One day in June, when I had been at Hinkleton Manor for about eight months I received a telegram from George Hamilton asking me to come at once to an address in Brighton: Kitty was ill and wanted to see me. The telegram had been forwarded from Wentworth’s, and I realized that Kitty did not know that I had taken up my abode at the Manor. It seemed strange that Kitty should want me, but I could not refuse to go to her when she was ill. I showed the telegram to Nanny and told her I must catch the ten o’clock train.
“I suppose you must go, Miss Char,” she said. “But come back as soon as you can. We won’t tell Clemmie about it. It would only upset her.”
I had no time to arrange anything; I threw a few clothes into a suitcase and set off. All the way down to Brighton I thought of Kitty and wondered about her—how ill was she? Why did she want to see me, me of all people?
Kitty had dropped out of my mind so completely in the last few months that I had scarcely thought of her at all except in a vague way as the mother of Clementina. And now she had come back into my life like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. She had a habit of doing that, I mused. She had a habit of disappearing out of my life for months—or even years—and returning suddenly and unexpectedly with peremptory demands upon my time. What kind of Kitty should I find when I reached Brighton? Would she be the old carefree Kitty of her little girlhood, or the Kitty who had come to me in trouble and made me the receptacle of her moods, or would she be the hard woman with the hatred in her eyes who had looked at me across the crowded courtroom and frightened me so?
I was still frightened when I remembered that look of scorn and hatred; it came back to me very vividly, and a cold shiver ran up my spine. That look was the last I had had from Kitty; I had not seen her since.
I gazed out of the window at the flying fields and tried to calm myself and to reason with the strange fear which had seized upon me—was I afraid of Kitty? I thought about it for a little and decided that it was not Kitty of whom I was afraid; it was the hatred which had terrified me. And surely the hatred must have gone now or she would not have sent for me to come to her when she was ill. It was a comforting thought, and I held on to it and elaborated it. If Kitty had married Mr. Hamilton and was happy with him—as Garth had seemed to expect—she would bear me no grudge for the part I had played in the divorce. Happy people do not cherish grievances. It is only when people are miserable, when they feel that the world has treated them badly, that hatred finds a lodging in their hearts. Soon I had convinced myself that Kitty was happy, and had sent for me to tell me so and to be friends with me. I was ready to meet her halfway, ready to wash out all the misunderstandings of the past few years.
The journey was a troublesome one, like all cross-country journeys; it involved innumerable changes, and long waits for dawdling trains. I became more and more tired and impatient as the day wore on, and wished at least a dozen times that I had made the journey by car.
I had wired to Mr. Hamilton to say that I would arrive at 5:10 and I more than half expected that he would be at the station to meet me. I tried to conjure up his face as I had seen it in court; a smooth round face, with a bewildered expression like that of a little boy who has been punished for something and does not understand why. (I had sympathized with the bewildered expression because I had felt bewildered too.) I had thought he looked kind and nice—not at all like a man who would steal another man’s wife. I had wondered about him a little.
As the train drew into the station I scrutinized the faces upon the platform—the eagerly searching, anxious faces peculiar to those who have come to meet their friends and are afraid they may not recognize them before the doors are opened and the quiet platform becomes Bedlam let loose—but I could see nobody with the least resemblance to the man I remembered. I collected my suitcase and found a taxi with some difficulty. Brighton was glaring white in the afternoon sunshine; the brightness of it hurt my eyes, already tired with the long day’s traveling.
The taxi stopped at a large square house standing well back in a formal garden. I looked up at it anxiously and saw that the blinds were drawn…
***
George Hamilton met me on the doorstep; he was pale and miserable—more like a little boy than ever—his eyes were rimmed with red.
“You’re—you’re too late,” he said thickly.
“Too late!”
He nodded. “She died this morning.” I stared at him aghast. I had never thought of this—not once in all my imaginings had I visualized this ending to my journey.
“I came at once,” I stammered. “I wasn’t in London—your wire was forwarded.”
He made a helpless gesture with his hands.
“I can’t believe,” I said stupidly. “Kitty—she was so—so full of life.”
“I know,” he said, looking down at his hands and speaking in that thick, husky voice which is the aftermath of weeping. “She was so full of life…it’s difficult to believe, isn’t it? You didn’t see her when she was ill…and that makes it harder to believe. I wish you had been here.”
“I came at once,” I said again.
“You couldn’t help it,” he replied drearily. “These things just happen…she wanted you, that’s why I wired, she wanted to tell you something.”
“What did she want to tell me?”
“I don’t know, she said she wanted your forgiveness.”
“But I had forgiven her long ago.”
“I wish we had known,” he said, still in that dreary, expressionless voice. “I wish we could have told her that you knew about it—whatever it was—and had forgiven her. She kept on saying over and over again, ‘I must see Char—I must tell her about it—tell Char to come—I must see Char.’”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought once she was going to give me a message for you,” he continued. “She said, ‘Tell Char it all happened so easily. It was such a little lie at first—such a little lie—and then it grew and grew.’ And then she cried out that it had grown into a tree and we were all hanging on it, you and I and Wisdon and herself—she was delirious of course.”
“She must have been delirious,” I said. “I had forgiven her for deceiving me over that night in the flat—I suppose it was that.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t know. I only know she wanted to see you, she kept on saying, ‘I must see Char.’ She was afraid to die. She was—afraid. It was dreadful,” he said, twisting his hands, “dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.”
“I wish—I wish I could have been here sooner,” I said again. It seemed to me that I had said the same thing a dozen times; I could find nothing else to say to him, no comfort of any kind to give him.
“It was pneumonia,” he continued. “First ’flu, you know, and then pneumonia. She wasn’t so very ill at first, and then—two days ago—she suddenly got worse. I could see it in the doctor’s face. I had specialists…they said they were afraid…they thought her heart…I did all I could, everything they suggested…”
“I’m sure you did,” I told him, as comfortingly as I could. “Perhaps her heart wasn’t very strong—our mother died very suddenly of heart trouble.”
He nodded miserably. “It was when she—when she knew that she wasn’t going to get better that she began to ask for you. She said over and over again, ‘I can’t die till I’ve seen Char.’ She clung to my hand and said I wasn’t to let her die—she was so afraid—so afraid.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’s happy now, isn’t she?” he asked, looking at me with his pathetic brown eyes. “She knows now that you’ve forgiven her and that everything’s all right—you believe that, don’t you, Miss Dean?”
I said I believed it.
We were still standing in the hall; he was too stricken to think of asking me to sit down. I leaned against the carved oak table, for my knees were knocking together and I felt that all the strength had flowed out of my body.
“I suppose—you’d like to—to see her,” he said at last.
He took me upstairs to see Kitty. It was a beautiful room, big and airy; Kitty was lying very peacefully in the bed. The room was full of flowers—great masses of roses and lilac—there were pink roses in the hands that were crossed so peacefully upon her breast.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” he said softly.
She was beautiful. She looked very pure and holy, very young. Her face wore an expression of sweet austerity. It was very calm, very peaceful. I saw that the old Kitty had come back—the Kitty that I had known and loved long ago. And yet it was not quite the old Kitty, for this was a woman, not a girl, a woman who had sampled life, who had been tossed by its storms and had come at last into a haven of rest.
Memories of the past crowded into my mind—memories of the past—discarded fragments of days long fled. I was overwhelmed with grief—not so much for Kitty’s broken life as for the mystery of Life itself. Kitty’s life was but half run—a mere twisted fragment—how could I think that it was complete? Where could I find the purpose, the meaning of it all?
There had been none of this bewilderment in my mind when I had stood and looked down upon the still forms of my mother and my father—they had had their lives. Death is natural when it comes to the old, natural and even kindly. But this was different, this was a ruthless thing.
I realized that Mr. Hamilton was speaking. “We had only been married for a few months,” he was saying. “Just a few months, that’s all, and I loved her more than ever. But I’m glad we were married because, you see, she belongs to me now. She doesn’t belong to anybody else. She’s my very own.”
He leaned over her and touched her hand possessively, protectingly. It was almost as if he were afraid that I would claim her—God knows I had no thought of such a thing. His love for Kitty had given him the right to call her his.
“She was good,” he continued huskily. “She really was good, Miss Dean. There was no badness in her. She just liked fun and amusement—she was so gay and pretty you see—and she needed love. We were very happy together. We suited each other. All I wanted was to see her happy, and when she was happy it made me happy too. She wasn’t happy with—with Wisdon.” He raised his eyes and looked at me, almost sternly. “He wasn’t kind to her, Miss Dean, and she needed kindness so much.”
I nodded—I couldn’t speak—it was true. Garth had not been kind to Kitty.
I stayed to dinner at Garton Lodge and went to a hotel for the night. Mr. Hamilton talked about Kitty all the time—I like to think that he found some relief in talking to me about her; he needed all the comfort he could get. He talked about her unselfishness, her goodness, her sunny nature, and the courage with which she had faced her ruined life. I listened to it all and I had to believe what he was saying—he believed it so implicitly himself—and yet, all the time at the back of my mind, I knew that Kitty had not been quite like that. I had seen another side of her, a side that George Hamilton had never seen. Perhaps the truth lay between our two visions—Kitty was neither all black nor all white but a mixture of the two, like the rest of humanity.
When the time came for me to go back to the hotel he asked me to stay with him. He could easily put me in the spare room for the night, he said, looking at me with his pathetic brown eyes. But I could not stay. I was worn out. I had given him all the sympathy I could and I felt empty. I must have time for my own sorrow.
He walked back to the hotel with me and left me there. I stayed at Brighton until after the funeral and then went home.