Essie stands entranced. It seems to her like the intermediate residence of some happy soul, freed from the world's toil and moil, shrived from sin, emancipated from life, where it should dwell in tempered bliss till that last day when heaven's brighter glories, stronger raptures, should burst upon and clothe it for aye. She strolls along the narrow gravel path, bathing her hands with childish delight in the moonbeams, and then stoops and picks up two or three little stones that the night's sweet alchemy has gifted with a bright short glory not their own. So stooping, she hears a man's quick firm foot running down the garden steps. She raises herself, and goes to meet him with "a moonlight-coloured smile" on her face. "Aren't they lovely?" she asks, holding up her pebbly treasures for him to look at.
Not speaking, he takes the little pink palm, stones and all, into his hand, and looks into her face; and then, as if yielding to a temptation that he hates, that he would fain resist, and to which, being over-strong, he must yet succumb, he snatches her to his breast, and kisses her fiercely—eyelids, lips, and neck—with a violence he is himself hardly conscious of.
"Stop!" she cries, surprised, half-shocked, pushing him away from her. "What do you mean? You frighten me!"
He recollects himself instantly, and releases her. "Itisalarming being kissed, especially when you are not used to it," he answers, with a sneer.
She looks up at him in blank astonishment. Has he gone mad? Is it the moonlight that has given him that white wrathy look?
"Something has happened!" she says, quickly. "What is it? tell me!"
"Oh! nothing—a mere bagatelle!" he replies, with a little bitter laugh. "It is only that I have been hearing a pleasant piece of news."
"What is it?"
"Only that an acquaintance of mine is going to be married!"
"Is it an acquaintance of mine too?"
"About the most intimate you have, I should say: yourself, in fact!"
"Is that news?" she asks, trying to smile. "Iamgoing to be married, am not I, to you?"
"I am not aware that my name is—Brandon," he answers, coldly, while his sorrowful, fierce eyes go through her heart like poisoned arrows.
She turns her head aside and groans. A great vague darkness blots out the broad moon, and the stars' thick cohorts; the bright water beside her grows black as hell's sluggish rivers.
He had not known how much he had been buoyed up by hope till that mute gesture of hers bid him despair.
"It's true, then?" he asks in a voice of sharp rage and anguish, catching hold of the white wonder of her arm, on which his fingers, unwittingly cruel, leave crimson prints.
"Iswhattrue?" she asks, faintly, trying for yet a little longer to stave off Fate, to push away Nemesis, with her weak woman-fingers.
"That you are—God! am I choking?—engaged to Brandon?"
"I was once," she falters under her breath.
"How long ago?"
"When first I came here."
"And since then you have written to break it off?" he asks, while a tone of joyful hope vibrates in his deep voice.
"No, I have not," she answers, in a frightened whisper.
St. John's face gathers blackness. "I am to understand, then," he resumes, in a constrained voice, out of which the man's strong will keeps the pent passion from bursting forth, "that you belonged to him at the time when I kept you out of bed one night to listen to an interesting chapter in my own autobiography?"
"Yes."
"And when, in reply to my inquiries, you denied having any connection beyond common acquaintance with—with him?"
"Yes."
"And when you were good enough to overlook all trifling obstacles, and to consent to marry me?"
"Yes."
The little catechism ended, the last cobweb of doubt torn away, they stand dumb. Esther's guilty head sinks down on her breast as a flower's head sinks overladen with rain. Suddenly she looks up and stretches out her arms. "Speak to me!" she says, huskily. "Curse me! strike me! call me some bad name—only speak!"
"I wish to God you were a man!" he answers, in a hard, low voice; while his straight brows draw together into one dark line across his face, and his lips look white and thin under his moustache.
"That you mightkillme!" she says, incoherent with excitement. "Well, kill me now! If revenge is so pleasant to you, I give you leave!"
"Let us have no heroics, please," says he, contemptuously; "you don't appear to be aware that it is not the fashion for English gentlemen to murder women who make fools of them. It may be a sensible practice, but it is at present confined to thetiers état."
Having spoken, he makes a slight movement to depart.
"Are you going to give me up?" she cries, smiting her hands together, and forgetting in her great dismay to reflect whether the remonstrance accorded well with her dignity or not.
"I have no claim upon you," he answers, icily.
"What do you mean?" she cries, passionately. "You are unjust. There could be nothing too bad forhimto say of me, but what injury have I done you? You ought to thank me and praise me for having been wicked and dishonourable and double-dealing for your sake."
"For my sake!" he repeats, with a sardonic smile. "I am hardly so conceited as to take it personally."
"What do you mean?" she asks, quickly. "If I did not do it for your sake, for whose did I?"
He is silent.
"Do you mean," she inquires, slowly, her cheeks paling to the whiteness of snowdrops blowing, "that you think I gave him up because I wanted to be a grand lady—because I wanted to have all these fine things" (looking round at the flowering gardens, at the broad lake, at the stately house shimmering in the moonshine) "belonging to me?"
Still he holds his peace.
"Is that what you meant?" she repeats, urgently.
"I meant," he says, looking up, his eyes flashing with a hard, metallic gleam, "that you thought a rich man a better investment than a poor one, and, being equally and conveniently indifferent to both, you thought it wisest to select the former."
"If such is your opinion of me," she says, turning away indignantly, "I don't wonder at your being in such a hurry to be rid of me!"
He looks askance at her out of the corners of his eyes. She has hidden her face in her hands, but by the panting breast and heaved white shoulder he sees that she is weeping—that a storm of sobs is shaking her childish frame.
"I am in a hurry to be rid of you!" he says, harshly, steeling himself against her. "From a woman who could throw a man over with the deliberate, cold-blooded artlessness you have done, one may well sing 'Te Deum' for being rescued in time."
She flings up her little head proudly, and the dusk splendour of her eyes blazes through great tears. "Listen to me!" she says, laying hold of his arm with one small burning hand. "I am a bad girl, I know, but I am not the calculating, mercenary wretch you take me for. I tell you honestly that the first day I came here—I had never been staying at a great house before—I thought it must be pleasant to live in large rooms, and have gilt and ormolu and fine pictures about one, and to have carriages and horses and servants, and not to be obliged to think twice before one spent sixpence; and I thought, too" (her long neck droops, and she blushes painfully as she makes the confession), "what a pity it was that I was already engaged, for that otherwise, as I was pretty, you might have taken a fancy to me——" She stops, choked with maiden shame. Upon his averted face an enduring flush, like a hectic autumn leaf's, burns red and angry.
"But as soon as I saw you, almost," she continues, commanding her tears with great difficulty—"as soon as you spoke to me, all such thoughts went out of my head. I don't know why they did," she says, simply. "You were not particularly pleasant or civil; I did not think you good-looking, and you gave me the idea of being ill-tempered; but" (with a sigh) "one cannot reason about those sort of things. I began to think so much about what youwere, that I forgot to remember what you had."
He makes no comment upon her confession.
"Do you believe me?" she asks, eagerly, her little fingers tightening their clasp upon his coat-sleeve.
Still he is dumb.
"Do you?" she repeats, excitedly, the quick breath passing to and fro pantingly across the threshold of her crimson lips.
"Why do you insist on making me uncivil?" he says, with a sarcastic smile. "I donotbelieve you. I dare say you fancy you are telling truth; but if another man were to come on the scene with a few thousands a-year more, and a higher position in the social scale, you would enact the same part over again. Women must be true to their instincts. Those who are bent on rising must kick down the ladder by which they have climbed: it is an irreversible law."
"You are mistaken," she says, eagerly. "I have no desire to climb; if I came here with any silly, childish idea that rich people were happier than poor ones, I have been quite disillusioned. Bob" (how oddly the little unromantic name comes in among her heroics!)—"Bob is a happier man than you are, though he is only a lieutenant in a foot regiment, and has next to nothing to live upon."
"I have no doubt thatBob" (with a little sneering emphasis on the monosyllable) "is in all respects a very superior person to me," says St. John, with a bitter pale smile, like a gleam of wrathful sunlight on a day of east wind and clouds and driving sleet.
"I quite agree with you," she answers eagerly, her great eyes flashing angry, like unwonted meteors that blaze fitful in the winter sky, "and I wish to Heaven I had never left him!"
Over Gerard's features a spasm, contracting and puckering them, passes ugly and painful; his hands clench themselves in the mightiness of his effort to govern his smitten soul. "That is easily remedied," he answers, after a little pause, in a clear cold voice. "Why should not you go back to him as you came? There is no reason why he should ever hear of this—thisepisode, thisinterlude, thisfarce."
"And you think that I am to be bandied about like a bale of goods!" she cries, scornfully, voice trembling and lip quivering with passion. "You are like the woman in the Judgment of Solomon, who said, 'Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it!'Youlove me! You never did!"
"Perhaps not," he answers, with slow difficulty; "perhaps what I loved was my ideal that I fancied I had found in you, and when I found I was mistaken, perhaps the love went too! My God, I wish it had!"
Through the proud calmness of his voice penetrates a tone of bitter, unwilling tenderness. Hearing it, her whole soul is melted into fresh, quick tears.
"It is not my ideal, or any one else's, that I love in you!" she cries, stretching out eager white arms towards him; "it is yourself—your very self! Oh, if I could but tear out my heart, and show it you! Oh! why won't you believe me?"
He looks at her—looks at the innocently-wooing arms, at the tear-stained, dimpled, tremulous face—and feels his resolution wasting away like wax before the fire, as Samson's wasted away in Delilah's lap. He turns his eyes away across the cool silvered flood, and hardens his heart against her.
"Why cannot you?" she repeats, in her sweet, vibrating voice.
"Because I have not the faith that removes mountains," he answers, harshly; "because a thing must be probable, or at least possible, before I can give credit to it; because I am unable to understand how, for a man whom you confess to having thought ill-looking, ill-tempered, and ill-mannered, you could, out of pure disinterested love, throw over one to whom you must, at least, have pretended to be sincerely attached."
"I never pretended anything of the kind," she answers, vehemently. "If you don't believe me, ask him. I was engaged to him because he seemed unhappy, and because I did not see any particular reason why I should not, and because he asked me."
Through all his bitter, surging wrath, St. John can hardly forbear a smile. "And you became engaged to me because I asked you?" he says, drily. "At that rate, there is no reason why the number of your aspirants should not be increasedad infinitum.
"And were you going to play the play out to the end, may I ask, andmarryus both?" he inquires, in the same cutting key.
No woman can stand being sneered at; she much prefers having the tables and chairs flung at her head.
"Do you think it manly or witty to jeer at me," cries Essie, stung almost to madness by his taunts, "because I have been fool enough to desert for you a man worth a hundred of you?"
Gerard stands motionless in the moonlight, with folded arms, and a chill, painful smile on his stern mouth. "I have already announced my conviction of his superiority, and have advised you to return to him," he says.
"Do you meanreally?" asks Essie, her wild, wide eyes flaming in half-incredulous fear on his face.
"I do," he answers, with icy steadiness.
"And you have done with me altogether?" she says, brokenly, her tears forcing their way through her slight shielding fingers, and falling one after another, slow and heavy, on the stones at her feet. "Serve me right!—Serve me right!"
Once again, intoxicated by her great fairness, he goes nigh to pardoning her; once again his obstinate will comes to his aid. "If I were to marry you now," he says, resolutely, "my life would be one long suspicion: I should love you madly, and should disbelieve in you."
With that, and his saying he should love her madly, a little creeping hope steals warmly about her heart. "Why should you disbelieve in me?" she asks, putting out a timid peace-making hand.
"Because a faith once broken can never be mended," he answers, sternly—"it may be patched up, but a patched faith will not do to go through life with; because a woman who has deceived a man once for one object may deceive him a second time for another. I should never," he says (words coming quicker and emotion deepening as he proceeds), "look in your sweet eyes without thinking I read some treachery in them; I should never press your heart against mine without fearing that it was beating for some one else."
She withdraws her rejected hand, and falls to weeping sorelier than ever, but very mutely.
"What madness induced you to tell me so many lies?" he cries, passionately, with mournful severity. "Were you bent on putting a gulf, that could never be bridged through all eternity, between us? Did not you know that that is the one sin I could never forget or forgive?"
She looks down humbled and crestfallen, and says, sobbingly, "I was afraid of you. I thought that, if I told you, I should lose you as I have done now, without telling you. I was on the point of speaking two or three times, but you looked so angry that my courage failed, and Idarednot."
"Afraid of me!" he says, reproachfully. "By your own showing, then, you could not have loved me perfectly, for 'perfect love casteth out fear,' If you are afraid of me, it is indeed time for us to part."
"I see you are bent on misconstruing every word I say," she says, hopelessly, and yet with a little petulant movement of shoulder and head, "and so I'll hold my tongue."
He looks at her, not relentingly, but with infinite sadness. "I almost wish that Constance had left me in my Fool's Paradise!" he says.
"Constance!" exclaims Esther, quickly. "Was it she that told you?"
"It was," he answers, quietly: "she heard it this morning; she was annoyed with me for not going to the ball, and chose this ingenious and, I must say, complete mode of revenge."
"WhathadI done to her?" says Essie, bringing her two hands together sharply, and looking upwards to Heaven's great black, blue floor above her,
"Thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
"WhathadI done to her," she says, in a sort of wonder, "that she should do me such a mischief?"
Looking at her as she stands with upturned eyes, like some sweet prayerful saint or penitent Magdalen, drawn by a cunning hand that has been resolved three centuries back into elemental dust—dust that has stopped a bunghole perhaps, like Alexander's—Gerard's resolution breaks a little; not his resolution of parting from her—thatremains firm as ever—but his power of so parting with nonchalant coldness. "Child!" he cries, a little roughly, and yet with a half-groan, placing a hand heavily on each of her shoulders—"Child! why are you so pretty? If it was your nature to be deceitful and underhand, why could not you be ugly too? Your beauty is the one thing about you that I believe in, and it drives me distracted!"
"And yet," she answers, with a melancholy smile, "you told me just now, very calmly, to go back to—tohim:you seemed to contemplate with great equanimity the prospect of seeing me and mydistracting beauty" (with a bitter emphasis) "in another man's possession."
"You are mistaken," he answers, with quick violence. "By God's help, I'll never see you again after to-night."
Hearing that heavy sentence, her knees tremble beneath her a little; a momentary dimness comes over her eyes; voice, breath, and heart seem to suspend their functions. No word of protest, of lamentation, of entreaty, crosses her whitened lips.
"What right have I to be with you?" he asks, indignantly—"I, who cannot see you without coveting you? What right have I to steal another man's wife, any more than his horse or his money?"
"Let me go, then," she answers, with a low, moaning sigh—"since it must be so. You know what is right better than I do. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!" he answers, very shortly, and turns away his head sharply, that only the lake and the stars may see the distortion that the passion of that parting is working on his face.
"Say you forgive me before I go!" says the tender, tremulous voice, that might unman a hero—might unsaint an anchorite—as she lingers yet a little minute beside him.
"Why should I say what is not true?" he asks, turning round roughly upon her. "I don't forgive you, and never shall, either in this world or the next."
"You must!" she says, sobbingly, the words coming a little wildly through a tempest of tears. "I cannot go unless you do; if I went now, I should remember you all my life as you are to-day; to-day would blot out all the happy hours we have been together!"
For all answer he turns away from her, and buries his face in his hands.
"Look at me kindly once again!" she says, calmness growing out of her strong emotion, putting up her two small hands and trying to draw his away from before his hidden face. "I may be very wicked; I suppose I am—as you say so—mean, underhand, deceitful; but yet, for the sake of what is gone, look at me kindly once again: that won't hurt you, as it is for the very last time!"
Still Gerard remains speechless—not from obstinacy, but because he cannot command his voice: and his pride revolts from speaking shakily, quaveringly, like an hysterical woman or paralytic old man.
"If I were a thief, or a murderer!" she says, indignantly, withdrawing her hands, "you could not turn from me with greater loathing!"
"You are a murderer!" he answers, with fierce vehemence, looking at her once again as she had asked him—looking at her with wrathful, reluctant passion, but not kindly. "You have murdered my whole future—my hope, my belief in women, in truth—my everything of life but what is merely animal. If you had murdered my body I could have forgiven you much more easily. Time or disease must have done that sooner or later, but now—" He stops abruptly.
"If I am a murderer, I am a suicide too," she replies, with a smile more tearful than her tears. "St. John," she says, earnestly, "don't you know that people always attend to dying requests, however foolish and unreasonable they may be? This of mine is a dying request, for after to-night I shall be dead to you. Say, 'Essie, I forgive you.'"
"What is it to you whether I forgive you or not?" he inquires, sullenly, with a certain savage pulling and biting of his moustache. "Are you mistaking me for Brandon again? Why should two indifferent acquaintances like us go through the farce of begging each other's pardons? What are we to one another?"
"Nothing," she answers, calmly; "you need not be so eager to remind me of that; my memory needs no refreshing; but wehave beensomething—do what you will you cannot take that away from me—so for the sake of that 'have been,' say you forgive me!"
"Falsehoods don't pass my lips so glibly as they do yours," he answers, doggedly. "If I were to say, 'I forgive you' a thousand times, I should be no nearer the doing it. Good-bye!" he says again, abruptly, putting out his hand; feeling that the strain is too great for him, and that if it last much longer he, being but human, will break under it. Her answering farewell is to fling herself upon his breast.
"I can no more say 'good-bye,'" she says, desperately, in a passionate whisper, "than you can say 'I forgive you.' St. John, take me back, try me once again! I know I ought not to say it—that it is undignified, unwomanly, perhaps—but I cannot see my everything going away from me without reaching out a hand to stop it. Oh, my darling! give me one more trial!"
Her arms cling about his brown throat close as the bindweed clings about the hedges in sultry August; her white warm breast heaves and pants against his, as the sea heaves and pants against the shore's tawny sides; her eyes, impassioned as only dark eyes can be—alluring, despairing—flame into his eyes, and down through his eyes into his heart. Prisoned in those sweet, frail fetters, he feels strength and name and fame ebbing from him, as Merlin's ebbed under Vivien's wily charm.
"Is not it better to be tricked by such a woman," Passion whispers, "than to spend long æons of unswerving fidelity with one less maddeningly fair? Were not such moments of ecstasy very cheaply purchased, even by years of suspicion and deceit?" But Will and Honour push her back with their strong right hands. "She has deceived you once, and therefore she will deceive you twice. She is enactingthismelodrama onyourbreast: she may enact the next on another man's. Put her away!—put her away!"
Hearkening to them, he, with a groan as of one that teareth out his right eye, with relentless fingers unfastens her arms from about his neck. "Yourdarling!" he says, contemptuously; "you are forgetting whom you are addressing!"
"I am, indeed," she answers, with a sudden revulsion of feeling; "but it is a mistake that one does not make twice in a lifetime."
"I hope not," he answers, taking, refuge in surly rudeness from the almost overpowering temptation to fall at her feet and say, "Essie, come to me! deceive me! outwit me! overreach me; do what you please, I cannot help it! If there were a thousand Brandons and ten thousand treacheries between us, Imustbe yours, and youmustbe mine!"
"I have degraded myself once to the dust before you," rejoins Essie, in a voice that tries to be angry, but is only trembling; "but there is no fear of my doing it again. And yet," she continues, after a pause, her soft nature making it more difficult for her to part from him in anger than to incur his contempt by again descending to supplication—"and yet, since I have confessed to having been wicked, you might as well forgive me. How much the better will you be for going through life with the consciousness that you have made one wretched woman even more unhappy than she would otherwise have been? You forgave that other girl who deceived you because she did not love you. Forgive me, who deceived you, because I loved you too well!"
"I forgave her," he answers, sternly, "because I had ceased to care about her—because what she stole from me had lost its value. Perhaps at some future period I may be in the same frame of mind towards you; at present I am some way off it. I neither can forgive you, nor have I the slightest wish to do so!"
Seeing that she is abasing herself in vain, she refrains. "Well, then, since you wish it, so it must be," she answers, with meek despair; and catching suddenly his hand before he has time to prevent her, she kisses it very humbly and sorrowfully. Then, unforgiven, unrecalled, she passes away. And Gerard, the battle over, the victory won, sits down on a garden-seat, and cries like a child for his pretty lost plaything.
And so that act of the play is finished: all the actors have strutted and fumed and fretted through their little parts, and now the curtain has fallen. When next it rises, the principal actress in this tragic drama is discovered lying full-dressed on her bed; her pretty face buried—eyes, nose, and mouth—in the tumbled pillow; her little neat-shod feet hanging over the bedside. She looks as if she had been thrown there, an inert, passive mass, by some spiteful giant. Six miles away, at Lord ——'s ball, the fiddles are squeaking, and the pink-and-green Chinese lanterns swinging to and fro among the orange boughs in the slight wind made by the rustling dresses and passing men and women. Sir Thomas, with his hands in their burst white gloves under his coat tails, and his blue-cloth back leaning against a marble mantel-piece, is talking sweetly, in his hard, rasping voice, of scab and foot-rot. Miladi is gone down to supper for the sixth time on the sixth devoted married man's arm; she is eating game pie, and drinking sherry and champagne and moselle in turns. Miss Blessington, sweeping about on the arm of a small white gentleman, whose estate is as large as his person is minute, is responding a little superciliously to a presumptuous younger son, who, annihilated by her Greek profile and Juno bust, has invited her to tread a measure with him.
"No, tha—anks; I never da—ance round da—ances."
Meanwhile Esther lies stretched upon the counterpane, while a gloomy pageant of all that she has lost passes before her eyes. Greedier than the dog in the fable, she had tried to keep shadow and substance: Gerard's love, Brandon's liking. Now, lo! both have fallen into the water. There are a few circles, a few rising bubbles; then all is over—gone, sunk to the bottom, to come up again never more. Vanished from her grasp is the great house—are the buhl and marqueterie cabinets—are the "Venus surprised by Satyrs" and the "Susanna and the Elders"—are the vineries, pineries, peacheries. Did they ever exist? or were they only a mirage, such as the sky presents to us sometimes—a mirage of ships shocking together, of armed men meeting in fight?
"Go back to your pigstye!" said the magic fish to Ilsabil, the fisherman's wife, when she modestly requested to be made lord of the sun and moon. "Go back to your pigstye!" cries Fate to Esther. At any other time the subsiding from the prospect of being rather a great lady into the certainty of being a very small one would have caused considerable annoyance to Esther's aspiring soul.Now, thethingsshe has lost merge and lose themselves in thepersonshe has lost. But is he lost necessarily, irrecoverably? Despite the forlorn attitude, the tear-swollen face, trying to suffocate itself in down, Hope is busy whispering, "You will see him again to-morrow: men in real life are not like men in novels—changeless of purpose, hard as iron or adamant. What they are one half-hour, they are the exact reverse of the next; what they swear to-night they will unswear to-morrow." As Hope, the deceiver, thus murmurs, there comes to her ear the sound of wheels briskly rolling to the door. "Is the ball over so early? are they come back already? or——?" She does not give herself time to speculate on any other hypothesis, but, springing from the bed, runs to the window, draws aside curtain and blind, and looks out. The hall-door is open; a vehicle stands before it. The moonlight and the light shed from the hanging-lamp in the portico are fighting together, struggling for possession of a horse and dog-cart, of two footmen's floured heads, and of a portmanteau and hat-box that they are carrying out. "Thud! thud!" she hears the portmanteau go in at the back of the cart. Then a man comes out—a man in hat and overcoat—drawing on dogskin gloves, and saying, "John, go and look for my box of cigar-lights; I left it on the smoking-room table." It is St. John, speaking in much his usual voice. He is going away! going away! and he can think of his cigar-lights! Her heart stops pulsing for a second, then sets off galloping at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Going without making any sign! She leans further out of the window, and rests her white arms, that look whiter than any lilies in the moonlight, on the sill. He is so close beneath her, if the servants were not there, she might call to him; as it is, he will never know that she has watched his departure. A sudden impulse prompts her to throw up the window higher, to rustle her dress, to cough, in order to attract his attention. At the unexpected noise John and Thomas turn their heads and look up, but their master does not. He gives a slight start, but, instantly recovering himself, walks steadily to the cart and gets in. Then she knows that he knows that she is looking at him—knows that he is resolute to part from her—
"taking no farewell—"
as Lancelot took none of Elaine.
The horse is a little fidgety at starting. "Wo-o-o! Gently, old lass!" This is the affecting form that St. John's last words take. She cranes her neck out of the window; she leans out her lithe body, reckless of the danger of losing her balance and tumbling on the hard gravel drive below, in her eagerness to catch the last glimpse of the lessening, dwindling bulk; then, forgetting to shut the window, careless of any cold or stock of rheumatism that she might be laying up for herself, she returns to her former position, flings herself again prone on her bed, again buries her face in the pillow; but this time no beguiling hope sits and whispers pleasant falsities to her. Hope got up upon the dog-cart, and drove away with Gerard.
The night wanes; morning dreams, that they say come true, invade many sleepers' brains. At Lord ——'s ball people are still dancing with the fury produced by champagne and supper; but Sir Thomas, Miladi, and Miss Blessington, are at home again, and in bed. Constance is not one of those hard dancers who think that one after-supper galop is worth ten ante-coenal ones. Not for all the entrancing valses Strauss ever composed would she run the risk of damaging the freshness of her toilette, nor the still more serious risk of exchanging the marble coolness of her cheeks for the unsightly flush of heat or the ugly pallor of exhaustion.
Dawn is just beginning stealthily to unlatch the eastern gate; her torch, new-lit, makes but a puny opponent for the night's one great and myriad lesser lamps. Esther has fallen into an uneasy doze, her damp brow and loosened hair resting on her bare, outflung arm. Suddenly a knock at her door makes her start up in a vague, confused horror. Is it St. John come back? Is it some one come to murder her? A thousand impossibilities flash across her bewildered brain. Without waiting for permission, the person who knocked enters; not St. John, nor a murderer—only a dishevelled housemaid, who has evidently just thrown a gown over her night attire, and endeavoured abortively to gather up the straggling hair out of her sleepy eyes under a muslin cap put on awry.
"A tallygraph for you, miss!" says she, coming forward, holding in one hand a blue envelope, and in the other a tall, solemn tallow candle, as sleepy as herself.
A telegraphic message! Oh hateful telegraph! Cruellest of modern inventions! Oh hastener of evil tidings, that, without you, come all too speedily! Oh maker of sick hearts and blanched cheeks and arrested pulses!
Esther snatches it, while a sudden, awful cold grasps her heart, and reads by the wavering, feeble light these words, in a scrawly clerk's hand:
"Robert Brandon to Esther Craven. Come home instantly; Jack is very ill."
With how few pen-strokes can a death-warrant be written! For a moment she sits bolt upright, void of breath or motion, as a white dead woman, from the house of whose fair body the spirit departed an hour ago; the telegram grasped in a stiff hand that knows not of it. Then consciousness returns, brought back by a huge, tearing, killing agony; then even the agony yields to one intense, consuming longing—one all-dominating purpose—the longing to slay time and space; to be with himnow, this instant; to be beside Jack dying, not Jack dead.
"Can I see Sir Thomas?" she asks collectedly, but in a rough, deep voice. "I have had bad news from home: my brother is very ill."
"Indeed, 'm, you don't say so;" replies the servant, growing broadly awake under the delightful excitement of a calamity having happened to somebody, and of herself being the first recipient of the news.
"Imustsee Sir Thomas!" Esther says, putting her hand up in a bewildered way to her head, and then springing off the bed and walking quickly towards the door.
"See Sir Thomas," repeats the woman, the most unfeigned alarm painting itself on her broad face—"now!Indeed, ma'am, you must be mad to think of such a thing! It would be as much as all our places are worth if he were to be disturbed before his usual time."
Esther turns and clutches her arm, while her great eyes brimful of despair, burn on her face. "I tell you my brother isdying!" she says, hoarsely—"I know he is; I must go to himthis minute;for God's sake help me to get to the station!"
"Indeed, 'm, I'm sorry to see you in such trouble,thatI am!" answers her companion, moved to compassion by the terrible, haggard misery of the young, round face, that she, in company with her fellow-servants, had often admired in its happy, dewy rosiness at prayers on Sunday evenings; "but, you see, all the men are in bed, and Simpson 'ud cut off his own 'ead afore he'd venture to take out the carriage without Sir Thomas's orders."
The tall, yellow candle flares between them: lights up the tortured beauty of the one woman, the placid stolidity of the other. Esther groans, and smites her hands together.
"Is therenovehicle I can have?" she asks in impatient agony—"no cart?—no anything? I'd give all I have in the world to any one who would take me. Oh God! how many minutes I am wasting."
The housemaid puts down her flat candlestick on the table, and rubs her forehead with her rough fore-finger to aid her thinking powers. "There's the dog-cart that the under-servants goes to church in," she says, presently, with an uncertain suggestion: "if we could knock the men up, you might haveit, perhaps."
"Knock them up this instant, then!" cries Esther, with passionate urgency—"now, this minute!Go, for God's sake!"
So saying, she almost pushes the woman out of the room, and herself follows her. Through long passages and corridors, full of emptiness and darkness—darkness utter and complete, save where through the gallery's high-stained east window the chilly, chilly dawn comes peeping, with a grey glimmer, about the black frames, never closing eyes, and stiff, prim simpers of the family portraits—down to the lower regions, where the huge kitchen-grate yawns, black as Erebus—up steep back-stairs along other passages. In one of these passages Esther stands, her frame trembling and teeth chattering with cold and nervous excitement, while her companion raps with broad, hard knuckles on a door, and loudly calls on Simpson to awake. But hard workers are hard sleepers, and it is some time before the coachman can be induced to leave the country of slumber. When at length he is aroused, and has come out to them, in all the yawning sulkiness of disturbed sleep, it is a still longer time before he can be induced to admit the possibility ofanyvehicle whatever being put at Esther's disposal: with so righteous a fear of his wrath has Sir Thomas succeeded in inspiring his subordinates.
It is not without the aid of all her remaining money, with the exception of what is needed for the purchase of her railway ticket—not without the aid of all that is left of poor Jack's hardly-spared five-pound note—that she is able at length to induce him to consent to the getting ready of the dog-cart "in which the under-servants goes to church." Fully three-quarters of an hour more elapse before one of the helpers can be knocked up, can dress himself, can harness the oldest and screwiest horse in the stables, and put him, with many a muttered grumble, into the cart. Wretched Esther follows the man and his lanthorn to the stable-yard, with the vain idea that her presence may hurry his movements. During most of the three-quarters of an hour she walks quickly up and down over the hard, round stones with which the yard is paved, or stands watching, with greedy eyes, every step in the harnessing process; while her hands clench themselves, as his are clenched who is dead by some very cruel, violent death, and a pain like a red-hot, two-bladed knife keeps running through her heart. Before the horse is well between the shafts, she has climbed into the cart and taken her seat.
"The luggage is not in yet, 'm," suggests the groom, respectfully.
"Oh! never mind the luggage," cries Esther, feverishly; "I don't want it! I don't want anything! I'm ready! Get in, please, and set off this minute!"
Dawn is breaking, slowly, coldly, greyly, without any of the rose-coloured splendours that mostly gild the day's childhood, as the glorious delusions of youth gild our morning. There has not been a positive, actual frost in the night—not frost enough to congeal the wayside pools or to kill the dahlias—but the air has, for all that, a frosty crispness, as of the first breath of coming winter. The trees and hedgerow holly-bushes loom gigantic, formless, treble and quadruple their real size, folded round and round in a mantle of mist; the meadows are like lakes of mist; sheets of vapour steaming damply up to the shapeless, colourless, low-stooping heavens. Esther has forgotten to take any wrap: through the poor protection of her thin cotton dress and jacket the mist creeps slowly, searchingly, making her limbs shake and shudder; but she herself is unconscious of it—she could not have told you afterwards whether she had been warm or cold.
At the turnpike gate a sleepy old man comes hobbling out (men at toll-gates are mostly one-legged), in his hand a candle, to which the white morning is beginning to give a very sickly, yellow look: it seems to Esther that he will never have done fumbling in his breeches-pocket for the sixpence of change that eludes his search.
"Why do you stop? Cannot you go a little quicker?" asks Esther, hoarsely, her teeth chattering with cold and misery, as the groom allows his horse to walk up a long, gentle incline.
"Sir Tummas allus gives pertikler horders as we should walk the 'orses up this 'ill," replies the man; "you see, 'm, it's collar-work pretty nigh all the way from our place to Brainton."
"But it is such a little hill, and Sir Thomas need never know," pleads Esther, imploringly. "I have not got any money now, but if you'll take me quicker—a good deal quicker—I will send you five shillings—ten shillings—by post, when I get home."
"Much obliged to you, ma'am," answers the man, touching his hat, and giving another instance of the influence of filthy lucre by whipping up his horse.
"When is the next train to Berwyn?" cries Esther, almost before they had pulled up at the station, to a porter, who stands waiting to receive any arriving passengers.
"7.20," replies the man, briefly.
"And what time is it now?"
"6.15."
"Is not there one before 7.20?"
"None; you are just too late for the 6.10 one; it has been gone about five minutes."
Unmindful of the presence of the careless, indifferent onlookers, Esther clasps her cold hands together and groans. In a great despair, as in a great bodily agony, we do not much mind who sees or hears us.
"Too late!" she says, with a heavy, tearless sob—"five minutes too late! Oh God, itishard!"
"Any luggage, Miss?" asks the porter, in his civil, matter-of-fact voice.
The common-place question brings her back to life. "No, none," she answers, collecting herself; and so saying walks into the station, and, taking refuge in the waiting-room, sinks down upon a green Utrecht velvet chair.
Owing to the earliness of the hour, other occupant of the room is there none; neither is there any fire (a fire always looks in good spirits; it never has the blues). Alongside of the empty fire-place stands a stiff, green Utrecht velvet sofa, and round the bare table more green Utrecht velvet chairs. Opposite to Esther, against the wall, hangs a roll of texts. Involuntarily her haggard eyes lift themselves to them, and light upon this one—which, under the slightly inappropriate title of "Encouragements to Repentance," heads the list: "Woe to me, for I am undone!" She shudders, "Is it an omen?" turns away her head quickly, and tries to look out of window, but the wire-blind hinders her gaze. Once again, "Woe is me, for I am undone!" standing out clear and black in large type from the white paper, greets her eyes. She can bear it no longer, but rising hastily, runs out, and begins to walk swiftly up and down the platform.
Brainton is a large station—a junction of many lines. Engines are snorting and puffing about; boilers letting off steam, with a noise calculated to break the drum of any ear; tarpaulin-covered waggons standing shunted on side lines. A train has just come in, and is disgorging its human load; a man with a hammer is walking along by the side of it, stooping and tapping the wheels; porters are driving luggage-piled trucks before them, and shouting out, "By your leave!" to any unwary traveller who may cross the relentless path of their Juggernaut: other parties are enduring and answering, with angelic patience andbonhomie, the agitated and incoherent questions of unprotected females in waterproof cloaks and turn-down hats. Everybody and everything is rampantlyalive;even to his handiwork, man seems to have imparted some of his own intense vitality; to the engines he has given motion and voice—motion and voice ten thousandfold stronger than his own.
In her hurried walks, Esther suddenly comes face to face with a fair-haired youth, who, followed by a porter carrying a gun-case, is walking lightly along with his hands in his pockets, whistling for very lightheartedness,
"I paddle my own canoe."
Jack's tune! What business has he to whistle it? All fair-haired youths, with nothing very prominent in any of their features, are more or less alike; and this amount of resemblance the unknown bears to her boy. Long after he has passed her, amid the shrieking of the engines, the shouts of the porters—"Take your seats for Wolverhampton, Birmingham!" "All here for Chester, Warrington, and Manchester?"—the well-known tune echos faintly back to her ears. An overpowering, blinding, deafening rush of feeling comes over her; she sits down hastily on a bench that is near at hand, in close proximity to an Irish labourer, with a blue-spotted bundle, and, careless of the contaminating contact, buries her head in her hands, and rocks to and fro in a paroxysm of despair.
It is one of those incontrovertible facts that we all know to be true, and that we all feel to be false, that every hour is of the same length; that in an hour of Elysium there are sixty whole minutes, and that in an hour of Hades there are only sixty. In Esther's hour of waiting there are, however, seventy-five minutes, as the train is a quarter of an hour late.
"Is it a fast train?" she asks eagerly of the bearded guard, who, with the politeness inborn in guards, opens the carriage-door for her.
"No, miss," he answers, with suavity—"slow train, miss; stops at every station; 6.10 was the fast train, miss!"
Off at last, sliding slowly at first past platform, officials, trucks, book-stalls, dowdy women and dusty men; then the wind comes beating with a strong rush against Esther's cheeks, blowing back her hair, as they fly through the air at the rate of fifty miles an hour.
The transit from Brainton to Berwyn occupies three hours, and during the greater part of that time Miss Craven maintains almost exactly the same attitude; with her greedy eyes devouring every field and tree and homestead as they run past—each village spire and bridge a finger-post to tell her that she is so much nearer her boy. She does not cry at all, or groan. Even had she wished to do so, conventionality—that makes us laugh when we would fain weep, makes us weep when we would fain laugh—would have forbidden her, for she is not alone in the carriage. Two other travellers share it with her—two extremely cheerful young men, to whom it is a matter of supreme indifference how many hedges and meadows are before, how many behind them. They are not exactly gentlemen: and indeed it is a matter of almost as curious inquiry as what becomes of all the pins that are made and lost, in what part of the train, if it be not in the guard's van, gentlemen and ladies travel, as assuredly they are but seldom to be met with in first-class carriages. The two youths have made themselves and their hat-boxes, rugs, &c., luxuriously comfortable, and seem rather disposed to be funny—to "show off," as children say, for the benefit of the lovely girl, who looks so disconsolate and dishevelled, who seems so unflatteringly unaware of their presence. They eat sandwiches and drink sherry; they are provided with a large stock of all the morning papers, and by-and-by the eldest and boldest of them proffersPunch, Fun, and half-a-dozen other dreary comicalities to Esther. She looks at him for a second with her large wistful eyes as she declines the offered civility, and then resumes her watch. Having obtained that one short glance, he ceases from his witticisms, half-conscious of being in the company of a great sorrow—as we involuntarily hush our voices and speak softly in the presence of our great master and owner—Death. Perhaps, cowardly slaves as we are, we fear lest, if we should speak loudly, he might be reminded of our existence—might lay his heavy hand on our shoulders also.
Another hour of waiting at Berwyn—another hour before there is any train for the branch line that leads to Glan-yr-Afon—any train, at least, that stops at so insignificant a station. Another hour of tramping in forlorn, impotent impatience up and down the platform, hustled by a hurrying crowd, who know nothing, and care, if possible, less, about her and her grief. Well, if every one in England wept for every one else's sorrows, the noise of tears and sobbings would drown the whirring of all the mills in Leeds and Manchester—the booming of all the cannon at Shoeburyness. It is half an hour past noon, when, almost before the train has stopped at the little wayside station, Esther springs out. She is the only passenger for Glan-yr-Afon; and the man who unites in himself the functions of station-master and porter looks at her with a recognising eye. He must know whether Jack is alive or dead. He looks much as usual, but so he would whether Jack were alive or dead. Feeling an overmastering sense of fear of and repugnance from the news he may have to give her, she runs to the little wicket that leads out into the road.
"Your ticket, please, miss!" cries the man, following her.
She had forgotten it; it takes a minute to extricate it from her glove; she thinks that he looks as if he were going to speak; and, in a blind terror of what he might say, turns from him and rushes down the road. Any suspense is better than some certainties.
The mountains stand still and drowsy in the sleepiness of midday. Through the mistiness of the air, the russet glories of the dying bracken blaze on their breasts: the oak-woods still keep their deep dusk green, but the sycamore has felt the kiss of winter, and is growing red and sere beneath it. The sun is reigning, sole despot of the sky, having banished every rebel cloud beyond the horizon's limits. It is almost always fine weather when we are most miserable. Whatever poets say to the contrary, Nature is not sympathetic: rather is she very insolent to us in her triumphant, durable beauty. She loves to say to us, "Though you are weeping, my eyes are dry: though you are very sick and feeble, I am strong and fair: though you are most short-lived, here to-day and gone to-morrow, I am eternal, Iendure."
In the meadow below the house, Jack's sheep are browsing—the Cheviots that he was so proud of: down the stony, steep back-road the cart-horses come jogging, to be watered at the pool at the hill-foot. With shortened breath and straining muscles, Esther runs fleetly past them, not daring to look into the carter's face. Through the gate, by the stables, and then the familiar little old house comes in sight, with its high-pitched roof and its old-fashioned chimney-pots. White pigeons are walking about on the gravelled sweep, bowing and scraping, and making love, with a formal solemnity worthy of Sir Charles Grandison. The Virginia creeper's scarlet banners wave from the wall; the hall-window is open; on the ledge lies a tabby cat, with one eye open and the other shut; two cocks are crowing in emulous rivalry in the farmyard. Everything looks peaceful, happy,alive. Gathering a little feeble hope from these signs, Esther collects her small remnant of breath, and runs towards the door. She has nearly reached it, when, stepping hastily out from the porch, one comes to meet her:one, but nottheone: he will pass through that porch but once again, and then not of his own accord, but borne heavily on others' shoulders. Unable to frame any speech, Esther looks up mutely in Brandon's face (for it is he), and there reads her doom. "He is dead—he is dead!" she sees written wetly on either eye.
"He is better off than we are," says the young man, brokenly, taking hold of both her hands.
She sits down heavily on the bench in the porch: what hurry is there now? After all, it is but a poor shabby remnant of us that Death gets when he makes his final claim upon us; in most of us the greater, better part has died long before. Of Esther, three-fourths died as she sat on the oak bench in the porch that autumn morning: breath remained, and blood still circulated through veins and arteries, and speech and hearing were left; but youth, and hope, and heart, died very suddenly and utterly, to come back to life again never any more. She sits staring vacantly at the seat opposite her for several minutes, and then speaks distinctly, almost loudly: "How long ago?"
"About eight," answers Brandon, briefly and sadly, turning away his head to hide his womanish tears for the young fellow that fell asleep so gently in his arms, in the early morning, when other folks were waking.
"What was it killed him?" asks the girl, in the same hard, clear voice.
Bob looks at her in astonishment: he had been steeling himself against faintings, hysterics, a terrible scene of shrieks and waitings, but this conscious stony collectedness fills him with a fearful surprise.
"It was diphtheria," he answers, sorrowfully taking her hand again, and stroking it, while his hot tears fall thick upon it.
She leaves it in his, passive as the hand of a statue, unknowing, indifferent, whether he held it or not.
"Did he suffer much?" she inquires, lifting her lovely, hopeless eyes piteously to his face.
"Not at the last," answers Brandon, evasively, almost under his breath.
Silence for a few seconds: the cocks are still crowing, the pigeons courting, the cat purring on the window-sill: Nature is fond of these horrible contrasts.
Presently she speaks again: "Why was not I sent for before?" she asks in a rough, harsh whisper.
"We telegraphed for you yesterday morning, the instant that we found there was any danger," he replies, speaking very gently, but wincing a little under the reproach implied in her question.
"And it did not reach me till this morning. If I had had it when I ought, I suppose I should have been in time to see him," she says, with apathy, looking away towards the misty hill.
"He sent you his love," says Brandon, struggling again with that same breaking in his voice. "Dear fellow! he was quite happy!"
"Was he?" she says, with the same vacant look. "I'll go to him." As she speaks, she rises and moves towards the door.
"You had better not," he says hastily, laying his hand on her arm.
"Why?" inquires she, looking at him with perfect calmness; "are you afraid of my fainting or going into hysterics? You need not be; it is only that I am not the least sorry that Jack is dead, and that I want to be."
"It is not that," he answers, earnestly; "but—but—you know, dear, that it is a terribly infectious complaint."
"Is it?" she answers, a ray of animation lighting up her haggard face. "I'm glad; perhaps God will let me catch it!"
Seeing that she is resolute, he ceases trying to dissuade her. In the small dark hall, old Luath is lying on the rug; seeing Esther enter, he raises himself quickly, and goes to meet her, with heavy tail wagging and affectionate eyes, on which age is written in blue dimness. Now that the master's sister has come home, he is sure that the master cannot be far behind. He is waiting for him, waiting to walk round the farm; he has been waiting this long time, thinking that he has gone upon a journey; and so he has. But oh! Luath, it is a journey on which man may take neither horse nor dog, neither wife, nor sister, nor friend; a journey on which some man, woman, or child is setting off every minute that beats; and whence no explorers return, with maps and charts, and wondrous tales, to vaunt themselves of their exploits, and be extolled and praised as benefactors to their race. Let us hope that it is because they find that country most pleasant that they come not again. In the drawing-room a canary is shrilling his loud, sharp song: they have thrown a shawl over his cage to keep him quiet; but through the shawl the sun pierces, and the bird's keen clear jubilation goes up to meet it. How can he sing so very gaily now Jack is dead? At the room-door they pause.
"Don't come in! I'd rather have him to myself, please," Esther says, in a steady whisper.
"Promise not to kiss him, Essie!" Brandon rejoins, very earnestly; also in a whisper, "We cannot spare you too."
She takes no notice of his request, but, opening the door gently, enters the chamber, where the king of kings, and lord of lords, almighty Death—before whom we all grovelling do unwilling obeisance—is holding one of his myriad courts. It is but a small, slightly furnished room in which he is holding this one, but that concerns him but little. His majesty is so great that he can afford to dispense with the adventitious adjuncts of pomp and circumstance. Without his crown and sceptre, without his courtiers—Plague, Pestilence, and Famine—he is still very king and emperor.
The window is open, but the white curtains drawn—
"While through the lattice ivy shadows creep."
On the table stand physic-bottles—puny foils with which we fence with death—and an open Bible, out of which Brandon, with shaking voice, and a weak, dying hand held in his strong tender one, read the old comfortable words that have soothed many a transit, to the young traveller who was setting out meekly, and not fearfully, in the autumn morning. Over the bed spreads a white sheet, and beneath it a formless form!
Can that be Jack? Can that be Jack, lying still and idle in the bright midday?—Jack, to whom the shelter of a house was ever irksome, who was up and about at cock-crow, to whom all weathers were the same, and the bracing wind blowing about the heathery hills the very breath of his nostrils? A feeling of incredulity steals over her. She walks to the bed and turns down the sheet from the face, and the incredulity deepens into incredulous awe. Oh, ye liars! all ye that say that sleep and death are alike! what kinship is there between the pliant relaxer of soft limbs, the light brief slumber, that, at any trivial noise, a trumpeting gnat or distant calling voice, flies and is dissolved, and the grave stiff whiteness of that profoundest rest that no thousand booming cannons, no rock-rending earthquake, no earth-riving thunderbolt can break? It is an insult to that strong narcotic to liken any other repose to that he gives. They have crossed the young fellow's hands upon his unheaving breast, meekly, as the hands of one that prayeth; and laid sprigs of grey-flowered rosemary in them. She looks at him steadfastly, a great, awful amazement in her dilated eyes. Isthisthe boy that whistled "I paddle my own canoe"—whose step, glad and noisy, echoed about the stairs?—the boy that sat and smoked at the study window, with her fond head resting on his young slight shoulder?—the boy that was worried about failing crops and barren land?—the boy whose laugh had a sincerer ring in it than any one else's, who made so many jokes, and had such a light heart? Canthisbe he—this white, awful, beautiful statue? Was ever crowned king, in purple and minever, half so majestical as he, as he lies on his narrow bed in the scant poor room, with that serene stern smile that only dead mouths wear on his solemn changed face?—that smile that seems to say, "I have overcome! Iknow!"
Esther's love for Jack is great as love can be—greater than Jonathan's for David, greater than David's for Absalom; and this pale, prone figure is unearthly fair and grand; but can she connect the two ideas? What have they to say to one another? Can she realise that if this form be not her brother, neither will she find him again on the earth's face, though she seek him carefully with tears. For one instant it comes home to her; for one instant light darts into her soul—light keen and cruel as the forked lightning flash that, on some mirk night, glares blinding bright into a dark room, illumining every object as with the furnace-fires of hell! She sinks on her trembling knees by the bedside, and says, with dumb, heart-wrung entreaty—"God! God! give him back to me, or let me go where he is."
But the great Lord that said once, "Lazarus, come forth!" has said "Come forth!" to never another since him. "Lie thou still, till I call thee!" He says; and none durst move hand or foot. But since he cannot come to her, why should not she go to him? Has the disease that slew him spent all its force on that one slight frame? Is not there enough of it left to kill her too? It was Juliet's thought when she spake reproachingly to her dead Romeo, as she looked into the empty poison-cup—
"Oh, churl! drink all and leave no friendly drop,To help me after——."
Suddenly Brandon's beseeching words recur to her: "Promise not to kiss him, Essie!" If she kiss him, he may give her the boon of death. Instantly she rises, and stooping over him, lays her tremulous warm lips on his still cheek. The unearthly awful cold of the contact between the dead and the living strikes a chilly shrinking along her veins and limbs; but not for that shrinking does she desist. Again and again she kisses him, driven on by that strong drear hope, saying moaningly, "My boy,! my boy!—give it me! give it me!" Then unbelief comes back. This is not Jack: he is somewhere else. She will find him by-and-by. This is very terrible, this present experience, but she catches herself thinking she will tell Jack all about it when she sees him. To the incredulity succeeds a stupid apathy. She sinks down upon her knees again, with her elbows resting on the counterpane, and fixes her stony eyes upon the dead stripling; watches him; looks at him steadfastly, without intermission; looks at "the shell of a flown bird," as the old philosopher very grandly said. She does not know how long she means to stay there; she does not know how long she has already staid there; when some one entering, lays his hand upon her shoulder, and says, with kindly gravity, "Come away, dear!"
"I am doing no harm!" she answers dully, not moving her eyes.
"Come, darling!" he says, not attempting to reason with her, but speaking in the coaxing tone one would use to a fractious sickly child.
She answers neither "Ay" nor "Nay;" she neither resists nor consents, and so, half carrying, half leading, he takes her from the room, and they leave poor Jack lying all alone in his shroud, smiling sternly sweet.
So the blinds are drawn down; a sort of notice that people put in their windows, saying, "Do not look in, or you will see Death!" and the few neighbours round drive up and inquire how Miss Craven is, and are informed that she is pretty well. And the servants each do the other's work; and there is a general interestingbouleversementin the household, and much chattering and crying and a stream of visitors in the kitchen. And Brandon goes hither and thither, taking upon himself all the drear work of arranging Jack's final departure from his home among the mountains, and keeping at bay his mothers and sisters, who, armed with bibles, hymnals, and "Reflections for a Mourner," are prepared to sally forth in proselytising ardour upon the conquest of Esther's soul. And Esther herself is, for the time, soulless as the fair marble mask in the quiet room upstairs.
"His lips are very mild and meek;Though one should smite him on the cheek,Or on the mouth, he will not speak."
If any one were to smite her on lip or cheek, neither would she resent it or complain; she sits in an armchair, in the drawing-room, with her hands folded in her lap, and the servants bring her tea every half-hour (incessant tea being supposed to be the necessary accompaniment of great grief), and request her to "keep up." So she sits in the armchair all day long—trying to be sorry, trying to weep. She has had Sarah in, and has made her tell her all the particulars of her brother's last hours; has listened attentively while the woman—the easy tears streaming down her cheeks—relates how "Mr. Brandon was with poor master all along, from the very first, and if he had been his own born brother, he could not have been kinder," and how he lifted him up in his arms, and laid his head on his shoulder—"Master could breathe easier so, poor dear young gentleman!"—andhe(master) had been so pleasant-spoken to the last, and had said, said he, 'God bless you, old fellow! I'd have done as much for you, if I had had the chance;' and how, about seven o'clock, he had asked what o'clock it was—we all knew what that meant—and had then seemed to fall asleep in Mr. Brandon's arms, and just as the clock struck eight, he gave a sigh—like that—and a sort of pleasant bit of a smile, and was gone all in a minute!" It is very touching, but it does not touch Esther. She rises and walks into the hall, and looks at his greatcoat and his hat, and kisses his gloves, that seem to retain somewhat of the shape of the kind hands that once filled them. She thinks resolutely of how he has been her one friend throughout life; thinks of the presents he gave her, and of how seldom he went to any town without bringing her some little remembrance back from it; thinks of that last five-pound note, so hardly spared, and yet so very gladly given; thinks of how poor he was, how slight, how young. But it is all no good; it seems to her like some pathetic tale about a stranger that she is telling herself. And the days pass, and she grows weak from inanition, but refuses all food. If she can be unnatural, horrible enough to feel hunger and thirst now Jack is dead, at all events she will not indulge her low nature; and so she eats not, and her pulse grows feeble,
"And all the wheels of being slow!"
So it comes to pass that she falls sick and is carried up to bed, and lies there half in sleep, half in insensibility. And the mornings and the evenings go by, and Jack's burial-day comes. They had hoped that it would have passed without her knowing, but it was not so. Now that he is leaving his home for this last time, he does not go light-springing down the stairs, as at other times, but with much tramping of strange feet, with purposed muffling of strange voices. How can she fail to hear,
"The steps of the bearers heavy and slow?"
Through all her trance it breaks; from her little latticed window, with her sick limbs trembling beneath her, and her miserable eyes nailed to the gaoler coffin, in whose strait custody her dead lies prisoned, she sees the drooped pall and the black-scarfed mourners. These mourners are but few, for Jack—though now awfuller than any absolutest monarch—was, in life, poor and of little consequence: the gap made by the extinction of that one young life is but narrow. Standing there, she feels a pang of bitter regret and anguish that there are not more people to be sorry for Jack. And so, being weak, the fountains of her soul are broken up within her, and she falls to weeping mightily; and, but for that weeping, she would, perchance, have died, some say; but I think not—for why should grief, being our natural element, kill us any more than water the fish, or air the bird?
Thus the grave yawns for another victim, and having swallowed him, and a million more that same day, returns to its former state of insatiable famished greed. It is a law—natural, wise, and comprehensible by the feeblest understanding—that all created beings, in which there is progressive life, must come forth, ripen, decay, and fall. But why, oh! why, in too many cases does the decay and fall forerun the ripening? Why is so many a worm permitted to gnaw out so many a closed bud's green heart? Why is the canker death allowed to pasture on so many an unblown life? Why are so many little toddling children, not yet come into the heritage of reason to which we are all by our human birth entitled, borne from their mother's emptied arms to their small short graves? Is it, as Hartley Coleridge very nobly, whether truly or untruly, said—
"God only made them for his Christ to save?"
Very wasteful is the mighty mother, knowing that her materials are inexhaustible. And so they lay Jack down in the wormy grave.
"Bear, bear him along,With his few faults shut up like dead flow'rets."
No one will ever abuse him or say anything ill-natured of him again; for to speak evil of the helpless, speechless, answerless dead, requires a heart as bad, a nature as cowardly vile, as his must be that foully murders a young child. And the mourners go home, and take off their hatbands and scarves, and give them to their wives to make aprons of. And old Luath lies in the hall, watching still, with ears attentively pricked at any incoming footstep, and hope drooping, as day droops too, begins to howl dismally towards sun-down.
And Esther—"You ought not to grieve for him; it is a happy change for him; he is in Heaven!" So they had said to her weepingly, as people do say to us, when the desire of our eyes has left us; but even as they spake them, she felt that they were but words, hollow and empty as the greetings in the market-place with which we salute our indifferent acquaintance. Was she so sure that the change had been a happy one? It was a change from the known to the unknown, from moderate certain evils, and moderate probable good, to infinite possibilities of horror or blessedness. Where lay this heaven, this promised land, where we so confidently lodge our dead? Was it up above that highest bluest arch that looks in truth pure enough, and solid enough, to be the floor of some sweet elysium? Ah! no! Human knowledge, that like a naughty, prying child, has found out at once so infinitely too much and too little, tells us that that skyey vault is but thin air. She thinks, shuddering—"What if heaven itself be but thin air?Is it anywhere?What if its existence at all be but the fine-spun fancy of poor human hearts, that must needs frame for themselves some blessed definite hope, sincerealhope have they none? Is it a beautiful tender fraud practised by themselves upon themselves, to save them from the despair of the black vagueness into which they must send out their departed ones, and go out themselves when life's little day is over? Oh, light! light! When the great God said, 'Let there be light!' in the material world, why did not He say so too in the world of spirits? I know that my soul shall live for ever! I know that there is that within me over which the most insatiable of monsters, insatiabler than any slain in classic tale—a monster that turns beauty to unsightliness, whose handmaid is corruption, and whose drink is tears—has no power. But alas! alas! can I rejoice in my immortality, when I know not where, or under what conditions, those endless, endless æons will roll themselves away into the past?"
"We must bow beneath the rod," says old Mrs. Brandon, nodding her head and her poke bonnet. It is the identical poke bonnet, and not another, in which she once paid her congratulatory visit. The summer sun had browned it a little, but otherwise it is in a state of high efficiency. "We must bow beneath the rod, knowing that it is atender Father'shand that wields it."
"I suppose so," answers Esther, listlessly. To her it seems a matter of indifference whose hand it was that inflicted such an immedicable hurt, seeing that it has been inflicted by some one, and now yawns, a gaping rift in her soul, never to be assuaged by any balsam.
"Suppose!" cries Miss Bessy, her long, uncertain nose reddening a little in her righteous zeal, at the slackness of Esther's faith. "Surely, surely, if we areBelievers, there can be no 'suppose' in such a case."
"I did not mean to express any doubt," Esther says, gently, but wearily.
"Supposewill not do us much good at theLast Day," continues Miss Bessy, rather venomously. "Unless we can lay fast hold upon Jesus" (laying hold of a roll of paper to exemplify the tenacity of her own grasp[1]), "unless we have assurance that we areElect, where are we?"
"If it is any comfort to you, love, you know that you have our prayers," says Mrs. Brandon, squeezing Esther's hand.