3
As a false merit seems still to attach to frankness, let me record that, when I met Beresford some three weeks later, I bowed to him and subsequently went up and exchanged a few words. This meeting also took place in Hyde Park, I was again making a slight détour for the sake of seeing the flowers and once more I turned in at Albert Gate and was nodding before I saw who had nodded to me. When I recognised Beresford, there was a moment's impulse to stalk away, but I am glad to say that I did not yield to it.
He was sitting in a bath-chair, out of the wind and in the sun, alternately dozing and waking with a start to look at the flowers and then close his eyes again. I have seen sick men in various parts of the world, but I doubt if I ever saw one who was still alive and yet looked nearer death. All flesh had disappeared from his face, until the bones of jaw, temple and nose threatened to cut through the waxen skin; his eye-lids were more vermilion than pink, with a permanent dusty-grey shadow darkening the hollow sockets. One hand lay exposed outside the rug, so thin that it seemed as if the bones must grate together; the other pressed painfully to his side whenever he began to cough.
"Why, how do you do?" he exclaimed in a weak whisper, bowing a second time, as his eye-lids flickered open and he found me watching him.
"You look remarkably ill," was all I could say.
"I'm better than I have been. It was really rather a close shave this time. They evidently felt it was a point of honour not to be beaten again and they kept me there just twenty-four hours longer than I could conveniently stand. I wasn't conscious of anything,—I hadn't been for some while before and I wasn't to be for some time after—but they had a bad scare. After doing their best to kill me for five days, they spent five weeks trying to keep me alive—so like war and peace, you know; wasteful, irrational and utterly, utterly purposeless. In a few weeks' time I shall be where I was when last we met; the Government will have kept me quiet for perhaps two months and will have expended a portion of a magistrate's time, ditto ditto prosecuting counsel, and six weeks' bed, board, share of prison staff and really first-rate medical attention. No one could have been better treated when once they were afraid they'd killed me."
He tried to laugh, but only succeeded in making himself cough. As he shook and rocked, growing momentarily pink and then reverting to a deathlier white, as I watched that bag of tuberculous bones being held together by a nervous refusal to die, I shared the sense of waste which O'Rane had once expressed to me. An impulse came to me, and I acted on it before I could give myself time to be cautious and niggardly.
"If I can get you out to South Africa, will you go?" I asked him.
He tried to speak before he had finished coughing, and the attack redoubled in violence.
"That would be playing their game rather too much," he said with a skeleton's grin.
"You're playing their game as quickly and more permanently by staying here."
"You mean I'm going to die? Now, there you're wrong. Of course, I shall die some time like everyone else, but I'm actually getting better now. If you'd seen me a month ago——!" He looked round at the flowers with eyes that burned feverishly. "I've got so much to do, there's so much to live for! Don't you feel you can't die, you won't die, when you see all the new leaves with that shade of green which seems only to last for a day before it becomes dark, dull, mature, dirty.... And the first flowers—before we've had time to be sated with them. This is June, summer.... And long before that, the little pink, sticky buds bursting everywhere.... And those curious fluffy things which you find on some shrubs and which seem to serve no purpose in nature.... I shall die in the autumn, when I do die; I couldn't in the spring, when the whole world's renewing itself and there's so much to do. God! there is so much to do!"
He smiled to himself, and his eyes suddenly closed. It was more than time for me to be on my way, but the scrape of my heel on the gravel roused him, and he held out his hand.
"It was kind of you—about South Africa, I mean,—but I can't get away—for reasons which I needn't discuss. And in any event it isn't necessary; I'm going to get well without that."
I shook hands and turned my steps eastwards. There are few things more painful than the dying consumptive's belief that he will recover. Beresford called me back with a cry that brought on another fit of coughing.
"I'm in my old quarters," he said. "You were rather—disgruntled by your last visit, I remember, but, if you've got over the shock and can ever spare a moment to call——"
This time I shook my head without hesitation or compassion. I do not remember ever being more affronted. A chance encounter in the street might be excused me; one may be pardoned for not upbraiding one's worst enemy when he is as near his death-bed as Beresford was; but it was another thing altogether to condone the past and acquiesce in the present. It was also what Mrs. O'Rane had virtually challenged me to do, when she lost her temper in Beresford's flat and asked whether I should continue to know her when she had come to live with him.
"I shall not call," I said. "Good-bye."
Thereafter I denied myself the walk from Albert Gate to Hyde Park Corner and went to my office through Belgrave Square and the Green Park.
I kept my own counsel about our meeting and went on with my own work, trying not to think of the O'Rane tragedy until it was brought to my notice by a chance encounter with O'Rane himself. I was deliberately not seeking his company, but I was pleased when he joined me in the Smoking Room at the House.
"Your voice at least is quite unmistakable," he said with his old smile. "So is Grayle's. The people who beat me are most of the Irish and a sprinkling of the Labour men—fellows who don't open their mouths from one end of the session to the other. And I'm here so little that it's slow work learning. Still, I'll back myself to be right ninety-five times out of a hundred, if I've heard a voice more than once. Do you know whether old Oakleigh is about?"
"I saw him here before dinner," I said.
"I promised to walk home with him. Why don't you come along, too? There's nothing of any interest on, and you can smoke in greater comfort at my place. Let's see if we can hunt him out."
Bertrand had sat down late, and we found him finishing his coffee in an almost deserted dining-room. It was still light, however, when we got outside, and we strolled at an easy pace along Millbank to "The Sanctuary." I had not been there since the night nearly three months before when O'Rane's life was broken in two. As we walked, I thought of the other night when Grayle and I met him for the first time, when, too, he had carried Beresford on his own back into the now empty house. He could not but be thinking of it himself, and I hardly knew whether to pity or admire him the more for his unembarrassed way of admitting us to his secret without suffering us to allude to it.
Unlocking the door, he went ahead to turn on the lights, came back to relieve us of our coats and bade us help ourselves from the side-board, while he opened a box of cigars. Perhaps from nervousness he talked rather more than usual and shewed himself unnecessarily solicitous for our comfort; otherwise we might have been sitting, as we occasionally sat ten months before, waiting for Mrs. O'Rane to come back from the theatre.... I confess that I started—I believe we all started—when we heard a taxi draw nearer and nearer, turn out of Millbank and stop at the door. Bertrand and I were facing the room, and we both of us gave a quick glance over our shoulders. O'Rane continued talking unconcernedly, only stopping when the curtain was pushed aside and George came in.
"It's a great thing to have a place where you can be sure of a drink after licensed hours," he remarked contentedly. "I've had no dinner and not much lunch; and I've left the Admiralty this moment. This war's got beyond the joke some people still think it. Don't mind me, Raney, I'm going to fend for myself and eat solidly for the next half-hour. What's the question before the House?"
He seated himself on the arm of my chair with a hunk of bread and cheese in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey and soda in the other. We were talking of the way in which our original intervention on behalf of Belgian neutrality had been overlaid by the nationalist ambitions of Italy in south Austria, France in Alsace-Lorraine, and by the frankly imperialist trend of Russia towards Constantinople and of ourselves towards Mesopotamia and in Africa and the Pacific.
"It may have been wise, it may be necessary," said O'Rane dubiously. "Perhaps you couldn't bring Italy in without promising Trieste and the Trentino, perhaps you couldn't keep Russia in without promising Constantinople."
Bertrand sighed and then yawned.
"I wonder if we've not bitten off more than we can chew," he growled. "I went through the phase of 'crushing Prussian militarism,' cutting up the map of Europe with a pair of scissors.... I hope nobody will put me up against a wall and shoot me, if I now doubt the possibility. I don't believe we can crush Prussian militarism."
"We—can't."
The words, spoken in a familiar, sneering drawl, came from behind me. Bertrand and I swung round in our chairs to face the door; George leapt to his feet, letting fall his bread and cheese and discharging a torrent of whiskey and soda into my lap. If the ghost of Peter Beresford had walked in to reinforce Bertrand at the point where their doctrines most nearly touched, he could not have dumbfounded us more. But it was not Beresford's ghost. The July night was descending so slowly that we were content with a single lamp in the middle of the room. In the gathering dusk by the door, standing out against the orange glow of the door-curtain, I saw Beresford himself, leaning with one hand on a stick and grasping a shapeless soft hat with the other. He was as waxen of complexion and almost as cadaverous as when we met in the Park three weeks before, but he had made a spasmodic effort to seem collected on entering, and the sneer in his voice was reproduced by a suggestion of swaggering contempt in his attitude.
I wondered helplessly and almost without anger why he had inflicted this outrage upon us. Trembling and speechless, Bertrand propelled himself slowly to his feet; speechless and breathing quickly, George took two steps forward. We were all too much preoccupied to look behind and see what O'Rane was doing until I heard what I can only describe as a rattle in the throat; Beresford's eyes opened wider, and he took a half-step back; I turned my head in time to see O'Rane spring like an animal on its prey, both arms outstretched and both feet off the ground. There was a thud, as the two fell together, a gasp from Beresford, the noise of boots scuffling on polished boards and then a silence only modified by laboured breathing.
George was the first to move.
"He'll kill him!" he called back to us. "Help me separate them!"
As quickly as an old and a middle-aged man could move, Bertrand and I hurried to his assistance. O'Rane was straddling Beresford's body, pinning both arms to the floor with his knees and gripping his throat with both hands until the eyes glared in the early stages of asphyxiation and the mouth fell open, gobbling hideously. The face was swollen and mulberry-coloured by the time that we could see it, and the first feeble resistance had given place to the dreadful placidity of physical exhaustion.
"You fool, you're murdering him!" George roared, slipping both hands inside O'Rane's collar and putting forth a reserve of strength which lifted assailant and assailed bodily from the ground. "Pull his hands away, you men!"
I caught O'Rane's left wrist in both hands, but the polished floor gave no purchase to my feet, and I might as well have tried to pluck a propeller from its shaft. His arms were like flexible, warm steel. When I planted my foot against his shoulder, it was like resting it on masonry that quivered slipperily, but never yielded.
"Fingers, man, fingers!" George shouted again. "Pull 'em apart, twist 'em, hurt him!"
I take no pride in having followed his advice save in so far as it saved the boy from the scaffold. Bertrand and I, each with our two hands, gripped O'Rane's third and fourth fingers, tugged and twisted until a stifled cry of pain broke from his lips. George was shaking him like a rat, and at last the grip relaxed and Beresford's head fell with a second thud on the floor.
"Don't let go!" cried George. "Now, Raney, will you swear on your honour not to touch him again?"
There was a sullen, long silence varied by the rip of rending clothes and the clatter of feet, as O'Rane made three unsuccessful plunges forward.
"You're—hurting my—hand!" he panted at length with the whimper of a little child.
George shook his head at me passionately.
"Will you swear on your honour, Raney?"
"Let me—get at him!" O'Rane sobbed.
"We'll break your fingers off at the knuckles if you don't swear!" George returned through clenched teeth.
There was a second silence, a last plunge.
"I won't touch him," sighed O'Rane.
We stepped back, panting and mopping our foreheads; then Bertrand walked to the nearest chair and subsided into it; I leaned against a sofa; George stood for a moment, rocking from his late exertion, then pressed one hand to his heart and hurried into the street, covering his mouth with a handkerchief. O'Rane stood where we had relaxed our hold on him, bending and unbending his tortured fingers; Beresford lay motionless and silent.
George's re-appearance with a request for brandy galvanised us all, but chiefly O'Rane, who walked up to him with out-thrust lips and cried:
"You can clear out of this, George Oakleigh, and I don't advise you to come back here."
"Don't be a fool, Raney," George answered wearily.
"If you hadn't put them up to it——"
"That's precisely why I did it. It was the only way of stopping you. Don't think I enjoyed it, old man." He caught O'Rane's right hand between his own two and patted it, as if he were caressing a woman. I learned afterwards that in addition to losing his sight O'Rane had been wounded in both hands. "Go and get some brandy—or wait, I'll get the brandy, while you lift Beresford on to a sofa. I've pulled my heart out of place."
Between us we made a rough bed and tried to bring the unconscious man round. His heart was fluttering like a captive bird, and for longer than I cared to count there was no other sign of life. At last the eyes opened for a moment, and I saw George relax his labours and lead O'Rane to one side.
"You'd better go to bed, old man," he said. "I'll report progress later, and we'll get him away as soon as we can. You'll only make things worse, if you're here when he comes round."
To my surprise, O'Rane allowed himself to be led away, and George returned to share our vigil. A second and third time the eyes opened; twice Beresford tried to raise himself and once his lips moved in soundless speech.
"Don't try to talk," I said, as I gave him some water to drink.
He closed his eyes, and a quarter of an hour passed before they opened again.
"W—w—why——?" he stammered suddenly.
"Don't—try—to—talk," I said again.
"But w—why did he do that?" Beresford persisted with slow obstinacy. "Is he m—m—mad?"
George, Bertrand and I stared at him and then at one another.
"Don't try to talk yet," was all that I could find to say.