CHAPTER XVII.
THE ONLY SON OF HIS MOTHER.
Afterthat first interview Cyril saw Emmanuel Joyce often. His duty took him nearly every day to that fœtid alley where the cobbler contrived to grow his flowers, and to maintain a semblance of prettiness in his narrow dwelling. Whenever the curate had half an hour to spare in his daily round he spent it with Emmanuel, and their talk was generally of spiritual things; for, like most unbelievers, Joyce loved to discuss the religion he pretended to abjure.
One day when Emmanuel had quoted one of the most appalling passages in ‘Queen Mab,’ Cyril startled him by asking,—
‘Do you know that Shelley was a lad of eighteen when he wrote those lines, and that the poem was published without his consent? You quote it to sustain your arguments with as muchconfidence as if it were the work of wisdom as mature as Bacon’s or Pascal’s.’
Emmanuel blushed.
‘He was a boy in years, perhaps, but a man in genius,’ he said.
‘Granted. Shelley was a marvellous boy, with all Chatterton’s precocity, and much more than Chatterton’s spirituality. If the light of his genius led him astray, it was not the less light from heaven. I doubt not if Shelley had lived to be old he would have learned to believe in much that seemed foolishness to his young imagination. Do you ever read Tennyson?’
‘Tennyson is too tame for me.’
‘Take my advice and read him. He is not so great a poet as Shelley, but he is a greater teacher. He and Victor Hugo are the two great moralists of the age; and I would put Tennyson higher than Hugo, because his ethics are of a graver and calmer cast. I will bring you my Tennyson to-morrow.’
‘You are too good,’ said Emmanuel, touched by the curate’s tone of equal friendship.
He went to hear Cyril preach, and listened with delight. He was willing to accept his new friend as a great moral teacher, but he was not willing to surrender his infidel opinions. He had hugged them too long. They were his hobby, as dear to him as a gallery of pictures to a wealthy connoisseur, or a cabinet of old china to a fine lady. But although the citadel had not yet yielded, its foundations were considerably weakened. After a fortnight’s acquaintance with Cyril, the cobbler took his mother to church regularly every Sunday, much to the widow’s delight. It was the only happiness that had been wanting in her simple laborious life, to go to church leaning on her son’s arm.
So things went on till the middle of the summer. Emmanuel had left off reading infidel books, won altogether by the curate’s sympathy. He stuck to his opinions, but he read the books Cyril chose for him, and enlarged the range of his ideas. Hitherto he had devoured books ravenously, but had not digested or absorbed their contents. Now he read in a methodic manner, and grouped hissubjects, under Cyril’s advice. He had supposed that all hard reading meant useful reading, but Cyril showed him that the best books were generally the easiest to read and remember.
One day when Emmanuel began a theological discussion the curate abruptly stopped him.
‘I am not going to talk to you about religion any more,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it is useless and unprofitable, harmful even, for both of us. I have said all I have to say about sacred things, and I have failed to convince you. I will not talk of the gospel for the sake of argument, and with a man who has made up his mind to reject gospel truth. Let us talk of literature, politics, anything you like, except religion. I am warmly interested in the growth of your mind.’
‘And you do not refuse to hold any communication with me because I am an infidel. You do not thrust me from you with loathing?’
‘Assuredly not. I pity you too much.’
‘You must be a man of very liberal opinions.’
‘My Master was a Man of liberal opinions.’
‘Yes, He sat at meat with publicans and sinners, the despised and the oppressed. He was the greatest, noblest, purest Man that ever lived, the wisest Teacher. If you claimed no more for Him than that——’
‘We claim a great deal more than that; but I am not going to discuss these things. Tell me how you like Tennyson.’
‘Better and better the more I read him.’
‘Just so. I don’t think anybody ever thoroughly likes Tennyson at the first reading.’
They went on to talk of the Laureate, and Cyril was surprised and pleased by the justice of the cobbler’s criticism. Emmanuel was touched by the curate’s forbearance. He expressed himself warmly when Cyril was taking leave of him.
‘You are a man in a thousand,’ he said. ‘You are not liberal in words only, but in acts. One would suppose that in your eyes I should be an outcast—a Pariah—Anathema Maranatha.’
‘You are a man,’ answered Cyril, ‘and your soul is precious in my esteem.’
Now came dark days for the pestiferous slums and putrescent lanes which surrounded and hemmed in the high street and market-place of Bridford, like a foul network of brick and mortar, shutting out the fresh sweet breezes that sweep over wood and pasture, moor and corn-field, and all the spicy summer odours of wild herbs and flowers. Mysteriously, scarce anyone knowing where the rumour first began, there arose the cry that cholera was in Bridford. People stood at the street corners, and on the door-steps, telling one another of this fatal visitant, with awe-stricken faces and hushed voices. They were accustomed to small-pox, they were but too familiar with typhus and typhoid, which two fatal diseases the great Jenner was just then seeking to differentiate. But cholera was a foe that came but seldom, and when he came was scathing as that dark angel of the Lord before whose burning breath the host of Sennacherib melted like snow. They had had cholera in the fatal year of ’32. It had revisited them in ’47—and now, stricken with an awful dread, they clustered in little groups at the street corners, at the baker’s, at the close little dingy shops thatsold everything, and in which the atmosphere was pervaded with subtly blended odours of cheese, blacking, pickled onions, chicory, lucifer matches, candles, bacon, firewood, and red herrings. There was a general exodus of all the well-to-do people of Bridford. They packed their trunks in a feverish hurry, and carried their children off to the sea, whereby all the accessible watering-places were sorely overcrowded, and a fertile crop of typhus and scarlatina was grown in close lodgings and sewer-scented bedchambers; so much so that it was afterwards asserted that those who stayed at home, and faced the perils of cholera, and did a good deal to help their poorer neighbours, fared better than those more cautious spirits who fled before the face of the foe.
Cyril worked day and night. He had studied surgery in Paris in one of his long vacations, and had gone about among the London hospitals in order to be of use in cases of emergency. He was now a valuable aid to the overworked parish doctor and his pallid assistant. The disease had spread fast among the crowded tenements under the shadow of thegreat chemical factory. Those fumes of sulphur and oxalic acid which poisoned the air of heaven in this locality proved no antidote to the cholera poison. There had been a good many deaths already. Cyril hunted the parish officers to accomplish such sanitary improvements as might be effected on the spur of the moment; but the whole neighbourhood was a nest of rottenness. There was not a drain that did its duty, or a sewer that did not breathe forth pollution by day and night. The funeral bell sounded all day long, and the faces of the people were pale and worn with an ever-present fear.
Emmanuel Joyce went on with his daily work, and his nightly studies. He wrote dismal verses about the cholera fiend and his victims, and was more than ever inclined to question the justice and benevolence of his Creator.
‘It isn’t for myself I’m afraid,’ he said to Cyril, who had scanty leisure now for literary discussions, but who looked in at Mrs. Joyce’s parlour once a day for five minutes’ friendly chat. ‘A man can die but once. I’m no more afraid of sudden death than a soldier is when he stands in his place in the ranksand knows that the next shot may be for him. But I can’t help feeling for the poor creatures round about—the mothers taken from their young children—the hard-working fathers carried off, and their little ones left to starve.’
‘It is hard, I grant,’ said Cyril. ‘But there is some good in all evil things. This dreadful outbreak may arouse the corporation of Bridford from their wicked apathy. We shall have sanitary reform, perhaps, after this awful warning.’
‘Ay, they’ll shut the stable door when the steed’s stolen,’ retorted Emmanuel, bitterly.
A few days later a death occurred in the house in which the Joyces lived. Cyril found the widow sitting with her work in her lap—she whose needle was rarely idle—pale, and crying silently.
‘Oh, sir,’ she sighed, ‘my poor Emmanuel, my blessed, well-beloved son!’
‘Dear Mrs. Joyce, is anything amiss with him? Is he ill?’ asked Cyril, alarmed.
‘No, sir—not yet. But oh, I am full of fear! The poor woman on the third floor—the young mother with the two children—you know—you werewith her last night. She’s gone, sir. Only taken yesterday morning, and gone this afternoon. A clear case of Asiatic cholera, the doctor says. Who can tell if my boy may not be the next?’
‘My good soul, you will be the next if you fret and frighten yourself like this. Does not God take care of us all? Those who are taken are in His keeping as truly as those He leaves behind. In life or death we are with Him. Why should Emmanuel be the next? He is sober and cleanly. He is better cared for in every way than his neighbours.’
‘Oh, Mr. Culverhouse, I love him so, he is all the world to me. I could not live without him. I have watched him grow up, as a child watches the one flower in his little garden. Every day and hour of his life has been precious to me. My only grief has been that he should set his face against the Bible. And now perhaps God is angry with him—God must be angry at unbelief—and will snatch him away from me.’
‘That would be to punish you. God is all just. He will give your son time to grow wiser.’
‘Oh, sir, it is not always so. The wicked man iscut off in the day of his iniquity. My son has denied God, and may be smitten in his pride. The poor young mother taken away from her babies, one that can only just crawl, and the other six weeks old! Why should Heaven pity me more than those babies?’
‘Because the loss must be harder for you. Some kind soul will care for the babies.’
‘True, sir, one of them was laughing and crowing an hour ago. They don’t know what death means. But Emmanuel is my all. At night when he lays down his book and talks to me for a little bit, I sit and drink in his words as if they were wine, warming and strengthening me. His poetry seems grander to me than any other poet’s. Yes, grander than Milton or Shakespeare. I think God meant him to be great.’
‘I believe God meant him to be good.’
‘Oh, Mr. Culverhouse, my mind is full of care when I think of him. My husband believed that some were chosen vessels of wrath. I have sometimes fancied that Emmanuel must be such a one. To be so gifted, and yet to deny God! To be sogood to me—the best and kindest of sons—and yet to be stubborn against his God. I cannot understand it.’
‘Can you not understand the case of a man to whom Heaven has given a searching and inquiring spirit—a mind not satisfied to be taught by others—wanting to find out everything for itself? Such a man, not having searched deep enough, may be still in the dark; but when he has lived longer, and thought more, the light will come. Be sure of that.’
‘Do you believe that, Mr. Culverhouse?’
‘Honestly. I give Emmanuel another year for his infidel opinions, and at the end of that time I expect to see him testifying to his belief in Christianity, like the apostle Paul, as ardent in faith as he has been ardent in disbelief.’
‘What comfort you have given me!’ sighed the widow.
Cyril went away touched by the mother’s intense love, deeply anxious for the safety of both mother and son in that infected house. If he had been rich enough he would have sent both off to some inlandvillage, far from the smoke of cities and the fumes of factory chimneys. But he had drained his purse in giving a little help in cases where help was most bitterly needed. For one moment there flashed across his mind the thought of what he might have done to help these people, if Beatrix Harefield’s fortune had been his. What sunshine he could have carried into dark places—what comfort, relief, ease of mind, sanitary improvements—blessings of education and moral enlightenment—better dwellings, hopefulness everywhere. Money would have done all this, and the woman he loved would have given him her wealth freely for these things. And now the wealth was useless and idle, and he and the woman he loved were unlike unhappy. His purse was empty; he could give Emmanuel and his mother nothing but friendship and pity. He saw them every day, though the continual calls upon his time made every moment precious.
Unhappily Mrs. Joyce had not the firmness of soul that can face a danger near at hand. She was nervous and full of fear. She had all manner of petty devices for keeping the enemy at bay. She,who had never been given to gossip, now lingered at the chandler’s shop, to talk to her neighbours, to hear the latest evil tidings, or to get the last specific which quackery had invented against the disease. Emmanuel’s life was made a burden to him by his mother’s care. She wanted him to take half a dozen different concoctions in a day. His affection yielded, while his common sense revolted.
‘I haven’t the least belief in these messes, but I’ll take anything to oblige you, mother,’ he said.
By and by the widow wondered to see her son’s appetite begin to languish.
‘I think those concoctions you give me are the cause of it,’ he said, when his mother bewailed this alarming symptom. ‘They sicken my stomach.’
‘Oh, Emmanuel, everybody knows that sarsaparilla is strengthening, and ought to give you an appetite; and then there’s the iron and the bark I got from the chemist’s for you.’
‘Yes, and the dandelion tea, and the ground-ivy.’
‘That was to sweeten your blood, Emmanuel.’
‘Mother, there was nothing the matter with me, and if you want me to take preventives against cholera, why can’t you be contented with simple things? Mr. Culverhouse says that a tea-spoonful of common salt taken daily with one’s food is the best preventive ever discovered, and that wouldn’t make me turn against my dinner, as your ground-ivy and such like rubbish does.’
Hereupon the widow began to cry.
‘I’m so anxious about you, Emmanuel,’ she said.
‘And so am I anxious about you, mother, but I don’t worry you nor myself. What’s the use? Here we are, rank and file, like soldiers, and the shells are exploding round us on every side. We may get hit, or we may not. There are survivors after all great battles. Think of those old fellows we have seen who were all through the Peninsular war. How many times must they and death have been within an inch of each other! We are no worse off than they were.’
The tolling of the funeral bell came like a full stop at the end of Emmanuel’s speech.
One of Mrs. Joyce’s ideas for the preservationof her son’s health—of herself she thought no more than if she had been invulnerable—was to get him as much as possible out of the tainted neighbourhood he lived in. She urged him to abandon his evening studies, and to take long walks into the country, she going with him. The young man humoured this fancy as he would have humoured any wish of his mother’s, and the two used to set out after working hours on a rural tramp. The country, or anything pretty in the way of rustic scenery, was not easily reached from Bridford. Long dusty high roads, bounded by uninteresting fields of mangel, or turnips, had to be traversed before the weary pedestrian arrived at anything rural or refreshing to the senses. Emmanuel and his mother had both a keen love of the beautiful, and they overwalked themselves nightly in the endeavour to reach some green hill-side or wooded dell they knew of. The evenings were sultry and oppressive. More than once the wayfarers were caught in a thunder-shower, and went home wet to the skin. Altogether this precautionary measure of Mrs. Joyce’s was about the worst thing she and herson could have done. The end was fatal. One night Emmanuel was seized with racking pain, and the usual symptoms of Asiatic cholera.
The parish doctor came early in the morning. Yes, there was no room for doubt, it was another case. The widow heard his opinion with a stony calmness. All her fussy anxiety seemed gone. Her pale set face betokened a despair too deep for words. She sat by her son’s pillow. She wiped the drops of agony from his drawn face. She obeyed to the letter every direction the doctor had given her.
‘How good you are!’ she said once, when she had seen the struggle between fortitude and pain, ‘how patient! Oh, my dear one, surely this is Christian patience. I know it. I feel it. At heart you are a Christian.’
‘I have tried to live an honest life,’ the sick man answered, feebly. ‘I have tried to keep my name fair in the sight of men—and to do as much good as I was able to my neighbours.’
‘That is Christianity, my dear. If you would but acknowledge——But no, I won’t talk to you now. God will have mercy. He will spareyou—for me—for me. And then your heart will be melted and you will turn to Him.’
‘Mother, if I should be taken away,’ Emmanuel said later, ‘I know Mr. Culverhouse will be good to you. You will not be friendless.’
‘Not friendless! I have no friend but you. The earth would be empty for me if you were gone. Oh, my boy, my boy, do you think that I could go on living without you?’
Cyril overheard these two speeches. He had knocked gently, and, receiving no answer, had softly opened the door. The neighbours, a family of nine, in the front room, had told him of Emmanuel’s state.
‘Oh, sir,’ cried the widow, turning to him with streaming eyes, ‘it has come. You know how I dreaded it—how I have prayed against it. I thought God would have mercy, that the scourge would pass by this door, as the angel of death passed by the doors that were sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb. But He has been deaf to my prayers.’
‘He is never deaf to prayer, though He maynot give us the answer we desire,’ said Cyril, gently. ‘Do not give way to despair. With God’s grace your son will recover, as so many have done.’
‘But how many have died!’ said the widow, sadly, as she resumed her seat by her son’s pillow.
Cyril stayed for more than an hour, comforting both the sick man and his mother by his presence. He said very little to Emmanuel, for the sufferer was in no state to talk or to be talked to. It was one of those cases in which a death-bed repentance—a calm survey of past errors and sins—a deliberate act of allegiance to God—was not to be expected. The sinking soul might clutch at the cross held aloft before those dim eyes, as a drowning man catches at the rope flung out to him at his last extremity; but any act involving thought, any calm reception of divine truth, was impossible. To Cyril’s eye the young man seemed already sinking. He opened his book by and by without a word of preface, and read those chapters of St. John’s gospel which contain Christ’s parting address to His disciples—words whose pathetic minor seems to breathe sad sweetness into dying ears. Emmanuel’sface brightened as he heard. He remembered how he had loved those chapters long ago, when he had read them at his mother’s knee, before his father’s severity and the hard ascetic life had made all religions reading hateful to him.
‘Yes,’ he murmured presently, in an interval of pain. ‘That is a lovely farewell. Those used to be your favourite chapters, mother.’
‘They are so still, dear. I have never tired of them.’
Cyril left with a heavy heart, promising to call in the evening, at the hour when he would be likely to meet the doctor. That anguish-wrung countenance of the widow’s haunted him all day long. In the places where he went there was little else but sorrow, but there seemed to him to be no burthen like unto this burthen of hers—a grief and a desolation beyond speech.
‘He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.’ Those words were continually in his mind. For that one widow—blessed and chosen above all other afflicted women—God upon earth worked one of His greatest miracles. Thrice onlyin His earthly pilgrimage did Heexercisethat ineffable power—and on this occasion it seemed exercised on the impulse of the moment. God’s human heart had been touched by this entirely human grief. He did not say to the widow—as His servants now say—‘Rejoice, for your son is in heaven.’ He gave her back her son upon earth.
Cyril was heavy at heart, for he had seen every cause for fear in Emmanuel Joyce’s condition.
‘If it were my life, now, that was in jeopardy, it would matter very little,’ he said to himself. ‘Who is there to be sorry for me? My cousin Kenrick would be grieved, perhaps, in a mild degree, to hear of my death; but it would make very little difference in his life. This poor woman’s existence will be desolate if she loses her son. There will be nothing left her. Hard to break the chain of love when poverty and loneliness have made each link so strong.’
The twilight was closing in when Cyril went back to the room where Emmanuel Joyce was lying, in an agony that looked like the throes of death. The widow’s ashen face indicated a knowledgeof her son’s peril. She tried to speak, but could not. She could only hold out her cold tremulous hand to the human friend of whose pity she felt assured, and look at him with wild despairing eyes. He pressed her hand gently, and sat down by the bedside to watch the struggle, while he waited for the doctor’s coming.
‘You have done everything?’ he inquired. ‘Yes, I am sure of that.’
The room had a stifling odour of laudanum and brandy. The sick man’s pinched and livid face, hollow sunken eye sand brow bedewed with death-like dampness made Cyril apprehend the worst. The hands grasping the coverlet were shrunken and wrinkled, the skin shrivelled like a washerwoman’s after her day’s labour. The oppressed respiration, the cold breath which chilled the curate’s cheek as he bent over his dying friend, alike inspired fear. Yet the brain remained unclouded all the while, and the hollow voice hoarsely whispered grateful acknowledgment of Cyril’s kindness. Never had Emmanuel Joyce been calmer in mind than in this dark hour. He waited with resignation for recovery or death.
It was more than an hour before the parish doctor appeared.
‘There are so many cases,’ he said, apologetically.
And then he looked at the patient with a calm business-like air that tortured the mother’s heart. He felt the pulse, put his hard hand upon the clammy brow.
‘He’s very bad to-night.’
‘Worse than he was this morning?’ asked the widow, hoarsely.
‘Ever so much worse.’
‘And you said this morning that he was in danger.’
‘My good woman, I’m very sorry for you,’ said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders, ‘but it’s a very bad case. Frankly, it’s hopeless. There’s no use in deceiving you. The young man is dying.’
No cry of despair came from the mother’s parched lips. She made no moan, but only crouched by her son’s bed, clasping him in her arms, as if she would have held him back from death by the sheer force of maternal love. She never turned to look at the doctor as he moved slowly towards the door.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s a sad case. The drainage of this place is shameful. We positively invite disease. I can’t do anything more. You can go on with the laudanum and the brandy; but I’m afraid it’s useless. And you might put a mustard plaster to the soles of his feet.’
Mrs. Joyce sprang up and ran to the cupboard, as if awakened to new life. There was a ray of hope for her in being told to do something, even though in the same breath the doctor said that it was useless.
Cyril followed the doctor into the dusky alley. Summer stars were shining down upon them, through the dim gray night. Blotches of yellow light gleamed in wretched windows, where there were more rags than glass, and more paper than rags. Every door-step was occupied by squatting forms of slipshod matrons, or men in shirt sleeves, smoking their clay pipes. The fumes of rank tobacco contested for mastery with sulphuric acid and asafœtida. A horrible place to live in—a worse place to die in.
‘Dr. Saunders, I would give a great deal to save that young man,’ said Cyril, putting his arm throughthe doctor’s. They had met continually during the troublous summer, and had grown very friendly.
‘So would I, my dear sir,’ answered Dr. Saunders. ‘You don’t suppose I’m adamant, do you? That woman’s face has hit me harder than anything I’ve met with in the last miserable six weeks. But I can’t help her. The young man is sinking.’
‘Is not cholera more or less a disorganization of the blood?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Have you ever tried the effect of transfusion upon a patient in a state of collapse?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When I was in Paris I heard a good deal about the transmission of blood from the veins of a healthy patient to those of a sinking one. I saw the operation performed at the Hôtel Dieu, and the result was successful.’
‘That’s an old idea,’ said the parish doctor, ‘but I’ve never gone into it. It was tried in the seventeenth century in France by Denis, the anatomist, and at Oxford by Dr. Richard Lower, who performed transfusion on animals. Dr. Blundell was the firstEnglish physician who performed experiments of that kind on the human subject. I’ve never done such a thing myself, and I can’t say I should like to attempt it.’
‘It’s the simplest process imaginable,’ said Cyril, ‘almost as easy as bleeding.’
And then he described the operation, as he had seen it performed in Paris.
‘It may be easy enough, but I shouldn’t care to try it.’
‘Not to snatch a man from the jaws of death, not to achieve a triumph in medical science, not to prove how far this nineteenth century of ours is ahead of the learned Middle Ages, when the best cure surgery could invent for a sick emperor was to wrap him in the skin of an ape, flayed alive?’
‘Science is a grand thing,’ admitted Dr. Saunders, ‘but I am no friend to rash experiments. And even if I were willing to try the operation upon that poor fellow yonder—who is bound to die, so there’s not much risk forhim—where am I to find the benevolent subject willing to part with sufficient blood?’
‘Here,’ answered Cyril. ‘I am ready for your lancet.’