"What, dearest?"
"We"ll forget the old story, won"t we, and only think of _now_? That"s the right way to take it, isn"t it?"
She kissed his face as she answered, just as she might have kissed a child. "Quite right, dear love," she said; "and now go to sleep. Or if you must talk a little more, talk about Conrad and Sally."
"Ah yes!" he answered; "that"s all happiness. Conrad and Sally! But there"s a thing...."
"What thing, dear? What is it?"
"I shall ask it you in the end, so why not now?" She felt in his hand a shudder that ran through him, as his hold on her fingers tightened.
"So why not now?" she repeated after him. "Why hesitate?"
The tremor strengthened in her hand and was heard in his voice plainly as he answered with an effort: "What became of the baby?"
"What became of the baby!" There was a new terror in Rosalind"s voice as she repeated the words--a fear for his reason. "What baby?"
"_The_ baby--_his_ baby--_his_ horrible baby!"
"Gerry darling! Gerry _dearest_! do think...." His puzzled eyes, bloodshot in his white face, turned full upon her; but he remained silent, waiting to hear more. "You have forgotten, darling," she said quietly.
His free hand that lay on the coverlid clenched, and a spasm caught his arm, as though it longed for something to strike or strangle. "No, no!" said he; "I am all right. I mean that d.a.m.ned monster"s baby.
There _was_ a baby?" His voice shook on these last words as though he, too, had a fear for his own reason. His face flushed as he awaited her reply.
"Oh, Gerry darling! but you _have_ forgotten. His baby was Sally--my Sallykin!"
For it was absolutely true that, although he had as complete a knowledge, in a certain sense, of Sally"s origin as the well-coached student has of the subject he is to answer questions in, he had forgotten it under the stress of his mental trial as readily as the student forgets what his mind has only acquiesced in for its purpose, in his joy at recovering his right to ignorance. Sally had an existence of her own quite independent of her origin. She was his and Rosalind"s--a part of _their_ existence, a necessity. It was easy and natural for him to dissociate the living, breathing reality that filled so much of their lives from its mere beginnings. It was less easy for Rosalind, but not an impossibility altogether, helped by the forgiveness for the past that grew from the soil of her daughter"s love.
"You _had_ forgotten, dear," she repeated; "but you know now."
"Yes, I had forgotten, because of Sally herself; but she is _my_ daughter now...."
She waited, expecting him to say more; but he did not speak again. As soon as he was, or seemed to be, asleep, she rose quietly and left him.
She was so anxious that no trace of the tempest that had pa.s.sed over her should be left for Sally to see in the morning that she got as quickly as possible to bed; and, with a little effort to tranquillise her mind, soon sank into a state of absolute oblivion. It was the counterswing of the pendulum--Nature"s protest against a strain beyond her powers to bear, and its remedy.
CHAPTER XLIV
OF A CONTRACT JOB FOR REPAIRS. HOW FENWICK HAD ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT AFTER ALL. WHICH IS WHICH, NOW OR TWENTY ODD YEARS AGO? HOW SALLY FOLLOWED JEREMIAH OUT. WHAT A LOT OF TALK ABOUT A LIFE-BELT!
A colourless dawn chased a grey twilight from the sea and white cliffs of St. Sennans, and a sickly effort of the sun to rise visibly, ending above a cloud-bank in a red half-circle that seemed a thing quite unconnected with the struggling light, was baffled by a higher cloud-bank still that came discouragingly from the west, and quenched the hopes of the few early risers who were about as St. Sennans tower chimed six. The gull that flew high above the green waste of white-flecked waters was whiter still against the inky blue of the cloud-curtain that had disallowed the day, and the paler vapour-drifts that paused and changed and lost themselves and died; but the air that came from the sea was sweet and mild for the time of year, and the verdict of the coastguardsman at the flagstaff, who in pursuance of his sinecure had seen the night out, was that the day was pretty sure to be an uncertain sart, with little froshets on the water, like over yander. He seemed to think that a certainty of uncertainty had all the value of a forecast, and was as well satisfied with his report as he was that he had not seen a smuggler through the telescope he closed as he uttered it.
"Well, I should judge it might be fairly doubtful," was the reply of the man he was speaking with. It was the man who had "Elinor"
and "Bessie" tattooed on his arm. They were not legible now, as a couple of life-belts, or hencoops, as they are sometimes called, hung over the arm and hid them. The boy Benjamin was with his father, and carried a third. An explanation of them came in answer to interrogation in the eye of the coastguard. "Just to put a touch of new paint on "em against the weather." The speaker made one movement of his head say that they had come from the pier-end, and another that he had taken them home to repaint by contract.
"What do you make out of S. S. P. C.?" the coastguard asked, scarcely as one who had no theory himself, more as one archaeologist addressing another, teeming with deference, but ready for controversy. The other answered with some paternal pride:
"Ah, there now! Young Benjamin, he made _that_ good, and asked for to make it red in place of black himself! Didn"t ye, ye young sculping?
St. Sennans Pier Company, that"s all it comes to, followed out. But I"m no great schoolmaster myself, and that"s G.o.d"s truth." Both contemplated the judicious restoration with satisfaction; and young Benjamin, who had turned purple under publicity, murmured that it was black afower. He didn"t seem to mean anything, but to think it due to himself to say something, meaning or no. The coastguardsman merely said, "Makes a tidy job!" and the father and son went on their way to the pier.
A quarter of an hour before, this coastguard had looked after the visitor in a blue serge suit up at Lobjoit"s, who had pa.s.sed him going briskly towards the fishing-quarter. He had recognised him confidently, for he knew Fenwick well, and saw nothing strange in his early appearance. Now that he saw him returning, and could take full note of him, he almost suspected he had been mistaken, so wild and pallid was the face of this man, who, usually ready with a light word for every chance encounter--even with perfect strangers--now pa.s.sed him by ungreeted, and to all seeming unconscious of his presence.
The coastguard was for a moment in doubt if he should not follow him, inferring something in the nature of delirium from his aspect; but seeing that he made straight for the pier, and knowing that young Benjamin"s father was more familiar with him than himself, he was contented to record in thought that that was a face with a bad day ahead, and leave it.
For Gerry, when Rosalind left him, was rash in a.s.suming he could let her do so safely. His well-meant pretext of sleep was not destined to grow into a reality. He had really believed that it would, so soothing was the touch of her hand in his own. The moment he was alone his mind leapt, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, to the a.n.a.lysis of one point or other in the past that had just come back to him. He tried to silence thought, and to sleep, knowing that his best hope was in rest; but each new effort only ended in his slipping back to what he had just dismissed. And that terrible last interview with Rosey at Umballa, when he parted from her, as he thought, never to see her again, was the Rome to which all the roads of recollection led. Each involuntary visit there had its _rencheriss.e.m.e.nt_ on the previous one, and in the end the image of that hour became a brain-oppression, and wrote the word "fever" large on the tablets of his apprehension.
He knew now it was not to be sleep; he knew it as he sat up in bed feeling his pulse, and stimulating it with his anxiety that it should go slow. Was there nothing he could take that would make him sleep?
Certainly he knew of nothing, anywhere, except it was to be found by waking Rosalind, probably sound asleep by now. Out of the question!
Oh, why, why, with all the warning he had had, had he neglected to provide himself with a mysterious thing known to him all his life as a soothing-draught? It would have been so useful now, and Conrad would have defined it down to the prosaic requirements of pharmacy. But it was too late!
So long as her hand was in his, so long as her lips were near his own, what did it matter what he recollected? The living present cancelled the dead past. But to be there alone in the dark, with the image of that Rosalind of former years clinging to him, and crying for forgiveness because his mind, warped against her by a false conception of the truth, could not forgive; to be defenceless against her last words, coming through the long interval to him again just as he heard them, twenty years ago, bringing back the other noises of the Indian night--the lowing of the bullocks in the compound, the striking of the hour on the Kutcherry gongs, the grinding of the Persian wheels unceasingly drawing water for the irrigation of the fields--to be exposed to this solitude and ever-growing imagination was to become the soil for a self-sown crop of terrors--fear of fever, fear of madness, fear at the very least of perturbation such that Sally might come, through it, to a knowledge that had to be kept from her at all costs.
He lighted his candle with a cautious match, and found what might be a solace--a lucky newspaper of the morning. If only he could read it without audible rustling, unheard by the sleepers!
The print was almost too small to be read by the light of a single candle; but there were the usual headings, the usual ranks of capitals that tell us so quick that there is nothing we shall care about in the pale undecipherable paragraphs below, and that we have spent our halfpenny in vain. There was the usual young lady who had bought, or was trying on, a large hat, and whose top-story above, in profile, had got so far ahead of her other stories below. There were the consignments of locust-flights of boots, for this young lady"s friends, with heels in the instep. And all the advertis.e.m.e.nts that some one _must_ believe, or they would not pay for insertion; but that _we_ ignore, incredulous. Fenwick tried hard, for his own sake, to make the whole thing mean something, but his dazed brain and feverish eyes refused to respond to his efforts, and he let the paper go, and gave himself up, a prey to his own memories. After all, the daylight was sure to come in the end to save him.
He tried hard to reason with himself, to force himself to feel the reality of his own belief that all was well; for he had no doubt of it, as an abstract truth. It was the power of getting comfort from it that was wanting. If only his heart could stop thumping and his brain burning, _he_ would have done the rejoicing that Rosalind was there, knowing all he knew, and loving him; that Sally was there, loving him too, but knowing nothing, and needing to know nothing; that one of his first greetings in the day to come would be from Conrad Vereker, probably too much intoxicated with his own happiness to give much attention to what he was beginning to acknowledge was some kind of physical or nervous fever. If he could only sleep!
But he could not--could hardly close his eyes. He said to himself again and again that nothing was the matter; that, if anything, he and Rosey were better off than they had been yet; that they had pa.s.sed through a land of peril to a great deliverance. But he did not believe his own a.s.surance, and the throng of memories that his feverish condition would not let sleep, or that were its cause, came on him more and more thickly through all those hours of the dreary night.
They came, too, with a growing force, each one as it returned having more the character of a waking dream, vivid almost to the point of reality. But all ended alike. He always found himself breaking away from Rosey in the veranda in the bungalow at Umballa, and could hear again her cry of despair: "Oh, Gerry, Gerry! It is not as you think.
Oh, stay, stay! Give me a chance to show you how I love you!" The tramp of his horse as he rode away from his home and that white figure left prostrate in the veranda above him, became a real sound that beat painfully upon his ears; and the voice of the friend he sought--an old soldier in camp at Sabatoo, where he rode almost without a halt--as he roused him in the dawn of the next day, came to him again almost as though spoken in the room beside him: "Left _your_ wife, Palliser!
My G.o.d, sir! what"s to come next?" And then the wicked hardness of his own heart, and his stubborn refusal to listen to the angry remonstrance that followed. "I tell you this, young man! the man"s a fool--a d.a.m.ned fool--that runs from the woman who loves him!" And the a.s.severation that the speaker would say the same if she was anything short of the worst character in camp, only in slightly different words. His remorse for his own obduracy, and the cruelty of his behaviour then; his shame when he thought of his application, months later, to the Court at Lah.o.r.e--for "relief" from Rosey: just imagine it!--these were bad enough to think back on, even from the point of view of his previous knowledge; but how infinitely worse when he thought what she had been to him, how she had acted towards him two years ago!
Even the painful adventure he could now look back to clearly, and with a rather amused interest, as to an event with no laceration in it--his wandering in an Australian forest, for how many days he could not say, and his final resurrection at a town a hundred miles from his starting-point--even this led him back in the end to the old story.
The whole pa.s.sed through his mind like the scenes of a drama--his confidence, having lost the track, that his horse, left to himself, would find it again; his terror when, coming back from a stone"s-throw off, he found the tree deserted he had tied his horse to; his foolish starting off to catch him, when the only sane course was to wait for his return. But the second act of the drama took his mind again to Rosey in her loneliness; for when he was found by a search-party at the foot of a telegraph-post he had used his last match to burn down, he was inarticulate, and seemed to give his name as Harrisson. As he slowly recovered sense and speech at the telegraph-station--for the interruption of the current had been his cry for help to its occupants--he heard himself addressed by the name and saw the mistake; but he did not correct it, being, indeed, not sorry for an incognito, sick of his life, as it were, and glad to change his ident.i.ty. But how if Rosey wrote to him then--think of it!--under his old name? Fancy _her_ when the time came for a possible reply, with who could say what of hope in it! Fancy her many decisions that it was still too soon for an answer, followed by as many others as time went on that it was not too late! If he had received such a letter from her then, might it not all have been different? May she not have written one? He had talked so little with her; nothing forbade the idea. And so his mind travelled round with monotonous return, always to that old time, and those old scenes, and all the pain of them.
It was curious--he noted the oddity himself--that his whole life in America took the drama character, and _he_ became the spectator. He never caught himself playing his own part over again, with all its phases of pa.s.sion or excitement, as in the earlier story. In that, his identification of himself with his past grew and grew, and as his fever increased through the small hours of the morning, got more and more the force of a waking dream. And when the dawn came at last, and the gleam from the languid sun followed it, the man who got up and looked out towards its great blue bank of cloud was only half sure he was not another former self, looking out towards another sea, twenty years ago, to see if he could identify the ship that was to take him from Kurachi to Port Jackson.
What did it all mean? Yes, sure enough he had taken his pa.s.sage, and to-morrow leagues of sea would lie between him and Rosey. That would end it for ever. No reconciliations, no repentance then!... Was there not still time? a chance if he chose to catch at it? Puny irresolution! Shake it all off, and have done with it.... He shuddered as he thought through his old part again, and then came back with a jerk to the strange knowledge that he was opening a closed book, a tragedy written twenty years ago; and that there, within a few feet of where he gazed with a jaded sight out to the empty sea, was Rosey herself, alive and breathing; and in an hour or two he was to see her, feel the touch of her hand and lips, be his happy self again of three days only gone by, if he could but face masterfully the strange knowledge this mysterious revival of a former self had brought upon him. And there was Sally....
But at the name, as it came to his mind, came also the shock of another mystery--who and what was Sally?
Let him lie down again and try to think quietly. Was not this part of his delirium? Could he have got the story right? Surely! Was it not of her that Rosey had said, only a few hours since, "_His_ baby was Sally--_my_ Sallykin"? And was he not then able to reply collectedly and with ease, "She is _my_ daughter now," and to feel the power of his choice that it should be so? But the strength of Rosalind was beside him then, and now he was here alone. He beat off--fought against--that hideous fatherhood of Sally"s that he could not bear, that image that he felt might drive him mad. Oh, villain, villain!
Far, far worse to him was--perforce must be--this miscreant"s crime than that mere murder that shook Hamlet"s reason to its foundation. He dared not think of it lest he should cry out aloud. But, patience!
Only two or three hours more, and Rosalind would be there to help him to bear it.... What a coward"s thought!--to help him to bear what she herself had borne in silence for twenty years!
Would he not be better up, now that it was light? Of course! But how be sure he should not wake them?
Well, the word was caution; he must be very quiet about it, that was all. He slipped on his clothes without washing--it always makes a noise--ran a comb through the tangled hair his pillow-tossings of four hours had produced, and got away stealthily without accident, or meeting any early riser, speech with whom would have betrayed him.
He had little trouble with the door-fastenings, that often perplex us in a like case, blocking egress with mysterious mechanisms.
Housebreakers were rare in St. Sennans. He had more fear his footsteps would be audible; but it seemed not, and he walked away towards the cliff pathway unnoticed.
The merp.u.s.s.y waked to a consciousness of happiness undefined, a sense of welcome to the day. What girl would not have done so, under her circ.u.mstances? For Sally had no doubt in her mind of her own satisfaction at the outcome of yesterday. She might have treated the feelings and experience of other lovers--regular ones, p.r.o.ne to nonsense--with contempt, but she never questioned the advantages of her own position as compared with theirs. Her feast was better cooked, altogether more substantial and real than the kickshaws and sweetmeats she chose to ascribe to the _menus_ of Arcadia. Naturally; because see what a much better sort Conrad was! It was going to be quite a different kind of thing this time. And as for the old Goody, she was not half bad. Nothing was half bad in Sally"s eyes that morning, and almost everything was wholly good.