The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

'"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 despondingly. 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 to-morrow.

'"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 realised - 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 of 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 thoughts 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! - 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!"'