CHAPTER VI.

“AH! PITY! THE LILY IS WITHERED.”

George Greswold left the dairy-garden like a man stricken to death. He felt as if the hand of Fate were on him. It was not his fault that this evil had come upon him, that these poor people whom he had tried to help suffered by his bounty, and were perhaps to die for it. He had done all that human foresight could do; but the blind folly of his servants had stultified his efforts. Nothing in a London slum could have been worse than this evil which had come about in a gentleman’s ornamental dairy, upon premises where money had been lavished to secure the perfection of scientific sanitation.

Mr. Porter murmured some hopeful remark as they went back to the house.

“Don’t talk about it, Porter,” Greswold answered impatiently; “nothing could be worse—nothing. Do all you can for these poor people—your uttermost, mind, your uttermost. Spare neither time nor money. Save them, if you can.”

“You may be assured I shall do my best. There are only three or four very bad cases.”

“Three or four! My God, how horrible! Three or four people murdered by the idiocy of my servants.”

“Joe Stanning—not much chance for him, I’m afraid—and Polly Rainbow.”

“Polly—poor pretty little Polly! O Porter, you _must_ save her! You must perform a miracle, man. That is what genius means in a doctor. The man of genius does something that all other doctors have pronounced impossible. You will have Hutchinson over to-morrow. He may be able to help you.”

“If she live till to-morrow. I’m afraid it’s a question of a few hours.”

George Greswold groaned aloud.

“And my daughter has been drinking the same tainted milk. Will she be stricken, do you think?” he asked, with an awful calmness.

“God forbid! Lola has such a fine constitution and the antecedent circumstances are different. I’ll go and have a look at my patients, and come back to you late in the evening with the last news.”

They parted by a little gate at the corner of a thick yew hedge, which admitted Mr. Greswold into his wife’s flower-garden: a very old garden, which had been the care and delight of many generations; a large square garden, with broad flower-beds on each side, a stone sundial in the centre of a grass-plot, and a buttressed wall at the end, a massive old wall of vermilion brickwork, honeycombed by the decay of centuries, against which a double rank of hollyhocks made a particoloured screen, while flaunting dragon’s-mouth and yellow stonecrop made a flame of colour on the top.

There was an old stone summer-house in each angle of that end wall, temples open to the sun and air, and raised upon three marble steps, stained with moss and lichen.

Charming as these antique retreats were to muse or read in, Mildred Greswold preferred taking tea on the lawn, in the shadow of the two old cedars. She was sitting in a low garden-chair, with a Japanese tea-table at her side, and a volume of Robertson’s sermons on her lap.

It was a rule of life at Enderby Manor that only books of pious tendency should be read on Sundays. The Sunday library was varied and well chosen. Nobody ever found the books dull or the day too long. The dedication of that one day in seven to godliness and good works had never been an oppression to Mildred Greswold.

She remembered her mother’s Sundays—days of hasty church, and slow elaborate dressing for afternoon or evening gaieties; days of church parade and much praise of other people’s gowns and depreciation of other people’s conduct; days of gadding about and running from place to place; Sunday luncheons, Sunday musical parties, Sunday expeditions up the river, Sunday in the studios, Sunday at Richmond or Greenwich. Mrs. Greswold remembered the fussy emptiness of that fashionable Sunday, and preferred sermons and tranquil solitude in the manor gardens.

Solitude meant a trinity of domestic love. Husband, wife, and daughter spent their Sundays together. Those were blessed days for the wife and daughter, since there were no business engagements, no quarter-sessions, or interviews with the bailiff, or letter-writing, to rob them of the society they both loved best in the world. George Greswold devoted his Sundays entirely to his Creator and his home.

“Where is Lola?” he asked, surprised to find his wife alone at this hour.

“She has a slight headache, and I persuaded her to lie down for an hour or so.”

The father’s face blanched. A word was enough in his overwrought condition.

“Porter must see her,” he said; “and I have just let him leave me. I’ll send some one after him.”

“My dear George, it is nothing; only one of her usual headaches.”

“You are sure she was not feverish?”

“I think not. It never occurred to me. She has often complained of headache since she began to grow so fast.”

“Yes, she has shot up like a tall white lily—my lily!” murmured the father tenderly.

He sank into a chair, feeling helpless, hopeless almost, under that overpowering sense of fatality—of undeserved evil.

“Dear George, you look so ill this afternoon,” said his wife, with tender anxiety, laying her hand on his shoulder, and looking earnestly at him, as he sat there in a downcast attitude, his arms hanging loosely, his eyes bent upon the ground. “I’m afraid the heat has overcome you.”

“Yes, it has been very hot. Do me a favour, Mildred. Go into the house, and send somebody to find Porter. He was going the round of the cottages where there are sick people. He can easily be found. I want him to see Lola, at once.”

“I’ll send after him, George; but, indeed, I don’t see any need for a doctor. Lola is so strong; her headaches pass like summer clouds. O George, you don’t think that _she_ is going to have fever, like the cottagers!” cried Mildred, full of a sudden terror.

“No, no; of course not. Why should she have the fever? But Porter might as well see her at once—at once. I hate delay in such cases.”

His wife hurried away without a word. He had imbued her with all his own fears.

He sat in the garden, just as she had left him, motionless, benumbed with sorrow. There might, indeed, be no ground for this chilling fear; others might die, and his beloved might still go unscathed. But she had been subjected to the same poison, and at any moment the same symptoms might show themselves. For the next week or ten days he must be haunted by a hideous spectre. He would make haste to get his dearest one away to the strong fresh mountain air, to the salt breath of the German Ocean; but if the poison had already tainted that young life, mountain and sea could not save her from the fever. She must pass through the furnace, as those others were passing.

“Poor little Polly Rainbow! The only child of a widow; the only one; like mine,” he said to himself.

He sat in the garden till dusk, brooding, praying dumbly, unutterably sad. The image of the widow of Nain was in his mind while he sat there. The humble funeral train, the mourning mother, and that divine face shining out of the little group of peasant faces, radiant with intellect and faith—among them, but not of them—and the uplifted hand beckoning the dead man from the bier.

“The age of miracles is past,” he thought: “there is no Saviour in the land to help _me_! In my day of darkness Heaven made no sign. I was left to suffer as the worms suffer under the ploughshare, and to wriggle back to life as best I could, like them.”

* * * * *

It was growing towards the summer darkness when he rose and went into the house, where he questioned the butler, whom he met in the hall. Mr. Porter had been brought back, and had seen Miss Greswold. He had found her slightly feverish, and had ordered her to go to bed. Mrs. Greswold was sitting with her. Did Dr. Porter seem anxious? No, not at all anxious; but he was going to send Miss Laura some medicine before bedtime.

It was after nine now, but Greswold could not stay in the house. He wanted to know how it fared with his sick tenantry—most of all with the little flaxen-haired girl he had so often noticed of late.

He went out into the road that led to the village, a scattered colony, a cottage here and there, or a cluster of cottages and gardens on a bit of rising ground above the road. There was a common a little way from the Manor, a picturesque, irregular expanse of hollows and hillocks, skirted by a few cottages, and with a fir plantation shielding it from the north. Mrs. Rainbow’s cottage stood between the common and the fir-wood, an old half-timbered cottage, very low, with a bedroom in the roof, and a curious dormer-window, with a thatched arch projecting above the lattice, like an overhanging eyebrow. The little garden was aflame with scarlet bean-blossom, roses, and geraniums, and the perfume of sweet-peas filled the air.

Greswold heard the doctor talking in the upper chamber as he stood by the gate. The deep, grave tones were audible in the evening stillness, and there was another sound that chilled the Squire’s heart: the sound of a woman’s suppressed weeping.

He waited at the gate. He had not the nerve to go into the cottage and face that sorrowing widow. It seemed to him as if the child’s peril were his fault. It was not enough that he had taken all reasonable precautions. He ought to have foreseen the idiocy of his servants. He ought to have been more on the alert to prevent evil.

The great round moon came slowly up out of a cluster of Scotch firs. How black the branches looked against that red light! Slowly, slowly gliding upward in a slanting line, the moon stole at the back of those black branches, and climbed into the open sky.

How often Lola had watched such a moonrise at his side, and with what keen eyes she had noted the beauty of the spectacle! It was not that he had trained her to observe and to feel the loveliness of nature. With her that feeling had been an instinct, born with her, going before the wisdom of maturity, the cultivated taste of travelled experience.

To-night she was lying in her darkened room, the poor head heavy and painful on the pillow. She would not see the moon rising slowly yonder in that cloudless sky.

“No matter; she will see it to-morrow, I hope,” he said to himself, trying to be cheerful. “I am a morbid fool to torment myself; she has been subject to headaches of late. Mildred is right.”

And then he remembered that death and sorrow were near—close to him as he stood there watching the moon. He remembered poor little Polly Rainbow, and desponded again.

A woman’s agonised cry broke the soft summer stillness, and pierced George Greswold’s heart.

“The child is dead!” he thought.

Yes, poor little Polly was gone. The widow came out to the gate presently, sobbing piteously, and clasped Mr. Greswold’s hand and cried over it, broken down by her despair, leaning against the gate-post, as if her limbs had lost the power to bear her up.

“O, sir, she was my all!” she sobbed; “she was my all!”

She could say no more than this, but kept repeating it again and again. “She was all I had in the world; the only thing I cared for.”

George Greswold touched her shoulder with protecting gentleness. There was not a peasant in the village for whom he had not infinite tenderness—pitying their infirmities, forgiving their errors, inexhaustible in benevolence towards them all. He had set himself to make his dependents happy as the first duty of his position. And yet he had done them evil unwittingly. He had cost this poor widow her dearest treasure—her one ewe lamb.

“Bear up, if you can, my good soul,” he said; “I know that it is hard.”

“Ah, sir, you’d know it better if it was your young lady that was stricken down!” exclaimed the widow bitterly; and the Squire walked away from the cottage-gate without another word.

Yes, he would know it better then. His heart was heavy enough now. What would it be like if _she_ were smitten?

* * * * *

She was much the same next day: languid, with an aching head and some fever. She was not very feverish. On the whole, the doctor was hopeful, or he pretended to be so. He could give no positive opinion yet, nor could Dr. Hutchinson. They were both agreed upon that point; and they were agreed that the polluted water in the garden well had been the cause of the village epidemic. Analysis had shown that it was charged with poisonous gas.

Mr. Greswold hastened his preparations for the journey to Scotland with a feverish eagerness. He wrote to engage a sleeping-carriage on the Great Northern. They were to travel on Thursday, leaving home before noon, dining in town, and starting for the North in the evening. If Lola’s illness were indeed the slight indisposition which everybody hoped it was, she might be quite able to travel on Thursday, and the change of air and the movement would do her good.

“She is always so well in Scotland,” said her father.

No, there did not seem much amiss with her. She was very sweet, and even cheerful, when her father went into her room to sit beside her bed for a quarter of an hour or so. The doctors had ordered that she should be kept very quiet, and a hospital nurse had been fetched from Salisbury to sit up at night with her. There was no necessity for such care, but it was well to do even a little too much where so cherished a life was at stake. People had but to look at the father’s face to know how precious that frail existence was to him. Nor was it less dear to the mother; but she seemed less apprehensive, less bowed down by gloomy forebodings.

Yes, Lola was quite cheerful for those few minutes in which her father sat by her side. The strength of her love overcame her weakness. She forgot the pain in her head, the weariness of her limbs, while he was there. She questioned him about the villagers.

“How is little Polly going on?” she asked.

He dared not tell the truth. It would have hurt him too much to speak to her of death.

“She is going on very well; all is well, love,” he said, deceiving her for the first time in his life.

This was on Tuesday, and the preparations for Scotland were still in progress. Mr. Greswold’s talk with his daughter was all of their romantic Highland home, of the picnics and rambles, the fishing excursions and sketching parties they would have there. The nurse sat in a corner and listened to them with a grave countenance, and would not allow Mr. Greswold more than ten minutes with his daughter.

He counted the hours till they should be on the road for the North. There would be the rest of Tuesday and all Wednesday. She would be up and dressed on Wednesday, no doubt; and on Thursday morning the good old gray carriage-horses would take them all off to Romsey Station—such a pretty drive on a summer morning, by fields and copses, with changeful glimpses of the silvery Test.

Dr. Hutchinson came on Tuesday evening, and found his patient not quite so well. There was a long conference between the two doctors, and then the nurse was called in to receive her instructions; and then Mr. Greswold was told that the journey to Scotland must be put off for a fortnight at the very least.

He received the sentence as if it had been his death-warrant. He asked no questions. He dared not. A second nurse was to be sent over from Southampton next morning. The two doctors had the cool, determined air of men who are preparing for a battle.

Lola was light-headed next morning; but with intervals of calmness and consciousness. She heard the church bell tolling, and asked what it meant.

“It’s for Polly Rainbow’s funeral,” answered the maid who was tidying the room.

“O, no,” cried Lola, “that can’t be! Father said she was better.”

And then her mind began to wander, and she talked of Polly Rainbow as if the child had been in the room: talked of the little girl’s lessons at the parish school, and of a prize that she was to get.

After that all was darkness, all was despair—a seemingly inevitable progress from bad to worse. Science, care, love, prayers—all were futile; and the bell that had tolled for the widow’s only child tolled ten days afterwards for Lola.

It seemed to George Greswold as those slow strokes beat upon his brain, heavily, heavily, like minute guns, that all the hopes and cares and joys and expectations life had held for him were over. His wife was on her knees in the darkened house from which the funeral train was slowly moving, and he had loved her passionately; and yet it seemed to him as if the open car yonder, with its coffin hidden under snow-white blossoms, was carrying away all that had ever been precious to him upon this earth.

“She was the morning, with its promise of day,” he said to himself. “She was the spring-time, with its promise of summer. While I had her I lived in the future; henceforward I can only live in the present. I dare not look back upon the past!”