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Page 24
Mannering talked gently to her.
"Be sure he did not cry out. He felt no pain, no shock--I am sure
of that. To die is no hardship to the dead, remember. He is at
peace, Mary. You must come and see him presently. Your father
will call you soon. There is just a look of wonder in his face--
no fear, no suffering. Keep that in mind."
"He could not have felt fear. He knew of nothing that a brave man
might fear, except doing wrong. Nobody knows how good he was but
me. His father loved him fiercely, passionately; but he never knew
how good he was, because Tom did not think quite like old Mr. May.
I must write and say that Tom is dangerously ill, and cannot
recover. That will break it to him. Tom was the only earthly
affection he had. It will be terrible when he comes."
They left her, and, after they had gone, she rose, fell on her
knees, and so remained, motionless and tearless, for a long time.
Through her own desolation, as yet unrealized, there still persisted
the thought of her husband's father. It seemed that her mind could
dwell on his isolation, while powerless to present the truth of her
husband's death to her. By some strange mental operation, not
unbeneficent, she saw his grief more vividly than as yet she felt
her own. She rose presently, quick-eared to wait the call, and
went to her desk in the window. Then she wrote a letter to her
father-in-law, and pictured his ministering at that moment to
his church. Her inclination was to soften the blow, yet she knew
that could only be a cruel kindness. She told him, therefore, that
his son must die. Then she remembered that he was so near. A
telegram must go rather than a letter, and he would be at
Chadlands before nightfall. She destroyed her letter and set about
a telegram. Jane Bond came in, and she asked her to dispatch the
telegram as quickly as possible. Her old nurse, an elderly
spinster, to whom Mary was the first consideration in existence,
had brought her a cup of soup and some toast. It had seemed to
Jane the right thing to do.
Mary thanked her and drank a little. She passed through a mental
phase as of dreaming--a sensation familiar in sleep; but she knew
that this was not a sleeping but a waking experience. She waited
for her father, yet dreaded to hear him return. She thought of
human footsteps and the difference between them. She remembered
that she would never hear Tom's long stride again.
It often broke into a run, she remembered, as he approached her;
and she would often run toward him, too--to banish the space that
separated them. She blamed herself bitterly that she had decreed
to sleep in her old nursery. She had loved it so, and the small
bed that had held her from childhood; yet, if she had slept with
him, this might not have happened.
"To think that only a wall separated us!" she kept saying to
herself. "And I sleeping and dreaming of him, and he dying only
a few yards away."
Death was no disaster for Tom, so the doctor had said. What
worthless wisdom! And perhaps not even wisdom. Who knows what a
disaster death may be? And who would ever know what he had felt
at the end, or what his mind had suffered if time had been given
him to understand that he was going to die? She worked herself
into agony, lost self-control at last and wept, with Jane Bond's
arms round her.
"And I was so troubled, because I thought he had been called back
to his ship!" she said.
"He's called to a better place than a ship, dear love," sobbed Jane.
After they left her, Sir Walter and Dr. Mannering had entered the
Grey Room for a moment and, standing there, spoke together.
"I have a strange consciousness that I am living over the past
again," declared the physician. "Things were just so when that
poor woman, Nurse Forrester--you remember."
"Yes. I felt the same when Caunter was breaking open the door. I
faced the worst from the beginning, for the moment I heard what he
had done, I somehow knew that my unfortunate son-in-law was dead.
I directly negatived his suggestion last night, and never dreamed
that he would have gone on with it when he knew my wish."
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