"Is it not best, in your own interests, that we should bid each other good-by?" she asked. "In the time to come--when you only remember how kind you once were to me--we may look forward to meeting again. After all that you have suffered, so bitterly and so undeservedly, don't, pray don't, make me feel that another woman has behaved cruelly to you, and that I--so grieved to distress you--am that heartless creature!"
Never in her life had she been so irresistibly charming as she was at that moment. Her sweet nature showed all its innocent pity for him in her face.
He saw it--he felt it--he was not unworthy of it. In silence, he lifted her hand to his lips. He turned pale as he kissed it.
"Say that you agree with me?" she pleaded.
"I obey you."
As he answered, he pointed to the lawn at their feet. "Look," he said, "at that dead leaf which the air is wafting over the grass. Is it possible that such sympathy as you feel for Me, such love as I feel for You, can waste, wither, and fall to the ground like that leaf? I leave you, Emily--with the firm conviction that there is a time of fulfillment to come in our two lives. Happen what may in the interval--I trust the future."
The words had barely passed his lips when the voice of one of the servants reached them from the house. "Miss Emily, are you in the garden?"
Emily stepped out into the sunshine. The servant hurried to meet her, and placed a telegram in her hand. She looked at it with a sudden misgiving. In her small experience, a telegram was associated with the communication of bad news. She conquered her hesitation--opened it--read it. The color left her face: she shuddered. The telegram dropped on the grass.
"Read it," she said, faintly, as Alban picked it up.
He read these words: "Come to London directly. Miss Letitia is dangerously ill."
"Your aunt?" he asked.
"Yes--my aunt."
BOOK THE SECOND--IN LONDON.
CHAPTER XII.
MRS. ELLMOTHER.
The metropolis of Great Britain is, in certain respects, like no other metropolis on the face of the earth. In the population that throngs the st reets, the extremes of Wealth and the extremes of Poverty meet, as they meet nowhere else. In the streets themselves, the glory and the shame of architecture--the mansion and the hovel--are neighbors in situation, as they are neighbors nowhere else. London, in its social aspect, is the city of contrasts.
Toward the close of evening Emily left the railway terminus for the place of residence in which loss of fortune had compelled her aunt to take refuge. As she approached her destination, the cab passed--by merely crossing a road--from a spacious and beautiful Park, with its surrounding houses topped by statues and cupolas, to a row of cottages, hard by a stinking ditch miscalled a canal. The city of contrasts: north and south, east and west, the city of social contrasts.
Emily stopped the cab before the garden gate of a cottage, at the further end of the row. The bell was answered by the one servant now in her aunt's employ--Miss Letitia's maid.
Personally, this good creature was one of the ill-fated women whose appearance suggests that Nature intended to make men of them and altered her mind at the last moment. Miss Letitia's maid was tall and gaunt and awkward. The first impression produced by her face was an impression of bones. They rose high on her forehead; they projected on her cheeks; and they reached their boldest development in her jaws. In the cavernous eyes of this unfortunate person rigid obstinacy and rigid goodness looked out together, with equal severity, on all her fellow-creatures alike. Her mistress (whom she had served for a quarter of a century and more) called her "Bony." She accepted this cruelly appropriate nick-name as a mark of affectionate familiarity which honored a servant. No other person was allowed to take liberties with her: to every one but her mistress she was known as Mrs. Ellmother.
"How is my aunt?" Emily asked.
"Bad."
"Why have I not heard of her illness before?"
"Because she's too fond of you to let you be distressed about her. 'Don't tell Emily'; those were her orders, as long as she kept her senses."
"Kept her senses? Good heavens! what do you mean?"
"Fever--that's what I mean."
"I must see her directly; I am not afraid of infection."
"There's no infection to be afraid of. But you mustn't see her, for all that."
"I insist on seeing her."
"Miss Emily, I am disappointing you for your own good. Don't you know me well enough to trust me by this time?"
"I do trust you."
"Then leave my mistress to me--and go and make yourself comfortable in your own room."
Emily's answer was a positive refusal. Mrs. Ellmother, driven to her last resources, raised a new obstacle.
"It's not to be done, I tell you! How can you see Miss Letitia when she can't bear the light in her room? Do you know what color her eyes are? Red, poor soul--red as a boiled lobster."
With every word the woman uttered, Emily's perplexity and distress increased.
"You told me my aunt's illness was fever," she said--"and now you speak of some complaint in her eyes. Stand out of the way, if you please, and let me go to her."
Mrs. Ellmother, still keeping her place, looked through the open door.
"Here's the doctor," she announced. "It seems I can't satisfy you; ask him what's the matter. Come in, doctor." She threw open the door of the parlor, and introduced Emily. "This is the mistress's niece, sir. Please try if you can keep her quiet. I can't." She placed chairs with the hospitable politeness of the old school--and returned to her post at Miss Letitia's bedside.
Doctor Allday was an elderly man, with a cool manner and a ruddy complexion--thoroughly acclimatized to the atmosphere of pain and grief in which it was his destiny to live. He spoke to Emily (without any undue familiarity) as if he had been accustomed to see her for the greater part of her life.
"That's a curious woman," he said, when Mrs. Ellmother closed the door; "the most headstrong person, I think, I ever met with. But devoted to her mistress, and, making allowance for her awkwardness, not a bad nurse. I am afraid I can't give you an encouraging report of your aunt. The rheumatic fever (aggravated by the situation of this house--built on clay, you know, and close to stagnant water) has been latterly complicated by delirium."
"Is that a bad sign, sir?"
"The worst possible sign; it shows that the disease has affected the heart. Yes: she is suffering from inflammation of the eyes, but that is an unimportant symptom. We can keep the pain under by means of cooling lotions and a dark room. I've often heard her speak of you--especially since the illness assumed a serious character. What did you say? Will she know you, when you go into her room? This is about the time when the delirium usually sets in. I'll see if there's a quiet interval.'
He opened the door--and came back again.
"By the way," he resumed, "I ought perhaps to explain how it was that I took the liberty of sending you that telegram.