"Rebecca Haygarth."
To my mind there seems just a shadowy hint of some bygone romance in this letter. Why did the dingy house in John-street bring the tears into Matthew's eyes? and why did the memory of Vauxhall and Bartholomew fair seem so sweet to him? And then that sighing and groaning and dolefulness of visage whenever the thought of the past came back to him?
What did it all mean, I wonder? Was it only his vanished youth, which poor, sobered, converted, Wesleyanised Matthew regretted? or were there pensive memories of something even sweeter than youth associated with the coloured lamps of Vauxhall and the dinginess of Clerkenwell? Who shall sound the heart of a man who lived a hundred years ago? and where is the fathom-line which shall plumb its mysteries? I should need a stack of old letters before I could arrive at the secret of that man's life.
The two other letters, which I have selected after some deliberation, relate to the last few weeks of Matthew's existence; and in these again I fancy I see the trace of some domestic mystery, some sorrowful secret which this sober citizen kept hidden from his wife, but which he was on several occasions half inclined to reveal to her.
Perhaps if the lady's piety—which seems to have been thoroughly sincere and praiseworthy, by the bye—had been a little less cold and pragmatical in its mode of expression, poor Matthew might have taken heart of grace and made a clean breast of it.
That there was a secret in the man's life I feel convinced; but that conviction goes very little way towards proving any one point of the smallest value to George Sheldon.
I transcribe an extract from each of the two important letters; the first written a month before Matthew's death, the second a fortnight after that event.
"And indeed, honour'd sir, I have of late suffered much uneasinesse of speritt concerning my husband. Those fits of ye mopes of w'h I informed you some time back have again come upon him. For awhile I did hope that these melancholic affections were ye fruit put forth by a regenerate soul; but within this month last past it has been my sorrow to discover that these gloomy disorders arise rather from ye promptings of the Evil One. It has pleased Mr. Haygarthe of late to declare that his life is nigh at an end; and indeed he affects a conviction that his days are number'd. This profane and impertinent notion I take to be a direct inspiration of Satan, of a like character to ye sudden and unaccountable fitts of laughter which have seized upon many pious Christians in the midst of earnest congregations; whereby much shame and discomfiture has been brought upon our sect. Nor is there any justification for this presumptuous certainty entertained by my husband, inasmuch as his health is much as it has ordinarily been for ye last ten years. He does acknowledge this with his own lips, and immediately after cries out that his race is run, and ye hand of death is upon him; which I cannot but take as ye voice of ye enemy speaking through that weak mouth of ye flesh.
"On Sunday night last past, ye gloomy fitt being come upon him after prayers, Mr. Haygarthe began all on a sudden, as it is his habit to do:
"'There is something I would fain tell ye, wench,' he cries out, 'something about those roistering days in London, which it might be well for thee to know.'