Rendel up to this moment had been accustomed, unconsciously to himself
perhaps, to live, as most men of keen intelligence and aspirations do
live, in the future. The possibilities of to-day had always had an added
zest from the sense of there being a long, magnificent expanse
stretching away indefinitely in front of him, in which to achieve what
he would. In his moments of despondency he had been able to conceive
disaster possible, but it was always, after all, such disaster as a man
might encounter, and then, surmounting, turn afresh to life. But of all
possible forms of disaster that would have occurred to him as being
likely to come near himself, there was one that he would have known
could not approach him: there was one form of misery from which, so far
as human probabilities could be gauged, he was safe. He had never
imagined that he could in his own experience learn what it meant,
according to the customary phrase, to "go under" because he could not
hold his head up: to disappear from among the honourable and the
strenuous, to be dragged down by the weight of some shameful deed which
would make him unfit to consort with people of his own kind. As he
walked home he was not conscious, perhaps, of trying to look his
situation in the face, of trying to adjust himself to it. And yet
insensibly things began falling into shape, as particles of sand
gradually subside after a whirlwind and settle into a definite form.
Then Stamfordham's words rang in his ears: "I must tell my colleagues."
It was a small fraction of the world in number, perhaps, that would thus
know how it happened, but they were, to Rendel, the only people who
mattered--the people, practically, in whose hands his own future lay. He
realised now as he had never done before in what calm confidence he had
in his inmost heart looked on that future, and most of all how much, how
entirely he had always counted on Lord Stamfordham's good opinion of his
integrity and worth. It was all gone. What should he do? How should he
take hold of life now?
As he waited at a corner to cross the road, he saw big newspaper boards
stuck up. The second edition of the other morning papers was coming out
with the news eagerly caught up from the _Arbiter_. There it was in big
letters, people stopping to read it as they passed: "Startling
Disclosure. Unexpected Action of the Government." No power on earth
could stop that knowledge from spreading now. How it would turn the
country upside down--what a fever of conjecture, what storms of
disapproval from some, of jubilation from others. What frantic
excitement was in store for the few who, with vigilance strained to the
utmost, were steering warily through such a storm! Rendel involuntarily
stopped and read with the others.
Some people he knew drove by in a victoria, two exquisitely dressed
women who smiled and bowed to him as they passed--chance acquaintances
whom he met in society, and to whom under ordinary circumstances he
would have been profoundly indifferent.
Rendel could almost have stood still in sheer terror at realising some
numbing sense that was stealing over him, some horrible change in his
view of things that was already beginning. For as they bowed to him with
unimpaired friendliness, he felt conscious of a distinct sensation of
relief, almost of gratitude, that in spite of what had happened they
should still be willing to greet him. Good God! was _that_ what his view
of life, and of his relations with his kind was going to be? No! no!
anything but that. He would go away somewhere, he would disappear...
yes, of course, that was what "they" all did. He remembered with a
shudder a man he had known, Bob Galloway, who, beginning life under the
most prosperous auspices, had been convicted of cheating at cards. He
recalled the look of the man who knew his company would be tolerated
only by those beneath him. He realised now part of what Galloway must
have gone through before he went out of England and took to frequenting
second-rate people abroad.
He looked up and found that he had mechanically walked back to Cosmo
Place. He was recalled from his absorption to a more pressing calamity,
as he recognised, with an acute pang of self-reproach, the doctor's
brougham still standing before the door. He entered the house quickly.
There was a sense of that strange emptiness, of the ordinary living
rooms of the house being deserted, that gives one an almost physical
sense that life is being lived through with stress and terrible
earnestness somewhere else. He heard some words being exchanged in a low
tone on the upper landing, and then a door shutting as Rachel turned
back into her father's room. Rendel met Doctor Morgan as he came down
the stairs. Morgan's face assumed an air of grave concern as he saw Sir
William's son-in-law coming towards him, and Rendel read in his face
what he had to tell. There are moments in which the intensity of nervous
strain seems to make every sense trebly acute, in which, without knowing
it, we are aware of every detail of sight and sound that forms the
material setting for a moment of great emotion. As he looked at Doctor
Morgan coming towards him, Rendel, without knowing it, was conscious of
every detail that formed the background to that figure of foreboding: of
the sunlight glancing on the glass of a picture, of its reflection in
the brass of a loose stair rod that had escaped from its fastenings, and
of which, even in that moment, Rendel's methodical mind automatically
made a note.
"I am afraid I can't give you a very good account," he said in answer
to Rendel's hurried inquiries. "He has had another and more prolonged
fainting fit, and I think it possible that his heart may be affected."
"Do you mean, then," said Rendel, "that--that--you are really anxious
about the ultimate issue?" and he tried to veil the thing he was
designating, as men instinctively do when it is near at hand.
"Yes, I am," Doctor Morgan answered. "Unless there is a great change in
the next few hours, there certainly will be cause for the gravest
anxiety."
Rendel was silent, his thoughts chasing each other tumultuously through
his brain.
"Does my wife know?" he said.
"I think she does," Morgan said. "I have not told her quite as clearly
as I have said it to you, but she knows how much care he needs and how
absolutely essential it is that he should be quiet. It is his one
chance. No talk, no news, no excitement."
"What has brought on this attack, do you think?" said Rendel, feeling as
if he were driven to ask the question.
"I can't tell," said Morgan. "He looked to me like a man who had been
excited about something. Do you know whether that is so?"
"Yes," said Rendel; "he got excited this morning about something that
was in the paper."
"Ah! by the way, yes, I don't wonder," said Morgan, who was an ardent
politician. "It was a most astonishing piece of news, certainly."
"It was, indeed," said Rendel, brought back for a moment to the
unendurable burthen he had been carrying about with him.
"The Imperialists are safe now to get in," said Morgan. "We look to you
to do great things some day," and without waiting for the polite
disclaimer which he took for granted would be Rendel's reply to his
remark, without seeing the swift look of keen suffering that swept over
Rendel's face, he hurried away.
Rendel was bowed down by an intolerable self-reproach. He could have
smiled at the thought that he had actually been seeking solace in the
idea that he had, at any rate, done a fine, a noble thing, that he had
done it for Rachel, that, if she ever knew it, she would know he had
sacrificed everything for her. And now, instead, how did his conduct
appear? How would it appear to her, since she knew but the outward
aspect of it? To her? Why, to himself, even, it almost appeared that
wishing to insist on screening himself at the expense of some one else,
he had, in defiance of her entreaties, appealed to her father, and
brought on an attack that might probably cause his death.
He stood for a moment as the door closed behind Morgan, and waited
irresolutely, with a half hope that Rachel would come downstairs to him.
But all was silent, desolate, forlorn; it was behind the shut door
upstairs that the strenuous issues were being fought out which were to
decide, in all probability, other fates than that of the chief sufferer
who lay there waiting for death. The chief sufferer? No. Rendel, as he
turned back sick at heart, after a moment, into his own study, thought
bitterly within himself that death to the man who has so little to
expect from life is surely a less trial than dying to all that is worth
having while one is still alive. That was how he saw his own life as he
looked on into the future, or rather, as he contemplated it in the
present--for the future was gone, it was blotted out. That was the
thought that ever and anon would come to the surface, would come in
spite of his efforts to the contrary, before every other. Then the
thought of Rachel's face of misery rose before him, haunted him with an
additional anguish. With an effort he pulled himself together, sat down
to the table, and wrote a letter to the committee of Stoke Newton,
stating briefly that he had relinquished his intention of standing,
directed it, and closed the envelope with a heavy sigh. One by one he
was throwing overboard his most precious possessions to appease the
Fates that were pursuing him. Where would it end? What would be left to
him? The one precious possession, the turning-point of his existence
still remained: Rachel, his love for her, their life together. But,
after all, those great goods he had meant to have in any case, and the
rest besides. The door opened. It was the servant come to tell him that
luncheon was ready; the ordinary bell was not rung for fear of
disturbing Sir William. Luncheon? Could the routine of life be going on
just in the same way? Was it possible that a morning had been enough to
do all this? He went listlessly into the dining-room. Rachel was not
there. He went upstairs, and as he went up met her coming out of her
father's room. Her startled and almost alarmed look, as at the first
moment she thought that he was going back into her father's room, smote
him to the heart.
"You had better not go in, Frank," she said hurriedly. "The doctor said
he was to be quite quiet. Please don't go in again," and the intonation
of the words told him how much lay at his door already.
"I was not going in," he said quietly. "I was coming to fetch you to
have some luncheon."
"I don't think I could eat anything," she said.
"You must try, darling," he said gently. "It is no good your being
knocked up at this stage. You look pretty well worn out already."
And indeed she did. The last twenty-four hours had made her look as
though she herself had been through an illness, and the nervous strain
added to her own condition made her appear, Rendel felt as he looked at
her, quite alarmingly ill. She suffered herself to be persuaded to eat
something, then wandered wretchedly back to her father's room to remain
there for the rest of the day.
Rendel did not leave the house again. He sat downstairs alone, trying to
realise what this world was that he was contemplating, this landscape
painted in shades of black and grey. Was this the prospect flooded with
sunshine that he had looked upon that very morning? The afternoon went
on: the streets of London were full of a gay and hurrying crowd. Was it
Rendel's imagination, the tense state of his nerves, that made him feel
in the very air as it streamed in at his window the electric disturbance
that was agitating the destinies of the country? Everyone looked as they
passed as though something had happened; men were talking eagerly and
intently. The afternoon papers were being hawked in the streets. One of
them actually had the map, all had the news, given with the same
comments of amazement, and, on the part of the Imperialists, of
admiration at the feat that had been so cleverly performed. So the day
wore on, the long summer's day, till all London had grasped what had
happened--while the man through whom London knew was sitting alone, an
outcast, with Grief and Anxiety hovering by him.
These two same dread companions, seen under another aspect, were with
Rachel as she sat through the afternoon hours in her father's darkened
room, listening to his breathing, with all her senses on the alert for
any sound, for any movement.
Sir William moved and opened his eyes; then, looking at Rachel, who was
anxiously bending over him, he rapidly poured out a succession of words
and phrases of which only a word here and there was intelligible.
"Frank," he said once or twice, then "Pateley," but Rachel had not the
clue that would have told her what the words meant. She tried in vain to
quiet him: he was not conscious of her presence. Then suddenly his
voice subsided to a whisper, and a strange look came over his face. An
uncontrollable terror seized upon Rachel. She ran out on to the stairs;
and as, unsteady, quivering, she rushed down, meaning to call her
husband, she caught her foot on the loose stair-rod and fell forward,
striking her head with violence as she reached the bottom. It was there
that Rendel, aghast, found her lying unconscious as he hurried out of
his study to see what had happened. The sickening horror of that first
moment, when he believed she was dead, swallowed up every other thought.
It made the time that followed, when Doctor Morgan, instantly sent for,
had pronounced that she had concussion of the brain, from which she
would recover if kept absolutely quiet, a period almost of relief.
And so Rachel was spared the actual moment of the parting she had been
trying to face. For though Sir William rallied again from the crisis
which had so alarmed her, he sank gradually into a state of coma from
which he was destined never to wake, and from which, almost
imperceptibly, he passed during the evening of the next day.
Rendel, tossed on a wild storm of clashing emotions, the great anxiety
caused by Rachel's accident and possible peril added to all he had gone
through, had in truth little actual sorrow to spare for the loss of Sir
William Gore. But Gore's death meant in one direction the death of all
his own remaining hopes. When he knew the end had come, and that he
would have to tell Rachel, when she was able to bear it, that her father
was dead, he then began to realise how, unconsciously to himself almost,
he had built upon some possibility of Sir William doing something to put
things right. What, he had not formulated to himself; but he had had
vague visions of a possible admission of some sort, of an attempted
reconciliation, atonement, confession, such as he had read of in
fiction, by which means the truth would have come out, and he would have
been absolved without any effort on his own part. But those
half-formulated dreams had vanished almost before he had realised them.
Sir William Gore had gone to his eternal rest, and, as far as Rendel
knew, no one but himself knew exactly what had happened. And now there
was nothing in front of him but that miserable blank.
Rachel was not told of what had happened until two days after her
father's funeral. She received the news as though stunned, bewildered;
as if it were too terrible for her to grasp. Gradually she came back to
life again, but she was not the same as before. Her recovery would be,
the doctor explained, a question of time. The accident that had befallen
her, following the great strain and anxiety she had gone through, had
completely upset her nervous system, and appeared--a not uncommon result
after such an accident--to have completely obliterated the time
immediately preceding her fall. The moment when Rendel, seeing her
gradually recovering, first ventured on some allusion to Stamfordham
and to what had taken place the day her father was taken ill, he saw a
puzzled, bewildered look in her face, as though she had no idea of what
he was saying, and he was seized by a fear almost too ghastly to be
endurable.
"Lord Stamfordham?" she said, puzzled. "When? I don't know about it."
But the doctor reassured him, and told him that all would come right:
she would be herself again, even if she never regained the memory of
what had happened before her fall.
"It is a common result of an accident of this kind," he said, "and need
give you no special cause for anxiety. I have known two or three cases
in which men who have completely recovered in other respects have never
regained the memory of what immediately preceded the accident. That girl
who was thrown in the Park a month ago, you remember--her horse ran away
and threw her over the railings--although she got absolutely right, does
not remember what she did that morning, or even the night before. And
after all," he added, "it does not seem to me so very desirable that
Mrs. Rendel should remember those two particular days she may have
lost."
Rendel gave an inward shudder. If he could but have forgotten them too!
"They were full, as I understand, of anxiety and grief about her
father's condition."
"They were," said Rendel. "It would be much better if she did not
remember them."
"That's right, keep your heart up, then," said Morgan, all
unconsciously; "and above all, no excitement for her, no anxiety, no
irritation. Change of scene would be good for her, perhaps, and seeing
one or two people. If I were you, I should take her to some German
baths. On every ground I should think that would be the best thing for
her."
See people? Rendel felt, with the sense of having received a blow, what
sort of aspect social intercourse presented to him now. But as the days
went on Doctor Morgan insisted more strongly on the necessity that
Rachel should go for a definite 'cure' somewhere, and recommended a
special place, Bad-Schleppenheim.
"Bad-Schleppenheim," he said, "is on the whole as good a place as you
could go to."
"But isn't it thronged with English people?" said Rendel.
"Not unduly," said Morgan. "At any rate, I think it is worth trying."
"I wonder if my wife would like it," said Rendel doubtfully.
"I wouldn't tell her," said the doctor, "till it's all settled. That's
the way to deal with wives, I assure you."
And with a cheery laugh, Dr. Morgan, who had no wife, went out.