The Sorceress (complete)

“Oh, Charlie, Charlie dear! You have been ill and we never knew.”

“How do you know now? They knew I never wanted you to know,” he said.

“Oh, Charlie – who ought to know but your own people? We have been wretched, thinking all sorts of dreadful things – but not this.”

“Naturally,” he said, “my own people might be trusted never to think the right thing. Now you do know you may as well take yourself off. I don’t want you – or anybody,” he added, with an impatient sigh.

“Charlie – oh, please let me stay with you. Who should be with you but your sister? And I know – a great deal about nursing. Mamma – ”

“I say – hold your tongue, can’t you? Who wants you to talk – of anything of that sort?”

Bee heard a slight stir in the curtains, and looking back hastily as she dried her streaming eyes saw the laconic nurse making signs to her. The sight of the stranger was more effectual even than her signs, and restored Bee’s self-command at once.

“Why did they bring you here?” said Charlie. “I didn’t want you; they know what I want, well enough.”

“What is it you want, oh, Charlie dear? Papa – and all of us – will do anything in the world you want.”

“Papa,” he said, and his weakened and irregular voice ran through the gamut from a high feeble tone of irritation to the quaver of that self-pity which is so strong in all youthful trouble. “Yes, he would be pleased to get me out of the way, and be done with me now.”

“Oh, Charlie! You know how wrong that is. Papa has been – miserable – ”

Charlie uttered a feeble laugh. He put his hand upon his chin, stroking down the irregular tufts of hair; even in his low state the poor boy had a certain pride in what he believed to be his beard.

“Not much,” he said. “I daresay you’ve made a fuss – Betty and you. The governor will crack up Arthur for the F. O. and let me drop like a stone.”

“No, Charlie, no. He has no such thought – he has taken such trouble not to let it be known. He would not advertise or anything.”

“Advertise!” A sudden hot flush came over the gaunt face. “For me!” It did not seem that such a thought had ever occurred to the young man. “Like the fellows in the newspapers that steal their master’s money – ‘All is arranged and you can return to your situation.’ By George!”

There was again a faint rustle in the curtains. Bee sprang up with her natural impatience, and went straight to the spot whence this sound had come.

“If I am not to speak to my brother alone and in freedom, I will not speak to him at all,” she said.

The laconic nurse remonstrated violently with her lips and eyes.

“Don’t excite him. Don’t disturb him. He’ll not sleep all night,” she managed to convey, with much arching of the eyebrows and mouth, then disappeared silently out of the bedroom behind.

“What’s that?” said Charlie, sharply. He moved on his sofa, and turned his head round with difficulty. “Are there more of you to come?”

There seemed a kind of hope and expectation in the question, but when Bee answered with despondency, “There’s only me, Charlie,” he broke out harshly:

“I don’t want you – I want none of you; I told them so. You can go and tell my father, as soon as they let me get out I’m going off to New Zealand or somewhere – the furthest-off place I can get to.”

“Oh, Charlie!” cried Bee, taking every word as the sincerest utterance of a fixed intention, “what could you do there?”

“Die, I suppose,” he said, with again that quaver of self-compassion in his voice, “or go to the dogs, which will be easy enough. You may say, why didn’t I die here and be done with it? I don’t know – I’m sure I wanted to. It was that doctor fellow, and that woman that talks with her eyebrows, and that confounded cad, Leigh – they wouldn’t let me. And I’ve got so weak; if you don’t go away this moment I’ll cry like a dashed baby!” with a more piteous quaver than ever in the remnant of his once manly voice.

All that Bee could do was to throw her arms round his neck and draw his head upon her shoulder, which he resisted fiercely for a moment, then yielded to in the abandonment of his weakness. Poor Charlie felt, perhaps, a momentary sweetness in the relaxation of all the bonds of self-control, and all the well-meaning attempts to keep him from injuring himself by emotion; the unexpected outburst did him good, partly because it was a breach of all the discipline of the sick room. Presently he came to himself and pushed Bee away.

“What do you come bothering about?” he said; “you ought to have left me alone. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got to lie on it. I don’t suppose that anyone has taken the trouble to – ask about me?” he added, after a little while, in what was intended for a careless tone.

“Oh, Charlie, everyone who has known; but papa would let nobody know: except at Oxford. We – went to Oxford – ”

He got up on his pillow with his eyes shining out of their hollow sockets, his long limbs coming to the ground with a faint thump. Poor Charlie was young enough to have grown during his illness, and those gaunt limbs seemed unreasonably long.

“You went to Oxford!” he said, “and you saw – ”

“Dear Charlie, they will say I am exciting you – doing you harm – ”

“You saw?” he cried, bringing down his fist upon the table with a blow that made the very floor shake.

“Yes,” said Bee, trembling, “we saw – or rather papa saw – ”

He pushed up the shade of the lamp with his long bony fingers, and fixed his eyes, bright with fever, on her face.

“Oh, Charlie, don’t look at me so! – the lady whom you used to talk to me about – whom I saw in the academy – ”

“Yes?” – he grasped her hand across the table with a momentary hot pressure.

“She came and saw papa in the hotel. She told him about you, and that you had – oh, Charlie, and she so old – as old as – ”

“Hold your tongue!” he cried, violently, and then with a long-drawn breath, “What more? She told him – and he was rude, I suppose. Confound him! Confound – confound them all!”

“I will not say another word unless you are quiet,” said Bee, her spirit rising; “put up your feet on the sofa and be quiet, and remember all the risk you are running – or I will not say another word.”

He obeyed her with murmurs of complaint, but no longer with the languid gloom of his first accost. Hope seemed to have come into his heart. He subdued himself, lay back among his pillows, obeyed her in all she stipulated. The light from underneath the raised shade played on his face and gave it a tinge of colour, though it showed more clearly the emaciation of the outlines and the aspect of neglect, rather than, as poor Charlie hoped, of enhanced manly dignity, conveyed by the irregular sick man’s growth of the infant beard.

“Papa was not rude,” said Bee, “he is never rude; he is a gentleman. Worse than that – ”

“Worse – than what?”

“Oh, I cannot understand you at all, you and – the rest,” cried the girl; “one after another you give in to her, you admire her, you do what she tells you – that woman who has harmed me all she can, and you all she can, and now – Charlie!” Bee stopped with astonishment and indignation. Her brother had raised himself up again, and aimed a furious but futile blow at her in the air. It did not touch her, but the indignity was no less on that account.

“Well,” he cried, again bringing down that hand which could not reach her, on the table, “How dare you speak of one you’re not worthy to name? Ah! I might have known she wouldn’t desert me. It is she who has kept the way open, and subdued my father, and – ” An ineffable look of happiness came upon the worn and gaunt countenance, his eyes softened, his voice fell. “I might have known!” he said to himself, “I might have known!”

And what could Bee say? Though she did not believe in – though she hated and feared with a child’s intensity of terror the woman who had so often crossed her path – she could not contradict her brother’s faith, though she considered it an infatuation, a folly beyond belief; it seemed, after all, in a manner true that this woman had not deserted him. She had subdued his father’s displeasure somehow, made everything easier. Bee looked at him, the victim of those wiles, yet nevertheless indebted to them, with the same exasperation which her father’s subjugation had caused her. What could she say, what could she do, to reveal to them that enchantress in her true colours? But Bee knew that she could do nothing, and there began to rise in her heart a dreadful question, Was it so sure that she herself was right? Was this woman, indeed, an evil Fate, or was she, was she – ? And the first story of all, the story of Aubrey, was it perhaps true?

The nurse came in noiselessly, hurrying, while Bee’s mind ran through those thoughts – evidently with the conviction that she would find the patient worse. But Charlie was not worse. He turned his face towards his attendant, still with something of that dreamy rapture in it.

“Oh, you may speak out,” he said; “I don’t mind noises to-night. Supper? Yes, I’ll take some supper. Bring me a beefsteak or something substantial. I’m going to get well at once.”

Nurse nodded at Bee, with much uplifting of her eyelids. “Put no faith in you,” she said, working the machinery of her lips; “was wrong; done him no end of good. Beefsteak; not exactly; but soon, soon, if you’re good.”

CHAPTER XLIV

Bee saw no more of Charlie that night. When she came out of his room, where there was a certain meaning in her presence, she seemed to pass into the region of dreams. She was taken upstairs to refresh herself and rest, into the smaller of two bedrooms which were over Charlie’s room, the other of which was occupied by Mrs. Leigh. And she was taken downstairs to dine with that lady tête-à-tête at the small shining table. There was something about the little house altogether, a certain conciseness, an absence of drapery, and of the small elegant litter which is so general nowadays, which gave it a masculine character – or, at least, Bee, not accustomed to æsthetic young men, accustomed rather to big boys and their scorn of the decorative arts, thought so with a curious flutter of her being. This perhaps was partly because the ornamental part of the house was devoted to Charlie, and the little dining-room below seemed the sole room to live in. It had one or two portraits hung on the walls, pictures almost too much for its small dimensions. The still smaller room behind was clothed with books, and had for its only ornament a small portrait of Mrs. Leigh over the mantel-piece. Whose rooms were these? Who had furnished them so gravely, and left behind an impression of serious character which almost chilled the heart of Bee? He was nowhere visible, nor any trace of him. No allusion was made as to an absent master of the house, and yet it bore an air so individual that Bee’s sensitive being was moved by it, with all the might of something stranger than imagination. She stood trembling among the books, looking at the mother’s portrait over the mantel-piece, feeling as if the very mantel-shelf on which she rested her arm was warm with the touch of his. But not a word was said, not an allusion made to Aubrey.

What had she to do with Aubrey? Nothing – less than with any other man in the world – any stranger to whom she could speak with freedom, interchanging the common coin of ordinary intercourse. He was the only man in the world whom she must not talk of, must not see – the only one of whose presence it was necessary to obliterate every sign, and never to utter the name where she was. Poor Bee! Yet she felt him near, his presence suggested by everything, his name always latent in the air. She slept and waked in that strange atmosphere as in a dream. In Aubrey’s house, yet with Aubrey obliterated – the one person in existence with whom she had nothing, nothing to do.