“Oh, my love, my poor heart-broken love, pray to Him to have pity upon us; ask Him to teach us how to bow to the rod, how to bear His chastisement. That is the lesson we have to learn,” pleaded Lady Jane, tearful and submissive, even in the depth of sorrow.
“Is it? My lesson is to see justice done upon the wretch who killed my husband—the malignant, the merciless devil. There was not one of those slayers of women and children in the Indian mutiny worse than the man who killed my love. What had he done—he, the kindest and best—generous, frank, pitiful to all who ever came in his way—what had he done to provoke any man’s enmity? Oh, God, when I remember how good he was, and how much brighter and better the world was for having him——”
She began to pace the room, as she had paced it again and again in her slow hours of agony, her hands clasped above her dishevelled head, her great dark eyes—so dovelike in their hours of love and happiness—burning with an angry light, lurid almost, in the excitement of her fevered brain. There had been times when Lady Jane had feared that reason must give way altogether amidst this wild delirium of grief. She had stayed to watch, and to console, forgetting her own broken heart, putting aside all considerations of her own sorrow as something that might have its way afterwards, in order to comfort this passionate mourner.
Comfort, even from affection such as this, was unavailing. Now and again the girl turned her burning eyes upon the mother’s pale, resigned face, and for a moment a thought of that chastened, gentle grief softened her.
“Dear, dear Lady Jane, God made you better than any other woman on this earth, I believe,” she cried amidst her anguish. “The saints and martyrs must have been like you, but I am not. I am not made like that. I cannot kiss the rod.”
The meeting between Juanita and her father was more painful to him than to her. She hung upon his neck in feverish excitement, imploring him to avenge her husband.
“You can do it,” she urged; “you who are so clever must know how to bring the murderer’s guilt home to him. You will find him, will you not, father? He cannot have gone very far. He cannot have got out of the country yet. Think, it was only Friday. I was a happy woman upon Friday; only think of that—happy—sitting by Godfrey’s side in the phaeton, driving through the sunset, and thinking how beautiful the world was and what a privilege it was to live. I had no more foreboding than the skylark had singing above our heads. And in less than an hour after midnight my darling was dead. Oh, God, how sudden! I cannot even remember his last words. He kissed me as he left me at my bedroom door—kissed me and said something. I cannot remember what it was; but I can hear the sound of his voice still—I shall hear it all my life.”
Lord Cheriton let her ramble on. He had, alas, so little to say to her, such sorry comfort to offer. Only words, mere words—which must needs sound idle and hollow in the ear of grief, frame his consolatory speeches with what eloquence he might. He could do nothing for her, since he could not give her back her dead. This wild cry for vengeance shocked him from those young lips; yet it was natural perhaps. He too would give much to see the assassin suffer; he too felt that the deck and the gallows would be too trivial a punishment for that accursed deed.
He had looked upon the marble face of him who was to have been the second Baron Cheriton—looked upon it in its placid repose, and had sworn within himself to do all that ingenuity could do to avenge that cruel murder.
“He could not have had an enemy,” he told himself, “unless it was some wretch who hated him for being happy and beloved.”