_He Tries to be Honest_
Davidina got over her cold without difficulty. But Mr. Trimblerigg,
who from repeated immersion, had been in the water much longer and
with opportunities for severe chills to take him between whiles, fell
seriously ill.
It was with a sort of satisfaction that he took to his bed; for this at
any rate was a genuine result of his life-saving efforts, and seemed in
a way to affect their character, giving them the testimonial he craved.
Davidina accepted the duty which fate had laid on her, and nursed him
with devoted detachment.
‘It’s wonderful how those two do love each other!’ remarked Mrs.
Trimblerigg, after viewing a sick-bed scene where Jonathan was as one
hanging between life and death in Davidina’s arms: ‘And yet to look at
them sometimes you wouldn’t think it.’
That was on the first day of desperate symptoms, preliminary to the
arrival of the doctor, when Davidina, for lack of higher guidance was
nursing him with prescriptions of her own choosing. He had horrible
pains; she pursued them with the old-fashioned remedies which, in
remote country districts, still effect cures, and for which the
undeserving doctor comes presently to receive the fee. Fore and
aft, wherever a pain came catching his breath, she skinned him with
untempered applications of hot raw mustard; and after five hours of it
he still survived.
When the doctor came he could not but admire her handiwork. ‘Well,
you have punished him!’ he said. He examined the patient and gave the
illness its name--double pneumonia. Its importance was a satisfaction
to Mr. Trimblerigg and Davidina alike; they took it as a worthy
occupation;--he to be ill of it, she to have the nursing of it. For the
next fortnight brother and sister enjoyed each other thoroughly, more
than they had ever done in their lives before. They even became fond of
each other. But character remained; the fondness was critical.
The day that the doctor pronounced him out of danger, Mr. Trimblerigg
had already felt so much better, that he wanted to get up. Life having
become attractive again, he was impatient to go out and meet it once
more on his own terms. And when he had seen from the medical eye that
all was to be well with him, he was as anxious to have word of it as
though it were a compliment on his good looks. ‘What does he say of
me?’ he asked when his sister returned from seeing the doctor to the
door.
Davidina, having measured him judicially with her eye, settled that he
was well enough for an indulgence that would be mutual.
‘He says you are out of danger,’ she answered; ‘so now you are in it
again.’
‘In what?’
‘In your own way,’ she replied, elliptically. ‘It’s done you no harm
being ill. To be safe from yourself for a fortnight never happened to
you before. Mother calls it a God’s mercy you’re still alive. Perhaps
it is: I don’t know.’
Mr. Trimblerigg lay trying to read her face and the meanings behind it.
‘Have I been a great trouble?’ he asked at last.
‘People can’t be as ill as you’ve been, without giving some trouble,’
she answered.
Yet he had a consciousness that he had been good, as goodness goes on
a bed of sickness; and he hankered to have it said.
‘Wasn’t I a good patient?’ he inquired in a tone of meek repentance.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You were as good as you knew how,’ replied Davidina, ‘and that’s not
saying a little; for you _know_ more than most; if you’d only do it.’
She paused, then added, ‘You were very good when you were out of your
senses.’
‘What did I say?’ inquired Mr. Trimblerigg anxiously; for the
possibilities of unconscious goodness alarmed him.
‘Your prayers.’ (His anxiety increased.) ‘You didn’t say much. ’Twas
either “God, I am not as other men are,” or “God, be merciful to me a
sinner,” just those two things, one or other; and they both sounded
real, as if you meant ’em.’
There was a long pause, while Mr. Trimblerigg calculated; he had got
the right atmosphere for it at last; so gathering his strength he said:
‘Davidina, it was I pushed you into the river.’
The avowal struck Davidina a cold blow: she had not reckoned that
feebleness, or illness, or affection, or gratitude, or anything indeed
but fear would ever have made Mr. Trimblerigg own truth against himself
so long after the date. Then she looked deeper, and realized that it
was fear: he was trying to get out of her clutches by telling the truth.
She countered him by telling a lie herself.
‘I didn’t know it,’ she said; ‘I never felt you touch me.’
‘But I did!’ he insisted.
‘Well, if you did, you didn’t do it on purpose.’
Into this trap he fell.
‘Yes, I did!’ he declared. ‘I hated you: I pushed you in because I
wanted you to drown.’
Reassured, she saw that once more he was telling lies. It comforted her
to find that he had not got out of her depth; her old Jonathan, the
Jonathan she knew, was safely hers again.
‘Then why did you try to save me?’ she inquired.
‘I didn’t try; not really. I only pretended to.’
‘Who was that for?’
‘Myself, I suppose. It would have been easier to think of afterwards,
you see: that I--tried.’
Here she saw that he had given her a bit of the real Jonathan wrongly
applied.
‘Ah, yes,’ she commented, ‘you manage to pretend to yourself a good
deal, don’t you? I wish I could!’
Her voice was gentle, regretful, full of compassion and understanding.
‘What would you like to pretend?’ it encouraged him to ask.
Then she smote him.
‘That I believed you,’ she said.
So the victory was won.
He lay back, exhausted of his attempt. He had not escaped her after
all; and his final word was uttered without any hope of reversing the
issue now decided.
‘Well, I’ve told you,’ he said, trying to appear indifferent; ‘and it’s
true,--every word.’
‘Then we won’t talk about it,’ she replied; ‘you can think it’s true,
if it amuses you. It would amuse me too, if I’d got the gift for it.’
She looked at him kindly, humorously; and then, speaking as one who
tries to chaff foolish fancies out of a child, said:
‘Some day, Jonathan, you’ll look in the glass and be thinking you’ve
got a halo; and it’ll only be the moon behind you, or a haystack on
fire, or something of that kind. If I’d got an imagination like yours,
I should be afraid to believe anything!’
So she shut him down with his poor weak wish to be privately and
confidentially honest. And as he lay back in the cage of her
contemptuous affections, he realized how very nearly he had escaped.
If he had only been content to tell merely the truth, Davidina might
have believed him: but at the last moment his Devil--his decorative
Devil--had tempted him to play the murderer; and to the lurid beauty of
it he had succumbed.
He turned his head away on the pillow, for there were tears in his eyes.
Davidina said: ‘It’s time you took your medicine.’ She poured it out as
she spoke, and set it beside him, with the two lumps of sugar that were
to follow.
‘I don’t want it,’ he cried peevishly. ‘Anyway, I don’t want it just
yet: you can leave it.’
‘No, I can’t; I’m going downstairs.’
‘Well, you can leave it, I say.’
‘And you’d empty it away and eat the sugar as soon as my back was
turned. I know. You’ve done that before.’
It was true he had: but all humans of my acquaintance do similar things
when left to themselves. It is their nature. But it was Davidina’s
devouring instinct for not leaving him to himself which made him
desperate.
‘Davidina,’ he cried, ‘why can’t you be friends?’
‘Friends?’ she retorted, ‘you are too anxious to be friends with
yourself, to be a safe friend for anyone else, I’m thinking. The best
friend for you is some one who knows how to make you honest to ’em
from a distance.’
She gave him his medicine as she spoke, and saw him drink it.
‘Well, there’s one thing you’re honest about at any rate,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he inquired, hopefully.
‘You bite your nails, and you don’t try to hide it.’
‘What does that matter to anybody?’ he demanded irritably.
‘Nothing, except to yourself. I never knew anybody yet that bit his
nails who was able to tell the truth. Not that that matters to you, I
suppose you’ll say.’
‘I do tell the truth sometimes,’ he declared in a tone of appealing
_naïveté_. ‘And when I do, you don’t believe me.’
‘When you do,’ she said, ‘you show a red light. That frightens me. It’s
like a train whistling and screaming to say there’s going to be an
accident.’
Whereat Mr. Trimblerigg put himself resolutely under the bed-clothes:
and so she left him.
Yet, in the end, she did him good. It is a pathetic fact that from that
day Mr. Trimblerigg left off biting his nails, hoping, perhaps, that
as they grew an instinct for truth would be born in him. Eventually he
even developed a habit of letting them grow quite long: securing, to
that extent, a sense of escape from the supervision of Davidina.
I wish I could add that that little addition of grey growth made him
become more truthful. But when in later years all his hair turned grey
and he wore it long, almost like a woman’s, even that did not alter the
fundamentals of his character.