The Secret Places of the Heart

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She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if she expected
him to understand her, but because she had to say these things which
burthened her mind to someone. "I have done hundreds of sketches. My
room is littered with them. When you turn them over he seems to be
lurking among them. But not one of them is like him."

She was trying to express something beyond her power. "It is as if
someone had suddenly turned out the light."

She followed the doctor upstairs. "This was his study," the doctor
explained.

"I know it. I came here once," she said.

They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay. Dr.
Martineau, struck by a sudden memory, glanced nervously at the desk, but
someone had made it quite tidy and the portrait of Aliss Grammont had
disappeared. Miss Leeds walked straight across to the coffin and
stood looking down on the waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir
Richmond's brows and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than
they had ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane
smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she sighed
deeply.

She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as though she
talked at that silent presence in the coffin. "I think he loved," she
said. "Sometimes I think he loved me. But it is hard to tell. He was
kind. He could be intensely kind and yet he didn't seem to care for
you. He could be intensely selfish and yet he certainly did not care for
himself.... Anyhow, I loved HIM.... There is nothing left in me now to
love anyone else--for ever...."

She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man with her
head a little on one side. "Too kind," she said very softly.

"There was a sort of dishonesty in his kindness. He would not let you
have the bitter truth. He would not say he did not love you....

"He was too kind to life ever to call it the foolish thing it is. He
took it seriously because it takes itself seriously. He worked for it
and killed himself with work for it...."

She turned to Dr. Martineau and her face was streaming with tears.
"And life, you know, isn't to be taken seriously. It is a joke--a
bad joke--made by some cruel little god who has caught a neglected
planet.... Like torturing a stray cat.... But he took it seriously and
he gave up his life for it.

"There was much happiness he might have had. He was very capable of
happiness. But he never seemed happy. This work of his came before
it. He overworked and fretted our happiness away. He sacrificed his
happiness and mine."

She held out her hands towards the doctor. "What am I to do now with the
rest of my life? Who is there to laugh with me now and jest?

"I don't complain of him. I don't blame him. He did his best--to be
kind.

"But all my days now I shall mourn for him and long for him...."

She turned back to the coffin. Suddenly she lost every vestige of
self-control. She sank down on her knees beside the trestle. "Why have
you left me!" she cried.

"Oh! Speak to me, my darling! Speak to me, I TELL YOU! Speak to me!"

It was a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful. She beat
her hands upon the coffin. She wept loudly and fiercely as a child
does....

Dr. Martineau drifted feebly to the window.

He wished he had locked the door. The servants might hear and wonder
what it was all about. Always he had feared love for the cruel thing it
was, but now it seemed to him for the first time that he realized its
monstrous cruelty.

THE END