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Dedit!
1
The Soul
It was grey English weather for the pauper funeral, with draughty wind and drizzle of rain, that by their positive attack seemed almost a relief from the drab chill. By no means an event, this ditching carrion, earth to the earth that bred such vermin parasites, ashes of a dull fire that was never flame, but smoke as of raked garbage, dust that had never defied the winds of circumstance, or lifted itself of its own will from its chance neighbour grains, from them so undistinguishable that to have named it, sounds fatuity, and to have bade it vote an insane scoundrel's blunder.
Not an event? But the whole countryside is up and out; the village cemetery overflows, and the rain's dubious drizzle is out to shame by honest tears as the wind's shifty casuality by men's strong sobbing. The road, too, is clogged with carriages; on the panels of the first of them is a small initial in dull blue, and a ducal coronet above it.
Ah! there's the Duke, that white-haired octogenarian in shabby black, his worn silk hat, a decade behind the fashion, with a broad band of cloth upon it. He stands, head bowed, by the open grave; stands? hardly; he leans heavily on a gold-mounted cane of ebony, and with his other arm clings to a stalwart man of forty in Colonel's uniform, a man so like him that the least critical stranger would at a glance divine the heir. There are so many more mourners—though not true mourners like the crowding country-folk—that we must ask its secret of the coffin.
A plain deal coffin; not so much as a brass plate! Stay, though! the village carpenter has chiseled some inscription. It's crude; it's hard to read—and when we've read it, it says little. There's the word Claudia; there's the brace of dates; last, the one word DEDIT![1] A woman it is; she lived three and fifty years and a few months; and somebody gave something, and some one who knew a little Latin wished to say so. That's all, unless we guess. An arrow at random: Claudia sounds like the name of one well-born. Debrett identifies the Duke, whose second daughter Claudia was born on the same day as our dead pauper. It sounds incredible; she must have been intensely loved and honoured, since high attend her obsequies, and low bewail her loss.
Then why the shallow soil for her, and not the porphyry and malachite vault, with its bronze sculptured doors, of her forefathers? Why the cheap crazy hearse, and the half-foundered nag, the common coffin and the cryptic epitaph, more riddle than answer?
Who is the stout man with the red face, his scanty hair, greyed over the ears, the crow's feet beside and the black pouches under his eyes, his short breath, the effort evident in his carriage, concordant witnesses that his five and forty years add, in his ledger of life, to more than middle age? He is the rector, doubtless, by his cloth, by the familiarity which those who are clearly natives of the place show toward him. He is still speaking by the open grave; his words will perhaps cut the knot that the incongruities of the scene have tied and tangled in our rope of thought.
"——— the destiny of Lady Claudia Cusack." (We were right, then; the Duke's daughter.) "Is any stranger here—can there be any stranger to her in the world, any who knows not her story?—who wonders at this burial, bare decency, with yet the mightiest and the humblest in the land made level not only by the democracy of Death, but that of Tears? It was her will, expressed with all the emphasis of passion, that she should lie by whom she loved, in whose society lived, the People. Beside me stand His Grace the Archbishop, my Lord the Bishop, and yet more, all lightnings of enthusiasm, thunders of eloquence: our sister knew that they would come; she prayed them not to speak. She willed that I, the humble priest, whose highest pride is that she called me her friend, should do this office, and pronounce this elegy."
He halts, he stumbles, this my sorry Pegasus, hobbled by bonds of language, hamstrung by knife of this great grief that has brought us here today.
"She prayed 'No eloquence, no eulogy!' She has her will in that; my speech is bankrupt—my heart's in my throat!—and she is beyond eulogy as beyond all earth's imperfections. But, for the rest, she asked no flowers. What then are these thronged children that owe health, wit, often life itself, to her? No wreaths? Her death itself was a victory nine years long. No crowns? The End crowns the Work. No music at her grave? Earth's breast hath suckled mighty children; but not Chopin, not Handel, has composed Dead March or Dirge such as this created by her genius, this that I hear today, the sobs of multitudes that mourn her. No monument? Ah, like the noble Roman, if thou seek one, look around thee! Behold the lives that she has saved, the hearts that she has eased, the cottages that she has built, the countryside that she has nourished as a mother her child—I had almost said a thing unlawful—the world she has created with the sustained wisdom, the care, the love of very Providence!
"Eloquence! Eulogy! My brothers and sisters, the trumpet of silver cannot sound, when silent fact is gold. I will not praise the Lady Claudia; I will state facts, known to nigh all of you at first hand, as crudely and as harshly as a geologist describes a mineral.
"I first came to this village, at that time barely one-fifth of its present size, just twenty years ago last Easter, as curate to your invalid rector, my dear friend and teacher, now with God, Dr Danesbury. Five years later, I lamented him at the graveside, and replaced him (alas! but ill!) at the altar. My first friend, after him, was the Lady Claudia Cusack. Few of us knew her rank, although her beauty, her manner, her refinement, sang their anthem aloud, proclaiming her more spirit than clay. She was by far the richest woman in the district: she lived at that time with a girl to share the work of house and garden, and since that girl's death, with her young nephew, this twelve-year lad from whom we look to see such great things, fruit of his three years' intimacy with her soul. She worked like any farmer's drudge; her delicate hands were knotted and callous from her grip on earth. Yet her mind soared; she read philosophy, poetry, history, even law; she knew Greek and Latin so well that Æschylus and Ovid were as legible to her as English; she made mathematics her recreation; and it was her telescope, the one luxury she allowed herself, that showed her, ten years since, first of the world's astronomers, that satellite of Neptune whose discovery amazed the learned, and so profoundly modified our theories of the origin of the planets.
"It was I whom she trusted with the secret of her name and her fortune: for she had need of ne in her most passionate work: I mean her charity.
"Let me say here that she was no devotee, hardly even a Christian, as the blind hearts of men judge Christians. She rarely came to church, she never communicated; she often spoke contemptuously of religion.
"But if charity be of the essence of Christ's teaching, the heart of His word, she was the first of Christians. Hers was no organised, systemic charity, that spies upon, that cross-examines, that insults, degrades and pauperises its object—I had almost said its victim.
"It was no condescending charity that humiliated the recipient, no indiscriminate charity that makes the giver mockery of fools and prey of rogues.
"Still less was it that prurient prig's charity that tries to bribe unworthiness, to buy virtue, to whiten sepulchres, and so makes cowards, liars, hypocrites and slaves of all that it infects.
"Her Charity was rarely even bestowed to meet emergencies; for she foresaw, and she forestalled, their assurgence. It was born of her heart's passion, intense as love in a boy, confident as love in a man, wilfully blind to merit, yet with eyes keenly critical to economise means, assure result. It was constructive. It calculated cost. The prize was health, prosperity or happiness; and she sought this without a thought of whether her child—she thought of us all as her children—were worthy. She never reproached; she never sought to influence conduct. She treated everyone as free and responsible. We have not shown ourselves unworthy, on the whole. Most villages have been stagnant, many have decayed; few have prospered and increased; for industrialism has been the spider to suck England's blood. Not one has increased fivefold, in these twenty years, save this; and it is she, she alone, who achieved it. I cannot conscientiously applaud every detail of her work; church attendance has fallen off; there is prevalent a certain looseness of conduct which I deplore, with a freedom of manner, an unserious attitude towards life, and a most exaggerated caricature of the great virtue of tolerance. Illegitimacy is enormously on the increase, and appears not to be condemned by public opinion. I feel bound to say that she deliberately encouraged sexual immorality; she even advocated promiscuity. When I reproached her, she said: 'Cricket and football are unsuitable for women.' But in our horror at such opinions, we must not hide our faces from fact; and it is not to be denied that our community excels all others in our neighbourhood, in such matters as rate of increase, healthiness, happiness, prosperity, independence, enterprise and intelligence. It is not for us to balance the ledger; we make the entries, and trust God to be just judge.
"To this work she gave all. I sum her love in the word.
"DEDIT.
"She could foretell her death day; these last nine years she has been dying of cancer. No one has heard her groan, or seen the smile fade from her face. She measured her Life, and she died penniless.
"DEDIT."
The rector staggered with emotion and exhaustion. He recovered himself, and would have gone on; but the local doctor, at one shrewd glance, divined mischief, sprang to his side, and with a brisk word in the Bishop's ear, and a gesture to beckon the aid of a bystander, took the sick man by the arm. "You've got to come home, Dick!" he whispered.
The rector tried to resist, then yielded, almost collapsing; and the two men led him through the swift-posted lane of sympathisers to the Duke's carriage.
"That red house with the tower, among the beeches!" said the doctor, pointing, "and come back for the Duke!"
"Yes, sir!" and the horses, glad to be off, sprang forward at the touch of the whip.
2
The Body
The doctor and the priest are Siamese twins, born of one mother, the Wizard. The separation is recent, indeed hardly complete; more, the Monistic Philosophy of Science, on the one hand, and Mary Baker Eddyism, on the other, seem to be trying to reunite them. Science is thus inspired by the fact that all priests are quacks, and that a sound soul is one symptom of a sound body; Mrs Eddy by the failure of medicine in America, where doctors are mostly just what Europe found priests were, ignorant thieves exploiting the credulity and fear of the yet more ignorant public.
The rector and the doctor of Lady Claudia's village had hardly understood this tendency. Their respective duties seemed to them divided cleanly, marked like a frontier on a map. They never encroached upon each other. They respected each other, though perhaps the doctor had less faith than the rector in the other's importance.
They were old friends and intimate; the doctor set his patient in a low Oxford chair, gave him brandy, passed a tobacco-jar with College-Arms on it.
"I was coming to see you, anyhow, Hal; I've been a bit nervous; I don't know why, but I keep thinking it's a—a return of my old trouble."
"Nonsense, Dick! Nothing less likely. What's the 'it,' anyhow?"
"I can't say. I'm nervous. Silly of me, I know."
"Any pain?"
"Headaches lately—rather sudden, but they go as they come. Oh yes! I've had twinges, very sharp, two or three times; shooting pains, starting from the sole of the foot, apparently, a warning of gout, I suppose. Then there's a curious feeling, not unpleasant in a way, as if I were wearing a belt."
The doctor tapped the arm of the chair, and began to hum a little tune. He swung round suddenly, took a thin package from a file, and glanced through the papers.
"Let's see!" he said, "You've not had such a bad time. Twenty years since you've been here, didn't you say? A year longer than I have. Fill your pipe! That's great jar. I never look at it but I go straight back to our first friendship, when I was a young fellow of Clare, as the limerick says, and you were another. What a May Term we wound up with!"
"When you rowed four, and I rowed seven!"
"And we bumped Lady Margaret, Hall, Third and Jesus."
"We'd have had First and gone Head if we'd had one more day."
"Jesus nearly caught them the last two days, after they bumped Third at Ditton."
"Well, it's too late to catch 'em now!"
"Wonder if we could pull an oar—I think I'll run over your reflexes, Tootle-tunn-teh, Oh, adorable friend of my youth!"
He took a little padded hammer from a drawer in his desk, and tapped the knee of the rector.
"Subnormal, decidedly subnormal!"
The clergyman had been studying his friend's face; if he couldn't cure souls, he could read minds.
"You don't like it, I can see. What is it?"
"Might be several things. Just stand up. Attention! Hands to the side! Now throw your head back! Now close your eyes!"
The doctor's strong arm caught a shoulder, and lowered a tottering body to a chair.
"Dizzy fit, eh?"
"No; my mind's clear enough; I seemed to lose my balance."
"That's Romberg's symptom."
"Symptom of what?"
"It looks as you had a touch of Tabes."
"Tabes—er, wasting or something, isn't it?"
"Tabes dorsalis. Call it locomotor ataxia: same thing."
The patient paled, and gripped his chair. The basket-work creaked. "My God!"
"Brace up, old man! It's awkward, and it's painful at times; but it's not fatal. George Meredith had it in his thirties, and lived to laugh at eighty. We can help you more than we could in those days, too."
But the rector's face had grown extraordinarily bitter; suddenly he broke into a savage laugh. The doctor did not understand, at the moment; he judged the water shallower than it was; and he said the obvious thing.
"You can't complain too much. You've had nearly twenty years of health."
"Barring a throat."
"Which I cured in a month."
"And a bad leg."
"You call that twopenny ha'penny skin lesion a bad leg? It was well in a week. Hang it all, man, you've not had even a day in bed."
"And now it breaks loose—today! Trust the Devil to make a good joke—I laughed at it myself just now!"
The doctor looked hard, saw sanity, decided not to ask any questions.
"You've got to thank two wits; mine in knowing how to prescribe for you; and yours, in having had the sense to obey my orders."
"It was tedious; it was revolting, too, a skeleton at every banquet. I think, another time, I'd rather suffer from the body than have my mind gnawing."
"I saw a spasm of hate in your face awhile ago. Do you reproach yourself, or blame another?"
"I suppose I do. I shouldn't, but my mind seems to have—Romberg's symptom, you called it, I think."
"Yes, Romberg's symptom."
"What is it?—Let me digress!"
"There's an automatic arrangement in our feet that keeps our bodies balanced, with no conscious aid. When you need your eyes to tell you how to hold your feet, that arrangement is out of order. If it gets worse, even your eyes won't serve; the muscles mutiny, and you can't walk. There's no loss of power, only of skill to apply it. You can be taught to walk again, as a child is."
"I see. My mind's got Romberg's symptom, right enough. It staggers unless I watch it, and control it; and nowadays my vigilance sometimes tires, my control weakens."
"You've no reason to reproach yourself. It's a common accident; it may be as innocent as influenza."
"I wasn't innocent."
"We are all innocent in one sense, for we are children lost in a forest, the Night of Ignorance on us, scarce a star! Why, man, if this wree punishment for sin, a thing unjust enough, as I see it, is the further wantoness and infamy conceivable, that such a rod should scourge those who have not sinned, nor their parents?"
"All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."
"Then why let some—some of the worst, by Jove!—go free?"
"We cannot understand, and we must not presume to criticise, the ways of God."
"You're begging the question. That's the fallacy in all theology."
"I know in whom I have believed."
The doctor tried another tack.
"I tell you." he said, "that sin so-called is often as unavoidable as gravitation."
"The insane are irresponsible."
"But where's the limit of insanity? We have definitions for legal purposes, but science has none. Like most moderns. I doubt Freewill altogether."
"I don't."
"Three thousand years of thought have left men arguing the point. Let's forget it!"
"I'll exercise my own Freewill, and do so!"
(Good, thought the doctor, I'm getting him over the shock.)
"All that apart, then, I can tell you of impulses to sin as urgent as the need to breathe."
"Disease, you'd call it?"
"Why should I, when it goes with perfect health of body, with perfect soundness of intellect."
"One point of the law, you know!"
"He's guilty of all? All right; but who made the law?"
"God."
"Then—which law? Laws conflict. I prefer to seek divers causes when I find divers effects. Where you say God, I would say Custom, Majority, a Tyrant's whim, a Politician's cunning, Fear borne of Ignorance, anything, everything; but never yet did Truth father a litter of Lies, or Simplicity create Confusion."
"You're more theological than I am! Hang theories! Give me your judgement in a concrete case!"
He laughed at the thought of the story he was going to tell.
"When I was in Kashmir, I heard of a terrible sinner. As you know, the Maharajah is a Hindu, though most of his people are Mohammedans. It's therefore a capital crime to kill a cow—or indeed to catch a mahseer, because one swallowed the Maharajah's soul, and you might catch that one! Well, a man in the Indus valley, high up, got cut off from the world by a landslide either side of him. Rather than starve, he killed his cow and ate her."
"Was the man a Hindu?"
"Lovely of you to dodge the issue! Oh you parsons! What does it matter?"
"To his conscience, everything!"
"Sin subjective, then?"
"For the purpose of this argument only."
"My point is: was he responsible for his act?"
"I would rather starve than steal."
"Ever try it out? And then, is suicide less of a sin than theft? You might atone for theft."
"All this is sheer casuistry."
"I apologise for the shape of my collar."
"We Anglicans hate casuistry." He really believed what he said!
"Well, here's another case." A curious smile, subtly sinister, twisted the doctor's mouth. "It's been in my notes a long while, and, unlike yours, it calls for a folio, if we follow its trail. My mind has been refreshed about it constantly; not a month since, by the same token, I had a new memento.
"This was a woman, sound in mind and body, just as you are, no worse, no less, except that she never happened to develop Romberg's symptom."
The doctor paused to see whether his patient would wince at the allusion. But he was calm; he had become impersonal by the road of intellectual interest.
"Till she fell fatally stricken—nothing to do with the other affair—she hadn't a day's ill-health. Her mind was clear to the last minute of life. She was fine morally in every way but one, even by your standards. That one? She was a nymphomaniac. She sprayed disease like a machine-gun; and—it's almost unparalleled in medical history—she remained dangerous all her life. Neither middle-age, nor the tortures of the murderous malady that ended her life, abated her desire, her success in securing its indulgence, or her power to poison."
"Yet you say she was sane?"
"As you or I. She suffered horribly from the knowledge of the misery she caused. She knew something of medicine, by the way; I may tell you I met her first in old Remsen's lab when I was taking stinks, and she was at Newnham. She came to me one day in a rage of despair, and told me a terrible story."
"We are put here to master ourselves, by the good help of God, and the virtue of Our Lord's Atonement. Temptation should be the touchstone of our gold; the bar of our High Jump, too!"
The doctor laughed.
"St Satan's boat is put on for us to hump, eh?"
"Safer to do it at Grassy, if we can. Accidents may happen between that and the Railway Bridge!"
"Yes, we should cleave unto Righteousness from our youth up—but I have heard that Solomon himself got progged for smoking in cap and gown."
"Si jeunesse savait, the French say."
"I thought French authors were always so immoral!"
"Only to those who read them in translations."
"Publishers translate none but the naughty books?"
"They have to please the British Public."
"This woman's story would have to be put in French and retranslated, or nobody in London—outside Chelsea and the Café Royal—would stand it."
"I claim the priest's privilege. Go on!"
"Three years before she met us, so she said, she became conscious of the craving. She had fierce horror of indulgence, her breeding, her mind, her training, her pride and her prudence all allied against it. But their combined force didn't hold her back for five poor minutes. She lived in London, and was there when the first attack came on; within half an hour she had won ease. Momentary indeed; some four hours later, the attack was renewed. It was nine o'clock; but she found an excuse to go into the street alone. Her radiant beauty, her elegance, her intense magnetism, made her search easy. Very curiously, she hated dalliance; as she said once, it's not that I like the taste; I don't; I merely need the drink. That night she woke at three o'clock: the streets were empty; and she got frightened; so she returned, and went straight to the room of a young footman. So it went on; she made her plans for gratifying her strange need. They were adventurous plans; liaisons did not please her; she rarely gave herself twice to the same man. It was as if she were a blind man seeking a pearl dropped among pebbles. She'd pick up each quickly, indifferently; the touch would prove it to be not what she sought, and she would throw it away, and pick up another. She came to Newnham chiefly to glut herself with the three thousand of us; yet she would sample Barnwell too, and cycle into the country to catch the chance of the roadside, or try her luck with the horsey denizens of Newmarket, or pray some grace among the pious folk of Peterborough. I want you to realise that this life suited her. Love was a meal she couldn't miss, that was all; and she throve on the diet. When I met her, she was the most splendid animal I had ever seen; and she never talked of love, or thought of it except when the brief spasm shook her. She was a clean-minded pal, cleaner than you, old friend! She was high-minded too; habitually thought in abstract terms, was constantly preoccupied with intellectual problems. She favoured me beyond most men; on and off, we remained intimate in the gross sense of the word for six or seven years. But for love! a mere interruption of the conversation, exactly like a man called to the telephone for a trifle, a matter settled and out of mind the moment the receiver falls back on the hook.
"About a month after I met her, she came to me for medical advice—I wasn't qualified then. Of course I warned her of the danger to others if she went on with her career: I sent her to Jonathan Hutchinson. She never came back from London; I lost sight of her for a year or so. I met her again one Boat-Race Night, veiled heavily, in the Empire Promenade. She took me to her flat in Jermyn Street; she told me that she couldn't stop ———"
"But that can't be the terrible story she told you later, since you knew all this at that time?"
"I recognise the acute critic who wrote the Commentary on Colossians whose echoes still wake our cloisters! I'm merely laying the table-cloth."
"The hors dœuvres, please!"
"Sharp to the taste, and spiced! That night I warned her almost angrily. I was just qualified and had a swelled head, and wanted everybody forcibly injected with all sorts of serums, and clothes to be made of carbolic lint, and kissing declared felony. I'd dream the sea was a basin of antiseptic and the air chloroform, and I the surgeon to operate on Mother Earth for Gravel.
"I spoke as the specialist couldn't speak, eagerly, passionately. I drew her pictures—and I coloured them—of the ravages she might cause, I showed her lives cut short, lives cripples, lives deformed; I made her see loves withered and blasted, hearts broken, hopes crushed down, wills baffled. I showed here even the indirect disaster within the scope of the swing of her scourge; parents whose age is suddenly smitten by a son's fall, children unborn with doom already upon them from her curse. It seems that I succeeded in my task of rousing her to fight, as you'll hear later.
"I saw her several times in the following two years. She was usually drunk or drugged; she was quite reckless, and refused to talk seriously. Then came the time I told you of at first, when she confessed."
"Confessed! What else? What didn't you know?"
"Her secret. Her virtue."
"What?"
"Her virtue. After that night in Jermyn Street she went to Maudsley. (He was one of the three best men on mind-lesions then living; perhaps the first of the three.) He failed. She tried hypnotic cures, a man in Vienna, for one; no good. She tried quacks. Maudsley had advised her, by the way, that her craving was an idiosyncrasy, and her health being perfect, harmless if she took precautions to protect others; and he supposed that need of these would pass in a few months at most. Her ordeal's fire blazed sevenfold when she found herself still dangerous after the last date set by any of her specialists."
The rector wiped his forehead. "In such a case," he said slowly, "I almost think—well, no, I can't say it."
"She thought it, she said it, and she tried it. I ought to be in quarantine, she cried, or perhaps in a lunatic asylum. I told her she was just as healthy, just as sane, as I was. I'm a pestilence, she almost shouted, only it's not been labelled, analysed and counter-mined. But I could prove even to you that I am legally mad; and you it was that made me so. I've tried, tried hard, to kill myself. That's madness, under the law? It all depends, I dissented judicially. Well, she went on, you know how gentle I am. I could never use violence, even in playing games. My muscles won't obey my will. I couldn't throw myself from a cliff or a bridge, or under a train; I couldn't kick a chair away from under me. I tried; I could no more that I could fight in the prize ring. I tried poisons, alcohol, morphia, cocaine: I drenched myself only to reach a tolerance where brandy affects me no more that toast and water, the drugs no more than so much sugar. I couldn't even get a craving for them. I couldn't force myself to swallow strychnine or belladonna; the thought of the violence of the convulsions they produce was more loathesome than even my life. I tried Cannabis, Chloral, Veronal; my next best to success was a stupor of three days and nights, from which I woke a giantess refreshed, greedy for pleasure.
"Her toxicological misadventures had rather amused me, from a technical point of view; I suggested charcoal. She had tried it twice. Unfortunately, the idea of anything glowing, from a firefly to a cigarette, brings on one of her attacks, and out she has to go!"
"This story nauseates me. Does it go on much longer?"
"Do you still blame her?"
"I'm upset. I must consider. Later."
"I'm near the end of the journey. That was her confession; she couldn't kill her desire, or even her power to indulge it; she couldn't thwart it, even by suicide. She went on spreading pestilence, as helpless and as innocent as thistledown. The strange thing was that she never caused a scandal. She was no hypocrite, not even careful to conceal her acts; it was as if there was a universal conspiracy of silence. Brilliant, voluptuous, well-groomed, frank in speech almost to cynicism or to brutality, her name never provoked a smile, a sneer, a jest, an innuendo, or another name to run in harness with it.
"In later days she bore such visible marks of a strange fate that a first look at her would rouse the most incurious, and set the dullest wondering; but none suggested a solution implying any stain upon her virtue."
"Strange, strange indeed! In this world, too! I'm bound to ask: is this tale true?"
"Word and letter, cynic! The care of souls breeds much contempt for men!"
"Swift was a priest!"
"Sterne for my money, to fight him to a finish!"
"But Sterne was a thoroughly bad person!"
"I know you for a good one, then, after that master-sneer. Well, let me end! I saw her constantly after that tragic day."
"That's what you used to go to London for?"
The doctor looked at his friend curiously. Was he such a fool as he pretended? His disavowal of Sterne on behalf of his cloth's misanthropy hardly argued it.
"She went to Paris, too," he answered lightly. "And to Naples, of course, the nymphomaniac's Valhalla. And to their hashish-dream, gigantic, multicoloured, vibrant, but as real as death and as solid as beefsteak, North Africa."
"She never visited you here?"
"No," said the doctor. "She lived her rational life ———." He hesitated, noting a queer look on his friend's face. "A life of infinite credit, with its strange twin, a life cut away from the conscious part of her, silently active like her liver, alert, efficient, venomous to the last. Only a month ago there came to me, bearing the wound of the first nail in his Calvary, her nephew, twelve years old!"
The rector took the revelation calmly.
"I thought so. My funeral oration, and then yours! When I pulled through my first funk, I laughed. It puzzled you. Now—you laugh too!"
The doctor searched; but the riddle of this speech baffled him. The rector smiled.
"I give it up Dick! I've no Scotch in me that I know of except the old and vatted; but I'm hanged if I see any joke."
"The clergy, if they are to joke with immunity, must joke as through a glass darkly. It was she who gave me my ticket for the journey whose last stop before the Terminus is Romberg's symptom."
"Your praise of her—her repartee, the resurrection of your long, quiet, half-forgotten curse, sardonic laughter from her grave!"
"I had remembered. I had made my private joke. Long as I spoke, I never moved my eyes from her coffin, inscribed with my terse irony. She gave me—that's what I meant by DEDIT."
"I think I never knew you until now."
"Possibly, possibly, man of science! You don't know everything yet!"
The doctor started up as if challenged. "Nor do you," he flung back sharply.
"Ah, what do you mean by that? I wonder now. I really wonder. Bluff, in the manner of Haeckel, like enough! Arrogance, or fear to have your armour traced to Wardour Street, or maybe just the unmeaning snappiness of the small dog's bark. All signs of weakness, all blank cartridge, my quick-firing friend!"
"My original remark was humble enough not to have provoked your outburst. And now I come to think of it, why were you so quick on the draw? Is the portrait you draw of me really the secret of your own soul, as artists say they must?"
"Does this recrimination lead us anywhere?"
"Oh yes, if you'll answer my original question."
"I've forgotten what it was."
"Do you still blame her?"
"Blame—what does blame mean? But my body won't let me forget, or my mind let me forgive: DEDIT."
"Your epitaph lacks terseness."
The parson stared in amazement. "Could I shorten it?"
"No: but I can. DEDI."[2]
His voice broke suddenly. As with many clever men, his talk was foil-play, thrust and riposte tempered with the convention that no hurt can come of it. He grasped his own meaning, knew that the button had come off his point. His humanity cried out.
"Old man!———" he faltered—"I'm damned sorry." He held out his hand.
The rector, red face bleached to sickliness of greys and ochres, walked straight from the house. On the steps, he stumbled.
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