THE MOST MISERABLE.
It was past noon when Felicita was driven up to the hotel in the
village, where, when she had last been at Engelberg, she had gone to
look upon the dead face of the stranger, who was to carry away the sin
of Roland Sefton, with the shame it would bring upon her, and bury it
forever in his grave. It seemed but a few days ago, and she felt
reluctant to enter the house again. In two or three hours when the
horses were rested, she said to the driver, she would be ready to return
to Stans. Then she wandered out into the village street, thinking she
might come across some peasant at work alone, or some woman standing
idly at her door, with whom she could fall into a casual conversation,
and learn what she had come to ascertain. But she met with no solitary
villager; and she strayed onward, almost unwittingly in the direction of
the cemetery. In passing by the church, she pushed open one of the
heavy, swinging doors, and cast a glance around; there was no one in
sight, but the gabble of boys' voices in some vestry close by reached
her ear, and a laugh rang after it, which echoed noisily in the quiet
aisles. The high altar was lit up by a light from a side-window and her
eye was arrested by it. Still, whether she saw and heard, or was deaf
and blind, she scarcely knew. Her feet were drawn by some irresistible
attraction towards the grave where her husband was not buried.
She did not know in what corner of the graveyard it was to be found; and
when she entered the small enclosure, with its wooden cross at the head
of every narrow mound, she stood still for a minute or two,
hesitatingly, and looking before her with a bewildered and reluctant
air, as if engaged in an enterprise she recoiled from. A young priest,
the curé of the nearest mountain parish, who visiting the grave of one
of his parishioners lately buried at Engelberg, was passing to and fro
among the grassy mounds with his breviary in his hands, and his lips
moving as if in prayer; but at the unexpected sight of a traveller thus
early in the season, his curiosity was aroused, and he bent his steps
towards her. When he was sufficiently near to catch her wandering eye,
he spoke in a quiet and courteous manner--
"Is madame seeking for any special spot?" he inquired.
"Yes," answered Felicita, fastening upon him her large; sad eyes, which
had dark rings below them, intensifying the mournfulness of their
expression, "I am looking for a grave. The grave of a stranger; Roland
Sefton. I have come from England to find it."
Her voice was constrained and low; and the words came in brief, panting
syllables, which sounded almost like sobs. The black-robed priest looked
closely and scrutinizingly into the pallid face turned towards him,
which was as rigid as marble, except for the gleam of the dark eyes.
"Madame is suffering; she is ill!" he said.
"No, not ill," answered Felicita, in an absent manner, as if she was
speaking in a dream, "but of all women the most miserable."
It seemed to the young curé that the English lady was not aware of what
words she uttered. He felt embarrassed and perplexed: all the English
were heretics, and how heretics could be comforted or counselled he did
not know. But the dreamy sadness of her face appealed to his compassion.
The only thing he could do for her was to guide her to the grave she
was seeking.
For the last nine months no hand had cleared away the weeds from around
it, or the moss from gathering upon it. The little pathway trodden by
Jean Merle's feet was overgrown, though still perceptible, and the
priest walked along it, with Felicita following him. Little threads of
grass were filling up the deep clear-cut lettering on the cross; and the
gray and yellow lichens were creeping over the granite. Since the snow
had melted and the sun had shone hotly into the high-lying valley there
had been a rapid growth of vegetation here, as everywhere else, and the
weeds and grass had flourished luxuriantly; but amongst them Alice's
slip of ivy had thrown out new buds and tendrils. The priest paused
before the grave, with Felicita standing beside him silent and
spell-bound. She did not weep or cry, or fling herself upon the ground
beside it, as he had expected. When he looked askance at her marble face
there was no trace of emotion upon it, excepting that her lips moved
very slightly, as if they formed the words inscribed upon the cross.
"It is not in good order just at present," he said, breaking the
oppressive silence; "the peasant who took charge of it, Jean Merle,
disappeared from Engelberg last summer, and has never since been seen or
heard of. They say he was paid to take care of this grave; and truly
when he was here there was no weed, no soil, no little speck of moss
upon it. There was no other grave kept like this. Was Roland Sefton a
relation of Madame?"
"Yes," she whispered, or he thought she whispered it from the motion of
her lips.
"Madame is not a Catholic?" he asked.
Felicita shook her head.
"What a pity! what a pity!" he continued, in a tone of mild regret, "or
I could console her. Yet I will pray for her this night to the good God,
and the Mother of Sorrows, to give her comfort. If she only knew the
solace of opening her heart; even to a fellow-mortal!"
"Does no one know where Jean Merle is?" she asked, in a low but clear
penetrating voice, which startled him, he said afterwards, almost as
much as if the image of the blessed Virgin had spoken to him. With the
effort to speak, a slight color flushed across the pale wan face, and
her eyes fastened eagerly upon him.
"No one, Madame," he replied; "the poor man was a misanthrope, and lived
quite alone, in misery. He came neither to confession nor to mass; but
whether he was a heretic or an atheist no man knew. Where he came from
or where he went to was known only to himself. But they think that he
must have perished on the mountains, for he disappeared suddenly last
August. His little hut is falling into ruins; it was too poor a place
for anybody but him."
"I must go there; where is it?" she inquired, turning abruptly away from
the grave, without a tear or a prayer, he observed. The spell that had
bound her seemed broken; and she looked agitated and hurried. There was
more vigor and decision in her face and manner than he could have
believed possible a few moments before. She was no longer a marble image
of despair.
"If Madame will go quite through the village," he answered, "it is the
last house on the way to Stans. But it cannot be called a house; it is
a ruin. It stands apart from all the rest, like an accursed spot; for no
person will go near it. If Madame goes, she will find no one there."
With a quick yet stately gesture of farewell, Felicita turned away, and
walked swiftly down the little path, not running, but moving so rapidly
that she was soon out of sight. By and by, when he had had time to think
over the interview and to recover from his surprise, he followed her,
but he saw nothing of her; only the miserable hovel where poor Jean
Merle had lived, into which she had probably found an entrance.
Felicita had learned something of what she had come to discover. Jean
Merle had been living in Engelberg until the last summer, though now he
had disappeared. Perished on the mountains! oh! could that be true? It
was likely to be true. He had always been a daring mountaineer when
there was every motive to make him careful of his life; and now what
could make it precious to him? There was no other reason for suddenly
breaking off the thread of his life here in Engelberg; for Felicita had
never imagined it possible that he would return to England. If he had
disappeared he must have perished on the mountains.
Yet there was no relief to her in the thought. If she had heard in
England that he was dead there would have been a sense of deliverance,
and a secret consciousness of real freedom, which would have made her
future course lie before her in brighter and more tranquil light. She
would at least be what she seemed to be. But here, amid the scenes of
his past life, there was a deep compunction in her heart, and a profound
pity for the miserable man, whose neighbors knew nothing about him but
that he had disappeared out of their sight. That she should come to seek
him, and find not even his grave, oppressed her with anguish as she
passed along the village street, till she saw the deserted hut standing
apart like an accursed place, the fit dwelling of an outcast.
The short ladder that led to it was half broken, but she could climb it
easily; and the upper part of the door was partly open, and swinging
lazily to and fro in the light breeze that was astir after the storm.
There was no difficulty in unfastening the bolt which held the lower
half; and Felicita stepped into the low room. She stood for awhile, how
long she did not know, gazing forward with wide open motionless eyes,
the brain scarcely conscious of seeing through them, though the sight
before her was reflected on their dark and glistening surface. A corner
of the roof had fallen in during the winter, and a stream of bright
light shone through it, irradiating the dim and desolate interior. The
abject poverty of her husband's dwelling-place was set in broad
daylight. The windowless walls, the bare black rafters overhead, the
rude bed of juniper branches and ferns, the log-seat, rough as it had
come out of the forest--she saw them all as if she saw them not, so busy
was her brain that it could take no notice of them just now.
So busy was it that all her life seemed to be hurrying and crowding and
whirling through it, with swift pictures starting into momentary
distinctness and dying suddenly to give place to others. It was a
terrifying and enthralling phantasmagoria which held her spell-bound on
the threshold of this ruined hovel, her husband's last shelter.
At last she roused herself, and stepped forward hesitatingly. Her eyes
had fallen upon a book or two at the end of a shelf as black as the
walls; and books had always called to her with a voice that could not be
resisted. She crept slowly and feebly across the mouldering planks of
the floor, through which she could see the grass springing on the turf
below the hut. But when she lifted up the mildewed and dust-covered
volume lying uppermost and opened it, her eyes fell first upon her own
portrait, stained, faded, nearly blotted out; yet herself as she was
when she became Roland Sefton's wife.
She sank down, faint and trembling, on the rough block of wood, and
leaned back against the mouldy walls, with the photograph in her hand,
and her eyes fastened upon it. His mother's portrait, and his
children's, he had given up as evidence of his death; but he had never
parted with hers. Oh! how he had loved her! Would to God she had loved
him as dearly! But she had forsaken him, had separated him from her as
one who was accursed, and whose very name was a malediction. She had
exacted the uttermost farthing from him; his mother, his children, his
home, his very life, to save her name from dishonor. It seemed as if
this tarnished, discolored picture of herself, cherished through all his
misery and desolation, spoke more deeply and poignantly to her than
anything else could do. She fancied she could see him, the way-worn,
haggard, weather-beaten peasant, as she had seen him last, sitting here,
with the black walls shutting him out from all the world, but holding
this portrait in his hands, and looking at it as she did now. And he had
perished on the mountains!
Suddenly all the whirl of her brain grew quiet; the swift thoughts
ceased to rush across it. She felt dull and benumbed as if she could no
longer exert herself to remember or to know anything. Her eyes were
weary of seeing, and the lids drooped over them. The light had become
dim as if the sun had already set. Her ears were growing heavy as though
no sound could ever disturb her again; when a bitter and piercing cry,
such as is seldom drawn from the heart of man, penetrated through all
the lethargy creeping over her. Looking up, with eyes that opened
slowly and painfully, she saw her husband's face bending over her. A
smile of exceeding sweetness and tenderness flitted across her face, and
she tried to stretch out both her hands towards him. But the effort was
the last faint token of life. They had found one another too late.