“Lord, it’s never you, Sir Godfrey!” she exclaimed—” What a turn you’ve given me to be sure! And the daring of it! Why couldn’t you wait till I wrote as I’d promised! Suppose Mr. Elverton had been here?”
“I should have throttled him I daresay,” was the cool reply, and the speaker, Sir Godfrey Lawrence, unfastened his coat and threw it aside, showing himself to be a distinctly handsome man of about two-or three-and-thirty— “I’ve been haunting this confoundedly dull neighbourhood for a week and more, and to-day by good luck I met him driving recklessly towards the town, drunk as usual, and whipping that unfortunate mare of his almost to madness. The groom was holding on to the trap behind with both hands in sheer desperation, lest he should be flung off into the road and left there. Neither master nor man saw me. But I guessed they would be absent for a few hours at any rate, so I walked on here as fast as the mud would let me. I have been nearly out of my mind with suspense; — how is she?”
“Weak enough, but doing well,” replied the nurse, eyeing him curiously as she spoke—” I make no doubt you’ve been anxious.”
“Anxious! Good God!” — and he strode up and down agitatedly—” I have seen her in my dreams, lying stiff in her coffin, poor little soul! — I have felt myself to be worse than a murderer, — if you call that being anxious! Is she out of all danger?”
“One can never quite say that,” returned Nurse Collins sedately— “Not so soon. You see, the baby was only born yesterday afternoon between five and six o’clock.”
Sir Godfrey turned white, then red, and bit his lips hard.
“Dead, I hope?” he said in a harsh whisper.
The nurse looked him full in the eyes.
“No, Sir Godfrey. Living.”
He made a swift step towards her.
“Why didn’t you smother it? You could have done so, and no one would have been any the wiser!”
Nurse Collins smiled coldly.
“Thank you, sir, but I have a conscience, little as you seem to think it. I would rather not commit murder, if you will excuse me, Sir Godfrey, — I could not do it, even to oblige you; it would be against my principles.”
“Damn your principles!” he muttered under his breath, and again he strode up and down.
“Can I see her?” he demanded suddenly, stopping abruptly.
“Well, I should think you might,” the nurse replied meditatively, “ I fancy perhaps it would rouse her a bit. She is certainly nervous and fretful. You might perhaps set her mind more at ease. But I must prepare her first. And you can see the baby too!” she added, with an unkind smile, as she left the room.
Sir Godfrey frowned, but said nothing, and during the few minutes he was kept waiting paced up and down in chafing discontent, remorse, and misery. He was a notoriously ‘fast’ man, very popular among the ‘Upper Ten,’ and he had more time and money on his hands than he knew what to do with. As a natural result of idleness and wealth combined, he was always more or less in what he called a ‘hobble,’ and the ‘hobble’ generally had a woman in the centre of it. But he was not wholly bad; and the latent manliness in him made him heartily ashamed of himself at the present moment. His so-called ‘flirtation’ with pretty Mrs. Elverton, begun lightly, had deepened into a dangerous passion and had gone too far; “much too far,” he told himself with a smarting conscience. Yet, after all, how could he help it? he queried. He was but a man, — and she, — she was so winsome and lovely and trustful, and so ill-treated by her drunken brute of a husband, that surely it was no wonder that —
Here his unhappy musings were interrupted by the return of Nurse Collins.
“You can come upstairs, Sir Godfrey. She is quite ready to see you.”
Treading softly on tiptoe, and trembling with a nervousness quite unusual to him, the baronet, whose marked attentions to another man’s wife had provided society with scandal for a considerable period, followed his guide into the room where lay the woman he loved with all that brief madness that only comes once in a lifetime, leaving disaster and ruin in its train. She had turned round on her pillows to catch the first glimpse of him as he entered; her eyes were brilliant with joy, and she stretched out her arms to him as he approached.
“Oh, Godfrey! How good — how brave of you to come!”
“Violet! my darling!” he murmured tremulously; and drawing her tenderly to his breast, he held her there while she wept softly from sheer weakness and delight combined. Nurse Collins turned away, and bent over the crib where the lonely infant quietly reposed. It was strangely passive, — it neither moved nor cried, and when the nurse came near it, it was not startled from its weirdly tranquil condition. Its eyes were fixed with singular tenacity on certain shadows thrown by the firelight upon the opposite wall, — the shadows of two guilty creatures, its mother and her lover, locked in each other’s arms.
After about half an hour’s whispered conversation, Sir Godfrey turned from the bedside, still holding one of Violet Elverton’s hands within his own, and said in an anxious voice, —
“She is very weak, nurse. For God’s sake take care of her!”
“I shall do my best, sir,” responded Nurse Collins, somewhat frigidly. “ Will you look at the child?”
The baronet started violently, and dropped the hand he held. Mrs. Elverton grew deadly pale, and her beautiful eyes searched his face alarmedly. “Oh, Godfrey!” she whispered with a half sob; “If it had only died!—”
“Ah! if it had!” he answered under his breath. “As it is, it must live on a lie, — it must be the unconscious witness of—” He flushed a shamed red. “Violet, — it is a bad beginning! “She made no reply, but only clung to him. Gently disengaging himself he laid her back on her pillows, and, rising from his place at the bedside, advanced somewhat unsteadily.
“Where is it?” he asked in hoarse accents.
The nurse silently pointed to the crib. Approaching almost timidly, he bent down lower and lower, gazing in vague wonder not unmixed with fear at the small creature he beheld — so frail and feeble a morsel of humanity, so infinitely touching in its helplessness and innocence. Presently, sinking on one knee, he lightly brushed the infant’s soft little face with his lips. Its earnest eyes, the angel copies of his own, looked up at him so sorrowfully, so appealingly, that he was moved to a greater remorse and shame than he had thought possible to his nature.
“Poor little child” he murmured—” Poor little sinless child of sin!”
And with the words a new and keener comprehension of its unhappy fate swept like a sudden flare of lightning over the suffering SOUL, pent up in flesh even as a prisoner behind close dungeon bars. ‘A child of sin l’ Yes; and therefore doomed by mystic and eternal laws to bear the burden of sin, which meant to an immortal Spirit the utter deprivation of all its highest privileges for all that bitterest phase of troublous striving known as human life. Ah, what strange passion was that which leaped into the child’s eyes then? — what dread and horror was it that held its erring father motionless, gazing into those eyes as though he read in them reproach and doom?
“God forgive me!” he whispered, laying his trembling hand on the tiny head—” God forgive me that I wish you were dead, my poor little one! Nothing but sorrow awaits you, — nothing but a fraud practised on your innocence all through your days; and who knows if the time may not come when both I and your mother will loathe the sight of you as the visible if unconscious witness of our sin! Poor child! — how much kinder would death be to you than life!”
A few hot tears dropped on the infant’s curled-up hand, — then, ashamed of his weakness, he again kissed the soft cheek, and rose, pale to the lips, and with a tremor running through his stalwart frame.
“It is a pretty little thing,” he said briefly to the nurse, at the same time laying a crisp ten-pound Bank of England note on the table; then, knitting his brows sternly, he added in a low tone, “You must keep your own counsel.”
Nurse Collins curtsied as she took the note and pocketed i
t.
“You may rely upon me, Sir Godfrey,” she replied. “But of course you know Mr. Elverton has his suspicions.”
“A drunkard’s suspicions are worthless,” he said. “The child is born in wedlock, and he can prove nothing. All you have to do is to hold your tongue. And don’t let Mrs. Elverton worry herself; — there is no cause for fear.”
And he moved gently again to the bedside, taking his love’s pale hands in his own and kissing them tenderly.
“Where are you going now, Godfrey?” she asked plaintively.
“I am staying at the inn on the coast,” he replied. “ You know it, — about seven miles from here. It is a fine night, and I shall walk. Don’t be in the least anxious, Violet; — sleep and get well quickly; remember, there is no danger.”
He said these last words slowly and with emphasis.
“Have you looked at it?” she whispered. “The child? Yes.”
“It’s eyes—”
Sir Godfrey kissed her quivering lips.
“I know. They are tell-tales; but do not alarm yourself needlessly now. Try not to think. Rest, and have confidence that all will go well. Nurse Collins is faithful.”
At that moment the nurse approached him r I think you had better be going, sir,” she said respectfully. “ I expect the doctor about eleven.”
Sir Godfrey at once accepted the warning, and, with a hurried yet tender farewell, left the room quickly, without again turning his head towards the shadowed corner where lay his love-abandoned child. Outside the door he shook hands with the nurse.
“I’m sure you will do all you can for her,” he said with great earnestness. “ You know very well her husband doesn’t care; — but I care, — and if she had died—”
“You would have soon forgotten her, sir,” remarked Nurse Collins composedly—” And found another lady. It is the way with most gentlemen of your standing.”
He gave her an angry glance, vexed at the coolness with which she thus estimated his character; then remembering she held his guilty secret in her hands, he forced a careless laugh.
“You think so?” he said lightly. “Perfectly natural on your part, I daresay. But you do not understand what real love is. Goodnight.”
And in another moment or two he had left the house.
The nurse stood for a little while on the landing from whence she had watched him disappear, thinking her own thoughts half aloud.
“Real love!” she muttered. “Ah! poor folks have their ideas about that as well as rich. What I call real love is very different to what your fine gentlemen of fashion calls it. To love a woman well enough to save her from any suspicion of slander is real love if you like; not to go dangling after her everywhere, and making people talk about her till she hasn’t got a shred of reputation left. Real love, indeed!”
Yet, with all her seeming-honest notions, she found a peculiar satisfaction in fingering Sir Godfrey’s crisp bank-note in her pocket, and she foresaw plenty of future opportunities for getting money out of him when matters required to be ‘hushed up’ or otherwise smoothed over. Therefore she was in a very contented frame of mind with herself and things in general when she reentered her patient’s room. Finding that Mrs. Elverton had fallen peacefully asleep and that the infant in its crib was apparently sleeping too, she softly stirred the fire and sat comfortably down beside it to await the arrival of the doctor, and also to concoct a plan by which Sir Godfrey Lawrence’s visit to the house during Mr. Elverton’s absence should be kept a secret by the other servants as well as herself.
Meanwhile, the SOUL of the newly-born was struggling rebelliously in its narrow prison, resolved to make a desperate fight for liberty; and up to the throne of Eternal Love its complaint piteously ascended.
“Not in this world, O divine Creator, — not in this world let me suffer! Not here shall be found the fires which purify, — not here, where Falsehood is given the dominion over Truth! Surely, O righteous Father, in this dark corner of Thy Universe Thy creatures have forgotten Thee, — and for this cause cometh all their sin! Condemn me not, O Thou supreme Mercy, to share their dreadful banishment! — for behold, I do not forget, — Thou and Thou only art my memory and my joy! If for some flaw in my nature I must needs pass a time of exile and severance from Thee, plunge me if Thou wilt into an abyss of fiery torture, provided such torture have Truth in its centre, rather than surround me by the infinitely worse and inextricable agony of Lies which blaspheme Thy majesty and mock Thy Holy Name! Dread God, in darkest Hell they know Thee, fear Thee, and recognise Thy justice! — but on this earth it seems they know Thee not, — they doubt Thy manifest existence, and are but evil shadows of an evil time. Make me not as one of these, Father Divine! — pity me, pardon me, release me, O Thou All-Powerful! Elsewhere let me find the cleansing flames; — but not here, — not in this doomed and desolate world, where even Thy Light is made Darkness!”
So prayed the prisoned SOUL, in silent musings that were in Heaven clear utterances, distinctly heard. And presently the longed-for Answer came, — an answer swift, sweet and penetrative, that filled the aerial essence of the suffering Immortal with a joy exceeding the limits even of angelic speech. Slowly expanding its hidden fibres and gathering all its winged force, the undying creature pressed towards its granted liberty. The body of the infant quivered convulsively in the throes of the impatient Spirit’s eager struggles, — and once it gave a feeble cry. The nurse, however, more than half asleep, and absorbed in her own thoughts, did not hear, and the piteous sound was not repeated. Silence and peace reigned in the room, till, at the appointed hour, a quick tread upon the stairs announced the doctor, and Nurse Collins rose to receive him. He was a big, burly, good-humcured man, and entered, smiling pleasantly.
“Well, nurse? How are we all?” he inquired in cheery accents. “Ah, Mrs. Elverton!” This, as his patient turned on her pillows, awake and bright-eyed— “You are looking almost yourself again! And your husband’s away I hear? Ah! well, perhaps it’s a good thing. You must be kept quiet; no worry and no excitement. Your pulse is excellent, — if you go on as well as this, you’ll be about again in a couple of week’s time. And how’s the baby?”
As he spoke, he advanced, large, genial, and still smiling, towards the crib.
“It’s been asleep some time, sir,” said Nurse Collins, uncomfortably conscious that she had not looked at it for at least three-quarters of an hour. “It’s a quiet little thing, though, when it’s awake — almost too quiet I fancy.”
“Well, well, there’s no harm in its being quiet,” said the doctor amiably. “Just let me see—”
He touched the infant’s forehead, gave a slight start, and bent down his ear to listen.
“Good Heavens!” he exclaimed, aghast. “ Nurse! This child is dead!”
With a shock of alarm the nurse sprang to his side, incredulous. He lifted the little body up in his arms; it was yet warm. The small face was very white and chill, — a pretty pathetic smile rested on the tiny mouth. The doctor made his examination tenderly, and shook his head.
“Some sudden convulsion, with contraction of the heart,” he said. “Life has been extinct quite twenty minutes.” And with kindly pity he laid the dead baby back in its crib, carefully composing its fragile limbs. “Break it to the mother gently.”
But Mrs. Elverton had heard; and, burying her head in her pillows, was sobbing hysterically. Not in sorrow, but in joy! — joy, and such exquisite relief as she had never dared to hope for. Weeping in apparent despair, she murmured over and over again amid her tears, —
“Thank God! Oh, thank God!”
And up through the star-strewn spaces of the night, a radiant Angel, released from brief bondage, soared higher and ever higher, like a bird, to the glory of the sun; the SOUL of the newly-born returned to Him who made it; and its happy Voice, echoing far into the centres of Eternal Light, sang again and again till the song was caught up in a triumphant chorus by hosts of its heavenly companions, —
“Than
k God for escape from the World and its Darkness! OH, THANK GOD!”
THE END
THE SILENCE OF THE MAHARAJAH
OUT in India at a certain English station which was generally admitted to be socially ‘ fast,’ with that unique sort of fastness peculiar to Anglo-Indian life, the leader of the most ‘rapid’ set was a handsome, dashing woman, known to the irreverent as ‘Lolly,’ and to the more orthodox as Mrs. Claude Annesley. She was the wife of Colonel Claude Annesley, of course, but this fact had to be strongly borne in upon the minds of those who were not thoroughly well acquainted with her, because at first sight she did not appear to be the wife of anybody. She gave you the impression of being a ‘free lance’ among women, joyously insolent and independent; and the bonds of matrimony seemed to press very lightly on her frivolous butterfly soul. She was not what one would call positively young any longer, being a trifle over forty, but she was so slim and light on her feet, besides knowing exactly what kind of corsets would give her the most perfectly pliant and svelte figure, that she was generously allowed by her men friends (though not by her women rivals) to pass for being still in the early thirties. She went in thoroughly, too, for all the newest methods of ‘skin treatment,’ and succeeded in preserving a fresh and even brilliant natural complexion, despite the heats of India. She was tall and brown-haired, with dark eyes which had a sparkle of the devil’s own mischief in them; she had very white even teeth, and could smile bewitchingly.
Her husband was younger than herself — some said four or five years younger — though at times he looked ten years older. He was a big, gaunt, grave-featured man with a turn for philosophy. He would sit silently smoking for hours, meditating inwardly and looking very old; but if a friendly comrade came in and disturbed his solitude with some senseless yet well-meaning remark about the weather or the Government, he would spring up to give a hearty return greeting: his eyes, which were a clear blue, would flash with pleasure, and in a moment he became young — quite young, with an almost boyish youngness which was amazing. It was on these occasions that people called him handsome, and murmured among themselves sotto-voce, “I wonder why he married Lolly?”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 921
