Part 55 (1/2)

'I wish that I had given him another kiss! I wish that I had gone to the turn of the road with him, as he asked me! I wish that I had taken his knife!'

Her tears seem to make her intelligence clearer, to render sharper her power of suffering.

'Is there _no one_ to be left alive? Is Death to have it all his own way?'

Her dimmed eyes rest on a drift of leaves blown by the last bl.u.s.terous wind against the hedge-bank outside; a discoloured pile--the yellow poplar leaf, the black-brown pear and the bronzed beech, the ribbed hazel and the smooth lime--one fate has overtaken them all. Dead--dead!

At her foot is an elm-leaf half-dragged underground by the dark industry of some blind earthworm. Underground--underground! That is the bourne of us all; of the young green leaf, aloft two months ago on the tree-top, visited by the voyaging birds and the gamesome airs, as of the little bounding joyous child.

The searching vapour has penetrated her clothes, and made her s.h.i.+ver with cold; but she dares not yet go indoors again, dares not yet face her sick Prue, with those sudden tidings written on her face.

She retraces her steps along the drive, and turns into the garden--the empty garden; empty to-day of even Jacob's presence, as he is kept at home by his rheumatism. It is profoundly silent. The fog has got even into the robin's throat. It is profoundly silent; and yet to Peggy, the air is full of voices--the voices of her dead, her lost, and her dying.

Her mother, Talbot, Prue, and now little Franky. He was not much to her, perhaps you may say; and yet she can ill spare his little drop of love out of her empty cup. Along the walks they hurry to meet her, and yet, as they come up to her, they pa.s.s her by with averted faces.

'I am certainly very lonely,' she says to herself, with a sort of astonishment; 'it is a very unusual case. There has happened to me what happens commonly to people only at eighty: I have outlived everything! I was given very few people to love, to begin with; but I did love them well. I gave them my very best. Oh, you cannot say, any of you, that I did not give you my very best, and yet not one of you will stay with me.

Not one of you. G.o.d--G.o.d! What have I done to be picked out of all the world for such a fate? Is it fair? Is it fair?'

Her voice goes wailing out into the mist; but the dying world around her has no answer to give to her riddle. It is awaiting that to its own. She has thrown herself down on the seat under her hawthorn bower, and from its dull berries and sharp thorns, and few still-clinging yellow leaves, the cold drops drip on her bare head, mix with the scalding drops on her cheeks; but she feels them not as she lies there, huddled up, collapsed, and despairing. Not for long, however. By and by her soul, as is the way with souls habitually brave, puts on its courage again. She raises herself, and lifts her drowned and weary eyes, as if through the fogs and exhalations they would pierce to Him who, as all the world once thought, as many still hold to be a truth far dearer than life, sits in judgment and mercy beyond them.

'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' she says solemnly.

'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

'I am not mad,--I would to heaven I were!

For then 'tis like I should forget myself: Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget!

Preach some philosophy to make me mad, And thou shalt be canonised, cardinal; For, being not mad, but sensible of grief, My reasonable part produces reason How I may be deliver'd of these woes, And teaches me to kill or hang myself: If I were mad, I should forget my son; Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.

I am not mad; too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity.'

In the days that follow, the death of Franky Harborough, which at an ordinary time would have been the sorrowful main occupation of Peggy's thoughts, has to retire into the background of her mind. In the foreground there is room for but one absorbing topic. Prue is decidedly worse. In an illness such as hers--which is less a definite disease than a decline all round, a bowing to its final ruin of a building whose foundations have been sapped for more than a year--there is very often, for a considerable period, but little change to be noted from day to day; and then suddenly--no, not suddenly--in a progression rather, as natural as that from seedtime to harvest, on some morning, at some noon or night, there is a step down to a lower level of vitality; a travelling along that lower level, until the time for a new and farther descent. It would seem impossible that any breath of the chilly fog outside could have thrust its pestilent way into the atmosphere, regulated with so pa.s.sionate a nicety, of Prue's room; and, indeed, there is no sign of any return of that bronchitis which had been the ostensible beginning of her illness. Nor is there any very perceptible aggravation of any one of her symptoms.

The signs of her approaching dissolution are rather negative than positive. It is only that Miss Prue is going downhill rather quicker than before--that is all. There is now no longer any question of the oak settle in the hall. Even the sofa in the dressing-room has been abandoned. Prue no longer stirs from her bed; but she lies there quite happily, quite as happy as she was before; for Freddy's gifts are within as easy reach of her hand, spread on the counterpane before her, as they were on the table in the adjoining room; and her card with its 365 black strokes hangs quite as full in her eye, on the wall opposite her bed.

However bad her night may have been, there is always something to look forward to at dawning, in having it brought to her to put her triumphant pen through another day.

'I shall be glad when we have got up to forty,' she says to Peggy, with a faint but cheerful laugh. 'I shall feel quite differently when we have reached forty: there will be all but a ninth of the time gone then.'

It is a day on which the officious dusk of the winter afternoon--always in such haste to shoulder away its pale brother--has already settled down. For sixteen long hours there will be no more glint of light. This dreary thought is pa.s.sing through Peggy's mind, as she nods drowsily over the fire. She is roused from it and from her semi-sleep by hearing the room-door open cautiously and seeing Sarah making signs--evidently not intended to be seen by Prue--through the aperture.

In obedience to them, Margaret rises languidly, and goes out upon the landing.

'What is it?'

'If you please, 'm, there's a lady wishes to speak to you.'

'Oh, Sarah, you know that I can't see any one; why did not you tell her so?'