Lankester dozed and woke, keeping up the fire, and wrapping himself in an eider-down, with which the valet had provided him. In the small hours he walked across the room to look at Marsham. He was lying still and breathing heavily. His thick fair hair, always slightly gray from the time he was thirty, had become much grayer of late; the thin handsome face was drawn and damp, the eyes cavernous, the lips bloodless. Even in sleep his aspect showed what he had suffered.
Poor, poor old fellow!
Lankester's whole being softened into pity. Yet he had no illusions as to the man before him--a man of inferior morale and weak will, incapable, indeed, of the clever brutalities by which the wicked flourish; incapable also of virtues that must, after all, be tolerably common, or the world would run much more lamely than it does. Straight, honorable, unselfish fellows--Lankester knew scores of them, rich and poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without flinching; who could produce in any society--as politicians or green-grocers--an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.
Well, what then? In the man looking down on Marsham not a tinge of pharisaic condemnation mingled with the strange clearness of his judgment. What are we all--the best of us? Lankester had not parted, like the majority of his contemporaries, with the "sense of sin." A vivid, spiritual imagination, trained for years on prayer and reverie, showed him the world and human nature--his own first and foremost--everywhere flecked and stained with evil. For the man of religion the difference between saint and sinner has never been as sharp as for the man of the world; it is for the difference between holiness and sin that he reserves his passion. And the stricken or repentant sinner is at all times nearer to his heart than the men "who need no repentance."
Moreover, it is in men like Lankester that the ascetic temper common to all ages and faiths is perpetually reproduced, the temper which makes of suffering itself a divine and sacred thing--the symbol of a mystery. In his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man, which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race. Where a thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee. The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this piteous sleeper heavenly dominations, princedoms, powers, hung in watch.
He sank, indeed, upon his knees beside the sleeper. In the intense and mystical concentration, which the habit of his life had taught him, the prayer to which he committed himself took a marvellous range without ever losing its detail, its poignancy. The pain, moral and physical, of man--pain of the savage, the slave, the child; the miseries of innumerable persons he had known, whose stories had been confided to him, whose fates he had shared; the anguish of irreparable failure, of missed, untasted joy; agonies brutal or obscure, of nerve and brain!--his mind and soul surrendered themselves to these impressions, shook under the storm and scourge of them. His prayer was not his own; it seemed to be the Spirit wrestling with Itself, and rending his own weak life.
He drew nearer to Marsham, resting his forehead on the bed. The firelight threw the shadow of his gaunt kneeling figure on the white walls. And at last, after the struggle, there seemed to be an effluence--a descending, invading love--overflowing his own being--enwrapping the sufferer before him--silencing the clamor of a weeping world. And the dual mind of the modern, even in Lankester, wavered between the two explanations: "It is myself," said the critical intellect, "the intensification and projection of myself." "It is God!" replied the soul.
Marsham, meanwhile, as the morning drew on, and as the veil of morphia between him and reality grew thinner, was aware of a dream slowly drifting into consciousness--of an experience that grew more vivid as it progressed. Some one was in the room; he moved uneasily, lifted his head, and saw indistinctly a figure in the shadows standing near the smouldering fire. It was not his servant; and suddenly his dream mingled with what he saw, and his heart began to throb.
"Ferrier!" he called, under his breath. The figure turned, but in his blindness and semi-consciousness he did not recognize it.
"I want to speak to you," he said, in the same guarded, half-whispered voice. "Of course, I had no right to do it, but--"