CHAPTER XX.
LET SILENCE BE ABOUT HER NAME.
Bella was dying. The doctors had pronounced their verdict. The spine had been fatally injured. A few hours of life—hours in which there would be happily little or no suffering—alone remained to Mr. Piper’s second wife. Very brief had been the story of his courtship and marriage.
He had sent off a groom to Great Yafford on one of the carriage horses to summon the most famous surgeon in the town, but Dr. Milroyd, who was a physician of some standing, and the humble Mr. Namby, who was not without experience in surgery, assured Mr. Piper that the whole college of surgeons would be powerless to prolong Bella’s life for an hour beyond the natural running out of the sand in a glass that had been turned for the last time.
‘You can go and sit by her if you like,’ said Mr. Namby, kindly. ‘It can do no harm. She would like you to be there, I dare say, poor thing. And don’t you think her family ought to be sent for?’
‘Yes,’ answered Mr. Piper. ‘I dare say she’d like to see them.’
They were standing in the corridor outside Bella’s room. That strange tranquillity of Mr. Piper’s impressed the doctors. They ascribed it to the intensity of his grief. He was stunned, no doubt, poor fellow, by the sudden calamity.
Ebenezer Piper went into the apple-green bedroom where his wife was lying, the wife who was so soon to drift away from him down that dark stream which led he knew not whither. The certainty of impending death made her sacred. She was beyond punishment or upbraiding. One could scarcely say hard things to the vilest criminal, when his hour of doom was fixed and the rope round his neck. The final irrevocable sentence stultifies all lesser penalties.
Bella was lying with her face turned away from the light, her lovely auburn hair rippling over the pillows—that hair whose luxuriance had been one of her charms. One little hand lay inert upon the satin coverlet. How pretty she was! The sense of her beauty struck her husband with actual pain. So lovely, so innocent-looking, and so false!
‘If she had lived I would have never seen her face again,’ he thought, ‘but now it doesn’t matter.’