Part 7

She stretched out her arms imploringly to the doctor.

“Well…” said he, almost to himself.

He signed to the two women to withdraw, and followed them out into the passage. “Go and get something to eat,” he said peremptorily, “while you can. We shall have trouble with her presently. I’ll wait in the dressing-room.”

He glanced at the twisting figure on the bed, shrugged his shoulders, and passed into the adjoining room, without, however, closing the door of communication. Sitting down in an arm-chair drawn up to the fire, he stretched himself and closed his eyes. The professional aspects of the case of Edward Arne rose up before him in all its interesting forms of complication.…

* * * * * * *

It was just this professional attitude that Mrs. Arne unconsciously resented both in the doctor and in the nurse. Through all their kindness she had realized and resented their scientific interest in her husband, for to them he had been no more than a curious and complicated case; and now that the blow had fallen, she regarded them both in the light of executioners. Her one desire, expressed with all the shameless sincerity of blind and thoughtless misery, was to be free of their hateful presence and alone--alone with her dead!

She was weary of the doctor’s subdued manly tones--of the nurse’s commonplace motherliness, too habitually adapted to the needs of all to be appreciated by the individual--of the childish consolation of the young sister, who had never loved, never been married, did not know what sorrow was! Their expressions of sympathy struck her like blows, the touch of their hands on her body, as they tried to raise her, stung her in every nerve.

With a sigh of relief she buried her head in the pillow, pressed her body more closely against that of her husband, and lay motionless.

Her sobs ceased.

* * * * * * *

The lamp went out with a gurgle. The fire leaped up, and died. She raised her head and stared about her helplessly, then sinking down again she put her lips to the ear of the dead man.

“Edward--dear Edward!” she whispered, “why have you left me? Darling, why have you left me? I can’t stay behind--you know I can’t. I am too young to be left. It is only a year since you married me. I never thought it was only for a year. ‘Till death us do part!’ Yes, I know that’s in it, but nobody ever thinks of that! I never thought of living without you! I meant to die with you.…

“No--no--I can’t die--I must not--till my baby is born. You will never see it. Don’t you want to see it? Don’t you? Oh, Edward, speak! Say something, darling, one word--one little word! Edward! Edward! are you there? Answer me for God’s sake, answer me!

“Darling, I am so tired of waiting. Oh, think, dearest. There is so little time. They only gave me half-an-hour. In half-an-hour they will come and take you away from me--take you where I can’t come to you--with all my love I can’t come to you! I know the place--I saw it once. A great lonely place full of graves, and little stunted trees dripping with dirty London rain… and gas-lamps flaring all round… but quite, quite dark where the grave is… a long grey stone just like the rest. How could you stay there?--all alone--all alone--without me?

“Do you remember, Edward, what we once said--that whichever of us died first should come back to watch over the other, in the spirit? I promised you, and you promised me. What children we were! Death is not what we thought. It comforted us to say that then.

“Now, it’s nothing--nothing--worse than nothing! I don’t want your spirit--I can’t see it--or feel it--I want you, you, your eyes that looked at me, your mouth that kissed me----”

She raised his arms and clasped them round her neck, and lay there very still, murmuring, “Oh, hold me, hold me! Love me if you can. Am I hateful? This is me! These are your arms.…”

The doctor in the next room moved in his chair. The noise awoke her from her dream of contentment, and she unwound the dead arm from her neck, and, holding it up by the wrist, considered it ruefully.

“Yes, I can put it round me, but I have to hold it there. It is quite cold--it doesn’t care. Ah, my dear, you don’t care! You are dead. I kiss you, but you don’t kiss me. Edward! Edward! Oh, for heaven’s sake kiss me once. Just once!

“No, no, that won’t do--that’s not enough! that’s nothing! worse than nothing! I want you back, you, all you.… What shall I do?… I often pray.… Oh, if there be a God in heaven, and if He ever answered a prayer, let Him answer mine--my only prayer. I’ll never ask another--and give you back to me! As you were--as I loved you--as I adored you! He must listen. He must! My God, my God, he’s mine--he’s my husband, he’s my lover--give him back to me!”

* * * * * * *

--“Left alone for half-an-hour or more with the corpse! It’s not right!”

The muttered expression of the nurse’s revolted sense of professional decency came from the head of the staircase, where she had been waiting for the last few minutes. The doctor joined her.

“Hush, Mrs. Joyce! I’ll go to her now.”

The door creaked on its hinges as he gently pushed it open and went in.

“What’s that? What’s that?” screamed Mrs. Arne. “Doctor! Doctor! Don’t touch me! Either I am dead or he is alive!”

“Do you want to kill yourself, Mrs. Arne?” said Dr. Graham, with calculated sternness, coming forward; “come away!”

“Not dead! Not dead!” she murmured.

“He is dead, I assure you. Dead and cold an hour ago! Feel!” He took hold of her, as she lay face downwards, and in so doing he touched the dead man’s cheek--it was not cold! Instinctively his finger sought a pulse.

“Stop! Wait!” he cried in his intense excitement. “My dear Mrs. Arne, control yourself!”

But Mrs. Arne had fainted, and fallen heavily off the bed on the other side. Her sister, hastily summoned, attended to her, while the man they had all given over for dead was, with faint gasps and sighs and reluctant moans, pulled, as it were, hustled and dragged back over the threshold of life.

* * * * * * *

II

“Why do you always wear black, Alice?” asked Esther Graham. “You are not in mourning that I know of.”

She was Dr. Graham’s only daughter and Mrs. Arne’s only friend. She sat with Mrs. Arne in the dreary drawing-room of the house in Chelsea. She had come to tea. She was the only person who ever did come to tea there.

She was brusque, kind, and blunt, and had a talent for making inappropriate remarks. Six years ago Mrs. Arne had been a widow for an hour! Her husband had succumbed to an apparently mortal illness, and for the space of an hour had lain dead. When suddenly and inexplicably he had revived from his trance, the shock, combined with six weeks’ nursing, had nearly killed his wife. All this Esther had heard from her father. She herself had only come to know Mrs. Arne after her child was born, and all the tragic circumstances of her husband’s illness put aside, and it was hoped forgotten. And when her idle question received no answer from the pale absent woman who sat opposite, with listless lack-lustre eyes fixed on the green and blue flames dancing in the fire, she hoped it had passed unnoticed. She waited for five minutes for Mrs. Arne to resume the conversation, then her natural impatience got the better of her.

“Do say something, Alice!” she implored.

“Esther, I beg your pardon!” said Mrs. Arne. “I was thinking.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t. People who sit and stare into the fire never do think, really. They are only brooding and making themselves ill, and that is what you are doing. You mope, you take no interest in anything, you never go out--I am sure you have not been out of doors to-day?”

“No--yes--I believe not. It is so cold.”

“You are sure to feel the cold if you sit in the house all day, and sure to get ill! Just look at yourself!”

Mrs. Arne rose and looked at herself in the Italian mirror over the chimney-piece. It reflected faithfully enough her even pallor, her dark hair and eyes, the sweeping length of her eyelashes, the sharp curves of her nostrils, and the delicate arch of her eyebrows, that formed a thin sharp black line, so clear as to seem almost unnatural.

“Yes, I do look ill,” she said with conviction.

“No wonder. You choose to bury yourself alive.”

“Sometimes I do feel as if I lived in a grave. I look up at the ceiling and fancy it is my coffin-lid.”

“Don’t please talk like that!” expostulated Miss Graham, pointing to Mrs. Arne’s little girl. “If only for Dolly’s sake, I think you should not give way to such morbid fancies. It isn’t good for her to see you like this always.”

“Oh, Esther,” the other exclaimed, stung into something like vivacity, “don’t reproach me! I hope I am a good mother to my child!”

“Yes, dear, you are a model mother--and model wife too. Father says the way you look after your husband is something wonderful, but don’t you think for your own sake you might try to be a little gayer? You encourage these moods, don’t you? What is it? Is it the house?”

She glanced around her--at the high ceiling, at the heavy damask portieres, the tall cabinets of china, the dim oak panelling--it reminded her of a neglected museum. Her eye travelled into the farthest corners, where the faint filmy dusk was already gathering, lit only by the bewildering cross-lights of the glass panels of cabinet doors--to the tall narrow windows--then back again to the woman in her mourning dress, cowering by the fire. She said sharply--

“You should go out more.”

“I do not like to--leave my husband.”

“Oh, I know that he is delicate and all that, but still, does he never permit you to leave him? Does he never go out by himself?”

“Not often!”

“And you have no pets! It is very odd of you. I simply can’t imagine a house without animals!”

“We did have a dog once,” answered Mrs. Arne plaintively, “but it howled so we had to give it away. It would not go near Edward.… But please don’t imagine that I am dull! I have my child.” She laid her hand on the flaxen head at her knee.

Miss Graham rose, frowning.

“Ah, you are too bad!” she exclaimed. “You are like a widow exactly, with one child, stroking its orphan head and saying, ‘Poor fatherless darling.’”

Voices were heard outside. Miss Graham stopped talking quite suddenly, and sought her veil and gloves on the mantelpiece.

“You need not go, Esther,” said Mrs. Arne. “It is only my husband.”

“Oh, but it is getting late,” said the other, crumpling up her gloves in her muff, and shuffling her feet nervously.

“Come!” said her hostess, with a bitter smile, “put your gloves on properly--if you must go--but it is quite early still.”

“Please don’t go, Miss Graham,” put in the child.

“I must. Go and meet your papa, like a good girl.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You mustn’t talk like that, Dolly,” said the doctor’s daughter absently, still looking towards the door. Mrs. Arne rose and fastened the clasps of the big fur-cloak for her friend. The wife’s white, sad, oppressed face came very close to the girl’s cheerful one, as she murmured in a low voice--

“You don’t like my husband, Esther? I can’t help noticing it. Why don’t you?”

“Nonsense!” retorted the other, with the emphasis of one who is repelling an overtrue accusation. “I do, only----”

“Only what?”

“Well, dear, it is foolish of me, of course, but I am--a little afraid of him.”

“Afraid of Edward!” said his wife slowly. “Why should you be?”

“Well, dear--you see--I--I suppose women can’t help being a little afraid of their friends’ husbands--they can spoil their friendships with their wives in a moment, if they choose to disapprove of them. I really must go! Good-bye, child; give me a kiss! Don’t ring, Alice. Please don’t! I can open the door for myself----”

“Why should you?” said Mrs. Arne. “Edward is in the hall; I heard him speaking to Foster.”

“No; he has gone into his study. Good-bye, you apathetic creature!” She gave Mrs. Arne a brief kiss and dashed out of the room. The voices outside had ceased, and she had reasonable hopes of reaching the door without being intercepted by Mrs. Arne’s husband. But he met her on the stairs. Mrs. Arne, listening intently from her seat by the fire, heard her exchange a few shy sentences with him, the sound of which died away as they went downstairs together. A few moments after, Edward Arne came into the room and dropped into the chair just vacated by his wife’s visitor.

He crossed his legs and said nothing. Neither did she.

His nearness had the effect of making the woman look at once several years older. Where she was pale he was well-coloured; the network of little filmy wrinkles that, on a close inspection, covered her face, had no parallel on his smooth skin. He was handsome; soft, well-groomed flakes of auburn hair lay over his forehead, and his steely blue eyes shone equably, a contrast to the sombre fire of hers, and the masses of dark crinkly hair that shaded her brow. The deep lines of permanent discontent furrowed that brow as she sat with her chin propped on her hands, and her elbows resting on her knees. Neither spoke. When the hands of the clock over Mrs. Arne’s head pointed to seven, the white-aproned figure of the nurse appeared in the doorway, and the little girl rose and kissed her mother very tenderly.

Mrs. Arne’s forehead contracted. Looking uneasily at her husband, she said to the child tentatively, yet boldly, as one grasps a nettle, “Say good-night to your father!”

The child obeyed, saying, “Good-night” indifferently in her father’s direction.

“Kiss him!”

“No, please--please not.”

Her mother looked down on her curiously, sadly.…

“You are a naughty, spoilt child!” she said, but without conviction. “Excuse her, Edward.”

He did not seem to have heard.

“Well, if you don’t care----” said his wife bitterly. “Come, child!” She caught the little girl by the hand and left the room.

At the door she half turned and looked fixedly at her husband. It was a strange ambiguous gaze; in it passion and dislike were strangely combined. Then she shivered and closed the door softly after her.

The man in the arm-chair sat with no perceptible change of attitude, his unspeculative eyes fixed on the fire, his hands clasped idly in front of him. The pose was obviously habitual. The servant brought lights and closed the shutters, drew the curtains, and made up the fire noisily, without, however, eliciting any reproof from his master.

Edward Arne was an ideal master, as far as Foster was concerned. He kept cases of cigars, but never smoked them, although the supply had often to be renewed. He did not care what he ate or drank, although he kept as good a cellar as most gentlemen--Foster knew that. He never interfered, he counted for nothing, he gave no trouble. Foster had no intention of ever leaving such an easy place. True, his master was not cordial; he very seldom addressed him or seemed to know whether he was there, but then neither did he grumble if the fire in the study was allowed to go out, or interfere with Foster’s liberty in any way. He had a better place of it than Annette, Mrs. Arne’s maid, who would be called up in the middle of the night to bathe her mistress’s forehead with eau-de-Cologne, or made to brush her long hair for hours together to soothe her. Naturally enough Foster and Annette compared notes as to their respective situations, and drew unflattering parallels between this capricious wife and model husband.

III

Miss Graham was not a demonstrative woman. On her return home she somewhat startled her father, as he sat by his study table, deeply interested in his diagnosis book, by the sudden violence of her embrace.

“Why this excitement?” he asked, smiling and turning round. He was a young-looking man for his age; his thin wiry figure and clear colour belied the evidence on his hair, tinged with grey, and the tired wrinkles that gave value to the acuteness and brilliancy of the eyes they surrounded.

“I don’t know!” she replied, “only you are so nice and alive somehow. I always feel like this when I come back from seeing the Arnes.”

“Then don’t go to see the Arnes.”

“I’m so fond of her, father, and she will never come here to me, as you know. Or else nothing would induce me to enter her tomb of a house, and talk to that walking funeral of a husband of hers. I managed to get away to-day without having to shake hands with him. I always try to avoid it. But, father, I do wish you would go and see Alice.”

“Is she ill?”

“Well, not exactly ill, I suppose, but her eyes make me quite uncomfortable, and she says such odd things! I don’t know if it is you or the clergyman she wants, but she is all wrong somehow! She never goes out except to church; she never pays a call, or has any one to call on her! Nobody ever asks the Arnes to dinner, and I’m sure I don’t blame them--the sight of that man at one’s table would spoil any party--and they never entertain. She is always alone. Day after day I go in and find her sitting over the fire, with that same brooding expression. I shouldn’t be surprised in the least if she were to go mad some day. Father, what is it? What is the tragedy of the house? There is one I am convinced. And yet, though I have been the intimate friend of that woman for years, I know no more about her than the man in the street.”

“She keeps her skeleton safe in the cupboard,” said Dr. Graham. “I respect her for that. And please don’t talk nonsense about tragedies. Alice Arne is only morbid--the malady of the age. And she is a very religious woman.”

“I wonder if she complains of her odious husband to Mr. Bligh. She is always going to his services.”

“Odious?”

“Yes, odious!” Miss Graham shuddered. “I cannot stand him! I cannot bear the touch of his cold froggy hands, and the sight of his fishy eyes! That inane smile of his simply makes me shrivel up. Father, honestly, do you like him yourself?”

“My dear, I hardly know him! It is his wife I have known ever since she was a child, and I a boy at college. Her father was my tutor. I never knew her husband till six years ago, when she called me in to attend him in a very serious illness. I suppose she never speaks of it? No? A very odd affair. For the life of me I cannot tell how he managed to recover. You needn’t tell people, for it affects my reputation, but I didn’t save him! Indeed I have never been able to account for it. The man was given over for dead!”

“He might as well be dead for all the good he is,” said Esther scornfully. “I have never heard him say more than a couple of sentences in my life.”

“Yet he was an exceedingly brilliant young man; one of the best men of his year at Oxford--a good deal run after--poor Alice was wild to marry him!”

“In love with that spiritless creature? He is like a house with some one dead in it, and all the blinds down!”

“Come, Esther, don’t be morbid--not to say silly! You are very hard on the poor man! What’s wrong with him? He is the ordinary, commonplace, cold-blooded specimen of humanity, a little stupid, a little selfish,--people who have gone through a serious illness like that are apt to be--but on the whole, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen----”

“Yes, and his wife is afraid of him, and his child hates him!” exclaimed Esther.

“Nonsense!” said Dr. Graham sharply. “The child is spoilt. Only children are apt to be--and the mother wants a change or a tonic of some kind. I’ll go and talk to her when I have time. Go along and dress. Have you forgotten that George Graham is coming to dinner?”

After she had gone the doctor made a note on the corner of his blotting-pad, “Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne,” and dismissed the subject of the memorandum entirely from his mind.

* * * * * * *

George Graham was the doctor’s nephew, a tall, weedy, cumbrous young man, full of fads and fallacies, with a gentle manner that somehow inspired confidence. He was several years younger than Esther, who loved to listen to his semi-scientific, semi-romantic stories of things met with in the course of his profession. “Oh, I come across very queer things!” he would say mysteriously, “There’s a queer little widow----!”

“Tell me about your little widow?” asked Esther that day after dinner, when, her father having gone back to his study, she and her cousin sat together as usual.

He laughed.

“You like to hear of my professional experiences? Well, she certainly interested me,” he said thoughtfully. “She is an odd psychological study in her way. I wish I could come across her again.”

“Where did you come across her, and what is her name?”

“I don’t know her name, I don’t want to; she is not a personage to me, only a case. I hardly know her face even. I have never seen it except in the twilight. But I gathered that she lived somewhere in Chelsea, for she came out on to the Embankment with only a kind of lacy thing over her head; she can’t live far off, I fancy.”

Esther became instantly attentive. “Go on,” she said.

“It was three weeks ago,” said George Graham. “I was coming along the Embankment about ten o’clock. I walked through that little grove, you know, just between Cheyne Walk and the river, and I heard in there some one sobbing very bitterly. I looked and saw a woman sitting on a seat, with her head in her hands, crying. I was most awfully sorry, of course, and I thought I could perhaps do something for her, get her a glass of water, or salts, or something. I took her for a woman of the people--it was quite dark, you know. So I asked her very politely if I could do anything for her, and then I noticed her hands--they were quite white and covered with diamonds.”

“You were sorry you spoke, I suppose,” said Esther.

“She raised her head and said--I believe she laughed--‘Are you going to tell me to move on?’”

“She thought you were a policeman?”

“Probably--if she thought at all--but she was in a semi-dazed condition. I told her to wait till I came back, and dashed round the corner to the chemist’s and bought a bottle of salts. She thanked me, and made a little effort to rise and go away. She seemed very weak. I told her I was a medical man, I started in and talked to her.”

“And she to you?”

“Yes, quite straight. Don’t you know that women always treat a doctor as if he were one step removed from their father confessor--not human--not in the same category as themselves? It is not complimentary to one as a man, but one hears a good deal one would not otherwise hear. She ended by telling me all about herself--in a veiled way, of course. It soothed her--relieved her--she seemed not to have had an outlet for years!”

“To a mere stranger!”

“To a doctor. And she did not know what she was saying half the time. She was hysterical, of course. Heavens! what nonsense she talked! She spoke of herself as a person somehow haunted, cursed by some malign fate, a victim of some fearful spiritual catastrophe, don’t you know? I let her run on. She was convinced of the reality of a sort of ‘doom’ that she had fancied had befallen her. It was quite pathetic. Then it got rather chilly--she shivered--I suggested her going in. She shrank back; she said, ‘If you only knew what a relief it is, how much less miserable I am out here! I can breathe; I can live--it is my only glimpse of the world that is alive--I live in a grave--oh, let me stay!’ She seemed positively afraid to go home.”

“Perhaps some one bullied her at home.”

“I suppose so, but then--she had no husband. He died, she told me, years ago. She had adored him, she said----”

“Is she pretty?”

“Pretty! Well, I hardly noticed. Let me see! Oh, yes, I suppose she was pretty--no, now I think of it, she would be too worn and faded to be what you call pretty.”

Esther smiled.