“No; worse. Can’t last through the night, I’m afraid.”
The forester’s wife pauses a moment, looking after the physician’s carriage as it whirls out of sight in the gathering darkness along the road; then, exclaiming sadly, “Poor, dear young lady!” she closes again the heavy iron gates, and retires to her own happy hearthside within the lodge.
Night has all but fallen, and though it is still only dusk upon the open road outside, within the avenue the gloaming is already deepening into mirk, and under the shadows of the limes it will soon be quite dark. A quiet spring night. When the wheels of the doctor’s carriage have retreated in the distance, no sound is to be heard amid the shadows but the twitter of a blackbird settling itself again to roost in its perfumed dreaming-place among the spruce branches, and the silvery tinkle of a streamlet making its way at hand through the ferny under-tangle of the wood. The air is rich with the fresh sweetness of budding life--the breath of unseen primroses opening their creamy petals upon dewy moss-banks in the darkness. Born amid the stillness, new, vague hopes stir within the heart; everywhere seems the delicious promise of the time of blossom and leaf that is to be; and the motionless night itself seems conscious of the coming of desire. It is a night to inspire a poet or a lover; every faint wood-scent, the cool touch of the night air itself upon the cheek, bringing with it some subtle suggestion, the more delightful that it is undefined, setting the pulse of youth a-beating with thoughts of a glad to-morrow.
Alas for those to whom no morrow will come!
At the upper end of the long avenue a faint light is shining yet in two windows of the many-gabled mansion-house. One of the windows is open, and within, at a small table, leaning his head upon his hand, can be seen the figure of a man. It is the master of the house. He has just received the last sentence of the physician, “I can be of no further service. The end will probably come before to-morrow”; and the words are still in his ears, beating like a leaden pendulum against his heart. Straight before him into the dark night he is gazing; but the eyes that look are tearless; only the drawn line about his mouth and the pitiful twitching of his lip bespeak the emotion that is working within. Yet he is not altogether left to himself. The air from the open window stirs his hair and fans his pale cheek--Nature, like a sweet and gentle friend, would offer him the soothing of her sympathy. Probably he is unconscious of it--drowning in the hopeless flood-tide of his grief; but, with the gentle air stealing in from the darkness outside, the influence of the great Reconciler, mother-heart of all mankind, is already touching him. While his ear takes in the soft movements of the nurse in the next room, tending all that is dearest to him on earth, his heart, stirred unconsciously by the subtle suggestions of the incoming night-scents, is travelling, torn with regret, through the tender avenues of the past. And strangely fresh in every detail reappear those scenes imprinted upon the pages of memory by the sunshine of love.