Again and again since they had been companions he had told her how he had always been a winner — against all obstacles, against overwhelming odds he had always got what he wanted. And now he was playing a big game, perhaps the biggest venture of his life — and he stood to win — and she should have gone with him to the Argentine, and should have shared his triumph, but for this complication, this troublesome turn that things had taken.
This had been his tone when she told him her thrilling secret, and he never knew how, while she sobbed upon his shoulder with hidden face, his words had cut her like a knife.
Oh, the dreary days, the days of friendlessness and dull monotony, when she had walked alone in Battersea Park, walking there in all weathers, till she knew every tree and every bush, and sat disconsolate in the least frequented alleys, and heard the joyous voices of children, and the light footsteps of happy youth. There and on the Embankment all her afternoons were spent, walking too much for her diminished strength, walking as if she could walk away from sorrow.
She had no yearning for the creature that was to take its life from her. She had never been a lover of children. Though she had been kind and generous with her small means to the fisher people’s babies, she had been fonder of their dogs. She did not realize the change that was to come in her life — the effect of that new presence. She felt nothing but the disgrace of her position, and the waning of her lover’s love. He was seldom with her now, and he made a merit of coming home every night, when the exigencies of business, and the social engagements that were a part of his business, made homecoming difficult. He came at midnight, or long after midnight, but the sound of the key turning in the lock, the knowledge that he was there, gave her no joy. She knew that he was tired of her. The fierce love had flamed and consumed her, and only the ashes were left — coldness on his part, on hers the cold of death.
She knew that her ordeal was near, for the doctor had told her so. The landlady was kind, but patronizing. It was she who engaged the doctor and the nurse. It was she who bought the layette and the cradle. All those pretty purchases which are the delight of happy mothers were left to a fussy stranger.
Her time of trial came early in a cold windy spring, after long and weary waiting. She suffered a martyrdom, and was kept in a state of semi-consciousness for hours before her son was born in that last dreadful hour of total insensibility. She woke as from a lurid dream, to see Rayner standing on one side of her bed and her doctor on the other, with another man, white-haired and elderly, a stranger. “It has been touch and go,” she heard the doctor say. And then Jack Rayner leant over the bed and took her in his arms, and kissed her with the old passionate kisses of those days by the western sea. She had not come out of the land of dreams, and she thought it was summer again and they were on the sands, and the lamplight on her face was sunshine.
Then she heard a faint strange cry, a cry that she had never heard before.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Your son — such a fine little fellow!”
She did not ask to see him. She hardly gave him another thought. She had been too near death, and for days and nights she lay in a state of such weakness that the things of this world seemed to matter very little. Day and night followed quickly — for her sleep was almost stupor. Rayner was sometimes there, sitting in an armchair near her bed, and he was tender and caressing as in those sunlit days at Fontainebleau. And then there were long intervals, everlasting nights and slow-coming dawn, when she was alone with the nurse.
It was a long time before she wanted to lift her head from the pillow — a long time before she remembered that she had a son, and asked to sec him. But at last the day came when the faint strange cry awakened a new yearning, and she asked for her baby. She was just able to sit up in bed, supported by a heap of pillows, just able to take the frail scrap of humanity in her arms, and scrutinize the tiny features, and gaze and wonder — Jack’s son — so small, so fragile. Could Jack Rayner have such a son? Would this poor morsel live and grow into a man, and be another Jack Rayner in years to come when she had long been dead? In her extremity of weakness she never thought of herself as likely to recover and leave the bed where she had been lying for what seemed immeasurable time.
Her recovery was very slow, and the grey-haired specialist who had been summoned hastily when her life trembled in the balance came more than once before she was able to leave her bed. He had never seen such a slow recovery. But this poor young lady was altogether abnormal, fragile and exquisite, like a choice piece of china.
“How old were you when you were married, dear lady?” he asked her one day; and when her cheeks flamed at the question, he knew that his suspicions were correct.
“Seventeen and a half.”
“Too young for the cares and the trials of matrimony. Never mind. We are going to make you strong and well. Your son is a fine little fellow, small, but beautifully made. And he will be a comfort to you.”
She sighed — sunk in a pit of depression. The changeless days — the old four-post bed, with its dark moreen curtains, the unlovely furniture, filled her with unutterable gloom. The days changed to night before she had left off looking for the sun, and the nights were interminable. She saw very little of Rayner now. The armchair by the bed was always empty. This tedious recovery had tired him out.
Sometimes in the dead of night she would awake from a troubled dream and see him standing by the bed, and he would stoop over her and kiss her, and call her by the old fond, foolish names of his love-making. But he never stayed long. He excused himself for not being with her in the day — that big game that he and a good many other gamblers were playing was absorbing him more and more. It was colossal — there were great chances, great risks. He was on the way to become one of the financiers of the world. But the road was difficult, and even dangerous. What of that? Jack Rayner was at the head and front of the battle — Jack who had never feared the face of man.
He would talk to her like that in the dead of night, and his face and his voice, the magnetism of the man thrilled her, and seemed to give her strength. She would fall into a sounder sleep after he left her, and her dreams glowed with a strange warmth, confused visions of success and splendour.
At last came the time when she was able to sit in the armchair by the fire with her baby on her lap, and then her new life began — the pure and happy life — the new love that filled her life — the active love, utterly different from the passive love that had seemed a mere helpless yielding to the man’s passion — the mere acceptance of caresses which brought bewilderment rather than bliss, the blind surrender of girlhood to the first lover. This was the love that can do as well as suffer — the love that can go through fire and water.
She worshipped this morsel of humanity, this soft dimpled thing that nestled on her bosom, this creature with eyes like stars, and a mouth like an opening rose. It was exquisite, it was all she could imagine of beauty and sweetness.
“Didn’t I tell you,” said the landlady, who came every day to see “my baby,” presuming on her services in providing for his comfort—” didn’t I tell you that they bring love with them?”
Yes. He had brought love with him from heaven whence he had come. Only among God’s angels could there be a creature so sweet and so divine!
“And now I suppose you’ll be engaging an experienced nurse for him,” said Mrs. Baker, “and that will mean that you’ll want my second floor for day and night nurseries. Luckily it will be empty after Midsummer, for the Pycrofts are going to furnish a Hat.”
A nurse? No, she would have no nurse. She was going to nurse him herself. She would give her darling to no stranger’s care.
Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Lapp, the monthly nurse, both protested and argued. She nurse her baby! She wash and dress and look after him night and day, and see him through his teething, and wheel his perambulator! No gentleman’s wife could do such work. They talked till they gave her a headache. They brought Rayner upon her next day, and then t
he doctor. Everyone lectured her, and told her the thing was impossible. But she stood like a rock. Mrs. Lapp would teach her. She had learnt a good deal already. She meant to nurse him.
“Darling! You are my baby, nobody else’s,” she said, hugging her cherished morsel, and he made a gurgling noise that sounded like assent. He was hers, all hers. Nobody else should have anything to do with him.
Everything yielded to her indomitable resolve. “Love will teach me the way,” she whispered to herself; but she was humble and meek with Mrs. Lapp, and that self-assertive adept found her quick to learn.
“If more mothers was like you, babies would have a better time,” she said. “They all think they’re going to be good nurses, but they won’t take the trouble to learn. I’ve nursed in small houses, where the father has been a clerk in the City with three hundred a year, and his lady would tell him the baby would make no difference, as she was going to be nurse. But it has always ended in a girl — a girl of twelve or thirteen that would leave the pram on a doorstep while she played hop-scotch. You’ll be better than that kind of girl, at any rate.”
She had her way, and at two months old the baby became her very own. Her health was re-established, and the monthly nurse was dismissed, and from this time she lived for her child. Rayner might go or stay as he pleased. She was too busy with her infant to be concerned about his absence, whether it was a question of hours or of days. He had to be in Paris for nearly a month. It was always a matter of necessity. He had to be in Brussels for a fortnight. She asked no questions. Sometimes when he was in high spirits, and had dined well, he liked to talk about his affairs, and would tell her of the companies that were being launched, of which he was the moving spirit, of the capital that was rolling in, and the marvellous things that were to be done in that land of Ophir between the two great seas.
She listened and was interested, because he talked well, and his face lighted and his eyes flashed, and there was romance in his talk — a kind of wild eloquence that could charm her even now when love had waned.
“You don’t understand the working of it all,” he said, rather disgusted at her inability to enter into business details or to realize the chances of adventurous finance. “You have no head for figures. Never mind, Molly, I shall make you a rich woman in spite of yourself — and in the meantime I should like to see you dress a little better than a nursemaid.”
And he threw a handful of gold into her lap. This was his idea of being kind. He was tired of her talk about her baby. He took very little notice of the child. She knew that he did not care, as she cared, though he swore that he loved the creature for her sake.
As time went on, she could see that he was bored when she talked of her darling; yet how could a mother help talking about the being that had filled her life with joy?
Battersea Park was no longer an arid waste; the trees were green, the sky was blue, the rippling water flashed and sparkled. It was the garden of Armida. She walked there behind her baby’s carriage as in a place of enchantment. His heavenly smiles, his little cooing noises made her heart leap with gladness. She was never weary of wheeling him about those prim avenues where the spring foliage grew and expanded as he did, as if they flourished in unison. Now the lilacs were in bloom, and he was beginning to “take notice,” that delightful awakening of consciousness for which she had been watching. He waved his hands and pointed to moving things. He laughed as a bird fluttered across the path. His mind had begun to act by outward signs and movements, that mind which Mary had seen even in his earliest smile — the smile that only mothers can read. When the hawthorns filled the park with whiteness and perfume he was taking more and more notice. He was almost talking. All her days were happy, except those days of ceaseless rain when there were no long hours in the open air for her darling, no birds or flowers to amuse him, no boats moving on blue water, no children or dogs or horses. Only toys that he was soon tired of, because they were not alive. She walked about the room with him, carrying him till she was ready to drop, for he was no longer a fragile scrap of humanity, but a fine large child, who bore the stamp of his father’s splendid physique.
Everyone in the house praised and admired him — the new lodgers on the second floor, the landlady, and the parlourmaid, even the charwoman. He seemed to grow in strength and beauty every day. He had lived through that hard winter when Rayner came from Paris with an account of a frozen river and boulevards piled with snow. He was eighteen months old, and he had never been seriously ill. His teething so far had been without difficulty. He was full of the joy of life, growing, thriving, and now his father admired him, played with him, tossed him in the air, and frightened Mary by the vigour of his play.
And then the life that had been all sunshine and joy changed suddenly, and all the world was dark. Heaven was iron, a heaven where there was no one to hear the cry of a mother’s despair. A horror came down upon the room where the boy was lying. He was dangerously ill. He was worse. He was dying. It had been the illness of a week, but with terrible fluctuations, between hope and fear. The week had seemed an eternity of pain. But now, looking back, she saw all that slow torture at once, as it were in one moment of agony, and the days and nights seemed to have rushed by like a tornado, a fatal destroying wind carrying joy and love and hope away for ever.
When they had laid the little white and silver coffin among the great company of the dead, Mary went back into the world of living creatures like a dead woman. For the rest of that year she moved and spoke like an automaton. She cared for nothing, she wanted nothing. Her heart was lying in Brompton Cemetery, where she went every day to look at the grave.
Jack Rayner had begun by being very sorry for her, but after a month or two he told her frankly that he was bored beyond endurance. Once when she reproached him for long weeks of desertion, he said:
“My dear girl, can you expect a man to come home very regularly to a fountain of tears? You hug your grief too long. When your boy was alive you made an idol of him, and I was nowhere. Now he is dead the case is worse.”
It was not long after this speech of his that a letter was brought her late at night by a special messenger, a letter in a large thick envelope with a big seal, a letter from Rayner, stuffed with bank-notes.
“My DARLING, — I have to cut and run. I shall be at Liverpool when you get this, on my way to the Argentine. Things are too hot for me in the City. I am paying for having allowed myself to be associated with fools. Don’t fret, dear, and don’t be frightened whatever you may see in the papers about me. I shall go under for a bit, but I shall come up again, and shall be on the crest of the wave before long. Remember I have always been a winner. I can’t fail. I send you fifty quid. Make it last as long as you can. I hope you will hear from me with a fresh supply before it is gone.
“Yours till death, “JACK.”
She was so steeped in sorrow that this blow hardly touched her. Nothing mattered.
She told the landlady that her husband had gone to South America. The woman had been reading the paper, and knew why he had left in such a hurry.
“There’s been a lot of hanky-panky going on, and your gentleman seems to have been mixed up in it,” she said, “and now it’s all come out. I hope he has left you provided for till he comes back — if come back he ever does.”
Mrs. Baker was not a favourable specimen of her class. She kept her house clean, and she was a good cook; but a warm-hearted sloven would have been better in the day of desolation. Mary took no notice of her insolent speech. Such pin-pricks cannot hurt a broken heart.
And now the slow dull days went on, and Battersea Park knew Mary’s footsteps again, heavy and languid footsteps now, for it was here she came to nurse her grief. Every curve of the gravel walk, every narrow vista where the path dwindled to a point, every distant gleam of blue water between green branches, every sparrow that hopped across her path recalled the joyous image of her child. He had noticed everything, he had been glad about everything, he had filled her life with sweetn
ess: and he was gone! She would walk from the park to the cemetery, a long weary walk, and stand beside his grave. She had spent two of Rayner’s ten-pound notes on a marble slab that bore her son’s name: “Here lies Johnnie, aged eighteen months. And the heart of his mother.”
The chaplain had disapproved of the fantastic epitaph, but seeing the mother’s haggard face, and a look of despair not common to young faces, he had allowed the inscription to stand.
The days went on, and Mary knew no change of time or place. All things were equally indifferent to her. She had done with life. She came to the last bank-note, and then there followed an interval in which her landlady asked the same question every morning, with an angry crescendo. Had she heard from Mr. Rayner? Had he sent her any money? A question repeated till the day when she was told she must find a home elsewhere.
“Very good. I will pack my trunks this morning.”
“Pack! Not a scrap of property do you take out of this house till I’m paid my rent, and the money I’ve laid out for you in the last fortnight.”
Mary seemed hardly to care, though the boxes thus impounded contained property of some value; all the pretty things that Rayner had bought for her in his flushes of luck and fits of generosity: trinkets, furs, laces — silk gowns and velvet coats — things he had brought her from Paris and from Brussels. Mary made no struggle against injustice, but went out of the house meekly, to the landlady’s astonishment. She did not know what it was to wander about the streets of a great city — houseless and hungry. Then came that night of horror, which only Austin Sedgwick knew of — the last picture in these visions of the past that haunted her nights of waking.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1010