HE SPEAKS AT LAST
Was it really the last day of Visitation? Punishment or Consequence,
would there be no more?
Punishment or Consequence, it matters little which. One thing more
happened on this eventful day. It came in a telegram from the ancestral
housekeeper.
“Please come down as soon as you can. There is a change.”
A change! When a man is ninety-five what change do his friends expect?
Leonard carried the telegram to Constance.
“I think,” he said, “it must be the end.”
“It is assuredly the end. You will go at once--to-day. Let me go with
you, Leonard.”
“You? But it would only distress you.”
“It will not distress me if I can take him, before he dies, a simple
message.”
“You sent me a message. How did you know that it was a message?”
“I knew it was a message, because I saw it with my mind’s eye written
clear and bright, and because I heard it plain and unmistakable. It came
to me in the night. I thought it was a dream. Now I think it was a
message.”
“You said that all the misfortunes were over. Like your message, it was
a dream. Yet now we get this telegram.”
“Why--do you call this a misfortune? What better can we desire for that
poor old man but the end?”
They started at once; they caught a train which landed them at the
nearest station a little before seven. It was an evening in early
spring. The sun was sinking, the cloudless sky was full of peace and
light, the air was as soft as it was fragrant; there was no rustle of
branches, even the birds were hushed.
“It is the end,” said Constance softly, “and it is peace.”
They had not spoken since they started together for the station. When
one knows the mind of his companion, what need for words?
Presently they turned from the road into the park. It was opposite the
stile over which, seventy years ago, one man had passed on his way to
death, and another, less fortunate, on his way to destruction.
“Let us sit down in this place,” said Leonard. “Before we go on I have
something to say--I should like to say it before we are face to face
with that most unhappy of men.”
Constance obeyed and sat down upon the stile.
“When we came here before,” he began, with a serious voice and grave
eyes, “I was fresh from the shame and the discovery of the family
misfortunes. And we talked of the sins of the fathers, and the eating of
sour grapes, and the consolation of the Prophet----”
“I remember every word.”
“Very well. I think you will understand me, Constance, when I say that I
am rejoiced that I made the discovery of this fatal family history with
all that it entailed--the train of evils and shames--yes, even though it
has led to these weeks of a kind of obsession or possession, during
which I have been unable to think of anything else.”
“What do you think now? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the
children, or was the Prophet right?”
“I see, with you, that it is impossible to avoid the consequences of the
father’s life and actions. The words ‘Third or Fourth Generation’ must
not be taken literally. They mean that from father to son there is a
continual chain of events linked together and inseparable, and always
moulding and causing the events which follow, and this though we know
not the past and cannot see the connecting links that form the chain. In
a higher stage humanity will refrain from some things and will be
attracted by other things entirely through the consideration of their
effect upon those who follow after. It will be a punishment self-imposed
by those who fall that they must, in pity and in mercy, have no children
to inherit their shame.”
“You put my own thoughts into words. But about the children I am not so
sure; their very shames may be made a ladder such as Augustine made his
sins.”
“There is nothing so true as the inheritance of consequences, except
that one does not inherit the guilt. Even with the guilt there is
sometimes the tendency to certain lines of action. ‘Nothing so
hereditary as the drink craving,’ says the physician. So I suppose there
may be a hereditary tendency in other directions. Some men--I have known
some--cannot sit down to steady work; they must lie about in the sun;
they must loaf; they have a _vitium_, an incurable disease, as incurable
as a humpback, of indolence, mind and body. Some seem unable to remain
honest--we all know examples of such men; some cannot possibly tell the
truth. What I mean”--Leonard went on, clearing his own mind by putting
his wandering thoughts into argumentative array--“is that the liability
to temptation--the tendency--is inherited, but the necessity which
forces a man to act is not inherited; that is due to himself. What says
the Prophet again? ‘As I live, saith the Lord God’--saith the Lord God.
It is magnificent; it is terrible in its depth of earnestness. He
declares an inspiration; through him the Lord strengthens His own
word--veritably strengthens His own word--by an oath, ‘As I live, saith
the Lord God.’ Can you imagine anything stronger, more audacious, but
for the eternal Verity that follows?”
The speaker’s voice trembled; his cheek, touched by the setting sun,
glowed; the light of the western sky filled his eyes. Constance,
woman-like, trembled at the sight of the man who stood revealed to
her--the new man--transformed by the experience of shames and sorrows.
“As the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine; but if
a man doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, saith
the Lord God.”
“‘Saith the Lord God!’” Leonard repeated. “What must have been the faith
of a man who could so attribute his words? How to sound the depths of
his faith and his insight?”
“He verily believed that he heard the voice of the Lord.”
“We live for and by each other,” Leonard returned. “We think that we
stand by ourselves, and we are lifted up by the work of our forefathers;
we talk as if we lived alone, and we are but links in the chain; we are
formed and we form; we are forged and we forge. I have been like unto
one who stands in a crowd and is moved here and there, but believes all
the time that he is alone on a hill-top.” He was silent for awhile.
Presently he went on. “All that has followed the crime,” he said, “has
been in the nature of consequence. The man who committed the act retired
from the world; he deserted the world; he gave up his duties; he
resigned his children to others. One of them went to sea; he was
drowned; others were drowned with him--that was but a consequence. His
daughter, neglected and ill educated, ran away with a vulgar adventurer
whom she took for a gallant gentleman--that was a consequence. His son
found out the dreadful truth and committed suicide; his boys had no
father; two of them fell into evil ways--that was a consequence. My own
father died young, but not so young as to leave me a mere infant--that
was a misfortune, but not a consequence. In other words, Constance, the
sins of that old man have been visited upon the children, but the soul
of the son has been as the soul of the father. That is the sum and
substance of the whole. The consequences are still with us. That poor
lady in the Commercial Road is still in the purgatory of poverty which
she brought upon herself. Her son is, and will continue, what he is. Her
daughter rises above her surroundings. ‘She shall surely live, saith the
Lord God.’ My two uncles will go on to the end in their own way, and so,
I suppose, shall I myself.”
He stopped; the light went out of his eyes. He was once more outwardly
his former self.
“That is all, Leonard?”
“That is all. I want you to understand that at the end--if this is the
end--I desire to feel towards that old man no thought or feeling of
reproach, only of pity for the fatal act of a moment and the long
punishment of seventy years--and you, whose ancestor he smote----”
“Only with forgiveness in the name of that ancestor and of pity akin to
yours and equal to yours. Come, Leonard: perhaps the end has come
already.”
They entered the Park by the broken gate and the ruined Lodge.
“I have been looking for some such call,” said Constance. “This morning
I sent you that message. I knew it was a true message, because there
fell upon me, quite suddenly, a deep calm. All my anxieties vanished. We
have been so torn”--she spoke as if the House was hers as well--“by
troubles and forebodings, with such woes and rumours of woes, that when
they vanished suddenly and unexpectedly I knew that the time was over.”
“You are a witch, Constance.”
“Many women are when they are interested. Oh, Leonard! what a happiness
that there is always an end of everything--of sorrow, nay, of joy! There
must come--at last--the end, even of Punishment or of Consequence.” She
looked up and round. “The evening is so peaceful--look at the glories of
the west--it is so peaceful that one cannot believe in storm and hail
and frost. It seems to mean, for us, relief--and for him--forgiveness.”
Everything was, indeed, still--there was no sound even of their own
footsteps as they walked across the springy turf of the park, and the
house when they came within view of it was bathed in the colours of the
west, every window flaming with the joy of life instead of the despair
of death. Yet within was a dying man.
“Death is coming,” said Constance, “with pardon upon his wings.”
The news that there was a “change”--word meaning much--at the Hall had
reached the village. The pride of the people, because no other village
in England entertained a recluse who lived by himself in a great house
and allowed everything to fall into decay, was to be taken from them. No
more would strangers flock over on Sunday mornings from the nearest town
and the villages round, to look over the wall at the tall stalwart
figure pacing his terrace in all weathers with the regularity of a
pendulum. In the village house of call the men assembled early to hear
and tell and whisper what they had heard.
Then the old story was revived--the story which had almost gone out of
men’s memories--how the poor gentleman, then young, still under thirty,
with a fine high temper of his own--it was odd how the fine high temper
had got itself remembered--lost in a single day his wife and his
brother-in-law, and never held up his head again, nor went out of the
house, nor took notice of man, woman, or child, nor took a gun in his
hand, nor called his dogs, nor rode to hounds, nor went to church.
These reminiscences had been told a thousand times in the dingy little
room of the village public-house. They reeked, like the room, of beer
and tobacco and wet garments. For seventy years they had been told in
the same words. They had been, so far, that most interesting form of
imaginative work--the story without an end. Now the end had arrived, and
there would be no more to tell.
The story was finished. Then the door opened, and the ci-devant scarer
of birds appeared. He limped inside, he closed the door carefully; he
looked around the room. He supported himself bravely with his two
sticks, and he began to speak.
“We’re all friends here? All friends? There’s nobody here as will carry
things to that young man? No.”
“Take half a pint, Thomas.”
“By your leave. Presently. I shall lend a hand to-morrow or next day to
digging a grave. We must all come to it. Why not, therefore?”
He looked important, and evidently had something more to say, if he
could find a way to say it.
“We’re all thinking of the same thing,” he began. “It’s the old Squire
who will soon be lyin’ dead, how he never went out of the place for
seventy long years--as long as I can remember. Why? Because there was a
man murdered and a woman died. Who was the man murdered? The Squire’s
brother-in-law. Who murdered him? John Dunning, they said. John Dunning,
he was tried and he got off and he went away. Who murdered that man?
John Dunning didn’t. Why? Because John Dunning didn’t go to the wood for
two hours afterwards. Who murdered that man, I say?”
At this point he accepted the hospitality of the proffered glass of
beer.
“I know who done it. I always have known. Nobody knows but me. I’ve
known for all these years; and I’ve never told. For why? He would ha’
killed me, too. For certain sure he would ha’ killed me. Who was it,
then? I’ll tell you. It was the man that lies a-dyin’ over there. It was
the Squire himself--that’s who it was. No one else was in the wood all
the morning but the Squire and the other gentleman. I say, the Squire
done it; the Squire and nobody else. The Squire done it. The Squire done
it.”
The men looked at each other in amazement. Then the blacksmith rose, and
he said solemnly:
“Thomas, you’re close on eighty years of age. You’ve gone silly in your
old age. You and your Squire! I remember what my father said, ‘The
Squire, he left Mr. Holme at the wood and turned back.’ That was the
evidence at the Inquest and the Trial. You and your Squire! Go home,
Thomas, and go to bed and get your memory back again.”
Thomas looked round the room again. The faces of all were hard and
unsympathetic. He turned and hobbled out. The days that followed were
few and evil, for he could speak about nothing else, and no one heeded
his garrulous utterances. Assuredly, if there had been a lunatic asylum
in the village he would have been enclosed there. A fatal example of the
mischief of withholding evidence! Now, had this boy made it clear at the
inquest that the two gentlemen were together in the wood for ten minutes
or a quarter of an hour, one knows not what might have followed.
Thomas did not go home. He turned his steps in the direction of the
Hall, and he hobbled along with a purpose in his face. His revelation
had been received with scorn and derision. Perhaps in another place it
would be received with more respect.
* * * * *
The housekeeper met Leonard and Constance at the open door. It had stood
open all day, as if for the admission of the guest whose wings were
hovering very near.
“He’s in the library,” said the woman, with the corner of her apron
brushing away the tears with which women-servants always meet the
approach of Azrael. “I wanted him to go upstairs and to bed, but he
takes no notice. He’s been in the library nearly all day.”
“Did he go out this morning after breakfast?”
“He took his breakfast as usual, and he went out afterwards as usual,
walking as upright as a post, and looking as strong and as hard as ever.
After a bit he stopped and shook all over. Then he turned round and went
indoors. He went into the library, and he sat down before the fire.”
“Did he speak?”
“Never a word. I offered him a glass of wine, but he only shook his
head. At one o’clock I took him his dinner, but he could eat nothing.
Presently he drank a glass of wine. At four o’clock I took him his tea,
but he wouldn’t touch it. Only he drank another glass of wine. That’s
all he’s had since the morning. And now he is sitting doubled up, with
his face working terrible.”
They opened the door of the library softly and went in. He was not
sitting ‘doubled up’: he was lying back in his ragged old leather chair,
extended--his long legs stretched out, his hands on the arms of the
chair, his broad shoulders and his great head lying back--splendid even
in decay, like autumn opulent. His eyes were open, staring straight
upwards to the ceiling. His face was, as the housekeeper put it
‘working.’ It spoke of some internal struggle. What was it that he was
fighting in his weary brain?
“Leonard,” the girl whispered, “it is not despair in his face. It is not
defiance. Look! It is doubt. There is something he cannot understand. He
hears whispers. Oh, I think I hear them, too! I know what they are and
whose they are.” She drew down her veil to hide her tears.
The sun had now gone down. The shadows of the twilight lay about the
corners of the big room, the rows of books looked ghostly; the western
light began to fall, and the colours began to fade. A fire burned in the
grate, as it always burned all the year round; the flames began to throw
flickering lights and shadows about the room; they lit up the face of
the old man, and his figure seemed to stand out clear and apart, as if
there were nothing in the room but himself; nay, as if there were no
room, no furniture, no house, nothing but that one sole figure in the
presence--the unspeakable presence--of the Judge.
His face was changing; the housekeeper spoke the truth. The defiance and
the stubbornness were going out of it. What was come to take their
place? As yet, nothing but doubt and pain and trouble. As for the
whispers, there was no proof that there were any whispers, save from the
assurance of the girl who heard them with the ear of faith. Leonard
stepped forward and bent over him.
“Sir,” he said solemnly, “you know me. I am your great-grandson--the
grandson of your eldest son, who killed himself because he discovered a
secret--your secret. And he could no longer endure it and live. I am his
grandson.”
The words were plain, even brutal. Leonard intended that there should be
no mistake about them. But, plain as they were, they produced no
effect. There was not even a gleam in the old man’s eye to show that he
heard.
“You are ninety-five,” Leonard went on. “It is time to speak. I have
brought with me one who will recall a day--if you have ever forgotten
it--of tragic memories, the day when you lost at once your wife and your
brother-in-law. You have never forgotten that day, have you?”
The old man made no reply. But he closed his eyes, perhaps as a sign
that he refused to listen.
“Sir, I have a message for you. It is from the man whom you saved from
the gallows--the innocent man whom you saved at a trial for murder. He
sent a message from his death-bed--words of gratitude and of prayer. The
good deed that you did has grown, and borne fruit a hundredfold--your
good deed. Let the grateful words of that man be some comfort to you.”
Again the old man made no sign.
* * * * *
At this point an unexpected interruption took place, for the door was
opened, and a man, a villager, came clumping in noisily. Seventy years
agone he was the boy who had done the bird-scaring.
“They told me”--he addressed Leonard, but he looked at the figure in the
chair--“that you were here, and they said that he was going at last. So
I came. I minded what you said. Did never a one suspect? That’s what you
said. I don’t care for him now.” He nodded valiantly at the figure of
his old master. “He won’t hurt no one--no more.”
He clumped across the room, being rheumatic, and planted himself before
the chair, bringing his stick down with a bump on the floor.
“Did never a man suspect?” He looked round and held up his finger.
He suspected. And he knew.
“Old man”--he addressed himself directly to the silent figure--“who done
that job? You done it. Nobody else done it. Nobody else couldn’t ha’
done it. Who done it? You done it. There was nobody else in the wood but
you before John Dunning came along.”
Leonard took him by the arm, and led him unresisting out of the library.
But he went on repeating his story, as if he could not say it often
enough to satisfy his conscience.
“I always meant to tell him some day before I died. Now I have told him.
I’ve told all the people too--all of them. Why should I go on putting of
it away and hiding of it? He ought to ha’ swung long ago, he ought. And
he shall too. He shall yet, though he be ninety years and more. Who done
it? Who done it? Who done it? He done it. He done it. He done it, I
say.”
They heard his voice as Leonard led him to the door; they heard his
voice when Leonard shut the door upon him, repeating his refrain in a
senile sing-song.
“What matter?” said Leonard. “Let him sing his burden all over the
village. The time has gone by when such as he can hurt.”
But the old man still made as if he had heard nothing. He remained
perfectly impassible. Not even the Sphinx could be more obstinately
fixed on betraying no emotion. Presently he stirred--perhaps because he
was moved; he pulled himself up with difficulty; he sat supported by the
arms of the chair, his body bending under the weight of the massive head
and broad shoulders, too heavy at last even for that gigantic frame; his
head was bent slightly forward; his eyes, deep set, were now fixed upon
the red coals of the fire, which burned all the year round to warm him;
his face was drawn by hard lines, which stood out like ropes in the
firelight. His abundant white hair lay upon his shoulders, and his long
white beard fell round him to the waist.
And thus he had been for seventy years, while his early manhood passed
slowly into the prime of life, while the first decay touched his locks
with tiny streaks of grey, while early age fell upon him, while his face
grew furrowed, while his eyes sank and his cheek-bones stood out, while
his teeth fell out and his long face was shortened and his ancient
comeliness vanished. So he had remained while his neglected children
grew up, while Consequences fell unheeded and unknown upon his house,
ignorant of what went on in the outer world, though a new world grew up
around him with new thoughts, new ideals, new standards, and a new
civilisation. The Great Revolution which we call the Nineteenth Century
went on around him, and he knew nothing; he lived, as he was born, in
the eighteenth century, which was prolonged to the days of King George
the Fourth. If he thought at all in his long life, his thoughts were as
the thoughts of the time in which he was born.
Did he think at all? Of what could he think when day followed day, and
one was like another, and there was no change; when spring succeeded
winter unheeded; and cold and heat were alike to one who felt neither;
and there was no book or newspaper or voice of friend to bring food for
the mind or to break the monotony of the days?
The anchorite of the Church could pray; his only occupations were prayer
and his mighty wrestling with the Devil. Since this anchorite of the
Country House could not pray, there was left with him, day and night,
the latter resource. Surely, after seventy long years, this occupation
must have proved wearisome.
Leonard went on: “Speak.”
The old man made no sign.
“Speak, then. Speak, and tell us what we already know.”
There was still no reply.
“You have suffered so long. You have made atonement so terrible: it is
time to speak--to speak and end it.”
His face visibly hardened.
“Oh! it is no use,” Leonard cried in despair. “It is like walking into a
brick wall. Sir, you hear me--you understand what is said! You cannot
tell us one single thing that we do not know already.”
He made a gesture of despair, and stepped back.
Then Constance herself stepped forward. She threw herself at his feet;
like a Greek suppliant she clasped his knees, and she spoke slowly and
softly:
“You must hear me. I have a right to be heard. Look at me. I am the
great-grand-daughter of Langley Holme.”
She raised her veil.
The old man screamed aloud. He caught the arms of the chair and sat
upright. He stared at her face. He trembled and shook all over, insomuch
that at the shaking of his large frame the floor also trembled and
shook, and the plates on the table and the fender rattled.
“Langley!” he cried, seeing nothing but her face--“Langley! You have
come back. At last--at last!”
He could not understand that this was a living woman, not a dead man. He
saw only her face, and it was the face of Langley himself.
“Yes,” she said, boldly. “Langley come back. He says that you have
suffered long enough. He says that he has forgiven you long ago. His
sister has forgiven you. All is forgiven, Langley says. Speak--speak--in
the very presence of God, Who knows. It was your hand that murdered
Langley. Speak! You struck him with the club in the forehead so that he
fell dead. When he was brought home dead, your punishment began with the
death of your wife, and has gone on ever since. Speak!”
The old man shook his head mechanically. He tried to speak. It was as if
his lips refused to utter the words. He sank back in the chair, still
gazing upon the face and trembling. At last he spoke.
“Langley knows--Langley knows,” he said.
“Speak!” Constance commanded.
“Langley knows----”
“Speak!”
“I did it!” said the old man.
Constance knelt down before him and prayed aloud.
“I did it!” he repeated.
Constance took his hand and kissed it.
“I am Langley’s child,” she said. “In his name you are forgiven. Oh, the
long punishment is over! Oh, we have all forgiven you! Oh, you have
suffered so long--so long! At last--at last--forgive yourself!”
Then a strange thing happened. It happens often with the very old that
in the hour of death there falls upon the face a return of youth. The
old man’s face became young; the years fell from him; but for his white
hair you would have thought him young again. The hard lines vanished
with the crow’s-feet and the creases and the furrows; the soft colour of
youth reappeared upon his cheek. Oh, the goodly man--the splendid face
and figure of a man! He stood up, without apparent difficulty; he held
Constance by the hand, but he stood up without support, towering in his
six feet six, erect and strong.
“Forgiven?” he asked. “What is there to be forgiven? Forgive myself?
Why? What have I done that needs forgiveness? Let us walk into the wood,
Langley--let us walk into the wood. My dear, I do not understand.
Langley’s child is but a baby in arms.”
His hand dropped. He would have fallen to the ground but that Leonard
caught him and laid him gently on the chair.
“It is the end,” said Constance. “He has confessed.”
It was the end. The Recluse was dead.