THE TIGER-SKIN (continued 2)

The Library Committee was composed of enlightened men and women, for it had been founded by an exceedingly busy and fussy Mrs. Marrable, “a bit of a Socialist,” as she called herself. She was at any rate a person professedly open to all the new ideas. The Committee were a little afraid of her, and had come to look to Ensor, the shy silent embodiment of Conservative, almost retrograde feeling in their midst, to oppose her. He generally began his sentences: “I know I am a bit old-fashioned.” This was a capital counterblast to Mrs. Marrable and her “bit” of Socialism. They found him invaluable, a sort of slipper on the wheels of frenzied progress, and Mrs. Marrable was not easily gainsaid. She was a relation of the Bishop’s cousin, and had lived in Beverley for years in a big red house where she entertained Saturday to Monday parties from London. She had no daughters.

Another influential member, Canon St. Leger, unmarried, and living in the best house in the Close, was a friend of Ensor’s, though he had not asked him to come in so much lately.…

Indeed, looking round the green baize-covered table where all the Committee found themselves at last seated, it occurred to Ensor that he had not shaken hands with a single one of his confrères since the last meeting, and that was a month ago. For that reason, he supposed, they seemed strange to him, although they were all or nearly all, people with whom he had been desired to take pot luck on any occasion, lunch, or dinner, when he had ridden in from High Walls on his bicycle and found he had put it too late to get back. All except Mrs. Marrable, with whom for political and temperamental reasons he had always cared to have very little to do.

While the Committee dealt with some purely financial and business matters, which called for no more attention from the members of the Committee than was implied in passing a vote of confidence or holding up hands for a resolution, Ensor wrought himself up into a strange state of nervous apprehension. It might have been mere perverse fancy, but as a matter of fact not one of these people had spoken to him since they sat down, or recognized his presence except by a nod of salutation such as the barest courtesy demanded. The attitude of each several person could be accounted for separately. So-and-so had come in late, such a one had too many irons in the fire to be able to spare a word till the meeting was over, but still—there it was, the indefinable uneasiness, the disagreeable insinuating point that morbid imaginings could establish. No one had actually addressed a word to him! …

He brooded over this—he was tired, overwrought and annoyed, for the child Phillis had shown a sad racial cloven foot to-day. He was afraid she was not going to turn out so well as he could have wished. By and by other business being disposed of, the Committee were invited to deal with the question of detailed selection of books for the Library. It was a subject on which Ensor was keenly interested, and here he had so much to say that he forgot his preoccupation and did not allow his natural shyness to interfere with the expression of his opinion. He was strongly against the determination of Mrs. Marrable, to permit, nay, to encourage, the introduction of a certain novel, the work of one of her literary confrères, into the list of the Library. Ensor had had the book sent him from London, so as to acquaint himself with its supposed nature. He had carefully kept it out of the way of his womenkind, until having thoroughly digested it, he threw it into the fire. Yet this book was to be placed on the shelves of the Library to which Adelaide subscribed, and a copy of it would be sure to find its way to High Walls! He could not bear the idea of such a girl as Phillis, eager, sensuous, full of strong, exuberant, readily-awakened sex instincts, sucking in the unhealthy, unnecessary knowledge presented so cleverly by this book, and it seemed to his hypochondriacal imaginings that the tendency of the rest of the Committee was to override his objections per se. He grew tremendously excited, and the Committee wondered to see the usually still and discreet man, who had married the lady they called the terrible Mrs. Dibben, make such a violent exhibition of himself.

“I have a nearly grown-up daughter, as you all know,” so he ended his speech, and for the moment he felt every inch a father. “Well, let me tell you, that I had rather see her lying dead at my feet than realize that she was taking into her pure mind anything so poisonous, so pernicious, so destructive of all moral health as the work in question. I would rather see her starved, neglected, maimed even, than ruined mentally by such murderous nourishment.…”

He stopped, he felt that the sense of the meeting was not with him. The silence that swallowed up the last word was hard and disapproving. The Chairman, Canon St. Leger, drubbed on his desk with a pencil.… Mrs. Marrable, divesting herself of her feather boa with the air of one throwing down the gauntlet, and tilting forward her chair, rose.…

“Do I understand?” she said, speaking with privileged indistinctness, but Ensor heard her for all that. “Do I understand from Mr. Ensor’s eloquent speech, that he cares to throw his shield merely over a member of his own immediate family? What about the stranger within his gates? And I have yet to learn that spiritual injury and moral oppression are the only enemies worth combating? Talk of mental starvation, indeed! … Mental! … There are worse things than mental starvation. There are blows… !”

She appeared to become hysterical and quite incoherent.

“Such hypocrisy… such disgusting hypocrisy I never heard of. Let him look to his own house, I say—let him set his own house in order before we put the Society on to him!”

“Mrs. Marrable, I must beg you to observe! This language is impermissible here,” Canon St. Leger said, avoiding Ensor’s eye and the deprecating gestures he automatically made.… “I must call upon you to apologize!”

“To me,” Ensor said, white to his lips.

“Oh yes, I’ll apologize to the Committee,” said the lady, “and they’ll accept my apology. They all know what I mean. But in the interest of Humanity, it is time some steps were taken, and I’ll take them.…”

She folded her boa tightly round her neck and passed out. Canon St. Leger swiftly put the retention or refusal of the book in question to the vote and closed the meeting.

Ensor, dazed, his eyes blurred with unaccustomed passion, walked away like a condemned man, condemned for a crime of which he was unwitting.

He rode studiously home, meditating on these things to the point of falling off his bicycle. He was stunned with the impact of the undeserved disagreeable, and knew not what to think or whom to ask for an explanation. And when he got home he found real trouble awaiting him. Phillis, who had been ailing rather unaccountably for some time past, had shown definite symptoms of illness during his absence. The little local country doctor, (but quite “good,”) had been sent for and had been and gone. He had pronounced the child’s uneasiness to be due to a mild attack of typhoid fever, so Adelaide, afoot, her eyes alight with excitement, told the sluggish, depressed man who dismounted from his bicycle at the door where she came to meet him.

“Have something, Wald. You look pale. That meddling brute of a doctor has gone and ordered a nurse all off his own bat!” she fretfully informed him, leading the way into the drawing-room and closing the door. “I was so angry with him when I heard what he had done. Of course I should have nursed her myself. The woman is here now so we must make the best of it.”

Ensor was secretly of opinion that Dr. Hodgson was right, and that the state of Adelaide’s nerves would have made her an indifferent nurse; he, however, contented himself with remarking that neither himself nor Dr. Hodgson would approve of her sitting up at night.

“But I shall have to as it is. No nurse can do both. And, Wald, I do so detest strangers coming into the house! They go prying about, making up all sorts of absurd conclusions and telling the ass of a doctor everything.…”

An expression of indefinable apprehension crossed her peevish face, and her husband was touched, taking it, as he did, as indicating the state of nervous tension she was in. Phillis’s illness—her own condition——

He took her limp hand and kissed it.

“My poor Adelaide, what have you to fear? There’s nothing wrong for him to find out; I don’t quite approve of the status of Mary in the house, but after all that’s the cook’s affair, not ours.… By the way.…”

He was going to tell her something of Mrs. Marrable’s insinuations, but concluded he had better not mention the matter at this juncture.… He merely asked abruptly, “Where is Mary? I haven’t seen her about for the last few days.”

“Gertrude has sent her away to some friends at Cullercoats, I believe. She asked me if I could spare her!”

“And of course you did, kind girl,” said Ensor.

“Oh yes. The work she does isn’t worth thinking about. I told Gertrude we should never make a servant of her.… Good-bye. I must go to Phillis. I want to keep an eye on that nurse. I didn’t like her face. A mischief-maker if ever there was one.”

Adelaide was gone and Ensor fell a-thinking on the painful scene of to-day. He was obsessed, now that it was over, by the recollection of a fluid and retreating Committee. He saw black coats, and the grey mantelets of the country ladies melting away from him, fleeing from his contact. He could not account for the social ban under which he appeared to lie. This was the culminating incident; he remembered now other slighter acts of neglect and inattention in the past, which he had been too little self-conscious to observe or to piece together in a pattern of general avoidance and cold shouldering. The arraignment of the woman Marrable did not disturb him so much as the nervous acceptance of it by the Canon. Mrs. Marrable was a shrew, a local terror, a person of advanced views, and the author of the book in question was a friend of hers, probably? …

But Canon St. Leger, a decent, sober-minded man, a man of his own stamp! … He saw his thin hand toying with the suspended pencil, he heard again his meek milk-and-water reproof of Mrs. Marrable’s unparliamentary language.… He could not away with that.…

He wandered about the garden half the night with the puppy, now fully trained to be a perfect house-dog and companion. It followed him in an orderly manner from covert to covert under the high beetling wall with the thick beds of nettles growing luxuriantly at the base. Once, however, there was a skirmish; the dog grew quite excited at what must surely have been a not unusual sight for him, the yellow knob of a small boy’s head peering over the wall, supported presumably from behind by a human Japanese ladder of other small boys. It was a favourite game in this neighbourhood.

“He! He!” they crowed and chuckled. “Who lives ’ere? Old Mother Brownrigg and her girls. He! He! No one ever comes out here alive… !”

The dog barked and sprang. Fear of his ultimately reaching them at last dislodged the grotesque cohort. Ensor, his nerves a little shaken by this noisy onslaught of words only half heard, turned and made his way back to the house. It was absurd to mind. Children were always climbing up the other side of that wall; it was nice to climb, it had jutting courses of bricks half-way up, and the village curiosity was provoked and stimulated by the air of quasi-mystery which Adelaide chose to foster about High Walls, and that her rather witch-like appearance abroad, always heavily, mediævally cloaked and motor-veiled, abetted. She dressed like a toadstool in the day. And in the evening like a panther. She strode along, her step was confident, her eyes abstracted, her whole manner carelessly insulting. No wonder the children were afraid of her.

He went in, and saw the doctor coming out and questioned him about Phillis. His anxiety was easily allayed. The big girl was strong enough to resist a whole army of adverse microbes. He saw the new nurse, a tall, thin sprig of a woman with some indication of character. She was very cold and civil, especially when she spoke to Adelaide. He thought he saw plainly that she disliked the mistress of the house, already. Another! Poor Adelaide!

He knew he was right, as the days went on. The two women detested each other, skirmished every time they met, issued cross orders and confused the other servants. But the maid defeated the mistress. Dr. Hodgson, meek, little insignificant man that he was, resisted all Mrs Ensor’s hints and manœuvres, and finally, her most palpable efforts to get rid of Nurse Ferrier, who was, on her side, careful to give no positive offence, or commit any domestic crime which might lead to her dismissal on other grounds than medical ones. She was a capital nurse, even Adelaide admitted that, only Phillis no longer wanted one. Hodgson said she did. He further implied that a nurse stood between Mrs. Ensor and all fatigue or anxiety undesirable for a woman in her state, and that was the only argument Adelaide dared not, or did not care to, gainsay.

The distracted woman vented her annoyance at the doctor’s tactics on her husband, and to punish him would not let him see Phillis. As she spent most of her time in the girl’s room which opened out of her own, Ensor saw very little of her. He found himself not very much cast down by this arrangement; he was much out of sympathy with his wife, a little fretted by her irritability, and was glad to defer their meeting until the need for the nurse’s presence which so enraged her should have passed away.

He wondered, sometimes, when that would be, and thought he would like to ask the nurse. But she rather sternly, and with a sort of frigidity put on over and above her statutory nurse’s manner, passed him in the hall or on the stairs. He began to fancy that Adelaide, moved by her strange taste for regulating the movements and gestures of others, had bidden her enter as little as possible into conversation with the master of the house. Well! Well! …

He missed Mary, to whom, in the present upheaval, he could have paid a little more attention. Still, presumably she was well. Adelaide had apparently carried out his expressed wishes for once, and had insisted on Gertrude’s sending her child away for sea air. He missed the daily appeal of the dark eyes set in paleness, the weak gestures with her hands which Mary often used in lieu of speaking, as if mere movement made less stir, and drew down less attention on her from the cruel powers above. Though her face was pale it was always clean, he remembered. And a queer thing—he never remembered her sitting down. Did she ever sit down? He had seen her squat, he had seen her stand, but he had never seen her sit except that first day in the motor-car, when, the dark fur cap on her head, and the dark fur up to her chin had made her look almost a lady. She was dressed exactly like Phillis, then, he remembered! Strange monitory caprice of Adelaide’s—an instance of her sheer love of power—to raise, and then to degrade! No man could do such a thing except, perhaps, some savage Asiatic king, one in whom caprice remained the only lust left to satisfy.

He did not care to affront such scenes as he had gone through at Beverley any more, and he took his name off the Committee. He stayed at home and spent this dreary, uneventful time mostly in wandering about the house followed by the dog, who had grown attached to him. It generally lay at his feet in the hall while he sat on one of the yellow chairs, reading papers endlessly, smoking far more than was good for him. Thus he caught the doctor, on his way through the outer hall to see Phillis. The doctor generally nodded kindly, but did not stop, there was nothing to say about Phillis; she was going on well, and Adelaide did not expect to be confined for a couple of months or so. The nurse flitted by on her screw soles, going up and downstairs, and taking no notice of the solitary man. He never saw Gertrude at all.

He was thinking seriously of going away from High Walls for a time, until Phillis was quite well, and Mary had come back, and he had got as far as the handling of Bradshaw and the turning of the page marked Continental Trains, when one day the nurse chose suddenly to leave the orbit in which she generally travelled, between the red baize door into the servants’ quarters and the staircase that led up into Phillis’s sick room, and came straight up to Wald Ensor. The deflection of the moon from her course could not have surprised him more. She spoke.

“I beg your pardon, Sir, but have I your permission to take Dr. Hodgson to see Mary?”

Her eyes drooped and seemed to look down both sides of her nose. With her white cap like a frontlet, her brown hair fluffed out in ascetic waves over her forehead, she was not altogether an unprepossessing woman. She was looking down at him, her lips were coldly pursed, and Ensor felt just as he had felt in the Beverley Committee-room.

“Certainly, Nurse,” he stammered, “But Mary, is she at home?”

“She is at home, Sir, and in my opinion very unwell.”

“What is the matter with her? I want to know. Mary is a special pet of mine.”

The lame, absurd words came broken from his lips.… He was not thinking of what he was saying. He was overwhelmed by an avalanche of doubts. Adelaide had lied to him.… “Hasn’t Mary been away at all?” he stammered.

The nurse raised her eyes, and gave him one straight winged glance.… She had strong black eyebrows that met across her nose, and a pout that was determined.

“She may have been. Not that I know of.…” Her nose was in the air. “Will you see her, Sir?” she ended more kindly. “Perhaps you would like to know how she is for yourself.”

“Yes,” he replied. “I should indeed. But I understood she had been sent away to the sea for her health? Let us go.… I don’t know where she sleeps, when she is at home.…”

“You shall see, Sir, if you will come with me.”

Her calmness was only a mask, Ensor felt; the quiet words covered an indignation that nearly broke through her professional reserve. She was boiling over with rage. She walked through the red baize door with an assured step, never turning or looking round at the shamefaced man who followed her with humble, downcast head, his morning paper still crumpled up in his hand.

The red baize door marked the transition between the oldest and most modern parts of the house. Ensor had never been up the second and original staircase which led to the attics, and it was these that Nurse Ferrier now proceeded to mount. It was rather dark everywhere, for a heavy shower was impending, the first few drops of which had fallen before they left the part of the house where the windows were bigger. The stairs were uncarpeted, low and uneven. They led up to wide, emaciated corridors, whose panelling was worm-eaten, pale with age and desuetude. Low doors, plumb in the wall, opened into many rooms, at each of which in turn Ensor expected the nurse to stop and enter.

Another flight of stairs, leading to just such another corridor! The air was faint, it seemed to have been sealed for centuries.… Ensor protested… asked some sort of question.… “Where were they going?”

“Into the attic, where Mary sleeps alone,” the nurse answered. Her manner was more kindly now.

“A child, to sleep all this way from everybody! …” he murmured.

She nodded but did not turn. They reached a short flight of five steps, built in. Ensor was quite in the dark, until the nurse pushed open a door at the head of the stairs and they emerged into the twilight of a large bare attic. When his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he realized that it occupied the whole top of the house.

“Give me your hand, Sir,” the nurse said quite gently. “You may get a shock. Mary’s here, or was yesterday.”

The attic was like the aisle of a church, with chapels on both sides. A wide window at the very end allowed a milky track of light to fall along the pale, decayed flooring of the middle. There were small dormer windows in the embrasures formed by old, roughly-joined beams filled in with whitewashed lath and plaster. Each was like a little room shut off. Towards the centre the flooring was rotted away—the jagged boards seemed to meet in a pattern of interwoven flanges.

They walked along it carefully, up to the very end, and Ensor saw the wide stretch of rolling country out of the big window. The nurse went along it carefully, peering into each alcove. She seemed puzzled.

“It was this one,” she said at last. “It’s so dark with the rain I can hardly see, but I was up here yesterday and got scolded for it.… Here she is!”

He stopped. His legs almost refused to move. The child was lying on a large thin mattress just at his feet. A shawl with ragged fringe covered her, and the dull stained tick of the mattress showed beyond it. There seemed to be no bed-linen, and the child’s nightdress, which might have been originally of pink flannel, was of a curious ingrained dull colour.…

Ensor started, and felt sick.

“Ah, Sir, you see——?” the nurse said, and stopped. She bent down.…

“Mary!” She had soft tones as well as harsh ones.

The child, who appeared to be dozing, opened her eyes and turned them up at her visitors. She still had her ridiculous top-knot straining the hair from her forehead, and the rest of it was matted on her face. Her hand lay open on the shawl, the other was under her cheek. She may have been aware of them, she did not look at these people. Slowly her eyes closed again and she lay quiet, a grey patch on the dark background of the pallet.

“Mary!” the nurse said again. “Here’s Mr. Ensor to see you.… Take her up, Sir,” she bade commandingly.

Ensor knelt down and lifted the upper part of the wretched, filthy little body half out of her bed on to one of his knees. As he handled her he had the sensation of her dry, harsh skin, and it reminded him of parchment. She coughed as he unavoidably jerked her in lifting.

By his prompt obedience to her request, he had rehabilitated himself in the nurse’s opinion, as she showed by the more familiar tone of her next speech.…

“Did you ever see such a disreputable nightdress? And such a hole to let a child sleep in?”

She went on scolding, and Ensor realized that her abuse was directed at Adelaide. Yet it seemed an impossible thing to answer her. She blamed the doers of this deed, but in a strain so incommensurate with the depth of the painful emotions raised in him by the sight of the child’s condition.… Seeing, however, that he was feeling as he should feel, she respected his wretchedness and spoke gently.

“She’s been alone so all night, but will you stay with her, Sir, while I fetch the doctor? It’s just on his time for coming. I may catch him before Mrs. Ensor sees him.”

She crept away. Ensor heard her gently close the attic door. There was silence, and her heels, on the stair, tapped… retreating.

Left alone in the attic with a dying child across his knee, the man tried frantically to collect his thoughts. Beyond a little dry, patient cough, made as it were of ashes and dust, which racked her now and then, Mary lay quite still across his knees. He changed his position, and now he sat on the floor beside the mattress. His eyes grew accustomed to the lighting of this place and he saw that there was a small window in each embrasure, and the one opposite him on the other side of the house had panes. That immediately over Mary’s bed was open to the air. The glass had evidently been cracked and had fallen out leaving jagged pieces in the frame. From one of these there depended the fragments of a checked cotton duster, stuffed in there by some one to ward off, more or less, the draught.

* * * * * * *

The shower was over, and the sun had come out, and sent warm rays across the worm-eaten floor, the floor whereon in the old days the feudal servants of the manor house had slept, weary feet to weary feet, fastened in all night by their lord, with no egress save by the little locked door at the foot of the staircase. The lord of old dared not leave his slaves free to murder their taskmaster in his sleep. There may have been at that time about a hundred healthy farm-hands keeping each other warm and their spirits up through the long night with jests and story-telling; now this enormous garret held but one sickly, fearful, solitary child.

Oh! who had done this? … His head swam with dreadful certainties.

A great bluebottle flew in at the window, and buzzed in and out of the rafters over Mary’s head. She was past noticing it, but it irritated Ensor and he wanted to get up and chase it away. But he could not bear to deposit the child on the filthy palliasse again. The same with a cockroach that made blundering rushes from one joist to another of the decayed ribs of the flooring.… There was probably vermin in that bed, and on the child even, but he was past caring.… He could not beat his breast, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! or tear his hair; his hands were tied, occupied with the task they should have set themselves long months agone—the work to which his down-pressed heart had all along instigated him. But in this moment he expiated fully what he described to himself as his rotten carelessness, his wicked easy-going acceptance of Adelaide’s excuses, his shameful apathy in the face of the cruel crime that was being enacted in his house—in Adelaide’s house indeed, but the shame was his. Here was a helpless child, dying under his roof, of neglect, or worse, and he had had the face to stand before that Committee composed of decent people, and had been puzzled by their quite natural behaviour. They were unfriendly; disgusted, outraged by his pusillanimity, of which they probably had an inkling, or more than an inkling. What about those boys looking over the wall! … He had expostulated with the Committee for admitting an unpleasant work of fiction into their list—a solecism at worst. He was thinking of Phillis’s morals whilst Mary starved! He knew now what Mrs. Marrable had meant. That harridan in the right!——

Dying of neglect and worse! His hand stole towards the open front of the child’s nightgown. With sudden resolve he turned her body quite round on his knee, and pushed the garment down to her middle.

Yes, the scars that play such an important part in the evidence when these sort of cases come before the court were all there, fresh and old scars; deep and superficial; healed, ill-healed, and suppurating. He turned the body round again, and felt Mary’s pulse. It seemed to him to be almost non-existent.…

Another long ten minutes—savage, agonizing, interminable! … He knew nothing about it… but he wished the doctor would come! The nurse had probably not been able to catch him before he saw Phillis, and had had to wait to waylay him until his official visit was over.

And as the child lay across his knee, to all appearances comatose, something grey and loathsome did crawl out from the screwed black hair on to the forehead.… He pulled out his handkerchief from his breast coat pocket, he felt no sense of disgust to weaken his efficiency.… Such things are! … It was all part of the horror that had surely now culminated and left him seared and stunned, shamed and blighted.…

The child sighed, and with a pathetic hint of the baby ways that had been scorched and made to perish out of her, crept closer into his embrace. Her sigh may have been one of relief, Ensor fondly hoped it.…

* * * * * * *

The bluebottle buzzed, the black-beetle looked out again from the crinkled folds of the Daily Telegraph which Ensor had flung down.… He did not move, he hardly thought, he was conscious only of the child nestling in his arms as if he were its new-found father, and a peace was his, a peace he had never known, as if his soul had at last found its billet.…

When Nurse Ferrier came up at last with the doctor, he smiled.

“Do what you can for her, Doctor,” he said pleadingly.

“Why wasn’t I called before?” Hodgson began angrily. Nurse Ferrier touched his arm. Ensor saw it.

The doctor imperiously pulled the duster out of the window-hole to make more light for himself, and returning, laid the child down on the wretched pallet and methodically examined her. The examination over, he gently pulled the shawl into position so as to cover her, and rose from his knees.

“Mr. Ensor, I must see Mrs. Ensor about this,” he said gravely.

On the way down the narrow flight of stairs Ensor summoned breath to ask a question.

“Is she dying?”

“Probably,” was the doctor’s curt reply, and it was all he would vouchsafe.

Adelaide was in the hall and came to meet them.

“Where have you been, Doctor?” she asked suspiciously. Her eyes fell and rested scornfully on her husband.…

“Wald, you look pretty bad. Go and get yourself a whiskey and soda.”

“Yes, do,” said Hodgson. He turned to Adelaide, with a rough dignity of manner. “Mrs. Ensor, it is my duty to tell you both that if that child upstairs dies I shall refuse a certificate and order an inquest.”

Wald almost admired Adelaide now for her pluck. A spasm of annoyance, no more, crossed her face, and turning, she led the way across the hall towards her morning-room. She said over her shoulder—

“She’s only shamming. It seems to me you want a drink too, Doctor. That was thunder we heard just now. It’s upset you both. Wald, be good enough to send Nurse Ferrier straight to me here. I’m going to sack her.”

She went into the portion of the hall that was screened off, and seeing that both the men disregarded her gesture of invitation to go further and stayed in the main hall, she shrugged her shoulders and flung herself on to her tiger-skin, turning her back, motionless.

The doctor looked at Ensor, and spoke meditatively.

“In Mrs. Ensor’s present state! …” he murmured. “Perhaps I had better speak to you, Mr. Ensor? …”

“Certainly,” Ensor said, leading the way into the dining-room. “I may say before you speak that I know nothing of this. But that’s no matter,” he went on, “the blame is mine.”

He rang the bell. “Ask Gertrude to come to me here,” he said to a maid who appeared at the service door at the end.

The girl hesitated. She had something in her hand.…

“What is it? What is it?” Ensor asked testily.

“I was going to show the doctor, Sir, what Mary had to eat.”

She held out a plate for their inspection with some toast rinds and the remains of dripping fat adhering to the sides.… In her other hand she held a mug, into which Dr. Hodgson peered.

“H’m, a concoction of tea-leaves.…”

“She was fed, Sir, worse than the dog,” the girl continued volubly. “Biscuits was bought for him. She never complained, not she—too frightened for that, for if she did she got the stick——”

“Who beat her?” Ensor asked, furiously.

“Mrs. Ensor, till she got ill. She used to take the poker to her. There’s all the marks on her back now—you’ve seen ’em, Doctor?”

“Yes, yes. Hold your tongue now,” Hodgson said.

He turned to Ensor who stood quietly beside him, receiving the unbearable douche of the servant-girl’s revelations with such fortitude as he was able to muster. “If the child dies there will have to be an inquest. I must give the nurse some directions. Where is she? Be off, back to your work!” he bade the kitchen-maid, “and ask Nurse to come to me.”

Nurse Ferrier, quiet, composed, unsmiling, appeared in the doorway, and Ensor scrutinized her face for news as eagerly as if he had not possessed the gift of speech.

“Is she dead?” he at last breathed.

“No, Sir, no,” she answered kindly after a pause, recalled, as it were, from other thoughts. Ensor did not catch the almost imperceptible shake of the doctor’s head that came hard upon her words. The nurse continued, softly, appealing to her chief. “We won’t let her die, will we, Doctor!”

“Not if we can help it,” he replied gruffly. “Get yourself a drink, Mr. Ensor, and buck up now! There will be a lot to do presently.”

Ensor slowly walked away and the doctor turned to the nurse.

“I wouldn’t give a farthing for that child’s life, you know,” he said. “Have you-brought her down?”

“Yes, she’s in the spare bedroom. Mr. Ensor would wish her to have the best of everything, … I think? …”

Her long drooping eyes were raised to the doctor’s for a moment. She wanted to talk to him, and he knew it. But he did not, at this juncture, care to throw any deductions he might have made from facts patent to both of them, into the common fund, and he interposed the chill of professional etiquette between himself and her possible confidences.

He walked quickly, meditating the while, down the narrow flagged way that led from the house door to the gate in the wall, where his horse was being held for him by James, the half idiotic manservant; the only male creature, excepting her husband, whom Adelaide would tolerate about the place. To-day, however, expecting as usual to have the whole of the path to himself, the doctor almost hustled a person of quite a different type from James’s, a smart, slight, efficient young fellow slipping briskly up to the house. Hodgson apologized. The stranger, who was dressed in some sort of uniform, looked curiously at him, as if about to speak, but thought better of it and passed on.

After some little delay, Gertrude came to her master in the dining-room where he had summoned her. She looked hurried, portentous, but at the same time, armed with the indifference of fat people. Her wide apron was covered here and there with spots of gravy or blood; he supposed she had been “drawing” chickens or killing them. Her bib was pinned up at the corners over her ample bosom. She had no right to have a breast; she had no right to be made like a woman. He loathed her, the agent of Adelaide’s system, the janissary who with fiendish personal lust of cruelty had brutally carried out his poor wife’s unholy theories.

And all the while, the uncomfortable consciousness was his, that whatever his contempt of Gertrude, it was equalled by her scorn of him. This abominable woman looked down on him; in her eyes lurked the conception of him as something mean and pitiful and likable, yes, she awarded him a certain amount of good-humoured commiseration. And she was his cook!

“I couldn’t come before,” she said sturdily. “I’ve been up with Phillis, who’s left all alone because of this business. Be done as soon as you can, Sir, for I want to get back to the poor child.”

“You will tell me before you go, please, how long this has been going on? How long have you been neglecting and ill-treating your own child?”

The woman sneered.

“Mary, d’ye mean? Well, you see, Mary all along was only allowed to be here, as you might say, through the kindness of Miss Adelaide, as being her cook’s child.” She continued, as if repeating a lesson learned by heart, “Miss Adelaide—Mrs. Ensor—has always been very good to me and I’ve been the same to her. But it stands to reason that Mrs. Ensor wasn’t going to bring up my bastard like a lady. Mary Adelaide—that’s her name—had to be trained to be a servant and work for her bread, like her mother’s always done, and when she didn’t work, she had to be beat.”

“And what was the work you set a child of ten to do?” Ensor asked, striving at calmness.

“Child of ten—she’s fifteen, same as Phillis! Well, let me see, she cleaned the silver, setting down to it every day, and swept a room, or may be two, and did down the steps, and her own sewing and mending.”

“And what did she have to eat?”

“What the girl showed you…” Gertrude said, throwing up her chin in sullen pride of evil-doing. “Scraps what was left over from the day before. That is, if I would remember to give it her, and she never reminded me. Too soft, shameful lazy she was, too, and one had to take a stick or a poker to her to make her bustle. Whoap! Go ’long! was all the kind words she got. And a neat cut across her back. She was that lazy they never had time to heal before there was a new stripe laid over the last one.”

“My God! A young child!” He covered his face with his hands.

Gertrude regarded him. Some shifting of values took place in her heavy brain. She came a step nearer, and her voice lost its tone of coarse bravado.

“You must know, Sir, I had my orders?”

“Your orders, woman! Your orders to play the murderess! You, the unnatural mother——”

“You may look a little nearer home for the unnaturalness, if you will have it? Some folks is very blind, and deaf, too.”

“What do you mean?”

His tone was violent. The cook said, patiently, raising her apron to her face—

“I’ll say no more, Sir. I must be going——”

“Stop!” cried Ensor furiously. “You brute——”

“Call me brute, Sir!” Gertrude answered, almost modestly.…

Then her temper rose, she flushed.

“Do you know who’s awaiting for me in my back kitchen where I told him to stop?” she said passionately. “No one won’t go away from here, Mister, I said, so long as I give you my word. But I’d something I’d like to say to Mr. Ensor first before he saw him, I said, and it would be best for all parties if I could get it said. So he let me come, though he’s not a-going back without seeing you!”

She produced a dirty card, from the bosom of her dress, and handed it to her master.…

* * * * * * *

The nurse met the doctor on the doorstep when he came back half an hour later. Her manner was instructive as she came forward, her finger on her lip, and he knew what she would tell him.

“Mary’s gone, Doctor. Half an hour ago. And Mrs. Ensor has bolted herself into her bedroom, and won’t answer to any one. I’m afraid she’s bad. And”—she dropped her voice—“there’s a man shut in the library with Mr. Ensor. Here’s what he brought. I found it on the floor of the dining-room just now.”

She produced the card, stained with blood where Gertrude’s fingers had grasped it. “Only fowl’s!” she said apologetically. The doctor took it.

“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Inspector G.W. Kelson!” he exclaimed. “That’s Mrs. Marrable! She said she was going to put the Society on to them.”

“She’s a bit late,” the nurse said.

“By half an hour,” he echoed her, as they went in together.

“You never heard anything like it,” the nurse continued, as they proceeded upstairs; “Gertrude, the cook here has been telling me. And who she is and all. They’ve just killed her—by inches.”

“Not by inches, by yards,” corrected Dr. Hodgson. He was very indignant. “The child’s back is covered with unhealed sores—suppurating. She doesn’t weigh more than forty-eight pounds. Sixty-two she should have. Systematic neglect and outrageous cruelty! They’ll have to answer for it.”

“Mr. Ensor knew nothing of it, I’ll swear,” the nurse said quickly.

“Yes. His wife leads him by the nose,” replied Hodgson.

“She’s a caution!” exclaimed the nurse, with virulence.

“And she’ll get off, because of her condition. They always admit that.”

“When it’s her own child, Doctor? Of course you know it’s her own child?”

“I suspected it,” he said quietly.

They had come into the great, wide, lightly-papered, spare bedroom, with three tall windows looking out over the grey gravel sweep in front of the house. The windows were wide open. The gardener could be heard sharpening his old-fashioned instrument ready for cutting the scrap of lawn beyond the gravel. Professionally, perfunctorily, the doctor looked at and examined what lay on the bed. Then, while the nurse finished her work, he strolled to a window and stared out, waiting to see the master of the house, whose voice could be heard urgently talking in the room immediately below.

The nurse, dabbling sponges in hot water, going backwards and forwards with towels, talked. She had not talked for weeks.

“The likeness!” she said. “Don’t you see it strong now she’s dead, Doctor? I must say I noticed it the very first moment he came up into that garret where they had put the poor child away to sleep—or to die, as it happened. Nobody’d been near her for days. Gertrude thought Mrs. Ensor had, and she thought—God knows what she thought!” She shuddered. “There wasn’t so much as a jug of water there. Mrs. Ensor hoped Mary would die, and Gertrude didn’t care. She’s a regular bad one. She was cook to Mrs. Ensor before she married and had a baby there, and Miss Adelaide’s father, he was a doctor, and he gave her a certificate of death. He was a wicked old man, by all accounts. So when Miss Adelaide got into trouble, this woman helped her.…”

All the while she talked, she was busying herself about the wretched little body of Mary. The doctor stood at his post near the window, waiting for Mr. Ensor’s visitor to go, listening to the nurse’s talk as he lightly slashed his top-boots with his riding-whip, and decided what he would do. He liked Ensor, and wanted to make it easy for him.

“And,” Nurse Ferrier continued, “she says they bought this house with its high walls all round, because Miss Adelaide didn’t care to be seen about much. She was ashamed, not so much because she had had a baby without being married, but because it was such a wretched little specimen. She called herself Mrs. Dibben—that was the name of Gertrude’s man—he was a prize-fighter. I make out that he was in prison at the time. Any way, he was never seen again.… Gertrude says they were all going on quite quietly, and the two children brought up like sisters.… Mrs. Ensor had almost come to think, Gertrude says, that it was the other way about, and that the beautiful child was hers, and the wretched one the cook’s.… Gertrude didn’t care—her child was the gainer.… But that the day Mr. Ensor came, Mrs. Ensor rushed into the kitchen like a mad thing, and said she’d told him Phillis was hers and Mary Gertrude’s, and that was the way it had to be, for he was coming to live here. Doctor, what do you think of that?”

“I think, if it’s true, it’s a disgusting business. But I don’t quite believe it.”

“I do,” said the nurse stoutly. “I am coming to believe it. That woman—Mrs. Ensor—is bad enough for anything and she simply couldn’t have had a nice simple child like Phillis, not if she tried ever so!”

“There, he’s gone!” said Hodgson, leaving the window. He came to the bedside and surveyed the child’s small body lying straight, neatly, fairly disposed. The nurse stood proudly away from her work—

“She looks nice, now, doesn’t she, Doctor? I’ve put her on one of Miss Phillis’s smart nightgowns. Gertrude went in to Mrs. Ensor’s room and got it for me. She’s not so bad, you know, Gertrude; she only did as she was told. Mrs. Ensor did the beating and wouldn’t let her—positively wouldn’t let her give the child nourishing food.”

“How is Mrs. Ensor? Did you gather?”

“Quite calm, Gertrude says, though she knows everything.”

“She’s absolutely determined not to let herself have a miscarriage, that’s about it,” said Hodgson, buttoning his coat. “She’s got plenty of self-control and courage of a kind.”

“Courage—to be cruel!” exclaimed the nurse, glancing at the human piece of wreckage on the bed. “And I should say that if she thinks it necessary to starve her children to death if they happen to be born weaklings, that the chances are she’ll have to kill the next too, even if she does manage to get it born all right, and I have my doubts about that. She’s far too keen about it, too——”

“What’s that?” Hodgson interrupted, cocking his ear.

“Mrs. Ensor’s door!”

“He’s gone in to her, then!”

They looked at each other.

* * * * * * *

Ensor, speaking urgently to his wife at the closed door of her room, anxious to impart some intelligence he had just received, could get no reply from her. He did not give it up, but continued to call her by her name—Adelaide. She had a pet name, chosen by herself. He remembered it, but he could not bring himself to use it.

Half an hour seemed to elapse. He heard a groan.

Though he hated her, it frightened him, for there was no one with her. He changed the tenor of his appeals.

“Adelaide, if you are ill, you must not shut yourself up like this. You may do harm to yourself—and to the child. If you won’t see me, at least let me send Gertrude to you.”

Then she spoke.

“Wald, I am not very ill—not more ill than I expect to be. For I am going to have a child. It will not be quite yet. As soon as it is born, I shall kill myself, but not till then. So you need not be afraid.”

Her voice sounded fainter, she had turned away from the door. He was astonished at her self-control—“not more ill than I expect to be!” He felt that he ought to see for himself how she was. Bitterly, dispassionately, he made the attempt.

“Let me see you, then,” he said gently. “Just for one moment!”

“Is it to scold me?” Her voice sounded close to the door. “I am not to be scolded—now.”

The key was turned in the lock, and he made his way in. His wife stood there on the threshold, half defiant, half apologetic. As he knew Adelaide, the deprecation was much for her. Her beautiful mournful eyes sought his. They held no cruel gleams, such as had lurked there so lately, when they had talked of Mary. Her dull black silk peignoir was gathered round her; she held it looped pathetically in one thin hand. Yet he was not moved. He only thought of her health, pathologically, as a doctor might. It was his duty. He had neglected his other duty lately.

She put up her sharp chin. Her hand let slip the folds of black, they fell all round her, trailing.…

“Kiss me, Wald!” she said.

“No, I cannot.”

She turned, and moved towards the sofa that stretched across the foot of her bed. Her stumble over the long embarrassing folds of the garment she wore was a mute reproach, but it could not affect him, to the extent of inducing him to comply with her request.… She breathed heavily and sat down on the sofa.…

“See Gertrude, then. She will tell you all you want to know.”

“Your cook! Adelaide, tell me yourself. Oh, why——?”

She rocked backwards and forwards and nursed her knees.

“I could not bear the sight of her, I tell you!” she answered him passionately. “She was a degenerate. She disgraced me. She wasn’t fit to live, she ought never to have been born—never even have been conceived! But she shames her father, not me! … I am a normal healthy woman and all disease is repugnant to me. It’s a law—a law that was infringed.… She pays the penalty.… And to see her going about day by day, the living testimony of unfitness—of beastliness.… Why, the sight of her peaked, suffering face, old and yellow—she looked like that even in her cradle—from the very first moment that Gertrude showed her to me—that finished me! For I insisted on seeing her at once, I was fit enough, I was about in a week.… Then when I came to look closer—her awful hand—did you know that she had a finger less on her right hand? … Still, I nursed her myself, I—faugh!”

She put her handkerchief to her bitten lips—there was blood on it when she took it away.

“Then when you came—I saw you look at her, in the car, and again, when we got out, and you carried the rugs for her as we walked up the drive—that was enough! I made up my mind then, and I have never repented it. Never, never, I tell you. You would never have married me, if you had known, for you have the same ideas as me. Wald, that’s what I liked in you, only I didn’t know that you were a coward—a mean, canting, respectable, conventional coward—what they used to call lily-livered—or is it pigeon-livered?”

“Sneer at me if you like, Adelaide, but explain. Damn you, explain!” he cried, forgetting himself, forgetting her state, forgetting everything under the stress of the terrible, nearly formulated horror.

“What’s there to explain?” she said. “I hated the child, and I beat her. I beat her to death, that’s all!”

He groaned in helplessness, overcome by her fierce self-sufficiency.

“But had you no sort of human feeling, no woman’s tenderness? You’ve been a mother—there’s surely such a thing as a mother’s heart… ?”

Adelaide looked at him wearily, shuddering.…

“Been a mother—yes. And you?—what about your tenderness—your heart? We used to wonder that your heart didn’t tell you when you heard her calling out—screaming—yelling? I beat her, I tell you, I beat her within an inch of her life, filthy, hateful object that I’d brought into the world—through you! Pah!”

She flung herself down. Her tone was so piercing, so foreign, so unknown to him, who had learned to expect every variation in Adelaide, that he cried, in panic fear merely—

“For God’s sake, keep your head, Adelaide! Don’t go mad now, on top of it all!”

“Oh, I’m not mad, not a bit of it, can’t you see, you fool? But, no, you can’t see, you can’t see anything, unless it’s under your nose. It was under your nose, and you worried and worried, and yet you didn’t see it! Here you are—Mary’s your own child—and mine! Mine! Yours! Don’t you remember that night—that night after ‘Tristan’——?”

“No, I remember nothing. Be quiet, now!” He held up his hand, as if to ward off a blow. “Where is she?”

“My God, I don’t know.”

She fell back. Her pains had begun. He took no notice.

“I’m going to Mary,” he murmured.

She rushed forward, and bolted the door behind him.

* * * * * * *

The doctor and the nurse were still waiting by the body of Mary. Aware of the portentous visit of Inspector Kelson, Hodgson fancied he might be of some use. He might do Ensor a good turn in allocating much of the blame, which the husband was so generously anxious to take on his own shoulders, on to the wife’s, where it belonged. There were reasons why she should be better able to bear it than he, the law would be merciful to her in her then condition.

Hodgson could not fathom her. He was merely an overworked, overdriven country doctor, riding about daily from one case to another. That the maladies of the hardy, normal, if worn-out wives of the labouring classes were of a painful and dreary similarity, and completely relieved him of the necessity of keeping himself up to date with the new departures in medicine, was perhaps the reason that he did not break down from obvious overwork. His old mare who carried her sleeping master on her back along the same old roads to the same old cottages to attend to Hodge’s same wife’s seventh baby was as well preserved as he.

A complicated, abnormal case like Mrs. Ensor’s; circumstances so dramatic as this affair at High Walls seldom or never came his way. And events in this house had in the last twenty-four hours succeeded each other with such a bewildering rapidity that he felt himself excused from keeping up too rigid an attitude with the nurse, who, like himself, was humanly and professionally interested, and he permitted himself a certain relaxation in talking to her.

Nurse Ferrier, on the other hand, having been shut up in High Walls for many days under the rigorous rule of Adelaide, was enjoying herself thoroughly. All the while that Ensor was closeted with Mrs. Ensor she continued freely to develop her physiological views, leaving the room, only for a moment, to get some white flowers to lay upon the child’s breast. They heard voices from the next room, and her open, and his professionally concealed, curiosity was wrought up to the highest pitch when suddenly these voices ceased, and they heard the click of a latch and a step in the corridor.…

Then the door of the room they were in was opened with deliberation and the hero of their surmises and of their sympathy walked into the room.

He did not really seem to see them, as they observed afterwards, although he moved his head slightly as he passed the doctor and made what might pass as a grunt of recognition. His politeness survived in the overthrow of all his standards and hopes and ambitions. They stood humbly aside; it was his hour. No one, so far as they knew, had told him that Mary was dead, but he could not help knowing it when his eyes had rested for a moment on what lay on the bed.

At a sign from Hodgson, the nurse left the room. The doctor followed her. The two stood in the corridor outside, looking nervously, now at that door of the room they had just vacated, now at that which gave admittance to Mrs. Ensor’s apartments, whence came no sound of stirring.

Five minutes later, Wald Ensor came out of the bedroom, carrying the body of the child in his arms very carefully. As he passed his wife’s door, with his burden, it was opened sharply and as suddenly closed again. Mrs. Ensor had looked out.

Hodgson and Ferrier followed Ensor downstairs, wondering what he was going to do, afraid that he had gone suddenly mad and that they would have to interfere.

But so far he was perfectly quiet, restrained, and measured in his movements. He walked steadily, balancing what he carried as a nurse does a baby, down into the hall, where the autumn fire leaped on the hearth, and the charred logs tinkled as they fell. He went through it into the portion railed off with screens and arm-chairs, and, stooping, deposited the corpse of his child on the tiger-skin which lay spread over the sofa—the old yellow sofa from Portland Place. The creases were in the skin that his wife had made when she was lying there only yesterday. Her bag—one of her bags—lay on it, and with a violent gesture of his occupied hand, Ensor swept it off.

Then, deliberately, as if he were in church, he knelt down beside the little white-robed form, smoothed the folds of the nightgown his hands had disarrayed, and half raising her, taking her in his arms, covered her with kisses long and deep.

He did not lift his head when Gertrude, her apron cast aside, a puzzling figure with her unaccustomed black surfaces displayed, pushed open the red baize door, and stood, savagely poised, her bony, floury arms resting on her hips.…

“Go back!” the doctor said, in a loud whisper.

Gertrude paid no heed. Her dull faithful eyes were raised, fixed on something she saw at the head of the staircase. It was her mistress who was even now descending. The nurse darted forward, and in so doing her dress caught in an accidental nail in one of the screens and made it fall over the end of the couch. Wald Ensor looked up, he kept hold of the child’s hand.… Adelaide continued to descend. Gertrude went a step to meet her, but Adelaide waved her away.…

Then Ensor rose, for Adelaide had reached the bottom of the staircase and was coming to him, and Mary.… She tottered, but she came on.…

Her husband raised his finger and pointed it at her, and she ceased, trembling, to advance.… Gertrude strode up to her and held her shoulder. Her state was obvious—she no longer took pains to conceal it.

“Listen, all of you!” Ensor was saying, in the same gloomy, intent voice he had used all day. “I pray to Almighty God that this woman may never live to bear another child!”

* * * * * * *

He stayed for the inquiry into the death of Mary; he bore himself like a man. Then he left England, and his wife never saw him again. She survived the birth of her child, stillborn.

THE END