But if he had never murdered anybody! In that case he could almost consent there should be a God! he could almost even thank him!—For what! That he was not to be damned for the thing he had not done—a thing he had had the misfortune to dream he had done—God never interfering to protect him from the horrible fancy? What was the good of a God that would not do that much for you—that left his creatures to make fools of themselves, and only laughed at them!—Bah! There was life in the old dog yet! If only he knew the thing for a fancy!
The music ceased, and the silence was a shock to him. Again he began to stare about him. He looked up. Before him in the air hovered the pale face of the girl he had—or had not murdered! It was one of his visions—but not therefore more unreal than any other appearance: she came from the world of his imagination—so real to him that in expectant moods it was the world into which he was to step the moment he left the body. She looked sweetly at him! She was come to forgive his sins! Was it then true? Was there no sin of murder on his soul? Was she there to assure him that he might yet hope for the world to come? He stretched out his arms to her. She turned away. He thought she had vanished. The next moment she was in the chapel, but he did not hear her, and stood gazing up. She threw her arms around him. The contact of the material startled him with such a revulsion, that he uttered a cry, staggered back, and stood looking at her in worse perplexity still. He had done the awful thing, yet had not done it! He stood as one bound to know the thing that could not be.
"Don't be frightened, uncle," said Arctura. "I am not dead. The sepulchre is the only resurrection-house! Uncle, uncle! thank God with me."
The earl stood motionless. Strange thoughts passed through him at their will. Had her presence dispelled darkness and death, and restored the lost chapel to the light of day? Had she haunted it ever since, dead yet alive, watching for his return to pardon him? Would his wife so receive him at the last with forgiveness and endearment? His eyes were fixed upon her. His lips moved tremulously once or twice, but no word came. He turned from her, glanced round the place, and said,
"It is a great improvement!"
I wonder how it would be with souls if they waked up and found all their sins but hideous dreams! How many would loathe the sin? How many would remain capable of doing all again? But few, perhaps no burdened souls can have any idea of the power that lies in God's forgiveness to relieve their consciousness of defilement. Those who say, "Even God cannot destroy the fact!" care more about their own cursed shame than their Father's blessed truth! Such will rather excuse than confess. When a man heartily confesses, leaving excuse to God, the truth makes him free, he knows that the evil has gone from him, as a man knows that he is cured of his plague.
"I did the thing," he says, "but I could not do it now. I am the same, yet not the same. I confess, I would not hide it, but I loathe it—ten times the more that the evil thing was mine."
Had the earl been able to say thus, he would have felt his soul a cleansed chapel, new-opened to the light and air;—nay, better—a fresh-watered garden, in which the fruits of the spirit had begun to grow! God's forgiveness is as the burst of a spring morning into the heart of winter. His autumn is the paying of the uttermost farthing. To let us go without that would be the pardon of a demon, not the forgiveness of the eternally loving God. But—Not yet, alas, not yet! has to be said over so many souls!
Arctura was struck dumb. She turned and walked out upon the great stair, her uncle following her. All the way up to the second floor she felt as if he were about to stab her in the back, but she would not look behind her. She went straight to her room, and heard her uncle go on to his. She rang her bell, sent for Donal, and told him what had passed.
"I will go to him," said Donal.
Arctura said nothing more, thus leaving the matter entirely in his hands.
Donal found him lying on the couch.
"My lord," he said, "you must be aware of the reasons why you should not present yourself here!"
The earl started up in one of his ready rages:—they were real enough! With epithets of contemptuous hatred, he ordered Donal from the room and the house. Donal answered nothing till the rush of his wrath had abated.
"My lord," he said, "there is nothing I would not do to serve your lordship. But I have no choice but tell you that if you do not walk out, you shall be expelled!"
"Expelled, you dog!"
"Expelled, my lord. The would-be murderer of his hostess must at least be put out of the house."
"Good heavens!" cried the earl, changing his tone with an attempted laugh, "has the poor, hysterical girl succeeded in persuading a man of your sense to believe her childish fancies?"
"I believe every word my lady says, my lord. I know that you had nearly murdered her."
The earl caught up the poker and struck at his head. Donal avoided the blow. It fell on the marble chimney-piece. While his arm was yet jarred by the impact, Donal wrenched the poker from him.
"My lord," he said, "with my own hands I drew the staple of the chain that fastened her to the bed on which you left her to die! You were yet in the house when I did so."
"You damned rascal, you stole the key. If it had not been for that I should have gone to her again. I only wanted to bring her to reason!"
"But as you had lost the key, rather than expose your cruelty, you went away, and left her to perish! You wanted her to die unless you could compel her to marry your son, that the title and property might go together; and that when with my own ears I heard your lordship tell that son that he had no right to any title!"
"What a man may say in a rage goes for nothing," answered the earl, sulkily rather than fiercely.
"But not what a woman writes in sorrow!" rejoined Donal. "I know the truth from the testimony of her you called your wife, as well as from your own mouth!"
"The testimony of the dead, and at second hand, will hardly be received in court!" returned the earl.
"If after your lordship's death, the man now called lord Forgue dares assume the title of Morven, I will publish what I know. In view of that, your lordship had better furnish him with the vouchers of his mother's marriage. My lord, I again beg you to leave the house."
The earl cast his eyes round the walls as if looking for a weapon. Donal took him by the arm.
"There is no farther room for ceremony," he said. "I am sorry to be rough with your lordship, but you compel me. Please remember I am the younger and the stronger man."
As he spoke he let the earl feel the ploughman's grasp: it was useless to struggle. His lordship threw himself on the couch.
"I will not leave the house. I am come home to die," he yelled. "I'm dying now, I tell you. I cannot leave the house! I have no money. Forgue has taken all."
"You owe a large sum to the estate!" said Donal.
"It is lost—all lost, I tell you! I have nowhere to go to! I am dying!"
He looked so utterly wretched that Donal's heart smote him. He stood back a little, and gave himself time.
"You would wish then to retire, my lord, I presume?" he said.
"Immediately—to be rid of you!" the earl answered.
"I fear, my lord, if you stay, you will not soon be rid of me! Have you brought Simmons with you?"
"No, damn him! he is like all the rest of you: he has left me!"
"I will help you to bed, my lord."
"Go about your business. I will get myself to bed."
"I will not leave you except in bed," rejoined Donal with decision; and ringing the bell, he desired the servant to ask mistress Brookes to come to him.
She came instantly. Before the earl had time even to look at her, Donal asked her to get his lordship's bed ready:—if she would not mind doing it herself, he said, he would help her: he must see his lordship to bed.
She looked a whole book at him, but said nothing. Donal returned her gaze with one of quiet confidence, and she understood it. What it said was, "I know what I am doing, mistress Brookes. My lady must not turn him out. I will take care of him."
"What are you two whispering at there?" cried the earl. "Here am I at the point of death, and you will not even let me go to bed!"
"Your room will be ready in a few minutes, my lord," said Mrs. Brookes; and she and Donal went to work in earnest, but with the door open between the rooms.
When it was ready,
"Now, my lord," said Donal, "will you come?"
"When you are gone. I will have none of your cursed help!"
"My lord, I am not going to leave you."
With much grumbling, and a very ill grace, his lordship submitted, and Donal got him to bed.
"Now put that cabinet by me on the table," he said.
The cabinet was that in which he kept his drugs, and had not been touched since he left it.
Donal opened the window, took up the cabinet, and threw it out.
With a bellow like that of a bull, the earl sprang out of bed, and just as the crash came from below, ran at Donal where he stood shutting the window, as if he would have sent him after the cabinet. Donal caught him and held him fast.
"My lord," he said, "I will nurse you, serve you, do anything, everything for you; but for the devil I'll be damned if I move hand or foot! Not one drop of hellish stuff shall pass your lips while I am with you!"
"But I am dying! I shall die of the horrors!" shrieked the earl, struggling to get to the window, as if he might yet do something to save his precious extracts, tinctures, essences, and compounds.
"We will send for the doctor," said Donal. "A very clever young fellow has come to the town since you left: perhaps he can help you. I will do what I can to make you give your life fair play."
"Come, come! none of that damned rubbish! My life is of no end of value to me! Besides, it's too late. If I were young now, with a constitution like yours, and the world before me, there might be some good in a paring or two of self-denial; but you wouldn't stab your murderer for fear of the clasp knife closing on your hand! you would not fire your pistol at him for fear of its bursting and blowing your brains out!"
"I have no desire to keep you alive, my lord; but I would give my life to let you get some of the good of this world before you pass to the next. To lengthen your life infinitely, I would not give you a single drop of any one of those cursed drugs!"
He rang the bell again.
"You're a friendly fellow!" grunted his lordship, and went back to his bed to ponder how to gain the solace of his passion.
Mrs. Brookes came.
"Will you please send to Mr. Avory, the new surgeon," said Donal, "and ask him, in my name, to come to the castle."
The earl was so ill, however, as to be doubtful, much as he desired them, whether, while rendering him for the moment less sensible to them, any of his drugs would do no other than increase his sufferings. He lay with closed eyes, a strange expression of pain mingled with something like fear every now and then passing over his face. I doubt if his conscience troubled him. It is in general those, I think, who through comparatively small sins have come to see the true nature of them, whose consciences trouble them greatly. Those who have gone from bad to worse through many years of moral decay, are seldom troubled as other men, or have any bands in their death. His lordship, it is true, suffered terribly at times because of the things he had done; but it was through the medium of a roused imagination rather than a roused conscience: the former deals with consequences; the latter with the deeds themselves.
He declared he would see no doctor but his old attendant Dowster, yet all the time was longing for the young man to appear: he might—who could tell?—save him from the dreaded jaws of death!
He came. Donal went to him. He had summoned him, he said, without his lordship's consent, but believed he would see him; the earl had been long in the habit of using narcotics and stimulants, though not alcohol, he thought; he trusted Mr. Avory would give his sanction to the entire disuse of them, for they were killing him, body and soul.
"To give them up at once and entirely would cost him considerable suffering," said the doctor.
"He knows that, and does not in the least desire to give them up. It is absolutely necessary he should be delivered from the passion."
"If I am to undertake the case, it must be after my own judgment," said the doctor.
"You must undertake two things, or give up the case," persisted Donal.
"I may as well hear what they are."
"One is, that you make his final deliverance from the habit your object; the other, that you will give no medicine into his own hands."
"I agree to both; but all will depend on his nurse."
"I will be his nurse."
The doctor went to see his patient. The earl gave one glance at him, recognized firmness, and said not a word. But when he would have applied to his wrist an instrument recording in curves the motions of the pulse, he would not consent. He would have no liberties taken with him, he said.
"My lord, it is but to inquire into the action of your heart," said Mr. Avory.
"I'll have no spying into my heart! It acts just like other people's!"
The doctor put his instrument aside, and laid his finger on the pulse instead: his business was to help, not to conquer, he said to himself: if he might not do what he would, he would do what he could.
While he was with the earl, Donal found lady Arctura, and told her all he had done. She thanked him for understanding her.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
A SLOW TRANSITION
A dreary time followed. Sometimes the patient would lie awake half the night, howling with misery, and accusing Donal of heartless cruelty. He knew as well as he what would ease his pain and give him sleep, but not a finger would he move to save him! He was taking the meanest of revenges! What did it matter to him what became of his soul! Surely it was worse to hate as he made him hate than to swallow any amount of narcotics!
"I tell you, Grant," he said once, "I was never so cruel to those I treated worst. There's nothing in the Persian hells, which beat all the rest, to come up to what I go through for want of my comfort. Promise to give it me, and I will tell you where to find some."
As often as Donal refused he would break out in a torrent of curses, then lie still for a space.
"How do you think you will do without it," Donal once rejoined, "when you find yourself bodiless in the other world?"
"I'm not there yet! When that comes, it will be under new conditions, if not unconditioned altogether. We'll take the world we have. So, my dear boy, just go and get me what I want. There are the keys!"
"I dare not."
"You wish to kill me!"
"I wouldn't keep you alive to eat opium. I have other work than that. Not a finger would I move to save a life for such a life. But I would willingly risk my own to make you able to do without it. There would be some good in that!"
"Oh, damn your preaching!"
But the force of the habit abated a little. Now and then it seemed to return as strong as ever, but the fit went off again. His sufferings plainly decreased.
The doctor, having little yet of a practice, was able to be with him several hours every day, so that Donal could lie down. As he grew better, Davie, or mistress Brookes, or lady Arctura would sit with him. But Donal was never farther off than the next room. The earl's madness was the worst of any, a moral madness: it could not fail to affect the brain, but had not yet put him beyond his own control. Repeatedly had Donal been on the verge of using force to restrain him, but had not yet found himself absolutely compelled to do so: fearless of him, he postponed it always to the very last, and the last had not yet arrived.
The gentle ministrations of his niece by and by seemed to touch him. He was growing to love her a little, He would smile when she came into the room, and ask her how she did. Once he sat looking at her for some time—then said,
"I hope I did not hurt you much."
"When?" she asked.
"Then," he answered.
"Oh, no; you did not hurt me—much!"
"Another time, I was very cruel to your aunt: do you think she will forgive me!"
"Yes, I do."
"Then you have forgiven me?"
"Of course I have."
"Then of course God will forgive me too!"
"He will—if you leave off, you know, uncle."
"That's more than I can promise."
"If you try, he will help you."
"How can he? It is a second nature now!"
"He is your first nature. He can help you too by taking away the body and its nature together."
"You're a fine comforter! God will help me to be good by taking away my life! A nice encouragement to try! Hadn't I better kill myself and save him the trouble!"
"It's not the dying, uncle! no amount of dying would ever make one good. It might only make it less difficult to be good."
"But I might after all refuse to be good! I feel sure I should! He had better let me alone!"
"God can do more than that to compel us to be good—a great deal more than that! Indeed, uncle, we must repent."
He said no more for some minutes; then suddenly spoke again.
"I suppose you mean to marry that rascal of a tutor!" he said.
She started up, and called Donal. But to her relief he did not answer: he was fast asleep.
"He would not thank you for the suggestion, I fear," she said, sitting down again. "He is far above me!"
"Is there no chance for Forgue then?"
"Not the smallest. I would rather have died where you left me than—"
"If you love me, don't mention that!" he cried. "I was not myself—indeed I was not! I don't know now—that is, I can't believe sometimes I ever did it."
"Uncle, have you asked God to forgive you!"
"I have—a thousand times."
"Then I will never speak of it again."
In general, however, he was sullen, cantankerous, abusive. They were all compassionate to him, treating him like a spoiled, but not the less in reality a sickly child. Arctura thought her grandmother could not have brought him up well; more might surely have been made of him. But Arctura had him after a lifetime fertile in cause of self-reproach, had him in the net of sore sickness, at the mercy of the spirit of God. He was a bad old child—this much only the wiser for being old, that he had found the ways of transgressors hard.
One night Donal, hearing him restless, got up from the chair where he watched by him most nights, and saw him staring, but not seeing: his eyes showed that they regarded nothing material. After a moment he gave a great sigh, and his jaw fell. Donal thought he was dead. But presently he came to himself like one escaping from torture: a terrible dream was behind him, pulling at the skirts of his consciousness.
"I've seen her!" he said. "She's waiting for me to take me—but where I do not know. She did not look angry, but then she seldom looked angry when I was worst to her!—Grant, I beg of you, don't lose sight of Davie. Make a man of him, and his mother will thank you. She was a good woman, his mother, though I did what I could to spoil her! It was no use! I never could!—and that was how she kept her hold of me. If I had succeeded, there would have been an end of her power, and a genuine heir to the earldom! What a damned fool I was to let it out! Who would have been the worse!"
"He's a heartless, unnatural rascal, though," he resumed, "and has made of me the fool I deserved to be made! His mother must see it was not my fault! I would have set things right if I could! But it was too late! And you tell me she has had a hand in letting the truth out—leaving her letters about!—That's some comfort! She was always fair, and will be the less hard on me. If I could see a chance of God being half as good to me as my poor wife. She was my wife! I will say it in spite of all the priests in the stupid universe! She was my wife, and deserved to be my wife; and if I had her now, I would marry her, because she would be foolish enough to like it, though I would not do it all the time she was alive, let her beg ever so! Where was the use of giving in, when I kept her in hand so easily that way? That was it! It was not that I wanted to do her any wrong. But you should keep the lead. A man mustn't play out his last trump and lose the lead. But then you never know about dying! If I had known my poor wife was going to die, I would have done whatever she wanted. We had merry times together! It was those cursed drugs that wiled the soul out of me, and then the devil went in and took its place!—There was curara in that last medicine, I'll swear!—Look you here now, Grant:—if there were any way of persuading God to give me a fresh lease of life! You say he hears prayer: why shouldn't you ask him? I would make you any promise you pleased—give you any security you wanted, hereafter to live a godly, righteous, and sober life."
"But," said Donal, "suppose God, reading your heart, saw that you would go on as bad as ever, and that to leave you any longer would only be to make it the more difficult for him to do anything with you afterwards?"
"He might give me a chance! It is hard to expect a poor fellow to be as good as he is himself!"
"The poor fellow was made in his image!" suggested Donal.
"Very poorly made then!" said the earl with a sneer. "We might as well have been made in some other body's image!"
Donal thought with himself.
"Did you ever know a good woman, my lord?" he asked.
"Know a good woman?—Hundreds of them!—The other sort was more to my taste! but there was my own mother! She was rather hard on my father now and then, but she was a good woman."
"Suppose you had been in her image, what then?"
"You would have had some respect for me!"
"Then she was nearer the image of God than you?"
"Thousands of miles!"
"Did you ever know a bad woman?"
"Know a bad woman? Hundreds that would take your heart's blood as you slept to make a philtre with!"
"Then you saw a difference between such a woman and your mother?"
"The one was of heaven, the other of hell—that was all the little difference!"
"Did you ever know a bad woman grow better?"
"No, never.—Stop! let me see. I did once know a woman—she was a married woman too—that made it all the worse—all the better I mean: she took poison—in good earnest, and died—died, sir—died, I say—when she came to herself, and knew what she had done! That was the only woman I ever knew that grew better. How long she might have gone on better if she hadn't taken the poison, I can't tell. That fixed her good, you see!"
"If she had gone on, she might have got as good as your mother?"
"Oh, hang it! no; I did not say that!"
"I mean, with God teaching her all the time—for ten thousand years, say—and she always doing what he told her!"
"Oh, well! I don't know anything about that. I don't know what God had to do with my mother being so good! She was none of your canting sort!"
"There is an old story," said Donal, "of a man who was the very image of God, and ever so much better than the best of women."
"He couldn't have been much of a man then!"
"Were you ever afraid, my lord?"
"Yes, several times—many a time."
"That man never knew what fear was."
"By Jove!"
"His mother was good, and he was better: your mother was good, and you are worse! Whose fault is that?"
"My own; I'm not ashamed to confess it!"
"Would to God you were!" said Donal: "you shame your mother in being worse than she was. You were made in the image of God, but you don't look like him now any more than you look like your mother. I have a father and mother, my lord, as like God as they can look!"
"Of course! of course! In their position there are no such temptations as in ours!"
"I am sure of one thing, my lord—that you will never be at any peace until you begin to show the image in which you were made. By that time you will care for nothing so much as that he should have his way with you and the whole world."
"It will be long before I come to that!"
"Probably; but you will never have a moment's peace till you begin. It is no use talking though. God has not made you miserable enough yet."
"I am more miserable than you can think."
"Why don't you cry to him to deliver you?"
"I would kill myself if it weren't for one thing."
"It is from yourself he would deliver you."
"I would, but that I want to put off seeing my wife as long as I can."
"I thought you wanted to see her!"
"I long for her sometimes more than tongue can tell."
"And you don't want to see her?"
"Not yet; not just yet. I should like to be a little better—to do something or other—I don't know what—first. I doubt if she would touch me now—with that small, firm hand she would catch hold of me with when I hurt her. By Jove, if she had been a man, she would have made her mark in the world! She had a will and a way with her! If it hadn't been that she loved me—me, do you hear, you dog!—though there's nobody left to care a worm-eaten nut about me, it makes me proud as Lucifer merely to think of it! I don't care if there's never another to love me to all eternity! I have been loved as never man was loved! All for my own sake, mind you! In the way of money I was no great catch; and for the rank, she never got any good of that, nor would if she had lived till I was earl; she had a conscience—which I never had—and would never have consented to be called countess. 'It will be no worse than passing for my wife now,' I would say. 'What's either but an appearance? What's any thing of all the damned humbug but appearance? One appearance is as good as another appearance!' She would only smile—smile fit to make a mule sad! And then when her baby was dying, and she wanted me to take her for a minute, and I wouldn't! She laid her down, and got what she wanted herself, and when she went to take the child again, the absurd little thing was—was—gone—dead, I mean gone dead, never to cry any more! There it lay motionless, like a lump of white clay. She looked at me—and never—in this world—smiled again!—nor cried either—all I could do to make her!"
The wretched man burst into tears, and the heart of Donal gave a leap for joy. Common as tears are, fall as they may for the foolishest things, they may yet be such as to cause joy in paradise. The man himself may not know why he weeps, and his tears yet indicate his turning on his road. The earl was as far from a good man as man well could be; there were millions of spiritual miles betwixt him and the image of God; he had wept it was hard to say at what—not at his own cruelty, not at his wife's suffering, not in pity of the little soul that went away at last out of no human embrace; himself least of all could have told why he wept; yet was that weeping some sign of contact between his human soul and the great human soul of God; it was the beginning of a possible communion with the Father of all! Surely God saw this, and knew the heart he had made—saw the flax smoking yet! He who will not let us out until we have paid the uttermost farthing, rejoices over the offer of the first golden grain.
Donal dropped on his knees and prayed:—
"O Father of us all!" he said, "in whose hands are these unruly hearts of ours, we cannot manage ourselves; we ruin our own selves; but in thee is our help found!"
Prayer went from him; he rose from his knees.
"Go on; go on; don't stop!" cried the earl. "He may hear you—who can tell!"
Donal went down on his knees again.
"O God!" he said, "thou knowest us, whether we speak to thee or not; take from this man his hardness of heart. Make him love thee."
There he stopped again. He could say no more.
"I can't pray, my lord," he said, rising. "I don't know why. It seems as if nothing I said meant anything. I will pray for you when I am alone."
"Are there so many devils about me that an honest fellow can't pray in my company?" cried the earl. "I will pray myself, in spite of the whole swarm of them, big and little!—O God, save me! I don't want to be damned. I will be good if thou wilt make me. I don't care about it myself, but thou canst do as thou pleasest. It would be a fine thing if a rascal like me were to escape the devil through thy goodness after all. I'm worth nothing, but there's my wife! Pray, pray, Lord God, let me one day see my wife again!—For Christ's sake—ain't that the way, Grant?—Amen."
Donal had dropped on his knees once more when the earl began to pray. He uttered a hearty Amen. The earl turned sharply towards him, and saw he was weeping. He put out his hand to him, and said,
"You'll stand my friend, Grant?"