Part 9

Silas became unwontedly withdrawn into himself, neither Nan nor Morgan knew what to make of him. At times he avoided them, at other times silently sought their company. Gregory, to whom Nan turned, after one glance at his brother, replied, “Let him alone,” and she followed the brief formula as being the best advice, finding that Silas only snarled at her whenever she spoke to him. She was relieved rather than dismayed; Silas surly was preferable to Silas honeyed.

He roamed alone, spending hours in the abbey after dusk; or ordered up Hambley, and under the little man’s guidance made his way to the secluded summer-house at Malleson Place. Lady Malleson was also at a loss to understand his altered manner; towards her he relaxed his taciturnity, and his speech was more than ever wild and varied, but although he ranged erratically she had the impression that his mind rarely departed from one central subject, and she had also the shrewd idea that that subject was his little sister-in-law, whom she had once seen, and whom she vaguely thought a pretty, delicate, rather appealing girl, unimportant until she had become the preoccupation of Silas’s thoughts.

So long as she had Silas with her, however, she cared very little what he talked about. The utmost that she deplored, sometimes, was his restlessness. It made her wonder whether she really held him. She wondered, indeed, sometimes whether her hold on him was too light to satisfy her vanity, or too secure—all too secure!—for the preservation of her safety and her convenience. She liked danger well enough, but there was a point where danger might become too dangerous.

“Wild man,—Ishmael,” she said to him.

But he went on regardless with what he had been saying.

“There’s but one use for the body,” he exclaimed, “health. Not mortification—that’s morbid. But _health_, lean and hard. Sinews like whips.” He bared a magnificent forearm. “The only instance where I practise what I preach,” he added bitterly, causing the muscles to rise at will.

“Then you should respect your brother Gregory,” she said, languidly content.

“You have seen him lately, my lady?”

“Yesterday, in the village.”

“The neatest of minds, in the body of a blacksmith,” said Silas.

“Neat?”

“Why, yes—so long as he doesn’t break out. Then he lays all around him, smashes everything he can see, without comment—that makes it quite uncanny, I assure you—and in a trice returns to his quiet and his neatness as though nothing out of the way had happened. He’s very inaccessible, my brother Gregory. No warnings. No explanations. No remorse. Nothing apparently, but action.”

“You respect that,” she said, looking at his fine bony face, and his thick rough hair.

“Think, if a man’s killed,” he brooded, “killed by violent means, what an outrage on the body. Blood spilt, that ran secretly and private in his veins. Bones, no one had ever seen. Entrails. What a bursting!”

She pictured his mind as a landscape ravaged by war, here a wreckage of stone and twisted iron, there a grave, here the stark Calvary of a stricken tree, there the bright blare of poppies striving for life amongst the rushes and rank weeds.

“You waste yourself,” she said; “you should be a martyr,—or a poet.”

She liked to stir him, by such calculated remarks.

“A second-rate poet? not I,” he sneered instantly; then, as the flattery stole over him, “More likely a martyr, of the two,” he said, responding.

“You waste yourself,” she repeated, drawing meanwhile slowly through her fingers the long silk fringe of a shawl that lay thrown across her sofa, “you waste yourself, out of contempt. You eagle with broken wings!”—she knew with what gluttony he accepted such metaphors, and amused herself when he wasn’t with her by thinking out new ones that she might serve up to him,—“you repudiate comfort, don’t you, in your dream of grandeur. Will you end, I wonder, by getting neither?” “No one speaks to me like your ladyship,” he muttered reluctantly. She laughed. She enjoyed pretending to an ideal of him that, his pride well fired, he would strain himself to live up to; an ideal, moreover, that coincided so adroitly with his own ideal of himself. “I never knew a man so vigorously reject the second-best. It was a pity,” she continued, smoothing out and patting down the fringe of the shawl, “that you never came across a woman to suit you.” She raised her eyes to watch him as she talked, and modulated her phrases according to the expression she found on his face, nor did she trouble to conceal the busy mischief in her own; there were advantages, certainly, in his blindness. “How would you have behaved, I wonder?” she went on; “you would have made a stormy lover, I fancy, once your resistance had been thrown to the winds. Stormy and exacting. Poor woman! Yet I dare say she wouldn’t have minded. Women are like that, you know. And for you,—no more loneliness, no more unsatisfied longings, no more misanthropy. I believe you’d have grown into a different man. You would probably have achieved a good deal.... But it would have taken a clever woman, a very clever woman, to steer you without your knowing that you were being steered.”

“Women in my walk of life don’t have time for cleverness, my lady,” he said acrimoniously, giving a literal answer to her words because he must ignore the meaning which he read into them, and which, as he well knew, she had intended him to read. Her ingenuity was tireless over insinuations that put him on the rack. Clever, she had said; she was clever enough! why hadn’t they, he wondered, appointed women to sit upon the tribunals of the Inquisition? “If you had been born into my class, or I into yours ...” he burst out.

“I don’t admit impertinence, you know, Dene,” she said in a voice of ice, “and anyway I am afraid I cannot give you any more time at present.”

VII

Thus, always. He hated his bondage, he despised while he coveted the woman, he hated her for holding him bound, but nothing, nothing was comparable to his hatred and disgust of himself in his inability to get free. Often he raved audibly, shaking his fists; and those who saw him stopped to listen to his mutterings, and thought what an alarming sight Silas Dene presented, with his wild blind eyes and furrowed mouth that mumbled and let drop the tiny river of saliva. He was often to be seen thus in the abbey, of an evening, prowling in the aisles; where occasionally on a Sunday he would be perceived by the rare visitor attracted to Abbot’s Etchery, that strange island of factory and Norman abbey emerging amidst the floods, sufficiently singular to be worth the journey out from Lincoln; and those who saw him there went away saying that not the least arresting sight in the desolate encampment was the blind man who in savagery and loneliness haunted the precincts of the abbey, and whose incoherent ravings could be readily changed by a little encouragement into a tirade of such vehemence, such angry bitterness, such bewildering aggression. They went away wondering what ailed him, to have made of him so baffling and solitary a figure.

VIII

Rumour, at the same time, began to trot like a jackal round the figure of Silas. There was the incident, never very clear to the village, of the fire. Loyalty of course silenced Nan and Morgan; and Hambley, to a very large extent silenced through fear, dared do no more than drop hints that Silas could scarcely trace back to him. Nevertheless, a taste of the story got about, a taste that the village relished and rolled over on its tongue, both in the workshops and the public bar,—for gossip that penetrated the fiercely secluded house of the Denes, and brought to light even the tip of one of their buried secrets, had a legendary smack denied to topics more vulgar and more frequently accessible.

Also, Lady Malleson’s name was murmured, behind the shelter of a raised hand.

Nan was aware of the curious looks, thrown at her because she had been with Silas during the fire; and Morgan, aware of similar looks, met them with a contemptuous impatience; but Silas for some days knew of nothing amiss. Only when he stood up to speak at the debating-club, down in the concert-room, he heard a murmur pass through his audience, a murmur of resentment and disapproval. It was as though the accumulated resentment of the men, repressed hitherto out of a lack of understanding, a certain awe, and even a grudging admiration, had now broken its bonds under a definite provocation that had submerged their submission by arousing their disgust. It was a low murmur, compounded of irritation, criticism, and of mutiny under a tyranny they no longer respected and were therefore no longer prepared to admit. Silas heard it, and with his fist already lifted for his peroration, stopped himself dead.

He faced them, standing alone under the dark frown of many sulky and rebellious looks.

“Some one spoke?” he demanded.

He was accustomed to exact silence when he took up the debate.

He had very little time to decide his course of action; he knew that they were against him; knew, obscurely, why; and dared not press home the question.

Morgan was not present, or he might have tided over the matter, out of pity for Silas, who in his defiance looked so extraordinarily gaunt and solitary, and so undefeatably proud.

Morgan, however, was busy elsewhere, so that Silas faced only a lowering throng, that sat obstinate, chins thrust forward into palms and murmured still, with deliberate intent to affront, but without the courage to bring clear accusation.

“This isn’t the treatment I’m accustomed to receive here,” Silas bayed at them finally, “and until I’m invited I’ll no longer trouble you. Invited I said, and invited I meant. If I’m sought up at my own house perhaps I’ll reconsider it, and come back to you. For the present, good-night to you all.”

One, more kind-hearted than the rest, and perhaps ashamed, rose clumsily to intercept him as he went towards the door.

“I’ll help you, Dene.”

Silas thrust him aside, and strode away alone.

IX

When this story had come to the ears of Nan and Morgan, they whispered “The fire!” and crept away from one another sooner than disturb a subject of which they could not bear to speak.

The fire had taken place at night, and had not been in itself of any importance. “You see nothing but a few tarred sheds burning,” Silas had cried, in a frenzy of desperation to Morgan, “and folk will come to me to-morrow to say you acted gallantly, or what not. Why shouldn’t you, seeing only wood and flames? You don’t hear it coming after you with great light strides and flaming fingers....”

“Silas, you’re afraid,” Morgan had said gravely.

Silas had checked himself at that; he had quavered, and made an effort to recover. The accusation had fallen like a plummet into the uncontrolled waters of his mind. He had quavered, and almost gibbered at Morgan; so greatly fallen beneath his normal standard of pride and independence that he had been shocking to hear and see. He had tried to defend himself, “Not afraid, only helpless, helpless....”

Nan and Morgan had stood, hearing him beseech them not to leave him. Nan knew then that Silas was betrayed by fear into revealing something he usually kept very, very carefully concealed; that was why the exposure was so shocking and so degrading; and Morgan seeing it with her eyes stood beside her, both equally hurt, and equally craving to rescue Silas. But he, in his mingled panic and resentment, had had nothing but insults for them, and, nearly screaming, told Morgan to clear out.

“Shall I stay with you?” Nan had asked.

He had hesitated; he wanted to fling her out, he tried to make himself say, “No, go!” but his extreme terror was stronger than this flicker of his other, antagonistic. He said, “Yes, you can stay,” a heat of hatred for her passing over him as he said it.

X

They had sat in silence after Morgan had gone, because Silas had forbidden her to speak. She was glad of the hush, for she felt that she had passed through a great empty din and that the brass vacancy of cymbals was still clanging in her ears. The scene had wounded her, and had roused emotions that bewildered her. Why should she resent (to the extent of stretching out deterrent hands, as she had done,) the betrayal of Silas by himself? Somewhere, though she would neither have probed nor acknowledged, she had believed that underneath her fear and pity lay hatred of Silas; she had even tried to extend her pity into a reassuring mental scorn. Yet to him, who never spared others, she had had the impulse to cry, “Spare yourself.” She had suffered from seeing him untrue to his own tradition.

They sat in silence, Silas tearing at the seat of a rush-bottomed chair, Nan watching the unequal glow in the sky outside the windows. She found herself trembling from time to time. Not with fear of the fire, but with disgust and regret of that noisy scene. She wished that something would happen to restore him to his ancient formidable credit, something to remove that disquieting sense of his fraudulence. She turned away from him, but next moment was glancing at him again; he was destroying the seat of the chair, shred by shred, his fine hands pulling at the rushes with a peevish haste and his head bent obstinately away from observation. Every time a siren hooted he hunched himself more closely together, as though the compression of his limbs would afford him some protection.

“I think the glare is dying down, Silas,” she said gently.

He hunched himself fretfully away.

He was thinking, “They are full of forbearance and long-suffering. Am I to be taught gratitude? perhaps through disaster? They would let God himself look into every corner of their minds. Little children!” For the moment, under the effect of his fear, he did not brand them as lacking in savour. Their limpidity seemed to him as desirable as the absence of danger. If danger might but be removed he would abandon as the price his own arrogant passions. He was humbled now to another standard of life. Weary of battle and opposition, peace appeared to him sweet and seemly, now that he had been granted tumult,—a tumult not of his own making, and entirely out of the control of his stage-managing. He thought again, “They have never a quick word against me. Nan gave me a stick, and I broke it and said I wanted no stick, because I knew she expected me to show pleasure. I am sure that after I broke it she had tears in her eyes. But why should she try to coax me with presents? or I allow myself to be coaxed?” He shuddered at the long scream of a siren, and reflected that they had probably kept the extent of the fire from him, knowing that he could not verify. For an instant he caught hold of the idea that the fire might get across the village to the abbey, and destroy that; and a little flash of old wicked glee passed across him. But it died away. He imagined the fire travelling down his own street, men and women flying before it, and he himself forgotten, engulfed,—perhaps even purposely left to perish. At this point he spoke, “Are you there, Nan?” She was there. “I never meant you any harm, Nan,” he said surprisingly. Warm-hearted, she was at his side as the words left his lips. “No, Silas, I know that....” “That’ll do,” he said pushing her away.

But he had now started upon another train of thought, which he adopted and amplified with his usual vehemence. “God preserve me, and I will live to befriend Nan and Linnet.” Obscurely he had the instinct of propitiation, offering his intention as a bribe to a very angry god; and partially in his chastened mood,—albeit but the vile chastening of terror,—he yielded to the stirrings of his own repressed sentimentalism. Simplicity, limpidity, were perhaps not the poor and bloodless attributes he had thought. Their case might be turned convincingly by a skilful advocate. He, Silas, had the mettle of strife within him; those other two had not: (The fire! the fire! in the meanderings of his arguments he had almost forgotten the fire. In the rush of recollection he knotted his fingers together till they cracked. He was horribly afraid.) Those two did not fight and wrestle with chimeras, muscles knotted and sweat pouring, as Silas did. Their minds were not ridden by demons. They did not sight everywhere a portent, a dark enemy or a fiercely fair ally. He had scorned them as easy, milky, satisfied,—he knew well the run of the familiar epithets. He had tried to scorn them; he had forsworn their kindness. He had crushed his love for them, and his longing to allow the warm tide of that love to flow in solace over him. He had been proud, and had driven his craft ever to sea, courting the gales and riot, rather than accept the broad comfort of the haven. Proud! proud! how superbly proud! how proportionately base the physical fear that could humble such a spirit of arrogance in man!

XI

A cry from Nan brought him to his feet, chattering. “What it it? what is it?” in a renewed access of fear. “Oh, Silas!” she exclaimed, coming close to him, “there’s Hambley looking in through the window; tell him to go away, oh, please tell him to go away! He does what you tell him always.”

Hambley was indeed pressing his face against the window, and the shape of his head was dark against the red sky. He was so small that he was only just able to reach the window by climbing to the outside sill with the tips of his fingers, and the end of his nose was flattened white upon the pane. Nan could see the grin on his evil little face. Silas strode to the door, flung it open, and summoned the little man. At the end of the street the night was torn by flames.

As soon as Hambley was inside he seized the little man by his collar. “Now what were you doing, peeping into my house when you thought you wouldn’t be found out? You little skunk, I’ve always called you, and so you are. You frightened Nan, you little skunk. You meant to spy upon me. Well, you’ll see what you get!” Holding him easily with one hand, sometimes swinging him clean off his feet, so that he twirled and dangled in mid-air, Silas thrashed him with his fist, and Hambley shrieked and appealed to Nan, and tried, but quite vainly, to kick Silas. Nan got into a corner, out of the way of the blows. When he had finished, Silas carried him over to the door and threw him regardlessly out into the street.

XII

Morgan came back at midnight, and said that the fire was over, not having spread beyond the sheds. He was rubbing his blackened hands on a piece of waste. His eyes fell upon the litter of shredded rushes scattered in witness on the floor near Silas. Nan drooped, pale and tired. He began to tell her about the fire, trying to brighten her and to make her feel that she was no longer a prisoner alone with Silas. He was purposely taking no notice of Silas, but presently looked up to see the blind man standing above them.

He appeared to be immensely tall and haggard, and upon his face was a look of suffering, which by the accentuation of furrow and wrinkle gave the suggestion that he was unkempt. His limbs and torso were hugely, grotesquely reproduced in shadow upon the walls and ceiling behind him. Inscrutable to them, he loomed over Nan and Linnet. At last he spoke.

“You’re glad to have him back, Nan. You’re glad to come back to her, Linnet.”

Their eyes met in tremulous surprise; was Silas to serve as their interpreter?

“You little, dainty people! Oh, yes. I know. Gentle in your dealings. Amiable. Indulgent. You don’t criticise—criticism’s uncharitable—might hurt somebody’s feelings. Let things remain as they are; don’t disturb. Moderation! That’s your creed. Make terms. Compromise!” He dropped ejaculations, and swung into his most rhetorical vein, in which he seemed really possessed by a spirit that released the unfaltering words. “O pliant ones of the earth! blessed are the meek, and flowers shall revive at your passage. Wander into the woods; call to the roe-deer to eat from your hand. Look with envy at the pairing foxes, the nesting birds; no creature so wild that it may escape the yearly call of home. If the fox and the vixen together can burrow their earth for shelter and the whelping of their litter, cannot you two together build a hut of boughs and branches in a clearing beside the stream? Listen: I covet no love, I am debarred; and love when it touches men like me is no virtue, only an indulgence of self and a lapse from strength.” He laughed. “Who would be weak? or bestial? But in you, love shall attain its highest purpose of usefulness and steadfastness. To be steadfast in love is reserved to man; it is the conscious will of love, the sustained reason. Without it, as well be a dog, and couple in the street. Are you fit? You are young and your minds are counterparts; you have no business with me or with Gregory. Leave me to Gregory, and Gregory to me; the dumb shall lead the blind, and the blind shall speak for the dumb. But you, go out, where no strife assails, and concern yourselves with labour. You are the builders, and we are the destroyers; we are the cursed, and you are the blessed. You and your like must build your security upon the ruins of us and our like; it’s the natural law. I might have been another man, but God saw fit to twist me; he wrenched my spirit and upon each of my eyes in turn he laid a finger.”

They sat absolutely speechless, confused and confounded that he should thus trumpet out the secret they had hitherto guarded from one another. They had wondered and suffered and trembled much, but of all outcomes this was an outcome they had certainly never foreseen. It broke over them like a natural catastrophe; Silas was making it into something beyond the diapason of their souls.

“Build!” he said passionately, earnestly, “build with your sanity and your health. Leave query and destruction to the tormented spirits; there will always be enough of those; and if you did but know,—oh, world!” he said, clasping his hands, “if you did but know, you would pity the precursor, solitary and bold. Then comes the army of the workers, with honest tools, and their flowing quietness.—Why should you struggle, you two, beside Gregory and me? You should be side by side, perfectly matched, amongst children who should resemble you. Tell me,” he said, bending down to them, “you love?”

When he reduced it to those naked terms, they were ashamed into honesty, both towards him and towards each other; they assented, as though he were a priest reading over them a terrible and simple marriage-service.

“Then you shall have the courage to love. You shall go unmolested. You were intended to fulfil, not to renounce. Who pretends to one law for all? Not I; I wouldn’t dare utter such a heresy of intolerance. Not in my sane moments. Who would take a field-bird up into the mountains? His place is simpler; sweeter....”

He suddenly put his hands over his face, and his voice faltered, as though he were spent and had nothing more to say.

“Go away now,” he said fretfully, “I’m tired out.”

XI

I