# Across the Stream/Chapter 9

BOOK III
CHAPTER IX
Late one afternoon about a week after, Archie was sitting with his old nurse, Blessington, in the room that had once been his day-nursery. He had left London the day after Helena had so honourably paid him the five half-crowns he had won from her, and since then he had been living here alone with his father. This evening, his mother and Jessie were coming down from town, his mother to remain here till she went up to London again for Helena's wedding which had been fixed for the end of the first week in August, while Jessie was but coming for a long week-end. Helena remained in town, where she was very busy shopping, and unpacking the lovely presents which Lord Harlow sent or brought to her, morning, noon, and night. They were really delightful presents, and the material of them was large precious stones, exquisitely set.
Archie had long made it a habit, when he was at home, to pay a visit to his old nurse before he went to dress for dinner. She had become housekeeper after the fledging of the family, and now, half-way through the decade of her seventies, did little more, when Archie was away, than sit white-haired and stately with her sewing or her knitting, and feel that she was very busy. But when Archie came home she would burst into violent activities, and constitute herself his nurse again, to whom he was always "Master Archie," and quite a little boy still. It mattered not one rap to her that he had his own valet, none other indeed than William, who in days gone ​by had fished him out of the lake, and received a gold watch and chain for the rescue, for Blessington was always in and out of his room, taking coats and trousers away to have buttons more securely adjusted, and loading her work-basket with piles of his socks and underclothing in which her eyes, still needle-sharp for all her seventy-five years, had detected holes that required darning. This habit of hers sometimes drove William nearly mad, for Blessington would take away all Archie's washing when it came back from the laundry, in order to inspect it thoroughly, and when his distracted valet wanted clean clothes, and applied to her for them, she would often entirely forget that she had taken them, and firmly deny the appropriation. Then William would craftily manage to get her to open her cupboard door, and lo, there was all Archie's clean linen. And Blessington would exclaim, "Eh, I must have taken it, and it went out of my head." Or she would abstract his sponge from the bath-room in order to put a stitch into it, and Archie, sitting in his bath, would find nothing to wash himself with. But Blessington was a sacred and a beloved institution, and as long as she was happy (which she most undoubtedly was when Archie was there to look after and inconvenience) no one minded these magpie-annexations of portable property.
Of all hours in the day Blessington loved best this evening visit of Archie's, when he sat among the tokens of his childhood, the play-table which now scarcely reached up to his knees, the little arm-chair, with its bar of wood strung through the arms so as to imprison and guard the sitter, the box of oak-bricks with which he used to build houses of amazing architecture, the depleted regiments of lead-soldiers which still stood on the mantel-shelf. Her great delight was to recall to him the days of his childhood, his naughtiness, the ​scrapes he got into, the whole patchwork of memories that retained still such lively and beloved colouring. And for him, too, during this last week, there had been in these talks a way of escape from this nightmare of his present experience; it was he himself, after all, who had put the coals on his mother's hearth-rug, had fished for pike with William, had attended, in rapturous trepidation, the advents of Abracadabra. These days seemed much further off from him than they did from her, for a bitter impassable water lay between them and him, while for her they had only receded a little further into the placid and sunny distance of her days. But, when he talked them over with her, he could recapture a dreamlike illusion of getting back into a life of which the most alarming feature was the presence of his father. Over everything else there hung enchantment.
He was sitting now in Blessington's rocking-chair, having tried without success to squeeze himself into the imprisoning seat of his childhood, and she was recalling the awful episode of the burnt rug.
"Eh, whatever possessed you to go and do it," she said, "I can't understand to this day, Master Archie. I'm speaking of when you set fire to your mamma's rug."
"Tell me about that," said Archie.
"Well, it was on an afternoon when you had a cold, and your mamma had allowed you to sit in her room while she went out driving. And what must you do but empty all the fire from the hearth on to her rug. You nearly got a whipping for that from your papa!"
Archie remembered that moment quite well, and how he had stood in his father's study, frightened but defiant, and refusing to say he was sorry when he was not. Then his mother had come in and had pointed to a bottle on the table, and told his father that he ought to learn his lesson first before he gave Archie one.… That had puzzled him at the time, though it was clear ​enough now. His father still had that lesson to learn, and Archie, during this last week, had begun to understand a little why his father had not yet learned it, if learning it implied the giving up of all that battles stood for.
He recalled himself with a jerk: he wanted to get back into the enchanted land which Blessington's reminiscences outlined for him.
"Yes, that hearthrug," he said. "That was a bad business, wasn't it, Blessington? What do you think put it into my head to empty the fire on to it?"
"Bless the boy, I don't know," said Blessington. "It was just mischief."
"Yes, but what's mischief?" asked Archie.
Blessington was a simple and direct theologian.
"Well, I shouldn't wonder if it's doing what Sapum wants you to do," said she, Sapum being her equivalent for the arch-enemy.
"I shouldn't wonder either," said Archie. "But it's rather beastly of Sapum to take possession of a very small boy with a bad cold in the head."
"Eh, he takes possession of us all, if we let him," observed Blessington. "But that was the naughtiest thing you ever did, dear. I wouldn't lay it up to you now."
"Was I good as a rule?" asked he.
"Yes, Master Archie, for a boy you were," said Blessington. "Boys are more trouble than girls, as is natural and proper."
"But doesn't Sapum enter into girls, too?" asked he, with another thought in his mind.
"Yes, to be sure, but not so violent-like. And when after that you were took ill, and we all went out to—eh, what's the name of that place in Switzerland—I must say you were wonderfully good. It was as if some angel took possession of you, not one of Sapum's ​flibertigibbits. You were no trouble at all; and see how quick you got well."
Archie rocked himself backwards and forwards for a minute in silence.
"I wish I could remember Martin," he said at length. "Tell me something about Martin."
"Eh, dear lamb!" said she. "Couldn't he be naughty too, when the fit took him! But then he got ill, and many's the time when I've longed for him to be naughty again, and he hadn't the spirit for it. He didn't want to die, and right up to the end he thought he'd get better. Your papa never loved any one like he loved him, and nobody could help loving him. He was like a April morning, dear—sunshine one minute and squalls the next. And there was months, Master Archie, when we thought you would follow him."
Blessington grew a little tearful, with the sweet, easy tears of old-age over this, and Archie changed the subject.
"And Abracadabra, now?" he asked. "What evenings those birthdays evenings were, weren't they? I wish Abracadabra came still, bringing all we wanted. What would you choose, Blessington?"
Blessington beamed again.
"Eh, I know what I'd choose," she said. "I'd choose a nice young lady to come here, and you and she take a fancy to each other, dear. That's what I'd choose. Isn't there some nice young lady, Master Archie?"
Archie stopped his rocking for a moment, and a bitter word was on the end of his tongue. Then he smiled back at his nurse's radiant face.
"I'm going to marry you, Blessington," he said, "when you're old enough. Don't you go flirting with anybody else now."
Blessington gave a little cackle of soft, toothless laughter.
​"Well, I never," she said. "Who ever heard such a thing?"
"Well, you've heard of it now," said he. "Blessington, I believe there's somebody else after you. I say, did you ever have any lovers once upon a time?"
Blessington looked solemn again.
"Well, there was your papa's game-keeper once," she said, "who made a silly of himself, as if I'd got nothing better to do than go and marry him. I didn't suffer any of his nonsense.… And there's the sound of the motor. That'll be your mamma and Miss Jessie coming. There's a nice young lady now!"
"Do you like her better than Miss Helena?" asked Archie.
Blessington nodded her head very emphatically.
"Not that I say she isn't a nice young lady, too," she said mysteriously.
"What's the matter with her then?" asked Archie.
Blessington looked the incarnation of discretion.
"I say nothing," she said. "But there's some as are artful, and some as are not. Now, my dear, you must go and see your mamma, or she'll be wondering where you are."
"I'm with my young woman," said Archie.
"There! Get along with you," said Blessington. "Eh, Master Archie, I love a talk over old times with you."
Archie went reluctantly away to greet his mother and Jessie, for these talks with Blessington had become to him a sort of oasis in this weary wilderness of scorching sand through which he had to travel all day and for many hours of the night. She was the comforter of the troubles of his earliest childhood; it was she who had always been by him if some nightmare snatched him from sleep, or if the dark developed terrors, and that habit of calling on her for aid, established among ​the mists of dawning consciousness he found still alive as an instinct, when there came on him now the maturer woes of love and manhood. Throughout his school life and his three years at Cambridge, he had never quite let go of Blessington's hand, which had been the first to direct and sustain his tottering attempts at locomotion. Now, too, she was the only member of his immediate circle who did not know of his trouble, and it was an unutterable relief to feel that he was not being pitied and sympathized with by somebody. For, though there is nothing in the world better than sympathy and pity, no sufferer smarting from a recent wound wants to live exclusively in such surroundings. Pity and sympathy, though they heal, yet touch the wound, and he never got over the impression when he was with his mother, for instance, that his wound was being dressed.… Jessie did not force that on him so much, yet with her he was always being reminded of the fact that she was Helena's sister. But with Blessington he could go back into the sunlight of the past: talk with her, and another occupation, temporary, he told himself, to tide him over those days, enabled him to get away to some extent, from himself.
He met his mother in the hall, and instantly those anxious eyes of love, which, for all his affection for her, he found irritating, were on him. She was at his wound again, taking off the bandages, seeing how it was getting on.…
"And how are you, darling?" she said, looking at at him with the tenderness that got on his nerves.
Archie kissed her.
"I am quite well, thanks," he said. "I have just been having a talk with Blessington."
"My dear, how she would like that!" said Lady Tintagel with eager cordiality. "That was thoughtful of you."
​Archie jerked himself away from her: though his mother said nothing direct, he felt that pity filled her mind. He was in its presence, and longed to get away from it. All the time another distinct piece of his mind wanted to hear about Helena. But he could not ask any question about her.
"How are you, Archie?" said Jessie quietly.
Archie's exasperation suddenly flared up.
"I have just told my mother I am very well," he said. "I am still very well, thank you."
Jessie laughed: she managed better than Lady Tintagel.
"In that case, come and have a game of golf-croquet with me," she said. "There's time before we need dress, isn't there? I do want some air so badly after town."
Archie glanced at the clock; he usually went to his father's study about this time, when they celebrated the approaching advent of dinner with a cocktail or two. That was the beginning of the tolerable part of the day: there was plenty of wine at dinner, and afterwards a succession of whiskies and sodas, and to be alive became quite a bearable condition again. On that first evening when Helena had told him her news and paid her half-crowns he had found that alcohol broke down his sense of being stunned, of being made of wood. Now he drank for another reason: by drink he got rid of the misery of normal consciousness and emerged into some sort of life again. It stimulated his brain, he could by its means escape for a little from that one perpetual thought of Helena that went round in his head like a stick in a backwater, and get into the current again. Sometimes he would go to his room, taking a whisky and soda with him, and wrestle with the sea-sketches he had so enthusiastically worked at at Silorno. By degrees the liquid in his glass ebbed, and his pile of cigarette-ends mounted, ​and he would go back for fresh supplies. But, while these hours lasted, he lived, and what to-morrow should bring he did not in the least care. He could escape for a few hours now, and that was sufficient. Also, when he went to bed, he could sleep heavily and dreamlessly.
There was still time for a game with Jessie, before going in to his father; Jessie would take longer to dress for dinner than he, and there would be a few minutes to spare after she went upstairs. But, even as they were strolling across the lawn to get the croquet-balls from their box, she a little ahead of him as he nursed a match for his cigarette, he looked up, and there in front of him might have been Helena. The two were of the same height and build, they moved like each other. It was Jessie, of course, but just for a second, while his match burned up in the hollow of his hand, it was not she at all.…
He threw the match away.
"Get the balls out, will you?" he said. "I've left my cigarette-case in my father's room."
He ran back to the house, and went in through the garden door of his father's study. Lord Tintagel was sitting in the big leather arm-chair, with his feet up on another, and a glass beside him.
"Just come for a cock-tail, father," said Archie. "Hullo, they're not here yet. It doesn't matter; I'll take a glass of whisky and soda."
"By all means; take what you like," said the other drowsily. "Your mother's come, hasn't she?"
"Yes, mother and Jessie," said Archie, pouring himself out some whisky. The soda-water was nearly exhausted, but the dregs of it gurgled pleasantly over the spirit. He drank it in a couple of gulps.
"What are you going to do now?" asked his father.
"Only have a game with Jessie."
"All right. Call in here when it's time to go up ​and dress. There'll be a cocktail for you then. Infernal lazy fellows the servants are not to bring them in earlier. Chuck me over the evening paper, will you?"
The evening remission from deadness and dulness and misery had begun for Archie. He played his game with Jessie, drank his cocktail, and by the end of dinner had risen to such naturalness of good spirits again, that his mother commended herself for the wisdom of her plan that he should leave London and seek a change of mind in a change of scene. He had done some writing since he had been here; he seemed pleased with the way it was going, and she talked hopefully to Jessie when they held a rather protracted sitting in the drawing-room before the two men joined them. Perhaps they had both overrated the strength of Archie's attachment: certainly to-night he did not appear like a boy who had so lately suffered an overwhelming disappointment in his affections.
"And Blessington says he has been just as delightful and affectionate to her as usual," said Lady Tintagel. "He goes and talks to her every evening as he always did. I think you must have been wrong, dear Jessie, when you thought he was so mortally hurt."
Jessie did not reply at once: she felt sure that she, with the insight of that love which is more comprehending than any mother's love, was somehow right about that point. It was not the mere lapse of a week that had restored Archie. Besides, Blessington did not know about his troubles. She could easily conjecture what a relief he might find in that. She knew that she would feel the same in his place; she could understand how much easier it was to behave normally with those who did not know than with those who did. Yet Archie's father knew, and all through dinner she had seen how friendly and intimate the two had become. Archie used to be constrained and awkward with his father, while his father used to be rather ​contemptuous of him. But this evening there had been none of that on either side, and now they lingered together a long time over their talk and their cigarettes. It was as if some bond of sympathy was springing up between them. But she shrank from admitting the explanation to herself: it might be that a man, who had been so bitterly disappointed about a girl, found something in another man that suited his mood. Women would remind him of a woman.…
There was a shout of laughter in the hall outside, and Archie came in, followed by his father. He did not communicate the grounds for his merriment, but, looking a little flushed, very handsome, and very content, sat down on the sofa by his mother.
"Well, mother darling?" he said.
Instantly her love yearned forth to him.
"My dear, it is good to hear you laugh," she said. "What have you and your father been talking about?"
The sense of being watched, the love that irritated did not trouble Archie now. The sunny hours would stretch unclouded until he fell into bed. He laughed again, looking across to his father."
"I say, father," he said, "shall I tell her, or would she think it not quite … ?"
"Just as you like," said Lord Tintagel.
The door into the garden, already ajar, swung gently open, admitting a breath of cool night-air into the room. It stirred in Jessie's hair as it passed her, and moved across to Archie, making the flowers in a vase near him vibrate. And for just that moment some impulse from the untainted tranquillity stirred in his soul, and his overheated, stimulated brain drank it thirstily in. His own laughter, and the subject of his laughter, the whole contents of the last hour or two, seemed stale and stuffy. The air of them was thick with the fumes of wine, with the fancies and images that it evoked, smoke-wreaths that hung heavy in ​the atmosphere, swirling and turning like dancers and melting into other shapes. But for that moment when the night-air came in from the crystal-clear dusk outside, that liquid tabernacle of sapphire in the holy night, where stars sang together and nightingales burned, the hot fumes dispersed, and he drew in long, tranquillizing breaths. This physical impression had, too, its psychical counterpart, for even as the air that stirred in Jessie's hair brought a coolness and a refreshment to him, so from the girl herself there seemed to stream into it a current of something wholesome and human and unfevered, unvexed by desire, and untouched by bitterness.…
"It's rather hot in here," he said. "Will you come for a stroll, Jessie?"
They went out together.… The heavens were full of stars, and a slip of a moon was near to its setting. Over the beds below the windows there hovered the fainter fragrance of sleeping flowers that stood with hanging heads and leaves that glimmered with the falling dew. Beyond lay the dimmed mirror of the lake, and beside it rose the dark mass of the wood in which the nightingales were singing. The scene seemed prepared for some human love-duet, when lovers fancy that nature is arranging her most sensuous effects for their benefit, though in reality she is but pursuing the path ordained for her by the wheeling seasons, and predicted by barometers and apparatus that is concerned only with heat and movements of the moon. And, of lovers, there was one of each pair absent, as the two walked quietly towards the wood of the nightingales; for Jessie there was no eager mate, and for Archie none.… Two hungry souls, both longing, both unsatisfied, went forth on that twilit pilgrimage. Spring still stirred in them, and there burned above them the everlasting choir of the stars. But that helped in no way: had they been lovers, an autumn ​squall or a winter snow-storm would have served their purpose just as well.
Archie chattered for a little while, comparing the moon to a clipped finger-nail, the dimmed mirror of the lake to a frozen rink in Switzerland, with all the hollowness of superficial talk, when the tongue speaks from habit, which is as lightly rooted as the seed on stony ground. Heart-whole, he had often chattered like that, and Jessie had sunned herself and responded to those silly things; but now she knew, as well as he, that the babble was no more than blown sea-foam. It made her heart ache that he should talk it to her, for, though she made no claim on his love, it was miserable that he could not recognize how true a friend it was who was by his side in this song-haunted darkness. She knew—none better—that he had no love to give her, but her love that was so disciplined to go hungry without crying out, starved for a word from him that should fly the flag of friendship, noblest of all ensigns that are not of royal emblazonment.
They had come to the edge of the lake, and a moorhen steered its water-logged flight across the surface. And then Archie's foolish chatter died, and he was silent as he watched the rayed ripple of water. The wash died away in the reeds, and chuckled on the bank, and at last he spoke.
"Why did Helena treat me like that?" he said. "It wasn't fair on me. Why did she encourage me? She might so easily have shown me that she didn't care. She knew: don't tell me she didn't know! Do answer me. Didn't she know? All the time that we were in town together she knew. And she let me go on. She was waiting to see if she could catch the Bradshaw. If she couldn't, perhaps she would have taken me. Was it so? You ought to know: you're her sister."
His voice had risen from the first reproach of his speech to a fury of indignation.
​"Did she love me or didn't she?" he cried. "Do tell me if you know."
His passion had found combustible material in her: she flamed with it.
"Helena doesn't love anybody," she said. "Oh, Archie, poor Helena!"
"Poor Helena!" said he. "Why 'poor'? Surely it's far more comfortable to love nobody. Oh, don't remind me of that stupid rot about it being better to have loved and lost. Anyhow, a worse thing is to have loved and not found. That's what has happened to me, and she made me think I had found. She meant to make me think that. Damned well she succeeded, too. And, if you're right about her not loving anybody, do you mean that she doesn't love the Bradshaw?"
Archie had closed a grip on her arm: now she shook his hand off, though loving to have it there.
"I can't answer you that," she said. "And I oughtn't to have said that Helena loves nobody. I withdraw that entirely."
"The saying of it, you mean," said he. "You don't withdraw your belief in it."
"I don't know the truth of it. What I said was only my opinion, and I withdraw it. I oughtn't to have said it."
"But you keep your opinion?" asked he.
"You shouldn't ask me that. I have withdrawn what I said. Please accept that."
In this high noon of stars she could see his face very clearly. It was not angry any longer: it was just empty, as if there was no one there behind the eyes and the mouth. It was a face empty, swept, and garnished, ready for any occupant who might take possession. The sweet, clean water of his nature must have run out on to desert sands; the cistern of the body into which it had so swiftly and boyishly bubbled ​all these years was empty. Just for one second that impression lasted, inscrutably frightening her, with some nightmare touch.
"Archie," she cried, "are you there? Is it you?" She heard a dreary little laugh for answer.
"Oh, I suppose so," he said. "I answer to my name, don't I?"
She longed, with a force of passion quite new to her, to be able to reach him in some way, to let her love be coined into the commoner metal of friendship, if only that could get to him, and give him the sense that he had something in his pocket worth having, even though it was not gold. She would have gleefully melted all her love into a currency that could have enriched him, for he did not want her love, and she had no other use for it except to help him in some way. And, as if to answer her yearning, he took her arm again, not angrily now, but with the quiet pressure of a man with a sympathetic friend.
"You're a good pal, Jessie," he said. "I'm awfully grateful to you. You won't play me false with your friendship, will you?"
"No, my dear," said she, stumbling a little on the words. "I'm—I'm not like that. The more you count on me the better I shall be pleased. I'm stupid at saying things, but, oh Archie, if a friend is any use to you, you've got one. And let me say, just once, how sorry I am for all this miserable business."
"Thanks, Jessie," said he.
They had turned back towards the house, and Jessie, unconscious of anything else except Archie, saw that they were already half across the lawn that lay dripping with dew. Her thin satin shoes were soaked, and the hem of her dress trailed on the grass. But she regarded that no more than she would have regarded it had she been walking in the dark with her lover.
​Then Archie spoke again—there was no more emotion in his voice than if he had been speaking through a telephone.
"Do keep on trying to be friends with me, Jessie," he said. "I'm nothing at all just now; I'm dead, but will you watch by the corpse? It likes to know you are there. There's no complaint if you go away, but when sometimes you have nothing to do, you might just sit with it."
"Archie, dear, don't talk such nonsense," she said.
"I daresay it is nonsense, but it seems to me sense. I don't feel as if I was anybody.… I can imagine what a house feels like that has been happily lived in for years, when the family goes away, and leaves it empty. There's a board up 'To let, unfurnished,' and the windows get dirty, and the knocker and door-handle, which were so well rubbed and polished, get dull. There used to be curtains in the windows, and in the evening passers-by in the street could see chinks of light from within, and perhaps hear sounds of laughter. But now there are no curtains, and the pictures have gone from the walls, leaving oblong marks where they used to hang. And the spirit of the house stares mournfully out, thinking of the days when there was laughter and love within its walls. Haven't you ever seen a house like that? They're common enough."
She pressed the hand that lay loose in the crook of her elbow.
"Oh, Archie, you give me such a heartache," she said.
"Well, I won't again. But if you think me wanting in affection to mother, or you, or anybody, just remember that I'm an empty house for the present. I daresay somebody will take me again."
Jessie felt that this was a truer Archie than he who had stopped so long in the dining-room and come in afterwards with a shout of laughter over something ​that he would not recount. But by now their stroll had taken them close to the long grey front of the house, and for the present Archie had no more to say, and was evidently meaning to go indoors again. Upstairs all was dark, but below, the five windows of the drawing-room, uncurtained and open, cast oblongs of light on to the gravel, and next to them the two windows of Lord Tintagel's study were lit. Even as they stepped from the grass on to the walk, and their footsteps became audible again, his figure, silhouetted against the light, appeared there, and the window-sash rattled as he opened it wider.
"Is that you, Archie?" he called. "Come in and see me before you go upstairs."
"All right, father," said he, "we're just coming in."
Jessie heard a fresh vigour in his quickened voice, and in the light from the windows she could see that his face was alert again. And it was with a sense of certainty that she guessed what had given him this sudden animation. Perhaps it was only the knowledge of his father's habits that informed her, perhaps it was a brain-wave passing from him to her that told her that inside his father's room were the things for which he craved, the cool hiss of bubbling water on to the ice that swam in the spirits.…
"You're not going to sit up long, are you?" she said.
"Oh, I don't know. My father and I often have a talk in the evening. And sometimes I do some writing before I go to bed. It's quite a good time for writing when every one has gone to bed and the house is quiet."
"You always used to say at Silorno that you wrote best in the morning."
"Yes, but that was at Silorno, where I could lie on the beach, and go for a swim at intervals. Lord! ​What jolly days they were! It's a pity they are all dead."
They went through the French window into the drawing-room, and found that Lady Tintagel had already gone upstairs. Archie stood by Jessie, shifting from one foot to the other, in evident impatience at her lingering.
"Well, you'll be wanting to go to bed," he said. "I daresay you'll go in and have a talk with my mother. And, do you know, my father's waiting for me; I think I'll join him. I shall soon come upstairs, I expect. I feel rather like writing to-night."
"I'm glad you're going on with that," she said. "That's something left, isn't it? The house isn't quite empty, Archie."
He laughed.
"No, I can trace my name in the dust on the window-panes," he said. "But I'll go to my father. Good-night, Jessie."
Lord Tintagel, rather unusually, was deep in the evening paper when Archie entered. Archie noticed, with some surprise, that his glass still stood untouched on the tray.
"Rather nasty news," he said, not looking up. "Give me my drink, Archie, there's a good fellow. Plenty of ice and not much soda."
"And what's the news?" asked Archie.
"Well, it looks as if there might really be trouble brewing. Servia has appealed to Russia against the Austrian ultimatum. I wonder if Germany can really be at the bottom of it all. And the city takes a gloomy view of it. All Russian securities are heavily down."
"Does that affect you?" asked Archie, bringing him his drink.
"Yes, I've got a big account open in them. I ​wonder if I had better sell. Of course there won't be war; we're always having these scares, and they always come to nothing. But if dealers are anxious, prices may fall a good bit yet, and I should find it difficult to pay my differences."
Archie poured himself out his first tumbler. He held it in his hand a moment, not tasting it, now that he had got it. Delay, when the delay was voluntary, would but add deliciousness to the moment when his mouth and throat would feel that cold sting.…
"I don't understand," he said, watching the bubbles stream up from the sides and bottom of his glass.
His father threw down the paper.
"It's as simple as heads and tails," he said. "I've bought a quantity of Russian mining shares, without paying for them, in the hope that they will go up. If they do, I shall sell at the higher price and pocket the difference. But if they go down I shall have to pay the difference at the next account. If the shares are each worth £8 now, and at the next account are only standing at £6, I shall have to pay £2 on each share. If I like, I can telegraph to my broker to sell now, while they're at £8. I shall have a loss because I bought them at £9, but I shall no longer be running any risks. But it's thirsty work talking. Just fill my glass again."
"But then, if the scare dies down again, I suppose your shares will go up," said Archie.
His father laughed.
"Sound business head you've got, Archie," he said. "You've got the hang of it; it's just heads and tails. Never you speculate: it's a rotten business. I've got into the habit now, but I recommend you not to take to it. It's easy enough to take to it, but it's the devil to break it. Same with other things. Make a habit of virtue, and you'll never go to the deuce."
He watched Archie a moment, who with head thrown ​back, and young, strong throat throbbing as he swallowed, was reaping the rewards of his delay in drinking. And when, with brightened eyes, he put his glass down, he stood there like some modern incarnation of Dionysus, his face pure Greek from the low-growing brown curls to the straight nose and the short round chin. With a cloak over his shoulders in exchange for his dress-clothes, with sandals for his patent leather shoes, and a wine-cup for his tall glass, he might have stepped straight from some temple-frieze, and his father wondered how any girl in her senses could have chosen the precise, pedantic man whom she was soon going to marry, when Archie was but waiting, as she must have known, for his moment. He, poor fellow, was often a very dreary and dispirited boy all day; but in the evening he came to himself again, and was what he used to be. And yet, though it seemed to Lord Tintagel a cruel thing to wish to deprive him of the few hours of the joy of living that were his during the day, he was smitten, with the easy and vague remorse of a man only half-sober, to see the effect that alcohol had on Archie, who, all his life till now, had scarcely tasted it. But he remembered when he himself had been at that stage; he remembered also his father giving him just such a warning as he now proposed to give Archie. He wished he had taken notice of it, and he hoped that Archie would.
That evening, thirty years ago, he recalled now with extreme distinctness. The scene had taken place in this very room, and his father, already half-tipsy, as his habit was, had warned him of the dangers of drink, and he remembered how laughable and grotesque such a warning had seemed coming from lips that had lost all precision of utterance. But he told himself that he was not going to commit any such absurdity: he was perfectly sober, indeed it seemed very likely that it had never entered Archie's head to think of him as a ​drunkard. Sometimes he stumbled a little going upstairs at night, sometimes he had an impression that his pronunciation was not quite distinct; but he never became incapable, as he could remember his father becoming, and being carried off to bed by two perspiring footmen.
He put down his second glass without tasting it.
"There's something I want to speak to you about, Archie," he said, "and you mustn't be vexed with me, because I'm only doing what I believe to be my duty. You won't be vexed, will you?"
Archie looked at him in surprise.
"No, I don't suppose I shall, father," he said. "What is it?"
His father got up and stood by his chair quite steadily, for he leaned back against the high chimney-piece.
"Well, I want to you be careful about that stuff," he said, pointing to the bottle. "That's one of the habits I was speaking about, which they say is so easy to keep clear of, but so hard to break. You drink rather freely, you know, whereas a few months ago you never touched wine or spirits. It's an awful snare—you may get badly entangled in it before you know you are caught at all."
Archie kept his lucid eyes fixed on his father's, and not a tremor of his beautiful mouth betrayed his inward laughter, his derisive merriment at this solemn adjuration delivered by a man who spoke very carefully for fear of his words all running into each other like the impress of ink on blotting-paper. It really was ludicrously funny, and the immortal Mr. Stiggins came into his mind.
"I hoge you don't think a whisky and soda after dinner is dangerous, father," he said. "You usually have one yourself, you know."
He moved across to the table as he spoke, and handed his father the drink he had mixed for him but ​a few moments before. Lord Tintagel, quite missing the irony of the act, began sipping it as he talked.
"No, of course not, my dear boy," he said. "I'm not a faddist who thinks there's a microbe of delirium tremens in every glass of wine. But—though you may never have heard it—your grandfather was a man who habitually took too much, and it's strange how that sort of failing runs in families."
Archie's mouth broadened into a smile.
"Skipping a generation now and then," he said gravely.
His father turned sharply on him.
"Eh? What?" he asked.
He looked hard at Archie for a moment—as hard, that is, as his rather wandering power of focus allowed him—and suddenly beheld himself with Archie's eyes, even as, thirty years ago, he had beheld his father when he spoke to him on precisely the same theme. He put down his glass, and a wave of shame as he saw himself as Archie saw him, went over him.
"I know: this doesn't come very well from me, Archie," he said. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? But I meant well."
He looked at the boy with a pathetic, deprecating glance.
"If I make an effort, will you make one, too?" he asked. "I've gone far along that road, and I should be sorry to see you following me. I should indeed. Just now I know you're unhappy, and a bottle of wine makes things more tolerable, doesn't it?"
Archie, in his empty, exasperated heart felt a sort of pity for his father, which was based on scorn. Something inside Lord Tintagel was probably serious and sincere, and yet it was what he had drunk that stimulated his scruples for Archie. He was in a mellow, kindly, moralizing stage in his cups that Archie had often noticed before. Certainly he himself did not ​want to become like that, but he felt that he was not within measurable distance of the need of making any resolution on the subject, so far was he from needing the exercise of his will. Just at present, even as his father had said, he was unhappy, and his unhappiness melted in the sunshine of drink. He did not care for it in itself; he but took it, so he told himself, like medicine because his mind was ailing.
"Well, let us talk about it to-morrow," he said. "We'll make some rule, shall we, father? And don't imagine for a moment that I am vexed with you. But I shall go upstairs now, I think. I've got some writing I want to do."
He hesitated a moment.
"I'll just take a night-cap with me," he said. "Good-night, father."
"Good-night, my dear boy; God bless you! We'll have a talk to-morrow."
Archie took the glass he had filled out into the hall, and waited there a moment, and the pity faded from his mind, leaving only contempt. It was just the maudlin mood that had prompted his father to be so ridiculous, and talk about resolutions. Certainly resolutions would do him no harm, and the keeping of them would undoubtedly do him good, for, instead of the firm, masterful man whom Archie had known as the rather prodigious denizen of that formidable room, there sat there now a weak, entangled creature. Archie could hardly believe that, in years not so long past, he had been afraid of his father: now his whole force, that dominating, intangible quality, had vanished. Occasionally he still flew into fits of anger that alarmed nobody, but that was all that was left of his power.
Archie sat for a few minutes on the hall-table, instead of going upstairs, for he meant, with a certain object in view, to go back to his father's room, on some trivial errand, and, as he waited, the big clock ​ticked him back into boyhood. There was the fireplace by which Abracadabra sat on the last of her appearances; there the screen behind which, as he had subsequently ascertained, William had hidden with a trumpet and the servants' dinner-bell, there the side-door into the gardens through which, pleasingly excited, he had hurried with the box for coffin of the dead bird which the cat had killed.… A hundred memories crowded about him, and not one, save where Blessington was concerned, held any romance or tenderness for him. They were as meaningless as pictures taken out from the empty house and leaning against the railings in the street: in the house itself, his bitter, lonely spirit, there was nothing left but the places where once they hung.
He went back to his father's room, crossing the hall with light foot, and turning the handle of the door with swiftness and silence. There was his father by the table, filling his glass again. It was just that which Archie wished to verify.
"I only came back for a book," he said. "Good-night again."