“You know, Anastasia,” she said, “your mother was perhaps my best friend, in spite of the great distance in age between us. That is, as much as she had a friend. I suppose I was the first person she met, after your father brought her home with him, after they were married first.”
She sighed and glanced at Anastasia.
“You know, I’ve often thought it was a pity your father didn’t warn your grandmother that he was intending to marry. It was a great shock to her. I remember the afternoon well. I was there visiting her. As a matter of fact we were just talking about him. She was expecting him back from a holiday. (You’ve heard all about it, I know.) Suddenly in he walked, and your mother with him. She was only nineteen, and very shy. She was no match for your grandmother, I’ll say that much.”
“He was much older,” said Anastasia wanly.
“Yes, he was. He was nearly forty then.”
“They had a sad life together.”
“Yes.”
Anastasia looked desolately out through the window. A single spray of ivy hung stiffened there against the pane. It seemed to tap at the glass, but there was no sound from it. It obeyed the wind and danced blindly on the air, and if it made some faint whisper against the pane, even that was lost somewhere outside.
She said, “I don’t see what else I could have done but go over after her. I got that letter from her, as I was starting out to school one morning. It was a terrible, incoherent letter. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me go, so I ran away.”
“I remember. Your father went after you.”
Miss Kilbride lay back in bed and her mouth folded up and her eyes folded up and she seemed almost to wither away in her sigh.
She said suddenly, “Oh, I’m very tired.”
Anastasia looked at her in alarm.
“Now don’t talk any more today. You’ll wear yourself out. I’ll come very soon again and we can talk. Tomorrow if you like.”
“No, no, no, I must talk to you now. Don’t think of going. Anything might happen. You might not come. I might not be here. I won’t last much longer. Now don’t shake your head at me. I know the state I’m in.”
She smiled nervously and darted a look at Anastasia.
“The truth is, I want to ask you a favour,” she said in a low voice.
“Of course. What is it?”
“It’s so difficult to talk. I have a reason for talking like this. It’s very difficult. It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s one of those things you keep locked away in your mind, or in your heart, and go over and over it again, and when it comes out it’s difficult and awkward, and the words sound foolish. Nothing sounds the way it is at all.
“Will you have patience with me, while I tell you a story?”
“Of course I will. It’s no question of patience at all. I’m very much interested.”
“Well, you know that my poor mother was bedridden, from the time I was seventeen. The time I want to tell you about was when I was twenty-eight years old. Before I begin I must tell you that she was very kind to me always. She loved me very much. But, the way it is with a lot of mothers, she was jealous of me.
“When I was twenty-eight I chanced to meet a man named Frank Briscoe. Never mind how we met, it was by chance. He was a year younger than I. He was an architect. We fell in love with each other, and wanted to get married. My mother, when I told her about it, was very much upset. She refused even to meet him.
“I did the wrong thing. I met him secretly a few times before I told her about him. That turned her against him, when she knew I had deceived her.
“It was a very sad time for me. I remember it very well. You can imagine it, Anastasia. She would fall into a dreadful fit every time I mentioned his name. She threatened to send the maid away and die there alone if I left her. And a lot more. No use to go into it. After all, I was all she had in the world.
“Well, things smoothed out a bit, as they will in the long run, and he used to visit me, once a week. On Tuesday nights. Of course we were all by ourselves downstairs. He used to come at seven and leave at ten-thirty. I lived for those evenings.”
Anastasia thought, She lived for those evenings. I knew she would say that. She lived for those evenings. It is pitiful. We are all just the same, and yet we go over and over our little lives time and time again, looking at each other and talking earnestly.
She listened earnestly.
“After he left me, those nights, I would go in and kiss my mother goodnight, and she would look up from her book and smile at me, and raise her head for me to fix her pillow, and I would take down her hair and brush it for the night. She never guessed what there was between us.
“How am I to tell you? I was neither a wife to him nor a daughter to her. I was nothing at all, just a stupid creature who went between them. I could not believe myself, no matter what I was doing. I loved him dearly. It seemed little enough to lie down with him, when he wanted me to. And I wanted to, though I should be ashamed to say it.
“I’ve always been glad. I’ve never been sorry at all. I never told it in confession. It saved me from being an old maid. I’m not an old maid.”
She looked at Anastasia in frightened triumph.
“You’re an angel,” said Anastasia helplessly.
“He was the angel. He was so bewildered by it all. And he loved me, so he did. He often swore he’d never come back, with things the way they were, but he always returned to me. Oh, thank God for that. That was for two years, that went on. I saw him every week. Sometimes on Sundays too, in the afternoons. But not often. Mother liked to have me stay here on Sundays, because people often came to visit then.”
She paused, and her mouth knotted up in bitter regret.
She said, “I used to think, We have more time than she has. And I would give in to her. More than that. I knew it pleased her, and I would stay.”
Her mind traveled drearily on to the end of her story.
She said, in a sick voice, “God help me, he was drowned then. He went off for a little holiday at Killiney, and there was some kind of an accident. I heard it from a friend of his, a stranger who sent me a letter, and he was already ten days buried by then. My mother was very kind to me then. She was very understanding. I used to go down there to the old settee where we had been together, and I put my face in the cushion there, and cried my eyes out many a time.
“Then I would hear my mother’s voice, calling to me to come to her. I can still hear her voice, much plainer than I can hear his. And her face is more plain to me than his is. This is his picture.”
She showed a ghostly brown photograph.
“He was very handsome, and scholarly. We used to laugh a lot when we first knew each other. We thought it would only be for a little while, that mother would give in. And then the time dragged on and on. He used to get very angry then. Sometimes he would arrive here in a great temper. I think he often hoped she’d die, God forgive us. But she outlived him by many years.
“Ah, well, that’s the way it is.”
“It must have been terrible for you.”
“It was hard. I never got over it.”
They were silent a while. Then Miss Kilbride said, “I want you to promise me something.”
She drew a deep breath and went on. The words came easily from her as though she recognized them. She did recognize them. She lay in peace and watched herself saying them at last.
“I have a ring he gave me once, a wedding ring. When I’m dead, and I soon will be dead, I want you to place it on my wedding finger and see that I’m buried with it on. Will you do that for me, Anastasia? It means more to me than Extreme Unction, God forgive me.”
Anastasia came over to the side of the bed. Her eyes were full of tears.