CHAPTER XXXVI.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS.

A solemn calm came down upon the house at Graybridge, and for the first

time Isabel Gilbert felt the presence of death about and around her,

shutting out all the living world by its freezing influence. The great

iceberg had come down upon the poor frail barque. It almost seemed to

Isabel as if she and all in that quiet habitation had been encompassed

by a frozen wall, through which the living could not penetrate.

She suffered very much; the morbid sensibility of her nature made her

especially liable to such suffering. A dull, remorseful pain gnawed at

her heart. Ah, how wicked she had been! how false, how cruel, how

ungrateful! But if she had known that he was to die--if she had only

known--it might all have been different. The foreknowledge of his doom

would have insured her truth and tenderness; she could not have wronged,

even by so much as a thought, a husband whose days were numbered. And

amid all her remorse she was for ever labouring with the one grand

difficulty--the difficulty of realizing what had happened. She had

needed the doctor's solemn assurance that her husband was really dead

before she could bring herself to believe that the white swoon, the

chill heaviness of the passive hand, did indeed mean death. And even

when she had been told that all was over, the words seemed to have very

little influence upon her mind. It could not be! All the last fortnight

of anxiety and trouble was blotted out, and she could only think of

George Gilbert as she had always known him until that time, in the full

vigour of health and strength.

She was very sorrowful; but no passionate grief stirred her frozen

breast. It was the shock, the sense of horror that oppressed her, rather

than any consciousness of a great loss. She would have called her

husband back to life; but chiefly because it was so horrible to her to

know that he was there--near her--what he was. Once the thought came to

her--the weak selfish thought--that it would have been much easier for

her to bear this calamity if her husband had gone away, far away from

her, and only a letter had come to tell her that he was dead. She

fancied herself receiving the letter, and wondering at its black-edged

border. The shock would have been very dreadful; but not so horrible as

the knowledge that George Gilbert was in that house, and yet there was

no George Gilbert. Again and again her mind went over the same beaten

track; again and again the full realization of what had happened slipped

away from her, and she found herself framing little speeches--penitent,

remorseful speeches--expressive of her contrition for all past

shortcomings. And then there suddenly flashed back upon her the too

vivid picture of that deathbed scene, and she heard the dull thick voice

murmuring feebly words of love and praise.

In all this time Roland Lansdell's image was shut out of her mind. In

the dense and terrible shadow that filled all the chambers of her brain,

that bright and splendid figure could have no place. She thought of Mr.

Colborne at Hurstonleigh now and then, and felt a vague yearning for his

presence. He might have been able to comfort her perhaps, somehow; he

might have made it easier for her to bear the knowledge of that dreadful

presence in the room up-stairs. She tried once or twice to read some of

the chapters that had seemed so beautiful on the lips of the popular

curate; but even out of that holy volume dark and ghastly images arose

to terrify her, and she saw Lazarus emerging from the tomb livid in his

grave-clothes: and death and horror seemed to be everywhere and in

everything.

After the first burst of passionate grief, bitterly intermingled with

indignation against the woman whom she believed to have been a wicked

and neglectful wife, Matilda Jeffson was not ungentle to the

terror-stricken girl so newly made a widow. She took a cup of scalding

tea into the darkened parlour where Isabel sat, shivering every now and

then as if with cold, and persuaded the poor frightened creature to take

a little of that comforting beverage. She wiped away her own tears with

her apron while she talked to Isabel of patience and resignation,

submission to the will of Providence, and all those comforting theories

which are very sweet to the faithful mourner, even when the night-time

of affliction is darkest.

But Isabel was not a religious woman. She was a child again, weak and

frivolous, frightened by the awful visitant who had so newly entered

that house. All through the evening of her husband's death she sat in

the little parlour, sometimes trying to read a little, sometimes idly

staring at the tall wick of the tallow-candle, which was only snuffed

once in a way--when Mrs. Jeffson came into the room "to keep the scared

creature company for a bit," she said to her husband, who sat by the

kitchen fire with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his

hands, brooding over those bygone days when he had been wont to fetch

his master's son from that commercial academy in the Wareham Road.

There was a good deal of going in and out, a perpetual tramp of hushed

footsteps moving to and fro, as it seemed to Isabel; and Mrs. Jeffson,

even in the midst of her grief, appeared full of some kind of business

that kept her astir all the evening. The Doctor's Wife had imagined that

all voice and motion must come to an end--that life itself must make a

pause--in a house where death was. Others might feel a far keener grief

for the man that was gone; but no one felt so deep an awe of death as

she did. Mrs. Jeffson brought her some supper on a little tray late in

the evening; but she pushed it away from her and burst into tears. There

seemed a kind of sacrilege in this carrying in and out of food and drink

while he lay up-stairs; he whose hat still hung in the passage without,

whose papers and ink-bottles and medical books were all primly arranged

on one of the little vulgar cupboards by the fireplace. Ah, how often

she had hated those medical books for being what they were, instead of

editions of "Zanoni" and "Ernest Maltravers!" and it seemed wicked even

to have thought unkindly of them, now that he to whom they belonged was

dead.

It was quite in vain that Mrs. Jeffson urged her to go up-stairs to the

room opposite that in which the surgeon lay; it was quite as vainly that

the good woman entreated her to go and look at him, now that he was

lying so peacefully in the newly-arranged chamber, to lay her hand on

his marble forehead, so that no shadow of him should trouble her in her

sleep. The girl only shook her head forlornly.

"I'm afraid," she said, piteously--"I'm afraid of that room. I never

thought that he would die. I know that I wasn't good. It was wicked to

think of other people always, and not of him; but I never thought that

he would die. I knew that he was good to me; and I tried to obey him:

but I think I should have been different if I had known that he would

die."

She pulled out the little table-drawer where the worsted socks were

rolled up in fluffy balls, with needles sticking out of them here and

there. Even these were a kind of evidence of her neglect. She had

cobbled them a little during the later period of her married

life,--during the time of her endeavour to be good,--but she had not

finished this work or any other. Ah, what a poor creature she was, after

all!--a creature of feeble resolutions, formed only to be broken; a weak

vacillating creature, full of misty yearnings and aspirings--resolving

nobly in one moment, to yield sinfully in the next.

She begged to be allowed to spend the night down-stairs on the rickety

little sofa; and Mrs. Jeffson, seeing that she was really oppressed by

some childish terror of that upper story, brought her some blankets and

pillows, and a feeble little light that was to burn until daybreak.

So in that familiar room, whose every scrap of shabby furniture had been

a part of the monotony of her life, Isabel Gilbert spent the first night

of her widowhood, lying on the little sofa, nervously conscious of every

sound in the house; feverishly wakeful until long after the morning sun

was shining through the yellow-white blind, when she fell into an uneasy

doze, in which she dreamt that her husband was alive and well. She did

not arouse herself out of this, and yet she was never thoroughly asleep

throughout the time, until after ten o'clock; and then she found Mrs.

Jeffson sitting near the little table, on which the inevitable cup of

tea was smoking beside a plate of the clumsy kind of bread-and-butter

inseparably identified with George Gilbert in Isabel's mind.

"There's somebody wants to see you, if you're well enough to be spoken

to, my dear," Matilda said, very gently; for she had been considerably

moved by Mrs. Gilbert's penitent little confession of her shortcomings

as a wife; and was inclined to think that perhaps, after all, Graybridge

had judged this helpless schoolgirl creature rather harshly. "Take the

tea, my dear; I made it strong on purpose for you; and try and cheer up

a bit, poor lassie; you're young to wear widow's weeds; but he was fit

to go. If all of us had worked as hard for the good of other folks, we

could afford to die as peaceful as he did."

Isabel pushed the heavy tangled hair away from her pallid face, and

pursed-up her pale lips to kiss the Yorkshire-woman.

"You're very kind to me," she said; "you used to think that I was

wicked, I know; and then you seemed very unkind. But I always wished to

be good. I should like to have been good, and to die young, like

George's mother."

It is to be observed that, with Isabel's ideal of goodness there was

always the association of early death. She had a vague idea that very

religious and self-denying people got through their quota of piety with

tolerable speed, and received their appointed reward. As yet her notions

of self-sacrifice were very limited; and she could scarcely have

conceived a long career of perfection. She thought of nuns as creatures

who bade farewell to the world, and had all their back-hair cut off, and

retired into a convent, and died soon afterwards, while they were still

young and interesting. She could not have imagined an elderly nun, with

all a long monotonous life of self-abnegation behind her, getting up at

four o'clock every morning, and being as bright and vivacious and

cheerful as any happy wife or mother outside the convent-walls. Yet

there are such people.

* * * * *

Mrs. Gilbert took a little of the hot tea, and then sat quite still,

with her head lying on Matilda Jeffson's shoulder, and her hand clasped

in Matilda's rough fingers. That living clasp seemed to impart a kind of

comfort, so terribly had death entered into Isabel's narrow world.

"Do you think you shall be well enough to see him presently, poor

lassie?" Mrs. Jeffson said, after a long silence. "I shouldn't ask you,

only he seems anxious-like, as if there was something particular on his

mind; and I know he's been very kind to you."

Isabel stared at her in bewilderment.

"I don't know who you are talking of," she said.

"It's Mr. Raymond, from Coventford! It's early for him to be so far as

Graybridge; but he looks as pale and worn-like as if he'd been up and

about all night. He was all struck of a heap-like when I told him about

our poor master."

Here Mrs. Jeffson had recourse to the cotton apron which had been so

frequently applied to her eyes during the last week. Isabel huddled a

shabby little shawl about her shoulders; she had made no change in her

dress when she had lain down the night before; and she was very pale and

wan, and tumbled and woebegone, in the bright summer light.

"Mr. Raymond! Mr. Raymond!" She repeated his name to herself once or

twice, and made a faint effort to understand why he should have come to

her. He had always been very kind to her, and associated with his image

there was a sense of sound wisdom and vigorous cheerfulness of spirit.

His presence would bring some comfort to her, she thought. Next to Mr.

Colborne, he was the person whom she would most have desired to see.

"I will go to him, Mrs. Jeffson," she said, rising slowly from the sofa.

"He was always very good to me. But, oh, how the sight of him will bring

back the time at Conventford, when George used to come and see me on

Sunday afternoons, and we used to walk together in the cold bare

meadows!"

That time did come back to her as she spoke: a grey colourless pause in

her life, in which she had been--not happy, perhaps, but contented. And

since that time what tropical splendors, what a gorgeous oasis of light

and colour had spread itself suddenly about her path! a forest of

miraculous flowers and enchanted foliage that had shut out all the

every-day world in which other people dragged out their tiresome

existences--a wonderful Asiatic wilderness, in which there were hidden

dangers lurking, terrible as the cobras that drop down upon the

traveller from some flowering palm-tree, or the brindled tigers that

prowl in the shadowy jungle. She looked back across that glimpse of an

earthly paradise to the old dull days at Conventford; and a hot blast

from the tropical oasis seemed to rush in upon her, beyond which the

past spread far away like a cool grey sea. Perhaps that quiet

neutral-tinted life was the best, after all. She saw herself again as

she had been; "engaged" to the man who lay dead up-stairs; and weaving a

poor little web of romance for herself even out of that prosaic

situation.

Mr. Raymond was waiting in the best parlour,--that sacred chamber, which

had been so rarely used during the parish surgeon's brief wedded

life,--that primly-arranged little sitting-room, which always had a

faint odour of old-fashioned _pot pourri_; the room which Isabel had

once yearned to beautify into a bower of chintz and muslin. The blind

was down, and the shutters half-closed; and in the dim light Charles

Raymond looked very pale.

"My dear Mrs. Gilbert," he said, taking her hand, and leading her to a

seat; "my poor child,--so little more than a child,--so little wiser or

stronger than a child,--it seems cruel to come to you at such a time;

but life is very hard sometimes----"

"It was very kind of you to come," Isabel exclaimed, interrupting him.

"I wanted to see you, or some one like you; for everything seems so

dreadful to me. I never thought that he would die."

She began to cry, in a weary helpless way, not like a person moved by

some bitter grief; rather like a child that finds itself in a strange

place and is frightened.

"My poor child, my poor child!"

Charles Raymond still held Isabel's passive hand, and she felt tears

dropping on it; the tears of a man, of all others the last to give way

to any sentimental weakness. But even then she did not divine that he

must have some grief of his own--some sorrow that touched him more

nearly than George Gilbert's death could possibly touch him. Her state

of feeling just now was a peculiarly selfish state, perhaps; for she

could neither understand nor imagine anything outside that darkened

house, where death was supreme. The shock had been too terrible and too

recent. It was as if an earthquake had taken place, and all the

atmosphere round her was thick with clouds of blinding dust produced by

the concussion. She felt Mr. Raymond's tears dropping slowly on her

hand; and if she thought about them at all, she thought them only the

evidence of his sympathy with her childish fears and sorrows.

"I loved him like my own son," murmured Charles Raymond, in a low tender

voice. "If he had not been what he was,--if he had been the veriest cub

that ever disgraced a good old stock,--I think even then I should have

loved him as dearly and as truly, for her sake. Her only son! I've seen

him look at me as she looked when I kissed her in the church on her

wedding-day. So long as he lived, I should have never felt that she was

really lost to me."

Isabel heard nothing of these broken sentences. Mr. Raymond uttered them

in low musing tones, that were not intended to reach any mortal ears.

For some little time he sat silently by the girl's side, with her hand

still lying in his; then he rose and walked up and down the room with a

soft slow step, and with his head drooping.

"You have been very much shocked by your husband's death?" he said at

last.

Isabel began to cry again at this question,--weak hysterical tears, that

meant very little, perhaps.

"Oh, very, very much," she answered. "I know I was not so good as I

ought to have been; and I can never ask him to forgive me now."

"You were very fond of him, I suppose?"

A faint blush flickered and faded upon Isabel's pallid face; and then

she answered, hesitating a little,----

"He was very good to me, and I--I tried always to be grateful--almost

always," she added, with a remorseful recollection of rebellious moments

in which she had hated her husband because he ate spring-onions, and

wore Graybridge-made boots.

Just the slightest indication of a smile glimmered upon Mr. Raymond's

countenance as he watched Isabel's embarrassment. We are such weak and

unstable creatures at the very best, that it is just possible this man,

who loved Roland Lansdell very dearly, was not entirely grieved by the

discovery of Isabel's indifference for her dead husband. He went back to

the chair near hers, and seated himself once more by her side. He began

to speak to her in a very low earnest voice; but he kept his eyes bent

upon the ground; and in that dusky light she was quite unable to see the

expression of his face.

"Isabel," he began, very gravely, "I said just now that life seems very

hard to us sometimes,--not to be explained by any doctrine of averages,

by any of the codes of philosophy which man frames for his own comfort;

only to be understood very dimly by one sublime theory, which some of us

are not strong mough to grasp and hold by. Ah, what poor tempest-tossed

vessels we are without that compass! I have had a great and bitter grief

to bear within the last four-and-twenty hours, Isabel; a sorrow that has

come upon me more suddenly than even the shock of your husband's death

can have fallen on you."

"I am very sorry for you," Isabel answered, dreamily; "the world must be

full of trouble, I think. It doesn't seem as if any one was ever really

happy."

She was thinking of her own life, so long to look back upon, though she

was little more than twenty years of age; she was thinking of the petty

sordid miseries of her girlhood,--the sheriff's officers and

tax-gatherers, and infuriated tradespeople,--the great shock of her

father's disgrace; the dull monotony of her married life; and Roland

Lansdell's sudden departure; and his stubborn anger against her when she

refused to run away with him; and then her husband's death. It seemed

all one dreary record of grief and trouble.

"I am growing old. Isabel," resumed Mr. Raymond; "but I have never lost

my sympathy with youth and all its brightness. I think, perhaps, that

sympathy has grown wider and stronger with increase of years. There is

one young man who has been always very dear to me--more dear to me than

I can ever make you comprehend, unless I were to tell you the subtle

link that has bound him to me. I suppose there are some fathers who have

as deep a love for their sons as I have for the man of whom I speak; but

I have always fancied fatherly love a very lukewarm feeling compared

with my affection for Roland Lansdell."

Roland Lansdell! It was the first time she had heard his name spoken

since that Sunday on which her husband's illness had begun. The name

shot through her heart with a thrill that was nearly akin to pain. A

little glimpse of lurid sunshine burst suddenly in upon the darkness of

her life. She clasped her hands before her face almost as if it had been

actual light that she wanted to shut out.

"Oh, don't speak of him!" she said, piteously. "I was so wicked; I

thought of him so much; but I did not know that my husband would die.

Please don't speak of him; it pains me so to hear his name."

She broke down into a torrent of hysterical weeping as she uttered this

last entreaty. She remembered Roland's angry face in the church; his

studied courtesy during that midnight interview at the Priory, the calm

reserve of manner which she had mistaken for indifference. He was

nothing to her; he was not even her friend; and she had sinned so deeply

against the dead man for his sake.

"I should be the last to mention Roland Lansdell's name in your

hearing," Mr. Raymond answered presently, when she had grown a little

quieter, "if the events of the last day or two had not broken down all

barriers. The time is very near at hand, Isabel, when no name ever

spoken upon this earth will be an emptier sound than the name of Roland

Lansdell."

She lifted her tear-stained face suddenly and looked at him. All the

clouds floated away, and a dreadful light broke in upon her; she looked

at him, trembling from head to foot, with her hands clasped convulsively

about his arm.

"You came here to tell me something!" she gasped; "something has

happened--to him! Ah, if it has, life is _all_ sorrow!"

"He is dying, Isabel."

"Dying!"

Her lips shaped the words, and her fixed eyes stared at Charles

Raymond's face with an awful look.

"He is dying. It would be foolish to deceive you with any false hope,

when in four-and-twenty hours' time all will be finished. He went

out--riding--the other night, and fell from his horse, as it is

supposed. He was found by some haymakers early the next morning, lying

helpless, some miles from the Priory, and was carried home. The medical

men give no hope of his recovery; but he has been sensible at intervals

ever since. I have been a great deal with him--constantly with him; and

his cousin Gwendoline is there. He wants to see you, Isabel; of course

he knows nothing of your husband's death; I did not know of it myself

till I came here this morning. He wants to see you, my poor child. Do

you think you can come?"

She rose and bent her head slowly as if in assent, but the fixed look of

horror never left her face. She moved towards the door, and seemed as if

she wanted to go at once--dressed as she was, with the old faded shawl

wrapped about her.

"You'd better get your housekeeper to make you comfortable and tidy,

while I go and engage a fly," said Mr. Raymond; and then looking her

full in the face, he added, "Can you promise me to be very calm and

quiet when you see him? You had better not come unless you can promise

me as much as that. His hours are numbered, as it is; but any violent

emotion would be immediately fatal. A man's last hours are very precious

to him, remember; the hours of a man who knows his end is near make a

sacred mystical period in which the world drops far away from him, and

he is in a kind of middle region between this life and the next. I want

you to recollect this, Isabel. The man you are going to see is not the

man you have known in the past. There would be very little hope for us

after death, if we found no hallowing influence in its approach."

"I will recollect," Isabel answered. She had shed no tears since she had

been told of Roland's danger. Perhaps this new and most terrible shock

had nerved her with an unnatural strength. And amid all the anguish

comprehended in the thought of his death, it scarcely seemed strange to

her that Roland Lansdell should be dying. It seemed rather as if the end

of the world had suddenly come about; and it mattered very little who

should be the first to perish. Her own turn would come very soon, no

doubt.

Mr. Raymond met Mrs. Jeffson in the passage, and said a few words to her

before he went out of the house. The good woman was shocked at the

tidings of Mr. Lansdell's accident. She had thought very badly of the

elegant young master of Mordred Priory; but death and sorrow take the

bitterness out of a true-hearted woman's feelings, and Matilda was

womanly enough to forgive Roland for the wish that summoned the Doctor's

Wife to his deathbed. She went up-stairs, and came down with Isabel's

bonnet and cloak and simple toilet paraphernalia; and presently Mrs.

Gilbert had a consciousness of cold water splashed upon her face, and a

brush passed over her tangled hair. She felt only half conscious of

these things, as she might have felt had they been the events of a

dream. So presently, when Mr. Raymond came back, accompanied by the

muffled rolling of wheels in the straw-bestrewn lane, and she was half

lifted into the old-fashioned, mouldy-smelling Graybridge fly,--so all

along the familiar high-road, past the old inn with the sloping roof,

where the pigeons were cooing to each other, as if there had been no

such thing as death or sorrow in the world,--so under the grand gothic

gates of monastic Mordred, it was all like a dream--a terrible

oppressive dream--hideous by reason of some vague sense of horror rather

than by the actual vision presented to the eyes of the sleeper. In a

troubled dream it is always thus,--it is always a hidden, intangible

something that oppresses the dreamer.

The leaves were fluttering in the warm midsummer wind, and the bees were

humming about the great flower-beds. Far away the noise of the waterfall

blended with all other summer sounds in a sweet confusion. And he was

dying! Oh, what wonderful patches of shadow and sunlight on the wide

lawns! what marvellous glimpses down long glades, where the young fern

heaved to and fro in the fitful breezes like the emerald wavelets of a

summer sea! And he was dying! It is such an old, old feeling, this

unwillingness to comprehend that there can be death anywhere upon an

earth that is so beautiful. Eve may have felt very much as Isabel felt

to-day, when she saw a tropical sky, serenely splendid, above the corpse

of murdered Abel. Hero may have found the purple distances of the

classic mountains, the yellow glory of the sunlit sands, almost more

difficult to bear than the loss of her drowned lover.

There was the same solemn hush at Mordred Priory that there had been in

the surgeon's house at Graybridge; only there seemed a deeper solemnity

here amid all the darkened splendour of the spacious rooms, stretching

far away, one beyond another, like the chambers of a palace. Isabel saw

the long vista, not as she had seen it once, when _he_ came into the

hall to bid her welcome, but with the haunting dreamlike oppression

strong upon her. She saw little glimmering patches of gilding and colour

here and there in the cool gloom of the shaded rooms, and long bars of

light shining through the Venetian shutters upon the polished oaken

floors. One of the medical men--there were three or four of them in the

house--came out of the library and spoke in a whisper to Mr. Raymond.

The result of the whispering seemed tolerably favourable, for the doctor

went back to his companions in the library, and Charles Raymond led

Isabel up the broad staircase; the beautiful staircase which seemed to

belong to a church or a cathedral rather than to any common habitation.

They met a nurse in the corridor; a prim, pleasant-looking woman, who

answered Mr. Raymond's questions in a cheerful business-like manner, as

if a Roland Lansdell or so more or less in the world were a matter of

very small consequence. And then a mist came before Isabel's eyes, and

she lost consciousness of the ground on which she trod; and presently

there was a faint odour of hartshorn and aromatic medicines, and she

felt a soft hand sponging her forehead with eau-de-Cologne, and a

woman's muslin garments fluttering near her. And then she raised her

eyelids with a painful sense of their weight, and a voice very close to

her said,--

"It was very kind of you to come. I am afraid the heat of the room makes

you faint. If you could contrive to let in a little more air, Raymond.

It was very good of you to come."

Oh, he was _not_ dying! Her heart seemed to leap out of a dreadful

frozen region into an atmosphere of warmth and light. He was not dying!

Death was not like this. He spoke to her to-day as he had always spoken.

It was the same voice, the same low music which she had heard so often

mingled with the brawling of the mill-stream: the voice that had sounded

perpetually in her dreams by day and night.

She slipped from her chair and fell upon her knees by the bedside. There

was nothing violent or melodramatic in the movement; it seemed almost

involuntary, half unconscious.

"Oh, I am so glad to hear you speak!" she said; "it makes me so

happy--to see you like this. They told me that you were very, very ill;

they told me that----"

"They told you the truth," Roland answered gravely. "Oh, dear Mrs.

Gilbert, you must try and forget what I have been, or you will never be

able to understand what I am. And I was so tired of life, and thought I

had so little interest in the universe; and yet I feel so utterly

changed a creature now that all earthly hope has really slipped away

from me. I sent for you, Isabel, because in this last interview I want

to acknowledge all the wrong I have done you; I want to ask your

forgiveness for that wrong."

"Forgiveness--from me! Oh, no, no!"

She could not abandon her old attitude of worship. He was a prince

always--noble or wicked--a prince by divine right of his splendour and

beauty! If he stooped from his high estate to smile upon her, was he not

entitled to her deepest gratitude, her purest devotion? If it pleased

him to spurn and trample her beneath his feet, what was she, when

counted against the magnificence of her idol, that she should complain?

There is always some devoted creature prostrate in the road when the car

comes by; and which of them would dream of upbraiding Juggernaut for the

anguish inflicted by the crushing wheels?

The same kind hands which had bathed Mrs. Gilbert's forehead half lifted

her from her kneeling attitude now; and looking up, Isabel saw Lady

Gwendoline bending over her, very pale, very grave, but with a sweet

compassionate smile upon her face. Lord Ruysdale and his daughter had

come to the Priory immediately after hearing of Roland's dangerous

state; and during the four-and-twenty hours that had elapsed, Lady

Gwendoline had been a great deal with her cousin. The hidden love which

had turned to jealous anger against Roland's folly regained all its

purer qualities now, and there was no sacrifice of self or self-love

that Gwendoline Pomphrey would have hesitated to make, if in so doing

she could have restored life and vigour to the dying man. She had heard

the worst the doctors had to tell. She knew that her cousin was dying.

She was no woman to delude herself with vain hopes, to put away the cup

for awhile because it was bitter, knowing that its last drop must be

drained sooner or later. She bowed her head before the inevitable, and

accepted her sorrow. Never in her brightest day, when her portrait had

been in every West-end print-shop, and her name a synonym for all that

is elegant and beautiful--never had she seemed so perfect a woman as

now, when she sat pale and quiet and resigned, by the deathbed of the

man she loved.

During that long night of watching, Mr. Lansdell's mind had seemed at

intervals peculiarly clear,--the fatal injuries inflicted upon his brain

had not blotted out his intellect. That had been obscured in occasional

periods of wandering and stupor, but every now and then the supremacy of

spirit over matter reasserted itself, and the young man talked even more

calmly than usual. All the fitfulness of passion, the wavering of

purpose--now hot, now cold, now generous, now cruel,--all natural

weakness seemed to have been swept away, and an unutterable calm had

fallen upon his heart and mind.

Once, on waking from a brief doze, he found his cousin watching, but the

nurse asleep, and began to talk of Isabel Gilbert. "I want you to know

all about her," he said; "you have only heard vulgar scandal and gossip.

I should like you to know the truth. It is very foolish, that little

history--wicked perhaps; but those provincial gossips may have garbled

and disfigured the story. I will tell you the truth, Gwendoline; for I

want you to be a friend to Isabel Gilbert when I am dead and gone."

And then he told the history of all those meetings under Lord Thurston's

oak; dwelling tenderly on Isabel's ignorant simplicity, blaming himself

for all that was guilty and dishonourable in that sentimental

flirtation. He told Gwendoline how, from being half amused, half

gratified, by Mrs. Gilbert's unconcealed admiration of him, so naïvely

revealed in every look and tone, he had, little by little, grown to find

the sole happiness of his life in those romantic meetings; and then he

spoke of his struggles with himself, real, earnest struggles--his

flight--his return--his presumptuous belief that Isabel would freely

consent to any step he might propose--his anger and disappointment after

the final interview, which proved to him how little he had known the

depths of that girlish sentimental heart.

"She was only a child playing with fire, Gwendoline," he said; "and had

not the smallest desire to walk through the furnace. That was my

mistake. She was a child, and I mistook her for a woman--a woman who saw

the gulf before her, and was prepared to take the desperate leap. She

was only a child, pleased with my pretty speeches and town-made clothes

and perfumed handkerchiefs,--a schoolgirl; and I set my life upon the

chance of being happy with her. Will you try and think of her as she

really is, Gwendoline,--not as these Graybridge people see her,--and be

kind to her when I am dead and gone? I should like to think she was sure

of one wise and good woman for a friend. I have been very cruel to her,

very unjust, very selfish. I was never in the same mind about her for an

hour together,--sometimes thinking tenderly of her, sometimes upbraiding

and hating her as a trickstress and a coquette. But I can understand her

and believe in her much better now. The sky is higher, Gwendoline."

If Roland had told his cousin this story a week before, when his life

seemed all before him, she might have received his confidence in a very

different spirit from that in which she now accepted it; but he was

dying, and she had loved him, and had been loved by him. It was by her

own act that she had lost that love. She of all others had least right

to resent his attachment to another woman. She remembered that day,

nearly ten years ago, on which she had quarrelled with him, stung by his

reproaches, insolent in the pride of her young beauty and the knowledge

that she might marry a man so high above Roland Lansdell in rank and

position. She saw herself as she had been, in all the early splendour of

her Saxon beauty, and wondered if she really was the same creature as

that proud worldly girl who thought the supremest triumph in life was to

become the wife of a marquis.

"I will be her friend, Roland," she said, presently. "I know she is very

childish; and I will be patient with her and befriend her, poor lonely

girl."

Lady Gwendoline was thinking, as she said this, of that interview in the

surgeon's parlour at Graybridge--that interview in which Isabel had not

scrupled to confess her folly and wickedness.

"I ought to have been more patient," Gwendoline thought; "but I think I

was angry with her because she had dared to love Roland. I was jealous

of his love for her, and I could not be kind or tolerant."

Thus it was that Isabel found Lady Gwendoline so tender and

compassionate to her. She only raised her eyes to the lady's face with a

grateful look. She forgot all about the interview at Graybridge; what

_could_ she remember in that room, except that _he_ was ill? in danger,

people had told her; but she could not believe that. The experience of

her husband's deathbed had impressed her with an idea that dangerous

illness must be accompanied by terrible prostration, delirium, raging

fever, dull stupor. She saw Roland in one of his best intervals,

reasonable, cheerful, self-possessed, and she could not believe that he

was going to die. She looked at him, and saw that his face was

bloodless, and that his head was bound by linen bandages, which

concealed his forehead. A fall from his horse! She remembered how she

had seen him once ride by upon the dusty road, unconscious of her

presence, grand and self-absorbed as Count Lara; but amongst all her

musings she had never imagined any danger coming to him in that shape.

She had fancied him always as a dauntless rider, taming the wildest

steed with one light pressure of his hand upon the curb. She looked at

him sorrowfully, and the vision of his accident arose before her; she

saw the horse tearing across a moonlit waste, and then a fall, and then

a figure dragged along the ground. She had read of such things: it was

only some old half-forgotten scene out of one of her books that rose in

her mind.

No doubt as to the nature of Mr. Lansdell's accident, no glimmering

suspicion of the truth, ever entered her brain. She believed most fully

that she had herself prevented all chance of an encounter between her

father and his enemy. Had she not seen the last of Mr. Sleaford in

Nessborough Hollow, whence he was to depart for Wareham station at break

of day? and what should take Roland Lansdell to that lonely glade in

which the little rustic inn was hidden,--a resting-place for haymakers

and gipsy-hawkers?

She never guessed the truth. The medical men who attended Roland

Lansdell knew that the injuries from which he was dying had never been

caused by any fall from a horse; and they said as much to Charles

Raymond, who was unutterably distressed by the intelligence. But neither

he nor the doctors could obtain any admission from the patient, though

Mr. Raymond most earnestly implored him to reveal the truth.

"Cure me, if you can," he said; "nothing that I can tell you will give

you any help in doing that. If it is my fancy to keep the cause of my

death a secret, it is the whim of a dying man, and it ought to be

respected. No living creature upon this earth except one man will ever

know how I came by these injuries. But I do hope that you gentlemen will

be discreet enough to spare my friends any useless pain. The gossips are

at work already, I dare say, speculating as to what became of the horse

that threw me. For pity's sake, do your best to stop their talk. My life

has been sluggish enough; do not let there be any _esclandre_ about my

death."

Against such arguments as these Charles Raymond could urge nothing. But

his grief for the loss of the young man he loved was rendered doubly

bitter by the mystery which surrounded Roland's fate. The doctors told

him that the wounds on Mr. Lansdell's head could only have been caused

by merciless blows inflicted with some blunt instrument. Mr. Raymond in

vain distracted himself with the endeavour to imagine how or why the

young man had been attacked. He had not been robbed; for his watch and

purse, his rings, and the little trinkets hanging at his chain, all of

them costly in their nature, had been found upon him when he was brought

home to the Priory. That Roland Lansdell could have counted one enemy

amongst all mankind, never entered into his kinsman's calculations. He

had no recollection of that little story told so lightly by the young

man in the flower-garden; he was entirely without a clue to the

catastrophe; and he perceived very plainly that Roland's resolution was

not to be shaken. There was a quiet determination in Mr. Lansdell's

refusal, which left no hope that he might be induced to change his mind.

He spoke with all apparent frankness of the result of his visit to

Nessborough Hollow. He had found Isabel there, he said, with a man who

was related to her,--a poor relation, who had come to Graybridge to

extort money from her. He had seen and spoken to the man, and was fully

convinced that his account of himself was true.

"So you see the Graybridge gossips had lighted on the usual mare's

nest," Roland said, in conclusion; "the man was a relation,--an uncle or

cousin, I believe,--I heard it from his own lips. If I had been a

gentleman, I should have been superior to the foul suspicions that

maddened me that night. What common creatures we are, Raymond, some of

us! Our mothers believe in us, and worship us, and watch over us, and

seem to fancy they have dipped us in a kind of moral Styx, and that

there is something of the immortal infused into our vulgar clay; but

rouse our common passions, and we sink to the level of the navigator who

beats his wife to death with a poker in defence of his outraged honour.

They put a kind of varnish over us at Eton and Oxford; but the colouring

underneath is very much the same, after all. Your King Arthur, or Sir

Philip Sidney, or Bayard, crops up once in a century or so, and the

world bows down before a gentleman; but, oh, what a rare creature he

is!"

* * * * *

"I want you to forgive me," Roland said to Isabel, after she had been

sitting some minutes in the low chair in which Lady Gwendoline had

placed her. There was no one in the room but Charles Raymond and

Gwendoline Pomphrey; and Mr. Raymond had withdrawn himself to a distant

window that had been pushed a little way open, near which he sat in a

very mournful attitude, with his face averted from the sick bed. "I want

you to forgive me for having been very unjust and cruel to you, Mrs.

Gilbert--Isabel. Ah, I may call you Isabel now, and no one will cry out

upon me! Dying men have all manner of pleasant privileges. I was very

cruel, very unjust, very selfish and wicked, my poor girl; and your

childish ignorance was wiser than my worldly experience. A man has no

right to desire perfect happiness: I can understand that now. He has no

right to defy the laws made by wiser men for his protection, because

there is a fatal twist in the fabric of his life, and those very laws

happen to thwart him in his solitary insignificance. How truly Thomas

Carlyle has told us that Manhood only begins when we have surrendered to

Necessity! We must submit, Isabel. I struggled; but I never submitted. I

tried to crush and master the pain; but I never resigned myself to

endure it; and endurance is so much grander than conquest. And then,

when I had yielded to the tempter, when I had taken my stand, prepared

to defy heaven and earth, I was angry with you, poor child, because you

were not alike rash and desperate. Forgive me, my dear; I loved you very

much; and it is only now--now when I am dying, that I know how fatal and

guilty my love was. But it was never a profligate's brief passion,

Isabel. It was wicked to love you; but my love was pure. If you had been

free to be my wife, I should have been a true and faithful husband to my

childish love. Ah, even now, when life seems so far away; even now,

Isabel, the old picture rises before me, and I fancy what might have

been if I had found you free."

The low penetrating voice reached Charles Raymond, and he bent his head

and sobbed aloud. Dimly, as the memory of a dream, came back upon him

the recollection of that time in which he had sat amongst the shadows of

the great beech-trees at Hurstonleigh, with the young man's poems open

in his hand, and had been beguiled into thinking of what might happen if

Roland returned to England to see Isabel in her girlish beauty. And

Roland had returned, and had seen her; but too late; and now she was

free once more,--free to be loved and chosen,--and again it was too

late. Perhaps Mr. Raymond seems only a foolish sentimentalist, weeping

because of the blight upon a young man's love-story; but then he had

loved the young man's mother,--and in vain!

"Gwendoline has promised to be your friend, Isabel," Roland said

by-and-by; "it makes me very happy to know that. Oh, my darling, if I

could tell you the thoughts that came to me as I lay there, with the

odour of leaves and flowers about me, and the stars shining above the

tall branches over my head. What is impossible in a universe where there

are such stars? It seemed as if I had never seen them until then."

He rambled on thus, with Isabel's hand held loosely in his. He seemed to

be very happy--entirely at peace. Gwendoline had proposed to read to

him; and the parish rector had been with him, urging the duty of some

religious exercises, eager to exhort and to explain; but the young man

had smiled at him with some shade of contempt in his expression.

"There is very little you could read from that book which I do not

already know by heart," he said, pointing to the Bible lying open under

the clergyman's hand. "It is not your unbeliever who least studies his

gospel. Imagine a man possessed of a great crystal that looks like a

diamond. His neighbours tell him that the gem is priceless--matchless

--without crack or flaw. But some evil thing within the man suggests

that it may be valueless after all--only a big beautiful lump of glass.

You may fancy that he would examine it very closely; he would scrutinize

every facet, and contemplate it in every light, and perhaps know a good

deal more about it than the believing possessor, who, feeling confident

in the worth of his jewel, puts it safely away in a strong box against

the hour when it may be wanted. I know all about the gospel, Mr. Matson;

and I think, as my hours are numbered, it may be better for me to lie

and ponder upon those familiar words. The light breaks upon me very

slowly; but it all comes from a far distant sky; and no earthly hand can

lift so much as the uttermost edge of the curtain that shuts out the

fuller splendour. I am very near him now; I am very near 'the shadow,

cloaked from head to foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds!'"

The conscientious rector thought Mr. Lansdell a very unpromising

penitent; but it was something to hear that the young man did not rail

or scoff at religion on his dying bed; and even that might have been

expected of a person who had attended divine service only once in six

weeks, and had scandalized a pious and well-bred congregation by

undisguised yawns, and absent-minded contemplation of his finger-nails,

during the respectable prosiness of a long sermon.

The rector did not understand this imperfect conversion, expressed in

phrases that sounded the reverse of orthodox; but the state of matters

in that death-chamber was much better than he had expected. He had heard

it hinted that Mr. Lansdell was a Freethinker--a Deist; even an Atheist,

some people had said; and he had half anticipated to find the young man

blaspheming aloud in the throes of his dying agony. He had not been

prepared for this quiet deathbed; this man, who was dying with a smile

upon his face, murmuring alternate fragments of St. John's Gospel and

Tennyson's "In Memoriam."

"I was with my mother when she died." Roland said by-and-by, "and yet

could not accept the simple faith that made her so happy. But I dare say

Saul had seen many wonderful things before that journey to Damascus. Had

he not witnessed the martyrdom of Stephen, and had yet been unmoved? The

hour comes, and the miracle comes with it. Oh, what an empty wasted life

mine has been for the last ten years! because I could not understand--I

could not see beyond. I might have done so much perhaps, if I could only

have seen my way beyond the contradictions and perplexities of this

lower life. But I could not--I could not; and so I fell back into a

sluggish idleness, 'without a conscience or an aim.' I 'basked and

battened in the woods.'"

The rector lingered in the house even after he had left Roland's

chamber. He would be summoned by-and-by, perhaps, and the dying man

would require some more orthodox consolation than was to be derived from

Mr. Tennyson's verses.

But Roland seemed very happy. There was a brightness upon his face, in

spite of its death-like pallor--a spiritual brightness, unaffected by

any loss of blood, or languor of that slow pulse which the London

physicians felt so often. For some two or three hours after the struggle

in Nessborough Hollow he had lain stunned and unconscious; then he had

slowly awakened to see the stars fading above the branches over his

head, and to hear the early morning breeze creeping with a ghostly

rustling noise amidst the fern. He awoke to feel that something of an

unwonted nature had happened to him, but not for some time to any

distinct remembrance of his encounter with Mr. Sleaford.

He tried to move, but found himself utterly powerless,--a partial

paralysis seemed to have changed his limbs to lead; he could only lie as

he had fallen; dimly conscious of the fading stars above, the faint

summer wind rippling a distant streamlet, and all the vague murmur of

newly-awakened nature. He knew as well as if a whole conclave of

physicians had announced their decision upon his case,--he knew that for

him life was over; and that if there was any vitality in his mind, any

sense of a future in his breast, that sense, so vague and imperfect as

yet, could only relate to something beyond this earth.

Very rambling fancies filled Mr. Lansdell's mind as he lay amongst the

bruised fern, with the wild-rose brambles and blossoms above him. He

knew that his life was done; he knew that for him all interest in this

earth and its creatures had ceased for ever; and a perfect calm came

down upon him. He was like a man who had possessed a great fortune, and

had been perpetually tormented by doubts and perplexities about it, and

who, waking one morning to discover himself a beggar, found a strange

relief in the knowledge that he was penniless. The struggle was all

over. No longer could the tempter whisper in his ear, urging him to

follow this or that wandering exhalation of the world's foul

marsh-lands. No more for him irresolution or perplexity. The problem of

life was solved; a new and unexpected way was opened for him out of the

blank weariness which men call existence. At first, the thought of his

approaching release brought with it no feeling but a sense of release.

It was only afterwards, when the new aspect of things became familiar to

him, that he began to think with remorseful pain of all the empty life

that lay behind him. He seemed to be thinking of this even when Isabel

was with him; for after lying for some time quite silent, in a doze, as

they thought who watched him,--he raised his heavy eyelids, and said to

her,--

"If ever you should find yourself with the means of doing great good, of

being very useful to your fellow-creatures, I should like you to

remember my wasted life, Isabel. You will try to be patient, won't you,

my dear? You will not think, because you are baulked in your first pet

scheme for the regeneration of mankind, that you are free to wash your

hands of the business, and stand aloof shrugging your shoulders at other

people's endeavours. Ten years ago I fancied myself a philanthropist;

but I was like a child who plants an acorn over-night, and expects to

see the tender leaflets of a sapling oak sprouting through the brown

earth next morning. I wanted to do great things all at once. My courage

failed before the battle had well begun. But I want you to be different

from me, my dear. You were wiser than I when you left me that day; when

you left me to my foolish anger, my sinful despair. Our love _was_ too

pure to have survived the stain of treachery and guilt. It would have

perished like some beautiful flame that expires in a tainted atmosphere.

Impure love may flourish in a poisoned habitation; but the true god

sickens and dies if you shut him from the free air of heaven. I know now

that we should not have been happy, Isabel; and I acknowledge the

mysterious wisdom that has saved us. My darling, do not look at me with

those despairing eyes; death will unite us rather than separate us,

Isabel. I should have been farther away from you if I had lived; for I

was tired of my life. I was like a spoilt child, who has possessed all

the toys ever devised by mortal toymaker, and has played with them all,

and grown weary of them, and broken them. Only his nurses know what an

abomination that child is. I might have become a very bad man if I had

lived, Isabel. As it is, I begin to understand what Tennyson means. He

has written the gospel of his age, Isabel. He has told me what I am: 'an

infant crying in the night; an infant crying for the light; and with no

language but a cry.'"

These were the last words that Roland Lansdell ever spoke to the

Doctor's Wife. He fell back into the same half-slumber from which he had

awakened to talk to her; and some one--she scarcely knew who it was--led

her out of the sick chamber, and a little way along the corridor into

another room, where the Venetian shutters were half open, and there was

sunshine and splendour.

Then, as if in a dream, she found herself lying on a bed; a bed that

seemed softer than the billows of the sea, and around which there were

curtains of pale green silk and shadowy muslin, and a faint odour like

incense hovering about everything. As in a dream, Isabel saw Lady

Gwendoline and the nurse bending over her; and then one of them told her

to go to sleep; she must want rest; she had been sorely tried lately.

"You are among friends," the soft patrician voice murmured. "I know that

I wronged you very much, poor child; but I have promised _him_ that I

will be your friend."

The soft curtains fell with a rustling noise between Isabel and the

light, and she knew that she was alone; but still the dream-like feeling

held her senses as in a spell. Does not simple, practical Sir Walter

Scott, writing of the time of his wife's burial, tell us that it was all

like a dream to him; he could not comprehend or lay hold of the dread

reality? And is it any wonder, therefore, if to this romantic girl the

calamity that had so suddenly befallen her seemed like a dream? He was

dying! every one said that it was so; he himself spoke of his death

calmly as a settled thing; and no one gainsayed him. And yet she could

not believe in the cruel truth. Was he not there, talking to her and

advising her? his intellect unclouded as when he had taught her how to

criticise her favourite poets in the bright summer days that were gone.

No, a thousand times no; she would _not_ believe that he was to die.

Like all people who have enjoyed a very close acquaintance with poverty,

she had an exaggerated idea of the power of wealth. Those great

physicians, summoned from Savile Row, and holding solemn conclave in the

library,--they would surely save him; they would fan that feeble flame

back into new life. What was medical science worth, if it was powerless

to save this one sick man? And then the prayers which had seemed cold

and lifeless on her lips when she had supplicated for George Gilbert's

restoration took a new colour, and were as if inspired.

She pushed aside the curtains and got up from the bed where they had

told her to sleep. She went to the door and opened it a little way; but

there was no sound to be heard in the long corridor where the portraits

of dead-and-gone Lansdells--all seeming to her more or less like

him--looked sadly down from the wainscot. A flood of hot sunshine poured

into the room, but she had no definite idea of the hour. She had lost

all count of time since the sudden shock of her husband's death; and she

did not even know the day of the week. She only knew that the world

seemed to have come to an end, and that it was very hard to be left

alone in a deserted universe.

For a long time she knelt by the bedside praying that Roland Lansdell

might live--only that he might live. She would be contented and happy,

she thought, to know that all the world lay between her and him, if she

could only know that he lived. There was no vestige of any selfish

desire in her mind. Childishly, ignorantly, as a child might supplicate

for the life of its mother, did this girl pray for the recovery of

Roland Lansdell. No thought of her new freedom, no foreshadowing of what

might happen if he could be restored to health, disturbed the simple

fervour of her prayers. She only wanted him to live.

The sun sloped westward, and still shone upon that kneeling figure.

Perhaps Isabel had a vague notion that the length of her prayers might

prevail. They were very rambling, unorthodox petitions. It is not every

mourner who can cry, "Thy will be done!" Pitiful and weak and foolish

are some of the lamentations that rise to the Eternal Throne.

At last, when Isabel had been some hours alone and undisturbed in that

sunlit chamber, an eager yearning to see Roland Lansdell once more came

upon her,--to see him, or at least to hear tidings of him; to hear that

a happy change had come about; that he was sleeping peacefully, wrapt in

a placid slumber that gave promise of recovery. Ah, what unspeakable

delight it would be to hear something like this! And sick men had been

spared before to-day.

Her heart thrilled with a sudden rapture of hope. She went to the door

and opened it, and then stood upon the threshold listening. All was

silent as it had been before. No sound of footsteps, no murmur of

voices, penetrated the massive old walls. There was no passing servant

in the corridor whom she could question as to Mr. Lansdell's state. She

waited with faint hope that Lady Gwendoline or the sick-nurse might come

out of Roland's room; but she waited in vain. The western sunlight

shining redly through a lantern in the roof of the corridor illumined

the sombre faces of the dead Lansdells with a factitious glow of life

and colour; pensive faces, darkly earnest faces--all with some look of

the man who was lying in the chamber yonder. The stillness of that long

corridor seemed to freeze Isabel's childish hopes. The flapping of a

linen blind outside the lantern sounded like the fluttering of a sail at

sea; but inside the house there was not so much as a breath or a

whisper.

The stillness and the suspense grew unendurable. The Doctor's Wife moved

away from the door, and crept nearer and nearer the dark oaken door at

the end of the corridor--the ponderous barrier that shut her from Roland

Lansdell. She dared not knock at that door, lest the sound should

disturb _him_. Some one must surely come out into the corridor before

long,--Mr. Raymond, or Lady Gwendoline, or the nurse,--some one who

could give her hope and comfort.

She went towards the door, and suddenly saw that the door of the next

room was ajar. From this room came the low murmur of voices; and Isabel

remembered all at once that she had seen an apartment opening out of

that in which Roland Lansdell lay--a large pleasant-looking chamber,

with a high oaken mantel-piece, above which she had seen the glimmer of

guns and pistols, and a picture of a horse.

She went into this room. It was empty, and the murmur of voices came

from the adjoining chamber. The door between the two rooms was open, and

she heard something more than voices. There was the sound of low

convulsive sobbing; very subdued, but very terrible to hear. She could

not see the sick man, for there was a little group about his bed, a

group of bending figures, that made a screen between her and him. She

saw Lady Gwendoline on her knees at the bottom of the bed, with her face

buried in the silken coverlet, and her arms thrown up above her head;

but in the next moment Charles Raymond saw her, and came to her. He

closed the door softly behind him, and shut out that group of bending

figures. She would have spoken; but he lifted his hand with a solemn

gesture.

"Come away, my dear," he said softly. "Come with me, Isabel."

"Oh, let me see him! let me speak to him! Only once more--only once!"

"Never again, Isabel,--never upon this earth any more! You must think of

him as something infinitely better and brighter than you ever knew him

here. I never saw such a smile upon a human face as I saw just now on

his."

She had no need of any plainer words to tell her he was dead. She felt

the ground reel suddenly beneath her feet, and saw the gradual rising of

a misty darkness that shut out the world, and closed about her like the

silent waters through which a drowning man goes down to death.

CHAPTER THE LAST.

"IF ANY CALM, A CALM DESPAIR."

Lady Gwendoline kept her promise. What promises are so sacred as those

that are made to the dying, and which become solemn engagements binding

us to the dead--the dead whom we have wronged, most likely; for who is

there amongst us who does not do some wrong to the creature he most

tenderly loves? Gwendoline Pomphrey repented her jealous anger against

her cousin; she bitterly lamented those occasions upon which she had

felt a miserable joy in the probing of his wounds. She looked back, now

that the blindness of passion had passed away with the passing of the

dead, and saw herself as she had really been-unchristian, intolerant,

possessed by a jealous anger, which she had hidden under the useful

womanly mask of outraged propriety. It was not Roland's sin that had

stung her proud spirit to the quick: it was her love for the sinner that

had been outraged by his devotion to another woman.

She never knew that she had sent the man she loved to his death.

Inflexible to the last, Roland Lansdell had kept the secret of that

fatal meeting in Nessborough Hollow. The man who had caused his death

was Isabel's father. If Roland had been vindictively disposed towards

his enemy, he would, for her sake, have freely let him go: but no very

vengeful impulse had stirred the failing pulses of his heart. He was

scarcely angry with Jack the Scribe; but rather recognized in what had

occurred the working of a strange fatality, or the execution of a divine

judgment.

"I was ready to defy heaven and earth for the sake of this girl," he

thought. "I fancied it was an easy thing for a man to make his own

scheme of life, and be happy after his own fashion. It was well that I

should be made to understand my position in the universe. Mr. Sleaford

was only a brutal kind of Nemesis waiting for me at the bottom of the

hill. If I had tried to clamber upwards,--if I had buckled on my armour,

and gone away from this castle of indolence, to fight in the ranks of my

fellow-men,--I need never have met the avenger. Let him go, then. He has

only done his appointed work; and I, who made so pitiful a use of my

life, have small ground for complaint against the man who has shortened

it by a year or two."

Thus it was that Mr. Sleaford went his own way. In spite of that

murderous threat uttered by him in the Old Bailey dock, in spite of the

savage violence of his attack upon Roland Lansdell, he had not, perhaps,

meant to kill his enemy. In his own way of expressing it, he had not

meant to go too far. There is a wide gulf between the signing of other

people's names, or the putting an additional y after the word _eight_,

and an unauthorized 0 after the numeral on the face of a cheque--there

is an awful distance between such illegal accomplishments and an act of

deliberate homicide. Mr. Sleaford had only intended to "punish" the

"languid swell" who had borne witness against him; to spoil his beauty

for the time being; and, in short, to give him just cause for

remembering that little amateur-detective business by which he had

beguiled the elegant idleness of his life. Isabel's father had scarcely

intended to do more than this. But when you beat a man about the head

with a loaded bludgeon, it is not so very easy to draw the line of

demarcation between an assault and a murder; and Mr. Sleaford did go a

little too far: as he learned a few days afterwards, when he read in the

"Times" supplement an intimation of the sudden death of Roland Lansdell,

Esq., of Mordred Priory, Midlandshire.

The strong man, reading this announcement in the parlour of a low

public-house in one of the most obscure purlieus of Lambeth, felt an icy

sensation of fear that he had never experienced before amidst all the

little difficulties attendant upon the forging of negotiable autographs.

This was something more than he had bargained for. _This_ Midlandshire

business was murder, or something so nearly resembling that last and

worst of crimes, that a stupid jury might fail to recognize the

distinction. Jack the Scribe, armed with Roland Lansdell's fifty pounds,

had already organized a plan of operations which was likely to result in

a very comfortable little income, without involving anything so

disagreeable to the feelings of a gentleman as the illegal use of other

people's names. It was to the science of money-lending that Mr. Sleaford

had turned his attention; and during the enforced retirement of the last

few years he had woven for himself a very neat little system, by which a

great deal of interest, in the shape of inquiry-fees and preliminary

postage-stamps, could be extorted out of simple-minded borrowers without

any expenditure in the way of principal on the part of the lender. With

a view to the worthy carrying out of this little scheme, Mr. Sleaford

had made an appointment with one of his old associates, who appeared to

him a likely person to act as clerk or underling, and to double that

character with the more dignified _rôle_ of solicitor to the MUTUAL AND

CO-OPERATIVE FRIEND-IN-NEED AND FRIEND-IN-DEED SOCIETY; but after

reading that dismal paragraph respecting Mr. Lansdell in the supplement

of the "Times," Jack the Scribe's ideas underwent a considerable change.

It might be that this big pleasant metropolis, in which there is always

such a nice little crop of dupes and simpletons ready to fall prone

beneath the sickle of the judicious husbandman, would become, in vulgar

parlance, a little too hot to hold Mr. Sleaford. The contemplation of

this unpleasant possibility led that gentleman's thoughts away to fairer

and more distant scenes. He had a capital of fifty pounds in his pocket.

With such a sum for his fulcrum, Jack the Scribe felt himself capable of

astonishing--not to say uprooting--the universe; and if an indiscreet

use of his bludgeon had rendered it unadvisable for him to remain in his

native land, there were plenty of opportunities in the United States of

America for a man of his genius. In America--on the "other side," as he

had heard his Transatlantic friends designate their country--he might

find an appropriate platform for the MUTUAL AND CO-OPERATIVE

FRIEND-IN-NEED AND FRIEND-IN-DEED SOCIETY. The genus dupe is

cosmopolitan, and the Transatlantic Arcadian would be just as ready with

his postage-stamps as the confiding denizen of Bermondsey or Camden

Town. Already in his mind's eye Mr. Sleaford beheld a flaming

advertisement of his grand scheme slanting across the back page of a

daily newspaper. Already he imagined himself thriving on the simplicity

of the New Yorkers; and departing, enriched and rejoicing, from that

delightful city just as the Arcadians were beginning to be a little

impatient about the conclusion of operations, and a little backward in

the production of postage-stamps.

Having once decided upon the advisability of an early departure from

England, Mr. Sleaford lost no time in putting his plans into operation.

He strolled out in the dusk of the evening, and made his way to some

dingy lanes and waterside alleys in the neighbourhood of London Bridge.

Here he obtained all information about speedily-departing steam-vessels

bound for New York; and early the following morning, burdened only with

a carpet-bag and the smallest of portmanteaus, Jack the Scribe left

Euston Square on his way to Liverpool, whence he departed, this time

unhindered and unobserved, in the steam-vessel _Washington_ bound for

New York. And here he drops out of my story, as the avenging goddess

might disappear from a classic stage when her work was done. For him too

a Nemesis waits, lurking darkly in some hidden turning of the sinuous

way along which a scoundrel walks.

* * * * *

"If any calm, a calm despair." Such a calm fell at last upon Isabel

Gilbert; but it was slow to come. For a long time it seemed to her as if

a dreadful darkness obscured all the world; a darkness in which she

groped blindly for a grave, where she might lie down and die. Was not

_he_ dead? What was there left in all the universe now that he was gone?

Happily for the sufferer there is attendant upon all great mental

anguish a kind of numbness, a stupefaction of the senses, which in some

manner deadens the sharpness of the torture. For a long time Isabel

could not think of what had happened within the last few troubled weeks.

She could only sit hopeless and tearless in the little parlour at

Graybridge while the funeral preparations went quietly on about her, and

while Mrs. Jeffson and the young woman, who went on to work at

eighteenpence a day, came in every now and then to arouse her from her

dull stupor for the trying-on of mourning garments which smelt of dye

and size, and left black marks upon her neck and arms. She heard the

horrible snipping of crape and bombazine going on all day, like the

monotonous accompaniment of a nightmare; and sometimes when the door had

been left ajar, she heard people talking in the opposite room. She heard

them talking in stealthy murmurs of the two funerals which were to take

place on successive days--one at Graybridge, one at Mordred. She heard

them speculate respecting Mr. Lansdell's disposal of his wealth; she

heard the name, the dear romantic name, that was to be nothing

henceforward but an empty sound, bandied from lip to lip; and all this

pain was only some portion of the hideous dream which bound her night

and day.

People were very kind to her. Even Graybridge took pity upon her youth

and desolation; though every pang of her foolish heart was the subject

of tea-table speculation. But the accomplished slanderer is not always a

malevolently disposed person. He is only like the wit, who loves his

jest better than his friend; but who will yet do his friend good service

in the day of need. The Misses Pawlkatt, and many other young ladies of

standing in Graybridge, wrote Isabel pretty little notes of condolence,

interlarded with quotations from Scripture, and offered to go and "sit

with her." To "sit with her;" to beguile with their frivolous stereotype

chatter the anguish of this poor stupefied creature, for whom all the

universe seemed obscured by one impenetrable cloud.

It was on the second day after the surgeon's funeral, the day following

that infinitely more stately ceremonial at Mordred church, that Mr.

Raymond came to see Isabel. He had been with her several times during

the last few days; but he had found all attempts at consolation utterly

in vain, and he, who had so carefully studied human nature, knew that it

was wisest and kindest to let her alone. But on this occasion he came on

a business errand; and he was accompanied by a grave-looking person,

whom he introduced to Isabel as the late Mr. Lansdell's solicitor.

"I have come to bring you strange news, Mrs. Gilbert," he said--"news

that cannot fail to be very startling to you."

She looked up at Charles Raymond with a sad smile, whose meaning he was

not slow to interpret. It said so plainly, "Do you think anything that

can happen henceforward upon this earth could ever seem strange to me?"

"When you were with--him--on the last day of his life, Isabel," Mr.

Raymond continued, "he talked to you very seriously. He changed--changed

wonderfully with the near approach of death. It seemed as if the last

ten years had been blotted away, and he was a young man again, just

entering life, full of noble yearnings and aspirations. I pray God those

ten idle years may never be counted against him. He spoke to you very

earnestly, my dear; and he urged you, if ever great opportunities were

given you, which they might be, to use them faithfully for his sake. I

heard him say this, and was at a loss to understand his full meaning. I

comprehend it perfectly now."

He paused; but Isabel did not even look up at him. The tears were slowly

pouring down her colourless cheeks. She was thinking of that last day at

Mordred; and Roland's tenderly-earnest voice seemed still sounding in

her ears.

"Isabel, a great charge has been entrusted to you. Mr. Lansdell has left

you the bulk of his fortune."

It is certain that Mr. Raymond expected some cry of surprise, some token

of astonishment, to follow this announcement; but Isabel's tears only

flowed a little faster, and her head sank forward on the sofa-cushion by

her side.

"Had you any idea that Roland intended to leave his money in this

manner?"

"Oh, no, no! I don't want the money; I can do nothing with it. Oh, give

it to some hospital, please: and let the hospital be called by his name.

It was cruel of him to think that I should care for money when he was

dead."

"I have reason to believe that this will was made under very peculiar

circumstances," Mr. Raymond said presently; "when Roland was labouring

under a delusion about you--a delusion which you yourself afterwards

dispelled. Mr. Lansdell's solicitor fully understands this; Lord

Ruysdale and his daughter also understand it; and no possible discredit

can attach to you from the inheritance of this fortune. Had Roland

lived, he might very possibly have made some alteration and

modifications of this will. As it stands, it is as good a will as any

ever proved at Doctors' Commons. You are a very rich woman, Isabel. Lady

Gwendoline, her father, and myself are all legatees to a considerable

amount; but Mordred Priory and the bulk of the Lansdell property are

left to you."

And then Mr. Raymond went on to explain the nature of the will, which

left everything to himself and Mr. Meredith (the London solicitor) as

trustees, for the separate use and maintenance of Isabel Gilbert, and a

great deal more, which had no significance for the dull indifferent ears

of the mourner. There had been a time when Mrs. Gilbert would have

thought it a grand thing to be rich, and would have immediately imagined

a life spent in ruby velvet and diamonds; but that time was past. The

blessings we sigh for are very apt to come to us too late; like that

pension the tidings of which came to the poet as he lay upon his

deathbed.

Mordred Priory became the property of Isabel Gilbert; and for a time all

that Shakespearian region of Midlandshire had enough to employ them in

the discussion of Mr. Lansdell's will. But even the voice of slander was

hushed when Mrs. Gilbert left England in the company of Lord Ruysdale

and his daughter for a lengthened sojourn on the Continent. I quote here

from the "Wareham Gazette," which found Isabel's proceedings worthy of

record since her inheritance of Mr. Lansdell's property.

Lady Gwendoline had promised to be the friend of Isabel; and she kept

her word. There was no bitterness in her heart now; and perhaps she

liked George Gilbert's widow all the better on account of that foolish

wasted love that made a kind of link between them.

Lord Ruysdale's daughter was not the sort of woman to feel any base envy

of Mrs. Gilbert's fortune. The Earl had been very slow to understand the

motives of his kinsman's will; but as he and his daughter received a

legacy of ten thousand pounds apiece, to say nothing of sundry

Cromwellian tankards, old-fashioned brooches and bracelets in

rose-diamonds, a famous pearl necklace that had belonged to Lady Anna

Lansdell, a Murillo and a Rembrandt, and nineteen dozen of Madeira that

connoisseurs considered unique, Lord Ruysdale could scarcely esteem

himself ill-treated by his late nephew.

So Mrs. Gilbert was permitted to possess her new wealth in peace,

protected from any scandal by the Ruysdale influence. She was permitted

to be at peace; and she went away with Lady Gwendoline and the Earl to

those fair foreign lands for which she had pined in the weedy garden at

Camberwell. Even during the first bitterness of her sorrow she was not

utterly selfish. She sent money to Mrs. Sleaford and the boys--money

which seemed enormous wealth to them; and she instructed her solicitor

to send them quarterly instalments of an income which would enable her

half-brothers to receive a liberal education.

"I have had a great sorrow," she wrote to her step-mother, "and I am

going away with people who are very kind to me; not to forget--I would

not for the world find forgetfulness, if such a thing was to be found;

only that I may learn to bear my sorrow and to be good. When I come

back, I shall be glad to see you and my brothers."

She wrote this, and a good deal more that was kind and dutiful, to poor

Mrs. Sleaford, who had changed that tainted name to Singleton, in the

peaceful retirement of Jersey; and then she went away, and was taken to

many beautiful cities, over all of which there seemed to hang a kind of

mist that shut out the sunshine. It was only when Roland Lansdell had

been dead more than two years, that she began to understand that no

grief, however bitter, can entirely obscure the beauty of the universe.

She began to feel that there is something left in life even when a first

romantic love is nothing but a memory; a peace which is so nearly akin

to happiness, that we scarcely regret the flight of the brighter spirit;

a calm which lies beyond the regions of despair, and which is unruffled

by those vague fears, those shadowy forebodings, that are apt to trouble

the joyful heart.

And now it seems to me that I have little more to do with Isabel

Gilbert. She passes away from me into a higher region than that in which

my story has lain,--useful, serene, almost happy, but very constant to

the memory of sorrow,--she is altogether different from the foolish wife

who neglected all a wife's duties while she sat by the mill-stream at

Thurston's Crag reading the "Revolt of Islam." There is a great gulf

between a girl of nineteen and a woman of five-and twenty; and Isabel's

foolish youth is separated from her wiser womanhood by a barrier that is

formed by two graves. Is it strange, then, that the chastening influence

of sorrow has transformed a sentimental girl into a good and noble

woman--a woman in whom sentiment takes the higher form of universal

sympathy and tenderness? She has faithfully employed the trust confided

to her. The money bequeathed to her by the ardent lover, who fancied

that he had won the woman of his choice, and that his sole duty was to

protect her from worldly loss or trouble,--the fortune bequeathed under

such strange circumstances has become a sacred trust, to be accounted

for to the dead. Only the mourner knows the exquisite happiness involved

in any act performed for the sake of the lost. Our Protestant creed,

which will not permit us to pray for our dead, cannot forbid the

consecration of our good works to those departed and beloved creatures.

Charles Raymond has transferred to Isabel something of that affection

which he felt for Roland Lansdell; and he and the orphans, grown into

estimable young persons of sixteen and seventeen, spend a great deal of

their time at Mordred Priory. The agricultural labourer, who had known

the Doctor's Wife only as a pale-faced girlish creature, sitting under

the shelter of a hedgerow, with a green parasol above her head, and a

book in her lap, has good reason to bless the Doctor's Widow; for model

cottages have arisen in many a pleasant corner of the estate which was

once Roland Lansdell's--pretty Elizabethan cottages, with peaked gables

and dormer windows. Allotment gardens have spread themselves here and

there on pleasant slopes; and coming suddenly upon some woody hollow,

you find yourself face to face with the Tudor windows of a schoolhouse,

a substantial modern building, set in an old-world garden, where there

are great gnarled pear-trees, and a cluster of beehives in a bowery

corner, sheltered by bushes of elder and hazel.

Sigismund Smith appears sometimes at Mordred Priory, always accompanied

by a bloated and dilapidated leathern writing-case, unnaturally

distended by stuff which he calls "copy," and other stuff which he

speaks of as "proofs."

Telegrams from infuriated proprietors of penny journals pursue him in

his calm retreat, and a lively gentleman in a white hat has been known

to arrive per express-train, vaguely declaring his intention of

"standing over" Mr. Smith during the production of an urgently-required

chapter of "The Bride of the Bosphorus; or, the Fourteen Corpses of the

Caspian Sea."

He is very happy and very inky; and the rustic wanderers who meet a

pale-faced and mild-looking gentleman loitering in the green lanes about

Mordred, with his hat upon the back of his head, and his insipid blue

eyes fixed on vacancy, would be slow to perceive in him the deliberate

contriver of one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded schemes of

vengeance that ever outraged the common dictates of human nature and

adorned the richly-illustrated pages of a penny periodical. Amongst the

wild roses and new-mown hay of Midlandshire, Mr. Smith finds it sweet to

lie at ease, weaving the dark webs of crime which he subsequently works

out upon paper in the dingy loneliness of his Temple chambers. He is

still a bachelor, and complains that he is not the kind of man to fall

in love, as he is compelled to avail himself of the noses and eyes, ruby

lips, and golden or raven tresses--there are no other hues in Mr.

Smith's vocabulary--of every eligible young lady he meets, for the

decking out of his numerous heroines. "Miss Binks?" he will perhaps

remark, when a lady's name is mentioned to him; "oh yes: _she's_ Bella

the Ballet Girl (one of Bickers's touch-and-go romances; the first five

numbers, and a magnificent engraving of one of Landseer's best pictures,

for a penny); I finished her off last week. She poisoned herself with

insect-powder in a garret near Drury Lane, after setting fire to the

house and grounds of her destroyer. She ran through a hundred and

thirteen numbers, and Bickers has some idea of getting me to write a

sequel. You see there _might_ be an antidote to the insect-powder, or

the oilman's shop-boy might have given Bella patent mustard in mistake."

But it has been observed of late that Mr. Smith pays very special

attention to the elder of the two orphans, whom he declares to be too

good for penny numbers, and a charming subject for three volumes of the

quiet and domestic school, and he has consulted Mr. Raymond respecting

the investment of his deposit-account, which is supposed to be something

considerable; for a gentleman who lives chiefly upon bread-and marmalade

and weak tea may amass a very comfortable little independence from the

cultivation of sensational literature in penny numbers.