He stood in front of her for a moment, undecided what to do, when she suddenly raised her head and cried sharply, “John, why don’t you go and see?”
“I can’t understand you,” he said. “You mean more than I know.”
She looked up at him again and laughed in a way that froze his blood. “Don’t I always?” she said, with a tone of contempt. Then added, stamping on the floor, “Go—go and see what has happened. I will never see that woman again.”
John went softly along the corridor, half dressed, ashamed, miserable. Something had happened more than he could understand, perhaps more than he would ever understand. The house was all silent, wrapt as in a garment in the morning sunshine, which came in by the great staircase windows and flooded everything. It was still very early. His step made a sound which ran all through and through it. He could not be noiseless as the women were, who stole about, and met, and had their encounters, and nobody was ever the wiser. He thought it was in the middle of the night that this arrival must have occurred which seemed to him like a dream, and which as he passed through the sleeping house and felt the stillness of it he began to think must be but some wild fancy of his wife’s, something which could not be true. When he pushed open the door of the ante-room a dark figure rose hurriedly out of a chair, and met him with the dazed look of a person disturbed and half asleep. “Miss Hill!” he cried. Then it was true!
She put up her hand and said “Hush.” Then, after a moment, “He is asleep, like a baby; he has never stirred.”
“Are you sure—that he is asleep?”
“Oh, I thought that myself,” she cried, understanding him. “He was so quiet. Yes, yes, he is asleep; breathing faintly, but you can hear him. Oh, safe and sound asleep!”
“My wife told me—his mother——”
“She is there,” said Agnes, beckoning him to the door of the inner room. He stood and looked in for a moment, with his clouded and troubled face, leaning against the lintel. Mary’s ear had been caught by the sound. She looked up and met his eyes with that ethereal clearness of countenance, the exaltation of her aroused and awakened soul. She looked him in the face with a mild serenity and peace and smiled in recognition, then turned her eyes to the bed as if to show him the boy softly sleeping there. Behind, the nurse still slept in the easy chair. To John it seemed as if it were all a dream, of which there was no explanation. How did it come about that the sick room had passed into the keeping of these two, arriving mysteriously during the night, whom his wife must have risen from his side to receive, of whom he had heard nothing? The nurse asleep, all the usual faces gone, the mother who had disowned him sitting in that attitude of love by Mar’s side—what did it all mean?
“This is all very strange,” he said, drawing back from the door. “I find you here in possession whom I thought far away—and the mother who was so estranged. Did you come down from the skies? Is it safe to leave her there? Is she——”