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THE BEDSIDE.
George Bascombe, 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 class. When the dying leaves began
to shiver 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
shivering 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 canal 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 God
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 fashion,
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.
"He must give us every sort of opportunity for trusting him," he
said. "The one he now gives you, is this dulness that has come over
you. Trust him through it, submitting to it and yet trusting against
it, and you get the good of it. In your present state perhaps you
cannot even try to bring about by force of will any better state of
feeling or higher intellectual condition; but you can say to God
something like this: "See, Lord, I am dull and stupid, and care for
nothing: take thou care of everything for me, heart and mind and
all. I leave all to thee. Wilt thou not at length draw me out of
this my frozen wintery state? Let me not shrink from fresh life and
thought and duty, or be unready to come out of the shell of my
sickness when thou sendest for me. I wait thy will. I wait even the
light that I feel now as if I dared not encounter for weariness of
body and faintness of spirit."
"Ah!" cried Leopold, "there you have touched it! How can you know so
well what I feel?"
"Because I have often had to fight hard to keep death to his own
province, and not let him cross over into my spirit."
"Alas! I am not fighting at all; I am only letting things go."
"You are fighting more than you know, I suspect, for you are
enduring, and that patiently. Suppose Jesus were to knock at the
door now, and it was locked; suppose you knew it was he, and there
was no one in the room to open it for him; suppose you were as weak
as you are now, and seemed to care as little about him or anything
else: what would you do?"
Leopold looked half amazed, as if wondering what his friend could be
driving at with such a question.
"What else could I do but get up and open it?" he said.
"Would you not be tempted to lie still and wait till some one came."
"No."
"Would you not say in your heart, 'The Lord knows I am very weak,
and I should catch cold, and the exertion would make me cough
dreadfully, and he won't mind if I lie still?'"
"That I wouldn't! What should I care what came to me? What would it
matter so long as I got one look at him! Besides, if he didn't want
me to get up, he wouldn't knock."
"But suppose you knew that the moment you turned the key you would
drop down, and when the Lord came in you would not see him."
"I can't think where you want to take me, Mr. Polwarth!" said the
youth. "Even if I knew I should drop dead the moment I got out on
the floor, what would it matter! I should get to him the sooner
then, and tell him why I didn't open the door. Can you suppose for a
moment I should let any care for this miserable body of mine come
between my eyes and the face of my Lord?"
"You see then that you do care about him a little, though a minute
ago you didn't think it! There are many feelings in us that are not
able to get up stairs the moment we call them. Be as dull and stupid
as it pleases God to let you be, and trouble neither yourself nor
him about that, only ask him to be with you all the same."
The little man dropped on his knees by the bedside, and said,
"O Lord Jesus, be near when it seems to us, as it seemed to thee
once, that our Father has forsaken us, and gathered back to himself
all the gifts he once gave us. Even thou who wast mighty in death,
didst need the presence of thy Father to make thee able to endure:
forget not us the work of thy hands, yea, the labour of thy heart
and spirit. O remember that we are his offspring, neither
accountable for our own being, nor able to comfort or strengthen
ourselves. If thou wert to leave us alone, we should cry out upon
thee as on the mother who threw her babes to the wolves--and there
are no wolves able to terrify thee. Ah Lord! we know thou leavest us
not, only in our weakness we would comfort our hearts with the music
of the words of faith. Thou canst not do other than care for us,
Lord Christ, for whether we be glad or sorry, slow of heart or full
of faith, all the same are we the children of thy Father. He sent us
here, and never asked us if we would; therefore thou must be with
us, and give us repentance and humility and love and faith, that we
may indeed be the children of thy Father who is in heaven. Amen."
While Polwarth was yet praying, the door had opened gently behind
him, and Helen, not knowing that he was there, had entered with
Bascombe. He neither heard their entrance, nor saw the face of
disgust that George made behind his back. What was in Bascombe's
deepest soul who shall tell? Of that region he himself knew nothing.
It was a silent, holy place into which he had never yet entered--
therefore lonely and deserted as the top of Sinai after the cloud
had departed. No--I will not say that: who knows what is where man
cannot or will not look? If George had sought there, perhaps he
might have found traces of a presence not yet altogether vanished.
In what he called and imagined his deeepest soul, however, all he
was now conscious of was a perfect loathing of the monstrous
superstition so fitly embodied before him. The prayer of the
kneeling absurdity was to him an audacious mockery of the
infrangible laws of Nature: this hulk of misshapen pottery actually
presuming to believe that an invisible individual heard what he said
because he crooked his hinges to say it! It did not occur to George
that the infrangible laws of Nature she had herself from the very
first so agonizingly broken to the poor dwarf, she had been to him
such a cruel step-mother, that he was in evil case indeed if he
could find no father to give him fair play and a chance of the
endurable. Was he so much to blame if he felt the annihilation
offered by such theorists as George, not altogether a satisfactory
counterpoise either to its existence or its loss? If, even, he were
to fancy in his trouble that the old fable of an elder brother,
something more humble than grand handsome George Bascombe and more
ready to help his little brothers and sisters, might be true, seeing
that an old story is not necessarily a false one, and were to try
after the hints it gave, surely in his condition such folly, however
absurd to a man of George Bascombe's endowments, might of the more
gifted ephemeros be pardoned if not pitied. Nor will I assert that
he was altogether unaware of any admixture of the sad with the
ludicrous when he saw the amorphous agglomerate of human shreds and
patches kneeling by the bedside of the dying murderer, to pray some
comfort into his passing soul. But his "gorge rose at the nonsense
and stuff of it," while through Helen ran a cold shudder of disgust
at the familiarity and irreverence of the little spiritual prig.
How many of the judgments we are told not to judge and yet do judge,
must make the angels of the judging and the judged turn and look at
each other and smile a sad smile, ere they set themselves to forget
that which so sorely needs to be forgotten.
Polwarth rose from his knees unaware of a hostile presence.
"Leopold," he said, taking his hand, "I would gladly, if I might,
walk with you through the shadow. But the heart of all hearts will
be with you. Rest in your tent a little while, which is indeed the
hollow of the Father's hand turned over you, with your strong
brother watching the door. Your imagination cannot go beyond the
truth of him who is the Father of lights, or of him who is the Elder
Brother of men."
Leopold answered only with his eyes. Polwarth turned to go, and saw
the on-lookers. They stood between him and the door, but parted and
made room for him to pass. Neither spoke. He made a bow first to one
and then to the other, looking up in the face of each, unabashed by
smile or scorn or blush of annoyance, but George took no notice,
walking straight to the bed the moment the way was clear. Helen's
conscience, however, or heart, smote her, and, returning his bow,
she opened the door for her brother's friend. He thanked her, and
went his way.
"Poor dear fellow!" said George kindly, and stroked the thin hand
laid in his: "can I do anything for you?"
"Nothing but be good to Helen when I am gone, and tell her now and
then that I'm not dead, but living in the hope of seeing her again
one day before long. She might forget sometimes--not me, but that,
you know."
"Yes, yes, I'll see to it," answered George, in the evil tone of one
who faithfully promises a child an impossibility. Of course there
was no more harm in lying to a man who was just on the verge of
being a man no more, and becoming only an unpleasant mass of
chemicals, which a whole ant-heap of little laws would presently be
carrying outside the gates of the organic, than there had been in
lying to him when he supposed him a madman. Neither could anyone
blame him for inconsistency; for had he not always said in the
goodness of his heart, that he would never disturb the faith of old
people drawing nigh their end, because such no more possessed the
needful elasticity of brain to accommodate themselves to the
subversion of previous modes of feeling and thought, unavoidable to
the adoption of his precious revelation. Precious he did believe it,
never having himself one of those visions of infinite hope, which,
were his theory once proved as true as he imagined it, must then
indeed vanish for ever.
"Do you suffer much?" asked George.
"Yes--a good deal."
"Pain?"
"Not so much;--sometimes. The weakness is the worst. But it doesn't
matter: God is with me."
"What good does that do you?" asked George, forgetting himself, half
in contempt, half in a curiosity which he would have called, and
which perhaps was, scientific.
But Leopold took it in good faith, and answered,
"It sets it all right, and makes me able to be patient."
George laid down the hand he held, and turned sadly to Helen, but
said nothing.
The next moment Wingfold entered. Helen kissed the dying hand, and
left the room with George.
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