University of Virginia Library

38. CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A SORE CONSCIENCE AND TENDER HEART.

Lehming went to his room not alone, for a train of perplexities and anxieties
followed him, and, as we have already said, he did not sleep.

He had such a sense of guilt that it seemed to him as if he had never done
wickedness before, although during his pure life a scrupulous conscience had
wounded him with many arrows.

“Particeps criminis!” he repeated to himself a hundred times. “I am
aiding and abetting in the concealment of a murderer. I am helping to hide
one who has shed the blood of his father's brother; the assassin of an old man
as venerable for goodness as for years.”

“Is it possible?” he queried as often. “Have I not misunderstood this
poor, confused child? Has she not misunderstood events? What are the
grounds of her conviction? Eyesight? She can hardly mean less; nothing
less would have driven her from her betrothed lover; she is too true in heart
to be moved by less.”

“I cannot believe such a monstrous thing,” he declared over and over
again. “Edward never was evil enough to commit a crime. He had in those
days no conscience toward God, but he had a conscience toward man. He
would break divine laws but not human laws. There are thousands and thousands
of such cases. There are infidels and atheists whose lives are stainless,
honorable, beautiful. We who believe cannot comprehend it, but we are compelled
to admit it. Edward was honorable; he was a gentleman; he could
not murder.”

There were moments during which he tried to persuade himself that Nestoria
was insane. “But no,” he decided; “I cannot believe it any more than
I can hope it; a clearer, steadier intellect never came face to face with mine.
Madness could get no hold on such physical and mental health as hers. In all
the sorrow and terror which must have tormented her she has not even had a
brain fever. Looking at such a constitution as that, I must concede her entire
sanity.”

“Ah! there is some error,” he frequently insisted, or rather pleaded.
“Some day events will force the real murderer to light, and compel him to
say to Edward, You are innocent! Some day the mists of this mystery will
blow away, and we shall behold the actual fact of crime, hideous enough, but
endurable. Denunciation now might be calamitous and horrible falsehood.
Nestoria is right; we must wait. There is no peril to justice in waiting.
Edward will not fly; not even though he be guilty; least of all if he be
guilty.”

“Wait!” was his final conclusion. He started from it and returned to it
many times; he was like a bird tied by the leg who flutters uselessly; it was
in vain that his conscience and his reason strove to tear him away; his promise
and his wishes both bound him to that word, Wait.

In these struggles the darkness of latter night and the grayness of early
morning flitted by. He was accustomed to rise at sunrise, breakfast on a roll

and a cup of coffee which he made for himself, and go over the lessons which
he would have to hear during the day, coaching up in them as carefully as if
he were pupil instead of teacher. This morning he was tempted to lie a while
later; his head reeled and his whole feeble body ached with the fever of sleeplessness;
but, with that martyr-like spirit which formed a large part of his
character, he resisted the temptation.

It was a trial to him to approach his mirror and face its pitiless candor. He
knew that he should be uglier than usual; that he should find himself little
less than repulsive. He was not one of those plain people who can create an
illusion about their own plainness, discovering in it some redeeming feature,
which makes amends for surrounding imperfections, and drawing therefrom a
comfortable sense of self-admiration. From the earliest days of childhood that
he could remember, he had been keenly conscious of his utter lack of comeliness;
and the response of looking-glasses, that benediction of simple joy to so
many, had always been to him a message of wretched humilitation. With
beautiful meekness and self-control he had fought with this aversion to a keen
spiritual pain, and forced himself into long contemplation of his ugliness.
Every day he made it a point to stand for a minute or so before his mirror, surveying
his misshapen head, his irregular features, and his yellow complexion,
and saying to himself with self-loathing, but with submission, “Thus it has
pleased God to make me.”

This morning the trial was doubly hard to bear. Never before had he been
so desirous of appearing so far agreeable to himself as to give him a hope of
becoming agreeable to some fellow creature. Nestoria, with her childlike and
touching beauty, her immense sorrows, and her sweet endurance, had dazzled
his intellect and won his heart. He believed that she would never return to
the man whom she had loved, and that some day, in pure loneliness and grief,
she would intrust herself to some other protector. To be that other Lehming
was willing to sacrifice whatever other good there might be for him in life,
and to complete the gift, if need be, with his death. Yet he knew that the
moment he came face to face with his mirror, he should see himself to be totally
unworthy of the affectionate regard of any woman.

He approached the cruel truth-teller with as much repugnance as if it were
a mortal foe, ready to plunge a dagger into his breast. He looked into it; he
beheld his long, coarse face, squalid with trouble and want of rest; he suffered
under the spectacle, but he did not flinch from it. To this remorseless Moloch
he dragged all his delicate, throbbing hopes, and sacrificed them as the Tyrians
sacrificed their little ones. He did not turn away until it seemed to him
that the inhuman offering had been completed.

“I must live for others,” he said as he left the mirror. “No one but a dog
would ever live for me. If I had a little less reason and faith than I have,
I
should say that the Redeemer could not have died for me, so insignificant and
despicable do I seem to myself.”

An hour later, after he had prepared his lessons, he heard the step of Imogen
Eleonore in the passage, joined her, and inquired after Nettie. To his
great relief (for up to this moment he did not know that the girl had not fled)
he learned that she was in her room asleep. In his place another man might
have been annoyed because she could slumber while he had waked through
both night and dawn on her account. Lehming felt only pleasure and wonder,
as if over a beneficent miracle.

“What health!” he marvelled to himself. “What health of mind and

body! Lesser troubles and perils than hers have sent men into sleepless nervousness,
ending in insanity. What is not such an organization capable of?”
That day he gave out to his scholars as the subject for English composition,
“Health.”

“Health of body and of mind,” he lectured with enthusiasm. “Without it
we can do little or nothing. From health we get that calmness and that endurance
in labor which make labor effective. At twenty-two the young Condé
slept until the opening guns of his first battle. From the tranquil and restorative
slumber of health he was awakened with difficulty to win the decisive victory
of Rocroi. Nature, or rather the Allfather who is nature, had planned
him for vast toil and great deeds. If you wish to accomplish much, you must
establish health as a starting-post. It is to the man of genius what the earth
was to Antæus; if he cannot touch it in his falls, he falls never to rise again.
Without it there can hardly be any splendid productiveness or large usefulness.”

All that day he saw nothing of Nestoria, and knew of her only that she had
not fled. In the evening he went to his study, laid out the unfinished manuscript
of a story (for boys), and tried to write. But the chariots of fancy drave
heavily, and he could not get through a single sentence. He opened a book;
of course it was a masterpiece of one of his favorite great authors; he wanted
a strong and noble stimulus for his flagging spirit. But the pages of Hawthorne
were as dull and cold to him as were the pages which lay before him in
his own handwriting. A night without rest, followed by a day of anxiety and
wearing inward debates, had utterly jaded both body and mind. Gradually his
long, unshapely chin drooped to his prominent breast-bones, and he sank into
the hard, horny gripe of the sleep of utter exhaustion.

Roused after a time by the consciousness of some presence, he became
aware that Nestoria was sitting by his fire and gazing upon his face, meanwhile
warming her little hands with a kitten-like grace and tranquillity. She
greeted his awakening with one of her peculiar smiles, a smile which was full
of sweetness as well as of plaintiveness, reminding him of sunshine beaming
through the curtains of rain.

“I am glad you have slept,” she said in a soothing tone, as if she were a
nurse and he her patient. “I am afraid that my troubles kept you awake last
night.”

“Your voice is like an æolian harp,” he answered dreamily. “It sings
because of storms, or in spite of them.”

There was no reply, except that her smile became a thought more sad,
while retaining all its sweetness.

“I am greatly obliged to you for not going away,” he presently continued,
recovering his waking senses. “You promised to remain, but it was a promise
hard to keep. I hope and believe that you will not be suffered to repent of it.”

“I stayed to confide in you,” she said. “You are so good and sympathetic
that I cannot help trusting you, and leaning upon you. Now that my father
and Judge Wetherel are gone, it seems to me that you must be the best man in
the world. I cannot make up my mind to leave you I must have at least
one comforter in all this wretched earthly wilderness. It is dangerous to stay;
but I cannot, cannot go—at least not yet.”

“You force me to do what you wish,” he responded, after surveying her
for some time in great perplexity of soul. “I still believe that I ought to urge
you to go before the authorities at once, and tell all you know. I still feel that

it is my duty to demand that step of you. But I am unable to demand it. I
must let you judge this tremendous matter for yourself. You must have the
time for deliberation that you require. We will wait.”

“We must!” she decreed with quiet firmness, and seemingly without considering
difficulties or adverse arguments, just as a child says, “I must have
the moon.”

On this basis they continued their life. Lehming had hoped to gain, little
by little, such an influence over the girl as would enable him to persuade her
into discharging her conscience of the load which oppressed it, and into clearing
up the mystery which had thus far balked the inquisitions of justice. But
instead of his mind encroaching upon hers, it was hers which day by day
gained empire over his. The moral force which springs from feeling was in
this case too mighty for the moral force which springs from conscience. The
woman's instinctive resoluteness defeated the man's superior reason.

He was almost carried away by her. He began to think of accepting his
portion, or at least some portion of the Wetherel estate, and devoting it to her
service. Would he be justified, he occasionally asked himself, in transporting
her to a foreign land, where she might be safe from the houndings of law, and
pass her days without terror? As yet he had not the presumption to query
whether it might not be right for him to unite her blighted life to his own
blighted life. He bowed down to her in secret; he silently gave her all that
exuberance of affection in his nature which no one had cared to reap; in one
plain word, he loved her. But he was too humble, too keenly aware of what
he considered his repulsive imperfections, to approach the idea of marrying
her otherwise than slowly and unconsciously.