Part 24

These words, spoken in a manner that was almost childlike, came upon Northcote with the force of a blow. He was perfectly accustomed to his mother’s voice and manner, that voice and manner which were so direct and so unqualified. But for the first time they had driven a deep flush of shame to his cheek. This dauntless unimaginative creature, who measured spoonfuls of tea, who counted pennies, whose staff of life was hard facts, what had she not performed at the call of her religion? What lions had she not removed from the path of this one ewe lamb of hers, in order that one day he should win his way to the kingdom she had designed for him? Night and day, year after year, had she labored with this object in view. He was her only son, and material greatness was to be his destiny. He recalled the unflinching figure of this woman tramping over the moors in the depth of winter, through rain and wind, through frost and snow, to earn a pittance by her tutelage; he recalled the resolution with which she performed the meanest household duties in order that money might be saved; he recalled her sitting beneath the insufficient light of a lamp through the midnight hours, transcribing, for the sake of a few miserable sovereigns, foreign masterpieces out of their native French, German, and Italian into trite, colorless, and rather wearisome English prose. All in an instant Northcote seemed to be fascinated, overcome, by the sudden revelation of the pathetic beauty of the commonplace.

“I won’t have you think I have become idle and extravagant,” he said, rising from the table and placing both his hands on her shoulders. “You see I have had to fight my battle, and a long, a stern, a lonely one it has been. What was I in the midst of six millions of fighters, most of them as sturdy, as fierce, and, in many cases, far better equipped than I was myself? But I must tell you, my dear, I believe I have conquered at last. I think I have got the turn of the tide. If health and strength remain to me, and never in my life have I been physically more robust than I am at present, I am about to make an income at the bar which, to frugal people like you and me, mammy, will seem fabulous wealth. For I ought to tell you I won my first big case the day before yesterday, and I think I am entitled to say I made an impression.”

“I know that you saved that poor woman, my dearest boy,” said his mother, with a tenderness that was almost grim.

“Tell me, by what means did you learn that?”

“I walked over to the Hall and borrowed the _Age_ of Sir John.”

“The _Age_!” said her son, in a tone that had a thrill of horror in it. “Why walk all that distance to the Hall to get a look at the _Age_ when Parson Nugent would have been only too pleased to lend you his _Banner_?”

“The reason is this, my dear boy,” said his mother impressively. “All my life I have been accustomed to look upon the _Age_ as the first English newspaper.”

“I expect you are right, you dear old Amazon,” said her son, strangling a groan.

“No, Henry, I am not right. I am prepared to believe there was a time when the _Age_ was the first English newspaper, but in my opinion it is so no longer. I shall never place my trust in the _Age_ again.”

“A heavy blow for Printing Press Square,” said Northcote, laughing to restrain his tears.

“I consider that leading article it had about the trial, and the terms in which it referred to you, my boy, to be a disgrace to English journalism. In fact, I wrote to the editor to say so.”

“What did you find to say to the editor?” asked Northcote feebly.

“I said it was contemptible that a newspaper of such a widespread influence as the _Age_ should lend itself to a faction whose aim was to suppress young men of talent.”

“And what had the editor to say to that?”

“Very wisely he did not reply. Perhaps I was somewhat severe in my letter, but I felt very strongly upon the point and I do not regret that I expressed myself at length.”

“In the name of wonder, what else did you say to the editor?”

“I said this faction of which I complained had been very mischievous in its influence in this country, but in the end it had always failed in its object, as in the end, Henry, everything that is merely negative and destructive and retardatory must fail. I cited the cases of Benjamin Disraeli and the poet Keats.”

“I suppose,” said Northcote, with a dull sense of agony overspreading his veins, “it could not occur to you, old woman, that by any possibility the _Age_ was justified in the course it took?”

“It could not, Henry,” said his mother.

Her air of finality bewildered him. Yet involuntarily he raised his eyes to her face, and, for the first time in his life as he looked at it, he was able to penetrate through its heroic commonness. The features were harsh and aggressive and scarcely lit by the mind, but the rigidity of such a nature in the teeth of public opinion had appeared to shed over them a little of the bloom that proceeds from the elevation of the intellect. It was a kind of apotheosis of the power of faith. Her eyes were deep blue, strangely unfearing and clear, wide-lidded, steady in their gaze. It was little enough that they had the capacity to see, but whatever they lacked in range derived compensation from mere force of vision. They were inaccessible to the changes which are wrought by influences from without. Whatever they had looked on once could never be modified by external causes.

Northcote carried the toil-stained hand to his lips with a reverence that was more profound than any he had ever felt for it before.

“Every man needs to have known one truly good woman,” he said, strengthening his grasp of the roughened fingers, “before he can even begin his own education.”

It darkened his eyes to see the muscles of the harsh face relax as they yielded to the slight softness of an infrequent emotion.

“Your father was constantly making speeches like these,” she said, with that simplicity which was so formidable. “I was never able to understand them.”

XXXVII

INDELIBLE EVIDENCE

For some time Northcote stood holding her hand and looking down into her eyes. A sense of deep wonder was percolating slowly to every part of his being. What a haven was here to embrace when the frail bark of his nature had been flung, like the cockle-shell that it was, upon the crest of tempestuous and multitudinous seas. How blind and undeveloped he had been not to have understood this before! From what ignominy could this anchorage have saved him! It would not have been necessary to founder upon the shoals had he been aware of this harbor that would have been so willing to embrace him. He was already broken into pieces; and those tears which appeared to suffuse his eyes with such facility and to suffuse hers with such a painful reluctance were falling from him.

“You must ignore that unmannerly attack in the _Age_,” she said in a stern voice which yet was full of redress. “The enemies of the friendless have no kingdom into which they can enter. A few years hence, when you are a rich and honored man, you will forgive them for having once stabbed you.”

The silence which followed her words was broken by the hard and intense breathing of the figure that clasped her.

“There is one thing I shall ask of you,” said Northcote at last. “I shall ask you to give me the pledge from your own lips that you will always believe in me as completely as you do at this moment, whatever doubts, charges, or suspicion the future hurls against me.”

“It is not necessary for me to give this assurance, but, since you demand it, I give it.”

“It is part of my weakness to demand it,” said her son, “although none is so well aware as am I that there is no need to give expression to your faith.”

“As you say, there is no need. But I remember your father saying to me shortly before that illness which was fatal to him, the greater the gifts the greater the lenity to be meted out to their unhappy possessors. On that account I have always treated you with more indulgence than otherwise I should have done.”

“Had you been more Spartan you might have strangled the genie at its birth.”

“I might.”

“And yet made of its possessor a more upright and God-fearing citizen.”

“That is impossible.”

“You never could conceive of his being other than you see him now?”

“I could not.”

“Even if the indelible evidence were laid before you?”

“Evidence is never indelible to us. So-called facts have no worth in our eyes. We believe or we do not believe. Nothing changes our emotions; they are what we understand by religion.”

“You speak for wise and great women.”

“I speak for the humblest of wives and mothers who cannot accept credit for blind obedience to an instinct which alone gives her life.”

“I begin to understand why even the most imperious natures, which are as ruthless as volcanoes in action, cannot live without your aid. It is not that you enslave and fetter them; your function is to cleanse, renew, rehabilitate.”

As Northcote spoke a feeling of profound joy overspread the humiliation whose penalties had been far more grievous to him than those of despair. Hardly had he tasted it, however, than the nightmare at the back of his thoughts assumed a visible shape. Of a sudden there came a sharp screech from the curtain. Margaret, who throughout the conversation with his mother had been engaged in fixing pieces of holly over the photographs on the wall, was still employed in this decoration. It was not she who was responsible for the sudden shrieking of the brass rings along the curtain pole.

With a single comprehensive movement the curtain had been flung back and the bed revealed. Seated upon it, half-dressed, with her hair hanging loose, and her bare arms exposed by her chemise, was his visitor of the previous night. Half a dozen hairpins were stuck in a row in her mouth. In the cold grayness of the December morning, which seemed to envelop her malignity in a bald realism, her features appeared blunt, pale, and hideous. The almost incredibly bitter and mocking glance was not directed upon the man, but upon the elderly, unprepossessing, and countrified figure in the shabby clothes and antique hat whom he was holding by the hand.

Northcote let the hand fall, and recoiled from his mother with a gasp of fear mixed with passion.

The young girl, whom life had done nothing to enlighten, stood in dumb amazement upon the chair on which she was poised.

There was a moment in which the older woman quivered with terror. The brutal eyes of the prostitute, fixed upon her face with a blunt contempt, seemed to change her into stone. Observing her to be petrified like a bird in the presence of a serpent, the woman seated upon the bed picked the row of hairpins from between her teeth with the circumspection of an actress who, upon the stage, is notorious for her power, and who, having a stupendous scene to enact, prepares her audience for it by a display of quietude. She proceeded to coil up her hair with a deliberation that had value as drama.

“Vice-president of the Great Trades’ Union,” she said, removing the last hairpin from her mouth.

The elder woman stood looking helplessly away. Those indomitable eyes were cowed for the first time in their history. For the first time they had come upon something upon which they had no opinion to deliver. She had barely the strength to carry her gaze to her son, who stood ten paces from her as pale and rigid as a statue.

“Better go--better take Peggy,” he whispered in a voice that she did not know to be his.

Margaret, still holding the holly, had come down from the chair, and like a child had come to stand at the side of her natural protectress. She was visibly afraid; and she had clutched the holly so tightly that blood was trickling from the wounds in her soft fingers.

The spectacle of her childishness restored to the elder woman that capacity for action which she was never without.

“Get your coat and gloves, child,” she said in her harsh tones. “Where’s the basket?”

She herself took up the basket, and, without venturing to look at her son or her who sat upon the bed, neither of whom had changed their postures nor spoken again, she led the way out with resolute steps to the top of the stairs. The young girl followed in her wake with a timid obedience, pulling on her cotton gloves over her bleeding fingers as she went.

At the head of the stairs this new resolution of the elder woman’s appeared to fail her.

“Go down, child; take the basket. I will follow you in a minute,” she said, handing the basket to the girl.

She turned suddenly and went back into the room. Her son was still standing in the attitude in which she had left him. There was a curious glare in his eyes. Advancing to him she placed her hands on his shoulders, pressed her lips against his forehead, and then, in a kind of headlong flight, darted away like a rabbit out of the room and down the stairs.

XXXVIII

CLEANSING FIRE

This irrational proceeding served to liberate Northcote from his thrall. Even as he felt his mother’s lips and witnessed her ridiculous flight, he was able to divine the nature of the impulse. It was the expression of that unconquerable instinct by which her sex affirms itself.

He walked to the window which commanded a view of the pavements below. He watched the two figures mingle in all their rustic quaintness with the heterogeneous streams of persons and traffic which defiled before his gaze. It followed their every deviation among this ruthless swarm of Londoners until they were swallowed by the mist of the December morning. The last detail he was able to discern, which served to emphasize their slightly ridiculous character as seen from this altitude, was the large empty basket bobbing about in the hand of the girl. Their rusticity in combination with the wild hurry of their flight marked them out as almost grotesque among the spruce and purposeful crowd through which they made their way. With a pang he remembered that neither of them had ever seen the metropolis before. Whither were they flying? How would they spend their day? What would be the end of their ill-starred adventure?

He continued to strain his eyes after them until they grew dark with the effort. He then left the window and turned round to find that his visitor was standing in front of the fire. She was yawning.

“A facer for the old Methodist,” she said, with a short, nonchalant laugh.

Northcote clenched his hands. An almost ungovernable fury caused his ears to sing.

“I know what is in your mind,” said the woman calmly. “Get it done.”

“I hope you will go,” said Northcote in a low tone.

“Get it done,” said the woman. “Tear my head from my body and I shall respect you.”

Northcote was barely able to point to the door. The woman looked at him with supreme effrontery. She was utterly divested of fear. Her nostrils seemed to be dilated in scorn, and her dark eyes were full of mockery.

“I never saw anything half so funny,” she said, “as the worthy old widow of the clergyman running back shamefaced to kiss her saint and hero. The three of you made a picture for an almanac, as my dear father would have said. You reminded me of nothing so much as a stuck pig. The dear old hymnologist and psalm-singer, who had spoken such brave nonsense, looked just like a poor silly old cow with a red face; and that stupid little baby-face sticking up the holly, well, she was just like one of those silly dolls with wax cheeks, which has a button which you press and it changes its color.”

Northcote was faint already with the dreadful struggle he was waging. Suddenly, as if touched by inspiration, he turned in the direction of the door. Yet the woman was too quick for him. She leaped before him and barred his course.

“I am asking you to pluck my throat out with your great hands,” she cried with fury. “Don’t you understand, you fool? Don’t you understand, I say? I cannot, I will not go back to the gutter; yet I cannot go anywhere else. Why don’t you do as you are told?”

“Do go!” he cried weakly, piteously. The veins were swelling in his neck.

He strove to thrust her aside, but she resisted him; and when he tried again she fixed her strong teeth in his hand ferociously.

“Do it now!” she cried, watching his eyes with the baleful hunger of a she-wolf.

“You are not worth it,” said Northcote, recovering possession of himself.

She spat in his face.

Northcote began to realize that he had to deal with a mad woman.

She plucked a knife from the table. By this time, however, the man had all his wits about him, and the movement was anticipated. He had seized her before she could make use of it.

He knew immediately that he had entered upon a terrible struggle. He possessed immense physical power, but the creature upon whom he had to exercise it was extremely supple and vigorous, and, above all, was now a maniac. She fought with the fury of a lioness. Her unbridled rage seemed to make her more than a match for him. Screaming foul oaths, and resorting to devices that a wild beast would not have employed, the issue hung in the balance. Inch by inch, however, he obtained a stronger purchase on her body, and it writhed under his great hands like that of a huge snake. He grunted under the Titanic exertion of forcing her to the ground. He shifted his hands to her throat, and once he felt it yield to their gripe, his own pent-up fury broke forth in an uncontrollable manner. Hardly conscious of what he did, he shook her with the passion of a wounded bear. She gave a low moan, and a spray of blood came on to her lips.

It fell upon him with a shock of surprise that her struggles had ceased. She had fallen stiff under his hands. When he relaxed his grip she fell to the ground, measuring her length with dull heaviness like a sack of flour. In an instant a revolting idea stifled the dreadful frenzy of the demoniac. She was dead. Those enormous hands of his had pressed out her life without knowing it.

Overcome with horror, Northcote sank to his knees beside the body. It was stark, and already a little cold. He rolled the corpse over, so that its face was exposed; he felt for the beating of the heart. There was not a movement of any sort to enkindle his touch. The face was convulsed, tinged with purple, mottled with gray. The eyes were glazed, and even more hideous than when he looked into them last. In his anguish, he gave a little cry, and rose from his knees, and pressed his hands to his head.

His first thought was for himself. By this irrevocable act he was destroyed. His dreams had come to a brutally abrupt termination. That high destiny which was to shake the world had petered out in a shameful public ignominy.

In a pitiable state of terror he fell on his knees again. There was a sort of morbid reflex action within him that seemed to draw him back to the body, to force him to pass his hands across the corpse. It was now cold. A stinging fury made him writhe. Was it for this foul, uncanny monster that he must forfeit one of the most precious jewels that had ever been devised by nature? He was a young man; life was before him; there was the magic talisman in his spirit that could bend the whole world to his purposes. He gnashed his teeth with impotent fury, and rose biting at his nails.

“This is a dreadful tragedy,” he muttered. “This is a dreadful tragedy. Think of such a one as myself being lost to mankind.”

His own grotesque words caused him to laugh. That surprising genie, that had been destined to conquer a stupidly material world, enabled him to present himself to himself in his amazing predicament. He could hardly preserve his gravity before a spectacle so astonishing.

“The genie is deriding me,” he said.

That mute and distorted face that was looking up at him with an insane leer had no message of its own. It was only significant to the advocate as the price of all that he was about to give up. Yet suddenly he remembered this strange creature he had broken with his hands as he had first encountered her in the prison. In no animate thing could the desire for life have been more intensely strong. Overmastering as was his own desire at this moment, hers, at that time, had been no less so. She must have life; she must see the sun and the clouds and the trees. The common earth had acquired fresh symbols for that debauched vision. And how nearly she had come to possess this strange new thing that she craved. One heaven-born man had all but given it to her. He had so nearly done so, that for one brief instant she had been able to taste it with those blood-stained lips. And when she had discovered that strong and shining as this one man was, his was not the divine valiance of those early mystics who roamed the hills in the childhood of the world, that he had not the simplicity to provide her with that which she craved, she insisted on receiving death at his hands in lieu of the life he could not give her.

It was then, that he took a little compassion. It was a loathsome and terrible destiny to which this human being had been called. By what subtle twist or abrogation of her noble faculties had she come to live her days on such lines as these. This avowed and ruthless enemy of society had been of no common or spurious clay. It was not a small nature that had taken a revenge so bitter. A little more and it had been how much? Another grain of courage, another ounce of power, and she, too, poor maimed and twisted thing of beauty, would have been numbered among the valiant.