Part 43 (1/2)

”Why should that fellow be any more likely now to make her happy--”

”Because he's lost his money and his father? I don't know why he should.

I dare say he'll begin bullying and slave-driving again--when he's forgotten all this. But--”

”But what?”

”Well--you see--I didn't think he could possibly care about anything but himself. I thought he was as hard as a millstone all through. Well, he isn't. That's so queer!”

The speaker's voice took a dreamy tone.

Sorell glanced in bitterness at the maimed hand lying on the bed. It was still bandaged, but he knew very well what sort of a shapeless, ruined thing it would emerge, when the bandages were thrown aside. It was strange and fascinating--to a student of psychology--that Otto should have been brought, so suddenly, so unforeseeably, into this pathetic and intimate relation with the man to whom, essentially, he owed his disaster. But what difference did it make in the quality of the Marmion outrage, or to any sane judgment of Douglas Falloden?

”Go to sleep, old boy,” he said at last. ”You'll have a hard time to-morrow.”

”What, the inquest? Oh, I don't mind about that. If I could only understand that fellow!”

He threw his head back, staring at the ceiling.

Otto Radowitz, in spite of Sorell's admonitions, slept very little that night. His nights were apt to be feverish and disturbed. But on this occasion imagination and excitement made it impossible to stop the brain process, the ceaseless round of thought; and the hours of darkness were intolerably long. Memory went back behind the meeting with the dying man on the hillside, to an earlier experience--an hour of madness, of ”possession.” His whole spiritual being was still bruised and martyred from it, like that sufferer of old whom the evil spirit ”tore” in departing. What had delivered him? The horror was still on him, still his master, when he became aware of that white face on the gra.s.s--

He drowsed off again. But in his half-dream, he seemed to be kneeling again and reciting Latin words, words he had heard last when his mother was approaching her end. He was more than half sceptical, so far as the upper mind was concerned; but the under-consciousness was steeped in ideas derived from his early home and training, ideas of sacrifice, forgiveness, atonement, judgment--the common and immortal stock of Christianity. He had been brought up in a house pervaded by the crucifix, and by a mother who was ardently devout.

But why had G.o.d--if there was a G.o.d--brought this wonderful thing to pa.s.s? Never had his heart been so full of hatred as in that hour of lonely wandering on the moor, before he perceived the huddled figure lying by the stream. And, all in a moment, he had become his enemy's proxy--his representative--in the last and tenderest service that man can render to man. He had played the part of son to Falloden's dying father--had prayed for him from the depths of his heart, tortured with pity. And when Falloden came, with what strange eyes they had looked at each other!--as though all veils had dropped--all barriers had, for the moment, dropped away.

”Shall I hate him again to-morrow?” thought Radowitz. ”Or shall I be more sorry for him than for myself? Yes, that's what I felt!--so marvellously!”

So that when he went to Constance with his news, and under the emotion of it, saw the girl's heart unveiled--”I was not jealous,” he thought.

”I just wanted to give her everything!”

Yet, as the night pa.s.sed on, and that dreary moment of the first awakening earth arrived, when all the griefs of mankind weigh heaviest, he was shaken anew by gusts of pa.s.sion and despair; and this time for himself. Suppose--for in spite of all Sorell's evasions and concealments, he knew very well that Sorell was anxious about him, and the doctors had said ugly things--suppose he got really ill?--suppose he died, without having lived?

He thought of Constance in the moonlit garden, her sweetness, her gratefulness to him for coming, her small, white ”flower-face,” and the look in her eyes.

”If I might--only once--have kissed her--have held her in my arms!” he thought, with anguish. And rolling on his face, he lay p.r.o.ne, fighting his fight alone, till exhaustion conquered, and ”he took the gift of sleep.”

CHAPTER XV

Douglas Falloden was sitting alone in his father's library surrounded by paper and doc.u.ments. He had just concluded a long interview with the family lawyer; and a tray containing the remains of their hasty luncheon was on a side-table. The room had a dusty, dishevelled air. Half of the house-servants had been already dismissed; the rest were disorganised.

Lady Laura had left Flood the day before. To her son's infinite relief she had consented to take the younger children and go on a long visit to some Scotch relations. It had been left vague whether she returned to Flood or not; but Douglas hoped that the parting was already over--without her knowing it; and that he should be able to persuade her, after Scotland, to go straight to the London house--which was her own property--for the winter.

Meanwhile he himself had been doing his best to wind up affairs. The elaborate will of twenty years earlier, with its many legacies and bequests, had been cancelled by Sir Arthur only six weeks before his death. A very short doc.u.ment had been subst.i.tuted for it, making Douglas and a certain Marmaduke Falloden, his uncle and an eminent K.C., joint executors, and appointing Douglas and Lady Laura guardians of the younger children. Whatever property might remain ”after the payment of my just debts” was to be divided in certain proportions between Douglas and his brother and sisters.

The estates, with the exception of the lands immediately surrounding the castle, were to be sold to the tenants, and the dates of the auction were already fixed. For the castle itself, negotiations had been opened with an enormously successful soap-boiler from the north, but an American was also in the market, and the Falloden solicitors were skilfully playing the two big fish against each other. The sale of the pictures would come before the court early in October. Meanwhile the beautiful Romney--the lady in black--still looked down upon her stripped and impoverished descendant; and Falloden, whose sole companion she often was through dreary hours, imagined her sometimes as tragic or reproachful, but more commonly as mocking him with a malicious Irish glee.

There would be some few thousand pounds left for himself when all was settled. He was determined to go into Parliament, and his present intention was to stand for a Merton fellows.h.i.+p, and read for the bar. If other men could make three or four thousand a year within three years or so of being called, why not he? His character had steeled under the pressure of disaster. He realised with a clearer intelligence, day by day, all that had gone from him--his father--his inheritance--the careless ease and self-a.s.surance that goes with the chief places at the feast of life. But if he must now drop to the lower rooms, it would not be ”with shame” that he would do that, or anything else. He felt within himself a driving and boundless energy, an iron will to succeed. There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in measuring himself against the world without the props and privileges he had hitherto possessed. He was often sore and miserable to his heart's depths; haunted by black regrets and compunction he could not get rid of. All the same it was his fixed resolve to waste no thoughts on mere happiness. His business was to make a place for himself as an able man among able men, to ask of ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the sharpening of brain on brain, the satisfaction he had once hoped to get out of marriage with Constance Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great wealth.

He turned to look at the clock.

She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, the only beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means of escape during a dreary fortnight from his peevish co-executor, who was of little or no service, and had allowed himself already to say unpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother's son.

It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently.