Page:The Love Charm.pdf/9

Rh starry eyes, she turned to Edward. Marion saw her approach, and clasping him passionately in her arms, exclaimed— "He is mine, loved long before you knew him—let us at least die together." "Ah," exclaimed the stranger, "is it even so; I knew not of it." A shrill wild laugh came from the little negro woman, and a faint cry from Marion; for Edward had sank down exhausted from her arm. Once more he unclosed his eyes, and fixing them on Marion with a look full of tenderness, murmured her name, and expired. The dark lady leant over him for a moment; whatever might be the anguish of that moment, she subdued it; but the veins swelled like chords in her clear temples, with the effort. She turned, and gave one look at the negro, who crouched beneath it like a beaten hound, and remained as if rooted to the spot. "Take him to your home," said she to Marion ; "what I must do, your eyes would shrink to witness. I will offer you nothing; my love and my gifts turn to curses." She stamped on the ground, and four strange figures came forward, and raising Marion and Edward, carried them into the boat by the stairs, and there left them. The wind and tide slowly drifted them along, and the maiden sat floating over the river, with her lover's head upon her knee. Once, and once only she raised her eyes. A wild, melancholy song came upon her ear, and a dark bark, dimly seen amid the grey vapours of morning, flitted past. On the deck she fancied she saw a tall figure with long floating hair, stand wringing her hands in some passionate despair. It past rapidly out of sight, and as it past, the melancholy song died away in the distance; never since has it been heard on the Thames. The boat that bore the living and the dead was met by some watermen, who conveyed them on shore. Marion was perfectly insensible, and was carried home in a brain fever, from which she never recovered. At the last gasp they thought her sensible, for her eyes wandered round the room in search of her uncle; she caught sight of his face—a scarcely perceptible smile past over her countenance, and in that smile she died. The house and garden still remain, but they have a lonely and mournful look. The old man plants no more flowers in his garden; the few that he watches grow in the churchyard. He has planted some rose bushes on the grave of the lovers; those he still tends and waters. They are the last link between this living world and himself. Night and morning he visits those tombs; but he never visits them without a prayer that the time may soon come when he shall sleep at their side.

L. E. L