One night Donal, hearing him restless, got up from the chair where he watched by him most nights, and saw him staring, but not seeing: his eyes showed that they regarded nothing material. After a moment he gave a great sigh, and his jaw fell. Donal thought he was dead. But presently he came to himself like one escaping from torture: a terrible dream was behind him, pulling at the skirts of his consciousness.
“I’ve seen her!” he said. “She’s waiting for me to take me—but where I do not know. She did not look angry, but then she seldom looked angry when I was worst to her!—Grant, I beg of you, don’t lose sight of Davie. Make a man of him, and his mother will thank you. She was a good woman, his mother, though I did what I could to spoil her! It was no use! I never could!—and that was how she kept her hold of me. If I had succeeded, there would have been an end of her power, and a genuine heir to the earldom! What a damned fool I was to let it out! Who would have been the worse!”
“He’s a heartless, unnatural rascal, though,” he resumed, “and has made of me the fool I deserved to be made! His mother must see it was not my fault! I would have set things right if I could! But it was too late! And you tell me she has had a hand in letting the truth out—leaving her letters about!—That’s some comfort! She was always fair, and will be the less hard on me. If I could see a chance of God being half as good to me as my poor wife. She was my wife! I will say it in spite of all the priests in the stupid universe! She was my wife, and deserved to be my wife; and if I had her now, I would marry her, because she would be foolish enough to like it, though I would not do it all the time she was alive, let her beg ever so! Where was the use of giving in, when I kept her in hand so easily that way? That was it! It was not that I wanted to do her any wrong. But you should keep the lead. A man mustn’t play out his last trump and lose the lead. But then you never know about dying! If I had known my poor wife was going to die, I would have done whatever she wanted. We had merry times together! It was those cursed drugs that wiled the soul out of me, and then the devil went in and took its place!—There was curara in that last medicine, I’ll swear!—Look you here now, Grant:—if there were any way of persuading God to give me a fresh lease of life! You say he hears prayer: why shouldn’t you ask him? I would make you any promise you pleased—give you any security you wanted, hereafter to live a godly, righteous, and sober life.”
“But,” said Donal, “suppose God, reading your heart, saw that you would go on as bad as ever, and that to leave you any longer would only be to make it the more difficult for him to do anything with you afterwards?”
“He might give me a chance! It is hard to expect a poor fellow to be as good as he is himself!”
“The poor fellow was made in his image!” suggested Donal.
“Very poorly made then!” said the earl with a sneer. “We might as well have been made in some other body’s image!”
Donal thought with himself.
“Did you ever know a good woman, my lord?” he asked.
“Know a good woman?—Hundreds of them!—The other sort was more to my taste! but there was my own mother! She was rather hard on my father now and then, but she was a good woman.”