A Sheaf of Corn Part 26

That she could be totally indifferent to the delicacy, even although dead and fairly started on her heavenward journeying, was a bewildering fact his dull brain could scarcely grasp. He got up from the table, and taking the unshaded lamp, walked heavily upstairs to look upon this marvel--his wife who was no more.

He was a stolid creature, but was shaken enough to give a sharp growl of fear when, from the other side of the rigid form upon the bed, a head was lifted.

"h.e.l.lo!" he called. "h.e.l.lo! What yu a-doin' here? Now then! Come out o'

that, yu young warmint; don't, I'll hide ye."

The figure lying by the dead woman slipped to the ground. It wore a brown frock and a crumpled white overall trimmed with lace.

"h.e.l.lo!" the man said again. He looked stupidly at his little daughter, then pulled aside the sheet which covered his wife.

In the waxen face, with lids still half-open above the dull eyes, with lips drawn back to show the gums, was little change. Beneath the chin a large white bow of coa.r.s.e muslin had been tied. It was designed to hide the thinness of the throat, but gave, besides, a dreadful air of smartness to the poor corpse. Above the sunken chest the arms were crossed, but, over them, and over the thin hands, in a burning, s.h.i.+ning ma.s.s of resplendent colour lay--

The husband held the lamp nearer, and bent his dull, red face to peer closer at the scattered heap--the miracle of bronze and red, red living gold. "h.e.l.lo!" he said again, then moved the lamp to let its light s.h.i.+ne on his daughter's face, and stared at her.

"h.e.l.lo!"

"I ha'n't got no one now to carl my ringolets," the child sobbed, her voice rising high in the scale of rebellious misery; "my ringolets ain't no good to me no more. I ha' cut 'em off; mother, she kin have 'em. They ain't no good ter me."

The glare of the lamp held awry was upon the broad red face of the girl with the streaming, yellow eyes, with the unevenly cropped head.

"I thought yu was the boy Jim," her father said.

PINK CARNATIONS

"You see, they are my lucky flowers," she said. "I can't very well wear them on my wedding-dress, but I'm to have some to go away with. Jack's going to bring them down from town with him to-night."

I asked of Daphne, who had been the favourite of fortune from her birth, in whose cup of sweet no bitter had ever mingled, who had walked for all her happy days along a flowery path, what she meant by such nonsense.

She was ready enough to give me her absurd girlish reasons.

What she told me was the feeblest folly, of course; but even silly superst.i.tion must be pardoned to such a pretty person; and the words of a young woman who is going to be married on the morrow must be treated by a hopeless spinster, I suppose, with, at least, a semblance of respect. There had been an occasion, it seemed, long ago in her childhood, when she, having lost from her neck a locket which held her dead father's portrait, had found it, all search for it having ceased, on the carnation-bed where she had stooped to pick a flower. On the day that the news reached them that Hugh, her brother, had won the hurdle race at Cambridge (one of the chief triumphs, it appeared, of her eventless life) she had just finished arranging a vase of pink carnations for her dressing-table. Once, when her mother had been seriously ill and there had been a fear the disease from which she suffered was going to take a dangerous turn, she, Daphne, had been frightened and very unhappy. Longing for, yet dreading the doctor's arrival, she had watched him descend from his carriage, wearing a pink carnation in his coat. She had known at once that his verdict on her mother's state would be favourable; and it was. A burglar had tried to get in at Daphne's sitting-room window--at least Daphne, on what appeared to me insufficient evidence, declared that he had done so. The window-box had fallen to the ground, and had put the burglar to flight--that is, if there had been one. At any rate it was clearly proved that the window-box had fallen. It contained, of course, pink carnations.

And so on to many other instances, chief among which was the fact that the first time she had beheld the handsome face of the Jack she was to marry to-morrow she had worn a bunch of her favourite flowers in the bodice of her white silk dress. Afterwards, on the day of the County Ball, at which function he had proposed, he had sent her a bouquet composed entirely of pink carnations, and had chosen one of those blooms for his own b.u.t.tonhole.

"Without knowing--without my having even mentioned to him that they brought me luck!" Daphne a.s.sured me, the dark, poetic eyes in her small face large with the mystery of it. "Do you wonder Jack agrees with me I _must_ not be without them on my wedding-day?"

By her mother's command, and in order that she might not look, as I am a.s.sured many brides do look, a "perfect rag" on her wedding-day, Daphne was to rest for a certain number of hours, that afternoon. She was forbidden, even, to write one of the seventy still remaining out of the three hundred letters of thanks to the donors of wedding-presents.

She should have to work them off--so many a day--on her honeymoon, Daphne ruefully supposed. Jack would help. She would make him direct the envelopes. She bore a grudge apparently against the givers of the treasures under which the tables in the morning-room were groaning.

"If you could only know what it has been!" she sighed. "However hard I wrote I couldn't keep pace. No sooner had I wiped one name off the list than three more presents had come!"

From this onerous duty, however, she was now to desist, and from all fatigue of receiving the guests who were arriving by different trains throughout the day. She was to lie at her ease on silken cus.h.i.+ons in that pretty room of her own, upon whose window-box the supposit.i.tious burglar had set his too heavy boot. I was amused to see that the white chintzes of the chairs and hangings were flowered with pink carnations, and that garlands of the flower, tied with pink ribbons, formed the frieze of the white wallpaper.

"Well, you were always a petted and spoilt child," I said to her; "and I suppose you are going to be so to the end of the chapter."

"Only more so," she said, with her youthful arrogance. "You can't think what a splendid hand at spoiling Jack is."

I laughed, told her to let me know how much he spoilt her in five years' time, and left her. For a servant had interrupted our conversation with the announcement that Mr Mavor, who had returned from town, would be glad to speak to me.

"Hughie? how absurd!" Daphne said, who wanted to go on talking to me about her lover. "As if Hughie could possibly have a thing to say to you which would not keep, Hannah!"

"It is to make me an offer of marriage I have not the slightest doubt,"

I told her, being of an age when a woman can make jokes of that kind about herself and pretend not to feel the heartp.r.i.c.k.

I found the head of the house in the room which had been turned into a museum of objects of art--precious and not precious--for exhibition on the morrow. I had known the young man from boyhood, and I saw at once that something was amiss. He had left for town before my arrival that morning, and this was our first meeting, but he forgot to come forward and put out his hand. He stalked past me, instead, and banged the door by which I had entered; then he seized me by the arm.

"Hannah," he said, "I want to talk to you. I want your advice. We're in a devil of a mess."

"It's the wedding-dress, or the wedding-cake!" I said, staring at him.

"One of them hasn't come!"

"It's about Marston. Something I only heard to-day. He must not be allowed to marry my sister."

"Hughie!"

He took his hand from my arm, laid it on one of the tables spread with the presents. There was a faint ringing of silver and china to show the hand was not steady. He is a self-contained, st.u.r.dily-built, matter-of-fact young man in the early twenties; quite unlike his sister, whose appearance is elegantly fragile, who is filled with nerves, and sensitive to the fingertips.

"I got a letter this morning," he went on, and for a moment fumbled in his coat-pocket as if with the intention, quickly relinquished, of showing it. "It was from a woman; telling me of certain incidents in Marston's career."

"Probably all made up. Lies."

"It isn't. Once for all, don't waste time in saying that. I went up this morning to the address she gave me. I saw her. She told me worse than she wrote--poor wretch! I didn't take it for gospel. I got confirmation, all round. There isn't room for the shadow of a doubt.

She left her husband a year ago for Marston----"

"A year ago? Only a year?"

"A year. The husband got a divorce; this brute refused to marry her."

"Oh, Hugh!"

"It's worse. I can't tell you all. Sufficient that he played the traitor, the coward, the beast. Left her to face shame, and poverty, and--everything, alone."

"Can it be so bad! You are certain?"

He lifted the unsteady hand and laid it open, heavily again upon the table where the Crown Derby coffee services, the silver inkstands, m.u.f.fineers and bridge boxes, whose donors had not even been thanked, jingled with a tiny music once more.

"Certain. Now, don't keep repeating that word, Hannah. I don't want to waste time producing proofs, but I've got them. It's as certain as death. And it's not the only thing. Once I was on his track--late in the day as it was--I learnt more. We live so in a hole, down here, and nothing like this has ever come near us. We've taken people for what they seemed to be--as I, a.s.s that I was, took Marston--and never poked into their histories. The man's got a bad record, all along. Decent people have closed their doors in his face."

"_What_ will you do, Hugh? What _can_ you do now?"

"Do? Stop the marriage," he said. He glared for a minute upon the costly display on the table, then turned his back on it all, and carried his white face to the window. "My sister shall never marry that scoundrel," he said.

"Daphne's heart will break."