"Well, come along, then."
We moved towards the door. As she opened it a faint, weak cry fell on my ear. My heart stood still.
"What"s that?" I asked, stopping on the threshold.
"Your child," she said shortly.
That, too! Oh, my love! oh, my poor love! All these long months!
"She allus said she"d send for you when she"d got over her trouble," the woman said as we climbed the stairs. ""I"d like him to see his little baby, nurse," she says; "our little baby. It"ll be all right when the baby"s born," she says. "I know he"ll come to me then. You"ll see." And I never said nothin"--not thinkin" you"d come if she was your leavins, and not dreamin" as you could be "er husband an" could stay away from "er a hour--her bein" as she was. Hush!"
She drew a key from her pocket and fitted it to the lock. She opened the door and I followed her in. It was a large, dark room, full of old-fashioned furniture. There were wax candles in bra.s.s candlesticks and a smell of lavender.
The big four-post bed was covered with white.
"My lamb--my poor pretty lamb!" said the woman, beginning to cry for the first time as she drew back the sheet. "Don"t she look beautiful?"
I stood by the bedside. I looked down on my wife"s face. Just so I had seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning when the wind and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she would wake, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek against mine--and that we should tell each other everything, and weep together, and understand and be comforted.
So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the room.
But the red lips were like marble, and she did not wake. She will not wake now ever any more.
I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written.
III.
I lay that night in a big room filled with heavy, dark furniture, in a great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains--a bed the counterpart of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.
They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.
I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me that it was I who had done that. The tall clock at the stairhead sounded the hours--eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was dark and very still.
I had not been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the intoxication of grief--a real drunkenness, more merciful than the calm that comes after.
Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought.
And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been about two that I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the ticking of the clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet determined not to hear it, _because it came from the next room_--the room where the corpse lay.
And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I was nervous--miserably nervous--a coward and a brute. It meant that I, having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body--the dead body that lay in the room next to mine. The heads of the beds were placed against the same wall; and from that wall I had fancied I heard slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So when I say that I became aware of them I mean that I at last heard a sound so distinct as to leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and fell on my cold hands as I held my breath and listened.
I don"t know how long I sat there--there was no further sound--and at last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.
"You fool!" I said to myself; "dead or alive, is she not your darling, your heart"s heart? Would you not go near to die of joy if she came to you? Pray G.o.d to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives you!"
"I wish she would come," myself answered in words, while every fibre of my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.
I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked at the polished furniture--the commonplace details of an ordinary room.
Then I thought of her, lying alone, so near me, so quiet under the white sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up, and walked across the floor and turned the door-handle?
As I thought it, I heard--plainly, unmistakably heard--the door of the chamber of death open slowly--I heard slow steps in the pa.s.sage, slow, heavy steps--I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain hands, that felt for the latch.
Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.
I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened--that door on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet I dared not turn away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the bed-foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its chin. There was a scent of lavender. Its eyes were wide open and looked at me with love unspeakable.
I could have shrieked aloud.
My wife spoke. It was the same dear voice that I had loved so to hear, but it was very weak and faint now; and now I trembled as I listened.
"You aren"t afraid of me, darling, are you, though I am dead? I heard all you said to me when you came, but I couldn"t answer. But now I"ve come back from the dead to tell you. I wasn"t really so bad as you thought me. Elvire had told me she loved Oscar. I only wrote the letter to make it easier for you. I was too proud to tell you when you were so angry, but I am not proud any more now. You"ll love me again now, won"t you, now I"m dead? One always forgives dead people."
The poor ghost"s voice was hollow and faint. Abject terror paralyzed me.
I could answer nothing.
"Say you forgive me," the thin, monotonous voice went on; "say you love me again."
I had to speak. Coward as I was, I did manage to stammer--
"Yes; I love you. I have always loved you, G.o.d help me!"
The sound of my own voice rea.s.sured me, and I ended more firmly than I began. The figure by the bed swayed a little unsteadily.
"I suppose," she said wearily, "you would be afraid, now I am dead, if I came round to you and kissed you?"
She made a movement as though she would have come to me.
Then I did shriek aloud, again and again, and covered my face with the sheet, and wound it round my head and body, and held it with all my force.
There was a moment"s silence. Then I heard my door close, and then a sound of feet and of voices, and I heard something heavy fall. I disentangled my head from the sheet. My room was empty. Then reason came back to me. I leaped from the bed.
"Ida, my darling, come back! I am not afraid! I love you! Come back!
Come back!"
I sprang to my door and flung it open. Some one was bringing a light along the pa.s.sage. On the floor, outside the door of the death-chamber, was a huddled heap--the corpse, in its grave-clothes. Dead, dead, dead.
She is buried in Mellor churchyard, and there is no stone over her.
Now, whether it was catalepsy--as the doctors said--or whether my love came back even from the dead to me who loved her, I shall never know; but this I know--that, if I had held out my arms to her as she stood at my bed-foot--if I had said, "Yes, even from the grave, my darling--from h.e.l.l itself, come back, come back to me!"--if I had had room in my coward"s heart for anything but the unreasoning terror that killed love in that hour, I should not now be here alone. I shrank from her--I feared her--I would not take her to my heart. And now she will not come to me any more.
Why do I go on living?
You see, there is the child. It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.