'Wounded, severely wounded,' Laura had been repeating to herself: but where wounded, she speculated—how, and with what, and in what part of the poor mortal frame.
The telegram was horribly brief and vague! And now though Laura and Bella Chevenix had few notes to compare, and could say nothing to comfort each other, they gathered some from the communion of tears and thoughts and sorrows.
Laura drew forth—as she had done a score of times before—Dalton's letters to her from Madeira, the Gold Coast, and sent by more than one homeward-bound ship; and the affection they breathed for her and Netty filled her soul with great gratitude now, whatever might happen. She had never received letters from him before—even in their early lover days at St. Leonard's long ago, before their years of separation came: and how strange it was to have received letters from him, conceived in the tenor of these, and signed 'Your affectionate husband, Tony Dalton.'
Now he and Laura were quite old enough to know their own minds, and to deplore the separation a previous less knowledge of each other had brought about between them; neither was likely to make any more false steps, from rashness or impulse, and they had a fair promise of a delicious companionship for the future if they were spared to meet again, and the perils of the Gold Coast ever became a thing of the past, but that fair promise hung by a thread now.
'Had we never met more—met as we did so singularly by the sudden arrival of his regiment in Aldershot,' said Laura, 'and I loved or compelled him, poor darling, to love me again, I might have gone on to the end of my days nursing a sickly sentimental memory on one hand, with a species of revengeful memory on the other; but, if we never meet more on this side of the grave, I shall—till carried to mine—remember with gratitude that he had learned to love me well, and Netty too, before we lost him for ever.'
All her natural gaiety and much of her aplomb had left Laura on the day Dalton sailed from Southampton, and now she was as crushed in spirit as a poor woman well could be. 'We love because we have loved,' says a novelist, 'and it is easier to go on in the old routine, even when all the real life and beauty has died out of it, than to break with the mere memory of that time which made our life holy and beautiful to us.'
In the time of this strange enforced separation—in the time of Dalton's actual desertion of Laura, and when she knew not whether he was dead or living till she met him at Aldershot—this had been something of the sentiment that inspired her; but now that they had both known and loved each other anew under better auspices, and been so briefly re-united, a contemplation of the catastrophe that might yet happen wrung Laura's heart to the core.
On leaving the latter, Bella, though still a prey to choking grief, in the warm and generous impulse of her nature, conceived the idea of, or thought she might find some comfort in, a visit to Lady Wilmot. She was his mother, whose grief at least could not be inferior to her own.
She committed to oblivion all that lady's treatment of herself in the past time, and even but lately at the Charity Bazaar; yet it was not without some misgivings, and even pausing in her progress once or twice, that she turned the heads of her pretty ponies in the direction of Wilmothurst, her tears falling hotly under her thick Shetland veil as she passed down the stately avenue and through the Chase, where every foot of the way suggested some memory of Jerry and his happy boyhood, when they were playmates till he went to Eton, and Lady Julia—well, never permitted her name to be on the ordinary visitors' list. There was a tall elm up which he had clambered, at the risk of his limbs, to get her a magpie's nest; here they had gathered the early primroses in April, and the Lent lilies in May, or hunted for butterflies. How often had they played croquet together on the bowling-green, and rowed dreamily for hours on the tree-shaded river; and at every turn the figure of the boy seemed to come before her, mingled with that of the moustached and handsome young officer to whom she so strangely bade farewell.
Full of these thoughts, Bella would not be repelled by the conventional manner or replies of the footman, and begged so earnestly to see Lady Julia that she was ushered into her presence by the former, as we have described in the last chapter.