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L Muehlbach - "The Merchant of Berlin"

J. Arthur Gibbs - "A Cotswold Village"

Various - "Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917"

Mrs. Georgie Sheldon - "Virgie's Inheritance"

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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




Rarely, if ever, had Charles Verity experienced purer pleasure, touched a
finer level of purpose and of hope than to-day, when thinking of and now
when looking upon Damaris. He thankfully appraised her worth, and in
spirit bowed before it, not doatingly or weakly but with reasoned
conviction. Weighed in the balances she would not be found wanting, such
was his firm belief. For himself he accepted this recall to active
participation in affairs, active service to the State, with a lofty
content. But that his daughter, in the flower of her young womanhood,
would profit by this larger and more distinguished way of life, gave the
said recall its deeper values and its zest.

Still he put her off awhile as to the exact announcement, smiling upon
her in fond, yet stately approval.

"Let the telling keep until after dinner, my dear," he bade her. "Pacify
the cravings of the natural man for food and drink. The day has been
fertile in demands--strenuous indeed to the point of fatigue. So let us
comfort ourselves inwardly and materially before we affront weighty
decisions."

He kissed her cheek.

"By the way, though, does it ever occur to you to think of the Bhutpur
Sultan-i-bagh and wish to go East again?"

And Damaris, with still uplifted chin, surveyed him gravely and with a
certain wistfulness, Miss Felicia's attempted poaching forgotten and an
impression of Faircloth vividly overtaking her. For they were so
intimately, disturbingly alike, the father and the son, in voice as well
as in build and feature.

"Go East?" she said, Faircloth's declared preference for sailing into the
sunrise present to her. "Why, I go East in my dreams nearly every night.
I love it--love it more rather than less as I grow older. Of course I
wish to go--some day. But that's by the way, Commissioner Sahib. All that
I really want, now, at once, is to go wherever you go, stay wherever you
stay. You won't ask me to agree to any plan which parts us, will
you?--which takes you away from me?"

"Ruth to a strange Naomi, my dear," he answered. "But so be it. I desire
nothing better than to have you always with me.--But I will not keep you
on tenter-hooks as to your and my projected destination. Let them bring
in dinner in half an hour. Carteret and I shall be ready. Meanwhile, read
this--agreeing to relegate discussion of it to a less hungry season."

And taking the letter she had forwarded to him yesterday, bearing the
imprint of the Indian Office, from the breast pocket of his shooting
coat, he put it into her hand.

The appointment--namely, that of Lieutenant-Governor of an Indian
presidency famous in modern history, a cradle of great reputations and
great men, of English names to conjure with while our Eastern Empire
endures--was offered, in terms complimentary above those common to
official communications. Sir Charles Verity's expert knowledge, not only
of the said mighty province but of the turbulent kingdom lying beyond its
frontiers, marked him as peculiarly fitted for the post. A campaign
against that same turbulent kingdom had but recently been brought to a
victorious conclusion. His influence, it was felt, might be of supreme
value at this juncture in the maintenance of good relations, and
consolidation of permanent peace.

Damaris' heart glowed within her as she read the courteous praiseful
sentences. Even more than through the well-merited success of his book,
did her father thus obtain and come into the fullness of his own at last.
Her imagination glowed, too, calling up pictures of the half-remembered,
half-fabulous oriental scene. The romance of English rule in India, the
romance of India itself, its variety, its complexity, the multitude of
its gods, the multitude of its peoples, hung before her as a mirage,
prodigal in marvels, reaching back and linking up through the centuries
with the hidden wisdom, the hidden terror of the Ancient of Days.

To this land of alien faiths and secular wonders, she found herself
summoned, not as casual sightseer or tourist, but as among the handful of
elect persons who count in its social, political and administrative life.
In virtue of her father's position, her own would be both conspicuous and
assured. An intoxicating prospect this for a girl of one-and-twenty!
Intoxicating, yet, as she envisaged it, disquieting likewise. She
balanced on the thought of all it demanded as well as all it offered, of
all it required from her--dazed by the largeness of the purview, volition
in suspense.

Carteret was the first to reappear, habited in the prescribed black and
white of evening male attire. In the last six months he had, perhaps, put
on flesh; but this without detriment to the admirable proportions of his
figure. It retained its effect of perfect response to the will within,
and all its natural grace. His fair hair and moustache were still almost
untouched with grey. His physical attraction, in short, remained
unimpaired. And of this Damaris was actually, if unconsciously, sensible
as he closed the door and, passing between the stumpy pillars, walked up
the long narrow room and stood, his hands behind him, his back to the
pleasantly hissing and crackling fire of driftwood.

"Alone, dear witch?" he said, and, seeing the open letter in her
hand--"Well, what do you make of this proposition?" And yet again, as she
raised serious pondering eyes--"You find it an extensive order?"

"I find it magnificent for him--beautifully as it should be, adequate
and right."

"And for yourself?" Carteret asked, aware of a carefulness in her
language and intrigued by it.

"Magnificent for me, too--though it takes away my breath."

"You must learn to breathe deeper, that's all," he returned, gently
teasing her.

"And who is to teach me to breathe deeper, dear Colonel Sahib," she
quickly, and rather embarrassingly, asked. "Not my father. He'll have
innumerable big things to do and to do them without waste of energy he
must be saved at every point. He must not fritter away strength in
coaching me in my odds and ends of duties, still less in covering up my
silly mistakes."

"Oh! you exaggerate difficulties," he said, looking not at her but at the
fierce yellow and black striped tiger skin at his feet.--Bless the lovely
child, what was she driving at?

Carteret started for Deadham under the impression he had himself
thoroughly in hand, and that all danger of certain inconvenient emotions
was passed. He had lived them down, cast them out. For over two years now
he had given himself to the superintendence of his estate, to county
business, to the regulation of his sister's--happily more
prosperous--affairs, to the shepherding of his two elder nephews in their
respective professions and securing the two younger ones royally good
times during their holidays at home. Throughout the hunting season,
moreover, he rode to hounds on an average of three days a week. Such
healthy sport helps notably to deliver a man from vain desires, by
sending his body cleanly weary to bed and to sleep o' nights.

By such varied activities had Carteret systematically essayed to rid
himself of his somewhat exquisite distemper, and, when coming to Deadham,
honestly believed himself immune, sane and safe. He was proportionately
disturbed by finding the cure of this autumn love-madness less complete
than, fool-like, he had supposed. For it showed disquieting signs of
resurrection even when Damaris, arrayed in the sheen of silken sunlight,
greeted him at the staircase foot, and an alarming disposition finally to
fling away head-cloth and winding-sheet when she petulantly broke in upon
Miss Verity's faded memories of Canton Magna with the flattering
assertion that time had run backward with him of late.

Now alone with her, confident, moreover, of her maidenly doubts
and pretty self-distrust, he felt at a decided disadvantage. The
detached, affectionately friendly, the avuncular--not to say
grandfatherly--attitude escaped him. He could not play that part.

"Oh! you exaggerate difficulties," he therefore told her, with a
singular absence of his habitual mansuetude, his tone trenching on
impatience. "Instinct and common sense will teach you-mother-wit, too-of
which, you may take it from me, you have enough and to spare.-Let alone
that there will be a host of people emulous of guiding your steps aright,
if your steps should stand in need of guidance which I venture to doubt.
Don't underrate your own cleverness." Hearing him, sensible of his
apparent impatience and misconceiving the cause of it, Damaris' temper
stirred. She felt vexed. She also felt injured.

"What has happened to you, Colonel Sahib?" she asked him squarely. "I
see nothing foolish in what I have said. You wouldn't have me so
conceited that I rushed into this immense business without a qualm,
without any thought whether I can carry it out creditably--with credit
to him, I mean?"

Thus astonishingly attacked, Carteret hedged.

"Miss Verity, of course, will be"--he began.

Damaris cut him short.

"Aunt Felicia is an angel, a darling," she declared, "but--but"--

And there stopped, pricked by a guilty conscience. For to expose Miss
Felicia's inadequacies and enlarge on her ineligibility for the position
of feminine Chief of the Staff, struck her as unworthy, a meanness to
which, under existing circumstances, she could not condescend to stoop.

Carteret looked up, to be entranced not only by the fair spectacle of
her youth but by her delicious little air of shame and self-reproach.
Evidently she had caught herself out in some small naughtiness--was both
penitent and defiant, at once admitting her fault and pleading for
indulgence. He suspected some thought at the back of her mind which he
could neither exactly seize nor place. She baffled him with her changes
of mood and of direction--coming close and then slipping from under his
hand. This humour was surely new in her. She would not leave him alone,
would not let him rest. Had she developed, since last he had converse
with her, into a practised coquette?

"Look here, dear witch," he said, making a return upon himself, and
manfully withstanding the sweet provocation of her near neighbourhood.
"We seem to be queerly at cross purposes. I can't pretend to follow the
turnings and doublings of your ingenious mind. I gather there is
something you want of me. To be plain, then, what is it?"

"That--that you shouldn't desert me--desert us--in this crisis. You have
never deserted me before--never since I can first remember."

"I desert you--good Lord!" Carteret exclaimed, his hands dropping at his
sides with an odd sort of helplessness.

"Ah! that's asking too much, I suppose," she said. "I'm selfish even to
think of it. Yet how can I do otherwise? Don't you understand how all
difficulties would vanish, and how beautifully simple and easy everything
would be if you coached me--if you, dear Colonel Sahib, went with us?"

The man with the blue eyes looked down at the tiger skin again, his
countenance strained and blanched.

More than ever did he find her humour baffling. Not once nor twice had
he, putting force upon himself, resisted the temptation to woo
her--witness his retirement from St. Augustin and his determined
abstinence from intercourse with her since. But now, so it might
veritably appear, the positions were reversed and she wooed him. Though
whether pushed to that length merely by wayward fancy, by some
transient skittish influence or frolic in the blood, or by realized
design he had no means of judging.--Well, he had bidden her be plain,
and she, in some sort at least, obeyed him. It behooved him, therefore,
to be plain in return, in as far as a straightforward reading of her
meaning would carry.

"So you think all would be simple and easy were I to go with you and your
father?" he said, both speech and manner tempered to gentleness. "I am
glad to have you think so--should be still more glad could I share your
belief. But I know better, dearest witch--know that you are mistaken.
This is no case of desertion--put that out of your precious mind once
and for all--but of discretion. My being in attendance, far from
simplifying, would embroil and distort your position. An elderly
gentleman perpetually trotting"--

"Don't," Damaris cried, holding up both hands in hot repudiation. "Don't
say that. There's distortion if you like! It's ugly--I won't have it, for
it is not true."

In the obvious sincerity of which denunciation Carteret found balm; yet
adhered to his purpose.

"But it is true, alas; and I therefore repeat it both for your admonition
and my own. For an elderly gentleman trotting at a young girl's heels is
a most unedifying spectacle--giving occasion, and reasonably, to the
enemy to blaspheme--bad for her in numberless ways; and, if he's any
remnant of self-respect left in him, is anything better than a fatuous
dotard, damnably bad for him as well. Do you understand?"

Damaris presented a mutinous countenance. She would have had much ado to
explain her own motives during this ten minutes' conference. If her
mental--or were they not rather mainly emotional?--turnings and doublings
proved baffling to her companion, they proved baffling to herself in an
almost greater degree. Things in general seemed to have gone into the
melting-pot. So many events had taken place, so many more been
preshadowed, so many strains of feeling excited! And these were
confusingly unrelated, or appeared to be so as yet. Amongst the confusion
of them she found no sure foothold, still less any highway along which to
travel in confidence and security. Her thought ran wild. Her intentions
ran with it, changing their colour chameleon-like from minute to minute.
Now she was tempted to make an equivocal rejoinder.

"To understand," she said, "is not always, Colonel Sahib, necessarily
to agree."

"I am satisfied with understanding and don't press for agreement," he
answered, and on an easier note--"since to me it is glaringly evident
you should take this fine flight unhandicapped. My duty is to stand
aside and leave you absolutely free--not because I enjoy standing aside,
but"--he would allow sentiment such meagre indulgence--"just exactly
because I do not."

Here for the second time, at the crucial moment, Felicia Verity made
irruption upon the scene. But though her entrance was hurried, it
differed fundamentally from that earlier one; so that both the man and
the girl, standing in the proximity of their intimate colloquy before the
fire, were sensible of and arrested by it. She was self-forgetful,
self-possessed, the exalted touch of a pure devotion upon her.

"I have been with my brother Charles," she began, addressing them both.
"I happened to see Hordle coming from the library--and I put off dinner.
I thought, darling"--this to Damaris, with a becoming hint of
deference--"I might do so. I gathered that Charles--that your
father--wished it. He has not been feeling well."

And as Damaris anxiously exclaimed--

"Yes"--Miss Felicia went on--"not at all well. Hordle told me. That was
why I went to the library. He hoped, if he waited and rested for a little
while, the uncomfortable sensations might subside and it would be
needless to mention them. He did not want any fuss made. We gave him
restoratives, and he recovered from the faintness. But he won't be equal,
he admits, to coming in to dinner. Colonel Carteret must be hungry--your
father begs us to wait no longer, I assured him we would not. Hordle is
with him. He should not be alone, I think, while any pain continues."

"Pain--pain?" Damaris cried, her imagination rather horribly caught by
the word. "But is he hurt, has he had some accident?"

While Carteret asked tersely: "Pain--and where?"

"Here," Felicia answered, laying her hand upon her left side over the
heart. She looked earnestly at Carteret as she spoke, conveying to him an
alarm she sought to spare Damaris.

"He tries to make little of it, and assures me it was only the heat of
the house which caused him discomfort after the cold air out of doors.
It may be only that, but I think we ought to make sure."

Again, and with that same becoming hint of deference, she turned to
her niece.

"So I sent orders that Patch should drive at once to Stourmouth and fetch
Dr. McCabe. I did not stop to consult you because it seemed best he
should take out the horses before they were washed down and stabled."

"Yes--but I can go to him?" Damaris asked.

"Darling--of course. But I would try to follow his lead, if I were
you--treat it all lightly, since he so wishes. Your father knows best in
most things--and may know best in this. Please God it is so."

Left alone with Carteret.

"I am anxious--most cruelly anxious about my brother," she said.

While Damaris, sweeping across the hall and down the corridor in her
sunshine silken dress, repeated:

"The ponies--the smugglers' ponies," a sob in her throat.




CHAPTER VII

TELLING HOW CHARLES VERITY LOOKED ON THE MOTHER OF HIS SON


"Which is equivalent to saying, 'Hear the conclusion of the whole
matter,' isn't it, McCabe?"

Dr. McCabe's square, hairy-backed hands fumbled with the stethoscope as
he pushed it into his breast pocket, and, in replying, his advertised
cheerfulness rang somewhat false.

"Not so fast, Sir Charles--in the good Lord's name, not so fast. While
there's life there's hope, it's me settled opinion. I'm never for signing
a patient's death-warrant before the blessed soul of him's entirely
parted company with its mortal tenement of clay. The normal human being
takes a mighty lot of killing in my experience, where the will to live is
still intact. Let alone that you can never be quite upsides with Nature.
Ah! she's an astonishing box of tricks to draw on where final
dissolution's concerned. She glories to turn round on your pathological
and biological high science; and, while you're measuring a man for his
coffin, to help him give death the slip."

Charles Verity slightly shifted his position--and that with singular
carefulness--against the pillows in the deep red-covered chair. His
hands, inert and bluish about the finger-tips, lay along the padded arms
of it. The jacket of his grey-and-white striped flannel sleeping-suit was
unfastened at the throat, showing the irregular lift and fall of his
chest with each laboured breath. His features were accentuated, his face
drawn and of a surprising pallor.

The chair, in which he sat, had been brought forward into the wide arc of
the great window forming the front of the room. Two bays of this stood
open down to the ground. Looking out, beyond the rich brown of the
newly-turned earth in the flower-beds, the lawn stretched away--a dim
greyish green, under the long shadows cast by the hollies masking the
wall on the left, and glittering, powdered by myriads of scintillating
dewdrops, where the early sunshine slanted down on it from between their
stiff pinnacles and sharply serrated crests.

In the shrubberies robins sang, shrilly sweet. A murmur of waves,
breaking at the back of the Bar, hung in the chill, moist, windless air.
Presently a handbarrow rumbled and creaked, as West--the head gardener,
last surviving relic of Thomas Clarkson Verity's reign--wheeled it from
beneath the ilex trees towards the battery, leaving dark smudgy tracks
upon the spangled turf.

Arrived at his objective, the old gardener, with most admired
deliberation, loaded down long-handled birch-broom, rake and hoe; and
applied himself to mysterious peckings and sweeping of the gravel around
the wooden carriages of the little cannon and black pyramid of
ball.--Man, tools, and barrow were outlined against the pensive
brightness of autumn sea and autumn sky, which last, to southward, still
carried remembrance of sunrise in a broad band of faint yellowish pink,
fading upward into misty azure and barred with horizontal pencillings of
tarnished silver cloud.

Thus far Charles Verity had watched the progress of the bowed,
slow-moving figure musingly. But now, as the iron of the hoe clinked
against the gravel flints, he came back, so to say, to himself and back
to the supreme question at issue. He looked up, his eyes and the
soundless ironic laughter resident in them, meeting McCabe's twinkling,
cunning yet faithful and merry little eyes, with a flash.

"The work of the world is not arrested," he said. "See, that
octogenarian, old West. He wheeled ill-oiled, squeaking barrows and
hacked at the garden paths when I was a Harchester boy. He wheels the one
and hacks at the other even yet--a fact nicely lowering to one's private
egotism, when you come to consider it. Why, then, my good friend,
perjure yourself or strive to mince matters? The work of the world will
be done whether I'm here to direct the doing of it or not.--Granted I am
tough and in personal knowledge of ill-health a neophyte. My luck
throughout has been almost uncanny. Neither in soldiering nor in sport,
from man or from beast, have I ever suffered so much as a scratch. I have
borne a charmed life--established a record for invulnerability, which
served me well in the East where the gods still walk in the semblance of
man and miracle is still persistently prevalent. Accident has passed me
by--save for being laid up once, nearly thirty years ago, with a broken
ankle in the house of some friends at Poonah."

He ceased speaking, checking, as it seemed, disposition to further
disclosure; while the soundless laughter in his eyes found answering
expression upon his lips, curving them, to a somewhat bitter smile
beneath the flowing moustache.

"In to-day's enforced idleness how persistently cancelled episodes and
emotions rap, ghostly, on the door demanding and gaining entrance!" he
presently said. "Must we take it, Doctor, that oblivion is a fiction,
merciful forgetfulness an illusion; and that every action, every
desire--whether fulfilled or not--is printed indelibly upon one's memory,
merely waiting the hour of weakness and physical defeat to show up?"

"The Lord only knows!" McCabe threw off, a little hopelessly. This was
the first utterance approaching complaint; and he deplored it for his
patient's sake. He didn't like that word defeat.

Then, to his hearer's relief with a softened accent, Charles Verity took
up his former theme.

"Save for a trifling go of fever now and again, illness has given me the
go-by equally with accident. But, for all my ignorance of such
afflictions I know, beyond all shadow of doubt, that a few repetitions of
the experience of last night must close any man's account. Experiment is
more enlightening than argument. There is no shaking the knowledge you
arrive at through it."

McCabe, standing at ease by the open window, untidy, hirsute, unkempt,
rammed his hands down into his gaping trouser pockets and nodded
unwilling agreement.

"The attack was bad," he said. "I'm not denying it was murderously bad.
And all the harder on you because, but for the one defaulting organ, your
heart, you're as sound as a bell. You're a well enough man to put up a
good fight; and that, you see, cuts both ways, be danged to it."

"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.--You know as well as I do
the Indian appointment will never be gazetted."

"There you have me, Sir Charles, loath though I am to admit as much. I'd
be a liar if I denied it would not."

"How long do you give me then? Months, or only weeks?"

"That depends in the main on yourself, in as far as I can presume to
pronounce. With care"--

"Which means sitting still here"--

"It does."

Charles Verity raised his shoulders the least bit.

"Not good enough, McCabe," he declared, "not good enough. There are rites
to be duly performed, words to be said, which I refuse to neglect. Oh,
no, don't misunderstand me. I don't need professional help to accomplish
my dying. Were I a member of your communion it might be different, but I
require no much-married parsonic intermediary to make my peace with God.
I am but little troubled regarding that. Shall not the judge of all the
earth do right?--Nevertheless, there remain rites to be decently
performed. I must make my peace with man--and still more with
woman--before I go hence and am no more seen. But, look here, I have no
wish to commit myself too soon, and risk the bathos of an anti-climax by
having to perform them twice, repeat them at a later date.--So how long
do you give me--weeks? Too generous an estimate? A week, then
or--well--less?"

"You want it straight?"

"I want it straight."

"More likely days. God grant I am mistaken. With your fine constitution,
as I tell you, you are booked to put up a good fight. All the same, to be
honest, Sir Charles, it was touch and go more than once last night."

In the room an interval of silence, and without song of the robins and
murmur of the sea, nearer now and louder as the rising tide lapped up the
sands at the back of the Bar. The faint yellow-pink after-thought of
sunrise and pencillings of tarnished cloud alike had vanished into the
all-obtaining misty blue of the upper sky. Heading for the French coast,
a skein of wild geese passed in wedge-shaped formation with honking cries
and the beat of strong-winged flight. The barrow creaked again, wheeled
some few yards further along the battery walk.