TRIX was not so quickly satisfied as Grace had been. ‘Going away!’ she cried; ‘going to leave Grace! I thought you could not bear to have her out of your sight.’
‘I hope I was not such an ass as to say so, but I cannot help myself—it is an old friend—’
‘Who is he? Do I know him?’ she said, as Grace had said. ‘You men are so ridiculous about your friends. Probably somebody that did you nothing but harm, and whom you would be thankful never to hear of again.’
‘You speak like an oracle. Trix; but I must go all the same.’
‘And why don’t you say who he is? Ah, it was a great deal better for you, Oliver, when you had no friends that your sister didn’t know of. Tell me who he is—at least, tell me his name.’
‘You would not be a bit the wiser. You know nothing whatever about—him. Trix, take great care of her while I am away.’
‘Oh, as for taking care of her!—’ He went out of the room while she was speaking to put his necessaries into his bag. And left alone, she began to think still more doubtfully over the meaning of this sudden move. She ran over every name she could think of, of people whom she knew he had known. She, too, felt the influence of that sudden cloud which blotted out the sky and brought the quick deluge of the spring shower pouring about the ears of the wayfarers. The darkness assisted her womanish imagination, as it had done that of Grace. It was like a sudden misfortune falling when no one thought of it. And Mrs. Ford’s mind was greatly exercised. When Oliver came into the room again, ready to start, she got up quickly and went to him with her two hands on the lappels of his coat. ‘Oliver,’ she cried, breathlessly, ‘I hope to goodness it is a him, and not—You couldn’t, you wouldn’t—it isn’t possible.’
‘Suspicion seems always possible,’ he said, harshly, putting her away from him. Was it the natural indignation of one unjustly blamed? ‘If that is all you think of me, what can it matter what I say?’
‘Oh,’ cried Trix, who was very impulsive, ‘I beg your pardon, Noll. It was only that I—it was because I am so anxious, oh, so anxious! that everything should go well. You won’t be long—not any longer than you can help?’
‘Not a moment,’ he said. ‘If I can return to-morrow, I will. I hope so with all I my heart. Going at all is no pleasure. Take care of her while I am away.’
It seemed to Trix that he was gone before she had known that he was going. It was very sudden. He had not intended to go at all till after his marriage. He had said so only that morning: and why this change all in an hour? A friend! It must be a very intimate friend, she concluded, or he would not have thrown up all his plans to go and visit him. To be sure, when a man is dying he is not likely to wait the convenience of another who is about to be married. She told her husband when he came in in the evening, and he, a good man, who was not wont to trouble himself about hidden meanings, received the news with great placidity.
‘Is it anyone we know?’ was his first question. ‘I hope it may be the sort of friend who will leave him something—a legacy couldn’t come at a better moment.’ This was a wonderful sedative to her alarms, and turned her thoughts into quite a different channel. It would be indeed a most suitable moment to have a legacy left him. Every time is suitable for that, but when a man is about to be married, nothing could be more appropriate. Mrs. Ford went across in the evening, after dinner, to see Grace. They lived quite near each other, and the Fords for that evening had no engagement. She found her future sister-in-law sitting over a little, bright fire, reading a novel, with papers beside her on the table, lists from the furniture shops, and some made out in her own handwriting of things that would be required in the new home. Miss Goodheart received Mrs. Ford very cordially. ‘It feels so odd to be quite alone again,’ she said, with a little laugh, which was slightly nervous, ‘and when one didn’t expect it. So I was glad to find a new book. Poor Oliver! he will not have pleasant journey. I hope he will find his friend better. Is he a friend of yours, too?’
‘He was in such a hurry he had not time to tell me, nor I to ask him,’ said Trix, which was not, as the reader knows, quite true.
There was a little pause after this, as if they each would have liked to ask questions of the other; and then, no questions being possible, as neither knew, they plunged into furniture, which is a very enthralling subject. Trix, having experience, was able to give many hints, and to suggest a number of things Grace had left out—kitchen things, for instance. How can anyone know about pots and pans, and how many are necessary, without practical knowledge supplied by recent experience?
They both subdued a little dull pain they had about the region of their hearts by a good long talk on this subject, and parted quite cheerfully when Mr. Ford—who never had any pains in that region except those which are produced by a digestion out of order—came to fetch his wife.
‘Oliver will take the opportunity to do several things on his own hook, now that he has managed to tear himself away,’ that gentleman said. ‘The great difficulty was to tear himself away. And I only hope his friend will leave him something.’
This, though it was so prosaic, gave a real comfort to the two women. It brought his mission quite out from the mystery that hung about it to the range of commonplace affairs.
It was not till Wentworth was fairly gone from the station shut up by himself in a compartment of a first-class carriage, and unapproached by any spectator, that he took out from his pocket and read over again the letter and telegram which had called him away thus hurriedly out of the happiness of his new life. The letter was on blue paper, not without a suspicion of greasiness, and very badly written in a hand which might have been that of a shopman or a schoolboy. But it was signed by a female name, and this is what it said:—
‘DEAR MR. WENTWORTH,—
‘Alice came home in bad health three months ago. She’s been very bad ever since, and there is now no hopes of her. It’s consumption and heart complaint, and what the doctor calls a complickation. For the last fortnight she’s been weaker and weaker every day, and yesterday was took much worse, and hasn’t but a day or two to live. She says as she can’t die happy without seeing you. She calls for you all the time she’s waking, both night and day. Oh, Mr. Wentworth, you always was a kind gentleman, not like some; I know as you would have nothing to say to her if she was well: but being as she’s very ill and near her death, I do hope as you’ll listen to me. You was the first as she ever took a fancy to, she says. But if you come, oh come at oncet, for there is not a moment to be lost.
‘Yours truly,
‘MATILDA.’
He unfolded the telegram afterwards and read, ‘If you want to find her in life, come at once.’
Wentworth remarked with a kind of horrible calm, and even a smile, that the telegraph people had corrected the spelling. This was the summons for which he had left Grace. He had read both more than once. Now that he had obeyed the call, he asked himself was it indeed so necessary—ought he to have done it? There had been perhaps something in the force of the contrast, something in the happiness which was so much more than he deserved, in the purity and nobleness of the woman who had given him her hand, and who was making her spotless atmosphere his, that stung him with that intolerable, remorseful pity, the impulse of which is not to be resisted. Standing by the side of his bride, and on the edge of a life altogether above his deserts, he had felt that he could not resist this appeal to him. To refuse to speak a word of comfort to a dying creature—he to whom God had been so good—how was it possible? Comfort! What comfort could he give? He might bid her repent, as he had repented. But his repentance had been paid, it had been richly recompensed, it was setting open to him the doors of every happiness; whereas to this sharer of his iniquities it was to be followed only by suffering and death.
Wentworth had never been callous or hard-hearted at his worst: and now at his best, compassion and remorse overwhelmed him. That he should receive that information, that appeal, with Grace’s hand in his, gave his whole nature a shock. He felt that he must take himself away out of her presence, and remove the recollections, the scenes that rushed back upon his mind, the image thus thrust before his eyes, away from her at least, even if he did not answer the appeal. He was not of the iron fibre of some men. He could not carry these two images side by side.
And then how did he dare resist such an appeal. ‘You were the first.’ He had said to himself that he was responsible for the ruin of no other human creature. He was not a seducer. He had used no wiles to draw anyone from the paths of virtue. Is that a defence when life and death are in the balance, and a man is arraigned before the tribunal of his own conscience? When he went back into the recesses of his memory and beheld all that was brought before him, as by a flash of lightning, and then remembered the position in which he now stood, he covered his face with his hands. He was ashamed to the bottom of his soul. The way of transgressors is hard. To anyone who had known all the facts, it would have appeared that Oliver Wentworth was the most striking example of undeserved happiness. He had no right to all the good things that had fallen into his lap. He had deserved a very different return for all that he had done; yet when he set out upon that railway journey, with the touch of Grace’s hand still warm in his, the shame and misery in his mind were a not unfit representation of those tortures which to most men are more real than the fire and brimstone of the bottomless pit. How was the recollection of what was passed ever to be washed out of his memory? He might repent—he had repented—and never so bitterly as now: but how was he to forget? In the great words of mercy it is proclaimed that God forgets as well as forgives: ‘Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.’ But the sinner, how is he to forget, even when he believes that he is forgiven?
Yet, what he was doing was not shameful nor sinful. It was mercy that carried him away from all he loved to give what consolation he could to a dying creature whom he had never loved, who had been but the companion of his amusements for a moment of aberration, a time which he looked back upon with astonishment and disgust. How could he have forgotten himself so far? How could he have fallen into such depths? His mind was so revolted by the recollection, such a horror and loathing filled him at the thought, that it was impossible to suppose that any softer sentiment lay concealed beneath. Had he been a less tender-hearted man, he would probably have thrown the letter into the fire, and perhaps sent a little money as the common salve for all sufferings; but his very happiness and elevation above those wretched recollections took from him the power to dismiss such an appeal in this way. And was it not a certain atonement, at least an offering of painful service such as the heart of man believes in, whatever may be its creed, to do this? The money he could have sent would have cost him nothing—this cost him what was incalculable, a price almost beyond bearing. His agitation calmed a little as he pursued these thoughts. He could not do her any good, poor creature; but if it pleased her, if it eased a little the last steps towards the grave?
He arrived in London late on a wet and cold spring night; in town there was little visible of the shivering growth which makes a sudden chill in spring more miserable than winter; but the streets were wet and gleaming with squalid reflections, and the crowds, even in the busiest thoroughfares, were thinned and subdued. Wentworth took a cab and drove through a part of London with which he was not familiar, through line upon line of poor little streets, each one exactly like its neighbours, lighted with few lamps, with a faint occasional shop window, few and far between, and with only at long intervals a dark figure under an umbrella going up or down. The endless extent of this net-work of streets, all poor, mean, dark, yet decent, the homes of myriads unknown, gave him a sense of weariness that many miles of country would not have produced.
At last the cab stopped before one of the narrow doors, flanked with little iron railings, the usual parlour window over-looking a narrow little area. In the room above a light was burning, and all the rest of the house dark. A square printed advertisement of some trade was in the parlour window, just visible by the lamplight, and a painted board of the same description was attached to the railings. The door was opened by a young woman with a candle in her hand, which nearly blew out with the entry of the blast of night air, and flickered before her face so that it was difficult to make out her features. She gave a little cry, ‘Oh, it’s Mr. Wentworth!’ and bade him come in. To describe the sensation with which Wentworth realised his position, known and expected in this house, going up the narrow stair which was all that separated him from the sickroom, from the dying woman, between whom and himself he was thus acknowledging a connection, is more than I can attempt. There was no secret here—a man in the slipshod dress of a worker at home looked out from the little back room and asked, ‘Has he come?’ as he passed. On the top of the stairs an older woman, with the dreadful black cap of the elderly decent English matron of the lower classes, came out to meet him, and put out her hand in welcome. ‘How do you do, Mr. Wentworth? She’s that excited there’s no keeping her still: and I’m so glad you’ve come.’
In the face of all this, his heart sank more and more. He felt himself no longer on a mission of mercy, but going to meet his fate.