Before the arrival of the close vehicle ordered by Emmie to convey her brother and herself to the station, the sister made one more earnest attempt to dissuade Bruce from making an effort which, in his present state, would probably bring on serious illness. Was it indeed, she urged, so needful for him to appear in person in London?
“Emmie, I have wronged a brother, and shall I not do what I can to right him?” was Bruce’s reply. “Yes,” he added, “though I knew that to go to him now were to go indeed to my grave.” Emmie attempted no further remonstrance.
The vehicle came, and the travellers started. Susan accompanied the Trevors as far as the station, to take their railway tickets, and look after their comforts. Emmie would have been thankful to have taken her faithful attendant with her all the way to London, but difficulties stood in the way. Not only had money run short (for Emmie’s purse had been empty, and her brother’s had been so poorly supplied that they had had to borrow from their servant), but Miss Trevor was afraid further to encroach on the hospitality of her aunt, whose house might already be full.
Few persons travelled in winter by the night train, which was chiefly used for luggage. Bruce and Emmie had the railway carriage to themselves, and the invalid was thus able to recline as on a couch. Very few words passed between the brother and sister during that long wearisome journey; Bruce was reserving the small residue of his strength for the morrow’s effort, and as the light of the dull lamp fell on his almost corpse-like features, Emmie felt that it would be cruel to disturb him even by a question. She scarcely knew whether her brother were thinking or sleeping; but what a full current of thought was passing through her own mind, as the train rolled on through the darkness! Emmie reviewed the events of that—to her—most eventful day with emotions of horror so mixed with fervent thankfulness, that she could not herself have told which was the uppermost feeling. Emmie had, as it were, had lions close to her path, but had found that the lions were chained; she had looked on death very near, but her spirit had been so braced by prayer that she had not fainted at his awful approach. She had, for once, conquered mistrust, and by doing so had been the blessed means of saving the life of her brother. But was she to rest content with one victory over besetting sin, or could she suppose that the enemy, though once foiled, would not perpetually be returning to his too familiar abode? Had vivid light been thrown into her heart’s haunted chamber, only that she should again resign it to darkness? Must not the young Christian be now constantly on the watch, and resolutely and prayerfully resolve that the thought “I fear” should never again turn her feet back from the path of duty?
Emmie was so absorbed in such reflections that she almost started when her brother broke silence at last.
“Emmie, what induced you to go to that house, and alone?” asked Bruce suddenly, opening his languid eyes, and fixing their gaze on his sister, who occupied the opposite seat. “Had anything occurred to make you suspect treachery in that most false of women?”
The question took Emmie by surprise, and she was about to return a frank reply, when there came the remembrance of her oath, like the galling of a hidden chain worn by penitents of old. Even all that had passed had not set the conscience of the maiden free from the burden of that dread oath.
“I cannot tell even you, Bruce, why I suspected Jael,—why I went through the wood in the storm,—but the thing which decided me to make my way into the house and search there for my brother was finding one of his slippers close to the garden-gate.”
A faint smile, the first seen on his lips during that fearful day, passed over the face of Bruce. “Then it was not for nothing,” he said, “that I contrived to detach that slipper from my foot as the villains bore me past the hedge to the gate. It was so dark that they did not notice the trace I was leaving behind me. But wherefore can you not tell me, Emmie, the cause of that suspicion of Jael which led one so timid as yourself to her dwelling in the midst of a storm so terrible, that when the bolt struck the house I thought to have been buried under its ruins?”
“Oh! Bruce, do not ask me!” murmured Emmie, shrinking from the searching gaze of her brother’s eyes.