“Oh, Syl, I can't tell you how glad I am that you are back. And Ella
too--with that hateful marriage broken off. I don't quite understand how
it is. He backed out at the last moment, didn't he? But my poor head has
been in such a whirl all day that I don't seem to understand anything.
Dr. Simmons is very kind and clever, but he's not like you, Syl. Your
coming gives me hope. Oh, you mustn't let him die, Syl, dear.”
Miss Lanyon put her hands on Sylvester's shoulders and began to cry
softly. He put his arm kindly round her, and tried to comfort her.
“I've been crying all day, I think,” she continued. The poor lady's eyes
were red; her grizzling hair, usually so neat, was disarranged; she
wore an old red dressing-gown with great white buttons, within which her
fragile figure seemed to be lost. The dining-room fire was nearly out,
and only one gas-jet was alight. The two were sitting up, neither able
to go to bed and sleep. Ella had retired to her room almost immediately
after her arrival, having learned that the old man was unconscious.
“He rallied so to-day,” said Miss Lanyon, drying her tears, “I thought
the poor dear had suddenly recovered. He spoke quite sensibly, though he
was so weak, and, oh, he wanted you so badly, Syl. And then Lady Milmo's
telegram came about the wedding, and I gave it him to read. No, you
mustn't scold me any more about it. I thought he would be so pleased.
Then he asked where you had gone, and when you were coming back, quite
in his old quiet way, and called for writing materials, and he wrote
something with great, great difficulty, and made nurse and me witness
his signature. It must have been to do with his will, I think. He had
just time to put it in an envelope when he fainted away. He revived
afterwards, and then he began to moan for you and Ella to come to him.
He didn't like the nurse; the strange face troubled him, poor darling.
He only wanted Ella and you. And now you have come and seen him, what do
you really think, Syl, dear? If it is the worst, tell me, for I am not
afraid to hear it.”
She drew herself up with a flash of family resemblance to her brother,
which the physician's quick eye noticed. He replied frankly. The old
man was in a natural sleep,--a hopeful sign. His recovery would probably
depend upon his power of resistance. Lytton, the great specialist, was
coming down to-morrow, and they might expect his verdict to be final.
They talked long together in the cold, dimly lit room. Miss Lanyon
repeated her story, with fresh details added here and there, told of
the kindness of Simmons, the numberless inquiries from the townspeople,
broke off to recall little instances of her brother's goodness. Only
to-day, during his short spell of consciousness, he had asked whether
Sylvester had made the arrangement for the Jenkins' three children to
board with the Jellicoes. At this announcement Sylvester brought his
hand down hard upon the table. \
“What a brute I am!” he exclaimed! “I forgot all about it! And he
remembered! What did you tell him?”
“I said that you no doubt were seeing to the matter,” replied Miss
Lanyon.
Sylvester sat on the corner of the table and stared in front of him,
his mind full of the father the latchet of whose shoes he felt himself
unworthy to loosen, and tears came into his eyes. The incident touched
him deeply. This tender thoughtfulness for little things in the midst
of events great enough to absorb the attention of a strong man seemed a
keynote of his father's nature.
“He is the one perfect man of his generation,” said Sylvester.
A while later he induced Miss Lanyon to go to bed, and went upstairs to
relieve the nurse by his father's side. And for some hours he watched
the beloved face, placid and wan in the dim light. Skilled physician
though he was, he alternated between hope and fear. A world without his
father was unimaginable. His life was barren enough already. His father
was the only being left that could satisfy the dumb craving for human
sympathy that gnawed continually at his vitals. The prospect of his
grim loneliness appalled him. Again he looked intently into the sleeping
face. The muscles all relaxed, it appeared unutterably careworn,--the
face of a man many years older. To the son seemed as if the last two
days had brought the havoc; he cursed Roderick in his heart.
Only once before had he felt the same murderous hatred of a man. Then he
was watching, even as he was doing now, by a man's bedside. The memory
recurred, intensely vivid. He set his teeth as he lived over again those
hours of agony and strife. Unconsciously he drew up his indictment of
humanity for the wrongs it had inflicted on him. Friendship was naught.
Had not his dearest friend stabbed him in the dark? Woman was inherently
false and corrupt. His own wife, who had lain in his arms, had betrayed
him, and she had smiled, smiled to the hour of her death. To have
children was a curse. How did he know that alien blood did not run in
Dorothy's veins? Woman's love, what was it? To-night Ella had confessed
her love for him. It had not stopped her from throwing herself into the
embraces of a satyr. The brute nature of humanity! He himself had not
been safeguarded from spasms of jealousy. Fiercely he attributed them to
the lower instincts. He forgot how at times in his sombre house he
had let his pen slip from his fingers and had ached for the touch of
a woman's hand and the sound of a child's laughter; how a girl's fresh
face, perilously like Ella's, had quivered before his vision, and how
the grip of cold iron had suddenly fastened round his heart, and he had
resumed his work, hard and scornful. These things that had come to him
were remote from the flesh; but he forgot them. In his hour of dark
misanthropy he ranked her sex and his own temptation at their lowest.
For her humiliation he had no pity. Like other women, she had rolled
in the mire; smirching was the natural consequence. For Roderick he had
hatred, unmitigated by any pleasant memory of old acquaintance. But he
remembered his father's many kindnesses to Roderick, and the man's crime
was further blackened by ingratitude.
Nor did he pity the father of the son thus disgraced. The ignoble, mean
old man who had always been the object of his scorn had brought his
punishment upon himself; for had he not neglected the elementary
responsibilities of parentage? There could be no pity for a father of
whom the son spoke openly with cynical contempt. Sylvester's eyes fell
upon his own father's face, and the contrast brought a tumultuous rush
of feeling. And from the wall opposite, his mother smiled down upon him
through the gloom. She was gone,--the one pure, divine woman the earth
had held. The one perfect man lay there, still living. He must not die.
Sylvester shook with a great terror. His father was as needful as the
sun in a foul and dismal world. These two were remote as stars from the
rest of humanity. Through them passed his faith in God.
But his faith in man was gone. On this night of vigil, after his day of
self-repression and stern meting out of justice, was the culmination of
all the disillusion and the bitterness of his life. Towards the three
human beings upon whom he was bringing crushing disgrace his heart was
cold granite. And the old man with the kindly, careworn face slept on
and on by his side.
At the first streaks of the winter dawn the door opened, and Ella,
simply dressed for the day, entered the room. Sylvester rose with a
frown and advanced to meet her.
“I must take my turn,” she whispered.
“There is no necessity,” he returned.
“I have passed through great trouble,” she said, looking at him with
eyes pathetically bright through want of sleep, “and it would be mere
human kindness to let me sit here for a little alone. And you must take
some rest.”
“I thank you for your consideration,” he replied ironically, ignoring
her appeal, “but I am not in need of rest.” He held the door open for
her to pass out, but she stood her ground.
“You are hard, but you claim to be just. Uncle Matthew sent for me. Aunt
Agatha has told you. I have some right to be here. Besides, it would
hurt him to know that you refused to let me be with him.”
“If you put it that way, I must admit your claim,” he said coldly. “If
you will come into the passage, I will give you some directions in view
of contingencies.”
She assented, and they went out together. At the end of the passage a
housemaid passed wraithlike on her way to the kitchen. The crack of the
stairs beneath her tread sounded sharp in the unbroken silence of the
house.
“Thank you, I will not forget,” said Ella, when he had ended his
instructions. She disappeared into the sick chamber; and Sylvester,
going to his own room, threw himself in his clothes upon the bed, and
wrapped in a rug fell, through force of habit and through fatigue, into
a heavy sleep.
A couple of hours afterwards he was awakened. Mr. Usher urgently
requested to speak with him. Sylvester rose, shook the sleep from his
eyes, and faced the grim contingencies of another day. He was prepared
for this interview with the father, had steeled himself against whining
entreaties and appeals to old comradeship. But to see him was an act of
common decency, however unpleasant and however fruitless. He sponged
his face with ice-cold water and went downstairs to the dining-room. Mr.
Usher was sitting on the edge of an armchair, warming his plump hands
before the fire. He rose as Sylvester entered, and, putting his hands
behind his back, regarded him with eyes more than ever expressionless
and red-rimmed.
“I had a telegram from my poor boy last night,” he announced in his
slow, pedantic way. “I could not come round last night. I have been
suffering again lately from my bronchial tubes. My doctor tells me the
night air in winter is dangerous for me. I was a prisoner.”
“Your health is valuable to you, no doubt,” said Sylvester,
sarcastically.
“I live for my son,” replied Usher, sitting down again in the armchair.
“If I ran risks now and contracted illness, who would stand by my son in
his hour of need? Prudence has been the guiding principle of my life. I
have profited by it.”
He wagged his head and looked into the fire. Sylvester turned one of the
straight-backed chairs and sat down, his elbow on the table.
“Perhaps you will state your business, Mr. Usher,” he said. “My time,
like your health, is valuable.”
“All in good time,” replied Usher; “nothing good comes of hurrying.
I never hurry.” He rubbed his palms together meditatively, like some
colossal and flabby fly. Then he continued deliberately: “I learn from
Roderick that he has been arrested for forging your father's name to a
cheque.”
“For £3,000,” said Sylvester.
“Yes. It is a great sum of money. But your father gave it to him as a
wedding present. Your father is a generous man.”
“Your son confessed to me that he forged it.”
“Well, perhaps he did,” assented Usher. “Perhaps he did.”
In spite of his contempt for the old man and his pitilessness towards
Roderick, he gazed upon his interlocutor with some wonder. Not a shaft
of dismay at the disgrace hanging over his son's head seemed to have
penetrated the brass-armoured egotism of this placid, unvenerable man.
Sylvester waited contemptuously for him to speak.
“You are preferring the charge against him this morning?” asked Usher.
“I have instructed my solicitor to do so.”
“There is still time to telegraph to your solicitor to withdraw it.”
“I have no such intentions.”
“I cannot let you proceed. I have the feelings of a father.”
Sylvester rose, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, stood on the
hearth-rug facing Mr. Usher.
“It is no doubt a painful matter to you,” said he, with cold politeness,
“but my intentions are unalterable. I will prosecute him right through.
Nothing you can possibly say will have the slightest effect on my
determination.”
Then the old man seemed to hug his stout body with his arms, and for
the first time a gleam came into his pale eyes and he chuckled softly
to himself. At the unexpected sound Sylvester started. Such symptoms
pointed to senility. But suddenly the old man turned to him with a quick
snarl, in startling contrast with his deliberate manner,--
“I suppose you are not aware, you young fool, that you will be sending
your own brother to gaol.”
He bent forward, gripping the arms of the chair, fixing Sylvester with
an inscrutable gaze, his lips beneath the scrubby white moustache parted
and showing his yellow stumps of teeth.
“Your brother. Don't you understand?”
“What idiocy are you talking?” exclaimed Sylvester, in angry impatience.
“I am talking the truth, my young friend. I am a truthful man,” replied
Usher, with mocking resumption of his usual habit of speech. “Roderick
is your own dear brother.”
“You accuse my father of having an illegitimate son?”
“Oh, no. Roderick is quite legitimate. He is my son. At least, I quite
believed your poor mother.”
“My mother--what the devil are you talking about?” cried Sylvester,
fiercely. “What has my mother got to do with it?”
“Roderick is her son, my dear Sylvester. Hers and mine. She was my
wife.”
Sylvester glared at him for a moment, and then, the preposterous
absurdity of the story dawning upon him, he broke into a contemptuous
laugh and turned away. The man was mad.
“I think it time we parted,” said Sylvester. Ushers face expressed
pained surprise.
“You do not believe me?”
Then as Sylvester did not reply otherwise than by a shrug, he drew
a mass of papers from his breast-pocket and selected therefrom a
photograph, old and discoloured, of a man and woman posed in the angular
attitudes of the photographer's art in the late fifties, and clad in the
uncouth attire of those days. The woman had a baby upon her lap.
“Your mother and brother and I,” said Mr. Usher. “I was a handsome young
man. I had fine black whiskers.”
Sylvester received the picture, looked at it, and a spasm of horrible
disgust shook his frame. The young woman was his mother--unmistakably.
“She was my dear wife,” said Usher.
“And you played the brute beast, I suppose, until she divorced you. And
then she married my father. I see,” said Sylvester, grimly.
But Usher raised his hand in deprecation. “On the contrary,” said he,
“we were never divorced. When I said your father had no illegitimate
children, I was wrong. You are an illegitimate child.”
Sylvester flung the photograph with a furious gesture into the fire. The
old man darted forward to rescue it, but Sylvester roughly pushed him
back into his chair, and stood over him trembling with anger. Behind him
the photograph curled and flamed.
“What devilish story are you telling me? Let me have it at once, all of
it,” cried Sylvester.
There was a slight pause. Usher passed the tip of his tongue over his
lips, and again he hugged himself in his armchair.
“I have been waiting to tell you this for thirty years. For your dear
father's sake I have held my peace. I am a peaceful man. But I could
not let you send your own brother to prison, your dear mother's son.
Fraternal love is a wondrous thing.”
“Come to the point and tell me, or I may not be responsible for what I
do,” said Sylvester, in husky menace.
The swelling triumph of his long-deferred vengeance had not quite
overmastered a craven spirit. A glance out of the corner of his eye
assured Usher of Sylvester's desperation. The sight was an unholy
mingling of delight and fear. He rubbed his soft palms together and
wagged his head.
“It is a sad story. I blame my wife. She acted wrongly. We lived in
Australia on a little farm. I am fond of rural pursuits. Ayresford
is rural. That is why I came here. We were married and happy with our
little child. We called him Roderick. It is a family name, but perhaps
that would not interest you. He was three years old when your father
came to these parts. Ah! he was a dashing young fellow then. He is not
dashing now. Poor Matthew!”
“Damn you!” said Sylvester.
“Ah! that is what your father has often said. You are like your father.
Well, to shorten a long story, he fell in love with my wife, and she
with him, and she ran away with him to England, leaving me alone with
our poor little boy Roderick. Here are proofs.” He patted the sheaf of
papers on his lap and signed to Sylvester to read them; but Sylvester
motioned a negative. He was convinced. His anger had subsided into he
knew not what state of reeling horror. Yet through it all Usher himself
was revealed to him, and he regarded him as something obscene.
“And you have received money from my father all this time as the price
of silence.”
“I was poor, and I forgave mine enemy. I am a forgiving man. It is my
way. When your dear mother died I came here and lived near him, to show
that I forgave him.”
“Like father, like son,” said Sylvester,--“a blackmailer and a forger.
Oh, my God!” He turned away and stood with bowed head, staring at the
carpet, his hands clenched. Without moving he said hoarsely,--
“Go. We have nothing more to say to each other.”
“You see you can't let your dear brother go to a felon's doom--and your
legitimate brother, too, my dear Sylvester,” said Usher, smacking his
lips at each word. Then he rose and buttoned his frock-coat and went out
of the room, chuckling quietly.
Presently Sylvester roused himself with a great shuddering sigh.
“Oh, God!” he said, and moved a step or two towards the fire.
There was a knock at the door and a servant entered, bearing a letter on
a tray.
“Miss Lanyon said I was to give you this at once, sir.”
He took it, found the envelope was addressed to himself in his father's
handwriting. He did not notice that the ink on the envelope was wet, nor
that the enclosure had been written some time previously.
“I, Matthew Lanyon,” it ran, “of Woodlands, Ayresford, hereby declare
that I drew a cheque for £3,000, dated the 10th December, 189-, in
favour of Roderick Charles Usher, Esq., of 13 Queen's Park Mansions,
London, S. W.” The document was signed by him, and the signature was
witnessed by Agatha Lanyon and Mary Evans, the nurse.
Like a man in a dream, Sylvester crossed to a little desk by the window,
that once had been his mother's, and wrote out a telegram; then a letter
with which he enclosed his father's statement. Both he addressed to his
solicitor. The gardener was summoned and despatched to the post-office.
When he had gone, Sylvester was scarcely conscious of his action.
Roderick's fate was of small account compared with the doom that had
fallen upon himself.
But an hour afterwards Roderick was driving through the London streets,
a free man.