Deadham Hard Part 46

"Send to meet the seven-thirty at Marychurch," so the pink paper instructed her. "Carteret comes with me. When we arrive will explain."

On reception of the above, her first thought was of the letter forwarded yesterday from the India Office, bearing the signature of the Secretary of State. And close on the heels of that thought, looking over its shoulder, indeed, in the effort--which she resisted--to claim priority, was the thought of the dear man with the blue eyes about to be a guest, once again, under this roof. This gave her a little thrill, a little gasp, wrapping her away to the borders of sad inattention to Louisa Taylor's somewhat academic discourse.--The girl's English was altogether too grammatical for entire good-breeding. In that how very far away from Carteret's!--Damaris tried to range herself with present company. But the man with the blue eyes indubitably held the centre of the stage. She wore the pearls to-day he gave her at St. Augustin. In what spirit did he come?--She hoped in the earlier one, that of the time when she so completely trusted him. For his counsel, dared she claim it in that earlier spirit, would be of inestimable value just now. She so badly needed someone in authority to advise with as to the events of yesterday, both in their malign and their beneficent aspects. Aunt Felicia had risen to the height of her capacity--dear thing, had been exquisite; but she would obey orders rather than issue them. Her office was not to lead, but rather to be led. And that the events of yesterday opened a new phase of her own and Faircloth's relation to one another appeared beyond dispute.

Where exactly did the curve of duty towards her father touch that relation, run parallel with or intersect it? She felt perplexed.

After tea, Miss Felicia having vanished on some affair of her own--Damaris asked no question, but supposed it not unconnected with the now, since Sir Charles was about to return, permanently exiled Theresa--our maiden went upstairs, in the tender evening light, on domestic cares intent. She wished to a.s.sure herself that the chintz bedroom, opening off the main landing and overlooking the lawn and front garden, had been duly made ready for Colonel Carteret. She took a somewhat wistful pleasure in silently ministering to his possible small needs in the matter of sufficient wealth of towels, candles and soap. She lengthened out the process. Lingered, rearranged the ornaments upon the mantelpiece, the bunch of sweet-leafed geranium--as yet unshrivelled by frost--and belated roses, placed in a vase upon the toilet-table.

In so doing she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror, and paused, studying it. Her looks were not at their best. She was wan.--That might, in part, be owing to the waning light. Around her eyes were dark circles, making them appear unnaturally large and solemn. So yesterday's emotions had left their mark! The nervous strain had been considerable and she showed it. One cannot drink the cup of shame, however undeserved, with physical any more than with mental impunity. She still felt a little shattered, but hoped neither her father nor Carteret would remark her plight. If the whole affair of yesterday could, in its objectionable aspects, be kept from Sir Charles's knowledge she would be infinitely glad. And why shouldn't it be? Without permission, Aunt Felicia certainly would not tell. Neither would the servants. The parish had given testimony, this afternoon, both of its good faith and its discretion.

So much for the objectionable side of the matter. But there was another side, far from objectionable, beautiful in sentiment and in promise. And, still viewing her reflection in the gla.s.s, she saw her eyes lose their solemnity, lighten with a smile her lips repeated. This was where Carteret's advice would be of so great value. How much ought she to tell her father of all that?

For, from amidst the shame, the anger, the strain and effort, Faircloth showed, to her thinking, triumphant, satisfying alike to her affection and her taste. In no respect would she have asked him other than he was.

She moved across to the window, and sat down there, looking out over the garden and battery, with its little cannons, to the Bar, and sea beyond which melted into the dim primrose and silver of the horizon. Such colour as existed was soft, soothing, the colour of a world of dreams, of subdued and voiceless fancies. It was harmonious, restful as an accompaniment to vision.--Damaris let it lap against her consciousness, encircling, supporting this, as water laps, also encircling and supporting--while caressing, mysteriously whispering against a boat's side--a boat lying at its moorings, swinging gently upon an even keel.--And her vision was of Faircloth, exclusively of him, just now.

For he had stayed to luncheon yesterday. A meal, to him in a sense sacred, as being the first eaten by him in his father's house. So graciously invited, how, indeed, could he do otherwise than stay? And, the initial strangeness, the inherent wonder of that sacred character wearing off, he found voice and talked not without eloquence. Talked of his proper element, the sea, gaining ease and self-possession from the magnitude and manifold enchantments of his theme.

To him, as to all true-born sailor-men--so Damaris divined--the world is made of water, with but accident of land. Impeding, inconvenient accident at that, too often blocking the pa.s.sage across or through, and constraining you to steer a foolishly, really quite inordinately divergent course. Under this obstructive head the two Americas offend direfully, sprawling their united strength wellnigh from pole to pole.

The piercing of their central isthmus promised some mitigation of this impertinence of emergent matter; though whether in his, the speaker's lifetime, remained--so he took it--open to doubt. The "roaring forties,"

and grim blizzard-ridden Fuegian Straits would long continue, as he feared, to bar the way to the Pacific. Not that his personal fancy favoured West so much as East. Not into the sunset but into the sunrising did he love to sail some goodly black-hulled s.h.i.+p.--And as he talked, more especially at his mention of this eastward voyaging, those manifold enchantments of his calling stirred Damaris' imagination, making her eyes bright as the fabled eyes of danger, and fathomless as well.

But the best came later. For, Mary having served coffee, Miss Felicia, making an excuse of letters to be written, with pretty tact left them to themselves. And Faircloth, returning after closing the door behind her fluttering, gently eager figure, paused behind Damaris' chair.--Jacobean, cane-panelled, with high-carved back and arms to it. Thomas Clarkson Verity had unquestionably a nice taste in furniture.--The young sea-captain rested his right hand on the dark terminal scroll-work, and bending down, laid his left hand upon Damaris' hand, covering it as it lay on the white damask table-cloth.

"Have I done what I should, and left undone what I shouldn't do, my dear and lovely sister?" he asked her, half-laughing and half-abashed. "It's a tricky business being here, you know--to put it no higher than that. And it might, with truth, be put far higher. I get so horribly fearful of letting you down in any way--however trivial--before other people. I balance on a knife-edge all the while."

"Have no silly fears of that sort," Damaris said quickly, a trifle distressed.

For it plucked at her sisterly pride in him that he should, even by implication, debase himself, noting inequality of station between himself and her. She held the worldly aspects of the matter in contempt. They angered her, so that she impulsively banished reserve. Leaning forward, she bent her head, putting her lips to the image of the flying sea-bird--which so intrigued her loving curiosity--and those three letters tattooed in blue and crimson upon the back of his hand.

"There--there"--she murmured, as soothing a child--"does this convince you?"

But here broke off, her heart contracting with a spasm of wondering tenderness. For under that pressure of her lips she felt his flesh quiver and start. She looked up at the handsome bearded face, so close above her, in swift enquiry, the potion--as once before--troubling her that, in touching this quaint stigmata, she inflicted bodily suffering. And, as on that earlier occasion, asked the question:

"Ah! but have I hurt you?"

Faircloth shook his head, smiling. Words failed him just then and he went pale beneath the overlay of clear brown sunburn.

"Then tell me what this stands for?" she said, being herself strangely moved, and desirous to lower the temperature of her own emotion--possibly of his as well. "Tell me what it means."

"Just a boy's fear and a boy's superst.i.tion--a bit morbid, both of them, perhaps--that is as I see things now. For I hold one should leave one's body as it pleased the Almighty to make it, unblemished by semi-savage decorations which won't wash off."

Faircloth moved away, drew his chair up nearer the head of the table, the corner between them, so that his hand could if desire prompted again find hers.

"By the way, I'm so glad you don't wear ear-rings, Damaris," he said.

"They belong to the semi-savage order of decoration. I hate them. You never will wear them? Promise me that."

And she had promised, somewhat diverted by his tone of authority and of insistence.

"But about this?" she asked him, indicating the blue and crimson symbol.

"As I say, fruit of fear and superst.i.tion--a pretty pair in which to put one's faith! All the same, they went far to save my life, I fancy--for which I thank them mightily being here, with you, to-day."

And he told her--softening the uglier details, as unfit for a gently-nurtured woman's hearing--a brutal story of the sea. Of a sailing s.h.i.+p becalmed in tropic waters, waiting, through long blistering days and breathless sweltering nights, for the breeze which wouldn't come--a floating h.e.l.l, between glaring skies and glaring ocean--and of bullyings, indignities and torments devised by a brain diseased by drink.

"But was there no one to interfere, no one to protect you?" Damaris cried, aghast.

"A man's master in his own s.h.i.+p," Faircloth answered. "And short of mutiny there's no redress. Neither officers nor men had a stomach for mutiny. They were a poor, cowed lot. Till this drunken madness came on him he had been easy going enough. They supposed, when it pa.s.sed, he'd be so again. And then as he reserved his special attentions for me, they were willing to grin and bear it--or rather let me bear it, just stupidly letting things go. It was my first long voyage. I'd been lucky in my skippers so far, and was a bit soft still. A bit conceited, I don't doubt, as well. He swore he'd break my spirit--for my own good, of course--and he came near succeeding.--But Damaris, Damaris, dear, don't take it to heart so. What does it matter? It did me no lasting harm, and was all over and done with--would have been forgotten too, but for the rather silly sign of it--years and years ago. Let us talk no more about it."

"Oh, no!--go on--please, go on," she brokenly prayed him.

So he told her, further, how at Singapore, the outward voyage at last ended, he was tempted to desert; or, better still, put an end, once and for all, to the whole black business of living. And how, meditating on the methods of such drastic deliverance--sitting in the palm-shaded verandah of a fly-blown little eating-house, kept by a monkey-faced, squint-eyed j.a.panese--he happened to pick up a Calcutta newspaper. He read its columns mechanically, without interest or understanding, his mind still working on methods of death, when a name leapt at him weighted with personal meaning.

"It hit me," Faircloth said, "full between the eyes, knocking the cry-baby stuff out of me, and knocking stuff of very different order in.

For I wanted something stronger than mother-love--precious though that is--to brace me up and put some s.p.u.n.k into me just then.--Sir Charles was campaigning in Afghanistan, and this Calcutta paper sang his praises to a rousing tune. Lamented the loss of him to the Indian Government, and the lack of appreciation and support of him at home which induced him to take foreign service. Can't you imagine how all this about a great soldier, whose blood after all ran in my veins, pulled me clean up out of the slime, where suicide tempted the soft side of me, into another world?--A sane world, in which a man can make good, if only he's pluck to hold on.--Yes, he saved me; or at all events roused the spirit in me which makes for salvation, and which that drunken brute had almost killed. But, because I was only a boy as yet, with a boy's queer instincts and extravagancies, I made the monkey-faced, j.a.panese eating-house keeper--who added artistic tattooing to other and less reputable ways of piling up a fortune--fix the sea-bird, for faith in my profession--and those three initials of my own name and a name not altogether my own, right here.--Fix them for remembrance and for a warning of which I could never get free. Always I should be forced to see it. And others must see it too. Through it my ident.i.ty--short of mutilation--was indestructibly established. From that ident.i.ty, henceforward, there wasn't any possible running away."

Faircloth had ended on a note of exultation, calmly sounded yet profound.

And upon that final note Damaris dwelt now, sitting on the chintz-covered window-seat of the room which Carteret would to-night inhabit. She went through the cruel story again, while the transparent twilight drew its elfin veil over all things, outdoor and in.

The crescent moon, a slender, upright wisp of a thing, climbed the southern sky. And Damaris' soul was strangely satisfied, for the story, if cruel, was one of rest.i.tution and the healing of a wrong. To her father--his father--the boy had turned in that bad hour, which very perfectly made for peace between them. The curve of her duty to the one, as she now apprehended, in nowise cut across or deflected the curve of her duty towards the other. The two were the same, were one. And this, somehow, some day, when time and sentiment offered opportunity for such disclosure, she must let her father know. She must repeat to him the story of the eating-house and its monkey-faced proprietor--of questionable reputation--away in tropic Singapore. It could hardly fail to appeal to him if rightly told. About the events and vulgar publicity of yesterday nothing need be said. About this, within careful limits, much; and that, with, as she believed, happiest result. She had succeeded in bringing father and son together in the first instance. Now, with this pathetic story as lever, might she not hope to bring them into closer, more permanent union? Why should not Faircloth, in future, come and go, if not as an acknowledged son, yet as acknowledged and welcome friend, of the house? A consummation this, to her, delightful and reasonable as just. For had not the young man pa.s.sed muster, and that triumphantly--she again told herself--in small things as well as great, in things of social usage and habit, those "little foxes" which, as between cla.s.s and cla.s.s, do so deplorably and disastrously "spoil the grapes?"

Therefore she began to invent ingenious speeches to Carteret and to her father. Hatch ingenious schemes and pretty plots--in the style of dear Aunt Felicia almost!--Was that lady's peace-making pa.s.sion infectious, by chance? And supposing it were, hadn't it very charming and praiseworthy turns to it--witness Felicia's rather n.o.ble gathering in and acceptance of Faircloth yesterday.

Arriving at which engaging conclusion, Damaris felt minded to commune for a s.p.a.ce with the restful loveliness of the twilight, before going downstairs again and seeking more definite employment of books or needlework. She raised the window-sash and, kneeling on the chintz-covered cus.h.i.+oned window-seat, leaned out.

The gardeners to-day had rooted up the geraniums and dug over the empty flower beds, just below, preparatory to planting them with bulbs for spring blossoming. The keen, pungent scent of the newly-turned earth hung in the humid air, as, mingling with it--a less agreeable incense--did the reek of the mud-flats. On the right the twin ilex trees formed a ma.s.s of soft imponderable gloom. Above and behind them the sky was like smoked crystal. The lawn lay open and vacant. Upon it nothing hopped or crept. The garden birds had eaten their suppers long since, and sought snug bosky perching places for the night. Even the unsleeping sea was silent, the tide low and waveless, no more than a languid ripple far out upon the shelving sands. All dwelt in calm, in a brooding tranquillity which might be felt.

Damaris listened to the silence, until her ears began to suspect its sincerity. Sounds were there in plenty, she believed, were her hearing sharp enough to detect them. They naughtily played hide-and-seek with her, striking a chord too deep or too thinly acute for human sense.

Sights were there too, had her eyes but a cat's or an owl's keener faculty of seeing. Behind the tranquillity she apprehended movement and action employing a medium, obeying impulses, to us unknown. Restfulness fled away, but, in place of it, interest grew. If she concentrated her attention and listened more carefully, she should hear; looked more steadily, she should see.

Just because she was tired, a little shattered still and spent, did this predominance of outward nature draw her, imposing itself. It beckoned her; and, through pa.s.sing deficiency of will, she followed its beckoning, making no serious effort to resist. With the consequence she presently did hear sounds, but sounds surely real and recognizable enough.

Coming from the sh.o.r.e eastwards, below the sea-wall along the river frontage, ponies walked, or rather floundered, fetlock deep in blown sand--a whole drove of them to judge by the confused and m.u.f.fled trampling of their many hoofs. The drop from the top of the sea-wall to the beach was too great, and the s.p.a.ce between the foot of the wall and the river-bank and breakwater too confined, for her to see the animals, even had not oncoming darkness rendered all objects increasingly ill-defined.

But the confused trampling instead of keeping along the foresh.o.r.e, as in all reason it should, now came up and over the sea-wall, on to the battery, into the garden, heading towards the house, Damaris strained her eyes through the tranquil obscurity, seeking visible cause of this advancing commotion, but without effect. Yet all the while, as her hearing clearly testified, the unseen ponies hustled one another, plunging, shying away from the swish and crack of a long-thonged whip.

One stumbled and rolled over in the sand.--For although the mob was half-way up the lawn by now, the shuffling, sliding sand stayed always with them.--After a nasty struggle it got on to its feet, tottering forward under savage blows, dead lame. Another, a laggard, fell into its tracks, and lay there foundered, rattling in the throat.

By this time the foremost of the drove came abreast the house front, where Sir Charles Verity's three ground-floor rooms, with the corridor behind them, ranged out from the main building. The many-paned semicircular windows of these rooms dimly glistened, below their fan-shaped, slated roofs. The crowding scurry of scared, over-driven animals was so indisputable that Damaris expected a universal smas.h.i.+ng of gla.s.s. But the sound of many hoofs, still muted by sliding sand, pa.s.sed straight on into and through the house as though no obstacle intervened barring progress.

The many-paned windows remained intact, undemolished, dimly glistening beneath their slated roofs. The garden stretched vacant, as before, right away to the battery, in the elusive twilight, a sky of smoked crystal--through which stars began to show faintly, points of cold blurred light--above the gloom of the ilex trees to the west, and in the south, above the indistinguishable sea, the slender moon hanging upright, silver and sickle-shaped.

Thus far Damaris' entire consciousness had resided in and been limited to her auditory sense; concentration being too absorbed and intense to allow room for reasoning, still less for scepticism or even astonishment. She had watched with her ears--as the blind watch--desperate to interpret, instant by instant, inch by inch, this reconstructed tragedy of long-dead man and long-dead beast. There had been no thinking round the central interest, no attempted reading of its bearing upon normal events. Mind and imagination were fascinated by it to the exclusion of all else. It acted as an extravagant dream acts, abrogating all known laws of cause and effect, giving logic and science the lie, negativing probability, making the untrue true, the impossible convincingly manifest.

Not, indeed, until she beheld Mary Fisher, deep-bosomed and comely, in black gown, white ap.r.o.n and cap, moving within those rooms downstairs--still echoing, as they surely must, to that tumultuous and rather ghastly equine transit--did the extraordinary character of the occurrence flash into fullness of relief.

Mary, meanwhile, set down her flat candlestick upon the big writing-table in Sir Charles's study, lighted lamps and drew blinds and curtains. Went into the bedroom next door and dressing-room beyond, methodically performing the evening ritual of "shutting up." Her shadow marched with her, as though mockingly a.s.sisting in her operations, now crouching, now leaping ahead, blotting a ceiling, extending itself upon a wall s.p.a.ce.

Other shadows, thrown by the furniture, came forth and leapt also, pranced, skipping back into hiding as the candle-light s.h.i.+fted and pa.s.sed. But save this indirect admission of the immaterial and grotesque, everything showed rea.s.suringly ordinary, the woman herself unconcerned, ignorant of disturbance.

Damaris rose from her kneeling posture upon the window-seat and, standing, lowered the sash. Once was enough. It was no longer inc.u.mbent upon her to listen or to look. If these ghostly phenomena were repeated they could convey nothing more to her, nothing fresh. They had delivered their message--one addressed wholly and solely to herself, so she judged, since Mary had so conspicuously no suspicion of it.