CHAPTER VII
TELLING HOW CHARLES VERITY LOOKED ON THE MOTHER OF HIS SON
"Which is equivalent to saying, 'Hear the conclusion of the whole matter,' isn't it, McCabe?"
Dr. McCabe's square, hairy-backed hands fumbled with the stethoscope as he pushed it into his breast pocket, and, in replying, his advertised cheerfulness rang somewhat false.
"Not so fast, Sir Charles—in the good Lord's name, not so fast. While there's life there's hope, it's me settled opinion. I'm never for signing a patient's death-warrant before the blessed soul of him's entirely parted company with its mortal tenement of clay. The normal human being takes a mighty lot of killing in my experience, where the will to live is still intact. Let alone that you can never be quite upsides with Nature. Ah! she's an astonishing box of tricks to draw on where final dissolution's concerned. She glories to turn round on your pathological and biological high science; and, while you're measuring a man for his coffin, to help him give death the slip."
Charles Verity slightly shifted his position—and that with singular carefulness—against the pillows in the deep red-covered chair. His hands, inert and bluish about the finger-tips, lay along the padded arms of it. The jacket of his grey-and-white striped flannel sleeping-suit was unfastened at the throat, showing the irregular lift and fall of his chest with each laboured breath. His features were accentuated, his face drawn and of a surprising pallor.
The chair, in which he sat, had been brought forward into the wide arc of the great window forming the front of the room. Two bays of this stood open down to the ground. Looking out, beyond the rich brown of the newly-turned earth in the flower-beds, the lawn stretched away—a dim greyish green, under the long shadows cast by the hollies masking the wall on the left, and glittering, powdered by myriads of scintillating dewdrops, where the early sunshine slanted down on it from between their stiff pinnacles and sharply serrated crests.
In the shrubberies robins sang, shrilly sweet. A murmur of waves, breaking at the back of the Bar, hung in the chill, moist, windless air. Presently a handbarrow rumbled and creaked, as West—the head gardener, last surviving relic of Thomas Clarkson Verity's reign—wheeled it from beneath the ilex trees towards the battery, leaving dark smudgy tracks upon the spangled turf.
Arrived at his objective, the old gardener, with most admired deliberation, loaded down long-handled birch-broom, rake and hoe; and applied himself to mysterious peckings and sweeping of the gravel around the wooden carriages of the little cannon and black pyramid of ball.—Man, tools, and barrow were outlined against the pensive brightness of autumn sea and autumn sky, which last, to southward, still carried remembrance of sunrise in a broad band of faint yellowish pink, fading upward into misty azure and barred with horizontal pencillings of tarnished silver cloud.
Thus far Charles Verity had watched the progress of the bowed, slow-moving figure musingly. But now, as the iron of the hoe clinked against the gravel flints, he came back, so to say, to himself and back to the supreme question at issue. He looked up, his eyes and the soundless ironic laughter resident in them, meeting McCabe's twinkling, cunning yet faithful and merry little eyes, with a flash.
"The work of the world is not arrested," he said. "See, that octogenarian, old West. He wheeled ill-oiled, squeaking barrows and hacked at the garden paths when I was a Harchester boy. He wheels the one and hacks at the other even yet—a fact nicely lowering to one's private egotism, when you come to consider it. Why, then, my good friend, perjure yourself or strive to mince matters? The work of the world will be done whether I'm here to direct the doing of it or not.—Granted I am tough and in personal knowledge of ill-health a neophyte. My luck throughout has been almost uncanny. Neither in soldiering nor in sport, from man or from beast, have I ever suffered so much as a scratch. I have borne a charmed life—established a record for invulnerability, which served me well in the East where the gods still walk in the semblance of man and miracle is still persistently prevalent. Accident has passed me by—save for being laid up once, nearly thirty years ago, with a broken ankle in the house of some friends at Poonah."
He ceased speaking, checking, as it seemed, disposition to further disclosure; while the soundless laughter in his eyes found answering expression upon his lips, curving them, to a somewhat bitter smile beneath the flowing moustache.
"In to-day's enforced idleness how persistently cancelled episodes and emotions rap, ghostly, on the door demanding and gaining entrance!" he presently said. "Must we take it, Doctor, that oblivion is a fiction, merciful forgetfulness an illusion; and that every action, every desire—whether fulfilled or not—is printed indelibly upon one's memory, merely waiting the hour of weakness and physical defeat to show up?"
"The Lord only knows!" McCabe threw off, a little hopelessly. This was the first utterance approaching complaint; and he deplored it for his patient's sake. He didn't like that word defeat.
Then, to his hearer's relief with a softened accent, Charles Verity took up his former theme.
"Save for a trifling go of fever now and again, illness has given me the go-by equally with accident. But, for all my ignorance of such afflictions I know, beyond all shadow of doubt, that a few repetitions of the experience of last night must close any man's account. Experiment is more enlightening than argument. There is no shaking the knowledge you arrive at through it."
McCabe, standing at ease by the open window, untidy, hirsute, unkempt, rammed his hands down into his gaping trouser pockets and nodded unwilling agreement.
"The attack was bad," he said. "I'm not denying it was murderously bad. And all the harder on you because, but for the one defaulting organ, your heart, you're as sound as a bell. You're a well enough man to put up a good fight; and that, you see, cuts both ways, be danged to it."
"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.—You know as well as I do the Indian appointment will never be gazetted."
"There you have me, Sir Charles, loath though I am to admit as much. I'd be a liar if I denied it would not."
"How long do you give me then? Months, or only weeks?"
"That depends in the main on yourself, in as far as I can presume to pronounce. With care"—
"Which means sitting still here"—
"It does."
Charles Verity raised his shoulders the least bit.
"Not good enough, McCabe," he declared, "not good enough. There are rites to be duly performed, words to be said, which I refuse to neglect. Oh, no, don't misunderstand me. I don't need professional help to accomplish my dying. Were I a member of your communion it might be different, but I require no much-married parsonic intermediary to make my peace with God. I am but little troubled regarding that. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?—Nevertheless, there remain rites to be decently performed. I must make my peace with man—and still more with woman—before I go hence and am no more seen. But, look here, I have no wish to commit myself too soon, and risk the bathos of an anti-climax by having to perform them twice, repeat them at a later date.—So how long do you give me—weeks? Too generous an estimate? A week, then or—well—less?"
"You want it straight?"
"I want it straight."
"More likely days. God grant I am mistaken. With your fine constitution, as I tell you, you are booked to put up a good fight. All the same, to be honest, Sir Charles, it was touch and go more than once last night."
In the room an interval of silence, and without song of the robins and murmur of the sea, nearer now and louder as the rising tide lapped up the sands at the back of the Bar. The faint yellow-pink after-thought of sunrise and pencillings of tarnished cloud alike had vanished into the all-obtaining misty blue of the upper sky. Heading for the French coast, a skein of wild geese passed in wedge-shaped formation with honking cries and the beat of strong-winged flight. The barrow creaked again, wheeled some few yards further along the battery walk.
"Thanks—so I supposed," Sir Charles Verity calmly said.
He stretched himself, falling into a less constrained and careful posture. Leaned his elbow on the chair-arm, his chin in the hollow of his hand, crossed the right leg over the left.
"Twenty-four hours will give me time for all which is of vital importance. The rest must, and no doubt perfectly will, arrange itself.—Oh! I'll obey you within reasonable limits, McCabe. I have no craving to hurry the inevitable conclusion. These last hours possess considerable significance and charm—an impressiveness even, which it would be folly to thrust aside or waste."
Once more he looked up, his tone and expression devoid now of all bitterness.
"I propose to savour their pleasant qualities to the full. So make yourself easy, my good fellow," he continued with an admirable friendliness. "Go and get your breakfast. Heaven knows you've most thoroughly earned it, and a morning pipe of peace afterwards.—The bell upon the small table?—Yes—oh, yes—and Hordle within earshot. I've everything I require; and, at the risk of seeming ungrateful, shall be glad enough of a respite from this course of food and drink, potions and poultices—remedial to the delinquent flesh no doubt, but a notable weariness to the-spirit.—And, see here, report to the two ladies, my sister and—and Damaris, that you leave me in excellent case, free of discomfort, resting for a time before girding up my loins to meet the labours of the day."
Charles Verity closed his eyes in intimation of dismissal, anxious to be alone the better to reckon with that deeper, final loneliness which confronted him just now in all its relentless logic.
For, though his mind remained lucid, self-realized and observant, his control of its action and direction was incomplete owing to bodily fatigue. Hence it lay open to assault, at the mercy of a thousand and one crowding thoughts and perceptions. And over these he desired to gain ascendency—to drive, rather than be driven by them. The epic of his three-score years, from its dim, illusive start to this dramatic and inexorable finish—but instantly disclosed to him in the reluctant admissions of the good-hearted Irish doctor—flung by at a double, in coloured yet incoherent progression, so to speak, now marching to triumphant blare of trumpet, now to roll of muffled drum. Which incoherence came in great measure of the inalienable duality of his own nature—passion and austerity, arrogance and self-doubt, love—surpassing most men's capacity of loving—and a defacing strain of cruelty, delivering stroke and counter-stroke. From all such tumult he earnestly sought to be delivered; since not the thing accomplished—whether for fame, for praise or for remorse—not, in short, what has been, but what was, and still more what must soon be, did he need, at this juncture, dispassionately to contemplate.
That sharp-toothed disappointment gnawed him, is undeniable, when he thought of the culminating gift of happy fortune, royally satisfying to ambition, as unexpectedly offered him as, through his own unlooked-for and tragic disability, it was unexpectedly withdrawn. But disappointment failed to vex him long. A more wonderful journey than any possible earthly one, a more majestic adventure than that of any oriental proconsulship, awaited him. For no less a person than Death issued the order—an order there is no disobeying. He must saddle up therefore, bid farewell, and ride away.
Nor did he flinch from that ride with Death, the black captain, as escort, any more than, during the past night, he had flinched under the grip of mortal pain. For some persons the call to endurance brings actual pleasure—of a grim heroic kind. It did so to Charles Verity. And not only this conscious exercise of fortitude, this pride of bearing bodily anguish, but a strange curiosity worked to sustain him. The novelty of the experience, in both cases, excited and held his interest, continued to exercise it and to hold.
Now, as in solitude his mental atmosphere acquired serenity and poise—the authority of the past declining—this matter of death increasingly engrossed him. For it trenches on paradox, surely, that the one absolutely certain event in every human career is also the most unexplored and practically incredible.—An everyday occurrence, a commonplace, concerning which there remains nothing new, nothing original, to be written, sung or said; yet a mystery still inviolate, aching with the alarm of the undiscovered, the unpenetrated, to each individual, summoned to accept its empire! He had sent others to their death. Now his own turn came and he found it, however calmly considered, a rather astounding business. An ending or a beginning?—Useless, after all, to speculate. The worst feature of it, not improbably, this same preliminary loneliness, this stripping naked, no smallest comfort left you of human companionship, or even of humble material keepsake from out the multitude of your familiar possessions here in the dear accustomed human scene.
The gates of death open. You pass them. They close behind you. And what then?—The whole hierarchy of heaven, the whole company of your forerunners thither—beloved and honoured on earth—may be gathered to hail the homing soul within those amazing portals; or it may drop, as a stone into a well, down the blank nothingness of the abyss.—Of all gambles invented by God, man or devil—so he told himself—this daily, hourly gamble of individual dissolution is the biggest. Man's heart refuses the horror of extinction, while his intellect holds the question in suspense. We hope. We believe. From of old fair promises have been made us; and, granted the gift of faith, hope and belief neighbour upon assurance. But certainty is denied. No mortal, still clothed in flesh, has known, nor—the accumulated science of the ages notwithstanding—does know, actually and exactly, that which awaits it.
Thus, anyhow, in the still, tender brightness of the autumn morning, while Nature and men alike pursued their normal activities and occupations, did this singular matter appear to Charles Verity—he, himself, arbitrarily cut off from all such activities and occupations in the very moment of high fruition. Had death been a less eminent affair, or less imminent, the sarcasm of his position might have seemed gross to the point of insult. But, the longer he envisaged it, the more did the enduring enigma and its accompanying uncertainty allure. Not as victim, but rather as conqueror of the final terror, did he begin to regard himself.
Meanwhile, though reason continued to hold the balance even between things positively known and things imagined only and hoped for, the god-ward impulse strengthened in him. Not by conscious or convincing argument from within, but by all-powerful compulsion from without, was his thought borne onward and upward to increasing confidence. So that he asked himself—as so many another, still unwearied, still enamoured of attainment, has asked in like case—whether impending divorce of soul and body may not confer freedom of a wider range and nobler quality, powers more varied and august than the mind, circumscribed by conditions of time and sense, has yet conception of?
To him such development seemed possible—certainly. Probable?—Ah, well, perhaps—perhaps. Which brought him back to his former contention, that its inherent loneliness constitutes the bitterest sting of death. Smiling, he quoted the ancient, divinely tender saying: "There is a child in each one of us which cries at the dark."
While, in swift reaction, he yearned towards battle where amid the fierce and bloody glory of the fight, souls of heroes troop forth together, shouting, into everlasting day or—sceptical reason shaking a sadly sage head once again—into everlasting night.
He stretched out his hand instinctively for the bell on the little table at his elbow. Hordle answered his summons, grey of countenance from alarm, anxiety, and broken rest.
"Let Miss Damaris know I shall be glad to see her when she is free to come to me," he said.
And here, although our damsel's reputation for courage and resource may, thereby, sustain some damage, I am constrained to state that while in the sick-room Miss Felicia shone, Damaris gave off but a vacillating and ineffective light.
Imagination is by no means invariably beneficent. The very liveliness of the perceptions which it engenders may intimidate and incapacitate. Upon Damaris imagination practised this mischief. Becoming, for the time, that upon which she looked, sharing every pang and even embroidering the context, she weakened, in some sort, to the level of the actual sufferer, helpless almost as he through the drench of overwhelming sympathy. She had been taken, poor child, at so villainous a disadvantage. Without preparation or warning—save of the most casual and inadequate—her humour wayward, she a trifle piqued, fancying her pretty clothes, her pretty looks, excited, both by the brilliant prospect presented by the Indian appointment and by her delicate passage of arms with Carteret, she was compelled of a sudden to witness the bodily torment of a human being, not only by her beloved beyond all others, but reverenced also. The impression she received was of outrage, almost of blasphemy. The cruelty of life lay uncovered, naked and open to her appalled and revolted consciousness. She received a moral, in addition to a physical shock, utterly confounding in its crudity, its primitive violence.
The ravage of pain can be, in great measure, surmounted and concealed; but that baser thing, functional disturbance—in this case present as heart spasm, threatening suffocation, with consequent agonized and uncontrollable struggle for breath—defies concealment. This manifestation horrified Damaris. The more so that, being unacquainted with the sorry spectacle of disease, her father, under the deforming stress of it, appeared to her as a stranger almost—inaccessible to affection, hideously removed from her and remote. His person and character, to her distracted observation, were altered beyond recognition except during intervals, poignant to the verge of heart-break, when passing ease restored his habitual dignity and grace.
Thus, while Miss Felicia and Carteret—with Hordle and Mary Fisher as assistants—ministered to his needs in as far as ministration was possible, she stood aside, consumed by misery, voluntarily effacing herself. Backed away even against the wall, out of range of the lamp-light, stricken, shuddering, and mute. Upon Dr. McCabe's arrival and assumption of command, Carteret, finding himself at liberty to note her piteous state, led her out into the passage and then to the long drawing-room, with gentle authority. There for a half-hour or more—to him sadly and strangely sweet—he sat beside her, while the tears silently coursed down her cheeks, letting her poor proud head rest against his shoulder, his arm supporting her gracious young body still clothed in all the bravery of her flowered silken sunshine dress.
Later, Mary bringing more favourable news of Sir Charles—pain and suffocation having yielded for the time being to McCabe's treatment—Carteret persuaded her to go upstairs and let the said Mary put her to bed. Once there she slept the sleep of exhaustion, fatigue and sorrow mercifully acting as a soporific, her capacity for further thought or feeling literally worn out.
During that session in the drawing-room Damaris, to his thankfulness, had asked no questions of him. All she demanded child-like, in her extremity, had been the comfort and security of human contact. And this he gave her simply, ungrudgingly, with a high purity of understanding, guiltless of any shadow of embarrassment or any after-thought. Their lighter, somewhat enigmatic relation of the earlier evening was extinguished, swamped by the catastrophe of Charles Verity's illness. Exactly in how far she gauged the gravity of that illness and its only too likely result, or merely wept, unnerved by the distressing outward aspect of it, Carteret could not determine. But he divined, and rightly, that she was in process of ranging herself, at least subconsciously, with a new and terrible experience which, could she learn the lesson of it aright would temper her nature to worthy issues.
Hence, with a peculiar and tender interest, he watched her when, coming down in the morning, he found her already in the dining-room, the pleasant amenities of a well-ordered, hospitable house and household abundantly evident.
Whatever the tragic occurrences of the last twelve hours, domestic discipline was in no respect relaxed. The atmosphere of the room distilled a morning freshness. Furniture and flooring shone with polish, a log fire, tipped by dancing flames, burned in the low wide grate. Upon the side-table, between the westward facing windows, a row of silver chafing-dishes gave agreeable promise of varied meats; as did the tea and coffee service, arrayed before Damaris, of grateful beverage. While she herself looked trim, and finished in white silk shirt and russet-red suit, her toilet bearing no sign of indifference or of haste.
That her complexion matched her shirt in colour—or rather in all absence of it—that her face was thin, its contours hardened, her eyebrows drawn into a little frown, her eyes enormous, sombre and clouded as with meditative thought, increased, in Carteret's estimation, assurance of her regained self-mastery and composure. Nor did a reticence in her manner displease him.
"I have persuaded Aunt Felicia to breakfast upstairs," she told him. "Dr. McCabe sends me word he—my father—wishes to rest for the present, so I engaged Aunt Felicia to rest too. She was wonderful."
Damaris' voice shook slightly, as did her hand lifting the coffee-pot.
"She stayed up all night. So did you, I'm afraid, didn't you,
Colonel Sahib?"
"Oh, for me that was nothing. A bath, a change, and ten minutes out there on the battery watching the sun come up over the sea," Carteret said. "So don't waste compassion on me. I'm as fit as a fiddle and in no wise deserve it."
"Ah! but you and Aunt Felicia did stay," she repeated, her hands still rather tremulously busy with coffee-pot and milk jug. "You were faithful and I no better than a shirker. I fell through, miserably lost myself, which was selfish, contemptible. I am ashamed. Only I was so startled. I never really knew before such—such things could be.—Forgive me, Colonel Sahib. I have been to Aunt Felicia and asked her forgiveness already.—And don't think too meanly of me, please. The shirking is over and done with for always. You may trust me it never will happen again—my losing myself as I did last night, I mean."
In making this appeal for leniency, her eyes met Carteret's fairly for the first time; and he read in them, not without admiration and a twinge of pain, both the height of her new-born, determined valour and the depth of her established distress.
"You needn't tell me that, you needn't tell me that, dear witch," he answered quickly. "I was sure of it all along. I knew it was just a phase which would have no second edition. So put any question of shame or need of forgiveness out of your precious head. You were rushed up against circumstances, against a revelation, calculated to stagger the most seasoned campaigner. You did not shirk; but it took you a little time to get your bearings. That was all. Don't vex your sweet soul with quite superfluous reproaches.—Sugar? Yes, and plenty of it I am afraid.—But you, too, must eat."
And on her making some show of repugnance—
"See here, we can't afford to despise the day of small things, of minor aids to efficiency, dearest witch," he wisely admonished her.
Whereupon, emulous to please him, bending her will to his, Damaris humbled herself to consumption of a portion of the contents of the chafing-dishes aforesaid. To discover that, granted a healthy subject, sorrow queerly breeds hunger, the initial distaste for food—in the main a sentimental one—once surmounted.
Later McCabe joined them. Recognized Damaris' attitude of valour, and inwardly applauded it, although himself in woeful state. For he was hard hit, badly upset. Conscious of waste of tissue, he set about to restore it without apology or hesitation, trouble putting an edge to appetite in his case also, and that of formidable keenness. Bitterly he grieved, since bearing the patient, he feared very certainly to lose, an uncommon affection. He loved Charles Verity; while, from the worldly standpoint, his dealings with The Hard meant very much to him—made for glory, a feather in his cap visible to all and envied by many. Minus the fine flourish of it his position sank to obscurity. As a whist-playing, golf-playing, club-haunting, Anglo-Indian ex-civil surgeon—and Irishman at that—living in lodgings at Stourmouth, he commanded meagre consideration. But as chosen medical-attendant and, in some sort, retainer of Sir Charles Verity he ranked. The county came within his purview. Thanks to this connection with The Hard he, on occasion, rubbed shoulders with the locally great. Hence genuine grief for his friend was black-bordered by the prospect of impending social and mundane loss. The future frowned on him, view it in what terms he might. To use his own unspoken phrase, he felt "in hellishly low water."
One point in particular just now worried him. Thus, as fish, eggs, porridge, hot cakes, honey, and jam disappeared in succession, he opened himself to Damaris and Carteret. A difficult subject, namely that of a second opinion.—Let no thought of any wounding of his susceptibilities operate against the calling in of such. He was ready and willing to meet any fellow practitioner they might select—a Harley Street big-wig, or Dr. Maskall, of Harchester, whose advice in respect of cardiac trouble was wide sought.
He had, however, but just launched the question when Hordle entered and, walking to the head of the table, addressed Damaris.
"Sir Charles desires me to say he will be glad to see you, miss, when you are at liberty," he told her in muffled accents.
She sprang up, to pause an instant, irresolute, glancing wide-eyed at Carteret.
He had risen too. Coming round the corner of the table, he drew back her chair, put his hand under her elbow, went with her to the door.
"There is nothing to dread, dearest witch," he gently and quietly said. "Have confidence in yourself. God keep you—and him.—Now you are quite ready? That's right.—Well, then go."
Carteret waited, looking after her until, crossing the hall followed by Hordle, she passed along the corridor out of sight. Silent, preoccupied, he closed the door and took a turn the length of the room before resuming his place at the opposite side of the table to McCabe, facing the light.
The doctor, who had ceased eating and half risen to his feet at the commencement of this little scene, watched it throughout; at first indifferent, a prey to his own worries, but soon in quickening interest, shrewd enquiry and finally in dawning comprehension.
"Holy Mother of Mercy, so that's the lay of the land, is it?" and his loose lips shaped themselves to a whistle, yet emitted no sound. To obliterate all signs of which tendency to vulgar expression of enlightenment he rubbed moustache, mouth and chin with his napkin, studying Carteret closely meanwhile.
"In the pink of condition, by Gad—good for a liberal twenty years yet, and more—bar accident. Indefinite postponement of the grand climacteric in this case.—All the same a leetle, lee-tie bit dangerous, I'm thinking, for both, if she tumbles to it."
Then aloud—"Has the poor darling girl grasped the meaning of her father's illness do you make out, Colonel grasped the ugly eventualities of it?"
Carteret slowly brought his glance to bear on the speaker.
"I believe so, though she has not actually told me as much," he said—"And now about this question of a second opinion, McCabe?"
The easily huffed Irishman accepted the reproof in the best spirit possible, as confirming his own perspicacity.
"Quite so. Flicked him neatly on the raw, and he winced. All the same he's a white man, a real jewel of a fellow, worthy of good fortune if the ball's thrown his way. I wonder how long, by-the-by, this handsome game's been a-playing?"
With which, as requested, he returned to the rival claims of Harley
Street and Harchester in respect of a consulting physician.
Carteret proved a faithful prophet, for in truth there was nothing to dread the beloved presence once entered, as Damaris thankfully registered.
The sun by now topped the hollies and shone into the study, flinging a bright slanting pathway across the dim crimson, scarlet and blue of the Turkey carpet. Charles Verity stood, in an open bay of the great window, looking out over the garden. Seen thus, in the still sunlight, the tall grey-clad figure possessed all its accustomed, slightly arrogant repose. Damaris thrilled with exalted hope. For the young are slow to admit even the verdict of fact as final. His attitude was so natural, so unstrained and unstudied, that the message of ghostly warning yesterday evening was surely discounted; while the subsequent terror of the night, that hideous battle with pain and suffocation, became to her incredible, an evil dream from which, in grateful ecstasy, she now awoke.
Her joy found expression.
"Dearest, dearest, you sent for me.—Is it to let me see you are really better, more beautifully recovered than they told me or I ventured to suppose?"
Her voice broke under a gladness midway between tears and laughter.
"The envious blades of Atropos' scissors have not cut the mortal thread yet anyhow," he answered, smiling, permitting himself the classic conceit as a screen to possible emotion. "But we won't build too much on the clemency of Fate. How long she proposes to wait before closing her scissors it is idle to attempt to say."
He laid his hands on Damaris' shoulders. Bent his head and kissed her upward pouted lips—thereby hushing the loving disclaimer which rose to them.
"So we will keep on the safe side of the event, my wise child," he continued. "Make all our preparations and thus deny the enemy any satisfaction of taking us unawares.—Can you write a business letter for me?"
"A dozen, dearest, if you wish," Damaris assented eagerly. Yet that image of the scissors stayed by her. Already her joy was sensibly upon the wane.
"Oh! one will be sufficient, I think—quite sufficient for this morning."
Charles Verity turned his head, looking seaward through the tranquil sunshine.
"That Indian appointment has to be suitably thanked for and—declined."
Damaris drew back a step so as to gain a clearer view of him. The hands resting on her shoulders were oddly inert, so she fancied, forceless and in temperature cold. Even through the thickness of cloth jacket and silk shirt she was aware of their lifelessness and chill. This roused rebellion in her. Her instinct was for fight. She made a return on McCabe's suggestion regarding further advice. She would demand a consultation, call in expert opinion. The dear man with the blue eyes—here her white face flushed rosy—would manage all that for her, and compel help in the form of the last word of medical science and skill.
"Might not your letter be put off for just a few days?" she pleaded, "in case—until"—
But Charles Verity broke in before she could finish her tender protest, a sadness, even hint of bitterness in his tone.
"You covet this thing so much," he said. "Your heart is so set on it?"
She made haste to reassure him.—No, no not that way, not for her. How could it signify, save on his account? She only cared because greedy of his advancement, greedy to have him exalted—placed where he belonged, on the summit, the apex, so that all must perceive and acknowledge his greatness. As to herself—and the flush deepened, making her in aspect deliciously youthful and ingenious—she confessed misgivings. Reported her talk with Carteret concerning the subject, and the scolding received from him thereupon.
"One more reason for writing in the sense I propose, then," her father declared, "since it sets your over-modest doubts and qualms at rest, my dear. That is settled."
His hands weighed on her shoulders as though he suddenly needed and sought support.
"I will sit down," he said. "There are other matters to be discussed, and
I can, perhaps, talk more easily so."
He went the few steps across to the red chair. Sank into it. Leaned against the pillows, bending backward, his hand pressed to his left side. His features contracted, and his breath caught as of one spent with running. And Damaris, watching him, again received that desolating impression of change, of his being in spirit far removed, inaccessible to her sympathy, a stranger. He had gone away and rather terribly left her alone.
"Are you in pain?" she asked, agonized.
"Discomfort," he replied. "We will not dignify this by the name of pain.
But I must wait for a time before dictating the letter. There's something
I will ask you to do for me, my dear, meanwhile."
"Yes"—He paused, shifted his position, closed his eyes.
"Have you held any communication with—"
He stopped, for the question irked him. Even at this pass it went against the grain with him to ask of his daughter news of his son.
But in that pause our maiden's scattered wits very effectually returned to her.
"With Darcy Faircloth?" she said. And as Charles Verity bowed his head in assent—"Yes, I should have told you already but—but for all which has happened. He was here the day before yesterday. He came home from church with me.—That was my doing, not his, to begin with. You mustn't think he put himself forward—took advantage, I mean, of your being away. If there is any blame it is mine."
"Mine, rather—and of long standing. God forgive me!"
But Damaris, fairly launched now upon a wholly welcome topic, would have none of this. To maintain her own courage, and, if it might be, combat that dreaded withdrawal of his spirit into regions where she could not follow, she braced herself to reason with him.
"No—there indeed you are mistaken, dearest," she gently yet confidently asserted. "You take the whole business topsy-turvy fashion, quite wrong way round. I won't weary you with explanations of exactly what led to Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday. But you ought to know that he and Aunt Felicia met. I hadn't planned that. It just happened. And she was lovely to him—lovely to us both. She made him stay to luncheon—inviting him in your name."
"I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the payment of my bad debts," Charles Verity remarked.
"But there isn't any bad debt—that's what I so dearly want you to believe, what I'm trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you," Damaris cried. "Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things—things about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt towards you all along."
Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea. Of a sailing ship, becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters. Of the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain. Of a fly-blown eating-house in Singapore. Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight of Charles Verity's name and successful record in the columns of a Calcutta newspaper; and the boy's resultant demand for the infliction of some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.
"So you see"—
Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.—
"You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life, where then is the debt?—Not on your side certainly, dearest."
Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries—for sophistries from worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely pronounce them?—Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul. They ought to be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son nor daughter condemned him. Neither did his sister, in the pathetic innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.
This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with self-mockery. For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of ambition and thirst of power fell away from him,—he riding under escort of Death, the black captain—all tributes of human tenderness and approval gained in value.—Not the approval of notable personages, of those high in office, nor even that of sympathetic critics and readers; but of persons in his own immediate voisinage, bound to him by friendship, by association, or the tie of blood.—Their good-will was precious to him as never before. He craved to be in perfect amity with every member of that restricted circle. Hence it vexed and fretted him to know the circle incomplete, through the exclusion of one rather flagrantly intimate example. Yet to draw the said member, the said example, within the circle, yielding it the place which it might rightfully aspire to occupy, amounted—after half a lifetime of abstention and avoidance—to a rather tremendous demonstration, one which might well be hailed as extravagant, as a courting of offence possible only to a sentimental egoist of most aggravated kind.
And he was tired—had no smallest inclination towards demonstrations. For the threatening of heart spasm, to which he lately denied the title of pain, though of short duration, affected him adversely, sapping his strength. His mind, it is true, remained clear, even vividly receptive; but, just as earlier this morning, his will proved insufficient for its direction or control. He mused, his chin sunk on his breast, his left hand travelling down over the long soft moustache, his eyes half closed. Thought and vision followed their own impulse, wandering back and forth between the low-caste eating-house in the sweltering heat and perfumed stenches of the oriental, tropic seaport; and the stone-built English inn—here on Marychurch Haven—overlooking the desolate waste of sand-hills, the dark reed-beds and chill gleaming tides.
For love of Damaris, his daughter, while still in the heat of his prime, he had foresworn all traffic with women. Yet now, along with the tacitly admitted claims of the son, arose the claim of the mistress, mother of that son—in no sensual sort, but with a certain wildness of bygone romance, wind and rain-swept, unsubstantial, dim and grey. Ever since conviction of the extreme gravity of his physical condition dawned on him, the idea of penetrating the courts of that deserted sanctuary had been recurrent. In the summing up of his human, his earthly, experience, romance deserved, surely, a word of farewell? Damaris' story served to give the idea a fuller appeal and consistency.
But he was tired—tired. He longed simply to drift. It was infinitely distasteful to him definitely to plan, or to decide respecting anything.
Meanwhile his continued silence and abstraction wore badly upon Damaris. She had steeled herself; had flamed, greatly daring. Now reaction set in. Her effort proved vain. She had failed. For once more she recognized that an unknown influence, a power dark and incalculably strong—so she figured it—regained ascendency over her father, working to the insidious changing of his nature, strangely winning him away. Waiting for some response, some speech or comment on his part, fear and the sense of helplessness assailed, and would have submerged her, had she not clung to Carteret's parting "God bless you" and avowed faith in her stability, as to a wonder-working charm. Nor did the charm fail in efficacy.—Oh! really he was a wonderful sheet-anchor, "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land," that dear man with the blue eyes! Consciously she blessed him.—And, thanks to remembrance of him, presently found voice and purpose once again.
"You aren't displeased with me, dearest?" she asked.
"Displeased?" Charles Verity repeated, at first absently. "Displeased, my dear, no—why?"
"We didn't do wrong?"—labouring the point, the more fully to recall and retain him—"Didn't take too much upon ourselves—Aunt Felicia, I mean, and I—by persuading Darcy Faircloth to stay on Sunday, by entertaining him when you were away? Or—or have I been stupid, dearest, and thoughtlessly wearied you by talking too much and too long?"
"Neither," he said. "On the contrary, all you have told me goes to lessen certain difficulties, make the crooked, in some degree, straight and rough places plain."
For, if Faircloth had been here so recently, broken bread too in the house, so he argued, it became the easier to bid him return. And Charles Verity needed to see him, see him this morning—since purpose of farewells, to be spoken in those long-deserted courts of romance, stiffened, becoming a thing not merely to be turned hither and thither in thought, but to be plainly and directly done.—"Send for him in your own name," he said. "Explain to him how matters stand, and ask him to talk with me."
And, as Damaris agreed, rejoiced by the success of her adventurous diplomacy, making to go at once and give the required instructions—
"Stay—stay a moment," her father said, and drew her down to sit on the chair-arm, keeping her hand in his, and with his other hand stroking it wistfully. For though certain difficulties might be sensibly lessened, they were not altogether removed; and he smiled inwardly, aware that not even in the crack of doom are feminine rights over a man other than conflicting and uncommonly ticklish to adjust.
"Before we commit ourselves to further enterprises, my darling, let us quite understand one another upon one or two practical points—bearing in mind the blades of Atropos' envious scissors. My affairs are in order"—Damaris shrank, piteously expostulated.
"Oh! but must we, are we obliged to speak of those things? They grate on me—Commissioner Sahib, they are ugly. They hurt."
"Yes—distinctly we are obliged to speak of them. To do so can neither hasten nor retard the event. All the more obliged to speak of them, because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could do with it.—As a means, of vast importance. As an end, uninteresting.—So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid. All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety regarding ways and means, if not to make you a rich woman. I have left an annuity to your Aunt Felicia. Her means are slender, dear creature, and her benevolence outruns them, so that she balances a little anxiously, I gather, on the edge of debt. The capital sum will return to you eventually. Carteret and McCabe consented, some years ago, to act as my executors. Their probity and honour are above reproach.—Now as to this place—if you should ever wish to part with it, let Faircloth take it over. I have made arrangements to that effect, about which I will talk with him when he comes.—Have no fear lest I should say that which might wound him. I shall be as careful, my dear, of his proper pride as of my own.—Understand I have no desire to circumscribe either your or his liberty of action unduly. But this house, all it contains, the garden, the very trees I see from these windows, are so knitted into the fabric of my past life that I shrink—with a queer sense of homelessness—from any thought of their passing into the occupation of strangers.—Childish, pitifully weak-minded no doubt, and therefore the more natural that one should crave a voice, thus in the disposition of what one has learned through long usage so very falsely to call one's own!"
"We will do exactly what you wish, even to the littlest particular, I promise you—both for Faircloth and for myself," Damaris answered, forcing herself to calmness and restraint of tears.
He petted her hands silently until, as the minutes passed, she began once more to grow fearful of that dreadful unknown influence insidiously possessing him and winning him away. And he may have grown fearful of it too, for he made a sharp movement, raising his shoulders as though striving to throw off some weight, some encumbrance.
"There is an end, then, of business," he said, "and of such worldly considerations. I need worry you with them no more. Only one thing remains, of which, before I speak to others, it is only seemly, my darling, I should speak to you."
Charles Verity lifted his eyes to hers, and she perceived his spirit as now in nowise remote; but close, evident almost to the point of alarm. It looked out from the wasted face, at once—to her seeing—exquisite and austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal, unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of impending portentous adventure.
"You know, Damaris, how greatly I love and have loved you—how dear you have been to me, dearer than the satisfaction of my own flesh?"
Speech was beyond her. She looked back, dazzled and for the moment broken.
"Therefore it goes hard with me to ask anything which might, ever so distantly, cause you offence or distress. Only time presses. We are within sight of the end."
"Ah! no—no," she exclaimed, wrenching away her hands and beating them together, passion of affection, of revolt and sorrow no more to be controlled. "How can I bear it, how can I part with you? I will not, I will not have you die.—McCabe isn't infallible. We must call in other doctors. They may be cleverer, may suggest new treatment, new remedies. They must cure you—or if they can't cure, at least keep you alive for me. I won't have you die!"
"Call in whom you like, as many as you like, my darling, the whole medical faculty if it serves to pacify or to content you," he said, smiling at her.
Damaris repented. Took poor passion by the throat, stifling its useless cries.
"I tire you. I waste your strength. I think only of myself, of my own grief, most beloved, my own consuming grief and desolation.—See—I will be good—I am good. What else is there you want to have me do?"
"This—but recollect you are free to say me nay, without scruple or hesitation. I shall not require you to give your reasons, but shall bow, unreservedly, to your wishes. For you possess a touchstone in such questions as the one now troubling me, which, did I ever possess it, I lost, as do most men, rather lamentably early in my career. If you suffer me to do so, I will ask Darcy Faircloth to bring his mother here to me, this evening at dusk, when her coming will not challenge impertinent observation—so that I may be satisfied no bitterness colours her thought of me and that we part in peace, she and I."
Damaris got up from her seat on the arm of the red-covered chair. She stood rigid, her expression reserved to blankness, but her head carried high.
"Of course," she said, a little hoarsely, and waited. "Of course. How could I object? Wasn't it superfluous even to ask me? Your word, dearest, is law."
"But in the present case hardly gospel?"
"Yes—gospel too—since it is your word. Gospel, that is, for me. Let Darcy Faircloth bring his mother here by all means. Only I think, perhaps, this is all a little outside my province. It would be better you should make the—the appointment with him yourself. I will send to him directly. Patch can take a note over to the island. I would prefer to have Patch go as messenger than either of the other men."
She walked towards the door. Stopped half-way and turned, hearing her father move. And as she turned—her eyes quick with enquiry as to his case, but inscrutable as to her own—Charles Verity rose too and held out his arms in supreme invitation. She came swiftly forward and kissed him, while with all the poor measure of force left him, he strained her to his breast.
"Have I asked too much from you, Damaris, and, in the desire to make sure of peace elsewhere, endangered the perfection of my far dearer peace with you?"
She leaned back from the waist, holding her head away from him and laid her hand on his lips.
"Don't blaspheme, most beloved," she said, "I have no will but yours."
Again she kissed him, disengaged herself very gently, and went.