The History of David Grieve Part 113

'Then we can do nothing,' said David.

'Nothing effectual, alas!' said the doctor, slowly. 'Palliatives, of course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not be much pain.'

'Will it be long?'

David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking out of window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words.

'I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. 'This return is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I don't like.

But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir!--have courage for her and yourself.'

The words were not mere plat.i.tudes--the soul of a good man looked from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening.

Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected himself.

'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to some warm place.'

'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it when I come again to-night.'

'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs, 'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is, with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing!

and yesterday she was so cheerful--she would tell me all about her boy.'

CHAPTER IX

The history of the weeks that followed shall be partly told in David's own words, gathered from those odds-and-ends of paper, old envelopes, the half-sheets of letters, on which he would write sometimes in those hours when he was necessarily apart from Lucy, thrusting them on his return between the leaves of his locked journal, clinging to them as the only possible record of his wife's ebbing life, yet pa.s.sionately avoiding the sight of them when they were once written.

'RYDAL, AMBLESIDE: _May 5th_--We arrived this afternoon. The day has been glorious. The mountains round the head of the lake, as we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage might not shake her, stood out in the sun; the light wind drove the cloud-shadows across their blues and purples; the water was a sheet of light; the larches were all out, though other trees are late; and every breath was perfume.

'But she was too weary to look at it; and before we had gone two miles, it seemed to me that I could think of nothing but the hateful length of the drive, and the ups and downs of the road.

'When we arrived, she would walk into the cottage, and before nurse or I realised what she was doing, she went straight through the little pa.s.sage which runs from front to back, out into the garden. She stood a moment--in her shawls, with the little white hood she has devised for herself drawn close round her head and face--looking at the river with its rocks and foaming water, at the shoulder of Nab Scar above the trees, at the stone house with the red blinds opposite.

'"It looks just the same," she said, and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

'We brought her in--nurse and I--and when she had been put comfortably on the low couch I had sent from London beforehand, and had taken some food, she was a little cheered. She made us draw her to the window of the little back sitting-room, and she lay looking out till it was almost dark. But as I foresaw, the pain of coming is more than equal to any pleasure there may be.

'Yet she would come. During those last days in London, when she would hardly speak to us, when she lay in the dark in that awful room all day, and every attempt to feed her or comfort her made her angry, I could not, for a long time, get her to say what she wished about moving, except that she would not go back to Manchester.

'Her hand-gla.s.s could not be kept from her, and one morning she cried bitterly when she saw that she could no longer so arrange her laces as to completely hide the disfigurement of the right side of the face.

'"No! I will _never_ go back to Merton Road!" she cried, throwing down the gla.s.s; "no one shall see me!"

'But at night, after I hoped she was asleep, she sent nurse to say that she wanted to go to--_Rydal!_--to the same cottage by the Rotha we had stayed at on our honeymoon. Nurse said she could--she could have an invalid-carriage from door to door. Would I write for the rooms at once? And Sandy could join us there.

'So, after nine years, we are here again. The house is empty. We have our old rooms. Nothing is changed in the valley. After she was asleep, I went out along the river, keeping to a tiny path on the steep right bank till I reached a wooden bridge, and then through a green bit, fragrant with fast-springing gra.s.s and flowers, to that point beside the lake I remember so well. I left her there one day, sitting, and dabbling in the water, while I ran up Loughrigg. She was nineteen. How she tripped over the hills!

'To-night there was a faint moon. The air was cold, but quite still, and the reflections, both of the islands and of Nab Scar, seemed to sink into unfathomed depths of shadowy water. Loughrigg rose boldly to my left against the night sky; I could see the rifle-b.u.t.ts and the soft blackness of the great larch-plantation on the side of Silver How.

'There, to my right, was the tower of the little church, whitish against the woods, and close beside it, amid the trees, I felt the presence of Wordsworth's house, though I could not see it.

'O Poet! who wrote for me, not knowing--oh, heavenly valley!--you have but one voice; it haunts my ears:--

_'Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine, too, is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed._'

'_May 10th_.--She never speaks of dying, and I dare not speak of it. But sometimes she is like a soul wandering in terror through a place of phantoms. Her eyes grow large and strained, she pushes me away from her. And she often wakes at night, sinking in black gulfs of fear, from which I cannot save her.

'Oh, my G.o.d! my heart is torn, my life is sickened with pity! Give me some power to comfort--take from me this impotence, this numbness. She, so little practised in suffering, so much of a child still, called to bear this _monstrous_ thing. Savage, incredible Nature! But behind Nature there is G.o.d--

'To-night she asked me to pray with her--asked it with reproach.

"You never say good things to me now!" And I could not explain myself.

'It was in this way. When Dora was with her, she used to read and pray with her. I would not have interfered for the world. When Dora left, I thought she would use the little manual of prayers for the sick that Dora had left behind; the nurse, who is a religious woman, and reads to her a good deal, would have read this whenever she wished. One night I offered to read it to her myself, but she would not let me. And for the rest--in spite of our last talk--I was so afraid of jarring her, of weakening any thought that might have sustained her. 'But to-night she asked me, and for the first time since our earliest married life I took her hand and prayed.

Afterwards she lay still, till suddenly her lip began to quiver.

'"I wasn't ever so very bad. I did love you and Sandy, and I did help that girl,--you know--that Dora knew, who went wrong. And I am so ill--SO ill!"'

'MAY 20TH.--A fortnight has pa.s.sed. Sandy and his nurse are lodging at a house on the hill; every morning he comes down here, and I take him for a walk. He was very puzzled and grave at first when he saw her, but now he has grown used to her look, and he plays merrily about among the moss-grown rocks beside the river, while she lies in the slung couch, to which nurse and I carry her on a little stretcher, watching him. 'There was a bright hour this morning. We are in the midst of a spell of dry and beautiful weather, such as often visits this rainy country in the early summer, before any visitors come. The rhododendrons and azaleas are coming out in the gardens under Loughrigg--some little copses here and there are sheets of blue--and the green is rus.h.i.+ng over the valley. We had put her among the rocks under a sycamore-tree--a singularly beautiful tree, with two straight stems dividing its rounded ma.s.ses of young leaf. There were two wagtails perching on the stones in the river, and swinging their long tails; and the light flickered through the trees on to the water foaming round the stones or slipping in brown cool sheets between them. There was a hawthorn-tree in bloom near by; in the garden of the house opposite a woman was hanging out some clothes to dry; the Grasmere coach pa.s.sed with a clatter, and Sandy with the two children from the lodgings ran out to the bridge to look at it. 'Yes, she had a moment of enjoyment! I bind the thought of it to my heart. Lizzie was sitting sewing near the edge of the river, that she might look after Sandy. He was told not to climb on to the stones in the current of the stream, but as he was bent on catching the vain, provoking wagtails who strutted about on them, the prohibition was unendurable. As soon as Lizzie's head was bent over her work, he would clamber in and out till he reached some quite forbidden rock; and then, looking back with dancing eyes and the tip of his little tongue showing between his white teeth, he would say, "Go on with your work, Nana, DARLING!"--And his mother's look never left him all the time. 'Once he had been digging with his little spade among the fine grey gravel silted up here and there among the hollows of the rocks. He had been digging with great energy, and for May the air was hot. Lizzie looked up and said to him, "Sandy, it's time for me to take you to bed"--that is, for his midday sleep. "Yes,"

he said, with a languid air, sitting down on a stone with his spade between his knees--"yes, I think I'd better come to bed. My heart is very dreary."

'What do you mean?'

'My heart is very dreary--dreary means tired, you know.'

'Oh, indeed!--where is your heart?'

'Here,' he said, laying his hand lackadaisically on the small of his back.

'And then she smiled, for the first time for so many, many days! I came to sit by her; she left her hand in mine; and after the child was gone the morning slipped by peacefully, with only the sound of the river and the wheels of a few pa.s.sing carts to break the silence.

'In the afternoon she asked me if I should not have to go back to Manchester. How could all those men and those big printing-rooms get on without me? I told her that John reported to me every other day; that a batch of our best men had sent word to me, through him, that everything was going well, and I was not to worry; that there had been a strike of some importance among the Manchester compositors, but that our men had not joined.

'She listened to it all, and then she shut her eyes and said:--

'"I'm glad you did that about the men. I don't understand quite--but I'm glad."

'... You can see nothing of her face now in its white draperies but the small, pointed chin and nose; and then the eyes, with their circles of pain, the high centre of the brow, and a wave or two of her pretty hair tangled in the lace edge of the hood.

'"_My darling,--my darling! G.o.d have mercy upon us!_"'

'_June 2nd.--"For the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment._" How profoundly must he who spoke the things reported in this pa.s.sage have conceived of marriage! _For the hardness of your hearts._ Himself governed wholly by the inward voice, unmoved by the mere external authority of the great Mosaic name, he handles the law presented to him with a sort of sad irony.

The words imply the presence in him of a slowly formed and pa.s.sionately held ideal. Neither sin, nor suffering, nor death can nor ought to destroy the marriage bond, once created. It is not there for our pleasure, nor for its mere natural object,--but to form the soul.

'The world has marched since that day, in law--still more, as it supposes, in sentiment. But are we yet able to bear such a saying?

'... Then compare with these words the magnificent outburst in which, a little earlier, he sweeps from his path his mother and his brethren. There are plentiful signs--take the "corban" pa.s.sage, for instance, still more, the details of the Prodigal Son--of the same deep and tender thinking as we find in the most authentic sayings about marriage applied to the parental and brotherly relation. But he himself, realising, as it would seem, with peculiar poignancy, the sacredness of marriage and the claim of the family, is yet alone, and must be alone to the end. The fabric of the Kingdom rises before him; his soul burns in the fire of his message; and the lost sheep call.

'She has been fairly at ease this afternoon, and I have been lying on the gra.s.s by the lake, pondering these things. The narrative of Mark, full as it is already of legendary accretion, brings one so close to him; the living breath and tone are in one's ears.'