The nine months of Perdita’s wifehood had worn to their end. Perdita lay as still and sorrowless, as her child who had never breathed.
Soulsby, as he stood on the steps of the darkened dwelling, looked on the shrouded windows with feelings he could not name. The close of this passage in his friend’s experience, which seemed already to have fallen back into a past whose life was in memory, was a bewildering, constraining thing. Would the old days return—with unwitnessed fellowship and unmarked words; as if the suffering eyes had never wearied of unheeded watching, and the sweet, faint tones had never struggled to be steady? He worked his hands nervously, as a step sounded in the passage.
“I—I did not know whether—whether the sad message was a request for my coming or not. I thought that—that I might just come to inquire, and either go or stay, as it was best. Can you—you will tell me what I should do?”
“Ah, sir! come in, if you please; come in,” said the old servant; making a sign towards the living-room, as she spoke in a toneless voice. “He sits in there alone hour after hour. He has never uttered a word, except to ask me if the poor young creature seemed happy in the time she lived with us. And, indeed, she never opened her lips to say she wasn’t; so proud to the end as she was, and such a spirit as there was in that weak body. Yes; go in, sir; go in. I fear he is taken, as after the mistress died, with looking back on things, and wishing they had all been different; and it will be a sad thing for him, if it is so, sir.”
Soulsby entered the room, and paused just inside the doorway, as if to accept notice or repulsion, as either might meet him.
Claverhouse was standing by the chimney-piece. He did not turn, but moved as though he felt his presence; and beckoning him forward with a sidelong gesture, spoke without looking towards him.
“Soulsby, it was a wrong thing that I did—that taking a young creature’s youth, and burying it. It is a thing for which I must live and die sorrowing. The memory of these months, as she lived them and suffered in them—for whether or no she knew it, she must have suffered—suffered starvation of her growing nature—must be always with me.”
He talked on; and Soulsby listened in silence, except for needful response, and at times a restraining or remonstrant word. There was a feeling upon him, that he was living the experience for the second time. A similar hour after Janet’s burial was present with him, in spite of an effort to repel it. Each word and look of his friend seemed in a strange manner familiar; and he found himself looking, without the bidding of his will, over the days that must be darkened, to the further inevitable time, when the cloud should surely have passed.
But there was different and sadder to come.
The following day he came as he was bidden, to fulfil this new demand on his unwearying friendship. With characteristic shrinking from breaking the silence of the dwelling of death, he entered the house without knock or ring.
The playwright was sitting with his arms stretched out on the table, and his head bowed over them. His friend was struck by a difference from the yesterday. His face was set in lines of hopeless misery, which on a face marked thus with the years and their burden, was tragic; and he gave no sign of knowing that his solitude was broken. On the table before him, almost covered by both his hands, was what seemed to be a small, black notebook.
After a minute’s waiting, Soulsby moved to the door; and Claverhouse suddenly spoke, in a voice that was almost a cry.
“No, do not leave me—do not leave me. Do not leave me alone in my outer life, as I am in the other.”
Soulsby returned to the hearth, and stood for some moments silent. When at last he spoke, he shrank at the sound of his own voice.
“Are you not—I think—are you not dwelling too much on the trouble? It—it is, I think, your nature to do so. It—it is—is it not a time for the exercise of will?”
Claverhouse made a sound and movement of the intense irritation, which comes from the breaking of thought that leads to a climax at once intensely shrunk from and sought; but Soulsby, at cost to himself, held to his purpose.
“What of the play—the play you have just finished? I have not heard it read as—as a whole. If—if you could lose yourself for a time in some other interest, you—you would be able to look more fairly at the trouble itself.”
The playwright started to his feet, as if a thought had given him strength. He burst from the room, with something of the old suddenness of action which was leaving him as the failing of his sight demanded caution in movement; and Soulsby heard that his steps on the stairs had their old uneven violence. In a minute he returned, with a pile of manuscript; and Soulsby fought with a feeling that approached to anger, for the helpless young creature, whose life was lost with trivial things as one of them. The words he heard brought a startled feeling, that grew to a sense almost of guilt.
“Soulsby, this play is the master-work of my life. It is to be put to the deepest use in my life. You will never read it, or hear it read. It will be buried with her. I can make one sign of what I shall never put in words. I shall not live, feeling that I have given nothing in return for what I have taken.”
He set the papers on the table, and fingered them as though composing them to lie as he said; and Soulsby looked on with eyes troubled and incredulous, living the experience as a dream.
The blind man felt the unbelief, whose signs were hidden from him. He suddenly swept up the papers, sprang to the grate, and thrust them on the dying fire. The embers leapt into life; and as a flaring, crackling sound told its hopeless tale, Soulsby darted forward with some agitated words. But he held his ground with unyielding strength; and by the time his friend had forced a passage, the moments had done their work. The flames were flickering to their death, and the sparks vanishing from their grey, trembling bed.
He watched them vanish with the strange gaze, at once straining and half - exultant, of growing blindness following something of a nature to be still discernible. When the last was gone, he knelt and gathered the ashes in his hands; his eyes held closely to the grate, his fumbling fingers touching them as things of price. A softening came like a spasm over his face, as he rose with his hands helpless with their crumbling burden, and his dim eyes caught the white expanse of a cloth which Soulsby had snatched from the table, and held to receive them. He yielded them at once; and glanced from his friend to the grate, with a groping wistfulness eloquent in its mute appeal. In a moment Soulsby was on his knees, gathering with his shapely hands the remaining cinders to their last vestige. He put them with the others; and stood with a set face of sorrow, as the dramatist folded the cloth, and spoke his parting words.
“They will be buried with her, Soulsby. It is well that you drove me to burn it. How could I have known with my blindness that my words were obeyed? And with it and her, will be buried the happiness that might have remained to me. So it is as it should and must be. I will leave you for to-day. Through the hours of tonight I must sit at her side.”
He left the room, carrying the folded cloth in both his blackened hands; and Soulsby took a step backwards, and looked after him with his fingers pressed to his forehead. As he moved back, his eye was caught by the note-book on the table. His hand mechanically sought it, and his eyes went down its open page. He started, and flung it from him as if it had stung him.
It was Perdita’s diary—the record of her hand of the hidden history of her wifehood.