"The little one opens my desk ... with the bra.s.s corners.... Yes, that one.... Open the top flap, and look in the little left-hand drawer.

Got it?"

"Yes; you want the letters out? There's only one packet."

"That's the lot. Read what's written on them."

"Only 'Emily, 1837.'"

"Quite right! That was your aunt, you know--your father's sister.

Don't cry, darling. Nothing to cry about! I'm only an old chap. There, there!" Rosalind sat down again by the bed, keeping the packet of letters in her hand. Presently the old man, who had closed his eyes as though dozing, opened them and said: "Have you put them on the fire?"

"No. Was I to?"

"That was what I meant. I thought I said so.... Yes; pop 'em on."

Rosalind went to the fireside and stood hesitating, till the old man repeated his last words; then threw the love-letters of sixty years ago in a good hot place in the burning coal. A flare, and they were white ash trying to escape from a valley of burning rocks; then even that was free to rise. Maybe the only one who ever read them would be soon--would be a mere attenuated ash, at least, as far as what lay on that bed went, so pale and evanescent even now.

"A fool of a boy, Rosey dear," said the old voice, as she took her place by the bed again. "Just a fool of a boy, to keep them all those years. And _she_ married to another fellow, and a great-grandmother.

Ah, well!... don't you cry about it, Rosey.... All done now!" She may have heard him wrong, for his voice went to a whisper. She wondered at the way the cough was sparing him.

Then she thought he was falling asleep again; but presently he spoke.

"I shall do very well now.... Nothing but a little rest ... that's all I want now. Only there's something I wanted to say about ...

about...."

"About Sally?" Rosalind guessed quickly, and certainly.

"Ah ... about the baby. _Your_ baby, Rosey.... That man that was her father ... he's on my mind...."

"Oh me, forget him, dear--forget him! Leave him to G.o.d!" Rosalind repeated a phrase used twenty years ago by herself in answer to the old soldier's first uncontrollable outburst of anger against the man who had made her his victim. His voice rose again above a whisper as he answered:

"I heard you say so, dear child ... then ... that time. You were right, and I was wrong. But what I've said--many a time, G.o.d forgive me!--that I prayed he was in h.e.l.l. I would be glad now to think I had not said it."

"Don't think of it. Oh, my dear, don't think of it! You never meant it...."

"Ah, but I did, though; and would again, mind you, Rosey! Only--not now! Better let him go, for Sallykin's sake.... The child's the puzzle of it...."

Rosalind thought she saw what he was trying to say, and herself tried to supplement it. "You mean, why isn't Sally like him?"

"Ah, to be sure! Like father like son, they say. His son's a chip of the old block. But then--he's his mother's son, too. Two such!--and then see what comes of 'em. Sallykin's your daughter ... Rosey's daughter. Sallykin...." He seemed to be drowsing off from mere weakness; but he had something to say, and his mind made for speech and found it:

"Yes, Rosey; it's the end of the story. Soon off--I shall be! Not very long now. Wasn't it foggy?"

"Yes, dear; it was. But it's clear now. It's snowing."

"Then you could send for Jack Roper. Old Jack! He can tell me something I want to know.... I know he can...."

"But it's the middle of the night, dear. We can't send for him now.

Sally shall go for him again when she comes in the morning. What is it you want to know?"

"What became of poor Algernon Palliser.... I know Old Jack knows....

Something he heard.... I forget things ... my head's not good. Ah, Rosey darling! if I'd been there in the first of it ... I could have got speech of him. I might have ... might have...."

As the old man's mind wandered back to the terrible time it dragged his hearer's with it. Rosalind tried to bear it by thinking of what Sally was like in those days, crumpled, violent, vociferous, altogether _intransigeante_. But it was only a moment's salve to a reeling of the reason she knew must come if this went on. If he slept it might be averted. She thought he was dropping off, but he roused himself again to say: "What became of poor Palliser--your husband?"

Then Rosalind, whose head was swimming, let the fact slip from her that the dying man had never seen or known her husband in the old days; only he had always spoken of him as one to be pitied, not blamed, even as she herself thought of him. Incautiously she now said, "Poor Gerry!" forgetting that Colonel Lund had never known him by that name, or so slightly that it did not connect itself. Yet his mind was marvellously clear, too; for he immediately replied: "I did not mean Fenwick. I meant your first husband. Poor boy! poor fellow! What became of him?"

"_His_ name was Algernon, too," was all the answer she could think of.

It was a sort of forlorn hope in nettle-grasping. Then she saw it had little meaning in it for her listener. His voice went on, almost whispering:

"Many a time I've thought ... if we could have found the poor boy ...

and shown him Sally ... he might have ... might have...."

Rosalind could bear it no longer. Whoever reads this story carelessly may see little excuse for her that she should lose her head at the bedside of a dying man. It was really no matter for surprise that she should do so. Consider the perpetual tension of her life, the broken insufficient sleep of the last two days, the shock of "Old Jack's"

sudden death a few hours since! Small blame to her, to our thinking, if she did give way! To some it may even seem, as to us, that the course she took was best in the end. And, indeed, her self-control stood by her to the last; it was a retreat in perfect order, not a flight. Nor did she, perhaps, fully measure how near her old friend was to his end, or release--a better name, perhaps.

"Major dear, I have something I must tell you." The old eyelids opened, and his eyes turned to her, though he remained motionless--quite as one who caught the appeal in the tension of her voice and guessed its meaning.

"Rosey darling--yes; tell me now." His voice tried to rise above a whisper; an effort seemed to be in it to say: "Don't keep anything back on my account."

"So I will, dear. Shut your eyes and lie quiet and listen. I want to tell you that I know that my first husband is not dead.... Yes, dear; don't try to speak. You'll see when I tell you.... Algernon Palliser is not dead, though we thought he must be. He went away from Lah.o.r.e after the proceedings, and he did go to Australia, no doubt, as we heard at the time; but after that he went to America, and was there till two years ago ... and then he came to England." The old man tried to speak, but this time his voice failed, and Rosalind thought it best to go straight on. "He came to England, dear, and met with a bad accident, and lost his memory...."

"_What!_" The word came so suddenly and clearly that it gave her new courage to go on. She _must_ tell it all now, and she felt sure he was hearing and understanding all she said.

"Yes, dear; it's all true. Let me tell it all. He lost his memory completely, so that he did not know his own name...."

"My G.o.d!"

"Did not know his own name, dear--did not know his own name--did not know the face of the wife he lost twenty years ago--all, all a blank!... Yes, yes; it was he himself, and I took him and kept him, and I have him now ... and oh, my dear, my dear, he does not know it--knows _nothing_! He does not know who I am, nor who he was, nor that Sally is the baby; but he loves her dearly, as he never could have loved her if ... if...."

She could say no more. The torrent of tears that was the first actual relief to the weight upon her heart of two years of secrecy grew and grew till speech was overwhelmed. But she knew that her story, however scantily told, had reached her listener's mind, though she could not have said precisely at what moment he came to know it. The tone of his exclamation, "My G.o.d!" perhaps had made her take his knowledge for granted. Of one thing, however, she felt certain--that details were needless, would add nothing to the main fact, which she was quite convinced her old friend had grasped with a mind still capable of holding it, although it might be in death. Even so one tells a child the outcome only of what one tells in full to older ears. Then quick on the heels of the relief of sharing her burden with another followed the thought of how soon the sympathy she had gained must be lost, buried--so runs the code of current speech--in her old friend's grave.

All her heart poured out in tears on the hand that could still close fitfully upon her own as she knelt by the bed on which he would so soon lie dying.

Presently his voice came again--a faint whisper she could just catch: "Tell it me again, Rosey ... what you told me just now ... just now." And she felt his cold hand close on hers as he spoke. Then she repeated what she had said before, adding only: "But he may never come to know his own story, and Sally must not know it." The old whisper came back, and she caught the words: "Then it is true! My G.o.d!"

She remained kneeling motionless beside him. His breath, weak and intermittent, but seeming more free than when she left him four hours since, was less audible than the heavy sleep of the overtaxed nurse in the next room, heard through the unclosed door. The familiar early noises of the street, the life outside that cares so little for the death within, the daily bread and daily milk that wake us too soon in the morning, the cynical interchanges of cheerful early risers about the comfort of the weather--all grew and gathered towards the coming day. But the old Colonel heard none of them. What thought he still had could say to him that this was good and that was good, hard though it might be to hold it in mind. But one bright golden thread ran clear through all the tangled skeins--he would leave Rosey happy at last, for all the bitterness her cup of life had held before.

The nurse had slept profoundly, but she was one of those fortunate people who can do so at will, and then wake up at an appointed time, as many great soldiers have been able to do. As the clock struck eight she sat up in the chair she had been sleeping in and listened a moment. No sound came from the next room. She rose and pushed the door open cautiously and looked in. Mrs. Fenwick was still kneeling by the bed, her face hidden, still holding the old man's hand. The nurse thought surely the still white face she saw in the intermittent gleams of a lamp-flame flickering out was the face of a dead man. Need she rouse or disturb the watcher by his side? Not yet, certainly. She pulled the door very gently back, not closing it.

A sound came of footsteps on the stairs--footsteps without voices. It was Fenwick and Sally, who had pa.s.sed through the street door, open for a negotiation for removal of the snow--for the last two hours had made a white world outside. Sally was on a stairflight in the rear. She had paused for a word with the boy Chancellorship, who was a candidate for snow-removal. He seemed relieved by the snow. It was a tidy lot better morning than last night, missis. He had breakfasted--yes--off of corfy, and paid for it, and b.u.t.tered 'arf slices and no stintin', for twopence. Sally had a fellow-feeling for this boy's optimism. But he had something on his mind, for when Sally asked him if Major Roper had got home safe last night, his cheerfulness clouded over, and he said first, "Couldn't say, missis;" and then, "He's been got home, you may place your dependence on that;" adding, inexplicably to Sally, "He won't care about this weather; it won't be no odds!" She couldn't wait to find out his meaning, but told him he might go on clearing away the snow, and when Mrs. Kindred came he was to say Miss Rosalind Nightingale told him he might. She said she would be answerable, and then ran to catch up Fenwick.

The nurse came out to meet them on the landing, and in answer to Fenwick's half-inquiry or look of inquiry--Sally did not gather which--said: "Yes--at least, I think so--just now." Sally made up her mind it was death. But it was not, quite; for as the nurse, preceding them, pushed the door of the sickroom gently open, the voice of the man she believed dead came out almost strong and clear in the silence: "Evil has turned to good. G.o.d be praised!"

But they were the last words Colonel Lund spoke. He died so quietly that the exact moment of dissolution was not distinguishable. Fenwick and Sally found Rosalind so overstrained with grief and watching that they asked for no explanation of the words. Indeed, they may not have ascribed any special meaning to them.

CHAPTER XXV