One look at the distorted face, dark with injected blood, the dreadful glassy glare of the eyes, the foam-stained lips, told that all was over. The faithful servant had died at his post. Whatever his charge had been, his term of service was ended. There was a vacancy in Lady Maulevrier's household.
CHAPTER XLVI.
THE DAY OF RECKONING.
Lord Hartfield stayed with the frightened wife while she knelt beside that awful figure on the hearth, wringing her hands with piteous bewailings and lamentations over the unconscious clay. He had always been a good husband to her, she murmured; hard and stern perhaps, but a good man. And she had obeyed him without a question. Whatever he did or said she had counted right.
'We have not had a happy life, though there are many who have envied us her ladyship's favour,' she said in the midst of her lamentations. 'No one knows where the shoe pinches but those who have to wear it. Poor James! Early and late, early and late, studying her ladyship's interests, caring and thinking, in order to keep trouble away from her. Always on the watch, always on the listen. That's what wore him out, poor fellow!'
'My good soul, your husband was an old man,' argued Lord Hartfield, in a consolatory tone, 'and the end must come to all of us somehow.'
'He might have lived to be a much older man if he had had less worry,' said the wife, bending her face to kiss the cold dead brow. 'His days were full of care. We should have been happier in the poorest cottage in Grasmere than we ever were in this big grand house.'
Thus, in broken fragments of speech, Mrs. Steadman lamented over her dead, while the heavy pendulum of the eight-day clock in the hall sounded the slowly-passing moments, until the coming of the doctor broke upon the quiet of the house, with the noise of opening doors and approaching footsteps.