Chapter X: In the Cemetery

As Mr. Thornton had said, he did not like to live in a quarrel, and after his interview with his son, he tried to appear just as he had done before, and when Bessie came to the Park, as she often did, he treated her civilly, and insensibly found himself admiring her beauty and grace, and thinking to himself, “If she had money she might do.”

Upon Mildred he laid no restrictions with regard to her intercourse with her family, feeling intuitively that they would not be heeded. And thus she was free to see her mother as often as she liked, and it was remarked by the villagers that the proud mistress of Thornton Park went more frequently to the farm house than anywhere else. Many a morning she spent in the pleasant room, listening while her mother talked, mostly of Mildred, whose long silence was beginning to trouble her.

“It is weeks since I heard from her. She said in her last letter it might be some time before she wrote again, but I am getting anxious,” she would say, while Mildred comforted her with the assurance that no news was good news, and that perhaps her daughter was intending to surprise her by coming upon her unexpectedly some day.

“I am certain of it; I am something of a prophet, and I know Milly will come,” she would say, as she smoothed her mother’s snowy hair, or caressed her worn face, which always lighted up with gladness when she came, and grew sadder when she went away.

By some strange coincidence, it frequently happened that Hugh called upon Mrs. Leach when Mildred was there, and always stopped to talk with her. But Mildred was never quite at ease with him. Her eyes never met his squarely, while her brilliant color came and went as rapidly as if she were a shy school-girl confronted with her master instead of the elegant Mrs. Thornton, whose beauty was the theme of every tongue, stirring even him a little, but bringing no thought of Mildred, of whom he sometimes spoke to her mother. As yet Milly had found no chance to visit her father’s and Charlie’s graves, which she knew she could find without difficulty, as her mother had told her of the headstones which Tom had put there in the spring. But she was only biding her time, and one afternoon in August, when she had been in Rocky Point six weeks or more, she drove up the mountain road to call upon some New Yorkers who were stopping at the new hotel. It was late when she left the hotel, and the full moon was just rising as she reached the entrance to the cemetery on her return home. Calling to the driver to let her alight, she bade him go on and leave her, saying she preferred to walk, as the evening was so fine. Mildred had already won the reputation among her servants of being rather eccentric, and thinking this one of her cranks, the man drove on, while she went into the grounds, where the dead were lying, the headstones gleaming white through the clump of firs and evergreens which grew so thickly as to conceal many of them from view, and to hide completely the figure of a man seated in the shadow of one of them not very far from the graves to which she was making her way. Hugh had also been up the mountain road on foot, and coming back had struck into the cemetery as a shorter route home. As he was tired and the night very warm, he sat down in an armchair under a thick pine, whose shadow screened him from observation, but did not prevent his outlook upon the scene around him. He had heard the sound of wheels stopping near the gate, but he thought no more of it until he saw Mildred coming slowly across the yard diagonally from the gate, holding up her skirts, for the dew was beginning to fall, and making, as it seemed to him, for the very spot where he was sitting. At first he did not recognize her, but when removing her hat as if its weight oppressed her she suddenly raised her head so that the moonlight fell upon her face, he started in surprise, and wondered why she was there. Whose grave had she come to find? Some one’s, evidently, for she was looking carefully about her, and afraid to startle her, Hugh sat still and watched, a feeling like nightmare stealing over him as she entered the little enclosure where the Leaches were buried. He could see the two stones distinctly, and he could see and hear her, too, as leaning upon the taller and bending low so that her eyes were on a level with the lettering, she said, as if reading. “John Leach, and Charlie; these are the graves. Oh, father! Oh, Charlie! do you know I have come back after so many years only to find you dead? And I loved you so much. Oh, Charlie, my baby brother!”

Here her voice was choked with sobs, and Hugh could hear no more, but he felt as if the weight of many tons was holding him down and making him powerless to speak or move, had he wished to do so. And so he sat riveted to the spot, looking at the woman with a feeling half akin to terror and doubt, as to whether it were her ghost, or Mildred herself weeping over her dead. As her smothered sobs met his ear and he thought he heard his own name, he softly whispered, “Milly,” and stretched his arms towards her, but let them drop again at his side and watched the strange scene to its close. Once Mildred seemed to be praying, for she knelt upon the grass, with her face on her father’s grave, and he heard the word “Forgive.”

Then she arose and walked slowly back to the road, where she was lost to view. As long as he could see the flutter of her white dress Hugh looked after her, and when it disappeared from sight he felt for a few moments as if losing his consciousness, so great was the shock upon his nervous system. Mrs. Thornton was Mildred Leach,—the girl he knew now he had never given up, and whose coming in the autumn he had been looking forward to with so much pleasure. She had come, and she was another man’s wife, and what was worse than all she was keeping her identity from her friends and daily living a lie. Did her husband know it, or was he, too, deceived?

“Probably,” Hugh said, with a feeling for an instant as if he hated her for the deception. But that soon passed away, and he tried to make himself believe that it was a hallucination of his brain and he had not seen her by those two graves. He would examine them and see, for if a form of flesh and blood had been there the long, damp grass would be trampled down in places. It was trampled down, and in the hollow between the graves a small, white object was lying.

“Her handkerchief. She has been here,” he whispered, as he stooped to pick it up. “If her name is on it I shall know for sure.”

There was a name upon it, but so faintly traced that he could not read it in the moonlight, which was now obscured by clouds. A storm was rising, and hastening his steps towards home he was soon in his own room and alone to think it out. Taking the handkerchief from his pocket, he held it to the light and read “M. F. Thornton.” There could be no mistake. It was Mrs. Thornton he had seen in the cemetery, but was it Mildred? “M. F.,” he repeated aloud, remembering suddenly that Mildred’s name was Mildred Frances, which would correspond with the initials.

“It is Milly,” he continued, “but why this deception? Is she ashamed to have her family claim her? Ashamed to have her husband know who she was; and did she pass for Fanny Gardner in Europe?”

Again a feeling of resentment and hatred came over him, but passed quickly, for although he might despise and condemn, he could not hate her. She had been too much to him in his boyhood, and thoughts of her had influenced every action of his life thus far. Just what he had expected, if he had expected anything, he did not know, but whatever it was, it was cruelly swept away. He had lost her absolutely, for when his respect for her was gone, she was gone forever, and laying his head upon the table he wrestled for a few moments with his grief and loss, as strong men sometimes wrestle with a great and bitter pain.

“If she were dead,” he said, “it would not be so hard to bear. But to see her the beautiful woman she is,—to know she is Mildred and makes no sign even to her poor, blind mother, is terrible.”

He was walking the floor now, with Milly’s handkerchief held tightly in his hands, wondering what he should do with it.

“I’ll keep it,” he said. “It is all I have left of her except the lock of hair and the peas she gave to me. What a fool I was in those days,” and he laughed as he recalled the morning when Milly threw him the pod which he had not seen in a year.

But he brought it out now, and laughed again when he saw how hard and shriveled were both the peas.

“Stony and hard like her. I believe I’ll throw them away and end the tomfoolery,” he said.

But he put them back in the box, which he called a little grave, and took up next the curl of tangled hair, comparing its color in his mind with Mrs. Thornton’s hair, which, from its peculiar, mottled appearance, had attracted his notice. How had she changed it, he wondered, and then remembering to have heard of dyes, to which silly, fashionable women sometimes resorted, he was sure that he hated her, and putting the box away went to bed with that thought uppermost in his mind, but with Milly’s handkerchief folded under his pillow.