A SIMPLER’S EUTHANASIA
Tired, he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.
—POPE (_Essay on Man_).
Ellinor, after hastily donning a few garments, stole on light foot in
her visitors’ wake and reached the cross-door at the instant when, on
the other side, the key was being turned by Margery. There she waited in
the darkness until voices and footsteps had died away beyond, when,
feeling for the old disused bolt on the inside, she drew it into its
socket. Then she ran back to her own room. She had arduous work to
perform before Margery should have time to return round by all the
basement passages to the keep wing and resume her office of spy. She
had, by some means or other, to convey David back to his tower so that
none should ever know the truth of this night’s events—none but he and
she.
How with her unaided strength she was to achieve this she did not stop
to consider: it must be done. As she re-entered the room it was a joyful
relief to find Barnaby kneeling on the floor beside Sir David.—Barnaby!
In the agitation of the night she had forgotten his presence.
Barnaby—the ideal silent helper.
The dumb lad looked up, nodded, then pillowed his cheek on his hand,
closed his eyes, drew a few deep breaths in pantomime of sleep and
nodded again. She knelt down for a moment beside him and laid her hand
lightly on David’s brow and over his heart. It was in truth a deep, and
it seemed a healing, sleep. Then she rose to her purpose. And in a
shorter space of time than she had dared to hope, Barnaby with her help
had safely laid Sir David on the couch in the observatory. A pillow was
placed under his head, his furred cloak over his feet; and still he
slept like a tired-out soldier.
After a quick look round, Ellinor closed the rolling dome and shut out
the sky, drew the heavy curtains before the door, and, satisfied that
all was as well as she could make it, was hurrying forth again when
Barnaby arrested her.
He had been passive enough under her imperative demand for help, but
now, to her surprise, the old look of distress and pleading had returned
upon his face. Again he plucked her by the sleeve and gesticulated, then
stopped short, pointed to the sleeper, and once more made that gesture
of conveying something to his lips which he had repeated so often after
his attack on Lady Lochore that afternoon.
Ellinor stood still, palsied by the lightning stroke that flashed into
her brain: she had divided the cup between David and her father! Now she
knew who it was Barnaby was seeking help for with such persistence.
The space of time between the moments when she fled from David’s side
and reached the threshold of the laboratory was ever a blank in
Ellinor’s memory. She had no consciousness even of Barnaby’s piteous joy
at being at last understood, of the long passages, the steep, winding
stairs, down and ever down. She never knew that she had crossed Margery
coming up with lighted candle, and staring at them in blank amazement.
She only knew that, when she stood upon the threshold of the room that
had received her with so dear a welcome, there in his chair, under the
light of the lamp, sat Master Simon, his grey head fallen forward on his
breast. He seemed profoundly and peacefully asleep—just as she had left
David. But even before she had laid her hand on his forehead to find it
stone cold, she knew in her heart that her father was dead.
Squatting on the old man’s knee, Belphegor gazed at her inquiringly with
yellow eyes.
Out of warm slumber, tinted like his books with rich and sober hues of
fawn and russet, with here and there a glint of faded gold, Parson
Tutterville was roused in the chill encircling dawn by a cry beneath his
windows—a wild and urgent cry that drew him from his down before he was
well awake:
“Uncle Horatio, for God’s sake!”
And as he thrust his night-capped head out of the casement, he asked
himself if he had not suddenly wandered into a terrible dream, for the
voice went on:
“My father is dead, and David, for aught I know, is dying!”