The Beth Book

"This morning!" Beth cried. "Why that was at eight o'clock, and now it is four!"

"I'll get 'em at once," Gwendolen said with contrition. But the girl herself looked worn to death. She had been on her feet since early morning, and had no prospect of a rest till she dropped on her bed late at night, too exhausted to undress.

"Never mind," Beth said. "Give me the coals, and I'll carry them up, and see to the rest. I have nothing else to do."

"Bless you," Gwendolen muttered.

Beth found Mr. Brock in bed, with bright eyes, and burning spots of colour on each cheek. A lamp was burning beside him. When he saw who it was, he raised his eyebrows; but smiled at the same time, as if he were both surprised and pleased. The room struck cold to Beth.

"What! no fire?" she exclaimed.

"I tried to light the pesky thing," he said, "but it wouldn't burn."

"Gwendolen forgot you altogether," Beth said. "She has far too much to do, poor girl, and I have only just heard that you were ill. Why didn't you call me?"

He smiled again.

"We are all of the same family here, you know," Beth said, "the great human family. You had only to say 'Sister!' and I should have come."

The smile faded from his lips, but it was replaced by another expression, which, when she saw it, caused Beth to ejaculate inwardly, "Surely of such are the Kingdom – "

Each had seen in the other's face at the same time something there is no human utterance to describe, and, recognising it, had reverently held their peace.

Beth fetched her oil-stove first, with the kettle on it, and, while the water was boiling, she cut bread and butter and lighted the fire.

"We'll have tea together, if you please," she said cheerfully. "I've a horrible suspicion that you've had nothing to eat or drink all day."

Her sympathy recalled his pleasant, patient smile.

"My appetite is not devouring," he said, "but my thirst is. Talk about selling one's birthright! I'd sell my brains, I believe, for a cup of tea at this moment."

"There's a bowl full for nothing, then," Beth rejoined. "Sip it while I boil you an egg."

He took the bowl in both hands and tried the tea.

"Oh!" he exclaimed with a long-drawn sigh, "it's nectar! it's mead! it's nepenthe! it's all the drinks ever brewed for all the gods in one! But I'm afraid to touch it lest I should finish it."

"Don't be afraid, then," said Beth, "for you'll find it like liquor for the gods in another respect; it will be to be had whenever you want it. What's the matter?"

"Did I make lament?" he asked. "I didn't know it. But I'm all one ache. I can't lie still for it, and I can't move without adding to it. I've been watching the ice-floes on the river from the Embankment and bridges by all lights lately; I never saw finer effects – such colour! It's wonderful what colour there is under your sombre sky if you know how to look for it; and it has the great advantage over the colour other countries teem with of being unexpected. It's not obvious; you have to look out for it; but when you have found it, you rejoice in it as in something rare and precious, and it excites you to enthusiasm beyond your wont – which should prevent chills, but it doesn't, as witness my aches."

Beth felt his hand and found it dry and burning.

"The doctor is the next and only thing for you, young man, after this frugal meal," she said, "and I'll go and fetch him. I hope to goodness these are the right things to give you."

He objected to the doctor, but she paid no attention to his remonstrance, and when she had done all she could think of for the moment, she put on her wet boots and walking things again, got the address of a good man from Ethel Maud Mary, and sallied out into the snow once more.

Rheumatic fever was the doctor's diagnosis, and his directions to Beth concluded with a long list of expensive medical comforts which it seemed were absolutely necessary. She went out again when he had gone, and brought back everything, toiling up the long flights of stairs with both arms full, breathless but cheerful; and having set all in order for use – sheets of medicated cotton-wool, medicines, Valentine's extract, clinical thermometer and chart – she settled herself to watch the patient, the clock, and the temperature of the room, which had to be equable, with the exactness and method of a capable nurse. Before the household retired, she went downstairs to fetch more coals, fearing they might run short in the night.

"He's 'ad one scuttle to-day," Gwendolen reminded her, warningly.

"He must have two more, then, if necessary," said Beth.

"They're sixpence a scuttle, you know," Gwendolen remonstrated.

"Two for a shilling, and no charge for delivery," said Beth as she toiled up the long ascent once more with her heavy burden.

"Eh! it would be a gay glad world if they all took it like you," Gwendolen muttered, as she stood, with the pencil in her mouth, studying the slate that hung outside the coal-cellar, and let her generosity war with her accuracy and honesty for a little before she made two more strokes on the line that began with the name of Brock; and no sooner done than regretted.

"I wish to goodness I'd put 'em down to old Piggot and Mother Hauseman," she thought. "They'd never miss the money, and it 'ud be a good deed for the likes of them to help their betters, and might likely profit their own souls, though unbeknown."

For many weeks Beth watched beside the sick man's bed, doing all that was possible to ease his pain day and night, snatching brief intervals of rest when she could, and concealing her weariness at all times. She used to wonder at the young man's uncomplaining fortitude, his gentleness, gratitude, and unselfish concern about her fatigue. Even when he was at his worst, he would struggle back to consciousness in order to entreat her to lie down; and when, to please him, she had settled herself on a little couch there was in his room, he would make a superhuman effort to keep still as long as his flickering consciousness lasted. There was only one thing he was ever exacting about – to keep her in sight. So long as he could see her he was satisfied, and would lie for hours, patiently controlling himself for fear of disturbing her by uttering exclamations or making other signs of suffering; but when she had to leave him alone, he broke down and moaned in his weakness and pain for her to come back and help him.

The doctor having declared that the north-east aspect of his attic was all against the patient, Beth insisted on changing with him, and, as soon as he could be moved, she, Ethel Maud Mary, and Gwendolen, with the doctor's help, carried him into her room in a sheet; an awkward manœuvre because of his length, which made it hard to turn him on the narrow landing; his weight was nothing, for he was mere skin and bone by that time – all eyes, as Beth used to tell him.

It was Christmas Eve when they moved him, and late that night Beth kept her vigil by him, sitting over the fire with her elbows on her knees and her face between her hands, listening dreamily to the clang and clamour of the church-bells, which floated up to her over the snow, mellowed by distance and full-fraught with manifold associations. As she sat there she pondered. She thought of the long way she had drifted from the days when she knelt in spirit at the call of the bells and lost herself in happy prayer. She thought of her husband's hypocrisy, and the way in which, when it dawned upon her, her own faith had melted from her; and she pondered on the difference it would have made if only she had been married early – just to a good man. It would not have been necessary for her to have loved him – not with passion – only to have relied upon him. Some one to trust, she craved for, more than some one to love; yet she allowed that a loveless marriage is a mock marriage. She did not regret the loss of her conventional faith, but she wished she could join the congregation just for the human fellowship. She felt the need of union, of some central station, a centre of peace, unlike the church, the house of disunion. Without knowing it, she leant to Quaker-Catholicism, the name assumed for her religious principles by Caroline Fox – Quaker-Catholicism having direct spiritual teaching for its distinctive dogma.

"What are you thinking about?" Arthur Brock said suddenly from the bed.

Beth started. She thought he was asleep.

"God," she said; with a gasp, "and going to church," she added, laughing at her own abruptness. "I was wanting a church to go to."

"You don't belong to the Established Church, then," he said. "Well, I don't go to church myself; but I make a difference on Sundays. I don't work, and I read another kind of book. It is my day for the plains of heaven. I should like to be there all the time, if I could manage it; but I can't, not being a monk in a cell. When I can, I make the ascent, however, with the help of the books that take one there."

"I used to read religious books too," said Beth; "but I found little illumination in them, most of them being but the dry husks of the subject, uninformed of the spirit, containing no vital spark, and stained with blood."

"How?" he exclaimed.

"This God of the Hebrews," Beth began, looking dreamily into the fire, "what is his history? He loved cruelty and bloodshed. The innocent animals first suffered in his service; but, not content with that, he went from bad to worse, as men do, and ended by demanding human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own son. And for that specially we are required to adore him, although it must be clear to the commonest capacity to-day that the worship of such a deity is devil-worship. I do not say there is no God; I only say this is not God – this blood-lover, this son-slayer, this blind omniscience, this impotent omnipotence, this merciful cruelty, this meek arrogance, this peaceful combatant; this is not God, but man. The mind of man wars with the works of God to mar them. Man tries to make us believe that he is made in the image of God; but what happened was just the reverse. Man was of a better nature originally, a more manifold nature. He had intellect for a toy to play with on earth, and spirit for a power to help him to heaven. But instead of toiling to strengthen his spirit, he preferred to play with his intellect; and he played until he became so expert in the use of it, and so interested in the game, that he forgot his origin. And then it was that he projected an image of himself into space, and was so delighted with his own appearance from that point of view, that he called it God and fell down and worshipped it. If you would understand man, consider God; if you would know his God, study man."

Arthur Brock reflected for a little.

"What you say sounds real smart," he said at last, "and there's a kind of glamour in your words that dazzles and prevents one seeing just how much they mean at first. It is true that religion culminates in human sacrifice both here and in Africa, and, for refinement of horror, we have here the literal bloody sacrifice of a son by his father. But that is not God, as you say; that is the ultimate of the priest. And the priest is the same at all times, in all ages, beneath all veneers of civilisation. His credit depends upon a pretence to power. He is not a humble seeker after truth, but a bigoted upholder of error and an impudent time-server. He destroys the scientific discoverer in one age; in the next he finds his own existence is threatened because he refuses to acknowledge that the discoverer was right; then he confesses the truth, and readjusts his hocus-pocus to suit it. He does not ask us to pin our faith to fancies which seem real to a child in its infancy, yet he would have us credulous about those which were the outcome of the intellectual infancy of the race. What he can't get over in himself is the absence of any sense of humour. I'm real sorry for him at times, and I tell him so."

Beth smiled. "I could not be so kindly courteous," she said. "Some things make me fierce. The kingdom of heaven is or is not within us, I believe; and half the time I know it is not in me, because there is no room for anything in me but the hate and rage that rend me for horror of all the falsehood, injustice, and misery I know of and cannot prevent. A sense of humour would save the church perhaps; but I'm too sore to see it. All I can say is: your religion to me is horrifying – human sacrifice and devil-worship, survivals from an earlier day welded on to our own time, and assorting ill with it. I would not accept salvation at the hands of such futile omnipotence, such cruel mercy, such blood-stained justice. The sight of suffering was grateful to man when the world was young, as it still is to savages; but we revolt from it now. We should not be happy in heaven, as the saved were said to be in the old tales, within sight of the sinners suffering in hell."

"Which is to say that there is more of Christ in us now than there was in the days of old," he said, speaking dispassionately, and with the confident deliberation of one who takes time to think. "I believe those old tales were founded on muddle-headed confusion of mind in the days when dreams were as real to mankind as the events of life. There are obscure tribes still on earth who cannot distinguish between what they have done and what they have only dreamt they did, and probably every race has gone through that stage of development. I don't know if excessive piety be a disease of the nerves, as some say, although what is piety in one generation does appear to be perversity in the next, as witness the sons of the clergy, and other children of pious people, who don't answer to expectation, as a rule. And I don't go much on churches or creeds, or faith in this personality or that. The old ideas have lost their hold upon me, as they have upon you; but that is no reason why we should give up the old truths that have been in the world for all time, the positive right and wrong, which are facts, not ideas. I believe that there is good and evil, that the one is at war with the other always; and that good can do no evil, evil no good. I've got beyond all the dogma and fiddle-faddle of the intellect with which the church has overlaid the spirit, and all the ceremonial so useful and necessary for individual souls in early stages of development. I used to think if I could find a religion with no blood in it, I would embrace it. Now I feel sure that it does not matter what the expression of our religious nature is so that it be religious. Religion is an attitude of mind, the attitude of prayer, which includes reverence for things holy and deep devotion to them. I would not lose that for anything – the right of appeal; but now, when I think of our Father in heaven, I do not despise our mother on earth."

Beth sat some time looking thoughtfully into the fire. "Go to sleep," she said at last, abruptly. "You ought not to be talking at this time of night."

"I wish you would go to sleep yourself," he said, as he settled himself obediently; "for I lose half the comfort of being saved, while you sit up there suffering for me."

The expression was not too strong for the strain Beth had to put upon herself in those days; for she had no help. Ethel Maud Mary and Gwendolen felt for her and her patient, as they said; but there of necessity their kindness ended. The other lodgers kept Gwendolen for ever running to and fro; each seemed to think she had nobody else to look after, and it was seldom indeed that any of them noticed her weariness or took pity on her. Beth did everything for herself, fetched the coals from the cellar, the water from the bath-room, swept and dusted, cleaned the grate, ran out to do the shopping, and returned to do the cooking and mending. Ethel Maud Mary stole the time to run up occasionally to show sympathy; but her own poor little hands were overfull, what with her mother ill in bed, both ends to be made to meet, and lodgers uncertain in money matters. She lost all her plumpness that winter, her rose-leaf complexion faded to the colour of dingy wax, and her yellow hair, so brightly burnished when she had time to brush it, became towzled and dull; but her heart beat as bravely-kind as ever, and she never gave in.

She climbed up one day in a hurry to Mr. Brock's room, which Beth occupied, snatching a moment to make inquiries and receive comfort; and as soon as she entered she subsided suddenly on to a chair out of breath.

"How you do it a dozen times a day, Miss Maclure, I can't think," she gasped.

"Those stairs have taught me what servants suffer," Beth said, as if that, at all events, were a thing for which to be thankful.

"You'd not have driven 'em, even if you hadn't known what they suffer," said Ethel Maud Mary. "That's the worst of this world. All the hard lessons have got to be learnt by the people who never needed them to make them good, while the bad folk get off for nothing."

"I don't know about not needing them," said Beth. "But I do know this: that every sorrowful experience I have ever had has been an advantage to me sooner or later."

"I wish I could believe that Ma's temper would be an advantage to me," Ethel Maud Mary said, sighing; "she's that wearing! But there, poor dear! she's sick, and there's no keeping the worries from her. There's only you and Mr. Brock in the house just now that pays up to the day, so you may guess what it is! He's getting on nicely now, I suppose; but you shouldn't be sitting here in the cold. A shawl don't make the difference; it's the air you breathe; and you ought to have your oil-stove going. Isn't the fire enough for him? I can't think so many degrees it need be in his room always, when there's no degree at all in yours."

"Oh, I'm hardy," said Beth. "I never was better."

"You look it," Ethel Maud Mary said sarcastically, "like a pauper just out of prison. What are you worrying about?"

"Beef-tea," said Beth. And so she was, and bread and butter, fuel, light, and lodging – everything, in fact, that meant money; for the money was all but done, and she had had a shock on the subject lately that had shaken her considerably.

She had spread out a newspaper to save the carpet, and was kneeling on the floor, one morning, in front of the window, cleaning and filling the little oil-stove, and Arthur was lying contentedly watching her – "superintending her domestic duties," he used to call it, that being all that he was equal to in his extreme weakness just then.

"You're a notable housekeeper," he said. "I shouldn't have expected you from your appearance to be able to cook and clean as you do."

"I used to do this kind of thing as a child to help a lazy servant we had, bless her," Beth answered. "The cooking and cleaning she taught me have stood me in good stead."

"If you had a daughter, how would you bring her up?" he asked.

Beth opened the piece of paper with which she was cleaning the oil off the stove, and regarded it thoughtfully. "I would bring her up in happy seclusion, to begin with," she said. "She should have all the joys of childhood; and then an education calculated to develop all her intellectual powers without forcing them, and at the same time to fit her for a thoroughly normal woman's life: childhood, girlhood, wifehood, motherhood, each with its separate duties and pleasures all complete. I would have her happy in each, steadfast, prudent, self-possessed, methodical, economical; and if she had the capacity for any special achievement, I think that such an education would have developed the strength of purpose and self-respect necessary to carry it through. I would also have her to know thoroughly the world that she has to live in, so that she might be ready to act with discretion in any emergency. I should, in fact, want to fit her for whatever might befall her, and then leave her in confidence to shape her own career. The life for a woman to long for – and a man too, I think – is a life of simple duties and simple pleasures, a normal life; but I only call that life normal which is suited to the requirements of the woman's individual temperament."

"You don't clamour for more liberty, then?"

"It depends upon what you mean by that. The cry for more liberty is sometimes the cry of the cowardly anxious to be excused from their share of the duties and labours of life; and it is also apt to be a cry not for liberty but for licence. One must discriminate."

"But how?"

"By the character and principles of the people you have to deal with – obviously."

She had lighted her little oil-stove by this time, and set a saucepan of water on it to boil. Then she fetched a chopping board and a piece of raw beef-steak, which she proceeded to cut up into dice and put into a stone jar until it was crammed full. Her sensitive mouth showed some shrinking from the rawness, and her white fingers were soon dyed red; but she prepared the meat none the less carefully for that. When the jar was filled and the contents seasoned, she put it in the pot on the stove for the heat to extract the juice.

"What is it going to be to-day?" he asked.

"Beef-jelly," she said. "You must be tired of beef-tea."

"I'm tired of nothing you do for me," he rejoined. "This is the homiest time I've had in England."

Beth smiled. In spite of poverty, anxiety, and fatigue, it was the "homiest time" she had had since Aunt Victoria's death, and she loved it. Now that she had some one she could respect and care for dependent on her, whose every look and word expressed appreciation of her devotion, the time never hung heavily on her hands, as it used to do in the married days that had been so long in the living. It was all as congenial as it was new to her, this close association with a man of the highest character and the most perfect refinement. She had never before realised that there could be such men, so heroic in suffering, so unselfish, and so good; and this discovery had stimulated her strangely – filled her with hope, strengthened her love of life, and made everything seem worth while.

She went on with her work in silence after that last remark of his, and he continued to watch her with all an invalid's interest in the little details of his narrow life.

"It would be a real relief to me to be able to get up and do all that for you," he finally observed. "I don't feel much of a man lying here and letting you work for me."

"This is woman's work," Beth said.

"Woman's work and man's work are just anything they can do for each other," he rejoined. "I wonder if I should get on any quicker with a change of treatment. Resignation is generally prescribed for rheumatism, and a variety of drugs which distract attention from the seat of pain to other parts of the person, and so relieve the mind. My head is being racked just now by that last dose I took. I should like to try Salisbury."

"What is Salisbury?" Beth asked.

"Principally beef and hot water, to begin with," he replied. "You'll find a little work on the subject among my books."

Beth read the volume, and then said, "You shall try Salisbury. It is easy enough."

"Yes," he answered. "It is easy enough with a nurse like you."

But in order to carry out the treatment some things had to be bought, and this led to the discovery which was a shock to Beth. Arthur's income depended principally upon the pictures he sold, and no more money came in after he fell ill. He had had some by him, but not nearly so much as he supposed, and it was all gone now, in spite of the utmost economy on Beth's part. Her own, too, was running short, but she had not troubled about that, because she still had some of her secret hoard to fall back upon. She had left it in one of the boxes which were sent on after her from Slane – a box which she had not opened until now, when she wanted the money. The money, however, was not there. She searched and searched, but in vain; all she found was the little bag that had contained it. She was stunned by the discovery, and sat on the floor for a little, with the contents of the box all scattered about her, trying to account for her loss. Then all at once a vision of Maclure, as she had seen him on one occasion with the bunch of duplicate keys, peering into her dress-basket with horrid intentness, flashed before her; but she banished it resolutely with the inevitable conclusion to which it pointed. She would not allow her mind to be sullied by such a suspicion. And as to the money, since it was lost, why should she waste her time worrying about it? She had better set herself to consider how to procure some more. She had still some of Arthur Brock's, but that she kept that she might be able to tell him truthfully that it was not all done when he asked about it – a pious fraud which relieved his mind and kept him from retarding his recovery by attempting to begin work again before he was fit for it. What money she had of her own would last but a little longer, and how to get more was the puzzle.