Chapter VI

'THOUGHTS THAT OFTEN LIE TOO DEEP FOR TEARS.'

Like the again partially widowed Laura, Bella Chevenix had watched with an aching heart the progressive news of the war among barbarians on the burning Gold Coast, from the landing on New Year's Day to the battle of Amoaful, the passage of the Prah, and the victorious advance on Coomassie; and now came the sudden shock and horror by a tantalisingly brief telegram, in the upper corner of a newspaper, headed by a sensational title in large type, but three lines, announcing that the two officers had fallen--Dalton severely wounded, and Wilmot killed and carried off by the enemy!

Bella sat for a time as one turned to stone, incapable even of tears--oppressed and crushed down by the one appalling and apparently, unrealisable thought.

'Jerry dead--Jerry dead--and I shall never see him more!'

Jerry, so full of life and fun and jollity! It seemed incredible. And yet, why so? He only ran the risks that many others were running. But the mind of Bella went painfully back to their parting, when mutual doubts of the purity and honesty of each other's intentions--doubts born of the existence of those horrible mortgages--had mutually fettered their tongues, especially so far as she was concerned, and, when they separated, little dreaming that it was for ever--separated with a simply repeated 'good-bye' and a lingering pressure of the hand, while no kiss, no embrace, no promise were exchanged, and he was going away to be done to death in that savage land; and she remembered how she wept floods of unavailing tears as the last sound of his footsteps died away. Poor fellow! And now she should see him no more--never again!

To Bella Chevenix sorrow, repentance, and love were alike useless, so far as Jerry Wilmot was concerned. To the girl, just then, it seemed as if the dream of her life was over and done; in it no other could replace Jerry; the light had gone for ever out of her world now. She threw herself upon her knees, in the solitude of her chamber, in a passionate burst of grief--the brilliant, beautiful, and once happy Bella--and strove to say, 'Thy will be done,' but the genuine submission thereto could only come by-and-by.

Under the circumstances of Jerry's profession and career, some peril, some suffering were not altogether unlooked-for or undreaded; but that he should be killed and carried off by the dreadful Ashantees, of whom she had a very vague yet terrible idea indeed, had been beyond her calculations--beyond her worst anticipations! She felt dazed, miserable--intensely, and confused.

'I am now sure that he loved me well--well and dearly--and how coldly I parted with him! Oh, Jerry my darling, can it be that I shall never see you again!' Thus she said to herself over and over in sad reiteration, though no sound but sighs left her lips.

Anon she rose and paced her room, with half uttered exclamations of anguish and sorrow; and then she would throw herself on her bed, burying her face in her hands, in mute and tearless agony. To think that he was gone--in his grave, if he ever found one--gone without the memory of a kind word from her that would make her future life less bitter.

'Oh, Jerry--dead--dead!' she murmured, with ceaseless reiteration.

She had a craving for such sympathy as her father, who was to a great extent ignorant of all that had passed between her and Jerry, could not yield her, and she resolved to visit Laura.

She staggered from the bedside to her toilette-table, and when she looked into the glass she was surprised by the frozen-like despair she saw in her own beautiful face, which was as colourless as Carrara marble now. She bathed her eyes, made a hasty toilette of the most sable things she could select, tied a thick black veil over her face, and, ordering her pony phaeton, set out to visit Laura, to whom the dire tidings had come, of course, betimes, and she too was overwhelmed by affliction that, however, was not without hope.

She was alone now, most terribly alone at Chilcote Grange. Little Netty had been sent to a West End finishing school that she might acquire all sorts of accomplishments and graces with which to delight her father on his return; and now perhaps poor Tony Dalton might die by the banks of the Prah and never see England again, for the heat of the horrible climate there made all wounds more perilous.

'Wounded, severely wounded,' Laura had been repeating to herself: but where wounded, she speculated--how, and with what, and in what part of the poor mortal frame.

The telegram was horribly brief and vague! And now though Laura and Bella Chevenix had few notes to compare, and could say nothing to comfort each other, they gathered some from the communion of tears and thoughts and sorrows.

Laura drew forth--as she had done a score of times before--Dalton's letters to her from Madeira, the Gold Coast, and sent by more than one homeward-bound ship; and the affection they breathed for her and Netty filled her soul with great gratitude now, whatever might happen. She had never received letters from him before--even in their early lover days at St. Leonard's long ago, before their years of separation came: and how strange it was to have received letters from him, conceived in the tenor of these, and signed 'Your affectionate husband, Tony Dalton.'

Now he and Laura were quite old enough to know their own minds, and to deplore the separation a previous less knowledge of each other had brought about between them; neither was likely to make any more false steps, from rashness or impulse, and they had a fair promise of a delicious companionship for the future if they were spared to meet again, and the perils of the Gold Coast ever became a thing of the past, but that fair promise hung by a thread now.

'Had we never met more--met as we did so singularly by the sudden arrival of his regiment in Aldershot,' said Laura, 'and I loved or compelled him, poor darling, to love me again, I might have gone on to the end of my days nursing a sickly sentimental memory on one hand, with a species of revengeful memory on the other; but, if we never meet more on this side of the grave, I shall--till carried to mine--remember with gratitude that he had learned to love me well, and Netty too, before we lost him for ever.'

All her natural gaiety and much of her aplomb had left Laura on the day Dalton sailed from Southampton, and now she was as crushed in spirit as a poor woman well could be. 'We love because we have loved,' says a novelist, 'and it is easier to go on in the old routine, even when all the real life and beauty has died out of it, than to break with the mere _memory_ of that time which made our life holy and beautiful to us.'

In the time of this strange enforced separation--in the time of Dalton's actual desertion of Laura, and when she knew not whether he was dead or living till she met him at Aldershot--this had been something of the sentiment that inspired her; but now that they had both known and loved each other anew under better auspices, and been so briefly re-united, a contemplation of the catastrophe that might yet happen wrung Laura's heart to the core.

On leaving the latter, Bella, though still a prey to choking grief, in the warm and generous impulse of her nature, conceived the idea of, or thought she might find some comfort in, a visit to Lady Wilmot. She was _his_ mother, whose grief at least could not be inferior to her own.

She committed to oblivion all that lady's treatment of herself in the past time, and even but lately at the Charity Bazaar; yet it was not without some misgivings, and even pausing in her progress once or twice, that she turned the heads of her pretty ponies in the direction of Wilmothurst, her tears falling hotly under her thick Shetland veil as she passed down the stately avenue and through the Chase, where every foot of the way suggested some memory of Jerry and his happy boyhood, when they were playmates till he went to Eton, and Lady Julia--well, never permitted _her_ name to be on the ordinary visitors' list. There was a tall elm up which he had clambered, at the risk of his limbs, to get her a magpie's nest; here they had gathered the early primroses in April, and the Lent lilies in May, or hunted for butterflies. How often had they played croquet together on the bowling-green, and rowed dreamily for hours on the tree-shaded river; and at every turn the figure of the boy seemed to come before her, mingled with that of the moustached and handsome young officer to whom she so strangely bade farewell.

Full of these thoughts, Bella would not be repelled by the conventional manner or replies of the footman, and begged so earnestly to see Lady Julia that she was ushered into her presence by the former, as we have described in the last chapter.

Poor Bella had but one thought--Lady Julia was _his_ mother, and gladly in that hour of woe would she have thrown her arms around her and embraced her tenderly; but Lady Julia was cold and calm in aspect and bearing as a Greek marble statue, and received her visitor without rising, and with a brief conventional pressure with one hand while motioning her to be seated with the other.

Whatever hopes Cousin Emily once had of Jerry for a husband--hopes often crushed by his indifference on the subject, and by a knowledge of the necessity that he must marry 'money'--they were gone now; and, besides, she could receive Bella Chevenix now with more equanimity than hitherto.

But her reception was common-place--chilling also--and poor Bella, feeling herself _de trop_, an utter intruder, felt confusion blend with the grief that oppressed her.

'After the awful news of this morning, Lady Julia,' said she, with a great effort, 'as an old friend of the family, whose ancestors have been for years upon the estate, as a neighbour, too, in a lonely part of the county--more than all--all--as--as--I conceived a great craving to see you,' said the girl, brokenly, in a weak, yet exquisitely sweet voice.

'Indeed--thanks.'

This was not an encouraging response, nevertheless Bella spoke again.

'Jerry--Wilmot, I mean--and I were such playmates in our childhood long, long ago, that--that--you know----'

Bella's voice completely failed her under the cold, inquiring eyes of Lady Julia and Emily Wilmot.

'Playmates!' said the former. 'Yes, your memory does you credit. I thought you must have forgotten all that by this time, as I am sure my poor dear boy did.'

'Forgotten!'

'Yes, I think I heard him say something like that to his friend, Captain Goring.'

'If he spoke of those pleasant times, he would scarcely have forgotten them,' was the natural response of Bella, to whom Lady Julia, after a languid stare, said,

'Next mail must bring some distinct details of this calamity that has fallen upon me and Miss Wilmot.'

Bella felt that she was excluded from the co-partnery of grief--she who loved the dead as she loved her own soul, and more, and she was almost, in spite of herself, tempted to daringly enter some little protest when Lady Julia spoke again.

'I wish Captain Goring were at home; I should send for him. By the way, does not rumour say he has succeeded to a fortune?'

'To £20,000 a year,' replied Bella, in a low voice.

'Say £10,000--that will be nearer the mark, perhaps £5,000.'

'Why?'

'I believe very little that I see, and always but the half of what I hear,' she replied, fanning herself.

'How can this woman think of such matters just _now_,' thought Bella, an emotion of resentful bitterness growing in her heart. 'Oh, how little did she deserve to have such a son as my darling Jerry!'

The snapping and snarling of Floss, who always resented the advent of visitors, now required all Lady Julia's kisses and blandishments to soothe him into the recess of his mother-of-pearl basket; and to Bella it seemed monstrous, incredible, her bearing. Only this morning these women heard of the dire calamity, and they were to all appearance as 'cool as cucumbers'--a little redness they exhibited about the eyes certainly, and a certain subdued manner alone seemed to show that they had in any way laid to heart the death of the poor fellow whose obsequies might have been performed by the birds of the wilderness.

Doubtless Bella failed to understand the highly born and long descended; yet in many a gallant field, against both Scots and French, long before even the days of the great Civil War, had her ancestors done good and true yeoman service, with bow and bill, for their acres at Langley Park, under the banner of the Wilmots, with its three eagles' heads--_sable_ and _argent_.

At last she rose.

'It is well for you, Lady Julia,' said she, 'that you are able to take this awful dispensation of Providence so calmly as you do.'

'When a thing is inevitable or irreparable, it is best to bow the head and accept it with a good grace,' replied the bereaved mother, closing her fan, but not rising from the fauteuil on which she was reclining, looking gentle and soft, yet iron-bound and icily conventional.

'The loss of an only son, and such a son?' exclaimed Bella, indignation mingling with her grief, as she burst into a flood of irrepressible tears, on which Lady Julia gave her a stare of well-bred astonishment, and asked,

'What do you mean, Miss Chevenix, by this excessive emotion? Have you lost any relation recently that you come almost in black, and with these jet ornaments?'

'No--but I thought--I thought--' stammered Bella.

'You thought--what?'

'That for poor Jerry----'

'Do you mean Captain Wilmot--my son?' asked Lady Julia, icily.

'Yes,' replied Bella, boldly enough now; 'we were such old and good friends that I thought--a little change of dress was but becoming reverence to his memory; and I shall make it deeper still.'

'As you please,' said Lady Julia, bowing curtly, while Cousin Emily rang the bell, and bowed the visitor out.

The two ladies then stared at each other.

There was a _deduction_ to be drawn from honest Bella's deep, pathetic, and unconcealed interest and grief for the poor dead fellow that proved somewhat offensive to Lady Julia, who, amid her own sorrow--or what she considered such--had been considering the fashion of her own mourning--of mourning for the entire household--and of a handsomely quartered hatchment to 'hang upon the outward wall'; thus she was rather astounded and indignant at the rash or adopted bearing in one of Bella's rank and position; but they savoured, she thought, somewhat of the servants' hall in demonstrativeness.

She was ashamed as yet to consult her _Dressmakers' Album_, even with the aid of Emily and Mademoiselle Florine, anent the most becoming fashion of mourning; but to-morrow she would certainly do so.

'_Assurement, oui!_' thought Florine.

Anger and no small degree of contempt were in the heart of Bella as she quitted the park gates of Wilmothurst, with a kind of dull and sodden despair mingling therein, as she drove her ponies home in the February twilight to her father's house that overlooked the village green, and she thought how true were the words of Wordsworth of

'Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'