"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 wants _my_
daddy 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?