XV
A LAST WISH
Many will remember the profound impression that Althea's death created. It extended far beyond the circles that her novels had reached. There was something about that last mysterious journey through London—the sudden, unheralded end, at some conjectural hour, when the great heart of the city was beating its faintest, that struck the popular imagination, always ready to be harrowed, and secretly grateful, I believe, for evidence that fate works with an even grimness under all the inequalities of rank or fortune. I attended the funeral, combining for the last time my professional duties with the privileges of an old but lately neglected friend, and saw her committed to the awakening earth. She was buried with all the pomp and circumstance that the church of her adoption gives its children as a last assurance of its own unshaken power, but through all the chants and absolutions the chill human ache of an irreparable loss persisted, as, through the perfume of incense and flowers, the raw smell of the polished elm coffin pierced to the sense. The church was crowded with her friends; wreaths and crosses, lyres with snapped strings, broken columns of rare exotic flowers, all symbols of untimely end, were banked round the catafalque, but the coffin itself was stark and bare, covered thinly by a pall of purple silk wrought at its hem with passion flowers. The girls in some refuge or another, poor soiled doves whose unwearied friend she had been, had sat up, it was said, night and day in order to complete it.
About the time that references to Mrs. Hepworth's career were ceasing to appear even in the minor papers, rumors of a theatrical hoax began to circulate through London. The new dancer, whom the zealous friendship of a certain well-known sporting baronet had forced upon an unwilling management, would not, after all, appear in the new play that was to replace theMotor Girlat the Dominion some time in May. "Would not appear!" Imagine what an eye trained to cheat the censor of his spoil could make of that; with what significance a tongue, thrust into a leathery cheek not quite innocent of biscuit and cheese, at the Bedford Street Bodega, could invest those three little words.
"Will not appear, my boy. Catch on? Why won't she? That's the joke, my boy. Because she's got to stop at home andnurse her mother."
Imagine it! just once, and then let us pass on into sweeter air. Even if it must be the air of a sick-room. For many weeks Fenella hardly breathed any other. During that first breathless rally which hardly gave thought to the final issue, and during which a spoonful of broth swallowed, an hour's quiet rest or a fall in temperature were triumphs repaying the sleepless night, dull eye, and hollow cheek a hundredfold, career, character, seemed very empty, shadowy words. Even if one of the vile journals in pink and blue and yellow covers addressed in a handwriting needlessly disguised, which, be sure of it, the postman did not fail to deliver at Number Eleven, had reached her, had not—as all were, in fact, been torn from its wrapper by honest Frances' grimy hand to light parlor or kitchen fire—I doubt very much whether the marked paragraph would have had power to inflict one pang upon her self-respect, or bring one drop of blood to her cheek.
How much she loved her mother, how far the wholesome, homelyfactof her had been the basis of all happiness in life, Nelly had not guessed until now, when the thought must be faced of its speedy change to a mere memory. A reproachful memory, alas! She looked back on her girlhood—her school-days, and saw herself heedless and heartless. How niggardly of love she had been, how chary in response! She even accused herself of a little snobbishness in her mother's regard—unjustly, since it was from the innate expansiveness of the older woman and not from the accident of station or manner that her own finer nature had shrunk. But, in circumstances like these, to be conscious of a finer nature does not administer much comfort.
Mrs. Barbour rallied a little from the first stroke, but never rose from her bed, and never spoke intelligibly again. Sometimes, by bending close to her lips and straining every sense, Fenella fancied she could construe the formless gabble into words, but into the words even her affection could read no meaning. During the day, indeed, her presence seemed to agitate the invalid to such an extent that the nurse had to be roused and the desperate effort to speak cut short by some opiate or injection. Once, driven almost mad at sight of her mother's mental suffering, Fenella took a sheet of stiff white cardboard, propped the sick woman upon a pillow, and put a pencil into the palsied hand. Slowly, with infinite pains on the one hand and infinite patience on the other, five dreadful letters took shape upon the writing-pad; five letters such as a dying man might scrawl with a finger dipped into his heart's blood:
"D—A—N—C—E."
A light broke upon the girl. "You want me to go on rehearsing? Is that it, mother?"
Oh! what joy in the poor fading eyes at being at last understood. The trembling head nodded again and again, and fell back on the pillow exhausted.
"I will then, dear!" Fenella whispered in her mother's ear. "I'll go and put my things on at once."
She came back, dressed as for the street, and kissed her mother good-bye. Ten minutes afterward, in response to a stealthy knock at the door, the little Scotch nurse whispered that the patient was fast asleep.
From now until the day on which the slowly curdling brain ceased to receive any impression at all the little loving conspiracy of lies went on. Every morning, at the usual hour of her departure for the theatre, Fenella, in hat and long coat, kissed her mother's cheek and forehead, and asked her how the night had passed—that night whose every hour she often had watched. At seven o'clock, dressed again, she came back, having first laid her cheek to the marble mantelpiece in the drawing-room, that it might be convincingly cold. (The best women have these depths in deception, this recognition of the importance of trifles.) She would sit down upon the bed and regale her duped parent with a long and elaborate history of the day's doings—what Mr. Dollfus had said, what Mr. Lavigne had said—how tiresome the chorus were, how jealous the leading lady—how set, above all, were all signs and portents toward ultimate triumph. Her achievement in this new field stirred even little Frances, now become a person of vast importance and responsibility, to involuntary admiration.
"Miss! You can't 'alf tell 'em!" that little helpmeet would say, harkening her.
Whenever a protracted illness has ended in death it is a commonplace of comfort with well-meaning but shallow folk to say, "You must all feel it amerciful release." Apart from its sincerity, the phrase is founded upon a misconception of human feeling. No dead are missed so much as the dead who have been long a-dying. The presence of a perilous illness brings many an evil into a house; it at least casts one out.Ennuinever reigns in the house that has the straw in front of its railings. A great drama is going on, and there never is a moment when one may not steal upstairs on tiptoe to measure its progress. Hence, apart altogether from sorrow, a strange emptiness in life when all is over, a bitter superadded regret for the close, shadowed room, haunted by broken murmurs, that was once the core of a whole polity of existence.
In her sad absorption Fenella forgot Sir Bryan all but completely. He wrote to her often. His letters, headed in black or blue, or embossed whitely in thick square letters—"The Turf Club"; "369 Mount Street, Tel. 9087 Mayfair"; "Coffers Castle. Parcels: Balafond Stn. N. B. R."—lay strewn about her dressing-table or stuck carelessly behind looking-glasses, for all the world, represented now by Nurse Ursula or Frances, to read if they would. (We will not suspect Nurse Ursula of such a thing for a moment, and on any that have been placed in my hands there is no such grimy finger-print as I am sure Frances would have left.) She answered rarely, and then only in little set missives, mere bulletins of her mother's health. She begged his pardon for leaving so many of his lettersunansered. She was quite well, thank him, had had a quiet night, and felt quiteenegetic. The doctor had been and said mother'sstrenthwas well maintained. She thanked him for the lovely grapes from Stanmore. She hoped that "Mud-Major" would win in the big race at Liverpool, and she remained sincerely his—Fenella Powys Barbour. She had decided on the full signature in letters to Lumsden. It sounded stately, and enforced respect. She would have been vastly surprised seeing the sort of respect with which the misspelt little notes were treated.
It is only part of the general injustice of life that while the man who was doing his clumsy best to lighten her sorrow hardly stayed in her mind a moment after she had cast his letters aside or scribbled an answer to them, the false lover, who had kissed her in her own home, loved and ridden away, haunted every hushed empty corner of it. Her very unhappiness brought him back to her, as a new illness weakens the smart of an old wound. She had an impulse once, which the lonely and deserted will understand, to set her thoughts on paper in the form of a letter to him.
"My darling lost love" (she began),"What years and years it [sic] seems to have past since I saw your dear face——"
"My darling lost love" (she began),
"What years and years it [sic] seems to have past since I saw your dear face——"
Then she stopped, and tore the sheet into little pieces. Anything approaching literary composition suddenly became hateful. The thought had occurred to her: How well the other woman could do this! The other woman—in her grave nearly a month.
One morning, while she lingered outside her mother's door, after perpetrating the customary deception, Frances, the begrimed, brought her Lumsden's card in a corner of her apron. He was in the small drawing-room, straight and fair and good to look upon, standing amid a dusty huddle of chairs that had not been restored to their places since the doctors consulted there a week ago.
"I came to see if you were killing yourself," he said, when they had shaken hands and he had asked after her mother.
"Oh! I'm as strong as a horse."
"That remark rather loses its force with me, because I know something about them. When did you take your feed—'horse'?"
"Sir Bryan! I eat with nurse."
"Oh! I know the sort of meals. You're dressed. Have you been out?"
"N—no."
"Just going then?"
Fenella blushed, but did not reveal the pious fraud.
"I've got the big car outside," said Lumsden. "Care to come for a run till tea?"
The suggestion had its attractions.
"I must run upstairs first. You don't mind waiting a minute?"
Nurse not only gave permission, but a little straight hygienic talk she had been saving up, too professional to be repeated here. Fenella took her seat almost with a feeling of duty done. Bryan ordered the chauffeur into the back and took the wheel himself.
"Tuck this round you. Now, where shall we go that's within reach? Richmond?"
"Oh no!" hastily—"not Richmond. Let's go to Hampstead."
"No; I don't care for Hampstead," with a sudden shadow of distaste. Two pasts met in their glance—her woman's fault of loving too well—and his.
After a while the mere physical act of breathing fully and deeply again, the rush of the spring air, pleasantly cold, past her pallid cheeks, did their work, and unsealed the springs of joy in her own young breast—a facile joy, born of health and perfect balance, for which she had often blamed herself since the summer, ignorant of how between it, as between every function of her body, and the ascetic ideal which a heart, untimely chastened, sought to impose, there was war declared, in which she was a mere battle-ground for contending forces. It had rained hard in the forenoon. Now, level with their eyes, a belated sun flooded the suburbs with temperate gold, spilled its overflow on wet slate roofs, set bright jewels in the upper windows of gray stucco houses, and wove a filagree pattern, beaded with tender green buds in railed gardens and bristling walled shrubberies. Nothing was beneath its glorifying magic. Between the flashing tram-rails the very bed of the wide road seemed flooded with alluvial dust. A wonderful sky country, all mountain and islet-strewn tarn—such a landscape as may lie at the gate of dream-cities in the Alps—closed the prospect into which they were rushing. The wheels hummed, the six cylinders purred happily. She began to sing to herself, stretching her neck and pouting her lips, a foolish little song she had caught from one of the Dominion girls:
"I like your old French bonnetWith the ribbons on it,And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.If you'll come to ParryThen we two will marryAnd our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."
"I like your old French bonnetWith the ribbons on it,And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.If you'll come to ParryThen we two will marryAnd our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."
"I like your old French bonnetWith the ribbons on it,And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.If you'll come to ParryThen we two will marryAnd our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."
"I like your old French bonnet
With the ribbons on it,
And I like your cha-a-a-arming ways.
If you'll come to Parry
Then we two will marry
And our wedding march shall be the Marseillaise."
"Feeling happier, Flash?"
She had forgotten him. Now, as she turned, self-reproachful, at the sound of his voice, the unreasonable little fit of happiness took wing. Yet she could not but admire him. How cleverly and coolly he drove! What chances he took! They were passing every one. Once, at some congestion in the traffic, a policeman touched his helmet and let him through. He seemed to feel this was a man not used to wait his turn. Paul had once said to her that most men failed in life because its detail was too much for them to tackle; at least, this was what she made out of a rather more ornate speech. Bryan didn't seem to find any difficulty. She remembered Jack Barbour's comprehensive phrase, "Bryan's first-class in anything he takes up." Was it because she was ambitious, aspiring, herself that she resisted this power, instead of succumbing to it, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have done, and being content to shine with a reflected glory? She had had her own little dream of success—the packed theatre, the thunders of applause, her name flashing and winking in letters of fire—part of the madness of a great city by night—paragraphs, interviews. All very mean and personal, no doubt, yet with an element in them that somehow dignified the ambition. For to be the favorite of the public was what she wanted—nothing else would do—the great good-hearted public, that rings its hard-earned shilling or half-crown upon the ledge of the ticket-office, shopman and clerk with honest wife and sweetheart at his side, equally ready to laugh or cheer or cry, who dip a mutual finger into a box of chocolates and believe that even a dancer can be an honest girl.