II

There was a seat under a mulberry tree on the little lawn, with its back

to the house and the gaping windows, and Wemyss, spying it out, led Lucy

to it as if she were a child, holding her by the hand.

She went with him indifferently. What did it matter whether she sat

under the mulberry tree or stood at the gate? This convulsed

stranger--was he real? Was anything real? Let him tell her whatever it

was he wanted to tell her, and she would listen, and get him his glass

of water, and then he would go his way and by that time the women would

have finished upstairs and she could be with her father again.

'I'll fetch the water,' she said when they got to the seat.

'No. Sit down,' said Wemyss.

She sat down. So did he, letting her hand go. It dropped on the seat,

palm upwards, between them.

'It's strange our coming across each other like this,' he said, looking

at her while she looked indifferently straight in front of her at the

sun on the grass beyond the shade of the mulberry tree, at a mass of

huge fuchsia bushes a little way off. 'I've been going through hell--and

so must you have been. Good God, what hell! Do you mind if I tell you?

You'll understand because of your own----'

Lucy didn't mind. She didn't mind anything. She merely vaguely wondered

that he should think she had been going through hell. Hell and her

darling father; how quaint it sounded. She began to suspect that she was

asleep. All this wasn't really happening. Her father wasn't dead.

Presently the housemaid would come in with the hot water and wake her to

the usual cheerful day. The man sitting beside her,--he seemed rather

vivid for a dream, it was true; so detailed, with his flushed face and

the perspiration on his forehead, besides the feel of his big warm hand

a moment ago and the small puffs of heat that came from his clothes when

he moved. But it was so unlikely ... everything that had happened since

breakfast was so _unlikely_. This man, too, would resolve himself soon

into just something she had had for dinner last night, and she would

tell her father about her dream at breakfast, and they would laugh.

She stirred uneasily. It wasn't a dream. It was real.

'The story is unbelievably horrible,' Wemyss was saying in a high

aggrievement, looking at her little head with the straight cut hair, and

her grave profile. How old was she? Eighteen? Twenty-eight? Impossible

to tell exactly with hair cut like that, but young anyhow compared to

him; very young perhaps compared to him who was well over forty, and so

much scarred, so deeply scarred, by this terrible thing that had

happened to him.

'It's so horrible that I wouldn't talk about it if you were going to

mind,' he went on, 'but you can't mind because you're a stranger, and it

may help you with your own trouble, because whatever you may suffer I'm

suffering much worse, so then you'll see yours isn't so bad. And besides

I must talk to some one I should go mad----'

This was certainly a dream, thought Lucy. Things didn't happen like this

when one was awake,--grotesque things.

She turned her head and looked at him. No, it wasn't a dream. No dream

could be so solid as the man beside her. What was he saying?

He was saying in a tormented voice that he was Wemyss.

'You are Wemyss,' she repeated gravely.

It made no impression on her. She didn't mind his being Wemyss.

'I'm the Wemyss the newspapers were full of last week,' he said, seeing

that the name left her unmoved. 'My God,' he went on, again wiping his

forehead, but as fast as he wiped it more beads burst out, 'those

posters to see one's own name staring at one everywhere on posters!'

'Why was your name on posters?' said Lucy.

She didn't want to know; she asked mechanically, her ear attentive only

to the sounds from the open windows of the room upstairs.

'Don't you read newspapers here?' was his answer.

'I don't think we do,' she said, listening. 'We've been settling in. I

don't think we've remembered to order any newspapers yet.'

A look of some, at any rate, relief from the pressure he was evidently

struggling under came into Wemyss's face. 'Then I can tell you the real

version,' he said, 'without you're being already filled up with the

monstrous suggestions that were made at the inquest. As though I hadn't

suffered enough as it was! As though it hadn't been terrible enough

already----'

'The inquest?' repeated Lucy.

Again she turned her head and looked at him. 'Has your trouble anything

to do with death?'

'Why, you don't suppose anything else would reduce me to the state I'm

in?'

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said; and into her eyes and into her voice came a

different expression, something living, something gentle. 'I hope it

wasn't anybody you--loved?'

'It was my wife,' said Wemyss.

He got up quickly, so near was he to crying at the thought of it, at the

thought of all he had endured, and turned his back on her and began

stripping the leaves off the branches above his head.

Lucy watched him, leaning forward a little on both hands. 'Tell me about

it,' she said presently, very gently.

He came back and dropped down heavily beside her again, and with many

interjections of astonishment that such a ghastly calamity could have

happened to him, to him who till now had never----

'Yes,' said Lucy, comprehendingly and gravely, 'yes--I know----'

--had never had anything to do with--well, with calamities, he told her

the story.

They had gone down, he and his wife, as they did every 25th of July, for

the summer to their house on the river, and he had been looking forward

to a glorious time of peaceful doing nothing after months of London,

just lying about in a punt and reading and smoking and resting--London

was an awful place for tiring one out--and they hadn't been there

twenty-four hours before his wife--before his wife----

The remembrance of it was too grievous to him. He couldn't go on.

'Was she--very ill?' asked Lucy gently, to give him time to recover. 'I

think that would almost be better. One would be a little at least one

would be a little prepared----'

'She wasn't ill at all,' cried Wemyss. 'She just--died.'

'Oh like father!' exclaimed Lucy, roused now altogether. It was she now

who laid her hand on his.

Wemyss seized it between both his, and went on quickly.

He was writing letters, he said, in the library at his table in the

window where he could see the terrace and the garden and the river; they

had had tea together only an hour before; there was a flagged terrace

along that side of the house, the side the library was on and all the

principal rooms; and all of a sudden there was a great flash of shadow

between him and the light; come and gone instantaneously; and

instantaneously then there was a thud; he would never forget it, that

thud; and there outside his window on the flags----

'Oh don't--oh don't----' gasped Lucy.

'It was my wife,' Wemyss hurried on, not able now to stop, looking at

Lucy while he talked with eyes of amazed horror. 'Fallen out of the top

room of the house her sitting-room because of the view--it was in a

straight line with the library window--she dropped past my window like a

stone--she was smashed--smashed----'

'Oh, don't--oh----'

'Now can you wonder at the state I'm in?' he cried. 'Can you wonder if

I'm nearly off my head? And forced to be by myself--forced into

retirement for what the world considers a proper period of mourning,

with nothing to think of but that ghastly inquest.'

He hurt her hand, he gripped it so hard.

'If you hadn't let me come and talk to you,' he said, 'I believe I'd

have pitched myself over the cliff there this afternoon and made an end

of it.'

'But how--but why--how could she fall?' whispered Lucy, to whom poor

Wemyss's misfortune seemed more frightful than anything she had ever

heard of.

She hung on his words, her eyes on his face, her lips parted, her whole

body an agony of sympathy. Life--how terrible it was, and how

unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful

day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was

death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending,

death waiting. Her father, so full of love and interests and

plans,--gone, finished, brushed away as if he no more mattered than some

insect one unseeingly treads on as one walks; and this man's wife, dead

in an instant, dead so far more cruelly, so horribly....

'I had often told her to be careful of that window,' Wemyss answered in

a voice that almost sounded like anger; but all the time his tone had

been one of high anger at the wanton, outrageous cruelty of fate. 'It

was a very low one, and the floor was slippery. Oak. Every floor in my

house is polished oak. I had them put in myself. She must have been

leaning out and her feet slipped away behind her. That would make her

fall head foremost----'

'Oh--oh----' said Lucy, shrinking. What could she do, what could she say

to help him, to soften at least these dreadful memories?

'And then,' Wemyss went on after a moment, as unaware as Lucy was that

she was tremblingly stroking his hand, 'at the inquest, as though it

hadn't all been awful enough for me already, the jury must actually get

wrangling about the cause of death.'

'The cause of death?' echoed Lucy. 'But--she fell.'

'Whether it were an accident or done on purpose.'

'Done on----?'

'Suicide.'

'Oh----'

She drew in her breath quickly.

'But--it wasn't?'

'How could it be? She was my wife, without a care in the world,

everything done for her, no troubles, nothing on her mind, nothing wrong

with her health. We had been married fifteen years, and I was devoted to

her--devoted to her.'

He banged his knee with his free hand. His voice was full of indignant

tears.

'Then why did the jury----'

'My wife had a fool of a maid--I never could stand that woman--and it

was something she said at the inquest, some invention or other about

what my wife had said to her. You know what servants are. It upset

some of the jury. You know juries are made up of anybody and

everybody--butcher, baker, and candle-stick-maker--quite uneducated most

of them, quite at the mercy of any suggestion. And so instead of a

verdict of death by misadventure, which would have been the right one,

it was an open verdict.'

'Oh, how terrible--how terrible for you,' breathed Lucy, her eyes on

his, her mouth twitching with sympathy.

'You'd have seen all about it if you had read the papers last week,'

said Wemyss, more quietly. It had done him good to get it out and talked

over.

He looked down at her upturned face with its horror-stricken eyes and

twitching mouth. 'Now tell me about yourself,' he said, touched with

compunction; nothing that had happened to her could be so horrible as

what had happened to him, still she too was newly smitten, they had met

on a common ground of disaster, Death himself had been their introducer.

'Is life all--only death?' she breathed, her horror-stricken eyes on

his.

Before he could answer--and what was there to answer to such a question

except that of course it wasn't, and he and she were just victims of a

monstrous special unfairness,--he certainly was; her father had probably

died as fathers did, in the usual way in his bed--before he could

answer, the two women came out of the house, and with small discreet

steps proceeded down the path to the gate. The sun flooded their spare

figures and their decent black clothes, clothes kept for these occasions

as a mark of respectful sympathy.

One of them saw Lucy under the mulberry tree and hesitated, and then

came across the grass to her with the mincing steps of tact.

'Here's somebody coming to speak to you,' said Wemyss, for Lucy was

sitting with her back to the path.

She started and looked round.

The woman approached hesitatingly, her head on one side, her hands

folded, her face pulled into a little smile intended to convey

encouragement and pity.

'The gentleman's quite ready, miss,' she said softly.