Bag and Baggage/"The Soft Seraphic Screen"
FROM GRAVE
BAG AND BAGGAGE
"THE SOFT SERAPHIC SCREEN"
I
PAPA was immensely proud of Ellen; and Ellen appeared a thing to merit papa's pride in her. Though but turned nineteen, she possessed the wit and accomplishments of bright maturity. She played with precocious brilliancy, she was an in- spired needlewoman, the light of her young vivacious intellect made glad the conventional dreariness of a commonplace house in a second-rate London Square—St. Charles's, Ladbroke Grove Road, to wit. And Ellen was pretty and Ellen was good. She a little suggested a Botticelli Madonna. Though her smooth heavy hair was of a dim golden tint, an impression as of delicate silveriness, very frail and pure, was what one carried away from her. There was something there ethereal; her complexion made one think of a pure cloud ever so faintly rosed by morning; her blue eyes smiled half-misted. The one definite note of colour on her face's comeliness lay in its brows, which were comparatively dark and beautifully modelled. Unaffected, admirable, blithe, Ellen was widowed papa's one treasure, his passion and solace. Day by day she was never out of his mind; the fair spirit of her irradiated each page of the ledgers he turned, and made Jacob's ladders of their columns of figures; it illumined the stiffest City fog, and accompanied him all the way home from work, like a tiny fairy link, glowing ardent as he approached his own door.
Papa, Mr. Vosper by name, was an accountant, not in a large way, and the hieroglyphics of a life of calculations, not wholly professional, lay scrawled pretty intricately over his face. In person he was a spare nervous man, with a habit of stiffness, which was only, like the simulation of death in certain insects, the instinctive self-protective attitude of a shy nature. In all his days he had never got really accustomed to life, or ceased to apprehend from it some shocking discovery. Only when at home with his girl had he the feeling of a sure sanctuary gained from the unexpected. He was like a free man there, understood, un-shadowed, cheerily secure within a bodyguard of domestic sympathies. He expanded; he enjoyed; he relished, the last thing at night, his pipe and his toddy. It was only abroad, in the thick of his fellow-men, that he felt nervously isolated.
Trusted Ellen was his housekeeper. She jingled the keys and cheapened the mutton. He never asked an account of her; his implicit faith would have shrunk from such an innuendo. Nor had he ever the least reason to question it. They did very well on a small income, and a household strictly limited to themselves and one general servant. Ellen was as thrifty in her management as she was priceless in herself.
Curiously, for all her delicate attractions, the girl had never been asked in marriage. There must have been some reason for this other than her youth and her father's straitened circumstances. Sweet and comely paragons are not to be found a'begging, as a rule, in a world of amorous susceptibilities. Her verbal readiness, that little smart accent on perfection, may possibly have accounted for philandering youth's remissness. Feminine wit is like a pin in the waist of decorum, a trap and a warning to the adventurous. Once pricked by, it is twice shy. Or the remissness may have been due to something deeper—an instinctive recoiling of subconsciousness from subconsciousness in the face of a discovered secret, unguessed at on the surface of things, where all appeared so seductive and so fair.
I cannot tell how that may be; only, it seemed, men admired and would not be committed. Perhaps Ellen minded, and perhaps she did not. In any case she bore her young virginity serenely. It had its own compensations and absorptions, and she found in them as yet a sufficient antidote to the loneliness of life.
Ellen's blue eyes were, as I have said, misted waters. Their pupils, normally small as the little patches which are used to emphasise beauty, in times of excitement dilated to an extent which quite altered the character of her face. It was then as if the patches, vulgarly enlarged, were throwing the surrounding soft tints out of tone. A hotness came about the lids and sockets; her lips and bosom appeared to swell; the secret, whatever it was, seemed throbbing to reveal itself. And this condition occurred more and more frequently as the girl approached womanhood. Her father, not failing to notice the phenomenon, dreaded to put it down to ripening adolescence. It really affected him poignantly in its bearing upon the question of the forced separation which matrimony would entail upon them both. If it signified a state of feeling, an unconscious exigency, then it might be that his prospect was a melancholy one. But he hoped it meant no such definite development. The thought of existence without his Ellen was unsupportable. She mothered him, she petted him, she amused him. What should he do lacking her devotion, her home virtues, the little dinners she saw cooked for him, the fond hand that replenished his toddy-glass? He thought there would be nothing for him, did she desert him, but to kill himself; that some day perhaps he would tell her so, and leave the conclusion to her.
It agitated him vaguely in this connexion to notice how, on occasions, these hot-eyed moods of the girl seemed to carry with them an exaggerated fondness for himself. Whimsically sedate, Ellen was not exceptionally given, as a rule, to exaggerated demonstrativeness. Wherefore the apparently increasing demand of her emotions for some approximate vehicle through which to express themselves struck him as distressfully ominous of the change he dreaded. Yet he had no will but to respond, since, for the time being at least, it meant more endearing happiness for himself.
This peculiar, one might have said impassioned mood met him one evening unexpectedly. It was long after dinner, and Ellen had just left the drawing-room on some errand. She had been, for her, a trifle dull, unresponsive and disinclined to talk, and Vosper was sitting alone, pondering a little anxiously, and always in its relation to that haunting dread, the problem of the young lady's silence. An impression as of porcelain in silver filigree, of a white embroidered frock, pale limbs, and slender neck holding at staid poise the graceful head above, remained fondly in his mind, and he was seeking in himself reassurance from that quietly normal vision, when the girl returned to the room transformed. The interval had wrought in her that now recurrent change, and her eyes were glowing. She went to the piano, played off, by heart and with rapid brilliancy, de Bussy's "Jardins sous la pluie," collapsed towards the end in a crash of discords, and, crying with a laugh, "My memory has broken all to pieces! Did you hear it?" jumped up and stood humming and vaguely fingering a pile of music on the instrument.
"Papa," she said suddenly; "I will fetch you your grog now, and it will loosen your little tongue and you shall talk."
She went, and returning in a few minutes with decanter, syphon and tumbler on a tray, mixed the paternal drink, and, placing it on a table handy, sat herself on the floor by her father's chair, and leaned caressingly against his knees.
Vosper smiled gladly over the rather premature indulgence, and, taking an enjoying gulp of the whisky and soda, settled himself for an hour of gossip and cosiness.
"How you can like it!" she said. "The very smell makes me shudder."
Vosper, pulling bright-eyed at his pipe, smiled luminously.
"From childhood we like what is kind to us," he said. "An aunt of mine, the ugliest that boy ever had, I thought beautiful. That was because she gave me pleasure, like nasty grog."
"Does it give you pleasure? What does it feel like?"
"It feels like, after a day of depression, getting a big cheque."
Ellen laughed. At the sound, Sultan, the monstrous black Persian, who was lying asleep on the hearth-rug, raised a lazy head, and, regarding his mistress a moment with narrowed eyes, got suddenly to his feet, and, running to her, fawned and rolled himself beside, inviting her caresses. With her fingers buried in his thick fur, Ellen spoke on dreamily:
"Poor little man! Does it take so little to make the world rosy to you?"
"Yes, so little, Nell; and in spite of reason, which tells me, even while I sip, that the vision is but an illusion of the moment."
"Why aren't you sipping all day, then?"
"My dear! What an immoral suggestion. Besides, the more one sips the faster the vision fades. It is a mere cobweb thing, the structure of a psychologic moment."
"Like gossamer, with the dew on it. And when the sun dries the dew, the thing seems gone. But it must be there all the time, you know, although you can't see it."
"O! I dare say the world's tapestried with dreams; but what's the good to one, when they are mostly invisible?"
"And this—this stuff, just gives you the eyes to see for a little? What do you see? Let me look into them."
She put up her arms, drew his head towards her, rosily smiled as she regarded it upside down, and, pressing her lips to his in that inverted position, released her prisoner and subsided into her former attitude.
"Go on," she said. "What do you see? What are you seeing now?"
"O! I can't explain," answered the father. "You know me, I dare say, better than I know myself. Just try to imagine."
"Very well, sir, I will. You see this shabby room—it is a little shabby, dear, isn't it?—like an Arabian boudoir. Its common paper is a mosaic of creamy marbles; its curtains hang in heavy folds, as soft and rich as sleep; there are great drowsy rugs on the paved floor, and on the chairs and sofas. Little splintered stars of light, of a hundred colours and all melting into one another, come glowing through the windows. The sound of the world outside is like the far-off murmur in a shell. You lie lapped in a half-waking dream, that is always palpitating on the verge of some delirious discovery; the anxieties, the heart- breaking struggles of existence, its nervous horrors and cruel rebuffs—they have all passed away and become as nothing. Anything lovely and ecstatic seems possible—a scent of incense creeps in at the curtains—and then they part noiselessly, and a naked foot"
She cried out; the cat hissed and sprang away, bristling its fur and swearing; Ellen nursed her left hand, flushed and whimpering a little.
"The wretch!" she said: "he bit my arm. Look! he has actually made it bleed."
Vosper got up, and knocked the ashes of his pipe out on the grate. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet.
"O! your imagination runs away with you," he said, as he came back. "Bitten you, has he? You had better suck it. I'm afraid I'm not capable of such exalted flights, my dear. If I were to try and explain what I really felt, I should say no more than a blissful nothingness. There's a virtue in rosy oblivion, isn't there? and it's all, I think, I'm conscious of." He refilled his pipe as he spoke. "You had better bathe it, hadn't you?" he said. "Ring up Annie for some warm water. By the by, when does she go? The sooner the better. You haven't heard of another yet, I suppose?"
Ellen sat on the floor, binding her handkerchief about her arm. The flush had gone from her face, leaving it unusually pale. But she could laugh again, upbraiding her assailant.
"No, don't bother: it's only a scratch. O, you naughty vicious fellow! Nobody shall love you any more. Did I pinch him? Well, it was an accident. Annie goes on Tuesday, papa."
Vosper had his second glass of toddy after Ellen had gone to bed. It failed to renew the glamour of the first. Perplexity had once more possessed the man, never abnormis sapiens. The eternal puzzle of things returned to darken his reflections. He wondered why so unexacting a man, one who asked no more than to be left by Fate to the simple enjoyment of habit and his harmless comforts, should be singled out, as it seemed to him, for the perpetual resolving of distracting problems. There was this Annie, a good girl—and a personable, worse luck. She had elected to give notice quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and in very enigmatic terms. She had better go, she had said to Ellen, before she was suspected. That had sounded suggestive enough to the master to make him anxious to get rid of a possible embarrassment; and so, in so far as she could understand or be enlightened, had thought the young mistress. But the girl was an accommodating girl and a capable cook, and now the discomforts, possibly the disasters, of a new regime were to be gone through with again.
And then these odd moods in his girl, and the more ruinous change they portended! Great as was his love for his Ellen, he could sometimes have felt as if his proper destiny lay in the peaceful shelter and self-abnegation of a monastery.
II
Ellen, her domestic duties over, often on fine mornings used to go and sit in the Long Walk in Kensington Gardens, taking a book with her. So we find her on the day succeeding that night of Sultan's misbehaviour.
Her slender forefinger marked the place in Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee, Chapter V, at which she had stopped reading. The book lay in her lap, and she sat on in a mood of pleasurable languor, conscious of little but the sun's warmth and the pleasant smell of grass and greening trees. Emotion was inactive within her; the pretty picture she made was innocent of the least self-consciousness; she was content just to sit and to vegetate.
Of a sudden she was aware that a figure, definitely detaching itself from the other moving shapes in the camera obscura of her dreaming mind, had paused to regard her. She started slightly and looked up.
She had a misty impression of having seen the woman before, here, in this very place; of having encountered such eyes fixedly regarding her, coming, and going, and returning, with an expression in them as of some haunting desire to challenge or be challenged. It was like the sense of a dream already dreamt, of a shadow associated with a past shadow, but whether also of a dream or of some forgotten reality she could not decide. Seeing herself observed, the woman hesitated, passed on, stopped, and suddenly returned with a resolute air.
"Forgive me," she said. "I fancied that I knew you. Would you mind telling me your name?"
She was not prepossessing in appearance, or of scrupulous cleanliness as to her dress and linen. She had a drawn discoloured face, and, in overblown contrast with it, an hypertrophied neck and bust, too full for their supporting frame. A modish hat was set at an angle upon her head; but its folds were thick with dust, and the hair beneath looked staring and uncombed. 'Style' clung to her like a threadbare habit, running down into a couple of once showy trodden-over shoes with paste buckles. For the rest, the incessant flurried movement of the flexuous lips, the little spasmodic cough, the mucid vacancy of the shell-fish-like eyes with their inflamed rims, pointed, significantly enough to discrimination, to one clear explanation of her aspect and condition.
Ellen, surprised out of her reverie, sat up, and, in a little flutter, gave the information asked. A spasm caught the woman's face, so ugly and convulsive that the girl started to her feet in fear.
"Let me call someone—a Keeper," she said. "You are feeling ill—you"
The other stopped her, gasping, entreating:
"No, for God's sake! It is nothing. Don't be frightened. I am taken this way sometimes. If I might sit by you a moment"
She was so obviously distressed, so patently clutching for a straw of human sympathy, that a sudden rush of compassion overswept the girl's first panic, and she recovered herself with a rather tremulous smile.
"Yes, please do," she said. "The bench is yours as much as mine. There. Will it distress you to talk? You thought you knew me, you say?"
The woman panted, as if fighting down a tendency to collapse.
"It was a mistake," she whispered—"of course—what else could it be?"
"I don't know," said Ellen. "I fancy—it occurs to me—haven't you already, at other times, seen me here, and"
She paused for some response; but none came. Suddenly the stranger half-turned, facing full upon her.
"Do you know what brought me to this?" she said, breathing quickly, her hand upon her bosom.
Ellen, palpitating a little, shook her head.
"Drink," said the stranger. "I'm a drunkard. Can you realize what that means? Most of my life I've been one. It was in my blood; it may be in anyone's; but I knew it, and yet I courted temptation. The depression—and then the glow, the heavenly moment—that was it—and, after all, damnation. It may be in anyone's, I say. A thousand million times better not to invite the risk." She was putting evident restraint upon herself to speak quietly, though the agitation of her nerves still showed in her voice. Her accent and intonation, Ellen could not but help noticing through all her perturbation, were those of an educated woman. "A thousand million times," she repeated.
"Was there never anyone to help you—to point it out?" said the girl gently.
"Never anyone—in the right way," answered the stranger. "If there had been, I might, who knows, have been saved. But righteousness touches no heart to shame. It needs pity and wise forbearance to do that."
"Is it too late, even now?"
The woman, not answering for a little, seemed as if pondering the inexplicable question.
"Is it?" she said presently. "God knows! If one were strong enough—as a warning and example—to find some resolute purpose, and prevail through it. To be a use in life—a saviour where one had been a slave—not despised and tolerated, but welcomed as a power. God knows, I say! I think I would accept any service, however humble, that promised me that position. Experience teaches, they say. Why should not mine? If I were accepted for it, looked up to for it, I think I might, even now, take my stand upon a rock and rule the very devil that had enslaved me."
Her voice had gathered strength from repressed emotion as she ended. But through all the incoherence of its utterance the dim clue it followed was plain enough to the perceptions of the child who sat beside. And within those young perceptions was already forming, half unconsciously at first, a response, impulsive, beautiful, to the cry of a smitten sister.
Ellen's was a peculiar mind; mature beyond its years, perspicacious, original, self-reliant. The girl, after her first fright, was not shocked in her near neighbourhood to this fulsome sinner so startlingly imposed upon her. Rather she found her case attractive, in a way no man could understand. The woman had nothing but her vice to recommend her, and it was the one thing that did. She would likely have been mean and small without it, a thing of conventional observances, of orthodox respectabilities—a standard example of the unsubmerged nine-tenths. But her vice, in degrading, had exalted her above herself; it had brought her into line with the essential tragedy of life—the curse of predisposition. God made the leper before he called our pity to him. Disease and ugliness had to be created to be cured. It seemed a paradox of divinity that man should have to straighten God's deformities. Ellen did not like this trait in the Almighty, though she would not have said so; but she was always ready to rebuke it by example.
Women are called illogical; yet, for all their professed religionism, their instinct, more than man's, revolts in practice against such divine irrationalism. That is why their sympathies can embrace the unloveliness which to the masculine perception is simply repulsive; why, in moments even of unconscious ecstatic mutiny against the bullying of Providence, they can suck the poison from the wounds inflicted by it. They speak devotion of their fervour, but they mean rebellion. We have heard of and shuddered at such acts; but in their spiritual essence they are of regular occurrence. Women are not nauseated, as men are, by the visible tokens of misery and disease. The cruel illogic of such human sores appeals to them above their foulness.
To cure—even here! What if Providence had capriciously appointed her to physic this one of its own created monstrosities—had thrown them together for the purpose? She took no credit for the thought. It came on the most natural of womanly impulses. And perhaps, after all, it proceeded from an utterly mistaken conception. But, as to that, she must speak what her sex urged, giving herself no time for reflection. She put out a caressing hand; her eyes were shining, her voice full.
"I am so sorry for you," she said. "I am so sorry. If I could help you in the way you suggest, I should be glad and thankful."
"Help me," said the woman—"you?" She looked into the hot young face, bending ravenously towards it. "How could you help me? she said.
Ellen blurted out. "If you meant what you said?"
"Meant?" cried the woman: "Meant? My God!"
"You must not mind," said the girl, in a soft voice, "if I take you at your word. When you talked about accepting any service, however humble, were you speaking?"
"I was speaking from my soul," interrupted the other. "Why, what am I to hold my head up? I would be a charwoman, a kitchenmaid, and thankfully, on such terms of welcome. But who would take me on any terms?"
"I would, and I will," said Ellen, looking up, "if you will let me."
Her fearless eyes challenged the sodden face.
"You!" repeated the woman, lost in thick amazement. "How?"
"We want a servant," said Ellen—"our present one is going—she is going next Tuesday. I live alone with my father, and our life is a very simple one. I do not like to suggest it. I would never have dared but for your—for what you said. But if you would not think it degrading, I should so like to have you—on that understanding, I mean—that you should be looked up to for what you had gone through. If it helped you to regain your strength of will, your self-respect—the obligation would all be mine—it would indeed; it would make me so glad and happy. Will you come? Will you give yourself that chance? I am sure, for my sake, you would not betray the trust I put in you."
"For your sake!" The woman looked stupidly on the ground. Her face worked, then suddenly unlovely tears were rolling down her cheeks.
"There are plenty of lady-helps in these days," said Ellen.
"Well, let me be called so," muttered the other; "but not out of pride, God knows." Presently, wiping her eyes with a soiled handkerchief, she spoke spasmodically, gaspingly, from behind its folds. "I don't know what to say. If the effort, after all, were beyond my strength. Do you realize what you undertake? If I dared—O, if I dared! Rash and impulsive, like—but you mean it; I can see it in your beautiful eyes. Only—there is so much to consider—such nerve to find—and I haven't got it now. But perhaps—where do you live? Will you tell me that?"
Ellen gave her address. The woman rose to her feet, still quivering and sobbing, a pitiful repellent sight.
"Give me a little time," she said; "and then—if I come at all, I will come—not like this. I never thought, in approaching you, that my purpose—but there may be a God after all. Would you get to hate me or love me? You mean so sweetly—dear love, you mean so well; but I know; I can foresee. Will you let me come if I can, and not hold me ungrateful if I fail."
"I shall expect you," said Ellen, also risen to her feet, and smiling brightly. "On Tuesday I shall expect you. You won't disappoint me, I am sure."
The woman gazed at her a moment in silence, with eyes half inspired, half horrified; then, muttering what sounded like a blessing, turned, and, with jerky unsteady steps, went off through the Park.
Ellen also turned, and made her way home. She felt in an odd state of exaltation, which, for the time at least, blinded her to the mad irrationality of the step she had taken. To have burdened herself, on a momentary impulse of charity, with a responsibility so tremendous! To be introducing into her father's house, that ark of domestic security, a potential wild beast, about whose antecedents she knew less than nothing! Yet the thought somehow did not trouble her. She felt, in some strange way, that she was about to make for herself such a friend as she had never yet known.
She hoped she had secured a servant to take Annie's place, she told her father that night. It was to be a lady-help, an experiment, and he was to remember to comport himself accordingly. He asked for no particulars. He was content to leave to her independent judgment all such domestic transactions. It would only have worried him to be consulted and made responsible in such matters.
III
On the Tuesday evening, by an accident, whether diabolic or providential remains an open question, Vosper returned home earlier than usual to find his daughter absent. He let himself in with his latch-key, and was hanging up his coat and hat in the hall, when he staggered slightly, and put a hand to his forehead. The vision of a woman, seen through the open door of the dining-room, moving softly here and there as she laid the table with glass and cutlery, caught like a cold hand at his heart. His face turned as pale as wax; he swayed, and clawed at the wall an instant. As he stood, the woman came out quickly and accosted him.
"Hush!" she said: "I had dreaded but hoped against this. Come in here, before she returns."
She took his sleeve, and he obeyed her, stumbling in a physical vertigo.
"Take something," she urged. "Quick! you must recover yourself."
She moved, as if towards the whisky decanter which stood on the sideboard. He stayed her with a feeble gesture; his tongue clacked inarticulate against his dry palate.
"You need not fear," she said. "I should not be here if you had need to."
"You—the lady-help? "
He spoke at last, small and thick, like a man recovering from a stroke.
"Yes," she said. "Listen to me."
"You have given it up? Is that what you mean?"
"For the last week," she answered; "and, God help me, for ever."
A little guttural laugh, or sneer, came from him; and then he cried out, like one half mad, "Clara!"
"Yes, you hoped I was dead," she said. "You never hoped it as I did myself. But not now. I have a purpose in living."
"Have you? My God! how did you find me out—find your way here?"
"Do you suppose I ever sought you? You might have known me better, if it had been in you to see and understand. When I left you, it was by my own act, and never to return."
"And yet" He made a frantic gesture with his hands.
"The purpose drew me," she said; "I had no choice. I had come upon her in the Park—our child—my child—and I had to speak. How many years ago was it?—and I knew her—I knew her—would to Christ I had not. What have you told her about me?"
"Nothing to your shame. We never speak of you; she believes you dead; and she was too young to remember. Some instinct in her, I think, keeps her away from the subject. Perhaps she thought you wicked."
"And you let her?"
"I never said so. I have sought all these years only peace from the past; and now—O, my ruined dream—this thunderbolt—no rest or comfort any more! My child and I had better be dead."
"Listen—do you hear? Your comfort shall not suffer for me. You have only to be silent and let things take their course. Look at me."
He raised his drooping head; his glassy eyes obeyed the summons, mutinously but irresistibly, from under their fallen lids.
"When I first spoke to her," said the woman, "I was at my worst. You had never known it, could never picture it—you, whose loathing had already found in the thing I was a beast beyond redemption. But there were lower depths; through all this waste of years I have descended to them. You would have shuddered to see the result—aghast—hating and cowering. But she—my child, mine—could smile on me, the hundredfold debased, and put out her pretty hand, and bid me have courage and come to her and be healed. I could have fallen at her feet—her own mother—think of it; and I promised—I promised to make the effort. She knew nothing of me—she need never learn that truth. Nor would you have known me again—your wife—so battered out of recognition. Yet you knew me now—you never doubted for one instant; and I ask you, shall not that change speak for my resolution? Even in these few days I have done something to qualify myself for the task I have undertaken. Yet I hoped against hope that you would not know me, so that I could have served her, unwatched, unsuspected, in the passion of my secret. Well, you will have to share it."
She was changed, as she had said. No term of purer life could now undo the ravages of the years; yet, that rankling thorn once removed, the intumescence, the delirium caused by its poison had subsided, leaving her sane and in a measure mistress of herself. She was ghastly pale, like one who had been bled almost to death, but it was the pallor of a convalescence from once disfiguring disease. A spectre of her old self, she had returned to recognition, and to the renewed haunting of the unhappy soul who had fondly believed her to be laid for ever.
The inhuman tyranny of this revisitation awakened in Vosper a fury of which he was normally incapable. Its cruelty seemed on a par with that which tenderly nurses a murderer and would-be suicide back to life in order to make him fit for the gallows. His little fancy home, which he had so laboriously built up stone by stone from the ruins of former days, had crashed in a moment about his ears. That fool's paradise, into whose securer fastnesses he had imagined himself to be surely penetrating, had, like the dreamy perspectives of a stage landscape, brought him up with a shock against a brick wall. It was an unheard of, a monstrous persecution. Even Job had been allowed to rebuild permanently on the ghastly wreckage of his house.
"Never, before God!" he broke out, with hysterical violence. "I will not endure the thought of such a conspiracy between us, or suffer your presence here on any terms whatever. You must go as you came, now, this instant, before she returns."
"And what would she think of me?"
"What does it matter what she thinks? You are nothing to her, I conclude, but a 'case'—an abstraction of a vice she does not understand, but which I know to be ineradicable."
"It is like old times to hear you say so," responded his wife stonily.
"Is it not true?" he burst out. "Do you not illustrate its truth in every line of your face? Do I not know what would certainly follow, were I mad enough to listen to your plea? To serve her, my unsophisticated girl—psha! There is only one way, were that really your desire, and you know it—to keep yourself eternally out of her life."
"It was for the child's sake I left you; I tell you it is for the child's sake I return."
"For her sake, great God! Are you the one to understand and advise her—or I, her father, who have watched over and cherished her welfare all these long years?"
"It is I, I think."
"You may think it; but not here."
"Yes, here, Henry. I am resolved."
He read it in her face, and before that inexorable sentence felt the will in himself already beginning to sweat, to yield its first fury, to turn whimperingly to a thought of compromise. With tears of self-pity in his eyes, he essayed an appeal to her better feelings.
"Cannot you be satisfied, Clara," he said, "with having wrecked my life once already? You owe me something—remember that. Have you ever considered, for one thing, what it meant to me, financially, when you left? I never questioned your right to your own small estate, though its withdrawal left me miserably provided against the hard problems of existence. But I faced them, and I conquered; and I have met the burden of the years as a man should—a stiff struggle; yet, I had hoped, earning its late reward in some measure of peace and security. And now you would prove my efforts all in vain!"
"You can have it, what is left of it, for your own again."
Her forced impassivity goaded him once more to madness.
"I do not want it," he cried—"the price of blood! You shall not stay, and ruin all I have done."
"Very well," she answered; "if you are resolved, I will confess myself to my daughter, and leave the issue to her."
He flung his hands to his temples, and, holding them so pressed, went to and fro distracted. He knew, surely enough, what that issue would be.
"What do you propose to do, if you remain?" he said, stopping and facing her wildly. "Tell me that."
"What I should have proposed," she answered, "had you not recognised me—my duty to my service. I am your lady-help, Henry; you need never consider me in any other light. I will never betray you or myself: have no least fear of it. You need not allude to me, speak to me, recognise my existence, if you will. A very little custom will make it all quite easy. I have no friends; I go under an assumed name; there is not the least chance of anybody discovering the truth. If there were, this change in me would be my sure disguise. But there is not. You may live the life of peace and comfort you desire. I will not disturb it. I will not, if you will accept my solemn word, drink one drop of anything but water so long as I am here."
He stood staring gloomily at her while she spoke.
"Will you not?" he said at last. "But I think I know better. I think I know what it will be. And God help us all, I say." He walked to the door, turned—"Tell her, when she comes in," he said, "that I am busy in my study, do not want to be disturbed until dinner. I must dress my wits somehow to face this ghastly masquerade" and he left the room.
IV
Ellen, for some reason best known to herself, said nothing to her father about the interview in the gardens, nor did she make any mention of the weakness to which their new acquisition was, or had been, subject. Possibly, on reflection, she had come to realise, a little guiltily, the rashness of her impulsive act, and was shy of inviting any criticism of it. Or some reluctance to betray the confidence reposed in her may have acted as a deterrent. She was well acquainted, of course, with her father's constitutional sensitiveness to domestic worries, and knew that any imposition of such upon his tranquillity would only make him irritable without help to herself. For any or none of these reasons, therefore, she kept silent, abiding, with a little trepidation, perhaps, the vindication, or otherwise, of her bold experiment.
In the meanwhile he, for his part, remained as necessarily tongue-tied; though the strain of secrecy superimposed on anxiety wrought in him a state of 'nerves' which seemed sometimes almost to verge on hysteria. Ellen thought him in these days in a very upturned frame of mind, moody, unreasonable, or subject to odd ebullitions of excitement. He did not seem to favour the new ménage, if one were to judge from the difficulty he appeared to experience, from the very first night, in accepting with any sort of accommodating grace the lady-help's ministrations. He was embarrassed in the woman's presence, and suspicious in her absence. He betrayed his feelings towards her in constant complaints and innuendoes to the girl, not in any way specific, but coloured by an intolerable fretfulness. He was a man indeed who could neither submit nor revolt with courage. His daughter, almost wearied by him at last, became more confirmed than ever in her policy of silence. She was endowed, morally, with a will the antithesis of his.
Poor wretch; he had, it must be admitted, some justification for his attitude. Dogmatic in the few beliefs he could comprehend, he was persuaded, and had always been persuaded, that no redemption was possible in the case of congenital drunkards. The psychology of such minds betrays invariably a strong self-cosseting instinct, and their creeds will always be found to embrace the least worry or agitation for themselves. Vosper could not sleep, or eat, or enjoy life adequately under the perpetual sense of impending disaster which haunted him. He was convinced that that disaster was only a question of time; that there would come a day when all the horror of his earlier experience would be renewed in an intensified form. It was impossible to be himself under the circumstances; and he made little attempt. He lived his days in the spirit of an imprisoned martyr to some preposterous cause, nervous misery underneath, at the best a false gaiety on the surface. The thing could not go on so, and fail to end in some hideous catastrophe.
Yet it went on, as the troubles of irresolute men will; and even in time assumed the guise, or the disguise, of a just endurable habit. The first dislocating tension of the secret relaxed, as day followed day and no evil ensued, and gradually a weak spirit of resignation began to possess the man. Truly, the situation, child hiding from father and father from child, was a grotesquely artificial one; yet for a drama's length it managed to carry conviction.
One ameliorating influence lay in Ellen herself. The girl, after the coming of the woman, seemed for a time much less subject than she had been to those fits of emotional excitement which had latterly affected her. She was even abnormally quiet in her conduct—more like the sweet child of old whom she had been seeming to repudiate. The father, in his new mood of tremulous reassurance, thought that he detected in this recovery a probable explanation of the state which had preceded it. The girl was of an age when the natural fondness in her was beginning to crave a more liberal outlet than the monotony and solitariness of her life could supply. The feeling, he admitted, was unconscious and perfectly wholesome, and, in the case of a sweet disposition like hers, could easily be directed into pure channels, and find therein a complete satisfaction for its desires. So it was that this affection, seeking itself a vent, and finding an insufficient one for its volume, had resulted in a sort of moral congestion producing moodiness and excitement, until, in the relief of discovering a new subject for its exercise, it had again begun to flow readily, and to resume its ancient sedateness. Ellen's accumulating amiability, in fact, had found in this work of redemption a way of escape for itself.
The child was mothering the mother, and finding emotional easement in the process—so decided the father. Was it even conceivable that, in the end, she would prevail with her? Despite his obstinate convictions, the self-indulgence in the man began gradually to pet a weakly optimistic fancy, not for the woman's sake, but because its realization would relieve his own mind of a load of apprehension. For that reason he could have lusted to find his dogmatism falsified. He began to glow a little over the picture of his girl, serene, endearing, persuasive, fighting his battles for him, while he himself lay secure, gathering a thread of hope even from his own undisturbed tranquillity. He never ventured so far as to face in his mind the consequences of a possible cure. It was always enough for the moment that he was left to enjoy it in peace. Whenever he saw his wife, her appearance seemed to be vindicating her promise. For the rest, she adhered strictly to the letter of her undertaking, and never voluntarily approached or addressed him.
And then, quite swiftly and unaccountably, it appeared, came a change.
•••••••
That spring was marked by very hot and oppressive weather. In our temperate climate any reasonable accession of warmth is always—whatever the complaints over the preceding cold and wet—speedily resented as an affliction, especially by women. The lovely ardour of an April sunshine produces amongst them more complaint than gratitude. Ellen was a true child of her climate; she loved, like a cuckoo flower, to feel the sun only so long as a cool wind blew and her roots rested in moisture; she loved, like a primrose, to drink in the glow from the tempering ambush of a copse. But when human duties and errands had to be faced, her petals wilted in the heat and she became sapless.
It may have been on this account that she seemed presently to fall flaccid, and gradually more and more so as the heat intensified, until her mood settled into one of almost habitual nervous depression. She became silent and absent-minded; she appeared unable to rally her spirits at all; and, in proportion as she drooped, so did her father's apprehensions return upon him with redoubled sickness. What was to account for her state? Did it derive from the conscious failure of her attempt to redeem a lost soul? All his earlier alarms revived in the thought; a tetchy anger returned to possess his mind; he began already to feel wickedly abused in his trust and indulgence. One night, when she was sitting with him in this mood of silent dejection, the burden of his wrongs seemed to become to him in a moment unendurable. He strode to the grate, knocked out the ashes of his pipe on the bars, and faced upon the girl in a passion of aggrieved protest.
"What is the matter with you?" he said.
She looked up exhaustedly, a little surprised. "Nothing, papa," she said.
"Nothing!" he snapped. "Then what has put you into this state of mind? Don't pretend, or ask for an explanation. You know perfectly well what I mean. Has anything happened to depress or disappoint you?"
"No, nothing whatever, papa."
"Good God!" he burst out. "Is nothing owing to me? Must I always be the one to find cheerfulness and sympathy, as well as food and clothes, for my family? To come home night after night from the killing wear and tear of business, and find this more killing atmosphere waiting to receive me! Are you unhappy? Do you want anything? Whatever it is I will not have it conveyed in this spirit. Do you understand? I say I will not have it. Have I not worries and anxieties enough already, without your adding to them tenfold by your behaviour? It must end, I say."
"It shall end," she answered. She had risen to her feet; her eyes were bright, her face a little flushed. "I can't answer for myself, papa; but I do know what you mean, and it is hard on you. It shan't happen any more. There, I am good again."
There was a wink of moisture on her lashes, as she ran out of the room; but all was sparkle and merriment when she returned presently with the tray of grog and tumblers, to mix her father his nightcap. Seeing her so transformed, his anger and agitation were assuaged in a moment.
"I didn't mean, my darling," he began—but she stopped him, a hot little palm on his lips.
"No, not another word," she said. "Don't I know, goose? It was a shame, and I am never going to be naughty any more."
She went to the piano, and rattled off piece after piece till the glasses rang. Vosper was quite comforted and reassured. It would have been too cruel at this pass to have his dream of new-dared contentment shattered.
From that night Ellen was herself again; and more, the fits of depression were succeeded by an even exaggerated recurrence of those earlier moods of emotion and excitement. Vosper observed, and was not yet satisfied. A haunting sense as of something unnatural in his neighbourhood kept him at a perpetual tension of uneasiness. Things were not as they should be; and still his mind harped on the only solution of the riddle comprehensible to it. One morning, at breakfast, looking across at the sideboard, a thing struck him. The whisky decanter was always left exposed there, and his glance had fallen on it. Surely, he thought, his last night's peg or two had not so reduced the quantity it had held. He seemed to remember that the bottle had been quite full at first; now it was half empty. He was conscious sometimes of his indulging a little beyond what health or wisdom dictated; but surely not to this extent.
A shock of half enlightenment, followed by a shiver of vindictive terror, shook his heart. When his wife came in presently on some duty, he regarded her hatefully from under covert lids. She was very pale, with a grim set look about the lips; but her actions betrayed no sign of conscious guilt. He would know presently, he told himself, and there for the moment he left it.
That night, at dinner, he asked Ellen, in as guarded, as natural a manner as he could assume, if she was satisfied with her new experiment. She answered, 'yes, quite.' Had she discovered, he said, no drawbacks, no weaknesses, no habits. He had thought it just possible that there might have been some such explanation of the woman's willingness to accept a service so comparatively unprofitable as theirs. There frequently was in these cases. Ellen knew of none. She did not favour the bottle, for instance, he asked. Ellen had no reason to suppose so.
The guileless unsophisticated child! Before he went up to the drawing-room, Vosper most carefully measured the quantity of liquor in the decanter, making an exact mental note of the point in the cut-glass to which it reached. Later, when the girl brought up his grog, he looked to verify his calculation. The whisky stood lower by a couple of finger breadths than he had left it an hour ago.
His hand trembled a little as he lifted his glass. His face had gone white; there was a sick feeling at his heart. But he managed to conceal his state from Ellen while she played. The girl, saying she had a headache, went to bed early; and a little later Vosper rose.
He was shivering all over; he poured out and swallowed a wineglassful of the raw spirit; then opened the door, and went very softly, swaying a little, downstairs. In the kitchen, he shut himself in with the woman and faced her.
"Liar!" he said: "liar!"
His voice was hoarse; he swallowed with difficulty. She stood before him motionless, her eyes staring into his.
"So, you have found out?" she said.
He could have struck her in his fury.
"You devil!" he breathed. "Was I not right? Did I not know? And this is all you have to answer for your broken promise?"
She seemed to try to speak and to fail. Her failure, as implying fear and conscience-guiltiness, stimulated his own shaking nerves, and lent him courage.
"I have watched the spirit decanter of late," he said—"you won't ask me to say more. To bring the curse back upon me like this—no truth, no shame, in the presence of your own child—to abuse her trust in you; to make beastly capital out of her innocence, her pity, her inexperience! Now you know what I have to say. To-night, as it is late, I will not turn you out. But to-morrow—be gone before I return, and darken my life no more."
She inclined her head: "I will be gone to-morrow," she said, her lips just moving; and, hesitating a moment, he turned and left her without another word.
It was over, and more easily than he had dared to hope. He went back to the drawing-room, gulped down a final glass of spirit, and, for safety's sake, carried the decanter with him to his bedroom, where, the racing of his heart presently subsiding, he fell into an exhausted sleep.
V
Ellen came down to breakfast late. She felt very languid and inert. Her lips were dry; her eyes had blue rims round them and little thready red veins in their corners. There was something very wistful about her appearance. Sickness, headache, even a cold, borrow a certain pathos for themselves from youthful prettiness. They can awaken a sympathy in the male observer which no adult domestic ailment is able to reach. He finds somehow in them a tender appeal to his pity, his emotions; his instinct leans caressingly, maybe, towards the fever which is at once a danger and an opportunity. Perhaps that is it, or perhaps it is that personable youth can idealise the disfigurements which make such unattractive prose of its elders. Not presence, or dignity, but only sweet immaturity may achieve poetry in a sneeze or a snuffle.
Ellen had Sultan, the great Persian, in her arms when the lady-help came in with her coffee. Her hot face was buried in the creature's fur; she nuzzled and fondled it. As the woman put down the tray on the table, the cat sprang from its mistress's embraces to the floor, where it stood arching its back and moaning. Ellen, her eyes alight with a sudden fire, put out an inviting hand. The cat started from it and spat. Ellen, half-rising, spat back, venomously, uncontrollably. In the act, she saw the woman, subsided into her chair, and sat regarding the other from under heavy lids, smiling, defiant. The woman stood motionless, leaning her hands on the tray as she had deposited it.
"Is papa not down yet?" said Ellen.
"He is down and already gone," answered the other in a low voice. "You are late; but even so he left unusually early."
"Did he? Well, I think I am glad."
"And I," said the woman.
She gave a heavy sigh, released her hold of the tray, and, coming round, stood above the girl.
"Beastly," she said. "Was it not?"
"He made me furious," said Ellen. "I couldn't help it."
"No, I know, I know. What shall we do, dear?"
There was a sudden intense grief in her voice.
"Nothing," said Ellen. "It is no good. You can do nothing for me."
"No, never again. He has noticed at last, and I am to go. He thinks, of course, it is I, and I did not undeceive him. We had a scene last night, after you were in bed, and I am to be gone before he returns."
"Why did he think it was you? I had told him nothing."
"But he knows, nevertheless—enough, a million times, to make him suspect. Leave that, dear, for the moment. What will you do without me?"
"What I should do with you, I suppose." The girl was crouching in her place, her forehead leaned upon her hand. "It is no good, I tell you. It might be, if I wanted to stop; but I don't. I am horrible, a hypocritical devil—I see that; and yet I don't want to be cured. It is quite useless."
"He must find out when I am gone."
"Yes."
"And you don't care?"
"No. I must have it or die."
"Better die, then."
"So I often think."
The woman put her hand to her face a moment, made a gesture of wildly forlorn renunciation, then bent lower over the sullen figure.
"Ellen," she said; "you questioned why he should suspect me. Because I am his wife, dear, and you are my child."
In the tense silence that ensued, the voice of a hawker, crying some squalid murder and suicide, passed outside the window and drifted away down the square.
"The curse was on me already," said the woman, "when we were married. It divided us at last when you were a little thing. He let you suppose I was dead: would to God I had been. And then the years went on, and I was carried helpless and hopeless with them. When I first came upon you in the Park, I I knew you, Ellen—I was sure; and as surely I saw that the curse had been transmitted, that you too had been marked down for destruction. I had that upon me at the time to end, swiftly and surely, my miserable life: I have it upon me still. But in the sudden prospect you opened out to me, not of hope for myself, but of help and warning for my child, I saw at least a respite. If I could do for her sake what I had failed in so utterly for my own, I might yet win, I thought, salvation for us both. Your father was the one difficulty, the one terror; but in the end I dared to face him, claiming mercy because of my resolve to win redemption. We met when you were out—it was a fearful moment—and he would not believe me; he would have refused my prayer and driven me from the house. But in my desperation I threatened to reveal the truth to you; and then he gave way at last. And I stopped on, hoping and fearing, Ellen, and—O, my God! you know, you know."
The girl rose from her chair, steadying herself by the back. She was white to the eyes her lips looked stiff and grey. She whispered something.
"What is it, darling? I can't hear."
"I said—O, poor papa!"
"Yes. What will you do?"
The poor thing put out her hand.
"You know. Give it me."
The woman felt in her bosom, and their fingers met.
"Only a few drops," she said—"nine or ten. Leave the bottle there. I shall follow you presently."
She cried out, as her daughter turned from her.
"Your mother, Ellen!"
The girl paused a moment.
"Yes," she said—"I hear. But why are you? We shall know—both of us—by and by. It is he I am thinking of. I could never understand why it was—I wanted so to be good—and it would end by driving him mad. There is no other way in all the world. It is not the first time I have thought it; and now I am sure."
Not once the word on her lips—no response, no solace to that mute agony. The mother held out her arms, and closed them on eternal vacancy; she heard the steps go up the stairs, the bedroom door close softly; and then all was silent.
"She has done it," she whispered. "It was the only way to save her—not to become like me—not"
She broke into a sudden whining laugh, and threw herself face downwards on the table.
•••••••
Vosper hardly dared to return home that night. The sick misgiving of an unforceful nature was upon him; he dreaded to find his will defied and the woman still in evidence.
The house seemed very quiet when he entered it. It was a still, oppressive evening. Somewhere in the square a belated barrel-organ was droning a popular waltz. The commonplace sound was somehow tonic in its effect upon him, and, in an access of resolution, he closed the door and hung up his hat.
"Ellen!" he called, half-fearfully: "Ellen!"
"Up here," answered a voice.
His heart seemed to stop; for a moment he had a mad impulse to open the door and fly; then a revulsion of feeling seized him—after all he was master here—and he ascended the stairs quickly, peremptorily, his pulses hammering, desperation giving him strength. On the landing stood the figure of his wife.
"Why are you here still?" he panted. "Where is Ellen?"
"I will show you," she said, softly. "She looks so pretty and so peaceful."
Something horrible seemed to catch in his throat. He staggered, and she caught his arm. The next moment they were in the bedroom together.
"Look," she said—"how at last she lies at rest. She killed herself, Henry. I gave her the means. I was only waiting for you to tell you. Was it not well done?"
He swayed back and sank into a chair against the wall. His head dropped forward, his whole body sagged; speech and motion were paralysed in him at a blow.
The woman had crossed to the farther side of the bed, on which lay the strange white thing, the little silvery madonna vindicated at last. The mother's face was bent over the sleeping picture with infinite tenderness. She spoke on, low and thrilling, exculpating, pleading, denouncing, to the shadows, to herself and to him:
"If we have got—somehow—into the wrong world, the best thing is to leave it. I have thought, that our vice, perhaps, Ellen's and mine, might be no vice, elsewhere—the thing, the normal thing, in some other place—not eccentric, not beastly, fitting into the order and a part with it—only wrong here. And we don't mean it—we don't mean it at all. We try to adapt ourselves; but our nature comes from somewhere else—we have strayed—we don't remember. They say one man's food is another man's poison. Why not one's world—our world's—Ellen's and mine? We intended no harm—we tried so dreadfully—and we couldn't without help." She bent lower, and went on, in a soothing moaning voice: "He was not strong enough for us, this man, dearie. There is no cure in hate and disgust. And he would not be denied his own—it comforted him—he had not the strength to resist, the unselfishness to forbear. With that warning before him he should have kept it away from you—its very shadow—its fumes—the visible token of what it means to him. But he would have thought that hard, unjust—such a little matter, yet so much to him, who never felt, never knew. And so all the time he failed to see, to understand, what one look had been enough for me to read. Someone will tell him how I tried with you—how I tried and prayed—strong at last, where he could not be strong—loyal to my promise—shielding you until the end was plain—not to be evaded—the damning hopeless end. My own, my child; my own, my child! You knew what it meant to me, to see it, smell it there, always within my grasp, and never to touch it. There was only one way at last—let him know that—and we took it. All else was despair—no prospect but hell; and so I spoke the truth, and you turned to it. Your own mother, my baby, that gave you life—ah, from the breast that—so pretty, so quiet lying there. All day I have sat here watching you, by your little cradle, and you have never stirred. But always the smile—the smile that waits for me alone when you wake."
The voice tailed off into unintelligible murmurs, which, to the mute terrific soul of the figure opposite, became merged in the low thunder of the distant traffic, of far inarticulate cries, of obscene laughter rising from deep vaults of death. He sat listening in an enormous trance, a prey to the supremity of fear, like a man walled in, swathed in stone, yet conscious of hideous whispers obscurely penetrating to him. How long this state lasted he never knew. It was punctuated presently by other sounds, nearer, more definite—sounds like the thin wail of wind, the sobbing of rain, the tapping of small nails into coffin wood. The discordance increased—whirled into a universal crepitation, in which all its parts were mingled and confounded—ran suddenly to attenuation and an end—and was nothing but the whine of a barrel-organ, fulsome, importunate, like the voice of a persistent beggar.
Vosper, uttering a horrible scream, staggered from his chair, staggered round the bed—and saw her. She was prone on the floor, shapeless, inanimate; but her limbs still twitched, and out of the huddled shadows stood a white hand, as if mockingly inviting, the fingers yet crooked about a tiny bottle.
Fear in that extremity forgot itself. There was only one thing for him to do. He wrenched the bottle from the convulsed hold, and, clutching it with both hands to his throat, reeled from the room. Twice, thrice, in his stumbling rush downstairs, he approached the thing to his lips, and as often, shuddering from the deadly odour of almonds that reached his brain, put it away again. In the hall at last, he glared about him frenziedly, saw the open door of the dining-room, hurried in, turned to the whisky decanter on the sideboard, seized it, and, putting it to his mouth, gulped down the raw spirit as if it were water. Pausing at last, he gave a long shuddering sigh, stood swaying a few moments; then, raising his hand as if to send the poison crashing into the grate, recollected himself, and, placing the little bottle gingerly on the sideboard, turned, ran to the front door, and, opening it, tore from the house on his way to the police-station.