Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (207 page)

“And himself a millionaire, with a seat in the House of Lords,” quoted her brother.

“So did the old churchmen,” she answered. “As Anthony the monk he would have become a cardinal with his palaces and revenues. A great man is entitled to his just wages.”

Jim had risen; he was pacing the room. “There’ll be the devil to pay,” he said. “The poor old guv’nor will go off his head. Aunt Mary will go off her head. They’ll all go off their heads. I shall have to exchange and go out to India.”

The colour had gone out of her cheeks.

“Why should they punish you for me?” she asked.

“Because it’s the law of the world,” he explained. “They’ve got to kick somebody. When he’s a millionaire with his seat in the House of Lords they’ll forgive us.”

“You’re making me feel pretty mean and selfish,” she said.

“Love is selfish,” he answered. “Don’t see how you can help that.” He halted suddenly in front of her. “You do love him?” he demanded. “You are not afraid to be selfish? You are going to let me down. You are going to hurt the guv’nor very seriously. He hasn’t had much luck in life. This is going to be the last blow. You are willing to inflict it?”

The tears were in her eyes.

“I must,” she answered.

He took her by the shoulders.

“If you had hesitated,” he said, “I should have known it wasn’t the real thing. You are under orders, kid, and can’t help yourself.

“You needn’t worry about me,” he said. “I’d have hated taking their confounded charity in any case. We must let the dad down as gently as possible. Leave it to me to break it to him. He must be used to disappointments, poor old buffer. Thank the Lord we haven’t
got
to worry about the mater. Tell her all that about Monk Anthony. She will love all that. Never mind the millionaire business and the House of Lords.”

Lady Coomber was a curiously shy, gentle lady, somewhat of an enigma to those who did not know her history; they included her two children. Her name had been Edith Trent. She came of old Virginia stock. Harry Coomber, then a clerk in the British Embassy, had met her in Washington, where she was living with friends, both her parents being dead. They had fallen in love with one another, and the marriage was within a day or two of taking place when the girl suddenly disappeared.

Young Harry, making use of all the influence he could obtain, succeeded in tracing her. She was living in the negro quarter of New Orleans, earning her living as a school teacher. She had discovered on evidence that had seemed to her to admit of no doubt that her grandmother had been a slave. It was difficult to believe. She was a beautiful, olive-skinned girl with wavy, dark brown hair and finely chiselled features. Young Harry Coomber, madly in love with her, had tried to persuade her that even if true it need not separate them. Outside America it would not matter. He would take her abroad or return with her to England. His entreaties were unavailing. She regarded herself as unclean. She had been bred to all the Southern American’s hatred and horror of the negro race. Among her people the slightest taint of the “tar brush” was sufficient to condemn man or woman to lifelong ostracism. She would have inflicted the same fate upon another, and a sense of justice compelled her not to shirk the punishment in her own case.

Five years later a circumstance came to light that proved the story false, and the long-delayed marriage took place quietly at the Sheriff’s office of a small town in Pennsylvania.

But the memory of those five years of her life, passed in what to her had been a living grave, had changed her whole character. An outcast among outcasts, she had drunk to the dregs their cup of terror and humiliation. In that city of shame, out of which for five years she had never once emerged, she had met men and women like herself: refined, cultured, educated. She had shared their long-drawn martyrdom. For her, the veil had been lifted from their tortured souls.

As a girl, she had been proud, haughty, exacting. It had been part of her charm. She came back to life a timid, gentle, sorrowful woman with a pity that would remain with her to the end for all creatures that suffered.

Left to herself, she would have joined some band of workers, as missionary, nurse or teacher — as servant in any capacity. It would not have mattered to her what so that she could have felt she was doing something towards lessening the world’s pain. She had yielded to her lover’s insistence from a sense of duty, persuaded that she owed herself to him for his faithfulness and patience.

The marriage had brought disappointment to them both. She had hoped some opportunity would be afforded her of satisfying her craving to be of help if only to some few in some small corner of the earth. But her husband’s straitened means had always kept her confined to the bare struggle for existence. Another, in her place, might have been able to give at least sympathy and kindliness. But she was a woman broken in spirit. All her strength went out in her endeavours to be a good wife and mother. And even here she failed. She was of no assistance to her husband, as she knew. For business she had neither heart nor head. In society she was silent and colourless. On her husband’s accession to the baronetcy and what was left of the estate, she had made a last effort to play her part. But the solitary years on the ranch had tended to increase her shyness, and secretly she was glad of the need for economy that compelled them to live abroad more or less in seclusion. The one joy she had was in her love of birds. To gather them about her, feed them, protect them by cunning means against their host of enemies, had become the business of her life. Even in the days of poverty she had been able to do that. She had come to love The Abbey even in the short time they had occupied it. She had made of its neglected gardens a bird sanctuary. Rare species, hunted and persecuted elsewhere, had found there a shelter. At early morning and late evening her little grey-clad figure could be seen stealing softly among the deep yew hedges and the tangled shrubberies that she would not have disturbed. One could always tell her whereabouts by the fluttering of wings above her in the air — the babel of sweet voices that heralded her coming.

Her children had never been told her story. She had exacted that as a promise. Though her reason had been satisfied that the rumour told against her had been false, the haunting fear that it yet might be true remained with her. She would not have it passed on to them lest it should shadow their lives as it had darkened hers. Rather than that she was content that they should grow up wondering at the difference between her and other mothers, at her lack of interest in their youthful successes and ambitions; at her strange aloofness from the things that excited their fears and hopes.

As Jim had said, Eleanor’s marrying a blacksmith’s son would not trouble her. The story of Monk Anthony she would love. The wrong done to him would probably bring tears into the still childish eyes. The prophecy of his millions and his seat in the House of Lords would not interest her.

CHAPTER XIII

THEY were married abroad, as it happened. Jim had exchanged; but his regiment, before going on to India, had been appointed to the garrison at Malta. There the family had joined him for the winter.

Fate had spared Sir Harry his last disappointment in life. Jim had not told him about Eleanor. There was no hurry. It could be done at any time. And he had died, after a few days’ illness, early in the spring. He had been busy, unknown to the others, fixing up with his sister Mary for Eleanor to come out in London during the season, and had built great hopes upon the result. Thus, so far as that matter was concerned, the poor old gentleman had died happy. Eleanor and her mother stopped on at a little place up in the hills. Anthony came out at the end of the summer; and they had been married in the English church. It was arranged that Lady Coomber should remain at Malta till Jim left for India; it might be the next year or the year after. Then she would come back to England and live with them at The Abbey. Anthony had not hoped to be able to take Eleanor back to The Abbey, but the summer had brought him unusual good fortune. As a matter of fact, everything seemed to be prospering with him just now. He was getting nervous about it, wondering how long it would last. He was glad that he had been able to pay Jim a good price for the place; beyond that, when everything was cleared up and Lady Coomber’s annuity provided for, there would not be much left.

Anthony’s mother would not come to live at The Abbey, though Eleanor was anxious that she should and tried to persuade her. Whether she thought Eleanor did not really want her or whether the reasons she gave him were genuine Anthony could not be sure.

“I should be wandering, without knowing it, into the kitchen,” she explained; “or be jumping up suddenly to answer a bell. Or maybe,” she added with a smile, “I’d be slipping out of the back door of an evening to the little gate behind the stables, and thinking I saw your father under the shadow of the elms, where he used to be always waiting for me. I’ll be happier in the old square. There are no ghosts there — leastways, not for my eyes to see.”

Besides, there was his aunt to be considered. He had thought that she might find a home with one or another of her chapel friends. But Mrs. Newt had fallen away from grace, as it was termed, and was no longer in touch with her former circle.

She had given back her fine tombstone to old Batson the stonemason, who, not knowing what else to do with it, had used it to replace a broken doorstep leading to his office. She had come to picture her safe arrival at the gates of Endless Bliss with less complacency. She no longer felt sure of her welcome.

Don’t see what I’ve done to deserve it,” she said. “All that I’ve ever tried to do has been to make myself comfortable in this world and to take good care, as I thought, to be on the right road for the next. I used to think it all depended upon faith: that all you had to do was to believe. But your poor uncle used to say it sounded a bit too cheap to be true. And if he was right and the Lord demands works, guess I’ll cut a poor figure.”

The idea had come to her to replace the optimism of her discarded tombstone by a simple statement of facts with underneath:
“
Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.” But the head sexton, on being consulted as a friend, had objected to the quotation as one calculated to let down the tone of the cemetery, and had urged something less committal.

So the two old ladies remained at Bruton Square, keeping for themselves the basement and the three small rooms at the top. Anthony added an extra kitchen and let the rest of the house to a Mr. Arnold Landripp, an architect. He had for some years been occupying the two large schoolrooms as an office. He was a widower. His daughter, who had been at school in the south of England and afterwards at University College, had now joined him. She was aged about twenty, and was said to be a “high-brow.” The term was just coming into use. She was a tall, pale girl with coal-black eyes. She wore her hair brushed back from her forehead and, in secret, smoked cigarettes, it was rumoured.

Betty and her father lived practically abroad. They had taken a flat in Florence and had let The Priory furnished to a cousin of Mr. Mowbray, who owned the big steel works at Shawley, half-way up the valley.

Anthony had been generous over the sharing of profits; and Mr. Mowbray had expressed himself as more than satisfied.

“I was running the business on to the rocks,” he confessed. “There wouldn’t have been much left for Betty. As it is, I shall die with an easy mind, thanks to you.”

He held out his hand. He and Anthony had been having a general talk in the great room with its three domed windows that had been Mr. Mowbray’s private office and was now Anthony’s. He and Betty would be leaving early the next morning on their return to Italy. He hesitated a moment, still holding Anthony’s hand, and then spoke again.

“I thought at one time,” he said, “that it might have been a closer relationship than that of mere partners. But she’s a strange girl. I don’t expect she ever will marry. I fancy I frightened her off it.” He laughed. “She knew that I loved her mother with as great a love as any woman could hope for. But it didn’t save me from making her life one of sorrow.

“Do you know what’s wrong with the Apostles’ Creed?” he said. “They’ve left out the devil. Don’t you make the mistake, my lad, of not believing in him. He doesn’t want us to believe in him. He wants us to believe that he is dead, that he never lived, that he’s just an old wives’ tale. We talk about the still small voice of God. Yes, if we listen very hard and if it’s all quiet about us, we can hear it. What about the insistent tireless voice of the other one who whispers to us day and night, sits beside us at table, creeps with us into bed? David made a mistake; he should have said, ‘the fear of the devil is the beginning of wisdom.’ It began in the Garden of Eden. If the Lord only hadn’t forgotten the serpent! It has been the trouble of all the reformers. They might have accomplished something: if they hadn’t forgotten the devil. It’s the trouble of every youngster, thinking he sees his life before him; they all forget the devil.”

Anthony laughed.

“What line of tactics do you suggest for overcoming him?” he asked.

“Haven’t myself had sufficient success to justify my giving advice,” answered Mr. Mowbray. “All I can warn you is that he takes many shapes. Sometimes he dresses himself up as a dear old lady and calls himself Mother Nature. Sometimes he wears a shiny hat and claims to be nothing more than a plain man of business. Sometimes he comes clothed in glory and calls himself Love.”

The old gentleman reached for his hat.

“Didn’t expect to find me among the prophets, did you?” he added with a smile.

He was growing feeble, and Anthony walked back with him to The Priory. They passed St. Aldys churchyard on their way.

“I’ll just look in,” said Mr. Mowbray, “and say good-bye. I always like to before I go away.”

Mr. Mowbray had bought many years ago the last three vacant graves in the churchyard. His wife lay in the centre one and Edward to the right of her.