Success
There was no one there: orderliness, silence, and the curious feeling
of a just-departed presence, as of the vanishing skirts of the
ghost-people, that one surprises on quietly opening some old rooms at
twilight.
“Father must be downstairs, after all,” she thought, “unless he is out.”
There was a feeling about the house as if it were empty; she realised
it now, and decided that her second thought must be the correct one:
her father must have gone out to see some friend. She took off her hat
and jacket, and went to get a light.
She went by the little masked stair by which she had first brought
Michael, meaning to go to the kitchen for matches. As she opened the
door, she was struck afresh with the silence and the feeling of the
emptiness of the house—a feeling less unfriendly than remote, and in no
way concerned with things human. Instinctively she moved more quietly
and sought the most shadowed side of the stair, as if unconsciously
seeking to identify herself with it and lose herself in the dusk which
was in possession here.
The staircase led straight into the dolphin room. Here the light was
dimmer than above, only the dolphins on the mantelpiece started out
starkly from an unseen background, and across a stretch of boards that
gleamed pale in the dusk the two desks loomed dark and indistinct. For
a moment she paused in the stair-doorway; then her eyes, more used to
the gloom, descried to her surprise a figure by one of the desks.
“Father!” she said in astonishment.
He did not answer nor turn. He was sitting in his desk-chair, a little
bent forward, papers spread before him.
“Father——” she said again; and then no more, for suddenly she knew.
It was not that he did not answer, or that he sat so still, or that the
house was quiet with that all-pervading quiet emptiness of something
gone. It was all of these, and more than these. She knew it suddenly;
she knew before she crossed the room or touched him—he was dead.
He had died there alone in the quiet old house, swiftly, painlessly,
from some sudden heart attack—as he had always hoped to die, sitting at
his desk in the dolphin room, busy to the last with the work he loved.
One breath, an absorbed, active man with all his faculties; the next,
gone elsewhere, with no one by to tell the moment or make trouble at
the passing.
For a long minute Nan stood looking at him, her comprehension of the
end and its perfection such that for the moment she had no other
feeling. He had gone as he would have chosen, from where he would have
chosen, and no one had seen him go. He had laid down his pen, and the
twilight had fallen—the long, grey, twilight of spring.
* * * * *
Mrs. Bidden had been out that evening. There was no reason why she
should not; she felt no guiltiness about it, nor any need to excuse
herself when she met Nan on the doorstep.
Nan had a telegram-form in her hand. “Will you take this to the post
office for me?” she said.
She spoke so quietly that the old servant felt no alarm; it was only
when at the post office a young clerk required her to read the message
that she began to be uneasy. The telegram was to Josiah requesting him
to come at once, and was signed by Nan, not by her father—as it would
have been in the unusual contingency of Mr. Foregood being wanted for
business reasons on a Saturday evening. Mrs. Bidden puzzled over the
fact uneasily as she hurried back again.
“Is anything the matter?” she asked, before she was fairly in the house.
“Yes,” Nan said. “Come in, and shut the door.”
After that the quietness, the solitary dignity was broken; other things
crowded in, other feelings rose up, other realisations. No human
incident or emotion is single celled; no matter how great or complete
or overwhelming it is after the first the components of it, or the
components which go to make complex humanity, will begin to separate
out and give rise to separate things. In the silent, shadowy house
there was now the sound of grief and surprise; the loud weeping of an
old and faithful servant for a lost master and for a left mistress.
One grieved for death, Nan remembered, one was left alone by him who
had thus gone without farewell. Soon a doctor came, fetched in nervous
haste; some conventional thing, a child of civilisation, required
feverishly to be told, in spite of unerring instinct handed down
through the ages, that life was really extinct. Then the dead man was
moved from his favourite place in his favourite room. The dead lie
upstairs on beds. How heavy they are. What a good thing the old stairs
were so shallow and wide, since it was necessary to move him! There
were other necessities: lighting candles and dissipating the company
of shadows, putting away the papers on the desk—they might be private,
or important; they would certainly be blown away in the cross-draughts
from the open doors.
Josiah came as soon as it was possible to do so, and with him Miss
Janet.
“I’m coming,” she announced, when she read the telegram; “there is
something the matter, I know it. If there isn’t, I can go back.”
So she came, and immediately and at once took the situation under
her charge. From the moment that she was admitted by Mrs. Bidden,
swollen-faced and tear-stained, she assumed command, to the advantage
of everyone, and to the relief of the doctor. Not that she had it all
her own way; for instance, she decided that Nan had better come back
with her to Bayswater, and Josiah remain here for the night. But Nan
decided otherwise, and carried her point; Miss Janet had not directed
as long as she had without learning when she must give way.
“Very well, dear,” she said, “just as you like; I’ll stay with you
here. Josiah can do for himself to-morrow morning. It’ll do him good.”
Nan said she hoped Miss Janet would not stay, if it was inconvenient,
adding an assurance that she did not mind being alone.
Miss Foregood put that aside emphatically. “It will do him good to get
his own breakfast,” she said. “No, Josiah”—this to her brother, who had
a vague feeling that he was the more suitable person to stay with his
old master and Nan—“you must go back; the cat’s shut in the house, and
the kitchen fire’s not raked out. You go back, there’s nothing more for
you to do here now; you can come in good time to-morrow morning.”
She followed him to the door and gave him directions in a lower voice
about sundry articles to be brought for herself. “My black alpaca,” was
the end of the list; “the second peg from the window in the cupboard in
my room. Don’t fold it worse than you can help. I don’t know why I came
away in this blue gown; but there, we didn’t stop for anything.”
Josiah made an entry of the alpaca in his notebook, and then went away,
still half feeling that he should have been the one to stay. The old
master dead upstairs, the old house with the long rooms and the stored
treasures that the dead man had loved, and little Nan, still little
Nan to him—he would like to have stayed with them. But Janet decreed
otherwise and Janet knew; no doubt Nan was better with one of her own
sex, and Janet was a capable, comfortable person, who could do things,
who always did do them. So he went away, and Nan and Miss Foregood
spent the rest of the evening together, the latter in writing several
letters.
Nan had not thought of them; she had few thoughts of the outside world.
But Miss Janet, with a perception of the proper thing, proceeded
to write to Mr. Annarly and to some little-known relations on the
Barmister side. Nan did not see that they were more concerned with her
father dead than they had been with him living, but to notify them of
the event seemed customary, at least Miss Janet said so, and it was
done.
“What about Michael?” she asked suddenly. “Have you telegraphed to him?”
“No,” Nan answered, then said, “I’ll write; I think it would be
better. I can explain, and tell him to come, if he can and when it is
convenient.”
Miss Janet did not quite approve, not yet did she quite understand the
point of view; convenience was scarcely a thing to be considered on an
occasion of this sort. Still, she did not say so, and Nan wrote her
letter, which was posted with the others. Soon afterwards she went to
bed faintly surprised to find that by the clock it was still early,
although the afternoon seemed so incredibly long ago.
Early the next morning, Josiah came again, bringing the alpaca, very
badly folded. He stayed all day. It was a curiously long day though,
unlike the last, long in passing rather than in retrospect. Out of
doors it was fine, a bright pale sunlight, which cast sharp shadows
and was hot by contrast with the cutting wind which lurked at corners.
The sun came but shadedly to the darkened house, and the noises of the
district came but indistinctly too, never drawing very near. Few people
on Sunday entered even the beginning of the street which led nowhere,
unless they wanted to settle an argument or keep an assignation, and
then they soon went away again.
It was not exactly an unhappy day, though strange. The Foregoods
talked a good deal of the past early struggling times, the long-dead
young mother, the business of then and of to-day. Nan listened, and
asked them questions now and then, feeling, as they talked, her father
curiously close, and yet at the same time curiously removed. Towards
evening a restlessness came upon her. The bells of a neighbouring
church beginning to ring for evening service suggested to her to go
to church. Miss Janet did not at first quite approve in her heart,
though she raised no audible objection; afterwards she thought better
of it, and took herself to task. “After all,” as she said to Josiah,
“why not go to church, if she wants to? Why stick fast within doors
because custom says you should—in a neighbourhood where you are totally
unknown—or any other neighbourhood either?”
So Nan went to church, and went alone since she wished it. Not to the
one the bells of which she had heard, but to one further in the City
to which she had before been with Michael. A church with a very small
congregation, and light so obscured by stained glass and encircling
buildings that nothing within was plain: carving and gilding and
stonework all indistinct as the purpose and meaning of life—though
perhaps not less beautiful for that.
Monday was another long day. Josiah again arrived early and stayed
late. Other people came during the day: Mr. Annarly came to offer
condolences and his services, if they were required. He brought kind
messages from the family and a little note from Mrs. Annarly asking
if there was anything they could do. He delivered these to Nan, and
then was at a loss as to what to say to her. He was very solemn and a
little awkward, anxious to say the right thing in the sad circumstances
of bereavement, but rather embarrassed as to what it was. He made the
same inquiries two or three times over, and found his chief relief in
talking across Nan of her and her loss to Miss Foregood, in a voice
lowered, as if in the presence of serious illness. He did not stay
long, and his going was almost as much relief to Nan as it was to him.
No one else inquired for her during the day; the Barmister relations
did not live in London, so they did not come; one or two trade friends
did and the dead man’s lawyer. They saw Josiah and merely asked after
her, if they knew her.
She spent a quiet time indoors. Miss Janet was there all day, except
when she went out to buy mourning; she was a good and economical buyer,
and the purchases she made were not extensive. She carried some of them
back with her, and she and Nan spent a long, undisturbed time altering
the ready-made clothes to fit more or less. Towards twilight Nan