THE LIVING CHILD.
The honeymoon of Lily and Maurice was short, and many would have called
it sad, could they have known how different it was from the marriage
holiday of most young couples. Maurice had looked forward to the wedding
as a desperate man looks forward to a new point of departure in his
life. He had fixed all his hopes of possible peace upon it. He had dated
new days of calm, if not of brightness, from it. He had sometimes
vaguely, sometimes desperately, looked to it as to a miracle day, on
which--how or why he knew not--the shadow would be lifted from his life.
The man who is doomed to death has a moment of acute expectation when
some new doctor places him under a fresh mode of treatment. For a few
days the increased vitality of his anxious mind sheds a dawn of apparent
life through his body. But the mind collapses. The dawn fades. The
darkness increases, death steals on. So it was with Maurice. Immediately
after the wedding, Lily noticed that he fell into a strangely watchful
condition of abstraction. He was full of tenderness to her, full of
cares for her comfort, but even in his moments of obvious solicitude he
seemed to be on the alert to catch the stir of some remote activity, or
to be listening for the sound of some distant voice. His own fate
engrossed him even in this first period of novel companionship with
another soul. The monomania of the haunted man gripped him and would not
release him. He thought of Lily, but he thought more, and with a deeper
passion, of himself.
The girl divined this, but she did not for an instant rebel. She had set
up a beautiful unselfishness in her heart and had consecrated it.
Purpose does much for a woman, helps her sometimes to rise higher than
perhaps man can ever rise, to the pale and vacant peaks of an inactive
martyrdom. And Lily was full of a passion of purpose known only to
herself. She loved Maurice not merely as a girl loves a man, but also as
the protective woman loves the being dependent upon her. His secret was
hers, but hers was not his. She had her beautiful loneliness of silent
hope, and that sustained her.
They went away together. In the train Maurice said to her suddenly, with
a sort of blaze of hungry eagerness:
"Lily--Lily--to-day there is a silence for me. Oh, Lily, if you have
brought me silence."
He seized her hand and his was hot like fire.
"Will it last--can it last?" he whispered.
And he glanced all round the carriage like one anticipating an answer to
his question from some unknown quarter, then he said:
"The noise of the train is so loud, perhaps--"
"Hush!" Lily said. "Don't fight your own peace, Maurice."
"Fight it--no, but I can scarcely believe in it. Lately the--it has been
so ceaseless, so poignant. Lily, I have had a fancy that you alone could
be my saviour. If it is so! Ah, but how can that be?"
She gave him a strange answer.
"Maurice," she said, "it may be so, but do not despair if the cry comes
again."
"What!" he exclaimed almost fiercely, "you--do you hear it then?"
"No, no, but it may come."
"It shall not. The silence is so beautiful."
He put his arms around her. The tears had sprung into his eyes.
"How weak I am," he said, with a fury against his own condition, "you
must despise me."
"I love you," she said.
He looked at her with a creeping astonishment.
"I wonder why," he said, slowly. "How can you love a man who has been so
miserable that he has almost ceased to be a man?"
"I love even your misery. Don't think me selfish, Maurice. But it was
your sorrow, you see, that first taught you to think of me."
He leaned from her suddenly towards the window which was open and pulled
it sharply up.
"Why do you do that?" Lily said quickly.
"One hears such noises in the air when one travels at this speed," he
answered. "With the window down one might fancy anything. I must shut
out fancy. There are voices in the wind that passes, in the rustling
woods that we rush through. I won't hear them."
The train sped on.
Their destination was an inland village set in the midst of a rolling
purple moor, isolated in a heather-clad gold of the land, distant from
the sea, distant from the murmur of modern life; a sleepy,
self-contented and serene abode of quiet women and ruminant men, living,
loving, and dying with a greater calm than often pervades our modern
life. A lazy divinity seemed to preside over the place, in spring-time
at least. Men strolled about their work as if Time waited on them, not
they on Time. The children--so Maurice thought--played more drowsily
than the children of towns. The youths were contemplative. Even the
girls often forgot to giggle as they thought of wedding rings and Sunday
love-making. Little dogs lay blinking before the low-browed doors of the
cottages, and cats reposed upon the garden walls round-eyed in sober
dreams. If Maurice sought a home of silence surely he had it here. Lily
and he put up at a small inn on the skirt of the village and facing the
rippling emptiness of the moor. Before going to bed they stepped out
into the night and the wide air. Stars were bright in the sky. Cottage
lights twinkled here and there behind them in the village. They heard a
stream running away into the heart of the long solitude that lay beyond
them. Lily was very quiet. Her heart was full. Thoughts, strange and
beautiful, overflowed in her mind. She felt just then how much bigger
the human soul is than the human body, how much stronger the prisoner is
than the prison in which nevertheless it is dedicated to dwell for a
time. Her hand just touched the arm of Maurice as she looked across the
soft darkness of the moor. He, too, felt curiously happy and safe.
Taking off his cap he passed his hand over his hair.
"Lily," he said, "peace is here for me, in this place with you. My brain
has been playing me tricks because I have been so much alone, the devil
dwells in a man's loneliness. Listen to the silence of these moors. What
a music it is!"
The lights in the cottages were extinguished one by one, as bed claimed
their owners. But Maurice and Lily, sitting on the dry fringe of the
heather, remained out under the stars. Her hand lay in his and suddenly
she felt his quiver.
"What is it, Maurice?" she asked.
He got up and made a step forward.
"Lily," he said, "there is--there must be some one near us, a child lost
on the moor, or forgotten by its mother. I hear it crying close to us.
Say you hear it too. No, no, it is not the old sound. Don't think that.
It can't be. There's a natural explanation of this--I'll swear there is.
Come with me."
He pulled her hastily up and pressed forward some steps, stumbling among
the bushes. Then he stopped, listening.
"It is somewhere just here, by us," he said. "I must see. Wait a moment.
I'll strike a light."
He drew out his match-box and struck a match, protecting the tiny flame
between his hands. Then he bent down, searching the uneven ground at
their feet. The flame went out.
"I wish I had a lantern," he muttered.
"Maurice," Lily said, "let us go back to the inn."
"What! and leave this child out here in the night. I tell you there is a
child crying near us."
He spoke almost angrily.
"Let us go back, Maurice."
He stood for a moment as if uncertain.
"You think--" he began, then he stopped. She took his hand and led him
towards the village in silence. As they reached the inn door, the faint
light from the coffee-room encircled them. Maurice was white to the
lips. He looked at Lily without speaking, and he was trembling.
"Wasn't there anything?" he whispered. "Is it here too? Can't you keep
it away?"
Lily said nothing. She opened the inn door. Maurice stepped into the
passage, heavily, almost like a drunken man. And this was the first
night of their honeymoon.
The incident of the moor threw Maurice back into the old misery from
which he had emerged for a brief moment, and, indeed, plunged him into
an abyss of despair such as he had never known before. For now he had
sincerely hoped for salvation, and his hope had been frustrated. He had
clung to a belief that Lily's love, Lily's companionship might avail to
rescue him from the phantom, or the reality, that was destroying his
power, shattering his manhood. The belief was dashed from him, and he
sank deeper in the sea of terror. They stayed on for a while in this
Sleepy Hollow, but Maurice no longer felt its peace. Remote as it was,
cloistered in the rolling moors, the cry of the child penetrated to it,
making it the very centre, the very core of all things hideous and
terrible. Even the silence of the village, its aloofness from the world,
became hateful to Maurice. For they seemed to emphasise and to
concentrate the voice that pierced more keenly in silence, that sounded
more horrible in solitude.
"I cannot stay here," he said to Lily. "Let us go back. I will take up
my work again. I will try to throw myself into it as I did when I was a
student. I shut out the living cry then, I will shut out the dead cry
now. For you--you cannot help me."
He looked at her while he spoke almost contemptuously, almost as one
looks at some woman whose courage or whose faith one has tried and found
wanting.
"You cannot help me," he repeated.
Secretly he felt a cruel desire to sting Lily into passion, to rouse her
to some demonstration of anger against his cowardice in thus taunting
her love and devotion. But she said nothing, only looked at him with
eyes that had become strangely steadfast, and full of the quiet light of
a great calm and patience.
"D'you say nothing?" he said.
"If you wish to go, Maurice, let us go."
He had got up and was standing by the low window that looked across the
moor.
"Don't you see," he said, "that I am going mad in this place? And you do
nothing. Why did I ever think that you could help me?"
"Try to think so still."
She, too, got up, followed him to the window and put her two hands on
his shoulders.
"Perhaps the time has not come yet," she said.
Suddenly he took her hands in his and pushed her a little way from him,
so that he could look clearly into her face.
"What do you mean? What can you mean?" he said. "Sometimes I think you
have some secret that you keep from me, some purpose that I know nothing
of. You look as if--as if you were waiting for something; were
expectant; I don't know--" he broke off, "After all what does it
matter? Only let us go from here. Let us get home. I hate that stretch
of moorland. At night it is full of bewailing and misery."
He shuddered although the warm spring sunshine was pouring in at the
window. Then he turned and left the room without another word. Lily
stood still for a moment, with her eyes turned in the direction of the
door. Her cheeks burned with a slight blush and her lips were half
opened.
"If he only knew what I am waiting for!" she murmured to herself. "Will
it ever come?"
She sank down on the broad, old-fashioned window seat, and leaned her
cheek against the leaded panes of glass. The bees were humming outside.
She listened to their music. It was dull and dreamy, heavy like a golden
noon in summer time. And then the white lids fell over her eyes, and the
hum of the bees faded from her ears, and she heard another music that
made her woman's heart leap up, she heard the first tiny murmur of a
new-born child.
It was sweeter than the hum of bees. It was sweeter than the soul the
lute gave up to the ears of Nature when Orpheus touched the strings. It
was so sweet that tears came stealing from under Lily's eyelids and
dropped down upon her clasped hands. She sat there motionless till the
twilight came over the moor, and Maurice entered, white and weary, to
ask impatiently of what she was dreaming.
As Maurice wished it, they returned the next day to Brayfield and
settled into the house that was to be their home. It stood on a low
cliff overlooking the sea; a broad green lawn, on which during the
season a band played and people promenaded, lay in front of it. Beyond,
the waves danced in the sunshine. The situation of the house was almost
absurdly cheerful, and the house itself was new and prettily furnished.
But the life into which Lily entered was strangely at variance with the
surroundings, strangely antagonistic to the brightness of the sea, the
sweetness of the air, the holiday gaiety that pervaded the little town
in the summer. For work did not abolish, did not even lull the sound of
the voice that pursued Maurice with an inexorable persistence. It was
obvious that on his return home after the honeymoon, he made a
tremendous effort to get the better of his enemy. He called up all his
manhood, all his strength of character. He refused to hear the voice.
When it cried in his ears, he went to sit with Lily, and plunged into
conversation on subjects that interested them both. He made her play to
him, or sing to him in the twilight. He read aloud to her. This was at
night. By day he worked unremittingly. When he was not driving to see
patients he laboured to increase his knowledge of medicine. He pursued
the most subtle investigations into the causes of obscure diseases, and
specially directed his enquiries towards the pathology of the brain. He
analysed the multitudinous developments of madness and traced them back
to their beginnings; and when, as was often the case, he discovered that
the mad man or woman whose malady was laid bare to him had inherited
this curse of humanity, he smiled with a momentary thrill of joy. His
ancestors on both sides of the family had been sane. Yet one of the
commonest, most invariable delusions of the insane was the imaginary
idea that they were pursued by voices, ordering them to do this or that,
suggesting crimes to them or weeping in their ears over some tragedy of
the past. Maurice knew that the mind which does not inherit a legacy of
insanity may yet be overturned by some terrible incident, by a great
shock, or by an unexpected bereavement. But surely such a mind would be
aware of its transformation, even as a man who, from an accident,
becomes disfigured is aware of the alteration of his face from beauty to
desolation. Maurice was not aware that his mind had been transformed.
Deliberately, calmly, he asked himself, "Am I insane?" Deliberately,
calmly, his soul answered, "No." Yet the cry of the child rang in his
ears, pursued his goings out and comings in, filled his days with
lamentation, and his nights with horror.
Then, leaving the subject of madness, Maurice began to institute a close
investigation into the subject of alleged hauntings of human beings by
apparitions and by sounds. He read of the actress, whose lover, who had
slain himself in despair at her cruelty, remained for ever with her,
manifesting his presence, although invisible, by cries, curses, and
clappings of the hands. He read of the clergyman who was haunted by the
footsteps of his murdered sweetheart, which even ascended the pulpit
stairs behind him, and pattered furtively about him when he knelt to
pray for pardon of his sin. He filled his mind with visionary terrors,
but they seemed remote or even ridiculous to him, and he said to himself
that they were the clever inventions of imaginative people. They were
worked up. They were moulded into conventional stories. They pleased the
magazines of their time. He alone was really haunted of all men in the
world, so far as he knew. And then a great and greedy desire came upon
him to meet some other man in a like case, to hear from live lips the
true and undecorated history of a despair like his own, one of those
bald and terse narratives which pierce the imagination of the hearer
like a sword, with no tinselled scabbard of exaggeration and of lies. He
wondered whether upon the earth a man walked in a darkness similar to
that which fell round him like a veil. He wondered whether he was
unique, even as he felt. Sometimes he caught himself looking furtively
at a harmless stranger, a bright girl tanned by the sea, or a lad just
back from a fishing excursion to Raynor's Bay, and saying to himself low
and drearily: "Does any spirit trouble you, I wonder? Does any spirit
cry to you in the night?" But neither his work, his excursions of the
imagination, nor the presence of Lily in his house, availed to cleanse
the life of Maurice from the stain of sound, that ever widened and
spread upon it. He fought for freedom for a while, strenuously, with all
his heart and soul. But the lost battle left him with his energies
exhausted, his courage broken. One night he said to Lily:
"Do you know all I have been doing since we came back here?"
"Yes, Maurice, I know."
"And that it has all been in vain," he said, with a passion of
bitterness that he could not try to conceal.
"That too I understand, Maurice--I knew it would be in vain."
He looked at her almost as at an enemy, for his heart was so full of
misery, his mind was so worn with weariness, that he began to lose the
true appreciation of human relations, and to confuse the beauty near him
with the ugliness that companioned him so closely.
"You knew it? What do you mean?" he said. "How could you know it?"
"I felt it, Maurice; do not try any longer to work out alone your own
redemption."
"You can say that to me?"
"Yes, for I believe that it is useless--you will fail."
He set his lips together and said nothing. But a frown distorted his
face slowly.
"Leave your redemption to God. Oh, Maurice, leave it," Lily said, and
there were tears in her eyes. "If this cry of the dead child is his
punishment to you it must--it will--endure so long as he pleases. Your
efforts cannot still it now. You yourself told me so once."
"I told you?"
"Yes--for the dead are beyond our hands and our lips. We cannot clasp
them. We cannot kiss them. We cannot speak to them."
"But they can speak to us and mock us. You are right. I can't still the
cry--I can't! Then it's all over with me!"
Suddenly, with a sob, Maurice flung himself down. He felt as if
something within him snapped, and as if straightway a dissolution of all
the man in him succeeded this rupture of the spirit. Careless of the
pride of man, before the world and even in his own home, he gave himself
up to a despair that was too weak to be frantic, too complete to be
angry; a despair that no longer strove but yielded, that lay down in the
dust and wept. Then, presently, raising his head and seeing Lily, in
whose eyes were tears of pity, Maurice was seized with an enmity against
her, unreasonably wicked, but suddenly so vehement that he did not try
to resist it.
"You have broken me," he said. "You have told me that there is no
redemption, that I am in the hands of God, who persecutes me. You have
told me the truth and made me hate you."
"Maurice!"
The cry came from her lips faintly, but there was the ring of anguish in
it.
"It is so," he repeated doggedly. "And, indeed, I believe that you have
added to the weight of my burden. Since we have been married the
persecution has increased. Once, when I was alone, I could bear it. Now
you are here I cannot bear it. The child hates you. When you are
near--in the night--its cry is so intense that I wonder you can sleep.
Yet I hear your quiet breathing. You say you love me. Then why are you
so calm? Why do you tell me to trust? Why do you hint that I may yet
find peace, and then tell me to cease from working for my own peace? You
don't love me, you laugh at my trouble. You despise me."
He burst out of the room almost like a man demented.
It might be supposed that Lily, who loved him, would have been
overwhelmed by this ecstasy of anger against her. But there was
something that sheathed her heart from death. She might be wounded, she
might suffer; but she looked beyond the present time, over the desert of
her fate to roses of a future that Maurice, in his misery, could not
see, in his self-engrossment could not divine. There is no living thing
that understands how to wait, that can feel the beauty of patience, as a
woman understands and feels. The curious depth of calm in Lily which
irritated Maurice was created by a faith, half religious, half
unreasoning, wholly strong and determined, such as no man ever knows in
quite the same fullness as a woman. It is such a perfection of faith
which gilds the silences in which the souls of many women wait,
surrounded by the clouds of apparently shattered lives, but conscious
that there is a great outcome, obscure and remote, but certain as the
purpose which beats forever in Creation.
From that day Maurice no longer kept up a pretence of energy, or a
simulation of even tolerable happiness in his home. The idea that the
spirit of the dead child was stirred to an intense disquietude by his
connection with Lily, and that, consequently, his marriage had deepened
his punishment, grew in him until at length it became fixed. He brooded
over it for hours together, his ears full of that eternal complaining.
He began to feel that by linking himself with Lily he had added to his
original sin, that his wedding had been a ceremony almost criminal, and
that if he had scourged himself by living ascetically, and by putting
rigorously away from him all earthly happiness, he might at last have
laid the child to rest and found peace and forgiveness himself. And this
fixed idea led him to shut Lily entirely out from his heart. He looked
upon the fate of her being with him in the house as irrevocable. But he
resolved that he ought to disassociate himself from her as far as
possible, and, without explaining further to her the thought that now
possessed him, he ceased to sit with her, ceased to walk out with her.
After dinner at night he retired to his study leaving her alone in the
drawing-room. He let her go up to bed without bidding her good-night.
When he was obliged to be with her at meals he maintained for the most
part an obstinate silence.
Yet the cry of the child grew louder. The spirit of the child was not
mollified. Its persecution continued and seemed to him to grow more
persistent with each passing day.
What else could he do? How could he separate himself more completely
from Lily?
Canon Alston came one day to solve this problem for him. The Canon had
resolved on taking a holiday, and being no lover of solitude in his
pleasures, he wished to persuade Maurice to become a grass widower for
three weeks.
"Can you let Lily go?" he said. "I know it is a shame to leave you
alone, but--"
He stopped, surprised at the sudden brightness that had come into
Maurice's usually pale and grave face. Maurice saw his astonishment and
hastened to allay it.
"I shall miss Lily of course," he began. "Still, if you want her, and
she is anxious to go--"
"I have not mentioned it to her," the Canon said.
And at this moment Lily came into the room. The project was laid before
her. She hesitated, looking from her father to her husband. Her
perplexity seemed to both the men curiously acute, even to Maurice who
was on fire to hear her decision. The prospect of solitude was sweet to
his tormented heart now that he was possessed by the fancy that Lily's
presence intensified his martyrdom. Yet Lily's obvious disturbance of
mind surprised him. The two courses open to her were really so simple
that there seemed no possible reason why she should look upon the taking
of one of them as a momentous matter.
"Well, Lily, what do you say?" the Canon asked, after a pause. "Will you
come with me?"
"But Maurice--"
"Maurice permits it, and I want you."
"I--I had not meant to leave home at present, father, not till after--"
She stopped abruptly.
"Till after what, my dear?" enquired the Canon.
She made no answer.
"Lily," Maurice said, trying to make his voice cool and indifferent, "I
think you ought to go. It will do you good. Do not mind me. I shall
manage very well for a little while."
"You would rather I went, Maurice?"
"I think we ought not to let your father go on his holiday alone."
"I will go," she said quietly.
So it was arranged. The Canon was jubilant at the prospect of his
daughter's company, and asked her where they should travel.
"What do you say to the English Lakes, Lily?" he asked, "they are lovely
at this time of year, and the rush of the tourist season has scarcely
begun. Shall we go there?"
"Wherever you like, father," she said.
The Canon was feeling too gay to notice the preoccupation of her manner,
the ungirlish gravity of her voice. That day, in the evening, when she
was at dinner with Maurice, Lily said:
"You lived near the Lakes once, didn't you, Maurice?"
"Yes," he said.
"What was the name of the valley?"
He told her.
"And the house?"
"End Cottage. It was close to the waterfall. I hate it," he added almost
fiercely. "It was there that I first heard--but I have told you."
He relapsed into silence and sent away the food on his plate untasted.
Lily glanced across at him. But she said nothing more. And Maurice was
struck by the consciousness that she took his strangeness strangely,
with a lack of curiosity, a lack of protestation unlike a woman; almost
for the first time since they were married he was moved to wonder how
much she loved him, indeed whether she still loved him at all. He had
got up from the dinner table and stood with one hand leaning upon it as
he looked steadily, with his heavy and hunted eyes, across at Lily.
"Are you glad to go with the Canon?" he asked.
"I am quite ready to go," she said quietly.
"You don't mind leaving me?"
"I think you wish me to leave you--"
"Perhaps I do," he said, watching her to see if she winced at the words.
But her face was still and calm.
"What then?"
"Then it is better for me to go for a little while than to stay."
"For a little while," he repeated, "yes."
He turned and went slowly out of the room, and suddenly his face was
distorted. For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying
and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely
faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this
a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was
surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could
not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not
actually locate it. Only in that respect did it differ from other sounds
of earth. As he stood in the half darkness, listening, a horror, greater
than he had ever felt before, came over him. The cry seemed to him
menacing, no longer merely a cry for sympathy, for assistance, no longer
merely the cry of a helpless creature in pain. He turned white and
sick, and clapped his two hands to his ears. And just as he did so the
dining-room door opened and Lily came out, a thin stream of light
following her and falling upon Maurice. He started at the vision of her
and at the revealing illumination. His nerves were quivering. His whole
body seemed to vibrate.
"Don't come near me," he cried out to Lily. "It is worse since you are
with me. Your presence makes my danger. Ah!"
And with a cry he dashed into his study, banging the door behind him, as
if he fled from her.
* * * * *
A few days later Maurice stood at the garden gate and helped Lily into
the carriage that was to take her to the station. A summons to a patient
prevented him from seeing her and the Canon off on their journey
northwards. Just before Lily put her foot on the step she stopped and
wavered.
"Wait a moment," she said.
She ran back into the little house which had been her home since she was
married. Maurice supposed that she had forgotten something. But she only
peeped into her bedroom, into the gay drawing-room, into Maurice's den.
And as she looked at this last little chamber, at the books, the ruffled
writing-table, the pipes ranged against the wall, her photograph
standing in a silver frame upon the mantelpiece, her eyes filled with
tears, and there was a stricken feeling at her heart.
"Lily, you will miss the train," Maurice called to her.
She hurried out, got into the carriage and was driven away, wondering
why she had gone back to take a last glance at her home, why she had
scarcely been able to see it for her tears.
That evening Maurice returned from his round of visits in a curious
state of excitement and of anticipation, mingled with nervous dread. He
felt as if the eyes of the dead child were upon all his doings, as if
the mind of the dead child pondered every act of his, as if the brain of
the dead child were busy about his life, as if the soul of the dead
child concerned itself for ever with his soul, which it had secretly
dedicated to a loneliness assured now by the departure of Lily. By
living alone, even for a few weeks, was he not in a measure obeying the
desire of the little spirit, which possessed his fate like some
inexorable Providence? If so, dare he not hope for an interval of peace,
for that stillness after which he longed with an anxiety that was like a
physical pain?
He entered his house. Twilight was falling, and the hall, in which on
the previous night the child had complained in so grievous a manner, was
shadowy. He stood there and listened. He heard the distant wash of the
sea, the voices of two servants talking together behind the swing door
that led to the kitchen. No sound mingled with the sea, or with the
chattering voices. Slowly he ascended the stairs and entered the
bedroom, in which Lily had slept quietly, while he, by her side, endured
the persecution of the child. The blinds were up. The dying daylight
crept slowly from the room, making an exit as furtive and suppressed as
that of one who steals from a death chamber. Maurice sat down upon the
bed and again listened for a long time.
He was conscious of the sense of relief which comes upon a man who,
through some sudden act, has removed from his shoulders a terrible
burden. He took this present silence to himself as a reward. But would
it last? Opening the window he leaned out to hear the sea more plainly.
All living voices, whether of Nature or of man, were beautiful to him,
they had come to make his silence.
A servant knocked at the door. Maurice went down to dine. He passed the
late evening as usual in his study. He slept calmly. He woke--to
silence. Did not this silence confirm his fixed idea that his marriage
with Lily had vexed that wakeful spirit, had troubled that unquiet soul
of the child? Maurice, wrapped in a beautiful peace, felt that it did.
And, as the silent lovely days, the silent lovely nights passed on he
came gradually to a fixed resolve.
Lily must not return to him, must not live with him again.
He pondered for a long time how he was to compass their further
separation. And, at length, he sat down and wrote a letter to Lily
telling her the exact truth.
"Think me cruel, selfish," he wrote at the end of his letter. "I am
cruel. I am selfish. Despair has made me so. The fear of madness has
made me so. I must have peace. I must and will have it, at whatever
cost."
He sent this letter to the _poste restante_ at Windermere, as Lily had
directed. She and her father were moving about in the Lake district, and
did not know from day to day where they might be. He received a reply
within a week. It reached him at breakfast time, and, happening to
glance at the postmark before he opened it, his face suddenly flushed
and his heart beat with violence. For the letter came from that lonely
village in that sequestered mountain valley in which he had once lived,
in which he had first heard the cry of the child. What chance had led
Lily's steps there? Maurice read the letter eagerly. It was very gentle,
very submissive. And there was one strange passage in it:
"I understand that you are at peace," Lily wrote. "Yet the child is not
at peace. It is crying still. You will ask me how I know that. Do not
ask me now. Some day I shall send for you and tell you. When I send for
you, if it is by day or night, promise that you will come to me. I claim
this promise from you. And now good-bye for a time. My father is very
unhappy about us. But he trusts me completely, and I have told him that
you and I must be apart, but only for a time. I shall not write to you
again till I send for you. Even my letter may disturb your peace and I
would give up my life to give you peace."
There was no allusion in the letter to the reason which had led Lily and
her father to the out-of-the-way valley which had seen the dawn of
Maurice's despair. And Maurice was greatly puzzled. Again there came
over him a curious conviction that Lily had some secret from him, some
secret connected with his fate, and that she was waiting for the arrival
of some day, fixed in her mind, on which to make a revelation of her
knowledge to him. This mention of an eventual summons, "by day or
night." What could it mean otherwise? Maurice read the letter again and
again. Its last words touched him by their perfect unselfishness and
also by their feminine romance. He had a moment's thought of the many
emotional stories Lily had read. "She lives in one now," he said to
himself. And then, as usual, he became self-engrossed, saw only his own
life, possibly touched for ever with a light of peace.
The Canon returned alone. He met Maurice gravely, almost sternly.
"I trust my child entirely," he said. "She has told me that for a time
you must live apart. She has made me promise not to ask you the reason
of this separation. I don't ask it, but if you--"
His voice broke and he turned away for a moment. Then he said:
"Lily remains in the place from which she wrote to you."
"She is going to live there!" Maurice exclaimed.
"For the present, I could not persuade her otherwise. Her old nurse,
Mrs. Whitehead, is going up to be with her. I cannot understand all
this."
The old man cast his eyes searchingly upon Maurice.
"What--?" he began, then, remembering his promise to his daughter, he
stopped short.
"We will talk no more about this," he said slowly. "No more."
He bade Maurice good-bye and returned, sorrowful, to the Rectory.
Lily kept her word. Maurice had no more letters from her. He only heard
of her from the Canon, and knew that she remained in that beautiful and
terrible valley, which he remembered so vividly and hated so ardently.
Meanwhile he dwelt in a peace that was strange to him. The little voice
had gone out of his life. The cry of the child was hushed. Often, in the
past, Maurice had contemplated the coming of this exquisite silence, but
he had always imagined it as a gradual approach. He had fancied that if
the lamentation of the child ever died out of his haunted life it would
fade away as the sound of the sea fades on a long strand when the
whispering tide goes down. Day by day, night by night, her crying would
grow less poignant, less distinct in a long diminuendo, as if the
restless spirit withdrew slowly farther and farther away, till the cry
became a whisper, then a broken murmur, then--nothing. This abrupt
cessation of persecution, this violent change from something that had
seemed like menace to perfect immunity from trouble, was a fact that
Maurice had never thought of as a possibility. He had grown to believe
that Lily's presence in his home intensified the terror from which he
suffered, certainly. But he had never supposed that her removal from him
would lay the spirit entirely to rest. And she said that it was not at
rest. How could she know that? And if it were not at rest, in what
region was it pursuing its weird activity? Whither had it gone? He
wondered long and deeply. And then he resolved to wonder no more. Peace
had come to him at last. He would not break it by questioning the reason
of it. He would accept it blindly, joyfully. Man blots the sunshine out
of life by asking "Why?"
Time passed on. Brayfield had gossiped, marvelled and sunk into a sort
of apathy of unrewarded and quiescent curiosity. The Canon pursued his
life at the Rectory. Maurice visited his patients and continued
unremittingly his medical researches. The immunity he now enjoyed
gradually wrought a great change in him. He emerged from prison into
the outer air. His health rapidly improved. His heavy eyes grew bright.
His mind was active and alert. He was a new man. The darkness faded
round him. He saw the light at last. For the silence endured. And at
last he even forgot to listen, at dawn or in the silent hours of the
night, for the cry of the child. Even the memory of it began to grow
faint within his heart. So rapidly does man forget his troubles when he
still has youth and the years are not heavy on him.
Yet Maurice often thought of Lily. And now that he was no longer bowed
under the tyranny of a shattered nervous system he felt a new tenderness
for her. He recalled her devotion and no longer linked her with his
persecution. He remembered her unselfishness. He wished her back again.
And then--he remembered all his misery, and that, with her, it went. And
his selfishness said to him--it is better so. And his mental cowardice
whispered to him--your safety is in your solitude. And he put the memory
of Lily's love and of the beauty of her nature from him.
So his silent autumn passed by. And his silent winter came. One day, in
a December frost, he met the Canon, muffled up to the chin and on his
way to see Miss Bigelow, who professed herself once again _in extremis_.
They stopped in the snow and spoke a few commonplace words, but Maurice
thought he observed a peculiar furtiveness in the old man's manner, a
hint of some suppressed excitement in his voice.
"How is Lily?" Maurice asked.
"Fairly well," the Canon said.
"She is still at the inn?"
"No, she lately moved into a little house further up the valley."
"Further up the valley," Maurice said. "But there's only one other house
in that direction. I have been there you know," he added hastily.
"Lily told me you had stayed there."
"Well, but--" Maurice persisted, "there is only one house, a private
house."
"They have been building up there," the Canon said evasively. "Houses
are springing up. It is a pity. Good-night."
And he turned and walked away. Maurice stood looking after him. So they
had been building in the valley, and End Cottage no longer possessed the
distinction of being the finale of man in that Arcadia of woods and
streams, and rugged hills on which the clouds brooded, from which the
rain came like a mournful pilgrim, to weep over the gentle shrine of
nature.
So they had been building in the valley.
Maurice made his way home. His mind was full of memories.
The close of the year drew on. It was a bad season, a cruel season for
the poor. Men went about saying to one another that it was a hard
winter. The papers were full of reports of abnormal frosts, of
tremendous falls of snow, of ice-bound rivers and trains delayed. There
were deaths from cold. The starving died off like flies, under hedges by
roadsides, in the fireless attics of towns. Comfortable and well-to-do
persons talked vigorously of the delights of an old-fashioned Christmas.
The doctors had many patients. Among them Maurice was very busy. His
talent had monopolised Brayfield and his time was incessantly occupied.
He scarcely noticed Christmas. For even on that day he was full of work.
Several people managed to be very ill among the plum puddings. The year
died and was buried. The New Year dawned, and still the evil weather
continued. In early January Maurice came down one morning to find by his
plate a letter written in a hand of old age, straggling and complicated.
It proved to be from Mrs. Whitehead, Lily's old nurse; and it contained
that summons of which Lily had spoken long ago in her letter to her
husband. Lily was ill and wished to see Maurice at once. The letter,
though involved, was urgent.
Maurice laid it down. There was a date on it but no name of a house. By
the date Maurice saw that the letter had been delayed in transit.
Blizzards, snow-storms, had been responsible for many such delays. He
got up from the table. At that moment there was no hesitation in his
mind. He would go to Lily at once, as fast as rail could carry him. In a
few moments his luggage was packed. Within an hour he was on his way to
the station. He stopped the carriage at the Rectory and asked to see the
Canon for a moment. The servant, looking reproachful, told him her
master had started three days before to see "Miss Lily," who was ill.
"Miss Lily," Maurice said. "You mean Mrs. Dale. I am on my way to see
her too. What is the matter? They do not tell me."
"I don't know, sir," the servant said, softening a little on learning
that Maurice was going north to his wife.
Maurice drove on to the station.
In all his after life he never could forget his white journey. It seemed
to him as if nature gathered herself together to delay him, to turn him
from his purpose of obeying the summons of Lily. Even the line from
Brayfield to London was blocked, and when at length Maurice reached
London he found the great city staggering under a burden of snow that
rendered its features unrecognisable. All traffic was practically
suspended. He missed train after train, and when he drove at last into
Euston Station and expressed his intention of going north by the night
mail the porter shook his head and drew a terrible picture of that
arctic region.
"Most of the lines are blocked, sir," he said, "or will be. It's
a-coming on for more snow."
"I can't help that," Maurice said. "I must go. Label my luggage."
The train was due to start at midnight. Maurice had a lonely dinner at
the station hotel. While he ate in the gaily lighted coffee-room he
thought of Lily and of his coming journey. The influence of the weather
had surrounded it with a curious romance such as English travel seldom
affords. Maurice was very susceptible to the mental atmosphere
engendered by outward circumstances, and yielded more readily than the
average man to the wayward promptings of the faithful spirit that
nestles somewhere in almost every intellect. He began to regard this
white journey to the ice-bound and rugged north with something of a
child's wide-eyed, half-delighted, half-alarmed anticipation. He thought
of the darkness, of the dangers by the way, of the multitudes of lonely
snow-wreathed miles the train would have to cover; of the increasing
cold as they went higher and higher up the land, of the early dawn over
fells and stone walls, of the grey light on the grey sea. Then he
listened to the strangely muffled roar of a London hoarse with cold. And
he shivered and had feelings of a man bound on some tremendous and novel
quest. As he came out of the hotel the wintry air met him and embraced
him. He entered the station, dull and sinister in the night, with its
haggard gas-lamps and arches yawning to the snow. There were few
passengers, and they looked anxious. The train drew in. Maurice had his
carriage to himself. The porter wished him good luck on his journey with
the voice and manner of one clearly foreseeing imminent disaster and
death. The whistle sounded, and the train glided, a long black and
orange snake, into the white wonder of the clouded night. Snow beat upon
the windows, incrusted with the filagree work of frost, and as the speed
of the train increased the carriage filled with the persistent music of
an intense and sustained activity. This music, and the thoughts of
Maurice fought against sleep. He leaned back with open eyes and listened
to the song of the train. Its monotony was like the monotony of an
irritable man, he thought, always angry, always expressing his anger.
Beneath bridges, in tunnels, the anger was dashed with ripples of fury,
with spurts of brutalising passion. And then the normal current of dull
temper flowed on again as before. Maurice wished that the windows were
not merely thick white blinds completely shutting out the night. He
longed to see the storm in which they fled towards greater storms, the
country which they spurned as they sprang northwards! Northwards! And to
that valley!
His thoughts went to his old life alone there, to the coming into it of
the haunting voice, to his terror, his struggle, his flight southward.
He had never thought to return there. Yet now he fled towards that place
of memories, calm, sane, cleansed of persecution, with his mind
fortified, and his heart steadily and calmly beating, unshaken by the
agonies of old. Was he the same man? It seemed almost impossible. And
now Maurice said to himself again that perhaps after all the cry of the
child had been imagination, a symptom of illness in him from which he
had--perhaps even through some obscure physical change--recovered
completely. Yet Lily had believed in the cry and believed in the unquiet
spirit behind it. But women are romantic, credulous--
The train rocked in a rapture of motion. Maurice drew his rugs more
closely round him. With the advance of night the cold grew more deadly.
Towards morning the pace of the train incessantly decreased. Huge masses
of snow had drifted upon the line. For a rising wind drove it together
under hedgerows and walls until expanding upon the track, it impeded the
progress of the engines. Maurice let down a window and peered out. He
saw only snow, stationary or floating, at rest in shadowy heaps that
fled back in the darkness, or falling in a veil before his eyes. It
seemed to him now as if a hand were stretched out to stay his impetuous
advance to Lily. The train went slower and slower. At last, towards
morning, it stopped. A long and distracted whistling pierced the air.
There was a jerk, a movement forward, then another stoppage. They were
snowed up in the middle of a desolate stretch of country, with a
blizzard raging round them.
How many hours passed before they were released Maurice never knew. He
lay wrapped up to the eyes, numbed and passive, of body, but mentally
travelling with an extraordinary rapidity. At first he was in the
valley. He saw it, as he had seen it in old days, in snow, its river
ice-bound, its waterfall arrested in the midst of an army of crystal
spears. White mountains rose round it to a low sky, curved, like a
bosom, in grey cloud shapes. The air was sharp and silent, clearer than
southern air, a thing that seemed to hold itself alert in its narrow
prison on the edge of solitude. He heard the bark of a dog on the hills,
in search of the starving sheep.
Then he came to one of those new houses of which the Canon had spoken,
and in it he found Lily. She was pale, but he scarcely noticed that,
engrossed in the strangeness of finding her there. For in the south he
had never fully realised Lily at home in the valley, walking on the
desolate narrow roads by day, sleeping in the shadow of the hills by
night. Now he began to realise her there. Where would the house be? Near
End Cottage, perhaps in sight of the garden to which he had stolen on
that evil night to listen for the voice of a bird!
After many hours the train was dug out of the snow, and sped forward
again in daylight. Maurice slept a little, but uneasily. And now, when
he was awake, he began to be filled with an unreasonable apprehension,
for which he accounted by taking stock of the low temperature of his
body, and of the loss of vitality occasioned by want of food and rest.
He was seized with fear as he came up into the north and saw vaguely the
moors around him, the snowy waves where the white woods rippled up the
flanks of the white hills. He began to realise again his former
condition when his life was full of the lamentation of the child. He
began to feel as if he drew near to that lamentation once more. Perhaps
the little sorrowful spirit had only deserted him to return to the
valley in which it first greeted him. Perhaps it would come again to him
there. He might hear the cry from the garden of the cottage as he
hastened past.
He shuddered and cursed his wild fancies. But they stayed with him
through all the rest of the journey, through all the delays and periods
of numb patience. And they increased upon him. When at last he reached
the dreary station by the flat sandbanks, at which he changed into the
valley train, he was pale and careworn, and full of alarm.
Very slowly the tiny train crawled up into the heart of the hills as the
darkness of the second night came down. Maurice was the only passenger
in it. He felt like one alone in a lonely world, fearing inhabitants
unseen, but whose distant presence he was aware of. Could Lily indeed be
here, beyond him in this desolation? It seemed impossible. But the
child might be here, wandering, a lost spirit, in this unutterable
winter. That would not be strange to him. And his soul grew colder than
his body. He could see nothing from the window, but occasionally he
heard the dry tapping of twigs upon the glass, as the train crept among
the leafless woods. And this tapping seemed to him to be the tiny
fingers of the child, feebly endeavouring to attract his attention. He
shrank away from the window to the centre of the carriage.
At the last station in the valley the train stopped. Maurice got out
into the darkness, and asked the guard the name of the house in which
Mrs. Dale lived.
"Mrs. Dale," he said, in the broad Cumberland dialect, "Oh, she bides at
End Cottage."
Maurice stared at his rugged face peering above the round lamp which he
held.
"End Cottage?"
"Yes, sir. The poor lady took it on a six months' lease, but I hear
she's--"
But Maurice had turned away with a muttered:
"I'll send up for the luggage."
He stumbled out into the white lane and through the little village. One
or two lads, roughly dressed and sprinkled with snowflakes, eyed him
from the shelter of the inn porch. As he moved past them, he heard their
muttered comments. He left the houses behind and found himself among
snow-laden trees. End Cottage was hidden in this narrow wood which was
generally full of the sound of the waterfall.
Now the waterfall was silent, motionless, a dead thing in a rocky grave.
Maurice saw a faint and misty light among the bare trees. It came from
his old home, and now his hand touched the white garden gate, prickly
with ice. He pushed it open and stole up the path till he reached the
little porch of the cottage. As he stood there his heart beat hard and
his breath fluttered in his throat. It seemed to him that there must be
some strange and terrible meaning in Lily's presence here. With a
shaking hand he pulled at the bell. He waited. No one came. He heard no
step. The silence was dense, even appalling. After a long pause he
turned the handle of the door, opened it, and stood on the threshold of
the cottage. Instead of entering at once he waited, listening for any
sound of life within the house, for the voices or footsteps of those
inhabiting it.
Just so had he waited on a summer night long ago, with the moon behind
him and leaf-laden trees. He listened, and, after a moment of profound
stillness, he heard--as he had heard in that very place so long ago--the
faint cry of a child. It came from within the house, clear and distinct
though frail and feeble.
Involuntarily Maurice moved a step backward into the snow. Horror
overwhelmed him. The dead child was here then with Lily, in his old
abode. The spirit was not laid to rest. It had only deserted him for a
while to greet him again here, to take up again here its eternal
persecution; and this resurrection appalled and unmanned him more than
all the persistent haunting of the past. He was dashed from confidence
to despair. The little cry paralysed him, and he leaned against the wall
of the porch almost like a dying man.
And again he heard the cry of the child.
How live and how real it was! Maurice remembered that he had said to
himself that the cry was a phantasy of the brain, an imaginary sound
vibrating from an afflicted body. And now his intellect denied such a
supposition; the cry came from a thing that lived, although it lived in
another world. It seemed to summon him with a strange insistence.
Against his will, and walking slowly as one in a trance, he moved
forward up the narrow stairway till he reached the room that had been
his old bedroom.
The cry came surely from within that room. The dead child was shut in
there. Yes, never before had Maurice been able to locate the cry
precisely. Now he could locate it. With shaking fingers he grasped the
handle of the door. He stood in a faint illumination, and the cry of the
child came louder to his ears. But there mingled with it another cry,
faint yet thrilling with joy:
"Maurice!"
He looked and saw Lily, white as a flower. She was propped on pillows,
and, stretching out her thin girl's arms, she held feebly towards
Maurice a tiny baby.
"Maurice--it is the child!" she whispered.
"The child!" he repeated hoarsely.
For an instant he believed that his fate was sealed, that the spirit,
which for so long had pursued him with its lamenting, now manifested its
actual presence to his eyes. Then, in a flash, the truth came upon him.
He fell upon his knees by the bedside and put out his arms for the
child. He held it. He felt its soft breath against his cheek. A cooing
murmur, as if of tiny happiness, came from its parted lips. It turned
its little face, flushed like a rose, against the breast of Maurice, and
nestled to sleep upon his heart.
And Lily's hand touched him.
"I thought you would not come in time," she said, as the nurse, at a
sign from her, stole softly from the room.
"In time?"
"To see me before--they say, you know, that--"
"Lily!" he cried.
"Hush! The child! Listen, dear. If I die, take the child. It is your
dead child, I think, come to life through me. Yes, yes, it is the little
child that has cried for love so long. Redeem your cruelty, oh, Maurice,
redeem it to your child. Give it your love. Give it your life. Give
it--"
"Lily!" he said again. And there were tears on his cheeks.
"I gave myself to you for this, Maurice. I was waiting for this. Do you
understand me now? You scarcely loved me, Maurice. But I loved you. Let
me think--in dying--that I have brought you peace at last."
He could not speak. The mystery of woman, the mystery of child was too
near to him. Awe came upon him and the terror of his own unworthiness,
rewarded--or punished--which was it?--by such compassion, such
self-sacrifice.
"When I left you," Lily murmured, and her voice sounded thin and tired,
"it seemed as if the spirit of the child came with me, as if I, too,
heard its dead voice in the night, crying for its salvation, for its
relief from agony. But, Maurice, you cannot hear it now. You will never
hear it again--unless--unless--"
She fixed her eyes on him. They were growing dim.
"God has given the dead to you again through me," she faltered, "that
you--may--redeem--redeem--your--sin."
She moved, and leaned against him, as if she would gather him and the
sleeping child into her embrace. But she could not. She slipped back
softly, almost like a snowflake that falls and is gone.
* * * * *
Maurice Dale is a famous doctor now. He lives with his daughter, who
never leaves him and whom he loves passionately. Many patients throng
to his consulting-room, but not one of them suspects that the grave
physician, deep down in his heart, cherishes a strange belief--not based
upon science. This belief is connected with his child. Secretly he
thinks of her as of one risen from the grave, come back to him from
beyond the gates of death.
The cry of the child is silent. Maurice never hears it now. But he
believes that could any demon tempt him, even for one moment, to be
cruel to his little daughter, he would hear it again. It would lament
once more in the darkness, would once more fill the silence with its
despair.
And then a dead woman would stir in her grave.
For there are surely cries of earth that even the dead can hear.
HOW LOVE CAME TO PROFESSOR GUILDEA.
HOW LOVE CAME TO PROFESSOR GUILDEA.
Dull people often wondered how it came about that Father Murchison and
Professor Frederic Guildea were intimate friends. The one was all faith,
the other all scepticism. The nature of the Father was based on love. He
viewed the world with an almost childlike tenderness above his long,
black cassock; and his mild, yet perfectly fearless, blue eyes seemed
always to be watching the goodness that exists in humanity, and
rejoicing at what they saw. The Professor, on the other hand, had a hard
face like a hatchet, tipped with an aggressive black goatee beard. His
eyes were quick, piercing and irreverent. The lines about his small,
thin-lipped mouth were almost cruel. His voice was harsh and dry,
sometimes, when he grew energetic, almost soprano. It fired off words
with a sharp and clipping utterance. His habitual manner was one of
distrust and investigation. It was impossible to suppose that, in his
busy life, he found any time for love, either of humanity in general or
of an individual.
Yet his days were spent in scientific investigations which conferred
immense benefits upon the world.
Both men were celibates. Father Murchison was a member of an Anglican
order which forbade him to marry. Professor Guildea had a poor opinion
of most things, but especially of women. He had formerly held a post as
lecturer at Birmingham. But when his fame as a discoverer grew he
removed to London. There, at a lecture he gave in the East End, he first
met Father Murchison. They spoke a few words. Perhaps the bright
intelligence of the priest appealed to the man of science, who was
inclined, as a rule, to regard the clergy with some contempt. Perhaps
the transparent sincerity of this devotee, full of common sense,
attracted him. As he was leaving the hall he abruptly asked the Father
to call on him at his house in Hyde Park Place. And the Father, who
seldom went into the West End, except to preach, accepted the
invitation.
"When will you come?" said Guildea.
He was folding up the blue paper on which his notes were written in a
tiny, clear hand. The leaves rustled drily in accompaniment to his
sharp, dry voice.
"On Sunday week I am preaching in the evening at St. Saviour's, not far
off," said the Father.
"I don't go to church."
"No," said the Father, without any accent of surprise or condemnation.
"Come to supper afterwards?"
"Thank you. I will."
"What time will you come?"
The Father smiled.
"As soon as I have finished my sermon. The service is at six-thirty."
"About eight then, I suppose. Don't make the sermon too long. My number
in Hyde Park Place is a hundred. Good-night to you."
He snapped an elastic band round his papers and strode off without
shaking hands.
On the appointed Sunday, Father Murchison preached to a densely crowded
congregation at St. Saviour's. The subject of his sermon was sympathy,
and the comparative uselessness of man in the world unless he can learn
to love his neighbour as himself. The sermon was rather long, and when
the preacher, in his flowing, black cloak, and his hard, round hat, with
a straight brim over which hung the ends of a black cord, made his way
towards the Professor's house, the hands of the illuminated clock disc
at the Marble Arch pointed to twenty minutes past eight.
The Father hurried on, pushing his way through the crowd of standing
soldiers, chattering women and giggling street boys in their Sunday
best. It was a warm April night, and, when he reached number 100, Hyde
Park Place, he found the Professor bareheaded on his doorstep, gazing
out towards the Park railings, and enjoying the soft, moist air, in
front of his lighted passage.
"Ha, a long sermon!" he exclaimed. "Come in."
"I fear it was," said the Father, obeying the invitation. "I am that
dangerous thing--an extempore preacher."
"More attractive to speak without notes, if you can do it. Hang your hat
and coat--oh, cloak--here. We'll have supper at once. This is the
dining-room."
He opened a door on the right and they entered a long, narrow room, with
a gold paper and a black ceiling, from which hung an electric lamp with
a gold-coloured shade. In the room stood a small oval table with covers
laid for two. The Professor rang the bell. Then he said,
"People seem to talk better at an oval table than at a square one."
"Really. Is that so?"
"Well, I've had precisely the same party twice, once at a square table,
once at an oval table. The first dinner was a dull failure, the second a
brilliant success. Sit down, won't you?"
"How d'you account for the difference?" said the Father, sitting down,
and pulling the tail of his cassock well under him.
"H'm. I know how you'd account for it."
"Indeed. How then?"
"At an oval table, since there are no corners, the chain of human
sympathy--the electric current, is much more complete. Eh! Let me give
you some soup."
"Thank you."
The Father took it, and, as he did so, turned his beaming blue eyes on
his host. Then he smiled.
"What!" he said, in his pleasant, light tenor voice. "You do go to
church sometimes, then?"
"To-night is the first time for ages. And, mind you, I was tremendously
bored."
The Father still smiled, and his blue eyes gently twinkled.
"Dear, dear!" he said, "what a pity!"
"But not by the sermon," Guildea added. "I don't pay a compliment. I
state a fact. The sermon didn't bore me. If it had, I should have said
so, or said nothing."
"And which would you have done?"
The Professor smiled almost genially.
"Don't know," he said. "What wine d'you drink?"
"None, thank you. I'm a teetotaller. In my profession and _milieu_ it is
necessary to be one. Yes, I will have some soda water. I think you would
have done the first."
"Very likely, and very wrongly. You wouldn't have minded much."
"I don't think I should."
They were intimate already. The Father felt most pleasantly at home
under the black ceiling. He drank some soda water and seemed to enjoy
it more than the Professor enjoyed his claret.
"You smile at the theory of the chain of human sympathy, I see," said
the Father. "Then what is your explanation of the failure of your square
party with corners, the success of your oval party without them?"
"Probably on the first occasion the wit of the assembly had a chill on
his liver, while on the second he was in perfect health. Yet, you see, I
stick to the oval table."
"And that means----"
"Very little. By the way, your omission of any allusion to the notorious
part liver plays in love was a serious one to-night."
"Your omission of any desire for close human sympathy in your life is a
more serious one."
"How can you be sure I have no such desire?"
"I divine it. Your look, your manner, tell me it is so. You were
disagreeing with my sermon all the time I was preaching. Weren't you?"
"Part of the time."
The servant changed the plates. He was a middle-aged, blond, thin man,
with a stony white face, pale, prominent eyes, and an accomplished
manner of service. When he had left the room the Professor continued,
"Your remarks interested me, but I thought them exaggerated."
"For instance?"
"Let me play the egoist for a moment. I spend most of my time in hard
work, very hard work. The results of this work, you will allow, benefit
humanity."
"Enormously," assented the Father, thinking of more than one of
Guildea's discoveries.
"And the benefit conferred by this work, undertaken merely for its own
sake, is just as great as if it were undertaken because I loved my
fellow man and sentimentally desired to see him more comfortable than he
is at present. I'm as useful precisely in my present condition of--in my
present non-affectional condition--as I should be if I were as full of
gush as the sentimentalists who want to get murderers out of prison, or
to put a premium on tyranny--like Tolstoi--by preventing the punishment
of tyrants."
"One may do great harm with affection; great good without it. Yes, that
is true. Even _le bon motif_ is not everything, I know. Still I contend
that, given your powers, you would be far more useful in the world with
sympathy, affection for your kind, added to them than as you are. I
believe even that you would do still more splendid work."
The Professor poured himself out another glass of claret.
"You noticed my butler?" he said.
"I did."
"He's a perfect servant. He makes me perfectly comfortable. Yet he has
no feeling of liking for me. I treat him civilly. I pay him well. But I
never think about him, or concern myself with him as a human being. I
know nothing of his character except what I read of it in his last
master's letter. There are, you may say, no truly human relations
between us. You would affirm that his work would be better done if I had
made him personally like me as man--of any class--can like man--of any
other class?"
"I should, decidedly."
"I contend that he couldn't do his work better than he does it at
present."
"But if any crisis occurred?"
"What?"
"Any crisis, change in your condition. If you needed his help, not only
as a man and a butler, but as a man and a brother? He'd fail you then,
probably. You would never get from your servant that finest service
which can only be prompted by an honest affection."
"You have finished?"
"Quite."
"Let us go upstairs then. Yes, those are good prints. I picked them up
in Birmingham when I was living there. This is my workroom."
They came into a double room lined entirely with books, and brilliantly,
rather hardly, lit by electricity. The windows at one end looked on to
the Park, at the other on to the garden of a neighbouring house. The
door by which they entered was concealed from the inner and smaller room
by the jutting wall of the outer room, in which stood a huge
writing-table loaded with letters, pamphlets and manuscripts. Between
the two windows of the inner room was a cage in which a large, grey
parrot was clambering, using both beak and claws to assist him in his
slow and meditative peregrinations.
"You have a pet," said the Father, surprised.
"I possess a parrot," the Professor answered, drily, "I got him for a
purpose when I was making a study of the imitative powers of birds, and
I have never got rid of him. A cigar?"
"Thank you."
They sat down. Father Murchison glanced at the parrot. It had paused in
its journey, and, clinging to the bars of its cage, was regarding them
with attentive round eyes that looked deliberately intelligent, but by
no means sympathetic. He looked away from it to Guildea, who was
smoking, with his head thrown back, his sharp, pointed chin, on which
the small black beard bristled, upturned. He was moving his under lip up
and down rapidly. This action caused the beard to stir and look
peculiarly aggressive. The Father suddenly chuckled softly.
"Why's that?" cried Guildea, letting his chin drop down on his breast
and looking at his guest sharply.
"I was thinking it would have to be a crisis indeed that could make you
cling to your butler's affection for assistance."
Guildea smiled too.
"You're right. It would. Here he comes."
The man entered with coffee. He offered it gently, and retired like a
shadow retreating on a wall.
"Splendid, inhuman fellow," remarked Guildea.
"I prefer the East End lad who does my errands in Bird Street," said the
Father. "I know all his worries. He knows some of mine. We are friends.
He's more noisy than your man. He even breathes hard when he is
specially solicitous, but he would do more for me than put the coals on
my fire, or black my square-toed boots."
"Men are differently made. To me the watchful eye of affection would be
abominable."
"What about that bird?"
The Father pointed to the parrot. It had got up on its perch and, with
one foot uplifted in an impressive, almost benedictory, manner, was
gazing steadily at the Professor.
"That's the watchful eye of imitation, with a mind at the back of it,
desirous of reproducing the peculiarities of others. No, I thought your
sermon to-night very fresh, very clever. But I have no wish for
affection. Reasonable liking, of course, one desires," he tugged sharply
at his beard, as if to warn himself against sentimentality,--"but
anything more would be most irksome, and would push me, I feel sure,
towards cruelty. It would also hamper one's work."
"I don't think so."
"The sort of work I do. I shall continue to benefit the world without
loving it, and it will continue to accept the benefits without loving
me. That's all as it should be."
He drank his coffee. Then he added, rather aggressively:
"I have neither time nor inclination for sentimentality."
When Guildea let Father Murchison out, he followed the Father on to the
doorstep and stood there for a moment. The Father glanced across the
damp road into the Park.
"I see you've got a gate just opposite you," he said idly.
"Yes. I often slip across for a stroll to clear my brain. Good-night to
you. Come again some day."
"With pleasure. Good-night."
The Priest strode away, leaving Guildea standing on the step.
Father Murchison came many times again to number one hundred Hyde Park
Place. He had a feeling of liking for most men and women whom he knew,
and of tenderness for all, whether he knew them or not, but he grew to
have a special sentiment towards Guildea. Strangely enough, it was a
sentiment of pity. He pitied this hard-working, eminently successful man
of big brain and bold heart, who never seemed depressed, who never
wanted assistance, who never complained of the twisted skein of life or
faltered in his progress along its way. The Father pitied Guildea, in
fact, because Guildea wanted so little. He had told him so, for the
intercourse of the two men, from the beginning, had been singularly
frank.
One evening, when they were talking together, the Father happened to
speak of one of the oddities of life, the fact that those who do not
want things often get them, while those who seek them vehemently are
disappointed in their search.
"Then I ought to have affection poured upon me," said Guildea, smiling
rather grimly. "For I hate it."
"Perhaps some day you will."
"I hope not, most sincerely."
Father Murchison said nothing for a moment. He was drawing together the
ends of the broad band round his cassock. When he spoke he seemed to be
answering someone.
"Yes," he said slowly, "yes, that _is_ my feeling--pity."
"For whom?" said the Professor.
Then, suddenly, he understood. He did not say that he understood, but
Father Murchison felt, and saw, that it was quite unnecessary to answer
his friend's question. So Guildea, strangely enough, found himself
closely acquainted with a man--his opposite in all ways,--who pitied
him.
The fact that he did not mind this, and scarcely ever thought about it,
shows perhaps as clearly as anything could the peculiar indifference of
his nature.
II.
One Autumn evening, a year and a half after Father Murchison and the
Professor had first met, the Father called in Hyde Park Place and
enquired of the blond and stony butler--his name was Pitting--whether
his master was at home.
"Yes, sir," replied Pitting. "Will you please come this way?"
He moved noiselessly up the rather narrow stairs, followed by the
Father, tenderly opened the library door, and in his soft, cold voice,
announced:
"Father Murchison."
Guildea was sitting in an armchair, before a small fire. His thin,
long-fingered hands lay outstretched upon his knees, his head was sunk
down on his chest. He appeared to be pondering deeply. Pitting very
slightly raised his voice.
"Father Murchison to see you, sir," he repeated.
The Professor jumped up rather suddenly and turned sharply round as the
Father came in.
"Oh," he said. "It's you, is it? Glad to see you. Come to the fire."
The Father glanced at him and thought him looking unusually fatigued.
"You don't look well to-night," the Father said.
"No?"
"You must be working too hard. That lecture you are going to give in
Paris is bothering you?"
"Not a bit. It's all arranged. I could deliver it to you at this moment
verbatim. Well, sit down."
The Father did so, and Guildea sank once more into his chair and stared
hard into the fire without another word. He seemed to be thinking
profoundly. His friend did not interrupt him, but quietly lit a pipe and
began to smoke reflectively. The eyes of Guildea were fixed upon the
fire. The Father glanced about the room, at the walls of soberly bound
books, at the crowded writing-table, at the windows, before which hung
heavy, dark-blue curtains of old brocade, at the cage, which stood
between them. A green baize covering was thrown over it. The Father
wondered why. He had never seen Napoleon--so the parrot was
named--covered up at night before. While he was looking at the baize,
Guildea suddenly jerked up his head, and, taking his hands from his
knees and clasping them, said abruptly:
"D'you think I'm an attractive man?"
Father Murchison jumped. Such a question coming from such a man
astounded him.
"Bless me!" he ejaculated. "What makes you ask? Do you mean attractive
to the opposite sex?"
"That's what I don't know," said the Professor gloomily, and staring
again into the fire. "That's what I don't know."
The Father grew more astonished.
"Don't know!" he exclaimed.
And he laid down his pipe.
"Let's say--d'you think I'm attractive, that there's anything about me
which might draw a--a human being, or an animal, irresistibly to me?"
"Whether you desired it or not?"
"Exactly--or--no, let us say definitely--if I did not desire it."
Father Murchison pursed up his rather full, cherubic lips, and little
wrinkles appeared about the corners of his blue eyes.
"There might be, of course," he said, after a pause. "Human nature is
weak, engagingly weak, Guildea. And you're inclined to flout it. I could
understand a certain class of lady--the lion-hunting, the intellectual
lady, seeking you. Your reputation, your great name----"
"Yes, yes," Guildea interrupted, rather irritably--"I know all that, I
know."
He twisted his long hands together, bending the palms outwards till his
thin, pointed fingers cracked. His forehead was wrinkled in a frown.
"I imagine," he said,--he stopped and coughed drily, almost shrilly--"I
imagine it would be very disagreeable to be liked, to be run after--that
is the usual expression, isn't it--by anything one objected to."
And now he half turned in his chair, crossed his legs one over the
other, and looked at his guest with an unusual, almost piercing
interrogation.
"Anything?" said the Father.
"Well--well, anyone. I imagine nothing could be more unpleasant."
"To you--no," answered the Father. "But--forgive me, Guildea, I cannot
conceive you permitting such intrusion. You don't encourage adoration."
Guildea nodded his head gloomily.
"I don't," he said, "I don't. That's just it. That's the curious part of
it, that I----"
He broke off deliberately, got up and stretched.
"I'll have a pipe, too," he said.
He went over to the mantelpiece, got his pipe, filled it and lighted it.
As he held the match to the tobacco, bending forward with an enquiring
expression, his eyes fell upon the green baize that covered Napoleon's
cage. He threw the match into the grate, and puffed at the pipe as he
walked forward to the cage. When he reached it he put out his hand, took
hold of the baize and began to pull it away. Then suddenly he pushed it
back over the cage.
"No," he said, as if to himself, "no."
He returned rather hastily to the fire and threw himself once more into
his armchair.
"You're wondering," he said to Father Murchison. "So am I. I don't know
at all what to make of it. I'll just tell you the facts and you must
tell me what you think of them. The night before last, after a day of
hard work--but no harder than usual--I went to the front door to get a
breath of air. You know I often do that."
"Yes, I found you on the doorstep when I first came here."
"Just so. I didn't put on hat or coat. I just stood on the step as I
was. My mind, I remember, was still full of my work. It was rather a
dark night, not very dark. The hour was about eleven, or a quarter past.
I was staring at the Park, and presently I found that my eyes were
directed towards somebody who was sitting, back to me, on one of the
benches. I saw the person--if it was a person,--through the railings."
"If it was a person!" said the Father. "What do you mean by that?"
"Wait a minute. I say that because it was too dark for me to know. I
merely saw some blackish object on the bench, rising into view above the
level of the back of the seat. I couldn't say it was man, woman or
child. But something there was, and I found that I was looking at it."
"I understand."
"Gradually, I also found that my thoughts were becoming fixed upon this
thing or person. I began to wonder, first, what it was doing there;
next, what it was thinking; lastly, what it was like."
"Some poor creature without a home, I suppose," said the Father.
"I said that to myself. Still, I was taken with an extraordinary
interest about this object, so great an interest that I got my hat and
crossed the road to go into the Park. As you know, there's an entrance
almost opposite to my house. Well, Murchison, I crossed the road, passed
through the gate in the railings, went up to the seat, and found that
there was--nothing on it."
"Were you looking at it as you walked?"
"Part of the time. But I removed my eyes from it just as I passed
through the gate, because there was a row going on a little way off, and
I turned for an instant in that direction. When I saw that the seat was
vacant I was seized by a most absurd sensation of disappointment, almost
of anger. I stopped and looked about me to see if anything was moving
away, but I could see nothing. It was a cold night and misty, and there
were few people about. Feeling, as I say, foolishly and unnaturally
disappointed, I retraced my steps to this house. When I got here I
discovered that during my short absence I had left the hall door
open--half open."
"Rather imprudent in London."
"Yes. I had no idea, of course, that I had done so, till I got back.
However, I was only away three minutes or so."
"Yes."
"It was not likely that anybody had gone in."
"I suppose not."
"Was it?"
"Why do you ask me that, Guildea?"
"Well, well!"
"Besides, if anybody had gone in on your return you'd have caught him,
surely."
Guildea coughed again. The Father, surprised, could not fail to
recognise that he was nervous and that his nervousness was affecting him
physically.
"I must have caught cold that night," he said, as if he had read his
friend's thought and hastened to contradict it. Then he went on:
"I entered the hall, or passage, rather."
He paused again. His uneasiness was becoming very apparent.
"And you did catch somebody?" said the Father.
Guildea cleared his throat.
"That's just it," he said, "now we come to it. I'm not imaginative, as
you know."
"You certainly are not."
"No, but hardly had I stepped into the passage before I felt certain
that somebody had got into the house during my absence. I felt convinced
of it, and not only that, I also felt convinced that the intruder was
the very person I had dimly seen sitting upon the seat in the Park. What
d'you say to that?"
"I begin to think you are imaginative."
"H'm! It seemed to me that the person--the occupant of the seat--and I,
had simultaneously formed the project of interviewing each other, had
simultaneously set out to put that project into execution. I became so
certain of this that I walked hastily upstairs into this room, expecting
to find the visitor awaiting me. But there was no one. I then came down
again and went into the dining-room. No one. I was actually astonished.
Isn't that odd?"
"Very," said the Father, quite gravely.
The Professor's chill and gloomy manner, and uncomfortable, constrained
appearance kept away the humour that might well have lurked round the
steps of such a discourse.
"I went upstairs again," he continued, "sat down and thought the matter
over. I resolved to forget it, and took up a book. I might perhaps have
been able to read, but suddenly I thought I noticed----"
He stopped abruptly. Father Murchison observed that he was staring
towards the green baize that covered the parrot's cage.
"But that's nothing," he said. "Enough that I couldn't read. I resolved
to explore the house. You know how small it is, how easily one can go
all over it. I went all over it. I went into every room without
exception. To the servants, who were having supper, I made some excuse.
They were surprised at my advent, no doubt."
"And Pitting?"
"Oh, he got up politely when I came in, stood while I was there, but
never said a word. I muttered 'don't disturb yourselves,' or something
of the sort, and came out. Murchison, I found nobody new in the
house--yet I returned to this room entirely convinced that somebody had
entered while I was in the Park."
"And gone out again before you came back?"
"No, had stayed, and was still in the house."
"But, my dear Guildea," began the Father, now in great astonishment.
"Surely----"
"I know what you want to say--what I should want to say in your place.
Now, do wait. I am also convinced that this visitor has not left the
house and is at this moment in it."
He spoke with evident sincerity, with extreme gravity. Father Murchison
looked him full in the face, and met his quick, keen eyes.
"No," he said, as if in reply to an uttered question: "I'm perfectly
sane, I assure you. The whole matter seems almost as incredible to me as
it must to you. But, as you know, I never quarrel with facts, however
strange. I merely try to examine into them thoroughly. I have already
consulted a doctor and been pronounced in perfect bodily health."
He paused, as if expecting the Father to say something.
"Go on, Guildea," he said, "you haven't finished."
"No. I felt that night positive that somebody had entered the house, and
remained in it, and my conviction grew. I went to bed as usual, and,
contrary to my expectation, slept as well as I generally do. Yet
directly I woke up yesterday morning I knew that my household had been
increased by one."
"May I interrupt you for one moment? How did you know it?"
"By my mental sensation. I can only say that I was perfectly conscious
of a new presence within my house, close to me."
"How very strange," said the Father. "And you feel absolutely certain
that you are not over-worked? Your brain does not feel tired? Your head
is quite clear?"
"Quite. I was never better. When I came down to breakfast that morning I
looked sharply into Pitting's face. He was as coldly placid and
inexpressive as usual. It was evident to me that his mind was in no way
distressed. After breakfast I sat down to work, all the time ceaselessly
conscious of the fact of this intruder upon my privacy. Nevertheless, I
laboured for several hours, waiting for any development that might occur
to clear away the mysterious obscurity of this event. I lunched. About
half-past two I was obliged to go out to attend a lecture. I therefore,
took my coat and hat, opened my door, and stepped on to the pavement. I
was instantly aware that I was no longer intruded upon, and this
although I was now in the street, surrounded by people. Consequently, I
felt certain that the thing in my house must be thinking of me, perhaps
even spying upon me."
"Wait a moment," interrupted the Father. "What was your sensation? Was
it one of fear?"
"Oh, dear no. I was entirely puzzled,--as I am now--and keenly
interested, but not in any way alarmed. I delivered my lecture with my
usual ease and returned home in the evening. On entering the house again
I was perfectly conscious that the intruder was still there. Last night
I dined alone and spent the hours after dinner in reading a scientific
work in which I was deeply interested. While I read, however, I never
for one moment lost the knowledge that some mind--very attentive to
me--was within hail of mine. I will say more than this--the sensation
constantly increased, and, by the time I got up to go to bed, I had come
to a very strange conclusion."
"What? What was it?"
"That whoever--or whatever--had entered my house during my short absence
in the Park was more than interested in me."
"More than interested in you?"
"Was fond, or was becoming fond, of me."
"Oh!" exclaimed the Father. "Now I understand why you asked me just now
whether I thought there was anything about you that might draw a human
being or an animal irresistibly to you."
"Precisely. Since I came to this conclusion, Murchison, I will confess
that my feeling of strong curiosity has become tinged with another
feeling."
"Of fear?"
"No, of dislike, of irritation. No--not fear, not fear."
As Guildea repeated unnecessarily this asseveration he looked again
towards the parrot's cage.
"What is there to be afraid of in such a matter?" he added. "I'm not a
child to tremble before bogies."
In saying the last words he raised his voice sharply; then he walked
quickly to the cage, and, with an abrupt movement, pulled the baize
covering from it. Napoleon was disclosed, apparently dozing upon his
perch with his head held slightly on one side. As the light reached him,
he moved, ruffled the feathers about his neck, blinked his eyes, and
began slowly to sidle to and fro, thrusting his head forward and drawing
it back with an air of complacent, though rather unmeaning, energy.
Guildea stood by the cage, looking at him closely, and indeed with an
attention that was so intense as to be remarkable, almost unnatural.
"How absurd these birds are!" he said at length, coming back to the
fire.
"You have no more to tell me?" asked the Father.
"No. I am still aware of the presence of something in my house. I am
still conscious of its close attention to me. I am still irritated,
seriously annoyed--I confess it,--by that attention."
"You say you are aware of the presence of something at this moment?"
"At this moment--yes."
"Do you mean in this room, with us, now?"
"I should say so--at any rate, quite near us."
Again he glanced quickly, almost suspiciously, towards the cage of the
parrot. The bird was sitting still on its perch now. Its head was bent
down and cocked sideways, and it appeared to be listening attentively to
something.
"That bird will have the intonations of my voice more correctly than
ever by to-morrow morning," said the Father, watching Guildea closely
with his mild blue eyes. "And it has always imitated me very cleverly."
The Professor started slightly.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, no doubt. Well, what do you make of this affair?"
"Nothing at all. It is absolutely inexplicable. I can speak quite
frankly to you, I feel sure."
"Of course. That's why I have told you the whole thing."
"I think you must be over-worked, over-strained, without knowing it."
"And that the doctor was mistaken when he said I was all right?"
"Yes."
Guildea knocked his pipe out against the chimney piece.
"It may be so," he said, "I will not be so unreasonable as to deny the
possibility, although I feel as well as I ever did in my life. What do
you advise then?"
"A week of complete rest away from London, in good air."
"The usual prescription. I'll take it. I'll go to-morrow to Westgate and
leave Napoleon to keep house in my absence."
For some reason, which he could not explain to himself, the pleasure
which Father Murchison felt in hearing the first part of his friend's
final remark was lessened, was almost destroyed, by the last sentence.
He walked towards the City that night, deep in thought, remembering and
carefully considering the first interview he had with Guildea in the
latter's house a year and a half before.
On the following morning Guildea left London.
III.
Father Murchison was so busy a man that he had little time for brooding
over the affairs of others. During Guildea's week at the sea, however,
the Father thought about him a great deal, with much wonder and some
dismay. The dismay was soon banished, for the mild-eyed priest was quick
to discern weakness in himself, quicker still to drive it forth as a
most undesirable inmate of the soul. But the wonder remained. It was
destined to a crescendo. Guildea had left London on a Thursday. On a
Thursday he returned, having previously sent a note to Father Murchison
to mention that he was leaving Westgate at a certain time. When his
train ran in to Victoria Station, at five o'clock in the evening, he was
surprised to see the cloaked figure of his friend standing upon the grey
platform behind a line of porters.
"What, Murchison!" he said. "You here! Have you seceded from your order
that you are taking this holiday?"
They shook hands.
"No," said the Father. "It happened that I had to be in this
neighbourhood to-day, visiting a sick person. So I thought I would meet
you."
"And see if I were still a sick person, eh?"
The Professor glanced at him kindly, but with a dry little laugh.
"Are you?" replied the Father gently, looking at him with interest. "No,
I think not. You appear very well."
The sea air had, in fact, put some brownish red into Guildea's always
thin cheeks. His keen eyes were shining with life and energy, and he
walked forward in his loose grey suit and fluttering overcoat with a
vigour that was noticeable, carrying easily in his left hand his
well-filled Gladstone bag.
The Father felt completely reassured.
"I never saw you look better," he said.
"I never was better. Have you an hour to spare?"
"Two."
"Good. I'll send my bag up by cab, and we'll walk across the Park to my
house and have a cup of tea there. What d'you say?"
"I shall enjoy it."
They walked out of the station yard, past the flower girls and newspaper
sellers towards Grosvenor Place.
"And you have had a pleasant time?" the Father said.
"Pleasant enough, and lonely. I left my companion behind me in the
passage at Number 100, you know."
"And you'll not find him there now, I feel sure."
"H'm!" ejaculated Guildea. "What a precious weakling you think me,
Murchison."
As he spoke he strode forward more quickly, as if moved to emphasise his
sensation of bodily vigour.
"A weakling--no. But anyone who uses his brain as persistently as you do
yours must require an occasional holiday."
"And I required one very badly, eh?"
"You required one, I believe."
"Well, I've had it. And now we'll see."
The evening was closing in rapidly. They crossed the road at Hyde Park
Corner, and entered the Park, in which were a number of people going
home from work; men in corduroy trousers, caked with dried mud, and
carrying tin cans slung over their shoulders, and flat panniers, in
which lay their tools. Some of the younger ones talked loudly or
whistled shrilly as they walked.
"Until the evening," murmured Father Murchison to himself.
"What?" asked Guildea.
"I was only quoting the last words of the text, which seems written upon
life, especially upon the life of pleasure: 'Man goeth forth to his
work, and to his labour.'"
"Ah, those fellows are not half bad fellows to have in an audience.
There were a lot of them at the lecture I gave when I first met you, I
remember. One of them tried to heckle me. He had a red beard. Chaps with
red beards are always hecklers. I laid him low on that occasion. Well,
Murchison, and now we're going to see."
"What?"
"Whether my companion has departed."
"Tell me--do you feel any expectation of--well--of again thinking
something is there?"
"How carefully you choose language. No, I merely wonder."
"You have no apprehension?"
"Not a scrap. But I confess to feeling curious."
"Then the sea air hasn't taught you to recognise that the whole thing
came from overstrain."
"No," said Guildea, very drily.
He walked on in silence for a minute. Then he added:
"You thought it would?"
"I certainly thought it might."
"Make me realise that I had a sickly, morbid, rotten imagination--heh?
Come now, Murchison, why not say frankly that you packed me off to
Westgate to get rid of what you considered an acute form of hysteria?"
The Father was quite unmoved by this attack.