The Shadow of Ashlydyat

by Mrs. Henry Wood

PART THE THIRD.

CHAPTER I.
A MORNING CALL.

Time elapsed. Autumn weather had come; and things were going on in their progression at Prior’s Ash as things always must go on. Be it slow or fast, marked or unmarked, the stream of life must glide forward; onwards, onwards; never turning from its appointed course that bears us straight towards eternity.

In the events that concern us nothing had been very marked. At least, not outwardly. There were no startling changes to be recorded—unless, indeed, it was that noted change in the heart of the town. The Bank of which you have heard so much was no more; but in its stead flourished an extensive ironmongery establishment—which, it was to be hoped, would not come to the same ignoble end. The house had been divided into two dwellings: the one, accessible by the former private entrance, was let to a quiet widow lady and her son, a young man reading for the Church; the other had been opened in all the grandeur and glory of highly-polished steel and iron. Not one of the Godolphins could pass it without a keen heart-pang, but the general public were content to congregate and admire as long as the novelty lasted.

The great crash, which had so upset the equanimity of Prior’s Ash, was beginning to be forgotten as a thing of the past. The bankruptcy was at an end—excepting some remaining formal proceedings which did not at all concern the general public, and not much the creditors. Compassion for those who had been injured by the calamity was dying out: many a home had been rendered needy—many desolate; but outside people do not make these uncomfortable facts any lasting concern of theirs. There were only two who did make them so, in regard to Prior’s Ash; and they would make them so as long as their lives should last.

George Godolphin’s wife was lying in her poor lodgings, and Thomas was dying at Ashlydyat. Dying so slowly and imperceptibly that the passage to the grave was smoothed, and the town began to say that he might yet recover. The wrong inflicted upon others, however unwillingly on his own part, the distress rife in many a house around, was ever present to him. It was ever present to Maria. Some of those who had lost were able to bear it; but there were others upon whom it had brought privation, poverty, utter ruin. It was for these last that the sting was felt.

A little boy had been born to Maria, and had died at the end of a few days. He was baptized Thomas. “Name him Thomas: it will be a remembrance of my brother,” George Godolphin had said. But the young Thomas died before the elder one. The same disorder which had taken off two of Maria’s other infants took him off—convulsions. “Best that it should be so,” said Maria, with closed eyes and folded hands.

Somehow she could not grow strong again. Lying in bed, sick and weak, she had time to ruminate upon the misfortunes which had befallen them: the bitter, hopeless reminiscence of the past, the trouble and care of the present, the uncertainty of the future. To dwell upon such themes is not good for the strongest frame; but for the weak it is worse than can be described. Whether it was that, or whether it was a tendency to keep ill, which might have arisen without any mental trouble at all, Maria did not grow strong. Mr. Snow sent her no end of tonics; he ordered her all kinds of dainties; he sat and chatted and joked with her by the half-hour together: and it availed not. She was about again, as the saying runs, but she remained lamentably weak. “You don’t make an effort to rouse yourself,” Mr. Snow would say, rapping his stick in displeasure upon the floor as he spoke. Well, perhaps she did not: the simple fact was, that there was neither health nor spirit within her to make the effort.

Circumstances were cruelly against her. She might have battled with the bankruptcy—with the shock and the disgrace; she might have battled with the discomforts of their fallen position, with the painful consciousness of the distress cast upon many a home, with the humiliation dealt out to herself as her own special portion by the pious pharisees around; she might have battled with the vague prospects of the future, hopeless though they looked: women equally sensitive, good, refined as Maria, have had to contend with all this, and have survived it. But what Maria could not battle with; what had told upon her heart and her spirit more than all the rest, was that dreadful shock touching her husband. She had loved him passionately, she had trusted him wholly; in her blind faith she had never cast as much as a thought to the possibility that he could be untrue to his allegiance: and she had been obliged to learn that—infidelity forms part of a man’s frail nature. It had dashed to the ground the faith and love of years; it had outraged every feeling of her heart; it seemed to have destroyed her trust in all mankind. Implicit faith! pure love! trust that she had deemed stronger than death!—all had been rent in one moment, and the shock had been greater than was her strength to endure. It was just as when one cuts a cord asunder. Anything, anything but this! She could have borne with George in his crime and disgrace, and clung to him when the world shunned him; had he been sent out to Van Diemen’s Land, the felon that he might have been, she could have crept by his side and loved him still. But this was different. To a woman of refined feeling, as was Maria, loving trustingly, it was as the very sharpest point of human agony. It must be so. She had reposed calmly in the belief that she was all in all to him: and she awoke to find that she was no more to him than were others. They had lived, as she fondly thought, in a world of their own, a world of tenderness, of love, of unity; she and he alone; and now she learnt that his world at least had not been so exclusive. Apart from more sacred feelings that were outraged, it brought to her the most bitter humiliation. She seemed to have sunk down to a level she scarcely knew with what. It was not the broad and bare infidelity: at that a gentlewoman scarcely likes to glance; but it was the fading away of all the purity and romance which had enshrined them round, as with a halo, they alone, apart from the world. In one unexpected moment, as a flash of lightning will blast a forest tree and strip it of its foliage, leaving it bare—withered—helpless—so had that blow rent the heart’s life of Maria Godolphin. And she did not grow strong.

Yes. Thomas Godolphin was dying at Ashlydyat, Maria was breaking her heart in her lonely lodgings, Prior’s Ash was suffering in its homes; but where was the cause of it all—Mr. George? Mr. George was in London. Looking after something to do, he told Maria. Probably he was. He knew that he had his wife and child upon his hands, and that something must be done, and speedily, or the wolf would come to the door. Lord Averil, good and forgiving as was Thomas Godolphin, had promised George to try and get him some post abroad—for George had confessed to him that he did not care to remain in England. But the prospect was a remote one at best: and it was necessary that George should exert himself while it came. So he was in town looking after the something, and meanwhile not by any means breaking his heart in regrets, or living as an anchorite up in a garret. Maria heard from him, and of him. Once a week, at least, he wrote to her, sometimes oftener; affectionate and gay letters. Loving words to herself, kisses and stories for Meta, teasings and jokes for Margery. He was friendly with the Verralls—which Prior’s Ash wondered at; and would now and then be seen riding in the Park with Mrs. Charlotte Pain—the gossip of which was duly chronicled to Maria by her gossiping acquaintance. Maria was silent on the one subject, but she did write a word of remonstrance to him about his friendship with Mr. Verrall. It was scarcely seemly, she intimated, after what people had said. George wrote her word back that she knew nothing about it; that people had taken up a false notion altogether. Verrall was a good fellow at heart; what had happened was not his fault, but the fault of certain men with whom he, Verrall, had been connected; and Verrall was showing himself a good friend now, and he did not know what he should do without him.

“A warm bright day like this, and I find you moping and stewing on that sofa! I’ll tell you what it is, Mrs. George Godolphin, you are trying to make yourself into a chronic invalid.”

Mr. Snow’s voice, in its serio-comic accent, might be heard at the top of the house as he spoke. It was his way.

“I am better than I was,” answered Maria. “I shall get well some time.”

“Some time! It’s to be hoped you will. But you are not doing much yourself towards it. Have the French left you a cloak and bonnet, pray?”

Maria smiled at his joke. She knew he alluded to the bankruptcy commissioners. When Mr. Snow was a boy, the English and French were at war, and he generally used the word French in a jesting way to designate enemies.

“They left me all,” she said.

“Then be so good as to put them on. I don’t terminate this visit until I have seen you out of doors.”

To contend would be more trouble than to obey. She wrapped herself up and went out with Mr. Snow. Her steps were almost too feeble to walk alone.

“See the lovely day it is! And you, an invalid, suffering from nothing but dumps, not to be out in it! It’s nearly as warm as September. Halloa, young lady! are you planting cabbages?”

They had turned an angle and come upon Miss Meta. She was digging away with a child’s spade, scattering mould over the path; her woollen shawl, put on for warmth, had turned round, and her hat had fallen back, with the ardour of her labours. David Jekyl, who was digging to more purpose close by, was grumbling at the scattered mould on his clean paths.

“I’ll sweep it up, David: I’ll sweep it up!” the young lady said.

“Fine sweeping it ’ud be!” grunted David.

“I declare it’s as warm as summer in this path!” cried Mr. Snow. “Now mind, Mrs. George, you shall stay here for half an hour; and if you grow tired there’s a bench to sit upon. Little damsel, if mamma goes indoors, you tell me the next time I come. She is to stay out.”

“I’ll not tell of mamma,” said Meta, throwing down her spade and turning her earnest eyes, her rosy cheeks, full on Mr. Snow.

He laughed as he walked away. “You are to stay out for the half-hour, mind you, Mrs. George. I insist upon it.”

Direct disobedience would not have been expedient, if only in the light of example to Meta; but Maria had rather been out on any other day, or been ordered to any other path. This was the first time she had seen David Jekyl since the Bank had failed, and his father’s loss was very present to her.

“How are you, David?” she inquired.

“I’m among the middlins,” shortly answered David.

“And your father? I heard he was ill.”

“So he is ill. He couldn’t be worser.”

“I suppose the coming winter is against him?”

“Other things are again him as well as the coming winter,” returned David. “Fretting, for one.”

Ah, how bitter it all was! But David did not mean to allude in any offensive manner to the past, or to hurt the feelings of George Godolphin’s wife. It was his way.

“Is Jonathan better?” she asked.

“He isn’t of much account, since he got that hurt,” was David’s answer. “Doing about three days’ work in a week! It’s to be hoped times ’ll mend.”

Maria walked slowly to and fro in the sunny path, saying a word or two to David now and then, but choosing safer subjects; the weather, the flowers under his charge, the vegetables already nipped with frost. She looked very ill. Her face thin and white, her soft sweet eyes larger and darker than was natural. Her hands were wrapped in the cloak for warmth, and her steps were unequal. Crusty David actually ventured on a little bit of civility.

“You don’t seem to get about over quick, ma’am.”

“Not very, David. But I feel better than I did.”

She sat down on the bench, and Meta came flying to her, spade in hand. Might she plant a gooseberry-tree, and have all the gooseberries off it next year for herself?

Maria stroked the child’s hair from her flushed face as she answered. Meta flew off to find the “tree;” and Maria sat on, plunged in a train of thought which the question had led to. Where should they be at the gooseberry season next year? In that same dwelling? Would George’s prospects have become more certain then?

“Now then! Is that the way you dig?”

The sharp words came from Margery, who had looked out at the kitchen window and caught sight of Miss Meta rolling in the mould. The child jumped up laughing, and ran into the house for her skipping-rope.

“Have I been out half an hour, do you think, David?” Maria asked by-and-by.

“Near upon ’t,” said David, without lifting his eyes.

She rose to pursue her way slowly indoors. She was so fatigued—and there had been, so to say, no exertion—that she felt as if she could never stir out again. Merely putting on and taking off her cloak was almost beyond her. She let it fall from her shoulders, took off her bonnet, and sank into an easy-chair.

From this she was aroused by hearing the gate hastily opened. Quick footsteps came up the path, and a manly voice said something to David Jekyl in a free, joking tone. She bounded up, her cheek flushing to hectic, her heart beating. Could it be George?

No; it was her brother, Reginald Hastings. He came in with a great deal of unnecessary noise and clatter. He had arrived from London only that morning, he proceeded to tell Maria, and was going up again by the night train.

“I say, Maria, how ill you look!”

Very ill indeed just then. The excitement of sudden expectation had faded, leaving her whiter than before. Dark circles were round her eyes, and her delicate hands, more feeble, more slender than of yore, moved restlessly on her lap.

“I have been very feverish the last few weeks,” she said. “I think I am stronger. But I have been out for a walk and am tired.”

“What did the little shaver die of?” asked Reginald.

“Of convulsions,” she answered, her bodily weariness too great to speak in anything but tones of apathy. “Why are you going up again so soon? Have you a ship?”

Reginald nodded. “We have orders to join to-morrow at twelve. The Mary, bound for China, six hundred tons. I know the mother would never forgive me if I didn’t come to say good-bye, so I thought I would have two nights of it in the train.”

“Are you going as second officer, Reginald?”

“Second officer!—no. I have not passed.”

“Regy!”

“They are a confounded lot, that board!” broke out Mr. Reginald, explosively. “I don’t believe they know their own business. And as to passing any one without once turning him, they won’t do it. I should like to know who has the money! You pay your guinea, and you don’t pass. Come up again next Monday, they say. Well, you do go up again, as you want to pass; and you pay another half-guinea. I did so; and they turned me again; said I didn’t know seamanship. The owls! not know seamanship! I! They took me, I expect, for one of those dainty middies in Green’s service who walk the deck in kid gloves all day. If there’s one thing I have at my fingers’ ends it is seamanship. I could navigate a vessel all over the world—and be hanged to the idiots! You can come again next Monday, they said to me. I wish the Times would show them up!”

“Did you go again?”

“Did I!—no,” fumed Reginald. “Just to add to their pockets by another half-guinea! I hadn’t it to give, Maria. I just flung the whole lot over, and went down to the first ship in the docks and engaged myself.”

“As what?” she asked.

“As A. B.”

“A. B.?” repeated Maria, puzzled. “You don’t mean—surely you don’t mean before the mast?”

“Yes I do.”

“Oh, Reginald!”

“It doesn’t make much difference,” cried Reginald in slighting tones. “The second mates in some of those ships are not much better off than the seamen. You must work, and the food’s pretty much the same, except at the skipper’s table. Let a fellow rise to be first mate, and he is in tolerably smooth water; but until then he must rough it. After this voyage I’ll go up again.”

“But you might have shipped as third mate.”

“I might—if I had taken my time to find a berth. But who was to keep me the while? It takes fifteen shillings a week at the Sailors’ Home, besides odds and ends for yourself that you can’t do without—smoke and things. I couldn’t bear to ask them for more at home. Only think how long I’ve been on shore this time, Maria. I was knocking about London for weeks over my navigation, preparing to pass.—And for the mummies to turn me at last!”

Maria sighed. Poor Reginald’s gloomy prospects were bringing her pain.

“There’s another thing, Maria,” he resumed. “If I had passed for second mate, I don’t see how I could go out as such. Where was my outfit to come from? An officer—if he is on anything of a ship—must look spruce, and have proper toggery. I am quite certain that to go out as second mate on a good ship would have cost me twenty pounds, for additional things that I couldn’t do without. You can’t get a sextant under three pounds, second-hand, if it’s worth having. You know I never could have come upon them for twenty pounds at home, under their altered circumstances.”

Maria made no reply. Every word was going to her heart.

“Whereas, in shipping as a common seaman, I don’t want to take much more than you might tie up in a handkerchief. A fo’castle fellow can shift any way aboard. And there’s one advantage,” ingenuously added Reginald; “if I take no traps out with me, I can’t lose them.”

“But the discomfort?” breathed Maria.

“There’s enough of that in any way, at sea. A little more or less is not of much account in the long-run. It’s all in the voyage. I wish I had never been such a fool as to choose the sea. But I did choose it; so it’s of no use kicking against it now.”

“I wish you were not going as you are!” said Maria earnestly. “I wish you had shipped as third mate!”

“When a sailor can’t afford the time to ship as he would, he must ship as he can. Many a hundred has done the same before me. To one third mate wanted in the port of London, there are scores and scores of able seamen.”

“What does mamma say to it?”

“Well, you know she can’t afford to be fastidious now. She cried a bit, but I told her I should be all right. Hard work and fo’castle living won’t break bones. The parson told me——”

“Don’t, Reginald!”

“Papa, then. He told me it was a move in the right direction, and if I would only go on so, I might make up for past shortcomings. I say, Isaac told me to give you his love.”

“Did you see much of him?”

“No. On a Sunday now and then. He doesn’t much like his new post. They are dreadfully over-worked, he says. It’s quite a different thing from what the Bank was down here.”

“Will he stop in it?”

“Oh, he’ll stop in it. Glad, too. It won’t answer for him to be doing nothing, when they can hardly keep themselves at home with the little money screwed out from what’s put aside for the Chisholms.”

Reginald never meant to hurt her. He only spoke so in his thoughtlessness. He rattled on.

“I saw George Godolphin last week. It was on the Monday, the day that swindling board first turned me back. I flung the books anywhere, and went out miles, to walk my passion off. I got into the Park, to Rotten Row. It’s precious empty at this season, not more than a dozen horses in it; but who should be coming along but George Godolphin and Mrs. Pain with a groom behind them. She was riding that beautiful horse of hers that she used to cut a dash with here in the summer; the one that folks said George gave——” Incautious Reginald coughed down the conclusion of his sentence, whistled a bar or two of a sea-song, and then resumed:

“George was well mounted, too.”

“Did you speak to them?” asked Maria.

“Of course I did,” replied Reginald, with some surprise. “And Mrs. Pain began scolding me for not having been to see her and the Verralls. She made me promise to go the next evening. They live at a pretty place on the banks of the Thames. You take the rail at Waterloo Station.”

“Did you go?”

“Well, I did, as I had promised. But I didn’t care much about it. I had been at my books all day again, and in the evening, quite late, I started. When I got there I found it was a tea-fight.”

“A tea-fight!” echoed Maria, rather uncertain what the expression might mean.

“A regular tea-fight,” repeated Reginald. “A dozen folks, mostly ladies, dressed up to the nines: and there was I in my worn-out sailor’s jacket. Charlotte began blowing me up for not coming to dinner, and she made me go into the dining-room and had it brought up for me. Lots of good things! I haven’t tasted such a dinner since I’ve been on shore. Verrall gave me some champagne.”

“Was George there?” inquired Maria, putting the question with apparent indifference.

“No, George wasn’t there. Charlotte said if she had thought of it she’d have invited Isaac to meet me: but Isaac was shy of them, she added, and had never been down once, though she asked him several times. She’s a good-natured one, Maria, is that Charlotte Pain.”

“Yes,” quietly responded Maria.

“She told me she knew how young sailors get out of money in London, and she shouldn’t think of my standing the cost of responding to her invitation; and she gave me a sovereign.”

Maria’s cheeks burnt. “You did not take it, Reginald?”

“Didn’t I! it was quite a godsend. You don’t know how scarce money has been with me. Things have altered, you know, Maria. And Mrs. Pain knows it too, and she has no stuck-up nonsense about her. She made me promise to go and see them when I had passed.—But I have not passed,” added Reginald, by way of parenthesis. “And she said if I was at fault for a home the next time I was looking out for a ship, she’d give me one, and be happy to see me. And I thought it was very kind of her; for I am sure she meant it. Oh—by the way—she said she thought you’d let her have Meta up for a few weeks.”

Maria involuntarily stretched out her hand—as if Meta were there, and she would clasp her and withhold her from some threatened danger. Reginald rose.

“You are not going yet, Regy?”

“I must. I only ran in for a few minutes. There’s Grace to see and fifty more folks, and they’ll expect me home to dinner. I’ll say good-bye to Meta as I go through the garden. I saw she was there; but she did not see me.”

He bent to kiss her. Maria held his hand in hers. “I shall be thinking of you always, Reginald. If you were only going under happier circumstances!”

“Never mind me, Maria. It will be uphill work with most of us, I suppose, for a time. I thought it the best thing I could do. I couldn’t bear to come upon them for more money at home.”

“Yours will be a hard life.”

“A sailor’s is that, at best. Don’t worry about me. I shall make it out somehow. You make haste, Maria, and get strong. I’m sure you look ill enough to frighten people.”

She pressed his hands between hers, and the tears were filling her eyes as she raised them—their expression one wild yearning. “Reginald, try and do your duty,” she whispered in an imploring tone. “Think always of heaven, and try and work for it. It may be very near. I have learned to think of it a great deal now.”

“It’s all right, Maria,” was the careless and characteristic answer. “It’s a religious ship I’m going in this time. We have had to sign articles for divine service on board at half-past ten every Sunday morning.”

He kissed her several times, and the door closed upon him. As Maria lay back in her chair, she heard his voice outside for some time afterwards laughing and talking with Meta, largely promising her a ship-load of monkeys, parrots, and various other live wonders.

In this way or that, she was continually being reminded of the unhappy past and their share in it; she was perpetually having brought before her its disastrous effects upon others. Poor Reginald! entering upon his hard life! This need not have been, had means not grown scarce at home. Maria loved him best of all her brothers, and her very soul seemed to ache with its remorse. And by some means or other, she was, as you see, frequently learning that Mr. George was not breaking his heart with remorse. The suffering in all ways fell upon her.

And the time went on, and Maria Godolphin grew no stronger. It went on, and instead of growing stronger she grew weaker. Mr. Snow could do nothing more than he had done; he sent her tonic medicines still, and called upon her now and then, as a friend more than as a doctor. The strain was on the mind, he concluded, and time alone would heal it.

But Maria was worse than Mr. Snow or any one else thought. She had been always so delicate-looking, so gentle, that her wan face, her sunken spirits, attracted less attention than they would have done in one of a more robust nature. No one glanced at the possibility of danger. Margery’s expressed opinion, “My mistress only wants rousing,” was the one universally adopted: and there may have been truth in it.

All question of Maria’s going out of doors was over now. She was really not equal to it. She would lie for hours together on her sofa, the little child Meta gathered in her arms. Meta appeared to have changed her very nature. Instead of dancing about incessantly, running into every mischief, she was content to nestle to her mother’s bosom and listen to her whispered words, as if some foreshadowing were on her spirit that she might not long have a mother to nestle to.

You must not think that Maria conformed to the usages of an invalid. She was up before breakfast in the morning, she did not go to bed until the usual hour at night, and she sat down to the customary meals with Meta. She has risen from the breakfast-table now, on this fine morning, not at all cold for late autumn, and Margery has carried away the breakfast-things, and has told Miss Meta that if she will come out as soon as her mamma has read to her, and have her things put on, she may go and play in the garden.

But when the little Bible story was over, her mamma lay down on the sofa, and Meta appeared inclined to do the same. She nestled on to it, and lay down too, and kissed her mamma’s face, so pretty still, and began to chatter. It was a charming day, the sun shining on the few late flowers, the sky blue and bright.

“Did you hear Margery say you might go out and play, darling? See how fine it is.”

“There’s nothing to play with,” said Meta.

“There are many things, dear. Your skipping-rope and hoop, and——”

“I’m tired of them,” interposed Meta. “Mamma, I wish you’d come out and play at something with me.”

“I couldn’t run, dear. I am not strong enough.”

“When shall you be strong enough? How long will it be before you get well?”

Maria did not answer. She lay with her eyes fixed upon the far-off sky, her arm clasped round the child. “Meta, darling, I—I—am not sure that I shall get well. I begin to think that I shall never go out with you again.”

Meta did not answer. She was looking out also, her eyes staring straight at the blue sky.

“Meta, darling,” resumed Maria in low tones, “you had two little sisters once, and I cried when they died, but I am glad now that they went. They are in heaven.”

Meta looked up more fixedly, and pointed with her finger. “Up in the blue sky?”

“Yes, up in heaven. Meta, I think I am going to them. It is a better world than this.”

“And me too,” quickly cried Meta.

Maria laid her hand upon her bosom to press down the rising emotion. “Meta, Meta, if I might only take you with me!” she breathed, straining the child to her in an agony. The prospect of parting, which Maria had begun to look at, was indeed hard to bear.

“You can’t go and leave me,” cried Meta in alarm. “Who’d take care of me, mamma? Mamma, do you mean that you are going to die?”

Meta burst into tears. Maria cried with her. Oh reader, reader! do you know what it is, this parting between mother and child? To lay a child in the grave is bitter grief; but to leave it to the mercy of the world!—there is nothing like unto it in human anguish.

Maria’s arms were entwined around the little girl, clasping her nervously, as if that might prevent the future parting; the soft rounded cheek was pressed to hers, the golden curls lay around.

“Only for a little while, Meta. If I go first, it will be only for a little while. You——” Maria stopped; her emotion had to be choked down.

“It is a happier world than this, Meta,” she resumed, mastering it. “There will be no pain there; no sickness, no sorrow. This world seems made up of sorrow, Meta. Oh, child! but for God’s love in holding out to our view that other one, we could never bear this, when trouble comes. God took your little sisters and brothers from it: and—I think—He is taking me.”

Meta turned her face downwards, and held her mother with a frightened movement, her little fingers clasping the thin arms to pain.

“The winter is coming on here, my child, and the trees will soon be bare; the snow will cover the earth, and we must wrap ourselves up from it. But in that other world there will be no winter; no cold to chill us; no summer heat to exhaust us. It will be a pleasant world, Meta; and God will love us.”

Meta was crying silently. “Let me go too, mamma.”

“In a little while, darling. If God calls me first, it is His will,” she continued, the sobs breaking from her aching heart. “I shall ask Him to take care of you after I am gone, and to bring you to me in time; I am asking Him always.”

“Who’ll be my mamma then?” cried Meta, lifting her head in a bustle, as the thought occurred to her.

More pain. Maria choked it down, and stroked the golden curls.

“You will have no mamma, then, in this world. Only papa.”

Meta paused. “Will he take me to London, to Mrs. Pain?”

The startled shock that these simple words brought to Maria cannot well be pictured: her breath stood still, her heart beat wildly. “Why do you ask that?” she said, her tears suddenly dried.

Meta had to collect her childish thoughts to tell why. “When you were in bed ill, and Mrs. Pain wrote me that pretty letter, she said if papa would take me up to London she’d be my mamma for a little while, in place of you.”

The spell was broken. The happy visions of heaven, of love, had been displaced for Maria. She lay quite silent, and in the stillness the bells of All Souls’ Church were heard ringing out a joyous peal on the morning air. Meta clapped her hands and lifted her face, radiant now with glee. Moods require not time to change in childhood: now sunshine, now rain. Margery opened the door.

“Do you hear them, ma’am? The bells for Miss Cecil. They’re as joyous as the day. I said she’d have it fine, last night, when I found the wind had changed. I can’t bear to hear wedding-bells ring out on a wet day: the two don’t agree. Eh me! Why, here’s Miss Rose coming in!”

Rose Hastings was walking up the path with a quick step, nodding at Meta as she came along. That young lady slipped off the sofa, and ran out to meet her, and Maria rose up from her sick position, and strove to look her best.

“I have come for Meta,” said Rose, as she entered. “Mamma thinks she would like to see the wedding.—Will you let her come, Maria?”

Maria hesitated. “To the church, do you mean? Suppose she should not be good?”

“I will be good,” said Meta, in a high state of delight at the prospect. “Mamma, I’ll be very good.”

She went with Margery to be dressed. Rose turned to her sister. “Are you pretty well this morning, Maria?”

“Pretty well, Rose. I cannot boast of much strength yet.”

“I wish you would return with me and Meta. Mamma told me to try and bring you. To spend the day with us will be a change, and you need not go near the church.”

“I don’t feel equal to it, Rose. I should not have strength to walk. Tell mamma so, with my dear love.”

“Only fancy!—she is to be married in a bonnet!” exclaimed Rose with indignation. “A bonnet and a grey dress. I wonder Lord Averil consented to it! I should hardly call it a wedding. A bonnet!—and no breakfast!—and Bessy Godolphin and Lord Averil’s sister, who is older if anything than Bessy, for bridesmaids!”

“And only one clergyman,” added Maria, her lips parting with a smile. “Do you think the marriage will stand good, Rose?”

Rose felt inclined to resent the joke, for Maria was laughing at her. But Meta came in, full of bustling excitement, eager to be gone. She kissed her mamma in careless haste, and was impatient because Rose lingered to say a word. Maria watched her down the path; her face and eyes sparkling, her feet dancing with eagerness, her laughter ringing on the air.

“She has forgotten already her tears for the parting that must come,” murmured Maria. “How soon, I wonder, after I shall be gone, will she forget me?”

She laid her temples lightly against the window-frame, as she looked dreamily at the blue sky; as she listened dreamily to the sweet bells that rang out so merrily in the ears of Prior’s Ash.

CHAPTER II.
NEARER AND NEARER.

Prior’s Ash lingered at its doors and windows, curious to witness the outer signs of Cecilia Godolphin’s wedding. The arrangements for it were to them more a matter of speculation than of certainty, since various rumours had gone afloat, and were eagerly caught up, although of the most contradictory character. All that appeared certain as yet was—that the day was charming and the bells were ringing.

How the beadle kept the gates that day, he alone knew. That staff of his was brought a great deal more into requisition than was liked by the sea of heads collected there. And when the first carriage came, the excitement in the street was great.

The first carriage! There were only two; that and another. Prior’s Ash turned up its disappointed nose, and wondered, with Rose Hastings, what the world was coming to.

It was a chariot drawn by four horses. The livery of the postillions and the coronet on the panels proclaimed it to be Lord Averil’s. He sat within it with Thomas Godolphin. The carriage following it was Lady Godolphin’s; it appeared to contain only ladies, all wearing bonnets and coloured gowns. The exasperated gazers, who had bargained for something very different, set up a half-groan.

They set up a whole one, those round the gates, when Lord Averil and his friend alighted. But the groan was not one of exasperation, or of anger. It was a low murmur of sorrow and sympathy, and it was called forth by the appearance of Thomas Godolphin. It was some little time now since Thomas Godolphin had been seen in public, and the change in him was startling. He walked forward, leaning on the arm of Lord Averil, lifting his hat to the greeting that was breathed around; a greeting of sorrow meant, as he knew, not for the peer, but for him and his fading life. The few scanty hairs stood out to their view as he uncovered his head, and the ravages of the disease that was killing him were all too conspicuous on his wasted features.

“God bless him! He’s very nigh the grave.”

Who said it, of the crowd, Thomas Godolphin could not tell, but the words and their accent, full of rude sympathy, came distinctly upon his ear. He quitted the viscount’s arm, turned to them, and raised his hands with a solemn meaning.

“God bless you all, my friends. I am indeed near the grave. Should there be any here who have suffered injury through me, let them forgive me for it. It was not intentionally done, and I may almost say that I am expiating it with my life. May God bless you all, here and hereafter!”

Something like a sob burst from the astonished crowd. But that he had hastened on with Lord Averil, they might have fallen on their knees and clung to him in their flood-tide of respect and love.

The Reverend Mr. Hastings stood in his surplice at the altar. He, too, was changed. The keen, vigorous, healthy man had now a grey, worn look. He could not forgive the blow; minister though he was, he could not forgive George Godolphin. He was not quite sure that he forgave Thomas for not having looked more closely after his brother and the Bank generally: had he done so, the calamity might never have occurred. Every hour of the day reminded Mr. Hastings of his loss, in the discomforts which had necessarily fallen upon his home, in the position of his daughter Maria. George Godolphin had never been a favourite of his: he had tried to like him in vain. The Rector of All Souls’ was a man of severe judgment, and rumour had made free with gay George’s name.

Lord Averil was the first to enter. Cecilia Godolphin came next with Thomas. She wore a light-grey silk robe, and a plain white bonnet, trimmed with orange-blossoms. The Honourable Miss Averil and Bessy Godolphin followed; their silk gowns of a darker shade of grey, and their white bonnets without orange-blossoms. Lady Godolphin came next, more resplendent than any, in a lemon brocaded silk, that stood on end with richness.

Did the recollection of the last wedding service he had performed for a Godolphin cause the Rector of All Souls’ voice to be subdued now, as he read? Seven years ago he had stood there as he was standing to-day, George and Maria before him. How had that promising union ended? And for the keeping of his sworn vows?—George best knew what he had kept and what he had broken. The Rector was thinking of that past ceremony now.

This one was soon over. The promises were made, the register signed, and Lord Averil was leading Cecilia from the church, when the Rector stepped before them and took her hand.

“I pray God that your union may be more happy than some other unions have been,” he said. “That, in a great degree, rests with you, Lord Averil. Take care of her.”

Her eyes filled with tears, but the viscount grasped his hand warmly. “I will; I will.”

The beadle was rapping his stick on sundry heads with great effect, and the excited crowd pushed and danced round that travelling carriage, but they made their way to it. To hand in Cecil and take his place beside her seemed to be but the work of a moment, so quickly did it pass, and Lord Averil, a pleasant smile upon his face, bowed to the shouts on either side as the carriage threaded its way through the throng. The three ladies next stepped into their carriage, and Thomas Godolphin turned into the Rectory. Mrs. Hastings, grey, worn, old—ten years older than she had been six months before—came forward to greet him, commiseration in every line of her countenance.

“I thought I would say good-bye to you,” he said, as he held her hands in his. “It will be my only opportunity. I expect this is my last quitting of Ashlydyat.”

“Say good-bye?” she faltered. “Are you—are you—so near——”

“Look at me,” quietly said Thomas, answering her unfinished sentence.

But there was an interruption. Bustling little feet and a busy little tongue came upon them. Miss Meta had broken from Rose and run in alone, throwing her straw hat aside as she entered.

“Uncle Thomas! Uncle Thomas! I saw you at the wedding, Uncle Thomas.”

He sat down and took the child upon his knee. “And I saw Meta,” he answered. “How is mamma? I am going to see her presently.”

“Mamma’s not well,” said Meta, shaking her head. “Mamma cries often. She was crying this morning. Uncle Thomas”—lowering her voice and speaking slowly—“mamma says she’s going to heaven.”

There was a startled pause. Thomas broke it by laying his hand upon the golden-haired head.

“I trust we are all going there, Meta. A little earlier or a little later, as God shall will. It will not much matter which.”

A few minutes’ conversation, and Thomas Godolphin went out to the fly which had been brought for him. Bexley, who was with it, helped him in.

“To Mrs. George Godolphin’s.”

The attentive old retainer—older by twenty years than Thomas, but younger in health and vigour—carefully assisted his master up the path. Maria saw the approach from the window. Why it was she knew not, but she was feeling unusually ill that day: scarcely able to rise to a sitting position on the sofa. Thomas was shocked at the alteration in her, and involuntarily thought of the child’s words, “Mamma says she’s going to heaven.”

“I thought I should like to say farewell to you, Maria,” he said, as he drew a chair near her. “I did not expect to find you looking so ill.”

She had burst into tears. Whether it was the unusual depression of her own spirits, or his wan face, emotion overcame her.

“It has been too much for both of us,” he murmured, holding her hands. “We must forgive him, Maria. It was done in carelessness, perhaps, but not wilfulness. Why do you not come to Ashlydyat sometimes? You know we should be glad to see you.”

She shook her head. “I cannot go out, Thomas. Indeed, I am not strong enough for it now.”

“But Maria, you should not give way to this grief; this weakness. You are young; you have no incurable complaint, as I have.”

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “At times I feel as though I should never be well again. I—I—have been so reproached, Thomas; so much blame has been cast on me by all people; it has been as if I had made away with their money; and you know that I was as innocent as they were. And there have been other things. If—if——”

“If what?” asked Thomas, leaning over her.

She was sitting back upon the sofa, her fair young face wan and colourless, her delicate hands clasped together, as in apathy. “If it were not for leaving Meta, I should be glad to die!”

“Hush, Maria! Rather say you are glad to live for her sake. George may by some means or other become prosperous again, and you may once more have a happy home. You are young, I say; you must bear up against this weakness.”

“If I could only pay all we owe; our personal debts!” she whispered, unconsciously giving utterance to the vain longing that was ever working in her heart. “Papa’s nine thousand pounds—and Mrs. Bond’s ten pounds—and the Jekyls—and the tradespeople!”

“If I could only have paid!” he rejoined in a voice broken by emotion. “If I could—if I could—I should have gone easier to the grave. Maria, we have a God, remember, who sees all our pangs, all our bitter sorrow: but for Him, and my trust in Him, I should have died long ago of the pain.”

Maria covered her face with her hand. Thomas rose.

“You are not going?” she exclaimed.

“Yes, for I must hasten home. This has been a morning of exertion, and I find there’s no strength left in me. God bless you, Maria!”

“Are we never to meet again?” she asked, as he held her thin hands in his, and she looked up at him through her blinding tears.

“I hope we shall meet again, Maria, and be together for ever and for ever. The threshold of the next world is opening to me: this is closing. Fare you well, child; fare you well.”

Bexley came to him as he opened the parlour door. Thomas asked for Margery: he would have said a kind word to her. But Margery had gone out.

Maria stood at the window, and watched him through her tears as he walked down the path to the fly, supported by Bexley. The old man closed the door on his master and took his seat by the driver. Thomas looked forth as they drove away, and smiled a last farewell.

A farewell in the deepest sense of the word. It was the last look, the last smile, that Maria would receive in this life, from Thomas Godolphin.

CHAPTER III.
FOR THE LAST TIME.

In the old porch at Ashlydyat, of which you have heard so much, sat Thomas Godolphin. An invalid chair had been placed there, and he lay back on its pillows in the sun of the late autumn afternoon. A warm, sunny autumn had it been; a real “Eté de St. Martin.” He was feeling wondrously well; almost, but for his ever-present sensation of weakness, quite well. His fatigue of the previous day—that of Cecil’s wedding—had left no permanent effects upon him, and had he not known thoroughly his own hopeless state, he might have fancied this afternoon that he was about to get well all one way.

Not in looks. Pale, wan, ghastly were they; the shadow of the grim, implacable visitor that was so soon to come was already on them; but the face in its stillness told of ineffable peace: the brunt of the storm had passed.

The white walls of Lady Godolphin’s Folly glittered brightly in the distance; the dark-blue sky was seen through the branches of the trees, growing bare and more bare against the coming winter; the warm sun rays fell on Thomas Godolphin. Margery came up, and he held out his hand.

“My mistress told me you’d have said good-bye to me yesterday, Mr. Thomas, and it was just my ill-luck to be out. I had gone to take the child’s shoes to be mended—she wears them out fast. But you are not going to leave us yet, sir?”

“I know not how soon it may be, Margery: very long it cannot be. Sit down.”

She stood yet, however, looking at him, disregarding the bench to which he had pointed; stood with a saddened expression and compressed lips. Margery’s was an experienced eye, and it may be that she saw the shadow which had taken up its abode on his face.

“You are going to see my old master and mistress, sir,” she burst forth, dashing some rebellious moisture from her eyes. “Mr. Thomas, do you recollect it?—my poor mistress sat here in this porch the very day she died.”

“I remember it well, Margery. I am dying quietly, thank God, as my mother died.”

“And what a blessing it is when folks can die quietly, with their conscience and all about ’em at peace!” ejaculated Margery. “I wonder how Mr. George would have took it, if he’d been called instead of you, sir?”

There was considerable acidity, not to say sarcasm, in the remark; perhaps not altogether suited to the scene and interview. Good Thomas Godolphin would not see it or appear to notice it. He took Margery’s hands in his.

“I never thought once that I should die leaving you in debt, Margery,” he said, his earnest tone bearing its own emotion. “It was always my intention to bequeath you an annuity that would have kept you from want in your old age. But it has been decreed otherwise; and it is of no use to speak of what might have been. Miss Janet will refund to you by degrees what you have lost in the Bank; and so long as you live you will be welcome to a home with her. She has not much, but——”

“Now never fash yourself about me, Mr. Thomas,” interrupted Margery. “I shall do well, I dare say; I’m young enough yet for work, I hope; I shan’t starve. Ah, this world’s nothing but a pack o’ troubles,” she added, with a loud sigh. “It has brought its share to you, sir.”

“I am on the threshold of a better, Margery,” was his quiet answer; “one where troubles cannot enter.”

Margery sat for some time on the bench, talking to him. At length she rose to depart, declining the invitation to enter the house or to see the ladies, and Thomas said to her his last farewell.

“My late missis, I remember, looked once or twice during her illness as grey as he does,” she cogitated within herself as she went along. “But it strikes me that with him it’s death. I’ve a great mind to ask old Snow what he thinks. If it is so, Mr. George ought to be telegraphed for; they are brothers, after all.”

Margery’s way led her past the turning to the railway station. A train was just in. She cast an eye on the passengers coming from it, and in one of them she saw her master, Mr. George Godolphin.

Margery halted and rubbed her eyes, and almost wondered whether it was a vision. Her mind had been busy with the question, ought he, or ought he not to be telegraphed for? and there he was, before her. Gay, handsome George! with his ever-distinguished entourage—I don’t know a better word for it in English: his bearing, his attire, his person so essentially the gentleman; his pleasant face and his winning smile.

That smile was directed to Margery as he came up. He bore in his hand a small wicker-work basket, covered with delicate tissue paper. But for the bent of Margery’s thoughts at the time, she would not have been particularly surprised at the sight, for Mr. George’s visits to Prior’s Ash were generally impromptu ones, paid without warning. She met him rather eagerly: speaking of the impulse that had been in her mind—to send a message for him, on account of the state of his brother.

“Is he worse?” asked George eagerly.

“If ever I saw death written in a face, it’s written in his, sir,” returned Margery.

George considered a moment. “I think I will go up to Ashlydyat without loss of time, then,” he said, turning back. But he stopped to give the basket into Margery’s hands.

“It is for your mistress, Margery. How is she?”

“She’s nothing to boast of,” replied Margery, in tones and with a stress that might have awakened George’s suspicions, had any fears with reference to his wife’s state yet penetrated his mind. But they had not. “I wish she could get a little of life into her, and then health might be the next thing to come,” concluded Margery.

“Tell her I shall soon be home.” And George Godolphin proceeded to Ashlydyat.

It may be that he had not the faculty for distinguishing the different indications that a countenance gives forth, or it may be that to find his brother sitting in the porch disarmed his doubts, but certainly George saw no reason to endorse the fears expressed by Margery. She had entered into no details, and George had pictured Thomas as in bed. To see him therefore sitting out of doors, quietly reading, certainly lulled all George’s present fears.

Not that the ravages in the worn form, the grey look in the pale face, did not strike him as that face was lifted to his; struck him almost with awe. For a few minutes their hands were locked together in silence. Generous Thomas Godolphin! Never since the proceedings had terminated, the daily details were over, had he breathed a word of the bankruptcy and its unhappiness to George.

“George, I am glad to see you. I have been wishing for you all day. I think you must have been sent here purposely.”

“Margery sent me. I met her as I was coming from the train.”

It was not to Margery that Thomas Godolphin had alluded—but he let it pass. “Sent purposely,” he repeated aloud. “George, I think the end is very near.”

“But you are surely better?” returned George, speaking in impulse. “Unless you were better, would you be sitting here?”

“Do you remember, George, my mother sat here in the afternoon of the day she died? A feeling came over me to-day that I should enjoy a breath of the open air; but it was not until after they had brought my chair out and I was installed in it, that I thought of my mother. It struck me as being a curious coincidence; almost an omen. Margery recollected the circumstance, and spoke of it.”

The words imparted a strange sensation to George, a shivering dread. “Are you in much pain, Thomas?” he asked.

“Not much; a little, at times; but the great agony that used to come upon me has quite passed. As it did with my mother, you know.”

Could George Godolphin help the feeling of bitter contrition that came over him? He had been less than man, lower than human, had he helped it. Perhaps the full self-reproach of his conduct never came home to him as it came now. With all his faults, his lightness, he loved his brother: and it seemed that it was he—he—who had made the face wan, the hair grey, who had broken the already sufficiently stricken heart, and had sent him to his grave before his time.

“It is my fault,” he spoke in his emotion. “But for me, Thomas, you might have been with us, at any rate, another year or two. The trouble has told upon you.”

“Yes, it has told upon me,” Thomas quietly answered. There was nothing else that he could answer.

“Don’t think of it, Thomas,” was the imploring prayer. “It cannot be helped now.”

“No, it cannot be helped,” Thomas rejoined. But he did not add that, even now, it was disturbing his death-bed. “George,” he said, pressing his brother’s hands, “but that it seems so great an improbability, I would ask you to repay to our poor neighbours and friends what they have lost, should it ever be in your power. Who knows but you may be rich some time? You are young and capable, and the world is before you. If so, think of them; it is my last request to you.”

“It would be my own wish to do it,” gravely answered George. “But do not think of it now, Thomas; do not let it trouble you.”

“It does not trouble me much now. The thought of the wrong inflicted on them is ever present with me, but I am content to leave that, and all else, in the care of the all-powerful, ever-merciful God. He can recompense better than I could, even had I my energies and life left to me.”

There was a pause. George loosed his brother’s hands and took the seat on the bench where Margery had sat; the very seat where he had once sat with his two sticks, in his weakness, years before, when the stranger, Mr. Appleby, came up and inquired for Mr. Verrall. Why or wherefore it should have come, George could not tell, but that day flashed over his memory now. Oh, the bitter remembrance! He had been a lightsome man then, without care, free from that depressing incubus that must, or that ought to, weigh down the soul—cruel wrong inflicted on his fellow-toilers in the great journey of life. And now? He had brought the evil of poverty upon himself, the taint of disgrace upon his name; he had driven his sisters from their home; had sent that fair and proud inheritance of the Godolphins, Ashlydyat, into the market; and had hastened the passage of his brother to the grave. Ay! dash your bright hair from your brow as you will, George Godolphin!—pass your cambric handkerchief over your heated face!—you cannot dash away remembrance. You have done all this, and the consciousness is very present with you.

Thomas Godolphin interrupted his reflections, bending towards George his wasted features. “George, what are your prospects?”

“I have tried to get into something or other in London, but my trying has been useless. All places that are worth having are so soon snapped up. I have been offered a post in Calcutta, and I think I shall accept it. If I find that Maria has no objection to go out, I shall: I came down to-day to talk it over with her.”

“Is it through Lord Averil?”

“Yes. He wrote to me yesterday morning before he went to church with Cecil. I received the letter by the evening mail, and came off this morning.”

“And what is the appointment? Is it in the civil service?”

“Nothing so grand—in sound, at any rate. It’s only mercantile. The situation is at an indigo merchant’s, or planter’s; I am not sure which. But it’s a good appointment; one that a gentleman may accept; and the pay is liberal. Lord Averil urges it upon me. These merchants—they are brothers—are friends of his. If I decline it, he will try for a civil appointment for me; but to obtain one might take a considerable time: and there might be other difficulties in the way.”

“Yes,” said Thomas shortly. “By the little I can judge, this appears to me to be just what will suit you.”

“I think so. If I accept it, I shall have to start with the new year. I saw the agents of the house in town this morning, and they tell me it is quite a first-class appointment for a mercantile one. I hope Maria will not dislike to go.”

They sat there conversing until the sun had set. George pointed out to his brother’s notice that the air was growing cold, but Thomas only smiled in answer: it was not the night air, hot or cold, that could any longer affect Thomas Godolphin. But he said that he might as well go in, and took George’s arm to support his feeble steps.

“Is no one at home?” inquired George, finding the usual sitting-room empty.

“They are at Lady Godolphin’s,” replied Thomas, alluding to his sisters. “Bessy goes there for good next week, and certain arrangements have to be made, so they walked over this afternoon just before you came up.”

George sat down. To find his sisters absent was a relief. Since the unhappy explosion, George had always felt as a guilty schoolboy in the presence of Janet. He remained a short time, and then rose to depart. “I’ll come up and see you in the morning, Thomas.”

Was there any prevision of what the night would bring forth in the mind of Thomas Godolphin? It might be. He entwined in his the hands held out to him.

“God bless you, George! God bless you, and keep you always!” And a lump, not at all familiar to George Godolphin’s throat, rose in it as he went out from the presence of his brother.

It was one of those charmingly clear evenings that bring a sensation of tranquillity to the senses. Daylight could not be said to have quite faded, but the moon was up, its rays shining brighter and brighter with every departing moment of day. As George passed Lady Godolphin’s Folly, Janet was coming from it.

He could not avoid her. I do not say that he wished to do so, but he could not if he had wished it. They stood talking together for some time; of Thomas’s state; of this Calcutta prospect of George’s, for Janet had heard something of it from Lord Averil; and she questioned him closely on other subjects. It was growing quite night when Janet made a movement homewards, and George could do no less than attend her.

“I thought Bessy was with you,” he remarked, as they walked along.

“She is remaining an hour or two longer with Lady Godolphin; but it was time I came home to Thomas. When do you say you must sail, George?”

“The beginning of the year. My salary will commence with the first of January, and I ought to be off that day. I don’t know whether that will give Maria sufficient time for preparation.”

“Sufficient time!” repeated Miss Godolphin. “Will she want to take out a ship’s cargo? I should think she might be ready in a tithe of it. Shall you take the child?”

“Oh yes,” he hastily answered; “I could not go without Meta. And I am sure Maria would not consent to be separated from her. I hope Maria will not object to going on her own score.”

“Nonsense!” returned Janet. “She will have the sense to see that it is a remarkable piece of good fortune, far better than you had any right to expect. Let me recommend you to put by half your salary, George. It is a very handsome one, and you may do it if you will. Take a lesson from the past.”

“Yes,” replied George, with a twitch of conscience. “I wonder if the climate will try Maria?”

“I trust that the change will be good for her in all ways,” said Janet emphatically. “Depend upon it she will be only too thankful to turn her back on Prior’s Ash. She will not get strong as long as she stops in it, or so long as your prospects are uncertain, doing nothing, as you are now. I can’t make out, for my part, how you live.”

“You might easily guess that I have been helped a little, Janet.”

“By one that I would not be helped by if I were starving,” severely rejoined Janet. “You allude, I presume, to Mr. Verrall?”

George did allude to Mr. Verrall; but he avoided a direct answer. “All that I borrow I shall return,” he said, “as soon as it is in my power to do so. It is not much: and it is given and received as a loan only. What do you think of Thomas?” he asked, willing to change the subject.

“I think——” Janet stopped. Her voice died away to a whisper, and finally ceased. They had taken the path home round by the ash-trees. The Dark Plain lay stretched before them in the moonlight. In the brightest night the gorse-bushes gave the place a shadowy, weird-like appearance, but never had the moonlight on the plain been clearer, whiter, brighter than it was now. And the Shadow?

The ominous Shadow of Ashlydyat lay there: the Shadow which had clung to the fortunes of the Godolphins, as tradition said, in past ages; which had certainly followed the present race. But the blackness that had characterized it was absent from it now: the Shadow was undoubtedly there, but had eyes been looking on it less accustomed to its form than were Miss Godolphin’s, they might have failed to make out distinctly its outlines. It was of a light, faint hue; more as the reflection of the Shadow, if it may be so expressed.

“George! do you notice?” she breathed.

“I see it,” he answered.

“But do you notice its peculiarity—its faint appearance? I should say—I should say that it is indeed going from us; that it must be about the last time it will follow the Godolphins. With the wresting from them of Ashlydyat the curse was to die out.”

She sat down on the bench under the ash-trees, and was speaking in low, dreamy tones: but George heard every word, and the topic was not particularly palatable to him. He could only remember that it was he and no other who had caused them to lose Ashlydyat.

“Your brother will not be here long,” murmured Janet. “That warning is for the last chief of the Godolphins.”

“Oh, Janet! I wish you were not so superstitious! Of course we know—it is patent to us all—that Thomas cannot last long: a few days, a few hours even, may close his life. Why should you connect with him that wretched Shadow?”

“I know what I know, and I have seen what I have seen,” was the reply of Janet, spoken slowly; nay, solemnly. “It is no wonder that you wish to ignore it, to affect to disbelieve in it; but you can do neither the one nor the other, George Godolphin.”

George gave no answering argument. It may be that he had felt he had forfeited the right to argue with Janet. She again broke the silence.

“I have watched and watched; but never once, since the day that those horrible misfortunes fell, has that Shadow appeared. I thought it had gone for good; I thought that our ruin, the passing of Ashlydyat into the possession of strangers, was the working out of the curse. But it seems it has come again; for the last time, as I believe. And it is only in accordance with the past, that the type of the curse should come to shadow forth the death of the last Godolphin.”

“You are complimentary to me, Janet,” cried George good-humouredly. “When poor Thomas shall have gone, I shall be here still, the last of the Godolphins.”

“You!” returned Janet, and her tone of scornful contempt, unconscious as she might herself be of it, brought a sting to George’s mind, a flush to his brow. “You might be worthy of the name of Godolphin once, laddie, but that’s over. The last true Godolphin dies out with Thomas.”

“How long are you going to sit here?” asked George, after a time, as she gave no signs of moving.

“You need not wait,” returned Janet. “I am at home now, as may be said. Don’t stay, George: I would rather you did not: your wife must be expecting you.”

Glad enough to be released, George went his way, and Janet sat on, alone. With that Shadow before her—though no longer a dark one—it was impossible but that her reflections should turn to the unhappy past: and she lost herself in perplexity.

A great deal of this story, The Shadow of Ashlydyat, is a perfectly true one; it is but the recital of a drama in real life. And the superstition that encompasses it? ten thousand inquisitive tongues will ask. Yes, and the superstition. There are things, as I have just said, which can neither be explained nor accounted for: they are marvels, mysteries, and so they must remain. Many a family has its supernatural skeleton, religiously believed in; many a house has its one dread corner which has never been fully unclosed to the light of day. Say what men will to the contrary, there is a tendency in the human mind to tread upon the confines of superstition. We cannot shut our eyes to things that occur within our view, although we may be, and always shall be, utterly unable to explain them; what they are, what they spring from, why they come. If I were to tell you that I believed there are such things as omens, warnings, which come to us—though seldom are they sufficiently marked at the time to be attended to—I should be called a visionary day-dreamer. I am nothing of the sort. I have my share of plain common sense. I pass my time in working, not in dreaming. I never had the gratification of seeing a ghost yet, and I wish I was as sure of the fruition of my dearest hopes, as I am that I never shall see one. I have not been taken into favour by the spirits, have never been promoted to so much as half a message from them—and never expect to be. But some curious incidents have forced themselves on my life’s experience, causing me to echo as a question the assertion of the Prince of Denmark—Are there not more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy?

Janet Godolphin rose with a deep sigh and her weight of care. She kept her head turned to the Shadow until she had passed from its view, and then continued her way to the house, murmuring: “It’s but a small misfortune; the Shadow is scarcely darker than the moonlight itself.”

Thomas was in his arm-chair, bending forward towards the fire, as she entered. His face would have been utterly colourless, save for the bluish tinge which had settled there, a tinge distinguishable even in the red blaze. Janet, keen-sighted as Margery, thought the hue had grown more ominous since she quitted him in the afternoon.

“Have you come back alone?” asked Thomas, turning towards her.

“George accompanied me as far as the ash-trees: I met him. Bessy is staying on for an hour with Lady Godolphin.”

“It’s a fine night,” he observed.

“It is,” replied Janet. “Thomas,” dropping her voice, “the Shadow is abroad.”

“Ah!”

The response was spoken in no tone of dread, or dismay; but calmly, pleasantly, with a smile upon his lips.

“It has changed its tone,” continued Janet, “and may be called grey now instead of black. I thought it had left us for good, Thomas. I suppose it had to come once more.”

“If it cared to keep up its character for consistency,” he said, his voice jesting. “If it has been the advance herald of the death of other Godolphins, why should it not herald in mine?”

“I did not expect to hear you joke about the Shadow,” observed Janet, after a pause of vexation.

“Nay, there’s no harm in it. I have never understood it, you know, Janet; none of us have; so little have we understood, that we have not known whether to believe or disbelieve. A short while, Janet, and things may be made plainer to me.”

“How are you feeling to-night?” somewhat abruptly asked Janet, looking askance at his face.

“Never better of late days. It seems as if ease both of mind and body had come to me. I think,” he added, after a few moments’ reflection, “that what George tells me of a prospect opening for him, has imparted this sense of ease. I have thought of him a great deal, Janet; of his wife and child; of what would become of him and of them. He may live yet to be a comfort to his family; to repair to others some of the injury he has caused. Oh, Janet! I am ready to go.”

Janet turned her eyes from the fire, that the rising tears might not be seen. “The Shadow was very light, Thomas,” she repeated. “Whatever it may herald forth, will not be much of a misfortune.”

“A misfortune!—to be taken to my rest!—to the good God who has so loved and kept me here! No, Janet. A few minutes before you came in, I fell into a doze, and I dreamt that I saw Jesus Christ standing there by the window, waiting for me. He had His hand stretched out to me with a smile. So vivid had been the impression, that when I awoke I thought it was reality, and was hastening towards the window before I recollected myself.”

Janet rang the bell for lights to be brought in. Thomas, his elbow resting on the arm of his chair, bent his head upon his hand, and became lost in imagination in the glories that might so soon open to him. Bright forms were flitting around a wondrous throne, golden harps in their hands; and in one of them, her harp idle, her radiant face turned as if watching for one who might be coming, he seemed to recognize Ethel.

George Godolphin meanwhile had gone home, and was sitting with his wife and child. The room was bright with light and fire, and George’s spirits were bright in accordance with it. He had been enlarging upon the prospect offered to him, describing a life in India in vivid colours; had drawn some imaginative pen-and-ink sketches of Miss Meta on a camel’s back; in a gorgeous palanquin; in an open terrace gallery, being fanned by about fifty slaves: the young lady herself looking on at the pictures in a high state of excitement, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks flushed. Maria seemed to partake of the general hilarity. Whether she was really better, or the unexpected return of her husband had infused into her artificial strength, unwonted excitement, certain it is that she was not looking very ill that night: her cheeks had borrowed some of Meta’s colour, and her lips were parted with a smile. The child’s chatter never ceased; it was papa this, papa the other, incessantly. Margery felt rather cross, and when she came in to add some dainty to the substantial tea she had prepared for her master, told him she hoped he would not be for carrying Miss Meta out to the wretched foreign places that were only good for convicts. India and Botany Bay ranked precisely alike in Margery’s estimation.

But tea was done with and removed, and the evening went on, and Margery came again to escort Miss Meta to bed. Miss Meta was not in a hurry to be escorted. Her nimble feet were flying everywhere: from papa at the table, to mamma who sat on the sofa near the fire: from mamma to Margery, standing silent and grim, scarcely deigning to look at the pen-and-ink sketches that Meta exhibited to her.

“I don’t see no sense in ’em, for my part,” slightingly spoke Margery, regarding with dubious eyes one somewhat indistinct representation held up to her. “Those things bain’t like Christian animals. An elephant, d’ye call it? Which is its head and which is its tail?”

Meta whisked off to her papa, elephant in hand. “Papa, which is its head, and which is its tail?”

“That’s its tail,” said George. “You’ll know its head from its tail when you come to ride one, Margery,” cried he, throwing his laughing glance at the woman.

“Me ride an elephant! me mount one o’ them animals!” was the indignant response. “I should like to see myself at it! It might be just as well, sir, if you didn’t talk about them to the child: I shall have her starting out of her sleep screaming to-night, fancying that a score of them’s eating her up.”

George laughed. Meta’s busy brain was at work; very busy, very blithesome just then.

“Papa, do we have swings in India?”

“Lots of them,” responded George.

“Do they go up to the trees? Are they as good as the one Mrs. Pain made for me at the Folly?”

“Ten times better than that,” said George slightingly. “That was a muff of a swing, compared with what the others will be.”

Meta considered. “You didn’t see it, papa. It went up—up—oh, ever so high.”

“Did it?” said George. “We’ll send the others higher.”

“Who’ll swing me?” continued Meta. “Mrs. Pain? She used to swing me before. Will she go to India with us?”

“Not she,” said George. “What should she go for? Look here. Here’s Meta on an elephant, and Margery on another, in attendance behind.”

He had been mischievously sketching it off: Meta sitting at her ease on the elephant, her dainty little legs astride, boy fashion, was rather a pretty sight: but poor Margery grasping the animal’s head, her face one picture of horror in her fear of falling, and some half-dozen natives propping her up on either side, was only a ludicrous one.

Margery looked daggers, but nothing could exceed Meta’s delight. “Draw mamma upon one, papa; make her elephant alongside mine.”

“Draw mamma upon one?” repeated George. “I think we’ll have mamma in a palanquin; the elephants shall be reserved for you and Margery.”

“Is she coming to bed to-night, or isn’t she?” demanded Margery, in uncommonly sharp tones, speaking for the benefit of the company generally, not to any one in particular.

Meta paid little attention; George appeared to pay less. In taking his knife from his waistcoat-pocket to cut the pencil, preparatory to “drawing mamma and the palanquin,” he happened to bring forth a ring. Those quick little eyes saw it: they saw most things. “That’s Uncle Thomas’s!” cried the child.

In his somewhat hasty attempt to return it to his pocket, George let the ring fall to the ground, and it rolled towards Margery. She picked it up, wonderingly—almost fearfully. She had believed that Mr. Godolphin would not part with his signet-ring during life: the ring which he had offered to the bankruptcy commissioners, and they, with every token of respect, had returned to him.

“Oh, sir! Surely he is not dead?”

“Dead!” echoed George, looking at her in surprise. “I left him better than usual, Margery, when I came away.”

Margery said no more. Meta was not so scrupulous. “Uncle Thomas always has that on his finger: he seals his letters with it. Why have you brought it away, papa?”

“He does not want it to seal letters with any longer, Meta,” George answered, speaking gravely now, and stroking her golden curls. “I shall use it in future for sealing mine.”

“Who’ll wear it?” asked Meta. “You, or Uncle Thomas?”

“I shall—some time. But it is quite time Meta was in bed; and Margery looks as if she thought so. There! just a few of mamma’s grapes, and away to dream of elephants.”

Some fine white grapes were heaped on a plate upon the table; they were what George had brought from London for his wife. He broke some off for Meta, and that spoiled young damsel climbed on his knee, while she ate them, chattering incessantly.

“Will there be parrots in India? Red ones?”

“Plenty. Red and green and blue and yellow,” returned George, who was rather magnificent in his promises. “There’ll be monkeys as well—as Margery’s fond of them.”

Margery flung off in a temper. But the words had brought a recollection to Meta. She bustled up on her knees, neglecting her grapes, gazing at her papa in consternation.

“Uncle Reginald was to bring me home some monkeys and some parrots and a Chinese dog that won’t bite. How shall I have them, papa, if I have gone to Cal—what is it?” She spoke better than she did, and could sound the “th” now; but the name of the place was difficult to be remembered.

“Calcutta. We’ll write word to Regy’s ship to come round there and leave them,” replied ready George.

It satisfied the child. She finished her grapes, and then George took her in his arms to Maria to be kissed, and afterwards put her down outside the door to offended Margery, after kissing lovingly her pretty lips and her golden curls.

His manner had changed when he returned. He stood by the fire, near Maria, grave and earnest, and began talking more seriously to her on this new project than he had done in the presence of his child.

“I think I should do wrong were I to refuse it: do not you, Maria? It is an offer that is not often met with.”

“Yes, I think you would do wrong to refuse it. It is far better than anything I had hoped for.”

“And can you be ready to start by New Year’s Day?”

“I—I could be ready, of course,” she answered. “But I—I—don’t know whether——”

She came to a final stop. George looked at her in surprise: in addition to her hesitation, he detected considerable emotion.

She stood up by him and leaned her arm on the mantel-piece. She strove to speak quietly, to choke down the rebellious rising in her throat: her breath went and came, her bosom heaved. “George, I am not sure whether I shall be able to undertake the voyage. I am not sure that I shall live to go out.”

Did his heart beat a shade quicker? He looked at her more in surprise still than in any other feeling. He had not in the least realized this faint suggestion of the future.

“My darling, what do you mean?”

He passed his arm round her waist, and drew her to him. Maria let her head fall upon his shoulder, and the tears began to trickle down her wasted cheeks.

“I cannot get strong, George. I grow weaker instead of stronger; and I begin to think I shall never be well again. I begin to know I shall never be well again!” she added, amending the words. “I have thought it for some time.”

“How do you feel?” he asked, breaking the silence that had ensued. “Are you in any pain?”

“I have had a pain in my throat ever since the—ever since the summer: and I have a constant inward pain here”—touching her chest. “Mr. Snow says both arise from the same cause—nervousness! but I don’t know.”

“Maria,” he said, his voice quite trembling with its tenderness, “shall I tell you what it is? The worry of the past summer has had a bad effect upon you, and brought you into this weak state. Mr. Snow is right: it is nervousness: and you must have change of scene ere you can recover. Is he attending you?”

“He calls every other day or so, and he sends me medicine of different kinds; tonics, I fancy. I wish I could get strong! I might—perhaps—get a little better, that is, I might feel a trifle better, if I were not always so entirely alone. I wish,” she more timidly added, “that you could be more with me than you are.”

“You cannot wish it as heartily as I,” returned George. “A little while, my darling, and things will be bright again. I have been earnestly and constantly seeking for something to do in London; I was obliged to be there. Now that I have this place given me, I must be there still, chiefly, until we sail, making my preparations. You can come to me if you like, until we do go,” he added, “if you would rather be there than here. I can change my bachelor lodgings, and get a place large enough for you and Meta.”

She felt that she was not equal to the removal, and she felt that if she really were to leave Europe she must remain this short intervening time near her father and mother. But—even as she thought it—the conviction came upon her, firm and strong, that she never should leave it; should not live to leave it. George’s voice, eager and hopeful, interrupted.

“We shall begin life anew in India, Maria: with the old country we shall leave old sores behind us. As to Margery—I don’t know what’s to be done about her. It would half break her heart to drag her to a new land, and quite break it to carry off Meta from her. Perhaps we had better not attempt to influence her either way, but let the decision rest entirely with her.”

“She will never face the live elephants,” said Maria, her lips smiling at the joke, as she endeavoured to be gay and hopeful as George was. But the effort entirely failed. A vision came over her of George there alone; herself in the cold grave, whither she believed she was surely hastening; Meta—ay—what of Meta?

“Oh, George! if I might but get strong! if I might but live to go with you!” she cried in a wail of agony.

“Hush, hush! Maria, hush! I must not scold you: but indeed it is not right to give way to these low spirits. That of itself will keep you back. Shall I take you to town with me when I return to-morrow, just for a week’s change? I know it would partially bring you round, and we would make shift in my rooms for the time. Margery will take care of Meta here.”

She knew how worse than useless was the thought of attempting it; she saw that George could not be brought to understand her excessive weakness. A faint hope came across her that, now that the uncertainty of his future prospects was removed, she might grow better. That uncertainty had been distressing her sick heart for months.

She subdued her emotion and sat down in the chair quietly, saying that she was not strong enough to go up with him this time: it would be a change in one sense for her, she added, thinking of the new life; and then she began to talk of other things.

“Did you see Reginald before he sailed?”

“Not immediately before it, I think.”

“You are aware that he has gone as a common seaman?”

“Yes. By the way, there’s no knowing what I may be able to do for Regy out there, and for Isaac too, perhaps. Once I am in a good position I shall be able to assist them—and I’ll do it. Regy hates the sea: I’ll get him something more to his taste in Calcutta.”

Maria’s face flushed with hope, and she clasped her nervous hands together. “If you could, George! how thankful I should be! I think of poor Regy and his hard life night and day.”

“Which is not good for you by any means, young lady. I wish you’d get out of that habit of thinking and fretting about others. It has been just poor Thomas’s fault.”

She answered by a faint smile. “Has Thomas given you his ring?” she asked.

“He gave it me this afternoon,” replied George, taking it from his pocket. It was a ring with a bright green stone, on which was engraved the arms of the Godolphins. Sir George had worn it always, and it came to Thomas at his death: now it had come to George.

“You do not wear it, George.”

“Not yet. I cannot bear to put it on my finger while Thomas lives. In point of fact, I have no right to do so—at least to use the signet: it belongs exclusively to the head of the Godolphins.”

“Do you see Mrs. Pain often?” Maria presently said, with apparent indifference. But George little knew the fluttering emotion that had been working within, or the effort it had taken to subdue that emotion ere the question could be put.

“I see her sometimes; not often. She gets me to ride with her in the Park now and then.”

“Does she continue to reside with the Verralls?”

“I suppose so. I have not heard her mention anything about it.”

“George, I have wondered where Mrs. Pain’s money comes from,” Maria resumed in a dreamy tone. “It was said in the old days, you know, that the report of her having thirty thousand pounds was false; that she had nothing.”

“I don’t believe she had a penny,” returned George. “As to her income, I fancy it is drawn from Verrall. Mrs. Pain’s husband was connected in some business way with Verrall, and I suppose she still benefits by it. I know nothing whatever, but I have thought it must be so. Listen!”

George raised his hand as he abruptly spoke, for a distinct sound had broken upon his ear. Springing to the window he threw it open. The death-bell of All Souls’ was booming out over Prior’s Ash.

Before a word was spoken by him or by his wife; before George could still the emotion that was thumping at his heart, Margery came in with a scared face. In her flurry, her sudden grief, she addressed him as she had been accustomed to address him in his boyhood.

“Do you hear it, Master George? That’s the passing-bell! It is for him. There’s nobody else within ten miles they would trouble to have the bell tolled for at nigh ten o’clock at night. The Master of Ashlydyat’s gone.”

She sat down on a chair, regardless of the presence of her master and mistress, and, flinging her apron up to her face, burst into a storm of sobs.

A voice in the passage aroused her, for she recognized it as Bexley’s. George opened the room door, and the old man came in.

“It is all over, sir,” he said, his manner strangely still, his voice unnaturally calm and low, as is sometimes the case where emotion is striven to be suppressed. “Miss Janet bade me come to you with the tidings.”

George’s bearing was suspiciously quiet too. “It is very sudden, Bexley,” he presently rejoined.

Maria had risen and stood with one hand leaning on the table, her eyes strained on Bexley, her white face turned to him. Margery never moved.

“Very sudden, sir: and yet my mistress did not seem unprepared for it. He took his tea with her, and was so cheerful and well over it that I declare I began to hope he had taken a fresh turn. Soon afterwards Miss Bessy came back, and I heard her laughing in the room as she told them some story that had been related to her by Lady Godolphin. Presently my mistress called me in, to give me directions about a little matter she wanted done to-morrow, and while she was speaking to me, Miss Bessy cried out. We turned round and saw her leaning over my master. He had slipped back in his chair powerless, and I hastened to raise and support him. Death was in his face, sir; there was no mistaking it; but he was quite conscious, quite sensible, and smiled at us. ‘I must say farewell to you,’ he said, and Miss Bessy burst into a fit of sobs; but my mistress kneeled down quietly before him, and took his hands in hers, and said, ‘Thomas, is the moment come?’ ‘Yes, it is come,’ he answered, and he tried to look round at Miss Bessy, who stood a little behind his chair. ‘Don’t grieve,’ he said; ‘I am going on first’ but she only sobbed the more. ‘Good-bye, my dear ones,’ he continued; ‘good-bye, Bexley. I shall wait for you all, as I know I am being waited for. Fear?’ he went on, for Miss Bessy sobbed out something that sounded like the word: ‘fear, when I am going to God!—when Jesus——’”

Bexley fairly broke down with a great burst, and the tears were rolling silently over Maria’s cheeks. George wheeled round to the window and stood there with his back to them. Presently Bexley mastered himself and resumed: Margery had come forward then and taken her apron from her eyes.

“It was the last word he spoke—‘Jesus.’ His voice ceased, his hands fell, and the eyelids dropped. There was no struggle; nothing but a long gentle breath; and he died with the smile upon his lips.”

“He had cause to smile,” interjected Margery, the words coming from her brokenly. “If ever a man has gone to his rest in heaven, it is Mr. Godolphin. He had more than his share of sorrow in this world, and God has taken him to a better.”

Every feeling in George’s heart echoed to the words, every pulse beat in wild sorrow for the death of his good brother,—every sting that remorse could bring pricked him with the consciousness of his own share in it. He thrust his burning face beyond the window into the cool night; he raised his eyes to the blue canopy of heaven, serene and fair in the moonlight, almost as if he saw in imagination the redeemed soul winging its flight thither. He pressed his hands upon his throbbing breast to still its emotion; but for the greatest exercise of self-control he would have burst into sobs, as Bexley had done; and it may be that he—he, careless George Godolphin—breathed forth a yearning cry to heaven to be pardoned his share of the past. If Thomas, in his changed condition, could look down upon him, now, with his loving eyes, his ever-forgiving spirit, he would know how bitter and genuine, how full of anguish were these regrets!

George leaned his head on the side of the window to subdue his emotion, to gather the outward calmness that man likes not to have ruffled before the world; he listened to the strokes of the passing-bell ringing out so sharply in the still night air: and every separate stroke was laden with its weight of pain.

CHAPTER IV.
GATHERED TO HIS FATHERS.

You might have taken it to be Sunday in Prior’s Ash—except that Sundays in ordinary did not look so gloomy. The shops were closed, a drizzling rain fell, and the heavy bell of All Souls’ was booming out at solemn intervals. It was tolling for the funeral of Thomas Godolphin. Morning and night, from eight o’clock to nine, had it so tolled since his death; but on this, the last day, it did not cease with nine o’clock, but tolled on, and would so toll until he should be in his last home. People had closed their shutters with one accord as the clock struck ten; some indeed had never opened them at all: if they had not paid him due respect always in life, they paid it to him in death. Ah, it was only for a time, in the first brunt of the shock, that Prior’s Ash mistook Thomas Godolphin. He had gone to his long home; to his last resting-place: he had gone to the merciful God to whom (it may surely be said!) he had belonged in life; and Prior’s Ash mourned for him.

You will deem this a sad story; perhaps bring a reproach upon me for recording it. That bell has tolled out all too often in its history; and this is not the first funeral you have seen at All Souls’. If I wrote only according to my own experiences of life, my stories would be always sad ones. Life wears different aspects for us, and its cares and its joys are unequally allotted out. At least they so appear to be. One glances up heavily from the burdens heaped upon him, and sees others without care basking in the sunshine. But I often wonder whether those who seem so gay, whose path seems to be cast on the broad, sunny road of pleasure,—whether they have not a skeleton in their closet. I look, I say, and wonder, marvelling what the reality may be. Nothing but gaiety, nothing but lightness, nothing, to all appearance, but freedom from care. Is it really so? Perhaps; with some—a very few. Is it well for those few? The broad road of pleasure, down which so many seem to travel, is not the safest road to a longer home, or the best preparation for it. Oh, if we could only see the truth when the burden upon us is heavy and long!—could only read how good it is!

But we never can. We are but mortal; born with a mortal’s keen susceptibility to care and pain. We preach to others, that these things are sent for their benefit; we complaisantly say so to ourselves when not actually suffering; but when the fiery trial is upon us, then we groan out in our sore anguish that it is greater than we can bear.

There is no doubt that, with the many, suffering predominates in life, and if we would paint life as it is, that suffering must form a comprehensive view in the picture. Reverses, sickness, death—they seem to follow some people as surely as the shadow follows the sun at noontide. It is probable; nay, it is certain, that minds are so constituted as to receive them differently. Witness, as a case in point, the contrast between Thomas Godolphin and his brother George. Thomas, looking back, could say that nearly the whole course of his life had been marked by sorrow. Some of its sources have been mentioned here; not all. There was the melancholy death of Ethel; there was the long-felt disease which marked him for its early prey; there was the dreadful crash, the disgrace, which nearly broke his heart. It is to those who feel them keenly that sorrows chiefly come.

And George? Look at him. Gay, light, careless, handsome George. What sorrows had marked his path? None. He had revelled in the world’s favour, he had made a wife of the woman he loved, he had altogether floated gaily down the sunniest part of the stream of life. The worry which his folly had brought upon himself, and which ended in his own ruin and in the ruin of so many others, he had not felt. No, he had scarcely felt it: and once let him turn his back on England and enter upon new scenes, he will barely remember it.

All Souls’ clock struck eleven, and the beadle came out of the church and threw wide the gates. It was very punctual, for there came the hearse in sight; punctual as he who was borne within it had in life always liked to be. Prior’s Ash peeped through the chinks of its shutters, behind its blinds and its curtains, to see the sight, as it came slowly winding along the street to the sound of the solemn bell. Through the mist of blinding tears, which rolled down many a face, did Prior’s Ash look out. They might have attended him to the grave, following unobtrusively, but that it was known to be the wish of the family that such demonstration should not be made: so they contented themselves with shutting up their houses, and observing the day as one of mourning. “Bury me in the plainest and simplest manner possible,” had been Thomas Godolphin’s directions when the end was drawing near. Under the circumstances, it was only seemly to do so; but so antagonistic were pomp and show of all kinds to the tastes of Thomas Godolphin, in all things that related to himself, that it is more than probable the same orders would have been given had he died as his forefathers had died—the Master of Ashlydyat, the wealthy chief of the Godolphins.

So a hearse and a mourning-coach were all that had been commanded to Ashlydyat. What means, then, this pageantry of carriages that follow? Fine carriages, gay with colours as they file past, one by one, the eyes of Prior’s Ash strained on them, some with coronets on their panels, all with closed blinds, a long line of them. Lady Godolphin’s is first, taking its place next the mourning-coach. They have come from various parts of the county, near and distant, to show their owners’ homage to that good man who had earned their deepest respect during life. Willingly, willingly would those owners have attended and mourned him in person, but for the same reason which kept away the more humble inhabitants of Prior’s Ash. Slowly the procession gained the churchyard, and the hearse and the mourning-coach stopped: the rest of the carriages filed off and turned their horses’ heads to face the churchyard, and waited still and quiet while the hearse was emptied. Out of the mourning-coach stepped two mourners only: George Godolphin and the Viscount Averil.

The Rector of All Souls’ stood at the gate in his surplice, book in hand. He turned, reciting the commencement of the service for the burial of the dead: “I am the resurrection and the life.” While they were in the church, the graveyard filled; by ones, by twos, by threes, they came stealing in, regardless of the weather, to see the last of the Master of Ashlydyat: and the beadle was lenient to-day.

The Rector of All Souls’ took his place at the head of the grave and read the service, as the coffin was lowered. George stood next to him; close to George, Lord Averil; and the other mourners were clustered beyond. Their faces were bent: the drizzling rain beat upon their bare heads. How did George feel as he stood there, between the two men whom he had so wronged? The Rector glanced at him once, and saw that he had difficulty in suppressing his emotion.

“I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: even so, saith the Spirit: for they rest from their labours.”

So hushed was the silence, that every word, as it fell solemnly from the lips of the minister, might be heard in all parts of the churchyard. If ever that verse could apply to frail humanity, with its unceasing struggle after holiness and its unceasing failure here, it most surely applied to him over whom it was being spoken. George Godolphin’s head was bowed, his face hidden in his handkerchief; the rain pattered down on his golden hair. He had gone to his grave so early! Bend forward, as so many of those spectators are doing, and read the inscription on the plate. There is a little earth on the coffin, but the plate is visible. “Thomas Godolphin of Ashlydyat: aged forty-five years.”

Only forty-five years! A period at which some men think they are only beginning life. So early a grave!—and George had helped to send him to it!

It was over: and the spectators began to draw unobtrusively away, silently and decently. In the general crowd and bustle, for every one seemed to be on the move, George turned suddenly to the Rector and held out his hand. “Will you shake hands with me, Mr. Hastings?”

There was a perceptible hesitation on the Rector’s part, not in the least sought to be disguised, ere he responded to it, and then he put his own hand into the one held out. It was the first time they had met since the crash. “I cannot do otherwise over the dead body of your brother,” was the answer. “But neither can I be a hypocrite, George Godolphin, and say that I forgive you, for it would not be true. The result of the injury you did me presses daily and hourly upon us in a hundred ways, and my mind as yet has refused to be brought into that charitable frame necessary to entire forgiveness. This is not altogether the fault of my will. I wish to forgive you for your wife’s sake and for my own; I pray night and morning that I may be enabled heartily to forgive you before I die. I would not be your enemy; I wish you well, and there’s my hand in token of it: but to pronounce forgiveness is not yet in my power. Will you call in and see Mrs. Hastings?”

“I have not time to-day. I must go back to London this evening, but I shall be down again very shortly and will see her then. It was a peaceful ending.”

George was gazing down dreamily at the coffin as he spoke the last words. The Rector looked at him.

“A peaceful ending! Yes. It could not be anything else with him.”

“No, no,” murmured George. “Not anything else with him.”

“May God in His mercy send us all as happy a one, when our time shall come!”

As the words left the Rector’s lips, the heavy bell boomed out again, giving notice to Prior’s Ash that the last rites were over: that the world had closed for ever on Thomas Godolphin.

“Oh, George! can’t you stay with me?”

The words broke from Maria with a wail of anguish as she rose to bid her husband good-bye. He was hastening away to catch the evening train. It seemed that she had not liked to prefer the request before, had put it off to the last moment. In point of fact, she had seen very little of George all day. After the funeral he had returned in the coach with Lord Averil to Ashlydyat, and only came home late in the afternoon.

Lord and Lady Averil, recalled so suddenly from their wedding tour, had reached Ashlydyat the previous night, and would not leave it again. Janet was to depart from it in a few days; Bessy would be on the morrow with Lady Godolphin.

George would not believe that his wife was in any sort of danger. He had been to Mr. Snow, begged him to take all possible care of her, and asked whether there were really any grounds for alarm. Mr. Snow answered him that he could not say for certain: she was, no doubt, very weak and poorly, but he saw no reason why she should not get out of it; and as for himself, he was taking of her all the care he could take. The reply satisfied George, and he became full of the projects and details of his departure, entering into them so warmly with her that Maria caught the spirit of enterprise, and was beguiled into a belief that she might yet go also.

He had come home from the funeral bearing a parcel wrapped in paper for Meta. It had been found amidst Thomas Godolphin’s things, directed to the child. George lifted Meta on to his knee—very grave, very subdued was his face to-day—and opened it. It proved to be a Bible, and on the fly-leaf in his own hand was written, “Uncle Thomas’s last and best gift to Meta,” and it was dated the day he died. Lower down were the words, “My ways are ways of pleasantness, and all my paths are peace.”

And the evening had gone on, and it grew time for George to leave. It was as he bent to kiss his wife that she had burst out with that wailing cry. “Oh, George! can’t you stay with me?”

“My darling, I must go. I shall soon be down again.”

“Only a little while! A little longer!”

The tone in its anguish quite distressed him. “I would stay if it were possible: but it is not so. I came down for a day only, you know, Maria, and I have remained more than a week. It will not be so very long before we sail, and I shall have my hands full with the preparations for our voyage.”

“I have been so much alone,” she sobbed hysterically. “I get thinking and thinking: it does not give me a chance to recover. George, you have been always away from me since the trouble came.”

“I could not help it. Maria, I could not bear Prior’s Ash; I could not stop in it,” he cried with a burst of genuine truth. “But for you and Thomas, I should never have set my foot in the place again, once I was quit of it. Now, however, I am compelled to be in London; there are fifty things to see to. Keep up your courage, my darling! A little while, and we shall be together and happy as we used to be.”

“Sir,” said Margery, putting her head in the door, “do you want to catch the nine train?”

“All right,” answered George.

“It may be all right if you run for it, it won’t be all right else,” grunted Margery.

He flew off, catching up his hand-portmanteau as he went, and waving his adieu to Meta. That young damsel, accustomed to be made a great deal of, could not understand so summary and slight a leave-taking, and she stood quite still in her consternation, staring after her papa: or rather at the door he had gone out of. Margery was right, and George found that he must indeed hasten if he would save the train. Maria, with a storm of hysterical sobs, grievous to witness, caught Meta in her arms, sat down on the sofa, and sobbed over the child, as she strained her to her bosom.

Meta was used to her mamma’s grief now, and she lay quite still, her shoes and white socks peeping out beyond the black frock; nay, a considerable view of the straight little legs peeping out as well. Maria bent her head until her aching forehead rested on the fair plump neck.

“Mamma! Mamma, dear! Mamma’s crying for poor Uncle Thomas!”

“No,” said Maria in the bitterness of her heart. “If we were but where Uncle Thomas is, we should be happy. I cry for us who are left, Meta!”

“Hey-day! and what on earth’s the meaning of this? Do you think this is the way to get strong, Mrs. George Godolphin?”

They had not heard him come in. Meta, always ready for visitors, scuffled off her mamma’s lap gleefully, and Mr. Snow drew a chair in front of Maria and watched her trying to dry away her tears. He moved a little to the right, that the light of the lamp which was behind him might fall upon her face.

“Now just you have the goodness to tell me what it is that’s the matter.”

“I—I am low-spirited, I think,” said Maria, her voice subdued and weak now.

“Low-spirited!” echoed Mr. Snow. “Then I’d get high-spirited, if I were you. I wish there never had been such a thing as spirits invented, for my part! A nice excuse it is for you ladies to sigh away half your time instead of being rational and merry, as you ought to be. A woman of your sense ought to be above it, Mrs. George Godolphin.”

“Mr. Snow,” interrupted a troublesome little voice, “papa’s gone back to London. He went without saying good-bye to Meta!”

“Ah! Miss Meta had been naughty, I expect.”

Meta shook her head very decisively in the negative, but Mr. Snow had turned to Maria.

“And so you were crying after that roving husband of yours! I guessed as much. He nearly ran over me at the gate. ‘Step in and see my wife, will you, Snow?’ said he. ‘She wants tonics, or something.’ You don’t want tonics half as much as you want common sense, Mrs. George Godolphin.”

“I am so weak,” was her feeble excuse. “A little thing upsets me now.”

“Well, and what can you expect? If I sat over my surgery fire all day stewing and fretting, a pretty doctor I should soon become for my patients! I wonder you——”

“Have you looked at my new black frock, Mr. Snow?”

She was a young lady who would be attended to, let who would go without attention. She had lifted up her white pinafore and stood in front of him, waiting for the frock to be admired.

“Very smart indeed!” replied Mr. Snow.

“It’s not smart,” spoke Meta resentfully. “My smart frocks are put away in the drawers. It is for Uncle Thomas, Mr. Snow! Mr. Snow, Uncle Thomas is in heaven now.”

“Ay, child, that he is. And it’s time that Miss Meta Godolphin was in bed.”

That same night Mr. Snow was called up to Mrs. George Godolphin.—Let us call her so to the end; but she is Mrs. Godolphin now. Margery was sleeping quietly, the child in a little bed by her side, when she was aroused by some one standing over her. It was her mistress in her night-dress. Up started the woman, wide awake instantly, crying out to know what was the matter.

“Margery, I shan’t be in time. The ship’s waiting to sail, and none of my things are ready. I can’t go without my things.”

Margery, experienced in illness of many kinds, saw what it was. Her mistress had suddenly awakened from some vivid dream, and in her weak state was unable to shake off the delusion. In fact, that species of half-consciousness, half-delirium was upon her, which is apt in the night-time to attack some patients labouring under long-continued and excessive weakness.

She had come up exactly as she got out of bed. No slippers on her feet, nothing upon her shoulders. As Margery threw a warm woollen shawl over those shoulders, she felt the ominous damp of the night-dress. A pair of list-shoes of her own were at the bedside, and she hastily put them upon her mistress’s feet.

“There’ll be no time, Margery; there’ll be no time to get the things ready: they never could be bought and made, you know. Oh, Margery! the ship must not go without me! What will be done?”

“I’ll telegraph up to that ship to-morrow morning, and get him to put off starting for a week or two,” cried Margery, nodding her head with authority. “Never you trouble yourself, ma’am; it will be all right. You shall go to sleep again comfortably, and we’ll see about the things with morning light.”

Margery talked as she conveyed her mistress back to bed, and remained talking after she was in it. A stock of this should be got in, a stock of the other: as for linen, it could all be bought ready made—and the best way too, now calico was so cheap. Somewhat surprised that she heard no answer, no further expressed fear, Margery looked close at her mistress by the night-lamp, wondering whether she had gone to sleep again. She had not gone to sleep. She was lying still, cold, white, without sense or motion; and Margery, collected Margery, very nearly screamed.

Maria had fainted away. Margery did not understand it at all, or why she should have fainted when she ought to have gone to sleep. Margery liked it as little as she understood it; and she ran upstairs to their landlady, Mrs. James, and got her to despatch her son for Mr. Snow.

But that was only the beginning. Night after night would these attacks of semi-delirium come upon her, though in the day she seemed pretty well. Mr. Snow came and came, and drew an ominous face and doubled the tonics and changed them, and talked and joked and scolded. But it all seemed unavailing: she certainly did not get better. Weary, weary hours! weary, weary days! as she lay there alone, struggling with her malady. And yet no malady, either, that Mr. Snow could discover; nothing but a weakness which he only half believed in.

Janet and Bessy Godolphin were one day sitting with Mrs. George. The time had come for Janet to quit Ashlydyat, and she was paying her farewell visit to Maria. Maria was at the window at work when they arrived; at work with her weak and fevered hands. No very poetical employment, that on which she was engaged, but one which has to be done in most families nevertheless—stocking-darning. She was darning socks for Miss Meta. Miss Meta, her sleeves and white pinafore tied up with black ribbon, her golden curls somewhat in disorder, for the young lady had rebelliously broken from Margery and taken a race round the garden in the blowing wintry wind, her smooth cheeks fresh and rosy, was now roasting her face in front of the fire, her doll and a whole collection of dolls’ clothes lying around her on the hearth-rug.

Bessy had come, not so much to accompany Janet, as for a special purpose—to deliver a message from Lady Godolphin. My lady, deeming possibly that her displeasure had lasted long enough, graciously charged Bessy with an invitation to Maria—to spend a day or two at the Folly ere her departure for Calcutta.

Maria gave a sort of sobbing sigh. “She is very kind. Tell Lady Godolphin how kind I think it of her, Bessy, but that I am not strong enough to go from home now.”

Bessy looked at her. “But, Maria, if you are not strong enough to go out on a short visit, how shall you be strong enough to undertake a three or four months’ voyage?”

Maria paused ere she answered the question. She was gazing out straight before her, as if seeing something at a distance—something in the future. “I think of it and of its uncertainty a great deal,” she presently said. “If I can only get away: if I can only keep up sufficiently to get away, I can lie down always in my berth. And if I do die before I reach India, George will be with me.”

“Child!” almost sharply interrupted Janet, “what are you saying?”

She seemed scarcely to hear the interruption. She sat, gazing still, her white and trembling hands lying clasped on her black dress, and she resumed, as if pursuing the train of thought.

“My great dread is, lest I should not keep up to get to London, to be taken on board; lest George should, after all, be obliged to sail without me. It is always on my mind, Janet; it makes me dream constantly that the ship has gone and I am left behind. I wish I did not have those dreams.”

“Come to Lady Godolphin’s Folly, Maria,” persuasively spoke Bessy. “It will be the very best thing to cheat you of those fears. They all arise from weakness.”

“I have no doubt they do. I had a pleasant dream one night,” she added with some animation. “I thought we had arrived in safety, and I and George and Meta were sitting under a tree whose leaves were larger than an umbrella. It was very hot, but these leaves shaded us, and I seemed to be well, for we were all laughing merrily together. It may come true, you know, Janet.”

“Yes,” assented Janet. “Are you preparing much for the voyage?”

“Not yet. Clothes can be had so quickly now. George talked it over with me when he was down, and we decided to send a list to the outfitter’s, just before we sailed, so that the things might not come down here, but be packed in London.”

“And Margery?” asked Janet.

“I do not know what she means to do,” answered Maria, shaking her head. “She protests ten times a day that she will not go; but I see she is carefully mending up all her cotton gowns, and one day I heard her say to Meta that she supposed nothing but cotton was bearable out there. What I should do without Margery on the voyage I don’t like to think about. George told her to consider of it, and give us her decision when he next came down. And you, Janet? When shall you be back again at Prior’s Ash?”

“I do not suppose I shall ever come back to it,” was Janet’s answer. “Its reminiscences will not be so pleasing to me that I should seek to renew my acquaintance with it.”

“Bexley attends you, I hear.”

“Yes. My aunt’s old servant has got beyond his work—he has been forty-two years in the family, Maria—and Bexley will replace him.”

When Janet rose to leave, she bent over Maria and slipped four sovereigns into her hand. “It is for yourself, my dear,” she whispered.

“Oh, thank you! But indeed I have enough, Janet. George left me five pounds when he was at home, and it is not half gone. You don’t know what a little keeps us. I eat next to nothing, and Margery, I think, lives chiefly upon porridge: there’s only Meta.”

“But you ought to eat, child!”

“I can’t eat,” said Maria. “I have never lost that pain in my throat.”

“What pain?” asked Janet.

“I do not know. It came on with the trouble. I feel—I feel always ill within myself, Janet. I seem to be always shivering inwardly; and the pain in the throat is sometimes better, sometimes worse, but it never quite goes away.”

Janet looked at her searchingly. She heard the meek, resigned tone, she saw the white, wan face, the attenuate hands, the chest rising with every passing emotion, the mournful look in the sweet eyes; and for the first time a suspicion that another life would shortly have to go, took possession of Miss Godolphin.

“What is George at, that he is not here to see after you?” she asked in a strangely severe accent.

“He cannot bear Prior’s Ash, Janet,” whispered Maria. “But for me and Thomas, he never would have come back to it. And I suppose he is busy in London: there must be many arrangements to make.”

Janet stooped and gravely kissed her; kissed her twice. “Take care of yourself, my dear, and do all you can to keep your mind tranquil and to get up your strength. You shall hear from me before your departure.”

Margery stood in the little hall. Miss Bessy Godolphin was in the garden, in full chase after that rebellious damsel, Meta, who had made a second escape through the opened door, passing angry Margery and the outstretched hand that would have made a prisoner of her, with a laugh of defiance. Miss Godolphin stopped to address Margery.

“Shall you go to India or not, Margery?”

“I’m just almost torn in two about it, ma’am,” was the answer, delivered confidentially. “Without me, that child would never reach the other side alive: she’d be clambering up the sides o’ the ship and get drownded ten times over before they got there. Look at her now! And who’d take care of her over there, among those native beasts—those elephants and black people? If I thought she’d ever come to be waited on by a black woman with woolly hair, I should be fit to smother her before she went out. I shall see, Miss Janet.”

“Margery, your mistress appears to want the greatest care.”

“She has wanted that a long while,” was Margery’s composed answer.

“She ought to have everything strengthening. Wine and other necessaries required by the sick.”

“I suppose she ought,” said Margery. “But she won’t take them, Miss Janet; she says she can’t eat and drink. And for the matter of that, we have nothing of that sort for her to take. There were more good things consumed in the Bank in a day than we should see in a month now.”

“Where’s your master?” repeated Janet in an accent not less sharp than the one she had used for the same question to Maria.

“He?” cried wrathful Margery, for the subject was sure to put her out uncommonly, in the strong opinion she was pleased to hold touching her master’s short-comings. “I suppose he’s riding about with his choice friend, Madam Pain. Folks talk of their horses being seen abreast pretty often.”

There was no opportunity for further colloquy. Bessy came in, carrying the laughing truant; and Margery, with a tart word to the young lady, attended the Miss Godolphins down the garden path to throw open the gate for them. In her poor way, in her solitary self, Margery strove to make up for the state they had been accustomed to, when the ladies called from Ashlydyat.

Maria, lying motionless on the sofa, where on being left alone she had thrown herself in weariness, heard Margery’s gratuitous remark about Mrs. Pain, through the unlatched door, and a contraction arose to her brow. In her hand lay the four sovereigns left there by Janet. She looked at them musingly, and then murmured, “I can afford to give her half.” When Margery returned indoors, she called her in, and sent her for Mrs. Bond.

A little while, and Mrs. Bond, on her meekest and civilest behaviour, stood before Maria, her thin shawl and wretched old gown drawn tightly round her, to protect her from the winter’s cold. Maria put two sovereigns into her hand.

“It is the first instalment of my debt to you, Mrs. Bond. If I live, I will pay it you all, but it will be by degrees. And perhaps that is the best way that you could receive it. I wish I could have given you some before.”

Mrs. Bond burst into tears. Not the crocodile’s tears that she was somewhat in the habit of favouring the world with when not quite herself, but real, genuine tears of gratitude. She had given up all hope of the ten pounds, did not expect to see a penny of it; and the joy overcame her. Her conscience pricked her a little also, for she remembered sundry hard words she had at one time liberally regaled her neighbours’ ears with, touching Mrs. George Godolphin. In her grateful repentance she could have knelt at Maria’s feet: hunger and other ills of poverty had tended to subdue her spirit.

“May the good Lord bless and repay you, ma’am!—and send you a safe journey to the far-off place where I hear you be going!”

“Yes, I shall go, if I am well enough,” replied Maria. “It is from thence that I shall send you home some money from time to time if I can do so. Have you been well, lately?”

“As well as pretty nigh clamming will let me be, ma’am. Things has gone hard with me: many a day I’ve not had as much as a crust to eat. But this ’ll set me up again, and, ma’am, I’ll never cease to pray for you.”

“Don’t spend it in—in—you know, Mrs. Bond,” Maria ventured timidly to advise, in a lowered voice.

Mrs. Bond shook her head and turned up her eyes by way of expressing a very powerful negative. Probably she did not feel altogether comfortable on the subject, for she hastened to quit it.

“Have you heard the news about old Jekyl, ma’am?”

“No. What news?”

“He’s dead. He went off at one o’clock this a’ternoon. He fretted continual after his money, folks says, and it wore him to a skeleton. He couldn’t abear to be living upon his sons; and Jonathan don’t earn enough for himself now, and the old ’un felt it.”

Some one else was feeling it. Fretting continually after his money!—that money which might never have been placed in the Bank but for her! Miss Meta came flying in, went straight up to the visitor, and leaned her pretty arm upon the snuffy black gown.

“When shall I come and see the parrot?”

“The parrot! Lawks bless the child! I haven’t got the parrot now, I haven’t had him this many a day. I couldn’t let him clam,” she continued, turning to Maria. “I was clamming myself, ma’am, and I sold him, cage and all, just as he stood.”

“Where is he?” asked Meta, looking disappointed.

“He’s where he went,” lucidly explained Mrs. Bond. “It were the lady up at t’other end o’ the town, beyond the parson’s, what bought him, ma’am. Leastways her daughter did: sister to her what was once to have married Mr. Godolphin. It’s a white house.”

“Lady Sarah Grame’s,” said Maria. “Did she buy the parrot?”

“Miss did: that cross-looking daughter of her’n. She see him as she was going by my door one day, ma’am, and she stopped and looked at him, and asked me what I’d sell him for. Well, on the spur o’ the moment I said five shilling; for I’d not a halfpenny in the place to buy him food, and for days and days he had had only what the neighbours brought him; but it warn’t half his worth. And miss was all wild to buy him, but her mother wasn’t. She didn’t want screeching birds in her house, she said, and they had a desperate quarrel in my kitchen before they went away. Didn’t she call her mother names! She’s a vixen that daughter, if ever there were one. But she got her will, for an hour or two after that, a young woman come down for the parrot with the five shilling in her hand. And there’s where he is.”

“I shall have twenty parrots when I go to India,” struck in Meta.

“What a sight of food they’ll eat!” ejaculated Mrs. Bond. “That there one o’ mine eats his fill now. I made bold one day to go up and ask after him, and the two young women in the kitchen took me to the room to see him, the ladies being out, and he had his tin stuffed full o’ seed. He knowed me again, he did, and screeched out to be heerd a mile off. The young women said that what with his screeching and the two ladies quarrelling, the house weren’t bearable sometimes.”

Meta’s large eyes were open in wondering speculation. “Why do they quarrel?” she asked.

“’Cause it’s their natur’,” returned Mrs. Bond. “The one what had the sweet natur’ was took, and the two fretful ones was left. Them young women said that miss a’most drove my lady mad with her temper, and they expect nothing less but there’d be blows some day. A fine disgraceful thing to say of born ladies, ain’t it, ma’am?”

Maria, in her delicacy of feeling, would not endorse the remark of Dame Bond. But the state of things at Lady Sarah Grame’s was perfectly well known at Prior’s Ash. Sarah Anne Grame had become her mother’s bane, as Mr. Snow had once said she would be. A very terrible bane; to herself, to her mother, to all about her. And the “screeching” parrot had only added a little more noise to an already too noisy house.

Mrs. Bond curtsied herself out. She met Margery in the passage, and stopped to whisper.

“I say! how ill she do look!”

“Who looks ill?” was the ungracious demand.

Mrs. Bond nodded towards the parlour door. “The missis. Her face looks more as if it had death writ in it, than voyage-going.”

“Perhaps you’ll walk on your way, Dame Bond, and keep your opinions till they’re asked for,” was the tart reply of Margery.

But, in point of fact, the words had darted into the faithful servant’s heart, piercing it as a poisoned arrow. It seemed so great a confirmation of her own fears.

CHAPTER V.
COMMOTION AT ASHLYDYAT.

A few more days went on, and they wrought a further change in Mrs. George Godolphin. She grew weaker and weaker: she grew—it was apparent now to Mr Snow as it was to Margery—nearer and nearer to that vault in the churchyard of All Souls’. There could no longer be any indecision or uncertainty as to her taking the voyage; the probabilities were, that before the ship was ready to sail, all sailing in this world for Maria would be over. And rumours, faint, doubtful, very much discredited rumours of this state of things, began to circulate in Prior’s Ash.

Discredited because people were so unprepared for it. Mrs. George Godolphin had been delicate since the birth of her baby, as was known to every one, but not a soul, relatives, friends, or strangers, had felt a suspicion of danger. On the contrary, it was supposed that she was about to depart on that Indian voyage: and ill-natured spirits tossed their heads and said it was fine to be Mrs. George Godolphin, to be set up again and go out to lead a grand life in India, after ruining half Prior’s Ash. How she was misjudged! how many more unhappy wives have been, and will be again, misjudged by the world!

One dreary afternoon, as dusk was coming on, Margery, not stopping, or perhaps not caring, to put anything upon herself, but having hastily wrapped up Miss Meta, went quickly down the garden path, leading that excitable and chattering demoiselle by the hand. Curious news had reached the ears of Margery. Their landlady’s son had come in, describing the town as being in strange commotion, in consequence of something which had happened at Ashlydyat. Rumour set it down as nothing less than murder; and, according to the boy’s account, all Prior’s Ash was flocking up to the place to see and to hear.

Margery turned wrathful at the news. Murder at Ashlydyat! The young gentleman was too big to be boxed or shaken for saying it, but he persisted in his story, and Margery in her curiosity went out to see with her own eyes. “The people are running past the top of this road in crowds,” he said to her.

For some days past, workmen had been employed digging up the Dark Plain by the orders of Lord Averil. As he had told Cecil weeks before, his intention was to completely renew it; to do away entirely with its past character and send its superstition to the winds. The archway was being taken down, the gorse-bushes were being uprooted, the whole surface, in fact, was being dug up. He intended to build an extensive summer-house where the archway had been, and to make the plain a flower-garden, a playground for children when they should be born to Ashlydyat: and it appeared that in digging that afternoon under the archway, the men had come upon a human skeleton, or rather upon the bones of what had once been a skeleton. This was the whole foundation for the rumour and the “murder.”

As Margery stood, about to turn home again, vexed for having been brought out in the cold for nothing more, and intending to give a few complimentary thanks for it to the young man who had been the means of sending her, she was accosted by Mr. Crosse, who had latterly been laid up in his house with gout. Not the slightest notice had he taken of George Godolphin and his wife since his return home, though he had been often with Thomas.

“How d’ye do, Margery?” he said, taking up Meta at the same time to kiss her. “Are you going to Ashlydyat with the rest?”

“Not I, the simpletons!” was Margery’s free rejoinder. “There’s my poor mistress alone in the house.”

“Is she ill?” asked Mr. Crosse.

“Ill!” returned Margery, not at all pleased at the question. “Yes, sir, she is ill. I thought everybody knew that.”

“When does she start for India?”

“She don’t start at all. She’ll be starting soon for a place a little bit nearer. Here! you run on and open the gate,” added Margery, whisking Meta from Mr. Crosse’s hand and sending her down the lane out of hearing. “She’ll soon be where Mr. Thomas Godolphin is, sir, instead of being marched off in a ship to India,” continued the woman, turning to Mr. Crosse confidentially.

He felt greatly shocked. In his own mind, he, as many others, had associated Maria with her husband, in regard to the summer’s work, in a lofty, scornful sort of way: but it did shock him to hear that she was in fear of death. It is most wonderful how our feelings towards others soften when we find that they and their shortcomings are about to be taken from us to a more merciful Judge.

“But what is the matter with her, Margery?” Mr. Crosse asked; for it happened that he had not heard the ominous rumours that were beginning to circulate in Prior’s Ash.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” returned Margery. “I don’t believe old Snow knows, either. I suppose the worry and misfortunes have been too much for her; as they were for somebody else. Mr. Godolphin is in his grave, and now she’s going to hers.”

Mr. Crosse walked mechanically by the side of Margery down the lane. It was not his road, and perhaps he was unconscious that he took it; he walked by her side, listening.

“He’ll have to go by himself now—and me to have been getting up all my cotton gowns for the start! Serve him right! for ever thinking of taking out that dear little lamb amid elephants and savages!”

Mr. Crosse was perfectly aware that Margery alluded to her master—his own bête noire since the explosion. But he did not choose to descant upon his gracelessness to Margery. “Can nothing be done for Mrs. George Godolphin?” he asked.

“I expect not, sir. There’s nothing the matter with her that can be laid hold of,” resentfully spoke Margery; “no malady to treat. Snow says he can’t do anything, and he brought Dr. Beale in the other day: and it seems he can’t do nothing, either.”

Meta had reached the gate, flung it open in obedience to orders, and now came running back. Mr. Crosse took her hand and went on with her. Was he purposing to pay a visit to George Godolphin’s wife? It seemed so.

It was quite dusk when they entered. Maria was lying on the sofa, with a warm woollen wrapper drawn over her. There was no light in the room except that given out by the fire, but its blaze fell directly on her face. Mr. Crosse stood and looked at it, shocked at its ravages; at the tale it told. All kinds of unpleasant pricks were sending their darts through his conscience. He had been holding himself aloof in his assumed superiority, his haughty condemnation, while she had been going to the grave with her breaking heart.

Had she wanted things that money could procure? had she wanted food? Mr. Crosse actually began to ask himself the question, as the wan aspect of the white face grew and grew upon him: and in the moment he quite loathed the thought of his well-stored coffers. He remembered what a good, loving gentlewoman this wife of George Godolphin’s had always been, this dutiful daughter of All Souls’ pastor: and for the first time Mr. Crosse began to separate her from her husband’s misdoings, to awaken to the conviction that the burden and sorrow laid upon her had been enough to bear, without the world meting out its harsh measure of blame by way of increase.

He sat down quite humbly, saying “hush” to Meta. Maria had dropped into one of those delirious sleeps: they came on more frequently now, and would visit her at the twilight hour of the evening as well as at night: and the noise of their entrance had failed to arouse her. Margery, however, came bustling in.

“It’s Mr. Crosse, ma’am.”

Maria, a faint hectic of surprise coming into her cheeks, sat up and let him take her hand. “I am glad to have the opportunity of seeing you once again,” she said.

“Why did you not send and tell me how ill you were?” burst forth Mr. Crosse, forgetting how exceedingly ill such a procedure would have accorded with his own line of holding aloof in condemning superiority.

She shook her head. “I might, had things been as they used to be. But people do not care to come near me now.”

“I am going in the ship, Mr. Crosse. I am going to ride upon an elephant and to have parrots.”

He laid his hand kindly upon the chattering child: but he turned to Maria, his voice dropping to a whisper. “What shall you do with her? Shall you send her out without you?”

The question struck upon the one chord of her heart that for the last day or two, since her own hopeless state grew more palpable, had been strung to the utmost tension. What was to become of Meta—of the cherished child whom she must leave behind her? Her face grew moist, her bosom heaved, and she suddenly pressed her hands upon it as if they could still its wild and painful beating. Mr. Crosse, blaming himself for asking it, blaming himself for many other things, took her hands within his, and said he would come and see her in the morning: she seemed so fatigued then.

But, low as the question had been put, Miss Meta heard it; heard it and understood its purport. She entwined her pretty arms within her mamma’s dress as Mr. Crosse went out, and raised her wondering eyes.

“What did he mean? You are coming too, mamma!”

She drew the little upturned face close to hers, she laid her white cheek upon the golden hair. The very excess of pain that was rending her aching heart caused her to speak with unnatural stillness. Not that she could speak at first: a minute or two had to be given to mastering her emotion.

“I am afraid not, Meta. I think God is going to take me.”

The child made no reply. Her earnest eyes were kept wide open with the same wondering stare. “What will papa do?” she presently asked.

Maria hastily passed her hand across her brow, as if that recalled another phase of the pain. Meta’s little heart began to swell, and the tears burst forth.

“Don’t go, mamma! Don’t go away from papa and Meta! I shall be afraid of the elephants without you.”

She pressed the child closer and closer to her beating heart. Oh the pain, the pain!—the pain of the parting that was so soon to come!

They were interrupted by a noise at the gate. A carriage had bowled down the lane and drawn up at it, almost with the commotion that used to attend the dashing visits to the Bank of Mrs. Charlotte Pain. A more sober equipage this, however, with its mourning appointments, although it bore a coronet on its panels. The footman opened the door, and one lady stepped out of it.

“It is Aunt Cecil,” called out Meta.

She rubbed the tears from her pretty cheeks, her grief forgotten, child-like, in the new excitement, and flew out to meet Lady Averil. Maria, trying to look her best, rose from the sofa and tottered forward to receive her. Meta was pounced upon by Margery and carried off to have her tumbled hair smoothed; and Lady Averil came in alone.

She threw back her crape veil to kiss Maria. She had come down from Ashlydyat on purpose to tell her the news of the bones being found: there could be little doubt that they were those of the ill-fated Richard de Commins, which had been so fruitlessly searched for: and Lady Averil was full of excitement. Perhaps it was natural that she should be so, being a Godolphin.

“It is most strange that they should be found just now,” she cried; “at the very time that the Dark Plain is being done away with. You know, Maria, the tradition always ran that so long as the bones remained unfound, the Dark Plain would retain the appearance of a graveyard. Is it not a singular coincidence—that they should be discovered just at the moment that the Plain is being dug up? Were Janet here, she would say how startlingly all the old superstition is being worked out.”

“I think one thing especially strange—that they should not have been found before,” observed Maria. “Have they not been searched for often?”

“I believe so,” replied Cecil. “But they were found under the archway; immediately beneath it: and I fancy they had always been searched for in the Dark Plain. When papa had the gorse-bushes rooted up they were looked for then in all parts of the Dark Plain, but not under the archway.”

“How came Lord Averil to think of looking under the archway?” asked Maria.

“He did not think of it. They have been found unexpectedly, without being searched for. The archway is taken down, and the men were digging the foundation for the new summer-house, when they came upon them. The grounds of Ashlydyat have been like a fair all the afternoon with people coming up to see and hear,” added Cecil. “Lord Averil is going to consult Mr. Hastings about giving them Christian burial.”

“It does seem strange,” murmured Maria. “Have you written to tell Janet?”

“No, I shall write to her to-morrow. I hastened down to you. Bessy came over from the Folly, but Lady Godolphin would not come. She said she had heard enough in her life of the superstition of Ashlydyat. She never liked it, you know, Maria; never believed in it.”

“Yes, I know,” Maria answered. “It used to anger her when it was spoken of. As it angered papa.”

“As George used to pretend that it angered him. I think it was only pretence, though. Poor Thomas, never. If he did not openly accord it belief, he never ridiculed it. How are your preparations getting on Maria?”

Maria was crossing the room with feeble steps to stir the fire into a blaze. As the light burst forth, she turned her face to Lady Averil with a sort of apology.

“I do not know what Margery is about that she does not bring in the lamp. I am receiving you very badly, Cecil.”

Cecil smiled. “I think our topic, the Ashlydyat superstition, is better discussed in such light as this, than in the full glare of lamp-light.”

But as Lady Averil spoke she was looking earnestly at Maria. The blaze had lighted up her wan face, and Cecil was struck aghast at its aspect. Was it real?—or was it only the effect of the firelight? Lady Averil had not heard of the ominous fears that were ripening, and hoped it was the latter.

“Maria! are you looking worse this evening? Or is the light deceiving me?”

“I dare say I am looking worse. I am worse. I am very ill, Cecil.”

“You do not look fit to embark on this voyage.”

Maria simply shook her head. She was sitting now in an old-fashioned arm-chair, one white hand lying on her black dress, the other supporting her chin, while the firelight played on her wasted features.

“Would the little change to Ashlydyat benefit you, Maria? If so, if it would help to give you strength for your voyage, come to us at once. Now don’t refuse! It will give us so much pleasure. You do not know how Lord Averil loves and respects you. I think there is no one he respects as he respects you. Let me take you home with me now.”

Maria’s eyelashes were wet as she turned them on her. “Thank you, Cecil, for your kindness: and Lord Averil—will you tell him so for me—I am always thanking in my heart. I wish I could go home with you; I wish I could go with any prospect of it doing me good; but that is over. I shall soon be in a narrower home than this.”

Lady Averil’s heart stood still and then bounded on again. “No, no! Surely you are mistaken! It cannot be.”

“I have suspected it long, Cecil! but since the last day or two it has become certainty, and even Mr. Snow acknowledges it. About this time yesterday, he was sitting here in the twilight, and I bade him not conceal the truth from me. I told him that I knew it, and did not shrink from it; and therefore it was the height of folly for him to pretend ignorance to me.”

“Oh, Maria! And have you no regret at leaving us? I should think it a dreadful thing if I were going to die.”

“I have been battling with my regrets a long while,” said Maria, bending her head and speaking in low, subdued tones. “Leaving Meta is the worst. I know not who will take her, who will protect her: she cannot go with George, without—without a mother!”

“Give her to me,” feverishly broke from the lips of Lady Averil. “You don’t know how dearly I have ever loved that child Maria, she shall never know the want of the good mother she has lost, as far as I can supply your place, if you will let her come to me. It is well that the only child of the Godolphins—and she is the only one—should be reared at Ashlydyat.”

Of all the world, Maria could best have wished Lady Averil to have Meta: and perhaps there had been moments when in her troubled imagination she had hoped it would be so. But she could not close her eyes to its improbabilities.

“You will be having children of your own, Cecil. And there’s Lord Averil to be considered!”

“Lord Averil is more than indulgent to me. I believe if I wished to adopt half a dozen children, he would only smile and tell me to prepare a nursery for them. I am quite sure he would like to have Meta.”

“Then—if he will—oh, Cecil, I should die with less regret.”

“Yes, yes, that is settled. He shall call and tell you so. But—Maria—is your own state so certain? Can nothing be done for you?—nothing be tried?”

“Nothing, as I believe. Mr. Snow cannot find out what is the matter with me. The trouble has been breaking my heart, Cecil: I know of nothing else. And since I grew alarmed about my own state, there has been the thought of Meta. Many a time have I been tempted to wish that I could have her with me in my coffin.”

“Aunt Cecil! Aunt Cecil! How many summer-houses are there to be, Aunt Cecil?”

You need not ask whose interrupting voice it was. Lady Averil lifted the child to her knee, and asked whether she would come and pay her a long, long visit at Ashlydyat. Meta replied by inquiring into the prospect of swings and dolls’ houses, and Cecil plunged into promises as munificently as George could have done.

“Should George not be with you?” she whispered, as she bent over Maria before leaving.

“Yes, I am beginning to think he ought to be now. I intend to write to him to-night; but I did not like to disturb him in his preparations. It will be a blow to him.”

“What! does he not know of it?”

“Not yet. He thinks I am getting ready to go out. I wish I could have done so!”

No, not until the unhappy fact was placed beyond all doubt, would Maria disturb her husband. And she did it gently at last. “I have been unwilling to alarm you, George, and I would not do so now, but that I believe it is all too certain. Will you come down and see what you think of me? Even Mr. Snow fears there is no hope for me now. Oh, if I could but have gone with you! have gone with you to be your ever-loving wife still in that new land!”

Lord Averil came in while she was addressing the letter. Greatly shocked, greatly grieved at what his wife told him, he rose from his dinner-table and walked down. Her husband excepted, there was no one whom Maria would have been so pleased to see as Lord Averil. He had not come so much to tell her that he heartily concurred in his wife’s offer with regard to the child, though he did say it—say that she should be done by entirely as though she were his own, and his honest honourable nature shone out of his eyes as he spoke it—as to see whether nothing could be done for herself, to entreat her to have further advice called in.

“Dr. Beale has been here twice,” was her answer. “He says there is no hope.”

Lord Averil held her hand in his, as he had taken it in greeting; his grave eyes of sympathy were bent with deep concern on her face.

“Cecil thinks the trouble has been too much for you,” he whispered. “Is it so?”

A streak of hectic came into her cheek. “Yes, I suppose it is that. Turn to which side I would, there was no comfort, no hope. Throughout it all, I never had a friend, save you, Lord Averil: and you know, and God knows, what you did for us. I have not recompensed you: I don’t see how I could have recompensed you had I lived: but when I am gone, you will be happy in knowing that you took the greatest weight from one who was stricken by the world.”

“You have been writing to George?” he observed, seeing the letter on the table. “But it will not go to-night: it is too late.”

“It can go up by to-morrow’s day mail, and he will receive it in the evening. Perhaps you will post it for me as you walk home: it will save Margery’s going out.”

Lord Averil put the letter into his pocket. He stood looking at her as she lay a little back in her easy-chair, his arm resting on the mantelpiece, curious thoughts passing through his mind. Could he do nothing for her?—to avert the fate that was threatening her? He, rich in wealth, happy now in the world’s favour; she, going to the grave in sorrow, it might be in privation—what could he do to help her?

There are moments when we speak out of our true heart, when the conventionality that surrounds the best of us is thrown aside, all deceit, all form forgotten. Lord Averil was a good and true man, but never better, never truer than now, when he took a step forward and bent to Maria.

“Let me have the satisfaction of doing something for you; let me try to save you!” he implored in low earnest tones. “If that may not be, let me help to lighten your remaining hours. How can I best do it?”

She held out her hand to him: she looked up at him, the gratitude she could not speak shining from her sweet eyes. “Indeed there is nothing now, Lord Averil. I wish I could thank you as you deserve for the past.”

He held her hand for some time, but she seemed weak, exhausted, and he said good night. Margery attended him to the outer gate, in spite of his desire that she should not do so, for the night air was cold and seemed to threaten snow.

“Your mistress is very ill, Margery,” he gravely said. “She seems to be in danger.”

“I’m afraid she is, my lord. Up to the last day or two I thought she might take a turn and get over it; but since then she has grown worse with every hour. Some folks can battle out things, and some folks can’t; she’s one of the last sort, and she has been tried in all ways.”

Lord Averil dropped the letter into the post-office, looking mechanically at its superscription, George Godolphin, Esquire. But that he was preoccupied with his own thoughts, he might have seen by the very writing how weak she was, for it was scarcely recognizable as hers. Very, very ill she looked, as if the end were growing ominously near; and Lord Averil did not altogether like the tardy summons which the letter would convey. A night and a day yet before George could receive it. A moment’s communing with himself, and then he took the path to the telegraph office, and sent off a message:

“Viscount Averil to George Godolphin, Esquire.
“Your wife is very ill. Come down by first train.”

The snow came early. It was nothing like Christmas yet, and here was the ground covered with it. The skies had seemed to threaten it the previous night, but people were not prepared to find everything wearing a white aspect when they rose in the morning.

The Reverend Mr. Hastings was ill. A neglected cold was telling so greatly upon him that his daughter Rose had at length sent for Mr. Snow. Mrs. Hastings was away for a day or two, on a visit to some friends at a distance.

Mr. Hastings sat over the fire, dreamily watching David Jekyl, awaiting the visit of Mr. Snow, and thinking his own thoughts. David was busy in the garden. He had a bit of crape on his old felt hat for his recently-interred father. The crape led the Rector’s thoughts to the old man, and thence to the deprivation brought to the old man’s years, the loss to the sons, through George Godolphin. How many more, besides poor old Jekyl, had George Godolphin ruined! himself, that reverend divine, amongst the rest!

“A good thing when the country shall be rid of him!” spoke the Rector in his bitterness. “I would give all the comfort left in my life that Maria, for her own sake, had not linked her fate with his! But that can’t be remedied now. I hope he will make her happier there, in her new home, than he has made her here!”

By which words you will gather that Mr. Hastings had no suspicion of the change in his daughter’s state. It was so. Lord and Lady Averil were not alone in learning the tidings suddenly; at, as it may be said, the eleventh hour. Maria had not sent word to the Rectory that she was worse. She knew that her mother was absent, that her father was ill, that Rose was occupied; and that the change from bad to worse had come upon herself so imperceptibly, that she saw not its real danger—as was proved by her not writing to her husband. The Rector, as he sits there, has his mind full of Maria’s voyage, and its discomfort: of her changed life in India: and he is saying to himself that he shall get out in the afternoon and call to see her.

The room faced the side of the house, but as Mr. Hastings sat he could catch a glimpse of the garden gate, and presently saw the well-known gig stop at it, and the surgeon descend.

“Well, and who’s ill now?” cried Mr. Snow, as he let himself in at the hall-door, and thence to the room, where he took a seat in front of the Rector, examined his ailment, and gossiped at the same time, as was his wont; gossiped and grumbled.

“Ah, yes; just so: feel worse than you have felt for twenty years. You caught this cold at Thomas Godolphin’s funeral, and you have not chosen to pay attention to it.”

“I think I did. I felt it coming on the next day. I could not read the service in my hat, Snow, over him, and you know that rain was falling. Ah! There was a sufferer! But had it not been for the calamity that fell upon him, he might not have gone to the grave quite so soon.”

“He felt it too keenly,” remarked Mr. Snow. “And your daughter—there’s another sad victim. Ah me! Sometimes I wish I had never been a doctor, when I find all that I can do in the way of treatment comes to nothing.”

“If she can only get well through the fatigues of the voyage, she may be better in India. Don’t you think so? The very change from this place will put new life into her.”

Mr. Snow paused in surprise, and the truth flashed into his mind—that Mr. Hastings was as yet in ignorance of Maria’s danger: flashed with pain. Of course it was his duty to enlighten him, and he would rather have been spared the task. “When did you see her last?” he inquired.

“The day Mrs. Hastings left. I have not been well enough to go out much since. And I dare say Maria has been busy.”

“I am sorry then to have to tell you that she has not been busy; that she has not been well enough to be busy. She is much worse.”

There was a significance in the tone that spoke to the father more effectually than any words could have done. He was silent for a full minute, and then he rose from his chair and walked once up and down the room before he turned to Mr. Snow.

“The full truth, Snow? Tell it me.”

“Well—the truth is, that hope is over. That she will not very long be here. I had no suspicion that you knew it not.”

“I knew nothing of it. When I and her mother were with her last: it was, I tell you, the day Mrs. Hastings left: Maria was talking of going back to London with her husband the next time he came down to Prior’s Ash. I thought her looking better that morning; she had quite a colour; was in good spirits. When did you see her?”

“Now. I went up there before I came down to you. She grows worse and worse every hour. Lord Averil telegraphed for George Godolphin last night.”

“And I have not been informed of this!” burst forth the Rector. “My daughter dying—for I infer no less—and I to be left in ignorance of the truth!”

“Understand one thing, Mr. Hastings—that until this morning we saw no fear of immediate danger. Lord Averil says he suspected it last night; I did not see her yesterday in the after-part of the day. I have known some few cases precisely similar to Mrs. George Godolphin’s; where danger and death seem to have come on suddenly together.”

“And what is her disease?”

The surgeon threw up his arms. “I don’t know—unless the trouble has fretted her into her grave. Were I not a doctor, I might say she had died of a broken heart, but the faculty don’t recognize such a thing.”

Half an hour afterwards, the Reverend Mr. Hastings was bending over his daughter’s dying bed. A dying bed, it too surely looked; and if Mr. Hastings had indulged a gleam of hope, the first glance at Maria’s countenance dispelled it. She lay wrapped in a shawl, the lace border of her nightcap shading her delicate face and its smooth brown hair, her eyes larger and softer and sweeter than of yore.

They were alone together. He held her hand in his, he gently laid his other hand on her white and wasted brow. “Child! child! why did you not send to me?”

“I did not know I was so ill, papa,” she panted. “I seem to have grown so much worse this last night. But I am better than I was an hour ago.”

“Maria,” he gravely said, “are you aware that you are in a state of danger?—that death may come to you.”

“Yes, papa, I know it. I have seen it coming a long while: only I was not quite sure.”

“And my dear child, are you——” Mr. Hastings paused. He paused and bit his lips, gathering firmness to suppress the emotion that was rising. His calling made him familiar with death-bed scenes; but Maria was his own child, and nature will assert her supremacy. A minute or two and he was himself again: not a man living was more given to reticence in the matter of his own feelings than the Rector of All Souls’: he could not bear to betray emotion in the sight of his fellow-men.

“Are you prepared for death, Maria? Can you look upon it without terror?”

“I think I am,” she murmured. “I feel that I am going to God. Oh, papa, forgive, forgive me!” she exclaimed, bursting into tears of emotion, as she raised her hands to him in the moment’s excitement. “The trouble has been too much for me; I could not shake it off. All the sorrow that has been brought upon you through us, I think of it always: my heart aches with thinking of it. Oh, papa, forgive me before I die! It was not my fault; indeed, I did not know of it. Papa”—and the sobs became painfully hysterical, and Mr. Hastings strove in vain to check them—“I would have sacrificed my life to bring good to you and my dear mamma: I would have sold myself, to keep this ill from you!”

“Child, hush! There has been nothing to forgive to you. In the first moment of the smart, if I cast an unkind thought to you, it did not last; it was gone almost as soon as it came. My dear child, you have ever been my loving and dutiful daughter. Maria, shall I tell it you?—I know not why, but I have loved you better than any of my other children.”

She had raised herself from the pillow, and was clasping his hand to her bosom, sobbing over it. Few daughters have loved a father as Maria had loved and venerated hers. The Rector’s face was preternaturally pale and calm, the effect of his powerfully suppressed emotion.

“It has been too much for me, papa. I have thought of your trouble, of the discomforts of your home, of the blighted prospects of my brothers, feeling that it was our work. I thought of it always, more perhaps than of other things: and I could not battle with the pain it brought, and it has killed me. But, papa, I am resigned to go: I know that I shall be better off. Before these troubles came, I had not learned to think of God, and I should have been afraid to die.”

“It is through tribulation that we must enter the Kingdom,” interrupted the calm, earnest voice of the clergyman. “It must come to us here in some shape or other, my child; and I do not see that it matters how, or when, or through whom it does come, if it takes us to a better world. You have had your share of it: but God is a just and merciful Judge, and if He has given you a full share of sorrow, He will deal out to you His full recompense.”

“Yes,” she gently said, “I am going to God. Will you pray for me, papa?—that He will pardon me and take me for Christ’s sake. Oh, papa! it seems—it seems when we get near death as if the other world were so very near to this! It seems such a little span of time that I shall have to wait for you all before you come to me. Will you give my dear love to mamma if I should not live to see her, and say how I have loved her: say that I have only gone on first; that I shall be there ready for her. Papa, I dare say God will let me be ever waiting and looking for you.”

Mr. Hastings turned to search for a Book of Common Prayer. He saw Maria’s on her dressing-table—one which he had given her on her marriage, and written her name in—and he opened it at the “Visitation of the Sick.” He looked searchingly at her face as he returned: surely the signs of death were already gathering there!

“The last Sacrament, Maria?” he whispered. “When shall I come?”

“This evening,” she answered. “George will be here then.”

The Reverend Mr Hastings bent his eyebrows with a frown, as if he thought—— But no matter. “At eight o’clock, then,” he said to Maria, as he laid the book upon the bed and knelt down before it. Maria lay back on her pillow, and clasping her hands upon the shawl which covered her bosom, closed her eyes to listen.

It was strange that even then, as he was in the very act of kneeling, certain words which he had spoken to Maria years ago, should flash vividly into the Rector’s mind—words which had referred to the death of Ethel Grame.

“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 carking cares, wails out a vain wish that he had been taken from the evil to come.”

Had the gift of prevision been on the Rector of All Souls’ when he spoke those words to Maria Hastings? Poor child! lying there now on her early death-bed; with her broken heart! The world’s carking cares had surely done their work on Maria Godolphin!

CHAPTER VI.
A CROWD OF MEMORIES.

If it were not for mismanagement, how smoothly things might go on! That telegraphic despatch which Lord Averil had deemed it well to send, and which had not been sent any too soon, did not reach George Godolphin for hours and hours, through mismanagement at his lodgings.

It was afternoon when he reached Prior’s Ash. The first person he saw at the station was Lord Averil. That nobleman, wondering at George’s non-appearance, believing that Maria was getting nearer to death with every hour, had come to the conclusion that by some mischance his message had miscarried; and he had now gone to the station to send another. Lord Averil linked his arm within George’s, and they walked rapidly away through the snow that lay on the path.

Yes, he linked his arm within George Godolphin’s who had so very nearly been held up to the virtuous British public as a candidate for a free passage to Australia. Somehow, George had slipped through that danger, and was a gentleman still: moreover, he was Lord Averil’s brother-in-law, and it was the earnest wish of that nobleman that society should forget the little mistake in George’s life as heartily as he did. He explained as he walked along: Maria had got rapidly worse all at once: it was only within a few hours that immediate danger had shown itself.

George could not understand it. He had left his wife, ill certainly, but not, as he believed, seriously so; he had supposed her to be busy in preparations for the voyage: and now to be told that she was dying! If this was so, why had Maria not sent for him before?

Lord Averil explained. No one seemed to have known of the danger.

“Snow must have known it,” remonstrated George.

“I think not. I was talking to him to-day, and he expressed his surprise at the disorder having suddenly increased in this rapid manner.”

“What is the disorder?” asked George. “My wife had no disorder—except weakness.”

“I suppose that is it—weakness.”

“But weakness does not kill!”

“Yes, it does, sometimes.”

Margery was standing at the door when they reached the gate, possibly looking out for her master, for she knew the hours of the arrival of the trains. The windows of the sitting-room faced that way, and George’s eyes naturally turned to them. But there was no sign of busy life, of every-day occupation: the curtains hung in their undisturbed folds, the blinds were partially down.

“I will just ask how your wife is now, and whether Cecil is here,” said Lord Averil, following George up the path.

No, Lady Averil and Miss Bessy Godolphin had left about ten minutes before, Margery said. My Lady Godolphin, who had driven up in her carriage and come in for a quarter of an hour, had left; and Miss Rose Hastings, who had been there the best part of the morning, had also left. Mrs. George Godolphin seemed a trifle better; inclined to sleep, tired out, as it were; and she, Margery, didn’t wonder at it with such a heap of visitors: she had given them a broad hint herself that her mistress might be all the better for an hour’s quiet.

Lord Averil departed. George flung his railway wrapper on to a chair and hung his hat up in the little hall: he turned his face, one of severity then, on Margery.

“Is your mistress so very ill? Why was I not sent for earlier? Is she so very ill?” he continued in an impassioned tone.

“Well, sir, I don’t know,” answered Margery, willing perhaps to soften the truth to him. “She is certainly better than she was in the morning. She is sitting up.”

George Godolphin was of a hopeful nature. Even those few words seemed to speak to his heart with a certainty. “Not there, sir,” interposed Margery, as he opened the door of the sitting-room. “But it don’t matter,” she added: “you can go in that way.”

He walked through the room and opened the door of the bedchamber. Would the scene ever leave his memory? The room was lighted more by the blaze of the fire than by the daylight, for curtains partly covered the windows and the winter’s dreary afternoon was already merging into twilight. The bed was at the far end of the room, the dressing-table near it. The fire was on his right as he entered, and on a white-covered sofa, drawn before it, sat Maria. She was partly dressed and wrapped in a light cashmere shawl; her cap was untied, and her face, shaded though it was by its smooth brown hair, was all too visible in the reflection cast by the firelight.

Which was the more colourless—that face, or the white cover of the sofa? George Godolphin’s heart stood still as he looked upon it and then bounded on with a rush. Every shadow of hope had gone from him.

Maria had not heard him, did not see him; he went in gently. By her side on the sofa lay Miss Meta, curled up into a ball and fast asleep, her hands and her golden curls on her mamma’s knee. With George’s first step forward, Maria turned her sad sweet eyes towards him, and a faint cry of emotion escaped her lips.

Before she could stir or speak, George was with her, his protecting arms thrown round her, her face gathered to his breast. What a contrast it was! she so wan and fragile, so near the grave, he in all his manly strength, his fresh beauty. Miss Meta woke up, recognized her papa with a cry and much commotion, but Margery came in and carried her off, shutting the door behind her.

Her fair young face—too fair and young to die—was laid against her husband’s; her feeble hand lay carelessly in his. The shock to George was very great; it almost seemed that he had already lost her; and the scalding tears, so rarely wrung from man, coursed down his cheeks, and fell on her face.

“Don’t grieve,” she whispered, the tears raining from her own eyes.

“Oh, George, my husband, it is a bitter thing to part, but we shall meet again in heaven, and be together for ever. It has been so weary here; the troubles have been so great!”

He steadied his voice to speak. “The troubles have not killed you, have they, Maria?”

“Yes, I suppose it has been so. I did try and struggle against them, but—I don’t know—— Oh, George!” she broke out in a wailing tone of pain, “if I could have but got over them and lived!—if I could only have gone with you to your new home!”

George sat down on the sofa where Meta had been, and held her to him in silence. She could hear his heart beating; could feel it bounding against her side.

“It will be a better home in heaven,” she resumed, laying her poor pale face upon his shoulder. “You will come to me there, George; I shall only go on first a little while; all the pains and the cares, the heart-burnings of earth will be forgotten, and we shall be together in happiness for ever and ever.”

He dropped his face upon her neck, he sobbed aloud in his anguish. Whatever may have been his gracelessness and his faults, he had loved his wife; and now that he was losing her, that love was greater than it had ever been: some pricks of conscience may have been mingled with it, too! Who knows?

“Don’t forget me quite when I am gone, George. Think of me sometimes as your poor wife who loved you to the last; who would have stayed with you if God had let her. When first I began to see that it must be, that I should leave you and Meta, my heart nearly broke; but the pain has grown less, and I think God has been reconciling me to it.”

“What shall I do?—what will the child do without you?” broke from his quivering lips.

Perhaps the thought crossed Maria that he had done very well without her in the last few months, for his sojourn with her might be counted by hours instead of by days: but she was too generous to allude to it; and the heart-aching had passed. “Cecil and Lord Averil will take Meta,” she said. “Let her stay with them, George! It would not be well for her to go to India alone with you.”

The words surprised him. He did not speak.

“Cecil proposed it yesterday. They will be glad to have her. I dare say Lord Averil will speak to you about it later. It was the one great weight left upon my mind, George—our poor child, and what could be done with her: Cecil’s generous proposal removed it.”

“Yes,” said George hesitatingly. “For a little while; perhaps it will be the best thing. Until I shall get settled in India. But she must come to me then; I cannot part with her for good.”

“For good? No. But, George, you may—it is possible—” she seemed to stammer and hesitate—“you may be forming new ties. In that case you would care less for the loss of Meta——”

“Don’t talk so!” he passionately interrupted. “How can you glance at such things, Maria, in these our last moments?”

She was silent for a few minutes, weeping softly. “Had this parting come upon me as suddenly as it has upon you, I might have started from the very thought with horror; but, George, I have had nothing else in my own mind for weeks but the parting, and it has made me look at the future as I could not else have looked at it. Do not blame me for saying this. I must allude to it, if I am to speak of Meta. I can understand how full of aversion the thought is to you now: but, George, it may come to pass.”

“I think not,” he said, and his voice and manner had changed to grave deliberation. “If I know anything of myself, Maria, I shall never marry again.”

“It is not impossible.”

“No,” he assented; “it is not impossible.”

Her heart beat a shade quicker, and she hid her face upon him so that he could not see it. When she spoke again, it was with difficulty he could catch the whispered words.

“I know how foolish and wrong it is for a dying wife to extract any promise of this nature from her husband: were I to say to you, Do not marry again, it would be little else than a wicked request; and it would prove how my thoughts and passions must still cling to earth. Bear with me while I speak of this, George, I am not going to be so wicked; but—but——”

Agitation stopped her voice. Her bosom heaved, her breath almost left her. He saw that this was mental emotion, not bodily weakness; and he waited until it should pass, stroking the hair from her brow with his gentle hand.

“My darling, what is it?”

“But there is one promise that I do wish to beg of you,” she resumed, mastering her emotion sufficiently to speak. “If—if you should marry, and your choice falls upon one—upon her—then, in that case, do not seek to have Meta home; let her remain always with Cecil.”

A pause, broken by George. “Of whom do you speak, Maria?”

The same laboured breathing; the same cruel agitation; and they had to be fought with before she could bring out the words.

“Of Charlotte Pain.”

“Charlotte Pain!” echoed George, shouting out the name in surprise.

“I could not bear it,” she shivered. “George, George! do not make her the second mother of my child! I could not bear it; it seems to me that I could not even in my grave bear it! Should you marry her, promise me that Meta shall not be removed from Ashlydyat.”

“Maria,” he quietly said, “I shall never marry Charlotte Pain.”

“You don’t know. You may think now you will not, but you cannot answer for yourself. George! she has helped to kill me. She must not be Meta’s second mother.”

He raised her face so that he could see it, his dark blue eyes met hers searchingly, and he took her hand in his as he gravely spoke.

“She will never be Meta’s second mother: nay, if it will be more satisfactory, I will say she never shall be. By the heaven that perhaps even I may some day attain to, I say it! Charlotte Pain will never be Meta’s second mother, or my wife.”

She did not answer in words. She only nestled a little nearer to him in gratitude; half in repentance perhaps for having doubted him. George resumed, in the same grave tone:

“And now, Maria, tell me what you mean by saying that Charlotte Pain has helped to kill you.”

A vivid flush came over her wan face, and she contrived to turn it from him again, so that her eyes were hidden. But she did not speak quite at first.

“It all came upon me together, George,” she murmured at length, her tone one of loving-tenderness, in token that she was not angry now; that the past, whatever may have been its sins against her, any or none, was forgiven. “At that cruel time when the blow fell, when I had nowhere to turn to for comfort, then I also learnt what Prior’s Ash had been saying, about—about Charlotte Pain. George, it seemed to wither my very heart; to take the life out of it. I had so loved you; I had so trusted you: and to find—to find—that you loved her, not me——”

“Hush!” thundered George, in his emotion. “I never loved any one but you, Maria. I swear it!”

“Well—well. It seems that I do not understand. I—I could not get over it,” she continued, passing her hand across her brow where the old aching pain had come momentarily again, “and I fear it has helped to kill me. It was so cruel, to have suffered me to know her all the while.”

George Godolphin compressed his lips. He never spoke.

“But, George, it is over; it is buried in the past; and I did not intend to mention it. I should not have mentioned it but for speaking of Meta. Oh, let it go, let it pass, it need not disturb our last hour together.”

“It appears to have disturbed you a great deal more than it need have done,” he said, a shade of anger in his tone.

“Yes, looking back, I see it did. When we come to the closing scenes of life, as I have come, this world closing to our view, the next opening, then we see how foolish in many things we have been; how worse than vain our poor earthly passions. So to have fretted ourselves over this little space of existence with its passing follies, its temporary interests, when we might have been living and looking for that great one that shall last for ever! To gaze back on my life it seems but a span; a passing hour compared with the eternity that I am entering upon. Oh, George, we have all need of God’s loving forgiveness! I, as well as you. I did not mean to reproach you: but I could not bear—had you made her your second wife—that she should have had the training of Meta.”

Did George Godolphin doubt whether the fear was wholly erased from her heart? Perhaps so: or he might not have spoken to her as he was about to speak.

“Let me set your mind further at rest, Maria. Had I ever so great an inclination to marry Mrs. Pain, it is impossible that I could do so. Mrs. Pain has a husband already.”

Maria raised her face, a flashing light, as of joy, illuminating it. George saw it: and a sad, dreamy look of self-condemnation settled on his own. Had it so stabbed her? “Has she married again?—since she left Prior’s Ash?”

“She has never been a widow, Maria,” he answered. “Rodolf Pain, her husband, did not die.”

“He did not die?”

“As it appears. He is now back again in England.”

“And did you know of this?”

“Only since his return. I supposed her to be a widow, as every one else supposed it. One night last summer, in quitting Ashlydyat, I came upon them both in the grounds, Mr. and Mrs. Pain; and I then learned to my great surprise that he, whom his wife had passed off as dead, had in point of fact been hiding abroad. There is some unpleasant mystery attached to it, the details of which I have not concerned myself to inquire into: he fell into trouble, I expect, and feared his own country was too hot for him. However it may have been, he is home again, and with her. I suppose the danger is removed, for I met them together in Piccadilly last week walking openly, and they told me they were looking out for a house.”

She breathed a sobbing sigh of relief, as one hears sometimes from a little child.

“But were Mrs. Pain the widow she assumed to be, she would never have been made my wife. Child!” he added, in momentary irritation, “don’t you understand things better? She my wife!—the second mother, the trainer of Meta! What could you be thinking of? Men do not marry women such as Charlotte Pain.”

“Then you do not care for her so very much?”

“I care for her so much, Maria, that were I never to see her or hear of her again it would not give me one moment’s thought,” he impulsively cried. “I would give a great deal now not to have kept up our acquaintance with the woman—if that had saved you one single iota of pain.”

When these earthly scenes are closing—when the grave is about to set its seal on one to whom we could have saved pain, and did not,—when heaven’s solemn approach is to be seen, and heaven’s purity has become all too clear to our own sight, what would we give to change inflicted wrongs—to blot out the hideous past! George Godolphin sat by the side of his dying wife, his best-beloved in life as she would be in death, and bit his lips in his crowd of memories, his unavailing repentance. Ah, my friends! these moments of reprisal, prolonged as they may seem, must come to us in the end. It is convenient no doubt to ignore them in our hot-blooded carelessness, but the time will come when they must find us out.

He, George Godolphin, had leisure to hug them to himself, and make the best and the worst of them. Maria, exhausted with excitement, as much as by her own weakness, closed her eyes as she lay upon his breast and dropped into a sleep, and he sat watching her face, holding her to him, not daring to move, lest he should disturb her, not daring even to lift a finger and wipe off his own bitter and unavailing tears.

Yes, there could be no doubt of the fact—that the troubles of one kind and another had been too much for her; that she was dying of them; and he felt the truth to his heart’s core. He felt that she, that delicate, refined, sensitive woman had been the very last who should have been treated rudely. You may remember it was observed at the beginning of her history that she was one unfitted to battle with the world’s sharp storms—it had now proved so. Charlotte Pain would have braved them, whatever their nature, have weathered them jauntily on a prancing saddle-horse; Maria had shrunk down, crushed by their weight. Il y a—let me once more repeat it—il y a des femmes et des femmes.

There came one with hurried steps up the path; with hurried steps and a distressed, anxious countenance. Passing Margery in the passage, she bore on as if no power on earth should stop her, and entered the sick-chamber.

It was Grace: Mrs. Akeman. This sudden change in the illness of Maria had certainly come at an inopportune moment: Mrs. Hastings was at a distance, Grace had gone for the day with her husband some miles into the country. A messenger was sent to her, and it brought her home.

It brought her home with a self-condemning conscience. Maria dying!—when Grace had only thought of her as flaunting off to India; when she had that very day remarked to her husband, as they drove along the snowy road in his four-wheeled chaise, crammed with architectural plans, that some people had all the luck of it in this world, and that Mr. and Mrs. George Godolphin, she supposed, would soon be swaying it in the Bengal presidency, as they had swayed it in Prior’s Ash. Maria dying! dying of the trouble, the sorrow, the disgrace, the humiliation, the neglect! dying of a broken heart! It came flashing into Grace Akeman’s mind that she might have taken a different view of her conduct: have believed in the wrongs of wives, who are bound to their husbands for worse as well as for better; it came into her mind that she might have accorded her a little sisterly sympathy instead of reproach.

She came in now, brimming over with repentance: she came in with a sort of belief that things could not have gone so very far; that there must be some remedy still, some hope; and that if she, Grace, exerted her energies to rouse Maria, health and life would come again. Maria had awakened out of her temporary slumber then, and George was standing with his arm on the mantel-piece. A half-frown crossed his brow when he saw Grace enter. He had never liked her; he was conscious that she had not been kind to Maria, and he deemed her severe manner and sharp voice scarcely suited to that dying chamber. But she was his wife’s sister, and he advanced to welcome her.

Grace did not see his welcome; would not see it. Perhaps in truth she was wholly absorbed by the sight which met her view in Maria. Remedy still?—hope yet? Ah no! death was there, was upon her, and Grace burst into tears. Maria held out her hand, a smile lighting up her wan countenance.

“I thought you were not coming to see me, Grace.”

“I was out; I went to Hamlet’s Wood this morning with Mr. Akeman,” sobbed Grace. “Whatever is the reason that you have suddenly grown so ill as this?”

“I have been growing ill a long time,” was Maria’s answer.

“But there must be hope!” said Grace in her quick way. “Mr. George Godolphin”—turning to him and dashing away the tears on her cheeks, as if she would not betray them to him—“surely there must be hope! What do the medical men say?”

“There is no hope, Grace,” interposed Maria in her feeble voice. “The medical men know there is not. Dr. Beale came with Mr. Snow at midday; but their coming at all is a mere form now.”

Grace untied her bonnet and sat down. “I thought,” said she, “you were getting well.”

Maria made a slight motion of dissent. “I have not thought it myself; not really thought it. I hoped it might be so, and the hope prevented my speaking: but there was always an undercurrent of conviction to the contrary in my heart.”

George looked at her, half-reproachfully. She understood the look, and answered it.

“I wish now I had told you, George: but I was not sure. And if I had spoken you would only have laughed at me then in disbelief.”

“You speak very calmly, Maria,” said Grace with passionate earnestness. “Have you no regret at leaving us?”

A faint hectic shone suddenly in Maria’s cheek. “Regret!” she repeated with emotion; “my days have been one long regret; one long, wearying pain. Don’t you see it is the pain that has killed me, Grace?”

Grace’s temper was sharp: her sense of right and wrong cynically keen: the Rector had had the same sharp temper in his youth, but he had learned to control it; Grace had not. She turned her flashing eyes, her flaming cheeks, on George Godolphin.

“Do you hear?—the pain has killed her. Who brought that pain upon her? Mr. George Godolphin, I wish you joy of your conscience! I almost seemed to foresee it—I almost seemed to foresee this,” she passionately cried, “ere ever my sister married you.”

“Don’t, Grace!” wailed Maria, a faint cry of fear escaping her; a sudden terror taking possession of her raised face. “George, George!” She held out her hands yearningly to him, as if she would shield him, or as if she wanted him to shield her from the sharp words. George crossed over to her with his protecting presence, and bent to catch her whisper, praying him for peace.

“You forget your sister’s state when you thus speak, Mrs. Akeman,” he gravely said. “Say anything you please to me later; you shall have the opportunity if you desire it; but in my wife’s presence there must be peace.”

Grace flung off the shawl which she had worn, and stood beating the toe of her foot upon the fender, her throat swelling with the effort to subdue her emotion. What with her anger in the past, her grief in the present, she had well-nigh burst into sobs.

“I think I could drink some tea,” said Maria. “Could we not have it together; here; for the last time? You will make it, Grace?”

Poor, weak, timid heart! Perhaps she only so spoke as an incentive to keep that “peace” for which she tremblingly yearned; which was essential to her, as to all, in her dying hour. George rang the bell and Margery came in.

It was done as she seemed to wish. The small round table was drawn to the fire, and Grace sat at it, making the tea. Maria turned her face and asked for Meta: Margery answered that she was coming in by-and-by. Very little was said. George drew a chair near Maria and leaned upon the arm of the sofa. The tea, so far as she went, was a mockery: George put a teaspoonful into her mouth, but she with difficulty swallowed it, and shook her head when he would have given her more. It did not seem to be much else than a mockery for the others: Grace’s tears dropped into hers, and George suffered his to grow cold and then swallowed it at a draught, as if it was a relief to get rid of it. Margery was called again to take the things away, and Maria, who was leaning back on the sofa with closed eyes, asked again for Meta to come in.

Then Margery had to confess that Miss Meta was not at home to come in. She had gone out visiting. The facts of the case were these. Lord Averil, after quitting the house, had returned to it to say a word to George which he had forgotten: but finding George had gone into his wife’s room, he would not have him disturbed. It was just at the moment that Margery had carried out Meta, and the young lady was rather restive at the proceedings, crying loudly. His lordship proposed to carry her off to Ashlydyat. Margery seized upon the offer. She took down a woollen shawl and the child’s garden-hat that were hanging on the pegs, and enveloped her in them without ceremony. “They’ll do as well as getting out her best things, my lord, if you won’t mind them: and it will be almost dusk by the time you get to Ashlydyat.”

It was quite the same to Lord Averil, whether the young lady was bundled up as she was now, or decked out in a lace frock and crinoline. He led her down the path, talking pleasantly; but Meta’s breath was caught up incessantly with sobbing sighs. Her heart was full, imperfect as her idea of the calamity overshadowing her necessarily was.

Thus it happened that Miss Meta was not at hand when Maria asked for her. Whether it was from this, or from causes wholly unconnected with it, in a short time Maria grew restless: restless, as it seemed, both in body and mind, and it was deemed advisable that she should not sit up longer.

“Go for Meta while they get me into bed, George,” she said to him. “I want her to be near me.”

He went out at once. But he did not immediately turn to Ashlydyat: with hasty steps he took the road to Mr. Snow’s. There had been a yearning on George Godolphin’s mind, ever since he first saw his wife in the afternoon, to put the anxious question to one or both of the medical men: “Can nothing be done to prolong her life, even for the shortest space of time?”

Mr. Snow was out: the surgery boy did not know where: “Paying visits,” he supposed, and George turned his steps to Dr. Beale’s, who lived now in Prior’s Ash, though he used not to live in it. Dr. Beale’s house was ablaze with light, and Dr. Beale was at home, the servant said, but he had a dinner-party.

How the words seemed to grate on his ear! A dinner-party!—gaiety, lights, noise, mirth, eating and drinking, when his wife was dying! But the next moment reflection came to him: the approaching death of a patient is not wont to cast its influence on a physician’s private life.

He demanded to see Dr. Beale in spite of the dinner-party. George Godolphin forgot recent occurrences, exacting still the deference paid to him all his life, when Prior’s Ash had bowed down to the Godolphins. He was shown into a room, and Dr. Beale came out to him.

But the doctor, though he would willingly have smoothed matters to him, could not give him hope. George asked for the truth, and he had it—that his wife’s life now might be counted by hours. He went out and proceeded towards Ashlydyat, taking the near way down Crosse Street, by the Bank—the Bank that once was: it would lead him through the dull Ash-tree Walk with its ghostly story; but what cared George Godolphin?

Did a remembrance of the past come over him as he glanced up at the Bank’s well-known windows?—a remembrance that pricked him with its sharp sting? He need never have left that house; but for his own recklessness, folly, wickedness—call it what you will—he might have been in it still, one of the honoured Godolphins, heir to Ashlydyat, his wife well and happy by his side. Now!—he went striding on with wide steps, and he took off his hat and raised his burning brow to the keen night air. You may leave the house behind you, George Godolphin, and so put it out of your sight, but you cannot blot out your memory.

Grace had remained with Maria. She was in bed now, but the restlessness seemed to continue. “I want Meta; bring Meta.”

“Dear Maria, your husband has but just gone for her,” breathed Grace. “She will soon be here.”

It seemed to satisfy her. She lay still, looking upwards, her breath, or Mrs. Akeman fancied it, growing shorter. Grace, hot tears blinding her eyes, bent forward to kiss her wasted cheek.

“Maria, I was very harsh to you,” she whispered. “I feel it now. I can only pray God to forgive me. I loved you always, and when that dreadful trouble came, I felt angry for your sake. I said unkind things to you and of you, but in the depth of my heart there lay the pain and the anger because you suffered. Will you forgive me?”

She raised her feeble hand and laid it lovingly on the cheek of Grace. “There is nothing to forgive, Grace,” she murmured. “What are our poor little offences one against the other? Think how much Heaven has to forgive us all. Oh, Grace, I am going to it! I am going away from care.”

Grace stood up to dash away her tears; but they came faster and faster. “I would ask you to let me atone to you, Maria,” she sobbed—“I would ask you to let me welcome Meta to our home. We are not rich, but we have enough for comfort, and I will try to bring her up a good woman; I will love her as my own child.”

“She goes to Cecil.” There was no attempt at thanks in words—Maria was growing beyond it; nothing but the fresh touch of the hand’s loving pressure. And that relaxed with the next moment and fell upon the bed.

Grace felt somewhat alarmed. She cleared the mist from her eyes and bent them steadily on Maria’s face. It seemed to have changed. “Do you feel worse?” she softly asked.

Maria opened her lips, but no sound came from them. She attempted to point with her finger to the door; she then threw her eyes in the same direction; but why or what she wanted it was impossible to tell. Grace, her heart beating wildly, flew across the little hall to the kitchen.

“Oh, Margery, I think she is sinking! Come you and see.”

Margery hastened in. Her mistress evidently was sinking, and was conscious of it. The eager, anxious look upon her face and her raised hand proved that she was wanting something.

“Is it my master?—Is it the child?” cried Margery, bending over her. “They won’t be long, ma’am.”

It was Margery’s habit to soothe the dying, even if she had to do it at some little expense of veracity. She knew that her master could not go to Ashlydyat and be home just yet: she did not know of his visits to the houses of the doctors: but if she had known it she would equally have said, “They won’t be long.”

But the eager look continued on Maria’s face, and it became evident to experienced Margery that her master and Meta were not the anxious point. Maria’s lips moved, and Margery bent her ear.

“Papa! Is it time?”

“It’s the Sacrament she’s thinking of,” whispered Margery to Mrs. Akeman: “or else that she wants to take leave of him. The Rector was to come at eight o’clock; he told me so when he called in again this afternoon. What is to be done, ma’am?”

“And it is only half-past six! We must send to him at once.”

Margery seemed in some uncertainty. “Shall you be afraid to stay here alone, ma’am, if I go?”

“Why! where is Jean?”

Jean, one of the old servants of Ashlydyat, discharged with the rest when the bankruptcy had come, but now in service there again under Lord and Lady Averil, had been with Margery all day. She had now been sent out by the latter for certain errands wanted in the town.

A tremor came over Mrs. Akeman at Margery’s question, as to whether she would be afraid to stay there alone. To one not accustomed to it, it does require peculiar courage to remain with the dying. But Grace could call up a brave spirit at will, and she no longer hesitated, when she saw the continued eager look on her sister’s face.

“Make haste, Margery. I shall not mind. Mrs. James is in the house, and I can call her if I see a necessity for doing so. Margery!”—following her outside the door to whisper it—“do you see that strange look in her face? Is it death?”

She was trembling all over, as she spoke, in nervous trepidation. It was to be a memorable night, that, what with one emotion and another, in the memory of Grace Akeman. Margery’s answer was characteristic. “It does look like it, ma’am; but I have seen them like this, and then rally again. Anyhow, it can’t be far off. Mrs. Akeman, it seems to me that all the good ones are leaving the world. First Mr. Godolphin, and now her!”

Margery had scarcely been gone five minutes when Lord Averil came back with Meta. They had not met George. It was not likely that they had, seeing that he was going to Ashlydyat by a different route. In point of fact, at that moment George was about turning into Crosse Street, passing his old house with those enlivening reminiscences of his. Grace explained why she was alone, and Lord Averil took off his hat and great-coat to remain.

Maria asked for him. He went up to the bed and she smiled at him and moved her hand. Lord Averil took it between his, the tears gathering in his earnest eyes as he saw the change in her.

“She has been as happy as possible with us all the evening,” he gently said, alluding to the child. “We will do all we can for her always.”

“Tell Cecil—to bring—her up—for God.”

She must have revived a little or she could not have spoken the words. By-and-by, Margery was heard to enter, panting with the speed she had made, and Mr. Hastings was not far behind.

As the clergyman approached the gate, he saw a man leaning over it, in the light cast by the white snow of the winter’s night. It was David Jekyl.

“I thought I’d ask how the young missis was, sir, as I went home, but it might be disturbing of ’em to go right up to the door,” he said, drawing back to make way for the Rector. “It were said in the town, as I come along, that she was worse.”

“Yes, David, she is worse; as ill as she can be. I have just had a message.”

David twirled his grey felt hat awkwardly round on his hand, stroking its napless surface with his other arm. He did not raise his eyes as he spoke to the Rector.

“Might be, you’d just say a word to her about that money, sir, asking of her not to let it worry her mind. It is said as them things have worried her more nor need be. If you could say a word for us, sir, that we don’t think of it any more, it might comfort her like.”

“The trouble for her has passed, David: to say this to her might bring her thoughts back to it. Heaven is opening to her, earth is closing. Thank you for your thoughtfulness.”

The Reverend Mr. Hastings continued his way slowly up the path, whence the snow had been swept away. Illness was upon him, and he could not walk quickly. It was a dull night, and yet there was that peculiar light in the atmosphere, often seen when the earth is covered with snow. The door was held open, awaiting him; and the minister uncovered his head, and stepped in with his solemn greeting:

“Peace be to this house and to all that dwell in it!”

There could be no waiting for George Godolphin: the spirit might be on its wing. They gathered in the room, Grace, Margery, and Viscount Averil: and, the stillness broken only by the hushed sobs of Grace, Mr. Hastings administered the last rite of our religion to his dying child.

CHAPTER VII.
AT REST.

Breathe softly, tread gently, for it is the chamber of the dying! The spirit is indeed on its wing, hovering on the very isthmus which separates time from eternity.

A small shaded lamp throws its subdued light upon the room, blending with the ruddier hue cast by the fire. The white, wan face of Maria Godolphin lies quietly on the not whiter pillow; her breath comes in short gasps, and may be heard at a distance; otherwise she is calm and still; the sweet soft eyes are open yet, and the world and its interests, so far as cognizance goes, has not closed. Meta, in her black frock, dressed as she had been in the day, is lying on the bed by her mother’s side: one weak arm is thrown round the child, as if she could not part with her greatest earthly treasure; and George is sitting in a chair on the other side the bed, his elbow on the pillow, his face turned to catch every shade that may appear on that fading one, so soon to be lost to him for ever.

The silence was interrupted by the striking of the house-clock: twelve: and its strokes came through the doors of the room with preternatural loudness in the hushed stillness of midnight. Margery glided in. Margery and Jean were keeping watch over the fire in the next room, the sitting-room, ready for any services required of them: and they knew that services for the dead as well as for the living might be wanted that night.

The doctors had paid a last visit, superfluous as they knew it to be. Dr. Beale had come with the departure of his dinner guests; Mr. Snow earlier in the evening: she was dying, they said, calmly and peacefully: and those friends who had wished to take their farewell had taken it ere they left the house, leaving her, as she wished, alone with her husband.

Margery came in with a noiseless step. If Margery had come in once upon the same errand which brought her now, she had come in ten times. Maria turned her eyes towards her.

“She would be a sight better in bed. It has gone midnight. It can’t do any good, her lying there.”

Meta partly stirred her golden curls as she moved nearer to her mother, and Maria’s feeble hand tightened its clasp on the little one. George nodded; and Margery went back rather in dudgeon, and gave the fire in the next room a fierce poke.

“It’s not well to let her see a mortal die. Just you hold your tongue, Jean, about mother and child! Don’t I know it’s parting them as well as you?—but the parting must come, and before another hour is over; and I say it would be better to bring her away now. Master has no more sense than a calf, or he’d send her. Not he! He just gave me one of his looks, as much as to say, ‘You be off again; she isn’t coming.’”

“How does she seem now?” asked Jean, a tall woman, with a thin, straight figure, and an old-fashioned, large white cap.

“I saw no change. There won’t be any till the minute comes.”

On the table was a tray of cups and saucers. Margery went up to them and drew two from the rest. “We may as well have a drop o’ tea now,” she said, taking up a small black tea-pot that was standing on the hob—for the grate was old-fashioned. “Shall I cut you a bit of bread and butter, Jean?”

“No, thank you. I couldn’t eat it.”

They sat on either side the table, the tea-cups between them. Margery put the tea-pot back on the hob. Jean stirred her tea noiselessly.

“I have known those, as far gone as she, rally for hours,” Jean remarked, in a half-whisper.

Margery shook her head. “She won’t rally. It will be only the working out of my dream. I dreamt last night——”

“Don’t get talking of dreams now, Margery,” interrupted Jean, with a shiver. “I never like to bring dreams up when the dead are about.”

Margery cast a resentful glance at her. “Jean, woman, if you have laughed at my dreams once you have laughed at them a hundred times when we lived together at Ashlydyat, ridiculing and saying you never could believe in such things. You know you have.”

“No more I don’t believe in ’em,” said Jane, taking little sips of her hot tea. “But it’s not a pleasant subject for to-night. The child is to come to the old home, they say, to be brought up by my lady.”

Margery grunted.

“Shall we have you at Ashlydyat again, Margery?”

“Now don’t you bother your head about me, Jean, woman. Is it a time to cast one’s thoughts about and lay out plans? Let the future take care of itself.”

Jean remained silent after this rebuff and attended to her tea, which she could not get sufficiently cool to drink comfortably. She had been an inferior servant to Margery at Ashlydyat, in a measure under her control; and she still deferred to her in manner. Presently she began again.

“It’s a curious complaint that your mistress has died of, Margery. Leastways it has a curious name. I made bold to ask Dr. Beale to-night what it was, when I went to open the gate for him, and he called it—what was it?—atrophy. Atrophy: that was it. They could not at all class the disease of which Mrs. George Godolphin had died, he said, and were content to call it atrophy for want of a better name. I took leave to say that I didn’t understand the word, and he explained that it meant a gradual wasting away of the system without apparent cause.”

Margery did not reply for the moment: she was swelling with displeasure.

“Margery, what is atrophy, for I don’t understand it a bit?”

“It’s rubbish,” flashed Margery—“as applied to my poor dear mistress. She has died of the trouble—that she couldn’t speak of—that has eaten into her heart and cankered there—and broke it at the last. Atrophy! but those doctors must put a name to everything. Jean, woman, I have been with her all through it, and I tell you that it’s the trouble that has killed her. She has had it on all sides, has felt it in more ways than the world gives her credit for. She never opened her lips to me about a thing—and perhaps it had been better if she had—but I have my eyes in my head, and I could see what it was doing for her. As I lay down in my clothes on this very sofa last night, for it wasn’t up to my bed I went, with her so ill, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, that if she could but have broken the ice and talked of her sorrows they might have worn off in time. It is burying the grief within people’s own breasts that kills them.”

Jean was silent. Margery began turning the grounds in her empty tea-cup round and round, staring dreamily at the forms they assumed.

“Hark!” cried Jean.

A sound was heard in the next room. Margery started from her chair and softly opened the door. But it was only her master, who had gone round the bed and was leaning over Meta. Margery closed the door again.

George had come to the conclusion that the child would be best in bed. Meta was lying perfectly still, looking earnestly at her mamma’s face, so soon, so soon to be lost to her. He drew the hair from her brow as he spoke.

“You will be very tired, Meta. I think you must go to bed.”

For answer Meta broke into a passionate storm of sobs. They roused Maria from her passive silence.

“Meta—darling,” came forth the isolated words in the difficulty of her laboured breath—“I am going away, but you will come to me. You will be sure to come to me, for God has promised. I seem to have had the promise given to me, to hold it, now, and I shall carry it away with me. I am going to heaven. When the blind was drawn up yesterday morning and I saw the snow, it made me shiver, but I said there will be no snow in heaven. Meta, there will be only spring there; no sultry heat of summer, no keen winter’s cold. Oh, my child! try to come to me, try always! I shall keep a place for you.”

The minutes went on: the spirit fleeting, George watching with his aching heart. Soon she spoke again.

“Has it struck twelve?”

“Ten minutes ago.”

“Then it is my birthday. I am twenty-eight to-day. It is young to die!”

Young to die! Yes, it was young to die: but there are some who can count time by sorrow, not by years.

“Don’t grieve, George. It will pass so very soon, and you will come to me. Clad in our white robes, we shall rise at the Last Day to eternal life, and be together for ever and for ever.”

The tears were dropping from his eyes. The grief of the present, the anguish of the parting, the remorse for the irrevocable past, in which he might have cherished her more tenderly had he foreseen this, and did not, were all too present to him. He laid his face on hers with a bitter cry.

“Forgive me before you go! Oh, my darling, forgive me all!”

There was no answering response, nothing but the feeble pressure of her hand as it held him there, and he started up to look at her. Ah no: there could never more be any response from those fading lips, never more, never more.

Had the hour come? George Godolphin’s heart beat quicker, and he wildly kissed her with passionate kisses—as if that would keep within her the life that was ebbing. The loving eyes gazed at him still—it was he who had the last lingering look, not Meta.

But she was not to die just then: life was longer in finally departing. George—greedily watching her every breath, praying (who knows?) wild and unavailing prayers to Heaven that even yet a miracle might be wrought and she spared to him—supported her head on his arm. And the minutes went on and on.

Meta was very still. Her sobs had first subsided into a sudden catching of the breath now and then, but that was no longer heard. Maria moved uneasily, or strove to move, and looked up at George in distress; dying though she was, almost past feeling, the weight of the child’s head had grown heavy on her side. He understood and went round to move Meta.

She had fallen asleep. Weary with the hour, the excitement, the still watching, the sobs, sleep had stolen unconsciously upon her: her wet eyelashes were closed, her breathing was regular, her hot cheeks were crimson. “Shall I take her to Margery?” he whispered.

Maria seemed to look approval, but her eyes followed the child as George raised her in his arms. It was impossible to mistake their yearning wish.

He carried the child round, he gently held her sleeping face to that of his wife, and the dying mother pressed her last feeble kiss upon the unanswering and unconscious lips. Then he took her and gave her to Margery.

The tears were in Maria’s eyes when he returned to her, and he bent his face to catch the words that were evidently striving to be spoken.

“Love her always, George.”

“Oh, my darling, there is no need to tell it me!”

The answer seemed to have burst from him in anguish. There is no doubt that those few last hours had been of the bitterest anguish to George Godolphin: he had never gone through such before—he never would go through such again. It is well, it is well that these moments can come but once in a lifetime.

He hung over her, suppressing his emotion as he best could for her sake; he wiped the death-dews from her brow, fast gathering there. Her eyes never moved from him, her fingers to the last sought to entwine themselves with his. But soon the loving expression of those eyes faded into unconsciousness: they were open still, looking, as it may be, afar off: the recognition of him, her husband, the recollection of earthly things had passed away.

Suddenly there was a movement of the lips, a renewal in a faint degree of strength and energy; and George strove to catch the words. Her voice was dreamy; her eyes looked dreamily at him whom she would never more recognize until they should both have put on immortality.

“And the city has no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light——”

Even as she was speaking, the last words of her voice dropped, and was still. There was no sigh, there was no struggle; had Meta been looking on, the child’s pulses would not have been stirred. Very, very gently had the spirit taken its flight.

George Godolphin let his head fall upon the pillow beside her. In his overwhelming grief for her? or in repentant prayer for himself? He alone knew. Let us leave it with him!

Once more, once more—I cannot help it, if you blame me for relating these things—the death-knell of All Souls’ boomed out over Prior’s Ash. People were rising in the morning when it struck upon their ear, and they held their breath to listen: three times two, and then the quick sharp strokes rang for the recently departed. Then it was for her who was known the previous night to be at the point of death! and they went out of their houses in the bleak winter’s morning, and said to each other, as they took down their shutters, that poor Mrs. George Godolphin had really gone at last.

Poor Mrs. George Godolphin! Ay, they could speak of her considerately, kindly, regretfully now, but did they remember how they had once spoken of her? She had gone to the grave with her pain and sorrow—she had gone with the remembrance of their severe judgment, their harsh words, which had eaten into her too-sensitive heart; she had gone away from them, to be judged by One who would be more merciful than they had been.

Oh, if we could but be less harsh in judging our fellow-pilgrims! I have told you no idle tale, no false story conjured up by a plausible imagination. Prior’s Ash lamented her in a startled sort of manner: their consciences pricked them sorely; and they would have given something to recall her back to life, now it was too late.

They stared at each other, shutters in hand, stunned as it were, with blank faces and repentant hearts. Somehow they had never believed she would really die, even the day before, when it had been talked of as all too probable, they had not fully believed it: she was young and beautiful, and it is not common for such to go. They recalled her in the several stages of her life: their Rector’s daughter, the pretty child who had been born and reared among them, the graceful girl who had given her love to George Godolphin, the most attractive man in Prior’s Ash; the faithful, modest wife, against whose fair fame never a breath of scandal had dared to come. It was all over now: she and her broken heart, her wrongs and her sorrows had been taken from their tender mercies to a land where neither wrongs nor sorrows can penetrate—where the hearts broken here by unkindness are made whole.

When Meta woke in the morning it was considerably beyond her usual hour, the result probably of her late vigil. Jean was in the room, not Margery. A moment’s surprised stare, and then recollection flashed over her. She darted out of bed, her flushed cheeks and her bright eyes raised to Jean.

“I want mamma.”

“Yes, dear,” said Jean evasively. “I’ll dress you, and then you shall go down.”

“Where’s Margery?”

“She has just stepped out on an errand.”

“Is mamma in her room? Is she in her bed?”

“We’ll go and see presently, dear,” repeated Jean with the same evasion.

The worst way that any one can take is to attempt to deceive a thoughtful, sensitive child, whose fears may be already awakened: it is certain to defeat its own ends. Meta knew as well as Jean did that she was being purposely deceived, that there was something to tell which was not being told. She had no very defined idea of death, but a dread came over Meta that her mamma was in some manner gone out of the house, that she should never see her again: she backed from Jean’s hand, dashed the door open, and flew down the stairs. Jean flew after her, crying and calling.

The noise surprised George Godolphin. He was in the parlour at the breakfast-table; sitting at the meal but not touching it. The consternation of Prior’s Ash was great, but that was as nothing in comparison with his. George Godolphin was as a man bewildered. He could not realize the fact. Only four and twenty hours since he had received intimation of the danger, and now she was—there. He could not realize it. Though all yesterday afternoon, since his arrival, he had known there was no hope—though he had seen her die—though he had passed the hours since, lamenting her as much as he could do so in his first stunned state, yet he could not realize it. He was not casting much blame to himself: he was thinking how circumstances had worked against him and against Maria. His mind was yet in a chaos, and it was from this confused state that the noise outside disturbed him. Opening the door, the sight came full upon his view. The child flying down in her white night-dress, her naked feet scarcely touching the stairs, her eyes wild, her hot cheeks flaming, her golden hair entangled as she had slept.

“I want mamma,” she cried, literally springing into his arms, as if for refuge. “Papa, I want mamma.”

She burst into a storm of sobs distressing to hear; she clung to him, her little arms, her whole frame trembling. George, half unmanned, sat down before the fire, and pressed her to him in his strong arms.

“Bring a shawl,” he said to Jean.

A warm grey shawl of chenille which Maria had often lately worn upon her shoulders was found by Jean, and George wrapped it round Meta as she lay in his arms, and he kept her there. Had Margery been present, she would probably have taken the young lady away by force, and dressed her, with a reprimand: but there was only Jean: and George had it all his own way.

He tried to comfort the grieved spirit; the little sobbing bosom that beat against his; but his efforts seemed useless, and the child’s cry never ceased.

“I want mamma; I want to see mamma.”

“Hush, Meta! Mamma”—George had to pause, himself—“mamma’s gone. She——”

The words confirmed all her fears, and she strove to get off his lap in her excitement, interrupting his words. “Let me go and see her, papa! Is she in the grave with Uncle Thomas? Oh, let me go and see it! Grandpapa will show it to me.”

How long it took to soothe her even to comparative calmness, George scarcely knew. He learnt more of Meta’s true nature in that one interview than he had learnt in all her life before: and he saw that he must, in that solemn hour, speak to her as he would to a girl of twice her years.

“Mamma’s gone to heaven, child; she is gone to be an angel with the great God. She would have stayed with us if she could, Meta, but death came and took her. She kissed you; she kissed you, Meta, with her last breath. You were fast asleep: you fell asleep by her side, and I held you to mamma for her last kiss, and soon after that she died.”

Meta had kept still, listening: but now the sobs broke out again.

“Why didn’t they wake me and let me see her? why did they take her away first? Oh, papa, though she is dead, I want to see her; I want to see mamma.”

He felt inclined to take her into the room. Maria was looking very much like herself; far more so than she had looked in the last days of life: there was nothing ghastly, nothing repulsive, as is too often the case with the dead; the sweet face of life looked scarcely less sweet now.

“Mamma that was is there still, Meta,” he said, indicating the next room. “The spirit is gone to heaven; you know that: the body, that which you used to call mamma, will be here yet a little while, and then it will be laid by Uncle Thomas, to wait for the resurrection of the Last Day. Meta, if I should live to come home from India; that is, if I am in my native land when my time comes to die, they will lay me beside her—”

He stopped abruptly. Meta had lifted her head and was looking at him with a wild, questioning expression; as if she could not at first understand or believe his words. “Mamma is there?”

“Yes. But she is dead now, Meta; she is not living.”

“Oh, take me to her! Papa, take me to her!”

“Listen, Meta. Mamma is changed, she looks cold and white, and her eyes are shut, and she does not stir. I would take you in: but I fear—I don’t know whether you would like to look at her.”

But there might be no denial now that the hope had been given; the child would have broken her heart over it. George Godolphin rose; he pressed the little head upon his shoulder, and carried her to the door, the shawl well wound round her body, her warm feet hanging down. Once in the room, he laid his hand upon the golden curls, to insure that the face was not raised until he saw fit that it should be, and bore her straight to the head of the bed. Then, holding her in his arms very tightly that she might feel sensibly his protection, he suffered her to look full upon the white face lying there.

One glance, and Meta turned and buried her head upon him; he could feel her trembling; and he began to question his own wisdom in bringing her in. Another minute, and she looked back and took a longer gaze.

“That’s not mamma,” she said, bursting into tears.

George sat down on a chair close by, and laid her wet cheek against his, and hid his eyes amidst her curls. His emotion had spent itself in the long night, and he thought he could control it now.

“That is mamma, Meta; your mother and my dear wife. It is all that is left of her. Oh, Meta! if we had only known earlier that she was going to die!”

“It does not look like mamma.”

“The moment death comes, the change begins. It has begun in mamma. Do you understand me, Meta? In a few days I shall hear read over her by your grandpapa——” George stopped: it suddenly occurred to him that the Reverend Mr. Hastings would not officiate this time; and he amended his sentence. “I shall hear read over her the words she has I know often read to you; how the corruptible body must die, and be buried in the earth as a grain of wheat is, ere it can be changed and put on immortality.”

“Will she never come again?” sobbed Meta.

“Never here, never again. We shall go to her.”

Meta sobbed on. “I want mamma! I want mamma, who talked to me and nursed me. Mamma loved us.”

“Yes, she loved us,” he said, his heart wrung with the recollection of the past: “we shall never find any one else to love us as she loved. Meta, child, listen! Mamma lives still; she is looking down from heaven now, and sees and hears us; she loves us, and will love us for ever. And when our turn shall come to die, I hope—I hope—we shall have learnt all that she has learnt, so that God may take us to her.”

It was of no use prolonging the scene: George still questioned his judgment in allowing Meta to enter upon it. But as he rose to carry her away, the child turned her head with a sharp eager motion to take a last look. A last look at the still form, the dead face of her who yesterday only had been as they were.

Margery had that instant come in, and was standing in her bonnet in the sitting-room. To describe her face of surprised consternation when she saw Meta carried out of the chamber, would take time and trouble. “You can dress her, Margery,” George said, giving the child into her arms.

But for his subdued tones, and the evident emotion which lay upon him all too palpably in spite of his efforts to suppress it, Margery might have given her private opinion of the existing state of things. As it was, she confined her anger to dumb-show. Jerking Meta to her, with a half fond, half fierce gesture, she lifted her hand in dismay at sight of the naked feet, turned her own gown up, and flung it over them.

CHAPTER VIII.
A SAD PARTING.

Again another funeral in All Souls’ Church, another opening of the vault of the Godolphins! But it was not All Souls’ Rector to officiate this time; he stood at the grave with George. Isaac Hastings had come down from London, Harry had come from his tutorship; Lord Averil was again there, and Mr. Crosse had asked to attend. Prior’s Ash looked out on the funeral with regretful eyes, saying one to another, what a sad thing it was for her, only twenty-eight, to die.

George Godolphin, contriving to maintain an outward calmness, turned away when it was over. Not yet to the mourning-coach that waited for him, but through the little gate leading to the Rectory. He was about to leave Prior’s Ash for good that night, and common courtesy demanded that he should say a word of farewell to Mrs. Hastings.

In the darkened drawing-room with Grace and Rose, in their new mourning attire, sat Mrs. Hastings: George Godolphin half started back as they rose to greet him. He did not stay to sit: he stood by the fireplace, his hat in his hand, its flowing crape almost touching the ground.

“I will say good-bye to you, now, Mrs. Hastings.”

“You really leave to-night?”

“By the seven o’clock train. Will you permit me to express my hope that a brighter time may yet dawn for you; to assure you that no effort on my part shall be spared to conduce to it?”

He spoke in a low, quiet, meaning tone, and he held her hand between his. Mrs. Hastings could not misunderstand him—that he was hinting at a hope of reimbursing somewhat of their pecuniary loss.

“Thank you for your good wishes,” she said, keeping down the tears. “You will allow me—you will speak to Lady Averil to allow me to have the child here for a day sometimes?”

“Need you ask it?” he answered, a generous warmth in his tone. “Cecil, I am quite sure, recognizes your right in the child at least in an equal degree with her own, and is glad to recognize it. Fare you well; fare you well, dear Mrs. Hastings.”

He went out, shaking hands with Grace and Rose as he passed, thinking how much he had always liked Mrs. Hastings, with her courteous manners and gentle voice, so like those of his lost wife. The Rector met him in the passage, and George held out his hand.

“I shall not see you again, sir. I leave to-night.”

The Rector took the hand. “I wish you a safe voyage!” he said. “I hope things will be more prosperous with you in India than they have been latterly here!”

“We have all need to wish that,” was George’s answer. “Mr. Hastings, promises from me might be regarded as valueless, but this much I wish to say ere we part: that I carry the weight of my debt to you about me, and I will lessen it should it be in my power. You will”—dropping his voice—“you will see that the inscription is properly placed on the tombstone?”

“I will. Have you given orders for it?”

“Oh yes. Farewell, sir. Farewell, Harry,” he added, as the two sons came in. “Isaac, I shall see you in London.”

He passed swiftly out to the mourning-coach, and was driven home. Above everything on earth, George hated this leave-taking: but there were two or three to whom it had to be spoken.

Not until dusk did he go up to Ashlydyat. He called in at Lady Godolphin’s Folly as he passed it: she was his father’s widow, and Bessy was there. My lady was very cool. My lady told him that it was his place to give the refusal of Meta to her: and she should never forgive the slight. From the very moment she heard that Maria’s life was in danger, she made up her mind to break through her rules of keeping children at a distance, and to take the child. She should have reared her in every luxury as Miss Godolphin of Ashlydyat, and have left her a handsome fortune: as it was, she washed her hands of her. George thanked her for her good intention as a matter of course; but his heart leaped within him at the thought that Meta was safe and secure with Cecil: he would have taken her and Margery out to make acquaintance with the elephants, rather than have left Meta to Lady Godolphin.

“She’ll get over the smart, George,” whispered Bessy, as she came out to bid him God-speed. “I shall be having the child here sometimes, you know. My lady’s all talk: she never cherishes resentment long.”

He entered the old home, Ashlydyat, and was left alone with Meta at his own request. She was in the deepest black: crape tucks on her short frock; not a bit of white to be seen about her, except her socks and the tips of her drawers; and Cecil had bought her a jet necklace of round beads, with a little black cross hanging from it on her neck. George sat down and took her on his knee. What with the drawn blinds and the growing twilight, the room was almost dark, and he had to look closely at the little face turned to him. She was very quiet, rather pale, as if she had grieved a good deal in the last few days.

“Meta,” he began, and then he stopped to clear his husky voice—“Meta, I am going away.”

She made no answer. She buried her face upon him and began to cry softly. It was no news to her, for Cecil had talked to her the previous night. But she clasped her arms tightly round him as if she could not let him go, and began to tremble.

“Meta!—my child!”

“I want mamma!” burst from the little full heart. “I want mamma to be with me again. Is she gone away for ever? Is she put down in the grave with Uncle Thomas? Oh, papa! I want to see her!”

A moment’s struggle with himself, and then George Godolphin gave way to the emotion which he had so successfully restrained in the churchyard. They sobbed together, the father and child: her face against his, the sobs bursting freely from his bosom. He let them come; loud, passionate, bitter sobs; unchecked, unsubdued. Do not despise him for it! they are not the worst men who can thus give way to the vehemence of our common nature.

It spent itself after a time; such emotion must spend itself; but it could not wholly pass yet. Meta was the first to speak: the same vain wish breaking from her, the sane cry.

“I want mamma! Why did she go away for ever?”

“Not for ever, Meta. Only for a time. Oh, child, we shall go to her: we shall go to her in a little while. Mamma’s gone to be an angel; to keep a place for us in heaven.”

“How long will it be?”

“Not a moment of our lives but it will draw nearer and nearer. Meta, it may be well for us that those we love should go on first, or we might never care to go thither ourselves.”

She lay more quietly. George laid his hand upon her head, unconsciously playing with her golden hair, his tears dropping on it.

“You must think of mamma always, Meta. Think that she is looking down at you, on all you do, and try and please her. She was very good: and you must be good, making ready to go to her.”

A renewed burst of sobs came from the child. George waited, and then resumed.

“When I come back—if I live to come back; or when you come to me in India; at any rate when I see you again, Meta, you will probably be grown up; no longer a child, but a young lady. If I shall only find you like mamma was in all things, I shall be happy. Do you understand, darling?”

“Yes,” she sobbed.

“Good, and gentle, and kind, and lady-like,—and remembering always that there’s another world, and that mamma has gone on to it. I should like to have kept you with me, Meta, but it cannot be: I must go out alone. You will not quite forget me, will you?”

She put up her hand and her face to his, and moaned in her pain. George laid his aching brow on hers. He knew that it might be the last time they should meet on earth.

“I shall write to you by every mail, Meta, and you must write to me. You can put great capital letters together now, and that will do to begin with. And,” his voice faltered, “when you walk by mamma’s grave on Sundays—and see her name there—you will remember her—and me. You will think how we are separated: mamma in heaven; I, in a far-off land; you here: but you know the separation will not be for ever, and each week will bring us nearer to its close—its close in some way. If—if we never meet again on earth, Meta——”

“Oh don’t, papa! I want you to come back to me.”

He choked down his emotion. He took the little face in his hands and kissed it fervently: in that moment, in his wrung feelings, he almost wished he had no beloved child to abandon.

“You must be called by your own name now. I should wish it. Meta was all very well,” he continued, half to himself, “when she was here; that the names should not interfere with each other. Be a good child, my darling. Be very obedient to Aunt Cecil, as you used to be to mamma.”

“Aunt Cecil is not mamma,” said Meta, her little heart swelling.

“No, my darling, but she will be to you as mamma, and she and Lord Averil will love you very much. I wish—I wish I could have kept you with me, Meta!”

She wished it also. If ever a child knew what an aching heart was, she knew it then.

“And now I must go,” he added—for indeed he did not care to prolong the pain. “I shall write to you from London, Meta, and I shall write you quite a packet when I am on board ship. You must get on well with your writing, so as to be able soon to read my letters yourself. Farewell, farewell, my darling child!”

How long she clung to him; how long he kept her clinging, he gave no heed. When the emotion on both sides was spent, he took her by the right hand and led her to the next room. Lady Averil came forward.

“Cecil,” he said, his voice quiet and subdued, “she must be called Maria now—in remembrance of her mother.”

“Yes,” said Cecil eagerly. “We should all like it. Sit down, George. Lord Averil has stepped out somewhere, but he will not be long.”

“I cannot stay. I shall see him outside, I dare say. If not, he will come to the station. Will you say to him——”

A low burst of tears from the child interrupted the sentence. George, in speaking to Cecil, had loosed her hand, and she laid her head down on a sofa to cry. He took her up in his arms, and she clung to him tightly: it was only the old scene over again, and George felt that they were not alone now. He imprinted a last kiss upon her face, and gave her to his sister.

“She had better be taken away, Cecil.”

Lady Averil, with many loving words, carried her outside the door, sobbing as she was, and called to her maid. “Be very kind to her,” she whispered. “It is a sad parting. And—Harriet—henceforth she is to be called by her proper name—Maria.”

“She will get over it in a day or two, George,” said Lady Averil, returning.

“Yes, I know that,” he answered, his face turned from Cecil. “Cherish the remembrance of her mother within her as much as you possibly can, Cecil: I should wish her to grow up like Maria.”

“If you would only stay a last hour with us!”

“I can’t; I can’t: it is best that I should go. I do not know what the future may bring forth,” he lingered to say, “Whether I shall come home—or live to come home, or she, when she is older, come out to me: it is all uncertain.”

“Were I you, George, I would not indulge the thought of the latter. She will be better here—as it seems to me.”

“Yes—there’s no doubt of it. But the separation is a cruel one. However—the future must be left. God bless you, Cecil! and thank you ever for your kindness.”

The tears rolled down her cheeks as he bent to kiss her. “George,” she whispered timidly—“if I might only ask you one question.”

“Ask me anything.”

“Is—have you any intention—shall you be likely to think of—of replacing Maria by Charlotte Pain—of making her your wife?”

“Replacing Maria by her!” he echoed, his face flushing. “Heaven forgive you for thinking it!”

The question cured George’s present emotion more effectually than anything else could have done. But his haughty anger against Cecil was unreasonable, and he felt that it was so.

“Forgive me, my dear: but it sounded so like an insult to my dear wife. Be easy: she will never replace Maria.”

In the porch, as George went out, he met Lord Averil hastening in. Lord Averil would have put his arm within George’s to walk with him through the grounds, but George drew back.

“No, not to-night: let me go alone. I am not fit for companionship. Good-night. Good-bye,” he added, his voice hoarse. “I thought to say a word of gratitude to you, for the past, for the present, but I cannot. If I live——”

“Don’t say ‘if,’ George: go away with a good heart, and take my best wishes with you. A new land and a new life! you may yet live down the past.”

Their hands lingered together in a firm pressure, and George turned away from Ashlydyat for the last time. Ashlydyat that might have been his.

CHAPTER IX.
A SAFE VOYAGE TO HIM!

Was it ever your fate or fortune to be on board an Indian vessel when it was just about to start? If so, there’s no doubt you retain a more vivid than agreeable reminiscence of the reigning confusion. Passengers coming on at the last moment and going frantic over their luggage or the discovered inconveniences of their cabins; cords and ropes creaking and coiling; sailors shouting, officers commanding; boxes shooting up from the boats to the deck, and to your feet, only in turn to be shot down again to the hold!—it is Bedlam gone frantic, and nothing less.

On a fine ship, anchored off Gravesend, this scene was taking place on a crisp day early in January. A bright, inspiriting, sunny day, giving earnest—if there’s anything in the popular belief—of a bright voyage. One gentleman stood aloof from the general mêlée. He had been on board half an hour or more; had seen to his cabin, his berth, his baggage—as much of the latter as he could see to; and now stood alone watching the turmoil. Others, passengers, had come on board in groups, surrounded by hosts of friends; he came alone: a tall and very distinguished-looking man, attired in the deepest mourning, with a grey plaid crossed on his shoulder.

As if jealous that the ship should have all the confusion to itself, the shore was getting up a little on its own account. Amidst the drays, the trucks, the carts: amidst the cases and packages, which were heaped on the bank, not all, it was to be hoped, for that ship, or she would never get off to-day; amidst the numerous crowds of living beings, idlers and workers, that such a scene brings together, there came something into the very throng of them, scattering everything that could be scattered right and left.

An exceedingly remarkable carriage, of the style that may be called “dashing,” especially if height be any criterion, its wheels red and green, its horses of high mettle, and a couple of fierce dogs barking and leaping round it. The scattered people looked up in astonishment to see a lady guiding those horses, and deemed at first that the sun, shining right into their eyes, had deceived them: pawing, snorting, prancing, fiery animals; which, far from being spent by their ten or twelve miles journey, looked as if they were eager to start upon another. The lady managed them admirably. A very handsome lady was she, of the same style as the carriage; dashing, with jet-black eyes, large and free, and a scarlet feather in her hat that might have been found nearly thirty-six inches long, had it been measured from top to tip. A quiet little gentleman, slight and fair, sat beside her, and a groom lounged grandly with folded arms in the back seat. She, on her high cushions, was almost a yard above either of them: the little gentleman in fact was completely eclipsed: and she held the reins in her white gauntleted hands and played gallantly with the whip, perfectly at ease, conscious that she was those foaming steeds’ master. Suddenly, without the least warning, she drew them back on their haunches.

“There she is! in the middle of the stream. Can’t you read it, Dolf? The Indus. How stupid of the people to tell us she was lying lower down!”

Jumping from the carriage without waiting to be assisted, she left the groom in charge and made her way to the pier, condescendingly taking the gentleman’s arm as she hastened up it, and hissing off the dogs as a hint that they were to remain behind. I am sure you cannot need an introduction to either of these people, but you shall have it for all that; Mr and Mrs. Rodolf Pain.

She, Charlotte, did all the acting, and the talking too. Her husband had always been retiring in manner, as you may remember; and he had grown far more retiring than he used to be. Charlotte bargained for a boat: and they were pulled to the ship’s side.

For a few moments they had to take their chance; they made only two more in the general confusion; but Charlotte seized upon a handsome young man with a gold band upon his cap, who was shouting out orders.

“Can you tell me whether Mr. George Godolphin has come on board yet?”

“Mr. George Godolphin,” repeated the young officer, cutting short some directions midway, and looking half bewildered in the general disorder.

“Bound for Calcutta,” explained Charlotte.

“I can inquire. Tymms,” beckoning to him one of the middies, “go and ask the steward whether a gentleman of the name of Godolphin has come down.”

But there was no need of further search. Charlotte’s restless eyes had caught sight of George—the solitary passenger in mourning whom you saw standing alone. She and Mr. Pain made the best of their way to him, over the impediments blocking up the deck.

He did not see their approach. He was leaning over the vessel on the side opposite to that facing the shore, and Charlotte gave him a smart rap on the arm with her gauntlet-glove.

“Now, Mr. George Godolphin! what do you say for your manners!”

He turned quickly, his face flushing slightly with surprise when he saw them standing there: and he shook hands with them both.

“I ask what you have to say for your manners, Mr. George? The very idea of your leaving England for good, and never calling to say good-bye to us!”

“I met Mr. Pain a day or two ago,” said George. “He——”

“Met Mr. Pain! what on earth if you did!” interrupted Charlotte. “Mr. Pain’s not me. You might have found time to dine with us. I have a great mind to quarrel with you, George Godolphin, by way of leave-taking.”

Something like a smile crossed George’s lips. “The fact is, I thought I might have seen you at the Verralls’, Mrs. Pain. I went there for half an hour yesterday. I charged Mrs. Verrall——”

“Rubbish!” retorted Charlotte. “When you must have known we had moved into a house at Shooter’s Hill, you could not suppose we were still at the Verralls’. Our catching you this morning here was a mere chance. We stayed late in town yesterday afternoon at the furniture warehouse, and, in driving back down the Strand, saw Isaac Hastings, so I pulled up to ask what had become of you, and whether you were dead or alive. He informed us you were to sail to-day from Gravesend, and I told Dolf I should drive down. But it is ill-mannered of you, Mr. George.”

“You will readily understand, that since my last return from Prior’s Ash, I have not felt inclined for visiting,” he said in a low grave tone, unconsciously glancing at his black attire. “I intended you no discourtesy, Mrs. Pain: but, for one thing, I did not know where you might be met with.”

“And couldn’t find out!” retorted Charlotte. “Dolf could have given you the address, I suppose, the other day, had you asked. He’s too great a fool to think to give it of his own accord.”

George looked at “Dolf,” whom his wife seemed so completely to ignore; looked at him with a pleasant smile, as if he would atone for Charlotte’s rudeness. “We were not together a minute, were we, Mr. Pain? I was in a hurry, and you seemed in one also.”

“Don’t say any more about it, Mr. Godolphin,” spoke Dolf, as resentfully as he dared. “That’s just like her! Making a fuss over nothing! Of course you could not be expected to visit at such a time: and any one but Charlotte would have the good feeling to see it. I am pleased to be able to see you here, and wish you a pleasant voyage; but I remonstrated with her this morning, that it was scarcely the right thing to intrude upon you. But she never listens, you know.”

“You needn’t have come,” snapped Charlotte.

“And then you would have gone on at me about my bad manners, as you have to Mr. Godolphin! One never knows how to please you, Charlotte.”

George resumed: to break the silence possibly, more than from any other motive. “Have you settled at Shooter’s Hill?”

“Settled!” shrieked Charlotte; “settled at Shooter’s Hill! Where it’s ten miles, good, from a theatre or any other place of amusement! No, thank you. A friend of Verrall’s had this place to let for a few weeks, and Dolf was idiot enough to take it——”

“You consented first, Charlotte,” interrupted poor Dolf.

“Which I never should have done had I reflected on the bother of getting up to town,” said Charlotte equably. “Settled at Shooter’s Hill! I’d as soon do as you are going to do, Mr. George—bury myself alive in Calcutta. We have taken on lease a charming house in Belgravia, and shall enter on a succession of dinner-parties: one a week we think of giving during the season. We shall not get into it much before February: it takes some time to choose furniture.”

“I hate dinner-parties,” said Dolf ruefully.

“You are not obliged to appear at them,” said Charlotte with much graciousness. “I can get your place filled up at table, I dare say. What is that noise and scuffling?”

“They are weighing anchor,” replied George. “We shall soon be on the move.”

“I hear that great alterations are being made at Ashlydyat,” remarked Charlotte.

“Only on the spot called the Dark Plain. The archway is taken down, and a summer-house is being built on the site. An elaborate sort of summer-house, for it is to contain three or four rooms, I believe. It will have a fine view.”

“And what of those ugly gorse-bushes?”

“They will be cleared away, and the place laid out as a garden.”

“Is my lady starring it at the Folly?”

“Scarcely: just now,” quietly answered George.

“Miss Godolphin has gone to Scotland, I hear.”

“Yes. Bessy will reside with Lady Godolphin.”

“And tart Margery? What has become of her?”

“She remains with Maria at Ashlydyat.”

Charlotte opened her eyes—Charlotte had a habit of opening them when puzzled or surprised. “Maria! Who is Maria?”

“The child. We call her by her proper name now.”

“Oh, by the way, I had nearly forgotten it,” returned Charlotte in the old good-natured tone: for it may be remarked, that during the interview her tone had been what she had just called Margery—tart. “I should like to have the child up on a visit when we get into our house, and astonish her mind with the wonders of London. I suppose Lady Averil will make no objection?”

A very perceptible flush, red and haughty, dyed the face of George Godolphin. “You are very kind to think of it, Mrs. Pain; but I fear Lady Averil would not consent. Indeed, I have desired that the child may not visit, except amidst her immediate relatives.”

“As you please,” said Charlotte resentfully. “Dolf, I think we may as well be moving. I only meant it as a kindness to the child.”

“And I thank you for it,” said George warmly. “For all the kindness you have shown her, Mrs. Pain, I thank you, sincerely and heartily. Take care!”

He interposed to prevent a rope, that was being borne along, from touching her. Charlotte began in earnest to think it was time to move, unless she would be carried down the river in the ship.

“When shall you come back?” she asked him.

He shook his head. He could net tell any more than she could. The future was all uncertain and indistinct.

“Well, you won’t forget to find us out whenever you do come?” returned Charlotte.

“Certainly not. Thank you.”

“Do you know,” cried Charlotte impulsively, “you are strangely different in manner, George Godolphin! You have grown as cold and formal as a block of ice. Hasn’t he, Dolf?”

“If he has, it’s your fault,” was the satisfactory answer of Dolf. “You keep firing off such a heap of personal questions, Charlotte. I see no difference in Mr. Godolphin; but he has had a good deal of trouble, you know.”

“Shall we ever hear of you?” continued Charlotte, pushing back Dolf with her elbow, and completely eclipsing his meek face with her sweeping scarlet feather.

“No doubt you will, Mrs. Pain, from one source or another. Not that I shall be a voluminous correspondent with England, I expect: except, perhaps, with Ashlydyat.”

“Well, fare you well, George,” she said, holding out both her gauntleted hands. “You seem rather cranky this morning, but I forgive you; it is trying to the spirits to leave one’s native place for good and all. I wish you all good luck with my best heart!”

“Thank you,” he said, taking the hands within his own and shaking them: “thank you always. Good-bye. Good-bye, Mr. Pain.”

Mr. Pain shook hands less demonstratively than his wife, and his leave-taking, if quiet, was not less sincere. George piloted them to the gangway, and saw them pulled ashore in the little boat.

They ascended to the carriage, which to all appearance had been keeping up a perpetual commotion since they left it, the fault probably of its horses and dogs; and Charlotte, taking her high seat, dashed away in style; her whip flourishing, the dogs barking, her red feather tossing and gleaming. What she will do when these feathers go out of fashion it’s hard to say: Charlotte could hardly stir out without one.

And by-and-by, the anchor up, the tug attached, the good ship Indus was fairly on her way, being towed smoothly down the river under command of her pilot. The passengers were tormenting themselves still: the sailors seemed to be perpetually hurrying hither and thither, the steward was in a tumult: but George Godolphin, wrapped in his grey plaid, remained in his place, quiet and still, gazing out over the bows of the vessel. What were his reflections, as his native land began to recede from his eyes? Did he regret it? Did he regret the position he had lost; the ruin he had wrought; the death of his wife? Did he, finally, regret the inevitable Past, with all its mistakes and sins?—and think that if it could only come over again, he would act differently? Possibly so. Once he lifted his hat, and pushed the golden hair further from his brow, from his handsome face, not less bright or handsome than of yore—except in its expression. In that, there was an unmistakable look of weary sadness, never before seen on the features of gay George Godolphin.

And when, hours after, the rest of the cabin passengers were summoned to dinner, he never stirred, but kept his place there, looking far into the dusky night, glancing up at the stars that came glittering out in the blue canopy of heaven.

A safe landing to him on the shores of Calcutta! A safe and sure landing on a different shore that must come after it!

And Mr. and Mrs. Pain’s dinner-parties in Belgravia are a great success.

THE END.

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LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED.
DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND GREAT WINDMILL STREET, W.

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“I care not how often murders and other mysteries form the foundation of plots, if they give us such novels as these.”—Harriet Martineau.

“Mrs. Henry Wood has an art of novel-writing which no rival possesses in the same degree.”—Spectator.

“The fame of Mrs. Henry Wood widens and strengthens.”—Morning Post.