“Would to God that my friendship could do more for him! Unhappily it can do so little.”
The fly came back for Mildred at nine o’clock. She had telegraphed from Brighton to the inn at Salisbury where she was to spend the night, and her room was ready for her when she arrived there at half-past ten: a spacious bedroom with a four-post bed, in which she lay broad awake all night, living over and over again that scene beside the grave, and seeing her husband’s gloomy face, and its mute reproach. She knew that she had done wrong in breaking in upon his solitude, she who renounced the tie that bound her to him; and yet there had been something gained. He knew now that under no stress of evidence could she ever believe him guilty of his wife’s death. He knew that his last and saddest secret was revealed to her, and that she was loyal to him still—loyal although divided.
She went to the morning service at the Cathedral. She lingered about the grave old Close, looking dreamily in at the gardens which had such an air of old-world peace. She was reluctant to leave Salisbury. It was near all that she had loved and lost. The place had the familiar air of the district in which she had lived so long—different in somewise from all other places, or seeming different by fond association.
She telegraphed to her aunt that she might be late in returning, and lingered on till three o’clock in the afternoon, and then took the train, which dawdled at three or four stations before it came to Bishopstoke—the familiar junction where the station-master and the superintendents knew her, and asked after her husband’s health, giving her a pain at her heart with each inquiry. She would have been glad to pass to the Portsmouth train unrecognised, but it was not to be.
“You have been in the South all the winter, I hear, ma’am. I hope it was not on account of your health?”
“Yes,” she faltered, “partly on that account,” as she hurried on to the carriage which the station-master opened for her with his own hand.
His face was among her home faces. She had travelled up and down the line very often in the good days that were gone—with her husband and Lola, and their comfort had been cared for almost as if they had been royal personages.
It was night when she reached Brighton, and Franz was on the platform waiting for her, and the irreproachable brougham was drawn up close by, the brown horse snorting, and with eyes of fire, not brooking the vicinity of the engine, though too grand a creature to know fear.
She found Miss Fausset in low spirits.
“I have missed you terribly,” she said. “I am a poor creature. I used to think myself independent of sympathy or companionship—but that is all over now. When I am alone for two days at a stretch I feel like a child in the dark.”