CHAPTER IV.
"Oh, stop this headlong current of your goodness;
It comes too fast upon a feeble soul."
DRYDEN: /Sebastian and Doras/.
THE smooth physician had paid his evening visit; Lord Saxingham had gone
to a cabinet dinner, for Life must ever walk side by side with Death:
and Lady Florence Lascelles was alone. It was a room adjoining her
sleeping-apartment--a room in which, in the palmy days of the brilliant
and wayward heiress, she had loved to display her fanciful and peculiar
taste. There had she been accustomed to muse, to write, to study--there
had she first been dazzled by the novel glow of Ernest's undiurnal and
stately thoughts--there had she first conceived the romance of girlhood,
which had led her to confer with him, unknown--there had she first
confessed to herself that fancy had begotten love--there had she gone
through love's short and exhausting process of lone emotion;--the doubt,
the hope, the ecstasy; the reverse, the terror; the inanimate
despondency, the agonised despair! And there now, sadly and patiently,
she awaited the gradual march of inevitable decay. And books and
pictures, and musical instruments, and marble busts, half shadowed by
classic draperies--and all the delicate elegancies of womanly
refinement--still invested the chamber with a grace as cheerful as if
youth and beauty were to be the occupants for ever--and the dark and
noisome vault were not the only lasting residence for the things of
clay.
Florence Lascelles was dying; but not indeed wholly of that common, if
mystic malady, a broken heart. Her health, always delicate, because
always preyed upon by a nervous, irritable, and feverish spirit, had
been gradually and invisibly undermined, even before Ernest confessed
his love. In the singular lustre of those large-pupilled eyes--in the
luxuriant transparency of that glorious bloom,--the experienced might
long since have traced the seeds which cradled death. In the night when
her restless and maddened heart so imprudently drove her forth to
forestall the communication of Lumley (whom she had sent to Maltravers,
she scarce knew for what object, or with what hope), in that night she
was already in a high state of fever. The rain and the chill struck the
growing disease within--her excitement gave it food and fire--delirium
succeeded; and in that most fearful and fatal of all medical errors,
which robs the frame, when it most needs strength, of the very principle
of life, they had bled her into a temporary calm, and into permanent and
incurable weakness. Consumption seized its victim. The physicians who
attended her were the most renowned in London, and Lord Saxingham was
firmly persuaded that there was no danger. It was not in his nature to
think that death would take so great a liberty with Lady Florence
Lascelles, when there were so many poor people in the world whom there
would be no impropriety in removing from it. But Florence knew her
danger, and her high spirit did not quail before it. Yet, when
Cesarini, stung beyond endurance by the horrors of his remorse, wrote
and confessed all his own share of the fatal treason, though, faithful
to his promise, he concealed that of his accomplice,--then, ah then, she
did indeed repine at her doom, and long to look once more with the eyes
of love and joy upon the face of the beautiful world. But the illness
of the body usually brings out a latent power and philosophy of the
soul, which health never knows; and God has mercifully ordained it as
the customary lot of nature, that in proportion as we decline into the
grave, the sloping path is made smooth and easy to our feet; and every
day, as the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the
false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a
wearied child upon the bosom of its mother.
It was with a heavy heart that Lady Florence listened to the monotonous
clicking of the clock that announced the departure of moments few, yet
not precious, still spared to her. Her face buried in her hands, she
bent over the small table beside her sofa, and indulged her melancholy
thoughts. Bowed was the haughty crest, unnerved the elastic shape that
had once seemed born for majesty and command--no friends were near, for
Florence had never made friends. Solitary had been her youth, and
solitary were her dying hours.
As she thus sat and mused, a sound of carriage wheels in the street
below slightly shook the room--it ceased--the carriage stopped at the
door. Florence looked up. "No, no, it cannot be," she muttered; yet,
while she spoke, a faint flush passed over her sunken and faded cheek,
and the bosom heaved beneath the robe, "a world too wide for its shrunk"
proportions. There was a silence, which to her seemed interminable, and
she turned away with a deep sigh, and a chill sinking of the heart.
At this time her woman entered with a meaning and flurried look.
"I beg your pardon, my lady--but--"
"But what?"
"Mr. Maltravers has called, and asked for your ladyship--so, my lady,
Mr. Burton sent for me, and I said, my lady is too unwell to see any
one; but Mr. Maltravers would not be denied; and he is waiting in my
lord's library, and insisted on my coming up and 'nouncing him, my
lady."
Now Mrs. Shinfield's words were not euphonistic, nor her voice
mellifluous; but never had eloquence seemed to Florence so effective.
Youth, love, beauty, all rushed back upon her at once, brightening her
eyes, her cheek, and filling up ruin with sudden and deceitful light.
"Well," she said, after a pause, "let Mr. Maltravers come up."
"Come up, my lady? Bless me!--let me just 'range your hair--your
ladyship is really in such dish-a-bill."
"Best as it is, Shinfield--he will excuse all.--Go."
Mrs. Shinfield shrugged her shoulders, and departed. A few moments
more--a step on the stairs, the creaking of the door,--and Maltravers
and Florence were again alone. He stood motionless on the threshold.
She had involuntarily risen, and so they stood opposite to each other,
and the lamp fell full upon her face. Oh, Heaven! when did that sight
cease to haunt the heart of Maltravers! When shall that altered aspect
not pass as a ghost before his eyes!--there it is, faithful and
reproachful alike in solitude and in crowds--it is seen in the glare of
noon--it passes dim and wan at night beneath the stars and the earth--it
looked into his heart and left its likeness there for ever and for ever!
Those cheeks, once so beautifully rounded, now sunken into lines and
hollows--the livid darkness beneath the eyes--the whitened lip--the
sharp, anxious, worn expression, which had replaced that glorious and
beaming regard from which all the life of genius, all the sweet pride of
womanhood had glowed forth, and in which not only the intelligence, but
the eternity of the soul, seemed visibly wrought.
There he stood, aghast and appalled. At length a low groan broke from
his lips--he rushed forward, sank on his knees beside her, and clasping
both her hands, sobbed aloud as he covered them with kisses. All the
iron of his strong nature was broken down, and his emotions, long
silenced, and now uncontrollable and resistless, were something terrible
to behold!
"Do not--do not weep so," murmured Lady Florence, frightened by his
vehemence; "I am sadly changed, but the fault is mine--Ernest, it is
mine; best, kindest, gentlest, how could I have been so mad! And you
forgive me? I am yours again--a little while yours. Ah, do not grieve
while I am so blessed!"
As she spoke, her tears--tears from a source how different from that
whence broke the scorching and intolerable agony of his own! fell soft
upon his bended head, and the hands that still convulsively strained
hers. Maltravers looked wildly up into her countenance, and shuddered
as he saw her attempt to smile. He rose abruptly, threw himself into a
chair, and covered his face. He was seeking by a violent effort to
master himself, and it was only by the heaving of his chest, and now and
then a gasp as for breath, that he betrayed the stormy struggle within.
Florence gazed at him a moment in bitter, in almost selfish penitence.
"And this was the man who seemed to me so callous to the softer
sympathies--this was the heart I trampled upon--this the nature I
distrusted!"
She came near him, trembling and with feeble steps--she laid her hand
upon his shoulder, and the fondness of love came over her, and she wound
her arms around him.
"It is our fate--it is my fate," said Maltravers at last, awaking as
from a hideous dream, and in a hollow but calm voice--"we are the things
of destiny, and the wheel has crushed us. It is an awful state of being
this human life!--What is wisdom--virtue--faith to men--piety to
Heaven--all the nurture we bestow on ourselves--all our desire to win a
loftier sphere, when we are thus the tools of the merest chance--the
victims of the pettiest villainy; and our very existence--our very
senses almost, at the mercy of every traitor and every fool!"
There was something in Ernest's voice, as well as in his reflections,
which appeared so unnaturally calm and deep that it startled Florence,
with a fear more acute than his previous violence had done. He rose,
and muttering to himself, walked to and fro, as if insensible of her
presence--in fact he was so. At length he stopped short, and fixing his
eyes upon Lady Florence, said in a whispered and thrilling tone:
"Now, then, the name of our undoer?"
"No, Ernest, no--never, unless you promise me to forego the purpose
which I read in your eyes. He has confessed--he is penitent--I have
forgiven him--you will do so too!"
"His name!" repeated Maltravers, and his face, before very flushed, was
unnaturally pale.
"Forgive him--promise me."
"His name, I say,--his name?"
"Is this kind?--you terrify me--you will kill me!" faltered out
Florence, and she sank on the sofa exhausted: her nerves, now so
weakened, were perfectly unstrung by his vehemence, and she wrung her
hands and wept piteously.
"You will not tell me his name?" said Maltravers, softly. "Be it so. I
will ask no more. I can discover it myself. Fate the Avenger will
reveal it."
At the thought he grew more composed; and as Florence wept on, the
unnatural concentration and fierceness of his mind again gave way, and,
seating himself beside her, he uttered all that could soothe, and
comfort, and console. And Florence was soon soothed! And there, while
over their heads the grim skeleton was holding the funeral pall, they
again exchanged their vows, and again, with feelings fonder than of old,
spoke of love.
