Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

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"Damaris," he said, at last, "speak to me."

"How can I speak to you when I don't understand," she answered gravely.
"Either you lie--which I should be sorry to accuse you of doing--or you
tell me a very terrible thing, if, that is, I at all comprehend what you
say.--Are you not the son of Mrs. Faircloth, who lives at the inn out by
the black cottages?"

"Yes, Lesbia Faircloth is my mother. And I ask for no better. She has
squandered love upon me--squandered money, upon me too; but wisely and
cleverly, with results. Still--" he paused--"well, it takes two,
doesn't it, to make a man? One isn't one's mother's son only."

"But Mrs. Faircloth is a widow," Damaris reasoned, in wondering
directness. "I have heard people speak of her husband. She was married."

"But not to my father. Do you ask for proofs--just think a minute. Whom
did you mistake me for when I called you and came down over the Bar in
the dusk?"

"No--no--" she protested trembling exceedingly. "That is not possible.
How could such a thing happen?"

"As such things mostly do happen. It is not the first case, nor will it
by a long way, I reckon, be the last. They were young, and--mayn't we
allow--they were beautiful. That's often a good deal to do with these
accidents. They met and, God help them, they loved."

"No--no--" Damaris cried again.

Yet she kept her hands on Faircloth's shoulders, clinging to him in the
excessive travail of her innocent spirit--though he racked her--for
sympathy and for help.

"For whom, after all, did you take me?" he repeated. "If there wasn't
considerable cause it would be incredible you should make such a mistake.
Can you deny that I am hall-marked, that the fact of my parentage is
written large in my flesh?"

He felt her eyes fixed on him, painfully straining to see him through the
rain and darkness; and, when she spoke again, he knew she knew that he
did not lie.

"But wasn't it wrong" she said.

"I suppose so. Only as it gave me life and as I love life I'm hardly the
person to deliver an unbiased opinion on that point."

"Then you are not sad, you are not angry?" Damaris presently and rather
unexpectedly asked.

"Yes--at times both, but not often or for long together. As I tell you I
love life--love it too well to torment myself much about the manner of my
coming by it. It might show more refinement of feeling perhaps to hang my
head and let a certain ugly word blast my prospects. But I don't happen
to see the business that way. On the contrary I hope to get every ounce
of advantage out of it I can--use it as a spur rather than a hobble. And
I love my profession too. It gives you room and opportunity. I am waiting
now for my first ship, my first command. That's a fine thing and a strong
one. For your first ship is as a bride to you, and your first command
makes you as a king among men. Oh! on a small scale I grant; but, as far
as it reaches, your authority is absolute. On board your own ship you are
master with a vengeance--if you like. And I do like."

Faircloth said the last few words softly, but with a weight of meaning
not to be misunderstood. He bent down, once more, chafed Damaris' feet
and wrapped his jacket carefully round them.

"And, while you and I are alone together, there is something--as we've
spoken so freely--which I want to tell you, so that there may be no
misconception about me or about what I want.--As men in my rank of life
go, I am well off. Rich--again on a small scale; but with means
sufficient to meet all my needs. I'm not a spend-thrift by nature,
luckily. And I have amply enough not only to hold my own in my profession
and win through, but to procure myself the pleasures and amusements I
happen to fancy. I want you to remember that, please. Tell me is it quite
clear to you?"

"Yes," Damaris said, "you have made it quite clear."

Yet for the first time he jarred on her, as with a more than superficial
difference of breeding and of class. This mention of money offended her
taste, seeming to lower the level upon which their extraordinary and--to
her--terrible conversation had thus far moved. It hurt her with another
kind of hurting--not magnificent, not absorbing, but just common. That in
speaking of money he was protecting himself, proudly self-guarding his
own honour and that of his mother, Lesbia Faircloth, never, in her
innocence of what is mean and mercenary, occurred to Damaris.

So she took her hands off his shoulders and clasped them in her lap.
Clasped them with all her poor strength, striving even in this extreme,
to maintain some measure of calm and of dignity. She must hold out, she
told herself, just simply by force of will hold out, till she was away
from him. After that, chaos--for thoughts, discoveries, apprehensions of
possibilities in human intercourse hitherto undreamed of, were marshalled
round her in close formation shoulder to shoulder. They only waited. An
instant's yielding on her part, and they would be on to her, crushing
down and in, making her brain reel, her mind stagger under their stifling
crowded assault.

"Go back and row," she said, at once imploring and imperious. "Row
quickly. I am very tired. I am cold. I want to be at home--to be in my
own place."

CHAPTER VI

RECOUNTING AN ASTONISHING DEPOSITION

Theresa Bilson bustled upstairs. Barring the absence of the extra brake,
which had caused--and for this she could not be sorry since didn't it
justify her "attitude" towards her recalcitrant ex-pupil?--some
inconvenient overcrowding in transit to and from the station, and barring
the rain, which set in between five and six o'clock, the expedition to
Harchester passed off with considerable _eclat_. Such, in any case, was
Theresa's opinion, she herself having figured conspicuously in the
foreground. During the inspection of the Cathedral the Dean paid her
quite marked attention; thanks, in part, to her historical and
archaeological knowledge--of which she made the most, and to her
connection with the Verity family--of which she made the most also. In
precisely what that connection might consist, the learned and timid old
gentleman, being very deaf and rather near-sighted, failed to gather. He
determined, however, to be on the safe side.

"Our genial Archdeacon," he said, "and his distinguished kinsman, Sir
Charles? Ah! yes--yes--indeed--to be sure--with the greatest pleasure."

And he motioned the blushing Theresa to fall into step with him, and with
Dr. Horniblow, at the head of the Deadham procession.

The afterglow of that triumphal progress irradiated her consciousness
still, when--after depositing the Miss Minetts upon their own doorstep,
with playful last words recalling the day's mild jokes and rallyings--she
drove on to The Hard to find the household there in a state of sombre and
most admired confusion.

Thus to arrive home in possession of a fine bag of news, only to
discover an opposition and far finer bag ready awaiting you may well
prove trying to the most high-souled and amiable of temper. By this time,
between success and fatigue, Theresa could not be justly described as
either high-souled or sweet tempered. She was at once inflated and on
edge, and consequently hotly indignant, as though the unfairest march
possible had been stolen upon her.

She bustled upstairs, and crossing the landing turned into the schoolroom
passage--a long, lamp-lit vista, hung with old Chinese wall-paper, the
running pattern of buds and flowers, large out of all proportion to the
bridges, palms, pagodas and groups of little purple and blue-clad men and
women disposed, in dwindling perspective, upon its once white surface.
Half-way along the passage, their backs towards her, Mary and Mrs.
Cooper, the cook--a fair, mild middle-aged, and cow-like person, of ample
proportions--stood conversing in smothered tones.

"And it's my belief he's been and told her, or anyhow that she guesses,
pore dear young lady," the latter, with upraised hands, lamented.

Theresa just caught these strange words. Caught too, Mary's hurried
rejoinder--"For mercy's sake, Mrs. Cooper, not a hint of that to any
living soul"--before the two women, sensible of the swish and patter of
her self-important entry, turned and moved forward to meet, or--could it
be?--to intercept her. Their faces bore a singular expression, in Mrs.
Cooper's case of sloppy, in Mary's of stern yet vivid alarm. Deeply
engaged though she was with her private grievance, Miss Bilson could not
but observe this. It made her nervous.

"What is the meaning," she began, her voice shrill with agitation, "of
the extraordinary story about Miss Damaris which Laura reports to me?
Someone is evidently very much in fault."

"Please don't speak quite so loud, Miss," Mary firmly admonished her.
"I've just got Miss Damaris quieted off to sleep, and if she's roused up
again, I won't answer for what mayn't happen."

"But what has happened? I insist upon knowing," Theresa declared, in
growing offence and agitation.

"Ah! that's just what we should be thankful enough to have you tell us,
Miss," Mrs. Cooper chimed in with heavy and reproachful emphasis upon
the pronouns.

To even the mild and cow-like revenge is sweet. Though honestly
distressed and scared, the speaker entertained a most consoling
conviction she was at this moment getting even with Theresa Bilson and
cleverly paying off old scores.

"The pore dear young lady's caught her death as likely as not, out
there across the river in the wet, let alone some sneaking rascal
making off with her stockings and shoes. When I saw her little naked
feet, all blue with the cold, it made my heart bleed, regularly bleed,
it did. I could only give thanks her Nanna, pore Mrs. Watson, who
worshipped the very ground Miss Damaris trod on, was spared living to
see that afflicting sight."

Then with a change of tone exasperating--as it was designed to be--to
one, at least, of her hearers, she added:

"I'll have that soup ready against Miss Damaris wakes, Mary, in case she
should fancy it. Just touch the bell, will you, and I'll bring it up
myself. It's not suitable to give either of the girls a chance for
prying. They're a deal too curious as it is. And I'm only too pleased to
watch with you, turn and turn about, as I told you, whenever you feel to
require a rest. Lizzie will have to see to the cooking anyhow--except
what's wanted for Miss Damaris. I couldn't put my mind into kitchen work
to-night, not if you paid me ever so."

And on large flat feet she moved away towards the back-staircase, leading
down to the offices from the far end of the passage, leaving an odour of
pastry behind her and of cloves.

"To think of what to-morrow may bring, ah! dear me," she murmured
as she went.

During the ten minutes or so which immediately followed Theresa Bilson
boxed the compass in respect of sensations, the needle, as may be noted,
invariably quivering back to the same point--namely, righteous anger
against Damaris. For was not that high-spirited maiden's imperviousness
to influence and defiance of authority--her, Theresa's, influence and
authority--the mainspring of all this disastrous complication? Theresa
found it convenient to believe so, and whip herself up to almost frantic
determination in that belief. It was so perfectly clear. All the more
clear because her informant, Mary, evidently did not share her belief.
Mary's account of to-day's most vexatious transactions betrayed
partizanship and prejudice, such as might be expected from an uneducated
person, offering--as Theresa assured herself--a pertinent example of the
workings of "the servant mind." Nevertheless uneasy suspicion dogged her,
a haunting though unformulated dread that other persons--one person above
all others--might endorse Mary's prejudices rather than her own, so
reasonably based, conviction.

"If only Mr. Patch had been in there'd have been somebody to depend on,"
the woman told her, recounting the anxious search after vanished Damaris.
"But he'd driven into Marychurch of course, starting ever so early
because of the parcels he had your orders to call for at the several
shops, before meeting the train. And the gardeners had left work on
account of the wet; so we'd nobody to send to make enquiries anywhere
except Tolling, and that feather-head Alfred, who you can't trust half a
minute out of your sight." Here she paused in her narrative and made a
move, adroitly driving Theresa Bilson before her out on to the landing,
thus putting a greater distance between that tormented spinster and the
neighbourhood of Damaris' bed-chamber. Her handsome brown eyes held the
light of battle and her colour was high. She straightened a chair,
standing against the wall at the stair-head, with a neatly professional
hand in passing.

"Mrs. Cooper and I were fairly wild waiting down on the sea-wall with the
lantern, thinking of drowning and--worse,--when"--she glanced sharply at
her companion and, lowering her eyes altered the position of the chair by
a couple of inches--"when Captain Faircloth's boat came up beside the
breakwater and he carried Miss Damaris ashore and across the garden."

"Stop"--Theresa broke in--"I do not follow you. Faircloth, Captain
Faircloth? You are not, I earnestly hope, speaking of the owner of that
low public-house on the island?"

"Yes--him," Mary returned grimly, her eyes still lowered.

"And do you mean me to understand that this young man carried Miss
Damaris--actually carried her"--Miss Bilson choked and cleared her throat
with a foolish little crowing sound--"carried her all the way into the
house--in his arms?"

"Yes, in his arms, Miss. How else would you have had him carry her?--And,
as gentle and careful as any woman could, too--into the house and right
upstairs here"--pointing along the passage as if veritably beholding the
scene once more--"and into her own bedroom."

"How shocking. How extremely improper!"

Theresa beat her fat little hands hysterically together. She credited
herself with emotions of the most praiseworthy and purest; ignorant that
the picture conjured up before her provoked obscure physical jealousies,
obscure stirrings of latent unsatisfied passion. More than ever, surely,
did the needle quiver back to that fixed point of most righteous anger.

"Such--such a proceeding cannot have been necessary. It ought not to have
been permitted. Why did not Miss Damaris walk?"

"Because she was in a dead faint, and we'd all the trouble in life to
bring her round."

"Indeed," she said, and that rather nastily. "I am sorry, but I cannot
but believe Miss Damaris might have made an effort to walk--with your
assistance and that of Cooper, had you offered it. As I remarked at
first, someone is evidently very much to blame. The whole matter must be
thoroughly sifted out, of course. I am disappointed, for I had great
confidence in you and Cooper--two old servants who might really have been
expected to possess some idea of the--the respect due to their master's
daughter. What will Sir Charles say when he hears of this objectionable
incident?"

"That's just what Mrs. Cooper and I are wondering, Miss," Mary took her
up with so much meaning that Miss Bilson inwardly quailed, sensible of
having committed a rather egregious blunder. This she made efforts to
repair by sheering off hurriedly on another tack.

"Not that I shall trouble Sir Charles with the matter, unless
circumstances arise which compel me to do so--as a duty. My great object,
of course, is at all times to spare him any domestic annoyance."

She began pulling off her gloves, a new pair and tight. Her hands were
moist and the glove-fingers stuck, rendering their removal lengthy and
difficult.

"To-morrow I shall have a thorough explanation with Miss Damaris and
decide what action it is my duty to take after hearing her version of the
events of this afternoon. I should prefer speaking to her to-night--"

"Miss Damaris isn't fit to talk about anything to-night."

Theresa pulled at the right-hand glove--the kid gave with a little
shriek, the thumb splitting out. She was in a state of acute indecision.
Could she retire from this contest without endangering her authority,
without loss of prestige, or must she insist? She had no real wish to
hasten to her ex-pupil's bedside. She would be glad to put off doing so,
glad to wait. She was conscious of resentment rather than affection. And
she felt afraid, unformulated suspicion, unformulated dread, again
dogging her. That Damaris was really ill, she did not believe for an
instant. Damaris had excellent health. The maids exaggerated. They
delighted in making mysteries. Uneducated persons are always absurdly
greedy of disaster, lugubriously credulous.--Yes, on the whole she
concluded to maintain her original attitude, the attitude of yesterday
and this morning; concluded it would be more telling to keep up the
fiction of disgrace--because--Theresa did not care to scrutinize her own
motives or analyse her own thought too closely. She was afraid, and she
was jealous--jealous of Damaris' beauty, of the great love borne her by
her father, jealous of the fact that a young man--hadn't she, Theresa,
seen the young sea-captain once or twice in the village recently and been
fluttered by his notable good looks?--had rescued the girl, and carried
her home, carried her up here across the landing and along the familiar
schoolroom passage, with its patterned Chinese wall-paper, gently and
carefully, in his arms.

And these qualifying terms--gentle and careful--rankled to the point even
of physical disturbance, so that Miss Bilson again became guilty of
inelegantly choking, and clearing her throat for the second time with a
foolish crowing sound.

"I will postpone my interview with Miss Damaris until after breakfast
to-morrow," she said, thus leaving Mary Fisher virtually, if not
admittedly, master of the field.

But long before breakfast time, in the grey and mournful autumn
morning, Patch rattled the dog-cart the seven miles into Stourmouth, as
fast as the black horse could travel, to fetch Damaris' old friend, the
retired Indian Civil surgeon, Dr. McCabe. For, coming to herself, in
the intervals of distracted fever dreams, she had asked for him, going
back by instinct to the comfort of his care of her in childish
illnesses long ago. Since she was ill enough, so Mary said, to need a
doctor, let it be him.

"Not Mr. Cripps out of the village, or Dr. Risdon from Marychurch. I
won't see them. I will not see anyone from near here. Keep them away from
me," she commanded. "I know Miss Bilson will try to send for one or the
other. But I won't see either. Promise you'll keep them away."

When, after his visit, Theresa Bilson, considerably flustered and
offended, found McCabe breakfasting in the dining-room and offered
profuse apologies for the inconvenience to which he must have been put by
so early and unnecessary a call, the tender-hearted and garrulous, but
choleric Irishman cut her uncommonly short.

"And would you be supposing then, that if the dear blessed child should
be desirous of consulting me I wouldn't have rejoiced to come to her a
thousand times as early and from ten thousand times as far?" he enquired,
between large mouthfuls of kidney and fried bacon. "The scheming little
pudding-faced governess creature, with a cherry nose and an envious eye
to her"--he commented to himself.

"But you do not apprehend anything serious?" Theresa said
stiffly--"Merely a slight chill?"

"With a temperature dancing up and down like a mad thing between a
hundred and one and a hundred and three? I'm dashed if I like the looks
of her at all, at all, Miss Bilson; and I am well acquainted with her
constitution and her temperament. She's as delicate a piece of feminine
mechanism as it's ever been my fortune to handle, and has been so from a
child. Mind and body so finely interwoven that you can't touch the one
without affecting the other--that is where danger comes in.--And I am
glad to find she has so competent a nurse as Mary Fisher--a wholesome
woman and one to put faith in. I have given my full instructions to her."

"But I"--Theresa began fussily, her face crimson.

"Oh! I don't doubt you're devotion itself; only my first consideration is
my patient, and so I make free to use my own judgment in the selection of
my assistants. No disrespect to you, my dear lady. You are at home in
more intellectual spheres than that of the sick-room. And now," he wiped
his mouth with his napkin, twinkling at her over the top of it with small
blue-grey eyes, at once merry, faithful, and cunning--"I'll be bidding
you good-bye till the evening. I have told Mary Fisher I'll be glad to
sleep here to-night. And I'll despatch a telegram to Sir Charles on my
way through the village."

"Sir Charles?" Theresa cried.

"Yes," he answered her. "I find the darling girl's illness as
serious as that."

CHAPTER VII

A SOUL AT WAR WITH FACT

The deepest and most abiding demand of all sentient creatures, strong and
weak alike, is for safety, or, that being unattainable, for a sense of
safety, an illusion even of safety.

This, so universal demand, dictated, in Damaris' case, her prayer for Dr.
McCabe's attendance. He belonged to the safeties of her childhood, to the
securely guarded, and semi-regal state--as, looking back, she recalled
it--of the years when her father held the appointment of Chief
Commissioner at Bhutpur. Dr. McCabe was conversant with all that; the
sole person available, at this juncture, who had lot or part in it. And,
as she had foreseen--when drifting down the tide-river in the rain and
darkness--once the supporting tension of Faircloth's presence removed,
chaos would close in on her. It only waited due opportunity. That
granted, as a tempest-driven sea it would submerge her. In the welter of
the present, she clutched at the high dignities and distinctions of the
past as at a lifebelt. Not vulgarly, in a spirit of self-aggrandizement;
but in the simple interests of self-preservation, as a means of keeping
endangered sanity afloat. For the distinctions and dignities of that
period were real too, just as uncontrovertible a contribution to her
knowledge of men and of things, just as vital an element in her
experience, as chaos let loose on her now. The one in no degree
invalidated the truth or actuality of the other.

But to keep this in mind, to remember it all the time, while imagination
galloped with fever brought on by chill and exposure, and reason
wandered, losing touch with plain commonsense through the moral shock she
had sustained, was difficult to the point of impossibility. She needed a
witness, visible and material, to the fact of those former happier
conditions; and found it, quaintly enough, in the untidy person and
humorous, quarrelsome, brick-dust coloured face--as much of the said
face, that is, as was discoverable under the thick stiff growth of sandy
hair surrounding and invading it--of the Irish doctor, as he sat by her
bed, ministered to and soothed her with reverent and whimsical delicacy.

As long as he was there, her room retained its normal, pleasant and
dainty aspect. All Damaris' little personal effects and treasures
adorning dressing and writing-tables, the photographs and ornaments upon
the mantelshelf, her books, the prints and pictures upon the walls--even
the white dimity curtains and covers, trellised with small faded pink and
blue roses--seemed to smile upon her, kindly and confiding. They wanted
to be nice, to console and encourage her--McCabe holding them in place
and in active good-will towards her, somehow, with his large freckled,
hairy-backed hands. But let him go from the room, let him leave her, and
they turned wicked, behaving as they had behaved throughout the past
rather dreadful night and adding to the general chaos by tormenting
tricks and distortions of their own.

The beloved photographs of her father, in particular, were cruel. They
grew inordinately large, stepped out of their frames, and stalked to and
fro in troops and companies. The charcoal drawing of him--done last year
by that fine artist, James Colthurst, as a study for the portrait he was
to paint--hanging between the two western windows, at right angles to her
bed where she could always see it, proved the worst offender. It did not
take the floor, it is true, but remained in its frame upon the wall. Yet
it too came alive, and looked full at her, compelling her attention,
dominating, commanding her; while, slowly, deliberately it changed, the
features slightly losing their accentuation, growing youthful, softer in
outline, the long drooping moustache giving place to a close-cut beard.
The eyes alone stayed the same, steady, luminous, a living silence in
them at once formidable and strangely sad. Finally--and this the poor
child found indescribably agitating and even horrible--their silence was
broken by a question. For they asked what she, Damaris, meant to say,
meant to do, when he--her father, the all-powerful Commissioner Sahib of
her babyhood's faith and devotion--came home here, came back?

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