‘You are worse than useless here, Henry. In fact, your presence and loud lamentations over him disturb Wally, and make him fretful and restless. Besides, you have your own duties to attend to, and must neglect them no longer. If you are sincere in your sorrow over this accident, prove it by doing your duty like a man, and attending the office as usual.’
For Henry Hindes had shut himself up since the night he had thrown his child down the stairs, and refused to meet anybody, on business or otherwise. Mr Abercorn, the chief clerk, and Mr Bloxam, the cashier, had been up to Hampstead together to inquire the reason of their employer’s non-appearance in the city, and Mrs Hindes had been obliged to tell them that her husband was confined to his room and quite unfit to see them, or attend to business for the present. She was obliged to invent this fiction, for the reason that, for some days, Hindes was imbibing opium to such an extent, and raving of what distressed his conscience so freely, that she felt, at all hazards, she must keep everybody from him but herself.
Captain Hindes and his wife came over, as soon as they heard of poor Hannah’s fresh trouble, and would have done anything in their power to help her, but it was a case where the assistance of one’s fellow-creatures could avail nothing, and the only thing was to wait and hope. Arthur did not see his brother on the occasion, for Henry had shut himself up in his own room, as usual, and refused to open the door. He had come chiefly to tell Hannah that they had found a little cottage to suit them in the Isle of Wight, and intended moving into it at once. She was not sorry to hear their news. She longed to get them, and everybody connected with her husband, out of the way, so that she might have him to herself, and shield him from all prying eyes and ears. During his short period of seclusion, she had carried all his meals to his room with her own hands, and coaxed him to eat them by every means in her power. And, now that the first shock was over, she ordered him to return to his official duties as she would have ordered a boy to return to school. He had reduced himself to such a state that he was no longer capable of regulating his actions. His reappearance in the office was so far beneficial that a business never proceeds so well and regularly as when the head of it is absent; but Hindes had almost rendered himself incapable, by this time, of taking any active part in the management of affairs, which he left entirely to his two chief men, Abercorn and Bloxam, whilst he sat brooding in his private room, or wandered restlessly about the streets, waiting for the doctors’ verdict respecting Wally, and wondering how much longer they would keep him in suspense. He consulted the best known physicians about the child, and brought the cleverest surgeons to see him, but the answer of each one was the same, ‘Wait, wait! This is a case for time. No one can foretell the upshot of such a fall until the child has, in a measure, done growing.’
Done growing! And Wally was not yet three years old. Henry Hindes would groan within himself, and say that it was impossible. He could not be kept so long in suspense. He must know at once. He almost felt sometimes as if he would rather his boy had been killed outright, than condemned to such a lingering illness as this promised to be. He could not bear it! He could not! He could not!
During those days of mortification and miserable impatience, how more than vividly Jenny Crampton’s fair image returned to his memory to torture him. His wife had advised him to confess all his unhallowed desires and wishes regarding her, but even Hannah knew little of what he had hoped, in his maddest moments, regarding Jenny. She had been a flirt—no doubt of that, though her errant heart had been caught fast at last by Frederick Walcheren. But before those days, when Henry Hindes had had no reason to affront her by the expression of his jealousy, she had not disdained to flirt a little with him on her own account.
She had meant her expressions of regard for him as nothing but a flash of coquetry; but he, with his secret passion for the beautiful girl, and the mad dreams he sometimes indulged in concerning her, had chosen to translate her kindness in a far warmer manner than she intended he should. And these tender moments, which were seared upon his memory, came back with irritating persistency to him now that they were over for ever—that even the remembrance of them had been dispelled by the terrible knowledge that his hand had quenched them for ever!
One day that he had brought her a little souvenir for her birthday—merely an étui of velvet, filled with scissors and thimble, and the rest of the rubbish provided for the work of ladies who don’t work, mounted in gold, and encrusted with turquoises—Jenny had kissed him—had advanced her ripe, pouting lips of her own accord, and pressed them upon his. He could recall to this day how the piece of coquetry affected him. She had guessed, well enough, her power over this apparently staid, sensible man of business, and liked to show it. She had smiled on him the while in her saucy way and made his head swim. It was this circumstance, and one or two others like it, that had caused Jenny to turn against him and say hard things about him directly she had gained a lover whose heart she wished to keep. It was the remembrance of such things that had made her fear the expression of his jealousy, and declare he took an unwarrantable interest in her affairs.
Yet, the feeling her kiss had raised in his breast haunted the wretched man long after he had caused her death. Sometimes the one memory pained him more than the other. He would wonder, if he had been bold enough to speak openly to Jenny of his feelings regarding her, whether she would have listened to his story and requited his affection, just a little, in return. She would dance before him, like an airy phantom, all through the dull, old streets of the city, beckoning him, with her dimpled little hand, to come nearer and nearer, and taste her lips once more! And then, when he had worked his imagination up to a pitch of frenzy, the scene would change, and he would see, instead, Jenny lying still and white in her shroud, with the purple marks of foul decomposition upon her cheeks and brow. Yet, dead as she appeared, her wraith would still have the power to unclose its lustreless eyes and livid lips to say, ‘These are the lips with which I kissed you, and you it was who rendered them like this, unfit for anyone but the worms to touch again.’
He would see her in the sunshine, and in the gloaming—in the crowded streets and by the deserted river-side—in the Mart and in his private office—till he nearly went mad with the longing to stamp her out from his brain, or to plunge himself into the silent river and follow her wherever she might be.
Much as she had haunted and pursued him since that fatal moment when he pushed her over the Dover cliff, never had he seen her as he had done since Wally’s accident! She seemed to come now with a mocking smile upon her lips—a smile which said, ‘I did it! I made him fall! I did for you what you did for me! Who was it made you drink morphia until you had paralysed your brain? I! Who was it drove you wild as you stumbled up these stairs? The remembrance of me! You killed me, and I have subjected your boy to a living death—a death far worse than mine—a death which will numb his nerves and his brain, and keep him a prisoner for life, tied to a sofa, inert in mind and muscle. Wally’s accident was due to me! You made my parents childless. I have robbed you of your son and heir.’