Louisa suddenly coloured violently, and stared at her brother-in-law. But she said nothing.
“You were quite right, Louisa,” continued Rufus, with tact, and inner amusement. “It is an artful little baggage. Carrying on clandestinely with Bollister. We ought to be thankful that the scandal didn’t break over our heads—without benefit of clergy. Though we must admit that she has made a brilliant marriage. New York forgives anything if the marriage is spectacular enough.”
Louisa was close to acid tears. Her mouth clenched in envy and hatred. She had wanted Anthony Bollister very urgently, herself, and there had been once or twice when she believed that she had entranced him. And now it was that hideous little baggage that had captured him, that pale shrivelled little snail, that odious and contemptible little creature, who was without style, without the slightest beauty, without the smallest wit! It was not to be borne.
“How like Adelaide!” she whispered, in a virulent tone. “She never had any consideration at all for us. She could not have made a more awkward marriage. If she had thought for one moment, how Papa detests the whole family,” she faltered a moment,and glanced downwards, “she could not have done this to us. It is the richest tale in New York, the family feud.”
“But New York will love this,” urged Rufus, delightedly. “Quite like Romeo and Juliet. All that is needed is the balcony.”
Louisa glanced at him swiftly, with such a flash of blue malignance that he, who knew her very well, was startled.
“It pleases you to make fun of the Turnbulls, Rufus,” she said, bitterly. “I don’t find it in the least amusing. But we might have known that Adelaide would disgrace us one day.”
“I don’t call it ‘disgrace,’ my dear,” he said, delighted more than ever. “After all, Tony Bollister isn’t exactly a pauper, or a chimney-sweep. I, for one, am excessively pleased.”
Louisa drew a deep breath, and her features became momentarily wizened. “I’m sure you won’t be overly pleased to know that your wife is plotting something quite violent. I saw it in her face. You’d best have a little talk with her.”
She turned and walked towards her own rooms, her golden head shining in the dim lamplight. Rufus watched her go, and drew in his lips against his teeth. He had married Lavinia because she was the eldest daughter of John Turnbull, and his obvious favourite. Now, he was not certain that he had not made a mistake. Louisa was much more to his taste. As things had now developed, her situation was quite as favourable as her sister’s.
He remembered what she had said about Lavinia, and was disquieted. There was Patrick, who was of a similar and equally dangerous temperament. He paused and listened at Patrick’s door. Louisa, then, had not entered her husband’s apartments, but had quickly retired. He knocked softly, then entered.
Patrick had not yet made the slightest gesture towards undressing. He had lit one lamp. He was standing near a window with undrawn curtains, and staring gloomily out into the darkness. He turned when he saw Rufus, and glowered at him intimidatingly. But he said nothing. His dark face was drawn and strangely ferocious.
Rufus shut the door after him. “A pretty kettle of fish,” he remarked, in a low light tone. “The running away. The marriage to Bollister. The ladies aren’t taking it in the most graceful manner.”
Patrick did not answer. He went to a table, opened a silver box, and withdrew a cheroot. He put a taper into the fire, lit it, then applied it to the cheroot, and drew upon it vigorously.
Rufus watched him closely.
“A clever little baggage,” he mused. “What gave her the idea in the first place—about us?”
Patrick shrugged his big shoulders. He leaned his arm on the mantel, and stared at the fire. His features, rough but handsome, were crudely revealed in the glow of red and black. Rufus did not like his expression.
“It was fortunate that Blakely came—before we heard the bad news,” continued Rufus, tentatively.
Patrick lifted his head and turned it in Rufus’ direction. Now his face was in darkness, and dangerously inscrutable.
“I’ve just been thinking,” pursued Rufus, very delicately, and he laughted a little. “Of course, the baggage will be found. But, if it is not—” and he coughed, “remembering our small agreement with Wilkins about her income, it will be rather awkward—.”
Patrick moved so fast that his arm was only a blur. Rufus felt the impact of his fist against his chin. Scarlet stars exploded before his eyes, and he had an impression that he was flying through space. A moment later, he found himself on the floor, on his back.
“Get out!” said Patrick, in a soft and savage tone. His foot lifted, drew back on the arch of a kick. Then he halted it. He smiled viciously. “No, Pat,” he admonished himself, gently. “Don’t kick a pig when it’s on the ground. That isn’t
Queensbury rules, you know. Or, is it? You’re an Irishman, Pat Brogan. You aren’t an English gentleman. So, Pat, you must remember never to kick a fallen swine, no matter how badly it smells.”
CHAPTER 58
John sat near his wife, and watched her as she slept.
He lay in his chair in a supine attitude which told more than any words or gestures might do. When she sighed in her sleep, his heart rose on a crest of pain and yearning. He watched her profile, the occasional slight lifting of her helpless and muted hands.
He no longer worried about Adelaide. Some mysterious reassurance had come to him in this room that she would be found, and all would be well. He did not think of her now. He thought of himself, and Lilybelle. He thought of so many things. It seemed to him that a most solemn hour had arrived, when he must understand.
He went back over the last years of his life. He thought of the slow and lethal illness of mind, rather than body, which had come over him. And, with a stern panic, he knew that he was mortally ill, or at least, dangerously ill.
He had known, all his life, that he had a strong and prepossessing body, but as his nature was not naturally introspective, he had not mused upon the fact, nor congratulated himself smugly. He was aware of his body as an animal is aware, with naturalness and indifferent acceptance. Though he had known headaches and the mysterious achings and malaise of a strong body sometimes, and briefly, not in full working order, true and devastating illness of the flesh had never touched him. He had heard, with contemptuous lack of comprehension, of the diseases of others, of sudden deaths and failures, of long and chronic collapses. Vaguely, he had believed that in these sufferers there was some weakness, some flaccidity of will, some lack of determined resistance, some ignominious surrender. He had known collapse, himself, but not that fatal disintegration of the flesh which afflicted others. He always rose from these collapses with recovering strength, and then forgot them.
Now, as he sat near Lilybelle tonight, waiting for the morning, it came to him with sudden and frightful knowledge that some vital virtue in him, some profound strength and resistance, had drained out of him like blood, and that the draining was no new thing but had persisted over a long and unconscious period. He was like a man who had been slowly bleeding to death for years, without much discomfort, or knowledge, and then reaches the time where it is borne in upon him that the limit of life and endurance has come, and he is abandoned in extremis.
Faintly, he remembered that he had felt increasing exhaustion over the past few years. But he had ignored the deep and silent warnings in himself. He had believed that by ignoring them they would cease to exist. He sat near his wife, and thought: What has brought this about? He did not deny any longer. He did not make the frenzied excuses other men might make. Without question, without denial, he accepted the verdict that he was close to death. And that before he died, before he finally gave up, he must understand everything, his life, himself, Lilybelle, his family, his relation to all the world. Otherwise he would die in the confusion in which he had lived.
The great and magnificent room about him was in semidarkness. He saw the looming of the pier mirror, a glimmering ghost in the
dimness. He saw the outline of his wardrobe, the edge of his chairs, the spectral glimmer of his fireplace, and the three or four crimson and expiring coals on the hearth. The windows were rectangles of empty gloom, framed in their draperies. And as he looked at them all, slowly, they seemed to be imbued with his own deathliness, to be the shapes of his own disintegration and fatal decay. They stood about him in silence, as if listening.
He felt no despair, only a kind of heavy sickness and abandonment.
Though he had experienced rages, hatreds and violences, confusions and furies, he had never delved in himself to explain these things to an indifferent mind that cared for nothing but emotion. The calm self-analysis of a less virile man was not his. Emotions and passions rose out of him like spiralling storms, and it had been enough for him that they were, and not why they were. He had been blasted and torn by them, involved only in sensation.
But now, in this grave hour, he asked himself why he was dying, he who was only in his middle forties. He rose heavily, went to a table near his mirror. He felt his lethargy, his iron weariness, the slowness of his step. He peered in the mirror, and saw his ravaged face, his feverish sunken eyes, so fierce and so restless, his mouth bitter and heavy, locked in deep lines. He saw the wide streaks of whiteness in his hair. He leaned forward, the better to confront himself, and then he saw that never before had he looked at his own image so intently. And he thought: Why, I’ve never looked at myself before!
The visual image blurred before him, yet he seemed to see what was real so much more clearly. It was almost as if a brilliant light had been turned on. He saw John Turnbull for the first time in all his life.
And he was profoundly astonished, and saddened.
The moments passed, and in his eyes there appeared a steadfast and burning light. He did not move. He saw himself through all the years, bewildered, infuriated, fulminating, wretched and rootless. He was like one who has died, and who is now standing apart, watching his life depicted before him like a living and blurred frieze of meaningless pictures.
Many a man has asked himself: What has motivated me through these feverish eons of my life? And John asked himself this question now, as he had never before asked himself. His question seemed asked of him by another, and he waited a little, wondering, confused, trying to remember, childishly urgent and simply perplexed, feeling a faint embarrassment as if the questioner were actually at hand, full of stern demand and inexorable waiting.
Then he said aloud, in a dull and marvelling voice: “It was hatred.”
Silence engulfed the room again. John looked into his mirror, and it seemed to him that the vague image in its fading depths was a small and uncertain shadow, utterly without substance or significance.
He said aloud, again: “And it is hatred that has killed me.”
He was overcome with amazement, as if some one else had uttered this sorrowful condemnation, this incredible thing. He wanted to cry out, half in laughter, and half in rage, repudiating this foolishness, this colossal stupidity imputed to him. And then, he was still as stone, still gazing at himself, not believing it was himself that stood there so impotent, so lonely, so wretched and contemptible before him.
What had he hated? He had been wronged. But so many millions had been wronged before him and would be wronged again. Had he been so egotistic, so imbecile, that he had let a wrong distort and cripple, and finally destroy him? The wrong had been done in laughter and youth and contempt, by an insignificant man of no consequence. Had the wrong been so very terrible, so very devastating and overwhelming?
John leaned his hands on the table heavily, but still stared at the mirror to the left of him. He asked himself this question again, and the room appeared to ring with its implacable sound. And now beside that image in the mirror crept Eugenia’s image, and it was the form of a stranger, its face only slightly familiar, its dumb gestures arousing in him only weariness and indifference.
He said aloud: “I never loved you. I do not love you now. I have killed myself because of you, because of what you never were. I never knew you. You are nothing to me.”
The dim face seemed to change, to dissolve, and then it was gone.
Then, all at once, John was overcome with rage against himself, and fury. He felt a hoarse wild laughter in every organ, every cell, of his body. For a dream, a lie, for a creature that never existed, he had destroyed his life, had made of it a barren and sterile wilderness, a hopeless dull horror, filled with enemies. He had hurt and injured those who had loved him, had driven them away. Now he was all alone in the wilderness, and not even the lying image was there with its empty words and imagined comfort.
Then, strangely, he knew that his father was standing beside him, living and vital. He could not hear his words, but the sound of his faint and echoing voice was sad and urgent and very tender. Standing there, hardly breathing, not moving, John listened.
Then he said, simply: “But, I am dying. I am done. I’ve killed myself. My God, I have wasted all my life. I have gotten things I never wanted; I have struck away those who loved me; I have abandoned everything that had in it the least joy and hope. I have done things that sickened me, that were never a part of me. For what? For hatred.”
He turned away, filled with the acrid poison of despair. He sat upon his chair again. Lilybelle stirred on the bed, moaned feebly. He went to her for a moment, looked down upon her, and his heart heaved. And now he knew what hatred could do for a man, or a world.
It seemed to him that it was hatred, not love, not compassion, not peace or justice or understanding, that lived among men, and in himself. He saw how it was deadlier than the most appalling virus that ever came from the mouths of the plague-stricken, a more lethal poison than any brewed by a chemist. It was an actual thing, an actual venom, an actual malignance. It literally corroded the cells of the brain, convulsed the vital organs, thickened blood, diseased the very breath. It made a man a pestilence, deadly to all other men, a danger and a madness that should be regarded with horror, and quickly destroyed. A man who walked abroad with hatred in his flesh was a leper. Corruption, decay, degeneration and death walked with him. If it debased and twisted the soul, it did not less with the body. The man of hatred had a fire in his eye, murder in his hand. He infected the innocent as well as the guilty. He was all sin.
Moreover, he was the first victim of his own pestilence.
He saw now how all his life had been made a hideous thing by his hatred. (He thought to himself: How terribly I have hated for so little!) And then he comprehended that it need not matter if the thing be small or great that made a man hate others. The focus of infection must have lived with him from the beginning, born of his own egotism, his own ignorance, his own stupidity. Then came the first lesion, and the poison spewed out into it, making the man a festering mass of corruption.
The first victim of a man’s hatred was always himself—yes. John saw himself as a putrid and pestilential creature, streaming with his own festerings. He saw the faces of those he had injured over all these years. He saw old Everett Livingston. What had he had against all these wretches? Nothing. He had struck out at them in his madness, and they had fallen away before him, confused, bewildered, mortally hurt. He had watched their suffering. Had it given him pleasure? No. Only for a moment had he felt some alleviation, some numbness. When he remembered later, he was filled with agony.
He had hated poor Lilybelle, not for what she was, but because of what he was. Now he knew that she had been the only reality in his life, the only love and purity. She alone of any had loved him.
But no, there had been another. He had always known it. His daughter, Adelaide, had loved him. And he had hated her. Why? Because she reminded him of some one whom he knew in his heart did not really love him. She reminded him of a lie, was a testament to his own degradation. What he had seen in her eyes had been love, and because, in his condition, he could not bear to be loved, he had hated.
And then he was stupefied with horror.
&n
bsp; He could find nothing to pity in himself. The wild turbulence of his nature rushed out to engulf all those he had hated in a writhing torrent of pity and remorse. He bent his head and grasped his hair fiercely in his hands, and rolled his head from side to side.
There is no hope for me anywhere, he thought. What I have done is too much for a single man to stop.
He thought of Mr. Wilkins, and in his feverish eyes the vision of that affable gentleman was a vision ringed in fire. This was his Lucifer, his destroyer.
And then, because he was now, in spite of his despair, so near to sanity, he burst into dreary laughter. “I allus gives ’em wot they wants.” It was not Mr. Wilkins who had done these things, but himself. Satan is powerless before a man who does not hate. Mr. Wilkins had known from the start that he was a man of hatred. He had given him what he wanted.
I can’t stop things now, thought John.
He seemed to see his own corrupted wounds. But, as he looked at them, they no longer drained. They were healthy. They were healing.
There was a sudden strange beating near his heart now. It grew stronger. He lifted his head, as if listening. His heart no longer moved with the old and familiar sluggishness, as if reluctant of every drop of blood entering or leaving it. Now it pulsed with aching strength, and a lightness flooded him.
He could not believe it. He felt his eyes fill with terrible moisture.
“God,” he said, simply, in a voice as low as prayer, “help me.”
He sat for a long time, while the windows became faintly gray, and the stillness seemed as intense as the stillness at the bottom of the ocean. He looked about him. The forms and shapes, so hardly discerned, were not emanations of sickness and death, as they had been before. They were warm and close and friendly, and full of compassion.
His body was tired, but no longer heavy. It felt very porous and light. He heard the soft dropping of the last embers on the hearth. A wind murmured beyond the windows. Lilybelle stirred on the bed, and muttered something. John rose and went to her, leaning over her, smoothing her, cold damp forehead.