As I sate trying to find some light, I heard the cry of a lusty child: “Mother! Mother!” At this her face contracted as with sudden pain, and saying only, “Wait where you are,” she left the shop.
I noticed she had still the same quick, light way of moving, “like a bird,” I used to tell her in the old days: it was but the dull, ungenerous colour and shape of her stuff gown that hid the dainty figure I had known, and only some different manner of dressing her hair that prevented the old trick of the little curls that would come out about her ears and forehead.
While she was away I thought it all out, and my heart melted with pity for the poor soul, forced to these years of loneliness, to this daily struggle for the support of herself and her child—our child—and, more than all else, to the torturing thought that the love which had been the sum of her existence was false. What should I do? Could I be in doubt for a moment? I would make up to her, by the devotion of a heart rich in feeling, all the sorrows of the past.
Here she entered again, but now collected and herself as at first. I rose and advanced to meet her, but she waved me off, and took up her sewing again in her former position.
“Lucy,” I said, standing over her, “does not the voice of our child—for I cannot doubt it is our child—plead for me? Listen a moment. When I returned from that ill-starred Russian voyage, I flew at once to join you. You had been in my heart during all my absence, and my return home was to be crowned with your love. But, to my consternation, I found strangers occupying the old rooms, and the woman told me with every circumstance of harrowing detail the story of your death by typhus, and that your mother followed you to the grave scarce a day later. Heartbroken as I was, I never sought for further confirmation than the nameless graves she pointed out to me by your parish church. She told me, too, your effects were burned by order of the overseers, and I took it for granted she had stolen anything of value that might have been left. When I found at my banker's that a lieutenancy in Berwick's was awaiting my application, I only too eagerly seized the opportunity of escaping from a country where I should be constantly reminded of my ruined past, and since that day I have never set foot in London till the present. Oh, Lucy! Lucy! I see it all now. The birth of our child was approaching. You, poor soul, were an unacknowledged wife; I was wandering, a shipwrecked stranger beyond all means of communication, and you fled from the finger of shame that cruel hands would hare pointed at you. Why that hag should have gone to such lengths to deceive me I cannot even guess. But now, my dear love, my dearest wife, it is at an end! I have a position—at least I am a captain, with fair chance of promotion—I no longer have a family to consider, and once I get out of this present trap I will acknowledge you before the whole world, and we will wipe out the cruel past as if it had never existed.”
“I have no past,” she said, quietly.
“Then, Lucy darling, as truly as I am your husband I will make you a future.”
“I have no husband,” she answered, in the same quiet tone: “my husband died the day my boy was born.”
“But, Lucy, my wife, you have love?”
“Not such love as you mean. My love, such as it is here, is for my boy. All else is for something beyond.”