CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Brett was suddenly aroused from his sleep by the sight of John in a green dressing gown standing at the foot of his bed.

John had switched the light on and there was no more colour in his face than on a blank sheet of paper.

“Hermione’s ill,” he said urgently. “I hate to disturb you, but she’s most awfully ill; we’ve got a doctor, he’s with her now. Can’t you hear her screaming?”

Mr. Brett listened. Mambles was a solid, deep-built house and his rooms were on the opposite wing to his daughter’s, but he could distinctly hear a high travelling sound like the shriek of wind in a broken chimney.

“Well, she ain’t dying from lung complaint,” said Mr. Brett after a pause.

He made no effort to get up, he merely eyed John with sardonic thoughtfulness over the bedclothes.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

“The doctor thought I ought to tell you,” said John a little reproachfully. “Nothing seems able to soothe her. Every now and then she screams for you. It’s awful to see her, her eyes are nearly starting out of her head. She never stops screaming.”

“I’ll have to see the doctor before I get up,” said Mr. Brett consideringly. “What’s been done to soothe her anyway?”

John hesitated.

“The doctor gave her a powerful sedative,” he explained, “and of course we kept saying everything we thought could help. I promised to get rid of Bodger.”

Mr. Brett was suddenly contorted by a spasm of silent laughter.

“John,” he murmured as soon as he could speak, “you’re a good boy, but you don’t show staying power. That bull terrier’s a trump card: you don’t want to throw him, in the first round. He’s more of a symbol than a streaky lawn. Don’t you do anything hasty with Bodger. You have him farmed out and we’ll have him back some day bringing his sheaves with him. But I don’t want to get up unless I have to, it’ll disturb my digestion. You send that doctor man in to talk to me and get Elise back into her own room. Hermione has her nurse and she can scream just as well with her as she can with a crowd of people standing round gaping at her, but maybe she won’t want to.”

“I don’t think you understand, Sir, how ill she is,” said John gravely. “She is quite delirious; she doesn’t know whether we are there or not.”

Mr. Brett shook his head.

“I fancy she’s just as conscious as she needs to be to make her points,” he said drily. “Unconsciousness sets in with Hermione when other people want to make theirs. She won’t forget to ask what you’ve done about Bodger first thing to-morrow morning.”

John withdrew, unconvinced and shocked. As he opened the door a rush of sound passed into the room.

Mr. Brett lay perfectly still listening to it.

Theodora had suffered from screaming attacks when she was angry (and when she thought she was hurt she was always angry), but she had never been seriously frightened. There was something curious to Mr. Brett in the sound of his daughter’s voice. It was a note of fear, and as he was registering this new note, the doctor came hurriedly into the room.

Dr. Raymond had motored over from the nearest small town. He was a clever and keen young man who had overworked himself in France and been sent into the country to recuperate. Mr. Brett looked at him attentively.

“What do you think my daughter’s got an attack of?” he asked.

“To tell you the truth,” said Dr. Raymond, “I don’t know—there’s an hysterical element in it of course, but there was nothing to indicate this kind of seizure when I saw her before. Her temperature is 106 and her pulse is like a jig-saw puzzle—the attack may turn to meningitis or some other acute brain trouble, and I suppose it has been produced by shock. They tell me she saw her dog killed this afternoon. The seriousness of her condition is that she isn’t in a fit state to stand any additional illness. It may be the dog of course, but she keeps calling out for you.”

“No, it ain’t the dog,” said Mr. Brett reflectively. “What she’s got an attack of, is the truth. It’s rare, but I don’t believe that as a disease it’s fatal.

“I told her what I thought of her this afternoon, and what she wants now is for me to take it all back. Well! I don’t see it that way. I didn’t tell her for fun. I told her because I thought she right down needed it.

“The burnt child dreads the fire, but you don’t want to stop the child dreading it, you want to stop it being burned. Now what do you anticipate will happen if she’s left to scream?”

“Neither her heart nor her brain will stand much more of it,” said Dr. Raymond gravely. “I can’t answer for the consequences if she keeps calling for you and you don’t go—anything may happen. On the other hand she may not recognise you even if you’re there. Her brain is caught on one point and sticks there, the excitement keeps mounting and nothing I’ve been able to do has touched it.”

“She’ll recognise me all right,” said Mr. Brett with conviction, “and she’ll get off her point—when she’s made it. If she was the only person concerned I’d leave things the way they are. But I’ve got my other daughter to consider, and that does me in. If I come along to the Princess Girla, I want you to undertake to get Mrs. Sterling back to bed and keep her there.”

Dr. Raymond agreed with alacrity, and hurried back to his patient.

Mr. Brett got up slowly and put on his bedroom slippers with reluctance. He was by no means convinced that he was doing the right thing, but he felt that neither Elise nor John would have understood his running counter to the doctor.

The servants, white and trembling, were all assembled in the big hall listening to the acute and terrible sound that filled the house. Mr. Brett looked at them contemplatively over the banisters.

“You can all make tracks for bed,” he said in his steady soothing drawl. “You can take my word for it—when there’s that amount of noise in an illness there’s no immediate danger. All except the cook, and she can send up some hot drinks to Mr. and Mrs. Sterling’s apartments.”

Then he opened Hermione’s door and walked to the foot of her bed. Even Mr. Brett was momentarily impressed by Hermione’s appearance. Her face was hardly human, it was wild and strained beyond recognition, her fixed eyes had an awful stare in them of blank terror. She had reached the acutest point of consciousness, beyond which the mind passes out of the power of personality.

“I’m not! I’m not! I’m not!” screamed Hermione.

In the absolute stillness of the room her tones gathered an incredible beating force: they neither changed their accent nor their sound, but swung on like the regular rise and fall of a piston rod in an engine.

Elise knelt in a crumpled heap on the floor by her sister’s bed, trying to hold one of Hermione’s burning, restless hands. The other clutched and plucked persistently at the counterpane.

Nurse Davies made ice packs by the bedside. John and Dr. Raymond clung together by the window as if their mutual impotence was a protection to them.

Mr. Brett faced his daughter consideringly. He fixed his quiet, dominating eyes upon hers, without anxiety. For one astonishing moment the room emptied itself of sound. Mr. Brett said steadily and gently,

“Hermione, I guess you have me beat.”

Nobody knew what he meant or guessed that in that instant’s pause he had passed a life sentence upon himself.

His words hardly reached Hermione’s maddened and excited brain, but something in his presence succeeded in breaking in upon the morbid concentration of her mind. The pupils of her eyes contracted suddenly: she had recognised him.

A few moments later the screaming began again, but it had lost its regularity, there were moments when it fell into vague mutterings.

Dr. Raymond stepped forward and felt her pulse again.

“I think the sedative is taking hold now,” he said with satisfaction.

Mr. Brett drew an arm chair forward beside the bed.

“I’ll stay here till morning,” he said to the doctor. “You carry out your part of the programme now. I guess the Princess don’t need an audience for a nap.”

Dr. Raymond cleared the room except for Nurse Davies, and after giving her a few orders withdrew. It was a puzzling case, but there was no doubt the brain crisis was over.

Mr. Brett drew out of his dressing-gown pocket a small and much worn book. It was called “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,” by Frank Stockton. Mr. Brett preferred it to any other novel.

Hermione still screamed at irregular intervals, but during one of her quieter moments Mr. Brett said to the Nurse,

“Now Nurse Davies it isn’t going to do a mite of good the two of us Agag-ing round. You just go into the next room and get a little rest. If there’s any change in the Princess’s condition I’ll wake you.”

Nurse Davies hesitated, but to her surprise Hermione slowly opened her eyes and looked at her with apparent consciousness.

“Yes,” she said, “leave me with my father.” Then she closed her eyes again.

When Mr. Brett and Hermione were alone, Mr. Brett drew up the blind and opened the window near him, then he returned to his arm chair, pulled a thick rug over his knees, arranged the reading lamp, so that it shed a light over Hermione’s face, and settled to his reading.

For an hour or more Hermione slept the deep sleep of intense exhaustion, then she woke with a start and fixed her strained eyes on her father’s face.

“Is that you Papa?” she asked quickly. “Am I going to die?”

Mr. Brett shook his head.

“No, Hermione,” he said, “you’ll live on yet a while. I’m not a betting man, but I’d take odds on it. Do you want that I should read out loud to you ‘The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine’? I don’t know a book more calculated to soothe the sick or enliven the down-hearted. I don’t say it’s like life—but it’s the way life might be like if we took irregular things more regularly.”

Hermione shook her head.

“No, I don’t want to be read to,” she whispered. “I want to talk to you. I think I can now. I can see what I want to say.”

Mr. Brett leaned forward and lit a spirit lamp beside the bed.

“Well,” he said, “let’s have some soup first. You can talk all you like on soup, but if you start on an empty stomach there’s no saying where you’ll land up on.”

Hermione drank the soup with perfect docility, and leaning back on her pillow began to speak in a low, fevered voice, with momentary pauses, but without intermission. Her eyes fixed themselves on Mr. Brett’s face with the intensity of the Ancient Mariner.

Mr. Brett put down “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,” and leaned forward so that he could catch her low, hurrying voice without effort. The night light cast weird shadows on his grey face and deep-set, patient eyes. He listened without attempting to interrupt Hermione. She began with the story of her childhood. In the long hours of her delirium her mind had built up and stored an attractive pageant of her character, set in the gloomy pitfalls of her life.

She told her father of the inner desolation of her childhood, her mother’s neglect, her nurse’s carelessness, his own inability to understand her or foster her affection for him.

“You said I was a fighter,” she exclaimed bitterly, “this is what I had to fight.”

She passed on swiftly to her girlhood, its outward triumphs and the shadowed internecine struggle between her beautiful young mother and herself. She struck again and again at the man beside her, pointing out to him his neglect, his lazy partisanship of his wife, chosen out of selfishness and fear.

“You never helped me,” she said bitterly, “you only wanted peace.”

She spoke of his careless consent to her European travels, the unsuitable chaperonage that had thrown her, young and inexperienced, into the fastest American set in Paris.

Without hesitation or restraint she gave him the story of her marriage. Mr. Brett had heard it before, but there were details she had spared him, moments of her dressed-up sacrifices and of her attitude of outraged womanhood, which convinced her of her own sincerity. He was spared nothing now. He was told of every physical brutality and of every irregular, inconsiderate word forced out of Prince Girla. Hermione had never forgotten a word that had displeased her, nor had she ever let his tenderness or repentance wash out a single stain.

There had never been a moment when Hermione was not in her own eyes an heroic, persecuted figure. She had kept her code unspotted from an alien and repulsive world. The mere facts of life were outrages upon her delicacy of temperament, and her rigid acceptance of propriety was a loophole by which she had escaped self-surrender.

Her low, exhausted voice moved on with the persistence of a gimlet. She stood surrounded by her negative virtues, covered with the insults of her foes, as St. Sebastian stands in old Tuscan pictures, imperturbable under a lacework of arrows.

Her eyes never left her father’s face: this picture, this continuous exposition of herself, was her answer to him.

She had been horribly startled by the unveiling of his point of view; her self-control had been stabbed into an acute resistance.

Now with the force of her delirium behind her she pinned him against her own interpretation of herself. She dared him with her exhausted, fevered eyes not to believe that she was faultless.

In the grey shadows of the gathering dawn she seemed to threaten him with her death.

“Do you understand me?” she murmured at last. “Do you see now what I’ve had to bear and what I’m really like?”

“Why, yes, Hermione,” said Mr. Brett patiently. “I guess I see what you’re like.”

Her eyes questioned him doubtfully, but there was nothing in his expression which revealed any latent sarcasm.

Mr. Brett had no expression in his face at all, beyond his grave attentiveness.

Hermione was completely exhausted now: she had spoken for nearly two hours without a pause. She closed her searching eyes and slept.

Mr. Brett looked out of the open window. It was a still dawn, full of the returning movements of arrested life.

Outside in the grey garden the stars were pale in a cloudy sky, the small battered moon was surrounded by an opalescent fiery ring.

The silence was broken by the scurry and hoot of hunting owls. A heavy mist swept over the garden and blotted out the shapes of the trees.

Mr. Brett did not take up again “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine.” Even that immortal classic failed to rouse any amusement in him.

Hermione breathed with the refreshing regularity of a child; her beauty slowly reasserted itself, but Mr. Brett did not see the beauty in her face: he noticed instead, with a pang at his heart, the lines of selfishness and unwavering vanity which her own character had engraved upon it.

“I reckon,” he said to himself, “that ‘the last enemy to be destroyed’ _is_ vanity. Murder isn’t a habit, cruelty can’t get on long without conceit. Lies run to it. I never knew a humble liar.

“Vanity is the toughest human quality there is—and it’s the most vital. You take it out with a trowel and it gets back with a spade.

“It’s trapped Hermione just the way it trapped Theodora.

“She just had to be thought smart, saint-like and brainy. She couldn’t face a back seat. Hermione don’t care a row of buttons what I think on any other subject, but she’d care what a roadside hog thought of the figure she made passing by. I cut into her because she saw I despised her. Then she lay and brooded till her vanity got so fire-heated it came mighty near burning her up. Poor child! She’s got a lot of qualities put into that fire of hers, and there ain’t any of ’em that’ll come out again. I startled her but I won’t have changed her. You can always startle a person out of themselves for a moment, and they thresh round and think they’ll never go back again, but it’s the same person threshing who was sitting quiet before the shock. Threshing don’t change them. I had to do it, and I guess it’ll turn out somehow the way I meant. Most things answer to a handle if you ain’t afraid to turn it and will take the consequences. There was a dog’s chance I could have squeezed out without having to pay all I had, but I wasn’t the dog that had that chance.”

Mr. Brett leaned back in his arm chair and turned his face towards the open window. The light was beating slowly through the white mist into the room.

Hermione slept steadily; there was nothing further to do for her.

Death lay definitely behind her.

Death lay in front of Mr. Brett and it was the only thing that was still in front of him.