The door of the cell was suddenly opened, and the venerable Canon Lenthall entered.
“I am glad you have consented to see the prisoner,” he said, addressing himself to the farmer and his daughter; “glad for many reasons.”
The farmer nodded and said, “It was not loikely, after what you told us, that we should fail to coom. But he be sadly altered.”
“Ah, sartin sure I be,” said the prisoner, with a hoarse laugh. “You see the chill of the grave be already upon me; man’s hopes and man’s heart canna’ live for ever, though the hopes be high and the heart be young. I may die before the gallows claims me—think o’ that.”
“I hope you are in a better frame of mind and are embued with a due sense of the awfulness of your position,” observed the canon.
“I be all that, reverend sir. Perhaps you will tell me—you who are so good and so religious—why I have been saved so long, why I was tempted to commit so dreadful a crime, and why I am doomed to die on the scaffold?”
“We cannot understand how the corn grows in the earth,” said the vicar, “how birds fly in the air, how insects crawl across a ceiling, how then can we understand the mysterious ways of the Creator?”
“You are right,” returned Chudley, sharply. “I have probably bin created, like thorns and nettles, for some mysterious purpose.”
“That may or may not be,” returned the vicar. “Providence is like the sun—when we first look at it we are dazzled and blinded; we believe that it is faultless. But art and science—those dangerous tutors of man, which teach him little, but which cannot teach him much—show him that there are spots upon the sun, apparently so spotless, and, perhaps, if he could understand the nature of these apparent blemishes he would worship with greater faith the majesty and effulgence of the Deity.”
The prisoner looked at the speaker and bowed his head reverently.