THE SHADOWY DEATH-CHAMBER.
I awoke in the night from a broken and unhealthy sleep. Turner’s voice,
and the tramp of Jupiter outside my window had aroused me. I raised the
sash, and looked out in time to see the old man throw himself on
Jupiter’s back and ride swiftly away. Just then the clock chimed three.
I could not sleep again. A remembrance of the scene by my father’s
death-bed—the knowledge that now he had full proof that I was indeed his
child, came with startling acuteness to my mind. I reflected that in
that house my mother had lived her brief period of happiness, and known
the anguish that at last drove her to death. Never had I felt her memory
so keenly, or her presence so near. A craving desire to draw my soul
closer to hers by material things seized upon me. The room which I could
remember her to have occupied, and that had been so often alluded to in
her journal, had never been opened since she left it. Turner and Maria
avoided the very passage which led to it, and I had shared somewhat in
this spirit of avoidance. Now a desire possessed me to visit that room.
The key was lost, Turner had often told me that, but bolts were of
little consequence to me then. I dressed hurriedly and let myself into
the garden. Around the old stone balcony the vines had run riot for
years, weaving themselves around the heavy balustrades in fantastic and
leafy masses.
I tore these vines asunder, laying the old steps bare and scattering
them with dead leaves, as I made my way to the balcony, which was
literally choked up with the silky tufts of the clematis vines, run to
seed, and passion flowers out of blossom. The nails, grown rusty in the
hinges, gave way as I pulled at the shutters closed for years and years.
Then the sash-door yielded before me, and I stood in the room my mother
had inhabited; and for the first time trod its floor since she left it
on that bitter, bitter night. How well I remembered it! Then I had stood
by her side a little child; now I was a woman alone in its desolation. I
sat down in the darkness till the first tints of dawn revealed all its
dreary outlines. A pile of cushions lay at my feet, and gleams of the
original crimson came up through the dust. On those cushions I had
crouched, watching her through my half-shut lashes as she sat in the
easy-chair, meditating her last appeal to the merciless heart of her
husband.
A cashmere shawl, moth-eaten, and, with its gorgeous tints almost
obliterated, hung over the chair, sweeping the dim carpet with its dusty
fringes. Pictures gleamed around me through a veil of dust; and vases
full of dead flowers stood on the mosaic tables. When I touched the
leaves they crumbled to powder beneath my fingers. I beat the cushions
free from their defacement, and reverently shook out the folds of my
mother’s shawl. These were the objects she had touched last, and to me
they were sacred. The rest I left in its dreariness, glad that time and
creeping insects had spread a pall over them.
Seated in her chair, I watched the dawn break slowly over the garden. It
seemed as if I were waiting for something—as if some object, sacred to
her memory, had called me to that room, and placed me in that chair. It
was a dull morning. Tints that should have been rosy took a pale violet
hue in the east. The birds were beginning to wake up, but as yet they
only moved dreamily in the leaves. No wind was astir, and the shadows of
night still lay beneath the trees of the wilderness. The stillness
around was funereal.
Unconsciously I listened. Yet whom could I expect? What human being ever
entered that room sacred to the memory of one unhappy woman?
At length there came upon this stillness a sound that would have
startled another, but I sat motionless and waited. It was like the
struggling of some animal through the flower thickets—the unequal tread
of footsteps—short pauses and quick gasps of breath. Then a feeble sound
of some one clambering up the steps, and there, upon the balcony, stood
my father.
My heart ceased to beat; for the universe I could not have moved or
spoken. He was dressed so strangely, his under garments all white as
snow, with that gorgeous gown of Damascus silk flowing over. His head
was bare, and the locks curled over the pallid forehead, crisped with a
dampness that I afterwards knew was the death sweat.
He stood within the window, with those great, burning eyes bent on me.
Their look was unearthly—their brightness terrible; but there was no
shrinking in my heart. I hardened under it as steel answers to the
flame.
After shaking the dust from my mother’s shawl, I had laid it back upon
the chair as it was at first; but when I sat down the folds were
disturbed, and fell around my shoulders, till, unconsciously, I had been
draped with them much as was my mother’s custom. Thus I appeared before
her husband and my father, ignorant of the appalling likeness that
struck his dying heart to the centre.
He stood for a whole minute in the sheltered window, never turning his
eyes a moment from my face. Then with a feeble stillness, taking each
step as a child begins to walk, he glided toward me, and, sinking on his
knees at my feet, took my two hands softly in his, and laid his damp
forehead upon them.
“Aurora—Aurora, forgive me, forgive her—I am dying—I am dying!—she
wronged you unconsciously.”
It sounds in the depths of my soul yet—the pathetic anguish of those
words! I could not move: my lips clung together: a stillness like that
of the grave fell over us both. He had taken me, the implacable child,
for the wronged mother; his cold lips lay passive upon my hands, and I
had no power to fling them off.
He meekly lifted his head. Those burning eyes were filled with tears, in
which they seemed to float like stars reflected in water.
“You will not speak it, Aurora, and I am dying?” he murmured, clasping
his arms over my neck, and drawing his head upward to my bosom, till I
could feel the sharp, quick pants of his heart close to mine. “I have
been years and years searching for the thing forgiveness; and now when
your lips alone can speak it, they will not! I am waiting, Aurora—but
you will not let me die! To wait is torture—but you will not speak!”
O my God, forgive me! but the black blood of Egypt rose like gall in the
bottom of my heart, when he spoke of torture in that prayerful,
broken-hearted manner. I forgot him, though he lay heavy as death upon
my bosom, and thought only of the real torture under which she, for whom
I was mistaken, had perished. My heart rose hard and strong, repelling
the feeble flutter of his with the heave of an iron shaft.
“It is not Aurora—I am not your gipsy wife, Lord Clare, but her
child—the foundling of your servant—the scoff of your whole race. I am
Zana!”
“Zana!” he repeated, lifting his eyes with a bewildered and mournful
look, “that was our child; but Aurora, how many times shall I ask where
is she? Have I not come all this weary way to find her? Where is she,
Zana?”
“I gave you her journal,” I said.
“Yes, yes, I have it here under my vest: you will find it by and by, but
let it be a little while. She, Aurora, herself, this writing is not
forgiveness; and I say again, child, I am dying!”
“I have nothing but what she has written,” I answered, shrinking from his
questions as if they had been poniards.
“But she does not tell all—not a word since that night. She was going
somewhere—she talked about dying, but that is not easy, Zana—see how
long I have been about it, and not dead yet. Tell me what she has been
doing since that miserable, miserable night.”
“Ask her in Eternity!” I said, attempting to free myself from his
embrace. “If the dead forgive, ask forgiveness of her there.”
He drew back upon his knees, supporting himself by the marble pressure
of his hands upon my arms.
“Dead. Is Aurora dead?” fell in a whisper from his white lips. “Is she
waiting for me there?”
“She is dead!” I answered.
“When, how, where did she die?” he questioned, with sudden energy, and a
glitter of the eye that burned away all the tears.
I hesitated one minute—an evasion was on my lips. I could not tell him
how his victim had died; it was striking a poniard into the last
struggles of waning life. Suffering from the agony of his look I turned
my head away; the fringe of my mother’s shawl caught in the ruby
ear-rings that were swayed by the motion. A fiery pain shot through my
temple; the gipsy blood ran hot and bitterly in my veins. His voice was
in my ear again, feeble, but commanding.
“Speak—how did Aurora die?”
The answer sprung like burning lava to my lips. I forgot that it was a
dying man to whom I spoke. My words have rung back to my own soul ever
since, clear and sharp as steel.
“_Your wife—my mother—was stoned to death by her tribe in the snow
mountains back of Granada!_”
My father sprang to his feet. For a moment he stood up, stiff and stark,
like a marble shaft: then he reeled forward and fell prone upon the
cushions, with a cry that made every nerve in my body quake.
That cry, that prostrate form, O God forgive me! barbarian that I was—my
voice had smitten him to the soul. I, his only child, had fiendishly
hurled him down to die! I looked upon him where he lay, ghastly and
quivering, like a shot eagle, among the cushions. All the sweet memories
of my infancy came back: a remembrance of the first tender kisses those
lips had pressed on my forehead, seemed burning there in curses of my
cruelty. I knelt down beside him, humbled to the dust, racked with an
anguish so scathing, that while I longed to perish by his side, it
seemed as if I were doomed to live on forever and ever.
I felt a shudder creep over his limbs as I bent over and touched him.
“Father, O my father!” I cried, in terrible anguish, “speak! say that I
have not killed you!”
He did not speak; he did not move; his eyes were closed; his pale hand
lay nerveless upon the carpet. An awful chill crept over me. I felt like
a murderess stricken with the first curse of my crime.
Noises came from the balcony, people were scrambling up the steps,
probably aroused by that fearful cry. I heard Turner’s voice—other
persons were with him. One a professional-looking man, who held a roll
of paper in his hand; another followed, carrying an inkstand bristling
with pens. The first man sat down by a table, upon which some vases
stood, and, unrolling a parchment, looked keenly at Turner.
“Awake him gently, there is no time to lose; this terrible effort must
soon terminate all.”
Turner knelt down by his master, and I drew back, waiting breathlessly
for him to speak; my very salvation seemed hanging on his first word.
How white he grew; how those old hands shook as they touched the pale
fingers that had fallen over the cushion! It was a long time before that
good old man could master the tears that swelled to his throat. The
stillness was profound. No one stirred; the barrister sat with one hand
pressed on the will he had come to execute; the other held the pen
suspended motionless.
“Will he sign now?” questioned the man, in a low voice; “it is all that
is wanting.”
Turner stood up, and his white face was revealed to the barrister, who
began to roll up the parchment.
“Good heavens, is it so?” he exclaimed, in a suppressed voice, “and in
this strange place.”
“My master, O my master!” cried Turner, falling upon his knees, and
crying aloud in his anguish as he lifted the pale hand of the dead, and
laid it reverently on the still bosom, “oh, would to God I had died for
thee!”
I looked on the old man with wonder and envy. He could weep, but I was
frozen into stone—he could touch the beloved hand; I was afraid even to
look that way. The curse of my gipsy inheritance was upon me; the first
act in the great drama of vengeance was performed, and it had left me
branded, heart and soul. I sat cowering in the shadows like a criminal,
not like the avenger of a great wrong. I had built up walls of granite
between myself and the dead, I, his only child.
The rush of all these thoughts on my brain stifled me. I could no longer
endure the presence of the living nor the dead, but arose and descended
into the garden. Turner followed me, weeping, and evidently with a
desire to comfort me. I, wishing to avoid him, was still held by a sort
of fascination under the windows of the death-chamber. A litter stood
beneath the balcony, on which a mattress had been placed; I knew what it
was for, and lingered near it with my eyes uplifted to the room above.
There was a faint conversation, smothered whispers, and a muffled tread
of feet upon the carpet.
I know not how or whence she came, but Maria stood by me, with her hands
clasped in the shock of a first terrible surprise, tearless and hushed,
a picture of mute sorrow. We were both looking upward. We saw them as
they lifted him from the cushions, and bore him forward over the
trampled vines to the broken steps. The faces of these men wore a look
of stern sorrow. They descended, very slowly, while Turner stood below
with arms uplifted, prepared to receive the dead.
The men paused, half way down the steps, to free a portion of the
Oriental gown which had entangled itself in the balustrade. Just then, a
first beam of the sunrise fell across that marble face. Oh, how
beautiful it was! how mournfully beautiful! Dim blue shadows lay around
the closed eyelids. The deathly white of the forehead gleamed out from
the golden auburn of his hair and beard, which the sunshine struck
aslant, and the wind softly stirred in terrible contrast with the
stillness of the face and limbs. A look of holy quiet, more heavenly
than a smile, hovered around his mouth; the very winds of morning seemed
unholy for disturbing the solemn stillness that lay upon him.
Once more I passed the threshold of my father’s house—the threshold upon
which I had slept a child-beggar and an infant outcast; for the first
time I trod over the spot not only without bitterness, but in humility
of soul. I followed the dead body of my father, whose love I had
repulsed, whose repentance I had rejected. That one idea drove all the
evil blood from my heart. I would have crept after him on my knees
before every proud remnant of his race, could the act have appeased this
thought within me.
It was early in the morning, so early that not even a servant was astir.
The men trod lightly over the marble vestibule and up the broad
staircase; after that thick carpets muffled their steps; and thus our
mournful group entered Lord Clare’s chamber without disturbing a soul in
the house.
Even young Morton, that had been left to watch with him when old Turner
went away, was not aroused from the deep slumber which had overtaken
him, in an easy-chair wheeled to a remote corner of the room.
Life had passed out, and death entered the room, while that man slept on
his post.
They laid my father on his bed, and then gathered in a group near the
window, pallid and anxious, conversing together. At times whispers are
more distinct than words. I heard all. The lawyer had a parchment roll
still in his hand. Turner looked wistfully at it, then at me.
“No, it is of no more value than blank paper,” said the lawyer,
answering the look; “and worse, the old will, which would have given
Marston Court to young Morton, its rightful owner, was destroyed in
anticipation of this. Lady Catherine sweeps every thing!”
“It was not that,” said Turner, “but his memory; let it be saved from
idle gossip. It is only known to us that my lord left this room last
night. Why make the manner or place of his death a wonder for people
that have no right to inquire about it?”
“We can be silent,” answered the lawyer, looking at his clerk.
“Do, for the sake of all who loved him; and this parchment, it is
useless; let us forget it. We know that his last wish was to provide for
her poor, poor child.”
Turner beckoned that I should advance, as he spoke.
“Zana,” he said, taking the parchment, “_he_ would have made you rich.
In this will, he left a large property to you; had he lived only a few
minutes longer, all would have been well. But God, who has made you an
orphan, leaves you still with old Turner. In this will, and to me also,
Lord Clare admits you to be his child. Shall it be so proclaimed? So far
the secret rests with us. Shall we darken his memory with it?”
Oh, how thankful I was for this power to atone in a little for the
cruelty of my acts! For the first time that day tears came to my eyes.
“Save his memory,” I said; “let me remain an outcast. No word or look of
mine shall darken his name.”
This resolution reconciled me somewhat to myself. I stole toward the
bed, and through my tears gazed upon that marble face.
“Oh, my father, can you hear me?” I murmured. “It is your child—not the
demon who refused to forgive—but you _are_ forgiven. In eternity you
have seen the wronged one, and instead of curses she has filled your
immortality with blessings. I see them upon this face, that in its
ineffable calm forgives even me, who was implacable.”
The broken sobs and murmurs in which I uttered these words of grief
awoke young Morton, who arose and came toward the window. Turner
advanced.
“Let some one arouse the family, the Earl of Clare is dead.”
Morton turned deathly pale, and almost staggered as he went out to
perform this mournful duty.