If Mr. Bell had had a prophetic eye he might have seen the torch all but inverted, and the angel with the grave and composed face standing very nigh, beckoning to his friend. That night Mr. Hale laid his head down upon the pillow on which it never more should stir with life. The servant who entered his room in the morning, received no answer to his speech; drew near the bed, and saw the calm, beautiful face lying white and cold under the ineffaceable seal of death. The attitude was exquisitely easy; there had been no pain—no struggle. The action of the heart must have ceased as he lay down.
Mr. Bell was stunned by the shock; and only recovered when the time came for being angry at every suggestion of his man’s.
“A coroner’s inquest? Pooh. You don’t think I poisoned him! Dr. Forbes says it is just the natural end of a heart complaint. Poor old Hale! You wore out that tender heart of yours before its time. Poor old friend! how he talked of his—Wallis, pack up a carpetbag for me in five minutes. Here have I been talking. Pack it up, I say. I must go to Milton by the next train.”
The bag was packed, the cab ordered, the railway reached, in twenty minutes from the time of this decision. The London train whizzed by, drew back some yards, and in Mr. Bell was hurried by the impatient guard. He threw himself back in his seat, to try, with closed eyes, to understand how one in life yesterday could be dead today; and shortly tears stole out between his grizzled eyelashes, at the feeling of which he opened his keen eyes, and looked as severely cheerful as his set determination could make him. He was not going to blubber before a set of strangers. Not he!
There was no set of strangers, only one sitting far from him on the same side. By-and-by Mr. Bell peered at him, to discover what manner of man it was that might have been observing his emotion; and behind the great sheet of the outspread Times, he recognized Mr. Thornton.
“Why, Thornton! is that you?” said he, removing hastily to a closer proximity. He shook Mr. Thornton vehemently by the hand, until the grip ended in a sudden relaxation, for the hand was wanted to wipe away tears. He had last seen Mr. Thornton in his friend Hale’s company.
“I’m going to Milton, bound on a melancholy errand. Going to break to Hale’s daughter the news of his sudden death!”
“Death! Mr. Hale dead!”
“Ay; I keep saying it to myself, ‘Hale is dead!’ but it doesn’t make it any the more real. Hale is dead for all that. He went to bed well, to all appearance, last night, and was quite cold this morning when my servant went to call him.”
“Where? I don’t understand!”
“At Oxford. He came to stay with me: hadn’t been in Oxford this seventeen years—and this is the end of it.”
Not one word was spoken for above a quarter of an hour. Then Mr. Thornton said:
“And she!” and stopped full short.
“Margaret you mean. Yes! I am going to tell her. Poor fellow! how full his thoughts were of her all last night! Good God! Last night only. And how immeasurably distant he is now! But I take Margaret as my child for his sake. I said last night I would take her for her own sake. Well, I take her for both.”
Mr. Thornton made one or two fruitless attempts to speak, before he could get out the words:
“What will become of her?”
“I rather fancy there will be two people waiting for her: myself for one. I would take a live dragon into my house to live, if by hiring such a chaperon, and setting up an establishment of my own, I could make my old age happy with having Margaret for a daughter. But there are those Lennoxes!”
“Who are they?” asked Mr. Thornton with trembling interest.
“Oh, smart London people, who very likely will think that they’ve the best right to her. Captain Lennox married her cousin—the girl she was brought up with. Good enough people, I dare say. And there’s her Aunt, Mrs. Shaw. There might be a way open, perhaps, by my offering to marry that worthy lady! but that would be quite a pis aller. And then there’s that brother!”
“What brother? A brother of her aunt’s?”
“No, no; a clever Lennox (the captain’s a fool, you must understand); a young barrister, who will be setting his cap at Margaret. I know he has had her in his mind these five years or more; one of his chums told me as much; and he was only kept back by want of fortune. Now that will be done away with.”
“How?” asked Mr. Thornton, too earnestly curious to be aware of the impertinence of his question.
“Why, she’ll have my money at my death. And if this Henry Lennox is half good enough for her, and she likes him—well! I might find another way of getting a home through a marriage. I’m dreadfully afraid of being tempted, at an unguarded moment, by her aunt.”
Neither Mr. Bell nor Mr. Thornton was in a laughing humour; so the oddity of any of the speeches which the former made was unnoticed by them. Mr. Bell whistled, without emitting any sound beyond a long hissing breath; changed his seat, without finding comfort or rest; while Mr. Thornton sat immovably still, his eyes fixed on one spot in the newspaper, which he had taken up in order to give himself leisure to think.
“Where have you been?” asked Mr. Bell, at length.
“To Havre. Trying to detect the secret of the great rise in the price of cotton.”
“Ugh! Cotton, and
