Saddle the Wind (56 page)

‘I’m afraid the deterioration of his lungs is already so far advanced. To be truthful I don’t know how he’s held out for this long. And to walk all that distance. The wonder
is
that he
got
here.’

‘So it could be – any day?’

He pressed her hand. ‘Or any hour, my dear.’

*

Blanche showed the doctor to the front door, opened it and stood aside. She thanked him, and he gave a little nod and said that he would call the next day. In the meantime he would have some medicine made up; perhaps, he suggested, someone could return with him to his surgery to bring it back. At once Blanche called to Lily and asked her if she would accompany the doctor. Quickly, obligingly, the girl put on her coat and followed Dr Quinn out to the street where his motor car waited at the kerb in the early evening light.

Having closed the door behind them, Blanche leaned back against it for a moment, like a runner pausing for breath. Then, with a sigh she stepped forward, moving towards the stairs. As she stepped onto the lower step George Marsh emerged from the dining room.

‘Blanche …’

As he came towards her she avoided looking him in the eye, as if somehow he might see past her now calm exterior to the fear and desperation that lay so close below the surface.

‘The doctor’s just gone,’ she said.

‘Yes, I heard him leave.’

‘He’s coming back tomorrow. Lily’s gone with him to bring back some medicine. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not.’ After a moment Marsh said, ‘What did Dr Quinn say?’

Blanche shrugged, not trusting herself to speak at once. Then she said, ‘I won’t give up hope.’

Marsh’s hand lifted, rested briefly on hers on the newel post. ‘I told you – if there’s anything he needs you have only to ask.’

‘I know – and thank you.’

She turned then and went on up the stairs.

Entering the bedroom, she softly closed the door behind her and moved to the bed. In the dim glow of
the gaslight, Jacko, lying on the floor at the bedside as close to Ernest’s pillow as he could get, looked around at Blanche’s entrance and thumped the floor once or twice with his tail. Blanche bent to pat him gently on the head and then stood looking down at Ernest who lay with his eyes closed. She could see so clearly now the unmistakable signs of his sickness. But it wasn’t too late, she said to herself. He could be saved. He had not come all that way only to die. She would save him.

As she stood there he opened his eyes and smiled at her. She returned his smile and asked softly:

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No. I wasn’t asleep. We were waiting for you to come upstairs, Jacko and I.’

She moved to the chair and sat down. In spite of the haggardness of Ernest’s face, the ravages wrought by his illness she could see there now a kind of calm; it had been growing since the moment she had found him again, since that moment when she had run to his side on the garden path, had held him in her arms. It was as if he had found a kind of peace.

‘I’m sorry I let you worry so about me, Blanche,’ he said.

‘Ernest – please don’t talk. Please rest.’

‘No, I must talk to you. I didn’t write because – well, because I’d promised you that I would send for you. I was so sure that I’d be a success – that it would only be a matter of time before everything was the way I wanted it to be. And I thought that when I had everything prepared I could write and – and if you still wanted to you could join me. It didn’t work out, though. Nothing worked out the way I hoped it would, the way I expected it to.’

‘Ernie, it doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t talk, please. Please rest.’

‘I can rest later. I have to talk to you now. Don’t stop me. There isn’t much time.’

‘Oh, Ernie –’

‘It’s all right, Blanche. I’ve known for some while now – that’s why I came here. I wanted to see you before I – while I still could. Though at times I thought I’d never make it. At last, though, I got to Hallowford and after asking around a bit I found where Mrs Callow lived in her little cottage. She told me where you were.’

As Blanche sat there Ernest continued to talk. She urged him several times to be silent and rest, but he would not and went on, his words a never-ending stream, tumbling over one another in his feverish effort to say to her everything that was on his mind. She heard from him about his early efforts to make good on his first trip to the mills of Bradford and Leeds, of the hardships that abounded there, the squalid living conditions for the thousands who had poured into the towns in search of prosperity. She heard of his eventual disillusionment and subsequent enlistment in the army and going out to the Transvaal. He spoke a little of his experiences there, of how, shortly before the war had ended, he had been shot in the arm and then had become sick with dysentery, returning to England in a weakened condition. ‘I couldn’t come to you then,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t come to you when I was in such a state. When I came back to you I wanted to be whole and healthy – and have something behind me. I wanted to be able to offer you a home – not the squalor and the – the misery that I found.’

He gazed at her, his hollow eyes burning into hers. ‘It’s what I told you before, Blanche – it all comes down to poverty. It destroys everything in the end. It will take the strongest person and wear him down, break him down. It makes rogues of good men. It destroys
everything in its path.’ He paused. ‘I’m afraid for you, Blanche.’

‘Hush, hush, Ernie.’

As Blanche spoke there came a knock at the door and Lily was there, having returned with a bottle of medicine from the doctor. Blanche thanked her. When the door had closed again behind the maid Blanche poured out a little of the medicine and gave it to Ernest. As she set down the spoon he said, taking up his earlier theme:

‘I’m afraid you’ll let it happen to you too, Blanche. And believe me, it can – and so easily. You start to go through bad times and you think things will be better. Tomorrow will be better, you say. But tomorrow
isn’t
better. Tomorrow’s often worse. And in the end you look back on your life and you see nothing but a string of – of empty yesterdays – and each one had been invested with
hope
. And in the end it’s all ashes. You mustn’t let it happen to you, Blanche. I told you before – you must make things happen for you. You must. Don’t accept whatever life cares to offer you; you have to reach out and take what you want. I learned that. Too late. Don’t let it happen to you, too. You won’t, will you?’

‘No, Ernie, I won’t.’

‘There’s a good girl.’ He smiled, turned and looked down to his side where Jacko lay. ‘And there’s a good old boy, too,’ he said. ‘Ent that right, Jacko?’

At the tone, at the words, Jacko rose, lifting his cold nose to meet Ernest’s hand that reached down to him. After stroking the dog’s head for a moment or two Ernest laid his hand back on the coverlet. ‘I think I shall sleep now for a while,’ he said. Then, frowning, he added, ‘Where are you going to sleep?’

‘Don’t you worry about me. I shall be all right. If I need a bed there’s a spare one. But I shall stay here.’

He smiled. ‘I won’t insist that you don’t. It’s so good to have you near.’

‘Blanche …’

And she was awake. Suddenly. Sitting in the chair she had thought that she would not sleep, could not sleep. But towards morning sleep had come and she had drifted off. And now Ernest was calling her name and she was awake, alert again.

She was at his side at once, sitting on the bed, arms reaching out, wrapping him in her embrace, for the first time in their lives the stronger in the situation. As she held him she became aware of Jacko moving about the room, prowling in a circle, like some phantom shape in the dim light of the oil lamp’s tiny flame, lost, impotent, making little whimpering cries.

‘Blanche …’ Although she was so close Ernest called out her name as if she were far away.

‘Blanche …!’

And there was alarm in his voice. Her name on his lips was a hoarse, gargled cry. ‘I’m here, I’m here,’ she murmured. She stroked his hair as she held him, weak as a child in her arms, while she felt the sweat of his forehead wet and clammy against her chin. ‘I’m here, I’m here.’ She could hear the phlegm rattling in his throat as he sucked in the air. He gasped, called to her again:

‘Blanche …’

‘Yes, Ernie, yes. I’m here.’

‘Oh … oh … oh …’ Little sighing cries, like those of a lost child; a child waking to find his mother close, the nightmare over. She could hear the sudden sound of relief in his voice. ‘Ah, Blanche, you’re here …’

‘Yes – I’m here, Ernie. Always …’

‘Yes …’ And then, suddenly: ‘Remember – what I said, Blanche.’

‘Ernie –’

‘Don’t – let it – happen to you.’

For a moment she could not think what was he talking about, but then she recalled his earlier admonishings. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I won’t.’

She held him in silence for some moments, listening while his breath struggled in his raddled lungs. After a while, his voice a hoarse whisper, he asked her to get him some water. Releasing him, she turned to the small bedside table and took up the jug. In the moment that she did so he spoke to her again:

‘Blanche – quickly – hold me. Hold my hands.’

Setting down the jug so quickly that the water slopped over onto the table she spun at the sound of his voice, bending to him, reaching out for the hands he raised before him. His eyes were closed. As her hands touched his she felt within each of them a little flicker of life, acknowledgements of her touch.
I won’t let you go, Ernie
, a voice cried defiantly in her head.
I won’t let you die. I won’t, I won’t
. But his hands in hers were already still.

On Thursday morning, with the skies heavy with the promise of rain, the coffin containing Ernest’s body was conveyed to Bath and placed in the coffin van of a train bound for Trowbridge. In one of the carriages sat Blanche, George Marsh beside her.

Dry-eyed now, Blanche sat numbly gazing out at the passing scenery and the stations through which they passed – Bathampton, Limpley Stoke, Freshford, Bradford-on-Avon. On arrival at Trowbridge she stood silently by while the coffin was taken from the train and loaded onto a waiting hearse. When the two wreaths had been placed on the coffin – one from herself, one from George – she and George climbed into a carriage,
which then set off to follow the hearse along the winding road to Hallowford.

At St Peter’s church the hearse and carriage came to a halt and Blanche and Marsh alighted onto the grass verge. As the bearers lifted the coffin to carry it to the graveside Blanche left Marsh’s side and stooped in the grass to pick a handful of daisies.

A little later she stood at George Marsh’s side while the coffin was lowered into the earth. Reaching out, she opened her fingers and let the small white flowers fall onto the coffin. It was over.

The rain came on in a heavy downpour as they drove back to Trowbridge station, lashing the windows of the carriage and distorting the view of the woodland, the fields and the heathland. Blanche had travelled the route so many times over the years. She would never travel it again.

On the train bound for Bath she sat gazing out unseeing from the rain-washed window of the railway carriage. Apart from the grief in her heart she was aware of a feeling of anger. Her mother and father, Mary, Arthur and Agnes … and now Ernest. All gone. And Ernest was right, she said to herself. It was the poverty that did it.
It destroys everything in the end
, Ernest had said.
It will take the strongest person and wear him down, break him down
. And he was right. All those stunted, withered dreams – like flowers trying to grow in some city street, starved of soil and sunlight. Her father with his talent for painting – destroyed by poverty – his dreams left to atrophy for want of nutriment – and which lack had also destroyed the others. And now Ernest, cast out by a society that had used the best of him and discarded the rest.
It’s what I told you before, Blanche – it all comes down to poverty
. His
words rang in her mind, echoing over and over … She saw him as he had been all those years ago, a tall, chestnut-haired young man with straight, strong limbs and steady grey eyes, taking Marianne and herself for rambles through the woods and over the hills. All the promise, gone. And then her imaginings would bring him back to her as he had been at the end – broken, and disillusioned with life, and with nothing left to live for.
I’m afraid for you, Blanche. I’m afraid you’ll let it happen to you too
.

‘No, Ernie, I won’t.’

George Marsh turned to her and she realized she had spoken the words aloud. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, giving him a little smile. ‘I’m all right.’

But to herself she silently repeated her vow:
I won’t, Ernie. I won’t
.

In her room in the house on Almond Street Blanche changed her clothes. Standing before the mirror she laid her spread hands over her belly. It had been ten days now, and she knew with an unwavering certainty that there was a child growing within her; she had no doubt of it whatsoever. Gentry’s child.

Just after six-thirty Alfredo Pastore arrived at the house. George Marsh himself answered his ring at the bell and showed him into the library, after which he went upstairs and informed Blanche of her visitor’s presence. Blanche, though expecting Alfredo’s appearance at some time, was not quite ready for him. Telling the visitor that she would be down in a few minutes, Marsh poured glasses of sherry for them both and as they drank he spoke briefly of Ernest’s arrival and subsequent death, and of his burial that morning.

When Blanche herself appeared ten minutes later
Marsh excused himself and left them together. Pastore at once went to Blanche, reached out and took her hands.

‘Mr Marsh told me about your brother, Blanche. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.’

She thanked him.

The stilted conversation that ensued lasted for some minutes and then he said:

‘What I came to say, Blanche – the answer I came back for –’ He shrugged, at a loss. ‘How can I ask you now – without appearing insensitive?’