The Ballad and the Source (29 page)

Gillman responded with a meaning jerk of the head. If he had spoken he might so far have committed himself as to say: “Ah … That's where it is”: thereby acknowledging that the season, the family parade, the blackberry and apple pudding, with all that this meant in the way of simple milestones and traditional pastimes and pleasures, had now come round again. But he did not like speaking, and he plunged his fork once more into the ground as we passed on.

“The
Jardines
must have gone to France,” I said.

“No doubt,” said my father.

Christmas brought us a large parcel from Paris: inside it a resplendent box of candied fruits sprinkled with crystallized violets and rose petals. New Year brought us each a card rioting­­­­ with nosegays and gold stars and white lace and silver-­winged cherubs, and inscribed with loving messages from Mrs. Jardine. I slept with mine under my pillow, and each time I drew it forth to gloat on it I was thrown into a strange voluptuous ferment, half physical, half aesthetic. My mother received a long letter, as from one lady friend to another, with news of health, weather and domestic occupations, together with an account of Cherry's general improvement under the care of a superlatively excellent young governess, Tanya Moore by name, handpicked for various stated moral and intellectual reasons by Mrs. Jardine from among a dozen candidates. She was the daughter of a Russian dancer, who had died in giving her birth, and of an Irish father, a painter, of dissolute habits, living an irregular and promiscuous life in Dublin, and indifferent to the interests of his only child. She had left this most unhappy and unsatisfactory guardianship and come to Paris at the age of nineteen to study music at the Conservatoire. Her money had become exhausted; and not wishing to return home or to appeal to her parent for financial assistance, she had made up her mind to find some way of earning and saving the means for the resumption of her studies, when her path and Mrs. Jardine's had miraculously converged. Her spirit of honourable independence, her artistic sensibility, the absence in her character of all that was banal, cramped, grasping, oblique—all this Mrs. Jardine found intensely sympathetic. She had seen in this young creature the image of her own solitary youthful struggles for self-determination. Nothing could exceed the perfection of her touch with young children. Her natural candour and equability had given Cherry an instant sense of confidence.
“To sum up,”
wrote Mrs.
Jardine, ‘
Tanya Moore has no cruelty in her. She can do a child no harm. Of how many guardians of the defenceless young could one say as much?'
My mother was rash enough to read this message aloud to us, and Jess, smarting from her latest
punition,
saw her chance and took it with bitter and economical emphasis. My mother told her not to be ridiculous.

Mrs. Jardine said also that she had thoroughly satisfactory reports of Maisie and Malcolm, and was hopeful on their score. They had been taken
just in time.

It was plain from this budget of news that relations between Mrs. Jardine and my mother were now established upon a firm basis of mutual matronly interests. I do not know if she showed the letter to my father. Certainly she answered it without delay, for I posted her reply myself.

It was in March, that month of baleful stars, unpropitious to humanity, that there came another violet envelope: inside, one flimsy sheet. Three nights ago, it said, in the mid hour of night, a cry:
‘
My head!
My head!'
Cherry. Sickness, delirium, then convulsions. The best children's specialist in Paris summoned post haste: ‘But naturally,' it said,
‘
I knew already.
Cerebro-spinal meningitis.
Now she is blind. She neither sees me nor knows me. While there is life there is hope.
Priez
pour nous.'
The handwriting was firm and finely formed as ever, her signature showed all its customary formal idiosyncrasy. She must have laid down her pen, then, in a paroxysm of anguish, seized it again; for at the bottom of the page she had scrawled:
‘
I know I can save her. I can do this'
;
and underlined it twice, with trembling ferocity.

Deeply distressed,
wired my mother.
My thoughts are with you.
Two days went by. Then came a telegram. Flushing, she tore it open, scanned it, sank back in her chair, her colour fading. It said:
She died at dawn.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” said my mother, pale.

She went out of the room.

Some week passed before a letter arrived. After reading it, she sat as if thunderstruck; then handing it to Jess, said in a stifled voice that we could read it. It was always curious and unpredictable what areas of experience my mother would see fit to uncover to us, naked, what conceal.

We read:

“It was a comfort to hear from you. I knew that you would be able to enter into my agony—you who are such a loving mother.
Yes,
from the start we were told to nurse her without hope of saving her. There was nothing to do but watch the remorseless text-book forward march of the disease, in superficial ways to alleviate her distress, and to be thankful when her tormented little body sank at last into a coma. I sat for twelve hours and watched the breath flutter in and out, lighter, lighter, slower, slower. Harry had sunk asleep exhausted in the armchair by the fire. One breath.
…
Another.
…
Another?
…
No
more.

“
Mary London, how can this be?
One moment ago she was singing by the piano while I played.
Trempe ton
pain, Marie.
Sur le pont d'Avignon—Malbrouk—
and I said to myself: Tanya is
right. This child has music in her:
an ear for the dead centre of the note, and
ecstasy
in those small pure bird-sounds.
That
is what is pressing in her for release. She is rare, she shall be cherished and brought
whole
into life. It was the evening of the night when, lying wakeful, I heard her cry. A moment ago.
Aeons
ago.

“
How is it conceivable that our treasure should be thus sought out, stalked, struck down?
No epidemic, not one other case in the neighbourhood, near or far. Her only companions the healthy brood at the home farm.
One
journey to Paris to buy her a pretty winter wardrobe
…?

“I
thought I could save her, my lamb, my own flesh and blood
—
and I could not. The virtue has gone out of me, I suppose. Nothing has been spared me, nothing. I am mocked by day and by night. An old barren woman. Must I be
taught to die,
while I still draw breath, that I am thrust again, again
—
and now
irrevocably—
into this pit where all experience is a proof of
nothing—no
warmth,
no
light,
no
colour,
no
happiness­­­­,
no love?
Like a wounded snake I drag my slow length along. I should be allowed to die, with my
TERRIBLE
knowledge locked in me. But I must exist a little longer, in case Malcolm should need me.

“
Harry is broken utterly. We can do nothing for one another. He
adored
this lovely child, they were inseparable. It would break your heart to see him. He has not even my wretched bare resource of speech. He cannot endure to speak of her, or to hear her name mentioned. Since her death he has only once broken silence:
it was to say that he wished her buried in her place
—
a spot at the south end of the grounds where a small grove of willows by a pool make a kind of temple, and where she loved to play. Her
almost daemonic
imagination had named each tree with a name of her own invention, and made of them creatures with half-human, half-magical attributes. Harry
—
he alone
—
was the recipient of these fantasies, which once or twice I overheard, and which seemed to me to bear the wild stamp of visionary genius. So this was done. She was taken from beneath the coverlet of snowdrops which I picked and wove for her, and laid in a white coffin. It was the first spring-promising evening when Harry and
Antoine,
his faithful friend and valet, carried her through the garden and laid her in her place. In the autumn I shall plant winter-flowering cherries along the path that leads to her; and one day a sculptor
—
could I but find
now
a sculptor equal to the conception
—
shall make the memorial I have planned for her there. When, if ever, I am no longer
physically
prostrate, I shall go in search of him.

Malcolm and Maisie did not come. What use?
For Malcolm, better to remain where he is, among his new interests and activities. For Maisie best too, and in a more positive sense, to remain
away from me.
Shall I tell you what you will know already?
She will blame me for this death.
Indeed, as I lie here, the thought runs through:
how far back and in what dark tangle of monstrous roots lies the undying worm
—
the
GUILT
? What expiations, for what crimes, are still in store?
Here lies the innocent, the victim, born rootless, unearthly flower of disease and drought, blooming for a day.”
Here two lines were scored out indecipherably.
“These are bad thoughts. No more of them. Tanya Moore, the charming girl to whom I had entrusted a portion of Cherry's education, went immediately to England at my request to visit the other two. She is a creature of unusual tact, insight, and sensibility. She has spoken to them of their little sister, of our life here; of all that was done and will be done. She is still in England. She will have been a comfort to them. She wishes to continue to live with me, to be of service to me in some capacity. We shall see. In the event of her being successful in winning Maisie's confidence and affection, I might conceivably try the experiment of a long summer holiday here for both children, with Tanya as their companion. Tanya writes that she found the unhappy girl frozen at first and stubborn, but that by degrees she has penetrated to deeper feelings, that Maisie had wept natural tears at last, questioned and listened in a spirit of simplicity and trust, and accepted, she thought, her offered friendship.

“I must relate to you a curious incident. The day after we had consigned our child to the earth, the village priest came to call upon me. He is an excellent man, shrewd, conscientious, well-loved in the parish:
a man of some parts and education. Distressed as he was by the unconsecrated place and manner of the burial, he came to offer his condolences and to ask my permission to bless and say prayers above her grave. I gave the priest my permission. Why not?
Prayers from a good heart will not make my darling's sleep less sound. Harry, with his detestation of R.C.s would have peremptorily refused his consent, as I was obliged to make clear to him. In this one matter, I told him, you must share with me the responsibility of practising a
deception.
To be brief—and this is what I wished to tell you
—
he left me with these words:
‘Ah, Madame,
consolez vous! Ne voyez vous pas que le Bon Dieu lui a épargné un destin funeste?'
There was that in his tone which arrested my attention. I inquired of him what could cause him to see in the cutting down of this beautiful, precious and gifted child a merciful dispensation.
‘
Madame,' was his reply,
‘
pardon my frankness. Is it possible that you with your acute and penetrating sensibility had not detected for yourself
…?' ‘
What?'
I
asked.
‘
The symptoms in this child of
abnormality?'
‘
Certainly,' I replied.
‘
She was conceived and reared in circumstances of ill-omen. I had undertaken it as the work of my remaining years to counteract the symptoms you perceived and restore her to a normal and a fruitful development.'
‘
Again pardon me,' he said with sorrowful firmness,
‘
you could not have succeeded.
My young manhood passed in hospitals, in asylums, has made me familiar with many forms of tragic inheritance. Do not imagine that I seek to pry into the secrets of your family history. I saw this exquisite grandchild but once. It was enough. I could not be mistaken. She exhibited in her personality the seeds of a congenital mental instability. In one form or another, this would have increased in her, inevitably increased, as she grew towards maturity. Believe me, Madame, she and all who loved her have been spared untold grief and pain.' He added,
‘
There are
many who would be mortally affronted by this directness of mine.
You, I know, are made of a stuff that can endure the exposure of a cruelly wounding truth.'

Was not this a curious experience?
—
an extraordinary thing to hear?
—
to be told?
I have no reason to think him a charlatan:
the reverse, indeed. He spoke with an earnestness as blunt as it was genuine. These things are for your ears alone.

“Blessings, my dear, dear friend. I know you think of me;
and I think of you:
a patch of freshness for me in my parched heart. Keep your four safe beneath your wing.