"What about?"
"What about, indeed? About not coming into the water to be pulled out.
You promised you would, you know you did!"
"I did; but subject to a reasonable interpretation of the compact.
I should have been out of my depth ever so long before you could reach me. Why didn"t you come closer?"
"How could I, with a fat, pink party drying himself next door? _You_ wouldn"t have, if it had been you, and him Goody Vereker...."
"Sal-ly! Darling!" Her mother remonstrates.
"We-ell, there"s nothing in that! As if we didn"t all know what the Goody would look like...."
Rosalind is really afraid that the strict mamma of her husband"s recent incubus will overhear, and sit at another breakwater next day.
"_Come_ along!" she says, dispersively and emphatically. "We shall have the shoulder of mutton spoiled."
"No, we shan"t! Shall we, Jeremiah? We"ve talked it over, me and Jeremiah. Haven"t we, Gaffer Fenwick?" She is splitting up the salt congestions of his mane as she sits by him on the shingle. He confirms her statement.
"We have. And we have decided that if we are two hours late it may be done enough. But that in any case the so-called gravy will be grey hot water."
"Get up and come along, and don"t be a mad kitten! I shall go and leave you two behind. So now you know." And Rosalind goes away up the shingle.
"What makes mother look so serious sometimes, kitten? She did just now."
"She"s jealous of you and me flirting like we do. Don"t put your hat on; let the sun dry you up a bit. Does she really look serious though?
Do you mean it?"
"Yes, I mean it. It comes and goes. But when I ask her she only laughs at me." A painful thought crosses Sally"s mind. Is it possible that some of her reckless escapades have _froisse_"d her mother? She goes off into a moment"s contemplation, then suddenly jumps up with, "Come along, Jeremiah," and follows her up the beach.
But the gravity on the face of the latter, by now half-way to the house, had nothing to do with any of Sally"s shocking vulgarities and outrageous utterances. No, nor even with the green-eyed monster Jealousy her unscrupulous effrontery had not hesitated to impute. She allowed it to dominate her expression, as there was no one there to see, until the girl overtook her. Then she wrenched her face and her thoughts apart with a smile. "You _are_ a mad little goose," said she.
But the thing that weighted her mind--oppressed or puzzled her, as might be--what was it?
Had she been obliged to answer the question off-hand she herself might have been at a loss to word it, though she knew quite well what it was. It was the old clash between the cause of Sally and its result.
It was the thought that, but for a memory that every year seemed to call for a stronger forgetfulness, a more effective oblivion, this little warm star that had shone upon and thawed a frozen life, this salve for the wound it sprang from, would have remained unborn--a nonent.i.ty! Yes, she might have had another child--true! But would that child have been Sally?
She was so engrossed with her husband, and he with her, that she felt she could, as it were, have trusted him with his own ident.i.ty. But, then, how about Sally? Though she might with time show him the need for concealment, how be sure that nothing should come out in the very confusion of the springing of the mine? She could trust him with his ident.i.ty--yes! Not Sally with hers. Her great surpa.s.sing terror was--do you see?--not the effect on _him_ of learning about Sally"s strange _provenance_, but for Sally herself. The terrible knowledge she could not grasp the facts without would cast a shadow over her whole life.
So she thought and turned and looked down on the beach. There below her was this unsolved mystery sitting in the sun beside the man whose life it had rent asunder from its mother"s twenty years ago. And as Rosalind looked at her she saw her capture and detain his hat. "To let his mane dry, I suppose," said Rosalind. "I hope he won"t get a sunstroke." She watched them coming up the shingle, and decided that they were going on like a couple of school-children. They were, rather.
Perhaps the image in Sally"s profane mind of "hers affectionately, Rebecca Vereker," before or after an elderly bathe, would not have appeared there if she had not received that morning a letter so signed, announcing that, subject to a variety of fulfilments--among which the Will of G.o.d had quite a conspicuous place--she and her son would make their appearance next Monday, as our text has already hinted. On which day the immature legs of Miss Gwendolen Arkwright were to be released from a seclusion by which some religious object, undefined, had been attained the day before.
But the conditions which had to be complied with by the lodgings it would be possible for this lady to occupy were such as have rarely been complied with, even in houses built specially to meet their requirements. Each window had to confront, not a particular quarter, but a particular ninetieth, of the compa.s.s. A full view of the sea had to be achieved from a sitting-room not exposed to its glare, an attribute destructive of human eyesight, and fraught with curious effects on the nerves. But the bedrooms had to look in directions foreign to human experience--directions from which no wind ever came at night. A house of which every story rotated on an independent vertical axis might have answered--nothing else would. Even then s.p.a.ce would have called for modification, and astronomy and meteorology would have had to be patched up. Then with regard to the different levels of the floors, concession was implied to "a flat"; but, stairways granted, the risers were to be at zero, and the treads at boiling-point--a strained simile! As to cookery, the services of a _chef_ with great powers of self-subordination seemed to be pointed at, a _cordon-bleu_ ready to work in harness. Hygienic precautions, such as might have been insisted on by an Athanasian sanitary inspector on the premises of an Arian householder, were made a _sine qua non_. Freedom from vibration from vehicles was so firmly stipulated for that nothing short of a balloon from Shepherd"s Bush could possibly have met the case. The only relaxation in favour of the possible was a diseased readiness to accept shakedowns, sandwiches standing, cuts off the cold mutton, and snacks generally on behalf of her son.
Mrs. Iggulden, who was empty both sets on Monday, didn"t answer in any one particular to any of these requisitions. But a spirit of overgrown compromise crept in, making a sufficient number of reasons why no one of them could be complied with an equivalent of compliance itself.
Only in respect of certain racks and tortures for the doctor was Mrs.
Iggulden induced to lend herself to dangerous innovation. "I can"t have poor Prosy put to sleep in a bed like this," said Sally, punching in the centre of one, and finding a hideous cross-bar. Either Mrs.
Iggulden"s nephew must saw it out, and tighten up the sacking from end to end, or she must get a Christian bed. Poor Prosy! Whereon Mrs.
Iggulden explained that her nephew had by an act of self-sacrifice surrendered this bed as a luxury for lodgers in the season, having himself a strong congenital love of bisection. He hadn"t slept nigh so sound two months past, and the crossbar would soothe his slumbers.
So it was finally settled that the Goody and her son should come to Iggulden"s. The question of which set she should occupy being left open until she should have inspected the stairs. Thereon Mrs.
Iggulden"s nephew, whose name was Solomon, contrived a chair to carry the good lady up them; which she, though faint, declined to avail herself of when she arrived, perhaps seeing her way to greater embarra.s.sment for her species by being supported slowly upstairs with a gasp at each step, and a moan at intervals. However, she was got up in the end, and thought she could take a little milk with a teaspoonful of brandy in it.
But as to giving any conception of the difficulties that arose at this point in determining the choice between above and below, that must be left to your imagination. A conclusion _was_ arrived at in time--in a great deal of it--and the Goody was actually settled on the ground floor at Mrs. Iggulden"s, and contriving to battle against collapse from exhaustion with an implication that she had no personal interest in reviving, but would do it for the sake of others.
CHAPTER XXVIII
HOW SALLY PUT THE FINISHING TOUCH ON THE DOCTOR, WHO COULDN"T SLEEP.
OF THE GRAND DUKE OF HESSE-JUNKERSTADT. AND OF AN INTERVIEW OVERHEARD
Fenwick was not a witness of this advent, as the Monday on which it happened had seen his return to town. He had had his preliminary week, and his desk was crying aloud for him. He departed, renewing a solemn promise to write every day as the train came into the little station at Egbert"s Road, for St. Sennans and Growborough. It is only a single line, even now, to St. Sennans from here, but as soon as it was done it was good-bye to all peace and quiet for St. Sennan.
Rosalind and her daughter came back in the omnibus--not the one for the hotel, but the one usually spoken of as Padlock"s--the one that lived at the Admiral Collingwood, the nearest approach to an inn in the old town. The word "omnibus" applied to it was not meant literally by Padlock, but only as a declaration of his indifference as to which four of the planet"s teeming millions rode in it. This time there was no one else except a nice old farmer"s wife, who spoke _to_ each of the ladies as "my dear," and _of_ each of them as "your sister."
Rosalind was looking wonderfully young and handsome, certainly. They secured all the old lady"s new-laid eggs, because there would be Mrs. Vereker in the evening. We like adhering to these ellipses of daily life.
Next morning Sally took Dr. Vereker for a walk round to show him the place. Try to fancy the condition of a young man of about thirty, who had scarcely taken his hand from the plough of general practice for four years--for his holidays had been mighty insignificant--suddenly inaugurating three weeks of paradise in _the_ society man most covets--of delicious seclusion remote from patients, a happy valley where stethoscopes might be forgotten, and carbolic acid was unknown, where diagnosis ceased from troubling, and prognosis was at rest. He got so intoxicated with Sally that he quite forgot to care if the cases he had left to Mr. Neckitt (who had been secured as a subst.i.tute after all) survived or got terminated fatally. Bother them and their moist _rales_ and cardiac symptoms, and effusions of blood on the brain!
Dr. Conrad was a young man of an honest and credulous nature, with a turn for music naturally, and an artificial bias towards medicine infused into him by his father, who had died while he was yet a boy.
His honesty had shown itself in the loyalty with which he carried out his father"s wishes, and his credulity in the readiness with which he accepted his mother"s self-interested versions of his duty towards herself. She had given him to understand from his earliest years that she was an unselfish person, and ent.i.tled to be ministered unto, and that it was the business of every one else to see that she did not become the victim of her own self-sacrifice. At the date of this writing her son was pa.s.sing through a stage of perplexity about his duty to her in its relation to his possible duty to a wife undefined.
That he might not be embarra.s.sed by too many puzzles at once, he waived the question of who this wife was to be, and ignored the fact that would have been palpable to any true reading of his mind, that if it had not been for Miss Sally Nightingale this perplexity might never have existed. He satisfied his conscience on the point by a pretext that Sally was a thing on a pinnacle out of his reach--not for the likes of him! He made believe that he was at a loss to find a foothold on his greasy pole, but was seeking one in complete ignorance of what would be found at the top of it.
This shallow piece of self-deception was ripe for disillusionment when Sally took its victim out for a walk round to show him the place.
It had the feeblest hold on existence during the remainder of the day, throughout which our medical friend went on dram-drinking, knowing the dangers of his nectar-draughts, but as helpless against them as any other dram-drinker. It broke down completely and finally between moonrise and midnight--a period that began with Sally calling under Iggulden"s window, "Come out, Dr. Conrad, and see the phosph.o.r.escence in the water; it"s going to be quite bright presently," and ended with, "Good gracious, how late it is! Shan"t we catch it?" an exclamation both contributed to. For it was certainly past eleven o"clock.
But in that little s.p.a.ce it had broken down, that delusion; and the doctor knew perfectly well, before ten o"clock, certainly, that all the abstract possible wives of his perplexity meant Sally, and Sally only. And, further, that Sally was at every point of the compa.s.s--that she was in the phosph.o.r.escence of the sea, and the still golden colour of the rising moon. That s.p.a.ce was full of her, and that each little wave-splash at their feet said "Sally," and then gave place to another that said "Sally" again. Poor Prosy!
But what did they _say_, the two of them? Little enough--mere merry chat. But on his part so rigid a self-constraint underlying it that we are not sure some of the little waves didn"t say--not Sally at all, but--Miss Nightingale! And a persistent sense of a thought that was only waiting to be thought as soon as he should be alone--that was going to run somewhat thus: "How could it come about? That this girl, whom I idolize till my idolatry is almost pain; this girl who has been my universe this year past, though I would not confess it; this wonder whom I judge no man worthy of, myself least of all--that she should be cancelled, made naught of, hushed down, to be the mate of a poor G.P.; to visit his patients and leave cards, make up his little accounts, perhaps! Certainly to live with his mother...." But he knew under the skin that he would be even with that disloyal thought, and would stop it off at this point in time to believe he hadn"t thought it.
Still, for all that this disturbing serpent would creep into his Eden, for all that he would have given worlds to dare a little more--that moment in the moonlight, with a glow-flecked water at his feet and hers, and the musical shingle below, and a sense of Christy Minstrels singing about Billy Pattison somewhere in the warm night-air above, and the flash of the great revolving light along the coast answering the French lights across the great, dark silent sea--that moment was the record moment of his life till then. It would never do to say so to Sally, that was all! But it was true for all that. For his life had been a dull one, and the only comfort he could get out of the story of it so far was that at least there was no black page in it he would like to cut out. Sally might read them all, and welcome. Their relation to _her_ had become the point to consider. You see, at heart he was a slow-coach, a milksop, nothing of the man of the world about him. Well, her race had had a dose of the other sort in the last generation. Had the breed wearied of it? Was that Sally"s unconscious reason for liking him?
"How very young Prosy has got all of a sudden!" was Sally"s postscript to this interview, as she walked back to their own lodgings with her mother, who had been relieving guard with the selfless one while the doctor went out to see the phosph.o.r.escence.
"He"s like a boy out for a holiday," her mother answered. "I had no idea Dr. Conrad could manage such a colour as that; I thought he was pallid and studious."
"Poor dear. _We_ should be pallid and studious if it was cases all day long, and his ma at intervals."
"Do you know, kitten darling, I can"t help thinking perhaps we do that poor woman an injustice...."
"--Can"t you?" Thus Sally in a parenthetic voice--
"... and that she really isn"t such a very great humbug after all!"