For Faith and Freedom

'Indeed, I am no ghost, Benjamin. As for curses, I have none; and as for reproaches, I leave them to thy conscience.'

'Humphrey, I am sore afflicted. I am now so low that I cannot even sit upright in my bed. But thou art a doctor – thou wilt bring me back to health. I am already better only for seeing thee here.'

I declare that as yet I had no thought, no thought at all, of what I was to do. I was but a physician in presence of a sick man, and therefore bound to help him if I could.

I asked him first certain questions, as physicians use, concerning his disorder and its symptoms. I learned that, after attending at the Court, he was attacked by fits of shivering and of great heat, being hot and cold alternately, and that in order to expel the fever he had sat drinking the whole evening – a most dangerous thing to do. Next, that in the morning he had been unable to rise from his bed, and, being thirsty, had drunk more wine – a thing enough of itself to kill a man in such a fever. Then he lost his head, and could tell me no more what had happened until he saw me standing by his bedside. In short, he had been in delirium, and was now in a lucid interval, out of which he would presently fall a-wandering again, and, perhaps, raving, and so another lucid interval, after which he would die, unless something could be done for him.

I liked not his appearance nor the account which he gave me, nor did I like his pulse, nor the strange look in his eyes – death doth often show his coming by such a prophetic terror of the eyes.

'Humphrey,' he said pitifully. 'It was no fault of mine that thou wast sent to the Plantations.'

'That I know full well, Cousin,' I answered him. 'Be easy on that score.'

'And as for Alice,' he went on. 'All is fair in love.'

I made no reply, because at this point a great temptation assailed my soul.

You have heard how I learned many secrets of the women while I was abroad. Now, while we were in Providence Island I found a woman of the breed they call half caste – that is, half Indian and half Portuguese – living in what she called wedlock with an English sailor, who did impart to me a great secret of her own people. I obtained from her not only the knowledge of a most potent drug (known already to the Jesuits), but also a goodly quantity of the drug itself. This, with certain other discoveries and observations of my own, I was about to communicate to the College in Warwick Lane.

As for this drug, I verily believe it is the most potent medicine ever yet discovered. It is now some years since it was first brought over to Europe by the Jesuits, and is therefore called Pulvis Jesuiticus, and sometimes Peruvian Bark. When administered at such a stage of the fever as had now been reached by my unhappy cousin, it seldom fails to vivify the spirits, and so to act upon the nerves as to restore the sinking, and to call back to life a man almost moribund.

Remembering this, I lugged the packet out of my pocket and laid it on the table.

'Be of good cheer, Cousin,' I said; 'I have a drug which is strong enough, with the help of God, to make a dying man sit up again. Courage, then!'

When I had said these words my temptation fell upon me. It came in the guise of a voice which whispered in my ear.

'Should this man die,' it said, 'there will be freedom for Alice. She can then marry the man she loves. She will be restored to happiness. While he lives, she must still continue in misery, being cut off from love. Let him die therefore.'

'Humphrey,' said Ben; 'in this matter of Alice: if she will come to me, I will make her happy. But I know not where she is hidden. Things go ill with me since that unlucky day. I would to God I had not done it! Nothing hath gone well since; and I drink daily to hide her face. Yet at night she haunts me – with her father, who threatens, and her mother, who weeps, and my grandfather, who reproaches. Humphrey – tell me – what is it, man? What mean thy looks?'

For while he spoke that other voice was in my ears also.

'Should he die, Alice will be happy again. Should he live, she will continue in misery.' At these words (which were but my own thoughts, yet involuntary), I felt so great a pity, such an overwhelming love for Alice, that my spirit was wholly carried away. To restore her freedom! Oh! what price was too great for such a gift? Nay – I was seized with the thought that to give her so great a thing, even my own destruction would be a light price to pay. Never, until that moment, had I known how fondly and truly I loved her. Why, if it were to be done over again – but this matters not. I have to make my confession.

'Humphrey, speak!' I suppose that my trouble showed itself in my face.

'Thou art married to Alice,' I said slowly. 'That cannot be denied. So long as thou livest, Benjamin, so long will she be robbed of everything that she desires, so long will she be unhappy. Now, if thou shouldst die' —

'Die? I cannot die; I must live.' He tried to raise himself, but he was too weak. 'Cousin, save my life.'

'If thou shouldst die, Benjamin,' I went on, regardless of his words, 'she will be set free. It is only by thy death that she can be set free. Say then to thyself: "I have done this poor woman so great an injury that nothing but my death can atone for it. Willingly, therefore, will I lay down my life, hoping thus to atone for this abominable wickedness."'

'Humphrey, do not mock me. Give me – give me – give me speedily the drug of which you spoke. I die – I die! – Oh! – give me of thy drug.'

Then I took the packet containing the Pulvis Jesuiticus and threw it upon the fire, where in a moment it was a little heap of ashes.

'Now, Benjamin,' I said, 'I cannot help thee. Thou must surely die.'

He shrieked, he wept, he implored me to do something – something to keep him alive. He began to curse and to swear.

'No one can now save thee, Benjamin,' I told him. 'Not all the College of Physicians; not all the medicines in England. Thou must die. Listen and heed: in a short time, unless thy present weakness causeth thee to expire, there will fall upon thee another fit of fever and delirium, after which another interval of reason: perhaps another – but yet thou must surely die. Prepare thy soul, therefore. Is there any message for Alice that thou wouldst send to her, being now at the point of death?'

His only answer was to curse and weep alternately.

Then I knelt beside his bed, and prayed aloud for him. But incessantly he cried for help, wearing himself out with prayers and curses.

'Benjamin,' I said, when I had thus prayed a while, but ineffectually, 'I shall take to Alice, instead of these curses, which avail nothing, a prayer for pardon, in order to touch her heart and cause her to think of thee with forgiveness, as of one who repented at the end. This I shall do for her sake. I shall also tell thy father that thy death was repentant, and shall take to him also a prayer for forgiveness as from thee. This will lighten his sorrow, and cause him to remember thee with the greater love. And to Robin, too, so that he may cease to call thee villain, I will carry, not these ravings, but a humble prayer (as from thyself) for forgiveness.'

This is my confession: I, who might have saved my cousin, suffered him to die.

The sick man, when he found that prayers or curses would not avail, fell to moaning, rolling his head from side to side. When he was thus quiet I prayed again for him, exhorting him to lift up his soul to his Judge, and assuring him of our full forgiveness. But, indeed, I know not if he heard or understood. It was then about four of the clock, and growing dark. I lit a candle, and examined him again. I think that he was now unconscious. He seemed as if he slept. I sat down and watched.

I think that at midnight, or thereabouts, I must have fallen asleep.

When I awoke the candle was out, and the fire was out. The room was in perfect darkness. I laid my hand upon my cousin's forehead. He was cold and dead.

Then I heard the voice of the watchman in the street: 'Past two o'clock, and a frosty morning!'

The voice I had heard before whispered again in my ear.

'Alice is free – Alice is free! Thou – thou – thou alone hast set her free! Thou hast killed her husband!'

I threw myself upon my knees and spent the rest of that long night in seeking for repentance; but then, as now, the lamentation of a sinner is also mingled with the joy of thinking that Alice was free at last, and by none other hand than mine.

This I repeat is my confession: I might have saved my cousin, and I suffered him to die. Wherefore I have left the profession in which it was my ambition to distinguish myself, and am no longer anything but a poor and obscure person, living on the charity of my friends in a remote village.

Two days afterwards I was sitting at the table, looking through the dead man's papers, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

It was Barnaby, who broke noisily into the room.

'Where is Benjamin?' he cried. 'Where is that villain?'

'What do you want with him?'

'I want to kill him. I am come to kill him.'

'Look upon the bed, Barnaby.' I laid back the sheet and showed him the pale face of the dead man.

'The hand of the Lord – or that of another – hath already killed him. Art thou now content?'

CHAPTER THE LAST

In the decline of years, when the sixtieth birthday is near at hand and one looks not to live much longer, and the future hath no fresh joy to bring with it (but only infirmities of age and pain), it is profitable and pleasant to look back upon the past, to observe the guidance of the Unseen Hand, to repent one's sins, and to live over again those seasons, whether of sorrow or of joy, which we now perceive to have been Providentially ordered.

This have I done, both in reading the history of our lives as related by my Mistress, and in writing this latter part. To the former have I added nothing, nor have I subtracted anything therefrom, because I would not suffer the sweet and candid soul of her whom I have always loved to be tarnished by any words of mine, breaking in upon her own, as jarring notes in some lovely harmony. It is strictly laid upon me to deliver her words just as she hath written them down.

Now, after the death of Benjamin, I took it upon myself, being his cousin, in the absence of his father, to examine the papers which he had left. Among them I found abundance of songs, chiefly in praise of wine and women, with tavern bills. Also, there were notes of legal cases, very voluminous, and I found notes of payment made to various persons engaged in inquiring after his wife, in those towns of the West Country where her father's name would procure friends for her. But there was no will; Benjamin had died (never looking for so early an end) without making any will. Therefore the estate of Bradford Orcas, with the old house, became the property of the Rector, Benjamin's father. And he, being moved to make reparation for his son's sin, and out of the great love which he bore to Alice, conveyed the whole to Robin on the day of his marriage. Thus the confiscated estate returned to the ancient family who had always held it, and promise to hold it still, so long as the good old stock shall last.

It is thirty years ago and more. King William III. is dead; Queen Anne is dead; King George (who cannot, they say, speak English, but is a stout Protestant) sits upon our throne; the Nonconformists are free, save that they cannot enter the Universities, and are subject to other disabilities, which will, doubtless, be removed in the course of years. But English people, I think, love power beyond all earthly things; and so long as the Church is in a majority the Churchmen will exercise their power and will not part with it. To us of Bradford Orcas it matters little. We worship at the parish church. Every Sunday I contemplate, as I did fifty years ago, the monument of Filipa kneeling apart, and of her husband and his second wife kneeling together. There is a new tablet in the chancel put up to the memory of Sir Christopher, and another to that of Dr. Comfort Eykin. Their bodies lie somewhere among the mounds on the north side of Ilminster Church.

Forty years ago, as you have seen, there stood three boys in the garden of the Manor House discoursing on their future. One wished never to go anywhere, but to remain always a country gentleman, like his grandfather; one would be a great lawyer, a Judge, even the Lord Chancellor; the third would be a great Physician. Lo! the end of all! The first, but after divers miseries, perils, and wanderings, hath attained to his desire; the second lies buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn, forgotten long since by his companions (who, indeed, are now with him in the pit), and remembered only among his own kin for the great wickedness which he wrought before the Lord. And, as for the third and last, no illustrious physician is he; but one who lives obscure (but content) in a remote village (in the very cottage where his Mistress was born), with books and music, and the society of the sweetest woman who ever graced this earth for his solace. She was always gracious: she was gracious in her childhood; gracious as a maiden; more gracious still is she in these latter days when her hair is grey, and her daughters stand about her, tall and comely.

Now, had I administered that powder – that sovereign remedy, the Pulvis Jesuiticus– what would have been her lot?

'Humphrey,' said Robin, 'a penny for thy thoughts.'

'Robin, I was thinking – it is not a new thing, but twenty years old and more – that Cousin Benjamin never did anything in his life so useful as to die.'

'Ay, poor Benjamin! That he had at the end the grace to ask our forgiveness and to repent hath in it something of a miracle. We have long forgiven him. But consider, Cousin. We were saved from the fight; we were saved from the sea; we were saved from slavery; we were enabled to strike the last blow for the Protestant religion – what were all these blessings worth if Benjamin still lived? To think, Humphrey, that Alice would never have been my wife and never a mother; and all these children would have remained unborn! I say that, though we may not desire the death of a sinner, we were not human if we rejoiced not at the death of our poor cousin.'

Yes; that is the thought which will not suffer me to repent. A single pinch of the Pulvis Jesuiticus, and he might have been living unto this very day: then would Alice have lost the crowning blessing of a woman's life.

Yet – I was, it is true, a physician – whose duty it is to save life, always to save life, even the life of the wretched criminal who is afterwards to die upon the gallows.

Yet, again, if he had been saved! As I write these lines I see my Mistress walking down the village street. She looks over my garden-gate; she lifts the latchet and enters, smiling gravely and tenderly. A sober happiness sits upon her brow. The terror of her first marriage has long been forgotten.

Why, as I watch her tranquil life, busy with her household and her children, full of the piety which asks not (as her father was wont to ask) how and where the mercy of Heaven is limited, and if, indeed, it will embrace all she loves; as I mark the tender love of husband and of children, which lies around her like a garment and prevents all her doings, there comes back to me continually a bed-room in which a man lies dying. Again in memory, again in intention, I throw upon the fire that handful of Pulvis Jesuiticus which should have driven away his fever and restored him to health again. A great and strong man he was, who might have lived till eighty years: where then would have been that love? where those children? where that tranquil heart and that contented mind? 'I WILL NOT SAVE HIS LIFE.' I say again in my mind: 'I WILL NOT SAVE HIM; HE SHALL DIE.'

'Humphrey,' my Mistress says, 'leave thy books awhile and walk with me: the winter sun is warm upon the hills. Come, it is the day when Benjamin died – repentant – what better could we wish? What greater blessing could have been bestowed upon him and upon us than a true repentance and to die? Oh! dear Brother, dear Humphrey, let us walk and talk of these blessings which have been showered upon my undeserving head.