The Wonder (7 page)

Stott pushed past the agitated Mrs. Reade, and went into the sitting-room. He had had neither breakfast nor lunch; there was no sign of any preparation for his tea, and the fireplace was grey with the cinders of last night’s fire. For some minutes he sat in deep despondency, a hero faced with the uncompromising detail of domestic neglect. Then he rose and called to the nurse.

She appeared at the head of the steep, narrow staircase. “Sh!” she warned, with a finger to her lips.

“I’m goin’ out again,” said Stott in a slightly modulated voice.

“Mrs. Reade’s coming back presently,” replied the nurse, and looked over her shoulder.

“Want me to wait?” asked Stott.

The nurse came down a few steps. “It’s only in case any one was wanted,” she began, “I’ve got two of ’em on my hands, you see. They’re both doing well as far as that goes. Only …” She broke off and drifted into small talk. Ever and again she stopped and listened intently, and looked back towards the half-open door of the upstairs room.

Stott fidgeted, and then, as the flow of conversation gave no sign of running dry, he dammed it abruptly. “Look ’ere, miss,” he said, “I’ve ’ad nothing to eat since last night.”

“Oh! dear!” ejaculated the nurse. “If—perhaps, if you’d just stay here and listen, I could get you something.” She seemed relieved to have some excuse for coming down.

While she bustled about the kitchen, Stott, half-way upstairs, stayed and listened. The house was very silent, the only sound was the hushed clatter made by the nurse in the kitchen. There was an atmosphere of wariness about the place that affected even so callous a person as Stott. He listened with strained attention, his eyes fixed on the half-open door. He was not an imaginative man, but he was beset with apprehension as to what lay behind thatdoor. He looked for something inhuman that might come crawling through the aperture, something grotesque, preternaturally wise and threatening—something horribly unnatural.

The window of the upstairs room was evidently open, and now and again the door creaked faintly. When that happened Stott gripped the handrail, and grew damp and hot. He looked always at the shadows under the door. If it crawled …

The nurse stood at the door of the sitting-room while Stott ate, and presently Mrs. Reade came grunting and panting up the brick path.

“I’m going out, now,” said Stott resolutely, and he rose to his feet, though his meal was barely finished.

“You’ll be back before Mrs. Reade goes?” asked the nurse, and passed a hand over her tired eyes. “She’ll be here till ten o’clock. I’m going to lie down.”

“I’ll be back by ten,” Stott assured her as he went out.

He did come back at ten o’clock, but he was stupidly drunk.

The Stotts’ cottage was no place to live in during the next few days, but the nurse made one stipulation: Mr. Stott must come home to sleep. He slepton an improvised bed in the sitting-room, and during the night the nurse came down many times and listened to the sound of his snores. She would put her ear against the door, and rest her nerves with the thought of human companionship. Sometimes she opened the door quietly and watched him as he slept. Except at night, when he was rarely quite sober, Stott only visited his cottage once a day, at lunch time; from seven in the morning till ten at night he remained in Ailesworth save for this one call of inquiry.

It was such a still house. Ellen Mary only spoke when speech was absolutely required, and then her words were the fewest possible, and were spoken in a whisper. The child made no sound of any kind. Even Mrs. Reade tried to subdue her stertorous breathing, to move with less ponderous quakings. The neighbours told her she looked thinner.

Little wonder that during the long night vigil the nurse, moving silently between the two upstairs rooms, should pause on the landing and lean over the handrail; little wonder that she should give a long sigh of relief when she heard the music of Stott’s snore ascend from the sitting-room.

O’Connell called twice every day during the first week, not because it was necessary for him to visit his two patients, but because the infant fascinated him. He would wait for it to open its eyes, and then he would get up and leave the room hurriedly. Always he intended to return the infant’s stare, but when the opportunity was given to him, he always rose and left the room—no matter how long and deliberately he had braced himself to another course of action.

It was on a Thursday that the baby was born, and it was on the following Thursday that the circumstance of the household was reshaped.

O’Connell came in the morning, full of resolution. After he had pronounced Mrs. Stott well on the way to recovery, he paid the usual visit to his younger patient. The child lay, relaxed, at full length, in the little cot which had been provided for him. His eyes were, as usual, closed, and he had all the appearance of the ordinary hydrocephalic idiot.

O’Connell sat down by the cot, listened to the child’s breathing and heart-beat, lifted and let fall again the lax wrist, turned back the eyelid, revealing only the white of the upturned eyeball, and then composed himself to await the natural waking of the child, if it were asleep—always a matter of uncertainty.

The nurse stood near him, silent, but she looked away from the cot.

“Hydrocephalus!” murmured O’Connell, staring at his tiny patient, “hydrocephalus, without a doubt. Eh? nurse!”

“Yes, perhaps! I don’t know, doctor.”

“Oh, not a doubt of it, not a doubt,” repeated O’Connell, and then came a flicker of the child’s eyelids and a weak crumpling of the tiny hand.

O’Connell caught his breath and clawed at his beard. “Hydrocephalus,” he muttered with set jaw and drawn eyebrows.

The tiny hand straightened with a movement that suggested the recovery of crushed grass, the mouth opened in a microscopic yawn, and then the eyelids were slowly raised and a steady unwavering stare of profoundest intelligence met O’Connell’s gaze.

He clenched his hands, shifted in his chair, and then rose abruptly and turned to the window.

“I—it won’t be necessary for me to come again, nurse,” he said curtly; “they are both doing perfectly well.”

“Not come again?” There was dismay in the nurse’s question.

“No! No! It’s unnecessary …” He broke off, and made for the door without another glance in the direction of the cot.

Nurse followed him downstairs.

“If I’m wanted—you can easily send for me,” said O’Connell, as he went out. As he moved away he dragged at his beard and murmured: “Hydrocephalus, not a doubt of it.”

Following his departure, Mrs. Reade heard curious and most unwonted laughter, and cautiously blundered downstairs to investigate. She found the nurse in an advanced condition of hysteria, laughing, gurgling, weeping, and intermittently crying in a shrill voice: “Oh! Lord have mercy; Lord ha’ mercy!”

“Now, see you ’ere, my dear,” said Mrs. Reade, when nurse had been recovered to a red-eyed sanity, “it’s time she was told. I’ve never ’eld with keepin’ it from ’er, myself, and I’ve ’ad more experience than many. …” Mrs. Reade argued with abundant recourse to parenthesis.

“Is she strog edough?” asked the nurse, still with tears in her voice; “cad she bear the sight of hib?” She blew her nose vigorously, and then continued with greater clearness: “I’m afraid it may turn her head.”

Out of her deep store of wisdom, Mrs. Reade produced a fact which she elaborated and confirmed by apt illustration, adducing more particularly the instance of Mrs. Harrison’s third. “She’s ’is mother,” was the essence of her argument, a fact of deep and strange significance.

The nurse yielded, and so the circumstance of Stott’s household was changed, and Stott himself was once more able to come home to meals.

The nurse, wisely, left all diplomacy to the capable Mrs. Reade, a woman specially fitted by nature for the breaking of news. She delivered a long, a record-breaking circumlocution, and it seemed that Ellen Mary, who lay with closed eyes, gathered no hint of its import. But when the impressive harangue was slowly rustling to collapse like an exhausted balloon, she opened her eyes and said quite clearly,

“What’s wrong with ’im, then?”

The question had the effect of reinflation, but at last the child itself was brought, and it was open-eyed.

The supreme ambition of all great women—and have not all women the potentialities of greatness?—is to give birth to a god. That ambition it is which is marred by the disappointing birth of a female child—when the man-child is born, there is always hope, and slow is the realisation of failure. That realisation never came to Ellen Mary. She accepted her child with the fear that is adoration. When she dropped her eyes before her god’s searching glance, she did it in reverence. She hid her faith from the world, but in her heart she believed that she was blessed above all women. In secret, she worshipped the inscrutable wonder that had used her as the instrument of his incarnation. Perhaps she was right. …

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A study of genius shows that in a percentage of cases so large as to exclude the possibility of coincidence, the exceptional man, whether in the world of action, of art, or of letters, seems to inherit his magnificent powers through the female line. Sir Francis Galton, it is true, did not make a great point of this curious observation, but the tendency of more recent analyses is all in the direction of confirming the hypothesis; and it would seem to hold good in the converse proposition, namely, that the exceptional woman inherits her qualities from her father.

CHAPTER V

HIS DEPARTURE FROM STOKE-UNDERHILL

THE VILLAGE OF STOKE
was no whit intimidated by the news that Mrs. Reade sowed abroad. The women exclaimed and chattered, the men gaped and shook their heads, the children hung about the ruinous gate that shut them out from the twenty-yard strip of garden which led up to Stott’s cottage. Curiosity was the dominant emotion. Any excuse was good enough to make friendly overtures, but the baby remained invisible to all save Mrs. Reade; and the village community kept open ears while the lust of its eyes remained, perforce, unsatisfied. If Stott’s gate slammed in the wind, every door that commanded a view of that gate was opened, and heads appeared, and bare arms—the indications of women who nodded to each other, shook their heads, pursed their lips and withdrew for the time to attend the pressure of household duty. Later, even that gate slamming would reinvigorate the gossip of backyards and front doorways.

The first stranger to force an entry was the rector. He was an Oxford man who, in his youth, had been an ardent disciple of the school that attempts the reconciliation of Religion and Science. He had been ambitious, but nature had predetermined his career by giving him a head of the wrong shape. At Oxford his limitations had not been clearly defined, and on the strength of a certain speech at the Union, he crept into a London west-end curacy. There he attempted to demonstrate the principle of reconciliation from the pulpit, but his vicar and his bishop soon recognised that excellent as were his intentions, he was doing better service to agnosticism than to his own religion. As a result of this clerical intrigue he was vilely marooned on the savage island of Stoke-Underhill, where he might preach as much science as he would to the natives, for there was no fear of their comprehending him. Fifteen years of Stoke had brought about a reaction. Nature had made him a feeble fanatic, and he was now as ardent an opponent of science as he had once been a defender. In his little mind he believed that his early reading had enabled him to understand all the weaknesses of the scientific position. His name was Percy Crashaw.

Mrs. Stott could not deny her rector the right of entry, and he insisted on seeing the infant, who was not yet baptised—a shameful neglect, according to Crashaw, for the child was nearly six weeks old. Nor had Mrs. Stott been “churched.” Crashaw had good excuse for pressing his call.

Mrs. Stott refused to face the village. She knew that the place was all agape, eager to stare at what they considered some “new kind of idiot.” Let them wait, was Ellen Mary’s attitude. Her pride was a later development. In those early weeks she feared criticism.

But she granted Crashaw’s request to see the child, and after the interview (the term is precise) the rector gave way on the question of a private ceremony, though he had indignantly opposed the scheme when it was first mooted. It may be that he conceived an image of himself with that child in his arms, the cynosure of a packed congregation. …

Crashaw was one of the influences that hastened the Stotts’ departure from Stoke. He was so indiscreet. After the christening he would talk. His attitude is quite comprehensible. He, the lawgiver of Stoke, had been thwarted. He had to find apology for the private baptism he had denied to many a sickly infant. Moreover, the Stotts had broken another of his ordinances, for father and mother had stood as godparents to their own child, and Crashaw himself had been the second godfather ordained as necessary by the rubric. He had given way on these important points so weakly; he had to find excuse, and he talked himself into a false belief with regard to the child he had baptised.

He began with his wife. “I would allow more latitude to medical men,” he said. “In such a case as this child of the Stotts, for instance; it becomes a burden on the community, I might say a danger, yes, a positive danger. I am not sure whether I was right in administering the holy sacrament of baptism. …”

“Oh! Percy! Surely …” began Mrs. Crashaw.

“One moment, my dear,” protested the rector, “I have not fully explained the circumstances of the case.” And as he warmed to his theme the image of Victor Stott grew to a fearful grotesqueness. It loomed as a threat over the community and the church. Crashaw quoted, inaccurately, statistics of the growth of lunacy, and then went off at a tangent into the theory of possession by evil spirits. Since his rejection of science, he had lapsed into certain forms of mediævalism, and he now began to dally with the theory of a malign incarnation which he elaborated until it became an article of his faith.