“Her mother died when she was quite a child,”
said George. “To think that she should
remember her and speak of her, but never once of me.”
The woman took him into the little bedroom in which
his wife had died. He knelt down by the bed and
kissed the pillow tenderly, the landlady crying as
he did so.
While he was kneeling, praying, perhaps, with his
face buried in this humble, snow-white pillow, the
woman took something from a drawer. She gave
it to him when he rose from his knees; it was a long
tress of hair wrapped in silver paper.
“I cut this off when she lay in her coffin,”
she said, “poor dear?”
He pressed the soft lock to his lips. “Yes,”
he murmured; “this is the dear hair that I have
kissed so often when her head lay upon my shoulder.
But it always had a rippling wave in it then, and now
it seems smooth and straight.”
“It changes in illness,” said the landlady.
“If you’d like to see where they have
laid her, Mr. Talboys, my little boy shall show you
the way to the churchyard.”
So George Talboys and his faithful friend walked to
the quiet spot, where, beneath a mound of earth, to
which the patches of fresh turf hardly adhered, lay
that wife of whose welcoming smile George had dreamed
so often in the far antipodes.
Robert left the young man by the side of this newly-made
grave, and returning in about a quarter of an hour,
found that he had not once stirred.
He looked up presently, and said that if there was
a stone-mason’s anywhere near he should like
to give an order.
They very easily found the stonemason, and sitting
down amidst the fragmentary litter of the man’s
yard, George Talboys wrote in pencil this brief inscription
for the headstone of his dead wife’s grave:
Sacred to the Memory of
HELEN,
THE BELOVED WIFE OF GEORGE TALBOYS,
“Who departed this life
August 24th, 18—, aged 22,
Deeply regretted by her sorrowing Husband.
ANYWHERE, ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD.
When they returned to Lansdowne Cottage they found
the old man had not yet come in, so they walked down
to the beach to look for him. After a brief search
they found him, sitting upon a heap of pebbles, reading
a newspaper and eating filberts. The little boy
was at some distance from his grandfather, digging
in the sand with a wooden spade. The crape round
the old man’s shabby hat, and the child’s
poor little black frock, went to George’s heart.
Go where he would he met fresh confirmation of this
great grief of his life. His wife was dead.
“Mr. Maldon,” he said, as he approached
his father-in-law.
The old man looked up, and, dropping his newspaper,
rose from the pebbles with a ceremonious bow.
His faded light hair was tinged with gray; he had
a pinched hook nose; watery blue eyes, and an irresolute-looking
mouth; he wore his shabby dress with an affectation
of foppish gentility; an eye-glass dangled over his
closely buttoned-up waistcoat, and he carried a cane
in his ungloved hand.
