Somehow Good, William Frend De Morgan [essential books to read .txt] 📗

up at tea. He did so, with apologies. You see, he hadn't liked to come away while his mother was asleep, in case she should ask for him when she woke up, and she slept rather longer than usual.

"She may have been trying to do too much lately," said he, with a beautiful faith in some mysterious activities practised by the Goody unseen. Sally cultivated this faith also, to the best of her ability, but she can hardly be said to have embraced it. The way in which she and her mother lent themselves to it was, nevertheless, edifying.

"You mustn't let her overdo it, doctor," said Rosalind, seriously believing herself truthful. And Sally, encouraged by her evident earnestness, added, "And make her take plenty of nourishment. That's half the battle."

Whereupon Laetitia, swept, as it were, into the vortex of a creed, found it in her to say, "As long as she doesn't get low." It was not vigorous, and lacked completion, but it reassured and enforced. By the time the little performance was done every one in the room believed that Mrs. Vereker did down the stairs, or scoured out saucepans, or at least dusted. Even her son believed, so forcibly was the unanimity. Perhaps there was a taint of the incredulous in the minds of Fenwick and Bradshaw. But each thought the other was heart-whole, and neither suspected himself of insincerity.

Sally was curious to know exactly what lines the Octopus had operated on. That would do later, though. She would get Prosy by himself, and make him tell her all about it. In the course of time tea died a natural death. Fenwick indulged in a yawn and a great shake, and remembered that he had no end of letters to answer. Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw suddenly thought, for no reasonable reason, that they ought to be getting back. But they didn't really go home. They went for a walk landward; as it was so windy, instead--remember that they were only in the third week of their honeymoon! Sally, with Talleyrand-like diplomacy, achieved that she and Dr. Conrad should go for another walk in another direction. The sea was getting up and the glass was going down, and it would be fun to go and see the waves break over the jetty. So said Sally, and Dr. Conrad thought so too, unequivocally. They walked away in the big sea-wind, fraught with a great inheritance from the Atlantic of cool warmth and dry moisture. And if you don't know what that means, you know mighty little of the ocean in question.

Rosalind watched them through the window, closed perforce, and saw them disappear round the flagstaff with the south cone hoisted, holding their heads on to all appearance. She said to herself: "Foolish fellow, why can't he speak?" And her husband answered either her thought or her words--though he could hardly have heard them as he sat driving his pen furiously through letters--with: "He'll have to confess up, Rosey, you'll see, before he goes."

She made no reply; but, feeling a bit tired, lay down to rest on the sofa. And so powerful was the sea air, and the effect of a fair allowance of exercise, that she fell into a doze in spite of the intensely wakeful properties of Mrs. Lobjoit's horsehair sofa, which only a corrugated person could stop on without a maintained effort, so that sound sleep was impossible. She never became quite unconscious of the scratching pen and the moaning wind; so, as she did not sleep, yet did not want to wake, she remained hovering on the borderland of dreams. One minute she thought she was thinking, sanely, about Sally and her silent lover--always uppermost in her thoughts--the next, she was alive to the absurdity of some dream-thing one of them had suddenly changed to, unnoticed. Once, half awake, she was beginning to consider, seriously, whether she could not legitimately approach the Octopus on the subject, but only to find, the moment after, that the Octopus (while remaining the same) had become the chubby little English clergyman that had married her to Gerry at Umballa, twenty years ago. Then she thought she would wake, and took steps towards doing it; but, as ill-luck would have it, she began to speak before she had achieved her purpose. And the result was: "Do you remember the Reverend Samuel Herrick, Gerry, at Umb----Oh dear! I'm not awake.... I was talking nonsense." Gerry laughed.

"Wake up, love!" said he. "Do your fine intelligence justice! What was it you said? Reverend Samuel who?"

"I forget, darling. I was dreaming." Then, with a nettle-grasping instinct, as one determined to flinch from nothing, "Reverend Samuel Herrick. What did you think I said?"

"Reverend Samuel Herrick or Meyrick.... 'Not negotiable.' I don't mean the Reverend Sam, whoever he is, but the payee whose account I'm enriching." He folded the cheque he had been writing into its letter and enveloped it. But he paused on the brink of its gummed edge, looking over it at Rosalind, who was still engaged getting quite awake. "I know the name well enough. He's some chap! I expect you saw him in the 'Chronicle.'"

"Very likely, darling! He must be some chap, when you come to think of it." She says this slightly, as a mere rounding-off speech. Then goes behind her husband's chair and kisses him over his shoulder as he directs the envelope.

"Marmaduke, Copestake, Dickinson, and Humphreys," says he, as he writes the names. "Now I call that a firm-and-a-half. Old Broad Street, E.C. _That's_ all!--as far as _he_ goes. Now, how about Puckeridge, Limited?"

"Don't write any more, Gerry dear; you'll spoil your eyes. Come and look at the sunset. Come along!" For a blood-red forecast of storm in the west, surer than the surest human barometer, is blazing through the window that cannot be opened for the blow, and turning the shell-work rabbit and the story of Goliath into gold and jewels. The sun is glancing through a rift in the cloud-bank, to say good-night to the winds and seas, and wish them joy of the high old time they mean to have in his absence, in the dark.

The lurid level rays that make an indescribable glory of Rosalind's halo-growth of hair as Gerry sees it against the window, have no ill-boding in them for either--no more, that is, than always has belonged to a rough night closing over the sea, and will do so always until the sea is ice again on a planet sick to death. As he draws her arm round his neck and she his round her waist, and they glance at each other in the flaming glow, there is no thought in either of any ill impending for themselves.

"I wish Sarah were here to see you now, Rosey."

"So should I, love! Only she would see you too. And then she'd make you vainer than you are already. All men are patches of Vanity. But I forgive you." She kisses him slightly in confirmation. They certainly were a wonderful sight, the two of them, a minute ago, when the light was at its best. Yes!--they wish Sally had been there, each on the other's account. It was difficult to say which of the two had thought of Sally first. Both had this habit of registering the _rapport_ of everything to Sally as a first duty.

But a sunset glow, like this one, lasts, maybe, little longer than a highest song-note may be sustained. It was to die. But Rosalind and Gerry watched it out. His cheek was resting in the thick mass of soft gold, just moving slightly to be well aware of it. The sun-ray touched it, last of anything in the room, and died....

"What's that, dear love? _Why?_..." It was Rosalind that spoke.

"Nothing, dearest! No, nothing!... Indeed, nothing at all!"

"Gerry, what _was_ it?"

"What was what, dear?"

"What made you leave off so suddenly?"

For the slightly intermittent movement of his cheek on her hair--what hairy thing is there that does not love to be stroked?--had stopped; and his hand that held hers had slipped from it, and rested for a moment on his own forehead.

"It's gone now. It was a sort of recurrence. I haven't been having them lately...."

"Come and sit down, love. There, now, don't fidget! What was it about?" Does he look pale?--thinks Rosalind--or is it only the vanished glow?

He is uncommunicative. Suppose they go out for a turn before dinner, he suggests. They can walk down to the jetty, to meet Sarah and her medical adviser. Soon said, soon settled. Ten minutes more, and they are on their way to the fisher dwellings: experiencing three-quarters of a gale, it appears, on the testimony of an Ancient Mariner in a blue and white-striped woollen shirt, who knows about things.

"That was _very_ queer, that recurrence!" Thus Gerry, after leaving the Ancient Mariner. "It was just as the little edge of the sun went behind the bank. And what do you think my mind hooked it on to, of all things in the world?" Rosalind couldn't guess, of course. "Why, a big wheel I was trying to stop, that went slowly--slowly--like the sun vanishing. And then just as the sun went it stopped."

"Was there anything else?" Entire concealment of alarm is all Rosalind can attend to.

"No end of things, all mixed up together. One thing very funny. A great big German chap.... I say, Rosalind!"

"What, Gerry darling?"

"Do you recollect, when we were in Switzerland, up at that last high-up place, Seelisberg--Sonnenberg--do you remember the great fat Baron that gave me those cigars, and sang?"

"Remember the Baron? Of course I do. Perfectly!" Rosalind contrived a laugh. "Was he in it?" Perhaps this was rash. But then, not to say it would have been cowardice, when it was on her tongue-tip. Let the nettle be grasped.

"He was in it, singing and all. But the whole thing was mixed up and queer. It all went, quite suddenly. And I should have lost him out of it, as one loses a dream, if it hadn't been for seeing him in Switzerland. It was something to hold on by. Do you understand?"

"I think I do. _I_ had forgotten what I was dreaming about when I woke on the sofa and talked that nonsense. But I held on to the name, for all that."

"But then that wasn't a real person, the Reverend--what was he?--Herrick or Derrick."

Rosalind passed the point by. "Gerry darling! I want you to do as I tell you. Don't worry your head about it, but keep quiet. If memory is coming back to you, it will come all the quicker for letting your mind rest. Let it come gradually."

"I see what you mean. You think it was really a recollection of B.C.?"

"I think so. Why should it not?"

"But it's all gone clean away again! And I can't remember anything of it at all--and there was heaps!"

"Never mind! If it was real it will come back. Wait and be patient!"

Rosalind's mind laid down this rule for itself--to think and act exactly as though there had been nothing to fear. Even if all the past had been easy to face it would have shrunk from suggestions. So thought she to herself, perhaps with a little excusable self-deception. Otherwise the natural thing would have been to repeat to him all the Baron's story.

No! She would not say a word, or give a hint. If it was all to come back to him, it would come back. If not, she could not