And the cause of this direful shock? Not this time could it be traced
to some evil spell, some phantasmal influence. The cause was clear, and
might have produced effects as sinister on nerves of stronger fibre if
accompanied by a heart as delicately sensitive, an honour as exquisitely
pure.
The letter found in her hand was without name; it was dated from L----,
and bore the postmark of that town. It conveyed to Lilian, in the biting
words which female malice can make so sharp, the tale we had sought
sedulously to guard from her ear,--her flight, the construction that
scandal put upon it. It affected for my blind infatuation a contemptuous
pity; it asked her to pause before she brought on the name I offered
to her an indelible disgrace. If she so decided, she was warned not to
return to L----, or to prepare there for the sentence that would exclude
her from the society of her own sex. I cannot repeat more, I cannot
minute down all that the letter expressed or implied, to wither the
orange blossoms in a bride’s wreath. The heart that took in the venom
cast its poison on the brain, and the mind fled before the presence of
a thought so deadly to all the ideas which its innocence had heretofore
conceived.
I knew not whom to suspect of the malignity of this mean and miserable
outrage, nor did I much care to know. The handwriting, though evidently
disguised, was that of a woman, and, therefore, had I discovered the
author, my manhood would have forbidden me the idle solace of revenge.
Mrs. Poyntz, however resolute and pitiless her hostility when once
aroused, was not without a certain largeness of nature irreconcilable
with the most dastardly of all the weapons that envy or hatred can
supply to the vile. She had too lofty a self-esteem and too decorous a
regard for the moral sentiment of the world that she typified, to do,
or connive at, an act which degrades the gentlewoman. Putting her aside,
what other female enemy had Lilian provoked? No matter! What other woman
at L---- was worth the condescension of a conjecture?
After listening to all that the ablest of my professional brethren
in the metropolis could suggest to guide me, and trying in vain their
remedies, I brought back my charge to L----. Retaining my former
residence for the visits of patients, I engaged, for the privacy of my
home, a house two miles from the town, secluded in its own grounds, and
guarded by high walls.
Lilian’s mother removed to my mournful dwelling-place. Abbot’s House, in
the centre of that tattling coterie, had become distasteful to her, and
to me it was associated with thoughts of anguish and of terror. I could
not, without a shudder, have entered its grounds,--could not, without a
stab at the heart, have seen again the old fairy-land round the Monks’
Well, nor the dark cedar-tree under which Lilian’s hand had been placed
in mine; and a superstitious remembrance, banished while Lilian’s angel
face had brightened the fatal precincts, now revived in full force. The
dying man’s curse--had it not been fulfilled?
A new occupant for the old house was found within a week after Mrs.
Ashleigh had written from London to a house-agent at L----, intimating
her desire to dispose of the lease. Shortly before we had gone to
Windermere, Miss Brabazon had become enriched by a liberal life-annuity
bequeathed to her by her uncle, Sir Phelim. Her means thus enabled her
to move from the comparatively humble lodging she had hitherto occupied
to Abbot’s House; but just as she had there commenced a series of
ostentatious entertainments, implying an ambitious desire to dispute
with Mrs. Poyntz the sovereignty of the Hill, she was attacked by some
severe malady which appeared complicated with spinal disease, and after
my return to L---- I sometimes met her, on the spacious platform of the
Hill, drawn along slowly in a Bath chair, her livid face peering forth
from piles of Indian shawls and Siberian furs, and the gaunt figure
of Dr. Jones stalking by her side, taciturn and gloomy as some sincere
mourner who conducts to the grave the patron on whose life he himself
had conveniently lived. It was in the dismal month of February that I
returned to L----, and I took possession of my plighted nuptial home on
the anniversary of the very day in which I had passed through the dead
dumb world from the naturalist’s gloomy death-room.