Full of some nameless apprehension, I started instantly on that bright June morning, feeling sure that at the least Robbie was the victim of some catastrophe. I was even prepared to learn that Robbie was dead, though I could not form the slightest conjecture as to what had led to this sudden demise. Or was Robbie engaged to be married, and had we to arrange about an elusive female of mysterious charm and antecedents?...
Well, it was not that, but it was even worse, for Agnes was engaged to John Marrible, who, with the selfishness of his sex, insisted that Robbie should die. He was with her and put his case. Agnes really seemed more taken up with Robbie than she was with him, and he demanded her undivided affection. For her part, she wanted to leave Robbie on the Continent for future emergencies, and promised not to think about him, but John objected to that. His head, he told us with a glance at her, was too full of other things, and he could not trust himself not to give the whole affair away by some inadvertence of happiness and pride. That glance settled it; Agnes took a half sheet of paper and wrote on it for a few minutes in silence.
“I will send it to the principal morning papers,” she said, “and John shall pay for it. Listen! Will this do?
“ORIOLE.—On the 17th instant, very suddenly, at Mannheim, Robert, only son of the late William and Margaret Oriole, of Karachi, India. Age 31. Deeply lamented. No flowers.
‘We will grieve not, only find
Strength in what remains behind.’”
That appeared next day, and I do not suppose that anybody lamented him more deeply than Mrs. Withers. She sent Agnes and me charming little notes of condolence and quoted from one of the Cologne sonnets, and asked if those touching lines in the notice of his death were by him.
A week or two later, I sat next Mrs. Withers at dinner, and Mr. Chapel was on her other side.
“Of course, you knew dear Robbie Oriole, Mr. Chapel,” she said. “What a loss to poetry. Are not those Cologne sonnets the finest in your opinion since Keats? I was privileged to have a copy of them. You agree with me, do you not, Mr. Goodenough? Do you remember that marvellous one beginning, ‘The clouds weep westwards under the scurrilous sky’?”
I hugged myself over not asking who had given her that privilege and sadly assented. She proceeded to talk to both of us, as her manner was at the dinner-table, with an intuition wrong in itself, but so excruciatingly right in general direction that it made me catch my breath.
“Yes, those sonnets,” she said. “How amazingly feminine they are, both in their tenderness and bitterness. Or, perhaps, all I mean is that women will always appreciate them more than men. When I say them over to myself, as I so often do, I seem to see Robbie reading them to Aggie Lockett. Certainly, I thought, when she first spoke to me about Robbie, that she was absolutely devoted to him. Indeed, it gave me a little shock when I saw to-day that she was to marry Jack Marrible.”