CHAPTER XVI.MIZPAH.

What was there in that telegram to cause Hugh Paull misgiving?

Ostensibly, but little. Many things could have occurred, simple in themselves, to give Mercedes an excuse to summon him. That she would take advantage of an excuse to shorten their separation, he well knew. As he turned over and re-read the telegram, he chided himself for the chill sense of impending trouble which was unnerving him; but his efforts came to nothing. He started for London at once, in irrepressible perturbation of mind.

Arrived home, the commonplace aspect of the familiar old house somewhat relieved him of his mental oppression. The housekeeper had had notice of his return in a week or ten days, and charwomen were about; there was a clatter of pails and the homely sound of busy brooms and scrubbing-brushes.

He spent the hours till Mercedes should arrive in superintending the arrangement of the library, and pretending to dine. His study lamp smoked. Just as he and the housekeeper had succeeded in coaxing it to burn with its wonted urbanity, one quarter chimed from the nearest church clock-tower.

A quarter-past nine! In a quarter-of-an-hourshewould be here—and the big, dingy room seemed to him full of the ill-savoured fumes of lamp oil. He dismissed the housekeeper, who knew he expected a patient, and threw open the windows.

It was a clear night. The stars shone, brilliant specks in the dark-blue. He leaned out of the window, listening for the roll of wheels—for that peal of the hall bell which he longed for, yet dreaded. He would always long for her presence with an intense longing: yet this longing would be tempered by the dread that he would betray himself in some unguarded moment, would betray the passionate character of his love.

He mentally forecast the interview. Leaning out in the sharpened autumnal air, he braced himself to endure: to keep himself at a completely respectful distance from the woman whose soul he believed to be the soul of his lost wife, and part of his own soul, but whose physical being belonged to the lazy voluptuary, the Prince Andriocchi.

“It is hard,” he told himself. “Oh, God! Thou alone knowesthowhard!”

The wild apostrophe brought a calm, a sudden peace—as if indeed his guardian angel had laid its holy hand upon his heated head; and as he took courage from the sense of occult help in his sore need, the clock slowly, warningly—it seemed to him with some knowledge of what was to come—chimed the half-hour.

Would she come? What was it all about? Perhaps the next few minutes’ silence and suspense were the worst of his life. Often afterwards, looking back into his past with a shudder, he thought so.

Yet the ring of the bell, sudden, impetuous, when it did come, was horrible. The sound ofhervoice, theslow footsteps along the hall—he clenched his hands as he listened, and cold drops of sweat were on his brow.

He went slowly to the door and opened it—for his limbs were stiff and heavy, disobedient to his will. Had he expected to see her also unnerved, trembling? He did not know—but the calm with which she entered was a shock to him.

“Please—shut—lock the door,” she said quietly, but with a desperate calm—imperiously, but in a tone of voice in which command was mingled with respect. “I have come,” she said, throwing aside her cloak and seating herself by the table, “to tell you, my friend, what will cause you grief, what will make you angry. But I must tell you, for your sake, and for mine.”

He stood, facing her, wondering at the extraordinary change in her, in her whole outward self. Her lovely face was pale and delicately beautiful as ever; but there was a new sternness about her sweet mouth, a look of absolute will in her dark, lustrous eyes which completely altered her. The clinging, tender girl had given place to the determined woman.

“What—is it?” he asked. “What has happened?”

“I—will tell you,” she began, evidently nerving herself for some disclosure, “just as it happened. You know that the prince”—(a look of pain contracted her features, and she blushed slightly as she said the word)—“my husband—liked the Pinewood. You know”—(she stopped and looked pleadingly up into his face)—“he liked you, liked our—friendship.”

Some warning of what was to come arose in his mind. Ah! at last some good-natured friend—some meddler—had stepped in between him and his long-waited-for happiness in life.

“Go on,” he said, in a hard tone, turning away from her.

“The prince knows you, and he knows me,” she went on, proudly. “Well, I must tell you what happened. Last night, we—the prince, the count, and myself—we went to the new play. The prince did not like it, and went away to his club. I was sitting, not talking, the count was silent also, when I heard the voices of men (it was between the acts) in the next box. They spoke of you—and of me. What they said, was an infamy. Ah! do not look so, monsieur. You and I, we have a champion. The count, he did hear it also, and his anger against these men was great. He at once took me away down the staircase, procured my carriage, and I came back to my house. He told me he would avenge my honour—your honour. At eleven o’clock he came in. He told me he had challenged the man who said that infamy; that to-day they would fight, not here in England, but in France; and he said good-bye.... This” (she drew a case from her bosom), “this is the name of the man who separates us, monsieur, for I also have come to say good-bye. To-morrow I go home with the prince to Spain.”

It was so abrupt, her calm yet confused statements were so unexpected, that for a moment Hugh’s head swam, he had to steady himself by placing his hand on the back of a chair. Then he took a slip of paper that she held out to him, and holding it near the lamp, saw in her handwriting—

“Colonel Roderick Pym.”

As he gazed upon that familiar, distasteful name, he seemed to have known all along that this must come,this moment, this interview; that this was what had cast a shadow on their relations, and that this wasthe end.

“Once,” he said, half to himself, half to her—it seemed to him as if her mind ought to recognise his thoughts without the outward expression of words,—“once I robbed this man of someone he loved; and now he robs me ofyou!”

As he sighed out that last word he recollected. Perhaps at that moment Roderick Pym was dead, his revenge had cost him his life; for the count would be a dangerous antagonist, he was a skilled swordsman and a dead shot.

“How, when do they fight?” he asked breathlessly, with the instinct to stay that duel at any cost.

“Fight!” she spoke almost indignantly. “Do you think I would let the good count kill himself for me—even foryou?” Tears stood in her eyes. “I knelt and prayed him,” she said. “I begged him, but he would not hear me. He said: ‘Would you have me be a coward?’ Then at last he said to me: ‘If you will promise me that to-morrow you will go home to Spain with the prince, and will never see or speak tohimagain, I too will go with you, and will sacrifice myhonneur.’” She paused and hung her head. “So, as I have promised, I have come to say good-bye,” she faltered.

Yes; he had known this all along, he felt he had. This was the end—the end of a promised passionate joy—the end of delights of eye and ear—of heart, soul, mind, body—all!

“Yes,” he said, meekly bowing his head, “I understand. We part; it is all over for ever.”

“Oh no!” she cried, with sudden life, and her facewas alight with love and hope, “only for here! You know—who should know better than you?—how short is this life, you who always see the dead and dying! Is it death, that which we call death?” she asked him, passionately. “Do you think it? Do you not rather think thatthisis dying, this living in a place where you must not love, where people hate and torture each other, and happiness cannot be, for no one will let another one be happy?”

He went to her and took her slender, cold hands in his—for the last time.

“It does not matter,” he said, bitterly, yet feeling, with a strange joy, that this sacrifice of love ennobled their love, raised it from a common thing to divinity. “No one can separate us after death, if God wills us to be soul to soul—one for ever.”

A strange expression flitted across her face. For one instant it seemed to him that this was not Mercedes, but Lilia. Then came the memory of that awful death-bed, when Lilia defied the will of her Creator, and would have forced him, her husband, to die with her, and he contrasted that hour of rebellion with this hour of humble renunciation.

“This isher soul,” he thought, in mingled awe and gratitude. “Roderick would have caused our misery; instead, he has saved us from an evil life together for here, in this painful world, to be united in eternity.”

This was his actual death, he felt, as he silently gazed into her eyes, this parting. Physical death, after this, would be nothing—would, indeed, be welcome.

For a moment he thought to take her, just this once, into his arms: to let her heart beat against his breast, to feel her lips upon his mouth; but before the thoughtwas really born in his mind he killed it and flung it from him.

“Risk eternity for a moment?” he said to himself. “No!”

He dropped her hands and smiled at her, the smile she might have seen with the eyes of her soul upon the face of her angel guardian.

“There is no more for us to saynow,” he said, “but to pray for each other. By-and-by we shall have time to see what this means—this you and I being but one soul.”

She rose and kept her eyes steadily fixed upon him. Then she slowly walked to the door. How slowly she passed from the room he never knew. Their eyes dwelt upon each other, and till she was gone he felt that never, even in infinite glory, could they be more really wedded than now.

The door was half open. The room was empty, save for himself and the shadows. The hall-door was gently shut. He heard the sound of carriage-wheels. All was over!

He sat down stupefied. This dead future which loomed blankly before him was stupefying—a dense blackness, a hopeless nothingness.

The hours passed. The lamp flickered and went out. Still he sat there gazing at vacancy, his mind groping about in this dreary cloud of fathomless misery.

He thought nothing tangible, felt neither cold nor fatigue. At last he began to wonder vaguely whether this was all that really existed—this dull, senseless apathy.

As he began to wonder, his attention was attractedby a brilliant speck of light at his feet. Tiny at first, it seemed to grow larger and brighter as he looked. A mere pin’s-point of light at first, in a few minutes it was a disc of some size. Then he saw an object he knew well—a steel urn at the end of his library fender.

With a flush of pain, he was alive again; alive, conscious of anguish, of separation from her, his darling, his adored. He seemed to see her retreating from him, steadily, hopelessly.

With a cry, he sprang up. That light was a mocking sunbeam. He saw it now, creeping in between the shutters. He went to the window, he flung open the shutters and defied the day, or would have defied it.

But he was face to face with the glory of the sunrise. The whole sky was golden, and crimson clouds floated upward, stately attendants upon the magnificence of the young day. Soft, white rounded masses were like smiles upon the clear blue sky: all meant life and hope and love.

And as he gazed he felt abashed at his own littleness. What was he but a speck upon the bosom of the earth? That little steel urn was greater in the shine of the world’s sun than was he in the Light that streams from the Eternal.

“I must reach it,” he told himself. “I must be more than a speck of dust. What is suffering, what is dull commonplace, but the ladder by which we climb to immortality?”

That was his crucial hour, the bridge over which he passed from unrest to peace.

None who knew him ever guessed the secret motives of his afterlife. They thought him more energetic, larger-minded, gentler, and more sympathetic. But hewas envied as a man who seemed to have fathomed the mystery of “peace on earth.”

He died suddenly. A month before his death he received a letter from a Spanish priest, who informed him of the death of the Princess Andriocchi, and enclosed him a sealed envelope addressed to him in Mercedes’ handwriting. He recognised the writing at once, though in character it was larger and firmer.

It contained a slip of paper, on which was inscribed one word—“Come!”

That word seemed to pierce his heart like an arrow. From that day his strength waned, his health failed. His household were hardly astonished when, one morning, he was found sitting in his chair by the library window, the early sunlight hovering about his dead, smiling face.

He passed away, smiling—a joyful smile that none had ever seen upon his face before.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESP.240, changed “If tell Helven this,” to “If I tell Helven this”.Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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