Chapter XXIV.
Would that marred and ruined being, once the beautiful Mrs. Brothertoft, ever revive enough to ask and receive forgiveness from her husband?
Lucy did not dare to hope it. She watched the breathing corpse, and looked to see it any moment escape from its bodily torture into death.
Edwin Brothertoft was but little harmed by the flames. A single leap had carried him through the fiery circle which was devouring his wife, as she sat bound. In an instant he had dragged her away over the falling floor, cut her free, and was at the window struggling through. He had been almost stifled by the smoke, but his hurts were slight. In a few days he was at his wife’s bedside.
He alone could interpret the sad, sad language of her suffering moans. Her soul, half dormant, in a body robbed of all its senses, seemed to perceive his presence and his absence by some spiritual touch. Would she ever hear his words of peace?
The red, ripe leaves grew over-ripe, and fell, and buried October. Then came the first days of November, with their clear, sharp sunshine, and bold, blue sky, and massive white clouds, sailing with the northwest wind a month before the snow-drifts. Sweet Indian summer followed. Its low southern breezes whispered the dying refrain of the times of roses and passionate sunshine.
Edwin Brothertoft sat by his wife’s window one twilight of that pensive season.
A new phase in his life had begun from the night of the rescue. By that one bold act of heroism he had leaped out of the old feebleness. He felt forgotten forces stir in him. His long sorrow became to him as a sickness from which a man rises fresh and purified.
In this mood, with the dim landscape, before him, a symbol of his own sombre history, and the glowing sky of evening beyond, symbolizing the clear and open regions of his mind’s career henceforth, — in this mood he grew tenderer for his wife than ever before.
It was no earthly love he felt for her. That had perished long ago. Deceit on her side wounded it. Disloyalty killed it. The element of passion was gone. There would have been a deep sense of shame in recalling his lover fondness once for a woman since unfaithful. But now he looked back upon her wrongs and his errors as irremediable facts, and he could pity both alike. The tendency of such a character as hers, so trained as hers, to some great rebellion against the eternal laws, some great trial of its strength with God, and to some great and final lesson of defeat, became plain to him. The law of truth in love and faith in marriage is the law a woman is likely to break if she is a law-breaker.
She had broken it, and he divined the spiritual warfare and the knowledge of defeat and degradation which had been her spiritual punishment, bitterer to bear than this final corporeal vengeance.
Entering into her heart and reading the thoughts there, he utterly forgave and pitied her.
And for himself, — what harm had she done him? None, — so he plainly saw. Except for the disenchanting office of this great sorrow, he would have lived and died a worldly man. When his poetic ardors passed with youth, he would have dwindled away a prosperous gentleman, lost his heroic and martyr spirit, and smiled or sneered or trembled at the shout for freedom through the land. Except for this great sorrow, his graceful gifts would have made him a courtier, his refinement would have become fastidiousness, he would have learned to idolize the status quo, and then, when the moment came for self-sacrifice, he would have been false to his nobler self. That meanness and misery he had escaped. That he had escaped it, and knew himself to be a man wholly true, was victory. The world might repeat its old refrain of disappointment in his career; it might say, “He promised to be our brilliant leader, — he is nobody.” But it could never say, “See, there is Brothertoft! He was an ardent patriot; but wealth spoiled him, the Court bought him, and he left us meanly.”
“My life,” he thought, “has been somewhat a negative. I have missed success. I have missed the joy of household peace. And yet I bear no grudge against my destiny. I have never for one moment been false to the highest truth, and that is a victory greater than success.”
These last words he had spoken aloud.
In reply, he heard a stir and a murmur from his wife.
He turned to her, and in the dusk he could see that her life was recoiling from death to gain strength to die. Voice and expression returned to her.
“Edwin!” she called to him, feebly.
“Jane?” he answered.
In the pleading tone of her cry, in the sweet affection of his one word of response, each read the other’s heart. There was no need of long interpretation. To her yearning for pardon and love, her name upon his lips gave full assurance that both were granted.
She reached blindly for his hand. He took hers tenderly. And there by the solemn twilight they parted for a time. Death parted them. She awoke in eternity. He stayed, to share a little longer in the dreamy work of life.