The Shadow of Ashlydyat. Henry Wood
ill consequences,” she resumed. “I did not catch the fever. Had I found myself growing in the least ill, I should have sent for you and told you the truth.”
“Ethel?” he impulsively cried—very impulsively for calm Thomas Godolphin; “had you caught the fever, I should never have forgiven those who led you into danger. I could not lose you.”
“Hark!” said Ethel. “Mamma is calling.”
Lady Sarah had been calling to Mr. Godolphin. Thinking she was not heard, she now came downstairs and entered the room, wringing her hands; her eyes were overflowing, her sharp thin nose was redder than usual. “Oh dear! I don’t know what we shall do with her!” she uttered. “She is so ill, and it makes her so fretful. Mr. Godolphin, nothing will satisfy her now but she must see you.”
“See me!” repeated he.
“She will, she says. I told her you were departing for Scotland, and she burst out crying, and said if she were to die she should never see you again. Do you mind going in? You are not afraid?”
“No, I am not afraid,” said Thomas Godolphin. “Infection cannot have remained all this time. And if it had, I should not fear it.”
Lady Sarah Grame led the way upstairs. Thomas followed her. Ethel stole in afterwards. Sarah Anne lay in bed, her thin face, drawn and white, raised upon the pillow; her hollow eyes were strained forward with a fixed look. Ill as he had been led to suppose her, he was scarcely prepared to see her like this; and it shocked him. A cadaverous face, looking ripe for the tomb.
“Why have you never come to see me?” she asked in her hollow voice, as he approached and leaned over her. “You’d never have come till I died. You only care for Ethel.”
“I would have come to see you had I known you wished it,” he answered. “But you do not look strong enough to receive visitors.”
“They might cure me, if they would,” she continued, panting for breath. “I want to go away somewhere, and that Snow won’t let me. If it were Ethel, he would take care to cure her.”
“He will let you go as soon as you are equal to it, I am sure,” said Thomas Godolphin.
“Why should the fever have come to me at all?—Why couldn’t it have gone to Ethel instead? She’s strong. She would have got well in no time. It’s not fair–”
“My dear child, my dear, dear child, you must not excite yourself,” implored Lady Sarah, abruptly interrupting her.
“I shall speak,” cried Sarah Anne, with a touch, feeble though it was, of her old peevish vehemence. “Nobody’s thought of but Ethel. If you had had your way,” looking hard at Mr. Godolphin, “she wouldn’t have been allowed to come near me; no, not if I had died.”
Her mood changed to tears. Lady Sarah whispered to him to leave the room: it would not do, this excitement. Thomas wondered why he had been brought to it. “I will come and see you again when you are better,” he soothingly whispered.
“No you won’t,” sobbed Sarah Anne. “You are going to Scotland, and I shall be dead when you come back. I don’t want to die. Why do they frighten me with their prayers? Good-bye, Thomas Godolphin.”
The last words were called after him; when he had taken his leave of her and was quitting the room. Lady Sarah attended him to the threshold: her eyes full, her hands lifted. “You may see that there’s no hope of her!” she wailed.
Thomas did not think there was the slightest hope. To his eye—though it was not so practised an eye in sickness as Mr. Snow’s, or even as that of the Rector of All Souls’—it appeared that in a very few days, perhaps hours, hope for Sarah Anne Grame would be over for ever.
Ethel waited for him in the hall, and was leading the way back to the drawing-room; but he told her he could not stay longer, and opened the front door. She ran past him into the garden, putting her hand into his as he came out.
“I wish you were not going away,” she sadly said, her spirits, that night very unequal, causing her to see things with a gloomy eye.
“I wish you were going with me!” replied Thomas Godolphin. “Do not weep, Ethel. I shall soon be back again.”
“Everything seems to make me weep to-night. You may not be back until—until the worst is over. Oh! if she might but be saved!”
He held her face close to him, gazing down at it in the moonlight. And then he took from it his farewell kiss. “God bless you, my darling, for ever and for ever!”
“May He bless you, Thomas!” she answered, with streaming eyes: and, for the first time in her life, his kiss was returned. Then they parted. He watched Ethel indoors, and went back to Prior’s Ash.
CHAPTER XII.
DEAD
“Thomas, my son, I must go home. I don’t want to die away from Ashlydyat!”
A dull pain shot across Thomas Godolphin’s heart at the words. Did he think of the old superstitious tradition—that evil was to fall upon the Godolphins when their chief should die, and not at Ashlydyat? At Ashlydyat his father could not die; he had put that out of his power when he let it to strangers: in its neighbourhood, he might.
“The better plan, sir, will be for you to return to the Folly, as you seem to wish it,” said Thomas. “You will soon be strong enough to undertake the journey.”
The decaying knight was sitting on a sofa in his bedroom. His second fainting-fit had lasted some hours—if that, indeed, was the right name to give to it—and he had recovered, only to be more and more weak. He had grown pretty well after the first attack—when Margery had found him in his chamber on the floor, the day Lady Godolphin had gone to pay her visit to Selina. The next time, he was on the lawn before the house, talking to Charlotte Pain, when he suddenly fell to the ground. He did not recover his consciousness until evening; and nearly the first wish he expressed was a desire to see his son Thomas. “Telegraph for him,” he said to Lady Godolphin.
“But you are not seriously ill, Sir George,” she had answered.
“No; but I should like him here. Telegraph to him to start by first train.”
And Lady Godolphin did so, accordingly, sending the message that angered Miss Godolphin. But, in this case, Lady Godolphin did not deserve so much blame as Janet cast on her: for she did debate the point with herself whether she should say Sir George was ill, or not. Believing that these two fainting-fits had proceeded from want of strength only, that they were but the effect of his long previous illness, and would lead to no bad result, she determined not to speak of it. Hence the imperfect message.
Neither did Thomas Godolphin see much cause for fear when he arrived at Broomhead. Sir George did not look better than when he had left Prior’s Ash, but neither did he look much worse. On this, the second day, he had been well enough to converse with Thomas upon business affairs: and, that over, he suddenly broke out with the above wish. Thomas mentioned it when he joined Lady Godolphin afterwards. It did not meet with her approbation.
“You should have opposed it,” said she to him in a firm, hard tone.
“But why so, madam?” asked Thomas. “If my father’s wish is to return to Prior’s Ash, he should return.”
“Not while the fever lingers there. Were he to take it—and die—you would never forgive yourself.”
Thomas had no fear of the fever on his own score, and did not fear it for his father. He intimated as much. “It is not the fever that will hurt him, Lady Godolphin.”
“You have no right to say that. Lady Sarah Grame, a month ago, might have said she did not fear it for Sarah Anne. And now Sarah Anne is dying!”
“Or dead,” put in Charlotte Pain, who was leaning listlessly against the window frame devoured with ennui.
“Shall you be afraid to go back to Prior’s Ash?” he asked of Maria Hastings.
“Not at all,” replied Maria. “I should