Kate Aylesford: A Story of the Refugees

by Charles J. Peterson

“You have been bred a gentleman,” answered the practitioner, replying in a spirit more common then, when caste was thought to make one man superior to another, than now, “and can therefore summon courage to face anything, I suppose. I am sorry I cannot hold out hope. If you have any arrangements to make, it would be wise to lose no time. Can I be of service to you otherwise than professionally?”

Aylesford turned uneasily in his bed, and did not reply for a moment. At last he spoke.

“No, thank you, Doctor. I have no affairs to settle, such as you mean.”

He seemed, however, as if there was something on his mind, so that the surgeon, lingering as he arranged his instruments, was induced to speak again.

“Perhaps you would like to see a parson,” he said. “Fortunately we have a chaplain with us.”

“It is not that,” answered Aylesford. “But you may send him, nevertheless.” He spoke, all this while, with difficulty. Then, as the surgeon went out, he murmured to himself, turning uneasily again, “Oh! Kate, Kate, what have I brought on you!”

We have failed to convey a true idea of Aylesford, if the reader considers him a remorseless villain. He was, indeed, deeply stained with vices, but they were mostly those, which, while violating the moral code quite as much as more brutal ones, yet do not degrade the entire nature. He was a spendthrift, a gambler, licentious, passionate and haughty. He was even capable of treachery, as we have seen, under the double temptation of interest and love. But this last crime had been the first of its kind he had ever been engaged in; his conscience was not yet seared to such atrocities; and now, when he found death approaching, the idea that Kate was in the hands of Arrison, and that she had been brought there by his own act, woke a thousand serpent-stings of remorse at his heart.

He lay there, but could not rest. He tossed from side to side, in spite of the entreaties of his attendant, a surgeon’s assistant, who declared that he was shortening his life. Deep groans continually broke from him, not because of pain, but in consequence, as the attendant saw, of mental anguish. The youth hoped that when the clergyman came, his patient would obtain peace of mind; but neither the presence of the chaplain, nor the prayers he read, nor the soothing words he addressed to the invalid, had any effect in composing Aylesford.

It was at this point of time that the present chapter opens. The clergyman had risen from his knees, and was sitting at the head of the bed; the surgeon’s assistant stood looking down on the invalid with folded arms; and three or four other persons, who had crowded into the room in the confusion, gazed with serious, awe-struck faces, now on the dying man, and now on his medical and spiritual advisers. A single tallow candle, placed on a little old-fashioned stand, on which were also several phials, threw a dim and yellow light on the disturbed countenance among the pillows and on the dark dress of the chaplain, leaving the remainder of the room in deep shadow, out of which the anxious, earnest faces of the spectators looked forth like the dark heads in old and time-stained pictures.

For sometime there was silence in the apartment. The invalid, at a pause in the clergyman’s exhortations, had suddenly turned his back on the speaker, with a deep groan that seemed wrung from his inmost heart; and now appeared to be dozing. The priest knew not what to do. He was a sincerely good man, far different from many among chaplains of that day, but his services, he saw, had produced no impression, and he was not sure that they were not positively rejected. Still he was willing to remain, in hopes that a better frame of mind might arise in the patient; but for this he thought it best to wait in silence.