ONE by one they all went to bed. Only Dick and Maude watched by Barny’s bedside all through the night, and Muffy sat in the keep, listening, in case they should call for her. Lights twinkled a little in the tower windows and went out.
The rain had stopped and the night was clearing. A few small stars twinkled doubtfully through the clouds over the courtyard. Each time that Muffy came to the door of the keep the quality of the darkness seemed to be thinner. The world was swinging over into morning. Yet the transition from night to day happened, as it always does, when no one was looking. She went to the door and it was dark. Ten minutes later it was grey.
Barny, emerging slowly from his drugged quiescence, made a bad patient. He had shown great fortitude before the operation, but none now that he knew it was over. He was very thirsty and they would not give him anything to drink for fear that he might be sick. He kept on imploring them to let him be sick, rather than prolong this torture. Dick had little patience with him, and left him to Maude, who might have been born for such a moment, who could meet Barny’s unreasonable reproaches with boundless sympathy, simply because they were unreasonable. She was an excellent nurse. Towards morning Barny began to threaten that he would get out of bed and find himself a drink.
“We must tie him down,” said Dick impatiently, “if this sort of thing goes on. You can’t hold him for ever.”
Maude shook her head.
“He won’t,” she said. “I’ve seen them like this before.”
“Have you? I’m glad I’m not a nurse.”
Barny eyed Dick with malignant dislike.
“Has anybody told you you’re a swine yet?” he asked. “If I’m sick it’ll be from the sight of you. Why don’t you go back to your …”
“Hush, Barny dear! If it hadn’t been for Dick …”
“Thinks I ought to be grateful to him, does he? I’m not. We’re going to see that Ellen gets a divorce, and he needn’t think that this’ll make any difference.”
Barny relapsed into weary mutterings about cads and swine and the indignity of having one’s appendix removed by a physician-accoucheur. He seemed to take this last very much to heart and feared that it might get known in the Temple.
Maude said to Dick:
“Go down for a bit and smoke a pipe in the courtyard. You must want one and I can manage him alone. I’m used to this sort of thing.”
“All right,” said Dick. “But don’t give him anything whatever to drink. I don’t want to start that vomiting again.”
“My dear Dick! As if I should.”
After the sick room, with its reek of chloroform and antiseptics, the air of the courtyard was like nectar. Dick’s footsteps echoed against the sleeping walls with a hollow sound, so that he found himself trying to walk softly. It was nearer to-day than he had thought and the stars were waning in the square of pale sky overhead.
He sat down on the edge of the well and lit his pipe. He was tired, but his mood was chiefly one of satisfaction over a difficult job well done. They had got Barny through it, though he had hardly dared to touch that appendix, fearing it would rupture before he got it out.
“Damned good thing I opened him up when I did,” he thought. “But how Thring will laugh when I tell him! Only he’ll never believe in the old …; nobody could who hadn’t seen him. I wish Clarke had been there. He can imitate a brogue.”
He began to think of all that they must do to-morrow, the drugs and appliances that he would need and the steps that he must take to get them quickly. Barny’s angry reproaches affected him not at all. Later on there would be trouble, he supposed. He would have to face the consequences of what he had done. But he was not sure what these would be, and, at the back of his mind, there was already a certain confidence in his own capacity to deal with them. To-night he had put through a difficult job successfully and that was quite enough for the moment.
He yawned and saw with amazement how quickly the light was growing. Everything in the courtyard was now visible, though without colour. Muffy’s white apron glimmered at the door of the keep and the candle which she held burned wanly. She was calling to him, in an echoing whisper:
“Dr. Napier … how is he?”
“Going on splendidly. You can go to bed now, if you like, Muffy. We shan’t want anything more.”
“Dr. Napier! Can I speak to you for a minute, please?”
She wanted him to come with her into the keep. He left the cool air reluctantly and went into the warm dusk of firelight and guttering candles. Muffy offered him a cup of coffee, which he took mechanically.
“Oh, sir … are you coming back to her … to Miss Ellen?”
He made a gesture to stop her. He did not want to go into all that yet.
“This isn’t the time to talk of it, Muffy.”
“I know, sir. But there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I’ve not had the chance before, but I must tell you at once. You see, sir, she doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know?” he asked confusedly.
“Not a thing, poor lamb. The others, they’ve been putting it about that you went on a walking tour. But Miss Ellen, she believes it.”
“Believes … believes …”
“I’m certain of it. She told me so. I could hardly credit my own ears, but it’s true.”
“But how can she …”
This was important. He must attend to it.
“I don’t know, sir. I suppose she just didn’t put two and two together, like the others did. And then, you know, Mr. Lindsay went over, but nobody was going to tell her that, stand to reason. We all thought she knew already. We all thought she was just passing it off. But it’s not so, sir. She thinks you’ve been true to her, if I might take the liberty of putting it like that. And she’d kill anyone who said anything different.”
Dick struggled amidst his other preoccupations, making the attempt to take this in.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as I stand here. She told me. She’d had her suspicions of what they were saying, you know, though she’d no notion of the real thing. She thought we had made out that there must have been some difference between the two of you, to make you go off so suddenly. Some quarrel about that … that lady. And she said: ‘Never let me hear you suggest such a thing,’ she said. She was in a real taking. ‘A husband and a wife,’ she said, ‘is quite above that sort of thing.’ I couldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t heard her. So you see, sir …”
She stopped and began to twist her apron, looking anxiously into his face.
Dick took some time to see. Fatigue and concentration had made him slow-witted. He found it hard to bring his mind to this extraordinary idea. But, after asking Muffy a few more questions, he began to be convinced.
“It was very stupid of her,” he commented, more to himself than Muffy.
She flared up at this.
“Stupid you may call it. I don’t. What should she know of such things, so good as she is? It’s written in the Bible, Dr. Napier, if you care to look. ‘Love thinketh no evil,’ it says. It wouldn’t come to her to think badly of you, because she looks up to you as a wife should do. If you think that stupid, then I’m sorry for you. She couldn’t think evil of you, sir, unless she was to hear it from your own lips.”
“I know.”
But some women, he thought, just as loving, might have guessed. Ellen’s stupidity, Ellen’s goodness, her love, how were these things to be disentangled? Had she failed to guess because she was good or because she was stupid?
“So you see, sir …” persisted the anxious Muffy.
“Yes, I see.”
“But do you? You haven’t thought yet. What I mean is that she’s still got it all to go through, worse than we thought, unless … unless …”
“Unless what, Muffy?”
“Unless you see to it that she’s spared.”
This was going on rather far for Dick. He was conscious of relief and thankfulness, because Ellen had not suffered. He was even dimly aware of the importance of this news. He knew that he would have been much more moved by it if he had not been so sleepy and so busy. Both his relief and his hope were languid.
“You want me,” he said with an effort, “never to tell her? To remain here, and behave as if nothing had happened?”
“That’s right, sir. You will, won’t you?”
“I don’t know, Muffy. That’s not a question I can answer now.”
“It would kill her if she knew. It really would. She’d never understand. She’d think you couldn’t love her.”
“Do you think I do?”
“I don’t doubt it, sir. But then I’m an old woman. I wouldn’t have seen it that way, not when I was Miss Ellen’s age.”
“No,” agreed Dick. “You’re right. She’d never understand.”
“And there’s more than her to think of. There’s her baby. The shock …”
“I know.”
“If she must be told, couldn’t you wait …”
“But the others? They all know. If I don’t tell her, they will …”
“Oh, no, sir. They’ll do what’s best for Miss Ellen. If they see you’ve come back to her they’ll not say anything to upset her. They know she mustn’t be upset, same as we do. Least said, soonest mended, they’ll think. And it’s not known to anyone outside the family barring Mr. Fletcher.”
“He won’t talk.”
“No. He seems a nice gentleman. And they’ll have all written to Mrs. Annesley, sure to. But she never interferes. She won’t want anything but to see Miss Ellen happy.”
Dick surveyed with detachment these possibilities.
It appeared that he was not ruined after all. All he had to do was to hold his tongue. Home, wife, and children were still his, and he might go back to his work in the autumn with an untarnished name. Ellen’s relations could not be expected to like him very cordially again, but they would keep their feelings to themselves. He did not much care. He had no great opinion of Ellen’s relations. And he would continue to think badly of himself. The episode had done him no credit at all. But even this was a bearable prospect. His opinion of himself could stand a good deal of wear and tear. The passing folly which has not ruined a life can be leniently dismissed.
He had been through a period of nervous disintegration, when the forces which governed his character seemed to be at a standstill. That was over now. He had come to himself. And though he felt remote from any sort of decision at the moment, he knew that his nature, confident, insensitive, and a little unscrupulous, would eventually carry the issue.
“If you should wait till after the child is born …” pleaded Muffy.
“I shall do what’s best for her,” he said. “I’ll think over what you’ve said. You were right to tell me at once. I’m obliged to you.”
He looked at his watch and drank up the coffee, which had grown cold. Bidding good night to Muffy, he went back to see how Maude and Barny were getting on.
She watched him striding across the court, looking, she told herself resentfully, as if he’d bought the place. It was broad daylight now, and a glow on the eastern tower told of the approaching sunrise. When she drew back the curtains in the keep it was so light that she could blow out the candles. She washed the coffee things, rehearsing mentally a narrative of these things:
“He didn’t seem to feel it as he ought, ma’am, but I think he will do what is right in his own way. He is a hard gentleman. I said to him, I said: ‘She doesn’t know any more than the babe unborn.’ ‘Oh!’ he says, ‘stupid of her.’ ‘Stupid!’ I could have boxed his ears. But it’s his nature to be hard, I suppose. And that’s the whole truth of it, ma’am. Miss Ellen, she never knew. I said: ‘It’ll kill her if you tell,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t understand.’ And she wouldn’t, would she? Not Miss Ellen …”
On the dresser there was a penny bottle of ink and a leather writing case which Mrs. Annesley had given to her at Christmas. She got as far as sitting down at the table and dating the letter which she would have wished to write.
“Dear Madam …” she wrote.
But it was too difficult. Her powers as a letter-writer were very limited and the narrative, so fluent in her mind, escaped her when she tried to commit it to paper. She got no further than Dear Madam.
Sunlight filled the sky and all the birds on the island began to sing. Muffy chewed the end of her pen for a little while. And then she gave it up. There was no need to write it in a letter. Plenty of people would tell Mrs. Annesley what had happened, how Barny had been taken ill, and how Dick had come back, and how everything seemed to have turned out for the best. Her story would keep. Soon she would be seeing Mrs. Annesley and they would have a long talk, and then she could be sure that her tale would go no further. Mrs. Annesley never betrayed confidences. After all it was not very safe to write things down. You never knew who might read them.
She tore up the sheet, yawned twice, and went to bed.