In his frequent fits of thinking about himself, and yet out of himself--as though he were contemplating the problems presented by the existence, and pondering the future, of another--James Dugdale was wont to wonder at his own tenacity of life. Ever since his youth he had been a sufferer in body, and had sustained great trials of mind; he had been always more or less feeble, and of the nervous febrile temperament which is said (erroneously) to wear itself out rapidly. But he had lived on and on, and the young, the strong, the prosperous, the happy, had passed before him, and been lost in the dimness of the separation of death.
He had been carefully dressed by his servant for the festivities of the evening, and had laid down upon the couch beside the windows of his sitting-room, from which a beautiful view was to be had in the daytime, through which the summer moonlight was streaming now, and had fallen into a reverie. His mind was singularly placid, his memory was singularly clear to-night, as he lay still, listening to the stir in the house, his face turned from the light of the candles which burned on the tables and the mantelpiece; and passing in mental review the persons and the events of long years ago.
How perfectly distinct and vivid they were to-night--his parents, his boyhood, the time when it was first discovered that he must never expect to be a healthy, vigorous man--his student days and their associations, the friends of that period of his life! Hayes Meredith was a young man--how curiously his memory reproduced him; and then his cousin Sibylla, his sole kinswoman and his steady friend--the old man who had loved him so well, and the sad dark episode of Margaret's marriage. How plainly he could see Godfrey Hungerford, and how distinctly he could recall the instinctive dislike, suspicion, repulsion he had caused him, and which he early learnt to know was bitter jealousy! Baldwin and Lady Davyntry, that kind, sympathising friend of later days--she whom he still mourned with a poignancy which time had blunted in the case of the others;--it was hard to understand, very wonderful to realise, that they were dead and he alive--he went on with his ordinary life betimes, and did not think about it much, but to-night it seemed impossible.
The wonderful incompleteness, the unmeaningness of life, the phantasmagoria of fragmentary existences occupied him, while all around him were preparations for a festival. Lastly came the image of Margaret, back in all the freshness of her youth, beauty, and happiness, as she had been twenty years ago, and the old man wondered at the strange distinctness of his memory.
Twenty years! a long, long time even at an earlier period of life, a wonderfully long time at his, to keep the memory green. He had had and lost many friends, but only one love; yes, that was the explanation; that was why she, who had died young long ago, never to grow old, never to have any withering touch of time laid upon her beauty, she who was to be remembered as a radiant creature always, had never had a predecessor, a successor, or a rival in his heart; so there was no other image to trouble or confuse hers. The circumstances which had killed her, as he felt, as surely as disease had ever killed,--they, too, returned freshly to his memory; he seemed to live through those old, old days again, and in some degree to realise once more their keen anxiety and distress.
How it had all passed away--how little it had really mattered--how little anything really mattered, after all, except the other world, and the reunion there, without which life, the most renowned as much as the meanest, would indeed be "a tale told by an idiot," and, in the multitude of the ages, and the spanlike brevity of its own duration, "signifying nothing"! It seemed like a dream, and yet it was all real: she had lived and suffered, feared, foreseen, and died under this very roof, beneath which he dwelt, and from which its master went forth a patient, but none the less a broken-hearted man, to die afar off, to lie in the solemn dust of the grand old world.
Were they, the two whom he remembered so well in their youth and love and happiness, any nearer to him than the most ancient of the ancient dead? Was there any difference or degree in all that inconceivable separation? Who could tell him that? Who could still the pang, which time can never lessen, which comes with the immeasurable change? We are in time and space, and they, the dead, are, as we say, beyond their bounds, set free from them. What, then, is their share with us?
He was thinking of these things, which indeed were wont to occupy his mind when he was very peaceful and alone, and thinking also how very brief all our uncertainty is--how short a time the Creator keeps His creatures in ignorance and suspense, and that he was very near to the lifting of the curtain--when Gertrude and Eleanor Baldwin came into the room, and gaily challenged his admiration of their ball-dresses, their wreaths, their bouquets, and their general appearance.
With the keenly strong remembrance of Margaret which he had been dwelling upon freshly before him, James Dugdale was struck by the likeness which Gertrude presented to her mother. Her face was more strictly handsome, her figure promised to be fuller and grander, but the resemblance in feature, in gesture, in voice, in all the subtler affinities which constitute the truth of such resemblances, was, complete. Had she stood thus, in her white dress, flower crowned, by his couch, alone, James Dugdale might have thought the spirit world had unbarred its portals for a little to give him a glimpse of Margaret in her eternal youth; but her arm was linked in that of her sister, and the old man's gaze included them both.
"Do I like you, you witches?" said Mr. Dugdale; "what a question! I think you are both incomparably perfect, and among all the compliments you will hear to-night, I don't think you will have a more satisfactory one than that. I see you are wearing your pearls, Nelly.--Where are your diamonds, Miss Baldwin?"