She got up at the words, feeling herself vaguely called upon—yet quite dull, dumb, with all sorts of thoughts going and coming through those wide-open doors of her mind—thoughts like strays which she seemed to see as they passed. Even Aubrey himself appeared a ghost. She got up and stood awaiting him when he approached her, not putting out a finger. Nobody interfered, not even Charlie, who was fuming internally yet somehow did not move. Aubrey went up to her and put his hands upon her shoulders. Her unresponsiveness sent a chill to his heart.
“Have you given me up, Bee?” he cried, “Already, already!” with anguish in his voice.
She could not say a word. She shook her head like a mute, looking at him with her dazed eyes.
“She does not understand it—not a word!” he said.
Bee shook her head again. It was all she could do. No, she did not understand, except that it was a kind of dying, something against which nobody could struggle. And then he kissed her on her forehead as gravely as though he had been her father; and the next moment was gone—was it only out of the room, or out of the world, out of life?
CHAPTER VIII.
It was a slow train. The slowest train that there is, is, of course, far, far quicker than any other mode of conveyance practicable in a land journey, but it does not seem so. It seems as if it were delay personified to the eager traveller, especially on the Continent. In England, when it stops at a multiplicity of stations at which there is nothing to do, it at least goes on again in most cases after it has dropped its half-passenger or taken in its empty bag of letters. But this can never be said of a German or even of a brisker Belgian train. The one in which Aubrey was meandered about Liege, for instance, till he had mastered every aspect of that smoky but interesting place. It stopped for what looked like an hour at every little roadside station, in order, apparently, that the guard might hold a long and excited conversation about nothing at all with the head man of the place. And all the while the little electric bell would go tingling, tingling upon his very brain. Thus he made his slow and weary progress through the afternoon and evening, stopping long at last at a midnight station (where everything was wrapped in sleep and darkness) for the arrival of the express, in which the latter portion of the journey was to be accomplished more quickly. If there had been anything wanted to complete the entire overthrow of a spirit in pain it was such an experience. All was dismal beyond words at the place where he had to wait—one poor light showing through the great universe of darkness, the dark big world that encompassed it around—one or two belated porters wandering through the blackness doing mysterious pieces of business, or pretending to do them. A poor little wailing family—a mother and two children, put out there upon a bench from some other train, one of the babies wailing vaguely into the dark, the other calling upon “mamma, mamma,” driving the poor mother frantic—were waiting like himself. It gave Aubrey a momentary consolation to see something that appeared at least to the external eye more forlorn than he. He remembered, too, that there had once been a baby cry that went to his heart, and though all the associations connected with that had now turned into gall and bitterness, so that the sound seemed like a spear penetrating his very being, and he walked away as far as the bounds of the station would allow, to get, if possible, out of hearing of it—yet pity, a better inspiration, at last gained the day. He went up and spoke to the woman, and found that she was an English workman’s wife making her way home with her children to a mother who was dying. They had turned her out here, with her babies, to wait—ah, not for the express train which was to carry on the gentleman, but for the slow, slow-creeping third-class which only started in the morning, and which would, after other long waits at other places, reach England sometime, but she could scarcely tell when.
“And must you pass the night here out in the cold?” said Aubrey.
“It isn’t not to call a cold night, sir,” said the woman, meekly, “and they’ve got plenty on to keep them warm.”
“I’ll try and get them to open the waiting-room for you,” said Aubrey.