THE LOVE THAT FOLLOWS THE DEAD.
On his return to Rupert Buildings, William Thornton walked on air. An
income, an assured income of a hundred pounds a quarter, was indeed an
improvement upon those casual loans which he had begged of his patron
from time to time, with somewhat more of boldness since Kilrush had
shown so marked a liking for his daughter's society. He was elated by
his patron's generosity; yet across his pleasant meditations in the
short distance between St. James's Square and St. Martin's Lane, there
was time for his thoughts to take a wider range, and for something of a
cloud to fall across his sunshine.
He was puzzled, he was even troubled, by his lordship's generosity.
What were the relations between that liberal patron and Antonia? Till
a fortnight ago his daughter's happy frankness had assured him that
all was well: that she was the kind of girl who may be trusted to take
care of herself without paternal interference. But there had been a
marked change in her manner after Kilrush's last visit. She had been
languid and silent. She looked unhappy, and had been absent-minded when
she talked of their literary projects--an essay for Cave--a story for
the _Monthly Review_, or the possibility of Garrick's favour for an
after-piece from the Italian of Goldoni.
Antonia waited upon him when he came in, helped him to change his
laced coat for an old one that he wore in the house, brought him his
slippers, and proceeded to prepare his tea; but there was no welcoming
smile.
"My dearest girl, there is something amiss," Thornton said, after he
had watched her for some time, while they sat opposite to each other
with the tea-tray between them. "My Tonia is no longer the happy girl
I have known so long. What ails my love? I have been with your friend
Kilrush. He leaves England to-morrow. Is it the loss of his company
distresses you?"
"No, no! It is best that he should come here no more."
"Why, dearest?"
"Because we could never more be friends. I was very happy in his
friendship. I knew not how happy till we parted."
"Why should such a friendship end? Why did you part?"
She burst into tears.
"I cannot--cannot--cannot tell you."
"Nay, love, you should have no secrets from your father--an indulgent
father, if sometimes a neglectful one. When have I ever scared you by a
harsh word?"
"No, no; but it is very hard to tell you that the man I esteemed
was unworthy of my friendship--that he came here with the vilest
design--that he waited till he had won my regard--and then--and
then--swore that he loved me passionately, devotedly--and offered to
make me--his mistress."
Thornton heard her with a countenance that indicated more of thought
than of horror.
"It would have been no disgrace to him to make you his wife," he said,
"but the Delafields have ever pretended to a pride in excess of their
rank. He did ill to offer you his affection upon those terms; yet I'll
swear his vows of love were sincere. I have but just left him, and I
never saw more distress of mind than I saw in his face to-day. When I
told him that you had been drooping, he implored me to call in his own
physician, at his charge."
"Oh, pray, sir, do not tell me how he looked or what he said!" cried
Tonia, with a passionate impatience, drying her tears as she spoke,
which broke out afresh before she had done. "I doubt he thinks money
can heal every wound. He offered to lavish his fortune upon me, and
marvelled that I could prefer this shabby parlour to a handsome house
and dishonour."
"He did very ill," said Thornton, in a soothing voice, as if he were
consoling a child in some childish trouble; "yet, my dearest Tonia, did
you but know the world as well as I do, you would know that he made you
what the world calls a handsome offer. To settle a fortune upon you--of
course he would mean a _settlement:_ anything else were unworthy of a
thought--would be to give you the strongest pledge of his fidelity.
Men who do not mean to be constant will not so engage their fortune.
And if--if the foolish Delafield pride--that Irish pride, which counts
a long line of ancestors as a sacred inheritance--stands in the way
of marriage--I'll be hanged if I think you ought to have rejected him
without the compliment of considering his offer and of consulting me."
"Father!"
She sprang up to her feet, and stood before him in all the dignity of
her tall figure; and her face, with the tears streaming over it, was
white with anger and contempt.
"My love, life is made up of compromises. Sure, I have tried to keep
your mind clear of foolish prejudices; and, as a student of history,
you must have seen the influences that govern the world. Beauty is
one, and the most powerful, of those influences. Aspasia--Agnes
Sorel--Madame de Pompadour. Need I multiply instances? But Beauty mewed
up in a two-pair lodging is worthless to the possessor; while, with a
fine establishment, a devoted protector, my dearest girl might command
the highest company in the town."
"Father!" she cried again, with a voice that had a sharp ring of agony,
"would you have had me say yes?"
"I would have had you consider your answer very seriously before you
said no."
"You could have suffered your daughter to stoop to such humiliation;
you would have had her listen to the proposal of a man who is free to
marry any one he pleases--but will not marry _her;_ who tells her in
one breath that he loves her--and in the next that he will not make her
his wife--oh, father, I did not think----"
"That I was a man of the world? My poor child, some of the greatest
matches in England have begun with unfettered love; and be sure that,
were your affection to consent to such a sacrifice, Kilrush would end
by giving you his name."
"Pray, pray, sir, say no more--you are breaking my heart--I want to
respect you still, if I can."
"Pshaw, child, after all we have read together! 'Tis a shock to hear
such heroics! What is the true philosophy of life but to snatch all the
comfort and happiness the hour offers? What is true morality but to do
all the good we can to ourselves, and no harm to our neighbours? Will
your fellow-creatures be any the better for your unkindness to Kilrush?
With his fortune to deal with, you could do an infinitude of good."
"Oh, cease, I implore you!" she exclaimed distractedly. "If his tears
could not conquer me, do you think your philosophy can shake my
resolve?"
She left him, and took refuge in her garret, and sat staring blankly
into space, heart-sick and disgusted with life. Her father! 'Twas the
first time she had ever been ashamed of him. Her father to be the
advocate of dishonour--to urge her to accept degradation! Her father,
whom she had loved till this hour with a child's implicit belief in the
wisdom and beneficence of a parent--was he no better than the wretches
she had heard Patty talk about, the complacent husbands who flourished
upon a wife's infidelity, the brothers who fawned upon a sister's
protector? Was all the world made of the same base stuff; and did
woman's virtue and man's honour live but in the dreams of genius?
She had accepted her father's dictum that religion and superstition
were convertible terms. Her young mind had been steeped in the
Voltairean philosophy before she was strong enough to form her own
opinions or choose her own creed. She had read over and over again of
the evil that religion had done in the world, and never of the good.
Instead of the whole armour of righteousness, she had been shown the
racks and thumb-screws of the Spanish Inquisition; and had been taught
to associate the altar with the _auto da fé_. All she knew of piety
was priestcraft; and though her heart melted with compassion for the
martyrs of a mistaken belief, her mind scorned their credulity. But
from her first hour of awakening reason she had never wavered in her
ideas of right and wrong, honour and dishonour. As a child of twelve,
newly entrusted with the expenditure of small sums, all her little
dealings with Mrs. Potter had shown a scrupulous honesty, a delicacy
and consideration, which the good woman had seldom met with in adult
lodgers. The books that had made her an infidel had held before her
high ideals of honour. And those other books--the books she most
loved--her Shakespeare, her Spenser--had taught her all that is noblest
in man and woman.
She thought of Shakespeare's Isabella, who, not to save the life of
a beloved brother, would stoop to sin. She recalled her instinctive
contempt for Claudio, who, to buy that worthless life, would have sold
his sister to shame.
"My father is like Claudio," she thought; and then with a sudden
compunction, "No, no, he is not selfish--he is only mistaken. It was of
me he thought--and that if Kilrush loved me, and I loved him, I might
be happy."
Her tears flowed afresh. Never till Kilrush threw off the mask had
she known what it was to look along the dull vista of life and see no
star, to feel the days a burden, the future a blank. She missed him.
Oh, how she missed him! Day after day in the parlour below she had
sat looking at his empty chair, listening unawares for a footstep she
was never likely to hear again. She recalled his conversation, his
opinions, his criticism of her favourite books, their arguments, their
almost quarrels about abstract things. His face haunted her: those
exquisitely refined features upon which the only effect of age was
an increased delicacy of line and colouring; the depth of thought in
the dark grey eyes; the grave smile with its so swift transition from
satire to a tender melancholy. Was there ever such a man? His elegance,
his dignity, his manner of entering a room or leaving it, the grace of
every gesture, so careless yet so unerring--every trait of character,
every charm of person, which she was unconscious of having noticed in
their almost daily association, seemed now to have been burnt into her
brain and to be written there for ever.
In the fortnight that had passed since they had parted, she had tried
in vain to occupy herself with the work which had hitherto interested
her so much as to make industry only another name for amusement. Her
adaptation of Goldoni's _Villeggiatura_ lay on her table, the pages
soiled by exposure, sentence after sentence obliterated. The facile
pen had lost its readiness. She found herself translating the lively
Italian with a dull precision; she, who of old had so deftly turned
every phrase into idiomatic English--who had lent so much of herself to
her author.
Often in these sorrowful days she had pushed aside her manuscript to
scribble her recollections of Kilrush's conversation upon a stray sheet
of foolscap. Often again, in those saddest moments of all, she had
recalled his words of impassioned love--his tears; and her own tears
had fallen thick and fast upon the disfigured page.
Well, it was ended, that friendship which had been so sweet; and she
had discovered the bitter truth that friendship between man and woman,
when the woman is young and beautiful, is impossible.
* * * * *
The days, weeks, months went by; and the name of Kilrush was no more
spoken by Thornton or his daughter. It was as if no such being had
ever had any part in their lives, any influence over their fate. Yet
Thornton was studiously obedient to his patron's wishes all the time.
Good Mrs. Potter, who was getting elderly, had for some years past
groaned under the burden of the house in Rupert Buildings, with the
double, or sometimes treble set of lodgers, who were needful to make
the business remunerative. Servant girls were troublesome, even when
paid as much as six pounds per annum, with a pound extra for tea and
sugar; lodgers were not always punctual with the weekly rent, and
sometimes left in her debt. Thornton paid her a low rent for his second
floor and garret; but he stayed from year's end to year's end; and she
valued him above the finer people who came and went in her bettermost
rooms. So when he told her that he was going to remove to a rural
neighbourhood, she opened her heart to him, and declared, firstly,
that she was sick of London, and London husseys--otherwise domestic
servants; secondly, that she could not live without Antonia; thirdly,
that she had long had it in her mind to remove her goods and chattels
to a countrified suburb, such as Highgate or Edmonton, and that could
she be secure of one permanent lodger she would do so without loss of
time.
"Choose a genteel house to the south-west of London, somewhere between
Wandsworth and Barnes, and my daughter and I will share it with you,"
said Thornton; and Mrs. Potter, who had no particular leaning to north
or east, agreed.
After this came a pleasant period of house-hunting, in which Antonia
was by-and-by induced to take a languid interest, going in a hackney
coach with Mrs. Potter and her daughter Sophy, who had served an
apprenticeship to a dressmaker, and was very doubtful how to dispose of
her talent now she was out of her time. After several suburban drives,
through suburbs that were all garden and meadow, they discovered an old
half-timbered cottage at Putney, whose casement windows looked across
the Thames to the church and episcopal palace and gardens of Fulham. To
Antonia, who had hardly known what it was to leave London since those
distant childish years in Windsor Forest, the white walled cottage and
garden seemed a heaven upon earth. Surely it must be a blissful thing
to live beside that broad reach of Thames, to see willows dipping
and reeds waving in the mild autumn wind, and the red sailed barges
drifting slowly down stream, and to hear the rooks in the great elms
yonder in the bishop's gardens, their clamorous chatter softened by
the intervening river. She went back to London enchanted with Rosemary
Bank, as the roomy old cottage called itself, and told her father that
she thought she could be happy there.
"Then Potter shall take the cottage to-morrow," cried Thornton, in a
rapture of eagerness; "for I'll be hanged if you have looked anything
but miserable for the last six weeks. Just as our luck had turned too,
my--my circumstances improved--and--and Garrick promising to put our
little Italian play on the stage, and to give me a benefit if it runs
twenty nights."
Tonia sighed, remembering the melancholy thoughts interwoven with every
line of that lively two-act burletta which she had squeezed out of
Goldoni's five-act comedy. Everybody was pleased with the neat little
after-piece, most of all Patty Lester, who was to play the soubrette,
in a short chintz petticoat, and high red heels to her shoes.
The theatre seemed a source of boundless wealth, for on Mrs.
Potter--who dropped in sometimes at tea-time for a gossip; or, coming
on a business errand, was invited to sit down and talk--complaining
that she did not know what to do with her dressmaking daughter,
Thornton offered to engage Mrs. Sophy as Antonia's "woman."
"She will have to accept a modest honorarium," he said, with his grand
air, "but she will be getting her hand in to go out as waiting-woman to
a lady of quality; and my Tonia will treat her more as a friend than a
servant."
Mrs. Potter snapped at the offer, though she did not know the meaning
of the word "honorarium." She guessed that it meant either wages or a
present, and to find that idle slut of hers an occupation, and yet have
her under the maternal eye, was an unspeakable advantage.
Antonia protested that she wanted no waiting-maid, though she loved
Sophy.
"Indeed, sir, you are not rich enough to make a fine lady of me," she
said.
"Nature has made you a lady, my love; and you are too sensible ever
to become fine. When we are living in the country--and I have to come
to London, occasionally, to look after my business--you will need a
companion whose time will be always at your service."
And so, with no more discussion, Sophia Potter was engaged, at a salary
of ten pounds per annum, paid quarterly.
At Rosemary Bank the changing seasons passed in a calm monotony;
and it seemed to Antonia, during the second year of her life in the
cottage by the Thames, as if she had never lived anywhere else. The
London lodging, the Strand and Fleet Street, Miss Lester's rooms in the
Piazza, receded in the distance of half-forgotten things; for the years
of youth are long, and the passing of a year makes a great gap in time.
The link between Tonia and London seemed as completely broken as if she
were living in Yorkshire or in Cornwall. There was a London coach that
started from the King's Head at the bottom of Putney High Street every
morning, for the Golden Cross, hard by Rupert Buildings; and this coach
carried Mr. Thornton and his fortunes three or four times a week, and
brought him home after dark. He had so much business that required his
presence in the metropolis, and first and foremost the necessity of
getting the latest news, which was always on tap at the Portico, where
half a score of gutter wits and politicians settled the affairs of the
nation, reviled Newcastle and the Pelhams, praised Pitt, canvassed the
prospects of war in America or on the continent, and enlarged on the
vices of the _beau monde_, every afternoon and evening.
Antonia accepted her father's absence as inevitable. Her own life was
spent in a peaceful monotony. She had her books and her literary work
for interest and occupation. She acquired some elementary knowledge
of horticulture from an old man who came once a week to work in the
garden; and, her love of flowers aiding her, she improved upon his
instructions and became an expert in the delightful art. She and Sophy
made the two-acre garden their pride. It was an old garden, and there
was much of beauty ready to their hands; rustic arches overhung with
roses and honeysuckle; espaliers of russet apples and jargonelle pears
screening patches of useful vegetables; plots of old-established turf;
long borders crowded with hardy perennials--a garden that had cost care
and labour in days that were gone.
And then there was the river-bank between Putney and Kew, where Tonia
found beauty and delight at all seasons; even in the long winter, when
the snapping of thin ice rang through the still air as the barges
moved slowly by, and the snow was piled in high ridges along the edge
of the stream. Summer or winter, spring or autumn, Tonia loved that
solitary shore, where the horses creeping along the towing-path were
almost the only creatures that ever intruded on her privacy. She and
Sophy were indefatigable pedestrians. They had indeed nothing else to
do with themselves, Sophy told her mother, and must needs walk "to pass
the time." Passing the time was the great problem in Sophia Potter's
existence. To that end she waded through "Pamela" and "Clarissa,"
sitting in the garden, on sleepy summer afternoons. To that end she
toiled at a piece of tambour work; and to that end she trudged, yawning
dismally now and then, by Tonia's side from Putney to Barnes, from
Barnes to Kew, while her young mistress's thoughts roamed in dreamland,
following airy shadows, or sometimes perhaps following a distant
traveller in cities and by lakes and mountains she knew not.
Often and often, in her peripatetic reveries, Antonia's fancies
followed the image of Kilrush, whose continental wanderings were
chronicled from time to time in _Lloyd's_ or the _St. James's_. He
was at Rome in the winter after their farewell; he was in Corsica in
the following spring; he spent the summer at Aix in Savoy; moved to
Montpelier in the late autumn; wintered at Florence. Tonia's thoughts
followed him with a strange sadness, wherever he went. Youth cannot
feed on regrets for ever, and the heartache of those first vacant days
had been healed; but the thought that she might never see his face
again hung like a cloud of sadness over the quiet of her life.
And now it was summer again, and the banks were all in flower, and the
blue harebells trembled above the mossy hillocks on Barnes Common, and
the long evenings were glorious with red and gold sunsets, and it was
nearly two years since she had rushed from her lover's presence with
a despairing farewell. Two years! Only two years! It seemed half a
lifetime. Nothing was less likely than that they would ever meet again.
Nothing, nothing, nothing! Yet there were daydreams, foolish dreams, in
which she pictured his return--dreams that took their vividest colours
on a lovely sunlit morning when the world seemed full of joy. He would
appear before her suddenly at some turn of the river-bank. He would
take her hand and seat himself by her side on such or such a fallen
tree or rough rustic bench where she was wont to sit in her solitude.
"I have come back," he would say, "come back to be your true friend,
never more to wound you with words of love, but to be your friend
always." The tears sprang to her eyes sometimes as imagination depicted
that meeting. Surely he would come back! Could they, who had been such
friends, be parted for ever?
But the quiet days went by, and her dream was not realized. No sign
or token came to her from him who had been her friend, till one July
evening, when she was startled by her father's unexpected return in a
coach and four, which drove to the little garden gate with a rush and a
clatter, as if those steaming horses had been winged dragons and were
going to carry off the cottage and its inmates in a cloud of smoke
and fire. Tonia ran to the gate in a sudden panic. What could have
happened? Was her father being carried home to her hurt in some street
accident--or dead? It was so unlike his accustomed arrival, on the
stroke of eleven, walking quietly home from the last coach, which left
the Golden Cross at a quarter-past nine, was due at the King's Head at
half-past ten, and rarely kept its time.
Her father alighted from the carriage, sound of limb, but with an
agitated countenance; and then she noticed for the first time that the
postillions wore the Kilrush livery, and that his lordship's coat of
arms was on the door.
"My love--my Tonia," cried Thornton, breathlessly, "you are to come
with me, this instant--alas! there is not a moment to spare. Bring her
hat and cloak," he called out to Sophy, who had followed at her lady's
heels, and stood open-mouthed, devouring the wonder-vision of coach and
postillions. "Run, girl, run!"
Tonia stared at her father in amazement.
"What has happened?" she asked. "Where am I to go?"
"Kilrush has sent me for you, Tonia. That good man--Kilrush--my
friend--my benefactor--he who has made our lives so happy. I shall lose
the best friend I ever had. Your cloak"--snatching a light cloth mantle
from the breathless Sophy and wrapping it round Tonia. "Your hat. Come,
get into the coach. I can tell you the rest as we drive to town."
He helped her into the carriage and took his seat beside her. She was
looking at him in a grave wonder. In his flurry and agitation he had
let her into a secret which had been carefully guarded hitherto.
"Is it to Lord Kilrush we owe our quiet lives here? Has his lordship
given you money?" she asked gravely.
"Oh, he has helped--he has helped me, when our means ran low--as any
rich friend would help a poor one. There is nothing strange in that,
child," her father explained, with a deprecating air.
"Kilrush!" she repeated, deeply wounded. "It was his kindness changed
our lives! I thought we were earning all our comforts--you and I. Why
are you taking me to him, sir? I don't understand."
"I am taking you to his death-bed, Tonia. His doctors give him only a
few hours of life, and he wants to see you before he dies, to bid you
farewell."
The tears were rolling down Thornton's cheeks, but Antonia's eyes were
tearless. She sat with her face turned to the village street, staring
at the little rustic shops, the quaint gables and projecting beams, the
dormer casements gilded by the sunset, Fairfax House, with its stout
red walls, and massive stone mullions, and a garden full of roses and
pinks, that perfumed the warm air as they drove by. She looked at all
those familiar things in a stupor of wonder and regret.
"You often talk wildly," she said presently, in a toneless voice. "Is
he really so ill? Is there no hope?"
The horses had swung round a corner, and they were driving by a lane
that led to Wandsworth, where it joined the London road. At the rate at
which they were going they would be at Westminster Bridge in less than
half an hour.
"Alas, child, I have it from his doctor. 'Tis a hopeless case--has
been hopeless for the last six months. He has been in a consumption
since the beginning of the winter, has been sent from place to place,
fighting with his malady. He came to London two days ago, from Geneva,
as fast as he could travel--a journey that has hastened his end, the
physician told me. Came to put his affairs in order, and to see you,"
Thornton concluded, after a pause.
"To see me! Ah, what am I that he should care?" cried Tonia.
To know that he was dying was to know that she had never ceased to love
him. But she did not analyze her feelings. All that she knew of herself
was a dull despair--the sense of a loss that engulfed everything she
had ever valued in this world.
"What am I that he should care?" she repeated forlornly.
"You are all in all to him. He implored me to bring you--with tears,
Antonia--he, my benefactor, the one friend who never turned a deaf ear
to my necessities," said Thornton, too unhappy to control his speech.
"Shall we be there soon?" Tonia asked by-and-by, in a voice broken by
sobs.
"In a quarter of an hour at the latest. God grant it may not be too
late."
No other word was spoken till the coach stopped at the solemn old
doorway in St. James's Square, a door through which Mrs. Arabella
Churchill had passed in her day of pride, when the house was hers, and
that handsome young soldier, her brother Jack, was a frequent visitor
there.
Night had not fallen yet, and there were lingering splashes of red
sunset upon the westward-facing windows of the Square; but on this side
all was shadow, and the feeble oil-lamps made dots of yellow light on
the cold greyness, and enhanced the melancholy of a summer twilight.
The door was opened as Thornton and Antonia alighted. Her father led
her past the hall porter, across the spacious marble-paved vestibule
that looked like a vault in the dimness of a solitary lamp which a
footman was lighting as they entered. Huge imperials, portmanteaux and
packing-cases filled one side of the hall; the bulk of his lordship's
personal luggage, which no one had found time to carry upstairs,
and the cases containing the pictures, porcelain, curios, which he
had collected in his wanderings from city to city, and in which his
interest had ceased so soon as the thing was bought. He had come home
too ill for any one to give heed to these treasures. There would be
time to unpack them after the funeral--that inevitable ceremony which
the household had begun to discuss already. Would the dying man desire
to be laid with his ancestors in the family vault under Limerick
Cathedral, within sound of the Shannon?
Antonia followed her father up the dusky staircase, their footfall
noiseless on the soft depth of an Indian carpet, followed him into a
dark little ante-room, where two men in sombre attire sat at a table
talking together by the light of two wax candles in tall Corinthian
candlesticks. One of these was his lordship's family lawyer, the other
his apothecary.
"Are we too late?" asked Thornton, breathlessly, with rapid glances
from the attorney to the doctor--glances which included a folded paper
lying on the table beside a silver standish.
"No, no; his lordship may last out the night," answered the doctor.
"Pray be seated, madam. If my patient is asleep, we will wait his
awakening. He does not sleep long. If he is awake you shall see him. He
desired that you should be taken to him without delay."
He opened the door of the inner room almost noiselessly and looked in.
A voice asked, "Is she here?"
It was the voice Tonia knew of old, but weaker. Her heart beat
passionately. She did not wait for the doctor, but brushed past him
on the threshold, and was scarce conscious of crossing the width of
a larger room than she had ever seen. She had no eyes for the gloomy
magnificence of the room, the high windows draped with dark red velvet,
the panelled walls, the lofty bed, with its carved columns and ostrich
plumes; she knew nothing, saw nothing, till she was on her knees by the
bed, and the dying man was holding her hands in his.
"Go into the next room, both of you," he said, whereupon his valet and
an elderly woman in a linen gown and apron, a piece of respectable
incompetence, the best sick-nurse that his wealth and station could
command, silently retired.
"Will you stop with me to the end, Tonia?"
"Yes, yes! But you are not going to die. I will not believe them. You
must not die!"
"Would you be sorry? Would it make any difference?"
"It would break my heart. I did not know that I loved you till you had
gone away. I did not know how dearly till to-night."
"And if I was to mend and be my own man again, and was to ask you the
same question again, would you give me the same answer?"
"Yes," she answered slowly; "but you would not be so cruel."
"No, Tonia, no, I am wiser now; for I have come to understand that
there is one woman in the world who would not forfeit her honour for
love or happiness. Ah, my dearest, here, here, on the brink of death,
I know there is nothing on this earth that a man should set above the
woman he loves--no paltry thought of rank or station, no cowardly dread
that she may prove unfaithful, no fear of the world's derision. If I
could have my life again I should know how to use it. But 'tis past,
and the only love I can ask for now is the love that follows the dead."
He paused, exhausted by the effort of speech. He spoke very slowly,
and his voice was low and hoarse, but she could hear every word. She
had risen from her knees, to be nearer him, and was sitting on the
side of the bed, holding him in her arms. In her heart of hearts she
had realized that death was near, though her soul rebelled against the
inevitable. She was conscious of the coming darkness, conscious that
she was holding him on the edge of an open grave.
"Do not talk so much, you are tiring yourself," she said gently, wiping
his forehead with a cambric handkerchief that had lain among the
heaped-up pillows. The odour of orange flower that it exhaled was in
her mind years afterwards, associated with that bed of death.
He lay resting, with his eyelids half closed, his head leaning against
her shoulder, her arm supporting him.
"I never thought to taste such ineffable bliss," he murmured. "You have
made death euthanasia."
He lapsed into a half-sleeping state, which lasted for some minutes,
while she sat as still as marble. Then he opened his eyes suddenly, and
looked at her in an agitated way.
"Tonia, will you marry me?" he asked.
"Yes, yes, if you bid me, by-and-by, when you are well," she answered,
humouring a dying man's fancy.
"Now, now! I have only a few hours to live. I sent for you to make you
my wife. I want your love to follow me in death. I want you to bear my
name--the name I refused you, the name that cost me half a lifetime of
happiness. Tonia, swear that you will be true--that you will belong to
me when I am dead, as you might have belonged to me in life."
She thought his mind was wandering. He had lifted himself from her
arms, and was sitting up in bed, magnetized into new life by the
intensity of his purpose.
"Ring that bell, dearest. Yes"--as she took up the handbell on his
table--"all has been arranged. Death will be civil to the last Baron
Kilrush, and will give me time for what I have to do."
His valet appeared at the door.
"Is his lordship's chaplain there?" Kilrush asked.
"Yes, my lord. The bishop has come with his chaplain."
"The bishop! My old friend is monstrous obliging. Show them in."
The valet ushered in a stately personage in full canonicals,
accompanied by a young man in surplice and hood. The bishop came to the
bedside, saluted Antonia courteously, and bent his portly form over
Kilrush with an affectionate air.
"My dear friend, on so solemn an occasion I could not delegate my duty
to another."
"You are very good. We are ready for you. My lawyer is in the next
room--he has the license; and this"--pointing to a thin gold hoop
worn with an antique intaglio ring on his little finger--"this was my
mother's wedding ring--it will serve."
The bishop took the Prayer-book which his chaplain had opened at the
Marriage Service, but paused with the book in his hand, looking at
Antonia with a grave curiosity. Kilrush followed the look, and answered
it as if it had been a question.
"You understand, bishop, that this marriage is not an atonement," he
said. "Miss Antonia Thornton is a lady of spotless reputation, who will
do honour to the name I leave her."
"That is well, Kilrush. But I hope this marriage is not designed to
injure any one belonging to you."
"No, I injure no one, for no one has any claim to be my heir."
The valet brought the candles from the further end of the room to a
table near the bishop, and rearranged the pillows at his master's back.
Antonia had risen from her seat on the edge of the bed, and stood
watching Kilrush with the candlelight full upon her face.
The bishop looked at her with a shrewd scrutiny. He wanted to know what
manner of woman she was, and what could be his old friend's motive for
this death-bed folly. They had been at Eton and Oxford together; and
though their paths had lain asunder since those early years, the bishop
knew what kind of life Kilrush had led, and was disinclined to credit
him with chivalrous or romantic impulses. He looked to the woman for
the answer to the enigma. An artful adventuress, no doubt, who had
worked upon the weaker will of a dying man. He scrutinized her with the
keen glance of a man accustomed to read the secrets of the heart in the
countenance, and his penetration was baffled by the tragic beauty of
her face, as she gazed at Kilrush, with eyes which seemed incapable of
seeing anything but him. He thought that no adventuress could conjure
up that look of despairing love, that unconsciousness of external
things, that supreme indifference to a ceremony which was to give her
wealth and station for the rest of her life, indifference even to that
episcopal dignity of purple and lawn which had rarely failed in its
influence upon woman.
"Make your ceremony as brief as you can, bishop," said Kilrush. "I have
something to say to my wife when 'tis over. Louis, call Mr. Thornton
and Mr. Pegloss."
The valet opened the door, and admitted Thornton and the lawyer. The
apothecary followed them, took up his position by his patient's pillow,
and gave him a restorative draught.
The bishop began to read in his great deep voice--a voice which must
have ensured a bishopric, but diminished from the thunder of his
cathedral tones to a grave baritone, musical as the soughing of distant
waves. The windows were open, and through the sultry air there came
the cry of the watchman calling the hour, far off and at measured
intervals--
"Past ten o'clock, and a cloudy night."
Tonia stood by the bed, holding her lover's hand.
"Who giveth this woman, etc."
Thornton was ready, trembling with excitement, dazed by the wonder of
it all, and scarcely able to speak; and Tonia's voice was choked with
tears when she made the bride's replies, slowly, stumblingly, prompted
by the chaplain. The ceremony had no significance for her, except as
a dying man's whim. Her only thought was of him. She could see his
face more distinctly now, in the nearer light of the candles, and the
awful change smote her heart with a pain she had never felt before. It
was death, the dreadful, the inevitable, the end of all things. What
meaning could marriage have in such an hour as this?
The chaplain read a final prayer. The ring had been put on. The
marriage was complete.
The bishop knelt by the table, and began to read the prayers for
the sick, Tonia standing by the bed, with Kilrush's hand in hers,
heedless of the solemn voice. The bishop looked up at her in a shocked
astonishment.
"It would be more becoming, madam, to kneel," he said in a loud whisper.
She sank on her knees beside the bed, and listened to the prayer that
seemed to mock her with its supplications for health and healing, while
Death, a palpable presence, hovered over the bed. To Antonia that
ineffectual prayer seemed the last sentence--the sentence of doom.
"You are vastly civil, bishop," said Kilrush, opening his eyelids after
one of his transient slumbers. "And now let Mr. Pegloss bring me the
paper I have to sign."
The attorney came to the bedside on the instant, carrying a
blotting-book which he arranged deftly, with a closely written sheet of
foolscap spread upon it, in front of Kilrush, who had been raised again
into a sitting position by the doctor and valet.
"This is my will, bishop," said Kilrush, as he wrote his name. "You and
your chaplain can witness it. 'Twill give an odour of sanctity to my
last act."
"Your lordship may command my services," said the bishop, taking the
pen from his friend's hand.
It was something of a shock to have this service asked of him. A few
hours ago there had been nothing he expected less than a legacy from
his old schoolfellow; but after having been asked to send his chaplain
to solemnize a death-bed marriage, after being as it were appealed
to on the score of early friendship, and after having so cordially
responded, it seemed to his episcopal mind that among the accumulated
treasures of art which poor Kilrush was about to surrender, some small
memento, were it but a diamond snuff-box, or an enamelled watch--should
have come to him.
He wrote his stately signature with a flourish; the chaplain following.
Kilrush sank back among his pillows, supported by the arms he loved.
"Bishop, you are a connoisseur," he said, in his faint voice, looking
up shrewdly at his schoolfellow's ample countenance, rosy with the rich
hues of the Côte d'or. "That Raffaelle over the chimney-piece--'tis
a replica of the Sposalizia at Milan. Some critics pronounce it the
finer picture. Let it be a souvenir of your obliging goodness to-night.
Louis, you will see the Raffaelle conveyed to his lordship's house
immediately. Mr. Pegloss will assist you to take the picture down. And
now good-night to you all."
"My dear Kilrush, you overpower me," murmured the bishop; and then he
bent over the invalid, and whispered a solemn inquiry.
"No, no; I am not in a fit state of mind," Kilrush answered fretfully.
"And my wife is not a believer."
"Not a believer!"
His lordship's eyebrows were elevated in unspeakable horror. He
glanced with something of aversion at the lovely face hanging over the
dying man with looks of all absorbing love. Not a believer! He would
scarcely have been more horrified had she been a disciple of Wesley or
Whitefield.
"My dear friend," he murmured, "'tis my bounden duty to urge----"
"Come to me to-morrow morning, bishop."
"Let it be so, then. At eight o'clock to-morrow morning."
"_A rivederci_," said Kilrush, with a mocking smile, waving an
attenuated hand, as the churchman and his satellite withdrew.
Thornton and the lawyer followed, but only to the ante-room. The
apothecary and valet remained. The physician had paid his last visit
before Antonia arrived. There had been a consultation of three great
men in the afternoon, and it had been decided that nothing more could
be done for the patient than to make him as comfortable as his malady
would permit, and for that the apothecary's art was sufficient.
"You can wait in the next room, Davis, within call," said Kilrush, as
the grave elderly man, in a queer little chestnut wig, bent over him,
looking anxiously in his face, and feeling his pulse.
The throb of life beat stronger than Davis had anticipated. A wonderful
constitution that could so hold out against the ravages of disease!
The breathing was laboured, but there was vigour enough left to last
out the long night hours--to last for days and nights yet, the medico
thought, as he left the room.
The valet was moving the candles from the table by the bed, when his
master stopped him.
"Leave them there: I want to see my wife's face," he said.
The man obeyed, and followed the apothecary.
Husband and wife were alone.
"On your knees, Tonia--so, with your face towards the light," Kilrush
said eagerly. "So, so, love. I want to see your eyes. You are my wife,
Tonia, my wife for ever--in life and after life. This perishing clay
will be hidden from your sight to-morrow--_this_ Kilrush will cease
to be--but--" striking his breast passionately, "there is something
here that will live--the mind of the man who loved you--and who dies
despairing--the martyr of his insensate pride."
He grasped her hands in both his own, looking into her eyes with a wild
intensity that touched the boundary line of madness; but she did not
shrink from him. That wasted countenance, leaden with the dull shadow
of death, was for her the dearest thing on earth, the only thing she
was conscious of in this last hour.
"Tonia, do you understand?" he gasped, struggling to recover breath.
"I have married you to make you mine beyond the grave. It would be the
agony of hell to die and leave you to another. You are mine by this
bond. I have given you all a dying lover can give--my name, my fortune.
Swear that you will be true to me, that you will never give yourself to
another man. That you will be my wife--mine only--till the grave unites
us, and that you will lie by my side when life is done, the vault by
the Shannon your only wedding bed. Promise me never to bless another
with your love."
"Never, never, never, upon my honour," she said, with a depth of
earnestness that satisfied him.
"On your honour--yes, for your honour means something. If the spirits
of the dead are free, I shall be near you. If you break your promise,
I shall haunt you--an angry ghost, pitiless, cruel. As you hope for
peace, do not cheat me."
In the unnatural strength of impassioned feeling he had exhausted that
reserve of energy which the apothecary had noted, and in the rush of
his passionate speech he was seized with a more violent fit of coughing
than any that had attacked him since Antonia's coming. She was agonized
at the sight of his suffering, and hung over him with despairing love,
while the attenuated frame was convulsed with the struggle for breath.
The fight ended suddenly. He flung his arms round her neck, and his
head fell upon her bosom, in an appalling silence. A blood-vessel had
burst in that last paroxysm, and in the red stream that poured from his
lips, covering Tonia's gown with crimson splashes, his life ebbed away.
A piercing shriek startled the watchers in the ante-room. Doctor,
nurse, valet, rushed to the bed-chamber, to find Antonia swooning on
her knees beside the bed, the dead man's arms still clasped about her
neck.
"Very sudden!" said the apothecary, as Thornton appeared at the door.
"I thought his lordship would have held out longer."
* * * * *
When Antonia recovered her senses she found herself lying on a sofa in
a room she had never seen before, with the respectable-incompetent in
a linen apron holding a bottle of smelling-salts to her nostrils, and
an odour of burnt feathers poisoning the atmosphere. Her father was
sitting by her side, holding her hand, and patting it soothingly. Some
one had taken off her gown, and her shoulders were wrapped in an old
shawl, lent by the incompetent. The lofty room was a well of shadow,
made visible by a single candle.
She lay in apathetic silence for some minutes, not knowing where she
was, or what had happened, wondering whether it was evening or morning,
summer or winter. It was only when her father talked to her that she
began to remember.
"My sweet child, I implore you to compose yourself," he said. "My dear
friend acted nobly. Alas, was there ever so fine, so generous a nature?
My Tonia is one of the richest women in London, and with a name that
may rank with the highest. My Tonia! How splendidly she will become her
exalted station."
Antonia heard him unheeding.
"Let me go back to him," she said, rising to her feet.
"Not yet, madam," murmured the nurse. "To-morrow morning. Not to-night,
dear lady. Let me help your ladyship to undress. The next room has been
prepared fur your ladyship."
"Why can't I go to him?" asked Antonia, turning to her father. "I
promised to stay with him till the end."
"Alas, love, thou wast with him till the last. His arms clasped thee
in death. I doubt thou wilt never forget those moments, my poor wench.
God! how he loved you! And he has made you a great lady."
She turned from him in disgust.
"You harp upon that," she said. "I loved him--I loved him. I loved
him--and he is dead!"
The nurse had crept away to assist in the last sad duties. Father and
daughter were alone, Antonia sitting speechless, staring into vacancy,
Thornton babbling feebly every now and then, irrepressible in his
exultation at so strange, so miraculous a turn of fortune's wheel.
"Kilrush's death would have beggared us, but for this," he thought.
A clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven. Only eleven o'clock! 'Twas
but two hours since Antonia had entered the house, and her life before
she crossed that threshold seemed to her far away in the dim distance
of years that were gone.
He had loved her, and had repented his cruelty. There was comfort in
that thought even in the despair of an eternal parting. Was it to be
eternal? He had spoken of an after-life, a consciousness that was to
follow and watch her. She, the Voltairean, who had been taught to smile
at man's belief in immortality, the fairy-tale of faith, the myth of
all ages and all nations--she, the unbeliever, hung upon those words of
his for comfort.
"If his spirit can be with me, sure he will know how fondly I love
him," she said; and the first tears she shed since his death flowed at
the thought.