IV

All this, however, came to an end next day when towards evening Miss

Entwhistle, Lucy's aunt, arrived.

Wemyss retired to his hotel again and did not reappear till next

morning, giving Lucy time to explain him; but either the aunt was

inattentive, as she well might be under the circumstances in which she

found herself so suddenly, so lamentably placed, or Lucy's explanations

were vague, for Miss Entwhistle took Wemyss for a friend of her dear

Jim's, one of her dear, dear brother's many friends, and accepted his

services as natural and himself with emotion, warmth, and reminiscences.

Wemyss immediately became her rock as well as Lucy's, and she in her

turn clung to him. Where he had been clung to by one he was now clung to

by two, which put an end to talk alone with Lucy. He did not see Lucy

alone again once before the funeral, but at least, owing to Miss

Entwhistle's inability to do without him, he didn't have to spend any

more solitary hours. Except breakfast, he had all his meals up in the

little house on the cliff, and in the evenings smoked his pipe under the

mulberry tree till bedtime sent him away, while Miss Entwhistle in the

darkness gently and solemnly reminisced, and Lucy sat silent, as close

to him as she could get.

The funeral was hurried on by the doctor's advice, but even so the short

notice and the long distance did not prevent James Entwhistle's friends

from coming to it. The small church down in the cove was packed; the

small hotel bulged with concerned, grave-faced people. Wemyss, who had

done everything and been everything, disappeared in this crowd. Nobody

noticed him. None of James Entwhistle's friends happened--luckily, he

felt, with last week's newspapers still fresh in the public mind--to be

his. For twenty-four hours he was swept entirely away from Lucy by this

surge of mourners, and at the service in the church could only catch a

distant glimpse, from his seat by the door, of her bowed head in the

front pew.

He felt very lonely again. He wouldn't have stayed in the church a

minute, for he objected with a healthy impatience to the ceremonies of

death, if it hadn't been that he regarded himself as the stage-manager,

so to speak, of these particular ceremonies, and that it was in a

peculiarly intimate sense his funeral. He took a pride in it.

Considering the shortness of the time it really was a remarkable

achievement, the way he had done it, the smooth way the whole thing was

going. But to-morrow,--what would happen to-morrow, when all these

people had gone away again? Would they take Lucy and the aunt with them?

Would the house up there be shut, and he, Wemyss, left alone again with

his bitter, miserable recollections? He wouldn't, of course, stay on in

that place if Lucy were to go, but wherever he went there would be

emptiness without her, without her gratefulness, and gentleness, and

clinging. Comforting and being comforted,--that is what he and she had

been doing to each other for four days, and he couldn't but believe she

would feel the same emptiness without him that he knew he was going to

feel without her.

In the dark under the mulberry tree, while her aunt talked softly and

sadly of the past, Wemyss had sometimes laid his hand on Lucy's, and she

had never taken hers away. They had sat there, content and comforted to

be hand in hand. She had the trust in him, he felt, of a child; the

confidence, and the knowledge that she was safe. He was proud and

touched to know it, and it warmed him through and through to see how her

face lit up whenever he appeared. Vera's face hadn't done that. Vera had

never understood him, not with fifteen years to do it in, as this girl

had in half a day. And the way Vera had died,--it was no use mincing

matters when it came to one's own thoughts, and it had been all of a

piece with her life: the disregard for others and of anything said to

her for her own good, the determination to do what suited her, to lean

out of dangerous windows if she wished to, for instance, not to take the

least trouble, the least thought.... Imagine bringing such horror on

him, such unforgettable horror, besides worries and unhappiness without

end, by deliberately disregarding his warnings, his orders indeed,

about that window. Wemyss did feel that if one looked at the thing

dispassionately it would be difficult to find indifference to the wishes

and feelings of others going further.

Sitting in the church during the funeral service, his arms folded on his

chest and his mouth grim with these thoughts, he suddenly caught sight

of Lucy's face. The priest was coming down the aisle in front of the

coffin on the way out to the grave, and Lucy and her aunt were following

first behind it.

_Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full

of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it

were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay...._

The priest's sad, disillusioned voice recited the beautiful words as he

walked, the afternoon sun from the west window and the open west door

pouring on his face and on the faces of the procession that seemed all

black and white,--black clothes, white faces.

The whitest face was Lucy's, and when Wemyss saw the look on it his

mouth relaxed and his heart went soft within him, and he came

impulsively out of the shadow and joined her, boldly walking on her

other side at the head of the procession, and standing beside her at the

grave; and at the awful moment when the first earth was dropped on to

the coffin he drew her hand, before everybody, through his arm and held

it there tight.

Nobody was surprised at his standing there with her like that. It was

taken quite for granted. He was evidently a relation of poor Jim's. Nor

was anybody surprised when Wemyss, not letting her go again, took her

home up the cliff, her arm in his just as though he were the chief

mourner, the aunt following with some one else.

He didn't speak to her or disturb her with any claims on her attention,

partly because the path was very steep and he wasn't used to cliffs, but

also because of his feeling that he and she, isolated together by their

sorrows, understood without any words. And when they reached the house,

the first to reach it from the church just as if, he couldn't help

thinking, they were coming back from their wedding, he told her in his

firmest voice to go straight up to her room and lie down, and she obeyed

with the sweet obedience of perfect trust.

'Who is that?' asked the man who was helping Miss Entwhistle up the

cliff.

'Oh, a _very_ old friend of darling Jim's,' she sobbed,--she had been

sobbing without stopping from the first words of the burial service, and

was quite unable to leave off. 'Mr.--Mr.--We--We--Wemyss----'

'Wemyss? I don't remember coming across him with Jim.'

'Oh, one of his--his _oldest_--f--fr--friends,' sobbed poor Miss

Entwhistle, got completely out of control.

Wemyss, continuing in his rôle of chief mourner, was the only person who

was asked to spend the evening up at the bereaved house.

'I don't wonder,' said Miss Entwhistle to him at dinner, still with

tears in her voice, 'at my dear brother's devotion to you. You have been

the greatest help, the greatest comfort----'

And neither Wemyss nor Lucy felt equal to explanation.

What did it matter? Lucy, fatigued by emotions, her mind bruised by the

violent demands that had been made on it the last four days, sat

drooping at the table, and merely thought that if her father had known

Wemyss it would certainly have been true that he was devoted to him. He

hadn't known him; he had missed him by--yes, by just three hours; and

this wonderful friend of hers was the very first good thing that she and

her father hadn't shared. And Wemyss's attitude was simply that if

people insist on jumping at conclusions, why, let them. He couldn't

anyhow begin to expound himself in the middle of a meal, with a

parlourmaid handing dishes round and listening.

But there was an awkward little moment when Miss Entwhistle tearfully

wondered--she was eating blanc-mange, the last of a series of cold and

pallid dishes with which the imaginative cook, a woman of Celtic origin,

had expressed her respectful appreciation of the occasion--whether when

the will was read it wouldn't be found that Jim had appointed Mr. Wemyss

poor Lucy's guardian.

'I am--dear me, how very hard it is to remember to say I was--my dear

brother's only relative. We belong--belonged--to an exiguous family, and

naturally I'm no longer as young as I was. There is only--was only--a

year between Jim and me, and at any moment I may be----'

Here Miss Entwhistle was interrupted by a sob, and had to put down her

spoon.

'--taken,' she finished after a moment, during which the other two sat

silent.

'When this happens,' she went on presently, a little recovered, 'poor

Lucy will be without any one, unless Jim thought of this and has

appointed a guardian. You, Mr. Wemyss, I hope and expect.'

Neither Lucy nor Wemyss spoke. There was the parlourmaid hovering, and

one couldn't anyhow go into explanations now which ought to have been

made four days ago.

A dead-white cheese was handed round,--something local probably, for it

wasn't any form of cheese with which Wemyss was acquainted, and the meal

ended with cups of intensely black cold coffee. And all these carefully

thought-out expressions of the cook's sympathy were lost on the three,

who noticed nothing; certainly they noticed nothing in the way the cook

had intended. Wemyss was privately a little put out by the coffee being

cold. He had eaten all the other clammy things patiently, but a man

likes his after-dinner coffee hot, and it was new in his experience to

have it served cold. He did notice this, and was surprised that neither

of his companions appeared to. But there,--women were notoriously

insensitive to food; on this point the best of them were unintelligent,

and the worst of them were impossible. Vera had been awful about it; he

had had to do all the ordering of the meals himself at last, and also

the engaging of the cooks.

He got up from the table to open the door for the ladies feeling

inwardly chilled, feeling, as he put it to himself, slabby inside; and,

left alone with a dish of black plums and some sinister-looking wine in

a decanter, which he avoided because when he took hold of it ice

clinked, he rang the bell as unobtrusively as he could and asked the

parlourmaid in a subdued voice, the French window to the garden being

open and in the garden being Lucy and her aunt, whether there were such

a thing in the house as a whisky and soda.

The parlourmaid, who was a nice-looking girl and much more at home, as

she herself was the first to admit, with gentlemen than with ladies,

brought it him, and inquired how he had liked the dinner.

'Not at all,' said Wemyss, whose mind on that point was clear.

'No sir,' said the parlourmaid, nodding sympathetically. 'No sir.'

She then explained in a discreet whisper, also with one eye on the open

window, how the dinner hadn't been an ordinary dinner and it wasn't

expected that it should be enjoyed, but it was the cook's tribute to her

late master's burial day,--a master they had only known a week, sad to

say, but to whom they had both taken a great fancy, he being so

pleasant-spoken and all for giving no trouble.

Wemyss listened, sipping the comforting drink and smoking a cigar.

Very different, said the parlourmaid, who seemed glad to talk, would the

dinner have been if the cook hadn't liked the poor gentleman. Why, in

one place where she and the cook were together, and the lady was taken

just as the cook would have given notice if she hadn't been because she

was such a very dishonest and unpunctual lady, besides not knowing her

place--no lady, of course, and never was--when she was taken, not sudden

like this poor gentleman but bit by bit, on the day of her funeral the

cook sent up a dinner you'd never think of,--she was like that, all

fancy. Lucky it was that the family didn't read between the lines, for

it began with fried soles----

The parlourmaid paused, her eye anxiously on the window. Wemyss sat

staring at her.

'Did you say fried soles?' he asked, staring at her.

'Yes sir. Fried soles. I didn't see anything in that either at first.

It's how you spell it makes the difference, Cook said. And the next

course was'--her voice dropped almost to inaudibleness--'devilled

bones.'

Wemyss hadn't so much as smiled for nearly a fortnight, and now to his

horror, for what could it possibly sound like to the two mourners on the

lawn, he gave a sudden dreadful roar of laughter. He could hear it

sounding hideous himself.

The noise he made horrified the parlourmaid as much as it did him. She

flew to the window and shut it. Wemyss, in his effort to strangle the

horrid thing, choked and coughed, his table-napkin up to his face, his

body contorted. He was very red, and the parlourmaid watched him in

terror. He had seemed at first to be laughing, though what Uncle Wemyss

(thus did he figure in the conversations of the kitchen) could see to

laugh at in the cook's way of getting her own back, the parlourmaid,

whose flesh had crept when she first heard the story, couldn't

understand; but presently she feared he wasn't laughing at all but was

being, in some very robust way, ill. Dread seized her, deaths being on

her mind, lest perhaps here in the chair, so convulsively struggling

behind a table-napkin, were the beginnings of yet another corpse. Having

flown to shut the window she now flew to open it, and ran out

panic-stricken into the garden to fetch the ladies.

This cured Wemyss. He got up quickly, leaving his half-smoked cigar and

his half-drunk whisky, and followed her out just in time to meet Lucy

and her aunt hurrying across the lawn towards the dining-room window.

'I choked,' he said, wiping his eyes, which indeed were very wet.

'Choked?' repeated Miss Entwhistle anxiously. 'We heard a most strange

noise----'

'That was me choking,' said Wemyss. 'It's all right--it's nothing at

all,' he added to Lucy, who was looking at him with a face of extreme

concern.

But he felt now that he had had about as much of the death and funeral

atmosphere as he could stand. Reaction had set in, and his reactions

were strong. He wanted to get away from woe, to be with normal, cheerful

people again, to have done with conditions in which a laugh was the most

improper of sounds. Here he was, being held down by the head, he felt,

in a black swamp,--first that ghastly business of Vera's, and now this

woebegone family.

Sudden and violent was Wemyss's reaction, let loose by the parlourmaid's

story. Miss Entwhistle's swollen eyes annoyed him. Even Lucy's pathetic

face made him impatient. It was against nature, all this. It shouldn't

be allowed to go on, it oughtn't to be encouraged. Heaven alone knew how

much he had suffered, how much more he had suffered than the Entwhistles

with their perfectly normal sorrow, and if he could feel it was high

time now to think of other things surely the Entwhistles could. He was

tired of funerals. He had carried this one through really brilliantly

from start to finish, but now it was over and done with, and he wished

to get back to naturalness. Death seemed to him highly unnatural. The

mere fact that it only happened once to everybody showed how exceptional

it was, thought Wemyss, thoroughly disgusted with it. Why couldn't he

and the Entwhistles go off somewhere to-morrow, away from this place

altogether, go abroad for a bit, to somewhere cheerful, where nobody

knew them and nobody would expect them to go about with long faces all

day? Ostend, for instance? His mood of sympathy and gentleness had

for the moment quite gone. He was indignant that there should be

circumstances under which a man felt as guilty over a laugh as over a

crime. A natural person like himself looked at things wholesomely. It

was healthy and proper to forget horrors, to dismiss them from one's

mind. If convention, that offspring of cruelty and hypocrisy, insisted

that one's misfortunes should be well rubbed in, that one should be

forced to smart under them, and that the more one was seen to wince the

more one was regarded as behaving creditably,--if convention insisted

on this, and it did insist, as Wemyss had been experiencing himself

since Vera's accident, why then it ought to be defied. He had found he

couldn't defy it by himself, and came away solitary and wretched in

accordance with what it expected, but he felt quite different now that

he had Lucy and her aunt as trusting friends who looked up to him, who

had no doubts of him and no criticisms. Health of mind had come back to

him,--his own natural wholesomeness, which had never deserted him in his

life till this shocking business of Vera's.

'I'd like to have some sensible talk with you,' he said, looking down at

the two small black figures and solemn tired faces that were growing dim

and wraith-like in the failing light of the garden.

'With me or with Lucy?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

By this time they both hung on his possible wishes, and watched him with

the devout attentiveness of a pair of dogs.

'With you and with Lucy,' said Wemyss, smiling at the upturned faces. He

felt very conscious of being the male, of being in command.

It was the first time he had called her Lucy. To Miss Entwhistle it

seemed a matter of course, but Lucy herself flushed with pleasure, and

again had the feeling of being taken care of and safe. Sad as she was at

the end of that sad day, she still was able to notice how nice her very

ordinary name sounded in this kind man's voice. She wondered what his

own name was, and hoped it was something worthy of him,--not Albert, for

instance.

'Shall we go into the drawing-room?' asked Miss Entwhistle.

'Why not to the mulberry tree?' said Wemyss, who naturally wished to

hold Lucy's little hand if possible, and could only do that in the dark.

So they sat there as they had sat other nights, Wemyss in the middle,

and Lucy's hand, when it got dark enough, held close and comfortingly in

his.

'This little girl,' he began, 'must get the roses back into her cheeks.'

'Indeed, indeed she must,' agreed Miss Entwhistle, a catch in her voice

at the mere reminder of the absence of Lucy's roses, and consequently of

what had driven them away.

'How do you propose to set about it?' asked Wemyss.

'Time,' gulped Miss Entwhistle.

'Time?'

'And patience. We must wait we must both wait p-patiently till time has

s-softened----'

She hastily pulled out her handkerchief.

'No, no,' said Wemyss, 'I don't at all agree. It isn't natural, it isn't

reasonable to prolong sorrow. You'll forgive plain words, Miss

Entwhistle, but I don't know any others, and I say it isn't right to

wallow--yes, wallow--in sorrow. Far from being patient one should be

impatient. One shouldn't wait resignedly for time to help one, one

should up and take time by the forelock. In cases of this kind, and

believe me I know what I'm talking about'--it was here that his hand,

the one on the further side from Miss Entwhistle, descended gently on

Lucy's, and she made a little movement closer up to him--'it is due to

oneself to refuse to be knocked out. Courage, spirit, is what one must

aim at,--setting an example.'

Ah, how wonderful he was, thought Lucy; so big, so brave, so simple, and

so tragically recently himself the victim of the most awful of

catastrophes. There was something burly about his very talk. Her darling

father and his friends had talked quite differently. Their talk used to

seem as if it ran about the room like liquid fire, it was so quick and

shining; often it was quite beyond her till her father afterwards, when

she asked him, explained it, put it more simply for her, eager as he

always was that she should share and understand. She could understand

every word of Wemyss's. When he spoke she hadn't to strain, to listen

with all her might; she hardly had to think at all. She found this

immensely reposeful in her present state.

'Yes,' murmured Miss Entwhistle into her handkerchief, 'yes--you're

quite right, Mr. Wemyss--one ought--it would be more--more heroic. But

then if one--if one has loved some one very tenderly--as I did my dear

brother--and Lucy her most precious father----'

She broke off and wiped her eyes.

'Perhaps,' she finished, 'you haven't ever loved anybody very--very

particularly and lost them.'

'Oh,' breathed Lucy at that, and moved still closer to him.

Wemyss was deeply injured. Why should Miss Entwhistle suppose he had

never particularly loved anybody? He seemed, on looking back, to have

loved a great deal. Certainly he had loved Vera with the utmost devotion

till she herself wore it down. He indignantly asked himself what this

maiden lady could know of love.

But there was Lucy's little hand, so clinging, so understanding,

nestling in his. It soothed him.

There was a pause. Then he said, very gravely, 'My wife died only a

fortnight ago.'

Miss Entwhistle was crushed. 'Ah,' she cried, 'but you must forgive

me----'

V

Nevertheless he was not able to persuade her to join him, with Lucy, in

a trip abroad. She was tirelessly concerned to do and say everything she

could that showed her deep sympathy with him in his loss--he had told

her nothing beyond the bare fact, and she was not one to read about

inquests--and her deep sense of obligation to him that he, labouring

under so great a burden of sorrow of his own, should have helped them

with such devotion and unselfishness in theirs; but she wouldn't go

abroad. She was going, she said, to her little house in London with

Lucy.

'What, in August?' exclaimed Wemyss.

Yes, they would be quiet there, and indeed they were both worn out and

only wished for solitude.

'Then why not stay here?' asked Wemyss, who now considered Lucy's aunt

selfish. 'This is solitary enough, in all conscience.'

No, they neither of them felt they could bear to stay in that house.

Lucy must go to the place least connected in her mind with her father.

Indeed, indeed it was best. She did so understand and appreciate Mr.

Wemyss's wonderful and unselfish motives in suggesting the continent,

but she and Lucy were in that state when the idea of an hotel and

waiters and a band was simply impossible to them, and all they wished

was to creep into the quiet and privacy of their own nest,--'Like

wounded birds,' said poor Miss Entwhistle, looking up at him with much

the piteous expression of a dog lifting an injured paw.

'It's very bad for Lucy to be encouraged to think she's a wounded bird,'

said Wemyss, controlling his disappointment as best he could.

'You must come and see us in London and help us to feel heroic,' said

Miss Entwhistle, with a watery smile.

'But I can come and see you much better and easier if you're here,'

persisted Wemyss.

Miss Entwhistle, however, though watery, was determined. She refused to

stay where she so conveniently was, and Wemyss now considered Lucy's

aunt obstinate as well as selfish. Also he thought her very ungrateful.

She had made use of him, and now was going to leave him, without

apparently giving him a thought, in the lurch.

He was having a good deal of Miss Entwhistle, because during the two

days that came after the funeral Lucy was practically invisible, engaged

in collecting and packing her father's belongings. Wemyss hung about the

garden, not knowing when these activities mightn't suddenly cease and

not wishing to miss her if she did come out, and Miss Entwhistle, who

couldn't help Lucy in this--no one could help her in the heart-breaking

work--naturally joined him.

He found these two days long. Miss Entwhistle felt there was a great

bond between herself and him, and Wemyss felt there wasn't. When she

said there was he had difficulty in not contradicting her. Not only,

Miss Entwhistle felt, and also explained, was there the bond of their

dear Jim, whom both she and Mr. Wemyss had so much loved, but there was

this communion of sorrow,--the loss of his wife, the loss of her

brother, within the same fortnight.

Wemyss shut his mouth tight at this and said nothing.

How natural for her, feeling so sorry for him, feeling so grateful to

him, when from a window during those two days she beheld him sitting

solitary beneath the mulberry tree, to go down and sit there with him;

how natural that, when he got up, made restless, she supposed, by

his memories, and began to pace the lawn, she should get up and

sympathetically pace it too. She could not let this kind, tender-hearted

man--he must be that, or Jim wouldn't have been fond of him, besides she

had seen it for herself in the way he had helped her and Lucy--she could

not let him be alone with his sad thoughts. And he had a double burden

of sad thoughts, a double loss to bear, for he had lost her dear brother

as well as his poor wife.

All Entwhistles were compassionate, and as she and Wemyss sat together

or together paced, she kept up a flow of gentle loving-kindness.

Wemyss smoked his pipe in practically unbroken silence. This was his way

when he was holding on to himself. Miss Entwhistle of course didn't

know he was holding on to himself, and taking his silence for the

inarticulateness of deep unhappiness was so much touched that she would

have done anything for him, anything that might bring this poor, kind,

suffering fellow-creature comfort--except go to Ostend. From that

dreadful suggestion she continued to shudder away; nor, though he tried

again, even after all arrangements for leaving Cornwall had been made,

would she be persuaded to stay where she was.

Therefore Wemyss was forced to conclude that she was obstinate as well

as selfish; and if it hadn't been for the brief moments at meals when

Lucy appeared, and through her unhappiness--what she was doing was

obviously depressing her very much--smiled faintly at him and always

went and sat as near him as she could, he would have found these two

days intolerable.

How atrocious, he thought, while he smoked in silence and held on to

himself, that Lucy should be taken away from him by a mere maiden lady,

an aunt, an unmarried aunt,--weakest and most negligible, surely, of all

relatives. How atrocious that such a person should have any right to

come between him and Lucy, to say she wouldn't do this, that, or the

other that Wemyss proposed, and thus possess the power to make him

unhappy. Miss Entwhistle was so little that he could have brushed her

aside with the back of one hand; yet here again the strong monster

public opinion stepped in and forced him to acquiesce in any plan she

chose to make for Lucy, however desolate it left him, merely because she

stood to her in the anæmic relationship of aunt.

During two mortal days, as he waited about in that garden so grievously

infested by Miss Entwhistle, sounds of boxes being moved and drawers

being opened and shut came through the windows, but except at meals

there was no Lucy. He could have borne it if he hadn't known they were

the very last days he would be with her, but as things were it seemed

cruel that he should be left like that to be miserable. Why should he be

left like that to be miserable, just because of a lot of clothes and

papers? he asked himself; and he felt he was getting thoroughly tired of

Jim.

'Haven't you done yet?' he said at tea on the second afternoon of this

sorting out and packing, when Lucy got up to go indoors again, leaving

him with Miss Entwhistle, even before he had finished his second cup of

tea.

'You've no idea what a lot there is,' she said, her voice sounding worn

out; and she lingered a moment, her hand on the back of her aunt's

chair. 'Father brought all his notes with him, and heaps and heaps of

letters from people he was consulting, and I'm trying to get them

straight--get them as he would have wished----'

Miss Entwhistle put up her hand and stroked Lucy's arm.

'If you weren't in this hurry to go away you'd have had more time and

done it comfortably,' said Wemyss.

'Oh, but I don't want more time,' said Lucy quickly.

'Lucy means she couldn't bear it drawn out,' said Miss Entwhistle,

leaning her thin cheek against Lucy's sleeve. 'These things--they tear

one's heart. And nobody can help her. She has to go through with it

alone.' And she drew Lucy's face down to hers and held it there a

moment, gently stroking it, the tears brimming up again in the eyes of

both.

Always tears, thought Wemyss. Yes, and there always would be tears as

long as that aunt had hold of Lucy. She was the arch-wallower, he told

himself, filling his pipe in silence after Lucy had gone in.

He got up and went out at the gate and crossed the road and stood

staring at the evening sea. Should he hear steps coming after him and

Miss Entwhistle were to follow him even beyond the garden, he would

proceed without looking round down to the cove and to the inn, where she

must needs leave him alone. He had had enough. That Miss Entwhistle

should explain to him what Lucy meant, he considered to be the last

straw of her behaviour. Barging in, he said indignantly to himself;

barging in when nobody had asked her opinion or explanation of anything.

And she had stroked Lucy's face as though Lucy and her face and

everything about her belonged to her, merely because she happened to be

her aunt. Fancy explaining to him what Lucy really meant, taking upon

herself the functions of interpreter, of go-between, when for a whole

day and a half before she appeared on the scene--and she had only

appeared on it at all thanks to his telegram--Lucy and he had been in

the closest fellowship, the closest communion....

Well, things couldn't go on like this. He was not the man to be

dominated by a relative. If he had lived in those sensible ancient days

when people behaved wholesomely, he would have flung Lucy over his

shoulder and walked off with her to Ostend or Paris and laughed at such

insects as aunts. He couldn't do that unfortunately, though where the

harm would be in two mourners like himself and Lucy going together in

search of relief he must say he was unable to see. Why should they be

condemned to search for relief separately? Their sorrows, surely, would

be their chaperone, especially his sorrow. Nobody would object to Lucy's

nursing him, supposing he were dangerously ill; why should she not be

equally beyond the reach of tongues if she nursed the bitter wounds of

his spirit?

He heard steps coming down the garden path to the gate. There, he

thought, was the aunt again, searching for him, and he stood squarely

and firmly with his back to the road, smoking his pipe and staring at

the sea. If he heard the gate open and she dared to come through it he

would instantly walk away. In the garden he had to endure being joined

by her, because there he was in the position of guest; but let her try

to join him on the King's highway!

Nobody opened the gate, however, and, as he heard no retreating

footsteps either, after a minute he began to want to look round. He

struggled against this wish, because the moment Miss Entwhistle caught

his eye she would come out to him, he felt sure. But Wemyss was not much

good at struggling against his wishes,--he usually met with defeat; and

after briefly doing so on this occasion he did look round. And what a

good thing he did, for it was Lucy.

There she was, leaning on the gate just as she had been that first

morning, but this time her eyes instead of being wide and blank were

watching him with a deep and touching interest.

He got across the road in one stride. 'Lucy!' he exclaimed. 'You? Why

didn't you call me? We've wasted half an hour----'

'About two minutes,' she said, smiling up at him as he, on the other

side of the gate, folded both her hands in his just as he had done that

first morning; and the relief it was to Wemyss to see her again alone,

to see that smile of trust and--surely--content in getting back to him!

Then her face went grave again. 'I've finished father's things now,' she

said, 'and so I came to look for you.'

'Lucy, how can you leave me,' was Wemyss's answer to that, his voice

vibrating, 'how can you go away from me to-morrow and hand me over again

to the torments--yes, torments, I was in before?'

'But I have to go,' she said, distressed. 'And you mustn't say that. You

mustn't let yourself be like that again. You won't be, I know--you're so

brave and strong.'

'Not without you. I'm nothing without you,' said Wemyss; and his eyes,

as he searched hers, were full of tears.

At this Lucy flushed, and then, staring at him, her face went slowly

white. These words of his, the way he said them, reminded her--oh no, it

wasn't possible; he and she stood in a relationship to each other like

none, she was sure, that had ever yet been. It was an intimacy arrived

at at a bound, with no preliminary steps. It was a holy thing, based on

mutual grief, protected from everything ordinary by the great wings of

Death. He was her wonderful friend, big in his simplicity, all care for

her and goodness, a very rock of refuge and shelter in the wilderness

she had been flung into when he found her. And that he, bleeding as he

was himself from the lacerations of the violent rending asunder from

his wife to whom he had been, as he had told her, devoted, that he

should--oh no, it wasn't possible; and she hung her head, shocked at her

thoughts. For the way he had said those words, and the words themselves

had reminded her--no, she could hardly bear to think it, but they _had_

reminded her of the last time she had been proposed to. The man--he

was a young man; she had never been proposed to by any one even

approximately Wemyss's age--had said almost exactly that: Without you I

am nothing. And just in that same deep, vibrating voice.

How dreadful thoughts could be, Lucy said to herself, overcome that such

a one at such a moment should thrust itself into her mind. Hateful of

her, hateful....

She hung her head in shame; and Wemyss, looking down at the little

bobbed head with its bright, thick young hair bent over their folded

hands as though it were saying its prayers,--Wemyss, not having his pipe

in his mouth to protect him and help him to hold on to himself, for he

had hastily stuffed it in his pocket, all alight as it was, when he saw

her at the gate, and there at that moment it was burning holes,--Wemyss,

after a brief struggle with his wishes, in which as usual he was

defeated, stooped and began to kiss Lucy's hair. And having begun, he

continued.

She was horrified. At the first kiss she started as if she had been hit,

and then, clinging to the gate, she stood without moving, without being

able to think or lift her head, in the same attitude bowed over his and

her own hands, while this astonishing thing was being done to her hair.

Death all round them, death pervading every corner of their lives, death

in its blackest shape brooding over him, and--kisses. Her mind, if

anything so gentle could be said to be in anything that sounds so loud,

was in an uproar. She had had the complete, guileless trust in him of a

child for a tender and sympathetic friend,--a friend, not a father,

though he was old enough to be her father, because in a father, however

much hidden by sweet comradeship as it had been in hers, there always at

the back of everything was, after all, authority. And it had been even

more than the trust of a child in its friend: it had been the trust of a

child in a fellow-child hit by the same punishment,--a simple

fellowship, a wordless understanding.

She hung on to the gate while her thoughts flew about in confusion

within her. These kisses--and his wife just dead--and dead so

terribly--how long would she have to stand there with this going on--she

couldn't lift up her head, for then she felt it would only get

worse--she couldn't turn and run into the house, because he was holding

her hands. He oughtn't to have--oh, he oughtn't to have--it wasn't

fair....

Then--what was he saying? She heard him say, in an absolutely broken

voice, laying his head on hers, 'We two poor things--we two poor

things'--and then he said and did nothing more, but kept his head like

that, and presently, thick though her hair was, through it came wetness.

At that Lucy's thoughts suddenly stopped flying about and were quite

still. Her heart went to wax within her, melted again into pity, into a

great flood of pitiful understanding. The dreadfulness of lonely

grief.... Was there anything in the world so blackly desolate as to be

left alone in grief? This poor broken fellow-creature--and she herself,

so lost, so lost in loneliness--they were two half-drowned things,

clinging together in a shipwreck--how could she let him go, leave him to

himself--how could she be let go, left to herself....

'Lucy,' he said, 'look at me----'

She lifted her head. He loosed her hands, and put his arms round her

shoulders.

'Look at me,' he said; for though she had lifted her head she hadn't

lifted her eyes.

She looked at him. Tears were on his face. When she saw them her mouth

began to quiver and twitch. She couldn't bear that.

'Lucy----' he said again.

She shut her eyes. 'Yes'--she breathed, 'yes.' And with one hand she

felt along up his coat till she reached his face, and shakingly tried to

brush away its tears.