“We were coming out of a shop,” she said, “when a man, looking like a servant, came up to us, and catching Lady Hamilton by the sleeve, begged her to go to a house not far off, where he said Sir Gavin Hamilton lay dying of smallpox, and quite alone. Lady Hamilton trembled very much at that, and asked him why he had deserted his master. The man answered that he had a wife and children, and when all the other servants left he was afraid to stay; and then it came out—for the man did not at first tell it—that he had left Sir Gavin the day before, and had gone for a doctor, but did not know whether the doctor went to Sir Gavin or not. But the man felt troubled about his master, and knowing about Lady Hamilton, had followed her up, and watched for her to come out of the shop. Then Lady Hamilton, weeping very much, went back into the shop, and wrote this letter, and brought me to the corner of our street, and kissing me good-by, went off with the man.”
Gavin started up, crying out:
“I must go at once to my mother!” but sank back, exhausted; and St. Arnaud, seeing the necessity for quieting him, said:
“I will go to the house, which I know well, and try to attract Lady Hamilton’s attention, and perhaps I can find out something.”
He went immediately, and returned in half an hour. He found Gavin much agitated, and Madame Ziska and Freda vainly trying to calm him. The news St. Arnaud brought was not, however, calculated to soothe poor Gavin.
“I went straight to the house—one of the finest in the court quarter,” he said. “It was not necessary to know that the house had been hastily abandoned. Doors and even windows were wide open, and Sir Gavin’s dog, a huge mastiff, lay moaning with hunger on the stairs of the main entrance, for the servants fled yesterday. There was but a solitary light in the whole vast place—I suppose, in Sir Gavin’s room, I stood on the street below, and threw pebbles at a window, until Lady Hamilton appeared at the window of a lower room. ‘He is very ill,’ she said, ‘and I believe would not have lived through another night had I not come. He is now delirious.’ I asked her if Sir Gavin’s valet had sent her a doctor. She replied the doctor had not yet come. At that moment the doctor arrived, on foot. I noticed that his man, following with his medicine case, was deeply pitted with smallpox, and I asked the doctor if, for a handsome consideration, I could engage this man to assist Lady Hamilton, which he agreed to, after making sure that Sir Gavin was of the rank and position to pay well for all that was done for him. So that she is now provided with help. I remained outside until Lady Hamilton again appeared at the window. She was weeping, and told me the doctor thought Sir Gavin could hardly survive many hours.”
“Why should my mother weep for that man, who has made her whole life wretched; and why—ah, why should she risk her life for him?” cried Gavin, throwing himself about in his chair in his agony of grief and alarm.
“Because,” quietly replied St. Arnaud, “she loves him still. I have seen it always. Your mother, Gavin, is one of those faithful women, whose love once given cannot be withdrawn; who silently and patiently endure to the end, and whose unshaken constancy makes one admire and despair. In one moment of Sir Gavin’s danger she forgot twenty-one years of insults and injuries.”
“I cannot understand it,” sighed Gavin.
“Nor can I. Only exalted souls like hers can. But I tell you a fact, which I have seen in Lady Hamilton’s eyes ever since the first moment I saw her, that Sir Gavin Hamilton has never ceased to be dear to her, although her pride forbade her to acknowledge it. There could be no doubt of it to-night when, sobbing and trembling, she told me that in his delirium he raved of her and his child as they were twenty years ago, and moaned that his wife would not come to him. She sent you her dearest love and prayers, and only begged, if you valued her happiness, to keep away from the infection. She will talk to you from the window, as she did to me; it is some distance from the ground.”