Secret Bread Part 44

said Archelaus as he shook his head; "you'll knaw fast enough. Read."

This is what Ishmael read by the evening light that flooded the room:

"Dear Archelaus," ran the letter, "I don't know whatever I shall do. I wish I was dead. Why did you come back and trouble me? There were plenty of women where you came from. You have told me about them often enough.

I never wanted you to make love to me. I never liked it, only I couldn't help it. And now there's a baby coming and he hasn't been near me for over two months. He seems as though he didn't want me any more, and I don't know what to do, because now he'll have to know...."

Ishmael read so far, and though he did not understand what he read, and it sent no rush of knowledge over his soul, yet a deadly sense of fear, of yet he knew not what, sent his heart pounding through his frame. The letter fell to his knee and Archelaus, watching, said:

"I told her to speak 'ee soft and let her lil' body lie against 'ee...."

Ishmael picked up the letter again, looked from the date--the month of January, in 1868--to the signature, "Phoebe Ruan," before he let the letter drop again. Still he said nothing, and after a minute Archelaus went on.

"Read the next," he said.

The next was but a further plaint, signed with Phoebe's name, in a rather more uneven hand. Ishmael found himself remembering, as his eye met them again, her little tricks with the pen--the wandering tails to her words, the elaborate capitals which gave a touch of individuality to the regular slanting lines. He picked up the last letter.

"Dear Archelaus," it began--Phoebe would never have suffered sufficiently from a sense of fitness to alter the conventional beginning, whatever the stress under which she wrote--"I have done it, and now he need never know unless you tell him, and you won't ever, will you, dear, dear Archelaus? Please promise me."

"Did you promise?" was all Ishmael's voice asked.

Archelaus stirred a little in the bed.

"I promised never to hurt her by tellen' 'ee," he said. There was a moment of silence, and then he broke into vehement speech. Even his voice had gathered strength; it was as though in the full flood of what was sweeping out of him, after being dammed for so many years, all physical disabilities were washed away.

"Aw, what do 'ee think I ded it for?" he asked; "for love of Phoebe?

Her!... I could have got as good at any brothel to Penzance.... It wasn't for love I ded it; it was for hate. Hate of 'ee, Ishmael! To get my revenge, and for you not to knaw till it was too late, much too late, to cast her off or the child. I wanted to wait till the boy should be the warld to 'ee ... till he had grown as your own soul, and you saw his son ready to come after him and thought it was your own flesh and blood you was leaving behind you, and you too old to leave any other....

Cloom's been yours all your life, but when you and I are both on us dead and rotting, it'll be I and not you who's living on at Cloom. So 'tes mine, after all, not yours...."

A moment later and the triumphant voice went on again.

"There's another letter," it said, "from your old Parson. I wrote to he after I'd met Nicky--my son--casual-like once in Canada. That's what he answered."

Again Ishmael picked up the letter, almost mechanically, and read:

"I have received your letter dated July, 1891. I cannot find words to write to you as I would wish. If what you tell me is true--and I do not think you could have invented the letters of which you send me copies--it would matter very little if I found the pen of men and of angels to tell you what I thought. I can only tell you that even if the wish is wicked I hope with all my heart, and pray it too, that you may never be allowed to come home to tell your brother what it is in your heart to tell him. That the boy may never in his turn have a son to gratify you with the sight of your grandchild at Cloom. That this weapon you have forged against your brother may be under Providence to your own undoing. And since the ways of G.o.d are mysterious--though I am tempted to say not as past finding out as the ways of man--even if you carry out your threat it may be that Ishmael will be given strength to withstand the horror of what you tell him, and that the Lord has a comfort for him in ways you could not understand, so that you will be robbed of all but an empty victory...."

As Ishmael slowly and with meticulous care put the letters safely on to the bed a step was heard coming along the pa.s.sage, the step of Nicky, the only step in that house which was both that of a man and vigorous.

Archelaus turned his head a little on the pillow, and Ishmael, for the first time showing any emotion, leant towards him. "If you say a word to him--" he began. The steps paused at the door and then went on again.

Ishmael stayed bent forward, eyes sidelong. Archelaus began to speak, as though his mind had drifted backwards from the acuteness of the present.

"All these years ..." he muttered, "all these years ... wandering auver the earth, I've thought on it.... Phoebe, she was a light woman and many was the time I'd held her lil' body to mine, but she was soft as a lil' lamb fresh from its mother, so she was.... The likes of you wants too much from a woman; I was never one of they chaps. If a woman was lil' and soft, said I--"

"Archelaus," said Ishmael, speaking very distinctly and bending over the old man to try and attract his wandering attention, "when you came back from California, had you it in your mind to do this thing?"

He had to repeat the question, and at last Archelaus showed a gleam of knowledge. "When I came back from Californy ..." he murmured, "I came back, so I ded.... No, I'd forgot all about her then, sure enough; she was but a soft lil' thing. But he'd got her, him as had taken all of mine, got the wench as had been mine, that I might ha' wanted again, and I was mad as fire. And then I was glad of it, for I saw my way, if so be as I could only get a cheild by her...." He turned a little on his pillows towards Ishmael and became confidential. "That was my fear," he went on, "that I'd go wi' her again and no cheild 'ud come any more than it had afore. But there's often a change in women after a few years, and besides ... I'd not wanted to get 'en afore. I knew I'd get 'en that time, and I ded. She was some whisht, she was, weth you and your fine gentleman ways of not sleeping along o' she, when she found the way she was in...." He laughed, a tiny, little old thread-like laugh, as out of the trough of the years there floated up to him Phoebe's predicament and his advice as to how to meet it--a thin little thread of laughter that spanned the years and connected that time of which he spoke with this present moment by the bed of death. The laugh died away and fell again into the abysses from which it had been evoked, and there only hung a silence in the room, but it was a silence thin, brittle as gla.s.s.

His lids drooped. Over his fast dimming brain the films of approaching dissolution began to swirl, now thick and fast, now tenuous again, so that he recognised Ishmael and what had happened for a fleeting moment during which the old glee peeped out of his blurred eyes. Then he drifted into sleep with the suddenness of an infant, a sleep quite peaceful, as of one who has accomplished well his task and now may rest.

Ishmael sat on by the bed; sometimes he looked at him, even laid his fingers on his pulse to make sure, with as much mechanical care as ever, that he was indeed only sleeping. He sat on where he was, but with his eyes staring out of the window, though they hardly saw the rolling fields that lay, a burnished green, beneath the evening light. Once a step came again to the door, and a voice asked if everything were all right. Ishmael answered "Yes," bidding the questioner go away, and he never knew that it had been Nicky's voice which asked.

CHAPTER IV

HESTER

Ishmael sat and watched his own thoughts pa.s.s before him. It is not given to every man to see all that he has lived by lying broken around him, and this was what had happened to Ishmael. He could see, now that he had lost him, how it was the thought of his son at Cloom, far more than Cloom itself, which had held ever deepening place in his heart and soul. He remembered the night when Phoebe had whispered to him that she was going to have a baby ... how she had clung about his neck and how happy she had seemed. He remembered too--the recollection swam up to him through years of blurred forgetting--an earlier night, when Phoebe had won him back to her ... that night of pa.s.sion which must have been on her side a calculated thing, a trap for him to fall in blindly--as he had. Phoebe--who had seemed so transparent, and whom, as he now realised, no one but Archelaus had ever really known.... Yet none of that hurt or even outraged him. What Phoebe had been was of supreme unimportance. Not at this distance of years could he conjure up the emotions of an outraged husband which even at the time would have seemed to him both inadequate and ridiculous. Not the realisation that that night of pa.s.sion had been a faked thing on her part--a set-piece on a stage--touched him. He took, as he was guiltily aware, too little to it himself, beyond animal appet.i.te, for him to dare judge of that.

But that other night, after she had told him he was to expect a child to be born to him, that night when he had gone out into the scented garden and felt drowning and yet uplifted on the tide of the deepest emotion of his life--to know that that had all been based on a delusion was what upset the whole of life now.

Could truth be built on untruth? If what he had felt then was all the time based upon a lie, how could there be anything worth the living for in that which he had left? The rapture, the deep and sacred joy, when through his fatherhood he had felt kin to G.o.d Himself--what of that?

What of the life, the religion, the love, the hopes, that had gone on piling up upon that one thing from that day on? Were they all as valueless as what they had been built on? If so, then he was bereft indeed, left in an empty world, that only echoed mockery to the plaints of men and the quiet eternal laughter of the Being who made them for ends of supreme absurdity.

It was not his relations.h.i.+p towards Nicky that Ishmael was weighing as he sat in the still room; it was his whole relations.h.i.+p towards life. It was not his fatherhood that he felt reeling; it was the fatherhood of G.o.d. It was not love that he felt slipping from his grasp; it was truth: not Nicky that he was despairing of, but the figure of Christ Himself.

If all that emotion, that love, that faith, that ardent pa.s.sion of joy and work, were founded, caused by, built upon what had never been, could they really exist either?

Once he did hear his voice saying aloud "My boy ... mine ..."; but even then, his pa.s.sion for truth outweighing indulgence to self, he knew that it was the mere mechanical speech of the situation rising to his lips unconsciously. He said the words again to try and get at exactly what their import was. "Mine...."

All that had struck him while Archelaus had been lying watching him read the letters was "This couldn't happen to a woman ... how unfairly it's arranged ... it's only a man this could happen to ..."; and that had shown him how small, after all, was the man's share, that such a thing could be possible. Him or another, it really did not seem to matter so very much. Both he and Archelaus had had Phoebe. That this spark of life should have been from him or from Archelaus ... was that, after all, so important? It seemed such a small share. Fatherhood, looked at dispa.s.sionately, seemed to him a thing very artificial in its convention. Life, that there should be life--yes, that was different, but not that it should have been from him or another on that particular occasion.... When one thought that both had equally possessed the woman they seemed to merge so in her personality as to lose individual personalities of their own.

If he had not kept away from Phoebe for those two months, thus, in the light of her letter, putting the matter beyond doubt, how would any of the three of them ever have known whose son Nicky was? Women always said they knew, even when they were going equally with two men; but did they?

Was it not rather that they always decided it was the child of the man they cared for most? And if conditions had all along been normal between him and Phoebe, then how would he have felt in the light of his brother's avowal? It would have been impossible to say whether the child had been his or his brother's; and yet Nicky would have been himself, even as he was now, and he, Ishmael, would have felt the same about him, and nothing would have been really different any more than if he had never known; or, knowing that there was doubt, still could not have told for certain which of the two it was who had fathered Nicky. How, then, was it different now that he did know beyond a doubt? Nicky was the same....

Ishmael clung on to that. Nicky was the same. Then--and the light came sliding into his heart with a sensation of easing--if Nicky were the same, then the truth might be the same too; all that he had lived by not be the more overset than was the Nicky he had known and loved all these years. Though Nicky was not what was called his son, all he had built upon Nicky might not be valueless any more than Nicky himself had become valueless, or one jot of his character or personality been overthrown.... Nicky stood where he had; then why not more than Nicky?

These were the eternal verities, not the mere accident of fatherhood.

Ishmael gave a long, tired sigh, and his body slipped a little down into his chair; his eyes still stared at the light in the sky. He felt suddenly terribly tired, so tired that his body grew very heavy and his mind of a thistledown lightness, which refused any more to concentrate.

Yet he knew that there were certain things he must face for the sake of Nicky, certain things he must ensure. He made a violent effort and forced his mind and body to respond to his will. To him, on the far rim of life, it might be vouchsafed to see how little certain things mattered after all; but there was Nicky, still in the midst of it, with a mind that lived more in the present than Ishmael's had ever done. It was important for Nicky's peace of mind that he should never know he was in fact, if not in law, what so many of his family had been, what he would have thought of as "base-born." And Nicky so disliked Archelaus and all he stood for.... Nicky's happiness--that was what mattered now, what must be ensured.

Slowly Ishmael turned in his chair and faced Archelaus once more. He bent down and spoke into his ear, but Archelaus did not stir beyond a muttering in his sleep. As he looked at him Ishmael saw how easy it would be to slip a pillow over his mouth and hold it there till he had been put beyond the reach to hurt Nicky. Yet he felt no temptation to do it, not because of any scruple of conscience--the suggestion did not get as far as arousing that--but simply for the reason that most people do not commit crime, because it does not seem a possible thing in the scheme of life as it is normally known. Things horribly unbelievable, out of the ordinary course, did happen in life, even as this thing that had happened to him; but the angle of life was not thereby changed, it was still the things that were abnormal. Ishmael saw the impossibleness of killing his brother even while he saw the possibility.

"Archelaus!..." he said again, speaking clearly and insistently. "You are not to tell anyone else. You are not to tell Nicky. Do you hear me!"

Archelaus stirred and opened his eyes; they stared at Ishmael for a long moment without recognition. Then a flame of understanding came into their dimmed look.

"I'm come home to tell my son," he said. "He'm my flesh and blood; I'm come home to tell en."

"No--no!" Ishmael put out his hand to take the letters which Archelaus had gathered into his grasp again. With surprising strength Archelaus rolled his body over on to them, and his voice was raised in a cry before Ishmael could stop him. At the same moment a step sounded in the corridor. It was Nicky, doubtless anxious, coming along for a third time to listen if all were well. At the cry he hurried and opened the door and came quickly in.

Hester the dog was with him and, bounding forward in the boisterous manner of the well-meaning foolish creatures of her type, she sprang upon the bed. Nicky ran forward as Archelaus uttered another cry, but unlike the first. This was of pure high terror. Nicky seized the dog by the scruff of the neck, so that she hung suspended for a moment in his grasp above the bed, before he bore her to the door. Archelaus stared as though he saw a ghost; his old mouth fell open, showing slack and curved inwards like the mouth of a very young baby. His eyes glazed with his terror; his cheeks had in that one minute a.s.sumed a pale, purplish hue, on which the deep lines and darker veins stood out like a network laid over his shrunken skin. He sat up in bed--he who had not lifted his head for a week--and stayed rigid so for a few beating moments. Then he fell back, crumpled up amid the pillows. Nicky had flung the dog outside, and came to bend over him, casting a watchful eye towards Ishmael to see how he was standing it. Ishmael's hand was slipped into the bed under his brother's body; his eyes were fixed on his face.

"Go for the doctor, quickly, Nicky!" he said. "Go yourself."

The dying man opened his eyes and fixed them on Ishmael.

"No," he said, so faintly that Nicky had to bend low to hear; "no. You don't need to send him away.... I've had a sign, Ishmael; I've had a sign.... Oh, my soul, I've had a sign!..."