LASSIE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14202, 27 October 1909, Page 10

LASSIE.

; PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT..

BY HELEN MATHERS, Author of " Oomin' Thro' the Rye." "My : Lady Malincourt." " Cherry Ripe," ' My * Lady Greensleeves," " Gay Lawless,"

Etc, Etc

[COPYRIGHT.]

CHAPTER XLV.

"AND I AM HIS." Lyndsay opened the door with her latchkey, and quietly crossed the hall, at that moment empty. Making straight for Roddy's room, she pulled up short at sight of Lassie, half kneeling, half crouched in the angle of the wall, her eyes immovably fixed on his door, then turning the handle, found herself shut out.

As she knocked, softly but insistently, a key turned, and Alison's face, worried, almost menacing, as if faced by some unexpected crisis, appeared. When he saw who it was he said rapidly : ,*' * "At the first sign of improvement you shall know—he is still alive." And closed and locked the door. ?

Coulter had come out, and Lyndsay turning to him said sharply, somehow connecting Lassie with the catastrophe:' " Why don't you take her away ', "What harm is she doing?" he said quietly. " She does not interfere, she asks no questions, is in the way of no one." -. ' " . . :-. -,-. ;-'"-

"I could not get her away," said Bob, who with the nurses had followed Coulter.-,". " Someone was wanted here—the servants were too broken-hearted, I fear, to be of much use, and I was able to alarm you less by my wire, perhaps, than they would have done, and make myself useful in other ways." "It was kind of you. But it is Eugenia who should be here." Lyndsay stooped and touched Lassie's shoulder. "Lassie," she said,, "you must go homo with your aunt nowat once. The girl looked for a moment away from the door at Lyndsay, with strange, sightless eyes; then faithful as the needle to the magnet, they went to it again, becoming at once eager. , ;" He may want me," she said, and her voice was a dry rustling whisper, issuing from dry lips. "It .was a race, you know, and'he' fell." Lyndsay shivered and turned to Coulter. v,v/ : - ;-■■ : :"'- :;--".';- :: ".;■; ; -'. ■-.:..■"..-

"They won't let me in," she id. All through that awful journey this was the moment for which she had strained, to be with Roddy, to see his face. 4 When she had crossed the hall somehow the worst half of it had seemed over, because she was so near him. . . . "Oh! what are they doing thereto my boy?" She clutched Coulter's arm and shook it violently. "Trying to save him," said James, and led her, half-resisting, -to the drawingroom, here he told her just how things stood, not attempting to mince matters in the least. J -After the shock she had received another might act as a counter-irritant, but when she knew the cause of the seizure in church, and Captain Rackett owned up to his part in the business, she turned on him as if he had been Roddy's actual murderer, as, indeed, the miserable man had almost persuaded himself that he was. "I obeyed him," he said iat last, humbly. "Everyone obeyed Roderick St. Leven.* If he had told me to cut off my hand I should have done it. Miss LaV reille would have done the same—practically did do it"—for; from Mrs. .Sellon he had: got some inkling of the truth, and Lassie's attitude told the rest.

"So he could confide in strangers, in a bit. of a girl, and not in me,", said Lyndsay, in deepest bitterness. "And she knewshe knewand did not tell me. You call that fair to him— call that love!" : -

" Love as great as yours," , said Coulter, quietly, "perhaps greater. ' It was a noble conspiracy of two persons, your son and ; Fenella, to keep the truth from you, that you might be left provided for." Lyndsay stared vacantly at them, almost 'as vacantly as Lassie had done at her.; Coulter said to himself that whoever loved Roddy loved him more than life itself, .beyond all reason. ' . , "To have failed so completely in insight, in comprehension :he would have known if I were dying," broke from her white lips. " However, I carried it off, he would have known ; but surely there was : a failure in him also, not to tell me, not to-let me fight' with him for that precious, precious life .'■ . ... and Lassie saw, knew . . . he trusted her, not me." She half rose as if she would go and thrust out the poor interloper, but Coulter took her hand, restrained her, made her listen.

■ " The great thing is that your son is not dead," he said. "It is now some hours since he fell insensible in the church—every added hour means fresh hopepresently they .may let - you inand you i will .want all your courage. You see; they have to fight not only the dose administered this morning, but the slow poisoning—'" " Poison "Yes." "By whom given?" i, "Eugenia." ' "Eugenia? 0! you must be mad— adores Roddy!" ' "I ■am prepared to stake my existence that I saw her administer it to him last night. She- has been giving him quinine tabloids,, steeped in poison, every day for weeks past—certainly; since she became jealous of Fenella."

" "01" cried Lyndsay wearily, "it is Lesbia who has somehow managed to throw' the blame on Eugenia." Yet as she spoke she remembered the look of murderous rage in the girl's eyes at Stratton, and her voice lacked conviction. *

"She probably did not begin at first/' said :•; Coulter, purposely talking on to distract Lyndsay's attention. "All the mischief has been done within the last few weeks. If he would only have trusted Alison, let him make an examination of him, he might have been saved, but" he was touchy about his health; ; and he thought all the time that it was malaria —though Alison and I did not." '

Lyndsay passed her hand across the eyes that had become suddenly old, different during the past awful hours. ; "And I was with, him every day, and did not see it. 0! never let mo dare to say, to think, I . loved him. My brutal selfishness only what I wanted to see—staying away even to-day that I might not be there when ; i another woman established the first claim on him. Tom was ill —very ill—but I was glad to have an excuse not to see Roddy marriedit: would cut me up horribly, I. knew, and I did not want to behave badly. 0! a jealous mother, jealous of her son's bride, is a loathsome eight." She got up before they could stop her, and went out into the hall, and-at that moment Roddy's door opened, and Alison looked out, looked over the head of that poor watcher in the corner, and beckoned Lyndsay > who went swiftly in. '■...■ ■ The disordered room was full of the odour of strange drugs .and suggested struggle. The shabby man sat by the bedside, watch •in i hand, absorbed in Roddy's pulse. As she came up to her boy, kneeled beside him, strangling the sob in her throat, the eyelids twitched in the discoloured, distorted face, half-opened, their*elosed again. They said eloquently that he did not want to be called back, only to be let slip away without fuss. Roddy always hated fuss. Then his hand moved a little in hers.

He was no more consciously aware that this was his mother than he had been of Alison's and, the other man's presence, yet by some unknown process he knew it, and suddenly opened his eyes. " You go and hide," he whispered; then his eyes closed, and Alison hurried her away, the tears streaming down ' Eer face for long ago, in scarlet fever, when, delirious, Roddy had been afraid the nurses would keep her from him, and now the old childish words rose mechanically to his lips. "There is just a chance," said Alison on the threshold, before he locked the door on her;" poison, malaria,, drugs, we have all these three to fight— there's a magnificent constitution that has never been wrecked by vice and self-indulgence, at the back of him, so that's~to the good." Lassie heard, and stirring for the first time in many hours, looked up as Lyndsay stooped down, and laid a compelling hand on her shoulder. *

"For Roddy's sake come with me," she said, atid as with cramped limbs the girl struggled up, Coulter, watching ■ her, .did not interfere as she followed Lyndsay into her own room, where .the two "■ faced one another. ~ ,- ■ "He was dying,'and you knew it, and did not tell me! 0! God forgive you, for I cannot!" cried Lyndsay, passionately. Because he wished it," said Lassie, in the slow, monotonous voice of a child. painfully i trying to recall a half-learnt lesson. "Would it have helped you,to know'/ You would have gone mad—he cared nothing for me—thought of nothing but you. I didn't count, except to help him, and that I did." '.' And you let me go away to my brother when every day and every hour of Roddy's precious life was , counted— did it to get. him for yourself—to keep mo out." ' She knew that she was behaving brutally to Lassie, but she could not help it, her anguish was too unendurable, too sharp. The loss of those precious days and hours of Roddy's company that might have been hers, had Lassie trusted her, she could not, never would, forgive. "I never thought of it," said Lassie, dully. " I only knew that I must do is he —nothing else matteredit was his one.wish, his one desire/ to spar© you. We didn't know, we didn't think anything could save him. Don't you give a dying person his one wish? I tried to give Roddy his ; he thought it better to die, securing you, than to die leaving you unprovided for and I thought so, too." "And I might have saved him," cried Lyndsay, beating her hands together, " found out what was really the matter— you behaved like two mad peopleand you wore the worst. No one but an imaginative fool could have set herself to join in such a mad adventure. If you had -only told me— mo help. "0! if I failed him, 0! he failed me in not believing that I could face any work, any hardships with him beside me—he dirt not trust me. He was weak to fear the future for me—there his father came out surely neither of us perfectly trusted the other, or each must have known." "My beloved is mine," she said, looking vacantly at Lyndsay, and, after a little pause, "and I am his. I must go back." She slipped from Lyndsay's side like water, and, with blank mind and eyes of awful eagerness, resumed her watch at his door. As the night progressed, so did the quiet duel between Coulter and Alison, for though the former was not surgeon enough to know what the signs in Lassie meant, he knew that the only possible relief to her agony was to bo allowed to see Roddy, if but for a moment. Her dumbness, her tormented eyes fixed on that door cried out more loudly far thau-any prayers, but Alison was obdurate and even angry at Coulter's . insistence, though he thought the man's attitude towards the stubborn girl in tie passage magnificent. What a position for a proud man like Coulter. What an embroglio it was all round!

:.:'..•" I dare not," he said. " It's not a eight for a woman," and could not be moved from his determination. * *

Coulter looked with almost hatred at the loose-limbed figure, the shaggy leonine head, the deep furrows wrought by time and thought above the brilliant eyes. You let his mother in," he said. "A mother is never frightened at anything she sees in the face of her child," said i Alison, significantly. "Miss . Latreille's state of, mind would bo much worse if she did see Captain St. Leven. v The strongest nerves would hardly be equal to all that has been going forward at anv moment for the last 12 hours." ;

As Coulter turned away, Alison's face changed, softened. Angry as he was at the more or less hysteria (as he believed) of the girl, there was a beaten look in James' eyes that he" did not like; and, indeed, in the hammering of Fenella through love into the perfect woman, James had not reckoned on madness completing the process. - ■.'■ ■ .\ ; V:\': :..■..:• ' ,:.;.,'.:,'.

"Get her home, ma'am," said Alison, j roughly; and, turning to Bob, "Put her to bed, and keep her there. She's in my j way here, and doing herself and everyone j else no good." Bob's eyes sparkled angrily. . I "Like Roddy, she has literally gone till ] she dropped," she said, and Lyndsay, hard, I embittered by Lassie's indifference to her, j and her own determination not to break i down, also "said that she did not see the I necessity for her to remain. Lassie's presence on guard at Roddy's door was practically a disputing of the right of way with her, an invasion of her privileges; that. Bob tacitly encouraged the girl, and Coulter openly bucked her up, angered her still more. " Yet it was for you," said Bob, bluntly. "Anyone could see that' Roddy was dying, but determined to hold up till) by his marriage, he had secured; future comfort, or rather luxury, to you." Blankets and pillows were brought to Las-' sie, but she did not lie down, and there was no getting her to cat, but she mechanically swallowed the meat juice that Coulter administered from time to time, taking no more notice of him than anyone else. For weeks past she had been living under a frightful strain that during the last few days had almost reached snapping-point/ In blindly helping Roddy to his self-sacrifice she had sacrificed herself, and the mental attack had probably been coming on for days, the shock of the day's events completing her derangement. As Coulter had feared, Lyndsay's reproaches had cut deep, threatened to topple over the already unbalanced brain. If only she could see him" just for one moment and ask him to forgive. her. Nothing mattered but that—that he should forgive her, -ease her terrible remorse that she had[helped to kill him, that if she had but been brave in refusing him, told Lyndsay, ehe might have saved him. She had been encouraging, marching with him to-, wards Death, and away from life all the while. ' ■ • ' ': . _ . Coulter saw it coming, heard the cries of one whose brain is wrapped in,burning fire, pierced through and through with ewords of agony. And he must see it, hear it all. His poor little girl, his white rose, he must hear her, while senseleee she would cry out that she did not love him, that she loved Roddy, and would tell : of all she had suffered. ' When he told her that Roddy was ; a shade better she seemed to listen, but had the same eager look, and her features did not change. He held her pulse, but she drew her hand away and pressed it with the other on her breast as if to choke something down, resolute to the last: to spare Roddy, and prevent herself, from crying out. But with.morning came help. :>. The door opened, and the shabby man stood tottering on the threshold, blinking away from the light. Then his eyes fell on the girl at his feet, and something in her attitude attracted his attention. Ho knew what it was himself to be unwanted like that; hut he saw something else as he bent down and looked in her eyes, felt her pulse, the pulse of approaching cerebral fever. . ;/ _, "Where are her people?" he said impatiently to Coulter,' "Send for them, "or anyone who lias influence over her. * She is going on.to brain fever as. hard as she can go, and if you can't get , her to weep or rave or do something she'll die." " Can't you tell her that he will get well —let her see him?" said Coulter, hoarsely. 'The shabby man shook his ragged head sadly, and at that moment came a sharp peal at the bell,..and the shrill penetrating sound of a child's voice r (To be continued next Saturday.)