On this second occasion, however, he has succeeded in getting away without any accident--as far, at least, as the persons employed about the hospital can tell."
When the letter fell from my trembling hand, when I first asked of my own heart the fearful question:--"Have I, to whom the mere thought of ever seeing this woman again, has been as a pollution to shrink from, the strength to stand by her death-bed, the courage to see her die?"--then, and not till then, did I really know how suffering had fortified, while it had humbled me; how affliction has the power to purify, as well as to pain.
All bitter memory of the ill that she had done me, of the misery I had suffered at her hands, lost its hold on my mind. Once more, her mother's last words of earthly lament--"Oh, who will pray for her when I am gone!" seemed to be murmuring in my ear--murmuring in harmony with the divine words in which the Voice from the Mount of Olives taught forgiveness of injuries to all mankind.
She was dying: dying among strangers in the pining madness of fever--and the one being of all who knew her, whose presence at her bedside might yet bring calmness to her last moments, and give her quietly and tenderly to death, was the man whom she had pitilessly deceived and dishonoured, whose youth she had ruined, whose hopes she had wrecked for ever. Strangely had destiny brought us together--terribly had it separated us--awfully would it now unite us again, at the end!
What were my wrongs, heavy as they had been; what my sufferings, poignant as they still were, that they should stand between this dying woman, and the last hope of awakening her to the consciousness that she was going before the throne of God? The sole resource for her which human skill and human pity could now suggest, embraced the sole chance that she might still be recovered for repentance, before she was resigned to death. How did I know, but that in those ceaseless cries which had uttered my name, there spoke the last earthly anguish of the tortured spirit, calling upon me for one drop of water to cool its burning guilt--one drop from the waters of Peace?
I took up Mr. Bernard's letter from the floor on which it had fallen, and re-directed it to my brother; simply writing on a blank place in the inside, "I have gone to soothe her last moments." Before I departed, I wrote to her father, and summoned him to her bedside. The guilt of his absence--if his heartless and hardened nature did not change towards her--would now rest with him, and not with me. I forbore from thinking how he would answer my letter; for I remembered his written words to my brother, declaring that he would accuse his daughter of having caused her mother's death; and I suspected him even then, of wishing to shift the shame of his conduct towards his unhappy wife from himself to his child.
After writing this second letter, I set forth instantly for the house to which Mr. Bernard had directed me. No thought of myself; no thought, even, of the peril suggested by the ominous disclosure about Mannion, in the postscript to the surgeon's letter, ever crossed my mind. In the great stillness, in the heavenly serenity that had come to my spirit, the wasting fire of every sensation which was only of this world, seemed quenched for ever.
It was eleven o'clock when I arrived at the house. A slatternly, sulky woman opened the door to me. "Oh! I suppose you're another doctor," she muttered, staring at me with scowling eyes. "I wish you were the undertaker, to get her out of my house before we all catch our deaths of her! There! there's the other doctor coming down stairs; he'll show you the room--I won't go near it."
As I took the candle from her hand, I saw that Mr. Bernard was approaching me from the stairs.
"You can do no good, I am afraid," he said, "but I am glad you have come."
"There is no hope, then?"
"In my opinion, none. Turner came here this morning, whether she recognised him, or not, in her delirium, I cannot say; but she grew so much worse in his presence, that I insisted on his not seeing her again, except under medical permission. Just now, there is no one in the room--are you willing to go up stairs at once?"
"Does she still speak of me in her wanderings?"
"Yes, as incessantly as ever."
"Then I am ready to go to her bedside."
"Pray believe that I feel deeply what a sacrifice you are making. Since I wrote to you, much that she has said in her delirium has told me"--(he hesitated)--"has told me more, I am afraid, than you would wish me to have known, as a comparative stranger to you. I will only say, that secrets unconsciously disclosed on the death-bed are secrets sacred to me, as they are to all who pursue my calling; and that what I have unavoidably heard above stairs, is doubly sacred in my estimation, as affecting a near and dear relative of one of my oldest friends." He paused, and took my hand very kindly; then added: "I am sure you will think yourself rewarded for any trial to your feelings to-night, if you can only remember in years to come, that your presence quieted her in her last moments!"
I felt his sympathy and delicacy too strongly to thank him in words; I could only look my gratitude as he asked me to follow him up stairs.
We entered the room softly. Once more, and for the last time in this world, I stood in the presence of Margaret Sherwin.
Not even to see her, as I had last seen her, was such a sight of misery as to behold her now, forsaken on her deathbed, to look at her, as she lay with her head turned from me, fretfully covering and uncovering her face with the loose tresses of her long black hair, and muttering my name incessantly in her fever-dream: "Basil! Basil! Basil! I'll never leave off calling for him, till he comes. Basil! Basil! Where is he? Oh, where, where, where!"
"He is here," said the doctor, taking the candle from my hand, and holding it, so that the light fell full on my face. "Look at her and speak to her as usual, when she turns round," he whispered to me.
Still she never moved; still those hoarse, fierce, quick tones--that voice, once the music that my heart beat to; now the discord that it writhed under--muttered faster and faster: "Basil! Basil! Bring him here! bring me Basil!"
"He is here," repeated Mr. Bernard loudly. "Look! look up at him!"
She turned in an instant, and tore the hair back from her face. For a moment, I forced myself to look at her; for a moment, I confronted the smouldering fever in her cheeks; the glare of the bloodshot eyes; the distortion of the parched lips; the hideous clutching of the outstretched fingers at the empty air--but the agony of that sight was more than I could endure: I turned away my head, and hid my face in horror.
"Compose yourself," whispered the doctor. "Now she is quiet, speak to her; speak to her before she begins again; call her by her name."
Her name! Could my lips utter it at such a moment as this?
"Quick! quick!" cried Mr. Bernard. "Try her while you have the chance."
I struggled against the memories of the past, and spoke to her--God knows as gently, if not as happily, as in the bygone time!
"Margaret," I said, "Margaret, you asked for me, and I have come."
She tossed her arms above her head with a shrill scream, frightfully prolonged till it ended in low moanings and murmurings; then turned her face from us again, and pulled her hair over it once more.