When Mildred perfectly recovered consciousness, she was lying on the old-fashioned couch in Mrs. Sowerby"s best room; but she was utterly spent and broken, and could do nothing for a little while but weep hysterically.
Polly lent over her, raining tears on her hands.
"Oh, Aunt Milly," sobbed the faithful little creature, "what should we have done if we had lost you? Darling--darling, how dreadful it would have been."
"I wished to die," murmured Mildred, half to herself; "but I never knew how terrible death could be. Oh, how sinful--how ungrateful I have been." And she covered her face with her hands.
"Oh, Heriot; ask her not to cry so," pleaded poor Polly. "I have never seen her cry before, never--and it hurts me so."
"It will do her good," he returned, hastily; but he went and stood by the window, until Polly joined him.
"She is better now," she said, timidly glancing up into his absorbed face.
Upon that he turned round.
"Then we must get her home, that she may change her wet things as soon as possible. Do you feel as though you can move?" he continued, in his ordinary manner, though perhaps it was a trifle grave. "You are terribly bruised, I fear, but I trust not otherwise injured."
She looked up a little surprised at the calmness of his tone, and then involuntarily she stretched out her hands to him--
"Let me thank you first--you have saved my life," she whispered.
"No," he returned, quietly. "It is true your disobedience placed us both in jeopardy; but it was your obedience at the last that really saved your life. If you had fainted, you must inevitably have been lost. I could not have supported you much longer in my cramped position."
"Your arm--did I hurt it?" she asked, anxiously, noticing an expression of pain pa.s.s over his face.
"I daresay I have strained it slightly," he answered, indifferently; "but it does not matter. The question is, do you think you can bear to be moved?"
"Oh, I can walk. I am better now," she replied, colouring slightly.
His coolness disappointed her; she was longing to thank him with the full fervour of a grateful heart. It was sweet, it was good in spite of everything to receive her life back through his hands. Never--never would she dare to repine again, or murmur at the lot Providence had appointed her; so much had the dark lesson of Coop Kernan Hole taught her.
"Well, what is it?" he asked, reading but too truly the varying expressions of her eloquent face.
"If you will only let me thank you," she faltered, "I shall never forget this hour to my dying day."
"Neither shall I," he returned, abruptly, as he wrapped her up in his dry plaid and a.s.sisted her to rise. His manner was as kind and considerate as ever during their short drive, but Mildred felt as though his reserve were imposing some barrier on her.
Consternation prevailed in the vicarage at the news of Mildred"s danger.
Olive, who seldom shed tears, became pale and voiceless with emotion, while Mr. Lambert pressed his sister to his heart with a whispered thanksgiving that was audible to her alone.
It was good for Mildred"s sore heart to feel how ardently she was beloved. A great flood of grat.i.tude and contrition swept over her as she lay, bruised and shaken, with her hand in Arnold"s, looking at the dear faces round her. "It has come to me not in the still, small voice, but in the storm," she thought. "He has brought me out of the deep waters to serve Him more faithfully--to give a truer account of the life restored to me."
The clear brightness of her eyes surprised Dr. Heriot as he came up to her to take leave; they reminded him of the Mildred of old. "You must promise to sleep to-night. Some one must be with you--Olive or Polly--you might get nervous alone," he said, with his usual thoughtfulness; but she shook her head.
"I think I am cured of my nervousness for ever," she returned, in a voice that was very sweet. The soft smiling eyes haunted him. Had an angel gone down and troubled the pool? What healing virtues had steeped the dark waters that her shuddering feet had pressed? Could faith, full-formed, spring from such parentage of deadly anguish and fear?
Mildred could have answered in the verse she loved so well--
"He never smiled so sweet before Save on the Sea of Sorrow, when the night Was saddest on our heart. We followed him At other times in sunshine. Summer days And moonlight nights He led us over paths Bordered with pleasant flowers; but when His steps Were on the mighty waters, when we went With trembling hearts through nights of pain and loss, His smile was sweeter, and His love more dear; And only Heaven is better than to walk With Christ at midnight over moonless seas."
CHAPTER XXVIII
DR. HERIOT"S MISTAKE
"In the cruel fire of sorrow Cast thy heart, do not faint or wail; Let thy hand be firm and steady, Do not let thy spirit quail: But wait till the trial is over, And take thy heart again; For as gold is tried by fire, So a heart must be tried by pain!"
Adelaide Anne Procter.
Mildred slept soundly that night in spite of her bruises. It was Dr.
Heriot who waked.
What nightmare of oppression was on him? What light, scorching and illuminating, was shining on him through the gloom? Was he losing his senses?--had he dreamt it? Had he really heard it? "John, save me, John!" as of a woman in mortal anguish calling on her mate, as Margaret had once--but once--called him, when a glimpse of the dark valley had been vouchsafed her, and she had bidden him, with frenzied eye and tongue, arrest her downward course: "I cannot die--at least, not like this--you must save me, John!" and that time he had saved her.
And now he had heard it again, at the only time when conventionality lays aside its decorous disguise, and the souls of men are bare to their fellows--at the time of awful peril on the brink of a momentarily expected death: so had she called to him, and so, with the sudden waking response of his soul, he had answered her.
He could see it all now. Never, to his dying hour, could he forget that scene--the prostrate figure crashing among the rocks, as though to an immediate and terrible death; the agonised struggle in the dark pit, the white face pressed heavily like death to his shoulder, the long unbound hair streaming across his arm; never before had he owned to himself that this woman was fair, until he had put back the blinding hair with his hand, as she clung to him in suffering helplessness.
"I wished to die, but I never knew how terrible death could be," he had heard her whisper between her quivering lips; and the knowledge that her secret was his had bidden him turn away his eyes from her--his own suffused with tears.
"Fool! blind fool that I was!" he groaned. "Fool! never to guess how dear she was until I saw death trying to s.n.a.t.c.h her from me; never to know the reason why her presence inspired me with such comfort and such rest! And I must needs call it friendship. Was it friendship that brought me day after day with such a sore heart to minister to her weakness?--was it only friendship and pity, and a generous wish to succour her distress?
"Oh, fool! miserable fool! for ever fated to destroy my own peace of mind!" But we need not follow the bitter self-communing of that generous spirit through that long night of doubt and pain from which he rose a sadder and a better man.
Alas! he had grasped the truth too late. The true woman, the true mate, the very nature akin to his own, had been beside him all these years, and he had not recognised her, blind in his pitiful worship of lesser lights.
And as he thought of the innocent girl who had pledged her faith to him, he groaned again within himself. Polly was not less dear to him in the misery that had befallen him, yet he knew, and shuddered at the knowledge, that all unwittingly he had deceived himself and her; he would love his child-wife dearly, he knew, but not as he could love a woman like Mildred.
"If she had been less reserved, less unapproachable in her gentle dignity, it might have been better for both of us," he said to himself.
"The saint has hidden the woman; one cannot embrace a halo!" and he thought with sharp anguish how well this new phase of weakness had become her. When she had claimed his indulgence for her wayward and nervous fancies, he had felt even then a sort of pride that she should appeal to him in her helplessness.
But these were vain thoughts. It might have been better for both of them if she were lying now under the dark waters of Coop Kernan Hole, her angel soul in its native heaven. Yes, it might be far better; he did not know--he had not Mildred"s faith; for as long as they must dwell together, and yet apart, in this mortal world, life could only be a bitter thing for him; but not for that should he cease to struggle.
"I have more than myself to consider," he continued, as he rose and drew back the curtain, and looked out on the rich harvest of the sky-glittering sheaves of stars, countless worlds beyond worlds, stretching out into immensity. "G.o.d do so to me and more also if my unkindness or fickleness cloud the clear mirror of that girlish soul. It is better, far better, for me to suffer--ay, for her too--than to throw off a responsibility at once so sacred and so pure."
How Mildred would have gloried in this generous victory if she had witnessed it! The knowledge that the tardy blessing of his love had been vouchsafed her, though too late and in vain, would have gladdened her desolate heart, and the honour and glory of it would have decked her lonely life, with infinite blossom.
But now she could only worship his goodness from afar. None but Mildred had ever rightly read him, or knew the unselfishness that was so deeply ingrained in this man"s nature. Loving and impulsive by nature, he had patiently wooed and faithfully held to the woman who had scorned his affection and provoked his forbearance; he had borne his wrecked happiness, the daily spectacle of his degradation, with a resignation that was almost sublime; he had comforted the poor sinner on her deathbed with a.s.surances of forgiveness that had sunk into her soul with strange healing; when at last she had left him, he had buried his dead out of his sight, covering with thick sods, and heaping the earth with pious hands over the memory of her past sins.
It was this unselfishness that had first taught him to feel tenderly to the poor orphan; he had schemed out of pure benevolence to make her his wife, until the generous fancy had grown dear to him, and he had believed his own happiness involved in it.
And now that it had resulted in a bitter awakening to himself and disappointment to another, no possibility of eluding his fate ever came into his mind. Polly already belonged to him; she was his, made his own by a distinct and plighted troth; he could no more put her away from him than he would have turned away the half-frozen robin that sought refuge from the inclement storm. Mildred had betrayed her love too late; it was his lot to rescue her from death, but not to bid her welcome to a heart that should in all honour belong to another. True, it was a trial most strange and bitter--an ordeal from which flesh and blood might well shrink; but long before this he had looked into the burning fiery furnace of affliction, and he knew, as such men know, that though he might be cast therein bound and helpless, that even there the true heart could discern the form most like unto the Son of G.o.d.
It was with some such feeling as this that he lingered by Polly"s side, as though to gain a minute"s strength before he should be ushered into Mildred"s presence.
"How tired you look, Heriot," she said, as he stood beside her; the word had involuntarily slipped from her in her gladness yesterday, and as she timidly used it again his lips touched her brow in token of his thanks.