Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/354

346 others, who raise Olivia's body from the ground and bear it quickly to the inn.

Maxwell, who has just arrived, meets the little procession at the door, and in a few brief words Yorke explains what has happened. No harm was done, he thought; he had kept her head above water all the time; it must be merely a faint from cold and fright.

"Not up-stairs," said Maxwell, opening the parlour-door, as the bearers entered the passage with their burden; "this way — in here:" and the hapless Olivia was laid on the same couch which had borne that morning the dead body of her husband.

And now, while the doctor and the landlady and Mrs. Polwheedle and Lucy are busy over the prostrate form, Yorke, wrapped up in a big overcoat of the landlord and covered with shawls, stands by the tap-room fire. He cannot bear to leave the spot, and this rough sort of vapour-bath will keep him from catching cold. But the children are sent off in the carriage, and the servants will explain why the others are detained. Comedy and the commonplace tread close upon the tragic in the actual business of life; and as Yorke stands before the blazing fire drinking hot spirits-and-water, while the landlord takes a glass also to keep him company, and begins a maundering story of how he got upset in a punt seven years ago, and some half-dozen tap-room loungers stand hard by discussing the events of the day, in undertones out of consideration for Yorke, nothing could well be more prosaic or matter-of-fact than the aspect of the scene. But he can drink the cordial and hold his feet to be scorched by the fire, while yet thinking over the tragic fate of the woman once so passionately loved, now pitied with a feeling that for a time left no room in his heart for other emotions — thinking, too, of the death of the noble soldier who seemed when first he knew him to deserve the envy of all younger men. And now what would be the end of this calamity and woe? He, the noble, the gallant, the unfortunate husband had found peace at last; but what further sufferings awaited the unhappy wife?

A long time must have passed, for his clothes are almost dry, when the good doctor appears at the door and beckons him to come into the passage.

"It is all over," said the old man, in a low voice. "It was the shock that killed her; life must have passed away before you brought her to land. Who could wish it were otherwise? Still in your wet clothes? You must look to yourself now, my dear friend, or you too will be a sufferer.

 

 From The Fortnightly Review.

law of the old French monarchy which excluded women from direct inheritance of the throne, by no means excluded them from great and often paramount influence in affairs of State. Indeed it would