THE sun sank lower; the western breeze floated cool and fresh into the house. As the evening advanced, the cheerful ring of the village clock came nearer and nearer. Field and flower-garden felt the influence of the hour, and shed their sweetest fragrance. The birds in Norah’s aviary sunned themselves in the evening stillness, and sang their farewell gratitude to the dying day.
Staggered in its progress for a time only, the pitiless routine of the house went horribly on its daily way. The panic-stricken servants took their blind refuge in the duties proper to the hour. The footman softly laid the table for dinner. The maid sat waiting in senseless doubt, with the hot-water jugs for the bedrooms ranged near her in their customary row. The gardener, who had been ordered to come to his master, with vouchers for money that he had paid in excess of his instructions, said his character was dear to him, and left the vouchers at his appointed time. Custom that never yields, and Death that never spares, met on the wreck of human happiness—and Death gave way.
Heavily the thunder-clouds of Affliction had gathered over the house—heavily, but not at their darkest yet. At five, that evening, the shock of the calamity had struck its blow. Before another hour had passed, the disclosure of the husband’s sudden death was followed by the suspense of the wife’s mortal peril. She lay helpless on her widowed bed; her own life, and the life of her unborn child, trembling in the balance.
But one mind still held possession of its resources—but one guiding spirit now moved helpfully in the house of mourning.
If Miss Garth’s early days had been passed as calmly and as happily as her later life at Combe-Raven, she might have sunk under the cruel necessities of the time. But the governess’s youth had been tried in the ordeal of family affliction; and she met her terrible duties with the steady courage of a woman who had learned to suffer. Alone, she had faced the trial of telling the daughters that they were fatherless. Alone, she now struggled to sustain them, when the dreadful certainty of their bereavement was at last impressed on their minds.
Her least anxiety was for the elder sister. The agony of Norah’s grief had forced its way outward to the natural relief of tears. It was not so with Magdalen. Tearless and speechless, she sat in the room where the revelation of her father’s death had first reached her; her face, unnaturally petrified by the sterile sorrow of old age—a white, changeless blank, fearful to look at. Nothing roused, nothing melted her. She only said, “Don’t speak to me; don’t touch me. Let me bear it by myself”—and fell silent again. The first great grief which had darkened the sisters’ lives had, as it seemed, changed their everyday characters already.
The twilight fell, and faded; and the summer night came brightly. As the first carefully shaded light was kindled in the sick-room, the physician, who had been summoned from Bristol, arrived to consult with the medical attendant of the family. He could give no comfort: he could only say, “We must try, and hope. The shock which struck her, when she overheard the news of her husband’s death, has prostrated her strength at the time when she needed it most. No effort to preserve her shall be neglected. I will stay here for the night.”
He opened one of the windows to admit more air as he spoke. The view overlooked the drive in front of the house and the road outside. Little groups of people were standing before the lodge-gates, looking in. “If those persons make any noise,” said the doctor, “they must be warned away.” There was no need to warn them: they were only the laborers who had worked on the dead man’s property, and here and there some women and children from the village. They were all thinking of him—some talking of him—and it quickened their sluggish minds to look at his house. The gentlefolks thereabouts were mostly kind to them (the men said), but none like him. The women whispered to each other of his comforting ways when he came into their cottages. “He was a cheerful man, poor soul; and thoughtful of us, too: he never came in and stared at meal-times; the rest of ‘em help us, and scold us—all he ever said was, better luck next time.” So they stood and talked of him, and looked at his house and grounds and moved off clumsily by twos and threes, with the dim sense that the sight of his pleasant face would never comfort them again. The dullest head among them knew, that night, that the hard ways of poverty would be all the harder to walk on, now he was gone.
A little later, news was brought to the bed-chamber door that old Mr. Clare had come alone to the house, and was waiting in the hall below, to hear what the physician said. Miss Garth was not able to go down to him herself: she sent a message. He said to the servant, “I’ll come and ask again, in two hours’ time”—and went out slowly. Unlike other men in all things else, the sudden death of his old friend had produced no discernible change in him. The feeling implied in the errand of inquiry that had brought him to the house was the one betrayal of human sympathy which escaped the rugged, impenetrable old man.
He came again, when the two hours had expired; and this time Miss Garth saw him.
They shook hands in silence. She waited; she nerved herself to hear him speak of his lost friend. No: he never mentioned the dreadful accident, he never alluded to the dreadful death. He said these words, “Is she better, or worse?” and said no more. Was the tribute of his grief for the husband sternly suppressed under the expression of his anxiety for the wife? The nature of the man, unpliably antagonistic to the world and the world’s customs, might justify some such interpretation of his conduct as this. He repeated his question, “Is she better, or worse?”
Miss Garth answered him:
“No better; if there is any change, it is a change for the worse.”
They spoke those words at the window of the morning-room which opened on the garden. Mr. Clare paused, after hearing the reply to his inquiry, stepped out on to the walk, then turned on a sudden, and spoke again:
“Has the doctor given her up?” he asked.
“He has not concealed from us that she is in danger. We can only pray for her.”
The old man laid his hand on Miss Garth’s arm as she answered him, and looked her attentively in the face.
“You believe in prayer?” he said.
Miss Garth drew sorrowfully back from him.
“You might have spared me that question sir, at such a time as this.”
He took no notice of her answer; his eyes were still fastened on her face.
“Pray!” he said. “Pray as you never prayed before, for the preservation of Mrs. Vanstone’s life.”
He left her. His voice and manner implied some unutterable dread of the future, which his words had not confessed. Miss Garth followed him into the garden, and called to him. He heard her, but he never turned back: he quickened his pace, as if he desired to avoid her. She watched him across the lawn in the warm summer moonlight. She saw his white, withered hands, saw them suddenly against the black background of the shrubbery, raised and wrung above his head. They dropped—the trees shrouded him in darkness—he was gone.
Miss Garth went back to the suffering woman, with the burden on her mind of one anxiety more.
It was then past eleven o’clock. Some little time had elapsed since she had seen the sisters and spoken to them. The inquiries she addressed to one of the female servants only elicited the information that they were both in their rooms. She delayed her return to the mother’s bedside to say her parting words of comfort to the daughters, before she left them for the night. Norah’s room was the nearest. She softly opened the door and looked in. The kneeling figure by the bedside told her that God’s help had found the fatherless daughter in her affliction. Grateful tears gathered in her eyes as she looked: she softly closed the door, and went on to Magdalen’s room. There doubt stayed her feet at the threshold, and she waited for a moment before going in.
A sound in the room caught her ear—the monotonous rustling of a woman’s dress, now distant, now near; passing without cessation from end to end over the floor—a sound which told her that Magdalen was pacing to and fro in the secrecy of her own chamber. Miss Garth knocked. The rustling ceased; the door was opened, and the sad young face confronted her, locked in its cold despair; the large light eyes looked mechanically into hers, as vacant and as tearless as ever.
That look wrung the heart of the faithful woman, who had trained her and loved her from a child. She took Magdalen tenderly in her arms.
“Oh, my love,” she said, “no tears yet! Oh, if I could see you as I have seen Norah! Speak to me, Magdalen—try if you can speak to me.”
She tried, and spoke:
“Norah,” she said, “feels no remorse. He was not serving Norah’s interests when he went to his death: he was serving mine.”
With that terrible answer, she put her cold lips to Miss Garth’s cheek.
“Let me bear it by myself,” she said, and gently closed the door.
Again Miss Garth waited at the threshold, and again the sound of the rustling dress passed to and fro—now far, now near—to and fro with a cruel, mechanical regularity, that chilled the warmest sympathy, and daunted the boldest hope.
The night passed. It had been agreed, if no change for the better showed itself by the morning, that the London physician whom Mrs. Vanstone had consulted some months since should be summoned to the house on the next day. No change for the better appeared, and th............