"Jack," said Molly, coming into the meagre little front room, "I wish you'd put that microscope away for half an hour; you look fagged to death."
Jack raised his head from the specimens. He had been straining his eyes over them ever since he came in from the hospital. On Saturday afternoons the work was always heavy in the crowded out-patients' department; and to-day, in the thick November fog and the reek of gas and damp humanity and unwashed clothing, he had begun, strong as he was, to feel tired and sick.
"You have no business cutting sections till you've had some dinner," said Molly; "you'll only cut them too thick, and get a headache as well."
"Oh, I'm all right; only the out-patients are so unreasonable. They will all talk at once on these foggy days. The poor things seem to get flurried, like the carthorses, with slipping about in the mud. I came in splashed up to my hat."
Molly put her arm round his neck. They had been living together for nearly four years now, and had learned to read each other as only close friends can read. No one else would have seen from the line of his mouth that he was depressed as well as tired.
"Is it bad news?" she asked softly, with her cheek against his hair.
"No, nothing in particular. I'm an idiot to get down in the mouth now, just when I've got a good appointment at last, and this big stroke of luck with the Medical Congress."
"Perhaps that's why. I never used to worry over weekly accounts in the days when we could't get enough to eat, as I do now with three pounds a week for housekeeping."
"You needn't worry, old girl; the last shilling's worth of debt will be cleared off next month. You see our difficulties are all over now; even the private practice is beginning to flourish."
She kissed him, laughing.
"And that's why you get the blues? You and I are contemptible frauds, Jack; our courage is only good for hard times; it all fizzles out at our fingers' ends at the first bit of prosperity."
"You're right," he answered gravely; "I'm not worth my salt. Two years ago, with the child ill and not a sixpence coming in, I shouldn't have got fidgetted by a fog and a few little worries; I'm getting spoiled. It's your fault, Moll; if you coddle me this way I shall end by growing fat and sensitive and ill-tempered, like a rich old patient with nothing to do but imagine troubles."
"You'd better not, or I shall hand you over to Johnny to be suppressed. He'll find you plenty to do."
"Yes, and I've plenty to do as it is, and here I am fooling about and wasting time. It's no use the Congress people inviting me to show sections if I haven't got any ready to show. They ought all to be in Edinburgh by the 15th."
Molly still kept her arm about his neck.
"Wait just a minute. You haven't told me what the 'few little worries' are? Hospital patients?"
"Oh, partly that; and then Theo..."
"You had a letter this morning?"
Her voice was quite under control, and as she leaned above him he could not see her eyes.
"Yes, I'm anxious about him. He's writing a set of Polish dances for stringed instruments, and he says the music takes on shapes and colours and dances round his bed all night, His handwriting is unsteady, too; you know what that sort of thing always means with him."
Molly was still looking out across her brother's head, with wide, grave eyes. He sighed, and added in his patient way:
"He doesn't say who the woman is this time, but I suppose there must be one; it seems to be the inevitable condition of his doing creative work. It's a bit difficult to understand how any one's affections can jump about that way."
There was a sudden little pause; then the girl said softly:
"Still, there is this; if a rainbow is not a permanent thing, it is at least a clean and beautiful one. An artist is a kind of glorious child; his instinct protects him from sordid entanglements."
"That makes it all the worse," Jack broke in gloomily. "If he got into vulgar intrigues with society flirts, as ninety-nine per cent, of the successful musicians do..."
"He would never have written the 'Crocus Field' Symphony."
"No, that's true; his music would have got vulgar too. But at least no one would suffer. As it is — Molly, my heart aches for the women that have loved him. That little Austrian princess — the year that Johnny was born, you know; I had a long talk with her. The poor child honestly believed he would be faithful to her, and the worst of it is that he believed it himself. I've no doubt she's got over it now, and married as her father wished; but do you think she'll ever be the same creature again? He has smashed her youth in pieces, and gone off to another toy."
"Just as Johnny would do if you gave him a precious thing to play with. It is the privilege of babies and of gods and of all things defenceless and divine; they take our joys and break them, and we comfort ourselves with the broken pieces."
Her brother turned round suddenly, and took her in his arms. They were both silent for a little while.
"How you have softened, Molly, since the child came! Sometimes you remind me of Mother."
"Theo's mother?"
"Yes; or Christ's mother. She seemed to me like the Catholic idea of the Madonna: everybody's mother."
"So long as I am Johnny's mother — Jack, how could I be hard against any one now, when I have the child?"
She sat down by the fire, drawing towards her a basket of clothes to mend. Jack began to whistle over his specimens, and she to darn earnestly at a stocking; neither was in the mood for further speech.
"Mummy!" a small voice wailed from the back room; "my house has tumbled down."
Molly rose and opened the folding doors. The bricks lay scattered on the carpet, and forlorn among the ruins sat Johnny, round-eyed and on the verge of tears. His mother picked him up and carried him into the front room.
"Never mind, sonnie; well build another house to-morrow. Come and play here till your tea is ready. You mustn't shake the table, though; Jack's cutting sections."
Johnny wriggled out of her arms, and ran up to the table, his blue eyes inquisitive and shining. He had the face of a cherub and the habits of a despotic emperor.
"Uncle!" he said, stretching out a fat hand towards the microscope; "I want to see. Uncle!"
The word was a new one in his vocabulary, and he was proud of it. Susan, the maid, had just been explaining to him that little boys ought not to call their uncles: "Jack."
Jack put up his left hand suddenly, and bit it. The next instant he remembered that even the gods have some mercy, and that his childhood was over.
"I want to see!" Johnny repeated imperiously. He was not accustomed to be kept waiting.
"Don't worry Jack, darling," said the mother; "he's busy."
"He doesn't worry me; I like to have him."
He stooped down and took the child on his knee.
"What is it you want to see, old man? There's nothing much to look at to-day."
"Can't you make the animals wiggle about?"
"Animals?"
"Infusoria, he means," Molly put in. "You showed him a drop of water the other day."
"Oh, those! No, chick, I've no pond water to-day, and we don't let animals wiggle about in the water from our tap."
"Why?"
"For fear they should wiggle about in your inside and give you a bad throat. There, you can get the high chair and sit beside me, only don't jerk my elbow. Oh, confound the screw!"
He was stooping, with knitted brows, to adjust the microscope. The king of the household looked on critically.
"You're twisting him wrong," he remarked in a severe voice.
"True for you, sonnie; and that little head in my light doesn't help me to twist it right."
"I think I hear Susan coming," Molly interposed. "And I think there are hot scones for tea. We'd better hurry up and get those grubby paws washed."
She opened the door, and Johnny, radiant at the prospect of scones, trotted away to Susan. Presently little squeals of delight were heard coming from the kitchen.
"Molly," said Jack, with his head down over the screws of the microscope, "don't let the child call me 'Uncle,' there's a good soul."
The diphtheria epidemic which was spreading through the south of England had reached Cornwall. In Porthcarrick and the neighbouring moorland hamlets child after child sickened and died. It had been a wet and stormy autumn, a hard time for the fisher-folk. Many lives had been lost in the rough weather; and what little fish was dragged to market over sodden roads and howling moors brought in small return for the labour and peril it had cost. Poverty, grief, and weariness had lain heavily on the storm-beaten villages ever since the September gales; now, at Christmas-time, the sickness had come.
But for their Vicar, the Porthcarrick people would have been in evil case. Dr. Jenkins, middle-aged, overworked, handicapped by the incessant cares of a small income and a large family, did his best; but conscientious and kindly as he was, he could hot have stood against the dead-weight of general misery without the support of the stronger nature. It was the Vicar who enrolled volunteer helpers and collected subscriptions; who tramped over the soaked heather from cottage to cottage, visiting the sick and bereaved, investigating cases of distress, and finding temporary homes, away from contagion, for the brothers and sisters of the stricken children. In these black weeks he was on foot early and late; quite white-haired now and a little slower in his movements than when Jack had known him, but otherwise hardly changed; erect and uncompromising as of old.
As for Mrs. Raymond, she remained the dutiful wife that she had always been. She was too feeble, too heavy and asthmatic, to tramp the stony moors as her husband did, and for courage, she had none to help herself or others; nor could she dare to mock the gods by offering consolation to any woman who had lost a child; but what little one so poor in spirit had to give she gave submissively, without complaint. She turned her old black silk gown once more to make it last another year, and timidly slipped into the Vicar's hand the money she had saved up to buy a new one "for your coal and blanket fund, Josiah." Her mornings were spent in making soups and jellies for the sick; her afternoons in sewing or knitting for them; but it was the Vicar who had to distribute the gifts. In age as in youth, she hid behind her master and asked his approval at every step; a patient Griselda, grown old in obedience, behind whose eyes still lurked the unlaid ghost of fear.
The heart-breaking rain spent itself at last; and one morning, laying the cloth for lunch in the dreary, immaculate sitting-room, she saw an unfamiliar gleam of sunshine fall across the table.
Her first impulse was to lift up her heart in thanksgiving for a merciful answer to prayer: if dry weather should be granted at last, perhaps the sickness might abate. Her second was the result of lifelong habit: she spread a newspaper upon the floor to save the carpet.
The board of health officer from Truro came in with the Vicar for a hasty lunch; they were to attend a committee meeting, and then to make a round of visits together to places suspected of unsanitary conditions.
"I shall probably be out late," the Vicar told his wife. "There has been another death near Zennor Cross, and I must go round there when we have finished."
"Don't kill yourself with work," said the visitor. "What would Porthcarrick do?"
"It is the diphtheria we hope to kill," Mr. Raymond answered bravely; "and we shall do it soon now, if the Almighty in His mercy should send us fair weather."
The official nodded approvingly. He was an earnest worker himself and a lover of workers, and the Vicar's indomitable energy delighted him. "What a splendid old fellow!" he had said to Dr. Jenkins. "As stiff as a cast-iron gate to look at; and just see the work he gets through!" He looked at the hard old face with genuine admiration.
"Talking of diphtheria," he said, "reminds me. I wonder are you by any chance related to the Dr. Raymond in Bloomsbury who has been making experiments lately with the diphtheritic virus? I saw an article about it in this week's Lancet; he's to read a paper at the Edinburgh Congress. His theory seems to be attracting a good deal of attention."
If he had turned to the woman her scared eyes would have silenced him; but he was
looking at Mr. Raymond, and the grey face never twitched.
"Yes, he is a relative."
"Really? How small the world is, to be sure! I spent a week in the same boarding-house with Dr. Raymond last summer; I was taking a holiday on the south coast, and he was there with a sister of his, a young widow, I think, with a little boy — such a beautiful child!"
Then he became conscious of the strained immobility of his hosts, and stopped.
"He is a relative," the Vicar repeated; "but not an acquaintance."
The conversation flagged awkwardly for a few minutes; then the visitor looked at his watch.
"It's time to go, I think."
In the garden the Vicar stopped short.
"Pardon me," he said to his guest; "I forgot a message for my wife. I will catch you up the road."
He went back into the house. His wife was standing where they had left her, quite still, her eyes on the floor.
"Sarah," he began, and paused in the doorway.
She started, then recovered her self-possession, and came up to him.
"Did you forget any thing?"
He hesitated, looking away from her. "You perhaps feel lonely when I am out so much?"
"No, Josiah; I'm used to being alone."
"Yes." He paused again.
"I was wondering... whether you would like Dr. Jenkins's little girl to come and sit with you sometimes. She is a nice, quiet little thing, and you were always so fond of children..."
The words died in his throat as he saw her draw back from him, her hands outstretched, her eyes widened, full of dread.
"No, no! Josiah. Oh, don't bring a child in here!"
His face had turned to stone.
"You mean, Sarah..?"
They stood still and looked at each other. He was brave enough, but not she. Her eyes sank; her old hand fluttered against the skirt of her gown.
"I... I'm not so strong as I was; ...and children are so noisy..."
He had not flinched.
"It is as you prefer," he said, and went out.
She watched him from her window as he walked up the lane; a black and sunless blot upon the landscape; correct, professional, with stubborn shoulders still unbowed under the weight of grey hair and of shame. Then she sat down at her neat work-table to darn his socks.
The church clock struck the hour; and, looking up, she saw the door of the board school open and a crowd of little girls coming out, laughing and chattering, their satchels swinging from their wrists. She put down her work.
"My eyes seem failing lately," she said aloud, as if in the empty room there had been still a listener, with whom she must keep up the decencies of old hypocrisy. "They ache when I sew." And she drew her hand across them furtively.
Then she rose and pulled her stiff, white curtain aside, very carefully, not to spoil its starched perfection, and looked out at the children. They came running down the lane; some passed her window without looking up; others glanced over her, where she sat forlorn and old, much as she, in her time long ago had often glanced over Spotty.
She shrank away, as Spotty used to shrink when any one crossed the yard, and drew the curtain forward again. But she peeped between its frilled edge and the shutter to see the children. Strange children all, with cold, unfriendly eyes; but some of them had satin cheeks and wind-kissed freckles here and there; and all of them had nimble feet and voices full of laughter; and one (but she turned her head away when that one passed) had thick and tawny curls that caught the sunlight where some other woman's hand had brushed them back and tied them with a ribbon.
"Johnny dangerously ill. Diphtheria.
Crying for you."
Jack repeated the words to himself over and over again. The wheels of the train hammered them out; the rattle of the windows, the breathing of his sleepy fellow-passengers, the heavy thumping of the thing that ached somewhere inside his chest or somewhere in the top of his head (he was not quite sure which) all worried and pursued him with their senseless iteration. Sometimes the refrain would break off for a moment and let him hear another one that was going on more softly underneath it, scarcely audible, but always going on: "You'll come too late; you'll come too late; you'll come too late."
Surely that must be St. Albans, that blur of brown streets in the shadowy landscape as the train rushed past He would soon be home now. But it was a long time since Molly's telegram had called him from his breakfast in Edinburgh and sent him tearing to the station for the first train back to London. Any thing might have happened since then. If only he had not gone to the medical Congress! If only...
He raised the window blind and looked out. It was growing dark already, but it grows dark so early in winter... Patches of snow gleamed faintly here and there in the level pasture land.
Somehow he had never realised till to-day what the child was to him. Indeed, he had never had much time for thinking about his personal affections; there were always so many things to do, what with the hospital and the microscope work, and chance jobs of coaching students for examinations, to make both ends meet. One couldn't afford to neglect opportunities for earning a few odd pounds here and there, with three mouths to feed and Johnny's education to save up for. And when he did get free, he was tired, or worried about patients, or rushing across the Continent in express trains in response to wild telegrams from Theo...
Poor Theo! The periodical tragedies with his duchesses and countesses had a trick of coming at such inconvenient times; and they were so real to him, while they lasted. Only a year ago he had tried to asphyxiate himself with charcoal fumes, together with the misunderstood and beautiful young wife of some bald-headed ambassador. The farewell telegram had come when Jack was down with influenza, and he had dragged himself up out of bed and caught the mail for Brussels. (It was considerate of nature, by the way, to have made him as strong as a horse.) He had arrived just in time to open the windows, and to keep the scandal out of the papers, and administer first restoratives and then consolation and fatherly advice to the two grown-up children. They had probably forgotten each other's existence by now.
"You'll come too late. You'll come too late..."
It was a bit hard that it should be diphtheria, the very disease that he had toiled and laboured over, that had been the centre of his secret hopes for the last three years. He was nearly convinced now that he was on the track of a discovery; but what use are discoveries if they cannot save the child you love? What use is any thing if it comes too late?
He lowered the blind again and leaned back in his corner with closed eyes. He had been tired when he left Edinburgh; and now his head throbbed like a steam-thresher. He must keep still for a few minutes and not listen to the burden of the wheels.
Ah, the staircase... and the door that creaked when his uncle pushed it open... and the room with the sloping ceiling... the two rafters... He started and opened his eyes. He had slipped back somehow to childhood, to the vicarage at Porthcarrick, to the room of horrors. It was some years now since he had last been troubled by that particular nightmare, the same which had haunted him after Helen died. He brushed one hand across his forehead; it was quite wet.
This was absurd; a man who has things to do can't afford to go in for nerves and fits of the horrors, as if he were Theo. If only the child would live...
"Tickets, please!"
As the door jerked open he sat up straight and realised dimly that he had been bargaining in his sleep with some unknown god; promising to forget Porthcarrick, to wipe out the image of the gable room, if the child might but live.
His sister met him under the disinfectant sheet on the landing of the stairs. Her face wore a strangely passive look, as if she had been suddenly awakened, as if her eyes were still heavy with sleep.
"Molly," he said, and paused; then again, in a whisper: "Molly..?"
She leaned her head against his shoulder.
"You're too late."
They went into the room. It had already been put in order; a shaded lamp burned beside the cot where Johnny lay like a big wax doll, his yellow hair spread round him. A bunch of snowdrops had been placed in his right hand. Jack knelt down and stayed a long time motionless and silent. At last he uncovered his face and kissed the rigid baby hands. As he rose, the sleeve of his coat brushed against the lamp-shade and tilted it back. A band of yellow light fell across the cot and lit up the profile of the little corpse. It was like Helen's.
Jack stood quite still beside the cot. The minutes dragged by heavily, and he stood looking. Something seemed to have dried up in him, and withered. One made so many mistakes in life, and when one found them out they mattered very little; indeed, nothing in the world mattered much.
Something moved on the other side of the cot. It was Molly; and as he looked up their eyes met. She put out her hands as if he had struck her.
"Ah, don't look so hard! He wanted to tell you; it was not his fault, it was mine!"
"It was mine," he answered wearily, and turned away. "I might have seen."
He crossed the room and leaned upon the mantle-piece, looking down into the fireless grate. Molly came up to him.
"I couldn't tell you, dear; it might have made you hate him. He has no one else in the world that will love him faithfully, only you and me; and me he has forgotten. If you were to desert him..."
She broke off. Jack had not moved, and his face was still hard. She slipped her arm about his neck, as Helen used to do.
"Remember, he is not quite a human being. It is not fair to blame him if he hurts us; he can't understand responsibilities, any more than an angel might, or a sky-lark. It's not his fault that he has genius. And if I bore a child to him, he bore one to me; his first symphony. Anyhow, if there ever was any thing to forgive, I forgave it long ago. Some one must pay for the music."
He shook his head with a hopeless gesture.
"You don't understand. It wasn't of you I was thinking. You can't be quite forsaken while I live; and at the worst you're a grown woman and can defend yourself, as far as any creature can, in a world like this. But if you and I had happened to die, — there are so many chances in life; and the child had lived, and fallen into uncle's hands... I wonder, did he never think of that?"
She drew his head down against her cheek.
"Dear, that is morbid and unjust; it's not like you, you are always so just. There was never much danger for Johnny; surely either you or I could always have managed to save him from that, if only with a little chloroform. And anyway the fates have been merciful; whatever they may do to us, they have at least spared the child. Jack, you have no right to be bitter against him, the child has suffered no wrong. He has hurt no one but me, and I have not complained."
"Don't be afraid," he answered, sighing. "It will make no difference; nothing will ever make any difference. He's her son and he has a right to me. I must just bear it."
A knock at the street-door roused him.
"That sounds like a telegram. From Edinburgh, perhaps; I was to have shown some sections to-night. For me, Susan? No, there's no answer."
There was a little hush after he shut the door.
"Is it from Edinburgh?" Molly asked, looking round. Jack was standing by the table, the telegram still in his hand. As he turned his head to answer, the look on his face cut her to the heart. Something faint and bitter, scarcely a smile, flickered for an instant round the bearded mouth.
"No," he said. "Something wrong with one of the duchesses, I suppose."
He handed her the telegram. It was dated from Paris.
"A dreadful misfortune has happened. Come to me. — Theo."
She laid the paper down in silence and went back to her place by the dead child.
Jack passed a hand across his eyes. A dim reflection of his childish misery flitted before him, and vanished; a half-forgotten image of a bird flying away from an open cage. He went back to the cot.
"Molly, how much money have we in the house?"
"Three sovereigns and a little silver."
He looked at his watch.
"I'd better take the gold and write you a cheque to go on with. Where's the carbolic, dear? Ask Susan to call a hansom while I get disinfected; I've only just time to catch the boat-train; it starts at nine from Charing Cross."
He stood a moment silent, looking down; then stooped, and drew the sheet over Johnny's head.
THE END