The Drunkard Part 30

"Yes," she said, "Tumpany is a good fellow at heart. And, like most people who drink, when he is himself he is a quite delightful person."

She went out into the hall, tall and beautiful, the jewels in her hair and on her hands sparkling in the candlelight.

Morton Sims took one of the candles from the table and went up to the couch.

A shadow flickered over the face of the man who was lying there.

It was but momentary, but in that instant the watcher became cold. The silver of the candle-stick stung the palm of a hand which was suddenly wet.

This tranquil, lovely room with its soft yellow light, dissolved and s.h.i.+fted like a scene in a dream... .

... It was a raw winter's morning. The walls were the whitewashed walls of a prison mortuary. There was a smell of chloride of lime... .

And lying upon a long zinc slab, with little grooves and depressions running down to the eye-hole of a drain, was a still figure whose face was a ghastly caricature of this face, hideously, revoltingly alike ...

Mary Lothian, Tumpany, and two maid-servants came into the room, and with some difficulty the poet was carried upstairs.

He was hardly laid upon his bed when the rain came, falling in great sheets with a loud noise, cooling and purging the hot air.

CHAPTER III

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE INEBRIATE, AND THE LETTER OF JEWELLED WORDS

"Verbosa ac grandis epistola venit a Capreis."

--_Juvenal._

It was three days after the accident.

Gilbert lay in bed. His head was crossed with bandages, his wrist was wrapped with lint and a wet compress was upon the ankle of his strained left foot.

The windows of his bedroom were wide to the sun and air of the morning.

There were two pleasant droning sounds. A bee was flying round the room, and down below in the garden Tumpany was mowing the strip of lawn before the house. Gilbert was very tranquil. He was wrapped round with a delicious peace of mind and body. He seemed to be floating in some warm ether of peace.

There was a table by the side of his bed. In a slender vase upon it was a single marguerite daisy with its full green stem, its rays of white--Chinese white in a box of colours--round the central gold. Close to his hand, upon the white turned down sheet was a copy of "John Inglesant." It was a book he loved and could always return to, and he had had his copy bound in most sumptuous purple.

Mary came into the bedroom.

She was carrying a little tray upon which there was a jug of milk and a bottle of soda water. There was a serene happiness upon her face. She had him now--the man she loved! He was hers, her own without possibility of interference. She was his Providence, he depended utterly upon her.

There are not many women like this in life, but there are some. Perhaps they were more frequent in the days of the past. Women who have no single thought of Self: women whose thoughts are always prayers: women in whose veins love takes the place of blood, whose hearts are cisterns of sweet charity, whose touch means healing, whose voices are like harps that sound forgiveness and devotion alone.

She put the tray upon the bedside table and sat down upon the bed, taking his unwounded hand in hers, stroking it with the soft cus.h.i.+ons of her fingers, holding up its well-shaped plumpness as if it were a toy.

"There is something so comic about your hands, darling!" she said. "They are so nice and fat and jolly. They make me want to laugh!"

To Gilbert his wife's happy voice seemed but part of the dream-like peace which lay upon him. He was drowsy with incense. How fresh and fragrant she was! he thought idly. He pulled her down to him and kissed her and the gilded threads of her hair brushed his forehead. Her lips were cool as violets with the dew upon their petals. She belonged to him. She was part of the pleasant furniture of the room, the hour!

"How are you feeling, darling? You're looking so much better!"

"My head hurts a little, but not much. But my nerves are ever so much better. Look how steady my hand is." He held it out with childish pride.

"And you'll see, Molly dear, that when I'm shaved, my complexion will be quite nice again! It's a horrid nuisance not to be able to shave. Do I look very bad?"

"No, you wicked image! You're a vain little wretch, Gillie, really!"

"I'm quite sure that I'm not. But, Molly, it's so nice to be feeling better. Master of one's self. Not frightened about things."

"Of course it is, you old stupid! If you were always good how much happier you'd be! Take my advice. Do what I tell you, and everything will come right. You've got a great big brain, but you're a silly boy, too! Think how much more placid you are now. Never take any more spirits again!"

"No, I won't, darling. I promise you I won't."

"That's right, dear. And this nice new doctor will help you. You like him, don't you?"

"Molly! What a dear simple fool you are! _Like_ him? You don't in the least realise who he is. It's Morton Sims, Morton Sims himself!

He's a fearfully important person. Twice, they say, he's refused to take a baronetcy. He's come down here to do research work. It's an enormous condescension on his part to come and plaster up my head. It's really rather like Lord Rosebery coming to shave one! And he'll send in a bill for about fifty pounds!"

"He won't, Gillie dear. I'm sure. But if he does, what's the use of worrying? I'll pay it out of my own money, and I've got nearly as much as you--nasty miser!"

They laughed together at this. Mary had three or four hundreds a year of her own, Gilbert a little more, independently of what he earned by writing. Mary was mean with her money. That is to say, she saved it up to give to poorer people and debated with herself about a new frock like a chancellor of the Exchequer about the advisability of a fresh tax. And Lothian didn't care and never thought about money. He had no real sense of personal property. He liked spending money. He was extravagant for other people. If he bought a rare book, a special j.a.panese colour-print, any desirable thing--he generally gave it away to some one at once. He really liked people with whom he came into contact to have delightful things quite as much as he liked to have them himself.

Nor was this an outcome of the poisoned state of his body, his brain, and--more terrible than all!--of his mind. It was genuine human kindness, an eager longing that others should enjoy things that he himself enjoyed so poignantly.

But what he gave must be the things that _he_ liked, though to all _necessity_ he was liberal. A sick poor person without proper nourishment, a child without a toy, some wretched tramp without tobacco for his pipe--to him these were all tragedies, equal in their appeal to his charity. And this was because of his trained power of psychology, his profound insight into the minds of others, though even that was marred by a Rousseau-like belief that every one was good and decent at heart! Still, the need of the dying village consumptive for milk and calf's-foot jelly, was no more vivid in his mind than the need of the tramp for a smoke. As far as he was able, it was his Duty, his happy duty, to satisfy the wants of both.

Mary was different.

The consumptive, yes! Stout flannel s.h.i.+rts for old shepherds who must tend the birth of lambs on bitter Spring midnights. Food for the tramp, too--no dusty wayfarer should go unsatisfied from the Lothians' house!

But not the subsequent s.h.i.+lling for beer and s.h.a.g and the humble luxury of the Inn kitchen that Gilbert would have bestowed.

Such was her wise penuriousness in its calm economy of the angels!

Yet, her husband had his economy also. Odd as it was, it was part of his temperament. If he had bought a rare and perfect object of art, and then met some one who he saw longed for it, but couldn't afford to have it in the ordinary way, he took a real delight in giving it. But it would have been easier for him to lop off a hand than to present one of the Toftrees' novels to any one who was thirsting for something to read. He would have thought it immoral to do so.

He had a great row with his wife when she presented a gaudy pair of pink-gilt vases to an ex-housemaid who was about to be married.

"But dear, she's _delighted_," Mary had said.

"You've committed a crime! It's disgraceful. Oblige me by never doing anything of the sort again. Why didn't you give her a ham?"

"Molly, may I have a cigarette?"

"Hadn't you better have a pipe? The doctor said that you smoked far too many cigarettes and that they were bad for you."