She got up in agitation.
"Let no one say I did not love him!" she cried in a voice suddenly strained and shrill.
Elizabeth got up also, forcing down her terror at this tragic figure suddenly revealed to her, and full of growing pity.
"Edith, dear, you are talking wildly," she said. "You don't know what you are saying."
Edith put up both hands to her head.
"It is not wild talk," she said, "it is sober truth. But I express it badly; I get confused. And there was something I wanted to ask you. Was it really true what you told me?"
Then her face changed. The hardness and restraint faded from it; it became humanized again by suffering.
"Elizabeth, I feel so ill," she said. "I am in pain, in great pain!"
Elizabeth was sitting in the window of Edward's smoking-room where two mornings ago he and Edith had sat talking and reading before she came over to the house next door. Late that night her baby, a seven-months child, had been born, flickering faintly into life and out again, and now in the room overhead Edith lay dying. An hour ago she had asked to see Elizabeth, but had passed into a state of unconsciousness before the girl could come to her. So now Elizabeth waited near at hand in case her cousin rallied again and again wished to see her. Edward, in the room upstairs, had promised to call her at once; Mrs. Hancock watched with him.
The house was very still with that curious stillness that comes with such a waiting. Outside the warm May wind blew in at the window laden with the scent of the wallflowers that grew just outside, and the air was full of the fragrance and chirrupings of spring. At the gate stood Mrs. Hancock's motor, which had just brought down a doctor from London, who at this moment was holding a consultation with Edith's doctor in the dining-room. Elizabeth had propped open the door of the room where she sat, so that she might hear him come out, and get a word with him, but she had been told there was no hope that her cousin would live. Above her head, from the room where Edith lay, came an occasional footstep, sounding dim and muffled, and she could hear the slow tick of the clock in the hall outside. She guessed, she believed with certainty, what it was Edith wanted to say to her, namely, to repeat the question that had been cut short by the coming of her pains two days before. And Elizabeth knew how she would answer it.
She sat there long in silence, alert for any noise that should come from the house. Then the dining-room door, where the physicians were consulting, opened, and she went out to meet them in the hall. A couple of sentences told her all, and the London specialist walked out to the motor waiting for him, while the other went upstairs again to the silent room. From outside came the whirr of the engines as Denton started them again.
Elizabeth sat down on the bottom step of the stairs, her mind quite still and inactive. Occasionally, like a cloud taking substance suddenly in a serene sky, some remembered scene, some sentence, some trivial happening connected with Edith, appeared there, forming itself and vanishing again, and more than once Edith's voice sounded in her ears as she said, "Let no one say that I did not love him." But for the most part the imminence of the great silent event that they were all waiting for kept her mind vacant. In that presence she could not think of anything else; those little things that kept occurring to her seemed to come from outside.
Then she heard a stir above her, the click of an opened door, and, looking round and up, she saw Edward beckoning to her.
"She has asked for you," he said, as she entered.
Edith was lying on her bed, looking with wide-open eyes at the ceiling. She did not seem to notice Elizabeth's entrance, but the doctor beckoned to her, and she knelt down at the right of the bed. Then he went back and stood some little distance off by the window. The breeze streamed in through the open sash, making the blind tassel rattle and tap against the wall, but otherwise there was dead silence.
Then suddenly Edith spoke.
"I want to see Elizabeth," she said. "Will not Elizabeth come?"
Elizabeth got up.
"I am here, Edith," she said.
"I want to speak to you alone," she said. "Nobody else must hear."
She had turned her eyes to the girl as she bent over her, and waited, looking at her with a fixed, anxious expression, till the others had gone into the dressing-room adjoining.
"We are alone?" she asked. "Then tell me. Did you love him?"
Elizabeth bent lower over her and kissed her.
"Yes, dear Edith," she said. "I always loved him."
"Then – then you must get him to forgive me. Perhaps he will forgive me? Do you think he will?"
Elizabeth took hold of the white, wet hand that lay outside the coverlet.
"Oh, my dear!" she said.
"Ask him to come, then," said Edith faintly. "Quickly, quickly!"
Next moment they stood together by the bed. Her lips moved once, but no sound came from them. Only her eyes, over which lay the deepening shadow, looked from one to the other and back again.