"Whose part in all the pomp that fillsThe circuit of the summer hillsIs that his grave is green!"
"Whose part in all the pomp that fillsThe circuit of the summer hillsIs that his grave is green!"
"Whose part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills
Is that his grave is green!"
I stepped into the narrow passage between the two houses, and looking up, saw that the present neighbours, friendlily inclined, had slung a rope across from window to window, upon which towels hung to dry. I could see only the projecting ledge of the window through which our little faces used to peep and the projecting ledge of that upon which the kitten had shivered and mewed. But I looked long at these, and at the tiny slip of blue sky above, and then came home and wrote this story.
A BROKEN BOOT
"Oh, the insufferable eyes of these poor might-have-beens."
Every morning of the spring and early summer he had walked down that sun- and shadow-flecked suburban road, and rested on that particular iron chair. The butcher's and fishmonger's boys going their rounds, the policeman on his beat, the postman wearily footing it, the daily governess returning from her morning's occupation, had become used to his appearance there; and he watched each one going upon his or her business, wistful-eyed.
To-day, on one of the chairs planted by the thoughtfulness of the ever-solicitous Town Council at intervals along the road, a tramp had also placed himself. He was a tramp of a dirty and unprepossessing appearance, and having cast a sidelong glance at the well-dressed, handsome, and distinguished-looking young man beside him, he had begun in hoarse, faint tones to beg of him. The voice was evidently that of a hungry man; but to the appeal no response was made, unless there was reply of a sort in a painfully crimsoning cheek and an averted gaze. The tramp pointed to his feet, the ragged boots grey with dust of weary miles, the naked toe peeping through. The gentleman faintly shook the head that he continued to hold aside. With an effort the tramp got upon his feet.
"D—n you!" he said. "May your belly go as empty as mine. May hell-fire blister your feet as mine are blistered!"
The man left alone upon the iron bench looked after the tramp shuffling painfully away, with no anger or condemnation in his eyes, only a submissive sadness.
"Poor devil!" he said. "Poor devil! What a beast I must seem to him."
Once again his fingers, hopeless as his eyes, felt over the region of his coat and waistcoat-pockets, wandered nervelessly to his trousers-pockets—empty all! How many a time had they flown there in the last few weeks to make the same discovery—a discovery causing a shock at first, surprise, incredulity, anger; of late, mechanically only, quite hopelessly.
And only a short time ago his pockets had been so well lined! He had been in debt, it is true, but money had been forthcoming for who cared to take. No beggar, however "professional," however visibly lying, had ever asked of him in vain. He had squandered, in a society his father's son should never have known, the fortune his father had left him; his extravagance had been mad, his self-indulgence unlimited; but it must be told of him that the occasion on which he most bitterly felt his present poverty was such an one as this. He missed so much—all that made life worth living in that foolish whirl "from gilded bar to gilded bar" which was all his manhood's experience: his credit at his tailor's, the cigars he had smoked and given away, his daily games of billiards (the one thing at which he had excelled in all his wasted life was billiards, his fingers sometimes itched with the longing to feel the cue in his hand again), all the thousand extravagances of such a young man's day. But up to the present it was this alone which made poverty intolerable,—the having to refuse when Want asked of him.
He watched the tramp hobbling painfully into the distance, and in his pale blue eyes came that pricking which is of tears.
"His blistered feet!" he said. "His blistered feet!"
And then very slowly he lifted one of his own long legs and laid it at the ankle upon the other knee, and touching his slender, high-arched foot very gingerly, he bent his head and examined his own boot.
Yes; there, sure enough, was the crack in the leather he had first discovered yesterday, and which had caused him a sleepless night. The first crack in his last pair of boots!
The lower lip of that small mouth which had been used to laugh at such foolish nothings, and which now so easily drooped to grieving, fell open as he looked. The crack was quite close to the sole and was scarcely noticeable yet, but it would take—how few days! to widen to a considerable gap! Then the people of the town in which he had been born, through which he had ridden his father's horses, and driven his father's carriages, would notice that he walked about in broken boots! To-day he had been careful to come by back ways to that favourite road whose sunshine and shadow he had run over so often as a boy; to his seat on that chair which was placed beneath the hedge of the garden in whose house he had been born.
Three months ago, when to his overwhelming astonishment it was first made clear to him that he had no longer a penny under heaven, he had gone in his bewilderment to his brother, a man whose share of the patrimony had not been squandered—had been put out to usury rather, bringing in thirty, forty, a hundredfold—a man living in luxury and holding the respect of his fellow-townsmen.
"You can come to me," the brother had said. "Eat at my table, sleep beneath my roof. I shall not turn my back upon my brother. But I shall not pay any bills for you, nor shall I allow you a farthing of money—you have shown us the use you make of money. You will find it inconvenient to be without, and I advise you therefore to get work."
So, for three months he had availed himself of his brother's hospitality, and the brother had kept his word. For three months he had crossed in the muddiest part of the street because he had feared to look the crossing-sweeper in the face, he had avoided the placarded blind man, the paralytic woman who had known him well. He carefully madedétoursto escape these, and the shoeblack boys with whom he had been held in high favour. As for the people of his own class—the world is not all unkind, but it is very busy, very forgetful—none remembered to seek him. He had been surrounded by associates of a sort; and he found himself quite alone.
For the first week or so he had thought it would be an easy thing to find employment; a few rebuffs where he had looked for a helping hand, a curt refusal or two, seemed to show him it was an impossibility. He had no knowledge of book-keeping, he could not take a clerkship; business men, with a mere glance at his handsome, delicate features, at the shrinking, deprecating glance of his eyes, at his white, nervous fingers, his faultless dress, decided that he was no good.
"Work? Yes. But at what can I work?" he had asked his brother at length, flushing and hesitating; for since he had been a recipient of his bounty he had become afraid of his highly-respected relatives, and of the wife who looked at him with hard eyes as he took his place at the table.
To that question no answer but a sour smile of a dragged-down lip and a shrug of the shoulder had come, followed by the reminder that there was always a crossing to sweep.
"I would rather sweep a crossing than lead the life you are leading," the brother had said.
And the other had acquiesced. It would be better, certainly; but—
For a young man of aristocratic appearance and faultlessly cut clothes to take a place at a crossing in his native town, and beg of the passers-by, some of whom would be personal friends, for coppers, requires moral courage; he had been all his life, hence his misfortunes, a moral coward.
So, of late, only spasmodically, and with a hopelessness that prepared defeat, did he make efforts to find occupation. But he was not naturally an idle man nor in all directions incompetent, and he watched the people passing to office, shop, workroom, with a gaze which had grown unspeakably wistful.
When the hour for the midday meal arrived, he had been wont to return to his brother's house, but to-day he had something else to do.
The road being emptied of the stream of passers-by which flowed more fully at that time, he got up and walked to the gate of the house where he had been born, and looked long within, upon the garden. It had always been a beautiful garden, full of flowering shrubs, and wide lawns, and winding, box-edged paths. Very little had it altered since to him it had seemed all the world, and he had the fancy to follow now about its sunny, shadowy ways into all its pleasant haunts, the figure of a little boy who had played there long ago.
It had been a lonely child who had played there, his only brother being too old to play, and he had gone about the garden-ways, carrying his absurd jumble of childish fancies, incredible aspirations, baby ambitions, on untiring little feet. It pleased the young man at the gate to follow him in fancy, from spot to spot, always in the sunshine, always with flowers around him, and the whisper of trees about him, and the song of birds overhead.
Leaving behind him the gay flower-beds upon which the creeper-covered house looked forth, into many a leafy nook and shrub-bound fastness the phantom little form ran happily. Where the trees grew tall and close above an undergrowth of shepherd's-parsley and blue-bell had been a favourite resort of the child's. When the eyes of the young man followed him there, and saw him stop beside the smooth trunk of a silver birch, he knew that a new knife had been given him that day, and that he was going to carve his own name upon the bark. He knew that, the task being accomplished, the child would fetch his mother, and lead her to the tree to see how deep the knife cut, and how always—always the name would be there!
Once, being tired with overmuch play, the child had fallen asleep against that tree, and had wakened to hear his mother's voice calling,—
The young man came back to the iron bench, his figure drooping. The lower lip had fallen open, showing the small, regular teeth. Into the face, "accustomed to refusals," into the wistful gaze of the pale blue eyes, something of awe had crept. Presently he put up his boot upon his knee, and once more his eyes fell upon the crack in the side. He moved his foot within the boot—certainly a bulging showed; by to-morrow the stocking would be seen.
To-morrow! Yes. He nodded his handsome head with eyes upon the boot and breathed the word to himself.
How long ago it seemed since this tragedy of the broken boot had befallen! Could it have been but yesterday? Was that possible?
His great need had developed his strategical powers, and accident had seemed to further his design. Quick upon the discovery, he had encountered his brother's page on his way to his brother's shoemaker, bearing that relative's shoes to be repaired. Seizing the opportunity, he had hastily divested himself of his own boot and had added that to the page's burden.
His spirits so easily arose; such a load by that simple manœuvre had been lifted from his heart! He pushed his feet into his slippers and came whistling downstairs to lunch. He had a perfect ear, and his whistle was most melodious and sweet; the canaries in the dining-room windows awoke and joined in shrilly. His brother, standing, with sour, sarcastic face, upon the hearth, held fastidiously between finger and thumb an article which apparently it was not agreeable to him to touch.
"I met Payne taking my boots," he said; "he had managed to get hold of one of yours by mistake. I rescued it. I think we don't employ the same bootmaker."
The young man's cheek did not burn any longer as he recalled that incident. He felt nothing now, no anger, no bitterness. To such as he it is so easy to forgive. Forgiveness had ever flowed from him in sheer weakness. It had been the habit of his life to love and admire his brother—he loved and admired him still. He did not think that he himself would have been quite so hard on a poor devil in his place; but his brother was a strong man and he a weak one—no doubt his brother was right.
It was certain he was not a cruel man—did he not owe him the bread he ate? Had he not shed tears over the death of a dog a day or two before? The dog had been in incurable pain, and a pill which had been procured from the chemist had caused that pain instantly to cease. The master had given the order of execution, and had turned away from the gaze of the suffering brute with the waters of sensibility in his eyes.
And how quietly the dog had died! One instant in convulsions of pain, and the next still—quite still! The young man who had carried with him from childhood a great dread of death had been much impressed. After all, could it be so terrible?
Only one little pill had sufficed to produce that great change—would suffice to kill two or three dogs, the chemist had said. But the young man had brought away with him a second dose for fear of accident. As he looked with unseeing eyes at the broken boot, his finger and thumb held the second little pill securely in the corner of his waistcoat pocket.
He was afraid of death; but, as a child believes, he believed in God. Through the recklessness, the wildness, the "joyous folastries" of youth there had clung to him still the feeling that God was above him; there beyond the stars; he had felt His smile sometimes, or grown cold beneath His frown. He had not read, nor thought; nor had he listened to clever talk on the absurdities of a worn-out faith, the uselessness of an obsolete creed. His business had been with enjoying himself simply—with none of those things. Of every other foolishness on earth his lips had babbled, but not blasphemies. He had not trodden the downward path with lingering steps, he had gone precipitately to his ruin; but at least his eyes had been on the stars.
It was for this reason, perhaps, that, although he sat there, a miserable failure, driven by the heartless might of the world to the last extremity, there was yet a light upon his brow, and about his weakly-parted lips a sweetness sometimes absent from brows and lips of more admirable men.
If he went, beneath scented lime-tree, past gay-flowered border, to peep through a certain wistaria-festooned window he should see his father with pipe and book in the accustomed chair, the mother would look up from her sewing. A recollection came to him of how once in those childish years which had been so much with him of late a sudden sense of overpowering loneliness had come upon him as he played. He had rushed to that window to comfort his little soul with the sight of the familiar faces, and had found the room empty. He recalled the terror that had fallen upon him, the horror of desolation. He would not risk the shock of disillusion. He saw them quite plainly, as his eyes seemed fixed on the broken boot, but he would not disturb them. No. When the time came and he entered the gate he would not go near the house, but would make his way through the shrubbery in which the lawn ended, and would seek that wilderness which had been his playground.
The wild hyacinths were blue about the roots of the tree on which his name was cut—how low down the sprawling letters were!—the pet name by which his mother had called him. If he fell asleep with his back against the trunk she might come and call him by it again.
It was because he had not slept all night that he was so tired. He had tossed and turned, tossed and turned upon his bed, seeking in his muddled, ineffectual brain for an escape from the disgrace of the broken boot. Quite suddenly there had presented itself to him the way of escape—the only way—the way he intended to take.
The feathery leaves of the shepherd's-parsley would wave above the broken boot. He would fall so blessedly asleep—so blessedly! The dog, he remembered, had not stirred.
The present master of the wistaria-covered house was driven past him, as he sat in the roadside chair, to turn in at the familiar gate; the afternoon sun, sinking towards evening, shone on the smart phaeton, the glossy-sided horse. Lesser men walked by him briskly to their humble dwellings, little children, belated from school or at play, rushed on. He grudged to no man his success, he looked on without bitterness at the joy of life—he blamed no one, envied no one. He had gone astray somehow, and was stranded and lost; but it was without rancour, or enmity, or spite that he, a lonely outsider, watched the "flowing, flowing, flowing, of the world."
So, at length, he rose from his place, pushed open the gate, laying a tender touch upon the latch that such dear hands had pressed in days gone by. So he made his way, going with unerring step, beneath the overbranching of copper-beech, lilac, and red may, to the flower-carpeted wilderness where, with bluebells about its roots and feathery foliage waving high around its trunk, stood that silver birch-tree upon whose smooth bark he had long ago carved his name.
WHEN DEEP SLEEP FALLETH
Ten days of honeymooning passed in a big hotel at Brighton. Ten days of feeling himself—he who, living, a man of wealth, in a small provincial town, was used to find himself talked about, looked up to, considered on every side—curiously unimportant and of no account. Then back with his bride to the imposing if somewhat gloomy-looking old house to which a dozen years ago he had brought home his first wife.
They had left Brighton early in the morning, and reached home as the winter's afternoon was closing in. In the drawing-room, where many a time she had seen his wife perform that office, the Bride poured out tea for him.
"At last," he said, and stood upon the rug before the fire, cup in hand, and smiled at her. "This is pleasant, isn't it?"
With a smile up at him, and a full glance of the dark melancholy eyes he so much admired, she let him know that indeed she thought it pleasant.
Her costly fur coat, one of his wedding-gifts to her, was tossed over the back of her chair; the firelight gleamed on heavy gold ornaments at wrists and throat. She had been a poor woman, clothing, not dressing, herself, till in her eight-and-thirtieth year all the fine things which money could buy were suddenly lavished upon her. So soon the feminine mind accustoms itself to that change! Every woman is born to fine raiment, meant to be softly swathed, richly decked, daintily tired. Cheated of her inheritance though she be, it is as natural to her as her own skin when at length she comes into it. The Bride felt a sense of well-being, but no strangeness.
The room in which she sat was perhaps a little overcrowded with beautiful things. In the days which were past, which she did not trouble too much to remember, she had sat here on Sunday afternoons—her one holiday, and always spent with the good-natured wife of the man she had married—and had told herself that the room bore too evident stamp of the wealth of the master of the house, and the too sumptuous tastes of the mistress. Yet, now that it was her own, so desirable in itself seemed each piece of furniture, so beautiful each ornament, it would be difficult, she felt, to decide what to banish.
The man's gaze followed hers, speculatively, roaming over the costly objects. He was by no means anxious to make a display of his wealth.
He dreaded above all things the charge of vulgarity, distrusting his first wife's taste, not being quite sure of his own. A compactly built, well-featured man of middle size and pale complexion; a man careful and correct in speech, manner and dress; in his gently reserved, modest bearing giving no sign that he had raised himself far above his origin, that his wealth was new.
"Do what you like here," he said to his wife, as if reading her thoughts. "Alter the disposition of the furniture—do away with it altogether. I am by no means wedded to things as they are."
He crossed as he spoke to a rosewood cabinet placed against the opposite wall. On its polished surface, above its innumerable little shelves and drawers, a Crown Derby tea and coffee service was set forth. Standing in the midst, propped between a basin and a cup, was the unframed photograph of a woman. This the man removed. Holding it loosely between his finger and thumb, still talking to his wife, he returned with it to his old position on the hearth.
"I have not set foot in this room since—for a year," he said. "I thought I would leave everything till you came. Do just as you like."
"You are so good to me——" she began, and then started forward in her chair. "Oh, don't, don't, love!" she cried. "Don't burn her picture!"
She was too late. For one instant the face of the first wife looked up at her, smiling, fat, fatuous, from the heart of the glowing coals, then, with a stab of the poker, wielded by a remorseless hand, vanished in the blaze.
"Oh, love!" she sighed, reproachfully, "Oh, love!"
"Why not?" he asked, with a smile which went no further than his close-set lips. He put down the poker on the hearth and rose up again. "She must have laid in a stock of hundreds of those photographs," he said. "The servants appear to have an inexhaustible supply. In spite of—discouragement—they kept my dressing-room and study-table garnished with them till I ordered them to desist."
The new wife looked away from him into the fire in a minute's silence. "It seems cruel," at last she said, with an obvious effort. "I wish you had not burnt it, love. At least, not to-night. In this big house there should be room for me and—her photographs."
When she found that their bedroom was to be the same which he and his former wife had occupied, she was uncomfortably surprised.
The servant who showed her to that apartment in time for her to change her dress for dinner was the middle-aged woman, calling herself parlour-maid, but who had acted as lady's-maid, factotum, confidante to the dead wife. She had made confidantes of all who would listen, poor woman, pouring out the secrets of her heart, and, as far as she knew them, of her husband's heart, into any stranger's ears.
"Can I be of any assistance to you, madam?" the maid had inquired; and madam, in order not to give offence, accepted for a time her services.
"I like to do my hair myself," she said, "but if you brush it for me I shall be glad."
She did not like this servant who had been on terms of close familiarity with the other woman; while, outwardly acquiescent, she allowed herself to be buttoned into a dressing-gown by the hard, bony fingers, in spirit she protested.
As the pins were taken out of the heavy dark hair, and the braids untwisted, the eyes of the new mistress and the eyes of the old servant met again and again in the glass. And the thought came to the bride: how often in that same glass those slanting eyes of the maid must have encountered other eyes! Eyes of shallow blue beneath a fringe of yellow-dyed, tousled locks.
The reflection was not a comforting one, and warm and cosy as was the brightly-lit room, she shivered. Hastily casting down her gaze it fell upon a photograph of her husband, taken ten years or so ago, shrined in its silver frame amid the silver accessories of the dressing-table. In order to break a silence which was getting on her nerves—
"Is that the picture which was always here?" she asked.
"Always," the servant replied. "It stood opposite one of my late mistress, taken at the same time, and framed in the same way. After my late mistress's death my master wished to have her photographs removed. He destroyed many of them. I think he destroyed the last to-day."
"Now, how in the world did she know that?" the Bride asked herself, guiltily conscious of the tell-tale face in the looking-glass, reddening before the servant's inquisitive eyes.
"After all, I will brush my hair myself," she said hastily. "I am used to doing it."
The servant, with no sign of either pleasure or displeasure on her shut-up, solemn face, withdrew.
"The silver-backed brushes on the table are those of my late mistress," she said from the door—"my master's last present to her. In the drawer beneath the looking-glass I think you will find your own brushes."
She found them there, and, lying beneath them, face upwards, a photograph of the dead wife.
The two women for years had called each other friend, but the Bride started back from the smiling presentment of the face now as if it had been some loathable thing. Started back, and shut the drawer.
Yet, in a minute had recovered herself, had taken out the picture, and laid it on the table before her, forcing herself to look long into the face that from among the medley of silver-topped bottles, pans and jars, smiled up at her.
As she looked, an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness and insecurity took possession of her. The fat, fatuous, and smiling face! It seemed to look with an air of contemptuous toleration upon her as an interloper; to say with its shallow gaze—"These are Mine. All this is Mine. It is I, you understand, who am mistress here."
Fascinated by this fancied new expression in the once expressionless eyes, the Bride looked and looked again—looked till the happy present slipped away from her and she was back in the unhappy past. The humble friend, her own poor toilette so soon made, sitting, by gracious permission, to watch the magnificent toilette of the other woman. In her bitter heart she felt again the scorn which her mind had always secretly held for this poor-witted, vulgar creature, who had not the brains to adapt herself to her husband's altered circumstances, who angered and shamed him beneath his still exterior, to his face, and gave him away to the first who would condescend to listen, behind his back. Who had sat before the dressing-table, watching in the glass the wide expanse of her bare bosom and white arms, and had boasted of her jewels and her dress. Babbled of things which should have been sacred between her husband and herself. How that woman sitting beside her, with the poor dress and the melancholy, dark eyes, hated her! With what an agony of pity she pitied the husband! Of what good were money, position, power to him with such a wife as this! She hated her. Hated her, as she sat before the glass, smiling at the reflection of her fair big arms and neck; hated her as, later at the dinner-table, she watched the husband's face, listening against his will to the woman gabbling forth some bit of information which the dullest-witted present knew she was expected to keep to herself.
Still lost to her surroundings in her reverie, the Bride heard again the outburst of foolish laughter with which the wife had once publicly declared her husband could keep nothing from her because of his habit of talking in his sleep. What she wished to know that in the daytime he would not tell her, she got from him at night by asking questions he never failed to answer while he slept.
She had hated her; and at last the poor creature, whose smiling face lay there beneath her fascinated gaze, had known it, and with the inferior force of her inferior nature had hated back. She had learnt—who knew how?—of the love between the woman who had been her friend and her own husband. The eyes had smiled no longer then.
The Bride lay back in her chair, motionless, while before her mind's eye rose the altered face of the woman who, deceived for long, was deceived no more—who knew! With her there had been no self-respecting reticence, no decency of secret tears. She had heaped insult upon the woman who had wronged her, she had led her husband a life of hell.
That time had been, mercifully, of short duration. A little illness of which no one took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting of a vessel on the brain.
It had been, of course, in this room she had died. Upon the bed, there. And her husband, sleeping beside her, had not known that she was dead. Slowly the Bride, as if fearing what she might see, looked over her shoulder. The room, with a bright fire, and lit by electric light, was as cheerful as day. But as her eyes, slowly travelling back again, met their own reflection in the glass, she saw in them a haunted look which frightened her. She flew to her feet; snatching the portrait from the table, she hurriedly crossed the room and flung it to the flames.
"He is right. Why not?" she said. "To burn a picture is nothing—nothing! And it has given me horrible thoughts."
It was difficult to banish them.
When the newly-married pair were alone in the drawing-room after dinner, and she was seated at the piano, she asked him, through the chords she was softly touching, if there was not another room in the house they could take for their sleeping-chamber.
"Certainly," he said; "most certainly if she wished."
He, himself, had not slept there since the night of his first wife's death, he told her. Told her, too, that before leaving for their wedding-trip, he had given orders to have one of the other rooms prepared against their return. The reason this had not been done, the invaluable parlour-maid had informed him, was because the wardrobe he had particularly desired to be moved there had proved too big for the niche which was to have received it. Wardrobe or no wardrobe, however, since she wished it, they would migrate on the morrow.
"You do wish it?" he asked her.
She nodded, softly striking her chords.
"I wonder why? You are no more superstitious or fanciful than I."
She shook her head, bending forward to study the score of the music on the desk, one of Sullivan's operas they had heard together at Brighton. He, sitting close behind her, his chin touching her shoulder, had fixed his eyes on the music too, although he could not read a note of it. "Horrid thoughts came to me there," she said. "I don't think, love, I shall ever like to be alone in that room."
He named the invaluable maid. "Have her up to dress you," he advised.
The Bride shrugged her shoulders, and her fingers moved more quickly in a livelier movement. "We will change the room," she said.
Later, he had placed himself on the rug at her feet, and she, leaning forward in the armchair drawn over the fire, had her arm about his neck while he talked to her of himself, she questioning. Of his early life he talked, and what had been for and what against him; of his later success, and his old ambitions.
"All achieved now," he said, and turned to smile at her the curious, characteristic smile accomplished by a twist of a closed lip.
"I have not bored you?" he asked her with anxiety, when the evening was over. "Except to you, I have never in my life talked of myself. It is a luxury in which I must not too much indulge."
She reassured him with the zeal of the newly-wedded, much loved and loving wife. "Promise me that you will always tell me all, that you will never keep a secret from me," she said; and he promised, smiling upon her with his twisted lip.
"If you do," she cried, fondly threatening, "I shall know it, Sleep-talker! I shall ask you in your sleep and you will tell me all."
That, under those circumstances, he should probably tell her much that had no foundation in fact, and much that it would by no means please her to hear, he warned her.
She fancied by his tone that he was annoyed, and hastily asserted that she had been in fun, that not for a moment could she seriously entertain such an intention.
"What you do not wish to tell me, be sure I do not wish to hear," she told him.
He stood by the open drawing-room door and watched her as she ran lightly upstairs.
Conscious of his eyes following her, the knowledge of his love and admiration warm at her heart, she went into their brightly-lit bedroom. For years she had lived such an unloved life, watching her youth fade, fighting only for bread to keep herself alive in a world where none wanted her. Since, in this man's eyes she was still so young and fair, let her look at herself!
She crossed the room to the looking-glass with a quick, exultant step, but having reached the dressing-table, drew back with almost a cry. Standing on it in its old place, facing her husband in his silver frame, was the silver-framed portrait with the elaborately-dressed fair hair, the smiling, shallow eyes of the first wife.
The Bride stifled the little cry upon her lips, but with her heart beating thickly, fell back from the dressing-table, and leant against the foot of the bed.
A moment's thought reassured her. There was nothing, after all, disturbing in the reappearance of a photograph which had been displaced. The invaluable maid with her slanting eyes, with, perhaps, her stupid devotion to a memory, was responsible.
At the thought the Bride's nerves steadied themselves, but her anger arose. She moved to the bell—but stopped. Better not to create talk among the servants by the order she had meditated; rather let this portrait of the dead wife follow the rest.
But when she held it, frame and all, over the fire, she relented and drew it back. "It is not like me to be a superstitious fool. I will not," she said. "She is in her grave, and I am—here. In a way I did not wish, but could not help, I spoilt the last year of her life. She is dead, buried out of mind, shovelled away under the earth, that a joy undreamt of might come to me. This poor triumph at least she shall have, to keep her old place on the table. I will never dress in the morning without remembering I am in her place. When I prepare for my bed at night she shall not be forgotten."
"'Les morts que l'on fait saigner dans leur tombe se vengent toujours!'" she quoted to herself as she undressed; and while she prided herself upon being above superstition, decided upon the above method of propitiating the Shade.
In the night she had a dream which bathed her in the sweat of terror. Opening her dreaming eyes upon the dressing-table which faced the foot of the bed she saw the figure of the dead wife standing there. Its back, clothed in its long nightdress, was turned to her, but in the glass which had so often reflected it she saw the foolish, fat face, the over-curled, fair hair. She saw, too, that the figure held in one hand its own photograph, while, with a pencil held in the other it wrote, smiling the while its own fatuous smile, on the reverse of the picture.
In her dream the Bride knew this vision to be a dream, a knowledge which by no means lessened the horror of it. "I must awake or die!" she said, and in a minute seemed broad awake.
It was morning; the sunshine flooding the room shone, with a brilliance which hurt the eyes upon the silver frame of the picture on the dressing-table. Nothing else was there; all the silver-topped pans and jars and bottles had disappeared; even the companion photograph was no longer to be seen; only the face of her one-time friend smiled and smiled and seemed to beckon from the strangely brilliant, dazzling frame.
With the horror of the dream no whit abated, the Bride rose heavily from her bed, dragged mysteriously attracted feet, that yet seemed weighted with lead, across the floor to the dressing-table; picked up in a hand that fumblingly obeyed the motion of her will, the picture.
Upon the back, written in the dead woman's familiar scrawl were the date of her death, and the words, "Died by my own hand."
In the desperate effort to cast the picture from her paralysed grasp, the Bride awoke.
She was really awake at last, and lying, faint with the dews of remembered terror, upon her bed, her head upon her husband's shoulder.
Thank God, awake at last! How horrible that had been!
Clinging to him in terror at first, she presently extricated herself from the man's encircling arm, and switched on the light. She dared not lie in the darkness with the thoughts that assailed her. Never for one instant before had the possibility of the wife's self-destruction occurred to her. Yet, all at once, how probable, how almost certain it seemed.
Died by her own hand! How easy it would have been! An overdose of the opiate the doctor was giving her to ease her pain. And she, weary of life—life made suddenly hideous to her; all her foolish vanities killed, her delight in herself, her belief in her friend, her faith in her husband. The gilding all stripped from the bauble which till then had made her happy. How possible! Nay, was it possible longer to doubt it?
And who was responsible? The woman who lay in her place, staring out into the room which had witnessed that foolish, harmless life, which had witnessed that tragic death; and the man sleeping beside her. They two.
Slowly, lest she should disturb him, the Bride raised herself upon her elbow, looked upon the sleeping face.
It was a face still unfamiliar to her in sleep. The always close-shut mouth was open, the straight-cut upper lip was strained tightly over the gums with a look almost of suffering, the eyes and temples looked as if sunken in pain. Feeling her gaze upon him, the man's lids half lifted themselves, an incoherent word or two fell from the stretched lips, the head moved restlessly upon the pillow.
Did he too guess this thing? Did he know?
"If he does he will never tell it to me," the Bride said to herself, knowing well he would spare her that pain.
In the next moment she was leaning over him, calling him in soft, distinct tones by his name.
"Love," she said, "do you hear me?"
He moaned, turning upon his back. The heavy jaw came fully into view, and the too thick throat which in the daytime the tall, close collar hid. With a light touch she swept the hair which, clinging low over his brow, so disguised it, backward.
"I hear," he answered in the thick, difficult voice of the sleeper.
"Love, I love you," she said. "Tell me, do you love me?"
A pause; then, "With my soul," he answered heavily.
"And—that other wife? Tell me, love."
The answer had always to be waited for, and seemed to come in unwilling response to the command of an intelligence afar off.
"Hate—I hated her," the sleeper said.
"She knew it—at last. Did she—did shekillherself? Tell me the truth, love, as you love me."
No answer but a strangled muttering, a head that moved as if in pain. The eyes watching him saw that the sleeper was tortured.
"But this once," she said to herself, "I must ask—I will know."
She bent over, without touching him, and put her lips down close to his ear. "Swear to tell me the truth," she said in her distinct, arresting whisper.
Long she waited, watching lips that writhed before speaking, eyes that seemed to ache to open and were sealed by an invisible hand. At length in the low, stumbling, unwilling voice came the response—"I swear."
"Did—she—kill—herself?"
"No!"
"Oh, love! Are you certain? Will you swear it?"
"I swear it," said the muffled voice.
"Why are you so sure? Why? Oh, tell me! Listen: she said she died by her own hand."
"A lie. It is a lie. I killed her."
Hours later, the light of morning, outshining the electric light, found the woman, the heavily slumbering man beside her, gazing, with a stricken face and eyes which looked as if sleep had been banished from them for ever, upon the new, unwelcome day.
Brightly the rays of the ascending sun struck upon the silver-framed portrait on the dressing-table, upon the smiling presentment of the fatuous-faced, shallow-eyed, dead wife.
THE EXCELLENT JOYS OF YOUTH
"No head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light."
He had that delicately tinted infantine complexion which only accompanies red hair; his eyes were brightly blue; his features well chiselled, with the exception of the lips, which were clumsily cut and loosely held together. He came down to breakfast in a not very agreeable mood, for he had been drinking for the last week, and this was the first time he had been thoroughly sober for that period. His head ached, his tongue was hot and leathery; he kept his hands in his trousers-pockets because they shook heavily, and he did not want the lodging-house servant to see.
The pockets were quite empty. He could not tell where the last few pounds had gone—if he had lost them at that game of poker he remembered playing before he fell asleep, or if they had been stolen since. He did not remember, and it would be worse than useless to inquire. Not a penny was left to him, and he had not a notion where a penny was to come from—even to pay for the breakfast which he had no appetite to eat.
With a heavy gloom upon his face, he stood and looked at the meal spread for him for several minutes before he sat down to table. There was smoked haddock, and he shook his head at it; scrambled eggs, and having looked at the dish he hastily covered it from sight. Beneath the sideboard a few bottles of soda-water were lying. He opened one, and, there being no glass at hand, poured the contents into his breakfast-cup, then drank with a thirst which threatened the cup as well as what it held.
Then he sat down to the table and stared at his reflection in the teapot.
"God! What a fool I've been," he said. "And what the devil am I to do now?"
Two or three letters lay beside his plate; he flicked them apart with his shaking finger. "Bills—bills—bills!" he said. "All bills!"
Unopened, he chucked them one by one into the fire, but stopped at the last. "A lawyer's fist," he said, regarding the ominously legal-looking hand-writing. "Someone threatening proceedings again. Let 'em proceed!"
He was about to throw that communication also in the fire, but paused in the act, and laid it down by his plate again, putting another plate on the top of it to conceal it from his sight.
He took up the knife, old and worn and sharpened at the point, which lay by the loaf of bread, and looked at its edge.
"This is how poor old Fleming got out of the scrape," he said. "And Fleming wasn't in a worse hole than I am."
But he turned the knife upon the bread instead of his own throat, and having begun with an expression of distaste upon the salt fish, his appetite arrived with eating, and, that dish disposed of, he attacked the buttered eggs, and found himself in a fair way to make a good meal. For, in spite of his intemperate habits, he had an invariably good appetite—an almost indomitable cheerfulness also. The inability to take himself and his misfortunes seriously had been at the bottom of all his failures. With his family history and his temperament he was foreordained to disaster; but he met it smiling, with the courage which was more the outcome of indifference than of heroism.
"Which is the way to the workhouse, Polly?" he inquired of the little lodging-house servant who came to clear the table.
He had filled his pipe and had turned his chair to the fire. His blue eyes shone as brightly, his red hair was watered as carefully free of curl, his person was as neat and spruce and daintily cared for as if he had been the most immaculate of mothers' sons.
Polly, at her first place, and with an unbounded admiration and regard for the lodger who, if he did make a sight of work splashing about in his bath, was always free with his shillings and full of his fun, looked at the young man distrustfully.
"What you got to do wi' th' work'us?" Polly asked resentfully, and seized the bread under one arm and the remains of the haddock under the other.
"If folks have no money and don't want to starve, what do they do?" he asked, puffing at his pipe.
"They work," said Polly, laconically; pushed open the door with her foot, deposited the dishes in the yard-wide hall beyond, and returned for the rest of the breakfast-things.
"They work if they're lucky and born poor," he said. "But if they're like me they can't work, Polly, because they don't know how, and no one will give them the chance to learn. No. It'll have to be the workhouse, my good girl."
Upon which Polly snuffled loudly, and her tears fell—splash—upon the plates she was carrying away. It was not the first time that the workhouse had been threatened; the dread of her life was that the threat should be carried into effect. So she cried, and her poor little red hands shook as she shuffled the plates together.
"Here's a letter," she snuffled.
"Fling it on the fire, Polly."
"'Tain't opened. I 'ont, then. You should ope your letters."
"Open it for me, then."
So the little maid-of-all work opened, and, in obedience to his orders, she being a sixth-standard scholar, and not stumbling once at a hard word, read the letter.
And as she read, the young man sat upright in his chair, pulled the pipe from lips which had fallen open in astonishment, and fixed unblinking eyes of innocent blue upon the handmaiden.
For in legal phraseology, the sense of which, if not the words, was a sore stumbling-block to Polly, the letter set forth that by the death of a certain James Playford, legatee under the will of Mr Daniel Thrower's uncle, a sum of money had been released which now, according to the said will, was to be divided between the said uncle's nephews and nieces. Due deduction having been made for this and that, Mr Daniel Thrower's share was found to amount to the sum of £98, 17s. 6d., for which a cheque was herewith enclosed.
"Do you mean to say he's sent the money?" Mr Daniel Thrower demanded, in the accents of incredulity.
"There ain't no money—not a farden—only a bit o' paper," Polly said, with disappointment.
Dan seized the cheque from her hand. "All right!" he said; "I shan't go to that institution we spoke of just yet, Polly. We've got another chance, my girl."
Truth to say, he had had several in his life, but this seemed to him the happiest which had ever befallen. After each drunken outburst he made resolution that it should be the last, and remained a strictly temperate person till the madness seized him again. The resolution he made as he sat gazing at the cheque he held in his hand, being the last, was the one he meant to keep. Years ago an elder brother had gone out to New South Wales, had bought some land there, and had prospered. He was not a very sympathetic brother, and had not responded to the suggestion that the ungain-doing Dan should take himself, his bad fortune, his unsatisfactory habits, also to New South Wales to settle down beside him.
Dan was of opinion, however, that, once there, this brother would find a difficulty in getting rid of him. He thought with longing of that clean and healthy life, the escape from the slough into which his feet would always wander while he remained here. The means to escape he now held in his hand!
"Here I keep on sinking, sinking!" Dan said to himself, illustrating the process with a movement of the hand which held the cheque. "Bill—he's as hard as nails, but he'll hold me up. I shall begin over again. I shall be free of this infernal embroglio. I shall write my name on a clean page——"
He would not stop to repent; he would look out the first steamer that sailed; he would pay his debts—they were not, after all, many, for he had a constitutional objection to cheating people, and always paid when he could. He would say good-bye to the man for whose friendship's sake he had come here, and would shake the dust of the miserable little town where he had played the fool of late from his feet. It was three or four days, he remembered, since he had seen the friend of whom he thought; he would have news to take him now! So slipping the letter which contained the cheque into his pocket, he walked out into the April sunshine of the little High Street, and betook himself to Gunton's lodgings.
Gunton was the not altogether satisfactory assistant to the one doctor in the place. Going thus early, he would catch him before he started on his rounds.
No need to hurry, Dan! Before the good people of Hayford shall see again the young doctor flying round on his long legs to visit the pauper patients, or clattering in Doctor Owen's tall gig over the cobblestones of the High Street on his way to those invalids of least consideration entrusted to his care, the last trump shall sound.
He was not in the little sitting-room where Dan and he had smoked so many pipes together. The visitor was striding across the passage to the bedroom, also on the ground-floor, when the landlady issued therefrom; and the landlady was in tears.
"I have kep' these apartments respectable and comf'table, and not a week unlet, these seventeen year, come Michaelmas," she sobbed. "And never have I had a death in 'em before."
Dan recoiled before the word. "Death?" he said.
And she repeated the word. "Poor Mr Gunton, he have had one of his throats, and he was took worse yesterday morning. He kep' askin' for you, sir, and no one could say where you was; and now he have sent me to fetch you, whatever happen, and to say as he's a-dyin'!"
"It's one of his jokes," Dan said; but he had grown grey about the lips, and his mouth fell open.
He pushed open the bedroom door, half expecting to be greeted by a smothered laugh from Gunton, and a whispered account of the last trick he'd played the old woman.
But Gunton, poor fellow, who had laughed and played his foolish jests, and got into mischief industriously all through his short life, had laid his mirth aside to-day. He had done but indifferently well the few tasks allotted him, shirking them when he could; the business he had now on hand was a very serious one, and there was no slipping out of it. He had to die.
He told his friend so in so many words. "What's o'clock now?" he asked. "Eleven? By two I shall be dead."
Dan tried not to believe. "I'll go for the doctor—I'll fetch a nurse!" he said.
The other stayed him with his difficult speech. "Don't waste time. It's no good," he said. "I've seen men die like this. I know. Owen was here till ten minutes ago. I told him last night it was all up. You know what an old ass it is—he wouldn't listen. He listens now. He's wired for ——" (naming a man locally celebrated in the profession). "He's driven, himself, to Fakenham for a nurse. I shall be dead before they get here. I told him so—the old ass! He's wired for my mother—she'll be too late. You can say I sent my love, Dan——"
All this in a hoarse, broken voice, interrupted by loud and painful breathing, and now and again by a short, rough cough.
"I didn't know you were seedy, old man! I'd have come at once," Dan said. "I've been on the spree again, for a day or so. It's the end. I'm not going to play the fool that fashion any more!"
"The end of my sprees!" poor Gunton said. "We've had one or two together, Dan. Don't look at me. I ain't pleasant to watch. Sorry. It won't be for long. Dan—my watch and studs, and a chain I never wore—they're"—he lifted a cold hand and tried to point to a little heap of trinkets lying on the drawers at the foot of the bed—"they're for you. Take them, will you? Take them now."
Dan nodded. "I'll take 'em, thank you, old man," he said, and sobbed suddenly. "Don't worry, Ted. Don't try to talk, dear old boy."
"I've got to. You know about Kitty. I was going to marry her next week. I took her away from the shop—made her give up her living. She's bought things to marry me. She can't pay for them. You—you——"
A struggle here, upon which Dan, in spite of himself, turned his back.
"I know," he said, brokenly. "I'll pay for them. I'll see to her. It'll be all right, Ted."
"No! My mother," the dying boy said; "tell her. She won't be pleased. Ask her to give Kitty a hundred pounds from me—with my love. Promise—promise."
"I promise," Dan said. "Anything—anything, dear old man. I know what you'll want done—don't, for God's sake, talk any more."
But for another hour of misery, of battling for breath, hideous to suffer and heart-breaking to witness, he would attempt to talk, irrationally at times, but now and again with a startling coherence. His mind ran on that gift of a hundred pounds. He sent message after message to the little shop-girl for whom, with the senseless prodigality of such youth, he had proposed to fling away his future. Again and again he adjured his friend to tell his mother what a good little girl Kitty was, how she had stuck to him and been a brick.
They said he was a clever fellow in his profession, the long-haired, long-legged young doctor, with his harum-scarum ways and his ready laugh. He had made a true diagnosis of his own case. Before doctors and nurses could be got to him he was dead.
"Don't look at me," was the last he said. "Pull the sheet over my face—don't look."
And so, with the thoughtfulness for others which had proclaimed him Gentleman in that inferior society where it had pleased him to move, he hid his suffering from the man who sat weeping like a woman beside him, and died.
It was Dan, his face blurred and swollen by crying, his usually darkened and subdued red hair proclaiming its curly nature in all the fierceness of its roseate hue—Dan, who at that moment would rather have been in any other place on earth—who received the bereaved mother, led her to the door of the death-chamber, and retired in miserable solitude to await the interview, to avoid which he would gladly have blown out his brains.
She came to him at last, a long, lean woman who had bent a stubborn back to many sorrows. A meek, unsubdued woman. The lankiness of limb, and the lankness of feature and hair, sufficiently pleasing in poor Ted, stretched forth at his long length yonder, were not such agreeable characteristics in the mother. Narrow face—narrow nature. In the thin features, contracted nostrils, close, small mouth, Dan might have read poor hope for Kitty.
"I have taken his jewellery," she said in her toneless voice. "I thought it best not to leave it about in a lodging-house. I miss a ring—a ring I gave him on his last birthday. Can you tell me where it is?"
She spread the watch, the chain, the sleeve-links, a certain pearl stud which Dan had noticed once or twice in his shirt when poor Gunton wore dress clothes, upon the table—all the poor, invaluable trifles which had lain on the drawers in that pathetic little heap bequeathed to the dead man's friend. "The ring is missing, you see," she said. She tied up the articles in a spare white handkerchief and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.
"Everything of his has become doubly precious to me," she said. "Perhaps you will be so good as to make inquiries about the ring."
Dan roused himself. Here was his opportunity. "I think the ring——" he began. "I think he gave the ring to Kitty, you know—the girl he was engaged to," he got out.
"Engaged?" the lady repeated. "My boy engaged—and without my knowledge!"
"We don't tell our mothers everything, I'm afraid," Dan said. He made a ghastly attempt to smile, to get back to his habitual easy manner which had forsaken him. "'Twouldn't be for our mothers' peace of mind——"
She interrupted him with cold dislike. "I know nothing of you and your mother," she said. "I know that there was perfect confidence between my son and me."
It was hard, after that, to tell her the story, but he told it, and saw her narrow face change from its frozen grieving to a still more frozen anger. She would not believe, or she affected not to believe, the story. A girl out of a little country shop tomarry—her boy!
"You have no right to take away his character so, and he not here to defend himself!" she said. "He—I perceive that he has consorted with low company since he has been here; but he is a gentleman—my son, by birth and education."
"Hewasa gentleman," Dan said gently. Was—was? Tedwas! Ted, who had been so alive, so "in it" in the jovial sense always—was! The word choked poor Dan, but he stumbled on, and told of the poor fellow's last charge to him, his last request to his mother.
Sometimes, in his confidential moments, Ted had spoken of this mother of his. "She is a good woman," he had said; "I suppose she never did, or said, or thought a wicked thing in her life."
She might be good, but she had now a heart as hard as the nether millstone. She did not choose to credit the story. She would not do her dear son's memory such an insult as to believe it. She looked with suspicion as well as dislike upon the poor friend with the rumpled red hair, with the fair skin, blurred and mottled, as such fair skins are wont to be, by his weeping. It was quite possible, she told herself in her miserable little wisdom, that he had made up the tale for his own ends. The hundred pounds was for himself, or at least he would share it. She would not believe; and presently she would hear no more.
"I must now really ask you to leave me alone," she said. "Your good feeling will show you that I have enough to bear."
"And you refuse to do this last thing poor Ted asked of you?" Dan said to her.
"I have no proof that he asked it," she answered.
And with that insult ringing in his ears, Dan went.
He pulled the door to upon him with a muttered oath on his lips; but he was not so enraged as another man would have been in his place. The "old girl" wasn't behaving well; but in Dan's experience, so many people did not behave well; and as it happened, the thing could be put right. If it had been yesterday, how helpless he would have been in the emergency! But old Playford's death had come just in the nick of time. As for himself and his chance—his last chance—well! He looked across at that other door behind which Ted lay. Ted and he had stuck together through ill report and good, had helped each other out of many a scrape, had had such good times!
Dan looked for a moment at the closed door, then stepped across the yard of matting and opened it.
Many a time he had run in without waiting for admission to his friend's lodgings, had pushed open the door to call a word to the young doctor, already gone to bed or not yet got up, perhaps. So, once more he opened the door far enough to admit his red head, and looked in. Ted was dead, he knew; but it takes time to reconcile us to the fact that the dead are also deaf, senseless, past grieving or comfort.
"It's all right, old man; don't you worry. I'll see to it," Dan said.