Rupert Godwin

A FATAL LESSON.

While Esther Vanberg lay very calm and still, with her hand linked in that of the Duke, the door was softly opened, and the surgeon appeared on the threshold of the chamber.

He was not alone. Behind him came the ever-welcome visitor to the death-chamber, the minister of the Gospel. The proud heart may scorn Heaven’s gentle laws while life is in its zenith, while the grave seems so far away; but, sooner or later, the dark hour comes, and the only earthly comforter is welcome.

“My friend, Mr. Champneys, has come to see our patient,” the surgeon said softly: “shall you and I leave them alone for a little? The nurse will see that Miss Vanberg wants nothing. She understands all that is required.”

The Duke rose from his seat by the bedside, and submissively followed the medical man.

They entered the sitting-room, and seated themselves in mournful silence. Candles had been brought, and the curtains drawn. A table had been laid for dinner, but the Duke took nothing but a glass of water.

“Is there no hope?” he asked presently, in heart-broken accents.

“None, upon this earth. I have telegraphed for the most eminent surgeons in England; but I have only done so in deference to your affectionate anxiety. I regret to say that the case is quite hopeless. Miss Vanberg’s life is a question of so many hours. She may possibly survive the night, but even that is doubtful.”

No more was said. The two men sat in silence. Vincent Mountford covered his face with his hands. But this time he shed no tears. He was occupied in solemn prayer for the departing soul of the woman he loved.

For upwards of an hour he sat thus. Then the door of the bedroom was opened, and the clergyman emerged.

“I am leaving her in peace,” he said. “I never talked with any one more humbly desirous to obtain solace from the true source of all consolation. I shall return in a few hours; my presence may afford some comfort. In the meantime, I wish you good-evening. Do not hesitate to send for me if—if there should be any unlooked-for change, or if the patient should wish to see me.”

Mr. Champneys departed as quietly as he had entered; and next minute the door of the sick-room was again opened, and Martha Gibbs appeared on the threshold.

“Miss Vanberg wishes to speak to you, sir,” she said, addressing the Duke.

Vincent Mountford hastened to respond to that summons. Once more he seated himself by the bed of the dying girl.

Mrs. Gibbs passed silently into the sitting-room, leaving the lovers alone together.

Even in the brief interval that had passed, the Duke saw a change in the face he loved.

Yes, the pale shadow was hovering nearer. The small hand was feebler; the dark eyes had a more spiritual light—the radiance of a soul fast escaping from its earthly bondage.

“Vincent,” said the Jewess, “I want to tell you the story of my youth. Ah, no, no!” she exclaimed, answering his look of remonstrance; “it will do me no harm to speak. I should suffer more were I compelled to keep silence. The only excuse for my life lies in the story of my childhood. I must speak of that, Vincent, before I die.”

“Speak, then, darling! Every word of yours is precious to me.”

“Let me begin at the beginning. The first thing I can remember is living in a great city—Paris, as I found out afterwards. I remember beautiful apartments; windows that opened into a garden, in which there was a fountain in a marble basin. I remember a happy, idle life, spent in this fairy mansion, and in those beautiful gardens; shut in from the great city by high walls and sheltering chestnut-trees.

“I remember a face, a lovely woman’s face, darker than my own—dark with the rich olive hue of the South. I remember that foreign-looking face smiling upon me, and I knew that she to whom it belonged was my mother.

“She was my mother. Hushed in her arms I used to sink to sleep in the still summer twilight while she sang to me. O, Vincent, I can almost hear her voice now as I think of her; and the old time comes back—I am a child once more. My mother was not happy. I was only a very little child when I first discovered that secret. She was not happy. Sometimes she would sit, pale and silent, for hours together—with her hands lying listlessly in her lap. Sometimes her tears fell upon my face as I lay in her arms. Children are quick to perceive sorrow. I saw that my mother was unhappy; and, child though I was, I watched her closely.

“Few friends visited us in that splendid abode, and even to me its lonely splendour seemed sad and dreary.

“Now and then—at long intervals, as I thought—a gentleman came; a gentleman whom I was told to call papa. He took me on his knee sometimes, and caressed me; and when he was with us my mother’s manner changed from its dreary quiet, its outbreaks of passionate sorrow.

“When he was with us my mother seemed gay and happy. She would sit on a heap of cushions at his feet, looking up at him with her dark eyes, which had a light like yellow sunshine in them, smiling at him, talking to him, happy and vivacious as some joyous bird.

“Ah, how beautiful I thought her then, in her rich dress, with jewels flashing on her hands and arms!

“But as I grew older, my father’s visits were rarer; my mother’s sorrow became deeper and more settled day by day.

“Then, by-and-by, there was a sudden change in our life. My father came very often, but not alone; he brought with him a young Englishman, an empty-headed fop, as I know now, with a heart of ice. Even then, child as I was, I perceived the man’s shallow nature, and I instinctively detested him.

“But my mother cared very little what guests she welcomed so long as she was blessed with the presence of the man she loved. She smiled her brightest smiles upon my father’s friend, and greeted him with her sweetest words.

“My father came day after day, week after week; but his English friend always came with him. He bought my mother a carriage, and we went to races and fêtes; but the Englishman accompanied us everywhere.

“This may have gone on for some three months, when the end came.

“Ah, Vincent, that end was very terrible! It was the old, old story: passionate devoted love on the one side; on the other, selfishness and cruelty. The Englishman, whose name I forget, came one day to announce that the house which was our only home had changed hands. He was its new master. My mother might still be its mistress. He brought his credentials with him, in the shape of a letter from my father.

“That letter now lies amongst my private papers, Vincent, and I have read it again and again, until its every word seems branded on my brain. That horrible letter has influenced my life; for it taught me to believe all men false and cruel. I accepted their flatteries; I let them squander their fortune on my follies; but I never trusted them; and it is only now, when the world is fading away from me, that I begin to understand there may really exist one good man upon this earth.

“Shall I tell you the contents of that letter, Vincent? It was very brief, for the writer had used little ceremony.

“The man my mother loved had grown tired of her and of her devotion. He had sold her to his wealthy friend! That was the gist of the letter. The elegant house, the horses, the carriages, all had been lost at the card-table; and the last stake had been the woman whom he had sworn to love and cherish to the hour of his death!

“Within an hour of the receipt of that letter my mother and I left the luxurious home in which I had been born. She took me to England—to London; and London did indeed seem a dreary city after the bright boulevards and chestnut-trees of Paris. All through one long summer day we wandered in the dismal muddy streets of the most squalid neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the Thames, and at length, worn out, wearied, and miserable, we took possession of our new home.

“Shall I tell you what it was like, Vincent, that new home,—the first that ever sheltered me in your native country?

“It was a garret, so poorly furnished, so utterly wretched, that a tolerably prosperous crossing-sweeper would have despised it for a habitation when his day’s work was over. The rain pattering against the casement beat in upon us through the gaps in the broken glass; and the chill night wind crept in through a hundred different cracks and crannies.

“‘This is the only lodging we can afford, child,’ my mother cried bitterly, as I stood in the midst of the wretched chamber, staring helplessly about me, utterly bewildered by the change in our position. ‘It is as good a home as either you or I have any right to occupy; for we are friendless outcasts, penniless wretches, who know not where to look for their daily bread.’

“Ah, Vincent, I dare not dwell upon that horrible time; for the shadow of death grows darker round me; and though I feel so little pain, the numbness seems creeping, creeping to my heart, and I know that the end must be very near.

“My mother went out on the day after our arrival, leaving me alone in that most miserable house. She did not return until late at night, and then she told me that she had obtained work which would give us, at the worst, enough to keep us from starvation.

“After this she went out every night, and was sometimes away from me half the day. She never came home till after midnight; and as soon as I was old enough to understand anything of London life, I knew that she was a figurante at a minor theatre on the Surrey side of the Thames.

“By-and-by we moved to a lodging which, although very humble and very poorly furnished, was a palace in comparison with the miserable garret that had first sheltered us.

“So long as my mother lived, I never entered a theatre. She loved me with the same passionate affection which I felt for her; and she could not bear that I should be exposed to the dangers and temptations of a life in which she saw so many fall into a fatal career of extravagance and vice. Her life was a very hard one; and others saw the change in her which I was too inexperienced to perceive. Strangers saw that the hard life was slowly killing her.

“One day she came in from her morning duties at the theatre with the hectic tint in her cheeks heightened, and the fatal brightness of her eyes even more brilliant than usual.

“It was my birthday, she had told me early that morning, and I was fifteen that day.

“She took both my hands, and led me to the window.

“‘Turn your face towards the light, Esther,’ she said. ‘Let me see your eyes, for I am going to tell you something, and I want to see if you are my own true daughter.’

“I looked at her wonderingly; and we stood thus, each looking with fixed and earnest gaze into the other’s eyes.

“‘Esther,’ said my mother, ‘I saw your father in the streets of London to-day. I saw him, and spoke to him; to him—to the man for whom I fled from a happy home in my native country—for whose sake I broke my father’s heart! But the vengeance of Heaven follows such sins as mine surely—too surely; and that vengeance has tracked me step by step ever since the fatal night upon which I was beguiled by your father’s empty promises to leave the shelter of my home, trusting in the honour of a villain. To-day, for the first time after weary years of beggary, I met your father in the street. For your sake, Esther, and for your sake only, I followed and spoke to him. He was very much surprised to see me, and even more disgusted to see me such an altered creature. His face said as much. I told him that his daughter was growing into womanhood; that in all the world she had not one friend to replace the mother on whose face the hand of death had set its stamp. I implored him to have pity upon this friendless child; I promised forgiveness for my own blighted life—for the lies that had lured me from my home—the cool treachery which would have sold me with the goods and chattels lost at a gaming-table. I humiliated myself to the dust, Esther, for your sake—only for your sake!

“‘Shall I tell you how that man answered my prayers? He told me to starve, or to rot, where I pleased; but not to obtrude my ghastly face on him. He had given me my chance, he said, and I might have squandered the wealth of a weak-minded fool who would have supported me in the splendour I was so fond of. I had chosen to fling away this chance, and whatever misery had come to me had been brought upon me by my own folly. He was not responsible for that folly, he told me, and he would not give me sixpence to save me from the pangs of starvation.

“‘This was what he said to me, Esther; but no words can tell the brutal manner in which he spoke, the cold-blooded insolence of his gaze. He could not have looked more scornfully at the dirt beneath his feet than he looked at me—at me, whose girlish brain was well-nigh turned by his flattery when he stole me from my home.

“‘You are indeed changed,’ he said. ‘I can scarcely bring myself to believe that the creature I am looking at was once the vaunted beauty of Seville.’

“‘I could find no words to speak my indignation. I was choked by the suffocating tears of shame and despair. He turned upon his heel, and left me—left me standing like a statue in the windy street, with the rain driving gustily at me, and the icy cold creeping to my very heart.’

“I burst into a torrent of sobs, and fell on my mother’s breast. I tried to comfort her; but there are some sorrows in which any attempt at comfort seems a mockery; and hers was one of them.

“‘Esther,’ she said, ‘I have told you this story as a solemn warning. You must be dull indeed if you cannot understand the bitter moral to be learnt from my life. Crush out from your heart every vestige of womanly affection. You are beautiful, and your beauty will win you lovers. Remember my fate! Remember that their admiration is the false worship of the profligate, who pays homage to the divinity that he is only eager to destroy. Value your charms only for their power to win the love you trample upon and despise. Be proud and pitiless, false and mercenary, as the wretches who pretend to adore you; for only thus will you keep them at your feet. They will be the slaves of a beautiful demon, who laughs at their devotion, and mocks them with false hopes, while she ruins them by her reckless extravagance, her insatiable avarice; but they would grow weary of the love of an angel, when once she has been won by their treacherous pleading. Take everything from them, but give nothing in return—not one true word, not one tender thought. Revenge my fate, Esther, and be warned by the misery you have seen. Remember the anguish of a woman who sacrificed her life to one unhappy passion, and who will die the heart-broken victim of a scoundrel.’

“This, and much more, my mother said to me, not once, but many times, before she faded slowly from me, leaving me alone in the world.

“Such, Vincent, was the teaching of my early youth; such were the precepts that had been carefully instilled into me when I found myself lonely and destitute, with the world all before me.

“I was not quite sixteen years of age when my mother died. I looked in the glass; but my life had been such a secluded one, that but for my mother’s words I should scarcely have known that I was beautiful.

“At first I was stunned by my calamity, and I sat day after day in my lonely room, in the idle helplessness of complete despair.

“One day the proprietor of the theatre in which my mother had been employed called upon me, and offered to engage me, paying for my services at the same pitiful rate as my mother had received for hers.

“I accepted his offer, since it afforded me the only chance of escaping starvation. I entered the theatre, and in the following year I received the offer of an engagement from the manager of the Circenses, where I have been employed ever since, and where I first met you, Vincent, and won the love which I have done so little to deserve.

“But I think you will understand now why my heart has seemed cold and hard as stone. My mother had taught me to believe that my father was only a sample of the rest of mankind. She had believed herself, and she had taught me to think, that truth, honour, loyalty, generosity, pure and unselfish affection did not exist in the breast of any man living. I had learnt the fatal lesson only too well, and you know what that lesson had made me—a heartless, pitiless creature, eager for my own pleasure alone, at any cost to others; extravagant, reckless, greedy, valuing those who admired me only for the wealth they lavished on me; proud and insolent, cold and ungrateful. To win you for my husband, to wear the coronet of a duchess, and to push my way into the great world in defiance of all who should oppose me—this was my ambition. But even to win such a prize as this I could not control the passionate temper which had so long been freely indulged; I could not curb the insolent tongue on whose reckless audacity I prided myself.

“Nothing but true and pure love could have exercised such forbearance as you have always shown me. O, forgive me, Vincent; forgive me for my heartless ingratitude! I see things in a softened light now that the shadows are closing round me, and I can understand how good, how noble you have been to me. You would have taken the nameless Jewess to your arms; you would have bestowed the sacred name of wife on the reckless adventuress who squandered your wealth and laughed at your love. Forgive me, Vincent! Remember my early teaching, the wrongs of my broken-hearted mother; remember these, and forgive me!”

“I do, Esther, with all my heart,” answered the Duke in a broken voice. “If you could live, darling; if heaven would spare you, the dismal lesson of the past should be forgotten in the happiness of the future, and you should learn that a man’s love can be as true and pure, as unselfish and devoted, as the affection of the woman who unites her fate to his.”

“Vincent,” said the Jewess, “when I am dead, you will go to my house and examine all my papers. If amongst them you can find any clue to the identity of my father, seek him out, if he still lives, and tell him of his victim’s death, and of the death of that daughter whom he refused to rescue from starvation.”

No more was said upon this subject. Esther gave Vincent Mountford some few directions respecting the papers which he was to examine.

“And now,” she said, “my true and only friend, I have one last favour to ask of you. My jewels and pictures, the furniture of my house, my carriage and horses, are worth a considerable sum. I should like them all to be sold to the best advantage—except such things as you, Vincent, may like to keep for my sake; and let the proceeds of the sale be given to Miss Watson, the girl whom I so cruelly injured in my wicked jealousy. You will do this, will you not, Vincent? It is the only atonement I can make for the treachery which may have caused so much pain. I trust in you, dear and faithful friend! Miss Watson must never know the name of the person by whose bequest she inherits the money; for if she did so, she might refuse to receive it. Let this last act of justice be as little known as the guilty act for which it is a poor reparation. Promise me, Vincent!”

The young man gave a solemn promise; and the dark eyes of the Jewess looked at him with a calmer light, as she lay back upon the pillow from which she was never to rise again.

It was late by this time, and the London surgeons had arrived. The Duke left the room as the medical men entered it.

Once more he paced slowly up and down the sitting-room; and, in spite of all that the Richmond surgeon had said to him, his heart was agitated by a faint thrill of hope.

That hope was soon changed to the calm quiet of despair. After about a quarter of an hour of suspense, the door of the bedchamber was opened, and the medical men came out, grave and silent, and in their solemn faces Vincent Mountford read the death warrant of the woman he loved.

“There is no hope?” asked the Duke, appealing to the Richmond surgeon.

“None!” that gentleman answered solemnly.

Vincent Mountford sank helplessly down upon the nearest chair. This time he gave way to no passionate outburst of grief: this time he was calm and silent; but he felt that the one bright dream, the fond delusion of his youth, was melting away from him for ever.

The time might come when Esther Vanberg’s beautiful face would smile upon him, faint and shadowy as the face that haunts a sleeper in his dream; but that time would be slow to come; and to-night it seemed to the Duke of Harlingford as if all the joy and brightness of his life had vanished away from him, never to be recalled.