Nobility -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Wessex (England) -- Fiction; Women -- England -- Fiction
He filled his post for more than two years with a pleasure to himself
which, though mournful, was soothing, his lady never forgiving him, or
allowing him to be anything more than 'the gardener' to her child, though
once or twice the boy said, 'That gardener's eyes are so sad! Why does
he look so sadly at me?' He sunned himself in her scornfulness as if it
were love, and his ears drank in her curt monosyllables as though they
were rhapsodies of endearment. Strangely enough, the coldness with which
she treated her foreigner began to be the conduct of Lord Icenway towards
herself. It was a matter of great anxiety to him that there should be a
lineal successor to the title, yet no sign of that successor appeared.
One day he complained to her quite roughly of his fate. 'All will go to
that dolt of a cousin!' he cried. 'I'd sooner see my name and place at
the bottom of the sea!'
The lady soothed him and fell into thought, and did not recriminate. But
one day, soon after, she went down to the cottage of the gardener to
inquire how he was getting on, for he had been ailing of late, though, as
was supposed, not seriously. Though she often visited the poor, she had
never entered her under-gardener's home before, and was much
surprised--even grieved and dismayed--to find that he was too ill to rise
from his bed. She went back to her mansion and returned with some
delicate soup, that she might have a reason for seeing him.
His condition was so feeble and alarming, and his face so thin, that it
quite shocked her softening heart, and gazing upon him she said, 'You
must get well--you must! I have been hard with you--I know it. I will
not be so again.'
The sick and dying man--for he was dying indeed--took her hand and
pressed it to his lips. 'Too late, my darling, too late!' he murmured.
'But you _must not_ die! Oh, you must not!' she said. And on an impulse
she bent down and whispered some words to him, blushing as she had
blushed in her maiden days.
He replied by a faint wan smile. 'Time was! . . . but that's past!' he
said, 'I must die!'
And die he did, a few days later, as the sun was going down behind the
garden-wall. Her harshness seemed to come trebly home to her then, and
she remorsefully exclaimed against herself in secret and alone. Her one
desire now was to erect some tribute to his memory, without its being
recognized as her handiwork. In the completion of this scheme there
arrived a few months later a handsome stained-glass window for the
church; and when it was unpacked and in course of erection Lord Icenway
strolled into the building with his wife.
'"_Erected to his memory by his grieving widow_,"' he said, reading the
legend on the glass. 'I didn't know that he had a wife; I've never seen
her.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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