No one went through so much as Miss Fennimore. Each hour of her attendance on Bertha stamped the sense of her own
failure, and of the fallacies to which her life had been dedicated. The sincerity, honour, and modesty that she had inculcated, had been founded on self-esteem alone; and when they had proved inadequate to prevent their breach, their outraged relics had prompted the victim to despair and die. Intellectual development and reasoning powers had not availed one moment against inclination and self-will, and only survived in the involuntary murmurs of a disordered nervous system. All this had utterly overthrown that satisfaction in herself and her own moral qualities in which Miss Fennimore had always lived; she had become sensible of the deep flaws in all that she had admired in her own conduct; and her reason being already prepared by her long and earnest study to accept the faith in its fulness, she had begun to crave after the Atoning Mercy of which she sorely felt the need. But if it be hard for one who has never questioned to take home individually the efficacy of the great Sacrifice, how much harder for one taught to deny the Godhead which rendered the Victim worthy to satisfy Eternal Justice? She accepted the truth, but the gracious words would not reach her spirit; they were to her as a feast in a hungry man’s dream. Robert alone was aware of the struggles through which she was passing, and he could do little in direct aid of her; the books—even the passages of Scripture that he found for her—seemed to fall short; it was as though the sufferer in the wilderness lay in sight of the brazen serpent, but his eyes were holden that he could not see it.
Only the governess’s strong and untaxed health could have carried her through her distress and fatigue, for she continued to engross the most trying share of the nursing, anxious to shield Phœbe from even the knowledge of all the miseries of Bertha’s nights, when the poor child would start on her pillow with a shriek, gaze wildly round, trembling in every limb, the dew starting on her brow, face well-nigh convulsed, teeth chattering, and strange, incoherent words—
‘A dream, only a dream!’ she murmured, recovering consciousness.
‘What was only a dream?’ asked Miss Fennimore, one night.
‘Oh, nothing!’ but she still shivered; then striving to catch hold of the broken threads of her philosophy, ‘How one’s imagination is a prey to—to—what is it? To—to old impressions—when one is weak.’
‘What kind of impressions?’ asked Miss Fennimore, resolved to probe the matter.
Bertha, whose defect of speech was greatly increased by weakness, was long in making her answer comprehensible; but Miss Fennimore gathered it at last, and it made her spirit quake, for it referred to the terrors beyond the grave. Yet she firmly answered—
‘Such impressions may not always result from weakness.’
‘I thought,’ cried Bertha, rising on her elbow, ‘I thought that