Part 21

They had come into the great, wide, lightly-papered, spare bedroom, with three tall windows looking out over the grey gravel sweep in front of the house. The windows were wide open. The gardener could be heard sharpening his old-fashioned instrument ready for cutting the scrap of lawn beyond the gravel. Professionally, perfunctorily, the doctor looked at and examined what lay on the bed. Then, while the nurse finished her work, he strolled to a window and stared out, waiting to see the master of the house, whose voice could be heard urgently talking in the room immediately below.

The nurse, dabbling sponges in hot water, going backwards and forwards with towels, talked. She had not talked for weeks.

“The likeness!” she said. “Don’t you see it strong now she’s dead, Doctor? I must say I noticed it the very first moment he came up into that garret where they had put the poor child away to sleep--or to die, as it happened. Nobody’d been near her for days. Gertrude thought Mrs. Ensor had, and she thought--God knows what she thought!” She shuddered. “There wasn’t so much as a jug of water there. Mrs. Ensor hoped Mary would die, and Gertrude didn’t care. She’s a regular bad one. She was cook to Mrs. Ensor before she married and had a baby there, and Miss Adelaide’s father, he was a doctor, and he gave her a certificate of death. He was a wicked old man, by all accounts. So when Miss Adelaide got into trouble, this woman helped her.…”

All the while she talked, she was busying herself about the wretched little body of Mary. The doctor stood at his post near the window, waiting for Mr. Ensor’s visitor to go, listening to the nurse’s talk as he lightly slashed his top-boots with his riding-whip, and decided what he would do. He liked Ensor, and wanted to make it easy for him.

“And,” Nurse Ferrier continued, “she says they bought this house with its high walls all round, because Miss Adelaide didn’t care to be seen about much. She was ashamed, not so much because she had had a baby without being married, but because it was such a wretched little specimen. She called herself Mrs. Dibben--that was the name of Gertrude’s man--he was a prize-fighter. I make out that he was in prison at the time. Any way, he was never seen again.… Gertrude says they were all going on quite quietly, and the two children brought up like sisters.… Mrs. Ensor had almost come to think, Gertrude says, that it was the other way about, and that the beautiful child was hers, and the wretched one the cook’s.… Gertrude didn’t care--her child was the gainer.… But that the day Mr. Ensor came, Mrs. Ensor rushed into the kitchen like a mad thing, and said she’d told him Phillis was hers and Mary Gertrude’s, and that was the way it had to be, for he was coming to live here. Doctor, what do you think of that?”

“I think, if it’s true, it’s a disgusting business. But I don’t quite believe it.”

“I do,” said the nurse stoutly. “I am coming to believe it. That woman--Mrs. Ensor--is bad enough for anything and she simply couldn’t have had a nice simple child like Phillis, not if she tried ever so!”

“There, he’s gone!” said Hodgson, leaving the window. He came to the bedside and surveyed the child’s small body lying straight, neatly, fairly disposed. The nurse stood proudly away from her work--

“She looks nice, now, doesn’t she, Doctor? I’ve put her on one of Miss Phillis’s smart nightgowns. Gertrude went in to Mrs. Ensor’s room and got it for me. She’s not so bad, you know, Gertrude; she only did as she was told. Mrs. Ensor did the beating and wouldn’t let her--positively wouldn’t let her give the child nourishing food.”

“How is Mrs. Ensor? Did you gather?”

“Quite calm, Gertrude says, though she knows everything.”

“She’s absolutely determined not to let herself have a miscarriage, that’s about it,” said Hodgson, buttoning his coat. “She’s got plenty of self-control and courage of a kind.”

“Courage--to be cruel!” exclaimed the nurse, glancing at the human piece of wreckage on the bed. “And I should say that if she thinks it necessary to starve her children to death if they happen to be born weaklings, that the chances are she’ll have to kill the next too, even if she does manage to get it born all right, and I have my doubts about that. She’s far too keen about it, too----”

“What’s that?” Hodgson interrupted, cocking his ear.

“Mrs. Ensor’s door!”

“He’s gone in to her, then!”

They looked at each other.

* * * * * * *

Ensor, speaking urgently to his wife at the closed door of her room, anxious to impart some intelligence he had just received, could get no reply from her. He did not give it up, but continued to call her by her name--Adelaide. She had a pet name, chosen by herself. He remembered it, but he could not bring himself to use it.

Half an hour seemed to elapse. He heard a groan.

Though he hated her, it frightened him, for there was no one with her. He changed the tenor of his appeals.

“Adelaide, if you are ill, you must not shut yourself up like this. You may do harm to yourself--and to the child. If you won’t see me, at least let me send Gertrude to you.”

Then she spoke.

“Wald, I am not very ill--not more ill than I expect to be. For I am going to have a child. It will not be quite yet. As soon as it is born, I shall kill myself, but not till then. So you need not be afraid.”

Her voice sounded fainter, she had turned away from the door. He was astonished at her self-control--“not more ill than I expect to be!” He felt that he ought to see for himself how she was. Bitterly, dispassionately, he made the attempt.

“Let me see you, then,” he said gently. “Just for one moment!”

“Is it to scold me?” Her voice sounded close to the door. “I am not to be scolded--now.”

The key was turned in the lock, and he made his way in. His wife stood there on the threshold, half defiant, half apologetic. As he knew Adelaide, the deprecation was much for her. Her beautiful mournful eyes sought his. They held no cruel gleams, such as had lurked there so lately, when they had talked of Mary. Her dull black silk _peignoir_ was gathered round her; she held it looped pathetically in one thin hand. Yet he was not moved. He only thought of her health, pathologically, as a doctor might. It was his duty. He had neglected his other duty lately.

She put up her sharp chin. Her hand let slip the folds of black, they fell all round her, trailing.…

“Kiss me, Wald!” she said.

“No, I cannot.”

She turned, and moved towards the sofa that stretched across the foot of her bed. Her stumble over the long embarrassing folds of the garment she wore was a mute reproach, but it could not affect him, to the extent of inducing him to comply with her request.… She breathed heavily and sat down on the sofa.…

“See Gertrude, then. She will tell you all you want to know.”

“Your cook! Adelaide, tell me yourself. Oh, why----?”

She rocked backwards and forwards and nursed her knees.

“I could not bear the sight of her, I tell you!” she answered him passionately. “She was a degenerate. She disgraced me. She wasn’t fit to live, she ought never to have been born--never even have been conceived! But she shames her father, not me!… I am a normal healthy woman and all disease is repugnant to me. It’s a law--a law that was infringed.… She pays the penalty.… And to see her going about day by day, the living testimony of unfitness--of beastliness.… Why, the sight of her peaked, suffering face, old and yellow--she looked like that even in her cradle--from the very first moment that Gertrude showed her to me--that finished me! For I insisted on seeing her at once, I was fit enough, I was about in a week.… Then when I came to look closer--her awful hand--did you know that she had a finger less on her right hand?… Still, I nursed her myself, I--faugh!”

She put her handkerchief to her bitten lips--there was blood on it when she took it away.

“Then when you came--I saw you look at her, in the car, and again, when we got out, and you carried the rugs for her as we walked up the drive--that was enough! I made up my mind then, and I have never repented it. Never, never, I tell you. You would never have married me, if you had known, for you have the same ideas as me. Wald, that’s what I liked in you, only I didn’t know that you were a coward--a mean, canting, respectable, conventional coward--what they used to call lily-livered--or is it pigeon-livered?”

“Sneer at me if you like, Adelaide, but explain. Damn you, explain!” he cried, forgetting himself, forgetting her state, forgetting everything under the stress of the terrible, nearly formulated horror.

“What’s there to explain?” she said. “I hated the child, and I beat her. I beat her to death, that’s all!”

He groaned in helplessness, overcome by her fierce self-sufficiency.

“But had you no sort of human feeling, no woman’s tenderness? You’ve been a mother--there’s surely such a thing as a mother’s heart…?”

Adelaide looked at him wearily, shuddering.…

“Been a mother--yes. And you?--what about your tenderness--your heart? We used to wonder that your heart didn’t tell you when you heard her calling out--screaming--yelling? I beat her, I tell you, I beat her within an inch of her life, filthy, hateful object that I’d brought into the world--through you! Pah!”

She flung herself down. Her tone was so piercing, so foreign, so unknown to him, who had learned to expect every variation in Adelaide, that he cried, in panic fear merely--

“For God’s sake, keep your head, Adelaide! Don’t go mad now, on top of it all!”

“Oh, I’m not mad, not a bit of it, can’t you see, you fool? But, no, you can’t see, you can’t see anything, unless it’s under your nose. It _was_ under your nose, and you worried and worried, and yet you didn’t see it! Here you are--Mary’s your own child--and mine! Mine! Yours! Don’t you remember that night--that night after ‘Tristan’----?”

“No, I remember nothing. Be quiet, now!” He held up his hand, as if to ward off a blow. “Where is she?”

“My God, _I_ don’t know.”

She fell back. Her pains had begun. He took no notice.

“I’m going to Mary,” he murmured.

She rushed forward, and bolted the door behind him.

* * * * * * *

The doctor and the nurse were still waiting by the body of Mary. Aware of the portentous visit of Inspector Kelson, Hodgson fancied he might be of some use. He might do Ensor a good turn in allocating much of the blame, which the husband was so generously anxious to take on his own shoulders, on to the wife’s, where it belonged. There were reasons why she should be better able to bear it than he, the law would be merciful to her in her then condition.

Hodgson could not fathom her. He was merely an overworked, overdriven country doctor, riding about daily from one case to another. That the maladies of the hardy, normal, if worn-out wives of the labouring classes were of a painful and dreary similarity, and completely relieved him of the necessity of keeping himself up to date with the new departures in medicine, was perhaps the reason that he did not break down from obvious overwork. His old mare who carried her sleeping master on her back along the same old roads to the same old cottages to attend to Hodge’s same wife’s seventh baby was as well preserved as he.

A complicated, abnormal case like Mrs. Ensor’s; circumstances so dramatic as this affair at High Walls seldom or never came his way. And events in this house had in the last twenty-four hours succeeded each other with such a bewildering rapidity that he felt himself excused from keeping up too rigid an attitude with the nurse, who, like himself, was humanly and professionally interested, and he permitted himself a certain relaxation in talking to her.

Nurse Ferrier, on the other hand, having been shut up in High Walls for many days under the rigorous rule of Adelaide, was enjoying herself thoroughly. All the while that Ensor was closeted with Mrs. Ensor she continued freely to develop her physiological views, leaving the room, only for a moment, to get some white flowers to lay upon the child’s breast. They heard voices from the next room, and her open, and his professionally concealed, curiosity was wrought up to the highest pitch when suddenly these voices ceased, and they heard the click of a latch and a step in the corridor.…

Then the door of the room they were in was opened with deliberation and the hero of their surmises and of their sympathy walked into the room.

He did not really seem to see them, as they observed afterwards, although he moved his head slightly as he passed the doctor and made what might pass as a grunt of recognition. His politeness survived in the overthrow of all his standards and hopes and ambitions. They stood humbly aside; it was his hour. No one, so far as they knew, had told him that Mary was dead, but he could not help knowing it when his eyes had rested for a moment on what lay on the bed.

At a sign from Hodgson, the nurse left the room. The doctor followed her. The two stood in the corridor outside, looking nervously, now at that door of the room they had just vacated, now at that which gave admittance to Mrs. Ensor’s apartments, whence came no sound of stirring.

Five minutes later, Wald Ensor came out of the bedroom, carrying the body of the child in his arms very carefully. As he passed his wife’s door, with his burden, it was opened sharply and as suddenly closed again. Mrs. Ensor had looked out.

Hodgson and Ferrier followed Ensor downstairs, wondering what he was going to do, afraid that he had gone suddenly mad and that they would have to interfere.

But so far he was perfectly quiet, restrained, and measured in his movements. He walked steadily, balancing what he carried as a nurse does a baby, down into the hall, where the autumn fire leaped on the hearth, and the charred logs tinkled as they fell. He went through it into the portion railed off with screens and arm-chairs, and, stooping, deposited the corpse of his child on the tiger-skin which lay spread over the sofa--the old yellow sofa from Portland Place. The creases were in the skin that his wife had made when she was lying there only yesterday. Her bag--one of her bags--lay on it, and with a violent gesture of his occupied hand, Ensor swept it off.

Then, deliberately, as if he were in church, he knelt down beside the little white-robed form, smoothed the folds of the nightgown his hands had disarrayed, and half raising her, taking her in his arms, covered her with kisses long and deep.

He did not lift his head when Gertrude, her apron cast aside, a puzzling figure with her unaccustomed black surfaces displayed, pushed open the red baize door, and stood, savagely poised, her bony, floury arms resting on her hips.…

“Go back!” the doctor said, in a loud whisper.

Gertrude paid no heed. Her dull faithful eyes were raised, fixed on something she saw at the head of the staircase. It was her mistress who was even now descending. The nurse darted forward, and in so doing her dress caught in an accidental nail in one of the screens and made it fall over the end of the couch. Wald Ensor looked up, he kept hold of the child’s hand.… Adelaide continued to descend. Gertrude went a step to meet her, but Adelaide waved her away.…

Then Ensor rose, for Adelaide had reached the bottom of the staircase and was coming to him, and Mary.… She tottered, but she came on.…

Her husband raised his finger and pointed it at her, and she ceased, trembling, to advance.… Gertrude strode up to her and held her shoulder. Her state was obvious--she no longer took pains to conceal it.

“Listen, all of you!” Ensor was saying, in the same gloomy, intent voice he had used all day. “I pray to Almighty God that this woman may never live to bear another child!”

* * * * * * *

He stayed for the inquiry into the death of Mary; he bore himself like a man. Then he left England, and his wife never saw him again. She survived the birth of her child, stillborn.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. farmhouse/farm-house, tea-gown/tea gown, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Merge disjointed contractions.

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