Lady Lindores and Edith were carried along through the darkness of the
night with that curious sense of rapid unseen movement which has in it a
kind of soothing influence upon suspense and mental distress. They spoke
to each other in the darkness of Carry--poor Carry! how would she take
it? but yet never ventured, even to each other, to express the innermost
feeling in their minds on this subject. As they drove along, the gleam
of other lamps went rapidly past them close to the gate of Dalrulzian,
leading back their thoughts for a moment to other interests. "It is John
Erskine's dogcart. Is he going away? is it some one arriving? has he
been dining somewhere?" Lady Lindores said, with the unconscious
curiosity of the country. Then she said with a little shudder, "I wonder
if he can have heard?"--that first question which always suggests itself
in the face of a great event. "How strange to think that some one has
been peacefully dining out while _that_ has been happening--so near!"
Edith answered only by pressing her mother's arm in which her own was
entwined, as they sat close together for mutual consolation. She had
other troubled wandering thoughts aching in her own heart; but of these
she said nothing, but watched the lamps turning up the Dalrulzian avenue
with a thrill of mingled feeling, half angry that he should not have
divined she was in trouble, half glad that he thus proved his ignorance
of all that had occurred. Thus unknowing, Carry's mother and sister
crossed in the dark another new actor in Carry's history, of whom no one
as yet had thought.
Carry was seated in her own room alone. It was her natural refuge at
such a moment. A fire had been lighted by the anxious servants--who saw
her shiver in the nervous excitement of this great and terrible
event--and blazed brightly, throwing ruddy gleams of light through the
room, and wavering ghostly shadows upon the wall. The great bed, with
its tall canopies and heavy ornaments, shrouded round with satin
curtains, looped and festooned with tarnished gold lace and every kind
of clumsy grandeur, stood like a sort of catafalque, the object of a
thousand airy assaults and attacks from the fantastic light, but always
dark,--a funereal object in the midst; while the tall polished wardrobes
all round the room gave back reflections like dim mirrors, showing
nothing but the light. Two groups of candles on the high mantelpiece,
twinkling against the dark wall, were the only other illuminations.
Carry sat sunk in a big chair close to the fire. If she could have
cried,--if she could have talked and lamented,--if she could have gone
to bed--or, failing this, if she had read her Bible,--the maids in the
house, who hung about the doors in anxiety and curiosity, would have
felt consoled for her. But she did none of these. She only sat there,
her slight figure lost in the depths of the chair, still in the white
dress which she had worn to receive her guests in the morning. She had
not stirred--the women said, gathering round Lady Lindores in whispering
eagerness--for hours, and had not even touched the cup of tea they had
carried to her. "Oh, my lady, do something to make her cry," the women
said. "If she doesn't get it out it'll break her heart." They had
forgotten, with the facile emotion which death, and especially a death
so sudden, calls forth, that the master had been anything but the most
devoted of husbands, or his wife other than the lovingest of wives. This
pious superstition is always ready to smooth away the horror of deaths
which are a grief to no one. "Your man's your man when a's done, even if
he's but an ill ane," was the sentiment of the awe-stricken household.
"Ye never ken what he's been to ye till ye lose him." It gave them all
a sense of elevation that Lady Caroline should, as they thought, be
wrapped in hopeless grief,--it made them think better of her and of
themselves. The two ladies went into the ghostly room with something of
the same feeling. Lady Lindores felt that she understood it--that she
had expected it. Had not her own mind been filled by sudden
compunction--the thought that perhaps she had been less tolerant of the
dead man than she ought; and how much more must Carry, poor Carry, have
felt the awe and pang of an almost remorse to think that he was gone
without a word against whom her heart had risen in such rebellion, yet
who was of all men the most closely involved in her very being? Lady
Lindores comprehended it all; and yet it was a relief to her mind that
Carry felt it so, and could thus wear the garb of mourning with reality
and truth. She went in with her heart full, with tears in her eyes, the
profoundest tender pity for the dead, the deepest sympathy with her
child in sorrow. The room was very large, very still, very dark, save
for that ruddy twilight, the two little groups of pale lights glimmering
high up upon the wall, and no sign of any human presence. "Carry, my
darling!" her mother said, wondering and dismayed. Then there was a
faint sound, and Carry rose, tall, slim, and white, like a ghost out of
the gloom. She had been sitting there for hours, lost in thoughts, in
dreams, and visions. She seemed to herself to have so exhausted this
event by thinking of it, that it was now years away. She stepped forward
and met her mother, tenderly indeed, but with no effusion. "Have you
come all the way so late to be with me, mother? How kind, how kind you
are! And Edith too----"
"Kind!" cried Lady Lindores, with an almost angry bewilderment. "Did you
not know I would come, Carry, my poor child. But you are stunned with
this blow----"
"I suppose I was at first. Yes, I knew you would come--at first; but it
seems so long since. Sit down, mother; you are cold. You have had such a
miserable drive. Come near to the fire----"
"Carry, Carry dear, never mind us; it is you we are all thinking of. You
must not sit there and drive yourself distracted thinking."
"Let me take off this shawl from your cap, mamma. Now you look more
comfortable. Have you brought your things to stay? I am ringing to have
fires lit in your rooms. Oh yes, I want you to stay. I have never been
able to endure this house, you know, and those large rooms, and the
desert feeling in it. And you will have some tea or something. I must
give orders----"
"Carry," cried her mother, arresting her hand on the bell, "Edith and I
will see to all that. Don't pay any attention to us. I have come to take
care of you, my dearest. Carry, dear, your nerves are all shattered. How
could it be otherwise? You must let me get you something,--they say you
have taken nothing,--and you must go to bed."
"I don't think my nerves are shattered. I am quite well. There is
nothing the matter with me. You forget," she said, with something like a
faint laugh, "how often we have said, mamma, how absurd to send and ask
after a woman's health when there is nothing the matter with her, when
only she has lost----" Here she paused a little, and then said gravely,
"Even grief does not affect the health."
"Very often it does not, dear; but, Carry, you must not forget that you
have had a terrible shock. Even I, who am not so nearly involved--even
I----" Here Lady Lindores, in her excitement and agitation, lost her
voice altogether, and sobbed, unable to command herself. "Oh, poor
fellow! poor fellow!" she said, with broken tones. "In a moment, Carry,
without warning!"
Carry went to her mother's side, and drew her head upon her breast. She
was perfectly composed, without a tear. "I have thought of all that,"
she said; "I cannot think it matters. If God is the Father of us all, we
are the same to Him, dead or living. What can it matter to Him that we
should make preparations to appear before Him? Oh, all that must be
folly, mother. However bad I had been, should I have to prepare to go to
you?"
"Carry, Carry, my darling! It is I that should be saying this to you.
You are putting too much force upon yourself--it is unnatural; it will
be all the more terrible for you after."
Carry stood stooping over her mother, holding Lady Lindores's head
against her bosom. She smiled faintly, and shook her head. "Has it not
been unnatural altogether?" she said.
To Edith standing behind, this strange scene appeared like a
picture--part of the phantasmagoria of which her sister had for years
been the centre: her mind leapt back to the discussions which preceded
Carry's marriage, the hopeless yielding of the victim, the perplexity
and misery of the mother. Now they had changed positions, but the same
strange haze of terror and pity, yet almost indignation, was in her own
breast. She had been the judge then--in a smaller degree she was the
judge now. But this plea stopped her confused and painful thoughts. Has
it not been unnatural altogether? Edith's impulse was to escape from a
problem which she could not deal with. "I will go and see the children,"
she said.
"The children--poor children! have you seen them, Carry? do they know?"
said Lady Lindores, drying the tears--the only tears that had been shed
for Torrance--from her cheeks.
Carry did not make any reply. She went away to the other end of the room
and took up a white shawl in which she wrapped herself. "The only thing
I feel is cold," she said.
"Ah, my love, that is the commonest feeling. I have felt sometimes as if
I could just drag myself to the fire like a wounded animal and care for
nothing more."
"But, mother, you were never in any such terrible trouble."
"Not like this--but I have lost children," said Lady Lindores. She had
to pause again, her lip quivering. "To be only sorrow, there is no
sorrow like that."
She had risen, and they stood together, the fantastic firelight throwing
long shadows of them all over the dim and ghastly room. Suddenly Carry
flung herself into her mother's arms. "Oh my innocent mother!" she
cried. "Oh, mother! you only know such troubles as angels may have. Look
at me! look at me! I am like a mad woman. I am keeping myself in, as you
say, that I may not go mad--with joy!"
Lady Lindores gave a low terrible cry, and held her daughter in her arm,
pressing her desperately to her heart as if to silence her. "No,
Carry--no, no," she cried.
"It is true. To think I shall never be subject to all _that_ any
more--that he can never come in here again--that I am free--that I can
be alone. Oh, mother, how can you tell what it is? Never to be alone:
never to have a corner in the world where--some one else has not a right
to come, a better right than yourself. I don't know how I have borne it.
I don't know how I can have lived, disgusted, loathing myself. No, no;
sometime else I shall be sorry when I have time to think, when I can
forget what it is that has happened to me--but in the meantime I am too
happy--too----"
Lady Lindores put her hand upon her daughter's mouth. "No, no,
Carry--no, no; I cannot bear it--you must not say it," she cried.
Carry took her mother's hands and kissed them, and then began to
sob--the tears pouring from her eyes like rain. "I will not say
anything," she cried; "no, no--nothing, mother. I had to tell you to
relieve my heart. I have been able to think of nothing else all these
hours. I have never had so many hours to myself for years. It is so
sweet to sit still and know that no one will burst the door open and
come in. Here I can be sacred to myself, and sit and think: and all
quiet--all quiet about me." Carry looked up, clasping her hands, with
the tears dropping now and then, but a smile quivering upon her mouth
and in her eyes. She seemed to have reached that height of passionate
emotion--the edge where expression at its highest almost loses itself,
and a blank of all meaning seems the next possibility. In her white
dress, with her upturned face and the wild gleam of rapture in her eyes,
she was like an unearthly creature. But to describe Lady Lindores's
anguish and terror and pain would be impossible. She thought her
daughter was distraught. Never in her life had she come in contact with
feeling so absolute, subdued by no sense of natural fitness, or even by
right and wrong. Her only comfort was that Edith had not been present to
hear and see this revelation. And the truth was that her own heart,
though so panic-stricken and penetrated with so much pity for the dead,
understood, too, with a guilty throb, the overwhelming sense of
emancipation which drove everything else from Carry's mind. She had
feared it would be so. She would not allow herself to think so; but all
through the darkness of the night as she drove along, she had been
trembling lest she should find Carry not heart-broken but happy, yet had
trusted that pity somehow would keep her in the atmosphere of gloom
which ought to surround a new-made widow. It hurt Lady Lindores's tender
heart that a woman should be glad when her husband died, however
unworthy that husband might have been. She did her best now to soothe
the excited creature, who took her excitement for happiness.
"We will talk of this no more to-night, Carry; by-and-by you will see
how pitiful it all is. You will feel--as I feel. But in the meantime you
are worn out. This terrible shock, even though you may think you do not
feel it, has thrown you into a fever. You must let me put you to bed."
"Not here," she said with a shudder, looking round the room; "not
here--I could not rest here."
"That is natural," Lady Lindores said with a sigh. "You must come with
me, Carry."
"Home, mother--home! Oh, if I could!--not even to Lindores,--to one of
the old poor places where we were so happy----"
"When we had no home," the mother said, shaking her head. But she, too,
got a wistful look in her eyes at the recollection. Those days when they
were poor, wandering, of no account; when it mattered little to any one
but themselves where they went, what the children might do, what
alliances they made,--what halcyon days these were to look back on! In
those days this miserable union, which had ended so miserably, could
never have been made. Was it worth while to have had so many additional
possessions added to them--rank and apparent elevation--for such a
result? But she could not permit herself to think, with Carry sitting
by, too ready to relapse into those feverish musings which were so
terrible. She put her arm round her child and drew her tenderly away.
They left the room with the lights against the wall, and the firelight
giving it a _faux air_ of warmth and inhabitation. Its emptiness was
scarcely less tragic, scarcely less significant, than the chill of the
other great room--the state chamber--in the other wing, where, with
lights burning solemnly about him all night, the master of the house lay
dead, unwatched by either love or sorrow. There were gloom and panic,
and the shock of a great catastrophe, in the house. There were even
honest regrets; for he had not been a bad master, though often a rough
one: but nothing more tender. And Carry lay down with her mother's arms
round her and slept, and woke in the night, and asked herself what it
was; then lay still in a solemn happiness--exhausted, peaceful--feeling
as if she desired nothing more. She was delivered: as she lay silent,
hidden in the darkness and peace of the night, she went over and over
this one certainty, so terrible yet so sweet. "God forgive me! God
forgive me!" she said softly to herself, her very breathing hushed with
the sense of relief. She had come out of death into life. Was it wrong
to be glad? That it was a shame and outrage upon nature was no fault of
poor Carry. Sweet tears rolled into her eyes, her jarred and thwarted
being came back into harmony. She lay and counted the dark silent hours
striking one by one, feeling herself all wrapped in peace and ease, as
if she lay in some sacred shrine. To-morrow would bring back the veils
and shrouds of outside life--the need of concealment, of self-restraint,
almost of hypocrisy--the strain and pain of a new existence to be begun;
but to-night--this one blessed night of deliverance--was her own.