The House of Dr. Edwardes

by Francis Beeding

  “Certainly, Doctor,” she said, “I will dance with you, if you insist.”

  “Ring-a-ring o’ roses,

  Pocketful of posies,

  This way, that way,

  All fall down.”

  broke in the childish treble of Miss Collett; and, in a moment, Constance found herself hand in hand with the doctor and Colonel, dancing merrily round Mr. Clearwater. On the other side of the doctor was Miss Truelow, and, wonder of wonders, the Reverend Mark Hickett was also there, completing the circle with the gray-haired child of ten.

  Constance, self-conscious and unhappy, tried instinctively to free herself, but the doctor’s clasp upon her hand was firm.

  The ring broke as they dropped to the ground. The Colonel sprang up laughing loudly. He pulled Miss Truelow to her feet, who, dishevelled and breathless, seemed unaware that a fair proportion of the back buttons of her dress had burst asunder.

  They started again, this time without Constance and the doctor, who fell out of the circle and stood apart watching the other four as they capered in a circle about Mr. Clearwater.

  Constance now felt very much alone. She had often felt like that at a party, when, failing to catch the spirit of the thing, she had stood apart and watched. She was in some other world and did not know what they were doing. Only the doctor knew. For him all those separate, disjointed souls fell into place.

  The doctor knew, but she was aware only that the surface was unreal. Those figures who capered and sang were beyond her—out of her range and sympathy. By what false memories or hopes were they thus beguiled into this semblance of a festival? The Colonel swung past, singing of posies, and Miss Truelow, a thin Maenad in black taffeta, leaned back from the circle, her eyes shut upon some secret ecstasy. The Reverend Mark Hickett gyrated as in performance of a rite, and Miss Collett swept by, dancing fatally towards the zero which would solve the mystery of her days.

  Constance turned suddenly to Doctor Murchison and gripped him urgently by the hand.

  “Stop them. Doctor,” she heard herself entreating. “‘Can’t you see? It’s all wrong.”

  Doctor Murchison looked at her inquiringly.

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  There was no time to see how he would take this appeal, for at that moment Warder Jones, who had come from his work in the meadow, and was waiting for an opportunity to address the doctor, touched his cap and stepped forward.

  “Beg pardon, Doctor,” he said. “But may be you ’aven’t noticed as how Mr. Curtis ’as given us the slip. ’E came out with the party, but I haven’t seen him since we started. ’E’s been a bit queer these last few days, and I don’t like to lose sight of ’im.”

  But the doctor was not looking at Warder Jones. He was listening and looking away, over the meadow, towards the forest from which, as he looked and listened, there came a sudden cry, loud enough to be heard above the sound of Mr. Clearwater’s piping and the merriment of the ring. The dancers paused abruptly. Silence fell as the whole group listened intently, and Constance was aware in that silence that the lark was no longer singing.

  The Reverend Mark Hickett stepped forward from the circle, straining his weak eyes in the direction of the cry. This then was the moment of revelation, the moment for which he had waited, and in which he must bear a part.

  There was a further noise in the wood, as though some beast was forcing its way through thick undergrowth. The bushes at one point on the edge of the fir trees quivered and shook. Then abruptly out darted the figure of a man. He was panting, and one sleeve of his coat was torn. There was dirt on his hands and cheeks, and a great smear lay across one side of his mouth. He stumbled towards them, but, before he could reach them, he tripped and fell, uttering, as he did so, a choking cry.

  It was Mr. Deeling.

  For a moment no one stirred. The dancers stood in their circle, motionless, all except the Reverend Mark Hickett who had stepped out in advance of the rest.

  He was a priest, and this was the obscure prologue to the harvest for which he had prayed. His voice rang out over the meadow and to the mountains beyond.

  “Hymn Number 245. The Two Hundred-and-Forty-Fifth Hymn:

  Fair waved the golden corn

  O’er Canaan’s pleasant land.”

  III

  That evening, after dinner, Constance and Doctor Murchison were walking in the rose garden. It was the first quiet moment since the sudden appearance of Mr. Deeling some three hours previously. Mr. Deeling had given a great deal of trouble. He had been carried speechless to bed by Warder Jones and his assistant, and after that it had been necessary to look for Mr. Curtis, who had ultimately appeared about an hour after the break-up of the hay party.

  Doctor Murchison had taken charge of Mr. Curtis.

  Constance had visited Mr. Deeling for a few minutes shortly before dinner. He had been strangely incoherent, and she had been able to get very little out of him. Only one thing was clear. Never again in any circumstances would he enter the wood. He had never been backward in any duty: he had worked tooth and nail, heart and soul, for the establishment, but no one could reasonably be expected to go back into the wood.

  She had begun to talk about Mr. Deeling at dinner, but Doctor Murchison to her surprise had refused to do so. He had talked, however, abundantly of other things, and Constance, not for the first time, was astonished at the wide range of his thought and experience. He had talked of Pietro Aretino and the literature of the Renaissance—as marvellous, he had maintained, as its painting and sculpture—of eighteenth-century glass and silver, and finally, though she did not remember how he came to do so, of Napoleon. Napoleon, she had found, was his hero, his greatest of men. Napoleon, he had said, had taken all life for his province, and his mind was everywhere at once. The doctor had quoted instances; how in the morning Napoleon would dictate letters and orders on such widely various subjects as the official caricatures to appear in the French press, the supply of artillery ammunition for the Spanish garrisons, a censure upon the high prices charged by Paris dressmakers, and a confidential memorandum on the attitude of Prussia to be sent through Talleyrand to Duroc. He was a master of mankind. He had in him the source of secret power, a curious expression which Doctor Murchison had used more than once, but which he had neglected to explain; and the talk had drifted on, by way of Napoleon’s decree dated from Moscow, reforming the Comédie Française, to a discussion of the modern French theater.

  Constance had referred to the play of H. R. Lenormand which she had seen in Paris on her way to Château Landry. She found that Doctor Murchison was familiar with the work of this dramatist, but by no means enthusiastic.

  “He writes of evil and its mysteries, but he is a trifler. He has seen the Ancient of Days and yet he remains helplessly a moralist. He is drawn into the darkness, it fascinates and intrigues him, but he goes into it with a lighted candle. You remember what Matthew Arnold said of the man who sinned against the Light. This man is sinning against the Dark.”

  After dinner they had taken their coffee on the terrace, and now they were walking in the rose garden, up and down in the scented darkness, which was presently chequered with silver by the moon which had climbed slowly above the barrier of the rocks.

  Suddenly he turned to her and broke into a praise of beauty.

  “There should be white peacocks about her with gilded beaks and she must be hung with pearls and emeralds and all pleasant stones. She should walk only in the light of the moon. Only the moonlight should touch her white arms and crimson mouth. For in the moonlight crimson is black, and we only feel it to be red.”

  He spoke in a kind of rhapsody, and her arm was drawn within his so naturally that she did not realize that he held her imperceptibly near to him as they walked.

  Suddenly he broke off.

  “I must go and make the round of my patients,” he said, “since Deeling is laid up.”

  “Let me do that for you,” she began, but he shook his head.

  “No,
he said with a smile, “I can’t allow you to lose a moment of all this. You should be sitting now at your window, looking at the roses that are trying to be red under the moon.”

  He withdrew his arm as he spoke, and Constance drew back a little. For a moment they stood silently together, then quietly he leaned forward and took her hands.

  “I have seen beauty tonight,” he said, looking her very directly in the eyes.

  Then he bent his head, lightly kissed her fingers, and, turning quickly away, left her alone in the garden.

  Chapter Eight

  I

  Mr. Deeling was lying in a rattan chair overlooking the rose garden.

  Three days had passed since the hay party, and he had spent most of the time in explaining very clearly to himself what had happened. He had overworked, and the heat had not unnaturally been too much for him. For two days he had lain in bed, while for the third and most of the fourth day he had been confined to the garden.

  It was now nearly seven o’clock, and he would shortly go for a little stroll, nothing strenuous, because he was still feeling somewhat weak, probably from the effects of the powerful tonic which they had insisted on giving him.

  He had not started earlier owing to the heat. It had grown no cooler these last four days. He had come to dread the slow climbing of the sun to the summit of its brazen arc, for it seemed every day to make matters worse, and he had waited impatiently for its descent. It was hanging now like a golden apricot above the rocks which shut the valley at its western end. Even as he looked, its wheel of fire began slowly to roll down the farther slope to a swift extinction. In a few minutes it would be comparatively cool, cool enough at least for an evening walk.

  Life was a very complicated business, so complicated that, unless one kept everything exactly in place, and behaved always according to plan, there would be chaos within and without. He must take care to keep his thoughts always perfectly in order. The mind was like a lens. One had to keep it steadily in focus; otherwise the object was indistinct, and the imagination, which was a dangerous and unaccountable faculty, might make of it any foolish or frightful thing it pleased.

  Fortunately, it was for him comparatively easy to live according to plan. He was Mr. Ambrose Deeling, a man whose daily conduct had not varied for eleven years. All he had to do was to continue in the way he had chosen. His duty was plain. He was there at Château Landry to uphold its traditions, to keep the flag of Doctor Edwardes flying. The old routine was threatened. He did not trust Doctor Murchison, and he had even less faith in that chit of a girl.

  He passed a soothing hand across his high wrinkled forehead and down over the severe, geometrical features, which relaxed for a moment and assumed a softer outline. Then he rose, very deliberately, and began walking with quiet, even steps down the garden path between the rose trees towards the steps which led to the meadow.

  How heavy was the scented air. A vague line from some almost forgotten classic which had intrigued him when in the upper form of his grammar school came back to him. Something from Theocritus. Something about sleep, dripping from the leaves of apple trees. He could not remember how it went on. That’s what it felt like in the garden now, only these were rose, not apple, trees—rose trees, heavy with sanguine blossoms, waiting with curled petals and fragrant hearts for the evening dew.

  As he walked, the sound of Mr. Clearwater’s flute came to his ears. The notes rose and fell, with a plaintive iteration.

  “It is beautiful,” said Mr. Deeling to himself, just above his breath.

  He found that he was walking awry, and that, having wandered from the path, he was knee-deep in the flowers that bordered it. For a moment he stood thus, listening to the music.

  “Dear me,” he said suddenly, “what am I doing here? And why am I listening to that confounded piping?”

  He stepped briskly back on to the path, and, turning the corner, discovered Colonel Rickaby seated on a carved stone bench. He was in his shirt sleeves and his braces were lying across his knees. Mr. Clearwater was piping behind him. Mr. Deeling halted a moment and stood watching them.

  The Colonel pulled the belt which he wore round the top of his trousers a hole tighter, felt in the pocket of his discarded coat and took out a piece of chamois leather with which he proceeded to rub the metal buckles of his braces, whistling the while through his teeth like an ostler.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Mr. Clearwater suddenly to the Colonel, stopping in the midst of a roulade. “It puts me off my playing.”

  “I don’t like your playing,” said Colonel Rickaby firmly, but without heat. “You remind me of those dashed confounded awful bagpipes of the old 49th Highland Brigade, or was it the 52nd? Fellows in skirts and nothing on beneath ’em. They were next us at Multan in ’93, or was it ’94? Used to squeal the place down, like a lot of pigs going to market.”

  “You do not like my playing?” said Mr. Clearwater equably.

  “Then I will recite to you my latest poem.”

  “Anything, anything you please,” grumbled the Colonel, as he went on polishing his braces. “Not that I care very much for the poets, don’t understand ’em, plain English is good enough for me. I remember once, when I was adjutant of the old 87th, a young fellow joined us from Sandhurst. He wore confoundedly long hair. Nice young fellow too—Thompson—Thomkins—no, Thomas it was. He died later of enteric, or was it sandfly fever? Well, anyhow, he had dashed confounded awful long hair, and he was a bit of a poet too, used to read Shakespeare, Wordsworth and all the other johnnies. His kit was full of them. One day I said to him in mess, ‘You dashed awful young monkey, why don’t you get your hair cut? You are bristling with intolerable hair, that’s what you are.’ Upon my word if he didn’t answer me back; told me I was quoting Swinburne at him. I’d never even heard of the fellow, unless it was the chap who used to play for Somerset, or was it Gloucester? No, I remember now, it was Sussex.”

  Mr. Deeling stepped forward.

  “Hullo, Pills,” said the Colonel.

  Mr. Deeling drew himself up.

  “My name is Deeling,” he answered coldly.

  “No offense,” said the Colonel. “We always used to call the medical officer in our battalion Pills.”

  Mr. Deeling was mollified. He could scarcely resent being addressed as a medical officer.

  Mr. Clearwater had by this time produced from his pocket a crumpled piece of paper.

  “Listen,” he said, “this is the poem I was talking to you about,” and waving his flute in the air he began to declaim:

  “When death walks down our village street,

  His boots are always clean and neat,

  For no one ever yet has found

  A trace of footsteps on the ground;

  Death passes by and makes no sound.”

  He paused and looked from one to the other.

  “It’s not very long,” said Mr. Deeling cautiously.

  “That’s only the first stanza,” said Mr. Clearwater.

  “Good God,” said the Colonel, “do you mean to say there’s any more of it?”

  “That is only the opening of the first canto,” said Mr.

  Clearwater. “In the next twenty stanzas I describe Death walking up the street of a village and pausing outside the houses uncertain which he shall enter. No one hears him but one old woman who has been ill for some time. She draws aside the curtain and watches his thin figure pass, and sees him scrabble with bony fingers on the door of one of her neighbors.”

  “It will be my masterpiece,” continued Mr. Clearwater, “and it will be very long indeed—almost as long as ‘The Ring and the Book.’ I will read you some more,” and he again consulted his MS.

  Mr. Deeling intervened hastily. “May I ask what you are doing, Colonel?” he said in a tone slightly louder than usual.

  The Colonel looked up from his polishing.

  “That’s for your private ear,” he said with a significant look at Mr. Clearwater.

  “I migh
t have known it,” said the latter, crumpling up his paper and cramming it into a trouser pocket. “My poetry is caviare to the Colonel,” and turning his back on them he walked lightly away.

  “Mad, of course,” said the Colonel, tapping his forehead, “mad as Moses.”

  “Now, Mr. Deeling,” he continued, “if we are really alone—”

  He looked about him cautiously, while Mr. Deeling groaned in spirit. The confidences of Colonel Rickaby were apt to be as long as the idylls of Mr. Clearwater. He felt, however, that it was his duty to listen.

  “I am at your disposal, Colonel,” he said. “But I was proposing to take a little walk. Perhaps you would have no objection to accompanying me? I do not propose to go very far, just down the steps into the meadow and as far as the fourth green, a distance of three hundred and fifty-seven yards, then back by way of the second tee, and so to the steps again—exactly half a mile in all.”

  “Suit me admirably,” said the Colonel, and getting to his feet he laid his braces carefully over the back of the seat. Then putting on his coat he fell into step beside Mr. Deeling.

  They descended the stone steps to the meadow in silence and, reaching the meadow, they started to walk slowly forward. Mr. Deeling glanced at his companion. The Colonel, to his surprise, was nervous, his rather prominent blue eyes were more protuberant than usual; his face was flushed and he twisted one side of his mustache nervously with his left hand.

  “The fact is,” said the Colonel suddenly, “I want to ask your advice. Do you know what date it is the day after tomorrow?”

  Mr. Deeling thought for a moment.

  “It will be the seventh of August,” he returned.

  “Quite correct,” said the Colonel, “the seventh of August it is, and the happiest day of my life.”

  He paused, and added, “Not lost but gone before.”

  They walked on two or three paces.

  “She was the best wife a man ever had,” he continued. “I lost her from cholera in ’89 at Hyderabad, or was it Nasipore? Upon my word I forget.”