The driver and horse both seemed to sympathise with my impatience: for each appeared to exert himself to the utmost.
I reached the street; but, before arriving at the house, I could see a crowd of people collected about the door.
Their movements betokened great agitation. Something very unusual had certainly happened. It was not like the excitement caused by a wedding: for—
“Then and there was hurrying to and fro,
And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress;
And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago
Blushed at the praise of their own loveliness.”
My arrival was not noticed by any member of the family. They were up-stairs, and I saw none of them; but from one of their guests, I obtained the details of the sad story. I was indeed, as Jessie had said in her letter, too late!
A few minutes before my arrival, she had been found dead in her dressing-room—with a bottle of prussic acid by her side!
I rushed back into the cab; and ordered the driver to take me home again. I was too much unmanned, to remain a minute longer in that house of woe.
I had suffered great mental agony on many previous occasions. When alone, with the body of my companion Hiram—whom I had neglected when on the “prospecting” expedition in California—my thoughts had been far from pleasant. They were not agreeable when I saw my friend, Richard Guinane, by his own act fall a corpse before my face. Great was the pain I felt, when standing by the side of poor Stormy Jack, and looking upon his last agonies. So was it, when my mother left me; but all these—even the grief I felt when told that Lenore was married, were nothing to the anguish I experienced, while riding home through the crowded streets of London, and trying to realise the awful reality that Jessie H— had committed suicide. A heart that but an hour ago had been throbbing with warm love—and that love for me—was now cold and still. A pure spirit, altogether devoted to me, had passed suddenly away—passed into eternity with a prayer upon her righteous lips; and that prayer for myself!
My anguish at her untimely end, was mingled with the fires of regret. I submitted my conscience to a strict self-examination. Had I ever deceived her, by pretending a love I did not feel? Was I, in any way, to blame for the sin she had committed? Did I, in any way, lead her to that act of self-destruction? Could her parents, in the agony of their grief, reproach me for anything?
These questions haunted me all that night; and I slept not. I even endeavoured to remember something in my conduct, which had been wrong. But I could not: for I had never talked to her of love. In all, that had passed between us, I had been true to Lenore.