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'How late you are!' she says.

If he were not looking at her, and did not see with his own eyes that the words proceeded out of her mouth, he would never have recognised her voice. By that voice, and by her whole appearance, he is so shocked, that for a moment he cannot answer. Even upon the face of a girl in the first flush of youth, and whose only ornamentings come from the Hand of God, two long nights' vigils, extravagant weeping, the careless dishevelment of heart-rending anguish, write themselves in terrible characters. What, then, must they do to a woman like Betty, whose whole beauty is a carefully built-up fabric, on which no sun must look, and no zephyr blow too inquisitively?

For the first time in his life Talbot fully realises what a built-up fabric it is. Through his mind flashes the doubt, whether, if without expecting to meet her, he had come across her in the street, he should have recognised her. She looks fifty years old. Her hair is in damp disorder; at the top all rough and disturbed, where it has evidently been desperately buried in a little counterpane. She is not now crying; but her unnumbered past tears have partially washed the rouge off her cheeks. A dreadful impression of the ludicrous, inextricably entangled with his unspeakable compassion – an impression for which he tells himself that he ought to be flayed alive – conveys itself to Talbot from her whole appearance. But though he ought to be flayed alive for receiving it, still it is there. And meanwhile she has spoken to him a second time. He must say something to her; not stand staring with stupid cruelty at her in her ruin and abasement.

'I expected you all yesterday,' she says in that same strange, dreadful voice.

He gives a sort of gasp. Can that indeed be the voice whose pretty treble has so often run with rippling laughter into his ears? the voice that sang him comic songs to that very banjo – now lying in its irony beside him – almost the last time that he heard its tones? His head is in a grisly whirl between that Betty and this. Which is the true one? Is this only a hideous nightmare? It seems at least to have the suffocating force of one; a force through which it is only by the strongest self-compulsion that he can break to answer her.

'I came as soon as I got your telegram.'

Her eyes, washed away to scarcely more than half their size, are resting upon him; and yet it seems by her next speech as if she had either not heard or not heeded his answer.

'You might have come quicker,' she says.

'But indeed I could not,' cries he, genuine distress lending him at last fluent speech. 'I was at the House till two in the morning; I never received it until I got home to Bury Street; I came by the very next train. Oh, Betty, how could you doubt that I should?'

As he speaks an arrow of self-reproach shoots through his heart at the thought of how near a chance the poor soul's cry for help had run of being altogether disregarded.

'I wanted to speak to you,' she says, a spark of fever brightening the chill wretchedness of her look. 'I have something to say to you; that was why I sent for you.'

'Of course, of course!' he answers soothingly. 'I was delighted to come.'

'I can't stay more than a minute,' she says restlessly. 'I must go back to him; I have never left him for eight and forty hours. He is asleep now – only under opiates – but an opiate sleep is better than none, is it not?' consulting his face with a piteous appeal.

'Much – much better,' replies Talbot earnestly.

'You have heard – they have told you – how ill he is?'

A sort of hard break makes itself heard in her voice; but she masters it impatiently.

'Yes, they have told me.'

'What have they told you?' asks she sharply. 'I daresay that they have told you a great deal more than the truth. If they have told you that there is no hope, they have told you wrong. They had no right to say so; there is hope!'

'They never told me that there was not,' replies he, still more soothingly than before; for it seems to him that no finger can be laid too gently on that terrible mother-ache.

'It all came so suddenly,' says she, putting her hand up with a bewildered air to her damp forehead and disordered hair. 'And yet now it seems centuries since he was running about. How he ran and jumped, did not he? There never was such an active child. And now it seems centuries that he has been lying in his little bed.'

For a moment she breaks down entirely, but fights her way on again.

'It was only a cold at first – quite a slight cold! He was not the least ill with it, and I thought nothing of it; and then on Tuesday there came an acrobatic company to Darnton' – the little neighbouring market-town – 'and he was so excited about them, and begged so hard to be allowed to go and see them, that I took him; and he was so delighted with them – he clapped and applauded more than anybody in the house; and all the evening afterwards he was trying to do the things he had seen them do – you know how clever he always is in imitating people – and telling nurse about them. Nurse and I agreed that we had never seen him in such spirits. But he did not sleep well; he was always dreaming about them, and jumping up; and next morning he was in a high fever, and I sent for the doctor, and he has been getting worse ever since; and now– '

Again she breaks down, but again recovering herself, goes on rapidly:

'But it is not the same as if it were a grown-up person, is it? Children have such wonderful recovering power, have not they? – down one day and up the next. They pull through things that would kill you or me, do not they? He will pull through, won't he? You think that he will pull through?'

'I am sure that he will,' replies Talbot earnestly.

It is, of course, an answer absolutely senseless, and in the air; but what other can he give, with those miserable eyes fastened in such desperate asking upon his?

'Oh, if you knew what it has been,' she says, her arms falling with a gesture of measureless tired woe to her sides as she speaks, 'to have been kneeling by him all these two days, hearing him moan, and seeing him try to get his breath! – he does not understand what it means; he has never been ill before. He thinks that I can help him. O God! he thinks I can help him, and that I don't! He turns to me for everything. You know that he always did when he was well, did not he? He is always asking me when the pain will go away? Asking me whether he has been naughty, and I am angry with him? Angry with him! I angry with him! O God! O God!'

Her excitement and her grief have been gaining upon her at each fresh clause of her speech, and at the end she flings herself down on the ground and buries her face in the cushion of a low chair, while dry, hard sobs shake her from head to foot.

What is he to say to her? Nothing. He will not insult such a sorrow by the futility of his wretched words. He can only stoop over her, and lay his hand no harshlier than her mother would have done, no harshlier than she herself would have laid hers upon her little dying boy, on her heaving shoulder. But she shakes off his light touch, and raising her distorted face, again tries to address him. But the rending sobs that still convulse her make her utterance difficult; and her words, when they come, scarcely intelligible.

'Do not touch me! leave me – leave me – alone! I – I have not yet said what – what I had to say to you. That – that was not what I had to say to you! I – I – must say what I – sent for you – to say.'

She pauses, gasping. It seems as if the task she had set herself was beyond her present strength.

'Do not tell me,' he says most gently; 'if it is anything that hurts you, do not tell me now; wait and tell me by and by.'

He has withdrawn at her bidding his hand from her shoulder, but has knelt down in his deep pity beside her, and tried to take in his her cold and clammy fingers. But she draws them sharply away.

'Did not I tell you to leave me alone!' she cries in a thin voice. 'Let me – let me say what I have to say to you, and have done with it. I will say it now! I must say it now! What business have you,' turning with a pitiful fierceness upon him, 'to try and hinder me?'

'I do not – I do not!' speaking in the tenderest tone. 'Tell it me of course, whatever it is, if it will give you the least relief.'

'I sent for you to tell you that it is all over – all over between us,' she says, having now mastered her sobs, and speaking with great rapidity and distinctness; 'that is what I sent for you to tell you. I wanted you to come at once, that I might tell you. Why did not you come at once? I have been a very wicked woman – '

'No, dear, no! indeed you have not!' he interrupts with an accent of excessive pain and protest.

But she goes on without heeding him:

'Or if I have not, it has been no thanks to me; it has been thanks to you, who have saved me from myself! But whatever there has been between us, it is over now. That is what I sent for you to tell you. Over! do you understand? Gone! done with! Do you understand? Why do not you say something? Do you hear? Do you understand?'

'I hear,' he answers in a mazed voice; 'but I – I do not understand! I do not understand why, if you want to tell me this, you should tell it me now of all times.'

'It is now of all times that I want to tell you – that I must tell you!' cries she wildly. 'Cannot you see that it is on account of him? Oh, cannot you think what it has been kneeling beside him with his little hot hand in mine! You do not know how fiery hot his hand is! Last night his pulse was so quick that the doctor could scarcely count the beats – it was up to 120; and while I was kneeling beside him the thought came to me that perhaps this had happened to him on – on – account of —us! that it was a judgment on me!'

She pauses for a minute, and he tries to put in some soothing suggestion, but she goes on without heeding him.

'You may call it superstition if you please, but it came to me – oh, it seems years ago now! – it must have been the night before last! – and as the night went on, it kept getting worse and worse, as he got worse and worse; and in the morning I could not bear it any longer, and I sent for you! I thought that you would have been here in a couple of hours.'

'So I would! So I would! Heaven knows so I would, if it had been possible!'

'And all yesterday he went on growing worse – I did not think that he could have been worse than he was in the night, and live – but he was. All day and all last night again he was struggling for breath! – think of having to sit by and see a little child struggling for his breath!'

She stops, convulsed anew by that terrible dry sobbing, that is so much more full of anguish than any tears.

'Poor little chap! poor Betty!'

'I have been listening all night for you! I could not have believed that you would have been so long in coming; it is such a little way off! I knew – I had a feeling that he would never get better until you had come – until I had told you that it was all over between us; but I have told you now, have not I? I have done all that I could! One cannot recall the past; no one can, not even God! He cannot expect that of me; but I have done what I could – all that is left me to do, have not I?'

There is such a growing wildness in both her eye and voice that he does not know in what terms to answer her; and can only still kneel beside her, in silent, pitying distress.

'I see that you think I am out of my wits!' she says, looking distrustfully at him; 'that I must be out of my wits to talk of sending you away – you who have been everything to me. Cannot you see that it is because I love you that I am sending you away? if I did not love you it would be nothing – no sacrifice! – it would be no use! But perhaps if I give up everything – everything I have in the world except him' (stretching out her hands, with a despairing gesture of pushing from herself every earthly good) – 'perhaps then —then– God will spare him to me! perhaps He will not take him from me! It may be no good! He may take him all the same; but there is just the chance! say that you think it is a chance!'

But he cannot say so. There are very few words that he would not try to compel his lips to utter; but he dares not buoy her up with the hope that she can buy back her child by a frantic compact with the Most High. Her eyes drop despairingly from his face, not gaining the assent they have so agonisedly asked for; and she struggles dizzily to her feet.

'That is all – I had – to – tell you!' she says fiercely. 'I have nothing more to say! – nothing that need – need detain you here any longer. I must go back to him; he may be asking for me! – asking for me, and I not there! But you understand – you are sure that you understand? I have often sent you away before in joke, but I am not joking now' (poor soul! that, at least, is a needless assertion); 'I am in real earnest this time! I am not sending you away to-day only to send for you back again to-morrow; it is real earnest this time; it is for ever! – do you understand? For ever! say it after me, that I may be sure that you are making no mistake —for ever.'

And he, looking down into the agony of her sunk eyes, not permitted even to touch in farewell her clammy hand, echoes under his breath, 'For ever!'

CHAPTER XXII

 
'Das Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvoll
Wie bei der Lichsten Gruss.'
 

For ever! All through the wintry day they hammer at his ears – those two small words that take up such a little space on a page, and yet cover eternity. There is nothing that does not say them to him. The hansom horse's four hoofs beat them out upon the iron-bound road; the locomotive snorts them at him; the dry winter wind sings them in his ears; Piccadilly's roar, and the tick of the clock on the chimney-piece of the room where he works in Downing Street, equally take their shape to him. For ever! They must always be solemn words, even though in the slackness of our loose vocabulary they are often fitted to periods no longer than ten minutes, than an hour, than six months. But one never quite forgets that they can stretch to the dimensions of the great sea that washes Time's little shores. For ever! At each point of his return journey there recurs to him the memory of some unkind thought that he had had of her on his way down. Here he had accused her of some paltry motive in sending for him! There he had protested against the dominion of her whims. Here again, he had groaned under the thought of having, within five days, to pass a second time this way in order to spend his compulsory Christmas with her.

Well, that Christmas is no longer compulsory – no longer possible even. He has his will. He may keep for himself that present which he had so grudged the trouble of choosing for her. For ever! Those two words are the doors that shut away into the irredeemable past that portion of his life in which she has shared. Only five years after all! He need not have grudged her only five years.

An intense and cutting remorse for the bitterness of his late thoughts of her; for his impatience of her fond yoke; for his weariness of her company, and passionate eagerness to escape from her, travels every step of the way with him as he goes. Well, he may be pleased now. He has his wish. He has escaped from her. But has he escaped? Can that be called escape, not for one moment of that day, or any succeeding days, to get the bottomless wretchedness of those poor eyes, the pathos of those sunk and ghastly cheeks, and of that damp ruffled hair from before his own vision; never for one instant of the whole noisy day to have his ears free from the sound of that thin, harsh mother-voice, asking him whether her boy will live? Between him and the paper on which he writes that face comes. It rises between him and the speakers in the House. It closes his eyes at night. It figures with added distortion in his dreams. It comes with the dull dawn to wake him. He spends his Christmas alone with it in London. To do so seems to him, in his remorse, some slight expiation of the unlovingness of his late past thoughts towards her. He would deem it a crime to join any happy Christmas party while she is kneeling with that face beside her dying child. Since he cannot go to her, he will go nowhere.

Once indeed – nay, to tell truth, twice, thrice, the thought has recurred to him of Freddy Ducane's affectionate invitation to the Manor, and that there is now nothing – no pre-engagement to hinder him from accepting it. But each time he dismisses the idea, as if it had been a suggestion of Satan. Scarcely less ruthlessly does he put to flight a face that, as the days go by, will come stealing in front of the other; a face that – albeit modest – is pertinacious too; since, despite his routings, it comes back and back again. And meanwhile he hears no news from Harborough. To telegraph inquiries would seem to him a contravention of her will – hers, who has so passionately decided that their paths are henceforth to diverge. But he anxiously and daily searches the obituary for that name he dreads to find; looks anxiously, too, about the streets and round his clubs in search of some common acquaintance – some country neighbour – to whom he may apply with probability of success for tidings of the child. But for some days he looks in vain. London has emptied itself for the Christmas holidays, and it appears to him as if he were the only one of his acquaintance left in it. That the boy is still fighting for his life is proved by the fact of his name not having been entered in the list of deaths. Still fighting! He still panting, and she still kneeling beside him! It makes Talbot draw his own breath gaspingly to think of it.

As the days go on, his anxiety to get news – any news, whether it may be bad or good – of how that drama being played out on the narrow stage of a little bed, and the one act of which that he has seen haunts him with such a persistency of torment, grows more urgent and intense. London has filled again. The Christmas holiday week is over, and humanity's innumerable beasts of burden have returned to their yokes. The frost still continues, and the clubs are nearly as crowded as in June; crowded with every one whom he does not wish to see; empty of any one that he seeks. Hitherto, as long as he has had no desire for their company – has avoided it rather, from the associations it has had with his own entanglement – he has met acquaintances made at Harborough, people living in the neighbourhood of Harborough, friends of the Harboroughs, at every turn. They have claimed his acquaintance; have insisted on greeting him; on forcing upon him pieces of local information which have no manner of interest for him. Now, however, that they might do him a substantial service; now that they might, nay, must, give him the tidings he is craving for, all such persons appear to have been swept from the face of the earth. Look as he may, in club, and street, and private house, he can find none.

One Sunday afternoon, a cold and ugly Sunday, he is walking down St. James's Street, turning over in his mind how best to obtain some certainty as to that subject, his miserable uncertainty upon which is desolating his life, when in one of the numberless passing hansoms his eye suddenly alights upon a surely very well-known profile. If it is not the profile of Betty's husband, he is deceived by the most extraordinary accidental likeness that ever beguiled human sight. Harborough is in London, then? What does that mean? Does it mean that the boy is better? or does it mean that it is all over? A spasm of pain contracts his heart. Poor little chap! Perhaps his father's presence here only means that he is already hidden away in the grave, and that there is nothing left for father-love, or mother-love either, to do for him.

Talbot's eye has eagerly singled out the hansom, and followed it. Happily for him, it stops at not a hundred yards' distance from him, at the St. James's Club, and a figure – indubitably Mr. Harborough's – jumps out. Talbot hastens after him. It is a club to which he himself belongs, and he enters it not a minute after the object of his pursuit. Some irrational fear that that object may even yet evade him – that he may be even yet balked of that news for which he seems to have been months, years, thirstily waiting, lends wings to his feet. He is so close upon his friend's heels that the latter has not had time to get beyond the hall. One lightning-glance tells Talbot that he looks much as usual; that there is no crape on his hat; and that his insignificant face is as innocent of any expression beyond its ordinary banal good humour as he has ever seen it. Then the child is not dead! That little jolly face that has been so often pressed against his own is not companioned with the dust. Thank God for that! But his one minute's look, though unspeakably reassuring, has not yet so entirely banished his fears that he can delay for one instant putting the question which has been for ten weary days on his lips, unable to be asked.

'The boy? How is the boy?'

Mr. Harborough starts.

'Hullo! it is you, is it? delighted to see you!' shaking his hand with the same prolonged and mistaken warmth under which Talbot has so often writhed.

He does not writhe now. He repeats his eager question:

'How is the boy?'

'Oh! you have heard of our trouble about him?' returns Harborough cheerfully. 'Well, to tell truth, the young beggar did give us a fright! but he is as right as a trivet again now, or at least he is on the high road to be so; but he had a near shave of it, poor little man! not one of us thought he would pull through. Andrew Clark himself did not. We all of us – his mother, I, everybody – thought he was going to give us the slip; but not a bit of it. I never saw such a boy! There he is, shouting and kicking up such a row, they can scarcely keep him in bed; and eat – he would eat an old shoe – he would eat you or me if we gave him the chance.'

He ends with a jovial, if not very wise, laugh; but Talbot does not echo it, though Heaven knows that he is glad enough at heart for any expression of mirth.

'You must run down and see him,' pursues the other hospitably; 'it is a long time since you have paid us a visit. Come now, fix a day; there is no time like the present.' 'You forget,' replies Talbot, with an embarrassment which, however, is not perceived by his interlocutor, 'that I am not one of those lucky fellows like you whose time is their own. I cannot take a holiday whenever I choose; you must remember that mine is just over.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' rejoins Betty's husband, with rough good humour. 'Do not tell me that they keep you as tight as that! I know better! I will take no excuses; only two days ago Betty was saying to me what an age it was since we had seen anything of you.'

Before he can hinder it, Talbot's jaw drops. Betty had said so? Betty? Has sorrow then robbed her of her wits?

'By the bye,' continues Harborough, correcting himself, and happily ignorant of the effect produced by his last words, 'it was the other way up; it was I who said so to her. But it is all the same thing; she will be delighted to see you. She will never forgive me if I let you escape us this time; and the boy, you positively must come and help us to keep that boy in order. I never saw such a boy!' (beginning again to chuckle).

It is not without very considerable difficulty, not without some sacrifice of truth, some vague promises, that Talbot at length succeeds in making his escape without having tied himself down to any special day for making his appearance at that house from whose doors the wife has warned him off with as great an eagerness as – it cannot be greater than – the husband now shows to force him into them. As long as he is in Harborough's company, the necessity for baffling his friend's stupid urgencies, the awkwardness of rebutting civilities so well meant, prevent him from realising the full intensity of his relief. But when he has reached his own rooms, when he is alone, then indeed he knows the weight of the burden that has rolled from his shoulders. The boy is not dead; riotously alive rather. Thank God – thank God for that! And she is no longer kneeling beside him, no longer out of breath for company. He may drive away for ever from before his eyes that hideous vision of her as he had last seen her, and which has been for fourteen days poisoning sleep and waking for him. He may drive it away; and not only so, but he may replace it by any other vision he chooses. Any other! In the first stupefaction of that thought – for joy has her stupefaction as well as pain – he covers his face with both hands, as if, by shutting out all other objects, he could the better bring that astounding change home to his mazed brain and his leaping heart. He is free! He has to say the word over many, many times to himself before he can at all take in its full significance. He is free! – free, too, with a freedom that has been given to him, that has been gained by no violent bursting of bars, and which therefore he may taste with that fulness of joy that those alone can feel who have long lain fast bound in misery and iron. He has been so long a bondman, the irons have cut so deeply into his flesh, that on first coming out into God's good light he staggers blindly as one drunk.

He walks to the window and looks out. The bells are ringing to afternoon church, and the congregations are passing staidly by. He looks out at them all, with a joyous smile at the endimanché shop-boys, each with his sweetheart on his arm; at the little children holding fathers' and mothers' hands. He, too, may have a sweetheart. He, too, may be blessed with little children. There are none of the possibilities which make life lovely to other men, to which he, too, may not aspire. The happy tears crowd into his eyes.

From the window he walks to his bureau, and out of a secret drawer takes a tiny tissue-paper parcel, and from it carefully extracts its contents. They consist of only one sprig of dried lavender, thieved from the garden of the little Red House, and at which for five months he has not dared to look. He may look at it now; may pass it lovingly across his lips; may inhale whatever yet lingers of its innocent cottage sweetness. There is enough still left to recall the parent-tree. He may see again that spreading flowered bush; may see again Minky galloping like a little gray whirlwind across the lawn; may hear again the parrot swearing in the cook's voice, and sleepily clacking with his black tongue in the sunshine; may watch the eleven birds – are there still eleven, he wonders? – hopping and quarrelling and twittering up and down upon his ladder; may see Jacob and the mowing-machine; and —her. Can any bodily eyes show her to him much more plainly than his spirit's eyes see her now, summoned up before him by that delicate, homely perfume, that is to him so indissolubly associated with her? – see her as he saw her last in the walled Manor garden, standing among the moon-shimmering white gladioli, and saying to him with farewell smile and wavering voice:

'Since you are so determined to go downhill, I suppose I dare not say that I hope our paths will ever meet again.'

But now – but now! God knows how he has long hated his downhill course; and now – and now there is no reason, none in heaven above or earth beneath, why their paths should not for ever merge. His head sinks forward on his clasped hands, still jealously clasped upon the lavender sprig, and his hot tears rain on its little dry buds. In his whole life before he has never cried for joy. At night he cannot sleep for that same troublesome joy; but, indeed, he would grudge any slumber that robbed him for even a moment of the consciousness of his blessedness. He feels no need of that lost sleep all next day as he walks, treading on air, through the murky London streets, that seem to him gold-paved, diamond-shining. He knows that he must look senselessly radiant; for, in the course of the day, several people of his acquaintance meeting him ask what he is smiling at. One inquires whether some one has left him a fortune. Before he can stop himself, he has almost answered, 'Yes.' Is not it true – most true? His state of exaltation lasts, with no perceptible lessening, through all that day, through the night – almost as sleepless as the preceding one – that follows it; but on the succeeding morning there comes a check, a very slight one, but still a check to the triumphal course of his felicity. Amongst that morning's letters is one which, at the first glance, he imagines to be from Betty; and though a second look reassures him on this point, and though, on opening it, it proves to be merely an invitation to dinner from a slight acquaintance, yet the train of thought induced by the shock of that first impression successfully pulls him down from his empyrean. What security has he that Betty may not write to him; that now that her terror and her grief are alike past, she may not deride as superstition the conduct dictated by that grief, and, like a child, ask to have back again her given and repented gift? What security has he – a cold sweat breaks out on his forehead at the thought – that any day, on his return from his work, he may not find her standing by the fire, ready to throw herself into his arms, and tell him with sobs that she cannot bear her life without him, and that they must take up again the old relations? And if she does so – there is such a horrible probability in the idea, that it is as well to face it – what answer is he to make her? Would it be chivalrous, loyal, to take her at that word wrung from her anguish, wrung from her when she was no more her real self than if she had been raving in a fit of madness? To make her keep to it, when with tears and prayers she is begging him to let her resume it? And if not, if not – with what a heart-sinking does he face the suggestion – must he again bow his neck to the yoke? Must he again put on his gyves? God save him from that hard alternative!