Miss Pole, Miss Matty, and I, meanwhile, attended to Miss Brown; and hard work we found it to relieve her querulous and never-ending complaints. But if we were so weary and dispirited, what must Miss Jessie have been! Yet she came back almost calm, as if she had gained a new strength. She put off her mourning dress, and came in, looking pale and gentle, thanking us each with a soft, long pressure of the hand. She could even smile—a faint, sweet, wintry smile—as if to reassure us of her power to endure; but her look made our eyes fill suddenly with tears, more than if she had cried outright.
It was settled that Miss Pole was to remain with her all the watching livelong night; and that Miss Matty and I were to return in the morning to relieve them, and give Miss Jessie the opportunity for a few hours of sleep. But when the morning came, Miss Jenkyns appeared at the breakfast-table, equipped in her helmet-bonnet, and ordered Miss Matty to stay at home, as she meant to go and help to nurse. She was evidently in a state of great friendly excitement, which she showed by eating her breakfast standing, and scolding the household all round.
No nursing—no energetic, strong-minded woman could help Miss Brown now. There was that in the room as we entered which was stronger than us all, and made us shrink into solemn, awestruck helplessness. Miss Brown was dying. We hardly knew her voice, it was so devoid of the complaining tone we had always associated with it. Miss Jessie told me afterwards that it, and her face too, were just what they had been formerly, when her mother’s death left her the young anxious head of the family, of whom only Miss Jessie survived.
She was conscious of her sister’s presence, though not, I think, of ours. We stood a little behind the curtain: Miss Jessie knelt with her face near her sister’s, in order to catch the last soft, awful whispers.
“O Jessie! Jessie! How selfish I have been! God forgive me for letting you sacrifice yourself for me as you did! I have so loved you—and yet I have thought only of myself. God forgive me!”
“Hush, love! hush!” said Miss Jessie, sobbing.
“And my father! my dear, dear father! I will not complain now, if God will give me strength to be patient. But, oh, Jessie! tell my father how I longed and yearned to see him at last, and to ask his forgiveness. He can never know now how I loved him—oh! if I might but tell him, before I die! What a life of sorrow his has been, and I have done so little to cheer him!”
A light came into Miss Jessie’s face. “Would it comfort you, dearest, to think that he does know?—would it comfort you, love, to know that his cares, his sorrows—” Her voice quivered, but she steadied it into calmness: “Mary! he has gone before you to the place where the weary are at rest. He knows now how you loved him.”
A strange look, which was not distress, came over Miss Brown’s face. She did not speak for some time, but then we saw her lips form the words, rather than heard the sound—“Father, mother, Harry, Archy;”—then, as if it were a new idea throwing a filmy shadow over her darkened mind—“But you will be alone, Jessie!”
Miss Jessie had been feeling this all during the silence, I think; for the tears rolled down her cheeks like rain, at these words, and she could not answer at first. Then she put her hands together tight, and lifted them up, and said—but not to us—
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”
In a few moments more Miss Brown lay calm and still—never to sorrow or murmur more.
After this second funeral, Miss Jenkyns insisted that Miss Jessie should come to stay with her rather than go back to the desolate house, which, in fact, we learned from Miss Jessie, must now be given up, as she had not wherewithal to maintain it. She had something above twenty pounds a year, besides the interest of the money for which the furniture would sell; but she could not live upon that; and so we talked over her qualifications for earning money.
“I can sew neatly,” said she, “and I like nursing. I think, too, I could manage a house, if any one would try me as housekeeper; or I would go into a shop, as saleswoman, if they would have patience with me at first.”
Miss Jenkyns declared, in an angry voice, that she should do no such thing; and talked to herself about “some people having no idea of their rank as a Captain’s daughter,” nearly an hour afterwards, when she brought Miss Jessie up a basin of delicately-made arrowroot, and stood over her like a dragoon until the last spoonful was finished; then she disappeared. Miss Jessie began to tell me some more of the plans which had suggested themselves to her, and insensibly fell into talking of the days that were past and gone, and interested me so much I neither know nor heeded how time passed. We were both startled when Miss Jenkyns reappeared, and caught us crying. I was afraid lest she would be displeased, as she often said that crying hindered digestion, and I knew she wanted Miss Jessie to get strong; but, instead, she looked queer and excited, and fidgeted round us without saying anything. At last she spoke. “I have been so much startled—no, I’ve not been at all startled—don’t mind me, my dear Miss Jessie—I’ve been very much surprised—in fact, I’ve had a caller, whom you knew once, my dear Miss Jessie—”
Miss Jessie went very white, then flushed scarlet, and looked eagerly at Miss Jenkyns.
“A gentleman, my dear, who wants to know if you would see him.”
“Is it?—it is not”—stammered out Miss Jessie—and got no further.
“This is his card,” said Miss Jenkyns, giving it to Miss Jessie; and while her head was bent over it, Miss Jenkyns went through a series of winks and odd faces to me, and formed her lips into a long sentence of which, of course, I could not understand a word.
“May he come up?” asked Miss Jenkyns, at last.
“Oh, yes! certainly!” said Miss Jessie, as much as to say, this is your house, you may show any visitor where you like. She took up some knitting of Miss Matty’s and began to be very busy, though I could see how she trembled all over.
Miss Jenkyns rang the bell, and told the servant who answered it to show Major Gordon upstairs; and, presently, in walked a tall, fine, frank-looking man of forty or upwards. He shook hands with Miss Jessie; but he could not see her eyes, she kept them so fixed on the ground. Miss Jenkyns asked me if I would come and help her to tie up the preserves in the store-room; and, though Miss Jessie plucked at my gown, and even looked up at me with begging eye, I durst not refuse to go where Miss Jenkyns asked. Instead of tying up preserves in the store-room, however, we went to talk in the dining-room; and there Miss Jenkyns told me what Major Gordon had told her; how he had served in the same regiment with Captain Brown, and had become acquainted with Miss Jessie, then a sweet-looking, blooming girl of eighteen; how the acquaintance had grown into love on his part, though it had been some years before he had spoken; how, on becoming possessed, through the will of an uncle, of a good estate in Scotland, he had offered and been refused, though with so much agitation and evident distress that he was sure she was not indifferent to him; and how he had discovered that the obstacle was the fell disease which was, even then, too surely threatening her sister. She had mentioned that the surgeons foretold intense suffering; and there was no one but herself to nurse her poor Mary, or cheer and comfort her father during the time of illness. They had had long discussions; and on her refusal to pledge herself to him as his wife when all should be over, he had grown angry, and broken off entirely, and gone abroad, believing that she was a cold-hearted person whom he would do well to forget. He had been travelling in the East, and was on his return home when, at Rome, he saw the account of Captain Brown’s death in Galignani.