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succeeded them. She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again. The warmth of his
breathing was against her belly. She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with
apprehensions and anticipations. Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid
and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through its terrors,
timidly desired.
'Better?' she whispered again.
He made a little movement with his head and pressed his face closer to her soft
flesh.
'Shall I stop now?' she went on, 'shall I go away?'
Burlap raised his head and looked at her. 'No, no,' he implored. 'Don't go. Not yet.
Don't break the magic. Stay here for a moment longer. Lie down here for a moment under
the quilt. For a moment.'
 Without speaking she stretched herself out beside him and he drew the quilt over
her, he turned out the light.
The fingers that caressed her arm under its wide sleeve touched delicately,
touched spiritually and as it were disembodiedly, like the fingers of those inflated rubber
gloves that brush so thrillingly against one's face in the darkness of seances, bringing
comfort from the Great Beyond and a message of affection from the loved ones who have
passed over. To caress and yet be a spiritualized rubber glove at a seance, to make love
but as though from the Great Beyond--that was Burlap's talent. Softly, patiently, with an
infinite disembodied gentleness he went on caressing. Beatrice's armour was melted quite
away. It was the soft young-girlish, tremulous core of her that Burlap caressed with that
delicate touch of spirit fingers from the Great Beyond. Her armour was gone; but she felt
so wonderfully safe with Denis. She felt no fears, or at least only such faint breathless
flutterings of her still almost childish flesh as served to quicken her happiness. She felt so
wonderfully safe even when--after what had seemed a delicious eternity of patiently
repeated caresses from wrist to shoulder and back again--the spirit hand reached out of
the Beyond and touched her breast. Delicately, almost disembodiedly it touched, like a
skin of rubber stuffed with air; spiritually it slid over the rounded flesh, and its angelic
fingers lingered along the skin. At the first touch the round breast shuddered; it had its
private terrors within Beatrice's general happiness and sense of security. But patiently,
gently, unalarmingly, the spirit hand repeated its caress again, again, till the reassured and
at last eager breast longed for its return and her whole body was alive with the tingling
ramifications of the breast's desires. In the darkness the eternities prolonged themselves.
CHAPTER XXXV
Next day, instead of whimpering with every return of pain, the child began to scream--cry
after shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity of recurrence for what
seemed to Elinor an eternity of hours. Like the scream of a rabbit in a trap. But a
thousand times worse; for it was a child that screamed, not an animal; _her_ child,
trapped and in agony. She felt as though she too were trapped. Trapped by her own utter
helplessness to alleviate his pain. Trapped by that obscure sense of guilt, that irrational
belief (but haunting in spite of its irrationality), that ever more closely pressing and
suffocating conviction that it was all, in some inscrutable fashion, _her_ fault, a
punishment, malevolently vicarious, for _her_ offence. Caged within her own snare, but
outside his, she sat there holding the small hand as it were between invisible bars, unable
to come to his aid, waiting through the child's quickbreathed and feverish silence for the
recurrence of that dreadful cry, for yet another sight of that suddenly distorted face, that
shuddering little body racked by a pain which was somehow of her own inflicting.
The doctor came at last with his opiates.
Philip arrived by the twelve-twenty. He had been in no hurry to get up and come
by an earlier train. It annoyed him to have to leave town. His late arrival was in the nature
of a protest. Elinor must really learn not to make such a fuss every time the child had a
stomach-ache. It was absurd. S
 he met him at the door as he stepped out of the car, so white and haggard, and
with such darkcircled and desperate eyes, that he was shocked to see her.
'But you're the one who's ill,' he said anxiously 'What is it?'
She did not answer for a moment, but stood holding him, her face hidden on his
shoulder, pressing herself against him. 'Dr. Crowther says it's meningitis,' she whispered
at last.
At half-past five arrived the nurse for whom Mrs. Bidlake had telegraphed in the
morning. The evening papers came by the same train; the chauffeur returned with a
selection of them. On the front page was the announcement of the discovery, in -his own
motor car, of Everard Webley's body. It was to old John Bidlake, dozing listlessly in the
library, that the papers were first brought. He read and was so excited by the news of
another's death that he entirely forgot all his preoccupations with his own. Rejuvenated,
he sprang to his feet and ran, waving the paper, into the hall. 'Philip!' he shouted in the
strong resonant voice that had not been his for weeks past. 'Philip! Come here at once!'
Philip, who had just come out of the sick-room and was standing in the corridor,
talking to Mrs. Bidlake, hurried down to see what was the matter. John Bidlake held out
the paper with an expression almost of triumph on his face. 'Read that,' he commanded
importantly.
When Elinor was told the news, she almost fainted.
* * * *
'I believe he's better this morning, Dr. Crowther.'
Dr. Crowther fingered his tie to feel if it were straight. He was a small man, brisk
and almost too neatly dressed. 'Quieter, eh? Sleeps?' he enquired telegraphically. His
conversation had been reduced to bed-rock efficiency. It was just comprehensible and
nothing more. No energy was wasted on the uttering of unnecessary words. Dr. Crowther
spoke as Ford cars are made. Elinor disliked him intensely, but believed in him for just
those qualities of perky efficiency and selfconfidence which she detested.
'Yes, that's it,' she said. 'He's sleeping.'
'He would be,' said Dr. Crowther, nodding, as though he had known everything in
advance-which indeed he had; for the disease was running its invariable course.
Elinor accompanied him up the stairs. 'Is it a good sign?' she asked in a voice that
implored a favourable answer.
Dr. Crowther pushed out his lips, cocked his head a little on one side, then
shrugged his shoulders. 'Well...' he said non-committally and was silent. He had saved at
least five foot-pounds of energy by not explaining that, in meningitis, a phase of
depression follows the initial phase of excitement.
The child now dozed away his days in a kind of stupor, suffering no pain (Elinor
was thankful for that), but disquietingly unresponsive to what was going on about him, as
though he were not fully alive. When he opened his eyes she saw that the pupils were so
enormously dilated that there was hardly any iris left. Little Phil's blue and mischievous
regard had turned to expressionless blackness. The light which had caused him such an
agony during the first days of his illness no longer troubled him. No longer did he start
and tremble at every sound. Indeed, the child did not seem to hear when he was spoken
to. Two days passed and then, quite suddenly and with a horrible sinking sense of
apprehension, Elinor realized that he was almost completely deaf.
'Deaf?' echoed Dr. Crowther, when she told him of her dreadful discovery.
'Common symptom.' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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