by Hugh Walpole
“By the blood, by the blood, by the blood of the Lamb We beseech Thee!”
Everywhere now women were crying, the Chapel was filled with voices, sobs, cries and prayers.
Mr. Crashaw stood there, motionless, his arms outstretched.
Maggie did not know what she felt. She seemed deprived of all sensation on one side, and, on the other, fear and excitement; both joy and disgust held her. She could not have told any one what her sensations were; she was trembling from head to foot as though with cold. But behind everything she had this terror, that at any moment she might be drawn forward to do something, to give some pledge that would bind her for all her life. She felt as though some power were urging her to this, and as though the Chapel and every one in it was conscious of the struggle.
What might have happened she would never know. She felt a touch on her sleeve, and, turning round, saw Aunt Anne’s eyes looking up at her out of a face that was so white and the skin of it so tightly drawn that it was like the face of a dead woman.
“I’m in great pain, Maggie. I think you must take me home,” she heard her aunt say.
Aunt Anne took her arm, they went out followed by Aunt Elizabeth. The fresh evening air that blew upon Maggie’s forehead seemed suddenly to make of the Chapel a dim, incredible phantom; faintly from behind the closed door came the echo of the hymn. The street was absolutely still — no human being was in sight, only an old cab stationed close at hand waiting for a possible customer; into this they got. The pale, almost white, evening sky, with stars in sheets and squares and pools of fire, shone with the clear radiance of glass above them. Maggie could see the stars through the dirty windows of the cab.
They were quite silent all the way home. Aunt Anne sitting up very straight, motionless, her fingers still on Maggie’s arm.
Inside the house there was Jane. She seemed at once to under-stand, and, with Aunt Elizabeth, led Aunt Anne up the dark stairs.
They disappeared, leaving Maggie alone in the hall, whose only sound was the ticking clock from the stairs and only light the dim lamp above the door.
CHAPTER V
THE CHOICE
She waited for some time alone in the hall listening for she knew not what. Her departure from the Chapel had been too abrupt to allow her in a moment to shake off the impression of it — above all, the impression of Mr. Crashaw standing there, his arms stretched out to her, his eyes burning her through and through with the urgent insistence of his discovery.
She was tired, her head ached horribly, she would have given everything at that moment for a friend who would care for her and protect her from her own wild fears. She did not know of what she was afraid, but she knew that she felt that she would rather do anything than spend the night in that house. And yet what could she do? How could she escape? She knew that she could not. Oh! if only Martin would come! Where was he? Why could he not carry her off that very night? Why did he not come?
She gazed desperately about her. Could she not leave the house there and then? But where should she go? What could she do without a friend in London? She stood there, clasping and unclasping her hands, looking up at the black stairs, listening for some sound from above, fancying a ghost in every darkening corner of the place.
Then her common sense reasserted itself. It was something, at any rate, that she was out of the Chapel, away from Mr. Crashaw’s piercing eyes, Mr. Thurston’s rasping voice, Mr. Warlock’s reproachful melancholy. She felt this evening as though by struggling with all her strength she could shut the gates upon new experiences that were fighting to enter into her soul, but must, at all costs to her own happiness, be defeated. No such thing as ghosts, no such thing as a God, be He kind, tender, cruel or loving — nothing but what one can see, can touch, can confront with one’s physical strength. She had been to a service at a Methodist chapel, her aunt had been ill, to-morrow there would be daylight and people hurrying down the street about their business, work and shops and food and sun ... No such thing as ghosts! Nothing but what you can see!
“And I’ll get some work without wasting a minute,” she thought, nodding her head. “In a shop if necessary — or I could be a governess — and then when he is free, Martin will be with me.”
She climbed on a chair and turned down the hall-gas as she had seen Martha do. She went to the door and slipped the chain into its socket and turned the lock. She listened for a moment before she started upstairs, she saw Mr. Crashaw’s eyes in the dark — she heard his voice.
“Punishment! Punishment!...”
She suddenly started to run up the black stairs, stumbled, ran faster through the passage under the picture of the armed men, arrived at last in her room, breathless.
During her undressing she stopped sometimes to listen. Her aunt’s bedroom was on the floor below hers, and she certainly could hear nothing through the closed doors, and yet she fancied, as she stood there, that the sound of sobbing came up to her and, twice, a sharp cry.
“I suppose I’m terribly selfish,” she thought, “I ought to want to go and help Aunt Anne, and I don’t.” No, she didn’t. She wanted to run away from the house, miles and miles and miles. She climbed into bed and thought of her escape. If Miss Trenchard did not answer her letter, then she could go off to Uncle Mathew, greatly though she disliked the thought of that; then she could live on her three hundred pounds and look about until she found work or Martin came for her.
But so ignorant was she of the world that she did not in the least know how she could get her three hundred pounds. But Uncle Mathew would know. She thought of him standing in the doorway at the hotel, holding up a glass, then she thought of Martin, and so fell asleep.
She woke suddenly to find some one standing in her open doorway and holding up a candle. That some one was old Martha, looking strange enough in a nightdress, her scanty grey hairs untidily about her neck and a dirty red shawl over her shoulders. Maggie blinked at the light and sat up in bed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s your aunt, Miss — Miss Anne. She’s very bad. She wants you to go to her.”
Maggie got out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and slippers and followed the servant.
As she hurried along the dark passage she was still only half-awake; her soul had not returned into her body, but her body was awake and vibrating with the knowledge that the soul was soon coming to it, and coming to it with great news, with the consciousness of a marvellous experience. For at the instant when Martha awoke her she had been dreaming of Martin, dreaming of him physically, so that it was his body against hers, his hand hot and dry in hers cool and soft, his cheek rough and strong against hers smooth and pale. There had been no sentimentality or weakness in her dream. They had been confident and sure and defiant together, and it had been real life for her, so real that this dream life in which now she moved down the shadowy passage was about her as green water is about one when one swims under waves.
It was only slowly, as the cold air of the house at night cleared her eyes and her throat and her breast, that she came to the world consciousness again and surrendered her lover back to the shades and felt a sudden frightened fear lest, after all, she should never really know that ecstasy of which she had just been dreaming.
Nevertheless it was still with a great consciousness of Martin that she entered her aunt’s bedroom. Before she entered she turned round for a moment to Martha.
“What must I do?” she asked. “What will she want me to do?”
“It’s only,” said Martha, “if the pains come on very bad, to give her some drops. They’re in a little green bottle by her bed. Five drops ... yes, miss, five drops in a little green bottle. Only if the pains is very bad. She’s brave — wonderful. I’d ‘ave sat up till morning willing, and so of course would Miss Elizabeth. But she seemed to want you, miss.”
They were like two conspirators whispering there in the dark. The room within was so still. Maggie very softly pushed back the door and entered. She walked a few steps insi
de the room and hesitated. There was no sound in the room at all, utter stillness so that Maggie could hear her own breathing as though it were some one else at her side warning her. Then slowly things emerged, the long white bed first, afterwards a shaded lamp beside it, a little table with bottles, a chair — beyond the circle of lighted shadow there were shapes, near the window a high glass, a dark shade that was the dressing-table, and faint grey squares where the windows hung.
In the room was a strange scent half wine, half medicine, and beyond that the plain tang of apples partially eaten, a little smell of oil too from the lamp — very faintly the figure of the Christ above the bed was visible. Maggie moved forward to the bed, then stopped again. She did not know what to do; she could see a dark shadow on the pillow that must she knew be her aunt’s hair, and yet she did not connect that with her aunt. The room was cold and, she felt, of infinite space. The smell of the wine and the medicine made her shy and awkward as though she were somewhere where she should not be.
There came a little sigh, and then a very quiet, tired voice.
“Maggie, is that you?”
“Yes, Aunt Anne.”
She came very close to the bed, and suddenly, as though a curtain had been drawn back, she could see her aunt’s large eyes and white sharp face.
“It was very good of you, dear, to come. I felt ashamed to wake you up at such an hour, but I wanted you. I felt that only you must be with me to-night. It was a call from God. I felt that it must be obeyed. Sit down, dear. There, on that chair. You’re not cold, are you?”
Maggie sat down, gathering her dressing-gown close about her. She was not even now drawn right out of her dream, and the room seemed fantastic, to rise and fall a little, and to be filled with sound, just out of hearing. For a time she was so sleepy that she nodded on her chair, and the green lamp swelled and quivered and the very bed seemed to sway in the dark, but soon the cold air cleared her head, and she was wide awake, staring before her at the grey window-panes. Her aunt did not for a long time speak again. Maggie sat there her mind a maze of the Chapel, old Crashaw, Miss Avies, and Martin. Slowly the cold crept into her feet and her hands, but her head now was burning hot. Then suddenly her aunt began to talk in a dreamy rather lazy voice, not her natural daily tone which was always very sharp and clear. She talked on and on; sometimes her sentences were confused and unfinished, sometimes they seemed to Maggie to have no meaning; once or twice the voice dropped so low that Maggie did not catch the words, but always there was especial urgency behind the carelessness as though every word were being spoken for a listener’s benefit — a listener who sat perhaps with pencil and notebook somewhere in the dark behind them.
“So sorry ... so sorry, Maggie dear ... so sorry,” the words ran up and down. “I hadn’t meant to take you away before the service was over. Elizabeth could have ... sometimes my pain is very bad and I have to lie down, you know. But it’s nothing — nothing really — only I’m glad, rather, that you should share all our little troubles, because then you’ll know us better, won’t you? Dear Maggie, there’s been something between us all this time, hasn’t there? Ever since our first meeting — and it’s partly been my fault. I wasn’t good at first, I wanted to be kind, but I was stiff and shy. You wouldn’t think that I’m shy? I am, terribly. I always have been since I was very little, and just to enter a room when other people are there makes me so embarrassed ... I remember once when mother was alive her scolding me because I wouldn’t come in to a tea-party. But I couldn’t; I stood outside the door in an agony, doing everything to make myself go in — but I couldn’t ... But now I’ve come to love you, dear, although of course you have your faults. But they are faults of your age, carelessness, selfishness. They are nothing in the eyes of God, who understands all our weaknesses. And you must learn to know Him, dear. That is my only prayer now. If I am taken, if I go before the great day — if it be His will — then I pray always, now that I may leave you in my place, waiting for Him as I have waited, trusting Him as I have trusted ... you saw to-night what it means to us, what it must mean to any one who has listened. There were times, years ago, when I had not turned to God, when I did not care, when I thought of earthly love ... God drew me to Himself ... You too must come, Maggie — you must come. You mustn’t stay outside — you are asked, you are invited — perhaps you will be compelled ...”
The voice sank: Maggie’s teeth chattered in her head from the cold, and her foot had gone to sleep. She felt obstinate and rebellious and frightened, she could not think clearly, and the words that came from her, suddenly, seemed to her not to be her own.
“Aunt Anne, I want to do everything that you and Aunt Elizabeth think I should, but I must be myself, mustn’t I? I’m grown up now; I’ve got my three hundred pounds and I don’t think I want to be religious. I’m very grateful to you and Aunt Elizabeth, but I’m not a help to you much, I’m afraid. I know I’m very careless, I do want to be better, and that’s all the more reason, perhaps, why I should go out and earn my own living. I’d learn more quickly then. But I do love you and Aunt Elizabeth ...”
She broke off; she did not love them. She knew that she did not. The only human being in all the world whom she loved was Martin. Nevertheless there did come to her suddenly then a new tenderness for her aunt; the actual sight of her pain in the Chapel had deeply touched her and now her eagerness for escape was mingled with a longing to be affectionate and good.
But Aunt Anne did not seem to have heard.
“Are you sure you’re not cold, dear?”
“No, aunt.”
Their hands touched.
“But you are. Put that rug over you. That one at the end of the bed. I’m quiet now. I think perhaps I shall sleep a little.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Perhaps turn the lamp down, dear. That’s it. A little more. Now, if you’d just raise my pillow. There, behind my head. That’s the way! Why, what a good nurse you are!”
Maggie, as tenderly as she could, turned the pillow, patted it, placed it beneath her aunt’s head. She was close against her aunt’s face, and the eyes seemed suddenly so fierce and urgent, so insistent and powerful, that seeing them was like the discovery of some blazing fire in an empty house. Most of all, they were terrified eyes. Maggie went back to her chair. After that, she sat there during the slow evolution of Eternity; Eternity unrolled itself before her, on and on and on, grey limitless mist and space, comfortless, lifeless, hopeless. She had been for many weeks leading a thoroughly unwholesome life in that old house with those old women. She did not herself know how unhealthy it had been, but she knew that she missed the wide fields and downs of Glebeshire, the winds that blew from the sea round Borhedden, the air that swirled and raced up and down the little stony strata of St. Dreot. Now she had been kept indoors, had had no fun of any kind, had looked forward to Mr. Magnus as her chief diversion. Then Martin had come, and suddenly she had seen how dangerously her life was hemming her in. She was losing courage. She would soon be afraid to speak for herself at all; she would soon ...
In a panic at these thoughts, and feeling as though some one was trying to push her down into a coffin whilst she was still alive, she began hurriedly to speak, although she did not know whether her aunt were asleep or no.
“I think I ought to tell you, Aunt Anne, that I wrote a letter some days ago and posted it myself. It was to a lady who knew Father once in Glebeshire, and she said that if ever I wanted help I was to write to her, and so — although perhaps I oughtn’t to have done it without asking you first, still I was afraid you mightn’t want me to — so I sent it. I wouldn’t like to hurt your feelings, Aunt Anne, and it isn’t that I’m not happy with you and Aunt Elizabeth, but I ought to be earning my own living, oughtn’t I? And I’ve only got my three hundred pounds, haven’t I? I’m not complaining, but I don’t know about anything yet, do I? I can’t even find my way when I’m out with Aunt Elizabeth. And I’m afraid I’ll never be really good enough to be religious. Perh
aps if Father’d wanted me to be I might be now, but he never cared ... I hope you won’t be angry, Aunt Anne, but I didn’t like to-night — I didn’t really. When I was there I thought that soon I’d begin to cry like the others, but it was only because every one else was crying — not because I wanted to. I hope you won’t be angry, but I’m afraid I’ll never be religious as you and Aunt Elizabeth want me to be; so don’t you think it will be better for me to start learning something else right away?”
Maggie poured all this out and then felt immense relief. At last she was honest again; at last she had said what she felt, and they knew it and could never say that she hadn’t been fair with them. She felt that her speech had cleared the air in every kind of way. She waited for her aunt’s reply. No sound came from the bed. Had her aunt heard? Perhaps she slept. Maggie waited. Then timidly, and softly she said:
“Aunt Anne ... Aunt Anne ...”
No reply. Then again in a whisper:
“Aunt Anne ... Aunt Anne ...”
Supposing Aunt Anne ... Maggie trembled, then, commanding herself to be calm, she bent towards the bed.
“Aunt Anne, are you asleep?”
Suddenly Aunt Anne’s face was there, the eyes closed, the mouth, the cheeks pale yellow in the faint reflection from the lamp. There was no stir, no breath.
“Aunt Anne, Aunt Anne,” Maggie whispered in terror now. Then she saw that her aunt was sleeping; very, very faintly the sheets rose and fell and the fingers of the hand on the coverlet trembled a little as though they were struggling to wake.
Then Aunt Anne had heard nothing after all. But it might be that she was pretending, just to see what Maggie would say.
“Aunt Anne,” whispered Maggie once more and for the last time. Then she sat back on her seat again, her hands folded, staring straight in front of her. After that she did not know for how long she sat there in a state somewhere between dream and reality. The room, although it never lost its familiarity, grew uncouthly strange; shapes grey and dim seemed to move beneath the windows, humping their backs, spinning out into long limbs, hands and legs and gigantic fingers. The deadest hour of the night was come; the outside world seemed to press upon the house, the whole world cold, thick, damp, lifeless, like an animal slain and falling with its full weight, crushing everything beneath it. Perhaps she slept — she did not know. Martin seemed to be with her, and against them was Aunt Anne, her back against the door, her hands spread, refusing to let them pass. The room joined in the struggle, the floor slipped beneath their tread, the curtain swayed forward and caught them in its folds, the lamp flickered and flickered and flickered ...