Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  “Get up, get up,” said Thomas Godolphin. “I will give you something for bread for your children to-night.”

  In the midst of his own sorrow he could feel for her, improvident old sinner though she was, and though he knew her to be so. He coaxed and soothed, and finally prevailed upon her to rise, but she was in a reckless, sullen mood, and it took him a little effort before it was effected. She burst into tears when she thanked him, and turned off in the direction of the Pollard cottages.

  The reflection of Mr. Snow’s bald head was conspicuous on the surgery blind: he was standing between the window and the lamp. Thomas Godolphin observed it as he passed. He turned to the surgery door, which was at the side of the house, opened it, and saw that Mr. Snow was alone.

  The surgeon turned his head at the interruption, put down a glass jar which he held, and grasped his visitor’s hand in silence.

  “Snow! why did you not write for me?”

  Mr. Snow brought down his hand on a pair of tiny scales, causing them to jangle and rattle. He had been bottling up his anger against Lady Sarah for some days now, and this was his first explosion.

  “Because I understood that she had done so. I was present when that poor child asked her to do it. I found her on the floor in Sarah Anne’s chamber. On the floor, if you’ll believe me! Lying there, because she could not hold her aching head up. My lady had dragged her out of bed in the morning, ill as she was, and forced her to attend as usual upon Sarah Anne. I got it all out of Elizabeth. ‘Mamma,’ she said, when I pronounced it to be fever, though she was almost beyond speaking then, ‘you will write to Thomas Godolphin.’ I never supposed but that my lady did it. Your sister, Miss Godolphin, inquired if you had been written for, and I told her yes.”

  “Snow,” came the next sad words, “could you not have saved her?”

  The surgeon shook his head and answered in a quiet tone, looking down at the stopper of a phial, which he had taken up and was turning about listlessly in his fingers.

  “Neither care nor skill could save her. I gave her the best I had to give. As did Dr. Beale. Godolphin,” — raising his quick dark eyes, flashing then with a peculiar light— “she was ready to go. Let it be your consolation.”

  Thomas Godolphin made no answer, and there was silence for a time. Mr. Snow resumed. “As to my lady, the best consolation I wish her, is, that she may have her heart wrung with remembrance for years to come! I don’t care what people may preach about charity and forgiveness; I do wish it. But she’ll be brought to her senses, unless I am mistaken: she has lost her treasure and kept her bane. A year or two more, and that’s what Sarah Anne will be.”

  “She ought to have written for me.”

  “She ought to do many things that she does not do. She ought to have sent Ethel from the house, as I told her, the instant the disorder appeared in it. Not she. She kept her in her insane selfishness: and now I hope she’s satisfied with her work. When alarming symptoms showed themselves in Ethel, on the fourth day of her illness, I think it was, I said to my lady, ‘It is strange what can be keeping Mr. Godolphin!’ ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I did not write to him.’ ‘Not write!’ I answered: and I fear I used an ugly word to my lady’s face. ‘I’ll write at once,’ returned she humbly. ‘Of course,’ cried I, ‘when the steed’s stolen we shut the stable-door.’ It’s the way of the world.”

  Another pause. “I would have given anything to take Ethel from the house at the time; to take her from the town,” observed Thomas Godolphin in a low tone. “I said so then. But it could not be.”

  “I should have done it, in your place,” said Mr. Snow. “If my lady had said no, I’d have carried her off in the face of it. Not married, you say? Rubbish! Every one knows she’d have been safe with you. And you would have been married as soon as was convenient. What are forms and ceremonies and carping tongues, in comparison with a girl’s life? A life, precious as was Ethel’s!”

  Thomas Godolphin leaned his forehead in his hand, lost in retrospect. Oh, that he had taken her! that he had set at nought what he had then bowed to, the convenances of society! She might have been by his side now, in health and life, to bless him! Doubting words interrupted the train of thought.

  “And yet I don’t know,” the surgeon was repeating, in a dreamy manner. “What is to be, will be. We look back, all of us, and say, ‘If I had acted thus, if I had done the other, so and so would not have happened; events would have turned out differently.’ But who is to be sure of it? Had you taken Ethel out of harm’s way — as we might have thought it — there’s no telling but she’d have had the fever just the same: her blood might have become infected before she left the house. There’s no knowing, Mr. Godolphin.”

  “True. Good evening, Snow.”

  He turned suddenly and hastily to the outer door, but the surgeon caught him before he passed its threshold, and touched his arm to detain him. They stood there in the obscurity, their faces shaded in the dark night.

  “She left you a parting word, Mr. Godolphin.”

  “Ah?”

  “An hour before she died she was calm and sensible, though fear fully weak. Lady Sarah had gone to her favourite, and I was alone with Ethel. ‘Has he not come yet?’ she asked me, opening her eyes. ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘he could not come; he was never written for.’ For I knew she alluded to you, and was determined to tell her the truth, dying though she was. ‘What shall I say to him for you?’ I continued. She put up her hand to motion my face nearer hers, for her voice was growing faint. ‘Tell him, with my dear love, not to grieve,’ she whispered, between her panting breath. ‘Tell him that I have gone on before.’ I think they were almost the last words she spoke.”

  Thomas Godolphin leaned against the modest post of the surgery door, and eagerly drank in the words. Then he wrung the doctor’s hand, and departed, hurrying along the street as one who shrank from observation: for he did not care, just then, to encounter the gaze of his fellow-men.

  Coming with a quick step up the side street, in which the entrance to the surgery was situated, was the Reverend Mr. Hastings. He stopped to accost the surgeon.

  “Was that Mr. Godolphin?”

  “Ay. This is a blow for him.”

  Mr. Hastings’s voice insensibly shrank to a whisper. “Maria tells me that he did not know of Ethel’s death or illness. Until they arrived here to-night, they thought it was Sarah Anne who died. He went up to Lady Sarah’s after the train came in, thinking so.”

  “Lady Sarah’s a fool,” was the complimentary rejoinder of Mr. Snow.

  “She is, in some things,” warmly assented the Rector. “The telegraphic message she despatched to Scotland, telling of the death, was so obscurely worded as to cause them to assume that it alluded to Sarah Anne.”

  “Ah well! she’s only heaping burdens on her conscience,” rejoined Mr. Snow in a philosophic tone. “She has lost Ethel through want of care (as I firmly believe) in not keeping her out of the way of infection; she prevented their last meeting, through not writing to him; she — —”

  “He could not have saved her, had he been here,” interrupted Mr. Hastings.

  “No one said he could. There would have been satisfaction in it for him, though. And for her too, poor child.”

  Mr. Hastings did not contest the point. He was so very practical a man (in contradistinction to an imaginative one) that he saw little use in “last” interviews, unless they produced actual good. Turning away, he walked home at a brisk pace. Maria was alone when he entered. Mrs. Hastings and Grace were out of the room, talking to some late applicant: a clergyman’s house, like a parish apothecary’s, is never free long together. Divested of her travelling cloaks and seated before the fire in her quiet merino dress, Maria looked as much at home as if she had never left it. The blaze, flickering on her face, betrayed to the keen glance of the Rector that her eyelashes were wet.

  “Grieving after Broomhead already, Maria?” asked he, his tone a stern one.

  “Oh, papa, no! I am glad to be
at home. I was thinking of poor Ethel.”

  “She is better off. 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 cares, wails out a vain wish that he had been taken early from the evil to come.”

  “It must be so dreadful for Thomas Godolphin!” Maria resumed, looking straight into the fire, and speaking as if in commune with herself, more than to her father.

  “Thomas Godolphin must find another love.”

  It was one of those phrases, spoken in satire only, to which the Rector of All Souls’ was occasionally given. He saw so much to condemn in the world, things which grated harshly on his advanced mind, that his speech had become imbued with a touch of gall, and he would often give utterance to cynical remarks, uncalled for at the moment.

  Maria took up the words literally. She turned to Mr. Hastings; her cheek flushed, her hands clasped; altogether betraying vivid emotion. “Oh, papa! another love! You should not say it of Thomas Godolphin. Love, such as his, is not for a week or a year: it is for all time.”

  The Rector paused a moment in his reply. His penetrating gaze was fixed upon his daughter. “May I inquire whence you have derived your knowledge of ‘love,’ Miss Maria Hastings?”

  Her eyes drooped, her face turned crimson, her manner grew confused. She turned her countenance from that of her father, and stammered forth some lame excuse. “Every one knows, papa, that Thomas Godolphin was fond of Ethel.”

  “Possibly. But every one does not know that Maria Hastings deems herself qualified to enlarge upon the subject,” was the Rector’s reply. And Maria shrank into silence.

  There came a day, not many days afterwards, when Maria Hastings, her sisters, and two of her brothers, were gathered in sombre silence around the study window of the Rectory. The room was built out at the back of the house, over the kitchen, and its side window commanded a full view of the churchyard of All Souls’, and of the church porch. Grace, who constituted herself mistress of the others a great deal more than did Mrs. Hastings herself, allowed the blind to be drawn up about two inches at the bottom of the window; and Maria, Isaac, Harry, and Rose, kneeling down for convenience sake, brought their faces into contact with it, as the mob outside the churchyard gate did there. Human nature is the same everywhere, whether in the carefully-trained children of a Christian gentleman, or in those who know no training but what the streets have given.

  The funeral, even now, was inside the church: it had been inside so long that those eager watchers, estimating time by their impatience, began to think it was never coming out again. A sudden movement in the church porch reassured them, and Grace knelt down and made one with the rest.

  Slowly — slowly — on it came. The Reverend Mr. Hastings first, in his white robes; the coffin next; Thomas Godolphin last, with a stranger by his side. Nothing more, except some pall-bearers in their white scarfs, and the necessary attendants. It was a perfectly simple funeral: according well with what the dead had been in her simple life.

  The appearance of this stranger took the curious gazers by surprise. Who was he? A spare man, past middle age, with a red nose and an unmistakable wig on his head. Rumours circulating in Prior’s Ash had said that Thomas Godolphin would be sole mourner. Lady Sarah Grame’s relatives — and she could not boast of many — lived far north of Aberdeen. “Who can he be?” murmured Grace Hastings.

  “Why, don’t you girls know? That’s through your having stuck yourselves in the house all the morning, for fear you should lose the funeral. If you had gone out, you’d have heard who he is.” The retort came from Harry Hastings. Let it be a funeral or a wedding, that may be taking place under their very eyes, boys must be boys all the world over. And so they ever will be.

  “Who is he, then?” asked Grace.

  “He is Ethel’s uncle,” answered Harry. “He arrived by train this morning. The Earl of Macsomething.”

  “The Earl of Macsomething!” repeated Grace.

  Harry nodded. “Mac begins the name, and I forget the rest. Lady Sarah was his sister.”

  “Is, you mean,” said Grace. “It must be Lord Macdoune.”

  The church porch was opposite the study window. The grave had been dug in a line between the two, very near to the family vault of the Godolphins and to the entrance gate of the churchyard. On it came, crossing the broad churchyard path which wound round to the road, treading between mounds and graves. The clergyman took his place at the head, the mourners near him, the rest disposing themselves decently around.

  “Grace,” whispered Isaac, “if we had the window open an inch, we should hear.” And Grace was pleased to accord her sanction, and they silently raised it.

  “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

  The children — indeed they were little more — hushed their breath and listened, and looked at Thomas Godolphin. Thomas Godolphin stood there, his head bowed, his face still, the gentle wind stirring his thin dark hair. It was probably a marvel to himself in after-life, how he had contrived, in that closing hour, to retain his calmness before the world.

  “The coffin’s lowered at last!” broke out Harry, who had been more curious to watch the movements of the men, than the aspect of Thomas Godolphin.

  “Hush, sir!” sharply rebuked Grace. And the minister’s voice again stole over the silence.

  “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth ... ashes to ashes ... dust to dust ... in sure and certain hope of the resur rection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”

  Every word came home to Thomas Godolphin’s senses; every syllable vibrated upon his heartstrings. That sure and certain hope laid hold of his soul, never again to quit it. It diffused its own holy peace and calm into his troubled mind: and never, until that moment, had he fully realized the worth, the truth, of her dying legacy: “Tell him that I have gone on before.” A few years — God, now present with him, alone knew how few or how many — and Thomas Godolphin would have joined her in eternal life.

  But why had Mr. Hastings come to a temporary pause? Because his eye had fallen upon one, then gliding up from the entrance of the churchyard to take his place amidst the mourners. One who had evidently arrived in a hurry. He wore neither scarf nor hatband, neither cloak nor hood: nothing but a full suit of plain black clothes.

  “Look, Maria,” whispered Grace.

  It was George Godolphin. He fell quietly in below his brother, his hat carried in his hand, his head bowed, his fair curls waving in the breeze. It was all the work of an instant: and the minister resumed:

  “I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours.”

  And so went on the service to the end.

  The beadle, with much bustle and a liberal use of his staff, scattered and dispersed the mob from the gates, to clear a passage. Two mourning coaches were in waiting. Thomas Godolphin came forth, leaning on his brother’s arm, both of them bare-headed still. They entered one; Lord Macdoune stepped into the other.

  “Thomas!” cried George Godolphin, leaning forward and seizing his brother’s hand impulsively, as the mourning-coach paced slowly on: “I should have been here in good time, but for a delay in the train.”

  “How did you hear of it? I did not know where to write to you,” was Thomas’s reply, spoken calmly.

  “I heard of it at Broomhead. I went back there, and then I came off at once. Thomas, could they not save her?”

&n
bsp; A slight negative movement was all Thomas Godolphin’s answer. “How did you find your father, George?”

  “Breaking. Breaking fast. Thomas, all his talk is, that he must come home to die.”

  “To Ashlydyat. I know. How is he to come to it? The Folly is not Ashlydyat. He has desired me to see that he is at Prior’s Ash before Christmas, and I shall do so.”

  George looked surprised. “Desired you to see that he is?”

  “If he is not back speedily, I am to go to Broomhead.”

  “Oh, I see. That your authority, upholding his, may be pitted against my lady’s. Take care, Thomas: she may prove stronger than both of you put together.”

  “I think not,” replied Thomas quietly; and he placed his elbow on the window frame, and bent his face upon his hand, as if wishing for silence.

  Meanwhile the Reverend Mr. Hastings had passed through the private gate to his own garden; and half a dozen men were shovelling earth upon the coffin, sending it with a rattle upon the bright plate, which told who was mouldering within:

  “Ethel Grame. Aged twenty years.”

  CHAPTER XV. A MIDNIGHT WALK.

  Thomas Godolphin sat in his place at the bank, opening the morning letters. It was some little time after the interment of Ethel Grame, and the second week in December was already on the wane. In two days more it was his intention to start for Broomhead: for no tidings arrived of the return of Sir George. The very last of the letters he came upon, was one bearing the Scotch post-mark. A poor little note with a scrawled address: no wonder the sorting-clerk had placed it last of all! It looked singularly obscure, in comparison with those large blue letters and their business hands.

  Thomas Godolphin knew the writing. It was Margery’s. And we may as well read the contents with him, verbatim:

  “Mr. Thomas Sir,

  “I imbrace this favurible oportunaty of adresing you for I considur it my duty to take up my pen and inform you about my master, He’s not long for this world, Mr. Thomas I know it by good tokens which I don’t write not being an easy writer but they are none the less true, The master’s fretting his life away because he is not at home and she is keeping him because she’s timorus of the fever. But you saw how it was sir when you were here and it’s the same story still. There’d have been a fight for it with my lady but if I’d been you Mr. Thomas I’d have took him also when me and the young ladies went with you to Prior’s Ash. When I got back here, sir I saw an awful change in him and Mr. George he saw it but my lady didn’t. I pen these lines sir to say you had better come off at once and not wait for it to be nearer Christmas, The poor master is always saying Thomas is coming for me, Thomas is coming for me but I’d not answer for it now that he will ever get back alive, Sir it was the worst day’s work he ever did to go away at all from Ashlydyat if my lady was dying to live at the new Folly place she might have gone to it but not him, When we do a foolish wrong thing we don’t think of the consekences at the time at least not much of em but we think all the more after and fret our hearts out with blame and it have been slowly killing him ever since, I am vexed to disturb you Mr. Thomas with this epistle for I know you must be in enough grief of your own just now.