FATHER AND SON.
Of all the men in London, there was scarcely one less qualified to
take charge of a young child than Francis Bramwell, living alone on
his tiny island in the South London Canal. He was not used to
children. He had had only one sister, and no brother. His sister,
twelve years older than himself, had married and gone away to
Australia before he was eight years of age. His father had been a
successful attorney in Shoreham, where he died ten years ago, when his
son was just twenty years old. His mother had been dead many years at
that time.
When his grand-uncle was buried a few years later, Bramwell became
rich and left Shoreham. He had been reading for the Bar in a
half-hearted and dilatory way.
He gave up all thought of the profession, and resolved to lead a life
of lettered ease and contemplation, to be summed up later, probably in
a book of one kind or another. In fact, as soon as he found himself
independent he determined to devote his attention to poetry, and, as
he did not feel certain of possessing a strong vein of genius, he
determined to confine himself to translations by way of a beginning.
For quietness he moved out of Shoreham to a cottage a few miles from
the dull little town of Beechley, and in Beechley, after the first
visit of John Ainsworth, he made the acquaintance of Philip Ray and
his beautiful sister Kate.
When he fell in love he threw his books to the winds, and, beyond
verses addressed to his mistress, had no dealings with the Muse.
He was then a man to all outward appearance of singularly unemotional
temperament. But under a placid demeanour he concealed a sensitive and
enthusiastic nature, a nature of fire and spirit, subject to raptures
and despairs, and desiring rapture almost as a necessity. Prose would
not satisfy him; he must have the wine of poetry. To love was not
enough for him; he must adore. Devotion was too tame; he must immolate
himself.
He had lived most of his years since adolescence apart, and had never
tried to make himself agreeable to any girl, until he told himself
that life without Kate Ray would be simply intolerable. After marriage
he treated his wife more like the goddess of a temple than the young,
pretty, vain, foolish, flighty mistress of a home.
Kate, who loved flattery and fine clothes, and trivial gaiety, could
not understand him. She thought him cold and formal at one time; a
wild man, a lunatic at another. He did not stoop to flattery, or
condescend to simulation. He was worshipful, not gallant. He praised
her spirit and her soul, possessions to which she did not attach much
importance. He said little about her eyes, or her figure, or her hair,
which she knew to be beautiful, and of which she was inordinately
vain.
She could not comprehend him. She did not try very hard. She never
tried very hard to do anything, except dress well and look pretty. He
was, no doubt, very grand, but she loved John Ainsworth all the while.
John's ways and manner were perfectly intelligible to her, and when he
came to her the second time secretly, and threw a romantic light upon
their stolen meetings--when she heard his flattery and sighs and
oaths--her weak will gave way, and she fled with him, taking the boy
with her.
Now, after three years, and when Bramwell had made up his mind he
should never see wife or child again, the boy had come from his wife's
death-bed to his door. What was he to do with this helpless being?
He had decreed in his own soul, beyond the reach of appeal, that he
would never see his wife again. It was plain she had not contemplated
a meeting with him. It was plain she had put such a thing beyond her
hopes--beyond, most likely, her desires. For had she not known where
he lay hidden? and had she not refrained from seeking him, refrained
even from letting him know she was alive? But when she found herself
on the point of dissolution, when she had been told she had only a few
hours to live, when the delirium of death was upon her, she had sent
the child to him. She had at least the grace to feel her shame, and
sufficient knowledge of him to be certain that no consideration on
earth would induce him once more to look on her, the woman he had
loved, who had betrayed his honour and laid his life in ruin.
But the boy? What was to be done with him?
The night before he had been too stupefied to think. When Philip left
him he had taken the child to his own room and put him in his own bed,
and the little fellow, overcome by fatigue and the lateness of the
hour, had fallen asleep.
Now it was bright, clear, unclouded morning, the morning after the
boy's advent. The little fellow still slept, but the father was broad
awake. He had risen at five, and was sitting in the room where Philip
had found him the evening before. His elbows rested on the table; his
head leaned upon his hands.
What should he do with the boy? Her child?--the child of the woman who
had brought infamy on his name, who had taken the heart out of his
life; leaving nothing but a harsh and battered husk behind?
The child was like her, too. He had known the first moment he looked
on the little face that this was the baby she had stolen away from his
home when he thought she was gradually growing to love him, when he
thought she had forgotten for ever the villain who had induced her
perfidy!
Like her! Good heavens! was this child to live with him always? Was
this child, day after day, hour after hour, to remind him by the look
in his eyes of all his youthful dreams of love and happiness, and the
wildering blow that for a time drove his reason from him and wrecked
his life before the voyage was well begun?
That would be intolerable. No man could bear that. Heaven could not
expect him to endure such a hell on earth.
He rose with a groan, and began pacing the room up and down.
He was a man slightly below the middle height, somewhat uncouth and
awkward in his motions. His shoulders were broad, his figure thin
almost to emaciation. He had large and powerful hands, not handsome
and soft, but muscular and knotty, like those of a man who had done
much physical labour, although he had never performed a day's manual
work in all his life. His nose was long and blunt at the end. His
cheeks were sunken. There were odd grey streaks in his long, straight
hair. He stooped slightly, and was slovenly in his carriage and dress.
The colour of his face was dark, almost dusky. His forehead was high
and pale.
The mere shell of the man was poor, almost mean. He did not look as
though he could fight or work. Beyond the breadth of his shoulders
there was no suggestion of bodily strength about him. When he walked
his tread lacked firmness. He looked as though the push of a child
would knock him down.
But when you had formed a poor opinion of the man, and set him down as
a weed, and were prepared to make short work of him morally, or
mentally, or physically, and came close to him face to face, and he
looked up at you and spoke, you felt confused, abashed. His eyes were
dark hazel, large, deep-set, luminous. They seldom moved quickly, they
seldom flashed, they seldom laughed. They rarely seemed concerned with
the people or things immediately in front of him. They had the awful
sadness and far-away look of the Sphinx. They saw not you, nor through
you, but beyond you. You became not the object of their gaze, but an
interruption in their range. They made you feel that you were in the
way. You seemed to be an impertinence interposing between a great
spirit in its commune with supernatural and august mysteries.
His voice was slow, deliberate, low in ordinary speech. It was not
musical. It had a breathlessness about it which fixed the attention at
once of those who heard. It suggested that the words spoken were read
from the margin of some mighty page, and that the speaker, if he
chose, could decipher the subject of the scroll.
If he raised his voice above this pitch it became uncertain, harsh,
grating, discordant. It suggested the unwilling awakening of the man.
It seemed to say that he lived at peace, and would that he were left
at peace, and that you came unnecessarily, undesired, to rouse and
harass him.
But it was when excited beyond this second stage, it was when not only
awakened but lifted into the expression of enthusiasm, that the
wonderful qualities of his voice were displayed. Then it became full
and rich and flexible and organ-toned, at once delicate and powerful.
It sounded as though not only the words, but the music also, were
written on the great scroll before his eyes, and he was reading both
with authority.
It was the spirit in the eyes and the spirit in the voice Philip Ray
worshipped. He knew the heart of this man was made of gold, but in the
eyes and the voice he found the spirit of a seer, a hero, a prophet.
The spirit of this man Kate Ray never knew, never even perceived. She
was too busy with the thought of her own physical beauty to notice
anything in the man but his plain appearance and unusual ways. He had
more money than ever she had hoped to share with a husband, but he
cared nothing for the things she liked or coveted. He would not take a
house in London: he would not move into even Beechley. The only value
he set upon a competency was because of the power it gave him over
books, and because of the privilege it afforded him of living
far away from the hurly-burly of men. His union with Kate Ray was an
ill-assorted marriage, and the greatest evil that can arise out of an
ill-assorted marriage had come of it.
From the day Kate left his house he never opened a volume of verse. At
first he plunged into a vortex of excitement, from which he did not
emerge until he had lost in gambling everything but Boland's Ait,
which brought in no revenue, and an income of about a hundred a year
from some property in the neighbourhood of the island.
When he regained his senses, and resolved upon retiring into solitude,
he recognised the importance, the necessity of finding some occupation
for his mind. He would have nothing which could remind him of the
past, nothing which could recall to his mind the peaceful days at
Shoreham or the joy and hope that his sweetheart and wife had brought
into his life. All that was to be forgotten for ever. His life was
over. It was immoral to anticipate the stroke of death. Between him
and death there lay nothing to desire but oblivion, and work was the
best thing in which to drown thought. He would devote the remainder of
his life to history, philosophy, science.
Although he had been on the island now more than two years, he had
still no definite idea of turning his studies to practical account. He
read and read and made elaborate notes and extracts from books. But
his designs were vague and nebulous. He called it all work. It kept
his mind off the past: that was the only result of all his labours. He
had no object to work for. He shuddered at the bare idea of notoriety
or fame, and he did not need money, for his means were sufficient for
his simple wants. Work was with him merely a draught of Lethe. He
numbed his brain with reading, and when he could read no longer he
copied out passages from his books or forced himself to think on
subjects which would not have been bearable three years ago. He was
not so much conquering himself as dulling his power to feel.
Now, in upon this life had come the boy, bringing with him more potent
voices from the past than all the verses of all the poets; and, worst
of all, bringing with him the face of his disgraced, dead wife!
What should he do? Either madness or death would be a relief, but
neither would come. The two things of which men are most afraid are
madness and death, and here was he willing to welcome either with all
the joy of which his broken heart was still capable.
When that baby was born he had felt no affection for it on its own
account. It seemed inexpressibly dear to her, and therefore it was
after her the most precious being in all the world to him. Up to that
time he knew his wife's heart had not gone out to him in love as his
heart had gone out to her. He believed that the child would be the
means of winning his beautiful wife's love for him. He had read in
books innumerable that wives who had been indifferent towards their
husbands in the early days of marriage grew affectionate when children
came. For this reason he welcomed with delight the little stranger.
This baby would be a more powerful bond between them than the promises
made by her at the altar. It would not only reconcile her to the
life-long relations upon which they had entered, but endear him to
her.
But she broke her vow, broke the bond between them, and in fleeing
from his house took with her the child, the creature that was dearer
to her than he! Here was food for hopelessness more bitter than
despair.
Now, when hope was buried for ever, and she was dead, the child had
come back to remind him every hour of the past, to neutralise the cups
of Lethe he felt bound to drink, that his life might not be a life of
never-ending misery, to torture him with his wife's eyes, which had
closed on him for ever three years ago, and which now were closed for
ever on all things in death.
What should he do? Would not merciful Providence take his reason away,
or stop these useless pulses in his veins?
He threw himself once more in his chair, and covered his face with his
hands.
From abroad stole sounds of the awakening world. The heavy lumbering
and grating of wagons and carts came from Welford Road, and from the
tow-path the dull heavy thuds of clumsy horses' feet.
The man sat an hour in thought, in reverie.
At length Bramwell took down his hands and raised his large eyes, in
which there now blazed the fire of intense excitement. "Light!" he
cried aloud; "God grant me light!"
He kept his eyes raised. His lips moved, but no words issued from
them. An expression of ecstasy was on his face. His cry had not been a
cry for light, but a note of gratitude-giving that light had been
vouchsafed to him. He was returning thanks.
At length his lips ceased to move, the look of spiritual exaltation
left his face, his eyes were gradually lowered, and he rose slowly
from his seat.
He stood a minute with his hand on his forehead, and said slowly, "I
was thinking of myself only. I have been thinking of myself only all
my life. I have, thank God, something else, some one else to think of
now! Who am I, or what am I, that I should have expected happiness,
complete happiness, bliss? Who am I, or what am I, that I should
repine because I suffer? Who am I, or what am I, that I should murmur?
My eyes are open at last. My eyes are open, and my heart too. Let me
go and look."
He crept noiselessly out of the room to the one in which the boy lay
still sleeping.
The chamber was full of the broad full even light of morning in early
summer. The window stood open, the noise of the carts and wagons came
from Welford Road, and the dull heavy thuds of the clumsy horses'
hoofs from the tow-path. The sparrows were twittering and flickering
about the cottage on the island. Dull and grimy as the place usually
appeared, there was now an air of health and brightness and vigorous
life about it which filled and expanded the heart of the recluse.
For years he had felt that he was dead, that his fellowship with man
had ceased for ever. His heart was now opened once more.
Who should cast the first stone, the first stone into an open grave,
her grave, Kate's grave? His Kate's grave! Not he; O, not he! His
young, his beautiful, his darling Kate's grave! His young Kate's
grave!
He turned to the bed on which rested the child.
Yes, there lay young Kate, younger than ever he had known her. The
beautiful boy! There was her raven hair, there the sweet strange curve
of the mouth, there the little hand under the cheek, as Kate used to
lie when she slept.
"God give me life and reason for him who is so like what I have lost!"
he cried; and circling his arm round the little head, he kissed the
sweet strange curve about the little mouth, and burst into tears, the
first he had shed for a dozen long years. In his great agony three
years ago he had not wept.
The child awoke, smiled, stretched up his little arms, and caught his
father round the neck.
"I want to go mother," whimpered the boy when he saw whom he held.
"You cannot go just now, child. But you and I shall go to her one
day--in Heaven."