Deadham Hard Part 52

He went the few steps across to the red chair. Sank into it. Leaned against the pillows, bending backward, his hand pressed to his left side. His features contracted, and his breath caught as of one spent with running. And Damaris, watching him, again received that desolating impression of change, of his being in spirit far removed, inaccessible to her sympathy, a stranger. He had gone away and rather terribly left her alone.

"Are you in pain?" she asked, agonized.

"Discomfort," he replied. "We will not dignify this by the name of pain.

But I must wait for a time before dictating the letter. There's something I will ask you to do for me, my dear, meanwhile."

"Yes"--He paused, s.h.i.+fted his position, closed his eyes.

"Have you held any communication with--"

He stopped, for the question irked him. Even at this pa.s.s it went against the grain with him to ask of his daughter news of his son.

But in that pause our maiden's scattered wits very effectually returned to her.

"With Darcy Faircloth?" she said. And as Charles Verity bowed his head in a.s.sent--"Yes, I should have told you already but--but for all which has happened. He was here the day before yesterday. He came home from church with me.--That was my doing, not his, to begin with. You mustn't think he put himself forward--took advantage, I mean, of your being away. If there is any blame it is mine."

"Mine, rather--and of long standing. G.o.d forgive me!"

But Damaris, fairly launched now upon a wholly welcome topic, would have none of this. To maintain her own courage, and, if it might be, combat that dreaded withdrawal of his spirit into regions where she could not follow, she braced herself to reason with him.

"No--there indeed you are mistaken, dearest," she gently yet confidently a.s.serted. "You take the whole business topsy-turvy fas.h.i.+on, quite wrong way round. I won't weary you with explanations of exactly what led to Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday. But you ought to know that he and Aunt Felicia met. I hadn't planned that. It just happened. And she was lovely to him--lovely to us both. She made him stay to luncheon--inviting him in your name."

"I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the payment of my bad debts," Charles Verity remarked.

"But there isn't any bad debt--that's what I so dearly want you to believe, what I'm trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you,"

Damaris cried. "Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things--things about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt towards you all along."

Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea. Of a sailing s.h.i.+p, becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters. Of the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain. Of a fly-blown eating-house in Singapore. Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight of Charles Verity's name and successful record in the columns of a Calcutta newspaper; and the boy's resultant demand for the infliction of some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.

"So you see"--

Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.--

"You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life, where then is the debt?--Not on your side certainly, dearest."

Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries--for sophistries from worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely p.r.o.nounce them?--Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul. They ought to be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son nor daughter condemned him. Neither did his sister, in the pathetic innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.

This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with self-mockery. For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of ambition and thirst of power fell away from him,--he riding under escort of Death, the black captain--all tributes of human tenderness and approval gained in value.--Not the approval of notable personages, of those high in office, nor even that of sympathetic critics and readers; but of persons in his own immediate voisinage, bound to him by friends.h.i.+p, by a.s.sociation, or the tie of blood.--Their good-will was precious to him as never before. He craved to be in perfect amity with every member of that restricted circle. Hence it vexed and fretted him to know the circle incomplete, through the exclusion of one rather flagrantly intimate example. Yet to draw the said member, the said example, within the circle, yielding it the place which it might rightfully aspire to occupy, amounted--after half a lifetime of abstention and avoidance--to a rather tremendous demonstration, one which might well be hailed as extravagant, as a courting of offence possible only to a sentimental egoist of most aggravated kind.

And he was tired--had no smallest inclination towards demonstrations. For the threatening of heart spasm, to which he lately denied the t.i.tle of pain, though of short duration, affected him adversely, sapping his strength. His mind, it is true, remained clear, even vividly receptive; but, just as earlier this morning, his will proved insufficient for its direction or control. He mused, his chin sunk on his breast, his left hand travelling down over the long soft moustache, his eyes half closed.

Thought and vision followed their own impulse, wandering back and forth between the low-caste eating-house in the sweltering heat and perfumed stenches of the oriental, tropic seaport; and the stone-built English inn--here on Marychurch Haven--overlooking the desolate waste of sand-hills, the dark reed-beds and chill gleaming tides.

For love of Damaris, his daughter, while still in the heat of his prime, he had foresworn all traffic with women. Yet now, along with the tacitly admitted claims of the son, arose the claim of the mistress, mother of that son--in no sensual sort, but with a certain wildness of bygone romance, wind and rain-swept, unsubstantial, dim and grey. Ever since conviction of the extreme gravity of his physical condition dawned on him, the idea of penetrating the courts of that deserted sanctuary had been recurrent. In the summing up of his human, his earthly, experience, romance deserved, surely, a word of farewell? Damaris' story served to give the idea a fuller appeal and consistency.

But he was tired--tired. He longed simply to drift. It was infinitely distasteful to him definitely to plan, or to decide respecting anything.

Meanwhile his continued silence and abstraction wore badly upon Damaris.

She had steeled herself; had flamed, greatly daring. Now reaction set in.

Her effort proved vain. She had failed. For once more she recognized that an unknown influence, a power dark and incalculably strong--so she figured it--regained ascendency over her father, working to the insidious changing of his nature, strangely winning him away. Waiting for some response, some speech or comment on his part, fear and the sense of helplessness a.s.sailed, and would have submerged her, had she not clung to Carteret's parting "G.o.d bless you" and avowed faith in her stability, as to a wonder-working charm. Nor did the charm fail in efficacy.--Oh!

really he was a wonderful sheet-anchor, "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land," that dear man with the blue eyes! Consciously she blessed him.--And, thanks to remembrance of him, presently found voice and purpose once again.

"You aren't displeased with me, dearest?" she asked.

"Displeased?" Charles Verity repeated, at first absently. "Displeased, my dear, no--why?"

"We didn't do wrong?"--labouring the point, the more fully to recall and retain him--"Didn't take too much upon ourselves--Aunt Felicia, I mean, and I--by persuading Darcy Faircloth to stay on Sunday, by entertaining him when you were away? Or--or have I been stupid, dearest, and thoughtlessly wearied you by talking too much and too long?"

"Neither," he said. "On the contrary, all you have told me goes to lessen certain difficulties, make the crooked, in some degree, straight and rough places plain."

For, if Faircloth had been here so recently, broken bread too in the house, so he argued, it became the easier to bid him return. And Charles Verity needed to see him, see him this morning--since purpose of farewells, to be spoken in those long-deserted courts of romance, stiffened, becoming a thing not merely to be turned hither and thither in thought, but to be plainly and directly done.--"Send for him in your own name," he said. "Explain to him how matters stand, and ask him to talk with me."

And, as Damaris agreed, rejoiced by the success of her adventurous diplomacy, making to go at once and give the required instructions--

"Stay--stay a moment," her father said, and drew her down to sit on the chair-arm, keeping her hand in his, and with his other hand stroking it wistfully. For though certain difficulties might be sensibly lessened, they were not altogether removed; and he smiled inwardly, aware that not even in the crack of doom are feminine rights over a man other than conflicting and uncommonly ticklish to adjust.

"Before we commit ourselves to further enterprises, my darling, let us quite understand one another upon one or two practical points--bearing in mind the blades of Atropos' envious scissors. My affairs are in order"--Damaris shrank, piteously expostulated.

"Oh! but must we, are we obliged to speak of those things? They grate on me--Commissioner Sahib, they are ugly. They hurt."

"Yes--distinctly we are obliged to speak of them. To do so can neither hasten nor r.e.t.a.r.d the event. All the more obliged to speak of them, because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could do with it.--As a means, of vast importance. As an end, uninteresting.--So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid.

All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety regarding ways and means, if not to make you a rich woman. I have left an annuity to your Aunt Felicia. Her means are slender, dear creature, and her benevolence outruns them, so that she balances a little anxiously, I gather, on the edge of debt. The capital sum will return to you eventually. Carteret and McCabe consented, some years ago, to act as my executors. Their probity and honour are above reproach.--Now as to this place--if you should ever wish to part with it, let Faircloth take it over. I have made arrangements to that effect, about which I will talk with him when he comes.--Have no fear lest I should say that which might wound him. I shall be as careful, my dear, of his proper pride as of my own.--Understand I have no desire to circ.u.mscribe either your or his liberty of action unduly. But this house, all it contains, the garden, the very trees I see from these windows, are so knitted into the fabric of my past life that I shrink--with a queer sense of homelessness--from any thought of their pa.s.sing into the occupation of strangers.--Childish, pitifully weak-minded no doubt, and therefore the more natural that one should crave a voice, thus in the disposition of what one has learned through long usage so very falsely to call one's own!"

"We will do exactly what you wish, even to the littlest particular, I promise you--both for Faircloth and for myself," Damaris answered, forcing herself to calmness and restraint of tears.

He petted her hands silently until, as the minutes pa.s.sed, she began once more to grow fearful of that dreadful unknown influence insidiously possessing him and winning him away. And he may have grown fearful of it too, for he made a sharp movement, raising his shoulders as though striving to throw off some weight, some enc.u.mbrance.

"There is an end, then, of business," he said, "and of such worldly considerations. I need worry you with them no more. Only one thing remains, of which, before I speak to others, it is only seemly, my darling, I should speak to you."

Charles Verity lifted his eyes to hers, and she perceived his spirit as now in nowise remote; but close, evident almost to the point of alarm. It looked out from the wasted face, at once--to her seeing--exquisite and austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal, unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of impending portentous adventure.

"You know, Damaris, how greatly I love and have loved you--how dear you have been to me, dearer than the satisfaction of my own flesh?"

Speech was beyond her. She looked back, dazzled and for the moment broken.

"Therefore it goes hard with me to ask anything which might, ever so distantly, cause you offence or distress. Only time presses. We are within sight of the end."

"Ah! no--no," she exclaimed, wrenching away her hands and beating them together, pa.s.sion of affection, of revolt and sorrow no more to be controlled. "How can I bear it, how can I part with you? I will not, I will not have you die.--McCabe isn't infallible. We must call in other doctors. They may be cleverer, may suggest new treatment, new remedies.

They must cure you--or if they can't cure, at least keep you alive for me. I won't have you die!"

"Call in whom you like, as many as you like, my darling, the whole medical faculty if it serves to pacify or to content you," he said, smiling at her.

Damaris repented. Took poor pa.s.sion by the throat, stifling its useless cries.

"I tire you. I waste your strength. I think only of myself, of my own grief, most beloved, my own consuming grief and desolation.--See--I will be good--I am good. What else is there you want to have me do?"

"This--but recollect you are free to say me nay, without scruple or hesitation. I shall not require you to give your reasons, but shall bow, unreservedly, to your wishes. For you possess a touchstone in such questions as the one now troubling me, which, did I ever possess it, I lost, as do most men, rather lamentably early in my career. If you suffer me to do so, I will ask Darcy Faircloth to bring his mother here to me, this evening at dusk, when her coming will not challenge impertinent observation--so that I may be satisfied no bitterness colours her thought of me and that we part in peace, she and I."

Damaris got up from her seat on the arm of the red-covered chair. She stood rigid, her expression reserved to blankness, but her head carried high.