"That's what I came on purpose to say, Major Roper. You're not to come out on any account in the fog. Colonel Lund wouldn't be any better for your coming, because he'll think of you going back through the fog, and he'll fret. Please do give up the idea of coming until it clears. Besides, he isn't my grandfather." An inconsecutive finish to correct a mistake of Old Jack's. She resumes the chair she had risen from when he came in, and thereupon he, suffering fearfully from having no breathing-apparatus and nothing to use it on, makes concession to a chair himself, but all the while waves a stumpy finger to keep Sally's last remark alive till his voice comes. The other old soldier remains standing, but somewhat on Sally's other side, so that she does not see both at once. A little voice, to be used cautiously, comes to the Major in time.
"Good Lard, my dear—excuse—old chap, you know!—why, good Lard, what a fool I am! Why, I knoo your father in India."
But he stops suddenly, to Sally inexplicably. She does not see that General Pellew has laid a finger of admonition on his lips.
"I never saw my father," she says. It is a kind of formula of hers which covers all contingencies with most people. This time she does not want it to deadlock the conversation, which is what it usually serves for, so she adds: "You really knew him?"
"Hardly knoo," is the reply. "Put it I met him two or three times, and you'll about toe the line for a start. Goin' off at that, we soon come up to my knowin' the Colonel's not your grandfather." Major Roper does not get through the whole of the last word—asthma forbids it—but his meaning is clear. Only, Sally is a direct Turk, as we have seen, and likes clearing up things.
"You know my friend Lætitia Wilson's mother, Major Roper?" The Major expresses not only that he does, but that his respectful homage is due to her as a fine woman—even a queenly one—by kissing his finger-tips and raising his eyes to heaven. "Well, Lætitia (Tishy, I call her) says you told her mother you knew my father in India, and went out tiger-hunting with him, and he shot a tiger two hundred yards off and gave you the skin." Sally laysstress on the two hundred yards as a means of identification of the case. No doubt the Major owned many skins, but shot at all sorts of distances.
It is embarrassing for the old boy, because he cannot ignore General Pellew's intimations over Sally's head, which she does not see. He is to hold his tongue—that is their meaning. Yes, but when you have made a mistake, it may be difficult to begin holding it in the middle. Perhaps it would have been safer to lose sight of the subject in the desert of asthma, instead of reviving it the moment he got to an oasis.
"Some misunderstanding'," said he, when he could speak. "I've got a tiger-skin the man who shot it gave me out near Nagpore, but he wasn't your father." How true that was!
"Do you remember his name?" Sally wants him to say it was Palliser again, to prove it all nonsense, but a warning finger of the old General makes him desperate, and he selects, as partially true, the supposed alias which—do you remember all this?—he had ascribed to the tiger-shooter in his subsequent life in Australia.
"Perfectly well. His name was Harrisson. A fine shot. He went away to Australia after that."
Sally laughs out. "How very absurd of Tishy!" she says. "She hadn't even got the name you said right.Shesaid it was Palliser. It sounds like Harrisson." She stopped to think a minute. "But even if she had said it right it wouldn't be my father, because his name, you know, was Graythorpe—like mine before we both changed to Nightingale—mother and I. We did, you know."
Old Jack assents to this with an expenditure of breath not warranted where breath is so scarce. He cannot say "of course," and that he recollects, too often. Perhaps he is glad to get on a line of veracity. The General says "of course," also. "Your mother, my dear, was Mrs. Graythorpe when I knew her at Umballa and on the boat." Both these veterans call Sally "my dear," and she doesn't resent it.
But her message is really given, and she ought to get back. She succeeds in finally overruling Major Roper's scheme of coming out into the fog, which has contrived to get blacker still during this conversation; but has more trouble with the other old soldier.She only overcomes that victor in so many battle-fields by representing that if he does see her safe to Ball Streetshewill be miserable if she doesn't seehimsafe back to the club. "And then," she adds, "we shall go on till doomsday. Besides, Iamyoung and sharp!" At which the old General laughs, and says isn'the? Ask his granddaughters! Sally says no, he isn't, and she can't have him run over to please anybody. However, he will come out to see her off, though Old Jack must do as he's told, and stop indoors. He watches the little figure vanish in the fog, with a sense of the merry eyebrows in the pretty shoulders, like the number of a cab fixed on behind.
When General Pellew had seen Sally out, to the great relief of Gibbon of the various reds in the lobby, he returned and drew a chair for himself beside Major Roper, who still sat, wrestling with the fog, where he had left him.
"What a dear child!... Oh yes; she'll be all right. Take better care of herself than I should of her. She would only have been looking after me, to see that I didn't get run over." He glanced round and dropped his voice, leaning forward to the Major. "She must never be told."
"You're right, Pelloo! Dam mistake of mine to say! I'm a dam mutton-headed old gobblestick! No better!" We give up trying to indicate the Major's painful interruptions and struggles. Of course, he might have saved himself a good deal by saying no more than was necessary. General Pellew was much more concise and to the purpose.
"Neverbe told. I see one thing. Her mother has told her little or nothing of the separation."
"No! Dam bad business! Keep it snug's the word."
"You saw she had no idea of the name. ItwasPalliser, wasn't it?"
"Unless it was Verschoyle." Major Roper only says this to convince himself that he might have forgotten the name—a sort of washy palliation of his Harrisson invention. It brings him within a measurable distance of a clear conscience.
"No, it wasn't Verschoyle. I remember the Verschoyle case." By this time Old Jack is feeling quite truthful. "ItwasPalliser, and it's not for me to blame him. He only did what you orI might have done—any man. A bit hot-headed, perhaps. But look here, Roper...."
The General dropped his voice, and went on speaking almost in a whisper, but earnestly, for more than a minute. Then he raised it again.
"It was that point. If you say a word to the girl, or begin giving her any information, and she gets the idea you can tell her more, she'll just go straight for you and say she must be told the whole. I can see it in her eyes. Andyou can't tell her the whole. You know you can't!"
The Major fidgeted visibly. He knew he should go round to learn about his old friend (it was barely a quarter of a mile) as soon as the least diminution of the fog gave him an excuse. And he was sure to see Sally. He exaggerated her age. "The gyairl's twenty-two," said he weakly. The General continued:
"I'm only speaking, mind you, on the hypothesis.... I'm supposing the case to have been what I told you just now. Otherwise, you could work the telling of it on the usual lines—unfaithfulness, estranged affections, desertion—all the respectable produceable phrases. But as for making that little Miss Nightingaleunderstand—that is, without making her life unbearable to her—it can't be done, Major. It can't be done, old chap!"
"I see your game. I'll tell her to ask her mother."
"It can't be done that way. I hope the child's safe in the fog." The General embarked on a long pause. There was plenty of time—more time than he had (so his thought ran) when his rear-guard was cut off by the Afridis in the Khyber Pass. But then the problem was not so difficult as telling this live girl how she came to be one—telling her, that is, without poisoning her life and shrouding her heart in a fog as dense as the one that was going to make the street-lamps outside futile when night should come to help it—telling her without dashing the irresistible glee of those eyebrows and quenching the smile that opened the casket of pearls that all who knew her thought of her by.
Both old soldiers sat on to think it out. The older one first recognised the insolubility of the problem. "It can't be done," said he. "Girls are not alike. She's too much like my nasturtium granddaughter now...."
"I shall have to tell her dam lies."
"That won't hurt you, Old Jack."
"I'm not complainin'."
"Besides, I shall have to tell 'em, too, as likely as not. You must tell me what you've told, so as to agree. I should go round to ask after Lund, only I promised to meet an old thirty-fifth man here at five. It's gone half-past. He's lost in the fog. But I can't go away till he comes." Old Jack is seized with an unreasoning sanguineness.
"The fog's clearin'," he says. "You'll see, it'll be quite bright in half-an-hour. Nothin' near so bad as it was, now. Just you look at that window."
The window in question, when looked at, was not encouraging. So far as could be seen at all through the turgid atmosphere of the room, it was a parallelogram of solid opacity crossed by a window-frame, with a hopeless tinge of Roman ochre. But Old Jack was working up to a fiction to serve a purpose. By the time he had succeeded in believing the fog was lifting he would be absolved from his promise not to go out in it. It was a trial of strength between credulity and the actual. The General looked at the window and asked a bystander what he thought, sir? Who felt bound to testify that he thought the prospect hopeless.
"You're allowin' nothin' for the time of day," said Major Roper, and his motive was transparent. Sure enough, after the General's friend had come for him, an hour late, the Major took advantage of the doubt whether absolute darkness was caused by fog or mere night, and in spite of all remonstrances, began pulling on his overcoat to go out. He even had the effrontery to appeal to the hall-porter to confirm his views about the state of things out of doors. Mr. Mulberry added his dissuasions with all the impressiveness of his official uniform and the cubic area of its contents. But even his powerful influence carried no weight in this case. It was useless to argue with the infatuated old boy, who was evidently very uneasy about Major Lund, and suspected also that Miss Nightingale had not reported fair, in order to prevent him coming. He made himself into a perfect bolster with wraps, and put on a respirator. This damned thing, however, he took off again, as it impeded respiration, and then went out into the all but solid fog, gasping and choking frightfully, to feel his wayto Hill Street and satisfy himself the best thing was being done to his old friend's bronchitis.
"They'll kill him with their dam nostrums," said he to the last member of the Club he spoke to, a chance ex-Secretary of State for India, whom he took into his confidence on the doorstep. "A little common-sense, sir—that's what's wanted in these cases. It's all very fine, sir, when the patient's young and can stand it...." His cough interrupted him, but he was understood to express that medical attendance was fraught with danger to persons of advanced years, and that in such cases his advice should be taken in preference to that of the profession. He recovered enough to tell Mulberry's subordinate to stop blowin' that dam whistle. There were cabs enough and to spare, he said, but they were affecting non-existence from malicious motives, and as a stepping-stone to ultimate rapacity. Then he vanished in the darkness, and was heard coughing till he turned a corner.
HOW MAJOR ROPER MET THAT BOY, AND GOT UPSTAIRS AT BALL STREET. AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN ASTHMA AND BRONCHITIS. HOW SALLY PINIONED THE PURPLE VETERAN, AND THERE WAS NO BOY. HOW THE GOVERNOR DONE HOARCKIN', AND GOT QUALIFIED FOR A SUBJECT OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
Old Jack's powers of self-delusion were great indeed if, when he started on his short journey, he really believed the fog had mended. At least, it was so dense that he might never have found his way without assistance. This he met with in the shape of a boy with a link, whom Sally at once identified from his description, given when the Major had succeeded in getting up the stairs and was resting in the sitting-room near the old sabre on the wall, wiping his eyes after his effort. Colonel Lund was half-unconscious after a bad attack, and it was best not to disturb him. Fenwick had not returned, and no one was very easy about him. But every one affirmed the reverse, and joined in a sort of Creed to the effect that the fog was clearing. It wasn't and didn't mean to for some time. But the unanimity of the creed fortified the congregation, as in other cases. No two believers doubted it at once, just as no two Alpine climbers, strung together on the moraine of a glacier, lose their foothold at the same time.
"I know that boy," said Sally. "His nose twists, and gives him a presumptuous expression, and he has a front tooth out and puts his tongue through. Also his trousers are tied on with strings."
"Everlastin' young beggar, if ever there was one," says the old soldier, in a lucid interval when speech is articulate. But he is allowing colloquialism to run riot over meaning. No everlasting person can ever have become part of the past if you think of it. He goes on to say that the boy has had twopence and is to come back for fourpence in an hour, or threepence if you can seethe gas-lamps, because then a link will be superfluous. Sally recognises the boy more than ever.
"I wonder," she says, "if he's waiting outside. Because the party of the house might allow him inside. Do you think I could ask, mother?"
"You mighttry, kitten," is the reply, not given sanguinely. And Sally goes off, benevolent. "Even when your trousers are tied up with string, a fog's a fog," says she to herself.
"I knoo our friend Lund first of all...." Thus the Major, nodding towards the bedroom door.... "Why, God bless my soul, ma'am, I knew Lund first of all, forty-six years ago in Delhi. Forty—six—years! And all that time, if you believe me, he's been the same obstinate moole. Never takin' a precaution about anythin', nor listening to a word of advice!" This is about as far as he can go without a choke. Rosalind goes into the next room to get a tumbler of water. The nurse, who is sitting by the fire, nods towards the bed, and Rosalind goes close to it to hear. "What is it, dear?" She speaks to the invalid as to a little child.
"Isn't that Old Jack choking? I know his choke. What does he come out for in weather like this? What does he mean? Send him back.... No, send him in here." The nurse puts in a headshake as protest. But for all that, Sally finds, when she returns, that the two veterans are contending together against their two enemies, bronchitis and asthma, with the Intelligence Department sadly interrupted, and the enemy in possession of all the advantageous points.
"He oughtn't to try to talk," says Rosalind. "But he will." She and Sally and the nurse sit on in the fog-bound front room. The gas-lights have no heart in them, and each wears a nimbus. Rosalind wishes Gerry would return, aloud. Sally is buoyant about him;he'sall right, trusthim! What about the everlasting young beggar?
"I persuaded Mrs. Kindred," says Sally. "And we looked outside for him, and he'd gone."
"Fancy a woman being named Kindred!"
"When people are so genteel one can believe anything! But what do you think the boy's name is?... Chancellorship! Isn't that queer? She knows him—says he's always about in theneighbourhood. He sleeps in the mews behind Great Toff House."
Her mother isn't listening. She rises for a moment to hear what she may of how the talk in the next room goes on; and then, coming back, says again she wishes Gerry was safe indoors, and Sally again says, "Oh,he'sall right!" The confidence these two have in one another makes them a couple apart—a sort of league.
What Mrs. Fenwick heard a scrap of in the next room would have been, but for the alarums and excursions of the two enemies aforementioned, a consecutive conversation as follows:
"You're gettin' round, Colonel?"
"A deal better, Major. I want to speak toyou."
"Fire away, old Cockywax! You remember Hopkins?—Cartwright Hopkins—man with a squint—at Mooltan—expression of his, 'Old Cockywax.'"
"I remember him. Died of typhoid at Burrampore. Now you listen to me, old chap, and don't talk—you only make yourself cough."
"It's only the dam fog.I'mall right."
"Well, shut up. That child in the next room—it's her I want to talk about. You're the only man, as far as I know, that knows the story. She doesn't. She's not to be told."
"Mum's the word, sir. Always say nothin', that's my motto. Penderfield's daughter at Khopal—at least, he was her father. One dam father's as good as another, as long as he goes to the devil." This may be a kind of disclaimer of inheritance as a factor to be reckoned with, an obscure suggestion that human parentage is without influence on character. It is not well expressed.
"Listen to me, Roper. You know the story. That's the only man I can't say God forgive him to. God forgiveme, but I can't."
"Devil take me if I can!... Yes, it's all right. They're all in the next room...."
"But the woman was worse. She's living, you know...."
"I know—shinin' light—purifying society—that's her game! I'd purifyher, if I had my way."
"Come a bit nearer—my voice goes. I've thought it all out. If the girl, who supposes herself to be the daughter of her mother'shusband, tries to run you into a corner—you understand?"
"I understand."
"Well, don't you undeceive her. Her mother has never told heranything. She doesn't suppose she had any hand in the divorce. She thinks his name was Graythorpe, and doesn't know he wasn't her father. Don't you undeceive her—promise."
But the speaker is so near the end of his tether that the Major has barely time to say, "Honour bright, Colonel," when the bronchial storm bursts. It may be that the last new anodyne, which is warranted to have all the virtues and none of the ill-effects of opium, had also come to the end ofitstether. Mrs. Fenwick came quickly in, saying he had talked too much; and Sally, following her, got Major Roper away, leaving the patient to her mother and the nurse. The latter knew what it would be with all this talking—now the temperature would go up, and he would have a bad night, and what would Dr. Mildmay say?
Till the storm had subsided and a new dose of the sedative had been given, Sally and Old Jack stood waiting in sympathetic pain—you know what it is when you can do nothing. The latter derived some insignificant comfort from suggestions through his own choking that all this was due to neglect of his advice. When only moans and heavy breathing were left, Sally went back into the bedroom. Her mother was nursing the poor old racked head on her bosom, with the sword-hand of the days gone by in her own. She said without speaking that he would sleep presently, and the fewer in the room the better, and Sally left them so, and went back.
Yes, the Major would take some toddy before he started for home. And it was all ready, lemons and all, in the black polished wood cellaret, with eagles' claws for feet. Sally got the ingredients out and began to make it. But first she gently closed the door between the rooms, to keep the sound of their voices in.
"You really did see my father, though, Major?" There seemed to be a good deal of consideration before the answer came, not all to be accounted for by asthma.
"Yes—certainly—oh yes. I saw Mr. Graythorpe once or twice. Another spoonful—that's plenty." A pause.
"Now, don't spill it. Take care, it's very hot. That's right." Another pause. "Major Roper...."
"Yes, my dear. What?"
"Dotell me what he was like."
"Have you never seen his portrait?"
"Mother burnt it while I was small. She told me. Do tell me what you recollect him like."
"Fine handsome feller—well set up. Fine shot, too! Gad! that was a neat thing! A bullet through a tiger two hundred yards off just behind the ear."
"But I thoughthisname was Harrisson." The Major has got out of his depth entirely through his own rashness. Why couldn't he leave that tiger alone? Now he has to get into safe water again.
A good long choke is almost welcome at this moment. While it goes on he can herald, by a chronic movement of a raised finger, his readiness to explain all as soon as it stops. He catches at his first articulation, so that not a moment may be lost. There weretwotigers—that's the explanation. Harrisson shot one, and Graythorpe the other. The cross-examiner is dissatisfied.
"Which was the one that shot the tiger two hundred yards off, just behind the ear?"
The old gentleman responds with a spirited decision: "Your father, my dear, your father. That tiger round at my rooms—show it you if you like—that skin was given me by a feller named Harrisson, in the Commissariat—quite another sort of Johnny. He was down with the Central Indian Horse—quite another place!" He dwells on the inferiority of this shot, the smallness of the skin, the close contiguity of its owner. A very inferior affair!
But, being desperately afraid of blundering again, he makes the fact he admits, that he had confoozed between the two cases, a reason for a close analysis of the merits of each. This has no interest for Sally, who, indeed, had only regarded the conversation, so far, as a stepping-stone she now wanted to leap to the mainland from. After all, here she is face-to-face with a man who actually knows the story of the separation, and can talk of it without pain. Why should she not get something from him, however little? You see, the idea of a something that couldnot be told was necessarily foreign to a mind some somethings could not be told to. But she felt it would be difficult to account to Major Roper for her own position. The fact that she knew nothing proved that her mother and Colonel Lund had been anxious she should know nothing. She could not refer to an outsider over their heads. Still, she hoped, as Major Roper was deemed on all hands an arrant old gossip, that he might accidentally say something to enlighten her. She prolonged the conversation in this hope.
"Was that before I was born?"
"The tiger-shootin'? Well, reely, my dear, I shouldn't like to say. It's twenty years ago, you see. No, I couldn't say—couldn't say when it was." He is beginning to pack himself in a long woollen scarf an overcoat with fur facings will shortly cover in, and is, in fact, preparing to evacuate a position he finds untenable. "I must be thinkin' of gettin' home," he says. Sally tries for a word more.
"Was it before he and mother fell out?" It is on the Major's lips to say, "Before the proceedings?" but he changes the expression.
"Before the split? Well, no; I should say after the split. Yes—probably after the split." But an unfortunate garrulity prompts him to say more. "After the split, I should say, and before the——"—and then he feels he is in a quagmire, and flounders to the nearest land—"before your father went away to Australia." Then he discerns his own feebleness, recognising the platitude of this last remark. For nobody could shoot tigers in an Indian jungle after he had gone off to Australia. Clearly the sooner he gets away the better.
A timely choking-fit interposes to preserve its victim from further questioning. The patient in the next room is asleep or torpid, so he omits farewells. Sally's mother comes out to say good-night, and Sally goes down the staircase with him and his asthma, feeling that it is horrible and barbarous to turn him out alone in the dense blackness. Perhaps, however, the peculiar boy with the strange name will be there. That would be better than nothing. Sally feels there is something indomitable about that boy, and that fog nourishes and stimulates it.
But, alas!—there is no boy. And yet it certainly would be fourpenceif he came back. For, though it may be possible to see the street gas-lamps without getting inside the glass, you can't see them from the pavement. Nevertheless, the faith that "it" is clearing having been once founded, lives on itself in the face of evidence, even as other faiths have done before now. So the creed is briefly recited, and the Major disappears with the word good-night still on his lips, and his cough, gasp, or choke dies away in the fog as he vanishes.
Somebody is whistling "Arr-hyd-y-nos" as he comes from the other side in the darkness—somebody who walks with a swinging step and a resonant foot-beat, some one who cares nothing for fogs. Fenwick's voice is defiant of it, exhilarated and exhilarating, as he ceases to be a cloud and assumes an outline. Sally gives a kiss to frozen hair that crackles.
"What's the kitten after, out in the cold? How's the Major?"
"Which?OurMajor? He's a bit better, and the temperature's lower." Sally believed this; a little thermometer thing was being wielded as an implement of optimism, and had lent itself to delusions.
"Oh, how scrunchy you are, your hands are all ice! Mamma's been getting in a stew aboutyou, squire." On which Fenwick, with the slightest of whistles, passes Sally quickly and goes four steps at a time up the stairs, still illuminated by Sally's gas-waste. For she had left the lights at full cock all the way up.
"My dearest, you never got my telegram?" This is to Rosalind, who has come out on the landing to meet him. But the failure of the telegram—lost in the fog, no doubt—is a small matter. What shelves it is the patient grief on the tired, handsome face Fenwick finds tears on as he kisses it. Sally has the optimism all to herself now. Her mother knows that her old friend and protector will not be here long—that, of course, has been true some time. But there's the suffering, present and to come.
"We needn't stop the chick hoping a little still if she likes." She says it in a whisper. Sally is on the landing below; she hears the whispering, and half guesses its meaning. Then she suppresses the last gas-tap, and follows on into the front room, where the three sit talking in undertones for perhaps an hour.
Yes, that monotonous sound is the breathing of the patient in the next room, under the new narcotic which has none of the bad effects of opium. The nurse is there watching him, and wondering whether it will be a week, or twenty-four hours. She derives an impression from something that the fog really is clearing at last, and goes to the window to see. She is right, for at a window opposite are dimly visible, from the candles on either side of the mirror, two white arms that are "doing" the hair of a girl whose stays are much too tight. She is dressing for late dinner or an early party. Then the nurse, listening, understands that the traffic has been roused from its long lethargy. "I thought I heard the wheels," she says to herself. Then Sally also becomes aware of the sound in the traffic, and goes toherwindow in the front room.
"You see I'm right," she says. "The people are letting their fires out, and the fog's giving. Now I'm going to take you home, Jeremiah." For the understanding is that these two shall return to Krakatoa Villa, leaving Rosalind to watch with the nurse. She will get a chop in half an hour's time. She can sleep on the sofa in the front room if she feels inclined. All which is duty carried out or arranged for.
After her supper Rosalind sat on by herself before the fire in the front room. She did not want to be unsociable with the nurse; but she wanted to think, alone. A weight was on her mind; the thought that the dear old friend, who had been her father and refuge, should never know that she again possessed her recovered husband on terms almost as good as if that deadly passage in her early life had never blasted the happiness of both. He would die, and it would have made him so happy to know it. Was she right in keeping it back now? Had she ever been right?
But if she told him now, the shock of the news might hasten his collapse. Sudden news need not be bad to cause sudden death. And, maybe the story would be too strange for him to grasp. Better be silent. But oh! if he might have shared her happiness!
Drowsiness was upon her before she knew it. Better perhaps sleep a little now, while he was sleeping. She looked in at him, and spoke to the nurse. He lay there like a lifeless waxwork—blown through, like an apparatus out of order, to simulate breath,and doing it badly. How could he sleep when now and then it jerked him so? He could, and she left him and lay down, and went suddenly to sleep. After a time that was a journey through a desert, without landmarks, she was as suddenly waked.
"What?... I thought you spoke...." And so some one had spoken, but not to her. She started up, and went to where the nurse was conversing through the open window with an inarticulate person in the street below, behind the thick window-curtain she had kept overlapped, to check the freezing air.
"What is it?"
"It's a boy. I can't make out what he says."
"Let me come!" But Rosalind gets no nearer his meaning. She ends up with, "I'll come down," and goes. The nurse closes the window and goes back to the bedroom.
The street door opens easily, the Chubb lock being the only fastening. The moment Rosalind sees the boy near she recognises him. There is no doubt about the presumptuous expression, or the cause of it. Also the ostentatious absence of the front tooth, clearly accounting for inaudibility at a distance.
"What do you want?" asks Rosalind.
"Nothin' at all for myself. I come gratis, I did. There's a many wouldn't." He is not too audible, even now; but he would be better if he did not suck the cross-rail of the area paling.
"Why did you come?"
"To bring you the nooze. The old bloke's a friend of yours, missis. Or p'r'aps he ain't! I can mizzle, you know, and no harm done."
"Oh no, don't mizzle on any account. Tell me about the old bloke. Do you mean Major Roper?"
"Supposin' I do, why shouldn't I?" This singular boy seems to have no way of communicating with his species except through defiances and refutations. Rosalind accepts his question as an ordinary assent, and does not make the mistake of entering into argument.
"Is he ill?" The boy nods. "Is he worse?" Another nod. "Has he gone home to his club?" The boy evidently has a revelation to make, but would consider it undignified to make it except as a denial of something to the contrary. He sees his way after a brief reflection.
"He ain't gone. He's been took."
"He's been taken? How has he been taken?"
"On a perambulance. Goin' easy! But he didn't say nothin'. Not harf a word!"
"Had he fainted?" But this boy has another characteristic—when he cannot understand he will not admit it. He keeps silence, and goes on absorbing the railing. Rosalind asks further: "Was he dead?"
"It'd take a lawyer to tell that, missis."
"I can't stand here in the cold, my boy. Come in, and come up and tell us." So he comes up, and Rosalind speaks to the nurse in the other room, who comes; and then they turn seriously to getting the boy's story.
He is all the easier for examination from the fact that he is impressed, if not awed, by his surroundings. All the bounce is knocked out of him, now that his foot is no longer on his native heath, the street. Witness that the subject of his narrative, who would certainly have been the old bloke where there was a paling to suck, has become a simple pronoun, and no more!
"I see him afore, missis," he says. "That time wot I lighted him round for twopence. And he says to come again in three-quarters of an hour. And I says yes, I says. And he says not to be late. Nor yet I shouldn't, only the water run so slow off the main, and I was kep.... Yes, missis—a drorin' of it off in their own pails at the balkny house by the mooze, where the supply is froze...."
"I see, you got a job to carry up pails of water from that thing that sticks up in the road?"
"Yes, missis; by means of the turncock. Sim'lar I got wet. But I didn't go to be late. It warn't much, in the manner of speakin'. I was on his 'eels, clost."
"You caught him?"
"Heard him hoarckin' in the fog, and I says to my mate—boy by the name of 'Ucklebridge, only chiefly called Slimy, to distinguish him—I says—I says that was my guv'nor, safe and square, by the token of the sound of it. And then I catches him up in the fog, follerin' by the sound. My word, missis, hewasbad! Wanted to holler me over the coals, he did, for behind mytime. I could hear him wantin' to do it. But he couldn't come by the breath."
Poor Old Jack! The two women look at each other, and then say to the boy: "Go on."
"Holdin' by the palins, he was, and goin' slow. Then he choked it off like, and got a chanst for a word, and he says: 'Now, you young see-saw'—that's what he said, missis, 'see-saw'—'just you stir your stumps and cut along to the clubbus: and tell that dam red-faced fool Mulberry to look sharp and send one of the young fellers to lend an arm, and not to come hisself.' And then he got out a little flat bottle of something short, and went for a nip; but the cough took him, and it sprouted over his wropper and was wasted."
The women look at each other again. The nurse sees well into the story, and says quickly under her breath to Rosalind: "He'd been told what to do if he felt it coming. A drop of brandy might have made the difference." The boy goes on as soon as he is waited for.
"Mr. Mulberry he comes runnin' hisself, and a couple more on 'em! And then they all calls me a young varmint by reason of the guv'nor having got lost. But a gentleman what comes up, he says all go opposite ways, he says, and you'll hear him in the fog. So I runs up a parsage, and in the middle of the parsage I tumbles over the guv'nor lyin' acrost the parsage. Then I hollers, and then they come."
"Oh dear!" says Rosalind; for this boy had that terrible power of vivid description which flinches at no realism—seemsto enjoy the horror of it; does not really. Probably it was only his intense anxiety to communicateall, struggling with his sense of his lack of language—a privilege enjoyed by guv'nors. But Rosalind feels the earnestness of his brief epic. He winds it up:
"But the guv'nor, he'd done hoarckin'. Nor he never spoke. The gentleman I told you, he says leave him lyin' a minute, he says, and he runs. Then back he comes with the apoarthecary—him with the red light—and they rips the guv'nor's sleeves up, spilin' his coat. And they prokes into his arm with a packin'-needle. Much use it done! And then they says, it warn't the fog, and I called 'em a liar. 'Cos it's a clearin' off, they says. It warn't, not much. I see the perambulance come, and they shovedhim in, and I hooked it off, and heard 'em saying where's that young shaver, they says; he'll be wanted for his testament. So I hooked it off."
"And where did you go?"
"To a wisit on a friend, I did. Me and Slimy—him I mentioned afore. And he says, he says, to come on here—on'y later. So then I come on here."
Rosalind finds herself, in the face of what she feels must mean Old Jack's sudden death, thinking how sorry she is she can command no pair of trousers of a reasonable size to replace this boy's drenched ones—a pair that would need no string. A crude brew of hot toddy, and most of the cake that had appealed to Major Roper in vain, and never gone back to the cellaret, were the only consolations possible. They seemed welcome, but under protest.
"Shan't I carry of 'em outside, missis?"
"On the stairs, then." This assent is really because both women believe he will be comfortabler there than in the room. "Where are you going to sleep?" Rosalind asks, as he takes the cake and tumbler away to the stairs. She puts a gas-jet on half-cock.
"Twopenny doss in Spur Street, off of 'Orseferry Road, Westminster." This identification is to help Rosalind, as she may not be able to spot this particular doss-house among all she knows.
"Do you always sleep there?"
"No, missis! Weather permitting, in our mooze—on the 'eap. The 'orse-keeper gives a sack in return for a bit of cleanin', early, before comin' away."
"What are you?" says Rosalind. She is thinking aloud more than asking a question. But the boy answers:
"I'm a wife, I am. Never learned no tride, ye see!... Oh yes; I've been to school—board-school scollard. But they don't learn you no tride. You parses your standards and chucks 'em." This incredible boy, who deliberately called himself a waif (that was his meaning), was it possible that he had passed through a board-school? Well, perhaps he was the highest type of competitive examinee, who can learn everything and forget everything.
"But you have a father?"
"I could show him you. But he don't hold with teachin' his sons trides, by reason of their gettin' some of his wiges. He's in the sanitary engineering himself, but he don't do no work." Rosalind looks puzzled. "That's his tride—sanitary engineering, lavatries, plumbin', and fittin'. Been out of work better than three years. He can jint you off puppies' tails, though, at a shillin'. But he don't only get a light job now and again, 'cos the tride ain't wot it was. They've been shearin' of 'em off of late years. Thank you, missis." The refreshments have vanished as by magic, and Rosalind gives the boy the rest of the cake and a coin, and he goes away presumably to the doss-house he smells so strong of, having been warmed, that a flavour of the heap in the mews would have been welcome in exchange. So Rosalind thinks as she opens the window a moment and looks out. She can quite see the houses opposite. The fog has cleared till the morning.
Perhaps it is the relenting of the atmospheric conditions, or perhaps it is the oxygen that the patient has been inhaling off and on, that has slightly revived him. Or perhaps it is the champagne that comes up through a tap in the cork, and reminds Rosalind's ill-slept brain of something heard very lately—what on earth exactly was it? Oh, she knows! Of course, the thing in the street the sanitary engineer's son drew the pails of water at for the house with the balcony. It is pleasanter to know; might have fidgeted her if she had not found out. But she is badly in want of sleep, that's the truth!
"I thought Major Roper was gone, Rosey." He can talk through his heavy breathing. It must be the purer air.
"So he is, dear. He went two hours ago." She sits by him, taking his hand as before. The nurse is, by arrangement, to take her spell of sleep now.
"I suppose it's my head. I thought he was here just now—just this minute."
"No, dear; you've mixed him up with Gerry, when he came in to say good-night. Major Roper went away first. It wasn't seven o'clock." But there is something excited and puzzled in the patient's voice as he answers—something that makes her feel creepy.
"Are yousure? I mean, when he came back into the room with his coat on."
"You are dreaming, dear! He never came back. He went straight away."
"Dreaming! Not a bit of it. You weren't here." He is so positive that Rosalind thinks best to humour him.
"I suppose I was speaking to Mrs. Kindred. What did he come back to say, dear?"
"Oh, nothing! At least, I had told him not to chatter to Sallykin about the old story, and he came back, I suppose, to say he wouldn't." He seemed to think the incident, as an incident, closed; but presently goes on talking about things that arise from it.
"Old Jack's the only one of them all that knew anything about it—that Sallykin is likely to come across. Pellew knew, of course; but he's not an old chatterbox like Roper."
Ought not Rosalind to tell the news that has just reached her? She asks herself the question, and answers it: "Not till he rallies, certainly. If he does not rally, why then——!" Why then he either will know or won't want to.
She has far less desire to tell him this than she has to talk of the identity of her husband. She would almost be glad, as he is to die—her old friend—that she should have some certainty beforehand of the exact time of his death, so that she might, only for an hour, have a companion in her secrecy. If only he and she might have borne the burden of it together! She reproached herself, now that it was too late, with her mistrust of his powers of retaining a secret. See how keenly alive he was to the need of keeping Sally's parentage in the dark! Andthatwas what the whole thing turned on. Gerry's continued ignorance might be desirable, but was a mere flea-bite by comparison. In her strained, sleepless, overwrought state the wish that "the Major" should know of her happiness while they could still speak of it together grew from a passing thought of how nice it might have been, that could not be, to a dumb dominant longing that it should be. Still, after all, the only fear was that he should talk to Gerry; and how easy to keep Gerry out of the room! And suppose he did talk! Would Gerry believe him? There was risky ground there, though.