_ When Sophia arrived in the bedroom, she was startled because her
father's head and beard were not in their accustomed place on the
pillow. She could only make out something vaguely unusual sloping
off the side of the bed. A few seconds passed--not to be measured
in time--and she saw that the upper part of his body had slipped
down, and his head was hanging, inverted, near the floor between
the bed and the ottoman. His face, neck, and hands were dark and
congested; his mouth was open, and the tongue protruded between
the black, swollen, mucous lips; his eyes were prominent and
coldly staring. The fact was that Mr. Baines had wakened up, and,
being restless, had slid out partially from his bed and died of
asphyxia. After having been unceasingly watched for fourteen
years, he had, with an invalid's natural perverseness, taken
advantage of Sophia's brief dereliction to expire. Say what you
will, amid Sophia's horror, and her terrible grief and shame, she
had visitings of the idea: he did it on purpose!
She ran out of the room, knowing by intuition that he was dead,
and shrieked out, "Maggie," at the top of her voice; the house
echoed.
"Yes, miss," said Maggie, quite close, coming out of Mr. Povey's
chamber with a slop-pail.
"Fetch Mr. Critchlow at once. Be quick. Just as you are. It's
father--"
Maggie, perceiving darkly that disaster was in the air, and
instantly filled with importance and a sort of black joy, dropped
her pail in the exact middle of the passage, and almost fell down
the crooked stairs. One of Maggie's deepest instincts, always held
in check by the stern dominance of Mrs. Baines, was to leave pails
prominent on the main routes of the house; and now, divining what
was at hand, it flamed into insurrection.
No sleepless night had ever been so long to Sophia as the three
minutes which elapsed before Mr. Critchlow came. As she stood on
the mat outside the bedroom door she tried to draw her mother and
Constance and Mr. Povey by magnetic force out of the wakes into
the house, and her muscles were contracted in this strange effort.
She felt that it was impossible to continue living if the secret
of the bedroom remained unknown one instant longer, so intense was
her torture, and yet that the torture which could not be borne
must be borne. Not a sound in the house! Not a sound from the
shop! Only the distant murmur of the wakes!
"Why did I forget father?" she asked herself with awe. "I only
meant to tell him that they were all out, and run back. Why did I
forget father?" She would never be able to persuade anybody that
she had literally forgotten her father's existence for quite ten
minutes; but it was true, though shocking.
Then there were noises downstairs.
"Bless us! Bless us!" came the unpleasant voice of Mr. Critchlow
as he bounded up the stairs on his long legs; he strode over the
pail. "What's amiss?" He was wearing his white apron, and he
carried his spectacles in his bony hand.
"It's father--he's--" Sophia faltered.
She stood away so that he should enter the room first. He glanced
at her keenly, and as it were resentfully, and went in. She
followed, timidly, remaining near the door while Mr. Critchlow
inspected her handiwork. He put on his spectacles with strange
deliberation, and then, bending his knees outwards, thus lowered
his body so that he could examine John Baines point-blank. He
remained staring like this, his hands on his sharp apron-covered
knees, for a little space; and then he seized the inert mass and
restored it to the bed, and wiped those clotted lips with his
apron.
Sophia heard loud breathing behind her. It was Maggie. She heard a
huge, snorting sob; Maggie was showing her emotion.
"Go fetch doctor!" Mr. Critchlow rasped. "And don't stand gaping
there!"
"Run for the doctor, Maggie," said Sophia.
"How came ye to let him fall?" Mr. Critchlow demanded.
"I was out of the room. I just ran down into the shop--"
"Gallivanting with that young Scales!" said Mr. Critchlow, with
devilish ferocity. "Well, you've killed yer father; that's all!"
He must have been at his shop door and seen the entry of the
traveller! And it was precisely characteristic of Mr. Critchlow to
jump in the dark at a horrible conclusion, and to be right after
all. For Sophia Mr. Critchlow had always been the personification
of malignity and malevolence, and now these qualities in him made
him, to her, almost obscene. Her pride brought up tremendous
reinforcements, and she approached the bed.
"Is he dead?" she asked in a quiet tone. (Somewhere within a voice
was whispering, "So his name is Scales.")
"Don't I tell you he's dead?"
"Pail on the stairs!"
This mild exclamation came from the passage. Mrs. Baines,
misliking the crowds abroad, had returned alone; she had left
Constance in charge of Mr. Povey. Coming into her house by the
shop and showroom, she had first noted the phenomenon of the pail-
-proof of her theory of Maggie's incurable untidiness.
"Been to see the elephant, I reckon!" said Mr. Critchlow, in
fierce sarcasm, as he recognized Mrs. Baines's voice.
Sophia leaped towards the door, as though to bar her mother's
entrance. But Mrs. Baines was already opening the door.
"Well, my pet--" she was beginning cheerfully.
Mr. Critchlow confronted her. And he had no more pity for the wife
than for the daughter. He was furiously angry because his precious
property had been irretrievably damaged by the momentary
carelessness of a silly girl. Yes, John Baines was his property,
his dearest toy! He was convinced that he alone had kept John
Baines alive for fourteen years, that he alone had fully
understood the case and sympathized with the sufferer, that none
but he had been capable of displaying ordinary common sense in the
sick-room. He had learned to regard John Baines as, in some sort,
his creation. And now, with their stupidity, their neglect, their
elephants, between them they had done for John Baines. He had
always known it would come to that, and it had come to that.
"She let him fall out o' bed, and ye're a widow now, missis!" he
announced with a virulence hardly conceivable. His angular
features and dark eyes expressed a murderous hate for every woman
named Baines.
"Mother!" cried Sophia, "I only ran down into the shop to--to--"
She seized her mother's arm in frenzied agony.
"My child!" said Mrs. Baines, rising miraculously to the situation
with a calm benevolence of tone and gesture that remained for ever
sublime in the stormy heart of Sophia, "do not hold me." With
infinite gentleness she loosed herself from those clasping hands.
"Have you sent for the doctor?" she questioned Mr. Critchlow.
The fate of her husband presented no mysteries to Mrs. Baines.
Everybody had been warned a thousand times of the danger of
leaving the paralytic, whose life depended on his position, and
whose fidgetiness was thereby a constant menace of death to him.
For five thousand nights she had wakened infallibly every time he
stirred, and rearranged him by the flicker of a little oil lamp.
But Sophia, unhappy creature, had merely left him. That was all.
Mr. Critchlow and the widow gazed, helplessly waiting, at the
pitiable corpse, of which the salient part was the white beard.
They knew not that they were gazing at a vanished era. John Baines
had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of
their souls, when orators by phrases could move crowds to fury or
to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when Demos was only
turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of life resided in its
inflexible and slow dignity, when hell really had no bottom, and a
gilt-clasped Bible really was the secret of England's greatness.
Mid-Victorian England lay on that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed
away with John Baines. It is thus that ideals die; not in the
conventional pageantry of honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly,
while one's head is turned--
And Mr. Povey and Constance, very self-conscious, went and saw the
dead elephant, and came back; and at the corner of King Street,
Constance exclaimed brightly--
"Why! who's gone out and left the side-door open?"
For the doctor had at length arrived, and Maggie, in showing him
upstairs with pious haste, had forgotten to shut the door.
And they took advantage of the side-door, rather guiltily, to
avoid the eyes of the shop. They feared that in the parlour they
would be the centre of a curiosity half ironical and half
reproving; for had they not accomplished an escapade? So they
walked slowly.
The real murderer was having his dinner in the commercial room up
at the Tiger, opposite the Town Hall. _