Part 8

We were at Bideford when I put him into short frocks and kept flannel next his skin and looked round for a second-hand perambulator. He was always ailing at this stage, and frightfully fretful, owing to a complication of disorders. He had whooping-cough and a slight touch of congestion of the lungs, and measles and a sore throat. His teeth worried him terribly, too. God alone knows what was happening to them. The process put the poor old man to evident torment, and to hear him say again and again: "Oh, ganny, my toofs _is_ hurtin’ me so," would have made angels weep. For all I know it did. The celestial being who could gaze unmoved at Daniel Dolphin’s sufferings during those last, awful, loathsome years of his earthly life would have been hard-hearted indeed. And heaven must have pitied me a trifle too--especially at Bideford, after I had put him into short frocks.

When he was one hundred and nine and three-quarters--when but three months remained before the climax--he lost the art of walking and talking about the same time. He seemed easy to manage without these accomplishments. I certainly missed his childish prattle as it gradually dwindled and ceased, but when command of locomotion slipped from him my work was much lightened. As a young child he had been very trying; now, on the dawn of babyhood, he enjoyed better health and got prettier to look at, at least, so it struck me. Indeed, he gradually grew to be the dearest, best-tempered little mite any woman ever loved and cuddled. I thought how proud his dear mother must have been of him more than a century ago. I also marvelled that so bonny a babe should have blossomed into such a funny child, and such an unsatisfactory man. Of course, I was led by appearances myself now. I could not revere the aged man I danced on my knee and fondled and hugged. I could not realise that this blue-eyed, thumb-sucking, crowing, kicking atom was my grandfather. My imagination was not equal to the task of grasping these facts. I only know that we lurked at Basingstoke three weeks, and then at Brixton; and that I lived night and day for grandfather, as his sun sank to the setting. I took him for long rides in his perambulator, and looked to his every want and joyed in his innocent, little, waning life. His curls went at Clapham Junction; the short, lanky locks of a year-old infant soon covered his bulbous skull; his proportions were those of tenderest youth. An awful expanse of brow and a triangular mouth had appeared; his nose had dwindled to a mere upturned lump, his eyes assumed the fatuous blear and blink of babyhood; he gasped and he gurgled, and jerked and panted, and stretched out fat fingers to me. He was always good-tempered to the last, though his intervals of weeping grew longer and longer. One thing he never could stand: my singing. When his first teeth were undergoing some unhallowed metamorphosis he had a succession of very bad nights, and at such times, until I realised the facts, I endeavoured to soothe him with musical lullabies. But I soon found my voice exercised a peculiarly irritating effect on grandfather. He had not enjoyed it even in the past, so I ceased from vocal efforts and never sang again.

Anon we went to Kilburn, when grandfather had but one year left to live by the New Scheme and rather more than five weeks by the old. Then he began to play with his toes, and that was the beginning of the end.

*CHAPTER XXIV.*

_*THE PASSING OF GRANDPAPA.*_

I shall not set down here the hard words hurled at me by different lodging-house keepers, who took it upon themselves to criticise my management of grandfather. Because, for instance, I persisted in feeding him latterly on condensed milk, instead of wasting money upon a wet nurse, I was unmercifully abused. But I went my way, and soon had him in long frocks, and took him from Kilburn to Ravenscourt Park. Here I was accused of being a baby-thief, because I explained as usual that the infant’s parents were in India.

"Its ma must be a pretty quick traveller then," said the sceptical landlady. "That hinfant ain’t a day more than three weeks old, or I’m no judge."

She was nearly right. It wanted now but one month to make grandfather a hundred and ten or nothing at all. It was, in fact, twenty-nine days before he was born, or after, according as you look at it. I got very muddled over his age about this time myself. I only remembered the date of his birthday, and realised that on the night before that anniversary the New Scheme would come to an end. The old man was now a mere hairless, blotchy, howling fragment, needing ceaseless attention at all hours of night and day. A bitter thought often came to me while I was getting his bottle--that my tiny grandfather should be going to such an unsatisfactory place so soon. For I never could believe, despite what the lawyers said, that his fiendish opponent had made any radical blunder in the agreement.

As the long days followed each other I became overstrung and hysterical, and felt that a very little more of it would send me mad. I let grandpapa drop out of his perambulator one day in Ravenscourt Park, where I had taken him for an airing. Of course, he screamed as only a frightened baby can, and attracted the attention of a policeman. The constable merely addressed me good-humouredly, but a ribald crowd collected in no time. Boys chaffed, women cried shame on me; an officious old fool, who said he belonged to some institution for the Prevention of Brutality to Infants in Arms, insisted on taking my address. I gave it to him, trundled grandfather home, and moved to Turnham Green the same evening. At our new lodgings I told the truth for once, and said grandfather’s poor mother was dead. The landlady here was young, and had a baby of her own, and showed me great kindness and sympathy. She prophesied all manner of hopeful things for grandfather, but feared that I should never live to see him grow up. There were reasonable grounds for such a doubt, for I was now much more than my age, and growing somewhat infirm. The last ten years had added not less than thirty to my own life. I looked pretty nearly eighty now, and felt considerably older.

A feeling of awe and horror daily gained ground upon me at this season. I was haunted by the thought of that awful night so close at hand, and I pictured a thousand terrors. I strung myself up to the task of facing the future alone, but I would have given all I possessed to feel that during those supreme last moments some fellow-creature--a medical man or one of the clergy for choice--would be with me. But I had kept my poor grandfather’s secret for ten years, and meant keeping it to the end. The final problem, however, was quite full of horrid possibility. One night I thought of an idea that made me turn goose-flesh all over. What if on the expiring of the New Scheme grandfather should revert to the old? What if on the morning of his hundred and tenth birthday, instead of finding nothing in his cradle, I should rise and be confronted with the withered remains of a centenarian? Of course, it would not matter much to grandfather, but an event of that kind must leave me in a dilemma, beside which the New Scheme itself was a mere child’s problem. What would the landlady say? What would anybody say? I determined that no one should have half a chance to say anything. It was merely justice to myself. I arranged a programme for that last night. The time of the year was late June, the weather beautiful, so a week before the end I took train to North London. I made up my mind to spend the last night of grandfather’s life quite alone with him on the wilds of Hampstead Heath. Then, if he suffered any further outrageous transformation at the last, I could just leave him there, and he would be found and duly buried after a coroner’s inquest, and I could put flowers on the grave anonymously afterwards. If, on the other hand, he simply went out, I should be able to rejoin my boxes, which would be waiting at the nearest railway station, and go upon my way unsuspected. If he suddenly disappeared in a lodging-house, it seemed clear to me that I should probably be arrested on suspicion of murder. I took two rooms not far from the Heath, and watched grandfather’s last week pass away in ceaseless wailing. Then came the night before his birthday. That evening I gave up the lodgings, sent my boxes to the station, and after a meat tea and the first dose of stimulant I had taken for a year, went forth to the final scene. Every seat upon Hampstead Heath that night seemed to be engaged by parties of two. The daylight waned slowly. Not until nine o’clock did the moonlight begin to grow strong enough to throw shadows. By ten it flooded the Heath with soft grey light. The scene was extremely peaceful; it even soothed to some slight extent the chaos in my heart. Grandfather slept. He had been unusually silent all day. He had shrunk, of course, to a mere red, new-born atom now. I had him snugly in a bundle all done up with safety pins. I remember wondering, even at that solemn time, how the Devil would be able to get grandfather out of that bundle without undoing the pins.

About eleven o’clock I threw his bottle away, for I knew he would never want it again. It was a beautiful night for the passing of grandpapa. I only hoped and prayed that he _would_ pass, and have done with it. I rambled about in the shadows cast by the moon, and peeped from time to time into the blanket I carried to see if anything was happening to grandfather; but he nestled there, silent and wide awake. I shivered as I looked into his round, open eyes, bright with moonlight. There was an unutterably weird expression in them, for they had intelligence once more; they were the eyes of a thinking being. It would hardly have surprised me at that moment if he had spoken and exchanged ideas with me. But he kept deadly silence, looking out of his blanket with those round moon-lit eyes that haunt me still. And then a strange thing happened. Despite my agitation, and the fact that I was now shaking with excitement, and suffering from palpitation of the heart, a great longing for sleep crept over me. I yearned to close my eyes; an astounding feeling, almost approaching indifference, rose within me. I actually heard myself saying, "I must sleep, I must sleep; it won’t make any difference to him." I fought against the overpowering drowsiness, being sure that it was simply sent by some malevolent, supernatural power, in order to prevent me from being in at the finish, so to speak. But my efforts were unavailing. As a distant church clock chimed half-past eleven, I sank down at the top of a bank under some gorse bushes, and the last action of which I am conscious was that I drew grandfather close to me and put my arms tight round him--those poor old arms that had been of some use to him in the past, but were powerless now.

Doubtless I slept for half-an-hour. Then I was awakened suddenly by the wail of a new-born babe. I sat up wildly. The bundle with grandfather in it was not in my arms. It had apparently rolled to the bottom of the bank. But even as I rose to struggle after it, the shrill cry of the infant changed to the mumbling groan of one infinitely old, and across the gorse bushes, in the haze of the moonlight, I saw the passing of grandfather. Whether the vision came out of my own brain, or was actually visible to my eyes, I cannot say. All I remember is that I distinctly heard my name, "Martha, Martha!" called twice in weak but frenzied accents, and saw an old, bent figure, with the moonbeams shining on its bald head, move across the light. It was stretching thin, bony fingers out towards me, and wringing its hands at the same time. I struggled to reach it, but suddenly grew conscious of something that came between--something formless and unutterable. There was a laugh in the air, harsh, unearthly, like a parrot’s. It died away, and the echo of a moan seemed to crawl as though alive through the high gorse. Then there was silence, and I, with my hands groping in front of me, fell forward unconscious.

I cannot have been insensible for very long, as facts proved. When I recovered again the moon still shone brightly, but the east already trembled with dawn, and it was cold. I staggered down the bank to where the baby’s cry had come from, and there lay the bundle, just as I had clasped it to my heart. I opened it; it was still warm as a nest from which the sitting bird has just flown; but it was empty. At the moment I awoke I must have missed grandfather’s birth or death, or departure or arrival, by the fraction of a second. I searched frantically round for him; I tore my face and my gloves in the furze and briars; I raised my voice and shrieked to him, and fell on my knees and prayed for him; but under my mad frenzy there throbbed a thought that spoke to me coldly and told me he was gone--clean gone, and vanished away for ever.

Presently I found a vacant seat, where I sat and collected myself. I dried the blood from a thorn scratch across my face, brushed the mud from my dress, and then, as a golden dawn flashed over the dew and woke the birds, I crawled away towards the railway station. A train for working men went at five, but I had to wait an hour and a half for it, and the time dragged. Every moment I expected to hear grandfather’s cry, and once I found my foot mechanically rocking his cradle. Then they opened the station, and I took a ticket to Baker Street, and saw my two boxes labelled, and went back into the world--alone.

* * * * *

I have set this narrative out with my own hand, and left it in safe keeping. When I am gone, and not sooner, I have directed that it shall be given to my fellow creatures. There is nothing more to add. For my own part, I am passing the fag-end of my life in seclusion--unknown, forgotten. So I would have it. I recently put up a cenotaph to grandfather’s memory in the little village church which I regularly attend. There can be no harm in that. I still think the old man was most unfairly treated, and I shall not hesitate to say so hereafter if opportunity ever offers. As for my own dismal part in probably the most awful tragedy earth’s annals ever recorded, I need say nothing. Those ten ghastly, sunless years are always with me, and I should have hesitated before adding another sad book to the many in the world, but that I hold it my duty to record these facts. My object is that a materialistic age may be confounded, that those who do not believe in the principalities and powers by which mankind is secretly led and guided, blinded and befooled, may pause and reflect before they find themselves meshed in some muddling devil’s web, from which there is no escape.

If an outrage of this sort can happen once, it may again. Who is safe?

FINIS.

PLYMOUTH: WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, PRINTERS.

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