It was very annoying to think she would have to wait two hours for a cup
of tea, but there it was! She had herself told Pegler she didn't want to
be disturbed till eight o'clock. She still felt too "done," too weak, to
get up and try to find her way to the kitchen to make herself some tea.
She lay, with her eyes wide open, longing for the daylight, and looking
back with shrinking fear to a night full of a misty horror.
Again and again she had lived through that awful moment when Varick had
pushed her over the edge of the embankment, to roll quickly, softly,
inexorably, into the icy-cold water.
She knew he had pushed her over. To herself it was a fact which did not
admit of any doubt at all. She had seen the mingled hatred and relief
which had convulsed his face. It was with that face she would always see
Lionel Varick henceforth.
There had been a moment when she had thought she would tell Dr. Panton;
then she had come to the conclusion that there was no good purpose to be
served by telling the strange and dreadful truth.
Some noble lines of Swinburne's which had once been quoted to her by a
friend she loved, floated into her mind--
"But ye, keep ye on earth
Your lips from over-speech,
Loud words and longing are so little worth;
And the end is hard to reach.
For silence after grievous thing's is good,
And reverence, and the fear that makes men whole
And shame, and righteous governance of blood,
And Lordship of the Soul.
And from sharp words and wits men pluck no fruit,
And gathering thorns they shake the tree at root;
For words divide and rend,
But silence is most noble till the end."
As she lay there, feeling physically so ill and weak, while yet her mind
worked so clearly and quickly, she set herself to solve a painful
puzzle. Why had Varick tried to do her to death? She admitted to herself
that she had never liked him, but she had never done him any harm. And
they had been on good terms--outwardly--always.
For hours, amid fitful, nightmarish snatches of sleep, and long, lucid
intervals of thought, Bubbles had wrestled with the question.
And then, lying there in the early morning, Bubbles _suddenly knew_.
Varick hated and feared her because she had unwittingly raised his wife
from the dead. And, believing that if he killed her, he would lay that
sinister, vengeful, unquiet ghost, he had deliberately planned
yesterday's expedition in order to do that which he had so nearly
succeeded in doing.
Bubbles gave an eerie little chuckle which startled herself. "I'd have
haunted him!" she muttered aloud. "He'd have found it more difficult to
get rid of me dead than alive."
Even as she murmured the words, the door opened, and she heard a voice
say, hesitatingly, "Then you're awake, Bubbles? Somehow I felt you were
awake, and I thought you might like a cup of tea."
It was Bill Donnington, with a lighted candle in one hand, and a cup of
tea in the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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