“And, Innocent, Innocent—you——?”
“Oh, do not be angry!” cried Innocent, hiding her piteous face upon her aunt’s breast. The woe, the horror, the distracting sense of sudden misery seemed to pass from the one to the other in that rapid moment. But the mother thus suddenly roused had to think of everything. “Put down the tray,” she said quickly to the staring intruder at the foot of the bed, “call Alice to me, get Miss Innocent’s room ready, and send some one for the doctor. She is ill—quick, go and call Alice, there is not a moment to lose. Innocent,” she whispered in her ear as the woman went away, “Innocent, for God’s sake look at me! Do you know what you are saying? Innocent! Frederick’s wife?”
Innocent raised herself up with a long-drawn sigh. Her face relaxed; she had put off her burden. “It was last night,” she repeated, “we were alone; I did not want to go, but they made me. She was angry—very angry—and then—oh! She opened her eyes and looked at me, and was still—still.—Till they came I did not know what it was.”
“And it was——? For God’s sake, Innocent, try to understand what you are saying. Did she die—when you were with her? You are not dreaming? But, Innocent, you had nothing to do with it, my poor, poor child?”
Once more Innocent unfolded the fingers which she had clenched fast upon something. She held out a small phial, with some drops of dark liquid still in it. “It was this,” she said, looking at it with a strange, vacant gaze.
And then a horrible conviction came to poor Mrs. Eastwood’s mind. Out of the depths of her heart there came a low but terrible cry. Many things she had been called upon to bear in her cheerful life, as all stout hearts are—now was it to be swallowed up in tragic disgrace and horror at the end?
The cry brought Nelly, wondering and horror-stricken, from her innocent sleep, and old Alice, forecasting new trouble to the family, but nothing so horrible, nothing so miserable as this.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A BEREAVED HUSBAND.
I will not attempt to describe the state of the house out of which Innocent had fled—the dismal excitement of all the attendants, the sudden turning of night into day, the whole household called up to help where no help was possible, and the miserable haste with which the two men, of whose lives Amanda was the centre and chief influence, came to the room in which she lay beyond their reach. Batty, roused from his sleep, stupid with the sudden summons and with the habitual brandy and water which had preceded it, stumbled into the room, distraught but incapable of understanding what had befallen him; while Frederick, stunned by the sudden shock, came in from the room where he had been dozing over a novel, and pretending to write letters, scarcely more capable of realizing the event which had taken place in his life than was his father-in-law. It was only when the doctor came, that any one of the party actually believed in the death which had thus come like a thief in the night. After he had made his dismal examination, he told them that the sad event was what he had always expected and foretold. “I have warned you again and again, Mr. Batty,” he said, “that in your daughter’s state of health any sudden excitement might carry her off in a moment.” There was nothing extraordinary in the circumstances, so far as he knew, or any one. The often-repeated passion had recurred once too often, and the long-foreseen end had come unawares, as everybody had known it would come. That was all. There was no reason for doubt or inquiry, much less suspicion. The glass which had fallen from the dead hand had been taken away, the black stain on the coverlit concealed by a shawl, which aunty in natural tidiness had thrown over it. Poor Batty, hoarsely sobbing, calling upon his child, was led back to his room, and with more brandy and water was made to go to bed, and soon slept heavily, forgetting for an hour or two what had befallen him. With Frederick the effect was different. He could not rest, nor seek to forget in sleep the sudden change which had come upon his life. He went out into the garden, in the broad, unchanged moonlight, out of sight of all the dismal bustle, the arrangements of the death-chamber, the last cares which poor aunty, weeping, was giving to the dead. The dead! Was that his wife? Amanda! She whom he had wooed and worshipped; who had given him rapture, misery, disgust, all mingled together; who had been the one prize he had won in his life, and the one great blight which had fallen upon that life? Was it she who was now called by that dismal title? who lay there now, rigid and silent, taking no note of what was done about her, finding no fault? Frederick stood in the moonlight, and looked up at her window with a sense of unreality, impossibility, which could not be put into words; but a few hours before he had been there, with his little cousin, glad to escape from the surroundings he hated, from Batty’s odious companionship, from Amanda’s termagant fits. He had felt it a halcyon moment, a little gentle oasis which refreshed him in the midst of the desert which by his own folly his life had become. And now—good heavens! was it true?—in a moment this desert was past, the consequences of his folly over, his life his own again to do something better with it. The world and the garden, and the broad lines of the moonlight, seemed to turn round with him as he stood and gazed at the house and tried to understand what had come upon him.
It may be thought strange that this should have been the first sensation which roused him out of the dull and stupefying pain of the shock he had just received. Frederick was not a man of high mould to begin with, but he was proud and sensitive to all that went against his self-love, his sense of importance, his consciousness of personal and family superiority—and he had the tastes of an educated man, and clung to the graces and refinements of life, except at those moments which no one knew of, when he preferred pleasure, so-called, to everything, moments of indulgence which had nothing to do with his revealed and visible existence. He had been wounded in the very points at which he was most susceptible, by Amanda and her belongings. She, herself, had been an offence to him even in the first moments of his passion, and, as his passion waned and disappeared altogether, what had he not been compelled to bear? He had brought it upon himself, he was aware, and he had believed that he would have to bear it all his life, or most of his life. And now, in a moment, he was free! But Frederick was not unnatural in exultation over his deliverance. The shock of seeing her lying dead upon that bed, the strange, pitiful, remorseful sense, which every nature not wholly deadened feels at sight of that sudden blow which has spared him and struck another—that sudden deprivation of the “sweet light,” the air, the movement of existence which we still enjoy, but which the other has lost—affected him with that subduing solemnity of feeling which often does duty for grief. How could any imagination follow Amanda into the realms of spiritual existence? Her life had been all physical—of the flesh, not of the spirit; there had been nothing about her which could lead even her lover, in the days when he was her lover, to think of her otherwise than as a beautiful development of physical life, a creature all made of lovely flesh and blood, with fascinations which began and ended in satiny gloss and dazzling colour, in roundness and brightness, and softness and warmth. What could he think of her now? She had gone, and had left behind all the qualities by which he knew her. Her voice was silent, that one gift she possessed by which she could call forth any emotion that was not of the senses; with it she could rouse a man to fierce rage, to wild impatience, to hatred and murderous impulses; but that was silent, and her beauty was turned into marble, a solemn thing that chilled and froze the beholder. What else was there of her that her husband could think of, could follow with his thoughts? Her soul—what was it? Frederick had never cared to know. He had never perceived its presence in any secret moment. But he was not impious, nor a speculatist of any kind; he indulged in no questions which the most orthodox theologian could have thought dangerous. He tried even to think piously of his Amanda as passed into another, he hoped a better, world; but he stood bewildered and saddened on that threshold, not knowing how to shape these thoughts, nor what to make of the possibility of spiritual non-bodily existence for her. He could not follow her in idea to any judgment, to any heaven. He stood dully sad before the dim portals within which she had passed, with a heavy aching in his heart, a blank and wondering sense of something broken off. He was not without feeling; he could not have gone to bed and slept stupefied as did the father, who had lost the only thing he loved. A natural awe, a natural pang, were in Frederick’s mind; he felt the life run so warm in his own veins, and she was dead and ended. Poor Amanda! he was more sorry for her than he was for himself. The anguish of love is more selfish; it is its own personal loss, the misery of the void in which it has to live alone, which wrings its heart. But Frederick, for once, felt little for himself. To himself the change was not heart-breaking; he was free from much that had threatened to make his life a failure; but for once his mind departed from selfish considerations. He was sorry for her. Poor Amanda! who had lost all she cared for, all she knew.