第93章
Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of tenderness.In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the fast-darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making a proselyte of him.
This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever listened.Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last hour of which I have been speaking.The excitement of pleading his cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.When the divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to look upon him before leaving his chamber.His face was changed.--There is a language of the human countenance which we all understand without an interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.--Such was the aspect of the face upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed his prayer.The change had been rapid, though not that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these cases.--The sick man looked towards him.--Farewell,--he said,--Ithank you.Leave me alone with her.
When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking key,--the same key I had once seen him holding.He gave this to her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to what it might contain.
Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp.--The young girl walked to the cabinet and unlocked the door.A deep recess appeared, lined with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory crucifix.A silver lamp hung over it.She lighted the lamp and came back to the bedside.The dying man fixed his eyes upon the figure of the dying Saviour.--Give me your hand, he said; and Iris placed her right hand in his left.So they remained, until presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained vacantly fixed upon the white image.Yet he held the young girl's hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed valley and it was all he could cling to.But presently an involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of torture.She pressed her lips together and sat still.The inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if her own slender fingers would be crushed in its gripe.It was one of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could not stir from her place.Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also must suffer uncomplaining.In the moment of her sharpest pain she did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying man's moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of agony were glistening on her own.How long this lasted she never could tell.Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about;but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I! --What is that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.--For you to drink,--said the torturer to the little woman.--She could not think that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her alive for her confession.The torturer knew better than she.
After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,--without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris, released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only utterance of her long agony.
Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's Hill burial-ground.You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.
You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless the stone is wrong.