CHAPTER XIV. ONCE MORE IN MY LADY'S CHAMBER.
AS my Lady left the churchyard by the wicket-gate, she caught the flutter of a female dress that flitted on before her, and vanished in the regions belonging to the domestics. Was it possible that anybody had been a witness to her late interview, or worse, a listener to the conversation? It was in the highest degree improbable, but not impossible. By crouching down behind the low stone wall, next Sir Robert's tomb, a person in the Abbey grounds, without doubt, could have overheard, and even, with caution, might have watched them. It chilled my Lady's heart to think of it. Yet what could be more unlikely? What servant of hers would have ventured upon such an outrage? Could Mary Forest have so far forgotten herself, actuated by an irrepressible curiosity to hear what her mistress and her lover could have to say to one another at that strange time and place? It was much more probable that some domestic about to use the short-cut through the churchyard, had seen her coming from it, and hastened back, to avoid a meeting. At the same time, the suspicion added to my Lady's troubles.
These were serious and pressing enough already, Heaven help her! and yet, urgent and perilous as they were, it was not of them that she first thought when she found herself once more in her own room. There are no circumstances, however tremendous, which have power to quench the susceptibilities of women: their feelings must have way, no matter how dangerous the indulgence in them, how immediate the necessity for action. The meshes of a net which threatened destruction to herself and all that were dear to her were closing in around Lady Lisgard, and, calm as she looked, she knew it well—well as the wily salmon that poises motionless, and seemingly unconscious of his peril, in the red pool, below which the fisherman has set the spreading snare; but my Lady turns her back for a little upon the tide of woes that is setting in upon her—a spring-tide that may reach Heaven knows how far—and seeks the inland Past. It is the last time that she will ever visit it, and therefore she cannot choose but linger there a while, and shed some bitter tears. Her door is locked, for none must see her wishing “Good-bye,” and the windows are wide open to the air, which blows the flame of her reading-lamp hither and thither. She needs air, poor lady. A waft of wind that has swept some snowy steppe would have been grateful to her throbbing brow that April night; and as for light, a very little is enough for her purpose. Those few old letters she is reading, taken from a secret drawer in my Lady's desk, are as familiar to her as her prayers, and she seems to hold them almost as sacred. Yet one is not even a letter, but only a piece of folded note-paper, torn at the creases, and yellow—nay, yellower than mere age could possibly have turned it. It has been damaged by seawater. Within it are two locks of hair, quite white, and a few words in faded ink, Frank Meade and Rachel Meade, with a date of five-and-thirty years ago.
She takes out the silver tresses, and looking on them reverently for a few moments, kisses them, and puts them back in the secret drawer—but not the writing; that she holds above the lamp until it has caught fire, and watches it until it is quite consumed, and the last spark has gone out. Then she brings forth from the same hiding-place two letters, evidently both by the same hand—a very unclerkly one—ill-spelled and ill-composed, but which have been to her more dear than any written words for a quarter of a century; for they were letters of a dead man, written, the one when he was her accepted lover, the other after he became her husband. They are letters of the Dead no longer; for he who was thought to have died is still alive, and being so, has become an enemy more terrible than any who should seek her life; one who, by simply saying: “This is my wife,” would thereby dishonour her, disgrace her children, and even shame the memory of that righteous man whose tomb she had just visited, and wept over with such honest tears. And yet with tenderness, though mixed with a certain awe and shrinking, does my Lady look upon those time-worn words, notwithstanding that the sacredness of Death is no longer on them. The first is what is called a love-letter, a note filled with foolish fondness, expressed with vehemence, but without coarseness; the second a tissue of passionate self-reproaches; the writer accusing himself of bringing a curse upon her happy home in having married her; then stating, as though reluctantly, certain arrangements he had made at the seaport,-from which his communication was dated, for the passage of herself and parents by the North Star. Both are signed Ralph Gavestone.
“So loving and so penitent,” murmurs she, “Time cannot surely have worked so ill with such a nature as he would have me believe! When he first sang that carol to my ear, I thought it might have been an angel singing:
O'er the hill and o'er the vale
Come three kings together.
“Alas, alas! to think with what terror I heard him sing it the last time. He may not be more changed within, perhaps, than he is without; since, notwithstanding what he said about his looks, I knew him again the first moment my eye lit upon him on yonder lawn. I wonder whether he would have known me, supposing he had snatched away my veil. Merciful Heaven, what a risk was that! nay, is not every moment that he remains at Mirk a risk! What if he heard the name of Gavestone coupled with mine? I am sure he recognised something in my voice, although I disguised it all I could. He must never come back hither—never, never! He must be as dead to me now as I deemed him to be before. God knows I pity him from the bottom of my heart: and also”—here she paused—“yes, and also that I do not love him—no, not him, although I love the man that wrote these words. I never concealed it, no, never, from my—Sir Robert himself. I said: 'I have no love to give you,' all along; 'only respect, devotion, duty.' And those, Heaven knows, I gave. If all together, and a hundred other gracious feelings added, could have made up love, then Sir Robert would have had that; but they can not. He knew it, noble heart, and was content. He knew that in that drawer I kept these very things that came on shore with me when——O Ralph, Ralph, Ralph!” My Lady shook with sobs; and then, in her agony, mistaking the noise of her own passion for some interruption from without, started up from the desk on which she had thrown herself, and listened.