Not a word was spoken. Scarce a sound betrayed their progress. The air was hushed—the flakes fell softly, heavily—the earth lay wrapped in a winding-sheet of snow—and Florian was dead before they reached the house!
CHAPTER LX
SOLACE
Bad news proverbially flies apace, and it is strange how soon the intelligence of any catastrophe pervades an entire household.
Though it was towards the small hours of morning that the coach arrived, with its dead freight, at the gates of Hamilton Hill, the whole establishment seemed to arouse itself on the instant, and to become aware, as though by instinct, that something had occurred productive of general confusion and dismay.
Cerise, pale and spiritless, was sitting in her bed-chamber, over the embers of a dying fire, thinking wearily of her husband, wondering, with aching heart and eyes full of tears, what could be this shadow that had of late come up between them, and now threatened to darken her whole life.
How she wished, yes, she actually wished now, she had never married him. He would have remembered her then as the girl he might have loved. For his own happiness, she protested, she could give him up readily, cheerfully even, to another woman. Then she reviewed all the women of her acquaintance, without, however, being able to fix on one to whom she could make this sacrifice ungrudgingly. She thought, too, how forlorn she would feel deprived of George. And yet, was she not deprived of him already? Could any separation be more complete than theirs? It was torture to reflect that he could not really have loved her, or it would never have come to this. And to leave her thus, without an opportunity for inquiry or explanation. It was careless, unkind, unpardonable. Better to have been sure of his affection, to have known his last thought was for her, and to have seen him brought in dead before her very eyes into the house!
A hurried step was on the stair, a trembling hand flung open the door, and Lady Hamilton’s maid rushed into the room, pale, scared, and incoherent, to exclaim—
“Oh! my lady—my lady! Whatever are we to do? The coach has been robbed, and they’ve brought him back home! They’re carrying him up the front stairs now. Stone dead, my lady! He never spoke, Ralph says, nor moved after the shot. Such a home-coming! such a home-coming! Oh dear! oh dear!”