“I ONLY REAPED WHAT I SOWED.”
Hammond awaited the woman whom he had saved from drowning.
“She has slept fairly well,” the landlady told him, “and I made her eat a
good breakfast that I carried up to her myself, Mr. Hammond!”
Now he waited to speak to her. A moment or two more, and the landlady
ushered her into the room, then slipped away.
“How can I ever repay you, sir!” cried the woman, seizing the hand that
Hammond held out to her.
For a moment or two her emotion was too great for further speech. Hammond
led her to an armchair and seated her. She sobbed convulsively for a
moment or two. He allowed her to sob. Presently tears came. The paroxysm
passed, the tears relieved her, and she lifted her sad, beautiful eyes to
his face.
“You know—oh, yes, you must know, Mr. Hammond—(I recognized you last
night)—how I came to be in the water. I tried to take my life. I was
miserable, despairing! God forgive me.”
His strong eyes were full of a rare tenderness, as he said, “But, Mrs.
Joyce, you surely know that death is not the end of all existence. I am
not what would be called a religious man, but every fibre of my inward
being tells me that death does not end all.”
He saw a shiver pass over her, as she hoarsely replied, “I, too, realize
that this morning, Mr. Hammond. But last night the madness of an
overwhelming despair was upon me. My life had been a literal hell for
years, until yesterday I could bear it no longer. I was famished with
hunger, sick with despair, and——”
She sighed wearily. “Perhaps,” she went on, “if you knew all I have
borne, you would not wonder at my rash, mad act.”
“Tell me your story, Mrs. Joyce,” he said, gently. “It may relieve your
overcharged heart, and, anyhow, I will be your friend, as far as I can.”
She sighed again. This time there was a note of relief, rather than
weariness, in the sigh.
“My father was a well-to-do farmer,” she began, “in North Hants. I was
the only child, and I fear I was spoiled. I received the best education
possible, and loved my studies for their own sake, for culture, in all
its forms, had a strong attraction for me. I had been engaged to a young
yeoman farmer for nearly a year. I had known him all my life, and we had
been sweethearts even as children. Then there came suddenly into my life
that man Joyce, for whom I sacrificed everything. God only knows how he
contrived to exercise such an awful fascination over me as to make me
leave everyone, everything, and marry him.”
For a moment she paused, and shuddered. Her voice, when she spoke, again,
was hollow, and full of tears.
“I killed my father by eloping on the very eve of my arranged marriage
with Ronald Ferris. Ronald left the country as soon as he could wind up
his affairs. And I—well, here in this mighty Babylon, I have ever since
been reaping some of the sorrow I had sown. Not a penny of my father’s
money ever reached me, and that brute Joyce only married me for what he
expected to get with me. He has done his best to make earth a hell for
me, and I, in my mad blindness, last night, almost exchanged earth’s
fleeting hell for God’s eternal hell.”
A look of shame filled her eyes as she lifted them to Hammond.
“What you reminded me of just now, Mr. Hammond, I, deep down in my soul,
know only too well—that death does not end all. My father was a true
Christian, and a lay preacher. I have travelled with him hundreds of
times to his preaching appointments, playing the harmonium and singing
solos for him in his services. More than once the sense of God’s claim
upon me was so great as almost to compel my yielding my heart and life.
Would to God I had! But my pride, my ambitions, strangled my good
desires, and, as I said just now, I broke my father’s heart. I killed
him, and ruined all my own life, though I have no pity for myself. Then
London life, my husband’s brutality, my own misery, all helped to drive
even the memory of God from my mind.”
“Yet,” broke in Hammond, “the Christian religion teaches that sorrow and
suffering ought to drive the possessor of the faith nearer to God.”
There was a hint of apology in his tones as he went on:
“Don’t misunderstand me, Mrs. Joyce; I only speak from hearsay. I have
heard parsons preach it, but I know nothing experimentally about these
things myself.”
She smiled in a slow, sad way, and, catching her breath in a kind of
quick sob, said: “Neither have I ever known anything experimentally of
these truths. I drifted into the outward form of a correct, religious,
life. I learned to like the brightness of our chapel services, the fun of
choir practice, the merry company, the adulation heaped upon me for my
solo-singing. Then there were the tea-meetings, the service of song, and
a multitude of other mild excitements which went to brighten the monotony
of a rural existence. But of God, of Christ, of the Divine life, I fear I
knew nothing.”
Hammond smiled inwardly as he listened to this strange confession. The
phraseology was new to him.
“It is the shibboleth of Nonconformity, I suppose,” he told himself. “And
I suppose each section of religious society has its own outward form of
things in which it trusts, thinking, caring, nothing for the great Divine
verities that should be the true religious life.”
He did not utter his thoughts aloud, but asked with some apparent
irrelevance, “Where is your husband, Mrs. Joyce?”
“Off on one of his drinking bouts, or maybe, locked up for drunkenness; I
cannot say.”
Her lifted eyes were full of beseeching, as she went on, “You will keep
secret, Mr. Hammond, all this wild, mad episode of my life. If only I
could know that the sad, mad, bad story was locked up between God and
you, your kind landlady and myself, I think I could go back and face my
misery better.”
“Do not fear, Mrs. Joyce,” he replied quickly. “The affair shall be as
though it had never been. I can answer for Mrs. Belcher, my landlady; and
for myself I give you my word, and——”
“God reward you, sir!” she sobbed. “Already you have given me clearer
views of Him than any minister or any sermon ever did.”
A few moments later Mrs. Joyce rose to leave. He pressed three sovereigns
into her hand, and in spite of her tearful protestations made her take
the money.
“If you are ever in desperate need, come to me, or write me, Mrs. Joyce,
and I will help you, if I can. Meanwhile, be assured that the little I
have done for you I would have done for any stranger, for, after all, the
human race is linked by a strange, a mighty family tie. Good-bye.”
She wrung the hand he gave her, then with a sudden, impulsive movement
she lifted it sharply to her lips and kissed it with a tearful
passionateness.
The next moment she was gone. His hand was wet with her tears.
“Poor soul!” he muttered.
Passing across the room to the window, he glanced out. She was moving
down the street. Her handkerchief was pressed to her eyes.
“How strange,” he murmured, as he turned from the window, “are
these chance encounters in life! Like ships at sea, we sight, hail,
exchange some kind of greeting, then pass on. Do we, after all, I
wonder, unconsciously influence each other in these apparently trivial
life-encounters? If so, how? Take this episode now, for instance. Will my
encounter with that poor soul have any effect on my life, or on hers? If
so, what?”