Tongues of Conscience Part 27

"Now, Dale," the Canon said, "for goodness' sake tell her to be more orderly and to do less--mind and body. She behaves as if life was a whirlpool. She swims stupendously, tell her to float--and give her a tonic."

And he went out of the room shaking his head at the culprit on the couch.

When the door had shut upon him, Maurice came up to the fire in silence and looked at Lily. She smiled at him rather hopelessly, and then suddenly she said:

"Poor dear father! To ask you to make me take life so easily!"

That remark was the first onward gliding of their minds in speech, the uttered continuance of the hitherto silent colloquy between them.

Maurice sat down. He accepted the irony of the situation suggested by the Canon without attempt at a protest.

"Life can never be easy, if one thinks," he said. Then, trying to adopt the medical tone, he added:

"But you think too much. I have often felt that lately."

"Yes," she said.

Her eyes were bent on him with a scrutiny that was nearly ungirlish.

Maurice tried not to see it as he put his fingers on her wrist. She added:

"I have felt that about you too."

Maurice had taken out his watch. Without speaking he timed the fluttering pulsation of her life, then, dropping her hand and returning the watch to his pocket:

"Your too eager thoughts were of me?" he asked.

"Yes, but yours were not of me."

"Not always," he said, with an honesty that pleased her.

And again Lily saw above his face the shadowy crown of thorns. She was really unwell and ready to be unstrung. Perhaps this made her say hastily, as she s.h.i.+fted lower on her cus.h.i.+ons:

"I'm partly ill to-day because you let me see how horribly you are suffering."

"Yes," Maurice said heavily. "I let you see it. Why's that?"

There was nothing like a shock to either of them in the directness of their words. They seemed spoken rightly at the inevitable time. No thought of question, of denial, was entertained by them. Maurice sat there by her and dropped his mask utterly.

"Miss Alston, I am a haunted man," he said.

And, in a moment, as he spoke, he seemed to be old. Lily said nothing.

She twisted between her little fingers the thin rug that covered her, and was angry with herself because, all of a sudden, she wanted to cry.

"And I am beginning to wonder," Maurice went on, "how much longer I can bear it, just how long."

Lily cleared her throat. It struck her as odd that she did not feel strange with this man who looked so old in the thin light from the lamp.

Indeed, now that the mask had entirely fallen from him, he seemed more familiar to her than ever before.

"I suppose we must bear everything so long as G.o.d chooses," she said.

"No, so long as we choose."

"But how?"

"To live to bear it. I cannot be haunted after I am dead. That can't be."

He lifted his head and looked at her with a sort of pale defiance, as if he would dare her to contradict him. Lily confronted the horror of his eyes, and a shudder ran over her. The thorns had pierced more deeply even than she had believed as she lay awake in the night. Just then a door banged and a footstep approached on the landing.

"Hush, it's father," Lily whispered.

And the Canon entered to ask the condition of the patient. Maurice prescribed and went away. In the windy evening as he walked, he was conscious of a large change dawning over his life. Either the spirit of prophecy--which comes to many men even in modern days--was upon him, or hope, which he believed quite dead in him, stirred faintly in his dream.

In either event he saw that on the black walk of his life there was the irregular, and as yet paltry, line of some writing, some inscription. He could not read the words. He only knew that there were some words to be read. And one of them was surely Lily's name.

He did not meet her until the evening of the following Sunday when, as usual, he went to supper at the Rectory. Lily was better and had been to church. The Canon was delighted and thanked Maurice for his skill in diagnosis and in treatment.

"You cure every one," he said.

Lily and Maurice exchanged a glance. He saw how well she understood that he felt the words to be an irony though they were uttered so innocently. After supper, just as the Canon, with his habitual Sunday sigh of satisfaction, was beginning to light his pipe, Sarah, the parlour maid, came in with a note. The Canon read it and his sigh moved onwards to something not unlike a groan. He put his filled pipe down on the mantelpiece.

"What is it, father?" asked Lily.

"Miss Bigelow," he replied laconically.

"On a Sunday. Oh, it's too bad!"

"It can't be helped," the Canon said. "Excuse me, Dale, I have to go out. But--stay--I shall be back in half an hour."

And he went out into the hall, took his coat and hat and left the house.

Miss Bigelow was his cross. She was a rich invalid, portentously delicate, full of benefactions to the parish and fears for the welfare of her soul. She kept the Canon's charities going royally, but, in return, she claimed the Canon's ghostly ministrations at odd times to an extent that sometimes caused the good man's saintly equanimity to totter. Hating doctors and loving clergymen, Miss Bigelow was forever summoning her distracted father confessor to speed that parting guest--her soul, which however, never departed. She remarked in confidence to those about her, that she had endured "a dozen deathbeds."

The Canon had sat beside them all. He must now take his way to the thirteenth.

As soon as the hall door banged Maurice looked up at Lily.

"Poor, dear father," she murmured.

"I am glad," Maurice said abruptly.

The remark might have been called rude, but it was so simply made that it had the dignity belonging to any statement of plain truth. Neither rude nor polite, it was merely a cry of fact from an overburdened human soul. Lily felt that the words were forced from the young doctor by some strange agitation that fought to find expression.

"You wish--you wish--" she began.

Then she stopped. The flood of expression that welled up in her companion's face frightened her. She trembled at the thought of the hidden thing, the force, that could loose such a sea.

"What is it?" she said like a schoolgirl--or so, a moment afterwards, she feared.

"I ought not to tell you," Maurice said, "I ought not, but I must--I must."

He had got up and was standing before her. His back was to the fire, and a shadow was over his face.

"I want to tell you. You have made me want to. Why is that?"