Part 27 (2/2)

”But how?”

”To live to bear it. I cannot be haunted after I am dead. That can't be.”

He lifted his head and looked at her with a sort of pale defiance, as if he would dare her to contradict him. Lily confronted the horror of his eyes, and a shudder ran over her. The thorns had pierced more deeply even than she had believed as she lay awake in the night. Just then a door banged and a footstep approached on the landing.

”Hush, it's father,” Lily whispered.

And the Canon entered to ask the condition of the patient. Maurice prescribed and went away. In the windy evening as he walked, he was conscious of a large change dawning over his life. Either the spirit of prophecy--which comes to many men even in modern days--was upon him, or hope, which he believed quite dead in him, stirred faintly in his dream.

In either event he saw that on the black walk of his life there was the irregular, and as yet paltry, line of some writing, some inscription. He could not read the words. He only knew that there were some words to be read. And one of them was surely Lily's name.

He did not meet her until the evening of the following Sunday when, as usual, he went to supper at the Rectory. Lily was better and had been to church. The Canon was delighted and thanked Maurice for his skill in diagnosis and in treatment.

”You cure every one,” he said.

Lily and Maurice exchanged a glance. He saw how well she understood that he felt the words to be an irony though they were uttered so innocently. After supper, just as the Canon, with his habitual Sunday sigh of satisfaction, was beginning to light his pipe, Sarah, the parlour maid, came in with a note. The Canon read it and his sigh moved onwards to something not unlike a groan. He put his filled pipe down on the mantelpiece.

”What is it, father?” asked Lily.

”Miss Bigelow,” he replied laconically.

”On a Sunday. Oh, it's too bad!”

”It can't be helped,” the Canon said. ”Excuse me, Dale, I have to go out. But--stay--I shall be back in half an hour.”

And he went out into the hall, took his coat and hat and left the house.

Miss Bigelow was his cross. She was a rich invalid, portentously delicate, full of benefactions to the parish and fears for the welfare of her soul. She kept the Canon's charities going royally, but, in return, she claimed the Canon's ghostly ministrations at odd times to an extent that sometimes caused the good man's saintly equanimity to totter. Hating doctors and loving clergymen, Miss Bigelow was forever summoning her distracted father confessor to speed that parting guest--her soul, which however, never departed. She remarked in confidence to those about her, that she had endured ”a dozen deathbeds.”

The Canon had sat beside them all. He must now take his way to the thirteenth.

As soon as the hall door banged Maurice looked up at Lily.

”Poor, dear father,” she murmured.

”I am glad,” Maurice said abruptly.

The remark might have been called rude, but it was so simply made that it had the dignity belonging to any statement of plain truth. Neither rude nor polite, it was merely a cry of fact from an overburdened human soul. Lily felt that the words were forced from the young doctor by some strange agitation that fought to find expression.

”You wish--you wish--” she began.

Then she stopped. The flood of expression that welled up in her companion's face frightened her. She trembled at the thought of the hidden thing, the force, that could loose such a sea.

”What is it?” she said like a schoolgirl--or so, a moment afterwards, she feared.

”I ought not to tell you,” Maurice said, ”I ought not, but I must--I must.”

He had got up and was standing before her. His back was to the fire, and a shadow was over his face.

”I want to tell you. You have made me want to. Why is that?”

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