Part 28

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What happened immediately after no one ever precisely knew. Not even the waiting servant had heard the street-door shut.

Next morning the park-keepers found a young man lying on the grass in Hyde Park, drenched to the skin with the night's heavy rain, unconscious, and apparently dying. The papers in his pockets proved that he was Philip Vaughan. A long and desperate illness followed, and for months both life and reason trembled in the balance. Lord Liscombe hurried up to London, and Vaughan's servant explained everything. Arthur Grey had been taken ill on the homeward voyage. The symptoms would now be recognized as typhoid, but the disease had not then been diagnosed, and the ship's surgeon pronounced it "low fever." He landed at Southampton, pushed his way to London, arrived at his lodgings more dead than alive, and almost immediately sank into the coma from which he never recovered. It was impossible to communicate with Vaughan, whose address was unknown; and when his telegram arrived, announcing his instant return, the servant and the landlady agreed that he must have heard the news from some other source, and was hurrying back to see his friend before he became invisible for ever. "You're just in time" meant just in time to see the body, for the coffin was to be closed that evening.

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The struggle was long and desperate, but Vaughan had on his side youth and a constitution, not strong indeed, but unweakened by profligacy. By slow degrees his nervous system rallied from the shock, and after a long period of foreign travel he returned, in great part, to his former habits. Only he could not and would not re-enter the House of Commons, but announced his retirement, on the score of health, at the next Election. Soon afterwards he inherited Lord Liscombe's fortune, made over Liscombe Abbey and its responsibilities to a distant cousin, and insensibly glided into the way of living which I described at the outset. Two years after the Election of 1880 he died at Rome, where he had been spending the winter. The attack of fever to which he succumbed was not peculiarly severe, but the doctor said that he made no effort to live, and was in fact worn out, though not by years.

Nobody missed him. Nobody lamented him. Few even said a kind word about him. His will expressed only one personal wish--that he might be buried by the side of Arthur Grey. But his executors thought that this arrangement would cause them a great deal of trouble, and he rests in the English cemetery at Rome.