A Sheaf of Corn Part 12

The words the child spoke had recorded a mere delusion, the doctor told her, of the little dazed brain in the moment preceding unconsciousness; but for all that rational view, they awed the mother, haunted her.

"Milly's p'or flo'rs is dead. Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs and they died," Milly had said.

Never would Mrs Eddington leave her child, or forget Milly's daddy again.

Yet, when the anniversary of poor Harry Eddington's death came round again, Milly had been for three-quarters of a year running about as of old; her mother had been for two months the wife of Major Walsh.

They had spent their honeymoon at Major Walsh's own place in Wiltshire, had stayed for another month in his London house, and they at last turned their steps in the direction of the home which had been Harry Eddington's, where his child had been left under the guardianship of the new Mrs Walsh's mother.

"You used to complain of the dulness of the place and of how buried alive you were there. You have been away for eight weeks, and you are mad to get back to it," the husband said, with a jealous eye upon his bride.

She subdued, judiciously, the joy which had been in her voice. "I am glad to see the old place again--yes," she said. "Won't it be delightful for us to be together there, where we first knew each other?"

"It is the child you want--not me," he said, with grudging reproach.

She found it necessary to make some quite exaggerated statements to rea.s.sure him.

Her mother was in the carriage which met them at the station. "Milly is staying up, till you come," she told them. "I left her capering wildly about the nursery with delight."

"I hope she won't over-excite herself," the mother said, and the grandmother laughed at that anxiety. No child of hers had ever had a weakness of the heart, and she was inclined to ridicule the idea that Milly required more care than had been given to her own children.

Full of longing to see her child, Mrs Walsh sprang from the carriage, and ran up the broad steps to the wide-open doors of her home. Then, with a happy after-thought, turned on the mat, and held out her hands to the new husband.

"Welcome--welcome to our home, dear," she said.

He grasped the hands tightly. "After all, I suppose I am a little more to you than the child?" he asked.

She smiled a flattering affirmative; and at the instant there came a scream in a child's voice from a room above, followed by an ominous silence.

When the others reached the nursery from which as they knew, the sound had come, the mother was already standing there, holding in her arms the unconscious form of her little girl. From a tiny wound in the child's white forehead drops of blood were oozing.

"I left her for one minute to fetch the water for her bath," the nurse was saying, hurriedly excusing herself. "She was running up and down and round about, calling, 'Daddy, come to Milly! Come, daddy, come!'"

"She fell and struck her head against the sharp corner of this stool,"

Major Walsh said. "Look, it has sharp corners."

The child was only unconscious for a minute. She opened her eyes, smiled upon her mother, hid her face in her neck, and presently was whispering a question again and again in her ear.

Mrs Walsh looked up in a bewildered fashion from the little hidden face. "What does she say?" the grandmother asked.

"She says, 'Where is my daddy gone?'" the mother repeated, faltering a little over the words, and with scared eyes.

"He is here," said the practical grandmother, and took Major Walsh by the arm. "We have told her her daddy was coming with her mother," she explained. "She was more excited about him even than about you, Millicent. Look up! Here is your daddy, darling."

Slowly the child lifted her head from the mother's shoulder, and looked at the big man with the hard face now stooping over her--looked for half a second, shut her eyes again, and again hid her face.

"It isn't my daddy," she said, with a baby whimper, "Milly wants _my_ daddy that came and danced with Milly. Where's my daddy gone?"

Later, when the child had been put to bed, the mother, having hurriedly dressed for dinner, knelt by the side of the crib to hold her daughter in her arms; kissing the tiny wound upon her forehead, she asked how it was she had managed so to hurt herself.

"My daddy came and danced. He whirled Milly round and round," the little one said, grievingly. She knew nothing more of the occurrence; it was the only explanation she ever gave.

The look of awe which had been there once before came back to Mrs Walsh's eyes. Only to the doctor did she ever repeat the child's words.

He, being a man of good common sense, refused of course to be impressed with the coincidence.

"She made herself giddy by, as she says, whirling round and round. In the moment of losing consciousness--who can tell by what unintelligible mental process?--the figure of her dead father, undoubtedly impressed with unusual clearness on the child's memory, was present with her. A vision? yes, if you like to call it so; say, rather, a dream in the instant before unconsciousness. Such a babe as this knows no distinction between dreams and realities--between the momentarily disordered mental vision and the ordinary objects of optical seeing."

For the rest, the unsatisfactory condition of the heart was still existent. Nothing that with care might not be obviated. With the absence of all excitement, with entire rest of mind and body, the child would outgrow the evil.

Yet, in spite of this cheerful view of the case, it was long before Mrs Walsh could successfully conceal the uneasiness and unhappiness she felt. Her punishment again, she told herself with morbid iteration. She had turned her back on her child, had forgotten her dead husband; nay, even in the moment of the child's accident, had she not been in the act of welcoming another man to that dead husband's home?

So, with a new life just begun for her, and new interests arising on all hands she found her mind continually dwelling on the days of her earlier married life. Often, when bent on any expedition with Major Walsh, dining with their neighbours, receiving them in her home, walking, driving with him, talking over the details of the business of the little estate, she was thinking, thinking how she and that other man had gone here and there, said this and that to each other. How he had looked, the words he had said; his gestures, his laugh, came curiously back to her; and her heart sank beneath a constant sense of self-reproach. How could she not have remembered all this before, and been true to the claims he had on her--that poor young husband who was the father of her child?

Once, but that was months later, and she was weak in body as well as depressed in mind, she sat alone over her bedroom fire as the dark came on, too tired to dress, and longed for her husband to come in and cheer her. Then the memory came to her of how once before, a few weeks before Milly was born, she had so sat in that very room, and had longed inexpressibly for that other husband; of how she had felt that she would die of fright and of longing for his comforting presence if he did not come; of how he had come at last, bringing warmth and love and courage to her failing heart; of how he had laughed, and said he had felt she was wanting him, and so had put what he was doing on one side and hurried to her. And as she thought of this, lying with shut eyes in her armchair, a curious feeling that he was there again with her in the room, took possession of her. She was not afraid; she lay quite still, hardly breathing, feeling "Harry is here! If I open my eyes I shall see him."

And often, in the weeks that followed, she was haunted by that strange consciousness of her first husband's presence; the curious, forcible impression that there was between her and him but a slight veil she lacked the resolution to rend, but that, rending it one day, she should see him.

Then Harold Walsh's child was born, and these unhealthy fancies were naturally vanquished.

It was a son, and there was much rejoicing. Poor little Milly's nose, it was said, must indeed be put out of joint by this advent of an heir to his father's large estates.

The child was born at Royle, his father's place, and christened there, while Milly had stayed on in her own home with her grandmother; the home where she had been born, where her father and mother had pa.s.sed their brief married life together. When the son and heir was two months old, he came with his father and mother to stay in that house also.

Then her mother and the neighbours who had known her through all her experiences of joy and of sorrow were glad to see that the Major's wife had got back her health and spirits and happiness.

The boy was a fine boy, and his mother idolised him; the father, contrary to general expectation, continued to be very much in love.

They were a prosperous and happy trio, seeming to suffice to themselves. Little Milly, who had longed for her mother and the new brother, found herself of comparatively small importance, and decidedly on the outside of the completed circle.

Who can measure the bitterness, the desolation, which no after-experience of the unkind tricks of destiny can ever equal, of the little heart which feels it is not wanted where it longs to cling?

Then Milly's birthday came, and she was six years old; a delicately lovely child with dark, straight hair, dark eyes, and a complexion which was as a finger-post to her father's history and her own, and should have said "Beware!" Milly had always a birthday-party; this year also she must have one.

But it was not a party such as Milly had been promised; with the small drawing-room turned into a cave of delights, where a real, white-robed fairy with silver wings and a wand presided over presents to be given to Milly and all her little guests. The promise, in the pleasurable excitement of the Walshs' arrival, had been forgotten by all but Milly.

When Milly demanded its fulfilment it was too late.

So the little guests could only dance--those that were big enough--or a.s.sisted by their elders, in the form of governess or elder sister, play at forfeits and twilight, and blindman's buff. These innocent gambols they carried on in the wide entrance hall. Some flags had been hung, to please Milly, against the heavy beams of the ceiling, and the gardener had filled every niche and corner with hothouse plants.

Bent, apparently, on spoiling his sister's pleasure, the heir of the house of Walsh must be taken with a colic on that day. His mother was anxious about him, fancying him feverish, and insisting on the doctor's presence. So it came to pa.s.s she was oftener sitting in the nursery, seeing her son jogged, howling l.u.s.tily, on the nurse's lap, than making merry with Milly and her friends in the hall.

As the afternoon drew to a close, and carriages began to arrive for the children and their guardians, Mrs Walsh came out of the nursery, and standing in the comparative darkness of the corridor, looked down upon the bright and pretty scene. The children in their dainty white dresses, with their flushed faces and tossed curls, were as lovely as the flowers everywhere surrounding them; the music of the chattering voices, of the clear laughter, was more agreeable to the ear than that of the piano Milly's governess was playing.

The fun, as is apt to be the case when such a gathering is nearly over, waxed livelier as the time came for the children to part. "Just one more game!" Milly's little excited voice was heard pleading--"only one more!"

It was Kiss in the Ring, the old world favourite they chose, and they formed themselves into a circle, putting the littlest boy--boys were scarce among them, and very small--in the centre.

It was in the midst of much laughing and chatter and noise that the two little girls on either side of Milly Eddington felt her hands turn ice-cold in theirs, and slowly slip from their grasp. The next instant she had fallen to the floor between them.

The doctor, luckily on the spot, attending to the baby-brother, was with her in two minutes. There was nothing to be done. She was dead.