‘Hch! Hch! I cuff—I cow—How is it,’ she asked me, ‘when I make so?’
‘You cough, Trude,’ I answered, calling her by that name for the first time.
‘I koff. Oh, your wonn-der-ful English language!’
I was now very concerned about my dear Trude, and insisted that she was to run off to bed without loss of a moment. This she did, under Maggie’s care, ascending the stairs with the childish curiosity that had attended all her past adventures, and leaving me alone with my manuscript, in which I began to write up the dialogue that I had just spoken and heard; but alas! a terrible catastrophe befell my little household: for in the morning a fever set its icy hand upon me, took away my appetite, quickened my pulse, and in a hundred wretched ways caused me to fall as ill as an old wife’s medicine-chest.
And because of the new interest that had entered my life, at first I would not listen to reason, but sat on the edge of my bed, goggling at Maggie, and imagining my darling Trude seated already at the breakfast-table, with a fork in her hand, and her mouth full of bacon. The thought of the bacon was too much for me! In a short while I was back again beneath the bedclothes, and Maggie was running up the street for Dr Barnet, that tubby little man.
The sight of my old friend cheered my heart. He wore his riding-breeches, and there was a dianthus in his buttonhole, a lovely flower, which the rest of us would have called a pink.
Hm, ha. While he looked down my throat, and pressed his fingers to my pulse, I tried to catch sight or sound of Trude, and commanded Maggie and the doctor that on no account was she to come into the room.
Vainly I cried to them: ‘Don’t let her in!’ She ran into the room; she was about to throw her arms around me; with the utmost difficulty she was hustled away. My throat tore me to pieces. There was a spinning-wheel in my head. And although, indeed, for two days I did not see her again—as soon as the nature of my illness had declared itself, there stood she: and I have now, after these many years, an impression of nothing but Trude, Trude, Trude, hovering at my bedside, or sitting in some chair by the open window; dosing me with spirit of mindererus for my fever, or with ipecacuanha, and never ceasing to indulge my thirst with diluent drinks and iced water; dieting me with warm gruels thinned with milk; and easing my throat with solutions of chlorate of potash. She physicked me, too, with blue pill and colocynth; and at the beginning of my convalescence, would feed me with eggs and milk-puddings, and later with whiting, turbot, and other forms of the flakier fishes, and a veal broth that had been a great favourite of hers, one year, in southern Germany. Grudgingly I told her that it was madness for her to be doing these things: that Maggie’s mother should have performed them, seeing that she was the village midwife, and therefore in every way a most competent person: Her Highness answered, that Dr Barnet allowed it because my case, from the very outset, had shown signs of progressing in a normal and highly satisfactory manner; also because she herself had been a sufferer, and was now immune, from the same fever.
‘When was that, Trude?’ I wondered, looking towards a bookshelf, on which were a few of my own novels, bound in tooled cloth of fading colours; ‘something that you did without my knowledge?’ She tried to tell me in her pretty English, fell surprisingly into vast difficulties, pulled from a pocket a dictionary of minute proportions; smiled, I thought, a little forlornly . . . and after a time, I did not see her in my room again. . . .
IV
She was gone; or had it been a trick of my departed fever, and Trude had never come into this room at all? I hunted for signs of her existence, seeking to persuade myself that there were no traces of Trude’s fingers on bottles and glasses; that it was Maggie’s mother who had attended me through my illness, pouring out my medicines, and sitting at the open window until her head nodded; I peered into the village, and there, even now, was Mrs Sparshot, bustling along her garden path, a tiny figure, her apron flying in the wind as she came up the street.
On that day, I remember, I was sitting in a chair for the first time; the weather was brightly boisterous, a young fire, made from sweet-smelling logs, smoked in the grate; and I could hear Dr Barnet, on his arrival, wailing loudly to Maggie and her mother, somewhere in the lower parts of the house. ‘Oh, Maggie, Maggie!’ I heard him crying; ‘oh, Mrs Sparshot!’ and he was such a long time coming up to my room—then I heard him humming and hawing on the landing below mine—that at last I could contain myself no longer: but, running out, and calling over the banisters, demanded that I should be given the truth without further delay.
And it would be impossible for me to tell you the nervous manner in which, clapping his hands a little more briskly than usual, and utterly incapable of throwing off the frowns and jerky intonations and movements that he had brought into my room, Dr Barnet during the next ten days tried to persuade me that ‘Mrs Arnold’ was merely resting.
‘Promise that you will let me see her . . . promise that you will let me see her . . . ’ I kept on repeating, while the doctor gazed at me blankly, his right hand pulling down the back of his coat.
‘Well,’ he would snap, turning suddenly on his heel, and leaving me always to conjecture that he had given his word; alas—before I knew where I was, I had contracted an earache, which required that I should have olive oil and laudanum poured everlastingly into the painful cavity; my head was swathed in a bandage from ear to ear; my temperature, too, had strange bouts of rising and falling, and I returned to my bed, where for a long time I lay very deaf to the world. And in addition to these doleful complications, at the end of a fortnight my tubby doctor’s face had fallen as long as a graveyard, and to my daily enquiries the little man began to reply very evasively; staring out of the window, he hoped to put aside my questions by commenting on sounds and movements that he heard and saw in the street below, so that in the midst of such a vast amount of mental and bodily affliction my only consolation was this: that Trude and I were in a like case, lying on our beds of sickness, with but my floor and her ceiling between us.
The room of the Princess Gertrude was a tiny, square domain of chintz; chintz chairs, chintz dressing-table, a short chintz sofa; there was a sturdy beam across the ceiling, a glass-panelled cupboard built into the thick wall, while a pleasant colour was cast by a bed-side lamp suitably shaded, or in the day-time by the sunlight filtering through rose curtains; and the window looked over the porch, so that the lazy crunch and voices of the Beeding villagers, early astir, would come up in the morning, and mingle with the waning voices of sleep.
And here she died. An impulse, that I do not pretend to explain, awakened me, and leaving my bed I peeped at the windy weather soon after dawn. The sun was already half hidden in vapours, and I saw, in the middle sky, dark clouds running and massing, ultimately to appear in the shape of a huge castle, turreted, and perched on a rock. Flush with my eyes spread the roofs of the village of Beeding; the shingle spire of the church rose palely from the depths of one of the many clumps of swaying trees; and below me, on the village street beneath my window, I fancied that I could see the figure of a man in a cut-away coat and riding-breeches, sitting on a white horse. The man and the horse were extraordinarily motionless—there was a kind of expectancy in the two figures—the horse’s head was as rigid as the figurehead of a docked ship, and the man—so it seemed to me—was staring up at Trude’s window with a fixed, scrutinous gaze. Presently he rode away, and no doubt it was but Farmer Kempster off to the fields; yet the incident was enough to fill me with sad convictions, and it has been always a matter of great sorrow with me that I was unable to hold her hand when Trude died.
On the next day they came in to shut the window, but I forbade them to do such a thing, and in a few minutes I heard the bell tolling. I heard it when the pain in my head was too mighty for thought, or anger, or sorrow, I took it with me into my dreams, I heard it tolling in every corner of the cottage when I went down at last, on the morning of a tremulous autumnal day. On one of the landings I met Maggie; she stood to let me pass, holding a
cotton duster in her hand.
‘Oh, Maggie, Maggie! And did she have all the same medicines that I had?’
‘She had um all!’
‘The spirit of mindererus, and the ipecacuanha? The chlorate of potash, the blue pill and the colocynth?’
‘Same as you had um! . . .’
‘Same as I had um? . . .’
I remember that Dr Barnet called, and I asked him to stay to lunch, which he did, eating voraciously several cuts off the cold joint, and holding his Mèdoc to the light. Afterwards we strolled into the garden at the back of the cottage, sat on two chairs, and spoke about the holly-hocks, and the Michaelmas daisies. There was a humming of insects; it was hotter now than summer had been. The little man wore an Evening Primrose (or œnothera) in his button-hole; presently I asked him to tell me as minutely as possible the illness from which she had died.
She had died of a dropsy, said the doctor, arising out of an attack of scarlet fever contracted while nursing: an anasarca, or, in other words, of an effusion into the pericardium, or sac surrounding the heart.
‘Yes, doctor,’ I muttered.
Which organ, he added, was already greatly debilitated by chronic pericarditis, due, no doubt, to an active life that eventually had become too strenuous for her constitutional powers, and to an insidious and highly trouble-some emphysema.
‘Yes, doctor,’ I said.
The little man turned quickly to me. ‘You noticed her lips and ears, how blue they were? And her humped shoulders, and her loud breathing? Yet she must have been a healthy woman in her time, your sister? What is it I have heard—that she lived all her life in some foreign country—’
‘In Germany . . . in one of those old castles on the Rhine. . . .
‘She ought never to have travelled so far!’ he muttered almost angrily, on a rising intonation, and jumping to his feet.
‘No, doctor,’ I answered.
He shook me by the hand.
‘A whisky and soda before you go?’
V
And now she lies here. I am always thinking of that. There is plenty of time, plenty of time. For all my days without her are inexpressibly long and languid, and I feel that I shall never die mortally, as Trude died. At dusk I go about the village, and talk to the villagers, but they are all so lifeless, such puppets, such stick-in-the-muds! with their crooked fingers going up to their hats, and all of them cut to one slow pattern. Trude! I think of you then! Maggie has told me that after death her hands were still warm. Well. The strangest of all her stories was this—the story that I am telling you now. And I never finished writing it—those of her public who remember her, why, they must think her still living! I have often wondered whether Beeding folk ever knew that once, for five whole weeks, they had a Princess in their midst. There was an honour that would have set them by the ears!
I believe you are wondering if it has ever occurred to me to go to Germany, on a voyage of exploration, to seek those turrets and battlements that had come to me so very clearly on the top of the Peckham ’bus. How foolish you are! Why, if I were to ask travellers from Köln to Mainz questions about her castle in Germany, probably they would think deeply, click their heels, and for the sake of politeness towards me add that no doubt, yes, in addition to Stolzenfels, Drachenfels, Rheinfels, and others of a demonstrable nature, there may be some part of that portion of the Rhine banks looking exactly like a castle, at sunset, formed in the dark cliffs. No. No. I am contented to think that it vanished in a moment, on the death of Trude. Dear lady. What a proud and cock-a-hoop person you have made of me! For it has been said, very often, of some author, that his characters lived; how often has it been said of any author, that one, at least, of his characters—died?
Contents
Contents
Foreword
Bibliography of Nugent Barker
Curious Adventure of Mr Bond
Stanley Hutchinson
The Six
I and My Wife Isobel
Whessoe
Interlude
The Spurs
Death’s Door
Gertie Macnamara
The Invalid
Out of Leading-Strings
Mrs Sayce’s Guy
Expectation of Life
A Passage in the Life of Dr Wilks
The Strange Disappearance of Monsieur Charbo
The Thorn
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Aimless Afternoon
The Announcement
Crescendo
Life and Death of the Princess Gertrude
Written With My Left Hand Page 23