And so that act of the play is finished: all the actors have strutted
and fumed and fretted through their little parts, and now the curtain
has fallen. When next it rises, the principal actress in this tragic
drama is discovered lying full-dressed on her bed; her pretty face
buried--eyes, nose, and mouth--in the tumbled pillow; her little
neat-shod feet hanging over the bedside. She looks as if she had been
thrown there, an inert, passive mass, by some spiteful giant. Six
miles away, at Lord ----'s ball, the fiddles are squeaking, and the
pink-and-green Chinese lanterns swinging to and fro among the orange
boughs in the slight wind made by the rustling dresses and passing
men and women. Sir Thomas, with his hands in their burst white gloves
under his coat tails, and his blue-cloth back leaning against a marble
mantel-piece, is talking sweetly, in his hard, rasping voice, of scab
and foot-rot. Miladi is gone down to supper for the sixth time on the
sixth devoted married man's arm; she is eating game pie, and drinking
sherry and champagne and moselle in turns. Miss Blessington, sweeping
about on the arm of a small white gentleman, whose estate is as large
as his person is minute, is responding a little superciliously to a
presumptuous younger son, who, annihilated by her Greek profile and
Juno bust, has invited her to tread a measure with him.
"No, tha--anks; I never da--ance round da--ances."
Meanwhile Esther lies stretched upon the counterpane, while a gloomy
pageant of all that she has lost passes before her eyes. Greedier than
the dog in the fable, she had tried to keep shadow and substance:
Gerard's love, Brandon's liking. Now, lo! both have fallen into the
water. There are a few circles, a few rising bubbles; then all is
over--gone, sunk to the bottom, to come up again never more. Vanished
from her grasp is the great house--are the buhl and marqueterie
cabinets--are the "Venus surprised by Satyrs" and the "Susanna and the
Elders"--are the vineries, pineries, peacheries. Did they ever exist?
or were they only a mirage, such as the sky presents to us sometimes--a
mirage of ships shocking together, of armed men meeting in fight?
"Go back to your pigstye!" said the magic fish to Ilsabil, the
fisherman's wife, when she modestly requested to be made lord of
the sun and moon. "Go back to your pigstye!" cries Fate to Esther.
At any other time the subsiding from the prospect of being rather a
great lady into the certainty of being a very small one would have
caused considerable annoyance to Esther's aspiring soul. _Now_, the
_things_ she has lost merge and lose themselves in the _person_ she has
lost. But is he lost necessarily, irrecoverably? Despite the forlorn
attitude, the tear-swollen face, trying to suffocate itself in down,
Hope is busy whispering, "You will see him again to-morrow: men in real
life are not like men in novels--changeless of purpose, hard as iron
or adamant. What they are one half-hour, they are the exact reverse of
the next; what they swear to-night they will unswear to-morrow." As
Hope, the deceiver, thus murmurs, there comes to her ear the sound of
wheels briskly rolling to the door. "Is the ball over so early? are
they come back already? or----?" She does not give herself time to
speculate on any other hypothesis, but, springing from the bed, runs to
the window, draws aside curtain and blind, and looks out. The hall-door
is open; a vehicle stands before it. The moonlight and the light shed
from the hanging-lamp in the portico are fighting together, struggling
for possession of a horse and dog-cart, of two footmen's floured
heads, and of a portmanteau and hat-box that they are carrying out.
"Thud! thud!" she hears the portmanteau go in at the back of the cart.
Then a man comes out--a man in hat and overcoat--drawing on dogskin
gloves, and saying, "John, go and look for my box of cigar-lights; I
left it on the smoking-room table." It is St. John, speaking in much
his usual voice. He is going away! going away! and he can think of
his cigar-lights! Her heart stops pulsing for a second, then sets off
galloping at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Going without
making any sign! She leans further out of the window, and rests her
white arms, that look whiter than any lilies in the moonlight, on the
sill. He is so close beneath her, if the servants were not there,
she might call to him; as it is, he will never know that she has
watched his departure. A sudden impulse prompts her to throw up the
window higher, to rustle her dress, to cough, in order to attract his
attention. At the unexpected noise John and Thomas turn their heads
and look up, but their master does not. He gives a slight start, but,
instantly recovering himself, walks steadily to the cart and gets in.
Then she knows that he knows that she is looking at him--knows that he
is resolute to part from her--
"taking no farewell--"
as Lancelot took none of Elaine.
The horse is a little fidgety at starting. "Wo-o-o! Gently, old lass!"
This is the affecting form that St. John's last words take. She cranes
her neck out of the window; she leans out her lithe body, reckless of
the danger of losing her balance and tumbling on the hard gravel drive
below, in her eagerness to catch the last glimpse of the lessening,
dwindling bulk; then, forgetting to shut the window, careless of any
cold or stock of rheumatism that she might be laying up for herself,
she returns to her former position, flings herself again prone on her
bed, again buries her face in the pillow; but this time no beguiling
hope sits and whispers pleasant falsities to her. Hope got up upon the
dog-cart, and drove away with Gerard.
The night wanes; morning dreams, that they say come true, invade many
sleepers' brains. At Lord ----'s ball people are still dancing with
the fury produced by champagne and supper; but Sir Thomas, Miladi, and
Miss Blessington, are at home again, and in bed. Constance is not one
of those hard dancers who think that one after-supper galop is worth
ten ante-coenal ones. Not for all the entrancing valses Strauss
ever composed would she run the risk of damaging the freshness of her
toilette, nor the still more serious risk of exchanging the marble
coolness of her cheeks for the unsightly flush of heat or the ugly
pallor of exhaustion.
Dawn is just beginning stealthily to unlatch the eastern gate; her
torch, new-lit, makes but a puny opponent for the night's one great and
myriad lesser lamps. Esther has fallen into an uneasy doze, her damp
brow and loosened hair resting on her bare, outflung arm. Suddenly a
knock at her door makes her start up in a vague, confused horror. Is
it St. John come back? Is it some one come to murder her? A thousand
impossibilities flash across her bewildered brain. Without waiting
for permission, the person who knocked enters; not St. John, nor a
murderer--only a dishevelled housemaid, who has evidently just thrown a
gown over her night attire, and endeavoured abortively to gather up the
straggling hair out of her sleepy eyes under a muslin cap put on awry.
"A tallygraph for you, miss!" says she, coming forward, holding in one
hand a blue envelope, and in the other a tall, solemn tallow candle, as
sleepy as herself.
A telegraphic message! Oh hateful telegraph! Cruellest of modern
inventions! Oh hastener of evil tidings, that, without you, come all
too speedily! Oh maker of sick hearts and blanched cheeks and arrested
pulses!
Esther snatches it, while a sudden, awful cold grasps her heart, and
reads by the wavering, feeble light these words, in a scrawly clerk's
hand:
"Robert Brandon to Esther Craven. Come home instantly; Jack is very
ill."
With how few pen-strokes can a death-warrant be written! For a moment
she sits bolt upright, void of breath or motion, as a white dead
woman, from the house of whose fair body the spirit departed an hour
ago; the telegram grasped in a stiff hand that knows not of it. Then
consciousness returns, brought back by a huge, tearing, killing agony;
then even the agony yields to one intense, consuming longing--one
all-dominating purpose--the longing to slay time and space; to be with
him _now_, this instant; to be beside Jack dying, not Jack dead.
"Can I see Sir Thomas?" she asks collectedly, but in a rough, deep
voice. "I have had bad news from home: my brother is very ill."
"Indeed, 'm, you don't say so;" replies the servant, growing broadly
awake under the delightful excitement of a calamity having happened to
somebody, and of herself being the first recipient of the news.
"I _must_ see Sir Thomas!" Esther says, putting her hand up in a
bewildered way to her head, and then springing off the bed and walking
quickly towards the door.
"See Sir Thomas," repeats the woman, the most unfeigned alarm painting
itself on her broad face--"_now!_ Indeed, ma'am, you must be mad to
think of such a thing! It would be as much as all our places are worth
if he were to be disturbed before his usual time."
Esther turns and clutches her arm, while her great eyes brimful of
despair, burn on her face. "I tell you my brother is _dying!_" she
says, hoarsely--"I know he is; I must go to him _this minute;_ for
God's sake help me to get to the station!"
"Indeed, 'm, I'm sorry to see you in such trouble, _that_ I am!"
answers her companion, moved to compassion by the terrible, haggard
misery of the young, round face, that she, in company with her
fellow-servants, had often admired in its happy, dewy rosiness at
prayers on Sunday evenings; "but, you see, all the men are in bed, and
Simpson 'ud cut off his own 'ead afore he'd venture to take out the
carriage without Sir Thomas's orders."
The tall, yellow candle flares between them: lights up the tortured
beauty of the one woman, the placid stolidity of the other. Esther
groans, and smites her hands together.
"Is there _no_ vehicle I can have?" she asks in impatient agony--"no
cart?--no anything? I'd give all I have in the world to any one who
would take me. Oh God! how many minutes I am wasting."
The housemaid puts down her flat candlestick on the table, and rubs
her forehead with her rough fore-finger to aid her thinking powers.
"There's the dog-cart that the under-servants goes to church in," she
says, presently, with an uncertain suggestion: "if we could knock the
men up, you might have _it_, perhaps."
"Knock them up this instant, then!" cries Esther, with passionate
urgency--"_now, this minute!_ Go, for God's sake!"
So saying, she almost pushes the woman out of the room, and herself
follows her. Through long passages and corridors, full of emptiness and
darkness--darkness utter and complete, save where through the gallery's
high-stained east window the chilly, chilly dawn comes peeping, with a
grey glimmer, about the black frames, never closing eyes, and stiff,
prim simpers of the family portraits--down to the lower regions, where
the huge kitchen-grate yawns, black as Erebus--up steep back-stairs
along other passages. In one of these passages Esther stands, her frame
trembling and teeth chattering with cold and nervous excitement, while
her companion raps with broad, hard knuckles on a door, and loudly
calls on Simpson to awake. But hard workers are hard sleepers, and it
is some time before the coachman can be induced to leave the country
of slumber. When at length he is aroused, and has come out to them,
in all the yawning sulkiness of disturbed sleep, it is a still longer
time before he can be induced to admit the possibility of _any_ vehicle
whatever being put at Esther's disposal: with so righteous a fear of
his wrath has Sir Thomas succeeded in inspiring his subordinates.
It is not without the aid of all her remaining money, with the
exception of what is needed for the purchase of her railway ticket--not
without the aid of all that is left of poor Jack's hardly-spared
five-pound note--that she is able at length to induce him to consent
to the getting ready of the dog-cart "in which the under-servants goes
to church." Fully three-quarters of an hour more elapse before one
of the helpers can be knocked up, can dress himself, can harness the
oldest and screwiest horse in the stables, and put him, with many a
muttered grumble, into the cart. Wretched Esther follows the man and
his lanthorn to the stable-yard, with the vain idea that her presence
may hurry his movements. During most of the three-quarters of an hour
she walks quickly up and down over the hard, round stones with which
the yard is paved, or stands watching, with greedy eyes, every step
in the harnessing process; while her hands clench themselves, as his
are clenched who is dead by some very cruel, violent death, and a
pain like a red-hot, two-bladed knife keeps running through her heart.
Before the horse is well between the shafts, she has climbed into the
cart and taken her seat.
"The luggage is not in yet, 'm," suggests the groom, respectfully.
"Oh! never mind the luggage," cries Esther, feverishly; "I don't want
it! I don't want anything! I'm ready! Get in, please, and set off this
minute!"
Dawn is breaking, slowly, coldly, greyly, without any of the
rose-coloured splendours that mostly gild the day's childhood, as the
glorious delusions of youth gild our morning. There has not been a
positive, actual frost in the night--not frost enough to congeal the
wayside pools or to kill the dahlias--but the air has, for all that, a
frosty crispness, as of the first breath of coming winter. The trees
and hedgerow holly-bushes loom gigantic, formless, treble and quadruple
their real size, folded round and round in a mantle of mist; the
meadows are like lakes of mist; sheets of vapour steaming damply up to
the shapeless, colourless, low-stooping heavens. Esther has forgotten
to take any wrap: through the poor protection of her thin cotton dress
and jacket the mist creeps slowly, searchingly, making her limbs shake
and shudder; but she herself is unconscious of it--she could not have
told you afterwards whether she had been warm or cold.
At the turnpike gate a sleepy old man comes hobbling out (men at
toll-gates are mostly one-legged), in his hand a candle, to which the
white morning is beginning to give a very sickly, yellow look: it seems
to Esther that he will never have done fumbling in his breeches-pocket
for the sixpence of change that eludes his search.
"Why do you stop? Cannot you go a little quicker?" asks Esther,
hoarsely, her teeth chattering with cold and misery, as the groom
allows his horse to walk up a long, gentle incline.
"Sir Tummas allus gives pertikler horders as we should walk the 'orses
up this 'ill," replies the man; "you see, 'm, it's collar-work pretty
nigh all the way from our place to Brainton."
"But it is such a little hill, and Sir Thomas need never know," pleads
Esther, imploringly. "I have not got any money now, but if you'll take
me quicker--a good deal quicker--I will send you five shillings--ten
shillings--by post, when I get home."
"Much obliged to you, ma'am," answers the man, touching his hat, and
giving another instance of the influence of filthy lucre by whipping up
his horse.
"When is the next train to Berwyn?" cries Esther, almost before they
had pulled up at the station, to a porter, who stands waiting to
receive any arriving passengers.
"7.20," replies the man, briefly.
"And what time is it now?"
"6.15."
"Is not there one before 7.20?"
"None; you are just too late for the 6.10 one; it has been gone about
five minutes."
Unmindful of the presence of the careless, indifferent onlookers,
Esther clasps her cold hands together and groans. In a great despair,
as in a great bodily agony, we do not much mind who sees or hears us.
"Too late!" she says, with a heavy, tearless sob--"five minutes too
late! Oh God, it _is_ hard!"
"Any luggage, Miss?" asks the porter, in his civil, matter-of-fact
voice.
The common-place question brings her back to life. "No, none," she
answers, collecting herself; and so saying walks into the station,
and, taking refuge in the waiting-room, sinks down upon a green Utrecht
velvet chair.
Owing to the earliness of the hour, other occupant of the room is there
none; neither is there any fire (a fire always looks in good spirits;
it never has the blues). Alongside of the empty fire-place stands a
stiff, green Utrecht velvet sofa, and round the bare table more green
Utrecht velvet chairs. Opposite to Esther, against the wall, hangs a
roll of texts. Involuntarily her haggard eyes lift themselves to them,
and light upon this one--which, under the slightly inappropriate title
of "Encouragements to Repentance," heads the list: "Woe to me, for I am
undone!" She shudders, "Is it an omen?" turns away her head quickly,
and tries to look out of window, but the wire-blind hinders her gaze.
Once again, "Woe is me, for I am undone!" standing out clear and black
in large type from the white paper, greets her eyes. She can bear it no
longer, but rising hastily, runs out, and begins to walk swiftly up and
down the platform.
Brainton is a large station--a junction of many lines. Engines are
snorting and puffing about; boilers letting off steam, with a noise
calculated to break the drum of any ear; tarpaulin-covered waggons
standing shunted on side lines. A train has just come in, and is
disgorging its human load; a man with a hammer is walking along by
the side of it, stooping and tapping the wheels; porters are driving
luggage-piled trucks before them, and shouting out, "By your leave!"
to any unwary traveller who may cross the relentless path of their
Juggernaut: other parties are enduring and answering, with angelic
patience and _bonhomie_, the agitated and incoherent questions of
unprotected females in waterproof cloaks and turn-down hats. Everybody
and everything is rampantly _alive;_ even to his handiwork, man seems
to have imparted some of his own intense vitality; to the engines he
has given motion and voice--motion and voice ten thousandfold stronger
than his own.
In her hurried walks, Esther suddenly comes face to face with a
fair-haired youth, who, followed by a porter carrying a gun-case, is
walking lightly along with his hands in his pockets, whistling for very
lightheartedness,
"I paddle my own canoe."
Jack's tune! What business has he to whistle it? All fair-haired
youths, with nothing very prominent in any of their features, are
more or less alike; and this amount of resemblance the unknown bears
to her boy. Long after he has passed her, amid the shrieking of the
engines, the shouts of the porters--"Take your seats for Wolverhampton,
Birmingham!" "All here for Chester, Warrington, and Manchester?"--the
well-known tune echos faintly back to her ears. An overpowering,
blinding, deafening rush of feeling comes over her; she sits down
hastily on a bench that is near at hand, in close proximity to an
Irish labourer, with a blue-spotted bundle, and, careless of the
contaminating contact, buries her head in her hands, and rocks to and
fro in a paroxysm of despair.
It is one of those incontrovertible facts that we all know to be true,
and that we all feel to be false, that every hour is of the same
length; that in an hour of Elysium there are sixty whole minutes, and
that in an hour of Hades there are only sixty. In Esther's hour of
waiting there are, however, seventy-five minutes, as the train is a
quarter of an hour late.
"Is it a fast train?" she asks eagerly of the bearded guard, who, with
the politeness inborn in guards, opens the carriage-door for her.
"No, miss," he answers, with suavity--"slow train, miss; stops at
every station; 6.10 was the fast train, miss!"
Off at last, sliding slowly at first past platform, officials, trucks,
book-stalls, dowdy women and dusty men; then the wind comes beating
with a strong rush against Esther's cheeks, blowing back her hair, as
they fly through the air at the rate of fifty miles an hour.
The transit from Brainton to Berwyn occupies three hours, and during
the greater part of that time Miss Craven maintains almost exactly the
same attitude; with her greedy eyes devouring every field and tree and
homestead as they run past--each village spire and bridge a finger-post
to tell her that she is so much nearer her boy. She does not cry at
all, or groan. Even had she wished to do so, conventionality--that
makes us laugh when we would fain weep, makes us weep when we would
fain laugh--would have forbidden her, for she is not alone in the
carriage. Two other travellers share it with her--two extremely
cheerful young men, to whom it is a matter of supreme indifference how
many hedges and meadows are before, how many behind them. They are
not exactly gentlemen: and indeed it is a matter of almost as curious
inquiry as what becomes of all the pins that are made and lost, in
what part of the train, if it be not in the guard's van, gentlemen
and ladies travel, as assuredly they are but seldom to be met with in
first-class carriages. The two youths have made themselves and their
hat-boxes, rugs, &c., luxuriously comfortable, and seem rather disposed
to be funny--to "show off," as children say, for the benefit of the
lovely girl, who looks so disconsolate and dishevelled, who seems so
unflatteringly unaware of their presence. They eat sandwiches and
drink sherry; they are provided with a large stock of all the morning
papers, and by-and-by the eldest and boldest of them proffers _Punch,
Fun_, and half-a-dozen other dreary comicalities to Esther. She looks
at him for a second with her large wistful eyes as she declines the
offered civility, and then resumes her watch. Having obtained that one
short glance, he ceases from his witticisms, half-conscious of being
in the company of a great sorrow--as we involuntarily hush our voices
and speak softly in the presence of our great master and owner--Death.
Perhaps, cowardly slaves as we are, we fear lest, if we should speak
loudly, he might be reminded of our existence--might lay his heavy hand
on our shoulders also.
Another hour of waiting at Berwyn--another hour before there is any
train for the branch line that leads to Glan-yr-Afon--any train, at
least, that stops at so insignificant a station. Another hour of
tramping in forlorn, impotent impatience up and down the platform,
hustled by a hurrying crowd, who know nothing, and care, if possible,
less, about her and her grief. Well, if every one in England wept for
every one else's sorrows, the noise of tears and sobbings would drown
the whirring of all the mills in Leeds and Manchester--the booming of
all the cannon at Shoeburyness. It is half an hour past noon, when,
almost before the train has stopped at the little wayside station,
Esther springs out. She is the only passenger for Glan-yr-Afon; and the
man who unites in himself the functions of station-master and porter
looks at her with a recognising eye. He must know whether Jack is alive
or dead. He looks much as usual, but so he would whether Jack were
alive or dead. Feeling an overmastering sense of fear of and repugnance
from the news he may have to give her, she runs to the little wicket
that leads out into the road.
"Your ticket, please, miss!" cries the man, following her.
She had forgotten it; it takes a minute to extricate it from her glove;
she thinks that he looks as if he were going to speak; and, in a blind
terror of what he might say, turns from him and rushes down the road.
Any suspense is better than some certainties.