"I've got to break to David that apparently he isn't going to get the fund for his hospital," Mr. Ferguson said. "There is no mention of it in her will. She told me once, about two years ago, that she was putting money by for him, and when she got the amount she wanted she was going to give it to him. But she left no memorandum of it. I'm afraid she changed her mind." His voice, rather than his words, caught her attention; he was not speaking naturally. He seemed to talk for the sake of talking, which was so unlike him that Mrs. Richie looked at him with mild curiosity. "Mrs. Maitland had a perfect right to change her mind," she said; "and really David never counted very much on the hospital. She spoke of it to him, I know, but I think he had almost forgotten it—though I hadn't," she confessed, a little ruefully. She smiled, and Robert Ferguson, fiercely twitching off his glasses, tried to smile back; but his troubled eyes lingered questioningly on her serene face. It was almost a beautiful face in its peace. What was it Mrs. Maitland had said about her looks? "Fair and—" He was so angry at remembering the word that he swore softly at himself under his breath, and Helena Richie gave him a surprised look. He had sworn at himself several times in these five days since Sarah Maitland, half delirious, wholly shrewd, had said those impossible things about David's mother. Under his concern and grief, under his solemn preoccupations, Robert Ferguson had felt again and again the shock of the incredible suggestion: "something on her conscience." Each time the words thrust themselves up through his absorbed realization of Mrs. Maitland's death, he pushed them down savagely: "It is impossible!" But each time they rose again to the surface of his mind. When they did, they brought with them, as if dredged out of the depths of his memory, some sly indorsement of their truth. . . . She never says anything about her husband. "Why on earth should she? He was probably a bad egg; that friend of hers, that Old Chester doctor, hinted that he was a bad egg. Naturally he is not a pleasant subject of conversation for his wife." . . . Her only friends, except in his own little circle, were two old men (one of them dead now), in Old Chester. "Well, Heaven knows a parson and a doctor are about as good friends as a woman can have." . . . But no women friends belonging to her past. "Thank the Lord! If she had a lot of cackling females coming to see her, I wouldn't want to!" . . . She is always so ready to defend Elizabeth's wicked mother.
"She has a tender heart; she's not hard like the rest of her sex."
No, Life had not played another trick on him! Mrs. Maitland was out of her head, that was all. As for him, somebody ought to boot him for even remembering what the poor soul had said. And so, disposing of the intolerable suspicion, he would draw a breath of relief—until the whisper came again: "something on her conscience?"
He was so goaded by this fancy of a dying woman, and at the same time so shaken by her death, that, as his guest was quick to see, he was entirely unreal; almost—if one can say such a thing of Robert Ferguson, artificial. He was artificial when he spoke of David and the money he was not to have; the fact was, he did not at that moment care, he said to himself, a hang about David, or his money either!
"You see," he said, as they came to the green door in the brick wall, and went into the other garden, "you see, your house is still empty?"
"Dear old house!" she said, smiling up at the shuttered windows.
He looked into her face, and its entire candor made him suddenly and sharply angry at Sarah Maitland. It was the old friendly anger, just as if she were not dead; and he found it curiously comforting. ("She ought to be ashamed of herself to have such an idea of Mrs. Richie. I'll tell her so—oh, Lord! what am I saying? Well, well; she was dying; she didn't know what she was talking about.") . . . "We could pull down some partitions and make the two houses into one," he said, wistfully.
But she only laughed and shook her head. "I want to see if my white peony is going to blossom; come over to the stone seat."
"You always shut me up," he said, sulkily; and in his sulkiness he was more like himself than he had been for days. Sitting by her side on the bench under the hawthorn, he let her talk about her peony or anything else that seemed to her a safe subject; for himself, all he wanted was the comfort of looking into her comforting eyes, and telling himself that he insulted her when he even denied those poor, foolish, dying words. When a sudden soft shower drove them indoors to his library he came back with a sigh to Mrs. Maitland; but this time he was quite natural: "The queer part of it is, she hadn't changed her mind about David's money up to within two days of her death. She meant him to have it when she spoke to me of writing to him; and her mind was perfectly clear then; at least"—he frowned; "she did wander for a minute. She had a crazy idea—"
"What?" said Mrs. Richie, sympathetically.