Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  He went close up, and halted in front of her: Rose by him, shaking from head to foot. Forgetting, probably, what Rose had said, that she would not speak to him, or else obeying the impulse of the moment, he mechanically held out his hand to Adeline: but there was no answering impulse on her part.

  He stood rooted to the spot, his eyes running rapidly over her. They glanced down on the flounces of the rich lace dress, they wandered up to her face — it was the first close, full view he had obtained of it. He saw the set, rigid features, the unmistakable stare of the glassy eye; and, with a rushing sensation of sickening awe and terror, the terrible truth burst upon his brain.

  That it was not Adeline de Castella, but her CORPSE which stood there.

  He was a strong-minded man — a man little given to betray his feelings, or to suffer them to escape beyond his own control: yet he staggered now against the wall by her side, in what seemed a fainting-fit. Rose, alarmed for the consequences of what she had done, burst into tears, knelt down, and began to rub his hands.

  “Open the windows — give some air here,” called out little Monsieur Durante, who had come all the way from Ostrohove to see the sight. “Here’s a gentleman in an attack.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” returned an Englishman, who made one of the company; “he has nearly fainted, that’s all. There’s no cause for alarm, young lady. I suppose he came in, not knowing what he was going to see, and the shock overpowered him. It is an odd fashion, this. See: he revives already.”

  Consciousness came to Mr. St. John. He rose slowly, shook himself out of a shuddering-fit, and with a last wild yearning glance at the dead, fell into the line of the retreaters. But it was Miss Carr who now detained him: Adeline’s message had yet to be given.

  “The address on the packet was in her handwriting, Mr. St. John,” she whispered; “she wrote it yesterday, only a few hours before she died. She charged me to say that everything is there, except the ring, which has never been off her finger since you placed it there, and will be buried with her; and to tell you that she had been ever faithful to you; as in life, so unto death.”

  Mr. St. John listened, and nodded in reply, with the abstracted air of one who answers what he does not hear, touching unconsciously the breast-pocket of his coat, where lay the packet.

  “There was something else,” continued she, “but I dare not venture to breathe that here. Later, perhaps?”

  Again he nodded with the same look of abstraction, never speaking; and began to follow in the wake of the crowd, who had taken their fill of gazing, and were making their way from the room.

  “He is a fine young man, though,” exclaimed M. Durante, looking after St. John with eyes of admiration. “But he is very pale: he has scarcely recovered himself.”

  “To think that he should have dropped at seeing a corpse, just as one might drop a stone, a fine strong man like him!” responded a neighbouring chemist, who had stepped in to have a look at the reception. “Qu’ils sont drôles, ces Anglais-là!”

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  UNAVAILING REPENTANCE.

  ROSE DARLING struggled out of the room with Mr. St. John; not caring to remain in it, possibly, without his sheltering presence. They went downstairs with the crowd — all silent and well-behaved, but still a crowd — and then Rose drew him into the small snug room that had been her abiding place and Mary’s for the day.

  Mr. St. John sat down, and leaned his head upon his hand. In a shock like this, he could not make believe not to feel it, or to gloss it over; indeed he was an independent man at all times, utterly refusing to give in to the false artificialities of society. Rose slipped away, and brought him a glass of wine; but he shook his head, declining to take it. Mary Carr had not come with them; it turned out afterwards that she thought he had left the house.

  “When did she die?” was the first question he presently asked.

  “Last night; a few minutes before twelve.”

  “Just as I was stepping on board the steamer at Folkestone,” he murmured to himself. “Why is she — there, Rose? — dressed — in that form? Are they mad?”

  “It is a custom they have in France, as it seems; but I had never before heard of it,” answered Rose. “Hark at the people passing up still!”

  A shiver of remembrance took him, but it was conquered immediately. Rose untied the black string of her straw bonnet, and put it on the table.

  “I suppose we are both in mourning for the same person,” she remarked, in allusion to the narrow band of crape on his hat: “little George St. John.”

  “Yes,” he shortly answered. “What did she die of?”

  “Of consumption: at least, that is what the doctors would tell you. I won’t say anything about a broken heart.”

  Mr. St. John made no reply. Rose resumed:, “From the moment that blood-vessel burst, there has been, I suppose, no real hope, no possibility of cure. But she rallied so greatly, and seemed so well, that I, for one, believed in it.” He looked at Rose; the words seemed to arouse his curiosity. “When did she burst a blood-vessel?”

  “It was at Beaufoy. It was — why, yes, it was the very day you were last there, Mr. St. John, almost in your sight. You remember the morning you quitted the house, and never came back again? — did you notice Adeline running down the steps of the colonnade after you, imploring you to stop? — did you notice that she sank down on the grass, as if from fatigue?”

  “I think I did,” he answered, in allusion to the last question. “I know she followed me down the steps.”

  “It was then the blood-vessel broke; through emotion, no doubt. Had you but looked back once again, you might have seen what was amiss. I never shall forget the sight. Just at first I had thought her foot slipped and threw her down, next I thought she was kneeling for a joke: but when I reached her, I saw what it was. One minute longer, and you would have seen the whole house gathered round her on the lawn. She was got indoors, and the doctors were sent for.

  What a house it was! She thought she was dying; and I believe the chiefest wish of her heart then was to see you.”

  “Why did you not send for me?”

  “We did send. I wrote to you, and Louise took the note at once to the Lodge. But you had already gone — turning Madame Baret’s brains upside down with the shock.”

  “You might have sent it after me to England.”

  “Of course I might — if I had only known you were gone to England. How was I to know it? I might be wishing to get a note to some one in the moon, but not see my way clear to writing the address. It was weeks, and weeks, and weeks, Mr. St. John, before we ever heard a syllable of you, whether you were in England or in any other part of the known world, or whether you were at the bottom of the sea.”

  “And she never married de la Chasse?”

  The words seemed spoken as a remark, not as a question. Rose, who seemed to have a touch of one of her ironical moods coming on, answered it:

  “Would you have had her marry him when death had set in? After the doctors had met that day, it was known throughout the house that nothing could save her. At least, they said so. The old malady of the spring had but been lying dormant; it was in her still; and the terrible trouble she went through had brought it forth again. Under the very happiest circumstances, had she married you, even — and I suppose that might have been her idea of happiness,” added Rose, satirically—” she could not have lived long. De la Chasse saw her for a few minutes on the day they were to have been married, and expressed himself very much concerned, and all that, as a matter of course; I don’t suppose he broke his heart over it.”

  “And she has been ill ever since?”

  “Ever since. The disease has fluctuated, as you may imagine; some weeks she would be at death’s door, some weeks comparatively well; but it has all the while been progressing on gradually to the ending. Frederick St. John” — and Rose stepped up to him in her excitement— “I don’t believe you were ever absent for one minute from her mind; by day and by night i
t was filled with that miserable love for you; and the yearning wish, destined not to be gratified, was ever upon her — that you would come and see her before she died.”

  “Why did you not let me know it? — why could you not have written to me?” he asked, in a sharp tone of pain.

  “For one thing, I tell you, I did not know where to write. For another, Adeline would not have let me. She had an idea that you did not care to come to her — that you perhaps would not, if summoned. And!” — Rose paused a moment, and angrily compressed her repentant lips—” I could wish my tongue had been bitten out for a share I took in the past. There’s not the least doubt that one ingredient in Adeline’s cup of bitterness was worse than all the rest — the thought of Sarah Beauclerc.”

  He uttered an exclamation.

  “And of your love for her. And I say I wish Sarah Beauclerc had been smothered, and I with her, if you like, before I had ever breathed her name to Adeline. But for that, but for deeming that she was your true love, and would some time be your wife, Adeline would have sent to the far ends of the earth after you for a parting interview.”

  He sat, leaning his head upon his fingers, looking into the fire.

  “What a miserable business it seems altogether! Nothing but cross-purposes, the one with the other. Sarah Beauclerc!”

  “Are you still engaged — perhaps at a moment like this I may be pardoned for asking it — to Sarah Beauclerc?”

  “I never was engaged to Sarah Beauclerc. I had once a sort of passing fancy for her; I don’t know that it was more. I have had no thought of her, or of any one else, since I parted from Adeline.”

  “In a letter I had from London, not very long ago,” resumed Rose, slowly, “your name was coupled with Miss Sarah Beauclerc’s. It said you were her shadow.”

  “Who said it?”

  “Never mind. It was a lady.”

  “Your correspondent laboured under a mistake, Rose; you may tell her so, for her satisfaction. Sarah Beauclerc will very soon be a wife, but not mine.”

  “Who is she going to marry?”

  “Lord Raynor.”

  Rose exhausted her surprise in ejaculations. She had thought Sarah Beauclerc would be Frederick St. John’s chosen wife; had felt utterly certain of it in her own mind. He sat in silence, never heeding her. Remembrances of the past were crowding upon him. That he had been very near loving Sarah Beauclerc, was indisputable: and but for the meeting with Adeline, this might have come to fruition: there was no knowing now. At Lady Revel’s — the evening spoken of to Rose by Miss Mary Anne Darling — he had learnt that she, Sarah, was going to be married to the Viscount Raynor, a man who, as Captain Budd, had been attached to her for years. She herself told him of this. In her calm, cold, cutting manner, she spoke of his contemplated marriage to Mademoiselle de Castella: was any covert reproof intended in this? any secret intimation that that justified her own engagement? However that might be, all chance of their being one in this world, had any such chance ever existed, was at an end; and Frederick St. John had no regret left in regard to it. All his regrets were for another.

  “If Adeline had but known it!” murmured Rose, genuine tears of vexation filling her eyes. “Did you not know she was dying, Mr. St. John?”

  “No. I knew nothing about her.”

  “Have you been in England ever since you quitted us that day?”

  “I went straight to London from Beaufoy, saw my brother Isaac, explained matters to him, and then accompanied him to Castle Wafer. Subsequently I went to Scotland, deer-stalking; running over once to London from thence, to see my mother. Before Christmas, I was again for a week in London, and then I escorted my mother to Castle Wafer. Now you know what my movements have been, Rose. I heard nothing of Adeline.”

  “Perhaps you kept yourself out of the way of hearing of her?”

  “I did.”

  “That was your temper!”

  “Just so. Our faults generally bring their own punishment.”

  “We heard you were in an awful passion at Madame Baret’s,” remarked Rose, who plunged into things irrelevant without mercy.

  “I thought I had cause to be. I thought so then. I do not know the reason now why she rejected me.”

  “Mary Carr will tell you that. Ill-fated Adeline! She would have given her poor life to have been allowed to whisper it to you then, to justify herself in your eyes. The fact is,” added Rose, after a pause, “the Church interfered to prevent the marriage, and Adeline was sworn to silence on the crucifix. I did not know it until to-day. She thought of you until the last, Mr. St. John, and in her dying moments got permission from her father for the truth to be disclosed to you. Mary was charged with it.”

  Mr. St. John’s eyes blazed up with an angry light. “Then I know that was the work of Father Marc!”‘

  “I dare say it was. He was very fond of Adeline, and no doubt thought her marriage with a heretic would be perdition here and hereafter. I don’t see that you can blame him: you would have done the same in his place, had you been true to your creed. Father Marc’s one of the best gossipers living. We saw a great deal of him in Adeline’s sick-room, after you left. I fell in love with the charming old père.”

  Would she ever be serious! The question might have crossed Mr. St. John at a less bitter moment.

  “And I think his gossip did Adeline good,” continued Rose. “It was a sort of break to her misery. How could you have doubted her — have doubted for a single moment, whatever your passionate rage might have been, that her whole love was yours?”

  How indeed? But perhaps in his inmost heart he never had doubted it. He sat there now, bearing the bitter weight of remembrance as he best might, his eyes looking back into the past, his delicate lips drawn in to pain.

  “They have no portrait of her,” went on Rose, not in her mercilessness, but in her giddy, gossiping lightness. “And the one you took of her, you defaced.”

  “Don’t, Rose!”

  The words came from him with a wail. His remorse wanted no feeding; it was already as great as he well knew how to bear. Rose was not quite without feeling, and the words and their tone checked her. She sat thinking how unkind she had been, and began flirting the strings of her bonnet about, as it lay near her on the table.

  But it was not in her nature to remain silent long. Something, perhaps the black ribbon, took her thoughts to another subject: and in truth she did not like to say more of Adeline.

  “Does it not seem like a fatality? All three of them to have died, one after the other!”

  Mr. St. John came slowly out of his pain, and looked at her for an explanation. “Three of whom?”

  “Oh, I was thinking of Alnwick. Mr. Carleton St. John first and then his two boys. I suppose you have inherited?”

  “My brother has. Yes,’ it is a very sad thing. Quite a fatality, as you say.”

  “What fortune has Charlotte now? Much?”

  “I really do not know. I fear not much.”

  “She reckoned so surely — I know she did — upon being Lady St. John!”

  “That seems to be a chief portion of life’s business, I think,” he remarked: “the reckoning upon things that never come to pass.”

  “I suppose you have not seen her since?”

  “Mrs. Carleton St. John? Yes, I have. I heard she was staying with Mrs. Darling in town, the week I spent there before Christmas, and I called.”

  “How was she looking? How did she seem?” asked Rose, rather eagerly.

  “She seemed quite well, and she looked well. Very thin: but in good health and spirits.”

  “There was no — excitement in her manner, was there?”

  “On the contrary. She struck me as being one of the calmest, quietest-mannered women I ever saw.”

  “Did you think her pretty?”

  “No. I thought her handsome.”

  “What did mamma say to you about me? — and Margaret and Mary Anne? No good, I know. They are always abusing me.”

  “I did n
ot see them. Mrs. Carleton St. John said they had all gone out to call on some old friend.”

  “You had no loss. Mamma you know; I don’t say anything against her, though it was a shame of her to keep me at school so long; but Mary Anne and Margaret are the primmest old creatures you can picture. Why, they are going on for thirty! I sent them over a cap apiece the other day, in return for a little interference of theirs. Lottie Singleton took the parcel. Didn’t it make them wild!”

  A faint smile parted his lips.

  “Where is Charlotte going to live?” resumed Rose. “Have you heard?”

  “I have heard nothing. I believe my brother wrote to beg of her to go back to Alnwick, and remain there as long as she chose. But she declined.”

  “I know one thing — that I hope she’ll not live with us,” cried Rose, tossing back her golden curls. “Charlotte always was so domineering, and now — especially — You are sure you observed no undue excitement of manner?” she broke off, after a pause.

  “Why do you ask it? To me she appeared to be almost unnaturally calm.”

  “I think I’ll tell you why,” said thoughtless Rose. And forthwith she disclosed to Mr. St. John all she had heard from Nurse Brayford. It was lamentably imprudent of her, without doubt; but she meant no harm. And the notion she herself had gathered from the story was, that the trouble had temporarily touched Charlotte’s brain, just as a passing fever will touch it. That was all the real thought of her heart; but her expressions were exaggerated as usual, meaning less than they implied. It had the effect of fully arousing Frederick St. John from his own care: and Rose was surprised to see him make so much of it. —