Chapter Twenty Four.
De Vayne’s Christmas Holidays.
“He that for love hath undergone
The worst that can befall,
Is happier thousandfold than one
Who never loved at all.
“A grace within his soul hath reigned,
Which nothing else can bring;
Thank God for all that I have gained
By that high suffering.”
Moncton Manes.
For many days Lord De Vayne seemed to be hovering between life and death. The depression of his spirits weighed upon his frame, and greatly retarded his recovery. That he, unconscious as he was of ever having made an enemy—good and gentle to all—with no desire but to love his neighbour as himself, and to devote such talents and such opportunities as had been vouchsafed him to God’s glory and man’s benefit;—that he should have been made the subject of a disgraceful wager, and the butt of an infamous experiment; that in endeavouring to carry out this nefarious plan, any one should have been so wickedly reckless, so criminally thoughtless;—this knowledge lay on his imagination with a depression as of coming death. De Vayne had been but little in Saint Werner’s society, and had rarely seen any but his few chosen friends; and that such a calamity should have happened in the rooms and at the table of one of those friends,—that Kennedy, whom he so much loved and admired, should be suspected of being privy to it;—this fact was one which made De Vayne’s heart sink within him with anguish and horror, and a weariness of life.
And in those troubled waters of painful thought floated the broken gleams of a golden phantasy, the rainbow-coloured memories of a secret love. They came like a light upon the darkened waves, yet a light too feeble to dissipate the under gloom. Like the phosphorescent flashes in the sea at midnight, which the lonely voyager, watching with interest as they glow in the white wake of the keel, guesses that they may be the heralds of a storm,—so these bright reminiscences of happier days only gave a weird beauty to the tumult of the sick boy’s mind; and the mother, as she sat by him night and day during the crisis of his suffering, listened with a deeper anxiety for future trouble to the delirious revelations of his love.
For Lady De Vayne had come from Other Hall to nurse her sick son. She slept on a sofa in his sitting-room, and nursed him with such tenderness as only a mother can. There was no immediate possibility of removing him; deep, unbroken quiet was his only chance of life. The silence of his sick-room was undisturbed save by the softest whispers and the lightest footfalls, and the very undergraduates hushed their voices, and checked their hasty steps as they passed in the echoing cloisters underneath, and remembered that the flame of life was flickering low in the golden vase.
De Vayne was much beloved, and nothing could exceed the delicacy of the attention shown him. Choice conservatory flowers were left almost daily at his door, and men procured rare and rich fruits from home or from London, not because De Vayne needed any such luxuries, which were easily at his command, but that they might show him their sympathy and distress. Several ladies more or less connected with Saint Werner’s offered their services to Lady De Vayne, but she would not leave her son, in whose welfare and recovery her whole thoughts were absorbed.
And so, gloomily for the son and mother, the Christmas holidays came on, and Saint Werner’s was deserted. Scarcely even a stray undergraduate lingered in the courts, and the chapel was closed; no sound of choir or organ came sweetly across the lawns at morning or evening; the ceaseless melancholy plash of the great fountain was almost the only sound that broke the stillness. Julian, Lillyston, and Owen had all gone down for the holidays, full of grief at the thought of leaving their friend in such a precarious state, but as yet not permitted to see or serve him. Lady De Vayne promised to write to Julian regular accounts of Arthur’s health, and told him how often her son spoke of him, both in his wanderings, and in his clearer moments.