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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

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All which upon the face of it might, surely, be voted encouraging
enough. Yet:

"Should there be any that doubt the veritable existence of hell fire,"
the doctor told himself, as he subsequently and thankfully pulled on his
night-shirt, "to recover them, and in double quick time, of their heresy
let 'em but look in my friend Verity's eyes."--And he rounded off the
sentence with an oath.




CHAPTER IX

AN EXPERIMENT IN BRIDGE-BUILDING OF WHICH TIME ALONE CAN FIX THE VALUES


Damaris lay on her side, her face turned to the wall. When Charles
Verity, quietly crossing the room, sat down in an easy chair, so placed
at the head of the half-tester bed as to be screened from it by the
dimity curtains, she sighed and slightly shifted her position.

Leaning back, he crossed his legs and let his chin drop on his breast.
He had barely glanced at her in passing, receiving a vague impression
of the outline of her cheek, of her neck, and shoulders, of her head,
dark against the dim whiteness on which it rested, and the long dark
stream of her hair spread loose across the pillows. He had no wish for
recognition--not yet awhile. On the contrary, it was a relief to have
time in which silently to get accustomed to her presence, to steep
himself in the thought of her, before speech should define the new
element intruded, as he believed, into his and her relation. Though
little enough--too little, so said some of his critics--hampered by
fear in any department, he consciously dreaded the smallest
modification of that relation. Among the many dissatisfactions and
bitternesses of life, it shone forth with a steady light of purity and
sweetness, as a thing unspoiled, unbreathed on, even, by what is
ignoble or base. And not the surface of it alone was thus free from all
breath of defilement. It showed clear right through, as some gem of the
purest water. To keep it thus inviolate, he had made sacrifices in the
past neither easy nor inconsiderable to a man of his temperament and
ambitions. Hence that its perfection should be now endangered was to
him the more exquisitely hateful.

Upon the altar of that hatred, promptly without scruple he sacrificed
the wretched Theresa. Most of us are so constituted that, at a certain
pass, pleasure--of a sort--is to be derived from witnessing the anguish
of a fellow creature. In all save the grossly degenerate that pleasure,
however, is short-lived. Reflection follows, in which we cut to ourselves
but a sorry figure. With Charles Verity, reflection began to follow
before he had spent many minutes in Damaris' sick-room. For here the
atmosphere was, at once, grave and tender, beautifully honest in its
innocence of the things of the flesh.--The woman had been inconceivably
foolish, from every point of view. If she had known, good heavens, if she
had only known! But he inclined now to the more merciful view that,
veritably, she didn't know; that her practical, even her theoretic,
knowledge was insufficient for her to have had any clear design. It was
just a blind push of starved animal instinct. Of course she must go. Her
remaining in the house was in every way unpermissible; still he need not,
perhaps, have been so cold-bloodedly precipitate with her.

Anyhow the thing was done--it was done--He raised his shoulders and
making with his hands a graphic gesture of dismissal, let his chin drop
on to his breast again.

For the East had left its mark on his attitude towards women with one
exception--that of his daughter--Charles Verity, like most men, not
requiring of himself to be too rigidly consistent. Hence Theresa, and
all which pertained to her, even her follies, appeared to him of
contemptibly small moment compared with the developments for which those
follies might be held accidentally responsible. His mind returned to
that main theme painfully. He envisaged it in all its bearings, not
sparing himself. Suffered, and looked on at his own suffering with a
stoicism somewhat sardonic.

Meanwhile Damaris slept. His nearness had not disturbed her, indeed he
might rather suppose its effect beneficent. For her breathing grew even,
just sweetly and restfully audible in the intervals of other sounds
reaching him from out of doors.

The wind, drawing out of the sunset, freshened during the night. Now it
blew wet and gustily from south-west, sighing through the pines and
Scotch firs in the Wilderness. A strand of the yellow Banksia rose,
trained against the house wall, breaking loose, scratched and tapped at
the window-panes with anxious appealing little noises.

Many years had elapsed since Charles Verity spent a night upstairs in
this part of the house, and by degrees those outdoor sounds attracted his
attention as intimately familiar. They carried him back to his boyhood,
to the spacious dreams and projects of adolescence. He could remember
just such gusty wet winds swishing through the trees, such petulant
fingering of errant creepers upon the windows, when he stayed here during
the holidays from school at Harchester, on furlough from his regiment,
and, later, on long leave from India, during his wonderful little
great-uncle's lifetime.

And his thought took a lighter and friendlier vein, recalling that
polished, polite, encyclopedic minded and witty gentleman, who had lived
to within a few months of his full century with a maximum of interest and
entertainment to himself, and a minimum of injury or offence to others.
To the last he retained his freshness of intellectual outlook, his
insatiable yet discreet curiosity. Taking it as a whole, should his life
be judged a singularly futile or singularly enviable one? Nothing
feminine, save on strictly platonic lines, was recorded to have entered
it at any period. Did that argue remarkable wisdom or defective courage,
or some abnormal element in a composition otherwise deliciously mundane
and human?

Charles had debated this often. Even as a boy it had puzzled him. As a
young man he had held his own views on the subject, not without lasting
effect. For one winter he had passed at The Hard, in the fine bodily
health and vigour of his early thirties, this very lack of women's
society contributed, by not unnatural reaction, to force the idea of
woman hauntingly upon him--thereby making possible a strange and hidden
love passage off the Dead Sea fruit of which he was in process of
supping here to-night.

He moved, bent forward, setting his elbows on the two chair arms,
closing his eyes as he listened, and leaning his forehead upon his
raised hands. For in the plaintive voice of the moist, fitful
southwesterly wind how, to his bearing, the buried, half-forgotten drama
re-lived and reenacted itself!

It dated far back, to a period when his career was still undetermined,
hedged about by doubts and uncertainties--before the magnificent and
terrible years of the Mutiny brought him, not only fame and distinction,
but a power of self-expression and of plain seeing.--Before, too, his not
conspicuously happy marriage. Before the Bhutpur appointment tested and
confirmed his reputation as a most able if most autocratic ruler. Before,
finally, his term of service under the Ameer in Afghanistan--that
extraordinary experience of alternate good and evil fortune in barbaric
internecine warfare, the methods and sentiments of which represented a
swing back of three or four centuries, Christianity, and the attitude of
mind and conduct Christianity inculcates, no longer an even nominal
factor, Mahomet, sword in hand, ruthlessly outriding Christ.

He had done largely more than the average Englishman, of his age and
station, towards the making of contemporary history. Yet it occurred to
him now, sitting at Damaris' bedside, those intervening years of
strenuous public activity, of soldiering and of administration, along
with the honours reaped in them, had procured cynically less substantial
result, cynically less ostensible remainder, than the brief and hidden
intrigue which preceded them. They sank away as water spilt on sand--thus
in his present pain he pictured it--leaving barely a trace. While that
fugitive and unlawful indulgence of the flesh not only begot flesh, but
spirit,--a living soul, henceforth and eternally to be numbered among the
imperishable generations of the tragic and marvellous children of men.

Then, aware something stirred close to him, Charles Verity looked up
sharply, turning his head; to find Damaris--raised on one elbow planted
among the pillows--holding aside the dimity curtain and gazing
wonderingly yet contentedly in his face.

"Commissioner Sahib," she said, softly, "I didn't know you'd come back.
I've had horrid bad dreams and seemed to see you--many of you--walking
about. The room was full of you, you over and over again; but not like
yourself, frightening, not loving me, busy about something or somebody
else. I didn't at all enjoy that.--But I am awake now, aren't I? I
needn't be frightened any more; because you do love me, don't you--and
this really is you, your very ownself?"

She put up her face to be kissed. But he, in obedience to an humility
heretofore unfelt by and unknown to him, leaning sideways kissed the hand
holding aside the curtain rather than the proffered lips.

"Yes, my darling, very surely it is me," he said. "Any multiplication of
specimens is quite superfluous--a single example of the breed is enough,
conceivably more than enough."

But to his distress, while he spoke, he saw the content die out of
Damaris' expression and her eyes grow distended and startled. She glanced
oddly at the hand he had just kissed and then at him again.

"It seems to me something must have happened which I can't exactly
remember," she anxiously told him, sitting upright and leaving go the
curtain which slipped back into place shutting off the arm-chair and its
occupant. "Something real, I mean, not just bad dreams. I know I had to
ask you about it, and yet I didn't want to ask you."

Charles Verity rose from his place, slowly walked the length of the room;
and, presently returning, stood at the foot of the bed. Damaris still sat
upright, her hands clasped, her hair hanging in a cloud about her to
below the waist. The light was low and the shadow cast by the bed-curtain
covered her. But, through it, he could still distinguish the startled
anxiety of her great eyes as she pondered, trying to seize and hold some
memory which escaped her. And he felt sick at heart, assured it could be
but a matter of time before she remembered; convinced now, moreover, what
she would, to his shame and sorrow, remember in the end.

The purity in which he delighted, and to which he so frequently and
almost superstitiously had turned for refreshment and the safeguarding of
all the finest instincts of his own very complex nature, would, although
she remembered, remain essentially intact. But, even so, the surface of
it must be, as he apprehended, henceforth in some sort dimmed, and that
by the breath of his own long ago misdoing. The revelation of passion and
of sex, being practically and thus intimately forced home on her, the
transparent innocence of childhood must inevitably pass away from her;
and, through that same passing she would consciously go forward,
embracing the privileges and the manifold burdens, the physical and
emotional needs and aspirations of a grown woman. The woman might,
would--such was his firm belief--prove a glorious creature. But it was
not she whom he wanted. Her development, in proportion as it was rich and
complete, led her away from and made her independent of him.--No, it
wasn't she, but the child whom he wanted. And, standing at the foot of
Damaris' bed, he knew, with a cruel certainty, he was there just simply
to watch the child die.

Yes, it was a mere matter of time. Sooner or later she would put a
leading question--her methods being bravely candid and direct. Of course,
it was open to him to meet that question with blank denial, open to him
to lie--as is the practice of the world when such damnably awkward
situations come along.--A solution having, in the present case, the
specious argument behind it that in so doing he would spare her, save her
pain, in addition to the obvious one that he would save his own skin.
Moreover, if he lied he could trust Damaris' loyalty. Whether she
believed it or not, she would accept his answer as final. No further
question upon the subject would ever pass her lips. The temptation was
definite and great. For might not the lie, if he could stomach his
disgust at telling it, even serve to prolong the life of the child?
Should he not sell his honour to save his honour--if it came to that?

Thus he debated, his nature battling with itself, while at that battle he
stoically, for a time, looked on. But when, at last, the climax was
reached, and Damaris commenced to speak, stoicism dragged anchor. For he
could conquer neither his disgust nor his sorrow, could find courage
neither for his denial nor for watching the child die. Leaving the foot
of the bed, he went and sat down in the arm-chair, where the dimity
curtain screened Damaris from his, and him from Damaris' sight.

"Commissioner Sahib," she began, her voice grave and low, "it has come
back to me--the thing I had to ask you, but it is very hard to say. If it
makes you angry, please try to forgive me--because it does hurt me to ask
you. It hurts me through and through. Only I can't speak of it. I
oughtn't just to leave it. To leave it would be wrong--wrong by you."

"Very well, my darling, ask me then," he said, a little hoarsely.

"You have heard about my being out on the Bar and--and all that?"

"Yes," he said, "I have heard."

"Captain Faircloth, who found me and brought me home, told me something."

Damaris' voice broke into tones of imploring tenderness.

"I love you, Commissioner Sahib, you know how I love you--but--but is
what Captain Faircloth told me true?"

Whereupon temptation surged up anew, inviting, inciting Charles Verity
to lie--dressing up that lie in the cloak of most excellent charity, of
veritable duty towards Damaris' fine courage and her precious innocence.
And he hedged, keeping open, if only for a few minutes longer, the way
of escape.

"How can I answer until I know what he did tell you?" he took her up, at
last, almost coldly.

"That he is your son--is my brother," Damaris said.

Even at this pass, Charles Verity waited before finally committing
himself, thereby unwittingly giving sentiment--in the shape of the
Powers of the Air--the chance to take a rather unfairly extensive hand
in the game.

For while he thus waited, he could not but be aware, through the tense
silence otherwise reigning in the room, of the tap and scratch of the
rose-spray upon the window-panes; of the swish of the moist gusty wind
sweeping from across the salt-marsh and mud-flats of the Haven--from the
black cottages, too, beyond the warren, gathered, as somewhat sinister
boon companions, about the bleak, grey stone-built Inn. And this served
to transfix his consciousness with visions of what once had been--he
knowing so exactly how it would all sound, all look out there, the
wistful desolation, the penetrating appeal bred of the inherent sadness
of the place on a wild autumn night such as this.

"Yes," he said at last, and putting a great constraint upon himself he
spoke calmly, without sign of emotion. "What the young man told is true,
Damaris, perfectly true."

"I--I thought so," she answered back, gravely. "Though I didn't
understand"--And, after a moment's pause, with a certain hopelessness of
resignation--"Though I don't understand even now."

In her utterance Charles Verity so distinctly heard the last words of
the--to him--dying child, that, smitten with raging bitterness of grief
and of regret, he said:

"Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, disgraceful, abominable, that he
should have made the occasion, or, to put the matter at its best, have
taken advantage of the occasion, when you were alone and, in a sense, at
his mercy, to tell you this most unhappy thing."

"No, no," Damaris cried, in her generous eagerness catching back the
curtain and looking at him nobly unselfconscious, nobly zealous to defend
and to set right. "You mustn't think that. He didn't start with any
intention of telling me. He fancied I might have lost my way among the
sand-hills, that I might be frightened or get some harm, and so came
straight to look for me, and take care of me. He was very beautifully
kind; and I felt beautifully safe with him--safe in the same way I feel
safe with you, almost."

Her mouth was soft, her eyes alight--dangerously alight now, for
her pulse had quickened. As she pleaded and protested her
temperature raced up.

"It happened later," she went on, "when we were in the boat, and it was
partly my fault. He wrapped my feet up in his coat. They were very cold.
And he believed I was asleep because I didn't speak or thank him. I was
so tired, and everything seemed so strange. I couldn't rouse myself
somehow to speak. And as he wrapped them in his coat, he kissed my feet,
thinking I shouldn't know. But I wasn't asleep, and it displeased me. I
felt angry, just as you felt when you condemned him just now."

"Ah! as I felt just now!" he commented, closing his eyes and, just
perceptibly, bowing his head.

"Yes, Commissioner Sahib, as you felt just now--but as, please you
mustn't go on feeling.--What he had done seemed to me treacherous; and it
pained as well as displeased me. But in all that I was unjust and
mistaken.--And it was then, because he saw he'd pained me, displeased and
made me angry, that he told me in self-defence--told me to show he wasn't
treacherous, but had the right--a right no one else in all the world has
over me except yourself."

"And you believed this young man, you forgave his audacity, and admitted
his right?" Sir Charles said.

He leaned back in the angle of the chair, away from her, smiling as he
spoke--a smile which both bade farewell and mocked at the sharpness and
futility of the grief which that farewell brought with it. For this was a
grown woman who pleaded with him surely, acting as advocate? A child,
compelled to treat such controversial, such debatable matters at all,
would have done so to a different rhythm, in a different spirit.

"Forgave him? But after just the first, when, I had time to at all think
of it," Damaris answered with rather desperate bravery, "I couldn't see
there was anything for me to forgive. It was the other way about. For
haven't I so much which he might very well feel belonged, or should have
belonged, to him?"

"You cut deep, my dear," Sir Charles said quietly.

Still holding back the curtain with one hand, Damaris flung herself
over upon her face. She would not give way, she would not cry, but her
soul was in travail. These words, as coming from her father, were
anguish to her. She could look at him no longer, and lying outstretched
thus, the lines of her gracious body, moulded by the embroidered linen
quilt, quivered from head to heel. Still that travail of soul should
bring forth fruit. She would not give in, cost what anguish it might,
till all was said.

"I only want to do what is right," she cried, her voice half stifled by
the pillows. "You know, surely you know, how I love you, Commissioner
Sahib, from morning till night and round till morning again, always and
above all, ever since I can first remember. But this is different to
anything that has ever happened to me before, and it wouldn't be right
not to speak about it. It would be there all the time, and it would
creep in between us--between you and me--and interfere in all my
thinking about you."

"It may very well do that in any case, my dear," he said.

"No--no," Damaris answered hotly, "not if I do right now--right by both.
For you must not entertain wrong ideas about him--about Captain Faircloth
I mean. You must not suppose he said a word about my having what might,
or ought to be his. He couldn't do so. He isn't the least that sort of
person. He took pains to make me understand--I couldn't think why at
first, it seemed a little like boasting--that he is quite well off and
that he's very proud of his profession. He doesn't want anything
from--from us. Oh! no," she cried, "no."

And, in her excitement, Damaris raised herself, from the small of her
back, resting on her elbows, sphinx-like in posture, her hands and
arms--from the elbows--stretched out in front of her across the pillows.
Her face was flushed, her eyes blazed. There was storm and vehemence in
her young beauty.

"No--he's too much like you, you yourself, Commissioner Sahib, to want
anything, to accept anything from other people. He means to act for
himself, and make people and things obey him, just as you yourself do.
And," she went on, with a daring surely not a little magnificent under
the circumstances--"he told me he loved life too well to care very much
how he came by it to begin with."

Damaris folded her arms, let her head sink on them as she finished
speaking, and lay flat thus, her face hidden, while she breathed short
and raspingly, struggling to control the after violence of her emotion.

The curtain hung straight. The wind took up its desolate chant again. And
Sir Charles Verity sat back in the angle of the arm-chair, motionless,
and, for the present, speechless.

In truth he was greatly moved, stirred to the deep places of perception,
and of conscience also. For this death of childhood and birth of
womanhood undoubtedly presented a rare and telling spectacle, which, even
while it rent him, in some aspects enraged and mortified him, he still
appreciated. He found, indeed, a strangely vital, if somewhat cruel,
satisfaction in looking on at it--a satisfaction fed, on its more humane
and human side, by the testimony to the worth of the unknown son by the
so well-beloved daughter. Respecting himself he might have cause for
shame; but respecting these two beings for whose existence--whether born
in wedlock or out of it--he was responsible, he had no cause for shame.
In his first knowledge of them as seen together, they showed strong,
generous, sure of purpose, a glamour of high romance in their
adventitious meeting and companionship.

This was the first, the unworldly and perhaps deepest view of the matter.
In it Charles Verity allowed himself to rest, inactive for a space. That
there were, not one, but many other views of the said matter, very
differently attuned and coloured he was perfectly well aware. Soon these
would leap on him, and that with an ugly clamour which he consciously
turned from in repulsion and weary disgust. For he was very tired, as he
now realized. The anxiety endured during his tedious cross-country
journey, the distasteful tragic-comedy of the _scene de seduction_ so
artlessly made him by unlucky Theresa Bilsen, followed by this prolonged
vigil; lastly the very real tragedy--for such it in great measure
remained and must remain--of his interview with Damaris and the re-living
of long buried drama that interview entailed, left him mentally and
physically spent. He fell away into meditation, mournful as it was
indefinite, while the classic lament of another age and race formed
itself silently upon his lips.

"_Comprehenderunt me iniquitates meae, et non potui ut viderem.
Multiplicatae sunt super capillos capitis mei; et cor meum dereliquit
me_," he quoted, in the plenitude of his existing discouragement.

At his time of life, he told himself, earth held no future; and in
heaven--as the Churches figure it--namely, an adjustment of the balance
on the other side death, his belief was of the smallest. A sea of
uncertainty, vast, limitless, laps the shores of the meagre island of the
present--which is all we actually have to our count. Faith is a
gift.--You possess it, or you possess it not; yet without it--

But here his attention was caught, and brought home to that very present,
by a movement upon the bed and Damaris' voice, asking tremulously:

"Commissioner Sahib are you angry, too angry to speak to me?"

Whereupon Charles Verity got up, gathered back the curtain stuffing it in
between the head board and the wall, and stood, tall, spare, yet
graceful, looking down at her. Whether from fatigue or from emotion, his
expression was softer, his face less keen than usual, and the likeness
between him and Darcy Faircloth proportionately and notably great.

"No, my dear," he said, "why should I be angry? What conceivable right
have I to be angry? As a man sows so does he reap. I only reap to-day
what I sowed eight or nine-and-twenty years ago--a crop largely composed
of tares, though among those tares I do find some modicum of wheat. Upon
that modest provision of wheat I must make shift to subsist with the best
grace I may. No, don't cry, my darling. It is useless. Tears never yet
altered facts. You will only do yourself harm, and put a crown to my
self-reproach."

He sat down on the side of the bed, taking her hand, holding and
coaxing it.

"Only let there be no doubt or suspicion on your part, my dear," he went
on. "As you have travelled so far along this dolorous way, take courage
and travel a little farther. To stop, to turn back, is only to leave your
mind open to all manner of imaginations worse very likely than the truth.
I will be quite plain with you. This episode--which I do not attempt to
explain or excuse--took place, and ended, several years before I first
met your mother. And it ended absolutely. Never, by either written or
spoken word, have I held any communication with Lesbia Faircloth since.
Never have I attempted to see her--this in the interests of her
reputation every bit as much as in those of my own. For her station in
life she was a woman of remarkable qualities and character. She had made
an ugly, a repulsive marriage, and she was childless.--More than this it
is not seemly I should tell you."