The days had passed. The great scheme of "The Equator, Ltd.," was before
the world, which had received it in a manner exceeding Fred Anderson's
most sanguine expectations. The possibilities and chances of the mine,
as set forth by the experts, appeared to be such as to rouse the hopes
of even the wary and experienced, and Anderson had no difficulty of
forming a Board of Directors most eminently calculated to inspire
confidence in the public--none the less that they were presided over by
a man who, if not possessed of special business qualifications, was of
good social position and bore an honourable name. Sir William Gore, the
Chairman of the company, was well pleased. He invested largely in the
undertaking. The savings of the Miss Pateleys, under the direction of
their brother, had gone the same way. The _Arbiter_ had indeed reason to
cheer on the Cape to Cairo railway, which day by day seemed more likely
of accomplishment.
Sir William, on the afternoon of the day when the success of the company
was absolutely an assured fact, came back to his house from the city,
satisfied with the prospects of the "Equator," with himself, and with
the world at large. He put his latchkey into the door and looked round
him a moment before he went in with a sense of well-being, of rejoicing
in the summer day. Then as he stepped into the house he became conscious
that Rachel was standing in the hall waiting for him, with an expression
of dread anxiety on her face. The transition of feeling was so sudden
that for a moment he hardly realised what he saw--then quick as
lightning his thoughts flew to meet that one misfortune that of all
others would assail them both most cruelly.
"Rachel!" he said. "Is your mother ill?"
"Yes," the girl answered. "Oh, father, wait," she said, as Sir William
was rushing past her, and she tried to steady her quivering lips. "Dr.
Morgan is there."
"Morgan--you sent for him...." said Gore, pausing, hardly knowing what
he was saying. "Rachel... tell me...?"
"She fainted," the girl said, "an hour ago. And we couldn't get her
round again. I sent--ah! there he is coming down." And a steady, slow
step, sounding to the two listeners like the footfall of Fate, was heard
coming down from above. Sir William went to meet the doctor, knowing
already what he was going to hear.
Lady Gore died that night, without regaining consciousness. Hers had
been the unspeakable privilege of leaving life swiftly and painlessly
without knowing that the moment had come. She had passed unconsciously
into that awful gulf, without having had to stand for a moment
shuddering on the brink. She had never dreaded death itself, but she had
dreaded intensely the thought of old age, of a lingering illness and its
attendant horrors. But none of these she had been called upon to endure:
even while those around her were looking at the beautiful aspect of life
that she presented to them the darkness fell, leaving them the memory
only of that bright image. Her daughter's last recollection of her had
been the caressing endearment with which Lady Gore had deprecated
Rachel's remaining with her till Sir William's return--how thankful the
girl was to have remained!--her husband's last vision of her, the
smiling farewell with which she had sped him on his way in the morning,
with a caution as to prudence in his undertakings. As he came back he
had found himself telling her already in his mind, before he was
actually in her presence, of what he had done. That was the thing which
gave an edge to every action, to each fresh development of existence.
Life was lived through again for her, and acquired a fresh aspect from
her interest and sympathy, from her keen, humorous insight and
far-seeing wisdom. But now, what would his life be without that light
that had always shone on his path? He did not, he could not, begin to
think about the future. He knew only that the present had crumbled into
ruins around him. That, he realised the next morning when, after some
snatches of uneasy sleep, he suddenly wakened with a sense of absolute
horror upon him, before he remembered shuddering what that horror was.
He had wanted to tell her about yesterday, about the "Equator," he said
to himself with a dull aching pain almost like resentment--he wanted to
have her approval, to have the sense that for her what he did was right,
was wise. But he knew now in his heart, as he really had known all the
time, that it was she who had been the wise one. And part of the horror,
as the time went on, would be to realise that when she had gone out of
the world something had gone out of himself too, which she had told him
was there. And he had dreamt that it was true. But that would come when
the details of misery were realised by him one by one, as after some
hideous explosion it is not possible to see at once in the wreck made by
the catastrophe all the ghastly confirmations of disaster that come to
light with the days. The first days were not the worst, either for him
or for Rachel, as each one of them afterwards secretly found. For though
life had come to a standstill, had stopped dead, with a sudden shock
that had thrown everything in it out of gear, there were at first new
and strange duties to be accomplished that filled up the hours and kept
the standards of ordinary existence at bay. There were letters of
condolence to be answered, tributes of flowers to be acknowledged, sent
by well-meaning friends moved by some impotent impulse of consolation,
until the air became heavy with the scent of camellias and lilies.
Rachel moved about in the darkened rooms, feeling as if the faint,
sweet, overpowering perfume were a kind of anodyne, that was mercifully,
during those early days, lulling her senses into lethargy. To the end of
her days the scent of the white lily would bring back to her the feeling
of actually living again through that first time of numbing grief. How
many hours, how many days and nights she and her father had lived within
that quiet sanctuary they could not have told--lived in the dark
stillness, with one room, the stillest of all, containing the beloved
something strangely aloof all that was left of the thing that had been
their very life. Then out of that quiet hallowed darkness they came one
dreadful day into the brilliant sunlight, a day that was lived through
with the acutest pain of all, of which every detail seemed to have been
arranged by a horrible cruel convention of custom in order to intensify
the pangs of it. They drove at a foot's pace through the crowded, sunlit
streets, with a shrinking agony of self-consciousness as one and another
passer-by looked up for a moment at what was passing. "Look, Jim, 'ere's
a funeral!" one small boy called to another--and Rachel, shuddering,
buried her face in her hands and could have cried out aloud. Some men,
not all, lifted their hats; two gaily-dressed women who were just going
to cross stopped as a matter of course on the pavement and waited
indifferently, hardly seeing what it was, until the obstruction had gone
by, as they would have done had it been anything else. Rachel, leaning
back by her father, trying to hide herself, yet felt as if she could
not help seeing everything they met. Every step of the way was a slow
torture. And oh, the return home! that drive, at a brisk trot this time,
through the same crowded, unfeeling streets, which still retained the
association of the former progress through them, the sense that now, as
the coachman whipped up his horses, for every one save for the two
desolate people who sat silently together inside the carriage, life
might--indeed, would--throw off that aspect of gloom and go on as
before! And then the worst moment of all, the finding on their return
that the house had taken on a ghastly semblance of its usual aspect,
that the blinds were up, the windows open, the sun streaming in
everywhere--the hard, cruel light, as it seemed to Rachel, shining into
the rooms that were for evermore to be different.
Then followed the time which is incomparably the worst after a great
loss, the time when, ordinary life being taken up again, the sufferer
has the additional trial of too large an amount of leisure on his
hands--the horror of all those new spare hours that used to be passed in
a companionship that is gone, that must be filled up with something
fresh unless they are to stand in wide, horrible emptiness, to assail
recollection with unendurable grief. And especially in that house were
they empty, where the existence of both father and daughter had revolved
round that of another to a greater extent than that of most people. The
problem of how to readjust the daily conditions was a hard, hard one to
solve, harder obviously for Sir William than it was for Rachel. The
girl was uplifted in those days by the sense that, however difficult she
might find it to carry out in detail, the general scheme of her life lay
clear before her. She was going to devote it to her father, she was
going to carry out that unmade promise, which she now considered more
binding on her than ever, although her mother had warned her against
making it, the promise that her father should come first. But the
warning at the moment it was made had not been accepted by Rachel, and
in the exaltation of her self-sacrifice it was forgotten now. She saw
her way, as she conceived, plainly in front of her. Rendel, with his
usual understanding and wisdom, did not obtrude himself on her during
those days. He had quite made up his mind not to ask for her decision
until there might be some hope of its being made in his favour. He had
felt Lady Gore's death as acutely as though he had the right of kinship
to grieve for her. He was miserably conscious that something inestimably
precious had gone out of his life, almost before he had had time to
realise his happiness in possessing it. But neither he nor Rachel
understood what Lady Gore's death had meant to Sir William. And the poor
little Rachel, rudderless, bewildered, tried to do the best she could
for her father's life by planning her own with absolute reference to it,
by putting at his disposal all the bare, empty hours available for
companionship which up to now had been so straitly, so tenderly, so
happily filled. And he on his side, conscious of some of her purpose,
but unaware of the extent to which she carried her deliberate intention
of consecrating herself to him, of bearing the burden of his destiny,
believed that he had to bear the overwhelming burthen of guiding hers.
Instead of going in the late afternoon hours of those summer days to his
club, where he would have found some companionship that was not
associated with his grief, and passing an hour agreeably, he wistfully
went home, feeling that Rachel would be expecting him. And Rachel on her
side felt it a duty to put away any regular occupation that might have
proved engrossing, and so to ordain her life that she should be always
ready and at her father's orders if he should appear. And, thus
deliberately cutting themselves loose from such minor anchorages as they
might have had, they tried to delude themselves into the belief that not
only was such makeshift companionship a solace, but that it actually was
able to replace that other all-satisfying companionship they had lost.
But they knew in their hearts, each of them, that it was not so. And Sir
William realised, more perhaps than Rachel did, that it never could be.
The relation between a father and daughter, when most successful, is
formed of delightful discrepancies and differences, supplementing one
another in the things that are not of each age. It means a protecting
care on the side of the father, an amused tender pride in seeing the
younger creature developing an individuality which, however, is hardly
in the secret soul of the elder one quite realised or believed in. The
experience of the man in such a relation has mainly been derived from
women of his own standing; his judgment of his daughter is apt to be a
good deal guesswork. The daughter, on the other hand, brings to the
relation elements necessarily and absolutely absent on the other side.
If she cares for her father as he does for her, she looks up to him, she
admires him, she accepts from him numberless prejudices and rules about
the government of life, and acts upon them, taking for granted all the
time that he cannot understand her own point of view. And yet, even so
constituted, it can be one of the most beautiful and even satisfying
combinations of affection the world has to show, provided the father has
not known what it is to have the fulness of joy in his companionship
with his wife, in that equal experience, mutual reliance, understanding
of hopes and fears, which is impossible when the understanding is being
interpreted through the imagination only, by one standing on a different
plane of life. Neither Rachel nor her father had realised all this; but
the mother with her acuter sensibilities had known, and had so
deliberately set herself to fulfil her task that they had all these
years been interpreted to one another, as it were, by that other
influence that had surrounded them, that atmosphere through which
everything was seen aright and in its most beautiful aspect. And the
time came when Sir William suddenly grasped with a burning, startling
vividness the fact that his life could not be the same again, that he
must henceforth take it on a lower plane. The day was fine and
bright--too warm, too bright; the hopeful light of spring had given
place to the steady glare of summer. He had been used before to go out
riding with Rachel in the early morning, in order to be back by the time
Lady Gore was ready to begin her day. They had tacitly abandoned this
habit now. Then one day it occurred to Sir William that it might be a
good thing for Rachel to resume it. He proposed to her that they should
go out as they used. She, in her inmost heart shrinking from it, but
thinking it would be a satisfaction to him, agreed. He, shrinking from
it as much as she did, thought to please her. And so they went out and
rode silently side by side, overpowered by mute comparison of this day
with days that had been. And when they got home they went each their own
way, and made no attempt at exchanging words. Sir William went miserably
to his study, his heart aching with a rush of almost unbearable sorrow
as he thought of the bright little room upstairs to which he had been
wont to hurry for the welcome that always awaited him. What should he do
with his life? How should he fill it? he asked himself in a burst of
grief, as he shut himself in. And so much had the theory, firmly
believed in by himself and his wife, that he had by his own free will,
and in order to devote his life to her, abandoned any quest of a public
career become an absolute conviction in his mind, that he felt a dull
resentment at having been so noble. He recognised now that it had been
quixotic. He had let the time pass. Fifty-five! To be sure, in these
days it is not old age; it may, indeed, under certain circumstances be
the prime of life, for a man who has begun his career early, political
or otherwise. Had this been Sir William's lot he could have sought some
consolation, or at any rate alleviation, in his misfortune, by turning
at once to his work and plunging into it more strenuously than before.
But even that mitigation, for so much as it might be worth, was denied
to him. And he sat there, trying to face the fact that seemed almost
incredible to a man of what seemed to him his aptitudes and capacity,
the awful fact that he had not enough to do to fill up his life. He did
not state this pitiless truth to himself explicitly, but it was
beginning to loom from behind a veil, and he would some day be forced to
look at it. He could not start anything fresh. He had not the requisite
impulse. He could have continued, he could not begin; the theatre of his
actions, as Lady Gore had foreseen, had indeed fallen when she fell, and
without it he could initiate no fresh achievements. Oh, to have had
something definite to turn to in those days, something that called for
instant completion! To have had some inexorable daily task, some duty
for which he was paid, in a government office, or in some private
undertaking of his own, for which he would have been obliged, like so
many other men, to leave his house at a fixed hour, and to be absorbed
in other preoccupations till his return. What a physical, material
relief he would have found in such a claim! Round most men of his age
life has woven many interests, many ties, many calls, on their time and
energies from outside as well as from those near to them, but all those
spare, available energies of his had been absorbed and appropriated,
filled up, nearer home, and so completely that he had never needed
anything else. And now, whither should he turn? What should he do? Then
he remembered his Book, the Book his wife and he had been accustomed to
talk of with such confidence, such certainty--he now realised how
very little there was of it done, or how much of what might be fruitful
in the conception was owing to the way that she, in their talking over
it, had held it up to him, so that now one light played round it, now
another. Well he remembered how, only two days before she was taken ill,
they had talked of it for a long time until she, with an enthusiasm that
made it seem already a completed masterpiece, had said with a smile,
"Now then, all that remains is to write it!" And he had almost believed,
as he left her, that it would spring into life some day, that it would
not only hold the place in his life of the Great Possibility that is
necessary to us all, but that he would actually put his fate to the
proof by carrying it into execution. He took out the portfolio in which
were the notes he had made about it now and again. They bore the seared
outward aspect of an entirely different mental condition from that with
which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that
comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we
were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion
of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the
darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. The
impression was so strong on him as he turned over the manuscript, that
he shuddered. What was the use of all this? What was it worth? He knew
in his heart that the person of all others to whom it had been of most
worth was gone--he would not be doing good to himself or to any one else
by going on with it. He would be defrauding no one by letting the
darkness cover it for ever. And another reason yet lay like cold lead at
the bottom of his heart--the real, cruel, crushing reason--he could not
write the book, he was not capable of writing it. That was the truth.
And he desperately thrust the stray leaves into the cover, and the whole
thing away from him, hopelessly, finally; there was nothing that would
help him. That curtain would never lift again. And he covered his face
with his hands as though trying to shut out the deadly knowledge.
But of all this Rachel, as she sat waiting for her father at breakfast,
was utterly unconscious. She did not realise the unendurable
complications that had piled one misery on another to him. To her the
wound had been terrible, but clean. The greatest loss she could conceive
had stricken her life, but there were no secondary personal problems to
add to it, no preoccupations of self apart from the one great
desolation.
Sir William turned over his letters listlessly as he sat down, opened
them, and looked through them.
"What am I to say to that?" he said, throwing one over to Rachel.
The colour came into her cheeks as she saw that it was from Rendel.
"I have one from him too," she said.
"Oh! well, I don't ask to see that," Sir William said, with an attempt
at cheerfulness. "I know better."
"I would rather you saw it, really, father," and she handed him Rendel's
letter to herself--a straightforward, dignified, considerate letter, in
which he assured her that he did not mean to intrude himself upon her
until she allowed him to come, and that all he asked was that she should
understand that he was waiting, and would be content to wait, as long as
there was a chance of hope.
"Well, when am I to tell him to come?" Sir William said.
"Father, what he wants cannot be," Rachel said.
"Cannot be?" said Sir William. "Why not?"
"Oh!" Rachel said, trying to command her voice, "I could not at this
moment think of anything of that kind."
"At this moment, perhaps," Sir William said. "But you see he is not in a
hurry. He says so, at any rate, though I am not sure that it is very
convincing."
"How would it be possible," said Rachel, "that I should go away? What
would you do if I left you alone?"
"Well, as to that," Sir William replied, speaking slowly in order that
he might appear to be speaking calmly, "I don't know, in any case, what
I shall do." And his face looked grey and worn, conveying to Rachel, as
she looked across at him, an impression of helpless old age in the
father who had hitherto been to her a type of everything that was
capable and well preserved. She sprang up and went to him.
"Father, dear father," she cried amidst her sobs, as she hid her face on
his shoulder. "You know that you are more to me than any one else in the
world. Let me help you--let me try, do let me try." And at the sound of
the words Gore became again conscious of the immeasurable, dark gulf
there was between what one human being had been able to do for him and
what any other in the world could try to do. And his own sorrow rose
darkly before him and swept away everything else--even the sorrow of his
child. It was almost bitterly that he said, as if the words were wrung
from him involuntarily--
"Nobody can help me now."
"Oh, father!" Rachel cried again miserably. "Let me try."
"Darling, I know," he said, recollecting himself at the sight of her
distress, "and you know what my little girl is to me; but there are some
things that even a daughter cannot do. And," he went on, "it would
really be a comfort to me, I think, if"--he was going to say, "if you
were married," but he altered it as he saw a swift change pass over
Rachel's face--"if I knew you were happy; if you had a home of your own
and were provided for."
"Do you think that would be a comfort to you?" asked Rachel, trying to
speak in an almost indifferent tone. "That you would be glad if I were
to go away from you to a home of my own?"
"Yes," he said, "I think it would." And as he spoke he felt that the
burden of giving Rachel companionship and trying to help her to bear her
grief would be removed from him. "Besides," he went on, with an attempt
at a smile, "it is not as if you would go far away from me altogether;
you will only be a few streets off, after all. I could come to you
whenever I wanted, and even--who knows?--I might sometimes ask you for
your hospitality."
"If I thought _that_----" Rachel said, and caught herself up.
"You know," her father said more seriously, "we have been discussing
this from one point of view only, from mine; but you are the person most
concerned, and I am taking for granted that, from your point of view, it
would be the best thing to do--that you would be happy."
"If I only thought," Rachel said, her face answering his last question,
if her words did not, "that you would come to me--that you would be
with me altogether----"
"I have no doubt that you would find that I came to you very often,"
said Sir William, with again a desolate sense of having no definite
reason for being anywhere.
There was a pause before he said, "Then I'll tell him to come and see
me, and perhaps he can see you afterwards."
"Oh," said Rachel, shrinking, "it is not possible yet."
"Well," said Sir William, "I will tell him so. We will explain to him
that, since he is willing to wait, for the moment he must wait."