The Shadow of Ashlydyat. Henry Wood
to be recovering.
“I thought John was getting better,” observed Thomas Godolphin.
“He might ha’ got better, if he’d had things to make him better! Wine and meat, and all the rest of it. He hadn’t got ’em; and he’s dead.”
Now a subscription had been entered into for the relief of the poor sufferers from the fever, Godolphin, Crosse, and Godolphin having been amongst its most liberal contributors; and to Thomas Godolphin’s certain knowledge, a full share, and a very good share, had been handed to the Bonds. Quite sufficient to furnish proper nourishment for John Bond for some time to come. He did not say to the woman, “You have had enough: where has it gone to? it has been wasted in riot.” That it had been wasted in riot and improvidence, there was no doubt, for it was in the nature of the Bonds so to waste it; but to cast reproach in the hour of affliction was not the religion of everyday life practised by Thomas Godolphin.
“Yes, they turned me back,” she resumed, swaying herself nose and knees together, as before. “They wouldn’t give me as much as a bit o’ bread. I wasn’t going home without taking something to my famished children; and I wasn’t going to beg like a common tramp. So I just sat myself down here; and I shan’t care if I’m found stark and stiff in the morning!”
“Get up, get up,” said Thomas Godolphin. “I will give you something for bread for your children to-night.”
In the midst of his own sorrow he could feel for her, improvident old sinner though she was, and though he knew her to be so. He coaxed and soothed, and finally prevailed upon her to rise, but she was in a reckless, sullen mood, and it took him a little effort before it was effected. She burst into tears when she thanked him, and turned off in the direction of the Pollard cottages.
The reflection of Mr. Snow’s bald head was conspicuous on the surgery blind: he was standing between the window and the lamp. Thomas Godolphin observed it as he passed. He turned to the surgery door, which was at the side of the house, opened it, and saw that Mr. Snow was alone.
The surgeon turned his head at the interruption, put down a glass jar which he held, and grasped his visitor’s hand in silence.
“Snow! why did you not write for me?”
Mr. Snow brought down his hand on a pair of tiny scales, causing them to jangle and rattle. He had been bottling up his anger against Lady Sarah for some days now, and this was his first explosion.
“Because I understood that she had done so. I was present when that poor child asked her to do it. I found her on the floor in Sarah Anne’s chamber. On the floor, if you’ll believe me! Lying there, because she could not hold her aching head up. My lady had dragged her out of bed in the morning, ill as she was, and forced her to attend as usual upon Sarah Anne. I got it all out of Elizabeth. ‘Mamma,’ she said, when I pronounced it to be fever, though she was almost beyond speaking then, ‘you will write to Thomas Godolphin.’ I never supposed but that my lady did it. Your sister, Miss Godolphin, inquired if you had been written for, and I told her yes.”
“Snow,” came the next sad words, “could you not have saved her?”
The surgeon shook his head and answered in a quiet tone, looking down at the stopper of a phial, which he had taken up and was turning about listlessly in his fingers.
“Neither care nor skill could save her. I gave her the best I had to give. As did Dr. Beale. Godolphin,”—raising his quick dark eyes, flashing then with a peculiar light—“she was ready to go. Let it be your consolation.”
Thomas Godolphin made no answer, and there was silence for a time. Mr. Snow resumed. “As to my lady, the best consolation I wish her, is, that she may have her heart wrung with remembrance for years to come! I don’t care what people may preach about charity and forgiveness; I do wish it. But she’ll be brought to her senses, unless I am mistaken: she has lost her treasure and kept her bane. A year or two more, and that’s what Sarah Anne will be.”
“She ought to have written for me.”
“She ought to do many things that she does not do. She ought to have sent Ethel from the house, as I told her, the instant the disorder appeared in it. Not she. She kept her in her insane selfishness: and now I hope she’s satisfied with her work. When alarming symptoms showed themselves in Ethel, on the fourth day of her illness, I think it was, I said to my lady, ‘It is strange what can be keeping Mr. Godolphin!’ ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I did not write to him.’ ‘Not write!’ I answered: and I fear I used an ugly word to my lady’s face. ‘I’ll write at once,’ returned she humbly. ‘Of course,’ cried I, ‘when the steed’s stolen we shut the stable-door.’ It’s the way of the world.”
Another pause. “I would have given anything to take Ethel from the house at the time; to take her from the town,” observed Thomas Godolphin in a low tone. “I said so then. But it could not be.”
“I should have done it, in your place,” said Mr. Snow. “If my lady had said no, I’d have carried her off in the face of it. Not married, you say? Rubbish! Every one knows she’d have been safe with you. And you would have been married as soon as was convenient. What are forms and ceremonies and carping tongues, in comparison with a girl’s life? A life, precious as was Ethel’s!”
Thomas Godolphin leaned his forehead in his hand, lost in retrospect. Oh, that he had taken her! that he had set at nought what he had then bowed to, the convenances of society! She might have been by his side now, in health and life, to bless him! Doubting words interrupted the train of thought.
“And yet I don’t know,” the surgeon was repeating, in a dreamy manner. “What is to be, will be. We look back, all of us, and say, ‘If I had acted thus, if I had done the other, so and so would not have happened; events would have turned out differently.’ But who is to be sure of it? Had you taken Ethel out of harm’s way—as we might have thought it—there’s no telling but she’d have had the fever just the same: her blood might have become infected before she left the house. There’s no knowing, Mr. Godolphin.”
“True. Good evening, Snow.”
He turned suddenly and hastily to the outer door, but the surgeon caught him before he passed its threshold, and touched his arm to detain him. They stood there in the obscurity, their faces shaded in the dark night.
“She left you a parting word, Mr. Godolphin.”
“Ah?”
“An hour before she died she was calm and sensible, though fear fully weak. Lady Sarah had gone to her favourite, and I was alone with Ethel. ‘Has he not come yet?’ she asked me, opening her eyes. ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘he could not come; he was never written for.’ For I knew she alluded to you, and was determined to tell her the truth, dying though she was. ‘What shall I say to him for you?’ I continued. She put up her hand to motion my face nearer hers, for her voice was growing faint. ‘Tell him, with my dear love, not to grieve,’ she whispered, between her panting breath. ‘Tell him that I have gone on before.’ I think they were almost the last words she spoke.”
Thomas Godolphin leaned against the modest post of the surgery door, and eagerly drank in the words. Then he wrung the doctor’s hand, and departed, hurrying along the street as one who shrank from observation: for he did not care, just then, to encounter the gaze of his fellow-men.
Coming with a quick step up the side street, in which the entrance to the surgery was situated, was the Reverend Mr. Hastings. He stopped to accost the surgeon.
“Was that Mr. Godolphin?”
“Ay. This is a blow for him.”
Mr. Hastings’s voice insensibly shrank to a whisper. “Maria tells me that he did not know of Ethel’s death or illness. Until they arrived here to-night, they thought it was Sarah Anne who died. He went up to Lady Sarah’s after the train came in, thinking so.”
“Lady Sarah’s a fool,” was the complimentary rejoinder of Mr. Snow.
“She is, in some things,” warmly assented the Rector. “The telegraphic message she despatched to Scotland, telling of the death,