Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  “Don’t grieve,” she whispered, the tears raining from her own eyes.

  “Oh, George, my husband, it is a bitter thing to part, but we shall meet again in heaven, and be together for ever. It has been so weary here; the troubles have been so great!”

  He steadied his voice to speak. “The troubles have not killed you, have they, Maria?”

  “Yes, I suppose it has been so. I did try and struggle against them, but — I don’t know —— Oh, George!” she broke out in a wailing tone of pain, “if I could have but got over them and lived! — if I could only have gone with you to your new home!”

  George sat down on the sofa where Meta had been, and held her to him in silence. She could hear his heart beating; could feel it bounding against her side.

  “It will be a better home in heaven,” she resumed, laying her poor pale face upon his shoulder. “You will come to me there, George; I shall only go on first a little while; all the pains and the cares, the heart-burnings of earth will be forgotten, and we shall be together in happiness for ever and ever.”

  He dropped his face upon her neck, he sobbed aloud in his anguish. Whatever may have been his gracelessness and his faults, he had loved his wife; and now that he was losing her, that love was greater than it had ever been: some pricks of conscience may have been mingled with it, too! Who knows?

  “Don’t forget me quite when I am gone, George. Think of me sometimes as your poor wife who loved you to the last; who would have stayed with you if God had let her. When first I began to see that it must be, that I should leave you and Meta, my heart nearly broke; but the pain has grown less, and I think God has been reconciling me to it.”

  “What shall I do? — what will the child do without you?” broke from his quivering lips.

  Perhaps the thought crossed Maria that he had done very well without her in the last few months, for his sojourn with her might be counted by hours instead of by days: but she was too generous to allude to it; and the heart-aching had passed. “Cecil and Lord Averil will take Meta,” she said. “Let her stay with them, George! It would not be well for her to go to India alone with you.”

  The words surprised him. He did not speak.

  “Cecil proposed it yesterday. They will be glad to have her. I dare say Lord Averil will speak to you about it later. It was the one great weight left upon my mind, George — our poor child, and what could be done with her: Cecil’s generous proposal removed it.”

  “Yes,” said George hesitatingly. “For a little while; perhaps it will be the best thing. Until I shall get settled in India. But she must come to me then; I cannot part with her for good.”

  “For good? No. But, George, you may — it is possible—” she seemed to stammer and hesitate— “you may be forming new ties. In that case you would care less for the loss of Meta — —”

  “Don’t talk so!” he passionately interrupted. “How can you glance at such things, Maria, in these our last moments?”

  She was silent for a few minutes, weeping softly. “Had this parting come upon me as suddenly as it has upon you, I might have started from the very thought with horror; but, George, I have had nothing else in my own mind for weeks but the parting, and it has made me look at the future as I could not else have looked at it. Do not blame me for saying this. I must allude to it, if I am to speak of Meta. I can understand how full of aversion the thought is to you now: but, George, it may come to pass.”

  “I think not,” he said, and his voice and manner had changed to grave deliberation. “If I know anything of myself, Maria, I shall never marry again.”

  “It is not impossible.”

  “No,” he assented; “it is not impossible.”

  Her heart beat a shade quicker, and she hid her face upon him so that he could not see it. When she spoke again, it was with difficulty he could catch the whispered words.

  “I know how foolish and wrong it is for a dying wife to extract any promise of this nature from her husband: were I to say to you, Do not marry again, it would be little else than a wicked request; and it would prove how my thoughts and passions must still cling to earth. Bear with me while I speak of this, George, I am not going to be so wicked; but — but — —”

  Agitation stopped her voice. Her bosom heaved, her breath almost left her. He saw that this was mental emotion, not bodily weakness; and he waited until it should pass, stroking the hair from her brow with his gentle hand.

  “My darling, what is it?”

  “But there is one promise that I do wish to beg of you,” she resumed, mastering her emotion sufficiently to speak. “If — if you should marry, and your choice falls upon one — upon her — then, in that case, do not seek to have Meta home; let her remain always with Cecil.”

  A pause, broken by George. “Of whom do you speak, Maria?”

  The same laboured breathing; the same cruel agitation; and they had to be fought with before she could bring out the words.

  “Of Charlotte Pain.”

  “Charlotte Pain!” echoed George, shouting out the name in surprise.

  “I could not bear it,” she shivered. “George, George! do not make her the second mother of my child! I could not bear it; it seems to me that I could not even in my grave bear it! Should you marry her, promise me that Meta shall not be removed from Ashlydyat.”

  “Maria,” he quietly said, “I shall never marry Charlotte Pain.”

  “You don’t know. You may think now you will not, but you cannot answer for yourself. George! she has helped to kill me. She must not be Meta’s second mother.”

  He raised her face so that he could see it, his dark blue eyes met hers searchingly, and he took her hand in his as he gravely spoke.

  “She will never be Meta’s second mother: nay, if it will be more satisfactory, I will say she never shall be. By the heaven that perhaps even I may some day attain to, I say it! Charlotte Pain will never be Meta’s second mother, or my wife.”

  She did not answer in words. She only nestled a little nearer to him in gratitude; half in repentance perhaps for having doubted him. George resumed, in the same grave tone:

  “And now, Maria, tell me what you mean by saying that Charlotte Pain has helped to kill you.”

  A vivid flush came over her wan face, and she contrived to turn it from him again, so that her eyes were hidden. But she did not speak quite at first.

  “It all came upon me together, George,” she murmured at length, her tone one of loving-tenderness, in token that she was not angry now; that the past, whatever may have been its sins against her, any or none, was forgiven. “At that cruel time when the blow fell, when I had nowhere to turn to for comfort, then I also learnt what Prior’s Ash had been saying, about — about Charlotte Pain. George, it seemed to wither my very heart; to take the life out of it. I had so loved you; I had so trusted you: and to find — to find — that you loved her, not me — —”

  “Hush!” 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, passing 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 Godolphin 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 pass, 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 passions. So to have fretted ourselves over this little space of existence with its passing fol
lies, 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 passing hour compared with the eternity that I am entering upon. Oh, George, we have all need of God’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 Godolphin 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 flashing 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 passed 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 assumed 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 Godolphin 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 Godolphin, 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. Passing Margery in the passage, 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 Godolphin, 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 flashing 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.

  She came in now, brimming over with repentance: she came in with a sort of belief that things could not have gone so very far; that there must be some remedy still, some hope; and that if she, Grace, exerted her energies to rouse Maria, health and life would come again. Maria had awakened out of her temporary slumber then, and George was standing with his arm on the mantel-piece. A half-frown crossed his brow when he saw Grace enter. He had never liked her; he was conscious that she had not been kind to Maria, and he deemed her severe manner and sharp voice scarcely suited to that dying chamber. But she was his wife’s sister, and he advanced to welcome her.

  Grace did not see his welcome; would not see it. Perhaps in truth she was wholly absorbed by the sight which met her view in Maria. Remedy still? — hope yet? Ah no! death was there, was upon her, and Grace burst into tears. Maria held out her hand, a smile lighting up her wan countenance.

  “I thought you were not coming to see me, Grace.”

  “I was out; I went to Hamlet’s Wood this morning with Mr. Akeman,” sobbed Grace. “Whatever is the reason that you have suddenly grown so ill as this?”

  “I have been growing ill a long time,” was Maria’s answer.

  “But there must be hope!” said Grace in her quick way. “Mr. George Godolphin” — turning to him and dashing away the tears on her cheeks, as if she would not betray them to him— “surely there must be hope! What do the medical men say?”

  “There is no hope, Grace,” interposed Maria in her feeble voice. “The medical men know there is not. Dr. Beale came with Mr. Snow at midday; but their coming at all is a mere form now.”

  Grace untied her bonnet and sat down. “I thought,” said she, “you were getting well.”

  Maria made a slight motion of dissent. “I have not thought it myself; not really thought it. I hoped it might be so, and the hope prevented my speaking: but there was always an undercurrent of conviction to the contrary in my heart.”

  George looked at her, half-reproachfully. She understood the look, and answered it.

  “I wish now I had told you, George: but I was not sure. And if I had spoken you would only have laughed at me then in disbelief.”

  “You speak very calmly, Maria,” said Grace with passionate earnestness. “Have you no regret at leaving us?”

  A faint hectic shone suddenly in Maria’s cheek. “Regret!” she repeated with emotion; “my days have been one long
regret; one long, wearying pain. Don’t you see it is the pain that has killed me, Grace?”

  Grace’s temper was sharp: her sense of right and wrong cynically keen: the Rector had had the same sharp temper in his youth, but he had learned to control it; Grace had not. She turned her flashing eyes, her flaming cheeks, on George Godolphin.

  “Do you hear? — the pain has killed her. Who brought that pain upon her? Mr. George Godolphin, I wish you joy of your conscience! I almost seemed to foresee it — I almost seemed to foresee this,” she passionately cried, “ere ever my sister married you.”

  “Don’t, Grace!” wailed Maria, a faint cry of fear escaping her; a sudden terror taking possession of her raised face. “George, George!” She held out her hands yearningly to him, as if she would shield him, or as if she wanted him to shield her from the sharp words. George crossed over to her with his protecting presence, and bent to catch her whisper, praying him for peace.

  “You forget your sister’s state when you thus speak, Mrs. Akeman,” he gravely said. “Say anything you please to me later; you shall have the opportunity if you desire it; but in my wife’s presence there must be peace.”

  Grace flung off the shawl which she had worn, and stood beating the toe of her foot upon the fender, her throat swelling with the effort to subdue her emotion. What with her anger in the past, her grief in the present, she had well-nigh burst into sobs.

  “I think I could drink some tea,” said Maria. “Could we not have it together; here; for the last time? You will make it, Grace?”

  Poor, weak, timid heart! Perhaps she only so spoke as an incentive to keep that “peace” for which she tremblingly yearned; which was essential to her, as to all, in her dying hour. George rang the bell and Margery came in.

  It was done as she seemed to wish. The small round table was drawn to the fire, and Grace sat at it, making the tea. Maria turned her face and asked for Meta: Margery answered that she was coming in by-and-by. Very little was said. George drew a chair near Maria and leaned upon the arm of the sofa. The tea, so far as she went, was a mockery: George put a teaspoonful into her mouth, but she with difficulty swallowed it, and shook her head when he would have given her more. It did not seem to be much else than a mockery for the others: Grace’s tears dropped into hers, and George suffered his to grow cold and then swallowed it at a draught, as if it was a relief to get rid of it. Margery was called again to take the things away, and Maria, who was leaning back on the sofa with closed eyes, asked again for Meta to come in.