Part 14

"I hear you are kind to everybody. All Slowshire sings your praises."

Archibald shook his head, wondering whether Betty would mention the sermon. He was burning with impatience to try on, so to speak, some of its phrases, to watch the effect of them on a woman who had listened to the Gamaliels of the day. Betty possessed sincerity, imagination, sympathy. These would flow freely at the touch of a friend's hand.

"If it would not bore you," he said, "I should like to talk over the Windsor sermon. You can help me----"

"I? Help--you?"

"You can, indeed"; his voice grew eager. "Whatever I say will be the fresher and purer if it passes through your mind before it is given to the world."

"My mind _is_ a sort of filter." She laughed. None the less she was pleased and flattered. Archibald began to speak in a soft monotone. Betty half closed her eyes and the lines of her figure slightly relaxed beneath the caressing inflections of the speaker's voice. Whenever Archie sang she was affected in the same way. A languor overcame her. For the moment she was not attempting to grasp the meaning of his words, which, even as inarticulate sounds, possessed value and significance. But, soon, she opened her eyes wide and sat up. By this time Archie was at the core of his theme, and his treatment of it was so masterly that Betty found herself thrilling with surprise and delight. A few minutes before life had seemed empty. Now it was full again, brimming over, bubbling, with possibilities swelling from shadow into substance. Archie, be it remembered, was not preaching the sermon. He was rather submitting the material, the tissues, the threads, the patterns, out of which a fine piece of work had been already fashioned. Now and again Betty was invited to choose, to select, out of these wares some one which pleased her fancy. She realised that Archie had more of Mark in him than she had deemed possible. Once or twice she seemed to hear Mark's eager tones.

"You say that like Mark."

"Has Mark talked to you on this theme?"

"Oh, no," Betty replied, "but he pours out his ideas, as you do."

"Mark and I have talked about this. He helped me. He always does."

Archie spoke hesitatingly, on the edge of full confession. He had a genuine desire to tell Betty the truth. The words formed on his lips.

"Yes, yes," said Betty absently. "Mark has helped me too, many a time; but he's in Sutherland." Her voice became cold as she recalled his letter. "I feel as if he were at the North Pole! Well, Archie, I've enjoyed our talk immensely."

"And when may I come to talk to you again?"

"You are not going--now?"

The "now" brought a sparkle to his eyes.

"I must. I'm one of the busiest men in Westchester."

"I shall run down to Windsor to hear your sermon," she said.

"Our sermon, Betty."

"That's rubbish. You must never pay me compliments, Archie. I couldn't stand them from you----" she broke off, irrelevantly: "How did you attain to your pinnacle? I suppose you've been climbing ever since we were children. It's quite wonderful. Don't come Friday or Saturday. Jim will be here. Poor, rich Jim! What do you think of Jim?"

Archie remembered, in the nick of time, what Mark had said about not abusing Jim.

"I think what you think," he said slowly. "Poor, rich Jim!"

After he had gone, Betty picked no more roses, but sat down on the bench, feeling rather forlorn. Archibald had taken something away with him. What it was she could not define precisely. For instance--was it Jim's character? He had said nothing. Nothing--except her own words: "Poor, rich Jim." Jim had been his friend, although the men had now little in common. Of course, he would not speak unkindly of an old schoolfellow. Yet as a preacher of Christ's gospel, he must in his heart rank Jim amongst Christ's enemies. Jim was not with Christ. He did not believe in Christ. The conclusion was obvious: he must be counted as an enemy. An enemy? Poor Jim!

She was still thinking of Jim, when his mother came towards her. She seemed to ascend the grass slope with difficulty; so Betty ran forward to offer an arm, which was accepted. As they moved slowly on, Betty glanced at the quiet face so near her own. Again, curiosity devoured her. She observed a faded look which she tried to interpret. Did it spell disappointment? Were the last draughts of life proving bitter? Perhaps she felt that her work was done, that her little world would wag on without her. They sat down, and Mrs. Corrance produced her needle, her silks, and a piece of embroidery from the old-fashioned velvet bag, which she always carried on her arm. Betty, who never sewed, wondered if the day would ever dawn when she would find solace in such trivial occupations. Then Mrs. Corrance asked for news of Mark. After that was told, silence fell on both: the silence which precedes the breaking of barriers. Then Betty said softly: "Are you glad that you have lived--or sorry?"

The frail hands, poised above the delicate embroidery, sank upon it, and remained still, while faint lines of interrogation puckered the placid forehead. Betty continued: "I ought not to ask such questions. I rush in like a fool. But then I am a fool, although I long to be wise. There is so much a girl like me wants to know, but if you tell me to hold my tongue I shall not be surprised or offended."

"I'm glad that I have lived, Betty."

"That is because you have loved. Your love for Jim has filled your life, ever since I have known you. If--if--oh, I am ashamed to put it so brutally--but if you lost Jim, or if Jim had never been born--what then?"

"My dear, you press me too hard. I can hardly conceive of life without Jim," she smiled. "He came when all was dark, and there has been light for me--ever since."

"When all was dark----" repeated Betty. She knew that Jim's father had died when Jim was a small boy.

"Yes. My married life was not happy. Perhaps I expected too much, as is the way with women; perhaps it was not meant that I should be happy."

"Not _meant_?" Betty spoke with impatience. "Surely the design, the intention, includes happiness, only we mar it."

"All young people think that," said Mrs. Corrance, "but as we grow older we see so little real happiness that we must believe, if we believe in the mercy of God, that, save for the few, happiness on earth is not to be enjoyed but earned rather, so that it may be enjoyed, without alloy, hereafter. And I believe that to everyone a glimpse of happiness is vouchsafed. Were it not for that, how many would struggle on?"

Betty asked no more questions. The youth in her rebelled against this placid acceptance of suffering and strife. She told herself that she had enormous capacity for enjoyment. Politics, literature, history, sport: all were fish to her net. But religion, and in particular that concrete presentation of it by the Church of England, had, so far, left her cold. She seemed to have touched but its phylacteries, out of which came no virtue. She had met many clever men who confessed themselves agnostic. Her kind friend, Lady Randolph, never spoke of religion, either in its wide or narrow sense. Certainly she did her duty without aid or formulae. In fact, when Betty came to think of it, some freethinkers of her acquaintance lived more Christian lives than many Churchpeople who took the Sacrament every Sunday. This was puzzling. On the other hand, the life she had led since the Admiral's death, the life of Mayfair, of big country houses, of race-meetings, of perpetual pleasure-seekings, had begun to pall. The grandmothers--some of them--who gambled, and made love, and over-ate themselves, revolted her. That they were at heart discontented and unhappy she could not doubt. Finally, she had just come to the trite conclusion that, in or out of the fashionable world, the people least to be pitied were those who had some definite object in view. Politics, for instance, had probably saved Lord Randolph from the hereditary curse of his family; fox-hunting made Harry Kirtling ride straight and walk straight; Jim Corrance admitted that money-grubbing kept him out of mischief. These pursuits, however, led to negative results: being preventive of evil, not productive of good, except indirectly. Mark Samphire not only avoided evil, but did good, as dozens were eager to testify, including herself. When with Mark she had always been conscious of his power to bring out the good in her. And this afternoon, listening to Archie, she had felt the same thrill, the same irresistible yearning to ascend, to scale the heights. None the less, she was whimsically aware, being a creature of sense as well as sensibility, that Mark cast a glamour. She loved him, and, loving him, loved what he loved, tried to see Heaven's wares with his eyes, and succeeded, so long as the magician remained at her side. When he was at work in Whitechapel and she was shopping in Bond Street, Heaven, somehow, seemed distant. At such times she looked at a set of sables or a diamond ornament with a pleasure which proved that the clay within her was very far from being purged.

Upon the following Saturday, when Jim asked her to become his wife, to share the fortune which would be no fortune without her, she said No, as kindly as words and looks could say it. Her distress at the pain she inflicted touched him profoundly.

"I shall remain your pal, Betty," Jim declared. "The other thing was always a forlorn hope. Is it any use saying that I have known for years that I wasn't first, and that I was sanguine enough to believe that if the first failed, I might be second? Isn't half a loaf better than no bread, dear?"

She let him take her hand, but she turned aside eyes full of tears.

"We'll go on as before. The mater needn't know--eh? It has been a great thing for her having you here."

"And a great thing for me," said Betty unsteadily. "I wish I could marry you, dear old Jim, but I can't--I can't."

She broke down, sobbing bitterly. Jim patted her hand, wondering what he could say to comfort her, but the words which came into his head seemed inadequate. If he had taken her face between his strong hands, kissed away her tears, and sworn passionately that he would love and cherish her so long as she lived, she might have changed a mind which was less strong than her body. While she sat weeping beside him, she was thinking not so much that she had lost Mark, but that she had lost love. The woman within her groaned, the flesh and blood protested. She saw herself as in a vision, treading the dreary years alone, with no strong arm to protect and defend, with no tiny hands to cling to and caress her. And at the end of the pilgrimage stood old age, grim and grey, carrying a sprig of rue in palsied shrivelled hands!

*CHAPTER XXI*

*RECUPERATION*

Mark went North with David Ross convinced that his months, if not his days, were numbered; but as time passed, this conviction passed with it, and hope once more fluttered into his heart. Stride took extraordinary interest in his case.

"You must become an animal and remain an animal till I give you leave to assume again the man," he told Mark after Archibald had left Crask. "I don't know what you and your brother have been up to, but you've had a relapse. You must go on all-fours till I tell you to walk upright."

Mark promised, but he added: "I feel an animal--an ass!"

Stride growled out something about dead lions, and set Mark to work in the garden, bare-legged and bare-headed. The work was light, but it strained every muscle in Mark's body. Then he was made to lie down in one of the sheds. After such rest came refreshment--easily digested, nourishing food, taken in small quantities, but often. During this month Mark reckoned that he was sleeping fourteen hours out of the twenty-four. At the end of each week Stride weighed him and applied a number of tests to determine what strength he had gained. There was a sort of rivalry between the patients. Dick who had gained two pounds crowed over Tom who had gained one. Into this competition Mark entered with boyish keenness. Stride said he was the star pupil of the class.

By the beginning of October, a radical improvement had taken place. The cold weather set in sharply, but Mark, always susceptible to atmospheric change, braved the frosty nights with impunity, sleeping in the sheds with the winds howling about him. He had the confidence in Stride that a well-trained dog has in his master. Some of Stride's "animals"--as he called them--proved at first unmanageable. Coming, as most of them did, from the strenuous life of crowded cities, accustomed to and yearning for the stimulus of constant mental action, such stagnation as Stride enforced seemed insupportable. These kittle cattle were yoked for a season with Mark.

Meantime he had received many letters from his friends, but none from Betty, who had returned to Lady Randolph. Jim wrote that he had been rejected, but made no mention of Archibald, who was often seen crossing the downs between Westchester and Birr Wood. As a matter of fact, Jim was not aware of these rides. He remained in London making money. From Pynsent Mark learned of the enthusiasm aroused by Archibald's Windsor sermon.

"Reading in the paper" (he wrote) "that your brother was preaching in St. George's Chapel, I went down to Windsor yesterday to hear him. He is quite amazing. What he said and the way he said it took us by storm. The Whitsuntide sermon gave only a taste of his quality. Out of the pulpit he has always struck me as being the typical English parson of means and position; in it he is--_apostolic_! I can find no other adjective to describe his persuasiveness, sincerity, and power. Lord Randolph tells me that it made a profound impression in the highest quarter. I saw Betty Kirtling and Lady Randolph in the knights' stalls...."

Mark thrust the letter into his pocket with an exclamation which made the man working next to him raise his brows.

"Anything wrong, Samphire? No bad news, I hope?"

Mark blurted out the truth. His companion, broken down by hard work in Manchester, had sympathetic eyes and lips which dropped compassion upon all infirmities save his own.

"I've had good news, Maitland: my brother has preached a great sermon at Windsor, and--and there is something wrong with me. I have the damnable wish that he'd failed--as I failed." Then he laughed harshly, bending down to pick up his spade.

That afternoon he climbed the mountain, which sloped steeply to the loch. The air, he felt, on the top of Ben Caryll would purge and purify; the panoramic view would enlarge the circle of his sympathies. And so it proved, although a materialist might assign another cause. When Mark reached the highest peak he became aware that he had accomplished a feat of physical endurance beyond such powers as he possessed two months before. He was not aware of undue fatigue; on the contrary, a strange exhilaration permeated mind and body. He could have danced, but he sat down, soberly enough, and reread Pynsent's letter. When he had done this, he tried to transport himself to Windsor. He wanted to sit with Betty in the knights' stalls, beneath the gorgeous silken banners, and the emblazoned shields of the princes of the world, under the eye and aegis of a living sovereign. But fancy left him--in Sutherland. He gazed upon moor and mountain whitened here and there by snow. He looked into the pale, luminous skies above, into the frosty opalescent mists to the westward, through which the sun glowed like a red-hot ball, and wherever he looked Betty was not. For the moment he could not recall her face. It seemed as if he were seeking a stranger with a written description of her in his hand.

Sitting there, some voice whispered to him that Betty wanted him, that he must descend the mountain and go to her. Then he told himself that he was mad. If he obeyed this beguiling voice in his ears, if he went south--what then? The hope in his eye and heart would kindle like hope in her, and such hope was a will-o'-the-wisp flickering above--a grave!

When he came down from the mountain, he found Stride busy in his laboratory. Stride possessed a magnificent Zeiss microscope and all the accessories--incubating ovens, sterilising apparatus, stains, and reagents--for the highest bacteriological work. Of late, Mark had given the little man some help in staining and mounting preparations.

"We are out of one world," Stride had said, "but I will introduce you to another through an apochromatic lens. You will find yourself quite at home, my friend. Here, in this drop of water, you will note the same struggle for existence, the same old game as it is played in Whitechapel or Whitehall."

When Mark began to understand something of the technique of the microscope, when Stride had shown him its uses, for instance, in the analysis of diseased tissue or blood, and revealed its magical powers of diagnosis, Mark asked a question: "How can any doctor work without one?" Stride laughed at such innocence.

"It takes up too much time. No hard-working practitioner ignores the value of it, but he cannot use it. When necessary, he sends preparations to some specialist. A microscope exacts more attention than a wife. That is why I"--he slapped his chest and winked furiously--"have remained single."

This devotion to his work strengthened the chain which linked patient to doctor. Stride--Mark felt assured--might have secured fame and fortune in London. Yet he chose to remain unknown and poor in Sutherland.

Mark told him that he had climbed Ben Caryll, and felt none the worse for it. Stride shook his big head.

"You oughtn't to attempt such walks--yet."

"Then the time is coming. I shall regain my health?"

He had never put the question so directly before. Stride eyed him attentively, hearing a new note in his voice.

"Per--haps."

"If I asked for leave of absence----"

"It would be refused--peremptorily," said Stride. "Why, man, you'd douse the glim which I've been coaxing into flame all these weeks. What magnet draws you from Crask? A woman?"

"Yes--a woman."

"Oh, these tempestuous petticoats! Now, Samphire, I'm not a fool, and I guessed, when you came here, that you left a girl behind you. You are not engaged to her?"

"No."

"Good! Now, listen to wisdom. If everything goes well with you--if fresh air and simple food and freedom from worry make you whole, you may marry some day--but you'll have to wait a long time, so as to make sure, and even then, after years of comparative health, you may break down again. Will this young lady wait for you--indefinitely?"

"I should never ask her to do that."

"Um! I daresay she's flirting with someone at this very minute. Eh? I beg pardon, Samphire. Your goddess, no doubt, is an exception; but few women, if they are women, can get along without a man. And now you must leave me. I'm on the edge of a small discovery. I've done some good work to-day."

"Your good work will tell, Stride."

"What d'ye mean? Recognition? If it comes, so much the better; if it doesn't, I've had 'the joy of the working'--eh?"

Next day, a letter from Archibald gave many details. He had enjoyed the honour of meeting his Sovereign, who said gracious things; he had dined with a Cabinet Minister; he had been interviewed at length by a reporter. The letter concluded as follows:--

"I cannot doubt that my sphere of influence and activity is about to be enlarged. If so, I shall count upon your help. I am deeply grateful for what you have done already. I recognise in you, my dear, dear brother, an insight into human life and character wider than my own. You have come into contact with what is primal and elemental: an experience lacking as yet to me. I have spoken of this to all our friends, acknowledging frankly my debt to you...."

Mark's smile, when he read these lines, was not easy to interpret, but the sense that, for a brief hour, he had grudged his own flesh and blood a triumph, made him reply cordially and affectionately. He ended his letter by assuring Archibald that such help as one brother could give another would always be at his disposal.

About this time, feeling stronger day by day, he began to wonder what work he should do in the future. Stride was emphatic that life in the East End would mean a return of his malady. Not being able to preach, a country curacy was unavailable; and in any case Mark told himself that such work would be distasteful. Stride startled him by saying abruptly, "Why don't you write?"

"Eh?"

"It's in you, I'll swear. It would be only a crutch, at first, but you have private means. You can write out-of-doors. You will be your own master. You can take proper care of yourself...." Stride waxed eloquent, and Mark listened with a curious exaltation.

"By Jove!" he said, drawing a deep breath, "I believe I can write."

"Everybody writes nowadays," said Stride, "but I have the feeling that you can write what a lot of us will want to read. Think it over!"

Mark thought it over for a week. Ideas inundated his brain, clamouring for expression. He begged permission to try his hand at a short story: four thousand words. Stride gave a grudging consent.

"Mind you," said he, "you're not fit for any sustained mental exertion, but go ahead--full steam, if you like, and we'll see what will happen."

Mark wrote his story, and submitted both it and himself to the autocrat. This was a week later, and the scales proclaimed a loss of two pounds. Stride pursed up his lips and waggled his big head.

"Back you go to the garden to-morrow," he growled. "I'll read your stuff to-night, and tell you what I think of it. It's almost certain to be rubbish."

In the morning, however, he had nothing but praise for the author, whose mind was by no means as familiar to him as his body. He beamed and gesticulated as if he had discovered a new bacillus. The story was despatched to an editor, Arthur Conquest, whom Stride knew, and Mark was enjoined to think no more about it. Think about it he did, naturally. The possibility of doing good work in a new field filled him once more with the ardours of youth. He told Stride there was a certain inevitableness about his failures. What had gone before--all trials and disappointments--were part of a writer's equipment. He could not doubt that he had found at last a strong-box, so to speak, for such talents as he possessed. Action had been denied him, articulate speech was not his, the power of putting a noble conception on to canvas he lacked; but he could, he would, he should write according to the truth that was in him, so help him God!

Stride warned him that the odds were greatly against his manuscript being accepted. The editor, however, read the story himself, and promised to publish it. His letter contained a message to Mark.

"Will you tell Mr. Samphire" (wrote Conquest) "that I am going to red-pencil his story, which I take to be a first attempt. He must serve his apprenticeship, which in his case needn't be a long one. I can see that he sets for himself a high standard. If he means business I should advise him to write a novel and burn it. When he comes to town, I hope to make his acquaintance."

"Conquest is cold-blooded," said Stride, "but he has a prescient eye. All the same, if you have business dealings with him--look out! And now--go back to your cabbages."

Mark told Maitland what had passed. Maitland entered with sympathy into his plans, confessing that he had tried writing as a trade.

"Grub Street is a long lane with no turning in it for nine-tenths of the foot passengers. I hope you'll gallop down it, Samphire, not crawl as I did."