THE DARK ANGEL

1

One evening in July Oswald Holmroyd and his mother came out through the western gateway of St. Saviour’s. Oswald walked slowly, with his more than Sunday walk, and from time to time he stole glances at his mother’s face, for it showed curiously divided. The lower half, taking its character from the set lips, seemed hard and almost stern; the upper half, subdued by the gleaming wetness of his mother’s eyes, presented a look of drenched submission, as of unresistant petals beaten down by heavy rain. They moved in silence, and for some considerable while no word had passed between them. Oswald himself was but a blurred and mute spectator of his mother’s tears. At the gateway she said, speaking in a low voice: “Close it very gently, dear.”

He answered “Yes, mother,” and closed it very gently as she bade him, taking prodigious care. For through the iron bars he held with both his hands he could descry the little grave they had just left. Its cracked and sun-scorched sods, replaced upon the tiny mound, contrasted harshly with the greener and untrodden grass around, and the still, white lilies they had stooped to lay upon it shone out at him through the evening air with the disturbing pallour of that small, dead face looked on so recently in silence and sorrow and wonderment, and much fear. She was there, then, the little sister he had played with; who had shared this life of his so lately. Across the other graves that hemmed her in, and through the headstones that stood so silently, leaning a little towards each other as though they listened with great intentness, that one pathetic clay-soiled mound seemed to gaze after him with the supplication of his sister’s face, betraying apprehensions at being left alone. It cried to him in all but words: “Oswald.... Don’t leave me.... Stay with me....”

But he closed the gate and latched it, and let go of the handle quickly, saying in the low voice of custom: “Good night, Beryl,” and turned away with an accusing consciousness of cowardice. For, in truth, it seemed a dreadful thing to leave his sister there in such a solemn place, amid the dead of all ages, now that the sun was sinking fast, so that only the topmost taper of St. Saviour’s spire caught the last gilding of its rays, and the lengthening shadows of the gravestones stretched out like hands to touch each other, and his own shadow and the shadow of the gate by which he stood extended far from him across the sandy drive, and the sky and the trees and the green grass and the churchyard wall and all things else foretold the creeping silence of long night. Nay! He dared not; he dared not stay with her. For her death had reawakened all his latent horror of this place; it had revived such terrors as his vanity had almost dared to deem outgrown. And he hastened to his mother’s side, there to reassume his pace of deep dejection and solemnity, suitable to the grief he bore, and to the altered world he walked in. He was consumed with a steadfast sorrow, yet supported by a woeful pride appropriate to one who now can claim close kinship with Death. Every now and then he lifted up a corner of the sorrow that subdued him, as if it had been a lowered window-blind, and stole a covert peep at the outer world. Each time he saw himself regarded, he dropped the corner of the blind at once, and withdrew into his inmost solemnity, saying to himself: “She was my sister. I am the brother of the little girl who died.” And for a brief, unworthy while he was suffused with consequence, and his heart beat faster through desire to sustain befittingly the importance of this new dread rôle. Until, all at once, the wickedness of such a state of mind burned conscience as if it had been some fierce, great carbuncle, throbbing hot, and he drew the curtains of his sorrow close, and vowed he would peep no more upon the outer world. From the sight of children playing in the street he turned away his eyes, lest perchance he might be tempted in a thoughtless moment to take sinful pleasure in their sport, and taste enjoyment before he was aware.

Yet God knows, in spite of all these contradictory emotions, that Oswald’s grief was great and genuine enough. He missed his sister dreadfully. At times the loss of her was like a universal heart-ache that filled all space; not a room or corner of the house but suffered it. When he told himself that he would never more.... No! never more see Beryl in this world; never more hear her voice; never more look into her eyes or clasp his two arms about her neck ... his lip trembled; his eyes burned; a pain crept up into his throat. Life without Beryl seemed unintelligible, like a sentence cut in twain. For ever he kept forgetting that his sister was dead. Always she seemed to be somewhere in the house, in some other room, in the kitchen, in the air about him; at his very elbow, causing him to turn sharply for a trepid sight of her before she should be gone. Now and again it seemed to him he heard her call his name: “Oswald!... Oswald!...” so clearly that, but for the dreadful, timely recollection of the truth, he would have cried back to her: “Yes, Beryl?...” or run to seek the reason of her call.

But now ... he dared not run. For all he loved and missed her, she had brought back secret terror into the house, into Oswald’s life. He lived in fear of her. Aye! It was a confession he would have dared to make to no one. To his mother least of all. She never suspected it. Never would she have credited that her son should entertain unworthy dread of his little, gentle, bygone sister, who had left them both to pass through Death’s dark doors into God’s eternal presence, all alone. But Oswald knew it, and the knowledge shocked him. He could not disencumber himself of those rebukeful, mortal fears that throve upon his sister’s memory and daunted courage. For now, for him, there were two Beryls. Of the little sister he had played with, who had laughed and run with him in hours of gladness, he felt no fear. No fear at all. But of that dead white sister he had last looked on in the preternatural stillness of her tiny coffin, who neither smiled nor spoke--he was terribly afraid. Not afraid by day, when the sun shone and the bright light seemed to be his guardian angel. But when the sun began to sink, and daylight dwindled, and the dusk crept tremulously into corners, and he thought disquietly of the lonely bed upstairs awaiting him.... Oh! Then! how bitterly he missed his sister. Even the sound of her voice charged with some nocturnal fear, had been welcome to him, establishing the close companionship of kindred terror that served to partner and to reassure his own. But this unfathomable ocean of dead soundlessness in which his lonely apprehensions struggled now dismayed and daunted him. In the uncommunicative silence of his solitary bed, intensified by the yet more awful stillness in the room beyond his own,--that never stirred; that never whispered “Oswald!” or confessed a fear, or sought to be assured he was awake--he plumbed the awful depth of solitude in which all human life is lived. A part of his very self seemed dead.

2

How had it all happened?

So swiftly and so terribly that Oswald never understood. Life, like that reeling figure of his fears that issued from the doorway in the street near the Horse Green, plunged headlong all at once into the dreadful and unreal. He became the helpless witness of events so utterly remote from his experience as to appear incredible. Again and again he asked himself, bewildered, if what had seemed to happen could be true; if it was not, rather, but a dream from which in time he would with thankfulness awake. His troubled mind persistently attributed the source of all its sorrow to a thunderstorm, with which (preposterously) a bag of cherries was in some dire way associated. He had bought the cherries with a penny all his own, at a small green-grocer’s shop in one of the side streets lying off the lower end of Spring Bank Gardens; a shop made suffocating with the odour of vegetables and bruised fruit, which--ever afterwards--recalled for him this awful time of sickness and sorrow. At midday he and Beryl had partaken of the cherries, and that same afternoon the storm broke. For some days they had lived beneath the threat of it. The little school had turned so dark that needlework and penmanship were made impossible, the tense faces of the scholars--withdrawn, by prudence, from the proximity of the window--were absorbed into the gloom like inkspots dropped on blotting-paper. Over fender and fire-irons a bedroom mat was spread, that the glint of naked steel might offer no inducement to the lightning. For the same sage reason even pens were put away, and the schoolroom gas was lit to relieve the deepening gloom, and Mrs. Holmroyd sought to distract her anxious charges with stories of the Good, interrupted by ejaculations from excited lips.

“Ooh! Mrs. Holmroyd! Did you see that one!”

“It’s coming nearer.”

“Once when it lightened there was a chimbley pot struck in the street next but two from ours.”

“Please Mrs. Holmroyd, my ma’s frightened of thunder storms. They always give her sick headaches.”

“My pa knows a man that was struck dead by lightning for swearing. My pa says nobody ought ever to swear in a thunderstorm.”

“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, what’s thunder and lightning made of?”

With awed voices they had discussed storms and the deity whilst the thunder rolled overhead and rocked the schoolroom with deafening reverberations. Torrential rain had fallen, whose furious drops rebounded to a foot’s height from the flooded flags and roadway, and flashed elongated in the lightning like electric sparks. Raging watercourses tore along the gutters, sweeping stones and papers in their flight, and soot and mortar--shaken by the thunder and dislodged by raindrops--tumbled down the schoolroom chimney and rattled alarmingly upon the hearth.

And Beryl, alone of all the quaking scholars, had demeaned herself with tears, running to Mrs. Holmroyd’s side for shelter, and hiding her head beneath her mother’s bosom; and Oswald had felt unworthily ashamed of his sister and the disgrace she drew upon herself and him. For she would not confess the thunder as the cause of her alarm; she pleaded sickness and a pain instead, and into Oswald’s righteousness there crept a stern repugnance of all falsehood. And when, at tea--the storm being over, and the thunder reduced to the mere rumble of a distant cart--Beryl pushed away her plate and wept afresh in lieu of eating, Oswald could not altogether rid his breast of the suspicion that she did this to cover up her earlier cowardice, and win back an alienated sympathy through tears. But thereafter events marched with terrible swift footsteps, like the resounding tramp of policemen, that brought dismay into his heart. The storm rolled altogether out of earshot; not the faintest lightning-flashes played upon the pulse of fear, and yet his little sister wept more dolorously--deaf to consolation and the persuasive voice of love. When, by custom, he should have been seated at his evening meal, a breathless Oswald was hastening to the doctor’s big brass plate in Hill Street, his bosom filled with dire forebodings, with a throbbing self-importance, and reflected pain, repeating to himself the urgent message with which his mother’s troubled lips had charged him. Long after, when Oswald would, of old, have been in bed, he still kept watch from the parlour window for the doctor’s coming, most dreadfully divided between the apprehensions of two senses: between the apprehensions of the eye that gazed into the street, and of the ear that hearkened through the thumping of his heart to bedroom sounds above. Aye! And of the conscience that bitterly reproached him with those base, unjust suspicions of his little sister, and racked him with a hundred doubts respecting the delivery of his mother’s message at the doctor’s door.

But the doctor came at last, a dire figure compounded of comforts and alarms that seemed to curdle the atmosphere of dread it walked through, and the prolonged sound of lowered voices and creaking floor-boards made Oswald’s heart sick. For some while after the doctor had taken leave of his mother at the front door, Oswald dared not emerge from his place of waiting in the kitchen; an inexpressible fear restrained him from making the least sign. Nor did his mother come in quest of him, or call upon his name immediately. She betook herself, instead, to the front parlour--whither the ensuing silence and the sense of his own solitude drove him timorously at last. He stole to the door, uttering the one word “Mother ...” in a voice of supplication. He fancied--though he could not quite be sure, since trouble walked with downcast eyes--that she had been seated with both hands pressed to her face when first he spoke her name, but she was risen to her feet by the time he dared to lift his eyes, and answered “Now dear ...” in a voice whose brightness seemed curiously at variance with the depth of silence from which it issued.

“How is Beryl, mother?”

“Beryl is very poorly, Oswald.”

“What is the matter with her?”

“The doctor says.... He scarcely knows. He is coming to see her again in the morning, dear.”

She did not tell him that the doctor had hinted darkly at inflammation of the bowels--in those days the vague term under which appendicitis hid--nor would Oswald have been much the wiser had she done so. Infinitely more significant for him was the glistening trouble on his mother’s cheeks which the resolute brightness of her voice had almost succeeded in its effort to conceal from him. The sight of her wet eyes, in which a desperate courage seemed to drown, caused an unspeakable wretchedness to descend upon his soul. A mist of sickly apprehension darkened life, blotting from his vision all at once the comfortable things contained in it, and filling it with ghastly images of silence and no shape; with featureless forebodings from which his cowardice desired to flee. When at length, with throbbing heart, he stole on tiptoe through the sickroom to his little sleeping place beyond, he scarcely dared to turn his eye towards the bed where Beryl lay, for fear of what dread spectacle his eye might meet. But his senses were poignantly aware of a small shape that writhed tormentedly beneath the coverlet, and moaned in its breathing, and never said: “Oswald ...” or raised its head. He closed the door between himself and sickness with an awful feeling of escape, as though the sight of pain were something to shut out and flee from. All that night his slumber seemed to be disturbed by dreams or dread distortions of reality. At one time it was a wail of anguish from the adjoining bedroom, real or fancied, that fetched him violently out of sleep; at another it was the dreary sound of sobbing, lulled by his mother’s tranquillizing voice, that woke him. Now and again he was confusedly aware of sounds from the kitchen below, as if someone drew water from the tap, or raked the fire with care. Whether these things in fact awoke him or he awoke to them, they seemed to be without cessation: endless noises from a world of trouble. Peace never reigned in the sickroom or the world beyond, but a perpetual torment turned in tired circles. He heard St. Gyles’s clock chime all sorts of unimaginable hours: twelves and thirteens and twenty-fours. From the railway goods-yard the stertorous snorts of locomotives, succeeded by the rapid ricochet of shunted waggons, churned the night with melancholy turmoil. Noise, noise, noise. He was for ever being brought to wide-eyed wakefulness by something inexpressible that roused him: the clinking of a glass; the creaking of a bedstead; the movement of a foot upon the floor; the dreadful cry of tired pain that cannot find escape from its own existence through the doors of slumber.

3

Daybreak brought no respite; only a deepened wretchedness. Early in the morning Oswald woke to the startled realization of his mother, gazing at him in silence from the bedroom door.

“ ... I want you to go to Elizabeth’s for me,” she said, when his eyes recorded recognition of her at last. “ ... Before she has time to get away to her work, dear. And ask her if she can possibly come and help me to-day.”

Oswald’s eyes pricked and smarted through their long privation of repose, but he obeyed his mother’s order with alacrity, for any task is preferable to the suspense of tossing on a bed that offers neither sleep nor comfort; of being the stricken witness of sufferings beyond one’s power to redeem. Before St. Gyles’s clock chimed half-past six he stood outside Elizabeth’s house in the narrow, disillusioned street where this rabid worker dwelt. Yet early though he knocked, the scarred and blistered door flew open at the first impact of his knuckles as if by magic, and Elizabeth confronted him with a face that sharp suspicion and the darkest surmises rendered terrible to see. She had her shawl on, but no hat, and she waved the shining house-key in her withered hand with a tragic gesture of repudiation.

“It’s no use!” she cried, in a shrill and vibrant voice. “I wean’t tek backword now. I’ve tekkn it once this week. I wean’t tek it a second time from Nobody. She said I was to come to-day, and I said I would, and Come I Will.” At which point, recognizing all at once the form and features of the messenger through the dense emotions that had made her eyesight of small avail, she broke off with something like a sob, and propped her bosom with the door-key.

“Master Oswald!” she exclaimed incredulously. “It’s you! What a fright you gied me.”

Her thin lips writhed and trembled like blown straws, and the two attesting hands flung up to the level of her seared face were alive with agitation.

“I was sure it was Burfords come to bring me backword.” With which she made no effort to dissimulate her tears, for though she had been spared the confirmation of her worst forebodings, she had tasted--in the brevity of that moment--all its bitterness. “Foster’s gied me backword on Monday,” she told Oswald. “They sent lass to say they’d let me know when they should be wanting me again. Aye! After I’d gotten my breakfast and was stood wi’ my shawl on, an’ door-key in my hand, and basket on table, all ready to set off.”

Thus far she had spoken in her tragic voice; the voice displaying awful tones, like vocal chasms and precipices; that dropped at times to cavernous intensity, and plumbed such Stygian depths as caused cold currents to creep down Oswald’s spine. All at once, however, her eye threw off its frenzy and she put the passion from her face as if it were a mask. The voice was almost honeyed that inquired of Oswald what had brought him at this early hour, though tragedy returned in force when she learned the motive of his visit. Come? Aye! Elizabeth would come at the call of his mother and of sickness, though a thousand Burfords stood between. Let Burfords give her backword if they cared, and be done with her. Not that she had any fear they would.

“Burfords will let me off to-day,” she declared, with the fervour of conviction. “I know they will. They can’t help, when I say who it is, and what it’s for. And if they won’t ... it’ll be all the same. Tell your mother I shall be up at your house as soon as I’ve had time to let Burfords know.”

And true to her promise she tore up the street within ten minutes of Oswald’s return--having been all round by Rockery House in the meanwhile--at her customary breakneck pace between stumbling and flying; the frayed extremeties of her shawl beating the air like wings.

“Oh, mum!” she cried, the instant she caught sight of Mrs. Holmroyd. “Whatever’s this! Why didn’t you send for me sooner! I could ’a come and sat up wi’ her last night after I’d got back from Tomlinson’s. I sat up a fortnight wi’ Mrs. Sharples before she died, and never went to bed, and did my washing every day just same. It’s nothing’m. I’m used to it. If anything was to happen in this house I couldn’t bide to think that anybody else should be here at time but me. I shouldn’t forgive myself.”

For her the cup of sickness held intoxicating properties. She drank of it with gusto, as though it were sacramental wine. Its vintage warmed her, sent rapt and fiery currents through her blood. Dear to her heart though washings and spring-cleanings were, deathbeds and sick-chambers evoked her very soul. Such was the state of fervour they bestirred in her that her wasted body seemed a receptacle altogether too frail for the ecstatic forces rending it. No task however herculean daunted her enthusiasms; they boiled within her bosom, sustained by fires invisible and undwindling. Her insatiable appetite for work and the zeal she brought to the doing of it dispelled something of the leaden atmosphere of gloom that darkened Oswald’s heart, and brought back a gleam of ancient comfort to this altered home. The vital sound of water running into tilted pails, the brisk manipulation of taps and opening of cupboard doors, the animated friction of steel fenders and fire-irons with cloths dipped in turpentine and rubbed on bathbrick tended in some mysterious fashion to remove the furrows from the gathered face of care. Oswald partook of a breakfast which Elizabeth prepared and set for him in the kitchen, in order that the parlour might be free at any moment for the doctor’s coming. The sunny brightness of the morning served to dissipate much of last night’s dread. By the time that Oswald had cleared his platter there crept into his troubled being an element of timid confidence and hope. He went into the garden and found a chastened joy in it. He peeped from the parlour window and perceived a street flooded with such sunshine as made him crimp his eyes. Surely ... surely, with so much brightness and loveliness abroad; with so much in life to live for ... hope’s curtains might be lifted. Things could not altogether be as dark as he had feared.

But just as the school began to reassemble, and life appeared to be on the point of resuming its cheerful, customary features once again, the sunlight was extinguished by the advent of the doctor, who drove up in his noiseless Victoria and strode gravely up the staircase, bringing gloom and the hush of apprehensions back with him as if he were nocturnal dusk incarnate. Elizabeth, red-eyed and authoritative, subdued the assembling scholars with an uplifted finger on their entry, bidding each one of them in turn to “Hush!... Be still!... Doctor’s i’ house.” Awed by the apparition, albeit with all their curiosities bestirred and emitting a bee-like murmur, they stole up the staircase striving with the futility of childhood to keep silence, and took their places in the schoolroom where Oswald dutifully seated himself as a pattern to behaviour. The presence of a doctor in the bedroom immediately adjoining the wall on which the varnished atlas hung impressed imagination powerfully, and drew more interest than the world map had ever done. That their little schoolmate Beryl, who had wept yesterday during the thunderstorm, lay now so near to them upon a bed of sickness was a tremendous fact infecting all with irrepressible excitement. They spoke in whispers, but their whispers were stridulous and penetrating; piercing sharp with eagerness and hope, and through such sympathies as children feel they revelled in the novelty of the situation, and welcomed each moment won from tasks and lesson-books; pointing to the progress of the clock’s hands with something like jubilation. Some of them bent ears towards the wall, eager to glean sounds of the slightest portent from the unseen world of happenings beyond; others slipped on tiptoe to the window, to feed their hungry curiosities on the sight of the doctor’s carriage, and Oswald watched them in a state of curious remoteness, without a word. Steeped in the subdued babel of small voices and his own more personal concerns and speculations, a strange mist of unreality seemed to be creeping over life and him. His reasoning powers attested that this was not a dream in which he took so dim a part, and yet it bore in small respect the similitude of life. The voices all about him fell upon his ears with a quality of strangeness and familiar surprise, as if they had passed through a filter and were purified of all that made them real; the window looking out upon the street showed preternaturally clear; even through the ardent hum of conversation that made the schoolroom buzz like an insectarium, he was acutely conscious of the ticking of the schoolroom clock--a sound both intimate and alien. That he should be sitting there in schooltime without his mother, without Beryl, was a circumstance so contrary to all experience as to border on the preposterous. For life itself is but a language, intelligible only when by long usage made familiar. The element of novelty can prove too much for comprehensions unprepared, like strange new words that take from speech all comfort and significance, and leave the hearer’s mind depressed with the consciousness of its inability to understand. Hours passed by, it seemed to Oswald, before the schoolroom door opened and Mrs. Holmroyd appeared. There would be no school that day, she announced to them. They were all to go home very quietly. Beryl was seriously ill. “It is nothing at all infectious,” she took care to impress upon her listeners. “Nothing that your parents need have the least fear of. You must be sure to tell them that. I will write, or send word by Oswald, when you are to come again.”

Saying which, to Oswald’s deep dismay, she turned her face away with an abruptness of which he understood too well the cause, and retired as hastily as she had entered.

The little school broke up forthwith, simmering under the force of its own suppressed excitement. It doffed its academic slippers and put on its outdoor shoes, and reclaimed its hats and mantles from the pegs upon the landing outside the schoolroom door--Oswald mutely assisting--and took its leave, eager to disseminate the news and impart to others its own wonder, and taste the full savour of its unlooked-for liberty. Beneath its mien of sadness Oswald sensed a fine elation eager to be gone. It pulled long faces and exclaimed: “Poor Beryl!” and asked those dreadful questions that youth for ever asks until it has been taught to check its impulses, and to wrap loin-cloths about its natural and naked sentiments. “Would Beryl get better?” “What would happen if she died?” “When my cousin Amy died,” the confectioner’s daughter confided, “Alice didn’t have to go back to school while the next term!”

Oswald participated in all these speculations with a sort of purged distress. Wistfully he watched them go. They waved their hands to him and cried: “Good-bye, Oswald,” and left him cheerfully to his solitude and dumb distress. Only the little Alice Rencil ran back to him as he was about to close the door and laid compassionating fingers on his sleeve.

“Never mind, Oswald,” she said to him. “I will ask mother if you may come and play with me. Often. Until Beryl gets better.”

The promise dropped like a lump of sugar into his bitter cup, causing its brimming wretchedness to overflow. For such a promise, in the present hour of pain, seemed too sweet for fulfilment. It partook of the elusive loveliness of heaven; a felicity so remote and unattainable as almost to mock the sorrow it aspires to lighten. For a while Oswald lingered on the doorstep, exchanging chastened handwaves with the receding figure of the organist’s little daughter. Then, slowly and reluctantly, he shut out the pleasant prospect of the sunlit world and retired to the sadness of his soul’s solitude; to the deep depression of this altered home. So changed, indeed, were all its features, so abstracted, dark and reticent the look it wore, that he seemed rather to be a stranger within strange walls than Oswald Holmroyd. A new life was sprung into being, in which he had no part. He was an outsider who haunted the outskirts of unseen happenings, as--in days agone--he had hovered about the fringe of crowds surrounding some dread Thing in front of the Infirmary gates. Sounds frightened him; of approaching footsteps he was grown afraid; almost did he live in dread of the moment when next he must encounter Elizabeth’s red eyes, or undergo the searching ordeal of his mother’s face. He crept into the parlour as quietly as could be, and hid there. A great desire for righteousness possessed him. From the book cupboard he drew the big Bible, that needed both his hands to lift. Its sheer avoirdupois seemed to dispense comfort to hearts like his in trouble. He spread the sacred tome upon his knee, and deeming every single portion of the Word of God contained in it to be equally acceptable to its Author and efficacious in the hour of sorrow, began dutifully with the First Chapter of Genesis: “In the Beginning ... God created Heaven, and Earth....”

4

Through all this mass of dark and doleful memory one recollection shone for Oswald Holmroyd and his mother like clear, consolatory starlight. That was the unimaginable kindness dispensed by the Organist of St. Saviour’s and his wife.

Within an hour, indeed, of the school’s disbandment Mrs. Rencil knocked softly at the door of the little house in Spring Bank Gardens, drawn there by the purest feelings of friendship and concern.

“Is there anything at all ...” she enquired of Mrs. Holmroyd when the first words of sympathy had been exchanged, “ ... in which we can be of the least help to you? Is there anything required for the sick-room which perhaps we might be able to lend?... Or special food, which we could prepare for you at home? Invalids always think so much more of dishes that are brought to them! And you will have so many claims upon your time. Both my husband and I would feel so happy if you would allow us to be of some real assistance to you ... however small.”

The proposal was reinforced with tones and looks that left no doubt of the fullness of its sincerity, and in such a solemn hour kindness much less than this would have caused Mrs. Holmroyd’s gratitude to break down. “There was nothing,” she said through tears, “which at present she stood in need of--more than the wonderful sympathy which had just been shown. It was a great comfort to her to be assured of that, and to know,--in the event of real necessity--which way to turn for help.” But the Organist’s wife was not yet at the end of her proposal.

“Arthur suggested ...” she said, “that perhaps it might relieve you of some of your difficulty if we were to take charge of Oswald for you during this very trying time.” She was thinking, as Mrs. Holmroyd knew, of Oswald’s little bedplace reachable through the sick-room. “I wish you would allow us to do so. We could accommodate him so easily; he would be no trouble at all. He could sleep in our small spare bedroom, and have his meals with us ... and come to see you each day, or as often as you wished him to.”

At first, though a surge of gratitude swept between Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart and lips, and her thankfulness could only cry: “How can I ever thank you!”--a wave of consternation swept her also, at the thought of separation from her son in an hour when she felt such two-fold need of him. But she thought too, of his little sleeping place beyond the room where Beryl lay, and realized that it could continue to be his sleeping place no more until this shadow lifted. And the problem of her son’s disposal troubled Mrs. Holmroyd even as she sought reasons to justify her keeping of him. She understood his disposition well enough to know how much, for all his resolute assertions, the dreadful isolation of removal to an upper room would cost him, destitute of all furniture save his own small bed; withdrawn from every companionship if, through need or fear, he raised his voice to solicit of the night one reassuring word. True, there was the empty schoolroom. She might have lodged him there, close by the wall. But even whilst she pondered in Mrs. Rencil’s presence how best his bed might be disposed, her conscience rose up and reproached her. “It is my own selfish feelings I am seeking to consider,” she said within herself. “Not his.” Moreover, despite the deep trouble she was in, her mother’s pride responded to such a genuine evidence of interest on his behalf, affirming--as it did--not only the great kindness of these friends, but the merit of her son. Who was to say that providence had no part in this proposal? And of a sudden, suffused with a great blind faith that was prepared to put its trust in any wisdom other than her own, she concurred with gratitude in the project of his going. “I had already been wondering,” she told her visitor, “ ... what was to be done with Oswald. The house is so small. And I fear it will be but a sad home for him ... during the next few days.”

Thus it befell that Oswald Holmroyd set off that same afternoon in company with Mrs. Rencil and her little daughter to the organist’s house in Hill Street, carrying his nightshirt and necessaries in a canvas satchel, and the deep sadness that was in him received the unexpected setting of a golden frame. It seemed to him he was no longer Oswald Holmroyd in the flesh, but the soul of disembodied sorrow that floated in an atmosphere of love; permeated through and through with a quality of human kindliness whose ambient warmth pertained to the divine. Looks, tones, gestures--all--within this new enchanted world--were softened to besuit the soul of sorrow. Every thought and act of kindness converged in Oswald. Alice brought all her playthings to lay as an offering on the altar of his sadness, Mrs. Rencil lulled his sense of strangership with the sweetest of smiles and voices. The Organist himself laid on Oswald’s shoulder a hand so warm, compassionate and kindly, as brought into Oswald’s throat a lump of unswallowable affection. Think! Standing on the broad balcony of the Organist’s drawing-room, immersed in a flood of glorified Hill Street sunlight--that was infinitely richer, warmer and more golden than the sunlight allocated to Spring Bank Gardens--he could survey the whole length of the High Gate as far as the Mansion House. From this impressive vantage point--surely the supreme pinnacle of human ambition--alike he could see and be seen. He could look down with pride and unimaginable condescension on upturned faces that looked (with no small envy of his elevation) at him. He could watch the music-cases come and go, that grew into visibility from every conceivable quarter of the horizon, and converged with the inevitableness of destiny upon this house of houses. Not only so, but on occasions he was even deputed to run downstairs and give admission to such recent pupils as still retained a diffidence about opening with their own hands the Organist’s door. Scales and five-finger exercises and the hourly sound of stammering sonatas were the very essence of the enchanted air he breathed. He drew them all into his lungs along with the more wondrous music that Arthur Rencil made with his own hands, and all Oswald’s pulses became musicians, meting out his eager blood in bars. Nor was his part in music confined alone to what he heard. During such intervals as the Organist’s teaching-room was empty Oswald was set to practice with a whimsical severity that utilized this method of distracting the boy’s mind from thoughts of the shadow of home.

“Oswald, you scamp! What’s this! You’ve only had half an hour’s work. How do you expect to be able to take the Service for me next Sunday, at this rate! Quick. Get into the music-room with you, and don’t you dare to give up counting or to take your fingers off the keys until my next pupil comes--whether he comes to-night or to-morrow afternoon!”

Then, too, Oswald was constituted the proud bearer of Arthur Rencil’s messages, hastening to this house or to that; to the music shop in High Gate for music paper; and to the iron-monger’s for fret-saws and brass hinges; and to Prestwich’s for the church keys; and to Canon Quexley’s in respect of hymns for Sunday. Walks, too, with Mrs. Rencil and her little daughter Oswald took; and now and then the drawing-room resounded with the most heavenly of games--in which the Organist of St. Saviour’s did not disdain to take his part. And little Alice Rencil held up her face to Oswald when at night she went to bed, and put her arms about his neck, and Oswald’s lips encountered soft, warm lips that might have been his sister Beryl’s lips--save in respect to the effect they had upon him. For these lips, whispering his own name as they kissed him, set all his prides on fire and filled him at the same time with sadness and confusion. Oh! if only Beryl had been well! If only she and his mother might have shared with him these hours of seraphic happiness, what more could he--or they--have asked of life? After every bout of mirth and laughter Oswald dutifully dimmed the brightness in his bosom and thought with conscientious sorrow of his little sister, and the debt incalculable he owed her sickness; these joys she could not share. For life, in such a magic setting, was not lived--but dreamed. He drew it effortlessly through his enchanted senses like breath through the lips. Time, for Oswald, ceased to be. Whole ages he abode in the Organist’s house in Hill Street; whole ages, that is to say, measured by the emotions, albeit--measured by the clock--they were but moments; a night; a day; a few brief mortal hours; no more; perishable hours of imperishable memory, dying like flesh and blood and sighing out their happiness like souls at last into the eternal void. Such was the bright atmosphere of love encompassing him here that gradually he lost thought of those shadows elsewhere deepening. When it is still day with us we find it hard to realize that in other latitudes the night has fallen. Away from the little house in Spring Bank Gardens, remote from the world of anxious whispers, hushed footsteps and fear-worn faces, his youthful hopes revived. Surely, with such invariable, kindly eyes and smiling lips and reassuring voices, there was no cause to feel alarm. The worst was over; the best was soon to be. Before long, Beryl would be his laughing, gleeful sister once again. She and his mother would come to join him in this house of gladness. He began to reconsider his first terrors with magnanimity and mild contempt, as he thought, at times, of pennies foolishly expended in his days of youth on baubles that a later wisdom scorned.

... And then, of a sudden, the life about him darkened like a blue sky when from nowhere, in no time at all, the black clouds rise and swallow it. He heard the house-bell ring a peal that made assurance sicken. His startled intuitions stirred in him like leaves when the storm’s first gust assails them. He sat at the pianoforte in the teaching-room, playing five-finger exercises with his whole heart, and counting in his bravest, clearest voice for Arthur Rencil and all the world to hear; but that sharp peal silenced his counting and stopped his fingers stock-still upon the keys. It went through his bosom with a swift pain, with an indescribable emotion such as he had experienced that evening in the chancel at St. Saviour’s when the passing bell rang out its apostrophic note for the dead alderman, and he and the choir had held their breath to listen, and hearts delayed their beat. It might have been anybody who rang at the Organist’s door, but a sharp, dread certitude within him affirmed this was not Anybody. He heard the blend of voices down below, that might have been discussing anything; but again the sharp, dread certitude within him proclaimed this was not Anything. It was Something. Something that concerned him very closely, deeply, terribly. One of these voices, he had made sure (for all he could not hear it) was the voice of Elizabeth. Another of the voices was the voice of Mrs. Rencil, for this he heard distinctly. It cried: “Alice, dear!... Come here awhile ... I want you.” And then his trembling intuitions were filled with every sort of sound inaudible to any hearing but that of a blanched and speechless terror. Sounds of movement; of doors opening and closing; of footsteps hastening in quest of him. Aye! in quest of him. In quest of Oswald Holmroyd. And such was his terror, such his certitude, that he had no courage, power or inclination to dissimulate. He could not count one beat or strike one single key to hide the fear he felt. He could only sit with impotent dropped wrists and his face turned over his shoulder in the direction of the door behind him that he knew inevitably must open.

It opened, as his fears divined, and Arthur Rencil came into the room. The accustomed smile upon his face was gone, absorbed into the solemnity of a great compassion; withdrawn to an illimitable distance (it seemed to Oswald) as if the Organist gazed down upon him with tenderness and sorrow from some infinite high place; from the sky; from heaven.

“ ... Oswald!” he said, and that voice of dreadful, undermining softness swept away from the listener his last hope, his last fortitude. “I am afraid that you will have to give up your practice for this morning ... and go home. Your mother has just sent for you....”

The gentle voice spoke on, but Oswald heard no more. As by a lightning stroke the veil of illusory happiness was rent in twain. Beyond, where he had deemed life’s sunlight still to be, was naught but a void of pitchy darkness and despair. He dropped his face upon the compassionating arm that the Organist put around him, and poured out the wretchedness of his soul in such tears as he had never shed before.