“Where be ’e? I must see ’im alone,” she said, always speaking in that hard, high voice. “We had words this mornin’ when we parted ... it were that Casey’s fault ... I must tell Jerry....”
“Hush!” said the doctor, solemnly, interrupting her. “You shall see him. But you must be brave—for the sake of your children.”
“Oh, never mind the children,” cried she, half-petulantly. “I want Jerry....”
“Hush!” said the doctor again. And he led her within into the surgery where those lights were burning that she had seen through the mist as she ran—cursing Casey in her heart.
There was a deep silence for a moment, and then those without heard a great cry.
“Poor soul!” murmured the old housekeeper, wiping her eyes. “He were a bad man to ’er, God knows! But—there—she loved ’im to the last, I do b’lieve.”
A year had passed away. It was autumn again, and Lucy Wood sat out on the threshold above her brick steps and gazed down into the marsh, and across it to the distant town and harbour. Her delicately fair face was wan and shrivelled, her eyes dull and sunken, her slender form now emaciated. She had been very ill. The doctor had given her up, but he had done all he could though he guessed well enough she could never pay him, and to-day he had sent his trusty housekeeper with a bowl of her special milk-broth, and to induce her to take a breath of fresh air in the late September sunshine. For it was no stormy September this year: the marsh lay brown and mellow with the hips and haws red on its hedges, and the river stealing across it to the sea; and the sea was dappled with the pale purple shadows cast upon its gently heaving surface by little fleecy puffs in the serenest of skies, that was only barred by the violet horizontal clouds of fine weather across the distance.
But the fine weather brought none of its peace to the widow; the placid sunshine seemed only to make her the more gloomy, as though she were fretting to have even the mist back again on the marsh—the mist through which she had so often listened and trembled—the mist that brought her the keenest memory of the worst, yet the best, that she had ever known on earth.
Every one had said that when Lucy Wood got over the shock she would “’ave ’er ’ealth again” as she had never had it through the last five years of her wretched married life, and Miss Hearn had been “pleased to think that the misguided woman wouldn’t ’ave nothing now to take ’er off them pore children as she ’ad been so wicked as to bring into this weary world.”
But every one had been wrong.