THE WALLS OF PRIDE
That evening Dr. Beamish returned, bringing with him, as on the
occasion of his first visit, a public examiner. This official came to
assure himself formally of the doctor’s assertion that a cure had been
effected, so that he might make his report thereupon, to the end that
after the lapse of twenty-eight days--provided that in the meanwhile
there were no fresh outbreak of pestilence in either of the other
inmates--the reopening of the house should be permitted.
Holles, awakening from eleven hours of uninterrupted lethargic sleep,
but still heavy with lassitude, stood dully at hand whilst the examiner
held his formal inquisition into the conditions of the patient, of Mrs.
Dallows, and of Holles himself. As the Colonel stood there, gaunt,
pale, unshaven, and dishevelled, Nancy’s eyes considered him very
gravely, whilst he himself dared to turn never so much as a single
glance in her direction.
When the examiner and the doctor passed at last from the room, Holles
dragged himself wearily after them. He followed them below-stairs, and
remained there alone after they had taken their departure.
For twenty-eight days he was doomed to imprisonment in this house, and
he made his dispositions. That night he slept in a back bedroom on the
ground floor. In the morning, having prepared himself breakfast in the
kitchen, a matter in which Mrs. Dallows came to his assistance, he went
to straighten out the dining-room so that it might serve him for a
lodging during the period of incarceration that lay ahead.
He found the room in utter darkness. It had not been entered since
the night of Nancy’s coming thither. He groped his way across to the
shutters, which he remembered to have closed by request of the examiner
after carrying Nancy from the room on that terrible night a week ago.
He pulled them open and let in a flood of daylight upon a scene each
detail of which reminded him poignantly of the happenings of that
night. There lay the chair overturned by Nancy as she retreated before
Buckingham. He imagined the circumstances in which it had fallen. There
on the polished blocks of the floor, under the table--where it had
escaped the eyes of Dr. Beamish--gleamed the blade of his own broken
sword, and yonder in a corner, whither it had rolled, the hilt which
his nerveless fingers had relinquished when he was struck down. On the
floor by the table there was a dull brown patch which he knew to have
been made by his own blood, and there were similar stains on the daybed
and on the napery of the table, which he guessed to have been made by
the blood of Buckingham.
Fallen between the daybed and the window, he found the slender dress
rapier which Buckingham had used. The Duke had dropped it there when
he rose at the end of their grim struggle, and he had not paused to
recover it in his precipitate flight.
For the rest, guttered candles, withered flowers, and rotting fruits
encumbered the table, and the lustre of glass and silver was dulled by
a film of dust. On the sideboard stood the array of dainty dishes that
had been prepared for that infamous intimate supper which had never
been consumed, rotting there, and loading the atmosphere of the room
with the evil odour of decay, which to Holles was like an exhalation of
the ugly memories they held for him.
He flung the windows wide, and spent some time in setting the room to
rights, and ridding it of all that refuse.
Thereafter he lay on the daybed smoking and thinking, and very
listless. And it was thus, in the days that followed, that most of
his hours were spent. If he did not regard himself as actually dead
already, at least he regarded himself as one whose life was ended,
one to whom death would bring a welcome relieving rest. Vaguely he
hoped--he would have prayed, but that he had long since lost the habit
of prayer--that the infection which he supposed present in this house
might claim him for her victim. Morning and evening, and ever and anon
throughout the day, he would open his doublet to finger his breast and
explore his armpits in expectancy, eager to discover upon himself the
tokens of the plague.
But the irony that had ever pursued him thwarted now his desire
of death as it had thwarted his every desire concerned with life.
Living and moving in that house of pestilence, breathing its mephitic
atmosphere, he yet remained as immune as if he had been a “safe man.”
For the first three days his existence was one of completest, listless
idleness. There were books in the house; but he had no desire to read.
He was content to lie there smoking and moping. Each morning Mrs.
Dallows reported to him the condition of the patient, which was one
of steady improvement, and this was confirmed by the doctor, who paid
two visits in the course of those three days. On the second of those
occasions he remained some time in talk with Holles, giving him news of
the dreadful state of things outside.
Whitehall was empty now of all its courtly tenants with the single
exception of the Duke of Albemarle. Honest George Monk had elected
to remain undaunted at his post as the representative of his King,
to perform in the King’s name--and whilst His Majesty was busy at
Salisbury with the amorous pursuit of Miss Frances Stewart--all that
which a king himself should be at hand to perform in time of national
stress, to mitigate the tribulations of his subjects.
Hopefully Holles inquired of Beamish if he knew aught of Buckingham.
Hopefully, that is, because he was expecting to hear that the Duke was
laid low by the infection.
“Gone with the rest,” the doctor informed him. “He left Town for
the North a week ago, aroused to a sudden sense of his duty as Lord
Lieutenant of York by the fact that a French lackey in his household
was stricken with the plague. He’ll be safe enough in York, no doubt.”
“A French lackey, eh? Only a lackey!” The Colonel’s face was overspread
with disappointment. “The devil watches over his own,” he grumbled. “A
wretched lackey pays for the sins of his master. Well, well, I suppose
there is a God--somewhere.”
“Have you no cause to know it, sir, and to give thanks?” Beamish
reproved him. And Holles turned away without answering, beyond a sigh
and a shrug, which but served to increase the doctor’s perplexity over
the behaviour of the members of this odd household. That all was very
far from well there was abundantly clear.
Acting upon a sudden impulse, Dr. Beamish left the room, and mounted
the stairs again--for all that his time was short and his patients
many. Dismissing Mrs. Dallows upon some trivial errand to the kitchen,
he remained closeted for five minutes with Miss Sylvester. That was the
name by which he knew her, the name by which she had chosen to make
herself known to both doctor and nurse.
Whether it was as a result of what he said to her in those five
minutes, or whether other influences were at work, within an hour
of the doctor’s departure, Holles was sought by Mrs. Dallows with a
message that Miss Sylvester was risen, and desired to speak with him.
The eyes of that kindly nurse, sharpened by solicitude, saw him turn
pale and tremble at the summons. His first impulse was to disregard it.
But, before making any reply, he took a turn in that wainscoted sombre
room. Then, with a sigh of resignation, he announced that he would
go. Mrs. Dallows opened the door, and held it for him to pass out,
tactfully refraining from following him.
He was washed and shaven, tolerably dressed, and his long, well-combed,
golden-brown hair hung in long, smooth ringlets to the snowy collar
which Mrs. Dallows had found time to wash and iron for him. Thus he no
longer presented the wild, unkempt appearance that had been his when
last Miss Sylvester had seen him. But there was a haggard dejection
about the lines of his mouth, a haunting sadness about his eyes that
nothing could relieve.
He found Miss Sylvester seated by the open window, where he himself
had sat throughout the greater part of those five days and six nights
when he had so unceasingly watched over her to beat back hungry death
from her pillow. She occupied a great chair set for her there by
Mrs. Dallows, a rug about her knees. She was very pale and weak, yet
her loveliness seemed to draw added charms from her condition. She
wore that gown of ivory white in which she had been carried to this
evil house, and her chestnut hair had been dressed with care and was
intertwined with a thread of pearls. Her long eyes seemed of a darker,
deeper blue than usual, perhaps because of the hollows her illness had
left about them. And there were other changes in her that in their sum
appeared almost to spiritualize her, so that to Holles she seemed to
have recovered something of her lost childhood, of her early youth, and
looked less like Sylvia Farquharson, the idolized player, and more like
the Nancy Sylvester whom he had known and loved so dearly.
Wistfully she looked up at him as he entered, then away through the
open window into the hot sunlight that scorched the almost empty street.
He closed the door, advanced a pace or two, and halted.
“You sent for me,” he said, “else I should not have ventured to
intrude.” And he stood now like a groom awaiting orders.
A tinge of colour crept into her cheeks. One of her slender, tapering
hands, that in these days had grown almost transparent, plucked
nervously at the rug about her knees. Ill at ease as she was, her
speech assumed, despite her, a stilted, formal shape.
“I sent for you, sir, that I might acknowledge the great debt in
which you have placed me; to thank you for your care of me, for your
disregard of your own peril in tending me; in short, sir, for my life,
which had been lost without you.”
She looked at him suddenly as she ceased, whereupon he shifted his
glance to the sunlight in the open so as to avoid the unbearable gaze
of her eyes that were gleaming like wet sapphires.
“You owe me no thanks--no thanks at all,” he said, and his voice was
almost gruff. “I but sought to undo the evil I had done.”
“That ... that was before the plague came to my rescue. In what you did
then, you sought at the risk of your life to make me the only possible
amend, and to deliver me from the evil man into whose power you had
brought me. But the plague, now. It was no fault of yours that I took
that. It was already upon me when you brought me hither.”
“No matter for that,” said he. “Reparation was due. I owed it to
myself.”
“You did not owe it to yourself to risk your life for me.”
“My life, madam, is no great matter. A life misused, misspent, has no
great value. It was the least that I could offer.”
“Perhaps,” she answered gently. “But also it was the most, and, as I
have said, far more than you owed.”
“I do not think so. But the matter is not worth contending.”
He did not help her. Persuaded of the scorn that must underline her
utterances, however smooth--because conscious that scorn was his only
desert--he accepted her words as expressions of a pitying gratitude
that offended. He stood before her, overwhelmed by the consciousness
of his unworthiness, in a mood of the most abject humility. But
unconsciously, without suspecting it, he had empanoplied this humility
in pride. His desire, above all, was to withdraw from an interview that
could be nothing but a source of pain.
But she detained him, persisting in what he accounted her cruel charity.
“At least the reparation you have made is a very full one.”
“It would comfort me to hear you say it, could I believe you,” he
answered grimly, and would have taken his leave of her on that but that
she stayed him by her interjection.
“Why should you not believe me? Why should I be other than sincere in
my desire to thank you?”
He looked at her at last, and in his eyes she saw some reflection of
the pain he was suffering.
“Oh, I believe you sincere in that. You wish to thank me. It is
natural, I suppose. You thank me; but you despise me. Your gratitude
cannot temper your contempt. It is not possible.”
“Are you so sure?” she asked him gently, and her eyes were very piteous.
“Sure? What else can I be? What else is possible? Do I not loathe and
despise myself? Am I so unconscious of my own infamy that I should
befool myself into the thought that any part of it can escape you?”
“Don’t!” she said. “Ah, don’t!” But in the sorrow in her face he
read no more than the confirmation of the very thing she was feebly
attempting to deny.
“Is it worth while to close our eyes to a truth so self-evident?” he
cried. “For years I sought you, Nan, a man without a stain upon his
name, to find you at last in an hour in which I was so besmirched
that I could not bear your eyes upon me. The very act that by a cruel
irony of chance brought us together here at last was an act by which
I touched the very bottom of the pit of infamy. Then--that dreadful
night--you regarded me rightly with loathing. Now you regard me with
pity because I am loathsome. Out of that pity, out of your charity, you
fling me thanks that are not due, since what I have done was done in
mitigation of my offence. What more is there to say? If this house were
not locked, and I a prisoner here, I should have gone by now. I should
have departed in that blessed moment that Beamish announced your danger
at an end, taking care that our paths should never cross again, that I
might never again offend you with the sight of my loathsomeness or the
necessity to render thanks for benefits received from unclean hands,
that you properly despise.”
“You think that sums all up?” she asked him, sadly incredulous. “It
does not. It leaves still something to be said--indeed, a deal.”
“Spare it me,” he begged her passionately. “Out of that same charity
that bids you thank me, spare me.” Then, more briskly, with a certain
finality, he added: “If you have commands for me, madam, I shall be
below until this house is reopened, and we can go our separate ways
again.”
He bowed formally, and turned away.
“Randal!” she called to him as he reached the door. He paused, his firm
resolve beaten down by that pleading utterance of his name. “Randal,
won’t you tell me how ... how you came into ... into the position in
which I found you here? Won’t you tell me that? Won’t you let me know
all--all--so that I may judge for myself?”
A moment he stood there, white to the lips and trembling, fighting his
pride--that pride which was masquerading in the garment of humility,
and so deceived him that he suffered it to prevail.
“Judge me, madam, upon the evidence you possess. It is sufficient to
enable you to do me justice. Nothing that went before, no vicissitudes
of my vagrant life, can extenuate the thing you know of me. I am a
scoundrel, a loathsomeness, an offence, and you know me to be this--you
in whose eyes I would ever have appeared as a man of shining honour.
Oh, God pity me! Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”
Her eyes were suddenly aswim in tears.
“I see that perhaps you judge yourself too hardly. Let me judge for
myself, Randal. Don’t you see that I am aching to forgive? Is my
forgiveness nothing to you?”
“It would be all,” he answered her. “But I could never believe in
it. Never. You are aching to forgive, you say. Oh, blessed, healing
words! But why is this? Because you are grateful to me for the life
I have helped to save. That is the true source of your pity for my
soul’s deformity, which is urging you to utter this forgiveness. But
behind that gratitude and that forgiveness there must ever remain the
contempt, the loathing of this deformity of mine. It must be so. I
know it, or I know nothing. Because of that....” He broke off, leaving
the sentence there, completing it with a wry smile and a despairing
shrug. But she saw neither. She had averted her eyes again, and she
was looking straight before her into the sunlight, across to the
black-timbered, yellow houses opposite which were blurred in her sight
by tears.
Softly he went out, and closed the door. She heard him go, and suffered
him to do so, making no further attempt to stay him, knowing not what
to say to combat his desperate convictions.
Heavy-footed he went down the stairs, back to that room where he had
his being. And as he went his thoughts confirmed him. They had met at
last, those two, only that they might part again. Their ways could
never lie together. Overshadowing their joint lives there must ever be
the loathly memory of that irrevocable thing he had done. Even if he
were not the broken vagrant that he was, even if he had anything to
offer in life to the woman of his dreams, his action when he played
the jackal for Buckingham must render impossible between them any
tenderness that should be sincere and unalloyed.
He was in a mood from which there was no escape. Pride hemmed his
soul about with walls of humility and shame, and there was no issue
thence save by the door that the plague might open. Yet even the plague
refused to stand his friend.