"If any calm, a calm despair." Such a calm fell at last upon Isabel Gilbert; but it was slow to come. For a long time it seemed to her as if a dreadful darkness obscured all the world; a darkness in which she groped blindly for a grave, where she might lie down and die. Was not _he_ dead? What was there left in all the universe now that he was gone?
Happily for the sufferer there is attendant upon all great mental anguish a kind of numbness, a stupefaction of the senses, which in some manner deadens the sharpness of the torture. For a long time Isabel could not think of what had happened within the last few troubled weeks.
She could only sit hopeless and tearless in the little parlour at Graybridge while the funeral preparations went quietly on about her, and while Mrs. Jeffson and the young woman, who went on to work at eighteenpence a day, came in every now and then to arouse her from her dull stupor for the trying-on of mourning garments which smelt of dye and size, and left black marks upon her neck and arms. She heard the horrible snipping of c.r.a.pe and bombazine going on all day, like the monotonous accompaniment of a nightmare; and sometimes when the door had been left ajar, she heard people talking in the opposite room. She heard them talking in stealthy murmurs of the two funerals which were to take place on successive days--one at Graybridge, one at Mordred. She heard them speculate respecting Mr. Lansdell"s disposal of his wealth; she heard the name, the dear romantic name, that was to be nothing henceforward but an empty sound, bandied from lip to lip; and all this pain was only some portion of the hideous dream which bound her night and day.
People were very kind to her. Even Graybridge took pity upon her youth and desolation; though every pang of her foolish heart was the subject of tea-table speculation. But the accomplished slanderer is not always a malevolently disposed person. He is only like the wit, who loves his jest better than his friend; but who will yet do his friend good service in the day of need. The Misses Pawlkatt, and many other young ladies of standing in Graybridge, wrote Isabel pretty little notes of condolence, interlarded with quotations from Scripture, and offered to go and "sit with her." To "sit with her;" to beguile with their frivolous stereotype chatter the anguish of this poor stupefied creature, for whom all the universe seemed obscured by one impenetrable cloud.
It was on the second day after the surgeon"s funeral, the day following that infinitely more stately ceremonial at Mordred church, that Mr.
Raymond came to see Isabel. He had been with her several times during the last few days; but he had found all attempts at consolation utterly in vain, and he, who had so carefully studied human nature, knew that it was wisest and kindest to let her alone. But on this occasion he came on a business errand; and he was accompanied by a grave-looking person, whom he introduced to Isabel as the late Mr. Lansdell"s solicitor.
"I have come to bring you strange news, Mrs. Gilbert," he said--"news that cannot fail to be very startling to you."
She looked up at Charles Raymond with a sad smile, whose meaning he was not slow to interpret. It said so plainly, "Do you think anything that can happen henceforward upon this earth could ever seem strange to me?"
"When you were with--him--on the last day of his life, Isabel," Mr.
Raymond continued, "he talked to you very seriously. He changed--changed wonderfully with the near approach of death. It seemed as if the last ten years had been blotted away, and he was a young man again, just entering life, full of n.o.ble yearnings and aspirations. I pray G.o.d those ten idle years may never be counted against him. He spoke to you very earnestly, my dear; and he urged you, if ever great opportunities were given you, which they might be, to use them faithfully for his sake. I heard him say this, and was at a loss to understand his full meaning. I comprehend it perfectly now."
He paused; but Isabel did not even look up at him. The tears were slowly pouring down her colourless cheeks. She was thinking of that last day at Mordred; and Roland"s tenderly-earnest voice seemed still sounding in her ears.
"Isabel, a great charge has been entrusted to you. Mr. Lansdell has left you the bulk of his fortune."
It is certain that Mr. Raymond expected some cry of surprise, some token of astonishment, to follow this announcement; but Isabel"s tears only flowed a little faster, and her head sank forward on the sofa-cushion by her side.
"Had you any idea that Roland intended to leave his money in this manner?"
"Oh, no, no! I don"t want the money; I can do nothing with it. Oh, give it to some hospital, please: and let the hospital be called by his name.
It was cruel of him to think that I should care for money when he was dead."
"I have reason to believe that this will was made under very peculiar circ.u.mstances," Mr. Raymond said presently; "when Roland was labouring under a delusion about you--a delusion which you yourself afterwards dispelled. Mr. Lansdell"s solicitor fully understands this; Lord Ruysdale and his daughter also understand it; and no possible discredit can attach to you from the inheritance of this fortune. Had Roland lived, he might very possibly have made some alteration and modifications of this will. As it stands, it is as good a will as any ever proved at Doctors" Commons. You are a very rich woman, Isabel. Lady Gwendoline, her father, and myself are all legatees to a considerable amount; but Mordred Priory and the bulk of the Lansdell property are left to you."
And then Mr. Raymond went on to explain the nature of the will, which left everything to himself and Mr. Meredith (the London solicitor) as trustees, for the separate use and maintenance of Isabel Gilbert, and a great deal more, which had no significance for the dull indifferent ears of the mourner. There had been a time when Mrs. Gilbert would have thought it a grand thing to be rich, and would have immediately imagined a life spent in ruby velvet and diamonds; but that time was past. The blessings we sigh for are very apt to come to us too late; like that pension the tidings of which came to the poet as he lay upon his deathbed.
Mordred Priory became the property of Isabel Gilbert; and for a time all that Shakespearian region of Midlandshire had enough to employ them in the discussion of Mr. Lansdell"s will. But even the voice of slander was hushed when Mrs. Gilbert left England in the company of Lord Ruysdale and his daughter for a lengthened sojourn on the Continent. I quote here from the "Wareham Gazette," which found Isabel"s proceedings worthy of record since her inheritance of Mr. Lansdell"s property.
Lady Gwendoline had promised to be the friend of Isabel; and she kept her word. There was no bitterness in her heart now; and perhaps she liked George Gilbert"s widow all the better on account of that foolish wasted love that made a kind of link between them.
Lord Ruysdale"s daughter was not the sort of woman to feel any base envy of Mrs. Gilbert"s fortune. The Earl had been very slow to understand the motives of his kinsman"s will; but as he and his daughter received a legacy of ten thousand pounds apiece, to say nothing of sundry Cromwellian tankards, old-fashioned brooches and bracelets in rose-diamonds, a famous pearl necklace that had belonged to Lady Anna Lansdell, a Murillo and a Rembrandt, and nineteen dozen of Madeira that connoisseurs considered unique, Lord Ruysdale could scarcely esteem himself ill-treated by his late nephew.
So Mrs. Gilbert was permitted to possess her new wealth in peace, protected from any scandal by the Ruysdale influence. She was permitted to be at peace; and she went away with Lady Gwendoline and the Earl to those fair foreign lands for which she had pined in the weedy garden at Camberwell. Even during the first bitterness of her sorrow she was not utterly selfish. She sent money to Mrs. Sleaford and the boys--money which seemed enormous wealth to them; and she instructed her solicitor to send them quarterly instalments of an income which would enable her half-brothers to receive a liberal education.
"I have had a great sorrow," she wrote to her step-mother, "and I am going away with people who are very kind to me; not to forget--I would not for the world find forgetfulness, if such a thing was to be found; only that I may learn to bear my sorrow and to be good. When I come back, I shall be glad to see you and my brothers."
She wrote this, and a good deal more that was kind and dutiful, to poor Mrs. Sleaford, who had changed that tainted name to Singleton, in the peaceful retirement of Jersey; and then she went away, and was taken to many beautiful cities, over all of which there seemed to hang a kind of mist that shut out the sunshine. It was only when Roland Lansdell had been dead more than two years, that she began to understand that no grief, however bitter, can entirely obscure the beauty of the universe.
She began to feel that there is something left in life even when a first romantic love is nothing but a memory; a peace which is so nearly akin to happiness, that we scarcely regret the flight of the brighter spirit; a calm which lies beyond the regions of despair, and which is unruffled by those vague fears, those shadowy forebodings, that are apt to trouble the joyful heart.
And now it seems to me that I have little more to do with Isabel Gilbert. She pa.s.ses away from me into a higher region than that in which my story has lain,--useful, serene, almost happy, but very constant to the memory of sorrow,--she is altogether different from the foolish wife who neglected all a wife"s duties while she sat by the mill-stream at Thurston"s Crag reading the "Revolt of Islam." There is a great gulf between a girl of nineteen and a woman of five-and twenty; and Isabel"s foolish youth is separated from her wiser womanhood by a barrier that is formed by two graves. Is it strange, then, that the chastening influence of sorrow has transformed a sentimental girl into a good and n.o.ble woman--a woman in whom sentiment takes the higher form of universal sympathy and tenderness? She has faithfully employed the trust confided to her. The money bequeathed to her by the ardent lover, who fancied that he had won the woman of his choice, and that his sole duty was to protect her from worldly loss or trouble,--the fortune bequeathed under such strange circ.u.mstances has become a sacred trust, to be accounted for to the dead. Only the mourner knows the exquisite happiness involved in any act performed for the sake of the lost. Our Protestant creed, which will not permit us to pray for our dead, cannot forbid the consecration of our good works to those departed and beloved creatures.
Charles Raymond has transferred to Isabel something of that affection which he felt for Roland Lansdell; and he and the orphans, grown into estimable young persons of sixteen and seventeen, spend a great deal of their time at Mordred Priory. The agricultural labourer, who had known the Doctor"s Wife only as a pale-faced girlish creature, sitting under the shelter of a hedgerow, with a green parasol above her head, and a book in her lap, has good reason to bless the Doctor"s Widow; for model cottages have arisen in many a pleasant corner of the estate which was once Roland Lansdell"s--pretty Elizabethan cottages, with peaked gables and dormer windows. Allotment gardens have spread themselves here and there on pleasant slopes; and coming suddenly upon some woody hollow, you find yourself face to face with the Tudor windows of a schoolhouse, a substantial modern building, set in an old-world garden, where there are great gnarled pear-trees, and a cl.u.s.ter of beehives in a bowery corner, sheltered by bushes of elder and hazel.
Sigismund Smith appears sometimes at Mordred Priory, always accompanied by a bloated and dilapidated leathern writing-case, unnaturally distended by stuff which he calls "copy," and other stuff which he speaks of as "proofs."
Telegrams from infuriated proprietors of penny journals pursue him in his calm retreat, and a lively gentleman in a white hat has been known to arrive per express-train, vaguely declaring his intention of "standing over" Mr. Smith during the production of an urgently-required chapter of "The Bride of the Bosphorus; or, the Fourteen Corpses of the Caspian Sea."
He is very happy and very inky; and the rustic wanderers who meet a pale-faced and mild-looking gentleman loitering in the green lanes about Mordred, with his hat upon the back of his head, and his insipid blue eyes fixed on vacancy, would be slow to perceive in him the deliberate contriver of one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded schemes of vengeance that ever outraged the common dictates of human nature and adorned the richly-ill.u.s.trated pages of a penny periodical. Amongst the wild roses and new-mown hay of Midlandshire, Mr. Smith finds it sweet to lie at ease, weaving the dark webs of crime which he subsequently works out upon paper in the dingy loneliness of his Temple chambers. He is still a bachelor, and complains that he is not the kind of man to fall in love, as he is compelled to avail himself of the noses and eyes, ruby lips, and golden or raven tresses--there are no other hues in Mr.
Smith"s vocabulary--of every eligible young lady he meets, for the decking out of his numerous heroines. "Miss Binks?" he will perhaps remark, when a lady"s name is mentioned to him; "oh yes: _she"s_ Bella the Ballet Girl (one of Bickers"s touch-and-go romances; the first five numbers, and a magnificent engraving of one of Landseer"s best pictures, for a penny); I finished her off last week. She poisoned herself with insect-powder in a garret near Drury Lane, after setting fire to the house and grounds of her destroyer. She ran through a hundred and thirteen numbers, and Bickers has some idea of getting me to write a sequel. You see there _might_ be an antidote to the insect-powder, or the oilman"s shop-boy might have given Bella patent mustard in mistake."
But it has been observed of late that Mr. Smith pays very special attention to the elder of the two orphans, whom he declares to be too good for penny numbers, and a charming subject for three volumes of the quiet and domestic school, and he has consulted Mr. Raymond respecting the investment of his deposit-account, which is supposed to be something considerable; for a gentleman who lives chiefly upon bread-and marmalade and weak tea may ama.s.s a very comfortable little independence from the cultivation of sensational literature in penny numbers.