CHAPTER XXI
HOW JIM RETURNED HOME, ALL BUT ONE LEG, AND LIZARANN CALLED ON HIM. HAD THE DEVIL GOT UNCLE BOB? HOW BRIDGETTICKS HAD HEARD OF A SCHEME FOR LIZARANN'S BENEFIT
Lizarann's deferred hopes of being allowed to rejoin her Daddy made her heart sick, but they never ceased to be hopes. No undercurrent of despair made itself felt. If Teacher's reassuring tones had not been sufficient, were there not the gentleman's, known to Lizarann's direct simplicity as Mr. Yorick—a designation remaining uncontradicted in his laughing acceptance of it. But he was going back to his own Rectory, in order that Gus should be once more in harness at St. Vulgate's—his own proper field of labour—during the approaching Holy Week. The invalid was enormously better; so he himself said.
However, Mr. Yorick was destined before his departure to put the crowning corner-stone on the fabric of Lizarann's affection for himself.
"Now, Miss Coupland," said he, "you sit still! And don't kick! And then tell me where you suppose you are going to be taken to-day."
Lizarann was cautious—wouldn't commit herself. "Who's a-going to tight me?" she asked, to get a clue.
"Me," said Mr. Yorick, falling to the grammatical level of his company. "I'm going to take you, as soon as ever you've guessed where. But only one guess, mind!"
Lizarann thought this shabby. But then, after all, when there is only one guess worth making, you may just as well use it up and have done with it. She looked from one of the faces that was watching to the other, and back; then risked her guess. "To Daddy in the Sospital!" she fairly shouted. But, alas!—disappointment was in store for her.
"No! Not Daddy in the Sospital. Guess again."
"Oh, Yorick, how can you? Playing with the child! I shouldn't have thought you could be so wicked. No, Lizarann dear, don't you believe him! Daddy's out of the Hospital, and you're to go and see him. There!... I'm telling the truth, child!" For Lizarann, bewildered, still glances from one to the other.
"That's it, Lizarann. Not Daddy in the Sospital, but Daddy out of the Sospital. Now wrap up warm, and we'll go at once." A wild shriek of delight, an "undue subordination" of limbs, as in pictures of a debased period, and a rush for wraps, is followed, we are sorry to say, by some coughing. There is no such thing as flawless event anywhere.
"Oh no!—it won't do her any harm to go out," says Teacher. "Dr. Ferris said it might do her good if it got mild. Now, Lizarann!—Mr. Yorick's ready." For this Monday, known to the Rev. Gus as "Annunciation," and to most of his flock as Lady Day—a dreadful day when your rent isn't ready—had come as a herald of early spring, and a belief in violets was in the air.
"How far mustn't we go to the Sospital?" Lizarann speaks obscurely, but the meaning is clear to her conductor. How long is the road we are not going to the Hospital on?—surely that's clear.
"How far is it to Daddy? Daddy's at home." And, surely enough, when Mr. Yorick comes to Tallack Street he turns the corner. This bewilders Lizarann.
"But Aunt Stingy, she's took a place," she says. She is not certain of the exact sense of her words. The place might be Badajoz; or a Chancellorship of something, with a portfolio. But it doesn't matter! In either case, Aunt Stingy has left her home desolate—cookless! Again Lizarann is sympathetically understood.
"Your Daddy's being seen to, Miss Coupland. So he won't starve. Here we are!" And it is actually true! Lizarann is back in the home she has been eight weeks away from. For although of late the child had been allowed out, cautiously, no expedition had covered the half-mile between the school and Tallack Street. It is actually true that she is back there now, and wild with delight on the knee her Daddy still has left for her—in a rapture of tears and laughter that can just allow—but only just—the moderation of deportment called for when knees but lately the subjects of comminuted fractures are sat upon, even by very light weights.
Jim was garrulous about the Hospital, and the kindness and attention he had received there. "Yes, master, I was main sorry to come away, one side o' lookin' at it. I'll carry the doctor-gentleman and Nurse Lucy in my mind a long day on. Many's the time I said to myself what I'd be tellin' of 'em to the little lass, home again. There was a bit o' sameness, as might be, when you think of it, and I got fixed uneasy-like about the lass. But, dear Lard bless you!—there was a many there worse off than me. Why, there was that pore chap you see, next bed off on the right! How might you suppose he come there?"
"Don't know, Jim; give it up! How was it?" Mr. Yorick does all the conversation. Lizarann will find her tongue presently, when she and Daddy are alone. At present she merely nestles to him, speechless, but blissful. Jim pursues his topic:
"As I made it out, master, it was this sort o' way: It was a kind o' small-arms factory, and there was two young wenches in the finishin' shop o' one mind about him. So it came to making ch'ice, for him. And one o' them, by name Clara, she warns him if she catches him sweethearting with her shopmate, she'd just mark him. Both decent girls, ye see! And she was all as good as her word, with a little pot of vitrol, right in his eyes! And he run, roaring mad with pain, and was caught in the machinery, and made a spoiled man of, as I reckon, all his days. Name of Linklater."
"What a terrible business! And it may have been he wasn't to blame, either."
"No—pore chap! He'd just no consolation, as you might say. I count myself a well-off man, set against him. Just wait a bit, master, and see me when I'm clear of them crutches. Once I get to use my stick again, anybody'll say, to see me: 'Why, there's a man ain't got anything the matter with him!' Nor yet I shan't have, to speak of!"
Athelstan Taylor could not help comparing Jim's resolute optimism—poor crushed wreck that he was!—with his sister's aggressive meekness and its pious claim to resignation or uncomplaining acquiescence in what was really a most happy release, though paraded as a cruel blow of Fate. But he could not stay to chat. He had to get back to St. Vulgate's; have a talk about the local flock, chiefly goats, with his friend, who had come home the evening before; pack his trunk, and get to Euston by one-thirty, with or without lunch. So he had only a few more hurried words with Jim.
"You'll think of what I was saying to you, Jim?"
"Sure, master!"
"And the lassie will just trot back to Miss Fossett, before it's dark. She'd better; the house might be cold here. Won't you, Lizarann?" Lizarann will, honour bright! "And how about those kisses I'm to take to my own little girls?" Payable on demand, three crossed to the account of Phœbe, three to Joan; both names being now familiar to drawer. They are very loud—those kisses! Mr. Yorick says farewell and goes. Lizarann and her Daddy are again alone together. Eight whole weeks!
Oh, the hours that had seemed weeks, and the days that had seemed years, of waiting—waiting for this moment. And here it was! Daddy himself—come back out of that mysterious Hospital, where Lizarann had never been to see him! No wonder Lizarann did not know where to begin!
"Well, then, little lass! They haven't cut the little lass's tongue out amongst 'em?" A vehement headshake of denial precedes the first of the many things Lizarann can select, at random, from the multitude she has been resolving to tell Daddy all through this dreary period of privation.
"Teacher's new cat's black all over, only white on the stomach. Yass! And four of the kittens was drownded." Jim's sympathies are all ready for Teacher's cat's kittens. But he is not further called on to show them, for the child deserts the kittens almost instantly with "Oh, Daddy!—they took you to the Sospital."
"Coorse they did! How many policeman was there, lassie?"
"There was free I see first. And one he turned back down the road. Only there was men, as well as policemen."
"Chaps?"
"Yass! And there was the boys. And there was a woman. And there was another woman. Only not sober." So she didn't count, that one; was civilly disqualified, as it were. But was the sober one making herself of use?—Jim inquires. "She wasn't finding any fault," is all the testimony Lizarann can give. It seems to imply that the drunken one was indicting the executive. Lizarann finishes up her report: "Then there was Mother Groves, and the 'ot-chestnut stall at the corner, and the Young Varmint." For this is the name—no less—by which Frederick Hawkins is known to Lizarann and her Daddy.
"So there they all was, the biling of 'em," said Jim. "And there was Daddy, he'd got himself under a cart, and was a bit the worse by it. And his little lass, she come and kissed him, for to cheer him up—hay, lassie? Nor never cried, nor made no noise, like he told her not to."
Lizarann felt proud and happy. But she could not endure a position with the slightest false pretence in it. "I did cried, too," she said, "when I got so far as Dartley Street. And the boy, he says not to water-cart."
"The Young Varmint?"
"Yass! He toldited me his nime, he did. Hawkins—Frederick—Hawkins." Lizarann gives the exact words the boy had said. "And he says not to water-cart because of his aunt and uncle. Took to the Sospital quite flat they was, and begun singing a fortnight after!" Jim made concession to the Young Varmint—went so far as to say that he would not warm his hide for him this time, pr'aps! But he spoke without confidence of the like abstention being justified in the future.
"And then the lassie come home," said he. "And who come to the door?"
"Only me, Daddy!"
"Ah!—but t'other side—who come?"
"Uncle Bob didn't come to the door, only he set it just on the jar for me to push." Clearly "coming to a door" involves opening it wide for friends, or conferring with strangers to learn their reason for knocking or ringing. He who takes letters from a letter-box does not go to the door, even if he rushes downstairs like a madman when the postman's knock comes.
You may be sure that Lizarann's narrative that followed was full of little niceties of language, as spoken in Tallack Street. But you have had all the substance, and it need not be repeated in a new form.
Jim interspersed the story of the suppression of his delirious brother-in-law with exclamations of applause. Lizarann deserved what the players call "a hand" now and again for the vivacity of her descriptive report of the knife scene, with its dramatic ending of the application of the spent lucifer-match to Uncle Bob's hand. "He just give one scroatch, and there he was!" The introduction of a new self-explanatory word into the language alone deserved recognition. But Jim was not concerned with this. The conduct of Athelstan Taylor in a difficult position took his attention off minor points.
"I could have named the sart of man he was," said he, speaking half to himself, "from the feel of his hand, and maybe no more than just a 'Good-marning, mate!' by the way. And—but to think of it!—him a parson!" Jim couldn't get over this at all. He dwelt on the unfitness of the arrangement: "Now, if they'd 'a made pore Bob a parson, it might 'a broke him of his habit, and we'd not have had a bad miss of him on our side." He seemed to go on thinking of the subject in all its aspects—possibly of the utilization of ecclesiastical preferments as an antidote to drunkenness. But his fingers kept wandering about his little girl's face and head, as if to detect the change eight weeks had made in it.
"Uncle Bob's dead," said she, getting closer to say it, in a dropped, awe-struck voice.
"Ah—he's dead! He might have turned over a better day's work, mayhap! But Lard!—if you come to that, what a many of us mightn't! Poor Bob!"
"Does it hurt, Daddy?"
"Does what hurt, lassie?"
"Being dead."
"I reckoned you might mean my old leg.... No—it don't hurt, bless you!—not good little lassies, like mine. Other folks' I couldn't say about. They do say the Devil gets some on 'em, now and again. But he ain't a sartainty, himself. Though in coorse he manages all he can see his way to." That is to say that, unless handicapped by absolute non-existence, Satan might be trusted to do his best to get all bad little lassies.
Lizarann knew her catechism, and all that was necessary for her salvation, as school-knowledge. But she could not help being curious about these things as actual facts—knowledge-knowledge, one might say. Daddy could be relied on. Why not go straight to the point? So after some mere conversation-making about whether Mr. Winkleson had ever actually seen the Devil, Lizarann did so. "Has he got Uncle Bob?" she asked.
Her father's answer was not consistent with his previous expressions of opinion. "Never you fear for him, lass! The Devil don't take a poor chap for making mistakes with his grog. And as for his handling that knife a bit too free, I doubt the liquor had just got the mastery of him. And then, you know, lass, a man ain't himself when that happens. Ye may make your mind easy about Bob."
So Lizarann felt no further disquiet. Perhaps she was unconsciously soothed by observing the differences of opinion among her seniors—Mr. Winkleson, Teacher, and Daddy. The last was most likely to know, and gave the pleasantest answer to the problem.
"And there was my little lass out in the snow in her night-shimmee. To think of that! And her Daddy all the while no more use than a turned turtle!" This had to be explained; and the continuity of the conversation was risked, owing to Lizarann's womanly pity for turtles on their backs and helpless. However, this very pity caused reaction towards the previous questions, as Jim's situation had been no better than that of the turtles. Lizarann had to cry a little over this, and then renewed her petition—previous applications having been met by evasion or postponement—to actually see the wooden substitute for a limb that, in spite of its boasted efficacy, compelled her Daddy to sit on a chair with more or less disguise of coat or blanket over it, both limbs being preferably kept horizontal for the present. But she might look at it, sure, might Lizarann; and, indeed, anyone would have thought, to see Jim exhibiting the business-end of a very new wooden leg, that some great improvement on a previous unsatisfactory condition had been attained. The little woman was incredulous about this; and, suspecting guile, put her Daddy through a severe cross-examination.
"'Sposin' you was obliged to it, Daddy; 'sposin' you had to walk all the way up Tallack Street, and all the way acrost Cazenove Street, and all the way acrost Trott Street to Blading Street where the cart was...?"
"Lard, lassie!—I could do it on my head, as the saying is, any minute o' the week!" But Jim demurs to an actual performance—says the doctor don't allow any tricks to be played. Lizarann gives the point up; but, oh dear!—how dreadfully afraid she feels that she is being practised on, and that in reality this shiny, well-turned, clean-leather-strapped contraption is, after all, no better—even perhaps worse—than an ordinary human foot. She will—she must!—elicit the truth somehow.
"Daddy!"
"Lassie!"
"When you was out on the yard-arm, and the wind was a-freshenin' up from the south...."
"To be sure, lass! Freshening to a three-quarter gale, and none too little canvas on her.... Easy ahead, lassie!" Jim is only helping the memory of the well-worn story, and the child accepts the prompting.
"... None too little canvas on her. And Peter Cortright and Marmaduke Flyn, they was both on the mainyard reefin' alongside. And Peter Cortright he sings out to look...."
"Ah!—and your Daddy, he looked, and there he see her, the Dutchman, carrying all sail afore the wind.... Well, little lass, and what o' that?"
"When you was then, 'sposin' you'd only had a wooden leg!"
Jim's big laugh comes; and so lost is he in his little lass, so free from all thought of his own great privation, even in the face of the bygone time, that he can make it a heart-whole laugh and never flinch.
"'Sposin' I'd only had a wooden leg? Well—as I reckon it—I shouldn't have taken much notice. Not for one such! If you'd 'a named two wooden legs now, lassie! That might have constitooted a poor kind of holt on a slippery yard. But I might have made a shift to do, even at that."
Lizarann was silenced, but not convinced. She resolved to thresh the subject out with Bridgetticks, whom she had secretly resolved to call upon on her way home. Bridget might know nothing about wooden legs, but she could cite a parallel experience, having herself walked on her brother's stelts, what he made out of two broomsticks and the foot'old nyled on, and mide syfe with a scrop of narrer iron hooping. She would refer it to Bridgetticks whether her brother—or a Circus, for that matter—could walk upon a bare yard, of which her own image was akin to a yard-measure, with a pair of stelts. If she, Bridget, felt confident of her brother's powers, no doubt Jim's assurance of his own might have been well grounded.
"Doesn't Aunt Stingy come to see to you, Daddy?" she asked anxiously. For she couldn't see no sign neither of breakfast, nor yet of dinner, nor yet of supper.
"No—lassie! Your aunt, she's got to 'tend on somebody else, away off to Wimbledon Common; and these here Simses—or Groombridges; I didn't catch the name right—she's got a short let to, are mostly away on a job. So she's packed together her bit of furniture, like you see it, and Mrs. Hacker, she's so obliging as to give me her time and attention; 'cos the master, ye see, he put the matter in trim for me. One don't look for hospital fare all the days of one's life."
Lizarann had heard where her aunt's "place" was, but her experience of places was of such as could be got to by half-past seven in the morning and come back to sleep at home. She thought now that she saw her way to enlightenment.
"Is where Aunt Stingy's gone where Mr. Winkleson lives?"
"Never a bit of it, lassie! He's by name Wilkins—Wilkinson Wilkins. This here's Wimbledon, a place with a Common to it. I went there once, for to see a review. I wouldn't mind going to see one again, and take the little lass." Perhaps he meant that his child's sight would serve for both; but more probably it was an instance of the strange way blind folk forget their own blindness. "Your aunty, she's come over once or twice, to pack up her traps and make straight, but I've got to put my dependence on Mrs. Hacker, so far as I can't shift for myself."
Lizarann derived from this and what followed one broad impression that the history of No. 27, Tallack Street had reached the end of a chapter—the one that contained her own biography to date. Another, that Aunt Stingy would be much less in evidence for the future. Another, that a new force had come into her life and Daddy's—a welcome one, connected with Miss Fossett and Mr. Yorick. She had a happy guardian-angel sensation about this, and took it to her bosom with only one slight misgiving—that they were too easily duped by that ridiculous little pipe of Dr. Ferris's, that would hold up like a candlestick certainly, and you could blow through if he let you, but that was impotent for every other purpose.
If this story could ask its reader a question at this point, it would be: "Have you not noticed that Lizarann has scarcely coughed, all through this long interview with her Daddy?" It was the case, anyhow, and rather points to the truth of what a physician once said to ourself, the writer: "If in the early stages of lung-disease doses of unalloyed joy, of perfect happiness, could be administered three times a day to the patient, the later stages would be much rarer than they are at present." Certainly Lizarann's happiness had almost touched rapture, doubts about the wooden leg being the only alloy in the pure gold. And she certainly had coughed mighty little. Perhaps Dr. Ferris would have known what claim Lizarann had to be considered a case of the kind referred to.
The delightful time had to come to an end, and Lizarann found herself compelled to say good-bye. Daddy would have it so, although darkness was a long way off yet awhile. So she departed, bidden first to go to Mrs. Hacker's, and say to that good lady, that she was on no account to be in any tirrit to come away from her own supper to attend to Jim's, for that he had got his pipe, Lizarann having helped him to light it,—a thing to rejoice at, after that one defective usage of an Institution otherwise perfect—and wasn't in any driving hurry. This message Lizarann gave fairly honestly, in an interview with Mrs. Hacker, which—being repeated to Jim—may be held responsible for some borrowed phrases used lately to describe impressions on her mind of his surroundings. But she was not uneasy about him; her faith in Mr. Yorick was too great for that.
Having given her message, it did not strike her as a serious transgression to pay a visit to Bridgetticks. The injunction to go straight home covered the line of road—did not deal with continuity of movement. That seemed to her a just interpretation of it. But of course not stopping only five minutes!
So she went to the door of Bridgetticks, and shouted through its keyhole, in preference to knocking or ringing. But Bridget was assisting her mother at the washtub, and up to her elbers in suds; so she sent an emissary to the door instead of going herself. He was very young, and was eating an apple; he was, in fact, too young and crude to be trusted to do like he was told; and he put a false construction on his mission, endeavouring to spit some of his apple through the keyhole, with a mistaken hospitality. His name was, as pronounced, Halexandericks. His bursts of laughter at each new failure of his attempts on the keyhole obscured the voice that was calling through it. He had a vacuous though not unpleasant laugh.
"I'll let you know directly, if you don't open that door," shouted his sister. She gave close particulars of the means she would resort to, but without effect. So she onsoapied the suds off of her arms, which she then placed akimbo, and went herself; not without a certain dancing effect, in consonance with a rhythmic utterance difficult to class as either song or recitation. Its words were certainly, "Waxy diddle-iddle-iddle, high-gee-wo!" ending in a pounce on Alexander, who spat his last piece of apple in his captor's face with a fiendish crow of delight. She wiped if off on his costume without comment.
"I seen my Daddy," said Lizarann, beaming, when the door was opened.
"I seen him afore ever you did," said Bridget, not to be outdone. "I seen him fetched along in a cab, last night just on seven-thirty. I seen him holped into the house."
"You story!" said Lizarann, hurt. "He can help himself, he can. He don't call for no help. Who was helping him?"
"Clapham Church Parsing—same as see your uncle Mr. Steptoe drownded—and rilewye-stytion cabman with rilings for trunks atop. Three thousand six hundred and thirty-two. Got him indoors they did."
Lizarann felt inclined to cry; this was a throw-back! But she wasn't one to give in easily. "My Daddy says he could swarm up the rigging as soon as not," said she. "Only the doctor he says for to keep quiet a bit, owing to prudence." When Lizarann repeated phrases lately heard, you would have thought, to listen to her, she was quite a big girl.
Now, it must not be supposed that Lizarann and Bridgetticks had not met during the past eight weeks. On the contrary, visits had been arranged, by request, even before Lizarann had been thought plenty well enough for school, only not to fret herself. These were the terms in which Miss Fossett's Anne confirmed that lady's opinion, and sanctioned a continued study of arithmetic and calligraphy. But intercourse during school-hours is fettered by formula; and when there's carpets and the bed made and all, you have to set quiet, and it's not the same thing. So when these two found themselves once more in their old haunt, it was as though a ceremonial padlock had been removed from their tongues. Lizarann's improved exterior—for Teacher and Anne had reconstructed it—clashed a little with Bridgetticks; but the principle held good. Here, on Mr. 'Icks's doorstep, when an imputation of falsehood as an exordium to any reply seemed natural and genial, neither speaker felt bound to check her inspirations. Lizarann and Bridgetticks were themselves again.
They sat on the doorstep, cloze or no!—this referred to Lizarann's frock—and Bridget retained her younger brother, perhaps for slight rehearsals of the vengeance she had in store for him; he was that troublesome! Bridget smelt of soap and warm steam.
"You wented on stelts, and wooden legs is better than stelts!" Lizarann's uneasiness rankles, and she longs for public acknowledgment of her Daddy's prospects of rehabilitation.
"I shouldn't 'a said so," Bridget answered. "Stelts you catches hold atop. Wooden legs is balancin'. Stelts is your hands as well as your legs. Wooden legs you're stood-on-end and pitches yourself over, just as like as not. Not onlest you have crutches. Your Daddy he 's crutches, he has. I see 'em myself!" Lizarann could say nothing about Job's comforters, if only because, on the one occasion when she had heard them mentioned—by Mr. Winkleson—she had supposed them to be woollen ones. Besides, she was interested on another point.
"My Daddy hasn't no scrutches," said she. She had caught their name, without understanding it, when her father used it; and now decided on denying them provisionally, pending inquiry into their nature. "What's a scrutch?"
"Oh, you little ignorance!" said Bridget. "Never to know what a crutch is, at your age!" She appealed to her infant brother to say, directly minute, what a crutch was, or she would take advantage of his unprotected youth to smack him. His reply, needing interpretation, was that it was a penny-farden. Halexandericks had evidently a turn for negotiation. His sister cast him off, telling him to go and ply by himself on the pivement, and then resumed: "If you'd 'a knowed 'em when you seed 'em, you might have kep' your eye open, and took note."
Lizarann, skipping the unnecessary, immediately replied: "Daddy said they was second-hand, and to go back when done with."
Bridget skipped some more. "Very well, then!—you see them cross-pieces for the 'ands?... Very well, then!—there's a lather pad for under the shoulder-j'int, and they're n'isy going down the street. Now don't you go to say I never told you." There was nothing really unkind or overbearing in Bridget's peculiar manner; it was only the strong working of a leading mind. She was, in fact, a very clever child, being less than two years her friend's senior.
She saw that Lizarann was downcast by hearing of the crutches, never having rightly appreciated the position, and set herself good-naturedly to consolation. "It's always tender where your leg's took off," said she, "and you want something to ketch the weight, walking." She spoke as if she had often had legs off. "But my father, he says it's nothing to get the hump about, with a little accommodatin'. And I seen a man with one leg and one crutch took two coppers to tike him to the stytion." Lizarann brightened visibly. "You see what your Daddy he'll look like when he's been a month in the country!"
Obviously this was repetition of something said by an older mouth. "Who toldited anything about the country?" said Lizarann.
"Clapham Church Parsing. Him as see Mr. Steptoe drownded. I heard him telling. 'You see,'—he says to your Daddy—'you see what you'll feel like when you've been a month in the country,' he says. 'You do just as I tell you,' he says, 'and I'll make it all square for you,' he says. And then he says you to go too."
"Me!" Lizarann exclaimed, open-mouthed with amazement. And then Bridgetticks gave more particulars of what really was a bout of careful eavesdropping on her part, she having succeeded in overhearing a good deal of conversation between Jim and the Rector of Royd, who had accompanied him from the Hospital the night before. It pointed to a scheme by which Lizarann was to be taken in at the Rectory, and carefully nurtured—treated, in fact, for a disease which had existence only on the authority of that lying little stethoscope of Dr. Ferris's! However, as long as no project involved a new separation from Daddy, what did Lizarann care?
Besides, look at the new experience of a world she had been so little in—it was glorious to think of! She was not so much dazzled as she might have been had every minute of her life been passed—for instance—in Drury Lane. She and Bridget had both benefited by school-treats. "I've been in the country," she said. "It's at Dorking."
But Bridget had a larger horizon. "There's more sorts than that," said she, "without taking count of foring parts. Like you'll find when you done some more geography." Lizarann felt awe-struck.
But it was getting along towards six, and she knew she ought to be reporting herself to Teacher. Perhaps she would have delayed still later, if she had not become anxious to ask that lady point-blank about this fascinating bucolic scheme. As it was, she was received with some displeasure—on her own behalf entirely—and decided to postpone investigations. We, for our part, have never believed that that extra half-hour of exposure to the evening air made in the long run the slightest difference.
CHAPTER XXII
THE EXACT STORY OF CHALLIS'S FIRST WIFE'S FIRST MARRIAGE. HOW HE AND MARIANNE MISSED THEIR EXPLANATION. CHARLOTTE THE DETECTIVE. CHALLIS'S SECOND COURTSHIP, IN A NUTSHELL
If there had been no cause of irritation between Alfred Challis and his wife about his relations with Grosvenor Square, it would have mattered much less what he kept back from her of his previous history. And if he had taken her fully into his confidence about the story of his early marriage with her sister, his relations with Grosvenor Square would have been much less capable of embitterment and misinterpretation. But his palpable concealment of Heaven-knew-what from one who conceived she had of all others the fullest right to know it, played the part, in this domestic misunderstanding, of poor Desdemona's bad faith towards her father. "She has deceived her father, and may thee," said Brabantio.
Could Marianne have known what Heaven knew, she would probably have held her husband blameless, if ill-judging; though she might have felt very little leniency towards her sister for contracting a marriage unknown to her family. But the ground was not in order for the sowing of a crop of explanation, to be reaped as a harvest of reconciliation. It was cumbered with the clover her husband was supposed to be enjoying at the Acropolis Club and elsewhere, and choked with a creeping weed of Jealousy unacknowledged. And as the trivial things of life are always the ones that play the biggest parts, so that unfortunate resolution not to disturb his wife, when Alfred Challis came home from the Club dinner, had to answer for quite ten times its fair share of the events that followed. No doubt her silence was a little vindictive—it would have been so easy to give a hint that she was awake—but the truth is it had very little to do with the matter. What had a great deal to do with it was the fact that Mr. Challis had not been enjoying himself. Had it been otherwise, he would have felt apologetic; the monitor he would not admit was his conscience would have prescribed amends to Marianne for contriving to be so jolly without her. But she had no guess that her Grosvenor Square enemy was laid up with a sprained ankle, any more than he had that the new cook had been the means of bringing to light a great deal—the worst half in disjointed fragments—of a story his good if mistaken intentions had concealed. For, needless to say, the actual story was still very obscure to her; and Mrs. Eldridge, though clever enough, was a biassed assistant in its elucidation.
Lest it should still be equally obscure to the reader, let him note its broad facts as follows: Edward Keith Horne married, or went through a marriage ceremony, with Kate Verrall, a governess at the house of a coal-merchant named Hallock. Six weeks later he went away to New York, promising an early return; there was some pretence of winding up a relative's affairs. He repudiated his wife shortly after; as she became convinced, and as Challis, his friend, also believed, on legally good grounds. As we have already said, Challis may have met conviction half-way, being in love with the girl himself. Of course, it was he whose name Mrs. Steptoe had remembered wrongly as Harris. And, equally of course, the miserable reprobate of Athelstan Taylor's painful experience at St. Brides was Horne, who succeeded with what was left of his mouth in nearly articulating his true name rightly. "Kay Thorne" was close to the truth, considering the circumstances. This story is fortunate in having very little to do with this man; as his young wife, or victim, may also have been in having for her only adviser a youth with a strong interest in urging her passive acceptance of her position. If only half the betrayed girls in the world could have such an adviser ready to hand! Alas!—how seldom is one found with the courage to say, "Think yourself at least in luck, silly girl, that you are not fettered for life to this lout or devil! Hug to your heart this one consolation, that though you have bought your experience of him, and what he calls love, dear, you have escaped scot-free of the blessed sacrament of marriage!" Too often the poor thing finds herself alone in the desert—the desert where correct expressions grow—sin, and shame, and penitence, and so on—and where marriage-lines and marriage-settlements make oases, from which she is excluded, for the Grundy family to breed in.
Perhaps Challis had a concealed motive for his decision when, at the time he married Kate's sister, he made up his mind to treat the whole story as a sealed book. But, even with none, was he wrong, knowing that his wife elect was quite convinced that no belonging of hers had ever set foot outside her particular Grundy oasis? Remember, too, that he was only pursuing the course he would have held it a point of honour to pursue if he had never married Marianne at all. Why should his marriage with her make it incumbent on him to dig up a story that his wife had already passed years in ignorance of, without any living creature being perceptibly the worse? No doubt Mrs. Eldridge would have said, with a portentous gush of deep conviction, "She ought to have been told." But why?
At least, the story shows that Challis himself had nothing disgraceful to conceal, and that all his actions were dictated by consideration for others. It is more than likely that an explanation, had the position favoured it, would have ended—if not by placing him in the position of a hero—at least by a discharge with a first-class certificate from the high court of Morality. But the atmosphere teemed with suggestions of malpractice undefined, and the master-hand of Mrs. Eldridge made the most of them.
No explanation took place between Challis and Marianne at the only time when it was easily possible—on the morning after we saw them last. Explanations are like strawberries—bottled up, they spoil. Now, whatever chance there would have been of Challis hearing of the photograph mystery and Mrs. Steptoe's memories was cancelled by the malign arrival on the scene of Mrs. Eldridge and her John, bound for his daily toil at St. Martin's-le-Grand. So, you see, it was early in the morning.
Charlotte had been so uneasy about dear Marianne that she felt she must come over to find out. It was so entirely unexpected. She had been laughing and joking the minute before. So Charlotte thought fit to say, and Challis, to whom it was said privately, detected a flavour of an unasked-for assurance that Marianne was cheerful in his absence. "It" had come quite suddenly, when Marianne went away to speak to Martha. Challis had no means of guessing what "it" had been, except Mrs. Eldridge's note, and a certain demeanour of his wife's, which no doubt had to answer for an expression of Master Bob's, in secret conclave with his sister Cat. According to him, his mater was savage, if you liked, this morning. Challis had gone to his wife's room to ask about "it" as soon as he heard that the servant had abated; and had been told, coldly, that nothing had been the matter that Marianne knew of. His production of Mrs. Eldridge's note was met by, "That's just like Charlotte!" He waited a few moments for counter-inquiry about himself, rather anxious to tell what a failure the Acropolis had turned out; but no curiosity was shown, and he went back to his own room to dress, saying nothing further. Had he been wise, he would have sat on the bed in his pyjamas, and said he meant to stop there until the mystery was accounted for.
Matters got definitely worse when Mrs. Eldridge, whose invasion occurred just at the end of breakfast, took advantage of a chance exit of Marianne's, in connection with housekeeping matters, to follow her and contrive a sympathetic interview within hearing of the two gentlemen. Not that a word was audible, but anyone with the slightest knowledge of human nature would have discerned that one of the speakers, the tone of whose voice was mellow with the opposite sexes of the persons she was speaking of, was recognizing the patience and forbearance of the other under trials, and exhorting her to renewed efforts in the same direction.
"What do you suppose was the matter?" Challis was filling his pipe, as he asked this question of Mr. Eldridge.
"Mean to say you don't know?"
"I certainly don't. Nobody has told me."
"I ain't any help. Don't ask me—that's all! Don't put it on me to say!" Mr. Eldridge, however, implies that his attitude is one of Discretion, not Ignorance. For he closes one eye, an action that can bear no other interpretation. He also shakes his head continuously and gently, as one who would convey to an interviewer the hopelessness of cross-examination.
"I suppose it was nothing but an upset. The weather's trying." It had really been unusually normal. But Mr. Challis was talking as gentlemen do when they are lighting a pipe, and thinking more about whether that's enough than about the topic in hand.
"Stomach!" said Mr. Eldridge, as nearly in a monosyllable as spelling permits. He repeated the word just half-a-dozen times in a run; then added this rider: "Say nervous system, when a lady. Puts it better."
"Something of that sort!" The pipe draws, and the smoker ought to look happy. He doesn't. But, then, the sympathetic murmur, with its unguessed import, of Mrs. Eldridge afar, is reaching his ears. Sudden appreciative gushes, and the firm tone of sound advice, are very unsettling when inarticulate. Cannot that fool John be made to throw a light on the mystery? Try again! "Charlotte told you all about it, John; you know she did!" The Christian names give cordiality. But John is not to be cajoled.
"Tellin's is tellin's," says he; and goes so far as to place a finger against one side of his nose, in token of perspicuity. "Put it at stomach!... Got the right time?"
"That clock's right."
"Then Greenwich is fast. Must see about gettin' off! Gettin' off—gettin' off—gettin' off!" Mr. Eldridge's repetitions no doubt have some bearing on his relations with his fellow-man, but it is not easy to say what. They seem to sanction concurrent event; that is the most one can say. He continued his last repetition even after he had taken his leave, saying he wouldn't wait for Lotty, because she was going the other way, and seeming quite content with his speech-work.
Hence, when Lotty reappeared hurriedly, and was surprised at his departure, having something she must say to him before he went, Challis got very little speech of the lady. All her limited time allowed her to say was that she had had a long talk with dear Marianne, and she was quite sure "it" would be all right now. Only she was convinced it would be so much better to say nothing to her—just to take no notice of "it" and let "it" drop. However, rush she must, or she would never catch John! And rush she did. And Challis grunted, but retired to his own room, and was soon absorbed in the Ostrogoths.
A stand-up fight between Titus and his wife at this period might have saved the situation. It would not have mattered one straw whether it had turned on Grosvenor Square or on the unsolved mystery of the photograph. Anything that led to fiery out-speech would have been a precursor of reconciliation.
It is difficult to tell anything with certainty about any love-affairs. Nobody ever knows anything at all about them; even the two constituents, if called on to explain and analyze themselves, make but a poor show. We know pretty well what the Poet is good for at a pinch. And as for the Man of the World and the Man in the Street—well!—all we can say is, give us the Woman of the World or the Woman in the Street; preferably the latter. But the duty of the story, in reference to the psychology of Challis's two marriages, is to tell what has come to light, or seems most probable—what it thinks or believes, not knows, about the depths of an unfathomable ocean.
Challis, then, being a young man irreligiously brought up—that is to say, made to understand that he was responsible for his behaviour, and that no attempt to shift his sins off on other shoulders would be held fair play—found himself at five-and-twenty in a position that would have been a sore trial to the strongest fortitude. He was, if not actually left in charge of a friend's recently married wife, at any rate in her close confidence; and, after her return to a home and friends from whom her marriage was a secret, the sole depository of that secret. He might never have fallen in love with Kate had they met on fair ground. But a youth unfamiliar with girl-kind that is not of his own belongings—sisters, to wit, and cousins earmarked as sisters—is always in danger if even a moderately pretty or attractive outsider takes him into her confidence. Challis's danger was all the greater owing to his terror of being treacherous to his friend. Perhaps, if the avowal of his passion had been legitimately possible, he might never have suspected himself of any passion to avow. But when you believe your conscience will brand you as a traitor to all eternity if you pursue a particular course, you naturally want to pursue it.
So it was a great relief to him when a letter, shown to him alone by the terrified girl, disclosed the atrocious deception that had been practised on her, and the miserable position in which she was placed. No wonder the avowal came. Our own belief is that it would have come, exactly the same, to a girl of almost any personality. Nothing could have averted it, short of a hare-lip, an isolated projecting tusk, or—suppose we say—onions. And this girl had pretty lips, and the interview occurred after tea.
Information is scanty about what followed. But no serious inquiry can have been made into the truth of Mr. Home's accusation against himself. The exact nature of it—the particular illegality he appealed to in support of his case—does not come to light. There really was no one to inquire, except Challis, unless the whole story had come out. It did not. A twelvemonth later Kate exchanged the name of Verrall—whether rightly or wrongly borne—for that of Challis, and two years later Master Bob was born, and his poor little mother had died of him. He showed no compunction, but kicked and made a horrible noise.
His father was only reasonably overwhelmed by his loss. It may be that, like many another inexperienced youth, he had not reckoned with the difficulties this world's Bobs and their like are apt to inflict on their family before they are formally enrolled in it, especially when the mothers they select have nervous temperaments. Challis felt, when he was left alone with the baby, that he had had a fierce tussle with Fate, and had come out of it severely punished. Probably, if his wife had survived, and Bob had lived to be a year old, without alarms about another brother or sister, his father would have been much less easily reconciled to his widowerhood. He would then have had a short draught of the nectar of life at its best; that is, if—as we suppose—a tempestuous excitability, which appeared two or three months after marriage, was entirely due to Master Bob. Mental unsoundness seems to have been denied; but, then, surely someone must have affirmed it?
As it was, Bob did a good deal—the best he could—to make up for the mischief he had done. He was a satisfaction to his father; and, being taken in hand by his Aunt Marianne, then a girl of eighteen, and in a sense adopted by her, became a strong connecting link between the two, and was really the agency that brought about Challis's second marriage four or five years later. It would have happened sooner, no doubt, but for the anomalous and grotesque condition of English Law, which, till a year or so since, made certain marriages diversely legal in different portions of the British Empire. The Angels might weep, but if they cried their eyes out it would still remain impossible for a man to wed with his deceased wife's sister on certain square yards of it. He had to be domiciled in a special portion of the Empire on which the sun never sets to do that, and yet live ungrundied. Marianne was slow to give in on the point. She had, in common with many of her countrywomen, a religious conviction—a belief in the plenary inspiration of any book in a religious binding—you know the sort. She may have had others, but the qualifications of her intelligence were not such as to enable bystanders to discover their exact nature. Alfred Challis certainly never did so. And this religious conviction did not give way until her brother-in-law deliberately wrote formal proposals to a Miss Bax, with elbows, whom she hated; to a fascinating young Jewish widow, who had lawlessly said she would just as soon marry a Gentile as a Jew; and to the daughter of a Unitarian minister. He took the three letters to her, and said, "Now, Polly Anne, which is it to be? You may burn two of these; the other one I post." Polly Anne promptly destroyed the two last; her brother-in-law was blasphemous and impious enough already without that, she said. But Emma Bax!—no, when she came to think of it, it was impossible! However, Challis directed the letter and, as it were, invested a postage-stamp in intimidation; so there was nothing for it but to throw her arms around his neck and surrender at discretion. Anything rather than Emma Bax! He kissed her tears away and said: "You know, Polly Anne, after all, you're only poor Kate's half-sister, when all's said and done!" This she found very consolatory.
It was a pity, at this juncture, that the girl's mother was a fool. Had she been a reasonably good guardian for her daughter, she would at least have insisted on the nuptials being celebrated in a land where the marriage would have been held lawful. But she contented herself with condemning the union in the abstract, and flinging Holy Writ—also in the abstract—at its perpetrators. The Bench of Bishops would have done the same, no doubt; but that Bench would have forbidden the banns, to a certainty. As she remained silent, and no outsider could be expected to screw himself up to prohibition-point in the case of a half-sister, the pair were wedded by a priest who knew nothing of them beyond their bare names, and never really became man and wife, as they would have done if they had been married sixty-odd years before; unless, indeed, some busybody had obtained a decree annulling the marriage—as the Law, with a keen sense of fun, directed in the days of our great-grandfathers.
The notable point in the psychology of these two marriages surely is that in neither case was the bride the free selection of the bridegroom, except in the sense that he was absolutely free to take or leave either. He never, strictly speaking, fell in love at all. He found himself in a well, and love trickled in. But even in this metaphor he never was over head and ears. He never wished to be a glove on any hand, to press any cheek. To call him passionately in love with either of the two sisters would have been just as absurd as to say that Romeo "got very fond" of Rosaline and Juliet. Exchange the phrases, and each fits its place. Challis got very fond of both his wives, being an affectionate sort of chap. But he remained a stranger to the divine intoxication which is known in its fulness only to Romeo and his like, and which some men never know at all.
Short of this last sort may often be found men who have escaped Romeo's experience early in life, yet whom some cunning context of circumstance may just upset, and convert for the moment into idiots as infatuated as the young Montague and Capulet we have cried over so many a time. For our own part, we count none quite safe from what is really an ennobling phase of sheer madness; except it be, for instance, a Charles the Second, a Rochester, a Tiberius, or a Joe Smith. Id genus omne is safe enough.
CHAPTER XXIII
HOW CHALLIS CALLED ON MISS ARKROYD IN GROSVENOR SQUARE. A SPRAINED ANKLE. ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE. KING SOLOMON AND HIS DJINN BOTTLE
Mr. Elphinstone, responsible for No. 101, Grosvenor Square, and the morals and dignity of the family that dwelt in it, was not without uneasiness about the literary and artistic circles that his two young ladies had elected to move in. This description is superficial; it judges from externals. Say that Mr. Elphinstone's appearance conveyed that he, like Atlas, had the whole house on his shoulders—was practically answerable for the honourable repute of all his subordinates, and morally for that of his superiors. That was the construction Alfred Challis felt obliged to put on such flawless shaving; such a weighty deference to the slightest personalities—his own, for instance—on production of adequate credentials; such a hypnotic suggestion of having foregone an episcopate elsewhere to take service with a beloved family whose interests he had at heart. It was a construction not free from the derision Mr. Challis was in the habit of meting out to dignitaries of all sorts. In this case he may not have been free from personal feeling; for he must have been aware that Elphinstone regarded him as an interloper—one who outraged the sacred traditions of the household, calling at unearthly hours in a soft felt hat, and smoking on the doorstep until compelled to throw away too much cigar by hearing that the family was at home.
This is substantially what was happening about two hours after Mr. Eldridge had declined to shed any light on anything at all, and his wife had departed enjoining silence about Heaven-knows-what. Challis, désœuvré by the mystification, had found himself unable to invent any single thing a Scythian mercenary would have been likely to say in English blank verse, and an approach towards Marianne of a conciliatory sort was met by, "I must see Steptoe now about the dinner." Unfortunately, this speech was absolutely passionless; if it had only been tempersome, there might have been a row. And a row—as the Press delights to phrase it—might have spelt salvation. But Challis could see in it nothing that justified more than a languid "All right!" on his part. And he had departed to the banks of the Danube again, with no better success than before.
Presently his wife knocked at his door in an excluded, ostracised sort of way, and he got up to open it. She was dressed for going out. "I won't disturb you," she said. "Don't come out. I only wanted to say that if the man comes about the gas you had better see him, because he won't believe Steptoe, and the meter is certainly out of order. That's all."
It was one of those queer little turning-points of existence. Challis was not ready with any reply that would have caused a moment's delay and saved the situation. Before he could manage more than general assent, Marianne was gone, too far for anything short of demonstrative recall. He did not see his way to this, and the chance was lost.
He was unable to work, and wanted to go out. But he had been, as it were, put in bond on account of the gas-man, who wouldn't believe. He failed to console himself by an accusation of Sadduceeism against that functionary, and repeated Blake—