“Don’t speak to me, Arthur Beresford,” she cried, and there was something awful in the tone of her voice. “Don’t come near me, or I may do you harm. I am not myself to-day, I’m that other one you have never seen. I know what you are here for without your telling me. You have come to talk to me of Phil, to say you are sorry for me, sorry he is dead, but I will not hear it. You, of all men, shall not speak his name to me, guilty as you are of his death. I sent him away. I murdered him, but you were the first cause; you suggested to me the cruel words I said to him, and which no man could hear and not go away. You talked of Sardanapalus, and effeminacy, and weakness, and lack of occupation, and every word was a sneer, because, coward that you were, you thought to raise yourself by lowering him, and fool that I was, when he came to me and told me of a love such as you are incapable of feeling, I spurned him and cast your words into his teeth and made him loathe and despise himself and made him go away, to seek the occupation, to build up the manhood you said he lacked; and now he is dead, drowned in those far off eastern waters, my Phil, my love, my darling. I am not ashamed to say it now. There is nothing unmaidenly in the confession that I love him as few men have ever been loved, and I wish I had told him so that night upon the rocks; I wish I had trampled down that scruple of cousinship which looks to me now so small. But I did not, I broke his heart, and saw it breaking, too; I knew it by the awful look upon his face, not a look of disappointment only; he could have borne that; few men, if any, die of love alone; but there was on his face a look of unutterable shame and humiliation as if all the manliness of his nature had been insulted by my taunts of his womanish habits and ways. Oh, Phil, my love, my love; if he could know how my heart is aching for him and will ache on forever until I find him again somewhere in the other world! Don’t speak to me” she continued, as Mr. Beresford tried to say something. “I tell you I am dangerous in these moods, and the sight of you who are the first cause of my anguish, makes me beside myself. You talked some nonsense once about waiting for my love. I told you then it could not be. I tell it to you now a thousand times more strongly. I would rather be Phil’s wife for one second than to be yours through all eternity. Oh, Phil, my love, if I could die and join him; but life is strong within me and I am young and must live on and on for years and years with that death-cry always sounding in my ears as it sounded that awful night when he went down beneath the waters with my name upon his lips. Where was I that I did not hear it, and know that he was dying? If I had heard it I believe I, too, should have died and joined him on his journey through the shades of death. But there was no signal; I did not hear him call, and laughed on as I shall never laugh again, for how can I be happy with Phil dead in the sea?”
She was beginning to soften; the mood was passing off, and though her face was pale as ashes, the glitter was gone from her eyes, which turned at last toward Margery, who had looked on in utter astonishment.
“Oh, Margie, Margie, help me. I don’t know what I have been saying. I think I must be crazy,” she said, as she stretched her arms towards Margery, who went to her at once, and leading her to the couch made her lie down while she soothed and quieted her until a faint color came back to her face, and her heart-beats were not so rapid and loud.
Across the room by the window Mr. Beresford was still standing, with a troubled look upon his face, and seeing him Queenie called him to her, and putting her icy hand in his, said to him very gently:
“Forgive me if I have wounded you. I am not myself when these moods are upon me. I don’t know what I said, for my heart is with Phil, and Phil is in the sea. Now go away, please, and leave me alone with Margie.”
Mr. Beresford bowed, and pressing the hand he held, said, in a choking voice:
“God bless you, Queenie, and comfort you, and forgive me if anything I said was instrumental in sending Phil away. He was the dearest friend I ever had, the one I liked the best and enjoyed the most, and I never shall forget him or cease to mourn for him. Good-by, Queenie; good-afternoon, Miss La Rue.”
He bowed himself from the room, and was soon riding slowly homeward, with sad thoughts in his heart of the friend he had lost and who seemed to be so near him that more than once he started and looked around as if expecting to meet Phil’s pleasant face and hear his well-remembered laugh. Mr. Beresford belonged to that class of men, who, without exactly saying there is no God and no hereafter, still doubt it in their hearts, and by trying to explain everything on scientific principles, throw a vail over the religion they were taught to hold so sacred in their childhood. But death had never touched him very closely, or borne away that for which he mourned with a very keen or lasting sense of loss and pain. His father had died when he was a boy, and though his mother lived till he was a well-grown youth, she had not attached him very strongly to her. He had been very proud of her as an elegant, fashionable woman who sometimes came in her lovely party dress to look at him before going out to some place of amusement, but he had never known what it was to be petted and caressed, and when she died his sorrow was neither deep nor lasting, and in his maturer manhood, when the seeds of skepticism were taking root, he could think without a pang that possibly there was beyond this life no place where loved ones meet again and friendships are renewed; nothing but oblivion—a long, dreamless sleep.
But now that Phil was dead—Phil, who had been so much to him—Phil, whom he loved far better than the cold, unsympathetic elder brother who had died years ago, he felt a bitter sense of loss, and pain, and loneliness, and as he rode slowly home in the gathering twilight of that wintry afternoon, and thought of that bright young life and active mind so suddenly blotted out of existence, if his theory was true, he suddenly cried aloud:
“It cannot be; Phil is not gone from me forever. Somewhere we must meet again. Death could only stupefy, not quench, all that vitality. There is something beyond; there is a rallying point, a world where we shall meet those whom we have loved and lost. And Phil is there, and some day I shall find him. Thank God for that hope—thank God there is a hereafter.”