CHAPTER III.

LEFT ALONE.

WHILE Mr. Jerningham dawdled away existence among the woods and hills of Berkshire, his wife’s life was marked by changes more eventful, and ruffled by deeper passions.

To Lucy Alford the lady of River Lawn had shown herself a kind and generous friend. Not long had the poor child enjoyed the luxurious quiet of the Hampton villa when she was suddenly summoned away from it. Mr. Desmond had managed her father’s affairs and pacified her father’s creditors; with what pecuniary sacrifice was only known to himself. But a sterner gaoler than the warder of Whitecross Street lay in wait for Lucy’s father, ready to stretch forth the icy hand that was to arrest that battered and broken wayfarer.

Debts and difficulties, disappointments and humiliations, with constant habits of inebriation, had done their fatal work for Tristram Alford. ’Twas but a poor wreck of humanity which emerged from the dreary city prison, when Laurence told his old tutor that he was free. The old man had suffered from one paralytic seizure long ago, in his better days of private tutorship. He had a second seizure in the Whitecross Street ward, but made light of the attack; and although he knew himself to be a wreck, was happily unconscious how near was the hour of his sinking.

Lucy returned to the dreary Islington lodgings, to find her father strangely, nay, indeed, alarmingly, altered. She wrote to Mrs. Jerningham to tell her fears, and Emily made haste to send a physician to see the invalid. The physician shook his head despondently, but recommended rest and change of air. These, with the aid of Mrs. Jerningham’s ample purse, were easily procured, and Lucy and her father were despatched to Ventnor.

Laurence saw the physician, and asked for a candid opinion upon Tristram Alford’s state.

“The man is a habitual drunkard,” replied the doctor, “and has evidently been killing himself with brandy for the last ten years. If you take the brandy-bottle away from him, he will die; if you let him go on drinking, he will die. The case is beyond a cure. The man’s brain is alcoholized. His next attack must be fatal.”

Having once enlisted Mrs. Jerningham’s friendship for Lucy Alford, Mr. Desmond felt that the young lady’s fortunes had passed out of his care. Already Emily had shown herself so kind and generous that it would have been base ingratitude to doubt her charity in every new emergency. He therefore held himself aloof from Lucy and her father, and only from Mrs. Jerningham did he hear how it fared with the girl in whose fate he had taken so benevolent an interest. But while he made no overt attempt to comfort or assist her in the hour of trial and trouble, he thought of her, and pitied her, with a constancy that was at once perplexing and unpleasing to his own mind.

“Poor little thing!” he said to himself, when he thought of the motherless girl watching the fading hours of her sole protector. And he wondered to perceive how much tenderness it was possible to infuse into those three common words. “Poor little thing! Tristram Alford cannot last many weeks--that is certain. And then--and then? She will be left quite alone in the world. And she must suppress all sign of her natural grief, and enact one of _those ladies_--ever so slightly expurgated--in _Côtelettes sautées chez Véfour_. What a dreary present! what a hopeless future!”

And at this point Mr. Desmond would dig his pen savagely into the paper, destroy the quill of an unoffending goose, and fling it from him in a sudden rage.

“What is it to me?” he asked himself. “There are hundreds of friendless girls in London for whom the future is as hopeless. Am I going to turn Quixote, and ride a tilt against the windmills of modern civilization?”

One morning in February the editor of the _Areopagus_ found an envelope edged with deepest black upon his breakfast-table. It contained a brief despairing scrawl from Lucy, smeared and blotted with many tears. Death had claimed his victim. The third seizure had come, and all was over.

“I cannot tell you how kind Mrs. Jerningham has been,” wrote the mourner; “all is arranged for the funeral. It is to take place on Friday. My poor dear will rest in a pleasant spot. It is very hard to bear this parting; but I think it would have seemed harder to me if he had died in London.” And then followed little pious sentences, in which faith struggled with despair.

“He was always good and kind,” she wrote; “I cannot recall one cross word from his dear lips. He did not go to church so regularly as religious people think right; but he was very good. He read the Bible sometimes, and cried over it; and wherever we lodged, the little children loved him. It was not in his nature to be harsh or unkind. May God teach me to be as good and gentle as he was, and grant that we may meet some day in a happier world!”

“The funeral is to be on Friday,” repeated Mr. Desmond, when he had folded and put away the letter. He was on the point of endorsing it with the rest of his correspondence, but changed his mind, and laid it gently aside in a drawer of his desk. “Not amongst tradesmen’s lies, and samples of double-crown, and contributors’ complaints,” he said. “On Friday? Yes; I will attend my poor old tutor’s funeral. It will comfort her to think that _one_ friend followed him to his grave.”

Early on the appointed morning, Mr. Desmond knocked at the door of the Ventnor lodging-house.

“Miss Alford is at home, of course,” he said to the maid. “Be so good as to take her this card, and tell her that I have come to attend the funeral, but will not intrude upon her.”

He spoke in a low voice; but those cautious, suppressed tones are of all accents the most penetrating. The door of the parlour was opened softly, and Mrs. Jerningham came out into the passage.

“I recognized your voice,” she said. “How very good of you to come!”

“Not at all. But how good of _you_ to come! I had no idea that I should meet you here.”

“And I was quite sure that I should meet _you_ here,” replied Emily, with the faintest possible sneer.

“Is Lucy in that room?”

“Yes.”

“I do not want to see her. I wished to show my regard for that poor old man. I spent many pleasant days under his roof, and he has made so lonely an ending. It is very good of you to come, Emily; and your presence here relieves me very much with regard to that poor girl’s future. I do not think you would be here if you were not really interested in her.”

“Yes, Laurence; I am really interested in--your _protégée_.”

“She is not my _protégée_; but I wish you to make her yours, because I scarcely think you could find a creature more in need of your charity. Poor child! she is very much distressed, I suppose.”

“For the moment she is heart-broken. I shall take her away from here this evening.”

“My dear Emily, I knew I was safe in relying on your noble nature!” exclaimed the editor, with enthusiasm.

“For pity’s sake, do not be so grateful. I have done no more than I would for any other helpless woman whom fate flung across my path. In the whole affair there is only one element that makes the act a sacrifice.”

“And that is----?”

“What only a woman can feel or understand. Pray, do not let us talk about it. The funeral will not take place for an hour.”

“I will go and get a band for my hat, and return here for the ceremony. There will be one mourning-coach, I suppose.”

“Yes. The doctor has kindly promised to act as chief mourner. There is no one else.”

“Poor Tristram! If you only knew that man’s appreciation of Greek; and Greek is the only language which requires a special genius in the scholar. And to die like this!”

Mr. Desmond departed to get his hat bound with the insignia of grief. Mrs. Jerningham went back to the parlour, where the orphan sat with listless hands loosely locked, and vacant, tearless eyes, lost in a stupor of grief. But even in this stupor she had recognized the voice of her dead father’s only friend.

“Was not that Mr. Desmond in the passage just now?” she asked.

“Yes; he has come down to attend his old friend’s funeral.”

“How good of him! How kind you both are to me!” murmured Lucy. “Oh, believe me, I am grateful. And yet, dear Mrs. Jerningham, I feel as if it would be better for me to be going to lie by _his_ side in that peaceful grave.”

“No, Lucy. Your life is all to come. You have known sorrow and trouble; but you have not drained the cup of happiness only to find the bitterness of the draught. _That_ is real despair. You have not outlived your hopes, and your dreams and your faith--nay, indeed, your very self--as I have.”