"The tiger-shootin"? Well, reely, my dear, I shouldn"t like to say.
It"s twenty years ago, you see. No, I couldn"t say--couldn"t say when it was." He is beginning to pack himself in a long woollen scarf an overcoat with fur facings will shortly cover in, and is, in fact, preparing to evacuate a position he finds untenable. "I must be thinkin" of gettin" home," he says. Sally tries for a word more.
"Was it before he and mother fell out?" It is on the Major"s lips to say, "Before the proceedings?" but he changes the expression.
"Before the split? Well, no; I should say after the split.
Yes--probably after the split." But an unfortunate garrulity prompts him to say more. "After the split, I should say, and before the----"--and then he feels he is in a quagmire, and flounders to the nearest land--"before your father went away to Australia." Then he discerns his own feebleness, recognising the plat.i.tude of this last remark. For n.o.body could shoot tigers in an Indian jungle after he had gone off to Australia. Clearly the sooner he gets away the better.
A timely choking-fit interposes to preserve its victim from further questioning. The patient in the next room is asleep or torpid, so he omits farewells. Sally"s mother comes out to say good-night, and Sally goes down the staircase with him and his asthma, feeling that it is horrible and barbarous to turn him out alone in the dense blackness.
Perhaps, however, the peculiar boy with the strange name will be there.
That would be better than nothing. Sally feels there is something indomitable about that boy, and that fog nourishes and stimulates it.
But, alas!--there is no boy. And yet it certainly would be fourpence if he came back. For, though it may be possible to see the street gas-lamps without getting inside the gla.s.s, you can"t see them from the pavement. Nevertheless, the faith that "it" is clearing having been once founded, lives on itself in the face of evidence, even as other faiths have done before now. So the creed is briefly recited, and the Major disappears with the word good-night still on his lips, and his cough, gasp, or choke dies away in the fog as he vanishes.
Somebody is whistling "Arr-hyd-y-nos" as he comes from the other side in the darkness--somebody who walks with a swinging step and a resonant foot-beat, some one who cares nothing for fogs. Fenwick"s voice is defiant of it, exhilarated and exhilarating, as he ceases to be a cloud and a.s.sumes an outline. Sally gives a kiss to frozen hair that crackles.
"What"s the kitten after, out in the cold? How"s the Major?"
"Which? _Our_ Major? He"s a bit better, and the temperature"s lower."
Sally believed this; a little thermometer thing was being wielded as an implement of optimism, and had lent itself to delusions.
"Oh, how scrunchy you are, your hands are all ice! Mamma"s been getting in a stew about _you_, squire." On which Fenwick, with the slightest of whistles, pa.s.ses Sally quickly and goes four steps at a time up the stairs, still illuminated by Sally"s gas-waste. For she had left the lights at full c.o.c.k all the way up.
"My dearest, you never got my telegram?" This is to Rosalind, who has come out on the landing to meet him. But the failure of the telegram--lost in the fog, no doubt--is a small matter. What shelves it is the patient grief on the tired, handsome face Fenwick finds tears on as he kisses it. Sally has the optimism all to herself now.
Her mother knows that her old friend and protector will not be here long--that, of course, has been true some time. But there"s the suffering, present and to come.
"We needn"t stop the chick hoping a little still if she likes." She says it in a whisper. Sally is on the landing below; she hears the whispering, and half guesses its meaning. Then she suppresses the last gas-tap, and follows on into the front room, where the three sit talking in undertones for perhaps an hour.
Yes, that monotonous sound is the breathing of the patient in the next room, under the new narcotic which has none of the bad effects of opium. The nurse is there watching him, and wondering whether it will be a week, or twenty-four hours. She derives an impression from something that the fog really is clearing at last, and goes to the window to see. She is right, for at a window opposite are dimly visible, from the candles on either side of the mirror, two white arms that are "doing" the hair of a girl whose stays are much too tight.
She is dressing for late dinner or an early party. Then the nurse, listening, understands that the traffic has been roused from its long lethargy. "I thought I heard the wheels," she says to herself. Then Sally also becomes aware of the sound in the traffic, and goes to _her_ window in the front room.
"You see I"m right," she says. "The people are letting their fires out, and the fog"s giving. Now I"m going to take you home, Jeremiah." For the understanding is that these two shall return to Krakatoa Villa, leaving Rosalind to watch with the nurse. She will get a chop in half an hour"s time. She can sleep on the sofa in the front room if she feels inclined. All which is duty carried out or arranged for.
After her supper Rosalind sat on by herself before the fire in the front room. She did not want to be unsociable with the nurse; but she wanted to think, alone. A weight was on her mind; the thought that the dear old friend, who had been her father and refuge, should never know that she again possessed her recovered husband on terms almost as good as if that deadly pa.s.sage in her early life had never blasted the happiness of both. He would die, and it would have made him so happy to know it. Was she right in keeping it back now? Had she ever been right?
But if she told him now, the shock of the news might hasten his collapse. Sudden news need not be bad to cause sudden death. And, maybe the story would be too strange for him to grasp. Better be silent. But oh! if he might have shared her happiness!
Drowsiness was upon her before she knew it. Better perhaps sleep a little now, while he was sleeping. She looked in at him, and spoke to the nurse. He lay there like a lifeless waxwork--blown through, like an apparatus out of order, to simulate breath, and doing it badly.
How could he sleep when now and then it jerked him so? He could, and she left him and lay down, and went suddenly to sleep. After a time that was a journey through a desert, without landmarks, she was as suddenly waked.
"What?... I thought you spoke...." And so some one had spoken, but not to her. She started up, and went to where the nurse was conversing through the open window with an inarticulate person in the street below, behind the thick window-curtain she had kept overlapped, to check the freezing air.
"What is it?"
"It"s a boy. I can"t make out what he says."
"Let me come!" But Rosalind gets no nearer his meaning. She ends up with, "I"ll come down," and goes. The nurse closes the window and goes back to the bedroom.
The street door opens easily, the Chubb lock being the only fastening.
The moment Rosalind sees the boy near she recognises him. There is no doubt about the presumptuous expression, or the cause of it. Also the ostentatious absence of the front tooth, clearly accounting for inaudibility at a distance.
"What do you want?" asks Rosalind.
"Nothin" at all for myself. I come gratis, I did. There"s a many wouldn"t." He is not too audible, even now; but he would be better if he did not suck the cross-rail of the area paling.
"Why did you come?"
"To bring you the nooze. The old bloke"s a friend of yours, missis.
Or p"r"aps he ain"t! I can mizzle, you know, and no harm done."
"Oh no, don"t mizzle on any account. Tell me about the old bloke.
Do you mean Major Roper?"
"Supposin" I do, why shouldn"t I?" This singular boy seems to have no way of communicating with his species except through defiances and refutations. Rosalind accepts his question as an ordinary a.s.sent, and does not make the mistake of entering into argument.
"Is he ill?" The boy nods. "Is he worse?" Another nod. "Has he gone home to his club?" The boy evidently has a revelation to make, but would consider it undignified to make it except as a denial of something to the contrary. He sees his way after a brief reflection.
"He ain"t gone. He"s been took."
"He"s been taken? How has he been taken?"
"On a perambulance. Goin" easy! But he didn"t say nothin". Not harf a word!"
"Had he fainted?" But this boy has another characteristic--when he cannot understand he will not admit it. He keeps silence, and goes on absorbing the railing. Rosalind asks further: "Was he dead?"
"It"d take a lawyer to tell that, missis."
"I can"t stand here in the cold, my boy. Come in, and come up and tell us." So he comes up, and Rosalind speaks to the nurse in the other room, who comes; and then they turn seriously to getting the boy"s story.
He is all the easier for examination from the fact that he is impressed, if not awed, by his surroundings. All the bounce is knocked out of him, now that his foot is no longer on his native heath, the street. Witness that the subject of his narrative, who would certainly have been the old bloke where there was a paling to suck, has become a simple p.r.o.noun, and no more!
"I see him afore, missis," he says. "That time wot I lighted him round for twopence. And he says to come again in three-quarters of an hour. And I says yes, I says. And he says not to be late. Nor yet I shouldn"t, only the water run so slow off the main, and I was kep.... Yes, missis--a drorin" of it off in their own pails at the balkny house by the mooze, where the supply is froze...."
"I see, you got a job to carry up pails of water from that thing that sticks up in the road?"
"Yes, missis; by means of the turnc.o.c.k. Sim"lar I got wet. But I didn"t go to be late. It warn"t much, in the manner of speakin". I was on his "eels, clost."
"You caught him?"
"Heard him h.o.a.rckin" in the fog, and I says to my mate--boy by the name of "Ucklebridge, only chiefly called Slimy, to distinguish him--I says--I says that was my guv"nor, safe and square, by the token of the sound of it. And then I catches him up in the fog, follerin" by the sound. My word, missis, he _was_ bad! Wanted to holler me over the coals, he did, for behind my time. I could hear him wantin" to do it.
But he couldn"t come by the breath."
Poor Old Jack! The two women look at each other, and then say to the boy: "Go on."
"Holdin" by the palins, he was, and goin" slow. Then he choked it off like, and got a chanst for a word, and he says: "Now, you young see-saw"--that"s what he said, missis, "see-saw"--"just you stir your stumps and cut along to the clubbus: and tell that dam red-faced fool Mulberry to look sharp and send one of the young fellers to lend an arm, and not to come hisself." And then he got out a little flat bottle of something short, and went for a nip; but the cough took him, and it sprouted over his wropper and was wasted."
The women look at each other again. The nurse sees well into the story, and says quickly under her breath to Rosalind: "He"d been told what to do if he felt it coming. A drop of brandy might have made the difference." The boy goes on as soon as he is waited for.
"Mr. Mulberry he comes runnin" hisself, and a couple more on "em! And then they all calls me a young varmint by reason of the guv"nor having got lost. But a gentleman what comes up, he says all go opposite ways, he says, and you"ll hear him in the fog. So I runs up a parsage, and in the middle of the parsage I tumbles over the guv"nor lyin" acrost the parsage. Then I hollers, and then they come."