CHAPTER IV.
Doctor Sewell’s report, the next morning, was not entirely satisfactory.
It was true that Wally was quite conscious, and had eaten a good breakfast, but he cried when he was moved, and did not seem to wish to get up, which was so far fortunate, because the medical man strictly forbade his doing so. But it made Hannah very uneasy, since it plainly denoted that he had sustained more injury than was outwardly apparent.
She did not see her husband all the day, during which he kept strictly to his own room, and she was glad of it, for she felt that she could not have spoken to him as she ought. She was already ashamed of her outburst of the day before, but did not feel as if she could speak much differently even now. For, as she sat by Wally’s side, tryingto soothe his fretfulness under pain, her thoughts would revert to sweet, beautiful Jenny, struck down through the same hand. Was this really a judgment on her husband for his unconfessed crime? Washischild to be taken from him, in the same way and by the same hand that had made other parents, as loving as himself, childless? But it was hard on her—very, very hard, that she should suffer, through her little son, for his father’s sins. Hannah sat by the baby’s side, thinking these sad thoughts throughout the day, and when night fell, and Wally was asleep, she wrestled with Heaven in prayer that the cup might pass away from her. Yet she knew, even while she prayed, that it is part of the world’s plan that the innocent shall suffer for the guilty, and often more than they suffer themselves.
When the household was once more sunk in sleep, Hannah bethought her of her husband, of whom she had heard nothing since the previous night. What was he doing? Whom had he spoken to?What had he had to eat? She felt she must ascertain these points before she went to rest herself, for the doctor had told her, since the boy was out of immediate danger, it must be days, perhaps weeks, before he could finally pronounce on the ultimate effects of the accident, and therefore it behoved her not to try her strength more than was absolutely needful. With the purpose of seeing her husband, she tried the door between them, but found it was still locked on his side, therefore she went round to that which opened into the passage, which he had left unfastened, and went softly in. The sight which met her eyes was a pitiable one. Henry Hindes was on his knees beside the bed, moaning in the agony of his spirit. Yet, such is the force of a mother’s love, that the expression of his pain did not move her as it had done that evening in the library. For since then had he not injuredherchild, which had awakened a twofold repulsion in her breast against him; one for herself and the other for Mrs Crampton. Hannah had neverrealised till now whatheragony of loss had been. As she approached him, Hindes lifted his bloodshot eyes and muttered,—
‘Say it at once, for God’s sake! Is he gone?’
‘Wally? No!’
‘Thank Heaven!’
‘Don’t be too quick to do that, Henry. He is in pain. There is no knowing what injuries he may not have sustained. Dr Sewell will give no opinion. He says time only can show; pray that God may have mercy upon us, and not visit your sins on the head of your unoffending child.’
Hindes groaned.
‘What would the worst be—the worst that could happen to him?’
‘Spinal disease. A cripple for life, or a lingering death,’ replied Hannah, sternly.
She could not find it in her heart to lighten the blow to the author of it.
‘A cripple for life—a lingering death—my Wally, my darling Wally!’ sobbed the father. ‘Oh, Hannah, my punishment is heavier than I can bear.’
‘You willhave tobear it, if God wills; so shall I—as the Cramptons had to bear—’
‘No, no, Hannah, for Heaven’s sake, no!’ screamed Henry Hindes, as he cowered beside the bedclothes. ‘I have seen his face—Mr Crampton’s face—before me ever since, saying, “Nowyou will know!Nowyou will know!” I drugged myself with morphia last night, but it was no good. He was there all the time—all the time.’
‘This is your fancy, Henry. I have told you so before. It is your own thoughts that take bodily shape to haunt you. But this sad accident calls loudly for reparation and repentance. Confess your sins to God, Henry. Ask Him to forgive them—tell Him everything—your unhallowed wishes and desires, your hasty temper and revenge, your disregard of advice and entreaty. He knows all your weakness, and will have compassion on it, and, perhaps, for the sake of your penitence and desire of amendment, Hemay mercifully spare our little one, and avert the possible consequences of your muddled senses.’
‘Iwillpray, Iwillrepent,’ moaned the unhappy man, with his face still hidden, ‘and I will confess, Hannah, everything—everything—if God will only hear and forgive me.’
‘He is sure to do that,’ said Hannah, more kindly; ‘though it is impossible to say in what way He may answer your prayers. But we will both pray, Henry, will we not, that this miserable affair may leave no bad effects behind it? And, should our prayers be granted, you will promise me to give up taking morphia, for the future, and keep your brain clear for the duties of everyday life. This would never have happened, remember, except that you were too stupefied, to see the child’s danger, or that you were in his way.’
‘I know, I know,’ he answered, ‘but he is better to-night, is he not?’
‘There is no knowing—Doctor Sewellsays it is impossible to say,’ she said, as she turned and left him to his own reflections.
Many more days passed in this miserable uncertainty. Doctor Sewell brought two more doctors with him, to make a thorough examination of the little child, but, though they all agreed that the spine had been injured, they could not decide to what extent. All they could say was, that Wally must be kept on his back till the real extent of the mischief was ascertained. It might be months, even years, before the matter was finally decided; meanwhile, he must be kept perfectly still while indoors, and only taken out in the air, lying flat on his back, in a wheeled chair. It was a pleasant prospect to have to keep a sturdy child of Wally’s age amused from morn to night, whilst in a recumbent position; but it was the only chance for him, so it must be done. The poor mother sat down patiently to await the verdict, but Henry Hindes raved like a madman at the doctors’ orders, anddeclared he should shoot himself before the best or worst was made known to him. Hannah insisted that he should return to his duties, and leave her to the melancholy charge of looking after the child.
‘You are worse than useless here, Henry. In fact, your presence and loud lamentations over him disturb Wally, and make him fretful and restless. Besides, you have your own duties to attend to, and must neglect them no longer. If you are sincere in your sorrow over this accident, prove it by doing your duty like a man, and attending the office as usual.’
For Henry Hindes had shut himself up since the night he had thrown his child down the stairs, and refused to meet anybody, on business or otherwise. Mr Abercorn, the chief clerk, and Mr Bloxam, the cashier, had been up to Hampstead together to inquire the reason of their employer’s non-appearance in the city, and Mrs Hindes had been obliged to tell them that her husband was confined to his room and quite unfit to see them, or attend tobusiness for the present. She was obliged to invent this fiction, for the reason that, for some days, Hindes was imbibing opium to such an extent, and raving of what distressed his conscience so freely, that she felt, at all hazards, she must keep everybody from him but herself.
Captain Hindes and his wife came over, as soon as they heard of poor Hannah’s fresh trouble, and would have done anything in their power to help her, but it was a case where the assistance of one’s fellow-creatures could avail nothing, and the only thing was to wait and hope. Arthur did not see his brother on the occasion, for Henry had shut himself up in his own room, as usual, and refused to open the door. He had come chiefly to tell Hannah that they had found a little cottage to suit them in the Isle of Wight, and intended moving into it at once. She was not sorry to hear their news. She longed to get them, and everybody connected with her husband, out of the way, so that she might have him to herself, and shield him from all prying eyesand ears. During his short period of seclusion, she had carried all his meals to his room with her own hands, and coaxed him to eat them by every means in her power. And, now that the first shock was over, she ordered him to return to his official duties as she would have ordered a boy to return to school. He had reduced himself to such a state that he was no longer capable of regulating his actions. His reappearance in the office was so far beneficial that a business never proceeds so well and regularly as when the head of it is absent; but Hindes had almost rendered himself incapable, by this time, of taking any active part in the management of affairs, which he left entirely to his two chief men, Abercorn and Bloxam, whilst he sat brooding in his private room, or wandered restlessly about the streets, waiting for the doctors’ verdict respecting Wally, and wondering how much longer they would keep him in suspense. He consulted the best known physicians about the child, and brought the cleverest surgeons to see him,but the answer of each one was the same, ‘Wait, wait! This is a case for time. No one can foretell the upshot of such a fall until the child has, in a measure, done growing.’
Done growing!And Wally was not yet three years old. Henry Hindes would groan within himself, and say that it was impossible. He could not be kept so long in suspense. He must know at once. He almost felt sometimes as if he would rather his boy had been killed outright, than condemned to such a lingering illness as this promised to be. He could not bear it! He could not! He could not!
During those days of mortification and miserable impatience, how more than vividly Jenny Crampton’s fair image returned to his memory to torture him. His wife had advised him to confess all his unhallowed desires and wishes regarding her, but even Hannah knew little of what he had hoped, in his maddest moments, regarding Jenny. She had been a flirt—no doubt of that, though her errant heart had beencaught fast at last by Frederick Walcheren. But before those days, when Henry Hindes had had no reason to affront her by the expression of his jealousy, she had not disdained to flirt a little with him on her own account.
She had meant her expressions of regard for him as nothing but a flash of coquetry; but he, with his secret passion for the beautiful girl, and the mad dreams he sometimes indulged in concerning her, had chosen to translate her kindness in a far warmer manner than she intended he should. And these tender moments, which were seared upon his memory, came back with irritating persistency to him now that they were over for ever—that even the remembrance of them had been dispelled by the terrible knowledge that his hand had quenched them for ever!
One day that he had brought her a little souvenir for her birthday—merely anétuiof velvet, filled with scissors and thimble, and the rest of the rubbish provided for the work of ladies whodon’twork, mounted in gold, and encrusted with turquoises—Jenny had kissed him—had advanced her ripe, pouting lips of her own accord, and pressed them upon his. He could recall to this day how the piece of coquetry affected him. She had guessed, well enough, her power over this apparently staid, sensible man of business, and liked to show it. She had smiled on him the while in her saucy way and made his head swim. It was this circumstance, and one or two others like it, that had caused Jenny to turn against him and say hard things about him directly she had gained a lover whose heart she wished to keep. It was the remembrance of such things that had made her fear the expression of his jealousy, and declare he took an unwarrantable interest in her affairs.
Yet, the feeling her kiss had raised in his breast haunted the wretched man long after he had caused her death. Sometimes the one memory pained him more than the other. He would wonder,if he had been bold enough to speak openly to Jenny of his feelings regarding her, whether she would have listened to his story and requited his affection, just a little, in return. She would dance before him, like an airy phantom, all through the dull, old streets of the city, beckoning him, with her dimpled little hand, to come nearer and nearer, and taste her lips once more! And then, when he had worked his imagination up to a pitch of frenzy, the scene would change, and he would see, instead, Jenny lying still and white in her shroud, with the purple marks of foul decomposition upon her cheeks and brow. Yet, dead as she appeared, her wraith would still have the power to unclose its lustreless eyes and livid lips to say, ‘Theseare the lips with which I kissed you, andyouit was who rendered them like this, unfit for anyone but the worms to touch again.’
He would see her in the sunshine, and in the gloaming—in the crowded streets and by the deserted river-side—in theMart and in his private office—till he nearly went mad with the longing to stamp her out from his brain, or to plunge himself into the silent river and follow her wherever she might be.
Much as she had haunted and pursued him since that fatal moment when he pushed her over the Dover cliff, never had he seen her as he had done since Wally’s accident! She seemed to come now with a mocking smile upon her lips—a smile which said, ‘Idid it!Imade him fall!Idid for you what you did for me! Who was it made you drink morphia until you had paralysed your brain?I!Who was it drove you wild as you stumbled up these stairs? The remembrance ofme! You killed me, and I have subjected your boy to a living death—a death far worse than mine—a death which will numb his nerves and his brain, and keep him a prisoner for life, tied to a sofa, inert in mind and muscle. Wally’s accident was due to me!Youmade my parents childless. I have robbed you of your son and heir.’
He suffered extra torture from the daily inquiries which met him as he entered the office. Of course, every clerk there had heard the story of his child’s fall, and was anxious to learn what the effects might be. The constant question of, ‘How is the little boy to-day, sir? I trust he is better;’ or, ‘Have the doctors given any decided opinion about Master Wally, sir? Is he any worse this morning?’ drove the unfortunate father nearly out of his senses, and often caused him to swear, in a most unfatherly manner, in return for the kindly inquiries made on the child’s behalf.
He could not banish the thought, even for a moment. His brother had migrated to the Isle of Wight, and he never saw his wife, except by Wally’s bedside. The boy, too, who had been so strong and sturdy was fast being reduced, under the effect of inertion and confinement, to a thin and sickly-looking child. His hands, that used to be so chubby, had grown white and limp; his abundant hair had been cropped to make him more comfortable, and histemper was fractious and irritable. In fact, he was no longer the little Wally of whom he had been so proud. He was almost as much changed, for the worse, as Henry Hindes himself. Sometimes, as his father sighed the long days away, Hannah’s admonition would recur to his mind: ‘Confess your sins to God, Henry! Tell Him everything! He knows your weakness and will have compassion on it!’
But where should he confess? To whom could he pour out the tale of his sins and his follies? He could not trust a private person, and the parsons of the Protestant church, though they professed to hear the confessions of the dying, who were passing into the very Presence of the great Father-Confessor of us all, and had no need of any more ministrations of man, would not hear a word from the living and the strong, who were still battling with the difficulties of life. He recalled what Mr Bloxam had told him one day, not so long before, of the consolation Catholics found in confession, and how it relieved their souls and consciencesto receive absolution from their priests. Hindes wondered how they set about it, whether it was a difficult task, or easily accomplished. In the course of the long walks he frequently took round the City, when his conscience would not let him sit still in the office any longer, he had often come across a little Roman Catholic church, in the East-end of London, where the congregation seemed of a poorer class than the generality. One afternoon he had peeped inside it, and looked, with wonder, at the brass ornaments and artificial flowers on the altar, at the dimly-lighted swinging lamp before the Virgin’s shrine, at the confessional on either side the building, covered in dingy red cloth, with the name of the priest, who occupied it, in white letters over the portal.
Henry Hindes had tried to confess his sins to God. He had poured out his soul in prayer, as well as he knew how, but the words had sounded hollow and meaningless in his own ears. He did not know God. He had never been used to talk toHim, and now that he had so great necessity of His reply, he did not know how to address Him. True, he had been a constant attendant at church, but the service had been a mockery to him. He had never really prayed from his heart. And now his prayers seemed to come back upon himself, unanswered, as if he had uttered them to the empty air. Wally grew no better for them. He still lay in his mother’s bed, weary, languid and fretful. God had certainly not yet seen fit to answer any prayers on his behalf. Hindes wondered within himself if confession would really do any good—whether he would feel easier after it—and whether he should please Heaven by the effort, and gain some good from it for Wally? It was against all his preconceived ideas of comfort or right, and he shrunk from the notion with aversion. What person, not brought up to the practice from childhood, does not? A priest will tell you that therein lies the merit of the sacrifice, but the sins that are usually confided tothe keeping of the confessional are very innocent ones. Few criminals take the burden of their crimes there. They are either too hardened, or too fearful. The confessionals are, generally speaking, occupied by women, who bring the same list of follies, week after week, to be absolved from. But that does not prove that there are not plenty of heavier burdens lying at the bottom of the lust of the eye and the pride of life.
But Henry Hindes had had no experience of the confessional, either as a vanity or a relief. He knew what he had heard concerning it, and he knew that, if he entered it, it would be strictly incognito, for he knew no Catholics, nor any priests. One afternoon, when his sins were lying on his mind, if possible, heavier than usual, he saw the door of the little East-end church standing invitingly open, and walked in, and took a seat to rest himself. The place was nearly empty. Two or three women, clad in sober black, and a sprinkling of half-grown children, were theonly occupants, and they were all engaged in prayer. There was a sense of drowsiness and a subtle smell of incense about the little temple of God that was consonant with the man’s perturbed feelings, and seemed to pacify them. Besides, he became interested in what was going on around him, and it diverted his mind, for a few brief moments, to watch it. Presently, the heavy baize curtain, that screened one of the confessionals, parted, and a woman issued thence. She had evidently been weeping, for she was wiping her eyes as she came out, but her face was illumined with joy. She entered the body of the church and took a seat just in front of Hindes. As she knelt down to return thanks for her absolution, he ever heard her murmur, ‘Oh! the comfort! the comfort! Thank God for it!’ He watched her earnestly after that, saw her take out her rosary, and begin to tell her beads, with her eyes raised and the same look of happiness irradiating her features. He found himself wondering what she hadhad to confess, and if it was anything like—like—what he might have to say. She looked a good, kindly sort of woman, and when, after a few minutes spent in prayer, she rose and left the church, Henry Hindes rose also and followed her into the open street. She looked astonished when she saw him hurrying after her—still more so when he began to speak. She thought at first she must have dropped something in her seat, but her little hand-bag and umbrella were safe. What could this stranger want with her? Her surprise was still greater when he opened his lips.
‘Forgive me for addressing you,’ he commenced, ‘but do tell me, is confession such a marvellous consolation to you?’
The woman looked as if she thought he wished to insult her.
‘Sir,’ she replied, ‘I saw you in church just now. Surely you can answer that question from your own experience?’
‘I cannot. I was in the church, it is true, but I am not of your faith. But youlooked so happy, so grateful, as you left the confessional, that you almost made me wish I were. Do tell me. Does confessionreallyrelieve your mind? Does it make your sins fall off you like an old garment? My friends have told me so, but I cannot believe it.’
‘Oh, sir, your friends were right, indeed. It is the greatest comfort anyone can have. Why, when the priest absolves you, they are all gone. You not only need not trouble yourself about them again, but you are strictly forbidden to do so. It would be doubting God’s goodness, and the power He has imparted to His priests. Oh, sir, do try it, only just once,’ continued the woman, who saw in Hindes a possible convert. ‘Just go to dear Father Henniker on the right hand side of the church, and he will explain it all to you so much better than I can.’
‘But will this father, as you call him, see my face?’
‘Oh, no; he sits behind a grating and you seem to be quite alone with God.You must put your mouth close to the grating and whisper low, but he will hear every word you say. And then the happiness of absolution! You won’t know yourself afterwards. I feel to-day as if I could dance and sing.’
‘Thank you, thank you, but I only asked for curiosity. You are very good to have told me so much. Good-afternoon!’
And, raising his hat to her, Hindes went on his way. He had not meant to take advantage of what he had heard, but somehow, whenever he went out, his feet seemed drawn to the same little church, until it became quite a habit of his to go and sit there and watch the penitents. And one day, almost before he knew what he was doing, he had lifted the baize curtain of one of the confessionals and walked inside.