"And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle, just outside the little wicket-gate.
"I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and on my way home at daybreak pa.s.sed by the cottage. The door stood open.
My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the cheerless yellow paper on the wall. "Amy!" I called aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. "Gone!" he said distinctly. "I had only asked for water--only for a little water...."
"He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching a painfully gasped word now and then. They were no longer in his own language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And with his panting breast and l.u.s.trous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him.
She had left him--sick--helpless--thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul. "Why?" he cried in the penetrating and indignant voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a swish of rain answered.
"And as I turned away to shut the door he p.r.o.nounced the word "Merciful!" and expired.
"Eventually I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death.
His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away.
Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking st.u.r.dily between the dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.
""Do you know where your daughter is?" I asked.
""Don"t I!" he cried. "I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this."
""He won"t frighten her any more," I said. "He is dead."
"He struck with his stick at the mud.
""And there"s the child."
"Then, after thinking deeply for a while--""I don"t know that it isn"t for the best."
"That"s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a pa.s.sion of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow pa.s.ses away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is "Amy Foster"s boy." She calls him Johnny--which means Little John.
"It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy"s cot in a very pa.s.sion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one--the father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."