The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

by M. E. Braddon

She shivered as she recalled that darkened chamber, the tainted atmosphere, the oppressive heat of a fire that had been burning day and night through the mild October weather. She knew that there was poison in that pestilential air, and that she had inhaled it, knew and did not care.

Her eyes were shining with a feverish light. Her heart ached with remorseful pity for the deserted wife, deserted by the man who had fled from his country, flung himself into a service of danger, flung away his life perhaps. It was because she had been unwise, had encouraged a close friendship that was but a mask for love, that yonder poor woman was lying on her sick bed deserted by her natural protector. He had sacrificed every tie, renounced every duty, on account of that guilty love. She hated herself when she thought that she had lured him from his home, had made him her friend and counsellor, at the expense of his young wife. Every hour he had spent with her in St. James's Square had been stolen from Lucy and her boy. It was the wife who had a right to his thoughts, his counsels, his leisure; and she had filched them from her. He had lingered by the fireside in her library, reluctant to leave her, when he should have been brightening Lucy's monotonous existence, elevating her mind by his conversation, continuing that education of heart and intellect in which he had been engaged before he lost himself in a fatal friendship. She had driven him from her with anger and contempt, driven him into exile and danger; but had she not as much need to be angry with herself, remembering her pleasure in his company, her forgetfulness of his wife's claims?

This one thing remained for her to do, to watch over the lonely wife in her day of peril, to win her back to life and health if it were possible. This atoning act would ease her conscience, perhaps, and bring her peace of mind. If George Stobart lived to come back to England he would know that she had done her duty, and, although not a Christian, had fulfilled the Christian's mission of mercy and love.

And if that ghastly distemper struck her down—a possible result, though she did not apprehend it—what then? She had no keen love of life, and would not much regret to lay down the load of days that had lost their savour. She had tasted all the pleasures that the world, the flesh, and the devil can offer a beautiful woman, all the luxuries that gold can buy, all the homage that rank can claim, the adulation of high-born profligates, the envy of rival beauties, and every trivial diversion that Satan can put into the minds of the idle rich. She had struck every note in the gamut of elegant pleasures; and had arrived at that period of satiety in which some women take to vice as the natural crescendo in the scale of emotion. What sacrifice would it be to die for her who feared no hereafter, had no account to render?

She visited Mrs. Stobart every day, questioned nurses and doctors, and took infinite trouble to secure the patient's comfort. She sat by the sick-bed, endured the fetid atmosphere of a room carefully shut against the air of heaven, she listened to Lucy's delirious ravings, her frantic appeals to her husband to come back to her. She, who in her right senses had seemed to grieve so little at his absence, in her wanderings was for ever recalling the happy hours of their courtship, acting over again that simple story of a girl's first love for a sweetheart of superior station.

Antonia listened with an aching heart. The love was there then; the woman was not the pink-and-white automaton she had once thought her. And she had come between George Stobart and this idyllic affection, had spoiled two lives, unwittingly, but not without guilt. She had absorbed him, suffered him to squander all his leisure upon her company, sought his counsel, invited his sympathy, made herself a part of his life, as no woman has the right to do with another woman's husband.

And now, sitting by what might be the bed of death, she could not forgive herself for that friendship which she had cherished without thought of the cost. She had courted his company, and reproached him when he absented himself. He had been her most cherished companion; those days had been blank on which they had not met. All the feverish pleasures of the great world had not been enough to make up for one lost hour of his society. Their talk beside the firelit hearth, in the darkening twilight, their meetings in poverty-stricken garrets and loathsome alleys, had been more to her than all the rest of her life.

"If she should die before he comes back to her it will be on my conscience for ever that I was the wretch who parted them," she thought.

The doctors were not hopeful of Mrs. Stobart's recovery. She had very little strength, they told Lady Kilrush, very little power to fight against the disease, which had attacked her in its most virulent form. Should she recover, she would be disfigured for life, and possibly blind.

Oh, the horror of it! If he came home to find the pretty childish face, the lily and rose complexion, so cruelly transformed! Was not death almost better for the victim than such a resurrection?