God's Good Man - Marie Corelli (i want to read a book .txt) 📗

ain’t sure of ‘is own mind! He don’t make a pretty thing just to break it agin all for nowt! Didn’t ye all come clickettin’ to me about the Five Sister beeches, an’ ain’t they still stannin’? An’ Miss Maryllia ‘ull stan’ too just as fast an’ firm as the trees,—you take my wurrd for’t! She ain’t goin’ to die! Why look at me—just on ninety, an’ I ain’t dead yet!”

But a qualm of fear and foreboding came over him whenever ‘Passon’ visited him. John’s sad face told him more than words could express.

“Ain’t she no better, Passon?” he would ask, timidly and tremblingly.

And John, laying his own hand on the old brown wrinkled one, would reply gently,

“No better, Josey! But we must hope,—we must hope always, and believe that God will be merciful.”

“An’ if He ain’t merciful, what’ll we do?” persisted Josey once, with tears in his poor dim eyes.

“We must submit!” answered John, almost sternly—“We must believe that He knows what is wise and good for her—and for us all! And we must live out our lives patiently without her, Josey!—patiently, till the blessed end—till that peace cometh which passeth all understanding!”

And Josey, looking at him, was awed by the pale spiritual serenity of his features and the tragic human grief of his eyes.

One person in the neighbourhood proved himself a mainstay of help and consolation during this time of general anxiety and suspense, and this was Julian Adderley. He was always at hand and willing to be of service. He threw his ‘dreams’ of poesy to the winds and became poet in earnest,—poet in sympathy with others,—poet in kindly thought,—poet in constant delicate ways of solace to the man he had learned to respect above all others, and whose unspoken love and despair he recognised with more passionate appreciation than any grandly written tragedy. He had gone at once to the Manor on Cicely’s arrival there, and had laid himself, metaphorically so to speak, at her feet. When she had first seen him, all oppressed by the weight of her sorrow as she was, she had burst out crying, whereat he had, without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment, taken her in his arms and kissed her. Neither he nor she seemed the least surprised at the spontaneity of their mutual caress,—it came quite naturally. “It was so new—so fresh!” said Julian afterwards. And from that eventful moment, he had installed himself more or less at the Manor, under Cicely’s orders. He wrote letters for her, answered telegrams, drew up a formal list of ‘Callers’ and ‘Enquiries,’ kept accounts, went errands for the two trained nurses who were in day and night attendance on the unconscious invalid upstairs, and made himself generally useful and reliable. But his ‘fantastic’ notions were the same as ever. He would not, as he put it, ‘partake of food’ at the Manor while its mistress was lying ill,—nor would he allow any servant in the household to wait upon him. He merely came and went, quietly to and fro, giving his best services to all, and never failing to visit Walden every day, and tell him all the latest news. He even managed to make friends with the great dog Plato, who, ever since Maryllia’s accident, had taken up regular hours of vigil outside her bedroom door, regardless of doctor and nurses, though he would move his leonine body gently aside whenever they passed in or out, showing a perfectly intelligent comprehension of their business. Plato every now and again would indulge in a walk abroad with Julian, accompanying him as far as the rectory, where he would enter, laying his broad head on Walden’s knee with a world of sympathy in his loving brown eyes, while Nebbie, half-jealous, half-gratified, squatted humbly in the shadow of his feathery tail. And John found a certain melancholy pleasure in caressing the very dog Maryllia loved, and would sit, thoughtfully stroking the animal’s thick coat, while Adderley and Dr. Forsyth, both of whom were now accustomed to meet in his little study every evening, discussed the pros and cons of what was likely to happen when Maryllia woke from her long trance of insensibility. Would her awakening be to life or death? John listened to their talk, himself saying nothing, all unaware that they talked merely to cheer him and to try and put the best light they could on the face of affairs in order to give him the utmost hope.

The weary days rolled on in rain and gloom,—Christmas came and went with a weight and dullness never before known in St. Rest. Every Sunday since the accident, Walden had earnestly requested the prayers of his congregation for Miss Vancourt, ‘who was seriously ill’—and on Christmas Day, he gave out the same request, with a pathetic alteration in the wording, which as he uttered it, caused many people to sob as they listened.

“The prayers of this congregation,” he said—“are desired for Maryllia Vancourt, who has been much beloved among you, and whose life is now in imminent peril!”

A chill seemed to strike through the church,—an icy blast far colder than the wintry wind,—the alabaster sarcophagus in front of the altar seemed all at once invested with a terrible significance,- -death, and death only was the sovereign ruler of the world! And when the children’s choir rose to give the ‘Hark the herald angels sing, Glory to the new-born King’—their voices were unsteady and fell out of tune into tears.

Maryllia was indeed in ‘imminent peril.’ She had become suddenly restless, and her suffering had proportionately increased. At the earliest symptom of returning consciousness, the attention of the watchers at her bedside became redoubled;—should she speak, they were anxious to hear the first word that escaped her lips. For as yet, no one knew how she had come by her accident. None of the hunters had seen her fall, and Bennett the groom, stoutly refused to believe that the mare had either missed her jump, or thrown her mistress.

“She couldn’t have done it,”—he declared—“And if she could, she wouldn’t! She’s too sensible, and Miss Vancourt’s too sure a rider. Something’s at the bottom of it all, and I’d give a good deal to find out what it is, and WHO it is!”

Thus said Bennett, with many dark nods of meaning, and gradually the idea that Maryllia had been the victim of foul play, took root in the minds of all the villagers who heard him. Everyone in the place was on the watch for a clue,—a whisper,—a stray suggestion as to the possible cause of the mischief. But so far nothing had been discovered.

On the night before the last of the year, Maryllia, who had been tossing uneasily all the afternoon, and moaning piteously, suddenly opened her eyes and looked about her with a frightened air of recognition. Cicely, always at hand with the nurse in attendance, went quickly to the bedside in a tremour of hope and fear.

“Maryllia! Dearest, do you know me?”

She stared vaguely, and a faint smile hovered about her lips. Then her brows suddenly knitted into a perplexed, pained frown, and she said quite clearly—

“It was Oliver Leach!”

Cicely gave a little cry. The nurse warned her into silence by a gesture. There was a pause. Maryllia looked from one to the other wistfully.

“It was not Cleo’s fault,” she went on, speaking slowly, but distinctly—“Cleo never missed. Oliver Leach took the hedge just behind us. It was wrong! He meant to kill me. I saw it in his face!” She shuddered violently, and her eyelids closed. “He was cruel— cruel!” she murmured feebly—“But I was too happy!”

She drifted again into a stupor,—and Cicely, her whole soul awakened by these broken words into a white heat of wrath and desire for vengeance, left the room with sufficient information to set the whole village in an uproar. Oliver Leach! In less than four-and- twenty hours, the news was all over the place. The spreading wave of indignation soon rose to an overwhelming high tide, and had Leach shown himself anywhere in or near the village he would have stood an uncommonly good chance of being first horsewhipped, and then ‘ducked’ in the river by an excited crowd. Oliver Leach! The hated, petty upstart who had ground down the Abbot’s Manor tenantry to the very last penny that could be wrested from them!—who had destroyed old cherished land-marks, and made ugly havoc in many once fair woodland places in order to put money in his own pocket,—even he, so long an object of aversion among them, was the would-be murderer of the last descendant of the Vancourts! The villagers talked of nothing else,—quiet and God-fearing rustics as they were, they had no patience with treachery, meanness and cowardice, and were the last kind of people in the world to hold their peace on a matter of wickedness or injustice, merely because Leach was in the employ of several neighbouring land-owners, including Sir Morton Pippitt. Murmurs and threats ran from mouth to mouth, and Walden when he heard of it, said nothing for, or against, their clamour for revenge. The rage and sorrow of his own soul were greater than the wrath of combined hundreds,—and his feeling was all the more deep and terrible because it found no expression in words. The knowledge that such a low and vile creature as Oliver Leach had been the cause, and possibly the intentional cause of Maryllia’s grievous suffering and injury, moved him to realise for the first time in his life what it was to be conscious of a criminal impulse. He himself longed to kill the wretch who had brought such destruction on a woman’s beauty and happiness!—and it was with a curious sort of satisfaction that he found himself called upon in the ordinary course of things to read at evening service during the first week in January, the Twenty-eighth Psalm, wherein David beseeches God to punish the ungodly.

“Reward them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their own inventions! “Recompense them after the work of their hands: pay them that they have deserved!”

Such demands for the punishment of one’s enemies may not be ‘Christian,’ but they are Scriptural, and as such, John felt himself justified in pronouncing them with peculiar emphasis and fervour.

Meanwhile, by slow degrees, the ‘imminent peril’ passed, and Maryllia came back to her conscious self,—a self that was tortured in every nerve by pain,—but, with the return of her senses came also her natural sweetness and gentleness, which now took the form of a touching patience, very sad, yet very beautiful to see. The first little gleam of gladness in her eyea awoke for Cicely,—to whom, as soon as she recognised her, she put up her lips to be kissed. Her accident had not disfigured her,—the fair face had been spared, though it was white and drawn with anguish. But she could not move her limbs,—and when she had proved this for herself, she lay very still, thinking quietly, with a dream-like wonder and sorrow in her blue eyes, like the wistfulness in the eyes of a wounded animal that knows not why it should be made to suffer. Docile to her nurses, and grateful for every little service, she remained for some days in a sort of waking reverie, holding Cicely’s hand often, and asking her an occasional question about the house, the gardens and the village. And January was nearly at an end, when she began at last to talk connectedly and to enquire closely as to her own actual condition.

“Am I going to die, Cicely?” she asked one morning—“You will tell me the truth, dear, won’t you? I