Chapter XXVII: The Last Penny Paid

The end came, as it often does after long anxiety, when least expected. The travelling party had been under the necessity of staying their wanderings and pitching their tent for a longer season than usual. For many reasons the leaders had chosen one of the loveliest and most admired scenes in Europe for their temporary resting place. It was early summer again, so that the Stanhopes might resort to a mountain and lake district where the air braced every nerve, and which afforded opportunity for feats of climbing and boating, to attract and occupy that member of the family whose delectation and employment were always the first cares, while the weary might rest in preparation for a fresh campaign.

The lake of the four cantons lay shimmering in its beauty, peacock-green or blue-black in tint as it happened to be in light or in shade. Great walnut-trees grew by its margin, and dipped their branches in its waters, while the most stunted pines ceased to flourish on the bare short grass or the rocky summits of its giant guardians. There were lower mountains that would have been well-grown mountains anywhere else, which rose sheer from the lake, and were clothed with waving wood from the soles of their feet to the crown of their heads; but one forgot them in the near presence of the bald Rhigi and the desolate Pilatus and the remoter vision of the blue range of the Engelberg seamed and tracked with everlasting snows.

The little burgher town, so grandly framed, was not altogether smoothed down from its ancient ruggedness and picturesqueness into modern commonplace uniformity, or, still worse, smartness. True, its great hotels, with bands of music for evening promenaders, were trying to the sensitive visitor, and its shops with their staple of carved wood, however pretty, and verging here and there on art proper, were not without their objections. But there was something to be said for the old covered rickety bridges over the pale green water, with the rude representations of the grotesque horrors of the Dance of Death; the Water Tower; the bold rough rendering on the face of the rock of the great sculptor’s idea of the lion of Switzerland, wounded to death, its paw still defending the broken lily of France.

Apart from a Babel of tongues, in which English prevailed, and swarms of motley tourists with the Rhigi railway as the scientific means to the desired end of attaining a region so strange in giddy height and width of view, so familiar by the descriptions and raptures of its crowds of admirers—and those inevitable attributes of Lucerne, were not very conspicuous in the early summer when the Stanhopes occupied their quarters—there were two distinct, even discordant, associations sharing the ground between them. There were the more vivid and recent traces of what all well-instructed, incredulous people now call the myth of William Tell—the national hero whose imaginary personality struck the first blow in breaking the fetters—doubtless as fabulous as the rest—of his country. Certainly, the common representation of him in a stage kilt, theatrically administering the oath of allegiance to his equally fantastic fellow-conspirators, as it figured in cheap photographs, was not calculated to inspire faith in his identity.

There was also the mediæval legend which, in its wild superstition, belonged to all Christendom, of the unrighteous judge who falsely condemned, not his lord and king alone, but the King of kings and the Saviour of men. And there was not found any place for repentance, in men’s horrified minds, for this traitor any more than for the arch-traitor. Pontius Pilate was doomed for ever to hide his white, conscience-stricken face, and wring his accursed, palsied hands with a feeble show of washing away the innocent blood from which no holy baptism of water could cleanse them.

Constantly as the sun rose or set on the glorious world of mountain peaks, wood, and water, these two idealised memories awoke and rose in conflict, glimmering through the white mists of morning, or brooding under the purple vault of night—the honest, brave Swiss freeman who bade all Swiss slaves go free—the falsehearted Roman coward who saw no evil in this man, and yet delivered up the Deliverer of the World into the hands of his deadly foes to do with Him what they would.

At Lucerne, Fan’s baby was born. To the mother her little daughter came as an angel from heaven, promising her a fresh paradise instead of the old, which had turned out but a waste howling wilderness with green oases here and there.

To the father the child brought the delight of a new toy with which he might play joyously for a while, and then, without thinking, break it. Harry had none of the trembling reverence, and clumsy awkwardness, in the middle of their tenderness, which some inexperienced fathers betray on their first introduction to their offspring. Harry took his infant daughter in his arms without hesitation and dandled her like an expert at once. The nurse and all who saw his performance cried out he was the most charmingly fatherly young father who had ever been beheld.

To her Uncle Horace, the last arrival was simply a fresh possession of Harry’s, a ‘rum’ and funny possession, with which the bachelor uncle was chary in having much to do, and that inflicted on him sundry spasms of bashfulness, but of which on the whole he did not disapprove.

As for Oliver, ‘the little woman’ made him more inclined to thank God and take courage. She was a tiny, weak weapon which might yet prove all-powerful in casting down strongholds and overthrowing a foul god, even the jovial Bacchus of Greek worship, which, seen near, was hideous as Dagon and cruel as Moloch.

But there came a speedy interruption to Fan’s recovery. Harry, whom her danger and weakness, together with the gift she had made him, subdued for the moment, was devoted to her in those days. He was sitting by her sofa, when she started up, and fixing on him eyes full of the craving care of an inappeasable anxiety, amazed and alarmed even Harry, who hardly knew what mental apprehension, any more than physical fear, meant, by the eager inquiry, ‘Where’s Harry?’

He hastened to soothe her by the assurance of his presence, without effect. He cried aloud, as he quailed before the blank non-recognition, and impatient denial of the glance which met his imploring looks, for Horry—Constable—any witness to convince Fan that here was Harry by her side.

The witnesses came quickly, and she knew each of them—down to the nurse who had been an utter stranger to her till within the last few weeks; but she did not know her husband, and she would not believe what the others said of his being himself, and of his standing in the room, the nearest of all to her, bending over her, clasping her hand. ‘Where’s Harry?’ she continued to demand with terrible, heart-rending insistance.

The long strain had snapped the strings of the fine instrument at last. She cried for Harry day and night, in his sight and hearing. As she cried she broke the silence which she had only once before stirred in order to claim succour for him; she poured forth in full measure her incalculable sufferings. She lived over again to one appalled auditor the long nights when she had sat listening for a footstep which never came, but was replaced by other footsteps, each, in its turn, causing her heart to bound with unwarrantable expectation, and sink in the sickness—growing always deadlier, of hope deferred; till it seemed as if all the footsteps which approached and departed in ignorance and indifference, trod, deliberately and mercilessly, over her quivering heart, spurning it as they passed. She showed how the truest woman in the world had been fain to impose upon herself with miserable deceptions, before she had confessed, in the secrecy of her own soul, that the fine gold of her idol was only base clay under its lacquer—how the most straightforward and sincere of human beings had been driven to play at the wretched game of keeping up appearances, of laying herself out to hoodwink her neighbors. She had been humbled in the dust as well as worn out by ceaseless struggles, and tortured to frenzy. Her sleep had gone from her eyes. Peace had been unknown to her—a God-fearing, Christ-loving woman.

The revelation was like the opening of those Books before which every son of man will smite his breast and call on the mountains to fall upon him and the hills to cover him. And Harry Stanhope’s accuser, day and night, before God and his brethren, was the woman who loved him best, and would sooner have bitten her tongue out than said the lightest word to blame him.

Every effort was made to withdraw Harry from the awful, ghastly ordeal. The instant Horace guessed instinctively what Fan was speaking of incessantly in the monotonous voice as tuneless as his own, which he could no longer catch so as to distinguish the words, he started forward with fury, as if he were mad himself, to drag Harry away; but Harry shook his brother off.

Oliver laid a firm hand on Harry’s shoulder, but from that, too, Harry freed himself. ‘Let me alone, Constable,’ he gasped. ‘My place is by my wife, and whatever I have done or left undone, I will stay with her and hear the last she has to say to me.’

None could dispute his right, and the men drew back; but there were still women’s pitiful voices beseeching him to have mercy on himself. ‘Go away, sir, for Heaven’s sake—for her sake. She does not mean it; she does not know what she is saying. Your staying will do no good.’

But Harry would not listen to the entreaties, and in the end he heard no voice save Fan’s. He stood there till her tale of martyrdom was burnt in and branded on his conscience. Under the operation his face did not grow sharp as Fan’s sharpened, neither did his fair hair betray patches of grey, as her dark hair betrayed when it was pushed aside that the death-sweat might be wiped from her temples. Yet his whole aspect underwent such a change as it was hardly possible he could entirely lose, so as to become the same that he had been before. He grew perceptibly older-looking in those days which could be so easily counted, with the sudden stamp of ripening to withering, which rapid, mortal illness sometimes impresses even on an infant’s face.

He had never before willingly encountered what was painful either to his senses or his sensibility. He had always selected the paths which were easiest and most agreeable to himself, without too much regard to their going down hill. They had brought him to where the battle raged hottest in the Valley of the Shadow of Death; and though it was not himself, but another, who was slain—the fumes of the smoke, the clatter of the strife, the deep wounds, the flowing life-blood, the gloom of that valley of shadows, were not likely to depart utterly from his consciousness, and leave him in the light-hearted, light-headed carelessness, the hard, untempered blaze of sunshine, of his former experience.

Fan had forgotten her baby in that last whirl of the tempest which swept her away, but she remembered it in the end. In the pouring out of her tribulation without restraint, she had constantly called on Horace and Oliver to help Harry, who stood nailed to the ground there by her pillow. Then, when her voice was sinking into an indistinguishable murmur, and her hands letting go every earthly hold, she felt gropingly for her child, and struggled to utter another sentence audibly. She did not speak for the child with her passing breath as so many mothers have spoken for their children. Fan’s care for Harry had swallowed up her care for their child. She spoke to the unheeding, unconscious infant who for many a long year would be a helpless human being, needing tender fostering and watchful protection, and instead of recommending the child to the father, in the bewilderment of poor Fan’s unapproachable fidelity to Harry, she recommended the father to the child. ‘Baby, take care of Harry,’ she managed to say, and with a few more fluttering breaths, died. The words of Fan’s final, fond, foolish injunction were still ringing in Harry’s ears when he staggered out of the room.