There are not so many passengers by the 5.30 train as to hinder its
being punctual. It is almost faithful to its minute. So far--it can't be
said to be very far--fortune favours the one of its occupants with whom
we have any concern. He rolls out, cross and furry, still repeating to
himself with an even greater intensity of inward emphasis than he had
employed at Paddington, that unflattering opinion of his own wisdom with
which he had embarked on his present venture. If it had appeared a
fool's errand when looked forward to dispassionately from the warmth and
ease of his own fireside, what does it appear now? Now that, having
picked out the most promising-looking of the few sleepy hansoms awaiting
unlikely passengers, and bidden the mufflered purple-nosed driver take
him as fast as his horse can lay legs to the ground to Harborough
Castle, he finds himself spinning through the Oxford suburbs out into
the flat country beyond--ugly as original ugliness, further augmented by
a December dawning and a black and iron frost, can make it. At each mile
that carries him nearer and nearer his goal, his own unreason looms ever
immenser and yet immenser before him. By such a gigantic folly as this
even Betty herself may be satisfied. At every echoing step the horse
takes on the frozen ground it seems to him less and less likely that
Betty has had any real reason for sending for him, any reason that may
at all account for or palliate his appearance at this unheard-of hour.
Even Betty herself has asked no such insanity of him as this. She had
reckoned upon her telegram reaching him at mid-day, and upon his
arriving in obedience to it sometime in the afternoon, an hour at which
any one may arrive at a friend's house without provoking special
comment. But now? At the spanking pace at which, in accordance with his
own directions, he is getting over the ground, he will reach the Castle
by eight o'clock, just as the housemaids are beginning to open the
shutters and clean the grates. When the door is unbarred to him by an
astonished footman struggling into his coat, whom shall he ask for? What
shall he say? Lady Betty? Impossible! At eight o'clock in the morning!
Mr. Harborough? Neither is he, any more than his wife, an early riser;
and if, in answer to his, Talbot's, astounding summons, he should drag
himself from his couch, and come in sleepy _deshabille_ to meet him,
what has he, Talbot, to say to him? What does he want with him? How can
he explain his own appearance? Had he better ask for no one, then?--say
nothing, but just slip in, trusting to the thoroughness of the
Harborough servants' acquaintance with his appearance to save him from
any inconvenient questions? Shall he wait in some cold sitting-room in
process of dusting, with its chairs standing on their heads, and the
early besom making play on its carpet until his half-hour is up, and he
can return whence he came, having at least done what he was bidden to
do? He laughs derisively at himself. And meanwhile _how_ cold he is! He
has been up all night, in itself a chilly thing; a hansom is by no means
a warm vehicle, at least to one to whom any nipping air is preferable to
having the glass let chokily down within a half-inch of his nose. The
dawn is being blown in by a small wind--small, but full of
knife-blades--and the griding frost that holds all earth and water in
the rigidity of death's ugly sleep, has pierced into his very bones. In
his life he has seldom taken a colder drive, and yet he dreads its
being over. What shall he say to Harborough? The chance of his seeing
him is indeed remote; but remote chances do sometimes become facts. If
this becomes fact, what is he to say to him? Even through Harborough's
hippopotamus-hide there must be some arrow that will penetrate. If
anything can open the stupid eyes, so miraculously sealed through five
years, surely this insane apparition of his will do it.
They have reached the park gates. The lodge-keeper at least is up and
dressed, and runs out with alacrity. She need not have been in such a
hurry. He would have been much more obliged to her if she had crawled,
and bungled, and delayed him a little. Now he is rolling through the
park, by the dead white grass and the pinched brown bracken; under the
black arms of the famous chestnuts, beneath which he and Betty have so
often strayed; through half a dozen more gates; through a last gate, on
leaving which behind them, turf more carefully trimmed, flower-beds now
hard and empty, clumps of laurustinus and rhododendron tell of his
neighbourhood to the house, which a turn in the approach now gives to
his view. His eye flies anxiously, though with little hope, to the
front. Does it look at all awake? Are there any blinds up? It would be
ludicrous to hope that Betty's could be; Betty who is never seen a
moment before eleven o'clock, and very often not for many moments after.
He looks mechanically, though quite hopelessly, up at her windows--the
three immediately above the portico--and so looking, starts, and gives
utterance to an involuntary ejaculation. In the case of all three,
shutters are open and blinds up. What can have happened? What can so
flagrant a departure from the habits of a lifetime imply? He has reached
the door by now, and, jumping out, rings the bell. He will probably have
long to wait before it is answered, the servants, expecting no such
summons, being probably dispersed to other quarters of the house. But,
as in the case of the lodge-keeper, he is mistaken.
With scarce any delay the great folding-doors roll back; nor is there in
the faces of the couple of footmen who appear any of that blank
astonishment which he had been schooling himself to meet. There is no
surprise that he can detect upon their civil features, any more than
there would have been had he and his portmanteau walked in at five
o'clock in the afternoon.
'Of--of course no one is up yet?' he says, with an air that he, as he
feels, in vain tries to make easy and disengaged.
'Oh yes, sir; her ladyship is up! Her ladyship has been up all night.'
_Up all night!_ Then some one must be ill! Is it Harborough? Harborough
ill? Will he die? In one thought-flash these questions, with all that
for him and his future life an answer in the affirmative would imply,
dart through his mind--dart with such a sickening dread that he can
scarcely frame his next and most obvious question.
'Is any one ill, then?'
For the first time the servant looks a little surprised. If it is not on
account of the illness in the house why has Mr. Talbot presented himself
at this extraordinary hour?
'Yes, sir; Master Harborough has been very ill for two days. Sir Andrew
Clark and Dr. Ridge Jones came down yesterday to see him, and he was
hardly expected to live through the night.'
Master Harborough! Not expected to live through the night! At this news,
so entirely unlooked for--since, amongst all the possibilities whose
faces he has been scanning, that of something having happened to the
children has never once presented itself--Talbot stands stock-still,
rooted to the spot, in sad amazement. Poor little Master Harborough! In
a moment he is seeing him again as he had last seen him--seen the little
sturdy figure that, in its rosy vigour, seemed to be shaking its small
fist in defiance at age, or decay, or death. Yes; he sees him
again--sees, too, his mother, laughing at his naughtiness, bragging of
his strength, smothering him with her kisses. Poor, poor Betty! A great
rush of compassionate tenderness floods his heart towards the woman
against whom he had just been harshly shutting that heart's doors;
discrediting her truth; grudging the service she has asked of him;
crediting her even in his thoughts with the indecency of summoning him
to her husband's death-bed. Oh, poor Betty! On his heart's knees he begs
her pardon.
His agitation is so great and so overcoming that, for the moment, he can
ask no more questions, but only follows the butler, who by this time has
appeared on the scene, in silent compliance with his request to him to
come upstairs--a request accompanied by the remark that he will let her
ladyship know that he is here. Having led him to Betty's boudoir, the
servant leaves him to look round, with what heart he may, on all the
objects of that most familiar scene. How familiar they are--all her toys
and gewgaws! Many he himself has given her; some they had chosen
together; over others they had quarrelled; over others, again, they had
made up--but how well he knows them, one and all! He looks round on them
with a triple sorrow--the sorrow of his past love and present pity for
her joining hands, in melancholy triad, with his deep and abiding
self-contempt. He looks round on the countless fans--fans
everywhere--open, half-open; on the great Japanese umbrella, stuck up,
in compliance with one of the most senseless fashions ever introduced,
in the middle of the room, with Liberty silk handkerchiefs meaninglessly
draped about its stem; on the jumping frogs and mechanical mice; on the
banjo she has often thrummed to him; on the mandoline she has tried to
wheedle him into learning to play, that he may sing her Creole
love-songs to it.
He turns away from them all with a sick impatient sigh. How hideously
out of tune they and all the fooleries they recall seem with this
soul-and-body-biting December dawning--with 'Master Harborough not
expected to live through the night!'
He has never seen Betty in the grasp of a great grief. He is as much at
a loss to picture how she will bear it as he would be to fancy a
butterfly drawing a load of coals. How will she take it? How will she
look? What shall he say? How shall he comfort her? That she has had any
other motive in sending for him than the child's impulse to show the cut
finger or the barked shin to a friend never occurs to him. His poor
Betty! No selfish regret enters his mind at having been summoned through
the midwinter night helplessly to see a little child die. He can think
of nothing but how best to console her. He is very far from being ready
with any consolations that even to himself appear at all consoling, when
the door opens, and she enters.
At the sound of the turning handle he has gone to meet her, with both
hands out as if to draw her and her misery to that breast whose doors
are thrown wider to her than they have been for many months; but no
answering hands come to meet them. Some gesture of hers tells him that
she does not wish him to approach her.
'How late you are!' she says.
If he were not looking at her, and did not see with his own eyes that
the words proceeded out of her mouth, he would never have recognised her
voice. By that voice, and by her whole appearance, he is so shocked,
that for a moment he cannot answer. Even upon the face of a girl in the
first flush of youth, and whose only ornamentings come from the Hand of
God, two long nights' vigils, extravagant weeping, the careless
dishevelment of heart-rending anguish, write themselves in terrible
characters. What, then, must they do to a woman like Betty, whose whole
beauty is a carefully built-up fabric, on which no sun must look, and no
zephyr blow too inquisitively?
For the first time in his life Talbot fully realises what a built-up
fabric it is. Through his mind flashes the doubt, whether, if without
expecting to meet her, he had come across her in the street, he should
have recognised her. She looks fifty years old. Her hair is in damp
disorder; at the top all rough and disturbed, where it has evidently
been desperately buried in a little counterpane. She is not now crying;
but her unnumbered past tears have partially washed the rouge off her
cheeks. A dreadful impression of the ludicrous, inextricably entangled
with his unspeakable compassion--an impression for which he tells
himself that he ought to be flayed alive--conveys itself to Talbot from
her whole appearance. But though he ought to be flayed alive for
receiving it, still it is there. And meanwhile she has spoken to him a
second time. He must say something to her; not stand staring with stupid
cruelty at her in her ruin and abasement.
'I expected you all yesterday,' she says in that same strange, dreadful
voice.
He gives a sort of gasp. Can that indeed be the voice whose pretty
treble has so often run with rippling laughter into his ears? the voice
that sang him comic songs to that very banjo--now lying in its irony
beside him--almost the last time that he heard its tones? His head is in
a grisly whirl between that Betty and this. Which is the true one? Is
this only a hideous nightmare? It seems at least to have the suffocating
force of one; a force through which it is only by the strongest
self-compulsion that he can break to answer her.
'I came as soon as I got your telegram.'
Her eyes, washed away to scarcely more than half their size, are
resting upon him; and yet it seems by her next speech as if she had
either not heard or not heeded his answer.
'You might have come quicker,' she says.
'But indeed I could not,' cries he, genuine distress lending him at last
fluent speech. 'I was at the House till two in the morning; I never
received it until I got home to Bury Street; I came by the very next
train. Oh, Betty, how could you doubt that I should?'
As he speaks an arrow of self-reproach shoots through his heart at the
thought of how near a chance the poor soul's cry for help had run of
being altogether disregarded.
'I wanted to speak to you,' she says, a spark of fever brightening the
chill wretchedness of her look. 'I have something to say to you; that
was why I sent for you.'
'Of course, of course!' he answers soothingly. 'I was delighted to
come.'
'I can't stay more than a minute,' she says restlessly. 'I must go back
to him; I have never left him for eight and forty hours. He is asleep
now--only under opiates--but an opiate sleep is better than none, is it
not?' consulting his face with a piteous appeal.
'Much--much better,' replies Talbot earnestly.
'You have heard--they have told you--how ill he is?'
A sort of hard break makes itself heard in her voice; but she masters it
impatiently.
'Yes, they have told me.'
'What have they told you?' asks she sharply. 'I daresay that they have
told you a great deal more than the truth. If they have told you that
there is no hope, they have told you wrong. They had no right to say so;
there is hope!'
'They never told me that there was not,' replies he, still more
soothingly than before; for it seems to him that no finger can be laid
too gently on that terrible mother-ache.
'It all came so suddenly,' says she, putting her hand up with a
bewildered air to her damp forehead and disordered hair. 'And yet now it
seems _centuries_ since he was running about. _How_ he ran and jumped,
did not he? There never was such an active child. And now it seems
_centuries_ that he has been lying in his little bed.'
For a moment she breaks down entirely, but fights her way on again.
'It was only a cold at first--quite a slight cold! He was not the least
ill with it, and I thought nothing of it; and then on Tuesday there came
an acrobatic company to Darnton'--the little neighbouring
market-town--'and he was so excited about them, and begged so hard to be
allowed to go and see them, that I took him; and he was so delighted
with them--he clapped and applauded more than anybody in the house; and
all the evening afterwards he was trying to do the things he had seen
them do--you know how clever he always is in imitating people--and
telling nurse about them. Nurse and I agreed that we had never seen him
in such spirits. But he did not sleep well; he was always dreaming about
them, and jumping up; and next morning he was in a high fever, and I
sent for the doctor, and he has been getting worse ever since; and
_now_----'
Again she breaks down, but again recovering herself, goes on rapidly:
'But it is not the same as if it were a grown-up person, is it? Children
have such wonderful recovering power, have not they?--down one day and
up the next. They pull through things that would kill you or me, do not
they? He _will_ pull through, won't he? You think that he _will_ pull
through?'
'I am sure that he will,' replies Talbot earnestly.
It is, of course, an answer absolutely senseless, and in the air; but
what other can he give, with those miserable eyes fastened in such
desperate asking upon his?
'Oh, if you knew what it has been,' she says, her arms falling with a
gesture of measureless tired woe to her sides as she speaks, 'to have
been kneeling by him all these two days, hearing him moan, and seeing
him try to get his breath!--he does not understand what it means; he has
never been ill before. He thinks that I can help him. O God! he thinks I
can help him, and that I don't! He turns to me for everything. You know
that he always did when he was well, did not he? He is always asking me
when the pain will go away? Asking me whether he has been naughty, and I
am angry with him? Angry with him! I _angry_ with him! O God! O God!'
Her excitement and her grief have been gaining upon her at each fresh
clause of her speech, and at the end she flings herself down on the
ground and buries her face in the cushion of a low chair, while dry,
hard sobs shake her from head to foot.
What is he to say to her? Nothing. He will not insult such a sorrow by
the futility of his wretched words. He can only stoop over her, and lay
his hand no harshlier than her mother would have done, no harshlier than
she herself would have laid hers upon her little dying boy, on her
heaving shoulder. But she shakes off his light touch, and raising her
distorted face, again tries to address him. But the rending sobs that
still convulse her make her utterance difficult; and her words, when
they come, scarcely intelligible.
'Do not touch me! leave me--leave me--alone! I--I have not yet said
what--what I had to say to you. That--that was not what I had to say to
you! I--I--must say what I--sent for you--to say.'
She pauses, gasping. It seems as if the task she had set herself was
beyond her present strength.
'Do not tell me,' he says most gently; 'if it is anything that hurts
you, do not tell me now; wait and tell me by and by.'
He has withdrawn at her bidding his hand from her shoulder, but has
knelt down in his deep pity beside her, and tried to take in his her
cold and clammy fingers. But she draws them sharply away.
'Did not I tell you to leave me alone!' she cries in a thin voice. 'Let
me--let me say what I have to say to you, and have done with it. I will
say it now! I _must_ say it now! What business have you,' turning with a
pitiful fierceness upon him, 'to try and hinder me?'
'I do not--I do not!' speaking in the tenderest tone. 'Tell it me of
course, whatever it is, if it will give you the least relief.'
'I sent for you to tell you that it is all over--all over between us,'
she says, having now mastered her sobs, and speaking with great rapidity
and distinctness; 'that is what I sent for you to tell you. I wanted you
to come at once, that I might tell you. Why did not you come at once? I
have been a very wicked woman----'
'No, dear, no! indeed you have not!' he interrupts with an accent of
excessive pain and protest.
But she goes on without heeding him:
'Or if I have not, it has been no thanks to me; it has been thanks to
you, who have saved me from myself! But whatever there has been between
us, it is over now. That is what I sent for you to tell you. _Over_! do
you understand? _Gone! done with!_ Do you understand? Why do not you say
something? Do you hear? Do you understand?'
'I hear,' he answers in a mazed voice; 'but I--I do not understand! I do
not understand why, if you want to tell me this, you should tell it me
_now_ of all times.'
'It is _now_ of all times that I want to tell you--that I must tell
you!' cries she wildly. 'Cannot you see that it is on account of _him_?
Oh, cannot you think what it has been kneeling beside him with his
little hot hand in mine! You do not know how fiery hot his hand is! Last
night his pulse was so quick that the doctor could scarcely count the
beats--it was up to 120; and while I was kneeling beside him the thought
came to me that perhaps this had happened to him on--on--account
of--_us_! that it was a judgment on me!'
She pauses for a minute, and he tries to put in some soothing
suggestion, but she goes on without heeding him.
'You may call it superstition if you please, but it came to me--oh, it
seems years ago now!--it must have been the night before last!--and as
the night went on, it kept getting worse and worse, as he got worse and
worse; and in the morning I could not bear it any longer, and I sent for
you! I thought that you would have been here in a couple of hours.'
'So I would! So I would! Heaven knows so I would, if it had been
possible!'
'And all yesterday he went on growing worse--I did not think that he
could have been worse than he was in the night, and live--but he was.
All day and all last night again he was struggling for breath!--think of
having to sit by and see a little child struggling for his breath!'
She stops, convulsed anew by that terrible dry sobbing, that is so much
more full of anguish than any tears.
'Poor little chap! poor Betty!'
'I have been listening all night for you! I could not have believed that
you would have been so long in coming; it is such a little way off! I
knew--I had a feeling that he would never get better until you had
come--until I had told you that it was all over between us; but I have
told you now, have not I? I have done all that I could! One cannot
recall the past; no one can, not even God! He cannot expect that of me;
but I have done what I could--all that is left me to do, have not I?'
There is such a growing wildness in both her eye and voice that he does
not know in what terms to answer her; and can only still kneel beside
her, in silent, pitying distress.
'I see that you think I am out of my wits!' she says, looking
distrustfully at him; 'that I must be out of my wits to talk of sending
you away--you who have been everything to me. Cannot you see that it is
because I love you that I am sending you away? if I did not love you it
would be nothing--no sacrifice!--it would be no use! But perhaps if I
give up everything--everything I have in the world except him'
(stretching out her hands, with a despairing gesture of pushing from
herself every earthly good)--'perhaps then--_then_--God will spare him
to me! perhaps He will not take him from me! It may be no good! He may
take him all the same; but there is just the chance! say that you think
it _is_ a chance!'
But he cannot say so. There are very few words that he would not try to
compel his lips to utter; but he dares not buoy her up with the hope
that she can buy back her child by a frantic compact with the Most High.
Her eyes drop despairingly from his face, not gaining the assent they
have so agonisedly asked for; and she struggles dizzily to her feet.
'That is all--I had--to--tell you!' she says fiercely. 'I have nothing
more to say!--nothing that need--need detain you here any longer. I must
go back to him; he may be asking for me!--asking for me, and I not
there! But you understand--you are sure that you understand? I have
often sent you away before in joke, but I am not joking now' (poor soul!
that, at least, is a needless assertion); 'I am in real earnest this
time! I am not sending you away to-day only to send for you back again
to-morrow; it is real earnest this time; it is for ever!--do you
understand? _For ever_! say it after me, that I may be sure that you are
making no mistake--_for ever_.'
And he, looking down into the agony of her sunk eyes, not permitted even
to touch in farewell her clammy hand, echoes under his breath, '_For
ever!_'