The Testing of Diana Mallory, Mrs. Humphry Ward [e book reader online TXT] 📗

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CHAPTER XXIV

It was about ten o'clock at night. Lankester, who had arrived from London an hour before, had said good-night to Lady Lucy and Sir James, and had slipped into Marsham's room. Marsham had barred his door that evening against both his mother and Sir James. But Lankester was not excluded.

Off and on and in the intervals of his parliamentary work he had been staying at Tallyn for some days. A letter from Lady Lucy, in reply to an inquiry, had brought him down. Oliver had received him with few words--indeed, with an evident distaste for words; but at the end of the first day's visit had asked him abruptly, peremptorily even, to come again.

When he entered Marsham's room he found the invalid asleep under the influence of morphia. The valet, a young fellow, was noiselessly putting things straight. Lankester noticed that he looked pale.

"A bad time?" he said, in a whisper, standing beside the carefully regulated spinal couch on which Marsham was sleeping.

"Awful, sir. He was fair beside himself till we gave him the morphia."

"Is there anybody sitting up?"

"No. He'll be quiet now for six or seven hours. I shall be in the next room."

The young man spoke wearily. It was clear that the moral strain of what he had just seen had weighed upon him as much as the fatigue of the day's attendance.

"Come!" said Lankester, looking at him. "You want a good night. Go to my room. I'll lie down there." He pointed to Marsham's bedroom, now appropriated to the valet, while the master, for the sake of space and cheerfulness, had been moved into the sitting-room. The servant hesitated, protested, and was at last persuaded, being well aware of Marsham's liking for this queer, serviceable being.

Lankester took various directions from him, and packed him off. Then, instead of going to the adjoining room, he chose a chair beside a shaded lamp, and said to himself that he would sleep by the fire.

Presently the huge house sank into a silence even more profound than that in which it was now steeped by day. A cold autumn wind blew round about it. After midnight the wind dropped, and the temperature with it. The first severe frost laid its grip on forest and down and garden. Silently the dahlias and the roses died, the leaves shrivelled and blackened, and a cold and glorious moon rose upon the ruins of the summer.

Lankester dozed and woke, keeping up the fire, and wrapping himself in an eider-down, with which the valet had provided him. In the small hours he walked across the room to look at Marsham. He was lying still and breathing heavily. His thick fair hair, always slightly gray from the time he was thirty, had become much grayer of late; the thin handsome face was drawn and damp, the eyes cavernous, the lips bloodless. Even in sleep his aspect showed what he had suffered.

Poor, poor old fellow!

Lankester's whole being softened into pity. Yet he had no illusions as to the man before him--a man of inferior _morale_ and weak will, incapable, indeed, of the clever brutalities by which the wicked flourish; incapable also of virtues that must, after all, be tolerably common, or the world would run much more lamely than it does. Straight, honorable, unselfish fellows--Lankester knew scores of them, rich and poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without flinching; who could produce in any society--as politicians or green-grocers--an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.

Well, what then? In the man looking down on Marsham not a tinge of pharisaic condemnation mingled with the strange clearness of his judgment. What are we all--the best of us? Lankester had not parted, like the majority of his contemporaries, with the "sense of sin." A vivid, spiritual imagination, trained for years on prayer and reverie, showed him the world and human nature--his own first and foremost--everywhere flecked and stained with evil. For the man of religion the difference between saint and sinner has never been as sharp as for the man of the world; it is for the difference between holiness and sin that he reserves his passion. And the stricken or repentant sinner is at all times nearer to his heart than the men "who need no repentance."

Moreover, it is in men like Lankester that the ascetic temper common to all ages and faiths is perpetually reproduced, the temper which makes of suffering itself a divine and sacred thing--the symbol of a mystery. In his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man, which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race. Where a thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee. The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this piteous sleeper heavenly dominations, princedoms, powers, hung in watch.

He sank, indeed, upon his knees beside the sleeper. In the intense and mystical concentration, which the habit of his life had taught him, the prayer to which he committed himself took a marvellous range without ever losing its detail, its poignancy. The pain, moral and physical, of man--pain of the savage, the slave, the child; the miseries of innumerable persons he had known, whose stories had been confided to him, whose fates he had shared; the anguish of irreparable failure, of missed, untasted joy; agonies brutal or obscure, of nerve and brain!--his mind and soul surrendered themselves to these impressions, shook under the storm and scourge of them. His prayer was not his own; it seemed to be the Spirit wrestling with Itself, and rending his own weak life.

He drew nearer to Marsham, resting his forehead on the bed. The firelight threw the shadow of his gaunt kneeling figure on the white walls. And at last, after the struggle, there seemed to be an effluence--a descending, invading love--overflowing his own being--enwrapping the sufferer before him--silencing the clamor of a weeping world. And the dual mind of the modern, even in Lankester, wavered between the two explanations: "It is myself," said the critical intellect, "the intensification and projection of myself." "_It is God!_" replied the soul.

Marsham, meanwhile, as the morning drew on, and as the veil of morphia between him and reality grew thinner, was aware of a dream slowly drifting into consciousness--of an experience that grew more vivid as it progressed. Some one was in the room; he moved uneasily, lifted his head, and saw indistinctly a figure in the shadows standing near the smouldering fire. It was not his servant; and suddenly his dream mingled with what he saw, and his heart began to throb.

"Ferrier!" he called, under his breath. The figure turned, but in his blindness and semi-consciousness he did not recognize it.

"I want to speak to you," he said, in the same guarded, half-whispered voice. "Of course, I had no right to do it, but--"

His voice dropped and his eyelids closed.

Lankester advanced from the fire. He saw Marsham was not really awake, and he dreaded to rouse him completely, lest it should only be to the consciousness of pain. He stooped over him gently, and spoke his name.

"Yes," said Marsham, murmuring, without opening his eyes. "There's no need for you to rub it in. I behaved like a beast, and Barrington--"

The voice became inarticulate again. The prostration and pallor of the speaker, the feebleness of the tone--nothing could have been more pitiful. An idea rushed upon Lankester. He again bent over the bed.

"Don't think of it any more," he said. "It's forgotten!"

A slight and ghastly smile showed on Marsham's lip as he lay with closed eyes. "Forgotten! No, by Jove!" Then, after an uneasy movement, he said, in a stronger and irritable voice, which seemed to come from another region of consciousness:

"It would have been better to have burned the paper. One can't get away from the thing. It--it disturbs me--"

"What paper?" said Lankester, close to the dreamer's ear.

"The _Herald_," said Marsham, impatiently. "Where is it?"

"In that cabinet by the fire."

"Shall I burn it?"

"Yes--don't bother me!" Evidently he now thought he was speaking to his valet, and a moan of pain escaped him. Lankester walked over to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. He saw a folded newspaper lying within it. After a moment's hesitation he lifted it, and perceived by the light of the night-lamp that it was the _Herald_ of August 2--the famous number issued on the morning of Ferrier's death. All the story of the communicated article and the "Barrington letter" ran through his mind. He stood debating with himself, shaken by emotion. Then he deliberately took the paper to the fire, stirred the coals, and, tearing up the paper, burned it piece by piece.

After it was done he walked back to Marsham's side. "I have burned the paper," he said, kneeling down by him.

Marsham, who was breathing lightly with occasional twitchings of the brow, took no notice. But after a minute he said, in a steady yet thrilling voice: "Ferrier!"

Silence.

"Ferrier!" The tone of the repeated word brought the moisture to Lankester's eyes. He took the dreamer's hand in his, pressing it. Marsham returned the pressure, first strongly, again more feebly. Then a wave of narcotic sleep returned upon him, and he seemed to sink into it profoundly.

* * * * *

Next morning, as Marsham, after his dressing, was lying moody and exhausted on his pillows, he suddenly said to his servant:

"I want something out of that cabinet by the fire."

"Yes, sir." The man moved toward it obediently.

"Find a newspaper in the top drawer, folded up small--on the right-hand side."

Richard looked.

"I am sorry, sir, but there is nothing in the drawer at all."

"Nonsense!" said Marsham, angrily. "You've got the wrong drawer!"

The whole cabinet was searched to no purpose. Marsham grew very pale. He must, of course, have destroyed the paper himself, and his illness had effaced his memory of the act, as of other things. Yet he could not shake off an impression of mystery. Twice now, weeks after Ferrier's death, he seemed to have been in Ferrier's living presence, under conditions very unlike those of an ordinary dream. He could only remind himself how easily the brain plays tricks upon a man in his state.

* * * * *

After breakfast, Sir James Chide was admitted. But Oliver was now in the state of obsession, when the whole being, already conscious of a certain degree of pain, dreads the approach of a much intenser form--hears it as the footfall of a beast of prey, drawing nearer room by room, and can think of nothing else but the suffering it foresees, and the narcotic which those about him deal out to him so grudgingly, rousing in him, the while, a secret