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Stephen Archer and Other Tales

G >> George MacDonald >> Stephen Archer and Other Tales




Now this might have been very well, or at least not very ill, if both
had done tolerably well thereafter--that is, if the one had continued
to attend to her expenditure as well as before, and the other, when he
threw away the account-book, had dismissed from his mind the whole
matter. But Dempster was one of those dangerous men--more dangerous,
however, to themselves than to others--who never forget, that is, get
over, an offence or disappointment. They respect themselves so much,
and, out of their respect for themselves, build so much upon success,
set so ranch by never being defeated but always gaining their point,
that when they are driven to confess themselves foiled, the confession
is made from the "poor dumb mouth" of a wound that cannot be healed.
It is there for ever--will be there at least until they find another
God to worship than their own paltry selves. Hence it came that the
bourn between the two spiritual estates yawned a little wider at one
point, and a mist of dissatisfaction would not unfrequently rise from
a certain stagnant pool in its hollow. The cause was paltry in one
sense, but nothing to which belongs the name of _Cause_ can fail to
mingle the element of awfulness even with its paltriness. Its worst
effect was that it hindered approximation in other parts of their
marching natures.

And as to Mrs. Dempster, I am sorry for the apparent justification
which what I have to confess concerning her must give to the severe
whims of such husbands as hers: from that very Monday morning she
began to grow a little careless about her expenditure--which she had
never been before. By degrees bill after bill was allowed to filch
from the provision of the following week, and when that was devoured,
then from that of the week after. It was not that she was in the least
more expensive upon herself, or that she consciously wasted anything;
but, altogether averse to housekeeping, she ceased to exercise the
same outlook upon the expenditure of the house, did not keep her
horses together, left the management more and more to her cook; while
the consciousness that she was not doing her duty made her more and
more uncomfortable, and the knowledge that things were going farther
and farther wrong, made her hate the idea of accounts worse and worse,
until she came at length to regard them with such a loathing as might
have fitted some extreme of moral evil. The bills which were supposed
by her husband to be regularly settled every week were at last months
behind, and the week's money spent in meeting the most pressing of its
demands, while what it could no longer cover was cast upon the growing
heap of evil for the time to come.

I must say this for her, however, that there was a small sum of money
she expected on the death of a crazy aunt, which, if she could but lay
hold of it without her husband's knowledge, she meant to devote to the
clearing off of everything, when she vowed to herself to do better in
the time to come.

The worst thing in it all was that her fear of her husband kept
increasing, and that she felt more and more uncomfortable in his
presence. Hence that troubled look in her eye, always more marked when
her husband sat dozing in his chair of a Sunday afternoon.

It was natural, too, that, although they never quarrelled, their
intercourse should not grow of a more tender character. Seldom was
there a salient point in their few scattered sentences of
conversation, except, indeed, it were some piece of news either had to
communicate. Occasionally the wife read something from the newspaper,
but never except at her husband's request. In general he enjoyed his
newspaper over a chop at his office. Two or three times since their
marriage--now eight years--he had made a transient resolve pointing at
the improvement of her mind, and to that end had taken from his great
glass-armoured bookcase some _standard_ work--invariably, I believe,
upon party-politics--from which he had made her read him a chapter.
But, unhappily, she had always got to the end of it without gaining
the slightest glimmer of a true notion of what the author was driving
at.

It almost moves me to pity to think of the vagueness of that
rudimentary humanity in Mr. Dempster which made him dream of doing
something to improve his wife's mind. What did he ever do to improve
his own? It is hard to understand how horses find themselves so
comfortable in their stables that, be the day ever so fine, the
country ever so lovely, the air ever so exhilarating, they are always
rejoiced to get back into their dull twilight: it is harder to me to
understand how Mr. Dempster could be so comfortable in his own mind
that he never wanted to get out of it, even at the risk of being
beside himself; but no doubt the dimness of its twilight had a good
deal to do with his content. And then there is that in every human
mind which no man's neighbour, nay, no man himself, can understand. My
neighbour may in his turn be regarding my mind as a gloomy place to
live in, while I find it no undesirable residence--though chiefly
because of the number of windows it affords me for looking out of it.
Still, if Dempster's dingy office in the City was not altogether a
sufficing type of the mind that used it, I consider it a very fairly
good one.

But wherein was Mrs. Dempster so very different from her husband as I
rudely fancy some of my readers imagining her? Whatever may have been
her reasons for marrying him--one would suppose they must have been
weighty--to do so she must have been in a very undeveloped condition,
and in that condition she still remained. I do not mean that she was
less developed than ninety-nine out of the hundred: most women affect
me only as valuable crude material out of which precious things are
making. How much they might be, must be, shall be! For now they stand
like so many Lot's-wives--so many rough-hewn marble blocks, rather, of
which a Divinity is shaping the ends. Mrs. Dempster had all the making
of a lovely woman, but notwithstanding her grace, her beauty, her
sweetness, her lark-like ballading too, she was a very ordinary woman
in that region of her which knew what she meant when she said "I." Of
this fact she had hardly a suspicion, however; for until aspiration
brings humility, people are generally pretty well satisfied with
themselves, having no idea what poor creatures they are. She saw in
her mirror a superior woman, regarded herself as one of the finer
works of creation. The worst was that from the first she had counted
herself superior to her husband, and in marrying him had felt not
merely that she was conferring a favour, which every husband would
allow, but that she was lowering herself without elevating him. Now it
is true that she was pleasanter to look at, that her manners were
sweeter, and her notions of the becoming far less easily satisfied
than his; also that she was a little less deficient in vague reverence
for certain forms of the higher than he. But I know of nothing in her
to determine her classification as of greater value than he, except
indeed that she was on the whole rather more honest. She read novels
and he did not; she passed shallow judgment, where he scorned to
judge; she read all the middling poetry that came in her way, and
copied books full of it; but she could no more have appreciated one of
Milton's or Shakspere's smallest poems than she could have laughed
over a page of Chinese. She liked to hear this and that popular
preacher, and when her husband called his sermons humbug, she heard it
with a shocked countenance; but was she better or worse than her
husband when, admiring them as she did, she permitted them to have no
more influence upon her conduct than if they had been the merest
humbug ever uttered by ambitious demagogue? In truth, I cannot see
that in the matter of worth there was much as yet to choose between
them.

It is hardly necessary, then, to say that there was little appreciable
approximation of any kind going on between them. If only they would
have read Dickens together! Who knows what might have come of it! But
this dull close animal proximity, without the smallest conscious
nearness of heart or mind or soul--and so little chance, from very
lack of wants, for showing each other kindnesses--surely it is a
killing sort of thing! And yet, and yet, there is always a
something--call it habit, or any poorest name you please--grows up
between two who are much together, at least when they neither quarrel
nor thwart each other's designs, which, tending with its roots towards
the deeper human, blossoms into--a wretched little flower indeed, yet
afar off partaking of the nature of love. The Something seldom reveals
its existence until they are parted. I suspect that with not a few,
Death is the love-messenger at the stroke of whose dart the stream of
love first begins to flow in the selfish bosom.

It is now necessary to mention a little break in the monotony of Mrs.
Dempster's life, which, but for what came afterwards, could claim no
record. One morning her page announced Major Strong, and possibly she
received the gentleman who entered with a brighter face than she had
ever shown her husband. The major had just arrived from India. He had
been much at her father's house while she was yet a mere girl, being
then engaged to one of her sisters, who died after he went abroad, and
before he could return to marry her. He was now a widower, a
fine-looking, frank, manly fellow. The expression of his countenance
was little altered, and the sight of him revived in the memory of Mrs.
Dempster many recollections of a happy girlhood, when the prospect of
such a life as she now led with tolerable content would have seemed
simply unendurable. When her husband came home she told him as much as
he cared to hear of the visitor she had had, and he made no objection
to her asking him to dine the next Sunday. When he arrived Mr.
Dempster saw a man of his own age, bronzed and big, with not much
waist left, but a good carriage and pleasant face. He made himself
agreeable at dinner, appreciated his host's wine, and told good
stories that pleased the business man as showing that he knew "what
was what." He accorded him his more particular approval, speaking to
his wife, on the ground that he was a man of the world, with none of
the army slang about him. Mr. Dempster was not aware that he had
himself more business peculiarities than any officer in her majesty's
service had military ones.

After this Major Strong frequently called upon Mrs. Dempster. They
were good friends, and did each other no harm whatever, and the
husband neither showed nor felt the least jealousy. They sang
together, occasionally went out shopping, and three or four times went
together to the play. Mr. Dempster, so long as he had his usual
comforts, did not pine in his wife's absence, but did show a little
more pleasure when she came home to him than usually when he came home
to her. This lasted for a few months. Then the major went back to
India, and for a time the lady missed him a good deal, which,
considering the dulness of her life, was not very surprising or
reprehensible.




CHAPTER II.

AN ASTONISHMENT.


Now comes the strange part of my story.

One evening the housemaid opened the door to Mr. Dempster on his
return from the city; and perhaps the fact that it was the maid, and
not the page as usual, roused his observation, which, except in
business matters, was not remarkably operative. He glanced at the
young woman, when an eye far less keen than his could not have failed
to remark a strangely excited expression on her countenance.

"Where is the boy?" he asked.

"Just run to the doctor's, sir," she answered.

Then first he remembered that when he left in the morning his wife had
not been feeling altogether well, but he had never thought of her
since.

"How is your mistress?" he said.

"She's rather poorly, sir, but--but--she's as well as could be
expected."

"What does the fool mean?" said Dempster to himself, and very nearly
said it aloud, for he was not over polite to any in his service. But
he did not say it aloud. He advanced into the hall with deliberation,
and made for the stair.

"Oh, please sir," the maid cried in a tone of perturbation, when,
turning from shutting the door, she saw his intention, "you can't go
up to mis'ess's room just at this minute, sir. Please go in the
dining-room, sir."

"What do you mean?" he asked, turning angrily upon the girl, for of
all things he hated mystery.

Like every one else in the house, and office both, she stood in awe of
him, and his look frightened her.

"Please go in the dining-room," she gasped entreatingly.

"What!" he said and did turn towards the dining-room, "is your
mistress so ill she can't see me?"

"Oh, no, sir!--at least I don't know exactly. Cook's with her, sir.
She's over the worst, anyhow."

"What on earth do you mean, girl? Speak out, will you? What is the
matter with your mistress?"

As he spoke he stepped into the room, the maid following him. The same
moment he spied a whitish bundle of something on the rug in front of
the fire.

"What do you mean by leaving things like that in the dining-room?" he
went on more angrily still.

"Please, sir," answered the girl, going and lifting the bundle
carefully, "it's the baby!"

"The baby!" shouted Mr. Dempster, and looked at her from head to foot.
"What baby?" Then bethinking himself that it must belong to some
visitor in the drawing-room with his wife, he moderated his tone.
"Make haste; take it away!" he said. "I don't want babies here!
There's a time and a place for everything!--What _are_ you about?"

For, instead of obeying her master and taking it away, the maid was
carefully looking in the blanket for the baby. Having found it and
turned aside the covering from its face, she came nearer, and holding
up the little vision, about the size and colour of a roll of red wax
taper, said:--

"Look at it, sir! It's your own, and worth looking at."

Never before had she dared speak to him so!

I will not venture to assert that Mr. Dempster turned white, but his
countenance changed, and he dropped into the chair behind him, feeling
less of a business man than had been his consciousness for the last
twenty years. He was hit hard. The absolutely Incredible had hit him.
Babies might be born in a day, but surely not without previous
preparation on the part of nature at least, if not on that of the
mother; and in this case if the mother had prepared herself, certainly
she had not prepared him for the event. It was as if the treasure of
Nature's germens were tumbling all together. His head swam. He could
not speak a word.

"Yes, sir," the maid went on, relieved of her trepidation in
perceiving that her master too was mortal, and that her word had such
power over him--proud also of knowing more of his concerns than he did
himself, "she was took about an hour and a half ago. We've kep'
sendin' an' sendin' after the doctor, but he ain't never been yet;
only cook, she knows a deal an' she says she's been very bad, sir. But
the young gentleman come at last, bless him! and now she's doin' as
well as could be expected, sir--cook says."

"God bless me!" said the astonished father, and relapsed into the
silence of bewilderment.

Eight years married with never a glimmer of offspring--and now, all at
once, and without a whisper of warning, the father of a "young
gentleman!" How could it be other than perplexing--discomposing,
indeed!--yet it was right pleasant too. Only it would have been more
pleasant if experience could have justified the affair! Nature--no,
not Nature--or, if Nature, then Nature sure in some unnatural mood,
had stolen a march upon him, had gone contrary to all that had ever
been revealed of her doings before! and why had she pitched on
him--just him, Duncan Dempster, to exercise one of her more grotesque
and wayward moods upon?--to play at hide-and-seek with after this
fashion? She had not treated him with exactly proper respect, he
thought, or, rather vaguely felt.

"Business is business," he remarked, under his breath, "and this
cannot be called proper business behaviour. What is there about me to
make game of? Really, my wife ought--"

What his wife ought or ought not to have done, however, had not yet
made itself clear to him, and his endeavour to excogitate being in
that direction broken off, gave way to the pleasure of knowing himself
a father, or perhaps more truly of having an heir. In the strength of
it he rose, went to the cellaret, and poured himself out a glass of
his favourite port, which he sat down to drink in silence and
meditation. He was rather a picture just then and there, though not a
very lovely one, seated, with his hat still on his head, in the middle
of the room, upon a chair half-way between the dining-table and the
sideboard, with his glass of wine in his hand. He was pondering partly
the pleasure, but still mainly the peculiarity of his position. A
bishop once told me that, shortly after he had been raised to the
episcopal dignity, a friend's horses, whose driver had tumbled off the
box drunk, ran away with him, and upset the carriage. He crept out of
the window over his head, and the first thought that came to him as he
sat perched on the side of the carriage, while it was jumbled along by
the maddened horses, was, "What do bishops do in such circumstances?"
Equally perplexing was the question Dempster had to ask himself: how
husbands who, after being married eight years, suddenly and
unexpectedly received the gift of a first-born, were in the habit of
comporting themselves! He poured himself out another glass, and with
it came the reflection, both amusing and consoling, that his brother,
who was confidently expecting his tidy five figures to crown the
earthly bliss of one or more of his large family some day, would be
equally but less agreeably surprised. "Serve him right!" he said to
himself. "What business have they to be looking out for my death?" And
for a moment the heavens appeared a little more just than he was
ordinarily in the habit of regarding them. He said to himself he would
work harder than ever now. There would now be some good in making
money! He had never given his mind to it yet, he said: now the world
should see what he could do when he did give his mind to it!

Hitherto gathering had been his main pleasure, but with the thought of
his money would now not seldom be mingled the thought of the little
thing in the blanket! He began to find himself strangely happy. I use
the wrong phrase--for the fact is, he had never yet found himself at
all; he knew nothing of the person except a self-painted and immensely
flattered portrait that hung in the innermost chamber of his heart--I
mean the innermost chamber he knew anything of: there were many
chambers there of which he did not even know the doors. Yet a few
minutes as he sat there, and he was actually cherishing a little pride
in the wife who had done so much better for him than he had at length
come to expect. If not a good accountant, she was at least a good
wife, and a very fair housekeeper: he had no doubt she would prove a
good mother. He would gladly have gone to her at once, to let her know
how much he was pleased with her behaviour. As for that little bit of
red clay--"terra cotta," he called it to himself, as he looked round
with a smile at the blanket, which the housemaid had replaced on the
rug before the fire--who could imagine him a potentate upon
'Change--perhaps in time a director of European affairs! He was not in
the way of joking--of all things about money; the very thought, of
business filled him from top to toe with seriousness; but he did make
that small joke, and accompany it with a grim smile.

He was startled from his musing by the entrance of the doctor, who had
in the meantime arrived and seen the lady, and now came to look at the
baby. He congratulated Mr. Dempster on having at length a son and
heir, but warned him that his wife was far from being beyond danger
yet. The whole thing was entirely out of the common, he said, and she
must be taken the greatest possible care of. The words woke a gentle
pity in the heart of the man, for by nature all men have some
tenderness for women in such circumstances, but they did not trouble
him greatly--for such dangers belonged to their calling, their
_business_ in life, and, doubtless, if she had attended to that
business earlier she would have found it easier.

"Did you ever know such a thing before, doctor?" he asked, with the
importance of one honoured by a personal visit from the Marvellous.

"Never in my own practice," answered the doctor, whom the cook had
instructed in the wonders of the case, "but I have read of such a
thing." And Mr. Dempster swelled like a turkey-cock.

It was several days before he was allowed to see the mother. Perhaps
had she expressed a strong desire to see him, it might have been
risked sooner, but she had neither expressed nor manifested any. He
kissed her, spoke a few stupid words in a kind tone, asking her how
she did, but paying no heed to her answer, and turned aside to look,
at the baby.

Mrs. Dempster recovered but slowly, and not very satisfactorily. She
did not seem to care much about the child. She tried to nurse him, but
was not very successful. She took him when the nurse brought him, and
yielded him again with the same indifference, showing neither pleasure
to receive nor unwillingness to part with him. The nurse did not fail
to observe it and remark upon it: _she_ had never seen a mother care
so little for her child! there was little of the mother in _her_ any
way! it was no wonder she was so long about it. It troubled the father
a little that she should not care for his child: some slight
fermentation had commenced in the seemingly dead mass of human
affection that had lain so long neglected in his being, and it seemed
strange to him that, while he was living for the child in the City,
she should be so indifferent to him at home. For already he had begun
to keep his vow, already his greater keenness in business was remarked
in the City. But it boded little good for either that the gift of God
should stir up in him the worship of Mammon. More sons are damned by
their fathers' money than by anything else whatever outside of
themselves.

There was the excuse to be made for Mrs. Dempster that she continued
far from strong--and her husband made it: he would have made it more
heartily if he had himself ever in his life known what it was to be
ill. By degrees she grew stronger, however, until, to persons who had
not known her before, she would have seemed in tolerable health. For a
week or two after she was again going about the house, she continued
to nurse the baby, but after that she became unable to do so, and
therewith began to neglect him entirely. She never asked to see him,
and when the nurse brought him would turn her head aside, and tell her
to take it away. So far from his being a pleasure to her, the very
sight of the child brought the hot dew upon her forehead. Her husband
frowned and wondered, but, unaccustomed to open his mind either to her
or to any one else, not unwisely sought to understand the thing before
speaking of it, and in the meantime commenced a genuine attempt to
make up to the baby for his mother's neglect. Almost without a notion
how even to take him in his arms, he would now send for him the moment
he had had his tea, and after a fashion, ludicrous in the eyes of the
nurse, would dandle and caress him, and strut about with him before
his wife, glancing up at her every now and then, to point the lesson
that such was the manner in which a parent ought to behave to a child.
In his presence she never made any active show of her dislike, but her
look seemed all the time fixed on something far away, as if she had
nothing to do with the affair.




CHAPTER III.

ANOTHER ASTONISHMENT.


But a second and very different astonishment awaited Mr. Dempster.
Again one evening, on his return from the City, he saw a strange look
on the face of the girl who opened the door--but this time it was a
look of fear.

"Well?" he said, in a tone at once alarmed and peremptory.

She made no answer, but turned whiter than before.

"Where is your mistress?" he demanded.

"Nobody knows, sir," she answered.

"Nobody knows! What would you have me understand by such an answer?"

"It's the bare truth, sir. Nobody knows where she is."

"God bless me!" cried the husband. "What does it all mean?"

And again he sunk down upon a chair--this time in the hall, and stared
at the girl as if waiting further enlightenment.

But there was little enough to be had. Only one point was clear: his
wife was nowhere to be found. He sent for every one in the house, and
cross-questioned each to discover the last occasion on which she had
been seen. It was some time since she had been missed; how long before
that she had been seen there was no certainty to be had. He ran to the
doctor, then from one to another of her acquaintance, then to her
mother, who lived on the opposite side of London. She, like the rest,
could tell him nothing. In her anxiety she would have gone back with
him, but he was surly, and would not allow her. It was getting towards
morning before he reached home, but no relieving news awaited him.
What to think was as much a perplexity to him as what to do. He was
not in the agony in which a man would have been who thoroughly loved
his wife, but he cared enough about her to feel uncomfortable; and the
cries of the child, who was suffering from some ailment, made him
miserable: in his perplexity and dull sense of helplessness he
wondered whether she might not have given the baby poison before she
went. Then the thing would make such a talk! and, of all things,
Duncan Dempster hated being talked about. How busy people's brains
would be with all his affairs! How many explanations of the mystery
would be suggested on 'Change! Some would say, "What business had a
man like him with a fine lady for a wife? one so much younger than
himself too!" He could remember making the same remark of another,
before he was married. "Served him right!" they would say. And with
that the first movement of suspicion awoke in him--purely and solely
from his own mind's reflection of the imagined minds of others. While
in his mind's ear he heard them talking, almost before he knew what
they meant the words came to him: "There was that Major Strong, you
know!"

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