“Oh no! I—I couldn’t!”
The newly-made widow burst into tears, and the older woman led her tenderly to her bedroom, and helped her to undress.
“I’ll never forget how kind you were to my poor darling—and to me, too, nurse. I hope to be able to prove my gratitude some day,” whispered Ivy, after the other had tucked her up in bed.
Nurse Bradfield was touched. She forgot how selfish she had secretly thought little Mrs. Lexton’s conduct had been, in practically insisting on going out this evening. She only remembered thenceforth her pretty ways, her sweet manner to her poor husband, and the easy good nature which always made her willing, when she happened to be at home, to arrange some little treat for her husband’s kind nurse.
That night Ivy lay for a long, long while with eyes wide open in the darkness. What had just happened filled her with a kind of awe. She had not known how easy and simple is the passage from life to death.
She reminded herself how very kind, how good a pal, she had always been to poor Jervis, and how happy he had been these last two months, owing to Miles Rushworth.
Dear, delightful, generous Miles Rushworth! The thought of him brought a rush of joy, as well as comfort, in its train.
At last a great peace descended upon her. All the terrors which had assailed her during those infrequent moments when she had been, by some strange chance, alone, during her husband’s illness, had vanished as if they had never been.
As she looked back she shivered at the thought of how frightened she had sometimes felt. And yet, after all, she knew now that there had been nothing to be really frightened about.
Roger Gretorex had been right as to what he had said, on that evening she still remembered so well. At the time she had thought it horrid of him to imagine such a thing as that—she let what he had suggested stay undefined. No need surely to put it into ugly words, even to herself. All the same, she did bring herself to face the comforting fact that, if rather horrible, it was certainly true. A great many more people are undoubtedly helped out of life than stupid, unimaginative folk suppose. As to those who—well—help them to leave a world which has no further use for them, they certainly, as Roger had declared, “got away with it,” often with marvellous success.
True, that disagreeable Dr. Berwick had been puzzled—he had said as much to her. But she had got on much better with him during the last couple of days, since, in fact, he had seen that she really could not endure the sight of poor Jervis’s sufferings. …
The word “death,” which means so much to the great majority of men and women, meant very little to Ivy Lexton. Indeed, she felt, as she lay there in the darkness, that this man who had been her lover-comrade had only gone away out of her life on a long journey—a journey from which, however, he was never to return. The fact that she had planned that journey, that it was owing to her direct action that he had gone from the world he found on the whole so pleasant, would and must, not only remain hidden, but in time be forgotten even by herself.
In a way, she was forgetting it already as she turned to her cloudless, sunny future—to the delightful existence she would henceforth lead, first as the fiancée, and then as the wife, of Miles Rushworth.
Run straight? Of course she would run straight! For one thing, Rushworth wasn’t the sort of man with whom it would be safe to run crooked. For all his odd ideas, and to Ivy his ideas as to morality were indeed singular, she realised that he had his weather eye very much open. She would henceforth have to be what to herself she vaguely called “a good woman.” But then, how easy it is to be a good woman when one has a hundred thousand a year!
VIII
After a good night of deep, healthy sleep, Ivy Lexton awoke. She sat up in bed and then, all at once, she remembered. …
Her first sensation was one of intense, almost painfully acute, relief. True, she would still have, for just a little while, to play a part. But playing a part was to her second nature. Now and again, but very rarely, in moments of suspense, and now and again in moments of panic, there would appear before a pair of astonished eyes another woman altogether to the everyday Ivy.
She slid out of her comfortable warm bed and softly opened the door of her bedroom, to see that the grandfather’s clock in the hall marked a quarter past nine.
The kindly, fussy old cook came out of her kitchen, and when she saw the slender figure, clad in diaphanous pale pink ninon trimmed with lace, standing half-in half-out of the door, she hurried down the passage and whispered, “Go back to bed, ma’am! I won’t be a minute in getting you a cup of tea. I scarcely slept a wink all night, I was that upset. Mr. Lexton was such a nice young gentleman.”
“Thank you very, very much, cook!”
Tears, genuine tears, rose to Ivy’s eyes. What cook said was so true—Jervis had been “such a nice young gentleman,” especially during this painful illness. It seemed so strange to think of him as gone, forever, from a world which on the whole had treated him so kindly, and of which he had been so contented a denizen. Ivy did not put the thoughts which haunted her mind in those words, but that was the purport of them.
After she had had her breakfast, she began to feel oddly restless, and so, earlier than was usual with her, she got up and dressed. Nurse Bradfield, it appeared, was still asleep.
The newly-made widow hesitated as to what she should
