"Jeanie and I redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if Death were waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out. I hardly ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers to his anxious questions.
"At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and, shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh till we reeled against the dirty walls. I think we were both getting a little mad.
"One day―it was the third of that nightmare life, so I learned afterwards, though for all I could have told then it might have been the three hundredth, for Time seemed to have fled from that house as from a dream, so that all things were tangled―I made a slip that came near to ending the matter, then and there.
"I had gone into that other room. Jeanie had left her post for a moment, and the place was empty.
"I did not think what I was doing. I had not closed my eyes that I can remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses were losing their hold of one another. I went through my usual performance of talking loudly to the thing underneath the white sheet, and noisily patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on the table.
"On my return, he asked me how she was, and I answered, half in a dream, 'Oh, bonny, she's trying to read a little,' and he raised himself on his elbow and called out to her, and for answer there came back silence―not the silence that IS silence, but the silence that is as a voice. I do not know if you understand what I mean by that. If you had lived among the dead as long as I have, you would know.
"I darted to the door and pretended to look in. 'She's fallen asleep,' I whispered, closing it; and he said nothing, but his eyes looked queerly at me.
"That night, Jeanie and I stood in the hall talking. He had fallen to sleep early, and I had locked the door between the two rooms, and put the key in my pocket, and had stolen down to tell her what had happened, and to consult with her.
"'What can we do! God help us, what can we do!' was all that Jeanie could say. We had thought that in a day or two he would be stronger, and that the truth might be broken to him. But instead of that he had grown so weak, that to excite his suspicions now by moving him or her would be to kill him.
"We stood looking blankly in each other's faces, wondering how the problem could be solved; and while we did so the problem solved itself.
"The one woman-servant had gone out, and the house was very silent―so silent that I could hear the ticking of Jeanie's watch inside her dress. Suddenly, into the stillness there came a sound. It was not a cry. It came from no human voice. I have heard the voice of human pain till I know its every note, and have grown careless to it; but I have prayed God on my knees that I may never hear that sound again, for it was the sob of a soul.
"It wailed through the quiet house and passed away, and neither of us stirred.
"At length, with the return of the blood to our veins, we went upstairs together. He had crept from his own room along the passage into hers. He had not had strength enough to pull the sheet off, though he had tried. He lay across the bed with one hand grasping hers."
My nurse sat for a while without speaking, a somewhat unusual thing for her to do.
"You ought to write your experiences," I said.
"Ah!" she said, giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to write a sad book."
"I think," she added, after a long pause, with the poker still in her hand, "it can only be the people who have never KNOWN suffering who can care to read of it. If I could write a book, I should write a merry book―a book that would make people laugh."
CHAPTER IX
The discussion arose in this way. I had proposed a match between our villain and the daughter of the local chemist, a singularly noble and pure-minded girl, the humble but worthy friend of the heroine.
Brown had refused his consent on the ground of improbability. "What in thunder would induce him to marry HER?" he asked.
"Love!" I replied; "love, that burns as brightly in the meanest villain's breast as in the proud heart of the good young man."
"Are you trying to be light and amusing," returned Brown, severely, "or are you supposed to be discussing the matter seriously? What attraction could such a girl have for such a man as Reuben Neil?"
"Every attraction," I retorted. "She is the exact moral contrast to himself. She is beautiful (if she's not beautiful enough, we can touch her up a bit), and, when the father dies, there will be the shop."
"Besides," I added, "it will make the thing seem more natural if everybody wonders what on earth could have been the reason for their marrying each other."
Brown wasted no further words on me, but turned to MacShaughnassy.
"Can YOU imagine our friend Reuben seized with a burning desire to marry Mary Holme?" he asked, with a smile.
"Of course I can," said MacShaughnassy; "I can imagine anything, and believe anything of anybody. It is only in novels that people act reasonably and in accordance with what might be expected of them. I knew an old sea-captain who used to read the Young Ladies' Journal in bed, and cry over it. I knew a bookmaker who always carried Browning's poems about with him in his pocket to study in the train. I have known a Harley Street doctor to develop at forty-eight a sudden and overmastering passion for switchbacks, and to spend every hour he could spare from his practice at one or other of the exhibitions, having three-pen'orths one after the other. I have known a book-reviewer give oranges (not poisoned ones) to children. A man is not a character, he is a dozen characters, one of them prominent, the other eleven more or less undeveloped. I knew a man once, two of whose characters were of equal value, and the consequences were peculiar."
We begged him to relate the case to us, and he did so.
"He was a Balliol man," said MacShaughnassy, "and his Christian name was Joseph. He was a member of the 'Devonshire' at the time I knew him, and was, I think, the most superior person I have ever met. He sneered at the Saturday Review as the pet journal of the suburban literary club; and at the Athenaeum as the trade organ of the unsuccessful writer. Thackeray, he considered, was fairly entitled to his position of favourite author to the cultured clerk; and Carlyle he regarded as the exponent of the earnest artisan. Living authors he never read, but this did not prevent his criticising them contemptuously. The only inhabitants of the nineteenth century that he ever praised were a few obscure French novelists, of whom nobody but himself had ever heard. He had his own opinion about God Almighty, and objected to Heaven on account of the strong Clapham contingent likely to be found in residence there. Humour made him sad, and sentiment made him ill. Art irritated him and science bored him. He despised his own family and disliked everybody else. For exercise he yawned, and his conversation was mainly confined to an occasional shrug.