Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (414 page)

“‘I thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,’ he answered; ‘don’t call out if it tries you.’

“Then for the first time she began to worry about herself — not for her own sake, but because of him.

“‘Do you think I
am
getting weaker, nurse?’ she asked me, fixing her great eyes on me with a frightened look.

“‘You’re making yourself weak by calling out,’ I answered, a little sharply. ‘I shall have to keep that door shut.’

“‘Oh, don’t tell him’ — that was all her thought—’don’t let him know it. Tell him I’m strong, won’t you, nurse? It will kill him if he thinks I’m not getting well.’

“I was glad when her sister came up, and I could get out of the room, for you’re not much good at nursing when you feel, as I felt then, as though you had swallowed a tablespoon and it was sticking in your throat.

“Later on, when I went in to him, he drew me to the bedside, and whispered me to tell him truly how she was. If you are telling a lie at all, you may just as well make it a good one, so I told him she was really wonderfully well, only a little exhausted after the illness, as was natural, and that I expected to have her up before him.

“Poor lad! that lie did him more good than a week’s doctoring and nursing; and next morning he called out more cheerily than ever to her, and offered to bet her a new bonnet against a new hat that he would race her, and be up first.

“She laughed back quite merrily (I was in his room at the time). ‘All right,’ she said, ‘you’ll lose. I shall be well first, and I shall come and visit you.’

“Her laugh was so bright, and her voice sounded so much stronger, that I really began to think she had taken a turn for the better, so that when on going in to her I found her pillow wet with tears, I could not understand it.

“‘Why, we were so cheerful just a minute ago,’ I said; ‘what’s the matter?’

“‘Oh, poor Jack!’ she moaned, as her little, wasted fingers opened and closed upon the counterpane. ‘Poor Jack, it will break his heart.’

“It was no good my saying anything. There comes a moment when something tells your patient all that is to be known about the case, and the doctor and the nurse can keep their hopeful assurances for where they will be of more use. The only thing that would have brought comfort to her then would have been to convince her that he would soon forget her and be happy without her. I thought it at the time, and I tried to say something of the kind to her, but I couldn’t get it out, and she wouldn’t have believed me if I had.

“So all I could do was to go back to the other room, and tell him that I wanted her to go to sleep, and that he must not call out to her until I told him.

“She lay very still all day. The doctor came at his usual hour and looked at her. He patted her hand, and just glanced at the untouched food beside her.

“‘Yes,’ he said, quietly. ‘I shouldn’t worry her, nurse.’ And I understood.

“Towards evening she opened her eyes, and beckoned to her sister, who was standing by the bedside, to bend down.

“‘Jeanie,’ she whispered, ‘do you think it wrong to deceive any one when it’s for their own good?’

“‘I don’t know,’ said the girl, in a dry voice; ‘I shouldn’t think so. Why do you ask?’

“‘Jeanie, your voice was always very much like mine — do you remember, they used to mistake us at home. Jeanie, call out for me — just till — till he’s a bit better; promise me.’

“They had loved each other, those two, more than is common among sisters. Jeanie could not answer, but she pressed her sister closer in her arms, and the other was satisfied.

“Then, drawing all her little stock of life together for one final effort, the child raised herself in her sister’s arms.

“‘Good-night, Jack,’ she called out, loud and clear enough to be heard through the closed door.

“‘Good-night, little wife,’ he cried back, cheerily; ‘are you all right?’

“‘Yes, dear. Good-night.’

“Her little, worn-out frame dropped back upon the bed, and the next thing I remember is snatching up a pillow, and holding it tight-pressed against Jeanie’s face for fear the sound of her sobs should penetrate into the next room; and afterwards we both got out, somehow, by the other door, and rushed downstairs, and clung to each other in the back kitchen.

“How we two women managed to keep up the deceit, as, for three whole days, we did, I shall never myself know. Jeanie sat in the room where her dead sister, from its head to its sticking-up feet, lay outlined under the white sheet; and I stayed beside the living man, and told lies and acted lies, till I took a joy in them, and had to guard against the danger of over-elaborating them.

“He wondered at what he thought my ‘new merry mood,’ and I told him it was because of my delight that his wife was out of danger; and then I went on for the pure devilment of the thing, and told him that a week ago, when we had let him think his wife was growing stronger, we had been deceiving him; that, as a matter of fact, she was at that time in great peril, and I had been in hourly alarm concerning her, but that now the strain was over, and she was safe; and I dropped down by the foot of the bed, and burst into a fit of laughter, and had to clutch hold of the bedstead to keep myself from rolling on the floor.

“He had started up in bed with a wild white face when Jeanie had first answered him from the other room, though the sisters’ voices had been so uncannily alike that I had never been able to distinguish one from the other at any time. I told him the slight change was the result of the fever, that his own voice also was changed a little, and that such was always the case with a person recovering from a long illness. To guide his thoughts away from the real clue, I told him Jeanie had broken down with the long work, and that, the need for her being past, I had packed her off into the country for a short rest. That afternoon we concocted a letter to him, and I watched Jeanie’s eyes with a towel in my hand while she wrote it, so that no tears should fall on it, and that night she travelled twenty miles down the Great Western line to post it, returning by the next up-train.

“No suspicion of the truth ever occurred to him, and the doctor helped us out with our deception; yet his pulse, which day by day had been getting stronger, now beat feebler every hour. In that part of the country where I was born and grew up, the folks say that wherever the dead lie, there round about them, whether the time be summer or winter, the air grows cold and colder, and that no fire, though you pile the logs half-way up the chimney, will ever make it warm. A few months’ hospital training generally cures one of all fanciful notions about death, but this idea I have never been able to get rid of. My thermometer may show me sixty, and I may try to believe that the temperature
is
sixty, but if the dead are beside me I feel cold to the marrow of my bones. I could
see
the chill from the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up about his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart.

“Jeanie and I redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if Death were waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out. I hardly ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers to his anxious questions.

“At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and, shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh till we reeled against the dirty walls. I think we were both getting a little mad.

“One day — it was the third of that nightmare life, so I learned afterwards, though for all I could have told then it might have been the three hundredth, for Time seemed to have fled from that house as from a dream, so that all things were tangled — I made a slip that came near to ending the matter, then and there.

“I had gone into that other room. Jeanie had left her post for a moment, and the place was empty.

“I did not think what I was doing. I had not closed my eyes that I can remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses were losing their hold of one another. I went through my usual performance of talking loudly to the thing underneath the white sheet, and noisily patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on the table.

“On my return, he asked me how she was, and I answered, half in a dream, ‘Oh, bonny, she’s trying to read a little,’ and he raised himself on his elbow and called out to her, and for answer there came back silence — not the silence that
is
silence, but the silence that is as a voice. I do not know if you understand what I mean by that. If you had lived among the dead as long as I have, you would know.

“I darted to the door and pretended to look in. ‘She’s fallen asleep,’ I whispered, closing it; and he said nothing, but his eyes looked queerly at me.

“That night, Jeanie and I stood in the hall talking. He had fallen to sleep early, and I had locked the door between the two rooms, and put the key in my pocket, and had stolen down to tell her what had happened, and to consult with her.

“‘What can we do! God help us, what can we do!’ was all that Jeanie could say. We had thought that in a day or two he would be stronger, and that the truth might be broken to him. But instead of that he had grown so weak, that to excite his suspicions now by moving him or her would be to kill him.

“We stood looking blankly in each other’s faces, wondering how the problem could be solved; and while we did so the problem solved itself.

“The one woman-servant had gone out, and the house was very silent — so silent that I could hear the ticking of Jeanie’s watch inside her dress. Suddenly, into the stillness there came a sound. It was not a cry. It came from no human voice. I have heard the voice of human pain till I know its every note, and have grown careless to it; but I have prayed God on my knees that I may never hear that sound again, for it was the sob of a soul.

“It wailed through the quiet house and passed away, and neither of us stirred.

“At length, with the return of the blood to our veins, we went upstairs together. He had crept from his own room along the passage into hers. He had not had strength enough to pull the sheet off, though he had tried. He lay across the bed with one hand grasping hers.”

* * * * *

My nurse sat for a while without speaking, a somewhat unusual thing for her to do.

“You ought to write your experiences,” I said.

“Ah!” she said, giving the fire a contemplative poke, “if you’d seen as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn’t want to write a sad book.”

“I think,” she added, after a long pause, with the poker still in her hand, “it can only be the people who have never
known
suffering who can care to read of it. If I could write a book, I should write a merry book — a book that would make people laugh.”

CHAPTER IX

The discussion arose in this way. I had proposed a match between our villain and the daughter of the local chemist, a singularly noble and pure-minded girl, the humble but worthy friend of the heroine.

Brown had refused his consent on the ground of improbability. “What in thunder would induce him to marry
her
?” he asked.

“Love!” I replied; “love, that burns as brightly in the meanest villain’s breast as in the proud heart of the good young man.”

“Are you trying to be light and amusing,” returned Brown, severely, “or are you supposed to be discussing the matter seriously? What attraction could such a girl have for such a man as Reuben Neil?”

“Every attraction,” I retorted. “She is the exact moral contrast to himself. She is beautiful (if she’s not beautiful enough, we can touch her up a bit), and, when the father dies, there will be the shop.”

“Besides,” I added, “it will make the thing seem more natural if everybody wonders what on earth could have been the reason for their marrying each other.”

Brown wasted no further words on me, but turned to MacShaughnassy.

“Can
you
imagine our friend Reuben seized with a burning desire to marry Mary Holme?” he asked, with a smile.

“Of course I can,” said MacShaughnassy; “I can imagine anything, and believe anything of anybody. It is only in novels that people act reasonably and in accordance with what might be expected of them. I knew an old sea-captain who used to read the
Young Ladies’ Journal
in bed, and cry over it. I knew a bookmaker who always carried Browning’s poems about with him in his pocket to study in the train. I have known a Harley Street doctor to develop at forty-eight a sudden and overmastering passion for switchbacks, and to spend every hour he could spare from his practice at one or other of the exhibitions, having three-pen’orths one after the other. I have known a book-reviewer give oranges (not poisoned ones) to children. A man is not a character, he is a dozen characters, one of them prominent, the other eleven more or less undeveloped. I knew a man once, two of whose characters were of equal value, and the consequences were peculiar.”

We begged him to relate the case to us, and he did so.

“He was a Balliol man,” said MacShaughnassy, “and his Christian name was Joseph. He was a member of the ‘Devonshire’ at the time I knew him, and was, I think, the most superior person I have ever met. He sneered at the
Saturday Review
as the pet journal of the suburban literary club; and at the
Athenæum
as the trade organ of the unsuccessful writer. Thackeray, he considered, was fairly entitled to his position of favourite author to the cultured clerk; and Carlyle he regarded as the exponent of the earnest artisan. Living authors he never read, but this did not prevent his criticising them contemptuously. The only inhabitants of the nineteenth century that he ever praised were a few obscure French novelists, of whom nobody but himself had ever heard. He had his own opinion about God Almighty, and objected to Heaven on account of the strong Clapham contingent likely to be found in residence there. Humour made him sad, and sentiment made him ill. Art irritated him and science bored him. He despised his own family and disliked everybody else. For exercise he yawned, and his conversation was mainly confined to an occasional shrug.