"Roughsedge stood near, reluctantly waiting"
But at the word "care" he pulled himself together. He sat down beside her, and plunged straight into his declaration. He went at it with the same resolute simplicity that he was accustomed to throw into his military duty, nor could she stop him in the least. His unalterable affection; his changed and improved prospects; a staff appointment at home if she accepted him; the Nigerian post if she refused him--these things he put before her in the natural manly speech of a young Englishman sorely in love, yet quite incapable of "high flights," It was very evident that he had pondered what he was to say through the days and nights of his exile; that he was doing precisely what he had always planned to do, and with his whole heart in the business. She tried once or twice to interrupt him, but he did not mean to be interrupted, and she was forced to hear it out.
At the end she gave a little gasp.
"Oh, Hugh!" His name, given him for the first time, fell so forlornly--it was such a breathing out of trouble and pity and despair--that his heart took another and a final plunge downward. He had known all through that there was no hope for him; this tone, this aspect settled it. But she stretched out her hands to him, tenderly--appealing. "Hugh--I shall have to tell you--but I am ashamed."
He looked at her in silence a moment, then asked her why. The tears rose brimming in her eyes--her hands still in his.
"Hugh--I--I--have always loved Oliver Marsham--and I--cannot think of any one else. You know what has happened?"
He saw the sob swelling in her white throat.
"Yes!" he said, passionately. "It is horrible. But you cannot go to him--you cannot marry him. He was a coward when he should have stood by you. He cannot claim you now."
She withdrew her hands.
"No!" The passion in her voice matched his own. "But I would give the world if he could--and would!"
There was a pause. Steadily the woman gained upon her own weakness and beat it down. She resumed:
"I must tell you--because--it is the only way--for us two--to be real friends again--and I want a friend so much. The news of Oliver is--is terrible. The Vicar had just seen Mr. Lankester--who is staying there. He is nearly blind--and the pain!" Her hand clinched--she threw her head back. "Oh! I can't speak of it! And it may go on for years. The doctors seem to be all at sea. They say heoughtto recover--but they doubt whether he will. He has lost all heart--and hope--he can't help himself. He lies there like a log all day--despairing. And, please--what amIdoing here?" She turned upon him impetuously, her cheeks flaming. "They want help--there is no one. Mrs. Fotheringham hardly ever comes. They think Lady Lucy is in a critical state of health too. She won't admit it--she does everything as usual. But she is very frail and ill, and it depresses Oliver. And I am here!--useless--and helpless. Oh, why can't I go?--why can't I go?" She laid her face upon her arms, on the bench, hiding it from him; but he saw the convulsion of her whole frame.
Beside a passion so absolute and so piteous he felt, his own claim shrink into nothingness--impossible, even, to give it voice again. He straightened himself in silence; with an effort of the whole man, the lover put on the friend.
"But you can go," he said, a little hoarsely, "if you feel like that."
She raised herself suddenly.
"How do I know that he wants me?--how do I know that he would even see me?"
Once more her cheeks were crimson. She had shown him her love unveiled; now he was to see her doubt--the shame that tormented her. He felt that it was to heal him she had spoken, and he could do nothing to repay her. He could neither chide her for a quixotic self-sacrifice, which might never be admitted or allowed; nor protest, on Marsham's behalf, against it, for he knew, in truth, nothing of the man; least of all could he plead for himself. He could only sit, staring like a fool, tongue-tied; till Diana, mastering, for his sake, the emotion to which, partly also for his sake, she had given rein, gradually led the conversation back to safer and cooler ground. All the little involuntary arts came in by which a woman regains command of herself, and thereby of her companion. Her hat tired her head; she removed it, and the beautiful hair underneath, falling into confusion, must be put in its place by skilled instinctive fingers, every movement answering to a similar self-restraining effort in the mind within. She dried her tears; she drew closer the black scarf round the shoulders of her white dress; she straightened the violets at her belt--Muriel's mid-day gift--till he beheld her, white and suffering indeed, but lovely and composed--queen of herself.
She made him talk of his adventures, and he obeyed her, partly to help her in the struggle he perceived, partly because in the position--beneath and beyond all hope--to which she had reduced him, it was the only way by which he could save anything out of the wreck. And she bravely responded. She could and did lend him enough of her mind to make it worth his while. A friend should not come home to her from perils of land and sea, and find her ungrateful--a niggard of sympathy and praise.
So that when Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge appeared, and Muriel returned with them, Mrs. Roughsedge, all on edge with anxiety, could make very little of what had--what must have--occurred. Diana, carved in white wax, but for the sensitive involuntary movements of lip and eyebrow, was listening to a description of an English embassy sent through the length and breadth of the most recently conquered province of Nigeria. The embassy took the news of peace and Imperial rule to a country devastated the year before by the most hideous of slave-raids. The road it marched by was strewn with the skeletons of slaves--had been so strewn probably for thousands of years. "One night my horse trod unawares on two skeletons--women--locked in each other's arms," said Hugh; "scores of others round them. In the evening we camped at a village where every able-bodied male had been killed the year before."
"Shot?" asked the doctor.
"Oh, dear, no! That would have been to waste ammunition. A limb was hacked off, and they bled to death."
His mother was looking at the speaker with all her eyes, but she did not hear a word he said. Was he pale or not?
Diana shuddered.
"And that isstopped--forever?" Her eyes were on the speaker.
"As long as our flag flies there," said the soldier, simply.
Her look kindled. For a moment she was the shadow, the beautiful shadow, of her old Imperialist self--the proud, disinterested lover of her country.
The doctor shook his head.
"Don't forget the gin, and the gin-traders on the other side, Master Hugh."
"They don't show their noses in the new provinces," said the young man, quietly; "we shall straighten that out too, in the long run--you'll see."
But Diana had ceased to listen. Mrs. Roughsedge, turning toward her, and with increasing foreboding, saw, as it were, the cloud of an inward agony, suddenly recalled, creep upon the fleeting brightness of her look, as the evening shade mounts upon and captures a sunlit hill-side. The mother, in spite of her native optimism, had never cherished any real hope of her son's success. But neither had she expected, on the other side, a certainty so immediate and so unqualified. She saw before her no settled or resigned grief. The Tallyn tragedy had transformed what had been almost a recovered serenity, a restored and patient equilibrium, into something violent, tumultuous, unstable--prophesying action. But what--poor child!--could the action be?
"Poor Hugh!" said Mrs. Roughsedge to her husband on their return, as she stood beside him, in his study. Her voice was low, for Hugh had only just gone up-stairs, and the little house was thinly built.
The doctor rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and then looked round him for a cigarette.
"Yes," he said, slowly; "but he enjoyed his walk home."
"Henry!"
Hugh had walked back to the village with Mrs. Colwood, who had an errand there, and it was true that he had talked much to her out of earshot of his parents, and had taken a warm farewell of her at the end.
"Why am I to be 'Henry'-ed?"--inquired the doctor, beginning on his cigarette.
"Because you must know," said his wife, in an energetic whisper, "that Hugh had almost certainly proposed to Miss Mallory before we arrived, and she had refused him!"
The doctor meditated.
"I still say that Hugh enjoyed his walk," he repeated; "I trust he will have others of the same kind--with the same person."
"Henry, you are really incorrigible!" cried his wife. "How can you make jokes--on such a thing--with that girl's face before you!"
"Not at all," said the doctor, protesting. "I am not making jokes, Patricia. But what you women never will understand is, that it was not a woman but a man that wrote--
"'If she be not fair for me--What care I--'"
"Henry!" and his wife, beside herself, tried to stop his mouth with her hand.
"All right, I won't finish," said the doctor, placidly, disengaging himself. "But let me assure you, Patricia, whether you like it or not, that that is a male sentiment. I quite agree that no nice woman could have written it. But, then, Hugh is not a nice woman--nor am I."
"I thought you were so fond of her!" said his wife, reproachfully.
"Miss Mallory? I adore her. But, to tell the truth, Patricia, I want a daughter-in-law--and--and grand-children," added the doctor, deliberately, stretching out his long limbs to the fire. "I admit that my remarks may be quite irrelevant and ridiculous--but I repeat that--in spite of everything--Hugh enjoyed his walk."
One October evening, a week later, Lady Lucy sat waiting for Sir James Chide at Tallyn Hall. Sir James had invited himself to dine and sleep, and Lady Lucy was expecting him in the up-stairs sitting-room, a medley of French clocks and china figures, where she generally sat now, in order to be within quick and easy reach of Oliver.
She was reading, or pretending to read, by the fire, listening all the time for the sound of the carriage outside. Meanwhile, the silence of the immense house oppressed her. It was broken only by the chiming of a carillon clock in the hall below. The little tune it played, fatuously gay, teased her more insistently each time she heard it. It must really be removed. She wondered Oliver had not already complained of it.
A number of household and estate worries oppressed her thoughts. How was she to cope with them? Capable as she was, "John" had always been there to advise her, in emergency--or Oliver. She suspected the house-steward of dishonesty. And the agent of the estate had brought her that morning complaints of the head gamekeeper that were most disquieting. What did they want with gamekeepers now? Who would ever shoot at Tallyn again? With impatience she felt herself entangled in the endless machinery of wealth and the pleasures of wealth, so easy to set in motion, and so difficult to stop, even when all the savor has gone out of it. She was a tired, broken woman, with an invalid son; and the management of her great property, in which her capacities and abilities had taken for so long an imperious and instinctive delight, had become a mere burden. She longed to creep into some quiet place, alone with Oliver, out of reach of this army of servants and dependents, these impassive and unresponsive faces.
The crunching of the carriage wheels on the gravel outside gave her a start of something like pleasure. Among the old friends there was no one now she cared so much to see as Sir James Chide. Sir James had lately left Parliament and politics, and had taken a judgeship. She understood that he had lost interest in politics after and in consequence of John Ferrier's death; and she knew, of course, that he had refused the Attorney-Generalship, on the ground of the treatment meted out to his old friend and chief. During the month of Oliver's second election, moreover, she had been very conscious of Sir James's hostility to her son. Intercourse between him and Tallyn had practically ceased.
Since the accident, however, he had been kind--very kind.
The door opened, and Sir James was announced. She greeted him with a tremulous and fluttering warmth that for a moment embarrassed her visitor, accustomed to the old excess of manner and dignity, wherewith she kept her little world in awe. He saw, too, that the havoc wrought by age and grief had gone forward rapidly since he had seen her last.
"I am afraid there is no better news of Oliver?" he said, gravely, as he sat down beside her.
She shook her head.
"We are in despair, Nothing touches the pain but morphia. And he has lost heart himself so much during the last fortnight."
"You have had any fresh opinion?"
"Yes. The last man told me he still believed the injury was curable, but that Oliver must do a great deal for himself. And that he seems incapable of doing. It is, of course, the shock to the nerves, and--the general--disappointment--"
Her voice shook. She stared into the fire.
"You mean--about politics?" said Sir James, after a pause.
"Yes. Whenever I speak cheerfully to him, he asks me what there is to live for. He has been driven out of politics--by a conspiracy--"
Sir James moved impatiently.
"With health he would soon recover everything," he said, rather shortly.
She made no reply, and her shrunken faded look--as of one with no energy for hope--again roused his pity.
"Tell me," he said, bending toward her--"I don't ask from idle curiosity--but--has there been any truth in the rumor of Oliver's engagement to Miss Drake?"
Lady Lucy raised her head sharply. The light came back to her eyes.
"She was engaged to him, and three weeks after his accident she threw him over."
Sir James made a sound of amazement. Lady Lucy went on:
"She left him and me, barely a fortnight afterward, to go to a big country-house party in the north. That will show you--what she's made of. Then she wrote--a hypocritical letter--putting it onhim.Hemust not be agitated, nor feel her any burden upon him; so, forhissake, she broke it off. Of course, they were to be cousins and friends again just as before. She had arranged it all to her own satisfaction--and was meanwhile flirting desperately, as we heard from various people in the north, with Lord Philip Darcy. Oliver showed me her letter, and at last told me the whole story. I persuaded him not to answer it. A fortnight ago, she wrote again, proposing to come back here--to 'look after' us--poor things! This time,Ireplied. She would like Tallyn, no doubt, as a place of retreat, should other plans fail; but it will not be open to her!"
It was not energy now--vindictive energy--that was lacking to the personality before him!
"An odious young woman" exclaimed Sir James, lifting hands and eyebrows. "I am afraid I always thought so, saving your presence, Lady Lucy. However, she will want a retreat; for her plans--in the quarter you name--have not a chance of success."
"I am delighted to hear it!" said Lady Lucy, still erect and flushed. "What do you know?"
"Simply that Lord Philip is not in the least likely to marry her, having, I imagine, views in quite other quarters--so I am told. But he is the least scrupulous of men--and no doubt if, at Eastham, she threw herself into his arms--'what mother's son,' et cetera. Only, if she imagined herself to have caught him--such an old and hardened stager!--in a week--her abilities are less than I supposed."
"Alicia's self-conceit was always her weak point."
But as she spoke the force imparted by resentment died away. Lady Lucy sank back in her chair.
"And Oliver felt it very much?" asked Sir James, after a pause, his shrewd eyes upon her.
"He was wounded, of course--he has been more depressed since; but I have never believed that he was in love with her."
Sir James did not pursue the subject, but the vivacity of the glance bent now on the fire, now on his companion, betrayed the marching thoughts behind.
"Will Oliver see me this evening?" he inquired, presently.
"I hope so. He promised me to make the effort."
A servant knocked at the door. It was Oliver's valet.
"Please, my lady, Mr. Marsham wished me to say he was afraid he would not be strong enough to see Sir James Chide to-night. He is very sorry--and would Sir James be kind enough to come and see him after breakfast to-morrow?"
Lady Lucy threw up her hands in a little gesture of despair, Then she rose, and went to speak to the servant in the doorway.
When she returned she looked whiter and more shrivelled than before.
"Is he worse to-night?" asked Sir James, gently.
"It is the pain," she said, in a muffled voice; "and we can't touch it--yet. He mustn't have any more morphia--yet."
She sat down once more. Sir James, the best of gossips, glided off into talk of London, and of old common friends, trying to amuse and distract her. But he realized that she scarcely listened to him, and that he was talking to a woman whose life was being ground away between a last affection and the torment it had power to cause her. A new Lady Lucy, indeed! Had any one ever dared to pity her before?
Meanwhile, five miles off, a girl whom he loved as a daughter was eating her heart out for sorrow over this mother and son--consumed, as he guessed, with the wild desire to offer them, in any sacrificial mode they pleased, her youth and her sweet self. In one way or another he had found out that Hugh Roughsedge had been sent about his business--of course, with all the usual softening formulæ.
And now there was a kind of mute conflict going on between himself and Mrs. Colwood on the one side, and Diana on the other side.
No, she should not spend and waste her youth in the vain attempt to mend this house of tragedy!--it was not to be tolerated--not to be thought of. She would suffer, but she would get over it; and Oliver would probably die. Sooner or later she would begin life afresh, if only he was able to stand between her and the madness in her heart.
But as he sat there, looking at Lady Lucy, he realized that it might have been better for his powers and efficacy as a counsellor if he, too, had held aloof from this house of pain.
It was about ten o'clock at night. Lankester, who had arrived from London an hour before, had said good-night to Lady Lucy and Sir James, and had slipped into Marsham's room. Marsham had barred his door that evening against both his mother and Sir James. But Lankester was not excluded.
Off and on and in the intervals of his parliamentary work he had been staying at Tallyn for some days. A letter from Lady Lucy, in reply to an inquiry, had brought him down. Oliver had received him with few words--indeed, with an evident distaste for words; but at the end of the first day's visit had asked him abruptly, peremptorily even, to come again.
When he entered Marsham's room he found the invalid asleep under the influence of morphia. The valet, a young fellow, was noiselessly putting things straight. Lankester noticed that he looked pale.
"A bad time?" he said, in a whisper, standing beside the carefully regulated spinal couch on which Marsham was sleeping.
"Awful, sir. He was fair beside himself till we gave him the morphia."
"Is there anybody sitting up?"
"No. He'll be quiet now for six or seven hours. I shall be in the next room."
The young man spoke wearily. It was clear that the moral strain of what he had just seen had weighed upon him as much as the fatigue of the day's attendance.
"Come!" said Lankester, looking at him. "You want a good night. Go to my room. I'll lie down there." He pointed to Marsham's bedroom, now appropriated to the valet, while the master, for the sake of space and cheerfulness, had been moved into the sitting-room. The servant hesitated, protested, and was at last persuaded, being well aware of Marsham's liking for this queer, serviceable being.
Lankester took various directions from him, and packed him off. Then, instead of going to the adjoining room, he chose a chair beside a shaded lamp, and said to himself that he would sleep by the fire.
Presently the huge house sank into a silence even more profound than that in which it was now steeped by day. A cold autumn wind blew round about it. After midnight the wind dropped, and the temperature with it. The first severe frost laid its grip on forest and down and garden. Silently the dahlias and the roses died, the leaves shrivelled and blackened, and a cold and glorious moon rose upon the ruins of the summer.
Lankester dozed and woke, keeping up the fire, and wrapping himself in an eider-down, with which the valet had provided him. In the small hours he walked across the room to look at Marsham. He was lying still and breathing heavily. His thick fair hair, always slightly gray from the time he was thirty, had become much grayer of late; the thin handsome face was drawn and damp, the eyes cavernous, the lips bloodless. Even in sleep his aspect showed what he had suffered.
Poor, poor old fellow!
Lankester's whole being softened into pity. Yet he had no illusions as to the man before him--a man of inferiormoraleand weak will, incapable, indeed, of the clever brutalities by which the wicked flourish; incapable also of virtues that must, after all, be tolerably common, or the world would run much more lamely than it does. Straight, honorable, unselfish fellows--Lankester knew scores of them, rich and poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without flinching; who could produce in any society--as politicians or green-grocers--an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.
Well, what then? In the man looking down on Marsham not a tinge of pharisaic condemnation mingled with the strange clearness of his judgment. What are we all--the best of us? Lankester had not parted, like the majority of his contemporaries, with the "sense of sin." A vivid, spiritual imagination, trained for years on prayer and reverie, showed him the world and human nature--his own first and foremost--everywhere flecked and stained with evil. For the man of religion the difference between saint and sinner has never been as sharp as for the man of the world; it is for the difference between holiness and sin that he reserves his passion. And the stricken or repentant sinner is at all times nearer to his heart than the men "who need no repentance."
Moreover, it is in men like Lankester that the ascetic temper common to all ages and faiths is perpetually reproduced, the temper which makes of suffering itself a divine and sacred thing--the symbol of a mystery. In his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man, which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race. Where a thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee. The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this piteous sleeper heavenly dominations, princedoms, powers, hung in watch.
He sank, indeed, upon his knees beside the sleeper. In the intense and mystical concentration, which the habit of his life had taught him, the prayer to which he committed himself took a marvellous range without ever losing its detail, its poignancy. The pain, moral and physical, of man--pain of the savage, the slave, the child; the miseries of innumerable persons he had known, whose stories had been confided to him, whose fates he had shared; the anguish of irreparable failure, of missed, untasted joy; agonies brutal or obscure, of nerve and brain!--his mind and soul surrendered themselves to these impressions, shook under the storm and scourge of them. His prayer was not his own; it seemed to be the Spirit wrestling with Itself, and rending his own weak life.
He drew nearer to Marsham, resting his forehead on the bed. The firelight threw the shadow of his gaunt kneeling figure on the white walls. And at last, after the struggle, there seemed to be an effluence--a descending, invading love--overflowing his own being--enwrapping the sufferer before him--silencing the clamor of a weeping world. And the dual mind of the modern, even in Lankester, wavered between the two explanations: "It is myself," said the critical intellect, "the intensification and projection of myself." "It is God!" replied the soul.
Marsham, meanwhile, as the morning drew on, and as the veil of morphia between him and reality grew thinner, was aware of a dream slowly drifting into consciousness--of an experience that grew more vivid as it progressed. Some one was in the room; he moved uneasily, lifted his head, and saw indistinctly a figure in the shadows standing near the smouldering fire. It was not his servant; and suddenly his dream mingled with what he saw, and his heart began to throb.
"Ferrier!" he called, under his breath. The figure turned, but in his blindness and semi-consciousness he did not recognize it.
"I want to speak to you," he said, in the same guarded, half-whispered voice. "Of course, I had no right to do it, but--"
His voice dropped and his eyelids closed.
Lankester advanced from the fire. He saw Marsham was not really awake, and he dreaded to rouse him completely, lest it should only be to the consciousness of pain. He stooped over him gently, and spoke his name.
"Yes," said Marsham, murmuring, without opening his eyes. "There's no need for you to rub it in. I behaved like a beast, and Barrington--"
The voice became inarticulate again. The prostration and pallor of the speaker, the feebleness of the tone--nothing could have been more pitiful. An idea rushed upon Lankester. He again bent over the bed.
"Don't think of it any more," he said. "It's forgotten!"
A slight and ghastly smile showed on Marsham's lip as he lay with closed eyes. "Forgotten! No, by Jove!" Then, after an uneasy movement, he said, in a stronger and irritable voice, which seemed to come from another region of consciousness:
"It would have been better to have burned the paper. One can't get away from the thing. It--it disturbs me--"
"What paper?" said Lankester, close to the dreamer's ear.
"TheHerald," said Marsham, impatiently.
"Where is it?"
"In that cabinet by the fire."
"Shall I burn it?"
"Yes--don't bother me!" Evidently he now thought he was speaking to his valet, and a moan of pain escaped him. Lankester walked over to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. He saw a folded newspaper lying within it. After a moment's hesitation he lifted it, and perceived by the light of the night-lamp that it was theHeraldof August 2--the famous number issued on the morning of Ferrier's death. All the story of the communicated article and the "Barrington letter" ran through his mind. He stood debating with himself, shaken by emotion. Then he deliberately took the paper to the fire, stirred the coals, and, tearing up the paper, burned it piece by piece.
After it was done he walked back to Marsham's side. "I have burned the paper," he said, kneeling down by him.
Marsham, who was breathing lightly with occasional twitchings of the brow, took no notice. But after a minute he said, in a steady yet thrilling voice:
"Ferrier!"
Silence.
"Ferrier!" The tone of the repeated word brought the moisture to Lankester's eyes. He took the dreamer's hand in his, pressing it. Marsham returned the pressure, first strongly, again more feebly. Then a wave of narcotic sleep returned upon him, and he seemed to sink into it profoundly.
Next morning, as Marsham, after his dressing, was lying moody and exhausted on his pillows, he suddenly said to his servant:
"I want something out of that cabinet by the fire."
"Yes, sir." The man moved toward it obediently.
"Find a newspaper in the top drawer, folded up small--on the right-hand side."
Richard looked.
"I am sorry, sir, but there is nothing in the drawer at all."
"Nonsense!" said Marsham, angrily. "You've got the wrong drawer!"
The whole cabinet was searched to no purpose. Marsham grew very pale. He must, of course, have destroyed the paper himself, and his illness had effaced his memory of the act, as of other things. Yet he could not shake off an impression of mystery. Twice now, weeks after Ferrier's death, he seemed to have been in Ferrier's living presence, under conditions very unlike those of an ordinary dream. He could only remind himself how easily the brain plays tricks upon a man in his state.
After breakfast, Sir James Chide was admitted. But Oliver was now in the state of obsession, when the whole being, already conscious of a certain degree of pain, dreads the approach of a much intenser form--hears it as the footfall of a beast of prey, drawing nearer room by room, and can think of nothing else but the suffering it foresees, and the narcotic which those about him deal out to him so grudgingly, rousing in him, the while, a secret and silent fury. He answered Sir James in monosyllables, lying, dressed, upon his sofa, the neuralgic portion of the spine packed and cushioned from any possible friction, his forehead drawn and frowning.
Sir James shrank from asking him about himself. But it was useless to talk of politics; Oliver made no response, and was evidently no longer abreast even of the newspapers.
"Does your man read you theTimes?" asked Sir James, noticing that it lay unopened beside him.
Oliver nodded. "There was a dreadful being my mother found a fortnight ago. I got rid of him."
He had evidently not strength to be more explicit. But Sir James had heard from Lady Lucy of the failure of her secretarial attempt.
"I hear they talk of moving you for the winter."
"They talk of it. I shall oppose it."
"I hope not!--for Lady Lucy's sake. She is so hopeful about it, and she is not fit herself to spend the winter in England."
"My mother must go," said Oliver, closing his eyes.
"She will never leave you."
Marsham made no reply; then, without closing his eyes again, he said, between his teeth: "What is the use of going from one hell to another hell--through a third--which is the worst of all?"
"You dread the journey?" said Sir James, gently. "But there are ways and means."
"No!" Oliver's voice was sudden and loud. "There are none!--that make any difference."
Sir James was left perplexed, cudgelling his brains as to what to attempt next. It was Marsham, however, who broke the silence. With his dimmed sight he looked, at last, intently, at his companion.
"Is--is Miss Mallory still at Beechcote?"
Sir James moved involuntarily.
"Yes, certainly."
"You see a great deal of her?"
"I do--I--" Sir James cleared his throat a little--I look upon her as my adopted daughter."
"I should like to be remembered to her."
"You shall be," said Sir James, rising. "I will give her your message. Meanwhile, may I tell Lady Lucy that you feel a little easier this morning?"
Oliver slowly and sombrely shook his head. Then, however, he made a visible effort.
"But I want to see her. Will you tell her?"
Lady Lucy, however, was already in the room. Probably she had heard the message from the open doorway where she often hovered. Oliver held out his hand to her, and she stooped and kissed him. She asked him a few low-voiced questions, to which he mostly answered by a shake of the head. Then she attempted some ordinary conversation, during which it was very evident that the sick man wished to be left alone.
She and Sir James retreated to her sitting-room, and there Lady Lucy, sitting helplessly by the fire, brushed away some tears of which she was only half conscious. Sir James walked up and down, coming at last to a stop beside her.
"It seems to me this is as much a moral as a physical breakdown. Can nothing be done to take him out of himself?--give him fresh heart?"
"We have tried everything--suggested everything. But it seems impossible to rouse him to make an effort."
Sir James resumed his walk--only to come to another stop.
"Do you know--that he just now--sent a message by me to Miss Mallory?"
Lady Lucy started.
"Did he?" she said, faintly, her eyes on the blaze. He came up to her.
"Thereis a woman who would never have deserted you!--or him!" he said, in a burst of irrepressible feeling, which would out.
Lady Lucy's glance met his--silently, a little proudly. She said nothing and presently he took his leave.
The day wore on. A misty sunshine enwrapped the beech woods. The great trees stood marked here and there by the first fiery summons of the frost. Their supreme moment was approaching which would strike them, head to foot, into gold and amber, in a purple air. Lady Lucy took her drive among them as a duty, but between her and the enchanted woodland there was a gulf fixed.
She paid a visit to Oliver, trembling, as she always did, lest some obscure catastrophe, of which she was ever vaguely in dread, should have developed. But she found him in a rather easier phase, with Lankester, who had just returned from town, reading aloud to him. She gave them tea, thinking, as she did so, of the noisy parties gathered so recently, during the election weeks, round the tea-tables in the hall. And then she returned to her own room to write some letters.
She looked once more with distaste and weariness at the pile of letters and notes awaiting her. All the business of the house, the estate, the village--she was getting an old woman; she was weary of it. And with sudden bitterness she remembered that she had a daughter, and that Isabel had never been a real day's help to her in her life. Where was she now? Campaigning in the north--speaking at a bye-election--lecturing for the suffrage. Since the accident she had paid two flying visits to her mother and brother. Oliver had got no help from her--nor her mother; she was the Mrs. Jellyby of a more hypocritical day. Yet Lady Lucy in her youth had been a very motherly mother; she could still recall in the depths of her being the thrill of baby palms pressed "against the circle of the breast."
She sat down to her task, when the door opened behind her. A footman came in, saying something which she did not catch. "My letters are not ready yet"--she threw over her shoulder, irritably, without looking at him. The door closed. But some one was still in the room. She turned sharply in astonishment.
"May I disturb you, Lady Lucy?" said a tremulous voice.
She saw a tall and slender woman, in black, bending toward her, with a willowy appealing grace, and eyes that beseeched. Diana Mallory stood before her. There was a pause. Then Lady Lucy rose slowly, laid down her spectacles, and held out her hand.
"It is very kind of you to come and see me," she said, mechanically. "Will you sit down?"
Diana gazed at her, with the childish short-sighted pucker of the brow that Lady Lucy remembered well. Then she came closer, still holding Lady Lucy's hand.
"Sir James thought I might come," she said, breathlessly. "Isn't there--isn't there anything I might do? I wanted you to let me help you--like a secretary--won't you? Sir James thought you looked so tired--and this big place!--I am sure there are things I might do--and oh! it would make me so happy!"
Now she had her two hands clasping, fondling Lady Lucy's. Her eyes shone with tears, her mouth trembled.
"Oh, you must--you must!" she cried, suddenly; "don't let's remember anything but that we were friends--that you were so kind to me--you and Mr. Oliver--in the spring. I can't bear sitting there at Beechcote doing nothing--amusing myself--when you--and Mr. Oliver--"
She stopped, forcing back the tears that would drive their way up, studying in dismay the lined and dwindled face before her. Lady Lucy colored deeply. During the months which had elapsed since the broken engagement, she, even in her remote and hostile distance, had become fully aware of the singular prestige, the homage of a whole district's admiration and tenderness, which had gathered round Diana. She had resented the prestige and the homage, as telling against Oliver, unfairly. Yet as she looked at her visitor she felt the breath of their ascendency. Tender courage and self-control--the woman, where the girl had been--a nature steadied and ennobled--these facts and victories spoke from Diana's face, her touch; they gave even something of maternity to her maiden youth.
"You come to a sad house," said Lady Lucy, holding her away a little.
"I know." The voice was quivering and sweet. "But he will recover--of course he'll recover!"
Lady Lucy shook her head.
"He seems to have no will to recover."
Then her limbs failed her. She sank into a chair by the fire, and there was Diana on a stool at her feet--timidly daring--dropping soft caresses on the hand she held, drawing out the tragic history of the preceding weeks, bringing, indeed, to this sad and failing mother what she had perforce done without till now--that electric sympathy of women with each other which is the natural relief and sustenance of the sex.
Lady Lucy forgot her letters--forgot, in her mind-weariness, all the agitating facts about this girl that she had once so vividly remembered. She had not the strength to battle and hold aloof. Who now could talk of marrying or giving in marriage? They met under a shadow of death; the situation between them reduced to bare elemental things.
"You'll stay and dine with me?" she said at last, feebly. "We'll send you home. The carriages have nothing to do. And"--she straightened herself--"you must see Oliver. He will know that you are here."
Diana said nothing. Lady Lucy rose and left the room. Diana leaned her head against the chair in which the older lady had been sitting, and covered her eyes. Her whole being was gathered into the moment of waiting.
Lady Lucy returned and beckoned. Once more Diana found herself hurrying along the ugly, interminable corridors with which she had been so familiar in the spring. The house had never seemed to her so forlorn. They paused at an open door, guarded by a screen.
"Go in, please," said Lady Lucy, making room for her to pass.
Diana entered, shaken with inward fear. She passed the screen, and there beyond it was an invalid couch--a man lying on it--and a hand held out to her.
That shrunken and wasted being the Oliver Marsham of two months before! Her heart beat against her breast. Surely she was looking at the irreparable! Her high courage wavered and sank.
But Marsham did not perceive it. He saw, as in a cloud, the lovely oval of the face, the fringed eyes, the bending form.
"Will you sit down?" he said, hoarsely.
She took a chair beside him, still holding his hand. It seemed as though she were struck dumb by what she saw. He inquired if she was at Beechcote.
"Yes." Her head drooped. "But I want Lady Lucy to let me come and stay here--a little."
"No one ought to stay here," he said, abruptly, two spots of feverish color appearing on his cheeks. "Sir James would advise you not. So do I."
She looked up softly.
"Your mother is so tired; she wants help. Won't you let me?"
Their eyes met. His hand trembled violently in hers.
"Why did you come?" he said, suddenly, breathing fast.
She found no words, only tears. She had relinquished his hand, but he stretched it out again and touched her bent head.
"There's no time left," he said, impatiently, "to--to fence in. Look here! I can't stand this pain many minutes more." He moved with a stifled groan. "They'll give me morphia--it's the only thing. But I want you to know. I was engaged to Alicia Drake--after--we broke it off. And I never loved her--not for a moment--and she knew it. Then, as soon as this happened she left us. There was poetic justice, wasn't it? Who can blame her? I don't. I want you to know--what sort of a fellow I am."
Diana had recovered her strength. She raised his hand, and leaned her face upon it.
"Let me stay," she repeated--"let me stay!"
"No!" he said, with emphasis. "You should only stay if I might tell you--I am a miserable creature--but I love you! And I may be a miserable creature--in Chide's opinion--everybody's. But I am not quite such a cur as that."
"Oliver!" She slipped to her knees. "Oliver! don't send me away!" All her being spoke in the words. Her dark head sank upon his shoulder, he felt her fresh cheek against his. With a cry he pressed her to him.
"I am dying--and--I--I am weak," he said, incoherently. He raised her hand as it lay across his breast and kissed it. Then he dropped it despairingly.
"The awful thing is that when the pain comes I care about nothing--not even you--nothing. And it's coming now. Go!--dearest. Good-night. To-morrow!--Call my servant." And as she fled she heard a sound of anguish that was like a sword in her own heart.
His servant hurried to him; in the passage outside Diana found Lady Lucy. They went back to the sitting-room together.
"The morphia will ease him," said Lady Lucy, with painful composure, putting her arm round the girl's shoulders. "Did he tell you he was dying?"
Diana nodded, unable to speak.
"It may be so. But the doctors don't agree." Then with a manner that recalled old days: "May I ask--I don't know that I have the right--what he said to you?"
She had withdrawn her arm, and the two confronted each other.
"Perhaps you won't allow it," said Diana, piteously. "He said I might only stay, if--if he might tell me--he loved me."
"Allow it?" said Lady Lucy, vaguely--"allow it?"
She fell into her chair, and Diana looked down upon her, hanging on the next word.
Lady Lucy made various movements as though to speak, which came to nothing.
"I have no one--but him," she said at last, with pathetic irrelevance. "No one. Isabel--"
Her voice failed her. Diana held out her hands, the tears running down her cheeks. "Dear Lady Lucy, let me! I am yours--and Oliver's."
"It will, perhaps, be only a few weeks--or months--and then he will be taken from us."
"But give me the right to those weeks. You wouldn't--you wouldn't separate us now!"
Lady Lucy suddenly broke down. Diana clung to her with tears, and in that hour she became as a daughter to the woman who had sentenced her youth. Lady Lucy asked no pardon in words, to Diana's infinite relief; but the surrender of weakness and sorrow was complete. "Sir James will forbid it," she said at last, when she had recovered her calm.
"No one shall forbid it!" said Diana, rising with a smile. "Now, may I answer some of those letters for you?"
For some weeks after this Diana went backward and forward daily, or almost daily, between Beechcote and Tallyn. Then she migrated to Tallyn altogether, and Muriel Colwood with her. Before and after that migration wisdom had been justified of her children in the person of the doctor. Hugh Roughsedge's leave had been prolonged, owing to a slight but troublesome wound in the arm, of which he had made nothing on coming home. No wound could have been more opportune--more friendly to the doctor's craving for a daughter-in-law. It kept the Captain at Beechcote, but it did not prevent him from coming over every Sunday to Tallyn to bring flowers or letters, or news from the village; and it was positively benefited by such mild exercise as a man may take, in company with a little round-eyed woman, feather-light and active, yet in relation to Diana, like a tethered dove, that can only take short flights. Only here it was a tether self-imposed and of the heart.
There was no direct wooing, however, and for weeks their talk was all of Diana. Then the Captain's arm got well, and Nigeria called. But Muriel would not have allowed him to say a word before departure had it not been for Diana--and the doctor--who were suddenly found to have entered, in regard to this matter, upon a league and covenant not to be resisted. Whether the doctor opened Diana's eyes need not be inquired; it is certain that if, all the while, in Oliver's room, she and Lady Lucy had not been wrestling hour by hour with death--or worse--Diana would have wanted no one to open them. When she did understand, there was no opposing her. She pleaded--not without tears--to be given the happiness of knowing they were pledged, and her Muriel safe in harbor. So Roughsedge had his say; a quiet engagement began its course in the world; Brookshire as yet knew nothing; and the doctor triumphed over Patricia.
During this time Sir James Chide watched the development of a situation he had not been able to change with a strange mixture of revolt and sympathy. Sometimes he looked beyond the tragedy which he thought inevitable to a recovered and normal life for Diana; sometimes he felt a dismal certainty that when Oliver had left her, that recovered life could only shape itself to ascetic and self-renouncing ends. Had she belonged to his own church, she would no doubt have become a "religious"; and he would have felt it the natural solution. Outside the Catholic Church, the same need takes shape--he thought--in forms less suited to a woman's weakness, less conducive to her dignity.
All through he resented the sacrifice of a being so noble, true, and tender to a love, in his eyes, so unfitting and derogatory. Not all the pathos of suffering could blunt his sense of Marsham's inferiority, or make him think it "worth while."
Then, looking deeper, he saw the mother in the child; and in Diana's devotion, mysterious influences, flowing from her mother's fate--from the agony, the sin, the last tremulous hope, and piteous submission of Juliet Sparling. He perceived that in this broken, tortured happiness to which Diana had given herself there was some sustaining or consoling element that nothing more normal or more earthly would have brought her; he guessed at spiritual currents and forces linking the dead with the living, and at a soul heroically calm among them, sending forth rays into the darkness. His religion, which was sincere, enabled him to understand her; his affection, his infinite delicacy of feeling, helped her.
Meanwhile, Diana and Lankester became the sustaining angels of a stricken house. But not all their tenderness and their pity could, in the end, do much for the two sufferers they tried to comfort. In Oliver's case the spinal pain and disorganization increased, the blindness also; Lady Lucy became steadily feebler and more decrepit. At last all life was centred on one hope--the coming of a great French specialist, a disciple of Charcot's, recommended by the English Ambassador in Paris, who was an old friend and kinsman of Lady Lucy.
But before he arrived Diana took a resolution. She went very early one morning to see Sir James Chide. He was afterward closeted with Lady Lucy, and he went up to town the following day on Diana's business. The upshot of it all was that on the morning of New Year's Eve a marriage was celebrated in Oliver Marsham's room by the Rector of Tallyn and Mr. Lavery. It was a wedding which, to all who witnessed it, was among the most heart-rending experiences of life. Oliver, practically blind, could not see his bride, and only morphia enabled him to go through it. Mrs. Fotheringham was to have been present; but there was a feminist congress in Paris, and she was detained at the last moment. The French specialist came. He made a careful examination, but would give no decided opinion. He was to stay a week at Tallyn in order to watch the case, and he reserved his judgment. Meanwhile he gave certain directions as to local treatment, and he asked that a new drug might be tried during the night instead of the second dose of morphia usually given. The hearts of all in charge of the invalid sank as they foresaw the inevitable struggle.
In the evening the new doctor paid a second visit to his patient. Diana saw him afterward alone. He was evidently touched by the situation in the house, and, cautious as he was, allowed himself a few guarded sentences throwing light on the doubt--which was in effect a hope--in his own mind.
"Madame, it is a very difficult case. The emaciation, the weakness, the nerve depression--even if there were no organic disease--are alone enough to threaten life. The morphia is, of course, a contributing cause. The question before us is: Have we here a case of irreparable disease caused by the blow, or a case of nervous shock producing all the symptoms of disease--pain, blindness, emaciation--but ultimately curable? That is what we have to solve."
Diana's eyes implored him.
"Give him hope," she said, with intensity. "For weeks--months--he has never allowed himself a moment's hope."
The doctor reflected.
"We will do what we can," he said, slowly. "Meanwhile, cheerfulness!--all the cheerfulness possible."
Diana's faint, obedient smile, as she rose to leave the room, touched him afresh. Just married, he understood. These are the things that women do!
As he opened the door for her he said, with some hesitation: "You have, perhaps, heard of some of the curious effects that a railway collision produces. A man who has been in a collision and received a blow suffers afterward great pain, loss of walking power, impairment of vision, and so forth. The man's suffering is real--the man himself perfectly sincere--his doctor diagnoses incurable injury--the jury awards him damages. Yet, in a certain number of instances, the man recovers. Have we here an aggravated form of the same thing?Ah, madame, courage!"
For in the doorway he saw her fall back against the lintel for support. The hope that he infused tested her physically more severely than the agonies of the preceding weeks. But almost immediately she controlled herself, smiled at him again, and went.
That night various changes were made at Tallyn. Diana's maid unpacked, in the room communicating with Marsham's; and Diana, pale and composed, made a new arrangement with Oliver's male nurse. She was to take the nursing of the first part of the night, and he was to relieve her at three in the morning. To her would fall the administration of the new medicine.
At eleven o'clock all was still in the house. Diana opened the door of Oliver's room with a beating heart. She wore a dressing-gown of some white stuff; her black hair, released from the combs of the day, was loosely rolled up, and curled round her neck and temples. She came in with a gentle deliberate step; it was but a few hours since the ceremony of the morning, but the tranformation in her was instinctive and complete. To-night she was the wife--alone with her husband.
She saw that he was not asleep, and she went and knelt down beside him.
"Oliver, darling!"
He passed his hand over her hair.
"I have been waiting for you--it is our wedding night."
She hid her face against him.
"Oh! you angel!" he murmured to her--"angel of consolation! When I am gone, say to yourself: 'I drew him out of the pit, and helped him to die'; say 'he suffered, and I forgave him everything'; say 'he was my husband, and I carried him on my heart--so.'" He moved toward her. She put her arms under his head and drew him to her breast, stooping over him and kissing him.
So the first part of the night went by, he very much under the influence of morphia and not in pain; murmured words passing at intervals between them, the outward signs of an inward and ineffable bond. Often, as she sat motionless beside him, the thought of her mother stirred in her heart--father, mother, husband--close, close all of them--"closer than hands and feet"--one with her and one with God.
About two o'clock she gave him the new drug, he piteously consenting for her sake. Then in a mortal terror she resumed her place beside him. In a few minutes surely the pain, the leaping hungry pain would be upon him, and she must see him wrestle with it defenceless. She sat holding her breath, all existence gathered into fear.
But the minutes passed. She felt the tension of his hand relax. He went to sleep so gently that in her infinite relief she too dropped into sleep, her head beside his, the black hair mingling with the gray on the same pillow.
The servant coming in, as he had been told, looked at them in astonishment, and stole away again.
An hour or so later Oliver woke.
"I have had no morphia, and I am not in pain. My God! what does it mean?"
Trembling, he put out his hand. Yes!--Diana was there--asleep in her chair. Hiswife!
His touch roused her, and as she bent over him he saw her dimly in the dim light--her black hair, her white dress.
"You can bring that old French fellow here whenever you like," he said, holding her. Then, faintly, his eyes closed: "This is New Year's Day."
Once more Diana's kisses fell "on the tired heart like rain"; and when she left him he lay still, wrapped in a tangle of thought which his weakness could not unravel. Presently he dropped again into sleep.
Diana too slept, the sleep of a young exhaustion; and when she woke up, it was to find her being flooded with an upholding, enkindling joy, she knew not how or whence. She threw open the window to the frosty dawn, thinking of the year before and her first arrival at Beechcote. And there, in the eastern sky--no radiant planet--but a twinkling star, in an ethereal blue; and from the valley below, dim joyous sounds of bells.