"What is my name, and who am I?" He repeats the whispered words as he hears them. "I am Athelstan Taylor, a priest in holy orders.... Yes—a clergyman of the Church of England ... yes!—I understand what you say. You have something on your conscience which you wish to tell. Try and tell me."
The nurse evidently thinks the man is dying, and may die without receiving the Sacrament, which she has supposed his principal object. She makes a suggestion to that effect. But Mr. Taylor thinks otherwise. "Presently!" he says. "Let him tell his story first." The nurse retires, and the tale goes on.
It was a hard tale to catch the threads of. But its hearer was able to master the main points. The narrator had married, sixteen years before, a very young and inexperienced girl, unknown to her parents, who seemed to have remained in ignorance throughout. Even when he deserted her, a very short time after marriage, she kept her secret from everyone but a young clerk, a friend of his own, with whom, as a natural consequence, the poor girl, apparently afraid to divulge the facts to her family, became very liée. His story was obscure at this point, the only clear thing being that, in order to shake her off and remain free to contract another marriage, he had written a mock confession to this young man; alleging, on grounds which the dying man's condition prevented his explaining in full, that the wedding had been really a fraud, and his statement that it was so seemed to have been held sufficient by the girl. The friend, either convinced of its truth or in love with the girl himself, had accepted it, or seemed to accept it, as indisputable. Was it to be wondered at that, when she returned to her home after an absence of some months, with nothing to show that this concealed marriage had taken place, she had accepted this young man as her lover, and married him with the full consent of her parents? The narrator had clearly foreseen this, and looked to it as a practical release from an encumbrance. His own subsequent career had been one of profligacy and crime, some of his sins being, to all appearance, far worse than this one, as such things are estimated; one achievement having, in fact, procured him a long term of penal servitude. How strange it seemed that now, with the hand of Death upon him, he should feel the lighter offence an exceptional weight upon his conscience! Yet so it was! And his hearer thought he could detect the relief the confession had given him in the changed whisper that followed the completion of his story. Mr. Taylor was glad that the atrocity that sent him to Portland Island was not specially referred to in the culprit's final inquiry—could he hope for forgiveness?
"I told the unhappy creature," wrote Athelstan to Gus, in the letter he wrote that evening, "that his chances of forgiveness must depend on the truth or falsehood of his own contrition, and I am afraid I had the cruelty to say it with some severity. You know my severe manner. But, then, it was true. I'm afraid, Gus dear, that I have hardly your faith in the efficacy of my holy office, taken by itself. But these things are awful to face. I had hardly time to fulfil my function as a priest when the poor wretch breathed his last."
It was at that last moment that the need of the rubber gloves became manifest. Just at the end, the dreadful nailless hand, moving painfully about, and fraught with some sudden strength, had caught the healthy one that lay near it on the coverlid, and drew it up to touch it with the things that had once been lips. The young doctor seemed relieved when he had himself seen the priest in holy orders well drenched in water with strange suspicions of sanitation in it, after a heart-felt lather of carbolic soap.
When the Rev. Athelstan came back to Jim's bedside, his face no longer wore its cheerful aspect of an hour ago. In that short time his sad experience—surely something more than a mere death-bed, such as his daily routine of life brought him to the sight of so often!—had changed it, and made him almost like another man.
"I'm martal glad ye've come, master," said Jim. And, at the sound of a voice with a memory in it of the chant the windlass echoes when the anchor leaves its bed in the sand, and the last shore-boat waves God-speed to the ship set free, his hearer seemed to shake off some of the gloom that oppressed him. "I'm martal glad to see ye back," he repeats, "by token of the good lady."
Athelstan takes the hand that seeks his. "Why the good lady, Jim?" he says.
"Why, master, the good lady she says to me, she says, did I know where to look for soomat or other? Lard knows what! And I says to her, 'Me look!' I says, because I was thinking belike this drawback on my eyesight might have slipped out of memory...."