I held my peace. In that vision of Jack Belsize I saw misery, guilt, children dishonoured, homes deserted,—ruin for all the actors and victims of the wretched conspiracy. Laura marked my disturbance when we reached home. She even divined the cause of it, and charged me with it at night, when we sate alone by our dressing-room fire, and had taken leave of our kind entertainers. Then, under her cross-examination, I own that I told what I had seen—Lord Highgate, under a feigned name staying at Newcome. It might be nothing. “Nothing! Gracious heavens! Could not this crime and misery be stopped?” “It might be too late,” Laura’s husband said sadly, bending down his head into the fire.
She was silent too for a while. I could see she was engaged where pious women ever will betake themselves in moments of doubt, of grief, of pain, of separation, of joy even, or whatsoever other trial. They have but to will, and as it were an invisible temple rises round them; their hearts can kneel down there; and they have an audience of the great, the merciful untiring Counsellor and Consoler. She would not have been frightened at Death near at hand. I have known her to tend the poor round about us, or to bear pain—not her own merely, but even her children’s and mine, with a surprising outward constancy and calm. But the idea of this crime being enacted close at hand, and no help for it—quite overcame her. I believe she lay awake all that night; and rose quite haggard and pale after the bitter thoughts which had deprived her of rest.
She embraced her own child with extraordinary tenderness that morning, and even wept over it, calling it by a thousand fond names of maternal endearment “Would I leave you, my darling—could I ever, ever, ever quit you, my blessing, and treasure!” The unconscious little thing, hugged to his mother’s bosom, and scared at her tones and tragic face, clung frightened and weeping round Laura’s neck. Would you ask what the husband’s feelings were as he looked at that sweet love, that sublime tenderness, that pure Saint blessing the life of him unworthy? Of all the gifts of Heaven to us below, that felicity is the sum and the chief. I tremble as I hold it lest I should lose it, and be left alone in the blank world without it: again, I feel humiliated to think that I possess it; as hastening home to a warm fireside and a plentiful table, I feel ashamed sometimes before the poor outcast beggar shivering in the street.
Breakfast was scarcely over when Laura asked for a pony carriage, and said she was bent on a private visit. She took her baby and nurse with her. She refused our company, and would not even say whither she was bound until she had passed the lodge-gate. I may have suspected what the object was of her journey. Florac and I did not talk of it. We rode out to meet the hounds of a cheery winter morning: on another day I might have been amused with my host—the splendour of his raiment, the neatness of his velvet cap, the gloss of his hunting-boots; the cheers, shouts, salutations, to dog and man; the oaths and outcries of this Nimrod, who shouted louder than the whole field and the whole pack too—but on this morning—I was thinking of the tragedy yonder enacting, and came away early from the hunting-field, and found my wife already returned to Rosebury.
Laura had been, as I suspected, to Lady Clara. She did not know why, indeed. She scarce knew what she should say when she arrived—how she could say what she had in her mind. “I hoped, Arthur, that I should have something—something told me to say,” whispered Laura, with her head on my shoulder; and as I lay awake last night thinking of her, prayed—that is, hoped, I might find a word of consolation for that poor lady. Do you know, I think she has hardly ever heard a kind word? She said so; she was very much affected after we had talked together a little.
“At first she was very indifferent; cold and haughty in her manner; asked what had caused the pleasure of this visit, for I would go in, though at the lodge they told me her ladyship was unwell, and they thought received no company. I said I wanted to show our boy to her—that the children ought to be acquainted—I don’t know what I said. She seemed more and more surprised—then all of a sudden—I don’t know how—I said, ‘Lady Clara, I have had a dream about you and your children, and I was so frightened that I came over to you to speak about it.’ And I had the dream, Pen; it came to me absolutely as I was speaking to her.
“She looked a little scared, and I went on telling her the dream. ‘My dear’ I said, ‘I dreamed that I saw you happy with those children.’
“‘Happy!’ says she—the three were playing in the conservatory into which her sitting-room opens.
“‘And that a bad spirit came and tore them from you, and drove you out into the darkness; and I saw you wandering about quite lonely and wretched, and looking back into the garden where the children were playing. And you asked and implored to see them; and the Keeper at the gate said ‘No, never.’ And then—then I thought they passed by you, and they did not know you.’
“‘Ah!’ said Lady Clara.