Miss Sullivan had just received Clara’s summons to Diana’s bed of death; she was preparing to go that evening, when Mrs. Tootler drove up in haste.
“Sally Bishop cannot live through the day,” said the lady. “She demands to see you. She has a confession to make. Coming death has absolved her from a pledge of wicked secrecy.”
And so, by the deathbed, Miss Sullivan, whose best and brightest hopes had been destroyed by the infamy of this poor, dying wretch, listened to her confession and pitied and pardoned her. Sally Bishop, vain and immodest, had nursed in her heart against young Ira Waddy the bitter spite of a shameless woman scorned. Belden, who was her first instructor in shamelessness, discovered this, and used his power to delude her into the joint revenge of the letters. Oh, what carefully villainous letters Belden made of them! how brutally treacherous! how vile! Sally Bishop took the correspondence in Ira Waddy’s writing to Miss Janeway.
“There,” said she, “you heiress, you great lady, that have stolen away my lover, because you are rich, and are engaged to him without your father’s knowledge, see what letters he used to write to me and how he spoke of you and his interviews with you. He ruined me because I loved him, and made of me what you see in my own letters, and I was willing that he should marry you because he always promised that I should be first. But now he is trying to get rid of me. He finds me in the way.”
Miss Janeway read the letters as one reads a fascinating tale of horror. There could be no doubt of them; hand, style, circumstances—it was inevitable they were his. Poor, innocent girl—she would afterward see the world and its treacheries, but never any so base as this. Her lover, with her maiden kiss upon his lips—agony! to leave her and write this.
What could she do? Die—and all the lovely sounds of nature that she had learned to love with him from childhood said to her, “die drearily.” But it was dreary life that was to be hers and slow-coming patience in her desolate retirement from the world, and experience of domestic shame and shame-crushed life and disgraced death in a darkened household and strict poverty and unaccustomed labour, and by all this a character forming—another woman than the gay, impetuous, proud, loving girl of days flattered by fulness of prosperity. Another in all but loving, and now she must love no more one she could not forget, who had fled when he learnt from her cold letter that his falseness to her was known, she could not sully her pen to tell him how, nor she, a pure woman, hear or speak or think of him more. Love!—what could she ever love again with anything more than quiet interest—she the pale schoolmistress, lonely as that betrothed Mary of the first Ira Waddy, preserver of her grandfather at Bunker Hill?
So this pale schoolmistress was calm and patient and learnt by her own wrong (the only teaching) to hate all wrong and to know it under any specious guise of quietism; and having something much to pardon in her own life, she grew to pardon other ruined lives. She saw how easily sorrow may become despair. A nobler woman she was becoming all these years, but still solitary; loving the many, but lonely of the few to love, until she found in Clara and Diana worthy objects of the closest and tenderest affection.
And now, almost forgetting the wrong this poor dying victim of Belden’s villainy had done her, in the sweet pleasure of forgiveness and the dear passion of reviving love, Miss Sullivan must go to the deathbed of her she called daughter, whose sad story she knew. She called Cecilia and resigned to her the dying woman, now at peace.
“I cannot tell you now, dear Cecilia,” she said. “I must go. I must think of what I have heard. Only, believe me, she has made me happy, happy again as a child. God forgive her, as I do.”
She went to her house by the same paths where her brilliant youth had walked; through the gate where she had so often stood for moments of the shy and lingering tenderness of parting; under the ancient elms whose gracefulness had drooped over her and her exiled lover in many a moonlight of pensive hopefulness. The glory had come back again. The freshness of youth and everlasting springtime was over all the world. She need never again force herself to say that it was good and beautiful; a brightness of transfiguring hope went before her and revealed beneath the drifting away of grey dimness and tearful mists the light of beauty unchangeable and goodness infinite.