Kitabı oku: «A Man from the North», sayfa 7

CHAPTER XV

In Adeline's idiosyncrasy there was a subtle, elusive suggestion of singularity, of unexpectedness, which Richard in spite of himself found very alluring, and he correctly attributed it, in some degree, to the peculiar circumstances of her early life, an account of which, with characteristic quaintness, she had given him at their second meeting.

The posthumous child of Richard Aked's brother, Adeline, who had no recollection of her mother, lived at first with her maternal grandparents and two uncles. She slept alone at the top of the house, and when she arose in the morning from the big bed with its red curtains and yellow tassels, she always ran to the window. Immediately below here were the leads which roofed the great projecting windows of the shop. It was her practice at night to scatter crumbs on the leads, and sometimes she would be early enough to watch the sparrows pecking them; more often all the crumbs had vanished while she was yet asleep. The Square never failed to interest her in the morning. In the afternoon it seemed torpid and morose; but before dinner, more especially on Saturdays and Mondays, it was gaily alert – full of canvas-covered stalls, and horses and carts, and heaped piles of vegetables, and pigs grunting amidst straw, and rough rosy-faced men, their trousers tied at the knees with string, who walked about heavily, cracking whips. These things arrived mysteriously, before the sun, and in the afternoon they dwindled imperceptibly away; the stalls were unthatched, the carts jolted off one by one, and the pigs departed squeaking, until at five o'clock the littered Square was left deserted and forlorn. Now and again a new stall, unfolding vivid white canvas, stood out brightly amid its soiled companions; then Adeline would run downstairs to her favourite uncle, who had breakfast at 7.30 so that he might be in charge of the shop while the rest were at table: "Uncle Mark, Uncle Mark, there is a new stall up at the top of the Square, near the New Inn!" "Perhaps it is only an old one with its face washed," Uncle Mark would say; and Adeline, raising her right shoulder, would put her head on it and laugh, screwing up her eyes.

In those days she was like a little Puritan girl, with her plain frocks and prim gait. Her black hair, confined by a semicircular comb which stretched from ear to ear over the top of her head, was brushed straight away from her forehead, and fell across the entire width of her shoulders in glossy, wavy lines. Her grey eyes were rather large, except when she laughed, and they surveyed people with a frank, inquiring look which frightened some of the commercial travellers who came into the shop and gave her threepenny bits; it seemed as if all one's secret shames stood revealed to that artless gaze. Her nose was short and flattened, but her mouth happened to be perfect, of exactly the classic form and size, with delectable lips half hiding the small white teeth.

To her the house appeared to be of immense proportions; she had been told that once, before she was born, it was three houses. Certainly it possessed more than the usual number of staircases, and one of these, with the single room to which it gave access, was always closed. From the Square, the window of the disused chamber, obscured and bare, contrasted strangely with the clear panes, white blinds, and red pads of the others. This room was next to her own, the two staircases running parallel; and the thought of its dread emptiness awed her at nights. One Saturday night in bed she discovered that grandma, who had been plaiting her hair for Sunday, had left a comb sticking in it. She called aloud to grandma, to Uncle Mark, to Uncle Luke, in vain. None of them came to her; but she distinctly heard an answering cry from the shut room. She ceased to call, and lay fearfully quiet for a while; then it was morning, and the comb had slipped out of her hair and down into the bed.

Beneath the house were many cellars. One served for kitchen, and Adeline had a swing there, hung from a beam; two others were larders; a fourth held coal, and in a fifth ashes were thrown. There were yet two more under the shop, to be reached by a separate flight of stone steps. Uncle Mark went down those steps every afternoon to turn on the gas, but he would never allow Adeline to go with him. Grandma, indeed, was very cross if, when the door leading to the steps happened to be open, Adeline approached within a yard of it. Often, chattering to the shop-girls, who at quiet times of the day clustered round the stove with their sewing, she would suddenly think of the cellars below, and her heart would seem to stop.

If the shutters were up, the shop was even more terribly mysterious than either the cellars or the disused room. On Sunday afternoons, when grandpa snored behind a red and yellow handkerchief in the breakfast-room, it was necessary for Adeline to go through the shop and up the show-room staircase, in order to reach the drawing-room, because to get to the house staircase would involve disturbing the sleeper. How strange the shop looked as she hurried timorously across! A dim twilight, worse than total darkness, filtered through the cracks of the shutters, showing faintly the sallow dust-sheets which covered the merinos and the chairs on the counters, and she always reached the show-room, which had two large, unobstructed windows, with a sob of relief. Very few customers were asked into the show-room; Adeline employed it on weekdays as a nursery; here she nursed her dolls, flew kites, and read "Little Wideawake," a book given to her by a commercial traveller; there was a cheval glass near the front window in which she contemplated herself long and seriously.

She never had the companionship of other children, nor did she desire it. Other children, she understood, were rude and dirty; although Uncle Mark and Uncle Luke taught in the Sunday-school, and grandpa had once actually been superintendent, she was not allowed to go there, simply because the children were rude and dirty. But she went to morning chapel, sitting alone with grandpa on the red cushions of the broad pew, that creaked every time she moved; Uncle Mark and Uncle Luke sat away up in the gallery with the rude and dirty Sunday-school children; grandma seldom went to chapel; the ministers called to see her instead. Once to her amazement Uncle Luke had ascended the pulpit stairs, looking just as if he was walking in his sleep, and preached. It seemed so strange, and afterwards the religious truths which she had been taught somehow lost their awfulness and some of their reality. On Sunday evenings she celebrated her own private service, in which she was preacher, choir, organist, and congregation. Her extempore prayers were the secret admiration of grandma, who alone heard them. Adeline stayed up for supper on Sundays. When the meal was over, grandpa opened the big Bible, and in his rich, heavy voice read that Shem begat Arphaxad and Arphaxad begat Salah and Salah begat Eber and Eber begat Pelag, and about the Ammonites and the Jebusites and the Canaanites and the Moabites; and then they knelt, and he prayed for them that rule over us, and widows and orphans; and at the word "orphans," grandma, who didn't kneel like the others but sat upright in her rocking-chair with one hand over her eyes, would say "Amen, Amen," under her breath. And after it was all over Adeline would choose whether Uncle Mark or Uncle Luke should carry her to bed.

Grandpa died, and then grandma, and Aunt Grace (who was not an aunt at all, but a cousin) came to stay with Adeline and her uncles, and one day the shutters of the shop were put up and not taken down again. Adeline learnt that Uncle Mark and Uncle Luke were going a long way off, to America, and that she was to live in future with Aunt Grace in a large and splendid house full of coloured pictures and statues and books. It seemed odd that Aunt Grace, whose dresses were rather shabby, should have a finer house than grandpa's, until Uncle Mark explained that the house did not really belong to Aunt Grace; Aunt Grace merely kept it in order for a rich young gentleman who had fifteen servants.

When she had recovered from the parting with her uncles, Adeline accepted the change with docility. Long inured as she was to spiritual solitude (for the closest friendship that can exist between a child and an adult comprises little more than an affectionate tolerance on either side, and certainly knows nothing of those intimate psychic affinities which attract child to child or man to man), she could not, indeed, have easily found much hardship in the conditions of her new life. One matter troubled her at first, namely, that Aunt Grace never prayed or read the Bible or went to chapel; nor, so far as Adeline knew, did anyone else at the Abbey. But she soon became reconciled to this state of things. For a time she continued to repeat her prayers; then the habit ceased.

The picture-gallery, of which she had heard a great deal, fascinated her at once. It was a long but not very lofty apartment, receiving daylight from a hidden source, hung with the finest examples of the four great Italian schools which flourished during the first half of the sixteenth century: the Venetian, a revel of colour; the Roman, dignified and even sedate; the Florentine, nobly grandiose; and the school of Parma, mysteriously delicate. Opportunity serving, she spent much of her time here, talking busily to the madonnas, the Christs, the martyred saints, the monarchs, the knights, the lovely ladies, and all the naïve mediæval crowd, giving each of them a part in her own infantile romances. When she grew older, she copied – who shall say whether consciously or unconsciously? – the attitudes and gestures of the women; and perhaps in time there passed into Adeline, by some ineffable channel, at least a portion of their demure grace and contented quietude. There were pictures also in the square library, examples of quite modern English and French work, sagaciously chosen by one whose critical faculty had descended to him through four generations of collectors; but Adeline had no eyes for these. The books, however, gorgeous prisoners in glass, were her good friends, though she might never touch them, and though the narrow, conventional girl's education assiduously bestowed upon her by her aunt in person, stifled rather than fostered curiosity with regard to their contents.

When Adeline was about nineteen, her guardian became engaged to be married to a middle-aged farmer, a tenant of the Abbey, who made it clear that in espousing Aunt Grace he was not eager to espouse Aunt Grace's protégée also. A serious question arose as to her future. She had only one other relative in England, Mr. Aked, and she passively accepted his timely suggestion that she should go to London and keep house for him.

CHAPTER XVI

On the Wednesday evening Richard took tea at the Crabtree, so that he might go down by train to Parson's Green direct from Charing Cross. The coffee-room was almost empty of customers; and Miss Roberts, who appeared to be in attendance there, was reading in the "cosy corner," an angle of the room furnished with painted mirrors and a bark bench of fictitious rusticity.

"What are you doing up here?" he asked, when she brought his meal. "Aren't you cashier downstairs any longer?"

"Oh, yes," she said, "I should just think I was. But the girl that waits in this room, Miss Pratt, has her half-holiday on Wednesdays, and I come here, and the governor takes my place downstairs. I do it to oblige him. He's a gentleman, he is. That polite! I have my half-holiday on Fridays."

"Well, if you've nothing else to do, what do you say to pouring out my tea for me?"

"Can't you pour it out yourself? Poor thing!" She smiled pityingly, and began to pour out the tea.

"Sit down," Richard suggested.

"No, thank you," she said. "There! If it isn't sweet enough, you can put another lump in yourself;" and she disappeared behind the screen which hid the food-lift.

Presently he summoned her to make out his check. He was debating whether to tell her that Mr. Aked was ill. Perhaps if he did so she might request to be informed how the fact concerned herself. He decided to say nothing, and was the more astonished when she began:

"Did you know Mr. Aked was very ill?"

"Yes. Who told you?"

"Why, I live near him, a few doors away – didn't I tell you once? – and their servant told ours."

"Told your servant?"

"Yes," said Miss Roberts, reddening a little, and with an inflection which meant, "I suppose you thought my family wouldn't have a servant!"

"Oh!" He stopped a moment, and then an idea came to him. "It must have been you who called last night to inquire!" He wondered why Adeline had been so curt with her.

"Were you there then?"

"Oh, yes. I know the Akeds pretty well."

"The doctor says he'll not get better. What do you think?"

"I'm afraid it's a bad lookout."

"Very sad for poor Miss Aked, isn't it?" she said, and something in the tone made Richard look up at her.

"Yes," he agreed.

"Of course you like her?"

"I scarcely know her – it's the old man I know," he replied guardedly.

"Well, if you ask me, I think she's a bit stand-offish."

"Perhaps that's only her manner."

"You've noticed it too, have you?"

"Not a bit. I've really seen very little of her."

"Going down again to-night?"

"I may do."

Nothing had passed between Adeline and himself as to his calling that day, but when he got to Carteret Street she evidently accepted his presence as a matter of course, and he felt glad. There was noting in her demeanour to recall the scene of the previous night. He did not stay long. Mr. Aked's condition was unchanged. Adeline had watched by him all day, while the nurse slept, and now she confessed to an indisposition.

"My bones ache," she said, with an attempt to laugh, "and I feel miserable, though under the circumstances there's nothing strange in that."

He feared she might be sickening towards influenza, caught from her uncle, but said nothing, lest he should alarm her without cause. The next day, however, his apprehension was justified. On his way to the house in the evening he met the doctor at the top of Carteret Street and stopped him.

"You're a friend of Mr. Aked's, eh?" the doctor said, examining Richard through his gold-rimmed spectacles. "Well, go and do what you can. Miss Aked is down with the influenza now, but I don't think it will be a severe attack if she takes care. The old fellow's state is serious. You see, he has no constitution, though perhaps that's scarcely a disadvantage in these cases; but when it comes to double basic pneumonia, with fever, and cardiac complications, pulse 140, respiration 40, temperature 103 to 104, there's not a great deal of chance. I've got a magnificent nurse, though, and she'll have her hands full. We ought really to send for another one, especially as Miss Aked wants looking after too… Bless you," he went on, in answer to a question from Richard, "I can't say. I injected strychnia this morning, and that has given relief, but he may die during the night. On the other hand he may recover. By the way, they seem to have no relations, except a cousin of Mr. Aked's who lives in the north. I've wired to her. Good evening. See what you can do. I'm due in my surgery in two minutes."

Richard introduced himself to the nurse, explained that he had seen the doctor, and asked if he could render assistance. She was a slender girl of about twenty-three, with dark, twinkling eyes and astonishingly small white ears; her blue uniform, made of the same print as a servant's morning-dress, fitted without a crease, and her immense apron was snowy. On one linen cuff was a stain; she noticed this while talking to Richard, and adroitly reversed the wristband under his very gaze.

"I suppose you know the Akeds pretty well?" she questioned.

"Well, pretty well," he answered.

"Do you know any friends of theirs, women, who happen to live near?"

"I feel fairly sure they have practically no acquaintances. I have never met any people here."

"It is very awkward, now that Miss Aked is taken ill."

The mention of Adeline gave him an opportunity to make more particular inquiries as to her condition.

"There is nothing to be afraid of," the nurse said, "only she must stay in bed and keep quite quiet."

"I fancied last night she looked ill," he said sagely.

"You were here last night?"

"Yes, and the night before."

"Oh! I wasn't aware – " The nurse stopped a moment. "Pardon me, if I am indiscreet, but are you engaged to Miss Aked?"

"No," said Richard shortly, uncertain whether or not he was blushing. The nurse's eyes twinkled, but otherwise her impassive gravity suffered no diminishment. "Not at all," he added. "I am merely a friend, anxious to do anything I can."

"I will get you to do some marketing for me," she decided suddenly. "The maid is sitting with Mr. Aked – he's a little easier for the moment – and Miss Aked, I think, is asleep. If I give you a list, can you discover the shops? I am quite ignorant of this neighbourhood."

Richard thought he could discover the shops.

"In the meantime I will have a bath. I have had no rest worth mentioning for twenty-four hours, and I want freshening up. Don't come back for twenty minutes, or there will be no one to let you in. Stay, I will give you the latch-key." It was attached to her chatelaine.

Equipped with written orders and a sovereign, he went out. Though he was away barely a quarter of an hour, she was dressed and downstairs again when he came in, her face as radiant as if she had just risen. She counted the change, and checked the different purchases with the list. Richard had made no mistakes.

"Thank you," she said very formally. He had expected a little praise.

"Is there anything else I can do?" he asked, determined not to weary in good works, however coldly his efforts were received.

"I think you might sit with Mr. Aked for a while," she said; "I must positively give some attention to Miss Aked, and half an hour's rest would not harm me. See, there are some slippers; would you mind taking off your boots and putting those on instead? Thank you. You may talk to Mr. Aked if he talks to you, and let him hold your hand – he'll probably want to. Let him have just a sip of the brandy and milk I will give you, whenever he asks for it. Don't mind if he grumbles at everything you do. Try to soothe him. Remember he is very seriously ill. Shall I take you upstairs?"

She looked at Richard and then at the door; and Richard, hesitating for a fraction of a second, stepped past her to open it. He managed it awkwardly because he had never done such a thing for a lady in his life, nor could he quite understand what mysterious prompting had led him to be so punctilious now. The nurse bowed acknowledgment and preceded him to the sick-room. He felt as a student feels just before the examination papers are handed round.

A smell of linseed escaped from the bedroom as the nurse pushed open the door.

"Stay outside a moment," she said to Richard. He could see the grate, on which a kettle was singing over a small fire. In front of the fire was a board, with a large bowl and spoon, and some pieces of linen. Then he was conscious of nothing but a loud sound of rapid, painful breathing, accompanied by moans and a strange rattling which came to his ears with perturbing distinctness. He knew nothing of sickness beyond what people had told him, and these phenomena inspired him with physical dread. He wished to run away.

"A friend of yours is coming to sit with you, Mr. Aked – you know Mr. Larch," he heard the nurse say; she was evidently busy about the bed. "You can go now, Lottie," she went on to the servant. "Wash up the things I have put in the sink, and then off to bed."

Richard waited with painful expectancy for the voice of Mr. Aked.

"Larch – did you say – why – didn't he come – before?" The tones were less unnatural than he had anticipated, but it seemed that only by the exercise of a desperate ingenuity could the speaker interject the fragments of a sentence here and there between his hurrying gasps.

Then the servant went downstairs.

"Come in, Mr. Larch," the nurse called pleasantly.

The patient, supported by pillows, was sitting upright in bed, and as Richard entered he looked towards the door with the expression of an unarmed man on the watch for an assassin. His face was drawn and duskily pale, but on each cheek burned a red flush; at every cruel inspiration the nostrils dilated widely, and the shoulders were raised in a frenzied effort to fill the embarrassed lungs.

"Well, Mr. Aked," Richard greeted him, "here I am, you see."

He made no reply beyond a weak nod, and signed to the nurse for the feeding-cup of brandy and milk, which she held to his mouth. Richard was afraid he might not be able to stay in the room, and marvelled that the nurse could be unmoved and cheerful in the midst of this piteous altercation with death. Was she blind to the terror in the man's eyes?

"You had better sit here, Mr. Larch," she said quietly, pointing to a chair by the bedside. "Here is the drink; hold the cup – so. Ring this bell if you want me for anything." Then she noiselessly disappeared.

No sooner had he sat down than Mr. Aked seized his shoulder for support, and each movement of the struggling frame communicated itself to Richard's body. Richard suddenly conceived a boundless respect for the nurse, who had watched whole nights by this tortured organism on the bed. Somehow existence began to assume for him a new and larger aspect; he felt that till that moment he had been going through the world with his eyes closed; life was sublimer, more terrible, than he had thought. He abased himself before all doctors and nurses and soldiers in battle; they alone tasted the true savour of life.

Art was a very little thing.

Presently Mr. Aked breathed with slightly less exertion, and he appeared to doze for a few moments now and then, though Richard could scarcely believe that any semblance of sleep was possible to a man in his condition.

"Adeline?" he questioned once.

"She's getting on fine," Richard said soothingly. "Would you like a sip?"

He put his grey lips clumsily round the lip of the cup, drank, and then pushed the vessel away with a gesture of irritation.

The windows were open, but the air was perfectly still, and the gas burnt without a tremor between the windows and the door.

"I'm stifled," the patient gasped. "Are they – doing – all they can – for me?" – Richard tried to reassure him.

"It's all over – with me – Larch – I can't – keep it up long – I'm going – going – they'll have to try – something else."

His lustrous eyes were fastened on Richard with an appealing gaze. Richard turned away.

"I'm frightened – I thought I shouldn't be – but I am. Doctor suggested parson – it's not that – I said no… Do you think – I'm dying?"

"Not a bit," said Richard.

"That's a lie – I'm off… It's a big thing, – death – everyone's afraid – of it – at last… Instinct!.. Shows there's something – awful behind it."

If Richard had been murdering the man, he could not have had a sharper sense of guilt than at that moment oppressed him.

Mr. Aked continued to talk, but with a growing incoherence which gradually passed into delirium. Richard looked at his watch. Only thirty minutes had slipped by, and yet he felt as if his shoulder had suffered the clutch of that hot hand since before the beginning of time! Again he experienced the disconcerting sensation of emotional horizons suddenly widened.

People were walking down the street; they talked and laughed. How incongruously mirthful and careless their voices sounded! Perhaps they had never watched by a sick-bed, never listened to the agonised breathing of a pneumonia patient. That incessant frantic intake of air! It exasperated him. If it did not stop soon, he should go mad. He stared at the gas-flame, and the gas-flame grew larger, larger, till he could see nothing else… Then, after a long while, surely the breathing was more difficult! There was a reverberating turmoil in the man's chest which shook the bed. Could Richard have been asleep, or what? He started up; but Mr. Aked clung desperately to him, raising his shoulders higher and higher in the struggle to inhale, and leaning forward till he was bent almost double. Richard hesitated, and then struck the bell. It seemed as if the nurse would never come. The door opened softly.

"I'm afraid he is much worse," Richard said to the nurse, striving to cover his agitation. She looked at Mr. Aked.

"Perhaps you had better fetch the doctor."

When he returned, Mr. Aked was lying back unconscious.

"Of course the doctor can do nothing now," said the nurse, calmly answering the question in his eyes. "He'll never speak any more."

"But Miss Aked?"

"It can't be helped. I shall say nothing to her till morning."

"Then she won't see him?"

"Certainly not. It would be madness for her to leave her bed."

The doctor arrived, and the three talked quietly together about the alarming prevalence of influenza at that time of the year, and the fatal results of carelessness.

"I tell you honestly," the doctor said, "I'm so overworked that I should be quite satisfied to step into my coffin and not wake again. I've had three 3 A. M. midwifery cases this week – forceps, chloroform, and the whole bag of tricks – on the top of all this influenza, and I'm about sick of it. That's the worst of our trade; it comes in lumps. What do you say, nurse?"