"I'm not a visitor, Molly," she answered; "and I've come to see if I can't make you a little easier.Won't you let me fix you comfortably? Why, you poor child, your hands are as hot as fire!""I'm hot all over," returned Molly peevishly; "and I'm sick--I'm as sick as I can be.Will won't believe it, but the doctor says so.""Will does believe it, and it worries him terribly.Here, sit up and let me bathe your face and hands in cold water.Doesn't that feel better?""A little," admitted Molly, when Maria had found a towel and dried her hands.
"And now I'm going to comb the tangles out of your hair.What lovely hair! It is the colour of ripe corn."A pleased flush brightened Molly's face, and she resigned herself easily to Maria's willing services."There's a comb over there on that shelf under the mirror," she said."Will broke half the teeth out of it the other day, and it pulls my hair out when Iuse it."
"Then I'll bring you one of mine.You must be careful of these curls.They're too pretty to treat roughly.Do I hurt you?"As she spoke, a bright strand of the girl's hair twisted about one of her rings, and after hesitating an instant she drew the circle from her finger and laid it in Molly's lap.
"There.I haven't any money, so that's to buy you medicine and food," she said."It cost a good deal once, I fancy.""Diamonds!" gasped Molly, with a cry of rapture.
Her hand closed over the ring with a frantic clutch; then slipping it on, she lay watching the stone sparkle in the last sunbeams.A colour had bloomed suddenly in her face, and her eyes shone with a light as brilliant as that of the jewel at which she gazed.
"And you had--others?" she asked in a kind of sacred awe.
"A great many once--a necklace, and rings, and brooches, and a silly tiara that made me look a fright.I never cared for them after the novelty of owning them wore off.They are evil things, it seems to me, and should never be the gifts of love, for each one of those foolish stones stands for greed, and pride, and selfishness, and maybe crime.That was my way of looking at them, of course, and whenever I wore my necklace I used to feel like asking pardon of every beggar that I passed.'One link in this chain might make a man of you,' was what I wanted to say--but Inever did.Well, they are almost all gone now; some I sold and some I gave away.This one will buy you medicine, I hope, and then it will give me more happiness than it has ever done before.""Oh, it is beautiful, beautiful," sighed Molly beneath her breath, and then went to the little cracked mirror in the corner and held the diamond first to her ear and then against her hair.
"They suit me," she said at last, opening the bosom of her wrapper and trying it on her pretty throat; "they would make me look so splendid.Oh, if I'd only had a lover who could give me things like this!"Maria, watching her, felt her heart contract suddenly with a pang of remembrance.Jewels had been the one thing which Jack Wyndham had given her, for of the finer gifts of the spirit he had been beggared long before she knew him.In the first months of his infatuation he had showered her with diamonds, and she had grown presently to see a winking mockery in each bauble that he tossed her.Before the first year was ended she had felt her pride broken by the oppressiveness of the jewels that bedecked her body, like the mystic princess who was killed at last by the material weight of the golden crown upon her brow.
"They could never make you happy, Molly.How could they? Come back and lie down, and let me put the ring away.Perhaps I'd better take it to town myself." But Molly would not open her closed hand on which the diamond shone; and long after Maria had cooked supper and gone back to the Hall the girl lay motionless, holding the ring against the light.When Will came in from milking she showed it to him with a burst of joy.
"Look! Oh, look! Isn't it like the sun?"
He eyed it critically.
"By Jove! It must have cost cool hundreds! I'll take it to town to-morrow and bring back the things you need.It will get the baby clothes, too, so you won't have to bother about the sewing.""You shan't! You shan't!" cried Molly in a passion of sobs."It's mine.She gave it to me, and you shan't take it away.I don't want the medicine: it never does me any good; and I can make the baby clothes out of my old things.I'll never, never give it up!"For an instant Will stared at her as if she had lost her senses.
"Well, she was a fool to let you get it," he said, as he flung himself out of the room.
CHAPTER IV.In Which Mrs.Blake's Eyes are Opened Before the beauty of Maria's high magnanimity Christopher had felt himself thrust further into the abasement of his self-contempt.Had she met his confession with reproach, with righteous aversion, with the horror he had half expected, it is possible that his heart might have recoiled into a last expression of defiance.But there had been none of these things.
In his memory her face shone moonlike from its cloud of dark hair, and he saw upon it only the look of a great and sorrowful passion.His wretchedness had drawn her closer, not put her further away, and he had felt the quiet of her tolerance not less gratefully than he had felt the fervour of her love.Her forgiveness had been of the grandeur of her own nature, and its height and breadth had appealed, even apart from her emotion, to a mind that was accustomed to dwell daily on long reaches of unbroken space.He had been bred on large things from his birth--large horizons, large stretches of field and sky, large impulses, and large powers of hating, and he found now that a woman's presence filled to overflowing the empty vastness of his moods.
Reaching the yard, he saw Tucker sitting placidly on his bench, and, crossing the long grass, he flung himself down beside him with a sigh of pleasure in the beauty of the scene.
