Part 5 (1/2)

The window had been opened, but the light was carefully shaded by the old brown curtains. Dolly lay quite still; she felt strangely tired, and as if she had been for a very long journey, toiling along a weary road.

And so she had, in truth; she had travelled along a road that no one ever retraces, she had learnt a secret that no one ever forgets.

Henceforth in many places and hours the vision that haunts each one of us was revealed to her; that solemn ghost of Death stood before her with its changing face, at once sad and tender and pitiless. Who shall speak of it? With our own looks, with the familiar eyes of others, it watches us through life, the good angel and comforter of the stricken and desolate, the strength of the weak, the pitiless enemy of home and peaceful love and tranquil days. But perhaps to some of us the hour may come when we fall into the mighty arms, feeling that within them is the home and the love and the peace that they have torn from us.

Dolly was still lying quite quiet and waiting for something to happen, when the door opened, and her aunt's maid came in carrying a nice little tray with breakfast upon it. There was a roll, and some French b.u.t.ter in a white scroll-like saucer, and Dolly's favourite cup.

'My lady is gone out, Miss Dolly,' said Marker, 'but she left word you was not to be disturbed. It is eleven o'clock, and she is going to take you and Miss Rhoda for a treat when she gets back.'

'A treat!' said Dolly, languidly; 'that will be nice. Marker, I have to push my arms to make them go.'

But when Dolly had had her bath and eaten her breakfast, her arms began to go of themselves. Once, indeed, she turned a little sick and giddy, for, happening to look out of window into the courtyard below, she saw that they were carrying away black cloths and silver-spangled draperies, which somehow brought up the terror of the night before; but her nurse kissed her, and made her kneel down and say her prayers, and told her in her homely way that she must not be afraid, that life and death were made by the same Hand, and ruled over by the same Love. 'The poor young lady was buried this morning, my dear,' said Marker, 'before you were awake. Your aunt went with the poor young man.'

Marker was a short, stout, smiling old woman. Lady Sarah was tall and thin, and silent, and scant in dress, with a brown face and grey hair; she came in, in her black gown, from the funeral, with her s.h.a.ggy kind eyes red with tears.

'You won't forget, my lady, that you promised the young ladies a treat,'

said Marker, who was anxious that Dolly should have something fresh to think of.

'I have not forgotten,' said Dolly's aunt, smiling, as she looked at the two children. 'Rhoda must get a remembrance to take back to school, mustn't she, Dolly? I have ordered a carriage at two.'

There is a royal palace familiar to many of us of which the courts are s.h.i.+ning and busy, and crowded with people. Flowers are growing among fountains and foliage, and children are at play; there is a sight of high gabled roofs overhead enclosing it, so do the long lines of the ancient arcades. Some music is playing to which the children are dancing. In this strange little world the children seem to grow up to music in beautiful ready-made little frocks and pinafores, the grown-up people seem to live on grapes and ices and bonbons, and on the enormous pears displayed in the windows of the cafes. Everything is more or less gilt and twinkling,--china flowers bloom delicate and scentless; it would seem as if the business of life consisted in wandering here and there, and sipping and resting to the sound of music in the shade of the orange-trees, and gazing at the many wonders displayed; at the gimcracks and trinkets and strings of beads, the precious stones, and the silver and gold, and the fanciful jewels. Are these things all dust and ashes?

Here are others, again, of imitation dross and dust, s.h.i.+ning and dazzling too; and again, imitations of imitations for the poorest and most credulous, heaped up in harmless glitter and array. Here are opera-gla.s.ses to detect the deceptions, and the deceptions to deceive the gla.s.ses,--bubbles of pomp, thinnest gilding of vanity and good-humour.

Some twenty years ago Dorothea Vanborough and a great many ladies and gentlemen her contemporaries were not the respectable middle-aged people they are now, but very young folks standing on tip-toe to look at life, which they gazed at with respectful eyes, believing all things, hoping all things, and interested in all things beyond words or the power of words to describe. My heroine was a blooming little girl, with her thick wavy hair plaited into two long tails. She wore a great flapping hat and frilled trousers, according to the barbarous fas.h.i.+on of the time. Little Rhoda was shorter and slighter, with great dark eyes and a wistful pale face; she was all shabbily dressed, and had no frills like Dolly, or flowers in her hat. The two stood gazing at the portrait of a smiling little Prince with a blue ribbon, surmounted by a wreath of flowers, glazed and enclosed in a gilt-locket. I suppose the little girls of the present[1] bear the same sort of allegiance to the Prince Imperial that Dolly felt for the little smiling Count of Paris of those days. For the King his grandfather, for the Dukes and Princes his uncles, hers was a very vague devotion; but when the old yellow royal coaches used to come by rumbling and shaking along the Champs Elysees, Dolly for one, followed by her protesting attendant, would set off running as hard as she could, and stand at the very edge of the pavement in the hopes of seeing her little smiling Prince peep out of the carriage-window. He was also to be seen in effigy on cups, on pin-boxes, and bonbons, and, above all, to be worn by the little girls in the ornamental fas.h.i.+on I have described. He smiled impartially from their various tuckers; and, indeed, many of the youthful possessors of those little gilt lockets are true to this day to their early impressions.

[Footnote 1: Written before recent events in France.]

So both Dolly and Rhoda came to tell Lady Sarah that they had made up their minds, what they most admired.

The widow had been sitting upon one of the benches in the garden, feeling not unlike the skeleton at a feast--a scanty figure in the suns.h.i.+ne, with a heart scarcely attuned to the bustle and chatter around her, but she began to tell herself that there must be some use even in the pomps and vanities of life, when she saw how happy the little girls looked, how the light had come into Dolly's eyes, and then she gave them each a solid silver piece out of a purse, which, contrary to the custom of skeletons, she held ready in her hand.

'Oh, thank you,' says Dolly; 'now I can get no end of things. There's George and Robert and----'

'It is much better to buy _one_ nice thing to take care of than a great many little ones,' said Rhoda, philosophically. 'Dolly, you don't manage well. I don't want to get everything I see. I shall buy that pretty locket. None of the girls in my cla.s.s have got one as pretty.'

'Come along quick then,' said Dolly, 'for fear they should have sold it.'

They left the Palais Royal at last and drove homewards with their treasures. Dolly never forgot that evening; the carriage drove along through the May-lit city, by teeming streets, by shady avenues, to the sounds of life and pleasure-making. Carriages were rolling along with them; long lines of trees, of people, of pavements led to a great triumphal archway, over which the little pink clouds were floating, while an intense sweet thrill of spring rung in the air and in the spirits of the people. Henriette opened the door to them when they got home.

'The poor gentleman from below,' she said, 'is waiting for you in the drawing-room. I told him you would not be long.'

The gentleman was waiting in the drawing-room as Lady Sarah came in with the two little girls shyly following. She would have sent them away, but a sort of shyness habitual to her made her shrink from a scene or an explanation. It may have been some feeling of the same sort which had induced the widower to go away to the farthest window of the room, where he stood leaning out with his back turned for an instant after they had come in.

Coming in out of the dazzle of the streets, the old yellow drawing-room looked dark and dingy; the lights reflected from the great amphitheatre without struck on the panelled doors and fusty hangings. All these furnished houses have a family likeness: chairs with Napoleon backs and bra.s.s-bound legs, tables that cry _vive l'empire_ as plain as tables can utter, old-fas.h.i.+oned secretaries standing demure with their backs against the wall, keeping their counsel and their secrets (if there _are_ such things as secrets). The laurel-crowned clocks tick beneath their wreaths and memorials of bygone victories, the looking-gla.s.ses placidly relate the faces, the pa.s.sing figures, the varying lights and changes as they pa.s.s before them. To-night a dusky golden light was streaming into the room from behind the hills, that were heaving, so Dolly thought, and dimming the solemn glow of the sky: she saw it all in an instant; and then, with a throb she recognised this wicked husband coming from the window where he had been standing with his back to them.

She had never seen him before so close, and yet she seemed to know his face. He looked very cruel, thought Dolly; he had a pale face and white set lips, and a sort of dull black gleam flashed from his eyes. He spoke in a harsh voice. He was very young--a mere boy, with thick fair hair brushed back from his haggard young face. He might have been, perhaps, about two or three and twenty.

'I waited for you, Lady Sarah. I came to say good-by,' he said. 'I am going back to London to-night. I shall never forget your----' His voice broke. 'How good you have been to me,' he said hoa.r.s.ely, as he took the two thin hands in his and wrung them again and again.

The widow's sad face softened as she told him 'to have trust, to be brave.'