66

A solemn

Maggie'

on mine. I looked up. George was standing before me. expression was upon his face, and a sad light filled his eyes. he said, "I have stolen that kiss-the first, the last. You are not angry with me? My dream is over. You do not love me-it is enough; it is mockery to hope for another answer. It would be unmanly to attempt to wrest it from you. Let what has happened be no trouble to you; whatever fate may have in store for you, you will always be what you are now in my eyes."

And with these words ringing in my ears he left me.

L

me.

CHAPTER VIII.

ERE a month had passed since the occurrence of the above episode in my life, George was on his way to New Zealand. It was not difficult for me to understand the cause of my aunt's improving conduct towards Her son had exacted it from her, and his was the only influence to which she yielded. Not a word ever escaped her lips as to his wish to make me his wife. I was very anxious at first to know whether she was acquainted with the secret; but I soon found out that she was not.

I lack the power to depict the scene that took place between the mother and son when his determination was announced to her. How she endured his departure, how her grief at times crazed her and made George falter in his intention, a weightier pen than mine might well fail to portray. The bereavement-it was substantially death, for they never met again—added a dozen years to her life and plunged her into immature dotage. I have often wondered how George could so resolutely have left. The mother's grief might have obstructed or defeated a fiercer determination. But do not let me forget the formidable incitement of the necessity of independence, made severer yet by the pride that followed his miscarried love.

I saw after the first great pang of separation was over how my aunt struggled to console herself. She was not without a certain philosophy, almost Scotch in the resoluteness of its provisions; and a lesser trouble might have yielded to it. But there are periods of grief when philosophy becomes irony. In all her reflections, the mother incessantly broke through. So that life indeed was now made for her a vale of tears.

It is misery that teaches mercy. Broken by her own grief, her conduct towards me became more tender.

She tried to make me promise that I would not leave her. I resisted her appeals; I would not promise. She called herself a miserable old She was abandoned, neglected, hated, she said. If I left her

woman.
VOL. XXXIV.

T

what was to become of her? She told me, moreover, that George ere his departure had exacted from her a solemn promise that on no consideration was she to allow me to leave her roof, unless a place of security and comfort should offer; and her answer had been that henceforth I should be cherished as a daughter. Without guessing that George loved me, she clung to me because she knew that his liking for me was strong and decided. I was the one whom he had always more particularly protected from her epigrammatic remarks. I was the one whom he had always selected as a companion in his excursions. In her eyes therefore I took a deep significance; I was sanctified by his liking. In her sight I was blessed, as is a relic of one that has departed in the eyes of a faithful mourner. With me too, she could talk for hours of her absent son.

I had been, nevertheless, seriously meditating a governess's place for some time. My determination had been renewed from the date of George's departure. When his influence was gone I dreaded a recurrence of his mother's conduct towards me. But being deceived in my conjectures my resolution again subsided. I relinquished the intention of leaving Ivy Lodge. Nothing could be plainer than that my aunt clung to me with a species of forlorn passion. I pitied her; I pitied the old woman left lonely and miserable, like one that is wrecked on an island surrounded by a comfortless sea on which the sun is slowly going down.

I remained with her. Attribute my determination to what you will; think it, if you like, the result of a nervous dread of facing the unknown world outlying Lorton; ascribe it to a timidity that kept me faithful, not to my relative but to her house, which at least afforded me shelter, and in which I might now hope for peace. Yes-selfishness, cowardice, helped me to make up my mind: and yet I should be unjust to my heart if I refused to remember that underlying all my other feelings was a sentiment of deep pity for my aunt, and an honest wish to minister to her wants-mental wants created by the vacancy in her heart-that I might discharge the debt I owed her of having fed and clothed me from my babyhood.

I was

Meanwhile, where was Kate?—what was she doing? I knew not. Ten weeks had elapsed since the receipt of her last letter. pained at the neglect, not alarmed at the silence. And though this silence continued I did not forebode. With Major Rivers I could associate no images but those of peace and love. My heart had refined him and his sorroundings into an idealism beyond the taint of human affairs. Death, pain, decay, found no footing in my thoughts of him; and I extended this creed to Kate, glorified in my sight by his presence. Laugh if you will; but remember I was country-bred, with eyes which saw all things that had not entered into my ex

perience glistening with a glamour of romance. Above all, I was not yet twenty.

But selfishness I knew. I had watched it in others, hated it in myself. It was the groundwork of that flimsy fabric of my construction which I had misnamed "human nature." I attributed it remorselessly to Kate. I thought that her silence was owing to her happiness. She was too much in love to think of me. The voluptuous life of a Southern world, the articulated lovelight of her husband's eyes, had passed over her heart like the breath over a mirror and had dimmed it. From it had passed the life at Ivy Lodge-from it the palefaced sister.

"It would have happened as I said," I cried, with almost cynical exultation at finding a misanthropical conjecture realised, "had I consented to live with her. She would have wearied of me-found me an intruder, and by perceptible toleration have taught me that dependence becomes more extravagantly bitter in proportion as we think we can claim it as a right."

But this hateful bitterness of mine was soon to be changed into despair. What an agony of remorse seizes me as I write, as I recall the cruelty of these passing sentiments towards my sister!

One morning a letter deeply edged with black was placed in my hand. I knew the handwriting at once. It was Major Rivers's. It bore the Paris postmark. I hesitated before I opened it. My dread was the greater because I stood on the edge of a precipice of whose existence I had wandered on in ignorance. I tore the envelope; glanced at the enclosure; and read that Kate was dead.

I read and doubted; nor could I prevail upon myself to believe until I had read the letter many times. It seemed incredible-impossible. I was stunned. I stared with vacant eye at the written lines, and went on mechanically reading; but no meaning took shape from what my eyes rested upon.

The letter was brief-brief as a sob, and as full of misery. The writer spoke of himself as heartbroken. Kate had died at Rome, giving birth to a boy. Her health would not allow her to return to England for her confinement. He-the writer-had been too prostrated to send me the news before. He was on his way home, and would be in London in a few days.

I sat for a long time tearless. I was too stunned to feel acutely yet. I could only think like one who is horribly startled. Presently dim conceptions of the reality floated upwards. They became stronger and stronger until they ended in an agony.

How was it I could not weep? How was it that these eyes remained stony, these lips tight? I prayed for tears, for there was a roaring in my head like the rushing of waters.

Suddenly my aunt entered the room. She came in with an expression of terror. She had heard of my having received a black-edged letter, and the thoughts of the mother flew to her son. Seeing my frozen attitude, my dilated eyes, my pale closed lips, she uttered a scream and snatched the letter from my hand. She read it. Her face relaxed her first expression, and took another-full of pain, but without the agony in it of the first.

"Good God!" she ejaculated, tossed up her hands, and burst into tears.

Her sobs made me shudder at first. I was incapable of comprehending her sorrow, for I could not understand my own. But she turned her face towards me; the plentiful tears coursed down her cheeks, the spectacle burst the iron-like bonds that compassed my heart. I fell with my head upon the table, and hiding my face in my arm, wept, as I have only wept once since.

My anguish was unutterable. My sobs shook me from head to foot. I trembled to them like a vessel trembles to the blows of hurling waves. My aunt endeavoured to comfort me. Her voice fell harshly. I raised my head, flung back my hair, and with my face buried in my hands glided to my bedroom.

Dead! What a change! It was the change that struck me dumb. The rapidity of it!-the unexpectedness of it! Dead, in the eye of that morning of joy which had dawned upon her after so long and bleak a night! The train of the vanished days swept past me mournfully; spectre-like, I mused with the apathy that follows temporarily the explosion of unspeakable grief. Memory restored her to me with awful vividness. I beheld her, the little child, leaping hand-in-hand with me; I heard her lisping laughter-saw the humid gladness in her young eyes. I beheld her meditative beneath the inexorable dominion of my aunt, with fallen merriment, with whispering accents. I beheld her budding in the beauty of womanhood: girlish in her maturity; but sad, spiritless, yearning for a new life. I beheld her as she wept upon my neck on the evening before her marriage. I heard her whispering of the graves of her parents; her parting kisses-her clinging kisses were still moist on my lips. . . .

O sister! Gone in the moment when life was fairest with promise! Dead in the very shadow of that triumphal arch which love had raised for thee! Dead with the roses about thee! Dead with the light of a royal dawn upon thy clay-cold eyes!

As I whispered to myself through the scalding tears that smarted on my cheeks and lips, my thoughts reverted to my cousin George. I saw his tearful eyes weeping for him and her, but calm, trustful. How I longed for his sympathy then! How lonely, how unutterably lonely I felt!

I looked towards the sky. I pictured my sister mournfully gazing down upon me in company with our father and mother. I extended my arms, and out of the depths of the keen bitterness of solitude and woe my whole heart went forth into a wild passionate appeal for death.

A dreary time followed. It was clad in deepest mourning. I grew thin and my face became white. I looked at my transparent hands, and hoped that they held death. A fortnight passed, and then my grief took to itself that undertone of resignation which is like a peace that blesses and promises rest to the aching heart.

November came. It was the anniversary of my sister's wedding. The morning had passed with me in prayer, meditation, and earnest struggles to conquer the lingering woe which many sobbing appeals to God had taught me was profitless. I was preparing to descend when the servant's knocking at the door told me I was wanted below. My heart gave a leap, then fluttered painfully. I knew, I guessed who it was. I passed downstairs and entered the parlour. There sat Major Rivers. As I entered he rose, held my hand in his for many moments, unable to speak, then drew a chair and led me to it.

I noticed but little change in him. Habitually dressed in dark clothes, his mourning dress made no difference to him. His face was calm, with the composure of the will. That composure, too, was familiar.

He looked at me with all his old wonderful tenderness in his eyes. In a moment my deep passion for him, which grief could not kill, time repress, disappointment change, revived in me.

He commenced speaking of Kate's death at once. His low melodious voice that voice which lives along my heart-strings with an unconquerable fascination to this hour-was filled with pathos. The story of her death was very simple. She had been seized with a fever after having been already ill from a protracted attack of morbid hysteria. So abrupt was the attack that it had laid her low at once, utterly disconcerting their intention of returning to England. This was at Rome. An eminent French physician was telegraphed for from Paris, and he attended her in the illness that terminated in death in a fortnight from the time of the attack. Death was hastened by her confinement.

"It taxed the cleverness of the doctor," said Major Rivers, "to preserve the poor little bairn. Its first cry was uttered as my poor wife died."

I had been crying very bitterly during his narrative. He took my hand as he concluded, and said:

"Maggie, I have come to ask you to teach me how to bear my You must not give way to your grief. Think of my greater

sorrow.