So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern women, with their straight s.e.xless eyes and their long limbs innocent of languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him for ever to n.o.bility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme pa.s.sion of his life would be for some woman who, by her pa.s.sivity, would provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been, he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which pain surely could not live.

"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it you were thinking of saying?"

He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell you about myself."

She looked sideways at him as they pa.s.sed under a lamp, and wrote in her heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted that till you met me you were a bad character."

"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it, and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with.

We've got our own lives to lead, thank G.o.d!"

She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted, and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something that you ought to tell me!"

He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, G.o.d, it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't married to each other...."

"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the others twit you with it?"

Oh, G.o.d, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."

"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."

He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she herself was bloomed over with the sensual pa.s.sivity that provokes men to cruel and extravagant demands. That n.o.body but himself ever seemed to have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not married to my father...."

But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either not quite innocent and have ugly a.s.sociations with s.e.x, or have had reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers, and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a merchant who undersells her compet.i.tors; and Ellen was innocent and undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff and holding back a th.o.r.n.y branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what is she like?"

"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that.

Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the Ess.e.x village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he could be so cra.s.s as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least, on her side it was love! On his ... on _his_...."

"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow it's making it happen all over again...."

This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for the argument of phantom pa.s.sions in her room, and she opened her eyes suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand, but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly, I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel of his Ellen.

"Forgive me," he murmured.

"Of course I forgive you."

"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"

"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."

"That's a brave undertaking!"

They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge.

Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth when it is nearly all bookshops?"

She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed with windows broken or hung with rags.

"Isn't this the High Street?"

"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a fine Sat.u.r.day morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the Highlanders drilling."

"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"

"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He said I would be just a fule to worry."

He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm.

"You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this awful part."

"Is this it?"

"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"

After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your mother's number was?"

"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that white dog!"

His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"

V

A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay s.p.a.ced over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good omens.

When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one, that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she perceived that he was going to do something which he should have delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and his office to these two strangers.

As they pa.s.sed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was definitely comic. But these frail a.s.surances, that were but conceits made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth, were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on lawns of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s p.r.i.c.king rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they pa.s.sed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with bra.s.s and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind, private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone; down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.

This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly: "You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'

happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty without which he could not have been so marked a character rea.s.serted itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably well and wearing the moire blouse that she had given her for her birthday.

"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk, and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now convinced her that mother was dying.

There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door to, was not less dest.i.tute of signs of mental activity than her broad, comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the end of the pa.s.sage pa.s.sed through a swing door, and they looked for one moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.

It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where mother was lying.

She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.

"Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."

The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs, and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a richer death-chamber, for among the gra.s.s there would have been several sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and minimally furnished as this room.

Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth, there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some inmost branch of a large tree.

"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"

From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to make her lips meet, and speak.

"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be with you. You needn't speak."

But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."