The rector"s voice, in its awed monotony, dwelt insistently on each word, then paused. "_To-day_," whispered Mary, caressing Minta"s hand, while the tears streamed down her cheeks; "he repented, Minta, and the Lord took him to Himself--at once--forgiving all his sins."
Mrs. Hurd gave no sign, but the dark figure on the other side of the cottage made an involuntary movement, which threw down a fire-iron, and sent a start through Willie"s wasted body. The reader resumed; but perfect spontaneity was somehow lost both for him and for Mary.
Marcella"s stormy presence worked in them both, like a troubling leaven.
Nevertheless, the priest went steadily through his duty, dwelling on every pang of the Pa.s.sion, putting together every sacred and sublime word. For centuries on centuries his brethren and forerunners had held up the Man of Sorrows before the anguished and the dying; his turn had come, his moment and place in the marvellous never-ending task; he accepted it with the meek ardour of an undoubting faith.
"_And all the mult.i.tudes that came together to this sight, when they beheld the things that were done, returned, smiting their b.r.e.a.s.t.s_."
He closed the book, and bent forward, so as to bring his voice close to the wife"s ear.
"So He died--the Sinless and the Just--for you, for your husband. He has pa.s.sed through death--through cruel death; and where He has gone, we poor, weak, stained sinners can follow,--holding to Him. No sin, however black, can divide us from Him, can tear us from His hand in the dark waters, if it be only repented,--thrown upon His Cross. Let us pray for your husband, let us implore the Lord"s mercy this night--this hour!--upon his soul."
A shudder of remembrance pa.s.sed through Marcella. The rector knelt; Mrs.
Hurd lay motionless, save for deep gasps of struggling breath at intervals; Ann Mullins sobbed loudly; and Mary Harden wept as she prayed, lost in a mystical vision of the Lord Himself among them--there on the cottage floor--stretching hands of pity over the woman beside her, showing His marred side and brow.
Marcella alone sat erect, her whole being one pa.s.sionate protest against a faith which could thus heap all the crimes and responsibilities of this too real earth on the shadowy head of one far-off Redeemer. "This very man who prays," she thought, "is in some sort an accomplice of those who, after tempting, are now destroying, and killing, because they know of nothing better to do with the life they themselves have made outcast."
And she hardened her heart.
When the spoken prayer was over, Mr. Harden still knelt on silently for some minutes. So did Mary. In the midst of the hush, Marcella saw the boy"s eyes unclose. He looked with a sort of remote wonder at his mother and the figures beside her. Then suddenly the gaze became eager, concrete; he sought for something. Her eye followed his, and she perceived in the shadow beside him, on a broken chair placed behind the rough screen which had been made for him, the four tiny animals of pinched paper Wharton had once fashioned. She stooped noiselessly and moved the chair a little forward that he might see them better. The child with difficulty turned his wasted head, and lay with his skeleton hand under his cheek, staring at his treasures--his little, all--with just a gleam, a faint gleam, of that same exquisite content which had fascinated Wharton. Then, for the first time that day, Marcella could have wept.
At last the rector and his sister rose.
"G.o.d be with you, Mrs. Hurd," said Mr. Harden, stooping to her; "G.o.d support you!"
His voice trembled. Mrs. Hurd in bewilderment looked up.
"Oh, Mr. Harden!" she cried with a sudden wail. "Mr. Harden!"
Mary bent over her with tears, trying to still her, speaking again with quivering lips of "the dear Lord, the Saviour."
The rector turned to Marcella.
"You are staying the night with her?" he asked, under his breath.
"Yes. Mrs. Mullins was up all last night. I offered to come to-night."
"You went with her to the prison to-day, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Hurd?"
"For a very few minutes."
"Did you hear anything of his state of mind?" he asked anxiously. "Is he penitent?"
"He talked to me of Willie," she said--a fierce humanness in her unfriendly eyes. "I promised him that when the child died, he should be buried respectably--not by the parish. And I told him I would always look after the little girls."
The rector sighed. He moved away. Then unexpectedly he came back again.
"I must say it to you," he said firmly, but still so low as not to be heard by any one else in the cottage. "You are taking a great responsibility here to-night. Let me implore you not to fill that poor woman with thoughts of bitterness and revenge at such a moment of her life. That _you_ feel bitterly, I know. Mary has explained to me--but ask yourself, I beg of you!--how is _she_ to be helped through her misery, either now or in the future, except by patience and submission to the will of G.o.d?"
He had never made so long a speech to this formidable parishioner of his, and his young cheek glowed with the effort.
"You must leave me to do what I think best," said Marcella, coldly. She felt herself wholly set free from that sort of moral compulsion which his holiness of mind and character had once exerted upon her. That hateful opinion of his, which Mary had reported, had broken the spell once for all.
Mary did not venture to kiss her friend. They all went. Ann Mulling, who was dropping as much with sleep as grief, shuffled off last. When she was going, Mrs. Hurd seemed to rouse a little, and held her by the skirt, saying incoherent things.
"Dear Mrs. Hurd," said Marcella, kneeling down beside her, "won"t you let Ann go? I am going to spend the night here, and take care of you and Willie."
Mrs. Hurd gave a painful start.
"You"re very good, miss," she said half-consciously, "very good, I"m sure. But she"s his own flesh and blood is Ann--his own flesh and blood.
Ann!"
The two women clung together, the rough, ill-tempered sister-in-law muttering what soothing she could think of. When she was gone, Minta Hurd turned her face to the back of the settle and moaned, her hands clenched under her breast.
Marcella went about her preparations for the night. "She is extremely weak," Dr. Clarke had said; "the heart in such a state she may die of syncope on very small provocation. If she is to spend the night in crying and exciting herself, it will go hard with her. Get her to sleep if you possibly can."
And he had left a sleeping draught. Marcella resolved that she would persuade her to take it. "But I will wake her before eight o"clock," she thought. "No human being has the right to rob her of herself through that last hour."
And tenderly she coaxed Minta to take the doctor"s "medicine." Minta swallowed it submissively, asking no questions. But the act of taking it roused her for the time, and she would talk. She even got up and tottered across to Willie.
"Willie!--Willie!--Oh! look, miss, he"s got his animals--he don"t think of nothing else. Oh, Willie! won"t you think of your father?--you"ll never have a father, Willie, not after to-night!"
The boy was startled by her appearance there beside him--his haggard, dishevelled mother, with the dews of perspiration standing on the face, and her black dress thrown open at the throat and breast for air. He looked at her, and a little frown lined the white brow. But he did not speak. Marcella thought he was too weak to speak, and for an instant it struck her with a thrill of girlish fear that he was dying then and there--that night--that hour. But when she had half helped, half forced Mrs. Hurd back to bed again, and had returned to him, his eyelids had fallen, he seemed asleep. The fast, whistling breath was much the same as it had been for days; she rea.s.sured herself.
And at last the wife slept too. The narcotic seized her. The aching limbs relaxed, and all was still. Marcella, stooping over her, kissed the shoulder of her dress for very joy, so grateful to every sense of the watcher was the sudden lull in the long activity of anguish.
Then she sat down in the rocking chair by the fire, yielding herself with a momentary relief to the night and the silence. The tall clock showed that it was not yet ten. She had brought a book with her, and she drew it upon her knee; but it lay unopened.
A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes of rain. Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on her cloak.
A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside her--she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of ear, and imagined more.
All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look round her. She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn across one of the windows, and she got up to close it. Fresh from the light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without at first seeing anything. Then there flashed out upon the dark the door of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road. A man came out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon him.
She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman"s face!--the powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline features--the mad keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes looked in hungrily at the prostrate form on the settle--at the sleeping child. Another figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path. There was a slight scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the curtain close with a hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The woman who had looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was becoming more and more difficult to manage and to watch.
Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.
The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours pa.s.sed, as all sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife.
"He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.
"Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal _knows_--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us something as against the _nothing_ of death--and a man wastes them in sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity!
Oh, why are we here--why am _I_ here--to ache like this--to hate good people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"
She sat over the fire, Willie"s hand clasped in hers. He alone in this forlorn household _loved_ her. Mrs. Hurd and the other children feared and depended on her. This creature of thistle-down--this little thread and patch of humanity--felt no fear of her. It was as though his weakness divined through her harshness and unripeness those maternal and protecting powers with which her nature was in truth so richly dowered.
He confided himself to her with no misgivings. He was at ease when she was there.