And while Gillian mourned her bitterly she was yet glad that Miss Craven was spared the sadness of witnessing the complete failure of her cherished dream.
In the little Norman church toward which Gillian was driving there had been added yet another memorial to a Craven who had died tragically and far from home; a record of disastrous calamity that, beginning four hundred years before with the Elizabethan gallant, had relentlessly pursued an ill-starred family. The church lay on the outskirts of the village and close to the south entrance of the park.
Gillian stopped the carriage for a few moments to speak to the anxious-looking woman who had hurried out from the creeper-covered lodge to open the gates. Behind one of the casements of the cottage a child was fighting for life, a cripple, with an exquisite face, whom Gillian had painted. To the sorrowful mother the eager tender words, the soft impulsive hand that clasped her own work-roughened palm, the wide dark eyes, misty with sympathy were worth infinitely more than the material aid, so carefully packed by Mrs. Appleyard, that the footman carried up the narrow nagged path to the cottage door.
And as the impatient horses drew the carriage swiftly on again Gillian leaned back in her seat with a quivering sigh. The woman at the lodge, despite her burden of sorrow, despite her humbleness, was yet richer than she and, with intolerable pain, she envied her the crowning joy of womanhood that would never be her own. The child she longed for would never by the touch baby hands bring consolation to her starved and lonely heart. Her thoughts turned to her husband in a sudden passion of hopeless love and longing. To bear him a child--to hold in her arms a tiny replica of the beloved figure that was so dear to her, to watch and rejoice in the dawning resemblance that the ardour of her love would make inevitable.... Hastily she brushed away the gathering tears as the carriage stopped abruptly with a jingle of harness at the lichgate.
Coaxing the reluctant Mouston from the seat where he still sulked she tied him to the gate, took the armful of flowers from the grave-faced footman, and dismissing the carriage walked slowly up the lime-bordered avenue. The orderliness and beauty of the churchyard struck her as it always did--a veritable garden of sleep, with level close-shorn turf set thick with standard rose trees, that even the clustering headstones could not make chill and sombre.
From the radiant sunshine without she passed into the cool dimness of the little building. With its tiny proportions, ornate and numerous Craven memorials and--for its size--curiously large chancel, it seemed less the parish church it had become than the private chapel for which it had been built. Then the house had been close by, but during the troublous years of Mary Tudor was pulled down and rebuilt on the present site.