The Creators Part 128

He looked down at her very quietly and kindly. It was when people were really outrageous that a Brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience and forbearance.

"You say he had to do all these things. Is that the fact?"

"No," said Laura, pa.s.sionately, "it's the truth."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean it's what it amounted to. They--they drove him to it with their everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining."

"I should not have thought he was a man to be much affected by adverse criticism."

"You don't know," she retorted, "how he was affected. You can't judge.

Anyhow, he stuck to it up to the very last--the very last," she cried.

"My dear Mrs. Prothero, n.o.body wanted him to----"

"He did it, though. He did it because he was not what you all thought him."

"We thought him splendid. My brother was saying only the other day he had never seen such pluck."

"Well, then, it's his pluck--his splendour that he's dying of."

"And you hold us, his friends, responsible for that?"

"I don't hold you responsible for anything."

She was trembling on the edge of tears.

"Come, come," he said gently, "you misunderstand. You've been doing too much. You're overstrained."

She smiled. That was so like them. They were sane when they got hold of one stupid fact and flung it at your head. But you were overstrained when you retaliated. When you had made a sober selection from the facts, such a selection as const.i.tuted a truth, and presented it to them, you were more overstrained than ever. They couldn't stand the truth.

"I don't hold _you_ responsible for his perversity," said the poor Doctor.

"You talked as if you did."

"You misunderstood me," he said sadly. "I only asked you to do what you could."

"I have done what I could."

He ordered her some bromide then, for her nerves.

That evening Prothero was so much better that he declared himself well.

The wind had changed to the south. She had prayed for a warm wind; and, as it swept through the great room, she flung off her fur-lined coat and tried to persuade herself that the weather was in Owen's favour.

At midnight the warm wind swelled to a gale. Down at the end of the garden the iron gate cried under the menace and torture of its grip. The sound and the rush of it filled Prothero with exultation. Neither he nor Laura slept.

She had moved her bed close up against his, and they lay side by side.

The room was a pa.s.sage for the wind; it whirled down it like a mad thing, precipitating itself towards the mouth of the night, where the wide north window sucked it. On the floor and the long walls the very darkness moved. The pale yellow disc that the guarded nightlight threw upon the ceiling swayed incessantly at the driving of the wind. The twilight of the white beds trembled.

Outside the gust staggered and drew back; it plunged forward again, with its charge of impetus, and hurled itself against the gate. There was a shriek of torn iron, a crash, and the long sweeping, rending cry of live branches wrenched from their hold, lacerated and crushed, trailing and clinging in their fall.

Owen dragged himself up on his pillows. Laura's arm was round him.

"It's nothing," she said, "only the gate. It was bound to go."

"The gate?"

It seemed to her touch that he drew himself together.

"I said I'd come back--through it----" he whispered. "I shall--come back"--his voice gathered a sudden, terrible, hoa.r.s.e vibration--"over it--treading it down."

At that he coughed and turned from her, hiding his face. The handkerchief she took from him was soaked in blood. He shuddered and shrank back, overcome by the inveterate, ungovernable horror.

He lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word should bring back the thing he loathed. Laura sat up and watched him.

Towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. The air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. Once the wind was so quiet that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. She counted seven strokes.

It grew warmer and warmer out there. Owen was very cold.

Laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the Doctor. She was gone about five minutes.

And Prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over his dead body.

LXVIII

Laura Prothero was sitting with Jane in the garden at Wendover one day in that spring. It was a day of sudden warmth and stillness that brought back vividly to both of them the hour of Owen's death.

They were touched by the beauty and the peace of this place where Nicky lived his perfect little life. They had just agreed that it was Nicky's life, Nicky's character, that had given to his garden its lucent, exquisite tranquillity. You a.s.sociated that quality so indivisibly with Nicky that it was as if he flowered there, he came up every spring, flaming purely, in the crocuses on the lawn. Every spring Nicky and a book of poems appeared with the crocuses; the poems as Nicky made them, but Nicky heaven-born, in an immortal innocence and charm.

It was incredible, they said, how heaven sheltered and protected Nicky.

He, with his infallible instinct for the perfect thing, had left them together, alone in the little green chamber on the lawn, shut in by its walls of yew. He was glad that he had this heavenly peace to give them for a moment.

He pa.s.sed before them now and then, pacing the green paths of the lawn with Nina.

"No, Jinny, I am _not_ going on any more," Laura said, returning to the subject of that intimate communion to which they had been left. "You see, it ended as a sort of joke, his and mine--n.o.body else saw the point of it. Why should I keep it up?"

"Wouldn't he have liked you to keep it up?"

"He would have liked me to please myself--to be happy. How can I be happy going on--giving myself to the people who rejected _him_? I'm not going to keep _that_ up."

"What will you do?"

Laura said that she would have enough to do, editing his poems and his memoirs. Jane had not realized the memoirs. They were, Laura told her, mainly a record of his life as a physician and a surgeon, a record so simple that it only unconsciously revealed the man he was. George Tanqueray had insisted on her publishing this first.