FullReads

“Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, ‘t were to consider too curiously to consider so.

Mr. Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret’s explanation of O’Rourke’s disappearance. He was undoubtedly drowned; had most likely drowned himself. The hat picked up on the wharf was strong circumstantial evidence in that direction. But one feature of the case staggered Mr. Bilkins. O’Rourke’s violin had also disappeared. Now, it required no great effort to imagine a man throwing himself overboard under the influence of mania a potu; but it was difficult to conceive of a man committing violinicide! If the fellow went to drown himself, why did he take his fiddle with him? He might as well have taken an umbrella or a German student-lamp. This question troubled Mr. Bilkins a good deal first and last. But one thing was indisputable: the man was gone–and had evidently gone by water.

It was now that Margaret invested her husband with charms of mind and person not calculated to make him recognizable by any one who had ever had the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She eliminated all his bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a Mr. O’Rourke as he ought to have been–a species of seraphic being mixed up in some way with a violin; and to this ideal she erected a costly headstone in the suburban cemetery. “It would be a proud day for Larry,” observed Margaret contemplatively, “if he could rest his oi on the illegant monumint I ‘ve put up to him.” If Mr. O’Rourke could have read the inscription on it, he would never have suspected his own complicity in the matter.

But there the marble stood, sacred to his memory; and soon the snow came down from the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible snow of weeks and months drifted down on Margaret’s heart, and filled up its fissures, and smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and there was peace upon it.

Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. Yet life had a relish to it again; she was free, though she did not look at it in that light; she was happier in a quiet fashion than she had ever been, though she would not have acknowledged it to herself. She wondered that she had the heart to laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps she was conscious of something comically incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who spent all winter in cutting ice, and all summer in dealing it out to his customers. She had not the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet she laughed still more merrily at him when he pressed her hand over the steaming loaf of brown-bread, delivered every Saturday morning at the scullery door. Both these gentlemen had known Margaret many years, yet neither of them had valued her very highly until another man came along and married her. A widow, it would appear, is esteemed in some sort as a warranted article, being stamped with the maker’s name.

There was even a third lover in prospect; for according to the gossip of the town, Mr. Donnehugh was frequently to be seen of a Sunday afternoon standing in the cemetery and regarding Mr. O’Rourke’s headstone with unrestrained satisfaction.

A year had passed away, and certain bits of color blossoming among Margaret’s weeds indicated that the winter of her mourning was oyer. The ice-man and the baker were hating each other cordially, and Mrs. Bilkins was daily expecting it would be discovered before night that Margaret had married one or both of them. But to do Margaret justice, she was faithful in thought and deed to the memory of O’Rourke–not the O’Rourke who disappeared so strangely, but the O’Rourke who never existed.

“D’ ye think, mum,” she said one day to Mrs. Bilkins, as that lady was adroitly sounding her on the ice question–“d’ ye think I ‘d condescind to take up wid the likes o’ him, or the baker either, afther sich a man as Larry?”