She had no dread of a solitary old age but an old age beholden to either public or private charity was to her intolerable; and she had now few years left her to work in—a governess's life wears women out very fast. She determined to begin to work again immediately, laying by as much as possible yearly against the days when she could work no more; consulted Miss Maclachlan, who was most kind; and then sought and was just about going to another situation, with the highest salary she had yet earned, when an utterly unexpected change altered every thing.
Chapter 4.
The fly was already at the door, and Miss Williams, with her small luggage, would in five minutes have departed, followed by the good wishes of all the household, from Miss Maclachlan's school to her new situation, when the postman passed and left a letter for her.
"I will put it in my pocket and read it in the train," she said, with a slight change of color. For she recognized the handwriting of that good man who had loved her, and whom she could not love.
"Better read it now. No time like the present," observed Miss
Maclachlan.
Miss Williams did so. As soon as she was fairly started and alone in the fly, she opened it, with hands slightly trembling, for she was touched by the persistence of the good rector, and his faithfulness to her, a poor governess, when he might have married, as they said in his neighborhood, "anybody." He would never marry any body now—he was dying.
"I have come to feel how wrong I was," he wrote, "in ever trying to change our happy relations together. I have suffered for this—so have we all. But it is now too late for regret. My time has come. Do not grieve yourself by imagining it has come the faster through any decision of yours, but by slow, inevitable disease, which the doctors have only lately discovered. Nothing could have saved me. Be satisfied that there is no cause for you to give yourself one moment's pain." (How she sobbed over those shaky lines, more even than over the newspaper lines which she had read that sun-shiny morning on the shore!) "Remember only that you made me very happy—me and all mine—for years; that I loved you, as even at my age a man can love; as I shall love you to the end, which can not be very far off now. Would you dislike coming to see me just once again? My girls will so very glad, and nobody knows any thing. Besides, what matter? I am dying. Come, if you can within a week or so; they tell me I may last thus long. And I want to consult with you about my children. Therefore I will not say good-by now, only good-night, and God bless you."
But it was good-by, after all. Though she did not wait the week; indeed, she waited for nothing, considered nothing, except her gratitude to this good man—the only man who had loved her—and her affection for the two girls, who would soon be fatherless; though she sent a telegram from Brighton to say she was coming, and arrived within twenty-four hours, still—she came too late.
When she reached the village she heard that his sufferings were all over; and a few yards from his garden wall, in the shade of the church-yard lime-tree, the old sexton was busy re-opening, after fourteen years, the family grave, where he was to be laid beside his wife the day after to-morrow. His two daughters, sitting alone together in the melancholy house, heard Miss Williams enter, and ran to meet her. With a feeling of nearness and tenderness such as she had scarcely ever felt for any human being, she clasped them close, and let them weep their hearts out in her motherly arms.
Thus the current of her whole life was changed; for when Mr. Moseley's will was opened, it was found that, besides leaving Miss Williams a handsome legacy, carefully explained as being given "in gratitude for her care of his children," he had chosen her as their guardian, until they came of age or married, entreating her to reside with them, and desiring them to pay her all the respect due to "a near and dear relative." The tenderness with which he had arranged every thing, down to the minutest points, for them and herself, even amidst all his bodily sufferings, and in face of the supreme hour—which he had met, his daughters said, with a marvelous calmness, even joy—touched Fortune as perhaps nothing had ever touched her in all her life before. When she stood with her two poor orphans beside their father's grave, and returned with them to the desolate house, vowing within herself to be too them, all but in name, the mother he had wished her to be, this sense of duty—the strange new duty which had suddenly come to fill her empty life—was so strong, that she forgot every thing else—even Robert Roy.