Jack stooped down and kissed her gravely. "As you like, mother. It shall be our secret, yours and mine."
CHAPTER X
So the holiday-time passed, and Theo suspected nothing. His mother's weakness and inability to take the pleasure trips he had planned for her were a sore disappointment to him; his sweet and sunny nature could not care for enjoyment which might not be shared with others, and he had religiously saved up his few superfluous coins "to take mother about in the summer." Not being able to do this, he spent his money on hot-house grapes and peaches for her, and his time in ransacking the district for flowers and shells, making a sea-water aquarium to amuse her, or sitting at the piano in the dark, improvising soft fantasies while she lay listening with Jack's hand clasped in hers. "This is the water lapping against a boat, mummy," he would say; "next year you'll come out and hear the real thing instead of my imitations."
"I think I like your imitations best, dear," she would answer cheerfully, and hold Jack's hand a little tighter.
For them it was a hard summer; at times, indeed, so hard that Jack's courage would have failed him but for the indomitable patience of hers. The disease had not yet reached its most painful stage; but there were already many long, sleepless nights, when Jack would sit with her, reading aloud or, if she was too ill for that, watching beside her silently. Often she entreated him to leave her and go back to bed. "I shall be quite comfortable," she would say, secretly dreading the lonely horror of the night, yet fearing lest the want of sleep should injure his health.
"Let me have all I can of you, mother," he would answer softly; and she would submit with a little sigh of relief.
Day would come at last, and with it Theo, light-footed and radiant, carrying dewy trails of honeysuckle to wreathe the foot of her bed. "Have you had a good night, mummy?" Sometimes he would notice Jack's haggard face. "You work too hard, old fellow," he would say. Once he came up behind him in the garden and slipped a hand through his arm; a wonderful hand, strong and slender, with the live finger-tips of the musician. "Jack," he said, "I've been worrying about you. I believe you have some trouble."
Jack paused a moment, then looked up with his grave smile. "A love trouble, do you think? My dear boy, I'm just an ordinary cart-horse; I can't get out of my harness to fall in love like you artists. By the way, what's become of the girl you wrote that song for last summer?"
Theo's tendency to fall in love was a standing joke in the household. A less adoring mother than Helen might have grown a little impatient of his raptures over now one girl and now another whom he had sat beside at a concert or seen passing in the street. He would find resemblances to the Libyan sybil, or the Madonna delle Pie, or Our Lady of the Rocks, where Jack with his slower imagination could see only a woman like any other woman. Once, rambling round the coast, they passed a fisherman's bare-footed daughter, sitting on a low rock at the water's edge, mending her father's nets; her wind-roughened hair hanging on her shoulders, a red sunset behind her and wet sands gleaming all around. For a week Theo was restless and miserable; he would tramp in pouring rain over windy cliffs to the village where she lived, and come back in the evening, wet to the skin, and pallid with weariness and disappointment because he had not seen her. Then came Sunday, and he saw her going to church in her best clothes, shiny boots cramping her feet and the thick hair dragged up under a horrible monstrosity of a hat, nodding and wagging with huge magenta roses. He came home, with a tragic face, but cured. Nothing remained of his passion for the bare-legged unknown girl but an exquisite little violin romance, which he called: "The Fishing-Nets."
The holidays over, he went back to Germany. Helen had persisted in keeping the truth from him. "But, mother," Jack said at last; "he must know some time. Don't let it come with a shock at the end. And... Germany is such a long way off."
"There's still time; let him have his first concerts in peace. We can send for him when I get worse. And when he does come, dear, you must keep the bad sights from him. I... have seen a person dying of cancer, and I don't want Theo..."
"Mother!" Jack broke in, "that is not fair. He is a human creature, and you have no right to rob him of a human inheritance. You stand with a shield in front of him, and he will never learn to live."
"He will learn soon enough — afterwards."
"Afterwards... and you will go lonely this last winter..." "Not lonely, dear, when I have you." "Oh, yes, you have me, of course; but I'm not Theo. Mother, you have been sacrificed all your life; and now at the very end... It's wicked to carry unselfishness to that; it's not just."
"It would not be just for me to hamper his development. An artist is a high priest before the Lord; he belongs to all men and to no man. I have no right to take him from his music because I happen to be dying; that is for mothers whose sons have no genius."
Jack stood looking on the floor, his teeth set.
"Then thank God I have no genius!" he said at last. She drew him down to her and kissed his forehead.
"Even I may thank God for that."
When Theo had gone, Jack brought her up to London, and took lodgings near Kew Gardens, for himself and her. The daily journey to and from town was a heavy addition to the fatigue of his life, but it gave Helen fresh air to breathe and trees to look at, and enabled him to be with her for the few months left to them.
That winter he failed in his examination; it was the only occasion in his student life when this happened.
Before the questioning began he knew that he was going to fail; he had passed a terrible night at Helen's bedside, and his head ached and throbbed so that the floor seemed heaving beneath him. Taking his place, he looked round at his fellow-students. Some were nervously excited, some depressed; a few quite composed and business-like. He watched them, for a moment, with a kind of vague curiosity; they seemed to him so far away, so anxious over matters of no moment. Nothing was of any consequence, really, except the hopeless things. Cancer, for instance; perhaps they would be asked about that; the examiners putting questions and the students answering them would think they knew something about it, as if a man could know anything about cancer till the person he loves best is dying of it. Then he knows, the only thing there is to know: that there is nothing, nothing, nothing he can do.
He shut his eyes; the horror of last night came over him, stifling, intolerable. "Oh, this is no use!" he thought; "I'm good for nothing to-day; I'd better go." Then he pulled himself together and plunged stolidly into the task set him.
At the end of the day one of the examiners came up to him with friendly concern. "You're not looking yourself to-day, Raymond; I'm afraid you don't feel quite up to the mark."
"No, not quite," Jack answered. "I was a fool to come. I have failed, of course?"
"I... fear so. You look as if you ought to be in bed. What's wrong?"
"Oh, nothing much, thank you."
Two or three days afterwards the same examiner saw him in the street and crossed over to speak to him.
"Raymond, Professor Brooks dined with me yesterday, and talked about you. Why didn't you tell us you'd been up all night with a cancer patient? You were not fit to go in for the examination. I'm very sorry about it; he tells me you've been having a terribly hard time."
Jack's eyes flashed.
"Yes; and so has the woman that washes the dissecting-room floor. She lost her baby last week, and I found her crying on the stairs over her bread and cheese. But she didn't shirk her scrubbing; people's private troubles have got nothing to do with their work."