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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




"Are you in pain?" she asked, agonized.

"Discomfort," he replied. "We will not dignify this by the name of pain.
But I must wait for a time before dictating the letter. There's something
I will ask you to do for me, my dear, meanwhile."

"Yes"--He paused, shifted his position, closed his eyes.

"Have you held any communication with--"

He stopped, for the question irked him. Even at this pass it went against
the grain with him to ask of his daughter news of his son.

But in that pause our maiden's scattered wits very effectually
returned to her.

"With Darcy Faircloth?" she said. And as Charles Verity bowed his head in
assent--"Yes, I should have told you already but--but for all which has
happened. He was here the day before yesterday. He came home from church
with me.--That was my doing, not his, to begin with. You mustn't think he
put himself forward--took advantage, I mean, of your being away. If there
is any blame it is mine."

"Mine, rather--and of long standing. God forgive me!"

But Damaris, fairly launched now upon a wholly welcome topic, would have
none of this. To maintain her own courage, and, if it might be, combat
that dreaded withdrawal of his spirit into regions where she could not
follow, she braced herself to reason with him.

"No--there indeed you are mistaken, dearest," she gently yet confidently
asserted. "You take the whole business topsy-turvy fashion, quite wrong
way round. I won't weary you with explanations of exactly what led to
Darcy Faircloth coming here with me on Sunday. But you ought to know that
he and Aunt Felicia met. I hadn't planned that. It just happened. And she
was lovely to him--lovely to us both. She made him stay to
luncheon--inviting him in your name."

"I seem to possess a singular gift for saddling my relations with the
payment of my bad debts," Charles Verity remarked.

"But there isn't any bad debt--that's what I so dearly want you to
believe, what I'm trying so hard, Commissioner Sahib, to tell you,"
Damaris cried. "Afterwards, when he and I were alone by ourselves, the
ice broke somehow, he gave himself away and said beautiful things--things
about you which made me delightfully happy, and showed how he has felt
towards you all along."

Simply, without picking of her words, hesitation or artifice, Damaris
repeated that somewhat sinister tale of the sea. Of a sailing ship,
becalmed through burning days and stifling nights in tropic waters. Of
the ill-doings of a brutal, drunken captain. Of a fly-blown eating-house
in Singapore. Of the spiritual deliverance there achieved through sight
of Charles Verity's name and successful record in the columns of a
Calcutta newspaper; and the boy's resultant demand for the infliction of
some outward and visible sign, some inalienable stigmata, which should
bear perpetual witness to the fact of his parentage.

"So you see"--

Damaris kindled, standing before him, flamed indeed to a rare
carelessness of convention, of enjoined pruderies and secrecies.--

"You gave him the beautiful gift of life to begin with; and saved his
life later when he was so miserably tempted to end it. As he loves life,
where then is the debt?--Not on your side certainly, dearest."

Listening to which fondly exalted sophistries--for sophistries from
worldly and moral standpoint alike must he not surely pronounce
them?--Charles Verity still received comfort to his soul. They ought to
be reckoned mistaken, of course, transparently in error, yet neither son
nor daughter condemned him. Neither did his sister, in the pathetic
innocence and purity of her middle-age maidenhood.

This moved him to thankfulness, none the less genuine because shot with
self-mockery. For he was curious to observe how, as the last urgings of
ambition and thirst of power fell away from him,--he riding under escort
of Death, the black captain--all tributes of human tenderness and
approval gained in value.--Not the approval of notable personages, of
those high in office, nor even that of sympathetic critics and readers;
but of persons in his own immediate voisinage, bound to him by
friendship, by association, or the tie of blood.--Their good-will was
precious to him as never before. He craved to be in perfect amity with
every member of that restricted circle. Hence it vexed and fretted him to
know the circle incomplete, through the exclusion of one rather
flagrantly intimate example. Yet to draw the said member, the said
example, within the circle, yielding it the place which it might
rightfully aspire to occupy, amounted--after half a lifetime of
abstention and avoidance--to a rather tremendous demonstration, one which
might well be hailed as extravagant, as a courting of offence possible
only to a sentimental egoist of most aggravated kind.

And he was tired--had no smallest inclination towards demonstrations. For
the threatening of heart spasm, to which he lately denied the title of
pain, though of short duration, affected him adversely, sapping his
strength. His mind, it is true, remained clear, even vividly receptive;
but, just as earlier this morning, his will proved insufficient for its
direction or control. He mused, his chin sunk on his breast, his left
hand travelling down over the long soft moustache, his eyes half closed.
Thought and vision followed their own impulse, wandering back and forth
between the low-caste eating-house in the sweltering heat and perfumed
stenches of the oriental, tropic seaport; and the stone-built English
inn--here on Marychurch Haven--overlooking the desolate waste of
sand-hills, the dark reed-beds and chill gleaming tides.

For love of Damaris, his daughter, while still in the heat of his prime,
he had foresworn all traffic with women. Yet now, along with the tacitly
admitted claims of the son, arose the claim of the mistress, mother of
that son--in no sensual sort, but with a certain wildness of bygone
romance, wind and rain-swept, unsubstantial, dim and grey. Ever since
conviction of the extreme gravity of his physical condition dawned on
him, the idea of penetrating the courts of that deserted sanctuary had
been recurrent. In the summing up of his human, his earthly, experience,
romance deserved, surely, a word of farewell? Damaris' story served to
give the idea a fuller appeal and consistency.

But he was tired--tired. He longed simply to drift. It was infinitely
distasteful to him definitely to plan, or to decide respecting anything.

Meanwhile his continued silence and abstraction wore badly upon Damaris.
She had steeled herself; had flamed, greatly daring. Now reaction set in.
Her effort proved vain. She had failed. For once more she recognized that
an unknown influence, a power dark and incalculably strong--so she
figured it--regained ascendency over her father, working to the insidious
changing of his nature, strangely winning him away. Waiting for some
response, some speech or comment on his part, fear and the sense of
helplessness assailed, and would have submerged her, had she not clung to
Carteret's parting "God bless you" and avowed faith in her stability, as
to a wonder-working charm. Nor did the charm fail in efficacy.--Oh!
really he was a wonderful sheet-anchor, "the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land," that dear man with the blue eyes! Consciously she blessed
him.--And, thanks to remembrance of him, presently found voice and
purpose once again.

"You aren't displeased with me, dearest?" she asked.

"Displeased?" Charles Verity repeated, at first absently. "Displeased, my
dear, no--why?"

"We didn't do wrong?"--labouring the point, the more fully to recall and
retain him--"Didn't take too much upon ourselves--Aunt Felicia, I mean,
and I--by persuading Darcy Faircloth to stay on Sunday, by entertaining
him when you were away? Or--or have I been stupid, dearest, and
thoughtlessly wearied you by talking too much and too long?"

"Neither," he said. "On the contrary, all you have told me goes to lessen
certain difficulties, make the crooked, in some degree, straight and
rough places plain."

For, if Faircloth had been here so recently, broken bread too in the
house, so he argued, it became the easier to bid him return. And Charles
Verity needed to see him, see him this morning--since purpose of
farewells, to be spoken in those long-deserted courts of romance,
stiffened, becoming a thing not merely to be turned hither and thither
in thought, but to be plainly and directly done.--"Send for him in your
own name," he said. "Explain to him how matters stand, and ask him to
talk with me."

And, as Damaris agreed, rejoiced by the success of her adventurous
diplomacy, making to go at once and give the required instructions--

"Stay--stay a moment," her father said, and drew her down to sit on the
chair-arm, keeping her hand in his, and with his other hand stroking it
wistfully. For though certain difficulties might be sensibly lessened,
they were not altogether removed; and he smiled inwardly, aware that not
even in the crack of doom are feminine rights over a man other than
conflicting and uncommonly ticklish to adjust.

"Before we commit ourselves to further enterprises, my darling, let us
quite understand one another upon one or two practical points--bearing in
mind the blades of Atropos' envious scissors. My affairs are in
order"--Damaris shrank, piteously expostulated.

"Oh! but must we, are we obliged to speak of those things? They grate on
me--Commissioner Sahib, they are ugly. They hurt."

"Yes--distinctly we are obliged to speak of them. To do so can neither
hasten nor retard the event. All the more obliged to speak of them,
because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could
do with it.--As a means, of vast importance. As an end,
uninteresting.--So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid.
All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income
dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety
regarding ways and means, if not to make you a rich woman. I have left an
annuity to your Aunt Felicia. Her means are slender, dear creature, and
her benevolence outruns them, so that she balances a little anxiously, I
gather, on the edge of debt. The capital sum will return to you
eventually. Carteret and McCabe consented, some years ago, to act as my
executors. Their probity and honour are above reproach.--Now as to this
place--if you should ever wish to part with it, let Faircloth take it
over. I have made arrangements to that effect, about which I will talk
with him when he comes.--Have no fear lest I should say that which might
wound him. I shall be as careful, my dear, of his proper pride as of my
own.--Understand I have no desire to circumscribe either your or his
liberty of action unduly. But this house, all it contains, the garden,
the very trees I see from these windows, are so knitted into the fabric
of my past life that I shrink--with a queer sense of homelessness--from
any thought of their passing into the occupation of strangers.--Childish,
pitifully weak-minded no doubt, and therefore the more natural that one
should crave a voice, thus in the disposition of what one has learned
through long usage so very falsely to call one's own!"

"We will do exactly what you wish, even to the littlest particular, I
promise you--both for Faircloth and for myself," Damaris answered,
forcing herself to calmness and restraint of tears.

He petted her hands silently until, as the minutes passed, she began once
more to grow fearful of that dreadful unknown influence insidiously
possessing him and winning him away. And he may have grown fearful of it
too, for he made a sharp movement, raising his shoulders as though
striving to throw off some weight, some encumbrance.

"There is an end, then, of business," he said, "and of such worldly
considerations. I need worry you with them no more. Only one thing
remains, of which, before I speak to others, it is only seemly, my
darling, I should speak to you."

Charles Verity lifted his eyes to hers, and she perceived his spirit as
now in nowise remote; but close, evident almost to the point of alarm. It
looked out from the wasted face, at once--to her seeing--exquisite and
austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal,
unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of
impending portentous adventure.

"You know, Damaris, how greatly I love and have loved you--how dear you
have been to me, dearer than the satisfaction of my own flesh?"

Speech was beyond her. She looked back, dazzled and for the moment
broken.

"Therefore it goes hard with me to ask anything which might, ever so
distantly, cause you offence or distress. Only time presses. We are
within sight of the end."

"Ah! no--no," she exclaimed, wrenching away her hands and beating them
together, passion of affection, of revolt and sorrow no more to be
controlled. "How can I bear it, how can I part with you? I will not, I
will not have you die.--McCabe isn't infallible. We must call in other
doctors. They may be cleverer, may suggest new treatment, new remedies.
They must cure you--or if they can't cure, at least keep you alive for
me. I won't have you die!"

"Call in whom you like, as many as you like, my darling, the whole
medical faculty if it serves to pacify or to content you," he said,
smiling at her.

Damaris repented. Took poor passion by the throat, stifling its
useless cries.

"I tire you. I waste your strength. I think only of myself, of my own
grief, most beloved, my own consuming grief and desolation.--See--I will
be good--I am good. What else is there you want to have me do?"

"This--but recollect you are free to say me nay, without scruple or
hesitation. I shall not require you to give your reasons, but shall bow,
unreservedly, to your wishes. For you possess a touchstone in such
questions as the one now troubling me, which, did I ever possess it, I
lost, as do most men, rather lamentably early in my career. If you suffer
me to do so, I will ask Darcy Faircloth to bring his mother here to me,
this evening at dusk, when her coming will not challenge impertinent
observation--so that I may be satisfied no bitterness colours her thought
of me and that we part in peace, she and I."

Damaris got up from her seat on the arm of the red-covered chair. She
stood rigid, her expression reserved to blankness, but her head
carried high.

"Of course," she said, a little hoarsely, and waited. "Of course. How
could I object? Wasn't it superfluous even to ask me? Your word,
dearest, is law."

"But in the present case hardly gospel?"

"Yes--gospel too--since it is your word. Gospel, that is, for me. Let
Darcy Faircloth bring his mother here by all means. Only I think,
perhaps, this is all a little outside my province. It would be better you
should make the--the appointment with him yourself. I will send to him
directly. Patch can take a note over to the island. I would prefer to
have Patch go as messenger than either of the other men."

She walked towards the door. Stopped half-way and turned, hearing her
father move. And as she turned--her eyes quick with enquiry as to his
case, but inscrutable as to her own--Charles Verity rose too and held
out his arms in supreme invitation. She came swiftly forward and kissed
him, while with all the poor measure of force left him, he strained her
to his breast.

"Have I asked too much from you, Damaris, and, in the desire to make
sure of peace elsewhere, endangered the perfection of my far dearer
peace with you?"

She leaned back from the waist, holding her head away from him and laid
her hand on his lips.

"Don't blaspheme, most beloved," she said, "I have no will but yours."

Again she kissed him, disengaged herself very gently, and went.




CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH WHICH IS ALSO CHAPTER THE LAST


At Lady's Oak--an ancient forest boundary--where the main road forks,
Damaris swung the dog-cart to the left, across the single-arch stone
bridge spanning the Arne; and on, up the long winding ascent from the
valley-bottom to the moorlands patched with dark fir plantations, which
range inland from behind Stourmouth. This constituted the goal of her
journey; for, the high-lying plateau reached, leagues of open country are
disclosed north and west, far as the eye carries, to the fine bare
outline of the Wiltshire Downs. She asked for wide prospects, for air and
ample space; but as floored by stable earth rather than by the eternal
unrest and "fruitless, sonorous furrows" of the sea.

Ever since the day of the funeral, now nearly a fortnight ago, Damaris
had kept within the sheltering privacy of the house and grounds. That
day, one of soft drizzling rain and clinging ground fog, had also been to
her one of hardly endurable distraction. Beneath assumption of respectful
silence, it jarred, boomed, took notes, debated, questioned. Beneath
assumption of solemnity, it peeped and stared. Her flayed nerves and
desolated heart plagued her with suspicions of insincerity.

In as far as Colonel Carteret controlled proceedings all had been marked
by reverent simplicity. But where the carcass is, the eagles,
proverbially, gather. And unfeathered fowl, in their own estimation
eminently representative of that regal species, flocked to Deadham church
and to The Hard.

If--to vary our metaphor--some, in the past, inclined to stone the living
prophet, these now outvied one another in their alacrity to bedeck his
tomb. Dr. Cripps, for example, hurried to offer himself as pall-bearer--a
request the more readily disposed of that there was no pall. While
Archdeacon Verity, to cite a second example and from a higher social
level, supported by his elder son Pontifex--domestic chaplain to the
Bishop of Harchester--insisted on sharing with Canon Horniblow the
melancholy honour of reading the burial service.

For the rest, the head, and lesser members of the family, from the big
house at Canton Magna, were solidly, not to say rather aggressively in
evidence. With them Mrs. Cowden and her husband-satellite, the Honourable
Augustus joined forces on arriving from Paulton Lacy.--Lord Bulparc drove
over from Napworth Castle. The country, indeed, showed up with
commendable indifference to depressing atmospheric conditions. Marychurch
sent a contingent. Stourmouth followed suit in the shape of General
Frayling--attended by Marshall Wace in full clerical raiment--bearing a
wreath of palm, violets, and myrtle wholly disproportionate in bulk and
circumference to his own shrivelled and rather tottery form.--Of this
unlooked for advent more hereafter.--Other distinguished soldiers came
from Aldershot and down from town. A permanent Under Secretary, correct
but visibly bored, represented the India Office.

The parish, neglecting its accustomed industries and occupations,
mustered in strength; incited thereto, not only by the draw of recently
resurrected scandal, but by news of the appointment recently offered Sir
Charles Verity, which had somehow got noised abroad. The irony of his
illness and death occurring precisely when he was invited to mount
nothing less--according to local report--than an oriental throne,
sufficed to stir the most lethargic imagination. Moralists of the
Reginald Sawyer school might read in this the direct judgment of an
offended deity. Deadham, however, being reprehensibly clannish, viewed
the incident otherwise; and questioned--thanks to an ingeniously inverted
system of reasoning--whether the said Reginald Sawyer hadn't laid himself
open to a charge of manslaughter or of an even graver breach of the
Decalogue.

Theresa Bilson--in whose hat artificial buttercups and daisies hastily
made room for bows of crape--lurked in the humble obscurity of the free
seats near the west door. To right and left she was flanked by a guardian
Miss Minett; but these ladies to-day were but broken reeds on which to
lean. They still laboured under a sense of having been compromised, and
of resultant social ostracism. This, although their former parsonic
lodger had vanished from the scene on the day following his threatened
immersion--a half-hearted proposition on his part of "facing out the
undeserved obloquy, living down the coarse persecution" meeting with as
scant encouragement from his ecclesiastical superior, the vicar, as from
themselves. Theresa--it really was hard on her--shared their eclipse.
Hence the humble obscurity of the free seats, where she sniffed, dabbed
her eyes and gurgled, unheeded and unseen.

Finally young Tom Verity--home on his first long leave--having
accompanied the family party from Canton Magna and feeling his sense of
humour unequal to the continued strain of their sublime insularity,
benevolently herded two stately, though shivering, turbanned native
gentlemen, who reached Deadham during the early stages of the ceremony no
one quite knew whence or when. In the intervals of his self-imposed
duties, he found time to admire the rich unction of his father, the
Archdeacon's manner and voice.

"_Plus ca change, plus la meme chose_," he quoted gleefully. "What a
consummate fraud the dear old governor is; and how deliciously innocent
of the fact, that he imposes upon no one half so successfully as he does
upon himself!"

Our young man also found time, from afar, to admire Damaris; but, let it
be added, to a very different tune. Her beauty came as surprise to him
as having much more than fulfilled its early promise. He found it
impressive beyond that of any one of the many ladies, mature or callow,
with whom it was his habit largely to flirt. So far he could
congratulate himself on having successfully withstood the wiles of
matrimony--but by how near a shave, at times by how narrow a squeak! If
that fine parental fraud, the Archdeacon, had but known!--Tom,
undeterred by the solemnity of the occasion, hunched up his shoulders
like a naughty boy expecting his ears boxed.--But then--thank the
powers, the Archdeacon so blessedly and refreshingly didn't, and, what
was more, didn't in the very least want to know. He never asked for
trouble; but, like the priest and Levite of sacred parable, carefully
passed by on the other side when trouble was about.

Our young friend looked again at Damaris. Yes--she had beauty and in the
grand manner, standing there at the foot of the open brick-lined grave,
calm, immobile, black-clad, white-faced, in the encircling melancholy of
the drizzling mist. With the family grouped about her, large-boned,
pompous, well-fed persons, impervious to general ideas as they were
imperviously prosperous, he compared her to a strayed deer amongst a
herd of store cattle. Really, with the exception of his cousin Felicia
and--naturally--of himself, the Verity breed was almost indecently true
to type. Prize animals, most of them, he granted, still cattle--for
didn't he detect an underlying trace of obstinate bovine ferocity in
their collective aspect?

Damaris' calm and immobility exceeded theirs. But in quality and source
how far removed, how sensitive and intelligent! Her mourning was in the
grand manner, too, her grief sincere and absolute to the extent of a
splendid self-forgetfulness. She didn't need to pose; for that forgotten
self could be trusted--in another acceptation of the phrase--never to
forget itself.

And here Tom Verity's agreeable frivolity, the astute and witty
shiftiness of mind and--in a degree--of practice, for which he so readily
found excuses and forgave himself, made place for nobler apprehensions.
Not merely Damaris', just now, rather tragic beauty moved and impressed
him; but some quality inherent in her upon which he felt disposed to
confer the title of genius. That was going far.--Mentally he pulled
himself up short.--For wasn't it going altogether too far--absurdly so?
What the dickens did this excessive admiration portend? Could he have
received the _coup de foudre_?--He had to-day a fancy for French tags, in
reaction from the family's over-powering Englishness.--That wouldn't suit
his book in the very least. For in the matters of the affections he held
it thriftless, to the confines of sheer lunacy, to put all your eggs into
one basket. He, therefore, politicly abstained from further observation
of Damaris; and, with engaging assiduity, reapplied himself to herding
the two native gentlemen through the remainder of the ceremony and, at
the conclusion of it, into the mildewed luxury of a Marychurch landau.

Deadham parish went home to its tea that evening damp, not to say
dripping, but well pleased with the figure it had cut in the public eye.
For it had contributed its quota to contemporary history; and what parish
can, after all, do more! Reporters pervaded it armed with note-books and
pencils. They put questions, politely requested a naming of names. The
information furnished in answer would reach the unassailable authority of
print, giving Deadham opportunity to read the complimentary truth about
itself. Still better, giving others opportunity to read the complimentary
truth about Deadham. Hence trade and traffic of sorts, with much
incidental replenishing of purses. Great are the uses of a dead prophet
to the keepers of his tomb! Not within the memory of the oldest
inhabitant had any funeral been so largely or honourably attended. Truly
it spelled excellent advertisement--and this although two persons,
calculated mightily to have heightened interest and brought up dramatic
and emotional values, were absent from the scene.