WITNESSED BY TWO.
(The English Illustrated Magazine.) ! (Continued.) | "But -'the few weeks which followed passed 'heavily for Anue. It was a dead time of year— there was no special necessity for ' her exerting herself to throw off the over- ; whelming depression, and strong and brave [ as she was, she allowed herself to some extent to yield to it. "If only ho had not come back— if I had never seen him again!" she repeated to herself incessantly. " I had in a sense ■ forgotten him — the thought of him never troubled me all the years of my marriage. I suppose I had never before understood now I could care. How I wish I had never learned it! How I wish he had never come back I" It waß above all in the afternoons — the dull, early dark, autumn afternoons, which for some weeks had been enlivened by the expectation, Bure two or three times . a week to be fulfilled, of Major Graham's " dropping in " — that the aching pain, the weary longing grew so bad as to be wellnigh intolerable. " How shall I bear it ?" said poor Anne to herself sometimes ; " it is so wrong, so unwomanly ! So Belfish, too, when I think •f my children. How much I have to be tkankful for — why should I ruin my life by crying for the one thing that is not for me ? It is worse, far worse, than if he had died ; had I known that he had loved me, I could have borne his death, it seems to mxc." She was sitting alone one afternoon about five weeks after Kenneth had left, thinking sadly over and over the same thoughts, when a tap at the door made her look up. "Come in," she said, though the tap hardly sounded like that of her maid, and no one else was likely to come to the door •C her own room, where she happened to Ibe. " Come in," and somewhat to her surprise the door half opened and old Ambrose's voice replied •• " If you please, ma'am "—then stopped and hesitated. "Come in," she repeated with a touch of impatience. " What is it, Ambrose ? Where is Seton ? " "If you please, ma'am, I couldn't find her — that iB to say," Ambrose went on nervously, "I didn't look for her. I thought, ma'am, I would rather tell you myself. You mustn't be startled, ma'am," and Anne at this looking up at the old man saw that he was pale and startled* looking himself, " but its — its Major Graham." " Major Graham ?" repeated Anne, and to herself her voice sounded almost like a scream. " What about him ? Have you .heard anything?" " It's him, ma'am — him himself I" said Ambrose. "He's in the library. I'm a little afraid, ma'am, there may be something wrong, he looked so strange and he did not answer when I spoke to him. But . he's in the library, ma'am." Anne did not wait to hear more. She rushed past Ambrose, across the landing, and down the two flights of steps which led to the library — a half-way-house room, between the ground floor and the drawingroom — almoat before his voice had stopped. At the door she hesitated a moment, and in that moment all sorts of wild suppositions flashed across her brain. " What was it ? What was she going to hear ? Had Kenneth turned back half-way out to India for her sake ? Had some trouble befallen him, in What could it be ? >r and her hearTPßeibxg so as almost to Buffocate her, she opened the door. Yes — there he stood— on the hearthrug as she had last seen him in that room. But he did not seem to hear her come in, for he made no movement toward herj he did not even turn his head in her direction. More and more startled and perturbed, Anne hastily went up to him. " Kenneth ! " Bhe cried. What is it P What iB the matter ? " She had hold out her hand as she hurried toward him, but he did not seem to see it. He stood there Btill, without moving, his face slightly turned away, till she was close beside him. " Kenneth," she repeated, this time with a thrill of aoruething very like anguish in her tone, " whaj; is the matter ? Are you angry with me ? Keuneth — speak." Then at last he slowly turned his head and looked at her with a strange, half wistful anxiety in his eyes ; he gazed at her as if hia very soul were in that gaze, and lifting his right hand gently laid it on her shoulder as he had done the evening he had bidden her farewell. Sho did not shrink from his touch, but, strange to say, she did not feel it, and some indefinable instinct made her turn her eyes away from his and glance at her shoulder. But even as she did so Bhe saw that his hand was no longer there, and with a thrill of fear she exclaimed again, " Speak, Kenneth, speak to me." The words fell on. empty air. There was no Kenneth beside her. She was standing on the hearthrug alone. Then, for the first time, there came over her that awful chill of terror so often described, yet so indescribable to all but the few who have felt it for themselves. With a terrible though half-stifled cry Anne turned toward the door. It opened before ahe reached it, and she half fell into old Ambrose's arms. Fortunately for her — for her reason perhaps — his vague misgiving had made him follow her, though of what he was afraid he could scarcely have told. "Oh, ma'am — oh, my poor lady" he exclaimed, as he half led, half carried her back to her own room. "What is it? Has he gone? But how could he have gone ? I was close by — I never saw him pass." "He is not thero— ho has not been there," said poor Anne, trembling and clinging to her old servant. " Oh, Ambrose, what you and I have seen was no living Kenneth Graham— no living man at all. Ambrose, ho came thus to say good-bye to me. He is dead," and the tears burst forth as she spoke, and Anno sobbed convulsively. Ambrose looked at her in distress and consternation past words. Then at last he found courage to speak. " My poor lady," he repeated. "It must be so. I misdoubted me and I did not know ,why. He did not ring, but I was passing by the door and something, a sort of feeling that there was some one waiting outside, made me open it. To my astonishment it was he," and Ambroso himself could not repress a sort of tremor. "He did not speak, but seemed to pasa me and le up the stairs and in the library in an instant. And then, not knowing what to do, I went to your room, ma'am. Forgive mo if I did wrong." " No, no," said Anne, " you could not havo done otherwise. King the bell, Ambroso, tell Seton I have had bad news, and that you think it haa upset me. But wait at the door till blio conies. I— l am afraid to be loft alone." And Mrs Medway looked so deadly pale and faint that when Seton came hurrying in answer to the sharply rung bell, it needed no explanation for her to Bee that Mrs Medway was really ill. Seton was a practical, matter-of-fact person, and the bustle of attending to her uristresK, trying to make her warm again — for Anne was ahivering with cold— and persuading her to take some restoratives, effectually drove an inquiry us to the cause of the sudden seizure out of the maid's head. And by the time Mrs Medway was bettor Seton had invented a satisfactory explanation of it all for herself. " You need a change, ma'am. It's too .
dull for anybody staying in town at this season, and it's beginning to tell on your nerves, ma'am," was the maid's idea. And some little time after the strange occurrence Mrs Medway was persuaded to ■ leave town for the country. j ' But not till she had seen in the news- 1 papers the fatal paragraph she knew would i soouor or later be there — the announce- ; ment of the death, on board Her Majesty's : troopship Ariadne, a few days before reaching the Cape, of " Major E. E. Graham/ of the One Hundred and Thirteenth Begiment. She "had known it/ she said to herself, yet when she saw it there, staring her in the face, she realised that she had been living in a hope which she had not allowed to herself that the apparition might in the end prove capable of other explanation. She would gladly have taken refuge in the thought that it was a dream, an optical delusion fed of her fancy incessantly brooding on her friend and on his last visit — that her brain was in someway disarranged or disturbed— anything, anything _ would have been welcome to her. But against all such was opposed the fact that it was not herself alone who had seen Kennetk Graham that fatal afternoon. And now, when the worst was certain, she recognised this still more clearly as the strongest testimony to the apparition not having been the product of her own imagination. And old Ambrose, her sole confidant, in his simple way agreed with her. "If I had not seen him, too, ma'am,. or if I alone had seen him," he said, furtively wiping his eyes. " But the two of us. No, it could have but the one meaning," and he looked sadly at the open newspaper. "There's a slight discrimpancy, ma'am," he said, as he pointed to the paragraph. " Our Major Graham's name was ( K. 8./ not « B. E." "It is only a misprint. I noticed that," said Anne wearily. " No, Ambrose, there can be no mistake. But Ido not want any one — not any one — ever to hear the story. You will promise me that, Ambrose ?" and the old man repeated the promise he had already given. There was another " discrimpancy," which had struck Anne more forcibly, but which she refrained from mentioning to Ambrose. "It can mean nothing ; it is no use putting it into his head," she said to herself, " Still, it is strange." The facts were these : The newspaper gave the date of Major Graham's death as Nov. 25 — the afternoon on which he had appeared to Mrs Medway and her servant was that of Nov. 26. This left no possibility of calculating that the vision had occurred at or even shortly after the moment of the death. " It must be a mistake in the announcement," Anna decided. And then she gave herself up to the acceptance of the fact. Kenneth was dead. Life held no individual future for her any more, nothing to look forward to, no hopes, however tremblingly admitted, that "someday" he might return, and return to discover— to own, perhaps, to himself and to her that he did love her, and that only mistaken pride, or her own coldness, or one of the hundred " mistakes " or " perhapses " by which men, so much more than women, allow to drift away from them the happiness they might grasp, had misled and withheld him ! No ; all was over. Henceforth she must live in her children alone — in the interests of others she must find her happiness. " And in one blessed thought," said the poor girl — for she was little more — even at the first to herself ; " that after all he did krih ffly n®krt,lc¥l^a^lforiasTl~ Wught. It was — it must have been — to tell me so that he came that day. My Kenneth—yes, he was mine after all." Some little time passed. In the quiet country place, whither, sorely against Seton's desires, Mrs Medway had betaken herself for " change," she heard no mention of Major Graham's death. One or two friends casually alluded to it in their letters as "very sad," but that was all. And Anne was glad of it. " I must brace myself to hear it spoken of and discussed by the friends who knew him well — who knew how well F knew him," she reflected. "But lam glad to escape it for a while." (To be continued.)
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Bibliographic details
Star (Christchurch), Issue 5581, 31 March 1886, Page 1
Word Count
2,051WITNESSED BY TWO. Star (Christchurch), Issue 5581, 31 March 1886, Page 1
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