How he ever reached Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Arthur did not know. He had some faint remembrance of walking down steps, and entering a cab, and driving—it might have been for miles, or only for a hundred yards, so far as his recollection of the matter enlightened him.
The blow Tifford dealt him at the door blotted every antecedent event out of his memory.
“Too late, sir,” said that individual, in a low tone to Alick. “It is all over!”
“What is over?” Tifford subsequently informed his friends, Mr. Dudley demanded, adding, “And then, poor gentleman, I told him she was gone.”
Arthur was precisely the man to feel a shock of this kind keenly; a stronger nature could never have suffered itself to be so deluded; and the servants about the house, the only people who noted his visit to the close shut room, suspected that Mrs. Dudley’s grief was less bitter than his; that her open lamentations, her fast-flowing tears were preferable to this silent sorrow—to this tardy repentance which kept him haunting the death-chamber—dragging him continually away both from business and from rest to look on the face of the child he had only grown to love much when she needed no more love from any human being.
It has before been stated, that Arthur Dudley always rated more highly the blessings he lacked than the blessings he enjoyed, and this very peculiarity of his temperament increased the grief which his affection, and his repentance alike were sure to produce when once affection and repentance were useless.
Never before in his life had Arthur Dudley felt so lonely and so miserable as during the week which succeeded Lally’s death. For some time previously he had been gradually estranging himself from every member of his family, and now there was a restraint evident in their manner towards him—a restraint and an awkwardness which neither he nor they, knew exactly how to overcome.
In those days even Heather grew hard, and would not of her own free will speak to him as she did to others about their child, whom he had, as she fancied, neglected.
“She was mine,” the poor mother repeated, when Bessie would fain have had her talk to Arthur of Lally, “she was mine, and mine only; he never cared for her. Even strangers—even Mr. Croft and Mr. Stewart, and Mr. Henry—were kinder to my darling than her own father. No, Bessie, I am not unfeeling—it is the truth. He was never with me nor with her; always with that wicked, cruel woman—always—always.”
It is a curious anomaly to notice how harsh the very excess of a woman’s sensibility frequently renders her.