And Christina's letters made no appeal. They were infrequent, hardly affectionate; amazingly tactful letters. Milly shrank in recognising how tactful. It showed Christina's power that she should be so tactful, should so master herself to a responsive calm. Milly had come to dread Christina's tact, her patience and her reticence, more than all the vehemence and passionate upbraidings of former years. Beneath the careful words she knew that a profound, undying hope lay hidden; pain, too, profound and undying. The thought of such hope, such pain, made Milly feel at once the pity and the repulsion.
In none of Christina's letters was there any mention of her health. Milly knew how fragile was her hold on life and how much had happened of late to tax it; but it was with a shock of something unrealisable, unbelievable, that she read one autumn morning, in a blurred and shaking hand: "I am very ill—dying, they say. Come to me at once. I must tell you something."
Christina dying. She had said that it would kill her. And what had she not said to Christina that might not well have killed her? Milly was stricken with dreadful remorse and horror.
She hastened to London.
The maid at the door of the little house in Sloane Street told her that Mrs. Drent was rapidly sinking. Milly read reproach in her simple eyes. "I did not know! Why was I not told?—Why was I not told?"—she repeated to the nurse who came to meet her. Mrs. Drent, the nurse said, would not have her sent for, but during these last few days she had become slightly delirious and had spoken of something she wished to tell, had, at last, insisted on writing herself. She could hardly live a day longer. Heart-failure had made her illness fatal.
In the sick room, Milly paused at the door. Was that Christina? That strange face with such phantom eyes? Christina's eyes did not look at her with reproach or with sorrow, but, it seemed, with terror, a wild, infectious terror; Milly felt it seize her as she stood, spellbound, by the door. Then a rush of immense pity and comprehension shook her through and through. Christina was dying, delirious, and what must she be feeling in her haunted abandonment and desolation? She ran to the bed weeping. She knelt beside it. Her tears rained upon Christina's hands, as she took her in her arms and kissed her. "Christina!—dearest Christina!—Forgive me! Forgive me!—I did not know!—Why did you not let me come and nurse you?—I have always nursed you! Why did you not tell me?—Oh, Christina!"
Holding her, kissing her, she could not see clearly the illumination that, at her words, illuminated the dying woman's face. Life seemed suddenly to leap to her eyes and lips. The terror vanished like a ghost in the uprising of morning sunlight. With a rapture of hope and yearning which resumed all her ebbing power, physical and spiritual, she stretched out her arms and clasped them about Milly's neck. "Do you love me again?" she asked. Her voice was like a child's in its ecstasy.
"My darling Christina!—Love you?—Who is there in all the world but you!" Milly cried. No affirmation could be too strong, she felt, no atonement too great.
"Better than you love him?"
Milly did not even hesitate. Lies were like obstacles hardly seen as, in the onrush of her remorse and pity, she leaped them.—"Yes,—Yes. You are everything," she reiterated. "I love you best. It has passed—that feeling."