(ii)
The Canon lay back against his pillows and it did not need the nurse’s gesture to Lucilla to tell them that he was dying. His breath came loud and fast and his eyes were closed.
Adrian had flung himself on his knees at the bedside and was sobbing, his face hidden in his arms. Quentillian stood beside Lucilla, who held her father’s hand in hers.
“Is he conscious?” Lucilla asked.
The nurse shook her head.
“Can anything be done to make it easier?” Lucilla said then.
“No, my dear. I’ve sent messages for the doctor and Mr. Clover, but——”
Her face completed the sentence.
They remained motionless, Adrian’s irregular sobs and the Canon’s heavy breathing alone cutting intermittently across the silence.
Quentillian never knew how long it was before Canon Morchard opened his eyes and spoke, articulating with great difficulty.
“All safe—all happy ... verily, all things work together for good!”
He smiled, looking straight across at Owen Quentillian, and suddenly said with great distinctness:
“Mors janua vitæ!”
Owen could hear the cry still, ringing through the room, in the time of dumb struggle that followed.
It seemed a fitting epitome of the spirit that had been Fenwick Morchard’s.
Just before the first hint of day dawned into the room, Lucilla and the nurse laid back on to the pillows the form that they had been supporting.
Adrian was crying and shivering like a child.
“Take him downstairs and give him something hot to drink,” the nurse commanded Owen. “There’s a fire in the kitchen.”
Quentillian looked at Lucilla.
“Please go,” she said.
He went downstairs with Adrian.
“If only I’d been better to him! He was awfully good to me, really,” sobbed Adrian. “He used to make an awful fuss of me when I was a little chap, and I wasn’t half grateful enough—beast that I was!”
“Drink this.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can. Try and be a man, Adrian, for your sister’s sake.”
“It’s worse for me than for any of them,” said Adrian ingenuously, “because I’ve got things to be remorseful about, and they haven’t. And now it’s too late!”
“You were here in time,” said Quentillian, abominably conscious, and resentful, of his own triteness.
“And I promised him I’d chuck my job. I think it comforted him.”
“I’m sure it did.”
“It was a sacrifice, in a way, to throw the whole thing up, when I was doing well and keen on it, and all that sort of thing; but I’m thankful now that I did it. Perhaps it made up to—him—for my having been such a hound, often and often.”
It was oddly evident that Adrian was torn between genuine grief and shock and a latent desire to make the most of his own former depravity.
“I daresay you’re thinking that having been through the war and everything, I ought to be used to the sight of death,” he said presently; “but it’s quite different when it’s like this. One got sort of hardened there, and everybody was running the same risk—oneself included. But my father—why, it seems like the end of everything, Owen. I must say, I think I’m a bit young to have my home broken up like this, don’t you?”
“Very young,” repeated Quentillian automatically, and yet not altogether without significance.
“I don’t know what will happen, but of course Lucilla and I have to leave St. Gwenllian. It’s hard on her, too. I thought we ought to keep together, you know, for a bit. It seems more natural. I shall have to look for a fresh job, and I don’t know what Hale will say to my chucking him.”
Adrian was silent, obviously uneasy, and it was evident enough that it was the strong revulsion from that anxiety which prompted his next sudden outburst.
“I’m so awfully thankful that I had the strength to make that promise about leaving Hale. It’ll always be a comfort to me to feel that I made a sacrifice for the dear old man, and that he—went—the happier for it. Mind you, I don’t agree with him about Hale and Hale’s crowd. Father had the old-fashioned ideas of his generation, you know, and of course all progress seemed a sort of vandalism to him. I daresay if he’d ever met Hale he’d have had his eyes opened a bit, and seen things quite differently. Hale was always jolly decent about him, too—he’d read some of his stuff, and had quite a sort of admiration for it, in a way. Said it was reactionary, and all that, but perfectly sound in its own way, you know—scholarly, and all that kind of muck.”
“Have you written to Hale?”
“No. Of course, in a way it’s an awfully awkward situation for me, having to tell him why I’m not coming back to him, and so on. I thought I’d pop up and see him as soon as it could be managed. Of course there are arrangements to be made——”
The boy broke off, in a fresh access of bewilderment and grief.
“I simply can’t realize he’s gone, Owen. I say—you do think he was happy, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That promise of mine meant a lot to him. I’m so thankful that I’ve got that to remember. You might say, in a way, considering how much he always thought of us, that some of his children had rather let him down, in a way. I mean, Lucilla and I were the only two there, out of the five of us. Of course, David, poor chap, had gone already, and Val and Flossie couldn’t very well help themselves—and yet there it was! Do you suppose that when he said—that—about ‘all safe, all happy’—he was thinking of us?”
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s a comfort to know his mind was at rest. He wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t made that promise, you know,” said Adrian.
“Look here, Adrian, hadn’t you better try and get some sleep? There’ll be things to be done, later, you know, and you and I—if you’ll let me help—must try and take some of it off Lucilla’s hands.”
All the child in Adrian responded to the transparent lure.
He drew himself up.
“Thanks awfully, Owen. I shall be only too glad of your help. There’ll be a good deal for me to see to, of course, so perhaps I’d better lie down for an hour or two while I can. What about Lucilla?”
“Would you like to come and find her?”
The boy shuddered violently.
“Not in there—I couldn’t,” he said piteously.
They went upstairs together.
As they passed the door of the Canon’s room, it was cautiously opened and the nurse came outside and spoke to Adrian.
“The doctor should be here presently. I want him to see Miss Morchard. She turned faint a little while ago, and I’ve got her into her room, but I’m afraid she’s in for a breakdown. I’ve seen them like this before, after a long strain, you know.”
The woman’s tone was professionally matter-of-fact.
“Had I better go to her?” said Adrian, troubled, and seeming rather resentful at the fresh anxiety thrust upon him.
“I shouldn’t, if I were you. It’ll only upset her. She’s broken down a bit—hysterical. It’ll relieve her, in the end. I shan’t leave her now, till the doctor comes.”
Lucilla hysterical!
Owen, almost more amazed than concerned, watched the nurse depart to what she evidently looked upon as a fresh case.
“Well, I can’t do anything, I suppose,” said Adrian miserably.
“Go to bed,” Quentillian repeated. “Shall I draft out some telegrams for you, and let you see them before they go? It’s no use sending them to the post-office before eight.”
“Don’t you want to sleep yourself?”
“Not just now, thanks.”
“Well, I’ll relieve you at seven. Send someone to call me, will you?—though I don’t suppose I shall sleep.”
The boy trailed into his room, disconsolate and frightened-looking.
Owen Quentillian, searching for writing materials, found them on the table in the Canon’s study, a table scrupulous in its orderliness, each stack of papers docketed, each article laid with symmetrical precision in its own place.
Owen would not sit there, where only the Canon had sat, under the crucifix mounted on the green velvet plaque. He went instead to another, smaller table, in the embrasure of a window, and sat there writing until the morning light streamed in upon him.
Then he laid down the pen, with a sense of the futility of activities that sought to cheat reflection, and let his mind dwell upon that which subconsciously obsessed it.
Canon Morchard had died as he had lived—an optimist. An invincible faith in the ultimate rightness of all things had been his to the end, and perhaps most of all at the end.
Quentillian envisaged the Canon’s causes of thankfulness.
He had seen his children as “safe” and “happy.” Was it only because he had wanted so to see them?
David, who was dead, had been mourned for, but the Canon had been spared the deepest bitterness of separation. He had known nothing of the gulf widening between his own soul and that of his eldest son....
A fool’s paradise?
He had seen Lucilla as safe and happy.
And yet Lucilla’s life was over, unlived. As she herself had said, her chances had gone by. Torquay remained. It was not very difficult to imagine her days there. An old lady—the placid kindness accorded by the aged to the middle-ageing—the outside interests of a little music, a few books, a flower-garden—the pathetic, vicarious planning for scarcely-seen nephews and nieces—the quick, solitary walks, cut short by the fear of being missed, and then, as years went on, more solitude, and again more solitude.
Lucilla had said: “I’m not an optimist now—but I’m free.”
From the bottom of his heart Owen recalled with thankfulness the fact of Lucilla’s freed spirit.
It was the best that life would ever hold for her now.
His thoughts turned to Flora.
Quentillian could not envisage her life: eternally secluded, eternally withdrawn. She was lost to them, as they were lost to her.
Subconsciously, he was aware of associations connected with Flora’s vocation upon which he preferred not to dwell. He knew, dimly, intuitively, that Lucilla’s merciless clarity of outlook had seen Flora less as a voluntary sacrifice than as the self-deluded victim of fanaticism.
But no doubts had crossed the Canon’s mind on Flora’s behalf. He had known no distrust of her craving for self-immolation, no dread of reaction coming too late.
He had thanked God for the dedication of Flora.
The one of his children for whom he had grieved perhaps longest was Valeria. And it was on Valeria that Owen’s thoughts dwelt most gladly. She had purchased reality for herself, and although the price might include his own temporary discomfiture, Quentillian rejoiced in it candidly. Nevertheless, it was Val’s error, and not Val’s achievement, that her father had seen. His hope for her had been the one of ultimate reparation implied in his own favourite words—“All things work together for good.”
And the Canon had quoted those words yet again, when Adrian, his favourite child, had come back to him. His deepest thankfulness had been for the emotional, unstable promise volunteered by Adrian’s impulsive youth.
Quentillian could see no reliance to be placed upon that promise to which the Canon, with such ardent gratitude and joy, had trusted. Adrian would drift, the type that does little harm, if less good. Strength of intellect, as of character, had been denied him. No interest would hold him long, no aim seem to him to be worth sustained effort.
And yet the Canon had felt Adrian, too—perhaps most of all Adrian, in the flush of reconciliation after their estrangement—to be “safe” and “happy.”
Then optimism was merely a veil, drawn across the nakedness of Truth?
From the depths of a profound and ingrained pessimism, Quentillian sought to view the question dispassionately, and felt himself fundamentally unable to do so.
Hard facts and—at best—resignation, or baseless hopes and undaunted courage, such as had been Canon Morchard’s?
The death of the Canon, bereft of all and yet believing himself to possess all, had epitomized his life.
Overhead, sounds and stirrings had begun, and Quentillian softly let himself out of the house and stepped out into the fresh chill of the morning air. His eyelids were stiff and aching from his vigil, and sudden, most unwonted tears filled them. He glanced at the windows of the old house. A light still burned in Lucilla’s, as though the nurse had been able to spare no thought from her ministrations.
Lucilla, the finest and bravest of the Canon’s children, had been broken on the wheel.
In the passionless sorrow that possessed him, Quentillian grasped at the strand of consolation that he knew to exist somewhere. It had been found for him once before, by Canon Morchard.
He found it again, remembering.
Mors janua vitæ.
The Canon had proclaimed it, as a joyful certainty. Approached far otherwise, Owen could yet proclaim it, too, as the supreme and ultimate Fact to be faced, of which the true realization would strike forever the balance between optimism and pessimism.
He turned towards the entrance again, and as he did so the blinds of Canon Morchard’s room were drawn down, by a careful, unseen hand.