When Charles left the barracks on that fatal night, instead of going home, he passed the dark hours in wandering wildly about the country; but when morning dawned, fearing the eye of man, he returned to the vicarage, and slunk unobserved to his chamber. When he did not appear at breakfast, his mother sought him in his room, where she found him in bed. He said he was very ill—and so indeed he was—and begged to be left alone; but as he was no better on the following day, she insisted on sending for medical advice. The doctor found him with all those physical symptoms that are apt to supervene from great anxiety of mind; and saying he could get no sleep, Charles requested to have some laudanum; but the physician was on his guard, for although the parties concerned wished to keep the thing private, some rumors had got abroad that awakened his caution.
The parents, meanwhile, had not the slightest anticipation of the thunderbolt that was about to fall upon them. They lived a very retired life, were acquainted with none of the officers, and they were even ignorant of the amount of their son’s intimacy with the regiment. Thus, when news of Herbert’s lamentable death reached them, the mother said to her son, “Charles, did you know a young man in the barracks called Herbert; a lieutenant, I believe? By the bye, I hope it’s not Emily’s Mr. Herbert.”
“Did I know him?” said Charles, turning suddenly towards her, for, under pretence that the light annoyed him, he always lay with his face to the wall. “Why do you ask, mother?”
“Because he’s dead. He had a fever and——”
“Herbert dead!” cried Charles, suddenly sitting up in the bed.
“Yes, he had a fever, and it is supposed he was delirious, for he blew out his brains; there is a report that he had been playing high, and lost a great deal of money. What’s the matter dear? O, Charles, I shouldn’t have told you! I was not aware that you knew him?”
“Fetch my father here, and mother, you come back with him!” said Charles, speaking with a strange sternness of tone, and wildly motioning her out of the room.
When the parents came, he bade them sit down beside him; and then, with a degree of remorse and anguish that no words could portray, he told them all; whilst they, with blanched cheeks and fainting hearts, listened to the dire confession.
“And here I am,” he exclaimed, as he ended, “a cowardly scoundrel, that has not dared to die! O Herbert! happy, happy Herbert! Would I were with you!”
At that moment the door opened, and a beautiful, bright, smiling, joyous face peeped in. It was Emily Lovell, the beloved daughter, the adored sister, arrived from London in compliance with a letter received a few days previously from Herbert, wherein he had told her that by the time she received it, he would be a captain. She had come to introduce him to her parents as her affianced husband. She feared no refusal; well she knew how rejoiced they would be to see her the wife of so kind and honorable a man. But they were ignorant of all this, and in the fulness of their agony, the cup of woe ran over, and she drank of the draught. They told her all before she had been five minutes in the room. How else could they account for their tears, their confusion, their bewilderment, their despair?