Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm [88]
"All right," said he, strong in his advantage. "Then I shan't tell either of you anything more."
Mrs. Batch through her tears called Katie a bad girl, and Clarence a bad boy.
"Where did you get THEM?" asked Clarence, pointing to the ear-rings worn by his sister.
"HE gave me them," said Katie. Clarence curbed the brotherly intention of telling her she looked "a sight" in them.
She stood staring into vacancy. "He didn't love HER," she murmured. "That was all over. I'll vow he didn't love HER."
"Who d'you mean by her?" asked Clarence.
"That Miss Dobson that's been here."
"What's her other name?"
"Zuleika," Katie enunciated with bitterest abhorrence.
"Well, then, he jolly well did love her. That's the name he called out just before he threw himself in. 'Zuleika!'—like that," added the boy, with a most infelicitous attempt to reproduce the Duke's manner.
Katie had shut her eyes, and clenched her hands.
"He hated her. He told me so," she said.
"I was always a mother to him," sobbed Mrs. Batch, rocking to and fro on a chair in a corner. "Why didn't he come to me in his trouble?"
"He kissed me," said Katie, as in a trance. "No other man shall ever do that."
"He did?" exclaimed Clarence. "And you let him?"
"You wretched little whipper-snapper!" flashed Katie.
"Oh, I am, am I?" shouted Clarence, squaring up to his sister. "Say that again, will you?"
There is no doubt that Katie would have said it again, had not her mother closed the scene with a prolonged wail of censure.
"You ought to be thinking of ME, you wicked girl," said Mrs. Batch. Katie went across, and laid a gentle hand on her mother's shoulder. This, however, did but evoke a fresh flood of tears. Mrs. Batch had a keen sense of the deportment owed to tragedy. Katie, by bickering with Clarence, had thrown away the advantage she had gained by fainting. Mrs. Batch was not going to let her retrieve it by shining as a consoler. I hasten to add that this resolve was only sub-conscious in the good woman. Her grief was perfectly sincere. And it was not the less so because with it was mingled a certain joy in the greatness of the calamity. She came of good sound peasant stock. Abiding in her was the spirit of those old songs and ballads in which daisies and daffodillies and lovers' vows and smiles are so strangely inwoven with tombs and ghosts, with murders and all manner of grim things. She had not had education enough to spoil her nerve. She was able to take the rough with the smooth. She was able to take all life for her province, and death too.
The Duke was dead. This was the stupendous outline she had grasped: now let it be filled in. She had been stricken: now let her be racked. Soon after her daughter had moved away, Mrs. Batch dried her eyes, and bade Clarence tell just what had happened. She did not flinch. Modern Katie did.
Such had ever been the Duke's magic in the household that Clarence had at first forgotten to mention that any one else was dead. Of this omission he was glad. It promised him a new lease of importance. Meanwhile, he described in greater detail the Duke's plunge. Mrs. Batch's mind, while she listened, ran ahead, dog-like, into the immediate future, ranging around: "the family" would all be here to-morrow, the Duke's own room must be "put straight" to-night, "I was of speaking"...
Katie's mind harked back to the immediate past—to the tone of that voice, to that hand which she had kissed, to the touch of those lips on her brow, to the door-step she had made so white for him, day by day...
The sound of the rain had long ceased. There was the noise of a gathering wind.
"Then in went a lot of others," Clarence was saying. "And they all shouted out 'Zuleika!' just like he did. Then a lot more went in. First I thought it was some sort of fun. Not it!" And he told how, by inquiries further down the river, he had learned the extent of the disaster. "Hundreds and hundreds of them—ALL of them," he summed up. "And all for the love of HER," he added, as with a sulky salute to Romance.
Mrs. Batch had risen from her chair, the better to cope with such magnitude. She stood with wide-spread arms, silent, gaping. She seemed, by sheer force of sympathy, to be expanding to the dimensions of a crowd.