This Was Ivor Trent полностью

Marsden often spent part of the holidays with us, as his people were in India, and he did not exaggerate when he told Rendell that we thought my father was “God Almighty when we were kids.” Every day, every hour, I spent with him widened and deepened his influence over me. He became a unique being, a man raised far above the generality of men. To be like him—that was my creed. And it was a passionate fanatical creed which made each day and every night a living ordeal. To be fearless, distinguished, cultured—to go through the world as if it were one’s own—never to be impressed, never to surrender oneself, never to be inadequate to any situation! To be like him!

But what quickened the roots of my admiration was his silence concerning my mother. For, now, I believed that this silence represented the triumph of his creed. I believed that he remained silent, although her death had stretched him permanently on the rack. He always spoke contemptuously of women, but—to me—that contempt only revealed his overwhelming love for her. As I grew older, I became convinced that his creed of courage had triumphed over the supreme ordeal of his life. Not even to me would he show the suffering which had turned his world into a wilderness. This belief heightened the pedestal on which I had placed him till he inhabited the clouds. When I prayed, it was not to God—but to him.

I stayed at school till I was eighteen, then, a year later, we went abroad and did not return to England till I was nearly twenty-one.

As the weeks passed, I noticed a change in him. Often when we were together, reading, I would look up to find his eyes fixed on me, his book face downwards on his knee. Also, sometimes he would get up suddenly, hesitate as if he were about to say something, then go abruptly out of the room. I noticed, too, that he was extraordinarily pale, and that he would clasp and unclasp his hands in a quick nervous manner, utterly unlike his normal dignified demeanour.

The night before my twenty-first birthday, he suddenly said in a new disconnected manner:

“It’s—well, let me see—it’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Yes, to-morrow.”

“Ah, I see, I see! Well, as a fact—I may as well tell you—you come into a certain amount of money when you’re twenty-one.”

“A certain amount of money! From whom?”

“Well, it’s all quite preposterous, of course, but—as a fact—a distant relative died a few years ago and left you some money. Quite unnecessary! I am a rich man. It was an impertinence, really.”

“But who was this relative?” I asked, astonished at this information.

“I did not even know her—or scarcely. She lived in Australia. She was—well, as a fact—she was a relative of your—mother’s.”

I stared at him. He had mentioned her at last! He stood, ashy-white, looking down at me, leaning heavily on a little table by his side.

Then—swiftly, terribly—I knew there was some mystery concerning my mother.

I leapt to my feet.

“Where was my mother buried?”

He made a curious whistling noise, exactly like the hiss of escaping steam.

“Where was she buried?” I repeated.

“I do not know.”

“You don’t—know!”

“No—or care.”

I went nearer to him.

“So you’ve lied to me. She died fourteen years ago——”

“Eleven!”

“Eleven?”

His arms shot up as if jerked by invisible strings. His face became distorted and his whole body began to writhe.

“Yes—eleven years ago! Eleven! Eleven! Died in rags, a pauper! And serve her right, too—the bitch, the harlot, the whore!”

The words fell like a whip across my eyes.

“But it was fourteen years—fourteen!—since she went off with her rat of an Italian lover. For that’s what she did. A dago was what she wanted. He knew all the bed tricks——”

A series of foul images followed. He pelted her with obscenities. A frenzy of sexual jealousy surged like lava from the depths of him. He stood swaying from side to side, a twisted, leering, humiliated being—ransacking the dung-heaps of his imagination for filth to hurl at her.

As I watched him, two things happened: one mysterious, the other miraculous.

The first was a consciousness of power which gradually possessed me. The dignity he had so abjectly abandoned became mine. The will-power that had deserted him entered into me. He was revealing the depths of himself. I would reveal nothing. I would live up to his creed. I would remain silent, watching him, till the very excess of his fury reduced him to impotence. And then I would go.

The second—and the miraculous—thing which happened was this. I saw a white mistiness behind him, from which emerged a vision of my mother in all the loveliness that had haunted my childhood. She was more real than the frenzied figure between us. I ceased to see or hear it. I felt we were alone, and that she was revealing why she had left him.