CHAPTER XX.
PEGGY’S CHANCE.
If there were blue skies now and then in a London February, what was February along the Riviera but the most exquisite springtime? And perhaps on all that favoured shore, Cannes has the richest firstfruits of the fertile year, for it is then that the mimosas are in their glory, and the hill of Californie is a yellow fairyland, an enchanted region,where all the trees drop golden rain.
Eve and her lover husband were at Cannes. Delicious as the place was at this season, and new as the shores of the Mediterranean were to Eve, she and her husband had not come there for their own pleasure. They had come at the advice of the doctors—to give Peggy a chance. That was what it had come to. Peggy’s only chance of living through the winter was to be found in the south. One doctor had suggested Capri, another Sorrento; but for some unexplained reason Vansittart objected to Italy, and then Mentone or Cannes had been talked about; and finally Cannes was decided upon, for medical reasons, in order that Peggy might have the watchful care of Dr. Bright, which might give her an additional chance in the hand-to-hand struggle with her grim adversary.
Vansittart had offered, in the first instance, to send Peggy to the south in the care of one of her elder sisters and an experienced travelling-maid, who should be also a skilled nurse; but Eve had been so distressed at the idea of parting with the ailing child, that of his own accord he had offered to accompany his youngest sister-in-law on the journey that was to give her a chance—alas! only achance. None of the doctors talked of cure as a certainty. Peggy’s family history was bad; and Peggy’s lungs were seriously affected.
It was almost inevitable that the youngest child—born after the mother’s health had begun to fail—should inherit the mother’s fatal tendency to lung disease; but things were altogether different in the case of Eve, the eldest daughter, born before her mother had begun to develop lung trouble. For Eve there was every chance. This was what a distinguished specialist told Vansittart, when he asked piteously if the hereditary disease shown too clearly by Peggy, were likely to appear by-and-by in Eve’s constitution. He was obliged to take what comfort he could from this assurance. He would not alarm Eve by suggesting that her chest should be sounded by the physician who had just passed sentence upon her sister. Perhaps he did not want to know too much. He was content to see his young wife fair and blooming, with all the indications of perfect health, and to believe that she must needs be exempt from inherited evil.
She was enraptured when he offered to take her to the south with Peggy.
“You are more than good, you are adorable,” she cried. “Now I feel justified in having worshipped you. What, you will leave Hampshire just when the hunting is at its best? You will forego all your plans for the spring? And you will put up with a sick child’s company?”
“I shall have my wife’s company, and that is enough. I shall see you happy and at ease, and not wearing yourself to death with anxieties and apprehensions about Peggy.”
“Yes, I shall be ever so much happier with her, should things come to the worst”—her eyes brimmed over with sudden tears at the thought—“it will be so much to be with her—to know that we have made her quite happy.”
They went to Haslemere next morning, and there was a grand scene with Peggy, who screamed with rapture on hearing that Eve and Jack were going to take her to Cannes their very own selves. She, who fancied she had lost Eve for ever, was to live with her, to sleep in the next room to her, to see her every day and all day long.
Then came the journey—the long, long journey, which made Eve and Peggy open wondering eyes at the width of France from sea to sea. They travelled with all those luxuries which modern civilization provides for the traveller who is able and willing to pay. And every detail of the journey was a surprise and a joy for Peggy, who brought upon herself more than one bad fit of coughing by her irrepressible raptures. The luncheon and dinner on board the rushingRapide; the comfortablewagon-litto retire to at Lyons, when darkness had fallen over the monotony of the landscape—and anon the surprise of awaking at midnight in a large bright roomwhere two small beds were veiled like brides in white net curtains, and where piled up pine-logs blazed on a wide open hearth, such as Peggy only knew of in fairy tales.
How comforting was the basin of hot soup which Peggy sipped, squatting beside this cavernous chimney, while Benson, the courier-maid, skilled in nursing invalids, who had been engaged chiefly to wait upon Peggy, unpacked the Gladstone bag, and made everything comfortable for the night. Peggy had slept fitfully all the way from Lyons, hearing as in a dream the porters shouting “Avignon,” at a place where they stopped in the winter darkness, and faintly remembering having heard of a city where Popes lived and tortured people once upon a time. She woke now and again in her white-curtained bed at Marseilles; for however happy her days might be her nights were generally restless and troubled. The new maid was very attentive to her, and gave her lemonade when her throat was parched, but the maid was able to sleep soundly between whiles, when Peggy was lying awake gazing through the white net curtains, and half expecting Robin Goodfellow to come creeping out of the wide black chimney, where the spark had faded from the heap of pale grey ashes on the hearth.
Towards morning Peggy fell into a refreshing slumber, and when she opened her eyes again the room was full of sunshine, and there was a band playing the “Faust Waltz” in the public gardens below.
“Why, it’s summer!” cried Peggy, clapping her hands, and leaping out of the parted white curtains, and rushing to the open window.
The maid was dressed, and Peggy’s breakfast was ready for her. “Oh, such delicious coffee!” she told Eve afterwards, “in a sweet little copper pot, and rolls such as were never made in humdrum England.”
Yes, it was summer, the February summer of that lovely shore. The Vansittarts stayed nearly a week at Marseilles, to rest Peggy after her forty-eight hours’ journey; and to see the Votive Church on the hill, and that famous dungeon on the rock which owes more of its renown to fiction than to fact; and the parting of the ways where the ships sail east and west, to Orient or Afric, the two wonder-worlds for the untravelled European. Eve and Peggy looked longingly at the great steamers vanishing on the horizon, hardly knowing whether, if the choice were put to them, they would go right or left—to the country were the Great Moguls, the jewelled temples, the tiger hunts, the palanquins, the tame elephants with castles on their backs are to be found; or to the country where the Moors live, and where modern civilization camps gipsy-fashion among the vestiges of earth’s most ancient people.
“Where would you like to go best, India or Africa?” asked Eve, as she and Peggy sat side by side in a fairy-like yawl, that went dipping and dancing over those summer waves, and seemed like atoy boat as it sailed under the lee of an Orient steamer bound for Alexandria.
“Oh, I think I would rather go up a pyramid than anything,” gasped Peggy, breathless at the mere thought. “Don’t you remember ‘Belzoni’s Travels,’ that tattered little old book which once was mother’s, and how they used to grope about, Belzoni and his people, and lose themselves in dark passages, and make discoveries inside the Pyramids? And then the Nile, and the crocodiles, which one could always run away from, because they can’t turn, don’t you know? Oh, I think Egypt must be best of all.”
Peggy and her companions were out driving along the Corniche road or sailing over the blue waters every day, and all day long; and the invalid made a most wonderful recovery during that week.
Her nights were ever so much quieter, her appetite had improved. Peggy’s chance began to look like a certainty, and hope revived in Eve’s breast. Hope had never died there. She could not believe that this bright, happy young creature was to be taken away from her. There was such vitality in Peggy, such vigour in those thin arms when they clasped themselves round Eve’s neck, such light and life in the full blue eyes when they looked out upon the movement and variety of the RueCannebière, or the bustle of the quays.
They went on to Cannes, and alighted first at one of the most comfortable hotels in Europe, the Mont Fleuri, so as to take their time in the selection of a home; for they meant to stay in Provence till there was an end of cold weather in England, to go back only when an English spring should have done its worst, and the footsteps of summer should be at hand. If Cannes should grow too warm, there was Grasse; and there were cool retreats perched still higher on the mountain slopes, where they might spend the last month or so of their sojourn. There were reasons why Eve would be glad to escape from the little world in which she was known, reasons why she should prefer the absolute retirement of a villa in a strange land, where she need receive no more visitors than she chose, where she might let it be known among the little community of British residents that she did not desire to be called upon.
They found just the retreat that suited them, high on the eastern hill, which at this season was cloaked with the mimosa’s golden bloom as with a royal garment. The villa stood on higher ground than the Hotel Californie, and all the gulf of San Juan lay at its feet, and the ships at anchor looked like toy ships in the distance of that steep descent, where palm and pine, cypress and olive, lent their varying form and colour to the rough grey rocks, and where garden below garden spread a carpet of vivid flowers, hedges of roses, beds of pink and purple anemones, the scarlet and orange of the ranunculus, amidst the gloom of rocky gorge and pine forest.
Beyond the gulf rose the islands, shadowy at eventide, clear and sunlit in those early mornings when Peggy watched the red fires of dawn lighting up far away yonder towards Italy. She shared Eve’s imaginings about that neighbouring country, and thought with wonder of being so near the border of that mystical land. All her ideas of Italy were derived from “Childe Harold,” the more famous passages of which she had read and learnt diligently under Eve’s instruction, the eldest daughter carrying on the education of the youngest in a casual way, after the homely governess had vanished from the scene.
The villa was small and unpretentious, flung down carelessly, as it seemed, in a spacious garden, a garden which had been neglected of late years, since much smarter villas had risen up, white and ornamental, upon the heights of Californie. But the garden had once been cared for. It was full of roses and ivy-leaved geranium, anemones and narcissi, and, what pleased Peggy most of all, there was a grove of orange trees, where she could lie upon the grass and let the mandarin oranges drop into her lap. Eve and her young sister sat among the oranges for hours at a stretch, Eve working at one of those tiny garments which it was her delight to make—“dressing dolls,” Vansittart called it; Peggy pretending to read, but for the most part gazing at sky or sea, watching the white clouds or the white ships sailing by in the blue.
“Don’t you think heaven must be very like this?” Peggy asked, one quiet noontide, when the sky was of its deepest sapphire, and the air had the warmth and perfume of an English midsummer.
“What, Peg, do you suppose there are orange trees in the ‘Land of the Leal’—orange trees, and smart villas, and afternoon parties?”
“No, no—only the blue sky, and the sea, and the hills jutting out, one beyond another, till they melt into the sky. It looks as if one could never come to the end of it all. It looks just like heaven.”
“Endless, and without limits, like Eternity,” said Vansittart, smiling at her, unconscious that Eve’s head was bending lower and lower over her work to hide the streaming tears. “A pretty fancy. But that boundless-seeming sea is only a big round pool after all; and think how clever it was of Columbus to find his way across the great ocean, and what rapture for Cortez to discover a second ocean, bigger than the first. And yet this earth of ours is only like a grain of sand in the multitude of worlds.”
“Don’t,” cried Peggy, with her fingers in her ears. “You make my head ache. I can’t bear to think of the universe. It’s much too big. Mütterchen used to tell me about it when I was a small child. She made me dream bad dreams. Why isn’t there one nice, comfortable world for us to live in, and one lovely heaven for us to go to after we are dead, and one horrid hell for theverybadpeople, just to prevent their mixing with the good ones? That’s what the Bible means, doesn’t it? I can’t bear to think of anything more than that.”
“Don’t think, darling,” said Eve, sitting down on the grass beside her, and drawing the fragile form close against her own—“don’t think. Only be happy. Breathe this delicious air, bask in this delightful sun, be happy, and get well.”
“Oh, I am getting well as fast as ever I can. Except for my tiresome cough, I am as well as anybody can be. I wonder what they are doing at Fernhurst. Skating on Farmer Green’s pond, perhaps, or crouching over the fire. You know how Hetty would always sit with her head hanging over the coals, in spite of all you could say about spoiling her complexion. And here we spoil our complexions in the sun. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Everything in our lives is wonderful, Peggy. Most of all, that I should have such a husband as Jack.”
Eve held out her hand to that model husband, smiling at him, with eyes that were veiled in tears, more grateful for his goodness to this ailing child than for all the love that he had lavished upon herself.
What a happy season this would have been on the lovely hill beside the tideless sea, if hope had never been dashed with fear! But, alas! there were moments, even at Peggy’s best, when the shadow of doom fell dark across the summer glory of a land that knows not winter. Sometimes, in the midst of her joyous delight in the things around her, a sudden paroxysm of coughing would surprise the poor child, shaking her as if some invisible demon had seized the wasted form by the narrow shoulders, and were trying to tear it piecemeal.
“My enemy has been very cruel to me to-day,” Peggy would say afterwards, with a serio-comic smile. “I thought Dr. Bright would get the better of him.”
At first she used to call that wearing cough her enemy, as she had heard old people talk of their gout or their rheumatism. Later, she talked of her cough as the dragon, and of Dr. Bright as St. George; but although the medical champion might get the better of the dragon now and again, he was a sturdy monster, and harder to kill than the toughest crocodile along the sandy shores of old Nile. Peggy was wonderfully patient, wonderfully hopeful about herself, even when hope began to wax faint in the hearts of her companions, when the trained attendant could tell of sorely troubled nights, and when Eve, creeping in from her adjoining bed-chamber half a dozen times between night and morning, was saddened at finding the fevered head tossing unquietly upon the heaped-up pillows, the blue eyes wide open, and the parched lips uttering speech that told of semi-delirium.
However bad Peggy’s nights were, her days were generally cheerful. She was never tired of the hillside paths, the luxury of ferns, and palms, and aloes, the glory of the golden-tufted mimosas, the peach blossom, the anemones, the silvery threads of water creeping down the rocky gorges, such narrow streamlets, cleaving Titanic rocks. To Peggy these things brought no satiety; while the more earthly enjoyment of afternoon tea at Rumpelmeyer’s, sitting out of doors, and eating as many cakes and bon-bons as ever she liked, was only a lesser revelation of a world where all was beauty. Eve and her husband saw the crowds at Rumpelmeyer’s with an amused interest. They looked on at this curiously blended smart world, this odd mixture of Royal Duchesses and Liverpool merchants, millionaires and impecuniouscavalière servente, Parisian celebrities, the old nobility of France and England—old as the Angevin kings, when England and France were one monarchy—and the newly-gotten wealth of New York and Chicago. Eve and Vansittart looked on and were amused, and then drove back to the villa on the hill, and rejoiced in the seclusion of their own garden, which it had been their delight to improve and beautify. Everything grew so quickly—the rose-trees they planted throve so well that it was like gardening in fairyland.
They were not intruded upon by that smart world which they saw at the tea-shop on the Croisette. At Cannes two things only count as worthy of regard or reverence—the first, fashion; the second, money. Eve and her husband had neither one nor the other. A Hampshire squire, with three thousand a year and a young wife, was a person who could interest nobody. Had he been a bachelor and a dancing man, he would have been eligible and even courted; for dancing men are in a minority, and a ball at the Cercle Nautique is apt to recall Edwin Long’s famous picture of the Babylonian Marriage Market, women of all nationalities waiting to be asked to dance. A Hampshire squire, living quietly with his wife and her sister in one of the cheapest villas in Californie was a person to seek, and not to be sought. If the Vansittarts wanted to be in society they should have brought letters of introduction, observed a Jewish Plutocrat whose garden joined the Vansittarts’ modest enclosure. “We can’t be expected to take any interest in people of whom we know absolutely nothing.”
It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the leaders of Cannes society, the owners of palatial villas, and givers of luncheons and dances, to understand that these pariahs did not desire to enter the charmed circle where wealth was the chief qualification, and where the triple millionaire, however humble his origin, and however dubious the source of his gold, was sure of welcome. Granted that such millionaires were talked of lightly as “good fun.” The smartpeople who laughed were pleased to eat their luncheons, and dance at their balls, or drive on their coaches, or sail in their yachts. For the smart world of Californie and La Route de Frejus February meant a round of luncheons and teas, dinners and dances. Everybody complained of the “strain,” of being “dragged” from party to party, of having “so much to do;” these butterflies treating the futilities of life as if they were penal servitude without option. To these the tranquil happiness of such a couple as Eve and Vansittart was unthinkable. Of course the poor things would be in society if society would have them. Cannes must be very dreary for such as they. It was really a pity that this kind of people did not stop at St. Raphael or go on to Alassio.
While society—looking at the “pretty young woman with the rather handsome husband” from afar, through a tortoiseshell merveilleuse—compassionated their forlorn condition, Eve and Vansittart found the resources of the neighbourhood inexhaustible, had schemes and delights for every day, and Peggy was never tired of comparing the Maritime Alps to heaven. What less in loveliness than heaven could be a land where one could picnic in February? For Peggy’s sake there were many picnics—now in a rocky gorge on the road to Vallauris, where one could sit about the dry bed of a cataract, and set out one’s luncheon on great rocky boulders, screened by feathery palm trees that suggested the South Sea Islands; now on the hilltop at Mougins, with the pinnacled walls of Grasse looking at them, across the deep valley of flower fields and mulberry orchards, blossoming lilies and budding vines; and now, with even more delight, in some sheltered inlet on the level coast of St. Honorat, some tiny cove where the water was brilliant as the jasper sea of the Apocalypse. Sometimes they landed and took their picnic luncheon under the pine trees, or on the edge of the sea—Peggy keenly interested in everything she saw, the time-worn fortress-monastery that rose tall above the level shore, and the modern building with its low-roofed cells and modest chapel, a building whose monastic rule forbade the entrance of Peggy and all her sex, and which therefore inspired the liveliest curiosity on her part. Not less delightful was the sister island of St. Marguerite, with its thrilling mystery of the nameless prisoner, whom Peggy would allow to be none other than a twin brother of the great Louis, and whose faded red velvet chair she looked at with affection and awe.
“To think of his meekly worshipping in this chapel, with an iron mask upon his face, when he might have been reigning over France and making war all over Europe, like the great King.”
“But in that case Louis must have been here. You wouldn’t have a brace of monarchs, Peggy. One brother must have gone to the wall,” argued Vansittart.
“They needn’t have shut him up in a dungeon, and made him wear a mask,” said Peggy.
“True, Peggy; the whole story involves a want of common sense which makes it incredible. I no more believe in a twin brother of Louis Quatorze than in a twin brother of our Prince of Wales, languishing in the Tower of London at this present moment.”
“But you believe there was a masked prisoner,” exclaimed Peggy, with keen anxiety.
“Oh yes, I am willing to believe in the Italian exile. The record of that gentleman’s existence seems tolerably reliable, and a very bad time he had of it. They managed things wonderfully well in those days. A political agitator, or the writer of an unpleasant epigram, could be promptly suppressed. They had prison walls for inconvenient people of all kinds.”
Peggy sighed. She did not care about the Italian politician. She had read her Dumas, and had a settled belief in the royal twin. She liked to think that he had lived and suffered in that cold grey fortress. She cared nothing for Marshal Bazaine, and his legendary leap from the parapet, which the soldier guide recited with his tongue in his cheek. She despised Vansittart for being so curious about such a humdrum incident—an elderly general creeping out of captivity under the nose of guardians who were wilfully blind, and slipping quietly off in a steamer.
Those tranquil days on the islands or on the sea would have been as exquisite for Eve as for Peggy if the heart of the elder sister had not been heavy with anxiety about the younger. During the first few weeks in that soft climate Peggy’s chance had seemed almost a certainty of cure. Even Dr. Bright had been hopeful for those first weeks, surprised by the marked improvement in his patient; but of late he had been grave to despondency, and every consultation strengthened Eve’s fears.
Indeed, there was little need of medical science to reveal the cruel truth. Every week that went by left something of Peggy’s youth and strength behind it. The walks which were easy for her in February were difficult in March, and impossible in April. The ground that was lost was never regained. Eve looked back, and remembered how Peggy had walked to the Signal with her a fortnight after their arrival. They had walked very slowly, and they had sat down to rest several times in the course of the journey; but the ascent had been accomplished without pain, and Peggy had been wild with delight at the prospect which rewarded them at the top.
“We’ll come up here often, won’t we, Eve?”
“As often as you like, darling.”
The second ascent was made in March, when the peach treesand anemones were all in bloom, and the gold of the mimosas was a glory of the past. This time Peggy found the winding walks long and wearisome, and although, in spite of Eve’s entreaties, she persisted in reaching the summit, the journey had evidently been too much for her. She sank exhausted on a bench, and it was nearly an hour before she was rested enough to mount the little platform on which the telescope stood, and explore the distance, looking for the French squadron which was rounding the point of the Esterelles, on its way to Toulon. Poor little Peggy! She was the only person who did not believe in the seriousness of her case.
“You and Dr. Bright make too much fuss about me,” she said to Eve, seeing tears in the fond sister’s eyes. “I am only growing. See how short my frock is! I have grown inches since Christmas.”
She stretched out her thin legs—so thin as to make the feet look abnormally big, and contemplated the spectacle with a satisfied air.
“I am going to be very tall,” she said. “I have only outgrown my strength. That is all that is the matter with me. Sophy and Jenny always said as much. And as for the cough which seems to frighten you so, it’s only a stomach cough. Sophy said so.”
Vansittart had procured every contrivance which could make Peggy’s life easier. He bought her a donkey, on whose back she could be carried up to the Signal, and when her own back grew too weak to endure the fatigue of sitting on the donkey he bought her a wheel chair, which a patient Provençal two-legged beast of burden was willing to drag about all day, if Peggy pleased. And at each stage of her weakness—at each step on the downward road—he found some contrivance to make locomotion easier, so that Peggy might live out of doors, in the sunshine and on the sea.
Alas! there came a day when Peggy no longer cared to be carried about, when even the ripening loveliness of the land, the warmth and splendour of the southern spring, the white-sailed skiff with its quaint old sailors talking their unintelligible Cannois, and chivalrously attentive to Peggy’s lightest wish—the time came when even these things could not tempt her from the couch in the garden, where she lay and watched the opening orange blossoms, and wondered who would be there to mark the first change from green to gold in the turn of the year, or thought of Eve’s wedding and the orange wreath in her hair, and marvelled to remember how strong her young limbs felt in that gladdest of midsummers, and how slight a thing it had been to walk to the Roman village upon Bexley Hill, or to the pine-crowned crest of Blackdown. And now Vansittart had to carry her to the sofa in the orange grove, and she lay there supine all through the golden afternoon, while Eve, who was said to be herself in delicate health, sat in a low chair near her, and read aloud from Dumas’ historical novels, or some fairy tale.
But this increasing weakness was of no consequence, Peggy protested, when she saw Eve looking anxious about her. She had only outgrown her strength. When she had done growing she would be as strong as ever, and able to climb those Sussex hills just as well as ever. But she would not be here to see the flower change to the fruit. That miracle of Nature’s handicraft would be for other eyes—for the eyes of some other weakling, perhaps, passing, like Peggy, through the ordeal of overgrowth. But there was something far more wonderful than tree or flower, which had been whispered about by Peggy’s nurse. There was the hope of a baby nephew or a baby niece in the first month of summer, a baby that was to open its eyes on some cool Alpine valley, to which Mr. and Mrs. Vansittart and their charge would migrate, when the plane trees by the harbour had unfolded their broad leaves, and the sun that looked upon Cannes was too fierce for any but the hardy natives of the old fishing village. In that sweet summer time a baby was to appear among them, and take its place in all their hearts and on all their knees, and was to reign over them by the divine right of the firstborn. Peggy’s nurse told her that, were it only for the sake of this new-comer, she ought to take care of herself, and get well quickly.
“You wouldn’t like not to see the baby, would you, Miss Margaret?”
Peggy always felt inclined to laugh when her prim attendant called her Miss Margaret. She had never been addressed by her baptismal name by any one else; but Benson was a superior person, who had lived only in the best families, and who did everything in a superior way.
“Like not to see Eve’s baby? Why, of course I shall see it—see it and nurse it, every day of my life,” answered Peggy.
“Of course, miss, if you are well enough when June comes.”
“If—I—am—well—enough,” Peggy repeated slowly, turning towards the nurse with an earnest gaze. “Perhaps you mean that I may not live till June. I heard you say something about me to the housemaid yesterday morning when she was making your bed. I was only half asleep; though I was too drowsy to speak and let you know I could hear all you were saying. You are quite wrong—both of you. I have only outgrown my strength. I shall grow up into a strong young woman, and I shall be very fond of Eve’s baby. I shall be the first aunt he will know.”
She stopped to laugh—a hoarse little laugh, which it pained Benson to hear.
“Isn’t that absurd?” she asked. “I am calling the baby ‘he.’ But I do hope it will be a boy—I adore little boys—and I’m afraid I rather hate little girls.”
“A son and heir,” said the nurse, placidly. “That will look nice in the newspapers.”
“Yes, baby will have to be in the newspapers,” agreed Peggy. “His first appearance upon any stage. I should so love to make something for him to wear. Eve is always working for him; though she contrives to keep her work a secret, even from me. ‘Mothers’-meeting work,’ she said, when I asked her what she was so busy about. As if I didn’t know better than that! One doesn’t use the finest lawn and real Valenciennes for mothers’-meeting work. Let me make something for Eve’s baby, Benson, there’s a dear. I would take such pains with my stitches.”
“It would tire you too much, Miss Margaret.”
“No, no, it won’t. My legs are weak—not my fingers. Let me make something, and surprise Eve with it when it is finished.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Vansittart would like you to know, miss. It is a secret.”
“Yes, but Eve knows that I know. I told her that I had been dreaming about her, and that I dreamt there was a baby. It was after I heard you and Paulette whispering—I really did dream—and Eve kissed me, and cried a little, and said perhaps my dream might come true.”
Peggy being very urgent, her nurse brought her some fine flannel, as soft as silk, and cut out a flannel shawl for the unknown, and instructed Peggy as to the manner in which it was to be made, and Peggy was propped up with pillows, and began a floss-silk scallop with neat little stitches, and with an earnest laboriousness which was a touching spectacle; but, alas! after ten minutes of strenuous labour, great beads of perspiration began to roll down Peggy’s flushed face, and the thin arm and hand trembled with the effort.
“Oh, Miss Margaret, you mustn’t work any more,” cried Benson, shocked at her appearance.
“I’m afraid I can’t, Nurse; not any more to-day,” sighed Peggy, sinking back into the pillows, breathless and exhausted. “But I’ll go on with baby’s shawl to-morrow. Please fold it up for me and keep it in your basket. Evemustn’t see it till it’s finished. The stitches are not too long, are they?”
No, the stitches were very small, but crowded one upon another in a manner that indicated resolute effort and failing sight.
“I feel as if I had been making shawls all day, like the poor woman in the poem,” said Peggy. “‘Stitch, stitch, stitch, with eyelids heavy and dim!’ How odd it is that everything seems difficult when one is ill! I thought it was only my legs that were weak, but I’m afraid it’s the whole of me. My finger aches with the weight of my thimble—the dear little gold thimble my brother-in-law gave me on Christmas Day.”
She put the little thimble to her lips, and kissed it as if it were a sentient thing. Vansittart came into the room while she was so engaged.
“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Do you know what I was thinking about?”
“Not I, quotha,” said he, sitting down by Peggy’s couch and taking her thin little hand in his. “Who can presume to thread the labyrinth of a young lady’s mind, without the least little bit of a clue? You must give me a clue, Peg, if you want me to guess.”
“Well, then, I was thinking of you. Is that a clue?”
“Not much of a one, my pet. You might be thinking anything—that my last coat is a bad fit about the shoulders—a true bill, Peggy; that I am growing stupid and indolent in this inconsistent climate, where one sleeps half the day and lies awake more than half the night.”
“I was thinking of your goodness to Eve, and to all of us. My gold thimble; your bringing us here when you would rather have stayed in Hampshire to hunt. And I was thinking how different our lives would have been if you had never come to Fernhurst. Eve would just have gone on slaving to make both ends meet, cutting out all our frocks, and working her Wilcox and Gibbs, and bearing with father’s temper, and going without things. I should have outgrown my strength all the same; but there would have been no one to bring us to Cannes. I should never have seen the Mediterranean, or the Snow Alps, or mother’s grave. I should never have seen Eve in pretty tea-gowns, with nothing in the world to do except sit about and look lovely. You have changed our lives.”
“For better, Peggy?” he asked earnestly.
“Yes, yes; for worlds and worlds better,” she answered, with her arms round his neck.
Benson had crept off to her dinner; Peggy and her brother-in-law were alone.
“God bless you for that assurance, Peggy dear. And—if—if I were not by any means a perfect Christian—if I had done wicked things in my life—given way to a wicked temper, and done some great wrong, not in treachery but in passion, to a fellow-man—could you love me all the same, Peggy?”
“Of course I could. Do you suppose I ever thought you quite perfect? You wouldn’t be half so nice if you were outrageously good. I know you could never be false or treacherous. And as for getting in a passion, and even hitting people, I shouldn’t love you one morsel the less for that. I have often wanted to hit people myself. My own sister Sophy, for instance, when she has been too provoking, with her superior airs and high-flown notions. Kiss me,Jack, again and again. If you were ever so wicked I think I should love you all the same.”
That was Vansittart’s last serious talk with Peggy. It was indeed Peggy’s last serious talk upon this planet, save for the murmured conversation in the dawn of an April day, when the London vicar, who was doing duty at St. George’s, came in before an early celebration to sit beside Peggy’s pillow and speak words of comfort and promise, words that told of a fairer world, whither Peggy’s footsteps were being guided by an impalpable Hand—a world where it might be she would see the faces of the loved and lost—those angel faces, missed here, but living for ever there.
“Do you really believe it, sir?” Peggy asked eagerly, with her thin hand on the grave Churchman’s sleeve, her imploring looks perusing the worn, elderly face. “Shall I really see my mother again—see her and know her in heaven?”
“We know only what He has told us, my dear. ‘In My Father’s house there are many mansions’—and it may be that the homes we have lost—the firesides we remember dimly—the faces that looked upon our cradles—will be found—again—somewhere.”
“Ah, you are crying,” said Peggy. “You would like to believe—just as I would. That is the only heaven I care for—to be with mother—and for Eve and Jack to come to us by-and-by.”
This day, when the vicar came in the early morning, was thought to be Peggy’s last on earth, but she lingered, rallied, and slowly sank again, a gradual fading—painless towards the end; for the stages of suffering which she had borne so patiently were past, and the last hours were peaceful. She could keep her arms round Eve’s neck and listen to the soothing voice of sorrowing love, till even this effort was too much, and the weak arms relaxed their hold, and were gently laid upon the bed in that meek attitude which looked like the final repose. She could hear Eve still—speaking or reading to her in the soft, low voice that was like falling waters—but her mind was wandering in a pleasant dreamland, and she thought she was drifting on a streamlet that winds through the valley between Bexley Hill and Blackdown; through summer pastures where the meadow-sweet grew tall and white beside the water, and where the voices of haymakers were calling to each other across the newly cut grass.
“I should like to have lived to see your child,” were Peggy’s last words, faltered brokenly into Eve’s ear as she knelt beside the bed.
There were long hours of silence; the mute faint struggles of the departing spirit; but that wish was the last of Peggy’s earthly speech.
Eve was broken-hearted. She never knew till the end came howshe had clung to some frail thread of hope; in spite of the Destroyer’s palpable advance; in spite of the physician’s sad certainty; in spite of her husband’s gentle warnings, striving to prepare her for the end. The blow was terrible. Vansittart trembled for life and reason when he saw the intensity of her grief. Always highly strung, she was in a condition of health which made hysteria more to be dreaded. The brief delay between death and burial horrified her; yet to Vansittart that swift departure of the lifeless clay seemed an unutterable relief. For just a few hours the wasted form lay on the rose-strewn bed; and then in the early dimness, before the mists had floated up from the valley, before harbour and parish church stood out clear and bright in the face of the morning sun, came the bearers of the coffin, and at nine o’clock Vansittart went alone to see the loved youngest sister laid in the cemetery on the hill, in the secluded corner he himself had chosen—near the mother’s grave—as a spot where Eve might like to sit by-and-by, when sorrow should be less poignant, a nook from which she could see the shallow bay, and the cloud-capped islands jutting out into the sea, and the tall white lighthouse of Antibes, standing up above the crest of the hill, glorified in the afternoon sun, as if it were nearer heaven than earth.
In everything that Vansittart did at this time his thought was of Eve and her feelings. His grief for her sorrow was no less keen than the sorrow itself. He had been very fond of poor little Peggy, and had grown fonder of her as her weakness increased, and strengthened her claim upon his compassion. But now he saw with Eve’s eyes, thought with Eve’s mind, and every sigh and every tear of hers wrung his heart afresh.
Those earnest words of Peggy’s, spoken with the wasted arms about his neck, were very precious to him. It seemed as if they were in some wise his absolution for the wrong which he had done in keeping the secret of Harold Marchant’s death. Peggy had told him that she and her sister owed comfort and happiness to him—that he had changed the tenor of their lives from struggling penury to luxury and ease. He knew that over and above all these material advantages he had given Harold Marchant’s sister a profound and steadfast love—a love which would last as long as his life, and which was and would be the governing principle of his life—and he told himself that in keeping that dark secret he had done well.
Tranquillized by this assurance he put aside the old fear as something to be forgotten. But there was a nearer fear, a fear which had grown out of Peggy’s illness and death, which no casuistry could lessen or thrust aside. The fear of hereditary phthisis came upon him in the dead of night, and flung its dark shadow across his path by day. He had talked long with Dr. Bright after Peggy’s death, and the kind physician had calmly discussed the probabilities of evil;had held nothing back. Fear there must needs be, in such a case; but there was also ground for hope. Vansittart told the doctor of Eve’s buoyant spirits and energy, her long walks and untiring pleasure in natural scenery. “That does not look like hereditary disease, does it?” he asked, pleading for a hopeful answer.
“Those are good signs, no doubt. Your wife is of an active temperament, highly nervous, but with a very happy disposition. Her sister’s fatal illness has tried her severely; but we must look to the arising of a new interest as the best cure for sorrow.”
“Poor Peggy! Yes, we shall brood less upon her loss when we have our little one to think about.”
The thought of Eve’s coming happiness as a mother was his chief comfort. She could not fail to be consoled by the infant whose tender life would absorb her every thought, whose sleeping and waking would be a source of interest and anxiety. But before the consoler’s coming there was a dreary interval to be bridged over, and this was a cause of fear.
There was a journey to be taken, for the climate of Cannes would be too hot for health, or even for endurance, before mother and child could be moved. Thus it was imperative that they should move without delay. Indeed, Vansittart thought they could not too soon leave the scene so closely associated with the image of the dead—where everything recalled Peggy, and the alternating hopes and fears of those gradual stages on her journey to the grave. On this path her feet had tripped so lightly last February, when her illness was talked of as “only a cough.” Under this giant eucalyptus her couch had been established in April, when walking had become a painful effort, and she could only lie and absorb the beauty of her surroundings, and talk of the coming days in which she would be strong again, and able to go up to the Signal with Jack.
Vansittart fancied that Eve would catch eagerly at the idea of leaving that haunted house; but her grief increased at the thought of going away.
“I like to be here in the place she loved. I can at least console myself with remembering how happy she was with us; and what a joy Californie and the wild walks above Golfe Juan were to her. Sometimes I think she is in the garden still. I lie upon the sofa here and watch the window, expecting to see her come creeping in, leaning upon the stick you gave her—so white and weak and thin—but so bright, so patient, so lovable.”
Then came the inevitable burst of tears, with the threatening of hysteria, and it was all her husband could do to tranquillize her.
“The comfort you get here is a cruel comfort, dearest,” he said. “We shall both be ever so much better away from Cannes—at St. Martin de Lantosque, in the cool mountain air. Our rooms are readyfor us, we shall have our own servants, and if the accommodation be somewhat rough——”
“Do you think I mind roughness with you? I could be happy in a hut. Oh, Jack, you are so patient with my grief! There are people who would say I am foolish to grieve so much for a young sister; but it is the first time Death has touched us since mother went. We were such a happy little band. I never thought that one of us could die, and that one the youngest, the most loving of us all.”
“Dearest, I shall never think your grief unreasonable; but I want you to grieve less, for my sake, for the sake of the future. Think, Eve, only think what it will be to have that new tie between us, a child, belonging equally to each, looking equally to each for all it has of safety and of gladness upon this earth.”