CHAPTER XLIV.
As he lay in the death-like sleep of exhaustion that followed his swoon, the change in Strange was terribly evident. He had shrunk to half his former size, his clothes hung in bags on his limp, thin limbs, his eyes were sunk into deep hollows, his skin was yellow and puckered, and his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a way that told of fever and thirst.
When Brydon, with the help of the panic-stricken servants, had got him to the sofa, knowing his horror of fuss, he told them to send at once for the doctor, and then dismissed them with the utmost speed—and now he stood at the window revolving many things, and wondering, if Strange grew worse, what would happen, would he send for his wife, and would she come?
“My God! I wish I did not know quite so much of him,” he muttered, “I wish he had not, in his ravings, turned himself inside out in that ghastly way. No man should know so much of another fellow as I do of him, it is like eavesdropping.”
Strange moaned, and Brydon crept over and covered his feet with awkward tenderness, then he moved softly through the rooms, looking at the skins and Oriental stuffs, the colours of which slid into him, and comforted his soul to some slight extent.
He was vaguely fingering a piece of drapery, when he struck his foot against the leg of a chair, he looked round breathlessly to see if he had disturbed Strange. No—he still slept, and Brydon continued his purposeless inspection, and, drawn by some strange coloured texture he went towards it, and came face to face with his own bride-picture.
He staggered back two or three steps in a spasm of terror. He had learnt a deal too much of that picture in Strange’s ravings, but the overmastering love for one’s own creation—inherent in God and man—forced him back to it, and as he looked, all the past died out, right back to that day when he was sitting in Waring Church, painting, and wiping great sweat-drops from his face in the ecstasy of knowing that he had done a great work, and one that would live for ever.
A sudden indefinable sound from the terrace brought him to himself.
It was a queer primitive sound; he felt somehow that Strange should not hear it, and went to the window to find out what it was.
Presently it began again, and ended in a chuckle, then he caught sight of a flutter of petticoats around the corner, and could distinguish a murmur of words. Then a distinct squeak startled him, and suddenly a toddling creature appeared on the terrace, and making a grab at a flower fell sprawling on its face, and in a fraction of time was pounced upon by the owner of the white skirts, who cuddled it to her breast, with anxious care, but as it only kicked and crowed she lifted her head from her kissing. And there within ten paces of him was his picture made flesh, but with the sorrow of all ages upon her face.
He swayed, put his hand to his head, then he dropped like a man in a dream into a chair, and murmured,
“Oh, God! has the earth opened—has she fallen from Heaven—has—has——”
He looked again and the flutter of her white dress in the sunlight gave to his dazed, enchanted eyes, the figure of a new Madonna, before whom the whole world must kneel and rise up to call her blessed.
She came on, still murmuring to her baby, she came up to the French window, and put out her hand to open it—then the madness fell from Brydon, and the whole truth came with a rush.
He sprang to his feet, cast one perturbed look at Strange, “Kill him or not, I can’t face it,” he muttered, and fled.
When Gwen got into the room, she sank wearily into a chair, and throwing off her hat let the baby butt her at his will.
When the smile for her baby flickered off her face, the final contained anguish of it was awful, but the child gave her little time to nurse grief. Every moment she had either to rock him, croon little songs to him or tickle him, if she were silent or passive for a moment a lusty butt against her breast or a punch from the pink dimpled fist brought her back to his service.
As she sat—sideways to the window—it was impossible for her to see Strange, but there was nothing to hide her from him.
The soft murmur of croons and baby-sounds at last half awoke him, he lay for some moments and let the vague music creep into his semi-consciousness, then he opened his eyes impatiently and closed them again—it was only one more dream, he thought—he was beset with dreams, tortured, shaken by them.
“Oh, God! those drugs,” he muttered.
Again the murmurs broke on his ears, there was a chuckle, a tender protesting voice, and a sharp little squeal. He shivered and peered out towards the sounds, his eyes were dimmed from his great sickness and could only see “men as trees walking.” Gradually he made out the shapes of a woman and a little child.
“Is it a dream, or death?” he murmured. “Oh! God, spare me! I am haunted by delusions.”
Another little murmur, and a soft low sob, it was the woman this time. Again he opened his eyes and through his dreaming saw the little yellow-headed child laughing around the chair, and inviting the woman to a game of bo-peep.
“Oh! my baby, my own, own baby,” she broke out, stooping to him, “do you know what they say—what they din into my ears, little love, dear baby mine? They say your father is dead, dead, DEAD, dear one. And must you live, grow up, little manikin, without knowing what a man he was?—Sweet, must I sing?—Ah! If you only knew how it hurts!”
The smile flickered back to her face, as she took him on her knee, and she sang a little song he evidently knew well, for he kicked and crowed by way of chorus, then he played with his bare toes for a little—his mother, as she sang, had pulled off his socks to kiss his feet—and as he played she returned to her sad soliloquy.
“You will have to take all from me on trust, little one, and, of course, you will think I exaggerate, my own, when I tell you that your mother had the best man that God yet made or will make, to love her, to love her.—Ah! what love it was!” she repeated gently.
Then her eyes dreamt, and rested for a moment, all the pain fled, and her face shone with radiant triumph and her mouth trembled like a happy child’s.
“Ah! what love!” she said again; but instantly all this was swamped in a mighty wave of pain—she caught her child and kissed him rather wildly, whispering, “Baby, she killed this man who loved her—killed him, baby, because she was unnatural and couldn’t love—she killed her mother too, and oh! baby, when in her loneliness she pleads and prays that God may let her love Him, He hides His face from her, and it is all quite just, baby mine, her mere desert.
“Ah! my own—I can’t sing, I am so tired.”
She put him down gently, and looked before her with sad unseeing eyes.
Strange struggled to break the spell—to speak—to move—but he was impotent—paralyzed. A vague horror—full of sickness and delirium—had him by the throat. He put his hand feebly to his forehead to brush the sweat away.
“This is more cruel than death,” he muttered.
Meanwhile, the baby—being a young person of an exploring tendency, and loose on the premises—played havoc with his opportunities. Having smashed two Venetian glasses and an atom of old Sèvres, he perceived his father on the sofa, and toddled over to investigate him—but so softly that no notice was taken till Strange suddenly found a tiny fist thrust into his mouth, then he started amazedly and touched the child with quaking awe.
Just then Gwen discovered her loss, ran a few steps forward with outstretched hands, and saw the two—Humphrey and his child.
“Humphrey—Humphrey!” she cried faintly, tottering towards them—then she fell at their feet.
To Strange it was still a cruel dream—her falling but part of it. Between the two, the child stood wondering, then he caught sight of a diamond on his father’s finger. He seized on the finger and dragged it to show his mother, but as she took no notice, he smacked her face soundly with his other hand—and simultaneously the two awoke, he from his delirium, she from her swoon.
And for one moment the two of them peered at each other through the fog of a bitter past. Then she sat up slowly, and looked at his face marvelling above her, and at his hand caught in her baby’s, and broke into half incoherent wild explainings. But suddenly the consciousness that words could in no sort of way touch her case, silenced her; she just sat dumbly on the floor, knowing that she had done evil in ignorance but that she had come up through great tribulation into unutterable joy, full of knowledge, and with a soul as white as Naaman’s skin. And so—as best became her—she simply held up her face to be kissed, while the baby clutched hold of one of her fingers and one of his father’s, and in words all his own and untranslatable, but mightier than those of gods or churches, decreed that henceforth and for ever those two should be one flesh. Which, after all, is the especial mission of his kind.
THE END.
NEW NOVEL
BY
Helen Prothero-Lewis
Hooks of Steel
IN 3 VOLS.
Now ready at all Libraries.
CHAPTER IV.
(Reprinted from Hooks of Steel.)
He stopped when he saw us, stopped dead short on the pavement amidst all the hurrying people. And as he looked at me and D’Arcy, his face changed and grew drawn and old with sharp, sudden misery. I had pierced him to the heart; in his face I saw it. Sick and cold with shame, scarce knowing what I did, I shrank back in the hansom. Only for a moment, but it was a fatal moment.
“Yes, that’s right, keep back, hide, I’ll protect you!” called out D’Arcy to me loudly, so loudly Felix could not fail to hear. Then placing one hand familiarly on my shoulder, he opened the trap-door again with his cane and shouted—“Off!”
Without an instant’s pause the driver whipped up his horse and was off as hard as he could go.
I recovered myself when I found I was being borne away from Felix.
“Stop!” I cried wildly, swinging back the doors in front of me, “let me get out. I must go back! I must go back to Felix!”
D’Arcy leaned forward and hastily swung the doors together again.
“You can never go back to Felix,” he said, seizing me and holding me firmly down in my seat. “You will have to stay with me instead. Felix would not have you now. He has caught you here in London alone with me; he has found you out.”
Appalled by his words and manner, I turned upon him. His face was still full of malignant triumph, his small dark eyes burnt as they gazed into mine, his lips were drawn back from his big white teeth in a wide grin. It was a full revelation this time. I knew him as he was; loathsomely, horribly ugly and wicked.
“You are a fiend!” I cried. “I know you now. You arranged it all. You deliberately took me where you knew Felix would see me. It was a vile plot. I see it all, and I hate you, I hate you! Do not dare to touch me. Take your hands off. Let me get out and leave you this instant.”
But D’Arcy only held me down more tightly. I dashed my hand upwards through the opening in the roof and called to the driver to stop. “No use,” said D’Arcy. “The man is in my pay. You may as well sit quiet, Rosamund. I shall be very kind, you have nothing to fear.”
Nearly frantic, I called to a passer-by to help me. Then D’Arcy shouted to the driver to let down the glass, and I found myself more straitly imprisoned than ever. By this time we had left the Strand far behind us, and were dashing up quiet side streets, but in what direction I knew not. It was like a horrible nightmare: on and on we went, and each step took me more hopelessly away from Felix. In vain did I struggle, in vain did I cry to be set down. The driver took no notice of my cries, and D’Arcy, still with that horrible grin on his face, said never another word, only held me back tightly in the hansom. I cannot say how long that terrible drive lasted. My mind throughout was a chaos of horror and despair.
At last, after long hours as it seemed to me, the hansom stopped, and D’Arcy called to the man to open the window. We were in the middle of a broad path bordered with trees, and all around us was silent dreary park-land. A drizzle of rain had begun, and beneath the trees it was already dark with the fast gathering shades of a winter evening. Here D’Arcy loosened his hold of me, and instantly I got out. Where to go and what to do next I knew not, so stood helplessly in the rain. D’Arcy sat looking at me for a moment, as if thinking, then got out also.
“There is the sovereign,” he said, handing up some money to the driver. The man took it, glanced at me, and hesitated.
“You can go,” said D’Arcy sharply.
“And leave the young lady in the rain?”
“Did you hear? You can go,” repeated D’Arcy, still more sharply. The man drove away. I felt too stunned to make any appeal to him. Besides, of what use? Was it not he who had driven me on and on, in spite of my cries, until now miles and miles of unknown streets lay between me and Felix. If I had been in the middle of a wilderness, and Felix the other side of the world, he could not have felt more lost to me than he did at that moment.
“Now, Rosamund,” said D’Arcy, turning to me and speaking very determinedly, “listen to reason and be a sensible girl. You have lost Felix. You are not so mad, I suppose, as to imagine he will have anything further to do with you after this. You lead a miserable life at the castle, and it will be still more miserable to go back there now, for Felix will never visit you any more. Neither will I come there after you again. I have had enough of it, I want something better. So if you go back, you go back to be absolutely alone with a madman and his keeper. Mark my words: your uncle is not, and never will be cured. At his best, he’s as mad as a hatter. And he’s liable to these attacks of violent madness which make him absolutely dangerous. Matthew keeps it dark, but it is not the first time your uncle has had to go to the asylum by any means. He’ll break out again as sure as my name is Leigh, perhaps next time without any warning. That happened once, so may well happen again. There’s no method in his madness: a thoroughly unreliable madman, my friend on the common calls him. So that’s the companion you will go home to.
“Now I have it in my power to offer you a very happy life. I love you, and I want you to be my wife. You are just fitted for a London life, and with your beauty and originality might make a perfect furore. Now, will you accept what I offer you and marry me? You have only to say ‘yes,’ and I will take you straight to my sister who will act as chaperon until we can be married: She is a good-natured girl, and will be glad to oblige me, for many reasons. Now say, will you marry me? I’ll be awfully kind to you, Rosamund. After all, you’d have had a slow time of it with that impecunious Felix.”
I had been listening in a dull, stunned way to this speech, but at his last words an hysterical passion of anger awoke within me.
“Marry you! Never! I would rather die,” I cried. “I know you at last for what you are, a wicked, plotting fiend!”
“Now, now! No nonsense,” said D’Arcy angrily. “Remember, Rosamund, you are very much in my power. You don’t know where you are, night is coming on, it is raining faster every minute, and you can’t find your way out of this place, or get a cab, without me. So give me a kind answer, and let me take you off to my sister’s. Come, child, don’t be foolish, we can’t stand here an hour, getting drenched. Be nice, I’ve loved you a long time, and been your most devoted slave, I am sure. Give me a kiss, and say you’ll come.”
“Never! Keep off! How dare you?” I cried, trembling with mingled fear and anger.
“You needn’t be so very particular. I’ll be bound you’ve kissed Felix hundreds of times.”
“Felix! Yes. But you—you!!” Words failed me. I could find none that would express my detestation of him.
He pressed closer, as if determined to kiss me. Then my passion grew beyond my control. I seized the cane he was holding in his hand, and struck him smartly across the face with it. Then I flung the hateful thing from me amidst the trees.
“There!” I cried. “That is to show you how I loathe and detest you now. Go and pick up your cane, the cane you used to help you in your plotting. You have wrecked my life. You have ruined Felix’s. You have persuaded me to deceive, and dragged me down to misery. Go, and never let me see your wicked face again.”
D’Arcy made for an instant as if he were going to strike me in return, but he restrained himself. “All right,” he said, in a voice trembling with suppressed rage. “All right, young lady. You have given me my congé, and I’ll take it. I don’t feel so anxious to make you my wife as I did a moment ago. I’d best not saddle myself with a vixen. I’ll leave you, to find your way back to the castle. I hope you will enjoy yourself when you get there.”
Then, without another word, he strode away and left me alone in that strange place in the rain.
I waited until he had disappeared in the darkness, then turned and walked in exactly the opposite direction, neither thinking nor caring where I was going, so dulled was I with misery. But the road went on, and seemed as if it would never end, and at length I stopped, chilled, wet, and weary. Then suddenly it occurred to me that I ought to try and get home; there was just a faint chance that Felix might go down to ask what it all meant. At the thought that he might arrive at the castle, find me still absent, and imagine me still with D’Arcy, I began to burn with fever. I turned, and ne’er through an arch so hurried the blown tide, as I through the rain and the dark did hurry then. Thinking it would now be best, I followed the direction D’Arcy had taken, and after a time came to some big iron gates. Just as I passed through them a hansom came driving towards me. My first impulse was to accost the driver, but I pulled myself up just when about to speak, for by the flickering light of the gas-lamp on the gate I saw it was the man who had driven me away from Felix. With my head down I hurried past him.
“Missy! Missy!” called the man as I passed. I made no answer. He turned and drove after me, walking the horse by my side as I pressed on in the rain. “Missy! Listen. I’m a poor man with a large family, and that gent is a well-known fare of mine so I did not like to go against him. But I didn’t half like the job. It went against my conscience a bit, it did, seeing you so unwilling inside. After I left you, when I’d got well away, who should I see but the gent dashing round a corner in another hansom, with a bad sort of look on him, and, dashed if I could go on, for thinking of the helpless looking young thing I left with him in the rain. So back I came again, just to see what had become of you. And now, Missy, if I can make up to you by driving you anywhere, say the word and jump in, and there you shall go.”
So lost and wretched did I feel, and so consuming was my desire to get home, I could not refuse the offer. The man helped to bring about my misery, but, if I sent him away now, where should I go, what should I do, in this great unknown city? I climbed in, feeling utterly spent.
“Where to?” asked the man, peering down through the now horribly familiar trap-door.
“Oh, take me home, take me home!” I half moaned in answer.
“Yes, Missy, don’t you fret, I’ll take you home. But where is it?”
“On Wildacre Common.”
“Phew! That’s a long way off. I can’t drive you to Wildacre, but I’ll drive you to Waterloo, and you’ll get a train there easy that’ll take you straight to Wildacre.”
He flicked his whip and started. I do not know what streets we passed through, but again I seemed to drive through miles and miles of them. The rain poured down upon the pavements, which shone in murky glossiness beneath the gas-lamps. The people flitted past like black ghosts, beneath the shade of their dripping umbrellas. This was the gay city, the city of my dreams. I had envied Felix his life in this city; I had risked my life’s happiness to spend one day in it. And, behold! its pleasures had turned to ashes in my mouth, and its light into horrible murky darkness. It was a miserable city, a terrible city, a city that made one feel fearfully, utterly alone.
We reached Waterloo at last, and my driver called a porter and asked him to attend to me. Then he drove off instantly, and not until afterwards did I remember that he had gone without even asking for his fare. The porter escorted me to the right platform, but there we found a train to Wildacre had just gone, and there would be no other for thirty-five minutes. I sat down in my wet things upon a bench, and waited with feverish impatience, whilst the clock overhead lagged through the interminable minutes. Then what D’Arcy had said came true. Strange horrible men came up and spoke to me. I sat mute, and answered never a word, and my heart sickened with longing for Felix. The porter came for me when the time was up, and put me into the train, and smiled gratefully at me when I gave him half-a-crown. All through the journey to Wildacre I sat in a kind of stupor, only waking from it when people got in and out at the stations, or when a train whizzed past on its way up to London. Then came the drive up the hill and across the common. It was very cold on the common. The rain had now ceased to fall, and the wind cut my face like a knife, but I was too weary to pull up the cab windows. By the little sunken fence I dismissed the cab, and walked in the darkness across the lawn to the honeysuckle porch. A flood of light greeted me as I opened the door, and Anne Gillotson rushed out of the dining-room looking white and agitated.
“Oh! I am glad to see you safely back again, Miss,” she said. “It is going on for ten o’clock, and I have been so anxious about you ever since it became dark. Mr. Felix Gray has been here. He arrived about nine o’clock, but when he found you were out he did not stay.”
I stood still in the hall, and a deadly sick feeling came over me. “Did he ask where I was?” I managed to say.
“Yes, Miss. Oh, please don’t look like that,” replied Anne, almost weeping. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but he was so stern and asked such sharp questions I was obliged to tell him.”
“You told him——?”
“I told him that you had said you were going to spend the day with an old schoolfellow who was staying near here.”
“And then?”
“Oh, dear! Miss, I am more vexed than I can say that it should have happened, for he looked in a dreadful way and went straight out at the door. I begged him to wait, but he said there would be no use in waiting. Then he changed his mind and came in again, and said he’d leave a note for you. I got him pen and paper and he wrote a short note. ‘Give her this,’ he said, ‘when she returns, if she ever does return.’ Then he went away. He has not been gone half an hour, Miss, if you’d only been a little bit earlier you’d have caught him. My dear, how wet you are, and how white you look; what does it all mean?”
“Where is the note?” I gasped.
She went into the dining-room and brought it out to me. I tore it open. There were but two words written on the paper:
“Good-bye, Rosamund.”
This was the end. Upon me had been laid the punishing hand of God.