The Man With The Mad Eyes

The other women being employed in the daytime, the sitting-room had been more especially Bessie's domain. How strange and chilling was the thought it would be empty of Bessie for evermore. Her untidy work-basket peeped out from under the sofa where she always pushed it on the appearance of a visitor; the penny weekly paper in which she read of the fashions, and the romantic love-matches of which she had dreamed while making an absolutely sordid marriage herself, was tucked behind the cushion of her chair. Deleah stood within the doorway for a minute, without entering, feeling strangely bereaved and forlorn. Not much sympathy had been between the pair, but the ties of blood are stronger than is realised till "marriage or death or division" snaps the cord.

With a lagging step Deleah went forward into the so pathetically empty room. On the table some flowers were lying. Two deep purple blooms of clematis. The creeper so carefully trained to climb beside a certain hall door came into her mind. She had noticed on an occasion she would fain have forgotten, without knowing she had done so, that it bore two buds. Deleah looked at the blossoms with an odd feeling of repulsion. She walked round the table to the side that was farthest from them. Then lifting her eyes, she saw that Charles Gibbon was standing by the opposite wall. The open door had screened him from her on entering.

"Mr. Gibbon!" she said, and her voice faltered with dismay; only apprehension was in her eyes.

He looked at her without speaking. It was curiously disturbing to see him standing there, his back to the wall, saying nothing; the broad, short figure, at one time so familiar in that room, now so alien and strange, the commonplace, plain-featured face, tragic with its new grey hue, the eyes—Deleah remembered with a shudder some words recently spoken about the eyes! They were fixed upon her face.

"Won't you come and sit down, Mr. Gibbon?"

He advanced a few steps, and stood at the table opposite her.

She looked at the flowers. "You brought these?"

"For you," he said, speaking thickly. "They are the only two the clematis had. If it had ten thousand they would have been for you."

Deleah kept her eyes upon the flowers. She felt that she could not touch them. "You are very kind," she said.

"You would say as much as that to any stranger in the street who had kicked a stone out of your path, and I—I—." He was stammering curiously in his thickened voice. It seemed that the words he wanted to speak would not come. "And I—after all that I suffer—only kind?" he got out at last.

With something of the expression of a trapped creature in her eyes, Deleah looked past him to the door. He turned instantly, and shut it, and came back to his place opposite her at the table.

"Your sister is married to Mr. Boult, to-day," he said. "At one time you could not marry me because of your sister. That impediment's gone. Another time, you had some other excuse. Again another. Come, what excuse have you to-day?" He leant across the table to bring his face closer to hers. "You don't intend to marry me, do you?"

She gazed at him with fear in her eyes, but did not speak. "You let me live beside you, set my heart on you, till there was nothing else on earth or heaven for me but you. You let me slave to serve a man I hated as a means of getting you. You let me get ready my house—every brick in it, every pound of paint laid on it, for you. You—"

"Mr. Gibbon, do wait! I think you are saying too much. I never deceived you. I never said I would marry you. I tried to make you understand."

"Listen! Have you always hated me? When you took my flowers and fruit—all the presents I lavished on you—tell me, did you hate me then?"

"Certainly I did not. I thought you very kind and generous."

"Do you hate me now?" When she told him 'no' he stretched out a shaking hand to her across the table. "Then—?"

Deleah stepped back from the hand and shook her head.

"Why?"

No answer.

"Why?"

"Oh, where would be the use of my telling you!"

"But you shall tell me."

"No."

"Then I will tell you. You think you are going to marry some one else."

Deleah lifted her head and looked at him with proud offence. "You are not to say that, Mr. Gibbon. It is not true."

"You think so," he persisted. "But you are not. Do you know why? Because I will stop you. I know! know! know!" He mercilessly slapped one of his shaking hands upon the table. "And I will stop you."

He turned away, walked to the door, stood staring at it for a moment, his back to her, then suddenly faced her again: "Sir Francis Forcus," he said. He walked to the table his eyes fixed on hers. "Sir Francis Forcus," he repeated. And once again, leaning across the table to bring his face close to hers, "Sir Francis Forcus."

Then he laughed in the girl's frightened face, and went out of the room.

Emily put an inquiring head in at the door.

"He haven't gone? Mr. Gibbon haven't gone, Miss Deleah? Well, now, when the mistress told me he was up along of you, I hoped 'twas another weddin' comin' off. You shouldn't have let him go so quick, my dear."

Deleah had a dazed look about the eyes. "He was horrible! I believe he is mad," she said.

Emily clapped her hands together. "Bessie's marriage have done that! I always told Bessie she'd send some of 'em to the lunatic asylum, or their graves."

"I believe he is mad. Which way did he go, Emily?" She ran down into the shop where Mrs. Day, if daughters were married or daughters were threatened, must never forget that she was licensed to sell tobacco and snuff, was still toiling away at her stocktaking. "Mama, did you see Mr. Gibbon go away?"

"No. Is he gone, my dear?"

Deleah dashed to the door, still open, although the windows were shuttered, and looked up and down the street.

"Do you want to call him back?" her mother asked of her, in mild surprise.

"I believe he is mad." Deleah was breathless, shaking with excitement or fear. "He was in the sitting-room—hiding behind the door—waiting for me."

"Mr. Gibbon! My dear, he couldn't have been. Why should he do that?"

"He was doing it. How did he get there?"

"He came in just as usual—there is really nothing the matter with him, Deleah—to ask me if I knew where his pistol was that he and Franky used to shoot at bottles with when he first came, out of his bedroom window. You remember? I told him it was in his bedroom still, for all I knew; I told him to run up and get it?"

"Did he get it? Had he a pistol in his pocket while he talked to me?"

Emily had followed Deleah into the shop. "He'd no pistol," she put in confidently. "He'd never find it. I'd never liked the nasty dang'rous thing, with Franky into every mischief, and I hid it up on the top of the wardrobe. He'd never find it!"

"Run and see," Mrs. Day said. She began to be impressed by the look of fear on Deleah's face; the girl was trembling violently, now, her teeth chattering as if with extreme cold.

In less than a minute Emily was back. "He've got it," they heard her calling as she came. "The pistol's gone. He've got it. Sure as we're living, he's goin' to shoot hisself, on account of Bessie!"

"Nonsense!" Mrs. Day cried sharply. "Deleah, there is really nothing to be frightened about, my dear. The pistol was Mr. Gibbon's own. He naturally wanted it."

Deleah stood in the middle of the shop, lit by the half-open door and the jet of gas above Mrs. Day's desk. She was squeezing her hands together, her arms strained against her breast as if trying desperately to stop her trembling. "Could I get there?" she said to her mother. "Could I get there first?" Her body was bent forward as if with the impulse to run, but she waited, squeezing herself in her arms, her brow knit, trying to steady her thought. "If I can get there first—!" she said.

"Where, dear? Get where? What is it you want to do, Deleah?"

She seemed not to hear: "If I can get there first!" she said to herself; then, going stumblingly, reached the door, and was gone.

The two women left, stared at each other's blank face in the mingled lights of the shop. "She isn't running after Mr. Gibbon, surely!" Mrs. Day said, helplessly perplexed.

"There's no good in her a-doing that. Gibbon's heart's set on Bessie,"
Emily declared.

"Do go after her, and bring her back, Emily."

The great yard of the Hope Brewery was nearly empty. A young clerk, his pen stuck in the bushy hair above his ears, his hands in his trousers pockets, was whistling as he walked across it, stepping lightly from the shadows cast by the huge buildings to the sunshine of the open spaces. An enormous drayman was backing a pair of powerful horses, in order to bring his wagon under that portion of the wall over which a barrel hung suspended; two other men also of gigantic proportions, with red-shining faces and aprons tied over their ample bodies, stood to watch the manoeuvres. A groom in charge of a saddle-horse by the entrance to the main building patted his horse's neck as he also looked on.

Deleah, flinging herself from the door of the four-wheeler which had brought her, dashed through the yard, consciously seeing none of these things, which yet photographed themselves on her brain and remained indelibly printed there till her dying day. She knew her way to the private room of Sir Francis, and made towards it, without pausing to heed the one or two men who endeavoured to stop and question her. In the ante-room to the inner sanctum, a confidential clerk who always sat there flew up from his desk.

"Excuse me, miss. A moment, please. You can't go in there. Sir Francis is particularly engaged."

When she took no notice, he tried to reach the door before her; but Deleah, too quick for him, dashing forward, opened, and shut it in his face.

Sir Francis was standing in his favourite position with his back to the mantelpiece, in riding dress, his gloves and whip in his hand. Deleah, bolting into the room, and falling back upon the door, the more effectually to close it upon the confidential clerk, had an instant's vision of him in his calm unassailableness, in that unruffled perfection of appearance, which, while it had always awakened her girlish admiration, had ever seemed to remove him to an immeasurable distance. The sight of him, even in what was to her a supreme moment, had its habitual effect of pouring cold waters of discouragement upon her mood, of making her doubtful of herself and any claim she could possibly make upon his attention. She had been presumptuous in pushing herself into his presence. Of course he was safe. Of course nothing could hurt him. The poor Honourable Charles, the erstwhile draper's assistant, with his common, thick-set figure, his hoarse voice, his unrefined accent—it was an offence even to think of him in the same breath with this elegant gentleman. How could this one on his high eminence of aloofness and security be endangered by such an one as that?

To see and feel all this was the work of a moment. The moment in which she slammed the door on the protesting clerk, the moment in which also she felt the shock of awaking from her frenzied zeal that would have beaten down all obstacles to save this man's life, to the perception that her zeal would in his eyes seem an absurdity; that her presence there was superfluous if not impertinent; that she had made a fool of herself for nothing.

Sir Francis suffered this inexplicable noisy invasion of his privacy with a look of annoyance and surprise breaking up the composure of his face. Then, seeing who it was who had thus burst upon him, who leant upon the door she had slammed, panting as if pursued, turning frightened, appealing eyes to him, the expression of his face changed, the whole man seemed to change. With a look such as Deleah had never dreamed it possible he could wear he went forward to her; in a tone she had not known his voice to take, he spoke her name.

"Deleah!" he said.

She looked at him; but in rapturous wonder at the light in his eyes, listening spellbound to the delight of her name so spoken, forgetting who she was, where she was, in the whirl of bliss where her senses momentarily swam. Then he held out his hands and took hers, and held them locked in his against his breast.

"My dear child, I was coming to you," he said. "You have come to me instead, my little Deleah!"