"She is that, Miss Deleah. I tell you how 'tis with me and Bessie—spite of her having such a way with her with the gentlemen, and such a will of her own—I have always felt I haven't never lost the little girl I had to wait on when first I come to service with your ma."
CHAPTER XXXII
The Man With The Mad Eyes
The other women being employed in the daytime, the sitting-room had been more especially Bessie's domain. How strange and chilling was the thought it would be empty of Bessie for evermore. Her untidy work-basket peeped out from under the sofa where she always pushed it on the appearance of a visitor; the penny weekly paper in which she read of the fashions, and the romantic love-matches of which she had dreamed while making an absolutely sordid marriage herself, was tucked behind the cushion of her chair. Deleah stood within the doorway for a minute, without entering, feeling strangely bereaved and forlorn. Not much sympathy had been between the pair, but the ties of blood are stronger than is realised till "marriage or death or division" snaps the cord.
With a lagging step Deleah went forward into the so pathetically empty room. On the table some flowers were lying. Two deep purple blooms of clematis. The creeper so carefully trained to climb beside a certain hall door came into her mind. She had noticed on an occasion she would fain have forgotten, without knowing she had done so, that it bore two buds. Deleah looked at the blossoms with an odd feeling of repulsion. She walked round the table to the side that was farthest from them. Then lifting her eyes, she saw that Charles Gibbon was standing by the opposite wall. The open door had screened him from her on entering.
"Mr. Gibbon!" she said, and her voice faltered with dismay; only apprehension was in her eyes.
He looked at her without speaking. It was curiously disturbing to see him standing there, his back to the wall, saying nothing; the broad, short figure, at one time so familiar in that room, now so alien and strange, the commonplace, plain-featured face, tragic with its new grey hue, the eyes—Deleah remembered with a shudder some words recently spoken about the eyes! They were fixed upon her face.
"Won't you come and sit down, Mr. Gibbon?"
He advanced a few steps, and stood at the table opposite her.
She looked at the flowers. "You brought these?"