'Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now.'
She is gone--passed out into the blackness of the winter evening--gone before Peggy, paralysed, half-stunned as she is, can arrest her. Was she ever here? The doubt flashes into the girl's mind. Of late, in her long vigils, she has seemed to be parted from the spirit-world by but the consistency of a spider's web. Has that fine partition been broken down? Has she been seeing visions, and dreaming dreams? Did that crape-gowned figure ever stand really in the body beside the table? Did she herself ever look across the lamplight into the still and bottomless despair of its eyes? Did it really give her Franky's knife, and tell her--oh no, it is incredible! God can never have granted to her--to her of all people, sunk so low as she is, far beyond the reach of any joy to touch--to hear such things as her ears seem to have heard. She looks wildly round the room.
'It was not true!' she says out loud; 'it was hallucination. It comes of sleeping so little.'
And yet it must be true, too; for here, clasped in her hand, is the poor knife, the object of the mother's journey. If that be real, then must all the rest be real too. As the splendour of this inference breaks in dazzling overpowering light upon her soul, she sinks on her knees beside the table, lays down her head upon it at the same spot where Talbot had laid his head in his heart-break five months ago, while she had stood over him pronouncing her unjust and inexorable sentence.
'Oh, love, love!' she sighs out; 'dear love! poor love! forgive me! come back to me! how could I tell?'
And then she lifts her face up to him, as if he were there; her face irradiated with a joy like that of morning. Yes, though Prue is dying upstairs, though Franky's pathetic bequest is still held between her fingers, her heart is leaping. Has not one of her dead been given back to her? Why, then, shall they not all? In that moment of supreme elation, it seems to her as if all things were possible; it seems to her as if Prue must get well, as if all her other dead joys must come crowding back to welcome that exceeding great one, that has flown to her with widespread arms out of the night of winter and despair. Prue will get well. God will make her well. With God all things are possible. There is a smile of wet radiance on her pale lips, and in her tired eyes; and she is repeating over and over again to herself, as if by repetition she would ensure their fulfilment, these lovely promises, when the door opens and Sarah looks in.
'If you please, 'm, could you come back to Miss Prue?'
'Oh yes, this minute--this minute! How has she been? how is she? Better? a little better?'
There must be something strange about her own appearance, for her servant is looking at her in undisguised amazement.
'Better, 'm?' she repeats in a wondering key; 'whatever should make you think she was better? She has had a bad bout of coughing since you left, and it has tired her out, so that it quite frightened me. That was partly why I came for you.'
Before her sentence is ended Peggy is upstairs again and at her sister's bedside; the transfiguration all dead out of her face.
'You have been a long time away,' says the sick girl feebly, and with a little of her old querulousness; 'why did you go?'
'I will not go again, darling.'
'But why did you go?' repeats the other with the pertinacity of sickness; 'where have you been?'
Margaret hesitates a moment; then:
'I have been with Franky Harborough's mother,' she answers gently, the tears rushing afresh to her eyes, as she holds out the legacy of the dead child before the faint eyes of the dying one; 'he sent me his knife; his mother brought it me.'
'Poor Franky!' says Prue softly, but she does not manifest any curiosity. She only turns her wan face upon the pillow, and closes her eyes. In the watches of the night, however, she recurs more than once to the subject, waking up to cry, 'Poor Franky!' and to say, 'How sad it is when young people die!'
And Peggy acquiesces.
The tired servants have gone to bed. They, too, have had their share of watching on former nights. Peggy keeps her vigil alone. In the intense silence of the dark, in the intense silence of the little lonely country house standing fog-muffled through the enormous November night, beside its unfrequented country road, she keeps her vigil alone. Not even an owl calls from the tree-tops, nor does a star look through the murk. In her night-watching of late she has been tormented with a cruel over-mastering drowsiness, which has filled her with a remorse such as those must have felt to whom it was said, 'What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?' but against which offended nature, being yet stronger than she, she has once and again contended in vain.
To-night, however, through all the hours of her vigil, she is broadly, acutely awake. Awake! Yes; but is she sane? That is the question that over and over again she puts to herself. If she be, what are these voices that keep calling to her out of the noisy silence? What are these faces that are becking and mowing at her? What are these flashes of light, dreader than any darkness--flashes that have the blasphemy to look like joy--that dart now and again across the sorrow-struck confusion of her soul? How dare they come? God-sent, or devil-sent; messengers from heaven, or fiends from hell, how dare they come? They shall not, shall not thrust themselves between her and her Prue.
When the tarrying dawn comes, it finds her almost as exhausted as it does her whose stock of mornings and evenings has so nigh run out. It has come, that tarrying dawn; and Prue, waking up with a start, as by some infallible instinct she always does as soon as the east has sent her first weak arrows against the great target of the dark, feebly calls to her sister to bring her her card that she may erase the one more parted day from the calendar. But when Peggy's strong and tender arms have propped her up, when Peggy's fond hand has put the pen into hers it escapes from her disobedient fingers.
'I do not know what has come to me,' she says with her little smile; 'but you must do it for me--that will be just as well, will not it? You do not think,' with an anxious catch in her voice, 'that it is ill-luck your doing it this once, instead of me? If you think so, I will try again.'
As morning advances there comes a slight renewal of strength--a slight revival to the dying girl. The servants and the doctor--the kind doctor who still makes a feint of prescribing--urge upon Margaret to take advantage of this slight amendment to snatch an hour or two of sleep; but she pushes away their advice almost rudely. Is not the text still ringing in her ears, 'What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?' And Prue, as it turns out, needs her more to-day than most days. For she is less drowsy and lethargic than she has been of late, able even to plan a new arrangement of all Freddy's presents, a new grouping round her of his photographs.
'Had ever any one so many portraits of the same person?' she says with a tiny white smile, looking contentedly at them, when the new arrangement has been effected. 'I am very silly about him; but he is silly about me too, is not he?' with a look of intensely wistful asking in her blue eyes.
When evening draws on, she begins to grow heavy again.
When evening draws on! Can it be again approaching? already again approaching--the grisly nightmare night? Why, it seems as if not more than half an hour had elapsed since day had begun to deal out her avaricious dole of light! and now she is again withdrawing it. The night is approaching. The night has approached. The night is here, in dominant black supremacy. And again Peggy watches. It is not the fault of the servants that she does so. At any crisis--a sickness, a catastrophe, a death--servants are almost always kind; and Margaret's are more than willing to shorten or forego their rest in order to share with her, or replace her in her vigil. But she dismisses their offers promptly, yet with a resolution that shows that it would be vain to press them. She will call them if there is any need. They go reluctantly, and once again night settles down upon the sad little Red House.
The drowsiness that used to frighten Margaret with its threatened mastery she has no longer any need to keep at bay. On the contrary, the preternatural wakefulness which had been with her all last night is with her still. With her, too, is the thundering silence, beating in her ear like a loud drum. All her last night's enemies are here again--all but one, the worst. She has no longer to contend with those flashes of dreadful incongruous joy. They at least are gone--extinct, dead! He that had called them forth is massed in her despair with her other dead. They are all gone irrevocably. The only difference is that God took the others, and she herself has thrown him away. But they are all equally gone--gone! If it were not so, if she had any one left, would she be kneeling here, in this overpowering loneliness, watching Prue go, and asking God over and over again, in the same stupid agonised words, to let her go easily?
Yes, it has come to this. We begin by asking such great things for our beloved--honour, and wisdom, and long life, and riches; and we end in this, 'Give them a short agony, an easy passing!' Is it a sign that God has heard her prayer, that as the hours go by Prue begins to talk out loud, with little laughs between? to talk--not of her cough, and her physic, and her short breath--but of gay and lovely things. She is talking to one who is not here, of fair sights that are not before her dying eyes.
Peggy holds her breath to listen. She is sitting in the garden with Freddy. She is riding with him through the woods. From what she says, it must be springtime. What a sheet of harebells! Never any May that she remembers have they been so many before! And the birds! how loudly they are singing! She would like to know the note of each, but she is so stupid, he must teach her!
A great dry sob breaks from the listener's breast.
'Oh, Prue, Prue!' she moans; 'take me with you! Let me, too, see the flowers and hear the birds!'
But Prue does not heed. She babbles happily on. By and by her wanderings die down into a sort of semi-stupor, that is neither sleep nor waking. The silence that her voice had broken is not again wholly restored. It is exchanged for those indefinite noises of the night which, to timid souls, seem to share the dominion of terror with its stillness. There are definite noises too. A mouse gnaws behind the wainscot; the wind has risen, not into a loud and roaring storm, but into a plaintive piping and muttering and whistling. A loose rose-branch that in summer sends its petals flying in through Prue's casement to her feet, is now tapping pertinaciously on the pane. It seems as if it would not take 'No' for answer, as if it were crying to her with summoning fingers, 'Come, come! it is time!'
The night has reached the dreariest of her little hours, that one that seems equally remote from the comfortable shores of the gone day and the coming one. The clocks have just struck two, and Peggy kneels on, still reiterating that monotonous prayer that God will take her Prue gently. To her ears, though not to her senses, come the noises of the night; come also noises that do not rightly belong to the province of the night, that are rather akin to the noises of the day: the sound, for instance, of wheels outside upon the lonely road, a sound that does not die away, gradually muffled and fading into the distance, but that ceases suddenly on the air--ceases, only to be succeeded by the noise of a vague, subdued stir in the house itself. But Peggy kneels on. The only noise that she heeds is that of the beckoning rose-branch that calls continually, 'Come, come!'
She has buried her face in the bed-clothes, praying always; and as she lifts it again she becomes aware that in the doorway, left ajar to give Prue more air and ease in breathing, some one is standing, some one standing at the dead of the night, looking in upon her. But still she kneels on. She is quite past fear. Is she wandering, like Prue? Is it some heavenly messenger that has come out of pure pity to her help? If it be so, it wears the homely human form, the form of one with whom she once sat under a hawthorn bower, with her happy head upon his breast.
As her solemn, haggard eyes meet his, he advances into the room, and kneels down beside her. They exchange no word. Their hands meet in no greeting; only they kneel side by side, until the morning. And at morning, when the first dawn-streak makes gray the chinks of the window-shutters, Prue, true to her infallible instinct, wakes up out of her trance; and, opening her eyes, cries with a loud, clear voice:
'Is it morning? Then there is another day gone. Forty days gone--forty days!' and so, lifting her face to Peggy to be kissed, as she has done all her life, before addressing herself to sleep, she closes her eyes, and turns her face on the pillow with a satisfied sigh; and on that satisfied sigh her soul slips away.
Speak softly, for Prue is asleep--asleep as Franky Harborough sleeps, as all they sleep, the time of whose waking is the secret of the Lord God Omnipotent.
Her little world have long prophesied that Prue would die, and now she is dead--dead, and, restless as she was, laid to rest in her moss-lined grave. With the live green moss environing her, with the bride-white flowers enwrapping her from dreamless head to foot, she has gone--gone from sofa and settle and garden--gone soon from everywhere, save from Peggy's heart. And he who is the alone lord and owner of that great heart does not grudge its place to the poor little figure seated for ever by that warm fireside; and if, as time goes on, he knows that the Prue so perennially enthroned there--the Prue of whom in after-days Peggy's children are taught to talk with lowered voices, as of some thing too sweet and sacred for common speech--is not the real Prue who fretted and repined, and loved to madness here on earth, he does not own it even to himself.
Postscript.--About six months after the death of Prue Lambton, the attention of the readers of one of the graver monthlies was arrested by the appearance in its pages of a short ode, the melody of whose versification, the delicate aroma of its fancy, the quaint beauty of its imagery, and the truth and freshness of its feeling, called to their minds the best of the Elizabethan lyrics. It was anonymous, and was addressed 'To Prue in Heaven.'
