The Last Days of a Rake

confessional. There was an English minister in the little entrepôt who was a particularly good fellow, not one of his multitudinous tribe who would fault a fellow for enjoying a bottle of wine or a woman’s charms. He went to this man, asked for his help and the fellow’s advice was quick and to the point. Lankin should go home.
    England. What is it about a man’s life that no matter where he has been, no matter how varied his experience, that word is a charm upon the senses, bringing with it the scent of heather and the feel of mist on the face, pudding bubbling in a stew pot, coal smoke and an hundred other sensory experiences? Whatever it is, it worked upon Lankin, and he remembered his youth with a nostalgic longing, a desire to return to his home country, the green pastures of Kent and the shore of the gray churning Channel, seabirds wheeling above. That single meeting and the minister’s advice, became a pivot. Lankin turned and looked back in horror. He had wasted forty years on self-indulgence and self-deception.
    He rallied and returned to England, but what a changed country! The last George was dead and England was crisscrossed with iron leviathans belching steam and whistling imperiously to oxen and cattle and sheep to get out of their self-important and unmovable path. Rail, in its infancy when Lankin left his country to travel, had become a full-blown adolescent, importunate and noisy. Even so, he was grateful to be home. The bracing Channel wind seemed to sweep from him the lingering lassitude that kept him in the thrall of opium, and he left his addiction on the boat like an undesirable piece of luggage.
    The climate was not kind, though, and Lankin soon found that the cold and damp exacerbated his illness. Should he stay? Or should he go, perhaps to prolong his life, to Spain or Portugal?

Part 12 - Departing at Dawn
    “But you decided to stay here.”
    Lankin nodded, his eyes closed. “That was…three years ago. I spent the intervening time repenting, John. Oh yes, a penitent I have become. And good deeds—while I was able—I did them by the score, but the lives I ruined weigh on me like Coleridge’s albatross.” He opened his eyes, and his gaze, wretched with suffering, fixed on Hamilton. “What good is penance, my friend? What good, I ask?”
    Hamilton ordered a cool, damp cloth from the teary-eyed maid and pressed it to Lankin’s fevered brow. He muttered a prayer under his breath, then, donning his clerical robe and retrieving his Bible, he knelt by his friend and performed the ritual of absolution, which Lankin’s confessions seemed to deserve.
    “Penance, my friend, has cleansed your soul of the guilt of your past behavior. The Lord has put away all your sins.”
    “How can that be,” Lankin whispered, “when every person I have harmed bears the burden of my sin?” He coughed, spitting blood into a snowy handkerchief, and it was ten minutes before he could continue, but when he did, he said, “Those girls—the poor girls I seduced and betrayed—and the young men, the ones who I induced to bankrupt their families…What good does my absolution do to them?”
    Honesty would not allow Hamilton to offer false reassurance. “Not one iota of good, Edgar.”
    Lankin nodded, his eyes closed and his breath rattling in his throat. Hamilton regarded his friend’s wan face with compassion, and leaned over, giving him a sip of cool water. Placing the glass back on the table, knowing it might be the last time he did that, he gently said, “You must forgive yourself, my friend, because you have confessed and received absolution for your part in their downfall. Somewhere, somehow, I pray that each of those men and women are confessing their own responsibility, for you did not force anyone to follow your lead.”
    The patter of driving rain on the window and the rattling of the sash were the only sounds in the room for a long time, time that Hamilton spent in prayer and in contemplation of Lankin’s tale, and his life, and his ultimate penitence. Straw on the street outside deadened the sound of carriages passing, a tribute to the dying man inside.
    How many men like Lankin were there, fellows who may have done good but out of lassitude, instead, did evil? It puzzled Hamilton that evil was so often the easier path, while good required effort and dedication. Was there another path, a neutral one that meandered between resolute evil and shining good?
    Perhaps there was. If Lankin had