Volume Three – Chapter Ten.
From the Gates of the Grave
“The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand,
Who saith ‘A whole I planed,
Youth shows but half: see all, nor be afraid!’”
Rabbi Ben Ezra.
She was not dead. “Still alive, but perfectly unconscious,” was the report that met Gerald as he reached the lodge. “They have not told Captain Chancellor how bad it is,” added Mr Thurston’s informant, “for he was severely stunned himself, and the hearing it might do him harm. He thinks Mrs Chancellor escaped unhurt.”
A little later Gerald caught a glimpse of the Chilworth surgeon. This gentleman seemed glad to get hold of some responsible person.
“Mrs Chancellor’s brother-in-law, Mr Thurston, I presume,” he began, and Gerald did not think the slight mistake worth correcting. “I have sent to Chilworth to telegraph for Dr Frobisher, of Marley. I suppose I did right?”
“Most certainly,” answered Gerald.
“You see I had no one to consult – we must keep it from Captain Chancellor as long as possible, he has had a narrow escape himself – and I feel the responsibility very great. There is no wonder they thought Mrs Chancellor was killed, at first – I almost thought so myself when I first came.”
“Then what is your opinion now?” Gerald ventured to ask, fancying a shadow of hope was inferred by the surgeon’s manner.
“I think there is a slight hope, a very slight one. It will hang on a thread for some days at the best, but she is young and very healthy, though not strong. If she escapes, however, it will be little short of a miracle. Can you tell me how it happened? It seems an extraordinary thing altogether; the ponies were not wild, the coachman tells me, and had been driven several times.”
Gerald told what he knew. The ponies, it appeared, from the boy Timothy’s account, had gone beautifully, “as quiet as quiet,” all the way, till on their return home Beauchamp had stopped for a moment at the lodge to get a light for his cigar. There was no man in the house; only the lodge-keeper’s wife was at home, and she unfortunately, encumbered with a screaming baby who would scarcely allow her to open the gate. Captain Chancellor, to save her trouble, jumped out of the carriage, giving the reins to his wife, and calling to Tim to stand by the ponies’ heads. The boy was on the point of obeying, when his mistress told him to stay where he was; “She could hold them quite well, she said,” was the child’s account, “and she thought they should learn to stand still of their-selves.” It was an unfortunate experiment; the ponies, eager to reach their stable, were irritated by the delay almost within sight of their home. They began to fret and fidget, and Eugenia, by way of soothing them, walked them on slowly a few paces. Then something, what, no one ever knew (possibly only the animals’ own unrestrainable impatience), startled them, and with a desperate plunge they dashed forward just as their master came out of the lodge. There was a rush and a scramble, which Tim could not clearly describe. He remembered seeing Captain Chancellor dart forward, catch hold of the reins on the side nearest to him, and for a moment the boy thought they were saved. Only for a moment, however; it seemed to him his master was dragged a few yards, then kicked violently aside, “all of a heap, he lay without moving,” said the boy. “I thought he was killed, and so did my mistress. She stood up in the carriage and screamed out ‘he is killed, it is my fault,’ and then in another minute she were out too. I don’t know if she throwed herself out or not; the carriage shook so, going so fast and she standing up, she could hardly have kep’ in.” Apparently Tim thought it his duty to throw himself after her. He confessed to the idea having crossed his mind, but remembered no more till he woke up to find himself shaken and confused, though otherwise unhurt, some twenty yards or so from the spot where the first part of the catastrophe had occurred. The ponies, satisfied, seemingly, with their day’s work, pursued their way home, their pace gradually subsiding as they became conscious of being their own masters. They rattled into the courtyard, no one at the first sound of their approach suspecting anything amiss, till the first glance of the empty carriage, and the torn and dragging reins told their own dreadful tale.
Such was the explanation of the accident. Mr Benyon listened in silence, shook his head when Gerald finished speaking, and then went back to his patient again to await the arrival of the greater man from Marley.
Gerald lost no time in sharing with Roma the crumb of comfort he had found.
“It is not quite so bad as I was told at first. She is still alive, but there is very little hope. Will you not come? There is nothing to do. She is perfectly unconscious, but I think it would be less wretched for you than staying up there alone. Tell poor little Floss we hope her aunt will soon be better.”
This was the pencilled note – Roma’s first letter from her lover, a sad enough one truly – which Mr Thurston sent to the poor girl, waiting in all the anguish of well-nigh hopeless anxiety for his report. Within half-an-hour she had joined him, pale, haggard, careworn, aged even it almost seemed, from the bright Roma of an hour or two ago, but calm, self-possessed now, ready for any service that might be required of her. And the sweet summer afternoon deepened into sweeter evening; the moon shone out in cold indifferent loveliness; here and there through the latticed windows of the cottage a star peeped in with its cheery twinkle, and still the dreary vigil went on; still lay on the pallet bed where they had first carried her, the so lately beautiful form of Eugenia Chancellor, beautiful still, but with a death-like beauty that seemed already to separate her from the living breathing beings about her. Only from time to time she moaned faintly, and moved her head from side to side uneasily on the pillow with the sad restlessness so pitiful to see; telling too surely to the experienced eye of invisible injury to the delicate brain.
It was unspeakably painful to witness, knowing that so little could be done to relieve or mitigate the suffering. And not the least painful part of what Roma and her lover had to go through, was the sight of Beauchamp Chancellor’s suffering when the truth as to Eugenia was broken to him. His distress was indescribable; so evidently genuine in its depth that more than once in the course of the next few days Roma found herself asking herself if, after all her many years’ knowledge of him, she had done full justice to his capacity for true and earnest feeling, to the latent possibilities for good in his character below the crust of worldliness and selfishness. Or was it that he had altered and improved, that contact with a nature so fresh and genuine and single-minded as Eugenia’s, had done its work; that notwithstanding her many faults and mistakes, the essential beauty of her sweetness and simplicity had unconsciously asserted itself, had found a little-suspected vein of sympathy in the lower nature of her husband? It almost seemed as if it were so, and if so, oh how sad, how doubly to be regretted, the premature ending of the fair young life so full of promise, so prized and precious.
“She has been so much happier lately, Roma,” poor Beauchamp would say, in his yearning for consolation and sympathy. “She was saying so herself just the other day. I am a coarse selfish creature compared with her. No one but I knows thoroughly how innocent, and true, and unselfish she is, and I took a long time to find it out – I can’t forgive myself when I think of that time – but lately I do think I have got to understand her better, and to make her happier. Don’t you think so, Roma? She said so herself, you know.”
And Roma would agree with him, and say whatever she could think of in the way of comfort – a dozen times, a day, for Beauchamp followed her about in a touchingly helpless, dependent sort of manner, as if in her presence alone he found his anxiety endurable. A dozen times a day, too, he would appeal to whichever doctor was on the spot, almost entreating for a word of hope or comfort. “I fancy she is lying more quietly just now,” he would say; or, “Don’t you think the expression of her face is calmer, more like itself?”
It was very hard to be unable to agree with him, but weary days, and still wearier nights, went by before either doctors or friends thought it would be any but cruel kindness to allow him to hope. At last, however – a long of coming “at last” it was – there crept into sight the first faint flutter of improvement; slowly, very slowly, life and consciousness returned to the all but dying wife, and after a new phase of anxiety, scarcely less trying than the first, the verdict was pronounced, “There is hope – the greatest danger to be apprehended in the way of recovery has been safely past – there is every reasonable ground for hope.” And then, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, Eugenia crept back to her place in the world, to the place which it had seemed all but certain would be vacant for evermore. Her extreme patience, her tranquil gentleness, had much to do with her recovery, said the authorities. And those who knew her best – Gerald and Roma, and Sydney when she came – knew her excitable impetuosity, her impatience of inaction, marvelled somewhat at this new revelation of her character.
“You are so good, Eugenia,” said Roma, one day when she was alone with the patient, still forced to lie motionless and unemployed, forbidden even to use her eyes or to talk much. “I cannot think how you have learnt to bear these long weeks of suffering, or at least tedium, so cheerfully.”
Eugenia drew her friend’s head down close beside her on her pillow. “Don’t you see, dear Roma,” she whispered, “how easy it is for me to be patient now that I am so happy? There has not been any suffering too much for me; I am so selfish that I cannot even regret the anxiety you all went through about me, for think what it has brought me – as nothing else could have done – the full knowledge of Beauchamp’s love. Never, since the dreadful day when first I doubted it, have I felt so assured of it as since this accident; never, since the passing away of my unreal, unreasonable dreams, has life looked so sweet to me as now, for though I know now that troubles, and disappointment, and failure must come; though I dare say I shall often feel them bitterly and exaggeratedly, still I can never again feel hopeless or heartless – I can never feel that my life has no value or object.”
Roma kissed her silently, but did not speak. In a minute or two Eugenia spoke again —
“And if anything was wanting to make me still happier, to make me more grateful for this new return to life, it is what you have told me about yourself and Gerald,” she said affectionately. “You are both so wise and good, you have both been so wise and good in what you have done for me, that I cannot tell you how happy I am in your happiness. Happiness actually in your grasp, with real root and foundation. You will not have to travel to it through vanished illusions as I did;” she sighed a little. “But I was hot-headed, and wilful, and selfish, and so I blinded myself. You have always thought of others more than of yourself, Roma. You have been reasonable and patient all your life. You deserve to step straight into happiness.”
“No I don’t, Eugenia. No one but I myself knows how little I deserve it,” whispered Roma. But she said no more, and Eugenia accepted her words simply as the expression of her womanly humility.
“Her engagement to Gerald has improved her in the only respect improvement in her – in my eyes at least – was possible,” thought Eugenia. “It has softened her so wonderfully. No one could call her too self-confident or decided in manner now.” But Roma in her own heart felt herself more changed than others suspected.
“I prided myself on my high principle and superiority to low influences, jealousy and selfishness, and all such unworthy feelings. And I fancied, too, I had so much self-command, even in thought,” she said to her lover, sadly, when, after Eugenia was fairly out of danger, she confessed to him the cruel storm of feeling, the anguish of self-reproach through which she had passed the day of the accident; “and see what I am in reality! Imagine the horrible, the repulsive selfishness of my feeling as I did at such a time, even for an instant.”
“But it was partly my fault,” said Gerald. “I had expressed myself badly. Don’t you see how it was? I was so afraid of deceiving you in any way, of in the least concealing from you what I had felt for another woman (though indeed you knew it already) that I misrepresented it. I mixed up past and present. Thinking it over since, indeed, I wonder you didn’t refuse to have anything to say to me. I don’t feel proud of my way of expressing myself that afternoon, I assure you.”
“I told you at the time you very nearly made me propose to you,” said Roma, half laughing in spite of her seriousness.
“But you misunderstood me, you did indeed,” he persisted. “I hardly like to talk about it, but to speak plainly, my love for Eugenia died, completely and for ever, the day I first learnt to think of her as the wife, the promised or actual wife – it all seemed one to me – of another. Had there been no other in the question, had it been a simple question of winning her by long devotion to care for me, I don’t say what limits there would have been to my perseverance. But as it was – ”
“Don’t explain,” interrupted Roma. “I don’t want you to explain. It can’t make me feel myself the least bit less despicable. I that have always despised other women so for being run away with by their feelings, even good ones. Oh, Gerald, are you sure you wouldn’t rather give me up now you know how bad I am?”
He smiled.
“Do you remember how I offended you long, long ago,” he said, “by persisting that you were no judge of your own character? Even then, at first sight, I doubted your belonging to the easy-going, prosaic order of beings you declared yourself to be one of. There are doubtless in all of us,” he went on more gravely, after a little pause, “possibilities of evil, of selfishness – the root of it all, I suppose, but I am no metaphysician – which we may well tremble to recognise. And in the lurid light of tempests of feeling, these are apt to show themselves in exaggerated blackness and enormity. But you cannot think, Roma, that I would love you less for seeing more of the depth of your character, the depth, and the strength, and the truth of it?” he added, tenderly.
So Roma was comforted. And Eugenia’s prediction that her two friends would “step straight into happiness,” was fulfilled as thoroughly as any prophecy of the kind can be fulfilled in a world where so very many things are crooked, more crooked than needs be, because so very few people have faith and patience sufficient to await the slow-coming, far-off, eventual “making straight” – faith and patience enough to work cheerily meanwhile in their own corner of the great vineyard. For though the tools be poor and imperfect, the soil hard, the light dim and fitful, oftentimes indeed delusive, the results of the labour all but invisible, what then?
“Is not our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days?”
The End.