Читать книгу Jessie Trim - B. L. Farjeon - Страница 6

Misfortunes never come singly, and they did not come singly to us. It was not for us to give the lie to a proverb. Often in a family, death is in a hurry when it commences, and takes one after another quickly; then pauses for a long breath.

In very truth, sorrow in its deepest phase had entered our house, and my mother's form seemed to shrink and grow less from the day she put on mourning for my grandmother. But if my mother had her troubles, I am sure I had mine; and one was of such a strange and terrible nature that, even at this distance of time, and with a better comprehension of things, a curiously-reluctant feeling comes upon me as I prepare to narrate it. It is summarised in a very few words. I murdered my baby-brother.

At least, such was my impression at the time. For a long while I was afflicted by secret remorse and by fear of discovery, and never till now have I made confession. There was only one witness of my crime: our cat. I remember well that my father was said to be sinking at the time, and my mother, having her hands full, and her heart, too, poor dear! placed me and my baby-brother in the room in which I used to sit with my grandmother. My task was to take care of the little fellow, and to amuse him. He was so young that he could scarcely toddle, and we had great fun with two oranges which my mother had given us to play with. It required great strength of mind not to eat them instead of playing with them; but the purpose for which they were given to us had been plainly set down by my mother. All that I could hope for, therefore, was that they might burst their skins after being knocked about a little, when of course they would become lawful food. We played ball with them; my baby-brother rolling them towards me, not being strong enough to throw them, and I (secretly animated by the wish that they would burst their skins) throwing them up to him, with a little more force than was actually necessary, and trying to make him catch them. I cannot tell for how long we played, for at this precise moment of my history a mist steals upon such of my early reminiscences as are related in this and the preceding chapters--a mist which divides, as by a curtain, one part of my life from another. My actual life will soon commence, the life that is tangible to me, as it were, that stands out in stronger colour and is distinct from the brief prologue which was acted in dreamland, and which lies nestled deep among the days of my childhood. Cloud-memories these; most of us have such. Some are wholly bright and sweet, some wholly sad and bitter, some parti-coloured. When the dreamland in which these cloud-memories have birth has faded, and we are in the summer or the winter of our days, fighting the Battle, or, having fought it, are waiting for the trumpet-sound which proclaims the Grand Retreat, we can all remember where we received such and such a wound, where such and such a refreshing draught was given to us, at what part of the fight such and such a scar was gained, and at what part a spiritual vision dawned upon our souls, captivating and entrancing us with hopes too bright and beautiful ever to be realised; and though our blood be thin and poor, and the glory of life seems to have waned with the waning of our strength, our pulses thrill and our hearts beat with something of the old glow as the remembrance of these pains and pleasures comes upon us!

To return to my baby-brother. The dusk steals upon us, and we are still playing with the oranges. The cat is watching us, and when an orange rolls in her direction she, half timidly, half sportively, stretches out her paw towards it, and on one occasion lies full-length on her stomach, with an orange between the tips of her paws, and her nose in a straight line with it. I hear my baby-brother laugh gleefully as I scramble on all-fours after the orange. The dusk has deepened, and my baby-brother's face grows indistinct. I throw the orange towards him. It hits him in the face, and his gleeful laughter changes to a scream. I absolutely never see my baby-brother again, and never again hear his voice. All that afterwards refers to him seems to be imparted to me when it is dark, and so strong is my impression of this detail that in my memory I never see his face with a light upon it. My baby-brother is taken suddenly ill, I am told. I go about the house, always in the dark, stepping very gently, and wondering whether my secret will become known, and if it does, what will be done to me. Still in the dark I hear that my baby-brother is worse; that he is dangerously ill. Then, without an interval as it seems, comes the news that my baby-brother is dead, and I learn in some undiscoverable way that he has died of the croup. I know better. I know that I gave him his death-blow with the orange, and I tremble for the consequences. But no human being appears to suspect me, and for my own sake I must preserve silence. Even to assume an air of grief at my baby-brother's death might be dangerous; it might look as if I were too deeply interested in the event; so I put on my most indifferent air. There are, however, two things in the house that I am frightened of. One is our old Dutch clock, the significant ticking and the very ropes and iron weights of which appear to me to be pregnant with knowledge of my crime. Five minutes before every hour the clock gives vent to a whirring sound, and at that sound, hitherto without significance, I tremble. There is a warning in it, and with nervous apprehension I count the seconds that intervene between it and the striking of the hour, believing that then the bell will proclaim my guilt. It does proclaim it; but no person understands it, no one heeds it. I lean against the passage wall, listening to the denunciation. Snaggletooth comes in and stands by my side while the clock is striking. I look up into his face with imploring eyes and a sinking heart. He taps my cheek kindly, and passes on. I breathe more freely; he does not know the language of the bells. The other thing of which I am frightened is our cat. I know that she knows, and I am fearful lest, by some mysterious means, she will denounce me. If I meet her in the dark, her green eyes glare at me. I try to win her over to my side in a covert manner by stroking her coat; but as I smooth her fur skilfully and cunningly, I am convinced that she arches her back in a manner more significant than usual, and that by that action she declines to be a passive accessory to the fact. Her very tail, as it curls beneath my fingers, accuses me. But time goes on, and I am not arrested and led away to be hanged. When my baby-brother is in his coffin I am taken to see him. The cat follows at my heels; I strive to push her away stealthily with my foot, but she rubs her ear against my leg, and will not leave me. I do not see my baby-brother, because I shut my eyes, and I sob and tremble so that they are compelled to take me out of the room; but I have a vague remembrance of flowers about his coffin. I am a little relieved when I hear that he is buried, but the night that follows is a night of torture to me. The Dutch clock ticks, 'I know! I know!' and the cat purrs, 'I know! I know!' and when I am in bed the shade of Jane Painter steals into the room, and after smelling about for blood, whispers in a ghastly undertone that she knows, and is going to tell. Of the doctor, also, I begin to be frightened, for after his visit to my father's sick-room, my mother brings him to see me--being anxious about me, I hear her say. He stops and speaks to me, and when his fingers are on my wrist, I fancy that the beating of my pulse is revealing my crime to him.

But more weighty cares even than mine are stirring in our house, and making themselves felt. My father's last moments are approaching, and I hear that he cannot last the day out. He lasts the day out, but he does not last the night out. As the friend of the family, Snaggletooth remains in the house to see the end of his old comrade. He and my father were schoolboys together, he tells me. 'He was the cleverest boy in the school,' Snaggletooth says; 'the cleverest boy in the school! He used to do my sums for me. We went out birds'-nesting together; and many and many's the time we've stood up against the whole school, snowballing. A snowball, with a stone in it, hit him in the face once, and knocked him flat down; but he was up in a minute, all bloody, and rushed into the middle of our enemies, like a young lion--like a young lion! He was the first and the cleverest of all of us--I was a long way behind him. And now, think of him lying there almost at his last breath, and look at me!' Snaggletooth straightens himself as he walks upstairs, murmuring, 'The cleverest boy in the school! And now think of him, and look at me!'

Snaggletooth's wife is in the house, and helps my mother in her trouble. In the night this good creature and I sit together in the kitchen--waiting. My mother comes in softly two or three times; once she draws me out of the kitchen on to the dark landing, and kneels down, and with her arms around my neck, sobs quietly upon my shoulder. She kisses me many times, and whispers a prayer to me, which I repeat after her.

'Be a good child always, Chris,' she says.

'I will, mother.' And the promise, given at such a time, sinks into my heart with the force of a sacred obligation.

Then my mother takes me into the kitchen, and gives me into the charge of Snaggletooth's wife, and steals away. Snaggletooth's wife begins to prattle to amuse me, and in a few minutes I ascertain that she in some way resembles Jane Painter; for--probably influenced by the appropriateness of the occasion for such narrations--she tells me stories in a low tone about the Ghost of the Red Barn, and the Cock-lane Ghost, and Old Mother Shipton. The old witch is a favourite theme with Snaggletooth's wife, and I hear many strange things. She says:

'One night Mother Shipton was in a terrible rage, and she told the grasshopper on the top of the Royal Exchange to jump over to the ball on St. Paul's Church steeple. And so it did. Soon after that, London was burnt to the ground.'

I muse upon this, and presently inquire: 'Was it an accident?'

'The fire? No; it was done on purpose.'

'Was it because the grasshopper jumped on to the steeple that London was set on fire?'

'Of course,' is the reply. 'That was Mother Shipton's spite.'

Snaggletooth's wife tells so many stories of ghosts and witches that the air smells of fire and brimstone, and I see the cat's tail stiffen and its eyes glow fearfully. Then I hear a cry from upstairs, and Snaggletooth's wife rises hurriedly, and looks about her with restless hands, and the whole house is in a strange confusion. Snaggletooth himself comes into the room, and as he whispers some consoling words to me--only the import of which I understand--his great tooth sticks out like a horn. He looks like a fiend.