But she was gone, almost running from the room after a sudden awkward embrace. “Mrs. Willoughby, I can’t express to you how I feel!” Hot, a little roughened, her lips had been like those of a child. “She might be in love with me,” said Sophia, picking up the childish glove, so creased and warm. “Now I suppose she will go home and dash off some verses in her album. For she certainly keeps an album. Poor little creature, she must get out of these sentimental ways if she is to be a doctor’s wife.” And putting away the glove in a drawer, she wrote in her notebook a memorandum that to-morrow a glove must be returned, flowers sent to Mrs. Hervey. Left to herself again, the terrors of her situation — strange that a chit like this should have been able to keep them at bay — thundered back on her again, and God was again a louring cloud, and she must do all she could to establish herself as methodical and undismayed.
The clock struck eleven, its calm silver voice suddenly enlarging the expanse of the empty room. She looked up, raising her forehead from her hand, opening her eyes. She stared about her, searching for a bunch of dying foxgloves in a white jar. Her being had sunk back to the previous night: she was again in the sitting-room of the Half Moon Inn with the lamplight hot on her cold sweating forehead and the moths flying in at the open window, she was locked in the same desperate cold trance. But now she knew what it was that oppressed her so deathlily. Not Caspar’s death, nor her own, but the death of her children had breathed so cold on her. For they would die, they would die! And through what untold stretches of time she must stumble, bearing the load of this knowledge, while yet they lived. Every minute was there to be lived through, methodical as the bricks in a prison wall. There could be no escape from this torment until despair came after it. How long did it take for a child to die of smallpox? A week, perhaps, or longer. Everything would go on, the fields be reaped, fruit ripen, meals appear and be taken away. The grass would grow, stealthily the grass would grow, as it grows on lawns, as it grows on graves. Two days ago, while her children had been quarrelling, the lawn had been mown and its edges sheared. It would need to be mown again, once, twice, before they were dead. For a blade of grass cannot be turned aside, any more than the scythe death swings so steadily, so skilfully. With this to come, with this to endure before its coming, how could she pass the time until the death of her children? There was nothing she could do. Mrs. Kerridge was perfectly qualified, could take charge of everything in the sickroom. The laundrymaid could wash bed-linen, the cook could make gruel, the housemaid empty slops, the scullion scour dishes. Every one else was provided for, had something to do to pass the time, some service to mitigate their care. But for her, the mother, there was nothing. She must wait, idle and alone.
Treading like a thief she went through her house so strange to her, and up the stairs, and along the passage to the night nursery door. A chink of light shone from under it, there was no sound within. They are dead already, she thought, waiting outside. But no, they were asleep, in a sound sleep, the two of them, a sleep that would do them good. Being so well asleep, she might open the door, steal in, look at them? But then they might waken, and the good of their sleep be undone. She must stay outside. Shivering and burning she waited, and down in the hall the clock ticked. Suddenly there was a whimper, a stir, a weak melancholy whining that seemed as though it must go on for ever. She turned the handle, and went in. Mrs. Kerridge, enormous in the candle-light, was bending over Augusta’s cot. She turned, and moved heavily and noiselessly towards the door, her finger to her lips.
“How are they?”
“The boy’s asleep. The girl has just wakened, she’s fretful. But I don’t mind that, that’s a good sign.”
“Let me come to her.”
“No, madam. It’s best not. Maybe she wouldn’t know you. If she did, she’d fret worse. She’s thirsty, you see. Best leave her alone, and she’ll go off again.”
The door was closed upon her, she stood again in the passage, listening to that endless whine. At last, sighing like some oppressed animal, she turned and went obediently downstairs. Stupid with anguish she unlocked the garden door, and walked up and down the lawn, looking at the dim wavering light from the night nursery windows. Once the shadow of Mrs. Kerridge crossed the blind, slow and towering.
It seemed on the morrow that every one she encountered had only two things to say: first, the children’s illness; next, fine weather for the harvest. Even Doctor Hervey, patting his horse’s neck, sunk in a final silence which rebuffed any further question from her, and yet apparently unable to mount and leave her, must needs at last say, “Splendid weather, this. Just what the farmers want. If only it lasts.”
It seemed as though it would last for ever, as though the unmoving air were a block of heat set down on the earth. Time could scarcely press its way through it, the minute-hand of the clock flagged, seemed wavering to a standstill. All the windows stood open, but no refreshment came in. Through the country-side, on the burning upland fields, the harvest was being reaped, the men, stooping, sickle in hand, worked like automatons, only pausing at the hedgerows to gather another handful of docks to plaster under their sweaty shirts. For such God-sent weather as this was not to be wasted. The overseers were among the men, seeing to it that they kept to their labour. To and fro from the cornfields trailed little processions of women, carrying water, or cold tea. Into some fields a farmer might cause a cask of soured cider to be carried. But this was a dubious measure. Though at first the men might seem to work the better for it, by the end of the day half a dozen of the weaker would be lying under the hedge, writhing and powerless with colic.
The trees of the park, heavily mustering, cut off the world of the Aspens from the drought of the working world. Deep in the branches the wood-pigeons cooed. Shoots of iridescent spray filled the greenhouses, the little fountain plashed, at dusk the flower-beds were watered. But thirst was in this world also. From the night nursery sounded the endless weak wail of the children, craving for the water that their treatment denied them. Mrs. Kerridge, who knew everything, knew that fever patients must not be allowed to drink beyond a regulated allowance. A little wine they might have, a little warm soup; but not water lest, the fever being for a moment checked, the eruption should be driven inward.
For five days the heat never slackened, and only on the sixth day did a thin brownish vapour begin to steal up from the westward, muffling the sun as it lowered. With dusk, a furtive wind got up, stirring the hot air. All day long Sophia had been framing in her mind the letter which must be sent to Frederick. It must be sent, it was a matter of propriety, of self-respect. Yet the day was over, and she had not set pen to paper. It was not wounded pride that prevented her. She had more pride than the pride that had been wounded, she was proud as a woman as well as proud as a wife; and woman’s pride knew that it had more to suffer by Frederick’s absence than by his recall. Were he not to come, people would talk, would surmise. Already they must be doing so; their silence before her was the index of how they prated behind her back. That Mrs. Willoughby’s children should be in danger of death and that Mr. Willoughby should remain on the Continent would drag her through a shame far deeper, far more sullying than the private disgrace of having beckoned him to return.
But the summons pride would have sent, envy kept back. Too well she knew what the quality of Frederick’s grief would be; how naturally, how purely his sorrow would run, how spontaneously he would feel all that she must feel with anguish, with difficulty and torment. He would melt, where she must be ground small. His heart’s-blood would run freely, where hers stagnated like old Seneca’s. For as she had given birth to her children, she would lose them: with throe after sickening throe, with effort, and humiliation, with clumsy, furious, disgraceful striving, with hideous afterbirth of all her hopes. But for Frederick it would be all an emotion, a something that afterwards music could call up, or the first snowdrops, or a page of poetry. And lanced for his spirit’s health by the death of his children, he would go back, quiveringly consolable, to be comforted by Minna Lemuel.
But write I will, she said to herself. There was the escritoire, and the inkstand, and the mother-of-pearl blotter which she had used when last she wrote to Frederick. I will write, and Roger shall take in the letter the first thing to-morrow morning. But the room was heavy with her resentment, she would walk in the park a little, to clear her head.
The light shone from the nursery windows, the wailing cry hung on her hearing. She turned her back, and walked swiftly across the parched turf, her glance on the ground, walking without direction. Presently she knew that the glimmer of water was before her. She had come to the boat-house by the lake. A screen of poplars grew beside it, the hot wind stirred them, slightly, raspingly, as though it were a cat’s tongue, licking. Against the piles of the boat-house the water slapped, lightly and rhythmically. Then, in a moment, as though a hand had grasped their trunks and shaken them, the poplars swayed violently, bending almost to earth, struggling to rear again against the grip of air that held them, and a wave, and a second wave, smacked against the echoing boat-house, and staring into the water she saw a brilliant sword of lightning strike up at her.
In a moment the thunder-clap was about her ears. She turned and ran, remembering only her children’s terror of thunderstorms. In the distance between the lake and the house the rain had come, drenching her to the skin. Into the house and up the stairs the lightning pursued her, brandishing before her steps. But the house was silent, they must still be asleep.
As she pushed open the heavy door, a voice came into her hearing.
“Don’t drop me, don’t drop me! I will keep my eyes shut, I promise not to look. Oh! ... Burning! That’s hell, Sister! But I didn’t look, I kept my eyes shut. Don’t drop me! I saw nothing, only those hairy arms. O Devil, don’t drop me.
That’s Satan, you know
. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, thy man-servant and thy maid-servant, thy cattle and all the stranger that is within thy gates. No! For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth ... Don’t drop me, don’t drop me! My mouth’s hot. I looked at hell with my mouth, my mouth’s burning. Hannah! Come and take hell out of my mouth, take it out, I say! And our mouths shall show forth thy praise. For in six days ... Three sixes are eighteen, are eighteen, four sixes are twenty-four, five sixes are hairy. In among the hairs are spots, like little hot mouths. Don’t drop me,
don’t drop me
!”
His hands were fastened, that he might not tear himself to pieces. His face and neck were covered with sores, sores were on his eyelids, sealing up his eyes. His hair stood out, stiff and bristling, as though the fever had singed it. Out of this horrible body, speckled with sores, swollen as though the poison within might at any moment explode it, the clear childish voice bubbled senseless as the tinkle of a fountain.
“Poor little lamb,” said Mrs. Kerridge, tightening the bedclothes with her bleak hands. “It’s wonderful how he keeps on about hell. But they often do, children. Not that they know what they’re talking about, you know, for they don’t. You couldn’t expect that.”
Sophia turned to the other bed. Out of the circle of the candle-light, its semi-darkness was lanced by the quivering blue flare of the lightning. Augusta lay there unstirring, unafraid. Her mouth was open and she snored, and choked with phlegm. As the lightning flickered out and the thunder pealed, putting out the noise of her breath, she seemed to go under like some one drowning, wearily rising to the surface again with the ensuing silence.
Mrs. Kerridge had followed Sophia, and stood behind her, shaking her head slowly.
“She doesn’t fight like her brother do.”
“I was afraid the storm would wake her. She is terrified of thunderstorms.”
Mrs. Kerridge did not answer.
Which of them will die first? The question rose to her lips, but she did not utter it. If the woman could say, she would not speak truly. No one ever spoke the truth in a sickroom. And they would both die, and since die they must, the sooner the better. For already her own children, the children she loved, were dead. This tinkling little maniac, corrupting under her eyes, this snoring choking slug that lay couched so slyly under the lightning, these were not her children. Her own life had ceased in them, they were fever’s children, not hers. Through the smell of the vinegar she could smell the foulness of their disease. “When did I love them last?” she asked herself. “Not when I left them to go to Cornwall. I was ashamed of them then. When Caspar was here, yes, for then they were well. But mostly they have been a care to me, a thing that must always be tended, made allowances for, buttressed up, remedied. Like a wound in me that would never quite heal, that must perpetually be cleansed and dressed. No, I have scarcely ever had time to love them, my mind divided between pitying them as they were and glorifying them as they would be; as they would be when all their ailments and deficiencies were fought through and done with. A devoted mother! That is what I have been, that is what people have said, will say, of me. But devotion is not love. It grovels, fears, forebodes, lies to itself or to others. Devotion is a spaniel’s trick, it is what the animal feeling of a mother turns into when it is cowed. An animal instinct cowed, that is what I have chiefly known. And now that fails me. My children are dying, and all that I can truly say I feel is resentment that I have been made a fool of. Damian’s chatter maddens me, I could not touch either of them without a shudder, though at this moment I could easily lay down my life for them. But that is not love, that is devotion, devotion exasperated to its last act, the spaniel driven mad.”
Mrs. Kerridge’s stare was gradually propelling her from the room. As the door closed she heard Damian’s raving veer back to the lime-kiln again. The sullenness of one unjustly condemned took possession of her thoughts. What a doom, that whatever I have done for the best should turn into whips and scorpions! The lime-kiln that was to cure their whooping-cough is now a hell that he must dangle over, past help of any snatching. The lime-kiln. Under the uproar of the storm she recalled with feverish accuracy every step of that journey: how, setting out, her thoughts had been of that long-ago expedition to see the Duke of Wellington, thoughts turned by the sight of the chestnut tree to an upswelling of maternal pride. She had felt herself stand up, a fortress, drawing out of the earth, out of the past, the nourishment which should feed and forward her ripening children. Dull, brooding, disblossomed, the chestnut had been she. And so they had gone on, walking between the songless July hedges, and over the parched fields, where the hoes had chinked against the flints. Edmunds, leaving his work, had come fawning up, ready to snatch an excuse for idling and gossip even from her austere disapproval. Then leaving the fields, they had gone up the steep track to where the lime-kiln stood on its grassy plateau with the heated air trembling above it. He had been asleep, his head bowed on his knees, his hands dangling; even at their departure, as he had stood watching them go down the lane, he had seemed like one sleep-walking. In his attitude, in his fixed stare, he had been like one beholding a vision, some fixed and grim hallucination of fever. For all his stare, she had thought, it is as though he does not see us. Hannah had gossiped a little about him afterwards. A rough solitary man, she had said, choosing of his own accord that life of uncouth solitude, a stranger from across the county, without kith or kin, and going only to the alehouse to buy a bottle to take away. Yet it was said that women would go to him, stealing to him by night, guided by the red glare of his kiln upon the dark hillside. A foul-living man, Hannah said. Had she not noticed the sores upon his wrists?