Those were dreams which never came true. She had waited, through dull and spiritless years, for her chance of life; it was written, in that book which no man shall read, that her life in that fuller sense was to be but a short one. She gave birth to her child—a boy—and knew her fate even before they told her. She sank slowly, drifting out of life with as little effort to retain it as she had shown throughout her days. Almost the last thing she did was to take her husband’s hand, as he sat speechless with grief beside her, and put it to her lips, and draw it up against her cheek.
“We waited—a long time—Davie,” she whispered. “I wish—I might—have—stayed.” She did not speak again; she held his hand in that position until the last breath fluttered out of her lips.
David Willis was utterly incapable of appreciating anything except the magnitude of his loss. He wandered desolately from room to room, picking up things that had belonged to her and putting his lips to them, and weeping, in a hopeless, despairing fashion, like a child. Fortunately for that other child who had been the direct cause of the disaster, there were kindly people about the place who cared for it, and found a nurse for it—a young and healthy woman who had but just lost a child of her own, and who was installed in the house of David Willis at once. From that big house in the newer part of the town came Mr. Robert Carlaw, the brother of the dead woman, hushing his loud and blustering voice a little as he crossed the threshold of the place of mourning.
He had an air with him, this Robert Carlaw; a sense of saying, when he entered a room, that it was something poorer and meaner than before he came; a magnificent air of proprietorship in every one he honoured by a nod or a handshake; the very town through which he walked became, not a sweet and beautiful old place which seemed to have been dropped clean out of the middle ages, but an awkward, badly built little place in which Robert Carlaw was good enough to live. The swing of him was so fine that the skirts of his coat brushed the houses as he went down the street; other passengers humbly took the roadway.
He was very kind and sympathetic with David Willis, with the kindness and sympathy of a patron to a dependent who has suffered a loss; he had scarcely seen his sister since she was a child, and knew absolutely nothing of her. He seated himself in an armchair—the chair which had been hers—opposite to where David Willis sat with his head bowed in his hands; he coughed, with a little shade of annoyance in the cough, as of one who is not receiving proper attention. David Willis looked up without speaking.
“Bad business, this,” said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head which was meant to convey that he referred to what was lying upstairs. “A man feels these things; I know I did. Cut me up dreadfully.”
“Yes,” said David, in a low voice.
“She was never strong, you know,” went on the brother; “not like the others, I mean. And then she married late, which tries a woman, I’m told.”
“Yes,” replied the other again in the same tone.
“She was just the sort that would give in without making what I call a kick for it. Hadn’t half enough of the devil in her. Not a bit like her brother in that respect. Why, I assure you, they’ve positively tried to kill me, half a dozen times; given me over for dead. But they didn’t know Bob Carlaw; he’s always proved one too many for ’em. There’s a lot of life in Bob.”