“Nothing—nothing: Halbert is quite well,” said Charles, sitting down and wiping the perspiration from his forehead, while Halbert’s wife clasped her hands in thankfulness. “He will be here soon; but I come from a most distressing scene—a deathbed—and that the deathbed of one who has spent his life as an infidel.”
“A stranger, Charles?” asked Mary.
“A stranger, and yet no stranger to us,” was Charles’s answer; and he pressed his hands on his eyes, as though to shut out the remembrance of what he had so lately witnessed. As he spoke, the servants entered the room for the usual evening worship, under the impression that the master had returned; and Charles Hamilton took Halbert’s place; and wife, and Christian, and the other Mary, marvelled when Charles’s voice arose in prayer, at the earnest fervent tone of supplication with which he pleaded for that dying stranger, that the sins of his bygone life might not be remembered against him; and that the blood of atonement, shed for the vilest, might cleanse and purify that polluted soul, even in the departing hour; and to these listeners there seemed a something in Charles’s prayer, as if the dying man and the sins of his fast fading life were thoroughly familiar to him and them.
A dreary journey it was for Halbert and Charles Hamilton as they left the warm social hearth and threaded the narrow streets in silence, following the sick man’s messenger. It was a boisterous night, whose windy gusts whirled the heavy clouds along in quick succession, scattering them across the dark bosom of the sky, and anon embattling them in ponderous masses that lowered in apparent wrath over the gloomy world below. A strange contrast to the blithe house they had left was the clamour and rudeness of the obscure inn they entered now, and an unwonted visitor was a clergyman there; but up the narrow staircase were they led, and pausing for an instant on the landing-place, they listened for a moment to the deep groans and wild exclamations of impatient agony, as the sufferer tossed about on his uneasy bed.
“Ay, sir,” said a servant, who came out of the room with a scared and terrified expression upon her face, in answer to Halbert’s inquiry; “ay, sir, he’s very bad; but the worst of it is not in his body, neither!” and she shook her head mysteriously; “for sure he’s been a bad man, and he’s a deal on his mind.”
She held open the door as she said so, and the visitors entered. The scanty hangings of his bed hid them from the miserable man who lay writhing and struggling there, and the brothers started in utter amazement as they looked upon the wasted and dying occupant of that poor room; the brilliant, the fashionable, the rich, the talented Forsyth—where were all these vain distinctions now?—lay before them, labouring in the last great conflict; poor, deserted, forlorn, and helpless, without a friend, without a hope, with scarce sufficient wealth to buy the cold civility of the terrified nurse who tended him with mercenary carelessness; pressing fast into the wide gloom of eternity, without one feeble ray of life or hope to guide him on that fearful passage, or assuage the burning misery of his soul ere it set out. Halbert Melville, deceived by that poor sufferer of old, bent down his face on his clasped hands, speechless, as the well-known name trembled on his companion’s tongue,—
“Who calls me?” said the dying man, raising himself fearfully on his skeleton arm, and gazing with his fiery sunken eyes through the small apartment. “Who spoke to me? Hence!” he exclaimed, wildly sitting up erect and strong in delirious fury. “Hence, ye vile spirits! Do I not come to your place of misery? Why will ye torment me before my time?”
His trembling attendant tried to calm him: “A minister,” she said, “had come to see him.” He said: “He allow a minister to come and speak with him?”