With his hand upon his chest he sank down to the floor before he had gone another step.By the time that she had relighted the candle,which had been extinguished in case any eye in the opposite grounds should witness his egress,she found that his poor heart had ceased to beat;and there rushed upon her mind what his cottage-friends had once told her,that he was liable to attacks of heart-disease,one of which,the doctor had informed them,might some day carry him off.
Accustomed as she was to doctoring the other parishioners,nothing that she could effect upon him in that kind made any difference whatever;and his stillness,and the increasing coldness of his feet and hands,disclosed too surely to the affrighted young woman that her husband was dead indeed.For more than an hour,however,she did not abandon her efforts to restore him;when she fully realized the fact that he was a corpse she bent over his body,distracted and bewildered as to what step she next should take.
Her first feelings had undoubtedly been those of passionate grief at the loss of him;her second thoughts were concern at her own position as the daughter of an earl.'Oh,why,why,my unfortunate husband,did you die in my chamber at this hour!'she said piteously to the corpse.'Why not have died in your own cottage if you would die!Then nobody would ever have known of our imprudent union,and no syllable would have been breathed of how I mismated myself for love of you!'
The clock in the courtyard striking the hour of one aroused Lady Caroline from the stupor into which she had fallen,and she stood up,and went towards the door.To awaken and tell her mother seemed her only way out of this terrible situation;yet when she put her hand on the key to unlock it she withdrew herself again.It would be impossible to call even her mother's assistance without risking a revelation to all the world through the servants;while if she could remove the body unassisted to a distance she might avert suspicion of their union even now.This thought of immunity from the social consequences of her rash act,of renewed freedom,was indubitably a relief to her,for,as has been said,the constraint and riskiness of her position had begun to tell upon the Lady Caroline's nerves.
She braced herself for the effort,and hastily dressed herself;and then dressed him.Tying his dead hands together with a handkerchief;she laid his arms round her shoulders,and bore him to the landing and down the narrow stairs.Reaching the bottom by the window,she let his body slide slowly over the sill till it lay on the ground without.She then climbed over the window-sill herself,and,leaving the sash open,dragged him on to the lawn with a rustle not louder than the rustle of a broom.There she took a securer hold,and plunged with him under the trees.
Away from the precincts of the house she could apply herself more vigorously to her task,which was a heavy one enough for her,robust as she was;and the exertion and fright she had already undergone began to tell upon her by the time she reached the corner of a beech-plantation which intervened between the manor-house and the village.Here she was so nearly exhausted that she feared she might have to leave him on the spot.But she plodded on after a while,and keeping upon the grass at every opportunity she stood at last opposite the poor young man's garden-gate,where he lived with his father,the parish-clerk.How she accomplished the end of her task Lady Caroline never quite knew;but,to avoid leaving traces in the road,she carried him bodily across the gravel,and laid him down at the door.Perfectly aware of his ways of coming and going,she searched behind the shutter for the cottage door-key,which she placed in his cold hand.Then she kissed his face for the last time,and with silent little sobs bade him farewell.
Lady Caroline retraced her steps,and reached the mansion without hindrance;and to her great relief found the window open just as she had left it.When she had climbed in she listened attentively,fastened the window behind her,and ascending the stairs noiselessly to her room,set everything in order,and returned to bed.
The next morning it was speedily echoed around that the amiable and gentle young villager had been found dead outside his father's door,which he had apparently been in the act of unlocking when he fell.
The circumstances were sufficiently exceptional to justify an inquest,at which syncope from heart-disease was ascertained to be beyond doubt the explanation of his death,and no more was said about the matter then.But,after the funeral,it was rumoured that some man who had been returning late from a distant horse-fair had seen in the gloom of night a person,apparently a woman,dragging a heavy body of some sort towards the cottage-gate,which,by the light of after events,would seem to have been the corpse of the young fellow.His clothes were thereupon examined more particularly than at first,with the result that marks of friction were visible upon them here and there,precisely resembling such as would be left by dragging on the ground.
