The Mating of Lydia

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

The night nurse gave a dose of morphia according to directions, and sat down on a low chair at the foot of the bed watching her patient.

About two o'clock in the morning, just as the darkness was beginning to thin, she was startled by a sound outside. She half rose, and saw the door open to admit a tall and gaunt figure, whom she recognized as the master of the house.

She held up an anxious finger, but Melrose advanced in spite of it. His old flowered dressing-gown and gray head came within the range of the night-light, and the nurse saw his shadow projected, grotesque and threatening, on the white traceries of the ceiling. But he made no sound, and never looked at the nurse. He stood surveying young Faversham for some time, as he lay hot and haggard with fever, yet sleeping under the power of morphia. And at last, without a word, the nurse saw her formidable visitor depart.

Melrose returned to his own quarters. The window of his room was open, and outside the great mountains, in a dewy dawn, were beginning to show purple through dim veils of silvery cloud. He stood still, looking out. His mind was churning like a yeasty sea. Old facts came to the surface; faces once familiar; the form and countenance of a brother drowned at twenty in Sandford lasher on the Oxford Thames; friends of his early manhood, riding beside him to hounds, or over the rolling green of the Campagna. Old instincts long suppressed, yet earlier and more primitive in him than those of the huckster and the curio-hunter, stirred uneasily. It was true that he was getting old, and had been too long alone. He thought with vindictive bitterness of Netta, who had robbed and deserted him. And then, again, of his involuntary guest.

The strangest medley of ideas ran through his mind. Self-pity; recollections connected with habits on which he had deliberately turned his back some thirty years before—the normal pleasures, friendships, occupations of English society; fanatical hatred and resentment—against two women in particular, the first of whom had, in his opinion, deliberately spoilt his life by a double cruelty, while the second—his wife—whom he had plucked up out of poverty, and the dust-heap of her disreputable relations, had ungratefully and wickedly rebelled against and deserted him.

Also—creeping through all his thoughts, like a wandering breeze in the dark, stole again and again the chilling consciousness of old age—and of the end, waiting. He was fiercely tenacious of life, and his seventieth birthday had rung a knell in his ears that still sounded. So defiant was he of death, that he had never yet brought himself to make a will. He would not admit to himself that he was mortal; or make arrangements that seemed to admit the grim fact—weakly accepted—into the citadel of a still warm life.

Yet the physical warnings of old age had not been absent. Some day he would feel, perhaps suddenly—the thought of it sent through him a shiver of impotent revolt against the human destiny—the clutch of the master whom none escapes.

Vague feelings, and shapeless terrors!—only subterraneously connected with the wounded man lying in his house.

And yet they were connected. The advent of the unconscious youth below had acted on the ugly stagnation of the Threlfall life with a touch of crystallizing force. Melrose felt it in his own way no less than the Dixons. Something seemed to have ended; and the mere change suggested that something might begin.

The sudden shock, indeed, of the new event, the mere interruption of habit, were serious matters in the psychology of a man, with whom neither brain nor nerves were normally attuned. Melrose moved restlessly about his room for a great part of the night. He could not get the haggard image of Faversham out of his mind; and he was actually, in the end, tormented by the thought that, in spite of nurses and doctors, he might die.