Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (64 page)

He moved his chair round, and sat looking at the fire, which was burning very low, and already ashes showed themselves in dun-coloured flakes over the red glow, like clouds that fleck the surface of a fiery sunset.

He sat there and gazed at it, and tried to form images out of it, but his brain refused the task. Only dead and gone memories from the time when he was a hot-blooded youth, from the time when he was a lusty man, from the time when his hair had begun to grizzle, until now, when he was an old white-headed, white-bearded man — the memories from all the periods of his lifetime flitted in front of his appalled eyes, and made him shudder and wince, so terribly cold-hearted and wicked did they seem under the strong light of his life’s sunset. At the time they had seemed mere slight self-indulgences, nothings, trifles that he had committed, as he would have smoked a cigarette, knowing it to be bad for his health. But now it was terrible to look down that long skeleton-lined vista of years, and he quaked and trembled at the doom that would be in store for him if — but that remained unformulated.

He stared at the fire in the hope of seeing one face come out of the red glow — a face that had shown love for him, a face that he had loved, and that he craved to see once more.

His throat was very parched, and he reached out his hand for a glass of milk that stood on the table close by — but all the while he kept his eyes fixed on the dying glow of the coals, in the dread that if he averted them once the face might come into being and disappear before he could see it. His fingers closed round the glass, and he was about to convey it to his mouth, but before he was able to accomplish this end a concentration of the anticipation that
her
face was about to appear in the fire made the hand pause half-way. The anticipation grew to a certainty, and his whole frame trembled for joy, and his eyes swam so from the straining that he could hardly see.

‘She is coming,’ he said half hysterically, and the blood poured in great jets through his veins. ‘Look — ah!’

But suddenly the fire shifted.

The multitude of candles he had lit to confuse Hollebone by their glare began to burn low in their sockets — one had even burnt down to the paper that had been folded round it. That ignited with a great glare, torchwise, pouring up volumes of greasy black smoke. Then it went out, and another began — and another and another. The room grew darker and darker, until the dawn began to show itself in silver cracks through the grey cloud-wall, like fur on the edging of a lady’s cloak. The cloud itself sailed up from the horizon, and passed majestically from the sea overhead. From north to south the sky grew yellow, and the sea, kissed by the soft wind, smiled and dimpled its surface into diamonds of gold and blue, mocking the tints of Heaven. The thin crescent of the jealous moon hung in the sky, more and more silver in the rose of the dawn, until at last it faded away. Then the sun peered over the edge of the sea.

What is’t to die?

‘Tis less than to be born; a lasting sleep;

A quiet resting from all jealousy;

A thing we all pursue — I know besides

It is but giving over of a game

That must be lost.

CHAPTER XI
.

When one has rolled the Ethical snowball of his Ego a year forward he has gathered a good deal on the way.

Goethe to Frau von Laroche.

January 3, 1775.

A HOUSE into which death has entered has always a calm dimness over it, not dissimilar to the noonday hush of a cloister — a feeling of fingers placed reverently to lips — and it was from this sanctuary of hushedness that Hollebone must needs sally forth on his rounds. Starting early in the morning, before breakfast indeed, it was his habit to visit the poorer patients, who were not likely to be discommoded by the untimely season of his visitation.

The morning was one of those bright cloudless days that come like the ghost of the summer to cheer the year before it finally plunges into its winter sleep at the fore end of November. But the cheeriness of the day found no reflection in his soul. He was gloomy, with the determined pessimism of an injured man, and, moreover, it annoyed him to be the bearer of fatal tidings — those of the death of Dr Hammond — and yet at every household he visited the inevitable string of questions was propounded.

Last of all, in the course of his early round, he found death awaiting him at the house of Mrs Waters, his partner’s deceased wife’s mother, for that aged dame had passed away just before he arrived at the door.

A doctor, by usage, becomes acquainted with the blacker side of human vicissitudes, and speedily grows case-hardened, but this second death in the day, so early, seemed to him to have some sinister foreboding.

‘Deaths never come by pairs,’ he said to himself, ‘always in triplets. Who is to be the third? I wish to God it was myself.’

From Mrs Waters’s house to his own was but a step, and he was returning thither to get some food, and to give some orders to Mary Ann, when Paton came in suddenly, with a white, scared face.

‘I came in, sir,’ he said, ‘to ask you what it would be best to do. I didn’t wish to alarm Mrs Kasker-Ryves, perhaps needlessly, but—’

‘Good God, man, what’s the matter? Is your master worse?’ Hollebone asked.

‘That is just what I cannot say, sir,’ the man said. ‘His room door is locked. I have knocked and knocked, but he has given no answer, and I thought it better to come in and ask you what to do than to alarm Mrs Kasker-Ryves.’

‘You were quite right,’ Hollebone said hurriedly. ‘You say you cannot make him answer your knocking. Which way does his room face? Over the sea — to the back, doesn’t it?’

The man answered, —

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, look here, just go into my garden — there’s a ladder lying against the wall. I will go round next door — you can hand it over to me, and I can climb up to his window and get in that way. Hurry, now! The servant will show you the way.’

The man did as he was told, and with all possible speed Hollebone was at the dead man’s window, which, without a moment’s hesitation, he broke, and then entered the room.

The atmosphere, however, was so fetid as almost to make him faint, caused by the suffocating exhalations of the candles.

A single glance at the motionless figure that had collapsed into the chair before the fire showed him what had happened.

He recoiled against the window sill, not daring to look more closely for fear of confirming his horrible suspicion, and before he could think of doing anything the servant, who had followed him up the ladder, entered through the broken window.

‘Is it all over?’ the man asked.

And Hollebone answered mechanically,—’Yes,’ and he shut his eyes from giddiness. The man went up to the body.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said huskily. ‘Poor master! He has died — and it’s apoplexy, too. I know the symptoms. Isn’t it so, doctor? He must have died very suddenly.’

Hollebone said faintly, —

‘Yes — very suddenly.’

The suspicion was growing stronger.

‘It is very strange,’ the man went on. ‘He must have just been taking a glass of milk. Mrs Kasker-Ryves poured it out for him just after you left. It will be a little comfort to her to know that she was of service to him even at the last moment.’

The man tried to remove the glass from the dead man’s rigid grasp, and as he was so engaged, did not notice Hollebone’s ghastly pallor.

‘That proves it,’ he said to himself. ‘She put the poison into his milk. Good God! What shall I do? What shall I do?’

And he kept his eyes turned from the body, dreading to see the terrible work that
his
poison had effected.

The noise of the breaking window had aroused the household, and Edith appeared at the door in between the two rooms haggard and white. As she came in Paton, in simple respect, undid the other door and went out, closing it behind him.

Edith, but half awakened from a terrible dream, looked at Hollebone with dilated, horror-stricken eyes.

‘Oh, Clement,’ she said, ‘what does it mean?’ Hollebone’s power of speech seemed to fail him for the moment, but steeling himself, he said as harshly as he could, —

‘Your husband is dead,’ and pointed to the body.

With a sudden light of revelation welling into her wondering eyes, she flung her arms round the neck of the motionless corpse and fell to the ground with it.

Hollebone turned his head towards the window. Somehow the look on her face had shaken his certainty.

‘Good Heavens!’ he said, ‘what am I to do? If I say that he died of poison she will be hung. There can be no doubt of that — and yet, and yet. My God! I love her in spite of it all. I have made her do it. It was because she loved me. I
can’t
let her be hung.’

And he remained in paralysed amazement surveying the living and the dead, lying together on the floor. In his strained state of mind he had hard work to keep from laughing at the grotesque figure of the corpse as it lay, stiff and unnatural like an artist’s lay figure, across Edith; but a sudden sense of the incongruous horror of it came into his mind, and, running forward, he lifted the heavy body up as well as he could and called aloud for Paton. The man entered, and Hollebone said hurriedly, —

‘Send Mrs Kasker-Ryves’s maid here. Your mistress has fainted again, and get someone of the servants to help you lift Mr Kasker-Ryves’s body on to the bed. Be quick, now.’

But there was little need for the latter injunction. The servants had been waiting, half curiously, half in awe, on the landing outside the door, and they entered and did as they were bid silently, at least it seemed so to Hollebone, although their lips were moving and a buzz of voices was on the air.

Edith was carried out of the room, and at last he himself left it. He was still, as it were, in a dream. There was such a horror in and about everything that it seemed to him as if such terrible occurrences must be the usual happenings in this world, and that the life he had hitherto led had been a meretricious apparition of which he had not apprehended the true horror. He went about his everyday work callously, but the light and shade had gone from his existence, and with it the power of distinguishing between good and evil. It is true that he had some small scruples about falsifying Mr Ryves’s death certificate, but the pangs of conscience were so small as in no wise to interfere with his after-thoughts. An impenetrable atmosphere of cynicism had settled down over his mind, a sense of the worthlessness of human ends, so overpowering that at times he was startled at the fact that anyone in this world struggled or was eager after anything.

Edith was very ill with brain fever, and her mother and Julia came down to nurse her, and shortly afterwards Mr Ryves the younger came also, to ascertain how his stepmother was at first hand. They were an uneasy quartette watching round Edith’s bed. Perhaps the unconscious patient was the easiest of them all in her mind.

Before Hollebone Mrs Ryland positively quailed. He seemed to her to be slighting her so obviously that she was afraid all the world noticed it, and having no one else to appeal to, she attempted to take refuge in Julia, excusing her own part in Edith’s marriage and in everything. To tell the truth, Mrs Ryland felt herself a much injured person — and the more so that in the depths of her heart lurked a guilty conscience. Her husband had several times since their daughter’s marriage expressed misgivings on the subject, and on hearing of her illness he had burst into such an agonised torrent of self-reproach that she had felt herself somewhat implicated in the crime.

‘I’m sure it was much better that she should have married this Mr Ryves,’ she said to herself for the thousandth time, just after Julia had repulsed her advances. ‘If she loves this young man she can marry him now, and there’s no harm done to anyone in particular.’

Nevertheless Mrs Ryland felt that somewhere about her mind there was a tender spot that she would just as well not approach. Therefore she kept as much out of Hollebone’s way during his professional visits as she could, and Hollebone at other times never approached the house; and as to young Mr Ryves, he was even more strange in his conduct than Hollebone. She felt quite sure he had something on his mind, he was so very abstracted, and Mrs Ryland was, moreover, certain that his absentness had some connection with that Tubbs girl. As for Julia herself, words would be powerless to express Mrs Ryland’s indignation at her conduct. To be sure she gave the young man no encouragement whatever, and she had thrown up every engagement in London to come down and nurse Edith, and she did nurse her unremittedly and assiduously; moreover, Julia was so much in the sickroom that she hardly ever saw young Kasker-Ryves — but that was all a trick to make him the more eager.

‘It’s all very well,’ Mrs Ryland said to her maid, whom out of sheer loneliness she had taken into her confidence, ‘it’s all very well for her to say she came down here while Mr Ryves had gone back to Yorkshire to bury his poor father, who is now in Heaven, if ever a man was — it’s all very well for her to say that, but she knew that he would be certain to come down here to inquire after his stepmother’s health, and that’s why she came.’

‘To be sure, mum,’ the servant said demurely. ‘It isn’t likely she came down here to nurse Miss Edith — I mean Mrs Ryves. It isn’t likely, either, that her crying is genuine;
she must have an onion in her handkerchief, tho’ to be sure I’ve never noticed the smell of it, and it’s so easy to make a face like hers look pale and ill by darkening the rims of her eyes artificially; and then, as you say, she shuts herself up in the sickroom
all
day long and never goes out alone, just in order to make young Mr Ryves more eager.’

There was something about the sound of this speech that made Mrs Ryland feel just in the least degree uneasy as to its true import, and she changed the subject, after a pause.

‘Ah!’ she said, with a sigh of reminiscence, ‘what a good man Mr Kasker-Ryves was. I’m sure if my daughter could have been happy with anyone she should have been with him, but she was so conscientious, she has nearly nursed herself into the grave with him. What a fine sight his funeral must have been. All the gentry of the county were there, and the grave was filled to the top with the wreaths that had been sent from all parts of the country. And what a magnificent sermon the bishop gave over his grave. It made me cry to read it.’

And, indeed, the reading of Mr Ryves’s obituary sermon made an inordinate number of people weep, over and above the class whose business in life is to weep at fashionable sermons. Many people wept, too, at Mr Ryves’s death, for the recipients of his bounty were legion. Even his rival merchants could find little against him after his death, little to weigh against the true merit of the man in the aggregate.

In the meantime his son was abstracted in a marked degree. He spoke to no one, and hardly ever stirred out of his room except at meal times, when they all three dined together in almost solemn silence, which, when it was broken, owed its rupture entirely to meteorological circumstances, and damp ones at that. For the winter was setting in with fog and rain. A month passed by, a terribly dismal month for everyone; but Edith began to grow better, became conscious, and then — a few things happened. First of all, Mrs Ryland fell ill, half of rheumatism and half of hysteria, with a constant running over at the eyes, until everyone voted her a nuisance, in the depressing state of the weather, and Julia was positively glad when she took to her bed. To be sure she had to dine alone with young Kasker-Ryves, but she placed implicit faith in her coldness of front in repelling that frivolous young swell, as she forced herself to call him. But she put overdue coldness into her demeanour, and the reaction when she was alone was noticeable even to Edith. Edith was by this time gaining strength rapidly, and was beginning to notice things; and one day — it was after she had got sufficiently advanced in health to sit by the fire, in an arm-chair — she observed Julia in a brown study, which was unprecedented in her experience, and she said, with a little smile, —