Chapter Twenty Nine.
Colonel Grey led Mrs Lawless into a room on the right of the hall and rang the bell. He ordered wine, which he insisted on his companion drinking. He also requested that two bedrooms should be in readiness and a meal prepared. The ordinary affairs of life could not be neglected even if the issues at stake were distressingly serious. The Colonel was feeling more settled in mind since he was in possession of the facts. There was no immediate cause for alarm, he decided; and sought to hearten Mrs Lawless with his sanguine views. But though she appeared to listen she was too obviously nervous to attend to what he said. She sipped her wine, sitting by the fluttering curtains near the open window, looking out at the sunshine.
“Perhaps I ought not to have come,” she said once, and appeared while looking at nothing in particular to be watching the road with grave intentness. “I don’t think he’ll consent to see me.”
She was remembering how recently he had said to her that if she sent for him again he would not come. She had not sent, but her presence there amounted to the same thing.
And then after a while the door opened and he came in. The Colonel uttered a sudden exclamation.
“My dear fellow!” he cried in astonishment, his manner charged with grave solicitude. “My dear fellow! Is this wise?”
Mrs Lawless sprang up from her chair, but he put out a hand and motioned her back, and with her startled eyes on his leaden face, she sank down again without speaking. Lawless took a seat.
“I don’t know how you came to hear of this,” he said. “I didn’t intend it should get about. They’re making more of it than they need. In a few days I should have been back in Cape Town.”
He looked inquiringly at the Colonel.
“You’ve seen Hayhurst, I suppose?”
“Yes. He delivered the letters safely.” He sat forward and stared at the ghastly suffering face. “He gave me a fairly graphic history of their recovery. The whole circumstances were a huge surprise,—huge. It was a masterly undertaking. The service you have rendered is incalculable. When the time comes we shall know how to thank you more adequately, in the meanwhile you have our very earnest gratitude; and I can only express my sincere regret that the result should be so disastrous for you.”
Colonel Grey advanced his hand. To his surprise Lawless refused to take it.
“Disastrous! Yes,” he answered. “Letters that are of a nature to lend themselves to blackmailing purposes are not worth the risk of a man’s life—and character. I suppose you might argue that I’ve boasted I hold life cheaply, and you doubtless consider I have no character to lose. Confess now,” he added, in response to the other’s hastily uttered protest, “that until those letters were safe in your hands you entertained a suspicion that I might misuse them?”
The Colonel sought for words and sought vainly. He was far too ruggedly honest to deny the charge. After a moment or two of silence he tacitly admitted it.
“Most men are liable to mistakes,” he said. “And... I suppose I was prejudiced.”
The man lying back in the easy-chair smiled drily.
“I am so unfortunate as to prejudice most people unfavourably. A profligate adventurer can scarcely expect to do otherwise.”
An almost inaudible sound broke from Zoë Lawless’ lips. He did not look at her but continued in the same bitter strain to the pain and embarrassment of both his hearers.
“For every offence of which I’ve been guilty I’ve had to pay to the uttermost farthing. On appearance I’ve been convicted of sins I haven’t committed. It’s the luck, I suppose, of the man who is marked for failure from the beginning of things.”
“I can understand,” Colonel Grey said, making ready allowance for his mood, “your resentment of certain injuries. I offer you my frank apologies for the very unworthy suspicions I have entertained. But if I have harboured doubts of you, I have also had moments when I have felt that those doubts were unjustified. I assert, in spite of your morbid imagining, that you more readily inspire confidence than distrust.”
“Then how comes it that I failed in inspiring you with confidence?”
“It was probably,” Colonel Grey began, and stopped, looking with some pity at the haggard face. “Really, my dear fellow,” he said, “is it wise to continue this painful subject?”
“Why not?” The man in the chair sat straighter and pulled himself together with an effort. “I’ve a fancy somehow,” he said, “for having the matter out... You’ve had a down on me ever since you knew I fought against my own side in the Boer war. It’s natural, of course—most people would feel as you do about it. And yet I don’t regret it—even now.”
“That’s an old story,” the Colonel said. “Why revive it?”
“I’ve a feeling I should like to speak of it. I’ve never explained my motive—no one would understand, or sympathise with it, if I did. In your place, reversing the circumstances, I should feel as you do about it. But when a man has been kicked out of the Service for cowardice, there’s something he owes to himself as well as to his country. I had to prove my nature for my own satisfaction. If they’d given me a chance in the ranks I shouldn’t have fought for the Boers. But I had to face the bullets again... I had to disprove for my personal satisfaction that quality of unaccountable fear that forced me to retreat in a dangerous and important crisis. God knows what sudden and uncontrolled impulse governed me on that occasion! ... I experienced that same cold terror once again when, unarmed, I faced one of my own Tommies with a fixed bayonet in his hand. I can feel the horror of that terror now—the mad and well-nigh uncontrollable impulse to turn my back and run. But the motive that had led me to join the fighting proved stronger than my fear. I went for him with my hands; and the horror left me, as a nightmare terror leaves a sleeper when he wakes... That is the history of this scar on my face.”
He paused, pressed his hand to his brow as if weary, and then resumed with a sort of dogged determination to justify himself,—to make these two people, who both in their hearts he knew condemned utterly what he had felt to be a legitimate means of correcting a base tendency before it became confirmed in him as an incorrigible fault, understand in a sense,—see and feel with him. It mattered to him so tremendously, the opinion of these two silent listeners, the one who sat with crossed knees, watching him intently, the other with her troubled eyes downcast, looking upon the ground. And both, he felt, judging him,—condemning him.
“You’ll think it at one with the rest, no doubt,” he said; “but I don’t regret the thing I did which all Englishmen abhor. I know now that I can face death without flinching. I conquered fear. The knowledge gives me all the satisfaction necessary to qualify the odium of the term traitor. It’s not the right way to look at the matter, perhaps; but that’s how it is.”
“It’s not the right spirit—no?” The Colonel spoke gruffly. “No man is justified in sacrificing honour and duty to his own ends. I recognise that your object was not altogether unworthy. But as a soldier you had no choice.”
Mrs Lawless looked up in silent appeal at the speaker. Then abruptly she rose and stood with her back to the room, facing the window. Lawless rose also. His face was grey, and the skin seemed to have tightened over the bones as it does after a sharp or a long illness. Colonel Grey had seen men look as he did who had fallen on the field; he had seen them too, lots of them, in hospital.
Lawless put out a hand gropingly. He was tired. He had better get back to bed. It was all finished. He had not succeeded in convincing them. They saw things from a different level; they couldn’t get down to him.
“I daresay you’re right,” he said uncertainly. “Anyway, it hardly seems to matter. I’m derelict... and done for.”
Mrs Lawless turned quickly. He did not see the swift rush of pity that suffused her face, the tears that streamed from her eyes. He was not conscious that she sprang towards him, that it was her arm about him that saved him from falling when, having used up his last reserve of strength in attempting to gain the door, he stumbled over a mat in his progress, and fell forward a collapsed and pitiful object, with drawn and shrunken features, and pallid lips.
The Colonel was at her side in an instant.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “He’s only fainted. We’d better get him back to bed. He ought never to have left it... The folly of it!”
“I ought to have come,” she whispered, sobbing. “You see—I did no good... The sight of me distressed him. I might have guessed...”
She knelt on the floor beside him and pillowed his head on her knee. It gave her infinite pleasure merely to hold him in her arms against the bosom that had hungered for him so long. But oh! the pity of it! to see him reduced, this strong man, to a mere helpless wreck. She drew him closer to her and her tears fell on his face.
“I believe he’s dying,” she murmured... “And he’ll never know how greatly I loved him... Why do we keep these things to ourselves till too late?”
The Colonel rang for assistance. To his infinite relief it was the schoolmaster who came to the door when it opened. In his assumption of authority Mr Burton seemed a tower of strength. He took in the situation at a glance, and, unaccountably, appeared not in the least surprised. He assumed prompt and resolute command. Between them he and the Colonel got the patient back to his room and into bed. Mr Burton, anticipating something of the sort when Lawless insisted on dressing, had sent for the doctor, and the medical man arrived very shortly, and standing at the bedside looked with grave dissatisfaction at his patient.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked concisely.
And Mr Burton explained.
While they conferred and acted in the sick-room, Mrs Lawless remained outside the door, listening for any sound from within, her face tense with anxiety, and her eyes tormented. After a while the door opened and the Colonel came forth, and seeing her there took her by the arm and led her back to the sitting-room.
“They’ll be some time in there,” he said. “You can’t stand about waiting. You shall see him before he leaves.”
“Was he better?” she asked, not heeding him.
“He’d come round—Yes.”
She sat down at a small table, and stretched her arms upon it, and looked at him miserably.
“I have felt all along,” she said, “that that would be the end. It’s his life, Colonel Grey, that he’s given—for a packet of letters. A packet of letters! ... Oh! dear God!” she cried, and dropped her face on her arms and broke down again and wept.
“And what is his reward?” she flashed suddenly, looking up at him through her tears. “He came to you,—to you—I don’t know why, unless it’s because you are a soldier and he felt that as a soldier you judged him—full of a human appeal, and you crushed ruthlessly the glimmering hope he cherished of justifying himself... I saw the hope slain in his eyes, heard it die out of his voice. It was the cruellest thing you could have done. You knew, being a soldier, what your judgment meant.”
Colonel Grey flushed quickly. He stood before her awkward, hesitating,—accused, judged, condemned, and powerless to defend himself. It was the very devil to be censured with quiet vehemence by a beautiful weeping woman, and be unable to retort. He felt that in a measure he deserved her censure. His conscience was not entirely free from reproach. He had realised the direct appeal in Lawless’ attempt at self-justification, had recognised, as he had grudgingly admitted, extenuating circumstances, but if the man had been dying before him he doubted that he could have concealed his disapproval of conduct that no soldier could possibly defend. He sympathised with the man; in many ways he admired him; but the crime of treachery must ever remain a crime in his eyes. It was inexcusable, unjustifiable.
“I think, Mrs Lawless, that your husband, having been a soldier himself, will understand what you, perhaps, cannot,” he said. “I’m glad he explained as he did; it gave one an insight into the motives that can move a man to commit unworthy and seemingly inexplicable acts. I have both liking and respect for him apart from that grave offence, which I cannot in sincerity condone, though I appreciate his reason as he gave it. He is a brave man guilty of a serious mistake.”
“Ah! if we all had to pay so dearly for our mistakes!” she said, and brushed away the tears impatiently as they flowed freely over her cheeks. “But I don’t know why I reproach you. I felt once as you feel about it—and I let him see it. That was the beginning of our estrangement. I see things differently now. I see points of honour differently. Human beings can’t be classed and judged by a code. It is necessary to make distinctions. The individual has direct and special claims which you men drilled in a system don’t understand.”
“The judgment of human affairs is beyond human comprehension,” Colonel Grey said quietly.
“That is one way of evading responsibility,” she replied. “But we women understand these things—the mothers of the race. Even the childless woman is a mother, for the maternal instinct is the birthright of her sex. We mothers realise the needs of the children. Hugh was my child, and I allowed the mother-instinct to be swamped in the pride of the wife. I adopted the Army system, and judged him by your standard. I wasn’t true to my sex... And so we drifted apart... But he never attempted to justify himself to me. I wonder whether, if he had, I should have understood.”
He walked across to the window and stood there looking out. He felt distressed and troubled and extremely sorry for this woman in her anxiety with her burden of self-reproach.
“It is so hard,” the sorrowful voice went on tearfully, “to be facing this with the memory of all the years that have been wasted. If I had stood by him in his dark hour...”
Further utterance was stopped by the rush of tears that choked her. She dropped her head on her arms again, and for a while the only audible sounds were those made by her bitter weeping.
It was a distinct relief to Colonel Grey when the door opened to admit the doctor. He entered abruptly, closing the door behind him, an undersized, delicate-looking man, with an unattractive manner at variance with a pair of sympathetic eyes. The sympathetic eyes took in the scene rapidly. They were accustomed to scenes, and the sight of a woman’s tears failed to embarrass him. He took a chair, drew it up to the table opposite Zoë Lawless, and regarded her attentively as he sat down. She had raised her face at his entrance, and was vainly endeavouring to dry her tears.
“Don’t mind me,” he said bluntly. “Crying is often a relief. Let it come. You are Mr Lawless’ wife, I understand?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice, and looked at him appealingly. What was he going to tell her, this man in whose power it lay to pass sentence of death, or hold out hope of life?
“I understand further that you have had an interview with him which seems to have considerably excited him?”
“I have seen him... Yes,” she faltered, her eyes filling anew. She stretched out a hand to him impulsively. “Tell me how he is,” she entreated. “Is he going to die?”
“I hope not,” he answered, but neither the words nor his manner of uttering them greatly reassured her. “He is very ill. You saw that.”
She nodded again.
“He’ll be worse before he’s better. We have to send for trained nurses. The care he is having at present is inadequate.”
“I’ll nurse him,” she cried eagerly, jealously. “Oh! let me nurse him. It is something that I can do.”
He looked at her strangely. For a second he hesitated, then he said, very slowly and deliberately, with his grave eyes on her face:
“I’m going to be very unkind; but I’m sure you’ll recognise the necessity for my veto when you consider how unfortunate in effect your presence has already been. You must not think of nursing your husband, Mrs Lawless. You must not, unless he asks for you, enter the room. Sick people have strange fancies,” he added in pity for her wrung and suffering face. “It is often necessary to make these unnatural restrictions.”
She stared at him with an unspeakable anguish in her eyes.
“They’ll call me,” she said, “if—They won’t let him die without allowing me to see him?”
“Oh dear! no,” he answered quickly. “Of course not—no!”
He rose and held out a sympathetic hand.
“We won’t talk of dying yet awhile. He’s got a splendid constitution. He ought to pull through. But we won’t risk any further excitement. Except for Mr Burton and the nurses, I don’t wish anyone to go into his room. Fresh faces set the mind working, and we must keep him tranquil and composed.”
“A very unpleasant duty,” he remarked to the Colonel, who accompanied him outside. “I am sorry for the wife; she takes it badly. But in cases of sickness it is the patient we have to consider.”
“How’s it going with him?” the Colonel asked bluntly.
“At this stage, impossible to say. It will be touch and go. But as I dislike losing my patients, I never admit the go until the hammer falls.”
The Colonel looked after him as he walked away in the sunshine, feeling oddly discouraged, and very disinclined to re-enter the sitting-room. When, bracing himself to face it, he turned the door-handle and went in, he found that Mrs Lawless had dried her eyes, and was sitting very quiet and entirely composed, looking out of the window.
Chapter Thirty.
Who shall tell of the moods and feelings, the alternating between hope and despair, that govern the mind of the looker-on at the conflict between life and death about the bed of one who is dear; the futility of tears, of intercession; the long drawn agony of suspense? Day by day, hourly almost, the mood varies, hope fluctuates, till finally depression settles upon the spirit, crushes it, reduces it to a state of dull acquiescence in the inevitable ordering of things.
Had Zoë Lawless been permitted to take an active part in the nursing the suspense would have told on her less, but it was almost beyond endurance to be denied all access to the room where the man she loved, and had so little understood, lay for the greater part of the time delirious, yielding up his life without a struggle for it, owning himself beaten,—done.
Mr Burton gave her frequent bulletins, sometimes hopeful, sometimes, despite his utmost endeavour to appear sanguine before her, depressed. The final issue had become to him also a matter of tremendous importance. He had a very warm regard for this man of striking personality, who had come into his quiet monotonous life and drawn him as a protagonist into the midst of startling and unusual events. And he was profoundly sorry for the beautiful woman who was his wife, and yet appeared to have no place nor share in his life. Mr Burton, knowing nothing of the circumstances surrounding the lives of these two, refrained from criticising either. He formed his liking impartially, and reserved judgment.
Every morning Mrs Lawless accompanied him part of the way to the school, and sometimes in the evening she would meet him coming home. He was the only human being to whom she could talk unreservedly. Colonel Grey had gone back to the coast after having arranged for a daily bulletin. He told Mr Burton to telegraph for him if his presence was needed, and this Mr Burton also undertook to do, supposing him to mean in the event of a fatal termination.
The days passed; they grew warmer; but Lawless made no progress towards recovery.
“He is not going to get well,” Zoë said with conviction one morning to the doctor when she interviewed him after he left the sick-room.
The doctor looked nonplussed.
“He makes no fight,” he answered, as though puzzled to account for this ready giving in. Then he added, with one of his rare attempts at encouragement: “But he is still with us.”
The hope thus sparingly dealt out was not sufficiently convincing to reassure her. She felt that the sand in the glass was running low. If only she might be allowed to sit beside him, to touch him! ... She feared that he might slip from her in his sleep perhaps, and that she might not know in time.
“You’ll call me—you’ll be sure to call me,” she said to the nurses continually, “if there’s any change for the worse?”
And one morning the call came. She was in bed when the nurse tapped at the door. She did not stay to dress herself, but slipping on a loose wrapper, pinned her hair up carelessly, and hurried to the sick-room. The doctor had been sent for but had not yet arrived. Both nurses were in the room. The night-nurse, who was only then relieved, remained to be of assistance. Lawless had been violently sick. He now lay back on the pillow exhausted with closed eyes, breathing so slightly that he scarcely seemed to breathe at all. He had all the appearance of a man who is rapidly sinking.
“Is it the end?” Zoë whispered to one of the nurses in an awestruck voice.
“I’m afraid so,” the woman answered, and placed a chair for her beside the bed.
She sank into it, and leaning forward looked fearfully at the quiet figure, the closed eyes, the pinched grey features. Almost she could fancy that he was dead already. She took one of the listless hands. It lay in hers limply, without response, without sense of feeling. She drew it to her and kissed it. Then she laid her head upon the pillow beside his and drew his face to hers, and held it pressed close against her cheek.
And so the doctor found her when he entered with her jealous arms clasping the inert figure, satisfying their long starvation of denial by contact, and with the glowing beauty of her warm rounded cheek resting against the shrunken colourless face on the pillow that had given no sign of life or movement since her entry. The doctor leant over the bed. He placed a quiet hand upon her shoulder to prevent her moving, and bending, low looked intently into the still face.
“He is asleep,” he said, and straightened himself and moved noiselessly away.
And Zoë Lawless remained where she was, undisturbed by everything and everyone about her, as oblivious as the sick man of external things. She was beyond thinking of the issues. She had ceased to wonder whether this crisis in his illness which meant the turning-point one way or the other would decide in his favour or not. He was hers. That was all that mattered then. Whether it were life or death that claimed him, it had given him to her. In the detachment of the moment that was the only thing that held any reality for her. She had got outside of life for a time. The things that went on in the world did not concern her; she had drawn apart from it all to a remote distance and was happy in her isolation with the body of her love.
All that day Lawless lay in the same comatose condition. It was impossible to say when he slept and when he was awake. He never appeared entirely conscious. At intervals the nurse gave him nourishment or a dose of medicine. She did not disturb Mrs Lawless, save at meal times to insist on her leaving the room in quest of food. Zoë went reluctantly, and wandered back after a brief absence, and took her place as before. Whether she had eaten in the interval was problematical; but the change and movement were a relief.
She stayed with him until nine o’clock that night. When she left he was sleeping soundly and comfortably; and, white and weary but extraordinarily happy, she went to bed and fell promptly into a deep and dreamless sleep.
And the next day the bedroom door was closed against her again. He was better. He was fully conscious, but he made no demand to see her; and in compliance with the doctor’s wishes she remained outside.
“Yesterday was the crisis,” he said to her. “He’s turned the corner. He isn’t out of the wood, but if there are no excitements he ought to pull through.”
She smiled when he unnecessarily cautioned her to keep out of sight. She was not at all likely to prejudice her husband’s chances of recovery, even though she never saw him again.
Her chief pleasure during the next few days was in listening to Mr Burton’s scraps of information concerning the wonderful doings and sayings of the invalid on the occasions when he went, as he usually did twice a day, into the sick-room. Even the accounts of the nourishment he took were absorbingly interesting.
Mr Burton came out of the bedroom one morning laughing, and, accompanied by Zoë, set out for his work. She looked at him wistfully as they left the hotel together. The smile still lingered in his eyes when they were out upon the road.
“I am all impatience,” she said, “to hear what amuses you. Was it something—Hugh said?”
“He called me a fool,” Mr Burton said, and chuckled,—“a very pronounced fool.” He had, as a matter of fact, called him a damned fool, but Mr Burton could not bring himself to use such an expression before a woman. “That shows a very decided improvement. I think if there had been anything handy he would have thrown it. Impatience is a healthy sign.”
“Oh!” she said, and the tears welled in her eyes so that she turned aside her face to hide them. “If you only knew how jealous I feel—of you!” And on another occasion she asked him: “Does he never mention me?”
“No,” Mr Burton answered with obvious reluctance. “You must remember,” he added in a kindly desire to soften the negative, “that since he saw you he has been so very ill that probably what happened before has been entirely wiped out. It is possible that he has forgotten seeing you, that he does not know you are here.”
That day she gathered a great bunch of wild flowers, and arranged them in a vase, and asked him to carry them to the sick-room.
“Say that a lady staying at the hotel sent them to him,” she said.
He did her bidding. He carried the vase into the bedroom and placed it on the dressing-table where the tired eyes could rest on it without effort.
“Bloemetjes,” he explained, and smiled at the patient.
“Ah!” Lawless smiled too. “Been botanising, have you? And I benefit by the fruits of your labour. It’s kind of you to remember a poor devil who can’t even crawl out into the sunshine. It’s precious dull work lying here, Burton. I don’t know what I should do if it wasn’t for your visits—cut my throat, if they’d give me a chance.”
“Oh! you grow better now with every day,” Mr Burton answered cheerfully. “Discontent is a proof of convalescence. You’ll soon be able to do your own botanising. By the way, I don’t wish to appropriate thanks that are not due to me. I had nothing to do with the gathering of those flowers. A lady staying in the hotel sent them to you.”
Lawless made no immediate response. His weary, fretful gaze sought the flowers, rested upon them a moment, and then turned deliberately away.
“Very kind of her,” he answered briefly, and was careful not to refer to the subject again.
Mr Burton regretted that he had no more expansive message of appreciation to carry away with him. But Mrs Lawless did not appear disappointed. She had not expected more. His want of curiosity as to the identity of the sender of the flowers told her what she desired to know. He was fully aware that she was staying in the hotel.
The next day she gathered fresh flowers, and Mr Burton carried them in as before. On this occasion the recipient made no remark; so far as Mr Burton saw he did not even look at them.
The little man carried away a sorely troubled heart. After his simple fashion he had grown fond of Zoë Lawless. It was a real delight to him to bear her any small crumb of comfort, to have to go to her empty-handed distressed him beyond measure. She shook her head at sight of his serious face and smiled faintly. She could always judge the nature of the news he brought before he imparted it by the gravity or gladness of his look. To-day it was very grave, and since the patient’s condition no longer called for serious anxiety, she knew her offering had not been well received.
“He snubbed my poor little gift,” she said.
And he wondered how she had divined it, and sought, as he always did when he believed she was feeling hurt, to offer consolation.
“He’s rather peevish to-day,” he explained excusingly. “He gets weary of lying there with nothing to do, and it makes him irritable. Not that he said anything unkind about the flowers... He—he didn’t appear to notice them.”
She nodded.
“I know,” she said.
That day the doctor removed his veto.
“There is no reason why you shouldn’t visit your husband now, Mrs Lawless,” he informed her, “if you are careful not to excite him, nor stay long in the room.”
She looked at him for a while thoughtfully, and a soft rose crept into her cheeks.
“Since he is so far recovered,” she answered quietly, “I think I will not risk retarding his progress—unless he asks for me.”
On the following day she gathered her flowers as before, and sent them by her trusty messenger.
“He has got to look at them this morning,” she announced as she gave them into his hands. “Take them to the bedside, and just say, ‘Zoë sends them.’”
Mr Burton quite blushed at the idea of taking such a liberty with her name; but he seized the flowers and departed hastily upon his errand, with many misgivings as to the reception that would be accorded him when he presented this remarkable message to the invalid.
When he entered the bedroom the nurse withdrew. She usually did, but he had never appreciated the tact of the proceeding as he did on that particular morning. Lawless was resting propped up against a quantity of pillows. He was colourless and wretchedly thin in face, but the improvement in his appearance was already very marked. He gained ground daily now.
He smiled his welcome when Mr Burton entered, but when his glance fell on the bunch of bloemetjes he frowned.
“I wish you didn’t bring that litter with you every morning,” he complained.
Mr Burton, remembering his instructions, walked deliberately to the bedside and laid his offering on the pillow.
“Zoë sent them,” he explained.
Lawless stared at him, and the blood mounted slowly to his hollow cheeks.
“The devil!” he muttered.
Then suddenly a wave of angry emotion swept over him. He seized the flowers in both hands, and flung them with all his feeble strength at the surprised, concerned little man, who jumped aside to dodge the missile as though it were a bomb.
“I was afraid you would resent the familiarity,” he said apologetically. “But she told me to use her name.”
“Oh! go to blazes!” Lawless muttered, already ashamed of the outburst. “What does it matter what you call her? ... Take back those bloemetjes to her, you old idiot, and tell her that until her consideration moves her to make her inquiries and offerings in person they have no interest for me.”
Mr Burton gathered up the strewn, rejected gift.
“She has got my white Flower of Innocence here, I see,” he remarked, and smiled with pleasure at sight of the bloom.
Lawless was lying with his face turned away, staring out of the window.
“You can leave that with me,” he said quietly,—“as being appropriate.”
Mr Burton carried the disordered bunch of flowers back to the giver with a beaming countenance.
“He flung them at me,” he explained delightedly.
Mrs Lawless looked hurt. The little man’s pleasure in the scorn of her gift appeared to her unkind.
“He kept back one bloom—a white one. But so long as you choose an emissary to convey your gift, he is not interested in it, he says.”
She looked at him in silence for a moment, her face flushing and paling in turns. Then she went close to him, took the despised flowers from him and rearranged them carefully. She put a flower in his coat, and drawing back surveyed the effect and him with a tender, affectionate smile.
“That is because this morning I shall not accompany you,” she said.
“No,” he answered musingly, and looked at her attentively over the tops of his glasses. “I suppose you won’t. I shall miss you; but I shall not be lonely because I carry with me the glad heart.”
Chapter Thirty One.
The greatest situations in life are invariably incomplete, inexorably limited by the very stress of feeling that should make them effective and convincing, as, for instance, it does on the stage, where effect is duly studied and considered irrespective of the sensitiveness of the human mind that shrinks from making a display of its deeper emotions.
Because of the intensity of their feeling and the natural reserve that prompted them to its concealment, the meeting between husband and wife was commonplace in the extreme. For years they had been apart, nursing resentment one against the other. Each had failed the other in the great essentials of married life. Both had made mistakes, and both had been unrelenting. But death makes an extraordinary difference in human affairs, even when it is merely the overshadowing of death’s wings, which, hovering for a while, pass on, the time being not yet fulfilled.
The fear, the almost certainty that death would claim her husband had melted for ever the hardness in Zoë Lawless’ heart. She was prepared, had been prepared from the moment she determined to leave Cape Town in search of him, to forgive every injury that she had suffered at his hands,—to accept him as he was for her love’s sake, unconditionally, as he had once told her was the only way possible to complete reconciliation. He had less to forgive; but he also had come to regard life differently since he had stood on the borderland of the Great Eternal,—to realise its limitations and insufficiencies, the pettiness of ill-feeling, the seriousness of the huge human blunder that is called unkindness. The overshadowing of death’s wings had softened him, had given him pause to think.
When the door opened in response to his querulously uttered invitation, and Zoë entered with her flowers in her hand, he looked towards her with a quick, sharp glance of inquiry. Behind the look was a certain fierce shyness, a diffidence which he strove to conceal. She approached the bed, placed the bloemetjes on the coverlet close to his hand and sat down in the chair she had occupied on the only other occasion that she had been permitted inside the room.
“I am so glad you are better,” she said.
He removed his gaze from her face and played with the flowers.
“You’ve been long enough in coming to see me,” he returned ungraciously.
“The doctor was afraid I might excite you,” she explained.
“Rot!” he ejaculated.
He pulled the flowers about and did not look at her.
“It’s been a near thing with me,” he went on, “I’ve had a closer look at death than I’m likely to get again, and come through... It didn’t seem to matter, somehow.” He still played with the flowers. “It would have squared things, perhaps, if I’d made you a widow.”
She leant towards him, and spoke in a low voice, reproachfully.
“You know it wouldn’t have squared things. It would have deprived both of us of the chance to make amends.”
“Still making a matter of conscience of it?” he said cynically.
She put her hand quickly on his, and so stayed the restless fingers in their destructive task.
“Hugh! That isn’t kind.”
“No,” he agreed. “But you see, it’s easy for you to do the right thing under given circumstances.”
“Oh! my dear!” she said. And then: “Easy! If you knew what it cost me to reconcile myself to the thought of sharing in nursing you with that woman... I was prepared to do that. Oh yes! I know the rights of that story now, but I didn’t when I left Cape Town.”
Lawless flushed darkly.
“I don’t deserve that you should come near me, Zoë... I behaved to you like a cad.”
“You didn’t behave well,” she returned. “I wonder why you acted as you did. When Colonel Grey told me the story, I felt that you must hate me to let me think that... It made me bitter. Afterwards, when death came so very close, such matters appeared less important, trivial even... I ceased to think of them.”
“It makes a difference,” he said.
His hand twisted under hers until the palm came uppermost; his fingers closed upon her fingers, gripping them tightly. A little thrill of happiness ran through her. It was many a long year since his hand had gripped hers like that. He turned his face suddenly and looked at her.
“You are cold,” he complained, but his eyes smiled with a look of complete satisfaction. “You punish me by staying out of my room altogether until I become violent, commit an assault on a very harmless person, and practically send for you. And now you are here—you permit me to hold your hand.”
She laughed and flushed warmly.
“I’m leaving it all to you,” she said softly. “I want to leave it to you... You ought to understand.”
“When I was sick,” he said whimsically, “I suffered from delusions. The most amazing as well as the pleasantest of these fancies was that one day you came and sat beside my bed where you are sitting now, only, inexplicably, your arms were about me, and your face was close to mine upon the pillow. I was out of my body then. I think I should have slipped away altogether but for those restraining arms. I’ve lain often and tried to will the vision back, but it never reappeared.”
He turned in the bed and lifted himself slightly on his elbow.
“You are far more elusive than that fancy of mine,” he grumbled.
He gripped the hand he held tighter, and pulled her towards him.
“I thought you weren’t conscious,” she said, stooping lower. “I didn’t guess you knew...”
“Zoë! my dear! my dear!” he cried, his face close to hers. “All these years without you! ... How have I borne it? I have been a wanderer on the face of the earth,—a rudderless ship that has drifted with the current, that has had no helm to answer to, no one on the look-out. I wonder that I didn’t go aground a dozen times. I should have got aground if there had not been the flame of my love for you alight in my heart to show me the danger places when I came to them. You have been my guiding star throughout the years. I never thought that we should meet, much less come together again; but I’ve always borne your goodness, your purity, in mind as things that counted, that kept a man from breaking himself on the reckless impulses of his own selfishness. I’ve been a limited, carnal-minded cad. But whatever brief passion has possessed me, I have never loved anyone but you. Zoë, I hate myself when I think of the past. I want to get away and hide myself—from you.”
“Don’t think of it,” she said soothingly. “We’ve done with all that.”
He looked at her wonderingly.
“What made you follow me out here?” he asked. “What brought you to this place, believing what you believed of me? ... It puzzles me to understand.”
She put out her other hand and laid it upon his shoulder and pushed him gently but firmly back upon the pillow.
“Why trouble about understanding?” she asked. “I don’t understand myself. It was just love drew me.” She spoke lower. “Whatever you have done, whatever you have been, I have never ceased to love you.”
He turned his face aside weakly. There were tears in his eyes. He endeavoured unsuccessfully to hide them from her. She put her arms about him, and gathered the shrunken, suffering figure to her bosom. Then she laid her head beside his on the pillow and drew his face close to hers...