“Hark!” said Gerard, suddenly. “Some one has opened the garden gate. Jermyn is coming back. What can he want?” Hester’s ear was quicker than his. She heard a step upon the travel, a feeble, dragging footstep, as of one who was weary unto death.
“It is not his step,” she said. “It is some one who is old and feeble.”
As she spoke there came creeping out of the shadow of the shrubbery, and round by the angle of the house, a figure that had a spectral look in the moonlight which silvered the face and shone white upon the travel-stained raiment. It was the figure of an old man with ragged grey beard and tall, gaunt form. The bent shoulders, the slow movements, indicated uttermost weariness.
The man came tottering towards the lamplit window, leaning upon his stick; he came closer and closer, till he was face to face with Hester, and then with a loud cry he lifted his stick and pointed at her triumphantly.
“I knew it,” he cried hysterically, “I knew it was you. I knew I had found you — at last — found you in the midst of your infamy — living in luxury while your old father has been starving. Yes, by Heaven, within an ace of starvation — living in sin—”
“Father,” cried Hester, piteously, stretching out her hands to him, trying to put her arms about him, “father, you have no cause to blame me. It was you who left me. I was giving you my life — would have given it you till my last breath — but you left me — left me without a word — alone and fatherless.”
Sobs choked her. She could say no more. She could only shape the words dumbly, while he thrust her from him with a savage gesture.
“Don’t touch me,” he cried, “I renounce you — I have done with you—”
And then from the father’s lips came one of those foul words which brand like red-hot iron. The daughter sank in an agony of shame at his feet — not fainting, only too keenly conscious of her misery.
To be called that name — and in Gerard’s hearing. What could her life be ever more after this night but one everlasting sense of shame?
Her hands were clasped over her face, as she half knelt, half crouched, upon the ground. In those few moments there was time for that one thought, “I am that thing which he has called me.” And then she heard Gerard’s hoarse cry of rage, a blow, a groan, and her father had fallen like a log on the gravel path beside her.
CHAPTER XXIII. “ALAS, WHY CAM’ST THOU HITHER?”
HE was not dead. Hester, in the first few minutes of helples3 horror, thought that the blow which had felled her father to the ground must needs be his death-blow; but it was not so. Her trembling fingers loosened the wisp of rusty black which he wore round his throat; she felt the beating of his heart under the ragged flannel shirt. She heard the stertorous breathing, which, however dreadful, at least indicated life.
“Go for the doctor,” she cried. “Oh, for God’s sake, the doctor — without the loss of a moment. You have not killed him.”
“Killed him! no. I only ventured to silence his foul tongue — the ungrateful old scoundrel. My blow was not murderous — but I meant to silence him, and I have done it,” said Gerard, with a scornful laugh.
It seemed such a worthless life to him, these poor dregs of a wasted existence. Age, poverty, drunkenness, what had such a man to live for, or how should such a man value life? — and yet if one made an end of this wretched remnant of used up humanity the act would be called murder, and one might be hanged for it.
What should be done? Send for a doctor? Yes. It was past one o’clock, and the nearest doctor was at Lowcombe, a mile off, a medical practitioner whose function it was to see a scattered population in and out of the world, a population dispersed at inconvenient distances, approachable only by accommodation roads, within a radius of sis or seven miles.
“I’ll go to the gardener’s cottage and try to get a messenger,” said Gerard. “Don’t be frightened, Hester. Just keep quiet till I come back.”
He ran off towards the gardener’s house, on the other side of the road, adjoining a large kitchen garden where the said gardener delighted in the cultivation of a vast stock of vegetables which nobody consumed, and in the consumption of seeds which ought to have been enough to sow vegetables over all the waste ground in Berkshire.
He was gone, and Hester’s fears grew more intense as she knelt beside the motionless form, listening to the labouring breath. Had he fainted, or was it some kind of stroke which made him unconscious? She went into the house for water to bathe his temples. She tried to force a spoonful of brandy between the pallid lips, but without success. She could only watch the face, which the moonlight whitened, and note how it had aged and altered for the worse since August. Those few months had done the work of years. Every line had deepened, and there was something worse than age, the pale, dull, soddened look of the habitual drunkard.
Gerard came back after a quarter of an hour that seemed an age.
“Dowling has started,” he said. “I waited till I had seen him go. It’s nearly an hour’s walk there and back. Your folly in setting your face against a stable has left us without a messenger in a dilemma like this. Hasn’t he got his senses back yet?”
He stood looking down at the figure stretched at full length across the pathway. The path in front of the verandah was narrow, but by a happy chance Nicholas Davenport had fallen with his head upon the edge of the lawn, where the turf was thick and soft. Gerard looked down at him with but little compunction, a sorry figure in mud-stained clothes, boots split and down at heel, trousers torn at the knees and ragged at the edge.
“I wonder whether the Rector of Lowcombe would urge me to make this man my father-in-law,” thought Gerard; and then moved by some better feeling he stooped down to lift the heavy head from the ground, and with Hester’s help conveyed the unconscious form into the drawing-room, and laid it on the sofa, where Hester placed a down pillow under the ragged grey hair, and spread a plush coverlet over the motionless limbs.
“Is there anything else that we can do?” she asked piteously.
“I am afraid not. I am lamentably ignorant of all medical treatment. If Lilian were here she would be ever so much more use. I’m afraid it is some kind of fit.”
“Do you think he is dying?” Hester asked, horror-stricken.
She was kneeling by the sofa, holding her father’s hand, which was cold and inert.
“I don’t know. I know nothing, except that his fall just now can hardly have killed him.”
“If it had you would have been his murderer,” she said, horrified at his callousness.
“Would you have preferred me to stand by and hear him insult you — you who have been his devoted slave — who sacrificed all the joys of girlhood to his necessities?”
No, he had no compunction. This dotard had broken in upon their lives, bringing horror and agitation into their peaceful home; this dotard to whom Hester owed nothing, who had been already overpaid in filial duty. He had no compunction, he the young man who had raised his hand against age and feebleness. He had no more regret for this tiling that he had done than he might have felt if he had kicked a strayed mongrel from his threshold. He was angry with the hazard of life which had brought this most ineligible visitor to his retreat, and had perhaps made a happy union with Hester impossible henceforward. He knew her exaggerated ideas of duty to this drunken log, knew her willingness to sacrifice herself. How could he tell what fine she would take?
Legalise their union, forsooth! Create a legal link between himself and yonder carrion. Go through the rest of his life ticketed with a disreputable father-in-law. He could not stay in the room with that unconscious item of poor humanity. He went out and paced the gravel walk from end to end, and back again, and back again, with monotonous repetition, waiting for the coming of the doctor, who did not come. The gardener came back in something less than an hour, to say that the doctor had been summoned to a distant farmhouse, where there was a baby expected, and would doubtless remain there till the arrival of the baby. The farmhouse was nearly five miles
on the other side of Lowcombe.
All that the doctor’s wife could promise was that her husband should go to the Rosary as soon as possible after his return home.
Thus, through the long October night there was nothing to be done but to wait and watch in patience. The air grew chill as morning approached, and Gerard came back to the drawing-room, where Hester bad kept up the fire, and where the lamp was still burning. The old man’s breathing was quieter, and he seemed now to have sunk into a heavy sleep.
“He will do well enough,” said Gerard, looking at the unlovely sleeper. “There is a Providence that watches over drunkards.”
“Gerard, Gerard, how cruel you are!”
“Do you expect me to be kind? I would have given thousands to keep that man out of our life.”
“You gave him the money that set him on the wrong path,” she said.
“I gave him money to get rid of him. I saw your life sacrificed to an imaginary claim. I saw your youth fading — your beauty with a blight upon it — the blight of poverty and care. He was the only bar to our happiness, and I swept him out of my way. We have been happy, Hester. For pity’s sake don’t tell me you care more for that wreck of humanity than you care for me!”
“I care for him because he is my father, and has such sore need of my love.”
“Ah, that is the old story. Well, you can go on caring for him — vicariously. We will put him in a sanatorium where his declining years will be made comfortable, and where he will be protected from his pernicious propensities.”
She took no notice of this speech. She was sitting, as she had sat through the greater part of that night, holding her father’s hand, stooping now and then to moisten his forehead with a handkerchief dipped in Eau-de-Cologne, listening to his breathing, hoping for the daylight and the coming of the doctor.
Daylight came at last, chilly and misty, and soon after daylight Mr. Mivor, the long-established and trusted family practitioner, was ushered into the room by a sleepy housemaid, who had heard with wonder that there was an invalid in the house — some one who had arrived unexpectedly in the night, and for whom a bedroom was to be aired and made ready. Hester had gone upstairs at daybreak to call the servants, and had seen to the lighting of a fire in this unused bedroom, a pleasant room enough, looking out over the high road and kitchen garden to the park-like meadows beyond.
Mr. Mivor had heard various conversations about the young couple at the Rosary, but as a discreet practitioner and a man of the world had refrained from all expression of opinion. He was not the less interested in this social mystery, and his curiosity was considerably increased by what he saw this morning — those two pale faces, the man’s sullen and heavy, the woman’s haggard with anxiety, and between them this shabby, disreputable figure, this sodden countenance, in which the medical eye was quick to see the indications of habitual intemperance.
“When did the seizure occur?” he asked, after he had made his examination.
“Soon after one o’clock.”
“Was he in good health up to that time?”
“I don’t know. He came into the house — an unexpected visitor — and dropped down almost immediately. He has been unconscious ever since,” Gerard answered deliberately.
“And there was no exciting cause — no quarrel, no shock of any kind?” interrogated the doctor, with a sharp look at the speaker.
“It may have been a shock to him to find us — in his state of mind — which I take it was not of the clearest.”
“You think he had been drinking?”
“I think it more than likely he had.”
Mr. Mivor postponed all further questions. He took out a neat little leather case, which he was in the habit of carrying with him on his professional rounds, and from this closely packed repository he selected a powder which he administered to the patient with his own hands, gravely watchful of him all the time. The old man’s eyes opened for a moment or two, only to close again.
“You will want a trained nurse,” he said presently, “if this person is to remain in your house — and, indeed, it would not be safe for him to be moved for some days.”
“He will remain here, and I shall help to nurse him,” said Hester, who had resumed her seat by the sleeper’s pillow. “He is my father.”
“Your father! I did not quite understand,” said the doctor, not a little surprised at this revelation, for he had noted the ragged flannel shirt, the greasy coat-collar, and the general aspect of foulness and decay which made the old man’s presence in that room a cause of wonder.
Her father! This poor human wreck the father of the beautiful Mrs. Hanley, about whom there had been so many speculations! Were some of her malevolent detractors right after all, and did she really come from the gutter?
He looked at the old man’s face more thoughtfully than before. Bloated and disfigured as those features were by evil habits, they did not show the coarse modelling which is supposed to go with low birth.
The hand lying inert on the plush coverlet was slender and finely formed — a hand that had never been hardened by the day-labourer’s work. The man might once have been a gentleman. The capacity for intemperance is sometimes immeasurable even in gentle blood.
Mr. Mivor was not quite satisfied with the aspect of the case. He did not implicitly believe that story of the old man’s entrance upon the scene, and immediate seizure. The stroke was a paralytic stroke, he had no doubt of that — but he suspected that there was something being kept from him, and he was all the more suspicious after Mrs. Hanley’s admission of her relationship to the patient. His duty, however, lay clear before him. Whatever might have happened in the small hours of the night that was gone — even if there had been a quarrel between the old man and the young one, and violence of some kind, as he suspected — the man was not dead. His duty was to cure him, if he could, and his interest was to keep his suspicions to himself.
“I’ll telegraph to London for a hospital nurse, if you like,” he said. “Pray do,” assented Gerard, ringing the bell. “I’ll send off your telegram as soon as it is written.”
“And in the meantime,” said the doctor, writing his message at a table where there were all the necessary materials ready to his hand, “I will help you to get the patient comfortably to bed.”
“His room is quite ready,” Hester said. “I can do anything for him — I am used to waiting upon him.”
“He has been ill before now, I suppose, then?”
“Never so bad as this. I never saw him lose consciousness as he did last night — after he fell.”
Her faltering accents and the distress in her face assured Mr. Mivor that his conjecture was well founded, but he pressed her with no further questioning, and quietly, with the skill and gentleness of the trained practitioner, he assisted the scared manservant to carry the slumbering form to the room above, and assisted Hester in removing the weather-stained outer garments, and settling the patient comfortably in the bed that had been made ready.
The fire burned cheerily in the old-fashioned grate, the autumn sun shone brightly outside. The room with its dainty French paper and white furniture looked fresh and pure as if it had been prepared for a bride — and there on the bed lay the victim of his own vices — those negative sins of sloth and intemperance which are supposed to injure only the sinner.
“My poor father has been wandering about the country till his clothes have got into this dreadful state,” Hester said to the doctor, apologetically, as she laid the wretched garments on a chair. “I have a trunk full of his things in the house, ready for him when he wants them. I suppose it is my duty to tell you that he has been the victim of intemperate habits, induced in the first instance by acute neuralgia. He is very much to be pitied, poor dear. You won’t tell any one, will you?”
“Tell any one! My dear young lady, what do yon think doctors are made of? Family secrets are as sacred for us as they are for the priesthood. It was very easy for me to guess that drink — and only drink — cou
ld have brought a gentleman to this sad pass. And now I shall leave yon to take care of him till the nurse arrives. I dare say she will be here early in the afternoon. I’ll look in before dark.” When he was gone Hester examined her father’s pockets. In the large outside pocket of the shooting-jacket there was a shattered volume of Horace, containing the satires, the margins annotated in Nicholas Davenport’s small penmanship — penmanship which had retained something of its original microscopic neatness, in spite of shaken nerves and tremulous fingers.
In the breast-pocket of the same coat there were a good many pages of manuscript, with many interlineations and blottings, indicative of strenuous labour. These were all of the same character, metrical translations of some of the satires. These attempts indicated extraordinary labour, the same passages being reproduced over and over again — now in one metre, now in another — but no section of the work was finished. There were all the marks of a weakened will directing a once powerful intellect.
Hester gave these pages to Gerard presently when he came in to look at the patient. She gave them to him in silence, not even looking at him, lest her face should express too intense a reproach. These laboured translations proved how completely the scholar had been duped by the man who had deliberately tempted him back into the way of vice.
“Poor fellow! Yes, he tried to earn my money. He had the instinct of a gentleman. I was a scoundrel, and you do well to hate or to despise mo. I am worthy of nothing better.”
“Hate yon!” she repeated, in a low, broken voice, “you know I can never do that. You did not realise what you were doing, or you never could have done such a cruel thing. Yon have ruined him, body and soul; but I am as much to blame as you. If I had been true to myself and to him, I might have found him and brought him back.”
“Yes, if yon had sacrificed youth, and love, and loveliness, and all fair things in this brief life for that worn-out hulk. No, Hester, I am not brutal, I am not heartless. I am sorry for him; but he is the victim of his own instincts, and if the opportunity had not come from my hand it would have come from some other hand. I should be much more sorry if you had gone on with that dull slavery which cut you off from all the joys that youth has a right to claim from life. I was mad when I saw your patient drudgery, your blank pleasureless days. I would have done a worse thing than I did to rescue you. And now — well — we must do the best we can for him” — with a reluctant glance at the sleeper. “After all, he is no worse off than many an elderly Croesus struck down in the midst of his possessions. To this complexion we must all come at last.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 921
