Lady Markham was a woman, everybody knew, who never hesitated when she realised a thing to be her duty, especially in all that concerned hospitals and the sick. She appeared by George Gaunt’s bedside in the middle of what seemed to him a terrible, long, endless night. It was not yet midnight, indeed; but they do not reckon by hours in the darkness through which he was drifting, through which there flashed upon his eyes confused gleams of scenes that were like scenes upon a stage all surrounded by darkness. The change had come. One of the nurses, the depressed one, thought it was for death; the other, possessed by the excitement of that great struggle, in which sometimes it appears that one human creature can visibly help another to hold the last span of soil on which human foot can stand, stood by the bed, almost carried away by what to her was like the frenzy of battle to a soldier, watching to see where she could strike a blow at the adversary, or drag the champion a hair’s-breadth further on the side of victory. There appeared to him at that moment two forms floating in the air—both white, bright, with the light upon them, radiant as with some glory of their own to the gaze of fever. He remembered them afterwards as if they had floated out of the chamber, disembodied, two faces, nothing more; and then all again was night. “He’s talked a deal about his mother, poor gentleman. He’ll never live to see his mother,” said the melancholy attendant, shaking her head. “Hush,” said the other under her breath. “Don’t you know we can’t tell what he hears and what he don’t hear?” Lady Markham was of this opinion too. She called the doleful woman with her outside the door, and left the last battle to be fought out. Frances stood on the other side of the bed. How she came there, why she was allowed to come, neither she nor any one knew. She stood looking at him with an awe in her young soul which silenced every other feeling. Nelly Winterbourn had been afraid of death, of seeing or coming near it. But Frances was not afraid. She stood, forgetting everything, with her head thrown back, her eyes expanded, her heart dilating and swelling in her bosom. She seemed to herself to be struggling too, gasping with his efforts for breath, helping him—oh, if she could help him!—saying her simple prayers involuntarily, sometimes aloud. Over and over again, in the confusion and darkness and hurrying of the last battle, there would come to him a glimpse of that face. It floated over him, the light all concentrated in it—then rolling clouds and gloom.

It was nearly morning when the doctor came. “Still living?”—“Alive; but that is all,” was the brief interchange outside the door. He would have been surprised, had he had any time for extraneous emotions, to see on the other side of the patient’s bed, softly winnowing the air with a large fan, a girl in evening dress, pearls gleaming upon her white neck, standing rapt and half-unconscious in the midst of the unwonted scene. But the doctor had no time to be surprised. He went through his examination in that silence which sickens the very heart of the lookers-on. Then he said, briefly, “It all depends now on the strength whether we can pull him through. The fever is gone; but he is as weak as water. Keep him in life twelve hours longer, and he’ll do.”

Twelve hours!—one whole long lingering endless summer day. Lady Markham, with her own affairs at such a crisis, had not hesitated. She came in now, having got a change of dress, and sent the weary nurse, who had stood over him all night, away. Blessed be fashion, when its fads are for angels’ work! Noiselessly into the room came with her, clean, fresh, and cool, everything that could restore. The morning light came softly in, the air from the open windows. Freshness and hope were in her face. She gave her daughter a look, a smile. “He may be weak, but he has never given in,” she said. Reinforcements upon the field of battle. In a few hours, which were as a year, the hopeful nurse was back again refreshed. And thus the endless day went on. Noon, and still he lived. Markham walked about the little street with his pockets full of small moneys, buying off every costermonger or wandering street vendor of small-wares, boldly interfering with the liberty of the subject, stopping indignant cabs, and carts half paralysed with slow astonishment. It was scarcely necessary, for the patient’s brain was not yet sufficiently clear to be sensitive to noises; but it was something to do for him. A whole cycle of wonder had gone round, but there was no time to think of it in the absorbing interest of this. Waring had employed his wife’s son to clear off those debts, which, if the old General ever knew of them, would add stings to sorrow—which, if the young man mended, would be a crushing weight round his neck. Waring had done this without a word or look that inferred that Markham was to blame. The age of miracles had come back; but, as would happen, perhaps, if that age did come back, no one had time or thought to give to the prodigies, for the profounder interest which no wonder could equal, the fight between death and life—the sudden revelation, in common life, of all the mysteries that make humanity what it is—the love which made a little worldling triumphant over every base suggestion—the pity that carried a woman out of herself and her own complicated affairs, to stand by another woman’s son in the last mortal crisis—the nature which suspended life in every one of all these differing human creatures, and half obliterated, in thought of another, the interests that were their own.

Through the dreadful night and through the endless sunshine of that day, a June day, lavish of light and pleasure, reluctant to relinquish a moment of its joy and triumph, the height of summer days, the old people, the old General and his wife, the father and mother, travelled without pause, with few words, with little hope, daring to say nothing to each other except faint questions and calculations as to when they could be there. When they could be there! They did not put the other question to each other, but within themselves, repeated it without ceasing: Would they be there before——? Would they be there in time?—to see him once again. They scarcely breathed when the cab, blundering along, got to the entrance of a little street, where it was stopped by a wild figure in a grey overcoat, which rushed at the horse and held him back. Then the old General rose in his wrath: “Drive on, man! drive on. Ride him down, whoever the fool is.” And then, somewhat as those faces had appeared at the sick man’s bedside, there came at the cab window an ugly little face, all puckers and light, half recognised as a bringer of good tidings, half hated as an obstruction, saying: “All right—all right. I’m here to stop noises. He’s going to pull through.”

“Mamma,” said Constance next evening, when all their excitement and emotions were softened down, “I hope you told Mrs Gaunt that I had been there?”

“My dear, Mrs Gaunt was not thinking of either you or me. Perhaps she might be conscious of Frances; I don’t know even that. When one’s child is dying, it does not matter to one who shows feeling. By-and-by, no doubt, she will be grateful to us all.”

“Not to me—never to me.”

“Perhaps she has no reason, Con,” her mother said.

“I am sure I cannot tell you, mamma. If he had died, of course—though even that would not have been my fault. I amused him very much for six weeks, and then he thought I behaved very badly to him. But all the time I felt sure that it would really do him no harm. I think it was cheap to buy at that price all your interest and everything that has been done for him—not to speak of the experience in life.”

Lady Markham shook her head. “Our experiences in life are sometimes not worth the price we pay for them; and to make another pay——”

“Oh!” said Constance with a toss of her head, shaking off self-reproach and this mild answer together. “It appears that there is some post his father wants for him to keep him at home; and Claude will move heaven and earth—that’s to say the Horse Guards and all the other authorities—to get it. Mamma,” she added after a pause, “Frances will marry him, if you don’t mind.”

“Marry him!” cried Lady Markham with a shriek of alarm; “that is what can never be.”

Meanwhile, Frances was walking back from Mrs Gaunt’s lodging, where the poor lady, all tremulous and shaken with joy and weariness, had been pouring into her sympathetic ears all the anguish of the waiting, now so happily over, and weeping over the kindness of everybody—everybody was so kind. What would have happened had not everybody been so kind? Frances had soothed her into calm, and coming down-stairs, had met Sir Thomas at the door with his inquiries. He looked a little grave, she thought, somewhat preoccupied. “I am very glad,” he said, “to have the chance of a talk with you, Frances. Are you going to walk? Then I will see you home.”

Frances looked up in his face with simple pleasure. She tripped along by his side like a little girl, as she was. They might have been father and daughter smiling to each other, a pretty sight as they went upon their way. But Sir Thomas’s smile was grave. “I want to speak to you on some serious subjects,” he said.

“About mamma? Oh, don’t you think, Sir Thomas, it is coming all right?”

“Not about your mother. It is coming all right, thank God, better than I ever hoped. This is about myself. Frances, give me your advice. You have seen a great deal since you came to town. What with Nelly Winterbourn and poor young Gaunt, and all that has happened in your own family, you have acquired what Con calls experience in life.”

Frances’ small countenance grew grave too. “I don’t think it can be true life,” she said.

He gave a little laugh, in which there was a tinge of embarrassment. “From your experience,” he said, “tell me: would you ever advise, Frances, a marriage between a girl like you—mind you, a good girl, that would do her duty, not in Nelly Winterbourn’s way—and an elderly, rather worldly man?”

“Oh no, no, Sir Thomas,” cried the girl; and then she paused a little, and said to herself that perhaps she might have hurt Sir Thomas’s feelings by so distinct an expression. She faltered a little, and added: “It would depend, wouldn’t it, upon who they were?”

“A little, perhaps,” he said. “But I am glad I have had your first unbiassed judgment. Now for particulars. The man is not a bad old fellow, and would take care of her. He is rich, and would provide for her—not like that hound Winterbourn. Oh, you need not make that gesture, my dear, as if money meant nothing; for it means a great deal. And the girl is as good a little thing as ever was born. Society has got talking about it; it has been spread abroad everywhere; and perhaps if it comes to nothing, it may do her harm. Now, with those further lights, let me have your deliverance. And remember, it is very serious—not play at all.”

“I have not enough lights, Sir Thomas. Does she,” said Frances, with a slight hesitation—“love him? And does he love her?”

“He is very fond of her; I’ll say that for him,” said Sir Thomas hurriedly. “Not perhaps in the boy-and-girl way. And she—well, if you put me to it, I think she likes him, Frances. They are as friendly as possible together. She would go to him, I believe, with any of her little difficulties. And he has as much faith in her—as much faith as in—— I can’t put a limit to his faith in her,” he said.

Frances looked up at him with the grave judicial look into which she had been forming her soft face. “All you say, Sir Thomas, looks like a father and child. I would do that to papa—or to you.”

Here he burst, to her astonishment, into a great fit of laughter, not without a little tremor, as of some other feeling in it. “You are a little Daniel,” he said. “That’s quite conclusive, my dear. Oh, wise young judge, how I do honour thee!”

“But——” Frances cried, a little bewildered. Then she added: “Well, you may laugh at me if you like. Of course, I am no judge; but if the gentleman is so like her father, cannot she be quite happy in being fond of him, instead of——? Oh no! Marrying is quite different—quite, quite different. I feel sure she would think so, if you were to ask her, herself,” she said.

“And what about the poor old man?”

“You did not say he was a poor old man; you said he was elderly, which means——”

“About my age.”

“That is not an old man. And worldly—which is not like you. I think, if he is what you say, that he would like better to keep his friend; because people can be friends, Sir Thomas, don’t you think, though one is young and one is old?”

“Certainly, Frances—witness you and me.”

She took his arm affectionately of her own accord and gave it a little kind pressure. “That is just what I was thinking,” she said, with the pleasantest smile in the world.

Sir Thomas took Lady Markham aside in the evening and repeated this conversation. “I don’t know who can have put such an absurd rumour about,” he said.

“Nor I,” said Lady Markham; “but there are rumours about every one. It is not worth while taking any notice of them.”

“But if I had thought Frances would have liked it, I should never have hesitated a moment.”

“She might not what you call like it,” said Lady Markham, dubiously; “and yet she might——”

“Be talked into it, for her good? I wonder,” said Sir Thomas, with spirit, “whether my old friend, who has always been a model woman in my eyes, thinks that would be very creditable to me?”

Lady Markham gave a little conscious guilty laugh, and then, oddly enough, which was so unlike her—twenty-four hours in a sickroom is trying to any one—began to cry. “You flatter me with reproaches,” she said. “Markham asks me if I expect my son to be base; and you ask me how I can be so base myself, being your model woman. I am not a model woman; I am only a woman of the world, that has been trying to do my best for my own. And look there,” she said, drying her eyes; “I have succeeded very well with Con. She will be quite happy in her way.”

“And now,” said Sir Thomas after a pause, “dear friend, who are still my model woman, how about your own affairs?”

She blushed celestial rosy red, as if she had been a girl. “Oh,” she said, “I am going down with Edward to Hilborough to see what it wants to make it habitable. If it is not too damp, and we can get it put in order—I am quite up in the sanitary part of it, you know—he means to send the Gaunts there with their son to recruit, when he is well enough. I am so glad to be able to do something for his old neighbours. And then we shall have time ourselves, before the season is over, to settle what we shall do.”

The reader is far too knowing in such matters not to be able to divine how the marriages followed each other in the Waring family within the course of that year. Young Gaunt, when he got better, confused with his illness, soothed by the weakness of his convalescence and all the tender cares about him, came at last to believe that the debts which had driven him out of his senses had been nothing but a bad dream. He consulted Markham about them, detailing his broken recollections. Markham replied with a perfectly opaque countenance: “You must have been dreaming, old man. Nightmares take that form the same as another. Never heard half a word from any side about it; and you know those fellows, if you owed them sixpence and didn’t pay, would publish it in every club in London. It has been a bad dream. But look here,” he added; “don’t you ever go in for that sort of thing again. Your head won’t stand it. I’m going to set you the example,” he said, with his laugh. “Never—if I should live to be a hundred,” Gaunt cried with fervour. The sensation of this extraordinary escape, which he could not understand, the relief of having nothing to confess to the General, nothing to bring tears from his mother’s eyes, affected him like a miraculous interposition of God, which no doubt it was, though he never knew how. There was another vision which belonged to the time of his illness, but which was less apocryphal, as it turned out—the vision of those two forms through the mist—of one, all white, with pearls on the milky throat, which had been somehow accompanied in his mind with a private comment that at last, false Duessa being gone for ever, the true Una had come to him. After a while, in the greenness of Hilborough, amid the cool shade, he learned to fathom how that was.

But were we to enter into all the processes by which Lady Markham changed from the “That can never be!” of her first light on the subject, to giving a reluctant consent to Frances’ marriage, we should require another volume. It may be enough to say that in after-days, Captain Gaunt—but he was then Colonel—thought Constance a very handsome woman, yet could not understand how any one in his senses could consider the wife of Claude Ramsay worthy of a moment’s comparison with his own. “Handsome, yes, no doubt,” he would say; “and so is Nelly Markham, for that matter,—but of the earth, earthy, or of the world, worldly; whereas Frances——”

Words failed to express the difference, which was one with which words had nothing to do.

THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.