Mary continued to live in the town of Lindow for several weeks. The
night of exposure had brought upon Kingcote a complication of ills; his
life was in the balance. It was something for Mary to have her children
with her, yet as often as not the sight of them was an added misery.
What would become of her and of them if Bernard died? Kingcote was
a frail reed to represent the support in life of any mortal. It was
anything but clear how, if he lived, the responsibilities which had come
upon him would be discharged. But his sister had all the shrinking from
the world’s demands which marked Kingcote himself, heightened by the
sensibilities and incapacity of a gently-nurtured woman. He was her only
stay. Her gratitude to him was very deep, and it had grown of late to a
sisterly love which she had not known in earlier days.
Gabriel came from London once a week, after bringing the children. That
morning he also brought a letter which had arrived for Kingcote. Mary
saw that it was from Mrs. Clarendon; she put it away. At first she was
much troubled with doubt whether it was her duty to send Mrs. Clarendon
news of what had happened; she determined ultimately to wait and see
if other letters came for her brother. But that which she kept had no
successor. The fact strengthened a suspicion she had conceived, and she
sent no news to Knightswell....
The return to London was scarcely a cheerful home-coming. Kingcote,
still feeble, very seldom spoke; after the first natural questions,
when he entered upon convalescence, he was possessed by muteness; no
interests reawoke in him; he watched his fraction of the world without
curiosity, and, beyond a pressure given to Mary’s hand from time to
time, gave no sign that others’ presence had significance for him. His
catastrophe he briefly explained exactly as Gabriel had done. Already
they had reached home, and he had not as much as asked if letters
awaited him.
Mary determined to wait a few days before she gave him the letter which,
was in her possession; she feared for the result it might have upon him.
Yet, on the other hand, it might be that to withhold it was an unwise
thing. The contents of this letter she felt that she knew; what she
could not know was how far her brother was prepared for them. But his
very silence was significant; he expected nothing from Knightswell.
His health established itself day by day; of that there was, happily,
every assurance. Yet he could not interest himself in anything. His
mind was much like that of a child when it is weary. He would sit in his
chair and watch what went on about him; even to read demanded too much
exertion. She read to him for several hours daily, and he listened,
or seemed to. At length Mary persuaded herself that to speak with him
freely might perchance be the best course. She began to do so one day
when she had been reading aloud.
“Bernard, can you remember all that happened on the day when you went to
Winstoke?”
“Remember? Certainly; everything, till I lost my senses in walking along
the roads.”
“Did you go to Knightswell?”
He replied in the affirmative, without constraint.
“And did you see Isabel?”
“I saw Mrs. Clarendon.”
It was a correction, but with no remarkable emphasis.
“Have you not expected to hear from her?”
He looked at her with more interest, but replied without emotion:
“No, I have not.”
Then he asked calmly: “Is there any letter?”
“Yes, there is one. It came the second day after you left London.”
“I will have it, please.”
Mary had the letter by her in readiness, and, having given it him, left
the room.
Kingcote examined the envelope deliberately, and opened it with equal
deliberation. He read this:
“Bernard,
“You have often wronged me so that it seemed to me that you did it
wilfully. Surely there can be no real love without trust, and you have
never trusted me. As you wish to free yourself, it shall be as if all
was at an end between us. But I am not free, for I still love you, and
I shall hold myself yours till you have rejected me a second time. Till
then I will keep silence; I cannot help it if you misinterpret that, as
you have misinterpreted my words.
“Isabel.”
He sat for a while musing, then went up to his own room. He walked up
and down with the letter in his hands; at length, as if unwillingly, he
destroyed it. When he had done so, he unlocked a drawer, and took out a
collection of letters, all from Isabel. One of them he held to the paper
still burning in the fireplace, then threw the others, one by one, upon
the flame. As he watched the last sparks flicker, he was overcome with a
rush of tears. He covered his face with his hands, and stood weeping.
There was a change in him after that day. He walked for several hours
each morning, and the rest of his time gave to new books, which he got
from a library. His own volumes did not attract him; he read simply with
the pleasure in novelty, which is as far as most people ever get to in
the matter of reading. His mind appeared to be quite calm, and in the
evenings he spoke freely with his sister. By degrees the question
of what he should do for a living actively occupied him. He
answered advertisements persistently, and received no replies; that,
circumstances considered, was in the order of things. The world has no
place for a man who is possessed merely of general intelligence and a
fair amount of reading. No one will take him on trust or on trial.
There must be specific capacity, estimable in terms of the ledger.
Lacking this, and lacking the aid of influential friends, a man
may starve--or there is the workhouse. What would you have? We are
civilised, and enjoy the blessings of a social order.
Kingcote believed that Mr. Meres might have helped him, but in that
quarter he could not apply. Gabriel was his only friend; Mr. Vissian,
though correspondence with him continued, could scarcely be counted. But
neither had Gabriel any practical suggestions to offer. He always talked
of literary work, and literary work Kingcote could not undertake; it was
perhaps his one note of actual wisdom, that he recognised his unfitness
for earning money by the pen, and did not waste time in efforts that
way. He was prepared, he said, to do anything that promised an income
whereon he and his sister could live. Were it manual labour, well and
good; were it the basest of clerkships, equally well.
“I have a need of work,” he said to Gabriel, one day about Christmas
time. “It is getting to be a physical need. I must do something which
calls for exertion. Do you know that I am at present exactly in the
state which leads men to any kind of dissipation, which tests their
character. If I had not my home and my sister, I should fall into the
gulf by the edge of which walk such men as I am. And, if I fell, there
would be no ascent to the light.”
“In other words, you are nursing your weakness,” said Gabriel
unsympathetically. He was seldom sympathetic. It may have been as a
tonic that Kingcote relished his society. “I perfectly believe what
you say; you are capable of going to the devil. But remember that other
people cannot devote themselves to hanging on at your coat-tails; you
must put the drag on yourself.”
Gabriel always worked during their sittings together; idleness was
abhorrent to him.
“I,” he went on, throwing himself back in his chair, “should have had as
natural an alacrity in going to the devil as any man. I was made for it.
I am by nature the most indolent fellow alive. I fight it, and I shall
go on fighting.”
It was stimulating, but without practical direction; nor was the artist
to blame for this. Kingcote was not adapted for any one of the plain
categories of money-earning labour. Only the benevolence of fate could
come to his aid.
He was a sad man to regard in these days. Seldom or never came a smile
to his face; the springs of his natural vivacity seemed broken. He
was not consciously melancholy, but then he did not give himself
opportunities of brooding. The character of his countenance was a
complete hopelessness; there was no forward-looking, no gleam of the joy
of living. Anxiety gained upon him as the months succeeded each other,
and when he was actively anxious his face had a look of age, which was
more painful to observe than the passionate misery of youth. He often
said that he felt he had lived his life, and that was indeed the
impression his habitual look conveyed. When he turned back to the past,
he saw hills and valleys; henceforth his path was on a dull plain,
with the latter darkness upon the horizon. Formerly, when he said in
conversation that he had come to know himself, and that he acquiesced
in his inefficiency, it was always with the pleasurable expectation of
being contradicted; there was a youthful insincerity in his confession.
At present he made no such statements, as a general thing, and for the
melancholy reason that they would no longer have been insincere; he
believed in truth that his character was an inefficient one. He had not
an ambition left. He had no passion left, which was worse.
He did at times think of Isabel, and with strange coldness. He had
lost the power of realising her to his mind’s eye; she was more of an
abstraction than a living woman. In certain moods there came to him the
temptation to dwell upon those tenderest memories, to try and hear the
voice which had once haunted him only too persistently, to see her face
as a living thing. He could not; her very features escaped him, when he
closed his eyes to fix them on the darkness. It was all so remote,
that happiness and suffering; it affected him only as would the poet’s
telling of a sweet and sad story. Anger he felt himself still capable
of, had he allowed himself to indulge in it. What he had seen in the
arbour at Knightswell could still be a source of indignation. That last
letter she wrote in ignorance of his having seen her then; and it was a
false letter. He accused her of paltry insincerity. That was why he had
at once burnt all her other letters; and the tears he had shed were not
so much on his own account as of regret for the vanished image of her
nobleness and truth. Noble he had tried to think her, in the face of all
he knew about her past; but it was all illusion, wrought in him by her
beauty. Her love was her vanity. She liked to make slaves of men, and
her coldness would preserve her independence to the end. That letter,
she thought, would bring him back to her feet; so noble it seems to
forgive. It was her better self that dictated the attempt to send him
abroad; having won her rich cousin, who freed her from fear of the
future. She meant for a moment to act honourably, and dismiss the lover
who had nothing to give her. When he took her at her word, the woman’s
instinct overcame her; she could not wholly lose her plaything. Nay,
she was piqued that he broke so easily; she would have had a passionate
scene, reproaches, entreaties--such as he, poor wretch, excelled in.
There should be punishment for his literalness....
It was in this way that he reasoned of Isabel. He entertained no doubt
of his interpretations. This view of her character became fixed; and it
made his heart as cold and heavy as a stone within his breast.
There was more truth in the words he spoke to his sister as they sat
together late on New Year’s Eve. Mary had not mentioned Isabel or
Knightswell since she gave him the last letter, and he himself only
now broke silence. He had closed his book, and was thoughtful for some
minutes, then said:
“Mary, we will never speak of the things that have happened in this past
year. I dare say you feel as if I were your debtor for a story, but the
story is too simple to tell; you must have gathered it for yourself from
what you have seen and heard.”
“I would not ask you to speak of what pains you, Bernard,” she replied.
“I scarcely think it does any longer pain me. There are some things,” he
added, after a pause, “which, however possible in themselves, the world
agrees to make impossible in practice. My story is one of these cases.
We forgot the world, or thought we were strong enough to overcome it.
But”--he laughed--“it is the latter end of the nineteenth century.” Mary
was not satisfied, naturally; but she only sighed, saying: “You have
suffered so much, dear!”
“Yes, but what else are we born for?”
This evening they were to have had Gabriel with them, but the day before
he had been called away to Norwich. A telegram came to him, saying that
his father was dead; the old man had been killed in a couple of days by
bronchitis. For the past half-year there had been communication between
father and son. The bookseller was alone in his old age; a sister who
had kept his house for many years was dead, and he had no near relatives
to take her place. He wished to see his son, and the artist had promised
to go to Norwich early in the new year. The journey had to be taken
sooner.
Within a week Kingcote received a note, asking him to go to his friend’s
studio. Gabriel was at work as usual. There was no need for hypocritical
words on one side or the other; Gabriel pointed in silence to a chair,
and talked for five minutes of an artist whose works were then on
exhibition at Burlington House.
Then: “My father seems to have left no will. But his affairs are in
order, and I shall be a good deal better off than I was. In fact, the
business has been profitable. No doubt his successor will continue to
find it so.”
“Who succeeds him?”
“I don’t know.”
He mixed colours on his pallet.
“The shop, and the house above it, were his freehold property; they
belong, of course, to me. There is a good deal of stock, and there is
an assistant who has been in the shop nine years. The immediate capital
required to carry on the business will be next to nothing.”
Kingcote was silent, and moved uneasily on his chair. The artist worked
for a few minutes, then, turning suddenly round: “Well, what do you
say?”
“You surely don’t mean----?”
“Certainly not, if it disagrees with you. Let us talk of something
else.”
Kingcote’s face was gloomy, but at length he broke into a laugh.
“The idea is amazing!” he exclaimed. “And it really occurred to you that
I should be capable of conducting a business?”
“Yes, it occurred to me,” admitted Gabriel, in his unsmiling way. “There
are many more disagreeable ways of getting a living. I went so far as to
think that the chance savoured of the providential.”
“But, my good friend, supposing for a moment that I were at all fitted
for such things”--the touch of depreciation was involuntary--“how
would it be possible for me to take over your father’s business? What
securities can I give you? What----”
Gabriel checked him with a peculiar look, very nearly a smile.
“You are giving yourself a testimonial. I scarcely credited you with
such business faculty.”
“Any man is aware that he cannot take a flourishing concern as a gift,”
said Kingcote, with a little annoyance.
“Please to remember,” Gabriel remarked, “that I am an artist, and that
you have certain pretensions to culture. I did not imagine that we ever
talked on any other basis.”
He painted on.
“Is that man in the shop to be depended on?” was Kingcote’s next
question. He had thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and was
swaying one foot up and down, looking at the ground.
“Entirely. A first-rate man of business, and on the whole a gentleman; I
have been at much trouble to get to know him.”
Kingcote rose, and walked about the studio. He smiled frequently, though
there was a twitching in his lips to show that his thoughts had their
prickly points.
“If I am to be a man of business,” he said at length, “I must accept the
responsibilities of one from the first. Let me be bound by conditions
you would lay upon a stranger, whom for some reason you were trusting
rather liberally, and--I will go to Norwich.”
The artist smiled, but did not look from his canvas.
“Your sister would have no objection?”
“I can foresee none. Rather the contrary, I should say.”
“In that case, will you go down with me to-morrow?”
“I will.”
“Good.”
Kingcote walked home in a singular mood. He was glad, but without
rejoicing; he was mortified, but without pain. It was done. His life
had fallen from insubstantial cloud-heights to the lower level, to
which fate had foredoomed it. To this end he had been travelling by how
indirect a way! He began with thoughts of glory; he would finish his
career as a shop-keeper. The sting was in the fact that he acknowledged
the justice of Gabriel’s estimate of him. Of himself he could never have
taken this step, however ready for it he might declare himself to be; a
push by a friendly hand, and he yielded with a sense of relief. Behind
the counter at Norwich, he would not be out of his place. He could
not make books, but he might very well sell them; he could foresee a
pleasure in the pursuit. The life would be restful. To dwell once more
in his native town would make a continuity between his boyhood and his
maturity; all between was air-building and moonshine. A few of those
people whom he used to know would still be living; perhaps it would cost
him a twinge or two to put up his name over the shop, and invite the
attention of all who remembered it; but a week of custom--in both senses
of the word--would put an end to sentimental difficulties. And at length
he would rest. His business would probably continue to flourish; in a
few years he might achieve independence. He might marry, children would
sit upon his knee....
Mary listened with wonder, in the end with extreme happiness. He told
her in the quietest way; it was not a future to excite enthusiasm,
even had he been capable of it in any cause. To her, poor woman, it was
admission to Elysian fields. This terrible London would be left behind,
and with it her unceasing fears. Her children would be brought up in
comfort, and enter naturally upon decent walks of life. The thought that
it was the end of all her brother’s hopes could not long dwell with
her; he and she were safe. What more can one ask, when the world is
over-full, and every day the internecine war grows deadlier?