Eustace and Hilda (105 page)

Eustace thought he saw a vibration in the blue felt hat, a tremor in the hands that seemed to steer, a twitching in the toes of the expensive shoes. But gratifying as it is to hear that other people have changed—for in them there is always room for improvement—one doesn't want to be told that one has changed oneself, especially if the change has involved paralysis.

“You haven't changed,” Eustace went on; “but then, no one could want you to; you've helped us to change and ever so many cripples, but I'm sure you're the same underneath, just as you look the same, except for this sad illness. And all the doctors say that's only temporary. At any moment, just when you're least thinking about it, you'll get better, just as the woman did in the Bible, just as the Sleeping Beauty did, when the prince waked her. And then all the past will seem as though it was just leading up to that, your moment of freedom.”

Eustace had said his say, he was emptied of thought and feeling. Over the Lincolnshire coast the sun was going down in calm magnificence. A few clouds, bars of indigo, bright at the edges, rested on the lower part of the great orb; below, the sea already shimmered with the opalescence of approaching twilight. The wind had dropped, but the water was still ruffled by the energy of its breath. A procession of ripples, tipped with palest gold, rolled purposefully towards Eustace; the cliff was not a barrier to them, they seemed to surmount it and flow right into him, bringing a delicious drowsy feeling that his returning consciousness would soon expel. The weakness must be expelled, for he had something to do, and now was the time to do it, now while they were passing the Second Shelter where he had first spoken to Miss Fothergill, and in sight of the rocks, far, far below, where Hilda and he had built their pond. No one was sitting in the shelter, no one was near them on the cliffs; they were within a few paces of the brink. It was now or never, for unless he did it now, when his mood of greatest confidence was on him, he would never do it, and Hilda would languish for months, for years, perhaps for life, a paralytic clamped in her iron shell.

He began to tremble as his will strove for mastery with his increasing physical weakness. He tried to get the message down into his hands, but they would not obey him; they would not turn the bath-chair towards the edge. A sudden sharp run to within a foot or two of the brink; then a pause for Hilda to realise all that threatened her; then a quick recoil, and then—how often had he rehearsed it—the miracle. No one could do it but him; and he must do it now, now, or spend his life in vain regret, tormented every time he took Hilda out, every time he brought her in, every time he saw her or thought of her, by the knowledge that there was something he could have done to cure her and he did not do it. But he had reckoned without himself. All his other faculties revolted against the act that his will was forcing on them and only when they were darkened by the shadow that was rising in him did he turn the wheels of the chair towards the abyss.

Too late. His fingers were slipping from the handle: the chair was moving of itself. Desperately he felt in his pockets, not for the brandy, purposely left behind, but for the wedges, those legitimate objects of precaution, but he could not reach them. “I don't feel very well, Hilda,” he gasped, “I think I'll sit down, if you don't mind.” Falling, he flung out his arm in an effort to grasp the wheel, his hand passed through the spokes and they closed on his wrist, bringing the chair to a standstill.

At first Hilda's vision was bounded by the sea and sky; she seemed to be hanging in space. Suddenly her head gave a jerk, a jerk like the nod a man gives, dozing by the fire; and when her chin settled again, lower on her chest, her eyes took in a strip of the cliff's edge, the quiet grasses lifted by the wind, and close beside her, turned up to the sky, the toe of her brother's shoe.

For a full minute by the second hand of her diamond wrist-watch Hilda's eyes never left the foot, and all the time she strained herself over until at last she saw the side of his head lying motionless on the ground.

Tremors passed through Hilda, violent tremors swelling into convulsive shudderings that made the bath-chair creak and rattle. At the height of the seizure she sneezed, sneezed with her whole body, not once, but several times, as if she were sneezing herself to life, and then the release of movement spread through all her limbs. Her foot sought the ground, and she followed, with a whirl of the Fortuny skirt that would have delighted Eustace. Rocking a little as she stood, but feeling the weakness flow out of her and the strength return, she looked down at him. Lying with his head turned the other way and his legs spread out, he looked as if his body had been tied to the wheel and shaken off. Freckles had come out on his nose, his moustache was nearly black against his ashen lips, and the grasses and the trefoil pressed themselves against his cheek.

She thought he was dead, but Eustace was not dead, and even as she looked at him he stirred and opened his eyes. “Oh, Hilda,” he murmured, “you're better. I'm so glad—I—” He drifted off again. She knelt beside him and loosened his collar, got his hand away from the spokes and began to chafe his wrists. One of his wrists was spotted with blood where the spoke had bitten into it. He opened his eyes again and saw, not only Hilda but several other people whom she hadn't noticed, standing round, looking very tall and solemn. The colour came back into his face and he sat up. “How stupid of me,” he said, “I must have fainted.” Seeing he was better, the onlookers began to tell each other to come away, but one man stayed behind and asked Hilda if he could do anything. Hilda asked him to help her to put Eustace into the bath-chair. “Yes,” he said, “but first I'll take it away from where it is; it'll be over the cliff in a moment. You might have had a nasty accident.”

One of the spectators who was moving away from the spot, believing himself to be out of earshot, said to his companion, “I saw it all happen, and it didn't look like an accident.”

Eustace heard the words but was too dazed to take in their meaning; he sat looking about him in a shy and happy confusion, while the stranger pulled the bath-chair back into safety. He put his hands under Eustace's shoulders, Hilda linked hers beneath his knees, and together they lifted him into the chair.

“Shall I push him for you, Madam?” said the man, who seemed loath to go away.

“Oh no, thank you,” said Hilda, “I'm sure I can manage.”

But the man was insistent.

“All right, you can take him for a start,” she said, a trifle ungraciously, “but you must let me have him when I tell you.”

“You can put your hand between mine, just to steady him,” the man said, leaving a space on the bar for Hilda's hand.

Still feeling dizzy, but always automatically alert to Hilda's relations with other people, Eustace was surprised to hear her say, “That's very kind of you.”

When they reached the wall of the preparatory school she dismissed her escort, who departed with many protestations and hat held high. Feeling weak all over, she took the handle and was just able to pull the bath-chair up the slope.

Watching from a window, Minney saw them come back.

T
HE TWO
recovering invalids had their supper downstairs, though Minney had done her utmost to persuade them to go to bed. “And I do wish you'd let me ring up Dr. Speedwell,” she said. “Mr. Eustace isn't looking any too grand, and besides, think how pleased he'll be to see you, Miss Hilda, walking about and looking just like anybody else. Why, it's only fair to him, I say, to show him how he's cured you. Those doctors in London couldn't. It's like a miracle.”

“Oh, don't let's have him, Minney,” pleaded Eustace. “Let's be as we are for this evening. It's such more fun, just the three of us. I can see him to-morrow if you think I ought to.”

“Well, we don't want him fainting here, do we, Miss Hilda?”

The tiny frown that had furrowed Hilda's brow while her face was clamped in illness had not yet straightened out.

“I don't need the doctor,” she said, “and I don't think Eustace does.”

Eustace glanced at her uneasily, troubled by something in her tone.

“Very well, then, but it's lucky Miss Hilda
is
better, because Mr. Crankshaw isn't coming back to-night—not that he'll be wanted, I'm sure—and I wouldn't trust Mr. Eustace to carry her upstairs.”

“Wouldn't you, Minney?” asked Hilda. “Why not?”

“No, I wouldn't, not as he is now. He might drop you. Now you both go into the drawing-room while I wash up, and I'll come and tell you when it's time to go to bed. No sitting up late, mind.”

Eustace opened the door for Hilda and followed her into the drawing-room. How well she graced the uncomfortable high-backed chair! She had only to move to give him happiness. Tired as he was, only just afloat on the sea of consciousness, he asked nothing better than to sit and look at her. But she was not looking at him. She was staring at the fire which Minney had lighted for them, and which burnt, as always, under protest.

“Was it an accident?” she said at length, still without looking at him.

“Was what an accident, darling?” asked Eustace, his heart and mind engaged in the play of Hilda's fingers, clenching and unclenching in her lap.

“Didn't you hear what the man said?”

She could curl her little finger right up.

“What man, Hilda dear?”

“The man on the cliffs.”

Her foot was swivelling round on her ankle, this way and that, in an impatient circle, and under the thin stuff of her shoe each of her toes seemed to have a life of its own.

“Do you mean the one who helped us?”

“No, another man.”

Eustace looked blank. “I'm afraid I wasn't taking much notice.”

“He said he'd seen it all, and he didn't think it was an accident,” said Hilda.

Eustace moved his head about in a gesture she remembered well.

“What did he think it was?”

“He thought you did it on purpose.”

There was no sound in the room save the angry sputtering of the fire. Eustace's mind spun and rattled like a pianola record when you wind it back.

“Well, I did, in a way.”

Hilda stiffened, so that for a moment Eustace thought the paralysis had taken hold of her again.

“Then you
were
trying to push me over.”

Eustace stared at her with his mouth open and the colour left his face.

“I don't altogether blame you,” said Hilda, “only I wonder you didn't do it at night, when there was no one about.”

“Oh!”

Eustace grasped the hard, knobbly arms of the chair and summoned all his faculties, sounding a bugle in his mind to rally the last stragglers. “No, no,” he said, starting up and sinking back again. “You mustn't think that, Hilda, you mustn't! Please don't, Hilda! It would kill me if you thought that. No, no, believe me, it was an experiment. Dr. Speedwell said a shock might cure you. He'll tell you so himself. You
must
believe me, Hilda! I should have explained everything, only I didn't seem to get the chance at supper, with Minney there. Please, please believe me! It was the only way I could think of, and I couldn't tell you before-hand, I couldn't give you any warning, you must see that, or it wouldn't have been a shock.”

He tried to explain his plan to her in detail, growing more and more incoherent. “And then I began to feel faint; but I thought I should have just time to do it, and I knew that if I didn't do it then, I never should, and then you would never get better. You are better now, aren't you?”

“Yes,” said Hilda sombrely. “I suppose I am.”

Her thoughts felt strange to her; never very accessible, they had circled so long in her mind without the outlet of speech that they had worn a groove there, a deep trench not easily penetrated from without.

Eustace looked at her beseechingly.

“Say something, Hilda. I can't bear it when you sit so still. You
can
speak now. Please say something. I can't say any more.”

“What am I to say?” Hilda spoke slowly as if her tongue was still rusty. “I must believe you, of course.” She looked at him inquiringly, as if begging him to give her the power to believe. “It was all so strange,” she went on dreamily. “After the first moment, I wasn't afraid of the fall. I've a good head for heights. Highcross Hill is high. Then I saw your foot. But it began before that.”

Her mind seemed to be unwinding, losing its coiled tightness.

“What he said was almost the first thing I heard—I shouldn't have taken so much notice. I've been a burden to you, Eustace. I know that. If I'd been able to move, well, even enough to have poured myself out a glass of medicine, I wouldn't have been a burden to you any more.”

“Oh, Hilda, what are you saying?” Eustace cried. “You couldn't speak before, and now you can, you want to break my heart. I can see you don't believe me. What can I do to convince you?”

She stared at him with a heavy vacancy.

“I wouldn't have talked to you as I did if I'd meant to—to hurt you,” he said. “And as
you
said, Hilda, if I'd wanted to do what you think, I could have done it at night.”

His myriad-pointed misery, like a file, scraped the skin of his mind for new methods of persuasion, but his rasped and bleeding consciousness could only speak its pain. Desperately he returned to the old arguments, but they lit no light in her sullen face which, to his horror, was beginning to take on the fixed, unnatural expression of her illness. He flung out his hands and as they dropped to his sides they struck against something hard. The wedges. For the sake of something to do he took them out and held them balanced on his palms like weights, eyeing Hilda as David might have eyed Goliath.

Hilda returned his look. “What have you got there?” she said. Loaded with suspicion, her voice dropped to a whisper. “You're frightening me. I don't feel safe. What have you got there, Eustace?”