He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against the strange woman’s breast; the woman glanced up at him almost resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little. She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her.
The man touched the baby’s cheek with a hesitating forefinger, and then turned away and walked out of the room. He saw quite clearly how the child would grow up, knowing only him, desiring no one else to fill its world. Before another hour had passed, the solitary man had mapped out the seat the child should take in the house and in church; had wandered in fancy over the fields through which the child should accompany him. There was no disloyalty to the dead woman in all this; the child had sprung out of the woman, in every sense, and took her place quite naturally in the deep heart of the man.
That evening David Willis received an unexpected visitor. The visitor came slowly and timidly, and yet with a certain forced air of defiance upon him, up the garden path, and knocked at the door of the little house. The one servant the house boasted, and who did not sleep there, had gone to her own home at the other end of the town; David Willis opened the door, and stared out into the twilight at the visitor.
The caller was a little man—very alert and very upright, with a tightly buttoned frock coat, and an old-fashioned silk hat with a curly brim. He carried something in one hand behind him. David Willis remembered to have seen him once or twice in the streets, walking very erect, and swinging a cane with a tassel attached to it; and always in church on Sundays, where he occupied a little odd pew in one corner, and gave the responses in a very loud and sonorous voice not at all fitting to his stature. David held the door in one hand, and looked out wonderingly at the little man.
“My name is Garraway-Kyle—Captain Garraway-Kyle—late of her Majesty’s service. You are in trouble, sir, your wife”—he stopped abruptly and coughed and frowned, and tugged at one end of his white mustache with his disengaged hand—“your wife, sir, was good enough to admire my flowers; used to stop sometimes to look at them. I thought perhaps——” His sunburned face took on a deeper tinge, and he brought his hand from behind him and showed a carefully arranged bunch of flowers.
David Willis came out into the little path, and closed the door behind him; his voice was rather unsteady when he spoke. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Would you like me to go with you and point out the—the grave?”
“I know it. I was there this afternoon,” replied the captain, shortly. “But I should like you to come with me.” So the two men went in silence out of the garden, and by the little gate into the churchyard, David Willis having no hat, and the captain carrying his in his hand.
At the grave the captain knelt stiffly, as though it were an effort for him to do so, and put the flowers at the head of the new mound. He remained for nearly half a minute kneeling, and then drew himself up and faced the other. “She was a sweet and gentle woman, sir; I have seen her often; I have ventured to peep over the wall when she was in her own garden. She was very fond of flowers.”
“Yes,” replied David, “very.”
“I wished sometimes that I might have offered her some of mine, the finest garden in the town, sir. But, of course, I did not know her. I am sorry to have had to give them to her like this.”