CHAPTER LXSOLACE

Bad news proverbially flies apace, and it is strange how soon the intelligence of any catastrophe pervades an entire household.

Though it was towards the small hours of morning that the coach arrived, with its dead freight, at the gates of Hamilton Hill, the whole establishment seemed to arouse itself on the instant, and to become aware, as though by instinct, that something had occurred productive of general confusion and dismay.

Cerise, pale and spiritless, was sitting in her bed-chamber, over the embers of a dying fire, thinking wearily of her husband, wondering, with aching heart and eyes full of tears, what could be this shadow that had of late come up between them, and now threatened to darken her whole life.

How she wished, yes, she actually wished now, she had never married him. He would have remembered her then as the girl he might have loved. For his own happiness, she protested, she could give him up readily, cheerfully even, to another woman. Then she reviewed all the women of her acquaintance, without, however, being able to fix on one to whom she could make this sacrifice ungrudgingly. She thought, too, how forlorn she would feel deprived of George. And yet, was she not deprived of him already? Could any separation be more complete than theirs? It was torture to reflect that he could not really have loved her, or it would never have come to this. And to leave her thus, without an opportunity for inquiry orexplanation. It was careless, unkind, unpardonable. Better to have been sure of his affection, to have known his last thought was for her, and to have seen him brought in dead before her very eyes into the house!

A hurried step was on the stair, a trembling hand flung open the door, and Lady Hamilton’s maid rushed into the room, pale, scared, and incoherent, to exclaim—

“Oh! my lady—my lady! Whatever are we to do? The coach has been robbed, and they’ve brought him back home! They’re carrying him up the front stairs now. Stone dead, my lady! He never spoke, Ralph says, nor moved after the shot. Such a home-coming! such a home-coming! Oh dear! oh dear!”

Lady Hamilton’s jaw dropped, and her whole face stiffened, as if she had been shot herself. Then she wailed out, “He was angry with me when he went away,” repeating the same words over and over again, as though attaching no meaning to the sounds, and staggering, with hands extended, like a blind woman to the staircase, while, numbed and palsied, as it was by the cruel pain, a silent prayer went out from her heart that she might die.

A strong form caught her in its arms, and she looked up in her husband’s face, living, unhurt, and kindly; but saddened with a grave and sorrowing expression she had never seen there before.

“Cerise,” he whispered, “a great grief has come upon us. There has been a skirmish on the moor, and Florian, poor Florian, has lost his life.”

She was sobbing in his embrace, sobbing with an intense and fearful joy.

“Thank God!” she gasped, putting her hair back from her white face, and devouring him with wild, loving eyes. “Darling, they told me it wasyou—they told me it wasyou.”

Nearer, nearer, he clasped her, and a tear stole down his cheek. It washim, then, all the time she had loved with her whole heartin spiteof his being her husband. It was for his departure she had been grieving in patient silence; it was his displeasure, and no unhallowed fondness for another, that had lately dimmed the soft blue eyes, and turned the sweet face so pale.

“My love!” he whispered; but, notwithstanding his past suspicions, his injustice, his cruel condemnation, this seemed all the amends he was disposed to make; for he went on to tell her how the coach had been beset, and how he must himself have been killed, but for Florian’s self-devotion—Florian, who was now lying dead in the very room that had lately come to be called his own.

She wanted no explanation, no apology. She had forgiven him long before he spoke. She had thought him estranged; she had believed him dead; and now he was alive again, and he was her own.

“I care not! I care not!” she exclaimed, wildly. “Let them live or die; what is it to me, so that you are safe! Shame on me,” she added, with more composure, “how selfish I am—how heartless! Let us go to him, George, and see if nothing can be done.”

Nothing could be done, of course. Hand in hand, husband and wife visited the chamber of death, hand in hand they left it, with saddened faces and slow, reverential step. But Sir George never forgot the lesson of that night; never again doubted the woman who had given him her whole heart; nor joined in the sneer of those who protest that purity and self-sacrifice are incompatible with earthly love.

But for the snow, Madame de Montmirail would have left Hamilton Hill next day. It was delightful, no doubt, to witness the perfect understanding, the mutual confidence, that had been re-established between Cerise and her husband; but it was not amusing. “Gratifying, but a little wearisome,” said the Marquise to herself, while she looked from her window on the smooth undulating expanse of white that forbade the prospect of travelling till there should come a thaw. Never perhaps in her whole life had this lady so much felt the want of excitement, intrigue, business, dissipation, even danger, to take her out of herself, as she expressed it, and preserve the blood from stagnating in her veins. It is only doing her justice also to state that she was somewhat anxious about Malletort. With half a yard of snow on the ground, however, not to mention drifts, it was hopeless to speculate on any subject out of doors till the weather changed.

For Slap-Jack, nevertheless, whose whole life had been passed in conflict with the elements, even a heavy fall of snow seemed but a trifling obstacle, easily to be overcome, and on no account to interfere with so important a ceremony as a seaman’s wedding. Assisted by his shipmate, who had consented to officiate as “best man” on the occasion, he set to work, “with a will,” so he expressed it, and cleared away a path four feet broad from the Hill to the “Hamilton Arms.” Down this path he proceeded in great state to be married, on the very day the thaw set in, attended by Sir George and Lady Hamilton, the Marquise, Smoke-Jack, and all the servants of the establishment. Ere the ceremony was accomplished, the wind blew high and the rain fell in torrents, omens to which the old foretopman paid not the slightest attention, but of which his best man skilfully availed himself to congratulate the bridegroom on his choice.

“It looks dirty to windward,” he proclaimed, in a confidential whisper, heard by the whole company; “and a chap ain’t got overmuch sea-room when he’s spliced. But she’s weatherly, mate; that’s whatsheis—wholesome and weatherly. I knows the trim on ’em.”

At a later period in the afternoon, however, when I am sorry to say, he had become more than slightly inebriated, Smoke-Jack was heard to express an equally flattering opinion as to the qualities, “wholesome and weatherly,” of Mrs. Dodge, not concealing his intention of making a return voyage, “in ballast o’ coorse,” as he strongly insisted, to these latitudes, when he had delivered a cargo in London. Shrewd observers were of opinion, from these compromising remarks and other trifling incidents of the day, that it was possible the hostess of the “Hamilton Arms” might be induced to change her name once more, under the irresistible temptation of subjugating so consistent a woman-hater as Smoke-Jack.

But in the last century, as in the present, death and marriage trod close on each other’s heels. The customers at the “Hamilton Arms” had not done carousing to the health of bride and bridegroom, the wintry day had not yet closed in with a mild, continuous rain, and Smoke-Jack was in the middle of an interminable forecastle yarn, whena couple of labouring men brought in the body of a darkly-clad foreign gentleman, who had lately been lodging at this roadside hostelry. They had found him half covered by a waning snow-wreath just under the wall in the “stell,” said these honest dalesmen, below Borrodaile Rise. He must have been dead for days, but there was no difficulty in identifying the Abbé, for the frozen element in which he was wrapped had kept off the very taint of death, and preserved him, to use their own language, “in uncommon fettle, to be sure!” Except the Marquise, I doubt if any one regretted him, and yet it seemed a strange and piteous fate for the gifted scholar, the able churchman, the polished courtier, thus to perish by breaking his neck off a Yorkshire mare on a Yorkshire moor.

“Men are so different!” observed Cerise, as she and George discussed the Abbé’s death, and, indeed, his character, walking together through the park, after the snow was gone, in the soft air of a mild winter’s day, nowhere so calm and peaceful as in our English climate.

“And women, too,” replied George, looking fondly in the dear face he had loved all his life, and thinking that her like could only be found amongst the angels in heaven.

Cerise shook her head.

“You know nothing about us,” said she. “My own, how blind you must have been when you went away and left me nothing of your cruel self but a riding-glove.”

He laughed, no doubt well pleased.

“It was you, then, who had taken it? I looked for it everywhere, and was forced to go away without it.”

“You did not lookhere,” she answered, and warm from the whitest bosom in the world she drew the missing glove that had lain there ever since the night he left her.

“George,” she added, and the love-light in her eyes betrayed her feelings no less than the low, soft accents of her voice, “you know now that I prize your little finger more than all the rest of the world. I never saw another face than yours that I cared twice to look upon, and it is my happiness, my pride, to think that I was never loved by any man on earth butyou!”

She raised her head and looked around in triumph while she spoke. Her eye, resting on the church of the distantvillage, caught a gleam of white from a newly-raised tomb-stone amongst its graves. An old man wrapping up his tools was in the act of leaving that stone, for he had finished his task. It was but to cut the following inscription:—

Florian de St. Croix.✚R. I. P.

FOOTNOTES[1]Au petit couvert.[2]A national banking scheme was about this period proposed to the Regent of France by a financial speculator of Scottish extraction named Law.[3]The progeny of a white and a Quadroon, sometimes called an Octoroon.[4]A witch.[5]Evil eye.[6]Runaway negroes who join in bands and live by plunder in the woods.

FOOTNOTES

[1]Au petit couvert.

[2]A national banking scheme was about this period proposed to the Regent of France by a financial speculator of Scottish extraction named Law.

[3]The progeny of a white and a Quadroon, sometimes called an Octoroon.

[4]A witch.

[5]Evil eye.

[6]Runaway negroes who join in bands and live by plunder in the woods.

UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.

Author's monogram: GJWM

Back to Index Next