Harvest by Mrs. Humphry Ward (most read books in the world of all time txt) 📕

as soon as he had found his voice again, "I'm drenched in disinfectant. I take all proper precautions--for the child's sake. Now then"--he rose with an effort to his feet--"what are you going to do for me?"

His aspect had altered, had assumed a sinister and passionate intensity. His sister was conscious of the menace in it, and hastily taking up a small hand-bag lying near her, she produced a purse from it.

"I have saved twenty pounds for you--out of my own money--with _great_ difficulty," she said, with indignant emphasis. "If I were to tell Richard, he would be furious. And I cannot--do--_anything_--more for you, beyond the allowance I give you. Everything you suffer from, you have brought upon, yourself. It is hopeless to try and help you."

He laughed.

"Well, then, I must try Rachel!" he said carelessly, as he looked for his hat.

"That I think would be the lowest depth!" said Lady Winton, breathing quick, "to beg money from the wife who divorced you!"

"I am ready to beg for money--requisition is the better word--from anybody in the world who has more of it than I. I am a Bolshevist. You needn't talk to me about property, or rights. I don't acknowledge them. I want something that you've got, and I haven't. I shall take it if I find the opportunity--civilly if I can, uncivilly, if I must."

Lady Winton made no reply. She stood, a statue of angry patience waiting for him to go. He slowly buttoned on his coat, and then stepped coolly across the room to look at an enlarged photograph of a young soldier standing on the piano.

"Handsome chap! You're in luck, Marianne. I suppose you managed to get him into a staff job of some sort, out of harm's way?"

He turned to her with a sneer on his lips. His sister was still silent.

The man moving about the room was perhaps the thing she feared and hated most in the world. Every scene of this kind--and he forced them on her, in spite of her futile resistance, at fairly frequent intervals--represented to her an hour of torture and humiliation. How to hide the scenes and the being who caused them, from her husband, her servants, her friends, was becoming almost her chief preoccupation. She was beginning to be afraid of her brother. For some time she had regarded him as incipiently insane, and as she watched him this evening he seemed to her more than ever charged with sinister possibilities. It appeared to be impossible to influence or frighten him; and she realized that as he seemed not to care a fig whether she caused a scandal or not, and she cared with every pulse of her being, she was really in his power, and it was no good struggling.

"Well, good-night, Edith," he said at last, taking up his hat. "This'll last for a bit--but not very long, I warn you--prices being what they are. Oh, by the way, my name just now is Wilson--make a note of it!"

"What's that for?" she said disdainfully.

"Some Canadian creditors of mine got wind of me--worse luck. I had to change my quarters, and drop the old name--for a bit. However--what's in a name?" He laughed, and held out his hand.

"Going to shake hands, Edie? You used to be awfully fond of me, when you were small."

She stood, apparently unmoved, her hands hanging. The pathetic note had been tried on her too often.

"Good-night, Roger. Nannie will show you out."

The door closed on him, and Lady Winton dropped on a sofa by the fire, her face showing white and middle-aged in the firelight. She was just an ordinary woman, only with a stronger will than most; and as an ordinary woman, amid all her anger and fear, she was not wholly proof against such a spectacle as that now presented by her once favourite brother. It was not his words that affected her--but a hundred little personal facts which every time she saw him burnt a little more deeply into her consciousness the irreparableness of his personal ruin--physical and moral. Idleness, drink, disease--the loss of shame, of self-respect, of manners--the sense of something vital gone for ever--all these fatal things stared out upon her, from his slippery emaciated face, his borrowed clothes, his bullying voice--the scent on him of the mews in which he lived!

She covered her face with her hands and cried a little. She could remember when he was the darling and pride of the family--especially of his father. How had it happened? He had said to her once, "There must have been a black drop somewhere in our forbears, Edie. It has reappeared in me. We are none of us responsible, my dear, for our precious selves. I may be a sinner and a loafer--but that benevolent Almighty of yours made me."

That was wicked stuff, of course; but there had been a twist in him from the beginning. Had _she_ done her best for him? There were times when her conscience pricked her.

The clock struck seven. The sound brought her to her feet. She must go and dress. Richard would be home directly, and they were dining out, to meet a distinguished General, in London for a few days' leave from the front. Dick must, of course, know nothing of Roger's visit; and she must hurriedly go and look up the distinguished General's career in case she had to sit next him. Vehemently she put the preceding hour out of her mind. The dinner-party to which she was going flattered her vanity. It turned her cold to think that Roger might some day do something which would damage that "position" which she had built up for herself and her husband, by ten years' careful piloting of their joint lives. She knew she was called a "climber." She knew also that she had "climbed" successfully, and that it was Roger's knowledge of the fact, combined with a horrid recklessness which seemed to be growing in him, that made the danger of the situation.

Meanwhile Delane stepped out into the fog, which, however, was lifting a little. He made his way down into Piccadilly, which was crowded with folk, men and women hurrying home from their offices, and besieging the omnibuses--with hundreds of soldiers too, most of them with a girl beside them, and smart young officers of every rank and service--while the whole scene breathed an animation and excitement, which meant a common consciousness, in the crowd, of great happenings. All along the street were men with newspapers, showing the headlines to passers-by. "President Wilson's answer to the German appeal expected to-morrow." "The British entry into Lille."

Delane bought an _Evening News_, glanced at the headlines, and threw it away. What did the war matter to him?--or the new world that fools supposed to be coming after it? Consumptives had a way, no doubt, of living longer than people expected--or hoped. Still, he believed that a couple of years or so would see him out. And that being so, he felt a kind of malignant indifference towards this pushing, chattering world, aimlessly going about its silly business, as though there were any real interest or importance in it.

Then, as he drifted with the crowd, he found himself caught in a specially dense bit of it, which had gathered round some fallen horses. A thin slip of a girl beside him, who was attempting to get through the crush, was roughly elbowed by a burly artilleryman determined to see the show. She protested angrily, and Delane suddenly felt angry, too. "You brute, you,--let the lady pass!" he called to the soldier, who turned with a grin, and was instantly out of reach and sight. "Take my arm," said Delane to the girl--"Where are you going?" The little thing looked up--hesitated--and took his arm. "I'm going to get a bus at the Circus." "All right. I'll see you there." She laughed and flushed, and they walked on together. Delane looked at her with curiosity. High cheek-bones--a red spot of colour on them--a sharp chin--small, emaciated features, and beautiful deep eyes. Phthisical!--like himself--poor little wretch! He found out that she was a waitress in a cheap eating-house, and had very long hours. "Jolly good pay, though, compared to what it used to be! Why, with tips, on a good day, I can make seven and eight shillings. That's good, ain't it? And now the war's goin' to stop. Do you think I want it to stop? I don't think! Me and my sister'll be starvin' again, I suppose?"

He found out she was an orphan, living with her sister, who was a typist, in Kentish town. But she refused to tell him her address, which he idly asked her. "What did you want with it?" she said, with a sudden frown. "I'm straight, I am. There's my bus! Night! night!--So long!" And with a half-sarcastic wave of her tiny hand, she left him, and was soon engulfed in the swirl round a north-bound bus.

He wandered on along Regent Street, and Waterloo Place, down the Duke of York's steps into the Mall, where some captured guns were already in position, with children swarming about them; and so through St. James's Park to the Abbey. The fog was now all but clear, and there were frosty stars overhead. The Abbey towers rose out of a purple haze, etherially pale and moon-touched. The House of Commons was sitting, but there was still no light on the Clock Tower, and no unmuffling of the lamps. London was waiting, as the world was waiting, for the next step in the vast drama which had three continents for its setting; and meanwhile, save for the added movements in the streets, and a new something in the faces of the crowds hurrying along the pavements, there was nothing to show that all was in fact over, and the war won.

Delane followed a stream of people entering the Abbey through the north transept. He was carried on by them, till a verger showed him into a seat near the choir, and he mechanically obeyed, and dropped on his knees.

When he rose from them, the choir was filing in, and the vergers with their pokers were escorting the officiating Canon to his seat. Delane had not been inside a church for two or three years, and it was a good deal more since he had stood last in Westminster Abbey. But as he watched the once familiar spectacle there flowed back upon him, with startling force, old impressions and traditions. He was in Cambridge again, a King's man, attending King's Chapel. He was thinking of his approaching Schools, and there rose in his mind a number of figures, moving or at rest, Cambridge men like himself, long since dismissed from recollection. Suddenly memory seemed to open out--to become full, and urgent, and emphatic. He appeared to be living at a great rate, to be thinking and feeling with peculiar force. Perhaps it was fever. His hands burnt.

"_My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour!_"

As the chant rose, and he recognized the words, he felt extraordinarily exalted, released, purified. Why not think away the past? It has no existence, except in thought.

"I am what I conceive myself to be--who can prove me to be anything else? What am I then! An educated man, with a mind--an intelligence. I have damaged it, but there it is--still mine."

His eyes wandered, during the Lesson, to the line of sculptured Statesmen in the north transept. He had taken History honours, and his thoughts began to play with matter still stored in them: