CHAPTER X.

SIT TIBI TERRA LEVIS.

FOR Emily Jerningham life’s fitful fever was ended. The change to a softer climate, the welcome warmth of southern breezes, had given her a brief respite, but her doom had been sealed long ago, and her existence had been only a question of so many weeks more or less.

The journey by sea and the first two weeks in the strange island were very sweet to Emily Jerningham. Laurence Desmond accompanied her on that final voyage, and friendship, sanctified by the shadows of the grave, attended her closing days.

This seemed the natural solution to the enigma of her perplexed existence. Death alone could make an easy end of all her difficulties, and she accepted the necessity as a blessed release.

“It has been made easy to me to resign you, Laurence,” she said, “and to pray for your future happiness with another. That poor little girl! I know she loves you very dearly. She reverences you as a heroic creature. Upon my word, sir, you are very fortunate. With me, had Fate united us, you would have been compelled to endure all manner of jealousies and caprices; and from that simple Lucy you will receive the pious worship that is ordinarily given only to saints.”

Mrs. Jerningham would not allow Laurence to remain with her until the last dread hour. When they had been a fortnight on the island, and had exhausted the little excursions and sights of the place, she persuaded Mr. Desmond to return to England.

“I know you cannot afford to remain so far away,” she said. “What may happen to the _Areopagus_ in your absence! I have always heard that sub-editors are a most incorrigible class of people. They insert those things which they should not insert, and so on. You may find yourself pledged to something appalling in the way of politics when you get back to London; or discover that one of your dearest friends has been flayed alive by your most savage operator. And, you see, I am so much better. I shall return to England in the spring quite a new creature.”

In this manner did Mrs. Jerningham cajole her friend to abandon her. It was the final sacrifice which she offered up--the sacrifice of her sole earthly happiness.

She stood at her window watching the steamer as it left the island, and her heart sank within her.

He was gone out of her life for ever. Thus faded all the glory of her world. She sat alone till long after dusk, thinking of her wasted, mistaken life; while Mrs. Colton fondly believed her charge was enjoying a refreshing slumber.

The English doctor, who attended Mrs. Jerningham daily, found his patient much worse when he made his call upon the morning after Mr. Desmond’s departure.

“I am afraid you were guilty of some imprudence yesterday,” he said; “for you are certainly not looking quite yourself to-day.”

“Yesterday was one of the quietest days I have spent on the island,” replied Mrs. Jerningham; “I did not stir out of doors.”

“That was a pity; for you ought to enjoy our good weather while it lasts. The rains will set in soon, and you will be a prisoner. But after our rainy season we have a delicious winter; and the voyage from England has done such wonders for you, that I really expect great things between this and the spring.”

“Do you mean that you really think I am to live?” asked Mrs. Jerningham, looking at him earnestly; “to drag my life on for weeks and months, and perhaps for years?”

“Upon my honour I have strong hopes, as I told your aunt yesterday; the improvement since your arrival has been so marked that I can hope anything. You do not know what Madeira can do for weak lungs.”

“Then I wish I had never come here.”

“My dear madam, you--” cried the doctor, alarmed.

“That sounds very horrible, does it not, Mr. Ransom? But, you see, there is a time when one’s life comes to a legitimate end--one’s mission is finished. There is no room for one any more upon the earth, as it seems. The priest has said, ‘_Ite, missa est_;’ the end is come. I do not want to prolong my life beyond its natural close; and that has come.”

Mr. Ransom looked at his patient as if doubtful whether she were altogether in her right mind. But he did not discuss the subject; he murmured some little soothing commonplace, and departed to warn Mrs. Colton that the patient was disposed to depression of spirits, and must, if possible, be roused and diverted.

“I do not consider it altogether a bad sign,” he said, cheeringly; “that low state of the nerves is a very common symptom of convalescence.”

To rouse and divert her invalid niece Mrs. Colton strove with conscientious and untiring efforts; but failed utterly. From the hour of Laurence Desmond’s departure Emily drooped. A depression came upon her too profound for human consolation. In devout studies, in pious meditations alone she found comfort. Her aunt read to her from the works of the great divines, and in the eloquent and noble pages of Hooker and Taylor, Barrow and South, as well as in the Gospel’s simpler record, the weak soul found comfort. But with earthly comfort she had done. A stranger, alone in a strange land, she waited the coming of that awful stranger whom all must meet once--he who “keeps the key of all the creeds.” Utter desolation of spirit took possession of her. She was thrown back upon the spiritual world, and was fain to seek a dwelling-place among those shadowy regions, like a shipwrecked mariner cast upon a desert island, and rejoiced to find any refuge from the perils of the great ocean.

Letters came to the lonely invalid, in token that she was not quite forgotten by the world she would fain forget; letters, and papers, and books from Mr. Desmond, who wrote with much affectionate solicitude; notes of condolence and inquiry from the few friends with whom she was on intimate terms. But these were only the last salutations which life sent to her who dwelt by the borders of death--the last farewells waved by friendly hands.

“He is good and self-devoted to the last,” she thought, as she read Mr. Desmond’s letters; “and I do not think I should have induced him to leave me if he had not believed it would look better for me to be here alone with my aunt.”

In this supposition Mrs. Jerningham was correct. Mr. Desmond was too much a man of the world not to be mindful of how things would appear to the eyes of the world, and it had seemed to him better that he should not prolong his stay at Madeira with the invalid.

He had returned to London, therefore, and had gone back to his work, which seemed very weary at this period of his life.

It was not possible that this utter severance should come to pass between him and Emily Jerningham without pain to himself. A man does not change all at once. However deeply he is bound to the new love, some frail links of the chain that tied him to the old hang about him still, some corner of his heart still holds the first dear image; and to the love that has been, the sorrow of parting lends a kind of sanctification.

Before leaving England Mrs. Jerningham had taken pains to provide for Lucy’s future. The girl would gladly have accompanied her patroness to Madeira, but this Emily would not permit.

“You have had trouble enough in nursing me,” she said, kindly; “and we must now try and find you a home in some pleasant, cheerful family. You must not be exposed any longer to the depressing influence of an invalid’s society.”

The pleasant family was easily found. Are there not always a hundred cheerful families eager to enlarge their home-circle by the addition of an agreeable stranger? Mrs. Jerningham showed herself very particular in her choice of a home for her _protégée_; and she was not satisfied until she had discovered an irreproachable clergyman’s family, some miles northward of Harrow, who were willing to receive Miss Alford, and beneath whose roof she would have opportunities of improving herself.

“But, dear Mrs. Jerningham, had I not better go to the lady in Ireland, or to some other lady who wants a governess?” remonstrated Lucy. “I ought to be getting my own living, you know. Why should I be a burden upon your kindness? If I were of any use to you, it would be different; but you will not let me be your nurse.”

“My dear girl, you are no burden! It is a pleasure to me to provide in some measure for your future. I promised Mr. Desmond that I would be your friend. You must let me keep my promise, Lucy.”

Of the interview which had taken place between Emily and Laurence, Lucy knew nothing. Neither did she know that there had been a listener during that never-to-be-forgotten half-hour in which Mr. Desmond had told her his secret.

What her own future might be she could not imagine; and this arrangement for placing her with a clergyman’s family beyond Harrow seemed to her a generous folly upon the part of Mrs. Jerningham.

She submitted only to please that lady; it would have seemed ungracious to refuse such kindness; but Lucy fancied she would have been happier if she had been permitted to renew her old struggles with fortune.

“Remember you are to improve yourself, Lucy,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “I want you to become the most accomplished and ladylike of women.”

And thus they kissed and parted. Emily breathed more freely when the girl had left her. That daily and hourly companionship with her happy rival had not been without its bitterness.

“The poor little thing has been very good to me,” she thought; “but I cannot forget that she will be Laurence Desmond’s wife when I am lying in my grave. And the winter winds will blow among the churchyard-trees, and the pitiless rain will fall upon my grave, and those two will sit beside their fire, and watch their children at play, and he will forget that I ever lived.”

Lucy went to her new home a few days before Mrs. Jerningham and her following sailed for Madeira. Between Lucy and Laurence there was no farewell. Mrs. Jerningham told Mr. Desmond what she had done for his old friend’s daughter, and he approved and thanked her; but he expressed no wish to see the young lady, or to be introduced to the family with whom she had taken up her abode.

He made no attempt to see Lucy on his return from Madeira. In this he was governed by a supreme delicacy of feeling.

“While Emily lives I belong to her,” he said to himself. “I am bound by a tie which only death can loosen.”

The hour in which that tie was to be loosened came very soon. A heart-broken letter from Mrs. Colton told Laurence that he was a free man.

“She spoke of you a few minutes before her death,” wrote Emily Jerningham’s aunt. “‘Tell him that one of my last prayers was for his future happiness,’ she said. She suffered much in the last week; but the last day was very peaceful. I can never tell you all her thoughtfulness for others--for you, for me, for Lucy Alford, for her servants, the few poor people at Hampton of whom she knew anything. Her long illness worked a great change in her--a holy and blessed change. Generous, affectionate, and noble-minded she had always been; but the piety of her closing hours was more than I should have dared to hope, remembering her somewhat careless way of thinking when she was in health. In death she is lovelier than in life; there is a divine smile upon her face now which I never saw before. I have received instructions from Mr. Jerningham. My beloved niece is to be buried in the family vault in Berkshire. Oh, Mr. Desmond! what a mournful homeward voyage lies before me! I know not how I am to endure the rest of my life without my more than daughter!”

Laurence Desmond’s tears fell fast upon the letter. The old familiar vision of the little garden at Passy, the proud, young face, the slim, white-robed figure, came back to him; and he recalled one summer afternoon, when his lips had almost shaped themselves into the portentous question, and he had restrained himself with an effort, remembering what his mentors of the smoking-room had said about the impossibility of marriage amongst a civilized community without a due provision for the indispensabilities of civilized existence.

“This comes of planning one’s life by the ethics of the club-house!” he said to himself, bitterly.