Читать книгу The Idol of the Blind - Gallon Tom - Страница 3

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COMETHUP ENTERS LIFE DISASTROUSLY.

“My dear” had looked her last upon a troublesome world. She had taken life sighingly, in little frightened gasps, as it were, with the fear upon her, even from childhood, that unknown horrors lurked for her in each day to which she was awakened. It can scarcely be said that she had clung to life with any tenacity—rather with the instinct of living; and she had fluttered out of it resignedly enough, a little sorry, perhaps, that she had left any one behind to grieve for her. And yet, with the inconsistency which had marked her life, she had died at the very moment when life had actually begun to be worth living for her.

“My dear” was one of those who wait long for the happiness, if any, that is to come to them, and find it a little tasteless when it is at last given to them. She had been the younger child of a stern and unbending man, who bent or broke to his code of rules those who were weak enough to be bent or broken, and thrust sternly aside those whose strength opposed itself to his. He had found in his little daughter one who smilingly and timidly obeyed in everything, and worshipped him without question—up to a certain point. That point was determined by the arrival of David Willis.

It was an old and a very ordinary story; such stories are played out to their bitter end day after day around us. David Willis was poor, and had absolutely no expectations; so far as old Robert Carlaw was concerned he simply did not exist—except as many other people existed, as a part of the world with which he had nothing to do. David, for his part, was as patient and long-suffering as the girl who loved him; and so they solemnly and pitifully plighted their troth, and agreed to wait. Boldness or resource of action was not in either of them; the girl, despite her love for the man, and the sort of humble, patient faithfulness with which she was endowed, would not have risked her father’s anger on any account. So, in a poor, half-ridiculous, half-heroic fashion, they parted and waited.

They waited, strange as it may seem, for nearly twenty years; until the man had entered the forties and the woman was nearing them. She was still a pretty woman, soft-eyed and gentle of voice, with a great mine of tenderness hidden away in her which no one had been able to discover. When, on her father’s death, she married David Willis, there seemed a prospect that the mine would be discovered, but the time had gone past; life had been so long a flat and stale and unprofitable thing that the old fierce heart-beats at the thought of her lover, the old hunger of love for him, had died away into a mere tremulous wonder as to whether he would be good to her, or whether he might have moments of harshness and sternness, like her father. She had hung too long expectant on hope to believe that the world was going to be very good to her now; she was only a little glad, for her lover’s sake, that his time of waiting was ended.

David Willis was a musician and a dreamer; not a very great musician, and certainly a dreamer whose dreams brought him no profit. He had filled the place of organist in one or two minor churches, living simply and contentedly. By the very irony of things, when the woman he loved was able to come to him and put her hands in his, and tell him that there was no further bar to their happiness, he was out of an engagement, and had scarcely a penny in the world. But, with a childlike faith which, even at their years, came near to the sublime, they married first and tried to be worldly afterward. Fortunately for them, her brother was a man of property in a small, old-fashioned town near the coast of Kent; and, having considerable influence in the place, he offered, through the clergyman of the parish, the vacant post of organist in the parish church to David Willis, after first roundly abusing his sister for having married a pauper.

It was a quaint old town, a place of red roofs and winding streets and strange old buildings; a very paradise to the dreamer and the woman who had waited so long for him. Her brother’s house stood at the far end of the town, in the newer part of it; but they saw little of him, and had, indeed, no particular desire to do so. They had their own quiet dwelling-place, a little house nestling under the frowning shadows of the church wherein he worked; a strange old place, with low ceilings and black beams, with a garden of roses stretching right along under the gray old church wall. Her life, for a few months at least, was a sweet and shadowed thing; people said afterward—people who had never known her—that they had seen her sitting often in the old church, with her mild eyes looking upward at a great rose window over the porch, while her husband practised for the services on the wheezy old organ; had seen her wandering in her garden among the roses, singing to herself in a subdued voice—the voice of one who has long been forced to be silent, or to subdue any natural mirth that might be in her.

The summer went by, while David Willis played on his organ, and his wife sang among her roses; and with the autumn came a new light in the eyes of the woman—a light as of one who waits and hopes for something. Poor, trembling, wistful creature, what dreams were hers then! What dreams when she sat by her husband’s side in the twilight, looking out over the town where the lights were beginning to twinkle one by one like sleepy eyes! What dreams of a little life that was to recompense her for all she had missed, and all she never could find in any other way! Childish hands were to draw all that mine of tenderness out of her, as no other hands could have done; childish words were to wake echoing words in her dull heart, and stir it to life again. She dreamed tremblingly of all she would do; of all she would teach the child; saw it walking by her side among the roses; fluttered into church proudly, braving the eyes of younger women with the mite beside her.

Those were dreams which never came true. She had waited, through dull and spiritless years, for her chance of life; it was written, in that book which no man shall read, that her life in that fuller sense was to be but a short one. She gave birth to her child—a boy—and knew her fate even before they told her. She sank slowly, drifting out of life with as little effort to retain it as she had shown throughout her days. Almost the last thing she did was to take her husband’s hand, as he sat speechless with grief beside her, and put it to her lips, and draw it up against her cheek.

“We waited—a long time—Davie,” she whispered. “I wish—I might—have—stayed.” She did not speak again; she held his hand in that position until the last breath fluttered out of her lips.

David Willis was utterly incapable of appreciating anything except the magnitude of his loss. He wandered desolately from room to room, picking up things that had belonged to her and putting his lips to them, and weeping, in a hopeless, despairing fashion, like a child. Fortunately for that other child who had been the direct cause of the disaster, there were kindly people about the place who cared for it, and found a nurse for it—a young and healthy woman who had but just lost a child of her own, and who was installed in the house of David Willis at once. From that big house in the newer part of the town came Mr. Robert Carlaw, the brother of the dead woman, hushing his loud and blustering voice a little as he crossed the threshold of the place of mourning.

He had an air with him, this Robert Carlaw; a sense of saying, when he entered a room, that it was something poorer and meaner than before he came; a magnificent air of proprietorship in every one he honoured by a nod or a handshake; the very town through which he walked became, not a sweet and beautiful old place which seemed to have been dropped clean out of the middle ages, but an awkward, badly built little place in which Robert Carlaw was good enough to live. The swing of him was so fine that the skirts of his coat brushed the houses as he went down the street; other passengers humbly took the roadway.

He was very kind and sympathetic with David Willis, with the kindness and sympathy of a patron to a dependent who has suffered a loss; he had scarcely seen his sister since she was a child, and knew absolutely nothing of her. He seated himself in an armchair—the chair which had been hers—opposite to where David Willis sat with his head bowed in his hands; he coughed, with a little shade of annoyance in the cough, as of one who is not receiving proper attention. David Willis looked up without speaking.

“Bad business, this,” said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head which was meant to convey that he referred to what was lying upstairs. “A man feels these things; I know I did. Cut me up dreadfully.”

“Yes,” said David, in a low voice.

“She was never strong, you know,” went on the brother; “not like the others, I mean. And then she married late, which tries a woman, I’m told.”

“Yes,” replied the other again in the same tone.

“She was just the sort that would give in without making what I call a kick for it. Hadn’t half enough of the devil in her. Not a bit like her brother in that respect. Why, I assure you, they’ve positively tried to kill me, half a dozen times; given me over for dead. But they didn’t know Bob Carlaw; he’s always proved one too many for ’em. There’s a lot of life in Bob.”

David Willis got up slowly. “Would you like to see her?” he asked.

“No, no; I don’t think so. It wouldn’t—wouldn’t do any good, and the sight of any one dead always upsets me. No, I don’t think I’ll see her; I only—only called in case I could do anything. A man needs sympathy at such a time.” He got up and took his hat, and swung toward the door. Turning there, he said abruptly, “What about the kid?”

“The——” said David, looking at him blankly.

“The child; is it alive?”

“Yes,” replied David; “doing well, they tell me.”

“Ah—that’s bad—for you, I mean.” He paused a moment, coughed uncomfortably, and stuck his hat sideways on his head; then remembered himself, and took it off and frowned at it. Finally he got out of the door awkwardly, and swung himself out through the garden of the roses and went up the street, trying hard not to whistle.

It was on the day of the funeral that David Willis first seemed to grasp the idea of his responsibility in regard to his infant son. He had had no thought of that before; had listened to the sympathizing remarks of the few friends he had with indifference, and had scarcely appeared to realize that there was a new element in his life at all. He grasped things slowly at all times, and required time to digest them; he had room for nothing else in his mind then but the thought of his loss. The day that saw her committed to the earth in the old churchyard within sight of the garden where she had walked was a day which passed for him like a troubled dream; he had a vague remembrance that people were very kind to him, and helped him, and told him what to do and where to stand. It was while he stood beside the grave that some words from the burial service broke upon his ears as though nothing had been said before; he saw in them something new and fresh and hopeful.

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and——”

He lost all that followed; with those final words came a new thought into his mind. The woman he had loved, for whom he had waited and hungered so patiently, was to sleep her last sleep in that quiet place, to sleep as calmly and as gently as she had lived. But there was something more than this, something to comfort him. God had, after all, been very merciful; so, in his simple mind, he told himself. The poor, frail woman was gone; in her place had come a little child. The words were true; he applied them at once to the baby. “He cometh up—like a flower.” Surely that was true; his eyes brightened as he thought of it; the bitterness fell away from his heart; he almost longed to leave her sleeping there and to get back to the child. He scarcely seemed to have seen the child yet—to know what it was like.

As he crossed the churchyard to his house the thing was forced more clearly and strongly upon him; he saw, with the fine instinct of love, that this was what she would have wished, that the child must grow up to think well of her, and to take her place. A man of rare singleness of life and purpose, he had been capable only of single emotions; and those emotions must, of necessity, be great. His dogged patience in waiting for one woman through all the best years of his life had had in it much of heroism; that was ended, and he turned now to something else to fill his days. The child should do it; the child had been sent for that very purpose. Over and over again the words came back to him, “He cometh up—like a flower.” That was very beautiful; it seemed strange that he had not thought of that before. He dreamed a dream, even as the woman had done, of all that the child was to be to him.

He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against the strange woman’s breast; the woman glanced up at him almost resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little. She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her.

The man touched the baby’s cheek with a hesitating forefinger, and then turned away and walked out of the room. He saw quite clearly how the child would grow up, knowing only him, desiring no one else to fill its world. Before another hour had passed, the solitary man had mapped out the seat the child should take in the house and in church; had wandered in fancy over the fields through which the child should accompany him. There was no disloyalty to the dead woman in all this; the child had sprung out of the woman, in every sense, and took her place quite naturally in the deep heart of the man.

That evening David Willis received an unexpected visitor. The visitor came slowly and timidly, and yet with a certain forced air of defiance upon him, up the garden path, and knocked at the door of the little house. The one servant the house boasted, and who did not sleep there, had gone to her own home at the other end of the town; David Willis opened the door, and stared out into the twilight at the visitor.

The caller was a little man—very alert and very upright, with a tightly buttoned frock coat, and an old-fashioned silk hat with a curly brim. He carried something in one hand behind him. David Willis remembered to have seen him once or twice in the streets, walking very erect, and swinging a cane with a tassel attached to it; and always in church on Sundays, where he occupied a little odd pew in one corner, and gave the responses in a very loud and sonorous voice not at all fitting to his stature. David held the door in one hand, and looked out wonderingly at the little man.

“My name is Garraway-Kyle—Captain Garraway-Kyle—late of her Majesty’s service. You are in trouble, sir, your wife”—he stopped abruptly and coughed and frowned, and tugged at one end of his white mustache with his disengaged hand—“your wife, sir, was good enough to admire my flowers; used to stop sometimes to look at them. I thought perhaps——” His sunburned face took on a deeper tinge, and he brought his hand from behind him and showed a carefully arranged bunch of flowers.

David Willis came out into the little path, and closed the door behind him; his voice was rather unsteady when he spoke. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Would you like me to go with you and point out the—the grave?”

“I know it. I was there this afternoon,” replied the captain, shortly. “But I should like you to come with me.” So the two men went in silence out of the garden, and by the little gate into the churchyard, David Willis having no hat, and the captain carrying his in his hand.

At the grave the captain knelt stiffly, as though it were an effort for him to do so, and put the flowers at the head of the new mound. He remained for nearly half a minute kneeling, and then drew himself up and faced the other. “She was a sweet and gentle woman, sir; I have seen her often; I have ventured to peep over the wall when she was in her own garden. She was very fond of flowers.”

“Yes,” replied David, “very.”

“I wished sometimes that I might have offered her some of mine, the finest garden in the town, sir. But, of course, I did not know her. I am sorry to have had to give them to her like this.”

“You are very good,” said David, softly.

Captain Garraway-Kyle turned away and looked up for a moment at the sombre church which rose above them. “You had not been married long, I think, Mr. Willis?”

“Not quite a year,” replied David.

“Ah! The child lives, I think?”

“Yes.”

They walked back together to the gate which led to the cottage; and there the captain held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said, stiffly; and then, “I am very sorry. By the way—boy or girl?”

“Oh, it’s a boy,” replied David.

The captain had gone a few paces down the street when he turned on his heel and came back again. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Willis, but what will you call him?”

It was almost an idle question, prompted in the captain’s mind for want of something better to say; but it set the old train of thought running in David Willis’s mind as it had run all that afternoon. The words he had heard at the grave-side seemed to sound in his ears again; the sudden thought struck him to give the boy some name that should keep in memory his mother, and the purpose for which he came into the world, and all that he meant to his father. He faced about, and looked at his visitor with a new light in his eyes. “I shall call him ‘Comethup,’” he said, slowly.

“I beg your pardon——” The captain looked a little startled.

“‘Comethup,’” said David again, half to himself. “Yes, that’s the name.”

“Oh, I see; family name, I presume?” said the other.

“Yes,” replied David Willis, “a family name. Good-night.” And he went inside, and sat down in the darkness to think about it.