The Three Brothers

by Eden Phillpotts

CHAPTER XVII

Humphrey Baskerville had sought for peace by many roads, and when the final large catastrophe of his life fell upon him, it found him treading a familiar path.

He had conceived, that only by limiting the ties of the flesh and trampling love of man from his heart, might one approximate to contentment, fearlessness, and rest. He had supposed that the fewer we love, the less life has power to torment us, and he had envied the passionless, sunless serenity of recorded philosophers and saints. He was glad that, at a time when nature has a large voice in the affairs of the individual and sways him through sense, he had not incurred the customary responsibilities.

Chance threw him but a single child; and when the mother of the child was taken from him, he felt a sort of dreary satisfaction that fate could only strike one more vital blow. He had dwarfed his affections obstinately; he had estimated the power of life to inflict further master sorrows, and imagined that by the death of one human creature alone could added suffering come. So at least he believed before the event. And now that creature was actually dead. Out of the ranks of man, the bullet had found and slain his son.

Yet, when Mark sank to the grave and the first storm of his passing was stilled in the father's heart, great new facts and information, until then denied, fell upon Humphrey Baskerville's darkness and showed him that even this stroke could not sever his spirit from its kind.

The looked-for deliverance did not descend upon him; the universal indifference did not come. Instead his unrest persisted and he found the fabric of his former dream as baseless as all dreaming. Because the alleged saint and the detached philosopher are forms that mask reality; they are poses only possible where the soul suffers from constitutional atrophy or incurred frost-bite.

They who stand by the wayside and watch, are freezing to death instead of burning healthily away. Faulty sentience is not sublime; to be gelded of some natural human instinct is not to stand upon the heights. He who lifts a barrier between himself and life, shall be found no more than an unfinished thing. His ambition for detachment is the craving of disease; his content is the content of unconsciousness; his peace is the peace of the mentally infirm.

A complete man feels; a complete man suffers with all his tingling senses; a complete man smarts to see the world's negligences, ignorances, brutalities; he endures them as wrongs to himself; and, because he is a complete man, he too blunders and adds his errors to the sum of human tribulation, even while he fights with all his power for the increase of human happiness.

The world's welfare is his own; its griefs are also his. He errs and makes atonement; he achieves and helps others to achieve; he loathes the cloister and loves the hearth. He suffers when society is stricken; he mourns when the tide of evolution seems to rest from its eternal task 'of pure ablution round earth's human shores'; he is troubled when transitory victories fall to evil or ignorance; in fine, he lives. And his watch-tower and beacon is not content, not peace, but truth.

He stands as high above the cowardly serenity of any anchorite or chambered thinker, as the star above glimmering and rotten wood in a forest hidden; and he knows that no great heart is ever passionless, or serene, or emparadised beyond the cry of little hearts, until it has begun to grow cold. To be holy to yourself alone is to be nought; a piece of marble makes a better saint; and he who quits the arena to look on, though he may be as wise as the watching gods, is also as useless.

Dimly, out of the cloud of misery that fell upon him when his son perished, Baskerville began to perceive and to feel these facts. He had consoled himself by thinking that the only two beings he loved in the whole world were gone out of it, and now waited together in eternity for his own arrival thither.

Their battle was ended; and since they were at rest, nothing further remained for him to trouble about. But the anticipated peace did not appear; no anodyne poured into his soul; and he discovered, that for his nature, the isolated mental standpoint did not exist.

There could arise no healing epiphany of mental indifference for him. He might be estranged, but to exile himself was impossible. He must always actively hate what he conceived to be evil; he must always suspect human motives; he must always feel the flow and ebb of the human tide. Though his own rocky heart might be lifted above them, the waves of that sea would tune its substance to throb in sympathy, or fret it to beat with antagonism, so long as it pulsed at all.

This discovery surprised the man; for he had believed that a radical neutrality to human affairs belonged to him.

He attributed the sustained restlessness of his spirit to recent griefs and supposed that the storm would presently disappear; and meantime he plunged into a minor whirlwind by falling into the bitterest quarrel with his elder brother.

Nathan indeed he had suffered to depart in peace; but as soon as the bereaved father learned that Vivian's son, Ned, was engaged to Cora, and perceived how it was this fact that had finally killed hope in Mark and induced the unhappy weakling to destroy himself, his rage burst forth against the master of Cadworthy; and when Vivian called upon the evening of the funeral to condole with Humphrey, an enduring strife sprang up between them.

"I'm come as the head of the family, Humphrey," began the veteran, "and it ban't seemly that this here terrible day should pass over your head without any of your kith and kin speaking to you and comforting you. We laid the poor young man along with his mother in the second row of the Baskerville stones. My word! as Gollop said after the funeral, 'even in death the Baskervilles be a pushing family!' Our slates stretch pretty near from the church to the churchyard wall now."

"Thank you for being there," answered his brother. "I couldn't have gone, because of the people. There was no maiming of the rite—eh?"

"Not a word left out—all as it should be. Eight young men carried him, including a farmer or two, and my son Ned, and Heathman Lintern, and also my son Rupert—though where he came from and where he went to after 'twas ended, I don't know, and don't care. He's left me—to better himself—so he thinks, poor fool! A nice way to treat a good father."

"You've lost a son, too, then—lost him to find him again, doing man's work. You'll live to know that he was right and you were wrong. But my son—my mind is turned rather rotten of late. After dark I can't get his dead face out of my eyes. Nought terrible, neither—just, in a word, 'dead.' He broke his neck—he didn't strangle himself. He knew what he was about. But there, I see it. Gone—and none knows what he was to me. He never knew himself; and for that matter I never knew myself, neither—till he was gone."

"We never do know all other folk mean to us—not until they be snatched off. If anybody had told me how my son Rupert's going would have made such a difference, I'd not have believed it."

"Then think of this house. You feel that—you with your store of children and Rupert, after all, but gone a few miles away to go on with his work and marry the proper wife you deny him. But me—nought left—nought but emptiness—no 'Good morning, father'; no 'Good night, father'; no ear to listen; no voice to ask for my advice. And I'd plotted and planned for him, Vivian; I'd made half a hundred little secret plans for him. I knew well the gentle fashion of man he was—not likely ever to make a fighter—and so I'd cast his life in a mould where it could be easy. He'd have come to know in time. But he never did know. He went out of it in a hurry, and never hinted a whisper of what he was going to do. If he'd but given me the chance to argue it out with him!"

"We've acted alike, me and you," answered his brother; "and it ban't for any man to dare to say that either of us was wrong. When the young fall into error, 'tis our bounden duty to speak and save 'em if we've got the power. I don't hold with Rupert——"

"No need to drag in your affairs. That case is very different. I did not treat my son like a child; I did not forbid him to marry and turn him out of doors."

"Stay!" cried Vivian, growing red, "you mustn't speak so to me."

"What did you do if it wasn't that? No proud man can stay under the roof where he's treated like a child. But Mark—did I forbid? No. I only made it clear that I despised the woman he'd set his heart on. I only told him the bitter truth of her. If she'd clung to him through all, would I have turned him away or refused him? Never. 'Twould have made no difference. 'Twas not me kept 'em apart—as you are trying to keep apart your son and Saul Luscombe's niece—trying and failing. 'Twas the proud, empty, heartless female herself that left him."

"I'll hear nought against her," answered Vivian stoutly. "She's not proud and she's not empty. She's a very sensible woman, and this cruel piece of work has been a sad trouble to her. She left Mark because she felt that you hated her, and would torment her and make her married life a scourge to her back. Any woman with proper sense and self-respect would have done the like. 'Twas you and only you choked her off your son, and 'tis vain—'tis wicked to the girl—to say now that 'twas her fault. But I've not come to speak these things—only I won't hear lies told."

"You've heard 'em already, it seems. Who's been telling you this trash? Nathan Baskerville belike?"

"As a matter of fact 'tis my son Ned," answered Vivian. "You must surely know how things have fallen out? It happened long afore poor Mark died. Didn't he tell you?"

"He told me nought. What should he tell me? Ned he certainly wouldn't name, for he knew of all your brood I like your eldest son least—a lazy, worthless man, as all the world well knows but you."

"You shan't anger me, try as you will, Humphrey. I'm here, as your elder brother and the head of the family, to offer sympathy to you in your trouble; and I'll ax you to leave my family alone. Young men will be young men, and as for Ned, if I be the only one that feels as I should feel to him, 'tis because I'm the only one that understands his nature and his gifts. He'll astonish you yet, and all of us. The books he reads! You wait. Soon ripe, soon rotten. He's taking his time, and if he wants a wife, 'tis only in reason that the future head of the family should have a wife; and why not? He shan't have to work as I have worked."

"A fool's word! What made you all you are? Work and the love of it. Yet you let him go to the devil in idleness."

"If you'd but suffer me to finish my speech—I say that Ned won't work as I have worked—with my limbs and muscles. He's got a brain, and the time be coming when he'll use it."

"Never."

"Anyway a settled life is the first thing, and the mind free to follow its proper bent. And I don't say 'no' to his marrying, because the case is different from Rupert's, and 'tis fitting that he should do so."

"But Rupert must not. And you pass for a just and sensible man!"

"'Tis strange—something in the Baskerville character that draws her—but so it is," continued the master of Cadworthy, ignoring his brother's last remark. "In a word, when he found she was free, my Ned took up with Cora Lintern, and she's going to marry him. But 'tis to be a full year from this sad Christmas—I bargained for that and will have it so."

"'Going to take him'? Going to take your son!" cried the other.

"She is; and I sanction it; for I found her a very different maiden to what you did."

"Going to marry Ned! Going from my Mark to your Ned!"

"'Twas settled some time ago. Mark knew it, for I myself let it out to him when I met him one day in North Wood. 'Twas but two days afore his last breath, poor fellow. Of course, I thought that he knew all about it, and as it was understood that he had got over his loss very bravely and was cheerful and happy as usual again, I made nothing of the matter, thinking that was the best way to take it."

Humphrey stared at him.

"Go on—you're letting in the light," he said.

"That's all—all save this. When I told Mark that Cora was going to wed his cousin, I saw by his face 'twas news for him. His colour faded away. Then I knew that he hadn't heard about it. Accident had kept it from him till the matter was a week old."

"And he said——?"

"He just said something stammering like. He was a bit of a kick-hammer in his speech sometimes—nothing to name; but it would overtake him now and again if he was very much excited. I didn't catch just what the words were—something about one of the family having her, I think 'twas."

"Then he went and killed himself, and not till then. So 'twas your son after all as settled him—don't roar me down, for I'll be heard. Your son—all his work! He plotted and planned it. And lazy I thought him! And I might have known there's no such thing as laziness of mind and body both. Busy as a bee damning himself—damning himself, I tell you! A shifty traitor, a man to stab other men in the back, a knave and the vilest thing that ever bore our name. And you know it—you know it as well as I do."

"By God! this is too much," shouted out Vivian, rising to his feet and towering over the crouching figure opposite him. "What are you made of to say such vile things of an innocent man? You see life all awry; you see——

"I see a hard-hearted, blind old fool," answered the other. "You let your wretched son rob you of justice and reason and sense and everything. Get hence! I'll have no more of you. But your time will come; you'll suffer yet; and this godless, useless brute—this murderer—will murder you yourself, maybe, or murder your love of living at the least. Wait and watch him a little longer. He'll bring your grey hairs with sorrow to the grave afore he's done with you—take my word for that. And as for me, I'll curse him to his dying day, and curse you for breeding him! Wait and watch what you've done and the fashion of man you've let loose on the world; and let them marry—the sooner the better—then his punishment's brewed and there's no escape from the drinking. Yes, let him eat and drink of her, for man's hate can't wish him a worse meal than that."

He ceased because he was alone. Vivian had felt a terrible danger threatening him, and had fled from it.

"My anger heaved up like seven devils in me," he told his wife afterwards. "If I'd bided a moment longer I must have struck the man. So I just turned tail and bolted afore the harm was done. Not but what harm enough be done. Mad—mad he was by the froth on his lip and the light in his eye, and them awful eyebrows twitching like an angry ape's. 'Twas more a wild beast in a tantrum than a human. 'Tis all over, and no fault of mine. I'll never speak to thicky horrible creature no more so long as I live—never. And I'll not willingly so much as set eyes upon him again."

"A very Pharaoh of a man, no doubt," declared Mrs. Baskerville. "The Lord has hardened his heart against us; but He'll soften it in His own good time. Though for that matter 'tis difficult to see how he can be struck again. His all be took from him."

Vivian considered this saying, but it did not shake his intention.

"He's growed dangerous and desperate, and 'twill be wiser that I see him no more," he answered. "He's flung my sympathy back in my face, and that's a sort of blow leaves a bruise that a long life's self can't medicine."

"'Twill come right. Time will heal it," she told him.

But he was doubtful.

"There may not be time," he said. "The man won't live long at the gait he's going—burning away with misery, he is. And calls himself a Christian! Little enough comfort the poor soul sucks out of Christ."

Within a week of this incident Humphrey Baskerville was seeking his brother's society again—a thing of all others least likely to have happened. It fell out that he was walking as usual on the waste above Hawk House, when he saw his nephew Rupert proceeding hastily along the distant road to Cadworthy Farm. The young man noted him, left his way and approached.

"'Tis well I met you, uncle," he said. "Young Humphrey's just ridden over to you with a message from mother. Then he came on to me. There's terrible trouble at home—father, I mean. You know what he is for doing heavy work—work beyond his years, of course. He was shifting grain from the loft, and they found him fallen and insensible with a sack on top of him. I hope to God it ban't very bad. Mother sent off for me, for fear it might be a fatal thing. And Humphrey says my name was on father's lips when they laid him to bed after doctor had gone. He said, 'This be Rupert's fault. I be driven to this heavy work along of him leaving me, and now he's killed me.' I'm sure I hope he'll call that back, for 'tis a terrible thing for me to live under if he died."

"I'll come along with you," said Mr. Baskerville; "and as to what your father may have spoken in his anger at being stricken down, pay no heed to it. He's like a silly boy over these feats of strength, and he'd have shifted the sacks just the same if you'd been there. The thing he said isn't true, and there's an end on it. He'll be sorry he uttered the word when he's better."

They hurried forward and presently stood at the door of Cadworthy.

"You'd best knock afore you enter," said the elder. "We're both in disgrace here, and come as strangers. I had a difference with your father last time we met. Ned Baskerville is tokened to that woman that killed Mark. I could not hear and keep dumb. I cursed my brother in my rage, and I owe him an apology."

Rupert knocked at the door, and his sister May answered it. Her eyelids were red with tears and her manner agitated.

"How's your father?" asked Humphrey.

"Very bad, uncle. 'Tis a great doubt if he'll get better, doctor says."

"Then be sure he will. I've come to see him."

Mrs. Baskerville appeared behind May. She was very pale, but appeared collected.

"I'm sorry—terrible sorry," she said. "I've told dear master that I'd sent for Rupert and for you, Humphrey, but he won't see neither of you. 'Tis no good arguing about it in his state; but I pray God he'll change his mind to-morrow."

Rupert kissed his mother.

"Bear up," he said. "With his strength and great courage he'll weather it, please God. You know where I am—not five mile away. I'll come running the moment he'll see me."

"And ask him to forgive his brother. I'm sorry I said the things I did," declared Humphrey Baskerville.

A pony cart drove up at this moment and Eliza Gollop alighted from it.

She carried a large brown-paper parcel, and a corded box was lifted out after her.

"I've come," she said. "Doctor left a message for me as he went back along, and I was ready as usual. How's the poor man going on? I'm afraid you must not be very hopeful—so doctor said on his way back; but where there's life and me there's always hope, as my brother Thomas will have it."

Humphrey and his nephew walked slowly away together. At the confines of the farmyard Rupert turned out of the road a little and pointed upwards to a window that faced the east. A white blind was drawn down over it.

"That's father's room," he said.