for all the pleasure he could take in them.
His wife Lilith was gone—dead—murdered.
This was to him the death-knell of nature. His mental suffering was not now sharp. He was much too weak to feel acutely. His sorrow had settled into a dull despair—a cold and lifeless misery.
Lilith was gone.
If she had passed away peacefully in her bed, attended by friends, sustained by religion, though he must have mourned for her, he could have borne his loss; or if, as had been at first supposed, she had accidentally fallen into the creek, and met a sudden, painless death, still, though he must have suffered much more, yet he could have endured the blow; but she had been butchered—cruelly butchered by some night-prowling ruffian, whose identity was neither known nor suspected, and whose motive for the monstrous crime could not even be imagined.
Lilith had been slain, and the blackness of darkness had settled upon the soul of him who felt that he had driven her forth that bitter winter night to meet her awful fate.
Yes, the blackness of darkness seemed to have fallen like the clods of the grave upon his dead and buried soul. In other deaths the body only dies; the soul lives on. In his case it seemed the soul that died, while the poor weak body lived on.
He had not been deserted in his misery and despair. As soon as the news of the discovered murder at Cliff Creek had flown over the country, spreading horror everywhere, friends and neighbors had flocked to the house, with profound sorrow for the murdered wife and sympathy for the awfully bereaved husband, and earnest proffers of assistance in any manner in which their services could be made available.
And when it became known that Mr. Hereward himself had been suddenly stricken down by dangerous illness, the ladies of the neighborhood, skilful nurses all, carefully trained to their duties as their mothers before them had been—and as all the mistresses of large plantations necessarily were—came in turn to stop at the Cliffs, and to take care of the desolate master.
The Rev. Mr. Cave, his old pastor, had come every day to visit him, and as soon as his condition warranted, to administer religious consolation.