Tongues of Conscience Part 5

"No, thank you, Kate. Good-night."

"Good-night, sir."

The door shut.

"Is it late?" said the painter.

"Nearly eleven. That is all."

"Are you tired, Uniacke? perhaps you are accustomed to go to bed early?"

"Not very. Besides to-night the gale would keep me awake; and I want to hear the end of your story."

"Then--Drury Lane invaded me one evening, smelling of gin, with black bonnet c.o.c.ked over one eye, an impossible umbrella, broken boots, straying hair, a mouth full of objurgation, and oaths, and crying between times, 'Where's Jack? Where's my boy? What 'a yer done with my boy,--yer!' I received Drury Lane with astonishment but, I hope, with courtesy, and explained that my picture was finished, that Jack had left me to go home, that I meant to take care of his future.

"My remarks were received with oaths, and the repeated demand to know where Jack was. 'Isn't he at home?' I asked. 'No, nor he ain't been 'ome.' After a while I gathered that Jack had disappeared in darkness from my house on the night when I put the last touch to my picture, and had not been seen by his mother since. She now began to soften and to cry, and I observed that maternity was in her as well as cheap gin. I endeavoured to comfort her and promised that little Jack should be found.

"'If he ain't found,' she sobbed, 'I'm done for, I am; 'e's my hall.'

"There was something horribly genuine in the sound of this cry. I began to see beyond the gin in which this poor woman was soaked; I began to see her half-drowned soul that yet had life, had breath.

"'We'll find him,' I said.

"'Never, never,' she wailed, rocking her thin body to and fro, 'I know 'e's gone to sea, 'e 'as. Jack's run away fur a sailor.'

"At these words I turned cold, for I felt as if they were true. I saw in a flash the result of my experiment. I had shown the boy the way that led to the great sea. Perhaps that night, even as he left my door, he had seen in fancy the white waves playing before him in the distance, the ships go sailing by. He had heard siren voices calling his youth and he had heeded them. His old mother kept on cursing me at intervals.

Instinct, rather than actual knowledge, led her to attribute this disappearance to my initiative. I did not attempt to reason her out of the belief, for alas! I began to hold it myself, Uniacke."

"You thought Jack had run away to sea, prompted by all that you had told him of the sea?"

"Yes. And I think it still."

"Think--then you don't--"

"I don't know it, you'd say? Do I not? Uniacke, a little while ago, when you told me of that--that woman for whom you cared much, you remember my saying to you, was there not something within you that would tell you if she were dead?"

"Yes, I remember."

"That something which makes a man know a thing without what is generally called knowledge of it. Well, that something within me makes me know that little Jack did run away to sea. I searched for him, I strove, as far as one can do such a thing, to sift all the innumerable grains of London through my fingers to find that one little grain I wanted. I spared no pains in my search. Conceive, even, that I escorted Drury Lane in the black bonnet to the Docks, to ships lying in the Thames, to a thousand places! It was all in vain; the wonder-child was swallowed up.

I had indeed drowned little Jack in the sea. I have never set eyes on him since he left me on the evening of the day when I completed my picture. Shall I ever set eyes on him again? Shall I, Uniacke? Shall I?"

Sir Graham put this strange question with a sort of morose fierceness, getting up from his chair as he spoke. The young clergyman could think of no reply.

"Why not?" he said at last. "He may be well, happy, active in a life that he loves, that he glories in."

"No, Uniacke, no, for he's far away from his duty. That hideous old woman, in her degradation, in her cruelty, in her drunkenness, loved that boy, loves him still, with an intensity, a pa.s.sion, a hunger, a feverish anxiety that are n.o.ble, that are great. Her hatred of me proves it. I honour her for her hatred. I respect her for it! She shows the beauty of her soul in her curses. She almost teaches me that there is indeed immortality--at least for women--by her sleepless horror of me.

Her hatred, I say, is glorious, because her love shines through it. I feed her. She doesn't know it. She'd starve rather than eat my bread.

She would kill me, I believe, if she didn't fancy in her vague mind, obscured by drink, that the man who had sent her boy from her might bring him back to her. For weeks she came every day--walking all the way from Drury Lane, mind you--to ask if the boy had returned. Then she endured the nightmare of my company, as I told you, while we searched in likely places for the vanished sea urchin. Jack did nothing for the support of his mother. It was she who kept him. She beat him. She cursed him. She fed him. She loved him; like an animal, perhaps, like a mother, certainly. That says all, Uniacke. It was I who sent that boy away. I must give him back to that old woman. Till I do so I can never find peace. This thing preys upon my life, eats into my heart. It's the little worm gnawing, always gnawing at me. The doctors tell me I am morbid because I am in bad health, that my bad health makes the malady in my mind. On the contrary, it is my mind that makes the malady in my body. Ah! you are wondering! You are wondering, too, whether it's not the other way! I see you are!"

"I cannot deny it," Uniacke said gently.

"You are wrong. You are wrong, I a.s.sure you. And surely you, a clergyman, ought to be the very man to understand me, to know how what seems a slight thing, a small selfishness, well, the inadvertence we spoke of lately, may punish the soul, may have a long and evil train of consequences. I was careless of that child, careful only of my ambition.

I ground the child in the mortar of my ambition; is it not natural that I should suffer now? Does not your religion tell you that it is right?

Answer me that?"

Uniacke hesitated. A conviction had been growing up in him all the evening that his guest was suffering severely under some nervous affliction; one of those obscure diseases which change the whole colour of life to the sufferer, which distort all actions however simple and ordinary, which render diminutive trials monstrous, and small evils immense and ineffably tragic. It seemed to Uniacke to be his duty to combat Sir Graham's increasing melancholy, which actually bordered upon despair. At the same time, the young clergyman could not hide from his mind--a mind flooded with conscience--that the painter was slightly to blame for the action which had been followed by so strange a result.

"I see you hesitate, Uniacke," said Sir Graham. "Ah, you agree with me!"

"No; I think you may have been careless. But you magnify a slight error into a grievous sin; and I do indeed believe that it must be your present bad state of health which acts as the magnifying gla.s.s. That is my honest opinion."

"No, no," said the painter, almost with anger, "my illness is all from the mind. If I could find that boy, if I could give him back to his mother, I should recover my peace, I should recover my health--I should no longer be haunted, driven as I am now. But, Uniacke, do you know what it is that I fear most of all, what it is that dogs me, night and day; though I strive to put it from me, to tell myself that it is a chimera?"

"What?"

"The belief that little Jack is dead; that he has been drowned at sea, perhaps lately, perhaps long ago."

"Why should you think that? You do not even know for certain that he ran away to sea."

"I am sure of it. If he is dead! If he is dead!"

The painter, as if in an access of grief, turned abruptly from the fire, walked over to the window, pulled one of the blowing curtains aside and approached his face to the gla.s.s.

"In spite of the storm it is still so light that I can see those graves," he said in a low voice.

"Don't look at them, Sir Graham. Let us talk of other things."

"And--and--yes, Uniacke, that poor, mad Skipper is still out there, lingering among them. He is by the churchyard wall, where you were standing this evening in the twilight: one would say he was watching."

The clergyman had also risen from his seat. He moved a step or two across the little room, then stood still, looking at Sir Graham, who was half concealed by the fluttering curtains.

"He is just where I stood?" Uniacke asked.

"Yes."

"Then he is watching."

"By a grave?"

"Yes. Only one of his crew ever gained the land. He gained it--a corpse.

He is buried by that wall. I was reading the inscription upon his tombstone, and wondering--"

"Wondering? Yes?"

"Where he is, how he is now, far away from the voice of the sea which took his life, the wind which roared his requiem."

"Poor man! You were here when he was washed up on the beach?"