“Away with your idle tales,” fiercely interrupted Aylesford, flinging himself away from the chaplain. But immediately he turned again. “I can’t waste time, sir,” he resumed, “and maybe by speaking, I may avert foul wrong. But no! no! that is impossible,” he almost shrieked, as he spoke these words, gazing hopelessly from the assistant to the minister, like one drowning out at sea may be supposed to turn his frantic eyes towards the unattainable shore.
“She is past rescue.”
“She?” said the clergyman. “My son,” he added solemnly, “if, as your words imply, there is a wrong to be remedied, speak out without delay. Next to repentance comes reparation, and it may be,” he added, as if speaking to himself, “that God, in His infinite mercy, will consider one to include both.”
Aylesford looked eagerly into the chaplain’s face, and, without further parley, proceeded to narrate, though in broken sentences and with rapidly failing words, his scheme to carry off his cousin, its failure, and the great probability there was that she was now in the power of a licentious, brutal, and reckless outlaw.
The narrative, indeed, was not consecutive. Whether the mind of the dying man began to wander, or whether remorse made his thoughts incoherent, he was not able to give an entirely connected story; but from his bitter denunciations of Arrison, his curses on his own folly for being duped, and his apostrophes to Kate, his hearers had no difficulty in arriving at a tolerably correct idea of our heroine’s peril.
“Alas!” said the clergyman, when Aylesford had concluded, “this is a wrong done which is beyond remedy, I fear.”
But Aylesford, at this, sprang up in bed.
“I tell you it is not beyond remedy,” he cried, shaking his damp hair like an angry lion rousing in his lair; and while his eyes gleamed with the fires of partial delirium, he continued, almost with a howl, “I’ll go myself to her rescue. Don’t you hear her reproaching me? Unhand me, I say.” And he struggled to get out of bed.
“We will send word to the enemy’s camp through a flag, that they may do all that can be done,” said the clergyman soothingly, as he and the assistant held down the frenzied man. “There, my son, lie back on your pillow again. There is no one calling you, that you need glare into that dark corner. God help you!”
Gradually the delusion passed from the mind of the invalid. His eye assumed its natural expression. He looked inquiringly around, like one awaking from a dream, and with an attempt at a wan smile, suffered himself to be placed in bed again.