“That I should have lived to see this day!” she said by way of reply.
I waited till her passion abated.
There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing, and suddenly she stood erect before me, wiping her swollen eyes. “Willie,” she gulped, “she’s gone!”
“Nettie?”
“Gone! … Run away. … Run away from her home. Oh, Willie, Willie! The shame of it! The sin and shame of it!”
She flung herself upon my shoulder, and clung to me, and began again to wish her daughter lying dead at our feet.
“There, there,” said I, and all my being was a-tremble. “Where has she gone?” I said as softly as I could.
But for the time she was preoccupied with her own sorrow, and I had to hold her there, and comfort her with the blackness of finality spreading over my soul.
“Where has she gone?” I asked for the fourth time.
“I don’t know—we don’t know. And oh, Willie, she went out yesterday morning! I said to her, ‘Nettie,’ I said to her, ‘you’re mighty fine for a morning call.’ ‘Fine clo’s for a fine day,’ she said, and that was her last words to me!—Willie!—the child I suckled at my breast!”
“Yes, yes. But where has she gone?” I said.
She went on with sobs, and now telling her story with a sort of fragmentary hurry: “She went out bright and shining, out of this house forever. She was smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going.” (“Glad to be going,” I echoed with soundless lips.) “ ‘You’re mighty fine for the morning,’ I says; ‘mighty fine.’ ‘Let the girl be pretty,’ says her father, ‘while she’s young!’ And somewhere she’d got a parcel of her things hidden to pick up, and she was going off—out of this house forever!”
She became quiet.
“Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; “let the girl be pretty while she’s young. … Oh! how can we go on living, Willie? He doesn’t show it, but he’s like a stricken beast. He’s wounded to the heart. She was always his favorite. He never seemed to care for Puss like he did for her. And she’s wounded him—”
“Where has she gone?” I reverted at last to that.
“We don’t know. She leaves her own blood, she trusts herself—Oh, Willie, it’ll kill me! I wish she and me together were lying in our graves.”
“But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly—“she may have gone to marry.”
“If that was so! I’ve prayed to God it might be so, Willie. I’ve prayed that he’d take pity on her—him, I mean, she’s with.”
I jerked out: “Who’s that?”
“In her letter, she said he was a gentleman. She did say he was a gentleman.”
“In her letter. Has she written? Can I see her letter?”
“Her father took it.”
“But if she writes—When did she write?”
“It came this morning.”
“But where did it come from? You can tell—”
“She didn’t say. She said she was happy. She said love took one like a storm—”
“Curse that! Where is her letter? Let me see it. And as for this gentleman—”
She stared at me.
“You know who it is.”
“Willie!” she protested.
“You know who it is, whether she said or not?” Her eyes made a mute unconfident denial.
“Young Verrall?”
She made no answer. “All I could do for you, Willie,” she began presently.
“Was it young Verrall?” I insisted.
For a second, perhaps, we faced one another in stark understanding. … Then she plumped back to the chest of drawers, and her wet pocket-handkerchief, and I knew she sought refuge from my relentless eyes.
My pity for her vanished. She knew it was her mistress’s son as well as I! And for some time she had known, she had felt.
I hovered over her for a moment, sick with amazed disgust. I suddenly bethought me of old Stuart, out in the greenhouse, and turned and went downstairs. As I did so, I looked up to see Mrs. Stuart moving droopingly and lamely back into her own room.
VI
Old Stuart was pitiful.
I found him still inert in the greenhouse where I had first seen him. He did not move as I drew near him; he glanced at me, and then stared hard again at the flowerpots before him.
“Eh, Willie,” he said, “this is a black day for all of us.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“The missus takes on so,” he said. “I came out here.”
“What do you mean to do?”
“What is a man to do in such a case?”
“Do!” I cried, “why—Do!”
“He ought to marry her,” he said.
“By God, yes!” I cried. “He must do that anyhow.”
“He ought to. It’s—it’s cruel. But what am I to do? Suppose he won’t? Likely he won’t. What then?”
He drooped with an intensified despair.
“Here’s this cottage,” he said, pursuing some contracted argument. “We’ve lived here all our lives, you might say. … Clear out. At my age. … One can’t die in a slum.”
I stood before him for a space, speculating what thoughts might fill the gaps between these broken words. I found his lethargy, and the dimly shaped mental attitudes his words indicated, abominable. I said abruptly, “You have her letter?”
He dived into his breast-pocket, became motionless for ten seconds, then woke up again and produced her letter. He drew it clumsily from its envelope, and handed it to me silently.
“Why!” he cried, looking at me for the first time, “What’s come to your chin, Willie?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s a bruise;” and I opened the letter.
It was written on greenish tinted fancy notepaper, and with all and more than Nettie’s usual triteness and inadequacy of expression. Her handwriting bore no traces of emotion; it was round and upright and clear as though it had been done in a writing lesson. Always her letters were like masks upon her image; they fell like curtains before the changing charm of her face; one altogether forgot the sound of her light clear voice, confronted by a perplexing stereotyped thing that had mysteriously got a hold upon one’s heart and pride. How
