Grit Lawless Part 50

"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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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, 'Zoe 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 quant.i.ty 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.

"Zoe 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 gla.s.ses. "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, pa.s.s 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 Zoe 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 Zoe 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

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 circ.u.mstances."

"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.