The Arbiter Part 9

"And the awful thing, do you know," said Pateley laughing, "is that I believe those people do make a difference."

"It is horrible to reflect upon," said Sir William.

"By the way," said Pateley, with a laugh, "your side is going in for the s.e.x too, I see. Is it true that you are going to have a Women's Peace Crusade?"

"Yes," said Sir William with an expression of disgust, "I believe that it is so. _My_ womenkind are not going to have anything to do with it, I am thankful to say."

"Oh, yes, I saw about that Crusade," said Wentworth, joining them, "in the _Torch_."

"Don't believe too firmly what the _Torch_ says--or indeed any newspaper--ha, ha!" said Pateley.

"I should be glad not to believe all that I see in the _Arbiter_, this morning," Sir William said. "Upon my word, Pateley, that paper of yours is becoming incendiary."

"I don't know that we are being particularly incendiary," said Pateley, with the comfortable air of one disposing of the subject. "It is only that the world is rather inflammable at this moment."

"Well, we have had conflagrations enough at the present," said Sir William. "We want the country to quiet down a bit."

"Oh! it will do that all in good time," said Pateley. "I am bound to say things are rather jumpy just now. By the way, Sir William, I wonder if you know of any investment you could recommend?"

Wentworth discreetly turned away and strolled back to Lady Gore's sofa.

"I rather want to know of a good thing for my two sisters who are living together at Lowbridge. I have got a modest sum to invest that my father left them, and I should like to put it into something that is pretty certain, but, if possible, that will give them more than 2-1/2 per cent."

"Why," said Sir William, "I believe I may know of the very thing. Only it is a dead secret as yet."

"Hullo!" said Pateley, p.r.i.c.king up his ears. "That sounds promising. For how long?"

"Just for the moment," said Sir William. "But of necessity the whole world must know of it before very long."

"Well, if it really is a good thing let us have a day or two's start,"

said Pateley laughing.

"All right, you shall," said Sir William. "You shall hear from me in a day or two."

CHAPTER VII

The days had pa.s.sed. The great scheme of "The Equator, Ltd.," was before the world, which had received it in a manner exceeding Fred Anderson's most sanguine expectations. The possibilities and chances of the mine, as set forth by the experts, appeared to be such as to rouse the hopes of even the wary and experienced, and Anderson had no difficulty of forming a Board of Directors most eminently calculated to inspire confidence in the public--none the less that they were presided over by a man who, if not possessed of special business qualifications, was of good social position and bore an honourable name. Sir William Gore, the Chairman of the company, was well pleased. He invested largely in the undertaking. The savings of the Miss Pateleys, under the direction of their brother, had gone the same way. The _Arbiter_ had indeed reason to cheer on the Cape to Cairo railway, which day by day seemed more likely of accomplishment.

Sir William, on the afternoon of the day when the success of the company was absolutely an a.s.sured fact, came back to his house from the city, satisfied with the prospects of the "Equator," with himself, and with the world at large. He put his latchkey into the door and looked round him a moment before he went in with a sense of well-being, of rejoicing in the summer day. Then as he stepped into the house he became conscious that Rachel was standing in the hall waiting for him, with an expression of dread anxiety on her face. The transition of feeling was so sudden that for a moment he hardly realised what he saw--then quick as lightning his thoughts flew to meet that one misfortune that of all others would a.s.sail them both most cruelly.

"Rachel!" he said. "Is your mother ill?"

"Yes," the girl answered. "Oh, father, wait," she said, as Sir William was rus.h.i.+ng past her, and she tried to steady her quivering lips. "Dr.

Morgan is there."

"Morgan--you sent for him...." said Gore, pausing, hardly knowing what he was saying. "Rachel... tell me...?"

"She fainted," the girl said, "an hour ago. And we couldn't get her round again. I sent--ah! there he is coming down." And a steady, slow step, sounding to the two listeners like the footfall of Fate, was heard coming down from above. Sir William went to meet the doctor, knowing already what he was going to hear.

Lady Gore died that night, without regaining consciousness. Hers had been the unspeakable privilege of leaving life swiftly and painlessly without knowing that the moment had come. She had pa.s.sed unconsciously into that awful gulf, without having had to stand for a moment shuddering on the brink. She had never dreaded death itself, but she had dreaded intensely the thought of old age, of a lingering illness and its attendant horrors. But none of these she had been called upon to endure: even while those around her were looking at the beautiful aspect of life that she presented to them the darkness fell, leaving them the memory only of that bright image. Her daughter's last recollection of her had been the caressing endearment with which Lady Gore had deprecated Rachel's remaining with her till Sir William's return--how thankful the girl was to have remained!--her husband's last vision of her, the smiling farewell with which she had sped him on his way in the morning, with a caution as to prudence in his undertakings. As he came back he had found himself telling her already in his mind, before he was actually in her presence, of what he had done. That was the thing which gave an edge to every action, to each fresh development of existence.

Life was lived through again for her, and acquired a fresh aspect from her interest and sympathy, from her keen, humorous insight and far-seeing wisdom. But now, what would his life be without that light that had always shone on his path? He did not, he could not, begin to think about the future. He knew only that the present had crumbled into ruins around him. That, he realised the next morning when, after some s.n.a.t.c.hes of uneasy sleep, he suddenly wakened with a sense of absolute horror upon him, before he remembered shuddering what that horror was.

He had wanted to tell her about yesterday, about the "Equator," he said to himself with a dull aching pain almost like resentment--he wanted to have her approval, to have the sense that for her what he did was right, was wise. But he knew now in his heart, as he really had known all the time, that it was she who had been the wise one. And part of the horror, as the time went on, would be to realise that when she had gone out of the world something had gone out of himself too, which she had told him was there. And he had dreamt that it was true. But that would come when the details of misery were realised by him one by one, as after some hideous explosion it is not possible to see at once in the wreck made by the catastrophe all the ghastly confirmations of disaster that come to light with the days. The first days were not the worst, either for him or for Rachel, as each one of them afterwards secretly found. For though life had come to a standstill, had stopped dead, with a sudden shock that had thrown everything in it out of gear, there were at first new and strange duties to be accomplished that filled up the hours and kept the standards of ordinary existence at bay. There were letters of condolence to be answered, tributes of flowers to be acknowledged, sent by well-meaning friends moved by some impotent impulse of consolation, until the air became heavy with the scent of camellias and lilies.

Rachel moved about in the darkened rooms, feeling as if the faint, sweet, overpowering perfume were a kind of anodyne, that was mercifully, during those early days, lulling her senses into lethargy. To the end of her days the scent of the white lily would bring back to her the feeling of actually living again through that first time of numbing grief. How many hours, how many days and nights she and her father had lived within that quiet sanctuary they could not have told--lived in the dark stillness, with one room, the stillest of all, containing the beloved something strangely aloof all that was left of the thing that had been their very life. Then out of that quiet hallowed darkness they came one dreadful day into the brilliant sunlight, a day that was lived through with the acutest pain of all, of which every detail seemed to have been arranged by a horrible cruel convention of custom in order to intensify the pangs of it. They drove at a foot's pace through the crowded, sunlit streets, with a shrinking agony of self-consciousness as one and another pa.s.ser-by looked up for a moment at what was pa.s.sing. "Look, Jim, 'ere's a funeral!" one small boy called to another--and Rachel, shuddering, buried her face in her hands and could have cried out aloud. Some men, not all, lifted their hats; two gaily-dressed women who were just going to cross stopped as a matter of course on the pavement and waited indifferently, hardly seeing what it was, until the obstruction had gone by, as they would have done had it been anything else. Rachel, leaning back by her father, trying to hide herself, yet felt as if she could not help seeing everything they met. Every step of the way was a slow torture. And oh, the return home! that drive, at a brisk trot this time, through the same crowded, unfeeling streets, which still retained the a.s.sociation of the former progress through them, the sense that now, as the coachman whipped up his horses, for every one save for the two desolate people who sat silently together inside the carriage, life might--indeed, would--throw off that aspect of gloom and go on as before! And then the worst moment of all, the finding on their return that the house had taken on a ghastly semblance of its usual aspect, that the blinds were up, the windows open, the sun streaming in everywhere--the hard, cruel light, as it seemed to Rachel, s.h.i.+ning into the rooms that were for evermore to be different.

Then followed the time which is incomparably the worst after a great loss, the time when, ordinary life being taken up again, the sufferer has the additional trial of too large an amount of leisure on his hands--the horror of all those new spare hours that used to be pa.s.sed in a companions.h.i.+p that is gone, that must be filled up with something fresh unless they are to stand in wide, horrible emptiness, to a.s.sail recollection with unendurable grief. And especially in that house were they empty, where the existence of both father and daughter had revolved round that of another to a greater extent than that of most people. The problem of how to readjust the daily conditions was a hard, hard one to solve, harder obviously for Sir William than it was for Rachel. The girl was uplifted in those days by the sense that, however difficult she might find it to carry out in detail, the general scheme of her life lay clear before her. She was going to devote it to her father, she was going to carry out that unmade promise, which she now considered more binding on her than ever, although her mother had warned her against making it, the promise that her father should come first. But the warning at the moment it was made had not been accepted by Rachel, and in the exaltation of her self-sacrifice it was forgotten now. She saw her way, as she conceived, plainly in front of her. Rendel, with his usual understanding and wisdom, did not obtrude himself on her during those days. He had quite made up his mind not to ask for her decision until there might be some hope of its being made in his favour. He had felt Lady Gore's death as acutely as though he had the right of kins.h.i.+p to grieve for her. He was miserably conscious that something inestimably precious had gone out of his life, almost before he had had time to realise his happiness in possessing it. But neither he nor Rachel understood what Lady Gore's death had meant to Sir William. And the poor little Rachel, rudderless, bewildered, tried to do the best she could for her father's life by planning her own with absolute reference to it, by putting at his disposal all the bare, empty hours available for companions.h.i.+p which up to now had been so straitly, so tenderly, so happily filled. And he on his side, conscious of some of her purpose, but unaware of the extent to which she carried her deliberate intention of consecrating herself to him, of bearing the burden of his destiny, believed that he had to bear the overwhelming burthen of guiding hers.

Instead of going in the late afternoon hours of those summer days to his club, where he would have found some companions.h.i.+p that was not a.s.sociated with his grief, and pa.s.sing an hour agreeably, he wistfully went home, feeling that Rachel would be expecting him. And Rachel on her side felt it a duty to put away any regular occupation that might have proved engrossing, and so to ordain her life that she should be always ready and at her father's orders if he should appear. And, thus deliberately cutting themselves loose from such minor anchorages as they might have had, they tried to delude themselves into the belief that not only was such makes.h.i.+ft companions.h.i.+p a solace, but that it actually was able to replace that other all-satisfying companions.h.i.+p they had lost.

But they knew in their hearts, each of them, that it was not so. And Sir William realised, more perhaps than Rachel did, that it never could be.

The relation between a father and daughter, when most successful, is formed of delightful discrepancies and differences, supplementing one another in the things that are not of each age. It means a protecting care on the side of the father, an amused tender pride in seeing the younger creature developing an individuality which, however, is hardly in the secret soul of the elder one quite realised or believed in. The experience of the man in such a relation has mainly been derived from women of his own standing; his judgment of his daughter is apt to be a good deal guesswork. The daughter, on the other hand, brings to the relation elements necessarily and absolutely absent on the other side.

If she cares for her father as he does for her, she looks up to him, she admires him, she accepts from him numberless prejudices and rules about the government of life, and acts upon them, taking for granted all the time that he cannot understand her own point of view. And yet, even so const.i.tuted, it can be one of the most beautiful and even satisfying combinations of affection the world has to show, provided the father has not known what it is to have the fulness of joy in his companions.h.i.+p with his wife, in that equal experience, mutual reliance, understanding of hopes and fears, which is impossible when the understanding is being interpreted through the imagination only, by one standing on a different plane of life. Neither Rachel nor her father had realised all this; but the mother with her acuter sensibilities had known, and had so deliberately set herself to fulfil her task that they had all these years been interpreted to one another, as it were, by that other influence that had surrounded them, that atmosphere through which everything was seen aright and in its most beautiful aspect. And the time came when Sir William suddenly grasped with a burning, startling vividness the fact that his life could not be the same again, that he must henceforth take it on a lower plane. The day was fine and bright--too warm, too bright; the hopeful light of spring had given place to the steady glare of summer. He had been used before to go out riding with Rachel in the early morning, in order to be back by the time Lady Gore was ready to begin her day. They had tacitly abandoned this habit now. Then one day it occurred to Sir William that it might be a good thing for Rachel to resume it. He proposed to her that they should go out as they used. She, in her inmost heart shrinking from it, but thinking it would be a satisfaction to him, agreed. He, shrinking from it as much as she did, thought to please her. And so they went out and rode silently side by side, overpowered by mute comparison of this day with days that had been. And when they got home they went each their own way, and made no attempt at exchanging words. Sir William went miserably to his study, his heart aching with a rush of almost unbearable sorrow as he thought of the bright little room upstairs to which he had been wont to hurry for the welcome that always awaited him. What should he do with his life? How should he fill it? he asked himself in a burst of grief, as he shut himself in. And so much had the theory, firmly believed in by himself and his wife, that he had by his own free will, and in order to devote his life to her, abandoned any quest of a public career become an absolute conviction in his mind, that he felt a dull resentment at having been so n.o.ble. He recognised now that it had been quixotic. He had let the time pa.s.s. Fifty-five! To be sure, in these days it is not old age; it may, indeed, under certain circ.u.mstances be the prime of life, for a man who has begun his career early, political or otherwise. Had this been Sir William's lot he could have sought some consolation, or at any rate alleviation, in his misfortune, by turning at once to his work and plunging into it more strenuously than before.

But even that mitigation, for so much as it might be worth, was denied to him. And he sat there, trying to face the fact that seemed almost incredible to a man of what seemed to him his apt.i.tudes and capacity, the awful fact that he had not enough to do to fill up his life. He did not state this pitiless truth to himself explicitly, but it was beginning to loom from behind a veil, and he would some day be forced to look at it. He could not start anything fresh. He had not the requisite impulse. He could have continued, he could not begin; the theatre of his actions, as Lady Gore had foreseen, had indeed fallen when she fell, and without it he could initiate no fresh achievements. Oh, to have had something definite to turn to in those days, something that called for instant completion! To have had some inexorable daily task, some duty for which he was paid, in a government office, or in some private undertaking of his own, for which he would have been obliged, like so many other men, to leave his house at a fixed hour, and to be absorbed in other preoccupations till his return. What a physical, material relief he would have found in such a claim! Round most men of his age life has woven many interests, many ties, many calls, on their time and energies from outside as well as from those near to them, but all those spare, available energies of his had been absorbed and appropriated, filled up, nearer home, and so completely that he had never needed anything else. And now, whither should he turn? What should he do? Then he remembered his Book, the Book his wife and he had been accustomed to talk of with such confidence, such certainty--he now realised how very little there was of it done, or how much of what might be fruitful in the conception was owing to the way that she, in their talking over it, had held it up to him, so that now one light played round it, now another. Well he remembered how, only two days before she was taken ill, they had talked of it for a long time until she, with an enthusiasm that made it seem already a completed masterpiece, had said with a smile, "Now then, all that remains is to write it!" And he had almost believed, as he left her, that it would spring into life some day, that it would not only hold the place in his life of the Great Possibility that is necessary to us all, but that he would actually put his fate to the proof by carrying it into execution. He took out the portfolio in which were the notes he had made about it now and again. They bore the seared outward aspect of an entirely different mental condition from that with which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. The impression was so strong on him as he turned over the ma.n.u.script, that he shuddered. What was the use of all this? What was it worth? He knew in his heart that the person of all others to whom it had been of most worth was gone--he would not be doing good to himself or to any one else by going on with it. He would be defrauding no one by letting the darkness cover it for ever. And another reason yet lay like cold lead at the bottom of his heart--the real, cruel, crus.h.i.+ng reason--he could not write the book, he was not capable of writing it. That was the truth.

And he desperately thrust the stray leaves into the cover, and the whole thing away from him, hopelessly, finally; there was nothing that would help him. That curtain would never lift again. And he covered his face with his hands as though trying to shut out the deadly knowledge.

But of all this Rachel, as she sat waiting for her father at breakfast, was utterly unconscious. She did not realise the unendurable complications that had piled one misery on another to him. To her the wound had been terrible, but clean. The greatest loss she could conceive had stricken her life, but there were no secondary personal problems to add to it, no preoccupations of self apart from the one great desolation.

Sir William turned over his letters listlessly as he sat down, opened them, and looked through them.

"What am I to say to that?" he said, throwing one over to Rachel.

The colour came into her cheeks as she saw that it was from Rendel.

"I have one from him too," she said.

"Oh! well, I don't ask to see that," Sir William said, with an attempt at cheerfulness. "I know better."

"I would rather you saw it, really, father," and she handed him Rendel's letter to herself--a straightforward, dignified, considerate letter, in which he a.s.sured her that he did not mean to intrude himself upon her until she allowed him to come, and that all he asked was that she should understand that he was waiting, and would be content to wait, as long as there was a chance of hope.

"Well, when am I to tell him to come?" Sir William said.

"Father, what he wants cannot be," Rachel said.

"Cannot be?" said Sir William. "Why not?"

"Oh!" Rachel said, trying to command her voice, "I could not at this moment think of anything of that kind."

"At this moment, perhaps," Sir William said. "But you see he is not in a hurry. He says so, at any rate, though I am not sure that it is very convincing."

"How would it be possible," said Rachel, "that I should go away? What would you do if I left you alone?"

"Well, as to that," Sir William replied, speaking slowly in order that he might appear to be speaking calmly, "I don't know, in any case, what I shall do." And his face looked grey and worn, conveying to Rachel, as she looked across at him, an impression of helpless old age in the father who had hitherto been to her a type of everything that was capable and well preserved. She sprang up and went to him.

"Father, dear father," she cried amidst her sobs, as she hid her face on his shoulder. "You know that you are more to me than any one else in the world. Let me help you--let me try, do let me try." And at the sound of the words Gore became again conscious of the immeasurable, dark gulf there was between what one human being had been able to do for him and what any other in the world could try to do. And his own sorrow rose darkly before him and swept away everything else--even the sorrow of his child. It was almost bitterly that he said, as if the words were wrung from him involuntarily--

"n.o.body can help me now."

"Oh, father!" Rachel cried again miserably. "Let me try."