‘YOU were late last night, Susie.’
‘Yes, mother, very late. I was with John.’
‘I know you were with John. And I have no doubt you had a great deal to say to him. So far as I know him, he would not have much to say to you.’
‘Indeed, it was the other way,’ said Susie. ‘It was he who talked. He said he remembered me perfectly well, and that I was not at all changed.’
Mrs. Sandford raised her eyes to her daughter, interrupting her work for a moment. She had a great deal of work. To be matron of a great hospital is no easy thing, and there were arrears besides to make up. She had been at work half the night, and had not heard at what hour Susie had stolen in. Now she looked up with an expression which made her stern face for a moment gentle.
‘It is true,’ she said; ‘you have not changed. I think better of him for perceiving that.’
‘You must think well of him, mother. He is a good, kind boy. He had an accident last night saving a child. It was nearly killed under a carriage, and he rushed in and saved it. But he did not escape scot-free. He has got a cut on his head, but it is not much. I looked at it: you need not be anxious.’
This Susie repeated very quickly, like a lesson, hurrying the sentences upon each other, lest her mother should interrupt her before all was said.
‘An accident—a cut on the face—but not anything much. Susie, what are you telling me—already? He went out, then, last night?’
‘Yes, he went out. Why shouldn’t he? He’s so young, and his first night in London. It isn’t at all exciting to us; but think what it would be to a boy who had never been here before.’
‘You are accusing him before I attack him, Susie. The first night! I didn’t even think of warning him not to go out. I thought him all safe the first night. Oh me, oh me, has it begun already?—what I’ve trembled for all his life!’
‘No, no,’ cried Susie with her anxious voice. ‘I’m sure it’s not that. He went out, to be sure. Fancy, at his age, to be in London, and without anyone to talk to, and not to go out. The parents of the child were very good to him, and had his head plastered up. It was very well done too,’ said Susie, with professional approbation. ‘For my part, I was quite happy to hear that he had saved the child.’
Mrs. Sandford shook her head. She turned back to her books again; then pushed them aside, and put up her hands to her head.
‘Oh! Susie,’ she cried, ‘I knew how it would be. He is your father all over. All his ways are his ways. I thought he was safe down in the quiet country with the old people. If they had lived, I should never have wished him to know anything of you or me. What can we do for him? We can’t even have him in the house with us. Oh, how foolish I was to bring him to London! I might have paid some one down there to take care of him—to keep him out of evil.’
‘Mother, you know that could not be. Don’t you remember how many talks we used to have about it? You can’t keep a boy of his age so. He is almost a man; and, mother, he looks like a man sometimes: when he rose up in indignation against me, because I—because I——’
‘You thought so too? Don’t conceal it from me, Susie. You saw him come in—with all this story about an accident—the very first night. I knew it was in him, his father’s son: and my poor father and mother with all their innocent tales about him; how good he was; never a suspicion, not a weakness of any kind. Oh, why did they die? Why did I bring him away from the country? And why, why is it permitted that this poison should come into a young boy’s veins, from a father he scarcely knew!’
‘Oh, mother, wait till you see; don’t condemn him unheard.’
‘Condemn him! Would I condemn him? My heart bleeds for him, Susie; but I see all the tortures that are in store for us: and for him it would have been better if he never had been born. For what can we do for him, you and I?’
‘Oh, mother, it is not so bad as that; it may never be so bad!’ Susie said, with tears.
Mrs. Sandford shook her head. She drew to her the books with which she had been busy, and resumed her work. After all, whatever happened, that had to be done. There was nothing in the world except work, in which there was any satisfaction. This was the conclusion she had come to long ago. It was morning, a little before the time when John was to have his audience, and this was how it was prepared. The table was covered with books, reports, accounts, all the records of her occupation, which had fallen into arrears during that forced leave she had been obliged to apply for, to bury her father. The room was very lofty for its size, somewhat barely furnished, with enormous windows and the fullest blaze of daylight, not a line or a corner of shadow anywhere. It was fitted with great cupboards full of stores—and constant use, constant business, was visible in every arrangement. There was nothing for grace or ornament, and not much for comfort—a place not so much to live in as to work in; but this was suitable to a life which was all work. When she resumed her examination of the books, Susie withdrew to a corner, where there was a little table and needlework, her own little place in this chamber and temple of labour. It was not pretty work with which she was occupied. She was making flannel bandages or belts, hemming down the rough edges, rolling them neatly up, ready for use. Susie had grown up in this atmosphere, and knew no other. She had gone through all a nurse’s training, though she had not taken up that profession. When a more tender hand than ordinary was wanted where all were tender, she was called to help. She was always at hand when the strength of the nursing sister was overtaxed. But still she had her own little separate place as the matron’s daughter, a sort of lay element where all were professional. She wore a sort of modified version of their severe black and white dress. Susie’s dress was black too, with white collar and cuffs, but these had sometimes a line of ornament, and she wore a ribbon at her throat, a locket, a bracelet, a few slight marks that she was not under the rule. She was twenty-two, very modest and quiet, sometimes looking older than her age, yet sometimes also looking infantine in the fulness of a life that knew no distractions, nothing but the hospital, the service of others. She was not strictly pretty. Her hair was brown, her eyes brown like most people’s, her complexion generally pale, with a little colour coming and going, nothing in her to be remarked at the first glance, no beauty—but to those who knew her a certain charm, tranquil and pure, the beauty of a spirit absolutely free from any pre-occupations of its own. There are very few people in the world of whom so much can be said, and perhaps their perfection in this moral way means a deficiency in some others, a want of imagination, even a defective vitality: but the human race is not likely to err so, and the occasional examples to be met with in the world are always wonderful, to those who can believe in them. Susie, as was natural, was very imperfectly known by those about her. She was, everybody allowed, very good, but how far her goodness went beyond the surface, or whether it was not partially seeming, or if there might not be a certain sense of self-interest in being so good (for to be sure, in the atmosphere in which she had been brought up, goodness is the best policy), was a point sometimes discussed in the hospital, where, as in other places, it was a little difficult to realise that heavenly form of character. People thought, even when they had no doubt of her, that so much goodness was uninteresting, and that they would have liked her better with a few more faults, which probably was quite true.
But Susie’s tranquil spirit was in much commotion this morning. She had slept little all night, and thought much. Susie was well aware of the tragedy of the family life. There were no secrets in it from her. And she had been brought up in the belief that the cloud of hereditary evil was so strong upon her brother, that to keep him in ignorance—to keep him if possible at a distance, where he could never know anything of the antecedents of his family—was the best thing for him. It did not occur to her that she herself was her father’s daughter, as much as John was his son, and that, if the hereditary principle was true, she ought to have shared her brother’s danger. This view of the subject was dismissed by the fact that she was a girl, and therefore her mother’s child, an opinion very fallacious, and not to be maintained for a moment, either by logic, reason, or experience. But, in spite of all these qualifying things, a foregone conclusion will always hold its place. She, it was felt, was in no danger, though she knew everything; but John, the boy! For him it was expedient that all precautions should be taken, with him there was a kind of miserable certainty that safeguards would fail.
This was the persuasion in which she had been brought up. And it is impossible to tell what horror and misery the girl had gone through, waiting for her young brother’s return on his first night in London. She had been waiting a long time, and she had gone over in her own mind all the dismal expectations which an anxious woman, bitterly acquainted with one form of dissipation, can turn over in the dreadful suspense of a long evening spent in watching for the return of one who comes not, and whose absence can be accounted for only by some catastrophe. A world of old recollections had come rolling up before her distracted eyes. She had seen him reeling along the street, stumbling in, with wild eyes and a stammering voice, with all the miserable signs upon him of that vice which, in its beginnings at least, is no sin, means no harm, and yet is the most degrading and destructive of all vices. No words can tell the tortures which a woman goes through, to whom such vigils are habitual. They were perhaps even more terrible now by being purely imaginary. For fact, however frightful, brings into action all the subtle forces of mercy, the attempts to account for and excuse, the natural yearnings of the heart over the sinner: whereas in imagination there is no alleviation, and the first fall carries with it a tragic prophecy of utter destruction. When John had appeared, with his paleness, with the lingering traces of that exhilaration which Montressor’s drink had left still in his eyes, and with the cut showing under his disordered hair, Susie had felt for a moment as if all were over, and the tragic conclusion, so long foreseen, coming to pass before her eyes.
But, presently, that subduing presence of reality began to tell upon her, and though it was hard to shake off the sway of the anticipated, and hard to realise that the story of the supposed sinner was not a gloss of excuse, yet by-and-by her mind had changed. She had not been quite convinced up to the moment of quitting him; for Montressor’s drink had left a fatal odour, and there was a certain excitement in the boy’s manner and address: but as she lay on her bed, in the dark, and went over and over everything that had passed, Susie’s attitude changed. I will not assert that the foreseen and expected were so far vanquished in her, that she had a calm and steady belief in her brother. Not that; but a passionate partisanship sprang up in her mind. Another conclusion rose up and did battle with the first. It had seemed miserably certain that he would err before. It seemed impossible but that he must overcome now. She went over every fact of the previous night, and explained it away to herself as she lay gazing at the dawning light. She made up by degrees a picture in every way favourable—an ideal figure, an image full of generosity, tenderness, and help. She seemed to see him flinging himself, a heroic young deliverer, among the crowding carriages; probably they had poured a little brandy down his throat to bring him to himself (for Susie had not advanced far enough in the new way to understand how in all innocence, though quite voluntarily and cheerfully, John might have swallowed Montressor’s potion), and then what so natural as that, a stranger, he had lost his way? He did not know that she or anyone was waiting for him, or that he should find a friendly voice, anyone with whom he could exchange a word when he got back. Why should he have hastened back? There was no reason for it. And to think that on his first evening in London he had saved a life! If the excitement of it brought a little tremor upon him, who could wonder? Had she seen it only, what with alarm and pride, and happiness and delight, Susie felt that she would have trembled for hours. He would not have been human if he had not felt it. And the brandy must have been given to bring him to himself. He was not aware, how should he be, of the degrading suspicions in her mind, and so did not explain that. But no doubt that was how it was. She rose up in the morning, having slept very little, still thrilling with the anxiety, the relief, and the pain— John’s partisan and advocate. She would have been so more or less, in any circumstances. She was so with her whole heart now.
John came in shortly after, a little later than the appointed hour. He came with a sense that he was on his defence, or at least was on the defensive, an almost more oppressive sensation: for except that he was distrusted, and all his doings regarded with an unfavourable eye, he did not know any more, neither what form the doubts and suspicions took, nor what reason there was in them. He came reluctantly, with nothing of the feeling with which a youth of his age, conscious of no wrong, should go to his mother; no trust in her kindness, no confidence that she would see anything which concerned him in a good light. And the very place, the great institution, which chilled and disheartened him with its atmosphere of professional business, added to this intuitive reluctance. It was the home of Christian charity and kindness; it was the place in which devoted men and women gave up their lives to the solace of the suffering, to save lives and alleviate pain. Many a poor creature had found ease and succour and the tenderest help in it. But yet to John it was cold, sending a chill to his very heart; the great space, the stony stairs and passages, the universal pre-occupation were all so destructive to the idea of anything that could be called a home. People might live there no doubt, did live there when they were compelled by illness, or by duty for the help of those who were ill, but to dwell under that vast roof which covered so much suffering, how was that possible? And She had no other home, and this was the only place in the world to which he had any natural right to come.
Home in a hospital! to him who had known what a natural home was, a place you live in with your own, possessing it to yourself, a secure shelter and refuge, what a chilly public place it was! He followed the porter of the hospital, who guided him up the bare stairs and pointed out the way to the matron’s rooms at the end of the long, lofty bare corridor, with a heart full of reluctance and disagreeable anticipations. He felt sure of being disapproved of, though he did not know what he had done that was wrong, and great discouragement and despondency, and a sense of injustice and an impulse of resistance filled his mind. It was not like a son going to his mother’s room, or a youth without a home to the centre of domestic warmth and protection, but like a clerk, or official messenger on business, that he knocked at the door pointed out to him. He was told to ‘Come in’ just as the messenger on business might have been told, and went in, and lingered for a moment by the door, struck by the strange impressiveness of the place; the great stream of unshadowed daylight, the height of the walls, too high for decoration, the furniture no more than necessity required, the large writing-table in the middle of the room, laden with books and papers. Mrs. Sandford, after her conversation with Susie, which had agitated her in spite of herself, had returned again to her work with more than ordinary absorption in it, and put up her hand to warn the new-comer against interrupting her in the midst of a calculation. John’s heart burned within him at this strange welcome. He stood for a moment undecided. It occurred to him, with a flash of resolution, that he would turn and go, cutting this bond, which was one of mere conventional connection, and, rushing forth, make his way as he could alone in the world.
He was stopped in this sudden gleam of half-formed intention by a soft touch upon his arm, and a still softer touch on his cheek, and found Susie standing by him, whom he had not seen on coming in, looking at him with a tender interest and pride.
‘I did not see you right, last night,’ she said, ‘Johnnie dear. There was no light. Let me look at you now.’
‘There is not very much to see, Susie.’
‘Oh, there is a great deal to see: my little brother that I have never stopped thinking of all my life—and just like what I thought; but you are not my little brother now. Mother, here is John.’
Mrs. Sandford laid down her pen and held out her hand.
‘If I had lost the thread of that account, I should never have found it again,’ she said. ‘My work is in such arrear. How are you this morning, John? Let us see this place on your forehead.’
‘It is nothing,’ he said, with a flush of colour.
‘I must see that for myself,’ she said, rising up, and taking his head in her hands. Other feelings came into John’s heart as he felt those hands, with their skilful touch, putting aside his hair, examining his wound. She let him go in a few moments, with a slight pat which was almost a caress. It was what she would have done to any young patient, but this he did not know. ‘It is, as Susie said, nothing to be uneasy about. If it does not heal in a day or two, we must get Mr. Denton or Mr. Colville to look at it. But I think it will heal of itself. It would have been more prudent, John, to remain at home instead of seeking adventures in the streets the first night.’
‘It didn’t look much like home,’ he said.
‘No; but it would, if you had waited for Susie. She is very like home even here. We cannot make a home for you, unhappily. The only thing for it, failing that, is to find you something to do.’
‘That is what I desire most,’ he said. She had seated herself again, returning to her books, and was looking at him with the air of one who has but a short time to spare for any other interest. Her eyes glanced from him to the long lines of figures she had before her. ‘Couldn’t I do some of that for you?’ said John, with a sudden impulse.
Mrs. Sandford started, and looked at him with astonished eyes.
‘My work?’ she said, ‘do you think you could do my work?’
‘If it is only adding up figures, surely,’ said John.
This time she let her eyes dwell on him a little longer, with a momentary smile, but more of wonder at his audacity than pleasure.
‘That was well meant,’ she said; ‘it was well meant. Susie, I think you can be spared to-day. You might go out with him, and show him something. It is natural that he should want to see something: and I shall have more time this evening to tell him what I have settled. I have heard of an engineer’s in which you can begin work. But you must take a holiday to-day. Susie will get her hat, and be ready at once. You will like that I suppose?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
Susie withdrew quickly, her face brightening, and John stood, watching his mother, who let her eye wander over her figures, then recovered herself with a glance towards him, in which he could read impatience restrained, and a desire that he should be gone. It was this, perhaps, that inspired him with the question, which a moment before he had never dreamed of putting to her.
‘Will you tell me,’ he said, ‘whether there was ever a Mr. Montressor who was a friend of my father’s?’ He asked this without knowing why.
She started, and the pen fell out of her hand. If it were possible to change from her natural paleness, he would have said she grew more pale. Against the merciless shining of the great window he could see her tremble, or at least so he thought. She did not say anything for a moment, and when she spoke her voice was somehow different.
‘I did not,’ she said, ‘know all your father’s friends; but it is a long time since all ended in that way. What do you know of any such friends?’
‘It is an uncommon name,’ said John.
‘Yes, it is an uncommon name. It is the sort of name that actors assume, and people of that kind. Ah, here is Susie, ready. Take your brother wherever you think he will like best to go. Don’t hurry. I shall not be anxious, as long as you are here in time for tea.’ She had risen with a sort of uneasy smile, and went with them to the door, touching Susie’s dress with her hand, smoothing down the little jacket she wore. When Susie had preceded her brother out of the room, Mrs. Sandford transferred her touch, nervously, quickly, to John’s arm. ‘Such people are no friends for you,’ she said, hastily. ‘Avoid them wherever you meet them. Avoid them! they are not friends for you.’
She had made no acknowledgment, and yet she had made more than an acknowledgment. The self-betrayal was instantaneous, but it was complete. Then it was his father of whom Montressor would not speak. Poor May! What had happened that he should be called Poor May!