The Cathedral Part 31

"All right, dear?"

"Yes. He doesn't look well. His forehead is all flushed, and I overheard some one at the Sampsons' say the other day that he wasn't well really, that he must take great care of himself. Ought he to?"

"Ought he what?"

"To take great care of himself."

"What nonsense!" Mrs. Brandon turned back to her book impatiently. "There never was any one so strong and healthy."

"He's always worrying about something. It's his nature."

"Yes, I suppose so."

Joan vanished. Mrs. Brandon sat, staring before her, her mind running with the clock--tick-tick-tick-tick--and then suddenly jumping at the mellow liquid gurgle that it sometimes gave. Would her husband come in and say good-night?

How she had grown, during these last weeks, to loathe his kiss! He would stand behind her chair, bending his great body over her, his red face would come down, then the whiff of tobacco, then the rough pressure on her cheek, the hard, unmeaning contact of his lips and hers. His beautiful eyes would stare beyond her, absently into the room. Beautiful! Why, yes, they were famous eyes, famous the diocese through. How well she remembered those years, long ago, when they had seemed to speak to her of every conceivable tenderness and sweetness, and how, when he thus had bent over her, she had stretched up her hand and found the b.u.t.tons of his waistcoat and pushed her fingers in, stroking his shirt and feeling his heart thump, thump, and so warm beneath her touch.

Life! Life! What a cheat! What a cheat! She jumped from her chair, letting the book drop upon the floor, and began to pace the room. And why should not this, too, cheat her once again? With the tenderness, the poignancy with which she now looked upon Morris so once she had looked upon Brandon.

Yes, that might be. She would cheat herself no longer. But she was older now. This was the last chance to live--definitely, positively the last. It was not the desire to be loved, this time, that drove her forward so urgently as the desire to love. She knew that, because Falk would do. If Falk would stay, would let her care for him and mother him and be with him, she would drive Morris from her heart and brain.

Yes, she almost cried aloud in the dark room. "Give me Falk and I will leave the other. Give me my own son. That's my right--every mother's right. If I am refused it, it is just that I should take what I can get instead."

"Give him to me! Give him to me!" One thing at least was certain. She could never return to the old lethargy. That first meeting with Morris had fired her into life. She could not go back and she was glad that she could not....

She stopped in the middle of the room to listen. The hall-door closed softly; suddenly the line of light below the door vanished. Some one had turned down the hall-lamp. She went to the drawing-room door, opened it, looked out, crying softly:

"Falk! Falk!"

"Yes, mother." He came across to her. He was holding a lighted candle in his hand. "Are you still up?"

"Yes, it isn't very late. Barely eleven. Come into the drawing-room."

They went back into the room. He closed the door behind him, then put the candle down on to a small round table; they sat in the candle-light, one on either side of the table.

He looked at her and thought how small and fragile she looked and how little, anyway, she meant to him.

How much most mothers meant to their sons, and how little she had ever meant to him! He had always taken his father's view of her, that it was necessary for her to be there, that she naturally did her best, but that she did not expect you to think about her.

"You ought to be in bed," he said, wishing that she would release him.

For the first time in her life she spoke to him spontaneously, losing entirely the sense that she had always had, that both he and his father would go away and leave her if she were tiresome.

To-night he would _not_ go away--not until she had struck her bargain with him.

"What have you been up to all these weeks, Falk?" she asked.

"Up to?" he repeated. Her challenge was unexpected.

"Yes; of course I know you're up to something, and you _know_ that I know. You must tell me. I'm your mother and I ought to be told."

He knew at once as soon as she spoke that she was the very last person in the world to whom he wished to tell anything. He was tired, dead tired, and wanted to go to bed, but he was arrested by the urgency in her voice.

What was the matter with her? So intent had he been, for the past months, on his own affairs that he had not thought of his mother at all. He looked across the table at her--a little insignificant woman, colourless, with no personality. And yet to-night something was happening to her. He felt all the impatience of a man who is closely occupied with his own drama but is forced, quite against his will, to consider some one else.

"There isn't anything to tell you, mother. Really there is not. I've just been kicking my heels round this blasted town for the last few months and I'm restless. I'll be going up to London very shortly."

"Why need you?" she asked him. The candle flame seemed to jump with the sharpness of her voice.

"Why need I? But of course I must. I ask you, is this a place for _any one_ to settle down in?"

"I don't know why it shouldn't be. I should have thought you could be very happy here. There are so many things you could do."

"What, for instance?"

"You could be a solicitor, or go into business, or--or--why, you'd soon find something."

He got up, taking the candle in his hand.

"Well, if that's your idea, mother, I'm sorry, but you can just put it out of your head once and for all. I'd rather be buried alive than stay in this hole. I _would_ be buried alive if I stayed."

She looked up at him. He was so tall, so handsome, _and so distant_-- some one who had no connection with her at all. She too got up, putting her little hand on his arm.

"Then are we, all of us, to count for nothing at all?"

"Of course you count," he answered impatiently, irritated by the pressure of her fingers on his coat. "You'll see plenty of me. But you can't possibly expect me to live here. I've completely wasted my beautiful young life so far--now apparently you want me to waste the rest of it."

"Then," she said, coming nearer to him and dropping her voice, "take me with you."

"Take you with me!" He stepped back from her. He could not believe that he had heard her correctly. "Take _you_ with me?"

"Yes."

"Take you with me?"

"Yes, yes, yes."

It was the greatest surprise of his life. He stared at her in his amazement, putting the candle back upon the table.

"But why?"

"Why?...Why do you think?...Because I love you and want to be with you."

"Be with me? Leave this? Leave Polchester?...Leave father?"

"Yes, why not? Your father doesn't need me any longer. n.o.body wants me here. Why shouldn't I go?"

He came close to her, giving her now all his attention, staring at her as though he were seeing her for the first time in his life.

"Mother, aren't you well?...Aren't you happy?"