The Shadow of Ashlydyat Part 26

Yes. It was Ethel who had died.

Thomas G.o.dolphin leaned against the wall in his agony. It was one of those moments that can fall only once in a lifetime; in many lives never; when the greatest limit of earthly misery bursts upon the startled spirit, shattering it for all time. Were Thomas G.o.dolphin to live for a hundred years, he never could know another moment like this: the power so to feel would have left him.

It had not left him yet. Nay, it had scarcely come to him in its full realization. At present he was half stunned. Strange as it may seem, the first impression upon his mind, was--that he was so much nearer to the next world. How am I to define this "nearer?" It was not that he was nearer to it by time; or in goodness: nothing of that sort. _She_ had pa.s.sed within its portals; and the great gulf, which divides time from eternity, seems to be only a span now to Thomas G.o.dolphin: it was as if he, in spirit, had followed her in. From being a place far, far off, vague, indefinite, indistinct, it had been suddenly brought to him, close and palpable: or he to it: Had Thomas G.o.dolphin been an atheist, denying a hereafter,--Heaven in its compa.s.sion have mercy upon all such!--that one moment of suffering would have recalled him to a sense of his mistake. It was as if he looked above with the eye of inspiration and saw the truth; it was as a brief, pa.s.sing moment of revelation from G.o.d. She, with her loving spirit, her gentle heart, her simple trust in G.o.d, had been taken from this world to enter upon a better. She was as surely living in it, had entered upon its mysteries, its joys, its rest, as that he was living here; she, he believed, was as surely regarding him now and his great sorrow, as that he was left alone to battle with it. From henceforth Thomas G.o.dolphin possessed a lively, ever-present link with that world; and knew that its gates would, in G.o.d's good time, be opened for him.

These feelings, impressions, facts--you may designate them as you please--took up their place in his mind all in that first instant, and seated themselves there for ever. Not yet very consciously. To his stunned senses, in his weight of bitter grief, nothing could be to him very clear: ideas pa.s.sed through his brain quickly, confusedly; as the changing scenes in a phantasmagoria. He looked round as one bewildered.

The bed, prepared for occupancy, on which, on entering, he had expected to see the dead, but not _her_, was between him and the door. Sarah Anne Grame in her invalid chair by the fire, a table at her right hand, covered with adjuncts of the sick-room--a medicine-bottle with its accompanying wine-gla.s.s and tablespoon--jelly, and other delicacies to tempt a faded appet.i.te--Sarah Anne sat there and gazed at him with her dark hollow eyes, from which the tears rolled slowly over her cadaverous cheeks. Lady Sarah stood before him; sobs choking her voice as she wrung her hands. Ay, both were weeping. But he----it is not in the presence of others that man gives way to grief: neither will tears come to him in the first leaden weight of anguish.

Thomas G.o.dolphin listened mechanically, as one who cannot do otherwise, to the explanations of Lady Sarah. "Why did you not prepare me?--why did you let it come upon me with this startling shock?" was his first remonstrance.

"I did prepare you," sobbed Lady Sarah. "I telegraphed to you last night, as soon as it had happened. I wrote the message with my own hand, and sent it off to the office before I turned my attention to any other thing."

"I received the message. But you did not say--I thought it was,"--Thomas G.o.dolphin turned his glance on Sarah Anne. He remembered her state, in the midst of his own anguish, and would not alarm her. "You did not mention Ethel's name," he continued to Lady Sarah. "How could I suppose you alluded to her? How could I suppose that she was ill?"

Sarah Anne divined his motive for hesitation. She was uncommonly keen in penetration: sharp, as the world says; and she had noted his words on entering, when he began to soothe Lady Sarah for the loss of a child; she had noticed his startled recoil, when his eyes fell on her. She spoke up with a touch of her old querulousness, the tears arrested, and her eyes glistening.

"You thought it was I who had died! Yes, you did, Mr. G.o.dolphin, and you need not attempt to deny it. You would not have cared, so that it was not Ethel."

Thomas G.o.dolphin had no intention of contradicting her. He turned from Sarah Anne in silence, to look inquiringly and reproachfully at her mother.

"Mr. G.o.dolphin, I could not prepare you better than I did," said Lady Sarah, "When I wrote the letter to you, telling of her illness----"

"What letter?" interrupted Thomas G.o.dolphin. "I received no letter."

"But you must have received it," returned Lady Sarah in her quick, cross manner. Not cross with Thomas G.o.dolphin, but from a rising doubt whether the letter had miscarried. "I wrote it, and I know that it was safely posted. You ought to have had it by last evening's delivery, before you would receive the telegraphic despatch."

"I never had it," said Thomas G.o.dolphin. "When I waited in your drawing-room now, I was listening for Ethel's footsteps to come to me."

Thomas G.o.dolphin knew, later, that the letter had arrived duly and safely at Broomhead, at the time mentioned by Lady Sarah. Sir George G.o.dolphin either did not open the box that night; or, if he opened it, had overlooked the letter for his son. Charlotte Pain's complaint, that the box ought not to be left to the charge of Sir George, had reason in it. On the morning of his son's departure with the young ladies, Sir George had found the letter, and at once despatched it back to Prior's Ash. It was on its road at this same hour when he was talking with Lady Sarah. But the shock had come.

He took a seat by the table, and covered his eyes with his hand as Lady Sarah gave him a detailed account of the illness and death. Not all the account, that she or any one else could give, would take one iota from the dreadful fact staring him in the face. She was gone; gone for ever from this world; he could never again meet the glance of her eye, or hear her voice in response to his own. Ah, my readers, there are griefs that change all our after-life! rending the heart as an earthquake will rend the earth: and, all that can be done is, to sit down under them, and ask of Heaven strength to bear them. To bear them as we best may, until time shall in a measure bring healing upon its wings.

On the last night that Thomas G.o.dolphin had seen her, Ethel's brow and eyes were heavy. She had wept much in the day, and supposed the pain in her head to arise from that circ.u.mstance; she had given this explanation to Thomas G.o.dolphin. Neither she, nor he, had had a thought that it could come from any other source. More than a month since Sarah Anne was taken with the fever; fears for Ethel had died out. And yet those dull eyes, that hot head, that heavy weight of pain, were only the symptoms of approaching sickness! A night of tossing and turning, s.n.a.t.c.hes of disturbed sleep, of terrifying dreams, and Ethel awoke to the conviction that the fever was upon her. About the time that she generally rose, she rang her bell for Elizabeth.

"I do not feel well," she said. "As soon as mamma is up, will you ask her to come to me? Do not disturb her before then."

Elizabeth obeyed her orders. But Lady Sarah, tired and wearied out with her attendance upon Sarah Anne, with whom she had been up half the night, did not rise until between nine and ten. Then the maid went to her and delivered the message.

"In bed still! Miss Ethel in bed still!" exclaimed Lady Sarah. She spoke in much anger: for Ethel was wont to be up betimes and in attendance upon Sarah Anne. It was _required_ of her to be so.

Throwing on a dressing-gown, Lady Sarah proceeded to Ethel's room. And there she broke into a storm of reproach and anger; never waiting to ascertain what might be the matter with Ethel, anything or nothing. "Ten o'clock, and that poor child to have lain until now with no one near her but a servant!" she reiterated. "You have no feeling, Ethel."

Ethel drew the clothes from her flushed face, and turned her glistening eyes, dull last night, bright with fever now, upon her mother. "Oh, mamma, I am ill, indeed I am! I can hardly lift my head for the pain.

Feel how it is burning! I did not think I ought to get up."

"What is the matter with you?" sharply inquired Lady Sarah.

"I cannot quite tell," answered Ethel. "I only know that I feel ill all over. I feel, mamma, as if I could not get up."

"Very well! There's that dear suffering angel lying alone, and you can think of yourself before you think of her! If you choose to remain in bed you must. But you will reproach yourself for your selfishness when she is gone. Another four and twenty hours and she may be no longer with us. Do as you think proper."

Ethel burst into tears, and caught her mother's robe as she was turning away. "Mamma, do not be angry with me! I trust I am not selfish.

Mamma"--and her voice sank to a whisper--"I have been thinking that it may be the fever."

The fever! For one moment Lady Sarah paused in consternation, but the next she decided there was no fear of it. She really believed so.

"The fever!" she reproachfully said. "Heaven help you for a selfish and a fanciful child, Ethel! Did I not send you to bed with headache last night, and what is it but the remains of that headache that you feel this morning? I can see what it is; you have been fretting after this departure of Thomas G.o.dolphin! Get up and dress yourself, and come in and attend upon your sister. You know she can't bear to be waited on by any one but you. Get up, I say, Ethel."

Will Lady Sarah Grame remember that little episode until death shall take her? I should, in her place. She suppressed all mention of it to Thomas G.o.dolphin. "The dear child told me she did not feel well, but I only thought she had a headache, and that she would perhaps feel better up," were the words in which she related it to him. What sort of a vulture was gnawing at her heart as she spoke them? It was true that, in her blind selfishness for that one undeserving child, she had lost sight of the fact that illness could come to Ethel; she had not allowed herself to entertain its probability; she, who had accused of selfishness that devoted, generous girl, who was ready at all hours to sacrifice herself to her sister; who would have sacrificed her very life to save Sarah Anne's.

Ethel got up. Got up as she best could; her limbs aching, her head burning. She went into Sarah Anne's room, and did for her what she was able, gently, lovingly, anxiously, as of yore. Ah, child! let those, who are left, be thankful that it was so: it is well to be stricken down in the path of duty, working until we can work no more.

_She_ did so. She stayed where she was until the day was half gone; bearing up, it was hard to say how. She could not touch breakfast; she could not take anything. None saw how ill she was. Lady Sarah was wilfully blind; Sarah Anne had eyes and thoughts for herself alone.

"What are you shivering for?" Sarah Anne once fretfully asked her. "I feel cold, dear," was Ethel's unselfish answer: not a word said she further of her illness. In the early part of the afternoon, Lady Sarah was away from the room for some time upon domestic affairs; and when she returned to it Mr. Snow was with her. He had been prevented from calling earlier in the day. They found that Sarah Anne had dropped into a doze, and Ethel was stretched on the floor before the fire, moaning. But the moans ceased as they entered.

Mr. Snow, regardless of waking the invalid, strode up to Ethel, and turned her face to the light. "How long has she been like this?" he cried out, his voice shrill with emotion. "Child! child! why did they not send for me?"

Alas! poor Ethel was, even then, growing too ill to reply. Mr. Snow carried her to her room with his own arms, and the servants undressed her and laid her in the bed from which she was never more to rise. The fever attacked her violently: but not more so than it had attacked Sarah Anne; scarcely as badly; and danger, for Ethel, was not imagined. Had Sarah Anne not got over a similar crisis, they would have feared for Ethel: so are we given to judge by collateral circ.u.mstances. It was only on the third or fourth day that highly dangerous symptoms declared themselves, and then Lady Sarah wrote to Thomas G.o.dolphin the letter which had not reached him. There was this much of negative consolation to be derived from its miscarriage: that, had it been delivered to him on the instant of its arrival, he could not have been in time to see her.

"You ought to have written to me as soon as she was taken ill," he observed to Lady Sarah.

"I would have done so had I apprehended danger," she repentantly answered. "But I never did apprehend it. Mr. Snow did not do so. I thought how pleasant it would be to get her safe through the danger and the illness, before you should know of it."

"Did she not wish me to be written to?"

The question was put firmly, abruptly, after the manner of one who will not be cheated of his answer. Lady Sarah dared not evade it. How could she equivocate, with her child lying dead in the house.

"It is true. She did wish it. It was on the first day of her illness that she spoke. 'Write, and tell Thomas G.o.dolphin.' She never said it but that once."

"And you did not do so?" he returned, his voice hoa.r.s.e with pain.

"Do not reproach me! do not reproach me!" cried Lady Sarah, clasping her hands in supplication, while the tears fell in showers from her eyes. "I did it for the best. I never supposed there was danger: I thought what a pity it was to bring you back, all that long journey: putting you to so much unnecessary trouble and expense."

Trouble and expense, in such a case! She could speak of expense to Thomas G.o.dolphin! But he remembered how she had had to battle both with expense and trouble her whole life long; that for her these must wear a formidable aspect: and he remained silent.

"I wish now I had written," she resumed, in the midst of her choking sobs. "As soon as Mr. Snow said there was danger, I wished it. But"--as if she would seek to excuse herself--"what with the two upon my hands, she upstairs, Sarah Anne here, I had not a moment for proper reflection."

"Did you tell her you had not written?" he asked. "Or did you let her lie waiting for me, hour after hour, day after day, blaming me for my careless neglect?"

"She never blamed any one; you know she did not," wailed Lady Sarah: "and I believe she was too ill to think even of you. She was only sensible at times. Oh, I say, do not reproach me, Mr. G.o.dolphin! I would give my own life to bring her back again! I never knew her worth until she was gone. I never loved her as I love her now."

There could be no doubt that Lady Sarah Grame was reproaching herself far more bitterly than any reproach could tell upon her from Thomas G.o.dolphin. An accusing conscience is the worst of all evils. She sat there, her head bent, swaying herself backwards and forwards on her chair, moaning and crying. It was not a time, as Thomas G.o.dolphin felt, to say a word of her past heartless conduct, in forcing Ethel to breathe the infection of Sarah Anne's sick-room. And, all that he could say, all the reproaches, all the remorse and repentance, would not bring Ethel back to life.

"Would you like to see her?" whispered Lady Sarah, as he rose to leave.

"Yes."

She lighted a candle, and preceded him upstairs. Ethel had died in her own room. At the door, Thomas G.o.dolphin took the candle from Lady Sarah.