CHAPTER VII
Mr. Maumbry had over-exerted himself in the relief of the suffering
poor, and fell a victim--one of the last--to the pestilence which had
carried off so many. Two days later he lay in his coffin.
Laura was in the room below. A servant brought in some letters, and
she glanced them over. One was the note from herself to Maumbry,
informing him that she was unable to endure life with him any longer
and was about to elope with Vannicock. Having read the letter she
took it upstairs to where the dead man was, and slipped it into his
coffin. The next day she buried him.
She was now free.
She shut up his house at Durnover Cross and returned to her lodgings
at Creston. Soon she had a letter from Vannicock, and six weeks
after her husband's death her lover came to see her.
'I forgot to give you back this--that night,' he said presently,
handing her the little bag she had taken as her whole luggage when
leaving.
Laura received it and absently shook it out. There fell upon the
carpet her brush, comb, slippers, nightdress, and other simple
necessaries for a journey. They had an intolerably ghastly look now,
and she tried to cover them.
'I can now,' he said, 'ask you to belong to me legally--when a proper
interval has gone--instead of as we meant.'
There was languor in his utterance, hinting at a possibility that it
was perfunctorily made. Laura picked up her articles, answering that
he certainly could so ask her--she was free. Yet not her expression
either could be called an ardent response. Then she blinked more and
more quickly and put her handkerchief to her face. She was weeping
violently.
He did not move or try to comfort her in any way. What had come
between them? No living person. They had been lovers. There was
now no material obstacle whatever to their union. But there was the
insistent shadow of that unconscious one; the thin figure of him,
moving to and fro in front of the ghastly furnace in the gloom of
Durnover Moor.
Yet Vannicock called upon Laura when he was in the neighbourhood,
which was not often; but in two years, as if on purpose to further
the marriage which everybody was expecting, the -st Foot returned to
Budmouth Regis.
Thereupon the two could not help encountering each other at times.
But whether because the obstacle had been the source of the love, or
from a sense of error, and because Mrs. Maumbry bore a less
attractive look as a widow than before, their feelings seemed to
decline from their former incandescence to a mere tepid civility.
What domestic issues supervened in Vannicock's further story the man
in the oriel never knew; but Mrs. Maumbry lived and died a widow.
1900.
