“Now she will sleep. Mr. Vincent, I congratulate you on having such pure blood in your veins; not robust, you know, but far better—such sweet, perfect health as one rarely meets with nowadays,” said the doctor, under his breath, with professional enthusiasm; “all the better for your sister that she came of such a stock. My wife, now, is another example—not robust, as I say—natures delicately organised, but in such exquisite adjustment, and with such elasticity! Mrs. Vincent will go to sleep like a baby, and wake able for—anything that God may please to send her,” said Dr. Rider with reverence. “They will both sleep till tomorrow if all goes well. Hush!—Well, I may be absurd, for neither of them could hear us here; but still it is best to err on the safe side.”
“But Susan—you are not deceiving us—Susan is—” said Vincent, with sudden alarm.
“She is asleep,” said Dr. Rider; “and, if I can, I will remain till she wakes; it is life or death.”
They parted thus—the doctor to the little room below-stairs, where Vincent’s dinner awaited him, and the young minister himself to his own room, where he went into the darkness with a kind of bewildered uncertainty and incomprehension of the events about him. To think that this day, with all its strange encounters and unexpected incidents, was Sunday, as he suddenly remembered it to be—that this morning he had preached, and this evening had to preach again, completed in Vincent’s mind the utter chaos and disturbance of ordinary life. It struck him dumb to remember that by-and-by he must again ascend the pulpit, and go through all his duties. Was he an impostor, doing all this mechanically? He debated the question dully in his own mind, as he sat too much bewildered to do anything else in the dark in his bedchamber, pondering with a certain confused gravity and consolation over all that had happened. But faculties, which are confused by sudden comfort and relief, are very different from faculties obscured and confounded by suffering. He sat vaguely in the dark, wondering over his strange position. This morning, even in the height of his despair, he had at least some idea what he was going to do in that pulpit of Salem. It was a sacrifice—a martyrdom to accomplish—a wild outcry and complaint to pour forth to the world. This evening he sat wasting the precious moments in the soft darkness, without knowing a word of what he was to say—without being able to realise the fact, that by-and-by he should have to go out through the sharp air echoing with church-bells—to see once more all those watchful faces turned upon him, and to communicate such instruction as was in him to his flock. A sense of exhaustion and satisfaction was in Vincent’s heart. He sat listless in a vague comfort and weariness, his head throbbing with the fumes of his past excitement, yet not aching. It was only now that he realised the rolling off from his head of this dark cloud of horror and shame. Susan was recovering—Susan was innocent. He became aware of the facts much in the same way as his mother became aware of them ere she dropped to sleep in the blessed darkness of the adjoining room. Confused as he was, with his brain still full of the pulsations of the past, he was so far conscious of what had happened. He sat in his reverie, regardless of the time, and everything else that he ought to have attended to. The little maid came and knocked at his door to say his dinner had been waiting for an hour, and he answered, “Yes; he was coming,” but sat still in the darkness. Then the landlady herself, compunctious, beginning to feel the thrills of returning comfort which had entered her house, came tapping softly to say it was near six, and wouldn’t Mr. Vincent take something before it was time for chapel? Mr. Vincent said “Yes” again, but did not move; and it was only when he heard the church-bells tingling into the night air that he got up at last, and, stealing first to the door of Susan’s room, where he ascertained that she still slept, and then to his mother’s, where he could hear her soft regular breathing in the darkness, he went away in an indescribably exalted condition of mind to Salem and his duty. There is a kind of weakness incident to excitement of mind and neglect of body, which is akin to the ecstatic state in which men dream dreams and see visions. Vincent was in that condition tonight. He was not careful what anybody would say or think; he no longer pictured to himself the upturned faces in Salem, all conscious of the tragedy which was connected with his name. The sense of deliverance in his heart emancipated him, and gave a contrary impulse to his thoughts. In the weakness of an excited and exhausted frame, a certain gleam of the ineffable and miraculous came over the young man. He was again in the world where God stoops down to change with one touch of His finger the whole current of man’s life—the world of childhood, of genius, of faith; that other world, dark sphere of necessity and fate, where nothing could stay the development into dread immortality of the obstinate human intelligence, and where dreary echoes of speculation still questioned whether any change were possible in heart and spirit, or if saving souls were a mere figure of speech, floated away far off over his head, a dark
