Into the Highways and Hedges Part 46

Meg leaned forward, without releasing her hand, and they kissed softly.

"I shall stay--till the end," she whispered in return.

So, very quietly and gently, Margaret Thorpe stole back to the place Meg Deane had left; but knew, even while her heart was filled with thankfulness, that, though the place might be the same, yet the girl who had left it would return no more.

Mr. Deane woke with a contented smile on his lips. "I dreamt of you, my Meg," he said. And, from that moment, he seemed to have simply put aside all that had happened since Meg had been his spoilt darling of long ago.

His mind wandered to her nursery rather than to her girlish days--to that very far away time, before Mrs. Russelthorpe's reign, when his little girl had sat on his knee, and ruled him with sweet baby tyranny.

Margaret tried once to recall his mind to the present; for her heart ached for a few words that she might treasure--words spoken to her real and womanly self; but the attempt distressed him, and she gave it up.

She slept on the sofa in his room; for he became uneasy when she was out of his sight; but the ebbing away of his life was quiet and gradual as the ebb of a summer sea.

Perhaps the faculty he had always possessed of forgetting troublesome matters helped to make his last days happy.

Apparently he utterly forgot the existence of the preacher. The grown-up daughter had given him more pain than pleasure; but the baby girl had been an unmixed joy. He loved to call her by the old pet names of her childhood. Laura, who came every day, watched her sister wonderingly.

Once, when Meg playfully answered some allusion to an old family joke, Laura felt a sudden longing to thrust aside the veil, to ask Meg about all the strange experiences that were surely in the background, to beg her to say whether the preacher was kind or cruel to her; but they both refrained from bringing any subject into that chamber which was already sanctified by the approach of the great healer.

Mrs. Russelthorpe came in one day, and stood by the bedside.

Mr. Deane turned his head away from her, as if her presence reminded him of something he preferred to forget; then, apparently with some effort, he recalled his thoughts.

"You must make friends with your aunt, little Meg. We must bury old grudges before--what is it?--before the sun goes down. It is going down fast!"

Meg held out her hand across the bed--for his sake she would have made friends with any one; but Mrs. Russelthorpe shook her head. "There is no need for us to go through that farce; for his thoughts have wandered again."

"Aunt Russelthorpe," said Meg, "let us both watch by him now; we both care for him--there is room for us both."

"No!" said her aunt. "There is room for only one of us two, Margaret; and he has chosen. Let us have no pretences. Stay where you are. You have won!" and Meg stayed.

She used to read to him by the hour, because he loved the sound of her voice, going on and on in the low monotonous key that soothed him. It was doubtful whether he ever followed the sense of what she read, and, as a matter of fact, Meg, though she would sit half the day with her hand in his and her head bent over a book, would have been puzzled if called on to give an account of what her tongue had been mechanically repeating.

The atmosphere was so peaceful that it seemed as if Time himself stood still for a s.p.a.ce with folded wings. "You are keeping so close to me, little Meg," her father said once with a dreamy smile,--"so close, that if you don't take care, when I go through the great gates, you will slip in too by mistake."

Meg pressed closer to him still; and yet, for all her clinging, she knew that there was a life's experience, even now, between him and her.

A thick velvet curtain, curiously embroidered in gold silks, hung across the door. It shut out the whole of the outside world for five days.

At the end of that time, Laura, pus.h.i.+ng it aside, touched Meg's shoulder as she sat in her usual place.

"Your husband is outside," she said. "I pa.s.sed him on my way in. He told me to tell you that he should like a minute's sight of you, but that you need not hurry--he could wait."

Meg made a sign that she would come; and presently, taking a shawl from Laura, slid gently out of the room, while her father's eyes were closed.

She opened the front door and stood at the top of the steps, s.h.i.+vering a little, though the evening was hot, for the flower-scented room upstairs was hotter.

A street musician was playing, and some children were shouting and dancing. After the silence she had left behind that curtain, the merry tune and the unsubdued voices sounded strangely loud and bold.

"My la.s.s," said the preacher. "Ye are lookin' liker a bit o' moonlight than ever! Come down to me."

And Meg, putting the shawl over her head, ran down, and stood beside him on the pavement. They walked down the length of the square together. The street player ceased playing for a moment to stare at the woman who had stepped out of the front door of No. 35 to keep company with a working man, and then the tune ground on again.

"Barnabas," she said in a low voice, "I shall come to you the very moment that--that he does not need me. I do not think Aunt Russelthorpe would keep me a second."

"And you'll not need to ask her!" said the preacher quickly. "Come to me any time, la.s.s; though ye'll find it a bit uncomfortable, I'm afear'd!

Still, we'll do somehow."

He frowned, considering the possibilities of Giles' house, then turned to her with a smile. "Do you feel as if ye'd stepped backwards a year or so?"

"No!" said Margaret. "There is no such thing as 'going back,' in reality. Is that Laura making a sign to me? No! it is only the lace curtain moving. He is still asleep, then. Tell me why you came, Barnabas. Had you anything especial to say to me?"

But her glance still rested anxiously on the window.

"Ay, I had some'ut to tell ye," he answered; "though I had nigh forgotten it in seeing ye. I've been a bit fashed about--ye'll be surprised, Margaret--about Mr. Cohen. Do you know whereabouts he lives?

Happen, it was a delusion; but yet, I'd as lief be sartain that it's _not_ him who is lyin' murdered i' the marshes."

He paused; but Margaret was too much surprised to speak.

"I'd ha' liked," he went on, more to himself than her, "I'd ha' liked to ha' had it out betwixt him and me, in a fair fight wi' no quarter asked--only I was sworn, and I'm glad I didn't. But that's one thing; and to think o' him bein' struck down from behind, lyin' there alone for days an' nights, helpless i' the sunlight an' the moonlight; cut off wi'out the chance of givin' a free blow; that's different. Where does he live? I must make my mind easy."

Meg was thoroughly roused this time, even to a momentary forgetting of that room upstairs.

"Mr. Sauls murdered!" she said. "It can't be true. What makes you fancy that? It is too horrible; it can't be true!"

She looked at his troubled face anxiously. Had his violent feeling against Mr. Sauls, and his equally strong remorse and efforts to subdue it, given rise to a morbid imagination on the subject? She knew (she understood the preacher better than of old) how violent both his hate and his horror of himself for so hating could be.

"Ay, it's horrible," he answered. "Margaret! when the l.u.s.t for a man's blood has been strong, and then one hears of a sudden that, mayhap, the man's been killed, one feels as if one's own thought had gotten shape and killed him!"

There was a thrill in the preacher's voice that made Meg draw closer to him. They had reached the end of the square, but she turned again.

"Will you not tell me more?" she asked.

He hesitated. "If I tell ye, do ye hold that I tell ye as countin' ye one wi' mysel'? An' will 'ee feel bound, as I hold myself bound, to keep it secret?"

"Yes," said Meg.

"Some one confessed to me that he'd killed a man as was walking alone across the marshes, an' robbed him. And it came to my mind as it were Mr. Sauls. There aren't many about us as are worth the robbing, an' very few but labourers as takes that way to th' farm. The man as told me was in a sort o' fever; I didn't think he was goin' to live, and no more did he; he was terrible scared o' dying, or I fancy he'd never ha' let it out. All one night he was very bad; then he quieted down an' slept, an'

awoke up a bit better, eatin' as if he'd been clemmed, but not takin'

notice o' what I said to him, nor seemingly understandin' a word. I tried to persuade him to gi'e himsel' up to justice, but it seemed just waste o' breath. I went down to get him some'ut more to eat, an' when I came back he were gone! he must ha' got his clothes on and just slipped through the window; happen, he understood a bit more nor I thought!"

"Who is the man?" asked Meg, in a horrified whisper.

"I'd as lief not tell ye that," said Barnabas; "for ye'd better not know."

"If--if it is true--what shall you do?"

"Nothing!" he answered decidedly. "What is told i' that way must be as safe as if it hadn't been breathed. I'd ha' tried to make the murderer confess and be hung, for the savin' o' his soul; but I'd not tell on him mysel', I'd sooner go to the gallows; an', mind, ye ha' sworn it shall be th' same wi' you, Margaret."