lovely child with dark, straight hair, dark eyes, and a complexion
which was as a finger-post to her father's history and her own, and
should have said "Beware!" Milly had always a birthday-party; this year
also she must have one.
But it was not a party such as Milly had been promised; with the small
drawing-room turned into a cave of delights, where a real, white-robed
fairy with silver wings and a wand presided over presents to be given
to Milly and all her little guests. The promise, in the pleasurable
excitement of the Walshs' arrival, had been forgotten by all but Milly.
When Milly demanded its fulfilment it was too late.
So the little guests could only dance--those that were big enough--or
assisted by their elders, in the form of governess or elder sister,
play at forfeits and twilight, and blindman's buff. These innocent
gambols they carried on in the wide entrance hall. Some flags had been
hung, to please Milly, against the heavy beams of the ceiling, and the
gardener had filled every niche and corner with hothouse plants.
Bent, apparently, on spoiling his sister's pleasure, the heir of the
house of Walsh must be taken with a colic on that day. His mother was
anxious about him, fancying him feverish, and insisting on the doctor's
presence. So it came to pass she was oftener sitting in the nursery,
seeing her son jogged, howling lustily, on the nurse's lap, than making
merry with Milly and her friends in the hall.
As the afternoon drew to a close, and carriages began to arrive for the
children and their guardians, Mrs Walsh came out of the nursery, and
standing in the comparative darkness of the corridor, looked down upon
the bright and pretty scene. The children in their dainty white
dresses, with their flushed faces and tossed curls, were as lovely as
the flowers everywhere surrounding them; the music of the chattering
voices, of the clear laughter, was more agreeable to the ear than that
of the piano Milly's governess was playing.
The fun, as is apt to be the case when such a gathering is nearly over,
waxed livelier as the time came for the children to part. "Just one
more game!" Milly's little excited voice was heard pleading--"only one
more!"
It was Kiss in the Ring, the old world favourite they chose, and they
formed themselves into a circle, putting the littlest boy--boys were
scarce among them, and very small--in the centre.
It was in the midst of much laughing and chatter and noise that the two
little girls on either side of Milly Eddington felt her hands turn
ice-cold in theirs, and slowly slip from their grasp. The next instant
she had fallen to the floor between them.
The doctor, luckily on the spot, attending to the baby-brother, was
with her in two minutes. There was nothing to be done. She was dead.
She had been the loveliest and the gayest there, laughing her pretty,
happy laugh, babbling with the rest. Several of the elder guests, it
was afterwards found, had been looking at the child and listening to
her, when all at once she had become silent, had sunk backwards, and
died.
So much they who looked on had seen, but nothing more.
Her mother, standing above, in the shadow of the corridor, and looking
down upon the brightly-lit hall below, had seen this--
She had seen the figure of her first husband--the smile upon his face
with which he had left her and her little daughter on the last day of
his life--come silently into the hall. She had seen him, moving softly,
attracting no notice from them, pass the groups of ladies standing near
the walls, and noiselessly thread his way through the ring of playing
children, till he stood at the back of his own little girl. She had
seen him, smiling still, and clasping his hands tenderly beneath the
child's chin, pull her softly backwards, and lay her dead upon the
floor.
FREDDY'S SHIP
"A day or two, and I must return these people's call," Mrs Macmichel
said to herself as she passed the Rectory gate. "What a bore!"
Two or three days ago the rector and his wife, calling on their new
parishioner at the Court, had found her just returned from lunch with
the shooting party in the field.
"Bad luck, wasn't it?" she asked, later, of the half-dozen men to whom
she was giving tea in the billiard-room. "If I'd stayed to watch you
shoot for another five minutes, I should have escaped them! Not a bad,
dowdy little woman--the man a worse stick in the drawing-room than the
pulpit, if possible. Subjects: his--parish room he wants to build;
hers--son at sea, or going to sea, or has been to sea, or something.
What is it to me? If he is drowned fifty fathoms deep at the bottom of
the sea, do I care?"
"Now, if I only have the good luck to pick on a day when they're out!"
she said as she stepped briskly along; a tall, and handsome, and
fashionable-looking woman, in her hat with the green twisted veil and
the green cock's feathers, her short, workman-like skirt and belted
coat.
Down the short path from the Rectory door to the gate the rector
himself was coming. Mrs Macmichel bowed a condescending head as she
passed on, receiving no form of salutation but a stare from a pair of
vacant eyes in return.
"Well, really! Such people!" the lady said to herself, as she walked
disdainfully on. "Even _here_ you would expect a man would know he is
always expected to take off his hat when a woman bows to him!"
"Mrs Macmichel!" a voice said at her back. A hand was laid upon her
arm. She turned a look of astonished questioning upon the man who had
ventured to touch her.
"Stop, please," he said; his voice was breathless as of one in great
agitation. "Mrs Macmichel, I think you owe my wife a call? I want you
to pay it now--at once----"
"It is very kind of you; I----"
"You mustn't make excuses. You mustn't deny me. You must go; and you
must--stay."
The thought that he might be mad was succeeded as she looked in his
face by the thought that he must be ill. The healthy colour natural to
them had left his large cheeks, their fatness was only flabbiness, the
small eyes were filled with a strange, pleading, protesting misery as
of a man in terrible bodily discomfort.
"Mr Jones, I am afraid you are not well?"
He stopped her with an impatiently thrown-up hand. "It's not that--I'm
all right. It's worse--it's my son----"
"The sailor?"
"News has come that the _Doughty_ has gone down. All lost."
"Your son was in that ship?"
He did not answer, but pressed his lips, which were piteously
quivering, together, and looked at her in staring misery.
"I am going into the village to wire for--confirmation. Till I return
you must keep with my wife."
"But, Mr Jones! I am deeply, deeply sorry; but you must let me
telegraph, and you, yourself, stay with Mrs Jones."
"No. She would know as soon as she saw my face. I stole away--I dare
not see her." He stayed a minute, biting at lips drawn inward over his
teeth. "Our only one!" he said. "No other! When I know--when there is
no hope--no hope--I must tell her. I could wish that she might die
before--that we might both die."
Tears had gushed upon the flabby cheeks; he mumbled his lips for a
minute, unable to speak.
"If there was anything else I could do--anything!" Mrs Macmichel said.
"But this----!"
"You will watch over her till I come back," he said, not even noticing
her remonstrance. "It is a service I ask of you by right of our common
humanity. Go in to her at once, please."
With his hand on her arm he turned her to the gate, and opened it for
her. "Let no one else come near her," he said. "The butcher delivering
our meat gave me the news. He saw it on the newspaper board at the
village shop. Everyone in the village who reads it will come up at once
to tell my wife. Keep them away. She has a weak heart; told suddenly,
she might--Don't let her stir out. Don't let her hold communication
with anyone till I return."
He put up a trembling hand in the direction of his clerical hat, but
lacked the spirit to lift it, and turned hurriedly away.
"But, Mr Jones!" she called. She made a step or two after him. "It will
be so awkward--for her, I mean. She won't understand. You see, I hardly
know your wife."
He raised his strengthless hand for a few inches, and let it fall with
a gesture of hopeless wretchedness. "Oh, what do such things matter?"
he groaned.
She was ashamed to persist. "I thought perhaps someone in the
village--someone she knew----"
"They could do nothing with her," he explained. "If she wanted them to
go, she would tell them to go; she can't tell you. If she wanted to go
into the village, she would go----"
"How soon will you be back?"
"An hour. Two hours. I must wire to Portsmouth, and wait a reply." He
began to walk on again. "When I come back I shall--know," he said, and
shuffled forward, with drooping back, and legs that shook beneath him,
on his way.
Once he turned, and, seeing her still at the gate, pointed a weakly
imperative finger at the house without stopping in his progress.
Hardly crediting that it could be upon her, Flora Macmichel, accustomed
to move in paths so carefully smoothed, to have all ugly things hidden
from her sight, that this task of matchless unpleasantness had been
thrust, she turned and walked slowly towards the Rectory door. There
are so many women in the world, shrieking, gesticulating, ready to rush
into any fray a-brewing; so many quiet and strong and helpful, aching
to take other people's burdens upon their shoulders; she had never
sought to identify herself with one or the other species, holding the
comfortable doctrine that we cannot all be servers, that in the general
scheme those who only stand to be waited on also hold a useful place.
Why need she do this thing? Three weeks ago she had not known these
people existed; three days ago had not set eyes on them. For humanity's
sake, he had said. Well!
But she thought of the mumbling lips, the look of anguish in the poor
eyes, went on, and rang the bell.
Mrs Jones was in, of course. She was sitting over the dining-room fire,
writing a letter. A short, rather fat, rather dumpy woman, with plain
features, an ominous flush on her sallow cheeks, iron-grey hair, and
very large, very luminous dark eyes.
"How very good of you to call so soon!" she said, and got up to
welcome, rather effusively, the rich woman who had come to be a
parishioner. "Let your master know at once that Mrs Macmichel is here,
Mabel," she said to the servant, and gave Mabel a look which indicated
tea was to make its appearance with as little delay as possible. "Are
you walking or driving? Walking? Really? Now, would you rather sit near
the fire or the open window? It is the kind of day--isn't it?--when
either is agreeable."
She had a slightly nervous manner, or she was not quite at ease with
the strange caller. She altered the position of the chairs, rattled the
poker in the fire, pushed away the little table which held the writing
things.
"I was just writing to my son," she said, and smiled, as if sure of her
interest in the subject, at the woman, who, chill to the marrow with
the discomfort of her errand, had taken a chair by the side of the
fire. "I think I told you he is in the navy? He is commanding the
_Doughty_, the new destroyer. Going trips in her every day or so. I
suppose these destroyers are terrible-looking things? Ah! I have never
seen one, but I imagined so. What a comfort to me to know they are,
after all, so safe as Freddy tells me they are."
"Such a mild day for the time of year, isn't it? And such a pretty
stretch of road from the Court here!"
"We often say so!"
"And just the right length for a walk!"
"Exactly a mile and a quarter."
"Really?"
"Exactly! We always called it a mile; but the last time he was home on
leave Freddy measured it with his new cyclometer. 'Now, mother,' he
said, 'please to remember it's a mile and a quarter, and, don't let's
have any dispute about it in future?'"
"It's so nice to know--to an inch or two!"
"Well, Freddy has a very accurate mind. He can't bear anything slipshod
in the way of a statement. Now, you are sure, after your walk, you do
not feel the fire too much? Then move into this chair. You have really
taken the least comfortable in the room. Now, isn't that better?"
Mrs Macmichel said that it was delightfully cosy. She was inwardly
shivering; the tips of her fingers felt like ice. She pulled off her
loose gloves, and held a pair of white hands blazing with jewels to the
flame. She must force herself to talk, and to keep the poor woman off
the topic of her son; but she, who was considered ready-tongued and
ready-witted, sat dumb, she had not a word to say.
"There is so much difference in chairs," she said, at length.
The banality did not affect Mrs Jones to laughter, as the speaker had a
fear it might have done. She seized eagerly on the remark.
"Isn't there? Some are straight in the back, and some slope too much
for comfort; some are too high in the seat for short legs, and some
quite ridiculously low."
"But this is perfect."
"I am so glad you find it so! It is Freddy's. It was one he bought when
he was in barracks. But he sent it to me. It was much too comfortable
to be anywhere but in his own home, he said. Isn't it delightful that
young men are so much attached to their homes, nowadays?"
It was indeed delightful, Mrs Macmichel answered; and added with an
effort the original remark that home was a delightful place.
She supposed it was, the other lady agreed. "I never go away from mine,
my health does not allow me," she said; "and so, perhaps, I can hardly
judge."
She looked round the rather dismal, rather shabby room with a something
critical in her gaze. Perhaps the presence of the fashionably-dressed
woman seated there--a person so evidently out of harmony with her
surroundings--helped her to see the familiar dowdiness with other eyes.
She gave a quick sigh as she looked, then turned to her visitor with
her nervous smile--
"It is a mercy Freddy does not see the old fashion, the shabbiness. He
only sees--home," she said.
Always Freddy! Poor Freddy, who would never see home again!
Searching wildly in her, at this crisis, stagnant mind for anything to
turn the poor woman from her subject, Mrs Macmichel remembered the
Parish Room. Here should be a mine of conversational wealth. She would
work it for all it was worth.
"My husband is so--interested in the scheme," she said, and gulped a
little at the lie. "Tell me over again, please, all those details you
gave me before. He would like to know how much you have in hand; what
you want to complete the room; what the bazaar brought in, and how much
you expect from the concert."
Mrs Jones rose easily to the bait. She rose, too, talking all the time,
to fetch from her writing-case the type-written circular where the
parish's need for such a room was stated, and the paper, in her
husband's handwriting, on which the sums already collected, and their
source, were set forth. A hundred and thirty pounds were still wanted.
What was a sum like that to this millionaire at the Court? And what a
lot of begging, writing, giving of jumble sales, supposing they were
moved to give that sum, would be saved to the Joneses!
Mrs Macmichel took the papers, glanced at them, laid them on her lap,
tried to say yes and no in the right places to the information now
eagerly poured forth to her; tried to keep her eyes from that letter
which the clergyman's wife had been interrupted in writing. It had
fluttered to the floor as she had looked through her writing-case, and
now lay, unheeded by her, at the visitor's feet.
"My own darling boy," it began.
"Such a poor parish." "So much indifference." "So disheartening," fell
on Flora Macmichel's unreceptive ear.
"My own darling boy."
Something other than curiosity, stronger than her will, glued her eyes
to the page.
"Your last dear letter reached me----"
Last! Yes, last indeed!
"Only five shillings and twopence in the bag; and of that, two
shillings were contributed by Mr Jones and myself. Discouraging, is it
not?"
"--This subject we will discuss more fully when you come home again,"
in spite of herself she read the words.
Come home again! Come home again! When the sea gives up its dead!
The servant came in, bringing tea; picked up the letter, returned it to
the table.
"If you please, ma'am, Mrs Pyman have called, and wish to speak with
you."
"Ask her to wait," the mistress said; then glanced at her visitor to
deprecate the anticipated polite protest on her part. "Anne Pyman will
like very much to sit down in the kitchen for a while," she said. But
as the maid withdrew she apparently altered her mind. "This good woman
is the biggest gossip in the village," she explained. "She is always
running up here to tell me this or that which she picks up. I think,
after all, if you would excuse me for one minute----?"
"Of course!" the visitor said, mechanically; then awoke to the
remembrance that she had undertaken to keep Mrs Jones from all outside
intercourse. She turned an anxious look upon her hostess--"I think if
we could have tea----?" she said.
Then she strangled a laugh in her throat--a laugh, sitting in Freddy's
chair! What--what must Freddy's mother think of her!
"Oh, certainly!" Mrs Jones concurred. The large dark eyes, the only
handsome feature she possessed, scanned with a fleeting gaze of inquiry
the other woman's face. "I daresay, after your walk----"
"If you don't mind. Yes. Quite so. Tea is so very refreshing, don't you
think?"
The temptation to say it was the cup which cheered but did not
inebriate crossed her mind, but was combated.
The bread-and-butter handed to her with her tea was thick, the tea had
not been creamed; but if food and drink had been fit for the
entertainment of the gods, she did not think she could have swallowed.
She lifted the bread-and-butter to her lips, then laid it, untasted,
down again, she stirred her tea, and glanced at the clock upon the
mantelpiece. For how long must she sit and talk inanities with this
mother whose only child was lying fathoms deep beneath the sea? She had
been there barely a quarter of an hour. For an hour and three-quarters,
at least, she must sit there still, whatever the other woman thought of
her, however she tried to rid herself of her company.
"You, too, have a son, I believe?" Mrs Jones was saying.
"Yes." She had an only son. His name was Connell. He was six years old.
"And very dear to you, I know!" The eyes of the woman whose only son
was drowned shone with sympathy. They were speaking eyes, really
beautiful with that light in them.
"Very dear to me," responded the woman in Freddy's chair. To her eyes
came a sudden, unexpected rush of tears. Of her own child she felt she
could not speak to this unconsciously bereaved mother.
"And six years old? Ah! Now I must show you what my dear boy was like
at six."
She got up, and fetched from the mantelpiece a photograph of a tiny boy
in a sailor's dress; a plain-featured, ordinary-looking little boy,
with dark eyes too solemn for his age.
"Now, is your boy as big, do you think? We considered Freddy a fine
boy. And whom do you think he takes after?"
"He is like you--about the eyes," Mrs Macmichel said. She gave the
photograph hurriedly back. She could not endure to look upon the eyes
closed now upon their "first dark day of nothingness."
Mrs Jones put the portrait tenderly in its place. "That big photograph
standing above the clock was taken only the other day," she said. "When
he was appointed to the _Doughty_, I wished so much to have him in his
uniform. But the trouble I had to get him to have it taken! For no
inducement in the world but to please me would he appear in uniform
when not on duty, he said."
And now he lay, like Nicanor, "dead in his harness."
Mrs Macmichel was seated directly in front of the enlarged photograph.
Its eyes looked straight into hers as she lifted them, with, it seemed
to her, an infinite sadness.
"Is it not strange that we should both be mothers of only sons?"
It was not, in fact, a very remarkable coincidence, but the visitor
conceded that it was strange.
"It ought to be a bond of sympathy between us."
"Yes."
Mrs Macmichel's eyes were turned uneasily upon the door at which the
servant had suddenly appeared.
"Mrs Pyman is afraid she can't wait any longer now, ma'am. She wouldn't
keep you more'n a minute, if you could speak to her, she says."
Mrs Macmichel put out a hand and gripped the arm of her hostess as she
rose from her seat--"Don't--" she said imploringly, "don't go! We are
so--so comfortable."
She could not but be flattered, although she could not help being
surprised. "Tell Anne Pyman, I am sorry," Mrs Jones said to the maid,
who, however, stood her ground.
"And cook say, the butcher have been, and can she speak to you for a
minute, ma'am?" she asked.
The butcher! He who had brought the terrible news. In her eagerness Mrs
Macmichel turned to the servant standing at the door.
"No," she said, "certainly not! Your mistress cannot come."
The miserable, not to be repressed chuckle of laughter took her again
as the girl withdrew. "You must think me strange," she said to the
lady, gazing at her with astonished eyes. "But I _am_ strange. We are
getting on so well. I don't like to be interrupted. Go on. You were
saying----?"
"About the bond of sympathy: our only children. I'm afraid the
bread-and-butter is too substantial; will you try a bun instead?"
"It is delicious!" Flora Macmichel said, and put the slice again to her
lips, and again placed it unbitten in the saucer.
"There is," said the clergyman's wife in a lowered tone, "something
awful--I mean in the sense of being full of awe--in being entrusted by
God with only one child. Don't you think that much more will be
required of us, and of them--our dear children?"
Mrs Macmichel had not thought of it in that light.
"You see, we have no others to share our devotion, to distract our
attention. Our only one should be, as near as a mother can make him so,
perfect."
"Wouldn't that make him a little--well--uninteresting?"
Mrs Jones's eyes blazed reproof as she answered: "Freddy is not
uninteresting," she said.
Presently her voice dropped to a hushed whisper. "Then, there is the
thought"--she said--"the haunting thought--should he die--should it
please God to take him from us, we lose our all. All!" she repeated;
and the word, spoken in that tone of heavy solemnity, dropped like lead
upon Flora Macmichel's heart.
If she lost Connell there was still, in her case, her husband; but she
thought of the husband of Mrs Jones, and was silent.
"I have a friend," she said, suddenly rousing herself to make one
effort suitable to the occasion, "whose only little girl died last
year. They thought her heart would break, but it did not. She--in a
marvellous way she bore it. Never once did she seem to me to
sorrow--painfully. The child, for long and long after she was dead,
seemed with her, she told me." She leant forward in her chair; her
voice, which was a rather harsh-speaking voice, grew low and earnest.
Was it possible that she--she, Flora Macmichel--had joined the company
of the preachers! "Don't you think that alleviations undreamed of are
always sent?" she asked, smarting tears in her eyes, her voice
breaking.
"Perhaps I ought not to say it," the other woman said, "it is my want
of faith, of which I should be ashamed; but it seems to me that
nothing--nothing--in this world, of course--could atone."
A bell clashed sharply.
By leaning back slightly in her chair, Mrs Jones could get, it seemed,
a side view of the door.
"Dear me! It is the boy from the telegraph office," she said. "I never
see him without the dreadful fear that something may be amiss. Isn't it
old-fashioned of me?"
The flush which told of disease had deepened on her cheeks; she laid a
hand upon her chest as she arose. "If you will excuse me for half a
moment----?"
But Mrs Macmichel had sprung to her feet and was at the door before the
other. "Let me!" she said hurriedly. "I--I have my hat on. You might
take cold----"
"Excuse me!" Mrs Jones cried.
"You really must allow me!" said Mrs Macmichel.
There was quite a scuffle at the door as to which should go out first.
It was the younger and stronger woman who dashed across the hall and
snatched the telegram from the boy upon the steps. She came back,
crushing the orange envelope, unopened, in her hand. Full well she knew
its contents. The authorities had not waited for the father's inquiry,
but had wired the news.