Bag and Baggage/John Darling's Atonement
JOHN DARLING'S ATONEMENT
I
A MAN of thirty and a young woman of eighteen, depressed from a rather aimless saunter in the wet, had paused, as by common consent, at a point where a field-path gave upon a stile, and thence upon rain-drowned flats. Behind them, half reluctantly abandoned, stood the comparative covert of hedgerows and a small coppice or two, rising blurred and phantasmic in the twilight; and in front yawned the desolation of a wild and shelterless marshland. Perhaps the contrast touched a dread sympathetic nerve in the girl. She appeared to shrink back from that sodden pool of blackness before her, in a panic something like a sleep-walker's, who wakes from warm sheets to find herself bewildered in the open night. Her vision was strained, looking out into it. She saw vague and indeterminate monsters there, writhing up and dissipating like smoke in the rain, and her heart was sick with alarm.
She sat on the stile, her skirt rolled up over her petticoat, her feet tucked under it. She was a fresh wholesome young body, inclining to plumpness, with pretty hair and blue honest eyes; but she was of a social grade obviously lower than her companion's—a farmer's daughter, in fact—and that may have accounted for the trouble. He leaned against the stile-post, preoccupied, holding an umbrella over her head. There was positively nothing of the rascal about him. As a matter of fact he was a very good fellow indeed—even particularly good and particularly soft-hearted. But he was of an affectionate nature and impulsive, was this John Darling—one might guess it from his mobile thin face and flying colour—and apt sometimes on a quick call of the blood to disregard the laws of moral property. Professionally he was a school-proprietor.
The girl suddenly spoke and emotionally: "I wish I had gone out with mother last night, as she wanted me."
He glanced at her and away; but there was nothing to answer.
"You've made me a woman, John, and a sad one," she said.
Her under lip trembled; she couldn't fight it off: "Won't you marry me, dear, dear John?" she cried, and broke into tears.
Fiddle-de-dee! There was never anything questionable but a trifle too much confidence between these two. He laughed, if rather drearily, as, holding the umbrella with his left hand, he hugged his right hard about the sweet and homely waist.
"What is all this foolish talk, Peggy Pretty?" he said. "To-night if you like; to-morrow if you like; any time you like, and you know it."
Of course she did. It was her sin to have wronged him by a thought—her staunch, upright, unchangeable true love. It was those menacing spectres out in the mist that had frightened her. Her sobs were jerked out of her in spasms, as she pressed him and pressed him to her heart. And presently she was releasing him rosily.
"Indeed, to-morrow wouldn't be too soon for me," she said; and hung her pretty head.
"Well, so we've got to talk," he answered; and wrapped her about with his love under the umbrella. As they sat together on the stile, they were a pair of as inseparable sweethearts as the world might boast. There could be no sin between these two, unless a very exacting devil should quote a mutual excess of good-nature for one. John Darling, for all his social and mental superiority, loved and had long loved his Peggy with a constant confidence in himself and her. Neither of them could conceive such a thing as a real misunderstanding with the other. The question was the slip—and at a very ruinous crisis, too.
That was the matter, the crisis. God knows (and John Darling) how many forlorn and neglected love-children (save the word), and disliked step-children, and other such encumbrances there be in a single county of the land! Mr. Squeers provided in his own way for some of these; John Darling provided in his, which was quite another—a kindly school and shelter for the poor waifs of fortune. But John lived at a later date than Wackford, and had the advantage of that gentleman's history to instruct him in how not to take advantage of other people's slips. And yet, at the last, he had made a slip of his own.
It seemed the moral of all his ill-founded philanthropy. He was not really fit to be the guide and mentor of youth. And heaven, through a long series of warnings, had appeared to imply the same. His establishment, fairly prosperous at first, had slowly and gradually decayed. Children died, or were withdrawn from his care; others did not come, or only in ever diminishing number, to replace the departed. His school dwindled, and his receipts. At last he was left with but a couple of forlorn hopes, and those took diphtheria. Farmer Pretty (that was Peggy's mother) began to look askance at him—a gentleman was a gentleman, but blood manured no crops—and it was at this pass that he had gone to Peggy to release her, and had bound her indissolubly to himself instead.
"I am just ruined, Peggy," he groaned. "I have got ten pounds in the bank—hardly enough to pay the nurse; no prospect of remittances, if these poor things escape my hands; brokers waiting round the corner. I shall have to close the school, unless"
"Unless what, John?"
"Never mind. I'm not every way a villain yet."
"But you're going to marry me—you promised."
"What a daft loveling! Do you want me now, a beggar? Will your mother want me?"
"Yes—O, yes! if she knew."
"But don't you see you must marry me without her knowing—bind yourself without her knowledge to a beggar?"
"I'm ready, when it's John."
"Dear illogician! I wonder if ever a woman yet, even on her death-bed, allowed illogic to her sex. But, if she did, you may be sure she recovered, to refute her own concession before too late. Very well, we'll go and be married to-morrow three weeks, at the Registry Office."
"I wish it might be the church; but it can't be helped, I suppose."
"And then we'll go and sing along the streets for our wedding breakfast."
"I'll sing for you blithely, and dance for you, John. My heart's dancing already. If we've done a wrong, it's the sweet way to mend it, my true, true lover."
And they parted on that. But the man's heart, as it bore him back to his lonely ruin of a home, beat heavily and fiercely in one. Fate had been ungenerous to him, pelting him to the very ground with his own excess of kindness.
The house stood lonely on the edge of a wet and weedy tract of common. Clear and near, it seemed, the lights of the town, half a mile away, twinkled and stretched themselves. It was a fairly large building, with a shrubbery about it; but rents were moderate in that remote place. The rain splashed in the porch; there was only one light in a window high up. Darling let himself in with a latchkey, and, pausing a moment in the deserted hall, struck a match and kindled a lamp. The worn carpet on the stairs, going up before him into darkness, spoke of many little feet which had learned to romp lightly there under his kind and merciful regime. It was all very bitter.
A decent woman came down the stairs and accosted him. There was warning in her face.
"Well?" he said.
"One's dead, sir," she answered.
"Which one?"
"It's little Claude Destrelle, sir."
He shrunk back. He had loved this boy above others—loved him the more for his late utter repudiation, it would appear, by one who had formerly held herself responsible for his keep and welfare. The pittance miserly withheld had only served to substantiate the child's forlorn claim on his own rich heart. It was a minute before he could speak.
"And the other?"
"He's bad; but he holds on. He'll do, I think."
The last of all! "I must make an attempt to reach poor Claude's kindred," he said, and turned into his study. Yet, once there, he did not write, but sat vacantly brooding in the lamplight. "What a child!" he thought. "What a child!—no understanding in her but through love. Shall I kill myself—and abandon her to the worst, damned coward that I should be?"
Quickly, impulsively, he turned a key in his desk, and took out a letter. It had reached him that morning—the sequel to an earlier one, briefly acknowledged by him. It was dated from a London square; but was penned in a thin rather foreign-looking hand. He had received in his time many such queer communications from secret correspondents—peremptory, or illiterate, or insidious, or all together, but suggesting without exception a common moral of guilt seeking to evade its own consequences. It was part of his business, and a necessary penalty of it.
But this letter was peculiar, inasmuch as it appeared to run on lines of repentance, or restitution.
"I refer myself again," it said, "to the boy registered at your school under a name and circumstances, of which you write to decline the decoverture, unless proof of my further claim to know. Very well—these facts only lately reach me after a person's death, and I am ask to mend a wrong the way after all the most natural to me. I am ready, then. It shall be very plain. It was my wife place the child at your school, unknown to me; and now she repent and die, after telling me your address and that was all. Then the convulsion seize her. I sign you my name down at foot; and hers of the unmarried was Destrelle. She may have name the child one or the other, or no name at all at your choice. That is for you; but she will have name herself, and that is enough. Now I desire in particular only to give the effect to her wish; and I desire also to remove the child from your so excellent care. It shall be well acknowledge."
John Darling's left hand rested on the letter after he had re-read it. His right supported his forehead, the elbow crooked on his desk, while he pondered. A fat-bodied, spider-legged clock on the mantelpiece struck eight.
"It shall be well acknowledge"—an empty claim to advance in the light of what had happened at the intense psychologic moment. That was his demon luck—the last scurvy spite of fate. And yet he had had a peculiar fondness for this abandoned waif; had always lavished upon him a plenitude of the kindness with which his heart was stored. Would that count for anything? He looked round the sorry room; he thought of the mean and tattered appointments of the dormitory upstairs in which the little quiet body lay—no subject for barter any longer. What was in all this to vouch for any especial tenderness or consideration? At the last his moral evidences were no better than Mr. Squeers's.
There was no definite guile in him at the moment. If one had asked him, as Peggy Pretty had asked earlier, what he had meant by his reservation on the question of closing the school at once, he would have answered, and quite truthfully to himself: "I don't know. I don't know in the least what was in my mind." And he didn't know. The "slip" was all paramount in him. He must save his honest love the consequences of it, at whatever cost to himself—that necessity obscured all other issues. But it also—which he did not recognise—made him desperate; and desperation is the devil's opportunity.
A sharp quick ring at the bell startled Darling from his reverie. He heard the little maid plod up from the basement, shuffle along the hall, and let someone in. The next moment his door opened. "Mister Fairmon," announced the girl, and shut in a stranger with him.
Darling rose. He saw before him a middle-aged spare gentleman, obviously late from the road, for his slim boots were thickly muddied, and his soft felt hat, which he held in his hand, was sparkling with raindrops. There was something essentially foreign in his appearance—in his vivid eyes, in his bottle-brush of a head, in his black small beard, pointing in an outward curve, like a scorpion's sting. He bowed, with a sweep of his hat to his breast, and drew his heels together.
"Mr. Darling?" he said, in a soft very caressing voice, as if the hope of his life were realised; and his teeth, white and flawless, emphasised his gratification. "I am too happy."
John Darling had a surprised intuition. Here, without doubt, was his unknown correspondent arrived in person.
"M. de Vermond?" he exclaimed.
"The same," answered the stranger. "Ah, forgive me—the impatience of the agent of restitution! I could not wait, I could not rest even, till I back my enquiry in the self-person. The boy—he is with you—here?"
The schoolmaster, looking down, fumbled some papers with the tips of his fingers.
"It is unfortunate, sir," he said; "it is grievously unfortunate, admitting the justice of your claim, that you come to consult me at a terrible crisis. The boy is here; but—but he is dangerously ill."
Why did he temporise with—beg the question? Perhaps he could not have told you, of his own knowledge, even then. M. de Vermond started and stared. The veneer, even in a moment, was warping.
"Ill!" he exclaimed angrily. "But you never"
"You had to justify your right to know, sir," said Darling stoutly.
The stranger pondered his face a moment darkly.
"Well," he then rapped out, with impatience. "I am waiting."
"Assuming your right," said John, "it is my unhappiness to inform you that diphtheria has broken out in the school. Luckily, prompt isolation, and—and removal, have limited the seizure to two cases, of which one, I regret to say, has ended fatally. The other"
"The other, sir," interrupted the stranger, "the other, it is so, then, is the subject of my visit?"
John Darling did not answer—he could not, in fact; something was choking him. The voice—he already hated it, as if it were the devil's—pursued and penetrated him remorselessly.
"Will he recover?"
"How can I tell?"
"Is there at least one chance? "
"One in ten, or fifty, or a hundred. How can I tell, I say?"
In an instant, to his shocked amazement, he felt his hand seized in a vehement grip. The soul of the man was looking down on him out of fiery windows.
"Seize that chance!" cried M. de Vermond. "It can be done—yes. Throw yourself—you, I say—your courage, your conscience into the pool, and win that life for me. I tell you, sir, on the day you surrender it into my hands, sound and well, I give you money, one thousand pounds, straight in your pocket. That is for a bargain. What is the stuff to me? pouf! But this child, he is much. I say it, and I mean it."
The monstrous thing had come; it faced him naked and terrific—the temptation which he had not had the moral force to strangle in its birth. He knew himself now—knew not only his own heart's bitterness, but its corruption. From the moment when the nurse had said to him about that other, "He'll do, I think," he had been really lost—he recognised it. He tried to assert himself; to repudiate the implied insult of a bribe; to express his indignation somehow. He could only gasp and blink in the blaze of a stupendous prospect. Where had been a blasted heath was a smiling pasture. An old song he was fond of ran perversely in his head. Music has a way of haunting troubled minds with a phrase of itself repeated over and over again. "At her cottage door Mary stood and listened," it went. Poor Mary! she was waiting for William to come back and reassure her—which William, honest lad, elected to do. What a tranquil pretty scene the sequel conjured up!
Darling could not speak a word, while every second's tick of the spidery clock on the mantelpiece seemed to be knitting an impenetrable web about his moral sense, and securing it from escape.
"Ah!" said the stranger, releasing his hand at last, "you accept the challenge—that is good. Now take me to see this boy."
John tried to murmur something about danger, infection, and the like. The other pushed him impatiently towards the door.
Up in the ghostly dormitory they found the little flushed life at its battle. A screen hid the dead. The nurse, sewing at some linen, rose and stood, still busy, by the bed.
The stranger stared greedily at the face on the pillow.
"How, then, do you call him?" he whispered to Darling.
The schoolmaster silently entreated silence, and withdrawing when the other would follow him, returned softly to the hall. There he turned desperately at bay.
"Charles Smith," he said.
M. de Vermond's brow went up cynically.
"He was register so?" he asked. "By Madame de Vermond?"
"Yes."
"Ah!" he shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. "A characteristic selection, juste ciel! But she lack, ever and always, the imagination."
John Darling clutched suddenly and passionately at a floating straw of self-justification.
"You will not object to tell me, sir," he said. "Your wife—possibly in some fit of anger, of some insane jealousy or revenge—did this thing, deprived you of your own, during your absence from her?"
M. de Vermond nodded gravely.
"I never saw it. I was away, yes, when it was born. She will not let me know, or confess but at this last. Now, by your good office, it shall be mine for the first time."
"Shall it? But if it comes to pass indeed, you will be good to it? Yet how can you be so certain?"
"He will recover, yes, through you. I know she shall not have the fruits of her deed to follow and console her. That would be reversion of the divine justice. Remember the thousand pounds."
He was gone with the words. Mounting the stairs, only half consciously, Darling returned to the dormitory.
"Nurse," he said, "you can rest for the night. I am going to battle out this case myself. That gentleman you saw was Charlie Smith's father, and I have made myself responsible to him for the boy's life."
She protested; he insisted. In a little he was alone with the sick. He was prepared for any manifestation of the powers of terror and disease. Charlie Smith's life against his own.
Now, in the murmuring watches of the night, he would often find his voice rising softly with the wind, clothing itself in its moanings to apostrophise the insensible figure on the bed:
"Charlie, Charlie," it appealed; "you are going to a beautiful house and someone's loving care, Charlie Smith. You will have money and fine clothes, and you will come to call him father—you upon whose poor little lips the gracious word has never learned to shape itself. It is sad for me, Charlie; but you know, if I had not agreed, if I had not pretended you were the other, ruin would have fallen on me, and you would have been transplanted elsewhere, perhaps into a hard and cruel soil. For she does not care, Charlie, the unnatural authoress of your poor little being. And now, when I write and tell her you are dead (as I shall do, though, for both our sakes, you must get well, Charlie)—when I write and tell her (and she does not even know by what name I have called you), she will give a sigh of relief, and answer that you are best put under the merciful ground without delay, but that she must not challenge scandal or discovery by being present. I am so certain of it, that the possibility of her arriving, and refusing to identify little Destrelle as her son, gives me no alarm whatever. Sleep and get well, Charlie boy."
And Charlie slept, and Charlie recovered, and Charlie's guilty mother answered exactly as John Darling had foretold. And one day Charlie was taken and left at the big house in the London square with the man who was not, and could not be, and yet assumed that he was, John Darling concluded, the boy's father. But, as for John, though he parted from his charge with tears in his eyes, he had also, be it remembered, a cheque for a thousand pounds in his pocket.
II
Is there not something aggravating to Providence in a too-uncompromising probity? Possibly, since human nature is said to reflect it, to be built after its likeness, there may be. Anyhow, an aphorism despite, scrupulous honesty, which the world has kept poor, begins often to prosper from the date of its first lapse from perfection.
It was certainly the case with John Darling. That thousand pounds launched him on a full tide of success—and through no signal capacities of his own, moreover. In fact, he invested it rather rashly; but everything turned up trumps. In a year he was floating on a steady keel.
He had heard nothing in the interval, had perhaps shrunk from hearing anything, about Charlie Smith. He hoped and trusted that the boy was living to justify the sacrifice of conscience he had made on his behalf. As to M. de Vermond, the class of client he represented owed, as a body, after all, a large measure of atonement to that small submerged tenth, a fraction of which he, John Darling, had devoted his past life to reclaiming. If the bereaved, and possibly not guiltless parent, was only doing late justice indirectly, he was still fulfilling a moral obligation. Charles Smith might have no direct blood-claim on him; yet the ties of brotherhood, and fatherhood and motherhood, dated from our first parents, of whom was original sin. In accepting him, the man had only accepted a principle which he had too long evaded. He, John, himself had been justified, through Providence, in affording him this means to redemption.
So he salved his conscience, and prepared himself—yes, himself—for the liberal duties of parentage. Would he have been content to compromise with Fortune for a changeling? No; he yearned with all his heart for his dear Peggy's blood-pledge of affection; was jealous of the very dreams which filled her waiting-mother's eyes with a joy of things beyond him; hated himself for the secret which barred all real confidence between them, and blackened the prospect of the innocent trust to come. As the time approached, he grew very disturbed and unhappy.
He had engaged for the occasion the nurse who had formerly served him. She came one night, when he was sitting miserably alone. He had some supper ready for her; but she could hardly touch it at first for a story she had to tell him.
"O, Mr. Darling!" she broke out; "to think how you were mistaken in the case of that poor little Charlie Smith!"
His heart seemed to stop for a moment. Then, "What about him?" he forced himself to demand.
"There!" said the good woman; "don't take on, sir. I know the kindness of your heart, and the goodness of your intentions."
"My intentions!" he repeated dully. He believed she had discovered.
"To hand the poor mite over to a loving father," she went on. "O! a pretty father! He starves and frights and tortures the child—revenges on him his hate to the dead mother, who bore him, against the bonds of wedlock, to a better man, and then hid him away, lest her guilt should bring disgrace upon her lover. But she confessed on her death-bed, and begged her lawful husband to care for the child! and he undertook it, the devil. O, the dog! the black heart! Charlie's grown a little ghost of terror, they do say—those that have chanced to get a glimpse of him. It was a friend of mine told me, Mrs. Barker, that nurses in the next house."
"Why don't they set the law on him?" He hardly knew his own voice.
"He defies them to prove anything. And the child denies he's hurt," said the woman; "a lamb, under that wolf's teeth."
"Well, I will save him," said John Darling, and he rose to his feet.
"God bless you!" she cried. "I knew you'd never rest, hearing it."
No, never again, until he had righted this monstrous wickedness—his own. His sudden staggering sense of responsibility to it made him feel physically sick. He reeled a little before he could recollect himself; and then he recovered his nerve, and more than his normal nerve, with a shiver. The spur to instant impulse was praiseworthy here. He must admit the fraud to M. de Vermond, restore him his thousand pounds, and abide by whatever consequences might ensue. Peggy would insist on that restitution, if she knew—no doubt about that. No doubt, moreover, that he could never look his own child in the face until he had made it.
Straight upstairs he went, and stood over his pretty wife where she rested in a chair. He must not kill her heart before the coming ordeal. He must not seek for any relief of his anguish through confession and absolution. Time enough for that when she was strong to hear him—strong in a divided love. His task was a one-man's task—the utmost for endurance. He opened upon it with a loving smile.
"Peggy," he said, "don't be disturbed; I must go to London immediately. A former pupil of mine is in need of me. But you won't be alone; nurse has come."
Her eyes took a momentary startled light; but relapsed almost instantly upon tenderness.
"I understand," she said. "Well, you are better out of the way."
He must not, even at that, disabuse her, protest at her mistake. He must not appeal to her, as his whole emotional soul yearned to do, not to misjudge him, but to bear him, his faults and weaknesses, always gently in mind, if anything should occur to make their separation a long, or even a final one. Though his heart bled to evoke this scene, his love was strong to reject it. His atonement must be single and complete. He parted from her as though he were going on a pleasant journey.
••••••
There was a suggestion of something stark and deadly about the atmosphere of the house in the square; but not until John Darling had noticed the attraction its windows seemed to possess for the eyes of casual loafers and lingering errand-boys, did he gather the reason. The blinds were down; the house was a house of mourning.
Not for the boy! that were an incredible spite of Fate; but his heart was half-suffocating him as he mounted the steps to the door. A little newsvendor stopped breathless to watch, and envy him.
It was opened to his ring, and to his instant confusion, by a policeman. The man accepted him with the stolid, unself-committing suspicion of his office. Every citizen, in the constabulary eye, is guilty of something, even if it be of nothing more than his not being a policeman.
"M. de Vermond," said Darling, finding his voice; "I have come to see him, on business."
"No good," said the officer.
"The business is of the last importance," urged John.
"He couldn't attend to it, not if you was the First Commissioner," said the policeman. "He fell down and killed himself yesterday morning."
John reeled. The policeman—first-aid graduate—put an arm like a stove-pipe about him, hooked him into the hall, and shut the door.
"What made you do that?" he said. "What's your name and business? Come, now!"
John gulped out both. He had been schoolmaster, until a year ago, he said, to the little boy Charlie Smith.
The admission obviously reassured the officer. He had even heard about him, in a manner, it appeared, from the child.
"Doctor's the man for you, sir," he said. "It's him's got charge of the boy."
He gave the name and address of the gentleman who had been M. de Vermond's professional adviser. As he spoke, he had his eye on John, and on John's own wandering vision.
"Ah!" he said; "a queer lot, ain't it?"
Darling acquiesced mutely. The hall in which he stood was empty and carpetless. So he had found it on the occasion of his former visit, when he had been shown, by a snuffling and moist-eyed old harpy, down its echoing length, with the blind doors on either side, into a little study at the back, where M. de Vermond, eager and gloating, had received him and his charge. Now, however, the door nearest him was open, and through the opening he caught glimpse of pictureless walls, dusty boards, and, thronged upon the latter, a confused gathering of motionless forms, some bronze, some marble, a few sheeted; but all seeming to express, in their cold and inhuman scrutiny, the haunting of a demented mind.
"Was what they call a collector," said the policeman. "Gave his whole fortun' to it, it's said. The house is full of nothing but them figures and busteses—not a washun-stand that'll stand. Drove him off of his head in the end; and no wonder. Was supposed he'd put himself under one of them sheets on a pedestal, to frighten the boy in the dark, and that he'd frightened himself to death instead, a' doing of it. Anyhow, he were found lying there with his neck broken, and the door locked on the inside, and the key in it."
He took off his helmet, looked into it for understanding, and put it on again without having found any.
"A queer thing," he said. "I've examined a' many dead eyes, but none equal to his. What they must a' seen before he went down like that, eh? You'll find the boy at the doctor's. You'd better go there."
••••••
John stood the poor little man at his knee.
"You shall find father, and mother, and a brother, too," he said; "or"—he corrected himself—"a sister. Come with me, my child."
"He made me sleep among them, locked in alone," wept Charlie; "and—and they made faces at me, sir."
The fearful deadly frost had melted in him—was yielding to the unforgotten glow of his old kind master's understanding and sympathy.
"Yes, yes," said John pitifully. "But it's all over, Charlie, and you're coming home with me."
"It is the best way," said the doctor. "The old life; the old influences. You must hold yourself accountable for him, that's all, in event of his being wanted at any time. A very pitiful case, upon my word. The man was mad on a grievance; but I never guessed it had gone to those lengths. He was plausible enough, when questioned. And so this is poor madam's wastrel? dear, dear! And he was exacting retribution of him. It's always the innocent ones that have to pay for the guilty in this suffering world. Well, I can see no objection to your taking the boy; and the sooner and farther the better."
"Come, Charlie!" said John Darling; and together they went out into the night—the little sobbing fellow and the remorseful man.
They were going to tell Peggy and the baby all about it—to confess and ask forgiveness for one of them.
"Now, I'll own to you, Charlie," said John. "He was not your father at all, and you were not his son. And, worse than that, I knew it before I sold you to him. But I thought he would be kind to you, Charlie; I never dreamt of anything else."
"I want to be your child again," said the boy.
"And so you shall," cried John; "first heir, from this moment, to my love and my luck. I owe it all to you, Charlie Smith."
He felt momentarily elated, as in a glow of success—the boy restored to him, that terrible confession uncalled for. His possession of the bribe wronged no one, unless a bloated treasury. The madman, he had learned, had died kinless and intestate; his collection was to count among the national windfalls of the year.
Yet, in the midst of his vainglory, a phrase, breathing from somewhere very faint and hollow, seemed always pursuing to overtake him. It followed like a funeral dirge; it mourned in lapses of the wind; it was here, there, nowhere—and suddenly it was singing, shrilly articulate, in his brain, "The innocent who pay for the guilty."
The doctor's words. It came to haunt him throughout the long journey; it was shrieking itself in his ears, more raucously emphatic than ever, as, holding the little boy by the hand, he stole up like a thief to his own front door.
"One's dead, sir."
The old dreary formula. Had he asked, as before, and received the inevitable reply? Diphtheria was it; or what? The wind, and the voices, and the roar of the train had got into his head.
"Which one?"
He believed that he had put the question—old and monstrous and monotonous, it seemed. And yet, as a fact, not he nor anyone had spoken at all. Only the nurse, with that eternal face of warning, stood conning him in the dim-lit hall.
"And the other?"
Again the mute enquiry.
"She holds on. She'll do, I think."
She?—who? The words were real enough this time—unmistakable—jarring him from his trance. He almost screamed his question:
"Who'll do? My wife?"
The nurse nodded.
"She fights to win. It were born dead, sir—the poor blessed mite!"
The man knelt down on the hard floor of the hall, and wrapped his arms convulsively about Charlie Smith, and dropped his head on the boy's shoulder.
"Neither brother nor sister at last," he said brokenly, "but, God help me, a mother yet, and my Peggy, my Peggy, a son. O, pray for me, pray for me—little man—wronged so much. He will listen to you—a child—having that—the innocent hostage—in His hands. Only once—O, my God! O, Charlie! ask for a mother—just when you need her—fill the empty place. For your sake—for hers—not mine. Don't speak of me—for yourself, Charlie—He'll listen then. Stay here—pray—O, pray, little boy, pray—while I creep—into the dark—there "
And in the dark the little emissary of mercy found him by and by, and, being commissioned, brought him his Peggy's message to come to her—to forgive her, because she had failed him, and answered his great longing with a gift of death.
But it was life for them all from that moment.