CHAPTER VII.
MRS. SANDFORD’S VIEW.
MRS. SANDFORD sat in her matron’s room in the light of the bay windows, making up her accounts as usual. She was regulating the lists of linen in the hospital, the surgical appliances, the provisions of all kinds. Her round of the wards had been made. The nurses had given their reports, the special cases had been visited. Her day’s work, so to speak, was done. The afternoon was the time for rest. She was occupying it, as she often did, in this necessary, but not ostentatious work, upon which so much of the comfort of the little community devoted to healing and merciful service, depended. Mrs. Sandford was known to be a great administrator: nothing was ever wanting, nothing to seek, under her management; her stores never ran out. But she was so used to this work of regulation and oversight that she did not find it very interesting. Sometimes she would lay down her pen, sometimes even lean back in her chair, which was not, however, a seductive lounge, but an ample, comfortable Chippendale, in which you sat upright very much at your ease, but had no encouragement to loll. She had things to think of apart from the hospital. A letter lay on her table among all her lists and account-books, which was from Susie, and there were things in it which made this mother, who, after all, though perhaps of sterner fibre than most, was still of the same stuff from which ordinary mothers are made—both smile and sigh. Susie’s life was undergoing new developments. A certain commotion was in it of new forces awakening, and new thoughts. Perhaps, under the most favourable circumstances, Susie was not likely to make such revelations as would justify any critic in saying that she was ‘in love'; but there were in her letter indications, little eddies which proved how the current went, straws that showed how the wind was blowing. For one thing, she kept up a continual comparison between two unknown persons, of which she herself was evidently unconscious, but which her mother perceived gradually by dint of repetition. ‘Mr. Percy Spencer tells me’—‘but Mr. Cattley says:’—she had told her mother at first all about her visitors, and how these two came and went, and talked of John. Susie had a great deal to say, too, of Elly, and had made her mother aware of all that had gone on in that respect, and also of Mrs. Egerton and her opposition, which by times extended to Susie and by times ebbed away altogether, as circumstances, or humour, or the weather moved the parish queen in one way or another. Those reports were always quite simple, and often amusing, for Susie had a quiet way of telling a story, very circumstantial and clear, which sometimes gave her readers a more luminous and humorous view than she was herself aware of. But Susie made no comparison in respect to the ladies of Edgeley. Their intercourse with her was simple. It was her visitors of the other sex who evidently produced this effect of balance and comparison in her mind.
‘Mr. Percy gave me his view of it; he takes very strong views; but Mr. Cattley tells me——’
This was always the position in which these two appeared—Percy bringing forward all kinds of opinions, decisive of many matters, social and otherwise; but Mr. Cattley always adding a criticism or comment, something that changed the issue. Mrs. Sandford, for the fiftieth time, leaned back in her chair, and put down her pen, and asked herself, with a faint, lingering smile, which softened her stern face, what Susie meant. Susie was her own child, to whom her heart was soft, her companion, the sharer of all her thoughts. The sternness which she had shown to John had never touched his sister. Susie knew her mother entirely, knew what she meant, and what her past life had been. There were no secrets between these two. Of many things in his own antecedents, John was ignorant, but Susie knew everything. All Susie’s ways of thinking had grown under her mother’s eye. She had never thoroughly known her son, but she knew Susie through and through. This made the greatest difference in their mutual relations. Mrs. Sandford was to her daughter both tender, and soft, and gentle. Susie knew how to make her laugh, to bring tears to her eyes, whereas to John there was no laughter in her. All this, and even the contrast with John, who was in no such position, drew the mother and daughter more closely together. And it was with all the mingled sympathy and alarm, and tender prescience and pleasure, and regret of that relationship, that she saw the moment coming when the child would find some one else to be nearer to her, more a portion of herself and her life than even her mother.
Mrs. Sandford felt, with that exquisite fellow-feeling which is like divination, almost before Susie did, the development of a new affection in Susie’s soul. And she leaned back in her chair between happiness and sadness, pleased to see her girl ‘respected like the lave,’ though already conscious of the desolation that desirable and good thing would bring with it—asking herself, almost with amusement, Which would it be? It was a mood more soft than was at all usual with her, and, notwithstanding the darkness that must come with the fulfilment of those dreams, it was a happy mood. That her mild Susie should have, not one but two suitors flattered and amused her. Which would it be? Mr. Cattley, in his mild, middle age, or Percy, the young priest, who had never intended to yield to the weakness of love-making? This was the subject of Mrs. Sandford’s thoughts: and other matters more painful, if any painful matters were at that moment within the possibilities of her life, had floated away like clouds from the languid sweetness of the afternoon sky.
There was something, however, in the sound of the hurried step she heard approaching which roused her. It rang along the unoccupied passages, quick, eager, hurried, yet with a little stumble of weakness in it, as of excitement gone too far, and losing hold of itself. She listened, and instantly sat upright in her chair, and put Susie’s letter away under a bundle of papers. It was perhaps something very bad brought into the accident ward, or the man in No. 4 had been taken with another attack, or—— Then something made her start a little.
‘It is his step,’ she said to herself: and he was John, the boy as she always called him in her heart.
He pushed open the door without knocking, and saying hurriedly, ‘May I come in,’ came in without waiting for permission. Her experienced eye saw at once that he had received a great shock. Either in body or mind he had been shaken violently. His hair hung in damp masses on his forehead. He was without colour, save when in speaking he suddenly reddened and then was pale again. A touch of personal disarrangement made this agitation of his appearance more remarkable. His tie had got loose, and he had not perceived it. Such a simple matter of external appearance seems to set a seal upon the profoundest commotions of life.
She cried out, ‘What is the matter?’ before he could speak a word. Then, starting suddenly with that instinctive alarm which moves us for those we love, added quickly, ‘Susie! You have had some bad news.’
‘Not of Susie,’ he said, in a breathless way. ‘Mother, I have come for you. Come with me instantly, for God’s sake!’
‘What is the matter, John? I can’t go out like this, you know. I have to make arrangements. What is it?—for heaven’s sake tell me what it is.’
‘I may never in my life ask such a thing from you again. Most likely I shall never want it. If you have any feeling for me, for God’s sake come with me. To me it is life or death.’
She put her hand upon his arm, and drew him towards her, looking in his face, feeling with a professional touch his hands and the throbbing of his pulse.
‘Something has gone amiss,’ she said. ‘Your hands are cold, and yet your pulse is high. You have had some shock.’ She got up as she spoke, and made him sit down in her chair, and put her hands upon his head. ‘Tell me what is the matter,’ she said, in that tone of mild determination with which she overawed her patients. ‘You are not fit to be flying about.’
There was something in the touch, in the maternal authority—though that was scarcely more individual to him than to any other—which touched the poor young fellow in the feverish crisis of feeling in which he was. It was a relief to sink down into the chair, to feel even its wooden arms giving him a sensation of support. And to have some one to fall back upon at such a moment was the best thing in heaven or earth. He had never wanted such a prop before. It was against all the principles of his life to look for it, and yet there was the profoundest consolation in it. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the heat and the horror of his thoughts relaxed a little. He had meant to seize upon her, to carry her away in a whirlwind of passionate haste and anxiety, to confront her with him, the stranger who had possession of John’s rooms, and seemed to claim possession of his life. That had seemed at first the only thing to do: to carry her off without warning, to bring her face to face with that unthought of, unsuspected apparition, and demand of her, ‘Who is this?’ Perhaps there had been in it a gleam of personal vengeance too, the desire to recompense with a keen, swift stroke of punishment the deception put upon him, and all the mysteries now suddenly let loose upon his head. But the touch of his mother’s hand, the anxiety in her voice, the kindness—though perhaps no more than any patient at the hospital would have called forth—over-turned all these intentions in a moment. He was wound up to such a passion of feeling that everything told upon him, and the revulsion was great. He leaned back, touching her shoulder, laying his head upon it.
‘Mother,’ he said, like a child, with a pathetic voice of reproach, ‘why did you tell me he was dead?’
‘John!’ she started so violently that the pillow of rest on which he had leaned seemed to reject as well as fail him. ‘John!’
He turned round upon her suddenly, and caught her hands in his.
‘Mother,’ he said again, ‘is it true? Mother, is it true? I have never understood. God help me, was this what it meant all the time?’
Mrs. Sandford, who was so self-controlled and so strong, trembled and quivered in his hold. She said, in a hoarse whisper,
‘What has happened? Tell me what it is.’
He held her hands fast, and would not let her go, swaying a little backward and forward as if he were shaking her, though he had no such meaning.
‘I have never understood,’ he repeated. ‘I must have been told what was not true. Now I know: you ought all to have seen that I must be told sooner or later. Is that true?’
She was a woman of great resolution, and she freed herself from him, though his hold was so close. She came round to the other side of the table, and stood looking at him, with the steady look which had daunted many a rebel. She said,
‘You are ill; you don’t know what you are saying. I should not wonder if you had had a slight sunstroke. You must go to Susie’s room, which is cool and fresh, and lie down.’
And then there ensued a moment’s parley, but not with words—with keen eyes looking into each other across the table. She stood as steady as a rock, as if she were thinking of nothing but the accidental illness of which she spoke. But John saw that the lighter part of her, the edge, so to speak, the line of her black gown, the turn of her elbow, had a quiver in them. He saw this without knowing that he saw it, as we do in moments of emotion.
‘Mother,’ he said, ‘it’s no mistake; it’s not illness. It’s what I tell you. Come with me and see him: and if you can say then that it is not true—— Ah!’ he exclaimed, with a sharp tone of distress, ‘you can’t. I see it in your face.’
Mrs. Sandford did all she could to steady herself still.
‘To see whom?’ she said. ‘To see——’ Then, with a long-drawn breath, ‘You are trying to frighten me. I know—no one of whom you can be speaking.’
‘Then why are you afraid?’ he said.
She kept standing, gazing at him for a moment more. Then a sort of shivering seized her, and in a moment all her defences seemed to fail. She gave him a look of agonised appeal, then came to him like a child flying from a suddenly realised danger, and dropped down by the side of his chair.
‘Oh, John,’ she cried, clinging to him, ‘save me. I cannot see him—oh, no, no! You don’t know what you ask. Say I am dead. Say I am—— Kill me rather, kill me! It would be kinder. Oh, no, no, no, no! I cannot, I cannot. I’ll rather die. Save me, John!’
A horrible dismay crept through and through him as he bent over her, exclaiming, ‘Mother, mother!’ trying to soothe her—but above all a profound, all-subduing pity. He had his answer; there was no possibility of misunderstanding what this meant: but the sight of the convulsed and broken figure clinging to him in utter self-abandonment penetrated to his very heart. He clasped with his own the hands that held his arm. He put down his head to the face which, full of mortal terror and misery, looked up to him imploring his protection. His protection! for her so strong, so self-sufficing, so immovable. To see her at his feet was more than he could bear.
‘Mother, I will; as far as I can, by every means I can. I will, I will—mother, it breaks my heart to see you. Then it is true, all true?’
And on the other side there seemed to rise before him another picture: the man with his smile arguing the question, persuading himself that anything he had done was, if not wholly right, at least far from being wrong, that it was the thing most natural to be done—with his air of mental confusion, yet satisfaction, his amiability, his conciliatory looks, his humorous self-consciousness, the subtle semi-intoxication which seemed to have got into his character. These things had made John smile a short time ago; they had filled him with a sort of compassionate kindness, an amused toleration of all the ways of this strange specimen of what human nature could come to. He was not amused or tolerant now. He thought with shrinking of this new, never-realised, impossible agent who had come into his life, impossible, yet, alas! real, never to be ignored again. But the first thing was his mother, his mother who, their positions reversed in a moment, clung to him with that face full of panic and anguish, flinging herself upon his protection. She, who was so strong, the embodiment of self-reliance and authority, to see her as weak as water, as weak as any poor woman, imploring her son to save her! He had never in his life till now given her more than the conventional kiss which their relationship seemed to demand when they met and parted. But now he held her close and kissed over and over again the white, agonised face which was pressed against his arm. Presently he raised her up tenderly and restored her to her seat—where gradually her panic calmed down, and she was able to speak. But it was very terrible and strange to John that she asked no questions, but took the miserable fact for granted, as if it were a thing that must have happened, that she had expected sooner or later, something inevitable in her way.
‘The only thing is,’ he said, with a sigh of subdued impatience, ‘why did you not tell me, mother. Why didn’t I know?’
His question brought the shivering back, but she replied, with an effort,
‘How can I tell you? We thought it was better so. I would not have you exposed to that knowledge. You were so young—and then it might never have been necessary—it might never have come——’
‘You mean that he might have died—there?’
‘It would,’ she said, bowing her head, ‘have been better so.’
‘Without anyone to stand by him or say a word, without love or succour,’ he cried. Was there not another side to the question? He thought she drew herself away from him with a renewed movement of alarm, and he rose from her side, too pitiful to be indignant, his heart wrung with contending thoughts.
She held out her hands to him with another outcry of terror.
‘Don’t go! I have no one. Don’t forsake me, don’t leave me alone! John, John!’
‘I must,’ he said, ‘if I am to defend you, to save you, as you say. And then,’ he added, ‘there is more than that: to take care of—him. He cannot be ignored, mother; at least he has claims upon me.’
‘Oh, John! Stay with me, don’t go. It has not been for myself I have feared most, but for you. It was always for you that I have feared, lest he might get an influence, lest he might—— John, stay with me! Have I not the best right to you? I that have——’
‘Distrusted me always, mother. I don’t blame you, but you know it has been so.’
She covered her face with her hands.
‘I am but a feeble, prejudiced woman. I claim no exception. I do wrong trying to do right, like all the rest, John. I feared, God forgive me, that you might turn out—I thought you were——’
‘The son of my father,’ he said, with a mingling of sweetness and bitterness which gave something keen and poignant to the sound of his voice. ‘And so I am—and so I must prove myself now.’