Mr. Dalbrook looked at his son interrogatively.
“Let her see him,” said Theodore, gently. “We cannot lessen her sorrow. It must have its way. Better perhaps that she should see him, and accustom herself to her grief; better for her brain, however it may torture her heart.”
He saw the risk of a further calamity in his cousin’s state—the fear that her mind would succumb under the burden of her sorrow. It seemed to him that there was more danger in thwarting her natural desire to look upon her beloved dead than in letting her have her way.
The housekeeper had followed her young mistress to the drawing-room door, and was waiting there. She shook her head, and murmured something about Mr. Dolby’s orders, but submitted to the authority of a kinsman and family solicitor, as even superior to the faculty.
She led the way silently to that upper chamber where the murdered man was lying. Matthew Dalbrook put his cousin’s icy hand through his arm and supported her steps as they slowly followed. Theodore remained in the drawing-room, walking up and down, in deepest thought, stopping now and then in his slow pacing to and fro to contemplate that stain upon the velvet pile, and the empty chair beside it.
In the room above Juanita knelt beside the bed where he who kissed her last night on the threshold of her chamber lay in his last slumber, a marble figure with calm dead face shrouded by the snowy sheet, with flowers—white waxen exotics—scattered about the bed. She lifted the sheet, and looked upon him, and kissed him with love’s last despairing kiss, and then she knelt beside the bed, with her face bent in her clasped hands, calmer than she had been at any moment since she found her murdered husband lying at her feet.
“It’s wonderful,” whispered the housekeeper to Mr. Dalbrook; “it seems to have soothed her, poor dear, to see him—and I was afraid she would have broke down worse than ever.”
“You must give way to her a little, Mrs. Morley. She has a powerful mind, and she must not be treated like a child. She will live through her trouble, and rise superior to it, be sure of that; terrible as it is.”
The door opened softly, and a woman came into the room, a woman of about five-and-forty, of middle height, slim and delicately made, with aquiline nose and fair complexion, and flaxen hair just touched with grey. She was deadly pale, but her eyes were tearless, and she came quietly to the bed, and fell on her knees by Juanita’s side and hid her face as Juanita’s was hidden, and the first sound that came from her lips was a long low moan—a sound of greater agony than Matthew Dalbrook had ever heard in his life until that moment.
“Good God,” he muttered to himself, as he moved to a distant window, “I had forgotten Lady Jane.”