"For G.o.d's sake, ma'am, do not approach these slight misadventures in so tragic a spirit. You have done nothing wrong whatever. I know you accuse yourself. It is madness to do so. I, who have so often scolded you, who have never spared the lash of my tongue when in past years I saw fair reason to apply it, I tell you now with the same reliable candour that your actions in this village and the motives that prompted them have been in each single case of a stainless n.o.bility."

She took no heed of him.

He stooped down and picked up the gla.s.s. "Drink some milk, ma'am. A few mouthfuls, perhaps even one, will help to clear the muddied vision of your mind. I cannot understand," he went on, half despairing, half exasperated, "what reasons you can possibly have for refusing to drink some milk. It is a feat most easily accomplished."

She did not move.

"Do you perchance imagine that a starved and badly treated body can ever harbour that most precious gift of the G.o.ds, a clear, sane mind?"

She did not move.

He looked at her in silence for a moment, then put down the gla.s.s.

"This is all my fault," he said slowly. "The whole responsibility for this unhappiness is on my shoulders, and I frankly confess it is a burden so grievous that I know not how to bear it."

He paused, but she took no notice.

"Ma'am, I have loved you."

She took no notice.

"And the property of love, I have observed, is often to mangle and kill the soul of its object."

She might have been asleep.

"Ma'am, I have brought you to a sorry pa.s.s. I was old, and you were young. I experienced, you ignorant. I deliberate, you impulsive. I a man, you a woman. Instead of restraining you, guiding you, shielding you from yourself, I was most vile, and fired you with desires for freedom that under the peculiar circ.u.mstances were wicked, set a ball rolling that I might have foreseen could never afterwards be stopped, put thoughts into your head that never without me would have entered it, embarked you on an enterprise in which the happiness of your whole life was doomed to shipwreck."

She stirred a little, and sighed a faint protest.

"This is very terrible to me--of a crushing, killing weight. Let it not also have to be said that I mangled your very soul, dimmed your reason, impaired the sweet sanity, the nice adjustment of what I know was once a fair and balanced mind."

She raised her head slowly and looked at him. "What?" she said. "Do you think--do you think I'm going mad?"

"I think it very likely, ma'am," said Fritzing with conviction.

A startled expression crept into her eyes.

"So much morbid introspection," he went on, "followed by hours of weeping and fasting, if indulged in long enough will certainly have that result. A person who fasts a sufficient length of time invariably parts piecemeal with valuable portions of his wits."

She stretched out her hand.

He mistook the action and bent down and kissed it.

"No," said Priscilla, "I want the milk."

He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and gave it to her, watching her drink with all the relief, the thankfulness of a mother whose child's sickness takes a turn for the better. When she had finished she gave him back the gla.s.s. "Fritzi," she said, looking at him with eyes wide open now and dark with anxious questioning, "we won't reproach ourselves then if we can help it--"

"Certainly not, ma'am--a most futile thing to do."

"I'll try to believe what you say about me, if you promise to believe what I say about you."

"Ma'am, I'll believe anything if only you will be reasonable."

"You've been everything to me--that's what I want to say. Always, ever since I can remember."

"And you, ma'am? What have you not been to me?"

"And there's nothing, nothing you can blame yourself for."

"Ma'am--"

"You've been too good, too unselfish, and I've dragged you down."

"Ma'am--"

"Well, we won't begin again. But tell me one thing--and tell me the truth--oh Fritzi tell me the truth as you value your soul--do you anywhere see the least light on our future? Do you anywhere see even a bit, a smallest bit of hope?"

He took her hand again and kissed it; then lifted his head and looked at her very solemnly. "No, ma'am," he said with the decision of an unshakable conviction, "upon my immortal soul I do not see a shred."

XXII

Let the reader now picture Priscilla coming downstairs the next morning, a golden Sunday morning full of Sabbath calm, and a Priscilla leaden-eyed and leaden-souled, her shabby garments worn out to a symbol of her worn out zeals, her face the face of one who has forgotten peace, her eyes the eyes of one at strife with the future, of one for ever asking "What next?" and shrinking with a shuddering "Oh please not that," from the bald reply.

Out of doors Nature wore her mildest, most beneficent aspect. She very evidently cared nothing for the squalid tragedies of human fate. Her hills were bathed in gentle light. Her sunshine lay warm along the cottage fronts. In the gardens her hopeful bees, cheated into thoughts of summer, droned round the pale mauves and purples of what was left of starworts. The gra.s.s in the churchyard sparkled with the fairy film of gossamers. Sparrows chirped. Robins whistled. And humanity gave the last touch to the picture by ringing the church bells melodiously to prayer.

Without doubt it was a day of blessing, supposing any one could be found willing to be blest. Let the reader, then, imagine this outward serenity, this divine calmness, this fair and light-flooded world, and within the musty walls of Creeper Cottage Priscilla coming down to breakfast, despair in her eyes and heart.

They breakfasted late; so late that it was done to the accompaniment, strangely purified and beautified by the intervening church walls and graveyard, of Mrs. Morrison's organ playing and the chanting of the village choir. Their door stood wide open, for the street was empty.

Everybody was in church. The service was, as Mrs. Morrison afterwards remarked, unusually well attended. The voluntaries she played that day were Dead Marches, and the vicar preached a conscience-shattering sermon upon the text "Lord, who is it?"

He thought that Mrs. Jones's murderer must be one of his parishioners.

It was a painful thought, but it had to be faced. He had lived so long shut out from gossip, so deaf to the ever-clicking tongue of rumour, that he had forgotten how far even small sc.r.a.ps can travel, and that the news of Mrs. Jones's bolster being a hiding-place for her money should have spread beyond the village never occurred to him. He was moved on this occasion as much as a man who has long ago given up being moved can be, for he had had a really dreadful two days with Mrs. Morrison, dating from the moment she came in with the news of the boxing of their only son's ears. He had, as the reader will have gathered, nothing of it having been recorded, refused to visit and reprimand Priscilla for this. He had found excuses for her. He had sided with her against his son. He had been as wholly, maddeningly obstinate as the extremely good sometimes are. Then came Mrs. Jones's murder. He was greatly shaken, but still refused to call upon Priscilla in connection with it, and pooh-poohed the notion of her being responsible for the crime as definitely as an aged saint of habitually grave speech can be expected to pooh-pooh at all. He said she was not responsible. He said, when his wife with all the emphasis apparently inseparable from the conversation of those who feel strongly, told him that he owed it to himself, to his parish, to his country, to go and accuse her, that he owed no man anything but to love one another. There was nothing to be done with the vicar. Still these scenes had not left him scathless, and it was a vicar moved to the utmost limits of his capacity in that direction who went into the pulpit that day repeating the question "Who is it?" so insistently, so appealingly, with such searching glances along the rows of faces in the pews, that the congregation, shuffling and uncomfortable, looked furtively at each other with an ever growing suspicion and dislike.

The vicar as he went on waxing warmer, more insistent, observed at least a dozen persons with guilt on every feature. It darted out like a toad from the hiding-place of some private ooze at the bottom of each soul into one face after the other; and there was a certain youth who grew so visibly in guilt, who had so many beads of an obviously guilty perspiration on his forehead, and eyes so guiltily starting from their sockets, that only by a violent effort of self-control could the vicar stop himself from pointing at him and shouting out then and there "Thou art the man!"

Meanwhile the real murderer had hired a waggonette and was taking his wife for a pleasant country drive.

It was to pacify Fritzing that Priscilla came down to breakfast. Left to herself she would by preference never have breakfasted again. She even drank more milk to please him; but though it might please him, no amount of milk could wash out the utter blackness of her spirit. He, seeing her droop behind the jug, seeing her gazing drearily at nothing in particular, jumped up and took a book from the shelves and without more ado began to read aloud. "It is better, ma'am," he explained briefly, glancing at her over his spectacles, "than that you should give yourself over to gloom."

Priscilla turned vague eyes on to him. "How can I help gloom?" she asked.

"Yes, yes, that may be. But n.o.body should be gloomy at breakfast. The entire day is very apt, in consequence, to be curdled."

"It will be curdled anyhow," said Priscilla, her head sinking on to her chest.

"Ma'am, listen to this."