It seemed to me that we had not proceeded a mile townward, between hedgerows, when the waning moon, hitherto invisible, began to glimmer over Hampstead Heath, shedding a ghostly farewell ray upon the silent country, where not a dog barked.
A strange sound, like the murmur of a voice, came to my ears at times. Was it a pursuit? I looked anxiously back, and even pulled up for an instant. Behind all was silent—but, oh, almighty heaven! what was this?
The old woman was moving—-her feeble hands essayed to lift the cloth that covered her face! A wild spasm of terror contracted my heart; and any one but a medical man, I am assured, would have abandoned the trap and an adventure so terrible; but the idea of a recovery from trance immediately flashed upon my mind, and my first thought was, the professor would not get the prized vertebræ after all. I lifted the almost inanimate woman beside me, and felt that she was warm, fleshy too, and had a returning pulse, which the motion of the trap accelerated. I uncovered her face that she might respire, and a wild cry escaped me—a cry that rang far over the heath.
Heavens! Was I going mad outright? She was Gertrude!—Gertrude Chalcot!—pale as death could make her, yet living still, her hazel eyes lurid and sunken, her dark hair falling about her face.
All that followed was like a swift nightmare: the drive to town, muffled in my overcoat and cloak; the abandonment of the trap in the street; her conveyance in secret to my lodgings, and placing her cosily in my own bed till I could get her other quarters and attendance. Luckily, Bob Asher, and the professor too, came about mid-day, or I should soon have been fit for Hanwell.
* * * *
How all this came to pass was very simple. Unwedded still, she had returned with her family to England in wretched health; her illness took a more serious form, and would seem to have culminated in a species of trance, with the medical technicalities of which it might be wearisome to trouble the reader. Suffice it, that the alarm of cholera was abroad, and the local terror at R—— induced her interment, as, perhaps, in too many other cases, hastily and prematurely; hence the vault being left unfinished, permitted her to respire, and our adventure—a mistake by the way—ended in her rescue, though a great horror of what her fate might have been filled my heart, and for a long period we were compelled to conceal from her the awful place in which she was found.
Under our united care she recovered fast. But my space is short.
Sweet is the union of lovers after a separation; but, with all its charm, much that was sad, startling, and even terrible, mingled with ours. She was mine now. Not even that proud and cruel father, who had so fiercely spurned me, could dispute the claim, I thought. Mine—oh, how strangely and how terribly mine!
The close of the year saw us married, Bob Asher acting as groomsman with great éclat. Sir —— —— took me as a partner, and for a month I went with my bride to Baden. There, one day, at the table d'hôte, she found herself face to face with her own parents. The alarm, the consternation, the scene, proved frightful; but all ended in a complete reconciliation, and Christmas-day saw us all happy at Chalcot Park, and I felt, on seeing my blooming Gertrude, in all the splendour of her beauty, opening the yearly ball, that I could with a whole heart forgive even her father for his pride and fury on the day that saw us separated.