This was the pencilled note—Roma’s first letter from her lover, a sad enough one truly—which Mr Thurston sent to the poor girl, waiting in all the anguish of well-nigh hopeless anxiety for his report. Within half-an-hour she had joined him, pale, haggard, careworn, aged even it almost seemed, from the bright Roma of an hour or two ago, but calm, self-possessed now, ready for any service that might be required of her. And the sweet summer afternoon deepened into sweeter evening; the moon shone out in cold indifferent loveliness; here and there through the latticed windows of the cottage a star peeped in with its cheery twinkle, and still the dreary vigil went on; still lay on the pallet bed where they had first carried her, the so lately beautiful form of Eugenia Chancellor, beautiful still, but with a death-like beauty that seemed already to separate her from the living breathing beings about her. Only from time to time she moaned faintly, and moved her head from side to side uneasily on the pillow with the sad restlessness so pitiful to see; telling too surely to the experienced eye of invisible injury to the delicate brain.
It was unspeakably painful to witness, knowing that so little could be done to relieve or mitigate the suffering. And not the least painful part of what Roma and her lover had to go through, was the sight of Beauchamp Chancellor’s suffering when the truth as to Eugenia was broken to him. His distress was indescribable; so evidently genuine in its depth that more than once in the course of the next few days Roma found herself asking herself if, after all her many years’ knowledge of him, she had done full justice to his capacity for true and earnest feeling, to the latent possibilities for good in his character below the crust of worldliness and selfishness. Or was it that he had altered and improved, that contact with a nature so fresh and genuine and single-minded as Eugenia’s, had done its work; that notwithstanding her many faults and mistakes, the essential beauty of her sweetness and simplicity had unconsciously asserted itself, had found a little-suspected vein of sympathy in the lower nature of her husband? It almost seemed as if it were so, and if so, oh how sad, how doubly to be regretted, the premature ending of the fair young life so full of promise, so prized and precious.
“She has been so much happier lately, Roma,” poor Beauchamp would say, in his yearning for consolation and sympathy. “She was saying so herself just the other day. I am a coarse selfish creature compared with her. No one but I knows thoroughly how innocent, and true, and unselfish she is, and I took a long time to find it out—I can’t forgive myself when I think of that time—but lately I do think I have got to understand her better, and to make her happier. Don’t you think so, Roma? She said so herself, you know.”
And Roma would agree with him, and say whatever she could think of in the way of comfort—a dozen times, a day, for Beauchamp followed her about in a touchingly helpless, dependent sort of manner, as if in her presence alone he found his anxiety endurable. A dozen times a day, too, he would appeal to whichever doctor was on the spot, almost entreating for a word of hope or comfort. “I fancy she is lying more quietly just now,” he would say; or, “Don’t you think the expression of her face is calmer, more like itself?”
It was very hard to be unable to agree with him, but weary days, and still wearier nights, went by before either doctors or friends thought it would be any but cruel kindness to allow him to hope. At last, however—a long of coming “at last” it was—there crept into sight the first faint flutter of improvement; slowly, very slowly, life and consciousness returned to the all but dying wife, and after a new phase of anxiety, scarcely less trying than the first, the verdict was pronounced, “There is hope—the greatest danger to be apprehended in the way of recovery has been safely past—there is every reasonable ground for hope.” And then, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, Eugenia crept back to her place in the world, to the place which it had seemed all but certain would be vacant for evermore. Her extreme patience, her tranquil gentleness, had much to do with her recovery, said the authorities. And those who knew her best—Gerald and Roma, and Sydney when she came—knew her excitable impetuosity, her impatience of inaction, marvelled somewhat at this new revelation of her character.
“You are so good, Eugenia,” said Roma, one day when she was alone with the patient, still forced to lie motionless and unemployed, forbidden even to use her eyes or to talk much. “I cannot think how you have learnt to bear these long weeks of suffering, or at least tedium, so cheerfully.”
Eugenia drew her friend’s head down close beside her on her pillow. “Don’t you see, dear Roma,” she whispered, “how easy it is for me to be patient now that I am so happy? There has not been any suffering too much for me; I am so selfish that I cannot even regret the anxiety you all went through about me, for think what it has brought me—as nothing else could have done—the full knowledge of Beauchamp’s love. Never, since the dreadful day when first I doubted it, have I felt so assured of it as since this accident; never, since the passing away of my unreal, unreasonable dreams, has life looked so sweet to me as now, for though I know now that troubles, and disappointment, and failure must come; though I dare say I shall often feel them bitterly and exaggeratedly, still I can never again feel hopeless or heartless—I can never feel that my life has no value or object.”
Roma kissed her silently, but did not speak. In a minute or two Eugenia spoke again—
“And if anything was wanting to make me still happier, to make me more grateful for this new return to life, it is what you have told me about yourself and Gerald,” she said affectionately. “You are both so wise and good, you have both been so wise and good in what you have done for me, that I cannot tell you how happy I am in your happiness. Happiness actually in your grasp, with real root and foundation. You will not have to travel to it through vanished illusions as I did;” she sighed a little. “But I was hot-headed, and wilful, and selfish, and so I blinded myself. You have always thought of others more than of yourself, Roma. You have been reasonable and patient all your life. You deserve to step straight into happiness.”
“No I don’t, Eugenia. No one but I myself knows how little I deserve it,” whispered Roma. But she said no more, and Eugenia accepted her words simply as the expression of her womanly humility.