“Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are to feel,—and know myself a man!”
Gray.
“To lose thee! oh! to lose thee,—to live on
And see the sun, not thee! will the sun shine—
Will the birds sing—flowers bloom, when thou art gone?
Desolate! desolate!”
Bulwer’s King Arthur.
“Oh, I was sure that you would come,—quite sure! And Ida—my own precious Ida!” The poor young girl clung to her sister as if they had been parted for years.
“My husband!” exclaimed Annabella, trembling lest terrible news should await her.
“He is much the same, but—”
“Where is he—I will fly to him; I—”
“My dear madam,” said the low voice of a stranger, as a tall, bald gentleman in black came forth from the interior of the cottage, with his finger raised to his lip, “may I request that no sound be uttered—my patient is in a state of high fever.”
“I will quietly glide up to his room—”
“If, as I suppose, I have the honour of addressing[253] the Countess of Dashleigh, I trust that she will pardon my strictly forbidding any one but Mr. Aumerle and the nurse from entering the chamber of the earl.”
“I am his wife!” murmured Annabella hoarsely.
“It is impossible,” said Dr. G——, “that you should meet without a degree of excitement which might endanger the life or the reason of my patient. The earl is in excellent hands; his friend, and the skilful attendant whom I have provided, will watch him night and day. If any new face were to be seen, I would not be answerable for the consequences.”
Dr. G—— had, of course, read “The Precipice and the Peer,” and naturally concluded that its authoress was the last person who could with impunity be admitted into the sick-room of the excited and fevered patient. From the physician’s decision there was no appeal, though to Annabella it appeared an intolerable sentence of banishment from the place to which both duty and affection called her. Always ready to rush to a conclusion, the unhappy wife was convinced that it was the just resentment of Dashleigh against her, that rendered her of all beings in the world the one whose presence he could not endure. Utterly prostrate and helpless in her sorrow, the countess left to Ida all care for the arrangements of the night. To herself it was nothing where she slept, or whether she ever should sleep again; she[254] was like a flower so crushed and bruised that it will never more unfold its petals to the sun.
The rude cottage of the fisherman offered wretched accommodation for so large a party. The earl occupied one of the two little bed-rooms which were reached by a ladder-like staircase; in the other—an apartment not ten feet square, with bare rafters, sloping roof, and single-paned window engrained with dust and sea salt, and incapable of being opened—the countess and her cousins passed the night. The gentlemen had to content themselves with the bare floor of the kitchen below, redolent of the scent of fish, and garlanded with nets and tackle,—an accommodation which they shared with their rough, weather-beaten, but hospitable host.
Annabella and Ida were so much exhausted by previous excitement, fatigue, and want of rest, that even in the miserable hovel they might have slept deeply and long, had it not been for the sounds from the next room, almost as distinctly heard through the slight partition as if the apartments had been one. It was agony to the countess to hear the moans of the fevered sufferer, or the wild words uttered in delirium. Ida passed the night in vain endeavours to soothe and calm a wounded spirit, while the weary Mabel peacefully slumbered beside them, unconscious of what was passing around. It was almost as great a relief to Ida as to her afflicted cousin when the morning broke at length, and welcome silence on the[255] other side of the partition told that the sufferer had sunk to rest.
Augustine Aumerle, after watching for hours at the bedside of the earl, whom he alone had any power to soothe in the paroxysms of his terrible malady, now resigned his post to the nurse, and descending the steep, narrow staircase, went forth to calm and refresh his spirit by a brief walk on the shore of the sea,—that sea in which he had so lately expected to find a grave. As he stood gazing on the bright expanse of waters, and enjoying the fresh morning breeze that, as it rippled the surface of the sea, also brought back the hue of health to his pale and careworn cheek, he was joined by Lawrence Aumerle.
Kindly greeting was exchanged between the brothers; questions were asked and replies were given, and then a silence succeeded. Something seemed pressing on the heart of each, to which the lip would not give ready utterance. Augustine was the first to speak, but he did so without looking at his brother; he rather seemed to be watching the sea-bird that lightly floated on the wave.
“Lawrence, you remember the evening when we conversed together in your study?”
“I have often thought of it since.”
“And so have I,” said Augustine; “I thought of it when I believed that there was but one step between me and death,—when I expected in a brief space to be in that world where we shall know even[256] as we are known,—where ours will not be the wild guess, but the absolute certainty,—not the wild grasping at the shadow, but the laying hold on the substance of truth.”
Lawrence fixed his eyes anxiously upon his brother, but did not interrupt him by a word.
“You said that experience is the growth of time. Lawrence, I have, then, lived an age in the last forty hours. A wide view of both heaven and earth is gained from the terrible height that I reached!”
“Common experience is the growth of time,” said the vicar; “but spiritual experience—”
“Give it in the words of inspiration,” interrupted Augustine; “I shall no longer ask you to put aside that solemn evidence, even for a moment. Tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience.”
“And experience, hope;” cried the vicar. “Oh, my brother!—that blessed hope shed abroad in the heart by the knowledge that Christ died for the ungodly, that hope that alone maketh not ashamed, is it—oh! is it your own?”
Augustine silently pressed the hand that had been unconsciously extended towards him; it was his only reply to the question. Without another sentence being uttered the brothers turned their steps in the direction of the cottage. But while pacing the shingley beach, Augustine was mentally subscribing to the confession of one of the brightest geniuses of earth,—that he had hitherto been but as a child[257] gathering pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth; while the vicar was raising to God, from the depths of a grateful heart, a thanksgiving for prayer answered at the very time when, and through the very trial by which his earthly happiness had appeared crushed a............