THE SORROWFUL MESSAGE.
I have no wealth of grief; no sobs, no tears.
Nor any sighs, no words, no overflow,
Nor storms of passion; no reliefs; yet oh!
I have a leaden grief, and with it fears
Lest they who think there's nought where nought appears
May say I never loved him.
—Hon. Mrs. Knox.
Dolly was with John Morgan. At that minute they were coming up the steps at the end of a narrow street near the Temple. The steps led up from the river, and came from under an archway. The morning was fine, and the walk had brought some colour into Dolly's pale cheeks as she came up, emerging from the gloom of the arch. John thought he had not seen her look so like herself for a long time past. Dolly liked the quaint old street, the steps, the river beyond, the alternate life and sleep of these old City places.
As they came along, John Morgan had been telling Dolly something that had touched her and made her forget for a time the sad preoccupations from which she found it so difficult to escape. He had been confiding in her—George had known the story he told her—no one else. It was a melancholy, middle-aged episode of Mrs. Carbury's faithlessness. 'She had waited so long,' said poor John, 'and with so much goodness, that it has, I confess, been a blow to me to find that her patience could ever come to an end. I can't wonder at it, but it has been a disappointment. She is Mrs. Philcox now. Philcox is a doctor at Brighton.... It is all over now,' said John, slowly, 'but I was glad to leave Kensington at the time.'
'I am so sorry and so glad, too, for she could not have been at all worthy of you,' cried Dolly, sympathising. 'Of course, she ought to have waited. People who love don't count time.'
'Hush, my dear girl,' said John. 'She was far too good for me, and I was a selfish fool to hope to keep her. How could I expect her to wait for me? What man has a right to waste a woman's life in uncertainty?'
'Why, I am waiting for Robert,' said Dolly.
John muttered uncomfortably that that was different. 'Robert is a very different person to me,' said John. 'This is the house.'
'What a nice old house,' said Dolly. 'I should like to live here for a little.' John rang at the bell. It was a door with a handsomely carved lintel, over which a few odd bow-windows were built out to get gleams of the river. There was a blank wall, too, leading to the arch; the steady stream of traffic dinned in the distance of the misty street end.
Mrs. Fane lived in one of the streets that lead out of the Strand. At one time she had worked for the Sisters of St. James, who lived not far off; but when, for various reasons, she ceased to become an active member of the community, she set up a little house of refuge, to which the Sisters often sent their convalescents. She had a sick kitchen for people who were leaving the hospitals, weak still and unfit for their work: mutton-chops and words of encouragement were dealt out to them; a ground-floor room had been fitted up as a reading-room, in which she gave weekly banquets of strong congon and dripping-cake, such as her guests approved. She was a clever, original-minded woman; she had once thought of being a Sister, but life by rule had become intolerable to her, and she had gone her own way, and set to work to discover a clue of her own in the labyrinth in which people go wandering in pursuit of the good intentions which are said to lead to a dreary terminus. London itself may be paved with good intentions for all we know. Who shall say what her stones might cry out if they had voices? But there they lie cold and hard and silent, except for the monotonous roll of the wheels passing on from suburbs to markets, to docks, and to warehouses, those cities within a city.
Charlotte Fane's clue in the labyrinth was a gift for other people's happiness, and a sympathy that no sorrow could ever over-darken. She had not been beautiful in her youth, but now in her middle age all her life seemed written in her kind face, in the clear brown eyes, in the gentle rectitude of her understanding sympathy. Some human beings speak to us unconsciously of trust and hope, as others, in their inner discordance, seem to jar and live out before our very eyes our own secret doubts and failings, and half-acknowledged fears.
I have a friend, a philosopher, who thinks more justly than most philosophers. The other day when he said, 'To be good is such a tremendous piece of luck,' we all laughed, but there was truth in his words, and I fear this luck of being born good, does not belong to all the people in my little history. John Morgan is good. His soul and his big body are at peace, and evenly balanced. Everything is intensely clear to him. The present is present, the past is past. Present the troubles and the hopes of the people among whom he is living; past the injuries and disappointments, the failures and grievances of his lot; once over they are immediately put away and forgotten. Charlotte Fane's instincts were higher and keener, perhaps, than the curate's, but she, too, was born in harmony with sweet and noble things.
'Yes,' said Morgan, 'I come here whenever I want help and good advice. There are a few sick people upstairs that I visit. Mrs. Fane will show you her little hospital. Two of her nurses have just gone out to the East. She has been nursing some cholera patients with great success. I sent a letter to The Times on the subject; I don't know if they have put it in; I have not seen the paper to-day.' As he spoke, there came a sudden, deep, melodious sound.
'That is Big Ben,' said John. 'Three-quarters. We are late.' The strokes fell one by one and filled the air and echoed down the street; they seemed to sound above the noise and the hurry of the day.
Dolly remembered afterwards how a man with an organ had come to the end of the street and had begun playing that tune of Queen Hortense's as they went into the house. The door was opened by a smiling-looking girl in a blue dress with some stiff white coiffe and a big apron.
'Mrs. Fane expected them; she would be down directly; would Mr. Morgan go up and speak to her first? Mrs. Connor was dying they feared. Would the lady wait in the nurses' sitting-room?' The little maid opened the door into a back room looking on to a terrace, beyond which the river flowed. There was a bookcase in the room: some green plants were growing in the window, a photograph hung over the chimney of one of Mr. Royal's pictures. Dolly knew it again, that silent figure, that angel that ruled the world; she had come face to face with the solemn face since she had looked at the picture two years ago in the painter's studio. Seeing it brought back that day very vividly—the young men's talk in the green walk: how Rhoda startled her when she came from behind the tree. The clocks were still going on tolling out the hour one by one and ringing it out with prosy reiteration, some barges were sailing up the river, some children were at play, and the drone of that organ reached her occasionally; so did the dull sound of voices in the room overhead. She saw two more white caps pass the window. She had waited some minutes, when she saw a paper lying on a chair, and Dolly, remembering John's letter to The Times, took it up and looked to see if it had been inserted. The letter was almost the first thing she saw, and she read it through quietly. It was signed 'Clericus,' and advocated a certain treatment for cholera. Long afterwards she talked it over quite calmly; then she turned the page. A quarter of an hour had passed by, for the clock in the room had begun to strike twelve. Did it strike into her brain? Did the fatal words come with a shriek from the paper? What was this? For a minute she sat stunned, staring at the printed words—then she knew that she had known it all along, that she never had had hope not for one instant since he left them. For one minute only she could not believe that harm had happened to him, and that was the minute when she read a list printed in pitiless order—'Killed on the 20th of September; wounded at the battle of the Alma; died on the following day of wounds received in action, Captain Errington Daubigney, Lieutenant Alexander Thorpe, —th Regiment, Ensign George Francis Vanborough....' There were other names following, but she could read no more. No one heard her cry, 'My George, oh, my George!' but when the door opened and two nurses came in quietly in their white coiffes and blue dresses, they found a poor black heap lying upon the floor in the sunlight.
I heard a sailor only the other day telling some women of his watch on the night of the Alma, and how he had worked on with some of the men from his ship, and as they went he searched for the face of a comrade who came from his own native town. 'His friends lived next door to us,' said Captain B——, 'and I had promised his mother to look after him. I could hear nothing of the poor fellow. They said he was dead, and his name was in the papers; and they were all in mourning for him at home, when he walked in one day long after. They found it harder to tell his mother that he was alive than that he was dead.' Alas! many a tender heart at home had been struck that day by a deadly aim from those fatal heights for whom no such happy shock was in store.
'If it had not been for George,' Jonah afterwards wrote to his mother, 'you would never have seen me again.'
On that deadly slope, as they struggled up through the deadly storm of which 'the hail lashed the waters below into foam,' Jonah fell, wounded in the leg, and as he fell the bugles sounded, and he was left alone and surrounded. A Russian came up to cut him down. He had time to see the muzzle of a gun deliberately aimed. Jonah himself could hardly tell what happened. Suddenly some soldier, springing from behind, fired, and the gun went up, and Jonah was able to struggle to his feet. He saw his new ally run one man through with his bayonet, and then, with his clenched fist, strike down a third who had come to close quarters. It was a gallant rescue. When a moment came to breathe again Jonah turned. 'Thank you, my man,' he gasped. The man looked at him and smiled. Jonah's nerves were sharpened, for even in that instant he recognised George dressed in his private's dress: his cap had gone, and he was bare-headed.
As Jonah exclaimed, he was carried on by a sudden rush from behind; he looked back, and he thought he saw George leap forward and fall. It was a sudden rally—a desperate push—men fell right and left. The Colonel, too, was down a few paces off, and then came a blinding crash. Jonah himself was knocked over a second time by a spent shell. When he came to himself, he was being carried to the rear, and the tide of battle had swept on.
That night, while Dolly was at home watching in the mourning house, two men were searching along a slope beyond a vineyard, where a fierce encounter had taken place. A village not far off had been burned to the ground; there were shreds and wrecks of the encounter lying all about. Some sailors came up with lanterns and asked the men what they were doing.
'They were looking for a man of their own corps. The Colonel had been making inquiry,' said the two soldiers. A reward had been offered—it was to be doubled if they brought him in alive.
'A gentleman run away from his friends,' said one of the men. 'There is an officer in the Guards has offered the money; he's wounded himself, and been carried to the shore.'
'Do you take money for it?' said one of the sailors, turning away, and then he knelt down and raised some one in his arms, and turned his lantern upon the face.
It was that of a young fellow, who might have seemed asleep at first. He had been shot through the temple in some close encounter. There was no mark except a dull red spot where the bullet had entered. He had been lying on his back on the slope, with his feet towards the sea; his brows were knit, but his mouth was smiling.
'Why, that's him, poor fellow!' said Corporal Smith, kneeling down and speaking below his breath. 'So he's dead: so much the worse for him, and for us too—twenty pound is twenty pound.'
'Here is a letter to his sweetheart,' said one of the sailors, laying the head gently down, and holding out a letter that had fallen from the dead man's belt.
'Miss Vanbur—Vanborough; that's the name,' said Smith.
The sailors had moved on with their lanterns: they had but little time to give to the dead in their search for the living; and then the soldiers, too, trudged back to the camp.
All that night George lay still under the stars, with a strange look of Dolly's own steadfast face that was not there in life. It was nobler than hers now, tear-stained and sorrowing, in the old house at home. Afterwards, looking back, it seemed some comfort to Dolly to remember how that night of mourning had been spent, not discordantly separated from her George whom she had loved, but with him in spirit.
All that night George lay still under the stars. In the morning, just at sunrise, they laid him in his grave. A breeze blew up from the sea in the soldiers' faces, and they could hear the echo of some music that the French were playing on the heights. Some regiment was changing quarters, and the band was playing 'Partant pour la Syrie,' and the music from the heights swelled over the valley. Then the armies passed on to fresh battle, leaving the soldiers who had fallen lying along the valley and by the sea.
Jonah, on board ship, heard a rumour that George had been found desperately wounded, but alive. When he came back to the camp he found, to his bitter disappointment, that it was but a vain hope. George's name was on the list of the officers who had died of their wounds on the day after the battle. That unlucky reward had made nothing but confusion. Smith and his companion declared they had found him alive and sent him to the shore to be taken on board. He must have died on the way, they said. Jonah paid the twenty pounds without demur when the men came to claim it. The letter they brought made their story seem true. Jonah asked them a few questions. 'Did he send me this letter for his sister?' he said: 'was he able to speak?'
Jonah was choking something down as he tried to speak quietly.
'He sent his duty, sir,' said Smith, 'and gave me the letter. He said we should meet in a better world.'
'Did he use those words?' said Jonah, doubtfully. Something in the man's tone seemed odd to him.
Smith gained courage as he went on. 'He couldn't speak much, poor gentleman. Joe can tell you as well as me. He said, "Smith, you are a good fellow," says he, didn't he, Joe?'
Joe did not like being appealed to, and stopped Smith short. 'Come along,' he said, gruffly, 'the Captain don't want you now.'
Jonah let them go. He was giddy and weak from illness, and overcome. He began to cry, poor fellow, and he did not want them to see it; he walked up and down, struggling with his grief. His was a simple, grateful heart.
Colonel Fane, too, saw the men, who had gained confidence, and whose story seemed probable: they said nothing of the money that Jonah had offered. Poor George's commission had come only the day before the battle. Colonel Fane sent his name home with the list of the officers who had fallen. He thought of the sweet-looking girl, his old friend's daughter, and remembered their talk together. His heart ached for her as he wrote her a few words of remembrance and feeling for her sorrow. His praise of George was Dolly's best comfort at that miserable time, and the few words he enclosed written by her brother on the very morning of the battle.