“You must repay her, dearest,” said he. “I know you love her, and until to-day it gave me pain; now it gives me pleasure. We owe her much.”
The happy, innocent life of Mabel Vane is soon summed up. Frank as the day, constant as the sun, pure as the dew, she passed the golden years preparing herself and others for a still brighter eternity. At home, it was she who warmed and cheered the house, and the hearth, more than all Christmas fires. Abroad, she shone upon the poor like the sun. She led her beloved husband by the hand to Heaven. She led her children the same road; and she was leading her grandchildren when the angel of death came for her; and she slept in peace.
Many remember her. For she alone, of all our tale, lived in this present century; but they speak of her as “old Madam Vane”—her whom we knew so young and fresh.
She lies in Willoughby Church—her mortal part; her spirit is with the spirits of our mothers and sisters, reader, that are gone before us; with the tender mothers, the chaste wives, the loyal friends, and the just women of all ages.
RESURGET.
I come to her last, who went first; but I could not have stayed by the others, when once I had laid my darling asleep. It seemed for a while as if the events of our tale did her harm; but it was not so in the end.
Not many years afterward, she was engaged by Mr. Sheridan, at a very heavy salary, and went to Dublin. Here the little girl, who had often carried a pitcher on her head down to the Liffey, and had played Polly Peachum in a booth, became a lion; dramatic, political and literary, and the center of the wit of that wittiest of cities.
But the Dublin ladies and she did not coalesce. They said she was a naughty woman, and not fit for them morally. She said they had but two topics, “silks and scandal,” and were unfit for her intellectually.
This was the saddest part of her history. But it is darkest just before sunrise. She returned to London. Not long after, it so happened that she went to a small church in the city one Sunday afternoon. The preacher was such as we have often heard; but not so this poor woman, in her day of sapless theology, ere John Wesley waked the snoring church. Instead of sending a dry clatter of morality about their ears, or evaporating the Bible in the thin generalities of the pulpit, this man drove God's truths home to the hearts of men and women. In his hands the divine virtues were thunderbolts, not swans' down. With good sense, plain speaking, and a heart yearning for the souls of his brethren and his sisters, he stormed the bosoms of many; and this afternoon, as he reasoned like Paul of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, sinners trembled—and Margaret Woffington was of those who trembled.
After this day, she came ever to the narrow street where shone this house of God; and still new light burst upon her heart and conscience. Here she learned why she was unhappy; here she learned how alone she could be happy; here she learned to know herself; and, the moment she knew herself, she abhorred herself, and repented in dust and ashes.