"Thank you. I am grateful for what you have done."
One by one they withdrew from the room, leaving him alone with his son. He took a chair and sat beside the bed. Outside the Hotel de l'Ecu he could hear the carts as they rattled over the cobbled stones, and the jangling bells of the horses. There were the voices of people too, calling to one another. A woman was singing in the house across the way.
There were things that he should do, and arrangements to be made. He would have Henry embalmed and buried in Paris. Later on they would try to have him removed to England. He would not like to think of Henry lying here, alone, in foreign soil. He must write to Barbara, to Robert Lumley, to the Flowers; there were so many letters he must write. Henry was twenty-eight. He had been twenty-eight three months. He looked younger, much younger, as he lay there on the bed. It made him think of those days when he and Sarah had gone down to visit the boys at Eton. Henry was always so delighted to see them. And at Oxford later.
So many friends to introduce. He could not remember ever having to beat Henry as a lad, or find fault with him. Such a companion too, these last years, ever since the start of the mine. He would have married soon, doubtless, and settled down at Clonmere with his bride. Now Clonmere would go to John…
He went on sitting in the chair, staring at the body of his son, and the candles burnt lower, forming spots of grease upon the floor beside the bed.
After an hour there came a light tap at the door, and the woman of the hotel asked him whether he would come down and have a bite or two to eat; he must keep his strength, she said, he must not give way.
He remembered that the business of living must be continued, that eating and drinking, and planning and sleeping, were part of existence, that Henry's death would alter none of this. He went downstairs and had his dinner alone in the little coffee-room of the hotel, and after dinner the doctor called and accompanied him to the house of the Maire, Monsieur Jacques-Theodore Leroux, where there were papers to be signed and certain formalities to be gone through.
The doctor and the Maire both signed the certificate of death, and another paper which would permit the father to have the body of his son embalmed and taken to Paris within the next few days. This necessary business gave Copper John some measure of comfort. It made something to do. He did not have leisure to be alone with his thoughts. When he had left the Maire and the doctor, he walked awhile in the town of Sens until it was dark, and then he returned to the Hotel de l'Ecu and went upstairs once more to Henry's room. It was as though he expected there to be some change, that Henry might perhaps have moved, or the things be disturbed upon the chair.
But Henry lay still and quiet, as he had been before.
Only the candles had sunk lower, and now burnt dim and fitful in their sockets. His father extinguished them, one by one, and as he did so it seemed to him an act of finality. It was his farewell to Henry.
He left the room, and shut the door behind him.
He asked the landlord for paper, and pen, and ink. He had recollected, when he had signed the death certificate, that the fourth of the month was the day when he always wrote to Robert Lumley and gave him an account of the work at the mine. He had omitted to do so in May, because he had been about to set forth on his journey, and had only sent his partner a short note, explaining that he was leaving for the Continent. Robert Lumley would consider him very remiss if he left him without word for two months. It was a good thing he had thought to bring with him the details of the mining accounts for the last six months.
It would be as well, perhaps, if Robert Lumley had a copy for reference. He dipped his pen in the ink and began his letter.
At the Hotel de I'Ecu, Sens, Dept. de I'allyonne, France.
My dear Mr. Lumley, You will, I am sure, learn with regret that the journey to Italy for the recovery of poor Henry's health has proved fruitless. He was unable on his return to proceed further than Sens in France, where he expired yesterday, the third of the month. It is a heavy blow to me, and will be so to the rest of my family, but we must pray to the Almighty to enable us to bear it with fortitude. I take it for granted that you have received the 1499, the whole of your royalty for last year, but I have nothing as yet to remit from the new mine, though I have great expectations that it will prove even more profitable than the first…
BOOK TWO
Greyhound John, 1828–1837
THE SUMMER OF 1828 passed slowly, and the days seemed endless to John in Lincoln's Inn, when, standing at the window of his rooms and looking out upon the narrow, stuffy court, he would think of the sea breaking on the shores of Doon Island, and the tide running swiftly up the creek below Clonmere. His work, as usual, held no interest for him, and he would loll in his chair, biting the end of his pen-holder, a heap of untidy papers before him on his desk, while now and again a clerk would appear and ask for some note or other from his file, which it would take an eternity to find. He longed for home more than he had ever done in his life before, and now that Henry was dead it would have been easy enough to give up this farce of the law in London, with the natural and true excuse that his presence was necessary at Clonmere. But something prevented him from doing so, a queer twist that had come into his mind with his brother's death. It seemed to him, during those long weeks in London, that he was in some way to blame for being alive and well, when Henry, who was so much better than himself, lay cold and dead in a gloomy French cemetery. It would not have mattered had it been the other way round. The family would have soon forgotten him. But Henry, so gay, so clever, adored by his sisters and well-nigh worshipped by his father, how could he ever be replaced?
They would never get over the loss. They would discuss the circumstances of his illness over and over again, just as they had done at Lletharrog when his father returned from France, and always there would be a sigh, and a harking back to that evening in the mine the winter before.
"It was that night that he caught the chill,"
Barbara would say. "Don't you remember how he came back to Bronsea the following week with a high fever, and was in bed here all during Christmas?"
"And yet," Eliza would answer, "Henry had often been wet to the skin before and taken no harm from it.
John was probably wet too that night, were you not, John, and you suffered no ill consequence?"
"Henry worked gallantly that night; I shall always remember it," said his father. "He did not spare himself. He was an example to all." And John, listening, standing with his hands in his pockets looking out of the farm-house window at Barbara's trim little garden, would feel an unconscious reproach in his father's words. If John had worked harder that night possibly Henry would not have had so much put upon him. He was aware of being no help to the family. He was the one brother now, to whom they would all turn, and yet he failed them. He knew that he should have made some effort to try to take Henry's place, not in his father's affections but in his esteem, by offering to go to Bronsea and to take some sort of responsibility upon his shoulders. Shyness prevented him, a feeling of inferiority, and a fear that if he spoke or moved, his father would think, "How hopeless a fellow he is compared to Henry!" It was better, therefore, to do nothing. He would just sink into himself and be silent. And so, instead of accompanying his father into Bronsea, he would take his rod and go fishing in the stream below the farm-house, thinking all the while about his dead brother out in France, wondering what his thoughts had been that last week, lying ill and lonely in the hotel. And his sisters, in the parlour at Lletharrog, would say to one another, "John is really very selfish. He seems quite unmoved by Henry's death." The only one who guessed the true turmoil of his mind was Jane, and she would come to him sometimes, and put her arm around his neck, but he knew that even Jane, with her intelligence and intuition, could not understand the fierce thoughts that troubled him. At the end of the fortnight he returned to London, and when his father wrote from Clonmere during the hot, dreary month of August, asking him whether he would be joining them as usual, he answered that pressure of work forbade it, indeed that it was unlikely that he would cross the water at all while they were there. His father made no answer to this palpable untruth, but a long letter came from Barbara, full of reproaches, saying that none of them could understand what had come over him; it was as though he had no affection for his home at all. And John, biting his pen-holder in his stuffy London office, tried to tell his sister that the very reason why he did not come was because he loved his home too well. He saw himself, in all the pride of possession, walking round the grounds with his father, discussing some alteration, looking up at the windows and the grey stone walls, and how the momentary delight would suddenly be shattered by the feeling that all this was coming to him through tragedy and mischance, that in reality he would have no right to any of it — Clonmere belonged to Henry, lying in his grave, and his father knew it too, his father would be thinking the very same thought as they walked before the castle together. No, it was useless. Barbara would not know what he meant.