Short Fiction

would have thought he was going to die. The sun was down. A green hue rose from the horizon halfway to the zenith, but a pale yellow lingered over the vanished sun, like the gold at the bottom of a chrysolite. The stars were twinkling small and sharp in the azure overhead. A cold wind blew in little gusts, now from this side, now from that, as they went steadily along. The horses’ hoofs rang loud on the hard road. The night got hold of him: it was at this season, and on nights like these, that he had haunted the house of Lucy’s father, doing his best to persuade her to make him, as he said, a happy man. It now seemed as if then, and then only, he had been a happy man. Certainly, of all his life, it was the time when he came nearest to having a peep out of the upper windows of the house of life. He had been a dweller in the lower regions, a hewer of wood to the god of the cellar; and after his marriage, he had gone straight down again to the temple of the earthy god⁠—to a worship whose god and temple and treasure caves will one day drop suddenly from under the votary’s feet, and leave him dangling in the air without even a pocket about him⁠—without even his banker’s book to show for his respectability.

The night, I say, recalled the lovely season of his courtship, and again, in the mirror of loss, he caught a glimpse of things beyond him. Ah, if only that time and its hopes had remained with him! How different things would have been now! If Lucy had proved what he thought her!⁠—remained what she seemed⁠—the gentle, complaisant, yielding lady he imagined her, promising him a life of bliss! Alas, she would not even keep account of five pounds a week to please him! He never thought whether he, on his part, might not have, in some measure, come short of her expectations in a husband; whether she, the more lovely in inward design and outward fashion, might not have indulged yet more exquisite dreams of bliss which, by devotion to his ideal of life, he had done his part in disappointing. He only thought what a foolishness it all was; that thus it would go on to the end of the book; that youth after youth would have his turn of such a wooing, and such a disappointment. Sunsets, indeed! The suns of man’s happiness never did anything but set! Out of money even⁠—and who could say there was any poetry in that?⁠—there was not half the satisfaction to be got that one expected. It was all a mess of expectations and disappointments mashed up together⁠—nothing more. That was the world⁠—on a fair judgment.

Such were his reflections till the driver pulled up for him to get down at his own gate. As he got down the said driver glanced up curiously at the row of windows on the first floor, and as soon as Mr. Dempster’s back was turned, pointed to them with the butt-end of his whip, and nodded queerly to the gentleman who sat on his other side.

“That’s more’n I’ve seen this six weeks,” he said. “There’s something more’n common up this evenin’, sir.”

There was light in the drawing-room⁠—that was all the wonder; but at those windows Mr. Dempster himself looked so fixedly that he had nearly stumbled up his own doorsteps.

He carried a latchkey now, for he did not care to stand at the door till the boy answered the bell; people’s eyes, as they passed, seemed to burn holes in the back of his coat.

He opened the street door quietly, and went straight up the stair to the drawing-room. Perhaps he thought to detect some liberty taken by his servants. He was a little earlier than usual. He opened that door, took two steps into the room, and stood arrested, motionless. With his shabby hat on his head, his shabby greatcoat on his back⁠—for he grudged every penny spent on his clothes⁠—his arms hanging down by his sides, and his knees bent, ready to tremble, he looked not a little out of keeping in the soft-lighted, dainty, delicate-hued drawing-room. Could he believe his eyes? The light of a large lamp was centred upon a gracious figure in white⁠—his wife, just as he used to see her before he married her! That was the way her hair would break loose as she ran down the stair to meet him!⁠—only then there was no baby in her lap for it to full over like a torrent of unlighted water over a white stone! It was a lovely sight.

He had stood but a moment when she looked up and saw him. She started, but gave no cry louder than a little moan. Instantly she rose. Turning, she laid the baby on the sofa, and flitted to him like a wraith. Arrived where he stood yet motionless, she fell upon her knees and clasped his. He was far too bewildered now to ask himself what husbands did in such circumstances, and stood like a block.

“Husband! husband!” she cried, “forgive me.” With one hand she hid her face, although it was bent to the ground, and with the other held up to him a bit of paper. He took it from the thin white fingers; it might explain something⁠—help him out of this bewilderment, half nightmare, half heavenly vision. He opened it. Nothing but a hundred-pound note! The familiar sight of bank paper, however, seemed to restore his speech.

“What does this mean, Lucy? Upon my word! Permit me to say⁠—”

He was growing angry.

“It is to pay the butcher,” she said, with a faltering voice.

“Damn the butcher!” he cried. “I hope you’ve got something else to say to me! Where have you been all this time?”

“At my mother’s. I’ve had a brain fever, and been out of my mind. It was all about