Ellen Middleton-A Tale Part 39

"Sleeping, thank G.o.d, and quietly too. Oh, Mrs. Middleton, hope is strong within me yet, and strength will be given us never to forsake him."

"Hope! strength! Alice, where are they to be found?"

Alice pointed to the sky and then to her own heart, and said, "_There_ and _here_. In quietness and in confidence shall be our strength." After a pause she resumed, "You were with him some time to-day, did he speak to you?"

Mrs. Middleton grew paler still at this question, and bowed her head in a.s.sent.

"What did he say?" continued Alice. "Oh, do not spare _me!_--do not think of _me!_ What did _he_ say?"

Mrs. Middleton joined her hands together and exclaimed, "'Where is she? Where is she?' was what he said. Again and again he repeated these words in a tone of indescribable anguish, and I was almost thankful when his mind wandered again, and I could leave his dreadful question unanswered.

Alice, my child, I am so weak, and you are so strong in your faith, in your hope, in your boundless charity, that I must give way before you, and for once ask you in mercy to let me speak of _her_. I could kneel on her grave and pray to be resigned; but now as it is I grow wild with terror--"

"Oh, let us speak of her, and let us pray for her; let us never have another secret fear, another unspoken terror. Let us pray that in this world she may still be blessed, or in a better she may have been mercifully received."

"You do not understand me yet, Alice. _He_ does. The same horrible fear has darted through his mind, darkened and clouded as it is. Her own deed; her own hand,... Alice, you never guessed the extent of his misery or of mine."

"Never guessed it, Mrs. Middleton? I have been with him in his hours of fierce delirium; I have been with him when he has taken me for _her_, and addressed to me words which have made my blood run cold; words of guilty love and of horrible remorse. I have lived between you and him during these days of darkness and agony. I have seen your hope die, and your terror grow; and do I not know what your fear is?--Suicide! Yes, let me speak the word at once, let me dive into your inmost thoughts, and let me carry consolation even into that extremity of misery. Who can declare the point where despair becomes _madness?_ Who shall judge? Who shall condemn? Who can tell the secret things of the soul save the G.o.d who made it?

He has set no limits to our prayers; and shall we say to His mercy, so far shalt thou go and no further?"

They knelt together, those two women; they poured forth their souls in prayer, and when they rose from their knees, and the elder of them leant her forehead against the breast of the younger and wept in silence, she blessed her in her heart; and she was right to bless her, for n.o.bly and tenderly had Alice Lovell borne her part through the heavy trials that had a.s.sailed her. We heard of her last on the bed of sickness, and death was drawing near to her; but youth, and strength of body and mind carried her through, and when she rose from her couch of weakness and of pain, it was to hurry to the bed-side of the husband who had forsaken her, and who, after some days of agonised search after the victim of his relentless pa.s.sion, maddened by the conviction that he had destroyed her, and haunted by an indescribable remorse, had lost in a brain fever all consciousness save of some intolerable anguish, and of that endless remorse. For many days he hovered between life and death, while his pale wife stood by his side and held his burning hand in hers; even while he raved in dreadful delirium of his love and his despair, and with frantic cries called upon the grave to give up its dead. She was indeed a ministering angel in that house of mourning, for there was another fierce but now subdued spirit, who without daring to approach the bed of suffering, was undergoing all the anguish of the blow she had struck, and which had recoiled upon herself. It was a fearful sight to see that old woman crying like a child over the ruin she had made, wringing her hands in despair, and with straining eyes and blanched cheeks, listening at the door of the room where the being, whom she had nursed as a child, and idolised as a man, whose pa.s.sions she had fostered, whose life she had saved and embittered, to whom she had confided her child, and whom she had at last ruined by her blind and furious revenge, was raving, cursing, and dying. Between them stood that child whom she had sacrificed, and he had betrayed. With words of peace and of holy confidence, pa.s.sing from one to the other, Alice spoke of hope and pardon, and turned the agony of the aged sufferer into penitence. By degrees she learnt from her lips all the secrets of her soul. From her she gathered the knowledge of that dark cloud which had hung over Ellen's life, and while she trembled and wept, in her heart there rose (as Mrs.

Middleton had said) an immense pity, a boundless charity. Day by day she watched and prayed by Henry's side, and at last discerned a ray of light through the gloom. The fever left him, and one day that she had supported his head for several weary hours, he opened his languid eyes and said, "Alice, is it you?"

She pressed upon his cheek a kiss, like a mother's to a rescued child; but when he whispered in her ear the terrible question on which his life and his reason depended, her face was as pale as his, and her tears fell like rain-drops on his brow. Gradually his strength returned, but still at times his mind wandered. For hours he would remain with his eyes fixed on vacancy, and his lips would move as if unconsciously, and form the fatal words of inquiry which never received an answer. Sometimes he took Alice for Ellen, and kneeling at her feet he, would implore her pardon, and curse and upbraid himself as her murderer and destroyer. With heroic patience, but with a sickening heart and a shuddering frame she listened to these ravings, and met his wild and involuntary confessions with a silent appeal to Heaven for mercy for him, and for strength for herself.

After a while she went with him to Elmsley, and there continued her work of love and endurance. Her strength seemed to increase with the demands upon it. Mrs. Middleton's broken spirit, and helpless despondency, needed her support almost as much as Henry's weakened mind. Her grandmother had returned to the cottage at Bridman, and nothing cheered the solitude of that melancholy abode, but the occasional visits of that angel who moved amidst all these various sufferings and dark a.s.sociations like a messenger of peace. It was as a hard task, and many a martyr's palm has perchance been more easily won.

She became identified with all their sorrows--almost with the remorse she witnessed; perhaps she suffered more than any of them, for she knew more than any one else of that terrible history which had driven Henry to madness, and Ellen (as she supposed) to self-destruction. Through her grandmother's tardy and unavailing misgivings, she learnt the details of that obstinate belief in the lost Ellen's guilt which had led her to hate and persecute her. She heard from her lips how that sentiment had grown into a pa.s.sion when fostered by a bitter and burning resentment; how, under the influence of that feeling, she had one night made her way into the house at Elmsley at dusk, with the intention of upbraiding Henry, and denouncing Ellen. She had found her alone, and asleep before the organ on which she had been playing. A savage hatred filled her soul, and she bent over that sleeping form with a fierce impulse to revenge upon her at once the death of Julia, and Henry's desertion of her own child. Conscience and terror alike checked her uplifted arm; she withdrew in silence, but left behind her the first of that series of mysterious threats, by which she haunted the mind, and scared the peace of that wretched and deeply-tried being. She confessed to Alice how she had employed and excited Robert Harding to act the part of a spy, to dodge the steps and watch the actions of her faithless husband, and of the unhappy object of his fatal pa.s.sion. A superst.i.tious belief in a mysterious call to denounce and to visit the crime she had witnessed, constantly counteracted by the influence which Henry possessed over her, and an intense anxiety for the innocent girl she had committed to his reckless hands, had kept her in a state of mind bordering on distraction. Harding was one of those men, who, dogged and obstinate in one respect, was weak and manageable in all others. He blindly followed her dictates, as long as she persuaded him that her aim was to protect or to avenge Alice, whom he loved with an instinctive, faithful, and humble devotion. He shared her hatred of Ellen, and on the day of her marriage had mixed with the crowd at the church door, and thrust into her hand that warning which had been so awfully realised. At the time of the election at--, he had watched from the gallery where he stood, with a strange mixture of grief and rage, Alice's altered countenance, and her husband's open and shameless devotion to her rival. He had in his possession one of those letters which Mrs. Tracy had so often written and then recalled; he resolved to deliver it at once, and thus bring sudden disgrace and misery upon that guilty pair whose destiny was in his hands. When he had done the deed, and retired to his solitary abode at Bridman, he felt frightened at what he had hazarded, and trembled like a child at the idea of Mrs. Tracy's anger. It was, therefore, a relief to him when Henry sought him out, and humbled himself before him. He was released from an awful responsibility, and returned to his post, supported by his aunt's bounty, obedient to her orders, and with a dog-like, self-denying fidelity, ready to die at Alice's feet, to kill her husband, or to save his life at the expense of his own, according as he was told that _she_ willed it--that _she_ required it. During the time he was in Mr. Escourt's service he might have been betrayed into more active steps, had he not detected, with a keen and instinctive jealousy, the motive which dictated his patron's sharp investigations, and the object he had in view; which, with a singular mixture of cunning and honesty, he contrived to defeat.

Mrs. Tracy described to Alice, in tones and with looks that made her shudder, how her spirit was moved, even at the altar where Ellen's ill-omened marriage was solemnised, to denounce that pale, stern bride as a homicide, and to proclaim aloud that the trembling hand which one man bestowed, and another received, with such loving trust, was stained with blood. She had risen to speak; the words were upon her lips:

"Phrenzy to her heart was given, To speak the malison of Heaven,"

when she met the full and glaring force of Henry's flashing eyes. She could not withstand their dark and dreadful power; Alice, her helpless child, was by his side, and she sunk back in her seat, overcome and subdued. On the day of Alice's confinement her hopes had been raised, and her heart softened, by some indications of sensibility on Henry's part. The reaction was violent when he returned after an absence of several hours, which she knew had been devoted to Ellen. She reproached and upbraided him, and he answered her by a careless and brutal avowal of the nature of his feelings, and he left the house again at dinner-time without even visiting his wife. Then in her fury she resolved at all risks to separate him from Ellen; she broke open his desk, where she found notes which excited her hatred and anger to such a degree that she determined to send them at once to Edward Middleton, and thus place an eternal barrier between the guilty pair. The result of that fatal act she now deplored with a ceaseless and bitter sorrow, and day after day, with tears and groans, entreated the forgiveness of her thrice-injured child. Patiently and mercifully did Alice listen to that misguided and unhappy woman's confessions; she abstained by a reproachful look or a severe word from heaping fresh misery on that aged and humbled head, but she pondered over these things in silence; and when she returned to Henry's side and he held out his hand to greet her, hers was cold and nervous, and her heart sunk within her as she fished her eyes on his, and in their wild and restless expression read that fearful retribution which sometimes falls on those who have walked in their own ways, and defied the justice of an Almighty Judge, till the light that was in them has become darkness, and His awful vengeance has overtaken them. Great indeed was that darkness in Henry Lovell's case--greater still from the light that had once been in him. Sparks of genius, touches of feeling, relics of the high capabilities of mind that had once been his, flashed through the night of his soul, and made its present darkness more sadly visible.

Alas, for all that G.o.d gives and man destroys! Alas, for all that might be and is not! Genius and intellect, which should subdue and regenerate worlds, and with n.o.ble thoughts, and words of fire, carry the truth from one hemisphere to the other--where are ye? What do ye? Consumed upon the altar of a withering selfishness--cramped and debased by the bonds of a narrow scepticism--man has prost.i.tuted you to vile uses.

Slaves of his pa.s.sions, and ministers of evil, He has made you;--and where G.o.d had said, "Let there be light," has too often answered, "Let there be darkness."

Henry's gloomy and wayward depression increased every day, although his intellect was not wholly obscured; but at the times that it was clearest, he seemed to suffer more than during its hours of partial aberration. He gave way less than at first to fits of violent irritation; the terrible expressions he used to utter, and the murmurs and curses which rose to his lips with such frightful bitterness, were at an end. He even ceased to ask that fatal question with which he had been wont to torture his wife and sister; he listened in silence to what they said, and once made a faint attempt to smile when Alice spoke cheerfully to him. He often gazed on her in silence, and watched her intently as she moved about the room. Once, when she was sitting at her work opposite to him, she heard him say, in a low voice, "_Notre Dame de bon secours_." She looked up with tears in her eyes; he rose wildly, and cried, "Your tears shall not avail you;" and then he turned away, and did not speak for some hours.

One morning that the sun was shining brightly, and the mild air forestalled the spring, Alice had thrown open a window that looked upon the flower-garden. A bird was chirping a few shrill notes near it; and Henry listened to them with an appearance of pleasure. When the bird flew away, he went to the window, and gazed earnestly on some early spring flowers, which were just coming into blossom. Alice opened a book on the table, and read aloud the following lines:--

"Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies.

Bathed in soft airs and fed with dew, What more of magic in you lies To fill the hearths fond view?

In childhood's sports, companions gay In sorrow, on life's downward way, How soothing! In our last decay.

Memorials prompt and true."

Henry held out his hand for the book, and read over these lines in silence; he then glanced at the t.i.tle-page, shuddered, and flung it from him. Alice picked it up, and looked anxiously at him.

"Was not Dr. Dodd hung for forgery?" he exclaimed. She turned very pale. He saw it; and said, "You need not be frightened now. I am not _mad_. In that very book I _forged_ the first link of that infernal chain with which I bound and destroyed her."

Alice knelt by him, and whispered--

"Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."

He drew fiercely back, and cried--

"There may be mercy for others; there can be none for me. Look into your Bible, you will see in it what I have done. Turned her body and her soul into h.e.l.l! G.o.d alone should do _that_.

_I_ have done it. Alice, if you believe, you must tremble. Ay, the devils do so too. Poor angel! G.o.d has turned thee into an earthly h.e.l.l. Pure spirit! chained to a fiend, thy fiery trial draws to an end."

He sank back into his chair, and muttered--

"The worm that never dies. Ay, I understand it now."

One day that Alice had been walking before breakfast, and was returning home with that heaviness of step, and abstraction from outward things, which prolonged and acute mental suffering produces, the porter's wife stopped her as she pa.s.sed the lodge, to tell her that half an hour before a gentleman had come to the gate in a post-chaise, and had expressed an anxious desire to see her; that on finding she was out, he had hesitated a moment as to what he should do, but that at last he had stepped into the lodge, and written a letter, which he had desired her to deliver to Mrs. Lovell as soon as she returned. Alice took it with a mixture of fear and curiosity. The only conjecture she could form was, that it came from Edward Middleton. The unbroken solitude in which he had lived--the obstinate silence which he had maintained when Mrs. Middleton once ventured to address a few lines to him, imploring him to aid her in the search of his guilty but unfortunate wife--made her break the seal of this letter with nervous anxiety.

She glanced at the signature, and, at once relieved and disappointed, she saw it was not from him, and then read as follows:--

"Madam,

"As one who, in his ministry, has received from dying lips a solemn confession--as a man who has witnessed a deep repentance, and a great affliction, I address you.

"There is one who has been for a while as if she had been dead to you and yours, but who is yet alive, although her life is pa.s.sing away like a morning cloud. In His name, who never broke the bruised reed, I ask you to smooth her pillow, and to bring peace and pardon to that weary spirit. She has made the sacrifice of her life to G.o.d; and her only desire is to be forgiven by those whom she has trespa.s.sed against, and to forgive those who have trespa.s.sed against her. I dare not say more. Just, it is hardly possible that you _can_ be; merciful, I am certain that you _will_ be. Mrs. Edward Middleton is at --; she is in the last stage of a rapid consumption, and before many days are gone by, her spirit will have returned to the G.o.d who gave it. She has confessed to me the sins and the sorrows of her short and troubled life. One heavy trial she has been spared, in the knowledge that your life, Madam, has been saved; and if she could receive from you, from her aunt, and, above all, from the husband whom she has offended, a token of forgiveness, her life might still close (I use her own expression) 'with one untroubled hour.' I heard her murmur these last words to herself, as, out of a nosegay, which had been in kindness sent her, she selected a pa.s.sionflower, the sight of which affected her strangely.

"I have undertaken this journey for the sole purpose of informing you of Mrs. Middleton's present residence. I shall await your answer at the inn at Elmsley. My reason for addressing this letter to you, Madam, was the fear of causing Mrs. William Middleton too sudden an emotion in her present state of health. To your hand I commit the task, and I pray that you may be guided and blessed in the performance of it.

"William Lacy."

Alice had begun to read this letter as she was walking towards the house; but as soon as she had read the few first lines, and that the sense of them burst upon her, she staggered to a bench, and a great faintness came over her. She read on, however; and, as the letter ended with that prayer for her which had been so fervently put up, she closed her eyes for an instant, and said _Amen_ with her whole heart.

The letter had rolled at her feet, and as she stooped for it, her husband suddenly joined her. He picked it up, and asked whence it came. She trembled and turned pale. He saw it, and guessed it all. He seized her hands, and looked wildly into her face--

"Is she alive?"

"She is, Henry, she is."

He fell with his face to the ground, and for the first time in his life his soul spoke to G.o.d.

When he arose he was very pale, but he took the letter from Alice's hand, and read it through in silence. "Not dead, but dying!" He hid his face in his hands and wept convulsively.

"Alice," he cried at last, as his wife bent over him in speechless sympathy, "Alice, my guardian angel! never forsake me--never leave me! Teach me to live; teach me to die; teach me to see _her_ die, and not to blaspheme and to curse. Put your hand on my forehead, and drive away the dreadful thoughts that come over me... She is dying; she is alone: what are we doing here? Alice, I must see this man, this priest; quick, quick--send him to me; there is no time to lose."

There was a wildness in Henry's countenance and manner which alarmed Alice. She walked fast with him to the house, and despatched a groom to the inn with an earnest entreaty to Mr.

Lacy that he would come to them directly. She then went to Mrs. Middleton, and, with tenderness and caution, informed her of that glad, mournful news, which relieved her worst fears, only by summoning her to the death-bed of that Ellen whom she so pa.s.sionately loved, and whose name vibrated in her ear, and thrilled through her heart, with a strange and undying power.

She rose as from a deep sleep, and prepared to go to her; but there was no gladness in the revival of her fainting spirit, and no hope in the pilgrimage before her.

An hour afterwards Henry Lovell received Mr. Lacy in his room.