This is not a bitter kind of grief, but so far as it went it was a true feeling. He had more sympathy with his wife in that moment than he had had throughout all their life together. Poor Amanda! it might be that he had gained, but she had lost. I need not say what a different, far different, sentiment this was, from that which feels with an ineffable elevation of anguish that she, who is gone, has gained everything, and that it is the survivor whose loss is unspeakable, irremediable. Frederick’s loss was not irremediable. But he was sorry, very sorry for her; the tears came into his eyes as he thought of the grave, and the silence, for Amanda. Poor Amanda! so fond of sound, and bustle, and motion; so confident in her own beauty; so bent upon gratification—all taken away from her at a stroke. He looked up at her window through his tears; the flickering lights had been put out, the movement stilled; no more shadows flitted across the white blinds; the windows were open, the place was quiet, one small taper left burning—the room given over to the silence of death. And all this in a few hours! It was then the middle of the night, three or four o’clock; he had been wandering there a long time, full of many thoughts. When he saw that all was still, he went back softly to the house. He had nowhere to go to but the little parlour in which he had been writing, where he threw himself on the sofa to get a few hours’ rest; and then it suddenly occurred to him to think of Innocent. Where was she? how had she disappeared out of that scene of consternation and distress? Frederick was cold and weary; he had wrapped a railway rug round him, and he could not now disturb himself and the house to inquire after his cousin. She must have gone to bed before it happened, he said to himself. He had not seen her, or heard her referred to, and doubtless it had been thought unnecessary to call her when the others were called. No doubt she was safe in bed, unconscious of all that had happened, and he would see her next morning. Thus Frederick assured himself ere he fell into a dreary comfortless doze on the sofa. Nothing could have happened to Innocent; she was safe and asleep, no doubt, poor child, slumbering unconsciously through all these sorrows.
It was not till late next morning that he found out how it really was. Neither aunty nor any one else entertained the slightest suspicion that Innocent had anything to do with Mrs. Frederick’s death. She had disappeared, and no one thought of her in the excitement of the moment. The very maid who had seen her leave the house had not identified the figure which had appeared and disappeared so suddenly in the moonlight. She thought first it was a ghost, and then that it was some one who had been passing and had been tempted to look in at the open door. In the spent excitement of the closed-up house next day—it was Sunday, most terrible of all days in the house of death—when the household, shut up, in the first darkness, had to realise the great change that had happened, and the two men, who had been arbitrarily drawn together by Amanda, were thrown upon each other for society in the darkened rooms, at the melancholy meals, with now no bond whatever between them—Frederick asked, with a kind of longing for his cousin. “Is Miss Vane still in her room? Is she ill?” he asked of the maid who attended at the luncheon which poor Batty swallowed by habit, moaning between every mouthful.
“Miss Vane, sir? oh, the young lady. She went away last night, when—when it happened,” answered the maid.
“Went away last night? Where has she gone?” cried Frederick, in dismay.
“That none on us knows. She went straight away out of the house, sir, the next moment after—it happened,” said the maid.
“She was frightened, I suppose, poor young lady. She took the way to the Minster, up the street. It was me that saw her. I didn’t say nothing till this morning, for I thought it was a ghost.”
“A ghost! My poor Innocent!” said Frederick. “Did she say nothing? Good heavens! where can the poor child have gone?”
He started up in real distress, and got his hat.
“Stay where you are,” said Batty. “You are not going out of my house this day, and my girl lying dead. My girl!—my pretty ’Manda!—none of them were fit to tie her shoes. Oh Lord, oh Lord! to think an old hulk like me should last and my girl be gone! You don’t go a step out of my house, mind you, Eastwood—not a step—to show how little you cared for my girl, if I have to hold you with my hands.”
“I have no desire to show anything but the fullest respect for Amanda,” said Frederick; “poor girl, she shall have no slight from me; but I must look after my little cousin. Miss Vane trusted her to me. My mother will be anxious——”