He grasped her unwilling hand, covered it with kisses and tears, and rushed from the room.
The watchmen were calling "Half-past eleven, and a fine night," when Lady Kilrush left her dressing-room, carrying a lighted candle and a key, and crossed the gallery to that other side of the spacious house where the late lord's rooms were situated. The household had retired soon after ten, and the great well staircase lay like a pit of darkness below the massive oak banisters. An oppressive silence, an oppressive gloom, pervaded the house, as Antonia unlocked the door that had seldom been opened since the coffin was carried out on the first stage of its long journey, on a summer night that memory recalled as if it had been yesterday. The atmosphere, the feelings of that night were in her mind as she crossed the threshold of the room which had never known the uses of human life since Kilrush occupied it. The wainscot mouse, the spider on the wall, the moth lurking in the window drapery, had been its only inhabitants.
The tall silver candlesticks, the portfolio and standish were on the table in the oak-panelled ante-room where Antonia remembered the lawyer and the doctor talking beside the empty hearth. The vastness of the bed-chamber had an appalling air in the glimmer of a single candle. Antonia's hand trembled as she lighted those other candles, the candles that had burnt beside the dying man when he spoke the words that made her a peeress.
How near that night seemed, as she stood beside the bed, funereal under the dark velvet hangings, a catafalque rather than a bed. She could hear the Bishop's full-mouthed tones, and that other voice, faltering and faint, but to her the world's best music.
"Oh, my beloved," she cried, falling on her knees beside the pillow on which his head had lain. "Oh, my dearest, kindest, best, surely it is you I love and none other—you, only you, only you!"
Her arms were folded on the coverlet, her head resting on them. She remained thus on her knees, for a long time, dreaming back the past. She lived again through those hours in Rupert Buildings, those hours spent in endless talk with Kilrush. They seemed to her now the most blissful hours of her life. She looked back and wondered at that happiness. Perhaps there was some touch of illusion in that dream of the past, something of the light that never was on sea or land; but to her there was no shadow of doubt that the joy of those past days exceeded all she had known of gladness since her husband's death.
She had made her night toilet and put on a loose silken négligé, meaning to spend the long hours in this room. Her first night in a husband's chamber—her wedding night, she thought, with a melancholy smile.
She had come here to solve the problem of the future, to determine whether she should or should not break her promise to the dead. For her, the free-thinker, it might seem a small thing to break a vow, when her keeping it would make a good man's life desolate. But despite the vagueness of her hope in the Hereafter, despite that early teaching which had bidden her believe in nothing that her human intelligence could not comprehend, her husband's image was a living presence in that room, a living influence in her life, and she could not imagine him lying in the dust, unconscious and indifferent. Somehow, somewhere, by some mysterious unthinkable means, the dead still lived, still loved her, still claimed her fidelity.
"My first dear love," she cried, in a burst of hysterical sobs, "I am yours and yours only. I can never belong to another, never own any husband but you."