As Mrs. Renshaw uttered these words and caressed the tattered volume she held as if it had been made of pure gold, her face became irradiated with a look of such innocent and guileless spirituality, that Nance, in a hurried act of mental contrition, wiped out of her memory every moment when she had not loved her. “What she must suffer!” the girl said to herself as she watched her. “What she must have suffered—with those people in that great house.”
Mrs. Renshaw sighed as she replaced the book in the shelf. “Writers seem to have got so clever in these last years,” she said plaintively. “They use so many long words. I wonder where they get them from—out of dictionaries, do you think?—and they hurt me, they hurt me, by the way they speak of our beloved religion. They can’t all of them be great philosophers like Spinoza and Schopenhauer, can they? They can’t all of them be going to give the world new and comforting thoughts? I don’t like their sharp, snappy, sarcastic tone. And oh, Nance dear!”—she returned to her seat on the sofa—“I can’t bear their slang! Why is it that they feel they must use so much slang, do you think? I suppose they want to make their books seem real, but I don’t hear real people talking like that. But perhaps it comes from America. American writers seem extraordinarily clever, and American dictionaries—for Dr. Raughty showed me one—seem much bigger than ours.”
She was silent for a while and then, looking gently at Linda, “I think it’s wonderful, dear, how well you play now. I thought last Sunday evening you played the hymns better than I’ve ever heard them! But they were beautiful hymns, weren’t they? That last one was my favourite of all.”
Once more she was silent, and Nance seemed to catch her lips moving, as she fixed her great sorrowful eyes upon the book-shelf, and began slowly pulling on her gloves.
“I must be going now,” she said, with a little sigh. “I thank you for the raspberry vinegar and the biscuits. I think I was tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night. Good-bye, dears. No, don’t, please, come down. I can let myself out. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it, and the poppies in the cornfields are quite red now. I can see a big patch of them from our terrace, just across the river. Poppies always make me think of the days when I was a young girl. We used to think a lot of them then. We used to make fairies out of them.”
Nance insisted on seeing her into the street. When she entered the room again, she was not altogether surprised to find Linda convulsed with sobs. “I can’t—I can’t help it,” gasped the young girl. “She’s too pitiful. She’s too sad. You feel you want to hug her and hug her, but you’re afraid even to touch her hand!” She made an effort to recover herself, and then, with the tears still on her cheeks, “Nance dear,” she said solemnly, “I don’t believe she’ll live to the end of this year. I believe, one of these days, when the Autumn comes, we shall hear she’s been found dead in her bed. Nance, listen!”—and the young girl’s voice became awe-struck and very solemn—“won’t it be dreadful for those two, over there, when they find her like that, and feel how little they’ve done to make her happy? Can’t you imagine it, Nance? The wind wailing and wailing round that house, and she lying there all white and dreadful—and Philippa with a candle standing over her—”
“Why do you say ‘with a candle’?” said Nance brusquely. “You’re talking wildly and exaggerating everything. If they found her in the morning, like that, Philippa wouldn’t come with a candle.”
Linda stared dreamily out of the window. “No, I suppose not,” she said, “and yet I can’t see it without Philippa holding a candle. And there’s something else I see, too,” she added in a lower voice.
“I don’t want—” Nance began and then, more gently, “What else, you silly child?”
“Philippa’s red lips,” she murmured softly, “red as if she’d put rouge on them. Do you think she ever does put rouge on them? That’s, I suppose, what made me think of the candle. I seemed to see it flickering against her mouth. Oh, I’m silly—I’m silly, I know, but I couldn’t help seeing it like that—her lips, I mean.”