CHAPTER V.

VIOLETS.

ALL the neighbours said it was a mystery how the Rodneys lived for the next three months, for Rodney was away for days together, only coming home now and then during his sober intervals; but it was no mystery at all. The wondrous kindness which the poor show to the poor was at work for them. Mrs. Rodney needed little food, and Nelly was always welcome to share the stinted meals in any house near at hand. Every day at dusk Bessie came in, and if she had been lucky in selling her flowers or fruit in the streets, she did not fail to bring some small, cheap dainty with her to tempt the sick woman's appetite. So the depth of the winter passed by; and the spring drew near, with its Easter week of holiday and gladness.

It was the day before Good Friday, when Rodney was returning, with lagging steps and a heavy heart, to his wretched home, after an absence of several days. Every nerve in his body was jarring, and every limb ached. He could scarcely climb the narrow and steep staircase; and when he reached his door, he was obliged to lean against it, breathing hardly after the exertion. It seemed very silent within, awfully still and silent. He listened for Nelly's chatter, or her mother's cough, which had sounded incessantly in his ears before he had left home; but there was no breath or whisper to be heard. Yet the door yielded readily to his touch, and with faint and weary feet he crossed the threshold, to find the room empty.

It was his first impression that it was empty; but when he looked round again with his dim, red eyes, whose sight was failing, they fell upon one awful occupant of the desolate room. Even that one he could not discern all at once, not till he had crossed the floor and laid his hand upon the strange object resting upon the old bed—the poor, rough shell of a coffin which the parish had provided for his wife's burial. She was not in it yet, but lay beyond it, in its shadow; her white, fixed face, very hollow and rigid, at rest upon the pillow, and her wasted hands crossed upon her breast. The neighbours had furnished their best to dress her for the grave, and a white cap covered her gray hair; while between her hands, on the heart that would beat no more, Bessie had laid a bunch of fresh spring violets.

Rodney sank down on his knees, with his arms stretched over the coffin towards his dead wife. Some of the deep, hard lines had vanished from her face, and an expression of rest and peace had settled upon it, which made her look more like the girl he had loved and married twenty years ago. How happy they had been then! And how truly he had loved her! If any man had told him to what a wretched end he would bring her, he would have asked indignantly, "Am I a dog, that I should do this thing?"

The memory of their first years together swept over him like a flood: their pleasant home, of which she had been so proud; their first-born child, and their plans and schemes for his future; the respect in which he had been held by all who knew him; and he had thrown them all away to indulge a shameful sin! And now she was dead; and even if he had the power to break through the hateful chain which fettered him body and soul, he could never make amends to her. He had killed her as surely, but more slowly and cruelly, than if he had stained his hands with her blood. God, if not man, would charge him with her murder.

The twilight came on as he knelt there, and for a few minutes the white features looked whiter and more ghastly before the darkness hid them from him. Then the night fell. It seemed more terrible than ever now—this stillness in the room which was not empty. His mind wandered in bewilderment; he could not fix his thoughts upon one subject for a minute together, not even on his wife, who was lying dead within reach of his hand. His head ached, and his brain was clouded. One dram would set him right again, and give him the courage to seek his neighbours, and inquire after Nelly; but he dared not meet them as he was. He could not bear to meet their accusing eyes, and listen to their rough reproaches, and hear how his wife had died in want, and neglect, and desertion. He must get something to drink, or he should go mad.

There was nothing in the room of any value—he knew that; yet there was one thing might give him the means of gratifying his quenchless drouth. He knew a man, serving at the counter of one of the nearest spirit-vaults, who had a love for flowers; and there was the bunch of sweet violets withering in the dead hands of his wife. For a minute or two the miserable drunkard's brain grew steady and clear, and he shuddered at the thought of thus robbing the dead; but the better moments passed quickly away. The scent of the flowers brought back to his troubled memory the lanes and hedgerows where he had rambled with her, under the showery and sunny skies of April, to gather violets—so long ago that surely it must have been in some other and happier life, and he must have been another and far better man. How happy the days had been! No poverty then; no aching limbs and wandering thoughts. He had believed in God, and loved his fellow-men. Now there was not a cur in the streets that was not a happier and nobler creature than himself.

Still, underneath the surface of these thoughts, his purpose strengthened steadily to exchange the fresh, sweet flowers for one draught of the poison which was destroying him—he knew it—body and soul. But the darkness had grown so dense that he could not, with all the straining of his be-dimmed eyes, trace the white outline of the dead face and hands; and his skin crept at the thought of touching, with his hot hand, the deathly chill of the corpse. The flowers were there; but how was he to snatch them away from the frigid grasp which held them without feeling her fingers touch his? But the pangs of his thirst gathered force from minute to minute, until overpowered by them, he stretched out his feverish and trembling hands across the coffin in the darkness, and laid them upon the dead hands of his wife.

The cold struck through him with an icy chill that he would never forget, but he would not now fail in his purpose. He loosed the violets from her fingers, and rushed away from the place, not daring to pause for an instant till he had reached the gin-palace where he could sell them.

[Illustration]