|AS my Lady left the churchyard by the wicket-gate, she caught the
flutter of a female dress that flitted on before her, and vanished in
the regions belonging to the domestics. Was it possible that anybody
had been a witness to her late interview, or worse, a listener to
the conversation? It was in the highest degree improbable, but not
impossible. By crouching down behind the low stone wall, next Sir
Robert's tomb, a person in the Abbey grounds, without doubt, could have
overheard, and even, with caution, might have watched them. It chilled
my Lady's heart to think of it. Yet what could be more unlikely? What
servant of hers would have ventured upon such an outrage? Could Mary
Forest have so far forgotten herself, actuated by an irrepressible
curiosity to hear what her mistress and her lover could have to say to
one another at that strange time and place? It was much more probable
that some domestic about to use the short-cut through the churchyard,
had seen her coming from it, and hastened back, to avoid a meeting. At
the same time, the suspicion added to my Lady's troubles.
These were serious and pressing enough already, Heaven help her! and
yet, urgent and perilous as they were, it was not of them that she first
thought when she found herself once more in her own room. There are
no circumstances, however tremendous, which have power to quench the
susceptibilities of women: their feelings must have way, no matter
how dangerous the indulgence in them, how immediate the necessity for
action. The meshes of a net which threatened destruction to herself and
all that were dear to her were closing in around Lady Lisgard, and, calm
as she looked, she knew it well--well as the wily salmon that poises
motionless, and seemingly unconscious of his peril, in the red pool,
below which the fisherman has set the spreading snare; but my Lady turns
her back for a little upon the tide of woes that is setting in upon
her--a spring-tide that may reach Heaven knows how far--and seeks
the inland Past. It is the last time that she will ever visit it, and
therefore she cannot choose but linger there a while, and shed some
bitter tears. Her door is locked, for none must see her wishing
“Good-bye,” and the windows are wide open to the air, which blows
the flame of her reading-lamp hither and thither. She needs air, poor
lady. A waft of wind that has swept some snowy steppe would have been
grateful to her throbbing brow that April night; and as for light, a
very little is enough for her purpose. Those few old letters she is
reading, taken from a secret drawer in my Lady's desk, are as familiar
to her as her prayers, and she seems to hold them almost as sacred. Yet
one is not even a letter, but only a piece of folded note-paper, torn at
the creases, and yellow--nay, yellower than mere age could possibly have
turned it. It has been damaged by seawater. Within it are two locks
of hair, quite white, and a few words in faded ink, _Frank Meade_ and
_Rachel Meade_, with a date of five-and-thirty years ago.
She takes out the silver tresses, and looking on them reverently for a
few moments, kisses them, and puts them back in the secret drawer--but
not the writing; that she holds above the lamp until it has caught fire,
and watches it until it is quite consumed, and the last spark has gone
out. Then she brings forth from the same hiding-place two letters,
evidently both by the same hand--a very unclerkly one--ill-spelled and
ill-composed, but which have been to her more dear than any written
words for a quarter of a century; for they were letters of a dead man,
written, the one when he was her accepted lover, the other after he
became her husband. They are letters of the Dead no longer; for he who
was thought to have died is still alive, and being so, has become an
enemy more terrible than any who should seek her life; one who, by
simply saying: “This is my wife,” would thereby dishonour her,
disgrace her children, and even shame the memory of that righteous man
whose tomb she had just visited, and wept over with such honest tears.
And yet with tenderness, though mixed with a certain awe and shrinking,
does my Lady look upon those time-worn words, notwithstanding that the
sacredness of Death is no longer on them. The first is what is called
a love-letter, a note filled with foolish fondness, expressed with
vehemence, but without coarseness; the second a tissue of passionate
self-reproaches; the writer accusing himself of bringing a curse
upon her happy home in having married her; then stating, as though
reluctantly, certain arrangements he had made at the seaport,-from which
his communication was dated, for the passage of herself and parents by
the _North Star_. Both are signed _Ralph Gavestone_.
“So loving and so penitent,” murmurs she, “Time cannot surely have
worked so ill with such a nature as he would have me believe! When he
first sang that carol to my ear, I thought it might have been an angel
singing:
O'er the hill and o'er the vale
Come three kings together.
“Alas, alas! to think with what terror I heard him sing it the last
time. He may not be more changed within, perhaps, than he is without;
since, notwithstanding what he said about his looks, I knew him again
the first moment my eye lit upon him on yonder lawn. I wonder whether he
would have known _me_, supposing he had snatched away my veil. Merciful
Heaven, what a risk was that! nay, is not every moment that he remains
at Mirk a risk! What if he heard the name of Gavestone coupled with
mine? I am sure he recognised something in my voice, although I
disguised it all I could. He must never come back hither--never, never!
He must be as dead to me now as I deemed him to be before. God knows
I pity him from the bottom of my heart: and also”--here she
paused--“yes, and also that I do not love him--no, not him, although
I love the man that wrote these words. I never concealed it, no, never,
from my--Sir Robert himself. I said: 'I have no love to give you,'
all along; 'only respect, devotion, duty.' And those, Heaven knows,
I gave. If all together, and a hundred other gracious feelings added,
could have made up love, then Sir Robert would have had that; but they
can _not_. He knew it, noble heart, and was content. He knew that
in that drawer I kept these very things that came on shore with me
when----O Ralph, Ralph, Ralph!” My Lady shook with sobs; and then, in
her agony, mistaking the noise of her own passion for some interruption
from without, started up from the desk on which she had thrown herself,
and listened.
Nothing was to be heard save a faint peal of laughter from the
croquet-ground, where Walter and the two young ladies were endeavouring
to play by lantern-light--a frolic she had heard them planning at
dinner-time. Yet even that slight tidings from the world without
recalled her to the present. “I must burn all proofs,” she murmured, as
though repeating some authoritative command of another rather than any
determination of her own. Then with a steady hand she took the letters,
and burned them to the last atom, reading the words with greediness, as
though, as the flame consumed them one by one, the remainder had grown
more precious, like the Sibyl's books. There was more to try her yet.
The last thing which the little drawer contained had yet to be brought
forth--a leaden locket, the facsimile of the one which Derrick had
just shewn to her in the churchyard. Within, although almost, as he had
expressed it, “dried to dust,” was a tiny sprig of wood. She emptied
this into the hollow of her hand, and instantly the wind whirled all
away. My Lady uttered a low moan of anguish, then sat with the poor
token in her hand, which, worthless and vacant as it was, yet, to her
streaming eyes, held all the treasure of her youth. “Alas, alas, for
the time that is no more!” cried she. “Who could have thought that
I, with my own hand, should destroy this precious pledge? Kind Heaven,
direct me--teach me what it is right to do! Till death should part us,
did I swear to cherish him; and now, though we both live, alone he roves
the world. It may be I should win him back to his former self, and
save a soul alive. He has loved me always--always; and he loves me now,
although he deems I have lain beneath the waves these thirty years, and
although he seeks------ But that shall never he. I will tell Mary Forest
rather to her face: 'I myself am married to this man whom you would
wed.' He shall not bring another sin upon himself and shame on her,
and----Ah, Heaven help me; what is that which I should do in this sad
strait?”
It was terrible to see my Lady's look of woe, as, rising from her
chair, she paced the room, and now prayed Heaven for aid, and now stood
listening to the mirth that still broke in from out of doors by fits,
and now gazed fixedly upon the little leaden case within her hand,
as though there were some magic help in that. “Farewell, Lucy,”
murmured she; “the last words that I ever thought to hear him say,
which, having said, he dropped, to save my life, into the wave. And now
I see him storm-tossed in the sea of sin, certain to sink, without a
plank but this poor ancient love of his to which to cling, and yet I may
not stretch a finger forth to aid him. Ah me, what base return! Why did
I not cleave to him, although I thought him dead, as he to me? Why was I
not faithful to his memory, as he to mine? Why say: 'In three years'
time, Sir Robert, if your fancy still holds firm, I will be yours?'
Why not repeat that 'No' I gave him first? Then, earning my own
living as I was born to earn it, I might have lived on alone until this
day, when, meeting with my poor lost Ralph once more, I could, without
a blush of shame, cry 'Husband!' and be to him indeed the guardian
angel his love paints I was. Heaven knows, I wish it for his sake alone.
I wish for nothing for myself but Death--yes, that would be best of all,
a thousand times.”
My Lady's once plump face looked pinched and worn, almost as though
the Shadow for which she sighed was really nigh; her anxious eyes, not
softened by her tears, peered timorous as a hare's to left and right,
as though the tenantless room held some one who could read her secret
soul. Then sitting down upon the sofa, with her hands clenched before
her, she stared out upon the twilight, deepening down upon the windmill
on the hill. But presently, “Forgive me these black thoughts,”
prayed she with inward shudder. “If, as they say, the place reserved
for the wicked is filled with those who have promised themselves to do
some good, and have not done it, then haply those who in their minds
revolve some deadly sin which they do not commit, may be forgiven. I
will not, with God's blessing, thus transgress again. I _know_ that
that is wrong, and prompted by the devil; but which is right and which
is wrong in this” (once more her eyes fell piteously upon the locket
in her hand)--“Lord help me in this trial.”
Here Walter's ringing voice was heard upon the lawn beneath: “Never
mind pulling up the rings, Letty; they are the best burglar-trap a
householder can lay; only bring in the mallets and balls.”
“My Walter!” exclaimed my Lady, starting up with haste. “Have
I forgotten _you_, then? My proud Sir Richard, too, disgraced,
dishonoured, shall men call you bastard? My sweet Letty--never, never,
never!” As though she dared not trust herself to think, she kept
repeating that sad word: then thrusting the dear token in the centre of
the wood and coals that were laid in the fireplace ready for the match,
she set all alight.
“Better for one to suffer than for three,” she muttered to herself.
“The die is cast. I am My Lady still. I would my heart could melt away
like this dull lead, and weigh me down no more, and with this last relic
of the past, that every thought of it might likewise perish. It can
never he, I know. While this my life still holds--a life of lies,
a whited sepulchre--this sting will never lose its venom--never,
never!--Shade of the dead,” cried she with vehemence, turning toward
the old church-tower, which stood up black against the rising moon,
“I charge you, witness what I do for you and yours! Here, in this
flame, I sacrifice not only this poor token, but the man that was my
husband; nay, who _is_, the man that I once loved, nay, whom I love now;
the man that laid his life down for my sake, with those two words, just
'Farewell, Lucy.' Great Heaven, is not this enough? Surely, now all
will go well--save for him and me. Is this too much to ask?... Forgive,
forgive: I know not what I said. Teach me to be humble, patient under
every blow, and no more vain regrets. I must act at once. What did
Arthur say? 'The matter lay in my own hands,' said he, whether this
man should stay at Mirk or not. How little did he know with what truth
he spoke! And I must speak to Mary without delay, for that I alone could
stop her marriage with this man. How true again? Well, I will do it.”
Then my Lady washed her swollen eyes, and smoothed her hair, all tangled
and escaped from its sober bonds, unturned the door-key, and having
rung her bell, awaited with the lamp so placed that it threw her face in
shadow, the coming of her waiting-maid.
END OF VOL. I.
End of Project Gutenberg's Mirk Abbey, Volume 1(of 3), by James Payn