Chapter XXXI: Life—and Death

Jack Dadd was more like a girl than ever—more like even than the puniest of pink and white complexioned lads—with whom to associate the idea of a bold, rude, fox-hunter or a slashing soldier, or a reckless buccaneer, as they had been represented in Jack’s favourite songs, would have been the height of absurdity, pathetic in the very wildness of the imagination.

He was wasted and worn to skin and bone, and faded to the colour of blanched wax, lying with his eyes shut, though he was not sleeping. Yet Jack was considered to have got the turn, to be in a fair, though still a precarious, way of recovery. Oliver had not altogether resigned his functions; he was with Jack this night again, sitting reading at a little distance from the bed, when he was startled by hearing a piping voice address him, and looking round, he saw Jack’s eyes wide open, with reason in their glance, fixed upon him. It was a critical moment, for between delirium and sheer feebleness, Jack had not before shown any consciousness of Oliver’s identity.

‘Noll,’ said Jack, ‘don’t you remember how I won your taws that time?’ referring to a famous, far-off, game of marbles in the Friarton playground.

Oliver was immensely relieved. ‘Yes, Jack, you beat me to sticks,’ he admitted candidly, while Jack emitted the ghost of a chuckle at the recollection of his old victory.

But Jack’s next speech was not so reassuring. ‘Constable,’ said Jack, ‘I’ve often been guilty of rank impudence to you.’

‘Gammon!’ said Oliver; ‘shut up for the rest of the night, old boy; let me turn you round, and do you try and get another sleep, which will set you on your pins again in no time, and let me finish my book.’

But Jack’s hour for conversation had come, and he would not be silenced. ‘I say, Constable, I hope I may get over this bout, and be let off this time, to live and make up for some things I’ve done unlike—unlike a gentleman.’

Heaven help the lad! who was too shy in the middle of his forwardness to say a Christian, the young counter-jumper who had his own standard for a man and a gentleman.

‘You may live to behave like a prince, Jack, if you’ll only be careful and not exhaust yourself. Here; swallow this stuff, and snooze away.’

But Jack was at his confessions again, more briskly than before, the moment he had taken the stimulant. ‘I wonder if anybody but the poor old guv’nor, and the mother, and perhaps a good fellow like you, Constable, would care whether I hopped the twig or not? I don’t deserve it from some people. There’s ’Liza—’Liza Polley—’Liza might not have always known her own mind, or rather, her friends went in and bamboozled her, and put a lot of nonsense into her head, but I was not quite fair to ’Liza. I came down hard upon her, when, as it turned out, you were not going after her, and when, if you will believe me,’ said Jack, with emphasis, succeeding in raising himself on his elbow, ‘she never cared a rap for you, it was me she cared for all the time—poor ’Liza!’ ended Jack, falling back with a sigh.

The delicious _naïveté_ of the assertion pleased Oliver greatly, while he hastened to give it a handsome corroboration. ‘I am profoundly convinced of the truth of what you say, Jack; and if it would not bring on a fresh attack of fever, I might generously tell you in return that Miss ’Liza Polley met me at break of day the other morning, daring the wrath of her mother, just to hear the last news of your health.’

‘Did she, though?’ exclaimed Jack, with his poor face brightening into a dim glow of satisfaction; ‘and ’Liza is as frightened as a hare while her mother has been like a she-bear that has been robbed of her whelps, since she sent ’Mily up the spout.’ There was a little pause. Oliver hoped Jack was dropping off to sleep. ‘I’ll not forget it of ’Liza Polley,’ Jack spoke again, with drowsy, lordly magnanimity; ‘it was the best errand she ever ran on. I’ll act on the square to her—on the square all round, please God. And as for Mrs. Polley, won’t the guv’nor make her squeak to a different tune, when he calls to pop the question to the mother for me?’

Yes, Jack was going to recover, to be a man instead of a boy—a good man ‘please God,’ as he had said simply. And it would please the Father of Lights, the source and the reward of all goodness.

Death and desolation were distanced for once. The strange, sad sights, sounds, and memories which the King of Terrors, even though his sceptre has been wrested from his grasp, still brings with him, and leaves behind him wherever his ‘pale feet’ pass, would be changed for the cheery, sweet, common tokens of returning health and life: the fresh, open air, everyday work, the familiar faces of friends no longer anxious or averted.

Oliver felt it like a great boon to himself. He went to ’Mily Polley’s marriage with much better spirit and hope, since there was no longer the least probability of his having to attend Jack Dadd’s funeral.

Oliver represented ’Mily’s circle, though Sam Cobbe gave her away. An old friend lent her his countenance when she needed it. For she was conscience-stricken and shame-smitten through all her defiance. She was really smarting keenly under the abandonment of her kindred. She was awaking silently—and when had ’Mily ever been silent before?—and sadly, already, even before he had made her his wife, to the utter poverty and short-lived nature of the passion which had existed between her and the man for whom she had—not generously but wilfully, sacrificed all that women hold dear. For this reason she was susceptible to the compliment of Oliver’s presence even more than to the show of her gaudy blue silk gown and desperately smart bonnet and veil. She thanked him with an earnestness which struck Oliver in ’Mily, and which he considered far out of proportion to the cause of the thanks, in the last words she said to him. She went with her husband straight from the church to the railway-station, as the Cobbes could not be expected to furnish the shabbiest version of a wedding-breakfast, and left immediately for Manchester. There was no trace of the couple when Oliver followed them to the station in the course of a quarter of an hour, intending to take a short journey on his own affairs.

Oliver Constable had his foot on a carriage step when the station-master hurried up, white and scared-looking, struggling to maintain his composure. He whispered to Oliver, ‘There’s been an accident to the 11.30 train north, close to Medlar Bridge. I’ve just had word. There’s folk hurt. All that can help is wanted immediately; but there’s no use driving the town wild, and bringing out a pack of useless, frantic people as long as it can be prevented. Would you mind, sir, coming with me and the nearest doctor and the surface-men?’

‘All right,’ consented Oliver, in reference to what was evidently all wrong. He, too, was agitated by the suddenness and shock of the message.

It was not till the little party had started and aroused the suspicion of a few idlers, though another quarter of an hour would pass before the vague alarm took shape, spread abroad and thrilled the town, that Oliver recollected the 11.30 train north was the very train by which the newly-married pair were to travel. He told himself the next moment that amongst the hundreds in the train there was little likelihood that the Birts should be the particular victims.

The place where the last portion of the train had run off the line, with the usual amount of overthrow and wreck, lay about midway between Friarton and the next station, from which assistance had already come, before the Friarton station-master and his band of helpers arrived. Oliver saw only the _débris_ of broken carriages and a throng of excited but uninjured people, when he leapt from the engine, on reaching his destination. ‘Not so bad as had been feared from the earliest report,’ Oliver heard proclaimed by various voices immediately. Two of the smashed carriages were found to have been empty. Only one carriage and the guard’s van were occupied. A woman had been killed, and five or six persons more or less hurt.’

Oliver Constable passed through the eager speakers, looking on every side for the Birts, half expecting to find ’Mily in hysterics if she had happened to be in a carriage near those which had broken loose, and if she had seen anything of the accident.

Before he was aware he found himself close to the waiting-room into which the sufferers had been carried. A railway servant at the door, taking it for granted that Oliver was seeking for the room and had a right to enter, beckoned him in before he could think where he was going, among the doctors and their patients—fainting or groaning, while pulses were felt, heads bandaged, and limbs set.

Oliver prepared to retreat, but first he cast a quick glance round. Stay! Was not that Birt in the soiled, jaunty new clothes for which ’Mily had paid, out of her little bit of money?

The man did not look much the worse, in spite of the outcry he was making over what a doctor was coolly pooh-poohing as a trifle of a broken collar-bone.

But where was ’Mily?

In another moment Oliver learnt the incredible fact that Birt did not know. The bridegroom had been smoking with the guard in the van when the accident happened, and ever since then—speaking from Birt’s point of view—he had been in far too bad a way to enquire after anybody. But no doubt she was somewhere outside, gaping and screeching with the rest of the women. She ought to be looked up at once—Birt grumbled crossly, taking the first word of scolding—to see if she could not make a beginning in minding her duty, and trying to do something for him when he was in mortal agony and as sick as a dog.

Oliver, with his heart standing still, took one step towards the door of another room which was kept closed. An elderly woman turned the key in the lock and let him go in. Alas! yes; there lay all that was mortal of ’Mily, the poor mangled body decently composed, covered over and put away from fascinated, appalled gaze, or rude, gloating scrutiny—in the very dress she had so often pictured herself as wearing, that she had bidden Oliver notice particularly, which she had, not three hours before, gone to church in. The chubby face was little altered, except for the closed eyes, since it had been spared, while death must have proved instantaneous. With no friend by her side, not missed, though she was in her bridal glory, till Oliver sought her out, the disastrous end of ’Mily’s foolish young life had indeed come swiftly.

In the grief and oppression with which Oliver set about making the necessary arrangements, he could yet believe that, as ’Mily had said of Fan’s fate, so her own might have been more miserable still.

It was a wise choice made by the warrior and poet king—rather to fall into God’s than into man’s hands. To die in an instant, though it were on her marriage morning, in her bridal finery, when her heart was softened in the act of quitting Friarton, thinking as she thought in all probability—with regretful tenderness of her mother and family, and repenting of her misconduct, while, at the same time, all faith and hope in her husband had not been crushed out of her, was surely better than to live on at the mercy of a man like Birt, to be dragged down by him into lower and lower depths, to risk becoming at last as heartless and worthless as himself.

Oliver had a worse ordeal to face before night than that of seeking out ’Mily on her marriage day, as the woman killed in the railway accident.

Mrs. Polley sent over an express to Friarton Mill to bid Mr. Constable come into the town and speak to her. In other circumstances it would have been an exacting, unreasonable demand; as it was Oliver, like any man with a true man’s heart, obeyed it as he would have obeyed the behest of the Queen.

He found the Polleys’ shop with the shutters up in the middle of the afternoon, for the first time in his recollection. Mrs. Polley was not in the back shop; she was in her daughters’ room, to which she had gone, with rapid unsteady feet, the moment a rash or stolid customer had pushed forward to the counter, and, in place of giving an order, had told the tragedy in all its raw anguish and frightful force, without waiting to weigh words, or to secure the presence of some solemnly commissioned, skilled, and pitying comforter. The mother was sitting by the side of the bed in which ’Mily had been wont to sleep. Mrs. Polley’s hard-working hand was mechanically smoothing down the crochet quilt, which had been one of the few feats of industry accomplished by the joint efforts of the sisters while they were still at school, and in which ’Mily, though the youngest, had played the foremost part. The first married of the three workers was to have carried off the quilt, but the bargain had not been kept in spite of ’Mily’s double title to the prize.

The heavy flush had not grown lighter on Mrs. Polley’s cheeks. She continued dry-eyed and silent, while all the eyes around her were dim, and the faces swollen with crying, and as Oliver—the last person there who had seen and spoken with ’Mily—entered the room, a fresh burst of lamentation broke from her sisters, even her father groaned aloud, and bowed his face over his shaking hands.

Oliver took Mrs. Polley’s hand reverently. ‘I am very sorry,’ he muttered. ‘She could not have suffered. She is in better hands even than in those of the friends who loved her best. I have done all that was required.’

‘Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, in a loud, harsh voice which startled everybody, ‘I have sent for you in case I should not live another night. How do I know when them as I’ve seen full of youth and life and gladness is took in the twinkling of an eye? I want to thank you before I die, and I may never have another chance. Yes, I know all you have done for my ’Mily this day. You have stood beside her—both as a bride and as a corpse. When every friend she had gave my gal up, and left her to be despised and trodden upon, when the mother as bore and had turned her adrift, that so her folly might grow into sin, showed no mercy, you came to her and let her feel she had one friend left on earth, so that she might be able to believe that she had still a Father and Saviour in heaven. You have ordered her coffin and undertook, if necessary, to pay for it, and are ready to see all that the cruel, grinding, tearing wheels left of her, laid in it, and to help to carry her yourself to the churchyard. Mr. Oliver, my thanks ain’t worth much; for aught that I know, they may be no better than ill wishes and curses, since I was the unnatural mother as shut ’Mily out into the street, where she had no refuge, save the base villain that had decoyed her from her mother’s roof. Hold your tongue, Polley, and you gals, and you, sir, though you were thrice my pastor,’ addressing Mr. Holland, as he came softly and sorrowfully into the room. She resisted fiercely all attempts of her frightened husband and children and the other awed bystanders to stay her wild self-accusation. ‘I will speak out. I’ve sung my own praises and been my own trumpeter many’s the time. I’ll publish likewise my barbarous cruelty. It was I as denounced my own daughter and condemned her to destruction and an early grave. So what would it serve you, Mr. Oliver, though you were to let me go down on my knees and bless you, because you had more pity on my ’Mily—my bright, clever ’Mily, that is now as cold and still as a clod of the walley, than her wicked mother had on her poor, thoughtless child?’

‘You loved her better than yourself, all the time you blamed her most,’ Oliver told the miserable woman. ‘It was your very love for her, and pride in her, which made you hard. She knew that then; she knows it better now.’

Something in the words spoken almost at random, opened the closed floodgate of tears which quenched the frenzy blazing into a devouring flame, and saved the stout heart from breaking. ‘Yes, I were fond and proud of my ’Mily, with good reason,’ protested Mrs. Polley more softly, though the softness was expressed by the deep sobs which rent her breast, and the torrents of tears that gushed from her eyes. ‘There was none of the other gals fit to hold a candle to her. She were that smart, my little ’Mily, she could run and speak by the time she was eighteen months. I’ve seen her a sitting up rosy and full of roguery, playing with the pillows in this here bed, when other children would have been lying like so many little logses. Her fingers and her tongue alike were that clever! She had finished her piece and begun another of this very bed quilt long before Ann or ’Liza had got half through with either of theirs—and her the youngest and only in her first quarter at the school. “I’ll make them stand about, mother, she would say to me,” with one of her merry laughs; “and I’ll wager I’ll be married first, as well as first done with my bit of the crochet, and get the quilt all to myself.” So she has been married first, and she has died first, leaving me and her father behind, as ought by rights to have gone long before her. Oh! ’Mily, ’Mily, if I could but have died for you!’

Poor young ’Mily Polley’s death on her marriage morning caused a great revulsion in the feelings which had been entertained towards her in her native town. Her awful fate wiped out, in human eyes, the sum of her transgressions. Her death was regarded—not so much in the light of retribution as of atonement. A tender veil of commiseration and charity was drawn over her offences till they were in a fair way to be forgotten as well as forgiven. Her memory was likely to survive in Friarton and appeal to all gentle, romantic hearts for generations to come—not as that of the erring girl, but as that of the newly-made wife who perished in the first hours of her wifehood.

’Mily’s intimate associates were forced to acknowledge remorsefully the little allowance they had made for her temptations, and the unanimity with which they had forsaken her in her humiliation.

Even some of the townspeople who had only noticed and inveighed against the girl as an exceedingly vulgar, pert, giddy creature, experienced an uncomfortable conviction that her opportunities of learning to become more civilised, modest, and steady had been limited, and, such as they were, might have been a good deal counteracted by the old feuds and jealousies between classes. At the same time the blithe ring of her voice as it had floated accidentally to them, the light fall of her footstep when she had passed them, lingered in the ears of these judges, and smote them with the realisation of how young this ’Mily Polley must have been, when her detractors had not thought it beneath their superior age, rank, and refinement, to enlarge on her sins against good taste. ’Mily had her revenge in this fact, that whereas she and her set had been heartily despised, sharply ridiculed, and religiously shunned by those more gently bred ladies of Friarton, who held it as a pious duty to work for, bear with, instruct and assist the laziest and most reckless of the poor in the town, very few could now afford to scorn ’Mily. All except the smallest and grossest minds saw that the solemnity of death, even without its tragedy—as in ’Mily’s piteous case—invested the girl with a simple dignity in her grave. But it was a pity that not more men and women had possessed the larger, gentler eyes to recognise that the sacredness of life had also bestowed on her worth and importance—even while she still bounced about her mother’s shop, and flounced along the streets.

Remorse, in its slightest manifestation of doubt and discontent with one’s self, is not an agreeable sensation, therefore the townspeople of Friarton, who, like the rest of the world, greatly preferred to feel at ease in their own minds, if not gently titillated with a consciousness of having done their best in the matters of justice and mercy, began to look around them in order to discover any loophole of escape from the painful impression that they had been hard and contemptuous to ’Mily Polley and perhaps hounded her on—for girls are sensitive as well as perverse—to her undoing. They were remarkably successful in their search. For one man had, as it were, redeemed the humane character of Friarton. Oliver Constable had paid respect to the girl from the first, and shown her mercy to the last. He had acted as the representative of her neighbours, and so removed, in a great measure, the lurking self-reproach from their consciences. And it was the same Oliver who had gone in for nursing old Dadd’s son, and pulled him through his fever.

It did seem as if Oliver Constable had come home from watching by his sister’s death-bed to save the life of Jack Dadd and to speak a parting word of forgiveness and God-speed to ’Mily Polley, so as to deliver the whole town from the charge of selfish cowardice and intolerant persecution. If so, what sort of man could he really be who had received such a commission and given himself to its fulfilment?

The reaction which had set in for poor ’Mily extended to Oliver. His fellow-townsmen commenced to conceive an altogether different impression of him, to exalt and make much of him, to canonise him—not merely before a hundred years had elapsed, but in his very lifetime. This experience is comparatively rare, still it happens sometimes that just as men’s sins occasionally go before them to judgment, so men’s patient continuance in well-doing is observed and awakens a response in their brethren before death has set its seal to virtue.

In the meantime Oliver was perfectly unaware of the sudden revolution in the sentiments of the town towards him, so that in place of being unpopular and lightly esteemed—not to say grossly slandered—he had sprung at once to the height of popularity and general respect, among those who were not particularly ashamed of thus turning their coats, after they had so recently decried and abused their champion and hero.

The only thing which struck Oliver as he walked along the streets of Friarton, in the drizzle and mud of November, was, that in spite of the season and the weather, he was constantly meeting friends and acquaintances, and that not merely everybody had something to say to him, but that all men and women were in the best humour, overflowing with geniality, as if they were reflecting June sunshine rather than November fog.