FullReads

The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his publisher’s salon. How much older he was now than then–and yet how much younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.

At a florist’s in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the bell jubilantly. He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told him her mistress was not at home. How dared the girl stare at him so impassively? Did she not know by what appointment–on what errand–he had come? Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would present himself that afternoon?

‘Not at home!’ he gasped. ‘But when will she be home?’

‘I fancy she won’t be long. She went out an hour ago, and she has an appointment with her dressmaker at five.’

‘Do you know in what direction she’d have gone?’

‘Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea.’

The world suddenly grew rosy again. ‘I will come back again,’ he said. Yes, a walk in this glorious air–heathward–would do him good.

As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall table. Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.

Mounting the few steps, he paused idly a moment on the verge of this green ‘God’s-acre’ to read a perpendicular slab on a wall, and his face broadened into a smile as he followed the absurdly elaborate biography of a rich, self-made merchant who had taught himself to read, ‘Reader, go thou and do likewise,’ was the delicious bull at the end. As he turned away, the smile still lingering about his lips, he saw a dainty figure tripping down the stony graveyard path, and though he was somehow startled to find her still in black, there was no mistaking Mrs. Glamorys. She ran to meet him with a glad cry, which filled his eyes with happy tears.

‘How good of you to remember!’ she said, as she took the bouquet from his unresisting hand, and turned again on her footsteps. He followed her wonderingly across the uneven road towards a narrow aisle of graves on the left. In another instant she has stooped before a shining white stone, and laid his bouquet reverently upon it. As he reached her side, he saw that his flowers were almost lost in the vast mass of floral offerings with which the grave of the woman beater was bestrewn.

‘How good of you to remember the anniversary,’ she murmured again.

‘How could I forget it?’ he stammered, astonished. ‘Is not this the end of the terrible twelve-month?’

The soft gratitude died out of her face. ‘Oh, is that what you were thinking of?’

‘What else?’ he murmured, pale with conflicting emotions.

‘What else! I think decency demanded that this day, at least, should be sacred to his memory. Oh, what brutes men are!’ And she burst into tears.

His patient breast revolted at last. ‘You said he was the brute!’ he retorted, outraged.

‘Is that your chivalry to the dead? Oh, my poor Harold, my poor Harold!’

For once her tears could not extinguish the flame of his anger. ‘But you told me he beat you,’ he cried.

‘And if he did, I dare say I deserved it. Oh, my darling, my darling!’ She laid her face on the stone and sobbed.