CHAPTER XLIII
TRUE NOBILITY
At the end of two hours, Earle went back to his charge, with a letter in his hand.
Tom had been much refreshed by his nice dinner and had been asleep for an hour.
But he now lay with a troubled, anxious expression on his face, which Earle could not fail to notice, even though his lips relaxed into a faint smile of welcome at his entrance.
He went up to the couch where he was reclining, and said, as he handed him the letter:
“I would like, if you feel able, to have you direct this letter to your mother, and after that, you can read it if you like. I have thought it best to write her something about your illness, knowing that she must be very anxious at not hearing from you for so long. I would gladly have done so before had you spoken of it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Tom said, in a low voice, as, taking the envelope and the pen filled with ink that Earle had brought him, he directed the letter, in rather a trembling hand. Then he unfolded it and read the few simple words that were written within.
“Dear Madam,” it said, “your son has been quite sick during the past three months, and I write this so that you may feel no further anxiety regarding him. He is improving daily, and will, we hope, soon be well. Should you feel able to come to him, you will come directly to Wycliffe, where you will be cordially received. Enclosed you will find a sum that your son would have sent you before now had he been able to write. Very truly,
Earle Wayne.”
A five-pound note had been enclosed within the letter, at the sight of which Tom Drake’s lips suddenly tightened into a firm line.
He read the letter through, and, when he had finished, it dropped from his fingers upon the counterpane, and lay there while he turned his face to the wall, and for some minutes did not speak.
“What did you do that for?” he at last demanded, almost fiercely, but with lips that trembled in spite of himself.
“To comfort an aged, anxious mother, and give a sick fellow a chance to see a familiar face. You would surely like to see your mother, Tom?”
“Yes; but it will be a little hard on the old lady when she finds we’ll have to part again so soon,” he said, with a stony look in his eyes.
“Don’t think of that now,” Earle said, kindly. “Is there anything more you would like me to add to the letter?”
Tom shook his head, and, picking up the letter and the note, tried to replace them in the envelope, but his hand shook so that he could not do it.
Earle gently took them from him, folded and sealed the letter, and went out, leaving him alone.
A groan burst from the huge chest of the once hardened wretch as the door closed after him, and burying his head in his pillow, he lay a long time without moving.
The next morning he seemed very silent and much depressed. It was a fine day, and Earle took him for a drive in the beautiful park around Wycliffe.
He did not talk much, but appeared lost in thought until the horses’ heads were turned toward home; then he astonished Earle by seizing his hand and bursting out:
“Sir, can you believe a wretch like me has any heart left? I didn’t think it myself, but you’ve got down to it at last. I’ll plead guilty—though once I thought that ten thousand devils couldn’t drive me to it; but you’ve broken me down completely; I can never hold up my head again, and I deserve the very worst they can give me. I’d like it over with and settled as soon as possible after she has been here. She’ll not stay long, probably. I’m well enough not to be a burden here any longer, and I’d feel easier in my mind to know just what is before me.”
The poor fellow was frightfully pale, and so excited that his sentences were disjointed and broken, and spoken through teeth so tightly shut that Earle could hear them grate.
The young marquis was deeply affected; he had uttered no fawning or servile protestations of sorrow or shame, asked for no mercy, expected none; but he could see that he was, as he said “completely broken down;” his heart had been melted by kindness, and little shoots of the original good that was in him had begun to spring up in the unusual atmosphere by which he had recently been surrounded.
Earle believed that a great and radical change was begun in the man, and, if rightly dealt with now, he might be saved.
Kindness had melted him; then why had he not a right to feel that kindness would hold him and mold him anew? His was undoubtedly one of those natures which grow reckless and harden itself against everything like stern justice and punishment, and only grow more desperate at the thought of penalty.
If tried and sentenced now for the attempt at robbery, even though he might protest himself deserving of it, yet he would go to his doom in dogged, sullen silence; nothing would ever reach his better nature again, and he would die as miserable as he had lived.
“Tom,” Earle said, gravely, after a thoughtful silence, during which these things had passed through his mind, “from what you say, I judge that you regret your past life, and, if you were to live it over again, you would spend it very differently.”
“Regrets won’t do me any good, and I don’t like to cry for quarter when I’m only getting my just deserts,” he said, with a kind of reckless bravery; then he added, with a heavy sigh that spoke volumes: “But I think it would be sort of comforting to a chap if he could look back and feel that he’d tried to live like a—man.”
“Then why not try to live like a ‘man’ in the future?” Earle said, earnestly, his fine face glowing with a noble purpose.
“Transportation for life isn’t likely to give a body much courage for anything,” the man answered, moodily, his face hardening at the thought.
“No; and I hope no such evil will ever overtake you to discourage you if you really have a desire to mend your course. Tom, you expect that I am going to arraign you before a tribunal, and have you punished for the wrong you have done me; but—I am going to do no such thing.”
A gasp interrupted him at this, and Tom Drake sank back in the carriage as if the intelligence had taken all his strength, but Earle went on:
“If you had appeared to have no regret for the past—if, as you gained in strength, you had exhibited no sorrow, nor expressed any appreciation of what had been done for you, or any desire to retrieve your errors, I might have felt that it would be better for others that you should be put where you could do no further mischief. But if you really want to try to become a good man, I am willing to help you. I will be your friend; I will give you employment as soon as you are able for it, and as long as you show a disposition to live aright, I will keep the secret of your past, and no harm shall ever come to you on account of it. Now tell me, Tom, if you are willing to make the trial? Shall we start fair and square from this moment, and see how much better we can make the world for having lived in it?” and Earle turned to the astonished man with a frank, kindly smile on his earnest, handsome face. The man was speechless—dumb.
Such a proposal as this had never occurred to him. He had fully expected that as soon as he should be able to bear it he would be transferred from his present luxurious quarters to some vile prison, there to await his trial, and then he had no expectation of anything better than to be sentenced to banishment as a convict for a long term of years, or perhaps for life.
Instead, here was hope, happiness, and the prospects of earning an honest living held out to him, and by the hand of him whom he had so terribly wronged.
No words came to his lips to express his astonishment, nor the strange tumult of feelings that raged within his heart. His whole soul bowed down before the grand nature that could rise above his own injuries and do this noble thing.
Tamora, Queen of the Goth, when suing for the life of her first-born son, prayed thus before Titus Andronicus:
“Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them, then, in being merciful;
Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.”
And thus Earle Wayne partook of the nature of the gods; his mercy, his grand self-abnegation, and forgiveness, with the helping hand held out so kindly to one of the earth’s lost and degraded ones, was indeed the surest badge of his nobility. And Marion Vance, in her meekness, had prophesied truly when she had told him, on her dying bed, that “good would come out of her sorrow.” She had said:
“You may, perhaps, be a nobler man for having been reared in obscurity; you will, at all events, realize that a noble character is more to be desired than a mere noble-sounding name.”
He was now living out the pure precepts that she had so untiringly taught him during those long, sorrowful years when she was so sadly and uncomplainingly bearing her banishment and disgrace.
Tom Drake dropped his face upon his hands to hide the humility and reverence he could not speak, and the tears he could not stay and was ashamed to show.
Earle Wayne’s enemy was utterly routed at last; he had stormed a citadel by a method of warfare hitherto untried, and it lay in ruins at his feet.
“I—I’m afraid I do not quite understand. You will not have me arrested or tried—I am to be a free man?” Tom Drake breathed, in low, suppressed tones.
“No; if you are sentenced to drag out a weary term of years as a convict, you would become discouraged, and be ready for almost any desperate deed if you should live to return; and, Tom, I have come to believe that you would really like to lead a different life from what your past has been.”
“I would, sir, I would; but I never should have thought of it but for you—but for that bullet. It was indeed, as you said, a ‘blessing in disguise,’” he said, weakly but earnestly.
Earle smiled his rare, luminous smile, then said, gravely:
“Then I will help you all I can, but you must do your share also; it cannot be done in a moment, and you must not get disheartened. It will be something like this wound of yours; sin, like the bullet, has entered deep—the disease lies deep, and only the most rigid and skillful handling, with patient endurance, will work the cure.”
He did not preach him a long sermon on human depravity, original sin, and the wrath of God.
This little warning was all he then gave, hoping by practical illustration to draw him by and by nearer to the Divine Master whose commands he was endeavoring to obey.
“And you—you make no account of anything? You forgive all those three years—the harm to the girl? How can you?” and the man lifted his earnest, wondering eyes to the grand face at his side.
“Yes, Tom, I can forgive it all,” Earle said; but his face grew pale and a trifle pained at the remembrance of all that those words called up; “and I shall feel that the experience was not in vain if you do not disappoint my expectations. If you will faithfully and honestly strive to overcome whatever there is of evil within you, or whatever may tempt you in the future, I shall feel that your character reclaimed is the ‘good’ that has come out of my ‘sorrow.’ Tom, will you strive to make an honest man, God’s noblest work, of yourself? I want your promise.”
“Sir, from the bottom of my heart I’d like to be an honest man, but—I’m afraid I can’t stand it,” he said, huskily.
“Can’t stand what, Tom?” Earle asked, with a look of perplexity and anxiety.
Were the temptations and habits of the old life so strong that he could not relinquish or overcome them?
“I feel as if a millstone had crushed me; I’m afraid I can’t stand it to face you day after day, with the memory of all I’ve done staring me in the face.”
Earle’s face lighted—this was the best proof he had had of the man’s sincerity.
“Tom, I want to tell you a little story; you will recognize it, perhaps, as you say your mother is a Christian woman. There was once a Man who was crushed beneath the sins of a world. He wore a crown of thorns and the purple robe of scorn and derision. His tender flesh was pierced, bruised, and mangled by His enemies, and His only cry was, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ There came a time when I realized that my sins helped to do all this, and I felt something, as you say, as if a ‘millstone had crushed me,’ and as if I could never live in His presence with the memory of it ever in my mind. But I read in His word, ‘Thy sins are remembered no more against thee forever; they are blotted out.’ The same word tells me to ‘forgive as I am forgiven.’ Of course, we cannot actually forget all that we have suffered, nor who was the immediate cause of it, but we can cherish no evil—we can regard and treat as kindly those who have injured us as if it had never been. That is the way I want to ‘blot out’ all the past between you and me. Do you understand me, Tom?”
“Yes, sir,” Tom Drake said, in scarcely audible tones, but his face was full of feeling and of an earnest purpose.
“May I feel then, that I can trust you fully from this hour?”
“You may, sir,” very decidedly the reply came; and, after a moment’s hesitation, he continued, in a resolute tone: “I’ll not waste my breath nor weary you with promises; but, sir, I’ll begin to live from this moment.”
“That is right; and here is my hand to seal our compact;” and the young Marquis of Wycliffe grasped the hand of poor degraded Tom Drake as heartily as if he had been another peer of the realm.
He had won an enemy—he had conquered a reckless, defiant human heart, with neither sword nor spear, but by the power of love and kindness.
Thrice blessed Marion Vance! Out of her sorrow had grown her Christianity, out of her Christianity had grown the education of this noble man, and out of his nobility the salvation of another.
Who can estimate the mighty influence of a pure example and faithful precepts?
Did she, now looking down upon this scene, realize toward what all the dark and winding path of her desolate life had tended?
She had learned to trust while here, where the way was so dark that she could not see; and may we not hope that faith had now ended in sight and that the joy she had missed on earth was increased a hundredfold in the better world?
Neither Earle nor his companion spoke again during the remainder of their drive.
Tom Drake went immediately to his rooms when they reached the house, and no one but himself and his Maker knew how he passed that solitary hour that followed his return.
Earle gave the reins to a groom and went to the library to see if there were any letters, but a servant met him on the way and handed him a telegram that had just arrived. It was a cable dispatch from the United States.
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