Here he finished abruptly, leaving the sheet on the blotting-pad, by the side of the open, despatch-box.
"They'll not be able to get over that," he said with a shudder; "and the woman's testimony will be concurrent. It's an odd thing that a man who can do it should care about what people say of him after it's done."
He shuddered again as from his dressing-case he took a small phial of medicine which he had purchased at a chemist's for the purpose, and from the drawer in which he had locked it the strychnine-bottle, and placed them side by side on the table. He then leisurely undressed himself, turned the bedclothes back, and rumpled the bed to give it the appearance of having been slept in; then he extinguished the light, took the phial of strychnine in his hand, lifted it to his mouth, drained it, and with one convulsive spring managed to throw himself on the bed.
"And he's quite gone, sir?" inquired weeping Mrs. Jobson the next morning of the doctor who had been hastily summoned.
"Gone, madam!" said the doctor, who was a snuffy Scotchman of the old school--"he's as dad as Jullius Cæsar. And this is another case o' the meschief of unauthorised parsons doctorin' themsalves and takkin' medicines in the dark."
[CHAPTER VIII.]
A last Message.
Wordsworth has written of one of those beautiful scenes which he loved so intensely, and with whose loveliness he was so familiar--
"The spot was made by Nature for herself;
The travellers know it not. * * *
* * * But it is beautiful,
And if a man should plant his ottage near,
Should sleep beneath the shelter of its trees,
And blend its waters with his daily meals,
He would so love it, that in his death-hour
Its image would survive amongst his thoughts."
It was amid a scene to which these lines might be applied, that Lord Sandilands and his daughter were living, a year after the death of Gilbert Lloyd--a scene so grand, and yet so full of soft and tender beauty, that an English writer, who knew it better than anyone except the native Swiss dwellers in it, declared it to be, "even amongst the wonders of the Alps, a very miracle of beauty." It was a nook in the Savoy Alps, near the Valley of the Sixt. It had needed both money and interest to enable the old English nobleman to make even a temporary "settlement" in the remote region; but he had used both to good purpose, when he found that the wounded spirit, the mind diseased, of his daughter were not to be healed by the distractions of travelling in the busy and populous centres of European life. They had tried many places, but she had sickened of all, though she tried hard to hide from her father--whose solicitude for her increased daily, as did her affection for him--that all his efforts to procure peace and pleasure for her were to a great extent ineffectual. The young English prima donna--whose brief and brilliant career, whose sudden, unexplained disappearance from the scene of her triumphs, had been the subject of much talk and many conjectures in London--was not identified on the Continent with the Miss Keith who kept so much to herself, but who was so very charming when she could be induced to enter into the pastime of the hour. This was the more natural, as Gertrude never exerted her greatest, her most characteristic, talent--she never sang after she left England The last occasion on which she had "tumbled," as she had said, to a limited but critical audience at Hardriggs, was the last appearance of Miss Lambert on any stage. Miss Keith looked well, when he was to be seen, and talked well, when she could be heard; but she never sang, and thus a kindly mist diffused itself over her identity.