CHAPTER XIX.
And so that act of the play is finished: all the actors have struttedand fumed and fretted through their little parts, and now the curtainhas fallen. When next it rises, the principal actress in this tragicdrama is discovered lying full-dressed on her bed; her pretty faceburied--eyes, nose, and mouth--in the tumbled pillow; her littleneat-shod feet hanging over the bedside. She looks as if she had beenthrown there, an inert, passive mass, by some spiteful giant. Sixmiles away, at Lord ----'s ball, the fiddles are squeaking, and thepink-and-green Chinese lanterns swinging to and fro among the orangeboughs in the slight wind made by the rustling dresses and passingmen and women. Sir Thomas, with his hands in their burst white glovesunder his coat tails, and his blue-cloth back leaning against a marblemantel-piece, is talking sweetly, in his hard, rasping voice, of scaband foot-rot. Miladi is gone down to supper for the sixth time on thesixth devoted married man's arm; she is eating game pie, and drinkingsherry and champagne and moselle in turns. Miss Blessington, sweepingabout on the arm of a small white gentleman, whose estate is as largeas his person is minute, is responding a little superciliously to apresumptuous younger son, who, annihilated by her Greek profile andJuno bust, has invited her to tread a measure with him.
"No, tha--anks; I never da--ance round da--ances."
Meanwhile Esther lies stretched upon the counterpane, while a gloomypageant of all that she has lost passes before her eyes. Greedier thanthe dog in the fable, she had tried to keep shadow and substance:Gerard's love, Brandon's liking. Now, lo! both have fallen into thewater. There are a few circles, a few rising bubbles; then all isover--gone, sunk to the bottom, to come up again never more. Vanishedfrom her grasp is the great house--are the buhl and marqueteriecabinets--are the "Venus surprised by Satyrs" and the "Susanna and theElders"--are the vineries, pineries, peacheries. Did they ever exist?or were they only a mirage, such as the sky presents to us sometimes--amirage of ships shocking together, of armed men meeting in fight?
"Go back to your pigstye!" said the magic fish to Ilsabil, thefisherman's wife, when she modestly requested to be made lord ofthe sun and moon. "Go back to your pigstye!" cries Fate to Esther.At any other time the subsiding from the prospect of being rather agreat lady into the certainty of being a very small one would havecaused considerable annoyance to Esther's aspiring soul. _Now_, the_things_ she has lost merge and lose themselves in the _person_ she haslost. But is he lost necessarily, irrecoverably? Despite the forlornattitude, the tear-swollen face, trying to suffocate itself in down,Hope is busy whispering, "You will see him again to-morrow: men in reallife are not like men in novels--changeless of purpose, hard as ironor adamant. What they are one half-hour, they are the exact reverse ofthe next; what they swear to-night they will unswear to-morrow." AsHope, the deceiver, thus murmurs, there comes to her ear the sound ofwheels briskly rolling to the door. "Is the ball over so early? arethey come back already? or----?" She does not give herself time tospeculate on any other hypothesis, but, springing from the bed, runs tothe window, draws aside curtain and blind, and looks out. The hall-dooris open; a vehicle stands before it. The moonlight and the light shedfrom the hanging-lamp in the portico are fighting together, strugglingfor possession of a horse and dog-cart, of two footmen's flouredheads, and of a portmanteau and hat-box that they are carrying out."Thud! thud!" she hears the portmanteau go in at the back of the cart.Then a man comes out--a man in hat and overcoat--drawing on dogskingloves, and saying, "John, go and look for my box of cigar-lights; Ileft it on the smoking-room table." It is St. John, speaking in muchhis usual voice. He is going away! going away! and he can think ofhis cigar-lights! Her heart stops pulsing for a second, then sets offgalloping at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Going withoutmaking any sign! She leans further out of the window, and rests herwhite arms, that look whiter than any lilies in the moonlight, on thesill. He is so close beneath her, if the servants were not there,she might call to him; as it is, he will never know that she haswatched his departure. A sudden impulse prompts her to throw up thewindow higher, to rustle her dress, to cough, in order to attract hisattention. At the unexpected noise John and Thomas turn their headsand look up, but their master does not. He gives a slight start, but,instantly recovering himself, walks steadily to the cart and gets in.Then she knows that he knows that she is looking at him--knows that heis resolute to part from her--
"taking no farewell--"
as Lancelot took none of Elaine.
The horse is a little fidgety at starting. "Wo-o-o! Gently, old lass!"This is the affecting form that St. John's last words take. She cranesher neck out of the window; she leans out her lithe body, reckless ofthe danger of losing her balance and tumbling on the hard gravel drivebelow, in her eagerness to catch the last glimpse of the lessening,dwindling bulk; then, forgetting to shut the window, careless of anycold or stock of rheumatism that she might be laying up for herself,she returns to her former position, flings herself again prone on herbed, again buries her face in the pillow; but this time no beguilinghope sits and whispers pleasant falsities to her. Hope got up upon thedog-cart, and drove away with Gerard.
The night wanes; morning dreams, that they say come true, invade manysleepers' brains. At Lord ----'s ball people are still dancing withthe fury produced by champagne and supper; but Sir Thomas, Miladi, andMiss Blessington, are at home again, and in bed. Constance is not oneof those hard dancers who think that one after-supper galop is worthten ante-coenal ones. Not for all the entrancing valses Straussever composed would she run the risk of damaging the freshness of hertoilette, nor the still more serious risk of exchanging the marblecoolness of her cheeks for the unsightly flush of heat or the uglypallor of exhaustion.
Dawn is just beginning stealthily to unlatch the eastern gate; hertorch, new-lit, makes but a puny opponent for the night's one great andmyriad lesser lamps. Esther has fallen into an uneasy doze, her dampbrow and loosened hair resting on her bare, outflung arm. Suddenly aknock at her door makes her start up in a vague, confused horror. Isit St. John come back? Is it some one come to murder her? A thousandimpossibilities flash across her bewildered brain. Without waitingfor permission, the person who knocked enters; not St. John, nor amurderer--only a dishevelled housemaid, who has evidently just thrown agown over her night attire, and endeavoured abortively to gather up thestraggling hair out of her sleepy eyes under a muslin cap put on awry.
"A tallygraph for you, miss!" says she, coming forward, holding in onehand a blue envelope, and in the other a tall, solemn tallow candle, assleepy as herself.
A telegraphic message! Oh hateful telegraph! Cruellest of moderninventions! Oh hastener of evil tidings, that, without you, come alltoo speedily! Oh maker of sick hearts and blanched cheeks and arrestedpulses!
Esther snatches it, while a sudden, awful cold grasps her heart, andreads by the wavering, feeble light these words, in a scrawly clerk'shand:
"Robert Brandon to Esther Craven. Come home instantly; Jack is veryill."
With how few pen-strokes can a death-warrant be written! For a momentshe sits bolt upright, void of breath or motion, as a white deadwoman, from the house of whose fair body the spirit departed an hourago; the telegram grasped in a stiff hand that knows not of it. Thenconsciousness returns, brought back by a huge, tearing, killing agony;then even the agony yields to one intense, consuming longing--oneall-dominating purpose--the longing to slay time and space; to be withhim _now_, this instant; to be beside Jack dying, not Jack dead.
"Can I see Sir Thomas?" she asks collectedly, but in a rough, deepvoice. "I have had bad news from home: my brother is very ill."
"Indeed, 'm, you don't say so;" replies the servant, growing broadlyawake under the delightful excitement of a calamity having happened tosomebody, and of herself being the first recipient of the news.
"I _must_ see Sir Thomas!" Esther says, putting her hand up in abewildered way to her head, and then springing off the bed and walkingquickly towards the door.
"See Sir Thomas," repeats
the woman, the most unfeigned alarm paintingitself on her broad face--"_now!_ Indeed, ma'am, you must be mad tothink of such a thing! It would be as much as all our places are worthif he were to be disturbed before his usual time."
Esther turns and clutches her arm, while her great eyes brimful ofdespair, burn on her face. "I tell you my brother is _dying!_" shesays, hoarsely--"I know he is; I must go to him _this minute;_ forGod's sake help me to get to the station!"
"Indeed, 'm, I'm sorry to see you in such trouble, _that_ I am!"answers her companion, moved to compassion by the terrible, haggardmisery of the young, round face, that she, in company with herfellow-servants, had often admired in its happy, dewy rosiness atprayers on Sunday evenings; "but, you see, all the men are in bed, andSimpson 'ud cut off his own 'ead afore he'd venture to take out thecarriage without Sir Thomas's orders."
The tall, yellow candle flares between them: lights up the torturedbeauty of the one woman, the placid stolidity of the other. Esthergroans, and smites her hands together.
"Is there _no_ vehicle I can have?" she asks in impatient agony--"nocart?--no anything? I'd give all I have in the world to any one whowould take me. Oh God! how many minutes I am wasting."
The housemaid puts down her flat candlestick on the table, and rubsher forehead with her rough fore-finger to aid her thinking powers."There's the dog-cart that the under-servants goes to church in," shesays, presently, with an uncertain suggestion: "if we could knock themen up, you might have _it_, perhaps."
"Knock them up this instant, then!" cries Esther, with passionateurgency--"_now, this minute!_ Go, for God's sake!"
So saying, she almost pushes the woman out of the room, and herselffollows her. Through long passages and corridors, full of emptiness anddarkness--darkness utter and complete, save where through the gallery'shigh-stained east window the chilly, chilly dawn comes peeping, with agrey glimmer, about the black frames, never closing eyes, and stiff,prim simpers of the family portraits--down to the lower regions, wherethe huge kitchen-grate yawns, black as Erebus--up steep back-stairsalong other passages. In one of these passages Esther stands, her frametrembling and teeth chattering with cold and nervous excitement, whileher companion raps with broad, hard knuckles on a door, and loudlycalls on Simpson to awake. But hard workers are hard sleepers, and itis some time before the coachman can be induced to leave the countryof slumber. When at length he is aroused, and has come out to them,in all the yawning sulkiness of disturbed sleep, it is a still longertime before he can be induced to admit the possibility of _any_ vehiclewhatever being put at Esther's disposal: with so righteous a fear ofhis wrath has Sir Thomas succeeded in inspiring his subordinates.
It is not without the aid of all her remaining money, with theexception of what is needed for the purchase of her railway ticket--notwithout the aid of all that is left of poor Jack's hardly-sparedfive-pound note--that she is able at length to induce him to consentto the getting ready of the dog-cart "in which the under-servants goesto church." Fully three-quarters of an hour more elapse before oneof the helpers can be knocked up, can dress himself, can harness theoldest and screwiest horse in the stables, and put him, with many amuttered grumble, into the cart. Wretched Esther follows the man andhis lanthorn to the stable-yard, with the vain idea that her presencemay hurry his movements. During most of the three-quarters of an hourshe walks quickly up and down over the hard, round stones with whichthe yard is paved, or stands watching, with greedy eyes, every stepin the harnessing process; while her hands clench themselves, as hisare clenched who is dead by some very cruel, violent death, and apain like a red-hot, two-bladed knife keeps running through her heart.Before the horse is well between the shafts, she has climbed into thecart and taken her seat.
"The luggage is not in yet, 'm," suggests the groom, respectfully.
"Oh! never mind the luggage," cries Esther, feverishly; "I don't wantit! I don't want anything! I'm ready! Get in, please, and set off thisminute!"
Dawn is breaking, slowly, coldly, greyly, without any of therose-coloured splendours that mostly gild the day's childhood, as theglorious delusions of youth gild our morning. There has not been apositive, actual frost in the night--not frost enough to congeal thewayside pools or to kill the dahlias--but the air has, for all that, afrosty crispness, as of the first breath of coming winter. The treesand hedgerow holly-bushes loom gigantic, formless, treble and quadrupletheir real size, folded round and round in a mantle of mist; themeadows are like lakes of mist; sheets of vapour steaming damply up tothe shapeless, colourless, low-stooping heavens. Esther has forgottento take any wrap: through the poor protection of her thin cotton dressand jacket the mist creeps slowly, searchingly, making her limbs shakeand shudder; but she herself is unconscious of it--she could not havetold you afterwards whether she had been warm or cold.
At the turnpike gate a sleepy old man comes hobbling out (men attoll-gates are mostly one-legged), in his hand a candle, to which thewhite morning is beginning to give a very sickly, yellow look: it seemsto Esther that he will never have done fumbling in his breeches-pocketfor the sixpence of change that eludes his search.
"Why do you stop? Cannot you go a little quicker?" asks Esther,hoarsely, her teeth chattering with cold and misery, as the groomallows his horse to walk up a long, gentle incline.
"Sir Tummas allus gives pertikler horders as we should walk the 'orsesup this 'ill," replies the man; "you see, 'm, it's collar-work prettynigh all the way from our place to Brainton."
"But it is such a little hill, and Sir Thomas need never know," pleadsEsther, imploringly. "I have not got any money now, but if you'll takeme quicker--a good deal quicker--I will send you five shillings--tenshillings--by post, when I get home."
"Much obliged to you, ma'am," answers the man, touching his hat, andgiving another instance of the influence of filthy lucre by whipping uphis horse.
"When is the next train to Berwyn?" cries Esther, almost before theyhad pulled up at the station, to a porter, who stands waiting toreceive any arriving passengers.
"7.20," replies the man, briefly.
"And what time is it now?"
"6.15."
"Is not there one before 7.20?"
"None; you are just too late for the 6.10 one; it has been gone aboutfive minutes."
Unmindful of the presence of the careless, indifferent onlookers,Esther clasps her cold hands together and groans. In a great despair,as in a great bodily agony, we do not much mind who sees or hears us.
"Too late!" she says, with a heavy, tearless sob--"five minutes toolate! Oh God, it _is_ hard!"
"Any luggage, Miss?" asks the porter, in his civil, matter-of-factvoice.
The common-place question brings her back to life. "No, none," sheanswers, collecting herself; and so saying walks into the station,and, taking refuge in the waiting-room, sinks down upon a green Utrechtvelvet chair.
Owing to the earliness of the hour, other occupant of the room is therenone; neither is there any fire (a fire always looks in good spirits;it never has the blues). Alongside of the empty fire-place stands astiff, green Utrecht velvet sofa, and round the bare table more greenUtrecht velvet chairs. Opposite to Esther, against the wall, hangs aroll of texts. Involuntarily her haggard eyes lift themselves to them,and light upon this one--which, under the slightly inappropriate titleof "Encouragements to Repentance," heads the list: "Woe to me, for I amundone!" She shudders, "Is it an omen?" turns away her head quickly,and tries to look out of window, but the wire-blind hinders her gaze.Once again, "Woe is me, for I am undone!" standing out clear and blackin large type from the white paper, greets her eyes. She can bear it nolonger, but rising hastily, runs out, and begins to walk swiftly up anddown the platform.
Brainton is a large station--a junction of many lines. Engines aresnorting and puffing about; boilers letting off steam, with a noisecalculated to break the drum of any ear; tarpaulin-covered waggonsstanding shunted on side lines. A train has just come in, and isdisgorging its human load; a man with a hammer is walking along
bythe side of it, stooping and tapping the wheels; porters are drivingluggage-piled trucks before them, and shouting out, "By your leave!"to any unwary traveller who may cross the relentless path of theirJuggernaut: other parties are enduring and answering, with angelicpatience and _bonhomie_, the agitated and incoherent questions ofunprotected females in waterproof cloaks and turn-down hats. Everybodyand everything is rampantly _alive;_ even to his handiwork, man seemsto have imparted some of his own intense vitality; to the engines hehas given motion and voice--motion and voice ten thousandfold strongerthan his own.
In her hurried walks, Esther suddenly comes face to face with afair-haired youth, who, followed by a porter carrying a gun-case, iswalking lightly along with his hands in his pockets, whistling for verylightheartedness,
"I paddle my own canoe."
Jack's tune! What business has he to whistle it? All fair-hairedyouths, with nothing very prominent in any of their features, aremore or less alike; and this amount of resemblance the unknown bearsto her boy. Long after he has passed her, amid the shrieking of theengines, the shouts of the porters--"Take your seats for Wolverhampton,Birmingham!" "All here for Chester, Warrington, and Manchester?"--thewell-known tune echos faintly back to her ears. An overpowering,blinding, deafening rush of feeling comes over her; she sits downhastily on a bench that is near at hand, in close proximity to anIrish labourer, with a blue-spotted bundle, and, careless of thecontaminating contact, buries her head in her hands, and rocks to andfro in a paroxysm of despair.
It is one of those incontrovertible facts that we all know to be true,and that we all feel to be false, that every hour is of the samelength; that in an hour of Elysium there are sixty whole minutes, andthat in an hour of Hades there are only sixty. In Esther's hour ofwaiting there are, however, seventy-five minutes, as the train is aquarter of an hour late.
"Is it a fast train?" she asks eagerly of the bearded guard, who, withthe politeness inborn in guards, opens the carriage-door for her.
"No, miss," he answers, with suavity--"slow train, miss; stops atevery station; 6.10 was the fast train, miss!"
Off at last, sliding slowly at first past platform, officials, trucks,book-stalls, dowdy women and dusty men; then the wind comes beatingwith a strong rush against Esther's cheeks, blowing back her hair, asthey fly through the air at the rate of fifty miles an hour.
The transit from Brainton to Berwyn occupies three hours, and duringthe greater part of that time Miss Craven maintains almost exactly thesame attitude; with her greedy eyes devouring every field and tree andhomestead as they run past--each village spire and bridge a finger-postto tell her that she is so much nearer her boy. She does not cry atall, or groan. Even had she wished to do so, conventionality--thatmakes us laugh when we would fain weep, makes us weep when we wouldfain laugh--would have forbidden her, for she is not alone in thecarriage. Two other travellers share it with her--two extremelycheerful young men, to whom it is a matter of supreme indifference howmany hedges and meadows are before, how many behind them. They arenot exactly gentlemen: and indeed it is a matter of almost as curiousinquiry as what becomes of all the pins that are made and lost, inwhat part of the train, if it be not in the guard's van, gentlemenand ladies travel, as assuredly they are but seldom to be met with infirst-class carriages. The two youths have made themselves and theirhat-boxes, rugs, &c., luxuriously comfortable, and seem rather disposedto be funny--to "show off," as children say, for the benefit of thelovely girl, who looks so disconsolate and dishevelled, who seems sounflatteringly unaware of their presence. They eat sandwiches anddrink sherry; they are provided with a large stock of all the morningpapers, and by-and-by the eldest and boldest of them proffers _Punch,Fun_, and half-a-dozen other dreary comicalities to Esther. She looksat him for a second with her large wistful eyes as she declines theoffered civility, and then resumes her watch. Having obtained that oneshort glance, he ceases from his witticisms, half-conscious of beingin the company of a great sorrow--as we involuntarily hush our voicesand speak softly in the presence of our great master and owner--Death.Perhaps, cowardly slaves as we are, we fear lest, if we should speakloudly, he might be reminded of our existence--might lay his heavy handon our shoulders also.
Another hour of waiting at Berwyn--another hour before there is anytrain for the branch line that leads to Glan-yr-Afon--any train, atleast, that stops at so insignificant a station. Another hour oftramping in forlorn, impotent impatience up and down the platform,hustled by a hurrying crowd, who know nothing, and care, if possible,less, about her and her grief. Well, if every one in England wept forevery one else's sorrows, the noise of tears and sobbings would drownthe whirring of all the mills in Leeds and Manchester--the booming ofall the cannon at Shoeburyness. It is half an hour past noon, when,almost before the train has stopped at the little wayside station,Esther springs out. She is the only passenger for Glan-yr-Afon; and theman who unites in himself the functions of station-master and porterlooks at her with a recognising eye. He must know whether Jack is aliveor dead. He looks much as usual, but so he would whether Jack werealive or dead. Feeling an overmastering sense of fear of and repugnancefrom the news he may have to give her, she runs to the little wicketthat leads out into the road.
"Your ticket, please, miss!" cries the man, following her.
She had forgotten it; it takes a minute to extricate it from her glove;she thinks that he looks as if he were going to speak; and, in a blindterror of what he might say, turns from him and rushes down the road.Any suspense is better than some certainties.