The very words—the mere sound of them in her own ears made her voice trail away into bitter helpless crying—which would not stop. It was the awful weeping of utter woe and weakness whose convulsive sobs go on and on until they almost cease to seem human sounds. Dowie’s practical knowledge told her what she had to face. This was what she had guessed at when she had known that there had been crying in the night. Mere soothing of the tenderest would not check it.
“I had been lonely—always—And then the loneliness was gone. And then—! If it had never gone—!”
“I know, my dear, I know,” said Dowie watching her with practised, anxious eye. And she went away for a few moments and came back with an unobtrusive calming draught and coaxed her into taking it and sat down and prayed as she held the little hands which unknowingly beat upon the pillow. Something of her steadiness and love flowed from her through her own warm restraining palms and something in her tender steady voice spoke for and helped her—though it seemed long and long before the cruelty of the storm had lessened and the shadow of a body under the bed-clothes lay deadly still and the heavy eyelids closed as if they would never lift again.
Dowie did not leave her for an hour or more but sat by her bedside and watched. Like this had been the crying in the night. And she had been alone.
As she sat and watched she thought deeply after her lights. She did not think only of the sweet shattered thing she so well loved. She thought much of Lord Coombe. Being a relic of a class which may be regarded as forever extinct, her views on the subject of the rights and responsibilities of rank were of an unswerving reverence verging on the feudal. Even in early days her perfection of type was rare. To her unwavering mind the remarkable story she had become a part of was almost august in its subjection of ordinary views to the future of a great house and its noble name. With the world falling to pieces and great houses crumbling into nothingness, that this one should be rescued from the general holocaust was a deed worthy of its head. But where was there another man who would have done this thing as he had done it—remaining totally indifferent to the ignominy which would fall upon his memory in the years to come when the marriage was revealed. That the explanation of his action would always be believed to be an unseemly and shameful one was to her respectable serving-class mind a bitter thing. That it would always be contemptuously said that a vicious elderly man had educated the daughter of his mistress, that he might marry her and leave an heir of her blooming youth, was almost worse than if he had been known to have committed some decent crime like honest murder. Even the servants’ hall in the slice of a house, discussing the ugly whisper had somewhat revolted at it and thought it “a bit too steep even for these times.” But he had plainly looked the whole situation in the face and had made up his mind to do what he had done. He hadn’t cared for himself; he had only cared that the child who was to be born should be his legitimatised successor and that there should remain after him a Head of the House of Coombe. That such houses should have heads to succeed to their dignities was a simple reverential belief of Dowie’s and—apart from all other feeling—the charge she had undertaken wore to her somewhat the aspect of a religious duty. His lordship was as one who had a place on a sort of altar.
“It’s because he’s so high in his way that he can bear it,” was her thought. “He’s so high that nothing upsets him. He’s above things—that’s what he is.” And there was something else too—something she did not quite follow but felt vaguely moved by. What was happening to England came into it—and something else that was connected with himself in some way that was his own affair. In his long talk with her he had said some strange things—though all in his own way.
“Howsoever the tide of war turns, men and women will be needed as the world never needed them before,” was one of them. “This one small unknown thing I want. It will be the child of my old age. I want it. Her whole being has been torn to pieces. Dr. Redcliff says that she might have died before this if her delicate body had not been stronger than it looks.”
“She has never been ill, my lord,” Dowie had answered, “—but she is ill now.”
“Save her—save it for me,” he broke out in a voice she had never heard and with a face she had never seen.
That in this plainly overwrought hour he should allow himself a moment of forgetfulness drew him touchingly near to her.
“My lord,” she said, “I’ve watched over her since she was five. I know the ways young things in her state need to have about them to give them strength and help. Thank the Lord she’s one of the loving ones and if we can hold her until she—wakes up to natural feelings she’ll begin to try to live for the sake of what’ll need her—and what’s his as well as hers.”
Of this she thought almost religiously as she sat by the bedside and watched.
Chapter 26
The doctor rode up the climbing moorland road the next morning and paid a long visit to his patient. He was not portentous in manner and he did not confine his conversation to the subject of symptoms. He however included something of subtle cross examination in his friendly talk. The girl’s thinness, her sometimes panting breath and the hollow eyes made larger by the black ring of her lashes startled him on first sight of her. He found that the smallness of her appetite presented to Dowie a grave problem.
“I’m trying to coax good milk into her by degrees. She does her best. But she can’t eat.” When they were alone she said, “I shall keep her windows open and make her rest on her sofa near them. I shall try to get her to walk out with me if her strength will let her. We can go slowly and she’ll like the moor. If we could stop the awful crying in the night— It’s been shaking her to pieces for weeks and weeks— It’s the kind that there’s no checking when it once begins. It’s beyond her poor bit of strength to hold it back. I saw how hard she tried—for my sake. It’s the crying that’s most dangerous of all.”
“Nothing could be worse,” the doctor said and he went away with a grave face, a deeply troubled man.
When Dowie went back to the Tower room she found Robin standing at a window looking out on the moorside. She turned and spoke and Dowie saw that intuition had told her what had been talked about.
“I will try to be good, Dowie,” she said. “But it comes—it comes because—suddenly I know all over again that I can never see him any more. If I could only see him—even a long way off! But suddenly it all comes back that I can never see him again—Never!”
Later she begged Dowie not to come to her in the night if she heard sounds in her room.
“It will not hurt you so much if you don’t see me,” she said. “I’m used to being by myself. When I was at Eaton Square I used to hide my face deep in the pillow and press it against my mouth. No one heard. But no one was listening as you will be. Don’t come in, Dowie darling. Please don’t!”
All she wanted, Dowie found out as the days went by, was to be quiet and to give no trouble. No other desires on earth had been left to her. Her life had not taught her to want many things. And now—:
“Oh! please don’t be unhappy! If I could only keep you from being unhappy—until it is over!” she broke out all unconsciously one day. And then was smitten to the heart by the grief in Dowie’s face.
That was the worst of it all and sometimes caused Dowie’s desperate hope and courage to tremble on the brink of collapse. The child was thinking that before her lay the time when it would be “all over.”
A patient who held to such thoughts as her hidden comfort did not give herself much chance.
Sometimes she lay for long hours on the sofa by the open window but sometimes a restlessness came upon her and she wandered about the empty rooms of the little castle as though she were vaguely searching for something which was not there. Dowie furtively followed her at a distance knowing that she wanted to be alone. The wide stretches of the moor seemed to draw her. At times she stood gazing at them out of a window, sometimes she sat in a deep window seat with her hands lying listlessly upon her lap b
ut with her eyes always resting on the farthest line of the heather. Once she sat thus so long that Dowie crept out of the empty stone chamber where she had been waiting and went and stood behind her. At first Robin did not seem conscious of her presence but presently she turned her head. There was a faintly bewildered look in her eyes.
“I don’t know why—when I look at the edge where the hill seems to end—it always seems as if there might be something coming from the place we can’t see—” she said in a helpless-sounding voice. “We can only see the sky behind as if the world ended there. But I feel as if something might be coming from the other side. The horizon always looks like that—now. There must be so much—where there seems to be nothing more. I want to go.”
She tried to smile a little as though at her own childish fancifulness but suddenly a heavy shining tear fell on her hand. And her head dropped and she murmured, “I’m sorry, Dowie,” as if it were a fault.
The Macaurs watched her from afar with their own special order of silent interest. But the sight of the slowly flitting and each day frailer young body began to move them even to the length of low-uttered expression of fear and pity.
“Some days she fair frights me passing by so slow and thin in her bit black dress,” Maggy said. “She minds me o’ a lost birdie fluttering about wi’ a broken wing. She’s gey young she is, to be a widow woman—left like that.”
The doctor came up the moor road every day and talked more to Dowie than to his patient. As the weeks went by he could not sanely be hopeful. Dowie’s brave face seemed to have lost some of its colour at times. She asked eager questions but his answers did not teach her any new thing. Yet he was of a modern school.
“There was a time, Mrs. Dowson,” he said, “when a doctor believed—or thought he believed—that healing was carried in bottles. For thinking men that time has passed. I know very little more of such a case as this than you know yourself. You are practical and kind and watchful. You are doing all that can be done. So am I. But I am sorry to say that it seems as if only a sort of miracle—! If—as you said once—she would ‘wake up’—there would be an added chance.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowie answered. “ If she would. But it seems as if her mind has stopped thinking about things that are to come. You see it in her face. She can only remember. The days are nothing but dreams to her.”
Dowie had written weekly letters to Lord Coombe in accordance with his request. She wrote a good clear hand and her method was as clear as her calligraphy. He invariably gathered from her what he most desired to know and learned that her courageous good sense was plainly to be counted upon. From the first her respectful phrases had not attempted to conceal from him the anxiety she had felt.
“It was the way she looked and that I hadn’t expected to see such a change, that took the strength out of me the first time I saw her. And what your lordship had told me. It seemed as if the two things together were too much for her to face. I watch over her day and night though I try to hide from her that I watch so close. If she could be made to eat something, and to sleep, and not to break her little body to pieces with those dreadful fits of crying, there would be something to hold on to. But I shall hold on to her, my lord, whether there is anything to hold on to or not.”
He knew she would hold on but as the weeks passed and she faithfully told him what record the days held he saw that in each she felt that she had less and less to grasp. And then came a letter which plainly could not conceal ominous discouragement in the face of symptoms not to be denied—increasing weakness, even more rapid loss of weight, and less sleep and great exhaustion after the convulsions of grief.
“It couldn’t go on and not bring on the worst. It is my duty to warn your lordship,” the letter ended.
For she had not “wakened up” though somehow Dowie had gone on from day to day wistfully believing that it would be only “ Nature” that she should. Dowie had always believed strongly in “Nature.” But at last there grew within her mind the fearsome thought that somehow the very look of her charge was the look of a young thing who had done with Nature—and between whom and Nature the link had been broken.
There were beginning to be young lambs on the hillside and Jock Macaur was tending them and their mothers with careful shepherding. Once or twice he brought a newborn and orphaned one home wrapped in his plaid and it was kept warm by the kitchen fire and fed with milk by Maggy to whom motherless lambs were an accustomed care.
There was no lamb in his plaid on the afternoon when he startled Dowie by suddenly appearing at the door of the room where she sat sewing—It was a thing which had never happened before. He had kept as closely to his own part of the place as if there had been no means of egress from the rooms he and Maggy lived in. His face sometimes wore an anxious look when he brought back a half-dead lamb, and now though his plaid was empty his weather-beaten countenance had trouble in it—so much trouble that Dowie left her work quickly.
“I was oot o’the moor and I heard a lamb cryin’,” he said uncertainly. “I thought it had lost its mither. It was cryin’ pitifu’. I searched an’ couldna find it. But the cryin’ went on. It was waur than a lamb’s cry—It was waur—” he spoke in reluctant jerks. “I followed until I cam’ to it. There was a cluster o’ young rowans with broom and gorse thick under them. The cryin’ was there. It was na a lamb cryin’. It was the young leddy—lyin’ twisted on the heather. I daurna speak to her. It was no place for a man body. I cam’ awa’ to ye, Mistress Dowson. You an’ Maggy maun go to her. I’ll follow an’ help to carry her back, if ye need me.”
Dowie’s colour left her.
“I thought she was asleep on her bed,” she said. “Sometimes she slips away alone and wanders about a bit. But not far and I always follow her. To-day I didn’t know.”
The sound like a lost lamb’s crying had ceased when they reached her. The worst was over but she lay on the heather shut in by the little thicket of gorse and broom—white and with heavily closed lids. She had not wandered far and had plainly crept into the enclosing growth for utter seclusion. Finding it she had lost hold and been overwhelmed. That was all. But as Jock Macaur carried her back to Darreuch, Dowie followed with slow heavy feet and heart. They took her to the Tower room and laid her on her sofa because she had faintly whispered.
“Please let me lie by the window,” as they mounted the stone stairs.
“Open it wide,” she whispered again when Macaur had left them alone.
“Are you—are you short of breath, my dear?” Dowie asked opening the window very wide indeed.
“No,” still in a whisper and with closed eyes. “But—when I am not so tired—I want to—look—”
She was silent for a few moments and Dowie stood by her side and watched her.
“—At the end of the heather,” the faint voice ended its sentence after a pause. “I feel as if—something is there.” She opened her eyes, “Something—I don’t know what. ‘Something.’ Dowie!” frightened, “Are you—crying?”
Dowie frankly and helplessly took out a handkerchief and sat down beside her. She had never done such a thing before.
“You cry yourself, my lamb,” she said. “Let Dowie cry a bit.”
Chapter 27
And the next morning came the “ waking up” for which Dowie had so long waited and prayed. But not as Dowie had expected it or in the way she hard thought “Nature.”
She had scarcely left her charge during the night though she had pretended that she had slept as usual in an adjoining room. She stole in and out, she sat by the bed and watched the face on the pillow and thanked God that—strangely enough—the child slept. She had not dared to hope that she would sleep, but before midnight she became still and fell into a deep quiet slumber. It seemed deep, for she ceased to stir and it was so quiet that once or twice Dowie became a little anxious and bent over her to look at her closely and listen to her breathing. But, though the small white face was always a touching sight, it was no whiter than usual and her breath
ing though low and very soft was regular.
“But where the strength’s to come from the good God alone knows!” was Dowie’s inward sigh.
The clock had just struck one when she leaned forward again. What she saw would not have disturbed her if she had not been overstrung by long anxiety. But now—after the woeful day—in the middle of the night with the echo of the clock’s solitary sound still in the solitary room—in the utter stillness of moor and castle emptiness she was startled almost to fright. Something had happened to the pitiful face. A change had come over it—not a change which had stolen gradually but a change which was actually sudden. It was smiling—it had begun to smile that pretty smile which was a very gift of God in itself.
Dowie drew back and put her hand over her mouth. “Oh!” she said “Can she be—going—in her sleep?”
But she was not going. Even Dowie’s fright saw that in a few moments more. Was it possible that a mist of colour was stealing over the whiteness—or something near colour? Was the smile deepening and growing brighter? Was that caught breath something almost like a little sob of a laugh—a tiny ghost of a sound more like a laugh than any other sound on earth?
Dowie slid down upon her knees and prayed devoutly—clutching at the robe of pity and holding hard—as women did in crowds nearly two thousand years ago.
“Oh, Lord Jesus,” she was breathing behind the hands which hid her face—“ if she can dream what makes her smile like that, let her go on, Lord Jesus—let her go on.”
When she rose to her chair again and seated herself to watch it almost awed, it did not fade—the smile. It settled into a still radiance and stayed. And, fearful of the self-deception of longing as she was, Dowie could have sworn as the minutes passed that the mist of colour had been real and remained also and even made the whiteness a less deathly thing. And there was such a naturalness in the strange smiling that it radiated actual peace and rest and safety. When the clock struck three and there was no change and still the small face lay happy upon the pillow Dowie at last even felt that she dare steal into her own room and lie down for a short rest. She went very shortly thinking she would return in half an hour at most, but the moment she lay down, her tired eyelids dropped and she slept as she had not slept since her first night at Darreuch Castle.