The Doctor's Wife: A Novel

She looked up at him – very much frightened by his manner, but with her hand still clasping his. The link must so soon be broken for ever. Only for a little while longer might she retain that dear hand in hers. Half an hour more, and they would be parted for ever and ever. The pain of that thought was strangely mingled with the delicious joy of being with him, of hearing from his lips that she was beloved. What did she care for Lady Gwendoline now? – cruel jealous Lady Gwendoline, who had outraged and insulted the purity of her love.

"Isabel," Roland said, very gravely, bending his head to a level with hers, as he spoke, but looking at the ground rather than at her, "It is time that we ended this farce of duty and submission to the world; we have tried to submit, and to rule our lives by the laws which other people have made for us. But we cannot – we cannot, my dear. We are only hypocrites, who try to mask our revolt under the pretence of submission. You come here and meet me, and we are happy together – unutterably and innocently happy. But you leave me and go home to your husband, and smile at him, and tell him that, while you were out walking, you met Mr. Lansdell, and so on; and you hoodwink and fool him, and act a perpetual lie for his delusion. All that must cease, Isabel. That Preacher, whom I think the noblest reformer, the purest philosopher whose voice was ever heard upon this earth, said that we cannot serve two masters. You cannot go on living the life you have lived for the last three weeks, Isabel. That is impossible. You have made a mistake. The world will tell you that, having made it, you must abide by it, and atone for your folly by a life of dissimulation. There are women brave enough – good enough, if you like – to do this, and to bear their burden patiently; but you are not one of them. You cannot dissimulate. Your soul has flown to me like a bird out of a cage; it is mine henceforth and for ever; as surely as that I love you, – fatally, unaccountably, mysteriously, but eternally. I know the strength of my chain, for I have tried to break it. I have held aloof, and tested the endurance of my love. If I ask you now to accept that love, it is because I know that it is true and pure, – the true metal, Izzie, the real virgin gold! I suppose a narrow vein of it runs through every man's nature; but it is only one woman's hand that has power to strike upon the precious ore. I love you, Isabel; and I want you to make an end of your present life, and leave this place for ever. I have written to an agent to get me a little villa on the outskirts of Naples. I went there alone, Izzie, two months ago, and set up your image in the empty rooms, and fancied you hovering here and there in your white dress, upon the broad marble terrace, with the blue sea below you, and the mountains above. I have made a hundred plans for our life, Izzie. There is not a whim or fancy of yours that I have not remembered. Ah, what happiness! to show you wonderful things and beautiful scenes! What delicious joy to see your eyes open their widest before all the fairest pictures of earth! I fancy you with me, Isabel, and, behold, my life is transformed. I have been so tired of everything in the world; and yet, with you by my side, all the world will be as fresh as Eden was to Adam on the first day of his life. Isabel, you need have no doubt of me. I have doubted myself, and tested myself. Mine is no light love, that time or custom can change or lessen: if it were, I would have done my duty, and stayed away from you for ever. I have thought of your happiness as well as my own, darling; and I ask you now to trust me, and leave this place for ever."

Something like a cry of despair broke from Isabel's lips. "You ask me to go away with you!" she exclaimed, looking at Roland as if she could scarcely believe the testimony of her own ears. "You ask me to leave George, and be your – mistress! Oh, Lady Gwendoline only spoke the truth, then. You don't understand – no one understands – how I love you!"

She had risen as she spoke, and flung herself passionately against the balustrade of the bridge, sobbing bitterly, with her face hidden by her clasped hands.

"Isabel, for Heaven's sake, listen to me! Can you doubt the purity of my love – the truth, the honesty of my intentions? I ask you to sign no unequal compact. Give me your life, and I'll give you mine in exchange – every day – every hour. Whatever the most exacting wife can claim of her husband, you shall receive from me. Whatever the truest husband can be to his wife, I swear to be to you. It is only a question of whether you love me, Isabel. You have only to choose between me and that man yonder."

"Oh, Roland! Roland! I have loved you so – and you could think that I – . Oh, you must despise me – you must despise me very much, and think me very wicked, or you would never – "

She couldn't say any more; but she still leant against the bridge, sobbing for her lost delusion.

Lady Gwendoline had been right, after all, – this is what Isabel thought, – and there had been no platonism, no poet-worship on Roland Lansdell's side; only the vulgar every-day wish to run away with another man's wife. From first to last she had been misunderstood; she had been the dupe of her own fancies, her own dreams. Lady Gwendoline's cruel words were only cruel truths. It was no Dante, no Tasso, who had wandered by her side; only a dissipated young country squire, in the habit of running away with other people's wives, and glorying in his iniquity. There was no middle standing-place which Roland Lansdell could occupy in this foolish girl's mind. If he was not a demi-god, he must be a villain. If he was not an exalted creature, full of poetic aspirations and noble fancies, he must be a profligate young idler, ready to whisper any falsehood into the ears of foolish rustic womanhood. All the stories of aristocratic villany that she had ever read flashed suddenly back upon Mrs. Gilbert's mind, and made a crowd of evidence against Lady Anna Lansdell's son. If he was not the one grand thing which she had believed him to be – a poetic and honourable adorer – he was in nothing the hero of her dreams. She loved him still, and must continue to love him, in spite of all his delinquencies; but she must love him henceforward with fear and trembling, as a splendid iniquitous creature, who had not even one virtue to set against a thousand crimes. Such thoughts as these crowded upon her, as she leaned sobbing on the narrow wooden rail of the bridge; while Roland Lansdell stood by, watching her with a grave and angry countenance.

"Is this acting, Mrs. Gilbert? Is this show of surprise and indignation a little comedy, which you play when you want to get rid of your lovers? Am I to accept my dismissal, and bid you good afternoon, and put up patiently with having been made the veriest fool that ever crossed this bridge?"

"Oh, Roland!" cried Isabel, lifting her head and looking piteously round at him, "I loved you so – I l-loved so!"

"You love me so, and prove your love by fooling me with tender looks and blushes, till I believe that I have met the one woman in all the world who is to make my life happy. Oh, Isabel, I have loved you because I thought you unlike other women. Am I to find that it is only the old story after all – falsehood, and trick, and delusion? It was a feather in your cap to have Mr. Lansdell of the Priory madly in love with you; and now that he grows troublesome, you send him about his business. I am to think this, I suppose. It has all been coquetry and falsehood, from first to last."

"Falsehood! Oh, Roland, when I love you so dearly – so dearly and truly; not as you love me, – with a cruel love that would bring shame and disgrace upon me. You never can be more to me than you are now. We may part; but there is no power on earth that can part my soul from yours, or lessen my love. I came to you this afternoon to say good-bye for ever, because I have heard that cruel things have been said of me by people who do not understand my love. Ah, how should those common people understand, when even you do not, Roland? I came to say good-bye; and then, after to-day, my life will be finished. You know what you said that night: 'The curtain goes down, and all is over!' I shall think of you for ever and ever, till I die. Ah, is there any kind of death that can ever make me forget you? but I will never come here again to see you. I will always try to do my duty to my husband."

"Your husband!" cried Mr. Lansdell, with a strident laugh; "had we not better leave his name out of the question? Oh, Isabel!" he exclaimed, suddenly changing his tone, "so help me Heaven, I cannot understand you. Are you only an innocent child, after all, or the wiliest coquette that ever lived? You must be one or the other. You speak of your husband. My poor dear, it is too late in the day now to talk of him. You should have thought of him when we first met; when your eyelids first drooped beneath my gaze; when your voice first grew tremulous as you spoke my name. From the very first you have lured me on. I am no trickster or thief, to steal another man's property. If your heart had been your husband's when first I met you, the beauty of an angel in a cathedral fresco would not have been farther away from me than yours. Depend upon it, Eve was growing tired of Eden when the serpent began to talk to her. If you had loved your husband, Isabel, I should have bowed my head before the threshold of your home, as I would at the entrance to a chapel. But I saw that you did not love him; I very soon saw that you did love, or seemed to love, me. Heaven knows how I struggled against the temptation, and only yielded at last when my heart told me that my love was true and honest, and worthy of the sacrifice I ask from you. I do ask that sacrifice; boldly, as a man who is prepared to give measure for measure. The little world to which you will say good-bye, Isabel, is a world whose gates will close on me in the same hour. Henceforth your life will be mine, with all its forfeitures. I am not an ambitious man, and have long ceased to care about making any figure in a world which has always seemed to me more or less like a show at a fair, with clanging cymbals and brazen trumpets, and promise and protestation, and boasting outside, and only delay and disappointment and vexation within. I do not give up very much, therefore, but what I have I freely resign. Come with me, Isabel, and I will take you away to the beautiful places you have been pleased to hear me talk about. All the world is ours, my darling, except this little corner of Midlandshire. Great ships are waiting to waft us away to far Southern shores, and tropical paradises, and deep unfathomable forests. All the earth is organized for our happiness. The money that has been so useless to me until now shall have a new use henceforward, for it shall be dedicated to your pleasure. Do you remember opening your eyes very wide the other day, Isabel, and crying out that you would like to see Rome, and poor Keats's grave, and the Colosseum, – Byron's Colosseum, – where the poetic gladiator thought of his wife and children, eh, Izzie? I made such a dream out of that little childish exclamation. I know the balcony in which we will sit, darling, after dark nights, in carnival time, to watch the crowd in the streets below, and, on one grandest night of all, the big dome of St. Peter's shining like a canopy of light, and all the old classic pediments and pillars blazing out of the darkness, as in a city of living fire. Isabel, you cannot have been ignorant of the end to which our fate was chaffing us; you must have known that I should sooner or later say what I have said to-day."

"Oh, no, no, no!" cried Mrs. Gilbert, despairingly, "I never thought that you would ask me to be more to you than I am now: I never thought that it was wicked to come here and meet you. I have read of people, who by some fatality could never marry, loving each other, and being true to others for years and years – till death sometimes; and I fancied that you loved me like that: and the thought of your love made me so happy; and it was such happiness to see you sometimes, and to think of you afterwards, remembering every word you had said, and seeing your face as plainly as I see it now. I thought, till yesterday, that this might go on for ever, and never, never believed that you would think me like those wicked women who run away from their husbands."

"And yet you love me?"

"With all my heart."

She looked at him with eyes still drowned in tears, but radiant with the truth of her sentimental soul, which had never before revealed itself so artlessly as now. Fondly as she worshipped her idol, his words had little power to move her, now that he was false to his attributes, and came down upon common ground and wooed her as an every-day creature. If Mr. Lansdell had declared his intention of erecting a marble mausoleum in the grounds of Mordred, and had requested Isabel to commit suicide in order to render herself competent to occupy it with him immediately, she would have thought his request both appropriate and delightful, and would have assented on the spot. But his wild talk of foreign travel had no temptation for her. True, she saw as in a bright and changing vision a picture of what her life might be far away amidst wild romantic regions in that dear companionship. But between herself and those far-away visions there was a darkly-brooding cloud of shame and disgrace. The Graybridge people might say what they chose of her: she could afford to hold her head high and despise their slanderous whispers: but she could not afford to tarnish her love – her love which had no existence out of bright ideal regions wherein shame could never enter.

Roland Lansdell watched her face in silence for some moments, and faintly comprehended the exaltation of spirit which lifted this foolish girl above him to-day. But he was a weak vacillating young man, who was unfortunate enough not to believe in anything, and he was, in his own fashion, truly and honestly in love, – too much in love to be just or reasonable, – and he was very angry with Isabel. The tide of his feelings had gathered strength day by day, and had relentlessly swept away every impediment, to be breasted at last by a rocky wall; here, where he thought to meet only the free boundless ocean, ready to receive and welcome him.

"Isabel," he said at last, "have you ever thought what your life is to be, always, after this parting to-day? You are likely to live forty years, and even when you have got through them you will not be an old woman. Have you ever contemplated those forty years, with three hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them; every day to be spent with a man you don't love – a man with whom you have not one common thought? Think of that, Isabel; and then, if you do love me, think of the life I offer you, and choose between them."

"I can only make one choice," Mrs. Gilbert answered, in a low sad voice. "I shall be very unhappy, I dare say; but I will do my duty to my husband – and think of you."

"So be it!" exclaimed Mr. Lansdell, with a long-drawn sigh. "In that case, good-bye." He held out his hand, and Isabel was startled by the coldness of its touch.

"You are not angry with me?" she asked, piteously.

"I have no right to be angry with any one but myself. I do not suppose you meant any harm; but you have done me the deepest wrong a woman can do to a man. I have nothing to say to you except good-bye. For mercy's sake go away, and leave me to myself."

She had no pretence for remaining with him after this, so she went away, very slowly, frightened and sorrowful. But when she had gone a few yards along the pathway under the trees, she felt all at once that she could not leave him thus. She must see his face once more: she must know for certain whether he was angry with her or not.

She crept slowly back to the spot where she had left him, and found him lying at full length upon the grass, with his face hidden on his folded arms. With a sudden instinct of grief and terror she knew that he was crying, and falling down on her knees by his side, murmured amidst her sobs, —

"Oh, pray forgive me! Pray do not be angry with me! I love you so dearly and so truly! Only say that you forgive me."

Roland Lansdell lifted his face and looked at her. Ah, what a reproachful look it was, and how long it lived in her memory and disturbed her peace!

"I will forgive you," he answered, sternly, "when I have learnt to endure my life without you."

He dropped his head again upon his folded arms, and Isabel knelt by his side for some minutes watching him silently; but he never stirred and she was too much frightened and surprised by his anger; and remorsefully impressed with a vague sense of her own wrong-doing, to dare address him further. So at last she got up and went away. She began to feel that she had been, somehow or other, very wicked, and that her sin had brought misery upon this man whom she loved.

CHAPTER XXVI.

A POPULAR PREACHER

What could Isabel Gilbert do? The fabric of all her dreams was shivered like a cobweb in a sudden wind, and floated away from her for ever. Everybody had misunderstood her. Even he, who should have been a demi-god in power of penetration as in every other attribute, – even he had wronged and outraged her, and never again could she look trustfully upward to the dark beauty of his face; never again could her hand rest, oh, so lightly, for one brief instant on his arm; never again could she tell him in childish confidence all the vague yearnings, the innocently-sentimental aspirations, of her childish soul.

Never any more. The bright ideal of her life had melted away from her like a spectral cloud of silvery spray hovering above an Alpine waterfall, and had left behind only a cynical man of the world, who boldly asked her to run away from her husband, and was angry with her because she refused to comply with his cruel demand.

Not for one moment did the Doctor's Wife contemplate the possibility of taking the step which Roland Lansdell had proposed to her. Far off – as far away from her as some dim half-forgotten picture of fairy-land – there floated a vision of what her life might have been with him, if she had been Clotilde, or the glittering Duchess, or Lady Gwendoline, or some one or other utterly different from herself. But the possibility of deliberately leaving her husband to follow the footsteps of this other man, was as far beyond her power of comprehension as the possibility that she might steal a handful of arsenic out of one of the earthenware jars in the surgery, and mix it with the sugar that sweetened George Gilbert's matutinal coffee.

She wandered away from Thurston's Crag, not following the meadow pathway that would have taken her homeward; but going anywhere, half-unconscious, wholly indifferent where she went; and thinking with unutterable sadness of her broken dreams.

She had been so childish, so entirely childish, and had given herself up so completely to that one dear day-dream. I think her childhood floated away from her for ever in company with that broken dream; and that the grey dawn of her womanhood broke upon her, cold and chill, as she walked slowly away from the spot where Roland Lansdell lay face downwards on the grass, weeping over the ruin of his dream. It seemed as if in that hour she crossed Mr. Longfellow's typical rivulet and passed on to the bleak and sterile country beyond. Well may the maiden linger ere she steps across that narrow boundary; for the land upon this hither side is very bare and desolate as compared with the fertile gardens and pleasant meads she abandons for ever. The sweet age of enchantment is over; the fairy companions of girlhood, who were loveliest even when most they deluded, spread their bright wings and flutter away; and the grave genius of common sense – a dismal-looking person, who dresses in grey woollen stuff, warranted not to shrink under the ordeal of the wash-tub, and steadfastly abjures crinoline – stretches out her hand, and offers, with a friendly but uncompromising abruptness, to be the woman's future guide and monitress.

Isabel Gilbert was a woman all at once; ten years older by that bleak afternoon's most bitter discovery. Since there was no one in the world who understood her, since even he so utterly failed to comprehend her, it must be that her dreams were foolish and impossible of comprehension to any one but herself. But those foolish dreams had for ever vanished. She could never think of Roland Lansdell again as she had thought of him. All her fancies about him had been so many fond and foolish delusions. He was not the true and faithful knight who could sit for ever at the entrance of his hermitage gazing fondly at the distant convent-casement, which might or might not belong to his lost love's chamber. No; he was quite another sort of person. He was the fierce dissolute cavalier, with a cross-handled sword a yard and a half long, and pointed shoes with long cruel spurs and steel chain-work jingling and clanking as he strode across his castle-hall. He was the false and wicked lover who would have scaled the wall of Hildegonde's calm retreat some fatal night, and would have carried the shrieking nun away, to go mad and throw herself into the Rhine on the earliest opportunity. He was a heartless Faust, ready to take counsel of Mephistopheles and betray poor trusting Gretchen. He was Robert the Devil, about whose accursed footsteps a whole graveyard of accusing spirits might arise at any moment. It may be that Isabel did not admire Mr. Lansdell less when she thought of him thus; but there was an awful shuddering horror mingled with her admiration. She was totally unable to understand him as he really was – a benevolently disposed young man, desirous of doing as little mischief in the world as might be compatible with his being tolerably happy himself; and fully believing that no great or irreparable harm need result from his appropriation of another man's wife.

The tears rolled slowly down Mrs. Gilbert's pale cheeks as she walked along the Midlandshire lanes that afternoon. She did not weep violently, or abandon herself to any wild passion of grief. As yet she was quite powerless to realize the blankness of her future life, now that her dream was broken for ever. Her grief was not so bitter as it had been on the day of Roland's sudden departure from Mordred. He had loved her – she knew that now; and the supreme triumph of that thought supported her in the midst of her sorrow. He had loved her. His love was not the sort of thing she had so often read of, and so fondly believed in; it was only the destroying passion of the false knight, the cruel fancy of the wicked squire in top-boots, whom she had frequently seen – per favour of a newspaper-order – from the back boxes of the Surrey Theatre. But he did love her! He loved her so well as to cast himself on the ground and weep because she had rejected him; and the wicked squire in top-boots had never gone so far as that, generally contenting himself with more practical evidences of his vexation, such as the levying of an execution on the goods and chattels of the heroine's father, or the waylaying and carrying off of the heroine herself by hired ruffians. How oddly it happens that the worthy farmer in the chintz waistcoat is always in arrear with his rent, and always stands in the relation of tenant to the dissolute squire!

Would Mr. Lansdell do anything of that kind? Isabel gave a little shiver as she glanced at the lonely landscape, and thought how a brace of hireling scoundrels might spring suddenly across the hedge, and bear her off to a convenient postchaise. Were there any postchaises in the world now, Isabel wondered. A strange confusion of thoughts filled her mind. She could not become quite a woman all in a moment; the crossing of the mystic brook is not so rapid an operation as that. Some remnants of the old delusions hung about her, and merely took a new form.

She sat down on the lower step of a stile to rest herself by-and-by, and smoothed back her hair, which had been blown about her face by the March wind, and re-tied the strings of her bonnet, before she went out on the high-road, that lay on the other side of the stile. When she did emerge upon the road, she found herself ever so far from home, and close to the model village where Mr. Raymond had given his simple entertainment of tea and pound-cake, and in which George Gilbert had stood by her side pleading to her with such profound humility. Poor George! The quiet aspect of the village-green, the tiny cottages, trim and bright in the fading March sunshine; the low wooden gate opening into the churchyard, – all these, so strange and yet so familiar, brought back the memory of a time that seemed unspeakably far away now.

It was Passion-week, – for Easter fell very late in March this year, – and the model village being a worthy model in the matter of piety as well as in all other virtues, there was a great deal of church-going among the simple inhabitants. The bells were ringing for evening service now, as Mrs. Gilbert lingered in the road between the village and the churchyard; and little groups of twos and threes, and solitary old women in black bonnets, passed her by, as she loitered quite at a loss whither to go, or what to do. They looked at her with solemn curiosity expressed in their faces. She was a stranger there, though Graybridge was only a few miles away; she was a stranger, and that alone, in any place so circumscribed as the model village, was enough to excite curiosity; and it may be that, over and above this, there was something in the look of her pale face and heavy eyelids, and a certain absent expression in her downcast eyes, calculated to arouse suspicion. Even in the midst of her trouble she could see that people looked at her suspiciously; and all in a moment there flashed back upon her mind the cruel things that Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey had said to her. Yes; all at once she remembered those bitter sentences. She had made herself a subject for slanderous tongues, and the story of her wicked love for Roland Lansdell was on every lip. If he, who should have known her – if he before whom she had bared all the secrets of her sentimental soul – if even he thought so badly of her as to believe that she could abandon her husband and become the thing that Mr. Dombey believed his wife to be when he struck his daughter on the stairs – the sort of creature whom grave Judge Brandon met one night under a lamp-post in a London street – how could she wonder that other people slandered and despised her? Very suddenly had the gates of Paradise closed upon her: very swiftly had she been dropped down from the fairy regions of her fancy to this cold, hard, cruel workaday world; and being always prone to exaggeration, she fancied it even colder, harder, and more cruel than it was. She fancied the people pointing at her in the little street at Graybridge; the stern rector preaching at her in his Sunday sermon. She pictured to herself everything that is most bitterly demonstrative in the way of scorn and contumely. The days were past in which solemn elders of Graybridge could send her out to wander here and there with bare bleeding feet and a waxen taper in her hand. There was no scarlet letter with which these people could brand her as the guilty creature they believed her to be; but short of this, what could they not do to her? She imagined it all: her husband would come to know what was thought of her, and to think of her as others thought, and she would be turned out of doors.

The groups of quiet people – almost all of them were women, and very few of them were young – melted slowly into the shadowy church-porch, like the dusky unsubstantial figures in a dioramic picture. The bells were still ringing in the chill twilight; but the churchyard was very lonely now; and the big solemn yew-trees looked weird and ghost-like against the darkening grey sky. Only one long low line of pale yellow light remained of the day that was gone! the day in which Isabel had said farewell to Roland Lansdell! It was a real farewell; no lovers' quarrel, wherefrom should spring that re-renewal of love so dismally associated with the Eton Latin Grammar. It was an eternal parting: for had he not told her to go away from him – to leave him for ever? Not being the wicked thing for which he had mistaken her, she was nothing in the world for him. He did not require perpetual worship; he did not want her to retire to a convent, in order that he might enjoy himself for the rest of his existence by looking up at her window; he did not want her to sit beside a brazier of charcoal with her hand linked in his – and die. He was not like that delightful Henry von Kleist, who took his Henriette to a pleasant inn about a mile from Potsdam, supped gaily with her, and then shot her and himself beside a lake in the neighbourhood. Mr. Lansdell wanted nothing that was poetical or romantic, and had not even mentioned suicide in the course of his passionate talk.

She went into the churchyard, and walked towards the little bridge upon which she had stood with George Gilbert by her side. The Wayverne flowed silently under the solid moss-grown arch; the wind had gone down by this time, and there was only now and then a faint shiver of the long dark rushes, as if the footsteps of the invisible dead, wandering in the twilight, had stirred them. She stood on the bridge, looking down at the quiet water. The opportunity had come now, if she really wanted to drown herself. Happily for weak mankind, self-destruction is a matter in which opportunity and inclination very seldom go together. The Doctor's Wife was very miserable; but she did not feel quite prepared to take that decisive plunge which might have put an end to her earthly troubles, Would they hear the splash yonder in the church, if she dropped quietly in among the rushes from the sloping bank under the shadow of the bridge? Would they hear the water surging round her as she sank, and wonder what the sound meant, and then go on with their prayers, indifferent to the drowning creature, and absorbed by their devotions? She wondered what these people were like, who kept their houses so tidily, and went to church twice a day in Passion-week, and never fell in love with Roland Lansdell. Long ago, in her childhood, when she went to see a play, she had wondered about the people she met in the street; the people who were not going to the theatre. Were they very happy? did they know that she had a free admission to the upper boxes of the Adelphi, and envy her? How would they spend the evening, – they who were not going to weep with Mr. Benjamin Webster, or Miss Sarah Woolgar? Now she wondered about people who were not miserable like herself – simple commonplace people, who had no yearnings after a life of poetry and splendour. She thought of them as a racer, who had just run second for the Derby, might think of a quiet pack-horse plodding along a dusty road and not wanting to win any race whatsoever.

"Even if they knew him, they wouldn't care about him," she thought. They did know him, perhaps, – saw him ride by their open windows, on a summer's afternoon, gorgeous on a two-hundred-guinea hack, and did not feel the world to be a blank desert when he was gone.

Did she wish to be like these people? No! Amid all her sorrow she could acknowledge, in the words of the poet, that it was better to have loved and lost him, than never to have loved him at all. Had she not lived her life, and was she not entitled to be a heroine for ever and ever by reason of her love and despair?

For a long time she loitered on the bridge, thinking of all these things, and thinking very little of how she was to go back to Graybridge, where her absence must have created some alarm by this time. She had often kept the surgeon waiting for his dinner before to-day; but she had never been absent when he ate it. There was a station at the model village; but there was no rail to Graybridge; there was only a lumbering old omnibus, that conveyed railway passengers thither. Isabel left the churchyard, and went to the little inn before which George had introduced her to his gardener and factotum. A woman standing at the door of this hostelry gave her all needful information about the omnibus, which did not leave the station till half-past eight o'clock; until that time she must remain where she was. So she went slowly back to the churchyard, and being tired of the cold and darkness without, crept softly into the church.

The church was very old and very irregular. There were only patches of yellow light here and there, about the pulpit and reading-desk, up in the organ-loft, and near the vestry-door. A woman came out of the dense obscurity as Isabel emerged from the porch, and hustled her into a pew; scandalized by her advent at so late a stage of the service, and eager to put her away somewhere as speedily as possible. It was a very big pew, square and high, and screened by faded curtains, hanging from old-fashioned brass rods. There were a great many hassocks, and a whole pile of prayer and hymn books in the darkest corner; and Isabel, sitting amongst these, felt as completely hidden as if she had been in a tomb. The prayers were just finished, – the familiar prayers, which had so often fallen like a drowsy cadence of meaningless words upon her unheeding ears, while her erring and foolish thoughts were busy with the master of Mordred Priory.

She heard the footsteps of the clergyman coming slowly along the matted aisle – the rustling of his gown as he drew it on his shoulders; she heard the door of the pulpit closed softly, and then a voice, a low earnest voice, that sounded tender and solemn in the stillness, recited the preliminary prayer. There are voices which make people cry, – voices which touch too acutely on some hidden spring within us, and open the floodgates of our tears; and the voice of the curate of Hurstonleigh was one of these. He was only a curate; but he was very popular in the model village, and the rumour of his popularity had already spread to neighbouring towns and villages. People deserted their parish churches on a Sunday afternoon and came to hear Mr. Austin Colborne preach one of his awakening sermons. He was celebrated for awakening sermons. The stolid country people wept aloud sometimes in the midst of one of his discourses. He was always in earnest; tenderly earnest, sorrowfully earnest, terribly earnest sometimes. His life, too, outside the church was in perfect harmony with the precepts he set forth under the shadow of the dark oaken sounding-board. There are some men who can believe, who can look forward to a prize so great and wonderful as to hold the pain and trouble of the race of very small account when weighed against the hope of victory. Austin Colborne was one of these men. The priestly robes he wore had not been loosely shuffled on by him because there was no other lot in life within his reach. He had assumed his sacred office with all the enthusiasm of a Loyola or an Irving, and he knew no looking back. It was such a man as this whom people came to hear at the little church beside the wandering Wayverne. It was such a man as this whose deep-toned voice fell with a strange power upon Isabel Gilbert's ears to-night. Ah, now she could fancy Louise de la Vallière low on her knees in the black shadow of a gothic pillar, hearkening to the cry of the priest who called upon her to repent and be saved. For some little time she only heard the voice of the preacher – the actual words of his discourse fell blankly on her ear. At first it was only a beautiful voice, a grand and solemn voice, rising and sinking on its course like the distant murmur of mighty waves for ever surging towards the shore. Then, little by little, the murmurs took a palpable form, and Isabel Gilbert found that the preacher was telling a story. Ah, that story, that exquisite idyl, that solemn tragedy, that poem so perfect in its beauty, that a sentimental Frenchman has only to garnish it with a few flowery periods, and lo, all the world is set reading it on a sudden, fondly believing that they have found something new. Mr. Austin Colborne was very fond of dwelling on the loveliness of that sublime history, and more frequently founded his discourse upon some divine incident in the records of the four Evangelists than on any obscure saying in St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians or the Hebrews. This is no place in which to dwell upon Mr. Austin Colborne, or the simple Christian creed it was his delight to illustrate. He was a Christian, according to the purest and simplest signification of the word. His sermons were within the comprehension of a rustic or a child, yet full and deep enough in meaning to satisfy the strictest of logicians, the sternest of critics. Heaven knows I write of him and of his teaching in all sincerity, and yet the subject seems to have so little harmony with the history of a foolish girl's errors and shortcomings, that I approach it with a kind of terror. I only know that Isabel Gilbert, weeping silently in the dark corner of the curtained pew, felt as she had never felt in all her Graybridge church-going; felt at once distressed and comforted.

Was it strange that, all at once, Isabel Gilbert should open her ears to the sublime story, which, in one shape or other, she had heard so often? Surely the history of all popular preachers goes far to demonstrate that Heaven gives a special power to some voices. When Whitfield preached the Gospel to the miners at Kingswood, – to rugged creatures who were little better than so many savages, but who, no doubt, in some shape or other, had heard that Gospel preached to them before, – the scalding tears ploughed white channels upon the black cheeks as the men listened. At last the voice of all others that had power to move them arose, and melted the stubborn ignorant hearts. Is it inspiration or animal magnetism which gives this power to some special persons? or is it not rather the force of faith, out of which is engendered a will strong enough to take hold of the wills of other people, and bend them howsoever it pleases? When Danton, rugged and gigantic, thundered his hideous demands for new hecatombs of victims, there must have been something in the revolutionary monster strong enough to trample out the common humanity in those who heard him, and mould a mighty populace to his own will and purpose as easily as a giant might fashion a mass of clay. Surely Mirabeau was right. There can be nothing impossible to the man who believes in himself. The masses of this world, being altogether incapable of lasting belief in anything, are always ready to be beaten into any shape by the chosen individual who believes, and is thus of another nature – something so much stronger than all the rest as to seem either a god or a demon. Cromwell appears, and all at once a voice is found for the wrongs of a nation. See how the king and his counsellors go down like corn before the blast of the tempest, while the man with a dogged will, and a sublime confidence in his own powers, plants himself at the helm of a disordered state, and wins for himself the name of Tiger of the Seas. Given Mr. John Law, with ample confidence in his own commercial schemes, and all France is rabid with a sudden madness, beating and trampling one another to death in the Rue Quincampoix. Given a Luther, and all the old papistical abuses are swept away like so much chaff before the wind. Given a Wesley, the believer, the man who is able to preach forty thousand sermons and travel a hundred thousand miles, and, behold, a million disciples exist in this degenerate day to bear testimony to his power.

Was it strange, then, that Isabel Gilbert, so dangerously susceptible of every influence, should be touched and melted by Mr. Colborne's eloquence? She had not been religiously brought up. In the Camberwell household Sunday had been a day on which people got up later than usual, and there were pies or puddings to be made. It had been a day associated with savoury baked meats, and a beer-stained "Weekly Dispatch" newspaper borrowed from the nearest tavern. It had been a day on which Mr. Sleaford slept a good deal on the sofa, excused himself from the trouble of shaving, and very rarely put on his boots. Raffish-looking men had come down to Camberwell in the Sunday twilight, to sit late into the night smoking and drinking, and discoursing in a mysterious jargon known to the household as "business talk." Sometimes of a summer evening, Mrs. Sleaford, awakened to a sense of her religious duties, would suddenly run a raid amongst the junior branches of the family, and hustle off Isabel and one or two of the boys to evening service at the big bare church by the canal. But the spasmodic attendance at divine service had very little effect upon Miss Sleaford, who used to sit staring at the holes in her gloves; or calculating how many yards of riband, at how much per yard, would be required for the trimming of any special bonnet to which her fancy leaned; or thinking how a decent-looking young man up in the gallery might be a stray nobleman, with a cab and tiger waiting somewhere outside the church, who would perhaps fall in love with her before the sermon was finished. She had not been religiously brought up; and the church-going at Graybridge had been something of a bore to her; or at best a quiet lull in her life, which left her free to indulge the foolish vagaries of her vagabond fancy. But now, for the first time, she was touched and melted; the weak sentimental heart was caught at the rebound. She was ready to be anything in the world except a commonplace matron, leading a dull purposeless life at Graybridge. She wanted to find some shrine, some divinity, who would accept her worship; some temple lifted high above the sordid workaday earth, in which she might kneel for ever and ever. If not Roland Lansdell, why then Christianity. She would have commenced her novitiate that night had she been in a Roman Catholic land, where convent-doors were open to receive such as her. As it was, she could only sit quietly in the pew and listen. She would have liked to go to the vestry when the service came to an end, and cast herself at the feet of the curate, and make a full confession of her sins; but she had not sufficient courage for that. The curate might misunderstand her, as Roland Lansdell had done. He might see in her only an ordinarily wicked woman, who wanted to run away from her husband. Vague yearnings towards Christian holiness filled her foolish breast; but as yet she knew not how to put them into any shape. When the congregation rose to leave the church, she lingered to the last, and then crept slowly away, resolved to come again to hear this wonderful preacher. She went to the little station whence the Graybridge omnibus was to start at half-past eight; and after waiting a quarter of an hour took her place in a corner of the vehicle. It was nearly ten when she rang the bell at her husband's gate, and Mrs. Jeffson came out with a grave face to admit her.