CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS AND GORGEOUS PALACES.
Lo! what wrong was her life to thee, Death?
--Rossetti
When Dolly awoke next morning Rhoda was dressed and her bed was empty.
The window had been opened, but the light was carefully shaded by the
old brown curtains. Dolly lay quite still; she felt strangely tired, and
as if she had been for a very long journey, toiling along a weary road.
And so she had, in truth; she had travelled along a road that no one
ever retraces, she had learnt a secret that no one ever forgets.
Henceforth in many places and hours the vision that haunts each one of
us was revealed to her; that solemn ghost of Death stood before her with
its changing face, at once sad and tender and pitiless. Who shall speak
of it? With our own looks, with the familiar eyes of others, it watches
us through life, the good angel and comforter of the stricken and
desolate, the strength of the weak, the pitiless enemy of home and
peaceful love and tranquil days. But perhaps to some of us the hour may
come when we fall into the mighty arms, feeling that within them is the
home and the love and the peace that they have torn from us.
Dolly was still lying quite quiet and waiting for something to happen,
when the door opened, and her aunt's maid came in carrying a nice little
tray with breakfast upon it. There was a roll, and some French butter in
a white scroll-like saucer, and Dolly's favourite cup.
'My lady is gone out, Miss Dolly,' said Marker, 'but she left word you
was not to be disturbed. It is eleven o'clock, and she is going to take
you and Miss Rhoda for a treat when she gets back.'
'A treat!' said Dolly, languidly; 'that will be nice. Marker, I have to
push my arms to make them go.'
But when Dolly had had her bath and eaten her breakfast, her arms began
to go of themselves. Once, indeed, she turned a little sick and giddy,
for, happening to look out of window into the courtyard below, she saw
that they were carrying away black cloths and silver-spangled draperies,
which somehow brought up the terror of the night before; but her nurse
kissed her, and made her kneel down and say her prayers, and told her in
her homely way that she must not be afraid, that life and death were
made by the same Hand, and ruled over by the same Love. 'The poor young
lady was buried this morning, my dear,' said Marker, 'before you were
awake. Your aunt went with the poor young man.'
Marker was a short, stout, smiling old woman. Lady Sarah was tall and
thin, and silent, and scant in dress, with a brown face and grey hair;
she came in, in her black gown, from the funeral, with her shaggy kind
eyes red with tears.
'You won't forget, my lady, that you promised the young ladies a treat,'
said Marker, who was anxious that Dolly should have something fresh to
think of.
'I have not forgotten,' said Dolly's aunt, smiling, as she looked at the
two children. 'Rhoda must get a remembrance to take back to school,
mustn't she, Dolly? I have ordered a carriage at two.'
There is a royal palace familiar to many of us of which the courts are
shining and busy, and crowded with people. Flowers are growing among
fountains and foliage, and children are at play; there is a sight of
high gabled roofs overhead enclosing it, so do the long lines of the
ancient arcades. Some music is playing to which the children are
dancing. In this strange little world the children seem to grow up to
music in beautiful ready-made little frocks and pinafores, the grown-up
people seem to live on grapes and ices and bonbons, and on the enormous
pears displayed in the windows of the cafes. Everything is more or less
gilt and twinkling,--china flowers bloom delicate and scentless; it
would seem as if the business of life consisted in wandering here and
there, and sipping and resting to the sound of music in the shade of the
orange-trees, and gazing at the many wonders displayed; at the gimcracks
and trinkets and strings of beads, the precious stones, and the silver
and gold, and the fanciful jewels. Are these things all dust and ashes?
Here are others, again, of imitation dross and dust, shining and
dazzling too; and again, imitations of imitations for the poorest and
most credulous, heaped up in harmless glitter and array. Here are
opera-glasses to detect the deceptions, and the deceptions to deceive
the glasses,--bubbles of pomp, thinnest gilding of vanity and
good-humour.
Some twenty years ago Dorothea Vanborough and a great many ladies and
gentlemen her contemporaries were not the respectable middle-aged people
they are now, but very young folks standing on tip-toe to look at life,
which they gazed at with respectful eyes, believing all things, hoping
all things, and interested in all things beyond words or the power of
words to describe. My heroine was a blooming little girl, with her thick
wavy hair plaited into two long tails. She wore a great flapping hat and
frilled trousers, according to the barbarous fashion of the time. Little
Rhoda was shorter and slighter, with great dark eyes and a wistful pale
face; she was all shabbily dressed, and had no frills like Dolly, or
flowers in her hat. The two stood gazing at the portrait of a smiling
little Prince with a blue ribbon, surmounted by a wreath of flowers,
glazed and enclosed in a gilt-locket. I suppose the little girls of the
present[1] bear the same sort of allegiance to the Prince Imperial that
Dolly felt for the little smiling Count of Paris of those days. For the
King his grandfather, for the Dukes and Princes his uncles, hers was a
very vague devotion; but when the old yellow royal coaches used to come
by rumbling and shaking along the Champs Elysees, Dolly for one,
followed by her protesting attendant, would set off running as hard as
she could, and stand at the very edge of the pavement in the hopes of
seeing her little smiling Prince peep out of the carriage-window. He was
also to be seen in effigy on cups, on pin-boxes, and bonbons, and, above
all, to be worn by the little girls in the ornamental fashion I have
described. He smiled impartially from their various tuckers; and,
indeed, many of the youthful possessors of those little gilt lockets are
true to this day to their early impressions.
[Footnote 1: Written before recent events in France.]
So both Dolly and Rhoda came to tell Lady Sarah that they had made up
their minds, what they most admired.
The widow had been sitting upon one of the benches in the garden,
feeling not unlike the skeleton at a feast--a scanty figure in the
sunshine, with a heart scarcely attuned to the bustle and chatter around
her, but she began to tell herself that there must be some use even in
the pomps and vanities of life, when she saw how happy the little girls
looked, how the light had come into Dolly's eyes, and then she gave them
each a solid silver piece out of a purse, which, contrary to the custom
of skeletons, she held ready in her hand.
'Oh, thank you,' says Dolly; 'now I can get no end of things. There's
George and Robert and----'
'It is much better to buy _one_ nice thing to take care of than a great
many little ones,' said Rhoda, philosophically. 'Dolly, you don't manage
well. I don't want to get everything I see. I shall buy that pretty
locket. None of the girls in my class have got one as pretty.'
'Come along quick then,' said Dolly, 'for fear they should have sold
it.'
They left the Palais Royal at last and drove homewards with their
treasures. Dolly never forgot that evening; the carriage drove along
through the May-lit city, by teeming streets, by shady avenues, to the
sounds of life and pleasure-making. Carriages were rolling along with
them; long lines of trees, of people, of pavements led to a great
triumphal archway, over which the little pink clouds were floating,
while an intense sweet thrill of spring rung in the air and in the
spirits of the people. Henriette opened the door to them when they got
home.
'The poor gentleman from below,' she said, 'is waiting for you in the
drawing-room. I told him you would not be long.'
* * * * *
The gentleman was waiting in the drawing-room as Lady Sarah came in with
the two little girls shyly following. She would have sent them away, but
a sort of shyness habitual to her made her shrink from a scene or an
explanation. It may have been some feeling of the same sort which had
induced the widower to go away to the farthest window of the room, where
he stood leaning out with his back turned for an instant after they had
come in.
Coming in out of the dazzle of the streets, the old yellow drawing-room
looked dark and dingy; the lights reflected from the great amphitheatre
without struck on the panelled doors and fusty hangings. All these
furnished houses have a family likeness: chairs with Napoleon backs and
brass-bound legs, tables that cry _vive l'empire_ as plain as tables can
utter, old-fashioned secretaries standing demure with their backs
against the wall, keeping their counsel and their secrets (if there
_are_ such things as secrets). The laurel-crowned clocks tick beneath
their wreaths and memorials of bygone victories, the looking-glasses
placidly relate the faces, the passing figures, the varying lights and
changes as they pass before them. To-night a dusky golden light was
streaming into the room from behind the hills, that were heaving, so
Dolly thought, and dimming the solemn glow of the sky: she saw it all in
an instant; and then, with a throb she recognised this wicked husband
coming from the window where he had been standing with his back to them.
She had never seen him before so close, and yet she seemed to know his
face. He looked very cruel, thought Dolly; he had a pale face and white
set lips, and a sort of dull black gleam flashed from his eyes. He spoke
in a harsh voice. He was very young--a mere boy, with thick fair hair
brushed back from his haggard young face. He might have been, perhaps,
about two or three and twenty.
'I waited for you, Lady Sarah. I came to say good-by,' he said. 'I am
going back to London to-night. I shall never forget your----' His voice
broke. 'How good you have been to me,' he said hoarsely, as he took the
two thin hands in his and wrung them again and again.
The widow's sad face softened as she told him 'to have trust, to be
brave.'
'You don't know what you say,' he said in a common-place way. 'God bless
you.' He was going, but seeing the two, Dolly and Rhoda, standing by the
door looking at him with wondering faces, he stopped short. 'I forgot,'
he said, still in his hard matter-of-fact voice, 'I brought a cross of
Emma's; I thought she would wish it. It won't bring ill-luck,' he said,
with a ghastly sort of laugh. 'She bore crosses enough in her life, poor
soul, but this one, at least, had no nails in it. May I give it to your
little girl?' he said, 'unless she is afraid to take anything from me.'
Lady Sarah did not say no, and the pale young man looked vaguely from
one to the other of the two little girls as they stood there, and then
he took one step towards Dolly, who was the biggest, and who was
standing, straight and tall for her age, in her light-coloured dress,
with her straw hat hanging on her arm. I don't know how to write this of
my poor little heroine. If he had seemed more unhappy, if he had not
looked so strangely and spoken so oddly, she might have understood him
better; but as it was, she thought he was saying terrible things,
laughing and jeering and heartless; so judged Dolly in an innocent
severity. Is it so? Are not the children of this world wiser in their
generation than the children of light? Are there not depths of sin and
repentance undreamt of by the pure in spirit? One seems to grasp at a
meaning which eludes one as one strains at it, wondering what is the
sermon to be preached upon this text.... It was one that little Dolly,
still playing in her childish and peaceful valley, could not understand.
She might forgive as time went on; she had not lived long enough yet
either to forgive or to forget; never once had it occurred to her that
any thought of hers, either of blame or forgiveness, could signify to
any other human being, or that any word or sign of hers could have a
meaning to any one except herself.
Dolly was true to herself, and in those days she used to think that all
her life long she would be always true, and always say all she felt. As
life grows long, and people, living on together through time and sorrow
and experience, realise more and more the complexities of their own
hearts, and sympathise more and more with the failings and sorrows of
others, they are apt to ask themselves with dismay if it is a reality of
life to be less and less uncompromising as complexities increase, less
true to themselves as they are more true to others, and if the very
angels of God are wrestling and at war in their hearts. All through her
life Dolly found, with a bitter experience, that these two angels of
charity and of truth are often very far apart until the miracle of love
comes to unite them. She was strong and true; in after days she prayed
for charity; with charity came sorrow, and doubt, and perplexity.
Charity is long-suffering and kind, and thinks no evil; but then comes
truth crying out, 'Is not wrong wrong; is not falsehood a lie?' Perhaps
it is because truth is not for this life that the two are at variance,
until the day shall come when the light shall come, and with the light
peace and knowledge and love, and then charity itself will be no longer
needed.
And so Dolly, who in those days had scarcely realised even human charity
in her innocent young heart, looked up and saw the wicked man who had
been so cruel to his wife coming towards her with a gift in his hand;
and as she saw him coming, black against the light of the sunset, she
shrank away behind Rhoda, who stood looking up with her dark wistful
eyes. The young man saw Dolly shrink from him, and he stopped short; but
at the same instant he met the tranquil glance of a trustful upturned
face, and, with a sigh, he put the cross (shimmering with a sudden flash
of light) into little Rhoda's soft clasping hand.
'You are not afraid, like your sister? Will you keep it for Emma's
sake?' he said again, in a softer voice.
There was a moment's silence. Lady Sarah, never, at the best of times, a
ready woman, tried to say something, but the words died away. Dolly
looked up, and her eyes met the flash of the young man's two wild
burning eyes. They seemed to her to speak. 'I saw you shrink away,' they
seemed to say. 'You are right; don't come near me--don't come near me.'
But this was only unspoken language.
'Good-by,' he said suddenly to Lady Sarah. 'I am glad to have seen you
once more,' and then he went quickly out of the room without looking
back, leaving them all standing scared and saddened by this melancholy
little scene.
The lights were burning deeper behind the hills; the reflections were
darker. Had there been a sudden storm? No; the sun had set quietly
behind Montmartre, where the poor girl was lying there upon the heights
above the city. Was it Dolly who was trembling, or was it the room that
seemed vibrating to the echo of some disastrous chords that were still
ringing in her ears?
Dolly went to the window and leant out over the wooden bar, looking down
into the rustling glooming lilac garden below. How sad the scent of the
lilac-trees in flower seemed as it came flooding up! She was still
angry, but she was sorry too, and two great tears fell upon the wooden
bar against which she was leaning. She always remembered that evening
when she smelt lilac in flower.
Rhoda was very much pleased with her cross.
'I shall hang it on a black ribbon,' said the child, 'and always think
of the poor gentleman when I wear it; and I shall tell the girls in
class all about him and how he gave it to me.'
'How you took it from him, you mean,' said Lady Sarah, shortly.
'No, indeed, Lady Sarah; he gave it to me,' cried Rhoda, clutching her
treasure quite tight.