The History of David Grieve Part 80

The lad opposite made a sharp, inarticulate sound which startled the minister's ear. Then clutching the handle of the door, he resumed sharply--

'Who has she married?'

The a.s.sumption of the right to question was arrogance itself--strange in the dumb, retiring creature whom the minister had hitherto known only as David's slave and shadow!

'A French sculptor,' said David steadily, but propping his head and hand against the counter, so as to avoid John's stare--'a man called Montjoie. I was a brute--I neglected her. She got into his hands. Then I sent for all my money to bribe him to marry her. And he has.'

'You--you _blackguard!_' cried John.

David straightened instinctively under the blow, and his eyes met John's for one fierce moment. Then Mr. Ancrum thought he would have fainted. The minister took rough hold of John by the shoulders.

'If you can't stay and hold your tongue,' he said, 'you must go. He is worn out with the journey, and I shall get him to bed. Here's some money: suppose you run to the house round the corner, in Prince's Street; ask if they've got some strong soup, and, if they have, hurry back with it. Come--look sharp. And--one moment--you've been sleeping here, I suppose? Well, I shall take your room for a bit, if that'll suit you. This fellow'll have to be looked after.'

The little lame creature spoke like one who meant to have his way.

John took the coin, hesitated, and stumbled out.

For days afterwards there was silence between him and David, except for business directions. He avoided being in the shop with his employer, and would stand for hours on the step, ostensibly watching the stall, but in reality doing no business that he could help. Whenever Mr. Ancrum caught sight of him he was leaning against the wall, his hat slouched over his eyes, his hands in his pockets, utterly inert and listless, more like a log than a human being. Still he was no less stout, lumpish, and pink-faced than before. His fate might have all the tragic quality; nature had none the less inexorably endowed him with the externals of farce.

Meanwhile David dragged himself from his bed to the shop and set to work to pick up dropped threads. The customers, who had been formerly interested in him, discovered his return, and came in to inquire why he had been so long away, or, in the case of one or two, whether he had executed certain commissions in Paris. The explanation of illness, however, circulated from the first moment by Mr. Ancrum, and perforce adopted--though with an inward rage and rebellion--by David himself, was amply sufficient to cover his omissions and inattentions, and to ease his resumption of his old place. His appearance indeed was still ghastly. The skin of the face had the tightened, transparent look of weakness; the eyes, reddened and sunk, showed but little of their old splendour between the blue circles beneath and the heavy brows above; even the hair seemed to have lost its boyish curl, and fell in harsh, troublesome waves over the forehead, whence its owner was perpetually and impatiently thrusting it back. All the bony structure of the face had been emphasised at the expense of its young grace and bloom, and the new indications of moustache and beard did but add to its striking and painful black and white. And the whole impression of change was completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking distrust with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and eagerness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked out upon the world.

'Was it fever?' said a young Owens College professor who had taken a lively interest from the beginning in the clever lad's venture.

'Upon my word! you do look pulled down. Paris may be the first city in the world--it is an insanitary hole all the same. So you never found time to inquire after those Moliere editions for me?'

David racked his brains. What was it he had been asked to do? He remembered half an hour's talk on one of those early days with a bookseller on the Quai Voltaire--was it about this commission? He could not recall.

'No, sir,' he said, stammering and flus.h.i.+ng. 'I believe I did ask somewhere, but I can't remember.'

'It's very natural, very natural,' said the professor kindly.

'Never mind. I'll send you the particulars again, and you can keep your eyes open for me. And, look here, take your business easy for a while. You'll get on--you're sure to get on--if you only recover your health.'

David opened the door for him in silence.

The reawakening of his old life in him was strange and slow. When he first found himself back among his books and catalogues, his ledgers and business memoranda, he was bewildered and impatient.

What did these elaborate notes, with their cabalistic signs and abbreviations--whether as to the needs of customers, or the whereabouts of books, or the history of prices--mean or matter? He was like a man who has lost a sense. Then the pressure of certain debts which should have been met out of the money in the bank first put some life into him. He looked into his financial situation and found it grave, though not desperate. All hope of a large and easy expansion of business was, of course, gone. The loss of his capital had reduced him to the daily s.h.i.+fts and small laborious acc.u.mulations with which he had begun. But this factor in his state was morally of more profit to him at the moment than any other.

With such homely medicines nature and life can often do most for us.

Such was Ancrum's belief, and in consequence he showed a very remarkable wisdom during these early days of David's return.

'As far as I can judge, there has been a bad shake to the heart in more senses than one,' had been the dry remark of the Paris doctor; 'and as for nervous system, it's a mercy he's got any left. Take care of him, but for Heaven's sake don't make an invalid of him--that would be the finish.'

So that Ancrum offered no fussy opposition to the resumption of the young man's daily work, though at first it produced a constant battle with exhaustion and depression. But never day or night did the minister forget his charge. He saw that he ate and drank; he enforced a few common sense remedies for the nervous ills which the moral convulsion had left behind it, ills which the lad in his irritable humiliation would fain have hidden even from him; above all he knew how to say a word which kept Dora and Daddy and other friends away for a time, and how to stand between David and that choked and miserable John.

He had the strength of mind also to press for no confidence and to expect no thanks. He had little fear of any further attempts at suicide, though he would have found it difficult perhaps to explain why. But instinctively he felt that for all practical purposes David had been mad when he found him, and that he was mad no longer. He was wretched, and only a fraction of his mind was in Manchester and in his business--that was plain. But, in however imperfect a way, he was again master of himself; and the minister bided his time, putting his ultimate trust in one of the finest mental and physical const.i.tutions he had ever known.

In about ten days David took up his hat one afternoon and, for the first time, ventured into the streets. On his return he was walking down Potter Street in a storm of wind and rain, when he ran against some one who was holding an umbrella right in front of her and battling with the weather. In his recoil he saw that it was Dora.

Dora too looked up, a sudden radiant pleasure in her face overflowing her soft eyes and lips.

'Oh, Mr. Grieve! And are you really better?'

'Yes,' he said briefly. 'May I walk with you a bit?'

'Oh no!--I don't believe you ought to be out in such weather. I'll just come the length of the street with you.'

And she turned and walked with him, chattering fast, and of course, from the point of view of an omniscience which could not have been hers, foolishly. Had he liked Paris?--what he saw of it at least before he had been ill?--and how long had he been ill? Why had he not let Mr. Ancrum or some one know sooner? And would he tell her more about Louie? She heard that she was married, but there was so much she, Dora, wanted to hear.

To his first scanty answers she paid in truth but small heed, for the joy of seeing him again was soon effaced by the painful impression of his altered aspect. The more she looked at him, the more her heart went out to him; her whole being became an effusion of pity and tenderness, and her simplest words, maidenly and self-restrained as she was, were in fact charged with something electric, ineffable. His suffering, his neighbourhood, her own sympathy--she was taken up, overwhelmed by these general impressions. Inferences, details escaped her.

But as she touched on the matter of Louie, and they were now at his own steps, he said to her hurriedly--

'Walk a little further, and I'll tell you. John's in there.'

She opened her eyes, not understanding, and then demurred a little on the ground of his health and the rain.

'Oh, I'm all right,' he said impatiently. 'Look here, will you walk to Chetham's Library? There'll be a quiet place there, in the reading room--sure to be--where we can talk.'

She a.s.sented, and very soon they were mounting the black oak stairs leading to this old corner of Manchester. At the top of the stairs they saw in the distance, at the end of the pa.s.sage on to which open the readers' studies, each with its lining of folios and its oaken lattice, a librarian, who nodded to David, and took a look at Dora. Further on they stumbled over a small boy from the charity school who wished to lionise them over the whole building. But when he had been routed, they found the beautiful panelled and painted reading-room quite empty, and took possession of it in peace. David led the way to an oriel window he had become familiar with in the off-times of his first years at Manchester, and they seated themselves there with a low sloping desk between them, looking out on the wide rain-swept yard outside, the buildings of the grammar-school, and the black ma.s.s of the cathedral.

Manchester had never been more truly Manchester than on this dark July afternoon, with its low shapeless clouds, its darkness, wind, and pelting rain. David, staring out through the lozenge panes at the familiar gloom beyond, was suddenly carried by repulsion into the midst of a vision which was an agony--of a spring forest cut by threadlike paths; of a shadeless sun; of a white city steeped in charm, in gaiety.

Dora watched him timidly, new perceptions and alarms dawning in her.

'You were going to tell me about Louie,' she said.

He returned to himself, and abruptly turned with his back to the window, so that he saw the outer world no more.

'You heard that she was married?'

'Yes.'

'She has married a brute. It was partly my fault. I wanted to be rid of her; she got in my way. This man was in the same house; I left her to herself, and partly, I believe, to spite me, she went off with him. Then at the last when she wouldn't leave him I made her marry him. I bribed him to marry her. And he did. I had just enough money to make it worth his while. But he will ill-treat her; and she won't stay with him. She will go from bad to worse.'

Dora drew back, with her hand on the desk, staring at him with incredulous horror.

'But you were ill?' she stammered.

He shook his head.

'Never mind my being ill. I wanted you to know, because you were good to her, and I'm not going to be a hypocrite to you. n.o.body else need know anything but that she's married, which is true. If I'd looked after her it mightn't have happened--perhaps. But I didn't look after her--I couldn't.'

His face, propped in his hands, was hidden from her. She was in a whirl of excitement and tragic impression--understanding something, divining more.

'Louie was always so self-willed,' she said trembling.

'Aye. That don't make it any better. You remember all I told you about her before? You know we didn't get on; she wasn't nice to me, and I didn't suit her, I suppose. But all this year, I don't know why, she's been on my mind from morning till night; I've always felt sure, somehow, that she would come to harm; and the worrying oneself about her--well! it has seemed _to grow into one's very bones_. '--He threw out the last words after a pause, in which he had seemed to search for some phrase wherewith to fit the energy of his feeling. 'I took her to Paris to keep her out of mischief. I had much rather have gone alone; but she would not ask you to take her in, and I couldn't leave her with John. Well, then, she got in my way--I told you--and I let her go to the dogs. There--it's done--_done!_'

He turned on his seat, one hand drumming the desk, while his eyes fixed themselves apparently on the portrait of Sir Humphry Chetham over the carved mantelpiece. His manner was hard and rapid; neither voice nor expression had any of the simplicity or directness of remorse.

Dora remained silent looking at him; her slender hands were pressed tight against either cheek; the tears rose slowly till they filled her grey eyes.