Hester answered nothing to his philosophical summing up of the situation. She took her seat by the bedside, watchful, ready to carry out the doctor’s instructions, which were of the simplest. There was hardly anything to be done. The old man might awaken from that prolonged slumber in his right mind, or he might not. She could but wait and watch. She had drawn down the blinds, and sat in the subdued light — sat with folded hands, and lips which moved in prayer to that Personal God of whose non-existence her latest studies had assured her. In this hour of agony and self-reproach her thoughts went back into the old paths; and even in the Great Perhaps there was some touch of comfort. Surely somewhere, she told herself, there must exist some Spirit of love and pity, some Universal All-comprehending Mind greater than the mind of man, to which sorrow could make its appeal — in which despair could find a refuge. All the peoples of the earth have felt the necessity for a God. Could this blind groping after the Great Spirit mean nothing, after all? The words of her new teachers — words of power from the pens of men who had thought long and deeply, who had brought culture and pure science to bear upon the problems of life and mind — came back to her in their inflexible assuredness — the words of men who said there was no God, and that the world was none the poorer for the loss of Him — the words of men who said that this life could be full of grace and pleasantness and hope and love, albeit there was no better life beyond, and our beloved dead were verily and for ever dead.
And then words more familiar, words known long before, recurred with a quieting power, like the sound of a melody learnt in childhood, and a gush of tears loosened the iron bands that held her heart, and a ray of hope stole in upon the darkness of her thoughts. “Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
CHAPTER XXIV. “ALAS FOR ME, THEN, MY GOOD DAYS ARE DONE.”
LIFE went by with dull and measured pace after that night of terror. Nicholas Davenport recovered consciousness upon awakening from that prolonged slumber, which may have marked the exhaustion following upon long wanderings from village to village, poor food, and unrestful nights in miserable beds. Hester found a rough record of his journeyings in his pockets, in the shape of crumpled tavern bills — the earliest in date a weekly account from the landlord of a little inn at Abingdon. This dated as far back as August, and it was evident the old man had gone to Abingdon almost immediately upon the receipt of Gerard’s money, it might be with some dim idea of being near Oxford and the Bodleian, or it might be from some memories of joyous days spent along the river when he was an undergraduate. There were several bills from the Abingdon Inn, spreading over a period of six or seven weeks, and the bills marked a downward progress in the drunkard’s career, each successive account showing a larger consumption of alcohol. The last account was not receipted, and it seemed but too likely that the old man had left in debt.
Later bills showed a journey down the river, by land or water. The names of the towns or villages where he had stopped had a rustic sound, the signs of the inns were quaint and old-fashioned. The Ring of Bells. The Old House at Home. The First and Last. But whatever the sign might be, Nicholas Davenport’s bill showed that his chief outlay had been for alcohol — brandy in the earlier stages of the journey. Later, when his funds were dwindling, the drink had been gin. The unhappy man had chosen the very worst direction for his fated footsteps, for in those low-lying rural villages by the river he must have found the atmosphere most calculated to bring back those neuralgic agonies which had been first the cause, and afterwards both cause and excuse, for his intemperance. His daughter’s care had kept the fiend at a distance, but he had gone in the very way of his old enemy. The last in date of all the bills was a scrawling memorandum from a wayside public-house in the next village to Lowcombe, and hardly two miles from the Rosary. It was doubtless from the fireside gossips of the tap-room that Nicholas Davenport had heard that description of Mr and Mrs. Hanley and their manner of life which had led him to suspect their identity with Gerard and Hester. And now he was stretched on a sick bed, helpless, the power of movement lost to the long lank limbs: helpless and almost imbecile. The mind was dim and blurred. Memory was gone, save for rare and sudden flashes of recollection, which had about them something strange and unearthly that thrilled his daughter with awe. Some sudden allusion to the past, some sharp, clear, scrap of speech startled and scared her as if the dead had spoken. His imbecility seemed far less unnatural, less painful even, than these transient revivifications of sense and memory.
The nursing sister, a quiet, orderly person between thirty and forty, tall, broad-shouldered, vigorous, and with a hearty appetite for her meals, relieved Hester’s watches in the invalid’s room; and after the first week a male attendant was engaged, who would be able to assist in getting the patient out of doors, so soon as he should be well enough to be moved into a Bath chair, and wheeled about the gardens and lanes. Mr. Mivor explained to Hester that her father’s condition was not so much an illness as a state. He had little hope in any marked recovery, physical or mental. Mr. Davenport’s constitution had been destroyed by intemperance, and the surprise, the shock, whatever it was that brought about the seizure of the other night, had only precipitated a crisis that was, in a measure, inevitable.
Hester’s colour came and went as she listened to his opinion. She lifted her eyes to the doctor with an imploring look.
“Tell me the truth, Mr. Mivor, the whole truth. Do you really think that what happened the other night has made hardly any difference to my father — that this sad state of things must have come about, even if—”
“Even if there had been no agitating cause — no fall. Yes, I do. But the fall came before the stroke, I think, did it not?”
“Yes, I am sorry to say;” and then in trembling accents she went on, “I am so anxious to know the truth, to know the worst even, that I must tell you all. You have promised to keep our secrets?”
“Yes, yes, he assured that you can trust me.”
“I left my home to spend my life with Mr. Hanley — left without my father’s knowledge. He was away from our poor lodgings at the time — and I thought that he had deserted me, and I may have cared less on that account, perhaps. But he had not meant to abandon me, I am sure. He had gone away under a misapprehension, and after wandering about the country he found us here — and he was not quite himself, I think, for he spoke to me cruelly — with words which no father—”
She broke down, sobbing out the bitter memory of that night. The worthy doctor soothed her with kindly sympathy. He had seen much of those storms of care and woe, anger and strife, that rage in the households whose outward seeming is peace and pleasantness, and he had a tender heart for the sorrows of his patients, especially for a young and beautiful woman who was expiating the sin of having loved too well, and who was evidently not of the clay of which sinners are made.
“Don’t tell me any more,” he said; “there were high words — a little hit of a scuffle perhaps, and your father fell. I thought as much when I helped to undress him. I examined him carefully. There were two or three incipient bruises — nothing more. Such a fall would not have produced the seizure. That was the result of gradual decay, the decay of an alcoholised brain. Your father has been the chief sinner against himself.”
There was infinite relief in this opinion so far as Gerard was concerned, but it did not lessen the burden of her own remorseful conscience. She blamed herself for this final ruin of the life she had fought so hard to reclaim.
One duty, one atonement, only remained, she thought, and that was to bear her burden, and to make this broken life as happy as she could. Her father knew her, and took pleasure in her companionship. That was much. He accepted his surroundings without inquiry or astonishment, and enjoyed the luxuries that were provided for him without asking whence they came. He saw Gerard without agitation, occasionally recognising him and addressing him by name, at other times greeting him with the distant politeness due to a stranger. And Gerard endur
ed his presence in the house, at first with a sublime patience, even going out of his way to pay the feeble old man little attentions when he met him in the garden or neighbouring lanes on sunny mornings, dragged along in his comfortable Bath chair, wrapped to the chin in fur, with Hester walking at his side. While the scene of that awful night, the fears that had haunted him in the slow hours of waiting for dawn and the doctor, were still fresh in his memory, a touch of pity and remorse made him patient of a presence which could not bring comfort or pleasantness into his retreat; but after a month of this endurance, the incubus began to oppress and annoy him, even although Hester took care that he should see as little as possible of that third inmate of the house, and refrained from worrying him with any details of her father’s life, whether he were better or worse, cheerful or depressed. The mere consciousness of the old man’s existence became unbearable, and Gerard urged the need of placing him in a sanatorium, where, as he argued, he would be better cared for than in any private home.
Hester was unhesitating in her refusal.
“He could not be happier or better cared for than he is here,” she said, “and even if he were as well eared for, which I doubt, I should not know it, and should be miserable about him.”
“That is rather a bad look-out for me. And how long is this kind of thing to last?”
“As long as he lives.”
“And according to your friend, Mr. Mivor, he may last for years — a wreck, but a living wreck — and in that case he will outlast me. You cannot mean it, Hester. You can’t mean to abandon me for — this unlucky old man?”
“Abandon you! Gerard, how could you think it?”
“But I must think it. No one can serve two masters. If you insist upon staying here to nurse your father, you can’t go to the South with me, and what becomes of our winter in Italy?”
“I have been thinking of that,” she said, with a troubled look. “But is it really necessary for you to go to the South? The weather has been so mild.”
“It generally is before Christmas. Winter doesn’t begin to show his teeth till January.”
“And you have been so well.”
“Not well enough to face five months’ cold weather, or to disobey my doctor. He told me to winter in the South.”
Hester sighed, and was silent for a few moments. Oh, that dream of the lovely South, how sweet it had been, bow fondly she had dwelt upon Browning’s Italian poems, upon all those word-pictures of mountain and olive wood, cypress and aloe; the hill-side chapel, the mule path, the straggling town upon the mountain ridge, the vine-shadowed berceau, the sapphire lake! And she had to renounce this fair dream; and, infinitely worse, she had to part from Gerard. If he must go to the South, they must be parted.
“I would give up anything rather than leave my father,” she said quietly. “I think you must know how I have looked forward to seeing that lovely South, the countries that seem a kind of dreamland when one thinks of them in our prosaic world, and seeing them with you — with you! But if you must go, you must go alone. You will come back to me, won’t you, dear? The parting won’t be for ever?”
“I shall come back — yes, of course, if I five; but it will be hideously dreary for you here all the winter. Surely you could trust your father to the nurse and his man. They are very kind to him, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are kind, and I am here to see that they are kind. How do I know what would happen if I were away? He is very trying sometimes. They might lose patience with him.”
“A sharp word would not hurt him once in a way. They would have to be kind to him in the main. His existence means bread and cheese for them, and it would be to their interest to make him comfortable.”
“That would not absolve me from my duty, Gerard. No; I must stay with him till the end.”
“Well, you must do as you please. If you find this place too dismal or too damp you can take your invalid to Hastings or Torquay. He could travel as far as that, I suppose?” —
“I don’t think so. Mr. Mivor said that any fatigue or excitement might be dangerous. He is to be kept as quiet as possible, and this place suits him admirably.”
“And he suits Mivor as a patient.”
“That’s a very unfair insinuation, Gerard. Mr. Mivor might come to see him every day, yet he only comes once in ten days. He told me the other day that he would not come again unless he were sent for; but urged him to come occasionally just to see that no neglect was arising.”
“I don’t grudge Mivor his fees. I only lament the change that has come into our life — the life we were to lead together;” and then, touched by the sadness in Hester’s face, he went on, “After all, if the winter were very mild, I might rub on here, perhaps.”
“No, no,” she cried eagerly, “you must run no risk. Oh, Gerard, surely you know how precious your life is to me — dearer than any other life. You must know that it is duty that keeps me here — that love would have me always by your side.”
“I know that you have all the obstinate clinging to unthankful duties which is a characteristic of your sex,” he said; “or perhaps I ought to say a characteristic of good women. The bad ones throw their caps over the mill, laugh duty to scorn, and, I believe, get the best out of life. Theirs is the Esau’s portion, the savoury mess that they long for, the pleasure that comes at the nick of time. After all, I think that is the best.”
He was lying back in his low bergère beside the drawing-room fire, his arms flung up above his head, his eyes gazing dreamily at the flaming logs, in that brief half-hour when the cold, pale winter day melts into darkness. He was very fond of Hester still, perfectly contented in her society; but he had begun to think of other things when he was with her, and he hated that presence of the old man and his attendants upstairs. One of the rooms that Davenport occupied was over the drawing-room, and Gerard could hear footsteps crossing the floor now and then, the male attendant’s heavy tread, the nursing sister’s lighter footfall, and at seven o’clock every evening the wheels of the invalid-chair drawn slowly across the room. He knew the automatic routine of that sad life, the hour at which the patient was dressed, his meals, his airing, the business of getting him to bed, which happened before Hester and Gerard sat down to dinner. He knew all these details, though Hester had talked of the patient so little — knew them by their monotonous recurrence. He considered what he should do with himself in the winter, how make life most pleasant to himself now that the spell which had bound him to the Rosary was broken? He had been warned against all excitement. The feverish life of the dissipated idler was not for him. The utmost that he could allow himself in the way of relaxation would be the society of clever people, and a little quiet dinner-giving in his fine London house. He could oscillate between London and the Rosary, and Hester need feel no sense of desertion. The winter season had begun; there would be plenty of pleasant people in London. His sister was to be married in the first week of the new year, and he would have to be in Devonshire for that occasion. His mother had written to him several times since her return from the Continent, urging him to go and see her, full of vague uneasiness about the life he was leading.
“If Hester owes a duty to her father, I have my obligation to my people,” he said to himself, in that long reverie by the fireside. “I have to consider the claims of those who have never brought disgrace upon me as that old sot has done upon her.”
“What are you thinking of so earnestly, Gerard?” Hester asked presently, watching his face in the fitful light.
“I am thinking of my mother.”
The answer chilled her. His mother; yes, he, too, had those who were near and dear to him — those in whose lives she had no part.
“Your mother. Ah how kind she was to me, and what ages ago that old life seems! Shall I ever see her again, I wonder?” she speculated, with a sigh.
And then came the bitter thought: What could his mother think of her? Disgraced, dishonoured, nameless; an outcast in the sight of such a woman as the Rector’s wife
. She did not reckon upon a good woman’s Christian charity. She thought of the Rector’s wife only as of one who had never been touched by sin, and who could make no allowances.
“Your sister is to be married very soon, I suppose?” she said interiogatively, after a long pause.
“In the first week of the year. I shall have to be at the wedding.”
“Of course. My heart will go with you, and all my warmest wishes for her happiness — even though she and I may never meet again.”
“Don’t harp upon that string, Hester. Let the future take care of itself. You are getting morbid in this odious house.”
“Odious! Oh, Gerard, we have been so happy here; I thought you loved this house.”
“So I did, while it was full of sunshine and flowers, and before you turned it into a hospital. Don’t let us quarrel, Hester. I’m a little hipped, and I shall be saying disagreeable things without meaning them. You have reminded me of my sister’s wedding, and that I have not even thought of a wedding present. What shall I give her?”
“Something very handsome, of course; but I know how charitable she is, and that she would rather have something for the poor people in her new parish.”
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