Arabella came back, closing the door; and while she busied herself with that precious saucepan on the hob—to which the Marchioness of Montfort had become a very secondary object—she said, looking towards Caroline from under her iron-grey ringlets:
“You heard—he misses me! He can’t bear me out of his sight now—me, me! You heard!”
Meekly Lady Montfort advanced, bringing in her hand the tray with the broth-basin.
“Yes, I heard! I must not keep you; but let me help while I stay.”
So the broth was poured forth and prepared, and with it Arabella disappeared. She returned in a few minutes, beckoned to Caroline, and said in a low voice:
“Come in—say you forgive him! Oh, you need not fear him; a babe could not fear him now!”
Caroline followed Arabella into the sick-room. No untidiness there; all so carefully, thoughtfully arranged. A pleasant room, too—with windows looking full on the sunniest side of the Vale of Health; the hearth so cheerily clear, swept so clean—the very ashes out of sight; flowers—costly exotics—on the table, on the mantelpiece; the couch drawn towards the window; and on that couch, in the gay rich dressing-gown of former days, warm coverlets heaped on the feet, snow-white pillows propping the head, lay what at first seemed a vague, undistinguishable mass—lay what, as the step advanced, and the eye became more accurately searching, grew into Jasper Losely.
Yes, there, too weak indeed for a babe to fear, lay all that was left of the Strong Man! No enemy but himself had brought him thus low-spendthrift, and swindler, and robber of his own priceless treasures—Health and Strength—those grand rent-rolls of joy which Nature had made his inheritance. As a tree that is crumbling to dust under the gnarls of its bark seems, the moment ere it falls, proof against time and the tempest, so, within all decayed, stood that image of strength-so, air scarcely stirring, it fell. “And the pitcher was broken at the fountain; and the wheel was broken at the cistern; vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher.”
Jasper turned his dull eye towards Caroline, as she came softly to his side, and looked at her with a piteous gaze. The stroke that had shattered the form had spared the face; and illness and compulsory abstinence from habitual stimulants had taken from the aspect much of the coarseness—whether of shape or colour—that of late years had disfigured its outline—and supplied the delicacy which ends with youth by the delicacy that comes with the approach of death. So that, in no small degree, the beauty which had been to him so fatal a gift, was once more visible—the features growing again distinct, as wanness succeeded to the hues of intemperance, and emaciation to the bloated cheeks and swollen muscle. The goddess whose boons adorn the outward shell of the human spirit came back to her favourite’s death-couch as she had come to the cradle—not now as the Venus Erycina, goddess of Smile and Jest, but as the warning Venus Libitina, the goddess of Doom and the Funeral.
“I’m a very poor creature,” said Jasper, after a pause. “I can’t rise—I can’t move without help. Very strange supernatural! She always said that if I raised my hand against her, it would fall palsied!” He turned his eye towards Arabella with a glare of angry terror. “She is a witch!” he said, and buried his face in the pillow. Tears rolled down the grim woman’s cheeks.