The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (64 page)

‘“Nay, nay, Huntingdon,” said he, “you’re too hard upon her – she must have food and sleep, and a mouthful of fresh air now and then, or she can’t stand it I tell you. Look at her, man, she’s worn to a shadow already.”

‘“What are her sufferings to mine?” said the poor invalid. “You don’t grudge me these attentions, do you, Helen?”

‘“No, Arthur, if I could really serve you by them. I would give my life to save you, if I might.”

‘“Would you
indeed
? – No!”

‘“Most willingly, I would.”

‘“Ah! that’s because you think yourself more fit to die!”

‘There was a painful pause. He was evidently plunged in gloomy reflections, but while I pondered for something to say, that might benefit without alarming him, Hattersley, whose mind had been pursuing almost the same course, broke silence with, –

‘“I say, Huntingdon, I
would send
for a parson, of some sort – If you didn’t like the vicar, you know, you could have his curate, or somebody else.”

‘“No; none of them can benefit me if
she
can’t,” was the answer. And the tears gushed from his eyes as he earnestly exclaimed, – “Oh, Helen, if I had listened to you, it never would have come to this! And if I had heard you long ago – Oh, God! how different it would have been!”

‘“Hear me now, then, Arthur,” said I, gently pressing his hand.

‘“It’s too late now,” said he despondently. And after that another paroxysm of pain came on; and then his mind began to wander, and we feared his death was approaching; but an opiate was administered,
his sufferings began to abate, he gradually became more composed, and at length sank into a kind of slumber. He has been quieter since; and now Hattersley has left him, expressing a hope that he shall find him better when he calls tomorrow.

‘“Perhaps, I
may
recover,” he replied, “who knows? – this may have been the crisis. What do
you
think, Helen?”

‘Unwilling to depress him, I gave the most cheering answer I could, but still recommended him to prepare for the possibility of what I inly feared was but too certain. But he was determined to hope. Shortly after, he relapsed into a kind of doze – but now he groans again.

‘There is a change. Suddenly he called me to his side, with such a strange, excited manner that I feared he was delirious – but he was not. “That
was
the crisis, Helen!” said he delightedly – “I had an infernal pain here – it is quite gone now; I never was so easy since the fall – Quite gone, by Heaven!” and he clasped and kissed my hand in the very fulness of his heart; but, finding I did not participate his joy, he quickly flung it from him, and bitterly cursed my coldness and insensibility. How could I reply? Kneeling beside him, I took his hand and fondly pressed it to my lips – for the first time since our separation – and told him as well as tears would let me speak, that it was not
that
that kept me silent; it was the fear that this sudden cessation of pain was not so favourable a symptom as he supposed. – I immediately sent for the doctor. We are now anxiously awaiting him: I will tell you what he says. There is still the same freedom from pain – the same deadness to all sensation where the suffering was most acute.

‘My worst fears are realized – mortification has commenced. The doctor has told him there is no hope – no words can describe his anguish – I can write no more.’

The next was still more distressing in the tenor of its contents. The sufferer was fast approaching dissolution – dragged almost to the verge of that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of prayers or tears could save him. Nothing could comfort him now: Hattersley’s rough attempts at consolation were utterly in
vain. The world was nothing to him: life and all its interests, its petty cares and transient pleasures were a cruel mockery. To talk of the past was to torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to his own regrets and apprehensions. Often he dwelt with shuddering minuteness on the fate of his perishing clay – the slow, piecemeal dissolution already invading his frame; the shroud, the coffin, the dark, lonely grave, and all the horrors of corruption.

‘If I try,’ said his afflicted wife, ‘to divert him from these things – to raise his thoughts to higher themes, it is no better: – “Worse and worse!” he groans. “If there be really life beyond the tomb, and judgment after death, how
can
I face it?” – I cannot do him any good; he will neither be enlightened, nor roused, nor comforted by anything I say; and yet he clings to me with unrelenting pertinacity – with a kind a childish desperation, as if I could save him from the fate he dreads. He keeps me night and day beside him. He is holding my left hand now, while I write; he has held it thus for hours: sometimes quietly, with his pale face upturned to mine: sometimes clutching my arm with violence – the big drops starting from his forehead, at the thought of what he sees, or thinks he sees before him. If I withdraw my hand for a moment, it distresses him: –

‘“Stay with me, Helen,” he says; “let me hold you so: it seems as if harm could not reach me while you are here. But death
will
come – it is coming now – fast, fast!
⁶
– and – Oh, if I
could
believe there was nothing after!”

‘“Don’t try to believe it, Arthur, there is joy and glory after, if you will but try to reach it!”

‘“What, for
me
?” he said, with something like a laugh. “Are we not to be judged according to the deeds done in the body? Where’s the use of a probationary existence, if a man may spend it as he pleases, just contrary to God’s decrees, and then go to Heaven with the best – if the vilest sinner may win the reward of the holiest saint, by merely saying, ‘I repent?’ “

‘“But if you
sincerely
repent –”

‘“I
can’t
repent; I only fear.”
⁷

‘“You only regret the past for its consequences to yourself?”

‘“Just so – except that I’m sorry to have wronged you Nell, because you’re so good to me.”

‘“Think of the goodness of God, and you cannot but be grieved to have offended Him?”

‘“What
is
God – I cannot see him or hear Him? – God is only an idea.”

‘“God is Infinite Wisdom, and Power, and Goodness – and LOVE;
⁸
but if this idea is too vast for your human faculties – if your mind loses itself in its overwhelming infinitude, fix it on Him who condescended to take our nature upon Him, who was raised to Heaven even in his glorified human body, in whom the fulness of the godhead shines.”
⁹

‘But he only shook his head and sighed. Then, in another paroxysm of shuddering horror, he tightened his grasp on my hand and arm, and groaning and lamenting, still clung to me with that wild, desperate earnestness so harrowing to my soul, because I know I cannot help him. I did my best to soothe and comfort him.

‘“Death is so terrible,” he cried, “I cannot bear it!
You
don’t know, Helen – you can’t imagine what it is, because you haven’t it before you; and when I’m buried, you’ll return to your old ways and be as happy as ever, and all the world will go on just as busy and merry as if I had never been; while I –”
¹⁰
He burst into tears.

‘“You needn’t let
that
distress you,” I said; “we shall all follow you soon enough.”

‘“I wish to God I could take you with me now!” he exclaimed, “you should plead for me.”

‘“No man can deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him,”
¹¹
I replied: “it cost more to redeem their souls – it cost the blood of an incarnate God, perfect and sinless in himself, to redeem us from the bondage of the evil one; – let
Him
plead for you.”

‘But I seem to speak in vain. He does not now, as formerly, laugh these blessed truths to scorn: but still he cannot trust, or will not comprehend them. He cannot linger long. He suffers dreadfully, and so do those that wait upon him – but I will not harass you with
further details: I have said enough, I think, to convince you that I did well to go to him.’

*

Poor, poor Helen! dreadful indeed her trials must have been! And I could do nothing to lessen them – nay, it almost seemed as if I had brought them upon her myself, by my own secret desires; and whether I looked at her husband’s sufferings or her own, it seemed almost like a judgment upon myself for having cherished such a wish.

The next day but one, there came another letter. That too was put into my hands without a remark, and these are its contents: –

D
EC
. 5th.

He is gone at last I sat beside him all night, with my hand fast locked in his, watching the changes of his features and listening to his failing breath. He had been silent a long time, and I thought he would never speak again, when he murmured, faintly but distinctly –

‘Pray for me, Helen!’

‘I do pray for you – every hour and every minute, Arthur, but you must pray for yourself.’

His lips moved but emitted no sound; – then his looks became unsettled; and, from die incoherent half-uttered words that escaped him from time to time, supposing him to be now unconscious, I gently disengaged my hand from his, intending to steal away for a breath of air, for I was almost ready to faint; but a convulsive movement of the fingers, and a faintly whispered ‘Don’t leave me!’ immediately recalled me: I took his hand again, and held it till he was no more – and then I fainted; it was not grief, it was exhaustion that, till then, I had been enabled successfully to combat. Oh Frederick! none can imagine the miseries, bodily and mental, of that death bed! How could I endure to think that that poor trembling soul was hurried away to everlasting torment? it would drive me mad! But thank God I have hope – not only from a vague dependence on the possibility that penitence and pardon might have reached him at the last, but from the blessed confidence that, through whatever purging fires the erring spirit may be doomed to pass – whatever fate awaits it, still, it is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that he hath made,
¹²
will
bless it in the end!

His body will be consigned on Thursday to that dark grave he so much dreaded; but the coffin must be closed as soon as possible. If you will attend the funeral come quickly, for I need help.

H
ELEN
H
UNTINGDON

On reading this, I had no reason to disguise my joy and hope from Frederick Lawrence, for I had none to be ashamed of. I felt no joy but that his sister was at length released from her afflictive, overwhelming toil – no hope but that she would in time recover from the effects of it, and be suffered to rest in peace and quietness, at least, for the remainder of her life. I experienced a painful commiseration for her unhappy husband (though fully aware that he had brought every particle of his sufferings upon himself, and but too well deserved them all), and a profound sympathy for her own afflictions, and deep anxiety for the consequences of those harassing cares, those dreadful vigils, that incessant and deleterious confinement beside a living corpse – for I was persuaded she had not hinted half the sufferings she had had to endure.

‘You will go to her, Lawrence?’ said I, as I put the letter into his hand.

‘Yes, immediately.’

‘That’s right! I’ll leave you, then, to prepare for your departure.’

‘I’ve done that, already, while you were reading the letter, and before you came; and the carriage is now coming round to the door.’

Inly approving his promptitude, I bade him good morning, and withdrew. He gave me a searching glance as we pressed each other’s hands at parting; but whatever he sought in my countenance, he saw there nothing but the most becoming gravity, it might be, mingled with a little sternness in momentary resentment at what I suspected to be passing in his mind.

Had I forgotten my own prospects, my ardent love, my
pertinacious hopes? It seemed like sacrilege to revert to them now, but I had not forgotten them. It was, however, with a gloomy sense of the darkness of those prospects, the fallacy of those hopes, and the vanity of that affection, that I reflected on those things as I remounted my horse and slowly journeyed homewards. Mrs Huntingdon was free now; it was no longer a crime to think of her – but did she ever think of
me? –
not
now
– of course it was not to be expected – but would she, when this shock was over? – In all the course of her correspondence with her brother (our mutual friend, as she herself had called him), she had never mentioned me but once – and that was from necessity. This, alone, afforded strong presumption that I was already forgotten; yet this was not the worst it might have been her sense of duty that had kept her silent, she might be only
trying
to forget; but in addition to this, I had a gloomy conviction that the awful realities she had seen and felt, her reconciliation with the man she had once loved, his dreadful sufferings and death, must eventually efface from her mind all traces of her passing love for me. She might recover from these horrors so far as to be restored to her former health, her tranquillity, her cheerfulness even – but never to those feelings which would appear to her, henceforth, as a fleeting fancy, a vain, illusive dream; especially as there was no one to remind her of my existence – no means of assuring her of my fervent constancy, now that we were so far apart, and delicacy forbade me to see her or to write to her, for months to come at least. And how could I engage her brother in my behalf? how could I break that icy crust of shy reserve? Perhaps he would disapprove of my attachment now, as highly as before; perhaps he would think me too poor – too lowly born, to match with his sister. Yes, there was another barrier: doubtless there was a wide distinction between the rank and circumstances
¹
of Mrs Huntingdon, the lady of Grassdale Manor, and those of Mrs Graham the artist, the tenant of Wildfell Hall; and it might be deemed presumption in me to offer my hand to the former – by the world, by her friends – if not by herself – a penalty I might brave, if I were certain she loved me; but otherwise, how could I? And, finally, her deceased husband, with his usual selfishness, might have so constructed his will as to place restrictions upon her
marrying again. So that you see I had reasons enough for despair if I chose to indulge it