ALL ALONG THE RIVER (continued 8)

He had been reading to Isola nearly all day. He was reading to himself now, trying to forget his own grief in the consideration of a leading article which prophecied a European war, and the ultimate extinction of English influence in continental politics.

There was perfect stillness in the room. Isola had been lying with closed eyes a little time before, and he fancied that she was sleeping.

The silence had lasted for nearly an hour, broken only by the shriek of the wind, and by the chiming of the quarters from the Church of La Trinità de’ Monti, when Colonel Disney was startled by his wife’s hand clutching his arm, and his wife’s agitated whisper sounding close to his ear.

“Martin! Did you see him?”

She had lifted herself into a sitting position, she who had not been able to sit up for many days past.

The hectic bloom had faded from her cheeks and left them ashy pale. Her eyes seemed almost starting from her head, straining their gaze as if to penetrate the deepening shadows on the landing beyond the half-open door.

“My love, you have been dreaming,” said Disney, soothing her with womanly gentleness. “Lie down again, my poor dear. See, let me arrange the pillows and make you quite comfortable.”

“No, no! I was not dreaming. I have not been asleep. He was there. I saw him as plainly as I see you. He pushed the door a little further open and looked in at me. I saw his face in the lamplight, very pale.”

Disney glanced at the door involuntarily. Yes, the aperture was certainly wider than when he looked at it last; just as if some one’s hand had pushed the door a little further back. The hand of the wind, no doubt.

“My dear girl, believe me, you were dreaming. No one could have approached that doorway without my hearing them.”

“I have been lying awake thinking all the time you have been reading your paper, Martin. I never had less inclination to sleep. I know that he was there looking in at me, with a smile upon his pale face. But he has gone. Thank God, he has gone! Only I can’t help wondering how he came there, without our hearing his step upon the stone stair.”

“Who was it, Isola?”

He knew what the answer would be. He thought her mind was wandering, and he knew there was only one image which could so agitate her.

“Lostwithiel.”

“A delusion, Isa. Lord Lostwithiel is far away from Rome. Come, dear love, let me read to you again, and let us have our good Tabitha in to cheer you with a cup of tea, and to brighten up the room a little. We have been growing low-spirited under the influence of the gloomy weather.”

He went out of the room on pretence of summoning Tabitha, and having sent her to watch beside his wife, he ran quickly downstairs to find out if the street door were open or closed. The door was shut and bolted. The servants on the ground floor had not opened the door to any one after five o’clock. There was no possibility of any stranger having entered the house since that hour.

The end came that night, with an appalling suddenness. Isola had refused to be carried back to her bedroom at the usual time. She seemed to have a horror of going back to that room, as if the shadows lurking there were full of fear. Even Father Rodwell’s presence, which generally had a soothing effect upon her nerves and spirits, failed to comfort her to-night. She refused to lie in her usual position, and insisted upon sitting up, supported by pillows, facing the doorway at which her fancy had evoked Lostwithiel’s image. She would not allow the door to be shut, and there was the same strained look in her too brilliant eyes all the evening.

Father Rodwell read aloud to her, continuing a history of St. Cecilia, in which she had been warmly interested; but to-night he could see that her thoughts were not with the book. He read on all the same, hoping that the sound of his voice might lull her to sleep. The wind had gone down as the night advanced, and the stars were shining in the strip of sky above the Pincian Gardens. Colonel Disney was pacing up and down the loggia, smoking his pipe in the cool darkness—full of saddest apprehensions.

Her mind had been wandering, surely, when she had that fancy about Lostwithiel, he told himself. It was something more than a dream. And then he remembered those long nights of delirium after her boy was born—and above all, that one night, when she had fancied herself at sea in a storm, when she had tried to fling herself overboard. He knew now what scene she had re-acted in that delirium, what the vision was which a mind distraught had conjured out of empty darkness.

The priest left them before eleven o’clock, and Martin Disney sat with his wife till long after midnight—Tabitha waiting quietly in the next room—before he could persuade her to go to bed. Isola was more wakeful than usual—though her slumbers had been much broken of late—and there was a restlessness about her which impressed her husband as a sign of evil.

“Is the storm over?” she asked, by-and-by, with her face turned towards the loggia and the starlight above the garden.

“Yes, dearest, all is calm now.”

“And the boy?” she said, suddenly looking up at the ceiling above which the child slept with his nurse. “He is asleep, of course.”

“I hope so. I went upstairs at nine o’clock, while Father Rodwell was reading to you, and gave him my goodnight kiss. He was fast asleep.”

“I wonder whether he will ever think of me when he is a man?” she said musingly.

“Can you doubt that? You will be his most sacred memory.”

“Ah,” she replied, “he will never know——”

The sentence remained unfinished.

“Will you carry me to my bed, Martin? The room begins to grow dark,” she whispered faintly. “I can hardly see your face.”

He lifted the wasted form in his arms, and carried her with tenderest care into the next room, and to the pure white bed which had been made ready for her, the long net curtains parted, the coverlet turned down. He laid her there, as he had done many a night during that slow and monotonous journey towards the grave; but her gentle acknowledgment of his carefulness was wanting to-night. Her head sank upon the pillow, her pale lips parted with a fluttering sigh, and all was still.

This was how the end came—suddenly, painlessly. She died like an infant falling asleep.

Colonel Disney laid his wife in the place she had loved, the cemetery under the shadow of the old Roman wall, in a verdant corner near Shelley’s grave.

Burial follows death with dreadful swiftness in that southern land, and the earth closed over Isola before noon of the day after her death.

Martin Disney waited to see the new-made grave covered with summer’s loveliest blossoms before he left the cemetery and went back to the house to which he had taken his fading wife in the radiant Italian springtime. He paced the desolate rooms, and wandered in and out between the drawing-room and the sunny bedroom, with its snowy curtained bed, and looked at this object and that with tear-dimmed eyes and an aching heart.

She was gone. That page of his life was closed for ever. And now he had but one purpose and one desire—to settle his account with the scoundrel who had destroyed her. He had waited till she was at rest: and now the long agony of waiting was over. Nothing could touch her more; and he was free to bring her seducer to book.

He had telegraphed in the morning to Captain Hulbert at Venice, but there had been no reply so far; and he could only suppose that Allegra and her husband had left the city upon one of those excursions which his sister had described to him as diversifying their quiet life in their palace on the grand canal. He had not been at home long, and his tired eyes were still dazed and blinded by the flood of sunlight which the servants had let in upon the rooms after the funeral, when a telegram was brought to him.

It was from Brindisi.

“The Eurydice went down with all hands last night, off Smyrna. My brother was on board. I am on my way to Greece. If you can be spared go to Allegra.—Hulbert.”

Martin Disney knew later that it was between eight and nine o’clock that the Eurydice struck upon a rock, and every soul on board her perished.

The boy and his nurse went back to Trelasco under Tabitha’s escort, and they were followed to Cornwall soon afterwards by the new Lord Lostwithiel and his wife, who established themselves at the Mount, to the great satisfaction of the neighbourhood, where it was felt that the local nobleman had again become a permanent institution. Allegra and her husband took Martin Disney’s son under their protection in the absence of his father, who carried a heavy heart back to the jungle and the tent, trying to find distraction and forgetfulness in the pursuit of big game, and who did not revisit the Angler’s Nest till two years after his wife’s death, when he returned to live a tranquil life among the books in the library which he had built for himself, and to watch the growth of his son, whose every look and tone recalled the image of his dead wife. Sometimes, on drowsy summer afternoons, smoking his pipe under the tulip tree, while the Fowey river rippled by in the sunshine, it seemed to him as if Isola’s pensive loveliness, and the years that he had lived with her, and the tears that he had shed for her, and the infinite pity which had blotted out all sense of his deep wrong, were only the transient phases of a long sad dream—the dream of a love that never was returned.

“And yet, and yet,” he said to himself, after lengthened meditation, with unseeing eyes fixed upon the movement of the tide, “I think she loved me. I think her heart was mine from the hour her tears welcomed me back to this house, until her last sigh. God help all young wives whom their husbands leave alone in their youth and beauty to stand or fall in the hour of temptation!”

Idly exploring the contents of the secretaire in the drawing-room one day, Martin Disney found the telegraphic message which his wife had written—and left unsent—before the Hunt Ball.

THE END.

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1. LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET. 2. HENRY DUNBAR. 3. ELEANOR’S VICTORY. 4. AURORA FLOYD. 5. JOHN MARCHMONT’S [LEGACY.] 6. THE DOCTOR’S WIFE. 7. ONLY A CLOD. 8. SIR JASPER’S TENANT. 9. TRAIL OF THE SERPENT. 10. LADY’S MILE. 11. LADY LISLE. 12. CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE. 13. BIRDS OF PREY. 14. CHARLOTTE’S INHERITANCE. 15. RUPERT GODWIN. 16. RUN TO EARTH. 17. DEAD SEA FRUIT. 18. RALPH THE BAILIFF. 19. FENTON’S QUEST. 20. LOVELS OF ARDEN. 21. ROBERT AINSLEIGH. 22. TO THE BITTER END. 23. MILLY DARRELL. 24. STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS. 25. LUCIUS DAVOREN. 26. TAKEN AT THE FLOOD. 27. LOST FOR LOVE. 28. A STRANGE WORLD. 29. HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE. 30. DEAD MEN’S SHOES. 31. JOSHUA HAGGARD. 32. WEAVERS AND WEFT. 33. AN OPEN VERDICT. 34. VIXEN. 35. THE CLOVEN FOOT. 36. THE STORY OF BARBARA. 37. JUST AS I AM. 38. ASPHODEL. 39. MOUNT ROYAL. 40. THE GOLDEN CALF. 41. PHANTOM FORTUNE. 42. FLOWER AND WEED. 43. ISHMAEL. 44. WYLLARD’S WEIRD. 45. UNDER THE RED FLAG. 46. ONE THING NEEDFUL. 47. MOHAWKS. 48. LIKE AND UNLIKE. 49. THE FATAL THREE. 50. THE DAY WILL COME. 51. ONE LIFE ONE LOVE. 52. GERARD; or, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil. 53. THE VENETIANS. 54. ALL ALONG THE RIVER. 55. THOU ART THE MAN. 56. SONS OF FIRE.

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