Still the man who loved her with true and generous affection could not, and would not, believe evil. “Poor dear heart,” he would say; “she is indeed to be pitied! How can she help being weary of my absence so long?”
And here it must not fail to be recorded, that Tournier was no longer the same man that he had been when first he arrived at Norman Cross—a proud, bitterly disappointed, sensitive, angry man, who had lost what little faith he ever had in God. He was still a faulty character, no
doubt. Poor erring men do not leap into perfection at a bound. But the revolving light that first sent forth its rays into his mind, some two years ago, in Cosin’s house, had gone on revolving till it became a settled and influential conviction—that God is good, and will help all who want Him, even in their direst need. How good and how mighty to save God was, he had yet to learn: but that He was good, and that He would help him, that he firmly believed. And who had done it for him—this miracle, if you like to call it?—God. By weak human instrumentality, by degrees: but yet God: for none else could have done it.
It made him stronger, much stronger, to bear the bitter trouble that yet oppressed him day by day. It made him hope on, even in the dark. It gave him an object in life, when all he once had lived for seemed swept away.
The reality of his belief was before long put to a very severe test. A letter from his mother arrived one day. The unusually shaky hand-writing
of the address instantly struck him, and a horrible dread that something was wrong seized him. It might have turned out nothing after all, for where we remember one presentiment that turns out true, we forget twenty that turn out false. But in this case it possessed him. He had been very far from well for some time past. In fact, the three years of prison life, and its attendant anxieties, were telling on him. He was lying on a sofa, which his friend at the farm had sent to the prison for him, when the letter was put in his hand. “I cannot read this here,” he muttered, and hurried out of the room, and thence into the road. Taking the way towards Yaxley, he almost ran down a lane that turned towards Whittlesea mere to a favourite spot by the water, where he had often gone fishing with Cosin (for it was deep there), and was very secluded. He called it his sanctuaire. Flinging himself down, he tore open the letter with trembling hands, and began to read:—
“Oh, my dear, dear son! How can I write
what I have to say to you? The good God give you strength to bear it like a man. Elise has run away from her home. Your friend, Colonel Fontenoy, has been staying in our neighbourhood, having recovered from his wounds: and made love to her in spite of the opposition of her family (you know what a handsome man he is), and by this time they are married in Paris . . .”
Whether Tournier got as far as this, no one could say. He was found some hours after with the letter crumpled up in his hand, lying lifeless on the green turf.
But what had been going on during the interval between his beginning the letter and his swooning away? One thing was most certain: The footsteps leading to the brink of the water, again and again repeated, were signs of an awful struggle between the impulse to get free from the troubles of this life (though not of the next), and the determination to trust in God and do the right.