wrong tack. What was the use of laying out, so to speak, all that
he had done in the sight of these angry eyes? Besides, a certain
high pride restrained him.
Louie looked a trifle disconcerted, and her flush deepened. Her
audacious attempt to put him in the wrong and provide herself with
a grievance could not be carried on. She took refuge in passion.
'Oh, I dare say you think you've done a precious lot!' she said,
sitting straight up and locking her hands round her knee, while the
whole frame of her stiffened and quivered. 'I suppose you think
other people would think so too. _I_ don't care! It don't
matter to me. You're the only belonging I've got--who else was
there for me to look to? Oh, it is all very fine! All I know is, I
can't stand my life any more! If you can't do anything, I'll just
pack up my traps and go. _Somebody_'ll have to make it easier
for me, that's all! Last week--I was out of the house--he found out
where I kept my money, he broke the lock open, and when I got home
there was nothing. _Nothing_, I tell you!' Her voice rose to a
shrillness that made David look to see that the door between them
and Lucy was securely closed. 'And I'd promised a whole lot of
things to the church for Easter, and Cecile and I haven't got a rag
between us; and as for the rent, the landlord may whistle for it!
Oh! the beast!' she said, between her teeth, while the fierce tears
stood in her eyes.
Lucy--any woman of normal shrewdness, putting two and two
together--would have allowed these complaints about half their
claimed weight. Upon David--unconsciously inclined to measure all
emotion by his own standard--they produced an immediate and deep
impression.
'You poor thing!' he murmured, as he stood looking down upon her.
She tossed her head, as though resenting his compassion.
'Yes, I'm about tired of it! I thought I'd come over and tell you
that. Now you know,--and if you hear things you don't like, don't
blame me, that's all!'
Her great eyes blazed into his. He understood her. Her child--the
priests--had, so far, restrained her. Now--what strange mixture of
shameless impulse--curiosity, greed, reckless despair--had driven
her here that she might threaten him thus!
'Ah, I dare say you think I've had a gay life of it over there with
your money,' she went on, not allowing him to speak. '_My God!_'
She shrugged her shoulders, with a scornful laugh, while the
tempest gathered within her.
'Don't I know perfectly that for years I have been one of the most
beautiful women in Paris! Ask the men who have painted me for the
Salon--ask that brute who might have made a fortune out of me if he
hadn't been the sot he is! And what have I got by it? What do other
women who are not a tenth part as good-looking as I am get by it? A
comfortable life, anyway! _Eh bien! essayons!--nous aussi._'
The look she flung at him choked the words on his lips.
'When I think of these ten years,' she cried, 'I just wonder at
myself. There,--what you think about it I don't know, and I don't
care. I might have had a good time, and I've had a _devil's_
time. And, upon my word, I think I'll make a change!'
In her wild excitement she sprang up and began to pace the narrow
room.
David watched her, fighting with himself, and with that inbred
antipathy of temperament which seemed to paralyse both will and
judgment. Was the secret of it that in their profound unlikeness
they were yet so much alike?
Then he went up to her and made her sit down again.
'Let me have a word now,' he said quietly, though his hand as it
gripped hers had a force of which he was unconscious. 'You say you
wonder at yourself. Well, I can tell you this: other people have
wondered too! When I left you in Paris ten years ago, I tell you
frankly, I had no hopes. I said to myself--don't rage at me!--with
that way of looking at things, and with such a husband, what chance
is there? And for some years now, Louie, I confess to you, I have
been simply humbled and amazed to see what--what'--his voice sank
and shook--'_love--and the fear of God_--can do. It has been
hard to be miserable and poor--I know that--but you have cared for
Cecile, and you have feared to shut yourself out from good people
who spoke to you in God's name. Don't do yourself injustice.
Believe in yourself. Look back upon these years and be thankful.
With all their miseries they have been a kind of victory! Will you
throw them away _now_? But your child is growing up and will
understand. And there are hands to help--mine, always--always.'
He held out his to her, smiling. He could not have analysed his own
impulse--this strange impulse which had led him to bless instead of
cursing. But its effect upon Louie was startling. She had looked
for, perhaps in her fighting mood she had ardently desired, an
outburst of condemnation, against which her mad pleasure in the
sound of her own woes and hatreds might once more spend itself. And
instead of blaming and reproaching he had--
She stared at him. Then with a sudden giving way, which was a matter
partly of nerves and partly of surprise, she let her two arms fall
upon the edge of the chair, and dropping her head upon them, burst
out into wild sobbing.
His own eyes were wet. He soothed her hurriedly and incoherently,
told her he would spare her all the money he could; that he and
Lucy would do their best, but that she must not suppose they were
very rich. He did not regard all his money as his own.
He went on to explain to her something of his business position.
Her sobbing slackened and ceased. And presently, his mood changing
instinctively with hers, he became more vague and cautious in
statement; his tone veered back towards that which he was
accustomed to use to her. For, once her burst of passion over, he
felt immediately that she was once more criticising everything that
he said and did in her own interest.
'Oh, I know you've become a regular Communist,' she said sullenly
at last, drying her eyes in haste.' Well, I tell you, I must have a
hundred pounds. I can't do with a penny less than that.'
He tried to get out of her for what precise purposes she wanted it,
and whether her husband had stolen from her the whole of the
quarter's allowance he had just sent her. She answered evasively;
he felt that she was telling him falsehoods; and once more his
heart grew dry within him.
'Well,' he said at last with a certain decision, 'I will do it if I
can, and I think I can do it. But, Louie, understand that I have
got Lucy and the child to think for, that I am not alone.'
'I should think she had got more than she could expect!' cried
Louie, putting her hair straight with trembling hands.
His cheek flushed at the sneer, but before he could reply she said
abruptly:
'Have you ever told her about Paris?'
'No,' he said, with equal abruptness, his mouth taking a stern
line, 'and unless I am forced to do so I never shall. That you
understand, I know, for I spoke to you about it in Paris. My past
died for me when I asked Lucy to be my wife. I do not ask you to
remember this. I take it for granted.'
'I saw that woman the other day,' said Louie with a strange smile,
as she sat staring into the fire.
He started, but he did not reply. He went to straighten some papers
on his table. It seemed to him that he did not want her to say a
word more, and yet he listened for it.
'I remember they used to call her pretty,' said Louie, a hateful
scorn shining in her still reddened eyes. 'She is just a little
frump now--nobody would ever look at her twice. They say her
husband leads her a life. He poisoned himself at an operation and
has gone half crippled. She has to keep them both. She doesn't give
herself the airs she used to, anyway.'
David could bear it no longer.
'I think you had better go and take Cecile to bed,' he said
peremptorily. 'I heard it strike nine a few minutes ago. I will go
and talk business to Lucy.'
She went with a careless air. As he saw her shut the door his heart
felt once more dead and heavy. A few minutes before there had been
the flutter of a divine presence between them. Now he felt nothing
but the iron grip of character and life. And that little picture
which her last words had left upon the mind--it carried with it a
shock and dreariness he could only escape by hard work, that best
medicine of the soul. He went out early next morning to his
printing-office, spent himself passionately upon a day of
difficulties, and came back refreshed.
For the rest, he talked to Lucy, and with great difficulty
persuaded her in the matter of the hundred pounds. Lucy's
indignation may be taken for granted, and the angry proofs she
heaped on David that Louie was an extravagant story-telling hussy,
who spent everything she could get on dress and personal luxury.
'Why, her dressing-table is like a perfumer's shop!' she cried in
her wrath; 'what she does with all the messes I can't imagine--makes
herself beautiful, I suppose! Why should we pay for it all? And I
tell you she has got a necklace of real pearls. I know they are
real, for she told Lizzie'(Lizzie was the boy's nurse)'that she
always took them about with her to keep them safe out of her
husband's clutches--just imagine her talking to the girl like that!
When will you be able to give _me_ real pearls, and where do
you suppose she got them?'
David preferred not to inquire. What could he do, he asked himself
in despair--what even could he know, unless Louie chose that he
should know it? But she, on the contrary, carefully avoided the
least recurrence to the threats of her first talk with him.
Ultimately, however, he brought his wife round, and Louie was
informed that she could have her hundred pounds, which should be
paid her on the day of her departure, but that nothing more, beyond
her allowance, could or should be given her during the current
year.
She took the promise very coolly, but certainly made herself more
agreeable after it was given. She dressed up Cecile and set her
dancing in the evenings, weird dances of a Spanish type,
alternating between languor and a sort of 'possession,' which had
been taught the child by a moustached violinist from Madrid, who
admired her mother and paid Louie a fantastic and stormy homage
through her child. She also condescended to take an interest in
Lucy's wardrobe. The mingled temper and avidity with which Lucy
received her advances may be imagined. It made her mad to have it
constantly implied that her gowns and bonnets would not be worn by
a maid-of-all-work in Paris. At the same time, when Louie's fingers
had been busy with them it was as plain to her as to anyone else
that they became her twice as well as they had before. So she
submitted to be pinned and pulled about and tried on, keeping as
much as possible on her dignity all the time, and reddening with
fresh wrath each time that Louie made it plain to her that she
thought her sister-in-law a provincial little fool, and was only
troubling herself about her to pass the time.
Dora, of course, came up to see Louie, and Louie was much more
communicative to her than to either Lucy or David. She told stories
of her husband which made Dora's hair stand on end; but she boasted
in great detail of her friendships with certain Legitimist ladies
of the bluest blood, with one of whom she had just held a
_quete_ for some Catholic object on the stairs of the Salon.
'I was in blue and pink with a little silver,' she said, looking
quickly behind her to see that Lucy was not listening. 'And Cecile
was a fairy, with spangled wings--the sweetest thing you ever saw.
We were both in the illustrated papers the week after, but as
nobody took any notice of Madame de C--she has behaved like a
washerwoman to me ever since. As if I could help her complexion or
her age!'
But above all did she boast herself against Dora in Church matters.
She would go to St. Damian's on Sunday, triumphantly announcing
that she should have to confess it as a sin when she got home, and
afterwards, when Dora, as her custom was, came out to early dinner
with the Grieves, Louie could not contain herself on the subject of
the dresses, the processions, the decorations, the flowers, and
ceremonial trappings in general, with which _she_ might, if
she liked, regale herself either at Ste. Eulalie or the Madeleine,
in comparison with the wretched show offered by St. Damian's. Dora,
after an early service and much Sunday-school, sat looking pale and
weary under the scornful information poured out upon her. She was
outraged by Louie's tone; yet she was stung by her contempt. Once
her gentleness was roused to speech, and she endeavoured to give
some of the reasons for rejecting the usurped authority of the
'Bishop of Rome,' in which she had been drilled at different times.
But she floundered and came to grief. Her adversary laughed at her,
and in the intervals of rating Cecile for having inked her dress,
flaunted some shrill controversy which left them all staring. Louie
vindicating, the claims of the Holy See with much unction and an
appropriate diction! It seemed to David, as he listened, that the
irony of life could hardly be carried further.
On the following day, David, not without a certain consciousness,
said to John Dalby, his faithful helper through many years, and of
late his partner:
'My sister is up at our place, John, with her little girl. Lucy
would be very glad if you would go in this evening to see them.'
John, who was already aware of the advent of Madame Montjoie,
accepted the invitation and went. Louie received him with a manner
half mocking--half patronising--and made no effort whatever to be
agreeable to him. She was preoccupied; and the stout, shy man in
his new suit only bored her. As for him, he sat and watched her;
his small, amazed eyes took in her ways with Cecile, alternately
boastful and tyrannical; her airs towards Lucy; her complete
indifference to her brother's life and interests. When he got up to
go, he took leave of her with all the old timid _gaucherie_.
But if, when he entered the room, there had been anything left in
his mind of the old dream, he was a wholly free man when he
recrossed the threshold. He walked home thinking much of a small
solicitor's daughter, who worshipped at the Congregational chapel
he himself attended. He had been at David Grieve's side all these
years; he loved him probably more than he would now love any woman;
he devoted himself with ardour to the printing and selling of the
various heretical works and newspapers published by Grieve & Co.;
and yet for some long time past he had been--and was likely to
remain--a man of strong religious convictions, of a common
Evangelical type.
The second week of Louie's stay was a much greater trial than the
first to all concerned. She grew tired of dressing and patronising
Lucy; her sharp eyes and tongue found out all her sister-in-law's
weak points; the two children were a fruitful source of jarring and
jealousy between the mothers; and by the end of the week their
relation was so much strained, and David had so much difficulty in
keeping the peace, that he could only pine for the Monday morning
which was to see Louie's departure. Meanwhile nothing occurred to
give him back his momentary hold upon her. She took great care not
to be alone with him. It was as though she felt the presence of a
new force in him, and would give it no chance of affecting her in
mysterious and incalculable ways.
On the Saturday before her last Sunday, Reuben Grieve arrived in
Manchester--with his wife. His nephew's letter and invitation had
thrown the old man into a great flutter. Ultimately his curiosity
as to David's home and child--David himself he had seen several
times since the marriage--and the desire, which the more prosperous
state of his own circumstances allowed him to feel, to see what
Louie might be like after all these years--decided him to go. And
when he told Hannah of his intended journey, he found, to his
amazement, that she was minded to go too. 'If yo'll tell me when yo
gan me a jaunt last, I'll be obliged to yo!' she said sourly, and
he at once felt himself a selfish brute that he should have thought
of taking the little pleasure without her.
When they were seated in the railway-carriage, he broke out in a
sudden excitement:
'Wal, I never thowt, Hannah, to see yo do thissens naw moor!'
'Aye, yo wor allus yan to mak t' warst o' things,' she said to him,
as she slowly settled herself in her corner.
Nevertheless, Reuben's feeling was amply justified. It had been a
resurrection. The clever young doctor, brimful of new methods, who
had brought her round, had arrived just in time to stop the process
of physical deterioration before it had gone too far; and the
recovery of power both on the paralysed side and in general health
had been marvellous. She walked with a stick, and was an old and
blanched woman before her time. But her indomitable spirit was once
more provided with its necessary means of expression. She was at
least as rude as ever, and it was as clear as anything can be in
the case of a woman who has never learnt to smile, that her visit
to Manchester--the first for ten years--was an excitement and
satisfaction to her.
David met them at the station; but Reuben persisted in going to an
old-fashioned eating-house in the centre of the city, where he had
been accustomed to stay on the occasion of his rare visits to
Manchester, in spite of his nephew's repeated offers of
hospitality.
'Noa, Davy, noa,' he said, 'yo're a gen'leman now, and yo conno' be
moidered wi' oos. We'st coom and see yo--thank yo kindly,--bit
we'st do for oursels i' th' sleepin' way.'
To which Hannah gave a grim and energetic assent.
When Louie had been told of their expected arrival she opened her
black eyes to their very widest extent.
'Well, you'd better keep Aunt Hannah and me out of each other's
way,' she remarked. 'I shall let her have it, you'll see. I'm bound
to.' A remark that David did his best to forget, seeing that the
encounter was now past averting.
When on Sunday afternoon the door of the Grieves's sitting-room
opened to admit Hannah and Reuben Grieve, Louie was lying half
asleep in an armchair by the fire, Cecile and Sandy were playing
with bricks in the middle of the floor, and Dora and Lucy were
chatting on the sofa.
Lucy, who had seen Reuben before, but had never set eyes on Hannah,
sprang up ill at ease and awkward, but genuinely anxious to behave
nicely to her husband's relations.
'Won't you take a chair? I'll go and call David. He's in the next
room. This is Miss Lomax. Louie!'
Startled by the somewhat sharp call, Louie sat up and rubbed her
eyes.
Hannah, resting on her stick, was standing in the middle of
the floor. At sight of the familiar tyrannous face, grown
parchment-white in place of its old grey hue--of the tall gaunt
figure robed in the Sunday garb of rusty black which Louie
perfectly remembered, and surmounted by the old head-gear--the
stiff frizzled curls held in place by two small combs on the
temples, the black bandeau across the front of the head, and the
towering bonnet--Louie suddenly flushed and rose.
'How do you do?' she said in a cool off-hand way, holding out her
hand, which Hannah's black cotton glove barely touched. 'Well, Uncle
Reuben, do you think I'm grown? I have had about time to, anyway,
since you saw me. That's my little girl.'
With a patronising smile she pushed forward Cecile. The
short-sighted tremulous Reuben, staring uncomfortably about him at
the town splendours in which 'Davy' lived, had to have the child's
hand put into his by Dora before he could pull himself together
enough to respond.
'I'm glad to see tha, my little dear.' he said, awkwardly dropping
his hat and umbrella as he stooped to salute her. 'I'm sure yo're
varra kind, miss'--This was said apologetically to Dora, who had
picked up his belongings and put them on a chair. 'Wal, Louie, she
doan't feature her mither mich, as I can see.'
He looked hurriedly at his wife for confirmation. Hannah, who had
seated herself on the highest and plainest chair she could find,
stared the child up and down, and then slowly removed her eyes,
saying nothing. Instantly her manner woke the old rage in Louie,
who was observing her excitedly.
'Come here to me, Cecile. I'd be sorry, anyway, if you were like
what your mother was at your age. You'd be a poor, ill-treated,
half-starved little wretch if you were!'
Hannah started, but not unpleasantly. Her grim mouth curved with a
sort of satisfaction. It was many years since she had enjoyed those
opportunities for battle which Louie's tempers had once so freely
afforded her.
'She's nobbut a midge,' she remarked audibly to Dora, who had just
tried to propitiate her by a footstool. 'The chilt looks as thoo
she'd been fed on spiders or frogs, or summat o' that soart.'
At this moment David came in, just in time to prevent another
explosion from Louie. He was genuinely glad to see his guests; his
feeling of kinship was much stronger now than it ever had been in
his youth; and in these years of independent, and on the whole
happy, living he had had time to forget even Hannah's enormities.
'Well, have you got a comfortable inn?' he asked Reuben presently,
when some preliminaries were over.
'I thank yo kindly, Davy,' said Reuben cautiously, 'we're meeterly
weel sarved; bit yo conno look for mich fro teawn folk.'
'What are yo allus so mealy-mouthed for?' said his wife
indignantly. 'Why conno yo say reet out 'at it's a pleeace not fit
for ony decent dog to put his head in, an' an ill-mannert
daggle-tail of a woman to keep it, as I'd like to sweep out wi th'
bits of a morning, an' leave her on th' muck-heap wheer she
belongs?'
David laughed. To an ear long accustomed to the monotony of town
civilities there was a not unwelcome savour of the moors even in
these brutalities of Hannah's.
'Sandy, where are you?' he said, looking round. 'Have you had a look
at him, Aunt Hannah?'
Sandy, who was sitting in the midst of his bricks sucking his thumb
patiently till Cecile should be given back to him by her mother,
and these invaders should be somehow dispersed, looked up and gave
his father a sleepy and significant nod, as much as to say, 'Leave
me alone, and turn these people out.'
But David lifted him up, and carried him off for exhibition. Hannah
looked at him, as he lay lazily back on his father's arm; his fair
curls straying over David's coat, his cheek flushed by the heat.
'Aye, he's a gradely little chap,' she said, more graciously it
seemed to David than he ever remembered to have heard Hannah Grieve
speak before. His paternal vanity was instantly delighted.
'Sit up, Sandy, and tell your great-uncle and aunt about the fine
games you've been having with your cousin.'
But Sandy was lost in quite other reflections. He looked out upon
Hannah and Reuben with grave filmy eyes, as though from a vast
distance, and said absently:
'Daddy!'
'Yes, Sandy, speak up.'
'Daddy, when everybody in the world was babies, who put 'em to bed?'
The child spoke as usual with a slow flute-like articulation, so
that every word could be heard. Reuben and Hannah turned and looked
at each other.
'Lord alive!' cried Hannah 'whativer put sich notions into th'
chilt's yed?'
David, with a happy twinkle in his eye, held up a hand for silence.
'I don't know, Sandy; give it up.'
Sandy considered a second or two, then said, with the sigh of one
who relinquishes speculation in favor of the conventional solution:
'I s'pose God did.'
His tone was dejected, as though he would gladly have come to
another conclusion if he could.
'Reuben,' said Hannah with severity, 'hand me that sugar-stick.'
Reuben groped in his pockets for the barley-sugar, which, in spite
of Hannah's scoffs, he had bought in Market Street the evening
before, 'for t' childer.' He watched his wife in gaping astonishment
as he saw her approaching Sandy, with blandishments which, rough
and clumsy as they were, had nevertheless the effect of beguiling
that young man on to the lap where barley-sugar was to be had.
Hannah fed him triumphantly, making loud remarks on his beauty and
cleverness.
Meanwhile Louie stood on the other side of the fire, holding Cecile
close against her, with a tight defiant grip--her lip twitching
contemptuously. David, always sensitively alive to her presence and
her moods, insisted in the midst of Sandy's feast that Cecile
should have her share. Sandy held out the barley-sugar, following
it with wistful eyes. Louie beat down Cecile's grasping hand. 'You
shan't spoil your tea--you'll be sick with that stuff!' she said
imperiously. Hannah turned, and brought a slow venomous scrutiny to
bear upon her niece--on the slim tall figure in the elegant
Parisian dress, the daintily curled and frizzled head, the wild
angry eyes. Then she withdrew her glance, contented. Louie's
evident jealousy appeased her. She had come to Manchester with one
fixed determination--not to be 'talked foine to by that hizzy.'
At this juncture tea made its appearance, Lucy having some time ago
given up the sit-down tea in the dining-room, which was the natural
custom of her class, as not genteel. She seated herself nervously
to pour it out. Hannah had at the very beginning put her down 'as a
middlin' soart o' person,' and vouchsafed her very little notice.
'Auntie Dora! auntie Dora!' cried Sandy, escaping from Hannah's
knee, 'I'm coming to sit by zoo.'
And as soon as he had got comfortably into her pocket, he pulled
her head down and whispered to her, his thoughts running as before
in the theological groove, 'Auntie Dora, God made me--and God made
Cecile--_did_ God make that one?'
And he nodded across at Hannah, huddling himself together meanwhile
in a paroxysm of glee and mischief. He was excited by the
flatteries he had been receiving, and Dora, thankful to see that
Hannah had heard nothing, could only quiet him by copious supplies
of bread and butter.
David wooed Cecile to sit on a stool beside him, and things went
smoothly for a time, though Hannah made it clearly evident that
this was not the kind of tea she had expected, and that she 'didn't
howd wi' new-fangled ways o' takkin' your vittles.' Reuben did his
best to cover and neutralise her remarks by gossip to David about
the farm and the valley. 'Eh--it's been nobbut _raggy_ weather
up o' the moors this winter, Davy, an' a great lot o' sheep lost.
Nobbut twothrey o' mine, I thank th' Lord.' But in the midst of a
most unflattering account of the later morals and development of
the Wigson family, Reuben stopped dead short, with a stare at the
door.
'Wal, aa niver!--theer's Mr. Ancrum hissel,--I do uphowd yo!'
And the old man rose with effusion, his queer eyes and face beaming
and blinking with a light of affectionate memory, for Ancrum stood
in the doorway, smiling a mute inquiry at Lucy as to whether he
might come in. David sprang up to bring him into the circle. Hannah
held out an ungracious hand. Never, all these years, had she
forgiven the ex-minister those representations he had once made on
the subject of David's 'prenticing.
Then the new-comer sat down by Reuben cheerily, parrying the
farmer's concern about his altered looks, and watching Louie, who
had thrown him a careless word in answer to his greeting. Dora, who
had come to know him well, and to feel much of the affectionate
reverence for him that David did, in spite of some bewilderment as
to his religious position, went round presently to talk to him, and
Sandy as it happened was left on his stool for a minute or two
forgotten. He asked his mother plaintively for cake, and she did
not hear him. Meanwhile Cecile had cake, and he followed her eating
of it with resentful eyes.
'Come here, Cecile,' said David, 'and hold the cake while I cut it;
there's a useful child.'
He handed a piece to Reuben, and then put the next into Cecile's
hand.
'Ready for some more, little woman?'
Cecile in a furtive squirrel-like way seized the piece and was
retiring with it, when Sandy, beside himself, jumped from his
stool, rushed at his cousin and beat her wildly with his small
fists.
'Yo're a geedy thing--a geedy 'gustin' thing!' he cried, sobbing
partly because he wanted the cake, still more because, after his
exaltation on Hannah's knee, he had been so unaccountably
neglected. To see Cecile battening on a second piece while he was
denied a first was more than could be borne.
'You little viper, you!' exclaimed Louie, and springing up, she
swept across to Sandy, and boxed his ears smartly, just as she was
accustomed to box Cecile's, whenever the fancy took her.
The child raised a piercing cry, and David caught him up.
'Give him to me, David, give him to me,' cried Lucy, who had almost
upset the tea-table in her rush to her child. 'I'll see whether that
sister of yours shall beat and abuse my boy in my own house! Oh,
she may beat her own child as much as she pleases, she does it all
day long! If she were a poor person she would be had up.'
Her face glowed with passion. The exasperation of many days spoke
in her outburst. David, himself trembling with anger, in vain tried
to quiet her and Sandy.
'Ay, I reckon she maks it hot wark for them 'at ha to live wi her,'
said Hannah audibly, looking round on the scene with a certain
enjoyment which contrasted with the panic and distress of the rest.
Louie, who was holding Cecile--also in tears--in her arms, swept
her fierce, contemptuous gaze from Lucy to her ancient enemy.
'You must be putting in _your_ word, must you?--you old toad,
you--you that robbed us of our money till your own husband was
ashamed of you!'
And, totally regardless of the presence of Dora and Ancrum, and of
the efforts made to silence her by Dora or by the flushed and
unhappy Reuben, she descended on her foe. She flung charge after
charge in Hannah's face, showing the minutest and most vindictive
memory for all the sordid miseries of her childhood; and then when
her passion had spent itself on her aunt, she returned to Lucy,
exulting in the sobs and the excitement she had produced. In vain
did David try either to silence her or to take Lucy away. Nothing
but violence could have stopped the sister's tongue; his wife,
under a sort of fascination of terror and rage, would not move.
Flinging all thoughts of her dependence on David--of the money she
had come to ask--of her leave-taking on the morrow--to the winds,
Louie revenged herself amply for her week's unnatural self-control,
and gave full rein to a mad propensity which had been gradually
roused and spurred to ungovernable force by the trivial incidents
of the afternoon. She made mock of Lucy's personal vanity; she
sneered at her attempts to ape her betters, shrilly declaring that
no one would ever take her for anything else than what she was, the
daughter of a vulgar cheese-paring old hypocrite; and, finally, she
attacked Sandy as a nasty, greedy, abominable little monkey, not
fit to associate with her child, and badly in want of the stick.
Then slowly she retreated to the door out of breath, the wild
lightnings of her eyes flashing on them still. David was holding
the hysterical Lucy, while Dora was trying to quiet Sandy.
Otherwise a profound silence had fallen on them all, a silence
which seemed but to kindle Louie's fury the more.
'Ah, you think you've got him in your power, him and his money, you
little white-livered cat!' she cried, standing in the doorway, and
fixing Lucy with a look beneath which her sister-in-law quailed,
and hid her face on David's arm. 'You think you'll stop him giving
it to them that have a right to look to him? Perhaps you'd better
look out; perhaps there are people who know more about him than
you. Do you think he would ever have looked at you, you little
powsement, if he hadn't been taken on the rebound?'
She gave a mad laugh as she flung out the old Derbyshire word of
abuse, and stood defying them, David and all. David strode forward
and shut the door upon her. Then he went tenderly up to his wife,
and took her and Sandy into the library.
The sound of Cecile's wails could be heard in the distance. The
frightened Reuben turned and looked at his wife. She had grown
paler even than before, but her eyes were all alive.
'A racklesome, natterin' creetur as ivir I seed,' she said calmly;
'I allus telt tha, Reuben Grieve, what hoo'd coom to. It's bred in
her--that's yan thing to be hodden i' mind. But I'll shift her in
double quick-sticks if she ever cooms meddlin' i' _my_ house,
Reuben Grieve--soa yo know.'
'She oughtn't to stay here,' said Ancrum in a quick undertone to
Dora; 'she might do that mother and child a mischief.'
Dora sat absorbed in her pity for David, in her passionate sympathy
for this home that was as her own.
'She is going to-morrow, thank God!' she said with a long breath;
'oh, what an awful woman!'
Ancrum looked at her with a little sad smile.
'Whom are you sorry for?' he asked. 'Those two in there?' and he
nodded towards the library. 'Think again, Miss Dora. There is one
face that will haunt me whenever I think of this--the face of that
French child.'
All the afternoon visitors dispersed. The hours passed. Lucy, worn
out, had gone to bed with a crying which seemed to have in it some
new and heavy element she would not speak of, even to David. The
evening meal came, and there was no sign or sound from that room
upstairs where Louie had locked herself in.
David stood by the fire in the dining-room, his lips sternly set.
He had despatched a servant to Louie's door with an offer to send
up food for her and Cecile. But the girl had got no answer. Was he
bound to go--bound to bring about the possible renewal of a
degrading scene?
At this moment Lizzie, the little nurse, tapped at the door.
'If you please, sir--'
'Yes. Anything wrong with Master Sandy?'
David went to the door in a tremor. 'He won't go to sleep, sir. He
wants you, and I'm afraid he'll disturb mistress again.'
David ran upstairs.
'Sandy, what do you want?'
Sandy was crying violently, far down under the bedclothes. When
David drew him out, he was found to be grasping a piece of
crumbling cake, sticky with tears.
'It's Cecile's cake,' he sobbed into his father's ear. 'I want to
give it her.'
And in fact, after his onslaught upon her, Cecile had dropped the
offending cake, which he had instantly picked up the moment before
Louie struck him. He had held it tight gripped ever since, and
repentance was busy in his small heart.
David thought a moment.
'Come with me, Sandy,' he said at last, and, wrapping up the child
in an old shawl that hung near, he carried him off to Louie's door.
'Louie!' he called, after his knock, in a low voice, for he was
uncomfortably aware that his household was on the watch for
developments.
For a while there was no answer. Sandy, absorbed in the interest of
the situation, clung close to his father and stopped crying.
At last Louie suddenly flung the door wide open.
'What do you want?' she said defiantly, with the gesture and
bearing of a tragic actress. She was, however, deadly white, and
David, looking past her, saw that Cecile was lying wide awake in
her little bed.
'Sandy wants to give Cecile her cake,' he said quietly, 'and to
tell her that he is sorry for striking her.'
He carried his boy up to Cecile. A smile flashed over the child's
worn face. She held out her little arms. David, infinitely touched,
laid down Sandy, and the children crooned together on the same
pillow, he trying to stuff the cake into Cecile's mouth, she gently
refusing.
'She's ill,' said Louie abruptly, 'she's feverish--I want a
doctor.'
'We can get one directly,' he said. 'Will you come down and have
some food? Lucy has gone to bed. If Lizzie comes and sits by the
children, perhaps they will go to sleep. I can carry Sandy back
later.'
Louie paused irresolutely. Then she went up to the bed, knelt down
by it, and took Cecile in her arms.
'You can take him away,' she said, pointing to Sandy. 'I will put
her to sleep. Don't you send me anything to eat. I want a doctor.
And if you won't order a fly for me at twenty minutes to nine
to-morrow, I will go out myself, that's all.'
'Louie!' he cried, holding out his hand to her in despair, 'why will
you treat us in this way--what have we done to you?'
'Never you mind,' she said sullenly, gathering the child to her and
confronting him with steady eyes. There was a certain magnificence
in their wide unconscious despair--in this one fierce passion.
She and Lucy did not meet again. In the morning David paid her her
hundred pounds, and took her and Cecile to the station, a doctor
having seen the child the night before, and prescribed medicine,
which had given her a quiet night. Louie barely thanked him for the
money. She was almost silent and still very pale.
Just before they parted, the thought of the tyranny of such a
nature, of the life to which she was going back, wrung the
brother's heart. The outrage of the day before dropped from his
mind as of no account, effaced by sterner realities.
'Write to me, Louie!' he said to her just as the train was moving
off; 'I could always come if there was trouble--or Dora.'
She did not answer, and her hand dropped from his. But he
remembered afterwards that her eyes were fixed upon him, as long as
the train was in sight, and the picture of her dark possessed look
will be with him to the end.
CHAPTER VII
It was a warm April Sunday. Lucy and Dora were pacing up and down
in the garden, and Lucy was talking in a quick, low voice.
'Oh! there was something, Dora. You know as well as I do there was
something. That awful woman didn't say that for nothing. I suppose
he'd tell me if I asked him.'
'Then why don't you ask him?' said Dora, with a little frown.
Lucy gathered a sprig of budding lilac, and restlessly stripped off
its young green.
'It isn't very pleasant,' she said at last, slowly. 'I dare say it's
silly to expect your husband never to have looked at anybody
else--'
She paused again, unable to explain herself. Dora glanced at her,
and was somewhat struck by her thin and worn appearance. She had
often, moreover, seemed to her cousin to be fretting during these
last weeks. Not that there was much difference in her ways with
David and Sandy. But her small vanities, prejudices, and passions
were certainly less apparent of late; she ordered her two servants
about less; she was less interested in her clothes, less eager for
social amusement. It was as though something clouding and dulling
had passed over a personality which was naturally restless and
vivacious.
Yet it was only to-day, in the course of some conversation about
Louie, of whom nothing had been heard since her departure, that
Lucy had for the first time broken silence on the subject of those
insolent words of her sister-in-law, which Ancrum and Dora had
listened to with painful shock, while to Reuben and Hannah,
pre-occupied with their own long-matured ideas of Louie, they had
been the mere froth of a venomous tongue.
'Why didn't you ask him about it at first--just after?' Dora
resumed.
'I didn't want to,' said Lucy, after a minute, and then would say
no more. But she walked along, thinking, unhappily, of the moment
when David had taken her into the library to be out of the sound of
Louie's rage; of her angry desire to ask him questions, checked by
a childish fear she could not analyse, as to what the answers might
be; of his troubled, stormy face; and of the tender ways by which
he tried to calm and comfort her. It had seemed to her that once or
twice he had been on the point of saying something grave and
unusual, but in the end he had refrained. Louie had gone away;
their everyday life had begun again; he had been very full, in the
intervals of his hard daily business, of the rebuilding of the
James Street court, and of the apprentices' school; and, led by a
variety of impulses--by a sense of jeopardised possession and a
conscience speaking with new emphasis and authority--she had taken
care that he should talk to her about both; she had haunted him in
the library, and her presence there, once the signal of antagonism
and dispute, had ceased to have any such meaning for him. Her
sympathy was not very intelligent, and there was at times a
childish note of sulkiness and reluctance in it; she was extremely
ready to say, 'I told you so,' if anything went wrong; but,
nevertheless, there was a tacit renunciation at the root of her new
manner to him which he perfectly understood, and rewarded in his
own ardent, affectionate way.
As she sauntered along in this pale gleam of sun, now drinking in
the soft April wind, now stooping to look at the few clumps of
crocuses and daffodils which were pushing through the blackened
earth, Lucy had once more a vague sense that her life this
spring--this past year--had been hard. It was like the feeling of
one who first realises the intensity of some long effort or
struggle in looking back upon it. Her little life had been breathed
into by a divine breath, and growth, expansion, had brought a pain
and discontent she had never known before.
Dora meanwhile had her own thoughts. She was lost in memories of
that first talk of hers with David Grieve after his return from
Paris, with the marks of his fierce, mysterious grief fresh upon
him; then, pursuing her recollection of him through the years, she
came to a point of feeling where she said, with sudden energy,
throwing her arm round Lucy, and taking up the thread of their
conversation:--
'I wouldn't let what Louie said worry you a bit, Lucy. Of course,
she wanted to make mischief; but you know, and I know, what sort of
a man David has been since you and he were married. That'll be
enough for you, I should think.'
Lucy flushed. She had once possessed very little reticence, and had
been quite ready to talk her husband over, any day and all day,
with Dora. But now, though she would begin in the old way, there
soon came a point when something tied her tongue.
This time she attacked the lilac-bushes again with a restless hand.
'Why, I thought you were shocked at his opinions,' she said,
proudly.
Dora sighed. Her conscience had not waited for Lucy's remark to
make her aware of the constant perplexity between authority and
natural feeling into which David's ideals were perpetually throwing
her.
'They make one very sad,' she said, looking away. 'But we must
believe that God, who sees everything, judges as we cannot do.'
Lucy fired up at once. It annoyed her to have Dora making spiritual
allowance for David in this way.
'I don't believe God wants anything but that people should be good,'
she said. 'I am sure there are lots of things like that in the New
Testament.'
Dora shook her head slowly. '"He that hath not the Son, hath not
life,"' she said under her breath, a sudden passion leaping to her
eye.
Lucy looked at her indignantly. 'I don't agree with you,
Dora--there! And it all depends on what things mean.'
'The meaning is quite plain,' said Dora, with rigid persistence. 'O
Lucy, don't be led away. I missed you at early service this
morning.'
The look she threw her cousin melted into a pathetic and heavenly
reproach.
'Well, I know,' said Lucy, ungraciously, 'I was tired. I don't know
what's wrong with me these last weeks; I can't get up in the
morning.'
Dora only looked grieved. Lucy understood that her plea seemed to
her cousin too trivial and sinful to be noticed.
'Oh! I dare say I'd go,' she said in her own mind, defiantly, 'if
_he_ went.'
Aloud, she said:--
'Dora, just look at this cheek of mine; I can't think what
the swelling is.'
And she turned her right cheek to Dora, pointing to a lump, not
discoloured, but rather large, above the cheek-bone. Dora stopped,
and looked at it carefully.
'Yes, I had noticed it,' she said. 'It is odd. Can't you account for
it in any way?'
'No. It's been coming some little while. David says I must ask Dr.
Mildmay about it. I don't think I shall. It'll go away. Oh! there
they are.'
As she spoke, David and Sandy, who had been out for a Sunday walk
together, appeared on the steps of the garden-door. David waved his
hat to his wife, an example immediately followed by Sandy, who
twisted his Scotch cap madly, and then set off running to her.
Lucy looked at them both with a sudden softening and brightening
which gave her charm. David came up to her, ran his arm through
hers, and began to give her a laughing account of Sandy's
behaviour. The April wind had flushed him, tumbled his black hair,
and called up spring lights in the eyes, which had been somewhat
dimmed by overmuch sedentary work and a too small allowance of
sleep. His plenitude of virile energy, the glow of health and power
which hung round him this afternoon, did but make Lucy seem more
languid and faded as she hung upon him, smiling at his stories of
their walk and of Sandy's antics.
He broke off in the middle, and looked at her anxiously.
'She isn't the thing, is she, Dora? I believe she wants a change.'
'Oh! thank you!' cried Lucy, ironically--'with all Sandy's spring
things and my own to look to, and some new shirts to get for you,
and the spring cleaning to see to. Much obliged to you.'
'All those things, madam,' said David, patting her hand, 'wouldn't
matter twopence, if it should please your lord and master to order
you off. And if this fine weather goes on, you'll have to take
advantage of it. By the way, I met Mildmay, and asked him to come
in and see you.'
Lucy reddened.
'Why, there's nothing,' she said, pettishly. 'This'll go away
directly.' Instinctively she put up her hand to her cheek.
'Oh! Mildmay won't worry you,' said David; 'he'll tell you what's
wrong at once. You know you like him.'
'Well, I must go,' said Dora.
They understood that she had a mill-girls' Bible class at half-past
five, and an evening service an hour later, so they did not press
her to stay. Lucy kissed her, and Sandy escorted her halfway to the
garden-door, giving her a breathless and magniloquent account of
the 'hy'nas and kangawoos' she might expect to find congregated in
the Merton Road outside. Dora, who was somewhat distressed by his
powers of imaginative fiction, would not 'play up' as his father
did, and he left her half-way to run back to David, who was always
ready to turn road and back garden into 'Africa country' at a
moment's notice, and people it to order with savages, elephants,
boomerangs, kangaroos, and all other possible or impossible things
that Sandy might chance to want.
Dora, looking back from the garden, saw them all three in a group
together--Sandy tugging at his mother's skirts, and shouting at the
top of his voice; David's curly black head bent over his wife, who
was gathering her brown shawl round her throat, as though the light
wind chilled her. But there was no chill in her look. That, for the
moment, as she swayed between husband and child, had in it the
qualities of the April sun--a brightness and promise all the more
radiant by comparison with the winter or the cloud from which it
had emerged.
Dora went home as quickly as tramcar and fast walking could take
her. She still lived in the same Ancoats rooms with her
shirt-making friend, who had kept company, poor thing! for four
years with a young man, and had then given him up with anguish
because he was not 'the sort of man she'd been taking him for,'
though no one but Dora had ever known what qualities or practices,
intolerable to a pure mind, the sad phrase covered. Dora might long
ago have moved to more comfortable rooms and a better quarter of
the town had she been so minded, for her wages as an admirable
forewoman and an exceptionally skilled hand were high; but she
passionately preferred to be near St. Damian's and amongst her
'girls.' Also, there was the thought that by staying in the place
whither she had originally moved she would be more easily
discoverable if ever,--ay, if _ever_--Daddy should come back
to her. She was certain that he was still alive; and great as the
probabilities on the other side became with every passing year, few
people had the heart to insist upon them in the face of her
sensitive faith, whereof the bravery was so close akin to tears.
Only once in all these years had there been a trace of Daddy.
Through a silk-merchant acquaintance of his, having relations with
Lyons and other foreign centres, David had once come across a
rumour which had seemed to promise a clue. He had himself gone
across to Lyons at once, and had done all he could. But the clue
broke in his hand, and the tanned, long-faced lunatic from
Manchester, whereof report had spoken, could be only doubtfully
identified with a man who bore no likeness at all to Daddy.
Dora's expectation and hope had been stirred to their depths, and
she bore her disappointment hardly. But she did not therefore cease
to hope. Instinctively on this Sunday night, when she reached home,
she put Daddy's chair, which had been pushed aside, in its right
place by the fire, and she tenderly propped up a stuffed bird,
originally shot by Daddy in the Vosges, and now vilely overtaken by
Manchester moths. Then she set round chairs and books for her
girls.
Soon they came trooping up the stairs, in their neat Sunday
dresses, so sharply distinguished from the mill-gear of the week,
and she spent with them a moving and mystical hour. She was
expounding to them a little handbook of 'The Blessed Sacrament,'
and her explanations wound up with a close appeal to each one of
them to make more use of the means of grace, to surrender
themselves more fully to the awful and unspeakable mystery by which
the Lord gave them His very flesh to eat, His very blood to drink,
so fashioning within them, Communion after Communion, the immortal
and incorruptible body which should be theirs in the Resurrection.
She spoke in a low, vibrating voice, somewhat monotonous in tone;
her eyes shone with strange light under her round, prominent brow;
all that she said of the joys of frequent Communion, of the mortal
perils of unworthy participation, of treating the heavenly food
lightly--coming to it, that is, unfasting and unprepared--of the
need especially of Lenten self-denial, of giving up 'what each one
of you likes best, so far as you can,' in preparation for the great
Easter Eucharist--came evidently from the depths of her own intense
conviction. Her girls listened to her with answering excitement and
awe; one of them she had saved from drink, all of them had been her
Sunday-school children for years, and many of them possessed, under
the Lancashire exterior, the deep-lying poetry and emotion of the
North.
When she dismissed them she hurried off to church, to sit once more
dissolved in feeling, aspiration, penitence; to feel the thrill of
the organ, the pathos of the bare altar, and the Lenten hymns.
After the service she had two or three things to settle with one of
the curates and with some of her co-helpers in the good works of
the congregation, so that when she reached home she was late and
tired out. Her fellow-lodger was spending the Sunday with friends;
there was no one to talk to her at her supper; and after supper she
fell, sitting by the fire, into a mood of some flatness and
reaction. She tried to read a religious book, but the religious
nerve could respond no more, and other interests, save those of her
daily occupations, she had none.
In Daddy's neighbourhood, what with his travels, his whims, and his
quotations, there had been always something to stir the daughter's
mind, even if it were only to reprobation. But since he had left
her the circle of her thoughts had steadily and irrevocably
narrowed. All secular knowledge, especially the reading of other
than religious books, had become gradually and painfully
identified, for her, with those sinister influences which made
David Grieve an 'unbeliever,' and so many of the best Manchester
workmen 'atheists.'
So now, in her physical and moral slackness, she sat and thought
with some bitterness of a 'young woman' who had recently entered
the shop which employed her, and, by dint of a clever tongue, was
gaining the ear of the authorities, to the disturbance of some of
Dora's cherished methods of distributing and organising the work.
They might have trusted her more after all these years; but nobody
appreciated her; she counted for nothing.
Then her mind wandered on to the familiar grievances of Sandy's
religious teaching and Lucy's gradual defection from St. Damian's.
She must make more efforts with Lucy, even if it angered David. She
looked back on what she had done to bring about the marriage, and
lashed herself into a morbid sense of responsibility.
But her missionary projects were no more cheering to her than her
thoughts about the shop and her work, and she felt an intense sense
of relief when she heard the step of her room-mate, Mary Styles,
upon the stairs. She made Mary go into every little incident of her
day; she was insatiable for gossip--a very rare mood for her--and
could not be chattered to enough.
And all through she leant her head against her father's chair,
recalling Lucy on her husband's arm, and the child at her skirts,
with the pathetic inarticulate longing which makes the tragedy of
the single life. She could have loved so well, and no one had ever
wished to make her his wife; the wound of it bled sometimes in her
inmost heart.
Meanwhile, on this same April Sunday, Lucy, after Sandy was safe in
bed, brought down some needlework to do beside David while he read.
It was not very long since she had induced herself to make so great
a breach in the Sunday habits of her youth. As soon as David's
ideals began to tease her out of thought and sympathy, his freedoms
also began to affect her. She was no longer so much chilled by his
strictness, or so much shocked by his laxity.
David had spoken of a busy evening. In reality, a lazy fit overtook
him. He sat smoking, and turning over the pages of Eckermann's
'Conversations with Goethe.'
'What are you reading?' said Lucy at last, struck by his face of
enjoyment. 'Why do you like it so much?'
'Because there is no one else in the world who hits the right nail
on the head so often as Goethe,' he said, throwing himself back
with a stretch of pleasure. 'So wide a brain--so acute and sane a
temper!'
Lucy looked a little lost, as she generally did when David made
literary remarks to her. But she did not drop the subject.
'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day about a
line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. What did it
mean?'
She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which would
make her ridiculous.
'A line of Goethe?' repeated David, pondering. 'Oh! I know. Yes, it
was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." When I was young and
foolish--when you and I were first acquainted, in fact, and you
used to scold me for going to the Hall of Science!--I often said
this line to myself over and over. I didn't know much German, but
the swing of it carried me away.'
And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated:'
_Handwerker trugen ihn; kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet_.'
'What does it mean?' said Lucy.
'Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits suicide
for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night after
his death, "labouring men bore him; no priest went with him."'
He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half smiling,
half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of feeling,
partly in sympathy, partly in irony.
'Then he wasn't a Christian?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Do you still
hate priests so much, David?'
'It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 'when
you think of all my clergymen friends?'
And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily
remembered the readiness with which any of the clergy at St.
Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or giving
a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authorities
to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She thought
also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him and
corresponded with him; of his reverent affection for Canon Aylwin,
for Ancrum.
'Well, anyway, you care about the labouring men,' she went on
persistently. 'I suppose you're what father used to call a "canting
Socialist"?'
'No,' said David, quietly--'no, I'm not a Socialist, except'--and
he smiled--'in the sense in which some one said the other day, "we
are all Socialists now."'
'Well, what does it mean?' said Lucy, threading another needle, and
feeling a certain excitement in this prolonged mental effort.
David tried to explain to her the common Socialist ideal in simple
terms--the hope of a millennium, when all the instruments of
production shall be owned by the State, and when the surplus profit
produced by labour, over and above the maintenance of the worker
and the general cost of production, will go, not to the capitalist,
the individual rich man, but to the whole community of workers;
when everybody will be made to work, and as little advantage as
possible will be allowed to one worker above another.
'I think it's absurd!' said Lucy, up in arms at once for all the
superiorities she loved. 'What nonsense! Why, they can't ever do it!'
'Well, it's about that!' said David, smiling at her. 'Still,
no doubt it _could_ be done, if it ought to be done. But
Socialism, as a system, seems to _me_, at any rate, to strike
down and weaken the most precious thing in the world, that on which
the whole of civilised life and progress rests--the spring of will
and conscience in the individual. Socialism as a spirit, as an
influence, is as old as organised thought--and from the beginning
it has forced us to think of the many when otherwise we should be
sunk in thinking of the one. But, as a modern dogmatism, it is like
other dogmatisms. The new truth of the future will emerge from it
as a bud from its sheath, taking here and leaving there.' He sat
looking into the fire, forgetting his wife a little.
'Well, any way, I'm sure you and I won't have anything to do with
it,' said Lucy positively. 'I don't a bit believe Lady Driffield
will have to work in the mills, though Mrs. Shepton did say it
would do her good. I shouldn't mind something, perhaps, which would
make her and Colonel Danby less uppish.'
She drew her needle in and out with vindictive energy.
'Well, I don't see much prospect of uppish people dying out of the
world,' said David, throwing himself back in his chair; 'until--'
He paused.
'Until what?' inquired Lucy.
'Well, of course,' he said after a minute, in a low voice, 'we must
always hold that the world is tending to be better, that the Divine
Life in it will somehow realise itself, that pride will become
gentleness, and selfishness love. But the better life cannot be
imposed from without--it must grow from within.'
Lucy pondered a moment.
'Then is it--is it because you think working-men _better_ than
other people that you are so much more interested in them? Because
you are, you know.'
'Oh dear no!' he said, smiling at her from under the hand which shaded
his eyes; 'they have their own crying faults and follies. But--so many
of them lack the first elementary conditions which make the better life
possible--that is what tugs at one's heart and fills one's mind! How can
_we_--we who have gained for ourselves health and comfort and
knowledge--how can we stand by patiently and see our brother diseased
and miserable and ignorant?--how can we bear our luxuries, so long as a
child is growing up in savagery whom we might have taught,--or a man is
poisoning himself with drink whom we might have saved,--or a woman is
dropping from sorrow and overwork whom we might have cherished and
helped? We are not our own--we are parts of the whole. Generations of
workers have toiled for us in the past. And are we, in return, to carry
our wretched bone off to our own miserable corner!--sharing and giving
nothing? Woe to us if we do! Upon such comes indeed the "second
death,"--the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as
this world is concerned, between us and the life of God!'
Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him--at the shining
eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, at the
paleness which went so readily in him with any expression of deep
emotion. Never had he so spoken to her before; never, all these
years. In general no one shrank more than he from 'high phrases;'
no one was more anxious than he to give all philanthropic talk a
shrewd business-like aspect, which might prevent questions as to
what lay beneath.
Her heart fluttered a little.
'David!' she broke out, 'what is it you believe? You know Dora
thinks you believe nothing.'
'Does she?' he said, with evident shrinking. 'No, I don't think she
does.'
Lucy instinctively moved her chair closer to him, and laid her head
against his knee.
'Yes, she does. But I don't mind about that. I just wish you'd tell
me why you believe in God, when you won't go to church, and when
you think Jesus was just--just a man.'
She drew her breath quickly. She was making a first voyage of
discovery in her husband's deepest mind, and she was astonished at
her own venturesomeness.
He put out a hand and touched her hair.
'I can't read Nature and life any other way,' he said at last,
after a silence. 'There seems to me something in myself, and in
other human beings, which is beyond Nature--which, instead of being
made by Nature, is the condition of our knowing there is a Nature
at all. This something--reason, consciousness, soul, call it what
you will--unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world
reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of
a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of
sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal
life--"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!--whence, if there
is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. And so, in
its most perfect work, it carries us to God--it bids us claim our
sonship--it gives us hope of immortality!'
His voice had the vibrating intensity of prayer. Lucy hardly
understood what he said at all, but the tears came into her eyes as
she sat hiding them against his knee.
'But what makes you think God is good--that He cares anything about
us?' she said softly.
'Well--I look back on human life, and I ask what reason--which is
the Divine Life communicated to us, striving to fulfil itself in
us--has done, what light it throws upon its "great Original." And
then I see that it has gradually expressed itself in law, in
knowledge, in love; that it has gradually learnt, under the
pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be
gained life must be lost; that beauty, truth, love, are the
realities which abide. Goodness has slowly proved itself in the
world,--is every day proving itself,--like a light broadening in
darkness!--to be that to which reason tends, in which it realises
itself. And, if so, goodness here, imperfect and struggling as we
see it always, must be the mere shadow and hint of that goodness
which is in God!--and the utmost we can conceive of human
tenderness, holiness, truth, though it tell us all we know, can yet
suggest to us only the minutest fraction of what must be the Divine
tenderness,--holiness,--truth.'
There was a silence.
'But this,' he added after a bit, 'is not to be proved by argument,
though argument is necessary and inevitable, the mind being what it is.
It can only be proved by living,--by taking it into our hearts,--by
every little victory we gain over the evil self.'
The fire burnt quietly beside them. Everything was still in the house.
Nothing stirred but their own hearts.
At last Lucy looked up quickly.
'I am glad,' she said with a kind of sob--'glad you think God loves
us, and, if Sandy and I were to die, you would find us again.'
Instead of answering, he bent forward quickly and kissed her. She
gave a little shrinking movement.
'Oh! that poor cheek!' he said remorsefully; 'did I touch it? I hope
Dr. Mildmay won't forget to-morrow.'
'Oh! never mind about it,' she said, half impatiently. 'David!'
Her little thin face twitched and trembled. He was puzzled by her
sudden change of expression, her agitation.
'David!--you know--you know what Louie said. I want you to tell me
whether she--she meant anything.'
He gave a little start, then he understood perfectly.
'My dear wife,' he said, laying his hand on hers, which were
crossed on his knee.
She waited breathlessly.
'You shall know all there is to know,' he said at last, with an
effort. 'I thought perhaps you would have questioned me directly
after that scene, and I would have told you; but as you did not, I
could not bring myself to begin. What Louie said had to do with
things that happened a year before I asked you to be my wife. When
I spoke to you, they were dead and gone. The girl herself--was
married. It was her story as well as my own, and it seemed to
concern no one else in the world--not even you, dear. So I thought
then, any way. Since, I have often wondered whether I was right.'
'Was it when you were in Paris?' she asked sharply.
He gave a sign of assent.
'I thought so!' she cried, drawing her breath. 'I always said there
was more than being ill. I said so to Dora. Well, tell me--tell me
at once! What was she like? Was she young, and good-looking?'
He could not help smiling at her--there was something so childish
in her jealous curiosity.
'Let me tell you in order,' he said, 'and then we will both put it
out of sight--at least, till I see Louie again.'
His heavy sigh puzzled her. But her strained and eager eyes
summoned him to begin.
He told her everything, with singular simplicity and frankness. To
Lucy it was indeed a critical and searching moment! No wife,
whatever stuff she may be made of, can listen to such a story for
the first time, from the husband she loves and respects, without
passing thereafter into a new state of consciousness towards him.
Sometimes she could hardly realise at all that it applied to David,
this tale of passion he was putting, with averted face, into these
short and sharp sentences. That conception of him which the daily
life of eight years, with its growing self-surrender, its expanding
spiritual force, had graven on her mind, clashed so oddly with all
that he was saying! A certain desolate feeling, too large and deep
in all its issues to be harboured long in her slight nature, came
over her now and then. She had been so near to him all these years,
and had yet known nothing. It was the separateness of the
individual lot--that awful and mysterious chasm which divides even
lover from lover--which touched her here and there like a cold
hand, from which she shrank.
She grew a little cold and pale when he spoke of his weeks of
despair, of the death from which Ancrum had rescued him. But any
ordinary prudish word of blame, even for his silence towards her,
never occurred to her. Once she asked him a wistful question:--
'You and she thought that marrying didn't matter at all when people
loved each other--that nobody had a right to interfere? Do you
think that now, David?'
'No,' he said, with deep emphasis. 'No.--I have come to think the
most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better
worth having than what people call an "ideal passion,"--if the
ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those
fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such
infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its
own weakness. I did not know it,--but, so far as in me lay, I was
betraying and injuring that society which has given me all I have.'
She sat silent. 'The most disappointing marriage.' An echo from that
overheard talk at Benet's Park floated through her mind. She
winced, and shrank, even as she realised his perfect innocence of
any such reference.
Then, with eagerness, she threw herself into innumerable questions
about Elise--her looks, her motives, the details of what she said
and did. Beneath the satisfaction of her curiosity, of course,
there was all the time a pang--a pang not to be silenced. In her
flights of idle fancy she had often suspected something not unlike
the truth, basing her conjecture on the mystery which had always
hung round that Paris visit, partly on the world's general
experience of what happened to handsome young men. For, in her
heart of hearts, had there not lurked all the time a wonder which
was partly self-judgment? Had David, with such a temperament, never
been more deeply moved than she knew herself to have moved him?
More than once a secret inarticulate suspicion of this kind had
crossed her. The poorest and shallowest soul may have these flashes
of sad insight, under the kindling of its affections.
But now she knew, and the difference was vast. After she had asked
all her questions, and delivered a vehement protest against the
tenacity of his self-reproach with regard to Louie--for what decent
girl need go wrong unless she has a mind to?--she laid her head
down again on David's knee.
'I don't think she cared much about you--I'm sure she couldn't
have,' she said slowly, finding a certain pleasure in the words.
David did not answer. He was sunk in memory. How far away lay that
world of art and the artist from this dusty, practical life in
which he was now immersed! At no time had he been really akin to
it. The only art to which he was naturally susceptible was the art
of oratory and poetry. Elise had created in him an artificial
taste, which had died with his passion. Yet now, as his quickened
mind lingered in the past, he felt a certain wide philosophic
regret for the complete divorce which had come about between him
and so rich a section of human experience.
He was roused from his reverie, which would have reassured her,
could she have followed it, more than any direct speech, by a
movement from Lucy. Dropping the hand which had once more stolen
over his brow, he saw her looking at him with wide, wet eyes.
'David!'
'Yes.'
'Come here! close to me!'
He moved forward, and laid his arm round her shoulders, as she sat
in her low chair beside him.
'What is it, dear? I have been keeping you up too late.'
She lifted a hand, and brought his face near to hers.
'David, I am a stupid little thing--but I do understand more than I
did, and I would never, _never_ desert you for anything,--for
any sorrow or trouble in the world!'
The mixture of yearning, pain, triumphant affection in her tone,
cannot be rendered in words.
His whole heart melted to her. As he held her to his breast, the
hour they had just passed through took for both of them a sacred
meaning and importance. Youth was going--their talk had not been
the talk of youth. Was true love just beginning?
CHAPTER VIII
'_My God! My God!_'
The cry was David's. He had reeled back against the table in his
study, his hand upon an open book, his face turned to Doctor
Mildmay, who was standing by the fireplace.
'Of course, I can't be sure,' said the doctor hastily, almost
guiltily. 'You must not take it upon my authority alone. Try and
throw it off your mind. Take your wife up to town to see Selby or
Paget, and if I am wrong I shall be too thankful! And, above all,
don't frighten her. Take care--she will be down again directly.'
'You say,' said David, thickly, 'that if it were what you suspect,
operation would be difficult. Yes, I see there is something of the
sort here.'
He turned, shaking all over, to the book beside him, which was a
medical treatise he had just taken down from his scientific
bookcase.
'It would be certainly difficult,' said the doctor, frowning, his
lower lip pushed forward in a stress of thought, 'but it would have
to be attempted. Only, on the temporal bone it will be a puzzle to
go deep enough.'
David's eye ran along the page beside him. 'Sarcoma, which was
originally regarded with far less terror than cancer (carcinoma),
is now generally held by doctors to be more malignant and more
deadly. There is much less pain, but surgery can do less, and death
is in most cases infinitely more rapid.'
'Hush!' said the doctor, with short decision, 'I hear her coming
down again. Let me speak.'
Lucy, who had run upstairs to quiet a yell of crying from Sandy
immediately after Doctor Mildmay had finished his examination of
her swollen cheek, opened the door as he spoke. She was slightly
flushed, and her eyes were more wide open and restless than usual.
David was apparently bending over a drawer which he had opened on
the farther side of his writing-table. The doctor's face was
entirely as usual.
'Well now, Mrs. Grieve,' he said cheerily, 'we have been
agreeing--your husband and I--that it will be best for you to go up
to London and have that cheek looked at by one of the crack
surgeons. They will give you the best advice as to what to do with
it. It is not a common ailment, and we are very fine fellows down
here, but of course we can't get the experience, in a particular
line of cases, of one of the first-rate surgical specialists. Do
you think you could go to-morrow? I could make an appointment for
you by telegraph to-day.'
Lucy gave a little unsteady, affected laugh.
'I don't see how I can go all in a moment like that,' she said. 'It
doesn't matter! Why don't you give me something for it, and it will
go away.'
'Oh! but it does matter,' said the doctor, firmly. 'Lumps like that
are serious things, and mustn't be trifled with.'
'But what will they want to do to it?' said Lucy nervously. She was
standing with one long, thin hand resting lightly on the back of a
chair, looking from David, whose face and figure were blurred to
her by the dazzle of afternoon light coming in through the window,
to Doctor Mildmay.
The doctor cleared his throat.
'They would only want to do what was best for you in every way,' he
said; 'you may be sure of that. Could you be very brave if they
advised you that it ought to be removed?'
She gave a little shriek.
'What! you mean cut it out--cut it away!' she cried, shaking, and
looking at him with the frowning anger of a child. 'Why, it would
leave an ugly mark, a hideous mark!'
'No, it wouldn't. The mark would disfigure you much less than the
swelling. They would take care to draw the skin together again
neatly, and you could easily arrange your hair a little. But you
ought to get a first-rate opinion.'
'What is it? what do you call it?' said Lucy, irritably. 'I can't
think why you make such a fuss.'
'Well, it might be various things,' he said evasively. 'Any way, you
take my advice, and have it seen to. I can telegraph as I go from
here.'
'I could take you up to-morrow,' said David, coming forward in
answer to the disturbed look she threw him. Now that her flush had
faded, how pale and drooping she was in the strong light! 'It would
be better, dear, to do what Doctor Mildmay recommends. And you
never mind a day in London, you know.'
Did she detect any difference in the voice? She moved up to him,
and he put his arm round her.
'Must I?' she said, helplessly; 'it's such a bore, to-morrow
particularly. I had promised to take Sandy out to tea.'
'Well, let that young man go without a treat for once,' said the
doctor, laughing. 'He has a deal too many, anyway. Very well, that's
settled. I will telegraph as I go to the train. Just come here a
moment, Grieve.'
The two went out together. When David returned, any one who had
happened to be in the hall would have seen that he could hardly
open the sitting-room door, so fumbling were his movements. As he
passed through the room to reach the study he caught sight of his
own face in a glass, and stopping, with clenched hands, pulled
himself together by the effort of his whole being.
When he opened the study-door, Lucy was hunting about his table in
a quick, impatient way.
'I can't think where you keep your india-rubber rings, David. I want
to put one round a parcel for Dora.'
He found one for her. Then she stood by the fire, as the
sunset-light faded into dusk, and poured out to him a story of
domestic grievances. Sarah, their cook, wished to leave and be
married--it was very unexpected and very inconsiderate, and Lucy
did not believe the young man was steady; and how on earth was she
to find another cook? It was enough to drive one wild, the
difficulty of getting cooks in Manchester.
For nearly an hour, till the supper-bell rang, she stood there,
with her foot on the fender, chattering in a somewhat sharp, shrill
way. Not one word would she say, or let him say, of London or the
doctor's visit.
After supper, as they went back into the study, David looked for
the railway-guide. 'The 10. 15 will do,' he said. 'Mildmay has made
the appointment for three. We can just get up in time.'
'It is great nonsense!' said Lucy, pouting. 'The question is, can we
get back? I must get back. I don't want to leave Sandy for the
night. He's got a cold.'
It seemed to David that something clutched at his breath and voice.
Was it he or some one else that said:--
'That will be too tiring, dear. We shall have to stay the night.'
'No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately.
Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed to smoke
and read. But the evening passed, for him, beneath his outward
quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, which
ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness and
numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the fire
crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he felt
himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror; then,
again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, and he
despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the doctor had
said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such an illness.
Well, what is rare does not happen--not to oneself--that was what
he seemed to be clinging to at last.
When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a quarter of an
hour.
'Why, you are early!' she said, opening her eyes.
'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work to-day. I
want a long night.'
In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after hour
he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring
morning broke.
They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As she
passed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for
Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted.
'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 'for of
course we can't get back for that.'
David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared not even
propose to her the extra comfort of first class, lest he should
intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her offhand,
flighty manner.
By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous doctor
they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously as they
entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and across David there
swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and fluttering birds
he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling beneath a
birdcatcher's net on the moors.
As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not kept
waiting very long by the great man. He received them with a sort of
kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and asked her a
number of general questions, entering the answers in his large
patients' book.
Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy over
his spectacles.
'Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and businesslike
voice, 'I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, Mrs.
Grieve. You must have that growth removed.'
Lucy flushed.
'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, half
sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a little
tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil on
her knee.
'No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If you were
my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that lump removed
without a day's, an hour's unnecessary delay. These growths are not
to be trifled with.'
He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. A number of
reflections were passing rapidly through his mind. The operation
was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the surgeon's duty
to try it. The chances were that it would prolong life which was
now speedily and directly threatened, owing to the proximity of the
growth to certain vital points.
'When could you do it?' said David, so hoarsely that he had to
repeat his question. He was standing with his arm on the
mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife.
The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his
engagement-book attentively.
'I _could_ do it to-morrow,' he said at last; 'and the sooner,
the better. Have you got lodgings? or can I help you? And--'
Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. 'Let me settle things with your
husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 'You look tired
after your journey. You will find a fire and some newspapers in the
waiting-room.'
And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her himself
across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. Then he
came back to David.
A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who answered
it presently took some brandy into the consulting-room. Lucy
meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of window at the square
garden, where the lilacs were already in full leaf in spite of the
east wind.
When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, looking
partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they been discussing it
all without her?
'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just going to
take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good luck they are
just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, you can settle in at
once.'
'But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in an
injured voice, looking at David.
'We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her bag
and umbrella from the table; 'but now we mustn't keep Mr. Selby. He
has to go out.'
'How long will it take?' interrupted Lucy, addressing the surgeon.
'Can I get back next day?'
'Oh no! you will have to be four or five days in town. But don't
alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at all about
the operation itself; your husband will look after you, and then a
little patience--and hope for the best. Now I really must be off.
Good-bye to you--good-bye to you.'
And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. When they
got in, Lucy said, passionately:--
'I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to these
lodgings.'
Then courage came to him. He took her hand.
'Dear, dear wife--for my sake--for Sandy's!'
She stared at him--at his white face.
'Shall I die?' she cried, with the same passionate tone.
'No, no, no!' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing no
one but her in the world, though they were driving through the
crowd of Regent Street. 'But we must do everything Mr. Selby said.
That hateful thing must be taken away--it is so near--think for
yourself!--to the eye and the brain; and it might go downwards to
the throat. You will be brave, won't you? We will look after you
so--Dora and I.'
Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve and
spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment promising
her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, and be quite
well; the next, checked and turned to stone by the memory of the
terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his private talk
with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be soothing the
present only to make the future more awful.
'David! she is in such fearful pain! The nurse says she must have
more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will you run to Mr.
Selby's house? You won't find him, of course--he is on his
round--but his assistant, who was with him here just now, went back
there. Run for him at once.'
It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the inner
room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the fire in the
sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him for a while, after
the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in an instant. Those
faint, distant sounds of anguish which had been in his ear for half
an hour or more, ever since the doctors had departed, declaring
that everything was satisfactorily over, had been more than his
manhood could bear.
He returned in an incredibly short space of time with a young
surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia.
'A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, 'and the nerves
have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do now.'
And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed eyes--so
small a creature in the wide bed--her head and face swathed in
bandages. But the breathing was growing even and soft. She was once
more unconscious.
The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with the
nurse.
'Won't you go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? Mrs.
Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her
compassion.
He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. The nurse
went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to Dora, who was
doing some unpacking there, and he was left alone with his wife.
The sounds of the street came into the silent room, and every now
and then he had a start of agony, thinking that she was moving
again--that she was in pain again. But no, she slept; her breath
came gently through the childish parted lips, and the dim
light--for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthening
April day--hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings.
Forty-eight hours ago, and they were in the garden with Sandy! And
now life seemed to have passed for ever into this half-light of
misery. Everything had dropped away from him--the interests of his
business, his books, his social projects. He and she were shut out
from the living world. Would she ever rise from that bed
again--ever look at him with the old look?
He sat on there, hour after hour, till Dora coaxed him into the
sitting-room for a while, and tried to make him take some food. But
he could not touch it, and how the sudden gas which the servant lit
glared on his sunken eyes! He waited on his companion mechanically,
then sat, with his head on his hand, listening for the sound of the
doctors' steps.
When they came, they hardly disturbed their patient. She moaned at
being touched; but everything was right, and the violent pain which
had unexpectedly followed the operation was not likely to recur.
'And what a blessing that she took the chloroform so well, with
hardly any after-effects!' said Mr. Selby cheerily, drawing on his
gloves in the sitting-room. 'Well, Mr. Grieve, you have got a good
nurse, and can leave your wife to her with perfect peace of mind.
You must sleep, or you will knock up; let me give you a sleeping
draught.'
'Oh! I shall sleep,' said David, impatiently. 'You considered the
operation successful--completely successful?'
The surgeon looked gravely into the fire.
'I shall know more in a week or so,' he said. 'I have never
disguised from you, Mr. Grieve, how serious and difficult the case
was. Still, we have done what was right--we can but wait for the
issue.'
An hour later Dora looked into the sitting-room, and said softly:--
'She would like to see you, David.'
He went in, holding his breath. There was a night-light in the room,
and her face was lying in deep shadow.
He knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.
'My darling!' he said--and his voice was quite firm and
steady--'are you easier now?'
'Yes,' she said faintly. 'Where are you going to sleep?'
'In a room just beyond Dora's room. She could make me hear in a
moment if you wanted me.'
Then, as he looked closer, he saw that about her head was thrown
the broad white lace scarf she had worn round her neck on the
journey up. And as he bent to her, she suddenly opened her languid
eyes, and gazed at him full. For the moment it was as though she
were given back to him.
'I made Dora put it on,' she said feebly, moving her hand towards
the lace. 'Does it hide all those nasty bandages?'
'Yes. I can't see them at all.'
'Is it pretty?'
The little gleam of a smile nearly broke down his self-command.
'Very,' he said, with a quivering lip.
She closed her eyes again.
'Oh! I hope Lizzie will look after Sandy,' she said after a while,
with a long sigh.
Not a word now of wilfulness, of self-assertion! After the
sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted
intermittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing
could be more speaking, more pathetic, than this helpless
acquiescence.
'I mustn't stay with you,' he said. 'You ought to be going to sleep
again. Nurse will give you something if you can't.'
'I'm quite comfortable,' she said, sleepily. 'There isn't any pain.'
And she seemed to pass quickly and easily into sleep as he sat
looking at her.
An hour or two later, Dora, who could not sleep from the effects of
fatigue and emotion, was lying in her uncomfortable stretcher-bed,
thinking with a sort of incredulity of all that had passed since
David's telegram had reached her the day before, or puzzling
herself to know how her employers could possibly spare her for
another three or four days' holiday, when she was startled by some
recurrent sounds from the room beyond her own. David was sleeping
there, and Dora, with her woman's quickness, had at once perceived
that the partition between them was very thin, and had been as
still as a mouse in going to bed.
The sound alarmed her, though she could not make it out.
Instinctively she put her ear to the wall. After a minute or two
she hastily moved away, and hiding her head under the bedclothes,
fell to soft crying and praying.
For it was the deep rending sound of suppressed weeping, the
weeping of a strong man who believes himself alone with his grief
and with God. That she should have heard it at all filled her with
a sort of shame.
Things, however, looked much brighter on the following morning. The
wound caused by the operation was naturally sore and stiff, and the
dressing was painful; but when the doctor's visit was over, and
Lucy was lying in the halo of her white scarf on her fresh pillows,
in a room which Dora and the nurse had made daintily neat and
straight, her own cheerfulness was astonishing. She made Dora go
out and get her some patterns for Sandy's summer suits, and when
they came she lay turning them over from time to time, or weakly
twisting first one and then another round her finger. She was, of
course, perpetually anxious to know when she would be well, and
whether the scar would be very bad; but on the whole she was a
docile and promising patient, and she even began to see some gleams
of virtue in Mr. Selby, for whom at first she had taken the
strongest dislike.
Meanwhile, David, haunted always by a horrible knowledge which was
hid from her, could get nothing decided for the future out of the
doctors.
'We must wait,' said Mr. Selby; 'for the present all is healing
well, but I wish we could get up her general strength. It must have
been running down badly of late.'
Whereupon David was left reproaching himself for blindness
and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's
thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of
health-degeneration may go on without its becoming conspicuous.
A few days passed. Dora was forced to go back to work; but as she
was to take up her quarters at the Merton Road house, and to write
long accounts of Sandy to his mother every day, Lucy saw her depart
with considerable equanimity. Dora left her patient on the sofa, a
white and ghostly figure, but already talking eagerly of returning
to Manchester in a week. When she heard the cab roll off, Lucy lay
back on her cushions and counted the minutes till David should come
in from the British Museum, whither, because of her improvement, he
had gone to clear up one or two bibliographical points. She
caressed the thought of being left alone with him, except for the
nurse--left to that tender and special care he was bestowing on her
so richly, and through which she seemed to hold and know him
afresh.
When he came in she reproached him for being late, and both enjoyed
and scouted his pleas in answer.
'Well, I don't care,' she said obstinately; 'I wanted you.'
Then she heaved a long sigh.
'David, I made nurse let me look at the horrid place this morning.
I shall always be a fright--it's no good.'
But he knew her well enough to perceive that she was not really
very downcast, and that she had already devised ways and means of
hiding the mark as much as possible.
'It doesn't hurt or trouble you at all?' he asked her anxiously.
'No, of course not,' she said impatiently. 'It's getting well. Do
ask nurse to bring me my tea.'
The nurse brought it, and she and David spoiled their invalid with
small attentions.
'It's nice being waited on,' said Lucy when it was over, settling
herself to rest with a little sigh of sensuous satisfaction.
Another week passed, and all seemed to be doing well, though Mr.
Selby would say nothing as yet of allowing her to move. Then came a
night when she was restless; and in the morning the wound troubled
her, and she was extremely irritable and depressed. The moment the
nurse gave him the news at his door in the early morning, David's
face changed. He dressed, and went off for Mr. Selby, who came at
once.
'Yes,' he said gravely, after his visit, as he shut the
folding-doors of Lucy's room behind him--'yes, I am sorry to say
there is a return. Now the question is, what to do.'
He came and stood by the fireplace, legs apart, head down, debating
with himself. David, haggard and unshorn, watched him helplessly.
'We could operate again,' he said thoughtfully, 'but it would cut
her about terribly. And I can't disguise from you, Mr. Grieve'--as
he raised his head and caught sight of his companion his tone
softened insensibly--'that, in my opinion, it would be all but
useless. I more than suspect, from my observation to-day, that
there are already secondary growths in the lung. Probably they have
been there for some time.'
There was a silence.
'Then we can do nothing,' said David.
'Nothing effectual, alas!' said the doctor, slowly. 'Palliatives, of
course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not be much pain.'
'Will it be long?'
David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking out of
window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words.
'I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. 'This return
is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I don't like.
But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir!--have courage for her and
yourself.'
The words were not mere platitudes--the soul of a good man looked
from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he
had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening.
Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But
David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected
himself.
'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to
some warm place.'
'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an
invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it
when I come again to-night.'
'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs,
'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is,
with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing!
and yesterday she was so cheerful--she would tell me all about her
boy.'
CHAPTER IX
The history of the weeks that followed shall be partly told in
David's own words, gathered from those odds-and-ends of paper, old
envelopes, the half-sheets of letters, on which he would write
sometimes in those hours when he was necessarily apart from Lucy,
thrusting them on his return between the leaves of his locked
journal, clinging to them as the only possible record of his wife's
ebbing life, yet passionately avoiding the sight of them when they
were once written.
'RYDAL, AMBLESIDE: _May 5th_--We arrived this afternoon. The
day has been glorious. The mountains round the head of the lake, as
we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage might not
shake her, stood out in the sun; the light wind drove the
cloud-shadows across their blues and purples; the water was a sheet
of light; the larches were all out, though other trees are late;
and every breath was perfume.
'But she was too weary to look at it; and before we had gone two
miles, it seemed to me that I could think of nothing but the
hateful length of the drive, and the ups and downs of the road.