Rosa went in the direction of the town, and Priscilla set her face toward the slope of the Down in front of her. Before she had gone for more than half a mile on her way to the farm, she saw a man approaching her—a middle-aged man in a black coat and leggings rather the worse for wear. He held up his hand to her while they were still far apart.
“Something has happened,” she said. “It cannot be that he became uneasy at my absence.” Then they met. “What is it, father?” she asked quickly.
“Dead—he is dead—the man is dead!” he said in a low voice.
“Dead—Marcus Blaydon—dead—are you sure?”
“Quite sure,” he replied.
“Thank God!” she said, speaking her words as though she were breathing a sigh of great relief.
And so she was; she was speaking of her husband.
CHAPTER VI
There came a dreadful misgiving to her. She clutched her father’s arm as they stood together on the road.
“You are sure?” she said in a low voice, with her eyes looking at him with something of fierceness in their expression. “There is no mistake—no possibility of a mistake? Remember what the man was—a trickster—unscrupulous—you are sure? Is that a letter—a paper?”
“A paper,” he said—“several papers. There can be no doubt about it. And don’t speak ill of him now, Priscilla. You will be sorry for it. He died the death of a man. However bad his life may have been, he made up for it in his death.”
“A hero?” she said, and she was smiling so that her father was angered.
“I would not have believed it of you; it is unnatural,” he said. “Have you no sense of what’s proper—what’s decent?”
“I have no sense that makes me be a hypocrite,” she said. “The man cheated me—he was within an hour or two of making me the most pitiful creature. As it was he made me the laughing-stock of the world. No one thought of my misfortune in being married to an impostor, a criminal, and having my life ruined by him. Every one took it for granted that I was a poor weak creature, on the look-out for a husband and ready to jump at the first suitor who turned up. What could I long for but his death? What chance should I have of doing anything in the world so long as he was alive and married to me? What could I long for but his death? At first it was mine that I longed for; but then I saw that to long for his was more sensible—more in keeping with the will of Heaven.”
“The will of Heaven! How can you talk like that, Priscilla?”
“If God has any idea of justice—of right and wrong—as we have been taught to regard right and wrong by those who assure us that they have been let into some of His secrets—it could not be His will that I should have my life wrecked by that man. I felt that I was born for something better, and so I hoped that he would die. Now that by the goodness of God he is dead, shall I not be grateful? Oh, what fools! standing here on the roadside discussing a delicate point in theology instead of talking over the good news!”
He looked at her for a few stern moments, and then thrust into her hand a bundle of papers.
“Read them for yourself,” he said. “I am going into the town. I don’t want to be by while you are chuckling over the death of a man—a man who died as the noblest man might be proud to die—trying to save his fellow creatures from destruction. Read those papers for yourself, and then ask God to forgive you for your dreadful words.”
“He died like a hero,” she murmured, taking the papers; and then she smiled again.
Her father was striding down the hill; the self-respecting gait of the churchwarden was his—the uncompromising stride of the man who worshipped the Conventional, and never failed to go to church for this purpose, returning to eat a one o’clock dinner of roast sirloin and Yorkshire pudding.
She watched him for some time, and the smile had never left her face. Then she looked strangely at the bundle of papers which he had flung at her—his action had suggested flinging them—in his wrath at her utterance of all that had been in his own heart for more than a year.
She glanced at the papers. They were Canadian, she saw, and they were profuse in the display of strong lettering in the headlines of the columns that met her eyes. It seemed as if the half-column of headlines was designed to exhibit the resources of the typefounders. She saw, without unfolding the papers, that they referred to a wreck that had taken place off the coast of Nova Scotia, great stress being laid on the fact that sixteen lives were lost, and that a man who had tried to carry a line ashore from the wreck had been swept away to destruction. “A Hero’s Death!” was the headline that called attention to this detail.
She folded the papers back into their creases. She felt that she could not do full justice on the open road to the matter with which they dealt. She must hurry home and read every line in the seclusion of her own room. In the same spirit she had occasionally hurried to her home with a new novel by a favourite author under her arm. Nothing must disturb her. She must be allowed to gloat over every line—to dwell lovingly upon the bold lettering of the headings, “A Hero’s Death!”
She almost ran along the road in her eagerness; and now her elation had increased so greatly that she felt it to be indecent—almost disgraceful—all that her father had suggested that it was. It was all very well for her to be conscious of a certain amount of satisfaction on learning that she was released from the dreadful bondage which compelled her to be the wife of a convict, but it was quite another matter to feel herself lilting that comic opera air, “I’ll kiss you and die like a ‘ero”; and, when she succeeded in banishing that ridiculous melody from buzzing in her ears, to be conscious of the rattle of the drum and the trumpet call of the cornet introducing Don César’s singing of “Let me like a soldier fall” in the opera of “Maritana.” But there they went on in her ears—the banjo-bosh of the one and the swashbuckler’s swagger of the other, accepting the beat of her hastening feet for their tempo. The more she hurried, the more rapidly the horrid tuney things went on; and she had a dreadful feeling of never being able to escape from them.
She was doomed for her wickedness to be haunted by those jingles for evermore.
Of course she had no idea that she was on the verge of hysteria; but her father would have known, if he had had any experience of the range of human emotion outside the profitable working of a large farm, that hysteria must be the sequel to that unnatural calm which his daughter had shown on learning that the man to whom she had bound herself was dead.
It was not, however, until she had reached her home and had gone very slowly upstairs to her room, that the buzzing and the lilting and the tinkling of tunes in her ears rushed together in a horrible terrifying jingle, and she cried out, flinging herself upon her bed in a paroxysm of wild tears and falsetto sobs. The reaction had come, and borne her down beneath its mad rush upon her.
When she became calm once more she had a sense of having been absurdly weak in failing to keep herself well in hand. She could not understand how it was that she had let herself behave so foolishly. If the man had been her lover she could not have been more upset by the news of his death, she thought.
But the thing had happened, however, and she felt that she might rest confident that it would never happen again. So she bathed her face and brushed her hair and set herself down to her newspapers on the seat at her open window. The sky was blue above the Downs, and the rain had left in the air a clean taste. In the meadow there were countless daffodils, and the afternoon sun was glistening upon the rain drops in their bells and on the blades of the emerald grasses of the slope. From the great brown field that was being ploughed came the rich smell of moist earth and the varying notes of the ploughman’s