she said the words, there was a knock at the library door. The footman appeared, and addressed himself to Miss Garth.
“A person wishes to see you, ma’am.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. A stranger to me — a respectable-looking man — and he said he particularly wished to see you.”
Miss Garth went out into the hall. The footman closed the library door after her, and withdrew down the kitchen stairs.
The man stood just inside the door, on the mat. His eyes wandered, his face was pale — he looked ill; he looked frightened. He trifled nervously with his cap, and shifted it backward and forward, from one hand to the other.
“You wanted to see me?” said Miss Garth.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. — You are not Mrs. Vanstone, are you?”
“Certainly not. I am Miss Garth. Why do you ask the question?”
“I am employed in the clerk’s office at Grailsea Station — ”
“Yes?”
“I am sent here — ”
He stopped again. His wandering eyes looked down at the mat, and his restless hands wrung his cap harder and harder. He moistened his dry lips, and tried once more.
“I am sent here on a very serious errand.”
“Serious to me?”
“Serious to all in this house.”
Miss Garth took one step nearer to him — took one steady look at his face. She turned cold in the summer heat. “Stop!” she said, with a sudden distrust, and glanced aside anxiously at the door of the morning-room. It was safely closed. “Tell me the worst; and don’t speak loud. There has been an accident. Where?”
“On the railway. Close to Grailsea Station.”
“The up-train to London?”
“No: the down-train at one-fifty — ”
“God Almighty help us! The train Mr. Vanstone traveled by to Grailsea?”
“The same. I was sent here by the up-train; the line was just cleared in time for it. They wouldn’t write — they said I must see ‘Miss Garth,’ and tell her. There are seven passengers badly hurt; and two — ”
The next word failed on his lips; he raised his hand in the dead silence. With eyes that opened wide in horror, he raised his hand and pointed over Miss Garth’s shoulder.
She turned a little, and looked back.
Face to face with her, on the threshold of the study door, stood the mistress of the house. She held her old music-book clutched fast mechanically in both hands. She stood, the specter of herself. With a dreadful vacancy in her eyes, with a dreadful stillness in her voice, she repeated the man’s last words:
“Seven passengers badly hurt; and two — ”
Her tortured fingers relaxed their hold; the book dropped from them; she sank forward heavily. Miss Garth caught her before she fell — caught her, and turned upon the man, with the wife’s swooning body in her arms, to hear the husband’s fate.
“The harm is done,” she said; “you may speak out. Is he wounded, or dead?”
“Dead.”
Chapter XI
The sun sank lower; the western breeze floated cool and fresh into the house. As the evening advanced, the cheerful ring of the village clock came nearer and nearer. Field and flower-garden felt the influence of the hour, and shed their sweetest fragrance. The birds in Norah’s aviary sunned themselves in the evening stillness, and sang their farewell gratitude to the dying day.
Staggered in its progress for a time only, the pitiless routine of the house went horribly on its daily way. The panic-stricken servants took their blind refuge in the duties proper to the hour. The footman softly laid the table for dinner. The maid sat waiting in senseless doubt, with the hot-water jugs for the bedrooms ranged near her in their customary row. The gardener, who had been ordered to come to his master, with vouchers for money that he had paid in excess of his instructions, said his character was dear to him, and left the vouchers at his appointed time. Custom that never yields, and Death that never spares, met on the wreck of human happiness — and Death gave way.
Heavily the thunder-clouds of Affliction had gathered over the house — heavily, but not at their darkest yet. At five, that evening, the shock of the calamity had struck its blow. Before another hour had passed, the disclosure of the husband’s sudden death was followed by the suspense of the wife’s mortal peril. She lay helpless on her widowed bed; her own life, and the life of her unborn child, trembling in the balance.
But one mind still held possession of its resources — but one guiding spirit now moved helpfully in the house of mourning.
If Miss Garth’s early days had been passed as calmly and as happily as her later life at Combe-Raven, she might have sunk under the cruel necessities of the time. But the governess’s youth had been tried in the ordeal of family affliction; and she met her terrible duties with the steady courage of a woman who had learned to suffer. Alone, she had faced the trial of telling the daughters that they were fatherless. Alone, she now struggled to sustain them, when the dreadful certainty of their bereavement was at last impressed on their minds.
Her least anxiety was for the elder sister. The agony of Norah’s grief had forced its way outward to the natural relief of tears. It was not so with Magdalen. Tearless and speechless, she sat in the room where the revelation of her father’s death had first reached her; her face, unnaturally petrified by the sterile sorrow of old age — a white, changeless blank, fearful to look at. Nothing roused, nothing melted her. She only said, “Don’t speak to me; don’t touch me. Let me bear it by myself” — and fell silent again. The first great grief which had darkened the sisters’ lives had, as it seemed, changed their everyday characters already.
The twilight fell, and faded; and the summer night came brightly. As the first carefully shaded light was kindled in the sickroom, the physician, who had been summoned from Bristol, arrived to consult with the medical attendant of the family. He could give no comfort: he could only say, “We must try, and hope. The shock which struck her, when she overheard the news of her husband’s death, has prostrated her strength at the time when she needed it most. No effort to preserve her shall be neglected. I will stay here for the night.”
He opened one of the windows to admit more air as he spoke. The view overlooked the drive in front of the house and the road outside. Little groups of people were standing before the lodge-gates, looking in. “If those persons make any noise,” said the doctor, “they must be warned away.” There was no need to warn them: they were only the labourers who had worked on the dead man’s property, and here and there some women and children from the village. They were all thinking of him — some talking of him — and it quickened their sluggish minds to look at his house. The gentlefolks thereabouts were mostly kind to them (the men said), but none like him. The women whispered to each other of his comforting ways when he came into their cottages. “He was a cheerful man, poor soul; and thoughtful of us, too: he never came in and stared at meal-times; the rest of ‘em help us, and scold us — all he ever said was, better luck next time.” So they stood and talked of him, and looked at his house and grounds and moved off clumsily by twos and threes, with the dim sense that the sight of his pleasant face would never comfort them again. The dullest head among them knew, that night, that the hard ways of poverty would be all the harder to walk on, now he was gone.
A little later, news was brought to the bedchamber door that old Mr. Clare had come alone to the house, and was waiting