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Philip Gibbs - "The Soul of the War"

Juliet Bredon - "Sir Robert Hart"

Anonymous - "Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda"

Various - "Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861"

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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




Yet whose eyes, after all, were they which thus asked? Was it not, rather
the younger man, the bearded one, who claimed, and of right, an answer to
that question? And upon Damaris it now dawned that these two, distinct
yet interchangeable personalities--imprisoned, as by some evil magic in
one picture--were in opposition, in violent and impious conflict, which
conflict she was called upon, yet was powerless, to avert or to assuage.

Not once but many times--since the transformation was persistently
recurrent--the girl turned her face to the wall to gain relief from the
sight of it and the demand it so fearfully embodied, pressing her dry
lips together lest any word should escape them. For the whole matter, as
she understood it was secret, sacred too as it was agonizing. No one must
guess what lay at the root of her present suffering--not even comfortable
devoted Mary, nor that invaluable lifebelt, Dr. McCabe. She held the
honour of both those conflicting interchangeable personalities in her
hands; and, whether she were strong enough to adjust their differences or
not, she must in no wise betray either of them. The latent motherhood in
her cried out to protect and to shield them both, to spare them both. For
in this stage of the affair, while the hallucinations of deadly fever--in
a sense mercifully--confused her, its grosser aspects did not present
themselves to her mind. She wandered through mazes, painful enough to
tread; but far removed from the ugliness of vulgar scandal. That her
sacred secret, for instance, might be no more than a _secret de
Polichinelle_ suspected by many, did not, so far, occur to her.

Believing it to be her exclusive property, therefore, she, inspired by
tender cunning, strove manfully to keep it so. To that end she made play
with the purely physical miseries of her indisposition.--With shivering
fits and scorching flushes, cold aching limbs and burning, aching head.
With the manifold distractions of errant blood which, leaving her heart
empty as a turned-down glass, drummed in her ears and throbbed behind her
eyeballs. These discomforts were severely real enough, in all conscience,
to excuse her for being self-occupied and a trifle selfish; to justify a
blank refusal to receive Theresa Bilson, or attempt to retail and discuss
the events of yesterday. All she craved was quiet, to be left alone, to
lie silent in the quiet light of the covered grey day.

In the earlier hours of it, silver rain showers travelled across the sea
to spend themselves, tearfully, against the panes of her bedroom
windows. But towards evening the cloud lifted, revealing a watery
sunset, spread in timid reds and yellows behind Stone Horse Head and the
curving coast-line beyond, away to Stourmouth and Barryport. The faint
tentative colours struck in long glinting shafts between the trunks and
branches of the stone pines and Scotch firs in the so-called
Wilderness--a strip of uncultivated land within the confines of the
grounds dividing the gardens from the open Warren to the West--and
gleamed in at the windows, faintly dyeing the dimity hangings and
embroidered linen counterpane of Damaris' bed.

Throughout the afternoon she had been less restless. So that Mary Fisher,
judging her to be fairly asleep, some five minutes earlier had folded her
needlework together, and, leaving the chair where she sat sewing, went
softly from the room.

But that brightening of sunset disturbed Damaris, bringing her slowly
awake. For a time she lay watching, though but half consciously the
tinted radiance as--the trees now stirred by a little wind drawing out of
the sunset--it shifted and flitted over the white surfaces. At first it
pleased her idle fancy. But presently distressed her, as too thin, too
chill, too restlessly unsubstantial, the veriest chippering ghost of
colour and of light. It affected her with a desolating sadness as of
failure; of great designs richly attempted but petering out into a
pitiful nothingness; of love which aped and mimicked, being drained of
all purpose and splendour of hot blood; of partings whose sorrow had lost
its savour, yet which masqueraded in showy crape for a heart-break long
grown stale and obsolete.

Her temperature rushed up; and she threw off the bedclothes, raising
herself on her elbow, while the shafts of thin brightness wavered
fitfully. Through them she saw the photographs of her father step out of
their frames again, and growing very tall and spare, stalk to and fro.
Other figures joined them--those of women. Her poor dear Nannie, in the
plain quaker-grey cotton gown and black silk apron she used to wear, even
through the breathless hot-weather days, at the Sultan-i-bagh long ago.
And Henrietta Pereira, too, composed and delicately sprightly, arrayed in
full flounced muslins and fine laces with an exquisiteness of high
feminine grace and refinement which had enthralled her baby soul and
senses, and, which held her captive by their charm even yet. A handsome,
high-coloured full-breasted, Eurasian girl, whom she but dimly
recollected, was there as well. And with these another--carrying very
certainly no hint of things oriental about her--an English woman and of
the people, in dull homely clothing, grave of aspect and of bearing; yet
behind whose statuesque and sternly patient beauty a great flame seemed
to quiver, offering sharp enough contrast to the frail glintings of the
rain-washed sunset amid which she, just now, moved.

At sight of the last comer, Damaris started up, tense with wonder and
excitement, since she knew--somehow--this final visitant belonged not to
the past so much as to the present, that her power was unexhausted and
would go forward to the shaping of the coming years. Which knowledge drew
confirmation from what immediately followed. For, as by almost
imperceptible degrees the brightness faded in the west, the figures, so
mysteriously peopling the room, faded out also, until only the woman in
homely garments was left. By her side stood the charcoal drawing of Sir
Charles Verity from off the wall--or seemed to do so, for almost at
once, Damaris saw that dreaded interchange of personality again take
place. Saw the strongly marked features soften in outline, the face grow
bearded yet younger by full thirty years.

Both the woman and the young man looked searchingly at her; and in the
eyes of both she read the same question--what did she mean to do, what to
say, when her father, the object of her adoration, came home to her, came
back to Deadham Hard?

"I will do right," she cried out loud to them in answer, "Only trust me.
I am so tired and it is all so difficult to believe and to understand.
But I am trying to understand. I shall understand, if you will give me
time and not hurry me. And, when I understand, indeed, indeed, you may
trust me, whatever it costs, to do right."

Just then Mary opened the door, entering quickly, and behind her came Dr.
McCabe, to find Damaris talking, talking wildly, sitting up, parched and
vivid with fever, in the disordered bed.




CHAPTER VIII

TELLING HOW TWO PERSONS, OF VERY DIFFERENT MORAL CALIBRE, WERE COMPELLED
TO WEAR THE FLOWER OF HUMILIATION IN THEIR RESPECTIVE BUTTONHOLES


Cross-country connections by rail were not easy to make, with the
consequence that Sir Charles Verity,--Hordle, gun-cases, bags and
portmanteaux, in attendance--did not reach The Hard until close
upon midnight.

Hearing the brougham at last drive up, Theresa Bilson felt rapturously
fluttered. Her course had been notably empty of situations and of
adventure; drama, as in the case of so many ladies of her profession--the
pages of fiction notwithstanding--conspicuously cold-shouldering and
giving her the go-by. Now, drama, and that of richest quality might
perhaps--for she admitted the existence of awkward conjunctions--be said
to batter at her door. She thought of the Miss Minetts, her ever-willing
audience. She thought also--as so frequently during the last, in some
respects, extremely unsatisfactory twenty-four hours--of Mr. Rochester
and of Jane Eyre. Not that she ranged herself with Jane socially or as to
scholastic attainments. In both these, as in natural refinement,
propriety and niceness of ideas, she reckoned herself easily to surpass
that much canvassed heroine. The flavour of the evangelical
charity-school adhered--incontestably it adhered, and that to Jane's
disadvantage. No extravagance of Protestantism or of applied
philanthropy, thank heaven, clouded Theresa's early record. The genius of
Tractarianism had rocked her cradle, and subsequently ruled her studies
with a narrowly complacent pedantry all its own. Nevertheless in moments
of expansion, such as the present, she felt the parallel between her own
case and that of Jane did, in certain directions, romantically hold.
Fortified by thought of the Miss Minetts' agitated interest in all which
might befall her, she indulged in imaginary conversations with that great
proconsul, her employer--the theme of which, purged of lyrical
redundancies, reduced itself to the somewhat crude announcement that
"your daughter, yes, may, alas, not impossibly be taken from you; but I,
Theresa, still remain."

When, however, a summons to the presence of the said employer actually
reached her, the bounce born of imaginary conversations, showed a
tendency, as is its habit, basely to desert her and soak clean away. She
had promised herself a little scene, full of respectful solicitude, of
sympathy discreetly offered and graciously accepted, a drawing together
through the workings of mutual anxiety leading on to closer intercourse,
her own breast, to put it pictorially, that on which the stricken parent
should eventually and gratefully lean. But in all this she was
disappointed, for Sir Charles did not linger over preliminaries. He came
straight and unceremoniously to the point; and that with so cold and
lofty a manner that, although flutterings remained, they parted company
with all and any emotions even remotely allied to rapture.

Charles Verity stood motionless before the fire-place in the long
sitting-room. He still wore a heavy frieze travelling coat, the fronts of
it hanging open. His shoulders were a trifle humped up and his head bent,
as he looked down at the black and buff of the tiger skin at his feet.
When Theresa approached with her jerky consequential little walk--pinkly
self-conscious behind her gold-rimmed glasses--he glanced at her,
revealing a fiercely careworn countenance, but made no movement to shake
hands with or otherwise greet her. This omission she hardly noticed,
already growing abject before his magnificence--for thus did his
appearance impress her--which, while claiming her enthusiastic
admiration, enjoined humility rather than the sentimental expansions in
which her imaginary conversations had so conspicuously abounded.

"I have seen Dr. McCabe," he began. "His report of Damaris' condition is
very far from reassuring. He tells me her illness presents peculiar
symptoms, and is grave out of all proportion to its apparent cause. This
makes me extremely uneasy. It is impossible to question her at present.
She must be spared all exertion and agitation. I have not attempted to
see her yet."

He paused, while anger towards her ex-pupil waxed warm in Theresa once
again. For the pause was eloquent, as his voice had been when speaking
about his daughter, of a depth of underlying tenderness which filled his
hearer with envy.

"I must therefore ask you, Miss Bilson," he presently went on, "to give
me a detailed account of all that took place yesterday. It is important I
should know exactly what occurred."

Whereat Theresa, perceiving pitfalls alike in statement and in
suppression of fact, hesitated and gobbled to the near neighbourhood of
positive incoherence, while admitting, and trying to avoid admitting, how
inconveniently ignorant of precise details she herself was.

"Perhaps I erred in not more firmly insisting upon an immediate enquiry,"
she said. "But, at the time, alarm appeared so totally uncalled for. I
assumed, from what was told me, and from my knowledge of the strength of
Damaris' constitution, that a night's rest would fully restore her to her
usual robust state of health, and so deferred my enquiry. The servants
were excited and upset, so I felt their account might be misleading--all
they said was so confused, so far from explicit. My position was most
difficult, Sir Charles," she assured him and incidentally, also, assured
herself. "I encountered most trying opposition, which made me feel it
would be wiser to wait until this morning. By then, I hoped, the maids
would have had time to recollect themselves and recollect what is
becoming towards their superiors in the way of obedience and respect."

Charles Verity threw back his head with a movement of impatience, and
looked down at her from under his eyelids--in effect weary and a
little insolent.

"We seem to be at cross purposes, Miss Bilson," he said. "You do not, I
think quite follow my question. I did not ask for the servants' account
of the events of yesterday--whatever those events may have been--but for
your own."

"Ah! it is so unfortunate, so exceedingly unfortunate," Theresa broke
out, literally wringing her hands, "but a contingency, an accident, which
I could not possibly have foreseen--I cannot but blame Damaris, Sir
Charles"--

"Indeed?" he said.

"No, truly I cannot but blame her for wilfulness. If she had
consented--as I so affectionately urged--to join the choir treat to
Harchester, this painful incident would have been spared us."

"Am I to understand that you went to Harchester, leaving my daughter
here alone?"

"Her going would have given so much pleasure in the parish," Theresa
pursued, dodging the question with the ingenuity of one who scents mortal
danger. "Her refusal would, I knew, cause sincere disappointment. I could
not bring myself to accentuate that disappointment. Not that I, of
course, am of any importance save as coming from this house, as--as--in
some degree your delegate, Sir Charles."

"Indeed?" he said.

"Yes, indeed," Theresa almost hysterically repeated.

For here--if anywhere--was her chance, as she recognized. Never again
might she be thus near to him, alone with him--the normal routine made it
wholly improbable.--And at midnight too. For the unaccustomed lateness of
the hour undoubtedly added to her ferment, provoking in her obscure and
novel hopes and hungers. Hence she blindly and--her action viewed from a
certain angle--quite heroically precipitated herself. Heroically, because
the odds were hopelessly adverse, her equipment, whether of natural or
artificial, being so conspicuously slender. Her attempt had no backing in
play of feature, felicity of gesture, grace of diction. The commonest
little actress that ever daubed her skin with grease-paint, would have
the advantage of Theresa in the thousand and one arts by which, from
everlasting, woman has limed twigs for the catching of man. Her very
virtues--respectability, learning, all the proprieties of her narrowly
virtuous little life--counted for so much against her in the present
supreme moment of her self-invented romance.

"You hardly, I dare say," she pursued--"how should you after the
commanding positions you have occupied?--appreciate the feelings of the
inhabitants of this quiet country parish towards you. But they have a
lively sense, believe me, of the honour you confer upon them, all and
severally--I am speaking of the educated classes in particular, of
course--by residing among them. They admire and reverence you so much, so
genuinely; and they have extended great kindness to me as a member of
your household. How can I be indifferent to it? I am thankful, Sir
Charles, I am grateful--the more so that I have the happiness of knowing
I owe the consideration with which I am treated, in Deadham, entirely to
you.--Yes, yes," she cried in rising exaltation, "I do not deny that I
went to Harchester yesterday--went--Dr. Horniblow thus expressed it when
inviting me--'as representing The Hard.' I was away when Damaris made
this ill-judged excursion across the river to the Bar. Had she confided
her intention to me, I should have used my authority and forbade her. But
recently we have not been, I grieve to say, on altogether satisfactory
terms, and our parting yesterday was constrained, I am afraid."

Theresa blushed and swallowed. Fortunately her sense of humour was
limited; but, even so, she could not but be aware of a dangerous decline.
Not only of bathos, but of vulgar bathos, from which gentility revolted,
must she be the exponent, thanks to Damaris' indiscretion!

"You require me to give you the details, Sir Charles," she resumed, "and
although it is both embarrassing and repugnant to me to do so, I obey. I
fear Damaris so far forgot herself--forgot I mean what is due to her age
and position--as to remove her shoes and stockings and paddle in the
sea--a most unsuitable and childish occupation. While she was thus
engaged her things--her shoes and stockings--appear to have been stolen.
In any case she was unable to find them when tired of the amusement she
came up on to the beach. Moreover she was caught in the rain. And I
deeply regret to tell you--but I merely repeat what I learned from Mary
Fisher and Mrs. Cooper when I returned--it was not till after dark, when
the maids had become so alarmed that they despatched Tolling and Alfred
to search for her, that Damaris landed from a boat at the breakwater,
having been brought down the river--by--by"--

Throughout the earlier portion of her recital Charles Verity stood in the
same place and same attitude staring down at the tiger skin. Twice or
thrice only he raised his eyes, looking at the speaker with a flash of
arrogant interrogation.

Upon one, even but moderately, versed in the secular arts of twig-liming,
such flashes would have acted as an effective warning and deterrent. Not
so upon Theresa. She barely noticed them, as blindly heroic, she pounded
along leading her piteous forlorn hope. Her chance--her unique chance, in
nowise to be missed--and, still more, those obscure hungers, fed by the
excitement of this midnight _tete-a-tete,_ rushed her forward upon the
abyss; while at every sputtering sentence, whether of adulation,
misplaced prudery, or thinly veiled animosity towards Damaris, she became
more tedious, more frankly intolerable and ridiculous to him whose favour
she so desperately sought. Under less anxious circumstances Charles
Verity might have been contemptuously amused at this exhibition of futile
ardour. Now it exasperated him. Yet he waited, in rather cruel patience.
Presently he would demolish her, if to do so appeared worth the trouble.
Meanwhile she should have her say, since incidentally he might learn
something from it bearing upon the cause of Damaris' illness.

But now, when, at the climax of her narrative, Theresa--seized by a spasm
of retrospective resentment and jealousy, the picture of the young man
carrying the girl tenderly in his arms across the dusky lawns arising
before her--choked and her voice cracked up into a bat-like squeaking,
Charles Verity's self-imposed forbearance ran dry.

"I must remind you that neither my time nor capacity of listening are
inexhaustible, Miss Bilson," he said to her. "May I ask you to be so good
as to come to the point. By whom was Damaris rescued and brought home
last night?"

"Ah! that is what I so deeply regret," Theresa quavered, still
obstinately dense and struggling with the after convulsion of her choke.
"I felt so shocked and annoyed on your account, Sir Charles, when the
maids told me, knowing how you would disapprove such a--such an incident
in connection with Damaris.--She was brought home, carried"--she
paused--"carried indoors by the owner of that objectionable public-house
on the island. He holds some position in the Mercantile Marine, I
believe. I have seen him recently once or twice myself in the
village--his name is Faircloth."

Theresa pursed up her lips as she finished speaking. The glasses of her
gold pince-nez seemed to gleam aggressively in the lamp-light. The backs
of the leather-bound volumes in the many book-cases gleamed also, but
unaggressively, with the mellow sheen--as might fancifully be figured--of
the ripe and tolerant wisdom their pages enshrined. The pearl-grey
porcelain company of Chinese monsters, saints and godlings, ranged above
them placid, mysteriously smiling, gleamed as well.

For a time, silence, along with these various gleamings, sensibly, even a
little uncannily, held possession of the room. Then Charles Verity moved,
stiffly, and for once awkwardly, all of a piece. Backed against the
mantelshelf, throwing his right arm out along it sharply and
heavily--careless of the safety of clock and of ornaments--as though
overtaken by sudden weakness and seeking support.

"Faircloth? Of course, his name is Faircloth." he repeated absently.
"Yes, of course."

But whatever the nature of the weakness assailing him, it soon,
apparently, passed. He stood upright, his face, perhaps, a shade more
colourless and lean, but in expression fully as arrogant and formidably
calm as before.

"Very well, Miss Bilson," he began. "You have now given me all the
information I require, so I need detain you no longer--save to say
this.--You will, if you please, consider your engagement as my daughter's
companion terminated, concluded from to-night. You are free to make such
arrangements as may suit you; and you will, I trust, pardon my adding
that I shall be obliged by your making them without undue delay."

"You do not mean," Theresa broke out, after an interval of speechless
amazement--"Sir Charles, you cannot mean that you dismiss me--that I am
to leave The Hard--to--to go away?"

"I mean that I have no further occasion for your services."

Theresa waved her arms as though playing some eccentric game of ball.

"You forget the servants, the conduct of the house, Damaris' need of a
chaperon, her still unfinished education--All are dependent upon me."

"Hardly dependent," he answered. "These things, I have reason to think,
can safely be trusted to other hands, or be equally safely be left to
take care of themselves."

"But why do you repudiate me?" she cried again, rushing upon her fate in
the bitterness of her distraction. "What have I done to deserve such
harshness and humiliation?"

"I gave the most precious of my possessions--Damaris--into your keeping,
and--and--well--we see the result. Is it not written large enough, in all
conscience, for the most illiterate to read?--So you must depart, my dear
Miss Bilson, and for everyone's sake, the sooner the better. There can be
no further discussion of the matter. Pray accept the fact that our
interview is closed."

But Theresa, now sensible that her chance was in act of being finally
ravished away from her, fell--or rose--perhaps more truly the
latter--into an extraordinary sincerity and primitiveness of emotion.
She cast aside nothing less than her whole personal legend, cast aside
every tradition and influence hitherto so strictly governing her conduct
and her thought. Unluckily the physical envelope could not so readily be
got rid of. Matter retained its original mould, and that one neither
seductive nor poetic.

She went down upon her fat little knees, held her fat little hands aloft
as in an impassioned spontaneity of worship.

"Sir Charles," she prayed, while tears running down her full cheeks
splashed upon her protuberant bosom--"Sir Charles"--

He looked at the funny, tubby, jaunty, would-be smart, kneeling figure.

"Oh! you inconceivably foolish woman," he said and turned away.

Did more than that--walked out into the hall and to his own rooms,
opening off the corridor. In the offices a bell tinkled. Theresa
scrambled on to her feet, just as Hordle, in response to its summons,
arrived at the sitting-room door.

"Did you ring, Miss?" he asked grudgingly. Less than ever was she in
favour with the servants' hall to-night.

Past intelligible utterance, Theresa merely shook her head in reply. Made
a return upon herself--began to instruct him to put out the lamps in the
room. Remembered that now and henceforth the right to give orders in this
house was no longer hers; and broke into sobbing, the sound of which her
handkerchief pressed against her mouth quite failed to stifle.

About an hour later, having bathed and changed, Sir Charles Verity made
his way upstairs. Upon the landing Dr. McCabe met him.

"Better," he said, "thank the heavenly powers, decidedly better.
Temperature appreciably lower, and the pulse more even. Oh! we're on the
road very handsomely to get top dog of the devil this bout, believe me,
Sir Charles."

"Then go to bed, my dear fellow," the other answered. "I will take
over the rest of the watch for you. You need not be afraid. I can be an
admirable sick-nurse on occasion. And by the way, McCabe, something has
come to my knowledge which in my opinion throws considerable light upon
the symptoms that have puzzled you. Probably I shall be more sure of my
facts before morning. I will explain to you later, if it should seem
likely to be helpful to you in your treatment of the case. Just now, as
I see it, the matter lies exclusively between me"--he smiled looking at
his companion full and steadily--"between me"--he repeated, "and my
only child."