The automatic voice ceased with a gasp. Her thoughts appeared to be astray. She pushed her knotted fingers up her cheeks almost to her eyes.
“It’s said,” she added with long, straight mouth, “that that unfortunate young man, Mr. Crimble—is ill.” She gave a glance at me without appearing to see me, and left the room.
What was amiss? Oh, this world! I sat trembling in empty dread, listening to her heavy, muffled footfall in the room above. The newspaper, with a scrawling cross on its margin, lay beside Mrs. Monnerie’s large, rough-edged envelope. I could bear the suspense no longer. On hands and knees I craned soundlessly forward over the white tablecloth, across the rank dish of coagulating bacon fat, and stole one or two of the last few lines of grey-black print at the foot of the column: “The reverend gentleman leaves a widowed mother. He was an only son, and was in his twenty-ninth year.”
“Leaves”; “was”—the dingy letters blurred my sight. Footsteps were approaching. I huddled back to my carpet stool on the chair. Mrs. Petrie had come to clear away the breakfast things. Stonily I listened while she cheerfully informed me that the glass was still rising, that she didn’t recollect such weather not for the month for ten years or more. “You must be what I’ve heard called an ’alcyon, miss.” She nodded her congratulations at me, and squinnied at the untasted bacon.
“I am going for a breath of air, Mrs. Petrie,” came Mrs. Bowater’s voice through the crack of the door. “Will you kindly be ready for your walk, miss, in half an hour?”
Left once more to myself, I heard the “alarm” clock on the mantelpiece ticking as if every beat were being forced out of its works, and might be its last. An early fly or two—my strange, familiar friends—darted soundlessly beneath the ceiling. The sea was shimmering like an immense looking-glass. More pungent than I had ever remembered it, the refreshing smell of seaweed eddied in at the open window.
With dry mouth and a heart that jerked my body with its beatings, I unfolded Fanny’s scrap of paper:—
“Wise M.—I have thrown the stone. And now I am fey for my own poor head. Could you—and—will you absolutely secretly send me any money you can spare? £15 if possible. I’m in a hole—full fathom five—but mean to get out of it. I ask you, rather than mother, because I remember you said once you were putting money by out of that young lady’s independence of yours. Notes would be best: if not, a Post Office Order to this address, somehow. I must trust to luck, and to your wonderful enterprise, if you would be truly a dear. It’s only until my next salary. If you can’t—or won’t—help me, damnation is over my head: but I bequeathe you a kiss all honey and roses none the less, and am, pro tem., your desperate F.
“P.S.—Be sure not to give M. this address: and in a week or two we shall all be laughing and weeping together over the prodigal daughter.”
Fanny, then, had not heard our morning news. I read her scribble again and again for the least inkling of it, my thoughts in disorder. That sprawling cross on the newspaper; this gibbering and dancing as of a skeleton before my eyes; and “the stone,” “the stone.” What did it mean? The word echoed on in my head as if it had been shouted in a vault. I was deadly frightened and sick, stood up as if to escape, and found only my own distorted face in Mrs. Petrie’s flower-and-butterfly-painted chimney glass.
“You, you!” my eyes cried out on me. And a furious storm—remorse, grief, horror-broke within. I knew the whole awful truth. Like a Shade in the bright light, Mr. Crimble stood there beyond the table, not looking at me, its face turned away. Unspeakable misery bowed my shoulders, chilled my skin.
“But you said ‘ill,’ ” I whispered angrily up at last at Mrs. Bowater’s bonneted figure in the doorway. “I have looked where the cross is. He is dead!”
She closed the door with both hands and seated herself on a chair beside it.
“I’ve trapsed that Front, miss—striving to pick up the ends. It doesn’t bear thinking of: that poor, misguided young man. It’s hid away. …”
“What did he die of, Mrs. Bowater?” I demanded.
She caught at the newspaper, folded it close, nodded, shook her head. “Four nights ago,” she said. And still, some one last shred of devotion—not of fidelity, not of fear, for I longed to pour out my heart to her—sealed my lips. Holy Living and Dying: Holy Living and Dying: I read over and over the faded gilt letters on the cover of Fanny’s gift, and she in her mockery, desperate, too. “Damnation”—the word echoed on in my brain.
But poor Mrs. Bowater was awaiting no confession from me. She had out-trapsed her strength. When next I looked round at her, the bonneted head lay back against the rose-garlanded wallpaper, the mouth ajar, the eyelids fluttering. It was my turn now—to implore her to “come back”: and failing to do so, I managed at last to clamber up and tug at the bell-pull.
XXX
I surveyed with horror the recumbent, angular figure stretched out on the long, narrow, horsehair sofa. The shut eyes—it was selfish to leave me like this.
“There, miss, don’t take on,” Mrs. Petrie was saying. “The poor thing’s coming round now. Slipping dead off out of things—many’s the time I’ve wished I could—even though you have come down for a bit of pleasuring.”
But it was Lyme Regis’s solemn, round-shouldered doctor who reassured me. At first sight of him I knew Mrs. Bowater was not going to die. He looked down on her, politely protesting that she must not attempt to get up. “This unseasonable heat,
