might this one chance be for her,--the chance of her hearing, and being
called back to the shores she was drifting from, by this stiff,
conventional fellow's voice. There was no knowing the wondrousness of a
loving human thing, even when its shackles were loosening themselves to
set it free.
"I will speak to those in charge with me," he said. "Will you control
every outward expression of feeling?"
"Yes."
Adjoining Lady Walderhurst's sleeping apartment was a small boudoir
where the medical men consulted together. Two of them were standing near
the window conversing in whispers.
Walderhurst merely nodded and went to wait apart by the fire. Ceremony
had ceased to exist. Dr. Warren joined the pair at the window. Lord
Walderhurst only heard one or two sentences.
"I am afraid that nothing, now, can matter--at any moment."
* * * * *
Those who do not know from experience what he saw when he entered the
next room have reason to give thanks to such powers as they put trust
in.
There ruled in the large, dim chamber an awful order and silence. The
faint flickering of the fire was a marked sound. There was no other but
a fainter and even more irregular one heard as one neared the bed.
Sometimes it seemed to stop, then, with a weak gasp, begin again. A
nurse in uniform stood in waiting; an elderly man sat on a chair at the
bedside, listening and looking at his watch, something white and
lifeless lying in his grasp,--Emily Walderhurst's waxen, unmoving hand.
The odour of antiseptics filled the nostrils. Lord Walderhurst drew
near. The speaking sign of the moment was that neither nurse nor doctor
stirred.
Emily lay low upon a pillow. Her face was as bloodless as wax and was a
little turned aside. The Shadow was hovering over it and touched her
closed lids and the droop of her cheek and corners of her mouth. She was
far, far away.
This was what Walderhurst felt first,--the strange remoteness, the
lonely stillness of her. She had gone alone far from the place he stood
in, and which they two familiarly knew. She was going, alone, farther
still. As he stood and watched her closed eyes,--the nice, easily
pleased eyes,--it was they themselves, closed on him and all prosaic
things and pleasures, which filled him most strangely with that sense of
her loneliness, weirdly enough, _hers_, not his. He was not thinking of
himself but of her. He wanted to withdraw her from her loneliness, to
bring her back.
He knelt down carefully, making no sound, stealthily, not removing his
eyes from her strange, aloof face. He slowly dared to close his hand on
hers which lay outside the coverlet. And it was a little chill and
damp,--a little chill.
A power, a force which hides itself in human things and which most of
them know not of, was gathering within him. He was warm and alive, a
living man; his hand as it closed on the chill of hers was warm; his
newly awakened being sent heat to it.
He whispered her name close to her ear.
"Emily!" slowly, "Emily!"
She was very far away and lay unmoving. Her breast scarcely stirred with
the faintness of her breath.
"Emily! Emily!"
The doctor slightly raised his eyes to glance at him. He was used to
death-bed scenes, but this was curious, because he knew the usual
outward aspect of Lord Walderhurst, and its alteration at this moment
suggested abnormal things. He had not the flexibility of mind which
revealed to Dr. Warren that there were perhaps abnormal moments for the
most normal and inelastic personages.
"Emily!" said his lordship, "Emily!"
He did not cease from saying it, in a low yet reaching whisper, at
regular intervals, for at least half an hour. He did not move from his
knees, and so intense was his absorption that the presence of those who
came near was as nothing.
What he hoped or intended to do he did not explain to himself. He was of
the order of man who coldly waves aside all wanderings on the subjects
of occult claims. He believed in proven facts, in professional aid, in
the abolition of absurdities. But his whole narrow being concentrated
itself on one thing,--he wanted this woman back. He wanted to speak to
her.
What power he unknowingly drew from the depths of him, what exquisite
answering thing he reached at, could not be said. Perhaps it was only
some remote and subtle turn of the tide of life and death which chanced
to come to his aid.
"Emily!" he said again, after many times.
Dr. Warren at this moment met the lifted eyes of the doctor who was
counting her pulse, and in response to his look went to him.
"It seems slightly stronger," Dr. Forsythe whispered.
The slow, faint breathing changed a shade; there was heard a breath
slightly, very slightly deeper, less flickering, then another.
Lady Walderhurst slightly stirred.
"Remain where you are," whispered Dr. Warren to her husband, "and
continue to speak to her. Do not alter your tone. Go on."
* * * * *
Emily Walderhurst, drifting out on a still, borderless, white sea,
sinking gently as she floated, sinking in peaceful painlessness deeper
and deeper in her drifting until the soft, cool water lapped her lips
and, as she knew without fear, would soon cover them and her quiet face,
hiding them for ever,--heard from far, very far away, across the
whiteness floating about her, a faint sound which at first only fell
upon the stillness without meaning. Everything but the silence had been
left behind aeons ago. Nothing remained but the soundless white sea and
the slow drifting and sinking as one swayed. It was more than sleep,
this still peace, because there was no thought of waking to any shore.
But the far-off sound repeated itself again, again, again and again,
monotonously. Something was calling to Something. She was so given up to
the soft drifting that she had no thoughts to give, and gave none. In
drifting so, one did not think--thought was left in the far-off place
the white sea carried one from. She sank quietly a little deeper and the
water touched her lip. But Something was calling to Something, something
was calling something to come back. The call was low, low and strange,
so regular and so unbroken and insistent, that it arrested, she knew not
what. Did it arrest the floating and the swaying in the enfolding sea?
Was the drifting slower? She could not rouse herself to think, she
wanted to go on. Did she no longer feel the water lapping against her
lip? Something was calling to Something still. Once, aeons ago, before
the white sea had borne her away, she would have understood.
"Emily, Emily, Emily!"
Yes, once she would have known what the sound meant. Once it had meant
something, a long time ago. It had even now disturbed the water, and
made it cease to lap so near her lip.
* * * * *
It was at this moment that one doctor had raised his eyes to the other,
and Lady Walderhurst had stirred.
When Walderhurst left his place beside his wife's bed, Dr. Warren went
with him to his room. He made him drink brandy and called his man to
him. "You must remember," he said, "that you are an invalid yourself."
"I believe," was the sole answer, given with an abstracted knitting of
the brows,--"I believe that in some mysterious way I have made her hear
me."
Dr. Warren looked grave. He was a deeply interested man. He felt that he
had been looking on at an almost incomprehensible thing.
"Yes," was his reply. "I believe that you have."
About an hour later Lord Walderhurst made his way downstairs to the room
in which Lady Maria Bayne sat. She still looked a hundred years old, but
her maid had redressed her toupee, and given her a handkerchief neither
damp nor tinted with rubbed-off rouge. She looked at her relative a
shade more leniently, but still addressed him with something of the
manner of a person undeservedly chained to a malefactor. Her irritation
was not modified by the circumstance that it was extremely difficult to
be definite in the expression of her condemnation of things which had
made her hideously uncomfortable. Having quite approved of his going to
India in the first place, it was not easy to go thoroughly into the
subject of the numerous reasons why a man of his years and
responsibilities ought to have realised that it was his duty to remain
at home and take care of his wife.
"Incredible as it seems," she snapped, "the doctors _think_ there is a
slight change, for the better."
"Yes," Walderhurst answered.
He leaned against the mantel and gazed into the fire.
"She will come back," he added in a monotone.
Lady Maria stared at him. She felt that the man was eerie, Walderhurst,
of all men on earth!
"Where do you think she has been?" She professed to make the inquiry
with an air of reproof.
"How should one know?" rather with the old stiffness. "It is impossible
to tell."
Lady Maria Bayne was not the person possessing the temperament to
incline him to explain that, wheresoever the outer sphere might be to
which the dying woman had been drifting, he had been following her, as
far as living man could go.
The elderly house steward opened the door and spoke in the hollow
whisper.
"The head nurse wished to know if your ladyship would be so good as to
see Lord Oswyth before he goes to sleep."
Walderhurst turned his head towards the man. Lord Oswyth was the name of
his son. He felt a shock.
"I will come to the nursery," answered Lady Maria. "You have not seen
him yet?" turning to Walderhurst.
"How could I?"
"Then you had better come now. If she becomes conscious and has life
enough to expect anything, she will expect you to burst forth into
praises of him. You had better at least commit to memory the colour of
his eyes and hair. I believe he has two hairs. He is a huge, fat,
overgrown thing with enormous cheeks. When I saw his bloated
self-indulgent look yesterday, I confess I wanted to slap him."
Her description was not wholly accurate, but he was a large and robust
child, as Walderhurst saw when he beheld him.
From kneeling at the pillow on which the bloodless statue lay, and
calling into space to the soul which would not hear, it was a far cry to
the warmed and lighted orris-perfumed room in which Life had begun.
There was the bright fire before which the high brass nursery fender
shone. There was soft linen hanging to be warmed, there was a lace-hung
cradle swinging in its place, and in a lace-draped basket silver and
gold boxes and velvet brushes and sponges such as he knew nothing about.
He had not been in such a place before, and felt awkward, and yet in
secret abnormally moved, or it seemed abnormally to him.
Two women were in attendance. One of them held in her arms what he had
come to see. It was moving slightly in its coverings of white. Its
bearer stood waiting in respectful awe as Lady Maria uncovered its face.
"Look at it," she said, concealing her relieved elation under a slightly
caustic manner. "How you will relish the situation when Emily tells you
that he is like you, I can't be as sure as I should be of myself under
the same circumstances."
Walderhurst applied his monocle and gazed for some moments at the object
before him. He had not known that men experienced these curiously
unexplainable emotions at such times. He kept a strong hold on himself.
"Would you like to hold him?" inquired Lady Maria. She was conscious of
a benevolent effort to restrain the irony in her voice.
Lord Walderhurst made a slight movement backward.
"I--I should not know how," he said, and then felt angry at himself. He
desired to take the thing in his arms. He desired to feel its warmth. He
absolutely realised that if he had been alone with it, he should have
laid aside his eyeglass and touched its cheek with his lips.
Two days afterwards he was sitting by his wife's pillow, watching her
shut lids, when he saw them quiver and slowly move until they were wide
open. Her eyes looked very large in her colourless, more sharply
chiselled face. They saw him and him only, as light came gradually into
them. They did not move, but rested on him. He bent forward, almost
afraid to stir.
He spoke to her as he had spoken before.
"Emily!" very low, "Emily!"
Her voice was only a fluttering breath, but she answered.
"It--was--you!" she said.
Chapter Twenty four
Such individuals as had not already thought it expedient to gradually
loosen and drop the links of their acquaintance with Captain Alec Osborn
did not find, on his return to his duties in India, that the leave of
absence spent in England among his relatives had improved him. He was
plainly consuming enormous quantities of brandy, and was steadily going,
physically and mentally, to seed. He had put on flesh, and even his
always dubious good looks were rapidly deserting him. The heavy young
jowl looked less young and more pronounced, and he bore about an evil
countenance.
"Disappointment may have played the devil with him," it was said by an
elderly observer; "but he has played the devil with himself. He was a
wrong'un to begin with."
When Hester's people flocked to see her and hear her stories of exalted
life in England, they greeted her with exclamations of dismay. If Osborn
had lost his looks, she also had lost hers. She was yellow and haggard,
and her eyes looked over-grown. She had not improved in the matter of
temper, and answered all effusive questions with a dry, bitter little
smile. The baby she had brought back was a puny, ugly, and tiny girl.
Hester's dry, little smile when she exhibited her to her relations was
not pretty.
"She saved herself disappointment by being a girl," she remarked. "At
all events, she knows from the outset that no one can rob her of the
chance of being the Marquis of Walderhurst."
It was rumoured that ugly things went on in the Osborn bungalow. It was
known that scenes occurred between the husband and wife which were not
of the order admitted as among the methods of polite society. One
evening Mrs. Osborn walked slowly down the Mall dressed in her best gown
and hat, and bearing on her cheek a broad, purpling mark. When asked
questions, she merely smiled and made no answer, which was extremely
awkward for the well-meaning inquirer.
The questioner was the wife of the colonel of the regiment, and when the
lady related the incident to her husband in the evening, he drew in his
breath sharply and summed the situation up in a few words.
"That little woman," he said, "lives every day through twenty-four hours
of hell. One can see it in her eyes, even when she professes to smile at
the brute for decency's sake. The awfulness of a woman's forced smile at
the devil she is tied to, loathing him and bearing in her soul the
thing, blood itself could not wipe out. Ugh! I've seen it once before,
and I recognised it in her again. There will be a bad end to this."
There probably would have been, with the aid of unlimited brandy and
unrestrained devil, some outbreak so gross that the social laws which
rule men who are "officers and gentlemen" could not have ignored or
overlooked it. But the end came in an unexpected way, and Osborn was
saved from open ignominy by an accident.
On a certain day when he had drunk heavily and had shut Hester up with
him for an hour's torture, after leaving her writhing and suffocating
with sobs, he went to examine some newly bought firearms. In twenty
minutes it was he who lay upon the floor writhing and suffocating, and
but a few minutes later he was a dead man. A charge from a gun he had
believed unloaded had finished him.
* * * * *
Lady Walderhurst was the kindest of women, as the world knew. She sent
for little Mrs. Osborn and her child, and was tender goodness itself to
them.
Hester had been in England four years, and Lord Oswyth had a brother as
robust as himself, when one heavenly summer afternoon, as the two women
sat on the lawn drinking little cups of tea, Hester made a singular
revelation, and made it without moving a muscle of her small
countenance.
"I always intended to tell you, Emily," she began quietly, "and I will
tell you now."
"What, dear?" said Emily, holding out to her a plate of tiny buttered
scones. "Have some of these nice, little hot ones."
"Thank you." Hester took one of the nice, little hot ones, but did not
begin to eat it. Instead, she held it untouched and let her eyes rest on
the brilliant flower terraces spread out below. "What I meant to tell
you was this. The gun was not loaded, the gun Alec shot himself with,
when he laid it aside."
Emily put down her tea-cup hastily.
"I saw him take out the charge myself two hours before. When he came in,
mad with drink, and made me go into the room with him, Ameerah saw him.
She always listened outside. Before we left The Kennel Farm, the day he
tortured and taunted me until I lost my head and shrieked out to him
that I had told you what I knew, and had helped you to go away, he
struck me again and again. Ameerah heard that. He did it several times
afterwards, and she always knew. She always intended to end it in some
way. She knew how drunk he was that last day, and--It was she who went
in and loaded the gun while he was having his scene with me. She knew he
would go and begin to pull the things about without having the sense to
know what he was doing. She had seen him do it before. I know it was she
who put the load in. We have never uttered a word to each other about
it, but I know she did it, and that she knows I know. Before I married
Alec, I did not understand how one human being could kill another. He
taught me to understand, quite. But I had not the courage to do it
myself. Ameerah had."
And while Lady Walderhurst sat gazing at her with a paling face, she
began quietly to eat the little buttered scone.
THE END
[** Transcriber changes:
Original page 90 (Part One, Chapter 4): The whole treat, juvenile and
adult, male and female, burst into three cheers which were roars and
bellows[missing. inserted]
Original page 37 (Part One, Chapter 2): "I wish I had such
clothes,[missing " inserted] answered Lady Maria, and she chuckled
again.
Original page 150 (Part Two, Chapter 7): Realising this, he did not
quite understand why he rather liked it in the case of Emily Fox-Seton,
though he only liked it remotely and felt his own inaptness a shade absurd.
Original page 277 (Part Two, Chapter 14): "I know what her ladyship
feels about being talked over. If I was a lady myself, I shouldn't like
it. And I know how deep you'll feel it, that when the doctor advised her
to get an experienced married person to be at hand, she said in that
dear way of hers, 'Jane, if your uncle could spare your mother, how I
should like to have her.'[extraneous ' omitted] I've never forgot her
kindness in Mortimer Street.'"
Original page 312 (Part Two, Chapter 17): "My lady! my lady!" she gasped
out as soon as she dare[missing "d" inserted].
Original page 320 (Part Two, Chapter 17): "They may be as innocent as I
am. And they may be murderers in their hearts. I can prove nothing, I
can prevent nothing. "[extraneous " omitted]Oh! _do_ come home."
Original page 432: Human nature at its best and worst is well
protrayed[changed to "portrayed"]. **]
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