The History of David Grieve Part 81

'It is very sad,' she said in a low voice.

There was a pause.

'Yes--it's sad. So are most things in this world, perhaps. All natural wants seem just to lead us to misery sooner or later. And who gave them to us--who put us here--with no choice but just to go on blundering from one muddle into another?'

Their eyes met. It was as though he had remembered her religion, and could not, in his bitterness, refrain from an indirect fling at it.

As for her, what he said was strange and repellent to her. But her forlorn pa.s.sion, so long trampled on, cried within her; her pure heart was one prayer, one exquisite throb of pain and pity.

'Did some one deceive you?' she asked, so low that the words seemed just breathed into the air.

'No,--I deceived myself.'

Then as he looked at her an impulse of confession crossed his mind.

Sympathy, sincerity, womanly sweetness, these things he had always a.s.sociated with Dora Lomax. Instinctively he had chosen her for a friend long ago as soon as their first foolish spars were over.

But the impulse pa.s.sed away. He thought of her severity, her religion, her middle-cla.s.s canons and judgments, which perhaps were all the stricter because of Daddy's laxities. What common ground between her and his pa.s.sion, between her and Elise? No! if he must speak--if, in the end, he proved too weak to forbear wholly from speech--let it be to ears more practised, and more human!

So he choked back his words, and Dora felt instinctively that he would tell her no more. Her consciousness of this was a mingled humiliation and relief; it wounded her to feel that she had so little command of him; yet she dreaded what he might say. Paris was a wicked place--so the world reported. Her imagination, sensitive, Christianised, ascetic, shrank from what he might have done.

Perhaps the woman shrank too. Instead, she threw herself upon the thought, the bliss, that he was there again beside her, restored, rescued from the gulf, if gulf there had been.

He went back to the subject of Louie, and told her as much as a girl of Dora's kind could be told of what he himself knew of Louie's husband. In the course of his two days' search for them, which had included an interview with Madame Cervin, he had become tolerably well acquainted with Montjoie's public character and career. Incidentally parts of the story of Louie's behaviour came in, and for one who knew her as Dora did, her madness and wilfulness emerged, could be guessed at, little as the brother intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse himself? Louie's character was a fixed quant.i.ty to be reckoned on by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she forgave him--for she knew not what!--became his champion. There was a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming ill in all he said which wrung her heart. And how blanched he was by that unknown misery! How should she not pity, not forgive? It was the impotence of her own feeling to express itself that swelled her throat. And poor Lucy, too--ah! poor Lucy.

Suddenly, as he was speaking, he noticed his companion more closely, the shabbiness of the little black hat and jacket, the new lines round the eyes and mouth.

'_You_ have not been well,' he said abruptly.' How has your father been going on?'

She started and tried to answer quietly. But her nerves had been shaken by their talk, and by that inward play of emotion which had gone on out of his sight. Quite unexpectedly she broke down, and covering her eyes with one hand, began to sob gently.

'I can't do anything with him now, poor father,' she said, when she could control herself. 'He won't listen to me at all. The debts are beginning to be dreadful, and the business is going down fast. I don't know what we shall do. And it all makes him worse--drives him to drink.'

David thought a minute, lifted out of himself for the first time.

'Shall I come to-night to see him?'

'Oh do!' she said eagerly; 'come about nine o'clock. I will tell him--perhaps that will keep him in.'

Then she went into more details than she had yet done; named the creditors who were pressing; told how her church-work, though she worked herself blind night and day, could do but little for them; how both the restaurant and the reading-room were emptying, and she could now get no servants to stay, but Sarah, because of her father's temper.

It seemed to him as he listened that the story, with its sickened hope and on-coming fate, was all in some strange way familiar; it or something like it was to have been expected; for him the strange and jarring thing now would have been to find a happy person. He was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs its own cloud over the universe.

But Dora got up to go, tying on her veil with shaking hands. She was so humbly grateful to him that he was sorry for her--that he could spare a thought from his own griefs for her.

As they went down the dark stairs together, he asked after Lucy.

She was now staying with some relations at Wakely, a cotton town in the valley of the Irwell, Dora said; but she would probably go back to Hastings for the winter. It was now settled that she and her father could not get on; and the stepmother that was to be--Purcell, however, was taking his time--as determined not to be bothered with her.

David listened with a certain discomfort. 'It was what she did for me,' he thought, 'that set him against her for good and all. Old brute!'

Aloud he said: 'I wrote to her, you know, and sent her that book.

She did write me a queer letter back--it was all dashes and splashes--about the street-preachings on the beach, and a blind man who sang hymns. I can't remember why she hated him so particularly!'

She answered his faint smile. Lucy was a child for both of them.

Then he took her to the door of the Parlour, noticing, as he parted from her, how dingy and neglected the place looked.

Afterwards--directly he had left her--the weight of his pain which had been lightened for an hour descended upon him again, shutting the doors of the senses, leaving him alone within, face to face with the little figure which haunted him day and night. During the days since his return from Paris the faculty of projective imagination, which had endowed his childhood with a second world, and peopled it with the incidents and creatures of his books, had grown to an abnormal strength. Behind the stage on which he was now painfully gathering together the fragments of his old life, it created for him another, where, amid scenes richly set and lit with perpetual summer, he lived with Elise, walked with her, watched her, lay at her feet, quarrelled with her, forgave her. His drama did not depend on memory alone, or rather it was memory pa.s.sing into creation. Within its bounds he was himself and not himself; his part was loftier than any he had ever played in reality; his eloquence was no longer tongue-tied--it flowed and penetrated. His love might be cruel, but he was on her level, nay, her master; he could reproach, wrestle with, command her; and at the end evoke the pardoning flight into each other's arms--confession--rapture.

Till suddenly, poor fool! a little bolt shot from the bow of memory--the image of a _diligence_ rattling along a white road--or of black rain-beaten quays, with their lines of wavering lamps--or of a hideous upper room with blue rep furniture where one could neither move nor breathe--would strike his dream to fragments, and as it fell to ruins within him, his whole being would become one tumult of inarticulate cries--delirium--anguish--with which the self at the heart of all seemed to be wrestling for life.

It was so to-day after he left Dora. First the vision, the enchantment--then the agony, the sob of desolation which could hardly be kept down. He saw nothing in the streets. He walked on past the Exchange, where an unusual crowd was gathered, elbowing his way through it mechanically, but not in truth knowing that it was there.

When he reached the shop he ran past John, who was reading a newspaper, up to his room and locked the door.

About an hour afterwards Mr. Ancrum came in, all excitement, a batch of papers under his arm.

'It is going to be war, John! _War_--I tell you! and such a war. They'll be beaten, those braggarts, if there's justice in heaven. The streets are all full; I could hardly get here; everybody talking of how it will affect Manchester. Time enough to think about that! What a set of selfish beasts we all are! Where's David?'

'Come in an hour ago!' said John sullenly; 'he went upstairs.'

'Ah, he will have heard--the placards are all over the place.'

The minister went upstairs and knocked at David's door.

'David!'

'All right,' said a voice from inside.

'David, what do you think of the news?'

'What news?' after a pause.

'Why, the war, man! Haven't you seen the evening paper?'

No answer. The minister stood listening at the door. Then a tender look dawned in his odd grey face.

'David, look here, I'll push you the paper under the door. You're tired, I suppose--done yourself up with your walk?'

'I'll be down to supper,' said the voice from inside, shortly.

'Will you push in the paper?'

The minister descended, and sat by himself in the kitchen thinking.

He was a wiser man now than when he had gone out, and not only as to that reply of the King of Prussia to the French ultimatum on the subject of the Hohenzollern candidature.

For he had met Barbier in the street. How to keep the voluble Frenchman from bombarding David in his shattered state had been one of Mr. Ancrum's most anxious occupations since his return. It had been done, but it had been difficult. For to whom did David owe his first reports of Paris if not to the old comrade who had sent him there, found him a lodging, and taught him to speak French so as not to disgrace himself and his country? However, Ancrum had found means to intercept Barbier's first visit, and had checkmated his attempts ever since. As a natural result, Barbier was extremely irritable. Illness--stuff! The lad had been getting into sc.r.a.pes--that he would swear.

On this occasion, when Ancrum stumbled across him, he found Barbier, at first bubbling over with the war news; torn different ways; now abusing the Emperor for a cochon and a _fou_, prophesying unlimited disaster for France, and sneering at the ranting crowds on the boulevards; the next moment spouting the same anti-Prussian madness with which his whole unfortunate country was at the moment infected. In the midst of his gallop of talk, however, the old man suddenly stopped, took off his hat, and running one excited hand through his bristling tufts of grey hair pointed to Ancrum with the other.

'_Halte la_!' he said, 'I know what your young rascal has been after. I know, and I'll be bound you don't. Trust a lover for hoodwinking a priest. Come along here.'