"Why should that fellow be any more likely now to make her happy--"
"Because he"s lost his money and his father? I don"t know why he should.
I dare say he"ll begin bullying and slave-driving again--when he"s forgotten all this. But--"
"But what?"
"Well--you see--I didn"t think he could possibly care about anything but himself. I thought he was as hard as a millstone all through. Well, he isn"t. That"s so queer!"
The speaker"s voice took a dreamy tone.
Sorell glanced in bitterness at the maimed hand lying on the bed. It was still bandaged, but he knew very well what sort of a shapeless, ruined thing it would emerge, when the bandages were thrown aside. It was strange and fascinating--to a student of psychology--that Otto should have been brought, so suddenly, so unforeseeably, into this pathetic and intimate relation with the man to whom, essentially, he owed his disaster. But what difference did it make in the quality of the Marmion outrage, or to any sane judgment of Douglas Falloden?
"Go to sleep, old boy," he said at last. "You"ll have a hard time to-morrow."
"What, the inquest? Oh, I don"t mind about that. If I could only understand that fellow!"
He threw his head back, staring at the ceiling.
Otto Radowitz, in spite of Sorell"s admonitions, slept very little that night. His nights were apt to be feverish and disturbed. But on this occasion imagination and excitement made it impossible to stop the brain process, the ceaseless round of thought; and the hours of darkness were intolerably long. Memory went back behind the meeting with the dying man on the hillside, to an earlier experience--an hour of madness, of "possession." His whole spiritual being was still bruised and martyred from it, like that sufferer of old whom the evil spirit "tore" in departing. What had delivered him? The horror was still on him, still his master, when he became aware of that white face on the gra.s.s--
He drowsed off again. But in his half-dream, he seemed to be kneeling again and reciting Latin words, words he had heard last when his mother was approaching her end. He was more than half sceptical, so far as the upper mind was concerned; but the under-consciousness was steeped in ideas derived from his early home and training, ideas of sacrifice, forgiveness, atonement, judgment--the common and immortal stock of Christianity. He had been brought up in a house pervaded by the crucifix, and by a mother who was ardently devout.
But why had G.o.d--if there was a G.o.d--brought this wonderful thing to pa.s.s? Never had his heart been so full of hatred as in that hour of lonely wandering on the moor, before he perceived the huddled figure lying by the stream. And, all in a moment, he had become his enemy"s proxy--his representative--in the last and tenderest service that man can render to man. He had played the part of son to Falloden"s dying father--had prayed for him from the depths of his heart, tortured with pity. And when Falloden came, with what strange eyes they had looked at each other!--as though all veils had dropped--all barriers had, for the moment, dropped away.
"Shall I hate him again to-morrow?" thought Radowitz. "Or shall I be more sorry for him than for myself? Yes, that"s what I felt!--so marvellously!"
So that when he went to Constance with his news, and under the emotion of it, saw the girl"s heart unveiled--"I was not jealous," he thought.
"I just wanted to give her everything!"
Yet, as the night pa.s.sed on, and that dreary moment of the first awakening earth arrived, when all the griefs of mankind weigh heaviest, he was shaken anew by gusts of pa.s.sion and despair; and this time for himself. Suppose--for in spite of all Sorell"s evasions and concealments, he knew very well that Sorell was anxious about him, and the doctors had said ugly things--suppose he got really ill?--suppose he died, without having lived?
He thought of Constance in the moonlit garden, her sweetness, her gratefulness to him for coming, her small, white "flower-face," and the look in her eyes.
"If I might--only once--have kissed her--have held her in my arms!" he thought, with anguish. And rolling on his face, he lay p.r.o.ne, fighting his fight alone, till exhaustion conquered, and "he took the gift of sleep."
CHAPTER XV
Douglas Falloden was sitting alone in his father"s library surrounded by paper and doc.u.ments. He had just concluded a long interview with the family lawyer; and a tray containing the remains of their hasty luncheon was on a side-table. The room had a dusty, dishevelled air. Half of the house-servants had been already dismissed; the rest were disorganised.
Lady Laura had left Flood the day before. To her son"s infinite relief she had consented to take the younger children and go on a long visit to some Scotch relations. It had been left vague whether she returned to Flood or not; but Douglas hoped that the parting was already over--without her knowing it; and that he should be able to persuade her, after Scotland, to go straight to the London house--which was her own property--for the winter.
Meanwhile he himself had been doing his best to wind up affairs. The elaborate will of twenty years earlier, with its many legacies and bequests, had been cancelled by Sir Arthur only six weeks before his death. A very short doc.u.ment had been subst.i.tuted for it, making Douglas and a certain Marmaduke Falloden, his uncle and an eminent K.C., joint executors, and appointing Douglas and Lady Laura guardians of the younger children. Whatever property might remain "after the payment of my just debts" was to be divided in certain proportions between Douglas and his brother and sisters.
The estates, with the exception of the lands immediately surrounding the castle, were to be sold to the tenants, and the dates of the auction were already fixed. For the castle itself, negotiations had been opened with an enormously successful soap-boiler from the north, but an American was also in the market, and the Falloden solicitors were skilfully playing the two big fish against each other. The sale of the pictures would come before the court early in October. Meanwhile the beautiful Romney--the lady in black--still looked down upon her stripped and impoverished descendant; and Falloden, whose sole companion she often was through dreary hours, imagined her sometimes as tragic or reproachful, but more commonly as mocking him with a malicious Irish glee.
There would be some few thousand pounds left for himself when all was settled. He was determined to go into Parliament, and his present intention was to stand for a Merton fellowship, and read for the bar. If other men could make three or four thousand a year within three years or so of being called, why not he? His character had steeled under the pressure of disaster. He realised with a clearer intelligence, day by day, all that had gone from him--his father--his inheritance--the careless ease and self-a.s.surance that goes with the chief places at the feast of life. But if he must now drop to the lower rooms, it would not be "with shame" that he would do that, or anything else. He felt within himself a driving and boundless energy, an iron will to succeed. There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in measuring himself against the world without the props and privileges he had hitherto possessed. He was often sore and miserable to his heart"s depths; haunted by black regrets and compunction he could not get rid of. All the same it was his fixed resolve to waste no thoughts on mere happiness. His business was to make a place for himself as an able man among able men, to ask of ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the sharpening of brain on brain, the satisfaction he had once hoped to get out of marriage with Constance Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great wealth.
He turned to look at the clock.
She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, the only beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means of escape during a dreary fortnight from his peevish co-executor, who was of little or no service, and had allowed himself already to say unpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother"s son.
It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently.
The mere prospect of seeing Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb and troubled excitement. Under its impulse he left the library, and began to walk aimlessly through the dreary and deserted house, for the mere sake of movement. The pictures were still on the walls, for the sale of them had not yet been formally sanctioned by the court; but all Lady Laura"s private and personal possessions had been removed to London, and dust-sheets covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had been already sold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall, amid a dusty litter of paper and straw. All the signs of normal life, which make the character of a house, had gone; what remained was only the debris of a once animated whole. Houses have their fate no less than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden possessor, the whole of the great many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth century foundations beneath the central tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt had disfigured the garden front, had often, since his father"s death, seemed to speak with an almost human voice of lamentation and distress.
But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of his surroundings. Why had she written to him?
Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers had written to him--letters that he was now wearily answering. But there had been nothing perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had seemed to hear her very voice saying the soft, touching things in it--things that women say so easily and men can"t hit upon; and to be looking into her changing face, and the eyes that could be so fierce, and then again so childishly sweet and sad--as he had seen them, at their last meeting on the moor, while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet there was not a word in the letter that might not have been read on the house-tops--not a trace in it of her old alluring, challenging self. Simplicity--deep feeling--sympathy--in halting words, and unfinished sentences--and yet something conspicuously absent and to all appearance so easily, unconsciously absent, that all the sweetness and pity brought him more smart than soothing. Yes, she had done with him--for all her wish to be kind to him. He saw it plainly; and he turned back thirstily to those past hours in Lathom Woods, when he had felt himself, if only for a moment, triumphant master of her thoughts, if not her heart; rebelled against, scolded, flouted, yet still tormentingly necessary and important. All that delicious friction, those disputes that are the forerunner of pa.s.sion were gone--forever. She was sorry for him--and very kind. His touchy pride recoiled, reading into her letter what she had never dreamt of putting into it, just because of the absence of that something--that old tremor--those old signs of his influence over her, which, of course, she would never let him see again.
All the same he had replied at once, asking if he might come and say good-bye before she left Scarfedale. And she had sent him a telegram--"Delighted--to-morrow--five o"clock."
And he was going--out of a kind of recklessness--kind of obstinate recoil against the sorrowful or depressing circ.u.mstance of life. He had given up all thoughts of trying to win her back, even if there were any chance of it. His pride would not let him sue as a pauper; and of course the Langmoors to whom she was going--he understood--from Scarfedale, would take good care she did not throw herself away. Quite right too.
Very likely the Tamworths would capture her; and Bletchley was quite a nice fellow.
When he did see her, what could they talk about? Radowitz?
He would like to send a message through her to Radowitz--to say something--
What could he say? He had seen Radowitz for a few minutes after the inquest--to thank him for his evidence--and for what he had done for Sir Arthur. Both had hurried through it. Falloden had seemed to himself stricken with aphasia. His mouth was dry, his tongue useless. And Radowitz had been all nerves, a nickering colour--good G.o.d, how deathly he looked!
Afterwards he had begun a letter to Radowitz, and had toiled at it, sometimes at dead of night and in a feverish heat of brain. But he had never finished or sent it. What was the use? Nothing was changed. That black sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard facts that no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could get over.
"I wish to G.o.d I had let him alone!"
That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden"s inmost being.
Trouble and the sight of trouble--sorrow--and death--had been to him, as to other men, sobering and astonishing facts. The most decisive effect of them had been to make him vulnerable, to break through the hard defences of pride and custom, so that he realised what he had done. And this realisation was fast becoming a more acute and haunting thing than anything else. It constantly drove out the poignant recollection of his father"s death, or the dull sense of financial loss and catastrophe.
Loss and catastrophe might be at some distant time made good. But what could ever give Radowitz back his art--his career--his natural object in life? The hatches of the present had just got to be closed over this ugly, irreparable thing. "I can"t undo it--nothing can ever be undone.
But I can"t spend my life in repenting it; one must just go forward, and not let that, or anything else, hamstring a man who has got his fight to fight, and can"t get out of it."
Undo it? No. But were no, even partial, amends possible?--nothing that could be offered, or done, or said?--nothing that would give Constance Bledlow pleasure, or change her opinion?--efface that shrinking in her, of which he hated to think?
He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing.
Money, of course, was of no use, even if he still possessed it.
Radowitz, in all matters connected with money, was hypersensitive and touchy. It was well known that he had private means; and it was certainly probable that he was now the richer man of the two.
No--there was nothing to be done. He had maimed forever the vital, energising impulse in another human being, and it could never be repaired. "His poor music!--_murdered_"--the words from Constance Bledlow"s horror-stricken letter were always in his mind. And the day after the inquest on Sir Arthur, he had had some conversation on the medical points of his father"s case, and on the light thrown on them by Radowitz"s evidence, with the doctor who was then attending Lady Laura, and had, it appeared, been several times called in by Sorell during the preceding weeks to see Radowitz and report on the progress of the hand.
"A bad business!" said the young man, who had intelligence and was fresh from hospital--"and awful hard luck!--he might have hurt his hand in a score of ways and still have recovered the use of it, but with this particular injury"--he shook his head--"nothing to be done! And the worst of it is that a trouble like this, which cuts across a man"s career, goes so deep. The thing I should be most afraid of is his general health. You can see that he"s delicate--narrow-chested--a bundle of nerves. It might be phthisis--it might be"--he shrugged his shoulders--"well, depression, bad neurasthenia. And the poor lad seems to have no family--no mother or sisters--to look after him. But he"ll want a lot of care, if he"s to pull round again. An Oxford row, wasn"t it? Abominable!"
But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura"s maid to ask a question for her mistress had diverted the doctor"s thoughts and spared Falloden reply.
A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towards Scarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood had been so intimate and familiar a part of himself that the thought of being wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemed merely absurd.
September was nearly gone; and the trees had long pa.s.sed out of their August monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze. The level afternoon light was searching out the different planes of distance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force and kingship: and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by day stealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the evening purple. The castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the shadows, a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine maidens through the blue water.
And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he and his kindred knew it no more. What did the plight of its last owner matter to it, or to the woods and hills? He tried to think of that valley a hundred years hence--a thousand!--and felt himself the merest insect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young.
But only for a moment. Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense of personality--of man"s dominance over nature--of the Nietzschean "will to power." To be strong, to be sufficient to one"s self; not to yield, but to be forever counterattacking circ.u.mstance, so as to be the master of circ.u.mstance, whatever blows it might choose to strike--that seemed to be the best, the only creed left to him.