Part 20

He did not care to affront such scenes as he had gone through at Beverley any more, and he took his name off the Committee. He stayed at home and spent this dreary, uneventful time mostly in wandering about the house followed by the dog, who had grown attached to him. It generally lay at his feet in the hall while he sat on one of the yellow chairs, reading papers endlessly, smoking far more than was good for him. Thus he caught the doctor, on his way through the outer hall to see Phillis. The doctor generally nodded kindly, but did not stop, there was nothing to say about Phillis; she was going on well, and Adelaide did not expect to be confined for a couple of months or so. The nurse flitted by on her screw soles, going up and downstairs, and taking no notice of the solitary man. He never saw Gertrude at all.

He was thinking seriously of going away from High Walls for a time, until Phillis was quite well, and Mary had come back, and he had got as far as the handling of _Bradshaw_ and the turning of the page marked Continental Trains, when one day the nurse chose suddenly to leave the orbit in which she generally travelled, between the red baize door into the servants’ quarters and the staircase that led up into Phillis’s sick room, and came straight up to Wald Ensor. The deflection of the moon from her course could not have surprised him more. She spoke.

“I beg your pardon, Sir, but have I your permission to take Dr. Hodgson to see Mary?”

Her eyes drooped and seemed to look down both sides of her nose. With her white cap like a frontlet, her brown hair fluffed out in ascetic waves over her forehead, she was not altogether an unprepossessing woman. She was looking down at him, her lips were coldly pursed, and Ensor felt just as he had felt in the Beverley Committee-room.

“Certainly, Nurse,” he stammered, “But Mary, is she at home?”

“She is at home, Sir, and in my opinion very unwell.”

“What is the matter with her? I want to know. Mary is a special pet of mine.”

The lame, absurd words came broken from his lips.… He was not thinking of what he was saying. He was overwhelmed by an avalanche of doubts. Adelaide had lied to him.… “Hasn’t Mary been away at all?” he stammered.

The nurse raised her eyes, and gave him one straight winged glance.… She had strong black eyebrows that met across her nose, and a pout that was determined.

“She may have been. Not that I know of.…” Her nose was in the air. “Will you see her, Sir?” she ended more kindly. “Perhaps you would like to know how she is for yourself.”

“Yes,” he replied. “I should indeed. But I understood she had been sent away to the sea for her health? Let us go.… I don’t know where she sleeps, when she is at home.…”

“You shall see, Sir, if you will come with me.”

Her calmness was only a mask, Ensor felt; the quiet words covered an indignation that nearly broke through her professional reserve. She was boiling over with rage. She walked through the red baize door with an assured step, never turning or looking round at the shamefaced man who followed her with humble, downcast head, his morning paper still crumpled up in his hand.

The red baize door marked the transition between the oldest and most modern parts of the house. Ensor had never been up the second and original staircase which led to the attics, and it was these that Nurse Ferrier now proceeded to mount. It was rather dark everywhere, for a heavy shower was impending, the first few drops of which had fallen before they left the part of the house where the windows were bigger. The stairs were uncarpeted, low and uneven. They led up to wide, emaciated corridors, whose panelling was worm-eaten, pale with age and desuetude. Low doors, plumb in the wall, opened into many rooms, at each of which in turn Ensor expected the nurse to stop and enter.

Another flight of stairs, leading to just such another corridor! The air was faint, it seemed to have been sealed for centuries.… Ensor protested… asked some sort of question.… “Where were they going?”

“Into the attic, where Mary sleeps alone,” the nurse answered. Her manner was more kindly now.

“A child, to sleep all this way from everybody!…” he murmured.

She nodded but did not turn. They reached a short flight of five steps, built in. Ensor was quite in the dark, until the nurse pushed open a door at the head of the stairs and they emerged into the twilight of a large bare attic. When his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he realized that it occupied the whole top of the house.

“Give me your hand, Sir,” the nurse said quite gently. “You may get a shock. Mary’s here, or was yesterday.”

The attic was like the aisle of a church, with chapels on both sides. A wide window at the very end allowed a milky track of light to fall along the pale, decayed flooring of the middle. There were small dormer windows in the embrasures formed by old, roughly-joined beams filled in with whitewashed lath and plaster. Each was like a little room shut off. Towards the centre the flooring was rotted away--the jagged boards seemed to meet in a pattern of interwoven flanges.

They walked along it carefully, up to the very end, and Ensor saw the wide stretch of rolling country out of the big window. The nurse went along it carefully, peering into each alcove. She seemed puzzled.

“It was this one,” she said at last. “It’s so dark with the rain I can hardly see, but I was up here yesterday and got scolded for it.… Here she is!”

He stopped. His legs almost refused to move. The child was lying on a large thin mattress just at his feet. A shawl with ragged fringe covered her, and the dull stained tick of the mattress showed beyond it. There seemed to be no bed-linen, and the child’s nightdress, which might have been originally of pink flannel, was of a curious ingrained dull colour.…

Ensor started, and felt sick.

“Ah, Sir, you see----?” the nurse said, and stopped. She bent down.…

“Mary!” She had soft tones as well as harsh ones.

The child, who appeared to be dozing, opened her eyes and turned them up at her visitors. She still had her ridiculous top-knot straining the hair from her forehead, and the rest of it was matted on her face. Her hand lay open on the shawl, the other was under her cheek. She may have been aware of them, she did not look at these people. Slowly her eyes closed again and she lay quiet, a grey patch on the dark background of the pallet.

“Mary!” the nurse said again. “Here’s Mr. Ensor to see you.… Take her up, Sir,” she bade commandingly.

Ensor knelt down and lifted the upper part of the wretched, filthy little body half out of her bed on to one of his knees. As he handled her he had the sensation of her dry, harsh skin, and it reminded him of parchment. She coughed as he unavoidably jerked her in lifting.

By his prompt obedience to her request, he had rehabilitated himself in the nurse’s opinion, as she showed by the more familiar tone of her next speech.…

“Did you ever see such a disreputable nightdress? And such a hole to let a child sleep in?”

She went on scolding, and Ensor realized that her abuse was directed at Adelaide. Yet it seemed an impossible thing to answer her. She blamed the doers of this deed, but in a strain so incommensurate with the depth of the painful emotions raised in him by the sight of the child’s condition.… Seeing, however, that he was feeling as he should feel, she respected his wretchedness and spoke gently.

“She’s been alone so all night, but will you stay with her, Sir, while I fetch the doctor? It’s just on his time for coming. I may catch him before Mrs. Ensor sees him.”

She crept away. Ensor heard her gently close the attic door. There was silence, and her heels, on the stair, tapped… retreating.

Left alone in the attic with a dying child across his knee, the man tried frantically to collect his thoughts. Beyond a little dry, patient cough, made as it were of ashes and dust, which racked her now and then, Mary lay quite still across his knees. He changed his position, and now he sat on the floor beside the mattress. His eyes grew accustomed to the lighting of this place and he saw that there was a small window in each embrasure, and the one opposite him on the other side of the house had panes. That immediately over Mary’s bed was open to the air. The glass had evidently been cracked and had fallen out leaving jagged pieces in the frame. From one of these there depended the fragments of a checked cotton duster, stuffed in there by some one to ward off, more or less, the draught.

* * * * * * *

The shower was over, and the sun had come out, and sent warm rays across the worm-eaten floor, the floor whereon in the old days the feudal servants of the manor house had slept, weary feet to weary feet, fastened in all night by their lord, with no egress save by the little locked door at the foot of the staircase. The lord of old dared not leave his slaves free to murder their taskmaster in his sleep. There may have been at that time about a hundred healthy farm-hands keeping each other warm and their spirits up through the long night with jests and story-telling; now this enormous garret held but one sickly, fearful, solitary child.

Oh! who had done this?… His head swam with dreadful certainties.

A great bluebottle flew in at the window, and buzzed in and out of the rafters over Mary’s head. She was past noticing it, but it irritated Ensor and he wanted to get up and chase it away. But he could not bear to deposit the child on the filthy palliasse again. The same with a cockroach that made blundering rushes from one joist to another of the decayed ribs of the flooring.… There was probably vermin in that bed, and on the child even, but he was past caring.… He could not beat his breast, _Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!_ or tear his hair; his hands were tied, occupied with the task they should have set themselves long months agone--the work to which his down-pressed heart had all along instigated him. But in this moment he expiated fully what he described to himself as his rotten carelessness, his wicked easy-going acceptance of Adelaide’s excuses, his shameful apathy in the face of the cruel crime that was being enacted in his house--in Adelaide’s house indeed, but the shame was his. Here was a helpless child, dying under his roof, of neglect, or worse, and he had had the face to stand before that Committee composed of decent people, and had been puzzled by their quite natural behaviour. They were unfriendly; disgusted, outraged by his pusillanimity, of which they probably had an inkling, or more than an inkling. What about those boys looking over the wall!… He had expostulated with the Committee for admitting an unpleasant work of fiction into their list--a solecism at worst. He was thinking of Phillis’s morals whilst Mary starved! He knew now what Mrs. Marrable had meant. That harridan in the right!----

Dying of neglect and worse! His hand stole towards the open front of the child’s nightgown. With sudden resolve he turned her body quite round on his knee, and pushed the garment down to her middle.

Yes, the scars that play such an important part in the evidence when these sort of cases come before the court were all there, fresh and old scars; deep and superficial; healed, ill-healed, and suppurating. He turned the body round again, and felt Mary’s pulse. It seemed to him to be almost non-existent.…

Another long ten minutes--savage, agonizing, interminable!… He knew nothing about it… but he wished the doctor would come! The nurse had probably not been able to catch him before he saw Phillis, and had had to wait to waylay him until his official visit was over.

And as the child lay across his knee, to all appearances comatose, something grey and loathsome did crawl out from the screwed black hair on to the forehead.… He pulled out his handkerchief from his breast coat pocket, he felt no sense of disgust to weaken his efficiency.… Such things are!… It was all part of the horror that had surely now culminated and left him seared and stunned, shamed and blighted.…

The child sighed, and with a pathetic hint of the baby ways that had been scorched and made to perish out of her, crept closer into his embrace. Her sigh may have been one of relief, Ensor fondly hoped it.…

* * * * * * *

The bluebottle buzzed, the black-beetle looked out again from the crinkled folds of the _Daily Telegraph_ which Ensor had flung down.… He did not move, he hardly thought, he was conscious only of the child nestling in his arms as if he were its new-found father, and a peace was his, a peace he had never known, as if his soul had at last found its billet.…

When Nurse Ferrier came up at last with the doctor, he smiled.

“Do what you can for her, Doctor,” he said pleadingly.

“Why wasn’t I called before?” Hodgson began angrily. Nurse Ferrier touched his arm. Ensor saw it.

The doctor imperiously pulled the duster out of the window-hole to make more light for himself, and returning, laid the child down on the wretched pallet and methodically examined her. The examination over, he gently pulled the shawl into position so as to cover her, and rose from his knees.

“Mr. Ensor, I must see Mrs. Ensor about this,” he said gravely.

On the way down the narrow flight of stairs Ensor summoned breath to ask a question.

“Is she dying?”

“Probably,” was the doctor’s curt reply, and it was all he would vouchsafe.

Adelaide was in the hall and came to meet them.

“Where have you been, Doctor?” she asked suspiciously. Her eyes fell and rested scornfully on her husband.…

“Wald, you look pretty bad. Go and get yourself a whiskey and soda.”

“Yes, do,” said Hodgson. He turned to Adelaide, with a rough dignity of manner. “Mrs. Ensor, it is my duty to tell you both that if that child upstairs dies I shall refuse a certificate and order an inquest.”

Wald almost admired Adelaide now for her pluck. A spasm of annoyance, no more, crossed her face, and turning, she led the way across the hall towards her morning-room. She said over her shoulder--

“She’s only shamming. It seems to me you want a drink too, Doctor. That was thunder we heard just now. It’s upset you both. Wald, be good enough to send Nurse Ferrier straight to me here. I’m going to sack her.”

She went into the portion of the hall that was screened off, and seeing that both the men disregarded her gesture of invitation to go further and stayed in the main hall, she shrugged her shoulders and flung herself on to her tiger-skin, turning her back, motionless.

The doctor looked at Ensor, and spoke meditatively.

“In Mrs. Ensor’s present state!…” he murmured. “Perhaps I had better speak to you, Mr. Ensor?…”

“Certainly,” Ensor said, leading the way into the dining-room. “I may say before you speak that I know nothing of this. But that’s no matter,” he went on, “the blame is mine.”

He rang the bell. “Ask Gertrude to come to me here,” he said to a maid who appeared at the service door at the end.

The girl hesitated. She had something in her hand.…

“What is it? What is it?” Ensor asked testily.

“I was going to show the doctor, Sir, what Mary had to eat.”

She held out a plate for their inspection with some toast rinds and the remains of dripping fat adhering to the sides.… In her other hand she held a mug, into which Dr. Hodgson peered.

“H’m, a concoction of tea-leaves.…”

“She was fed, Sir, worse than the dog,” the girl continued volubly. “Biscuits was bought for him. She never complained, not she--too frightened for that, for if she did she got the stick----”

“Who beat her?” Ensor asked, furiously.

“Mrs. Ensor, till she got ill. She used to take the poker to her. There’s all the marks on her back now--you’ve seen ’em, Doctor?”

“Yes, yes. Hold your tongue now,” Hodgson said.

He turned to Ensor who stood quietly beside him, receiving the unbearable douche of the servant-girl’s revelations with such fortitude as he was able to muster. “If the child dies there will have to be an inquest. I must give the nurse some directions. Where is she? Be off, back to your work!” he bade the kitchen-maid, “and ask Nurse to come to me.”

Nurse Ferrier, quiet, composed, unsmiling, appeared in the doorway, and Ensor scrutinized her face for news as eagerly as if he had not possessed the gift of speech.

“Is she dead?” he at last breathed.

“No, Sir, no,” she answered kindly after a pause, recalled, as it were, from other thoughts. Ensor did not catch the almost imperceptible shake of the doctor’s head that came hard upon her words. The nurse continued, softly, appealing to her chief. “We won’t let her die, will we, Doctor!”

“Not if we can help it,” he replied gruffly. “Get yourself a drink, Mr. Ensor, and buck up now! There will be a lot to do presently.”

Ensor slowly walked away and the doctor turned to the nurse.

“I wouldn’t give a farthing for that child’s life, _you_ know,” he said. “Have you-brought her down?”

“Yes, she’s in the spare bedroom. Mr. Ensor would wish her to have the best of everything,… I think?…”

Her long drooping eyes were raised to the doctor’s for a moment. She wanted to talk to him, and he knew it. But he did not, at this juncture, care to throw any deductions he might have made from facts patent to both of them, into the common fund, and he interposed the chill of professional etiquette between himself and her possible confidences.

He walked quickly, meditating the while, down the narrow flagged way that led from the house door to the gate in the wall, where his horse was being held for him by James, the half idiotic manservant; the only male creature, excepting her husband, whom Adelaide would tolerate about the place. To-day, however, expecting as usual to have the whole of the path to himself, the doctor almost hustled a person of quite a different type from James’s, a smart, slight, efficient young fellow slipping briskly up to the house. Hodgson apologized. The stranger, who was dressed in some sort of uniform, looked curiously at him, as if about to speak, but thought better of it and passed on.

After some little delay, Gertrude came to her master in the dining-room where he had summoned her. She looked hurried, portentous, but at the same time, armed with the indifference of fat people. Her wide apron was covered here and there with spots of gravy or blood; he supposed she had been “drawing” chickens or killing them. Her bib was pinned up at the corners over her ample bosom. She had no right to have a breast; she had no right to be made like a woman. He loathed her, the agent of Adelaide’s system, the janissary who with fiendish personal lust of cruelty had brutally carried out his poor wife’s unholy theories.

And all the while, the uncomfortable consciousness was his, that whatever his contempt of Gertrude, it was equalled by her scorn of him. This abominable woman looked down on him; in her eyes lurked the conception of him as something mean and pitiful and likable, yes, she awarded him a certain amount of good-humoured commiseration. And she was his cook!

“I couldn’t come before,” she said sturdily. “I’ve been up with Phillis, who’s left all alone because of this business. Be done as soon as you can, Sir, for I want to get back to the poor child.”

“You will tell me before you go, please, how long this has been going on? How long have you been neglecting and ill-treating your own child?”

The woman sneered.

“Mary, d’ye mean? Well, you see, Mary all along was only allowed to be here, as you might say, through the kindness of Miss Adelaide, as being her cook’s child.” She continued, as if repeating a lesson learned by heart, “Miss Adelaide--Mrs. Ensor--has always been very good to me and I’ve been the same to her. But it stands to reason that Mrs. Ensor wasn’t going to bring up my bastard like a lady. Mary Adelaide--that’s her name--had to be trained to be a servant and work for her bread, like her mother’s always done, and when she didn’t work, she had to be beat.”

“And what was the work you set a child of ten to do?” Ensor asked, striving at calmness.

“Child of ten--she’s fifteen, same as Phillis! Well, let me see, she cleaned the silver, setting down to it every day, and swept a room, or may be two, and did down the steps, and her own sewing and mending.”

“And what did she have to eat?”

“What the girl showed you…” Gertrude said, throwing up her chin in sullen pride of evil-doing. “Scraps what was left over from the day before. That is, if I would remember to give it her, and she never reminded me. Too soft, shameful lazy she was, too, and one had to take a stick or a poker to her to make her bustle. Whoap! Go ’long! was all the kind words she got. And a neat cut across her back. She was that lazy they never had time to heal before there was a new stripe laid over the last one.”

“My God! A young child!” He covered his face with his hands.

Gertrude regarded him. Some shifting of values took place in her heavy brain. She came a step nearer, and her voice lost its tone of coarse bravado.

“You must know, Sir, I had my orders?”

“Your orders, woman! Your orders to play the murderess! You, the unnatural mother----”

“You may look a little nearer home for the unnaturalness, if you will have it? Some folks is very blind, and deaf, too.”

“What do you mean?”

His tone was violent. The cook said, patiently, raising her apron to her face--

“I’ll say no more, Sir. I must be going----”

“Stop!” cried Ensor furiously. “You brute----”

“Call me brute, Sir!” Gertrude answered, almost modestly.…

Then her temper rose, she flushed.

“Do you know who’s awaiting for me in my back kitchen where I told him to stop?” she said passionately. “No one won’t go away from here, Mister, I said, so long as I give you my word. But I’d something I’d like to say to Mr. Ensor first before he saw him, I said, and it would be best for all parties if I could get it said. So he let me come, though he’s not a-going back without seeing you!”

She produced a dirty card, from the bosom of her dress, and handed it to her master.…

* * * * * * *

The nurse met the doctor on the doorstep when he came back half an hour later. Her manner was instructive as she came forward, her finger on her lip, and he knew what she would tell him.

“Mary’s gone, Doctor. Half an hour ago. And Mrs. Ensor has bolted herself into her bedroom, and won’t answer to any one. I’m afraid she’s bad. And”--she dropped her voice--“there’s a man shut in the library with Mr. Ensor. Here’s what he brought. I found it on the floor of the dining-room just now.”

She produced the card, stained with blood where Gertrude’s fingers had grasped it. “Only fowl’s!” she said apologetically. The doctor took it.

“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Inspector G.W. Kelson!” he exclaimed. “That’s Mrs. Marrable! She said she was going to put the Society on to them.”

“She’s a bit late,” the nurse said.

“By half an hour,” he echoed her, as they went in together.

“You never heard anything like it,” the nurse continued, as they proceeded upstairs; “Gertrude, the cook here has been telling me. And who she is and all. They’ve just killed her--by inches.”

“Not by inches, by yards,” corrected Dr. Hodgson. He was very indignant. “The child’s back is covered with unhealed sores--suppurating. She doesn’t weigh more than forty-eight pounds. Sixty-two she should have. Systematic neglect and outrageous cruelty! They’ll have to answer for it.”

“Mr. Ensor knew nothing of it, I’ll swear,” the nurse said quickly.

“Yes. His wife leads him by the nose,” replied Hodgson.

“She’s a caution!” exclaimed the nurse, with virulence.

“And she’ll get off, because of her condition. They always admit that.”

“When it’s her own child, Doctor? Of course you know it’s her own child?”

“I suspected it,” he said quietly.