“My child, my little Bride. You have been a dear, dear child to me. In days to come, if you live to have children of your own, may you be rewarded for all the tenderness you have shown to me.”
“Mother, mother, let me die too! I cannot bear it! I cannot live without you!”
“Dearest, you must live for your father; you must comfort each other,” and with a last effort of strength, the dying woman brought the hands of father and daughter together across her emaciated form, and held them locked together so in her stiffening fingers.
When the end came they neither knew exactly. Bride was on her knees, her face hidden, the shadow seeming to weigh her down till all was blackness round her, and she felt sinking, sinking, sinking down into some unknown abyss, clinging frantically to something which she took to be her mother’s hand. The Duke, with his eyes upon his wife’s face, saw the fluttering of the eyelids, heard a soft sigh, and then watched the settling down upon that wan face of a look of unspeakable rest and sweetness.
If that was death, why need death be dreaded? It was like nothing that he had seen or imagined before. The only words which came into his mind were those of a familiar formula never understood before—
“The peace of God that passeth all understanding.”
CHAPTER III
THE HOUSE OF MOURNING
EUSTACE MARCHMONT came in sight of Penarvon Castle just as the last rays of the winter sunset were striking upon its closed windows and turning them into squares of flashing red light dazzling to the eye. The castle stood commandingly upon its lofty promontory of jagged cliff, and from its garden walls, as the young man remembered well, the spectator could look sheer down a deep precipice into the tossing waves of the sea beneath. He remembered the long side terrace of the castle, against which the thunder of the surf in winter months made a perpetual roar and battle; whilst even on summer evenings, when the sea lay like a sheet of molten gold beneath them, the ceaseless murmur was always to be heard, suggestive of the restless life of the ocean. It was natural perhaps that Eustace should draw rein and look at the majestic pile with something of pride in his gaze, for he was the Duke’s next of kin, and in the course of nature would one day be master here. Yet there was no exultation in the steady gaze he fixed upon his future home: it was speculative and thoughtful rather than triumphant. There was a shade of perplexity in the wide-open grey eyes intently fixed upon the place, which looked at the moment as though lit up for illumination, and the firm lips set themselves in lines that were almost grim.