A Likely Story

by William De Morgan

CHAPTER XI

How the picture spoke again. Abstract metaphysical questions, and no answers. How the Picture's memory was sharpened, and how Mr. Pelly woke up. Mr. Stebbings and Mrs. Buckmaster. The actule fax. Jack's resurrection, without an arm. Full particulars. All fair in love. How Mr. Pelly knew the picture could see all, and how Madeline had not gone to bed. Captain Maclagan's family. Fuller particulars. General Fordyce and the Bart, not wanted. What the picture must have seen and may have thought. Good-bye to the story. Mere postscript.

It is scarcely fair play to make a merit of patience—isn't cricket, as folk say nowadays—when you are in a comfortable armchair before a warm fire, and are feeling drowsy. But, then, Mr. Pelly was under an entirely wrong impression on this point, and had scheduled himself as wakeful, but content to bide his time. Yet he might reasonably have suspected himself of drowsiness when James, the young man, coming to wind up the contents of the room, and revise the shutters, retreated with apologies. For had he been really awake, he would certainly have said, "All right, James! Come in. Never mind me!" As it was, he deferred doing so a fraction of a second, and the consequences were fatal. He remained wide awake, no doubt—people always do. But he had not the slightest idea that James had gone, closing the door gently, when the picture said to him from the chimneypiece, in exactly the voice he had heard before, "Is it all true?"

Mr. Pelly found that, mysteriously, he took it as a matter of course that this should be so. "I presume," he said, "that you are alluding to the substance of the manuscript we have just read. I am scarcely in a position to form an opinion."

"Why not?" said the picture. At least, she said "perche" and this translates "Why not?" in English.

"Because I am conscious of a strong bias towards accepting it as true, occasioned by the details of your own Italian experience, which you were so kind as to give me—perhaps you will remember?—some while since—let me see?—before I went away to see that niece of mine married at Cowcester. Now, this narrative of yours—so my Reason tells me; and I may add that I have already committed myself to this opinion when awake—can only be regarded as a figment of my own imagination, based on a partial perusal of the manuscript you have just heard—that is to say, would have just heard had you been objective. I am borrowing a phrase from my friend, Professor Schrudengesser. I do not see that any harm can come of my speaking plainly, as if you happen to have an independent existence you will appreciate the difficulties of the position, and if you haven't, I don't see that it matters."

"Mr. Pelly," said the picture impressively, "I should like, if you will allow me, to say a serious word to you on this subject. I refer to the reality of our existence, a subject to which the most frivolous amongst us cannot afford to be indifferent. Have you never considered that the only person of whose existence we have absolute certainty is ourself? Outside and beyond it, are we not painfully dependent on the evidence of our senses? What is our dearest friend to us but a series of impressions on our sight, touch, and hearing, plus the conclusion we draw—possibly unsound—that what we touch is also what we see, and that what we hear proceeds from both? Have you attached due weight to...?"

Mr. Pelly interrupted the voice. "You will excuse me," he said, "but in view of the fact that I may wake at any moment, is it not rather a tempting of Providence to discuss abstract metaphysical questions? No one would be more interested than myself in such discussions under circumstances of guaranteed continuity. But..." Mr. Pelly paused, and the voice laughed. The picture itself remained unmoved.

"Circumstances of guaranteed continuity," it repeated mockingly. "When have you ever had a guarantee of continuity, and from whom? If you were suddenly to find yourself extinct, at any moment, could you logically—could you reasonably—express surprise?—you who had actually passed through an infinity of nonentity before you, at any rate, became a member of Society! Why should not your nonentity come back again? What has been, may be."

Mr. Pelly's mind felt referred to sudden death, but his reply was, "Guaranteed continuity of communication was what I meant." Then he reflected that perhaps sudden death might be only suspension of communication—however, he had had no experience of it himself, and could only guess. The picture continued sadly:

"That makes me think how hard it is that you should wake to live in the great world I cannot join in; to move about and be free, while I must needs be speechless! Give me a thought sometimes, even as the disembodied spirit, as some hold, may give a thought to one he leaves behind. Yet even that one is better off than I; for may not he or she rejoin those that have gone before? While I must grow fainter and fainter, and be at last unseen and forgotten; or even worse, restored! Rather than that, let me peel and be relined, or sold at Christie's with several others as a job lot."

Mr. Pelly endeavoured to console the speaker. "You need not be apprehensive," he said. "You are covered with glass, and in a warm and dry place. Nothing is more improbable than change, in any form, at Surley Stakes. Indeed, the first baronet, over two hundred and fifty years ago, is said to have accepted his new dignity with reluctance, on the score of its novelty. This library is three hundred years old."

"And I," said the voice, "was over one hundred years old when it was built. But tell me—tell me—was it not all true, the story? You know it was!"

"It rests on the intrinsic evidence of the manuscript. There is nothing to confirm it. And, as I have pointed out to you, your own narrative may be a mere figment of my imagination—you must at least admit the possibility——"

"I will if you insist upon it; it is of small importance to me what others think, so long as I may hang here undisturbed, and dream over the happy days I must have passed, in the person of my original, four hundred years ago. But oh, to think of that hateful time of bondage, with my darling hidden in the darkness underground, sore with manacles and starved for want of food! Think of my joy when I could see and feel his own dear face, all clammy though it was with the dungeon damps from below! Think of my exultation at his returning life—life to be lived for me! And believe me—for this I can know, for I was Maddalena, and now it comes, like a dim memory—that I shuddered when they told me that the sodden old horror that had been my owner was well started on his flight to Hell, sent by the swift little knife-spike of my Marta. Oh how often have I seen that little knife itself in the long girth that could but just span the bloated carcass of the Ferretti!—for he is a clear memory to me. And to think that that knife—that knife—was to..."

Mr. Pelly felt constrained to interrupt. "Pardon me," he said, "if I venture to recall to you that the duty of Christians, of all denominations, is to forgive; and besides, entirely apart from that, all this occurred such a very long time ago."

"How long is needed, think you"—and as the voice said this, it almost grew cruel in its earnestness—"how long, for a girl, to forgive the utmost wrong God in His wisdom has put it in the power of Man to inflict on Woman? Still, I did shudder—have I not said it?—at what they told me; though they showed me not the knife, and that was well. I did shudder, it is true; but now, as you say, it is best forgotten. Better for me to think of our days that must have been, of the babes that were born to us that I never saw, of how we watched them growing in the happy passing hours, in the little old Castello in the hills. Better for me to know, as I know now, that I, while this thing that I am now—this thing of paint and canvas—lay hid in a garret, even I could be to him, my love, a slight half-solace for his ruined hand. How slight, who can tell who does not know what a lost right hand means to the artist whose life is in his craft?..."

It seemed then to Mr. Pelly that the voice continued, though he heard it less distinctly, always dwelling on the life of its prototype, as revealed to it by the manuscript, in a manner that the dream-machinery of his mind failed to account for. His impression was that it continued thus for a very long time—some hours—during the last half of which it changed its character, becoming slowly merged in that of another voice, familiar to Mr. Pelly, which ended by saying with perfect distinctness, "The Captain wished his arm to be broke gradual to his family. 'Ence what I say!" And then Mr. Pelly was suddenly aware that he had dropped asleep for five minutes, and had been spoiling his night's rest. Also that he was now quite awake, and that Mr. Stebbings the butler had spoken the last words to Mrs. Buckmaster the housekeeper; and that both were unaware that he was on the other side of the large armchair-back—and, indeed, it was large enough to conceal something bigger than Mr. Pelly. He abstained from making his presence known, however; more, perhaps, because he thought he was scarcely awake enough for words than to hear what should come next. He fancied the crushed hand incident of the dream had mixed itself into Mr. Stebbings' last speech, and made nonsense of it. But then, how about the sequel?

"'His arm broke gradual,' Mr. Stebbings?" Mrs. Buckmaster repeated. And her perception of the oddity of the speech reassured Mr. Pelly, who began to suspect he might be awake. But he waited for the reply.

"Quite so, Mrs. Buckmaster. Broke gradual. From consideration for family feeling. And that, if an amanuensis, suspicion would attach, and, in consequence, divulge."

Mr. Stebbings's style assumed that if he used the right words, somewhere, it didn't matter what order they came in. It didn't really matter; his respectability seemed more than a makeweight for slighted syntax.

Mrs. Buckmaster was a venerable and sweet institution of forty years standing, that spoke to every member of the household as "my dear"; and conveyed an impression, always, of having in her hands a key with which she had just locked a store-room, or was going to unlock one. Or, rather, not so much a key, as a flavour of a key. Mrs. Buckmaster was a sort of amateur mother of several county families, whose components all but acknowledged her, and paid her visits in her private apartments when they came to call at the Stakes. Her reply to Mr. Stebbings now was, "Merciful Heaven! And the girl nursed him. And she a Dutch woman!"

Mr. Pelly roused himself. His sensitive conscience recoiled from further eavesdropping. "What's all that, Stebbings? What's all that, Mrs. Buckmaster?" he said, becoming manifest, and evoking apologies. Mr. Stebbings had had no idear!

Mrs. Buckmaster said: "Well, now—to think of that!" then, collecting herself, added, "Tell Mr. Pelly, Thomas, what you know. Thomas will tell you, sir, what he knows."

Thomas perceived distinction ahead, and braced himself for an effort. "Respecting the actule fax, sir, they are soon told. After the lamentable disaster to both armies at Stroomsdrift, accompanied with unparalleled 'eroism on both sides, the Captain's horse became restive, and ensued. No longer under the Captain's control, having received a bullet through the upper arm—unfortunately the right, but, nevertheless, in the service of his country. Wonderful to relate, he retained his presence of mind"—Mr. Stebbings's pride in this passage was indescribable—"and arrived without further disaster, though unconscious...." It was perhaps as well that the Baronet called Mr. Stebbings away at this point, as Mrs. Buckmaster knew the whole story.

"Why on earth couldn't Stebbings begin at the beginning?" said Mr. Pelly rather irritably. "Is Captain Calverley alive or dead?—that's what I want to know. And who's that outside, talking to Sir Stopleigh and the General?"

"It's the Captain himself, sir," said Mrs. Buckmaster. "Looking that well—only no arm! His right, too." And then she cleared matters up, by telling how, after the battle, the young soldier, badly wounded in more places than one, had, nevertheless, contrived to keep his seat on a half-runaway horse he could scarcely guide, which carried him away in a semi-conscious state to a lonely farm on the veldt, tenanted only by a Dutch mother and daughter. These two, hating roineks in theory, but softening to a young and handsome one in practice, had kept the wounded man and nursed him round, but could get no surgical help advanced enough to save his arm, which he had been obliged to leave in South Africa. The daughter had evidently regarded the Captain as her property—a fair prisoner of war—and had done her best to retain him, writing letters to his friends for him at his dictation, which were never despatched in spite of promises made, and heading off search-parties that appeared in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Buckmaster condemned this conduct on principle, but said: "Ah, poor girl—only think of it," in practice.

That was really the whole of the story, so far. But like a continuous frieze, it would bear any quantity of repetition, as the Captain's reappearance always suggested his first departure, five months ago, and led to a new recital. The frieze, however, was not to remain unbroken; for Mrs. Buckmaster was balked of her fourth da capo by the reappearance of the Baronet, with General Fordyce, both of them also knee-deep in recapitulations. Sir Stopleigh was in a state of high bewilderment.

"Just listen to this. Uncle Kit.... Oh, you know—Mrs. Buckmaster's told you. Never mind, General, tell us again how it happened—it has been queer! Tell Mr. Pelly how you came to hear of it."

"It was like this," said the General, who was collected. "A month ago I was knocked over by receiving this telegram. Here it is." He produced it from a pocket-book and read: "'Am alive and well if news that am marrying Dutch girl contradict otherwise keep silent till I come Jack.' Well, George, I saw nothing for it but to bottle up, and I assure you I was pretty well put to it to keep my own counsel. However, I really hadn't any choice. Very well, then! That goes on till ten days ago, when another wire comes from Madeira, 'Passenger by Briton in London this day week Jack.' And sure enough my young friend bursts into my chambers four days ago, with, 'Tell me about Madeline—is she engaged?' 'Not that I know of, my dear boy,' said I. 'And I think I should know if she were.' Then says he, 'Oh, what a selfish beast I am! But you'll forgive me, General, when you know.' However, I didn't want to know, but forgave him right off."

"And then I suppose he told you all he's been telling us downstairs—about the Dutch girl and the farmhouse on the veldt?"

"Yes, he seems to have known very little from the moment he was struck until his senses came back to him at the farm. I must say they seem to have behaved wonderfully well to him...."

"I can't say I think burning his letters and cutting him off from all communications was exactly good behaviour." Thus the Baronet. But the General seemed doubtful.

"We-e-ell!—I don't know. I shouldn't quite say that. Remember it was only this poor girl that did it, and one sees her motive. No—no! All's fair in love, George. I'm sorry for her, with all my heart."

Mrs. Buckmaster murmured under her breath: "What was I saying to Mr. Christopher?" and thereon Mr. Pelly felt in honour bound to testify to her truthfulness. "Yes—Mrs. Buckmaster thought so." Nobody was very definite.

"But did he come here with you, General?" asked Mr. Pelly, who was gradually toning down to sane inquiry-point. Mixed replies said that the Captain had not been long in the house. Lady Upwell was interviewing him—they were, in fact, audible in the distance. The General supplied further information.

"You see," he said, "Master Jack and I had just arranged it all beautifully. I was to come here to let it out gently and not frighten Miss Upwell, and also to find how the land lay. Because, you see after all, they were not engaged...."

"Oh no! They were not engaged." This was a kind of chorus; after which the General continued:

"Anyhow, Miss Upwell might have picked up with some other young fellow. However, she hasn't. Well!—I was to come here and take the soundings, and his ship was to follow on; he meanwhile going down to inflict a full dramatic surprise on his own family at Granchester Towers. He said their nerves were strong enough, and it would do them good. He was to come on as soon as he could, unless he heard to the contrary. And then, as he was riding through Sampford Pagnell on his way here, what must be come upon but a man of his own company, who had been invalided home after enteritis, who had been drinking and got into a row. He stopped to see him out of his difficulties—had to go bail for him—and then came on here. But it made him late. And I should have been here sooner myself, only something went wrong with the trains. It made me so late that I almost made up my mind, if Jack wasn't here, to go back to the inn at Grewceham, so as not to frighten you all out of your wits."

"There's my wife coming up. I wonder what they've settled." Thus the Baronet.

Then her Ladyship came in, and following her, in tiptoe silence, the young soldier himself. But alas!—it was all true about the arm. There was the loose right sleeve, looped up to his coat. But its survivor was still in evidence, and Mr. Pelly, as he took the hand that was left in his own, wondered if he was not still dreaming, so full was his mind of the story of that other hand, lost four hundred years ago. He could not dismiss the picture from his thoughts; and as he stood there talking with the young soldier, in whom he could see the saddening of his terrible experience through all the joy of his return, he was always conscious of its presence, conscious of its eyes fixed on all that passed before it—conscious of its comparison between the lot of its original, and Madeline's. And it made the old gentleman feel quite eerie and uncomfortable. So he resolved to say good-night, and did so as soon as a pause came in an earnest conversation aside between the Baronet and his Lady, who seemed to be enforcing a view by argument. Mr. Pelly heard the last words:

"I have told this dear, silly fellow Mad must speak for herself. I won't say anything.... No—not to-morrow; she had better be told and come down now." Here a subcolloquy. "Wouldn't she have gone to bed? Oh no, Eliza said not. Besides, she could slip something on." And then the mainstream again. "You must give me a little time to tell her, you know. One o'clock, isn't it? That doesn't matter. Just think if it was a party! You'll find I'm right, George." For when Lady Upwell is pleased and excited she calls her husband by his Christian name without the Sir.

When she had departed the General went back on a previous conversation. "But we can't make out yet, Jack, how we came not to get any wire about it—as soon as it was known you were alive. It ought to have been in the papers a month ago."

"Nobody knows out there yet, except Head Quarters. Don't you see? As soon as I was fit to get on a horse, I rode all night across the veldt, and reported myself in the early morning. I begged them to keep me dark for a bit, and old Pipeclay said he could manage it...."

"But why did you want it kept dark?"

"I'll tell you directly. When I had settled that, I made a rush for Port Elizabeth, and just caught the Briton. Do you know, I was so anxious nobody should know anything about it till I knew about Madeline that I travelled as Captain Maclagan. And when I got to Southampton there was a Mrs. Maclagan and two grown-up daughters inquiring for me! So really no one knew anything at all about me till you did."

Then the Baronet would know more of Jack's two months of nursing at the Dutch farm. He thought he could understand about the girl; and he wouldn't ask any questions. But why had Jack thought Madeline was engaged to Sir Doyley Chauncey? He was engaged to another girl? Yes, he was; but that was just it! It was another girl, of the same name—another Madeline. Master Jack coloured and was rather reserved. Then he spoke:

"I'll tell you if you like. I told the General." Who nodded. "But you mustn't blame poor Chris. Remember she was brought up a Boer, though she had some English education. It was a newspaper notice—Court and Fashionable game—'A marriage is arranged between Sir Doyley Chauncey of Limp Court, Gloucestershire, and Miss Madeline...' and there the paper was carefully cut away between the lines with scissors—one can always tell a scissor cut. I was sure poor Chris had done it, for her own reasons. I had told her all about Mad. There was no humbugging at all."

"But you silly boy," said the General, "don't you see what I told you is true? If she had seen the name Upwell, on the next line, she wouldn't have cut it. Of course, she wouldn't leave the name Farrant—it's Lina Farrant, George; old Farrant's daughter at Kneversley—man thinks Bacon wrote Shakespeare——"

"Of course not! I see that all now. But one isn't so cool as one might be sometimes. I got quite upside down with never hearing, and, of course, I couldn't write myself. I was quite dependent on poor Chris. But I was going to tell why I wanted to keep it dark that I was alive. You see, if Mad had got engaged—to anyone—well, I don't exactly see how to tell it...." He hesitated a good deal.

"Well, then..."

"Well, then what?"

"Do you know, I think I would almost soonest not try to talk about it. But there was nothing wrong, you know, anywhere."

"Oh no! Nothing wrong. We quite understand."

"Only when a girl has nursed you like that—even if..."

"Even if you don't love her—is that it?"

Jack was relieved. "Yes—that's about it! All the same, if Madeline had been engaged, I might have gone back and married her—to do the poor girl a good turn."

"In spite of her squelching your letters?" said Sir Stopleigh.

"Why, ye-es! Look at why she did it!"

"There, they are coming down," said the General. "Come along, George! We aren't wanted here. Good-night, Jack!"

And then off they go, leaving the young man alone, pacing backwards and forwards between the door and the picture. There is but one lamp left burning, on a small table near, and it is going out. He picks it up and holds it nearer to see the picture. But his hand shakes; one can hear it by the tinkle in its socket of the ring that carries an opal globe that screens the light. And he does not see much, for he can hear, a long way off, Madeline's voice and her mother's—a mere murmur. Then the murmur flashes up a little louder for a moment, and the voices of the Baronet and the old General are bidding each other good-night, a long way off. Then a girl's footstep on the stair.

The tinkle of the lamp stops as the young soldier puts it back on its table. That lamp will go out very soon. But a log on the fire, that seemed dead, breaks out in a blaze, and all the shadows it makes on the walls leap and dance in its flicker. For the lamp is making haste to die.

That is a timid touch upon the handle of the door. The young soldier's face of expectation is a sight to see, a sight to remember. His one hand is bearing on the table where he placed the lamp—almost as though he were for the moment dizzy. Then, in the wavering light he can see the loose, many-flowered robe of Madeline, such a one as she wears for the toilette, and her white face, and her cloud of beautiful hair that is all undone. They are all there in the leaping light of the fire, and he hears her voice that says, "Oh Jack—-oh Jack—-oh Jack!" and can say no more. And he, for his part, cannot speak, but must needs grieve—oh, how bitterly!—for the loss of the one strong arm that is gone. How he would have drawn her to him! But he still has one, and it is round her. And her two white arms are round his neck as their lips meet, even as those arms in the picture must have met round the neck of her beloved, even as their lips must have met, when the dungeon closed again on the dead gaoler and its prisoners, in that castle in the Apennines, four hundred years ago!

The picture still hangs over the chimney-shelf in the library at Surley Stakes, and you may see it any time if you are in the neighbourhood. Mr. Stebbings will show it to you, and give you an abstract of the cinquecento in Italy. But he sometimes is a little obscure; so our recommendation to you is, to ask for Mrs. Buckmaster, who can never tire of talking about it, and who will strike you as being the living image of Mrs. Rouncewell in "Bleak House." Make her talk freely, and she will tell you how whenever "our young lady," otherwise Lady Calverley—for our friend Jack unexpectedly came to the inheritance of Granchester Towers two years since—visits the Stakes she always goes straight to the picture and looks at it before anything else. And how she tells little Madeline, her eldest girl, who is old enough to understand, that pictures can really see and hear; and, indeed, has told her the story of the picture long ago. Of which the crown and summit of delight to this little maid of four seems to have been its richness in murder. Chiefest of all, the impalement of the old Raimondi on Marta's knife. You will gather that requests are made for a recital of this part of the story at untimely moments—coming home from church on Sunday, and so on. She is going to tell it to Baby herself as soon as he is old enough. But he isn't one yet; he has to be reckoned in months. To think of the joys there are before him!

Mrs. Buckmaster will tell you too—if you work her up enough—of the Dutch girl, and the miles of veldt Sir John bought and gave her as a wedding present. But to get at all this you must first get her out of the library, for while she is there she can talk of little but the picture.

"I always do have the thought," she will very likely say, as she has said it to us, "that the picture can as good as hear us speak, for all the world as if it was a Christian, and not an inanimate object. Because its eyes keep looking—looking. Like reading into your mind, whatever Mr. Stebbings may say! We must all think otherwise, now and again, and Mr. Stebbings's qualifications as a butler none can doubt." Mrs. Buckmaster will then tell you of the three different Artists three separate eminent critics have ascribed it to. But there can be no doubt that the family incline to Boldrini, on the strength of Mr. Pelly's dream. To be sure, no such artist is known to have existed. But is not the same true of the nipote del fratello di latte del Bronzino, whom the Coryphæus of these Art Critics invented to father it on?

Anyhow, there hangs the picture, night and day. If it sees, it sees its owners growing older, year by year. It sees their new grandchildren appear mysteriously, and each one behave as if it was the first new child in human experience. It sees a one-armed soldier keen on organization of territorial forces, and a beautiful wife who thinks him the greatest of mankind. And it sees, too, now and again, a very old, old gentleman whom Death seems to overlook because he is so small and dry; whom you may see too, by-the-by, if you look out sharp at Sotheby's, or Wilkinson's, or Puttick's, or Simpson's, or Quaritch's, or the Museum Reading Room. Some believe Mr. Pelly immortal.

If it hears, it hears the few sounds the silent north has to show against the music and the voices of the south. It can listen to the endless torrent of song from its little brown-bird outside above the meadow, poised in the misty blue of a coming day, or the scanty measure of the pleading of the nightingale, heard from a thousand throats among the Apennines in years gone by, welcome now as a memory that brings them back. It can hear the great wind roar in the chimney at its back through the winter nights, and the avalanches in miniature that come falling from the roof above when the world awakes to fight against its shroud of snow. But there is one thing it heard in our story it may listen for in vain—the bark of the great dog Cæsar. For Cæsar died of old age at eighteen, the age at which many of us fancy we begin to live, and the great bark shakes the Universe no more. Other dogs eat small sweet biscuits now from the hand of the mistress who loved him, with precisely the same previous examination of them, with the identical appearance of condescension in taking them at all. But Cæsar lies—his mortal part—in a good-sized grave behind the lawn, where it can be pointed out from the library, and his hospis comesque corporis may be among the shades, may have met for anything we know the liberated soul of Marta's poodle, and they may have considered each other sententiously, and parted company on the worst of terms. Cæsar never could have stood that poodle, on this side.

But the picture is there still, for those who are curious to see it. Whether it would not hang more fitly in the little Castello in the hills, if it could be identified, is matter for discussion. If pictures could really speak, what would this one say?

THE END