He wrenched himself away from the hand, and faced her, white and panting.
"D'you mean... you'd believe it..?"
"I have not even asked you for your word."
Jack had still not understood. He put up a hand, and the fingers shook against his throat.
"S'pose I told you... it was all a lie... from beginning to end? S'pose I told you I... didn't confess... because there... was nothing to confess... because..."
She caught him suddenly in her arms.
"My dear, there is no need to tell me that; of course I knew!"
Jack was sobbing now, in the slow, tearless, frightful way that was like the weeping of a grown man.
When they sat down together, she in a low chair by the fire, he on the hearth rug at her feet, staring into the red coals, she learned the story of the mavis, or as much of it as Jack could put into words, which, indeed, was not much. He told it quietly, without tears, but with pauses and intervals of silence here and there, much as she had heard other stories told long ago in Siberia.
But for that same Siberia, she too, like Dr. Jenkins, would probably have failed to understand. But she had lived outside the pale of men's mercy, and her unsheltered eyes had seen the naked sores of the world. Month after month of daily contact with criminals, idiots, and lunatics on the journey out, years spent among a monstrous population of degenerates in a land which has been for centuries a sink without a drain, had taught her many things. To her the Vicar's disease was no new horror; she had seen his like in every shape and stage, from ghastly children sniggering and leering while they burned a squirrel alive, to homicidal maniacs plunging into frenzied orgies, their hands wet from the gash in a victim's throat.
The story was finished, and both sat silent for a little while. It was growing dark in the room. Helen was softly stroking the head on her knee.
"Tell me one thing more, my son. What was it you were going to do when you got out of the window? To run away and go to sea?"
"Not to sea; only to the cliff. I'd had enough."
His voice was quite lifeless and dreary; utterly unchildlike.
"Old Jenkins is wrong, though," he added. "Uncle didn't know my arm was smashed; I took precious good care he shouldn't."
Her fingers tightened on his. "Because..?"
"You see, I couldn't manage to kill him; I did try once, and it was no use. So I thought I'd see whether I could make him kill me; then he'd have been hanged."
Helen stooped and kissed him. The twilight faded slowly into darkness; a faint glow shone in the blackening coals.
"That's why it's such beastly rot," Jack began suddenly, and stopped. Helen's arm was still round his neck.
"What is, dear?"
"Why, you coddling me up and making all this fuss, just as if I was Theo. Oh, of course I'll look after the little beggar, and try to lick him into shape, and not let the other chaps bully him, — he's such a shrimp; but his wanting to chum up with me, and all that, is just bubble and squeak."
"Theo is a little boy, and... has not gone down into hell, yet. His turn will come, when he is a man. But I think I understand."
Jack burst out laughing. His voice sounded old and thin out of the darkness.
"You?" he said. "Rats!"
He jerked away from her hand and stirred the dying embers with the poker.
"You think, because you've seen prisons and things... What do you know? you're clean. Your people may have been shot and hanged, and all that, but they've not been tied up and ------"
She put a hand over his mouth to stop him.
"Hush! It was to set God's creature free, and Theo's father died to set God's people free. Whose child should you be but mine?"
Early next morning, when he came into Helen's room, awkward and sullen, to say good-bye, she greeted him in a cheerful, matter-of-fact way, as if their new relationship were years old.
"Then you'll spend all your holidays here, if your people don't object. I'll run down to Cornwall and see them, and try to arrange matters; perhaps they'll let me adopt you altogether. And about pocket-money, of course you'll share whatever Theo has, and I'll make the amount a little larger. It's rather a tiny income for three, so we shall all have to be careful till my two sons are grown, and can support themselves."
Jack muttered something sulkily about its being "beastly slow" not to be twenty-one. He was near to breaking down again, and his speech was proportionately curt and slangy. There were tears in Helen's eyes as she kissed him.
"And you'll take care of Theo. Since I was left alone I have been anxious about him, having no one near that I could trust. He will be a musician when he grows up, and musicians are not always the happiest people. But I shall feel quite safe now that I have you, who are so good to singing-birds. God keep you, my other son!"
It was the last time that the story of the mavis was referred to.
CHAPTER IX
The year in which Jack came of age was to him one of trial. He grew up, and entered into life; a difficult matter commonly, and in his case a grievous one.
He was studying medicine in London, and the more observant among the professors had begun to watch his development with interest. When he could get sufficiently far out of himself to throw off the laboured accuracy, the painful over-conscientiousness which usually marred his work, he would show a certain breadth of conception and sureness of intellectual grasp quite unusual at his age. More than once a professor, demonstrating in the dissecting room, had looked up in surprise at his questions, and asked him quickly: "How did you guess that?" But these flashes of sudden insight never came to help him out at examinations. At such times he always relapsed into the dull and docile pupil whom
Dr. Cross had known. He was too steady and diligent a worker to fail; but would pass ingloriously, by sheer perseverance, showing no trace of the special capacities which marked him as a born physician.
His heart's desire, never mentioned to any one except Helen, and to her but half-expressed, was to become a great specialist in the diseases of children. Even to himself he scarcely formulated this, his one ambition; but, hidden deep under the diffidence which afflicted him lay an abiding sense that he was called to this vocation; rather, that he held a claim for it upon the gods, as justification for faith. In his dumb way, half-consciously, he demanded this satisfaction of them, not repining nor in anger, but as a fair right, bought and paid for. Surely they would be honest for this once, and not repudiate so clear a title-deed. Seeing that he had accepted the curse of childhood as they had laid it on him, and had neither blasphemed against their ruling nor fallen by the way and died, it seemed but just that they should grant him, in return, a special understanding of the wrongs and griefs of children, a special right to help and heal. If Dr. Jenkins had but understood...
In other respects his childhood had marked him less than Helen had feared. The trace of it showed chiefly in a certain soberness of judgment, the serious moderation of a too early maturity. Yet he seemed to her freer than she had dared to hope from any morbid taint of bitterness, and, if not so young as his years warranted, still, far younger than he had been at fourteen.
Of Molly he seldom spoke, even to Helen; and she had often grieved over his reticence, dreading lest it might be the cloak for secret brooding. But, well as she had learned to read his character, she was mistaken here. He had trained himself not to waste his strength on barren yearning before the coming of the time for action. To rescue his sister was with him a purpose, not a craving; when he should have hewn a foothold for himself it would be time to turn and stretch a hand to her; till then he could do nothing for her but keep his face averted, lest the sight of her, defenceless in the enemy's hands, might distract him from his work. He had not seen her for seven years. She had been put to school in Truro, he knew; and, being now sixteen and tall for her age, was counted a young woman grown. "Next summer," Aunt Sarah had written in her Christmas letter, "she is to come home for good, and help in the parish work; for I am not so active as I used to be, and your uncle is troubled with rheumatism in the damp weather. She had a fancy to learn hospital nursing; but your uncle decided that she would be more useful and safer from temptation at home, so she has said no more about it. She has always been a good girl and very obedient, and he is pleased with her."