"Gwendoline has promised to be your friend, Isabel," Roland said by-and-by; "it makes me very happy to know that. Oh, my darling, if I could tell you the thoughts that came to me as I lay there, with the odour of leaves and flowers about me, and the stars shining above the tall branches over my head. What is impossible in a universe where there are such stars? It seemed as if I had never seen them until then."
He rambled on thus, with Isabel's hand held loosely in his. He seemed to be very happy—entirely at peace. Gwendoline had proposed to read to him; and the parish rector had been with him, urging the duty of some religious exercises, eager to exhort and to explain; but the young man had smiled at him with some shade of contempt in his expression.
"There is very little you could read from that book which I do not already know by heart," he said, pointing to the Bible lying open under the clergyman's hand. "It is not your unbeliever who least studies his gospel. Imagine a man possessed of a great crystal that looks like a diamond. His neighbours tell him that the gem is priceless—matchless —without crack or flaw. But some evil thing within the man suggests that it may be valueless after all—only a big beautiful lump of glass. You may fancy that he would examine it very closely; he would scrutinize every facet, and contemplate it in every light, and perhaps know a good deal more about it than the believing possessor, who, feeling confident in the worth of his jewel, puts it safely away in a strong box against the hour when it may be wanted. I know all about the gospel, Mr. Matson; and I think, as my hours are numbered, it may be better for me to lie and ponder upon those familiar words. The light breaks upon me very slowly; but it all comes from a far distant sky; and no earthly hand can lift so much as the uttermost edge of the curtain that shuts out the fuller splendour. I am very near him now; I am very near 'the shadow, cloaked from head to foot, who keeps the keys of all the creeds!'"
The conscientious rector thought Mr. Lansdell a very unpromising penitent; but it was something to hear that the young man did not rail or scoff at religion on his dying bed; and even that might have been expected of a person who had attended divine service only once in six weeks, and had scandalized a pious and well-bred congregation by undisguised yawns, and absent-minded contemplation of his finger-nails, during the respectable prosiness of a long sermon.
The rector did not understand this imperfect conversion, expressed in phrases that sounded the reverse of orthodox; but the state of matters in that death-chamber was much better than he had expected. He had heard it hinted that Mr. Lansdell was a Freethinker—a Deist; even an Atheist, some people had said; and he had half anticipated to find the young man blaspheming aloud in the throes of his dying agony. He had not been prepared for this quiet deathbed; this man, who was dying with a smile upon his face, murmuring alternate fragments of St. John's Gospel and Tennyson's "In Memoriam."
"I was with my mother when she died." Roland said by-and-by, "and yet could not accept the simple faith that made her so happy. But I dare say Saul had seen many wonderful things before that journey to Damascus. Had he not witnessed the martyrdom of Stephen, and had yet been unmoved? The hour comes, and the miracle comes with it. Oh, what an empty wasted life mine has been for the last ten years! because I could not understand—I could not see beyond. I might have done so much perhaps, if I could only have seen my way beyond the contradictions and perplexities of this lower life. But I could not—I could not; and so I fell back into a sluggish idleness, 'without a conscience or an aim.' I 'basked and battened in the woods.'"
The rector lingered in the house even after he had left Roland's chamber. He would be summoned by-and-by, perhaps, and the dying man would require some more orthodox consolation than was to be derived from Mr. Tennyson's verses.
But Roland seemed very happy. There was a brightness upon his face, in spite of its death-like pallor—a spiritual brightness, unaffected by any loss of blood, or languor of that slow pulse which the London physicians felt so often. For some two or three hours after the struggle in Nessborough Hollow he had lain stunned and unconscious; then he had slowly awakened to see the stars fading above the branches over his head, and to hear the early morning breeze creeping with a ghostly rustling noise amidst the fern. He awoke to feel that something of an unwonted nature had happened to him, but not for some time to any distinct remembrance of his encounter with Mr. Sleaford.
He tried to move, but found himself utterly powerless,—a partial paralysis seemed to have changed his limbs to lead; he could only lie as he had fallen; dimly conscious of the fading stars above, the faint summer wind rippling a distant streamlet, and all the vague murmur of newly-awakened nature. He knew as well as if a whole conclave of physicians had announced their decision upon his case,—he knew that for him life was over; and that if there was any vitality in his mind, any sense of a future in his breast, that sense, so vague and imperfect as yet, could only relate to something beyond this earth.
Very rambling fancies filled Mr. Lansdell's mind as he lay amongst the bruised fern, with the wild-rose brambles and blossoms above him. He knew that his life was done; he knew that for him all interest in this earth and its creatures had ceased for ever; and a perfect calm came down upon him. He was like a man who had possessed a great fortune, and had been perpetually tormented by doubts and perplexities about it, and who, waking one morning to discover himself a beggar, found a strange relief in the knowledge that he was penniless. The struggle was all over. No longer could the tempter whisper in his ear, urging him to follow this or that wandering exhalation of the world's foul marsh-lands. No more for him irresolution or perplexity. The problem of life was solved; a new and unexpected way was opened for him out of the blank weariness which men call existence. At first, the thought of his approaching release brought with it no feeling but a sense of release. It was only afterwards, when the new aspect of things became familiar to him, that he began to think with remorseful pain of all the empty life that lay behind him. He seemed to be thinking of this even when Isabel was with him; for after lying for some time quite silent, in a doze, as they thought who watched him,—he raised his heavy eyelids, and said to her,—