Studies in love and in terror Part 18

When with Father Ferguson, Agnes somehow never felt quite so good as she did when she was by herself or with a strange priest; and yet Father Ferguson was always very kind to her.

As she came into the sacristy he looked round with a smile. "Well?" he said. "Well, Agnes, my child, what can I do for you?"

Agnes put the newspaper she was holding down on a chair. And then, to her surprise, Father Ferguson took up the paper and glanced over the front page. He was an intelligent man, and sometimes he found Summerfield a rather shut-in, stifling sort of place.

But the priest's instinctive wish to know something of what was pa.s.sing in the great world outside the suburb where it was his duty to dwell did him an ill turn, for something he read in the paper caused him to utter a low, quick exclamation of intense pain and horror.

"What's the matter?" cried Agnes Barlow, frightened out of her usual self-complacency. "Whatever has happened, Father Ferguson?"

He pointed with shaking finger to a small paragraph. It was headed "Suicide of a Lady at Dover," and Agnes read the few lines with bewildered and shocked amazement.

Teresa Maldo, whom she had visioned, only a few minutes ago, as leading a merry, gloriously careless life with her lover, was dead. She had thrown herself out of a bedroom window in a hotel at Dover, and she had been killed instantly, dashed into a shapeless ma.s.s on the stones below.

Agnes stared down at the curt, cold little paragraph with excited horror. She was six-and-twenty, but she had never seen death, and, as far as she knew, the girls with whom she had been at school were all living. Teresa--poor unhappy, sinful Teresa--had been the first to die, and by her own hand.

The old priest's eyes slowly brimmed over with tears. "Poor, unhappy child!" he said, with a break in his voice. "Poor, unfortunate Teresa!

I did not think, I should never have believed, that she would seek--and find--this terrible way out."

Agnes was a little shocked at his broken words. True, Teresa had been very unhappy, and it was right to pity her; but she had also been very wicked; and now she had put, as it were, the seal on her wickedness by killing herself.

"Three or four days before she went away she came and saw me," the priest went on, in a low, pained voice. "I did everything in my power to stop her, but I could do nothing--she had given her word!"

"Given her word?" repeated Agnes wonderingly.

"Yes," said Father Ferguson; "she had given that wretched, that wickedly selfish man her promise. She believed that if she broke her word he would kill himself. I begged her to go and see some woman--some kind, pitiful, understanding woman--but I suppose she feared lest such a one would dissuade her to more purpose than I was able to do."

Agnes looked at him with troubled eyes.

"She was very dear to my heart," the priest went on. "She was always a generous, unselfish child, and she was very, very fond of you, Agnes."

Agnes's throat tightened. What Father Ferguson said was only too true.

Teresa had always been a very generous and unselfish girl, and very, very fond of her. She wondered remorsefully if she had omitted to do or say anything she could have done or said on the day that poor Teresa had come and spoken such strange, wild words----?

"It seems so awful," she said in a low voice, "so very, very awful to think that we may not even pray for her soul, Father Ferguson."

"Not pray for her soul?" the priest repeated. "Why should we not pray for the poor child's soul? I shall certainly pray for Teresa's soul every day till I die."

"But--but how can you do that, when she killed herself?"

He looked at her surprised. "And do you really so far doubt G.o.d's mercy?

Surely we may hope--nay, trust--that Teresa had time to make an act of contrition?" And then he muttered something--it sounded like a line or two of poetry--which Agnes did not quite catch; but she felt, as she often did feel when with Father Ferguson, at once rebuked and rebellious.

Of course there _might_ have been time for Teresa to make an act of contrition. But every one knows that to take one's life is a deadly sin. Agnes felt quite sure that if it ever occurred to herself to do such a thing she would go straight to h.e.l.l. Still, she was used to obey this old priest, and that even when she did not agree with him. So she followed him into the church, and side by side they knelt down and each said a separate prayer for the soul of Teresa Maldo.

As Agnes Barlow walked slowly and soberly home, this time by the high road, she tried to remember the words, the lines of poetry, that Father Ferguson had muttered. They at once haunted and eluded her memory.

Surely they could not be

Between the window and the ground, She mercy sought and mercy found.

No, Agnes was sure that he had not said "window," and yet window seemed the only word that would fit the case. And he had not said, "_she_ mercy found"; he had said, "_he_ mercy sought and mercy found"--of that Agnes felt sure, and that, too, was odd. But then, Father Ferguson was very odd sometimes, and he was fond of quoting in his sermons queer little bits of verse of which no one had ever heard.

Suddenly she bethought herself, with more annoyance than the matter was worth, that in her agitation she had left Mr. Ferrier's newspaper in the sacristy. She did not like the thought that Father Ferguson would probably read those pretty, curious verses, "My Lady of the Snow."

Also, Agnes had actually forgotten to speak to the old priest of her impertinent cook!

II

We find Agnes Barlow again walking in Summerfield; but this time she is hurrying along the straight, unlovely cinder-strewn path which forms a short cut from the back of The Haven to Summerfield station; and the still, heavy calm of a late November afternoon broods over the rough ground on either side of her.

It is nearly six months since Teresa Maldo's elopement and subsequent suicide, and now no one ever speaks of poor Teresa, no one seems to remember that she ever lived, excepting, perhaps, Father Ferguson....

As for Agnes herself, life had crowded far too many happenings into the last few weeks for her to give more than a pa.s.sing thought to Teresa; indeed, the image of her dead friend rose before her only when she was saying her prayers. And as Agnes, strange to say, had grown rather careless as to her prayers, the memory of Teresa Maldo was now very faint indeed.

An awful, and to her an incredible, thing had happened to Agnes Barlow.

The roof of her snug and happy House of Life had fallen in, and she lay, blinded and maimed, beneath the fragments which had been hurled down on her in one terrible moment.

Yes, it had all happened in a moment--so she now reminded herself, with the dull ache which never left her.

It was just after she had come back from Westgate with little Francis.

The child had been ailing for the first time in his life, and she had taken him to the seaside for six weeks.

There, in a day, it had turned from summer to winter, raining as it only rains at the seaside; and suddenly Agnes had made up her mind to go back to her own nice, comfortable home a whole week before Frank expected her back.

Agnes sometimes acted like that--on a quick impulse; she did so to her own undoing on that dull, rainy day.

When she reached Summerfield, it was to find her telegram to her husband lying unopened on the hall table of The Haven. Frank, it seemed, had slept in town the night before. Not that that mattered, so she told herself gleefully, full of the pleasant joy of being again in her own home; the surprise would be the greater and the more welcome when Frank did come back.

Having nothing better to do that first afternoon, Agnes had gone up to her husband's dressing-room in order to look over his summer clothes before sending them to the cleaner. In her careful, playing-at-housewifely fas.h.i.+on, she had turned out the pockets of his cricketing coat. There, a little to her surprise, she had found three letters, and idle curiosity as to Frank's invitations during her long stay away--Frank was deservedly popular with the ladies of Summerfield and, indeed, with all women--caused her to take the three letters out of their envelopes.

In a moment--how terrible that it should take but a moment to shatter the fabric of a human being's innocent House of Life!--Agnes had seen what had happened to her--to him. For each of these letters, written in the same sloping woman's hand, was a love letter signed "Janey"; and in each the writer, in a plaintive, delicate, but insistent and reproachful way, asked Frank for money.

Even now, though nearly seven weeks had gone by since then, Agnes could recall with painful vividness the sick, cold feeling that had come over her--a feeling of fear rather than anger, of fear and desperate humiliation.

Locking the door of the dressing-room, she had searched eagerly--a dishonourable thing to do, as she knew well. And soon she had found other letters--letters and bills; bills of meals at restaurants, showing that her husband and a companion had constantly dined and supped at the Savoy, the Carlton, and Prince's. To those restaurants where he had taken her, Agnes, two or three times a year, laughing and grumbling at the expense, he had taken this--this _person_ again and again in the short time his wife had been away.

As to the further letters, all they proved was that Frank had first met "Janey Cartwright" over some law business of hers, connected--even Agnes saw the irony of it--in some shameful way with another man; for, tied together, were a few notes signed with the writer's full name, of which the first began:

Dear Mr. Barlow: Forgive me for writing to your private address [etc., etc.].

The ten days that followed her discovery had seared Agnes's soul. Frank had been so dreadfully affectionate. He had pretended--she felt sure it was all pretence--to be so glad to see her again, though sometimes she caught him looking at her with cowed, miserable eyes.

More than once he had asked her solicitously if she felt ill, and she had said yes, she did feel ill, and the time at the seaside had not done her any good.

And then, on the last of those terrible ten days, Gerald Ferrier had come down to Summerfield, and both she and Frank had pressed him to stay on to dinner. He had done so, though aware that something was wrong, and he had been extraordinarily kind, sympathetic, unquestioning. But as he was leaving he had said a word to his host: "I feel worried about Mrs.

Barlow"--Agnes had heard him through the window. "She doesn't look the thing, somehow! How would it be if I asked her to go with me to a private view? It might cheer her up, and perhaps she would lunch with me afterwards?" Frank had eagerly a.s.sented.

Since then Agnes had gone up to London, if not every day, very nearly every day, and Mr. Ferrier had done his best, without much success, to "cheer her up."