A Sovereign Remedy

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

"Then I shall have to go," he said obstinately. "I will not have my work spoiled by any woman."

She felt small somehow; a trifle remorseful perhaps as she left the room. He certainly had been rather dejected of late and it was such a pity.

And Ned also! He was not dejected, but he was changed, curiously changed.

In truth the past six weeks, since the night when he had outwatched the stars, to be met in the dawn by the mischance of a confidence not intended for his ears, had changed him a great deal. He had not seen Aura since. He had purposely left New Park, before she was well enough to receive visitors, and had only returned to it after she had been moved for a freshening up at the seaside. But he had heard of her constantly from Ted, who, after two or three days of intense anxiety, had gone back to business with renewed zest. This time interruption had apparently been beneficial; at least the first few days of Aura's convalescence and disappointment had been cheered by him with the most sanguine of outlooks on the future. He even went so far as to say that, perhaps after all, things were best as they were. They would move into a still better house, and be able to set up properly before taking upon themselves the responsibilities of life.

Aura had said "Perhaps," and after he had gone had lain and cried softly to herself. There is nothing in the wide world so sacred to a woman as her grief for the child which has died to save her life. It is grief of the most inward type, unknown, unrecognised by others, which lasts through the years and grows no slighter than it was when in the dim, between life and death, she first learns that her child has paid the ransom for her.

In a way, therefore, the doubt, which by degrees grew into a certainty, that Fate had denied motherhood to her, had at first almost brought her comfort.

If there was no probability of her being more fortunate in the future, happiness neither awaited her, nor could there be any rivalry between the dead child and a living one. There was a tragedy in both lives, not only in the one.

Such thoughts as these, aided by the very intensity of her grief, kept her going until she began to face the world again at the sea-side. Then came one of those fiery furnaces of the soul through which so few pass unscathed. She used to wander down at the ebb low tide, past the groups of children building castles in the sand, past the uttermost outermost little waving fringe of sea-spoil left, but for a brief half hour, by the regretful retreat of the waves, and gaze out over the long, low sand-banks, claimed as their own by clouds of fluttering, settling, fluttering seagulls.

The tide had truly ebbed--the mud-flats of life lay bare. Her thoughts were like the gulls, never still for a second. Only in the slack tide of the estuary there was rest for a moment, and the long, brown arms of the seaweed waved sleepily, seeming to call her to rest with them.

So she would go back again to her lodgings, but in the night time she would rise and draw up her blind and look out.