While the first set of decanters were traversing the table, I slipped away unnoticed, and without changing my uniform, took the road at a rasping pace direct for the Reculvers. The moon was just rising from the sea, and the last notes of the curfew were dying away, as I drew up at the door of Miss Auriol's cottage.
She was alone, and sitting at tea, to which she bade me welcome, in a manner that showed she half doubted the honesty of my visit, and betrayed such emotions of shame, confusion, and awkwardness, I felt myself quite an intruder. But I simply asked if she had heard more of Berkeley.
She admitted that she had, and stated mournfully that for the last three days he had been constantly at the park, thus confirming what Frank Jocelyn had told me.
In the course of another visit or two, I gradually learned piecemeal all the poor girl's unhappy history, and how she became the victim, first of evil fortune, and afterwards of a cold-blooded man of the world like De Warr Berkeley.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Where are the illusions bright and vain
That fancy boded forth?
Sunk to their silent caves again,
Auroræ of the north!
Oh! who would live those visions o'er,
All brilliant though they seem,
Since earth is but a desert shore,
And life a weary dream!
MOIR.
She was the orphan daughter of the poor curate of a secluded village on the borders of Wales. Her mother, also the daughter of a curate, had died when Agnes was very young. She was thus left to be the sole prop and comfort of the old man's declining years, and he loved her dearly—all the more dearly that, with a little brother, a beautiful, golden-haired boy (the same whose miniature I remarked), she alone survived of all their children, ten in number.
The rest had perished early; for all possessed that terrible heritage, the seeds of which Agnes was now maturing in her own bosom—consumption.
One by one the old clergyman had seen them borne forth from his little thatched parsonage, under the ivy-clad lyke-gate of the village church, and laid by their mother's side, a row of little grassy graves, where the purple and golden crocuses grew in spring, and the white-eyed marguerites in summer, all as gaily as if the last hopes of a broken heart were not buried beneath them.
In the fulness of time the shadow of death again fell on the old parsonage, and the curate's white hairs were laid in the dust, close by the quiet little Saxon church in which he had ministered so long; and now the ten graves of the once loving household lay side by side, without a stone to mark them.