A few days after Edgar Sutherland’s visit to Mount Eden, Jane Peartree
walked out for the first time after her illness into the sun. She wore
the plain cap and gown of the other inmates of the Home, and even in
that simple costume (or rather, perhaps, because of it) she looked
strangely beautiful. Leaning on the arm of Adèle Lambert, she passed
feebly across the green lawn in front of the house, and gained a garden
seat in a quiet walk leading to the home farm.
The day was very mild for winter tide, the sun was shining gently, and
here and there from the dark earth a snowdrop was peeping. The air,
moreover, was full of that cool, balmy sweetness which so often in our
chill climate precedes the resurrection of the spring.
But Jane Peartree was ill at ease. Ever since her encounter with
Sutherland she had been strangely fretful and uneasy, and had not her
strength failed she would certainly have taken her departure before that
day.
As they sat together on the window-seat, her cry was still for speedy
flight.
‘I must go to-morrow!--yes, Adèle, to-morrow! I have already stayed too
long!’
‘But, madame, you are still so weak. Why should you go so soon?’
‘I cannot stay! I have so far to go,--and--and I shall go mad, I think,
if I remain. You are all kind--kinder than I deserve--but it is not
that! No, no!’ ‘But _where_ will you go, madame? Have you not told me
you have no home--no friends?’
‘I have none--I want none,’ returned Jane Peartree; ‘but all the same,
I must leave this place. Here, I feel like a dead woman in her shroud,
dead and cold, but being forced back to life, just when I would be left
alone to rest for ever. I do not feel at peace. In the night I cannot
sleep, and in the day I am afraid. Why should I be sitting here in the
sunshine, when by rights I should be lying in my grave?’
Adèle looked at her companion in deep sorrow and pain, and wondered,
indeed, if her wits were going, since her words were so incomprehensible
and strange. Just then, as they sat side by side, there passed across
the lawn, some hundred yards away, the figure of a man, at the sight of
whom Adèle brightened, and said, forcing a smile:--
‘Sister Ursula tells me your name is uncommon, even in England; yet you
have a namesake yonder, madame.’
‘A namesake?’ repeated Jane Peartree.
‘Yes; one of the gardeners upon the estate. That is he crossing to the
shrubberies.’
Jane Peartree turned her weary eyes towards the man, and in a moment her
heart leapt up in wondering recognition, her pale face flushed, and she
uttered a low cry. Who that had once seen it could fail to remember
the little, quaint, old-fashioned figure, the curious gait, of Luke
Peartree? Yes, it was Uncle Luke, greyer and older than when, long years
before, he led little Madeline home from Grayfleet Churchyard, but still
living--‘to brighten the sunshine.’
‘Quick! call him! I must speak to him!’ cried the invalid, rising
faintly to her feet.
Adèle ran off instantly after the man, who had disappeared into the
shrubberies. Presently she reappeared, the little gnome-like figure
trotting by her side. As he came up, clad in homespun and leather
gaiters, and carrying a pruning-hook, his wrinkled face expanded into
the vacant wondering smile that was so familiar.
What was his surprise to see a strange woman, tall and pale, standing
with extended arms, gazing upon him through streaming tears?
‘Uncle Luke! don’t you know me?’
Uncle Luke stood and scratched his head, smiling, more amicably than
ever, the smile of honest stupefaction. Before he could utter a word,
which, indeed, he was in no hurry to do, the strange woman had flung her
arms around his neck, and, sobbing and crying, was kissing him upon the
cheek.
‘Uncle Luke! it is I--Madeline!’
The little man staggered as if under a blow, and went quite pale.
‘Madlin!’ he cried. ‘Not little Madlin as I brung to London! Why, lor’,
so it be!’
And at a loss for any other means of expressing his utter bewilderment
and delight, he grinned from ear to ear.
Very pretty it was, as well as pitiful, to see Madeline (whom we shall
call by her assumed name no longer) lead the little man to the garden
seat, sit by his side, hold his hand, and look fondly in his eyes, as
she questioned him, lifting his rough hand to kiss it from time to time.
The weight of years, the burden of sorrow, had rolled away from her in a
moment, and she was a child again, while the heaven that ‘bends above
us in our infancy’ was opening over her--bright, tranquil, peaceful, and
divine.
Meantime, poor Uncle Luke seemed too stupefied to understand completely
what was taking place. He sat blushing and grinning, scarcely able to
recognise, in the beautiful, full-grown woman fondling him, the little
Madlin of his remembrance; and indeed that remembrance was sadly
clouded, like the rest of his feeble mind, by the mists of years. When
she told him how diligently and how often she had sought to trace him,
when she questioned him as to the reasons which had prevented him
from seeking her out, he had little or no reply to give. She gathered,
however, that he had been for years in the service of a distant kinsman,
who was a head gardener on the estate.
It was destined to be a day of strange surprises. As Madeline sat by
Uncle Luke, her face wet with happy tears, two gentlemen approached
along the garden wall behind her. Adèle saw them first, and was about to
utter a delighted cry, when the younger of the two placed his finger to
his lips to enjoin silence. Thus it happened that, before Madeline knew
or suspected the truth, she saw her husband standing before her, gazing
upon her with wistful, wondering eyes; and before she could stir or
speak she beheld him kneeling beside her, sobbing wildly, touching her
with his outstretched hand.
‘Madeline! My darling!’
She rose wildly to her feet, looking this way and that, as if in act to
fly. Uncle Luke rose too, completely puzzled, till Adèle beckoned him
away. So it came to pass that the other three walked aside, and the
husband and wife were left alone.
‘Madeline! speak to me; my Madeline, my own dear wife!’
She shuddered at the last word, and made a feeble attempt to withdraw
from his embrace; but at last, sobbing hysterically, she yielded, and
suffered him, with tenderest kisses, to place her head upon his breast.
EPILOGUE.
In that manner, and in no other, Madeline rose from the grave.
When the first shock of meeting was over, and calmer speech was
possible, Forster told his wife of the duel on Boulogne sands and the
death of her persecutor at the hands of Edgar Sutherland; thus assuring
her that, whether the marriage with Gavrolles was real or a delusion,
she was then a free woman. She listened sadly, and seemed little
comforted, until Forster assured her of his intention, with her consent,
to quit England, and seek some country where the story of their sorrows
was unknown, and where the viperous journal of the period has not
yet begun to crawl. Then she again laid her head upon his breast, and
promised to go with him, anywhere out of the old world of scandal,
cruelty, and shame.
So she lived, who had died. By her own lips the mystery of her
resurrection was explained. She told him how, while flying in despair,
she had encountered the poor waif of the streets, and in some wild
impulse of dread, fearing pursuit, and wishing to destroy all traces of
identity, she had taken the shawl from her shoulders, bracelets from her
wrists, and given them to her outcast sister. The rest was clear.
Mad with drink and misery, the outcast must have yielded to death’s
fascination, and cast herself away into the river--whence, long
afterwards, her disfigured body was taken to be identified by Forster
and buried, as the reader is aware.
Madeline lived again. She still lives, but far away from the scene of
her martyrdom. Sometimes in the course of his wanderings (for he is
still a wanderer and unmarried) Edgar Sutherland visits a pleasant home
on the bank of a great American river, where a happy wife and husband
are growing old together among their children. There he is ever
an honoured guest, certain of having attentive auditors while he
discourses, more garrulously as years creep on, on his pet theme--the
purification of manhood and the regeneration of womankind.
Uncle Luke is yonder, too. At Madeline’s strong entreaty, he accompanied
her from England; and now, very old and feeble, but still bright and
simple as ever, he goes hand in hand through the woods and fields, with
another ‘little Madlin,’ the very image of the little girl he used
to love so well. For a long time he hardly seemed to recognise in the
gentle woman who took him to her home the pretty Madeline of other
years; but when the child came, he, a child himself, found his happiness
in her, and recognised the vision of his old playmate, re-risen to
delight his declining days.
And now, what remains to be told? The human shadows that have arisen
throughout our story fade one by one away. Of only one of these, Adèle
Lambert, will the reader care to hear a last record. She died in the
springtime at Mount Eden, passing away, in perfect peace and faith: her
spirit purified; her hand in that of the man who had pointed her upward
to a holier life, her eyes on the face she had learned to regard as that
of an angel, sent to succour sinners in this dark world.
This world remains as most men find it; a tomb, save for those superb
spirits who come to bless the wretcheder dwellers in it, with deeds of
beautiful self-sacrifice and words of divine love. In the depth of its
darker recesses, still the snake-like seducer slimes his victim, and the
slanderer spits his venom, and the literature of the Liar still festers
like a feverish sore, spreading moral sickness and contamination all
around. Thence, and thence only, comes the voice which would fain
proclaim to the unhappy that there is no God, and but one gospel--‘Eat
and drink, for tomorrow you die.’ But God is, as sure as Love is, or
Hope, or heavenly Purity and Light. Therefore let no man despair,
though now, as ever, ‘the Light shineth in Darkness, and the Darkness
comprehendeth it not.’
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Martyrdom of Madeline, by Robert Buchanan