For a while there was no answer. Sandy, absorbed in the interest of the situation, clung close to his father and stopped crying.
At last Louie suddenly flung the door wide open.
"What do you want?" she said defiantly, with the gesture and bearing of a tragic actress. She was, however, deadly white, and David, looking past her, saw that Cecile was lying wide awake in her little bed.
"Sandy wants to give Cecile her cake," he said quietly, "and to tell her that he is sorry for striking her."
He carried his boy up to Cecile. A smile flashed over the child"s worn face. She held out her little arms. David, infinitely touched, laid down Sandy, and the children crooned together on the same pillow, he trying to stuff the cake into Cecile"s mouth, she gently refusing.
"She"s ill," said Louie abruptly, "she"s feverish--I want a doctor."
"We can get one directly," he said. "Will you come down and have some food? Lucy has gone to bed. If Lizzie comes and sits by the children, perhaps they will go to sleep. I can carry Sandy back later."
Louie paused irresolutely. Then she went up to the bed, knelt down by it, and took Cecile in her arms.
"You can take him away," she said, pointing to Sandy. "I will put her to sleep. Don"t you send me anything to eat. I want a doctor.
And if you won"t order a fly for me at twenty minutes to nine to-morrow, I will go out myself, that"s all."
"Louie!" he cried, holding out his hand to her in despair, "why will you treat us in this way--what have we done to you?"
"Never you mind," she said sullenly, gathering the child to her and confronting him with steady eyes. There was a certain magnificence in their wide unconscious despair--in this one fierce pa.s.sion.
She and Lucy did not meet again. In the morning David paid her her hundred pounds, and took her and Cecile to the station, a doctor having seen the child the night before, and prescribed medicine, which had given her a quiet night. Louie barely thanked him for the money. She was almost silent and still very pale.
Just before they parted, the thought of the tyranny of such a nature, of the life to which she was going back, wrung the brother"s heart. The outrage of the day before dropped from his mind as of no account, effaced by sterner realities.
"Write to me, Louie!" he said to her just as the train was moving off; "I could always come if there was trouble--or Dora."
She did not answer, and her hand dropped from his. But he remembered afterwards that her eyes were fixed upon him, as long as the train was in sight, and the picture of her dark possessed look will be with him to the end.
CHAPTER VII
It was a warm April Sunday. Lucy and Dora were pacing up and down in the garden, and Lucy was talking in a quick, low voice.
"Oh! there was something, Dora. You know as well as I do there was something. That awful woman didn"t say that for nothing. I suppose he"d tell me if I asked him."
"Then why don"t you ask him?" said Dora, with a little frown.
Lucy gathered a sprig of budding lilac, and restlessly stripped off its young green.
"It isn"t very pleasant," she said at last, slowly. "I dare say it"s silly to expect your husband never to have looked at anybody else--"
She paused again, unable to explain herself. Dora glanced at her, and was somewhat struck by her thin and worn appearance. She had often, moreover, seemed to her cousin to be fretting during these last weeks. Not that there was much difference in her ways with David and Sandy. But her small vanities, prejudices, and pa.s.sions were certainly less apparent of late; she ordered her two servants about less; she was less interested in her clothes, less eager for social amus.e.m.e.nt. It was as though something clouding and dulling had pa.s.sed over a personality which was naturally restless and vivacious.
Yet it was only to-day, in the course of some conversation about Louie, of whom nothing had been heard since her departure, that Lucy had for the first time broken silence on the subject of those insolent words of her sister-in-law, which Ancrum and Dora had listened to with painful shock, while to Reuben and Hannah, pre-occupied with their own long-matured ideas of Louie, they had been the mere froth of a venomous tongue.
"Why didn"t you ask him about it at first--just after?" Dora resumed.
"I didn"t want to," said Lucy, after a minute, and then would say no more. But she walked along, thinking, unhappily, of the moment when David had taken her into the library to be out of the sound of Louie"s rage; of her angry desire to ask him questions, checked by a childish fear she could not a.n.a.lyse, as to what the answers might be; of his troubled, stormy face; and of the tender ways by which he tried to calm and comfort her. It had seemed to her that once or twice he had been on the point of saying something grave and unusual, but in the end he had refrained. Louie had gone away; their everyday life had begun again; he had been very full, in the intervals of his hard daily business, of the rebuilding of the James Street court, and of the apprentices" school; and, led by a variety of impulses--by a sense of jeopardised possession and a conscience speaking with new emphasis and authority--she had taken care that he should talk to her about both; she had haunted him in the library, and her presence there, once the signal of antagonism and dispute, had ceased to have any such meaning for him. Her sympathy was not very intelligent, and there was at times a childish note of sulkiness and reluctance in it; she was extremely ready to say, "I told you so," if anything went wrong; but, nevertheless, there was a tacit renunciation at the root of her new manner to him which he perfectly understood, and rewarded in his own ardent, affectionate way.
As she sauntered along in this pale gleam of sun, now drinking in the soft April wind, now stooping to look at the few clumps of crocuses and daffodils which were pushing through the blackened earth, Lucy had once more a vague sense that her life this spring--this past year--had been hard. It was like the feeling of one who first realises the intensity of some long effort or struggle in looking back upon it. Her little life had been breathed into by a divine breath, and growth, expansion, had brought a pain and discontent she had never known before.
Dora meanwhile had her own thoughts. She was lost in memories of that first talk of hers with David Grieve after his return from Paris, with the marks of his fierce, mysterious grief fresh upon him; then, pursuing her recollection of him through the years, she came to a point of feeling where she said, with sudden energy, throwing her arm round Lucy, and taking up the thread of their conversation:--
"I wouldn"t let what Louie said worry you a bit, Lucy. Of course, she wanted to make mischief; but you know, and I know, what sort of a man David has been since you and he were married. That"ll be enough for you, I should think."
Lucy flushed. She had once possessed very little reticence, and had been quite ready to talk her husband over, any day and all day, with Dora. But now, though she would begin in the old way, there soon came a point when something tied her tongue.
This time she attacked the lilac-bushes again with a restless hand.
"Why, I thought you were shocked at his opinions," she said, proudly.
Dora sighed. Her conscience had not waited for Lucy"s remark to make her aware of the constant perplexity between authority and natural feeling into which David"s ideals were perpetually throwing her.
"They make one very sad," she said, looking away. "But we must believe that G.o.d, who sees everything, judges as we cannot do."
Lucy fired up at once. It annoyed her to have Dora making spiritual allowance for David in this way.
"I don"t believe G.o.d wants anything but that people should be good,"
she said. "I am sure there are lots of things like that in the New Testament."
Dora shook her head slowly. ""He that hath not the Son, hath not life,"" she said under her breath, a sudden pa.s.sion leaping to her eye.
Lucy looked at her indignantly. "I don"t agree with you, Dora--there! And it all depends on what things mean."
"The meaning is quite plain," said Dora, with rigid persistence. "O Lucy, don"t be led away. I missed you at early service this morning."
The look she threw her cousin melted into a pathetic and heavenly reproach.
"Well, I know," said Lucy, ungraciously, "I was tired. I don"t know what"s wrong with me these last weeks; I can"t get up in the morning."
Dora only looked grieved. Lucy understood that her plea seemed to her cousin too trivial and sinful to be noticed.
"Oh! I dare say I"d go," she said in her own mind, defiantly, "if _he_ went."
Aloud, she said:--
"Dora, just look at this cheek of mine; I can"t think what the swelling is."
And she turned her right cheek to Dora, pointing to a lump, not discoloured, but rather large, above the cheek-bone. Dora stopped, and looked at it carefully.
"Yes, I had noticed it," she said. "It is odd. Can"t you account for it in any way?"
"No. It"s been coming some little while. David says I must ask Dr.