The Dilemma/Chapter LX
CHAPTER LX.
The short winter afternoon was drawing to a close, when Yorke again arrived at the little inn. Mrs. Polwheedle from the window had seen him enter, and waiting at the top of the little staircase, beckoned to him come up, and led the way into an empty bedroom. "She is quieter now than she has been," said the lady, closing the door, after a caution to him to speak low, as the walls were so thin; "but she has not had a wink of sleep, and it looks as if the opium had got into her head, she confuses things so. I get quite frightened sometimes with her talking: she is quiet now, but she will go on sometimes when I am outside just as if I were in the room. I do wish Maxwell would come back quickly; it would be such a comfort to know what he thinks, and have his advice. I don't half like the responsibility of keeping her here in this way. The place is not fit for a person in health to live in, leave alone one who is sick; I begin to feel quite upset myself." And indeed the good lady looked both tired and flushed.
Yorke explained what was proposed — that the carriage from "The Beeches" would arrive in a few minutes to take them away, and that Mr. and Mrs. Peevor had sent a very particular invitation to herself, which only a sense of consideration had prevented their delivering in person.
"That is very kind, I am sure," said Mrs. Polwheedle, looking pleased and mollified. "The landlady tells me 'The Beeches' is a perfect palace of a place, with everything done in the most elegant style; not that I mind at all about such things for myself, but I am sure it will do the poor thing good to go there. But I am not so sure about our getting her to go. She does talk so very strangely about things. But perhaps you had better go in and see if you can persuade her. I will stop outside for a bit and get the things ready."
So saying, Mrs. Polwheedle opened the door, and then, pushing open the one on the opposite side of the little landing, motioned to Yorke to enter the room to which it belonged. It was a small bedroom, used as a sitting-room for the occasion, there being no parlour up-stairs. As Yorke entered, Olivia, who seemed to be walking restlessly up and down, and was looking the other way, turned sharply round. She still wore the dress in which she had made her escape that morning, but the long hair was now arranged in coils round the head, although not with her usual neatness, and she wore a scarf round her shoulders; but although Yorke instinctively noted these details, what caught his eye was the pallid face, which made the hectic flush seem brighter, the parched lips, and the wild aspect of the restless eyes. She seemed almost another person from the Olivia of the previous evening, gentle, languid, and depressed.
Turning quickly round when Yorke entered the room, Olivia seemed startled and even frightened for an instant, while she stopped and looked at him with a puzzled face, as if not knowing him. Then the expression cleared, and stepping towards him, she held out her hand. "You startled me at first," she said, with a smile, which to the other seemed inexpressibly sad; "do you know I thought you had come down from heaven!" Then drawing a little nearer, and looking at him earnestly, she added, "Robert has come down from heaven, my husband that was, Robert Falkland — he came down to save me and Livie and the baby from the fire; he saved us all, and now he has gone away again. He was always brave and noble."
Yorke stood tongue-tied with emotion. He had not been prepared for this, and in the shock of this revelation of her state he could not find at once words to reply.
Then the restless eyes turned away, and she moved to the window, and then began pacing again the little room, as if not aware of his presence. Still there remained something of the old grace of movement; but how far removed seemed this poor wild creature from the gentle yet stately Olivia of former days! Better surely that she had perished in the flames than be reserved for such a fate as this!
Suddenly she stopped opposite to him, and again smiling, said, "Won't you be seated, Mr. Yorke?" and sitting down herself on a little cane chair, motioned him to take another.
Yorke obeyed her: and while for a brief space she sat quietly as if waiting for him to speak, with her graceful arms crossed over the scarf, something of the old Olivia seemed for the instant to have returned. But almost immediately the eyes began to roll wildly about the room, and Yorke hastened to speak before the phrenzy should again possess her.
"I have come on behalf of some very kind friends — the friends with whom I am living — to ask you to make their house your home for a while."
"Friends?" she said, speaking in an absent manner, and looking down — "it must be very nice to have kind friends."
"And you will find them friends indeed," he continued, gaining hope from her manner. "Their carriage will be here directly; will you not make ready to start? it is getting late."
"Friends?" she said again, in a mournful voice — "I have no friends; Robert is dead, and my husband has left me and gone away. Yet no!" she added, with sudden energy, and looking fixedly at Yorke; "he is not my husband — I have no husband. I have been living with two men — and one is dead, and one is gone away; but I have no husband." And Olivia repeated this, "I have no husband," looking down on the floor, as if to herself."This little inn is wanting in comforts," said Yorke, trying to give a turn to the conversation; "there is hardly room for all of you. It will be a good thing to move into another house. This room is small and close," he added, by way of diversion, while Olivia looked at him earnestly, as if weighing the proposition.
She replied abruptly, "The room is good enough for a bad woman like me; I am not a fit woman to live with decent people. Mrs. Polwheedle came to see me to-day, but she has gone away again; she did not care to stay with a bad woman like me."
Just then the door was pushed open, and the youngest child came into the room, toddling with uncertain step, just able to walk. It stood looking at its mother for a while, with one little hand in its mouth, as if afraid to come near; and then as Yorke, who was sitting near the door, held out his arms, it came up to him.
Olivia meanwhile had been gazing on the ground as if busied with her thoughts. Looking up, and seeing the child on Yorke's knee, she cried, "Why don't you send it away, wretched little bastard brat?"
As she called this out in a harsh voice, the very tones of which seemed to be changed, the frightened child began to cry.
Then Olivia jumping forward caught it in her arms. "My darling, my darling," she said, "don't you cry. Your mother's no better than a street-walker; but it's not my darling's fault, is it?" And she rocked the child to and fro, holding it to her breast, and crooning over it till the crying ceased.
Yorke, unwilling to disturb her while in this mood, sat silent. While they were in this situation, Mrs. Polwheedle entered the room.
She seemed relieved to find Olivia so quiet, and announced the arrival of the carriage.
Olivia at this rose, the child still in her arms, as if intending to obey the summons.
"If you will go down and take your place, my dear," said Mrs. Polwheedle, "I will get the children ready, and follow you with the things;" and she made a sign to Yorke which he understood to mean that they should take advantage of Olivia's present humour to make a start.
There came up to Yorke the doubt whether this plan for giving her shelter ought now to be pursued; but it seemed too late to alter it now. And what else could be done?
Olivia without saying a word handed the child to Mrs. Polwheedle, and moved to the door. On the landing outside the elder child was standing, holding the banister with one hand, a doll which had come from "The Beeches" in the other. Her mother stooped down and kissed her without saying a word, and then descended the stairs, and made for the entrance-door.
As she passed along the little passage, she stopped at the parlour-door as if in doubt, and then turning to Yorke, who was following, she put her finger on her lips, and said, "Hush, that is where they have laid him," and then passed out into the open air. This was the first reference to her knowledge that Falkland's corpse was in the house; nor did she know that it had been moved into another room; but how much of the facts was understood by the poor clouded brain could not be told.
The carriage-road was at the back of the inn; the front door opened on to the little terrace, set out with benches, which reached down to the river. The evening was dull and gloomy, with slight rain falling; the wind moaned sadly through the bare trees, and night was fast closing in.
Olivia wore no hat, or other wrapper than the scarf, but Yorke forbore to check her action by noticing this.
She stood for a few seconds looking in front of her, not seeming to notice the rain falling on her bare head; and at last Yorke said that the carriage was at the back of the house — they had better go that way.
At the sound of his voice she turned round and looked at him in a vacant way, and then started off at a quick pace towards the ruins of her own house, the outline of which could still be made out in the dim evening light, about a couple of hundred yards higher up the river.
Yorke followed and overtook her, and they stepped side by side in silence, passing the spot where only two days before, in his walk with Lucy, he had first met her children. It seemed as if weeks had passed since that walk.
Olivia stopped at the garden-fence and looked up at the ruins. "See," she said, "the fire has gone from there now; but it is still here," she continued, clasping her head with both hands; "it is still here, and burning; it never stops burning." And she stood holding up her hands to her forehead, and looking bewildered at the ground. "Olivia," said Yorke, although he could hardly speak for the fulness of his heart, "you want rest and quiet, my poor friend, and by-and-by, please God, all will come right. Let us turn back."
"Come right!" she cried, "how can it come right? See here," she continued, laying a hand on his arm, and pointing with the other towards the ruined house. "I was at the window there, praying for my children, when he came up the ladder, and I thought God had answered my prayers and sent his spirit to save us. But it was not his spirit, it was himself. Yes, Major Yorke, it was my husband; he was a hunted prisoner, wounded and sick, wandering in the desert, and I was bearing children to another man. And now he is dead; he died to save me, and a polluted wretch like me still walks the earth."
Then with a cry she turned away from the house, and began walking hurriedly along the bank up the river.
The evening was growing dark, the swollen river ran level with the footway, and Yorke striding along by her side could hardly distinguish between land and water.
A short distance they walked thus in silence along the narrow path, which gave barely room for the two between the hedge and the river, Yorke striving to think how best to calm her agitated mind. At last he said, "Olivia, you will tire yourself out if you hurry in this way; the children are waiting for you; will you not go back to them, poor little things? "
"Poor little things indeed," she said, "to have so vile a mother!" She stopped short and turned half round as if about to go back, and then saying, "There is no help!" and throwing up her arms, made a step forward, whether seeing the water or not her companion could not tell, and sank into the stream.
Yorke plunged in and caught her as she rose to the surface.
The poor creature struggled violently, holding out her arms, whether to get free or clinging to him to be saved he could not tell, but he caught her in his grasp and held her firmly, and after a few moments her efforts ceased, although she still clutched him tightly round the neck with one arm. And at first as they floated down the stream the danger of the situation did not strike him. Often when in his younger days he had played with his brother subalterns at saving a drowning man in an Indian swimming-bath, it had seemed as if impossible to sink. But the weight of his heavy clothes and the icy coldness of the water began at once to tell; and cramped as was the movement of his arms by her grasp, it was as much as he could do to keep her head above water, as he pushed out with his feet towards the shore. The plunge had not been far, but it was made at a point where the bank projected into the river, into the middle of which they had been swept by the strong current. Good swimmer as he deemed himself, he found himself powerless to struggle with the stream, and soon the thought came over him that the fate which had so long bound up their lives together would now follow them to the end. Were they to die locked in each other's arms? And in an instant the picture of past days came up before him, the days when he worshipped the gentle, the gracious, the noble Olivia; the days when he lived on in the bitterness of his heart at losing her, the poor wreck he now held in his arms for the first time, and who, seemingly unconscious of her state, looked up at the sky with a dull, stony stare. He could make out in the dim light that her eyes were open, but more he could not tell, and as he pushed convulsively along in the darkness to where he thought the bank must be, it came over him to wonder if people when they found their bodies would guess the truth, or would they think that the unhappy woman in her madness had dragged him to destruction? — when he saw the dim bank looming just above him, and with his free hand caught hold of some weeds growing against its side.
They were saved; but exhausted and benumbed as he was, and encumbered with his charge, and unable to find any footing, it was only by a desperate effort that he still clutched the weeds. So short a time, and yet all his strength was gone. How easy to be drowned after all! and, too tired to call for help, he must soon let go, when he sees a figure kneeling on the bank above, and an arm stretched out has seized his in its grasp. It is Lucy, who, learning in a few short words from Mrs. Polwheedle enough to guess at Olivia's state, had followed them up the bank, reaching the spot in time to save him. With the help of Lucy, throwing herself down on the wet grass to lend her weight to his efforts, he at last drags himself out, still grasping his burden; and while he stands exhausted looking at the figure lying inanimate at their feet, Lucy raises the shrill cry which soon brings succour — the landlord, the gallant Joe, the Peevors' footman, Mrs. Polwheedle, and others, who raise Olivia's body from the ground and bear it quickly to the inn.
Maxwell, who has just arrived, meets the little procession at the door, and in a few brief words Yorke explains what has happened. No harm was done, he thought; he had kept her head above water all the time; it must be merely a faint from cold and fright.
"Not up-stairs," said Maxwell, opening the parlour-door, as the bearers entered the passage with their burden; "this way — in here:" and the hapless Olivia was laid on the same couch which had borne that morning the dead body of her husband.
And now, while the doctor and the landlady and Mrs. Polwheedle and Lucy are busy over the prostrate form, Yorke, wrapped up in a big overcoat of the landlord and covered with shawls, stands by the tap-room fire. He cannot bear to leave the spot, and this rough sort of vapour-bath will keep him from catching cold. But the children are sent off in the carriage, and the servants will explain why the others are detained. Comedy and the commonplace tread close upon the tragic in the actual business of life; and as Yorke stands before the blazing fire drinking hot spirits-and-water, while the landlord takes a glass also to keep him company, and begins a maundering story of how he got upset in a punt seven years ago, and some half-dozen tap-room loungers stand hard by discussing the events of the day, in undertones out of consideration for Yorke, nothing could well be more prosaic or matter-of-fact than the aspect of the scene. But he can drink the cordial and hold his feet to be scorched by the fire, while yet thinking over the tragic fate of the woman once so passionately loved, now pitied with a feeling that for a time left no room in his heart for other emotions — thinking, too, of the death of the noble soldier who seemed when first he knew him to deserve the envy of all younger men. And now what would be the end of this calamity and woe? He, the noble, the gallant, the unfortunate husband had found peace at last; but what further sufferings awaited the unhappy wife?
A long time must have passed, for his clothes are almost dry, when the good doctor appears at the door and beckons him to come into the passage.
"It is all over," said the old man, in a low voice. "It was the shock that killed her; life must have passed away before you brought her to land. Who could wish it were otherwise? Still in your wet clothes? You must look to yourself now, my dear friend, or you too will be a sufferer.
THE END