peep through a certain wistaria-festooned window he should see his
father with pipe and book in the accustomed chair, the mother would
look up from her sewing. A recollection came to him of how once in
those childish years which had been so much with him of late a sudden
sense of overpowering loneliness had come upon him as he played. He had
rushed to that window to comfort his little soul with the sight of the
familiar faces, and had found the room empty. He recalled the terror
that had fallen upon him, the horror of desolation. He would not risk
the shock of disillusion. He saw them quite plainly, as his eyes seemed
fixed on the broken boot, but he would not disturb them. No. When the
time came and he entered the gate he would not go near the house, but
would make his way through the shrubbery in which the lawn ended, and
would seek that wilderness which had been his playground.
The wild hyacinths were blue about the roots of the tree on which his
name was cut--how low down the sprawling letters were!--the pet name by
which his mother had called him. If he fell asleep with his back
against the trunk she might come and call him by it again.
It was because he had not slept all night that he was so tired. He had
tossed and turned, tossed and turned upon his bed, seeking in his
muddled, ineffectual brain for an escape from the disgrace of the
broken boot. Quite suddenly there had presented itself to him the way
of escape--the only way--the way he intended to take.
The feathery leaves of the shepherd's-parsley would wave above the
broken boot. He would fall so blessedly asleep--so blessedly! The dog,
he remembered, had not stirred.
The present master of the wistaria-covered house was driven past him,
as he sat in the roadside chair, to turn in at the familiar gate; the
afternoon sun, sinking towards evening, shone on the smart phaeton, the
glossy-sided horse. Lesser men walked by him briskly to their humble
dwellings, little children, belated from school or at play, rushed on.
He grudged to no man his success, he looked on without bitterness at
the joy of life--he blamed no one, envied no one. He had gone astray
somehow, and was stranded and lost; but it was without rancour, or
enmity, or spite that he, a lonely outsider, watched the "flowing,
flowing, flowing, of the world."
So, at length, he rose from his place, pushed open the gate, laying a
tender touch upon the latch that such dear hands had pressed in days
gone by. So he made his way, going with unerring step, beneath the
overbranching of copper-beech, lilac, and red may, to the
flower-carpeted wilderness where, with bluebells about its roots and
feathery foliage waving high around its trunk, stood that silver
birch-tree upon whose smooth bark he had long ago carved his name.
WHEN DEEP SLEEP FALLETH
Ten days of honeymooning passed in a big hotel at Brighton. Ten days of
feeling himself--he who, living, a man of wealth, in a small provincial
town, was used to find himself talked about, looked up to, considered
on every side--curiously unimportant and of no account. Then back with
his bride to the imposing if somewhat gloomy-looking old house to which
a dozen years ago he had brought home his first wife.
They had left Brighton early in the morning, and reached home as the
winter's afternoon was closing in. In the drawing-room, where many a
time she had seen his wife perform that office, the Bride poured out
tea for him.
"At last," he said, and stood upon the rug before the fire, cup in
hand, and smiled at her. "This is pleasant, isn't it?"
With a smile up at him, and a full glance of the dark melancholy eyes
he so much admired, she let him know that indeed she thought it
pleasant.
Her costly fur coat, one of his wedding-gifts to her, was tossed over
the back of her chair; the firelight gleamed on heavy gold ornaments at
wrists and throat. She had been a poor woman, clothing, not dressing,
herself, till in her eight-and-thirtieth year all the fine things which
money could buy were suddenly lavished upon her. So soon the feminine
mind accustoms itself to that change! Every woman is born to fine
raiment, meant to be softly swathed, richly decked, daintily tired.
Cheated of her inheritance though she be, it is as natural to her as
her own skin when at length she comes into it. The Bride felt a sense
of well-being, but no strangeness.
The room in which she sat was perhaps a little overcrowded with
beautiful things. In the days which were past, which she did not
trouble too much to remember, she had sat here on Sunday
afternoons--her one holiday, and always spent with the good-natured
wife of the man she had married--and had told herself that the room
bore too evident stamp of the wealth of the master of the house, and
the too sumptuous tastes of the mistress. Yet, now that it was her own,
so desirable in itself seemed each piece of furniture, so beautiful
each ornament, it would be difficult, she felt, to decide what to
banish.
The man's gaze followed hers, speculatively, roaming over the costly
objects. He was by no means anxious to make a display of his wealth.
He dreaded above all things the charge of vulgarity, distrusting his
first wife's taste, not being quite sure of his own. A compactly built,
well-featured man of middle size and pale complexion; a man careful and
correct in speech, manner and dress; in his gently reserved, modest
bearing giving no sign that he had raised himself far above his origin,
that his wealth was new.
"Do what you like here," he said to his wife, as if reading her
thoughts. "Alter the disposition of the furniture--do away with it
altogether. I am by no means wedded to things as they are."
He crossed as he spoke to a rosewood cabinet placed against the
opposite wall. On its polished surface, above its innumerable little
shelves and drawers, a Crown Derby tea and coffee service was set
forth. Standing in the midst, propped between a basin and a cup, was
the unframed photograph of a woman. This the man removed. Holding it
loosely between his finger and thumb, still talking to his wife, he
returned with it to his old position on the hearth.
"I have not set foot in this room since--for a year," he said. "I
thought I would leave everything till you came. Do just as you like."
"You are so good to me----" she began, and then started forward in her
chair. "Oh, don't, don't, love!" she cried. "Don't burn her picture!"
She was too late. For one instant the face of the first wife looked up
at her, smiling, fat, fatuous, from the heart of the glowing coals,
then, with a stab of the poker, wielded by a remorseless hand, vanished
in the blaze.
"Oh, love!" she sighed, reproachfully, "Oh, love!"
"Why not?" he asked, with a smile which went no further than his
close-set lips. He put down the poker on the hearth and rose up again.
"She must have laid in a stock of hundreds of those photographs," he
said. "The servants appear to have an inexhaustible supply. In spite
of--discouragement--they kept my dressing-room and study-table
garnished with them till I ordered them to desist."
The new wife looked away from him into the fire in a minute's silence.
"It seems cruel," at last she said, with an obvious effort. "I wish you
had not burnt it, love. At least, not to-night. In this big house there
should be room for me and--her photographs."
When she found that their bedroom was to be the same which he and his
former wife had occupied, she was uncomfortably surprised.
The servant who showed her to that apartment in time for her to change
her dress for dinner was the middle-aged woman, calling herself
parlour-maid, but who had acted as lady's-maid, factotum, confidante to
the dead wife. She had made confidantes of all who would listen, poor
woman, pouring out the secrets of her heart, and, as far as she knew
them, of her husband's heart, into any stranger's ears.
"Can I be of any assistance to you, madam?" the maid had inquired; and
madam, in order not to give offence, accepted for a time her services.
"I like to do my hair myself," she said, "but if you brush it for me I
shall be glad."
She did not like this servant who had been on terms of close
familiarity with the other woman; while, outwardly acquiescent, she
allowed herself to be buttoned into a dressing-gown by the hard, bony
fingers, in spirit she protested.
As the pins were taken out of the heavy dark hair, and the braids
untwisted, the eyes of the new mistress and the eyes of the old servant
met again and again in the glass. And the thought came to the bride:
how often in that same glass those slanting eyes of the maid must have
encountered other eyes! Eyes of shallow blue beneath a fringe of
yellow-dyed, tousled locks.
The reflection was not a comforting one, and warm and cosy as was the
brightly-lit room, she shivered. Hastily casting down her gaze it fell
upon a photograph of her husband, taken ten years or so ago, shrined in
its silver frame amid the silver accessories of the dressing-table. In
order to break a silence which was getting on her nerves--
"Is that the picture which was always here?" she asked.
"Always," the servant replied. "It stood opposite one of my late
mistress, taken at the same time, and framed in the same way. After my
late mistress's death my master wished to have her photographs removed.
He destroyed many of them. I think he destroyed the last to-day."
"Now, how in the world did she know that?" the Bride asked herself,
guiltily conscious of the tell-tale face in the looking-glass,
reddening before the servant's inquisitive eyes.
"After all, I will brush my hair myself," she said hastily. "I am used
to doing it."
The servant, with no sign of either pleasure or displeasure on her
shut-up, solemn face, withdrew.
"The silver-backed brushes on the table are those of my late mistress,"
she said from the door--"my master's last present to her. In the drawer
beneath the looking-glass I think you will find your own brushes."
She found them there, and, lying beneath them, face upwards, a
photograph of the dead wife.
The two women for years had called each other friend, but the Bride
started back from the smiling presentment of the face now as if it had
been some loathable thing. Started back, and shut the drawer.
Yet, in a minute had recovered herself, had taken out the picture, and
laid it on the table before her, forcing herself to look long into the
face that from among the medley of silver-topped bottles, pans and
jars, smiled up at her.
As she looked, an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness and insecurity
took possession of her. The fat, fatuous, and smiling face! It seemed
to look with an air of contemptuous toleration upon her as an
interloper; to say with its shallow gaze--"These are Mine. All this is
Mine. It is I, you understand, who am mistress here."
Fascinated by this fancied new expression in the once expressionless
eyes, the Bride looked and looked again--looked till the happy present
slipped away from her and she was back in the unhappy past. The humble
friend, her own poor toilette so soon made, sitting, by gracious
permission, to watch the magnificent toilette of the other woman. In
her bitter heart she felt again the scorn which her mind had always
secretly held for this poor-witted, vulgar creature, who had not the
brains to adapt herself to her husband's altered circumstances, who
angered and shamed him beneath his still exterior, to his face, and
gave him away to the first who would condescend to listen, behind his
back. Who had sat before the dressing-table, watching in the glass the
wide expanse of her bare bosom and white arms, and had boasted of her
jewels and her dress. Babbled of things which should have been sacred
between her husband and herself. How that woman sitting beside her,
with the poor dress and the melancholy, dark eyes, hated her! With what
an agony of pity she pitied the husband! Of what good were money,
position, power to him with such a wife as this! She hated her. Hated
her, as she sat before the glass, smiling at the reflection of her fair
big arms and neck; hated her as, later at the dinner-table, she watched
the husband's face, listening against his will to the woman gabbling
forth some bit of information which the dullest-witted present knew she
was expected to keep to herself.
Still lost to her surroundings in her reverie, the Bride heard again
the outburst of foolish laughter with which the wife had once publicly
declared her husband could keep nothing from her because of his habit
of talking in his sleep. What she wished to know that in the daytime he
would not tell her, she got from him at night by asking questions he
never failed to answer while he slept.
She had hated her; and at last the poor creature, whose smiling face
lay there beneath her fascinated gaze, had known it, and with the
inferior force of her inferior nature had hated back. She had
learnt--who knew how?--of the love between the woman who had been her
friend and her own husband. The eyes had smiled no longer then.
The Bride lay back in her chair, motionless, while before her mind's
eye rose the altered face of the woman who, deceived for long, was
deceived no more--who knew! With her there had been no self-respecting
reticence, no decency of secret tears. She had heaped insult upon the
woman who had wronged her, she had led her husband a life of hell.
That time had been, mercifully, of short duration. A little illness of
which no one took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been
the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her
bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by
excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting
of a vessel on the brain.
It had been, of course, in this room she had died. Upon the bed, there.
And her husband, sleeping beside her, had not known that she was dead.
Slowly the Bride, as if fearing what she might see, looked over her
shoulder. The room, with a bright fire, and lit by electric light, was
as cheerful as day. But as her eyes, slowly travelling back again, met
their own reflection in the glass, she saw in them a haunted look which
frightened her. She flew to her feet; snatching the portrait from the
table, she hurriedly crossed the room and flung it to the flames.
"He is right. Why not?" she said. "To burn a picture is
nothing--nothing! And it has given me horrible thoughts."
It was difficult to banish them.
When the newly-married pair were alone in the drawing-room after
dinner, and she was seated at the piano, she asked him, through the
chords she was softly touching, if there was not another room in the
house they could take for their sleeping-chamber.
"Certainly," he said; "most certainly if she wished."
He, himself, had not slept there since the night of his first wife's
death, he told her. Told her, too, that before leaving for their
wedding-trip, he had given orders to have one of the other rooms
prepared against their return. The reason this had not been done, the
invaluable parlour-maid had informed him, was because the wardrobe he
had particularly desired to be moved there had proved too big for the
niche which was to have received it. Wardrobe or no wardrobe, however,
since she wished it, they would migrate on the morrow.
"You do wish it?" he asked her.
She nodded, softly striking her chords.
"I wonder why? You are no more superstitious or fanciful than I."
She shook her head, bending forward to study the score of the music on
the desk, one of Sullivan's operas they had heard together at Brighton.
He, sitting close behind her, his chin touching her shoulder, had fixed
his eyes on the music too, although he could not read a note of it.
"Horrid thoughts came to me there," she said. "I don't think, love, I
shall ever like to be alone in that room."
He named the invaluable maid. "Have her up to dress you," he advised.
The Bride shrugged her shoulders, and her fingers moved more quickly in
a livelier movement. "We will change the room," she said.
Later, he had placed himself on the rug at her feet, and she, leaning
forward in the armchair drawn over the fire, had her arm about his neck
while he talked to her of himself, she questioning. Of his early life
he talked, and what had been for and what against him; of his later
success, and his old ambitions.
"All achieved now," he said, and turned to smile at her the curious,
characteristic smile accomplished by a twist of a closed lip.
"I have not bored you?" he asked her with anxiety, when the evening was
over. "Except to you, I have never in my life talked of myself. It is a
luxury in which I must not too much indulge."
She reassured him with the zeal of the newly-wedded, much loved and
loving wife. "Promise me that you will always tell me all, that you
will never keep a secret from me," she said; and he promised, smiling
upon her with his twisted lip.
"If you do," she cried, fondly threatening, "I shall know it,
Sleep-talker! I shall ask you in your sleep and you will tell me all."
That, under those circumstances, he should probably tell her much that
had no foundation in fact, and much that it would by no means please
her to hear, he warned her.
She fancied by his tone that he was annoyed, and hastily asserted that
she had been in fun, that not for a moment could she seriously
entertain such an intention.
"What you do not wish to tell me, be sure I do not wish to hear," she
told him.
He stood by the open drawing-room door and watched her as she ran
lightly upstairs.
Conscious of his eyes following her, the knowledge of his love and
admiration warm at her heart, she went into their brightly-lit bedroom.
For years she had lived such an unloved life, watching her youth fade,
fighting only for bread to keep herself alive in a world where none
wanted her. Since, in this man's eyes she was still so young and fair,
let her look at herself!
She crossed the room to the looking-glass with a quick, exultant step,
but having reached the dressing-table, drew back with almost a cry.
Standing on it in its old place, facing her husband in his silver
frame, was the silver-framed portrait with the elaborately-dressed fair
hair, the smiling, shallow eyes of the first wife.
The Bride stifled the little cry upon her lips, but with her heart
beating thickly, fell back from the dressing-table, and leant against
the foot of the bed.
A moment's thought reassured her. There was nothing, after all,
disturbing in the reappearance of a photograph which had been
displaced. The invaluable maid with her slanting eyes, with, perhaps,
her stupid devotion to a memory, was responsible.
At the thought the Bride's nerves steadied themselves, but her anger
arose. She moved to the bell--but stopped. Better not to create talk
among the servants by the order she had meditated; rather let this
portrait of the dead wife follow the rest.
But when she held it, frame and all, over the fire, she relented and
drew it back. "It is not like me to be a superstitious fool. I will
not," she said. "She is in her grave, and I am--here. In a way I did
not wish, but could not help, I spoilt the last year of her life. She
is dead, buried out of mind, shovelled away under the earth, that a joy
undreamt of might come to me. This poor triumph at least she shall
have, to keep her old place on the table. I will never dress in the
morning without remembering I am in her place. When I prepare for my
bed at night she shall not be forgotten."
"'Les morts que l'on fait saigner dans leur tombe se vengent
toujours!'" she quoted to herself as she undressed; and while she
prided herself upon being above superstition, decided upon the above
method of propitiating the Shade.
In the night she had a dream which bathed her in the sweat of terror.
Opening her dreaming eyes upon the dressing-table which faced the foot
of the bed she saw the figure of the dead wife standing there. Its
back, clothed in its long nightdress, was turned to her, but in the
glass which had so often reflected it she saw the foolish, fat face,
the over-curled, fair hair. She saw, too, that the figure held in one
hand its own photograph, while, with a pencil held in the other it
wrote, smiling the while its own fatuous smile, on the reverse of the
picture.
In her dream the Bride knew this vision to be a dream, a knowledge
which by no means lessened the horror of it. "I must awake or die!" she
said, and in a minute seemed broad awake.
It was morning; the sunshine flooding the room shone, with a brilliance
which hurt the eyes upon the silver frame of the picture on the
dressing-table. Nothing else was there; all the silver-topped pans and
jars and bottles had disappeared; even the companion photograph was no
longer to be seen; only the face of her one-time friend smiled and
smiled and seemed to beckon from the strangely brilliant, dazzling
frame.
With the horror of the dream no whit abated, the Bride rose heavily
from her bed, dragged mysteriously attracted feet, that yet seemed
weighted with lead, across the floor to the dressing-table; picked up
in a hand that fumblingly obeyed the motion of her will, the picture.
Upon the back, written in the dead woman's familiar scrawl were the
date of her death, and the words, "Died by my own hand."
In the desperate effort to cast the picture from her paralysed grasp,
the Bride awoke.
She was really awake at last, and lying, faint with the dews of
remembered terror, upon her bed, her head upon her husband's shoulder.
Thank God, awake at last! How horrible that had been!
Clinging to him in terror at first, she presently extricated herself
from the man's encircling arm, and switched on the light. She dared not
lie in the darkness with the thoughts that assailed her. Never for one
instant before had the possibility of the wife's self-destruction
occurred to her. Yet, all at once, how probable, how almost certain it
seemed.
Died by her own hand! How easy it would have been! An overdose of the
opiate the doctor was giving her to ease her pain. And she, weary of
life--life made suddenly hideous to her; all her foolish vanities
killed, her delight in herself, her belief in her friend, her faith in
her husband. The gilding all stripped from the bauble which till then
had made her happy. How possible! Nay, was it possible longer to doubt
it?
And who was responsible? The woman who lay in her place, staring out
into the room which had witnessed that foolish, harmless life, which
had witnessed that tragic death; and the man sleeping beside her. They
two.
Slowly, lest she should disturb him, the Bride raised herself upon her
elbow, looked upon the sleeping face.
It was a face still unfamiliar to her in sleep. The always close-shut
mouth was open, the straight-cut upper lip was strained tightly over
the gums with a look almost of suffering, the eyes and temples looked
as if sunken in pain. Feeling her gaze upon him, the man's lids half
lifted themselves, an incoherent word or two fell from the stretched
lips, the head moved restlessly upon the pillow.
Did he too guess this thing? Did he know?
"If he does he will never tell it to me," the Bride said to herself,
knowing well he would spare her that pain.
In the next moment she was leaning over him, calling him in soft,
distinct tones by his name.
"Love," she said, "do you hear me?"
He moaned, turning upon his back. The heavy jaw came fully into view,
and the too thick throat which in the daytime the tall, close collar
hid. With a light touch she swept the hair which, clinging low over his
brow, so disguised it, backward.
"I hear," he answered in the thick, difficult voice of the sleeper.
"Love, I love you," she said. "Tell me, do you love me?"
A pause; then, "With my soul," he answered heavily.
"And--that other wife? Tell me, love."
The answer had always to be waited for, and seemed to come in unwilling
response to the command of an intelligence afar off.
"Hate--I hated her," the sleeper said.
"She knew it--at last. Did she--did she _kill_ herself? Tell me the
truth, love, as you love me."
No answer but a strangled muttering, a head that moved as if in pain.
The eyes watching him saw that the sleeper was tortured.
"But this once," she said to herself, "I must ask--I will know."
She bent over, without touching him, and put her lips down close to his
ear. "Swear to tell me the truth," she said in her distinct, arresting
whisper.
Long she waited, watching lips that writhed before speaking, eyes that
seemed to ache to open and were sealed by an invisible hand. At length
in the low, stumbling, unwilling voice came the response--"I swear."
"Did--she--kill--herself?"
"No!"
"Oh, love! Are you certain? Will you swear it?"
"I swear it," said the muffled voice.
"Why are you so sure? Why? Oh, tell me! Listen: she said she died by
her own hand."
"A lie. It is a lie. I killed her."
* * * * *
Hours later, the light of morning, outshining the electric light, found
the woman, the heavily slumbering man beside her, gazing, with a
stricken face and eyes which looked as if sleep had been banished from
them for ever, upon the new, unwelcome day.