The Shadow of Ashlydyat

“It is through tribulation that we must enter the Kingdom,” interrupted the calm, earnest voice of the clergyman. “It must come to us here in some shape or other, my child; and I do not see that it matters how, or when, or through whom it does come, if it takes us to a better world. You have had your share of it: but God is a just and merciful Judge, and if He has given you a full share of sorrow, He will deal out to you His full recompense.”

“Yes,” she gently said, “I am going to God. Will you pray for me, papa?—that He will pardon me and take me for Christ’s sake. Oh, papa! it seems—it seems when we get near death as if the other world were so very near to this! It seems such a little span of time that I shall have to wait for you all before you come to me. Will you give my dear love to mamma if I should not live to see her, and say how I have loved her: say that I have only gone on first; that I shall be there ready for her. Papa, I dare say God will let me be ever waiting and looking for you.”

Mr. Hastings turned to search for a Book of Common Prayer. He saw Maria’s on her dressing-table—one which he had given her on her marriage, and written her name in—and he opened it at the “Visitation of the Sick.” He looked searchingly at her face as he returned: surely the signs of death were already gathering there!

“The last Sacrament, Maria?” he whispered. “When shall I come?”

“This evening,” she answered. “George will be here then.”

The Reverend Mr Hastings bent his eyebrows with a frown, as if he thought– But no matter. “At eight o’clock, then,” he said to Maria, as he laid the book upon the bed and knelt down before it. Maria lay back on her pillow, and clasping her hands upon the shawl which covered her bosom, closed her eyes to listen.

It was strange that even then, as he was in the very act of kneeling, certain words which he had spoken to Maria years ago, should flash vividly into the Rector’s mind—words which had referred to the death of Ethel Grame.

“The time may come, Maria—we none of us know what is before us—when some of you young ones who are left, may wish you had died as she has. Many a one, battling for very existence with the world’s carking cares, wails out a vain wish that he had been taken from the evil to come.”

Had the gift of prevision been on the Rector of All Souls’ when he spoke those words to Maria Hastings? Poor child! lying there now on her early death-bed; with her broken heart! The world’s carking cares had surely done their work on Maria Godolphin!

CHAPTER VI.

A CROWD OF MEMORIES

If it were not for mismanagement, how smoothly things might go on! That telegraphic despatch which Lord Averil had deemed it well to send, and which had not been sent any too soon, did not reach George Godolphin for hours and hours, through mismanagement at his lodgings.

It was afternoon when he reached Prior’s Ash. The first person he saw at the station was Lord Averil. That nobleman, wondering at George’s non-appearance, believing that Maria was getting nearer to death with every hour, had come to the conclusion that by some mischance his message had miscarried; and he had now gone to the station to send another. Lord Averil linked his arm within George’s, and they walked rapidly away through the snow that lay on the path.

Yes, he linked his arm within George Godolphin’s who had so very nearly been held up to the virtuous British public as a candidate for a free passage to Australia. Somehow, George had slipped through that danger, and was a gentleman still: moreover, he was Lord Averil’s brother-in-law, and it was the earnest wish of that nobleman that society should forget the little mistake in George’s life as heartily as he did. He explained as he walked along: Maria had got rapidly worse all at once: it was only within a few hours that immediate danger had shown itself.

George could not understand it. He had left his wife, ill certainly, but not, as he believed, seriously so; he had supposed her to be busy in preparations for the voyage: and now to be told that she was dying! If this was so, why had Maria not sent for him before?

Lord Averil explained. No one seemed to have known of the danger.

“Snow must have known it,” remonstrated George.

“I think not. I was talking to him to-day, and he expressed his surprise at the disorder having suddenly increased in this rapid manner.”

“What is the disorder?” asked George. “My wife had no disorder—except weakness.”

“I suppose that is it—weakness.”

“But weakness does not kill!”

“Yes, it does, sometimes.”

Margery was standing at the door when they reached the gate, possibly looking out for her master, for she knew the hours of the arrival of the trains. The windows of the sitting-room faced that way, and George’s eyes naturally turned to them. But there was no sign of busy life, of every-day occupation: the curtains hung in their undisturbed folds, the blinds were partially down.

“I will just ask how your wife is now, and whether Cecil is here,” said Lord Averil, following George up the path.

No, Lady Averil and Miss Bessy Godolphin had left about ten minutes before, Margery said. My Lady Godolphin, who had driven up in her carriage and come in for a quarter of an hour, had left; and Miss Rose Hastings, who had been there the best part of the morning, had also left. Mrs. George Godolphin seemed a trifle better; inclined to sleep, tired out, as it were; and she, Margery, didn’t wonder at it with such a heap of visitors: she had given them a broad hint herself that her mistress might be all the better for an hour’s quiet.

Lord Averil departed. George flung his railway wrapper on to a chair and hung his hat up in the little hall: he turned his face, one of severity then, on Margery.

“Is your mistress so very ill? Why was I not sent for earlier? Is she so very ill?” he continued in an impassioned tone.

“Well, sir, I don’t know,” answered Margery, willing perhaps to soften the truth to him. “She is certainly better than she was in the morning. She is sitting up.”

George Godolphin was of a hopeful nature. Even those few words seemed to speak to his heart with a certainty. “Not there, sir,” interposed Margery, as he opened the door of the sitting-room. “But it don’t matter,” she added: “you can go in that way.”

He walked through the room and opened the door of the bedchamber. Would the scene ever leave his memory? The room was lighted more by the blaze of the fire than by the daylight, for curtains partly covered the windows and the winter’s dreary afternoon was already merging into twilight. The bed was at the far end of the room, the dressing-table near it. The fire was on his right as he entered, and on a white-covered sofa, drawn before it, sat Maria. She was partly dressed and wrapped in a light cashmere shawl; her cap was untied, and her face, shaded though it was by its smooth brown hair, was all too visible in the reflection cast by the firelight.

Which was the more colourless—that face, or the white cover of the sofa? George Godolphin’s heart stood still as he looked upon it and then bounded on with a rush. Every shadow of hope had gone from him.

Maria had not heard him, did not see him; he went in gently. By her side on the sofa lay Miss Meta, curled up into a ball and fast asleep, her hands and her golden curls on her mamma’s knee. With George’s first step forward, Maria turned her sad sweet eyes towards him, and a faint cry of emotion escaped her lips.

Before she could stir or speak, George was with her, his protecting arms thrown round her, her face gathered to his breast. What a contrast it was! she so wan and fragile, so near the grave, he in all his manly strength, his fresh beauty. Miss Meta woke up, recognized her papa with a cry and much commotion, but Margery came in and carried her off, shutting the door behind her.

Her fair young face—too fair and young to die—was laid against her husband’s; her feeble hand lay carelessly in his. The shock to George was very great; it almost seemed that he had already lost her; and the scalding tears, so rarely wrung from man, coursed down his cheeks, and fell on her face.

“Don’t grieve,” she whispered, the tears raining from her own eyes.

“Oh, George, my husband, it is a bitter thing to part, but we shall meet again in heaven, and be together for ever. It has been so weary here; the troubles have been so great!”

He steadied his voice to speak. “The troubles have not killed you, have they, Maria?”

“Yes, I suppose it has been so. I did try and struggle against them, but—I don’t know– Oh, George!” she broke out in a wailing tone of pain, “if I could have but got over them and lived!—if I could only have gone with you to your new home!”

George sat down on the sofa where Meta had been, and held her to him in silence. She could hear his heart beating; could feel it bounding against her side.

“It will be a better home in heaven,” she resumed, laying her poor pale face upon his shoulder. “You will come to me there, George; I shall only go on first a little while; all the pains and the cares, the heart-burnings of earth will be forgotten, and we shall be together in happiness for ever and ever.”

He dropped his face upon her neck, he sobbed aloud in his anguish. Whatever may have been his gracelessness and his faults, he had loved his wife; and now that he was losing her, that love was greater than it had ever been: some pricks of conscience may have been mingled with it, too! Who knows?

“Don’t forget me quite when I am gone, George. Think of me sometimes as your poor wife who loved you to the last; who would have stayed with you if God had let her. When first I began to see that it must be, that I should leave you and Meta, my heart nearly broke; but the pain has grown less, and I think God has been reconciling me to it.”

“What shall I do?—what will the child do without you?” broke from his quivering lips.

Perhaps the thought crossed Maria that he had done very well without her in the last few months, for his sojourn with her might be counted by hours instead of by days: but she was too generous to allude to it; and the heart-aching had passed. “Cecil and Lord Averil will take Meta,” she said. “Let her stay with them, George! It would not be well for her to go to India alone with you.”

The words surprised him. He did not speak.

“Cecil proposed it yesterday. They will be glad to have her. I dare say Lord Averil will speak to you about it later. It was the one great weight left upon my mind, George—our poor child, and what could be done with her: Cecil’s generous proposal removed it.”

“Yes,” said George hesitatingly. “For a little while; perhaps it will be the best thing. Until I shall get settled in India. But she must come to me then; I cannot part with her for good.”

“For good? No. But, George, you may—it is possible—” she seemed to stammer and hesitate—“you may be forming new ties. In that case you would care less for the loss of Meta–”

“Don’t talk so!” he passionately interrupted. “How can you glance at such things, Maria, in these our last moments?”

She was silent for a few minutes, weeping softly. “Had this parting come upon me as suddenly as it has upon you, I might have started from the very thought with horror; but, George, I have had nothing else in my own mind for weeks but the parting, and it has made me look at the future as I could not else have looked at it. Do not blame me for saying this. I must allude to it, if I am to speak of Meta. I can understand how full of aversion the thought is to you now: but, George, it may come to pass.”

“I think not,” he said, and his voice and manner had changed to grave deliberation. “If I know anything of myself, Maria, I shall never marry again.”

“It is not impossible.”

“No,” he assented; “it is not impossible.”

Her heart beat a shade quicker, and she hid her face upon him so that he could not see it. When she spoke again, it was with difficulty he could catch the whispered words.

“I know how foolish and wrong it is for a dying wife to extract any promise of this nature from her husband: were I to say to you, Do not marry again, it would be little else than a wicked request; and it would prove how my thoughts and passions must still cling to earth. Bear with me while I speak of this, George, I am not going to be so wicked; but—but–”

Agitation stopped her voice. Her bosom heaved, her breath almost left her. He saw that this was mental emotion, not bodily weakness; and he waited until it should pass, stroking the hair from her brow with his gentle hand.

“My darling, what is it?”

“But there is one promise that I do wish to beg of you,” she resumed, mastering her emotion sufficiently to speak. “If—if you should marry, and your choice falls upon one—upon her—then, in that case, do not seek to have Meta home; let her remain always with Cecil.”

A pause, broken by George. “Of whom do you speak, Maria?”

The same laboured breathing; the same cruel agitation; and they had to be fought with before she could bring out the words.

“Of Charlotte Pain.”

“Charlotte Pain!” echoed George, shouting out the name in surprise.

“I could not bear it,” she shivered. “George, George! do not make her the second mother of my child! I could not bear it; it seems to me that I could not even in my grave bear it! Should you marry her, promise me that Meta shall not be removed from Ashlydyat.”

“Maria,” he quietly said, “I shall never marry Charlotte Pain.”

“You don’t know. You may think now you will not, but you cannot answer for yourself. George! she has helped to kill me. She must not be Meta’s second mother.”

He raised her face so that he could see it, his dark blue eyes met hers searchingly, and he took her hand in his as he gravely spoke.

“She will never be Meta’s second mother: nay, if it will be more satisfactory, I will say she never shall be. By the heaven that perhaps even I may some day attain to, I say it! Charlotte Pain will never be Meta’s second mother, or my wife.”

She did not answer in words. She only nestled a little nearer to him in gratitude; half in repentance perhaps for having doubted him. George resumed, in the same grave tone:

“And now, Maria, tell me what you mean by saying that Charlotte Pain has helped to kill you.”

A vivid flush came over her wan face, and she contrived to turn it from him again, so that her eyes were hidden. But she did not speak quite at first.

“It all came upon me together, George,” she murmured at length, her tone one of loving-tenderness, in token that she was not angry now; that the past, whatever may have been its sins against her, any or none, was forgiven. “At that cruel time when the blow fell, when I had nowhere to turn to for comfort, then I also learnt what Prior’s Ash had been saying, about—about Charlotte Pain. George, it seemed to wither my very heart; to take the life out of it. I had so loved you; I had so trusted you: and to find—to find—that you loved her, not me–”

“Hush!” thundered George, in his emotion. “I never loved any one but you, Maria. I swear it!”

“Well—well. It seems that I do not understand. I—I could not get over it,” she continued, passing her hand across her brow where the old aching pain had come momentarily again, “and I fear it has helped to kill me. It was so cruel, to have suffered me to know her all the while.”

George Godolphin compressed his lips. He never spoke.

“But, George, it is over; it is buried in the past; and I did not intend to mention it. I should not have mentioned it but for speaking of Meta. Oh, let it go, let it pass, it need not disturb our last hour together.”

“It appears to have disturbed you a great deal more than it need have done,” he said, a shade of anger in his tone.

“Yes, looking back, I see it did. When we come to the closing scenes of life, as I have come, this world closing to our view, the next opening, then we see how foolish in many things we have been; how worse than vain our poor earthly passions. So to have fretted ourselves over this little space of existence with its passing follies, its temporary interests, when we might have been living and looking for that great one that shall last for ever! To gaze back on my life it seems but a span; a passing hour compared with the eternity that I am entering upon. Oh, George, we have all need of God’s loving forgiveness! I, as well as you. I did not mean to reproach you: but I could not bear—had you made her your second wife—that she should have had the training of Meta.”

Did George Godolphin doubt whether the fear was wholly erased from her heart? Perhaps so: or he might not have spoken to her as he was about to speak.

“Let me set your mind further at rest, Maria. Had I ever so great an inclination to marry Mrs. Pain, it is impossible that I could do so. Mrs. Pain has a husband already.”

Maria raised her face, a flashing light, as of joy, illuminating it. George saw it: and a sad, dreamy look of self-condemnation settled on his own. Had it so stabbed her? “Has she married again?—since she left Prior’s Ash?”

“She has never been a widow, Maria,” he answered. “Rodolf Pain, her husband, did not die.”

“He did not die?”

“As it appears. He is now back again in England.”

“And did you know of this?”

“Only since his return. I supposed her to be a widow, as every one else supposed it. One night last summer, in quitting Ashlydyat, I came upon them both in the grounds, Mr. and Mrs. Pain; and I then learned to my great surprise that he, whom his wife had passed off as dead, had in point of fact been hiding abroad. There is some unpleasant mystery attached to it, the details of which I have not concerned myself to inquire into: he fell into trouble, I expect, and feared his own country was too hot for him. However it may have been, he is home again, and with her. I suppose the danger is removed, for I met them together in Piccadilly last week walking openly, and they told me they were looking out for a house.”

She breathed a sobbing sigh of relief, as one hears sometimes from a little child.

“But were Mrs. Pain the widow she assumed to be, she would never have been made my wife. Child!” he added, in momentary irritation, “don’t you understand things better? She my wife!—the second mother, the trainer of Meta! What could you be thinking of? Men do not marry women such as Charlotte Pain.”

“Then you do not care for her so very much?”

“I care for her so much, Maria, that were I never to see her or hear of her again it would not give me one moment’s thought,” he impulsively cried. “I would give a great deal now not to have kept up our acquaintance with the woman—if that had saved you one single iota of pain.”

When these earthly scenes are closing—when the grave is about to set its seal on one to whom we could have saved pain, and did not,—when heaven’s solemn approach is to be seen, and heaven’s purity has become all too clear to our own sight, what would we give to change inflicted wrongs—to blot out the hideous past! George Godolphin sat by the side of his dying wife, his best-beloved in life as she would be in death, and bit his lips in his crowd of memories, his unavailing repentance. Ah, my friends! these moments of reprisal, prolonged as they may seem, must come to us in the end. It is convenient no doubt to ignore them in our hot-blooded carelessness, but the time will come when they must find us out.

He, George Godolphin, had leisure to hug them to himself, and make the best and the worst of them. Maria, exhausted with excitement, as much as by her own weakness, closed her eyes as she lay upon his breast and dropped into a sleep, and he sat watching her face, holding her to him, not daring to move, lest he should disturb her, not daring even to lift a finger and wipe off his own bitter and unavailing tears.

Yes, there could be no doubt of the fact—that the troubles of one kind and another had been too much for her; that she was dying of them; and he felt the truth to his heart’s core. He felt that she, that delicate, refined, sensitive woman had been the very last who should have been treated rudely. You may remember it was observed at the beginning of her history that she was one unfitted to battle with the world’s sharp storms—it had now proved so. Charlotte Pain would have braved them, whatever their nature, have weathered them jauntily on a prancing saddle-horse; Maria had shrunk down, crushed by their weight. Il y a—let me once more repeat it—il y a des femmes et des femmes.

There came one with hurried steps up the path; with hurried steps and a distressed, anxious countenance. Passing Margery in the passage, she bore on as if no power on earth should stop her, and entered the sick-chamber.

It was Grace: Mrs. Akeman. This sudden change in the illness of Maria had certainly come at an inopportune moment: Mrs. Hastings was at a distance, Grace had gone for the day with her husband some miles into the country. A messenger was sent to her, and it brought her home.

It brought her home with a self-condemning conscience. Maria dying!—when Grace had only thought of her as flaunting off to India; when she had that very day remarked to her husband, as they drove along the snowy road in his four-wheeled chaise, crammed with architectural plans, that some people had all the luck of it in this world, and that Mr. and Mrs. George Godolphin, she supposed, would soon be swaying it in the Bengal presidency, as they had swayed it in Prior’s Ash. Maria dying! dying of the trouble, the sorrow, the disgrace, the humiliation, the neglect! dying of a broken heart! It came flashing into Grace Akeman’s mind that she might have taken a different view of her conduct: have believed in the wrongs of wives, who are bound to their husbands for worse as well as for better; it came into her mind that she might have accorded her a little sisterly sympathy instead of reproach.

She came in now, brimming over with repentance: she came in with a sort of belief that things could not have gone so very far; that there must be some remedy still, some hope; and that if she, Grace, exerted her energies to rouse Maria, health and life would come again. Maria had awakened out of her temporary slumber then, and George was standing with his arm on the mantel-piece. A half-frown crossed his brow when he saw Grace enter. He had never liked her; he was conscious that she had not been kind to Maria, and he deemed her severe manner and sharp voice scarcely suited to that dying chamber. But she was his wife’s sister, and he advanced to welcome her.

Grace did not see his welcome; would not see it. Perhaps in truth she was wholly absorbed by the sight which met her view in Maria. Remedy still?—hope yet? Ah no! death was there, was upon her, and Grace burst into tears. Maria held out her hand, a smile lighting up her wan countenance.

“I thought you were not coming to see me, Grace.”

“I was out; I went to Hamlet’s Wood this morning with Mr. Akeman,” sobbed Grace. “Whatever is the reason that you have suddenly grown so ill as this?”

“I have been growing ill a long time,” was Maria’s answer.

“But there must be hope!” said Grace in her quick way. “Mr. George Godolphin”—turning to him and dashing away the tears on her cheeks, as if she would not betray them to him—“surely there must be hope! What do the medical men say?”

“There is no hope, Grace,” interposed Maria in her feeble voice. “The medical men know there is not. Dr. Beale came with Mr. Snow at midday; but their coming at all is a mere form now.”

Grace untied her bonnet and sat down. “I thought,” said she, “you were getting well.”

Maria made a slight motion of dissent. “I have not thought it myself; not really thought it. I hoped it might be so, and the hope prevented my speaking: but there was always an undercurrent of conviction to the contrary in my heart.”

George looked at her, half-reproachfully. She understood the look, and answered it.

“I wish now I had told you, George: but I was not sure. And if I had spoken you would only have laughed at me then in disbelief.”

“You speak very calmly, Maria,” said Grace with passionate earnestness. “Have you no regret at leaving us?”

A faint hectic shone suddenly in Maria’s cheek. “Regret!” she repeated with emotion; “my days have been one long regret; one long, wearying pain. Don’t you see it is the pain that has killed me, Grace?”