CHAPTER XXV

“God’s Hand touched her unawares.”

WHEN Tom Huntly rode home with a big bag of game after a satisfactory dinner with a crony it was nearly twelve o’clock. Yet to his surprise the whole house was lit up, and there was an uneasy sense of motion and confusion. He dismounted and called for a servant. Suddenly he heard a woman crying. He let the horse go and walked into the house.

“How can you expect me to go to her? No, I won’t! I won’t! Oh, it’s horrid! it’s terrible!—just when I was so happy too! No, doctor, go and sit with her till Tom comes! Oh, my God! . . . Doctor! here he is!”

“Where is my wife?” said Tom Huntly. The words sounded to his ears like a quotation; it was absurd to suppose they could be his. He did not look at Gladys, dissolved in frightened tears over the inappropriateness of the angel Death. The doctor spoke with the unreal cheerfulness of his profession.

“Another hæmorrhage, Major Huntly. It is over now, but you must expect to find her a little weak.” Then, as Tom Huntly uncomprehendingly followed him, “It is my duty to tell you that I consider her case serious—very.” A nurse stood by the bed fanning her. A sudden remembrance of the boy’s birth (the boy at Eton) swept over him.

She looked very young, with that old, bright something in her eyes that the last ten years of the world had managed to dim. She whispered his name.

“Tom, come a little nearer.” He knelt beside her, and put his arms around her. They had wasted a lot of time. “I wanted you so—Tom,” she whispered. “It’s been such a poor sort of thing, hasn’t it? What we might have been to each other, I mean? But it’s been all my fault, dear. I never knew a man that could have made me half—so happy. There are not many women who could say that of their husbands in our—world—are there, Tom?” She coughed till the slow breath came back. “So you’ll not worry, Tom?” she gasped.

“Mary—Mary, darling—you won’t leave me and the boy?” It was frightful this want of time. She smiled bravely.

“I’m so glad you care,” she murmured. “Tell him—Tom—that his mother says she wants him to be—a gentleman—like his father.” The nurse stepped forward, but the doctor shook his head.

“There is no need,” he said, but he meant “There is no hope.”

“Ah, Mary! Mary!” She opened her eyes again: she was much too tired to be frightened of death.

God takes the ignorant, plucky souls who have fought the good fight, not quite knowing why, very peacefully to Himself.

“I should like,” she gasped, “more air.” The nurse came towards her bed with the fan in her hand, but before she could reach her a gust of wind strangely cool and fresh swung the curtains of the window, and Mary Huntly was dead, having passed from a life which stifled, limited and kept back all the highest and noblest in her to beyond the horizon where “Over all this weary world of ours breathes diviner air.” The room was very quiet and still. The doctor after a few words to the nurse, engaging her for another case, went off to his quarters.

Gladys composed two heart-broken notes to Jack Hurstly in her sleep, and Tom Huntly left alone with the body of the woman he loved fought the old fight with the grimness of things.