SILENT SORROW.
And the little lady grew silent and thin,
Paling and ever paling,
As is the case with a hid chagrin,
And they all said she was ailing.—ROBERT BROWNING.
The young wife’s faith and hope were sinking under the pressure of
coldness and solitude; and only her undying love survived in all its
strength and beauty.
She was seriously ill, though she still kept up, moving about the house
to attend to her domestic affairs all day, and sitting up to receive her
husband half the night.
And these exhausting duties of course made her worse.
And oh, illness in woman is very repulsive to most men, and especially
to those of Alexander Lyon’s fastidious nature and self-indulgent
habits. Illness pales the cheeks and dims the eyes; and worse than all,
it frets the nerves and tries the temper.
So it was with Drusilla: weary and anxious, suffering in mind and body,
when Alexander came home near morning she could not always welcome him
with the happy glances he had been accustomed to receive from her.
And on these occasions her sad face and tearful eyes so displeased and
irritated him, that he would go off to his own room without touching the
refreshments that she had got ready for him, or even stopping to bestow
a kind word upon her.
He meant, by this conduct, to punish her for what, in his thoughts, he
called “her sulks.” But this sort of punishment nearly broke her loving
heart. He caused her depression and then blamed her for being depressed.
It was as if he had crushed a violet and then blamed it for withering.
It was a pity, too, that just at this time such a contrast should have
been exhibited between his brilliant, beautiful and imperious cousin and
his little, pale, drooping wife.
He would spend the evening with Anna at some fashionable assembly, where
he saw her, in all the splendor of beauty and pride of place, the
all-admired belle of the season, the reigning queen of society;—and
then, full of the intoxication of her new charms, he would return home
to find Drusilla, pale, weary and depressed, and he would start off to
his own room to curse the fate that had so long blinded him to the
transcendent attractions of his high-born cousin, and bound him for life
to the insignificant daughter of his housekeeper. And the very bitterest
element in his misery was the thought that, sooner or later, his old
rival, Richard Hammond, must win the priceless treasure that he himself
had so madly cast away.
It is to be feared that if at this time Alexander Lyon could possibly
have devised any means of secretly and legally repudiating his young
wife, he would not have hesitated to do so. As it was, he estranged
himself from her, and passed more nights in his rooms at the hotel than
in his home at Cedarwood. But he never gave the gentle creature a single
harsh word or look; with all his madness—and his mood was little less
than madness—he could not do either; he simply broke her spirit by
coldness, neglect and avoidance.
And yet, notwithstanding all this, if he had but known it, in his heart
of hearts it was Drusilla he loved and not Anna.
He had made no mistake in marrying this sweet girl; it had been a true
inspiration that had drawn him towards her when he was a youth and she a
child. She was the better half of his spirit, and the guardian angel of
his life, as well as the true love of his youth. And once he knew all
this to be true; but now he seemed to have forgotten.
Besides, Drusilla—soul and body, beyond all doubt or question—was his
own; and therefore was she undervalued and despised as something of
little worth; while Anna was unattainable by him, and likely to become
the wife of his rival; and therefore was Anna over-rated as a pearl
beyond price, and desired with passionate eagerness. But whatever this
phrenzy was, for the girl whom he had known from his boyhood up, and in
his thoughts rejected as a wife years before—it was not love; it was
probably a hallucination made up of pride, jealousy, admiration, and the
fascination of the unattainable. Alexander Lyon had fancied many a
beauty in his life; but he had never once loved any other than the
young, devoted wife whom he now so insanely wronged and grieved.
And ah! how severely she suffered in secret, how bitterly she wept over
the ever-increasing estrangement; never blaming him, however, even in
her thoughts; blaming herself, rather, for not being able to merit his
love and make him happy; never losing faith in him, but losing faith in
herself.
Her love was without a taint of selfishness; but it was not without sin,
for it was idolatrous.
She seemed to herself to have no life but in him. Failing as she
thought, to _merit_ his love, and failing to make him happy, she was
willing to die to set him free and give him peace.
“Poor Alick,” she said, in her heart, as she paced up and down her
forsaken chamber floor, wringing her hands and weeping bitterly; “Poor
Alick, it is not his fault that we are both so miserable, it is mine. I
am not a fit wife for him; I never was; but I loved him so! I loved him
so. Ah, but if I had loved him rightly I never would have let him
shipwreck his life upon me—so unfit to be his mate. He married me out of
pity, and I let him do it, and now I deserve to be wretched. But he is
wretched too, though he don’t deserve to be so. Ah! what can I do to
undo all this?”
And in the climax of her hysterical passion she was almost ready to lay
down her young life that her beloved might step over it into liberty and
light.
“Oh, why, oh, why did he ever ruin his hopes by wedding me? Why? Oh, I
know too well why. Poor Alick! it was out of the goodness of his heart
that he did it! He was always so good to me from my infancy up, calling
me his child, giving me everything I needed, doing all I asked. And when
he saw me a poor little motherless and homeless girl, he took pity on
me, and raised me up and put me on his bosom and comforted me and tried
to love me; but he cannot, because I am not lovable; and now, even now,
he never gives me an unkind word or look, only stays away from me
because he cannot love me, and he is too honest to feign a love he
cannot feel. Oh, Alick! I would die to make you free and happy again, if
it were not a sin! I would, dear, I would!”
Such was the burden of her lamentations in her hours of secret
suffering.
No word of these sad plaints reached his ears. Her paroxysms of anguish
would have exhausted themselves, or she would have obtained some degree
of self-command before his late return home; so that though pale and
sad, and bearing the traces of recent tears, she met him with composure;
for she remembered, poor child, his abhorrence of an ugly, weeping face.
But now he had no mercy on her; she seemed to him a fetter that galled
him, and he pitied himself and not her.
Sometimes, when she looked even more than usually pale and ill, he
wondered whether she was going to die; but he wondered without alarm,
and even without pity.
Drusilla spent the long winter evenings in reading. She read a great
number of books, but they were not always the most judiciously chosen,
or the best calculated to cheer her spirits or strengthen her mind.
Among the new works that Alexander brought home one night and threw
carelessly upon the table, was Mrs. Crowe’s “Night Side of Nature.”
And this book subsequently fell into Drusilla’s hands, and she seized
and read it with avidity. And worse than all, she read it in her lonely
night watches in that isolated country house.
The work, written with great power to prove the reality of the
re-appearance of departed spirits in this world, and filled with
accredited stories of apparitions, haunted houses, marvellous visions,
presentiments, omens, warnings, dreams, et cetera, had a great
fascination for Drusilla, and night after night she pored over its dark
pages with a morbid fervor.
There was another book that came in her way about the same time, and
exercised the same fatal spell over her impressible imagination. It was
that volume of De Quincy’s works containing the “Three Memorable
Murders,” and worked up with all the fearful intensity of the Opium
Eater.
The effect of these books upon her excitable nervous system was
terrible.
This was owing very much to the circumstances under which they were
read. In a solitary house, in a deep wood, in the dead of night, and in
the depth of winter. And often, her imagination would be so wrought
upon, that she would not dare to lift her eyes to the looking-glass over
the mantle-piece, lest she should meet there the reflection of some face
other than her own, nor venture to glance at the windows on her left,
for fear she should see some spectral form peering in through the
darkness.
And so, in the appalling solitude and silence of the scene, and of the
hour, imaginary terrors were added to real troubles, and between them
both her nervous system was nearly broken down.
It is true that she might have ameliorated her condition in more than
one way, but that she had too much consideration for others and too
little for herself.
She might have gone to bed early each night but that Alexander had no
night key, and there was no one to let him in whenever he pleased to
return, except herself.
Also, she might have made Pina sit up to keep her company; but she would
not deprive the girl of rest.
Lastly, she could at least have closed the window shutters against that
imaginary spectral form she always feared to see; but she chose to leave
them open that the light from her drawing-room might cheer her beloved
in his late approach to the house—whenever he chose to come home; which
was not often at this period.
But this state of things could not last forever; and a crisis was at
hand.
One dark, still, winter night, when not a star was to be seen in the
sky, and the very air, as well as the earth and the water seemed
frozen—between two and three o’clock after midnight, Drusilla sat alone
in her drawing-room.
To while away the tedious hours she had read until her eyes filmed and
her brain reeled. And then she had been compelled to lay aside her book,
and sink back in her resting chair.
In the excited state of her nervous system she could not sleep, for she
was listening through the dead stillness of deep night, hoping to hear
the sound of the horse’s feet, that was always the warning of her
husband’s approach.
And yet she had no means of knowing whether he would return that night
or not.
As she sat there waiting and listening, she could but remember the
possible dangers of her position.
The house contained much of the sort of property that tempt
burglars—property at once very valuable and very portable—such as silver
and gold plate, jewels and money.
She had been living in it now some months, and secludedly as she lived,
her abode there, and the richness and defencelessness of the premises
might well have come to the knowledge of the professional burglars,
whose acuteness in discovering such rich mines of unprotected treasure
is much finer than that of the detectives who are always supposed to be
on their track.
How easy—how perfectly easy it would be, she thought, for even one
resolute villain to break through those unprotected glass windows, and
murder her, and rob the house, in safety and at leisure.
The cottage was half a mile from any other dwelling house, and a quarter
of a mile from any public road. The wildest shriek that might ever rise
from dying victim in its rooms, could never be heard by human ears
without.
As Drusilla remembered these circumstances her very soul grew sick with
terror. And was it any wonder?
She was a young, delicate, impressible woman. And on this dark night,
and in this isolated house she was quite alone. Her man-servant was in
his loft over the stables, where he slept, with pistols by his side, to
guard the valuable horses. And her maid-servant was in her attic over
the kitchen, in a distant part of the dwelling.
Any determined thief could easily have entered the house and worked his
will upon the poor young neglected wife and the property.
“Oh Alick, dear Alick, if you could know how much I suffer, you would
not leave me so,” she groaned, wringing her hands and rising in her
restlessness to walk the floor.
But almost immediately her worshipping heart rebuked her for having cast
even a shadow of reproach upon her husband, and she hastened to add,
“But it is my own fault. He has done everything for my comfort here;
given me a beautiful home, and attentive servants. And I ought to be
happy and courageous. Instead of that, I am sad and timid, and
altogether unworthy to be called his wife. I do not wonder that he
wearies of me.”
So weeping and wringing her hands she paced up and down the floor, until
in turning around she faced the front, unclosed windows, and suddenly
uttered a piercing shriek and fell upon her face in a deadly swoon.
And well she might. For peering in at the window, from the darkness
without was a livid white face—a man’s stern face.