“You have been indulging already,” said Graham softly. Arne had begun to doze off. His cushion had sagged down, the doctor stooped to rearrange it, carelessly laying the little phial for the moment in a crease of the rug covering the man’s knees.
Mrs. Arne in her mourning dress was crossing the hall as he came to the top of the basement steps and pushed open the swing door. She was giving some orders to Foster, the butler, who disappeared as the doctor advanced.
“You’re about again,” he said, “good girl!”
“Too silly of me,” she said, “to be hysterical! After all these years! One should be able to keep one’s own counsel. But it is over now, I promise I will never speak of it again.”
“We frightened poor Dolly dreadfully. I had to order her out like a regiment of soldiers.”
“Yes, I know. I’m going to her now.”
On his suggestion that she should look in on her husband first she looked askance.
“Down there!”
“Yes, that’s his fancy. Let him be. He is a good deal depressed about himself and you. He notices a great deal more than you think. He isn’t quite as apathetic as you describe him to be. . . . Come here!” He led her into the unlit dining-room a little way. “You expect too much, my dear. You do really! You make too many demands on the vitality you saved.”
“What did one save him for?” she asked fiercely. She continued more quietly, “I know. I am going to be different.”
“Not you,” said Graham fondly. He was very partial to Alice Arne in spite of her silliness. “You’ll worry about Edward till the end of the chapter. I know you. And”—he turned her round by the shoulder so that she fronted the light in the hall—“you elusive thing, let me have a good look at you. . . . Hum! Your eyes, they’re a bit starey. . . .”
He let her go again with a sigh of impotence. Something must be done . . . soon . . . he must think. . . . He got hold of his coat and began to get into it. . . .
Mrs. Arne smiled, buttoned a button for him and then opened the front door, like a good hostess, a very little way. With a quick flirt of his hat he was gone, and she heard the clap of his brougham door and the order “Home.”
“Been saying good-bye to that thief Graham?” said her husband gently, when she entered his room, her pale eyes staring a little, her thin hand busy at the front of her dress.
“Thief? Why? One moment! Where’s your switch?”
She found it and turned on a blaze of light from which her husband seemed to shrink.
“Well, he carried off my drops. Afraid of my poisoning myself, I suppose?”
“Or acquiring the morphia habit,” said his wife in a dull level voice, “as I have.”
She paused. He made no comment. Then, picking up the little phial Dr. Graham had left in the crease of the rug, she spoke—
“You are the thief, Edward, as it happens, this is mine.”
“Is it? I found it knocking about; I didn’t know it was yours. Well, will you give me some?”
“I will, if you like.”
“Well, dear, decide. You know I am in your hands and Graham’s. He was rubbing that into me today.”
“Poor lamb!” she said derisively; “I’d not allow my doctor, or my wife either, to dictate to me whether I should put an end to myself, or not.”
“Ah, but you’ve got a spirit, you see!” Arne yawned. “However, let me have a go at the stuff and then you put it on top of the wardrobe or a shelf, where I shall know it is, but never reach out to get it, I promise you.”
“No, you wouldn’t reach out a hand to keep yourself alive, let alone kill yourself,” said she.“That is you all over, Edward.”
“And don’t you see that is why I did die,” he said, with earnestness unexpected by her. “And then, unfortunately, you and Graham bustled up and wouldn’t let Nature take its course. . . . I rather wish you hadn’t been so officious.”
“And let you stay dead,” said she carelessly. “But at the time I cared for you so much that I should have had to kill myself, or commit suttee like a Bengali widow. Ah, well!”
She reached out for a glass half-full of water that stood on the low ledge of a bookcase close by the arm of his chair. . . . “Will this glass do? What’s in it? Only water? How much morphia shall I give you? An overdose?”
“I don’t care if you do, and that’s a fact.”
“It was a joke, Edward,” she said piteously.
“No joke to me. This fag end of life I’ve clawed hold of, doesn’t interest me. And I’m bound to be interested in what I’m doing or I’m no good. I’m no earthly good now. I don’t enjoy life, I’ve nothing to enjoy it with—in here—” he struck his breast. “It’s like a dull party one goes to by accident. All I want to do is to get into a cab and go home.”
His wife stood over him with the half-full glass in one hand and the little bottle in the other.
Her eyes dilated . . . her chest heaved.
“Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”
“Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a dream—a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear? At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people—my fellow creatures. I’ve left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should be, really, in relation to me?”
He rose a little in his seat—she stepped nervously aside, made as if to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.
“They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were ghosts walking. Or perhaps, it’s I who am a ghost to them? . . . You don’t understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you are! . . .”
Alice Arne smiled, and balanced the objects she was holding. He motioned her to pour out the liquid from one to the other, but she took no heed; she was listening with all her ears. It was the nearest approach to the language of compliment, to anything in the way of loverlike personalities that she had heard fall from his lips since his illness. He went on, becoming as it were lukewarm to his subject—
“But the worst of it is that once break the cord that links you to humanity—it can’t be mended. Man doesn’t live by bread alone . . . or lives to disappoint you. What am I to you, without my own poor personality? . . . Don’t stare so, Alice! I haven’t talked so much or so intimately for ages, have I? Let me try and have it out. . . . Are you in any sort of hurry?”
“No, Edward.”
“Pour that stuff out and have done. . . . Well, Alice, it’s a queer feeling, I tell you. One goes about with one’s looks on the ground, like a man who eyes the bed he is going to lie down in, and longs for. Alice, the crust of the earth seems a barrier between me and my own place. I want to scratch the boardings with my nails and shriek something like this: ‘Let me get down to you all, there where I belong!’ It’s a horrible sensation, like a vampire reversed! . . .”
“Is that why you insisted on having this room in the basement?” she asked breathlessly.
“Yes, I can’t bear being upstairs, somehow. Here, with these barred windows and stone-cold floors . . . I can see the people’s feet walking above there in the street . . . one has some sort of illusion . . .”
“Oh!” She shivered and her eyes travelled like those of a caged creature round the bare room and fluttered when they rested on the sombre windows imperiously barred. She dropped her gaze to the stone flags that showed beyond the oasis of Turkey carpet on which Arne’s chair stood. . . .
Then to the door, the door that she had closed on entering. It had heavy bolts, but they were not drawn against
her, though by the look of her eyes it seemed she half imagined they were. . . .
She made a step forward and moved her hands slightly. She looked down on them and what they held . . . then changed the relative positions of the two objects and held the bottle over the glass. . . .
“Yes, come along!” her husband said. “Are you going to be all day giving it me?”
With a jerk, she poured the liquid out into a glass and handed it to him. She looked away—towards the door. . . .
“Ah, your way of escape!” said he, following her eyes. Then he drank, painstakingly.
The empty bottle fell out of her hands. She wrung them, murmuring—
“Oh, if I had only known!”
“Known what? That I should go near to cursing you for bringing me back?”
He fixed his cold eyes on her, as the liquid passed slowly over his tongue.
“—Or that you would end by taking back the gift you gave?”
THE WELL
W. W. JACOBS
I
Two men stood in the billiard-room of an old country house, talking. Play, which had been of a half-hearted nature, was over, and they sat at the open window, looking out over the park stretching away beneath them, conversing idly.
“Your time’s nearly up, Jem,” said one at length, “this time six weeks you’ll be yawning out the honeymoon and cursing the man—woman I mean—who invented them.”
Jem Benson stretched his long limbs in the chair and grunted in dissent.
“I’ve never understood it,” continued Wilfred Carr, yawning. “It’s not in my line at all; I never had enough money for my own wants, let alone for two. Perhaps if I were as rich as you or Croesus I might regard it differently.”
There was just sufficient meaning in the latter part of the remark for his cousin to forbear to reply to it. He continued to gaze out of the window and to smoke slowly.
“Not being as rich as Croesus—or you,” resumed Carr, regarding him from beneath lowered lids, “I paddle my own canoe down the stream of Time, and, tying it to my friends’ door-posts, go in to eat their dinners.”
“Quite Venetian,” said Jem Benson, still looking out of the window. “It’s not a bad thing for you, Wilfred, that you have the doorposts and dinners—and friends.”
Mr. Carr grunted in his turn. “Seriously though, Jem,” he said, slowly, “you’re a lucky fellow, a very lucky fellow. If there is a better girl above ground than Olive, I should like to see her.”
“Yes,” said the other, quietly.
“She’s such an exceptional girl,” continued Carr, staring out of the window. “She’s so good and gentle. She thinks you are a bundle of all the virtues.”
He laughed frankly and joyously, but the other man did not join him.
“Strong sense—of right and wrong, though,” continued Carr, musingly. “Do you know, I believe that if she found out that you were not—”
“Not what?” demanded Benson, turning upon him fiercely. “Not what?”
“Everything that you are,” returned his cousin, with a grin that belied his words. “I believe she’d drop you.”
“Talk about something else,” said Benson, slowly; “your pleasantries are not always in the best taste.”
Wilfred Carr rose and taking a cue from the rack, bent over the board and practiced one or two favourite shots. “The only other subject I can talk about just at present is my own financial affairs,” he said slowly, as he walked round the table.
“Talk about something else,” said Benson again, bluntly.
“And the two things are connected,” said Carr, and dropping his cue he half sat on the table and eyed his cousin.
There was a long silence. Benson pitched the end of his cigar out of the window, and leaning back closed his eyes.
“Do you follow me?” inquired Carr at length.
Benson opened his eyes and nodded at the window.
“Do you want to follow my cigar?” he demanded.
“I should prefer to depart by the usual way for your sake,” returned the other, unabashed. “If I left by the window all sorts of questions would be asked, and you know what a talkative chap I am.”
“So long as you don’t talk about my affairs,” returned the other, restraining himself by an obvious effort, “you can talk yourself hoarse.”
“I’m in a mess,” said Carr, slowly, “a devil of a mess. If I don’t raise fifteen hundred by this day fortnight, I may be getting my board and lodging free.”
“Would that be any change?” questioned Benson.
“The quality would,” retorted the other. “The address also would not be good. Seriously, Jem, will you let me have the fifteen hundred?”
“No,” said the other, simply.
Carr went white. “It’s to save me from ruin,” he said, thickly.
“I’ve helped you till I’m tired,” said Benson, turning and regarding him, “and it is all to no good. If you’ve got into a mess, get out of it. You should not be so fond of giving autographs away.”
“It’s foolish, I admit,” said Carr, deliberately. “I won’t do so any more. By the way, I’ve got some to sell. You needn’t sneer. They’re not my own.”
“Whose are they?” inquired the other.
“Yours.”
Benson got up from his chair and crossed over to him. “What is this?” he asked, quietly. “Blackmail?”
“Call it what you like,” said Carr. “I’ve got some letters for sale, price fifteen hundred. And I know a man who would buy them at that price for the mere chance of getting Olive from you. I’ll give you first offer.”
“If you have got any letters bearing my signature, you will be good enough to give them to me,” said Benson, very slowly.
“They’re mine,” said Carr, lightly; “given to me by the lady you wrote them to. I must say that they are not all in the best possible taste.”
His cousin reached forward suddenly, and catching him by the collar of his coat pinned him down on the table.
“Give me those letters,” he breathed, sticking his face close to Carr’s.
“They’re not here,” said Carr, struggling. “I’m not a fool. Let me go, or I’ll raise the price.”
The other man raised him from the table in his powerful hands, apparently with the intention of dashing his head against it. Then suddenly his hold relaxed as an astonished-looking maid-servant entered the room with letters. Carr sat up hastily.
“That’s how it was done,” said Benson, for the girl’s benefit as he took the letters.
“I don’t wonder at the other man making him pay for it, then,” said Carr, blandly.
“You will give me those letters?” said Benson, suggestively, as the girl left the room.
“At the price I mentioned, yes,” said Carr; “but so sure as I am a living man, if you lay your clumsy hands on me again, I’ll double it. Now, I’ll leave you for a time while you think it over.”
He took a cigar from the box and lighting it carefully quitted the room. His cousin waited until the door had closed behind him, and then turning to the window sat there in a fit of fury as silent as it was terrible.
The air was fresh and sweet from the park, heavy with the scent of new-mown grass. The fragrance of a cigar was now added to it, and glancing out he saw his cousin pacing slowly by. He rose and went to the door, and then, apparently altering his mind, he returned to the window and watched the figure of his cousin as it moved slowly away into the moonlight. Then he rose again, and, for a long time, the room was empty.
It was empty when Mrs. Benson came in some time later to say good-night to her son on her way to bed. She walked slowly round the table, and pausing at the window gazed from it in idle thought, until she saw the figure of her son advancing with rapid strides toward the house. He looked up at the window.
“Good-night,” said she.
“Good-night,” said Benson, in a deep voice.
“Where is Wilfred?”
“Oh, he h
as gone,” said Benson.
“Gone?”
“We had a few words; he was wanting money again, and I gave him a piece of my mind. I don’t think we shall see him again.”
“Poor Wilfred!” sighed Mrs. Benson. “He is always in trouble of some sort. I hope that you were not too hard upon him.”
“No more than he deserved,” said her son, sternly. “Good night.”
II
The well, which had long ago fallen into disuse, was almost hidden by the thick tangle of undergrowth which ran riot at that corner of the old park. It was partly covered by the shrunken half of a lid, above which a rusty windlass creaked in company with the music of the pines when the wind blew strongly. The full light of the sun never reached it, and the ground surrounding it was moist and green when other parts of the park were gaping with the heat.
Two people walking slowly round the park in the fragrant stillness of a summer evening strayed in the direction of the well.
“No use going through this wilderness, Olive,” said Benson, pausing on the outskirts of the pines and eyeing with some disfavour the gloom beyond.
“Best part of the park,” said the girl briskly; “you know it’s my favourite spot.”
“I know you’re very fond of sitting on the coping,” said the man slowly, “and I wish you wouldn’t. One day you will lean back too far and fall in.”
“And make the acquaintance of Truth,” said Olive lightly. “Come along.”
She ran from him and was lost in the shadow of the pines, the bracken crackling beneath her feet as she ran. Her companion followed slowly, and emerging from the gloom saw her poised daintily on the edge of the well with her feet hidden in the rank grass and nettles which surrounded it. She motioned her companion to take a seat by her side, and smiled softly as she felt a strong arm passed about her waist.
“I like this place,” said she, breaking a long silence, “it is so dismal —so uncanny. Do you know I wouldn’t dare to sit here alone, Jem. I should imagine that all sorts of dreadful things were hidden behind the bushes and trees, waiting to spring out on me. Ugh!”
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