第39章

"I look like a comfortable, happy woman, don't I?" she said, with a bitter laugh.

She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard before from other than ladies' lips.Her slightest actions seemed to have the easy, negligent grace of a thoroughbred woman.Her skin, for all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can purchase.Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were, had not lost their whiteness.

Little by little, in answer to his questions, the sad story of the woman came out.There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports and paragraphs about attempted suicides.

"My name is Rebecca Murdoch," said the woman, as she ended."Ihave nine-pence left, and I thought of spending it at the chemist's over the way in securing a passage to the other world.

Whatever it is, it can't be worse to me than this, so why should I stop here?"Besides the natural compassion and sadness moved in his heart by what he heard, Isaac felt within him some mysterious influence at work all the time the woman was speaking which utterly confused his ideas and almost deprived him of his powers of speech.All that he could say in answer to her last reckless words was that he would prevent her from attempting her own life, if he followed her about all night to do it.His rough, trembling earnestness seemed to impress her.

"I won't occasion you that trouble," she answered, when he repeated his threat."You have given me a fancy for living by speaking kindly to me.No need for the mockery of protestations and promises.You may believe me without them.Come to Fuller's Meadow to-morrow at twelve, and you will find me alive, to answer for myself--No !--no money.My ninepence will do to get me as good a night's lodging as I want."She nodded and left him.He made no attempt to follow--he felt no suspicion that she was deceiving him.

"It's strange, but I can't help believing her," he said to himself, and walked away, bewildered, toward home.

On entering the house, his mind was still so completely absorbed by its new subject of interest that he took no notice of what his mother was doing when he came in with the bottle of medicine.She had opened her old writing-desk in his absence, and was now reading a paper attentively that lay inside it.On every birthday of Isaac's since she had written down the particulars of his dream from his own lips, she had been accustomed to read that same paper, and ponder over it in private.

The next day he went to Fuller's Meadow.

He had done only right in believing her so implicitly.She was there, punctual to a minute, to answer for herself.The last-left faint defenses in Isaac's heart against the fascination which a word or look from her began inscrutably to exercise over him sank down and vanished before her forever on that memorable morning.

When a man, previously insensible to the influence of women, forms an attachment in middle life, the instances are rare indeed, let the warning circumstances be what they may, in which he is found capable of freeing himself from the tyranny of the new ruling passion.The charm of being spoken to familiarly, fondly, and gratefully by a woman whose language and manners still retained enough of their early refinement to hint at the high social station that she had lost, would have been a dangerous luxury to a man of Isaac's rank at the age of twenty.

But it was far more than that--it was certain ruin to him--now that his heart was opening unworthily to a new influence at that middle time of life when strong feelings of all kinds, once implanted, strike root most stubbornly in a man's moral nature.Afew more stolen interviews after that first morning in Fuller's Meadow completed his infatuation.In less than a month from the time when he first met her, Isaac Scatchard had consented to give Rebecca Murdoch a new interest in existence, and a chance of recovering the character she had lost by promising to make her his wife.

She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his faculties as well.All the mind he had he put into her keeping.

She directed him on every point--even instructing him how to break the news of his approaching marriage in the safest manner to his mother.