“Anything can be bought,” he retorted, with his quiet, hoarse persuasiveness, “at a price. I’ve got the price, no matter what it is.”
Suddenly I understood my pink and hard acquaintance. I understood that stale look in his eyes. Tears do not bring that. Nothing brings it but sleepless thoughts beyond the assuagement of tears. Behind such eyes the heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot. Who should know better than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing! But here was a wound, raw and fresh and savage. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“What was little Minnie to you?” I asked, and answered myself. “You’re Hines. You’re the man she married.”
“Yes. I’m Chris Hines.”
“You’ve brought her back to us,” I said stupidly.
“She made me promise.”
Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once lived in it! To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the hour of death! Many have known the experience. So our tiny God’s Acre, shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has space but for few more of the returning. Laws have been invoked and high and learned courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother.
I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie Lassie about the statuette, and led him on, through the nagged and echoing passage and the iron gate, to the white-studded space of graves. The new excavation showed, brown against the bright verdure. Above it stood the headstone of the Munns, solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year’s salary, at the pitiful wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his municipal clerkship. Hines’s elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a shudder, as he looked about him.
“It’s crowded,” he muttered.
“We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square. I am glad for her father’s sake that Minnie wished to come back.”