The Judge Part 16

"Away now!"

"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the best tablecloth after the mending--and there's nothing but cod-roes, and you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away, dear--you'll make Richard feel awkward--"

Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.

IV

He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to her three times.

_"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds, and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now I do--that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima, you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you; we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd light even the darkest pa.s.sage of time for me with your wit and your beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my lovely red-haired Ellen...."_

And she had written to him twice....

_"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as. .h.i.therto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Sh.e.l.ley and Byron. But their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one another. Do please come soon...."_

Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and ill.u.s.trated papers for the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.

Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.

Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a fine night with that ironical air nature always a.s.sumes to persons convulsed by human pa.s.sion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in lank, curved strands about her shoulders.

She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.

They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."

"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I knocked that it was diphtheria she had."

"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with wonder. But her rationalism a.s.serted itself and her glance grew shrewd again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses.

"Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."

"Oh, G.o.d, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."

"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.

Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."

"That be d.a.m.ned."

"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?"

Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked so wee!"

"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him, and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family now. You might have let me do that!"

"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and gathered her closely to him.

"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.

"You look very beautiful."

"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."

"n.o.body would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck with a large horn b.u.t.ton anything but decent."

"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like, though doubtless it would do me good to know."

"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back the first thing in the morning."

"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness.

("Ye've got--ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me feel all--all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appet.i.te even when the Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you!

There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry.

She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."

"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."

"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal Family."

"But why must you go out?"

"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill, friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,'

'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."

"But, my G.o.d, can't you telephone?"

"No, of course not. They can't do that in these inst.i.tutions. They'd have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!"

She pa.s.sed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she never got one. Ill.u.s.trated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages, clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."

Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't I go and look at this board?"

"No. I want to go myself."

"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some place in Princes Street."

"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying good-night to Mother."

They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.

She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there, shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.

"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."

"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be able to keep it up?"

She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.

He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ...

I do not believe in G.o.d ... yet I know that through you I shall find ...

something the same as G.o.d...." He could not say it all. But it communicated itself in their long unpa.s.sionate kiss.

They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.

He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.

At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to G.o.d, and which is doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than precious stones.