"Nathan Bladesden, you hate me, and perhaps you have cause. You are a cold, stern man, with no mercy, and my tortures must be pleasure to you. Enjoy them all! And if any man ever doubts the existence of hell in your presence, tell him that you have seen it with your own eyes in the house of Philip Pomeroy, when the only woman he ever loved in the world lay dead before him, murdered by his own hand, and a devil stood by, taunting him with his guilt!"
"I will taunt thee no more, Doctor Philip!" fell slowly from the Quaker's lips. "I hate thee no longer. I pity thee. Thy Maker is dealing with thee now, and thy punishment is enough!"
He turned away, then, and left the suffering man still within the room beside the dead. Once as he passed into the hall he looked back and saw through the still open door a dark form fall forward with a groan, the head against the coffin and the arms clasping it as if it had been a living thing.
There are two endings to the story of "Faust"—that marvellous wierd history of human love and demoniac temptation which alike in drama and opera enraptures the world, and once before alluded to in this narration. In the older and coarser version, when the ruin is full accomplished and the hour of penalty full ripe, Marguerite is seen ascending heavenward, while Mephistopheles laughs hoarsely and points downward to the lower pit, whence arise blue flames and horrible discords, and into which the doomed Faust is seen to be dragged at the last moment by the hands of the swarming and gibbering monsters. In the other and yet more terrible version, Maguerite is seen ascending, and the laugh of the demon is heard, but it is only a faint, fading, mocking laugh, as even he flies away and leaves the man accursed kneeling in hopeless agony over the dead form from which the pure spirit has just gone upward—condemned, not to the pit and the flame, but to that worse hell of living alone and without hope, racked by love that has come in its full force when too late, and by a remorse that will worse clutch at his heart-strings than all the fiends of perdition could do at the poor body which coffers his soul of torment. Who does not know how much the more dreadful is that second doom? Who does not—let him never tempt God and fate by making the rash experiment!
Nathan Bladesden was right—even for such sins as those Doctor Philip Pomeroy had committed, the reckoning was fearful!
Poor Eleanor Hill had been right, too, when she said: "Leave him to me! * * * I will so punish him as no man was ever punished!"
Shall there not be one glimmer more of sunshine after the dark night and the storm? Thank heaven, yes!—in a far-off glance at fortunes left long in abeyance but not forgotten.
Lying on the sofa at Mrs. Burton Hayley's, one evening when the first fires of winter had not long been lighted,—still taking the privilege of the invalid though no longer one, and making a pillow of the lap of Margaret Hayley, her dainty white fingers playing with his clustering golden blonde hair as they had erewhile done among the summer rose-leaves,—a quick, warm, happy kiss stolen now and again when the dignified lady, of the mansion was too busy with the devoutly-religious work that she was reading, to be horrified by such immoral practices,—lying thus, and the two talking of dear little Elsie's coming happiness and their own which was not to be much longer deferred; of the restored pride and renovated health of Robert Brand—quite as dear to Margaret, since that day in the garden, as to the son and daughter of his own blood; of the delirious joy and dreadfully broad Scotch of old Elspeth Graeme since the return of her "bonny bairn;" of poor Eleanor Hill and Captain Hector Coles, dead so differently on the fatal Virginian soil; of these and others, and of all the events which had been so strangely crowded within the compass of little more than half a year,—lying thus and talking thus, we say, Carlton Brand drew from his pocket a little fragment clipped from a newspaper, and said:
"By the way, Margaret, here is something that I found in one of the Baltimore papers yesterday. It concerns some friends of ours, whom we may never meet again, but whom neither of us, I think, will ever quite forget. Read it."