CHAPTER XXXV.

THE DEATH-BED

“Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, When death’s approach is seen so terrible.” —Shakespeare.

“Black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies.” —Milton.

“To die, I own Is a dread passage.” —Thomson

It was several hours later in the evening. In a small room, in one of the dwellings which the conflagration at the Neck had spared, Aylesford lay extended on a bed, his life ebbing fast away.

On landing, he had desired to see some of the principal officers, to whom he had disclosed the name of his family, which he found not unknown; and having besought that the men who had accompanied him should not be considered prisoners, desired next the services of a surgeon as soon as one could be spared. Fallen, as he was, in many particulars, his sense of honor made him thus provide for the safety of his companions before looking after his wound.

The surgeon attended immediately, accompanied by the leader of the expedition, for the latter, aware of the vast estates of the Aylesfords, in the colonies, as well as of their noble connexions in England, and hearing that the male representative of the name had been brought in wounded, naturally concluded that the hurt was received while he was hastening to join the royal standard. On discovering the precarious condition of his guest, this officer directed that the utmost attention should be paid to him, and left with reluctance to attend to the urgent calls of his command.

The surgeon was not long in discovering that the wound of his patient was mortal; that human skill could even do but little to prolong life; and that all which was left for him was to alleviate the sufferings of the dying man. Aylesford read his doom in the countenance of the physician. He had, however, suspected it from the first. As we have seen, on former occasions, he was not deficient in courage, and he asked in a voice quite calm if his suspicions were not correct.

“Don’t be afraid to speak out, Doctor,” he said, resolutely, though in a feeble voice. “It’s false kindness to conceal the truth, when a man’s within an hour of death.”

“You have been bred a gentleman,” answered the practitioner, replying in a spirit more common then, when caste was thought to make one man superior to another, than now, “and can therefore summon courage to face anything, I suppose. I am sorry I cannot hold out hope. If you have any arrangements to make, it would be wise to lose no time. Can I be of service to you otherwise than professionally?”

Aylesford turned uneasily in his bed, and did not reply for a moment. At last he spoke.

“No, thank you, Doctor. I have no affairs to settle, such as you mean.”

He seemed, however, as if there was something on his mind, so that the surgeon, lingering as he arranged his instruments, was induced to speak again.

“Perhaps you would like to see a parson,” he said. “Fortunately we have a chaplain with us.”

“It is not that,” answered Aylesford. “But you may send him, nevertheless.” He spoke, all this while, with difficulty. Then, as the surgeon went out, he murmured to himself, turning uneasily again, “Oh! Kate, Kate, what have I brought on you!”

We have failed to convey a true idea of Aylesford, if the reader considers him a remorseless villain. He was, indeed, deeply stained with vices, but they were mostly those, which, while violating the moral code quite as much as more brutal ones, yet do not degrade the entire nature. He was a spendthrift, a gambler, licentious, passionate and haughty. He was even capable of treachery, as we have seen, under the double temptation of interest and love. But this last crime had been the first of its kind he had ever been engaged in; his conscience was not yet seared to such atrocities; and now, when he found death approaching, the idea that Kate was in the hands of Arrison, and that she had been brought there by his own act, woke a thousand serpent-stings of remorse at his heart.

He lay there, but could not rest. He tossed from side to side, in spite of the entreaties of his attendant, a surgeon’s assistant, who declared that he was shortening his life. Deep groans continually broke from him, not because of pain, but in consequence, as the attendant saw, of mental anguish. The youth hoped that when the clergyman came, his patient would obtain peace of mind; but neither the presence of the chaplain, nor the prayers he read, nor the soothing words he addressed to the invalid, had any effect in composing Aylesford.

It was at this point of time that the present chapter opens. The clergyman had risen from his knees, and was sitting at the head of the bed; the surgeon’s assistant stood looking down on the invalid with folded arms; and three or four other persons, who had crowded into the room in the confusion, gazed with serious, awe-struck faces, now on the dying man, and now on his medical and spiritual advisers. A single tallow candle, placed on a little old-fashioned stand, on which were also several phials, threw a dim and yellow light on the disturbed countenance among the pillows and on the dark dress of the chaplain, leaving the remainder of the room in deep shadow, out of which the anxious, earnest faces of the spectators looked forth like the dark heads in old and time-stained pictures.

For sometime there was silence in the apartment. The invalid, at a pause in the clergyman’s exhortations, had suddenly turned his back on the speaker, with a deep groan that seemed wrung from his inmost heart; and now appeared to be dozing. The priest knew not what to do. He was a sincerely good man, far different from many among chaplains of that day, but his services, he saw, had produced no impression, and he was not sure that they were not positively rejected. Still he was willing to remain, in hopes that a better frame of mind might arise in the patient; but for this he thought it best to wait in silence.

“Will he wake again?” said he, at last, rising and whispering to the assistant. “This looks like the stupor of death.”

Perhaps it was the rustling of the silk canonicals which roused the invalid, perhaps his doze had come to an end of itself; but at this Aylesford turned quickly around, and half raising himself on his arm, fixed his eyes on the priest. A wild gleam shot from his haggard eyes.

“You can do me no good,” he said, in a hollow voice, “but, but,” he struggled for words, “stay by me to the last. I thank you.”

“I know, my son,” mildly answered the clergyman, “that I can do you no good; but there is one who can; and to Him I exhort you to turn your eyes.”

But the sick man, shaking his head, interrupted the minister of heaven.

“It is too late, too late,” he said, “even if your religion is true.” The venerable man lifted his hands in horror, and raised his eyes in a mute petition above. “But enough of this,” continued Aylesford. “I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, sir; you mean well, and I thank you: but that is a subject on which we shall never agree, and my time is too precious to waste.”

Aylesford was, like most fashionable profligates of that day, an atheist at heart. It was an age, when the French Encyclopaediasts had exhausted every resource of sophistry and satire to shake the belief in a divine revelation; when young men thought it smart to laugh at the Bible, as a collection of old legends only fit for women; and when Voltaire, Helvetius, D’Alembert, and other mere analytical thinkers were ignorantly ranked, by men of little learning and less wisdom, above the great synthetical minds who have, throughout the generations, held fast to Christianity, not only as a revelation historically established on irrefragible grounds of proof, but as a religion whose divinity is proved, apart from this, by its wonderful adaptation to all the wants of the human soul, to its sorrows as well as to its joys, and especially to its longings after immortality. So firmly established was Aylesford’s atheism, that it left him with few or no doubts, even in this dread hour. Perhaps—for who can tell?—men may commit the unpardonable sin, so awfully denounced in Scripture, by obdurate unbelief: and it is certain that this thought flashed across the mind of the clergyman, who put up a mental petition that it might not be so in this instance.

“A little while longer, O Lord, forbear,” he prayed. “Spare the barren fig-tree yet a space.”

“It’s another thing I want to speak about,” said Aylesford, after a pause for breath. “I had resolved to die without revealing it; but I feel as if it must out. If there’s a hell at all,” he suddenly added, while he glared, almost like a wild beast, at the clergyman, while he struck his breast with his clenched hand, “it’s here now, here at my heart, where it’s been gnawing, gnawing—”

“My son, oh! my son,” cried the white-haired clergyman, deeply impressed, and with tears in his eyes, making a last effort to benefit the dying man, “there’s a worm that never dies, that gnaws forever.”

“Away with your idle tales,” fiercely interrupted Aylesford, flinging himself away from the chaplain. But immediately he turned again. “I can’t waste time, sir,” he resumed, “and maybe by speaking, I may avert foul wrong. But no! no! that is impossible,” he almost shrieked, as he spoke these words, gazing hopelessly from the assistant to the minister, like one drowning out at sea may be supposed to turn his frantic eyes towards the unattainable shore.

“She is past rescue.”

“She?” said the clergyman. “My son,” he added solemnly, “if, as your words imply, there is a wrong to be remedied, speak out without delay. Next to repentance comes reparation, and it may be,” he added, as if speaking to himself, “that God, in His infinite mercy, will consider one to include both.”

Aylesford looked eagerly into the chaplain’s face, and, without further parley, proceeded to narrate, though in broken sentences and with rapidly failing words, his scheme to carry off his cousin, its failure, and the great probability there was that she was now in the power of a licentious, brutal, and reckless outlaw.

The narrative, indeed, was not consecutive. Whether the mind of the dying man began to wander, or whether remorse made his thoughts incoherent, he was not able to give an entirely connected story; but from his bitter denunciations of Arrison, his curses on his own folly for being duped, and his apostrophes to Kate, his hearers had no difficulty in arriving at a tolerably correct idea of our heroine’s peril.

“Alas!” said the clergyman, when Aylesford had concluded, “this is a wrong done which is beyond remedy, I fear.”

But Aylesford, at this, sprang up in bed.

“I tell you it is not beyond remedy,” he cried, shaking his damp hair like an angry lion rousing in his lair; and while his eyes gleamed with the fires of partial delirium, he continued, almost with a howl, “I’ll go myself to her rescue. Don’t you hear her reproaching me? Unhand me, I say.” And he struggled to get out of bed.

“We will send word to the enemy’s camp through a flag, that they may do all that can be done,” said the clergyman soothingly, as he and the assistant held down the frenzied man. “There, my son, lie back on your pillow again. There is no one calling you, that you need glare into that dark corner. God help you!”

Gradually the delusion passed from the mind of the invalid. His eye assumed its natural expression. He looked inquiringly around, like one awaking from a dream, and with an attempt at a wan smile, suffered himself to be placed in bed again.

“Thank you,” he said feebly, as the clergyman stooped and gently wiped the big drops from his hair. “I’ve been talking wildly, I fear. The fever’s in my head. But did not some one,” and he glanced around, “say that they’d send pursuers out after her?”

“I said I would send word to the enemy’s camp,” answered the chaplain; and looking around the room, he singled out an individual who had been a spectator hitherto. “You have heard what has been said,” he continued. “Will you undertake to see that this is done?”

The person addressed nodded his head, and departed immediately, Aylesford watching his retreating figure eagerly till it disappeared through the doorway, when he closed his eyes with a deep sigh, and remained motionless and silent so long afterwards that the clergyman began to think life had departed with that profound expiration.

He, therefore, whispered to the assistant.

“Does he still breathe?”

“Yes!” was the reply, after the speaker had leaned over the invalid for a moment. “He dozes again. That burst of emotion exhausted him terribly, however, and it may be that he’ll never come to again.”

The clergyman made no answer, but clasping his hands, appeared engaged in silent prayer.

In about ten minutes the dying man stirred again. His eyes were still closed, but he murmured incoherently. At first his words were low and disconnected, but gradually he spoke louder; and finally the listeners distinguished parts of sentences. But whether he was referring to the tragedy he had just detailed, or to some other, or whether what he said was purely the effect of delirium, the hearers could not ascertain.

“The pitiless villain,” were his words. “No mercy, no mercy. Oh! that I had run him through when he proposed it. I broke her heart. Mary! Mary! blessed saint,” he exclaimed piteously, “don’t look at me so reproachfully.”

“He thinks she is already dead,” whispered the clergyman to the assistant.

“Or perhaps there is still another,” was the low reply.

Tossing from side to side on the bed, working his fingers on the counterpane, every lineament of his face betraying the terrible mental agonies he was undergoing, Aylesford lay, a picture of remorse which had come too late. As his broken ejaculations went on it became evident that another person, as the surgeon had hinted, now mingled in his thoughts with Miss Aylesford.

“Forgive me, Mary, forgive me,” he cried, clasping his hands, “I have indeed deserted our child; but if I had known—if I had—”

Here his words sunk into indistinct babblings, all that could be distinguished being the single phrase, “they call her his niece, you know.”

He lay still for nearly a minute. Suddenly he sprang up again, glaring wildly at the opposite part of the bed.

“Take him away,” he shrieked, in a voice that made the hair of his hearers stand on end with horror, and was heard far away out across the silence of the night; “his fingers almost touch me.”

He clung to the clergyman, as a child, when woke from a dream in which it has seen horrible shapes, clings to its mother; his eyeballs starting from their sockets, his features convulsed with agony, and the perspiration exuding, like huge rain drops, over his clammy forehead.

It was a scene, which those who were present, could never shake off. The terrified countenance of the dying man, the despairing clutch with which he held on to the chaplain, and the fixed, stony gaze of horror which he fastened, as if on some object right across the bed, and almost within reach; the whole rendered, for an instant, visible with more than ordinary distinctness, as a burning deck of one of the ships that was consuming, fell in, shooting a quick, intense glare into the room.

“Oh! my God,” he cried, “they come; there is a hell.”

The piercing tone, almost amounting to a shriek; the awful look; the gesture of horrible fear with which he shrank closer yet to the clergyman; these no pen can adequately paint.

But in a moment, a convulsion passed over him; a deep breath was heard, which was nearly stertorous; and he fell back into the chaplain’s arms, stone dead.