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Stephen Archer and Other Tales

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"She's gone to him!" he cried aloud, and, springing from the bed on
which he had thrown himself, he paced the chamber in a fury. He had no
word for it but hers that he was now in India! They had only been
waiting till--By heaven, that child was none of his! And therewith
rushed into his mind the conviction that everything was thus
explained. No man ever yet entertained an unhappy suspicion, but
straightway an army of proofs positive came crowding to the service of
the lie. It is astounding with what manifest probability everything
will fall in to prove that a fact which has no foundation whatever!
There is no end to the perfection with which a man may fool himself
while taking absolute precautions against being fooled by others.
Every fact, being a living fact, has endless sides and relations; but
of all these, the man whose being hangs upon one thought, will see
only those sides and relations which fall in with that thought.
Dempster even recalled the words of the maid, "It's mis'ess's," as
embodying the girl's belief that it was not master's. Where a man,
whether by nature jealous or not, is in a jealous condition, there is
no need of an Iago to parade before him the proofs of his wrong. It
was because Shakespere would neither have Desdemona less than perfect,
nor Othello other than the most trusting and least suspicious of men,
that he had to invent an all but incredible villain to effect the
needful catastrophe.

But why should a man, who has cared so little for his wife, become
instantly, upon the bare suspicion, so utter a prey to consuming
misery? There was a character in his suffering which could not be
attributed to any degree of anger, shame, or dread of ridicule. The
truth was, there lay in his being a possibility of love to his wife
far beyond anything his miserably stunted consciousness had an idea
of; and the conviction of her faithlessness now wrought upon him in
the office of Death, to let him know what he had lost. It magnified
her beauty in his eyes, her gentleness, her grace; and he thought with
a pang how little he had made of her or it.

But the next moment wrath at the idea of another man's child being
imposed upon him as his, with the consequent loss of his precious
money, swept every other feeling before it. For by law the child was
his, whoever might be the father of it. During a whole minute he felt
on the point of tying a stone about its neck, carrying it out, and
throwing it into the river Lea. Then, with the laugh of a hyena, he
set about arranging in his mind the proofs of her guilt. First came
eight childless years with himself; next the concealment of her
condition, and the absurd pretence that she had known nothing of it;
then the trouble of mind into which she had fallen; then her strange
unnatural aversion to her own child; and now, last of all, conclusive
of a guilty conscience, her flight from his house. He would give
himself no trouble to find her; why should he search after his own
shame! He would neither attempt to conceal nor to explain the fact
that she had left him--people might say what they pleased--try him for
murder if they liked! As to the child she had so kindly left to
console him for her absence, he would not drown him, neither would he
bring him up in his house; he would give him an ordinary education,
and apprentice him to a trade. For his money, he would leave it to a
hospital--a rich one, able to defend his will if disputed. For what
was the child? A monster--a creature that had no right to existence!

Not one of those who knew him best would have believed him capable of
being so moved, nor did one of them now know it, for he hid his
suffering with the success of a man not unaccustomed to make a mask of
his face. There are not a few men who, except something of the nature
of a catastrophe befall them, will pass through life without having or
affording a suspicion of what is in them. Everything hitherto had
tended to suppress the live elements of Duncan Dempster; but now, like
the fire of a volcano in a land of ice, the vitality in him had begun
to show itself.

Sheer weariness drove him, as the morning began to break, to lie down
again; but he neither undressed nor slept, and rose at his usual hour.
When he entered the dining-room, where breakfast was laid as
usual--only for one instead of two--he found by his plate, among
letters addressed to his wife, a packet directed to himself. It had
not been through the post, and the address was in his wife's hand. He
opened it. A sheet of paper was wrapped around a roll of unpaid
butcher's bills, amounting to something like eighty pounds, and a note
from the butcher craving immediate settlement. On the sheet of paper
was written, also in his wife's hand, these words: "I am quite
unworthy of being your wife any longer;" that was all.

Now here, to a man who had loved her enough to understand her, was a
clue to the whole--to Dempster it was the strongest possible
confirmation of what he had already concluded. To him it appeared as
certain as anything he called truth, that for years, while keeping a
fair face to her husband--a man who had never refused her anything--he
did not recall the fact that almost never had she asked or he offered
anything--she had been deceiving him, spending money she would not
account for, pretending to pay everything when she had been ruining
his credit with the neighbourhood, making him, a far richer man than
any but himself knew, appear to be living beyond his means, when he
was every month investing far more than he spent. It was injury upon
injury! Then, as a last mark of her contempt, she had taken pains that
these beggarly butcher's bills should reach him from her own hand! He
would trouble himself about such a woman not a moment longer!

He went from breakfast to his omnibus as usual, walked straight to his
office, and spent the day according to custom. I need hardly say that
the first thing he did was to write a cheque for the butcher. He made
no further inquiry after her whatever, nor was any made of him there,
for scarcely one of the people with whom he did business had been to
his house, or had even seen his wife.

In the suburb where he lived it was different; but he paid no heed to
any inquiry, beyond saying he knew nothing about her. To her relatives
he said that if they wanted her they might find her for themselves.
She had gone to please herself, and he was not going to ruin himself
by running about the world after her.

Night after night he came home to his desolate house; took no comfort
from his child; made no confession that he stood in need of comfort.
But he had a dull sensation as if the sun had forsaken the world, and
an endless night had begun. The simile, of course, is mine--the
sensation only was his; _he_ could never have expressed anything that
went on in the region wherein men suffer.

A few days made a marked difference in his appearance. He was a hard
man; but not so hard as people had thought him; and besides, _no_ man
can rule his own spirit except he has the spirit of right on his side;
neither is any man proof against the inroads of good. Even Lady
Macbeth was defeated by the imagination she had braved. Add to this,
that no man can, even by those who understand him best, be labelled as
a box containing such and such elements, for the humanity in him is
deeper than any individuality, and may manifest itself at some crisis
in a way altogether beside expectation.

His feeling was not at first of an elevated kind. After the grinding
wrath had abated, self-pity came largely to the surface--not by any
means a grand emotion, though very dear to boys and girls in their
first consciousness of self, and in them pardonable enough. On the
same ground it must be pardoned in a man who, with all his experience
of the world, was more ignorant of the region of emotion, and more
undeveloped morally, than multitudes of children: in him it was an
indication that the shell was beginning to break. He said to himself
that he was old beside her, and that she had begun to weary of him,
and despise him. Gradually upon this, however, supervened at intervals
a faint shadow of pity for her who could not have been happy or she
would not have left him.

Days and weeks passed, and there was no sign of Mrs. Dempster. The
child was not sent out to nurse, and throve well enough. His father
never took the least notice of him.




CHAPTER IV.

WHAT IT MEANT.


Some of my readers, perhaps all of them, will have concluded that Mrs.
Dempster was a little out of her mind. Such, indeed, was the fact, and
one not greatly to be wondered at, after such a peculiar experience as
she had had. Some small degree of congestion, and the consequent
pressure on some portion of the brain, had sent certain faculties to
sleep, and, perhaps, roused others into morbid activity. That it is
impossible to tell where sanity ends and insanity begins, is a trite
remark indeed; but like many things which it is useless to say, it has
the more need to be thought of. If I yield to an impulse of which I
know I shall be ashamed, is it not the act of a madman? And may not
the act lead to a habit, and at length to a despised, perhaps feared
and hated, old age, twisting at the ragged ends of a miserable life?

However certain it is that mental disorder had to do with Mrs.
Dempster's departure from her home, it is almost as certain she would
never have gone had it not been for the unpaid bills haunting her
consciousness, a combination of demon and ghost. The misery had all
the time been growing upon her, and must have had no small share in
the subversion of her microcosm. When that was effected, the evil
thing that lay at the root of it all rose and pounced upon her. Wrong
is its own avenger. She had been doing wrong, and knowingly for years,
and now the plant of evil was blossoming towards its fruit. If one say
the evil was but a trifle, I take her judgment, not his, upon that.
She had been lazy towards duty, had persistently turned aside from
what she knew to be her business, until she dared not even look at it.
And now that the crisis was at hand, as omened by that letter from the
butcher, with the sense of her wrong-doing was mingled the terror of
her husband. What would he think, say, and do? Not yet had she, after
all these years, any deep insight into his character; else perhaps she
might have read there that, much as he loved money, the pleasure of
seeing signal failure follow the neglect of his instructions would
quite compensate him for the loss. What the bills amounted to, she had
not an idea. Not until she had made up her mind to leave her home
could she muster the courage to get them together. Then she even
counted up the total and set down the sum in her memory--which sum
thereafter haunted her like the name of her devil.

As to the making up of her mind--she could remember very little of
that process--or indeed of the turning of her resolve into action. She
left the house in the plainest dress her wardrobe could afford her,
and with just one half-crown in her pocket. Her design was to seek a
situation, as a refuge from her husband and his wrath. It was a
curious thing, that, while it gave her no trouble to leave her baby,
whom indeed she had not that day seen, and to whom for some time she
had ceased to be necessary, her only notion was to get a place as
nurse.

At that time, I presume, there were few or no such offices for
engaging servants as are now common; at all events, the plan Mrs.
Dempster took, when she had reached a part of London she judged
sufficiently distant for her purpose, was to go from shop to shop
inquiring after a situation. But she met with no prospect of success,
and at last, greatly in need of rest and refreshment, went into a
small coffee shop. The woman who kept it was taken by her appearance,
her manners, and her evident trouble, and, happening to have heard of
a lady who wanted a nurse, gave her the address. She went at once, and
applied for the place. The lady was much pleased with her, and agreed
to take her, provided she received a satisfactory character of her.
For such a demand Mrs. Dempster was unprepared; she had never thought
what reference she could give, and, her resources for deception easily
exhausted, gave, driven to extremity, the name and address of her
mother. So met the extremes of loss and salvation! She returned to the
coffee shop, and the lady wrote at once to the address of the young
woman's late mistress, as she supposed.

The kindness of her new friend was not exhausted; she gave her a share
of her own bed that night. Mrs. Dempster had now but two shillings,
which she offered her, promising to pay her the rest out of the first
wages she received. But the good woman would take no more than one of
them, and that in full payment of what she owed her, and Mrs. Dempster
left the shop in tears, to linger about the neighbourhood until the
hour should arrive at which the lady had told her to call again.
Apparently she must have cherished the hope that her mother, divining
her extremity, would give her the character she could honestly claim.
But as she drew near the door which she hoped would prove a refuge,
her mother was approaching it also, and at the turning of a corner
they ran into each other's arms. The elderly lady had a hackney coach
waiting for her in the next street, and Mrs. Dempster, too tired to
resist, got into it at once at her mother's desire. Ere they reached
the mother's house, which, as I have said, was a long way from Mr.
Dempster's, the daughter told everything, and the mother had perceived
more than the daughter could tell: her eyes had revealed that all was
not right behind them. She soothed her as none but a mother can,
easily persuading her she would make everything right, and undertaking
herself to pay the money owing to the butcher. But it was soon evident
that for the present there must be no suggestion of her going back to
her husband; for, imagining from something, that her mother was taking
her to him, she jumped up and had all but opened the door of the cab
when her mother succeeded in mastering her. As soon as she was
persuaded that such had never been the intention, she was quiet. When
they reached the house she was easily induced to go to bed at once.

Her mother lived in a very humble way, with one servant, a trustworthy
woman. To her she confided the whole story, and with her consulted as
to what had better be done. Between them they resolved to keep her,
for a while at least, in retirement and silence. To this conclusion
they came on the following grounds: First, the daughter's terror and
the mother's own fear of Mr. Dempster; next, it must be confessed, the
resentment of both mistress and servant because of his rudeness when
he came to inquire after her; third, the evident condition of the poor
creature's mind; and last, the longing of the two women to have her to
themselves, that they might nurse and cosset her to their hearts'
content.

They were to have more of this indulgence, however, than, for her
sake, they would have desired, for before morning she was very ill.
She had brain fever, in fact, and they had their hands full,
especially as they desired to take every precaution to prevent the
neighbourhood from knowing there was any one but themselves in the
house.

It was a severe attack, but she passed the crisis favourably, and
began to recover. One morning, after a quieter night than usual, she
called her mother, and told her she had had a strange dream--that she
had a baby somewhere, but could not find him, and was wandering about
looking for him.

"Wasn't it a curious dream, mamma?" she said. "I wish it were a true
one. I knew exactly what my baby was like, and went into house after
house full of children, sure that I could pick him out of thousands. I
was just going up to the door of the Foundling Hospital to look for
him there when I woke."

As she ceased, a strange trouble passed like a cloud over her forehead
and eyes, and her hand, worn almost transparent by the fever followed
it over forehead and eyes. She seemed trying to recall something
forgotten. But her mother thought it better to say nothing.

Each of the two nights following she had the same dream.

"Three times, mother," she said. "I am not superstitious, as you know,
but I can't help feeling as if it must mean something. I don't know
what to make of it else--except it be that I haven't got over the
fever yet. And, indeed, I am afraid my head is not quite right, for I
can't be sure sometimes, such a hold has my dream of me, that I
haven't got a baby somewhere about the world. Give me your hand,
mother, and sing to me."

Still her mother thought it more prudent to say nothing, and do what
she could to divert her thoughts; for she judged it must be better to
let her brain come right, as it were, of itself.

In the middle of the next night she woke her with a cry.

"O, mother, mother! I know it all now. I am not out of my mind any
more. How I came here I cannot tell--but I know I have a husband and a
baby at Hackney--and--oh, such a horrible roll of butcher's bills!"

"Yes, yes, my dear! I know all about it," answered her mother. "But
never mind; you can pay them all yourself now, for I heard only
yesterday that your aunt Lucy is dead, and has left you the hundred
pounds she promised you twenty years ago."

"Oh, bless her!" cried Mrs. Dempster, springing out of bed, much to
the dismay of her mother, who boded a return of the fever. "I must go
home to my baby at once. But tell me all about it, mamma. How did I
come here? I seem to remember being in a carriage with you, and that
is the last I know."

Then, upon condition that she got into bed at once, and promised not
to move until she gave her leave, her mother consented to tell her all
she knew. She listened in silence, with face flushed and eyes glowing,
but drank a cooling draught, lay down again, and at daybreak was fast
asleep. When she awoke she was herself again.




CHAPTER V.

WHAT CAME OF IT.


Meantime, things were going, as they should, in rather a dull fashion
with Duncan Dempster. His chariot wheels were gone, and he drove
heavily. The weather was good; he seldom failed of the box-seat on the
omnibus; a ray of light, the first he had ever seen there, visited his
table, reflected from a new window on the opposite side of a court
into the heart of his dismal back office; and best of all, business
was better than usual. Yet was Dempster not cheerful. He was not,
indeed, a man an acquaintance would ever have thought of calling
cheerful; but in grays there are gradations; and however differently a
man's barometer may be set from those of other people, it has its ups
and downs, its fair weather and foul. But not yet had he an idea how
much his mental equilibrium had been dependent upon the dim
consciousness of having that quiet uninterested wife in the
comfortable house at Hackney. It had been stronger than it seemed, the
spidery, invisible line connecting that office and that house, along
which had run twice a day the hard dumpling that dwelt in Mr.
Dempster's bosom. Vaguely connected with that home after all must have
been that endless careful gathering of treasure in the city; for now,
though he could no more stop making money than he could stop
breathing, it had not the same interest as formerly. Indeed, he had
less interest than before in keeping his lungs themselves going. But
he kept on doing everything as usual.

Not one of the men he met ever said a word to him about his wife. The
general impression was that she had left him for preferable society,
and no one wondered at her throwing aside such "a dry old stick," whom
even the devoted slaves of business contemned as having nothing in him
but business.

A further change was, however, in progress within him. The first sign
of it was that he began to doubt whether his wife had indeed been
false to him--had forsaken him in any other company than that of
Death. But there was one great difficulty in the way of the
conclusion. It was impossible for him to imagine suicide as proceeding
from any cause but insanity, and what could have produced the disorder
in one who had no cares or anxieties, everything she wanted, and
nothing to trouble her, a devoted husband, and a happy home? Yet the
mere idea made him think more pitifully, and so more tenderly of her
than before. It had not yet occurred to him to consider whether he
might not have had something to do with her conduct or condition.
Blame was a thing he had never made acquaintance with--least of all in
the form of self-blame. To himself he was simply all right--the poised
centre of things capable of righteous judgment on every one else. But
it must not be forgotten how little he knew about his own affairs at
all; his was a very different condition from that of one who had
closed his eyes and hardened his heart to suspicions concerning
himself. His eyes had never yet been opened to anything but the order
of things in the money world--its laws, its penalties, its
rewards--those he did understand. But apparently he was worth
troubling. A slow dissatisfaction was now preying upon him--a sense of
want--of not having something he once had, a vague discomfort, growing
restless. This feeling was no doubt the worse that the birth of the
child had brought such a sudden rush of fresh interest into his
occupation, which doubt concerning that birth had again so suddenly
checked; but even if the child should prove after all his own, a
supposition he was now willing to admit as possibly a true one, he
could never without his mother feel any enthusiasm about him, even
such enthusiasm as might be allowed to a man who knew money from
moonshine, and common sense from hysterics. Yet once and again, about
this time, the nurse coming into the room after a few minutes'
absence, found him bending over the sleeping infant, and, as she
described him, "looking as if he would have cried if he had only known
how."

One frosty evening in late autumn the forsaken husband came from
London--I doubt if he would now have said "home"--as usual, on the top
of the omnibus. His was a tough nature physically, as well as morally,
and if he had found himself inside an omnibus he would have thought he
was going to die. The sun was down. A green hue rose from the horizon
half-way to the zenith, but a pale yellow lingered over the vanished
sun, like the gold at the bottom of a chrysolite. The stars were
twinkling small and sharp in the azure overhead. A cold wind blew in
little gusts, now from this side, now from that, as they went steadily
along. The horses' hoofs rang loud on the hard road. The night got
hold of him: it was at this season, and on nights like these, that he
had haunted the house of Lucy's father, doing his best to persuade her
to make him, as he said, a happy man. It now seemed as if then, and
then only, he had been a happy man. Certainly, of all his life, it was
the time when he came nearest to having a peep out of the upper
windows of the house of life. He had been a dweller in the lower
regions, a hewer of wood to the god of the cellar; and after his
marriage, he had gone straight down again to the temple of the earthy
god--to a worship whose god and temple and treasure caves will one day
drop suddenly from under the votary's feet, and leave him dangling in
the air without even a pocket about him--without even his banker's
book to show for his respectability.

The night, I say, recalled the lovely season of his courtship, and
again, in the mirror of loss, he caught a glimpse of things beyond
him. Ah, if only that time and its hopes had remained with him! How
different things would have been now! If Lucy had proved what he
thought her!--remained what she seemed--the gentle, complaisant,
yielding lady he imagined her, promising him a life of bliss! Alas,
she would not even keep account of five pounds a week to please him!
He never thought whether he, on his part, might not have, in some
measure, come short of her expectations in a husband; whether she, the
more lovely in inward design and outward fashion, might not have
indulged yet more exquisite dreams of bliss which, by devotion to his
ideal of life, he had done his part in disappointing. He only thought
what a foolishness it all was; that thus it would go on to the end of
the book; that youth after youth would have his turn of such a wooing,
and such a disappointment. Sunsets, indeed! The suns of man's
happiness never did anything but set! Out of money even--and who could
say there was any poetry in that?--there was not half the satisfaction
to be got that one expected. It was all a mess of expectations and
disappointments mashed up together--nothing more. That was the
world--on a fair judgment.

Such were his reflections till the driver pulled up for him to get
down at his own gate. As he got down the said driver glanced up
curiously at the row of windows on the first floor, and as soon as Mr.
Dempster's back was turned, pointed to them with the butt-end of his
whip, and nodded queerly to the gentleman who sat on his other side.

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