Her queer eyes looked through him and beyond him, not seeing him, seeing some reality that was not he. He had gone to her for her truth and she had given it him. A wish, even a hidden wish, could kill. In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing; they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose, and got through to his mother, and had killed her secretly, in the dark. His wish was a part of himself, but stronger than himself. The force behind it was indestructible, for it was a form of his desire for Effie; so that while he lived he could not kill it.
It had been there all the time, cunningly disguised. It was there in his fear of Nurse Eden; it was there in that obstinate belief of his that his mother would live. His beliefs were always the expression of his fears. He had been afraid that his mother would not die. That was his fear. He saw it all clearly in the moment while Nurse Eden’s voice went on.
“But it wasn’t that, Mr. Hollyer,” she was saying. “We were all wishing her to live— No. I think she was too far gone. She had got beyond us.”
It was too late for Nurse Eden to go back on it. He knew. He was certain.
IV
He knew, and if he were to keep on thinking about it—but he was afraid to think. You could go mad, thinking. The moment of his certainty remained in his memory; he knew where to find it if he chose to look that way. But he refused to look. Such things were better forgotten.
He told himself there was nothing in it. Nothing but Nurse Eden’s hysteria and vanity. She wanted you to believe she was wonderful, that she could do things. She didn’t really believe it herself. In her own last moment of honesty she had confessed as much. He was a fool to have been taken in by her.
Meanwhile, three months after his mother’s death, he had married Effie Carroll. Her father, who had held out against the engagement, surrendered suddenly on the day of the wedding, and made his daughter an allowance of fifty pounds a year. He said he didn’t want to profit by her folly, and the fifty pounds were no more than the cost of her keep.
It was horrible to think they should owe their happiness to his mother’s death; but as things had turned out they didn’t owe it; they could have married even if she had lived. And as he had now no motive for wishing her dead, he almost forgot that he had ever wished it.
Not that Hollyer reproached himself; his tendency, when he thought it all over, was to reproach his mother. He had found out something about himself. Before he married he had gone to Dr. Ransome to be overhauled, and Ransome had told him there was nothing much the matter with him; never was. And if the old pessimist said there wasn’t much the matter, you might depend upon it there wasn’t anything at all. Except, Ransome said, molly-coddling; and that wasn’t Hollyer’s fault.