Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/326

316 the world and I must soon part company. I am dying. I am prematurely worn out by my great trouble. My pulse numbers little more than thirty beats to the minute. Night brings me no rest. I lay my head upon the pillow only to pass hours of wakeful sorrow, and to rise each day more weary. I cannot sleep. Opiates give me a numbing repose, but only by taking doses so large as almost to endanger life. It must end soon. Still do I pray Heaven that I may see her once again before I die. God grant that this may be!”

“And the figure seen in the park—you have seen it since?”

“But once, three nights since, and in the same place. But for a space of time so brief that I could do little more than recognise it before it vanished.”

We had passed out of St. James’s Park, and crossing the Mall, approached a gate on the other side, leading into the Green Park. The gatekeeper stepped forward, as though to oppose our entrance, but seeing Daly he moved aside, touching his hat respectfully, and we passed into the park. For some minutes we had not spoken. Slowly as we were walking, it was evidently a serious exertion to Daly, and occasionally his breathing became so short we were obliged to halt altogether.

“There is the lime-tree,” he said at length, in a low tone, pointing to a tree some hundred yards in front of us. As we moved in the direction indicated, the sad reverence which affected Daly extended its influence to me. It was not without a vague sensation of awe that I found myself beneath the shadow of the tree.

“This was our trysting-place,” said Daly, sadly. “This is the spot hallowed by love and sorrow. These branches above us have sheltered Margaret’s gentleness, have shrouded my vigils of mourning and broken hope. Here on this bark—”

He stopped suddenly with a wild scream of surprise. His whole frame trembled. He gasped for breath.

“Look! look!” he cried. “There—there are figures scratched on the bark! She will come again! At twelve! See, it says at twelve! Thank God, thank God!”

But for my support he would have fallen. Certainly, as he had said, there appeared upon the bark figures scratched by some sharp instrument.

“You think that she has been here?” I asked, when he had a little recovered from the violence of his emotion; “that she has done this?”

“I am sure of it.”

“But may not these marks be the result of mere accident? the chance work of an idle hand?”

“Impossible!” be cried, with passion. “She has been here! She will come again—at twelve o’clock. I will await her here. And you—you too—I beg, I implore you, to remain also!”

There was a feverish energy in his manner that almost alarmed me. Unwilling to leave him in such a state, and prompted also by an interest strongly excited, I acceded to his request, and it was arranged that we should remain together beneath the tree until twelve o’clock had chimed.

It wanted some hours to midnight. How we succeeded in wiling away the time I hardly know. We spoke but little, and my companion was deaf to all suggestion that we should quit for a period the lime-tree, and return at the appointed hour.

“I shall wait here until she comes,” he said.

His recent agitation had given place to a strangely determined calmness. His lips were compressed, the fingers of his one hand tightly clenched. He leant against the tree with a motionless rigidity, gazing in the direction in which he stated he had formerly seen the figure of Margaret appear. I must confess I was myself possessed with a nervous anxiety to see the issue of the adventure which kept me in a ceaseless excitement.

Twelve o’clock was at length tolled out by the Abbey bell. The night was fine, but dark. A mist in the nature of a blight veiled the horizon. We gazed eagerly towards Constitution Hill. We were too agitated for speech, and Daly’s heart was beating with a violence that shook his whole frame at every throb.

We waited patiently for about four minutes. We could see nothing. With a movement, part of despair, part amazement, Daly turned his head round as though about to address some remark to me. Suddenly a strange cry broke from him, and he raised his one arm with a beseeching gesture.

“See, see, she is there—there—close upon us! Margaret, Margaret—my wife, my own! Thank God!”

Trembling from head to foot he moved forward some steps. His words died away in an unintelligible murmur, and he fell forward heavily on the ground. I looked where he had pointed.

I am writing at a period so distant from the date of the events narrated, and lapse of time so undermines our belief, even in our own experience of the unusual, that I hesitate to set down as an actual fact what it seemed to me I really saw on that night in the Green Park. How far I had been wrought upon by Daly’s strange conduct, and a sympathetic inclination to credit the improbable so roused in me, I cannot tell. Certainly, I did believe that I could trace out in the mist a shadowy female form—tall, slight, majestic—first advancing to where Daly stood, then bending over him in an attitude of unspeakable tenderness, then fading away altogether into air.

I hurried forward to Daly’s aid. I raised him quickly; he was insensible. I loosened his neckerchief; and as he was thin and light I carried him without much difficulty towards the entrance to the park from Piccadilly. But he never spoke or moved. Assistance was obtained after a short interval. A surgeon opened a vein in his arm. All was fruitless, however. The sorrows of Lane Daly were for ever over. He was quite dead.

By a letter found in one of his pockets it appeared that he had been residing in a small street near Covent Garden Market, and the body was accordingly conveyed thither. He had occupied two small rooms at the top of the house; they were dark, confined, and poorly furnished. I could find no clue to the names of any of his friends, to whom I could communicate the sad