Part 21 (1/2)

But Richard saved me, and sent her away angry. I crept back to the bed, and lay down on it again. I heard the others whispering as they pa.s.sed through the hall. Mary Leighton was crying; Charlotte was silent. I don't think I heard her voice at all.

After a long while I heard them go down, and go into the dining-room.

They spoke in very subdued tones, and there was only the slightest movement of china and silver, to indicate that a meal was going on. But this seemed to give me a more frantic sense of change than anything else. I flung myself across the bed, and another of those dreadful, tearless spasms seized me. Everything--all life--was going on just the same; even in this very house they were eating and drinking as they ate and drank before--the very people who had talked with him this day; the very table at which he had sat this morning. Oh! they were so heartless and selfish: every one was; life itself was. I did not know where to turn for comfort. I had a feeling of dreading every one, of shrinking away from every one.

”Oh!” I said to myself, ”if Richard is with them at the table, I never want to see him again.”

But Richard was not with them. In a moment or two he came to the door, only to ask me if I wanted anything, and to say he would come back by-and-by.

There was a question which I longed so frantically to ask him, but which I dared not; my life seemed to hang on the answer. _When were they going to take him away?_ I had heard something about trains and carriages, and I had a wild dread that it was soon to be.

I went to the door and called Richard back, and made him understand what I wanted to know. He looked troubled, and said in a low tone,

”At four o'clock we go from here to meet the earliest train. I have telegraphed his friends, and have had an answer. I am going down myself, and it is all arranged in the best way, I think. Go and lie down now, Pauline; I will come and take you down soon as the house is quiet.”

Richard went away unconscious of the stab his news had given me. I had not counted on anything so sudden as this parting. While he was in the house, while I was again to look upon his face, the end had not come; there was a sort of hope, though only a hope of suffering, something to look forward to, before black monotony began its endless day.

CHAPTER XVII.

BESIDE HIM ONCE AGAIN.

There are blind ways provided, the foredone Heart-weary player in this pageant world Drops out by, letting the main masque defile By the conspicuous portal.

_R. Browning_.

What is this world? What asken men to have?

Now with his love--now in his cold grave-- Alone, withouten any companie!

_Chaucer_.

The tall old clock, which stood by the dining-room door, had struck two, and been silent many minutes, before Richard came to me. I had spent those dreadful hours in feverish restlessness: my room seemed suffocating to me. I had walked about, had put away my trinkets, I had changed my dress, and put on a white one which I had worn in the morning, and had tried to braid my hair.

The quieting of the house, it seemed, would never come. It was twelve o'clock before any one came up-stairs. I heard one door after another shut, and then sat waiting and wondering why Richard did not come, till the moments seemed to grow to centuries. At last I heard him at the door, and I went toward it trembling, and followed him into the hall. He carried a light, for up-stairs it was all dark, and when we reached the stairway, he took my hand to lead me. I was trembling very much; the hall below was dimly lit by a large lamp which had been turned low. Our steps on the bare staircase made so much noise, though we tried to move so silently. It was weird and awful. I clung to Richard's hand in silence. He led me across the hall, and stopped before the library-door.

He let go my hand, and taking a key from his pocket, put it in the lock, turned it slowly, then opened the door a little way, and motioned me to enter.

Like one in a trance, I obeyed him, and went in alone. He shut the door noiselessly, and left me with the dead.

That was the great, the immense hour of my life. No vicissitude, no calamity of this mortal state, no experience that may be to come, can ever have the force, the magnitude of this. All feelings, but a child's feelings, were comparatively new to me, and here, at one moment, I had put into my hand the plummet that sounded h.e.l.l; anguish, remorse, fear--a woman's heart in hopeless pain. For I will not believe that any child, that any woman, had ever loved more absolutely, more pa.s.sionately, than I had loved the man who lay there dead before me. But I cannot talk about what I felt in those moments; all that concerns what I write is the external.

The--coffin was in the middle of the room, where the table ordinarily stood--where my chair had been that night, when he told me his story.

Surely if I sinned, in thought, in word, _that_ night, I paid its full atonement, _this_. Candles stood on a small table at the head of where he lay, and many flowers were about the room. The smell of verbena-leaves filled the air: a branch of them was in a vase that some one had put beside his coffin. The fresh, cool night-air came in from the large window, open at the top.

His face was, as Richard said, much as in life, only quieter. I do not know what length of time Richard left me there, but at last, I was recalled to the present, by his hand upon my shoulder, and his voice in a whisper, ”Come with me now, Pauline.”

I rose to my feet, hardly understanding what he said, but resisted when I did understand him.

”Come with me,” he said, gently, ”You shall come back again and say good-bye. Only come out into the hall and stay awhile with me; it is not good for you to be here so long.”