XIX
THE WAGES
The chauffeur was fastening his leather gaiters as they came out.
"Frognal!" was all Bryan said. "And drive like h—ll!"
The lad touched his cap. As they took their seats, the car seemed to bounce and then leap forward. The streets and squares were empty, except for an occasional limping shadow on the pavement that stopped short at their approach and turned to watch them past. From time to time the chauffeur's shoulder dipped to one side, and the piercing wail of a "Gabriel" horn went before them like an admonition of judgment at hand. She knew then that they were nearing a corner, and that she must hold her companion's arm, for the suddenly diverted impetus seemed to heel the car over on two wheels and she could not keep her seat on the inflated cushions except by clinging to him. But he never spoke to her, or seemed to notice the clutch upon his sleeve. The muscles of his forearm were always moving spasmodically, as if the anguish of waiting found relief in some restless, regular motion of the hands. She knew he had a trick of twisting his signet-ring round and round. The carriage lamp was behind his head, and she only saw his face in silhouette. In the dark lanes around Hampstead the car seemed to be plunging giddily into a tunnel of light made by its own lamps.
It stopped, almost as suddenly as it had started, outside a thick hedge of evergreens. Over an unpainted oak gate an electric light was burning inside a tiny drop-lantern of frosted glass. Beneath it three or four men were standing together; one of whom wore a flat braided cap with a peak. Lumsden jumped out almost before the car had pulled up, and, with a hasty word to the man in blue, disappeared. He had not asked her to come in with him, and she was shy of renewing her offer of service. She sat still in the corner where he had left her, and began to look about her and take her bearings. The hedge was so high and the house so far back that she could only see two of its gable windows. A light, turned very low, showed in one of these. Across the road, on the other side from the house, was a pebbled path with a fringe of coarse grass at its further edge. In front of her a few lamps marked out a curved perspective of road. Beneath it and beyond, the heath lay in confused patches of various intensities of blackness. The sky was paling over in the direction of Highgate, and a bird in a tree overhead, roused probably by the glare of the lamps, was beginning to pipe drowsily and tentatively.
A "honk! honk!" like the croak of some old marsh-haunting reptilian bird, began to sound behind her from the direction in which they had come. It grew louder. A motor-cab slowed up behind them, and two men, one of whom carried a large bag, passed quickly into the house. The two chauffeurs, avoiding the whispering group at the gate, walked up and down together on the edge of the heath, smoking the cigarette of freemasonry and stamping their feet, for the morning was turning cold. A French maid-servant brought out a big cat-skin rug. "For mademoiselle," she said. Her beady eyes scanned the girl curiously as she tucked it round her.
It was broad daylight when Fenella woke, and the heath was a dull sodden green under the window. Lumsden was shaking her by her shoulder. She woke suddenly and completely, as we do from a sleep of which we are half ashamed.
"Why didn't you call me before?"
"You were better asleep. You couldn't have done anything."
"Is—is the boy better?"
He shook his head, and put his hand to his throat as though his collar irked him.
"Not—dead? Oh, Bryan!"
"S—s-h!Just going. Come in now. I want you to see him first."
The house was quite new, full of quaint projecting windows planned to trap the sun, with a tiled roof that dipped and rose in unexpected places. A house of nooks and corners—built for light and air, and the new religion of open window and running water over porcelain baths, in which one feels death to be almost as incongruous as dust. Half the hall door was of glass, in bubbly panes like the bottom of a bottle. He held it open for her, and, bidding her follow, crossed the tiled hall parlor to a white-railed and velvet-carpeted staircase. A red-eyed maid-servant, carrying an enamelled pail and with a mass of soiled linen over one arm, stood aside to let them pass. At the head of the staircase was a square landing, lit by an octagonal turret skylight. A great many doors opened off it. Bryan turned the handle of one.
"In here!" he said.
The room was large and gaily papered. In the centre was a brass-railed cot. Its brass-railed sides had been lifted off and stood, behind it, against the wall. All around the little bed, upon tables and even chairs, were strange utensils, meaningless to the girl, some in glass, others in shining white metal with tubes that coiled and trailed, and linen, linen, everywhere that sheet or towel could be hung. The room was as full of strange scents as of strange shapes, but that of rubber overpowered all the rest, and was to be, for all time, the smell that could most vividly recall the scene to the girl's memory. The blinds were up, but no one had remembered to switch off the lights. Into one corner of the room a pile of toys had been hastily swept; prominent among them a great elephant brandished four lumpy wheeled legs in the air.
Upon the bed a little lad of five or six was lying, covered with clothes to his waist. Even now, with his poor little face lead-color, and all the spun silk of his hair damped down on his forehead, he was beautiful: with the hue of health on his cheek the face must have been that of an angel. His fringed eyelids were closed, and had dark shadows under them; his pinched nose was pitifully like Lumsden's. He seemed to be very tired, and very glad that all these clever people had given up exercising their skill upon him. For no one was doing anything now. One man, in shirt sleeves, held his limp wrist in a great hairy paw, and kept his eyes upon his watch; the other stood at his colleague's shoulder with his hands behind his back, intent upon the shrunken little face.
Lumsden cleared a chair, and, pulling it forward, bade the girl, with a gesture, sit down.
"Any change, Webber?" he asked.
"It may be a few minutes yet.Hush!"
He got up and put his ear to the boy's mouth. A faint snore was audible. He looked up at his partner.
"'Cheyne-Strokes' breathing beginning, Girling."
"Is he suffering?" Bryan asked. He seemed to have lost interest in the technicalities of the question. "That's all I want to know."
"No, no," said the younger man. "Please believe us, Sir Bryan. He won't have suffered from first to last."
"Why's it such a long business?"
"Oh! seven hours is nothing unusual. The power of resistance in children his age is generally much greater. Twelve to fourteen is quite common. I still believe, Webber, there was subcutaneous administration as well."
"Perhaps. I could find no puncture, but his reaction to the ether certainly looked like it."
As Webber spoke he dropped the wrist, pocketed his watch, and made a sign to Lumsden.
"Can I take him up?" said the baronet.
"Yes. It doesn't matter now."
Bryan lifted the inert little body out of bed, held it to his breast, and put his face down on the wet curls.
"Squirrel! Squirrel!" he whispered once or twice, and held him closer.
"I can't hear anything now," he said at the end of a few minutes.
"Let me look at his eyes," said Webber.
Bryan gave a great wild laugh. "His eyes! Good God, man! what do you think you'll see there? Eyes? He never had any. He was born blind."
He laid the body tenderly down on the bed, put one hand across his face for a moment, and touched the weeping girl on the shoulder.
"Come down, Flash. I must send you home now. Don't cry so, girl! It's not fair. This ismyfuneral."
On the way to the head of the staircase they passed another door. He laid his hand upon the brass knob.
"I promised I'd show you real life. There's more inside here. Do you want to see it?"
"No! no!" The girl shrank away, and pulled her skirts from the panel.
"All right, then. Don't be afraid. I haven't been in myself yet. I'm not going to. The fiend! oh! the fiend, Flash! A little child like that—a little boy born blind! He never saw the sun. Look out of this window over the heath and think of it. For all he ever saw he might have lived and died at the bottom of a well. I used to describe things for him though. He was stupid with some people, but he knew my voice. Gad, how he knew it! You'd see the poor little devil's eyes straining, straining, and he'd struggle and kick and push things out of the way till he found me. Oh! the incarnate fiend!"
"Bryan! She's dead, remember."
"Dead! What do I care? If she wasn't I'd have killed her myself. And she knew it. She was the one I cared for least. A cold, vicious, bargaining jade. I tried to get the boy away, but she was too d—d clever. So many hundreds a year more, that's all he meant to her. Do you remember my asking you once if you were fond of kids? I was thinking of him when I asked you that. Some day, perhaps—I thought——'Cos some good women are the devil over things like that, Flash; and if I'd had a dozen born right they shouldn't have come in front of him—This is nice talk to a girl!"
"I don't mind, Bryan. I don't seem to mind a bit now. I think I've missed my proper delicacy, somehow."
He stared at her. "You haven't missed your health, at any rate. You must be a robust little animal for all your color. This time yesterday, Flash, think of it! If it was put in a book, who'd believe it? I wonder if everything that ever can happen a man and a girl has happened us, or if there's more coming to-morrow."
They had been talking in the dining-room. He went over to the sideboard for a drink and stopped suddenly. A half-crown was lying on the top of the buffet. He brought it over to the light, lying flat in the palm of his hand.
"This is a rummy coincidence, Flash," he said, without taking his eyes off it. "D'you know, years and years ago in Vienna, where I was a thing that danced and trailed the conquering sabre past theTöchterschulenin theHohenmarkon court days, I spun a coin this very size to decide a rather important matter for me. 'Tails I go on; heads I go out.' I wasn't bluffing. I was pretty hard hit, or thought I was. But I was young, too, and I'll never forget my feelings when I looked down and saw the double eagle—I'd shut my eyes while it spun, and I remember feeling behind in my hip pocket——Hello! Where did this come from?"
He was holding Ingram's strange present in his hand.
"Of course. Another property. 'Act ii., scene 2: The lair of the wicked baronet.' Do you want it back? No, I won't, though," snatching it back as she reached for it. "Guns are for people who know how to let them off."
He made a movement as though to put it back, then checked himself, and balancing it in his hand looked from it to the coin and back again. The half-crown lay now, head upward, upon the table.
Suddenly Fenella caught his arm. "Bryan! not that—not that!"
He seemed to rouse himself. "Not that?"—angrily. "Why not? What d'you mean? How can you know what I was thinking of?"
His hand had closed upon the weapon. She loosened his fingers one by one to find her own hand held fast.
"Bryan, perhaps I've been too hard on you to-night. Suppose—suppose——Don't look at me that way or I'll stop. I don't promise anything. I must have time. It won't be easy for either of us."
He bent his head and put his lips to the hand that had been held out to slay him and to save him in one night.
"As you will, Flash. God bless you whatever you do with me."
"And now, dear, let me go," she said gently. "Remember, I have my own dead to watch."