The Man With The Mad Eyes
The other women being employed in the daytime, the sitting-room had been
more especially Bessie's domain. How strange and chilling was the thought
it would be empty of Bessie for evermore. Her untidy work-basket peeped
out from under the sofa where she always pushed it on the appearance of a
visitor; the penny weekly paper in which she read of the fashions, and the
romantic love-matches of which she had dreamed while making an absolutely
sordid marriage herself, was tucked behind the cushion of her chair.
Deleah stood within the doorway for a minute, without entering, feeling
strangely bereaved and forlorn. Not much sympathy had been between the
pair, but the ties of blood are stronger than is realised till "marriage
or death or division" snaps the cord.
With a lagging step Deleah went forward into the so pathetically empty
room. On the table some flowers were lying. Two deep purple blooms of
clematis. The creeper so carefully trained to climb beside a certain hall
door came into her mind. She had noticed on an occasion she would fain
have forgotten, without knowing she had done so, that it bore two buds.
Deleah looked at the blossoms with an odd feeling of repulsion. She walked
round the table to the side that was farthest from them. Then lifting her
eyes, she saw that Charles Gibbon was standing by the opposite wall. The
open door had screened him from her on entering.
"Mr. Gibbon!" she said, and her voice faltered with dismay; only
apprehension was in her eyes.
He looked at her without speaking. It was curiously disturbing to see him
standing there, his back to the wall, saying nothing; the broad, short
figure, at one time so familiar in that room, now so alien and strange,
the commonplace, plain-featured face, tragic with its new grey hue, the
eyes--Deleah remembered with a shudder some words recently spoken about
the eyes! They were fixed upon her face.
"Won't you come and sit down, Mr. Gibbon?"
He advanced a few steps, and stood at the table opposite her.
She looked at the flowers. "You brought these?"
"For you," he said, speaking thickly. "They are the only two the clematis
had. If it had ten thousand they would have been for you."
Deleah kept her eyes upon the flowers. She felt that she could not touch
them. "You are very kind," she said.
"You would say as much as that to any stranger in the street who had
kicked a stone out of your path, and I--I--." He was stammering curiously
in his thickened voice. It seemed that the words he wanted to speak would
not come. "And I--after all that I suffer--only kind?" he got out at last.
With something of the expression of a trapped creature in her eyes, Deleah
looked past him to the door. He turned instantly, and shut it, and came
back to his place opposite her at the table.
"Your sister is married to Mr. Boult, to-day," he said. "At one time you
could not marry me because of your sister. That impediment's gone. Another
time, you had some other excuse. Again another. Come, what excuse have you
to-day?" He leant across the table to bring his face closer to hers. "You
don't intend to marry me, do you?"
She gazed at him with fear in her eyes, but did not speak. "You let me
live beside you, set my heart on you, till there was nothing else on earth
or heaven for me but you. You let me slave to serve a man I hated as a
means of getting you. You let me get ready my house--every brick in it,
every pound of paint laid on it, for you. You--"
"Mr. Gibbon, do wait! I think you are saying too much. I never deceived
you. I never said I would marry you. I tried to make you understand."
"Listen! Have you always hated me? When you took my flowers and fruit--all
the presents I lavished on you--tell me, did you hate me then?"
"Certainly I did not. I thought you very kind and generous."
"Do you hate me now?" When she told him 'no' he stretched out a shaking
hand to her across the table. "Then--?"
Deleah stepped back from the hand and shook her head.
"Why?"
No answer.
"Why?"
"Oh, where would be the use of my telling you!"
"But you shall tell me."
"No."
"Then I will tell you. You think you are going to marry some one else."
Deleah lifted her head and looked at him with proud offence. "You are not
to say that, Mr. Gibbon. It is not true."
"You think so," he persisted. "But you are not. Do you know why? Because I
will stop you. I know! know! know!" He mercilessly slapped one of his
shaking hands upon the table. "And I will stop you."
He turned away, walked to the door, stood staring at it for a moment, his
back to her, then suddenly faced her again: "Sir Francis Forcus," he said.
He walked to the table his eyes fixed on hers. "Sir Francis Forcus," he
repeated. And once again, leaning across the table to bring his face close
to hers, "Sir Francis Forcus."
Then he laughed in the girl's frightened face, and went out of the room.
Emily put an inquiring head in at the door.
"He haven't gone? Mr. Gibbon haven't gone, Miss Deleah? Well, now, when
the mistress told me he was up along of you, I hoped 'twas another weddin'
comin' off. You shouldn't have let him go so quick, my dear."
Deleah had a dazed look about the eyes. "He was horrible! I believe he is
mad," she said.
Emily clapped her hands together. "Bessie's marriage have done that! I
always told Bessie she'd send some of 'em to the lunatic asylum, or their
graves."
"I believe he is mad. Which way did he go, Emily?" She ran down into the
shop where Mrs. Day, if daughters were married or daughters were
threatened, must never forget that she was licensed to sell tobacco and
snuff, was still toiling away at her stocktaking. "Mama, did you see Mr.
Gibbon go away?"
"No. Is he gone, my dear?"
Deleah dashed to the door, still open, although the windows were
shuttered, and looked up and down the street.
"Do you want to call him back?" her mother asked of her, in mild surprise.
"I believe he is mad." Deleah was breathless, shaking with excitement or
fear. "He was in the sitting-room--hiding behind the door--waiting for
me."
"Mr. Gibbon! My dear, he couldn't have been. Why should he do that?"
"He was doing it. How did he get there?"
"He came in just as usual--there is really nothing the matter with him,
Deleah--to ask me if I knew where his pistol was that he and Franky used
to shoot at bottles with when he first came, out of his bedroom window.
You remember? I told him it was in his bedroom still, for all I knew; I
told him to run up and get it?"
"Did he get it? Had he a pistol in his pocket while he talked to me?"
Emily had followed Deleah into the shop. "He'd no pistol," she put in
confidently. "He'd never find it. I'd never liked the nasty dang'rous
thing, with Franky into every mischief, and I hid it up on the top of the
wardrobe. He'd never find it!"
"Run and see," Mrs. Day said. She began to be impressed by the look of
fear on Deleah's face; the girl was trembling violently, now, her teeth
chattering as if with extreme cold.
In less than a minute Emily was back. "He've got it," they heard her
calling as she came. "The pistol's gone. He've got it. Sure as we're
living, he's goin' to shoot hisself, on account of Bessie!"
"Nonsense!" Mrs. Day cried sharply. "Deleah, there is really nothing to be
frightened about, my dear. The pistol was Mr. Gibbon's own. He naturally
wanted it."
Deleah stood in the middle of the shop, lit by the half-open door and the
jet of gas above Mrs. Day's desk. She was squeezing her hands together,
her arms strained against her breast as if trying desperately to stop her
trembling. "Could I get there?" she said to her mother. "Could I get there
first?" Her body was bent forward as if with the impulse to run, but she
waited, squeezing herself in her arms, her brow knit, trying to steady her
thought. "If I can get there first--!" she said.
"Where, dear? Get where? What is it you want to do, Deleah?"
She seemed not to hear: "If I can get there first!" she said to herself;
then, going stumblingly, reached the door, and was gone.
The two women left, stared at each other's blank face in the mingled
lights of the shop. "She isn't running after Mr. Gibbon, surely!" Mrs. Day
said, helplessly perplexed.
"There's no good in her a-doing that. Gibbon's heart's set on Bessie,"
Emily declared.
"Do go after her, and bring her back, Emily."
The great yard of the Hope Brewery was nearly empty. A young clerk, his
pen stuck in the bushy hair above his ears, his hands in his trousers
pockets, was whistling as he walked across it, stepping lightly from the
shadows cast by the huge buildings to the sunshine of the open spaces. An
enormous drayman was backing a pair of powerful horses, in order to bring
his wagon under that portion of the wall over which a barrel hung
suspended; two other men also of gigantic proportions, with red-shining
faces and aprons tied over their ample bodies, stood to watch the
manoeuvres. A groom in charge of a saddle-horse by the entrance to the
main building patted his horse's neck as he also looked on.
Deleah, flinging herself from the door of the four-wheeler which had
brought her, dashed through the yard, consciously seeing none of these
things, which yet photographed themselves on her brain and remained
indelibly printed there till her dying day. She knew her way to the
private room of Sir Francis, and made towards it, without pausing to heed
the one or two men who endeavoured to stop and question her. In the
ante-room to the inner sanctum, a confidential clerk who always sat there
flew up from his desk.
"Excuse me, miss. A moment, please. You can't go in there. Sir Francis is
particularly engaged."
When she took no notice, he tried to reach the door before her; but
Deleah, too quick for him, dashing forward, opened, and shut it in his
face.
Sir Francis was standing in his favourite position with his back to the
mantelpiece, in riding dress, his gloves and whip in his hand. Deleah,
bolting into the room, and falling back upon the door, the more
effectually to close it upon the confidential clerk, had an instant's
vision of him in his calm unassailableness, in that unruffled perfection
of appearance, which, while it had always awakened her girlish admiration,
had ever seemed to remove him to an immeasurable distance. The sight of
him, even in what was to her a supreme moment, had its habitual effect of
pouring cold waters of discouragement upon her mood, of making her
doubtful of herself and any claim she could possibly make upon his
attention. She had been presumptuous in pushing herself into his presence.
Of course he was safe. Of course nothing could hurt him. The poor
Honourable Charles, the erstwhile draper's assistant, with his common,
thick-set figure, his hoarse voice, his unrefined accent--it was an
offence even to think of him in the same breath with this elegant
gentleman. How could this one on his high eminence of aloofness and
security be endangered by such an one as that?
To see and feel all this was the work of a moment. The moment in which she
slammed the door on the protesting clerk, the moment in which also she
felt the shock of awaking from her frenzied zeal that would have beaten
down all obstacles to save this man's life, to the perception that her
zeal would in his eyes seem an absurdity; that her presence there was
superfluous if not impertinent; that she had made a fool of herself for
nothing.
Sir Francis suffered this inexplicable noisy invasion of his privacy with
a look of annoyance and surprise breaking up the composure of his face.
Then, seeing who it was who had thus burst upon him, who leant upon the
door she had slammed, panting as if pursued, turning frightened, appealing
eyes to him, the expression of his face changed, the whole man seemed to
change. With a look such as Deleah had never dreamed it possible he could
wear he went forward to her; in a tone she had not known his voice to
take, he spoke her name.
"Deleah!" he said.
She looked at him; but in rapturous wonder at the light in his eyes,
listening spellbound to the delight of her name so spoken, forgetting who
she was, where she was, in the whirl of bliss where her senses momentarily
swam. Then he held out his hands and took hers, and held them locked in
his against his breast.
"My dear child, I was coming to you," he said. "You have come to me
instead, my little Deleah!"