“We found the bundle, and we searched the fruit boats, but we never got trace of you,” Flora said.
“I was an ass, and I got it pretty well bumped out of me,” Tom said, musingly. “A lot they cared who I was, on old Jensen’s Valkyr. A fellow named Kelly went overboard that first run, and I went into Montreal three months later, with Kit Kelly’s papers. Kelly and I stuck together until he got married; everyone always called me Kit. I never took any special trouble then to hide myself.—I always thought I’d come home, my next shore leave.”
“Roger spent the rest of his life hunting you,” Flora said. “He was never at home for more than a few weeks, or a few days, at a time, after that, and we all knew Cecily was happier when he was away. She had been much better that spring; he and she had gone to Old Point Comfort, and she had seemed much more human, somehow. But this autumn she was wretched, sad and worried about herself, and she had begun to say again, even to him, what she had often said to Lily and me: ‘My marriage was a sin. All marriage is not wrong. But God intended me for a life of prayer and holiness, and what have I accomplished by disobeying the guidance of my own conscience?’
“This sort of thing made Roger furious, and I could see it, if she could not. ‘We’d have a fine world, if you had your way, Sis,’ he said to her once. ‘Where would the younger generation come from?’
“‘Oh, Roger, don’t!’ she would say. He would look at her, look at me, shrug, and smile. But presently I would see into what impatient lines his face would fall. ‘It would have been a calamity for her to have a child!’ he said to me one day. ‘We would surely have had two children on our hands then!’ Once he had told me, bitterly and resentfully, that her hasty and ill-considered marriage was killing her. ‘She was seventeen in years when we were married,’ he said. ‘But I can understand her mother’s fury now. She was about nine years old where life was concerned—a mystic, a child saint—torturing herself with scruples and with half-assimilated scraps of theology and mysticism!’
“That was the situation here at Wastewater that September, when Roger had word from the police at Guam that a boy who might have been Tom was there. As a matter of fact, this was that first ‘false Tom,’ who had them all deceived for so long. Roger went off to San Francisco, possibly to sail—as indeed he did finally sail—for the Orient. Will, my husband, had been away almost a year. David here was in boarding school.
“Left alone with Cecily and Lily, I did not dare risk Lily’s baby being born in Wastewater. It would have started any amount of talk, and although poor Lily was not responsible, and although Margret had been spreading hints as to Lily’s having secretly married this Charpentier, it seemed wiser not to have the whole thing here. Lily went in to my Boston apartment, and I got her a good practical nurse, and her baby was born months too soon—and died within a few minutes!”
“Died!” said more than one of the young voices.
“Died. Indeed, it never breathed at all. Lily was very ill, and went—as is not uncommon in such cases—into a sort of low fever, like the old brain fever, and she was near death for a long, long time.
“I lived with her, and the nurse, and a good servant named Carrie, in the Boston apartment, for Cecily had grown worse by that time, and the Crowchester doctor had quite frankly diagnosed her trouble as a tumour. We had heard that word before many times, but Roger never would believe it. Cecily believed it though, and she was furious at the Crowchester man because he would not operate in her husband’s absence. So we had dismissed the Crowchester doctor—always a hard thing to do—and Cecily told him frankly that she wanted to come in to Boston and stay at a hospital for observation.