Deadham Hard Part 15

All which upon the face of it might, surely, be voted encouraging enough. Yet:

"Should there be any that doubt the veritable existence of h.e.l.l fire,"

the doctor told himself, as he subsequently and thankfully pulled on his night-s.h.i.+rt, "to recover them, and in double quick time, of their heresy let 'em but look in my friend Verity's eyes."--And he rounded off the sentence with an oath.

CHAPTER IX

AN EXPERIMENT IN BRIDGE-BUILDING OF WHICH TIME ALONE CAN FIX THE VALUES

Damaris lay on her side, her face turned to the wall. When Charles Verity, quietly crossing the room, sat down in an easy chair, so placed at the head of the half-tester bed as to be screened from it by the dimity curtains, she sighed and slightly s.h.i.+fted her position.

Leaning back, he crossed his legs and let his chin drop on his breast.

He had barely glanced at her in pa.s.sing, receiving a vague impression of the outline of her cheek, of her neck, and shoulders, of her head, dark against the dim whiteness on which it rested, and the long dark stream of her hair spread loose across the pillows. He had no wish for recognition--not yet awhile. On the contrary, it was a relief to have time in which silently to get accustomed to her presence, to steep himself in the thought of her, before speech should define the new element intruded, as he believed, into his and her relation. Though little enough--too little, so said some of his critics--hampered by fear in any department, he consciously dreaded the smallest modification of that relation. Among the many dissatisfactions and bitternesses of life, it shone forth with a steady light of purity and sweetness, as a thing unspoiled, unbreathed on, even, by what is ign.o.ble or base. And not the surface of it alone was thus free from all breath of defilement. It showed clear right through, as some gem of the purest water. To keep it thus inviolate, he had made sacrifices in the past neither easy nor inconsiderable to a man of his temperament and ambitions. Hence that its perfection should be now endangered was to him the more exquisitely hateful.

Upon the altar of that hatred, promptly without scruple he sacrificed the wretched Theresa. Most of us are so const.i.tuted that, at a certain pa.s.s, pleasure--of a sort--is to be derived from witnessing the anguish of a fellow creature. In all save the grossly degenerate that pleasure, however, is short-lived. Reflection follows, in which we cut to ourselves but a sorry figure. With Charles Verity, reflection began to follow before he had spent many minutes in Damaris' sick-room. For here the atmosphere was, at once, grave and tender, beautifully honest in its innocence of the things of the flesh.--The woman had been inconceivably foolish, from every point of view. If she had known, good heavens, if she had only known! But he inclined now to the more merciful view that, veritably, she didn't know; that her practical, even her theoretic, knowledge was insufficient for her to have had any clear design. It was just a blind push of starved animal instinct. Of course she must go. Her remaining in the house was in every way unpermissible; still he need not, perhaps, have been so cold-bloodedly precipitate with her.

Anyhow the thing was done--it was done--He raised his shoulders and making with his hands a graphic gesture of dismissal, let his chin drop on to his breast again.

For the East had left its mark on his att.i.tude towards women with one exception--that of his daughter--Charles Verity, like most men, not requiring of himself to be too rigidly consistent. Hence Theresa, and all which pertained to her, even her follies, appeared to him of contemptibly small moment compared with the developments for which those follies might be held accidentally responsible. His mind returned to that main theme painfully. He envisaged it in all its bearings, not sparing himself. Suffered, and looked on at his own suffering with a stoicism somewhat sardonic.

Meanwhile Damaris slept. His nearness had not disturbed her, indeed he might rather suppose its effect beneficent. For her breathing grew even, just sweetly and restfully audible in the intervals of other sounds reaching him from out of doors.

The wind, drawing out of the sunset, freshened during the night. Now it blew wet and gustily from south-west, sighing through the pines and Scotch firs in the Wilderness. A strand of the yellow Banksia rose, trained against the house wall, breaking loose, scratched and tapped at the window-panes with anxious appealing little noises.

Many years had elapsed since Charles Verity spent a night upstairs in this part of the house, and by degrees those outdoor sounds attracted his attention as intimately familiar. They carried him back to his boyhood, to the s.p.a.cious dreams and projects of adolescence. He could remember just such gusty wet winds swis.h.i.+ng through the trees, such petulant fingering of errant creepers upon the windows, when he stayed here during the holidays from school at Harchester, on furlough from his regiment, and, later, on long leave from India, during his wonderful little great-uncle's lifetime.

And his thought took a lighter and friendlier vein, recalling that polished, polite, encyclopedic minded and witty gentleman, who had lived to within a few months of his full century with a maximum of interest and entertainment to himself, and a minimum of injury or offence to others.

To the last he retained his freshness of intellectual outlook, his insatiable yet discreet curiosity. Taking it as a whole, should his life be judged a singularly futile or singularly enviable one? Nothing feminine, save on strictly platonic lines, was recorded to have entered it at any period. Did that argue remarkable wisdom or defective courage, or some abnormal element in a composition otherwise deliciously mundane and human?

Charles had debated this often. Even as a boy it had puzzled him. As a young man he had held his own views on the subject, not without lasting effect. For one winter he had pa.s.sed at The Hard, in the fine bodily health and vigour of his early thirties, this very lack of women's society contributed, by not unnatural reaction, to force the idea of woman hauntingly upon him--thereby making possible a strange and hidden love pa.s.sage off the Dead Sea fruit of which he was in process of supping here to-night.

He moved, bent forward, setting his elbows on the two chair arms, closing his eyes as he listened, and leaning his forehead upon his raised hands. For in the plaintive voice of the moist, fitful southwesterly wind how, to his bearing, the buried, half-forgotten drama re-lived and reenacted itself!

It dated far back, to a period when his career was still undetermined, hedged about by doubts and uncertainties--before the magnificent and terrible years of the Mutiny brought him, not only fame and distinction, but a power of self-expression and of plain seeing.--Before, too, his not conspicuously happy marriage. Before the Bhutpur appointment tested and confirmed his reputation as a most able if most autocratic ruler. Before, finally, his term of service under the Ameer in Afghanistan--that extraordinary experience of alternate good and evil fortune in barbaric internecine warfare, the methods and sentiments of which represented a swing back of three or four centuries, Christianity, and the att.i.tude of mind and conduct Christianity inculcates, no longer an even nominal factor, Mahomet, sword in hand, ruthlessly outriding Christ.

He had done largely more than the average Englishman, of his age and station, towards the making of contemporary history. Yet it occurred to him now, sitting at Damaris' bedside, those intervening years of strenuous public activity, of soldiering and of administration, along with the honours reaped in them, had procured cynically less substantial result, cynically less ostensible remainder, than the brief and hidden intrigue which preceded them. They sank away as water spilt on sand--thus in his present pain he pictured it--leaving barely a trace. While that fugitive and unlawful indulgence of the flesh not only begot flesh, but spirit,--a living soul, henceforth and eternally to be numbered among the imperishable generations of the tragic and marvellous children of men.

Then, aware something stirred close to him, Charles Verity looked up sharply, turning his head; to find Damaris--raised on one elbow planted among the pillows--holding aside the dimity curtain and gazing wonderingly yet contentedly in his face.

"Commissioner Sahib," she said, softly, "I didn't know you'd come back.

I've had horrid bad dreams and seemed to see you--many of you--walking about. The room was full of you, you over and over again; but not like yourself, frightening, not loving me, busy about something or somebody else. I didn't at all enjoy that.--But I am awake now, aren't I? I needn't be frightened any more; because you do love me, don't you--and this really is you, your very ownself?"

She put up her face to be kissed. But he, in obedience to an humility heretofore unfelt by and unknown to him, leaning sideways kissed the hand holding aside the curtain rather than the proffered lips.

"Yes, my darling, very surely it is me," he said. "Any multiplication of specimens is quite superfluous--a single example of the breed is enough, conceivably more than enough."

But to his distress, while he spoke, he saw the content die out of Damaris' expression and her eyes grow distended and startled. She glanced oddly at the hand he had just kissed and then at him again.

"It seems to me something must have happened which I can't exactly remember," she anxiously told him, sitting upright and leaving go the curtain which slipped back into place shutting off the arm-chair and its occupant. "Something real, I mean, not just bad dreams. I know I had to ask you about it, and yet I didn't want to ask you."

Charles Verity rose from his place, slowly walked the length of the room; and, presently returning, stood at the foot of the bed. Damaris still sat upright, her hands clasped, her hair hanging in a cloud about her to below the waist. The light was low and the shadow cast by the bed-curtain covered her. But, through it, he could still distinguish the startled anxiety of her great eyes as she pondered, trying to seize and hold some memory which escaped her. And he felt sick at heart, a.s.sured it could be but a matter of time before she remembered; convinced now, moreover, what she would, to his shame and sorrow, remember in the end.

The purity in which he delighted, and to which he so frequently and almost superst.i.tiously had turned for refreshment and the safeguarding of all the finest instincts of his own very complex nature, would, although she remembered, remain essentially intact. But, even so, the surface of it must be, as he apprehended, henceforth in some sort dimmed, and that by the breath of his own long ago misdoing. The revelation of pa.s.sion and of s.e.x, being practically and thus intimately forced home on her, the transparent innocence of childhood must inevitably pa.s.s away from her; and, through that same pa.s.sing she would consciously go forward, embracing the privileges and the manifold burdens, the physical and emotional needs and aspirations of a grown woman. The woman might, would--such was his firm belief--prove a glorious creature. But it was not she whom he wanted. Her development, in proportion as it was rich and complete, led her away from and made her independent of him.--No, it wasn't she, but the child whom he wanted. And, standing at the foot of Damaris' bed, he knew, with a cruel certainty, he was there just simply to watch the child die.

Yes, it was a mere matter of time. Sooner or later she would put a leading question--her methods being bravely candid and direct. Of course, it was open to him to meet that question with blank denial, open to him to lie--as is the practice of the world when such d.a.m.nably awkward situations come along.--A solution having, in the present case, the specious argument behind it that in so doing he would spare her, save her pain, in addition to the obvious one that he would save his own skin.

Moreover, if he lied he could trust Damaris' loyalty. Whether she believed it or not, she would accept his answer as final. No further question upon the subject would ever pa.s.s her lips. The temptation was definite and great. For might not the lie, if he could stomach his disgust at telling it, even serve to prolong the life of the child?

Should he not sell his honour to save his honour--if it came to that?

Thus he debated, his nature battling with itself, while at that battle he stoically, for a time, looked on. But when, at last, the climax was reached, and Damaris commenced to speak, stoicism dragged anchor. For he could conquer neither his disgust nor his sorrow, could find courage neither for his denial nor for watching the child die. Leaving the foot of the bed, he went and sat down in the arm-chair, where the dimity curtain screened Damaris from his, and him from Damaris' sight.

"Commissioner Sahib," she began, her voice grave and low, "it has come back to me--the thing I had to ask you, but it is very hard to say. If it makes you angry, please try to forgive me--because it does hurt me to ask you. It hurts me through and through. Only I can't speak of it. I oughtn't just to leave it. To leave it would be wrong--wrong by you."

"Very well, my darling, ask me then," he said, a little hoa.r.s.ely.

"You have heard about my being out on the Bar and--and all that?"

"Yes," he said, "I have heard."

"Captain Faircloth, who found me and brought me home, told me something."

Damaris' voice broke into tones of imploring tenderness.

"I love you, Commissioner Sahib, you know how I love you--but--but is what Captain Faircloth told me true?"

Whereupon temptation surged up anew, inviting, inciting Charles Verity to lie--dressing up that lie in the cloak of most excellent charity, of veritable duty towards Damaris' fine courage and her precious innocence.

And he hedged, keeping open, if only for a few minutes longer, the way of escape.

"How can I answer until I know what he did tell you?" he took her up, at last, almost coldly.

"That he is your son--is my brother," Damaris said.

Even at this pa.s.s, Charles Verity waited before finally committing himself, thereby unwittingly giving sentiment--in the shape of the Powers of the Air--the chance to take a rather unfairly extensive hand in the game.

For while he thus waited, he could not but be aware, through the tense silence otherwise reigning in the room, of the tap and scratch of the rose-spray upon the window-panes; of the swish of the moist gusty wind sweeping from across the salt-marsh and mud-flats of the Haven--from the black cottages, too, beyond the warren, gathered, as somewhat sinister boon companions, about the bleak, grey stone-built Inn. And this served to transfix his consciousness with visions of what once had been--he knowing so exactly how it would all sound, all look out there, the wistful desolation, the penetrating appeal bred of the inherent sadness of the place on a wild autumn night such as this.

"Yes," he said at last, and putting a great constraint upon himself he spoke calmly, without sign of emotion. "What the young man told is true, Damaris, perfectly true."

"I--I thought so," she answered back, gravely. "Though I didn't understand"--And, after a moment's pause, with a certain hopelessness of resignation--"Though I don't understand even now."

In her utterance Charles Verity so distinctly heard the last words of the--to him--dying child, that, smitten with raging bitterness of grief and of regret, he said:

"Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, disgraceful, abominable, that he should have made the occasion, or, to put the matter at its best, have taken advantage of the occasion, when you were alone and, in a sense, at his mercy, to tell you this most unhappy thing."

"No, no," Damaris cried, in her generous eagerness catching back the curtain and looking at him n.o.bly unselfconscious, n.o.bly zealous to defend and to set right. "You mustn't think that. He didn't start with any intention of telling me. He fancied I might have lost my way among the sand-hills, that I might be frightened or get some harm, and so came straight to look for me, and take care of me. He was very beautifully kind; and I felt beautifully safe with him--safe in the same way I feel safe with you, almost."

Her mouth was soft, her eyes alight--dangerously alight now, for her pulse had quickened. As she pleaded and protested her temperature raced up.