It was not till Wentworth was fairly gone from the station shut up by himself in a compartment of a first-class carriage, and unapproached by any spectator, that he took out from his pocket and read over again the letter and telegram which had called him away thus hurriedly out of the happiness of his new life. The letter was on blue paper, not without a suspicion of greasiness, and very badly written in a hand which might have been that of a shopman or a schoolboy. But it was signed by a female name, and this is what it said:—
‘Dear Mr. Wentworth,—
‘Alice came home in bad health three months ago. She’s been very bad ever since, and there is now no hopes of her. It’s consumption and heart complaint, and what the doctor calls a complickation. For the last fortnight she’s been weaker and weaker every day, and yesterday was took much worse, and hasn’t but a day or two to live. She says as she can’t die happy without seeing you. She calls for you all the time she’s waking, both night and day. Oh, Mr. Wentworth, you always was a kind gentleman, not like some; I know as you would have nothing to say to her if she was well: but being as she’s very ill and near her death, I do hope as you’ll listen to me. You was the first as she ever took a fancy to, she says. But if you come, oh come at oncet, for there is not a moment to be lost.
‘Yours truly,
‘Matilda.’
He unfolded the telegram afterwards and read, ‘If you want to find her in life, come at once.’
Wentworth remarked with a kind of horrible calm, and even a smile, that the telegraph people had corrected the spelling. This was the summons for which he had left Grace. He had read both more than once. Now that he had obeyed the call, he asked himself was it indeed so necessary—ought he to have done it? There had been perhaps something in the force of the contrast, something in the happiness which was so much more than he deserved, in the purity and nobleness of the woman who had given him her hand, and who was making her spotless atmosphere his, that stung him with that intolerable, remorseful pity, the impulse of which is not to be resisted. Standing by the side of his bride, and on the edge of a life altogether above his deserts, he had felt that he could not resist this appeal to him. To refuse to speak a word of comfort to a dying creature—he to whom God had been so good—how was it possible? Comfort! What comfort could he give? He might bid her repent, as he had repented. But his repentance had been paid, it had been richly recompensed, it was setting open to him the doors of every happiness; whereas to this sharer of his iniquities it was to be followed only by suffering and death.
Wentworth had never been callous or hard-hearted at his worst: and now at his best, compassion and remorse overwhelmed him. That he should receive that information, that appeal, with Grace’s hand in his, gave his whole nature a shock. He felt that he must take himself away out of her presence, and remove the recollections, the scenes that rushed back upon his mind, the image thus thrust before his eyes, away from her at least, even if he did not answer the appeal. He was not of the iron fibre of some men. He could not carry these two images side by side.
And then how did he dare resist such an appeal. ‘You were the first.’ He had said to himself that he was responsible for the ruin of no other human creature. He was not a seducer. He had used no wiles to draw anyone from the paths of virtue. Is that a defence when life and death are in the balance, and a man is arraigned before the tribunal of his own conscience? When he went back into the recesses of his memory and beheld all that was brought before him, as by a flash of lightning, and then remembered the position in which he now stood, he covered his face with his hands. He was ashamed to the bottom of his soul. The way of transgressors is hard. To anyone who had known all the facts, it would have appeared that Oliver Wentworth was the most striking example of undeserved happiness. He had no right to all the good things that had fallen into his lap. He had deserved a very different return for all that he had done; yet when he set out upon that railway journey, with the touch of Grace’s hand still warm in his, the shame and misery in his mind were a not unfit representation of those tortures which to most men are more real than the fire and brimstone of the bottomless pit. How was the recollection of what was passed ever to be washed out of his memory? He might repent—he had repented—and never so bitterly as now: but how was he to forget? In the great words of mercy it is proclaimed that God forgets as well as forgives: ‘Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.’ But the sinner, how is he to forget, even when he believes that he is forgiven?
Yet, what he was doing was not shameful nor sinful. It was mercy that carried him away from all he loved to give what consolation he could to a dying creature whom he had never loved, who had been but the companion of his amusements for a moment of aberration, a time which he looked back upon with astonishment and disgust. How could he have forgotten himself so far? How could he have fallen into such depths? His mind was so revolted by the recollection, such a horror and loathing filled him at the thought, that it was impossible to suppose that any softer sentiment lay concealed beneath. Had he been a less tender-hearted man, he would probably have thrown the letter into the fire, and perhaps sent a little money as the common salve for all sufferings; but his very happiness and elevation above those wretched recollections took from him the power to dismiss such an appeal in this way. And was it not a certain atonement, at least an offering of painful service such as the heart of man believes in, whatever may be its creed, to do this? The money he could have sent would have cost him nothing—this cost him what was incalculable, a price almost beyond bearing. His agitation calmed a little as he pursued these thoughts. He could not do her any good, poor creature; but if it pleased her, if it eased a little the last steps towards the grave?
He arrived in London late on a wet and cold spring night; in town there was little visible of the shivering growth which makes a sudden chill in spring more miserable than winter; but the streets were wet and gleaming with squalid reflections, and the crowds, even in the busiest thoroughfares, were thinned and subdued. Wentworth took a cab and drove through a part of London with which he was not familiar, through line upon line of poor little streets, each one exactly like its neighbours, lighted with few lamps, with a faint occasional shop window, few and far between, and with only at long intervals a dark figure under an umbrella going up or down. The endless extent of this net-work of streets, all poor, mean, dark, yet decent, the homes of myriads unknown, gave him a sense of weariness that many miles of country would not have produced.