CHAPTER SEVENHe Tries to be Honest
DAVIDINA got over her cold without difficulty. But Mr. Trimblerigg, who from repeated immersion, had been in the water much longer and with opportunities for severe chills to take him between whiles, fell seriously ill.
It was with a sort of satisfaction that he took to his bed; for this at any rate was a genuine result of his life-saving efforts, and seemed in a way to affect their character, giving them the testimonial he craved.
Davidina accepted the duty which fate had laid on her, and nursed him with devoted detachment.
‘It’s wonderful how those two do love each other!’ remarked Mrs. Trimblerigg, after viewing a sick-bed scene where Jonathan was as one hanging between life and death in Davidina’s arms: ‘And yet to look at them sometimes you wouldn’t think it.’
That was on the first day of desperate symptoms, preliminary to the arrival of the doctor, when Davidina, for lack of higher guidance was nursing him with prescriptions of her own choosing. He had horrible pains; she pursued them with the old-fashioned remedies which, in remote country districts, still effect cures, and for which the undeserving doctor comes presently to receive the fee. Fore and aft, wherever a pain came catching his breath, she skinned him with untempered applications of hot raw mustard; and after five hours of it he still survived.
When the doctor came he could not but admire her handiwork. ‘Well, you have punished him!’ he said. He examined the patient and gave the illness its name—double pneumonia. Its importance was a satisfaction toMr. Trimblerigg and Davidina alike; they took it as a worthy occupation;—he to be ill of it, she to have the nursing of it. For the next fortnight brother and sister enjoyed each other thoroughly, more than they had ever done in their lives before. They even became fond of each other. But character remained; the fondness was critical.
The day that the doctor pronounced him out of danger, Mr. Trimblerigg had already felt so much better, that he wanted to get up. Life having become attractive again, he was impatient to go out and meet it once more on his own terms. And when he had seen from the medical eye that all was to be well with him, he was as anxious to have word of it as though it were a compliment on his good looks. ‘What does he say of me?’ he asked when his sister returned from seeing the doctor to the door.
Davidina, having measured him judicially with her eye, settled that he was well enough for an indulgence that would be mutual.
‘He says you are out of danger,’ she answered; ‘so now you are in it again.’
‘In what?’
‘In your own way,’ she replied, elliptically. ‘It’s done you no harm being ill. To be safe from yourself for a fortnight never happened to you before. Mother calls it a God’s mercy you’re still alive. Perhaps it is: I don’t know.’
Mr. Trimblerigg lay trying to read her face and the meanings behind it. ‘Have I been a great trouble?’ he asked at last.
‘People can’t be as ill as you’ve been, without giving some trouble,’ she answered.
Yet he had a consciousness that he had been good, asgoodness goes on a bed of sickness; and he hankered to have it said.
‘Wasn’t I a good patient?’ he inquired in a tone of meek repentance. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You were as good as you knew how,’ replied Davidina, ‘and that’s not saying a little; for youknowmore than most; if you’d only do it.’ She paused, then added, ‘You were very good when you were out of your senses.’
‘What did I say?’ inquired Mr. Trimblerigg anxiously; for the possibilities of unconscious goodness alarmed him.
‘Your prayers.’ (His anxiety increased.) ‘You didn’t say much. ’Twas either “God, I am not as other men are,” or “God, be merciful to me a sinner,” just those two things, one or other; and they both sounded real, as if you meant ’em.’
There was a long pause, while Mr. Trimblerigg calculated; he had got the right atmosphere for it at last; so gathering his strength he said:
‘Davidina, it was I pushed you into the river.’
The avowal struck Davidina a cold blow: she had not reckoned that feebleness, or illness, or affection, or gratitude, or anything indeed but fear would ever have made Mr. Trimblerigg own truth against himself so long after the date. Then she looked deeper, and realized that it was fear: he was trying to get out of her clutches by telling the truth.
She countered him by telling a lie herself.
‘I didn’t know it,’ she said; ‘I never felt you touch me.’
‘But I did!’ he insisted.
‘Well, if you did, you didn’t do it on purpose.’
Into this trap he fell.
‘Yes, I did!’ he declared. ‘I hated you: I pushed you in because I wanted you to drown.’
Reassured, she saw that once more he was telling lies. It comforted her to find that he had not got out of her depth; her old Jonathan, the Jonathan she knew, was safely hers again.
‘Then why did you try to save me?’ she inquired.
‘I didn’t try; not really. I only pretended to.’
‘Who was that for?’
‘Myself, I suppose. It would have been easier to think of afterwards, you see: that I—tried.’
Here she saw that he had given her a bit of the real Jonathan wrongly applied.
‘Ah, yes,’ she commented, ‘you manage to pretend to yourself a good deal, don’t you? I wish I could!’
Her voice was gentle, regretful, full of compassion and understanding. ‘What would you like to pretend?’ it encouraged him to ask.
Then she smote him.
‘That I believed you,’ she said.
So the victory was won.
He lay back, exhausted of his attempt. He had not escaped her after all; and his final word was uttered without any hope of reversing the issue now decided.
‘Well, I’ve told you,’ he said, trying to appear indifferent; ‘and it’s true,—every word.’
‘Then we won’t talk about it,’ she replied; ‘you can think it’s true, if it amuses you. It would amuse me too, if I’d got the gift for it.’
She looked at him kindly, humorously; and then, speaking as one who tries to chaff foolish fancies out of a child, said:
‘Some day, Jonathan, you’ll look in the glass and be thinking you’ve got a halo; and it’ll only be the moon behind you, or a haystack on fire, or something of that kind. If I’d got an imagination like yours, I should be afraid to believe anything!’
So she shut him down with his poor weak wish to be privately and confidentially honest. And as he lay back in the cage of her contemptuous affections, he realized how very nearly he had escaped. If he had only been content to tell merely the truth, Davidina might have believed him: but at the last moment his Devil—his decorative Devil—had tempted him to play the murderer; and to the lurid beauty of it he had succumbed.
He turned his head away on the pillow, for there were tears in his eyes.
Davidina said: ‘It’s time you took your medicine.’ She poured it out as she spoke, and set it beside him, with the two lumps of sugar that were to follow.
‘I don’t want it,’ he cried peevishly. ‘Anyway, I don’t want it just yet: you can leave it.’
‘No, I can’t; I’m going downstairs.’
‘Well, you can leave it, I say.’
‘And you’d empty it away and eat the sugar as soon as my back was turned. I know. You’ve done that before.’
It was true he had: but all humans of my acquaintance do similar things when left to themselves. It is their nature. But it was Davidina’s devouring instinct for not leaving him to himself which made him desperate.
‘Davidina,’ he cried, ‘why can’t you be friends?’
‘Friends?’ she retorted, ‘you are too anxious to be friends with yourself, to be a safe friend for anyone else, I’m thinking. The best friend for you is some one whoknows how to make you honest to ’em from a distance.’
She gave him his medicine as she spoke, and saw him drink it.
‘Well, there’s one thing you’re honest about at any rate,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he inquired, hopefully.
‘You bite your nails, and you don’t try to hide it.’
‘What does that matter to anybody?’ he demanded irritably.
‘Nothing, except to yourself. I never knew anybody yet that bit his nails who was able to tell the truth. Not that that matters to you, I suppose you’ll say.’
‘I do tell the truth sometimes,’ he declared in a tone of appealingnaïveté. ‘And when I do, you don’t believe me.’
‘When you do,’ she said, ‘you show a red light. That frightens me. It’s like a train whistling and screaming to say there’s going to be an accident.’
Whereat Mr. Trimblerigg put himself resolutely under the bed-clothes: and so she left him.
Yet, in the end, she did him good. It is a pathetic fact that from that day Mr. Trimblerigg left off biting his nails, hoping, perhaps, that as they grew an instinct for truth would be born in him. Eventually he even developed a habit of letting them grow quite long: securing, to that extent, a sense of escape from the supervision of Davidina.
I wish I could add that that little addition of grey growth made him become more truthful. But when in later years all his hair turned grey and he wore it long, almost like a woman’s, even that did not alter the fundamentals of his character.