“Will he wake again?” said he, at last, rising and whispering to the assistant. “This looks like the stupor of death.”
Perhaps it was the rustling of the silk canonicals which roused the invalid, perhaps his doze had come to an end of itself; but at this Aylesford turned quickly around, and half raising himself on his arm, fixed his eyes on the priest. A wild gleam shot from his haggard eyes.
“You can do me no good,” he said, in a hollow voice, “but, but,” he struggled for words, “stay by me to the last. I thank you.”
“I know, my son,” mildly answered the clergyman, “that I can do you no good; but there is one who can; and to Him I exhort you to turn your eyes.”
But the sick man, shaking his head, interrupted the minister of heaven.
“It is too late, too late,” he said, “even if your religion is true.” The venerable man lifted his hands in horror, and raised his eyes in a mute petition above. “But enough of this,” continued Aylesford. “I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, sir; you mean well, and I thank you: but that is a subject on which we shall never agree, and my time is too precious to waste.”
Aylesford was, like most fashionable profligates of that day, an atheist at heart. It was an age, when the French Encyclopaediasts had exhausted every resource of sophistry and satire to shake the belief in a divine revelation; when young men thought it smart to laugh at the Bible, as a collection of old legends only fit for women; and when Voltaire, Helvetius, D’Alembert, and other mere analytical thinkers were ignorantly ranked, by men of little learning and less wisdom, above the great synthetical minds who have, throughout the generations, held fast to Christianity, not only as a revelation historically established on irrefragible grounds of proof, but as a religion whose divinity is proved, apart from this, by its wonderful adaptation to all the wants of the human soul, to its sorrows as well as to its joys, and especially to its longings after immortality. So firmly established was Aylesford’s atheism, that it left him with few or no doubts, even in this dread hour. Perhaps—for who can tell?—men may commit the unpardonable sin, so awfully denounced in Scripture, by obdurate unbelief: and it is certain that this thought flashed across the mind of the clergyman, who put up a mental petition that it might not be so in this instance.
“A little while longer, O Lord, forbear,” he prayed. “Spare the barren fig-tree yet a space.”
“It’s another thing I want to speak about,” said Aylesford, after a pause for breath. “I had resolved to die without revealing it; but I feel as if it must out. If there’s a hell at all,” he suddenly added, while he glared, almost like a wild beast, at the clergyman, while he struck his breast with his clenched hand, “it’s here now, here at my heart, where it’s been gnawing, gnawing—”
“My son, oh! my son,” cried the white-haired clergyman, deeply impressed, and with tears in his eyes, making a last effort to benefit the dying man, “there’s a worm that never dies, that gnaws forever.”