Somehow Good Part 10

One little pleasant surprise awaited her. It came to her knowledge for the first time that she was sole heir to the estate of her late stepfather, Paul Nightingale. The singular practice that we believe to exist in many families of keeping back all information about testamentary dispositions as long as possible from the persons they concern, especially minors, had been observed in her case; and her mother, perhaps resenting the idea that her daughter--a young chit!--should presume to outlive her, had kept her in ignorance of the contents of her stepfather's will. It did not really matter much. Had the sum been large, and a certainty, it might have procured for her a safer position when a temporary guest at the Residency at Khopal, or even caused her indignant young bridegroom to think twice before he took steps to rid himself of her. But, after all, it was only some three hundred and fifty pounds a year, and depended on the life of a lady of forty-odd, who might live to be a hundred. A girl with no more than that is nearly as defenceless as she is without it.

A condition was attached to the bequest--not an unwelcome one. She was to take her stepfather's name, Nightingale. She was really very glad to do this. There was a _faux air_ of a real married name about Mrs.

Nightingale that was lacking in Mrs. Graythorpe. Besides, all troublesome questions about who Sally's father was would get lost sight of in the fact that her mother had changed her name in connexion with that sacred and glorious thing, an inheritance. A trust-fund would always be a splendid red-herring to draw across the path of Mrs.

Grundy's sleuth-hounds--a quarry more savoury to their nostrils even than a reputation. And nothing soothes the sceptical more than being asked now and again to witness a transfer of stock, especially if it is money held in trust. It has all the force of a pleasant alterative pill on the circulation of Respectability--removes obstructions and promotes appet.i.te--is a certain remedy for sleeplessness, and so forth. So though there wasn't a particle of reason why Mrs.

Nightingale's money should be held by any one but herself, as she had no intention whatever of marrying, Colonel Lund consented to become her trustee; and both felt that something truly respectable had been done--something that if it didn't establish a birthright and a correct extraction for Miss Sally, at any rate went a long way towards it.

By the time Mrs. Nightingale had got settled in the little house at Shepherd's Bush, that she took on a twenty-one years' lease five or six years after her return to England, and had christened it Saratoga, after her early recollection of the place where she first saw her stepfather, whose name she took when she came into the money he left her--by this time she, with the a.s.sistance of Colonel Lund, had quite a.s.sumed the appearance of a rather comfortably off young widow-lady, who did not make a great parade of her widowhood, but whose circ.u.mstances seemed reasonable enough, and challenged no inquiry. Inquisitiveness would have seemed needless impertinence--just as much so as yours would have been in the case of the hypothetical So-and-sos at the beginning of our last chapter. A vague impression got in the air that Sally's father had not been altogether satisfactory--well, wasn't it true? It may have leaked out from something in "the Major's" manner. But it never produced any effect on friends, except that they saw in it a reason why Mrs. Nightingale never mentioned her husband. He had been a black sheep. Silence about him showed good feeling on her part. _De mortuis_, etc....

Of one thing we feel quite certain--that if, at the time we made this lady's acquaintance, any chance friend of hers or her daughter's--say, for instance, Laet.i.tia Wilson, Sally's old school-friend and present music-colleague--had been told that Mrs. Nightingale, of Krakatoa Villa, No. 7, Glenmoira Road, Shepherd's Bush, W., had been the heroine of divorce proceedings under queer circ.u.mstances, that her husband wasn't dead at all, and that that dear little puss Sally was Goodness-knows-who's child, we feel certain that the information would have been cross-countered with a blank stare of incredulity. Why, the mere fact that Mrs. Nightingale had refused so many offers of marriage was surely sufficient to refute such a nonsensical idea! Who ever heard of a lady with a soiled record refusing a good offer of marriage?

But while we are showing our respect for what the man in the street says or thinks, and the woman in the street thinks and says, are we not losing sight of a leading phrase of the symphony, sonata, cantata--whatever you like to call it--of Mrs. Nightingale's life? A phrase that steals in, just audibly--no more, in the most _strepitoso_ pa.s.sage of the stormy second movement--a movement, however, in which the proceedings of the Divorce Court are scarcely more audible, _pianissimo legato_, a chorus with closed lips, all the stringed instruments _sordini_. But it grows and grows, and in _allegro con fuoco_ on the voyage home, and only leaves a bar or two blank, when the thing it metaphorically represents is asleep and isn't suffering from the wind. It breaks out again _vivacissimo accelerando_ when Miss Sally (whom we allude to) wakes up, and doesn't appreciate Nestle's milk. But it always grows, and in due course may be said to become the music itself.

More intelligibly, Mrs. Nightingale became so wrapped up in her baby, that had seemed to her at first a cruel embarra.s.sment--a thing to be concealed and ignored--that very soon she really had no time to think about where she broke her mola.s.ses-jug, as Uncle Remus says. The new life that it had become hers to guard took her out of herself, made her quite another being from the reckless and thoughtless girl of two years ago.

As time went on she felt more and more the value of the newcomer's indifference to her extraction and the tragedy that had attended it.

A living creature, with a stupendous capacity for ignoring the past, and, indeed, everything except a monotonous diet, naturally gave her mind a bias towards the future, and hope grew in her heart unconsciously, without reminding her that it might have been despair.

A bad alarm, when the creature was six months old, that an enteric attack might end fatally, had revealed to its mother how completely it had taken possession of her own life, and what a power for compensation there was even in its most imperious and tyrannical habits. As it gradually became articulate--however unreasonable it continued--her interest in its future extinguished her memories of her own past, and she found herself devising games for baby before the little character was old enough to play them, and costumes before she was big enough to wear them. By the time Saratoga Villa had become Krakatoa, Miss Sally had had time to benefit by a reasonable allowance of the many schemes her mother had developed for her during her infancy. Had all the projects which were mooted for her further education at this date been successfully carried out, she would have been an admirable female Crichton, if her reason had survived the curriculum. Luckily for her, she had a happy faculty for being plucked at examinations, and her education was consequently kept within reasonable bounds.

There was, however, one department of culture in which Sally outshot all compet.i.tors. This was swimming. She would give a bath's length at the Paddington Baths to the next strongest swimmer in the Ladies'

Club, and come in triumphant in a race of ten lengths. It was a grand sight to see Sally rus.h.i.+ng stem on, cleaving the water with her head almost as if breath were an affectation, and doubling back at the end while the other starters were scarcely half-way. Or shooting through the air in her little blue costume straight for the deepest water, and then making believe to be a fish on the s.h.i.+ny tiles at the bottom.

Her mother always said she was certain that if that little monkey had managed to wriggle through some hole into the sea, on her voyage home, she would have swum after the s.h.i.+p and climbed up the rudder chains. Possibly, but she was only twelve months old! If, however, she had met with an early death, her mother's lot would have lacked its redemption. The joint life of the two supplies a possible answer to the conundrum that has puzzled us. For in a certain sense the absorption of her own existence in that of another than herself had made of Rosalind the woman, at the date of our introduction to her, quite another person from Rosalind the hot-headed and thoughtless girl that had quarrelled with her natural guardian for doing what she had a perfect right to do, and had steered alone into unknown seas, a s.h.i.+p without a rudder or a compa.s.s, and very little knowledge of the stars of heaven for her guide. We can see what she is now much better than we can judge what she was then.

It need not be supposed that this poor lady never felt any interest, never made any inquiry, about the sequel of the life she had so completely _bouleverse_; for, whatever blame we feel bound to express, or whatever exculpation we contrive to concoct for her, there can be no doubt what the result was to the young man who has come into the story, so far, only under the name of Gerry. We simply record his designation as it has reached us in the data we are now making use of.

It is all hearsay about a past. We add what we have been able to gather, merely noting that what it seems to point to recommends itself to us as probable.

"n.o.body knoo, n.o.body cared," was our friend Major Roper's brief reply to an inquiry what became of this young man. "Why, good Lard, sir!" he went on, "if one was to begin fussin' about all the Johnnies that shy off when there's a row of that sort, one would never get a dam night's rest! Not but what if I could recollect his name. Now, what _was_ his confounded name? Thought I'd got it--but no--it wasn't Messiter. Fancy his Christian name was Jeremiah.... I recollect Messiter I'm thinkin'

of--character that looked as if he had a pain in his stomach--came into forty thousand pounds. Stop a bit--was it Indermaur? No, it wasn't Indermaur. No use guessin'--give it up."

Besides, the Major was getting purple with suppressed coughing. When he had given it up, he surrendered unconditionally to the cough, but was presently anxious to transmit, through its subsidence, an idea that he found it impossible to shake across the table between us out of an inarticulate forefinger end. It a.s.sumed form in time. Why not ask the lady herself? We demurred, and the old soldier explained.

"Not rus.h.i.+n' at her, you know, and sayin', 'Who the dooce was it married you, ma'am?' I'm not a dam fool. Showin' tact, you know--puttin' it easy and accidental. 'Who was that young beggar now?--inspector--surveyor--something of the sort--up at Umballa in seventy-nine? Burrumpooter Irrigation--that's what _he_ was on.' And, Lard bless you, my dear sir, you don't suppose she'll up and say, 'I suppose you mean that dam husband of mine.' Not she! Sensible woman that, sir--seen the world--knows a thing or two. You'll see she'll only say, 'That was Foodle or Parker or Stebbins or Jephson,' as may be, accordin' to the name."

We did not see our way to this enterprise, and said so. We drew a line; said there were things you could do, and things you couldn't do.

The Major chuckled, and admitted this might be so; his old governor used to say, "Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines." The last two words remained behind in the cough, unless, indeed, they were shaken out off the Major's forefinger into a squeezed lemon that was awaiting its Seltzer.

"But I can tell you thing, Mr.," said he, forgetting our name, as soon as he felt soothed by the lemon-squash. "He didn't keep his name, that young man didn't. You may bet he didn't safely! Only, it's no use askin' me why, nor what he changed it to. If it _was_ him that was lost in the Bush in New South Wales, when I was at Sydney, why, of course that chap's _name_ was the same. I remember that much. Can't get hold of the name, though." He appeared to consult the pattern on his silk pocket-handkerchief as an oracle, and to await its answer with a thoughtful eye. Presently he blew his nose on the oracle, and returned it to his pocket, adding: "But it's a speculation--little speculation of my own. Don't _ask me_!" We saw, however, that more would come, without asking. And it came.

"It made a talk out there at the time. But _that_ didn't bring him to life. You may talk till you're hoa.r.s.e, but you won't bring a dead man to--not when he's twenty miles off in a forest of gum-trees, as like as tallow-candles.... Oh yes, they had the natives put on the scent--black trackers, they call 'em--but, Lard! it was all no use.

They only followed the scent of his horse, and the horse came back a fortnight after with them on his heels, an hour or so behind.... He'd only just left his party a moment, and meant to come back into the open. I suppose he thought he was sure to cross a cutting, and got trapped in the solid woodland."

"But what was the speculation? You said just now...."

"Not much to go by," said the Major, shaking a discouraging head.

"Another joker with another name, who turned up a hundred miles off!

Harrisson, I fancy--yes, Harrisson. It was only my idea they were the same. I came away, and don't know how they settled it."

"But something, Major Roper, must have made you think this man the same--the same as Jeremiah Indermaur, or whatever his name was--Mrs.

Nightingale's man?"

"Somethin' must! What it was is another pair of shoes." He cogitated and reflected, but seemed to get no nearer. "You ask Pelloo," he said.

"He might give you a tip." Then he called for a small gla.s.s of cognac, because the Seltzer was such dam chilly stuff, and the dry sherry was no use at all. We left him arranging the oracle over his face, with a view to a serious nap.

We got a few words shortly after with General Pellew, who seemed a little surprised at the Major's having referred to him for information.

"I don't know," said he, "why our friend Roper shouldn't recollect as much about it as I do. However, I do certainly remember that when this young gentleman, whatever his name was, left the station, he did go to Sydney or Melbourne, and I have some hazy recollection of some one saying that he was lost in the Bush. But why old Jack fancies he was found again or changed his name to Harrisson I haven't the slightest idea."

So that all we ourselves succeeded in getting at about Gerry may be said to have been the trap-door he vanished through. Whether Mrs.

Nightingale got at other sources of information we cannot say.

Whatever she learned she would be sure to keep her own counsel about.

She may have concluded that the bones of the husband who had in a fit of anger deserted her had been picked by white ants, twenty years ago, in an Australian forest; or she may have come to know, by some means, of his resuscitation from the Bush, and his successes or failures in a later life elsewhere. We have had our own reasons for doubting that she ever knew that he took the name of Harrisson--if he really did--a point which seemed to us very uncertain, so far as the Major's narrative went. If she did get a sc.r.a.p of tidings, a flying word, about him now and again, it was most likely all she got. And when she got it she would feel the danger of further inquiry--the difficulty of laying the reasons for her curiosity before her informant. You can't easily say to a stranger: "Oh, do tell us about Mrs. Jones or Mr.

Smith. She or he is our divorced or separated wife or husband." A German might, but Mrs. Nightingale was not a German.

However, she _may_ have heard something about that Gerry, we grant you, in all those twenty long years. But if you ask us our opinion--our private opinion--it is that she scarcely heard of him, if she heard at all, and certainly never set eyes on him, until one day her madcap little daughter brought him home, half-killed by an electric shock, in a cab we were at some pains to describe accurately a few pages ago. And even then, had it not been for the individualities of that cab, she might have missed seeing him, and let him go away to the infirmary or the police-station, and probably never been near him again.

As it was, the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the face of her old lover--of her husband. Eighteen--twenty--years had made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The mark of the world he had lived in was on him; and it was the mark of a rough, strong world where one fights, and, if one is a man of this sort, maybe wins. But she never doubted his ident.i.ty for a moment. And the way in which she grasped the situation--above all, the fact that he had not recognised her and would not recognise her--quite justified, to our thinking, Major Roper's opinion of her powers of self-command.

Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the "electrocuted" man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took that sanguinary galvanic shock to.

CHAPTER IX

HOW THOSE GIRLS DO CHATTER OVER THEIR MUSIC! MRS. NIGHTINGALE'S RESOLUTION. BUT, THE RISK! A HARD PART TO PLAY. THERE WAS ONLY MAMMA FOR THE GIRL! THE GARDEN OF LONG AGO

Two parts in a sestet, played alone, may be a maddening torture to a person whose musical imagination is not equal to supplying the other four. Perhaps you have heard Haydn, Op. 1704, and rejoiced in the logical consecutiveness of its fugues, the indisputableness of its well-cla.s.sified statements, the swift pertinence of the repartees of the first violin to the second, the apt _resume_ and orderly reorganization of their epigrammatic interchanges by the 'cello and the double-ba.s.s, the steady typewritten report and summary of the whole by the pianoforte, and the regretful exception to so many points taken by the clarionet. If so, you have no doubt felt, as we have, a sense of perfect satisfaction at faultless musical structure, without having to surrender your soul unconditionally to the pa.s.sionate appeal of a Beethoven, or to split your musical brains in conjectures about what Volkanikoffsky is driving at. You will find at the end that you have pa.s.sed an hour or so of tranquil enjoyment, and are mighty content with yourself, the performers, and every one else.

But if you only hear the two parts, played alone, and your mental image of all the other parts is not strong enough to prevent your hearing the two performers count the bars while the non-performers don't do anything at all, you will probably go away and come back presently, or go mad.

n.o.body else was there when Sally and Laet.i.tia Wilson were counting four, and beginning too soon, and having to go back and begin all over again, and missing a bar, and knocking down their music-stands when they had to turn over quick. So n.o.body went mad. Mamma had gone to an anti-vaccination meeting, and Athene had gone to stay over Bank Holiday at Leighton Buzzard, and the boys had gone to skate, and papa was in his study and didn't matter, and they had the drawing-room to themselves. Oh dear, how very often they did count four, to be sure!

Sally was _distraite_, and wasn't paying proper attention to the music.

Whenever a string had to be tightened by either, Sally introduced foreign matter. Laet.i.tia was firm and stern (she was twenty-four, if you please!), and wouldn't respond. As thus, in a tightening-up pause:

"I like him awfully, you know, Tishy. In fact, I love him. It's a pleasure to hear him come into the house. Only--one's _mother_, you know! It's the _oddity_ of it!"

"Yes, dear. _Now_, are you ready?... It only clickets down because you will _not_ screw in; it's no use turning and leaving the key sloppy...."

"I know, Tishy dear--teach your granny! There, I think that's right now. But it _is_ funny when it's one's mother, isn't it?"

"One--two--three--four! There--you didn't begin! Remember, you've got to begin on the demisemiquaver at the end of the bar--only not too staccato, remember--and allow for the pause. Now--one, two, three, four, and you begin--in the _middle_ of four--_not_ the end. Oh dear!

Now once more...." etc.

You will at once see from this that Sally had lost no time in finding a confidante for the fossil's communication.

An hour and a half of resolute practising makes you not at all sorry for an oasis in the counting, which you inaugurate (or whatever you do when it's an oasis) by smas.h.i.+ng the top coal and making a great blaze.

And then you go ever so close, and can talk.