"Hurrah for the Doctor! Three cheers for Saxham! Don't forget us, Doc! Come back again! God bless you, Saxham! Bravo, Saxham! Saxham! Saxham! Hurrah!"
A woman who had loved him would have wept for joy. A pity his wife did not!
How strangely Owen had looked at her just now, when she had brushed his sleeve lightly with her finger-tip! How curious it was that he never touched her if he could help it! She had quite forgotten having told him that, while she liked to know him near, she could not endure the thought of being taken by him, caressed by him, held in his embrace.... That had been the frank, truthful expression of her feelings at the time. She did not recoil so from his contact now. She had not realised how deeply her words had wounded the man's great, suffering, patient heart. Spoken, they had passed from her memory. It is so natural for a fair, sweet woman to forget! It is so impossible for a man who has been stabbed to help remembering, with the deep, bleeding wound unclosed!
There was another thing that Saxham did not know. Although, as time went on, the beloved image of the Mother, cherished in the innermost shrine of her adopted daughter's heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm beauty of its outlines or deterioration in the richness of its tender and austere and gracious colouring; and each new day supplied some fresher garland of old imperishable memories to grace it with;—that Shape with the grey-green jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that laughed had faded—faded! She would not own it even to herself, but the keen edge of her grief for Beauvayse was blunted. The anniversary of his death, occurring in the coming month of February, was to be a solemn retreat of sacred prayer for her. But it was the Mother's death-day also, when to the palm of martyrdom had been added the Saint's crown. She was going to spend three days at the Kensington Convent, where the dead nun had taken the vows. She told Saxham now of the arrangement she had made through Lady Castleclare, who was intimate with the Superior.
"It will be a little like old times," she said to Saxham, "living in a Convent again. And there are many Sisters there who knew Mother, and loved her——"
Her eyes swam in sudden tears. And Saxham, as he looked at her, felt his heart contract in a spasm of bitter jealousy. All that love for the dead, and not a crumb for the living! He saw Beauvayse, his rival still, stretching a hand from the grave to keep her from him. And he could have cried aloud:
"Those tears are for a trickster who cheated you into loving him. Listen, now, and I, who have never lied, even to win you, will show him to you as he really was!..."
But he did not yield to the temptation to enlighten her. A vision rose up before him of a dying man on a camp-bed, and he heard his own voice saying:
"I will never tell her! I will not blacken any man's reputation to further my own interests!"
She was speaking, telling him something. He came back out of the fierce mental struggle to listen to the voice that was so sweet and clear, and yet so cold, so cold....