Maurice's hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his pocket. He had the sense of having escaped from a terror—the terror of intolerable remorse. For if she had not been "all right," if, instead of just "a bad cold," the dispatch had said "something had happened"!—then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain: "If—if—if—"
So he said, "Thank God."
All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Edith did not come into the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had left the house. "I should think she would!" Eleanor thought; "she could hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me." But she did not think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say to Maurice. Should she tell him the truth?—or some silly story of a walk to their meadow? The two alternatives flew back and forth in her mind like shuttlecocks. There was one thing she felt sure of: that letter—which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice was to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow—Maurice must not see that letter! If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself) still half sick from those drenched hours of the trolley ride and the dark wanderings from Mrs. O'Brien's to Mrs. Newbolt's, the whole thing would seem simply ridiculous. Some time, he must know that she loved him enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying—or trying to die! She would tell him, some time; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he must not know it now, because she hadn't carried it out. That first night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm! She had thought she never would be warm any more!)—when she had found herself in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it out. Glad not to be dead. As she lay there, shivering slowly into delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt's distracted questions, she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it would have been wrong to—to lie down there in the river? People call it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it right off," Eleanor said; "she just thought we'd quarreled!"); but Mrs. Newbolt had said it was "wicked." "But I didn't do it!" Eleanor told herself in a rush of gratitude. She hadn't been "wicked"! Instead, she was in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, looking dreamily at the old French clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting, and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being alive. It was then that she had felt that she must get that letter—Maurice mustn't see it! Little by little, humiliation at her failure to be heroic, grew acute. Maurice wouldn't know that she loved him enough to give him Jacky; he would just know that she was silly. She had got wet; and had a cold in her head. Snuffles—not Death. He might—laugh!... It was then that she implored Mrs. Houghton to get the letter out of her desk.
Yet when it was given to her she held it in her hand under the bedclothes, saying to herself that she would not destroy it, yet, because, even though she had failed, there might come a time when it would prove to Maurice how much she loved him. She was so absorbed in this thought that she did not grieve much for Bingo. "Poor little Bingo," she said, vaguely, when Mrs. Houghton told her that the little dog was dead; "he was so jealous." Now, with Maurice coming nearer every hour, she could not think of Bingo; she was face to face with a decision! What should she tell him about the "accident"?
It was in the afternoon of the day that Maurice was to arrive,—he had telegraphed that he would reach Mercer in the evening;—that she had a sudden panic about Edith. "She was here that night and saw me. I know she laughed at me because I hadn't any hat on! She may—suspect? If she does, she'll tell him! What shall I do to stop her?" She couldn't think of any way to stop her! She couldn't hold her thoughts steady enough to reach a decision. First would come gladness of her own comfort and safety, and the warm, warm bed; then shame, that she had faltered and run away from a chance to do a great thing for Maurice; then terror that Edith would make her ridiculous to Maurice. Then all these thoughts would whirl about, run backward: First, terror of Edith! then shame! then comfort! Suddenly the terror thought held fast with a question. "Suppose I make her promise not to tell Maurice anything? I think she would keep a promise...." It would be dreadful to ask the favor of secrecy of Edith—just as she had asked the same sort of favor of Lily—but to seem silly to Maurice would be more dreadful than to ask a favor! She held to this purpose of humiliating self-protection, long enough to ask Mrs. Houghton when Edith was coming down from Green Hill.
"Why, she's here, now, in the house!" Edith's mother said.
"Here?" Eleanor said, despairingly. If Edith was here, then Maurice, when he came, would see her and she would tell him! "She would make a funny story of it," Eleanor thought; "I know her! She would make him laugh. I can't bear it! ... I would like to speak to Edith," she told Mrs. Houghton, faintly.
Edith, summoned by her mother, stood for a rigid moment outside Eleanor's door, trying to get herself in hand. In these anxious days, Edith's youth had been threatened by assailing waves of a remorse that at times would have engulfed it altogether, but for that unflinching reasonableness which made her the girl she was. "It may be," Edith had said to herself; "it may be that what I said to her in the garden made her so angry that she tried to kill herself; but why should it have made her angry? I didn't injure her. Besides, she dragged it out of me! I couldn't lie. She said, 'You love him.' I would not lie, and say I didn't! But what harm did it do her?" So she reasoned; but reason did not keep her from suffering. "Did I drive her to it?" Edith said, over and over. So when her mother told her Eleanor wanted to speak to her, she grew a little pale. When she entered Eleanor's room her heart was beating so hard she felt smothered, but she was perfectly matter of fact. "Anything I can do for you, Eleanor?" she said. She stood at the foot of the bed, holding on to the carved bed post.
Eleanor looked at her for a silent moment, then gathered herself together. "Edith," she said (she was very hoarse and spoke with difficulty), "I don't want to bother Maurice about—about my accident. So I am going to ask you, please, not to refer to it to him. Not to tell him anything about it. Anything. Promise me."
"Of course I won't!" Edith said. As she spoke she forgot herself in pity for the scared, haggard face. ("Oh, was it my fault?" she thought, with a real pang.) And before she knew it her coldness was all gone and she was at Eleanor's side; she sat down on the edge of the bed and caught her hand impulsively. "Eleanor," she said, "I've been awfully unhappy, for fear anything I said—that morning—troubled you? Of course there was no sense in talking that way, for either of us. So please forgive me! Was it what I said, that made you—that bothered you, I mean? I'm so unhappy," Edith said, and caught her lip between her teeth to keep it steady; her eyes were bright with tears. "Eleanor, truly I am nothing to—to anybody. Nobody cares a copper for me! Do be kind to me. Oh—I've been awfully unhappy; and I'm so glad you're better."