HOW EWAN MOURNED FOR HIS WIFE
What passed at the new Ballamona on that morning of Dan's penance was
very pitiful. There, in the death-chamber already darkened, lay Ewan's
young wife, her eyes lightly closed, her girlish features composed, and
a faint tinge of color in her cheeks. Her breast was half open, and her
beautiful head lay in a pillow of her soft brown hair. One round arm was
stretched over the counterpane, and the delicate fingers were curved
inward until the thumb-nail, like an acorn, rested on the inner rim of a
ring. Quiet, peaceful, very sweet and tender, she lay there like one who
slept. After a short, sharp pang she had died gently, without a
struggle, almost without a sigh, merely closing her eyes as one who was
weary, and drawing a long, deep breath. In dying she had given premature
birth to a child, a girl, and the infant was alive, and was taken from
the mother at the moment of death.
When the Deemster entered the room, with a face of great pallor and eyes
of fear, Mona was standing by the bed-head gazing down, but seeing
nothing. The Deemster felt the pulse of the arm over the counterpane
with fingers that trembled visibly. Then he shot away from the room, and
was no more seen that day. The vicar, the child-wife's father, came with
panting breath and stood by the bedside for a moment, and then turned
aside in silence. Ewan came, too, and behind him Dan walked to the door
and there stopped, and let Ewan enter the chamber of his great sorrow
alone. Not a word was said until Ewan went down on his knees by the side
of his wife, and put his arms about her, and kissed her lips, still
warm, with his own far colder lips, and called to her softly by her
name, as though she slept gently, and must not be awakened too harshly,
and drew her to his breast, and called again, in a tenderer tone that
brushed the upturned face like a caress:
"Aileen! Aileen! Aileen!"
Mona covered her eyes in her hands, and Dan, where he stood at the door,
turned his head away.
"Aileen! Ailee! Ailee! My Ailee!"
The voice went like a whisper and a kiss into the deaf ear, and only one
other sound was heard, and that was the faint cry of an infant from the
room below.
Ewan raised his head and seemed to listen; he paused and looked at the
faint color in the quiet cheeks; he put his hand lightly on the heart,
and looked long at the breast that did not heave. Then he drew his arms
very slowly away, and rose to his feet.
For a moment he stood as one dazed, like a man whose brain is benumbed,
and, with the vacant light still in his eyes, he touched Mona on the arm
and drew her hand from her eyes, and he said, as one who tells you
something that you could not think, "She is dead!"
Mona looked up into his face, and at sight of it the tears rained down
her own. Dan had stepped into the room noiselessly, and came behind
Ewan, and when Ewan felt his presence, he turned to Dan with the same
vacant look, and repeated in the same empty tone, "She is dead!"
And never a tear came into Ewan's eyes to soften their look of dull
torpor; never again did he stretch out his arms to the silent form
beneath him; only with dazed, dry eyes, he looked down, and said once
more, "She is dead!"
Dan could bear up no longer; his heart was choking, and he went out
without a word.
It was the dread silence of feeling that was frozen, but the thaw came
in its time. They laid out the body of the young wife in the darkened
room, and Ewan went away and rambled over the house all day long, and
when night fell in, and the lighted candles were set in the
death-chamber, and all in Ballamona were going off to bed, Ewan was
still rambling aimlessly from room to room. He was very quiet, and he
spoke little and did not weep at all. In the middle of that night the
Deemster opened his bedroom door and listened, and Ewan's step was still
passing from room to room, and Mona heard the same restless footfall in
every break of her fitful sleep. But later on, in the dark hour that
comes before day, the Deemster opened his door and listened again, and
then all was quiet in the house. "He has gone to bed at last," thought
the Deemster; but in the early morning, as he passed by Ewan's room, he
found the door open, and saw that the bed had not been slept in.
The second day went by like the first, and the next night like the
former one, and again in the dead of night the Deemster opened his door
and heard Ewan's step. Once more, in the dark hour that goes before the
day, he opened his door and listened again, and all was quiet as before.
"Surely he is in bed now," thought the Deemster. He was turning back
into his own room, when he felt a sudden impulse to go to Ewan's room
first and see if it was as he supposed. He went, and the door was open
and Ewan was not there, and again the bed had not been slept in.
The Deemster crept back on tiptoe, and a gruesome feeling took hold of
him. He could not lie, and no sleep had come near his wakeful eyes, so
he waited and listened for that unquiet beat of restless feet, but the
sound did not come. Then, as the day was breaking over the top of Slieu
Dhoo, and all the Curraghs around lay veiled in mist, and far away to
the west a deep line stretched across where the dark sea lay with the
lightening sky above it, the Deemster opened his door yet again, and
went along the corridor steadily until he came to the door of the room
where the body was. "Perhaps he is sitting with her," he thought, with
awe, and he turned the handle. But when the door swung open the Deemster
paused; a faint sound broke the silence; it was a soft and measured
breathing from within. Quivering with dread, the Deemster stepped into
the death-chamber, and his head turned rigidly toward the bed. There, in
the gloom of the dawn that came over the light of the last candle that
flickered in its socket, Ewan lay outstretched by the side of the white,
upturned face of his dead wife, and his hand lay on her hand, and he was
in a deep sleep.
To the Deemster it was as if a spirit had passed before his face, and
the hair of his flesh stood up.
They buried Ewan's young wife side by side with his mother, under the
elder-tree (now thick with clusters of the green berry) by the wall of
the churchyard that stood over by the sea. The morning was fine, but the
sun shone dimly through a crust of hot air that gathered and slumbered
and caked above. Ewan passed through all without a word, or a sigh, or a
tear. But when the company returned to the Deemster's house, and Mona
spoke to Ewan and he answered her without any show of feeling, and Dan
told him of his own remorse and accused himself of every disaster, and
still Ewan gave no sign, but went in and out among them all with the
vacant light in his eyes, then the Bishop whispered to Mona, and she
went out and presently came again, and in her arms was the infant in its
white linen clothes.
The sun was now hidden by the heavy cloud overhead, and against the
window-panes at that moment there was a light pattering of rain-drops.
Ewan had watched with his vacant gaze when Mona went out, but when she
came again a new light seemed to come into his eyes, and he stepped up
to her and looked down at the little face that was sleeping softly
against her breast. Then he put out his arms to take the child, and Mona
passed it to him, and he held it, and sat down with it, and all at once
the tears came into his dry eyes and he wept aloud.