Kitabı oku: «The Pennycomequicks (Volume 2 of 3)», sayfa 9

'I shall never, never forgive that the truth was kept from me. The marriage was a fraud practised on me.'

'My dear mother – you know whom I mean – acted with the kindest intentions, but I cannot excuse her for not speaking.'

'Janet knew, as you tell me, and she said nothing.'

'Mamma urged her to remain silent.'

'I was sacrificed,' said Philip bitterly. 'Upon my word, this is a family that transmits from one generation to another the fine art of hoaxing the unsuspicious.'

'Philip!' A rush of indignant blood mantled her face, and then left it again. She heaved a sigh, and said, 'If I had known before I married you whose daughter I was I would on no account have taken you. I would have taken no honest man for his own sake, no other for my own.'

'You know what Schofield was to me – to me above every man. I can recall when I told you and Janet and your mother how he had embittered my life, how he had ruined my father – and you all kept silence.'

'Philip, you are mistaken; I never heard that.'

'At all events your mother and Janet heard me – heard me when they knew I was engaged to you, and they told me nothing. It was infamous, unpardonable. They knew how I hated that man before I was married. They knew that I would rather have become allied to a Hottentot than to such an one as he. They let me marry you in ignorance – it was a fraud; and how, I ask' – he raised his voice in boiling anger – 'how can I trust you when you profess your ignorance?' He sprang to his feet and walked across the room. 'I don't believe in your innocence. It was a base, a vile plot hatched between you all, Schofield and the rest of you. Here am I – just set on my feet and pushing my way in an honest business, and find myself bound by an indissoluble bond to the daughter of the biggest scoundrel on the face of the globe.'

Salome did not speak. To speak would be in vain.

He was furious; he had lost his trust in her.

She began to tremble, as she had trembled when Mrs. Sidebottom had seen her on the stairs – a convulsive shivering extending from the shuddering heart outwards to the extremities, so that every hair on her head quivered, every fold in her gown.

'And now,' pursued Philip, 'the taint is transmitted to my child. It might have been endurable had I stood alone. It is intolerable now. These things run in the blood like maladies.'

She was nigh on fainting; she lifted one hand slightly in protest; but he was too angry to attend to any protest.

'Can I doubt it? The clever swindler defrauded my father, and the clever daughter uses the inherited arts and swindles the son. How do I know but that the same falsehood, low, cunning, and base propensities may not lurk inherent in my child, to break out in time and make me curse the day that I gave to the world another edition of Beaple Yeo, alias Schofield, bearing my hitherto untarnished name?'

Then she turned and walked to the door, with her hands extended as one blind, stepping slowly, stiffly, as if fearful of stumbling over some unseen obstacle. She went out, and he, looking sullenly after her, saw of her only the white fingers holding the door, and drawing it ajar, and trying vainly to shut it, pinching them in so doing, showing how dazed she was – instinctively trying to shut the door, and too lost to what she was about to see how to do it.

CHAPTER XXXII.
THE FLIGHT OF EROS

The funeral of Mrs. Cusworth was over.

The blinds were drawn up at last.

When the service at the grave was concluded, Philip and Salome returned to their home, if that may be called home from which the elements that go to make up home – trust, sympathy, pity, forgiveness – have fled.

The sun streamed in at the windows, broke in with a rude impatience, as the blinds mounted, and revelled on the floors again, and reflected itself in glass and gilding and china, brought out into bloom again the faded flowers on the carpets, and insisted on the bunches of roses and jessamine and nondescripts on the wall-papers putting on their colours and pretence of beauty.

But there was no sunshine streaming into the shadowed hearts of Philip and Salome, because over both the hand of Philip held down the blinds.

Philip, always cold, uncommunicative, allowing no one to lay finger on his pulse, resenting the slightest allusion to his life apart from business – Philip had made no friend in Mergatroyd, only acquaintances – drew closer about him the folds of reserve.

At one time much fuss was made about the spleen, but we have come now to disregard it, to hold it as something not to be reckoned with; and Philip regarded the heart as we do our spleens.

Philip was respected, but was not popular with his own class, and was respected, but not popular, among the operatives of his mill. Some men, however self-contained, are self-revealing in their efforts after concealment. So was it with Philip.

Shrewd public opinion in Mergatroyd had gauged and weighed him before he supposed that it was concerned about him. It pronounced him proud and honest, and capable, through integrity of purpose, of doing a cruel, even a mean, thing. He had been brought up apart from those modifying forces which affect, or ought to affect, the conduct governed by principle. Principle is a good thing as a direction of the course of conduct, but principle must swerve occasionally to save it from becoming a destructive force. In the solar system every planet has its orbit, but every orbit has its deflections caused by the presence of fellow planets. Philip as a child had never lain with his head on a gentle bosom, from which, as from a battery, love had streamed, enveloping him, vivifying, warming the seeds of good in him. He reckoned with his fellow-men as with pieces of mechanism, to be used or thrown aside, as they served or failed. He had been treated in that way himself, and he had come to regard such a cold, systematic, material manner of dealing with his brother men as the law of social life.

That must have been a strange experience – the coming to life of the marble statue created by Pygmalion. How long did it take the veins in the alabaster to liquefy? How long before the stony breast heaved and pulsation came into the rigid heart? How long before light kindled in the blank eye, and how long before in that eye stood the testimony to perfect liquefication, a tear?

There must have been in Galatea from the outset great deficiency in emotion, inflexibility of mind, absence of impulse; a stony way of thinking of others, speaking of others, dealing with others; an ever-present supposition that everyone else is, has been, or ought to be – stone.

Philip had only recently begun to mollify under the influence of Salome. But the change had not been radical. The softening had not extended far below the surface, had not reached the hard nerves of principle.

In the society of his wife, Philip had shown himself in a light in which no one else saw him. As the sun makes certain flowers expand, and these flowers close the instant the sun is withdrawn, so was it with him. He was cheerful, easy, natural with her, talked and laughed and showed her attentions; but when he came forth into the outer world again he exhibited no signs of having unfurled.

Now that his confidence in his wife was shaken, Philip was close, undemonstrative, in her presence as in that of his fellows. He was not the man to make allowances, to weigh degrees of fault. Allowances had not been made for his shortcomings in his past life, and why should he deal with Salome as he had not been dealt by? Fault is fault, whether in the grain or in the ounce.

When Philip said the prayer of prayers at family devotions, and came to the petition, 'Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us,' he had no qualms of conscience, not a suspicion that his conduct was ungenerous.

He forgave Salome – most certainly he forgave her. He bore no malice against her for having deceived him. He was ready to make her an allowance of forty pounds per annum for her clothing, and thirty pounds for pocket or pin money. Should she fall ill, he would call in a specialist regardless of expense; if she wanted to refurnish the drawing-room he would not grudge the cost. Would a man be ready to do all this unless he forgave a trespass against him? He could not take her head, and lay it on his shoulder, and stroke the golden hair, and kiss the tears from her eyes – but then he did not ask of Heaven to pet and mollycoddle him, only to forgive him, and he did forgive Salome.

He saw that his wife's heart ached for her mother; that she felt keenly the loss of her who had been to her the representative of all maternal tenderness and consideration. That was natural and inevitable. But everyone has to undergo some such partings; it is the lot of humanity, and Salome must accommodate herself to her bereavement. He saw that she was without an intimate friend in the place, to whom she could pour out her heart, and of whom take counsel; but then, he also had been friendless, till he came not to require a friend and to value human sympathy. What he did not appreciate, she must learn to do without.

He saw that she was distressed and in agony of mind because he was offended with her; but this afforded him no regret. She had sinned against him and must accept the consequences. It was a law of nature that sin should meet with punishment, and the sinner must accept his chastisement as his due. What were the consequences in comparison with the weight of her transgression?

Procrustes had a bed on which he tied travellers, and if their length exceeded that of the bed he cut off their extremities; but if they were shorter, he had them stretched to equal it. Philip had his iron bed of principle, on which he extended himself, and to this he would fit his poor, tender, suffering wife.

As he and Salome returned together from the funeral they hardly spoke to each other on the way. Her hand was on his arm, trembling with grief and mute, disregarded appeal. He knew that she was crying, because she continually put her kerchief to her eyes. Tears are a matter of course at funerals, as orange-blossoms are a concomitant of weddings. Mrs. Cusworth, though not Salome's mother, had stood to her for eighteen years in the relation of one; tears, therefore, thought Philip, were proper on this occasion – very proper.

He did not blame her for crying – God forbid!

For his own part, Philip had regarded Mrs. Cusworth with dislike; he had seen how commonplace, unintellectual a woman she was; but it was of course right, quite right and proper, that Salome should see the good side of the deceased.

Philip wore his stereotyped business face at the funeral, the face he wore when going through his accounts, hearing a sermon, reprimanding a clerk, paying his rates. He was somewhat paler than usual, but the most attentive observer could not say that this was caused by feeling and was not the effect of contrast to his new suit of glossy black mourning. Not once did he draw the little hand on his arm close to his side and press it. He let it rest there with as much indifference as if it were his paletôt.

On reaching the house, he opened the door with his latchkey, and stood aside to allow Salome to enter. Then he followed, hung his hat on the stand, and blew his nose. He had avoided blowing his nose at the grave or in the street, lest it should give occasion to his being supposed to affect a grief he did not feel; and Philip was too honest to pretend what was unreal, and afraid to be thought to pretend.

He followed Salome upstairs.

On reaching the landing where was his study door, Salome turned to look at him before ascending further. Her face was white, her eyes red with weeping. Wondrously beautiful in colour and reflected light was her ruddy gold hair bursting out from under the crape bonnet above her pallid face.

She said nothing, but waited expectantly, with her brown eyes on his face. He received the look with imperturbable self-restraint, opened his door, and without a word went into his study.

Salome's bosom heaved, a great sob broke from it; and then she hastily continued her ascent. She had made her final appeal, and it had been rejected.

Mrs. Cusworth had died worth an inconsiderable sum, and that she had left to Janet, as more likely to need it than Salome.

And now that the last rites had been paid to the kindhearted, if stupid and illiterate old woman, who had loved Salome as her own child, Salome turned to her baby to pour forth upon it, undivided, the rich torrent of her love, gushing tinged with blood from a wounded heart.

There exists a sympathetic tie in nature and in human relations of which Philip had never thought – that between the mother and the babe. And now the wrong done to the mother reacted, revenged itself on her child. The little one had been ailing for a while, now it became seriously ill. The strain to which Salome had been put made itself felt in the weak frame of the infant that clung to her breast. Salome would allow no one to nurse her darling but herself whilst its precious life was in danger, and the child would, on its part, allow no one else to touch it. It sobbed and cried and demanded of its mother infinite patience and pity, unwearied rocking in her arms and hugging to her heart, a thousand kisses, and many tears, words of infinite love and soothing addressed to it, soft sighs breathed over it from an utterly weary bosom, and earnest prayers, voiceless often, but ever ascending, as the steam of the earth to heaven.

For awhile, care for the babe excluded all other thoughts, devoured all other cares. Through the long still night Salome was by her child; she did not go to bed, she sat in the room by its crib, sometimes taking it on her lap, in her arms, then, when it was composed to sleep, laying it again in its cradle. She heard every stroke of the clock at every hour. She could not sleep, she could but watch and pray.

Every hour or two Philip came to inquire after his child. He stood by the cradle when it was sleeping there, stooped and looked at the flushed face and the little clenched hands; but when it was on Salome's lap or in her arms he did not come so near, he stood apart, and instead of examining the child himself, asked about it. Salome controlled herself from giving way to feeling; her composure, the confidence with which she acted, impressed Philip with the idea that she had got over all other troubles except that caused by the child's illness; and were this to pass that she would be herself again.

But, through all her thought for the child ran the burning, torturing recollection of what Philip had said concerning it. She was not sure that he desired that it should live – live to grow up a Beaple Yeo – a Schofield. The house was perfectly still. All the servants were asleep. Only Salome was awake upstairs, when at four o'clock in the morning, as the day was beginning to break raw and gray in the east, and to look wanly in through the blind into the sick room – Philip entered.

Salome was kneeling by the crib – a swing crib of wood on two pillars. She knelt by it, she had been rocking, rocking, rocking, till she could no more stir an arm. Aching in all her joints, with her pulses hammering in her weary brain, she had laid both hands on the crib side, and her brow against it also. Was she asleep, or was she only fagged out and had slidden into momentary unconsciousness through exhaustion of power? Her beautiful copper hair, burnished in every hair, reflected the light of the lamp on the dressing-table. On one delicate white finger was the golden hoop. She did not hear Philip as he entered. Hitherto, whenever he had come through the door, she had looked up at him wistfully. Now only she did not, she remained by the crib, holding to it, leaning her brow on it, and tilting it somewhat on one side.

He stood by her, and looked down on her, and for a while a softness came over his heart, a stirring in its dead chambers as of returning life. He saw how worn out she was. He saw that she who had been so hearty, so strong, in a few days had become thin and frail in appearance, that the fresh colour had gone from her cheek, the brightness from her eye, that the sweet dimple had left her mouth. He saw her love and self-devotion for her child, the completeness with which her soul was bound up in it. And he saw how lonely she now was without her mother to talk to about the maladies, the acquirements, and the beauty of her darling.

She did not glance up at that moment, or she would have seen tokens of melting in his cold eye.

He remained standing by her, and he looked at the child now sleeping quietly. It was better, he trusted. It could hardly be so still unless it was better.

Then, all at once. Salome recovered consciousness, saw him, and said, 'Oh, Philip, you do not want him to die?'

Philip drew himself up.

'You have the crib too much tilted,' he said. He put his hands to it to counterbalance her weight, but she raised her head from the side and the crib righted itself. He still kept his hand where he had placed it, without any reason for so doing.

'Philip,' she said again, with passionate entreaty in her voice, 'you do not wish my darling to die?'

'How can you ask such a foolish question?' he answered. 'I am afraid the long night-watching has been too much for you.'

'Oh, Philip – you do love him? You do love him – although there is something of me in him. But – ' she said hastily, 'he is mostly yours. He is like you, he has dark hair and eyes, and his name is Philip, and of course he is, he is a Pennycomequick! Oh, Philip! You love him dearly?'

'Of course I love him; he is my child. Why do you doubt?'

'Because,' she said, 'I – I am his mother. But that is all – I am only a sort of superior nurse. He is a Pennycomequick through and through, and there is no – no – nothing of what you dread in him.'

'Yes, he is a Pennycomequick.'

'He can, he will be no other than a good and noble man. He can, he will be that, if God spares him.'

'So I trust.'

'Oh, Philip – he is better, so much better. I am sure there is a turn. I thank God – indeed, indeed I do. Look at his dear little face; it is cool again.'

He had his hand on the side of the crib, and he stooped to look at the sleeping babe. And, as he was so doing, Salome, who still knelt, put her lips timidly to his hand and kissed it – kissed it as it rested on the side of her babe's crib.

Then he withdrew his hand. He took his kerchief out of his pocket, wiped it, said coldly, 'Yes, the child is better,' and left the room.

Philip went to bed. He had not asked Salome if she were going to rest, he had not called up the nurse to relieve her, though he saw and admitted that she was worn out. He had withdrawn his hand from her lips not with intention to hurt her, but to show her that he was opposed to sentimentality, and not inclined to be cajoled into a renewal of confidence by such arts. That which angered and embittered him chiefly was the fact that he was tied to a woman of such disreputable parentage. Then, in the next place, he could not forgive the fraud practised on him in making him marry her in ignorance of her real origin. He did not investigate the question whether Salome were privy to it. He thought that it was hardly possible she could have been kept in complete ignorance of the truth. It was known to her sister. Some suspicion of it at least must have been entertained by her. A fraud, a scandalous one, had been perpetrated – on her own showing by her sister and reputed mother – and even supposing she were not guilty of taking share in it, she must reap the consequences of the acts of her nearest relatives. Mrs. Cusworth and Mrs. Baynes were beyond the reach of his anger, therefore it must fall on the one accessible.

Salome had acquired by marriage with him a good position and a comfortable home, and it was conceivable that for the sake of these prospective advantages she would have acquiesced, if not actually concurring, in the wretched mean plot which had led to his connection with her – the daughter of the most despicable of men, and his own personal enemy.

Philip went to bed and fell asleep, satisfied with himself that he had acted aright, and that suffering was necessary to Salome to make her feel the baseness of her conduct.

Salome finding that the child fretted, took it out of the cot, drew it to her bosom, and seated herself by the window. She had raised the blind and looked out at the silvery morning light breaking in the east, and the pale east was not more wan than her own face. When Psyche let fall the drop of burning wax on the shoulder of Cupid, the god of Love leaped up, spread his wings and fled. Psyche stood at the window watching his receding form, not knowing whither he went, but knowing that he went from her without prospect of return. So now did Salome look from the window gazing forth into the cold sky, looking after lost love – gone – gone, apparently, past recall.