"I will go to Sally's garret the first thing to-morrow morning," he said. "Please God I may not be too late!"
He was silent for the rest of the meal, and his slumbers were brief and perturbed, his fitful sleep haunted by visions of splendour and beauty: the brazen duchess, erstwhile maid-of-honour, wife of two husbands, radiant and half-naked as the goddess of chastity, with a diamond crescent on her brow; and that other woman, whose modest bearing gave the grace of purity even to the splendour of her jewels and glittering silver gown. Dream faces followed him through the labyrinth of sleep, and his last dream was of the nightmare kind. He was in the retreat at Fontenoy, fighting at close quarters with a French dragoon, whom he knew of a sudden for the foul fiend in person, and that the stake for which he fought was Antonia's soul.
"He shall not have her," he cried. "I'd sooner see her another man's wife than the devil's prize."
He was awakened by his own voice, in a hoarse, gasping cry, and starting up in the broad light of a May morning, looked at his watch, and found it was half-past five. He rose quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, and made his morning toilet in a little back room that served as his dressing-closet—a Spartan chamber, in which an abundance of cold water was his only luxury. He left the house soon after six, and walked quickly through the quiet morning streets to the pestiferous alley where Sally Dormer lay dying or dead.
She was one of his penitents, a woman who was still young, and had once been beautiful, steeped in sin in the very morning of life, in the company of thieves and highwaymen, grown prematurely old in a profligate career, a courtesan's neglected offspring, and carrying the seeds of consumption from her cradle. Her mother had been dead ten years; her father had never been known to her; her only relative was a boy of eleven, her mother's sole legacy. A sermon of Whitefield's preached to thousands of hearers on Kennington Common, in the sultry stillness of an August night, had awakened her to the knowledge of sin. She was one of the many who went to hear the famous preacher, prompted by idle curiosity, and who left him changed and exalted, shuddering at the sins of the past, horrified at the perils of the future. That wave of penitent feeling might have ebbed as quickly as it rose but for George Stobart, who found the sinner while the effect of Whitefield's eloquence was new, and completed the work of conversion—a work more easily accomplished, perhaps, by reason of Sally Dormer's broken health.
She had been marked for death before that sultry night when she had stood under the summer stars, trembling at Whitefield's picture of the sinner's doom, pale to the lips as he dwelt on the terrors of hell, and God's curse upon the stubborn unbeliever. "All the curses of the law belong to you, oh, ye adamantine hearts, that melt not at the name of Jesus. Cursed are you when you go out; cursed are you when you come in; cursed are your thoughts; cursed are your words; cursed are your deeds! Everything you do, say, or think, from morning to night, is only one continued series of sin. Awake, awake, thou that sleepest, melt and tremble, heart of stone. Look to Him whom thou hast pierced! Look and love; look and mourn; look and praise. Though thou art stained with sin, and black with iniquity, thy God is yet thy God!"
Stobart had told Antonia of Sally Dormer's condition, and had provided by her means for the penitent's comfort in her lingering illness, the fatal end of which was obvious, however much her state varied from week to week. But he had opposed Antonia's desire to visit the invalid, shrinking with actual pain from the idea of any contact between the spotless woman and the castaway, who in her remorse for her past life was apt to expatiate upon vile experiences.
Five minutes' walk brought Mr. Stobart to a narrow street on the edge of the river, a street long given over to the dregs of humanity. The houses were old and dilapidated, and several of those on the water-side had been shored up at the back with timber supports, moss-grown and slimy from the river fog, yet a favourite climbing place for vagabond boys, as well as for a colony of starveling rats.
Sally's lodging was on the third story of a corner house, one of the oldest and most tumble-down, but also one of the most spacious, having formed part of a nobleman's mansion under the Tudor kings, when all the river-side was pleasaunce and garden.
The garret occupied the whole of the top floor, under a steeply sloping roof, and had two windows, one looking to the street, the other to the river. Here Sally had been slowly dying for near half a year, in charge of her little brother, and under the supervision of the dispensary doctor, who saw her daily.