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 him self 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.