"In this room?" I asked.
My landlady seemed troubled at my tone.
"Well, not exactly in this very room. We carried her upstairs, but she
died immediately. She was dying when she came here. I should not have
taken her in had I known. So many people are prejudiced against a house
where death has occurred, as if there were anywhere it had not. It was
not quite fair to us."
I did not speak for a while, and the rattle of the plates and knives
continued undisturbed.
"What did she leave here?" I asked at length.
"Oh, just a few books and photographs, and such-like small things that
people bring with them to lodgings," was the reply. "Her people promised
to send for them, but they never did, and I suppose I forgot them. They
were not of any value."
The woman turned as she was leaving the room.
"It won't drive you away, sir, I hope, what I have told you," she said.
"It all happened a long while ago.
"Of course not," I answered. "It interested me, that was all." And the
woman went out, closing the door behind her.
So here was the explanation, if I chose to accept it. I sat long that
morning, wondering to myself whether things I had learnt to laugh at
could be after all realities. And a day or two afterwards I made a
discovery that confirmed all my vague surmises.
Rummaging through this same dusty book-case, I found in one of the ill-
fitting drawers, beneath a heap of torn and tumbled books, a diary
belonging to the fifties, stuffed with many letters and shapeless
flowers, pressed between stained pages; and there--for the writer of
stories, tempted by human documents, is weak--in faded ink, brown and
withered like the flowers, I read the story I already knew.
Such a very old story it was, and so conventional. He was an artist--was
ever story of this type written where the hero was not an artist? They
had been children together, loving each other without knowing it till one
day it was revealed to them. Here is the entry:--
"May 18th.--I do not know what to say, or how to begin. Chris loves
me. I have been praying to God to make me worthy of him, and dancing
round the room in my bare feet for fear of waking them below. He
kissed my hands and clasped them round his neck, saying they were
beautiful as the hands of a goddess, and he knelt and kissed them
again. I am holding them before me and kissing them myself. I am
glad they are so beautiful. O God, why are you so good to me? Help
me to be a true wife to him. Help me that I may never give him an
instant's pain! Oh, that I had more power of loving, that I might
love him better,"--and thus foolish thoughts for many pages, but
foolish thoughts of the kind that has kept this worn old world,
hanging for so many ages in space, from turning sour.