The house in Bloomsbury was profoundly agitated by all these
discoveries. Curiously enough, and against all the previsions of his
friends, Mr. Mannering had not been thrown back by the excitement. The
sharp sting of these events which had brought back before him once more
the tragic climax of his life--the time when he had come back as out of
the grave and found his home desolate--when his wife had fled before his
face, not daring to meet his eye, although she had not knowingly sinned
against him, and when all the triumph of his return to life, and of his
discoveries and the fruit of his dreadful labours, had become bitterness
to him and misery--came back upon him, every incident standing out as if
it had been yesterday. He had fallen into the dead calm of failure, he
had dropped his tools from his hands, and all his ambition from his
heart. He had retired--he who had reappeared in existence after all his
sufferings, with the consciousness that now the ball was at his foot,
and fame if not fortune secured--into the second desert, more
impenetrable than any African forest, of these rooms in Bloomsbury, and
vegetated there all these years, forgetting more or less all that had
happened to him, and all that might have happened to him, and desiring
only to linger out the last of his life unknowing and unknown. And now
into his calm there had come back, clear as yesterday, all that terrible
climax, every detail of his own tragedy.
It ought to have killed him: that would have seemed the most likely
event in his weakness, after his long illness; and perhaps,--who could
say?--the best thing that could have happened, in face of the new
circumstances, which he could not accept and had no right to refuse. But
no, it did not kill him. It acted upon him as great trouble acts on some
minds, like a strong stimulant. It stung him back into life, it seemed
to transfuse something, some new revivifying principle, into his veins.
He had wanted, perhaps, something to disperse the mists of illness and
physical dejection. He found it not in soothing influences or pleasure,
but in pain. From the day when he stumbled downstairs to Miss Bethune’s
room on the dreadful report that she was dying, he began at once to
resume his usual habits, and with almost more than his usual strength.
Was it possible that Death, that healer of all wounds, that peacemaker
in all tumults, had restored a rest that was wanting to the man’s secret
heart, never disclosed to any ear? She was dead, the woman who
unwittingly, without meaning it, had made of his life the silent tragedy
it had been. That she was guiltless, and that the catastrophe was all a
terrible mistake, had made it worse instead of better. He had thought
often that had she erred in passion, had she been carried away from him
by some strong gale of personal feeling, it would have been more
bearable: but the cruel fatality, the network of accident which had
made his life desolate, and hers he knew not what--this was what was
intolerable, a thing not to bear thinking of.
But now she was dead, all the misery over, nothing left but the silence.
She had been nothing to him for years, torn out of his heart, flung out
of his life, perhaps with too little pity, perhaps with little
perception of the great sacrifice she had made in giving up to him
without even a protest her only child: but her very existence had been a
canker in his life; the thought that still the same circle of earth
enclosed them--him and the woman who had once been everything to him,
and then nothing, yet always something, something, a consciousness, a
fever, a jarring note that set all life out of tune. And now she was
dead. The strong pain of all this revival stung him back to strength. He
went out in defiance of the doctor, back to his usual work, resuming the
daily round. He had much to meet, to settle, to set right again, in his
renewed existence. And she was dead. The other side of life was closed
and sealed, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre. Nothing
could happen to bring that back, to renew any consciousness of it more.
Strange and sad and disturbing as this event was, it seemed to settle
and clear the turbid current of a spoiled life.
And perhaps the other excitement and climax of the life of his neighbour
which had been going on under the same roof, helped Mr. Mannering in the
renewal of his own history. When he heard Miss Bethune’s story, the
silent rebellion against his own, which had been ever in his mind, was
silenced. It is hard, in the comparison of troubles, which people who
have been more or less crushed in life are so fond of making, when
brought into sufficiently intimate relation with each other, to have to
acknowledge that perhaps a brother pilgrim, a sister, has had more to
bear than oneself. Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the
bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others. But
yet, when Mr. Mannering heard, as she could tell him, the story of the
woman who had lived so near him for years with that unsuspected secret,
he did not deny that her lot had been more terrible than his own. Miss
Bethune was eager to communicate her own tale in those days of
excitement and transition. She went to him of her own accord after the
first day of his return to his work, while the doctor hovered about the
stairs, up and down, and could not rest, in terror for the result. Dr.
Roland could not believe that his patient would not break down. He could
not go out, nor even sit quietly in his own room, less he should be
wanted, and not ready at the first call. He could not refrain from a
gibe at the lady he met on the stairs. “Yes, by all means,” he said, “go
and tell him all about your own business. Go and send him out to look
after that wretched Hesketh, whom you are going to keep up, I hear, all
the same.”
“Not him, doctor. The poor unhappy young creature, his wife.”
“Oh, yes; that is how these miserable villains get hold upon people of
weak minds. His wife! I’d have sent him to gaol. His wife would have
been far better without a low blackguard like that. But don’t let me
keep you. Go and give the _coup de grace_ to Mannering. I shall be
ready, whatever happens, downstairs.”
But Miss Bethune did not give Mannering the _coup de grace_. On the
contrary, she helped forward the cure which the climax of his own
personal tragedy had begun. It gave both these people a kind of forlorn
pleasure to think that there was a kind of resemblance in their fate,
and that they had lived so long beside each other without knowing it,
without suspecting how unlike other people their respective lives had
been. The thought of the unhappy young woman, whose husband of a year
and whose child of a day had been torn from her, who had learnt so sadly
to know the unworthiness of the one, and whose heart and imagination had
for five and twenty years dwelt upon the other, without any possible
outlet, and with a hope which she had herself known to be fantastic and
without hope, filled Mannering with a certain awe. He had suffered for
little more than half that time, and he had not been deprived of his
Dora. He began to think pitifully, even mercifully, of the woman who had
left him that one alleviation in his life.
“I bow my head before her,” Miss Bethune said. “She must have been a
just woman. The bairn was yours, and she had no right to take her from
you. She fled before your appearance, she could not look you in the
face, but she left the little child that she adored to be your comfort.
Mr. Mannering, you will come with me to that poor woman’s grave, and you
will forgive her. She gave you up what was most dear to her in life.”
He shook his head. “She had others that were more dear to her.”
“I could find it in my heart, if I were you, to hope that it was so; but
I do not believe it. How could she look you in the face again, having
sinned against you? But she left you what she loved most. ‘Dora, Dora,’
was all her cry: but she put Dora out of her arms for you. Think kindly
of her, man! A woman loves nothing on this earth,” cried Miss Bethune
with passion, “like the little child that has come from her, and is of
her, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: and she gave that over to
you. She must have been a woman more just than most other women,” Miss
Bethune said.
Mr. Mannering made no reply. Perhaps he did not understand or believe in
that definition of what a woman loves best; but he thought of the
passion of the other woman before him, and of the long hunger of her
heart, with nothing to solace her, nothing to divert her thoughts from
that hopeless loss and vacancy, nothing to compensate her for the ruin
of her life. She had been a spirit in prison, shut up as in an iron
cage, and she had borne it and not uttered even a cry. All three, or
rather all four, of these lives, equally shipwrecked, came before him.
His own stricken low in what would have been the triumph of another
man; his wife’s, turned in a moment from such second possibilities of
happiness as he could not yet bear to think of, and from the bliss of
her child, into shame and guilt such as did not permit her to look her
husband in the face, but drove her into exile and renunciation. And then
this other pair. The woman with her secret romance, and long, long
penitence and punishment. The man (whom she condemned yet more bitterly,
perhaps with better cause than he had condemned his wife), a fugitive
too, disappearing from country and home with the infant who died, or who
did not die. What a round of dreadful mistake, misapprehension,
rashness, failure! And who was he that he should count himself more
badly treated than other men?
Miss Bethune thus gave him no _coup de grace_. She helped him after the
prick of revival, to another more steadfast philosophy, in the
comparison of his fate with that of others. He saw with very clear eyes
her delusion--that Harry Gordon was no son of hers, and that she would
be compelled to acknowledge this and go back to the dreariness and
emptiness of her life, accepting the dead baby as all that ever was
hers: and he was sorry for her to the bottom of his heart; while she,
full of her illusions, went back to her own apartment full of pity for
him, to whom Dora did not make up for everything as Harry, she felt
triumphantly, did to herself.
Dr. Roland watched them both, more concerned for Mannering, who had been
ill, than for Miss Bethune, who had all that curious elasticity which
makes a woman generally so much more the servant of her emotions than a
man, often, in fact, so much less affected by them. But there still
remained in the case of the patient another fiery trial to go through,
which still kept the doctor on the alert and anxiously watching the
course of events. Mannering had said nothing of Dora’s fortune, of the
money which he had refused vehemently for her, but which he had no right
to refuse, and upon which, as Dr. Roland was aware, she had already
drawn. One ordeal had passed, and had done no harm, but this other was
still to come.
It came a day or two after, when Dr. Roland sat by Mannering’s side
after his return from the Museum, holding his pulse, and investigating
in every way the effect upon him of the day’s confinement. It was
evening, and the day had been hot and fatiguing. Mr. Mannering was a
little tired of this medical inspection, which occurred every evening.
He drew his wrist out of the doctor’s hold, and turned the conversation
abruptly to a new subject.
“There are a number of papers which I cannot find,” he said, almost
sharply, to Dora, with a meaning which immediately seemed to make the
air tingle. He had recovered his usual looks in a remarkable degree, and
had even a little colour in his cheek. His head was not drooping, nor
his eye dim. The stoop of a man occupied all day among books seemed to
have disappeared. He leaned back in his chair a little, perhaps, but
not forward, as is the habit of weakness, and was not afraid to look
the doctor in the face. Dora stood near him, alarmed, in the attitude of
one about to flee. She was eager to leave him with the doctor, of whom
he could ask no such difficult questions.
“Papers, father? What papers?” she said, with an air of innocence which
perhaps was a little overdone.
“My business affairs are not so extensive,” he said, with a faint smile;
“and both you, doctor, who really are the author of the extravagance,
and Dora, who is too young to meddle with such matters, know all about
them. My bills!--Heaven knows they are enough to scare a poor man: but
they must be found. They were all there a few days ago, now I can’t find
them. Bring them, Dora. I must make a composition with my creditors,” he
said, again, with that forced and uncomfortable smile. Then he added,
with some impatience: “My dear, do what I tell you, and do it at once.”
It was an emergency which Dora had been looking forward to, but that did
not make it less terrible when it came. She stood very upright, holding
by the table.
“The bills? I don’t know where to find them,” she said, growing suddenly
very red, and then very pale.
“Dora!” cried her father, in a warning tone. Then he added, with an
attempt at banter: “Never mind the doctor. The doctor is in it; he ought
to pay half. We will take his advice. How small a dividend will content
our creditors for the present? Make haste, and do not lose any more
time.”
Dora stood her ground without wavering. “I cannot find them, father,”
she said.
“You cannot find them? Nonsense! This is for my good, I suppose, lest I
should not be able to bear it. My dear, your father declines to be
managed for his good.”
“I have not got them,” said Dora firmly, but very pale. “I don’t know
where to find them; I don’t want to find them, if I must say it,
father,--not to manage you, but on my own account.”
He raised himself upright too, and looked at her. Their eyes shone with
the same glow; the two faces bore a strange resemblance,--his, the lines
refined and softened by his illness; hers, every curve straightened and
strengthened by force of passionate feeling.
“Father,” said Dora almost fiercely, “I am not a child!”
“You are not a child?” A faint smile came over his face. “You are
curiously like one,” he said; “but what has that got to do with it?”
“Mannering, she is quite right. You ought to let her have her own way.”
A cloud crossed Mr. Mannering’s face. He was a mild man, but he did not
easily brook interference. He made a slight gesture, as if throwing the
intruder off.
“Father,” said Dora again, “I have been the mistress of everything while
you have been ill. You may say the doctor has done it, or Miss Bethune
has done it,--they were very kind friends, and told me what to do,--but
it was only your own child that had the right to do things for you, and
the real person was me. I was a little girl when you began to be ill,
but I am not so now. I’ve had to act for myself, father,” the girl
cried, the colour flaming back into her pale cheeks, “I’ve had to be
responsible for a great many things; you can’t take that from me, for it
had to be. And you have not got a bill in the world.”
He sat staring at her, half angry, half admiring, amazed by the change,
the development; and yet to find her in her impulsive, childish
vehemence exactly the same.
“They’re all gone,” cried Dora, with that dreadful womanish inclination
to cry; which spoils so many a fine climax. “I had a right to them--they
were mine all through, and not yours. Father, even Fiddler! I’ve given
you a present of that big book, which I almost broke my arm (if it had
not been for Harry Gordon) carrying back. And now I know it’s quarter
day, and you’re quite well off. Father, now I’m your little girl again,
to do what you like and go where you like, and never, never hear a word
of this more,” cried Dora, flinging herself upon his shoulder, with her
arms round his neck, in a paroxysm of tenderness and tears.
What was the man to do or say? He had uttered a cry of pain and shame,
and something like fury; but with the girl clinging round his neck,
sobbing, flung upon his mercy, he was helpless. He looked over Dora’s
bright head at Dr. Roland with, notwithstanding his impatience of
interference, a sort of appeal for help. However keen the pang was both
to his heart and his pride, he could not throw off his only child from
her shelter in his arms. After a moment his hand instinctively came upon
her hair, smoothing it down, soothing her, though half against his will.
The other arm, with which he had half put her away, stole round her with
a softer pressure. His child, his only child, all of his, belonging to
no one but him, and weeping her heart out upon his neck, altogether
thrown upon him to be excused and pardoned for having given him all the
tendance and care and help which it was in her to give. He looked at
Roland with a half appeal, yet with that unconscious pride of
superiority in the man who has, towards the man who has not.
“She has the right,” said the doctor, himself moved, but not perhaps
with any sense of inferiority, for though he was nearly as old as Mr.
Mannering, the beatitude of having a daughter had not yet become an
ideal bliss to him--“she has the right; if anybody in the world has it,
she has it, Mannering, and though she is a child, she has a heart and
judgment as good as any of us. You’ll have to let her do in certain
matters what seemeth good in her own eyes.”
Mr. Mannering shook his head, and then bent it in reluctant acquiescence
with a sigh.