CHAPTER XIII.
PICCOLOMINI.
The doctors were in almost constant attendance—the minister of the parish came to pray by the bedside of the half-conscious patient, whose heavy moans broke in upon his supplication. The children of Maidlin, awe-stricken and full of wonder and curiosity, hung about the gate of Allenders, telling each other how Harry fell, and how the trail was found on the road, where his horse had dragged him along the damp, loose soil. And their mothers came in bands in the early afternoon to speak of it with kindred awe and mystery, and stealing round by the back of the house, beckoned Mysie out to learn from her how the sufferer was. More dignified people, and even Sir John Dunlop himself, sent messengers to inquire for poor Harry; and Gilbert Allenders, like an ill-omened shadow, continually hovered about the door.
Poor Harry! they never spoke to each other, these women who watched him; but Agnes and Rose perceived when they approached the bed that it was only a strong self-restraint which prevented Martha from thrusting them away. She was jealous now, even of them—she could not bear to see him touched by any hand but her own—as if it was her hand alone which could touch him without inflicting pain; and they saw her shiver when the surgeon drew near him, as if with bodily fear. And sometimes, when Martha laid Agnes down upon the sofa in this sad sick room, and covered her tenderly as if she were a child, an hour of feverish sleep would fall upon the little wife; and Rose, when sent to her own room for the night, after lingering at the door, and wandering up and down to see if anything could possibly be wanted which was not ready, would weep herself into a trance of slumber, from which the awakening was bitter—but Martha never slept.
And Harry lay upon his bed, unconscious, and never said a word which testified that he knew them there. Conscious of pain—conscious of the agony of being touched or moved, which drew from him those shrill cries and heavy moanings—and with dim, dreamy eyes, which seemed to recognize sometimes where it was he lay, as they wandered over the well-known furniture; but though he spoke of them all in his times of greater ease, and addressed them by loving names, which brought a swooning deadly sickness over Agnes, and convulsed Martha with a terrible tenderness, he never spoke to them as present beside him; wandering, broken lines of thought, strange visible associations which connected one distant thing with another, came from him in an interrupted flow—and sometimes strange half-dreaming prayers, exclaimed vehemently at one time, at another repeated with a placid smile like a child’s—“Lead us not into temptation—deliver us from evil,” made up the prolonged and audible reverie of Harry’s stricken soul.
On the morning of the third day, while Martha sat beside him on one side, and Agnes, with her face buried in the coverlet, knelt by the bed, silently praying and weeping, on the other, a gradual awakening came to Harry’s face. Martha, whose look never left it, saw the dreamy eyes light up, at first faintly, but gradually rising into life. Then he saw Agnes, and stealing his feeble hand along the bed, laid it on her head. She started up with a faint cry, and Harry’s trance was broken.
“Am I to die?” he said, in a whisper, when for some moments they had held his hands in silence—his hands, one of which was bathed in the tears of Agnes, while on the other had fallen a single great burning drop, falling from Martha’s heavy eyelid, like a drop of living fire.
But no answer came to him, except the convulsive sobs of Agnes, and a tightened and clinging pressure of the hand which lay in Martha’s grasp.
“Then let me see them, Martha,” said Harry, faintly; “let me see them all once again. You will be better without me, and I will be better away. Oh God! my God! I have lost a life.”
“But not a soul, Harry—not a soul,” cried Martha, bending down her head, to kiss with burning vehemence the hand on which her tears fell now like hail-drops. “First look up, Harry, my son! my son!—and there is another life!”
And the dim eyes turned upward to the roof—to the human mortal screen built between him and the sky; and saw, not the heavens opened, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, but only a household of weeping women, half frantic with love and eagerness, crying aloud for him before the everlasting throne, where mercy sits and judgment; and a blank numbness was on Harry’s soul. He could not throw himself before this footstool, and ask with his last breath for that deliverance which comes from Him who never thrust one empty away. Sleep was upon him, and he craved repose; he trusted to them who interceded—he leaned with faint consciousness upon their supplications; but for himself he could ask nothing—his heart was voiceless, apathetic, asleep.
“Pray for me, Martha,” said Harry, faintly.
For this was all his hope.
Pray for him! When was it, working or resting, that Martha forgot thus to pray?
“And gather them all,” said Harry—“gather them all in here, that I may see them before I die.”
He said the words with a faint, mournful pathos. He was not rebellious to his doom—poor Harry! but it seemed to him that he was sinking into some pensive, gentle rest. This was how the visible death, drawing near, disclosed itself, in the midst of his great pain, to his heart.
And Martha called them in, one by one—Rose, Lettie, Katie Calder, little Harry, and the infant boy. You would have thought, to hear him speak, that this dying man was passing away into the heaven which he already knew for home, and that there interposed no obscuring cloud between him and the sky; or that this suffering of death consciously made up for all the evil that had gone before—for neither remorse nor terror overshadowed Harry, nor did he speak of faith. Poor Harry! this benumbed and quiet peace seemed all he desired.
And when he had bidden them farewell, gently, faintly, without any violence of emotion—with a perfect calm and submission, and what people call resignation to the will of God—Harry laid himself down again to die.
But his head had scarcely fallen back again upon the pillow, when he started violently—a start which wrung from him a half scream of pain.
“Send for Lindsay, Martha!—send for Robertson, in Stirling! Any one—any one you can get most easily!—at once, before I die!”
Without hesitation, Martha went to obey his order; and John, who was swift and ready, was in the saddle in a very few minutes, galloping to Stirling for a lawyer.
But when Martha returned to the sick chamber, Harry had relapsed into unconsciousness, and she sat down, watching by him silently, as she had done before. Within a few hours the lawyer came. The whole country rang with the news of the accident, and people forgot how they had condemned poor Allenders, in pity for him, and for the family, whose singular devotion to him it needed little discernment to discover. So Mr. Robertson had left his house at once, to his own inconvenience, to come to the dying man. But Harry lay upon his bed, communing aloud with his own heart; and the very lawyer turned aside and wept, as he heard this heart laid open. A sinful man had Harry been!—shipwrecked and lost! Yet it was a child’s heart!
And Martha’s words, or an influence more wonderful than them, was breathing on the chaos of this disturbed and wandering soul. Poor Harry! And his lips spoke aloud the texts and psalms which he had learned a child, at Martha’s knee. In the room there was a hush like death, through which now and then the restrained sob of Agnes struggled faintly. She was still lying in the same position, her face hidden, in prostrate, powerless grief; and Rose knelt beside her, pale as death, fixing the eyes, from which her tears fell down continually, upon Harry’s face, while her throat quivered now and then with a convulsive gasp. Martha, at his other side, with her head bent upon her folded arms, shook with great tremblings, like successive waves—but no sound came from her; and the lawyer, afraid to move, and full of awe, stood silent at the foot of the bed. Through this scene ascended Harry’s voice, low and faint, but distinctly audible; and now he reads from his child’s memory, what has been read by his bedside only recently, in hope to catch some passing gleam of consciousness—the last words of the Lord!
Oh! wonderful, benign and tender words!—spoken under the very death-shadow, by that One who alone was free to redeem—who can tell what was their influence upon the rapt soul, which, past all human intercourse, was still open to the dealings of the Lord? Mysterious awe and wonder hushed even their very prayers. No human speech could move him now, or reach his veiled and hidden soul: but the way was all open to God.
All through the night Harry continued thus—with broken prayers, and words of Holy Writ, mingling with the common things to which he sometimes returned—and towards the dawn he fell into a broken sleep.
The lawyer, meanwhile, waited. It was a singular kindness; but Harry might awake out of his trance at any moment, and this man, who had a kindly heart, was concerned for the family, and sufficiently interested to give his time without much grudging. And they had all a vague expectation that Harry would awake from this sleep, in possession of his faculties.
They were right, he did so; and after a few minutes of repose and contemplation, and of tender words to those around him, he started again, and asked for the lawyer. Mr. Robertson came from the library, where he had been sitting, and Harry sent his sisters and his wife away.
They were not long shut out from the sick room. The lawyer left the chamber and the house, with a farewell of deep and melancholy sympathy; and for about an hour after, Harry continued conscious of their presence. But this consciousness was broken and disturbed; and afterwards he sank back into a slumbrous, interrupted reverie, from which he never woke again.