"Oh," he would exclaim, "for a little of the wealth I have wasted in the foolish past time—for Mary's sake—for Mary's sake!"
How bitter it was to look back in the light of experience and think of what might be now, had he been wiser than he was! And his whole soul recoiled at the contemplation of the awful loneliness of life without her, if Mary were taken from him.
Her fast failing health drew him from his usual selfish and useless repining over the past, or if he did so, it was for her sake alone now; for that she was failing and passing away from him day by day, became painfully apparent; a cough shook her delicate form, and again and again was her handkerchief soaked in blood. And he could only groan over the poverty that precluded all change of air, or scene, and the employment of greater medical skill than that possessed by the country practitioner. But no skill could have availed Mary; and the frail tenure of her life, despite all his love and anxiety, was only a thing of time.
The consumption that was wasting her delicate form only served to make her beauty seem more tender, alluring, and pathetic to the eyes of her sorrow-stricken husband, to whom she said more than once, with her head reclined on his breast—
"If I am taken from you, Greville darling, I trust you will think of the past less regretfully, of the future more hopefully, and remember that we are, while here, but as 'little children playing with shells upon the shore of time.'"
"You are too good for this rough and bitter world," said he, as his tears fell hotly on her soft and rippling hair, and thought in his heart, "Oh, why does God take her and leave me?"
And he clasped her to his heart, as if by the mere strength of his love, and strength of his arms too, he might protect and keep her with him, and kissed her more tenderly than he had ever done in his lover days, for a holier emotion was in his heart now, and to him it seemed that touches of great sweetness came and went about her lips and into her unusually luminous eyes, though their expression grew more weary day by day, and there came into them also that strange, weird, and far-off look that belongs, not to this world, but to the life that is gradually ebbing away from it, and this expression Greville Hampton saw and read with acute mental agony.
"God is taking me away from you, darlings," she said softly, one evening; "but you will always be true and loving to each other for my sake."
Little Derval clung to his father, unable yet to realise the great sorrow that had come upon both.
Why prolong this part of our story? At last all was over, and Greville, worn out with grief and long watching, was led away like a child by the curate from the chamber of death, where his Mary lay, still rarely beautiful, as a piece of sculpture, in her last repose. All seemed terribly silent in the little cottage now; the buzzing of the flies in the sunshine, and the ticking of a clock alone were heard, unless it might be a sob from old Patty Fripp in the kitchen, where she sat rocking herself to and fro, with her apron over her head, or if she moved about it was with soft and stealthy tread, as if she feared to wake someone.