"Forgiveness—from me! Oh, no, no!"
She could not abandon her old attitude of worship. He was a prince always—noble or wicked—a prince by divine right of his splendour and beauty! If he stooped from his high estate to smile upon her, was he not entitled to her deepest gratitude, her purest devotion? If it pleased him to spurn and trample her beneath his feet, what was she, when counted against the magnificence of her idol, that she should complain? There is always some devoted creature prostrate in the road when the car comes by; and which of them would dream of upbraiding Juggernaut for the anguish inflicted by the crushing wheels?
The same kind hands which had bathed Mrs. Gilbert's forehead half lifted her from her kneeling attitude now; and looking up, Isabel saw Lady Gwendoline bending over her, very pale, very grave, but with a sweet compassionate smile upon her face. Lord Ruysdale and his daughter had come to the Priory immediately after hearing of Roland's dangerous state; and during the four-and-twenty hours that had elapsed, Lady Gwendoline had been a great deal with her cousin. The hidden love which had turned to jealous anger against Roland's folly regained all its purer qualities now, and there was no sacrifice of self or self-love that Gwendoline Pomphrey would have hesitated to make, if in so doing she could have restored life and vigour to the dying man. She had heard the worst the doctors had to tell. She knew that her cousin was dying. She was no woman to delude herself with vain hopes, to put away the cup for awhile because it was bitter, knowing that its last drop must be drained sooner or later. She bowed her head before the inevitable, and accepted her sorrow. Never in her brightest day, when her portrait had been in every West-end print-shop, and her name a synonym for all that is elegant and beautiful—never had she seemed so perfect a woman as now, when she sat pale and quiet and resigned, by the deathbed of the man she loved.
During that long night of watching, Mr. Lansdell's mind had seemed at intervals peculiarly clear,—the fatal injuries inflicted upon his brain had not blotted out his intellect. That had been obscured in occasional periods of wandering and stupor, but every now and then the supremacy of spirit over matter reasserted itself, and the young man talked even more calmly than usual. All the fitfulness of passion, the wavering of purpose—now hot, now cold, now generous, now cruel,—all natural weakness seemed to have been swept away, and an unutterable calm had fallen upon his heart and mind.
Once, on waking from a brief doze, he found his cousin watching, but the nurse asleep, and began to talk of Isabel Gilbert. "I want you to know all about her," he said; "you have only heard vulgar scandal and gossip. I should like you to know the truth. It is very foolish, that little history—wicked perhaps; but those provincial gossips may have garbled and disfigured the story. I will tell you the truth, Gwendoline; for I want you to be a friend to Isabel Gilbert when I am dead and gone."
And then he told the history of all those meetings under Lord Thurston's oak; dwelling tenderly on Isabel's ignorant simplicity, blaming himself for all that was guilty and dishonourable in that sentimental flirtation. He told Gwendoline how, from being half amused, half gratified, by Mrs. Gilbert's unconcealed admiration of him, so naïvely revealed in every look and tone, he had, little by little, grown to find the sole happiness of his life in those romantic meetings; and then he spoke of his struggles with himself, real, earnest struggles—his flight—his return—his presumptuous belief that Isabel would freely consent to any step he might propose—his anger and disappointment after the final interview, which proved to him how little he had known the depths of that girlish sentimental heart.
"She was only a child playing with fire, Gwendoline," he said; "and had not the smallest desire to walk through the furnace. That was my mistake. She was a child, and I mistook her for a woman—a woman who saw the gulf before her, and was prepared to take the desperate leap. She was only a child, pleased with my pretty speeches and town-made clothes and perfumed handkerchiefs,—a schoolgirl; and I set my life upon the chance of being happy with her. Will you try and think of her as she really is, Gwendoline,—not as these Graybridge people see her,—and be kind to her when I am dead and gone? I should like to think she was sure of one wise and good woman for a friend. I have been very cruel to her, very unjust, very selfish. I was never in the same mind about her for an hour together,—sometimes thinking tenderly of her, sometimes upbraiding and hating her as a trickstress and a coquette. But I can understand her and believe in her much better now. The sky is higher, Gwendoline."
If Roland had told his cousin this story a week before, when his life seemed all before him, she might have received his confidence in a very different spirit from that in which she now accepted it; but he was dying, and she had loved him, and had been loved by him. It was by her own act that she had lost that love. She of all others had least right to resent his attachment to another woman. She remembered that day, nearly ten years ago, on which she had quarrelled with him, stung by his reproaches, insolent in the pride of her young beauty and the knowledge that she might marry a man so high above Roland Lansdell in rank and position. She saw herself as she had been, in all the early splendour of her Saxon beauty, and wondered if she really was the same creature as that proud worldly girl who thought the supremest triumph in life was to become the wife of a marquis.
"I will be her friend, Roland," she said, presently. "I know she is very childish; and I will be patient with her and befriend her, poor lonely girl."
Lady Gwendoline was thinking, as she said this, of that interview in the surgeon's parlour at Graybridge—that interview in which Isabel had not scrupled to confess her folly and wickedness.