“Very good, Juniper; you’re a regular brick,” said the other voice, suddenly changing to a tone of maudlin affection; “where’s my dear Mary—ah, there she is!” and the speaker staggered towards the stile. Mary saw him indistinctly through the hedge—she would have fled, but terror and misery chained her to the spot. A few moments after and Frank, in his shirt-sleeves, (he had been joining the hay-makers), made his way up to her. His face was flushed, his eyes inflamed and staring wildly, his hair disordered, and his whole appearance brutalised.
“Let me help—help—you, my beloved Mary, over shtile—ah, yes—here’s Juniper—jolly good fellow, Juniper—help her, Juniper—can’t keep shteady—for life of me.”
He clutched at her dress; but now the spell was loosed, she sprang over the stile, and cast one look back. There stood her lover, holding out his arms with an exaggerated show of tenderness, and mumbling out words of half-articulate fondness; and behind him, a smile of triumphant malice on his features, which haunted her for years, was Graves, the tempter, the destroyer of his unhappy master. She cared to see no more, but, with a cry of bitter distress, she rushed away as though some spirit of evil were close behind her, and never stopped till she had gained the rectory.
Chapter Eight.
Farewell.
There are impressions cut deeper into the heart by the sudden stroke of some special trial than any made by the continuous pressure of afflictions, however heavy; impressions which nothing in this world can efface—wounds, like the three-cornered thrust of the bayonet, which will not heal up. Such was the keen, piercing sorrow which the sight of Frank in his drunkenness had stabbed deep into the soul of Mary Oliphant. The wound it had made would never heal. Oh, miserable drink! which turns the bright, the noble, the intellectual creatures of God into worse than madmen; for the madman’s reason is gone—we pity, but we cannot blame him; but in the victim of strong drink reason is suspended but not destroyed, and in all the distortion, grimaces, reelings, babblings, ravings of the miserable wretch while his sin is on him, we see a self-inflicted insanity, and a degradation which is not a misfortune but a crime.
The day after that miserable meeting at the stile, Frank called at the rectory, the picture of wretchedness and despair. Mrs Oliphant came to him, and told him that Mary declined seeing him; indeed, that she was so utterly unnerved and ill, that she would have been unequal to an interview even had she thought it right to grant him one.
“Is there no hope for me, then?” he asked. “Have I quite sinned away even the possibility of forgiveness?”