Part 26 (1/2)

Eleanor whispers, ”Yes.”

”Do you know what I saw in your eyes?”

”No.”

”Three long words that kept repeating themselves. All the same words, and the worst, the most heartbreaking. 'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!' They will drive a soul to perdition quicker than any in the English language. I am going to have them engraved on my tombstone, because I can only conquer them in death.”

”You are right. I was looking on, living in fancy the worthless days and hours.”

”Crush that tendency, Mrs. Roche. Think of me when your life seems worthless, and remember all that I have lost. Your face is so sweet, so pure, so beautiful, it was made for the good love that crowns spotless womanhood. But this is my station, and I shall never know what you do with your future.”

”Shall I show you?” says Eleanor hastily, for she is easily swayed, and the stranger has worked upon her emotion.

”Yes.”

”See!” and the soft, enticing eyes of Carol Quinton are torn asunder--the photograph is reduced to a handful of sc.r.a.ps scattered on the carriage cus.h.i.+on.

”You are a good woman,” says the other, rising and looking down tenderly, lovingly at Eleanor.

Again they clasp hands, then a cloud of towzled hair under a black c.r.a.pe bonnet vanishes down the platform, and Mrs. Roche is left alone, with the pieces of torn cardboard and the scent of patchouli on the opposite seat.

CHAPTER XIII.

IF NEED, TO DIE--NOT LIVE.--_Chas. Kingsley_.

”Have I changed, or has everything changed?” Eleanor asks herself, as the days slip by in the old farmhouse.

Mr. and Mrs. Grebby are just the same warm-hearted, genial couple as of yore; they crack the same jokes at their knife-and-fork tea, while Rover wags his tail as pleasantly as ever, and Black Bess trots to market.

The school children have not forgotten ”Teacher,” and, greet her in demonstrative fas.h.i.+on, flinging their small arms round her neck when she stoops to kiss them.

Yet Mrs. Roche finds that their mouths are sticky, and the little hands she clasps in hers hot and unpleasant to the touch.

She rises early, and on churning morning helps her mother even more industriously than in past days, yet her heart is heavy, and the old songs never pa.s.s her lips without a stifled sob. She tries to hum the ”Miller of Dee,” as for the sake of happy recollections she polishes afresh the pewter service on the parlour table, yet all the while her eyes are scrutinising the inartistic arrangement of the room. Why should the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under gla.s.s covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall--how gruesome they appear in the spring suns.h.i.+ne! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor Mrs.

Grebby's most sacred feelings.

She looks in the old family Bible, standing in its accustomed place on a table by the window. There are the births, deaths, and marriages of the Grebby family for generations. Oh, if her marriage could be blotted out, and a date of death mark her name. She envies the twins that died in their infancy, when she--Eleanor--was only two years old.

The pewter pots tire her arm, unaccustomed, now to rubbing anything but diamond trinkets. The service she so admired once does not attract her now. She puts it away half clean, and longs for a novel.

Vegetating was not very soothing after all. The poisoned arrows had followed her even to Copthorne, and their wounds could not heal. The thoughts she struggled to suppress, here in the dead calm, proclaimed themselves more loudly, worked fiercer havoc. She longs, pines, sickens for a sight of one she must never see, for a voice it would be death to hear, the touch of a hand it were sin to clasp.

So she wanders about in her strange state of depression, pretending to enjoy the glorious green of the spring, and seeing only light and darkness, cold and desolation, in primrose banks and rippling streams.

Mr. Grebby is too preoccupied with his cattle and his land to notice the change in Eleanor, while Mrs. Grebby takes infinite pains to give her married daughter the best their house affords, and only remarks on her lack of appet.i.te, at which she loudly laments.

”You ain't eatin' anything, dearie,” she says one morning at breakfast.

”Try a tumbler of new milk to put some strength into you. It's them towns as makes you pale and spiritless. I knows 'em. We was that done up after our visit to you and cousin Harriett it was quite surprisin'.

But law, how Pa did make me walk in London. Up them Monument steps, and down again before I'd got my breath, with poor Rover in charge of a policeman below, and everyone a laughing 'cause I was puffing so.”