Part 57 (1/2)
”Allow me one word more,” said the curate, ”and then we shall go: Our crimes are friends that will hunt us either to the bosom of G.o.d, or the pit of h.e.l.l.”
She looked down, but her look was still sullen and proud.
The curate rose, took up her bag, went with her to the station, got her ticket, and saw her off.
Then he hastened back to Drew, and told him the whole story.
”Poor woman!” said her husband. ”--But G.o.d only knows how much _I_ am to blame for all this. If I had behaved better to her she might never have left me, and your poor young friend would now be well and happy.”
”Perhaps consuming his soul to a cinder with that odious drug,” said Wingfold. ”'Tis true, as Edgar in King Lear says:
The G.o.ds are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us;
but he takes our sins on himself, and while he drives them out of us with a whip of scorpions he will yet make them work his ends. He defeats our sins, makes them prisoners, forces them into the service of good, chains them like galley-slaves to the rowing-benches of the gospel-s.h.i.+p, or sets them like ugly gurgoyles or corbels or brackets in the walls of his temples.--No, that last figure I retract. I don't like it. It implies their continuance.”
”Poor woman!” said Mr. Drew again, who for once had been inattentive to the curate. ”Well! she is sorely punished too.”
”She will be worse punished yet,” said the curate, ”if I can read the signs of character. SHE is not repentant yet--though I did spy in her just once a touch of softening.”
”It is an awful retribution,” said the draper, ”and I may yet have to bear my share--G.o.d help me!”
”I suspect it is the weight of her own crime that makes her so fierce to avenge her daughter. I doubt if anything makes one so unforgiving as guilt unrepented of.”
”Well, I must try to find out where she is, and keep an eye upon her.”
”That will be easy enough. But why?”
”Because, if, as you think, there is more evil in store for her, I may yet have it in my power to do her some service.--I wonder if Mr.
Polwarth would call that DIVINE SERVICE,” he added, with one of his sunny smiles.
”Indeed he would,” answered the curate.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE BEDSIDE.
George Bas...o...b.., when he went to Paris, had no thought of deserting Helen. But he had good ground for fearing that it might be ruinous both to Lingard and himself to undertake his defence. From Paris he wrote often to Helen, and she replied--not so often, yet often enough to satisfy him; and as soon as she was convinced that Leopold could not recover, she let him know, whereupon he instantly began his preparations for returning.
Before he came, the weather had changed once more. It was now cold, and the cold had begun at once to tell upon the invalid. There are some natures to which cold, moral, spiritual, or physical, is lethal, and Lingard's was of the cla.s.s. When the dying leaves began to s.h.i.+ver in the breath of the coming winter, the very brightness of the sun to look gleamy, and nature to put on the unfriendly aspect of a world not made for living in but for shutting out--when all things took the turn of reminding man that his life lay not in them, Leopold began to shrink and withdraw. He could not face the ghastly persistence of the winter, which would come, let all the souls of the summer-nations shrink and protest as they might; let them creep s.h.i.+vering to Hades; he would have his day.
His sufferings were now considerable, but he never complained. Restless and fevered and sick at heart, it was yet more from the necessity of a lovely nature than from any virtue of will that he was so easy to nurse, accepting so readily all ministrations. Never exacting and never refusing, he was always gently grateful, giving a sort of impression that he could have been far more thankful had he not known the object of the kindnesses so unworthy. Next to Wingfold's and his sister's, the face he always welcomed most was that of the gate-keeper--indeed I ought hardly to say NEXT to theirs; for if the curate was to him as a brother, Polwarth was like a father in Christ. He came every day, and every day, almost till that of his departure, Leopold had something to ask him about or something to tell him.
”I am getting so stupid, Mr. Polwarth!” he said once. ”It troubles me much. I don't seem to care for anything now. I don't want to hear the New Testament: I would rather hear a child's story--something that did not want thinking about. If I am not coughing, I am content. I could lie for hours and hours and never think more than what goes creeping through my mind no faster than a ca.n.a.l in Holland. When I am coughing,--I don't think about anything then either--only long for the fit to be over and let me back again into Sleepy Hollow. All my past life seems to be gone from me. I don't care about it. Even my crime looks like something done ages ago. I know it is mine, and I would rather it were not mine, but it is as if a great cloud had come and swept away the world in which it took place. I am afraid sometimes that I am beginning not to care even about that. I say to myself, I shall be sorry again by and by, but I can't think about it now. I feel as if I had handed it over to G.o.d to lay down where I should find it again when I was able to think and be sorry.”
This was a long utterance for him to make, but he had spoken slowly, and with frequent pauses. Polwarth did not speak once, feeling that a dying man must be allowed to ease his mind after his own fas.h.i.+on, and take as much time to it as he pleased. Helen and Wingfold both would have told him he must not tire himself, but that Polwarth never did. The dying should not have their utterances checked, or the feeling of not having finished forced upon them. They will always have plenty of the feeling without that.
A fit of coughing compelled him to break off, and when it was over, he lay panting and weary, but with his large eyes questioning the face of Polwarth. Then the little man spoke.