Having provided myself with the writing materials necessary to draft a will, and having wrapped myself from head to foot in waterproof, I accompanied the clergyman to the hall-door. There we ascended the conveyance which was to take us to our destination, and soon were cutting our way through the driving sleet and snow. Being of an inquisitive turn of mind, I thought it would be wise to elicit from the clergyman some little information about the young lady whose will I supposed that I was about to draw; and with that view I began to examine him. I, however, found that he could tell me very little. He only knew that she was a Miss M——; that she had been staying with an aunt of hers who lived in his parish; that she had become dangerously ill some four or five days previously; that he believed she was an only daughter; that her mother was dead; and that her father had been telegraphed for, and was expected to arrive in the morning. He added earnestly: ‘He will never see his daughter alive, poor man!’
While we were speaking, the joy-bells had begun to ring out their merry peals, welcoming in the new year. In a few moments, however, after the clergyman’s last remark, they ceased, and a dead silence ensued. ‘How ironical was the tone of those bells!’ said the clergyman with a sigh, as the last peal was dying away. I answered half-unconsciously ‘Yes;’ but I little knew how fully I would comprehend his meaning before many hours had passed away.
After a long and bitter drive, the conveyance at last drew up at a large old-fashioned house, with the appearance of which I was well acquainted, and which I knew to be the residence of an old lady of property, though I had never been inside it. The clergyman, on alighting, brought me round to a side-door, at which he knocked very gently. After he had knocked two or three times, the door was at length opened to us by an elderly woman, whom I afterwards learned to be the nurse, and who conducted us, by the aid of a lantern, up an old winding-stair into a long corridor. Stopping before a door at the end of it, the nurse motioned us to wait while she entered the room. She had been only a few seconds inside, when I heard a low moan, and a female voice exclaim almost in a cry: ‘Oh, has the time come?’ A moment afterwards the clergyman and myself had entered the room, and lying on a bed in the middle of it I saw the form of a young girl apparently about twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. As we approached her bedside, the clergyman said to her: ‘I have brought the solicitor with me;’ but she did not answer him, and gently waved her hand for the nurse and himself to leave the room.
After they had left, she looked at me earnestly for a minute and then said in a faint voice: ‘Are you a solicitor, sir?’
I answered: ‘I am;’ and added: ‘I suppose you wish me to draw your will for you?’
‘My will!’ she said with evident surprise. ‘Ah no! I have nothing to leave, except perhaps my heart.’ She remained for some time after this without speaking, her silence being only broken by moans such as I had heard from the corridor. After a little while I heard her murmur: ‘O my father, my poor dear father! must it be?’ then clasping her two almost fleshless hands, she closed her eyes for a few moments. At last, with evident effort, she turned round on her pillow, and looking straight at me, said in a voice tremulous with weakness and emotion: ‘I want, sir, to make a statement to you which I feel it my duty to make before I die. It has tortured me for months, and I dare not meet my Maker if I did not tell all, though it breaks my very heart to do so.’
Fearing that she was going to confess some crime, or make some other important criminal declaration, I said to her: ‘If you are about to make any statement which may be of importance afterwards, I had better go for a magistrate, and you can make it before him.’
‘O no, sir; no magistrate!’ she cried out earnestly. ‘What I have to tell concerns my poor father, and I dare not state it to a magistrate, for it might ruin him. If you will not hear me and try to save my poor father, I shall die with sealed lips. O my father! my good kind father! it is too, too cruel that I must tell of your sin.’ The last words were pronounced almost in a cry; the tears filled her eyes, and she began to sob piteously. Her racking cough soon followed; and I feared that she must indeed die ‘with sealed lips,’ as she had said; for to me it seemed that every succeeding cough must be her last. After a little while, however, a slight respite came, and she tried to resume her statement. She gasped out: ‘The insurance—the Blank Insurance’ (mentioning the name of a well-known Company); ‘it’s not my’—— But before she could get any farther, the cough again seized her, and this time with such terrible power that the poor creature fell back utterly exhausted.
Fearing that her life was now really waning, I went to the door of the room for the nurse, who at once came in. When she had settled the sufferer in a more easy position, she turned to me and whispered: ‘Very little longer, sir!’ I, however, remained in the room, in the hope that after a little time she might have strength to resume her statement; but when half an hour had nearly elapsed without bringing with it any sign of returning strength, I saw that the statement must remain in its unfinished condition. I therefore wrote down carefully all that had occurred, put it into an envelope, sealed it, placed it in my pocket, and prepared to go away. Before doing so, I took one look at the form that lay on the bed before me. To describe her face, I cannot, though I seem to see it as distinctly to-day as I saw it then—one of those strangely exquisite flowers, whose tender growth so often kindles the selfish craving of the old reaper, Death. I had stood by many a death-bed; my profession had inured me to scenes of anguish and pain; but as I looked on that pale beautiful woman, and read on her features the impression which told only too plainly of a conflict of racking reality within, my cold heart softened, and my whole nature went forth in one great yearning to comfort and to soothe her. I breathed a prayer for the soul that was passing—earnest, as I had never known earnestness before; and with feelings too sad to portray, but too real to be forgotten, I left the room and the house.
Two days after this eventful night, my friend the clergyman (whom I subsequently discovered to be the newly appointed rector of a neighbouring parish) again entered my study. He told me that the poor young girl was dead, that she had passed away about half an hour after I had left the room, never having spoken a word after that terrible fit of coughing to which I had been a witness.