The History of David Grieve Part 102

'Well, I must go,' he said, rousing himself; 'I shall just catch the train. Send a line to Ancrum, there's a dear, to say I will go and see him to-night. Four months! I am afraid he has been very bad.'

Lucy stood by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory feelings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's Park, her husband's chivalry and delicacy of feeling had given back to her the self-respect and healed the self-love which had been so rudely hurt, there had been a certain readjustment of Lucy's nature going on below the little commonplaces and vanities and affections of her life which she herself would never have been able to explain. It implied the gradual abandonment of certain ambitions, the relinquishment bit by bit of an arid and fruitless effort.

She would stand and sigh sometimes--long, regretful sighs like a child--for she knew not what. But David would have his way, and it was no good; and she loved him and Sandy.

But she owed no love to Louie Montjoie! It was a relief to her now--an escape from an invading sweetness of which her little heart was almost afraid--to sit down and plan how she would protect David from that grasping woman and her unspeakable husband.

'David, my dear fellow!' said Ancrum's weak voice. He rose with difficulty from his seat by the fire. The room was the same little lodging-house sitting-room in Mortimer Road, where David years before had poured out his boyish account of himself. Neither chiffonnier, nor pictures, nor antimaca.s.sars had changed at all; the bustling landlady was still loud and vigorous. But Ancrum was a shadow.

'You are better?' David said, holding his hand in both his.

'Oh yes, better for a time. Not for long, thank G.o.d!'

David looked at him with painful emotion. Several times during these eight years had he seen Ancrum emerge from these mysterious crises of his, a broken and shattered man, whom only the force of a superhuman will could drag back to life and work. But he had never yet seen him so beaten down, so bloodless, so emaciated as this.

Lung mischief had declared itself more than a year before this date, and had clearly made progress during this last attack of melancholia. He thought to himself that his old friend could not have long to live.

'Has Williams been to see you?' he asked, naming a doctor whom Ancrum had long known and trusted.

'Oh yes! He can do nothing. He tells me to give in and go to the south. But there is a little work left in me still. I wanted my boys. I grew to pine for my boys--up there.'

'Up there' meant that house in Scotland where lived the friends bound to him by such tragic memories of help asked and rendered in a man's worst extremity, that he could never speak of them when he was living his ordinary life in Manchester, pa.s.sionately as he loved them.

They chatted a little about the boys, some of whom David had been keeping an eye on. Five or six of them, indeed, were in his printing-office, and learning in the apprentices' school he had just started.

But in the middle of their talk, with a sudden change of look, Ancrum stooped forward and laid his hand on David's.

'A little more, Davy--I have just to get a _little_ worse--and _she_ will come to me.'

David was not sure that he understood. Ancrum had only spoken of his wife once since the night when, led on by sympathy and emotion, he had met David's young confession by the story of his own fate.

She was still teaching at Glasgow so far as David knew, where she was liked and respected.

'Yes, Davy--when I have come to the end of my tether--when I can do no more but die--I shall call--and she will come. It has so far killed us to be together--more than a few hours in the year. But when life is all over for me--she will be kind--and I shall be able to forget it all. Oh, the hours I have sat here thinking--thinking--and _gnashing my teeth!_ My boys think me a kind, gentle, harmless creature, Davy. They little know the pa.s.sions I have carried within me--pa.s.sions of hate and bitterness--outcries against G.o.d and man. But there has been One with me through the storms'--his voice sank--'aye! and I have gone to Him again and again with the old cry--_Master!--Master!--carest Thou not that we perish?_'

His drawn grey face worked and he mastered himself with difficulty.

David held his hand firm and close in a silence which carried with it a love and sympathy not to be expressed.

'Let me just say this to you, Davy,' Ancrum went on presently, 'before we shut the door on this kind of talk--for when a man has got a few things to do and very little strength to do 'em with, he must not waste himself. You may hear any day that I have been received into the Catholic Church, or you may only hear it when I am dying. One way or the other, you _will_ hear it. It has been strange to go about all these years among my Unitarian and dissenting friends and to know that this would be the inevitable end of it. I have struggled alone for peace and certainty. I cannot get them for myself. There is an august, an inconceivable possibility which makes my heart stand still when I think of it, that the Catholic Church may verily have them to give, as she says she has. I am weak--I shall submit--I shall throw myself upon her breast at last.'

'But why not now,' said David, tenderly, 'if it would give you comfort?'

Ancrum did not answer at once; he sat rubbing his hands restlessly over the fire.

'I don't know--I don't know,' he said at last. 'I have told you what the end will be, Davy. But the will still flutters--flutters--in my poor breast, like a caged thing.'

Then that beautiful half-wild smile of his lit up the face.

'Bear with me, you strong man! What have you been doing with yourself? How many more courts have you been pulling down? And how much more of poor Madam Lucy's money have you been throwing out of window?'

He took up his old tone, half bantering, half affectionate, and teased David out of the history of the last six months. While he sat listening he reflected once more, as he had so often reflected, upon the difference between the reality of David Grieve's life as it was and his, Ancrum's, former imaginations of what it would be.

A rapid rise to wealth and a new social status, removal to London, a great public career, a personality, and an influence conspicuous in the eyes of England--all these things he had once dreamed of as belonging to the natural order of David's development. What he had actually witnessed had been the struggle of a hidden life to realise certain ideal aims under conditions of familiar difficulty and limitation, the dying down of that initial brilliance and pa.s.sion to succeed, into a wrestle of conscience as sensitive as it was profound, as tenacious as it was scrupulous. He had watched an unsatisfactory marriage, had realised the silent resolve of the north-countryman to stand by his own people, of the man sprung from the poor to cling to the poor: he had become familiar with the veins of melancholy by which both character and life were crossed.

That glittering prince of circ.u.mstance as he had once foreseen him, was still enshrined in memory and fancy; but the real man was knit to the cripple's inmost heart.

Another observer, perhaps, might have wondered at Ancrum's sense of difference and disillusion. For David after all had made a mark. As he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind the printing-office where he now employed from two to three hundred men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experiences, of this apprentices' school for the sons of members of the 'house,'

imitated from one of the same kind founded by a great French printing firm, and the object just now of a pa.s.sionate energy of work on David's part--or as he diverged into the history of an important trade dispute in Manchester, where he had been appointed arbitrator by the unanimous voice of both sides--as he told these things, it was not doubtful even for Ancrum that his power and consideration were spreading in his own town.

But, substantially, Ancrum was right. Hard labour and natural gift had secured their harvest; but that vivid personal element in success which captivates and excites the bystander seemed, in David's case, to have been replaced by something austere, which pointed attention and sympathy rather to the man's work than to himself. When he was young there had been intoxication for such a spectator as Ancrum in the magical rapidity and ease with which he seized opportunity and beat down difficulty. Now that he was mature, he was but one patient toiler the more at the eternal puzzles of our humanity.

Ancrum let him talk awhile. He had always felt a certain interest in David's schemes, though they were not of a quality and sort with which a mind like his naturally concerned itself. But his interest now could not hold out so long as once it could.

'Ah, that will do--that will do, dear fellow!' he said, interrupting and touching David's hand with apologetic affection.

'I seem to feel your pulse beating 150 to the minute, and it tires me so I can't bear myself. Gossip to me. How is Sandy?'

David laughed, and had as usual a new batch of 'Sandiana' to produce. Then he talked of Louie's coming and of the invitation which had been sent to Reuben Grieve.

'I shall come and sit in a corner and look at _her_,' said Ancrum, nodding at Louie's name. 'What sort of a life has she been leading all these years? Neither you nor I can much imagine. But what beauty it used to be! How will John stand seeing her again?'

David smiled, but did not think it would affect John very greatly.

He was absorbed in the business of Grieve & Co., and no less round, roseate, and trusty than he had always been.

'Well, good night--good night!' said Ancrum, and seemed to be looking at the clock uneasily. 'Come again, Davy, and I dare say I shall struggle up to you.'

At that moment the door opened, and, in spite of a hasty shout from Ancrum, which she did not or would not understand, Mrs. Elsley, his landlady, came into the room, bearing his supper. She put down the tray, seemed to invite David's attention to it by her indignant look, and flounced out again like one bursting with forbidden speech.

'Ancrum, this is absurd!' cried David, pointing to the tea and morsel of dry bread which were to provide this shrunken invalid with his evening meal. 'You _can't_ live on this stuff now, you know--you want something more tempting and more nourishing. Do be rational!'

Ancrum sprang up, hobbled with unusual alacrity across the room, and, laying hold of David, made a feint of ejecting his visitor.

'You get along and leave me to my wittles!' he said with the smile of a schoolboy; 'I don't spy on you when you're at your meals.'

David crossed his arms.

'I shall have to send Lucy down every morning to housekeep with Mrs. Elsley,' he said firmly.

'Now, David, hold your tongue! I couldn't eat anything else if I tried. And there are two boys down with typhoid in Friar's Yard--drat 'em!--and scarcely a rag on 'em: don't you understand?

And besides, David, if _she_ comes, I shall want a pound or two, you see?'

He did not look at his visitor's face nor let his own be seen. He simply pushed David through the door and shut it.

'Sandy, they're just come!' cried Lucy in some excitement, hugging the child to her by way of a last pleasant experience before the advent of her sister-in-law. Then she put the child down on the sofa and went out to meet the new-comers.

Sandy sucked a meditative thumb, putting his face to the window, and surveyed the arrival which was going on in the front garden.

There was a great deal of noise and talking; the lady in the grey cloak was scolding the cabman, and 'Daddy' was taking her bags and parcels from her, and trying to make her come in. On the steps stood a little girl looking frightened and tired. Sandy twisted his head round and studied her carefully. But he showed no signs of running out to meet her. She might be nice, or she might be nasty.

Sandy had a cautious philosophical way with him towards novelties.

He remained perfectly still with his cheek pressed against the gla.s.s.

The door opened. In came Louie, with Lucy looking already flushed and angry behind her, and David, last of all, holding Cecile by the hand.

Louie was in the midst of denunciations of the cabman, who had, according to her, absorbed into his system, or handed over to an accomplice on the way, a bandbox which had _certainly_ been put in at St. Pancras, and which contained Cecile's best hat. She was red and furious, and David felt himself as much attacked as the cabman, for to the best of his ability he had transferred them and their packages, at the Midland station, from the train to the cab.