A Woman of Genius by Mary Hunter Austin

Author:Mary Hunter Austin [Austin, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2022-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

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The Odd Fellows took charge of my husband's funeral, his body was moved from the Rathbones', to their hall and did not go back again to the rooms over the store. Miss Rathbone made up my crape for me. I believe it gave her a little comfort to do so. Forester came and settled up my husband's affairs; he was rather inclined to resent what he felt was an effort of the Rathbones to claim a larger share in the business than the books showed, but he thought my indifference natural to my grief. He was shocked a little at my determination to go on with my engagement; we were not so poor he thought, that I could not afford a little retirement to my widowhood. But in that strange renewal of communion after death, I felt my husband nearer than before. He would go with me at last out of Higgleston. Strangely, I wanted to see Miss Rathbone, but she kept away from me. That was as it should have been in Higgleston. She had tried to get my husband, she had been, in a way, the death of him. It was hardly expected that I could bear the sight of her, though it would have been Christian to forgive her.

I did see her, however, the night before I went away. It was the dusk of the first of September. There was a moon coming up, large and dulled at the edges by the haze, and that strange earthy smell with the hint of decay in it, kept in by the banded mists that lay below the moon. The darkness crept close along the earth and spread upward like an exhalation into the sky where almost the full day halted. I had slipped out down a side street and across an open lot to the cemetery. I would have that hour with my dead free from observation.

I went between the white head stones and the flower borders. As I neared my husband's grave, something moved upon it. It arose out of the low mound as I approached; for one heart-riving second I stopped, speechless; it moved again and showed a woman.

"Miss Rathbone!" I called. "Henrietta!" I had not used her name before; I have just now remembered it.

"You might have left me this," she said. I saw that she had covered the mound with flowers, and I was glad I had not brought any.

"I am leaving," I answered. "I am going to-morrow ... where my work is."

"Yes, you can go. But I have to stay ... where my work is. I stay with him. You can go ... you always wanted to go. And I, I have been talked about and I daren't even cry for him, not even at night, for my father hears me." She was crying now, deeply, bitterly. "You never cared for him," she insisted, "and now he knows it; he knows and has come back to me ... to me."

"He comes back," I admitted.

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