PART II
No inquest was held on Horace Kilbourne's wife. The doctor had attended her almost daily. For years her husband had been warned her heart was in such a condition that she might die suddenly, at any moment. She had so died. Except that it was a happy release for herself, and for her husband—that over-tired, good, and patient man—one of Heaven's mercies, there was nothing to be said. Unless Kilbourne himself, in remembrance of other days, and in the tenderness of his heart, shed a tear for her, there was not a soul to weep for drunken Julia Kilbourne.
Although, to the best of his ability, he had lived retired from all society, and in his sensitiveness to his wife's shame had kept, as well as he could, her history to himself, it was well known in the town. There was none who knew who did not respect and pity him. Kind hands were eagerly put out to him. At last he, who had shrunk from going to other men's houses because he could not ask them to his own, was free to do so.
It was a little disappointing that he repulsed all such advances.
The only adverse criticism which had been passed on him had been that, a heavily burthened man, he had not known how to conceal his misfortune, but had carried about with him a face as miserable as his history. That his face would now bear witness to his new-found delight of liberty was confidently expected.
It was strange that, instead of the looked-for lightening of gloom, there was, if possible, in his bearing, his wife being safely dead and buried, an increase of melancholy.
Kate Grantley, who thought she knew him better than the rest, was not surprised that the little letter she wrote him on the first news of Mrs Kilbourne's death remained unanswered. The words her pen had written had come warm from a heart realising the shock, the bewilderment, from which it was inevitable that he must suffer. But it was a letter which it would have been painful to him to answer, perhaps. He had known that she would understand.
She would not be hurt that he ceased to linger for her at the hour they both came out of school. Often she walked to the street which held her home and his, with his tall figure a dozen yards in front of her. She would not hurry a step to overtake him. All in good time. She no more doubted him—she no more doubted that in due time he would ask her to be his wife—than she doubted what her answer would be when he did so. Between them there had been no vulgar philandering; no word of what might have been, what yet might be, had passed their lips. Yet, deep in their hearts was guarded an unspoken compact which—she would have staked her life on it—neither would betray.
But she was unpleasantly startled, coming face to face with him one day, he walking down his garden path, which she was passing, to find that he did not even purpose to speak to her. Pretending to fumble at the lock of the gate, he hung back until she was well in front.
Later on, the pair had encountered in a shop. She had put out a hand to him, and he had taken it. But there had been hesitation, almost reluctance, on his part, and it seemed to her that he had looked at her with intolerable reproach in his eyes.
She was haunted by the remembrance. Was it possible that his wife's death could have been really a grief to him? Such a grief as that? Or was the lonely life he was leading, coming upon the shock of finding the woman dead, telling upon him physically and mentally?
"Go and ask Mr Kilbourne in to supper to-night!" she commanded her brother. She lived with him in another little bow-windowed house, with a purple clematis over the bow-window, a crimson rambler over the door, and about it the same air of sweetness, of neatness, of wholesomeness its mistress wore. "He is looking ill and wretched. Try to bring him in."
"I have asked him every day of my life. He won't come," the brother said. "He gets out of my way when he can," he added. "He does not seem to wish to be friendly any more."
She looked at him in silence, considering the statement. Kilbourne's punctiliousness was exaggerated, but she thought she understood it. It was delicacy carried to an extreme, perhaps, but she was proud to think it was characteristic of him.
"I don't see why he need be afraid of being civil to me, for all that," the brother said, almost as if she had spoken.
The next time Kate Grantley had an opportunity of looking in Kilbourne's face she was painfully struck by his appearance. The man was thinner, more worn, years older. His head seemed to droop beneath a heavier burthen than of yore; he walked as if his feet were shod with lead.
Several months, in which she had had no word with him, had gone by since his wife's death. At this rate, before he dared to stretch out a hand to gather for himself the happiness ready to bloom for him, he would be dead! She thought she saw that the man, lonely, sensitive, to a fault, was passing his days in brooding melancholy, in unmerited self-reproach. He had had more than enough of sadness in his life. For an idea, a stupid convention of other folks' manufacture, and not worth respecting, he should have no more. He should not be allowed to take his own path, to push her on one side again.
Once resolved on any course, she was a very practical young person, alert to take the opportunity the moment gave.
She overtook him determinedly, one afternoon, as he walked ahead of her from school, as usual. The holidays, during which neither had left home, were over; the summer was over, the winter term well begun.
"Mr Kilbourne, will you come into No. 6 for one minute to-day?" she said. "I particularly wish to speak to you."
He had been ready enough to go there in the old days, with or without pretext; now he had the look of a man called on to do a thing at which his soul sickened.
"If you will excuse me——" he said.
But Kate was resolute.
"I cannot excuse you. You must come at once," she said.
She had assumed the little air of authority over him which in her he had found to be so pleasant. With a look upon his face as if he were going to his execution, he obeyed.
For many weeks she had gone about, the words she meant to speak to him, of encouragement, of comradeship, upon her lips; the chance to use them had never come. Now she would not use them, but would speak to him as if there had been no hiatus in their communion, as if no tragedy had come between.
She faced him as they entered the bright little sitting-room, of exquisite neatness, and sweet with flowers, which had ever seemed such a haven of rest to him.
"Have you seen Alick?" she began. "Have you heard that they have promoted him, and that he is to be sent to the Paris branch?" (Alick was a clerk in one of the banks.)
He had not heard.
"He'll be pleased. It's what he wished for, isn't it?" he asked, not looking at her, gazing before him with lack-lustre eyes.
Her heart sank as, seeing him close at hand, she noted the change in him. Although, with his slouching gait and loose-hung limbs and hanging head, he had never been a smart-looking man, he had yet been one possessed of great personal nicety; in that matter—in the shipwreck of his life—being careful not to let himself go. But now there was about him a look of neglect, making to ache with pity the heart of the woman who observed it.
Alick was pleased, she admitted, with sinking spirit. "But it is about myself I want to ask your advice," she went on.
He glanced at her quickly with his deep, sad eyes, and glanced away again.
"Shall I throw up what I am doing here, and go with Alick? It is this I want to ask you. My brother could share lodgings with a friend he has there. He does not really want me; but I used to wish for Paris—long ago, before we met, you and I. I might meet with a good appointment there. It is a chance for me. Help me to make up my mind. Shall I go?"
There fell a complete silence between them.
She sat on the music-stool, her back to the open piano, a pretty, slight girl, with a dark and resolute little face. It confronted the gloomy one before it now with an expression progressing from expectation to surprise, to irritation, in its gaze. On her part, she determined not to say another word to bridge the pause; but it seemed that the silence would never be broken.
At length he slowly lifted his eyes to hers.
"I think, perhaps, it would be better for you to go," he said.
She sprang up from the stool, turned to the piano, began sorting, with quick, nervous fingers, the music there.
"You think so? Very well; I'll go, then," she said. "I only wanted to hear what you would think of it."
He had risen with an air of relief and picked up his hat. He looked in silence for a minute at her straight back in its trim Norfolk jacket, at her thick braids of black hair beneath the plain straw hat.
"Of course you know best what you wish," he said hesitatingly.
She placed the freshly arranged music with an air of decision on the piano.
"I know very well what I wish, thank you," she said.
There was another silence.
"Is that all?" he asked her.
"Quite all. Except"—she turned round upon him and showed him that the dark skin of her face had whitened, that her eyes were hurt and angry—"except that Alick has to go next week. I suppose I ought to give a term's notice; but also, if I don't, I suppose they'll do without it—I shall be ready to go with him. We shall be busy till we start. I may not see you to speak to again—this will be our good-bye."
"Is that so?" he said.
She could hardly believe her ears; she held her breath in the cruelty of the surprise, and set her teeth to help her to bear the pain.
"Ours has been a long friendship," she said, striving to steady her voice. "Two years—seeing each other every day. Strange, isn't it, how things come to an end?"
"Except some things which are endless," he said.
She took heart of grace at that.
"You mean Faith?" she asked; "Love?" She looked at him eagerly.
"I mean Pain," he corrected her, and held out his hand.
She would not put hers within it.
"If, after these long two years, you can go like that, your friendship is not what I thought it. It is not worth a hand-clasp. Good-bye," she said, and turned her back upon him, not deigning to watch him go.
"Do you go or stay?" her brother asked, when he came in from the bank that afternoon.
"I—go!" she said, but not with her usual bright promptness; and, looking at her face across their little tea-table, he saw that it had lost something of its usual serenity.
"Seen Kilbourne?" he asked.
She told him yes, with an air of careful unconcern; that he had come in that morning; that she had told him of their contemplated departure, and had said good-bye to him.
"I used to think——" the brother began, but she cut him short.
"I know. You often said so; don't say it any more," she said. "All that was a mistake—and absurd."
"You know what they are saying of him, Kate? They are saying he killed his wife."
Her dark face whitened, her dark eyes opened wide.
"They cannot!"
"They do. They say he couldn't look such a miserable, hangdog wretch for nothing. The worst is, the boys at the college have got hold of it. One of the little wretches wrote up on the white wall of his class-room the other day, 'Who killed his wife?' Bryant, the science master, told me Kilbourne took no notice, but his face was sea-green for the rest of the morning."
"He should have thrashed the whole class—thrashed them within an inch of their lives!"
"Well, he didn't. He did nothing." Alick dropped his voice. "Bryant told me he looked as if he were afraid," he said.
"What beasts people are to say such things!" she burst out. "And of such a man! The gentlest, the kindest——"
"I know, my dear. I'm sorry for poor old Kilbourne. I daresay he didn't kill his wife; but something's happened to him, and she did die uncommonly sudden. Anyhow, from what Bryant said, it's evident he's lost his nerve and his courage. At that rate, he'll precious soon lose his post."
Kate Grantley and Kilbourne, arriving from opposite directions, reached his gate at the same moment, the next morning. Rudely chalked upon the stone post was the question which had confronted Kilbourne on his class-room walls.
He pointed to the words with his stick which shook in his hand; his face was ashen white.
"Isn't it fitting that you and I should be confronted by that question?" he asked her.
She stared from the writing to him.
"I don't think it at all fitting!" she said. "Why don't you send for a policeman, and stop it?"
He pushed open the gate, and, taking no further notice of her, walked up the little path to his door. Reaching it, he found her behind him.
With that air of girlish authority he had once found so pleasant, "I am coming in," she said.
He led the way into that bow-windowed room in which Mrs Kilbourne had died. The pervading aroma of alcohol had left it; airiness and a certain formal tidiness now reigned in place of stuffiness and neglect; but the room was perhaps more depressing than before to a sensitive mind.
The sofa was in the same place; the basket, which had held the things she liked to have at hand, still stood beside it. The over-large table at which the unfortunate Julia had so often watched her husband eat his unappetising meals, and where he still made a pretence of eating them in sight of the empty sofa, still occupied too much of the available space.
Kilbourne turned and confronted the girl, who had followed him in. His eyes shone now, and there was the working of excitement in his face.
"I thought we had said our last words," he began; "I thought that that, at least, was done with—and you were going away. You have no right to follow me, Kate, to overthrow me in this fashion. My strength is almost exhausted; I have tried too much—too much—and all alone——"
"I know," she said, with her fine air of decision. "That is why I have come. You mustn't be alone any more. You must come with us."
He had tossed away his hat, and thrust his hands which were shaking, into his coat-pockets. He turned with excitement upon her, but she went firmly on.
"With Alick and me. You are too good for the post you hold; with your degrees you can easily get a better one. Come to Paris. Turn your back upon all that has been depressing and worrying you; upon this melancholy room"—she gazed round upon the unlovely space—"upon this"—she waved a peremptory, small hand towards the vacant sofa.
He looked at her with his accusing eyes, with a scarcely controlled emotion; but she stopped him when he tried to speak.
"We have been good friends," she said. "If I have not helped you through these two years we have walked as comrades together, you, at least, have helped me. Helped me so much"—she paused a moment, and the level tone of her voice quavered musically—"that I cannot lose you; that I need you terribly still."
"And I!" he burst forth then. "And I! Can you ever picture to yourself the magnitude of my need of you?"
He clenched the hands in his coat-pockets, and turned his back on her, and she saw his shoulders heave.
"It is killing me," he said—"killing me—just that."
His voice, which had been raised, sank brokenly. She listened, when it was silent, to the beating of her heart.
In a minute she went to him and laid a hand upon his arm.
"Then, why?" she asked him, whisperingly. "Why?"
He flung round upon her, and she fell back from the vehement accusing of his eyes.
"Why?" he repeated. "Why?" He threw a hand at the empty sofa. "There!" he said. "There—where you ask me to turn my back—my dead wife lies there—always for me. And she is between you and me for ever."
It sounded to her but the utterance of morbidity. The strange words were only a token of that from which she had come to save him. She had the courage to be unmaidenly, to persist.
"I, at any rate, do not see it so," she said. "To have me for your friend is to do no wrong to your dead wife."
"How can we be friends—you and I?" he asked her; and she, who knew they could not now be merely that, did not speak.
"I, who for your sake cursed her in my heart," he went on, his shaken voice hushed to an awe-struck whisper. "You, who put into her hands the poison which killed her."
"I?" she breathed, and drew back, staring at him, wondering, for one dreadful moment, had his unhealthy brooding turned his brain. "Killed her? I?"
"You!" he said, wildly. He went across the room, and shut the door behind her they had left ajar. "If it had been I myself I could have borne it; but you—you—! I found the empty bottle, that night, dropped from her hand; the label—'Poison'—and your name——"
"The chloral bottle?" she asked him; and the cloud of fear and dismay lifted from her eyes, and they were alight with understanding and with hope. She went swiftly to him and caught his arm. "Horace, do you remember that you warned me never to give her any narcotic, however earnestly she might beg for it—that it would not be safe—that she would kill herself? Do you remember?"
"But you gave it, all the same. Your name was on the bottle——"
"On the bottle—of water," she said. "It never held anything else. I used to take it home and fill it every day. The doctor told me to do it—it was a harmless fraud we played on her. She used to drink it, never doubting, and fall asleep——"
"Kate!"
She held him tightly by his arm, and looked with eyes that were dimmed with tears of most blessed relief upon the working of his face.
As, later, they went together through the little garden, and passed again the rudely-chalked question upon the gate—"Shall I stay here with you, and face the music," Kate Grantley asked, "or will you come away with me to Paris?"
"AS 'TWAS TOLD TO ME"
Her husband had died suddenly in the third year of their marriage, and she had been left a young widow with their only child.
The husband had been dead a year—a year passed in close seclusion in her country home—when she went out on a bright morning of the early spring, taking her little daughter with her, to gather primroses in the plantation bordering one extremity of the park around her house.
She had remembered when she arose in the morning that the day was the anniversary of her husband's death.
A year only! It had seemed like twenty years. For she was very young, and fairly rich and much admired, and the life she had hitherto led had not prepared her to support loneliness and retirement profitably. The shock of the sudden death had been terrible. She had thought that she should die of it; but she did not even fall ill. And there was the child, whom she adored. And later there had arisen a new interest.
The new interest, in the form of Major Harold Walsh, was at her elbow on this kind morning of sweetest spring. He was a middle-aged man, with a handsome, hard face and a very tender manner, and he chose, as some may think inopportunely, the anniversary of the husband's death to make the widow an offer of marriage.
The widow reminded him of what had happened on that day a year ago, pointed out that she could not possibly entertain such a proposition so soon, even cried a little when she spoke of her husband. But in no other way did she discourage the tender-mannered major with the hard face.
It would have been well-nigh impossible for a man to make an offer of marriage with a child of three years old clinging to her mother's skirts and incessantly babbling in her mother's ear; so the child with her nurse was sent into the interior of the plantation, in search of the lovely primroses said to flourish there, while the two elders wandered with slow steps and down-bent eyes upon the outskirts of the coppice.
So they would have been content to wander for hours, perhaps—he begging for assurances that she with an only half-feigned, pretty reluctance gave—but that their agreeable dalliance was cut short by a sufficiently alarming interruption.
She did not absolutely dislike him? Liked him—very much, even? That was well. Years hence, if he waited patiently—and he would try, he would try to wait—she might even get to love him a little? Was that asking too much? Well, not just yet, then; he would wait. But he was not to go away unhappy? Not utterly discouraged? He need not, for what had taken place between them, debar himself entirely of the delight of her society, he might—?
It was at that instant of the major's soft-voiced pleading and of the widow's low, monosyllabic replies, that a voice from out the plantation on their left smote sharply upon their ears. It called affrightedly upon Mrs Eddington's name.
The mother, whose mother-love was, and would always be, the strongest passion of her life, fled into the wood. Following the direction of the voice, in two minutes she came upon the kneeling form of the nurse; and the nurse's white and terrified face looked up at her across the unconscious form of the little child.
"I found her so," the woman got out through chattering teeth. "I sat reading, and she ran to the other side of the tree. She was talking to me, and then she didn't talk, and I went round and found—this!"
With shaking fingers the mother tore asunder the broad muslin strings of the hat upon which the child lay, rent open the dainty dress at the throat—"Look at mother! Milly! Milly! Look at mother!" she called wildly, impatiently, fiercely even.
As if in answer to the passionate appeal, the child's dark lashes stirred for a moment on the transparent cheek; were still; stirred again; then the dark eyes, so like the dark eyes of the dead father, opened upon the mother's face.
"Only fainted," the gentleman who had been proposing to officiate as Milly's stepfather said. He was much relieved that the scene, at which he had looked on awkwardly enough, was over. That for a three-year-old child to faint was an unusual, an alarming occurrence, he did not, of course, understand. Certainly, if Mrs Eddington thought it necessary, he would go for the doctor. He could probably bring him quicker than a groom. Should he carry the little Milly home first?
But the mother must carry Milly herself. No; nurse should certainly not touch her. Never again should nurse, who had let the child for a minute out of her sight, touch Milly.
Nurse, surreptitiously grasping a frill of the child's muslin frock, wept, silent and remorseful, as she walked alongside.
Once, the child, who lay for the better part of the half-mile to her home in a kind of stupor, opened her eyes again beneath her mother's frightened gaze and was heard to mutter something about some flowers.
"She is asking for the primroses she had gathered!" Mrs Eddington whispered, in a tone of intensest relief. "Did you bring them, nurse?"
The unfortunate nurse, of course, had not brought them.
"Milly's po'r flo'rs is dead," Milly grieved in the little weak voice they heard then for the first time. "Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs, and they died."
To that astonishing statement the child adhered during the first days of her long illness, till she forgot, and spoke of it no more. For any questioning, she gave no explanation of her words. She never enlarged upon the first declaration in any way, nor did she even alter the form of the words in which she gave it expression. Always she alluded to the curious delusion with a grieving voice, often with tears.
"Dear daddy is dead, darling," the mother said to her in an awed whisper, kneeling at her side. "He could not come to Milly."
"Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs, and they died," the sad little voice protested; and the child softly whimpered upon the pillow.
"The child can't, of course, even remember her father," Major Walsh said, with impatience, being sick of the subject and the importance attached to it. "She was only two when he died."
"How can you tell what a child of two remembers?" Mrs Eddington asked. "She was very fond of Harry. I think she does remember."
Persistently, in her mind recurred an episode of the last day of her husband's life. He had carried his little daughter, laughing and prattling to him, down from the nursery, and had put her in her mother's arms. The child, when he turned to go, had clung to him. "Don't leave Milly, daddy. Take Milly too," she cried. Laughing, he had kissed her. "Not now—not now," he had said—"but later I will come and take Milly."
Then he had gone out, with a smile still on his face, and had fallen dead as he walked across the park.
It was inevitable that in these days the memory of her husband should more fully occupy the young widow's mind. He had died of heart disease; his child, it was now discovered, had a certain weakness of the heart. A superstitious feeling that she had not remembered him enough, and that this was her punishment, took possession of Mrs Eddington's brain. She remembered with remorse what had been occurring at the moment her child had fallen insensible among the primroses. On the very anniversary of her poor Harry's death she had forgotten him so far! Never would she forget him again.
The words the child spoke had recorded a mere delusion, the doctor told her, of the little dazed brain in the moment preceding unconsciousness; but for all that rational view, they awed the mother, haunted her.
"Milly's p'or flo'rs is dead. Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs and they died," Milly had said.
Never would Mrs Eddington leave her child, or forget Milly's daddy again.
Yet, when the anniversary of poor Harry Eddington's death came round again, Milly had been for three-quarters of a year running about as of old; her mother had been for two months the wife of Major Walsh.
They had spent their honeymoon at Major Walsh's own place in Wiltshire, had stayed for another month in his London house, and they at last turned their steps in the direction of the home which had been Harry Eddington's, where his child had been left under the guardianship of the new Mrs Walsh's mother.
"You used to complain of the dulness of the place and of how buried alive you were there. You have been away for eight weeks, and you are mad to get back to it," the husband said, with a jealous eye upon his bride.
She subdued, judiciously, the joy which had been in her voice. "I am glad to see the old place again—yes," she said. "Won't it be delightful for us to be together there, where we first knew each other?"
"It is the child you want—not me," he said, with grudging reproach. She found it necessary to make some quite exaggerated statements to reassure him.
Her mother was in the carriage which met them at the station. "Milly is staying up, till you come," she told them. "I left her capering wildly about the nursery with delight."
"I hope she won't over-excite herself," the mother said, and the grandmother laughed at that anxiety. No child of hers had ever had a weakness of the heart, and she was inclined to ridicule the idea that Milly required more care than had been given to her own children.
Full of longing to see her child, Mrs Walsh sprang from the carriage, and ran up the broad steps to the wide-open doors of her home. Then, with a happy after-thought, turned on the mat, and held out her hands to the new husband.
"Welcome—welcome to our home, dear," she said.
He grasped the hands tightly. "After all, I suppose I am a little more to you than the child?" he asked.
She smiled a flattering affirmative; and at the instant there came a scream in a child's voice from a room above, followed by an ominous silence.
When the others reached the nursery from which as they knew, the sound had come, the mother was already standing there, holding in her arms the unconscious form of her little girl. From a tiny wound in the child's white forehead drops of blood were oozing.
"I left her for one minute to fetch the water for her bath," the nurse was saying, hurriedly excusing herself. "She was running up and down and round about, calling, 'Daddy, come to Milly! Come, daddy, come!'"
"She fell and struck her head against the sharp corner of this stool," Major Walsh said. "Look, it has sharp corners."
The child was only unconscious for a minute. She opened her eyes, smiled upon her mother, hid her face in her neck, and presently was whispering a question again and again in her ear.
Mrs Walsh looked up in a bewildered fashion from the little hidden face. "What does she say?" the grandmother asked.
"She says, 'Where is my daddy gone?'" the mother repeated, faltering a little over the words, and with scared eyes.
"He is here," said the practical grandmother, and took Major Walsh by the arm. "We have told her her daddy was coming with her mother," she explained. "She was more excited about him even than about you, Millicent. Look up! Here is your daddy, darling."
Slowly the child lifted her head from the mother's shoulder, and looked at the big man with the hard face now stooping over her—looked for half a second, shut her eyes again, and again hid her face.
"It isn't my daddy," she said, with a baby whimper, "Milly wantsmydaddy that came and danced with Milly. Where's my daddy gone?"
Later, when the child had been put to bed, the mother, having hurriedly dressed for dinner, knelt by the side of the crib to hold her daughter in her arms; kissing the tiny wound upon her forehead, she asked how it was she had managed so to hurt herself.
"My daddy came and danced. He whirled Milly round and round," the little one said, grievingly. She knew nothing more of the occurrence; it was the only explanation she ever gave.
The look of awe which had been there once before came back to Mrs Walsh's eyes. Only to the doctor did she ever repeat the child's words. He, being a man of good common sense, refused of course to be impressed with the coincidence.
"She made herself giddy by, as she says, whirling round and round. In the moment of losing consciousness—who can tell by what unintelligible mental process?—the figure of her dead father, undoubtedly impressed with unusual clearness on the child's memory, was present with her. A vision? yes, if you like to call it so; say, rather, a dream in the instant before unconsciousness. Such a babe as this knows no distinction between dreams and realities—between the momentarily disordered mental vision and the ordinary objects of optical seeing."
For the rest, the unsatisfactory condition of the heart was still existent. Nothing that with care might not be obviated. With the absence of all excitement, with entire rest of mind and body, the child would outgrow the evil.
Yet, in spite of this cheerful view of the case, it was long before Mrs Walsh could successfully conceal the uneasiness and unhappiness she felt. Her punishment again, she told herself with morbid iteration. She had turned her back on her child, had forgotten her dead husband; nay, even in the moment of the child's accident, had she not been in the act of welcoming another man to that dead husband's home?
So, with a new life just begun for her, and new interests arising on all hands she found her mind continually dwelling on the days of her earlier married life. Often, when bent on any expedition with Major Walsh, dining with their neighbours, receiving them in her home, walking, driving with him, talking over the details of the business of the little estate, she was thinking, thinking how she and that other man had gone here and there, said this and that to each other. How he had looked, the words he had said; his gestures, his laugh, came curiously back to her; and her heart sank beneath a constant sense of self-reproach. How could she not have remembered all this before, and been true to the claims he had on her—that poor young husband who was the father of her child?
Once, but that was months later, and she was weak in body as well as depressed in mind, she sat alone over her bedroom fire as the dark came on, too tired to dress, and longed for her husband to come in and cheer her. Then the memory came to her of how once before, a few weeks before Milly was born, she had so sat in that very room, and had longed inexpressibly for that other husband; of how she had felt that she would die of fright and of longing for his comforting presence if he did not come; of how he had come at last, bringing warmth and love and courage to her failing heart; of how he had laughed, and said he had felt she was wanting him, and so had put what he was doing on one side and hurried to her. And as she thought of this, lying with shut eyes in her armchair, a curious feeling that he was there again with her in the room, took possession of her. She was not afraid; she lay quite still, hardly breathing, feeling "Harry is here! If I open my eyes I shall see him."
And often, in the weeks that followed, she was haunted by that strange consciousness of her first husband's presence; the curious, forcible impression that there was between her and him but a slight veil she lacked the resolution to rend, but that, rending it one day, she should see him.
Then Harold Walsh's child was born, and these unhealthy fancies were naturally vanquished.
It was a son, and there was much rejoicing. Poor little Milly's nose, it was said, must indeed be put out of joint by this advent of an heir to his father's large estates.
The child was born at Royle, his father's place, and christened there, while Milly had stayed on in her own home with her grandmother; the home where she had been born, where her father and mother had passed their brief married life together. When the son and heir was two months old, he came with his father and mother to stay in that house also. Then her mother and the neighbours who had known her through all her experiences of joy and of sorrow were glad to see that the Major's wife had got back her health and spirits and happiness.
The boy was a fine boy, and his mother idolised him; the father, contrary to general expectation, continued to be very much in love. They were a prosperous and happy trio, seeming to suffice to themselves. Little Milly, who had longed for her mother and the new brother, found herself of comparatively small importance, and decidedly on the outside of the completed circle.
Who can measure the bitterness, the desolation, which no after-experience of the unkind tricks of destiny can ever equal, of the little heart which feels it is not wanted where it longs to cling?
Then Milly's birthday came, and she was six years old; a delicately lovely child with dark, straight hair, dark eyes, and a complexion which was as a finger-post to her father's history and her own, and should have said "Beware!" Milly had always a birthday-party; this year also she must have one.
But it was not a party such as Milly had been promised; with the small drawing-room turned into a cave of delights, where a real, white-robed fairy with silver wings and a wand presided over presents to be given to Milly and all her little guests. The promise, in the pleasurable excitement of the Walshs' arrival, had been forgotten by all but Milly. When Milly demanded its fulfilment it was too late.
So the little guests could only dance—those that were big enough—or assisted by their elders, in the form of governess or elder sister, play at forfeits and twilight, and blindman's buff. These innocent gambols they carried on in the wide entrance hall. Some flags had been hung, to please Milly, against the heavy beams of the ceiling, and the gardener had filled every niche and corner with hothouse plants.
Bent, apparently, on spoiling his sister's pleasure, the heir of the house of Walsh must be taken with a colic on that day. His mother was anxious about him, fancying him feverish, and insisting on the doctor's presence. So it came to pass she was oftener sitting in the nursery, seeing her son jogged, howling lustily, on the nurse's lap, than making merry with Milly and her friends in the hall.
As the afternoon drew to a close, and carriages began to arrive for the children and their guardians, Mrs Walsh came out of the nursery, and standing in the comparative darkness of the corridor, looked down upon the bright and pretty scene. The children in their dainty white dresses, with their flushed faces and tossed curls, were as lovely as the flowers everywhere surrounding them; the music of the chattering voices, of the clear laughter, was more agreeable to the ear than that of the piano Milly's governess was playing.
The fun, as is apt to be the case when such a gathering is nearly over, waxed livelier as the time came for the children to part. "Just one more game!" Milly's little excited voice was heard pleading—"only one more!"
It was Kiss in the Ring, the old world favourite they chose, and they formed themselves into a circle, putting the littlest boy—boys were scarce among them, and very small—in the centre.
It was in the midst of much laughing and chatter and noise that the two little girls on either side of Milly Eddington felt her hands turn ice-cold in theirs, and slowly slip from their grasp. The next instant she had fallen to the floor between them.
The doctor, luckily on the spot, attending to the baby-brother, was with her in two minutes. There was nothing to be done. She was dead.
She had been the loveliest and the gayest there, laughing her pretty, happy laugh, babbling with the rest. Several of the elder guests, it was afterwards found, had been looking at the child and listening to her, when all at once she had become silent, had sunk backwards, and died.
So much they who looked on had seen, but nothing more.
Her mother, standing above, in the shadow of the corridor, and looking down upon the brightly-lit hall below, had seen this—
She had seen the figure of her first husband—the smile upon his face with which he had left her and her little daughter on the last day of his life—come silently into the hall. She had seen him, moving softly, attracting no notice from them, pass the groups of ladies standing near the walls, and noiselessly thread his way through the ring of playing children, till he stood at the back of his own little girl. She had seen him, smiling still, and clasping his hands tenderly beneath the child's chin, pull her softly backwards, and lay her dead upon the floor.
FREDDY'S SHIP
"A day or two, and I must return these people's call," Mrs Macmichel said to herself as she passed the Rectory gate. "What a bore!"
Two or three days ago the rector and his wife, calling on their new parishioner at the Court, had found her just returned from lunch with the shooting party in the field.
"Bad luck, wasn't it?" she asked, later, of the half-dozen men to whom she was giving tea in the billiard-room. "If I'd stayed to watch you shoot for another five minutes, I should have escaped them! Not a bad, dowdy little woman—the man a worse stick in the drawing-room than the pulpit, if possible. Subjects: his—parish room he wants to build; hers—son at sea, or going to sea, or has been to sea, or something. What is it to me? If he is drowned fifty fathoms deep at the bottom of the sea, do I care?"
"Now, if I only have the good luck to pick on a day when they're out!" she said as she stepped briskly along; a tall, and handsome, and fashionable-looking woman, in her hat with the green twisted veil and the green cock's feathers, her short, workman-like skirt and belted coat.
Down the short path from the Rectory door to the gate the rector himself was coming. Mrs Macmichel bowed a condescending head as she passed on, receiving no form of salutation but a stare from a pair of vacant eyes in return.
"Well, really! Such people!" the lady said to herself, as she walked disdainfully on. "Evenhereyou would expect a man would know he is always expected to take off his hat when a woman bows to him!"
"Mrs Macmichel!" a voice said at her back. A hand was laid upon her arm. She turned a look of astonished questioning upon the man who had ventured to touch her.
"Stop, please," he said; his voice was breathless as of one in great agitation. "Mrs Macmichel, I think you owe my wife a call? I want you to pay it now—at once——"
"It is very kind of you; I——"
"You mustn't make excuses. You mustn't deny me. You must go; and you must—stay."
The thought that he might be mad was succeeded as she looked in his face by the thought that he must be ill. The healthy colour natural to them had left his large cheeks, their fatness was only flabbiness, the small eyes were filled with a strange, pleading, protesting misery as of a man in terrible bodily discomfort.
"Mr Jones, I am afraid you are not well?"
He stopped her with an impatiently thrown-up hand. "It's not that—I'm all right. It's worse—it's my son——"
"The sailor?"
"News has come that theDoughtyhas gone down. All lost."
"Your son was in that ship?"
He did not answer, but pressed his lips, which were piteously quivering, together, and looked at her in staring misery.
"I am going into the village to wire for—confirmation. Till I return you must keep with my wife."
"But, Mr Jones! I am deeply, deeply sorry; but you must let me telegraph, and you, yourself, stay with Mrs Jones."
"No. She would know as soon as she saw my face. I stole away—I dare not see her." He stayed a minute, biting at lips drawn inward over his teeth. "Our only one!" he said. "No other! When I know—when there is no hope—no hope—I must tell her. I could wish that she might die before—that we might both die."
Tears had gushed upon the flabby cheeks; he mumbled his lips for a minute, unable to speak.
"If there was anything else I could do—anything!" Mrs Macmichel said. "But this——!"
"You will watch over her till I come back," he said, not even noticing her remonstrance. "It is a service I ask of you by right of our common humanity. Go in to her at once, please."
With his hand on her arm he turned her to the gate, and opened it for her. "Let no one else come near her," he said. "The butcher delivering our meat gave me the news. He saw it on the newspaper board at the village shop. Everyone in the village who reads it will come up at once to tell my wife. Keep them away. She has a weak heart; told suddenly, she might—Don't let her stir out. Don't let her hold communication with anyone till I return."
He put up a trembling hand in the direction of his clerical hat, but lacked the spirit to lift it, and turned hurriedly away.
"But, Mr Jones!" she called. She made a step or two after him. "It will be so awkward—for her, I mean. She won't understand. You see, I hardly know your wife."
He raised his strengthless hand for a few inches, and let it fall with a gesture of hopeless wretchedness. "Oh, what do such things matter?" he groaned.
She was ashamed to persist. "I thought perhaps someone in the village—someone she knew——"
"They could do nothing with her," he explained. "If she wanted them to go, she would tell them to go; she can't tell you. If she wanted to go into the village, she would go——"
"How soon will you be back?"
"An hour. Two hours. I must wire to Portsmouth, and wait a reply." He began to walk on again. "When I come back I shall—know," he said, and shuffled forward, with drooping back, and legs that shook beneath him, on his way.
Once he turned, and, seeing her still at the gate, pointed a weakly imperative finger at the house without stopping in his progress.
Hardly crediting that it could be upon her, Flora Macmichel, accustomed to move in paths so carefully smoothed, to have all ugly things hidden from her sight, that this task of matchless unpleasantness had been thrust, she turned and walked slowly towards the Rectory door. There are so many women in the world, shrieking, gesticulating, ready to rush into any fray a-brewing; so many quiet and strong and helpful, aching to take other people's burdens upon their shoulders; she had never sought to identify herself with one or the other species, holding the comfortable doctrine that we cannot all be servers, that in the general scheme those who only stand to be waited on also hold a useful place.
Why need she do this thing? Three weeks ago she had not known these people existed; three days ago had not set eyes on them. For humanity's sake, he had said. Well!
But she thought of the mumbling lips, the look of anguish in the poor eyes, went on, and rang the bell.
Mrs Jones was in, of course. She was sitting over the dining-room fire, writing a letter. A short, rather fat, rather dumpy woman, with plain features, an ominous flush on her sallow cheeks, iron-grey hair, and very large, very luminous dark eyes.
"How very good of you to call so soon!" she said, and got up to welcome, rather effusively, the rich woman who had come to be a parishioner. "Let your master know at once that Mrs Macmichel is here, Mabel," she said to the servant, and gave Mabel a look which indicated tea was to make its appearance with as little delay as possible. "Are you walking or driving? Walking? Really? Now, would you rather sit near the fire or the open window? It is the kind of day—isn't it?—when either is agreeable."
She had a slightly nervous manner, or she was not quite at ease with the strange caller. She altered the position of the chairs, rattled the poker in the fire, pushed away the little table which held the writing things.
"I was just writing to my son," she said, and smiled, as if sure of her interest in the subject, at the woman, who, chill to the marrow with the discomfort of her errand, had taken a chair by the side of the fire. "I think I told you he is in the navy? He is commanding theDoughty, the new destroyer. Going trips in her every day or so. I suppose these destroyers are terrible-looking things? Ah! I have never seen one, but I imagined so. What a comfort to me to know they are, after all, so safe as Freddy tells me they are."
"Such a mild day for the time of year, isn't it? And such a pretty stretch of road from the Court here!"
"We often say so!"
"And just the right length for a walk!"
"Exactly a mile and a quarter."
"Really?"
"Exactly! We always called it a mile; but the last time he was home on leave Freddy measured it with his new cyclometer. 'Now, mother,' he said, 'please to remember it's a mile and a quarter, and, don't let's have any dispute about it in future?'"
"It's so nice to know—to an inch or two!"
"Well, Freddy has a very accurate mind. He can't bear anything slipshod in the way of a statement. Now, you are sure, after your walk, you do not feel the fire too much? Then move into this chair. You have really taken the least comfortable in the room. Now, isn't that better?"
Mrs Macmichel said that it was delightfully cosy. She was inwardly shivering; the tips of her fingers felt like ice. She pulled off her loose gloves, and held a pair of white hands blazing with jewels to the flame. She must force herself to talk, and to keep the poor woman off the topic of her son; but she, who was considered ready-tongued and ready-witted, sat dumb, she had not a word to say.
"There is so much difference in chairs," she said, at length.
The banality did not affect Mrs Jones to laughter, as the speaker had a fear it might have done. She seized eagerly on the remark.
"Isn't there? Some are straight in the back, and some slope too much for comfort; some are too high in the seat for short legs, and some quite ridiculously low."
"But this is perfect."
"I am so glad you find it so! It is Freddy's. It was one he bought when he was in barracks. But he sent it to me. It was much too comfortable to be anywhere but in his own home, he said. Isn't it delightful that young men are so much attached to their homes, nowadays?"
It was indeed delightful, Mrs Macmichel answered; and added with an effort the original remark that home was a delightful place.
She supposed it was, the other lady agreed. "I never go away from mine, my health does not allow me," she said; "and so, perhaps, I can hardly judge."
She looked round the rather dismal, rather shabby room with a something critical in her gaze. Perhaps the presence of the fashionably-dressed woman seated there—a person so evidently out of harmony with her surroundings—helped her to see the familiar dowdiness with other eyes. She gave a quick sigh as she looked, then turned to her visitor with her nervous smile—
"It is a mercy Freddy does not see the old fashion, the shabbiness. He only sees—home," she said.
Always Freddy! Poor Freddy, who would never see home again!
Searching wildly in her, at this crisis, stagnant mind for anything to turn the poor woman from her subject, Mrs Macmichel remembered the Parish Room. Here should be a mine of conversational wealth. She would work it for all it was worth.
"My husband is so—interested in the scheme," she said, and gulped a little at the lie. "Tell me over again, please, all those details you gave me before. He would like to know how much you have in hand; what you want to complete the room; what the bazaar brought in, and how much you expect from the concert."
Mrs Jones rose easily to the bait. She rose, too, talking all the time, to fetch from her writing-case the type-written circular where the parish's need for such a room was stated, and the paper, in her husband's handwriting, on which the sums already collected, and their source, were set forth. A hundred and thirty pounds were still wanted. What was a sum like that to this millionaire at the Court? And what a lot of begging, writing, giving of jumble sales, supposing they were moved to give that sum, would be saved to the Joneses!
Mrs Macmichel took the papers, glanced at them, laid them on her lap, tried to say yes and no in the right places to the information now eagerly poured forth to her; tried to keep her eyes from that letter which the clergyman's wife had been interrupted in writing. It had fluttered to the floor as she had looked through her writing-case, and now lay, unheeded by her, at the visitor's feet.
"My own darling boy," it began.
"Such a poor parish." "So much indifference." "So disheartening," fell on Flora Macmichel's unreceptive ear.
"My own darling boy."
Something other than curiosity, stronger than her will, glued her eyes to the page.
"Your last dear letter reached me——"
Last! Yes, last indeed!
"Only five shillings and twopence in the bag; and of that, two shillings were contributed by Mr Jones and myself. Discouraging, is it not?"
"—This subject we will discuss more fully when you come home again," in spite of herself she read the words.
Come home again! Come home again! When the sea gives up its dead!
The servant came in, bringing tea; picked up the letter, returned it to the table.
"If you please, ma'am, Mrs Pyman have called, and wish to speak with you."
"Ask her to wait," the mistress said; then glanced at her visitor to deprecate the anticipated polite protest on her part. "Anne Pyman will like very much to sit down in the kitchen for a while," she said. But as the maid withdrew she apparently altered her mind. "This good woman is the biggest gossip in the village," she explained. "She is always running up here to tell me this or that which she picks up. I think, after all, if you would excuse me for one minute——?"
"Of course!" the visitor said, mechanically; then awoke to the remembrance that she had undertaken to keep Mrs Jones from all outside intercourse. She turned an anxious look upon her hostess—"I think if we could have tea——?" she said.
Then she strangled a laugh in her throat—a laugh, sitting in Freddy's chair! What—what must Freddy's mother think of her!
"Oh, certainly!" Mrs Jones concurred. The large dark eyes, the only handsome feature she possessed, scanned with a fleeting gaze of inquiry the other woman's face. "I daresay, after your walk——"
"If you don't mind. Yes. Quite so. Tea is so very refreshing, don't you think?"
The temptation to say it was the cup which cheered but did not inebriate crossed her mind, but was combated.
The bread-and-butter handed to her with her tea was thick, the tea had not been creamed; but if food and drink had been fit for the entertainment of the gods, she did not think she could have swallowed. She lifted the bread-and-butter to her lips, then laid it, untasted, down again, she stirred her tea, and glanced at the clock upon the mantelpiece. For how long must she sit and talk inanities with this mother whose only child was lying fathoms deep beneath the sea? She had been there barely a quarter of an hour. For an hour and three-quarters, at least, she must sit there still, whatever the other woman thought of her, however she tried to rid herself of her company.
"You, too, have a son, I believe?" Mrs Jones was saying.
"Yes." She had an only son. His name was Connell. He was six years old.
"And very dear to you, I know!" The eyes of the woman whose only son was drowned shone with sympathy. They were speaking eyes, really beautiful with that light in them.
"Very dear to me," responded the woman in Freddy's chair. To her eyes came a sudden, unexpected rush of tears. Of her own child she felt she could not speak to this unconsciously bereaved mother.
"And six years old? Ah! Now I must show you what my dear boy was like at six."
She got up, and fetched from the mantelpiece a photograph of a tiny boy in a sailor's dress; a plain-featured, ordinary-looking little boy, with dark eyes too solemn for his age.
"Now, is your boy as big, do you think? We considered Freddy a fine boy. And whom do you think he takes after?"
"He is like you—about the eyes," Mrs Macmichel said. She gave the photograph hurriedly back. She could not endure to look upon the eyes closed now upon their "first dark day of nothingness."
Mrs Jones put the portrait tenderly in its place. "That big photograph standing above the clock was taken only the other day," she said. "When he was appointed to theDoughty, I wished so much to have him in his uniform. But the trouble I had to get him to have it taken! For no inducement in the world but to please me would he appear in uniform when not on duty, he said."
And now he lay, like Nicanor, "dead in his harness."
Mrs Macmichel was seated directly in front of the enlarged photograph. Its eyes looked straight into hers as she lifted them, with, it seemed to her, an infinite sadness.
"Is it not strange that we should both be mothers of only sons?"
It was not, in fact, a very remarkable coincidence, but the visitor conceded that it was strange.
"It ought to be a bond of sympathy between us."
"Yes."
Mrs Macmichel's eyes were turned uneasily upon the door at which the servant had suddenly appeared.
"Mrs Pyman is afraid she can't wait any longer now, ma'am. She wouldn't keep you more'n a minute, if you could speak to her, she says."
Mrs Macmichel put out a hand and gripped the arm of her hostess as she rose from her seat—"Don't—" she said imploringly, "don't go! We are so—so comfortable."
She could not but be flattered, although she could not help being surprised. "Tell Anne Pyman, I am sorry," Mrs Jones said to the maid, who, however, stood her ground.
"And cook say, the butcher have been, and can she speak to you for a minute, ma'am?" she asked.
The butcher! He who had brought the terrible news. In her eagerness Mrs Macmichel turned to the servant standing at the door.
"No," she said, "certainly not! Your mistress cannot come."
The miserable, not to be repressed chuckle of laughter took her again as the girl withdrew. "You must think me strange," she said to the lady, gazing at her with astonished eyes. "But Iamstrange. We are getting on so well. I don't like to be interrupted. Go on. You were saying——?"
"About the bond of sympathy: our only children. I'm afraid the bread-and-butter is too substantial; will you try a bun instead?"
"It is delicious!" Flora Macmichel said, and put the slice again to her lips, and again placed it unbitten in the saucer.
"There is," said the clergyman's wife in a lowered tone, "something awful—I mean in the sense of being full of awe—in being entrusted by God with only one child. Don't you think that much more will be required of us, and of them—our dear children?"
Mrs Macmichel had not thought of it in that light.
"You see, we have no others to share our devotion, to distract our attention. Our only one should be, as near as a mother can make him so, perfect."
"Wouldn't that make him a little—well—uninteresting?"
Mrs Jones's eyes blazed reproof as she answered: "Freddy is not uninteresting," she said.
Presently her voice dropped to a hushed whisper. "Then, there is the thought"—she said—"the haunting thought—should he die—should it please God to take him from us, we lose our all. All!" she repeated; and the word, spoken in that tone of heavy solemnity, dropped like lead upon Flora Macmichel's heart.
If she lost Connell there was still, in her case, her husband; but she thought of the husband of Mrs Jones, and was silent.
"I have a friend," she said, suddenly rousing herself to make one effort suitable to the occasion, "whose only little girl died last year. They thought her heart would break, but it did not. She—in a marvellous way she bore it. Never once did she seem to me to sorrow—painfully. The child, for long and long after she was dead, seemed with her, she told me." She leant forward in her chair; her voice, which was a rather harsh-speaking voice, grew low and earnest. Was it possible that she—she, Flora Macmichel—had joined the company of the preachers! "Don't you think that alleviations undreamed of are always sent?" she asked, smarting tears in her eyes, her voice breaking.
"Perhaps I ought not to say it," the other woman said, "it is my want of faith, of which I should be ashamed; but it seems to me that nothing—nothing—in this world, of course—could atone."
A bell clashed sharply.
By leaning back slightly in her chair, Mrs Jones could get, it seemed, a side view of the door.
"Dear me! It is the boy from the telegraph office," she said. "I never see him without the dreadful fear that something may be amiss. Isn't it old-fashioned of me?"
The flush which told of disease had deepened on her cheeks; she laid a hand upon her chest as she arose. "If you will excuse me for half a moment——?"
But Mrs Macmichel had sprung to her feet and was at the door before the other. "Let me!" she said hurriedly. "I—I have my hat on. You might take cold——"
"Excuse me!" Mrs Jones cried.
"You really must allow me!" said Mrs Macmichel.
There was quite a scuffle at the door as to which should go out first.
It was the younger and stronger woman who dashed across the hall and snatched the telegram from the boy upon the steps. She came back, crushing the orange envelope, unopened, in her hand. Full well she knew its contents. The authorities had not waited for the father's inquiry, but had wired the news.
"It was—was for me," she said, gasping out the intelligence.
The dark eyes of the elder woman questioned her sharply. "How strange—how very strange it should have been sent on here!"
"My husband knew I was coming to make—a long call. He sent it on."
Mrs Jones sat down again before her tea-tray, and in the speaking eyes was a dawning of suspicion—"I hope nothing is the matter?" she said. "You will read your telegram, Mrs Macmichel?"
Mrs Macmichel thrust the envelope into the pocket of her coat, and kept her hand upon it there. "It is from my dressmaker; she is always bothering," she said.
"But are you sure, as you have not read it?"
"Quite sure. I always know when they come from her."
The hand which seized upon her cup again was shaking. The slice of bread-and-butter was sodden with the tea which had been spilt on it as she had put it so hurriedly down. "What were we talking of?" she asked. "I—it was so interesting. Please go on."
"It was about our dear children," said Mrs Jones slowly. She looked with a gaze of awakening distrust at her visitor. Her thoughts evidently turned to her husband. "I will hear if Mr Jones has returned," she said. "He would be so sorry to miss you——"
She put out her hand to the bell. Mrs Macmichel stopped her hurriedly. "Don't ring!" she said, in the loud voice of alarm. "Please! I will stay till Mr Jones comes back, however long he is away. I promise."
Ah, if he would only come! Only half an hour lived through of the two hours yet! Yet, for worlds she would not be present at the meeting of the wife and husband, who then would—know!
"I will stay, if you will let me go the very instant he comes," she added. "If you tell me when you see him coming up the garden path, I will run."
"He is here!" Mrs Jones said, with an air of relief. "I heard the garden-gate; I know his step——"
Oh, not for ten worlds would Flora, who had ever shunned the sight of pain, see that meeting! She almost flung her teacup from her. She seized the other's hand.
"Good-bye! oh, good-bye!" she said; "I cannot possibly stay another minute. I am so sorry! Oh, Mrs Jones, will you please remember, I am nearly dead with sorrow—but I must go."
"She is certainly mad," said the other woman to herself. She was so astonished that she forgot to rise from her chair, but sat looking after her vanishing guest with eyes wide with dismay.
On the doorstep the clergyman and the lady encountered. He was panting as one, all unaccustomed to such exercise, who had run. There was a look of famished eagerness in his eyes, the unhealthy pallor of his face was beaded with drops of sweat.
"They told me—at the office—a telegram had been sent," he said.
She snatched it from her pocket and put it in his hand. "I kept it from her," she said. "Take it, and let me go."
And yet she could not go.
His shaking fingers had torn open the envelope, had clutched the enclosure. It wavered so, that, standing behind him, she put her arms round his arms—tall woman as she was—her hands over his, and helped him to steady it.
"Read it," he said to her; "I can't—I can't see."
So she read aloud to him, in a voice that rose on a note of triumph and finished in a sob, the single line of the message!
"Not on board theDoughty. Tell mother all right."
Mrs Jones, coming to the dining-room door, looked out for one instant on her husband, apparently clutched in Mrs Macmichel's embrace. In the next, the lady was speeding with her long stride down the path to the gate; the clergyman had staggered into a hall chair, a succession of sounds, something between sobs and hiccoughs, issuing from his throat.
"My dear, has she hurt you?" his wife cried excitedly. "She is mad—quite mad, I am sure!"
Her husband, catching sight of Mrs Macmichel's face as she entered, followed her upstairs to her room. She was lying, dressed as she was, on her bed, with her face hidden.
"My dear, what is the matter? What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked.
She had been to the Rectory, to call on the Joneses, she told him.
"Well?"
"TheDoughtyhas gone down. All on board lost."
"So I hear. Well?"
"It was their son's ship."
"Well?"
"Freddy's." She sat up and laughed across the sob in her throat. "You stupid! I am crying because Freddy did not go down in theDoughty," she said.