Leonora by Arnold Bennett (best fiction novels TXT) 📕

the room. 'Father's done something to himself. Fred's come up. They're bringing him.'

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John Stanway had called at the chemist's in the Market Place and had given a circumstantial description of an accident to Bran. It appeared that while Carpenter was washing the waggonette, Bran being loose in the stable-yard, the groom had suddenly slipped the lever of the carriage-jack and the off hind wheel had caught Bran's hind leg and snapped it like a piece of wood. The chemist had suggested prussic acid, and John had laughingly answered that perhaps the chemist would be good enough to come up and show them how to administer prussic acid to a dog of Bran's size in great pain. John explained that the animal was now fast by the collar, and he had demanded a large dose of morphia, together with a hypodermic instrument. Having obtained these, and precise instructions for their use, John had hurried away. It was not till three hours had elapsed that a startling suspicion had disturbed the chemist's easy mind. By that time, his preparations completed, John had dropped unconscious from the arm-chair in his office at the works, and Bursley was provided with one of those morbid sensations which more than joy or triumph electrify the stagnant pulses of a provincial town. Scores of persons followed the cab which conveyed Stanway from the works to his house; and on the route most of the inhabitants seemed to know in advance, by some strange intuition, that the vehicle was coming, and at their windows or at their gates (according to social status) they stood ready to watch it pass. And even after John had entered his home and had been carried upstairs, and the cab and the policeman had gone, and the doctor had gone, and Fred Ryley and Mr. Mayer, the works manager, had gone, a crowd still remained on the footpath, staring at the gravelled drive and at the front door, silent, patient, implacable.

The doctor had tried hot coffee, artificial respiration, and other remedies, but without the least success, and he had reluctantly departed, solemn for once, leaving four women to understand that there was nothing to do save to wait for the final sigh. The inactivity was dreadful for them. They could only look at each other and think, and move to and fro aimlessly in the large bedroom, and light the gas at dusk, and examine from moment to moment those contracted pupils and that damp white brow, and listen for the faint occasional breaths. They did not think the thoughts which, could they have foreseen the situation, they might have expected to think. It did not occur to them to search for the causes of the disaster, nor to speculate upon its results in regard to themselves: they surrendered to the supreme fact. They were all incapable of logical and ordered reflections, and in the hushed torpor of their secret hearts there wandered, loosely, little disconnected ideas and sensations; as that the Stanway family was at length getting its full share of vicissitude and misfortune, that John was after all more important and more truly dominant and more intimately a part of their lives than they had imagined, that this affair was a thousand miles removed from that of Uncle Meshach, that they were fully supplied with mourning, and that suicide was mysteriously different from their previous notion of it. The impressive thoughts, the obvious thoughts--that if their creeds were sound, a soul was about to enter into eternal torment, and that their lives would be violently changed, and that they would be branded before the world as the wife and the daughters of a defaulter and a self-murderer--did not by any means absorb their minds in those first hours.

In the attitude of the girls towards Leonora there was a sort of religious deference, as of priestesses to one soon to be sacrificed. 'She is the central figure of the tragedy,' they had the air of saying to each other. 'We feel the affliction, but it cannot be demanded from us that we should feel it as she feels it. We are only beginning to live; we have the future; but she--she will have nothing. She will be the widow.' And the significance of that terrible word--all that it implied of social diminishment, of feeding on memory, and of mere waiting for death--seemed to cling about Leonora as she stood restlessly observant by the bed. And when Rose urged her to drink some tea, she could not help drinking the tea humbly, from a sense of the duty of doing what she was told. It was not Rose's fault that Rose was superior, and that only twenty-four hours ago she had coldly informed her mother that no act of her father's would surprise her. Leonora resigned herself to humility.

'Mamma,' said Millicent, creeping into the room after an absence, 'Uncle Meshach is here with Mr. Twemlow, and he says he's coming in. Must he?'

'Of course, darling,' Leonora answered, without turning her head.

Uncle Meshach appeared, leaning on his stick and on Arthur's arm. He wore his overcoat and even his hat, and a white knitted muffler encircled his shrivelled neck in loose folds. No one spoke as the old and feeble man, with short uncertain steps, drew Arthur towards the bed and gazed at his dying nephew. Meshach looked long, and sighed. Suddenly he demanded of Leonora in a whisper:

'Is he unconscious?'

Leonora nodded.

Drawing a little nearer to the bed, Meshach signed to Millicent to approach, and gave her his stick. Then he unbuttoned his overcoat, and his coat, and the flap-pocket of his trousers, and after much searching found a box of matches. He shook out a match clumsily, and struck it, and came still nearer to the bed. All wondered apprehensively what the old man was going to do, but none dared interfere or protest because he was so old, and so precariously attached to life, and because he was the head of the family. With his thin, veined, trembling hand, he passed the lighted match close across John's eyeballs; not a muscle twitched. Then he extinguished the match, put it in the box, returned the box to his pocket, and buttoned the pocket and his coats.

'Ay!' he breathed. 'The lad's unconscious right enough. Let's be going.'

Taking his stick from Milly, he clutched Arthur's arm again, and very slowly left the room.

After a moment's hesitation Leonora followed and overtook them at the bottom of the stairs; it was the first time she had forsaken the bedside. She was surprised to see Fred Ryley in the hall, self-conscious but apparently determined to be quite at home. She remembered that he said he should come up again as soon as he had arranged matters at the works.

'Just take Mr. Myatt to the cab, will you?' said Twemlow quietly to Fred. 'I'll follow.'

'Certainly,' Fred agreed, pulling his moustache nervously. 'Now, Mr. Myatt, let me help you.'

'Ay!' said Meshach. 'Thou shalt help me if thou'n a mind.' As he was feeling for the step with his stick he stopped and looked round at Leonora. 'Lass!' he exclaimed, 'thou toldst me John was i' smooth water.' Then he departed and they could hear his shuffling steps on the gravel.

Twemlow glanced inquiringly at Leonora.

'Come in here,' she said briefly, pointing to the drawing-room. They entered; it was dark.

'Your uncle made me drive up with him,' Arthur explained, as if in apology.

She ignored the remark. 'You must go back to New York--at once,' she told him, in a dry, curt voice.

'Yes,' he assented, 'I suppose I'd better.'

'And don't write to me--until after I have written.'

'Oh, but----' he began.

She thought wildly: 'This man, with his reason and his judgment, has not the slightest notion how I feel, not the slightest!'

'I must write,' he said in a persuasive tone.

'No!' she cried passionately and vehemently. 'You aren't to write, and you aren't to see me. You must promise, absolutely.'

'For how long?' he asked.

She shook her head. 'I don't know, I can't tell.'

'But isn't that rather----'

'Will you promise?' she cried once more, quite loudly and almost fiercely. And her accents were so full of entreaty, of command, and of despair, that Arthur feared a nervous crisis for her.

'If you wish it,' he said, forced to yield.

And even then she could not be content.

'You give me your word to do nothing at all until you hear from me?'

He paused, but he saw no alternative to submission. 'Yes.'

She thanked him, and without shaking hands or saying good-night she went upstairs and resumed her place by the bedside. She could hear Uncle Meshach's cab drive away.

'How came Mr. Twemlow to be here, mother?' Rose demanded quietly.

'I don't know,' Leonora replied. 'He must have been at uncle's.'

When the doctor had been again and gone, and various neighbours and the 'Signal' reporter had called to inquire for news, and the hour was growing late, Ethel said to her mother, 'Fred thinks he had better stay all night.'

'But why?' Leonora asked.

'Well, mother,' said Milly, 'it's just as well to have a man in the house.'

'He can rest on the Chesterfield in the drawing-room,' Ethel added. 'Then if he's wanted----'

'Yes, yes,' Leonora agreed. 'And tell him he's very kind.'

At midnight, Fred was reading in the drawing-room, the man in the house, the ultimate fount of security for seven women. Bessie, having refused positively to go to bed, slept in a chair in the kitchen, her heels touching the scrap of hearthrug which lay like a little island on the red tiles in front of the range. Rose and Millicent had retired to bed till three o'clock. Ethel, as the eldest, stayed with her mother. When the hall-clock sounded one, meaning half past twelve, Leonora glanced at her daughter, who reclined on the sofa at the foot of the beds; the girl had fallen into a doze.

John's condition was unchanged; the doctor had said that he might possibly survive for many hours. He lay on his back, with open eyes, and damp face and hair; his arms rested inert on the sheet; and underneath that thin covering his chest rose and fell from time to time, with a scarcely perceptible movement. It seemed to Leonora that she could realise now what had happened and what was to happen. In the nocturnal solemnity of the house filled with sleeping and quiescent youth, she who was so mature and so satiate had the sensation of being alone with her mate. Images of Arthur Twemlow did not distract her. With the full strength of her mind she had shut an iron door on the episode in the garden; it was as though it had never existed. And she gazed at John with calm and sad compassion. 'I would not sell my home,' she reflected, 'and here is the consequence of refusal.' She wished she had yielded--and she could perceive how unimportant, comparatively, bricks-and-mortar might be--but she did not blame herself for not having yielded. She merely regretted her sensitive obstinacy as a misfortune for both of them. She had a vision of humanity in a hurried procession, driven along by some force unseen and ruthless, a procession in which the grotesque and the pitiable were always occurring. She thought of John standing