Page:Catherine Carmichael; Or Three Years Running.pdf/11

there had been daylight, and John Carmichael had been there. Now it was pitch dark, though it was in the middle of summer, and the waters were running very strong. The ferryman refused at first to put the buggy on the raft, bidding old Carmichael wait till the next morning. It was Christmas Eve, he said, and he did not care to be drowned on Christmas Eve.

Nor was such to be his destiny. But it was the destiny of Peter Carmichael. The waters went over him and one of his horses. At three o'clock in the morning his body was brought home to Warriwa, lying across the back of the other. The ferryman had been unable to save the man's life, but had got the body, and had brought it home to the young widow just twelve months after the day on which she had become a wife.

CHAPTER III. CHRISTMAS DAY. NO. 3.

THERE she was, on the morning of that Christmas Day, with the ferryman and that old woman, with the half-idiot boy, and the body of her dead husband! She was so stunned that she sat motionless for hours, with the corpse close to her, lying stretched out on the verandah, with a sheet over it. It is a part of the cruelty of the life which is lived in desolate places, far away, that when death comes, the small incidents of death are not mitigated to the sufferer by the hands of strangers. If the poorest wife here at home becomes a widow, some attendant hands will close the glazed eye and cover up the limbs, and close the coffin which is there at hand; and then it will be taken away and hidden for ever. There is an appropriate spot, though it be but under the poorhouse wall. Here there was no appropriate spot, no ready hand, no coffin, no coroner with his authority, no parish officer ready with his directions. She sat there numb, motionless, voiceless, thinking where John Carmichael might be. Could it be that he would come back to her, and take from her that ghastly duty of getting rid of the object that was lying within a yard or two of her arm?

She tried to weep, telling herself that, as a wife now widowed, she was bound to weep for her husband. But there was not a tear, nor a sob, nor a moan. She argued it with herself, saying that she would grieve for him now that he was dead. But she could not grieve,—not for that; only for her own wretchedness and desolation. If the waters had gone over her instead of him, then how merciful would heaven have been to her! The misery of her condition came home to her with its full weight,—her desolation, her powerlessness, her friendlessness, the absence of all interest in life, of all reason for living; but she could not induce herself to say, even to herself, that she was struck with anguish on account of him. That voice, that touch, the cunning leer of that eye, would never trouble her again. She had been freed from something. She became angry with herself because it was in this way that she regarded it; but it was thus that she continued to regard it. She had threatened once to kill him,—to kill him should he speak a word as to which she bade him to be silent. Now he was dead,—whether he had spoken that word or not. Then she wondered whether he had spoken it, and she wondered, also, what John Carmichael would say or do when he should hear that his kinsman was no more. So she sat motionless for hours within her room, but with the door open on to the verandah, and the feet of the corpse within a few yards of her chair.

The old ferryman took the horse, and went out under the boy's guidance in quest of the shepherds. Distances are large on these sheep-runs, and a shepherd with his flock is not always easily found. It was nearly evening before he returned with two of these men, and then they dug the grave,—not very far away, as the body must be carried in their arms; and then they buried him, putting up a rough palisade around the spot to guard it, if it might be so guarded for a while, from the rats. She