“What is it, Jake?” she said. “Win says you’re cross. Something gone wrong?”
“Lucy’s dead,” he answered, rising to his feet and handing her the paper.
She paled a little as she read the notice. Then, raising her eyes, they met his. In this look was their knowledge of the secret that both had struggled to keep, and that now, at last, was theirs.
For the second time in a half-year, Death had stepped in and claimed one of the four whose lives had touched so briefly and so momentously twenty-five years before.
“Poor Lucy!” said Bessie, in a low voice. “But they say she was very happy with Moreau. You can do something for your—for the girl now.”
“Yes,” he said; “I’ll think it over. I won’t be down to breakfast. Send up some coffee.”
He went upstairs and locked himself in his library. He could not understand why the news had affected him so deeply. It seemed to make him feel sick. He did not tell Bessie that he had gone upstairs because he felt too ill and shaken to see any one.
All morning he sat in the library, with frowning brows, thinking. At noon he took the train for the city and, soon after its arrival, despatched to Mariposa the five hundred dollars. He had no doubt of her accepting it, as it never crossed his mind that Lucy, at the last moment, might have told.
The days that followed her mother’s funeral passed to Mariposa like a series of gray dreams, dreadful, with an unfamiliar sense of wretchedness. The preoccupation of her mother’s illness was gone. There were idle hours, when she sat in her rooms and tried to realize the full meaning of Lucy’s last words. She would sit motionless, staring before her, her heart feeling shriveled in her breast. Her life seemed broken to pieces. She shrank from the future, with the impossibilities she had pledged herself to. And the strength and inspiration of the beautiful past were gone. All the memories of that happy childhood and young maidenhood were blasted. It was natural that the shock and the subsequent brooding should make her view of the subject morbid. The father that she had grown up to regard with reverential tenderness, had not been hers. The mother, who had been a cherished idol, had hidden a dark secret. And she, herself, was an outsider from the home she had so deeply loved—child of a brutal and tyrannical father—originally adopted and cared for out of pity.