'I wish that I had given him another kiss! I wish that I had gone to the turn of the road with him, as he asked me! I wish that I had taken his knife!'
Her tears seem to make her intelligence clearer, to render sharper her power of suffering.
'Is there no one to be left alive? Is Death to have it all his own way?'
Her dimmed eyes rest on a drift of leaves blown by the last blusterous wind against the hedge-bank outside; a discoloured pile – the yellow poplar leaf, the black-brown pear and the bronzed beech, the ribbed hazel and the smooth lime – one fate has overtaken them all. Dead – dead!
At her foot is an elm-leaf half-dragged underground by the dark industry of some blind earthworm. Underground – underground! That is the bourne of us all; of the young green leaf, aloft two months ago on the tree-top, visited by the voyaging birds and the gamesome airs, as of the little bounding joyous child.
The searching vapour has penetrated her clothes, and made her shiver with cold; but she dares not yet go indoors again, dares not yet face her sick Prue, with those sudden tidings written on her face.
She retraces her steps along the drive, and turns into the garden – the empty garden; empty to-day of even Jacob's presence, as he is kept at home by his rheumatism. It is profoundly silent. The fog has got even into the robin's throat. It is profoundly silent; and yet to Peggy, the air is full of voices – the voices of her dead, her lost, and her dying. Her mother, Talbot, Prue, and now little Franky. He was not much to her, perhaps you may say; and yet she can ill spare his little drop of love out of her empty cup. Along the walks they hurry to meet her, and yet, as they come up to her, they pass her by with averted faces.
'I am certainly very lonely,' she says to herself, with a sort of astonishment; 'it is a very unusual case. There has happened to me what happens commonly to people only at eighty: I have outlived everything! I was given very few people to love, to begin with; but I did love them well. I gave them my very best. Oh, you cannot say, any of you, that I did not give you my very best, and yet not one of you will stay with me. Not one of you. God – God! What have I done to be picked out of all the world for such a fate? Is it fair? Is it fair?'
Her voice goes wailing out into the mist; but the dying world around her has no answer to give to her riddle. It is awaiting that to its own. She has thrown herself down on the seat under her hawthorn bower, and from its dull berries and sharp thorns, and few still-clinging yellow leaves, the cold drops drip on her bare head, mix with the scalding drops on her cheeks; but she feels them not as she lies there, huddled up, collapsed, and despairing. Not for long, however. By and by her soul, as is the way with souls habitually brave, puts on its courage again. She raises herself, and lifts her drowned and weary eyes, as if through the fogs and exhalations they would pierce to Him who, as all the world once thought, as many still hold to be a truth far dearer than life, sits in judgment and mercy beyond them.
'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' she says solemnly. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'
CHAPTER XXXVIII
'I am not mad, – I would to heaven I were!
For then 'tis like I should forget myself:
Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonised, cardinal;
For, being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver'd of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
If I were mad, I should forget my son;
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.'
In the days that follow, the death of Franky Harborough, which at an ordinary time would have been the sorrowful main occupation of Peggy's thoughts, has to retire into the background of her mind. In the foreground there is room for but one absorbing topic. Prue is decidedly worse. In an illness such as hers – which is less a definite disease than a decline all round, a bowing to its final ruin of a building whose foundations have been sapped for more than a year – there is very often, for a considerable period, but little change to be noted from day to day; and then suddenly – no, not suddenly – in a progression rather, as natural as that from seedtime to harvest, on some morning, at some noon or night, there is a step down to a lower level of vitality; a travelling along that lower level, until the time for a new and farther descent. It would seem impossible that any breath of the chilly fog outside could have thrust its pestilent way into the atmosphere, regulated with so passionate a nicety, of Prue's room; and, indeed, there is no sign of any return of that bronchitis which had been the ostensible beginning of her illness. Nor is there any very perceptible aggravation of any one of her symptoms.
The signs of her approaching dissolution are rather negative than positive. It is only that Miss Prue is going downhill rather quicker than before – that is all. There is now no longer any question of the oak settle in the hall. Even the sofa in the dressing-room has been abandoned. Prue no longer stirs from her bed; but she lies there quite happily, quite as happy as she was before; for Freddy's gifts are within as easy reach of her hand, spread on the counterpane before her, as they were on the table in the adjoining room; and her card with its 365 black strokes hangs quite as full in her eye, on the wall opposite her bed.
However bad her night may have been, there is always something to look forward to at dawning, in having it brought to her to put her triumphant pen through another day.
'I shall be glad when we have got up to forty,' she says to Peggy, with a faint but cheerful laugh. 'I shall feel quite differently when we have reached forty: there will be all but a ninth of the time gone then.'
It is a day on which the officious dusk of the winter afternoon – always in such haste to shoulder away its pale brother – has already settled down. For sixteen long hours there will be no more glint of light. This dreary thought is passing through Peggy's mind, as she nods drowsily over the fire. She is roused from it and from her semi-sleep by hearing the room-door open cautiously and seeing Sarah making signs – evidently not intended to be seen by Prue – through the aperture.
In obedience to them, Margaret rises languidly, and goes out upon the landing.
'What is it?'
'If you please, 'm, there's a lady wishes to speak to you.'
'Oh, Sarah, you know that I can't see any one; why did not you tell her so?'
'I did tell her so, 'm, but she would not take "No"; she says if she stays all night she must see you.'
'What does she mean?' cries Peggy, in a voice of astonished indignation; 'who can she be? Who is she?'
'Well, 'm, I really did not recognise her until she spoke – dressed in deep mourning and that; and she asked me not to mention her name. She said she was sure you would not see her if I did.'
Dressed in deep mourning! Peggy's legs have been somewhat shaky under her of late, through long standing upon them. Perhaps that is why she now catches at the banisters. It has flashed upon her who her visitor is. What has brought her hither? Why has she come? Has she gone mad?
'Go and sit with Miss Prue, while I am away,' she says to the servant; and so walks slowly downstairs. Outside the door of the hall she pauses a moment to pull herself together. She is trembling violently, and her teeth chatter.
What has brought her here? What can they have to say to each other? She enters. Beside the table is standing Lady Betty Harborough; for it is she who is Peggy's visitor. The lamp is lit, and burns brightly, though nowadays there is never any one to read or work by its gentle glow. A flourishing fire sings on the hearth; but their joint cheerfulness serves only to throw up into higher relief the inky gloom of the figure they illuminate. She makes no movement to go to meet Peggy, but awaits her coming; and for a moment the two women look at each other in silence.
As they do so, a doubt – a real, serious doubt flashes across Peggy's mind, as to whether this is Lady Betty. Coupled with the doubt comes a darted recollection of the two last occasions on which she has seen her; the very last of all, sitting under a date-palm in the Hartleys' conservatory, in the full flush of her décolleté beauty and impudent folly, out of sheer love of mischief, turning the head of a foolish parish priest; and the time before – oh! that time before – when her own heart had lain down and died, on that star-strewn night, when through the gate of the walled garden she had seen her with her arms laced about John Talbot's neck.
There is no veil to disguise the ruin of Lady Betty's face. Under her heavy crape bonnet, her hair, uncurled by the damp of the winter night, hangs in pitiful little tags upon her sunk forehead. There is no trace of rouge on her pinched cheeks; nor any vestige of black, save that painted there by agonised vigils, under her hopeless eyes. Her mouth – that mobile mouth so seldom seen at rest, always either curved into a smile, or formed into a red pout, or playing some pretty antic or other – is set like a flint, and around it are drawn lines deeper and more, many more, than those cut by old age's chisel. Can it be this forlorn and God-struck creature that she, Peggy, has been hating so long and so well? Beneath this dual consciousness – the same consciousness under which Talbot had confusedly laboured once before – beneath the waning influence of that old hostility, and this new and immeasurable compassion, Peggy finds it impossible to speak. But her visitor saves her the trouble.
'I must apologise for intruding upon you at such a time. I know that I have no right to do so; I should not have taken such a liberty, only that – that I had a message to give you – a commission from a – a person who is dead.'
Her voice is perfectly clear and collected, without a quiver in it. It is only by the slight hesitation before a word here and there that it could be conjectured that it was not a matter of perfect indifference to her of which she is speaking. There is such a lump rising in Peggy's throat, that she could not answer if she were to gain a kingdom by it.
'Perhaps you are aware,' continues the other, quite as collectedly as before, 'that I have lost my son. He died, after a few days' illness, on the 3d; and when he was dying, he was very anxious that you should have this,' holding out to Margaret, in a hand that does not shake, the knife that had been so eagerly urged upon her acceptance by poor little Franky on his last visit to her. 'He wished me to tell you that it has five blades; and that though there is a little notch out of one of them, it does not cut the worse for that.'
Peggy has taken the knife, and is covering it with sad and reverent kisses.
'God bless him!' she says brokenly. 'God in heaven bless him!'
The tears are raining in a torrent down the face of Franky's friend; but his mother's eyes are dry.
'Not long before he died,' she resumes, in that awful collected voice, 'he asked me to give it into your hands; that must be my excuse to-night. I believe you refused it once before. I told him that I thought you would not refuse it now. He begged you to keep it. He said he should not want it any more; it was quite true,' her eye wandering round the room, and speaking as if to herself, as if having forgotten Peggy's presence – 'he will never want anything any more!'
Peggy has lifted her swimming eyes upwards.
'They are in God's hands, and no evil shall touch them!' she says solemnly.
It is not only the little innocent who has already crossed the flood of whom she is thinking, but also of that other one in the room upstairs, whose feet are so fast nearing the ford.
'He was very fond of you, very!' says the mother, her parched eyes noting with an expression of surprise and envy the agitation of her companion. 'And he was not one to take a fancy to everybody either; he had his likes and dislikes. Yes, he was very fond of you; but,' with a sort of hurry in her tone, 'you did not come before me; no one did that. Mammy was always first. Last time he was staying at the Manor he wrote me two little letters; how do you think he signed them?' with a pale, wild smile: '"Your loving friend." Was not that an odd signature? "Your loving friend!"'
Peggy's sobs have mastered her so completely, that she can make no answer beyond that of once again convulsively pressing her poor little legacy to her quivering lips.
'He suffered a good deal,' continues Betty, with that terrible composure of hers; 'but he made no fuss about it. He asked me once or twice whether I could not take away the pain; but when I told him that I could not, he quite understood. Children are so patient; and he always was a plucky little chap.'
'You poor woman!' cries Peggy, in a voice almost unintelligible through her tears. 'Oh, I wish I could do anything for you! Oh, you poor woman!'
She has caught both Betty's icy hands into her own warm compassionate clasp. She has clean forgotten that they are the hands of the woman who has slain her life. She knows only that there is a most miserable creature struggling in the deep waters beside her, to whom all her large pitying heart goes out. The other accepts indifferently that strong and sorrowful clasp, as what would not she so accept?
'You seem to be very kind!' she says, with a sort of stupid wonder. 'And yet, if you come to think of it, we have no great cause to love each other; you have no great cause to be fond of me.'
'You poor soul!' returns Peggy, looking back, with all the perfect honesty of her sad eyes, into the other's disfigured face. 'I bear you no malice for any harm you may have done me; and I have never wittingly done you any.'
'Never wittingly done me any!' repeats Betty, with a dull and dragging intonation. 'Have not you? There were only two things in the world that I cared about. You took one of them from me, and now God has taken the other.'
Peggy lets go her hands in a revulsion of feeling strong beyond the power of words to express, and steps back a horrified pace or two. Is it possible, is it conceivable that in this most sacred hour of holy mother-grief, she can think or speak of her own lawless passion?
'You are shocked!' says Betty, perceiving this movement on the part of her companion. 'I do not know why you should be. If I were to pretend that I had always been a good woman, it would not give me back my boy; and what does anything else matter?'
Then there is silence for a minute or two. It is broken by Betty.
'When you had taken him from me, why did you send him away again?' she asks abruptly.
For a moment it seems as if all the blood in Peggy's body had sprung to her brain, and was hammering at her temples, and dinning in her ears in a surge of passionate indignation. But at sight of the stricken face before her, her anger dies down again.
'I could not say anything harsh to you to-night,' she replies gently; 'but you must know that you are the last person who has any right to ask that question.'
'I know it,' replies Betty, with a stony indifference; 'any right, or any need either, since I know the answer. Do not I know that you were in the walled garden on that night last June? Did not I see you as I ran past? I knew what you would think, and I knew, too, that I could trust to him not to undeceive you.'
Peggy is trembling like a leaf. Must she bear it? Does Christian charity command her to endure this ruthless, purposeless tearing open of her scarcely cicatrised wound?
'There was no question of undeceiving,' she says brokenly, yet with dignity. 'I did not trust to hearsay – I should not have been likely to do that; but I could not distrust the evidence of my own eyes.'
Betty's sunken look is fixed on the girl's quivering features.
'It was a pity for your own peace of mind,' she says slowly, 'that you did not come a moment earlier, or stay a moment or two later! You would have seen then how much the evidence of your own eyes was worth. It would have saved you a good deal of pain; for I suppose you have taken it to heart – you look as if you had. I thought that you looked as if you had when I saw you at the Hartleys' party the other night. The other night' – putting up her hand to her head with a confused look – 'was it the other night! or a year ago? or when?'
Margaret's heart has begun to beat so suffocatingly fast that she can hardly draw her breath. What is Betty saying? What is she implying? Is it – is it —
'I suppose,' continues Lady Betty, in the same level, even, absolutely colourless voice as before, 'that you thought we met by appointment? Poor man!' with a catch that is almost like the echo of a ghost's laugh in her voice; 'if you had seen his face when he first caught sight of me, I think you would have exonerated him from that accusation. What do you suppose that he was doing when I came upon him? Why, kissing the spot of ground that he fancied your feet might have touched! I suppose that that was what sent me mad! There was a time, you know, when he used to kiss the print of my feet. Yes, I suppose it was that, though it seems odd now. If I had known how differently things would look from the other side of my Franky's grave, how little I should have cared!'
The oppression on Margaret's breathing is heavier than ever – the thundering of her heart more deafening; but she must master them – she must speak.
'But I saw!' she cries, gasping; 'I saw!'
'You saw my arms round his neck,' returns the other, in that terrible level voice of hers, out of which despair seems to have pressed all modulation, not a shade of colour tinging her livid face as she makes the admission. 'I know that you did. Do you wonder that I can own it? If you only knew of how infinitely little consequence it seems to me now, you would not wonder. Yes, you saw my arms round his neck; but do you suppose that it was by his will or consent that they were there? Poor man!' with the same ghastly spectre of a laugh as before; 'if he is as innocent of all other crimes at the Day of Reckoning as he is of that, he will come off easily indeed.'
Is Peggy's breath going to stop altogether? Is her heart resolved to break altogether out of its prison in the agony of its springing? She presses her clenched hand hard upon it. It must let her listen. It must not– must not burst in two until she has heard – heard to the end.
'I wish you to understand,' goes on Betty, relentlessly pursuing her confession, 'that it was I – I – who forced my last good-bye against his will – oh, most against his will – upon him! I knew that it was good-bye; he had not left me much doubt upon that head. I knew that his one wish was to be rid of me – to hear no more of me – to have done with me for this and all other worlds; and so, as I tell you, I thrust my last good-bye upon him, and you saw it, and misunderstood, as how should not you? I do not know whether you will believe me – it matters little to me whether you do or not.'
Her hopeless voice dies away on the air, and her sunk look wanders aimlessly round the room. Peggy is reeling as she stands. Is it the fog from outside which has come in and is misting her eyes? She puts up her hand stupidly to them, as if to wipe it away.
'I – I – I – am sure you are speaking truth,' she says, in an almost unintelligible broken whisper; 'but as yet – as yet – I – I – cannot take it in.'
'I would be quick about it if I were you,' answers the other stonily. 'I would not waste any more time. You have wasted five months already; and we are none of us allowed much time to enjoy ourselves in. We none of us keep our good things long. Any one would have thought that I might have kept my Franky a little, would not they? He was only six. Did you know that he was only six? Many people took him for seven; he was so big for his age. What, crying again? Well, I do not much wonder; he was a very loving little fellow, was not he? and had a great fancy for you. He prized that knife almost more than anything he possessed, and yet he was determined that you should have it. You will take care of it, will not you? Good-bye!'