of which has been known to occur among people we hear of; people of
whom our friends know and, whispering, tell the tale. A woman called
to see Althea--a woman who had possibly been comely at one time in her
life but was no longer, a creature unprepossessing enough now. With her
was a child two or three years old. It was not a pleasant story she
told, but she told it in a way convincing to her hearer. She was the
woman, she said, who should have been David Phillips’s wife; the child
was hers and his, but he had cast them both off. They were in want;
would Mrs. Phillips help them?
She gave the woman money and sent her away in haste, telling her never
to return, and that she did not believe her story; but she never
doubted its truth for a moment. Would a woman, even a lost creature,
advertise her shame needlessly? She had never dreamed that her husband,
David Phillips, had ever been other than upright and honorable, and
had heard and thought but little in her life about evil of this sort.
But she had seen that David was changed; he was growing more quiet and
reticent every day. Perhaps he was losing his love for her, and he had
not seemed to care when the baby died. Her little son! And he was the
father of her son.
A whirlwind of rage swept over her at the thought that he had covered
the memory of this lost darling with shame, that he had brought
humiliation upon her. How could she go on and live in the same world
with him and with--those others. A wild impulse to take herself out of
it came to her; a vision of the river, deep and dark, rose temptingly.
Her wrath turned against the man who had deceived her. At times
she longed for him to be there that she might face him with her
knowledge of his iniquity; then, with revulsion of feeling, rejoiced
at his absence. No one seeing her then could charge her with being
unemotional. Vindictive passion stirred her one hour, shame weighed
her down the next, then followed a wave of grief for the vanished
days of peace. Life was not the joyous thing it had seemed in the old
Greenbrier days; now, she knew that it meant tears, and heartache,
and sorrows worse than death. She wrote brief notes in reply to her
husband’s letters. Why she postponed writing him that their lives
could not go on together she hardly knew, since she had determined to
send such a letter. One day she began the task. Before she had finished
illumination came. She knew suddenly that she loved the man she was
preparing to put out of her life--loved him in spite of his sins, of
his wrong to herself, loved him with an intensity she had not dreamed
of when she married him. It was not the love she had read of and had
not thought to experience, it was a thousand times stronger. She did
not want it so; she resented the truth and would have denied it to
herself but could not.
For days she fought with her impulses, and then resisted them no
longer. She was too frank and transparent to dream of concealing her
knowledge of the wretched secret, and, besides, she had conceived a
plan whose carrying out involved mutual explanation and consultations.
With trembling haste, now that she had resolved upon a course, she
wrote the letter telling him her story of the woman and child, of her
grief and resentment, and, finally, of her love and willingness to
forgive and receive him back. Then she added--it was the crowning bit
of self-sacrifice--“I want to provide for the child; if you like, I
will find it and bring it home.”
She sent the letter and waited. With all her spirit of forgiveness and
her impatience for his return she was not unmindful of the fact that
she was doing an unusual thing, one he would have no right to expect, a
truly Christian act. Indeed, the spirit of condescension, of goodness
stooping to the sinner, was manifest in the letter.
She did not know where the woman and child might be found, but spent
those days of waiting in wandering about a quarter of the city she had
known but little of, thinking that by chance she might find them. Once
she caught a glimpse of the woman in a passing street car--a hard-faced
creature in tawdry garb she looked in the pitiless sunlight.
Hurrying home, a little belated, one evening, she was driven by a
sudden spring shower to the nearest shelter, which chanced to be a
dilapidated warehouse, hardly more than a shed, from whose open door
the sound of singing issued. By the dim and flickering light of a few
lanterns hung about she saw a motley company seated on improvised
benches, or standing next the wall. There were men who looked like
tramps and others, better clothed, who might be worse. There were women
who might be honest mothers of families, others who as surely were not.
Unwholesome looking children of various ages looked curiously on.
But one voice was heard; evidently the crowd was not familiar with the
words of the song. The man standing by an upturned box with a cheap
glass lamp upon it was the singer. “There Is a Fountain Filled With
Blood,” was the hymn; he sang one stanza through alone. As he began the
second a woman joined in in a thin, uncertain soprano:
“The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
And there may I, though vile as he,
Wash all my sins away,
Wash all my sins away.”
With the third verse the woman stopped and sat down, sobbing loudly,
but not before Althea had seen her face; it was that of the woman she
was seeking.
The man by the box began to speak in a low, conversational tone. As he
stepped out of the shadow into the light of the lamp she recognized,
with a start of surprise, the “hard case” of the Greenbrier revival.
He did not look like a hard case now. He was shabbily dressed, but
his thin, dark face wore an expression of earnestness, of absorbed
interest, of what even seemed like love for the people about him.
“I was vile, like that thief,” he said; “I defied God. I cared
nothing for Him; I believed He cared nothing for me. I broke His laws
recklessly and rejoiced in my wickedness, or I pretended to rejoice,
though I could never quite quiet the pricks of conscience, for I
knew better. I had a mother who loved me and prayed for me. One day
I suddenly saw all my guilt and was without hope, but light came and
forgiveness even to me--to me!--to me!--and since that day ‘redeeming
love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.’”
Then he pleaded with his hearers in impassioned but simple language to
leave their sins and live good lives for the sake of the One who died
upon the cross, for their own sakes, for the sake of those about them.
It was not a sermon; it was not even a connected discourse; it was
neither learned nor logical, but it was a cry from the heart, and the
listeners knew it and were moved accordingly.
Althea knew that she had encountered again the mysterious something
which had passed her by. The hard case whose conversion at Greenbrier
had been so lightly regarded that he was not counted in by the
revivalists when they “made up their jewels,” had found there the
spiritual gift that made him a new man. Sometimes she had suspected
that those who professed to have consciously won this blessing deceived
themselves, but there was something genuine here. But she could not
speculate on this now. She stepped to the side of the yellow-haired
girl and touched her arm.
“Where is your baby?” she whispered. The girl looked up with red eyes,
stupidly. “My baby?” she repeated wonderingly, and then comprehended.
Through the artificial color on her cheeks a genuine red showed. She
dropped her head and then lifted it and looked straight in Althea’s
eyes.
“I have no baby, lady; I never had. I was just fooling you. I wanted
money. I never knew your husband only by name, and he never saw or
heard of me, I reckon. I read in the paper that he’d gone to New York.
I wanted money, and I’d seen you, and I guessed you were, well--an easy
mark, and so I fixed up the story. I thought you looked, too, as if you
had no sympathy for such as me, and maybe that made me pick on you to
give you a little trouble instead of another. You didn’t know a body
could be so wicked, did you? The baby is Mrs. Caffrey’s, across the
street. His mother’s good to me and lets me take care of him when she
goes washing. I’ve been a bad girl, lady, but I’m going to be better.
I’ll pay you back that money some day.”
But Mrs. Phillips was gone. She flew across the street. The door of the
two-room shanty was open and she stepped in after a hasty knock. The
baby--she would have known it anywhere--lay asleep on a bed; a woman
stood at a table ironing.
“Are you Mrs. Caffrey, and whose baby is this?” asked the visitor.
“Oim Mrs. Caffrey, and thot boy is mine, born in howly wedlock, av ye
plaze, an’ wud have a father this blessed minute av ut hadn’t bin for
the haythenish shtame cars thot wudn’t shtop to rouse up a man who’d
set down on the thrack to rest as he was comin’ from a wake. An’ phwat
wud ye be likin’ to know for, ma’am?”
“It isn’t Maggie Miller’s baby?”
“Maggie Miller--the likes av her! My little Patsy asked av his mother
was an ondacent famale--him that had an honest father married to his
mother by the praste. Och, the impident question! Maggie, she’s got no
baby, betther’s her luck. Not thot Maggie’s so bad, poor body. She’s
good to little Patsy, an’ she’s over now helpin’ thot preacher man
sing the hymns she used to hear in the counthry when she was a betther
gurrl. She’d be betther askin’ the Howly Mother to shpake for her, an’
be confessin’ her sins to Father Ryan; but av this warehouse religion
kapes her from divilmint it’s not the likes av me to shpake ill av it.
But phwat is it, leddy?”
The lady, with a strange look on her face, apologized confusedly for
her visit and hurried up the street, Mrs. Caffrey peering after her and
talking volubly to herself. Her mind was in a tumult. She had condemned
her husband on the first charge against him, without question and
without giving him a chance for defense. She had emphasized the injury
by offering to extend pardon to him. Pardon! When she was the one to
need forgiveness! And he was away and she wanted to see him at once.
In the morning came a message. There had been a railroad accident at
a junction fifty miles away. David Phillips had been seriously hurt.
Would she come?
She was on the train in an hour. It seemed years since the calm,
uneventful period of her early married life when she had sometimes
fancied that she was born with a limited capacity for emotion. She knew
better now; depths had been sounded and were stirred. She had learned
what love and suffering meant, and more suffering was before her. The
thing that most bewildered her was being suddenly and unquestionably
in the wrong. She had been accustomed always to be right, or to think
herself so. She had never been a suppliant to God or man. She wondered
if she had been self-righteous, and was filled with sudden humility.
She was ready to humble herself before man, at least. The train did not
move fast enough. Would David forgive her? Would she reach him in time?
She found him at a farm-house with a broken leg and many bruises, but
he would live. She had long explanations to make, but as she knelt by
his side could only gasp:
“I was wrong; it was not true; I was mistaken.”
He drew her face to his, and she knew pardon was hers, and love.
“It hurt me, sweetheart, that you believed the story,” he whispered,
faintly, “but when you were ready to take me back in spite of what
you believed, when you could forgive such a wrong, I knew you loved
me--and--and I had been afraid.”
He closed his eyes with a look of utter peace and the doctors decreed
silence, but she sat by his side through the day, nor knew that the
hours were long.
The miracle of spring was being wrought upon the world. But yesterday
the trees had been bare; to-day in the sunshine their buds had burst
into green, the peach trees were pink with bloom, the dandelions shone
yellow in the grass. A sense of growth, of transformation, was in the
very air.
What comes so suddenly to buds and flowers may come to the human soul.
Under the sod and through the harsh reign of frosts and snows the way
had been prepared for the wonder of the trees. Motherhood, bereavement
and tears, injured love and humiliation, and the later happiness had
done their silent work upon the woman nature. The time had come for a
new birth.
In the dusk she left David and wandered down a grassy lane. In the
western sky beyond the broad prairie, the gorgeous tints of the sunset
faded into blue and pearl. The soft, damp air brought the smell of
the fresh earth from the newly plowed field; a spicy odor from a wild
apple tree, now a mass of pale pink, was wafted to her. A robin chirped
sleepily among the young maple leaves overhead. The tender, elusive
charm of the season of growth was all about her. But was it only this
that so moved her, she vaguely wondered. She had known the joy of
spring before, and it was not like this. Her soul seemed lifted up. She
felt dimly that a greater glory than she had known was just beyond.
Inside the open door of a little cottage down the lane a woman sat by a
lamp sewing and singing. Her voice rose sweet and clear:
“Just as I am--though tossed about.
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
With fears within and foes without--
O Lamb of God, I come!”
All her life she had been familiar with the hymns that expressed the
thoughts of the world seeking God--hymns of penitence, of agony, of
peace and praise, of ecstatic worship--and she had not known their
meaning. All at once light came. She lifted up her arms.
“O Lamb of God! O Lamb of God!” she whispered. The cloud that had
obscured her spiritual sight lifted. She saw herself an imperfect human
creature, but, with all her faults and frailties, an atom of the divine
essence; her little life a part of the divine plan; her sorrows and
trials the discipline inflicted by love. Before her suddenly appeared
her lost child, the child she had mourned without hope, a glorified
vision. Its baby hands beckoned her; its sweet lips smiled. Love for
child and husband, the old earthly love, filled her bosom with a power
she had not known, but there was a love greater than this. Could that
be hers, also?
She tried to pray, but could not form her thoughts. Was that a touch
upon her hair, a whisper in her ear? Surely she heard the words:
“Come unto Me all ye that are heavy laden.” She stood trembling as in a
holy presence. Her face turned toward the sky.
“O Lamb of God--O Lamb of God, I come.”
He heard in heaven. Joy enfolded her as a garment. Divine peace fell
upon her. Her soul was born.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.