“‘They told me, the doctor told me at the hospital—or I dreamed it, on that terrible night of the operation’, she said. ‘Flora, did you know that I thought I had a child that night? No, or they told me I did——’ she said, beginning to be frightened again.
“‘Don’t bother your head about it now, Cecily,’ I said. ‘Just get well, so that when Roger comes back——’
“She shuddered at Roger’s name, and began to get excited.
“‘I will be dead before that, and God will have forgiven me, Flora,’ she said. ‘Ah, you don’t think I was a sinner, but I was! Before I ever took my marriage vow, I had taken another, when I was only fourteen years old! Another girl and I at the convent had taken a solemn oath to God that we would never marry!’”
“Poor child!” breathed Gabrielle’s pale lips, involuntarily.
“Poor child,” Flora echoed, without opening her eyes. Her voice was so weak that David held water to her mouth, and she drank with difficulty. “Poor little Cecily! She said that when she had first come to Wastewater she had no thought of lovers or love in her mind. That she had been bewildered and astonished at the emotion Roger had almost at once roused in her, but that she had never thought of it as love. That all her thoughts and senses had been in a wild confusion, culminating on the day that he and she drove in to Minford, beyond Tinsalls, quite simply, and that Roger, who knew the Justice there, got a special license and they were married.
“That night she went quite simply away from her mother’s room, expecting to be questioned in the morning. But her mother did not miss her; Cecily was quietly dressing when her mother awakened the next day. She said she remembered her vow that day. And when she came to this part, I thought she was going to die. She said quite seriously that she had had not one single happy moment since, and I suppose when Roger laughed at her scruples—as he did laugh—he broke her heart.
“I told her that no minor child could take a valid vow of that sort, and that indeed her very marriage might be questioned, since her age had been given as nineteen. No use! She believed me only enough to say that no irregularity in her license could possibly make her child more accursed than she would feel a child of hers to be.
“‘But I understand now—I never had a child—it’s Lily’s child!’ she said, over and over again, with so much deep thankfulness that I could only be thankful, too. ‘Lily told me all about it,’ she said, so humbly and tenderly, ‘and she is no worse a sinner than I—less, perhaps, for she loved and I did not!’
“I dismissed the nurse that afternoon, as it chanced, and sent for a nurse we had had from Crowchester, Hannah Rosecrans, a fine girl. She came the next day, and I told her, naturally, the whole truth, but that both my poor Lily and Mrs. Fleming must be treated with the utmost consideration until Mr. Fleming came home.