Tongues of Conscience Part 28

He spoke as if he were questioning his own intellect for the reason, not asking it of her. And she did not try to answer his question.

"I suppose," he continued, "it is because you are the only human being who has partially understood that there is something with me that sets me apart from all my kind, from all the others."

"With you?" Lily said.

She felt horribly frightened and yet strong and earnest.

"Yes, with me," he answered. "I told you that I was a haunted man. Miss Alston, can you, will you bear to hear what it is that is with me, and why it comes. It is a story that, perhaps, your father might forbid you to read. I don't know. And, if it was fiction, perhaps he would be right. But--but--I think--I wonder--you might help me. I can't see how, but--I feel--"

He faltered suddenly, and seemed for the first time to become self-conscious and confused.

"Tell me, please," Lily said.

She felt rather as if she were beginning to read some strange French story by night. Maurice still stood on the hearth.

"It is a sound that is with me," he said. "Only that; never anything else but that."

"A sound," she repeated.

She thought of their conversation about the bells.

"Yes, it is a cry--the cry of a child."

"Yes?"

"That's nothing--you think? Absurd for a man to heed such a trifle?"

"Why do you think it comes?"

Maurice hesitated. His eyes searched the face of the little girl with an almost hard gaze of scrutiny, as if he were trying to sum up the details of her nature.

"Long ago--before I came here, before I was qualified, I was cruel, bitterly cruel to a child," he said at last, speaking now very coldly and distinctly.

His eyes were on Lily. Had she made just then any movement of horror or of disgust, had an expression betokening fear of him come into her eyes, Maurice knew that his lips would be sealed, that he would bid her good-night and leave her. But she only looked more intent, more expectant. He went on.

"I was bitterly cruel to my own child," he said.

Then Lily moved suddenly. Maurice thought she was going to start up. If she had intended to she choked the impulse. Was she shocked? He could not tell. She had turned her face away from him. He wondered why, but he did not know that those last words had given to Lily an abrupt and fiery insight into the depths of her heart.

"At that time," Maurice said, still speaking very distinctly and quietly, "I was desperately ambitious. I was bitten by the viper whose poison, stealing through all a man's veins, is emulation. My only desire, my only aim in life was to beat all the men of my year, to astonish all the authorities of the hospital to which I was attached by the brilliance of my attainments and my achievements, I was ambition incarnate, and such mad ambition is the most cruel thing in the world.

And my child interfered with my ambition. It cried, how it cried!"

He was becoming less definitely calm.

"It cried through my dreams, my thoughts, my endeavours, my determinations. Do you know what a weapon a sound can be, Miss Alston?

Perhaps not. A sound can be like a sword and pierce you, like a bludgeon and strike you down. A little sound can nestle in your life, and change all the colour and all the meaning of it. The cry of the living child was terrible to me, I thought then. But--then--I had never heard the cry of the dead child. You see I wanted to forget something. And the tiny cry of the child recalled it. There were no words in the cry, and yet there were words,--so it seemed to me--telling over a past history. This history--well, I want to say to you--"

Lily had now put a guard on watch over against her impulsive nature.

When Maurice stopped speaking she was able to look towards him again and murmur:

"Say all you want to."

"Thank you," he said, almost eagerly. "If you knew--Miss Alston, before this time, when I was a very young student, I had fallen into one of the most fatal confusions of youth. I had made a mistake as to the greatest need of my own nature. I had, for a flash of time, thought my greatest need was love."

"And it wasn't," the girl said, with a note of wonder in her voice.

"No, it was success, to outstrip my fellows. But I thought it was love, and I followed my thought and I sacrificed another to my thought. My child's mother died almost in giving her to me, and, in dying, made me promise to keep the child always with me. I kept that promise. I was a young student, very poor. My love had been secret. Now I was alone with this helpless child. I left my own lodgings and took others. I brought it there, and its presence obliged me to shut my doors against my own family and against my friends. To keep the door shut I put forward the excuse of my ambition. I said that I was giving myself up to work and I shut myself in with the child. I was its nurse as well as its father. I thought I should be sufficient for it. But it missed--her, whom I scarcely missed."

"You had not loved her?"

Maurice bent his head.

"I had made a mistake, as I said. I had only thought so. Long before she died I had almost hated her for crippling my ambition. She was swept out of my path. But the child was left crying for her."

"Yes. I know."

"Its wail came eternally between me and my great desire. When I sat down to work the sound--which I could not quiet--perplexed my brain. When I lay down to get, in sleep, power for fresh work, it struck through my dreams. I heard it when the stars were out over London, and in the dawn, when from my lodging windows I could see the first light on the Thames.

Miss Alston, at last it maddened me."

Lily was pale. She scarcely knew of what she was expectant.

"I had tried to comfort the child. I had failed. Now I determined to forget it, to shut it out from my working life. At last, by force of will, I almost succeeded. I read, I wrote, I a.n.a.lysed the causes of disease, the results of certain treatments as opposed to the results of others. And sometimes I no longer heard my child, no longer knew whether it wailed and wept or whether it was silent. But one evening--"

Maurice stopped. His face was very white and his eyes burned with excitement.

"One evening," he repeated, speaking almost with difficulty, and with the obstinate note in his voice of one telling a secret half against his will and better judgement, "I could not work. The wail of the child was so loud, so alarmed, so full of a fear that seemed to my imagination intelligent, and based on a knowledge of something I did not know, that my professional instinct was aroused. At first I listened, sitting at my writing table. Then I got up and softly approached the folding doors.

Beyond them, in the dark, the child lamented like one to whom a nameless horror draws near. Never had I known it to weep like this; for this was no cry after a mother, no cry of desire, no cry even of sorrow. It was a half-strangled scream of terror, I did not go into the room, but as I listened, I knew--"

He faltered.

"Yes," Lily said.

"As I listened I knew what the cry meant. Miss Alston, is it not strange that even a baby who scarcely knows life knows so well--death?"

"Death!"

"Yes, recognises its coming, shrinks from it, fears it with the terror of a clear intelligence. Is it not very strange?"

"Death!" Lily repeated.

She too was pale. Maurice continued in a low voice.

"I understood the meaning of the cry, and I did not enter the inner room. No, I walked back to my writing table, put my hands over my ears--to deaden the cry--and gave myself again to work. How long I worked I don't know, but presently I heard a loud knocking at the door of my room. I sprang up and opened it. My landlady stood outside.

"'What do you want?' I asked.

"The good woman's face was grave.