She was gone. On no other night in the year could he so ill have spared her patient face.

Oh! Better to have no home in which to lay his head than to have a home and dread to go to it through such a cause. He ate and drank, for he was exhausted—but he little knew or cared what; and he wandered about in the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and brooding and brooding.

No word of a new marriage had ever passed between them; but Rachael had taken great pity on him years ago, and to her alone he had opened his closed heart all this time on the subject of his miseries; and he knew very well that if he were free to ask her, she would take him. He thought of the home he might at that moment have been seeking with pleasure and pride; of the different man he might have been that night; of the lightness then in his now heavy-laden breast; of the then restored honour, self-respect, and tranquillity all torn to pieces. He thought of the waste of the best part of his life, of the change it made in his character for the worse every day, of the dreadful nature of his existence, bound hand and foot, to a dead woman, and tormented by a demon in her shape. He thought of Rachael, how young when they were first brought together in these circumstances, how mature now, how soon to grow old. He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path—for him—and how he had sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face, that smote him with remorse and despair. He set the picture of her up beside the infamous image of last night, and thought, Could it be that whole earthly course of one so gentle, good, and self-denying was subjugate to such a wretch as that!

Filled with these thoughts—so filled that he had an unwholesome sense of growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty light turn red—he went home for shelter.

CHAPTER XIII

Rachael

A CANDLE faintly burned in the window, to which the black ladder had often been raised for the sliding away of all that was most precious in this world to a striving wife and a brood of hungry babies; and Stephen added to his other thoughts the stern reflection, that of all the casualties of this existence upon earth, not one was dealt out with so unequal a hand as Death. The inequality of Birth was nothing to it. For, say that the child of a King and the child of a Weaver were born tonight in the same moment, what was that disparity to the death of any human creature who was serviceable to, or beloved by, another, while this abandoned woman lived on!

From the outside of his home he gloomily passed to the inside, with suspended breath and with a slow foot-step. He went up to his door, opened it, and so into the room.

Quiet and peace were there. Rachael was there, sitting by the bed.

She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight of his mind. She sat by the bed, watching and tending his wife. That is to say, he saw that someone lay there, and he knew too well it must be she, but Rachael’s hands had put a curtain up, so that she was screened from his eyes. Her disgraceful garments were removed, and some of Rachael’s were in the room. Everything was in its place and order as he had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the hearth was freshly swept. It appeared to him that he saw all this in Rachael’s face, and looked at nothing besides. While looking at it, it was shut out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes were filled, too.

She turned again towards the bed, and, satisfying herself that all was quiet there, spoke in a low, calm, cheerful voice.

“I am glad you have come at last, Stephen. You are very late.”

“I ha’ been walking up an’ down.”

“I thought so. But ’tis too bad a night for that. The rain falls very heavy, and the wind has risen.”

The wind? True. It was blowing hard. Hark to the thundering in the chimney, and the surging noise! To have been out in such a wind, and not to have known it was blowing!

“I have been here once before today, Stephen. Landlady came round for me at dinner-time. There was someone here that needed looking to, she said. And ’deed she was right. All wandering and lost, Stephen. Wounded, too, and bruised.”

He slowly moved to a chair and sat down, drooping his head before her.

“I came to do what little I could, Stephen; first, for that she worked with me when we were girls both, and for that you courted her and married her when I was her friend——”

He laid his furrowed forehead on his hand, with a low groan.

“And next, for that I know your heart, and am right sure and certain that ’tis far too merciful to let her die, or even so much as suffer, for want of aid. Thou knowest who said, ‘Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone at her!’ There have been plenty to do that. Thou art not the man to cast the last stone, Stephen, when she is brought so low.”

“Oh Rachael, Rachael!”

“Thou hast been a cruel sufferer, Heaven reward thee!” she said, in compassionate accents.