A Sheaf of Corn Part 10

There was another silence.

"Is that all?" he asked her.

"Quite all. Except"--she turned round upon him and showed him that the dark skin of her face had whitened, that her eyes were hurt and angry--"except that Alick has to go next week. I suppose I ought to give a term's notice; but also, if I don't, I suppose they'll do without it--I shall be ready to go with him. We shall be busy till we start. I may not see you to speak to again--this will be our good-bye."

"Is that so?" he said.

She could hardly believe her ears; she held her breath in the cruelty of the surprise, and set her teeth to help her to bear the pain.

"Ours has been a long friendship," she said, striving to steady her voice. "Two years--seeing each other every day. Strange, isn't it, how things come to an end?"

"Except some things which are endless," he said.

She took heart of grace at that.

"You mean Faith?" she asked; "Love?" She looked at him eagerly.

"I mean Pain," he corrected her, and held out his hand.

She would not put hers within it.

"If, after these long two years, you can go like that, your friendship is not what I thought it. It is not worth a hand-clasp. Good-bye," she said, and turned her back upon him, not deigning to watch him go.

"Do you go or stay?" her brother asked, when he came in from the bank that afternoon.

"I--go!" she said, but not with her usual bright promptness; and, looking at her face across their little tea-table, he saw that it had lost something of its usual serenity.

"Seen Kilbourne?" he asked.

She told him yes, with an air of careful unconcern; that he had come in that morning; that she had told him of their contemplated departure, and had said good-bye to him.

"I used to think----" the brother began, but she cut him short.

"I know. You often said so; don't say it any more," she said. "All that was a mistake--and absurd."

"You know what they are saying of him, Kate? They are saying he killed his wife."

Her dark face whitened, her dark eyes opened wide.

"They cannot!"

"They do. They say he couldn't look such a miserable, hangdog wretch for nothing. The worst is, the boys at the college have got hold of it.

One of the little wretches wrote up on the white wall of his cla.s.s-room the other day, 'Who killed his wife?' Bryant, the science master, told me Kilbourne took no notice, but his face was sea-green for the rest of the morning."

"He should have thrashed the whole cla.s.s--thrashed them within an inch of their lives!"

"Well, he didn't. He did nothing." Alick dropped his voice. "Bryant told me he looked as if he were afraid," he said.

"What beasts people are to say such things!" she burst out. "And of such a man! The gentlest, the kindest----"

"I know, my dear. I'm sorry for poor old Kilbourne. I daresay he didn't kill his wife; but something's happened to him, and she did die uncommonly sudden. Anyhow, from what Bryant said, it's evident he's lost his nerve and his courage. At that rate, he'll precious soon lose his post."

Kate Grantley and Kilbourne, arriving from opposite directions, reached his gate at the same moment, the next morning. Rudely chalked upon the stone post was the question which had confronted Kilbourne on his cla.s.s-room walls.

He pointed to the words with his stick which shook in his hand; his face was ashen white.

"Isn't it fitting that you and I should be confronted by that question?" he asked her.

She stared from the writing to him.

"I don't think it at all fitting!" she said. "Why don't you send for a policeman, and stop it?"

He pushed open the gate, and, taking no further notice of her, walked up the little path to his door. Reaching it, he found her behind him.

With that air of girlish authority he had once found so pleasant, "I am coming in," she said.

He led the way into that bow-windowed room in which Mrs Kilbourne had died. The pervading aroma of alcohol had left it; airiness and a certain formal tidiness now reigned in place of stuffiness and neglect; but the room was perhaps more depressing than before to a sensitive mind.

The sofa was in the same place; the basket, which had held the things she liked to have at hand, still stood beside it. The over-large table at which the unfortunate Julia had so often watched her husband eat his unappetising meals, and where he still made a pretence of eating them in sight of the empty sofa, still occupied too much of the available s.p.a.ce.

Kilbourne turned and confronted the girl, who had followed him in. His eyes shone now, and there was the working of excitement in his face.

"I thought we had said our last words," he began; "I thought that that, at least, was done with--and you were going away. You have no right to follow me, Kate, to overthrow me in this fashion. My strength is almost exhausted; I have tried too much--too much--and all alone----"

"I know," she said, with her fine air of decision. "That is why I have come. You mustn't be alone any more. You must come with us."

He had tossed away his hat, and thrust his hands which were shaking, into his coat-pockets. He turned with excitement upon her, but she went firmly on.

"With Alick and me. You are too good for the post you hold; with your degrees you can easily get a better one. Come to Paris. Turn your back upon all that has been depressing and worrying you; upon this melancholy room"--she gazed round upon the unlovely s.p.a.ce--"upon this"--she waved a peremptory, small hand towards the vacant sofa.

He looked at her with his accusing eyes, with a scarcely controlled emotion; but she stopped him when he tried to speak.

"We have been good friends," she said. "If I have not helped you through these two years we have walked as comrades together, you, at least, have helped me. Helped me so much"--she paused a moment, and the level tone of her voice quavered musically--"that I cannot lose you; that I need you terribly still."

"And I!" he burst forth then. "And I! Can you ever picture to yourself the magnitude of my need of you?"

He clenched the hands in his coat-pockets, and turned his back on her, and she saw his shoulders heave.

"It is killing me," he said--"killing me--just that."

His voice, which had been raised, sank brokenly. She listened, when it was silent, to the beating of her heart.

In a minute she went to him and laid a hand upon his arm.