pains; it was too much.
She flushed, and her anger bubbled.
“For shame on ye, then, Tom Wycombe, for a godless ungrateful wretch!”
shrieked she. “Oh, ye’ve ’ad warnin’s enough, ’ave ye! Well, ye shall
jist ’ave this one afore I’ve done wi’ ye! She be yer own child, be she?
Just you make quite sure o’ that afore ye swear at yer old friends,
a-worritin’ as to ’ow ye shall bring ’er up!”
Her anger had bubbled and boiled over; it would not go down all at once,
though she was frightened at the effect of her words.
For Wycombe had turned not white but blue: his features twitched, his
lips trembled, but no words came from them.
“If it weren’t as I ha’ knowed ye this twenty year, and closed yer pore
mother’s eyes for ye fifteen year ago come Martinmas, and was with that
pore wife o’ yours in ’er trouble, I’d ha’ spoke long ago, I would,”
said the woman, as though trying to find good reason and excuse for her
hastiness. “I allers said as ye did ought to know and you wastin’
yerself on that brat! And them’s my feelin’s.”
Tom Wycombe found his voice.
“Get o’ my ’ouse!” stammered he, in a low sort of growl like a dog about
to spring.
“Well, I never!” retorted the woman, but she turned a bit pale.
“Get o’ my ’ouse,” panted the man again, “and don’t dare come to me with
no more cowardly lies!”
At the word the flush flew back to her cheek.
“Lies!” shrieked she. “Ask the neighbours, ask the ’ole parish, ask the
parson if it be a lie as this ’ere brat be Ben Forester’s!”
A shudder ran through him: she noticed it.
“But, Lord love ye,” she said with a brutal laugh, “_you_ know well
enough ’tain’t no lies! A blind bat ye was, I know, and so terrible sot
on that woman, ye was the very one to be made a ninny on. But the wind
do blow, and when smoke flies in yer face ye be bound to wonder where
the fire be! _You_ knowed they was old sweet’earts same as others did!
Why didn’t ye see to it as they shouldn’t ’ave a chance to get so
chummy? Pore soul, she weren’t all bad-like, p’r’aps! It were kind of
agin ’er will. I was sorry for ’er, I was, when she took to pinin’ wus
’n ever as soon as ’e were gone to sea, and she in the family way! Why,
the little un’ was born afore ’er time, if ye mind, the very night the
_Mary Jane_ went down with all ’ands. And as like that pore lad as two
peas, it were, when I first dressed it! Why, you won’t go for to say
Daisy be like you, I reckon! Nor yet like ’er mother, seein’ as yer wife
was black-eyed as a gipsy. But there be none so blind as them as won’t
see!”
Mrs. Goodenough had moved towards the door as she finished this speech,
her back half turned towards the man, who was standing by the fender.
She laughed again as she spoke the last words, the flush of anger still
on her cheek.
But it paled once more as she turned to him for a last thrust.
He had stooped and had taken up the poker that lay at his feet: his face
was horrible to behold. Wycombe had the name of a kindly man in deed,
though surly and chary of speech; everybody said he had spoiled his
wife, and was gentle to every woman for her sake; but Mrs. Goodenough
opened his door and fled from him that night.
Tom Wycombe heaved a deep sigh.
That awful peevish, maddening voice rambling on, like cinders dropping
on a wound, had nearly driven him crazy. If she had not gone away he
would have hunted her forth with blows. He had never beaten a woman in
his life—he had never raised his hand on a man—but he knew that he must
have fallen upon that woman now.
Slowly—for he was cold and stiff though it was a June night—he dragged
himself to the door and locked and bolted it. Then he went to the recess
in which stood the child’s cot, and drew the curtains in front of
it—curtains which he had put up with his own hand to keep her tiny
chamber sacred, and to shield her tender little head from the night
draughts.
After he had done that, he let himself drop wearily into his old chair
by the empty hearth, and sat gazing vacantly into the dead embers. He
could not think—he was stunned; only he felt old for the first time—very
old, older than his fifty odd years.
Without, the summer night had, for a short space, dropped the whole
cloak of its darkness upon the wide plain. Unconsciously, he was glad of
it: glad that the moon was hidden behind a deep bank of cloud that had
overlapped the horizon and was gradually creeping up the sky: glad that,
as he looked through the door, left open because of the heat, he could
scarcely make out the cabbages and sweet-peas in his terrace garden:
glad that the darkness covered him—that the earth could not see his
misery.
He sat, stupid, almost senselessly stupid, not trying to realize his
woe. But gradually the blood flowed back to his brain, and with it the
power of thought came to him; the woman’s words, though he had scarcely
been conscious of them all at the time, came dropping back into his
recollection, and, with the remembrance of each careless thrust, the
tide of his conviction slowly but surely gathered strength till it
flooded his reason and rushed in at last and swamped his soul in
terrible certainty.
He had told the woman to get out of his house, he had longed to kill her
for what she had said—but it was not because he had not believed her.
Alas! if he had not believed her perhaps he could have done it! But from
the first word that she had spoken an awful fore-knowledge that he
should have to _come_ to believe her had been borne in upon him.
Yes, Ben Forester, the good-looking, easy-going, pleasant-spoken
sailor-lad whom his wife had known all her life down at the Harbour, who
had been away at sea when he had wooed her—but who had come back—who had
come back!
But why, if she loved Ben, had she married him? The answer was easy
enough. She had a brute of a drunken father, and neither kith nor kin
beside. Her only chance of escape from a life of slavery, spiced with
blows, was marriage, and—fancied as she had been by many—he was the only
one who had offered her that. Ben was a rolling stone that gathered no
moss, and he was sure enough Ben had never offered her marriage. Why,
yes, she had told him the very day he asked her last, that his was the
only offer she had had!
He could hear her now, aye, and see her too! There—down on the beach, on
a warm October night with the after-glow, still a fire in the west,
casting rosy reflections over the sea, and the harvest moon rising red
behind the hill.
Why had he been so eager to get her that he had never noticed how
listless she was—how gently anxious to withdraw from his kiss? He called
it all to mind now.... If Ben had not been away at sea—even then ... but
he would have hated him a little sooner, that is all, and he would not
have had those five years.
It was no use hating him now, he was dead. And Milly was dead and could
never tell the truth....
Never tell the truth? Why, she _had_ told it! In a flash there rose up
before him the scene of her death-bed—the moment that he had thought
till then was the bitterest that life could bring to him.
“Ye won’t ’ate ’er, Tom! Ye won’t never visit it on _’er_, come what
may! Oh, do promise me that!” she had cried. “’Tain’t _’er_ fault, no
ways, Tom!”
And he had promised, not knowing what he promised. She had been weak,
delirious, he had thought, and he had supposed she had meant that he was
not to hate the child for being the cause of the wife’s death.
He remembered to have said in his haste that he _should_ so hate the
little one, little guessing how it might ... how it _might_ come true!
Yes, he remembered that he had said: “I couldn’t never forgive ’er,
Milly, if ye was to die and leave me ’cos of ’er.”
And then she had said what she had said.
But of course he knew now what she had meant by her passionate prayer!
And he had promised that which he could not perform!
The little one moved and moaned in her sleep. He started instinctively
towards her, the long habit of five years compelling; then remembrance
rushed upon him and choked him, and he sat down again, moaning himself.
Ah, could it be that those idle words of his were going to come true
under this different stress—that he was going to hate her—his little
maid whom he had reared and nursed as a mother nurses her first-born?
Had he indeed blindly promised that which he could not perform?
Remembrance rushed in upon him.
Now that the veil was lifted the past lay vivid and hard before him, as
the familiar marsh-land would lie to-morrow morning, when the kindly
night had lifted her cloak and the whole world would smile, bright and
garish, with never a covered place, with never a secret, and different,
different from yesterday!
It had been a good world on the whole till now, but now he was fain to
say in his haste that it had never been good! For he remembered that
Milly had never had any happiness in it save that which she had had
apart from him; he remembered that her sunniest days had been those when
the _Mary Jane_ was in port, and she had asked leave to walk down to the
harbour to see her father; or when Ben Forester had come up to the
village—never, as he recollected, consenting to come in to the
cottage—but certainly, oh, most certainly wandering with _her_ along the
quiet lanes, or upon the lonely downs while he was at work.
Why remember any more? Why torture himself with further proof? He was
quite soundly enough convinced. He saw that he ought to have guessed it
long ago. He scarcely even blamed them—they were dead. He blamed
himself: himself for having so often asked her to have him; himself for
not guessing; himself for having been a fool, and for having been _old_.
Yes, there had been the mischief—he had been too old to understand, and
it was hard he had not been too old to love.
His anger was slowly dying out, but with the fire of his wrath was dying
also the fire of his life.
He felt very old.
Milly had been taken from him, but Daisy had been left, and she had made
life new for him—she had made him young. But Milly had gone from him
afresh to-day, and she had taken Daisy away with her. There was no one
left to him, and he knew that he was too old ever to begin caring for
anything again—ever to make another clutch at life in its fulness.
His appointed days he would have to run, and to that end he must needs
work that he might eat; but the savour of work was gone, for the savour
of life was gone—with his child.
He sat there beside the dead hearth and faced it all out, while the cool
dawn crept slowly into the sky behind the downs, first putting out the
stars in the blue-black heaven, then softly washing it with faintest
grey, then slowly streaking it and flushing it with violet and with rose
and with gold.
Rising out of the plain, a red-roofed town caught the first of the
morning light, its buildings clustered thick on a steep hill crowned by
an ancient church that was pinnacled upon its summit, its feet girdled
by the pale purple mists of the marsh which the sun would soon pierce
and disperse.
Many a time had he seen that crown take the earliest wave of the morning
as though it were the first thing that the new day looked at, but he had
never noticed it before as he noticed it now, remembering that it was in
that very church he had wed his wife; in that same town he had been wont
to take his little maid to buy her new shoes, or the stuff for her best
frocks.
But the dawn was waxing into daybreak; the clouds had vanished with the
night; the town was reddening, the marsh was yellowing, the river was
pearling silver-white: the sun rose.
The world was bright and light as he had foreseen it: full of hope, full
of work, full also of prying curiosity and eager, cruel cheerfulness.
The day was here, darker for him now than the night—and he knew that he
must face it.
He went to the little recess behind which was the child’s cot and drew
aside the curtains.
She was sleeping still, and there was a little flush on her cheek that
would have troubled him at any other moment. But as he looked he saw her
with fresh eyes—he saw the round face, the dimple in the chin, the clear
skin, the golden-brown curly hair, and even the eyes that, when open,
were as veronicas in the sunshine: the skin, the eyes, the hair, and the
dimple of Ben Forester. Yes, he saw it all now in one complete picture.
His wife had been oval-faced, ox-eyed, sallow-hued—and he—he was but a
sandy nondescript. He saw it—and one last great wave of hate swept over
his heart. In the little person of the child he saw Ben Forester before
him, and the morning sky swam red in his sight.
Daisy awoke. Daddie had forgotten to draw the chintz curtain that shaded
the little window opposite to her bed, and the first sunbeam shot
straight at her eyes and lifted the curtains there and shone into the
blue depths beneath.
She stirred, rubbing the eyes with her chubby fists, then she called out
“Dad!”
She did not generally need to call at all, but this morning she called
twice—then a third time, lustily; then she sat up in her cot and looked
round, and seeing the room empty she began to cry.
Still Dad did not come to his little maid—to his little maid who had
unconsciously learnt to think that to cry was the safe way to get
everything she wanted.
The garden door stood open; the scent of the morning dew on the earth
came stealing in with here and there a whiff from the sweet-pea hedge
beyond the path; the sun was slanting across the threshold, and had
almost reached her bed. She slipped down and ran to the door with her
feet bare; she knew that she should get a scolding for that, but she was
frightened, and she risked it.
What she saw when she got to the threshold did not stop her tears.
The June lilies were a-bloom against the grey wall at the garden’s edge;
the wall was low and the lilies were higher—they stood white and tall
against the green marsh and the blue sea in the distance.
In front of the lilies on the grass plot Daddie knelt on the ground with
his head bowed down on the garden wall. She was too little to be
definitely alarmed, but she was vaguely frightened, and she cried louder
than ever.
Then as he did not immediately respond she gathered her little
night-dress about her and trotted across the wet turf towards him.
“Daddie, Daddie!” cried she, shaking him, “I wants to get up; I wants my
breakfast!”
A shiver ran through him; then slowly he pulled himself up by the wall
and sat on it as though he were afraid to stand on his feet; he passed
his hand across his face and through his hair: Daisy thought his face
looked very funny.
She stopped crying, but fright was still in the blue eyes as she gazed
at him with her finger in her mouth. Instinctively she felt that
something was amiss.
“Has ’oo been to bed in the garden?” she asked in a puzzled way—“be ’oo
very sleepy and cold like me was when me tummled into the river?”
He nodded his head.
“Be ’oo still frightened ’cos me tummled in? She won’t never go for to
do it again. ’Cos whatever would ’oo do wivout me?” said she, trying to
console. But he only groaned, and she was sore puzzled.
Then his eyes fell on her little night-dress and on her bare, brown
feet, and automatically he said what he would have said on any other
occasion:
“Ye didn’t ought to ha’ come out with no frock and no shoes and
stockings on,” said he. “Run in directly, like a good girl.”
He spoke in a low, dull voice; but she was reassured at getting the
expected scolding, and stopped the whimper that she was about to start
upon afresh.
“Ain’t ye comin’?” said she. “I want my breakfast.”
“Well, run in and get dressed, and I’ll get it for ye,” said he.
She looked at him again, still a little puzzled that he did not kiss
her, that he did not hasten to do all her bidding, but on the whole
consoled, since things seemed to be resuming their ordinary routine of
getting dressed and having breakfast.
So she took her finger out of her mouth and gathered up her night-dress
again and ran back through the morning dew.
On the threshold she turned to see if he were coming; the sun shone on
her golden head and into her blue eyes; her little robe gleamed white in
it, but on her creamy cheeks was the flush of recent sleep: she was like
the morning dew herself—and like the spring-time.
He gazed at her fascinated—but he gazed as one who looks through a heavy
mist into a great distance; he gazed at her as though she were already
only a memory.
Not an hour afterwards he was leading her out into the distance himself.
No soul had been stirring in the village as the two had passed through
the silent little street and under the old gateway, down the hill.
Alone and unnoticed they took their way across the wide marsh that
glistened with the sunlight on the mists of the night; she was prattling
gaily—the “long journey” on which he had told her they were going, was a
great treat, and so was the wearing of her best blue frock on a
week-day: but his face was heavy, and he did not look at her.
Daisy jumped along at his side; her saucy chatter which had called many
a smile to the dull face where others rarely saw anything but gloom—woke
never a ghost of one to-day.
But she was too much excited to notice that.
“Be we goin’ to buy a new frock?” she cried in high glee as they neared
the town on the marsh. “It were a good job it were the old one as I
messed when I tummled into the river, weren’t it, Dad? And it were a
good job I weren’t drownded, weren’t it?” she added, loth to leave a
subject which she felt invested her with an additional importance.
He groaned, but she was too much pre-occupied to hear it.
“We’ll ’ave a pink frock, this time, won’t we, Dad? ’cos it were such a
good job I didn’t get drownded,” she insisted. “You said we wouldn’t
’ave blue again, and I want pink, so I will ’ave it, won’t I?” And she
kept on repeating “won’t I?” until he was forced to reply.
But he only said: “We ain’t goin’ to buy no frocks to-day.” And as he
said it he struck off towards the lower road that skirted the base of
the hill.
“But I’d rather see the shops, Daddie,” declared she. And as he took no
notice, she added fretfully: “’Tain’t the right way to the sweet shop—no
’tain’t.”
It was the first time he had ever refused her an innocent wish; his
heart tightened as he answered:
“We ain’t got no time to buy sweets to-day. We’se got a long way to go.
Ye must come along like a good girl, and maybe ye shall ’ave some sweets
another time.”
“Does ’oo promise?” said she authoritatively.
And with the tightening at his heart again, he said: “I promise!”
They struck out again on to the sun-scorched marsh-land beyond the town.
She was a sunny-souled babe, and she was reconciled, but as the heat
began to pour down on them, she began to flag.
“Where be we goin’, Daddie?” she would ask. “To the se’side? I ain’t
never been to this se’side before. Be it a far beach?”
“Yes,” he would answer, “it be a very far beach.”
Then, presently: “Ain’t we goin’ to ’ave no dinner, Dad? I’d rather go
’ome. I be tired.”
“Soon,” he would reply; but the complaints multiplied.
“I don’t want to go no further,” was the next. “Daddy carry Daisy on his
back!”
At first he had tried to be deaf to this last request; he had a vague
feeling that he _dared_ not take her in his arms.
But the old habit of the past five years was upon him still. He could
not endure that the little footsteps should lag painfully, and that the
little voice that had been so dear to him should plead in vain.
“Daddie, Daddie,” it cried, “don’t ye ’ear?”
He heard, he heard well enough!
A sob rose in his throat, and he turned away that the child might not
see tears on his old cheeks. But he stooped down and lifted her on to
his back. And then he could hear her laugh for contentment, and could
feel her nestle her head down against his, as she slowly dropped to
sleep.
A farmer, driving across that distant marsh-land, met them thus. Months
afterwards he told it in the village on the hill.
Two months and more had passed by: where the plain had been at its
greenest against a sea—blue beneath the hot sun and east winds of
spring—it was golden now with the gold of the harvesting, and brown with
the seeds of many grasses that nodded heavy heads in the western
breezes.
The cottage on the cliff was sad and quiet.
For the best part of a week after that memorable evening when little
Daisy had fallen into the river—it had remained absolutely silent: no
smoke had ascended heavenward from its old brick chimney, no voice,
either sober or merry, had been heard from out its latticed windows or
its orchard-garden.
To the dismay of the neighbours and most of all to the maker of the
whole mischief, Tom Wycombe’s house was bolted and barred, and when “the
perlice” in the person of one man who had overlooked the village
morality for many years, considered it its duty to scale the garden wall
and investigate the premises—it was found to be swept and garnished, but
deserted.
Men had gathered outside the inn above the old Church Square, or under
the public shed that overlooked the marsh and—between the puffs of an
evening pipe—had declared it to be their solemn opinion that the “pore
old chap had ’eard somethin’ at last,” though who had been “so
blackguardly as tell ’im and them two dead and buried,” they couldn’t
think, and would dearly have liked to know.
The women whispering across the counter to the old post-mistress, who
always knew everything, had their suspicions.
They had them, and they aired them, but they got no satisfaction. For
Mrs. Goodenough herself was too frightened to be indiscreet, and Tom
Wycombe—when he returned—kept his own counsel. For he did return, to the
relief of all, but he returned alone—a changed and aged man—and he kept
his own counsel in solitude.
To the kindly inquiries of timid neighbours, he answered civilly but
very curtly that “Daisy was livin’ at the sea for the sake of ’er
’ealth.”
The reply eased the minds of those who had loved the little one, but it
had not deceived them. For the child had always been perfectly strong,
and if she had not been, Wycombe would have been less than ever likely
to part from her.
Less than ever likely unless something had happened to change his blind
devotion to her, and that that something had happened, no one had any
doubt, but everybody pitifully respected his silence and left him alone
in his wretchedness.
And thus the weeks wore away till the harvest had ripened and been
gathered in.
“Oo’d ha’ thought he’d ha been so old,” said the neighbours, watching
him totter back from the village well, with his two pails of water
hanging on hooks from a bar of wood across his shoulders. “’E seemed a
likely man too, when ’e married the girl, but folk didn’t ought to wed
where there’s such a breach in years.”
“Ah, ’e feels that now,” said an old man wisely. “And yet it seems a
pity ’e couldn’t ha’ kep’ the comfort o’ the little ’un. It wern’t _’er_
fault no ways, and it do seem rough on a child too.”
Was that what he was beginning to think himself also?
When their backs were all turned, and they had gone back to their work
or their pleasure, to friends or to home; when the door was safely shut
behind him and he was alone once more with the lonely, silent plain—the
distant, murmuring sea—his face let go of that cruel hold on secrecy, he
dared to think of his pain—to tell it—to himself and to the land that
was his most familiar friend.
For his pain was there, it never left him. Only from having been a
furious beast, flying at his throat, it had become merely a constant and
wearisome companion, who would leave him no peace even in his
loneliness—a persistent aching—a weary, weary longing.
Yes, that was it: a weary, weary longing—a longing for the little duties
that used to need fitting in to his rougher man’s work, the care of a
tender little body, the care of a sunny little soul, the daily anxieties
and the hourly joys, the rare punishments, the frequent rewards, the
mischief, and the noise and the laughter—the endless vitality of the day
and the deep and tender rest of even.
Where were they all?
To use her own little phrase—the phrase that came back to him at every
turn—“all gone—all gone!”
The words echoed through his brain most days, but, when the bells of
which the parish was so proud pealed on Sundays, and he closed his door
and sat by his lonely hearth, instead of leading her forth to church in
her best as he had been wont to do—then they fairly maddened him.