During the afternoon, seeing that Meg looked a little tired, and also realizing, in his practical fashion, that Ben’s mother would be more at ease in the society she was used to, John Holt sent her to ramble about with her boy, and Robin went with them; and Meg and John went to rest with the thousands of roses among the bowers of the fairy island, and there they said a good deal to each other. John Holt seemed to get a kind of comfort in finding words for some of the thoughts he had been silent about in the past.
“It’s a queer thing,” he said, “but when I talk to you about her I feel as if she were somewhere near.”
“Perhaps she is,” said Meg, in her matter-of-fact little way. “We don’t know what they are doing. But if you had gone into another world, and she had stayed here, you know you would have come to take care of her.”
“That’s true,” said John Holt. “I took care of her when she was here, the Lord knows. There wasn’t anything on earth she liked that I wouldn’t have broken my neck to get at. When I built that house for her—I built a big house to take her to when we were married—she said I hadn’t left out a thing she cared for. And she knew what things ought to be. She wasn’t like me, Meg. I’d spent my life trying to make a fortune. I began when I was a boy, and I worked hard. She belonged to people with money, and she’d read books and travelled and seen things. She knew it all. I didn’t, when first I knew her, but I learned fast enough afterwards. I couldn’t help it while I was with her. We planned the house together. It was one of the best in the country—architecture, furniture, pictures, and all the rest. The first evening we spent there——” He stopped and cleared his throat, and was silent a few seconds. Then he added, in a rather unsteady voice, “We were pretty happy people that evening.”
Later he showed Meg her miniature. He carried it in an oval case in his inside pocket. It was the picture of a young woman with a brilliant face, lovely laughing eyes, and a bright, curving red mouth.
“No,” he said, as he looked at it, “She couldn’t go out. She’s somewhere.”
Then he told Meg about the rooms they had made ready for “John Holt, Junior,” as they had called the little child who died so quickly.
“It was her idea,” he said. “There was a nursery, with picture paper on the walls. There was a bathroom, with tiles that told stories about little mermen and mermaids, that she had made up herself. There was a bedroom, with a swinging cot, frilled with lace and tied with ribbons. And there were picture-books and toys. The doors never were opened. John Holt, Junior, never slept in his cot. He slept with his mother.”
There he broke off a moment again.
“She used to be sorry he wouldn’t be old enough to appreciate all this,” he said next. “She used to laugh about him, and say, he was going to be cheated out of it. But she said he should come with us, so that he could say he had been. She said he had to see it, if he only stared at it and said ‘goo.’”