"Do not, I beseech you, add to the agonies of the present, by recalling the bitterness of the past."
He was sinking rapidly; the slow, heavy, and painful effort of respiration increased; his lower jaw quivered at times, and then his eye remained fixed, even when he was addressing me. Never, but in the eyes of the dying, is that wild, imploring, and unearthly glance visible. They seemed larger than usual; brighter and more glistening. On closer examination, I was surprised to find that, since the shot had struck him, he looked much older. Since yesterday his hair had actually become grizzled, and his whole aspect was that of a man bordering on fifty years of age.
"Is it not strange," said he, "that all the old Scottish prayers my poor mother taught me when a child—prayers which I have never remembered since—are crowding on my mind to-night, and hovering on my tongue, with many of her pious and simple thoughts, just as if her voice had uttered them yesterday, though the flowers of thirty summers have bloomed upon her grave? Those prayers, to me so meaningless when I was a wee an' wilfu' tot, find a terrible echo in my heart to-night——"
"Sensibility," said he, after a long pause, "is often a source of the deepest unhappiness. I have eaten and drunken; I have sung and roistered among my comrades—and that passed for mirth, for they knew not my inner heart, and the source of secret sorrow within me. I have often been glad to escape from present thought by rushing into revelry, leaving to the future those mental reproaches that revel was sure to cost me...... I can now look back with pity and contempt on that devil-may-care exterior, which threw a thin veil over my remorse."
He paused frequently, and his voice sometimes died away; but the night wind, which blew through a chink of an adjacent gunport, re-animated him from time to time.
"Oh! in an hour like this, how awful it seems to see behind me the remembrance of a life misspent, and before me the dim and shadowy future—the horrors—the ages—the uncounted ages of eternity! Oh, yes!" he continued in a voice that was weaker, and broken by many a convulsive sob; "the assumption of a reckless military character humiliated me. Ernestine—poor Ernestine! when I am no more, and she has read these papers, will see how unworthy I have been of the honour her good father intended for me."
With hands that trembled, and frequently failed in their office, he drew from his breast a small horn case about three inches square. It was suspended to his neck by a slender chain of steel; and, opening it, he showed me that it was a book, containing some thirty-five or forty pages, closely filled with writing in a small and distinct hand.
"Take this," said he; "it is the story—the sad secret—of my life. It is, moreover, a memorandum of all I possess, which I leave equally between Ernestine and Gabrielle. I have three estates, two in poor old Scotland, (the best blessings of God and Saint Andrew be on it!) I have a third at Vienna; but I am the last of my race, and have left these girls, whom I have loved as sisters—all—every thing!"
He gave me the volume, which was stained with his blood, (and had been bruised by the death-shot in its passage through his breast,) and then sank back exhausted. A violent shivering passed over his features; I thought he was about to expire, and was hurrying to summon aid, when he rallied, and again begged (what he had thrice before implored) that a Catholic clergyman might be brought to him; but there was no such person to be found either on board the Anna Catharina, or within cannon-shot of the Danish posts. This was a source of terrible affliction to poor Kœningheim, who belonged to the ancient faith; and his moans of mental agony were greater than those conduced by the pain of his wound.
After being informed by the weeping Ernestine that all hope of obtaining a priest was over, he never spoke again, but expired just as the ship's bell uttered the first stroke of midnight.