Then remembering the limited resources of service in that small and isolated household, David, with the thoughtfulness of a boy who had long had a man’s responsibilities on his own young shoulders, re-entered his boat and rowed rapidly across to the little sandy isle, to tell his grandmother, and even to suggest her returning with him.
The gentle old dame saw even more clearly than her grandson had done, the need they had of her at Promontory Hall. So she lost no time in getting ready to go, and in less than half an hour from the moment when she received the news, she stood in Sophia’s kitchen, earnestly offering her services.
“If you’ll only look after de chile, which I b’lieve you is a great favorite ’long o’ her, dat is all as I shall ax ob you,” said ’Phia.
And so the sweet old dame “looked after” little Gloria, and comforted her, night and day, during the three days that preparations for the funeral went on.
Meanwhile, David Lindsay made himself useful in many ways at the Hall during the day, and at night returned to the little isle to take care of the house in the absence of its mistress.
Often Gloria tried to see and console her stricken uncle; but he always refused to have her, saying:
“Let all innocent beings keep aloof from me.”
Thus, in alternations between the frenzy of remorse and the stupor of despair, Marcel de Crespigney passed the interval between the death and burial of his “murdered wife,” as, in his morbid self-reproach, he called her.
“Words kill!” he answered to the expostulations of his friend, the doctor. “Words kill, and I killed her with cruel words! The last words I spoke to her—the last words her failing senses heard from me—were cruel, murderous words! They killed her! What though no law can drag me before an earthly tribunal to answer for her life? Before the awful judgment seat of the God in my own soul, I stand a self-convicted murderer!”
The good doctor shrugged his shoulders, reflecting that it was of no use to argue with a man whose morbid sensibility made him, for the time being, a monomaniac.