Basil

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"Since the first symptoms of her disease appeared, on Saturday last, I
cannot find that any error has been committed in the medical
treatment, as reported to me. I remained some time by her bedside
to-day, observing her. The delirium which is, more or less, an
invariable result of Typhus, is particularly marked in her case, and
manifests itself both by speech and gesture. It has been found
impossible to quiet her, by any means hitherto tried. While I was
watching by her, she never ceased calling on your name, and entreating
to see you. I am informed by her medical attendant, that her
wanderings have almost invariably taken this direction for the last
four-and-twenty hours. Occasionally she mixes other names with yours,
and mentions them in terms of abhorrence; but her persistency in
calling for your presence, is so remarkable that I am tempted, merely
from what I have heard myself; to suggest that you really should go to
her, on the bare chance that you might exercise some tranquillising
influence. At the same time, if you fear infection, or for any private
reasons (into which I have neither the right nor the wish to inquire)
feel unwilling to take the course I have pointed out, do not by any
means consider it your duty to accede to my proposal. I can
conscientiously assure you that duty is not involved in it.

"I have, however, another suggestion to make, which is of a positive
nature, and which I am sure will meet with your approval. It is, that
her parents, or some of her other relations, if her parents are not
alive, should be informed of her situation. Possibly, you may know
something of her connections, and can therefore do this good office.
She is dying in a strange place, among people who avoid her as they
would avoid a pestilence. Even though it be only to bury her, some
relation ought to be immediately summoned to her bed-side.

"I shall visit her twice to-morrow, in the morning and at night. If
you are not willing to risk seeing her (and I repeat that it is in no
sense imperative that you should combat such unwillingness), perhaps
you will communicate with me at my private address.

"I remain, dear Sir,
"Faithfully yours,
"JOHN BERNARD.

"P. S.--I open my letter again, to inform you that Turner, acting
against all advice, has left the hospital to-day. He attempted to go
on Tuesday last, when, I believe, he first received information of the
young woman's serious illness, but was seized with a violent attack of
giddiness, on attempting to walk, and fell down just outside the door
of the ward. On this second occasion, however, he has succeeded in
getting away without any accident--as far, at least, as the persons
employed about the hospital can tell."

When the letter fell from my trembling hand, when I first asked of my
own heart the fearful question:--"Have I, to whom the mere thought of
ever seeing this woman again has been as a pollution to shrink from,
the strength to stand by her death-bed, the courage to see her
die?"--then, and not till then, did I really know how suffering had
fortified, while it had humbled me; how affliction has the power to
purify, as well as to pain.

All bitter memory of the ill that she had done me, of the misery I had
suffered at her hands, lost its hold on my mind. Once more, her
mother's last words of earthly lament--"Oh, who will pray for her when
I am gone!" seemed to be murmuring in my ear--murmuring in harmony
with the divine words in which the Voice from the Mount of Olives
taught forgiveness of injuries to all mankind.

She was dying: dying among strangers in the pining madness of
fever--and the one being of all who knew her, whose presence at her
bedside might yet bring calmness to her last moments, and give her
quietly and tenderly to death, was the man whom she had pitilessly
deceived and dishonoured, whose youth she had ruined, whose hopes she
had wrecked for ever. Strangely had destiny brought us
together--terribly had it separated us--awfully would it now unite us
again, at the end!

What were my wrongs, heavy as they had been; what my sufferings,
poignant as they still were, that they should stand between this dying
woman, and the last hope of awakening her to the consciousness that
she was going before the throne of God? The sole resource for her
which human skill and human pity could now suggest, embraced the sole
chance that she might still be recovered for repentance, before she
was resigned to death. How did I know, but that in those ceaseless
cries which had uttered my name, there spoke the last earthly anguish
of the tortured spirit, calling upon me for one drop of water to cool
its burning guilt--one drop from the waters of Peace?

I took up Mr. Bernard's letter from the floor on which it had fallen,
and re-directed it to my brother; simply writing on a blank place in
the inside, "I have gone to soothe her last moments." Before I
departed, I wrote to her father, and summoned him to her bedside. The
guilt of his absence--if his heartless and hardened nature did not
change towards her--would now rest with him, and not with me. I
forbore from thinking how he would answer my letter; for I remembered
his written words to my brother, declaring that he would accuse his
daughter of having caused her mother's death; and I suspected him even
then, of wishing to shift the shame of his conduct towards his unhappy
wife from himself to his child.

After writing this second letter, I set forth instantly for the house
to which Mr. Bernard had directed me. No thought of myself; no
thought, even, of the peril suggested by the ominous disclosure about
Mannion, in the postscript to the surgeon's letter, ever crossed my
mind. In the great stillness, in the heavenly serenity that had come
to my spirit, the wasting fire of every sensation which was only of
this world, seemed quenched for ever.

It was eleven o'clock when I arrived at the house. A slatternly, sulky
woman opened the door to me. "Oh! I suppose you're another doctor,"
she muttered, staring at me with scowling eyes. "I wish you were the
undertaker, to get her out of my house before we all catch our deaths
of her! There! there's the other doctor coming down stairs; he'll show
you the room--I won't go near it."

As I took the candle from her hand, I saw that Mr. Bernard was
approaching me from the stairs.

"You can do no good, I am afraid," he said, "but I am glad you have
come."

"There is no hope, then?"

"In my opinion, none. Turner came here this morning, whether she
recognised him, or not, in her delirium, I cannot say; but she grew so
much worse in his presence, that I insisted on his not seeing her
again, except under medical permission. Just now, there is no one in
the room--are you willing to go up stairs at once?"

"Does she still speak of me in her wanderings?"

"Yes, as incessantly as ever."

"Then I am ready to go to her bedside."

"Pray believe that I feel deeply what a sacrifice you are making.
Since I wrote to you, much that she has said in her delirium has told
me"--(he hesitated)--"has told me more, I am afraid, than you would
wish me to have known, as a comparative stranger to you. I will only
say, that secrets unconsciously disclosed on the death-bed are secrets
sacred to me, as they are to all who pursue my calling; and that what
I have unavoidably heard above stairs, is doubly sacred in my
estimation, as affecting a near and dear relative of one of my oldest
friends." He paused, and took my hand very kindly; then added: "I am
sure you will think yourself rewarded for any trial to your feelings
to-night, if you can only remember in years to come, that your
presence quieted her in her last moments!"

I felt his sympathy and delicacy too strongly to thank him in words; I
could only _look_ my gratitude as he asked me to follow him up stairs.

We entered the room softly. Once more, and for the last time in this
world, I stood in the presence of Margaret Sherwin.

Not even to see her, as I had last seen her, was such a sight of
misery as to behold her now, forsaken on her deathbed, to look at her,
as she lay with her head turned from me, fretfully covering and
uncovering her face with the loose tresses of her long black hair, and
muttering my name incessantly in her fever-dream: "Basil! Basil!
Basil! I'll never leave off calling for him, till he comes. Basil!
Basil! Where is he? Oh, where, where, where!"

"He is here," said the doctor, taking the candle from my hand, and
holding it, so that the light fell full on my face. "Look at her and
speak to her as usual, when she turns round," he whispered to me.

Still she never moved; still those hoarse, fierce, quick tones--that
voice, once the music that my heart beat to; now the discord that it
writhed under--muttered faster and faster: "Basil! Basil! Bring him
here! bring me Basil!"

"He is here," repeated Mr. Bernard loudly. "Look! look up at him!"

She turned in an instant, and tore the hair back from her face. For a
moment, I forced myself to look at her; for a moment, I confronted the
smouldering fever in her cheeks; the glare of the bloodshot eyes; the
distortion of the parched lips; the hideous clutching of the
outstretched fingers at the empty air--but the agony of that sight was
more than I could endure: I turned away my head, and hid my face in
horror.

"Compose yourself," whispered the doctor. "Now she is quiet, speak to
her; speak to her before she begins again; call her by her name."

Her name! Could my lips utter it at such a moment as this?

"Quick! quick!" cried Mr. Bernard. "Try her while you have the
chance."

I struggled against the memories of the past, and spoke to her--God
knows as gently, if not as happily, as in the bygone time!

"Margaret," I said, "Margaret, you asked for me, and I have come."

She tossed her arms above her head with a shrill scream, frightfully
prolonged till it ended in low moanings and murmurings; then turned
her face from us again, and pulled her hair over it once more.

"I am afraid she is too far gone," said the doctor; "but make another
trial."

"Margaret," I said again, "have you forgotten me? Margaret!"

She looked at me once more. This time, her dry, dull eyes seemed to
soften, and her fingers twined themselves less passionately in her
hair. She began to laugh--a low, vacant, terrible laugh.

"Yes, yes," she said, "I know he's come at last; I can make him do
anything. Get me my bonnet and shawl; any shawl will do, but a
mourning shawl is best, because we are going to the funeral of our
wedding. Come, Basil! let's go back to the church, and get unmarried
again; that's what I wanted you for. We don't care about each other.
Robert Mannion wants me more than you do--he's not ashamed of me
because my father's a tradesman; he won't make believe that he's in
love with me, and then marry me to spite the pride of his family.
Come! I'll tell the clergyman to read the service backwards; that
makes a marriage no marriage at all, everybody knows."

As the last wild words escaped her, some one below stairs called to
Mr. Bernard. He went out for a minute, then returned again, telling me
that he was summoned to a case of sudden illness which he must attend
without a moment's delay.

"The medical man whom I found here when I first came," he said, "was
sent for this evening into the country, to be consulted about an
operation, I believe. But if anything happens, I shall be at your
service. There is the address of the house to which I am now going"
(he wrote it down on a card); "you can send, if you want me. I will
get back, however, as soon as possible, and see her again; she seems
to be a little quieter already, and may become quieter still, if you
stay longer. The night-nurse is below--I will send her up as I go
downstairs. Keep the room well ventilated, the windows open as they
are now. Don't breathe too close to her, and you need fear no
infection. Look! her eyes are still fixed on you. This is the first
time I have seen her look in the same direction for two minutes
together; one would think she really recognised you. Wait till I come
back, if you possibly can--I won't be a moment longer than I can
help."

He hastily left the room. I turned to the bed, and saw that she was
still looking at me. She had never ceased murmuring to herself while
Mr. Bernard was speaking; and she did not stop when the nurse came in.

The first sight of this woman, on her entrance, sickened and shocked
me. All that was naturally repulsive in her, was made doubly revolting
by the characteristics of the habitual drunkard, lowering and glaring
at me in her purple, bloated face. To see her heavy hands shaking at
the pillow, as they tried mechanically to arrange it; to see her
stand, alternately leering and scowling by the bedside, an incarnate
blasphemy in the sacred chamber of death, was to behold the most
horrible of all mockeries, the most impious of all profanations. No
loneliness in the presence of mortal agony could try me to the quick,
as the sight of that foul old age of degradation and debauchery,
defiling the sick room, now tried me. I determined to wait alone by
the bedside till Mr. Bernard returned.

With some difficulty, I made the wretched drunkard understand that she
might go downstairs again; and that I would call her if she was
wanted. At last, she comprehended my meaning, and slowly quitted the
room. The door closed on her; and I was left alone to watch the last
moments of the woman who had ruined me!

As I sat down near the open window, the sounds outside in the street
told of the waning of the night. There was an echo of many footsteps,
a hoarse murmur of conflicting voices, now near, now afar off. The
public houses were dispersing their drunken crowds--the crowds of a
Saturday night: it was twelve o'clock.

Through those street-sounds of fierce ribaldry and ghastly mirth, the
voice of the dying woman penetrated, speaking more slowly, more
distinctly, more terribly than it had spoken yet.

"I see him," she said, staring vacantly at me, and moving her hands
slowly to and fro in the air. "I see him! But he's a long way off; he
can't hear our secrets, and he does not suspect you as mother does.
Don't tell me that about him any more; my flesh creeps at it! What are
you looking at me in that way for? You make me feel on fire. You know
I like you, because I _must_ like you; because I can't help it. It's
no use saying hush: I tell you he can't hear us, and can't see us. He
can see nothing; you make a fool of him, and I make a fool of him. But
mind! I _will_ ride in my own carriage: you must keep things secret
enough to let me do that. I say I _will_ ride in my carriage: and I'll
go where father walks to business: I don't care if I splash him with
_my_ carriage wheels! I'll be even with him for some of the passions
he's been in with me. You see how I'll go into our shop and order
dresses! (be quiet! I say he can't hear us). I'll have velvet where
his sister has silk, and silk where she has muslin: I'm a finer girl
than she is, and I'll be better dressed. Tell _him_ anything, indeed!
What have I ever let out? It's not so easy always to make believe I'm
in love with him, after what you have told me. Suppose he found us
out?--Rash? I'm no more rash than you are! Why didn't you come back
from France in time, and stop it all? Why did you let me marry him? A
nice wife I've been to him, and a nice husband he has been to me--a
husband who waits a year! Ha! ha! he calls himself a man, doesn't he?
A husband who waits a year!"

I approached nearer to the bedside, and spoke to her again, in the
hope to win her tenderly towards dreaming of better things. I know not
whether she heard me, but her wild thoughts changed--changed darkly to
later events.

"Beds! beds!" she cried, "beds everywhere, with dying men on them! And
one bed the most terrible of all--look at it! The deformed face, with
the white of the pillow all round it! _His_ face? _his_ face, that
hadn't a fault in it? Never! It's the face of a devil; the
finger-nails of the devil are on it! Take me away! drag me out! I
can't move for that face: it's always before me: it's walling me up
among the beds: it's burning me all over. Water! water! drown me in
the sea; drown me deep, away from the burning face!"

"Hush, Margaret! hush! drink this, and you will be cool again." I gave
her some lemonade, which stood by the bedside.

"Yes, yes; hush, as you say. Where's Robert? Robert Mannion? Not here!
then I've got a secret for you. When you go home to-night, Basil, and
say your prayers, pray for a storm of thunder and lightning; and pray
that I may be struck dead in it, and Robert too. It's a fortnight to
my aunt's party; and in a fortnight you'll wish us both dead, so you
had better pray for what I tell you in time. We shall make handsome
corpses. Put roses into my coffin--scarlet roses, if you can find any,
because that stands for Scarlet Woman--in the Bible, you know.
Scarlet? What do I care! It's the boldest colour in the world. Robert
will tell you, and all your family, how many women are as scarlet as I
am--virtue wears it at home, in secret; and vice wears it abroad, in
public: that's the only difference, he says. Scarlet roses! scarlet
roses! throw them into the coffin by hundreds; smother me up in them;
bury me down deep; in the dark, quiet street--where there's a broad
door-step in front of a house, and a white, wild face, something like
Basil's, that's always staring on the doorstep awfully. Oh, why did I
meet him! why did I marry him! oh, why! why!"

She uttered the last words in slow, measured cadence--the horrible
mockery of a chaunt which she used to play to us at North Villa, on
Sunday evenings. Then her voice sank again; her articulation
thickened, and grew indistinct. It was like the change from darkness
to daylight, in the sight of sleepless eyes, to hear her only
murmuring now, after hearing her last terrible words.

The weary night-time passed on. Longer and longer grew the intervals
of silence between the scattered noises from the streets; less and
less frequent were the sounds of distant carriage-wheels, and the
echoing rapid footsteps of late pleasure-seekers hurrying home. At
last, the heavy tramp of the policeman going his rounds, alone
disturbed the silence of the early morning hours. Still, the voice
from the bed muttered incessantly; but now, in drowsy, languid tones:
still, Mr. Bernard did not return: still the father of the dying girl
never came, never obeyed the letter which summoned him for the last
time to her side.

(There was yet one more among the absent--one from whose approach the
death-bed must be kept sacred; one, whose evil presence was to be
dreaded as a pestilence and a scourge. Mannion!--where was Mannion?)

I sat by the window, resigned to wait in loneliness till the end came,
watching mechanically the vacant eyes that ever watched me--when,
suddenly, the face of Margaret seemed to fade out of my sight. I
started and looked round. The candle, which I had placed at the
opposite end of the room, had burnt down without my noticing it, and
was now expiring in the socket. I ran to light the fresh candle which
lay on the table by its side, but was too late. The wick flickered its
last; the room was left in darkness.

While I felt among the different objects under my hands for a box of
matches: Margaret's voice strengthened again.

"Innocent! innocent!" I heard her cry mournfully through the darkness.
"I'll swear I'm innocent, and father is sure to swear it too. Innocent
Margaret! Oh, me! what innocence!"

She repeated these words over and over again, till the hearing them
seemed to bewilder all my senses. I hardly knew what I touched.
Suddenly, my searching hands stopped of themselves, I could not tell
why. Was there some change in the room? Was there more air in it, as
if a door had been opened? Was there something moving over the floor?
Had Margaret left her bed?--No! the mournful voice was speaking
unintermittingly, and speaking from the same distance.

I moved to search for the matches on a chest of drawers, which stood
near the window. Though the morning was at its darkest, and the house
stood midway between two gas-lamps, there was a glimmering of light in
this place. I looked back into the room from the window, and thought I
saw something shadowy moving near the bed. "Take him away!" I heard
Margaret scream in her wildest tones. "His hands are on me: he's
feeling my face, to feel if I'm dead!"

I ran to her, striking against some piece of furniture in the
darkness. Something passed swiftly between me and the bed, as I got
near it. I thought I heard a door close. Then there was silence for a
moment; and then, as I stretched out my hands, my right hand
encountered the little table placed by Margaret's side, and the next
moment I felt the match-box that had been left on it.

As I struck a light, her voice repeated close at my ear:

"His hands are on me: he's feeling my face to feel if I'm dead!"

The match flared up. As I carried it to the candle, I looked round,
and noticed for the first time that there was a second door, at the
further corner of the room, which lighted some inner apartment through
glass panes at the top. When I tried this door, it was locked on the
inside, and the room beyond was dark.

Dark and silent. But was no one there, hidden in that darkness and
silence? Was there any doubt now, that stealthy feet had approached
Margaret, that stealthy hands had touched her, while the room was in
obscurity?-- Doubt? There was none on that point, none on any other.
Suspicion shaped itself into conviction in an instant, and identified
the stranger who had passed in the darkness between me and the
bedside, with the man whose presence I had dreaded, as the presence of
an evil spirit in the chamber of death.

He was waiting secretly in the house--waiting for her last moments;
listening for her last words; watching his opportunity, perhaps, to
enter the room again, and openly profane it by his presence! I placed
myself by the door, resolved, if he approached, to thrust him back, at
any hazard, from the bedside. How long I remained absorbed in watching
before the darkness of the inner room, I know not--but some time must
have elapsed before the silence around me forced itself suddenly on my
attention. I turned towards Margaret; and, in an instant, all previous
thoughts were suspended in my mind, by the sight that now met my eyes.

She had altered completely. Her hands, so restless hitherto, lay quite
still over the coverlid; her lips never moved; the whole expression of
her face had changed--the fever-traces remained on every feature, and
yet the fever-look was gone. Her eyes were almost closed; her quick
breathing had grown calm and slow. I touched her pulse; it was beating
with a wayward, fluttering gentleness. What did this striking
alteration indicate? Recovery? Was it possible? As the idea crossed my
mind, every one of my faculties became absorbed in the sole occupation
of watching her face; I could not have stirred an instant from the
bed, for worlds.

The earliest dawn of day was glimmering faintly at the window, before
another change appeared--before she drew a long, sighing breath, and
slowly opened her eyes on mine. Their first look was very strange and
startling to behold; for it was the look that was natural to her; the
calm look of consciousness, restored to what it had always been in the
past time. It lasted only for a moment. She recognised me; and,
instantly, an expression of anguish and shame flew over the first
terror and surprise of her face. She struggled vainly to lift her
hands--so busy all through the night; so idle now! A faint moan of
supplication breathed from her lips; and she slowly turned her head on
the pillow, so as to hide her face from my sight.

"Oh, my God! my God!" she murmured, in low, wailing tones, "I've
broken his heart, and he still comes here to be kind to me! This is
worse than death! I'm too bad to be forgiven--leave me! leave me!--oh,
Basil, leave me to die!"

I spoke to her; but desisted almost immediately--desisted even from
uttering her name. At the mere sound of my voice, her suffering rose
to agony; the wild despair of the soul wrestling awfully with the
writhing weakness of the body, uttered itself in words and cries
horrible, beyond all imagination, to hear. I sank down on my knees by
the bedside; the strength which had sustained me for hours, gave way
in an instant, and I burst into a passion of tears, as my spirit
poured from my lips in supplication for hers--tears that did not
humiliate me; for I knew, while I shed them, that I had forgiven her!

The dawn brightened. Gradually, as the fair light of the new day
flowed in lovely upon her bed; as the fresh morning breeze lifted
tenderly and playfully the scattered locks of her hair that lay over
the pillow--so, the calmness began to come back to her voice and the
stillness of repose to her limbs. But she never turned her face to me
again; never, when the wild words of her despair grew fewer and
fainter; never, when the last faint supplication to me, to leave her
to die forsaken as she deserved, ended mournfully in a long, moaning
gasp for breath. I waited after this--waited a long time--then spoke
to her softly--then waited once more; hearing her still breathe, but
slowly and more slowly with every minute--then spoke to her for the
second time, louder than before. She never answered, and never moved.
Was she sleeping? I could not tell. Some influence seemed to hold me
back from going to the other side of the bed, to look at her face, as
it lay away from me, almost hidden in the pillow.

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