CHAPTER III
THE LETTERS
A week later there was no doubt that Archelaus was dying. He had passed the week only half-conscious—some spring both in the machinery of his splendid old body and his brain seemed as though they had given way together. He lay dying, and Ishmael, standing day by day beside the bed, looking down on the seamed, battered, gnarled thing that lay there so helplessly, felt a stirring of something new towards Archelaus. It was not any touch of that irrational affection that very easily affected people experience for those they have never really liked and yet towards whom they feel a warm outflow merely because of the approach of death; neither was it any regret that he had not loved Archelaus in life. That would have been absurd; there had been nothing to make him like his brother and everything to make him do the reverse, and he was not of those whose values are upset by approaching death. But his antipathy for Archelaus had all his life been so deep, if not so very violent a thing, that it had hitherto prevented him feeling towards him even as amicably as one human being naturally feels towards another. This was the change that took place now—he was not enabled to yearn over a brother, but he was, for the first time, able to look with the detached impersonal sympathy and kindliness of one man towards another whom he has no particular reason to dislike. A profound pity wrung his heart as he looked—the pity he would have felt from the beginning if Archelaus had ever let him, the pity which had prompted his forbearance at the time of the bush-beating in the wood.
This broken old man had wandered all his days; he had lived all over the earth and called no place his, even as he had possessed many women and yet called none his own. That such had been his nature and would have been even under other circumstances did not at this pass make the wanderings less pitiful. For the whole time that sense of wrong had kept telling him that he ought to have one special place for his own, and that one the place where he was born, which his father had held before him. Looking down on him, Ishmael wondered what it was that had driven him back to it at the latter end, whether it were blind instinct or some more reasoned prompting. He was soon to know, for on the day a week after Archelaus had been brought home he seemed to become himself again in mind and demanded to see his brother alone.
Ishmael went upstairs and into the bedroom.
Archelaus lay in the big bed, looking smaller than seemed possible; his face, deep in the pillows, jutted sharply between the mounds of whiteness with an effect as of some gaunt old bird of prey. His hands and long corded wrists looked discoloured against the sheet. Ishmael went across to the bed and sat down beside it. Archelaus was very still; only his eyes glittered as they stared up at Ishmael from between his thickly veined lids.
"You wanted to see me," said Ishmael. His voice was expressionless, but not from any hard feeling on his part. It seemed to him as he sat there that nothing as vigorous as animosity could be left alive between them—both old, both frail, both drawing near to sleep. And yet, as their eyes stared into each other's, some tremor of the old distaste still seemed to communicate itself….
Archelaus began to speak, very slowly, very low, so that Ishmael had to stoop forward to hear, but each word was distinct, and evidently with that extraordinary clarity that comes sometimes to the dying, even to those whose brains have been troubled, the old man knew what he was saying.
"I want to tell 'ee," said Archelaus. Ishmael stayed bent forward, attentive.
"What do 'ee suppose I came back for?" asked Archelaus—and this time there was definite malice in voice and look; "because I loved 'ee so?"
"No, I never thought that. I wondered rather … and I thought it was just that—" he broke off. Archelaus finished the sentence for him.
"That I was old and wandering in my wits, and came home as a dog does? No; it wasn't that. I came home to tell 'ee something—something I've hid in my heart for years past, something that'll make I laugh if I find myself in hell!"
Ishmael waited in silence. When he again began to speak it was as though
Archelaus were wandering away from the point which he had in mind.
"You've set a deal of store by Cloom, haven't you, Ishmael?" he asked.
Ishmael nodded. Archelaus went on:
"Not just for Cloom, is it? To hand it on better'n you got it—to have your own flesh and blood to give it to? To a man as is a man it wouldn't be so much after all wi'out that?"
Again Ishmael assented. Again Archelaus went on without any fumbling after words, as though all his life he had known what he was going to say at this moment. He lifted his hand and began fumbling at the neck of his nightshirt. Ishmael guessed what he was wanting, for when he had been undressed they had found a little flat oilskin bag slung around his neck which they had left there. Now he bent forward, and, loosening the shirt, lifted out the bag. In obedience to a nod from Archelaus, he took out his knife and, cutting the dark, greasy string that looked as though it had rested there for years, slipped the bag from off it. Then, still in obedience to Archelaus, he slit the oil-silk and a few discoloured letters fell out. He gathered them up from off the coverlet and waited.
"Read," said Archelaus. Ishmael dived into a pocket for his spectacles, found them, adjusted them, and began to turn over the letters. Archelaus pointed to one with his trembling old finger. "That first," he whispered; "take that one first." Then, as Ishmael settled himself to read, he added with a low chuckle: "Knaw the writen', do 'ee?"
It had seemed vaguely familiar to Ishmael, but no more, and not even now could he say whose it was. It was very old-fashioned writing and very characterless, the hand which had in his youth been called "Italian," and it seemed to him to have nothing distinctive about it. "Never mind," said Archelaus as he shook his head; "you'll knaw fast enough. Read."
This is what Ishmael read by the evening light that flooded the room:
"Dear Archelaus," ran the letter, "I don't know whatever I shall do. I wish I was dead. Why did you come back and trouble me? There were plenty of women where you came from. You have told me about them often enough. I never wanted you to make love to me. I never liked it, only I couldn't help it. And now there's a baby coming and he hasn't been near me for over two months. He seems as though he didn't want me any more, and I don't know what to do, because now he'll have to know…."
Ishmael read so far, and though he did not understand what he read, and it sent no rush of knowledge over his soul, yet a deadly sense of fear, of yet he knew not what, sent his heart pounding through his frame. The letter fell to his knee and Archelaus, watching, said:
"I told her to speak 'ee soft and let her lil' body lie against 'ee…."
Ishmael picked up the letter again, looked from the date—the month of January, in 1868—to the signature, "Phoebe Ruan," before he let the letter drop again. Still he said nothing, and after a minute Archelaus went on.
"Read the next," he said.
The next was but a further plaint, signed with Phoebe's name, in a rather more uneven hand. Ishmael found himself remembering, as his eye met them again, her little tricks with the pen—the wandering tails to her words, the elaborate capitals which gave a touch of individuality to the regular slanting lines. He picked up the last letter.
"Dear Archelaus," it began—Phoebe would never have suffered sufficiently from a sense of fitness to alter the conventional beginning, whatever the stress under which she wrote—"I have done it, and now he need never know unless you tell him, and you won't ever, will you, dear, dear Archelaus? Please promise me."
"Did you promise?" was all Ishmael's voice asked.
Archelaus stirred a little in the bed.
"I promised never to hurt her by tellen' 'ee," he said. There was a moment of silence, and then he broke into vehement speech. Even his voice had gathered strength; it was as though in the full flood of what was sweeping out of him, after being dammed for so many years, all physical disabilities were washed away.
"Aw, what do 'ee think I ded it for?" he asked; "for love of Phoebe? Her!… I could have got as good at any brothel to Penzance…. It wasn't for love I ded it; it was for hate. Hate of 'ee, Ishmael! To get my revenge, and for you not to knaw till it was too late, much too late, to cast her off or the child. I wanted to wait till the boy should be the warld to 'ee … till he had grown as your own soul, and you saw his son ready to come after him and thought it was your own flesh and blood you was leaving behind you, and you too old to leave any other…. Cloom's been yours all your life, but when you and I are both on us dead and rotting, it'll be I and not you who's living on at Cloom. So 'tes mine, after all, not yours…."
A moment later and the triumphant voice went on again.
"There's another letter," it said, "from your old Parson. I wrote to he after I'd met Nicky—my son—casual-like once in Canada. That's what he answered."
Again Ishmael picked up the letter, almost mechanically, and read:
"I have received your letter dated July, 1891. I cannot find words to write to you as I would wish. If what you tell me is true—and I do not think you could have invented the letters of which you send me copies—it would matter very little if I found the pen of men and of angels to tell you what I thought. I can only tell you that even if the wish is wicked I hope with all my heart, and pray it too, that you may never be allowed to come home to tell your brother what it is in your heart to tell him. That the boy may never in his turn have a son to gratify you with the sight of your grandchild at Cloom. That this weapon you have forged against your brother may be under Providence to your own undoing. And since the ways of God are mysterious—though I am tempted to say not as past finding out as the ways of man—even if you carry out your threat it may be that Ishmael will be given strength to withstand the horror of what you tell him, and that the Lord has a comfort for him in ways you could not understand, so that you will be robbed of all but an empty victory…."
As Ishmael slowly and with meticulous care put the letters safely on to the bed a step was heard coming along the passage, the step of Nicky, the only step in that house which was both that of a man and vigorous. Archelaus turned his head a little on the pillow, and Ishmael, for the first time showing any emotion, leant towards him. "If you say a word to him—" he began. The steps paused at the door and then went on again. Ishmael stayed bent forward, eyes sidelong. Archelaus began to speak, as though his mind had drifted backwards from the acuteness of the present.
"All these years …" he muttered, "all these years … wandering auver the earth, I've thought on it…. Phoebe, she was a light woman and many was the time I'd held her lil' body to mine, but she was soft as a lil' lamb fresh from its mother, so she was…. The likes of you wants too much from a woman; I was never one of they chaps. If a woman was lil' and soft, said I—"
"Archelaus," said Ishmael, speaking very distinctly and bending over the old man to try and attract his wandering attention, "when you came back from California, had you it in your mind to do this thing?"
He had to repeat the question, and at last Archelaus showed a gleam of knowledge. "When I came back from Californy …" he murmured, "I came back, so I ded…. No, I'd forgot all about her then, sure enough; she was but a soft lil' thing. But he'd got her, him as had taken all of mine, got the wench as had been mine, that I might ha' wanted again, and I was mad as fire. And then I was glad of it, for I saw my way, if so be as I could only get a cheild by her…." He turned a little on his pillows towards Ishmael and became confidential. "That was my fear," he went on, "that I'd go wi' her again and no cheild 'ud come any more than it had afore. But there's often a change in women after a few years, and besides … I'd not wanted to get 'en afore. I knew I'd get 'en that time, and I ded. She was some whisht, she was, weth you and your fine gentleman ways of not sleeping along o' she, when she found the way she was in…." He laughed, a tiny, little old thread-like laugh, as out of the trough of the years there floated up to him Phoebe's predicament and his advice as to how to meet it—a thin little thread of laughter that spanned the years and connected that time of which he spoke with this present moment by the bed of death. The laugh died away and fell again into the abysses from which it had been evoked, and there only hung a silence in the room, but it was a silence thin, brittle as glass.
His lids drooped. Over his fast dimming brain the films of approaching dissolution began to swirl, now thick and fast, now tenuous again, so that he recognised Ishmael and what had happened for a fleeting moment during which the old glee peeped out of his blurred eyes. Then he drifted into sleep with the suddenness of an infant, a sleep quite peaceful, as of one who has accomplished well his task and now may rest. Ishmael sat on by the bed; sometimes he looked at him, even laid his fingers on his pulse to make sure, with as much mechanical care as ever, that he was indeed only sleeping. He sat on where he was, but with his eyes staring out of the window, though they hardly saw the rolling fields that lay, a burnished green, beneath the evening light. Once a step came again to the door, and a voice asked if everything were all right. Ishmael answered "Yes," bidding the questioner go away, and he never knew that it had been Nicky's voice which asked.