“Oh, William, darling! in this dying moment let me be to you as your mother!”
Again he unclosed his wearied eyelids. It is probable that he only partially understood.
“Papa’s gone for her.”
“Not her! I—I——” Lady Isabel checked herself, and fell sobbing on the bed. No; not even at the last hour when the world was closing on him, dared she say, I am your mother.
Wilson re-entered. “He looks as if he were dropping off to sleep,” quoth she.
“Yes,” said Lady Isabel. “You need not wait, Wilson. I will ring if he requires anything.”
Wilson though withal not a bad-hearted woman, was not one to remain for pleasure in a sick-room, if told she might leave it. She, Lady Isabel, remained alone. She fell on her knees again, this time in prayer for the departing spirit, on its wing, and that God would mercifully vouchsafe herself a resting-place with it in heaven.
A review of the past then rose up before her, from the time of her first entering that house, the bride of Mr. Carlyle, to her present sojourn in it. The old scenes passed through her mind like the changing picture in a phantasmagoria.
Why should they have come, there and then? She knew not.
William slept on silently; she thought of the past. The dreadful reflection, “If I had not done as I did, how different would it have been now!” had been sounding its knell in her heart so often that she had almost ceased to shudder at it. The very nails of her hands had, before now, entered the palms, with the sharp pain it brought. Stealing over her more especially this night, there, as she knelt, her head lying on the counterpane, came the recollection of that first illness of hers. How she had lain, and, in that unfounded jealousy, imagined Barbara the house’s mistress. She dead! Barbara exalted to her place. Mr. Carlyle’s wife, her child’s stepmother! She recalled the day when, her mind excited by a certain gossip of Wilson’s—it was previously in a state of fever bordering on delirium—she had prayed her husband, in terror and anguish, not to marry Barbara. “How could he marry her?” he had replied, in his soothing pity. “She, Isabel, was his wife. Who was Barbara? Nothing to them?” But it had all come to pass. She had brought it forth. Not Mr. Carlyle; not Barbara; she alone. Oh, the dreadful misery of the retrospect!