CHAPTER XXVI—THE LAST LOOK.
Dead woman, shrouded white as snow
While Death the shade broods darkly nigh,
Place thy cold hand in mine, and so—
‘Good-bye.’
No prayer or blessing hum of breath
Came from thy lips as thou didst die;
I loath’d thee living, but in death—
‘Good-bye!’
So close together after all,
After long strife, stand thou and I,
I bless thee, while I faintly call—
‘Good-bye!’
Good-bye the past and all its pain,
Kissing thy poor dead hand, I cry—
Again, again, and yet again—
‘Good-bye!’—The Exile: a Poem.
It would have been difficult to analyse accurately the emotions which filled the bosom of Ambrose Bradley, as he stood and looked upon the dead face of the woman who, according to the law of the land and the sacrament of the Church, had justly claimed to be his wife. He could not conceal from himself that the knowledge of her death brought relief to him and even joy; but mingled with that relief were other feelings less reassuring—pity, remorse even, and a strange sense of humiliation.
He had never really loved the woman, and her conduct, previous to their long separation, had been such as to kill all sympathy in the heart of a less sensitive man, while what might be termed her unexpected resurrection had roused in him a bitterness and a loathing beyond expression. Yet now that the last word was said, the last atonement made, now that he beheld the eyes that would never open again, and the lips that would never again utter speech or sound, his soul was stirred to infinite compassion.
After all, he thought, the blame had not been hers that they had been so ill-suited to each other, and afterwards, when they met in after years, she had not wilfully sought to destroy his peace. It had all been a cruel fatality, from the first: another proof of the pitiless laws which govern human nature, and make men and women suffer as sorely for errors of ignorance and inexperience as for crimes of knowledge.
He knelt by the bedside, and taking her cold hand kissed it solemnly. Peace was between them, he thought, then and for ever. She too, with all her faults and all her follies, had been a fellow-pilgrim by his side towards the great bourne whence no pilgrim returns, and she had reached it first. He remembered now, not the woman who had flaunted her shamelessness before his eyes, but the pretty girl, almost a child, whom he had first known and fancied that he loved. In the intensity of his compassion and self-reproach he even exaggerated the tenderness he had once felt for her; the ignoble episode of their first intercourse catching a sad brightness reflected from the heavens of death. And in this mood, penitent and pitying, he prayed that God might forgive them both.
When he descended from the room, his eyes were red with tears. He found the little boy sobbing wildly in the room below, attended by the kindly Frenchwoman who kept the house. He tried to soothe him, but found it impossible, his grief being most painful to witness, and violent in the extreme.
‘Ah, monsieur, it is indeed a calamity!’ cried the woman. ‘Madame was so good a mother, devoted to her child. But God is good—the little one has a father still!’
Bradley understood the meaning of her words, but did not attempt to undeceive her. His heart was welling over with tenderness towards the pretty orphan, and he was thinking too of his own harsh judgments on the dead, who, it was clear, had possessed many redeeming virtues, not the least of them being her attachment to her boy.
‘You are right, madame,’ he replied, sadly, ‘and the little one shall not lack fatherly love and care. Will you come with me for a few moments? I wish to speak to you alone.’
He placed his hand tenderly on the child’s head, and again tried to soothe him, but he shrank away with petulant screams and cries. Walking to the front entrance he waited till he was joined there by the landlady, and they stood talking in the open air.
‘How long had she been here, madame?’ he asked.
‘For a month, monsieur,’ was the reply. ‘She came late in the season for the baths, with her bonne and the little boy, and took my rooms. Pardon, but I did not know madame had a husband living, and so near.’
‘We have been separated for many years. I came to Boulogne yesterday quite by accident, not dreaming the lady was here. Can you tell me if she has friends in Boulogne?’
‘I do not think so, monsieur. She lived quite alone, seeing no one, and her only thought and care was for the little boy. She was a proud lady, very rich and proud; nothing was too good for her, or for the child; she lived, as the saying is, en princesse. But no, she had no friends! Doubtless, being an English lady, though she spoke and looked like a compatriote, all her friends were in her own land.’
‘Just so,’ returned Bradley, turning his head away to hide his tears; for he thought to himself, ‘Poor Mary! After all, she was desolate like myself! How pitiful that I, of all men, should close her eyes and follow her to her last repose!’
‘Pardon, monsieur,’ said the woman, ‘but madame, perhaps, was not of our Church? She was, no doubt, Protestant?’
It was a simple question, but simple as it was Bradley was startled by it. He knew about as much of his dead wife’s professed belief as of the source whence she had drawn her subsistence. But he replied:
‘Yes, certainly. Protestant, of course.’
‘Then monsieur will speak to the English clergyman, who dwells there on the hill’ (here she pointed townward), ‘close to the English church. He is a good man, Monsieur Robertson, and monsieur will find——’
‘I will speak to him,’ interrupted Bradley. ‘But I myself am an English clergyman, and shall doubtless perform the last offices, when the time comes.’
The woman looked at him in some astonishment, for his presence was the reverse of clerical, and his struggle in and with the sea had left his attire in most admired disorder, but she remembered the eccentricities of the nation to which he belonged, and her wonder abated. After giving the woman a few more general instructions, Bradley walked slowly and thoughtfully to his hotel.
More than once already his thoughts had turned towards Alma, but he had checked such thoughts and crushed them down in the presence of death; left to himself, however, he could not conquer them, nor restrain a certain feeling of satisfaction in his newly-found freedom. He would write to Alma, as in duty bound, at once, and tell her of all that had happened. And then? It was too late, perhaps, to make full amends, to expect full forgiveness; but it was his duty to give to her in the sight of the world the name he had once given to her secretly and in vain.
But the man’s troubled spirit, sensitive to a degree, shrank from the idea of building up any new happiness on the grave of the poor woman whose corpse he had just quitted. Although he was now a free man legally, he still felt morally bound and fettered. All his wish and prayer was to atone for the evil he had brought on the one being he reverenced and loved. He did not dare, at least as yet, to think of uniting his unworthy life with a life so infinitely more beautiful and pure.
Yes, he would write to her. The question was, where his letter would find her, and how soon?
When he had last heard from her she was at Milan, but that was several weeks ago; and since then, though he had written twice, there had been no response. She was possibly travelling farther southward; in all possibility, to Home.
The next few days passed drearily enough. An examination of some letters recently received by the deceased discovered two facts—first, that she had a sister, living in Oxford, with whom she corresponded; and, second, that her means of subsistence came quarterly from a firm of solicitors in Bedford Bow, London. Next day the sister arrived by steamboat, accompanied by her husband, a small tradesman. Bradley interviewed the pair, and found them decent people, well acquainted with their relative’s real position. The same day he received a communication from the solicitors, notifying that the annuity enjoyed by ‘Mrs. Montmorency’ lapsed with her decease, but that a large sum of money had been settled by the late Lord Ombermere upon the child, the interest of the sum to be used for his maintenance and education, and the gross amount with additions and under certain reservations, to be at his disposal on attaining his majority.
On seeking an interview with the Rev. Mr. Robertson, the minister of the English Church, Bradley soon found that his reputation had preceded him.
‘Do I address the famous Mr. Bradley, who some time ago seceded from the English Church?’ asked the minister, a pale, elderly, clean-shaven man, bearing no little resemblance to a Roman Catholic priest.
Bradley nodded, and at once saw the not too cordial manner of the other sink to freezing point.
‘The unfortunate lady was your wife?’
‘Yes; but we had been separated for many years.’
‘Ah, indeed!’ sighed the clergyman with a long-drawn sigh, a furtive glance of repulsion, and an inward exclamation of ‘no wonder!’
‘Although we lived apart, and although, to be frank, there was great misunderstanding between us, all that is over for ever, you understand. It is in a spirit of the greatest tenderness and compassion that I wish to conduct the funeral service—to which I presume there is no objection.’
Mr. Robertson started in amazement, as if a bomb had exploded under his feet.
‘To conduct the funeral service! But you have seceded from the Church of England.’
‘In a sense, yes; but I have never done so formally. I am still an English clergyman.’
‘I could never consent to such a thing,’ cried the other, indignantly. ‘I should look upon it as profanity. Your published opinions are known to me, sir; they have shocked me inexpressibly; and not only in my opinion, but in that of my spiritual superiors, they are utterly unworthy of one calling himself a Christian.’
‘Then you refuse me permission to officiate?’
‘Most emphatically. More than that, I shall require some assurance that the lady did not share your heresies, before I will suffer the interment to take place in the precincts of my church.’
‘Is not my assurance sufficient?’
‘No, sir, it is not!’ exclaimed the clergyman with scornful dignity. ‘I do not wish to say anything offensive, but, speaking as a Christian and a pastor of the English Church, I can attach no weight whatever to the assurances of one who is, in the public estimation, nothing better than an avowed infidel. Good morning!’
So saying, with a last withering look, the clergyman turned on his heel and walked away.
Seeing that remonstrance was useless, and might even cause public scandal, Bradley forthwith abandoned his design; but at his suggestion his wife’s sister saw the incumbent, and succeeded in convincing him that Mrs. Montmorency had died in the true faith. The result of Mr. Robertson’s pious indignation was soon apparent. The sister and her husband, who had hitherto treated Bradley with marked respect, now regarded him with sullen dislike and suspicion. They could not prevent him, however, from following as chief mourner, when the day of the funeral came.
That funeral was a dismal enough experience for Ambrose Bradley. Never before had he felt so keenly the vanity of his own creed and the isolation of his own opinions, as when he stood by the graveside and listened to the last solemn words of the English burial service. He seemed like a black shadow in the sacred place. The words of promise and resurrection had little meaning for one who had come to regard the promise as only beautiful ‘poetry,’ and the resurrection as only a poet’s dream. And though the sense of his own sin lay on his heart like lead, he saw no benign Presence blessing the miserable woman who had departed, upraising her on wings of gladness; all he perceived was Death’s infinite desolation, and the blackness of that open grave.