“Couldn’t she be sent to the sea for a month or so?… I would arrange
it.… That is, if you could spare her?”
He waited on the cook’s answer agonizedly. She was in effect the
child’s mother, with absolute power over it for life and death.…
“Spare her, Lord, yes!” answered the cook calmly. “The work she does
isn’t worth speaking about. You’re nobbut a poor worker, aren’t you,
Mary?” She turned to Ensor, away from the child, but she did not
trouble to drop her voice at all--
“’Twould be no good, Sir. I’m thinking Miss Adelaide’s begun her grand
training too late.”
“What d’you mean?” he asked.
“She’ll be training her into her grave, that’s what she’s doing.”
“Sh--h! for God’s sake, woman!” he muttered, and sought his wife.
Something must be done.
* * * * * * *
He had no authority, except, strange to say, as far as Phillis was
concerned. And though Phillis’s physical upbringing left nothing to be
desired, he considered her mental education in some ways to be
defective. Adelaide placed no obstacle whatever to his realization of
certain views he had formulated and insisted on to the verge of
tediousness with regard to the moral standards to be inculcated in a
young growing girl.
She listened patiently, while he exposed these theories, and her thin
lips wore something more nearly approaching to a smile at these times
than any other, while her husband thus took a practical interest in
the future of her daughter. He reasoned broadly, and generally; he
could not lay his whole mind before the wife of Phillis’s father. For
that father counted, and not, in Ensor’s idea, favourably. Phillis had
certain strongly marked tendencies which he deplored, and which he
conceived her to derive from the parent he did not know. She had
undoubtedly a strain of the coarse and the callous; her father had
probably had these characteristics more strongly developed. She had
also some disagreeable qualities that he distinguished in and traced
from Adelaide, and that careful training might cross and deny and
finally eradicate. She was sly, she was morbid, she was headstrong and
reckless of the claims of others.
So, acting with Adelaide’s authority, delegated to him,
unquestioningly, he kept a strict watch and supervision on the books
she read, and the conversations she heard or took part in. He did not
countenance her frequent visits to the kitchen and her odd indecent
familiarity with Gertrude the cook. He had asked his wife if he might
not prohibit the child from entering the servants’ quarters
altogether, and seal the red baize door that led to them against her
use. He would like to forbid all entrance and egress by it, and force
her to give her word of honour that she would observe the prohibition.
“She may give it, but she won’t keep it,” said Adelaide lazily. “You
can’t wonder. She’s fond of Gertrude, because she gives her tit-bits,
and Phillis is greedy, poor darling! And then”--she looked up in his
face--“there’s your beloved Mary! She’s about, and you must remember
the two were brought up together. They were like foster sisters before
you came. You altered everything. And now I am going to have your
child!”
He stooped and kissed her, full of premature paternal emotion.
Adelaide was supposed to be not quite so well to-day. She was lying on
the famous tiger-skin that he had given her, and which she had spread
over a low wide couch in the hall. She chose to lie on it always, so
that the brute’s savage head was close to her own. Loving and akin,
the live Adelaide and the dead beast he had given her, both reeked of
each other. There was all the hot suggestion of the jungle, of
careless natural savagery in the juxtaposition of the tiger’s snarling
teeth, Adelaide’s dusky eyes, and the spots and splashes of black that
showed on each side of her spare form, like caked, dried blood upon
the gold. It was his wife’s boast that her beautiful figure was hardly
altered by her present condition, and the shocking cruelty to the
unborn implied in this attainment of an unnatural shapeliness was lost
on the simple fellow who was so soon to be a father.
“Our child,” he said, kissing her again passionately, “is the thing
that matters.”
Then the recollection of that other child went through, pierced his
heart like an arrow. He rose from his knees. All the blood in his body
came into his face. He stood looking down on the woman, who had
returned the passion of his caress with all the force of which she was
at present capable. A large patch on the tiger-skin, a zebra mark
bitten in, zig-zagging across the yellow fur, focussed his eyes.…
“Adelaide,” he prayed softly, “could we not take Mary back into the
house again?”
“No,” Adelaide said. She spoke quite quietly too, but Ensor knew her;
a storm was coming.
“Then,” he said pleadingly. “Could she not be sent away for a
bit--or”--his immense struggle betrayed itself in his voice--“for
good?”
“You cannot interfere with Gertrude’s business,” came plumb and sharp
from Adelaide. “If Gertrude likes to leave me, she can of course take
her child away with her. But I cannot do without Gertrude, and
Gertrude will never leave me. Ask her.”
She turned away, and laid her cheek against the flat head of the
tiger.
“And I was so happy!” she wailed, in bitter accents.
He knelt down again. Her breath came quick. He feared for her.
“It is no use,” she said. “You have spoilt it all. And all for the
sake of a dirty misbegotten little wretch whose own mother can’t stand
her and beats and neglects her. I don’t blame Gertrude. Don’t you
understand, Wald, Mary is one of the wrecklings, one of Nature’s
faults that ought to have been smothered at birth? I wish I had. I
wish somebody had. My father would have put her away fast enough if I
had asked him, only like a fool, I was kind to Gertrude, and saw her
through with it. But I have come to hate the very sight of the child!
And you--_you_ to come snivelling to me about her.… You!”
She laughed. Her passion was spent. She looked him, her husband, up
and down, contemptuously.
He murmured: “Don’t, don’t excite yourself!”
“I won’t,” she said squarely, turning her face round to the wall. “I’m
better now. I won’t let you hurt me. I’ll even discuss the unwholesome
brat, if you like, that’ll show you I don’t care. Get on. Talk quietly
and tell me what’s wrong about Mary’s upbringing.”
“You are very good,” Ensor murmured, “are you sure it won’t upset
you?”
“No, I tell you.” She sat up and faced him. She pulled a basket of
needle-work towards her and busied herself with it. Her hands did not
shake. Ensor admired her. After all, she had no nerves, and he might
as well say his say about the child, get better terms of existence for
her, and be done with the subject. He made up his mind he would not
say much; he would not descend to particulars of her ill treatment
unless Adelaide asked for them. He began gently--
“I do think, don’t you? that when all’s said and done, Mary’s young,
and even a servant’s child ought to have some joy of its life. Mary
oughtn’t to be made to slave like a grown-up. Hang it all, a simple
child should lightly draw its breath, not to the tune of housework and
floorscrubbing. The sight of that poor kid carrying those heavy pails
about makes me quite sick. I should like to tell you what I saw
yesterday. Gertrude must be an unnatural mother----”
“Well, speak out, what did you see?” Adelaide asked sharply.
“You were out driving. Mary was standing by one of the high windows in
the hall----”
“She’d no business to be there. Suppose a caller came?”
“No callers come. Why don’t they, by the way?”
“I hate people. I’ve snubbed them all, they daren’t show their noses
here. Go on. What was your paragon doing in the hall?”
“She was eating something out of an enamel tin platter such as you
feed dogs in, laid on the sill. The platter was not over clean, and I
don’t know what the mess was, but it looked most unappetizing and she
seemed to be--yes, actually picking something--something
disgusting--something alive out of it.…!”
“Pah, you sicken me!” Adelaide screamed. Ensor went on relentlessly,
now that he was wound up.…
“I put my hand on to her little scrubby head with that faded knot of
red ribbon on the crown----”
“I wonder you can touch it. Don’t touch me.”
“And I told her not to eat the nasty stuff, and what was it? She said
it was bits Gertrude cut off the toast before it went in the
dining-room, the same as the dog had. It looked days old--quite
mouldy. I shouldn’t like to give such a mess to my dog. I can only
account for it as a morbid taste of the young growing child, and I
bade her throw it away, and not eat between meals. It shows the
shocking state of health she’s in, and she’s morbidly inventive, for
then she said----”
“What did she say?”
“That it was her breakfast. Nonsense, I said. But she stuck to it. She
seemed cowed, brutalized, but she stuck to it. I say, Adelaide--I know
you aren’t very fit just now, but oughtn’t you to make some inquiries?
Does Gertrude beat her or ill treat her? I hear sounds, of a morning
sometimes--not so much lately since you’ve been seedy--but they freeze
my blood, until I realize that it’s the dog getting a licking.… Oh,
Adelaide, reassure me, don’t you see a man can’t stand the suspicion
of such a thing in his house? A helpless child.…”
The drops of sweat stood on his forehead. Adelaide spoke, as it were a
prepared speech, which it was now time to make.
“Your house!” she said. It was hers and the man winced.…
She continued, raising herself a little. “Look here! Mary’s a liar as
well as a pig. You’ve owned it. Morbid--is that all? I say a filthy,
beastly liar!… And, Wald, I’m going to bear _your_ child, and if you
want to have a healthy one, born alive--you haven’t had much luck with
children, so you say--you had better not worry me.… Let me have this
chance. I’ll never try again. I shall kill myself if this one does not
come off. Suppose you be wise in time, and leave off meddling in my
domestic concerns, and go and attend to your own. You’ve a meeting of
the Library Committee in Beverley at three. It’s full time.” She
glanced composedly at the watch that lay on her breast, and lay down
again as if it were a duty.…
He went about his business, trying to calm down in the quiet operation
of the natural round, and the mild form of civic functions that filled
his days. Adelaide was right, an important meeting of the Library
Committee was on for to-day, at which he had announced his intention
of speaking, for the subject interested him personally. It was a
question of morals as applied to the feast of contemporary literature
spread before the youth of Beverley and Weighton. Ensor’s contention
was that as young girls formed the main contingent of the readers of
books in all provincial towns it behoved far-seeing and right-minded
city councillors to see that no works pernicious in quality or
deleterious in tone should be delivered over to their private
consumption. Their elders, with a taste for life, spiced and
otherwise, should purchase outright the literature their souls loved,
and leave the shelves of chance to works of limpid purity and
unimpeachable if dreary moral tone.
The Library Committee was composed of enlightened men and women, for
it had been founded by an exceedingly busy and fussy Mrs. Marrable, “a
bit of a Socialist,” as she called herself. She was at any rate a
person professedly open to all the new ideas. The Committee were a
little afraid of her, and had come to look to Ensor, the shy silent
embodiment of Conservative, almost retrograde feeling in their midst,
to oppose her. He generally began his sentences: “I know I am a bit
old-fashioned.” This was a capital counterblast to Mrs. Marrable and
her “bit” of Socialism. They found him invaluable, a sort of slipper
on the wheels of frenzied progress, and Mrs. Marrable was not easily
gainsaid. She was a relation of the Bishop’s cousin, and had lived in
Beverley for years in a big red house where she entertained Saturday
to Monday parties from London. She had no daughters.
Another influential member, Canon St. Leger, unmarried, and living in
the best house in the Close, was a friend of Ensor’s, though he had
not asked him to come in so much lately.…
Indeed, looking round the green baize-covered table where all the
Committee found themselves at last seated, it occurred to Ensor that
he had not shaken hands with a single one of his confrères since the
last meeting, and that was a month ago. For that reason, he supposed,
they seemed strange to him, although they were all or nearly all,
people with whom he had been desired to take pot luck on any occasion,
lunch, or dinner, when he had ridden in from High Walls on his bicycle
and found he had put it too late to get back. All except Mrs.
Marrable, with whom for political and temperamental reasons he had
always cared to have very little to do.
While the Committee dealt with some purely financial and business
matters, which called for no more attention from the members of the
Committee than was implied in passing a vote of confidence or holding
up hands for a resolution, Ensor wrought himself up into a strange
state of nervous apprehension. It might have been mere perverse fancy,
but as a matter of fact not one of these people had spoken to him
since they sat down, or recognized his presence except by a nod of
salutation such as the barest courtesy demanded. The attitude of each
several person could be accounted for separately. So-and-so had come
in late, such a one had too many irons in the fire to be able to spare
a word till the meeting was over, but still--there it was, the
indefinable uneasiness, the disagreeable insinuating point that morbid
imaginings could establish. No one had actually addressed a word to
him!…
He brooded over this--he was tired, overwrought and annoyed, for the
child Phillis had shown a sad racial cloven foot to-day. He was afraid
she was not going to turn out so well as he could have wished. By and
by other business being disposed of, the Committee were invited to
deal with the question of detailed selection of books for the Library.
It was a subject on which Ensor was keenly interested, and here he had
so much to say that he forgot his preoccupation and did not allow his
natural shyness to interfere with the expression of his opinion. He
was strongly against the determination of Mrs. Marrable, to permit,
nay, to encourage, the introduction of a certain novel, the work of
one of her literary confrères, into the list of the Library. Ensor
had had the book sent him from London, so as to acquaint himself with
its supposed nature. He had carefully kept it out of the way of his
womenkind, until having thoroughly digested it, he threw it into the
fire. Yet this book was to be placed on the shelves of the Library to
which Adelaide subscribed, and a copy of it would be sure to find its
way to High Walls! He could not bear the idea of such a girl as
Phillis, eager, sensuous, full of strong, exuberant, readily-awakened
sex instincts, sucking in the unhealthy, unnecessary knowledge
presented so cleverly by this book, and it seemed to his
hypochondriacal imaginings that the tendency of the rest of the
Committee was to override his objections _per se_. He grew
tremendously excited, and the Committee wondered to see the usually
still and discreet man, who had married the lady they called the
terrible Mrs. Dibben, make such a violent exhibition of himself.
“I have a nearly grown-up daughter, as you all know,” so he ended his
speech, and for the moment he felt every inch a father. “Well, let me
tell you, that I had rather see her lying dead at my feet than realize
that she was taking into her pure mind anything so poisonous, so
pernicious, so destructive of all moral health as the work in
question. I would rather see her starved, neglected, maimed even, than
ruined mentally by such murderous nourishment.…”
He stopped, he felt that the sense of the meeting was not with him.
The silence that swallowed up the last word was hard and disapproving.
The Chairman, Canon St. Leger, drubbed on his desk with a pencil.…
Mrs. Marrable, divesting herself of her feather boa with the air of
one throwing down the gauntlet, and tilting forward her chair, rose.…
“Do I understand?” she said, speaking with privileged indistinctness,
but Ensor heard her for all that. “Do I understand from Mr. Ensor’s
eloquent speech, that he cares to throw his shield merely over a
member of his own immediate family? What about the stranger within his
gates? And I have yet to learn that spiritual injury and moral
oppression are the only enemies worth combating? Talk of mental
starvation, indeed!… Mental!… There are worse things than mental
starvation. There are blows…!”
She appeared to become hysterical and quite incoherent.
“Such hypocrisy… such disgusting hypocrisy I never heard of. Let him
look to his own house, I say--let him set his own house in order
before we put the Society on to him!”
“Mrs. Marrable, I must beg you to observe! This language is
impermissible here,” Canon St. Leger said, avoiding Ensor’s eye and
the deprecating gestures he automatically made.… “I must call upon you
to apologize!”
“To me,” Ensor said, white to his lips.
“Oh yes, I’ll apologize to the Committee,” said the lady, “and they’ll
accept my apology. They all know what I mean. But in the interest of
Humanity, it is time some steps were taken, and I’ll take them.…”
She folded her boa tightly round her neck and passed out. Canon St.
Leger swiftly put the retention or refusal of the book in question to
the vote and closed the meeting.
Ensor, dazed, his eyes blurred with unaccustomed passion, walked away
like a condemned man, condemned for a crime of which he was unwitting.
He rode studiously home, meditating on these things to the point of
falling off his bicycle. He was stunned with the impact of the
undeserved disagreeable, and knew not what to think or whom to ask for
an explanation. And when he got home he found real trouble awaiting
him. Phillis, who had been ailing rather unaccountably for some time
past, had shown definite symptoms of illness during his absence. The
little local country doctor, (but quite “good,”) had been sent for and
had been and gone. He had pronounced the child’s uneasiness to be due
to a mild attack of typhoid fever, so Adelaide, afoot, her eyes alight
with excitement, told the sluggish, depressed man who dismounted from
his bicycle at the door where she came to meet him.
“Have something, Wald. You look pale. That meddling brute of a doctor
has gone and ordered a nurse all off his own bat!” she fretfully
informed him, leading the way into the drawing-room and closing the
door. “I was so angry with him when I heard what he had done. Of
course I should have nursed her myself. The woman is here now so we
must make the best of it.”
Ensor was secretly of opinion that Dr. Hodgson was right, and that the
state of Adelaide’s nerves would have made her an indifferent nurse;
he, however, contented himself with remarking that neither himself nor
Dr. Hodgson would approve of her sitting up at night.
“But I shall have to as it is. No nurse can do both. And, Wald, I do
so detest strangers coming into the house! They go prying about,
making up all sorts of absurd conclusions and telling the ass of a
doctor everything.…”
An expression of indefinable apprehension crossed her peevish face,
and her husband was touched, taking it, as he did, as indicating the
state of nervous tension she was in. Phillis’s illness--her own
condition----
He took her limp hand and kissed it.
“My poor Adelaide, what have you to fear? There’s nothing wrong for
him to find out; I don’t quite approve of the status of Mary in the
house, but after all that’s the cook’s affair, not ours.… By the
way.…”
He was going to tell her something of Mrs. Marrable’s insinuations,
but concluded he had better not mention the matter at this juncture.…
He merely asked abruptly, “Where is Mary? I haven’t seen her about for
the last few days.”
“Gertrude has sent her away to some friends at Cullercoats, I believe.
She asked me if I could spare her!”
“And of course you did, kind girl,” said Ensor.
“Oh yes. The work she does isn’t worth thinking about. I told Gertrude
we should never make a servant of her.… Good-bye. I must go to
Phillis. I want to keep an eye on that nurse. I didn’t like her face.
A mischief-maker if ever there was one.”
Adelaide was gone and Ensor fell a-thinking on the painful scene of
to-day. He was obsessed, now that it was over, by the recollection of
a fluid and retreating Committee. He saw black coats, and the grey
mantelets of the country ladies melting away from him, fleeing from
his contact. He could not account for the social ban under which he
appeared to lie. This was the culminating incident; he remembered now
other slighter acts of neglect and inattention in the past, which he
had been too little self-conscious to observe or to piece together in
a pattern of general avoidance and cold shouldering. The arraignment
of the woman Marrable did not disturb him so much as the nervous
acceptance of it by the Canon. Mrs. Marrable was a shrew, a local
terror, a person of advanced views, and the author of the book in
question was a friend of hers, probably?…
But Canon St. Leger, a decent, sober-minded man, a man of his own
stamp!… He saw his thin hand toying with the suspended pencil, he
heard again his meek milk-and-water reproof of Mrs. Marrable’s
unparliamentary language.… He could not away with that.…
He wandered about the garden half the night with the puppy, now fully
trained to be a perfect house-dog and companion. It followed him in an
orderly manner from covert to covert under the high beetling wall with
the thick beds of nettles growing luxuriantly at the base. Once,
however, there was a skirmish; the dog grew quite excited at what must
surely have been a not unusual sight for him, the yellow knob of a
small boy’s head peering over the wall, supported presumably from
behind by a human Japanese ladder of other small boys. It was a
favourite game in this neighbourhood.
“He! He!” they crowed and chuckled. “Who lives ’ere? Old Mother
Brownrigg and her girls. He! He! No one ever comes out here alive…!”
The dog barked and sprang. Fear of his ultimately reaching them at
last dislodged the grotesque cohort. Ensor, his nerves a little shaken
by this noisy onslaught of words only half heard, turned and made his
way back to the house. It was absurd to mind. Children were always
climbing up the other side of that wall; it was nice to climb, it had
jutting courses of bricks half-way up, and the village curiosity was
provoked and stimulated by the air of quasi-mystery which Adelaide
chose to foster about High Walls, and that her rather witch-like
appearance abroad, always heavily, mediævally cloaked and
motor-veiled, abetted. She dressed like a toadstool in the day. And in
the evening like a panther. She strode along, her step was confident,
her eyes abstracted, her whole manner carelessly insulting. No wonder
the children were afraid of her.
He went in, and saw the doctor coming out and questioned him about
Phillis. His anxiety was easily allayed. The big girl was strong
enough to resist a whole army of adverse microbes. He saw the new
nurse, a tall, thin sprig of a woman with some indication of
character. She was very cold and civil, especially when she spoke to
Adelaide. He thought he saw plainly that she disliked the mistress of
the house, already. Another! Poor Adelaide!
He knew he was right, as the days went on. The two women detested each
other, skirmished every time they met, issued cross orders and
confused the other servants. But the maid defeated the mistress. Dr.
Hodgson, meek, little insignificant man that he was, resisted all Mrs
Ensor’s hints and manœuvres, and finally, her most palpable efforts
to get rid of Nurse Ferrier, who was, on her side, careful to give no
positive offence, or commit any domestic crime which might lead to her
dismissal on other grounds than medical ones. She was a capital nurse,
even Adelaide admitted that, only Phillis no longer wanted one.
Hodgson said she did. He further implied that a nurse stood between
Mrs. Ensor and all fatigue or anxiety undesirable for a woman in her
state, and that was the only argument Adelaide dared not, or did not
care to, gainsay.
The distracted woman vented her annoyance at the doctor’s tactics on
her husband, and to punish him would not let him see Phillis. As she
spent most of her time in the girl’s room which opened out of her own,
Ensor saw very little of her. He found himself not very much cast down
by this arrangement; he was much out of sympathy with his wife, a
little fretted by her irritability, and was glad to defer their
meeting until the need for the nurse’s presence which so enraged her
should have passed away.
He wondered, sometimes, when that would be, and thought he would like
to ask the nurse. But she rather sternly, and with a sort of frigidity
put on over and above her statutory nurse’s manner, passed him in the
hall or on the stairs. He began to fancy that Adelaide, moved by her
strange taste for regulating the movements and gestures of others, had
bidden her enter as little as possible into conversation with the
master of the house. Well! Well!…
He missed Mary, to whom, in the present upheaval, he could have paid a
little more attention. Still, presumably she was well. Adelaide had
apparently carried out his expressed wishes for once, and had insisted
on Gertrude’s sending her child away for sea air. He missed the daily
appeal of the dark eyes set in paleness, the weak gestures with her
hands which Mary often used in lieu of speaking, as if mere movement
made less stir, and drew down less attention on her from the cruel
powers above. Though her face was pale it was always clean, he
remembered. And a queer thing--he never remembered her sitting down.
Did she ever sit down? He had seen her squat, he had seen her stand,
but he had never seen her sit except that first day in the motor-car,
when, the dark fur cap on her head, and the dark fur up to her chin
had made her look almost a lady. She was dressed exactly like Phillis,
then, he remembered! Strange monitory caprice of Adelaide’s--an
instance of her sheer love of power--to raise, and then to degrade! No
man could do such a thing except, perhaps, some savage Asiatic king,
one in whom caprice remained the only lust left to satisfy.
He did not care to affront such scenes as he had gone through at
Beverley any more, and he took his name off the Committee. He stayed
at home and spent this dreary, uneventful time mostly in wandering
about the house followed by the dog, who had grown attached to him. It
generally lay at his feet in the hall while he sat on one of the
yellow chairs, reading papers endlessly, smoking far more than was
good for him. Thus he caught the doctor, on his way through the outer
hall to see Phillis. The doctor generally nodded kindly, but did not
stop, there was nothing to say about Phillis; she was going on well,
and Adelaide did not expect to be confined for a couple of months or
so. The nurse flitted by on her screw soles, going up and downstairs,
and taking no notice of the solitary man. He never saw Gertrude at
all.
He was thinking seriously of going away from High Walls for a time,
until Phillis was quite well, and Mary had come back, and he had got
as far as the handling of _Bradshaw_ and the turning of the page
marked Continental Trains, when one day the nurse chose suddenly to
leave the orbit in which she generally travelled, between the red
baize door into the servants’ quarters and the staircase that led up
into Phillis’s sick room, and came straight up to Wald Ensor. The
deflection of the moon from her course could not have surprised him
more. She spoke.
“I beg your pardon, Sir, but have I your permission to take Dr.
Hodgson to see Mary?”
Her eyes drooped and seemed to look down both sides of her nose. With
her white cap like a frontlet, her brown hair fluffed out in ascetic
waves over her forehead, she was not altogether an unprepossessing
woman. She was looking down at him, her lips were coldly pursed, and
Ensor felt just as he had felt in the Beverley Committee-room.
“Certainly, Nurse,” he stammered, “But Mary, is she at home?”
“She is at home, Sir, and in my opinion very unwell.”
“What is the matter with her? I want to know. Mary is a special pet of
mine.”
The lame, absurd words came broken from his lips.… He was not thinking
of what he was saying. He was overwhelmed by an avalanche of doubts.
Adelaide had lied to him.… “Hasn’t Mary been away at all?” he
stammered.
The nurse raised her eyes, and gave him one straight winged glance.…
She had strong black eyebrows that met across her nose, and a pout
that was determined.
“She may have been. Not that I know of.…” Her nose was in the air.
“Will you see her, Sir?” she ended more kindly. “Perhaps you would
like to know how she is for yourself.”
“Yes,” he replied. “I should indeed. But I understood she had been
sent away to the sea for her health? Let us go.… I don’t know where
she sleeps, when she is at home.…”
“You shall see, Sir, if you will come with me.”
Her calmness was only a mask, Ensor felt; the quiet words covered an
indignation that nearly broke through her professional reserve. She
was boiling over with rage. She walked through the red baize door with
an assured step, never turning or looking round at the shamefaced man
who followed her with humble, downcast head, his morning paper still
crumpled up in his hand.
The red baize door marked the transition between the oldest and most
modern parts of the house. Ensor had never been up the second and
original staircase which led to the attics, and it was these that
Nurse Ferrier now proceeded to mount. It was rather dark everywhere,
for a heavy shower was impending, the first few drops of which had
fallen before they left the part of the house where the windows were
bigger. The stairs were uncarpeted, low and uneven. They led up to
wide, emaciated corridors, whose panelling was worm-eaten, pale with
age and desuetude. Low doors, plumb in the wall, opened into many
rooms, at each of which in turn Ensor expected the nurse to stop and
enter.
Another flight of stairs, leading to just such another corridor! The
air was faint, it seemed to have been sealed for centuries.… Ensor
protested… asked some sort of question.… “Where were they going?”
“Into the attic, where Mary sleeps alone,” the nurse answered. Her
manner was more kindly now.
“A child, to sleep all this way from everybody!…” he murmured.
She nodded but did not turn. They reached a short flight of five
steps, built in. Ensor was quite in the dark, until the nurse pushed
open a door at the head of the stairs and they emerged into the
twilight of a large bare attic. When his eyes grew accustomed to the
light, he realized that it occupied the whole top of the house.
“Give me your hand, Sir,” the nurse said quite gently. “You may get a
shock. Mary’s here, or was yesterday.”
The attic was like the aisle of a church, with chapels on both sides.
A wide window at the very end allowed a milky track of light to fall
along the pale, decayed flooring of the middle. There were small
dormer windows in the embrasures formed by old, roughly-joined beams
filled in with whitewashed lath and plaster. Each was like a little
room shut off. Towards the centre the flooring was rotted away--the
jagged boards seemed to meet in a pattern of interwoven flanges.
They walked along it carefully, up to the very end, and Ensor saw the
wide stretch of rolling country out of the big window. The nurse went
along it carefully, peering into each alcove. She seemed puzzled.
“It was this one,” she said at last. “It’s so dark with the rain I can
hardly see, but I was up here yesterday and got scolded for it.… Here
she is!”
He stopped. His legs almost refused to move. The child was lying on a
large thin mattress just at his feet. A shawl with ragged fringe
covered her, and the dull stained tick of the mattress showed beyond
it. There seemed to be no bed-linen, and the child’s nightdress, which
might have been originally of pink flannel, was of a curious ingrained
dull colour.…
Ensor started, and felt sick.
“Ah, Sir, you see----?” the nurse said, and stopped. She bent down.…
“Mary!” She had soft tones as well as harsh ones.
The child, who appeared to be dozing, opened her eyes and turned them
up at her visitors. She still had her ridiculous top-knot straining
the hair from her forehead, and the rest of it was matted on her face.
Her hand lay open on the shawl, the other was under her cheek. She may
have been aware of them, she did not look at these people. Slowly her
eyes closed again and she lay quiet, a grey patch on the dark
background of the pallet.
“Mary!” the nurse said again. “Here’s Mr. Ensor to see you.… Take her
up, Sir,” she bade commandingly.
Ensor knelt down and lifted the upper part of the wretched, filthy
little body half out of her bed on to one of his knees. As he handled
her he had the sensation of her dry, harsh skin, and it reminded him
of parchment. She coughed as he unavoidably jerked her in lifting.
By his prompt obedience to her request, he had rehabilitated himself
in the nurse’s opinion, as she showed by the more familiar tone of her
next speech.…
“Did you ever see such a disreputable nightdress? And such a hole to
let a child sleep in?”
She went on scolding, and Ensor realized that her abuse was directed
at Adelaide. Yet it seemed an impossible thing to answer her. She
blamed the doers of this deed, but in a strain so incommensurate with
the depth of the painful emotions raised in him by the sight of the
child’s condition.… Seeing, however, that he was feeling as he should
feel, she respected his wretchedness and spoke gently.
“She’s been alone so all night, but will you stay with her, Sir, while
I fetch the doctor? It’s just on his time for coming. I may catch him
before Mrs. Ensor sees him.”
She crept away. Ensor heard her gently close the attic door. There was
silence, and her heels, on the stair, tapped… retreating.
Left alone in the attic with a dying child across his knee, the man
tried frantically to collect his thoughts. Beyond a little dry,
patient cough, made as it were of ashes and dust, which racked her now
and then, Mary lay quite still across his knees. He changed his
position, and now he sat on the floor beside the mattress. His eyes
grew accustomed to the lighting of this place and he saw that there
was a small window in each embrasure, and the one opposite him on the
other side of the house had panes. That immediately over Mary’s bed
was open to the air. The glass had evidently been cracked and had
fallen out leaving jagged pieces in the frame. From one of these there
depended the fragments of a checked cotton duster, stuffed in there by
some one to ward off, more or less, the draught.
* * * * * * *
The shower was over, and the sun had come out, and sent warm rays
across the worm-eaten floor, the floor whereon in the old days the
feudal servants of the manor house had slept, weary feet to weary
feet, fastened in all night by their lord, with no egress save by the
little locked door at the foot of the staircase. The lord of old dared
not leave his slaves free to murder their taskmaster in his sleep.
There may have been at that time about a hundred healthy farm-hands
keeping each other warm and their spirits up through the long night
with jests and story-telling; now this enormous garret held but one
sickly, fearful, solitary child.
Oh! who had done this?… His head swam with dreadful certainties.
A great bluebottle flew in at the window, and buzzed in and out of the
rafters over Mary’s head. She was past noticing it, but it irritated
Ensor and he wanted to get up and chase it away. But he could not bear
to deposit the child on the filthy palliasse again. The same with a
cockroach that made blundering rushes from one joist to another of the
decayed ribs of the flooring.… There was probably vermin in that bed,
and on the child even, but he was past caring.… He could not beat his
breast, _Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!_ or tear his hair;
his hands were tied, occupied with the task they should have set
themselves long months agone--the work to which his down-pressed heart
had all along instigated him. But in this moment he expiated fully
what he described to himself as his rotten carelessness, his wicked
easy-going acceptance of Adelaide’s excuses, his shameful apathy in
the face of the cruel crime that was being enacted in his house--in
Adelaide’s house indeed, but the shame was his. Here was a helpless
child, dying under his roof, of neglect, or worse, and he had had the
face to stand before that Committee composed of decent people, and had
been puzzled by their quite natural behaviour. They were unfriendly;
disgusted, outraged by his pusillanimity, of which they probably had
an inkling, or more than an inkling. What about those boys looking
over the wall!… He had expostulated with the Committee for admitting
an unpleasant work of fiction into their list--a solecism at worst. He
was thinking of Phillis’s morals whilst Mary starved! He knew now what
Mrs. Marrable had meant. That harridan in the right!----
Dying of neglect and worse! His hand stole towards the open front of
the child’s nightgown. With sudden resolve he turned her body quite
round on his knee, and pushed the garment down to her middle.
Yes, the scars that play such an important part in the evidence when
these sort of cases come before the court were all there, fresh and
old scars; deep and superficial; healed, ill-healed, and suppurating.
He turned the body round again, and felt Mary’s pulse. It seemed to
him to be almost non-existent.…
Another long ten minutes--savage, agonizing, interminable!… He knew
nothing about it… but he wished the doctor would come! The nurse had
probably not been able to catch him before he saw Phillis, and had had
to wait to waylay him until his official visit was over.
And as the child lay across his knee, to all appearances comatose,
something grey and loathsome did crawl out from the screwed black hair
on to the forehead.… He pulled out his handkerchief from his breast
coat pocket, he felt no sense of disgust to weaken his efficiency.…
Such things are!… It was all part of the horror that had surely now
culminated and left him seared and stunned, shamed and blighted.…
The child sighed, and with a pathetic hint of the baby ways that had
been scorched and made to perish out of her, crept closer into his
embrace. Her sigh may have been one of relief, Ensor fondly hoped it.…
* * * * * * *
The bluebottle buzzed, the black-beetle looked out again from the
crinkled folds of the _Daily Telegraph_ which Ensor had flung down.…
He did not move, he hardly thought, he was conscious only of the child
nestling in his arms as if he were its new-found father, and a peace
was his, a peace he had never known, as if his soul had at last found
its billet.…
When Nurse Ferrier came up at last with the doctor, he smiled.
“Do what you can for her, Doctor,” he said pleadingly.
“Why wasn’t I called before?” Hodgson began angrily. Nurse Ferrier
touched his arm. Ensor saw it.
The doctor imperiously pulled the duster out of the window-hole to
make more light for himself, and returning, laid the child down on the
wretched pallet and methodically examined her. The examination over,
he gently pulled the shawl into position so as to cover her, and rose
from his knees.
“Mr. Ensor, I must see Mrs. Ensor about this,” he said gravely.
On the way down the narrow flight of stairs Ensor summoned breath to
ask a question.
“Is she dying?”
“Probably,” was the doctor’s curt reply, and it was all he would
vouchsafe.
Adelaide was in the hall and came to meet them.
“Where have you been, Doctor?” she asked suspiciously. Her eyes fell
and rested scornfully on her husband.…
“Wald, you look pretty bad. Go and get yourself a whiskey and soda.”
“Yes, do,” said Hodgson. He turned to Adelaide, with a rough dignity
of manner. “Mrs. Ensor, it is my duty to tell you both that if that
child upstairs dies I shall refuse a certificate and order an
inquest.”
Wald almost admired Adelaide now for her pluck. A spasm of annoyance,
no more, crossed her face, and turning, she led the way across the
hall towards her morning-room. She said over her shoulder--
“She’s only shamming. It seems to me you want a drink too, Doctor.
That was thunder we heard just now. It’s upset you both. Wald, be good
enough to send Nurse Ferrier straight to me here. I’m going to sack
her.”
She went into the portion of the hall that was screened off, and
seeing that both the men disregarded her gesture of invitation to go
further and stayed in the main hall, she shrugged her shoulders and
flung herself on to her tiger-skin, turning her back, motionless.
The doctor looked at Ensor, and spoke meditatively.
“In Mrs. Ensor’s present state!…” he murmured. “Perhaps I had better
speak to you, Mr. Ensor?…”
“Certainly,” Ensor said, leading the way into the dining-room. “I may
say before you speak that I know nothing of this. But that’s no
matter,” he went on, “the blame is mine.”
He rang the bell. “Ask Gertrude to come to me here,” he said to a maid
who appeared at the service door at the end.