CHAPTER XL.
From the house of Sir Philip Hastings Mr. Short rode quickly on to the cottage of Mistress Best, which he had visited once before in the morning. The case of John Ayliffe, however, was becoming more and more urgent every moment, and at each visit the surgeon saw a change in the countenance of the young man which indicated that a greater change still was coming. He had had a choice of evils to deal with; for during the first day after the accident there had been so much fever that he had feared to give any thing to sustain the young man's strength. But long indulgence in stimulating liquors had had its usual effect in weakening the powers of the constitution, and rendering it liable to give way suddenly even where the corporeal powers seemed at their height. Wine had become to John Ayliffe what water is to most men, and he could not bear up without it. Exhaustion had succeeded rapidly to the temporary excitement of fever, and mortification had begun to show itself on the injured limb. Wine had become necessary, and it was administered in frequent and large doses; but as a stimulant it had lost its effect upon the unhappy young man, and when the surgeon returned to the cottage on this occasion, he saw not only that all hope was at an end, but that the end could not be very far distant.
Good Mr. Dixwell was seated by John Ayliffe's side, and looked up to the surgeon with an anxious eye. Mr. Short felt his patient's pulse with a very grave face. It was rapid, but exceedingly feeble--went on for twenty or thirty beats as fast as it could go--then stopped altogether for an instant or two, and then began to beat again as quickly as before.
Mr. Short poured out a tumbler full of port wine, raised John Ayliffe a little, and made him drink it down. After a few minutes he felt his pulse again, and found it somewhat stronger. The sick man looked earnestly in his face as if he wished to ask some question; but he remained silent for several minutes.
At length he said, "Tell me the truth, Short. Am not I dying?"
The surgeon hesitated, but Mr. Dixwell raised his eyes, saying, "Tell him the truth, tell him the truth, my good friend. He is better prepared to bear it than he was yesterday."
"I fear you are sinking, Sir John," said the surgeon.
"I do not feel so much pain in my leg," said the young man.
"That is because mortification has set in," replied Mr. Short.
"Then there is no hope," said John Ayliffe.
The surgeon was silent; and after a moment John Ayliffe said, "God's will be done."
Mr. Dixwell pressed his hand kindly with tears in his eyes; for they were the Christian words he had longed to hear, but hardly hoped for.
There was a long and somewhat sad pause, and then the dying man once more turned his look upon the surgeon, asking, "How long do you think it will be?"
"Three or four hours," replied Mr. Short. "By stimulants, as long as you can take them, it may be protracted a little longer, but not much."
"Every moment is of consequence," said the clergyman. "There is much preparation still needful--much to be acknowledged and repented of--much to be atoned for. What can be done, my good friend to protract the time?"
"Give small quantities of wine very frequently," answered the surgeon, "and perhaps some aqua vitæ--but very little--very little, or you may hurry the catastrophe."
"Well, well," said John Ayliffe, "you can come again, but perhaps by that time I shall be gone. You will find money enough in my pockets, Short, to pay your bill--there is plenty there, and mind you send the rest to my mother."
The surgeon stared, and said to himself, "he is wandering;" but John Ayliffe immediately added, "Don't let that rascal Shanks have it, but send it to my mother;" and saying "Very well, Sir John," he took his leave and departed.
"And now my dear young friend," said Mr. Dixwell, the moment the surgeon was gone, "there is no time to be lost. You have the power of making full atonement for the great offence you have committed to one of your fellow creatures. If you sincerely repent, as I trust you do, Christ has made atonement for your offences towards God. But you must show your penitence by letting your last acts in this life be just and right. Let me go to Sir Philip Hastings."
"I would rather see his daughter, or his wife," said John Ayliffe: "he is so stern, and hard, and gloomy. He will never speak comfort or forgiveness."
"You are mistaken--I can assure you, you are mistaken," answered the clergyman. "I will take upon me to promise that he shall not say one hard word, and grant you full forgiveness."
"Well, well," said the young man, "if it must be he, so be it--but mind to have pen and ink to write it all down--that pen won't write. You know you tried it this morning."
"I will bring one with me," said Mr. Dixwell, rising eager to be gone on his good errand; but John Ayliffe stopped him, saying, "Stay, stay--remember you are not to tell him any thing about it till he is quite away from his own house. I don't choose to have all the people talking of it, and perhaps coming down to stare at me."
Mr. Dixwell was willing to make any terms in order to have what he wished accomplished, and giving Mrs. Best directions to let the patient have some port wine every half hour, he hurried away to the Court.
On inquiring for Sir Philip, the servant said that his master had ridden out.
"Do you know where he is gone, and how long he will be absent?" asked Mr. Dixwell.
"He is gone, I believe, to call at Doctor Juke's, to consult about my lady," replied the man; "and as that is hard upon twenty miles, he can't be back for two or three hours."
"That is most unfortunate," exclaimed the clergyman. "Is your lady up?"
The servant replied in the negative, adding the information that she was very ill.
"Then I must see Mistress Emily," said Mr. Dixwell, walking into the house. "Call her to me as quickly as you can."
The man obeyed, and Emily was with the clergyman in a few moments, while the servant remained in the hall looking out through the open door.
After remaining in conversation with Mr. Dixwell for a few minutes, Emily hurried back to her room, and came down again dressed for walking. She and Mr. Dixwell went out together, and the servant saw them take their way down the road in the direction of Jenny Best's cottage: but when they had gone a couple of hundred yards, the clergyman turned off towards his own house, walking at a very quick pace, while Emily proceeded slowly on her way.
When at a short distance from the cottage, the beautiful girl stopped, and waited till she was rejoined by Mr. Dixwell, who came up very soon, out of breath at the quickness of his pace. "I have ordered the wine down directly," he said, "and I trust we shall be able to keep him up till he has told his story his own way. Now, my dear young lady, follow me;" and walking on he entered the cottage.
Emily was a good deal agitated. Every memory connected with John Ayliffe was painful to her. It seemed as if nothing but misfortune, sorrow, and anxiety, had attended her ever since she first saw him, and all connected themselves more or less with him. The strange sort of mysterious feeling of sympathy which she had experienced when first she beheld him, and which had seemed explained to her when she learned their near relationship, had given place day by day to stronger and stronger personal dislike, and she could not now even come to visit him on his death-bed with the clergyman without feeling a mixture of repugnance and dread which she struggled with not very successfully.
They passed, however, through the outer into the inner room where Mistress Best was sitting with the dying man, reading to him the New Testament. But as soon as Mr. Dixwell, who had led the way, entered, the good woman stopped, and John Ayliffe turned his head faintly towards the door.
"Ah, this is very kind of you," he said when he saw Emily, "I can tell you all better than any one else."
"Sir Philip is absent," said Mr. Dixwell, "and will not be home for several hours."
"Hours!" repeated John Ayliffe. "My time is reduced to minutes!"
Emily approached quietly, and Mrs. Best quitted the room and shut the door. Mr. Dixwell drew the table nearer to the bed, spread some writing paper which he had brought with him upon it, and dipped a pen in the ink, as a hint that no time was to be lost in proceeding.
"Well, well," said John Ayliffe with a sigh, "I won't delay, though it is very hard to have to tell such a story. Mistress Emily, I have done you and your family great wrong and great harm, and I am very, very sorry for it, especially for what I have done against you."
"Then I forgive you from all my heart," cried Emily, who had been inexpressibly shocked at the terrible change which the young man's appearance presented. She had never seen death, nor was aware of the terrible shadow which the dark banner of the great Conqueror often casts before it.
"Thank you, thank you," replied John Ayliffe; "but you must not suppose, Mistress Emily, that all the evil I have done was out of my own head. Others prompted me to a great deal; although I was ready enough to follow their guidance, I must confess. The two principal persons were Shanks the lawyer, and Mrs. Hazleton--Oh, that woman is, I believe, the devil incarnate."
"Hush, hush," said Mr. Dixwell, "I cannot put such words as those down, nor should you speak them. You had better begin in order too, and tell all from the commencement, but calmly and in a Christian spirit, remembering that this is your own confession, and not an accusation of others."
"Well, I will try," said the young man faintly, lifting his hand from the bed-clothes, as if to put it to his head in the act of thought. But he was too weak, and he fell back again, and fixing his eyes on a spot in the wall opposite the foot of the bed, he continued in a sort of dreamy commemorative way as follows: "I loved you--yes, I loved you very much--I feel it now more than ever--I loved you more than you ever knew--more than I myself knew then. (Emily bent her head and hid her eyes with her hands.) It was not," he proceeded to say, "that you were more beautiful than any of the rest--although that was true too--but there was somehow a look about you, an air when you moved, a manner when you spoke, that made it seem as if you were of a different race from the rest--something higher, brighter, better, and as if your nobler nature shone out like a gleam on all you did--I cannot help thinking that if you could have loved me in return, mine would have been a different fate, a different end, a different and brighter hope even now--"
"You are wandering from the subject, my friend," said Mr. Dixwell. "Time is short."
"I am not altogether wandering," said John Ayliffe, "but feel faint. Give me some more wine." When he had got it, he continued thus: "I found you could not love me--I said in my heart that you would not love me; and my love turned into hate--at least I thought so--and I determined you should rue the day that you had refused me. Long before that, however, Shanks the lawyer had put it into my head that I could take your father's property and title from him, and I resolved some day to try, little knowing all that it would lead me into step by step. I had heard my mother say a hundred times that she had been as good as married to your uncle who was drowned, and that if right had been done I ought to have had the property. So I set to work with Shanks to see what could be done. Sometimes he led, sometimes I led; for he was a coward, and wanted to do all by cunning, and I was bold enough, and thought every thing was to be done by daring. We had both of us got dipped so deep in there was no going back. I tore one leaf out of the parish register myself, to make it seem that your grandfather had caused the record of my mother's marriage to be destroyed--but that was no marriage at all--they never were, married--and that's the truth. I did a great number of other very evil things, and then suddenly Mrs. Hazleton came in to help us; and whenever there was any thing particularly shrewd and keen to be devised, especially if there was a spice of malice in it towards Sir Philip or yourself, Mrs. Hazleton planned it for us--not telling us exactly to do this thing of that, but asking if it could not be done, or if it would be very wrong to do it. But I'll tell you them all in order--all that we did."
He went on to relate a great many particulars with which the reader is already acquainted. He told the whole villanous schemes which had been concocted between himself, the attorney, and Mrs. Hazleton, and which had been in part, or as a whole, executed to the ruin of Sir Philip Hastings' fortune and peace. The good clergyman took down his words with a rapid hand, as he spoke, though it was somewhat difficult; for the voice became more and more faint and low.
"There is no use in trying now," said John Ayliffe in conclusion, "when I am going before God who has seen and known it all. There is no use in trying to conceal any thing. I was as ready to do evil as they were to prompt me, and I did it with a willing heart, though sometimes I was a little frightened at what I was doing, especially in the night when I could not sleep. I am sorry enough for it now--I repent from my whole heart; and now tell me--tell me, can you forgive me?"
"As far as I am concerned, I forgive you entirely," said Emily, with the tears in her eyes, "and I trust that your repentance will be fully accepted. As to my father, I am sure that he will forgive you also, and I think I may take upon myself to say, that he will either come or send to you this night to express his forgiveness."
"No, no, no," said the young man with a great effort. "He must not come--he must not send. I have made the atonement that he (pointing to Mr. Dixwell) required, and I have but one favor to ask. Pray, pray grant it to me. It is but this. That you will not tell any one of this confession so long as I am still living. He has got it all down. It can't be needed for a few hours, and in a few, a very few, I shall be gone. Mr. Dixwell will tell you when it is all over. Then tell what you like; but I would rather not die with more shame upon my head if I can help it."
The good clergyman was about to reason with him upon the differences between healthful shame, and real shame, and false shame, but Emily gently interposed, saying, "It does not matter, my dear sir; a few hours can make no difference."
Then rising, she once more repeated the words of forgiveness, and added, "I will now go and pray for you, my poor cousin--I will pray that your repentance may be sincere and true--that it may be accepted for Christ's sake, and that God may comfort you and support you even at the very last."
Mr. Dixwell rose too, and telling John Ayliffe that he would return in a few minutes, accompanied Emily back towards her house. They parted, however, at the gates of the garden; and while Emily threaded her way through innumerable gravelled walks, the clergyman went back to the cottage, and once more resumed his place by the side of the dying man.