Chapter XXVll.—(Continued.)

Star (Christchurch), Issue 4907, 24 March 1894, Page 1

Chapter XXVll.—(Continued.)

It was between seven and eight in the evening, and there was a gloomy twilight Jn the loggia, and in the garden beyond, j The wind which had dropped in the after* toon had begun to rage again, as if not only Nero bnt all the wicked ewperorß were abroad in the air. Isola had- begged that one of the windows might be opened, in spite of tho tempestuous weather, and the cold damp dreath cf the storm crept into the room and chilled Martin Disney as he sat by hia wife's sofa, reading a London paper that had come by the evening post. The only artificial light in the room wsd & reading-lamp at the Colonel's elbow, shaded from the draught by the fourleaved Bcreen which protooted tho invalid. The gloomy grey daylight had not quite faded, and throngh the half-open door opposite him Martin Disney saw the white marble wall of the staircase, and some oleanders in stone vases that stood on the spacious landing. He had beon reading to laola nearly all flay. He was reading to himself now, trying to forget his own grief in the consideration of a leading artiole which presaged a European war, and the ultimate extinction of English influence in continental politics. There was perfeot stillness in the room. Isola had beon lying with closed eyes a little time before, and he fancied that she was sleeping. The silence had lasted for nearly an Jiour, broken only by the shriek of the wind, and by the chiming of the quarters from the Church of La Trinita de' Monte, when Colonel Disney was startled from his gloomy study by his wife's hand clutching his arm, and his wife's agitated whisper sending close to his ear. "Don't follow him! Don't, Martin, don't!" She had lifted herself into a sitting position, she who had not sat up for many days. The hectic bloom had faded from her oheeks and left them ashy pale. Her eyea seemed almost starting from her head, straining their gaze as if to-penetrate the deepening shadows on the landing beyond the half-open door. '* My love, you have been dreaming^ said Disney, soothing her. with womanly gentleness. "Lie down again, my poor dear. See, let me arrange the pillows and make you quite comfortable." "No, no! I was not dreaming. Ihave not been asleep. He 'was there; I saw him aa plainly as I see you. He pushed the door a little further open and looked in at me. I saw hia face in the lamplight, very pale." Disney glanced at the door involuntarily. Yes, the aperture was certainly wider than when he looked at it last; just as if some one's hand had pushed the door farther-:-aj&r.* The hand c? the wind no doubt. "My dear girl, believe me, you are dreaming. No one could have approached that doorway without my hearing them." " I have been lying awake thinking all the time you have been reading your paper, Martin. I never had le3s inclination to sleep. I know that he was there looking in at me, with a smile upon hia pale face. But he has gone, thank God he has gone ! Only I can't help wondering how he cams there, without our hearing his step upon the stone stair." "Who was it, Iaola?" He knew what the answer would be. He thought her mind was wandering, and he knew there wbb only one image which could so agitate her. "Lord Loßtwithiel." "A delusion, Isa. Lord Lostwithiel is far away from Eome. Oome, dear love, let me read to you again, and let ua have our good Tabitha in to cheer you with a cup of tea, and to brighten up the room a little. We have been lapsing into gloom under the influence of the gloomy weather." He went out of the room on pretence of summoning Tabitha, and having sent her to watch beside his wife, he ran quickly downstairs to find out if the street door were open or closed. The door wos shut and bolted. The servants on the ground floor had not opened the door to anyone after five o'clock. There was no possibility of any stranger having entered the house since that hour. The end came that night, with an appalling suddenness. Isola had refused to be carried back to her bedroom at the usual time. She seemed to have a horror of going into the room, as if the shadows lurking there were full of fear. Even Father Bodwell's presence, which generally had a soothing affect upon her nerves and spirits, failed to comfort her to-night. She refused to lie in her usual position, and insisted upon sitting up, supported by pillows, facing the doorway at which her fanoy had evoked Lostwithiel's image. She would not allow the door to be shut, and there was the same strained look in her too brilliant eyes all the evening. Father Bodwell read aloud to her, going on with a history of St Cecilia, in which she had been warmly interested; but tonight he could see that her thoughts were not with the book; He went on all the same, hoping that the Bound of his voice might lull her to sleep. The wind had gone down as the night advanced, and the Btars were shining in the strip of sky above the Fincian Gardens. Colonel Disney was pacing up and down the loggia, smoking his pipe in the cool darkneßß—full of saddest apprehensions. Her mind had been wandering, surely, when she had that fancy about Lostwithiel, he told himself. It waa something more than a dream. And then he remembered those long nights of delirium after her boy was born—and above all, that one night, when she bad fancied herBelf at sea in a storm, when she had tried to fling herself overboard. He knew now what scene she had reacted iv that delirium, what the vision was which her wandering mind had conjured out of the empty darkness. The prioat left them before eleven o'clock, and Martin Disney sat with his wife till long after midnight—Tabitha waiting quietly in the next room—before he could persuade her to go to bad. Isola wbb more wakeful than usual—though her slumbers had been much broken of late— and there wa9 a reatleßaness about her which impressed her husband as a sign of evil. "Is the storm over ? " she asked, by and by, with her face turned towards the loggia and the starlight above the garden. " fes, dearest, all is calm now." "And the boy?" she said, suddenly, looking up at the ceiling above which the _hild slept with his nurse. He is asleep, of sourse." " I hope bo, I went upßtßira at nine o'clock, while Father Eodwell was reading to you, and gave him my good night kißs. fie was fast asleep." " I wonder whether he will ever think if me when he is a man," she said nusingly. "Can you doubt that? Yoa will be hia ten iMte4 memory."

" Ah," she replied, "he will never know—" The sentence remained unfinished. "Will you carry, me to my bed, Martin, the room begins to grow dark," she said faintly. " I can hardly see your face." He lifted the wasted form in his arms, and carried her with tenderest care into the next room, and to the pure white bed which had been made ready for her, the long pet curtains parted, the coverlet turned down. He laid her there, as he had done many a night daring that slow and monotonous journey towards the grave ; but her gentle acknowledgment of his carefulness was wanting to-night. Her head sank upon the pillow, her pale lips parted with a faint fluttering sigh, aud all was still. This waa how the end came-— suddenly, painlessly. She died like an infant sinking to sleep. Colonel Disney laid hia wife in the place she had loved, the cemetery under the shadow of the old Korean wall, in a verdant corner near Shelley's grave. " Burial follows death with a dreadful swiftness in that southern land, and the earth had closed over Isola before noon of tha day after her death. Martin Disney waited to see the new made grave covered with Bummer's loveliest blossoms before ho left the cemetery and went baok to the house to which he had taken his fading wife in the lovely Italian springtime. He paced the desolate rooms, and wandered in and out between ihe drawing-room and the sunny bedroom, with its snowy curtained bed, and looked at this object and that, with tear-dimmed eyes and an aching heart. He had telegraphed the day before to Captain Hulbert at Venies, but there had been no reply so far; and he could only | suppose that Allegra and her husband had left the city upon one of those excursions which his sister had described to him aB diversifying their quiet life in their rooms |on the grand canal. He had not been at home long, and his tired eye 3 were still dazed and blinded by the flood of sunlight which the servants had let in upon the rooms after the funeral, when a telegram was brought to him. It was from Brindisi. i "The Eurydice went down with all hands last night off Smyrna. My brother was on board. lam on my way to Greece. IE you can be spared go to Allegra— Hulbert." Martin Disney knew later that it was between seven and eight o'clock that the Eurydice struck upon a rook, and every soul on board her perished. The boy and his nursj went back to Trelasco under Tabitha'a escort, and were followed Ito Cornwall soon afterwards by the new Lord Lostwithiel and his wife, who established themselves at the Mount, to the great satisfaction of the neighbourhood, where it was felt that the local nobleman had now become a permanent institution. Allegra and her husband took Martin Disney's son under their protection in the absence of his father, who was fighting in the Soudan, and who did not rqvisit the Anglera' Nest till two years j after his wife's death, when he returned honourably distinguished by hia services, a V.C., and a broken man; returned to live a tranquil life among .tho books in the library which he had built for himself, and to watch the growth of his son, whose every look and tone recalled the image o£ ■ki& dead wife » Sometime-?, oa /drowsy summer afternoons, smoking his pipe under the tulip tree, while the Fowey river rippled by in the sunshine, it seemed to him as if Isola'a pensive loveliness, and the years that he had lived with her, and the teara that he had shed for her, and the infinite pity whioh had blotted out all sense of his deep wrong, were only the transient phases of one long melancholy dream— the dream of a love that was never returned. "And yet, and yet," he said to himselP, after lengthened meditation, with unseeing eyes fixed upon the movement of the tide, "I think ahe loved me. I think her heart waa sine from the hour her teara welcomed me bie_*%* this house, until her last sigh. God help all young wives whom their husbands leave alone in their youth and beauty to stand or fall in the hour of temptation." Idly exploring the contents of the secretaire in the drawing-room one day, I Martin Disney found the telegraphic message which his wife had written— | and left nnsent— before the hunt ball. [the end.]