The Combined Maze Part 55

"Of course I mean it."

"Well, then--as it happens--it's what I'm going to do."

"You should have done it before."

"I couldn't."

"Why not?"

"I hadn't the money."

Mr. Ransome closed his eyes again as if in pain.

"I'd have given it you, Randall," he said, presently. He had opened his eyes, but they wandered uneasily, avoiding his son's gaze. "If I'd had it. But I hadn't. I've been doing badly."

And again his eyelids dropped and lifted.

"Things have gone wrong that hadn't ought to if I'd been what I should be."

There was anguish in Ranny's father's eyes now. They turned to him for rea.s.surance. As if in some final act of humility and contrition, he unbared and abased himself, he laid down the pretension of integrity.

His shawl had slipped from his knees. His hands moved over it as if, having unbared, he now sought to cover himself. Ransome stooped over him and drew the shawl up higher and wrapped it closer with careful, tender touches.

"Don't worry about that," he said.

"Your Mother'll be all right, Randall. She's got a bit of her own. It's all there, except what she put into the business. You won't have to trouble about her." He paused. "Have you got the money now?" he said.

"I shall have. To-morrow, probably."

"Then don't you wait."

"It'll be beastly work, you know, Father. Are you sure you don't mind?"

"What _I_ mind is your being married to that woman. I never liked it, Randall."

He closed his eyes. His face became more than ever drawn and peaked. His mouth opened. With short, hard gasps he fought for the breath he had so spent.

Ransome's heart reproached him because he had not cared enough about his father. And he said to himself, "He must have cared a lot more than he ever let on."

The way to the Divorce Court had been made marvelously smooth for him.

His mother couldn't say now that it would kill his father.

But on Monday morning things did not go with Ransome entirely as he had expected. Shaftesbury Avenue refused to lend him more than ten pounds on the security of his furniture. Still, that was a trifling hitch. Now that the proceedings had been consecrated by his father's sanction, there could be no doubt that his mother would be glad to lend him the five pounds. He would ask her for it that evening as soon as he got home.

But he did not ask her that evening, nor yet the next. He did not ask her for it at all. For as soon as he got home she came to him out of his father's room. She stood at the head of the stairs by the door of the room, leaning against the banisters. And she was crying.

"Is Father worse?" he said.

"He's going, my dear. There's a trained nurse just come. She's in there with the doctor. But they can't do anything."

He drew her into the front room, and she told him what had happened.

"He was sittin' in his chair there like he was yesterday--so bright--and I thought he was better, and I made him a drop of chicken broth and sat with him while he took it. Then I left him there for a bit and went upstairs to the children--Dossie was sick this morning--"

"Dossie--?"

"It's nothing--she's upset with something she's eaten--and I was there with her ten minutes per'aps, and when I came back I found your Father in a fit. A convulsion, the doctor says it was; he said all along he might have them, but I thought he was better. And he's had another this evening, and he hasn't come round out of it right. He doesn't know me, Ranny."

He had nothing to say to her. It was as if he had known that it would happen, and that it would happen like this, that he would come home at this hour and find his mother standing at the head of the stairs, and that she would tell him these things in these words. He even had the feeling that he ought to have told _her_, to have warned her that it would be so.

On Wednesday evening, at eight o'clock, when Ransome should have been in the lawyer's room at the Polytechnic, he was standing by his father's bed. Mr. Ransome had partially recovered consciousness, and he lay supported by his son's arms in preference to his own bed. For his bed had become odious to him, sinking under him, falling from him treacherously as he sank and fell, whereas Ranny's muscles adjusted themselves to all his sinkings and fallings. They remained and could be felt in the disintegration that presently separated them from the rest of Ranny, Ranny's arms being there, close under him, and Ranny's face a long way off at the other end of the room.

The process of dissolution had nothing to do with Mr. Ransome. It went on, not in him but outside him, in the room. He was almost unaware of it, it was so inconceivably gradual, so immeasurably slow. First of all the room began to fill with gray fog, and for ages and ages Ranny's face and his wife's face hung over him, bodiless, like pale lumps in the fog.

Then for ages and for ages they were blurred, and then withdrawn from him, then blotted out.

This dying, which was so eternally tedious to Mr. Ransome, lasted about twenty minutes, so that at half past eight, when Ranny should have been listening to his legal adviser, he was trying to understand what the doctor was trying to tell him about the causes, the very complicated causes of his father's death.

And with Mr. Ransome's death there came again on Ranny and his mother, and on all of them, the innocence and the immense delusion in which they had lived, in which they had kept it up, in the days before Ranny's wife had run away from him and before Ranny's enlightenment and his awful outburst. Only the innocence was ten times more persistent, the delusion ten times more solemn and more unutterably sacred now. Mr. Ransome's death made it impossible for them to speak or think or feel about him otherwise than if he had been a good man. If Ranny could have doubted it he would have stood reproved. From the doctor's manner, from his Uncle Randall's manner and his Aunt Randall's, from Mr. Ponting's and the a.s.sistant's manner, and from the manner, the swollen grief, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of the servant Mabel, he would have gathered that his father was a good man.

But Ransome never doubted it. He spoke, he thought, he felt as if his father's death had left him inconsolable. It was the death of a man who had made them all ashamed and miserable; who had tried to take the joy out of Ranny's life as he had already taken it out of Ranny's mother's face; who had hardly ever spoken a kind word to him; who, if it came to that, had never done anything for him beyond contributing, infinitesimally, to his existence. And even this Mr. Ransome had done by accident and inadvertence, thinking (if he could be said to have been thinking at all) of his own pleasure and not of his son's interests; for Ranny, if he had been consulted, would probably have preferred to owe his existence to some other parent.

And even in his last act, his dying, in his choice of that hour, of all hours open to him to die in, Mr. Ransome had inflicted an incurable injury upon his son. He had timed it to a minute. And Ranny knew it. He had had the idea firmly fixed in his head that if he did not go to the Polytechnic and find out how to set about filing his pet.i.tion that Wednesday night, he would never get his divorce. Things would happen, they were bound to happen if he gave them time.

And yet that death, so ill-timed, so disastrous for Ranny in its consequences, Ranny mourned as if it had been in itself an affliction, an irreparable loss. He felt with the most entire sincerity that now that the Humming-bird was dead he would never be happy again.

On the Sunday after the funeral, which was on the Sat.u.r.day, he sat in the front parlor with his mother and Mr. and Mrs. Randall, listening with a dumb but poignant acquiescence to all that they were saying about his father. Their idea now was that Mr. Ransome was not only a good man, a man of indissoluble integrity, but a man of unimaginably profound emotions, of pa.s.sionate affections concealed under the appearance of austerity.

"No one knows," Mrs. Ransome was saying, "what 'E was thinking and what 'E was feeling--what went on inside him no one ever knew. For all he said about it you'd have thought he didn't take much notice of what happened--Ranny's trouble--and yet I know he felt it something awful. It preyed on 'is mind, poor Ranny being left like that. Why, it was after that, if you remember, that he began to break up. I put all his illness down to that.

"And then the children--you might say he didn't take much notice of them, but 'E was thinking about them all the time, you may depend upon it. 'E sent for them the Sunday before he died. I'm glad he did, too.

Aren't you, Ranny?"

"Yes, Mother," Ranny said, and choked.

"It'll be something for them to remember him by when they grow up. But they'll never know what was in his heart. None of us ever knew nor ever will know, now."

"He was a good man, Emmy, and a kind man--and just. I never knew any one more just than Fulleymore. We were saying so only last night, weren't we?"

"Yes, John," said Mrs. Randall. "We were saying you could always depend upon his word. And, as _you_ say, there were things in him we never knew--and never shall know."

And so it went on, with tearful breaks and long, oppressive silences, until some one would think of some as yet unmentioned quality of Mr.

Ransome's. Every now and then, in the silences, one of them would be visited by some involuntary memory of his unpleasantness and of the furtive vice that had destroyed him, and would thrust the thought back with horror, as outrageous, indecent, and impossible. They all spoke in voices of profound emotion and with absolute, unfaltering conviction.

"We shall never know what was in him." Always they came back to that, they dwelt on it, they clung to it. Under all the innocence and the delusion it was as if, through their grief, they touched reality, they felt the unaltered, unapparent splendor, and testified to the mystery, to the ultimate and secret sanct.i.ty of man's soul.