Chapter XVII

Was it her corpse that he bore for miles,
When he gladly dreamt of her grateful smiles?
Silently, as he bore her on,
Her soul from its gentle frame has gone,
And never on earth shall his heart discover
The moment her love and her life were over.
* * * *

Lay her i’ the earth;
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!
SHAKSPEARE.

Castleton had passed all that night in wakeful solitude. He had dismissed his servant early, as if to write; but instead, had watched through the sleepless hours, absorbed in somewhat tardy reflections on the state to which he had reduced himself. How many prospects, which opening life had shown him in perspective, had he unaccountably missed in the actual attainment! How many sources of happiness had been dried up, whilst he, instead of partaking of their spontaneous flow, had been refining over-much on their component qualities. Too true it was, that he, the favoured child of nature and fortune, had signally failed, both in securing his own happiness, and in contributing to that of others: and yet, in the result, he had no one but himself to blame.

The silence of the hour, and the sad abstraction of his thoughts conspired to invest any extraneous object, which should force his attention, with the morbid impressions of his imagination. The fitful gusts of the moaning wind seemed to speak a solemn and piteous warning to him. He rose and drew aside the window-curtains. The dim and struggling dawn had just begun to win its hard-fought way through the dense masses of fast-rolling clouds, which rushed onwards to oppose its progress. For one moment he felt freshened, as he exposed his burning brow to the driving rain. Looking forth, he beheld at his own door, a houseless mendicant, with a child in her arms, crouching for shelter; and as he dropt a coin into her hand, he thought, “Poor wretch! your sorrows are not of your own devising. One ought to be thankful, that neither oneself, nor a beloved one, is exposed to such a night as this.”

He had hardly again closed the window, when a noise was heard below, and Carter, who had been staying with him lately, rushed into the room, evidently endeavouring, but in vain, through his consternation and distress, so to collect himself, as to be able to break to his patron some dreadful news.

“O my Lord! prepare for the worst. My Lady!--they’re bringing her here!--but it’s all over.”

Before he could at all relieve Castleton’s agonizing suspense, the frantic figure of George stood before them; his eyes staring wildly, and his drenched appearance showing from whence he had just emerged.

“She’s dead!--she’s dead! You’ll look your last on her now; and cursed be the hour when you first beheld her!”

“Hold, man!” said Carter; “respect his feelings.”

“His feelings! what were his feelings for her compared with mine? Who was it, who, in the moment of danger was present, to struggle for her safety? He who had sworn to love, honour, and protect her, or her despised and neglected cousin?”

The agony of Castleton, as the truth broke upon him, was too intense for utterance, and prevented interruption; George, therefore, proceeded half raving, “But for that hideous breaker which forced us asunder, she might still have been saved. I stretched forth my hand to renew my protecting hold, and this met my gripe, and snapped within it,” putting his hand into his breast, and producing the gold chain and little watch before referred to;--“your first fatal gift;” and with that recollection, he raised it in his hand furiously, as if preparing to dash it to the ground; but checking himself, he added, “No; it was her last thought, the last request she made!” and, kissing it solemnly, he placed it on the table before Castleton. “Once more I felt that I had her safe. In vain the breakers a second time strove to separate us; or, perhaps they only roared in mockery at my reviving hopes. I rushed through the surf, as I thought in triumph;--she was already dead!”

The mournful procession now arrived, bearing in a litter the lifeless form of Lucy. There was on her no trace of death, beyond the mere absence of life. Placid, as still in sleep, she lay without as yet the paleness of a corpse; no disorder in her appearance, except the streaming locks of her long fair hair, which, darkened and clotted with moisture, hung in tangled masses over her features. There was no symptom of a struggle on her part; but it seemed rather as if, trusting, under Providence, to the efforts of him who would have saved her if he could, she yielded her spirit to the issue; those lips, through which might never more pass the slightest breath to stir a feather, or dull a mirror, were calmly closed, not forcibly compressed: the expression of her whole countenance was perfect repose.

As they, who had brought her into the presence of her husband, deposited their burthen, one arm dropped from her side, and hung stiffly down to the ground. Castleton earnestly regarded it: there was the hand on which he had placed the wedding-ring; and, as he pressed it between his, already cold and clammy as it was, the idea that first roused him from his stupor into which the sudden shock had plunged him was, that she might yet be saved; such things had been done before.

With wonderful precision he gave the requisite orders for attempting to restore animation. George, who had for some time remained silent, on hearing this, cried out with a bitter smile, “As if I would have left her for a moment, had I not too surely known that there was no longer such a chance.”

He was right: after many hours’ useless endeavours, all were obliged to own that their efforts were vain.

George had, in the mean time, been in the first paroxysms of a brain fever; through all the stages of which Castleton attended him with the affectionate care of a brother; and when he was pronounced out of danger, prepared to follow the corpse of poor Lucy to Somersby, where she was to be interred in the family vault. As the orders which Castleton had in his first despair given, that every possible honour should be paid to her remains, were to be acted on by interested parties, they had been too extravagantly fulfilled; and though, in the stupor of grief, the chief mourner was as unconscious of any of the surrounding splendours, as the corpse in whose honour they were collected, yet she, to whom in life pomp had been her only bane, was borne unconsciously along with princely and almost unparalleled pageantry.

Castleton’s first care, upon somewhat recovering his composure, was to exert all his influence to advance George in his profession. In his wishes to serve the farmer and his sister, though equally sincere, he was not equally successful. Nothing could persuade them to leave Bankside, where they remained together, still mourning their bereavement.

As to Castleton himself, I have too much respect for the intensity of his present grief, aggravated in his case by bitter feelings of self-reproach, to anticipate the date when that elasticity of spirit, which is the never-failing attribute of the human mind, shall have enabled him to struggle with his present depression, and imparting its buoyancy, as it will do whenever the heart’s core has not been completely crushed, shall, with the assistance of time, have triumphed over mortal sorrow.

THE END.

LONDON:
IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY STREET, STRAND.

Transcriber’s Note:

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These were left unchanged, as were jargon, dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings. Ten misspelled words were corrected. The word ‘to’ was added to “... sit next [to] Lady ...”

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, reversed, or partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. Duplicate words at line endings were removed.