“Stop, child. Where are you going?” Mrs. Fordham said.
And Heloise replied:
“Going to Abelard. Didn’t you tell me he was hurt?”
“Yes; but,—Heloise”—and Mrs. Fordham hesitated a little, frightened by the expression on her daughter’s face, “you must not go. There is no need; he will be here soon. I told them to bring him, as we are the only friends he has, and I hurried home to get the front room ready. Abelard is dead; he fell from the tower and was killed; there they are now.”
And pointing to the group of men coming slowly down the road, Mrs. Fordham hastened to open her best room, and did not see the look of unutterable anguish and horror which came into her daughter’s face when she heard the news.
Heloise did not faint, but she uttered a low, gasping cry, and held fast to the back of a chair, while everything turned dark about her, and she was conscious of nothing except that in the yard there was the tramp of feet as the men came up the walk, bearing the body of him who had left her only the night before, full of life and health. Then she started, and fleeing up the stairs to her own room, threw herself upon the bed, where she lay listening to the sounds below, and trying to realize the full extent of the horror which had come upon her. At last when all was quiet, and the men were gone, she crept to the window and looked out upon the day, which had seemed so bright to her in the early morning, but was so dark and dreary now.
Colonel Schuyler himself was just going through the gate, so occupied with his own thoughts that he nearly stumbled over a little girl who was coming into the yard, and in whom Heloise recognized Phebe Young, the daughter of the woman with whom Abelard had boarded. Heloise was not afraid of Phebe, but she drew back from the window till Colonel Schuyler was out of sight, feeling as if she almost hated him for having built the house where Abelard lost his life.
There was a knock at the door, and ere Heloise could answer it little Phebe Young came in. She had caught a glimpse of Heloise at the window, and thinking it no harm, had come straight up to her room.
“Please, miss,” she said, laying a paper on the young girl’s lap, “we found this under his jacket pinned tight, and ma knew most it comed from your rose bush, for there hain’t no more like it in Hampstead, and she sent it to you, cause she guesses you liked him some.”
It was the rose Heloise had picked for Abelard and fastened in his buttonhole the night before, when they stood for a moment by the gate, and he told her to watch for him on the morrow as he was to work upon the tower. Now he was dead, and the rose, which had been so fresh and dewy then, was wilted and crushed, and right in the centre, upon the pure white petals, was a little drop of blood, or rather the stain of one. Abelard’s blood, Heloise knew, and she felt a strange sickness steal over her as she held the faded flower in her hand and gazed upon that bright red spot, the sight of which seemed to stamp a similar mark upon her heart, which ached and throbbed with a new pain.