"Is she ill?"
"Not that either."
"Then why make all this fuss? What does it matter to me?"
"It matters more to you than to anybody else in the world, dear,"
said Janet.
Victor took her by the shoulders as she stood by his bed. "In the
name of goodness, Janet, what is it?" he said.
It came at last, a broken story, through many gusts of breath, all
pretences down between them now and their hearts naked before each
other.
Fenella Stanley, who, since she left Newnham, had been working (as he
knew) as a voluntary assistant at some Women's Settlement in London,
had just been offered and had accepted the position of its resident
Lady Warden, and signed on for seven years.
"Seven years, you say?"
"Seven years, dear."
The Governor had prayed and protested, saying he had only one
daughter, and asking if she meant that he was to live the rest of his
life alone, but Fenella, who had written heart-breaking letters, had
held to her purpose. It was like taking the veil, like going into a
nunnery; the girl was lost to them, they had seen the last of her.
"I had it all from Catherine Green," said Janet.
Willie Killip, the postman, had given her the letter just when she
was standing at the porch, looking down the Curragh lane for Victor,
and seeing him coming along with his high step and the sunset behind
him, swishing the heads off the cushags with his cane.
"I couldn't find it in my heart to tell you last night, and you
looking so happy, so I ran away to my room, and it's a sorrowful
woman I am to tell you this morning."
She knew it would be bitter hard to him--as hard as it must have been
to Jacob to serve seven years for Rachel and then lose her, and that
was the saddest story in the old Book, she thought.
"But we must bear it as well as we can, dear, and--who knows?--it may
all be for the best some day."
Victor, resting on his elbow, had listened with mouth agape. The
flaming light which had crimsoned his sky for five long years,
sustaining him, inspiring him, had died out in an instant. For some
moments he did not speak, and in the intervals of Janet's
lamentations nothing was audible but the cry of some sea-gulls who
had come up from the sea, where a storm was rising. Then he began to
laugh. It was wild, unnatural laughter, beginning thick in his
throat and ending with a scream.
"Lord, what a joke!" he cried. "What a damned funny joke!"
But at the next moment he broke into a stifling sob, and fell face
down on to the pillow and soaked it with his tears.
Janet hung over him like a mother-bird over a broken nest, her
wrinkled face working hard with many emotions--sorrow for her boy and
even anger with Fenella.
"Aw, dear! aw, dear!" she moaned, "many a time I've wished I had been
your real mother, dear; but never so much as now that I might have a
right to comfort you."
At that word, though sadly spoken, Victor raised himself from his
pillow, brushed his eyes fiercely and said, in a firm, decided voice,
"That's all right, mother. I've been a fool. But it shall never
happen again--never!"