The ruling passion, it appeared, was still strong. That night Francis played for three hours with Aunt and Grand’mère, who could summon up spirit for the game. It was euchre. The deck of thirty-two cards was ready when they went upstairs, and on and on, remorselessly and almost without speaking, they played hand after hand. Francis, as the least experienced, was euchred again and again, and he could not but notice that frequently his grandmother’s hand would disappear beneath the covers, presumably to press some aching part or to ease her bedgown, and when it reappeared—could that have been the flash of a card that had not been there before? An unworthy thought, and he pushed it down, but not quite out of sight. Mary-Ben was willing enough to lose, but Francis had not come to the time of life when he understood that winning is not always a matter of taking the trick.
As they parted at bedtime, he whispered to Aunt, “What’s the news of Madame Thibodeau?”
“She doesn’t get out much now, Francis; she’s become so stout you see. But she’s wonderful. Stone deaf, but she plays cards three times a week. And wins! Oh dear me, yes; she wins! Eighty-seven, now.”
Where was Victoria Cameron? Who was caring for the Looner?
It appeared that Aunt had been forced to get rid of Victoria Cameron. She had kicked over the traces just once too often, and Aunt had turned her out lock, stock, and barrel. She had not been replaced as cook, but Anna Lemenchick did her best, helped out by old Mrs. August’s youngest girl, who was willing, though not very bright. Anna’s best was not good, but with poor Marie-Louise reduced to a diet of liquids, Aunt had no heart to look for another first-rate cook, in spite of her brother’s urging. It seemed heartless, didn’t it, to hire somebody to cook dishes poor Grand’mère could not hope to taste?
Francis was still incapable of telling Aunt that he knew about the Looner, but on his first night at St. Kilda he crept upstairs while he knew Aunt would be busy on her prie-dieu. All the curtains that had deadened sound were gone. Nobody slept up there because Anna Lemenchick came by the day. He tried the door of the room which had once been hospital and madhouse and prison, but it was locked.
In his childhood room, which seemed to have lost substance, like everything else at St. Kilda, Francis caught sight of himself as he undressed, in the long mirror before which he had once postured in a mockery of women’s attire. A young man, with hair on his chest and legs, black curls clustering about his privates; moved by an impulse he could have denied, but to which he yielded, he once again drew the bed cover about him and looked at what he saw—looked hungrily for the girl who should have been behind the mirror, but was not. Where was she? He had not found her in any of the girls with whom, at Spook, he had sought her. She must be somewhere, that girl from the world of myth, from the real Cornwall of his imagination. He would not believe it could be otherwise. But the consequence of his gazing brought on such arousal that he had to “choke the ghost”, which was school slang for masturbation. As always, the act brought relief and disgust, and he fell asleep in a bad temper. He didn’t want crushes and affairs and the student amusements he heard so much about at Spook. He wanted love. He was twenty-three, which he thought very old to be without love, and he wondered what could possibly be the matter with him, or with his fate, or whatever decreed such things. Hell!
He had no trouble, the next morning, in finding Victoria Cameron. She was smack in the middle of the main street, in a small shop which said, over the door, CAMERON FANCY BAKED GOODS, and inside she stood behind the counter amid a profusion of her best work.
“Well, you never thought leaving your grandfather’s house would be the ruin of me, did you, Frankie? It’s been the making of me. Dad and the boys baking the bread as always, and me making the fancy stuff here, we’re doing a land-office business, let me tell you. No, I’m not married, nor will I ever be, though it’s not for want of offers, let me tell you. I’ve better things to do than slaving for some man, and you can bet on that.”
“Zadok? That’s a sad story. He wanted to marry me, but can you imagine that? I told him straight: Not as long as you do what you do at Devinney’s, I told him, and don’t give it up, because I wouldn’t marry you even if you gave it up. I’m too fond of my own way, I said. But it hurt him. You could see that. I don’t pretend that was all of it, but it may have been part of it.
“I think it was that poor boy’s death that hit him hardest. You hadn’t heard about that? No, I don’t suppose there’d be anybody tell you. Zadok felt he’d done it, in a way.”
A pause, during which a group of customers, who looked curiously at Francis, were accommodated with a half-dozen of lemon-curd tarts, another half-dozen of the raspberry tarts, two lemon pies promised for a wedding anniversary, and a big bag of cream puffs. Not to speak of two crusty white and two brown and two raisin loaves. When this press of business was completed, Victoria continued. “Zadok was always one for his beer, you remember. And after I told him flat there was nothing doing so far as I was concerned he took to bringing it up to that room on the top floor, to drink while he sang to Frankie—the other Frankie. You know, Francis, he loved that boy. You might almost have thought he was his own. Zadok had a heart in him, you’ve got to give him that. I didn’t like him bringing in the beer, but I couldn’t have stopped it without more trouble than it seemed to me to be worth. And I think there was some spite in it. Men are funny, you know, Francis. I think Zadok wanted to show me that if I wouldn’t have him, he’d go to the Devil, hoping maybe I’d change my mind to save him. But I wasn’t raised to think you can save people. If they can’t save themselves—that’s to say, as far as anybody can–nobody else can do it for them. We all have our fate to live out, and I knew it wasn’t my fate to save Zadok. So he’d drink a lot, and get silly, and drink healths to Frankie, and Frankie knew something cheerful and jolly was meant, and he’d laugh in that sort of lingo that was all he could manage. But I was firm on the one thing: I wouldn’t let Zadok give Frankie any of the beer.
“Probably that’s what did it. Instead of beer, Frankie drank a lot of water. Harmless, wouldn’t you say? He’d just piss it into his diaper, and no harm done. But one night Zadok and I had a real knock-down row, because he was drinking more than usual and making too much noise, and at last I walked out on the two of them and told Zadok he could get Frankie ready for sleep by himself.
“Of course I knew he couldn’t. The boy relied on me to get him ready for the night, and I wouldn’t fail him. So after an hour or so, when I knew Zadok had gone, I went in to settle Frankie down, and I did, but I thought he looked a little queer, and he was heavy to lift. In the morning he was dead.
“Do you know what it was? Drownded! I had to get the old Aunt, and she sent for Dr. J.A., and after he looked at Frankie he said that was what it was. Drownded! You see, that poor boy wasn’t like other people. There was some gland right in the top of his head that wasn’t right, and when he went on that water toot with Zadok he must have drunk about—I don’t know—gallons maybe, and it was more than he could stand. The doctor said some of it must have got into his blood, and then into his lungs, and he drownded. The doctor called it pulmonary oedema. I’ve remembered it, because—well, you wouldn’t expect me to forget it, would you? So there had to be another funeral at night, though there was no priest this time, and now there really is a Frankie under that stone that was a fake for so long.