Part 135 (1/2)
”Hus.h.!.+” 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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.