The words were not mere platitudes—the soul of a good man looked from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening. Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected himself.
'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to some warm place.'
'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it when I come again to-night.'
'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs, 'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is, with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing! and yesterday she was so cheerful—she would tell me all about her boy.'
CHAPTER IX
The history of the weeks that followed shall be partly told in David's own words, gathered from those odds-and-ends of paper, old envelopes, the half-sheets of letters, on which he would write sometimes in those hours when he was necessarily apart from Lucy, thrusting them on his return between the leaves of his locked journal, clinging to them as the only possible record of his wife's ebbing life, yet passionately avoiding the sight of them when they were once written.
'RYDAL, AMBLESIDE: May 5th—We arrived this afternoon. The day has been glorious. The mountains round the head of the lake, as we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage might not shake her, stood out in the sun; the light wind drove the cloud-shadows across their blues and purples; the water was a sheet of light; the larches were all out, though other trees are late; and every breath was perfume.
'But she was too weary to look at it; and before we had gone two miles, it seemed to me that I could think of nothing but the hateful length of the drive, and the ups and downs of the road.
'When we arrived, she would walk into the cottage, and before nurse or I realised what she was doing, she went straight through the little passage which runs from front to back, out into the garden. She stood a moment—in her shawls, with the little white hood she has devised for herself drawn close round her head and face—looking at the river with its rocks and foaming water, at the shoulder of Nab Scar above the trees, at the stone house with the red blinds opposite.
'"It looks just the same," she said, and the tears rolled down her cheeks.