"No, no! me sweet child is here."
And Mrs. O'Toole opened the parlour door, Kate, at the moment, entering from the inner room. She stopped, for an instant, while Lady Desmond advanced rapidly, and clasped her to her heart, straining her closely in her arms.
"Oh! Georgy," cried Kate, amid her sobs, "you will never hear his voice again—he is gone! gone before a gleam of hope or prosperity brightened the sad evening of his life; before I could see him as he was, before the bitter dregs of the cup of adversity had lost their bitterness by use. And I could do nothing for him, nothing! Oh, when we parted last, who, who could have thought, that it would have ended thus?"
And she pointed expressively to the small, mean room, now dimly lighted, by the candles, which Mrs. O'Toole scrupulously kept burning after evening closed.
Lady Desmond, grasping Kate's hand nervously, walked to the bed-side, and holding back the folds of her veil, bent reverently over the dead, for a moment, in silence, then drawing back, broke into an agony of hysterical tears, that startled Kate, by its vehemence, and brought nurse rapidly to her side.
"I feel as if guilty of his death," she repeated. "Why, why, did I delay my return?"
"Oh, hush, dearest Georgy, hush," whispered Kate, somewhat calmed, by witnessing the remorseful emotion of her cousin. "I was wrong to speak as I did; it was the sharpness of sorrow made me utter such words; God forgive them, for in my inmost heart I feel that He never punishes, He only sends messengers after us to keep us in the right path; the poverty was nothing; and even this! we shall yet understand it all!"
They stood there in silence, nurse supporting Lady Desmond, who leant against her, her bonnet thrown aside, her luxuriant black hair drawn back from her lofty forehead, her large dark eyes dilated, as if her soul gazed through them far away. Kate, a smile struggling through the tears streaming from hers, and one hand slightly raised towards Heaven. The three figures symbolising well, homely humanity, with its quiet necessary fortitude. Intellect and refinement, with their larger capacity, for joy or for suffering, and faith, so often almost extinguished, amid sorrow and doubt, yet still preserving a ray of everlasting hope.
But Lady Desmond was overpowered by the fatigue of a rapid and frequently obstructed journey, performed in a fever of anxiety; and Kate's attention was beneficially attracted from her all engrossing subject of thought to her cousin's evident exhaustion. She wished much to remove Kate at once from what she considered her wretched lodging, to her hotel, but this Kate resolutely refused to comply with.