Part 31 (1/2)
Michael put his hand to his head.
”Everything has come at once,” said Wentworth. ”I have you again. And I have her. I've nothing left to wish for.”
Michael did not leave the prison in the gondola which had brought Wentworth, and which was waiting to take them both away. The excitement of his brother's arrival had proved too great, and he fell from one fainting fit into another. Wentworth was greatly alarmed, but the doctor was rea.s.suring and cheerful. He said that Michael had borne the news with almost unnatural calmness, but that the shock must have been great, and a breakdown was to be expected. He laughed at Wentworth's anxiety even while he ministered to Michael, and a.s.sured him that no one in his experience had died of joy.
But later in the evening when Wentworth, somewhat pacified, had returned to Venice for the night, the doctor felt yet again for the twentieth time that the young Englishman baffled him.
It seemed to him that he was actually relieved when the kind, awkward, tender elder brother had reluctantly taken his departure, promising to come back early in the morning.
”Do not distress yourself, you will be quite well enough to leave to-morrow,” the doctor said to him many times. ”I expected this momentary collapse. It is nothing.”
Michael's eyes dwelt on the kind face and then closed. There was that in them which the doctor could not fathom.
He took the food that was pressed on him, and then turned his face to the wall, and made as if he slept.
And the walls bent over him, and whispered to him, ”Stay with us. We are not so cruel as the world outside.”
And that night the dying convict in the next cell, nearly as close on freedom as Michael, heard all through the night a low sound of strangled anguish that ever stifled itself into silence, and ever broke forth anew, from dark to dawn.
The next morning Michael went feebly down the prison steps, calm and wan, leaning on Wentworth's careful arm, and smiling affectionately at him.
CHAPTER XXVI
Les caracteres faibles ne montrent de la decision que quand il s'agit de faire un sottise.--DANIEL DARC.
A week or two after the news of Michael's proved innocence had convulsed Hamps.h.i.+re, and before Michael and Wentworth had returned to Barford, Aunt Aggie might have been seen on a fine May afternoon walking slowly towards ”The Towers.” She had let her cottage at Saundersfoot for an unusually long period, and was marking time with the Blores. Whatever Aunt Mary's faults might be she was always ready to help her sister in this practical manner, when Aunt Aggie was anxious to add to the small, feebly frittered away income, on which her muddled, impecunious existence depended.
In spite of the most pertinent remarks to the contrary from her sister, Aunt Aggie believed herself to be an unsurpa.s.sed manager of restricted means. She constantly advised young married couples as to the judicious expenditure of money, and pressed on Magdalen the necessity of retrenching in exasperating directions, namely, where a minute economy entailed a colossal inconvenience.
In her imagination she saw herself continually consulted, depended on, strenuously implored to give her opinion on matters of the utmost delicacy, fervently blessed for her powerful spiritual a.s.sistance of souls in jeopardy, and always gracefully attributing the marvellous results of her intervention to a Higher Power of which she was but the unworthy channel.
These imaginary scenes were the unfailing solace of Aunt Aggie's somewhat colourless life, and the consciousness of them in the background gave her a certain meek and even patient self-importance, the basis of which was hidden from Lady Blore.
Aunt Aggie had also another perennial source of chastened happiness in recalling the romance of her youth, those halcyon days before the Archdeacon had been unsuccessfully harpooned and put to flight by Lady Blore.
Her clerical love affair perfumed her conversation, as a knife which has once a.s.sociated with an onion inevitably reveals, even in estrangement, that bygone intimacy.
No one could breathe the word Margate without Aunt Aggie remarking that she had had a dear friend who had evinced a great partiality for Margate. Were the clergy mentioned in her presence with the scant respect with which the ministry and other secular bodies have to put up, Aunt Aggie vibrated with indignation. _She_ had known men of the highest talents holding preferment in the Church.
But in her imagination her affair of the heart had pa.s.sed beyond reminiscence. Far from being buried in the past it remained the chief factor in her life, colouring and shaping the whole of her future.
Aunt Aggie could at any moment dip into a kind of sequel to that early history. In the sequel the Archdeacon's wife was, of course, to die; but, owing to circ.u.mstances which Aunt Aggie had not yet thoroughly worked out, that unhappy lady was first to undergo tortures in some remote locality, nursed devotedly--poor thing--by Aunt Aggie. The result of her ministrations was never in doubt from the first. The Archdeacon's wife was, of course, to succ.u.mb, calling down blessings on the devoted stranger at her bedside, with the enigmatical smile which spoke of some sacred sorrow.
Aunt Aggie had shed many delicious tears over that deathbed scene, and the chastened grief of the saintly Archdeacon, quite overshadowed by his boundless grat.i.tude to herself. At this crisis his overwhelming desolation wrung from him--with gross disloyalty to the newly dead--a few disjointed sentences which revealed only too clearly how unsuited to him his wife had been, how little she had understood him, how lonely his wedded life had been. She had evidently been one of those tall thin maypoles of women who have but little tenderness in them.
Aunt Aggie, after giving the children a sample of what a real mother could be, was to retire to her little home at Saundersfoot. Here the real joy of the situation was to begin.
After a decent interval the Archdeacon was to be constantly visiting Saundersfoot, was to be observed visiting Aunt Aggie at Saundersfoot, singling her out from among the numerous spinsters of that watering-place to make her the object of reverent attentions. Others younger and better looking than Aunt Aggie--especially Miss Barnett, the doctor's sister, who, it was whispered, wore an artificial cus.h.i.+on from Douglas's under her hair--were to set their caps or cus.h.i.+ons at the dignified Archdeacon, seen pacing the sands. But it was all of no avail.
He had eyes for no one but the gentle, retiring Miss Bellairs. Aunt Aggie was to become the object of burning jealousy and detraction on the part of the female--that is to say almost the whole--population of Saundersfoot. But she herself, while envious calumny raged round her, went on her way calm and grave as ever.