“Now she will sleep. Mr. Vincent, I congratulate you on having such pure blood in your veins; not robust, you know, but far better—such sweet, perfect health as one rarely meets with nowadays,” said the doctor, under his breath, with professional enthusiasm; “all the better for your sister that she came of such a stock. My wife, now, is another example—not robust, as I say—natures delicately organised, but in such exquisite adjustment, and with such elasticity! Mrs. Vincent will go to sleep like a baby, and wake able for—anything that God may please to send her,” said Dr. Rider with reverence. “They will both sleep till to-morrow if all goes well. Hush!— Well, I may be absurd, for neither of them could hear us here; but still it is best to err on the safe side.”
“But Susan—you are not deceiving us—Susan is——” said Vincent, with sudden alarm.
“She is asleep,” said Dr. Rider; “and, if I can, I will remain till she wakes; it is life or death.”
They parted thus—the doctor to the little room below-stairs, where Vincent’s dinner awaited him, and the young minister himself to his own room, where he went into the darkness with a kind of bewildered uncertainty and incomprehension of the events about him. To think that this day, with all its strange encounters and unexpected incidents, was Sunday, as he suddenly remembered it to be—that this morning he had preached, and this evening had to preach again, completed in Vincent’s mind the utter chaos and disturbance of ordinary life. It struck him dumb to remember that by-and-by he must again ascend the pulpit, and go through all his duties. Was he an impostor, doing all this mechanically? He debated the question dully in his own mind, as he sat too much bewildered to do anything else in the dark in his bed-chamber, pondering with a certain confused gravity and consolation over all that had happened. But faculties, which are confused by sudden comfort and relief, are very different from faculties obscured and confounded by suffering. He sat vaguely in the dark, wondering over his strange position. This morning, even in the height of his despair, he had at least some idea what he was going to do in that pulpit of Salem. It was a sacrifice—a martyrdom to accomplish—a wild outcry and complaint to pour forth to the world. This evening he sat wasting the precious moments in the soft darkness, without knowing a word of what he was to say—without being able to realise the fact, that by-and-by he should have to go out through the sharp air echoing with church-bells—to see once more all those watchful faces turned upon him, and to communicate such instruction as was in him to his flock. A sense of exhaustion and satisfaction was in Vincent’s heart. He sat listless in a vague comfort and weariness, his head throbbing with the fumes of his past excitement, yet not aching. It was only now that he realised the rolling off from his head of this dark cloud of horror and shame. Susan was recovering—Susan was innocent. He became aware of the facts much in the same way as his mother became aware of them ere she dropped to sleep in the blessed darkness of the adjoining room. Confused as he was, with his brain still full of the pulsations of the past, he was so far conscious of what had happened. He sat in his reverie, regardless of the time, and everything else that he ought to have attended to. The little maid came and knocked at his door to say his dinner had been waiting for an hour, and he answered, “Yes; he was coming,” but sat still in the darkness. Then the landlady herself, compunctious, beginning to feel the thrills of returning comfort which had entered her house, came tapping softly to say it was near six, and wouldn’t Mr. Vincent take something before it was time for chapel? Mr. Vincent said “Yes” again, but did not move; and it was only when he heard the church-bells tingling into the night air that he got up at last, and, stealing first to the door of Susan’s room, where he ascertained that she still slept, and then to his mother’s, where he could hear her soft regular breathing in the darkness, he went away in an indescribably exalted condition of mind to Salem and his duty. There is a kind of weakness incident to excitement of mind and neglect of body, which is akin to the ecstatic state in which men dream dreams and see visions. Vincent was in that condition to-night. He was not careful what anybody would say or think; he no longer pictured to himself the up-turned faces in Salem, all conscious of the tragedy which was connected with his name. The sense of deliverance in his heart emancipated him, and gave a contrary impulse to his thoughts. In the weakness of an excited and exhausted frame, a certain gleam of the ineffable and miraculous came over the young man. He was again in the world where God stoops down to change with one touch of His finger the whole current of man’s life—the world of childhood, of genius, of faith; that other world, dark sphere of necessity and fate, where nothing could stay the development into dread immortality of the obstinate human intelligence, and where dreary echoes of speculation still questioned whether any change were possible in heart and spirit, or if saving souls were a mere figure of speech, floated away far off over his head, a dark fiction of despair. In this state of mind he went back to the pulpit where, in the morning, he had thrilled his audience with all those wild complications of thought which end in nothing. Salem was again crowded—not a corner of the chapel remained unfilled; and again, many of the more zealous members were driven out of their seats by the influx of the crowd. Vincent, who had no sermon to preach, and nothing except the fulness that was in his heart to say, took up again his subject of the morning. He told his audience with the unpremeditated skill of a natural orator, that while Reason considered all the desperate chances, and concluded that wonderful work impossible, God, with the lifting of His countenance, with the touch of His power, made the darkness light before Him, and changed the very earth and heavens around the wondering soul. Lifted out of the region of reasonableness himself, he explained to his astonished audience how Reason halts in her conclusions, how miracle and wonder are of all occurrences the most natural, and how, between God and man, there are no boundaries of possibility. It was a strange sermon, without any text or divisions, irregular in its form, sometimes broken in its utterance; but the man who spoke was in a “rapture”—a state of fasting and ecstasy. He saw indistinctly that there were glistening eyes in the crowd, and felt what was somewhat an unusual consciousness—that his heart had made communications to other hearts in his audience almost without his knowing it; but he did not observe that nobody came to the vestry to congratulate him, that Tozer looked disturbed, and that the deacons averted their benign countenances. When he had done his work, he went home without waiting to talk to anybody—without, indeed, thinking any more of Salem—through the crowd, in the darkness, passing group after group in earnest discussion of the minister. He went back still in that exalted condition of mind, unaware that he passed Mrs. Tozer and Phœbe, who were much disposed to join him—and was in his own house sooner than most of his congregation. All within was quiet, lost in the most grateful and profound stillness. Sleep seemed to brood over the delivered house. Vincent spoke to the doctor, who still waited, and whose hopes were rising higher and higher, and then ate something, and said his prayers, and went to rest like a child. The family, so worn out with labour, and trial, and sorrow, slept profoundly under the quiet stars. Those hard heavens, from which an indifferent God saw the Innocents murdered and made no sign, had melted into the sweet natural firmament, above which the great Father watches unwearied. The sudden change was more than mere deliverance to the young Nonconformist. He slept and took rest in the sweet surprise and thankfulness of his soul. His life and heart, still young and incapable of despair, had got back out of hard anguishes and miseries which no one could soften, to the sweet miraculous world in which circumstances are always changing, and God interferes for ever.
CHAPTER X.
WHEN Vincent awoke next morning, his mother was standing by his bedside. Her eyes were dewy and moist, a faint tinge of colour was on her sweet old cheek, and her steps tottered a little as she came up to his bed, and stooped to kiss him. “Oh, Arthur, my dear boy, she knows me!” said Mrs. Vincent, putting up her hand to her eyes. “I must not be away from her a moment, but I could not resist coming to tell you. She knows me, dear. Make haste and dress, and come and see your sister, Arthur; and I will give orders about your breakfast as I go back. My dear, I know you have been anxious,” said the widow, putting back his hair fondly with the soft little hand which still trembled; “though men have not the way of showing it, I know you have been very anxious. You looked quite pale and thin as you slept. But I must speak to the landlady now and see about your food. Come to Susan’s room as soon as you are dressed, and I will order your breakfast, my dear boy,” said his mother, going softly out again, with her tender little figure all beautified and trembling with joy. Mrs. Vincent met the landlady near the door, and stopped to speak to her. “My daughter is a great deal better,” said the minister’s mother. “I have been so anxious, I have never been able to thank you as I ought to have done for your kindness and attention. We have been as quiet as if we had been at home. We will all remember your attention, though I have never been able to thank you before; and I am sure it is very gratifying to my son to think it is one of his own flock who has taken so much pains for us. Mr. Vincent has been very anxious about his sister,” continued the widow; “I fear he has not been taking his food, nor keeping his regular time for meals. You would oblige me very much if you would try to have something nice for his breakfast. We were all much shaken yesterday, being so anxious;—some new-laid eggs perhaps—though I know they are scarce in a town at this time of the year—or anything you can think of that will tempt him to eat. I would not say so much,” said Mrs. Vincent, smiling upon the astonished landlady, and leaning to support her own weakness on the rail of the passage upon which the staircase opened, “but that I know your kind interest in your minister. I am sure you will take all the pains you can to get him to attend to his precious health. Thank you. I am very much obliged.”
With this the little woman passed on, feeling indeed too weak to stand longer; and leaving the landlady, who had intended to mingle some statement of her own grievances with her congratulations, with the plea quietly taken out of her hands, and the entire matter disposed of. Mrs. Vincent was moving back again to the sick-room, when the door opened down-stairs, and some one asked for Mr. Vincent, and came up hurriedly. The minister’s mother recognised Tozer’s voice, and made a pause. She was glad of the opportunity to make sure that all was well in the flock. She leant over the railing to shake hands with the butterman, moved to a little effusion of thankfulness by the recollection of the state of anxiety she was in when she saw him last.
“My son is not up yet,” she said. “We were very anxious yesterday. It was the crisis of the fever, and everything depended upon it. I daresay you would see how anxious Mr. Vincent was; but, thank heaven, now all is going on well.”
“You see, ma’am,” said Tozer, “it must have all been on the nerves, and to be sure there ain’t nothing more likely to be serviceable than good news. It’s in the paper this morning. As soon as I see it, I said to my missis, ‘This is why the minister was so pecooliar yesterday.’ I divined it in a moment, ma’am; though it wasn’t to say prudent, Mrs. Vincent, and not as you would have advised no more nor myself, to fly off like that out of chapel, without as much as shaking hands with one o’ the deacons. But I make allowances, I do; and when I see it in the paper, I said to my missis, ‘It’s all along o’ this Mr. Vincent was so queer.’ I don’t doubt as it’ll be quite looked over, and thought no more of, when it’s known what’s the news.”
“What news?” said Mrs. Vincent, faintly, holding fast by the railing. “You mean the news of my dear child’s recovery,” she added, after a breathless pause. “Have they put it in the papers? I am sure it is very good, but I never heard of such a thing before. She has been very ill to be sure—but most people are very ill once in their lives,” said the widow, gasping a little for breath, and fixing her eyes upon the paper which Tozer held in his hand.