The Slave of the Lamp Part 42

She stopped suddenly, and there was a silence in the room. He was looking at her curiously, still ignoring that little left hand. Only one word of her speech seemed to have attached itself to his understanding.

"Fred?" he said. "Fred Farrar?"

"Yes--my husband!"

He turned away--walked towards the door, and then returned to the hearthrug, where he stood quite still.

"I suppose it was a quiet wedding," he said in a hard voice, "on my account; eh?"

"Yes," she whispered. He waited, but she added nothing.

Then suddenly he laughed.

"I have made a most extraordinary mistake!" he said, and again laughed.

"Oh, don't" she exclaimed.

"Don't what?"

"Laugh."

He came nearer to her--quite near, until his sleeve almost touched her bowed head.

"I thought--at St. Mary Western--that you loved _me_."

She seemed to shrink away from him.

"What made me think so, Hilda?"

She raised her head, and her eyes flashed one momentary appeal for mercy--like the eyes of a whipped dog.

"Tell me," he said sternly.

"It was," she whispered, "because _I_ thought so myself."

"And when I was gone you found out that you had made a mistake?"

"Yes; he was so kind, so _brave_, Christian--because he knew of my mistake."

Christian Vellacott turned away, and looked thoughtfully out of the window.

"Well," he said, after a pause, "so long as you do not suffer by it--"

"Oh--h," she gasped, as if he were whipping her. She did not quite know what he meant. She does not know now.

At last he spoke again, slowly, deliberately, and without emotion.

"Some day," he said, "when you are older, when you have more experience of the world, you will probably fall into the habit of thanking G.o.d, in your prayers, that I am what I am. It is not because I am good ...

perhaps it is because I am ambitious--my father, you may remember, was considered heartless; it may be _that_. But if I were different--if I were pa.s.sionate instead of being what the world calls cold and calculating--you would be ... your life would be--" he stopped, and turning away he sat down wearily in Aunt Judy's armchair. "You will know some day!" he said.

It is probable that she does know now. She knows, in all likelihood, that her husband would have been powerless to save her from Christian Vellacott--from herself--from that Love wherein there are no roses but only thorns.

And in the room above them Aunt Hester was dying. So wags the world.

There is no attention paid to the laws of dramatic effect upon the stage of life. The scenes are produced without sequence, without apparent rhyme or reason; and Chance, the scene-s.h.i.+fter, is very careless, for comedies are enacted amid scenic effects calculated to show off to perfection the deepest tragedy, while tragedies are spoilt by their surroundings.

The doctor and Mrs. Carew stood at the bedside, and listened to the old woman's broken murmurings. Into her mind there had perhaps strayed a gleam of that Light which is not on the earth, for she was not abusing her great-nephew.

"Ah, Christian," she was murmuring, "I wish you would come. I want to thank you for your kindness, more especially to Aunt Judy. She is old, and we must make allowances. I know she is aggravating. It happened long ago, when your father was a little boy--but it altered her whole life. I think women are like that. There is something that only comes to them once. I am feeling far from well, nephew Vellacott. I think I should like to see a doctor. What does Aunt Judy think? Is she asleep?"

She turned her head to where she expected to find her sister, and in the act of turning her eyes closed. She slumbered peacefully. The two sisters had slept together for seventy years--seventy long, monotonous years, in which there had been no incident, no great joy, no deep sorrow--years lost. Except for the natural growth and slow decay of their frames, they had remained stationary, while around them children had grown into men and women and had pa.s.sed away.

Presently Aunt Hester opened her eyes, and they rested on the vacant pillow at her side. After a pause she slowly turned her head, and fixed her gaze upon the doctor's face. He thought that the power of speech had left her, but suddenly she spoke, quite clearly.

"Where is my sister Judith?" she asked.

There are times when the truth must be spoken, though it kill.

"Your sister died yesterday," replied the doctor.

Aunt Hester lay quite still, staring at the ceiling. Her shrivelled fingers were picking at the counter-pane. Then a gleam of intelligence pa.s.sed across her face.

"And now," she said, "I shall have a bed to myself. I have waited long enough."

Aunt Hester was very human, although the shadow of an angel's wing lay across her bed.

It was many years later that Christian Vellacott found himself in the presence of the Angel of Death again. A telegram from Havre was one day handed to him in the room at the back of the tall house in the Strand, and the result was that he crossed from Southampton to Havre that same night.

As the sun rose over the sea the next morning, its earliest rays glanced gaily through the open port-hole of a cabin in a large ocean steamer, still panting from her struggle through tepid Eastern seas.

In this little cabin lay the Jesuit missionary, Rene Drucquer, watching the moving reflections of the water, which played ceaselessly on the painted ceiling overhead. He had been sent home from India by a kind-hearted army surgeon; a doomed man, stricken by a climatic disease in which there was neither hope nor hurry. When the steamer arrived in the Seine it was found expedient to let the young missionary die where he lay. The local agent of the Society of Jesus was a kind-hearted man, and therefore a faithless servant. He acceded to Rene Drucquer's prayer to telegraph for Christian Vellacott.

And now Vellacott was actually coming down the cabin stairs. He entered the cabin and stood by the sick man's bed.

"Ah, you have come," said the Frenchman, with that peculiar tone of pathetic humour which can only be rendered in the language that he spoke.

"But how old! Do I look as old as that, I wonder? And hard--yes, hard as steel."

"Oh no," replied Vellacott. "It may be that the hardness that was once there shows now upon my face--that is all."

The Frenchman looked lovingly at him, with eyes like the eyes of a woman.

"And now you are a great man, they tell me."

Vellacott shrugged his shoulders.

"In my way," he admitted. "And you?"