"You were very fond of him, I suppose?"
A faint blush flickered and faded upon Isabel"s pallid face; and then she answered, hesitating a little,----
"He was very good to me, and I--I tried always to be grateful--almost always," she added, with a remorseful recollection of rebellious moments in which she had hated her husband because he ate spring-onions, and wore Graybridge-made boots.
Just the slightest indication of a smile glimmered upon Mr. Raymond"s countenance as he watched Isabel"s embarra.s.sment. We are such weak and unstable creatures at the very best, that it is just possible this man, who loved Roland Lansdell very dearly, was not entirely grieved by the discovery of Isabel"s indifference for her dead husband. He went back to the chair near hers, and seated himself once more by her side. He began to speak to her in a very low earnest voice; but he kept his eyes bent upon the ground; and in that dusky light she was quite unable to see the expression of his face.
"Isabel," he began, very gravely, "I said just now that life seems very hard to us sometimes,--not to be explained by any doctrine of averages, by any of the codes of philosophy which man frames for his own comfort; only to be understood very dimly by one sublime theory, which some of us are not strong mough to grasp and hold by. Ah, what poor tempest-tossed vessels we are without that compa.s.s! I have had a great and bitter grief to bear within the last four-and-twenty hours, Isabel; a sorrow that has come upon me more suddenly than even the shock of your husband"s death can have fallen on you."
"I am very sorry for you," Isabel answered, dreamily; "the world must be full of trouble, I think. It doesn"t seem as if any one was ever really happy."
She was thinking of her own life, so long to look back upon, though she was little more than twenty years of age; she was thinking of the petty sordid miseries of her girlhood,--the sheriff"s officers and tax-gatherers, and infuriated tradespeople,--the great shock of her father"s disgrace; the dull monotony of her married life; and Roland Lansdell"s sudden departure; and his stubborn anger against her when she refused to run away with him; and then her husband"s death. It seemed all one dreary record of grief and trouble.
"I am growing old. Isabel," resumed Mr. Raymond; "but I have never lost my sympathy with youth and all its brightness. I think, perhaps, that sympathy has grown wider and stronger with increase of years. There is one young man who has been always very dear to me--more dear to me than I can ever make you comprehend, unless I were to tell you the subtle link that has bound him to me. I suppose there are some fathers who have as deep a love for their sons as I have for the man of whom I speak; but I have always fancied fatherly love a very lukewarm feeling compared with my affection for Roland Lansdell."
Roland Lansdell! It was the first time she had heard his name spoken since that Sunday on which her husband"s illness had begun. The name shot through her heart with a thrill that was nearly akin to pain. A little glimpse of lurid sunshine burst suddenly in upon the darkness of her life. She clasped her hands before her face almost as if it had been actual light that she wanted to shut out.
"Oh, don"t speak of him!" she said, piteously. "I was so wicked; I thought of him so much; but I did not know that my husband would die.
Please don"t speak of him; it pains me so to hear his name."
She broke down into a torrent of hysterical weeping as she uttered this last entreaty. She remembered Roland"s angry face in the church; his studied courtesy during that midnight interview at the Priory, the calm reserve of manner which she had mistaken for indifference. He was nothing to her; he was not even her friend; and she had sinned so deeply against the dead man for his sake.
"I should be the last to mention Roland Lansdell"s name in your hearing," Mr. Raymond answered presently, when she had grown a little quieter, "if the events of the last day or two had not broken down all barriers. The time is very near at hand, Isabel, when no name ever spoken upon this earth will be an emptier sound than the name of Roland Lansdell."
She lifted her tear-stained face suddenly and looked at him. All the clouds floated away, and a dreadful light broke in upon her; she looked at him, trembling from head to foot, with her hands clasped convulsively about his arm.
"You came here to tell me something!" she gasped; "something has happened--to him! Ah, if it has, life is _all_ sorrow!"
"He is dying, Isabel."
"Dying!"
Her lips shaped the words, and her fixed eyes stared at Charles Raymond"s face with an awful look.
"He is dying. It would be foolish to deceive you with any false hope, when in four-and-twenty hours" time all will be finished. He went out--riding--the other night, and fell from his horse, as it is supposed. He was found by some haymakers early the next morning, lying helpless, some miles from the Priory, and was carried home. The medical men give no hope of his recovery; but he has been sensible at intervals ever since. I have been a great deal with him--constantly with him; and his cousin Gwendoline is there. He wants to see you, Isabel; of course he knows nothing of your husband"s death; I did not know of it myself till I came here this morning. He wants to see you, my poor child. Do you think you can come?"
She rose and bent her head slowly as if in a.s.sent, but the fixed look of horror never left her face. She moved towards the door, and seemed as if she wanted to go at once--dressed as she was, with the old faded shawl wrapped about her.
"You"d better get your housekeeper to make you comfortable and tidy, while I go and engage a fly," said Mr. Raymond; and then looking her full in the face, he added, "Can you promise me to be very calm and quiet when you see him? You had better not come unless you can promise me as much as that. His hours are numbered, as it is; but any violent emotion would be immediately fatal. A man"s last hours are very precious to him, remember; the hours of a man who knows his end is near make a sacred mystical period in which the world drops far away from him, and he is in a kind of middle region between this life and the next. I want you to recollect this, Isabel. The man you are going to see is not the man you have known in the past. There would be very little hope for us after death, if we found no hallowing influence in its approach."
"I will recollect," Isabel answered. She had shed no tears since she had been told of Roland"s danger. Perhaps this new and most terrible shock had nerved her with an unnatural strength. And amid all the anguish comprehended in the thought of his death, it scarcely seemed strange to her that Roland Lansdell should be dying. It seemed rather as if the end of the world had suddenly come about; and it mattered very little who should be the first to perish. Her own turn would come very soon, no doubt.
Mr. Raymond met Mrs. Jeffson in the pa.s.sage, and said a few words to her before he went out of the house. The good woman was shocked at the tidings of Mr. Lansdell"s accident. She had thought very badly of the elegant young master of Mordred Priory; but death and sorrow take the bitterness out of a true-hearted woman"s feelings, and Matilda was womanly enough to forgive Roland for the wish that summoned the Doctor"s Wife to his deathbed. She went up-stairs, and came down with Isabel"s bonnet and cloak and simple toilet paraphernalia; and presently Mrs.
Gilbert had a consciousness of cold water splashed upon her face, and a brush pa.s.sed over her tangled hair. She felt only half conscious of these things, as she might have felt had they been the events of a dream. So presently, when Mr. Raymond came back, accompanied by the m.u.f.fled rolling of wheels in the straw-bestrewn lane, and she was half lifted into the old-fashioned, mouldy-smelling Graybridge fly,--so all along the familiar high-road, past the old inn with the sloping roof, where the pigeons were cooing to each other, as if there had been no such thing as death or sorrow in the world,--so under the grand gothic gates of monastic Mordred, it was all like a dream--a terrible oppressive dream--hideous by reason of some vague sense of horror rather than by the actual vision presented to the eyes of the sleeper. In a troubled dream it is always thus,--it is always a hidden, intangible something that oppresses the dreamer.
The leaves were fluttering in the warm midsummer wind, and the bees were humming about the great flower-beds. Far away the noise of the waterfall blended with all other summer sounds in a sweet confusion. And he was dying! Oh, what wonderful patches of shadow and sunlight on the wide lawns! what marvellous glimpses down long glades, where the young fern heaved to and fro in the fitful breezes like the emerald wavelets of a summer sea! And he was dying! It is such an old, old feeling, this unwillingness to comprehend that there can be death anywhere upon an earth that is so beautiful. Eve may have felt very much as Isabel felt to-day, when she saw a tropical sky, serenely splendid, above the corpse of murdered Abel. Hero may have found the purple distances of the cla.s.sic mountains, the yellow glory of the sunlit sands, almost more difficult to bear than the loss of her drowned lover.
There was the same solemn hush at Mordred Priory that there had been in the surgeon"s house at Graybridge; only there seemed a deeper solemnity here amid all the darkened splendour of the s.p.a.cious rooms, stretching far away, one beyond another, like the chambers of a palace. Isabel saw the long vista, not as she had seen it once, when _he_ came into the hall to bid her welcome, but with the haunting dreamlike oppression strong upon her. She saw little glimmering patches of gilding and colour here and there in the cool gloom of the shaded rooms, and long bars of light shining through the Venetian shutters upon the polished oaken floors. One of the medical men--there were three or four of them in the house--came out of the library and spoke in a whisper to Mr. Raymond.
The result of the whispering seemed tolerably favourable, for the doctor went back to his companions in the library, and Charles Raymond led Isabel up the broad staircase; the beautiful staircase which seemed to belong to a church or a cathedral rather than to any common habitation.
They met a nurse in the corridor; a prim, pleasant-looking woman, who answered Mr. Raymond"s questions in a cheerful business-like manner, as if a Roland Lansdell or so more or less in the world were a matter of very small consequence. And then a mist came before Isabel"s eyes, and she lost consciousness of the ground on which she trod; and presently there was a faint odour of hartshorn and aromatic medicines, and she felt a soft hand sponging her forehead with eau-de-Cologne, and a woman"s muslin garments fluttering near her. And then she raised her eyelids with a painful sense of their weight, and a voice very close to her said,--
"It was very kind of you to come. I am afraid the heat of the room makes you faint. If you could contrive to let in a little more air, Raymond.
It was very good of you to come."
Oh, he was _not_ dying! Her heart seemed to leap out of a dreadful frozen region into an atmosphere of warmth and light. He was not dying!
Death was not like this. He spoke to her to-day as he had always spoken.
It was the same voice, the same low music which she had heard so often mingled with the brawling of the mill-stream: the voice that had sounded perpetually in her dreams by day and night.
She slipped from her chair and fell upon her knees by the bedside. There was nothing violent or melodramatic in the movement; it seemed almost involuntary, half unconscious.
"Oh, I am so glad to hear you speak!" she said; "it makes me so happy--to see you like this. They told me that you were very, very ill; they told me that----"
"They told you the truth," Roland answered gravely. "Oh, dear Mrs.
Gilbert, you must try and forget what I have been, or you will never be able to understand what I am. And I was so tired of life, and thought I had so little interest in the universe; and yet I feel so utterly changed a creature now that all earthly hope has really slipped away from me. I sent for you, Isabel, because in this last interview I want to acknowledge all the wrong I have done you; I want to ask your forgiveness for that wrong."
"Forgiveness--from me! Oh, no, no!"
She could not abandon her old att.i.tude of worship. He was a prince always--n.o.ble or wicked--a prince by divine right of his splendour and beauty! If he stooped from his high estate to smile upon her, was he not ent.i.tled to her deepest grat.i.tude, her purest devotion? If it pleased him to spurn and trample her beneath his feet, what was she, when counted against the magnificence of her idol, that she should complain?
There is always some devoted creature prostrate in the road when the car comes by; and which of them would dream of upbraiding Juggernaut for the anguish inflicted by the crushing wheels?
The same kind hands which had bathed Mrs. Gilbert"s forehead half lifted her from her kneeling att.i.tude now; and looking up, Isabel saw Lady Gwendoline bending over her, very pale, very grave, but with a sweet compa.s.sionate smile upon her face. Lord Ruysdale and his daughter had come to the Priory immediately after hearing of Roland"s dangerous state; and during the four-and-twenty hours that had elapsed, Lady Gwendoline had been a great deal with her cousin. The hidden love which had turned to jealous anger against Roland"s folly regained all its purer qualities now, and there was no sacrifice of self or self-love that Gwendoline Pomphrey would have hesitated to make, if in so doing she could have restored life and vigour to the dying man. She had heard the worst the doctors had to tell. She knew that her cousin was dying.
She was no woman to delude herself with vain hopes, to put away the cup for awhile because it was bitter, knowing that its last drop must be drained sooner or later. She bowed her head before the inevitable, and accepted her sorrow. Never in her brightest day, when her portrait had been in every West-end print-shop, and her name a synonym for all that is elegant and beautiful--never had she seemed so perfect a woman as now, when she sat pale and quiet and resigned, by the deathbed of the man she loved.
During that long night of watching, Mr. Lansdell"s mind had seemed at intervals peculiarly clear,--the fatal injuries inflicted upon his brain had not blotted out his intellect. That had been obscured in occasional periods of wandering and stupor, but every now and then the supremacy of spirit over matter rea.s.serted itself, and the young man talked even more calmly than usual. All the fitfulness of pa.s.sion, the wavering of purpose--now hot, now cold, now generous, now cruel,--all natural weakness seemed to have been swept away, and an unutterable calm had fallen upon his heart and mind.
Once, on waking from a brief doze, he found his cousin watching, but the nurse asleep, and began to talk of Isabel Gilbert. "I want you to know all about her," he said; "you have only heard vulgar scandal and gossip.
I should like you to know the truth. It is very foolish, that little history--wicked perhaps; but those provincial gossips may have garbled and disfigured the story. I will tell you the truth, Gwendoline; for I want you to be a friend to Isabel Gilbert when I am dead and gone."
And then he told the history of all those meetings under Lord Thurston"s oak; dwelling tenderly on Isabel"s ignorant simplicity, blaming himself for all that was guilty and dishonourable in that sentimental flirtation. He told Gwendoline how, from being half amused, half gratified, by Mrs. Gilbert"s unconcealed admiration of him, so navely revealed in every look and tone, he had, little by little, grown to find the sole happiness of his life in those romantic meetings; and then he spoke of his struggles with himself, real, earnest struggles--his flight--his return--his presumptuous belief that Isabel would freely consent to any step he might propose--his anger and disappointment after the final interview, which proved to him how little he had known the depths of that girlish sentimental heart.
"She was only a child playing with fire, Gwendoline," he said; "and had not the smallest desire to walk through the furnace. That was my mistake. She was a child, and I mistook her for a woman--a woman who saw the gulf before her, and was prepared to take the desperate leap. She was only a child, pleased with my pretty speeches and town-made clothes and perfumed handkerchiefs,--a schoolgirl; and I set my life upon the chance of being happy with her. Will you try and think of her as she really is, Gwendoline,--not as these Graybridge people see her,--and be kind to her when I am dead and gone? I should like to think she was sure of one wise and good woman for a friend. I have been very cruel to her, very unjust, very selfish. I was never in the same mind about her for an hour together,--sometimes thinking tenderly of her, sometimes upbraiding and hating her as a trickstress and a coquette. But I can understand her and believe in her much better now. The sky is higher, Gwendoline."
If Roland had told his cousin this story a week before, when his life seemed all before him, she might have received his confidence in a very different spirit from that in which she now accepted it; but he was dying, and she had loved him, and had been loved by him. It was by her own act that she had lost that love. She of all others had least right to resent his attachment to another woman. She remembered that day, nearly ten years ago, on which she had quarrelled with him, stung by his reproaches, insolent in the pride of her young beauty and the knowledge that she might marry a man so high above Roland Lansdell in rank and position. She saw herself as she had been, in all the early splendour of her Saxon beauty, and wondered if she really was the same creature as that proud worldly girl who thought the supremest triumph in life was to become the wife of a marquis.
"I will be her friend, Roland," she said, presently. "I know she is very childish; and I will be patient with her and befriend her, poor lonely girl."
Lady Gwendoline was thinking, as she said this, of that interview in the surgeon"s parlour at Graybridge--that interview in which Isabel had not scrupled to confess her folly and wickedness.
"I ought to have been more patient," Gwendoline thought; "but I think I was angry with her because she had dared to love Roland. I was jealous of his love for her, and I could not be kind or tolerant."
Thus it was that Isabel found Lady Gwendoline so tender and compa.s.sionate to her. She only raised her eyes to the lady"s face with a grateful look. She forgot all about the interview at Graybridge; what _could_ she remember in that room, except that _he_ was ill? in danger, people had told her; but she could not believe that. The experience of her husband"s deathbed had impressed her with an idea that dangerous illness must be accompanied by terrible prostration, delirium, raging fever, dull stupor. She saw Roland in one of his best intervals, reasonable, cheerful, self-possessed, and she could not believe that he was going to die. She looked at him, and saw that his face was bloodless, and that his head was bound by linen bandages, which concealed his forehead. A fall from his horse! She remembered how she had seen him once ride by upon the dusty road, unconscious of her presence, grand and self-absorbed as Count Lara; but amongst all her musings she had never imagined any danger coming to him in that shape.
She had fancied him always as a dauntless rider, taming the wildest steed with one light pressure of his hand upon the curb. She looked at him sorrowfully, and the vision of his accident arose before her; she saw the horse tearing across a moonlit waste, and then a fall, and then a figure dragged along the ground. She had read of such things: it was only some old half-forgotten scene out of one of her books that rose in her mind.
No doubt as to the nature of Mr. Lansdell"s accident, no glimmering suspicion of the truth, ever entered her brain. She believed most fully that she had herself prevented all chance of an encounter between her father and his enemy. Had she not seen the last of Mr. Sleaford in Nessborough Hollow, whence he was to depart for Wareham station at break of day? and what should take Roland Lansdell to that lonely glade in which the little rustic inn was hidden,--a resting-place for haymakers and gipsy-hawkers?
She never guessed the truth. The medical men who attended Roland Lansdell knew that the injuries from which he was dying had never been caused by any fall from a horse; and they said as much to Charles Raymond, who was unutterably distressed by the intelligence. But neither he nor the doctors could obtain any admission from the patient, though Mr. Raymond most earnestly implored him to reveal the truth.
"Cure me, if you can," he said; "nothing that I can tell you will give you any help in doing that. If it is my fancy to keep the cause of my death a secret, it is the whim of a dying man, and it ought to be respected. No living creature upon this earth except one man will ever know how I came by these injuries. But I do hope that you gentlemen will be discreet enough to spare my friends any useless pain. The gossips are at work already, I dare say, speculating as to what became of the horse that threw me. For pity"s sake, do your best to stop their talk. My life has been sluggish enough; do not let there be any _esclandre_ about my death."