A Sheaf of Corn Part 11

"Then, why?" she asked him, whisperingly. "Why?"

He flung round upon her, and she fell back from the vehement accusing of his eyes.

"Why?" he repeated. "Why?" He threw a hand at the empty sofa. "There!"

he said. "There--where you ask me to turn my back--my dead wife lies there--always for me. And she is between you and me for ever."

It sounded to her but the utterance of morbidity. The strange words were only a token of that from which she had come to save him. She had the courage to be unmaidenly, to persist.

"I, at any rate, do not see it so," she said. "To have me for your friend is to do no wrong to your dead wife."

"How can we be friends--you and I?" he asked her; and she, who knew they could not now be merely that, did not speak.

"I, who for your sake cursed her in my heart," he went on, his shaken voice hushed to an awe-struck whisper. "You, who put into her hands the poison which killed her."

"I?" she breathed, and drew back, staring at him, wondering, for one dreadful moment, had his unhealthy brooding turned his brain. "Killed her? I?"

"You!" he said, wildly. He went across the room, and shut the door behind her they had left ajar. "If it had been I myself I could have borne it; but you--_you_--! I found the empty bottle, that night, dropped from her hand; the label--'Poison'--and your name----"

"The chloral bottle?" she asked him; and the cloud of fear and dismay lifted from her eyes, and they were alight with understanding and with hope. She went swiftly to him and caught his arm. "Horace, do you remember that you warned me never to give her any narcotic, however earnestly she might beg for it--that it would not be safe--that she would kill herself? Do you remember?"

"But you gave it, all the same. Your name was on the bottle----"

"On the bottle--of water," she said. "It never held anything else. I used to take it home and fill it every day. The doctor told me to do it--it was a harmless fraud we played on her. She used to drink it, never doubting, and fall asleep----"

"Kate!"

She held him tightly by his arm, and looked with eyes that were dimmed with tears of most blessed relief upon the working of his face.

As, later, they went together through the little garden, and pa.s.sed again the rudely-chalked question upon the gate--"Shall I stay here with you, and face the music," Kate Grantley asked, "or will you come away with me to Paris?"

"AS 'TWAS TOLD TO ME"

Her husband had died suddenly in the third year of their marriage, and she had been left a young widow with their only child.

The husband had been dead a year--a year pa.s.sed in close seclusion in her country home--when she went out on a bright morning of the early spring, taking her little daughter with her, to gather primroses in the plantation bordering one extremity of the park around her house.

She had remembered when she arose in the morning that the day was the anniversary of her husband's death.

A year only! It had seemed like twenty years. For she was very young, and fairly rich and much admired, and the life she had hitherto led had not prepared her to support loneliness and retirement profitably. The shock of the sudden death had been terrible. She had thought that she should die of it; but she did not even fall ill. And there was the child, whom she adored. And later there had arisen a new interest.

The new interest, in the form of Major Harold Walsh, was at her elbow on this kind morning of sweetest spring. He was a middle-aged man, with a handsome, hard face and a very tender manner, and he chose, as some may think inopportunely, the anniversary of the husband's death to make the widow an offer of marriage.

The widow reminded him of what had happened on that day a year ago, pointed out that she could not possibly entertain such a proposition so soon, even cried a little when she spoke of her husband. But in no other way did she discourage the tender-mannered major with the hard face.

It would have been well-nigh impossible for a man to make an offer of marriage with a child of three years old clinging to her mother's skirts and incessantly babbling in her mother's ear; so the child with her nurse was sent into the interior of the plantation, in search of the lovely primroses said to flourish there, while the two elders wandered with slow steps and down-bent eyes upon the outskirts of the coppice.

So they would have been content to wander for hours, perhaps--he begging for a.s.surances that she with an only half-feigned, pretty reluctance gave--but that their agreeable dalliance was cut short by a sufficiently alarming interruption.

She did not absolutely dislike him? Liked him--very much, even? That was well. Years hence, if he waited patiently--and he would try, he would try to wait--she might even get to love him a little? Was that asking too much? Well, not just yet, then; he would wait. But he was not to go away unhappy? Not utterly discouraged? He need not, for what had taken place between them, debar himself entirely of the delight of her society, he might--?

It was at that instant of the major's soft-voiced pleading and of the widow's low, monosyllabic replies, that a voice from out the plantation on their left smote sharply upon their ears. It called affrightedly upon Mrs Eddington's name.

The mother, whose mother-love was, and would always be, the strongest pa.s.sion of her life, fled into the wood. Following the direction of the voice, in two minutes she came upon the kneeling form of the nurse; and the nurse's white and terrified face looked up at her across the unconscious form of the little child.

"I found her so," the woman got out through chattering teeth. "I sat reading, and she ran to the other side of the tree. She was talking to me, and then she didn't talk, and I went round and found--this!"

With shaking fingers the mother tore asunder the broad muslin strings of the hat upon which the child lay, rent open the dainty dress at the throat--"Look at mother! Milly! Milly! Look at mother!" she called wildly, impatiently, fiercely even.

As if in answer to the pa.s.sionate appeal, the child's dark lashes stirred for a moment on the transparent cheek; were still; stirred again; then the dark eyes, so like the dark eyes of the dead father, opened upon the mother's face.

"Only fainted," the gentleman who had been proposing to officiate as Milly's stepfather said. He was much relieved that the scene, at which he had looked on awkwardly enough, was over. That for a three-year-old child to faint was an unusual, an alarming occurrence, he did not, of course, understand. Certainly, if Mrs Eddington thought it necessary, he would go for the doctor. He could probably bring him quicker than a groom. Should he carry the little Milly home first?

But the mother must carry Milly herself. No; nurse should certainly not touch her. Never again should nurse, who had let the child for a minute out of her sight, touch Milly.

Nurse, surrept.i.tiously grasping a frill of the child's muslin frock, wept, silent and remorseful, as she walked alongside.

Once, the child, who lay for the better part of the half-mile to her home in a kind of stupor, opened her eyes again beneath her mother's frightened gaze and was heard to mutter something about some flowers.

"She is asking for the primroses she had gathered!" Mrs Eddington whispered, in a tone of intensest relief. "Did you bring them, nurse?"

The unfortunate nurse, of course, had not brought them.

"Milly's po'r flo'rs is dead," Milly grieved in the little weak voice they heard then for the first time. "Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs, and they died."

To that astonis.h.i.+ng statement the child adhered during the first days of her long illness, till she forgot, and spoke of it no more. For any questioning, she gave no explanation of her words. She never enlarged upon the first declaration in any way, nor did she even alter the form of the words in which she gave it expression. Always she alluded to the curious delusion with a grieving voice, often with tears.

"Dear daddy is dead, darling," the mother said to her in an awed whisper, kneeling at her side. "He could not come to Milly."

"Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs, and they died," the sad little voice protested; and the child softly whimpered upon the pillow.

"The child can't, of course, even remember her father," Major Walsh said, with impatience, being sick of the subject and the importance attached to it. "She was only two when he died."

"How can you tell what a child of two remembers?" Mrs Eddington asked.

"She was very fond of Harry. I think she does remember."

Persistently, in her mind recurred an episode of the last day of her husband's life. He had carried his little daughter, laughing and prattling to him, down from the nursery, and had put her in her mother's arms. The child, when he turned to go, had clung to him.

"Don't leave Milly, daddy. Take Milly too," she cried. Laughing, he had kissed her. "Not now--not now," he had said--"but later I will come and take Milly."

Then he had gone out, with a smile still on his face, and had fallen dead as he walked across the park.

It was inevitable that in these days the memory of her husband should more fully occupy the young widow's mind. He had died of heart disease; his child, it was now discovered, had a certain weakness of the heart.

A superst.i.tious feeling that she had not remembered him enough, and that this was her punishment, took possession of Mrs Eddington's brain.

She remembered with remorse what had been occurring at the moment her child had fallen insensible among the primroses. On the very anniversary of her poor Harry's death she had forgotten him so far!

Never would she forget him again.