A Sheaf of Corn Part 13

She had been the loveliest and the gayest there, laughing her pretty, happy laugh, babbling with the rest. Several of the elder guests, it was afterwards found, had been looking at the child and listening to her, when all at once she had become silent, had sunk backwards, and died.

So much they who looked on had seen, but nothing more.

Her mother, standing above, in the shadow of the corridor, and looking down upon the brightly-lit hall below, had seen this--

She had seen the figure of her first husband--the smile upon his face with which he had left her and her little daughter on the last day of his life--come silently into the hall. She had seen him, moving softly, attracting no notice from them, pa.s.s the groups of ladies standing near the walls, and noiselessly thread his way through the ring of playing children, till he stood at the back of his own little girl. She had seen him, smiling still, and clasping his hands tenderly beneath the child's chin, pull her softly backwards, and lay her dead upon the floor.

FREDDY'S SHIP

"A day or two, and I must return these people's call," Mrs Macmichel said to herself as she pa.s.sed the Rectory gate. "What a bore!"

Two or three days ago the rector and his wife, calling on their new parishioner at the Court, had found her just returned from lunch with the shooting party in the field.

"Bad luck, wasn't it?" she asked, later, of the half-dozen men to whom she was giving tea in the billiard-room. "If I'd stayed to watch you shoot for another five minutes, I should have escaped them! Not a bad, dowdy little woman--the man a worse stick in the drawing-room than the pulpit, if possible. Subjects: his--parish room he wants to build; hers--son at sea, or going to sea, or has been to sea, or something.

What is it to me? If he is drowned fifty fathoms deep at the bottom of the sea, do I care?"

"Now, if I only have the good luck to pick on a day when they're out!"

she said as she stepped briskly along; a tall, and handsome, and fashionable-looking woman, in her hat with the green twisted veil and the green c.o.c.k's feathers, her short, workman-like skirt and belted coat.

Down the short path from the Rectory door to the gate the rector himself was coming. Mrs Macmichel bowed a condescending head as she pa.s.sed on, receiving no form of salutation but a stare from a pair of vacant eyes in return.

"Well, really! Such people!" the lady said to herself, as she walked disdainfully on. "Even _here_ you would expect a man would know he is always expected to take off his hat when a woman bows to him!"

"Mrs Macmichel!" a voice said at her back. A hand was laid upon her arm. She turned a look of astonished questioning upon the man who had ventured to touch her.

"Stop, please," he said; his voice was breathless as of one in great agitation. "Mrs Macmichel, I think you owe my wife a call? I want you to pay it now--at once----"

"It is very kind of you; I----"

"You mustn't make excuses. You mustn't deny me. You must go; and you must--stay."

The thought that he might be mad was succeeded as she looked in his face by the thought that he must be ill. The healthy colour natural to them had left his large cheeks, their fatness was only flabbiness, the small eyes were filled with a strange, pleading, protesting misery as of a man in terrible bodily discomfort.

"Mr Jones, I am afraid you are not well?"

He stopped her with an impatiently thrown-up hand. "It's not that--I'm all right. It's worse--it's my son----"

"The sailor?"

"News has come that the _Doughty_ has gone down. All lost."

"Your son was in that ship?"

He did not answer, but pressed his lips, which were piteously quivering, together, and looked at her in staring misery.

"I am going into the village to wire for--confirmation. Till I return you must keep with my wife."

"But, Mr Jones! I am deeply, deeply sorry; but you must let me telegraph, and you, yourself, stay with Mrs Jones."

"No. She would know as soon as she saw my face. I stole away--I dare not see her." He stayed a minute, biting at lips drawn inward over his teeth. "Our only one!" he said. "No other! When I know--when there is no hope--no hope--I must tell her. I could wish that she might die before--that we might both die."

Tears had gushed upon the flabby cheeks; he mumbled his lips for a minute, unable to speak.

"If there was anything else I could do--anything!" Mrs Macmichel said.

"But this----!"

"You will watch over her till I come back," he said, not even noticing her remonstrance. "It is a service I ask of you by right of our common humanity. Go in to her at once, please."

With his hand on her arm he turned her to the gate, and opened it for her. "Let no one else come near her," he said. "The butcher delivering our meat gave me the news. He saw it on the newspaper board at the village shop. Everyone in the village who reads it will come up at once to tell my wife. Keep them away. She has a weak heart; told suddenly, she might--Don't let her stir out. Don't let her hold communication with anyone till I return."

He put up a trembling hand in the direction of his clerical hat, but lacked the spirit to lift it, and turned hurriedly away.

"But, Mr Jones!" she called. She made a step or two after him. "It will be so awkward--for her, I mean. She won't understand. You see, I hardly know your wife."

He raised his strengthless hand for a few inches, and let it fall with a gesture of hopeless wretchedness. "Oh, what do such things matter?"

he groaned.

She was ashamed to persist. "I thought perhaps someone in the village--someone she knew----"

"They could do nothing with her," he explained. "If she wanted them to go, she would tell them to go; she can't tell you. If she wanted to go into the village, she would go----"

"How soon will you be back?"

"An hour. Two hours. I must wire to Portsmouth, and wait a reply." He began to walk on again. "When I come back I shall--know," he said, and shuffled forward, with drooping back, and legs that shook beneath him, on his way.

Once he turned, and, seeing her still at the gate, pointed a weakly imperative finger at the house without stopping in his progress.

Hardly crediting that it could be upon her, Flora Macmichel, accustomed to move in paths so carefully smoothed, to have all ugly things hidden from her sight, that this task of matchless unpleasantness had been thrust, she turned and walked slowly towards the Rectory door. There are so many women in the world, shrieking, gesticulating, ready to rush into any fray a-brewing; so many quiet and strong and helpful, aching to take other people's burdens upon their shoulders; she had never sought to identify herself with one or the other species, holding the comfortable doctrine that we cannot all be servers, that in the general scheme those who only stand to be waited on also hold a useful place.

Why need she do this thing? Three weeks ago she had not known these people existed; three days ago had not set eyes on them. For humanity's sake, he had said. Well!

But she thought of the mumbling lips, the look of anguish in the poor eyes, went on, and rang the bell.

Mrs Jones was in, of course. She was sitting over the dining-room fire, writing a letter. A short, rather fat, rather dumpy woman, with plain features, an ominous flush on her sallow cheeks, iron-grey hair, and very large, very luminous dark eyes.

"How very good of you to call so soon!" she said, and got up to welcome, rather effusively, the rich woman who had come to be a parishioner. "Let your master know at once that Mrs Macmichel is here, Mabel," she said to the servant, and gave Mabel a look which indicated tea was to make its appearance with as little delay as possible. "Are you walking or driving? Walking? Really? Now, would you rather sit near the fire or the open window? It is the kind of day--isn't it?--when either is agreeable."

She had a slightly nervous manner, or she was not quite at ease with the strange caller. She altered the position of the chairs, rattled the poker in the fire, pushed away the little table which held the writing things.

"I was just writing to my son," she said, and smiled, as if sure of her interest in the subject, at the woman, who, chill to the marrow with the discomfort of her errand, had taken a chair by the side of the fire. "I think I told you he is in the navy? He is commanding the _Doughty_, the new destroyer. Going trips in her every day or so. I suppose these destroyers are terrible-looking things? Ah! I have never seen one, but I imagined so. What a comfort to me to know they are, after all, so safe as Freddy tells me they are."

"Such a mild day for the time of year, isn't it? And such a pretty stretch of road from the Court here!"

"We often say so!"