Clayhanger Part 70

"Yes. It's a mystery to me how he could keep it up."

"I was afraid you would. Well, he's quieter now. In fact, he's unconscious."

"Unconscious, is he?"

"You'll have no more trouble with the old gentleman," said the doctor.

He was looking at the window, as though at some object of great interest to be seen thence. His tone was gentle and unaffected. For the twentieth time Edwin privately admitted that in spite of the weak, vacuous smile which seemed to delight everybody except himself, there was a sympathetic quality in this bland doctor. In common moments he was common, but in the rare moment when a man with such a smile ought to be at his worst, a certain soft dignity would curiously distinguish his bearing.

"Um!" Edwin muttered, also looking at the window. And then, after a pause, he asked: "Will it last long?"

"I don't know," said the doctor. "The fact is, this is the first case of Cheyne-Stokes breathing I've ever had. It may last for days."

"How's the nurse?" Edwin demanded.

They talked about the nurse, and then Dr Heve said that, his brother the Vicar and he having met in the street, they had come in together, as the Vicar was anxious to have news of his old acquaintance's condition.

It appeared that the Vicar was talking to Maggie and Janet in the drawing-room.

"Well," said Edwin, "I shan't come down. Tell him I'm only presentable enough for doctors."

With a faint smile and a nod, the doctor departed. As soon as he had gone, Edwin jumped off the bed and looked at his watch, which showed two o'clock. No doubt dinner was over. No doubt Maggie had decided that it would be best to leave him alone to sleep. But that day neither he nor anybody in the household had the sense of time, the continuous consciousness of what the hour was. The whole systematised convention of existence was deranged, and all values trans.m.u.ted. Edwin was aware of no feeling whatever except an intensity of curiosity to see again in tranquillity the being with whom he had pa.s.sed the night. Pushing his hand through his hair, he hurried into the sick-room. It was all tidy and fresh, as though nothing had ever happened in it. Mrs Nixon, shrivelled and deaf, sat in the arm-chair, watching. No responsibility now attached to the vigil, and so it could be left to the aged and almost useless domestic. She gave a gesture which might have meant anything--despair, authority, pride, grief.

Edwin stood by the bedside and gazed. Darius lay on his back, with eyes half-open, motionless, unseeing, unhearing, and he breathed faintly, with the soft regularity of an infant. The struggle was finished, and he had emerged from it with the right to breathe. His hair had been brushed, and his beard combed. It was uncanny, this tidiness, this calm, this pa.s.sivity. The memory of the night grew fantastic and remote. Surely the old man must spring up frantically in a moment, to beat off his enemy! Surely his agonised cry for Clara must be ringing through the room! But nothing of him stirred. Air came and went through those parted and relaxed lips with the perfect efficiency of a healthy natural function. And yet he was not asleep. His obstinate and tremendous spirit was now withdrawn somewhere, into some fastness more recondite than sleep; not far off; not detached, not dethroned; but undiscoverably hidden, and beyond any summons. Edwin gazed and gazed, until his heart could hold no more of the emotion which this mysteriously impressive spectacle, at once majestic and poignant, distilled into it. Then he silently left the old woman sitting dully by the spirit concealed in its ruined home.

FOUR.

In the evening he was resting on the sofa in the drawing-room. Auntie Hamps was near him, at work on some embroidery. In order that her dear Edwin might doze a little if he could, she refrained from speech; from time to time she stopped her needle and looked reflectively at the morsel of fire, or at the gas. She had been in the house since before tea. Clara also had pa.s.sed most of the day there, with a few intervals at her own home; but now Clara was gone, and Janet too had gone. Darius was tiring them all out, in his mild and senseless repose. He remained absolutely still, and the enigma which he so indifferently offered to them might apparently continue for ever; at any rate the doctor's statement that he might keep as he was for days and days, beyond help, hung over the entire household, discouraging and oppressive. The energy of even Auntie Hamps was baffled. Only Alicia, who had come in, as she said, to take Janet's place, insisted on being occupied. This was one of the nights dedicated by family arrangement to her betrothed, but Alicia had found pleasure in sacrificing herself, and him, to her very busy sense of duty.

Suddenly the drawing-room door was pushed open, without a sound, and Alicia, in all the bursting charm of her youthfulness and the delicious naivete of her self-importance, stood in the doorway. She made no gesture; she just looked at Edwin with a peculiar ominous and excited glance, and Edwin rose quickly and left the room. Auntie Hamps had noticed nothing.

"Maggie wants you upstairs," said Alicia to Edwin.

He made no answer. He did not ask where Maggie was. They went upstairs together. But at the door of the sick-room Alicia hung back, intimidated, and Edwin entered and shut the door on that beautiful image of proud, throbbing life.

Maggie, standing by the bed under the gas which blazed at full, turned to him as he approached.

"Just come and look at him," she said quietly.

Darius lay in exactly the same position; except that his mouth was open a little wider, he presented exactly the same appearance as in the afternoon. His weary features, pitiful and yet grim, had exactly the same expression. But there was no sign of breathing. Edwin bent and listened.

"Oh! He's dead!" he murmured.

Maggie nodded, her eyes glittering as though set with diamonds. "I think so," she said.

"When was it?"

"Scarcely a minute ago. I was sitting there, by the fire, and I thought I noticed something--"

"What did you notice?"

"I don't know... I must go and tell nurse."

She went, wiping her eyes.

Edwin, now alone, looked again at the residue of his father. The spirit, after hiding within so long, had departed and left no trace. It had done with that form and was away. The vast and forlorn adventure of the little boy from the Bastille was over. Edwin did not know that the little boy from the Bastille was dead. He only knew that his father was dead. It seemed intolerably tragic that the enfeebled wreck should have had to bear so much, and yet intolerably tragic also that death should have relieved him. But Edwin's distress was shot through and enlightened by his solemn satisfaction at the fact that destiny had allotted to him, Edwin, an experience of such profound and overwhelming grandeur. His father was, and lo! he was not. That was all, but it was ineffable.

Maggie returned to the room, followed by Nurse Shaw, whose head was enveloped in various bandages. Edwin began to antic.i.p.ate all the tedious formalities, as to which he would have to inform himself, of registration and interment...

FIVE.

Ten o'clock. The news was abroad in the house. Alicia had gone to spread it. Maggie had startled everybody by deciding to go down and tell Clara herself, though Albert was bound to call. The nurse had laid out the corpse. Auntie Hamps and Edwin were again in the drawing-room together; the ageing lady was making up her mind to go. Edwin, in search of an occupation, prepared to write letters to one or two distant relatives of his mother. Then he remembered his promise to Big James, and decided to write that letter first.

"What a mercy he pa.s.sed away peacefully!" Auntie Hamps exclaimed, not for the first time.

Edwin, at a rickety fancy desk, began to write: "Dear James, my father pa.s.sed peacefully away at--" Then, with an abrupt movement, he tore the sheet in two and threw it in the fire, and began again: "Dear James, my father died quietly at eight o'clock to-night."

Soon afterwards, when Mrs Hamps had departed with her genuine but too spectacular grief, Edwin heard an immense commotion coming down the road from Hanbridge: cheers, shouts, squeals, penny whistles, and trumpets.

He opened the gate.

"Who's in?" he asked a stout, shabby man, who was gesticulating in glee with a little Tory flag on the edge of the crowd.

"Who do you think, mister?" replied the man drunkenly.

"What majority?"

"Four hundred and thirty-nine."

The integrity of the empire was a.s.sured, and the paid agitator had received a proper rebuff.

"Miserable idiots!" Edwin murmured, with the most extraordinary violence of scorn, as he re-entered the house, and the blare of triumph receded. He was very much surprised. He had firmly expected his own side to win, though he was reconciled to a considerable reduction of the old majority. His lips curled.

It was in his resentment, in the hard setting of his teeth as he confirmed himself in the rightness of his own opinions, that he first began to realise an individual freedom. "I don't care if we're beaten forty times," his thoughts ran. "I'll be a more out-and-out Radical than ever! I don't care, and I don't care!" And he felt st.u.r.dily that he was free. The chain was at last broken that had bound together those two beings so dissimilar, antagonistic, and ill-matched--Edwin Clayhanger and his father.

VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK FOUR--HIS START IN LIFE.

THE BIRTHDAY VISIT.

It was Auntie Hamps's birthday.

"She must be quite fifty-nine," said Maggie.

"Oh, stuff!" Edwin contradicted her curtly. "She can't be anything like as much as that."