Secret Bread Part 29

"I've come to say good-bye," went on the voice. "Won't 'ee just say good-bye to I? I'm going to another world this time, not to Australy or Californy. I can't stand life any longer, Phoebe; you'll just wish I a good journey for the last? 'Tes a hard voyage, I fear."

Her self-control broke; she could no longer hold her tongue, a sick belief in his words struggling with the conviction, born of her wish, that he would never carry out his threat.

"Go away, Archelaus! I wish you'd go away and leave me in peace. I don't believe you'll do no such wickedness; you're only trying to frighten me, and it's wicked, with me so near my time and no one with me. Go away, Archelaus!"

"You don't believe me ...? Just lie there in your soft bed and listen, then," said Archelaus through the door. "You'll soon knaw whether I'm a man to be believed or not. Good-bye, lil' Phoebe!"

She heard him go downstairs, caught the well-known creak of two of them--one at the top, the other near the bottom, which always creaked; she could gauge his descent by them. Then came the harder ring of his boots upon the nags of the pa.s.sage. Then for a while all was quiet, while she lay with straining ears trying to ignore the sound of her own heart that she might better hear any sounds below.

Upon her incredulous senses came a faint scrabbling noise, a scuffling sound, clearly audible through the old worn boarding of the floor; it was followed by the sharp clatter of an overturned chair. Then came to her a noise so often described by him that for one moment it seemed she had heard it before, as sometimes in a day after a vivid dream the events dreamed of seem for an irrational recurring moment actually to have happened. A noise of choking....

It went on and on, a sound no acting could have counterfeited--a wild choking, a frenzy of protest made by compressed lungs and windpipe. The choking went on and then grew fainter; at last it died away. Phoebe lay soaked in sweat, her hands clutching the side of the bed, her rising beats of pulses and heart confusing the sense of sound so much that she hardly knew when the suggestive noise from below had really ceased.

It might have only been a few minutes she stayed there, it might have been an hour or more, for all she could have told; but at last, driven by her fear, she half-fell from the bed and found the door. She drew the bolt with fingers that did not feel it, opened the door, and crept to the head of the stairs. Not a sound came up to her. She put one bare foot forward, drew it back, then impelled by something stronger than her own will, she began the descent, holding on by the wall. She went down the first flight, turned the corner--without looking up, for she felt very giddy--and then went on down the stairs, still groping. At their foot she took a step or two along the pa.s.sage and suddenly felt the shock of something solid and hairy against her face. She screamed out and looked up and saw what it was that had made those ominous sounds, that had choked out life swinging from a beam of the hall. Poor Wanda hung dead, her head limply to one side, her tongue out, her furry paws, that had pattered with so much energy and glee in her master's service, dangling helplessly.

CHAPTER III

PHOEBE PAYS TOLL

When Ishmael returned a few hours later no one had thought to cut down the body of Wanda. Everyone was too occupied with Phoebe, and those people who had come in by the hall had merely thrust the dangling obstruction aside and hurried on, with only a thought to it as the cause of the trouble upstairs. Ishmael, finding his beloved dog hanging thus, coming on it without a word of warning, felt a shock, a sense of unbelievable outrage that made him for a moment or two think he must be dreaming or out of his mind. He put out a hand and touched the pitiful thing before conviction came upon him, and with a shout of rage and pain he gathered Wanda in his arms, calling her name, hoping for a twitch of life. Then he whipped out his knife and sawed through the cord and lowered the body upon the floor, felt for the heart, turned up the dropped eyelids, even shook the inanimate stiffening form of his pet. He knew it was in vain--that never again would she jump trustingly upon him, never again would she appear absurdly with one of his slippers in her wide mouth that always seemed to smile at the joke, coming down the drive to greet him; that never again would he have her for his untiring companion on his walks or upon the plateau where he was wont to lie and look into her wise eyes and talk to her without fear of contradiction, receiving that full measure of admiration and belief that only a dog gives. So much was his grief, but overpowering that simpler emotion was a sick rage. The knowledge that rough, brutal hands must have carried out this outrage, that in an agony of fear and astonishment she must have yielded up her breath, struck at his heart. He got to his feet, and carrying the body into the parlour, laid it down, then went through to the kitchen. The dairymaid was standing over a kettle of water that was heating on the fire; the other maid stood near her. They had evidently been talking together earnestly when he burst in upon them; they had not even heard his approach. Both girls seemed excited, charged with portent beyond the ordinary. They stood staring at Ishmael, mouths open.

"What is the meaning of it?" he shouted at them. "How is it you are both in here like this, and with--that left in the pa.s.sage? Has everyone gone mad? What has happened?"

"Oh, maister!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed one of them, "havn't 'ee heard?"

"Heard what? I come in and find my poor dog--" He broke off; he could not bring himself to utter the words that would tell what he had come upon.

"Missus got out of the bed and found someone had hung the dog, and her was took all of a sudden, and the doctor is overstairs weth her now,"

the girl informed him; and through all her commiseration the ghoulish delight of her kind in misfortune showed. "She'm mortal bad, they do say," she added.

Ishmael stood still where he was. His mind had been subjected to too violent an onslaught for this fresh news to break upon it with much added weight. Dimly aware that the standard of these other people would expect him hardly to notice the death of his dog when his wife was in danger, he did not speak again of Wanda, but all his loyalty of affection went out to the furry body lying helplessly in the deserted parlour, as all his sense of horror had been absorbed by the finding of it. After that everything seemed to him more or less dreamlike; an impersonal pity and anxiety he felt and deeply, but it was as though he stood and looked on at Phoebe from outside of himself as much as from outside of her.

He was first stirred to active realisation by the expression of her physical pain; when he heard her cries, rising and falling, piercing the calm autumn night, he went into the garden and tried to stop his ears, but the thin poignancy of those cries still rang in them. He went back to the parlour, and picking up the body of poor Wanda, carried it out to a spot of the garden where the sun fell the longest, and there, beneath a rambler rose bush, began to dig her grave furiously. Suddenly it struck him as rather awful that it should be a grave he was busy over at such a moment, and he stopped. Then his deadly sense of proportion that never would leave him alone for long told him how little it really mattered, and he went on with his work. Wanda was covered by a smoothed patch of earth--he wanted no mound to bring the memory of the pity of her before him--by the time the flame in his lantern had flickered and died, and the late moon was riding high in the sky. He put on his coat and went again to the house.

Phoebe's ordeal was not over till broad day had appeared and the usual sounds of farm-life had perforce begun again. With them there mingled a fresh note--the cry of the new-born child, insistent, wailing, plaintive; but the cries of its mother had ceased. She lay silent in her exhaustion, amid the dim looming of the horror that had encompa.s.sed her, and she showed no interest even in the desired babe that had been laid in the curve of her arm as she had pictured him not twelve hours before.

The ordeal had been too much for Phoebe in her weak condition; she was never to recover from the terror of that minute or hour when she had lain and listened, as she thought, and as he had meant her to think, to Archelaus hanging himself in the pa.s.sage below. The child, though born prematurely and for the first few weeks a sickly little creature enough, gradually strengthened, but Phoebe's life flickered lower each hour.

She did not seem frightened at the approach of death, if she realised it, which was doubtful. It was as though she had used up all of emotion before and had no strength left to indulge in any now. That was how Ishmael too had felt all those first hours after his homecoming; but with a short spell of heavy, irresistible sleep the power to feel returned to him, and he was even surprised at the depth to which he felt a pang. He had not "loved" Phoebe in the sense in which that much-abused word is generally used; he had felt for her a pa.s.sion which was in itself a reaction and an affection which had diminished and not augmented in their life together. But intimacy and custom go far towards producing that sense of knowledge of another human being which makes the imagination translate what the other is suffering into terms of self, and that is after all the method by which the most vivid human sympathy is evoked. He felt he knew her so well--her aims and ideas, her likes and little gusty hates, her sweetnesses and her pettiness--that he suffered with her now more acutely than she for herself.

Also, as her life drew out, and that feeling of something focussing, of many tangled threads all being drawn together, which the approach of death gives, took hold of the watchers, all the external things which go to make life fell away from him and the stark roots of it stood out.

This had been his mate, this fragile little thing lying there, her listless eyes not meeting his, her limp fingers not responding to any touch. She had been nearer to him physically than any other human being, and that she had been further mentally was swamped in that thought in the hour when she was dying of the nearness.... For he had the guilty feeling of the man whose wife dies in childbirth, and though he told himself that whatever pa.s.sing brute had wantonly hung the harmless dog had brought about this tragedy, that could not altogether absolve him.

His poor little Phoebe--he had always known her soft heart for animals, but even he had not guessed that the tragedy of Wanda would affect her so--she who had seen so many animals killed with much less sickening than he himself.

As he sat by the bed there flashed on him an irrational memory of that day in the field when the girls had found a wounded toad amidst the oat-sheaves, and how he had come up to them as they cl.u.s.tered round it in their pale gowns. It had been Blanche who had been most articulate in her pity, and yet Blanche had not scrupled to hurt him when it suited her. Phoebe, till these months of irritation and the dislike which had seemed to spring in her, had never wilfully hurt anyone. He felt he knew all of Phoebe there had been to know, and his heart softened over her as she slipped away from any power of his to tell her so.

That flattened little form under the crumpled coverlet was Phoebe's, was the same body with which she had given him so much delight. This was the Phoebe who had hung about his neck in the valley and smothered his words upon his lips with kisses--she who had taught him her own knowledge of love, that instinctive knowledge of Aspasia and her sisters; it was through her he had become a man. So he felt now looking at her.

With dawn, the day after the child's birth, it became plain that she could hold the frail thread of her life no longer. The nurse sat on one side of the bed; the doctor had not yet come back after leaving to attend another case. The child lay beside her, because the only time she spoke or showed any interest that night she had asked for it. Now she lay either asleep or already unconscious, her hair all pushed away from her face, which had fallen into hollows. She looked far older than her years--older than it would have been possible to imagine she ever could look.

Ishmael sat very still, his mind as quiescent as his body; it was as though it had been hypnotised by its steady concentration on her approaching death as by the steady keeping of the eyes fixed on some one glittering object. All around that one point thought had ceased; impalpable walls shut off from consciousness everything else in the scheme of things. The focussing in the quiet room sharpened, grew more intense; the liquid light of dawn began to flood the air, and a bright shaft shot across the hill as the sun swam up over the rim of the moor.

It fell across the bed, and Phoebe stirred and opened her eyes. Their gaze rested blankly on Ishmael, wandered round the room, then fell to the round head against her shoulder.

The shaft of sun lay upon the baby's reddish fair fluff of hair, and the brightness of it seemed to arrest Phoebe's look, as it might have the unreasoning gaze of a child. She put out one wavering hand and tried to touch it; her direction was uncertain, and the hand fell again without reaching more than the outskirts of the beam. Thinking she wished to touch the child, the nurse guided her hand, and as Phoebe felt her fingers fall about the curve of its head a faint look of content pa.s.sed across her face. Then she tried to make as though to lift her hand, but it fell sideways. The nurse moved the baby nearer her, but it was not that that Phoebe wanted; she kept trying to touch the gleam of sun upon the white quilt. Ishmael felt a pang go through him as he remembered the girl who had once before tried to pick the sun....

A few moments later the child, as though stirred by some prescience, began to whimper and make little struggling movements--Phoebe had died as simply as she had lived, and as secretively.

CHAPTER IV

THE DISCOVERING OF NICKY

There followed for Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect required from a newly-made widower. Later, after the funeral was over and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down again, with the incongruous addition of a nurse, he began to feel that unkind touch of the ludicrous which accompanies the position of a young man left with a baby on his hands. He was ashamed of this feeling and tried to suppress it, but it was there nevertheless. It ceased to twinge when Va.s.sie came down, her husband with her, to pay him a visit--partly because, he guessed, it was to see that all was being done for the baby's welfare in such a masculine house that she had come.

Va.s.sie was resplendent, and if she did not love her husband ecstatically she was intensely proud of him. She had become an enthusiastic Radical, and talked of the rights of the people as to the manner bred. Ishmael suppressed a smile, feeling himself completely the embodiment of opposite views, and liked her husband in spite of it. He was just not quite a gentleman--a little too vivid, too clever, too emphatic; but that he would go far even the Parson believed. Ishmael was grateful to the pair for coming, and never asked Va.s.sie why she, who held such socialistic views, had not come to stay when Phoebe was alive.

Afterwards he realised the chief debt he owed to Va.s.sie was that she first opened his eyes to the delightfulness of his child. One evening of winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of the bath, and Va.s.sie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the room she had arranged according to her modern ideas--the modernity of '69--as a nursery. A fire leapt in the grate from behind a thing like a wire meat-safe that Ishmael had never seen before and that had never been considered necessary to keep him or his brothers from a fiery death. Before it was spread a creamy-hued blanket, on which stood an oval bath from whose lip a cloud of steam wavered up, the incense of this ritual. Va.s.sie sat beside it, a towel over her knees, and sprawling upon it, its bent legs kicking in the air, its tiny fists clutching at everything and nothing with the instinctive grasp of life, lay the baby.

James Nicholas Ruan--so called after his uncle and the Parson--was a little over three months old, just the age when a baby begins to be attractive even to a male observer.

Ishmael watched him as Va.s.sie skilfully dipped and dried him, turning him about on her lap to dust the powder into the interstices of his tiny person, and, far from resenting this as an indignity, he seemed to think it all a huge joke. Yet the jollity of him, his sudden smiles and his clutchings and wavings, all seemed addressed to himself alone--part of some life he alone knew, some vision he alone could see. As he was soaped and patted, and powdered and turned, there was always the air about him of a being really supremely independent of everyone; although his body seemed so helpless one got the impression that his soul was thoroughly aloof, untouched. When he laughed at the efforts of the grown-ups to please him it was a sublime condescension, that was all.

When something failed to please him he was recalled to the things of this world and set up a loud wail, which filled Ishmael with anxiety, though Va.s.sie and the nurse remained unaccountably calm. The baby evidently was of their opinion, because he left off wailing with the suddenness with which he had begun, and finally was tucked into his cradle and fell soundly asleep, one tiny hand flung palm upwards upon the pillow by his head after the manner of babies from time immemorial.

Ishmael, though he had first held aloof and then been terrified when Va.s.sie insisted on his taking the fragile little body in his arms, had yet felt a thrill go through him when he did so. It was not possible for a man to have the feeling for the land that he had and not both crave for a child and feel a deep-rooted emotion at its possession. Yet it was more than that, he told himself, when he felt the warm little body utterly dependent on him. He had taken him up before often enough, but never in the intimacy of this evening, which held the quality of a shrine.

He showed nothing of what he felt, but that evening, after Va.s.sie and her ever-talking husband had settled themselves in the parlour, he went up again to the nursery and told the nurse she could go downstairs for a little while. Then he crossed over to the cot and, drawing back the curtain, looked down at the little morsel lying asleep in it. This was his son, this small rosy thing, his son that would one day walk his land beside him and would eventually take it over as his own. This was flesh of his flesh as no wife could ever be, and soul of his soul as well.

As he looked the baby began to whimper and opened its eyes, of the milky blue of a kitten's. Ishmael went on his knees beside the cot, and eager, absurdly eager, to be able to cope with the situation successfully himself, spoke as soothingly as he knew how. The baby's whimper became a cry. His little hand beat the air. Ishmael struck his forefinger into the tiny palm, and the little fingers curled round it with that amazing tenacity of babies, who can clutch and suck before they can do anything else--getting, always getting, from life, like all young things. The baby hung firmly on to the finger and his cries died down; his mouth twitched and puckered to an absurd smile. Ishmael felt an exquisite glow suffuse his tired heart that had been so dry for months. He dared not make a sound for fear he broke the spell of contentment that held the baby and himself; he stayed with his finger enwrapped by those tiny clinging fingers till long after the baby had fallen asleep again. Then he crept from the room, and meeting the nurse his face a.s.sumed a blank and casual expression. But his heart guarded the glow that had been lit, which grew within him.

He began to work at Cloom as never before, because this time he was not working for himself. As the baby grew and became more and more of a delight and a companion--and a baby can be an excellent companion--he felt within him a steady gleam that did not flicker with the mood of the hour as so many gleams will. He told himself, as he settled into a manner of life and thought of which the child was the inalienable centre, that this was indeed the greatest thing in life. Before this, desire paled and self died down; in the white light of this love all others faded in smoke, except the love of heaven, of which it was a part. By heaven he meant not only the future state of the soul, but the earth on which he trod, and the only thing likely to become pernicious during the years that followed was his obsession with the one idea and his certainty that he had found the great secret.

Yet in spite of the pa.s.sion which held him, and which he told himself was the master pa.s.sion, there at times, and more as the years went on, would arise in him the old feeling--the feeling that something must surely happen, that round the corner awaited events of which the mere expectation made each day's awakening a glowing thing. Life was young and insistent in his veins, and with the lifting dawns, the recurrent springs, it began to sing anew--for him as apart from his child. Not yet had he found any one thing to make the complete round, to give him enough whereby to live without further questioning.

CHAPTER V

CENTRIPETAL MOVEMENT

While little Nicky was still too young to need troubling over in the matter of schooling, Ishmael yet found himself for the first time considering the subject, not so much as it would affect his child, but as it bore upon the children of the countryside--children such as his own brothers had been, as he might have been himself.... The Education Act had not long been pa.s.sed, for it was the spring of '72 when Ishmael began to take an active part in its administration in the West. He was still a young man, but the happenings and circ.u.mstances of his life had made for thoughtfulness, and a.s.sociation with his firebrand brother-in-law was turning that thought into more definite channels than formerly. Ishmael was becoming less a philosophic dreamer, and he began to feel within himself the stirring of desire to do things. Not that he had ever been idle, but his own little corner of the world and the definite work he had had to do in it had hitherto filled the practical part of life for him. Now that Cloom was so far set upon the upward way as to allow him more liberty, bigger though not dearer ideas began to germinate within him.