Vera. Elizabeth von Arnim

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      They had gone down, he and his wife, as they did every 25th of July, for the summer to their house on the river, and he had been looking forward to a glorious time of peaceful doing nothing after months of London, just lying about in a punt and reading and smoking and resting—London was an awful place for tiring one out—and they hadn't been there twenty-four hours before his wife—before his wife——

      The remembrance of it was too grievous to him. He couldn't go on.

      'Was she—very ill?' asked Lucy gently, to give him time to recover. 'I think that would almost be better. One would be a little at least one would be a little prepared——'

      'She wasn't ill at all,' cried Wemyss. 'She just—died.'

      'Oh like father!' exclaimed Lucy, roused now altogether. It was she now who laid her hand on his.

      Wemyss seized it between both his, and went on quickly.

      He was writing letters, he said, in the library at his table in the window where he could see the terrace and the garden and the river; they had had tea together only an hour before; there was a flagged terrace along that side of the house, the side the library was on and all the principal rooms; and all of a sudden there was a great flash of shadow between him and the light; come and gone instantaneously; and instantaneously then there was a thud; he would never forget it, that thud; and there outside his window on the flags——

      'Oh don't—oh don't——' gasped Lucy.

      'It was my wife,' Wemyss hurried on, not able now to stop, looking at Lucy while he talked with eyes of amazed horror. 'Fallen out of the top room of the house her sitting-room because of the view—it was in a straight line with the library window—she dropped past my window like a stone—she was smashed—smashed——'

      'Oh, don't—oh——'

      'Now can you wonder at the state I'm in?' he cried. 'Can you wonder if I'm nearly off my head? And forced to be by myself—forced into retirement for what the world considers a proper period of mourning, with nothing to think of but that ghastly inquest.'

      He hurt her hand, he gripped it so hard.

      'If you hadn't let me come and talk to you,' he said, 'I believe I'd have pitched myself over the cliff there this afternoon and made an end of it.'

      'But how—but why—how could she fall?' whispered Lucy, to whom poor Wemyss's misfortune seemed more frightful than anything she had ever heard of.

      She hung on his words, her eyes on his face, her lips parted, her whole body an agony of sympathy. Life—how terrible it was, and how unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting. Her father, so full of love and interests and plans—gone, finished, brushed away as if he no more mattered than some insect one unseeingly treads on as one walks; and this man's wife, dead in an instant, dead so far more cruelly, so horribly. …

      'I had often told her to be careful of that window,' Wemyss answered in a voice that almost sounded like anger; but all the time his tone had been one of high anger at the wanton, outrageous cruelty of fate. 'It was a very low one, and the floor was slippery. Oak. Every floor in my house is polished oak. I had them put in myself. She must have been leaning out and her feet slipped away behind her. That would make her fall head foremost——'

      'Oh—oh——' said Lucy, shrinking. What could she do, what could she say to help him, to soften at least these dreadful memories?

      'And then,' Wemyss went on after a moment, as unaware as Lucy was that she was tremblingly stroking his hand, 'at the inquest, as though it hadn't all been awful enough for me already, the jury must actually get wrangling about the cause of death.'

      'The cause of death?' echoed Lucy. 'But—she fell.'

      'Whether it were an accident or done on purpose.'

      'Done on——?'

      'Suicide.'

      'Oh——'

      She drew in her breath quickly.

      'But—it wasn't?'

      'How could it be? She was my wife, without a care in the world, everything done for her, no troubles, nothing on her mind, nothing wrong with her health. We had been married fifteen years, and I was devoted to her—devoted to her.'

      He banged his knee with his free hand. His voice was full of indignant tears.

      'Then why did the jury——'

      'My wife had a fool of a maid—I never could stand that woman—and it was something she said at the inquest, some invention or other about what my wife had said to her. You know what servants are. It upset some of the jury. You know juries are made up of anybody and everybody—butcher, baker, and candle-stick-maker—quite uneducated most of them, quite at the mercy of any suggestion. And so instead of a verdict of death by misadventure, which would have been the right one, it was an open verdict.'

      'Oh, how terrible—how terrible for you,' breathed Lucy, her eyes on his, her mouth twitching with sympathy.

      'You'd have seen all about it if you had read the papers last week,' said Wemyss, more quietly. It had done him good to get it out and talked over.

      He looked down at her upturned face with its horror-stricken eyes and twitching mouth. 'Now tell me about yourself,' he said, touched with compunction; nothing that had happened to her could be so horrible as what had happened to him, still she too was newly smitten, they had met on a common ground of disaster, Death himself had been their introducer.

      'Is life all—only death?' she breathed, her horror-stricken eyes on his.

      Before he could answer—and what was there to answer to such a question except that of course it wasn't, and he and she were just victims of a monstrous special unfairness—he certainly was; her father had probably died as fathers did, in the usual way in his bed—before he could answer, the two women came out of the house, and with small discreet steps proceeded down the path to the gate. The sun flooded their spare figures and their decent black clothes, clothes kept for these occasions as a mark of respectful sympathy.

      One of them saw Lucy under the mulberry tree and hesitated, and then came across the grass to her with the mincing steps of tact.

      'Here's somebody coming to speak to you,' said Wemyss, for Lucy was sitting with her back to the path.

      She started and looked round.

      The woman approached hesitatingly, her head on one side, her hands folded, her face pulled into a little smile intended to convey encouragement and pity.

      'The gentleman's quite ready, miss,' she said softly.

III

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