Part II
No inquest was held on Horace Kilbourne’s wife. The doctor had attended her almost daily. For years her husband had been warned her heart was in such a condition that she might die suddenly, at any moment. She had so died. Except that it was a happy release for herself, and for her husband—that over-tired, good, and patient man—one of Heaven’s mercies, there was nothing to be said. Unless Kilbourne himself, in remembrance of other days, and in the tenderness of his heart, shed a tear for her, there was not a soul to weep for drunken Julia Kilbourne.
Although, to the best of his ability, he had lived retired from all society, and in his sensitiveness to his wife’s shame had kept, as well as he could, her history to himself, it was well known in the town. There was none who knew who did not respect and pity him. Kind hands were eagerly put out to him. At last he, who had shrunk from going to other men’s houses because he could not ask them to his own, was free to do so.
It was a little disappointing that he repulsed all such advances.
The only adverse criticism which had been passed on him had been that, a heavily burthened man, he had not known how to conceal his misfortune, but had carried about with him a face as miserable as his history. That his face would now bear witness to his new-found delight of liberty was confidently expected.
It was strange that, instead of the looked-for lightening of gloom, there was, if possible, in his bearing, his wife being safely dead and buried, an increase of melancholy.
Kate Grantley, who thought she knew him better than the rest, was not surprised that the little letter she wrote him on the first news of Mrs Kilbourne’s death remained unanswered. The words her pen had written had come warm from a heart realising the shock, the bewilderment, from which it was inevitable that he must suffer. But it was a letter which it would have been painful to him to answer, perhaps. He had known that she would understand.
She would not be hurt that he ceased to linger for her at the hour they both came out of school. Often she walked to the street which held her home and his, with his tall figure a dozen yards in front of her. She would not hurry a step to overtake him. All in good time. She no more doubted him—she no more doubted that in due time he would ask her to be his wife—than she doubted what her answer would be when he did so. Between them there had been no vulgar philandering; no word of what might have been, what yet might be, had passed their lips. Yet, deep in their hearts was guarded an unspoken compact which—she would have staked her life on it—neither would betray.
But she was unpleasantly startled, coming face to face with him one day, he walking down his garden path, which she was passing, to find that he did not even purpose to speak to her. Pretending to fumble at the lock of the gate, he hung back until she was well in front.
Later on, the pair had encountered in a shop. She had put out a hand to him, and he had taken it. But there had been hesitation, almost reluctance, on his part, and it seemed to her that he had looked at her with intolerable reproach in his eyes.
She was haunted by the remembrance. Was it possible that his wife’s death could have been really a grief to him? Such a grief as that? Or was the lonely life he was leading, coming upon the shock of finding the woman dead, telling upon him physically and mentally?
“Go and ask Mr Kilbourne in to supper to-night!” she commanded her brother. She lived with him in another little bow-windowed house, with a purple clematis over the bow-window, a crimson rambler over the door, and about it the same air of sweetness, of neatness, of wholesomeness its mistress wore. “He is looking ill and wretched. Try to bring him in.”
“I have asked him every day of my life. He won’t come,” the brother said. “He gets out of my way when he can,” he added. “He does not seem to wish to be friendly any more.”
She looked at him in silence, considering the statement. Kilbourne’s punctiliousness was exaggerated, but she thought she understood it. It was delicacy carried to an extreme, perhaps, but she was proud to think it was characteristic of him.
“I don’t see why he need be afraid of being civil to me, for all that,” the brother said, almost as if she had spoken.
The next time Kate Grantley had an opportunity of looking in Kilbourne’s face she was painfully struck by his appearance. The man was thinner, more worn, years older. His head seemed to droop beneath a heavier burthen than of yore; he walked as if his feet were shod with lead.
Several months, in which she had had no word with him, had gone by since his wife’s death. At this rate, before he dared to stretch out a hand to gather for himself the happiness ready to bloom for him, he would be dead! She thought she saw that the man, lonely, sensitive, to a fault, was passing his days in brooding melancholy, in unmerited self-reproach. He had had more than enough of sadness in his life. For an idea, a stupid convention of other folks’ manufacture, and not worth respecting, he should have no more. He should not be allowed to take his own path, to push her on one side again.
Once resolved on any course, she was a very practical young person, alert to take the opportunity the moment gave.
She overtook him determinedly, one afternoon, as he walked ahead of her from school, as usual. The holidays, during which neither had left home, were over; the summer was over, the winter term well begun.
“Mr Kilbourne, will you come into No. 6 for one minute to-day?” she said. “I particularly wish to speak to you.”
He had been ready enough to go there in the old days, with or without pretext; now he had the look of a man called on to do a thing at which his soul sickened.
“If you will excuse me——” he said.
But Kate was resolute.
“I cannot excuse you. You must come at once,” she said.
She had assumed the little air of authority over him which in her he had found to be so pleasant. With a look upon his face as if he were going to his execution, he obeyed.
For many weeks she had gone about, the words she meant to speak to him, of encouragement, of comradeship, upon her lips; the chance to use them had never come. Now she would not use them, but would speak to him as if there had been no hiatus in their communion, as if no tragedy had come between.
She faced him as they entered the bright little sitting-room, of exquisite neatness, and sweet with flowers, which had ever seemed such a haven of rest to him.
“Have you seen Alick?” she began. “Have you heard that they have promoted him, and that he is to be sent to the Paris branch?” (Alick was a clerk in one of the banks.)
He had not heard.
“He’ll be pleased. It’s what he wished for, isn’t it?” he asked, not looking at her, gazing before him with lack-lustre eyes.
Her heart sank as, seeing him close at hand, she noted the change in him. Although, with his slouching gait and loose-hung limbs and hanging head, he had never been a smart-looking man, he had yet been one possessed of great personal nicety; in that matter—in the shipwreck of his life—being careful not to let himself go. But now there was about him a look of neglect, making to ache with pity the heart of the woman who observed it.
Alick was pleased, she admitted, with sinking spirit. “But it is about myself I want to ask your advice,” she went on.
He glanced at her quickly with his deep, sad eyes, and glanced away again.
“Shall I throw up what I am doing here, and go with Alick? It is this I want to ask you. My brother could share lodgings with a friend he has there. He does not really want me; but I used to wish for Paris—long ago, before we met, you and I. I might meet with a good appointment there. It is a chance for me. Help me to make up my mind. Shall I go?”
There fell a complete silence between them.
She sat on the music-stool, her back to the open piano, a pretty, slight girl, with a dark and resolute little face. It confronted the gloomy one before it now with an expression progressing from expectation to surprise, to irritation, in its gaze. On her part, she determined not to say another word to bridge the pause; but it seemed that the silence would never be broken.
At length he slowly lifted his eyes to hers.
“I think, perhaps, it would be better for you to go,” he said.
She sprang up from the stool, turned to the piano, began sorting, with quick, nervous fingers, the music there.
“You think so? Very well; I’ll go, then,” she said. “I only wanted to hear what you would think of it.”
He had risen with an air of relief and picked up his hat. He looked in silence for a minute at her straight back in its trim Norfolk jacket, at her thick braids of black hair beneath the plain straw hat.
“Of course you know best what you wish,” he said hesitatingly.
She placed the freshly arranged music with an air of decision on the piano.
“I know very well what I wish, thank you,” she said.
There was another silence.
“Is that all?” he asked her.
“Quite all. Except”—she turned round upon him and showed him that the dark skin of her face had whitened, that her eyes were hurt and angry—“except that Alick has to go next week. I suppose I ought to give a term’s notice; but also, if I don’t, I suppose they’ll do without it—I shall be ready to go with him. We shall be busy till we start. I may not see you to speak to again—this will be our good-bye.”
“Is that so?” he said.
She could hardly believe her ears; she held her breath in the cruelty of the surprise, and set her teeth to help her to bear the pain.
“Ours has been a long friendship,” she said, striving to steady her voice. “Two years—seeing each other every day. Strange, isn’t it, how things come to an end?”
“Except some things which are endless,” he said.
She took heart of grace at that.
“You mean Faith?” she asked; “Love?” She looked at him eagerly.
“I mean Pain,” he corrected her, and held out his hand.
She would not put hers within it.
“If, after these long two years, you can go like that, your friendship is not what I thought it. It is not worth a hand-clasp. Good-bye,” she said, and turned her back upon him, not deigning to watch him go.
“Do you go or stay?” her brother asked, when he came in from the bank that afternoon.
“I—go!” she said, but not with her usual bright promptness; and, looking at her face across their little tea-table, he saw that it had lost something of its usual serenity.
“Seen Kilbourne?” he asked.
She told him yes, with an air of careful unconcern; that he had come in that morning; that she had told him of their contemplated departure, and had said good-bye to him.
“I used to think——” the brother began, but she cut him short.
“I know. You often said so; don’t say it any more,” she said. “All that was a mistake—and absurd.”
“You know what they are saying of him, Kate? They are saying he killed his wife.”
Her dark face whitened, her dark eyes opened wide.
“They cannot!”
“They do. They say he couldn’t look such a miserable, hangdog wretch for nothing. The worst is, the boys at the college have got hold of it. One of the little wretches wrote up on the white wall of his class-room the other day, ‘Who killed his wife?’ Bryant, the science master, told me Kilbourne took no notice, but his face was sea-green for the rest of the morning.”
“He should have thrashed the whole class—thrashed them within an inch of their lives!”
“Well, he didn’t. He did nothing.” Alick dropped his voice. “Bryant told me he looked as if he were afraid,” he said.
“What beasts people are to say such things!” she burst out. “And of such a man! The gentlest, the kindest——”
“I know, my dear. I’m sorry for poor old Kilbourne. I daresay he didn’t kill his wife; but something’s happened to him, and she did die uncommonly sudden. Anyhow, from what Bryant said, it’s evident he’s lost his nerve and his courage. At that rate, he’ll precious soon lose his post.”
Kate Grantley and Kilbourne, arriving from opposite directions, reached his gate at the same moment, the next morning. Rudely chalked upon the stone post was the question which had confronted Kilbourne on his class-room walls.
He pointed to the words with his stick which shook in his hand; his face was ashen white.
“Isn’t it fitting that you and I should be confronted by that question?” he asked her.
She stared from the writing to him.
“I don’t think it at all fitting!” she said. “Why don’t you send for a policeman, and stop it?”
He pushed open the gate, and, taking no further notice of her, walked up the little path to his door. Reaching it, he found her behind him.
With that air of girlish authority he had once found so pleasant, “I am coming in,” she said.
He led the way into that bow-windowed room in which Mrs Kilbourne had died. The pervading aroma of alcohol had left it; airiness and a certain formal tidiness now reigned in place of stuffiness and neglect; but the room was perhaps more depressing than before to a sensitive mind.
The sofa was in the same place; the basket, which had held the things she liked to have at hand, still stood beside it. The over-large table at which the unfortunate Julia had so often watched her husband eat his unappetising meals, and where he still made a pretence of eating them in sight of the empty sofa, still occupied too much of the available space.
Kilbourne turned and confronted the girl, who had followed him in. His eyes shone now, and there was the working of excitement in his face.
“I thought we had said our last words,” he began; “I thought that that, at least, was done with—and you were going away. You have no right to follow me, Kate, to overthrow me in this fashion. My strength is almost exhausted; I have tried too much—too much—and all alone——”
“I know,” she said, with her fine air of decision. “That is why I have come. You mustn’t be alone any more. You must come with us.”
He had tossed away his hat, and thrust his hands which were shaking, into his coat-pockets. He turned with excitement upon her, but she went firmly on.
“With Alick and me. You are too good for the post you hold; with your degrees you can easily get a better one. Come to Paris. Turn your back upon all that has been depressing and worrying you; upon this melancholy room”—she gazed round upon the unlovely space—“upon this”—she waved a peremptory, small hand towards the vacant sofa.
He looked at her with his accusing eyes, with a scarcely controlled emotion; but she stopped him when he tried to speak.
“We have been good friends,” she said. “If I have not helped you through these two years we have walked as comrades together, you, at least, have helped me. Helped me so much”—she paused a moment, and the level tone of her voice quavered musically—“that I cannot lose you; that I need you terribly still.”
“And I!” he burst forth then. “And I! Can you ever picture to yourself the magnitude of my need of you?”
He clenched the hands in his coat-pockets, and turned his back on her, and she saw his shoulders heave.
“It is killing me,” he said—“killing me—just that.”
His voice, which had been raised, sank brokenly. She listened, when it was silent, to the beating of her heart.
In a minute she went to him and laid a hand upon his arm.
“Then, why?” she asked him, whisperingly. “Why?”
He flung round upon her, and she fell back from the vehement accusing of his eyes.
“Why?” he repeated. “Why?” He threw a hand at the empty sofa. “There!” he said. “There—where you ask me to turn my back—my dead wife lies there—always for me. And she is between you and me for ever.”
It sounded to her but the utterance of morbidity. The strange words were only a token of that from which she had come to save him. She had the courage to be unmaidenly, to persist.
“I, at any rate, do not see it so,” she said. “To have me for your friend is to do no wrong to your dead wife.”
“How can we be friends—you and I?” he asked her; and she, who knew they could not now be merely that, did not speak.
“I, who for your sake cursed her in my heart,” he went on, his shaken voice hushed to an awe-struck whisper. “You, who put into her hands the poison which killed her.”
“I?” she breathed, and drew back, staring at him, wondering, for one dreadful moment, had his unhealthy brooding turned his brain. “Killed her? I?”
“You!” he said, wildly. He went across the room, and shut the door behind her they had left ajar. “If it had been I myself I could have borne it; but you—you—! I found the empty bottle, that night, dropped from her hand; the label—‘Poison’—and your name——”
“The chloral bottle?” she asked him; and the cloud of fear and dismay lifted from her eyes, and they were alight with understanding and with hope. She went swiftly to him and caught his arm. “Horace, do you remember that you warned me never to give her any narcotic, however earnestly she might beg for it—that it would not be safe—that she would kill herself? Do you remember?”
“But you gave it, all the same. Your name was on the bottle——”
“On the bottle—of water,” she said. “It never held anything else. I used to take it home and fill it every day. The doctor told me to do it—it was a harmless fraud we played on her. She used to drink it, never doubting, and fall asleep——”
“Kate!”
She held him tightly by his arm, and looked with eyes that were dimmed with tears of most blessed relief upon the working of his face.
As, later, they went together through the little garden, and passed again the rudely-chalked question upon the gate—“Shall I stay here with you, and face the music,” Kate Grantley asked, “or will you come away with me to Paris?”