_ CHAPTER XLVIII. DEATH THE DELIVERER
The spring advanced; the days grew a little warmer; and at length, partly from economic considerations, it was determined they should go home. When they reached London, they found a great difference in the weather: it cannot be said she owes her salubrity to her climate. Fog and drizzle, frost and fog, were the embodiment of its unvarying mutability. At once Richard was worse, and dared not think, for his mother's sake, and the labour she had spent upon him, of going to the next popular concert, if indeed those delights had not ceased for the season. But he ought to try, for he could do that in the middle of the day, at least to get news of Arthur Manson. He dreaded hearing that he was no more in this world. The cold wintry weather, and the return to poor and spare nourishment caused by Richard's illness, must have been hard upon him! It was a continual sorrow to Richard that he had not been able to get him his new clothes before he was taken ill. So the first morning he felt it possible, he took his way to the city. There he learned that the company had dispensed with Arthur's services, because his attendance had become so irregular.
"You see, sir," said the porter, "the gov'nors they don't think no more of a man than they do of a horse: so long as he can hold the shafts up an' lean agin the collar, he's money; when he can't no longer, he's dirt!"
Sad at heart, Richard set out for Clerkenwell. He was ill able for the journey, but Arthur was dying! He would brave the mother for the sake of the son! He got into an omnibus which took him a good part of the way, and walked the rest. When at length he looked up at the dreary house, he saw the blinds of the windows drawn down. A pang of fear went through his heart, and an infilial murmur awoke in his brain:--why was he, on whom those poor lives almost depended, made feeble as themselves, and incapable of helping them? After all his hoping and trusting, _could_ there be a God in the earth and things go like that? The look of things seemed the truth of things; the seen denied the unseen. Cold and hunger and desertion; ugly, mocking failure; heartless comfort, and hopeless misery, made up the law of life! Moody and wretched he went up the stair to the darkened floor.
When he knocked at the front room, that in which Alice slept with her mother, it was opened by Alice, looking more small and forlorn than he had yet seen her, with hollower cheeks and larger eyes, and a smile to make an angel weep.
"Richard!" she cried, with a voice in which the very gladness sounded like pain. A pink flush rose in her poor wasted cheeks, and she lay still in his arms as if she had gone to live there.
He could not, for pity, speak one word.
"How ill you look!" she murmured. "I knew you must be ill! I thought you might be dead! Oh, God _is_ good to leave you to us!" Then bursting into tears, "How wicked of me," she sobbed, "to feel anything like gladness, with my mother lying there, and me not able to do anything for her, and not knowing what's become of her, or how things are going with her!--We shall never see her again!"
"Don't say that, Alice! Never say _never_ about anything except it be bad. You can't be _sure_, you know. You can't be sure of anything that's not in your very mouth--and then sometimes you can't swallow it!--But how's Arthur?"
"He'll know all about it soon!" she answered, with a touch of bitterness. "If he had been left me, we should have got along somehow. He would have lain in bed, and I would have worked beside him! How I could have worked for _him_! But he's past hope now! He'll never get up again."
"Oh God," cried Richard in his heart, where an agony of will wrestled with doubt, "if thou art, thou wilt hear me, and take pity on her, and on us all!--I dare not pray, Alice," he went on aloud, "that he may live, but I will pray God to be with him. It would be poor kindness to want him left with us, if he is taking him where he will be well. May I go and see him?"
"Surely, Richard.--But mayn't I let him know first? The surprise might be too much for him."
Their talk had waked him, however, and he knew his brother's voice. "Richard! Richard!" he cried, so loud that it startled Alice: he had not spoken above a whisper for days. Richard opened his door, and went in. But when he saw Arthur, he could scarcely recognize him, he was so wasted. His eyes stood out like balls from his sunken cheeks, and the smile with which he greeted him was all teeth, like the helpless smile of a skull. Overcome with tenderness, the stronger that he would have passed him in the street as one unknown, Richard stooped and kissed his forehead, then stood speechless, holding the thin leaf of a hand that strained his. Arthur tried to speak, but his cough came on, and his brother begged him to be silent.
"I will go into the next room with Alice," he said, "and come to you again. I shall see you often now, I hope. I've been ill or I should have been here fifty times."
In the next room lay the motionless form of the unmotherly mother. A certain something of human grace had returned to her countenance. Richard did not like looking at her; he felt that, not loving her, he had no right to let his eyes rest on her. But she had been sinned against like his own mother: he must not fail her with what sympathy she might claim!
"Don't think hard things of her," said Alice, as if she knew what he was thinking. "She had not the strength of some people. I believe myself she could not help it. She had been used to everything she wanted!"
"I pity her heartily," answered Richard.
She threw her arms round his neck, and clung to him as if she would never more let him go.
"But what am I to do?" she said, releasing him. "If I stay at home to nurse Arthur, we must both die of hunger. If I go away, there is nobody to do anything for him!"
"I wish I could stay with him!" returned Richard. "But I've been so long ill that I have no money, and I don't know when I shall have any. I have just one shilling in my possession. Take it, dear."
"I can't take your last shilling, Richard!"
"There's no fear of me," he said; "I shall have everything I want. It makes me ashamed to think of it. You must just creep on for a while as best you can, while I think what to do. Only there's the funeral!"
Alice gave a cry choked by a sob.
"There is no help!" she said in a voice of despair. "The parish is all that is left us!"
"It don't matter much," rejoined Richard. "For my part I don't care a paring what becomes of my old clothes when I've done with them! You needn't think, whether she be anywhere or nowhere, that she cares how her body gets put under the earth! Don't trouble about it, Alice; it really is nothing. I would come to the funeral, but I don't see how I can. I don't know now what I shall say to my mother!--Tell Arthur I hope to see him again soon; I must not stop now. I won't forget you, Alice--not for an hour, I think. Beg some one in the house to go in to him now and then while you are away. I shall soon do something to cheer him up a bit. Good-night, dear!"
With a heavy heart Richard went. It was all he could do to get home before dark, having to walk all the way. His mother was much distressed to see him so exhausted; but he managed not to tell her what he had been about. He had some tea and went to bed, and there remained all the next day. And while he was in bed, it came to him clear and plain what he must do. It was certain that for a long time he could do nothing for Arthur and Alice out of his own pocket. Even if he got to work at once, he could not take his wages as before, seeing his parents had spent upon him almost all they had saved!
But there was one who _ought_ to help them! Specially in such sore need had they a right to the saving help of their own father! He would go to his father and their father--and as the words rose in his mind, he wondered where he had heard something like them before.
The next day he begged his father and mother to let him spend a week or two with his grandfather. _