The castaway

Gordon was alone in the vehicle, for Fletcher rode outside. He set his face to the fogged pane, catching the panorama of dark hedges, gouged gravelly runnels and stretches of murky black, with occasional instantaneous sense of detail—dripping bank, sodden rhododendron and mildewed masonry—vivid in a dull, yellow, soundless flare of July lightning. A gauze of unbroken grayness, a straggling light—the lodge. A battlemented wall plunging out of the darkness—and Gordon saw the Abbey, its tiers of ivied cloisters uninhabited since Henry the Eighth battered the old pile to ruin, its gaunt and unsightly forts built for some occupant’s whim, and the wavering, fog-wreathed lake reflecting lighted windows. This was Newstead in which the bearers of his title had lived and died, the gloomy seat of an ancient house stained by murder and insanity, of which he was the sole representative.

What was he thinking as he sat in the gloomy dining-room, with Rushton, the footman he had trained to his own service, standing behind his chair? Of his mother first of all. He had never, even as a child, distinguished a sign of real tenderness in her moments of tempestuous caresses. His maturer years had grown to regard her with a half-scornful, half good-humored tolerance. He had shrugged at her tempers, dubbing her “The Honorable Kitty” or his “Amiable Alecto.” His letters to her had shown only a nice sense of filial duty: many of them began with “Dear Madam”; more had been signed simply with his name. Yet now he felt an aching hope that in her seclusion she had not seen the unkindest of the stories of him. His half-sister—now on her way from the north of England—absorbed with her family cares, would have missed the brunt of the attacks; his mother had been within their range. He recalled with a pang that she had treasured with a degree of pride a single review of his earliest book which had not joined in the sneering chorus.

He pushed back his chair, dismissed the footman, and alone passed to the hall and ascended the stair. At the turn of the balustrade a shaded lamp drowsed like a monster glow-worm. In his own room a low fire burned, winking redly from the coronetted bed-posts, and a lighted candle stood on the dressing-table. He looked around the familiar apartment a moment uncertainly, then crossed to a carved cabinet above a writing-desk and took therefrom a bottle of claret. The cabinet had belonged to his father, dead many years before. Gordon thought of him as he stood with the bottle in his hand, staring fixedly at the dull, carved ebony of the swinging door.

His father! “Mad Jack Gordon” the world had called him when he ran away with the Marchioness of Carmathen to break her heart! Handsome he had been still when he married for her money the heiress of Gight, Gordon’s mother. A stinging memory recalled the only glimpse he had ever had of that father—a tall man in uniform on an Aberdeen street, looking critically at a child with a lame leg.

Gordon winced painfully. He felt with a sharper agony the sensitive pang of the cripple, the shame of misshapenness that all his life had clung like an old-man-of-the-sea. It had not only stung his childhood; it had stolen from him the romance of his youth—the one gleam that six years ago had died.

Six years! For a moment time fell away like rotten shale from about a crystal. The room, the wine-cabinet, faded into a dim background, and on this, as if on a theater curtain, dissolving pictures painted themselves flame-like.

He was back in his Harrow days now, at home for his last vacation.

“George,” his mother had remarked one day, looking up from a letter she was reading, “I’ve some news for you. Take out your handkerchief, for you will need it.”

“Nonsense! What is it?”

“Mary Chaworth is married.”

“Is that all?” he had replied coldly; but an expression, peculiar, impossible to describe, had passed over his face. He had never afterward seen her or spoken her name.

“Mary!” he murmured, and his hand set down the bottle on the table. Love—such love as his verses told of—he had come to consider purely subjective, a mirage, a simulacrum to which actual life possessed no counterpart. Yet at that moment he was feeling the wraith of an old thrill, his nostrils smelling a perfume like a dead pansy’s ghost.

He withdrew his hand from the bottle and his fingers clenched. How it hurt him—the sudden stab! For memory had played him a trick; it had dragged a voice out of the past. It was her voice—her words that she had uttered in a careless sentence meant for other ears, one that through those years had tumbled and reëchoed in some under sea-cavern of his mind—“Do you think I could ever care for that lame boy?”

He smiled grimly. She had been right. Nature had set him apart, made him a loup-garou, a solitary hob-goblin. He had been unclubbable, sauvage, even at Cambridge. And yet he had had real friendships there; one especially.

Gordon’s free hand fumbled for his fob and his fingers closed on a little cornelian heart. It had been a keepsake from his college classmate, Matthews, drowned in the muddy waters of the Cam.

He released the bottle hurriedly, strode to the window and flung it open. A gust of rain struck his face and spluttered in the candle, and the curtain flapped like the wing of some ungainly bird. Out in the dark, beneath a clump of larches, glimmered whitely the monument he had erected to “Boatswain,” his Newfoundland. The animal had gone mad.

“Some curse hangs over me and mine!” he muttered. “I never could keep alive even a dog that I liked or that liked me!”

A combined rattle and crash behind him made him turn. The wind had blown shut the door of the cabinet with a smart bang, and a yellow object, large and round, had toppled from its shelf, fallen and rolled to his very feet.

He started back, his nerves for the instant shaken. It was a skull, mottled like polished tortoise-shell, mounted in dull silver as a drinking-cup. He had unearthed the relic years before with a heap of stone coffins amid the rubbish of the Abbey’s ruined priory—grim reminder of some old friar—and its mounting had been his own fancy. He had forgotten its very existence.

Now, as it lay supine, yet intrusive, the symbol at one time of lastingness and decay, it filled him with a painful fascination.

Picking it up, he set it upright on the desk, seized the bottle, knocked off its top against the marble mantel and poured the fantastic goblet full.

“Death and life!” he mused. “One feeds the other, each in its turn. Life! yet it should not be too long; I have no conception of any existence which duration would not render tiresome. How else fell the angels? They were immortal, heavenly and happy. It is the lastingness of life that is terrible; I see no horror in a dreamless sleep.”

He put out his hand to the goblet, but withdrew it.

“No—wait!” he said, and seating himself at the desk, he seized a pen. The lines he wrote, rapidly and with scarcely an alteration, were to live for many a long year—index fingers pointing back to that dark mood that consumed him then:

He repeated the last stanza aloud and raised the goblet in both hands.

“Rhyming and revelling—what else counts? To drink the wine of youth to the dregs and then—good night! Is there anything beyond? Who knows? He who cannot tell! Who tells us there is? He who does not know!”

Did the dead know?

He set the wine down, pushing it from him, sprang up, seized the candle and entered the room on the other side of the corridor. The bed-curtains were drawn close and a Bible lay open on the night-stand. He wondered with a kind of impersonal pity if the book had held comfort for her at the last.

He held the candle higher so its rays lighted the page: But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.... In the morning thou shall say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!

It stared at him plainly in black letters, an age-old agony of wretchedness. Had this been the keynote of her lonely, fitful, vehement life? Had years of misery robbed her—as it had robbed him, too? A distressed doubt, like a dire finger of apprehension, touched him; he put out his hand and drew aside the curtains.

Looking, he shuddered. Death had lent her its mystery, its ineffaceable dignity. He recognized it with a new and inexplicable feeling, like rising from the grave. Back of the placid look, in abeyance, in the stirlessness of the unringed hands—she had lost her wedding-ring years ago—some quality, strange, unintimate, lay confronting him. He remembered his words to Hobhouse in the street—words that had not been cold on his lips when he read Fletcher’s message. Ever since, they had lain rankling like a raw burn in some crevice of his brain. “Lame brat!” And yet, beneath her frantic rages, under the surface he had habitually disregarded, what if in her own way she had really loved him!

A clutching pain took possession of him, a sense of physical sickness and anguish. He dropped the curtain, and stumbled from the room, down the long stair, calling for the footman.

“Rushton,” he shouted, “get the muffles! Let us have a bout like the old times.” He threw off his coat, pushed the chairs aside and bared his arms. “The gloves, Rushton, and be quick about it!”

The footman hesitated, a half-scared expression in his look.

“Never fear,” said Gordon, and laughed—a tightening laugh that strained the cords of his throat. “Put them on! That’s right! What are you staring at? Do you think she will hear you? Not she! Put up your hands—so! Touched, by the Lord! Not up to your old style, Rushton! You never used to spar so villainously. You will disgrace the fancy. Ah-h!” And he knocked him sprawling.

Rushton scrambled to his feet as the housekeeper entered, dismay upon her mask-like relic of a face. Gordon was very white and both noticed that his eyes were full of tears.

Long after midnight, when the place was quiet, the housekeeper heard an unaccustomed sound issuing from the chamber where the dead woman lay. She took a light and entered. The candle had burned out, and she saw Gordon sitting in the dark beside the bed.

He spoke in a broken voice:

“Oh, Mrs. Muhl,” he said, “she was my mother! After all, one can have but one in this world, and I have only just found it out!”