Witching Hill Part 15

"I couldn't help seeing the likeness," I replied.

"It's my mother," he said unnecessarily.

His manner was curiously dogged and unlike him.

"And you keep her photograph under the floor?"

"Yes; you don't see many about, do you?" he inquired with precocious bitterness.

There was not one to be seen downstairs. That I knew from my glimpse of the photograph under the floor; there was nothing like it on any of the walls, nothing so beautiful, nothing with that rather wild, defiant expression which I saw again in Ronnie at this moment.

"But why under the floor?" I persisted, guessing vaguely though I did.

"You won't tell anybody you saw it there?"

"Not a soul."

"You promise?"

"Solemnly."

"You won't say a single word about it, if I tell you something?"

"Not a syllable."

"Well--then--it's because I don't want Daddy to see it, for fear----"

"--it would grieve him?" I suggested as the end of his broken sentence.

And I held my breath in the sudden hope that I might be right.

"For fear he tears it up!" the boy said harshly. "He did that once before, and this is the last I've got."

I made no comment, and there were no further confidences from Ronnie. So many things I wanted to know and could not ask! I could only hold my peace and Ronnie's hot hand, until it pinched mine in sudden warning, as the whole house lept under a springy step upon the stairs.

"Not a word to anybody, you know, Mr. Gillon?"

"Not one, to a single soul, Ronnie!"

But it was a heavy seal that was thus placed upon my lips; heavy as lead when I discussed the child with Uvo Delavoye; and that was almost every minute that we spent together for days to come.

For Ronnie became very ill.

In the beginning it was an honest chill. The chill turned to that refuge of the General Pract.i.tioner--influenza. Double pneumonia was its last, most definite stage; the local doctor made no mistake about that, and Coplestone appealed in vain against the verdict, before specialists who came down from London at a guinea a mile.

It was a mild enough case so far. The boy was strong and healthy, and capable of throwing off at least as much as most strong men. He was also a capital little patient--and Coplestone was a magnificent patient's father. He did not harry the doctors; he treated the elderly Scotch nurse like a queen; he was not always in and out of the sick-room by day, and he never set foot in it during the night. In the daytime Delavoye took him for long walks, and I would sit up with him at night until he started nodding in his chair.

The first night he said: "You must have some whisky, Gillon. I've got a new lot in." And when I said I seldom touched it--"I know you don't, in this house," he rejoined, with his hand for an instant on my shoulder.

"But that's all right, Gillon!--Do you happen to know much about Dr.

Johnson?"

"Hardly anything. You should try Uvo."

"Well, I don't know much myself; but I always remember that when the poor old boy was dying he refused the drugs which were giving him all the peace he got, because he said he'd made up his mind to 'render up his soul to G.o.d unclouded.' Now I come to think of it, there's not much a.n.a.logy," continued Coplestone with a husky laugh. "But I know I'd rather do what Dr. Johnson wouldn't than go up clouded to my little lad if ever he--wanted me!"

And he took about a teaspoonful from a mistaken sense of hospitality, but no second allowance as the night wore on. The next night I was able to refuse without offending him; after that the decanter was never touched. Yet once or twice I saw the stopper taken out in sheer absence of mind, only to be replaced without flurry or hesitation.

Self-control? I never knew a man with more; it came out every hour that we spent together, and before long it was needed almost every minute.

One day Delavoye dashed into the office in town clothes and with a tragic face.

"They want a second nurse! It's come to that already," he said, "and I'm going up about it now."

"But isn't that the doctor's job?" I asked, liking the looks of him as little as his news.

"I can't help it if it is, Gilly! I must lend a hand somehow or _I_ shall crack up. It's little enough one can do, besides being day-nurse to poor old Coplestone, and this afternoon he's asleep for once. What a great chap he is, Gilly, and will be ever after, if only we can pull the lad through and then get them both out of this! But it's two lives hanging on one thread, and that cursed old man of mine trying all he knows to cut it! I'll euchre him, you'll see. By hook or crook I'll balk him----"

But white clouds were tumbling behind the red houses opposite, and Delavoye dashed out again to catch his train, like the desperate leader of a forlorn hope, leaving his dark eyes burning before mine and his wild words ringing in my ears.

Quite apart from the point on which he was never sane, he seemed to have lost the otherwise level head on which I had learnt to rely at any crisis; but Coplestone still kept his, and him I admired more and more.

He still took his exercise like a man, refrained from harrying nurse or doctor, showed an untroubled face by the sick-bed, but avoided the room more and more, and altogether during the terrible delirious stages.

"If I were to stay there long," he said to me once, "I should make a scene. I couldn't help it. There are more things than one to cloud your mind, and I've got to keep mine unclouded all the time."

He kept it very nearly serene; and his serenity was not the numbness of despair which sometimes wears the same appearance; for I do not think there was a moment at which Coplestone despaired. He had much too stout a heart. There was nothing forced or unnatural in his manner; his feelings were not deadened for an instant, yet not for an instant would he give them rein. Only, our sober vigils cut deeper lines than his excesses before Christmas, and every night left him a hard year older.

We spent them all downstairs in his study. Neither of us was a chess-player, and I was all unversed in cards, but sometimes we played draughts or dominoes by the hour, as though one of us had been Ronnie himself. Often we talked of him, but never as though there were any question of his eventual recovery. Coplestone would only go so far as to bemoan the probability of an entirely lost hockey term, and his eye would steal round to the photograph of last year's hockey eleven at Ronnie's little school, in a place of honour on the mantelpiece, where indeed it concealed one of his own most heroic trophies.

Fitted and proportioned like half a hundred others on the Estate, that study of Coplestone's is one of those Witching Hill interiors that time cannot dismantle in my mind. It was filled with the memorials of a brilliant boyhood. There were framed photographs of four Cambridge crews, of two Eton eights, of the Eton Society with Coplestone to the fore in white trousers, of the "long low wall with trees behind it" and of the "old grey chapel behind the trees." There were also a number of parti-coloured caps under suspended oars, and more silver in the shape of cups, salvers, and engraved cigarette boxes than his modest staff of servants could possibly keep clean. Over the mantelpiece hung the rules of the Eton Society--under gla.s.s--with a trophy of canes decked with light blue ribbons.

"It all looks pretty blatant, I'm afraid," said Coplestone apologetically. "But I thought it would interest Ronnie and perhaps hound him on to cut me out. And now----"

He stopped, and I hoped he was not going on, for this was when Ronnie was at his worst and the second nurse had arrived.

"And now," said Coplestone, "the little sinner wants to be a dry-bob!"

I have not naturally a despondent temperament, but that night I for my part was wondering whether Ronnie would ever go to Eton at all. The delirious stage is always terrifying to the harrowed ignoramus watching by the bed; it is almost worse if one is downstairs, trying not to listen, yet doing little else, and without the nurse's calm voice and experienced eyes to rea.s.sure one. That was how I spent that night. The delirium had begun the night before, and been intermittent ever since.

But Coplestone was not terrified; he kept both nerve and spirits like a hero. His thought for me brought a lump into my throat. Since I refused to leave him, I must take the sofa; he would do splendidly in the chair.

He did better than I could have believed possible. He fell peacefully asleep, and I sat up watching his great long limbs in the lowered gas-light, but always listening while I watched.

Ronnie had not the makings of his father's fine physique. That was one of the disquieting features of the case. He was fragile, excitable, highly strung, as I felt his poor mother must have been before him. And he was tragically like his hidden portrait of her. I saw it as often as I was permitted a peep at Ronnie. What had she done amiss before she died? That was perhaps the chief thing I wanted to know about her, but after my pledge to Ronnie I felt unable even to discuss the poor soul with Delavoye. But she was only less continually in my mind than Ronnie himself, and to-night it seemed she was in his as well.

"O Mummie! Mummie--darling! My very, very, own little Mummie!"

G.o.d knows what had taken me upstairs, except the awful fascination of such wanderings, the mental necessity of either hearing them or knowing that they had ceased. On the stairs I felt so thankful they had ceased; it was in the darkened play-room, now a magazine of hospital appliances, kettles, bottles, and the oxygen apparatus; it was here I heard the joyous ravings of his loving little heart--here, on the threshold between his own two rooms, that I even saw him with his thin arms locked round the neck of the young nurse who had taken over the night duty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: His thin arms locked round the neck of the young nurse.]

She heard me. She came to the door and stood in silhouette against the cheerful firelight of the inner room. Its glow just warmed one side of her white cap and plain apparel, then glanced off her high white forehead and made a tear twinkle underneath.