"Go instantly, Bessie. Deleah, take her downstairs--"

The bridegroom, dressed for the character in blue frock-coat, lavender trousers, with gloves and tie to match, and a flower in his b.u.t.tonhole, was in waiting to help his bride to alight. He, who had never struck her as looking so before, suddenly appeared quite old to Deleah, in spite of his careful array, and the whiskers which had been oiled and curled.

Bessie with the forget-me-nots surrounding her plump, fair-skinned face, looked almost a child in comparison.

"Late!" he said, smiling upon the ladies. "But better late than never, eh, Sister Deleah?"

"That depends on how you look at these things," said Deleah, for the first time in her life feeling the desire to be unpleasant.

"We sprang a surprise on you, eh?"

"We were not at all surprised, Mr. Boult."

"It will have to be 'George' now, won't it? We can't have Sister Deleah 'Mr. Boult-ing' me. Eh, Bess?"

"You may call him 'George,' Deda," said a magnanimous Bessie.

"Thank you," said Deleah, in the tone of one who is not at all grateful.

She followed the happy pair to the platform. Both were too smartly dressed for ordinary travellers, and people, guessing them to be bride and bridegroom, looked at them with interest.

"How they all stare! I hope they find us worth looking at."

"I always have thought you were, my dear," Mr. Boult said gallantly.

Quite a little crowd collected to see Bessie handed into the first-cla.s.s carriage, on which the word 'engaged' had been pasted: "We shall be alone.

I have seen to that," the bridegroom said, proud of his man-of-the-world ways.

Deleah climbed into the carriage with her sister. "You wish you were coming with us?" Mr. Boult inquired facetiously.

"Not at all!"

"Your turn will come. How about Mr. Gibbon? Now that Bessie is out of the way you can have your chance."

"Good-bye, Bessie. I do so hope you may be happy."

"You're a lucky young lady, tha's what you are!" Emily said, putting her head into the carriage. "You couldn't marry all of 'em what was in love with you, Bessie; but you've made a wise ch'ice--"

The guard cut her eloquence short by slamming the door. Mr. Boult, oblivious of the fact that Bessie might also have liked to show herself, filled up the window. Emily, determined that no item of the ritual proper to such ceremonies should be omitted, promptly threw a handful of rice in his face. It stung, half blinded him, but had the effect of driving him from his position, so that Bessie for one minute could appear. The poor face in the white tulle and forget-me-nots looked anxious, frightened, appealing; and as the train, rushing on, carried it from them the women left on the platform looked at each other through eyes blinded with tears.

"Poor Bessie! She is such a child always," Deleah said.

"She is that, Miss Deleah. I tell you how 'tis with me and Bessie--spite of her having such a way with her with the gentlemen, and such a will of her own--I have always felt I haven't never lost the little girl I had to wait on when first I come to service with your ma."

CHAPTER x.x.xII

The Man With The Mad Eyes

The other women being employed in the daytime, the sitting-room had been more especially Bessie's domain. How strange and chilling was the thought it would be empty of Bessie for evermore. Her untidy work-basket peeped out from under the sofa where she always pushed it on the appearance of a visitor; the penny weekly paper in which she read of the fashions, and the romantic love-matches of which she had dreamed while making an absolutely sordid marriage herself, was tucked behind the cushion of her chair.

Deleah stood within the doorway for a minute, without entering, feeling strangely bereaved and forlorn. Not much sympathy had been between the pair, but the ties of blood are stronger than is realised till "marriage or death or division" snaps the cord.

With a lagging step Deleah went forward into the so pathetically empty room. On the table some flowers were lying. Two deep purple blooms of clematis. The creeper so carefully trained to climb beside a certain hall door came into her mind. She had noticed on an occasion she would fain have forgotten, without knowing she had done so, that it bore two buds.

Deleah looked at the blossoms with an odd feeling of repulsion. She walked round the table to the side that was farthest from them. Then lifting her eyes, she saw that Charles Gibbon was standing by the opposite wall. The open door had screened him from her on entering.

"Mr. Gibbon!" she said, and her voice faltered with dismay; only apprehension was in her eyes.

He looked at her without speaking. It was curiously disturbing to see him standing there, his back to the wall, saying nothing; the broad, short figure, at one time so familiar in that room, now so alien and strange, the commonplace, plain-featured face, tragic with its new grey hue, the eyes--Deleah remembered with a shudder some words recently spoken about the eyes! They were fixed upon her face.

"Won't you come and sit down, Mr. Gibbon?"

He advanced a few steps, and stood at the table opposite her.

She looked at the flowers. "You brought these?"

"For you," he said, speaking thickly. "They are the only two the clematis had. If it had ten thousand they would have been for you."

Deleah kept her eyes upon the flowers. She felt that she could not touch them. "You are very kind," she said.

"You would say as much as that to any stranger in the street who had kicked a stone out of your path, and I--I--." He was stammering curiously in his thickened voice. It seemed that the words he wanted to speak would not come. "And I--after all that I suffer--only kind?" he got out at last.

With something of the expression of a trapped creature in her eyes, Deleah looked past him to the door. He turned instantly, and shut it, and came back to his place opposite her at the table.

"Your sister is married to Mr. Boult, to-day," he said. "At one time you could not marry me because of your sister. That impediment's gone. Another time, you had some other excuse. Again another. Come, what excuse have you to-day?" He leant across the table to bring his face closer to hers. "You don't intend to marry me, do you?"

She gazed at him with fear in her eyes, but did not speak. "You let me live beside you, set my heart on you, till there was nothing else on earth or heaven for me but you. You let me slave to serve a man I hated as a means of getting you. You let me get ready my house--every brick in it, every pound of paint laid on it, for you. You--"

"Mr. Gibbon, do wait! I think you are saying too much. I never deceived you. I never said I would marry you. I tried to make you understand."

"Listen! Have you always hated me? When you took my flowers and fruit--all the presents I lavished on you--tell me, did you hate me then?"

"Certainly I did not. I thought you very kind and generous."

"Do you hate me now?" When she told him 'no' he stretched out a shaking hand to her across the table. "Then--?"

Deleah stepped back from the hand and shook her head.

"Why?"

No answer.

"Why?"

"Oh, where would be the use of my telling you!"

"But you shall tell me."