"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, pa.s.sing 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 G.o.dolphin 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sions. So to have fretted ourselves over this little s.p.a.ce of existence with its pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing hour compared with the eternity that I am entering upon. Oh, George, we have all need of G.o.d'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 G.o.dolphin 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.dolphin 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 G.o.dolphin, 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. Pa.s.sing Margery in the pa.s.sage, 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 G.o.dolphin, 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, br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 G.o.dolphin"--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 pa.s.sionate 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?"

Grace's temper was sharp: her sense of right and wrong cynically keen: the Rector had had the same sharp temper in his youth, but he had learned to control it; Grace had not. She turned her flashing eyes, her flaming cheeks, on George G.o.dolphin.

"Do you hear?--the pain has killed her. Who brought that pain upon her?

Mr. George G.o.dolphin, I wish you joy of your conscience! I almost seemed to foresee it--I almost seemed to foresee this," she pa.s.sionately cried, "ere ever my sister married you."

"Don't, Grace!" wailed Maria, a faint cry of fear escaping her; a sudden terror taking possession of her raised face. "George, George!" She held out her hands yearningly to him, as if she would shield him, or as if she wanted him to shield her from the sharp words. George crossed over to her with his protecting presence, and bent to catch her whisper, praying him for peace.

"You forget your sister's state when you thus speak, Mrs. Akeman," he gravely said. "Say anything you please to me later; you shall have the opportunity if you desire it; but in my wife's presence there must be peace."

Grace flung off the shawl which she had worn, and stood beating the toe of her foot upon the fender, her throat swelling with the effort to subdue her emotion. What with her anger in the past, her grief in the present, she had well-nigh burst into sobs.

"I think I could drink some tea," said Maria. "Could we not have it together; here; for the last time? You will make it, Grace?"

Poor, weak, timid heart! Perhaps she only so spoke as an incentive to keep that "peace" for which she tremblingly yearned; which was essential to her, as to all, in her dying hour. George rang the bell and Margery came in.

It was done as she seemed to wish. The small round table was drawn to the fire, and Grace sat at it, making the tea. Maria turned her face and asked for Meta: Margery answered that she was coming in by-and-by. Very little was said. George drew a chair near Maria and leaned upon the arm of the sofa. The tea, so far as she went, was a mockery: George put a teaspoonful into her mouth, but she with difficulty swallowed it, and shook her head when he would have given her more. It did not seem to be much else than a mockery for the others: Grace's tears dropped into hers, and George suffered his to grow cold and then swallowed it at a draught, as if it was a relief to get rid of it. Margery was called again to take the things away, and Maria, who was leaning back on the sofa with closed eyes, asked again for Meta to come in.

Then Margery had to confess that Miss Meta was not at home to come in.

She had gone out visiting. The facts of the case were these. Lord Averil, after quitting the house, had returned to it to say a word to George which he had forgotten: but finding George had gone into his wife's room, he would not have him disturbed. It was just at the moment that Margery had carried out Meta, and the young lady was rather restive at the proceedings, crying loudly. His lordship proposed to carry her off to Ashlydyat. Margery seized upon the offer. She took down a woollen shawl and the child's garden-hat that were hanging on the pegs, and enveloped her in them without ceremony. "They'll do as well as getting out her best things, my lord, if you won't mind them: and it will be almost dusk by the time you get to Ashlydyat."