BAD NEWS
Sa manière de souffrir est le témoignage qu'une âme porte sur elle-même.
There was a horrid throbbing silence while Dora read, and her parents
calculated the seconds which would necessarily elapse before she reached
the bottom line. Such moments as these are scored up as years in the span
of life.
Mrs. Glynde did not know what she was doing. It happened that she
was trying to rub away a flaw in the window-glass with her pocket
hand-kerchief--a flaw which must have been an old friend, as such things
are in quiet lives. At this occupation she found herself when her heart
began to beat again.
“I suppose,” said Dora in a terribly calm voice, “that the _Times_ never
makes a mistake--I mean they never publish anything unless they are quite
sure?”
Then the English gentleman of parts who ever and anon peeped out through
the veneer of the parson asserted himself--the English gentleman whose
sense of fair play and honour told him that it is better to strike at
once a blow that must be struck than to keep the victim waiting.
“Such is their reputation,” answered Dora's father.
Mrs. Glynde turned with that pathetic yearning movement of a punished dog
which waits to be called. But Dora had some of her father's sternness,
her father's good British reserve, and she never called.
Turning, she walked quietly out of the room. And all the light had gone
out of her life. So we write, and so ye read; but do we realise it? It is
not many of us who have suddenly to look at life without so much as a
glimmer in its dark recesses to make it worth the living. It is not many
of us who come to be told by the doctor: “For the rest of your existence
you must give up eyesight,” or, “For the remainder of life you must go
halt.” But these are trifles. Everything is a trifle, if we would only
believe it. Riches and poverty, peace and war, fame and obscurity, town
and country, England and the backwoods--all these are trifles compared
with that other life which makes our own a living completeness.
Silently she went, and left silence behind her. The Rector was abashed.
For once a woman had acted in a manner unexpected by him; for he was
ignorant enough of the world to keep up the old fallacy of treating women
as a class. True, it was Dora, whom he held apart from the rest of her
sex; but still he was left wondering. He felt as if he had been found
walking in a holy place with shoes upon his feet--those gross shoes of
Self with which most of us tramp through the world, not heeding where we
tread or what we crush.
One of the hardest things we have to bear is the helpless standing by
while one dear to us must suffer. When Mrs. Glynde turned round and came
towards her husband she had become an old woman. Her face had suddenly
aged while her frame was yet in its full strength, and such a change is
not pleasant to look on.
“Tom,” she said, in a dry, commanding voice, “you must go up to the Holme
at once and hear what news they have. There may be some chance--it may
please God to spare us yet.”
“Yes,” answered the Rector meekly; “I will go.”
While he was lacing his boots with all speed Mrs. Glynde took up the
newspaper again, and reread the brief account of the disaster. They were
spared comment; that blow came later, when the warriors of Fleet Street
set about explaining why the defeat was sustained and why it should never
have happened. In due course these carpet tacticians proved to their own
satisfaction that Colonel Stevenor was incompetent for the service on
which he had been dispatched. But the reek of printing-ink never was good
for the better feelings.
In due course the Rector set off across the park; very grave, and
distinctly aware of the importance of his mission. He had somewhere in
his composition a strong sense of the dramatic, to which the situation
appealed. He felt that had he been a younger man he would have stored up
many details during the morning's work worthy of reproduction in the
narrative form during years to come.
Before he reached the great house he was aware that the grim pleasure of
imparting bad news was not to be his, for the blinds were all lowered--a
detail likely to receive early attention in a feminine household, for it
is only men who can hear of a death without thinking of mourning and the
blinds.
The butler opened the door and took the Rector's hat and stick with a
silent _savoir-faire_ indicative of experience in well-bred grief. His
chaste demeanour said as plainly as words that this was right and proper,
the Rector being no more than he expected.
“Where's your mistress?” asked Mr. Glynde, who had strong views upon
butlers in general and Tims in particular--said Tims being so sure of his
place that he did not always trouble to know it.
“Library, sir,” replied Tims in an appropriately sepulchral voice.
The Rector went to the library without waiting to be announced. He was a
man well versed in human nature, as most parsons are, and it is possible
that he had caught a glimpse of Mrs. Agar watching his advent from the
dining-room window.
The lady of the house was standing by the writing-table when he entered,
and beneath her ill-concealed excitement there was something subtly
observant, like the glance of an untruthful child, which he never forgot
nor forgave, despite his cloth and the impossibilities popularly expected
therefrom.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “it is you. I have telegraphed for Arthur. I
have--telegraphed for Arthur.”
“Why?”
She gave a nervous, almost a guilty little laugh, and looked at him with
puzzled discomfort.
“Why?” he repeated, looking at her with a cold scrutiny much dreaded of
the parish ne'er-do-wells.
“Oh, well,” she replied, “it is only natural that I should want him at
home in such a time as this--such a terrible affliction. Besides--”
“Besides,” suggested the Rector imperturbably, “he is now master of
Stagholme.”
“Yes!” she said, with a simulated surprise which would scarcely have
deceived the most guileless Sunday-school teacher. “I had not thought of
that. I suppose something must be done at once--those horrid lawyers
again.”
Her eyes were dancing with breathless excitement. To this woman
excitement even in the form of a death was better than nothing. The
bourgeois mind, with its love of a Crystal Palace, a subscription dance,
or even a parochial bazaar, was unquenchable even after years of practice
as the county lady of position.
The Rector did not answer. He stood squarely in front of her with a
persistence that forced her to turn shiftily away with a pretence of
looking at the clock.
“This is a bad business,” he said. “That boy ought never to have gone out
there.”
Mrs. Agar had her handkerchief ready and made use of it, with as much
effect upon Mr. Glynde as might have been produced upon a granite sphinx.
There is no man harder to deceive than the innately good and
conscientious man of the world who has tried to find good in human
nature.
“Poor boy!” sobbed the lady. “Dear Jem! I could not keep him at home.”
Thus proving herself a fool, and worse, before those wise eyes.
When occasion demanded Mr. Glynde could wield a very strong
silence--stronger than he thought. He wielded it now, and Mrs. Agar
shuffled before it, her eyes glittering with suppressed
communicativeness. She was obviously bubbling over with talk relevant and
irrelevant, but the Rector had the chivalry to check it by his cold
silence.
After a pause it was he who spoke, in a quiet, unemotional voice which
aggravated while it cowed her.
“When did you hear this news?” he asked.
“Oh, last night. It was so late that I did not send down. I--it was so
sudden. I was terribly upset.”
“M--yes.”
“I telegraphed to Arthur first thing this morning,” the mistress of
Stagholme went on eagerly, “and I was just going to write to you when you
came in.”
With that nervous desire for corroborative evidence which arouses the
suspicion of the observant whenever it appears, Mrs. Agar indicated the
writing-table with open blotter and inkstand. Instantly, but too late,
she regretted having done so, for a volume playfully called “Every Man
his own Lawyer” lay confessed beside the writing-case, and its home on
the bookshelf stared vacantly at them.
“And from whom did you hear it?” pursued the Rector, heartlessly looking
at the book with an air of recognition.
“Oh, from a Mr. Johnson--at the War Office, or the India Office, or
somewhere. I suppose I ought to write and thank him. Let me see--where is
the telegram?”
She shuffled among the papers on the writing-table, and made the hideous
mistake of pushing “Every Man his own Lawyer” behind the stationery case.
“Here it is!” she exclaimed at length.
It was a long document. Mr. Johnson, not having to pay for telegraphic
expenses out of his own pocket, had done his task thoroughly. He stated
clearly that the advance column under Colonel Stevenor, Major Agar, and
another British officer had been surprised and annihilated. There were no
particulars yet, nor could reliable details be expected, as it was quite
certain that not one man of the ill-fated corps had survived. General
Seymour, added the official, missing out in his haste the commanding
officer's surname, had promptly repaired to the scene of the disaster, to
punish the victors, and, if possible, recover the effects of the slain.
Mrs. Agar was one of those persons who are incapable of reading a letter
or a telegram thoroughly. She was one of those for whose comprehension
the wrong end of the story must have been specially created. Had the
official put Seymour Michael's name in full, it is probable that in her
infantile excitement she would have failed to take it in or to connect it
with the man who had wronged her twenty years before.
She had not thought much about that little affair during late years, her
feeling for Seymour Michael having settled down into a passive hatred.
The longing to do him some personal injury had died away fifteen years
before. She was, as a matter of fact, quite incapable of a lasting
feeling of any description. Hers was a life lived for the present only. A
tea-party next week was of more importance to her than a change in
fortune next year. Some people are thus, and Heaven help those whose
lives come under their fickle influence!
The one permanent motive of her existence was her son Arthur--the puny
little infant who had been prematurely ushered into a world that seemed
full of hatred twenty years before--and even his image faded from mind
and thought before the short Cambridge terms were half expired.
At this moment she was thinking less of the death of Jem than of the
approaching arrival of Arthur. There must have been something wrong with
her mental focus, to which trifles presented themselves as of the first
importance, to the obliteration of larger matters.
“And this is all the news you have had?” inquired the Rector, rather
hurriedly. He saw Sister Cecilia coming up the avenue, and that lady was
for him the embodiment of the combination of those feminine failings
which aggravated him so intensely.
“Yes.”
He moved towards the door, and standing there he turned, holding up a
warning finger.
“You must be very careful,” he said. “You must not consult any lawyer or
take any steps in this matter. So far as you are concerned the state of
affairs is unchanged. I, as the Squire's executor, am the only person
called upon to act in any way if that poor boy has died without making a
will. You must remember that your son is under age.”
With that he left her, rather precipitately, for Sister Cecilia, like all
busybodies, was a quick walker.
In a few moments Miss Cecilia Harbottle entered the library. She glided
forward as if afloat on a depth of the milk of human kindness, and folded
Mrs. Agar in an emotional embrace.
“Dear!” she exclaimed. “Dear Anna, how I feel for you!”
In illustration of this sympathy she patted Mrs. Agar's somewhat flabby
hands, and looked softly at her. She could hardly have failed to see a
glitter in the bereaved one's eyes, which was certainly not that of
grief. It was the gleam of pure, heartless excitement and love of change.
But Sister Cecilia probably misread it; for, like all excesses, that of
charity seems to dull the comprehension.
“Tell me, dear,” she urged gently, “all about it.”
How many of us imagine the satisfaction of our own curiosity to be
sympathy!
So Mrs. Agar told her all about it, and presently they sat down, with a
view to fuller discussion. There was, however, a point beyond which even
Mrs. Agar would not go. This point Sister Cecilia scented with the
instinct of the terrier, so keen was her nose in the sniffing of other
people's business. When that point was reached a third time she gently
led the way over it.
“Of course,” she said, with a resigned glance at the curtain poles, “one
cannot help sometimes feeling that a wise Providence does all for the
best.”
Gratifying as this must have been to the power in question, no miraculous
manifestation of joy was forthcoming, and Mrs. Agar cunningly confined
herself to a non-committing “Yes.”
After a sigh, Sister Cecilia further expatiated.
“I cannot but think,” she said, “that Stagholme will be in better hands
now. Of course dear Jem was very nice, and all that--a dear, good boy.
But do you not think that Arthur is more suited to the position in some
ways?”
“Perhaps he is,” allowed Mrs. Agar, with ill-concealed pleasure.
“He is,” continued Sister Cecilia, with a broader brush, “so refined, so
gentlemanly, so ideal a country squire.”
And after that she had no difficulty in supplying herself with
information.