SLEEP.
As Wingfold came out of the room, which was near the stair, Helen rose
from the top of it, where she had been sitting all the time he had been
with her brother. He closed the door gently behind him, and stepped
softly along the landing. A human soul in guilt and agony is an awful
presence, but there was more than that in the hush of the curate: he
felt as if he had left the physician of souls behind him at the bedside;
that a human being lay on the rack of the truth, but at his head stood
one who watched his throes with the throbs of such a human heart as
never beat in any bosom but his own, and the executioners were angels
of light. No wonder if with such a feeling in his breast Wingfold walked
softly, and his face glistened! He was not aware that the tears stood in
his eyes, but Helen saw them.
“You know all!” she faltered.
“I do. Will you let me out by the garden again? I wish to be alone.”
She led the way down the stair, and walked with him through the garden.
Wingfold did not speak.
“You don’t think very badly of my poor brother, do you, Mr. Wingfold?”
said Helen, meekly.
“It is a terrible fate,” he returned. “I think I never saw a lovelier
disposition. I do hope his mind will soon be more composed. I think he
knows where alone he can find rest. I am well aware how foolish that of
which I speak seems to some minds, Miss Lingard; but when a man is once
overwhelmed in his own deeds, when they have turned into spectres to
mock at him, when he loathes himself and turns with sickness from past,
present, and future, I know but one choice left, and that is between the
death your friend Mr. Bascombe preaches, and the life preached by Jesus,
the crucified Jew. Into the life I hope your brother will enter.”
“I am so glad you don’t hate him.”
“Hate him! Who but a demon could hate him?”
Helen lifted a grateful look from eyes that swam in tears. The terror of
his possible counsel for the moment vanished. He could never tell him to
give himself up!
“But, as I told you, I am a poor scholar in these high matters,” resumed
the curate, “and I want to bring Mr. Polwarth to see him.”
“The dwarf!” exclaimed Helen, shuddering at the remembrance of what she
had gone through at the cottage.
“Yes. That man’s soul is as grand and beautiful and patient as his body
is insignificant and distorted and troubled. He is the wisest and best
man I have ever known.
“I must ask Leopold,” returned Helen, who, the better the man was
represented, felt the more jealous and fearful of the advice he might
give. Her love and her conscience were not yet at one with each other.
They parted at the door from the garden, and she returned to the
sick-room.
She paused, hesitating to enter. All was still as the grave. She turned
the handle softly and peeped in: could it be that Wingfold’s bearing had
communicated to her mind a shadow of the awe with which he had left the
place where perhaps a soul was being born again? Leopold did not move.
Terror laid hold of her heart. She stepped quickly in, and round the
screen to the side of the bed. There, to her glad surprise, he lay fast
asleep, with the tears not yet dried upon his face. Her heart swelled
with some sense unknown before: was it rudimentary thankfulness to the
Father of her spirit?
As she stood gazing with the look of a mother over her sick child, he
lifted his eyelids, and smiled a sad smile.
“When did you come into the room?” he said.
“A minute ago,” she answered.
“I did not hear you,” he returned.
“No, you were asleep.”
“Not I! Mr. Wingfold is only just gone.”
“I have let him out on the meadow since.”
Leopold stared, looked half alarmed, and then said,
“Did God make me sleep, Helen?”
She did not answer. The light of a new hope in his eye, as if the
dawn had begun at last to break over the dark mountains, was already
reflected from her heart.
“Oh! Helen,” he said, “that IS a good fellow, SUCH a good fellow!”
A pang of jealousy, the first she had ever felt, shot to her heart: she
had hitherto, since his trouble, been all in all to her Leopold! Had
the curate been a man she liked, she would not perhaps have minded it so
much.
“You will be able to do without me now,” she said sadly. “I never could
understand taking to people at first sight!”
“Some people are made so, I suppose, Helen. I know I took to you at
first sight! I shall never forget the first time I saw you--when I came
to this country a lonely little foreigner,--and you, a great beautiful
lady, for such you seemed to me, though you have told me since you were
only a great gawky girl--I know that could never have been--you ran
to meet me, and took me in your arms, and kissed me. I was as if I had
crossed the sea of death and found paradise in your bosom! I am not
likely to forget you for Mr. Wingfold, good and kind and strong as he
is! Even SHE could not make me forget you, Helen. But neither you nor
I can do without Mr. Wingfold any more, I fancy. I wish you liked him
better!--but you will in time. You see he’s not one to pay young
ladies compliments, as I have heard some parsons do; and he may be
a little--no, not unpolished, not that--that’s not what I mean--but
unornamental in his manners! Only, you see,--”
“Only, you see, Poldie,” interrupted Helen, with a smile, a rare thing
between them, “you know all about him, though you never saw him before.”
“That is true,” returned Leopold; “but then he came to me with his door
open, and let me walk in. It doesn’t take long to know a man then. He
hasn’t got a secret like us, Helen,” he added, sadly.
“What did he say to you?”
“Much what he said to you from the pulpit the other day, I should
think.”
Then she was right! For all his hardness and want of sympathy, the
curate had yet had regard to her entreaties, and was not going to put
any horrid notions about duty and self-sacrifice into the poor boy’s
head!
“He’s coming again to-morrow,” added Leopold, almost gleefully, “and
then perhaps he will tell me more, and help me on a bit!”
“Did he tell you he wants to bring a friend with him?”
“No.”
“I can’t see the good of taking more people into our confidence.”
“Why should he not do what he thinks best, Helen? You don’t interfere
with the doctor--why should you with him? When a man is going to the
bottom as fast as he can, and another comes diving after him--it isn’t
for me to say how he is to take hold of me. No, Helen; when I trust, I
trust out and out.”
Helen sighed, thinking how ill that had worked with Emmeline.
Ever since George Bascombe had talked about the Polwarths that day they
met him in the park, she had felt a sort of physical horror of them,
as if they were some kind of unclean creature that ought not to be in
existence at all. But when Leopold uttered himself thus, she felt that
the current of events had seized her, and that she could only submit to
be carried along.