'Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now.'
She is gone--passed out into the blackness of the winter evening--gone
before Peggy, paralysed, half-stunned as she is, can arrest her. Was she
ever here? The doubt flashes into the girl's mind. Of late, in her long
vigils, she has seemed to be parted from the spirit-world by but the
consistency of a spider's web. Has that fine partition been broken down?
Has she been seeing visions, and dreaming dreams? Did that crape-gowned
figure ever stand really in the body beside the table? Did she herself
ever look across the lamplight into the still and bottomless despair of
its eyes? Did it really give her Franky's knife, and tell her--oh no, it
is incredible! God can never have granted to her--to her of all people,
sunk so low as she is, far beyond the reach of any joy to touch--to hear
such things as her ears seem to have heard. She looks wildly round the
room.
'It was not true!' she says out loud; 'it was hallucination. It comes of
sleeping so little.'
And yet it must be true, too; for here, clasped in her hand, is the poor
knife, the object of the mother's journey. If that be real, then must
all the rest be real too. As the splendour of this inference breaks in
dazzling overpowering light upon her soul, she sinks on her knees beside
the table, lays down her head upon it at the same spot where Talbot had
laid his head in his heart-break five months ago, while she had stood
over him pronouncing her unjust and inexorable sentence.
'Oh, love, love!' she sighs out; 'dear love! poor love! forgive me! come
back to me! how could I tell?'
And then she lifts her face up to him, as if he were there; her face
irradiated with a joy like that of morning. Yes, though Prue is dying
upstairs, though Franky's pathetic bequest is still held between her
fingers, her heart is leaping. Has not one of her dead been given back
to her? Why, then, shall they not all? In that moment of supreme
elation, it seems to her as if all things were possible; it seems to her
as if Prue must get well, as if all her other dead joys must come
crowding back to welcome that exceeding great one, that has flown to her
with widespread arms out of the night of winter and despair. Prue will
get well. God will make her well. With God all things are possible.
There is a smile of wet radiance on her pale lips, and in her tired
eyes; and she is repeating over and over again to herself, as if by
repetition she would ensure their fulfilment, these lovely promises,
when the door opens and Sarah looks in.
'If you please, 'm, could you come back to Miss Prue?'
'Oh yes, this minute--this minute! How has she been? how is she? Better?
a little better?'
There must be something strange about her own appearance, for her
servant is looking at her in undisguised amazement.
'Better, 'm?' she repeats in a wondering key; 'whatever should make you
think she was better? She has had a bad bout of coughing since you left,
and it has tired her out, so that it quite frightened me. That was
partly why I came for you.'
Before her sentence is ended Peggy is upstairs again and at her sister's
bedside; the transfiguration all dead out of her face.
'You have been a long time away,' says the sick girl feebly, and with a
little of her old querulousness; 'why did you go?'
'I will not go again, darling.'
'But why did you go?' repeats the other with the pertinacity of
sickness; 'where have you been?'
Margaret hesitates a moment; then:
'I have been with Franky Harborough's mother,' she answers gently, the
tears rushing afresh to her eyes, as she holds out the legacy of the
dead child before the faint eyes of the dying one; 'he sent me his
knife; his mother brought it me.'
'Poor Franky!' says Prue softly, but she does not manifest any
curiosity. She only turns her wan face upon the pillow, and closes her
eyes. In the watches of the night, however, she recurs more than once to
the subject, waking up to cry, 'Poor Franky!' and to say, 'How sad it is
when young people die!'
And Peggy acquiesces.
The tired servants have gone to bed. They, too, have had their share of
watching on former nights. Peggy keeps her vigil alone. In the intense
silence of the dark, in the intense silence of the little lonely country
house standing fog-muffled through the enormous November night, beside
its unfrequented country road, she keeps her vigil alone. Not even an
owl calls from the tree-tops, nor does a star look through the murk. In
her night-watching of late she has been tormented with a cruel
over-mastering drowsiness, which has filled her with a remorse such as
those must have felt to whom it was said, 'What, could ye not watch with
Me one hour?' but against which offended nature, being yet stronger than
she, she has once and again contended in vain.
To-night, however, through all the hours of her vigil, she is broadly,
acutely awake. Awake! Yes; but is she sane? That is the question that
over and over again she puts to herself. If she be, what are these
voices that keep calling to her out of the noisy silence? What are these
faces that are becking and mowing at her? What are these flashes of
light, dreader than any darkness--flashes that have the blasphemy to
look like joy--that dart now and again across the sorrow-struck
confusion of her soul? How dare they come? God-sent, or devil-sent;
messengers from heaven, or fiends from hell, how dare they come? They
shall not, shall not thrust themselves between her and her Prue.
When the tarrying dawn comes, it finds her almost as exhausted as it
does her whose stock of mornings and evenings has so nigh run out. It
has come, that tarrying dawn; and Prue, waking up with a start, as by
some infallible instinct she always does as soon as the east has sent
her first weak arrows against the great target of the dark, feebly calls
to her sister to bring her her card that she may erase the one more
parted day from the calendar. But when Peggy's strong and tender arms
have propped her up, when Peggy's fond hand has put the pen into hers it
escapes from her disobedient fingers.
'I do not know what has come to me,' she says with her little smile;
'but you must do it for me--that will be just as well, will not it? You
do not think,' with an anxious catch in her voice, 'that it is ill-luck
your doing it this once, instead of me? If you think so, I will try
again.'
As morning advances there comes a slight renewal of strength--a slight
revival to the dying girl. The servants and the doctor--the kind doctor
who still makes a feint of prescribing--urge upon Margaret to take
advantage of this slight amendment to snatch an hour or two of sleep;
but she pushes away their advice almost rudely. Is not the text still
ringing in her ears, 'What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?' And
Prue, as it turns out, needs her more to-day than most days. For she is
less drowsy and lethargic than she has been of late, able even to plan a
new arrangement of all Freddy's presents, a new grouping round her of
his photographs.
'Had ever any one so many portraits of the same person?' she says with a
tiny white smile, looking contentedly at them, when the new arrangement
has been effected. 'I am very silly about him; but he is silly about me
too, is not he?' with a look of intensely wistful asking in her blue
eyes.
When evening draws on, she begins to grow heavy again.
_When evening draws on!_ Can it be again approaching? already again
approaching--the grisly nightmare night? Why, it seems as if not more
than half an hour had elapsed since day had begun to deal out her
avaricious dole of light! and now she is again withdrawing it. The night
is approaching. The night has approached. The night is here, in dominant
black supremacy. And again Peggy watches. It is not the fault of the
servants that she does so. At any crisis--a sickness, a catastrophe, a
death--servants are almost always kind; and Margaret's are more than
willing to shorten or forego their rest in order to share with her, or
replace her in her vigil. But she dismisses their offers promptly, yet
with a resolution that shows that it would be vain to press them. She
will call them if there is any need. They go reluctantly, and once again
night settles down upon the sad little Red House.
The drowsiness that used to frighten Margaret with its threatened
mastery she has no longer any need to keep at bay. On the contrary, the
preternatural wakefulness which had been with her all last night is with
her still. With her, too, is the thundering silence, beating in her ear
like a loud drum. All her last night's enemies are here again--all but
one, the worst. She has no longer to contend with those flashes of
dreadful incongruous joy. They at least are gone--extinct, dead! He that
had called them forth is massed in her despair with her other dead. They
are all gone irrevocably. The only difference is that God took the
others, and she herself has thrown him away. But they are all equally
gone--gone! If it were not so, if she had any one left, would she be
kneeling here, in this overpowering loneliness, watching Prue go, and
asking God over and over again, in the same stupid agonised words, to
let her go easily?
Yes, it has come to this. We begin by asking such great things for our
beloved--honour, and wisdom, and long life, and riches; and we end in
this, 'Give them a short agony, an easy passing!' Is it a sign that God
has heard her prayer, that as the hours go by Prue begins to talk out
loud, with little laughs between? to talk--not of her cough, and her
physic, and her short breath--but of gay and lovely things. She is
talking to one who is not here, of fair sights that are not before her
dying eyes.
Peggy holds her breath to listen. She is sitting in the garden with
Freddy. She is riding with him through the woods. From what she says, it
must be springtime. What a sheet of harebells! Never any May that she
remembers have they been so many before! And the birds! how loudly they
are singing! She would like to know the note of each, but she is so
stupid, he must teach her!
A great dry sob breaks from the listener's breast.
'Oh, Prue, Prue!' she moans; 'take me with you! Let me, too, see the
flowers and hear the birds!'
But Prue does not heed. She babbles happily on. By and by her wanderings
die down into a sort of semi-stupor, that is neither sleep nor waking.
The silence that her voice had broken is not again wholly restored. It
is exchanged for those indefinite noises of the night which, to timid
souls, seem to share the dominion of terror with its stillness. There
are definite noises too. A mouse gnaws behind the wainscot; the wind has
risen, not into a loud and roaring storm, but into a plaintive piping
and muttering and whistling. A loose rose-branch that in summer sends
its petals flying in through Prue's casement to her feet, is now tapping
pertinaciously on the pane. It seems as if it would not take 'No' for
answer, as if it were crying to her with summoning fingers, 'Come, come!
it is time!'
The night has reached the dreariest of her little hours, that one that
seems equally remote from the comfortable shores of the gone day and the
coming one. The clocks have just struck two, and Peggy kneels on, still
reiterating that monotonous prayer that God will take her Prue gently.
To her ears, though not to her senses, come the noises of the night;
come also noises that do not rightly belong to the province of the
night, that are rather akin to the noises of the day: the sound, for
instance, of wheels outside upon the lonely road, a sound that does not
die away, gradually muffled and fading into the distance, but that
ceases suddenly on the air--ceases, only to be succeeded by the noise of
a vague, subdued stir in the house itself. But Peggy kneels on. The only
noise that she heeds is that of the beckoning rose-branch that calls
continually, 'Come, come!'
She has buried her face in the bed-clothes, praying always; and as she
lifts it again she becomes aware that in the doorway, left ajar to give
Prue more air and ease in breathing, some one is standing, some one
standing at the dead of the night, looking in upon her. But still she
kneels on. She is quite past fear. Is she wandering, like Prue? Is it
some heavenly messenger that has come out of pure pity to her help? If
it be so, it wears the homely human form, the form of one with whom she
once sat under a hawthorn bower, with her happy head upon his breast.
As her solemn, haggard eyes meet his, he advances into the room, and
kneels down beside her. They exchange no word. Their hands meet in no
greeting; only they kneel side by side, until the morning. And at
morning, when the first dawn-streak makes gray the chinks of the
window-shutters, Prue, true to her infallible instinct, wakes up out of
her trance; and, opening her eyes, cries with a loud, clear voice:
'Is it morning? Then there is another day gone. Forty days gone--forty
days!' and so, lifting her face to Peggy to be kissed, as she has done
all her life, before addressing herself to sleep, she closes her eyes,
and turns her face on the pillow with a satisfied sigh; and on that
satisfied sigh her soul slips away.
Speak softly, for Prue is asleep--asleep as Franky Harborough sleeps, as
all they sleep, the time of whose waking is the secret of the Lord God
Omnipotent.
* * * * *
Her little world have long prophesied that Prue would die, and now she
is dead--dead, and, restless as she was, laid to rest in her moss-lined
grave. With the live green moss environing her, with the bride-white
flowers enwrapping her from dreamless head to foot, she has gone--gone
from sofa and settle and garden--gone soon from everywhere, save from
Peggy's heart. And he who is the alone lord and owner of that great
heart does not grudge its place to the poor little figure seated for
ever by that warm fireside; and if, as time goes on, he knows that the
Prue so perennially enthroned there--the Prue of whom in after-days
Peggy's children are taught to talk with lowered voices, as of some
thing too sweet and sacred for common speech--is not the real Prue who
fretted and repined, and loved to madness here on earth, he does not own
it even to himself.
* * * * *
_Postscript._--About six months after the death of Prue Lambton, the
attention of the readers of one of the graver monthlies was arrested by
the appearance in its pages of a short ode, the melody of whose
versification, the delicate aroma of its fancy, the quaint beauty of its
imagery, and the truth and freshness of its feeling, called to their
minds the best of the Elizabethan lyrics. It was anonymous, and was
addressed 'To Prue in Heaven.'
THE END.
_J. D. & Co._
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.
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| Transcriber's Note:-- |
| |
| Punctuation errors have been corrected. |
| |
| The following suspected printer's errors have been addressed.|
| |
| Page 57. ever changed to over. |
| (tumbling over each other). |
| |
| Page 108. percedence changed to precedence. |
| (to grasp at a precedence). |
| |
| Page 206. schnsuchtsvoll changed to sehnsuchtsvoll |
| (Das Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvoll) |
| |
| Page 297. yon changed to you. |
| (you made me think). |
| |
| Page 309. astonied changed to astonished. |
| (to have her astonished eyes). |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+