THE DARK ANGEL
1
One evening in July Oswald Holmroyd and his mother came out through the
western gateway of St. Saviour’s. Oswald walked slowly, with his more
than Sunday walk, and from time to time he stole glances at his mother’s
face, for it showed curiously divided. The lower half, taking its
character from the set lips, seemed hard and almost stern; the upper
half, subdued by the gleaming wetness of his mother’s eyes, presented a
look of drenched submission, as of unresistant petals beaten down by
heavy rain. They moved in silence, and for some considerable while no
word had passed between them. Oswald himself was but a blurred and mute
spectator of his mother’s tears. At the gateway she said, speaking in a
low voice: “Close it very gently, dear.”
He answered “Yes, mother,” and closed it very gently as she bade him,
taking prodigious care. For through the iron bars he held with both his
hands he could descry the little grave they had just left. Its cracked
and sun-scorched sods, replaced upon the tiny mound, contrasted harshly
with the greener and untrodden grass around, and the still, white lilies
they had stooped to lay upon it shone out at him through the evening air
with the disturbing pallour of that small, dead face looked on so
recently in silence and sorrow and wonderment, and much fear. She was
there, then, the little sister he had played with; who had shared this
life of his so lately. Across the other graves that hemmed her in, and
through the headstones that stood so silently, leaning a little towards
each other as though they listened with great intentness, that one
pathetic clay-soiled mound seemed to gaze after him with the
supplication of his sister’s face, betraying apprehensions at being left
alone. It cried to him in all but words: “Oswald.... Don’t leave me....
Stay with me....”
But he closed the gate and latched it, and let go of the handle quickly,
saying in the low voice of custom: “Good night, Beryl,” and turned away
with an accusing consciousness of cowardice. For, in truth, it seemed a
dreadful thing to leave his sister there in such a solemn place, amid
the dead of all ages, now that the sun was sinking fast, so that only
the topmost taper of St. Saviour’s spire caught the last gilding of its
rays, and the lengthening shadows of the gravestones stretched out like
hands to touch each other, and his own shadow and the shadow of the gate
by which he stood extended far from him across the sandy drive, and the
sky and the trees and the green grass and the churchyard wall and all
things else foretold the creeping silence of long night. Nay! He dared
not; he dared not stay with her. For her death had reawakened all his
latent horror of this place; it had revived such terrors as his vanity
had almost dared to deem outgrown. And he hastened to his mother’s side,
there to reassume his pace of deep dejection and solemnity, suitable to
the grief he bore, and to the altered world he walked in. He was
consumed with a steadfast sorrow, yet supported by a woeful pride
appropriate to one who now can claim close kinship with Death. Every now
and then he lifted up a corner of the sorrow that subdued him, as if it
had been a lowered window-blind, and stole a covert peep at the outer
world. Each time he saw himself regarded, he dropped the corner of the
blind at once, and withdrew into his inmost solemnity, saying to
himself: “She was my sister. I am the brother of the little girl who
died.” And for a brief, unworthy while he was suffused with consequence,
and his heart beat faster through desire to sustain befittingly the
importance of this new dread rôle. Until, all at once, the wickedness of
such a state of mind burned conscience as if it had been some fierce,
great carbuncle, throbbing hot, and he drew the curtains of his sorrow
close, and vowed he would peep no more upon the outer world. From the
sight of children playing in the street he turned away his eyes, lest
perchance he might be tempted in a thoughtless moment to take sinful
pleasure in their sport, and taste enjoyment before he was aware.
Yet God knows, in spite of all these contradictory emotions, that
Oswald’s grief was great and genuine enough. He missed his sister
dreadfully. At times the loss of her was like a universal heart-ache
that filled all space; not a room or corner of the house but suffered
it. When he told himself that he would never more.... No! never more see
Beryl in this world; never more hear her voice; never more look into her
eyes or clasp his two arms about her neck ... his lip trembled; his eyes
burned; a pain crept up into his throat. Life without Beryl seemed
unintelligible, like a sentence cut in twain. For ever he kept
forgetting that his sister was dead. Always she seemed to be somewhere
in the house, in some other room, in the kitchen, in the air about him;
at his very elbow, causing him to turn sharply for a trepid sight of her
before she should be gone. Now and again it seemed to him he heard her
call his name: “Oswald!... Oswald!...” so clearly that, but for the
dreadful, timely recollection of the truth, he would have cried back to
her: “Yes, Beryl?...” or run to seek the reason of her call.
But now ... he dared not run. For all he loved and missed her, she had
brought back secret terror into the house, into Oswald’s life. He lived
in fear of her. Aye! It was a confession he would have dared to make to
no one. To his mother least of all. She never suspected it. Never would
she have credited that her son should entertain unworthy dread of his
little, gentle, bygone sister, who had left them both to pass through
Death’s dark doors into God’s eternal presence, all alone. But Oswald
knew it, and the knowledge shocked him. He could not disencumber himself
of those rebukeful, mortal fears that throve upon his sister’s memory
and daunted courage. For now, for him, there were two Beryls. Of the
little sister he had played with, who had laughed and run with him in
hours of gladness, he felt no fear. No fear at all. But of that dead
white sister he had last looked on in the preternatural stillness of her
tiny coffin, who neither smiled nor spoke--he was terribly afraid. Not
afraid by day, when the sun shone and the bright light seemed to be his
guardian angel. But when the sun began to sink, and daylight dwindled,
and the dusk crept tremulously into corners, and he thought disquietly
of the lonely bed upstairs awaiting him.... Oh! Then! how bitterly he
missed his sister. Even the sound of her voice charged with some
nocturnal fear, had been welcome to him, establishing the close
companionship of kindred terror that served to partner and to reassure
his own. But this unfathomable ocean of dead soundlessness in which his
lonely apprehensions struggled now dismayed and daunted him. In the
uncommunicative silence of his solitary bed, intensified by the yet more
awful stillness in the room beyond his own,--that never stirred; that
never whispered “Oswald!” or confessed a fear, or sought to be assured
he was awake--he plumbed the awful depth of solitude in which all human
life is lived. A part of his very self seemed dead.
2
How had it all happened?
So swiftly and so terribly that Oswald never understood. Life, like that
reeling figure of his fears that issued from the doorway in the street
near the Horse Green, plunged headlong all at once into the dreadful and
unreal. He became the helpless witness of events so utterly remote from
his experience as to appear incredible. Again and again he asked
himself, bewildered, if what had seemed to happen could be true; if it
was not, rather, but a dream from which in time he would with
thankfulness awake. His troubled mind persistently attributed the source
of all its sorrow to a thunderstorm, with which (preposterously) a bag
of cherries was in some dire way associated. He had bought the cherries
with a penny all his own, at a small green-grocer’s shop in one of the
side streets lying off the lower end of Spring Bank Gardens; a shop made
suffocating with the odour of vegetables and bruised fruit, which--ever
afterwards--recalled for him this awful time of sickness and sorrow. At
midday he and Beryl had partaken of the cherries, and that same
afternoon the storm broke. For some days they had lived beneath the
threat of it. The little school had turned so dark that needlework and
penmanship were made impossible, the tense faces of the
scholars--withdrawn, by prudence, from the proximity of the window--were
absorbed into the gloom like inkspots dropped on blotting-paper. Over
fender and fire-irons a bedroom mat was spread, that the glint of naked
steel might offer no inducement to the lightning. For the same sage
reason even pens were put away, and the schoolroom gas was lit to
relieve the deepening gloom, and Mrs. Holmroyd sought to distract her
anxious charges with stories of the Good, interrupted by ejaculations
from excited lips.
“Ooh! Mrs. Holmroyd! Did you see that one!”
“It’s coming nearer.”
“Once when it lightened there was a chimbley pot struck in the street
next but two from ours.”
“Please Mrs. Holmroyd, my ma’s frightened of thunder storms. They always
give her sick headaches.”
“My pa knows a man that was struck dead by lightning for swearing. My pa
says nobody ought ever to swear in a thunderstorm.”
“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, what’s thunder and lightning made of?”
With awed voices they had discussed storms and the deity whilst the
thunder rolled overhead and rocked the schoolroom with deafening
reverberations. Torrential rain had fallen, whose furious drops
rebounded to a foot’s height from the flooded flags and roadway, and
flashed elongated in the lightning like electric sparks. Raging
watercourses tore along the gutters, sweeping stones and papers in their
flight, and soot and mortar--shaken by the thunder and dislodged by
raindrops--tumbled down the schoolroom chimney and rattled alarmingly
upon the hearth.
And Beryl, alone of all the quaking scholars, had demeaned herself with
tears, running to Mrs. Holmroyd’s side for shelter, and hiding her head
beneath her mother’s bosom; and Oswald had felt unworthily ashamed of
his sister and the disgrace she drew upon herself and him. For she would
not confess the thunder as the cause of her alarm; she pleaded sickness
and a pain instead, and into Oswald’s righteousness there crept a stern
repugnance of all falsehood. And when, at tea--the storm being over, and
the thunder reduced to the mere rumble of a distant cart--Beryl pushed
away her plate and wept afresh in lieu of eating, Oswald could not
altogether rid his breast of the suspicion that she did this to cover up
her earlier cowardice, and win back an alienated sympathy through tears.
But thereafter events marched with terrible swift footsteps, like the
resounding tramp of policemen, that brought dismay into his heart. The
storm rolled altogether out of earshot; not the faintest
lightning-flashes played upon the pulse of fear, and yet his little
sister wept more dolorously--deaf to consolation and the persuasive
voice of love. When, by custom, he should have been seated at his
evening meal, a breathless Oswald was hastening to the doctor’s big
brass plate in Hill Street, his bosom filled with dire forebodings, with
a throbbing self-importance, and reflected pain, repeating to himself
the urgent message with which his mother’s troubled lips had charged
him. Long after, when Oswald would, of old, have been in bed, he still
kept watch from the parlour window for the doctor’s coming, most
dreadfully divided between the apprehensions of two senses: between the
apprehensions of the eye that gazed into the street, and of the ear that
hearkened through the thumping of his heart to bedroom sounds above.
Aye! And of the conscience that bitterly reproached him with those base,
unjust suspicions of his little sister, and racked him with a hundred
doubts respecting the delivery of his mother’s message at the doctor’s
door.
But the doctor came at last, a dire figure compounded of comforts and
alarms that seemed to curdle the atmosphere of dread it walked through,
and the prolonged sound of lowered voices and creaking floor-boards
made Oswald’s heart sick. For some while after the doctor had taken
leave of his mother at the front door, Oswald dared not emerge from his
place of waiting in the kitchen; an inexpressible fear restrained him
from making the least sign. Nor did his mother come in quest of him, or
call upon his name immediately. She betook herself, instead, to the
front parlour--whither the ensuing silence and the sense of his own
solitude drove him timorously at last. He stole to the door, uttering
the one word “Mother ...” in a voice of supplication. He fancied--though
he could not quite be sure, since trouble walked with downcast
eyes--that she had been seated with both hands pressed to her face when
first he spoke her name, but she was risen to her feet by the time he
dared to lift his eyes, and answered “Now dear ...” in a voice whose
brightness seemed curiously at variance with the depth of silence from
which it issued.
“How is Beryl, mother?”
“Beryl is very poorly, Oswald.”
“What is the matter with her?”
“The doctor says.... He scarcely knows. He is coming to see her again in
the morning, dear.”
She did not tell him that the doctor had hinted darkly at inflammation
of the bowels--in those days the vague term under which appendicitis
hid--nor would Oswald have been much the wiser had she done so.
Infinitely more significant for him was the glistening trouble on his
mother’s cheeks which the resolute brightness of her voice had almost
succeeded in its effort to conceal from him. The sight of her wet eyes,
in which a desperate courage seemed to drown, caused an unspeakable
wretchedness to descend upon his soul. A mist of sickly apprehension
darkened life, blotting from his vision all at once the comfortable
things contained in it, and filling it with ghastly images of silence
and no shape; with featureless forebodings from which his cowardice
desired to flee. When at length, with throbbing heart, he stole on
tiptoe through the sickroom to his little sleeping place beyond, he
scarcely dared to turn his eye towards the bed where Beryl lay, for fear
of what dread spectacle his eye might meet. But his senses were
poignantly aware of a small shape that writhed tormentedly beneath the
coverlet, and moaned in its breathing, and never said: “Oswald ...” or
raised its head. He closed the door between himself and sickness with an
awful feeling of escape, as though the sight of pain were something to
shut out and flee from. All that night his slumber seemed to be
disturbed by dreams or dread distortions of reality. At one time it was
a wail of anguish from the adjoining bedroom, real or fancied, that
fetched him violently out of sleep; at another it was the dreary sound
of sobbing, lulled by his mother’s tranquillizing voice, that woke him.
Now and again he was confusedly aware of sounds from the kitchen below,
as if someone drew water from the tap, or raked the fire with care.
Whether these things in fact awoke him or he awoke to them, they seemed
to be without cessation: endless noises from a world of trouble. Peace
never reigned in the sickroom or the world beyond, but a perpetual
torment turned in tired circles. He heard St. Gyles’s clock chime all
sorts of unimaginable hours: twelves and thirteens and twenty-fours.
From the railway goods-yard the stertorous snorts of locomotives,
succeeded by the rapid ricochet of shunted waggons, churned the night
with melancholy turmoil. Noise, noise, noise. He was for ever being
brought to wide-eyed wakefulness by something inexpressible that roused
him: the clinking of a glass; the creaking of a bedstead; the movement
of a foot upon the floor; the dreadful cry of tired pain that cannot
find escape from its own existence through the doors of slumber.
3
Daybreak brought no respite; only a deepened wretchedness. Early in the
morning Oswald woke to the startled realization of his mother, gazing at
him in silence from the bedroom door.
“ ... I want you to go to Elizabeth’s for me,” she said, when his eyes
recorded recognition of her at last. “ ... Before she has time to get
away to her work, dear. And ask her if she can possibly come and help me
to-day.”
Oswald’s eyes pricked and smarted through their long privation of
repose, but he obeyed his mother’s order with alacrity, for any task is
preferable to the suspense of tossing on a bed that offers neither sleep
nor comfort; of being the stricken witness of sufferings beyond one’s
power to redeem. Before St. Gyles’s clock chimed half-past six he stood
outside Elizabeth’s house in the narrow, disillusioned street where this
rabid worker dwelt. Yet early though he knocked, the scarred and
blistered door flew open at the first impact of his knuckles as if by
magic, and Elizabeth confronted him with a face that sharp suspicion and
the darkest surmises rendered terrible to see. She had her shawl on, but
no hat, and she waved the shining house-key in her withered hand with a
tragic gesture of repudiation.
“It’s no use!” she cried, in a shrill and vibrant voice. “I wean’t tek
backword now. I’ve tekkn it once this week. I wean’t tek it a second
time from Nobody. She said I was to come to-day, and I said I would, and
Come I Will.” At which point, recognizing all at once the form and
features of the messenger through the dense emotions that had made her
eyesight of small avail, she broke off with something like a sob, and
propped her bosom with the door-key.
“Master Oswald!” she exclaimed incredulously. “It’s you! What a fright
you gied me.”
Her thin lips writhed and trembled like blown straws, and the two
attesting hands flung up to the level of her seared face were alive with
agitation.
“I was sure it was Burfords come to bring me backword.” With which she
made no effort to dissimulate her tears, for though she had been spared
the confirmation of her worst forebodings, she had tasted--in the
brevity of that moment--all its bitterness. “Foster’s gied me backword
on Monday,” she told Oswald. “They sent lass to say they’d let me know
when they should be wanting me again. Aye! After I’d gotten my breakfast
and was stood wi’ my shawl on, an’ door-key in my hand, and basket on
table, all ready to set off.”
Thus far she had spoken in her tragic voice; the voice displaying awful
tones, like vocal chasms and precipices; that dropped at times to
cavernous intensity, and plumbed such Stygian depths as caused cold
currents to creep down Oswald’s spine. All at once, however, her eye
threw off its frenzy and she put the passion from her face as if it were
a mask. The voice was almost honeyed that inquired of Oswald what had
brought him at this early hour, though tragedy returned in force when
she learned the motive of his visit. Come? Aye! Elizabeth would come at
the call of his mother and of sickness, though a thousand Burfords stood
between. Let Burfords give her backword if they cared, and be done with
her. Not that she had any fear they would.
“Burfords will let me off to-day,” she declared, with the fervour of
conviction. “I know they will. They can’t help, when I say who it is,
and what it’s for. And if they won’t ... it’ll be all the same. Tell
your mother I shall be up at your house as soon as I’ve had time to let
Burfords know.”
And true to her promise she tore up the street within ten minutes of
Oswald’s return--having been all round by Rockery House in the
meanwhile--at her customary breakneck pace between stumbling and flying;
the frayed extremeties of her shawl beating the air like wings.
“Oh, mum!” she cried, the instant she caught sight of Mrs. Holmroyd.
“Whatever’s this! Why didn’t you send for me sooner! I could ’a come and
sat up wi’ her last night after I’d got back from Tomlinson’s. I sat up
a fortnight wi’ Mrs. Sharples before she died, and never went to bed,
and did my washing every day just same. It’s nothing’m. I’m used to it.
If anything was to happen in this house I couldn’t bide to think that
anybody else should be here at time but me. I shouldn’t forgive myself.”
For her the cup of sickness held intoxicating properties. She drank of
it with gusto, as though it were sacramental wine. Its vintage warmed
her, sent rapt and fiery currents through her blood. Dear to her heart
though washings and spring-cleanings were, deathbeds and sick-chambers
evoked her very soul. Such was the state of fervour they bestirred in
her that her wasted body seemed a receptacle altogether too frail for
the ecstatic forces rending it. No task however herculean daunted her
enthusiasms; they boiled within her bosom, sustained by fires invisible
and undwindling. Her insatiable appetite for work and the zeal she
brought to the doing of it dispelled something of the leaden atmosphere
of gloom that darkened Oswald’s heart, and brought back a gleam of
ancient comfort to this altered home. The vital sound of water running
into tilted pails, the brisk manipulation of taps and opening of
cupboard doors, the animated friction of steel fenders and fire-irons
with cloths dipped in turpentine and rubbed on bathbrick tended in some
mysterious fashion to remove the furrows from the gathered face of care.
Oswald partook of a breakfast which Elizabeth prepared and set for him
in the kitchen, in order that the parlour might be free at any moment
for the doctor’s coming. The sunny brightness of the morning served to
dissipate much of last night’s dread. By the time that Oswald had
cleared his platter there crept into his troubled being an element of
timid confidence and hope. He went into the garden and found a chastened
joy in it. He peeped from the parlour window and perceived a street
flooded with such sunshine as made him crimp his eyes. Surely ...
surely, with so much brightness and loveliness abroad; with so much in
life to live for ... hope’s curtains might be lifted. Things could not
altogether be as dark as he had feared.
But just as the school began to reassemble, and life appeared to be on
the point of resuming its cheerful, customary features once again, the
sunlight was extinguished by the advent of the doctor, who drove up in
his noiseless Victoria and strode gravely up the staircase, bringing
gloom and the hush of apprehensions back with him as if he were
nocturnal dusk incarnate. Elizabeth, red-eyed and authoritative, subdued
the assembling scholars with an uplifted finger on their entry, bidding
each one of them in turn to “Hush!... Be still!... Doctor’s i’ house.”
Awed by the apparition, albeit with all their curiosities bestirred and
emitting a bee-like murmur, they stole up the staircase striving with
the futility of childhood to keep silence, and took their places in the
schoolroom where Oswald dutifully seated himself as a pattern to
behaviour. The presence of a doctor in the bedroom immediately
adjoining the wall on which the varnished atlas hung impressed
imagination powerfully, and drew more interest than the world map had
ever done. That their little schoolmate Beryl, who had wept yesterday
during the thunderstorm, lay now so near to them upon a bed of sickness
was a tremendous fact infecting all with irrepressible excitement. They
spoke in whispers, but their whispers were stridulous and penetrating;
piercing sharp with eagerness and hope, and through such sympathies as
children feel they revelled in the novelty of the situation, and
welcomed each moment won from tasks and lesson-books; pointing to the
progress of the clock’s hands with something like jubilation. Some of
them bent ears towards the wall, eager to glean sounds of the slightest
portent from the unseen world of happenings beyond; others slipped on
tiptoe to the window, to feed their hungry curiosities on the sight of
the doctor’s carriage, and Oswald watched them in a state of curious
remoteness, without a word. Steeped in the subdued babel of small voices
and his own more personal concerns and speculations, a strange mist of
unreality seemed to be creeping over life and him. His reasoning powers
attested that this was not a dream in which he took so dim a part, and
yet it bore in small respect the similitude of life. The voices all
about him fell upon his ears with a quality of strangeness and familiar
surprise, as if they had passed through a filter and were purified of
all that made them real; the window looking out upon the street showed
preternaturally clear; even through the ardent hum of conversation that
made the schoolroom buzz like an insectarium, he was acutely conscious
of the ticking of the schoolroom clock--a sound both intimate and alien.
That he should be sitting there in schooltime without his mother,
without Beryl, was a circumstance so contrary to all experience as to
border on the preposterous. For life itself is but a language,
intelligible only when by long usage made familiar. The element of
novelty can prove too much for comprehensions unprepared, like strange
new words that take from speech all comfort and significance, and leave
the hearer’s mind depressed with the consciousness of its inability to
understand. Hours passed by, it seemed to Oswald, before the schoolroom
door opened and Mrs. Holmroyd appeared. There would be no school that
day, she announced to them. They were all to go home very quietly. Beryl
was seriously ill. “It is nothing at all infectious,” she took care to
impress upon her listeners. “Nothing that your parents need have the
least fear of. You must be sure to tell them that. I will write, or send
word by Oswald, when you are to come again.”
Saying which, to Oswald’s deep dismay, she turned her face away with an
abruptness of which he understood too well the cause, and retired as
hastily as she had entered.
The little school broke up forthwith, simmering under the force of its
own suppressed excitement. It doffed its academic slippers and put on
its outdoor shoes, and reclaimed its hats and mantles from the pegs upon
the landing outside the schoolroom door--Oswald mutely assisting--and
took its leave, eager to disseminate the news and impart to others its
own wonder, and taste the full savour of its unlooked-for liberty.
Beneath its mien of sadness Oswald sensed a fine elation eager to be
gone. It pulled long faces and exclaimed: “Poor Beryl!” and asked those
dreadful questions that youth for ever asks until it has been taught to
check its impulses, and to wrap loin-cloths about its natural and naked
sentiments. “Would Beryl get better?” “What would happen if she died?”
“When my cousin Amy died,” the confectioner’s daughter confided, “Alice
didn’t have to go back to school while the next term!”
Oswald participated in all these speculations with a sort of purged
distress. Wistfully he watched them go. They waved their hands to him
and cried: “Good-bye, Oswald,” and left him cheerfully to his solitude
and dumb distress. Only the little Alice Rencil ran back to him as he
was about to close the door and laid compassionating fingers on his
sleeve.
“Never mind, Oswald,” she said to him. “I will ask mother if you may
come and play with me. Often. Until Beryl gets better.”
The promise dropped like a lump of sugar into his bitter cup, causing
its brimming wretchedness to overflow. For such a promise, in the
present hour of pain, seemed too sweet for fulfilment. It partook of the
elusive loveliness of heaven; a felicity so remote and unattainable as
almost to mock the sorrow it aspires to lighten. For a while Oswald
lingered on the doorstep, exchanging chastened handwaves with the
receding figure of the organist’s little daughter. Then, slowly and
reluctantly, he shut out the pleasant prospect of the sunlit world and
retired to the sadness of his soul’s solitude; to the deep depression of
this altered home. So changed, indeed, were all its features, so
abstracted, dark and reticent the look it wore, that he seemed rather to
be a stranger within strange walls than Oswald Holmroyd. A new life was
sprung into being, in which he had no part. He was an outsider who
haunted the outskirts of unseen happenings, as--in days agone--he had
hovered about the fringe of crowds surrounding some dread Thing in front
of the Infirmary gates. Sounds frightened him; of approaching footsteps
he was grown afraid; almost did he live in dread of the moment when next
he must encounter Elizabeth’s red eyes, or undergo the searching ordeal
of his mother’s face. He crept into the parlour as quietly as could be,
and hid there. A great desire for righteousness possessed him. From the
book cupboard he drew the big Bible, that needed both his hands to lift.
Its sheer avoirdupois seemed to dispense comfort to hearts like his in
trouble. He spread the sacred tome upon his knee, and deeming every
single portion of the Word of God contained in it to be equally
acceptable to its Author and efficacious in the hour of sorrow, began
dutifully with the First Chapter of Genesis: “In the Beginning ... God
created Heaven, and Earth....”
4
Through all this mass of dark and doleful memory one recollection shone
for Oswald Holmroyd and his mother like clear, consolatory starlight.
That was the unimaginable kindness dispensed by the Organist of St.
Saviour’s and his wife.
Within an hour, indeed, of the school’s disbandment Mrs. Rencil knocked
softly at the door of the little house in Spring Bank Gardens, drawn
there by the purest feelings of friendship and concern.
“Is there anything at all ...” she enquired of Mrs. Holmroyd when the
first words of sympathy had been exchanged, “ ... in which we can be of
the least help to you? Is there anything required for the sick-room
which perhaps we might be able to lend?... Or special food, which we
could prepare for you at home? Invalids always think so much more of
dishes that are brought to them! And you will have so many claims upon
your time. Both my husband and I would feel so happy if you would allow
us to be of some real assistance to you ... however small.”
The proposal was reinforced with tones and looks that left no doubt of
the fullness of its sincerity, and in such a solemn hour kindness much
less than this would have caused Mrs. Holmroyd’s gratitude to break
down. “There was nothing,” she said through tears, “which at present she
stood in need of--more than the wonderful sympathy which had just been
shown. It was a great comfort to her to be assured of that, and to
know,--in the event of real necessity--which way to turn for help.” But
the Organist’s wife was not yet at the end of her proposal.
“Arthur suggested ...” she said, “that perhaps it might relieve you of
some of your difficulty if we were to take charge of Oswald for you
during this very trying time.” She was thinking, as Mrs. Holmroyd knew,
of Oswald’s little bedplace reachable through the sick-room. “I wish you
would allow us to do so. We could accommodate him so easily; he would be
no trouble at all. He could sleep in our small spare bedroom, and have
his meals with us ... and come to see you each day, or as often as you
wished him to.”
At first, though a surge of gratitude swept between Mrs. Holmroyd’s
heart and lips, and her thankfulness could only cry: “How can I ever
thank you!”--a wave of consternation swept her also, at the thought of
separation from her son in an hour when she felt such two-fold need of
him. But she thought too, of his little sleeping place beyond the room
where Beryl lay, and realized that it could continue to be his sleeping
place no more until this shadow lifted. And the problem of her son’s
disposal troubled Mrs. Holmroyd even as she sought reasons to justify
her keeping of him. She understood his disposition well enough to know
how much, for all his resolute assertions, the dreadful isolation of
removal to an upper room would cost him, destitute of all furniture save
his own small bed; withdrawn from every companionship if, through need
or fear, he raised his voice to solicit of the night one reassuring
word. True, there was the empty schoolroom. She might have lodged him
there, close by the wall. But even whilst she pondered in Mrs. Rencil’s
presence how best his bed might be disposed, her conscience rose up and
reproached her. “It is my own selfish feelings I am seeking to
consider,” she said within herself. “Not his.” Moreover, despite the
deep trouble she was in, her mother’s pride responded to such a genuine
evidence of interest on his behalf, affirming--as it did--not only the
great kindness of these friends, but the merit of her son. Who was to
say that providence had no part in this proposal? And of a sudden,
suffused with a great blind faith that was prepared to put its trust in
any wisdom other than her own, she concurred with gratitude in the
project of his going. “I had already been wondering,” she told her
visitor, “ ... what was to be done with Oswald. The house is so small.
And I fear it will be but a sad home for him ... during the next few
days.”
Thus it befell that Oswald Holmroyd set off that same afternoon in
company with Mrs. Rencil and her little daughter to the organist’s house
in Hill Street, carrying his nightshirt and necessaries in a canvas
satchel, and the deep sadness that was in him received the unexpected
setting of a golden frame. It seemed to him he was no longer Oswald
Holmroyd in the flesh, but the soul of disembodied sorrow that floated
in an atmosphere of love; permeated through and through with a quality
of human kindliness whose ambient warmth pertained to the divine. Looks,
tones, gestures--all--within this new enchanted world--were softened to
besuit the soul of sorrow. Every thought and act of kindness converged
in Oswald. Alice brought all her playthings to lay as an offering on the
altar of his sadness, Mrs. Rencil lulled his sense of strangership with
the sweetest of smiles and voices. The Organist himself laid on Oswald’s
shoulder a hand so warm, compassionate and kindly, as brought into
Oswald’s throat a lump of unswallowable affection. Think! Standing on
the broad balcony of the Organist’s drawing-room, immersed in a flood of
glorified Hill Street sunlight--that was infinitely richer, warmer and
more golden than the sunlight allocated to Spring Bank Gardens--he could
survey the whole length of the High Gate as far as the Mansion House.
From this impressive vantage point--surely the supreme pinnacle of human
ambition--alike he could see and be seen. He could look down with pride
and unimaginable condescension on upturned faces that looked (with no
small envy of his elevation) at him. He could watch the music-cases come
and go, that grew into visibility from every conceivable quarter of the
horizon, and converged with the inevitableness of destiny upon this
house of houses. Not only so, but on occasions he was even deputed to
run downstairs and give admission to such recent pupils as still
retained a diffidence about opening with their own hands the Organist’s
door. Scales and five-finger exercises and the hourly sound of
stammering sonatas were the very essence of the enchanted air he
breathed. He drew them all into his lungs along with the more wondrous
music that Arthur Rencil made with his own hands, and all Oswald’s
pulses became musicians, meting out his eager blood in bars. Nor was his
part in music confined alone to what he heard. During such intervals as
the Organist’s teaching-room was empty Oswald was set to practice with a
whimsical severity that utilized this method of distracting the boy’s
mind from thoughts of the shadow of home.
“Oswald, you scamp! What’s this! You’ve only had half an hour’s work.
How do you expect to be able to take the Service for me next Sunday, at
this rate! Quick. Get into the music-room with you, and don’t you dare
to give up counting or to take your fingers off the keys until my next
pupil comes--whether he comes to-night or to-morrow afternoon!”
Then, too, Oswald was constituted the proud bearer of Arthur Rencil’s
messages, hastening to this house or to that; to the music shop in High
Gate for music paper; and to the iron-monger’s for fret-saws and brass
hinges; and to Prestwich’s for the church keys; and to Canon Quexley’s
in respect of hymns for Sunday. Walks, too, with Mrs. Rencil and her
little daughter Oswald took; and now and then the drawing-room resounded
with the most heavenly of games--in which the Organist of St. Saviour’s
did not disdain to take his part. And little Alice Rencil held up her
face to Oswald when at night she went to bed, and put her arms about his
neck, and Oswald’s lips encountered soft, warm lips that might have been
his sister Beryl’s lips--save in respect to the effect they had upon
him. For these lips, whispering his own name as they kissed him, set all
his prides on fire and filled him at the same time with sadness and
confusion. Oh! if only Beryl had been well! If only she and his mother
might have shared with him these hours of seraphic happiness, what more
could he--or they--have asked of life? After every bout of mirth and
laughter Oswald dutifully dimmed the brightness in his bosom and thought
with conscientious sorrow of his little sister, and the debt
incalculable he owed her sickness; these joys she could not share. For
life, in such a magic setting, was not lived--but dreamed. He drew it
effortlessly through his enchanted senses like breath through the lips.
Time, for Oswald, ceased to be. Whole ages he abode in the Organist’s
house in Hill Street; whole ages, that is to say, measured by the
emotions, albeit--measured by the clock--they were but moments; a night;
a day; a few brief mortal hours; no more; perishable hours of
imperishable memory, dying like flesh and blood and sighing out their
happiness like souls at last into the eternal void. Such was the bright
atmosphere of love encompassing him here that gradually he lost thought
of those shadows elsewhere deepening. When it is still day with us we
find it hard to realize that in other latitudes the night has fallen.
Away from the little house in Spring Bank Gardens, remote from the world
of anxious whispers, hushed footsteps and fear-worn faces, his youthful
hopes revived. Surely, with such invariable, kindly eyes and smiling
lips and reassuring voices, there was no cause to feel alarm. The worst
was over; the best was soon to be. Before long, Beryl would be his
laughing, gleeful sister once again. She and his mother would come to
join him in this house of gladness. He began to reconsider his first
terrors with magnanimity and mild contempt, as he thought, at times, of
pennies foolishly expended in his days of youth on baubles that a later
wisdom scorned.
... And then, of a sudden, the life about him darkened like a blue sky
when from nowhere, in no time at all, the black clouds rise and swallow
it. He heard the house-bell ring a peal that made assurance sicken. His
startled intuitions stirred in him like leaves when the storm’s first
gust assails them. He sat at the pianoforte in the teaching-room,
playing five-finger exercises with his whole heart, and counting in his
bravest, clearest voice for Arthur Rencil and all the world to hear;
but that sharp peal silenced his counting and stopped his fingers
stock-still upon the keys. It went through his bosom with a swift pain,
with an indescribable emotion such as he had experienced that evening in
the chancel at St. Saviour’s when the passing bell rang out its
apostrophic note for the dead alderman, and he and the choir had held
their breath to listen, and hearts delayed their beat. It might have
been anybody who rang at the Organist’s door, but a sharp, dread
certitude within him affirmed this was not Anybody. He heard the blend
of voices down below, that might have been discussing anything; but
again the sharp, dread certitude within him proclaimed this was not
Anything. It was Something. Something that concerned him very closely,
deeply, terribly. One of these voices, he had made sure (for all he
could not hear it) was the voice of Elizabeth. Another of the voices was
the voice of Mrs. Rencil, for this he heard distinctly. It cried:
“Alice, dear!... Come here awhile ... I want you.” And then his
trembling intuitions were filled with every sort of sound inaudible to
any hearing but that of a blanched and speechless terror. Sounds of
movement; of doors opening and closing; of footsteps hastening in quest
of him. Aye! in quest of him. In quest of Oswald Holmroyd. And such was
his terror, such his certitude, that he had no courage, power or
inclination to dissimulate. He could not count one beat or strike one
single key to hide the fear he felt. He could only sit with impotent
dropped wrists and his face turned over his shoulder in the direction of
the door behind him that he knew inevitably must open.
It opened, as his fears divined, and Arthur Rencil came into the room.
The accustomed smile upon his face was gone, absorbed into the solemnity
of a great compassion; withdrawn to an illimitable distance (it seemed
to Oswald) as if the Organist gazed down upon him with tenderness and
sorrow from some infinite high place; from the sky; from heaven.
“ ... Oswald!” he said, and that voice of dreadful, undermining softness
swept away from the listener his last hope, his last fortitude. “I am
afraid that you will have to give up your practice for this morning ...
and go home. Your mother has just sent for you....”
The gentle voice spoke on, but Oswald heard no more. As by a lightning
stroke the veil of illusory happiness was rent in twain. Beyond, where
he had deemed life’s sunlight still to be, was naught but a void of
pitchy darkness and despair. He dropped his face upon the
compassionating arm that the Organist put around him, and poured out the
wretchedness of his soul in such tears as he had never shed before.