She put her head down on her hands; tired out mentally as well as bodily. So Mr. Gibson thought. He felt as if much speech from him would only add to her excitement, and make her worse. He left the room, and called Molly, from where she was sitting dolefully. ‘Go to Cynthia!’ he whispered, and Molly went. She took Cynthia into her arms with gentle power, and laid her head against her own breast, as if the one had been a mother, and the other a child.
‘Oh, my darling!’ she murmured. ‘I do so love you, dear, dear Cynthia!’ and she stroked her hair, and kissed her eyelids; Cynthia passive all the while, till suddenly she started up, stung with a new idea, and looking Molly straight in the face, she said,—
‘Molly, Roger will marry you! See if it isn’t so! You two good—’
But Molly pushed her away with a sudden violence of repulsion. ‘Don’t!’ she said. She was crimson with shame and indignation. ‘Your husband this morning! Mine to-night! What do you take him for?’
‘A man!’ smiled Cynthia. ‘And therefore, if you won’t let me call him changeable, I’ll coin a word and call him consolable!’ But Molly gave her back no answering smile. At this moment, the servant Maria entered the consulting-room, where the two girls were. She had a scared look.
‘Isn’t master here?’ asked she, as if she distrusted her eyes.
‘No!’ said Cynthia. ‘I heard him go out. I heard him shut the front door not five minutes ago.’
‘Oh, dear!’ said Maria. ‘And there’s a man come on horseback from Hamley Hall, and he says as Mr. Osborne is dead, and that master must go off to the squire straight away.’
‘Osborne Hamley dead!’ said Cynthia, in awed surprise. Molly was out at the front door, seeking the messenger through the dusk, round into the stable-yard, where the groom sat motionless on his dark horse, flecked with foam, made visible by the lantern placed on the steps near, where it had been left by the servants, who were dismayed at this news of the handsome young man who had frequented their master’s house, so full of sportive elegance and winsomeness. Molly went up to the man, whose thoughts were lost in recollection of the scene he had left at the place he had come from.
She laid her hand on the hot damp skin of the horse’s shoulder; the man started.
‘Is the doctor coming, miss?’ For he saw who it was by the dim light.
‘He is dead, is he not?’ asked Molly, in a low voice.
‘I’m afeard he is,—leastways, there is no doubt according to what they said. But I’ve ridden hard! there may be a chance. Is the doctor coming, miss?’
‘He is gone out. They are seeking him, I believe. I will go myself. Oh! the poor old squire!’ She went into the kitchen—went over the house with swift rapidity to gain news of her father’s whereabouts. The servants knew no more than she did. Neither she nor they had heard what Cynthia, ever quick of perception, had done. The shutting of the front door had fallen on deaf ears as far as others were concerned. Upstairs sped Molly to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Gibson stood at the door, listening to the unusual stir in the house.
‘What is it, Molly? Why, how white you look, child!’
‘Where’s papa?’
‘Gone out. What’s the matter?’
‘Where?’
‘How should I know? I was asleep; Jenny came upstairs on her way to the bedrooms; she’s a girl who never keeps to her work, and Maria takes advantage of her.’
‘Jenny, Jenny!’ cried Molly, frantic at the delay.
‘Don’t shout, dear,—ring the bell. What can be the matter?’
‘Oh, Jenny!’ said Molly, half-way up the stairs to meet her, ‘who wanted papa?’
Cynthia came to join the group; she too had been looking for traces or tidings of Mr. Gibson.
‘What is the matter?’ said Mrs. Gibson. ‘Can nobody speak and answer a question?’
‘Osborne Hamley is dead!’ said Cynthia, gravely.
‘Dead! Osborne! Poor fellow! I knew it would be so, though,—I was sure of it. But Mr. Gibson can do nothing if he’s dead. Poor young man! I wonder where Roger is now? He ought to come home.’
Jenny had been blamed for coming into the drawing-room instead of Maria, whose place it was, and so had lost the few wits she had. To Molly’s hurried questions her replies had been entirely unsatisfactory. A man had come to the back door—she could not see who it was—she had not asked his name; he wanted to speak to master, —master had seemed in a hurry, and only stopped to get his hat.
‘He will not be long away,’ thought Molly, ‘or he would have left word where he was going. But oh! the poor father all alone!’ And then a thought came into her head, which she acted upon straight. ‘Go to James, tell him to put the side-saddle I had in November on Nora Creina. Don’t cry, Jenny. There is no time for that. No one is angry with you. Run!’
So down into the cluster of collected women Molly came, equipped in her jacket and skirt; quick determination in her eyes; controlled quivering about the corners of her mouth.
‘Why, what in the world’—said Mrs. Gibson—‘Molly, what are you thinking about?’ But Cynthia had understood it at a glance, and was arranging Molly’s hastily assumed dress, as she passed along.
‘I am going. I must go. I cannot bear to think of him alone. When papa comes back he is sure to go to Hamley, and if I am not wanted, I can come back with him.’ She heard Mrs. Gibson’s voice following her in remonstrance, but she did not stay for words. She had to wait in the stable-yard, and she wondered how the messenger could bear to eat and drink the food and beer brought out to him by the servants. Her coming out had evidently interrupted the eager talk,—the questions and answers passing sharp to and fro; but she caught the words, ‘all amongst the tangled grass,’ and ‘the squire would let none on us touch him; he took him up as if he was a baby; he had to rest many a time, and once he sat him down on the ground; but still he kept him in his arms; but we thought we should ne’er have gotten him up again—him and the body.’
‘The body!’
Molly had never felt that Osborne was really dead till she heard these words. They rode quick under the shadows of the hedgerow trees, but when they slackened speed, to go up a brow, or to give their horses breath, Molly heard these two little words again in her ears; and said them over again to herself, in hopes of forcing the sharp truth into her unwilling sense. But when they came in sight of the square stillness of the house, shining in the moonlight—the moon had risen by this time—Molly caught at her breath, and for an instant she thought she never could go in, and face the presence in that dwelling. One yellow light burnt steadily, spotting the silver shining with its earthly coarseness. The man pointed it out; it was almost the first word he had spoken since they had left Hollingford.
‘It’s the old nursery. They carried him there. The squire broke down at the stair-foot and they took him to the readiest place. I’ll be bound for it the squire is there hisself, and old Robin too. They fetched him, as a knowledgeable man among dumb beasts, till th’ regular doctor came.’
Molly dropped down from her seat before the man could dismount to help her. She gathered up her skirts and did not stay again to think of what was before her. She ran along the once familiar turns, and swiftly up the stairs, and through the doors, till she came to the last; then she stopped and listened. It was a deathly silence. She opened the door:—the squire was sitting alone at the side of the bed, holding the dead man’s hand, and looking straight before him at vacancy He did not stir or move, even so much as an eyelid, at Molly’s entrance. The truth had entered his soul before this, and he knew that no doctor, be he ever so cunning, could, with all his striving, put the breath into that body again. Molly came up to him with the softest steps, the most hushed breath that ever she could. She did not speak, for she did not know what to say. She felt that he had no more hope from earthly skill, so what was the use of speaking of her father and the delay in his coming? After a moment’s pause, standing by the old man’s side, she slipped down to the floor, and sat at his feet. Possibly her presence might have some balm in it; but uttering of words was as a vain thing. He must have been aware of her being there, but he took no apparent notice. There they sat, silent and still, he in his chair, she on the floor; the dead man, beneath the sheet, for a third. She fancied that she must have disturbed the father in his contemplation of the quiet face, now more than half, but not fully, covered up out of sight. Time had never seemed so without measure, silence had never seemed so noiseless as it did to Molly, sitting there. In the acuteness of her senses she heard a step mounting a distant staircase, coming slowly, coming nearer. She knew it not to be her father’s, and that was all she cared about. Nearer and nearer—close to the outside of the door—a pause, and a soft, hesitating tap. The great gaunt figure sitting by her side quivered at the sound. Molly rose and went to the door: it was Robinson, the old butler, holding in his hand a covered basin of soup.