"I can recall now the sympathy I felt for Matty Gordon," she pursued, "a great belle and beauty who ran off and married that scamp, Aleck Douglas.He turned into a perfect rascal, they said, though I must admit that he made a very amiable husband, and never stinted her, even if he stole from other people.Well, she stuck to him through good and evil report, and was really from all appearances a most contented woman.When he died at last, people said that it was just in time to escape the penitentiary, but to see Matty you would have thought she had lost nothing short of pure perfection.Poor old Bishop Deane, who always would speak his mind, in the pulpit or out of it, went to call on her, he told me, and took occasion to reprove her for such excessive grief over so unworthy an object.'He was not an upright man, Matty, and you know it,' he began quite boldly; 'he was a libertine, and a gambler, and an open scoffer at religion.' But Matty went on sobbing harder than ever, and at last, getting angry, he said sternly: 'And more than this, ma'am, he was, as you know, a faithless and disloyal husband!' Then the poor girl drew out a pocket handkerchief with a three-inch black border and mopped her pretty blue eyes.'Ah, but, Bishop, I had so much to be thankful for!' she said.'He never chewed tobacco!' Well, well, she may have been a fool, as the Bishop insisted, but he was a man, in spite of his cloth, and could never learn to understand a woman's sensibilities."She finished, and, turning, touched him gently on the hand.
"It is the little things that count in marriage, Christopher,"and after a moment she added thoughtfully: "Promise me that you will always use an ash-tray.""Anything, dear mother; I promise anything."With a contented sigh she closed her eyes, and, still holding his hand, fell into a broken and troubled sleep, from which she awoke presently in a gentle delirium.Her lost youth had returned to her, and with it something of her old gaiety of manner.Suddenly he felt a strange thrill pass through her, and raising herself with a last great endeavour, she sat erect, staring into the blue sky that showed through the window.
"I am engaged for this set, sir," she said in her winning voice, while a girlish smile transfigured her wan face, "but if it pleases you, you may put your name down for the next."Rising, he bent quickly over her, but before he touched her she had fallen back upon the pillows and lay with her arch smile frozen upon her face.
CHAPTER V.Christopher Plants by Moonlight At midnight they left him to watch alone in her chamber, and while he sat in the shadow beside the tester bed his thoughts encircled the still form on the white counterpane.On the mantel two candles burned dimly, and the melted tallow dripped slowly down into the tall brass candlesticks.The dimity curtains of the bed fluttered softly in the breeze that blew through the open window, and in his nostrils there was the scent of the single rose standing in a glass vase upon the table.Tucker had brought her the rose that morning and she had held it for a pleased moment in her trembling fingers.Everything in the room around him was ready for her use--her nightcap lay on the bureau, and in the china tray beside it he saw her brush and comb, in which a long strand of white hair was still twisted.On her hands, folded quietly upon her breast, he caught the flash of Docia's piece of purple glass, and he remembered with a throb of pain that she had asked that her betrothal ring might be buried with her.
"Well, she knows all now," he thought in bitterness."She knows the theft of the diamond, and the deception that lasted nearly thirty years." In the midst of his sorrow a sudden shame possessed him, and he felt all at once that his heart was pierced by the unearthly keenness of the dead eyes."She knows all now,"he repeated, and there was a passionate defiance in his acknowledgment."She knows all that I have hidden from her, as well as much that has been hidden from me.Her blind eyes are open, and she sees at last my failure and my sin, and the agony that I have known.For years I have shielded her, but she cannot shield me now, for all her wider vision.She can avert my fate no more than I could hold her back from hers.We are each alone--she, and I, and Maria, and the boy whom I have ruined--and there is no love that can keep a man from living and dying to himself."It seemed to him, sitting there in the shadow, that he felt as he had felt before in grave moments--the revolutions of the wheel on which he was bound.And with that strange mystic insight which comes to those who lead brooding and isolated lives close to Nature, he asked himself if, after all, these things had not had their beginning in the dawn of his existence so many million years ago."Has it not all happened before as it happens now--my shame and my degradation, the kiss I placed on Maria's lips, and the watch I keep by the deathbed of my mother? It is all familiar to me, and when the end comes, that will be familiar, too."A night moth entered, wheeling in dizzy circles about the candle, but when it went so near as to scorch its wings he caught it gently in his hollowed palms and released it into the darkness of the yard.As he leaned out he saw the light shining clear in Maria's window, and while he gazed upon it he felt a curious kinship with the moth that had flown in from the night and hovered about the flame.
