The Shadow of the Rope | Page 4

woman, bitterly.
"I was prevented," Rachel replied coldly. "Well?"
And the monosyllable was a whisper.
"He is still alive," said the woman at the door.
"Is that all?" asked Rachel, a catch in her voice.
"It is all I'll say till the doctor has been."
"But he has got through the night," sighed Rachel, thankfully. "I could
see the light in his room from hour to hour, even though I could not
come. Did you sit up with him all night long?"
"Every minute of the night," said the other, with undisguised severity in
her fixed red eyes. "I never left him, and I never closed a lid."

"I am so sorry!" cried Rachel, too sorry even for renewed indignation at
the cause. "But I couldn't help it," she continued, "I really could not.
We--I am going abroad--very suddenly. Poor Mr. Severino! I do wish
there was anything I could do! But you must get a professional nurse.
And when he does recover--for something assures me that he will--you
can tell him--"
Rachel hesitated, the red eyes reading hers.
"Tell him I hope he will recover altogether," she said at length; "mind,
altogether! I have gone away for good, tell Mr. Severino; but, as I
wasn't able to do so after all, I would rather you didn't mention that I
ever thought of nursing him, or that I called last thing to ask how he
was."
And that was her farewell message to the very young man with whom a
hole-and-corner scandal had coupled Rachel Minchin's name; it was to
be a final utterance in yet another respect, and one of no slight or
private significance, as the sequel will show. Within a minute or two of
its delivery, Rachel was on her own doorstep for the last time, deftly
and gently turning the latchkey, while the birds sang to frenzy in a
neighboring garden, and the early sun glanced fierily from the brass
knocker and letter-box. Another moment and the door had been flung
wide open by a police officer, who seemed to fill the narrow hall, with
a comrade behind him and both servants on the stairs. And with little
further warning Mrs. Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as
she had left him in the professor's chair, but with his feet raised stiffly
upon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broad
north light that filled the room.
The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes
gazed yet more closely at her. But there was little to gather from the
strained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips. Not a cry
had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that
instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes
against a background of grim tomes. There was no swaying of the
lissome figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or
unspoken. In moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is

often the way in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and
complete detachment, not the least common of immediate results,
makes us sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would
or should; and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of
her tragic freedom. So God had sundered whom God had joined
together! And this was the man whom she had married for love; and
she could look upon his clay unmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor
consideration, that still made her shudder, as eight eyes noted from the
door; he must have been dead when she came down and found him
seated in shadow; she had misjudged the dead, if not the living. The
pose of the head was unaltered, the chin upon the chest, the mouth
closed in death as naturally as in sleep. No wonder his wife had been
deceived. And yet there was something unfamiliar, something negligent
and noble, and all unlike the living man; so that Rachel could already
marvel that she had not at once detected this dignity and this distinction,
only too foreign to her husband as she had learnt to know him best, but
unattainable in the noblest save by death. And her eyes had risen to the
slice of sky in the upper half of the window, and at last the tears were
rising in her eyes, when they filled instead with sudden horror and
enlightenment.
There was a jagged hole in the pane above the hasp; an upset of ink on
the desk beneath the window; and the ink was drying with the dead
man's blood, in which she now perceived him to be soaked, while the
newspaper on the floor beside him was crisp as toast from