The Complete Works of L M Montgomery

by L. M. Montgomery

  Old Jean Stewart died three years after Agatha’s death, and thenceforth Christine lived alone, keeping the big house herself in the immaculate fashion that Agatha had loved. She had always hated housework. She did it all now, down to the very scrubbing and stove-blacking, taking a fierce satisfaction in these hated tasks, glad when her beautiful white hands, on which never a jewel shone, grew rough and hardened. She had to have help outside, to keep the grounds as Agatha had liked them. For this purpose she employed half-witted old Dormy Woods, who pottered about all the lawns of Harrowsdene and liked to insinuate that he knew dark secrets about everybody. Sometimes the queer remarks he occasionally let fall gave Christine a start of dread; when he looked at her with his horrible filmy eyes and said leeringly, “I could tell strange tales o’ some folks,” she grew cold to her very heart. Was it possible he knew and guessed her secret? No, it was not possible. But she was always uneasy in his presence, and it was for that very reason she employed him. It was part of her penance. Perhaps, too, old Dormy told her bits of unsolicited news now and then.

  She gave largely and secretly to the charities that Agatha had always supported, but she never spent an unnecessary cent. When people called her miserly she said bitterly to herself, “That is better than being called a murderess.” She never wore anything but severe black. She never went anywhere save to the stores, where she did her economical buying, and to church. Every Sunday she sat alone in the old North pew, reading her Bible until the service began, never lifting her eyes. She did this because she detested reading the Bible. For the same reason she read a chapter in it every night and every morning. One month, eight years after Agatha’s death, she suffered from a slight but uncomfortable affection of the eyes that was epidemic in Harrowsdene, and could not read at all. Then she discovered that she missed her Bible, that she had come to enjoy it. From that time she never opened her Bible again. Yet she had read through it so often that it had become part of her, its philosophy, its poetry, its drama, its ageless, incredible wisdom, of earth and of spirit, its unexampled range of colourful human nature were hers inalienably, permeating her soul and intellect.

  Her reading was all heavy and serious now. She never looked at one of the sentimental romances she had once revelled in. Now she read only the old histories and biographies and poems in the old North bookcases. This filled part of the time left over from her meticulous housekeeping; the rest she passed in knitting and sewing, making garments which she secretly sent to the poor of the nearest city.

  She never touched her piano after Agatha’s death; no one ever heard her sing again. She never spoke to anyone beyond a grave Good Day, and when people talked to her or strove to hold her in conversation she answered with brief gravity and went her way — she who had once been such a chatterbox. She had put all companionship out of her life. She would not even have a cat or dog at “Whiteflowers.” She kept the flowers that Agatha had loved in her garden, but she never touched one. Moonlight was still a fair thing, but she would not look at it. She would not accept any enjoyment, and she never for one waking! moment forgot that she had killed Agatha. The passing of years never dulled or dimmed the realization. Sometimes she dreamed that people knew of it and looked on her with horror and contempt. She would wake up with perspiration on her fore-head and breathe a word of passionate relief that it was only a dream.

  She did not wholly succeed in banishing all passion from her life. When old Dormy told her that he’d heard Dr. Lennox was going to marry Florence King, the high school teacher, she felt a sudden savage thrill of jealousy.

  “Surely he will never marry that stiff, pedantic creature,” she thought. Yet she knew Miss King was handsome and clever, and Dormy reported Harrowsdene as approving the match. That night Christine looked from her window through the gap in the pines to the light that burned in a house across the river. She knew the light was in Ward Lennox’s office, and she kept an ugly vigil with pain and longing. But by dawn she had conquered it. Ward Lennox might marry Florence King. It was naught to her. She had put all that behind her.

  But Dr. Lennox did not marry Florence King; he did not marry anyone, though gossip linked his name with this or that for many years before it accepted the fact that Dr. Lennox meant to remain a bachelor. He was a busy, friendly man, with a large practice; everybody liked him and trusted him. People got well of serious illnesses just because they believed in him. His personality cured more patients than his medicine. He was no hermit. He went freely into society and enjoyed life. He and Christine never met. At long intervals they passed each other on the street. He would bow courteously and Christine coldly; that was all. People had forgotten that it had ever been supposed they would marry.

  After this fashion fourteen years passed. Christine was thirty-four years old — if anybody had thought about her age. Nobody did. Her own generation were all married and gone. To the younger she was what she had always seemed — a grave, stately, middle-aged eccentric woman, considered miserly, living her strange secluded life at old-fashioned “Whiteflowers.” She was always pale, darkly and plainly dressed; yet there was a haunting, tragic charm about her that made the younger beauties seem cheap and common beside her. Christine never thought about her appearance save when, looking into her unshaded mirror over the brown bottle on the table, she saw the lines on her face and the slight hollows in the cheeks that had once been so round and delicately hued, and had a momentary impression that she was old and faded — much more so than her contemporaries. But that was part of her atonement. She had given up her beauty when she gave up love and life’s fulfillment.

  Her atonement was becoming easier — too easy, she thought. She had ceased to have wild longings of the things she had put away from her. She had ceased to dream of Ward — ceased to desire feverishly to fling open her silent piano and plunge her fingers into music. She was beginning to like her housework, her reading, even her sewing and knitting. When she realized this, she felt all the old sting of her guilt and remorse. She must not be happy. What could she do to make herself miserable?

  The thought came to her that she would adopt a child. Nothing could be more distasteful to her. She had always disliked children. Most of all she disliked ugly children. She went to the orphan asylum in the city and brought home its ugliest inmate — a boy of eight, with a pitiful little face scarred by some inhuman attack of a drunken father. His name was Jacky Brent and he was a timid, silent little fellow — the very type which made Christine feel most uncomfortable. But she revelled in her discomfort and in all the annoyances which the care and upbringing of this child brought into her methodical existence. She left nothing undone that could contribute to his comfort and welfare. She studied dietetic tables and child welfare magazines, and vexed her soul with balanced meals and tables of weights. She helped him with his lessons; she invited his schoolmates to “Whiteflowers” to make it lively for him and watched over their games and their manners, and got up appropriate lunches for them. She got a dog for him and forced herself to tolerate muddy paw tracks; she played halma and dominoes with him — even ball in the backyard because she abhorred it. She helped him with his lessons, even, she remembered, as Agatha had once helped her. She helped him build a playhouse and picnicked with him in it. She forced herself to talk to him. She had lived so long with silence that she found it difficult to talk, and more difficult still to talk to a child. But she persevered, and eventually, as they gradually built up a little store of common interests, she found it easier and easier. Jacky learned to talk too, as his timidity wore off somewhat, and sometimes his quaint, unexpected remarks prompted in Christine a desire for laughter to which she had long been a stranger. She never let herself laugh. She did not even smile, but momentarily the eyes of her girlhood returned to her.

  In spite of his delicacy of appearance Jacky was a healthy child, but one night, when he had been at “Whiteflowers” nearly a year, he was suddenly taken violently ill. Christine telephoned wildly for old Dr. Abbott. Dr. Abbott was away; the
re was nothing to do but send for Ward Lennox. Ward Lennox crossed the threshold of “Whiteflowers” for the first time in fifteen years. He was cool, impersonal, professional; Christine was so upset about Jacky that she could think of nothing else. They met and talked like casual acquaintances.

  Ward Lennox told her that Jacky had appendicitis and that an operation was imperative. No time must be lost. At dawn a trained nurse was in charge of the case, and the specialist from the city had come. Christine locked herself in her room and paced the floor until the operation was over. Then they told her that the abscess had broken before the operation and that Jacky’s condition was very critical. Christine went back to her room.

  She did not pray. She had never prayed since Agatha’s death — she had never dared to. Always in the back of her mind was the feeling that she must not pray without confession — and she could not confess. She did not pray now; she looked at her drawn, anguished face in her glass and for the first time she was unconscious of the little brown bottle under it.

  Jacky might die, and she loved Jacky!

  “I cannot live without him,” she said, wringing her hands. “I cannot.”

  She remembered with a stab of horrible compunction that she had rebuked him sharply the day before for something he had said. She recalled his grieved look, the look that always came into his poor little face when he displeased her. He had always tried so hard to please her. That very night before he went to bed, when he had seemed so tired and dull, he had faithfully hung his clothes up and set his shoes straight, and put all his little treasures tidily away in his box, as her rigid rules required. Christine went and looked at them, his little tops and nails and balls and engines, his new jack-knife and the old broken one he still loved because it had been his only prized possession in the asylum, his tin pail and spade, and the dancing monkey which had delighted him so. If Jacky died...

  Jacky did not die. He recovered. And when he was well again Christine sat down in her room on the first day he went back to school and took stock of her emotions.

  She had taken Jacky for a penance. He had ceased to be a penance; he had become her delight. She loved him with all the intensity of her passionate nature. She could not give him up — she could not. Such a sacrifice she could not make. She had once given her lover up in the surge of a new horror and remorse. But that surge had spent itself. She could not give Jacky up now; neither could she keep him with her guilty secret. One must be surrendered. She must make her choice.

  When Jacky came from school, running through the hall calling gaily for “Aunty,” who had mothered and petted and spoiled him all through his convalescence, her choice was made. She got Jacky his supper, helped him with his lessons and put him to bed, reconciling him to its unusual earliness by the promise of a treat on the morrow.

  Then she went out, bareheaded, into the autumn dusk — not realizing that she was bareheaded.

  She had thought it all over. The tale must be told. She did not know what the result might be. Probably at this lapse of time nothing would be done to her. People would believe that it was merely carelessness and content themselves with gossip and wonder and condemnation. Christine’s pride still cringed at thought of it. It would be horrible, horrible to open up the old wound, horrible to have her long-hidden secret proclaimed to her world. But it must be.

  To whom could she tell it? Nurse Ransome had died five years ago. Ward Lennox? Yes, it should be to him. Her punishment must be as severe as it could possibly be. She would go and confess to him.

  She walked steadily along the street. The world about her seemed weird and purple and shadowy, with great cold clouds piling up above a sharp yellow eastern sky.

  Christine felt that it was in keeping with her terrible errand; when she passed a house through whose open windows came the sound of music and laughter and dancing, she shuddered. Tomorrow these people would be talking of her — of her, Christine North, who had poisoned Agatha. And yet they were dancing tonight as if there were no such things in the world as horrible carelessness and never-dying remorse and public shame. She struck her hands together in her misery but she went on.

  Ward Lennox was sitting on his verandah when Christine came up the walk in the pale moonshine that was beginning to silver the October dusk. His amazement could not have been much greater if Agatha North herself had come up the walk — it almost made him speechless. But he contrived to murmur a few conventional words and asked Christine to come in.

  “I would rather stay out here,” said Christine, who felt that what she had come to say could not be said in a lighted room.

  She sat down in the chair he drew forward for her. The light streaming out through the window of the room behind her made a primrose nimbus around her shapely head. In the dim light she looked very beautiful, a majestic creature with that subtly knowing, deep-eyed white face of hers in its frame of flat dark hair. The lovely line of cheek and throat rose above her black collar. Ward Lennox suddenly remembered the time he had dared to kiss that white throat — the only time he had ever kissed her. It seemed to him that he could almost hear her little, deprecating laugh as she escaped him. Surely it had been the laugh of a woman who loved the man who kissed her. No coquette could have laughed just like that.

  Christine looked straight at him, sensing the vast reserve of strength that underlay his external courtesy and gaiety and charm. How strong he was! And she — she had been so weak and cowardly!

  “I have come to tell you something,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said gently.

  Christine waited a moment. She must find very plain, direct words. Her hands, she found, were clammy and her mouth was dry.

  “I killed Agatha fifteen years ago. I didn’t mean to — but I killed her.”

  “Christine!”

  It gave her a strange shock to hear her name again. It was so long since she had heard it. For years she had been Miss North to everyone. Even to Jacky she was only “Aunty.” Under the shock she was also conscious of an enormous relief, as if some horrible darkness or weight had been suddenly lifted from her soul.

  She hurried on, rather incoherently now.

  “I gave her four of the sleeping tablets by mistake, through carelessness. My thoughts were wool-gathering. I hadn’t put the tablets back in the right place when I gave her one at eleven — and I fell asleep — and was stupid when I went to give her the regular medicine — and then I — I — played with my hair at the glass for hours, and she was dead — I never knew it. And I could not confess. I knew I ought to — but I was afraid to. I thought they might put me in prison, or always point the finger of scorn at me. I couldn’t face it, so I lied. But I am telling the truth now, and I’ve done penance — oh, I’ve done penance. But I can’t give Jacky up — so I’m telling it all now. Oh, whatever they do to me, don’t let them take Jacky from me.

  Ward Lennox was moved profoundly, Everything was clear to him now and, oh, the pity of it! For it had all been so unnecessary.

  “Christine,” he said slowly. “You did not kill Agatha. The tablets you gave her were quite harmless.”

  Christine looked up, dazed, incredulous.

  “The day before Agatha died Nurse Ransome told me that she did not think the sleeping tablets would be needed again and I took them away, wanting them for another patient, as my supply had run low. I left in their place a bottle of tablets to be used if Agatha had any return of certain annoying digestive symptoms. They were harmless — the whole bottleful wouldn’t have hurt her. I remember it all distinctly. Nurse Ransome should have told you. I suppose she forgot. Agatha died of heart failure — there is absolutely no doubt of that. Oh, Christine, my poor darling, and this was why — if you had trusted me...”

  “If” indeed! Christine was struggling with a whirlpool of emotion in which a still half-incredulous joy was uppermost. She had not killed Agatha — there was no blood on her hands — that was the only fact she could grasp clearly now. Later on would come bitter regret, for her folly a
nd cowardice, for the lost, wasted years, for everything she had thrown away in insensate sacrifice to her pride and her vain hunger for atonement. Later yet again would come a wistful realization that, after all, the years had not been wasted. Vanity, selfishness, frivolity had been stripped from her soul as a garment. Strength, fineness, reserve, dignity, all she had lacked had been given unto her in those years of penance; even physically they had not been barren. In her regular, simple life the delicacy of her girlhood had vanished. She had become a perfectly healthy woman. All this had been bought with a great price, but she could never have purchased it in a cheaper market.

  She stood up... and swayed unsteadily.

  “I must go home — think this out. I can’t — no, no, you must not come with me — I must be alone.”

  “Christine!” His voice was a sharp protest. “You are not going to shut me out of your life again — I love you. I’ve always loved you — we must...”

  “Not yet — not yet,” she besought him feverishly, pushing him away from her.

  He stepped back and let her pass. He had waited long — he could wait a little longer.

  Christine went blindly home to “Whiteflowers.” She went to Agatha’s room and knelt by Agatha’s bed. For the first time in fifteen years she prayed — a prayer of thankfulness and humility. For the rest of the night she sat at Agatha’s window looking out into the moonlit beauty of “Whiteflowers,” or walked about the dim haunted room in a mingled intoxication of joy and regret. Under all the turmoil of her mind she felt curiously young again — as if life had suddenly folded back many of its pages. Through the gap in the pines she saw Ward’s light in the house across the river. For the first time since Agatha’s death she let herself think about him. A door of life she had thought shut forever seemed slowly opening before her.