THE week passed in the sombre hurry yet tedium of a house lying under the shadow of death—that period during which when it is night we long for morning, and when it is morning we long for night, hoping always for the hope that never comes, trembling to mark the progress which does go on silently towards the end.
Colonel Kingsward was rough and angry with Bee that first morning, to her consternation and dismay. She had never been the object of her father’s anger before, and this hasty and imperious questioning seemed to take all power of reply out of her. “What had she been doing to her mother?” She! to her mother! Bee was too much frightened by his threatening look, the cloud on his face, the fire in his eyes, to say anything. Her mind ran hurriedly over all that had happened, and that last terrible visit, which had changed the whole aspect of the earth to herself. But it was to herself that this stroke of misfortune had come, and not to her mother. A gleam of answering anger came into Bee’s eyes, sombre with the unhappiness which had been pushed aside by more immediate suffering, yet was still there like a black background, to frame whatever other miseries might come after. As for Colonel Kingsward, it was to him, as to so many men, a relief to blame somebody for the trouble which was unbearable. The blow was approaching which he had never allowed himself to believe in. He had blamed his wife instinctively, involuntarily, at the first hearing of every inconvenience in life; and it had helped to accustom him to the annoyance to think that it was her fault. He had done so in what he called this unfortunate business of Bee’s, concluding that but for Mrs. Kingsward’s weakness, Mr. Aubrey Leigh and his affairs would never have become of any importance to the family. He had blamed her, too, and greatly, for that weakening of health which he had so persistently endeavoured to convince himself did not mean half so much as the doctors said. Women are so idiotic in these respects. They will insist on wearing muslin and lace when they ought to wear flannel. They will put on evening dresses when they ought to be clothed warmly to the throat, and shoes made of paper when they ought to be solidly and stoutly shod, quite indifferent to the trouble and anxiety they may cause to their family. And now that Mrs. Kingsward’s state had got beyond the possibility of reproach, he turned upon his daughter. It must be her fault. Her mother had been better or he should not have left her. The quiet of the country was doing her good; if she had not been agitated all would have been well. But Bee, with all her declarations of devotion to her mother; Bee, the eldest, who ought to have had some sense; Bee had brought on this trumpery love business to overset the delicate equilibrium which he himself, a man with affairs so much more important in hand, had refrained from disturbing. It did him a little good, unhappy and anxious as he was, to pour out his wrath upon Bee. And she did not reply. She did not shed tears, as her mother had weakly done in similar circumstances, or attempt excuses. Even if he had been sufficiently at leisure to note it, an answering fire awoke in Bee’s eyes. He had not leisure to note, but he perceived it all the same.
Presently, however, every faculty, every thought, became absorbed in that sick chamber; things had still to be thought of outside of it, but they seemed strange, artificial things, having no connection with life. Then Charlie was summoned from Oxford, and the younger boys from school, which increased the strange commotion of the house, adding that restless element of young life which had no place there, nothing to do with itself, and which roused an almost frenzied irritation in Colonel Kingsward when he saw any attempt on the part of the poor boys to amuse themselves, or resume their usual occupations. “Clods!” he said; “young brutes! They would play tennis if the world were falling to pieces.” And again that glance of fire came into Bee’s eyes, marked unconsciously, though he did not know he had seen it, by her father. The boys hung about her when she stole out for a little air, one at each arm. “How is mother, Bee? She’s no worse? Don’t you think we might go over to Hillside for that tournament? Don’t you think Fred might play in the parish match with Siddemore? They’re so badly off for bowlers. Don’t you think——”
“Oh, I think it would be much better for you to be doing something, boys; but, then, papa might hear, and he would be angry. If we could but keep it from papa.”
“We’re doing mother no good,” said Fred.
“How could we do mother good? Why did the governor send for us, Bee, only to kick our heels here, and get into mischief? A fellow can’t help getting into mischief when he has nothing to do.”
“Yes,” repeated Fred, “what did he send for us for? I wish mother was better. I suppose as soon as she’s better we’ll be packed off again.”
They were big boys, but they did not understand the possibility of their mother not getting better, and, indeed, neither did Bee. When morning followed morning and nothing happened, it seemed to her that getting better was the only conclusion to be looked for. If it had been Death that was coming, surely it must have come by this time. Her hopes rose with every new day.
But Mrs. Kingsward had been greatly agitated by the sight of Charlie when he was allowed to see her. “Why has Charlie come home?” she said. “Was he sent for? Was it your father that brought him? Charlie, my dear, what are you doing here? Why have you come back? You should have been going on with—— Did your father send for you? Why—why did your father send for you, my boy?”
“I thought,” said Charlie, quite unmanned by the sight of her, and by this unexpected question, and by all he had been told about her state, “I thought—you wanted to see me, mother.”
“I always like to see you—but not to take you away from—— And why was he sent for, Moulsey? Does the doctor think?—does my husband think?——”
Her feverish colour grew brighter and brighter. Her eyes shone with a burning eagerness. She put her hot hand upon that of her son. “Was it to say good-bye to me?” she said, with a strange flutter of a smile.
At the same time an argument on the same subject was going on between the doctor and the Colonel.
“What can the children do in a sick room? Keep them away. I should never have sent for them if you had consulted me. It is bad enough to have let her see Charlie, summoned express—do you want to frighten your wife to death?”
“There can be no question,” said the Colonel, “if what you tell me is true, of frightening her to death. I think, Benson, that a patient in such circumstances ought to know. She ought to be told——”
“What?” the doctor said, sharply, with a harsh tone in his voice.
“What? Do you need to ask? Of her state—of what is imminent—that she is going to——”
Colonel Kingsward loved his wife truly, and he could not say those last words.
“Yes,” said the doctor, “going to——? Well, we hope it’s to One who has called her, that knows all about it, Kingsward. Doctors are not supposed to take that view much, but I do. I’d tell her nothing of the sort. I would not agitate her either with the sight of the children or those heathenish thoughts about dying. Well, I suppose you’ll take your own way, if you think she’s in danger of damnation; but you see I don’t. I think where she’s going she’ll find more consideration and more understanding than ever she got here.”
“You are all infidels—every one of you,” said Colonel Kingsward; “you would let a soul rush unprepared into the presence of—”
“Her Father,” said Doctor Benson. “So I would; if he’s her Father he’ll take care of that. And if he’s only a Judge, you know, a Judge is an extraordinarily considerate person. He leaves no means untried of coming to a right decision. I would rather trust my case in the hands of the Bench than make up my own little plea any day. And, anyhow you can put it, the Supreme Judge must be better than the best Bench that ever was. Leave her alone. She’s safer with Him than either with you or me.”
“It’s an argument I never would pardon—in my own case. I shudder at the thought of being plunged into eternity without the time to—to think—to—to prepare——”
“But if your preparations are all seen through from the beginning? If it’s just as well known then, or better, what you are thinking, or trying to think, to make yourself ready for that event? You knew yourself, more or less, didn’t you, when you were in active service, the excuses a wretched private would make when he was hauled up, and how he would try to make the worse appear the better cause. Were you moved by that, Colonel Kingsward? Didn’t you know the man, and judge him by what you knew?”
“It seems to me a very undignified argument; there’s no analogy between a wretched private and my—and my—and one of us—at the Judgment Seat.”
“No—it’s more like one of your boys making up the defence—when brought before you—and the poor boy would need it too,” Dr. Benson added within himself. But naturally he made no impression with his argument, whether it was good or bad, upon his hearer. Colonel Kingsward was in reality a very unhappy man. He had nobody to blame for the dreadful misfortune which was threatening him except God, for whom he entertained only a great terror as of an overwhelming tyrannical Power ready to catch him at any moment when he neglected the observances or rites necessary to appease it. He was very particular in these observances—going to church, keeping up family prayers, contributing his proper and carefully calculated proportion to the charities, &c. Nobody could say of him that he was careless or negligent. And now how badly was his devotion repaid!—by the tearing away from him of the companion of his life. But he felt that there was still much more that the awful Master of the Universe might inflict, perhaps upon her if she was not prepared to meet her God. He was wretched till he had told her, warned her, till she had fulfilled everything that was necessary, seen a clergyman, and got herself into the state of mind becoming a dying person. He had collected all the children that she might take leave of them in a becoming way. He had, so far as he knew, thought of everything to make her exit from the world a right one in all the forms—and now to be told that he was not to agitate her, that the God whom he wished to prepare her to meet knew more of her and understood her better than he did! Agitate her! When the alternative might be unspeakable miseries of punishment, instead of the acquittal which would have to be given to a soul properly prepared. These arguments did not in the least change his purpose, but they fretted and irritated him beyond measure. At the bottom of all, the idea that anybody should know better than he what was the right thing for his own wife was an intolerable thought.
He went in and out of her room with that irritated, though self-controlled look, which she knew so well. He had never shown it to the world, and when he had demanded of her in his angry way why this was and that, and how on earth such and such things had happened, Mrs. Kingsward had till lately taken it so sweetly that he had not himself suspected how heavy it was upon her. And when she had begun to show signs of being unable to bear the responsibility of everything in earth and heaven, the Colonel had felt himself an injured man. There were signs that he might eventually throw that responsibility on Bee. But in the meantime he had nobody to blame, as has been said, and the burden of irritation and disturbance was heavy upon him.
The next morning after his talk with Dr. Brown he came in with that clouded brow to find Charlie by her bedside. The Colonel came up and stood looking at the face on the pillow, now wan in the reaction of the fever, and utterly weak, but still smiling at his approach.
“I have been telling Charlie,” she said, in her faint voice, “that he must go back to his college. Why should he waste his time here?”
“He will not go back yet,” said Colonel Kingsward; “are you feeling a little better this morning, my dear?”
“Oh, not to call ill at all,” said the sufferer. “Weak—a sort of sinking, floating away. I take hold of somebody’s hand to keep me from falling through. Isn’t it ridiculous?” she said, after a little pause.
“Your weakness is very great,” said the husband, almost sternly.
“Oh, no, Edward. It’s more silly than anything—when I am not really ill, you know. I’ve got Charlie’s hand here under the counterpane,” she said again, with her faint little laugh.
“You won’t always have Charlie’s hand, or anyone’s hand, Lucy.”
She looked at him with a little anxiety.
“No, no. I’ll get stronger, perhaps, Edward.”
“Do you feel as if you were at all stronger, my dear?”
She loosed her son’s hand, giving him a little troubled smile. “Go away now, Charlie dear. I don’t believe you’ve had your breakfast. I want to speak to—papa.” Then she waited, looking wistfully in her husband’s face till the door had closed. “You have something to say to me, Edward. Oh, what is it? Nothing has happened to anyone?”
“No, nothing has happened,” he said. He turned away and walked to the window, then came back again, turning his head half-way from her as he spoke. “It is only that you are, my poor darling—weaker every day.”
“Does the doctor think so?” she said, with a little eagerness, with a faint suffusion of colour in her face.
He did not say anything—could not perhaps—but slightly moved his head.
“Weaker every day, and that means, Edward!” She put out her thin, hot hands. “That means——”
The man could not say anything. He could do his duty grimly, but when the moment came he could not put it into words. He sank down on the chair Charlie had left, and put down his face on the pillow, his large frame shaken by sobs which he could not restrain.
These sobs made Mrs. Kingsward forget the meaning of this communication altogether. She put her hands upon him trying to raise his head. “Edward! Oh, don’t cry, don’t cry! I have never seen you cry in all my life. Edward, for goodness’ sake! You will kill me if you go on sobbing like that. Oh, Edward, Edward, I never saw you cry before.”
Moulsey had darted forward from some shadowy corner where she was and gripped him by the arm.
“Stop, sir—stop it,” she cried, in an authoritative whisper, “or you’ll kill her.”
He flung Moulsey off and raised his head a little from the pillow.
“You have never seen me with any such occasion before,” he said, taking her hands into his and kissing them repeatedly.
He was not a man of many caresses, and her heart was touched with a feeble sense of pleasure.
“Dear!” she said softly, “dear!” feebly drawing a little nearer to him to put her cheek against his.
Colonel Kingsward looked up as soon as he was able and saw her lying smiling at him, her hand in his, her eyes full of that wonderful liquid light which belongs to great weakness. The small worn face was all illuminated with smiles; it was like the face of a child—or perhaps an angel. He looked at first with awe, then with doubt and alarm. Had he failed after all in the commission which he had executed at so much cost to himself, and against the doctor’s orders? He had been afraid for the moment of the sight of her despair—and now he was frightened by her look of ease, the absence of all perturbations. Had she not understood him? Would it have to be told again, more severely, more distinctly, this dreadful news?