The old mahogany fourposter with the red rep hangings had been brought out from among the lumber, and set up afresh in John’s study. And soon after his interview with Mahony John shifted his quarters to this room, on the pretence of sleeping poorly and disturbing his wife. Lizzie raised fierce objections to the change. It took Mary to mollify her, and to insist that she must now place her own health and comfort above everything. Save in this one point, it was true, Lizzie needed small persuasion. The household danced to her whims.
Emmy’s room was only a trifle nearer the study than the other bedrooms; but in everything that touched her father the girl’s senses were preternaturally acute. And so it happened that she started out of her first sleep, wakened she did not know by what, but conscious, even as she opened her eyes, of sounds coming from her father’s room — the strange, heart-rending sounds of a man crying. Sitting up in bed, her hands pressed to her breast, Emmy listened till she could bear it no longer: stealthily unlatching the door, she crept down the passage to the study. And there, on this and many another night, she lay crouched on the mat, her heart bursting with love and pity; while John, believing himself alone with his Maker, railed and rebelled, in blind anguish, against his fate. Yes, Emmy knew before any one else that some disaster had come upon her father. And in the riot of emotion the knowledge stirred in her, there was one drop of sweetness: she alone shared his secret.
The feeling of intimacy this engendered did much to help her over the days of suspense that followed; when she waited from hour to hour for the unknown blow to fall. She confided in no one — not even Aunt Mary. Her father himself she dared not approach. Papa was so stern with her. Once, after a night when she really thought her heart would break, she ventured a timid: “Papa, if there is anything . . . I mean, Papa . . . if I could . . .” But he stared so angrily at her that she turned and ran from the room, for fear of bursting out crying — as much at the sound of her own words and the feeling of self-pity they roused in her, as at his cold repulse. She did not see the look he threw after her as she went. “Her mother’s daughter,” was his muttered comment; and long past days rose before him, when there had been one at his side from whom nothing was hid. Tatting and crocheting, crocheting and tatting, Emmy gave her imagination free play. A failure in business, even bankruptcy was the solution she favoured — being still too young to face of herself the destructive thought of death. And did this happen, and Papa lose all his money, then would come HER chance. He would learn that he had one faithful soul at his side, one shoulder to lean on. Together they would go away, he and she, right into the bush if necessary, and start life afresh. But again there were moments when she indulged an even dearer hope: at last, perhaps, Papa was beginning to see what a dreadful mistake his marriage had been.
For Emmy hated her stepmother; hated her, and sat in judgment on her, with the harshness of the young creature who has been wounded in her tenderest susceptibilities. Thus, though for the most part she rejoiced to know Lizzie among the uninitiated, she could also burn with a furious, unreasoning anger against her for living on, so blindly, so selfishly, without noticing that something was amiss. At sight of the big woman lying stretched on her CHAISE LONGUE, idly fanning herself, book and vinaigrette at her elbow; or Papa bathing her temples for her with lavender-water, or running errands for her like a servant — at things like these Emmy clenched her fist, and averted her tell-tale eyes. She hated, too, Lizzie’s vigorous, exaggerated manner of speaking; hated the full red lips that went in and out and up and down when she talked; her affected languor . . . her unwieldy figure . . . the baby that was on the way.
But with the crash came also the chance of revenge. Then it was Emmy’s turn; and she could say in all good faith: “Oh, DON’T let her — don’t let . . . Mamma go in to him, Aunt Mary! She worries him so.” As always, there was just the suspicion of a pause — a kind of intake of the breath — before she got the “Mamma” out; a name here bestowed for the third time, and only after a severe inward struggle, because HE had wished it.
Meanwhile John’s serene and dignified existence had shattered to its foundations; carrying with it, in its fall, the peace and security of those lesser lives that depended on it. For close on six months, he had kept his own counsel. With his once full lips pinched thin in his old, greying face, he went doggedly to and from the warehouse in Flinders Lane, as he had done every day for five-and-twenty years: driving off at nine of a morning, and returning as the clock struck six to escort Lizzie to any entertainment she still cared to patronise: and this, though his skin had gone the colour of dry clay or a dingy plaster, and he was so wasted that his clothes seemed to flap scarecrow-like on his bones. Mary’s heart bled for him; and even Richard was moved to remark that what John must be suffering, both mentally and physically, God alone knew. But they could only pity in silence; open compassion was not to be thought of: after the one terrible night Mary had spent with John, the subject of his illness was taboo, even to her. Alone, sheathed in his impenetrable reserve, he prepared for his departure; bade farewell, behind locked doors, to a life of surpassing interest, now cut short in mid-career. In politics, his place would not be hard to fill. But of the great business he had built up he was still the mainspring; and, in a last spurt of his stiff pride, he laboured to leave all that concerned it in perfect order. — And yet, watching him with her heart in her eyes, Mary sometimes wondered . . . wondered whether the unquenchable optimism that had made him the man he was had even yet wholly deserted him. He had had so little experience of illness, and was, she knew, still running privily from doctor to specialist; giving even quacks and their remedies a trial. Did he nurse a hope that medical opinion, right in ninety-nine cases, might prove wrong in his, and he have the hundredth chance? One thing at least she knew: he intended, if humanly possible, to bear up till the child was born and Lizzie better able to withstand the blow.
But this was not to be. The morning came when, in place of rising and tapping at his wife’s door, solicitously to inquire how she had passed the night, John, beaten at last, lay prostrate in his bed . . . from which he never rose again.
A scene of the utmost confusion followed. Mary, summoned just as she was sitting down to breakfast, found Lizzie in hysterics, John writhing in an agony he could no longer conceal. The scared servants scuttled aimlessly to and fro; the children, but half dressed, cried in a corner of the nursery. Emmy alone had her wits about her — though she, too, shook as with the ague.
Meeting Mary at the front door, she held out two clasped hands imploringly. “Oh . . . what is it? Aunt Mary! what is the matter with Papa?”
“Emmy . . . your poor, dear father — my darling, I look to you to be brave and help me — he will need all our help now.”
Long prepared for some such emergency, Mary took control. Dispatching the groom at a gallop for the doctor, she mixed a soothing-draught for Lizzie (“See to her first,” was John’s whispered request) and gave John the strongest opiate she dared. The children were put in the carriage, and sent to “Ultima Thule.” Then, as Richard had directed, Mary cleared the sickroom of superfluous furniture; while Emmy bore a note to Miss Julia — Mary’s sole confidante. And faithful to a promise, Miss Julia was back with Emmy inside an hour. Without her aid she at once saw to Lizzie, and brought the servants to their senses — without this sane, calm presence, Mary did not know how she would have managed, John from the start obstinately refusing to let her out of his sight. Or for that matter without Emmy either . . . Emmy was her right hand. Nimble, yet light-footed as a cat; tireless; brave; Emmy now proved her mettle. Nothing was beneath her: she performed the most menial duties of the sickroom with a kind of fiery, inner gratitude. And, these done, would sit still as a mouse, a scrap of needlework in her hand, just waiting for the chance of springing up afresh. Her young face grew thin and peaked, and the life went out of her step; but she never complained, or sought to obtrude her own feelings. Only one person knew what she was suffering. It was on Auntie Julia’s neck that she had had her single breakdown, and wept out her youthful passion of love and despair.
“What shall I do! Oh, what SHALL I do?”
And Auntie Julia, knowing everything, understanding everything, wisely let her cry and cry till she could cry no more. “There, there, my little one! There, there!” But after this Emmy did not again give way. Indeed, thought Mary, there was something in her of John’s own harsh self-mastery: a trait that sat oddly on her soft and lovely girlhood.
Lizzie was the sorest trial. But then, poor thing, was it to be wondered at in her condition, and after the shock John had given her? For when, that first morning he failed to present himself at her bedside, Lizzie passed in a twinkling from a mood of pettish surprise to one of extreme ungraciousness. The housemaid was peremptorily bidden to go knock at the master’s door and ask the reason of his negligence. The girl’s confused stammerings throwing no light on this, Emmy was loudly rung for. “Pray, my love, be so good as to find out if your Papeh, who has evidently FORGOTTEN to wish me a good-morning, does not intend going to town to-day!” And when Emmy, sick and trembling, yet with a kind of horrific satisfaction, returned bearing John’s brutal reply: “No, not to-day, nor ever again!” Lizzie, now thoroughly roused, threw on a wrapper and swept down the passage to her husband’s room.
On discovering the true state of things she dropped to the floor in a swoon. Restored to consciousness and got back to bed, she fell to screaming in hysterical abandonment — on his arrival the doctor had more to do for her than for John, and pulled a long face. And even when the danger of a premature confinement was over, and the worst of the hysteria got under, she would lie and sob and cry, breaking out, to whoever would listen, in wild accusations.
“Oh, Mary, love! When I think HOW I have been deceived! . . . the trick that has been played on me . . . me who ought to have known before any one else. John and his secrecy! — he has made a fool of me, even in the eyes of the servants.”
“My poor, dear Lizzie! Do believe me, he only wanted to spare you . . . as long as he could. Consider him now, and his sufferings, and don’t make it harder for him than you can help. Think, too, of your baby.”
But she might as well have talked to a post: Lizzie continued stormily to weep and to rail. The two older women bore patiently with her, even coming to consider it a good thing that she was thus able to vent her emotion. It remained for Emmy, Emmy with the hard and unyoung look her face assumed when she spoke of her stepmother, to make the bitter comment: “She’s not really SORRY for Papa — she’s SAVAGE, Aunt Mary, that’s what she is!”— a point of view which Mary herself was so rigidly suppressing that it received but scant quarter. “Emmy, Emmy! You must NOT say such things of your Mamma.” But Richard declared the girl had hit the nail on the head. It was herself and herself alone Lizzie grieved for.
“And is it so unnatural? Has Fate not played her a shabby trick? She took John, as we all know, because he was by far the best catch that had ever come her way. Now, after a few brief years of glory, and when her main ambition was about to materialise, the Lady Turnham-to-be sees herself doomed to a widow’s dreary existence: all weepers and seclusion: with, for sole diversion, the care of an unwanted infant. Not to speak of the posse of stepdaughters she has loaded herself up with.”
“It DOES sound harsh . . . the way you put it,” said Mary, and re-tied her bonnet-strings; she had run home one evening for a peep at her children.
However, if he and Emmy were right about Lizzie and her feelings, then what a blessing it was that John, in his illness, made no demands on her, asking neither for nor after her. With his one request on the morning of his collapse, that she should receive first attention, all thought for her seemed exhausted: just as, in the brutal answer he returned her by Emmy, had evaporated his love and care. From the sound of her pitiless crying he turned with repugnance away. Did she enter his room, with a swish of the skirts, either forgetting to lower her voice or hissing in a melodramatic whisper, he was restless till she withdrew. Except for Mary — and he fretted like a child if Mary were long absent — John asked only to be alone.
On taking to his bed he had severed, at one stroke, every link with the outside world: and soon he was to lie drug-sodden and mercifully indifferent even to the small world of his sickroom. But before this happened he expressed one wish — or rather gave a last order. The nature of his illness was not to be made known beyond the family circle.
“Trying to keep his Chinese Wall up to the end,” said Mahony. “His death — like his life — is to be nobody’s business but his own. Well, well . . . as a man lives so he shall die!”
But Mary was much perturbed. A dying man’s whim — and as such, of course, it had to be respected. But what COULD it hurt now whether people knew what was the matter with him or not? Concealing the truth meant all sorts of awkward complications. But Emmy, overhearing this, flushed sensitively and looked distressed. “Oh, Aunt Mary, don’t you SEE? Papa is . . . is ASHAMED of having a cancer.”
Ashamed? . . . ashamed of an illness? . . . Mary had never heard of such a thing. But Richard, struck afresh by Emmy’s acumen, declared: “That’s it! The girl is right. You call it a sick man’s fancy, I the exaggerated reserve of a lifetime, but Emmy knows better, sees deeper than any of us.” And added a moment later: “It strikes me, my dear, that if instead of hankering after that impossible scapegrace of a son, just because he WAS a son, your brother had had a little more eye for the quick wits and understanding of his daughter, he might have been a happier man.”
News of the serious illness of the Honourable John Millibank Turnham, M.L.C., brought an endless string of callers and inquirers to the door: the muffled knocker thudded unceasingly. People came in their carriages, on horseback, on foot; and included not merely John’s distracted partners, and his colleagues on the Legislative Council, but many a lesser man and casual acquaintance — Mary herself marvelled to see how widely known and respected John had been. And those who could not come in person wrote letters of condolence, sent gifts of luscious fruit and choice flowers and out-of-season delicacies — anything in short of which kindly people ............