Somehow Good - William Frend De Morgan (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📗

of league.

What Mrs. Fenwick heard a scrap of in the next room would have been, but for the alarums and excursions of the two enemies aforementioned, a consecutive conversation as follows:

"You're gettin' round, Colonel?"

"A deal better, Major. I want to speak to _you_."

"Fire away, old Cockywax! You remember Hopkins?--Cartwright Hopkins--man with a squint--at Mooltan--expression of his, 'Old Cockywax.'"

"I remember him. Died of typhoid at Burrampore. Now you listen to me, old chap, and don't talk--you only make yourself cough."

"It's only the dam fog. _I'm_ all right."

"Well, shut up. That child in the next room--it's her I want to talk about. You're the only man, as far as I know, that knows the story. She doesn't. She's not to be told."

"Mum's the word, sir. Always say nothin', that's my motto. Penderfield's daughter at Khopal--at least, he was her father. One dam father's as good as another, as long as he goes to the devil." This may be a kind of disclaimer of inheritance as a factor to be reckoned with, an obscure suggestion that human parentage is without influence on character. It is not well expressed.

"Listen to me, Roper. You know the story. That's the only man I can't say God forgive him to. God forgive _me_, but I can't."

"Devil take me if I can!... Yes, it's all right. They're all in the next room...."

"But the woman was worse. She's living, you know...."

"I know--shinin' light--purifying society--that's her game! I'd purify _her_, if I had my way."

"Come a bit nearer--my voice goes. I've thought it all out. If the girl, who supposes herself to be the daughter of her mother's husband, tries to run you into a corner--you understand?"

"I understand."

"Well, don't you undeceive her. Her mother has never told her _anything_. She doesn't suppose she had any hand in the divorce. She thinks his name was Graythorpe, and doesn't know he wasn't her father. Don't you undeceive her--promise."

But the speaker is so near the end of his tether that the Major has barely time to say, "Honour bright, Colonel," when the bronchial storm bursts. It may be that the last new anodyne, which is warranted to have all the virtues and none of the ill-effects of opium, had also come to the end of _its_ tether. Mrs. Fenwick came quickly in, saying he had talked too much; and Sally, following her, got Major Roper away, leaving the patient to her mother and the nurse. The latter knew what it would be with all this talking--now the temperature would go up, and he would have a bad night, and what would Dr. Mildmay say?

Till the storm had subsided and a new dose of the sedative had been given, Sally and Old Jack stood waiting in sympathetic pain--you know what it is when you can do nothing. The latter derived some insignificant comfort from suggestions through his own choking that all this was due to neglect of his advice. When only moans and heavy breathing were left, Sally went back into the bedroom. Her mother was nursing the poor old racked head on her bosom, with the sword-hand of the days gone by in her own. She said without speaking that he would sleep presently, and the fewer in the room the better, and Sally left them so, and went back.

Yes, the Major would take some toddy before he started for home. And it was all ready, lemons and all, in the black polished wood cellaret, with eagles' claws for feet. Sally got the ingredients out and began to make it. But first she gently closed the door between the rooms, to keep the sound of their voices in.

"You really did see my father, though, Major?" There seemed to be a good deal of consideration before the answer came, not all to be accounted for by asthma.

"Yes--certainly--oh yes. I saw Mr. Graythorpe once or twice. Another spoonful--that's plenty." A pause.

"Now, don't spill it. Take care, it's very hot. That's right." Another pause. "Major Roper...."

"Yes, my dear. What?"

"_Do_ tell me what he was like."

"Have you never seen his portrait?"

"Mother burnt it while I was small. She told me. Do tell me what you recollect him like."

"Fine handsome feller--well set up. Fine shot, too! Gad! that was a neat thing! A bullet through a tiger two hundred yards off just behind the ear."

"But I thought _his_ name was Harrisson." The Major has got out of his depth entirely through his own rashness. Why couldn't he leave that tiger alone? Now he has to get into safe water again.

A good long choke is almost welcome at this moment. While it goes on he can herald, by a chronic movement of a raised finger, his readiness to explain all as soon as it stops. He catches at his first articulation, so that not a moment may be lost. There were _two_ tigers--that's the explanation. Harrisson shot one, and Graythorpe the other. The cross-examiner is dissatisfied.

"Which was the one that shot the tiger two hundred yards off, just behind the ear?"

The old gentleman responds with a spirited decision: "Your father, my dear, your father. That tiger round at my rooms--show it you if you like--that skin was given me by a feller named Harrisson, in the Commissariat--quite another sort of Johnny. He was down with the Central Indian Horse--quite another place!" He dwells on the inferiority of this shot, the smallness of the skin, the close contiguity of its owner. A very inferior affair!

But, being desperately afraid of blundering again, he makes the fact he admits, that he had confoozed between the two cases, a reason for a close analysis of the merits of each. This has no interest for Sally, who, indeed, had only regarded the conversation, so far, as a stepping-stone she now wanted to leap to the mainland from. After all, here she is face-to-face with a man who actually knows the story of the separation, and can talk of it without pain. Why should she not get something from him, however little? You see, the idea of a something that could not be told was necessarily foreign to a mind some somethings could not be told to. But she felt it would be difficult to account to Major Roper for her own position. The fact that she knew nothing proved that her mother and Colonel Lund had been anxious she should know nothing. She could not refer to an outsider over their heads. Still, she hoped, as Major Roper was deemed on all hands an arrant old gossip, that he might accidentally say something to enlighten her. She prolonged the conversation in this hope.

"Was that before I was born?"

"The tiger-shootin'? Well, reely, my dear, I shouldn't like to say. It's twenty years ago, you see. No, I couldn't say--couldn't say when it was." He is beginning to pack himself in a long woollen scarf an overcoat with fur facings will shortly cover in, and is, in fact, preparing to evacuate a position he finds untenable. "I must be thinkin' of gettin' home," he says. Sally tries for a word more.

"Was it before he and mother fell out?" It is on the Major's lips to say, "Before the proceedings?" but he changes the expression.

"Before the split? Well, no; I should say after the split. Yes--probably after the split." But an unfortunate garrulity prompts him to say more. "After the split, I should say, and before the----"--and then he feels he is in a quagmire, and flounders to the nearest land--"before your father went away to Australia." Then he discerns his own feebleness, recognising the platitude of this last remark. For nobody could shoot tigers in an Indian jungle after he had gone off to Australia. Clearly the sooner he gets away the better.

A timely choking-fit interposes to preserve its victim from further questioning. The patient in the next room is asleep or torpid, so he omits farewells. Sally's mother comes out to say good-night, and Sally goes down the staircase with him and his asthma, feeling that it is horrible and barbarous to turn him out alone in the dense blackness. Perhaps, however, the peculiar boy with the strange name will be there. That would be better than nothing. Sally feels there is something indomitable about that boy, and that fog nourishes and stimulates it.

But, alas!--there is no boy. And yet it certainly would be fourpence if he came back. For, though it may be possible to see the street gas-lamps without getting inside the glass, you can't see them from the pavement. Nevertheless, the faith that "it" is clearing having been once founded, lives on itself in the face of evidence, even as other faiths have done before now. So the creed is briefly recited, and the Major disappears with the word good-night still on his lips, and his cough, gasp, or choke dies away in the fog as he vanishes.

Somebody is whistling "Arr-hyd-y-nos" as he comes from the other side in the darkness--somebody who walks with a swinging step and a resonant foot-beat, some one who cares nothing for fogs. Fenwick's voice is defiant of it, exhilarated and exhilarating, as he ceases to be a cloud and assumes an outline. Sally gives a kiss to frozen hair that crackles.

"What's the kitten after, out in the cold? How's the Major?"

"Which? _Our_ Major? He's a bit better, and the temperature's lower." Sally believed this; a little thermometer thing was being wielded as an implement of optimism, and had lent itself to delusions.

"Oh, how scrunchy you are, your hands are all ice! Mamma's been getting in a stew about _you_, squire." On which Fenwick, with the slightest of whistles, passes Sally quickly and goes four steps at a time up the stairs, still illuminated by Sally's gas-waste. For she had left the lights at full cock all the way up.

"My dearest, you never got my telegram?" This is to Rosalind, who has come out on the landing to meet him. But the failure of the telegram--lost in the fog, no doubt--is a small matter. What shelves it is the patient grief on the tired, handsome face Fenwick finds tears on as he kisses it. Sally has the optimism all to herself now. Her mother knows that her old friend and protector will not be here long--that, of course, has been true some time. But there's the suffering, present and to come.

"We needn't stop the chick hoping a little still if she likes." She says it in a whisper. Sally is on the landing below; she hears the whispering, and half guesses its meaning. Then she suppresses the last gas-tap, and follows on into the front room, where the three sit talking in undertones for perhaps an hour.

Yes, that monotonous sound is the breathing of the patient in the next room, under the new narcotic which has none of the bad effects of opium. The nurse is there watching him, and wondering whether it will be a week, or twenty-four hours. She derives an impression from something that the fog really is clearing at last, and goes to the window to see. She is right, for at a window opposite are dimly visible, from the candles on either side of the mirror, two white arms that are "doing" the hair of a girl whose stays are much too tight. She is dressing for late dinner or an early party. Then the nurse, listening, understands that the traffic has been roused from its long lethargy. "I thought I heard the wheels,"