“What is it? What is it?” Ensor asked testily.
“I was going to show the doctor, Sir, what Mary had to eat.”
She held out a plate for their inspection with some toast rinds and
the remains of dripping fat adhering to the sides.… In her other hand
she held a mug, into which Dr. Hodgson peered.
“H’m, a concoction of tea-leaves.…”
“She was fed, Sir, worse than the dog,” the girl continued volubly.
“Biscuits was bought for him. She never complained, not she--too
frightened for that, for if she did she got the stick----”
“Who beat her?” Ensor asked, furiously.
“Mrs. Ensor, till she got ill. She used to take the poker to her.
There’s all the marks on her back now--you’ve seen ’em, Doctor?”
“Yes, yes. Hold your tongue now,” Hodgson said.
He turned to Ensor who stood quietly beside him, receiving the
unbearable douche of the servant-girl’s revelations with such
fortitude as he was able to muster. “If the child dies there will have
to be an inquest. I must give the nurse some directions. Where is she?
Be off, back to your work!” he bade the kitchen-maid, “and ask Nurse
to come to me.”
Nurse Ferrier, quiet, composed, unsmiling, appeared in the doorway,
and Ensor scrutinized her face for news as eagerly as if he had not
possessed the gift of speech.
“Is she dead?” he at last breathed.
“No, Sir, no,” she answered kindly after a pause, recalled, as it
were, from other thoughts. Ensor did not catch the almost
imperceptible shake of the doctor’s head that came hard upon her
words. The nurse continued, softly, appealing to her chief. “We won’t
let her die, will we, Doctor!”
“Not if we can help it,” he replied gruffly. “Get yourself a drink,
Mr. Ensor, and buck up now! There will be a lot to do presently.”
Ensor slowly walked away and the doctor turned to the nurse.
“I wouldn’t give a farthing for that child’s life, _you_ know,” he
said. “Have you-brought her down?”
“Yes, she’s in the spare bedroom. Mr. Ensor would wish her to have the
best of everything,… I think?…”
Her long drooping eyes were raised to the doctor’s for a moment. She
wanted to talk to him, and he knew it. But he did not, at this
juncture, care to throw any deductions he might have made from facts
patent to both of them, into the common fund, and he interposed the
chill of professional etiquette between himself and her possible
confidences.
He walked quickly, meditating the while, down the narrow flagged way
that led from the house door to the gate in the wall, where his horse
was being held for him by James, the half idiotic manservant; the only
male creature, excepting her husband, whom Adelaide would tolerate
about the place. To-day, however, expecting as usual to have the whole
of the path to himself, the doctor almost hustled a person of quite a
different type from James’s, a smart, slight, efficient young fellow
slipping briskly up to the house. Hodgson apologized. The stranger,
who was dressed in some sort of uniform, looked curiously at him, as
if about to speak, but thought better of it and passed on.
After some little delay, Gertrude came to her master in the
dining-room where he had summoned her. She looked hurried, portentous,
but at the same time, armed with the indifference of fat people. Her
wide apron was covered here and there with spots of gravy or blood; he
supposed she had been “drawing” chickens or killing them. Her bib was
pinned up at the corners over her ample bosom. She had no right to
have a breast; she had no right to be made like a woman. He loathed
her, the agent of Adelaide’s system, the janissary who with fiendish
personal lust of cruelty had brutally carried out his poor wife’s
unholy theories.
And all the while, the uncomfortable consciousness was his, that
whatever his contempt of Gertrude, it was equalled by her scorn of
him. This abominable woman looked down on him; in her eyes lurked the
conception of him as something mean and pitiful and likable, yes, she
awarded him a certain amount of good-humoured commiseration. And she
was his cook!
“I couldn’t come before,” she said sturdily. “I’ve been up with
Phillis, who’s left all alone because of this business. Be done as
soon as you can, Sir, for I want to get back to the poor child.”
“You will tell me before you go, please, how long this has been going
on? How long have you been neglecting and ill-treating your own
child?”
The woman sneered.
“Mary, d’ye mean? Well, you see, Mary all along was only allowed to be
here, as you might say, through the kindness of Miss Adelaide, as
being her cook’s child.” She continued, as if repeating a lesson
learned by heart, “Miss Adelaide--Mrs. Ensor--has always been very
good to me and I’ve been the same to her. But it stands to reason that
Mrs. Ensor wasn’t going to bring up my bastard like a lady. Mary
Adelaide--that’s her name--had to be trained to be a servant and work
for her bread, like her mother’s always done, and when she didn’t
work, she had to be beat.”
“And what was the work you set a child of ten to do?” Ensor asked,
striving at calmness.
“Child of ten--she’s fifteen, same as Phillis! Well, let me see, she
cleaned the silver, setting down to it every day, and swept a room, or
may be two, and did down the steps, and her own sewing and mending.”
“And what did she have to eat?”
“What the girl showed you…” Gertrude said, throwing up her chin in
sullen pride of evil-doing. “Scraps what was left over from the day
before. That is, if I would remember to give it her, and she never
reminded me. Too soft, shameful lazy she was, too, and one had to take
a stick or a poker to her to make her bustle. Whoap! Go ’long! was all
the kind words she got. And a neat cut across her back. She was that
lazy they never had time to heal before there was a new stripe laid
over the last one.”
“My God! A young child!” He covered his face with his hands.
Gertrude regarded him. Some shifting of values took place in her heavy
brain. She came a step nearer, and her voice lost its tone of coarse
bravado.
“You must know, Sir, I had my orders?”
“Your orders, woman! Your orders to play the murderess! You, the
unnatural mother----”
“You may look a little nearer home for the unnaturalness, if you will
have it? Some folks is very blind, and deaf, too.”
“What do you mean?”
His tone was violent. The cook said, patiently, raising her apron to
her face--
“I’ll say no more, Sir. I must be going----”
“Stop!” cried Ensor furiously. “You brute----”
“Call me brute, Sir!” Gertrude answered, almost modestly.…
Then her temper rose, she flushed.
“Do you know who’s awaiting for me in my back kitchen where I told him
to stop?” she said passionately. “No one won’t go away from here,
Mister, I said, so long as I give you my word. But I’d something I’d
like to say to Mr. Ensor first before he saw him, I said, and it would
be best for all parties if I could get it said. So he let me come,
though he’s not a-going back without seeing you!”
She produced a dirty card, from the bosom of her dress, and handed it
to her master.…
* * * * * * *
The nurse met the doctor on the doorstep when he came back half an
hour later. Her manner was instructive as she came forward, her finger
on her lip, and he knew what she would tell him.
“Mary’s gone, Doctor. Half an hour ago. And Mrs. Ensor has bolted
herself into her bedroom, and won’t answer to any one. I’m afraid
she’s bad. And”--she dropped her voice--“there’s a man shut in the
library with Mr. Ensor. Here’s what he brought. I found it on the
floor of the dining-room just now.”
She produced the card, stained with blood where Gertrude’s fingers had
grasped it. “Only fowl’s!” she said apologetically. The doctor took
it.
“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Inspector G.W.
Kelson!” he exclaimed. “That’s Mrs. Marrable! She said she was going
to put the Society on to them.”
“She’s a bit late,” the nurse said.
“By half an hour,” he echoed her, as they went in together.
“You never heard anything like it,” the nurse continued, as they
proceeded upstairs; “Gertrude, the cook here has been telling me. And
who she is and all. They’ve just killed her--by inches.”
“Not by inches, by yards,” corrected Dr. Hodgson. He was very
indignant. “The child’s back is covered with unhealed
sores--suppurating. She doesn’t weigh more than forty-eight pounds.
Sixty-two she should have. Systematic neglect and outrageous cruelty!
They’ll have to answer for it.”
“Mr. Ensor knew nothing of it, I’ll swear,” the nurse said quickly.
“Yes. His wife leads him by the nose,” replied Hodgson.
“She’s a caution!” exclaimed the nurse, with virulence.
“And she’ll get off, because of her condition. They always admit
that.”
“When it’s her own child, Doctor? Of course you know it’s her own
child?”
“I suspected it,” he said quietly.
They had come into the great, wide, lightly-papered, spare bedroom,
with three tall windows looking out over the grey gravel sweep in
front of the house. The windows were wide open. The gardener could be
heard sharpening his old-fashioned instrument ready for cutting the
scrap of lawn beyond the gravel. Professionally, perfunctorily, the
doctor looked at and examined what lay on the bed. Then, while the
nurse finished her work, he strolled to a window and stared out,
waiting to see the master of the house, whose voice could be heard
urgently talking in the room immediately below.
The nurse, dabbling sponges in hot water, going backwards and forwards
with towels, talked. She had not talked for weeks.
“The likeness!” she said. “Don’t you see it strong now she’s dead,
Doctor? I must say I noticed it the very first moment he came up into
that garret where they had put the poor child away to sleep--or to
die, as it happened. Nobody’d been near her for days. Gertrude thought
Mrs. Ensor had, and she thought--God knows what she thought!” She
shuddered. “There wasn’t so much as a jug of water there. Mrs. Ensor
hoped Mary would die, and Gertrude didn’t care. She’s a regular bad
one. She was cook to Mrs. Ensor before she married and had a baby
there, and Miss Adelaide’s father, he was a doctor, and he gave her a
certificate of death. He was a wicked old man, by all accounts. So
when Miss Adelaide got into trouble, this woman helped her.…”
All the while she talked, she was busying herself about the wretched
little body of Mary. The doctor stood at his post near the window,
waiting for Mr. Ensor’s visitor to go, listening to the nurse’s talk
as he lightly slashed his top-boots with his riding-whip, and decided
what he would do. He liked Ensor, and wanted to make it easy for him.
“And,” Nurse Ferrier continued, “she says they bought this house with
its high walls all round, because Miss Adelaide didn’t care to be seen
about much. She was ashamed, not so much because she had had a baby
without being married, but because it was such a wretched little
specimen. She called herself Mrs. Dibben--that was the name of
Gertrude’s man--he was a prize-fighter. I make out that he was in
prison at the time. Any way, he was never seen again.… Gertrude says
they were all going on quite quietly, and the two children brought up
like sisters.… Mrs. Ensor had almost come to think, Gertrude says,
that it was the other way about, and that the beautiful child was
hers, and the wretched one the cook’s.… Gertrude didn’t care--her
child was the gainer.… But that the day Mr. Ensor came, Mrs. Ensor
rushed into the kitchen like a mad thing, and said she’d told him
Phillis was hers and Mary Gertrude’s, and that was the way it had to
be, for he was coming to live here. Doctor, what do you think of
that?”
“I think, if it’s true, it’s a disgusting business. But I don’t quite
believe it.”
“I do,” said the nurse stoutly. “I am coming to believe it. That
woman--Mrs. Ensor--is bad enough for anything and she simply couldn’t
have had a nice simple child like Phillis, not if she tried ever so!”
“There, he’s gone!” said Hodgson, leaving the window. He came to the
bedside and surveyed the child’s small body lying straight, neatly,
fairly disposed. The nurse stood proudly away from her work--
“She looks nice, now, doesn’t she, Doctor? I’ve put her on one of Miss
Phillis’s smart nightgowns. Gertrude went in to Mrs. Ensor’s room and
got it for me. She’s not so bad, you know, Gertrude; she only did as
she was told. Mrs. Ensor did the beating and wouldn’t let
her--positively wouldn’t let her give the child nourishing food.”
“How is Mrs. Ensor? Did you gather?”
“Quite calm, Gertrude says, though she knows everything.”
“She’s absolutely determined not to let herself have a miscarriage,
that’s about it,” said Hodgson, buttoning his coat. “She’s got plenty
of self-control and courage of a kind.”
“Courage--to be cruel!” exclaimed the nurse, glancing at the human
piece of wreckage on the bed. “And I should say that if she thinks it
necessary to starve her children to death if they happen to be born
weaklings, that the chances are she’ll have to kill the next too, even
if she does manage to get it born all right, and I have my doubts
about that. She’s far too keen about it, too----”
“What’s that?” Hodgson interrupted, cocking his ear.
“Mrs. Ensor’s door!”
“He’s gone in to her, then!”
They looked at each other.
* * * * * * *
Ensor, speaking urgently to his wife at the closed door of her room,
anxious to impart some intelligence he had just received, could get no
reply from her. He did not give it up, but continued to call her by
her name--Adelaide. She had a pet name, chosen by herself. He
remembered it, but he could not bring himself to use it.
Half an hour seemed to elapse. He heard a groan.
Though he hated her, it frightened him, for there was no one with her.
He changed the tenor of his appeals.
“Adelaide, if you are ill, you must not shut yourself up like this.
You may do harm to yourself--and to the child. If you won’t see me, at
least let me send Gertrude to you.”
Then she spoke.
“Wald, I am not very ill--not more ill than I expect to be. For I am
going to have a child. It will not be quite yet. As soon as it is
born, I shall kill myself, but not till then. So you need not be
afraid.”
Her voice sounded fainter, she had turned away from the door. He was
astonished at her self-control--“not more ill than I expect to be!” He
felt that he ought to see for himself how she was. Bitterly,
dispassionately, he made the attempt.
“Let me see you, then,” he said gently. “Just for one moment!”
“Is it to scold me?” Her voice sounded close to the door. “I am not to
be scolded--now.”
The key was turned in the lock, and he made his way in. His wife stood
there on the threshold, half defiant, half apologetic. As he knew
Adelaide, the deprecation was much for her. Her beautiful mournful
eyes sought his. They held no cruel gleams, such as had lurked there
so lately, when they had talked of Mary. Her dull black silk
_peignoir_ was gathered round her; she held it looped pathetically in
one thin hand. Yet he was not moved. He only thought of her health,
pathologically, as a doctor might. It was his duty. He had neglected
his other duty lately.
She put up her sharp chin. Her hand let slip the folds of black, they
fell all round her, trailing.…
“Kiss me, Wald!” she said.
“No, I cannot.”
She turned, and moved towards the sofa that stretched across the foot
of her bed. Her stumble over the long embarrassing folds of the
garment she wore was a mute reproach, but it could not affect him, to
the extent of inducing him to comply with her request.… She breathed
heavily and sat down on the sofa.…
“See Gertrude, then. She will tell you all you want to know.”
“Your cook! Adelaide, tell me yourself. Oh, why----?”
She rocked backwards and forwards and nursed her knees.
“I could not bear the sight of her, I tell you!” she answered him
passionately. “She was a degenerate. She disgraced me. She wasn’t fit
to live, she ought never to have been born--never even have been
conceived! But she shames her father, not me!… I am a normal healthy
woman and all disease is repugnant to me. It’s a law--a law that was
infringed.… She pays the penalty.… And to see her going about day by
day, the living testimony of unfitness--of beastliness.… Why, the
sight of her peaked, suffering face, old and yellow--she looked like
that even in her cradle--from the very first moment that Gertrude
showed her to me--that finished me! For I insisted on seeing her at
once, I was fit enough, I was about in a week.… Then when I came to
look closer--her awful hand--did you know that she had a finger less
on her right hand?… Still, I nursed her myself, I--faugh!”
She put her handkerchief to her bitten lips--there was blood on it
when she took it away.
“Then when you came--I saw you look at her, in the car, and again,
when we got out, and you carried the rugs for her as we walked up the
drive--that was enough! I made up my mind then, and I have never
repented it. Never, never, I tell you. You would never have married
me, if you had known, for you have the same ideas as me. Wald, that’s
what I liked in you, only I didn’t know that you were a coward--a
mean, canting, respectable, conventional coward--what they used to
call lily-livered--or is it pigeon-livered?”
“Sneer at me if you like, Adelaide, but explain. Damn you, explain!”
he cried, forgetting himself, forgetting her state, forgetting
everything under the stress of the terrible, nearly formulated horror.
“What’s there to explain?” she said. “I hated the child, and I beat
her. I beat her to death, that’s all!”
He groaned in helplessness, overcome by her fierce self-sufficiency.
“But had you no sort of human feeling, no woman’s tenderness? You’ve
been a mother--there’s surely such a thing as a mother’s heart…?”