The unobtrusive funeral cortege had turned the corner of Bank Street and
disappeared from view almost an hour ago. In the front room of the house
in which had lived the man just carried to his grave, the gentle old
woman who had been his mother sat and looked with pathetic patience at
Miss Amory Starkweather as the rough winds of the New England early
spring rushed up the empty thoroughfare and whirled through the yet
unleafed trees. Miss Amory had remained after the other people had gone
away, and she was listening to the wind, too.
"We are both old women," she had said. "We have both lived long enough to
have passed through afternoons like this more than once before. Howsoever
bad other hours may be, it seems to me that these are always the worst."
"Just after--everything--has been taken away," Mrs. Latimer said now;
"the house seems so empty. Faith," tremulously, "even Faith can't help
you not to feel that everything has gone--such a long, long way off."
She did not wipe away the tear that fell on her cheek. She looked very
small and meek in her deep mourning. She presented to Miss Amory's
imagination the figure of a lovable child grown old without having lost
its child temperament.
"But I must not complain," she went on, with an effort to smile at Miss
Amory's ugly old intelligently sympathetic countenance. "It must have
been all over in a second, and he could have felt no pain at all. Death
by accident is always an awful shock to those left behind; but it must
scarcely be like death to--those who go. He was quite well; he had just
bought the pistol and took it out to show to Mr. Baird. Mr. Baird himself
did not understand how it happened."
"It is nearly always so--that no one quite sees how it is done," Miss
Amory answered. "Do not let yourself think of it."
She was sitting quite near to Mrs. Latimer, and she leaned forward and
put her hand over the cold, little, shrivelled one lying on the lap of
the mourning-dress.
"Though it was so sudden," she said, "it was an end not unlike
Margery's--the slipping out of life without realising that the last hour
had come."
"Yes; I have thought that, too."
She looked up at the portrait on the wall--the portrait of the bright
girl-face. Her own face lighted into a smile.
"It is so strange to think that they are together again," she said. "They
will have so much to tell each other."
"Yes," said Miss Amory; "yes."
She got up herself and went and stood before the picture. Mrs. Latimer
rose and came and stood beside her.
"Mr. Baird has been with me every day," she said. "He has been like a son
to me."
A carriage drew up before the house, and, as the occupant got out, both
women turned to look.
Mrs. Latimer turned a shade paler.
"They have got back from the funeral," she said. "It is Mr. Baird."
Then came the ring at the front door, the footsteps in the passage, and
Baird came into the room. He was haggard and looked broken and old, but
his manner was very gentle when he went to the little old woman and took
her hands.
"I think he scarcely knew he had so many friends at Janney's Mills," he
said. "A great many of them came. When I turned away the earth was
covered with flowers."
He drew her to a chair and sat by her. She put her white head on his arm
and cried.
"He was always so sad," she said. "He thought people never cared for him.
But he was good--he was good. I felt sure they must love him a little. It
will be better for him--_now_."
Miss Amory spoke from her place before the fire, where she stood rigidly,
with a baffled look on her face. Her voice was low and hoarse.
"Yes," she said, with eager pitifulness. "It will be better now."
The little mother lifted her wet face, still clinging to Baird's arm as
she looked up at him.
"And I have it to remember," she sobbed, "that you--_you_ were his
friend, and that for years you made him happier than he had ever been. He
said you gave him a reason for living."
Baird was ashen pale. She stooped and softly kissed the back of his hand.
"Somehow," she said, "you seemed even to comfort him for Margery. He
seemed to bear it better after he knew you. I shall not feel as if they
were quite gone away from me while I can talk to you about them. You will
spare an hour now and then to come and sit with me?" She looked round the
plain, respectable little room with a quiet finality. "I am too old and
tired to live long," she added.
It was Baird who kissed her hand now, with a fervour almost passion. Miss
Amory started at sight of his action, and at the sound of the voice in
which he spoke.
"Talk to me as you would have talked to him," he said. "Think of me as
you would have thought of him. Let me--in God's name, let me do what
there is left me!"
* * * * *
Miss Amory's carriage had waited before the gate, and when she went out
to it Baird went with her.
After he had put her into it he stood a moment on the pavement and looked
at her.
"I want to come with you," he said. "May I?"
"Yes," she answered, and made room for him at her side.
But he took the seat opposite to her and leaned back, shutting his eyes
while Miss Amory's rested upon him. The life and beauty which had been
such ever-present characteristics of his personality seemed to have left
him never to return. Miss Amory's old nerves were strung taut. She had
passed through many phases of feeling with regard to him as the years had
gone by. During those years she had believed that she knew a hidden thing
of him known by no other person. She had felt herself a sort of silent
detective in the form of an astute old New England gentlewoman. She had
abhorred and horribly pitied him. She had the clear judicial mind which
must inevitably see the tragic pitifulness of things. She had thought too
much to be able to indulge in the primitive luxury of unqualified
condemnation. As she watched him to-day during their drive through the
streets, she realised that she beheld a kind of suffering not coming
under the head of any ordinary classification. It was a hopeless, ghastly
thing, a breaking up of life, a tearing loose of all the cords to which a
man might anchor his existence.
When they reached the house and entered the parlour, she went to her
chair and sat down--and waited. She knew she was waiting, and believed
she knew what for. In a vague way she had always felt that an hour like
this would come to them. They were somehow curiously akin. Baird began to
walk to and fro. His lips were trembling. Presently he turned towards the
rigid figure in the chair and stood still.
"It was not an accident," he said. "He killed himself."
"That I felt sure of," Miss Amory answered. "Tell me why he did it."
Baird began to tremble a little himself.
"Yes, I will," he said. "I must. I suppose--there is a sort of hysteric
luxury in--confession. He did it because there was nothing else left. The
foundations of his world had been torn from under his feet. Everything
was gone." His voice broke into a savage cry. "Oh! in one short
lifetime--the black misery a man can bring about!"
"Yes," said Miss Amory.
He threw himself into a chair near her.
"For years--years," he said, "he hid a secret." Miss Amory bent forward.
She felt she must help him a little--for pity's sake.
"Was it the secret of Margery?" she half whispered.
"Did you know it?"
"When a woman has spent a long life alone, thinking--thinking," she
answered, "she has had time to learn to observe and to work at problems.
The day she fainted in the street and I took her home in my carriage, I
began to fear--to guess. She was not only a girl who was ill--she was a
child who was being _killed_ with some horror; she was heart-breaking. I
used to go and see her. In the end I knew."
"I--did not," he said, looking at her with haggard eyes.
There was a long pause. She knew he had told her all in the one
sentence--all she had guessed.
"She did not know I knew," she went on, presently. "She believed no one
knew. Oh, I tell you again, she was heart-breaking! She did not know that
there were wild moments when she dropped words that could be linked into
facts and formed into a chain."
"Had you formed it," he asked, "when you wrote and told me she had died?"
"Yes. It had led me to you--to nothing more. I felt death had saved her
from what would have been worse. It seemed as if--the blackest
devil--would be glad to know."
"I am the blackest devil, perhaps," he said, with stony helplessness,
"but when I received your letter I was grovelling on my knees praying
that I might get back to her--and atone--as far as a black devil could."
"And she was _dead_," said Miss Amory, wringing her hands together on her
lap; "dead--dead."
She stopped suddenly and turned on him. "He killed himself," she cried,
"because he found out that it was _you_!"
"Yes. I was the one man he loved--he had told his secret to me--to
_me!_--the black devil. Now--now I must go to his mother, day after day,
and be her son--because I was his friend--and knew his love for
Margery--and of her sweetness--and her happy, peaceful death. He used to
talk to me for hours; she--poor, tender soul--will talk to me again--of
Margery--Margery--Margery--and of Lucien, whose one happiness I was."
"It will--almost--be--enough," said Miss Amory, slowly.
"Yes," he answered; "it will almost be enough--even for a black devil."
And he turned on his chair and laid his face on his folded arms and
sobbed like a woman.