The Shadow of Ashlydyat Part 28

"She ought to do many things that she does not do. She ought to have sent Ethel from the house, as I told her, the instant the disorder appeared in it. Not she. She kept her in her insane selfishness: and now I hope she's satisfied with her work. When alarming symptoms showed themselves in Ethel, on the fourth day of her illness, I think it was, I said to my lady, 'It is strange what can be keeping Mr. G.o.dolphin!'

'Oh,' said she, 'I did not write to him.' 'Not write!' I answered: and I fear I used an ugly word to my lady's face. 'I'll write at once,'

returned she humbly. 'Of course,' cried I, 'when the steed's stolen we shut the stable-door.' It's the way of the world."

Another pause. "I would have given anything to take Ethel from the house at the time; to take her from the town," observed Thomas G.o.dolphin in a low tone. "I said so then. But it could not be."

"I should have done it, in your place," said Mr. Snow. "If my lady had said no, I'd have carried her off in the face of it. Not married, you say? Rubbis.h.!.+ Every one knows she'd have been safe with you. And you would have been married as soon as was convenient. What are forms and ceremonies and carping tongues, in comparison with a girl's life? A life, precious as was Ethel's!"

Thomas G.o.dolphin leaned his forehead in his hand, lost in retrospect.

Oh, that he _had_ taken her! that he had set at nought what he had then bowed to, the _convenances_ of society! She might have been by his side now, in health and life, to bless him! Doubting words interrupted the train of thought.

"And yet I don't know," the surgeon was repeating, in a dreamy manner.

"What is to be, will be. We look back, all of us, and say, 'If I had acted thus, if I had done the other, so and so would not have happened; events would have turned out differently.' But who is to be sure of it?

Had you taken Ethel out of harm's way--as we might have thought it--there's no telling but she'd have had the fever just the same: her blood might have become infected before she left the house. There's no knowing, Mr. G.o.dolphin."

"True. Good evening, Snow."

He turned suddenly and hastily to the outer door, but the surgeon caught him before he pa.s.sed its threshold, and touched his arm to detain him.

They stood there in the obscurity, their faces shaded in the dark night.

"She left you a parting word, Mr. G.o.dolphin."

"Ah?"

"An hour before she died she was calm and sensible, though fearfully weak. Lady Sarah had gone to her favourite, and I was alone with Ethel.

'Has he not come yet?' she asked me, opening her eyes. 'My dear,' I said, 'he could not come; he was never written for.' For I knew she alluded to you, and was determined to tell her the truth, dying though she was. 'What shall I say to him for you?' I continued. She put up her hand to motion my face nearer hers, for her voice was growing faint.

'Tell him, with my dear love, not to grieve,' she whispered, between her panting breath. 'Tell him that I have gone on before.' I think they were almost the last words she spoke."

Thomas G.o.dolphin leaned against the modest post of the surgery door, and eagerly drank in the words. Then he wrung the doctor's hand, and departed, hurrying along the street as one who shrank from observation: for he did not care, just then, to encounter the gaze of his fellow-men.

Coming with a quick step up the side street, in which the entrance to the surgery was situated, was the Reverend Mr. Hastings. He stopped to accost the surgeon.

"Was that Mr. G.o.dolphin?"

"Ay. This is a blow for him."

Mr. Hastings's voice insensibly shrank to a whisper. "Maria tells me that he did not know of Ethel's death or illness. Until they arrived here to-night, they thought it was Sarah Anne who died. He went up to Lady Sarah's after the train came in, thinking so."

"Lady Sarah's a fool," was the complimentary rejoinder of Mr. Snow.

"She is, in some things," warmly a.s.sented the Rector. "The telegraphic message she despatched to Scotland, telling of the death, was so obscurely worded as to cause them to a.s.sume that it alluded to Sarah Anne."

"Ah well! she's only heaping burdens on her conscience," rejoined Mr.

Snow in a philosophic tone. "She has lost Ethel through want of care (as I firmly believe) in not keeping her out of the way of infection; she prevented their last meeting, through not writing to him; she----"

"He could not have saved her, had he been here," interrupted Mr.

Hastings.

"No one said he could. There would have been satisfaction in it for him, though. And for her too, poor child."

Mr. Hastings did not contest the point. He was so very practical a man (in contradistinction to an imaginative one) that he saw little use in "last" interviews, unless they produced actual good. Turning away, he walked home at a brisk pace. Maria was alone when he entered. Mrs.

Hastings and Grace were out of the room, talking to some late applicant: a clergyman's house, like a parish apothecary's, is never free long together. Divested of her travelling cloaks and seated before the fire in her quiet merino dress, Maria looked as much at home as if she had never left it. The blaze, flickering on her face, betrayed to the keen glance of the Rector that her eyelashes were wet.

"Grieving after Broomhead already, Maria?" asked he, his tone a stern one.

"Oh, papa, no! I am glad to be at home. I was thinking of poor Ethel."

"She is better off. The time may come, Maria--we none of us know what is before us--when some of you young ones who are left may wish you had died as she has. Many a one, battling for very existence with the world's cares, wails out a vain wish that he had been taken early from the evil to come."

"It must be so dreadful for Thomas G.o.dolphin!" Maria resumed, looking straight into the fire, and speaking as if in commune with herself, more than to her father.

"Thomas G.o.dolphin must find another love."

It was one of those phrases, spoken in satire only, to which the Rector of All Souls' was occasionally given. He saw so much to condemn in the world, things which grated harshly on his advanced mind, that his speech had become imbued with a touch of gall, and he would often give utterance to cynical remarks, uncalled for at the moment.

Maria took up the words literally. She turned to Mr. Hastings; her cheek flushed, her hands clasped; altogether betraying vivid emotion. "Oh, papa! another love! You should not say it of Thomas G.o.dolphin. Love, such as his, is not for a week or a year: it is for all time."

The Rector paused a moment in his reply. His penetrating gaze was fixed upon his daughter. "May I inquire whence you have derived your knowledge of 'love,' Miss Maria Hastings?"

Her eyes drooped, her face turned crimson, her manner grew confused. She turned her countenance from that of her father, and stammered forth some lame excuse. "Every one knows, papa, that Thomas G.o.dolphin was fond of Ethel."

"Possibly. But every one does not know that Maria Hastings deems herself qualified to enlarge upon the subject," was the Rector's reply. And Maria shrank into silence.

There came a day, not many days afterwards, when Maria Hastings, her sisters, and two of her brothers, were gathered in sombre silence around the study window of the Rectory. The room was built out at the back of the house, over the kitchen, and its side window commanded a full view of the churchyard of All Souls', and of the church porch. Grace, who const.i.tuted herself mistress of the others a great deal more than did Mrs. Hastings herself, allowed the blind to be drawn up about two inches at the bottom of the window; and Maria, Isaac, Harry, and Rose, kneeling down for convenience sake, brought their faces into contact with it, as the mob outside the churchyard gate did there. Human nature is the same everywhere, whether in the carefully-trained children of a Christian gentleman, or in those who know no training but what the streets have given.

The funeral, even now, was inside the church: it had been inside so long that those eager watchers, estimating time by their impatience, began to think it was never coming out again. A sudden movement in the church porch rea.s.sured them, and Grace knelt down and made one with the rest.

Slowly--slowly--on it came. The Reverend Mr. Hastings first, in his white robes; the coffin next; Thomas G.o.dolphin last, with a stranger by his side. Nothing more, except some pall-bearers in their white scarfs, and the necessary attendants. It was a perfectly simple funeral: according well with what the dead had been in her simple life.

The appearance of this stranger took the curious gazers by surprise. Who was he? A spare man, past middle age, with a red nose and an unmistakable wig on his head. Rumours circulating in Prior's Ash had said that Thomas G.o.dolphin would be sole mourner. Lady Sarah Grame's relatives--and she could not boast of many--lived far north of Aberdeen.

"Who can he be?" murmured Grace Hastings.

"Why, don't you girls know? That's through your having stuck yourselves in the house all the morning, for fear you should lose the funeral. If you had gone out, you'd have heard who he is." The retort came from Harry Hastings. Let it be a funeral or a wedding, that may be taking place under their very eyes, boys must be boys all the world over. And so they ever will be.

"Who is he, then?" asked Grace.

"He is Ethel's uncle," answered Harry. "He arrived by train this morning. The Earl of Macsomething."

"The Earl of Macsomething!" repeated Grace.

Harry nodded. "Mac begins the name, and I forget the rest. Lady Sarah was his sister."

"Is, you mean," said Grace. "It must be Lord Macdoune."

The church porch was opposite the study window. The grave had been dug in a line between the two, very near to the family vault of the G.o.dolphins and to the entrance gate of the churchyard. On it came, crossing the broad churchyard path which wound round to the road, treading between mounds and graves. The clergyman took his place at the head, the mourners near him, the rest disposing themselves decently around.

"Grace," whispered Isaac, "if we had the window open an inch, we should hear." And Grace was pleased to accord her sanction, and they silently raised it.

"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay."