CHAPTER XXVI

“And Memory fed the Soul of Love with tears.”

“TOO late!” is a phrase holding the eternal knell of life. It sounds like a muffled peal even to those who hear it lightly said. To those who have lived through it, the worst of the battle passes before their eyes again. Many, perhaps blissfully, miss all that it means. They dare not, or cannot, face remorse. That they themselves have pulled down their house about their ears seems to them an infamous impossibility. They forget all their own cruel words, long neglect and unfair judgment, and only remember flashes of sunlight which they connect—probably quite falsely—with themselves. Their “yesterdays look backward with a smile.”

Gladys never realized even as much as a tinge of shame. She cried a great deal. Mary knew how to manage things so beautifully, and, better still how to manage Tom. There was a certain heavy awkwardness about Tom that Gladys didn’t like. It had the effect of putting her in the wrong, which was, on the face of it, absurd. Also he wouldn’t do what she wished without coarsely asking “Why.” Altogether, Mary had taken the edge off a difficulty; and Gladys hated difficulties almost as much as she did explanations.

It was so dreadfully trying, too—Mary’s dying just then! Another week, perhaps, and it would not have mattered so much. The thought forced her to look into the glass. The crying had done no great damage; she would dress entirely in white. Jack would come round soon after breakfast to find out how Mary was. Oh, poor Mary!

There was something so bald and primitive and earnest about death; _whatever_ happened she would not be taken to see the body. She went out into the dining-room. Suddenly she began to be afraid of meeting Tom.

Tom had passed the night of a thousand years; it comes once or even twice in a lifetime. He was looking very old and haggard. When Gladys came into the room he winced as if he had touched a snake. It was a very awkward meeting. Tom would have gone out of the room and said nothing, but there was breakfast—and the servants. By-and-bye there was only breakfast, and Gladys sitting where Mary used to sit. She was thinking that at least he might have shaved, and wondering if she dared to speak to him. It was very hot and still.

“Did you know that Mary had had a hæmorrhage before?” he asked in the dangerously level tones of passion curbed. Gladys burst into tears.

“How can you speak of her in that heartless way, Tom?” she cried. He gave a queer little sound that might have been a laugh.

“Answer me,” he said. The question was how much did he know, and what was the safest lie? He saved her the trouble. “Very well, you did know, then! Now how long has this been going on?”

“It was easy enough to keep it from you, Tom!” she said, with the brutality of a weak thing cornered. “You never took the trouble to find out. Poor Mary made me promise not to tell you. She told me first in England that her temperature rose every night, but that she didn’t intend to make herself an invalid for that. She said you were the sort of man who hated invalids.” Tom broke a paper-cutter he had been playing with on the table. “I don’t know how many hæmorrhages she had—not very many; certainly not one for a long time——”

“Certainly not one yesterday morning,” he interrupted slowly, a little pause between each word. “Before you went to the picnic?” Gladys looked desperately at the paper-cutter. There was something in the psalms about a green bay-tree that occurred to her, not of course in connection with herself.

“No, she never said so. She wanted particularly to go to the picnic; she said (who was it that said women are no inventors?) that she would be so dull without you. I tried to persuade her not to go, but she would——”

“I wonder,” said Tom meditatively, “how many lies you have been telling me? Don’t get angry, it really isn’t worth while, and it doesn’t matter in the least, you know, only you had better save some for your old age. You can pack your things, as we are going home next week.” He rose drearily from the table and made his way out of the room; he cared so very little about anything.

He felt as physically tired as after a forced march. An endless expanse of days and months and years passed before his eyes—there seemed so much time now.

Suddenly he thought of the boy!—Mary’s boy and his. He straightened himself up; there was still somebody left to do that for. For Mary’s sake he would devote himself to the boy; it was tremendously worth while. He sat down and painstakingly wrote a letter that made his own tears come and the boy’s when he read it, and drew the two together as nothing but sorrow and loneliness and love can ever do. It followed so naturally and plainly that if Mary wanted her son to be like his father, the father must try to be a better sort of chap. Remorse receded, and took with it the burden of hopelessness.