Jim Daly's Repentance.
When the story was told to me, I thought it infinitely sad and pathetic.
I wish I could tell it as I heard it, but having scant skill as a
narrator, I fear I cannot. I can only set down the facts as they
happened, and in my halting words they will read, I fear, but baldly and
barely; and if in the reading will be found no trace at all of the tears
which awoke in me for this little human tragedy, I am sorry, more sorry
than I can say, for my want of skill. Indeed, I would need to write of
it with a pen steeped in tears. It is the story of a hard and futile
repentance,--futile, in that amends could never be made to those who had
been sinned against; but surely, surely not futile, inasmuch as no hour
of human pain is ever wasted that is laid before our Lord, but rather is
gathered by Him in His pitiful hands, to be given back one day as a
harvest of joy.
"Whisht, achora, whisht! sure I know you never meant to hurt me or the
child." The woman, childishly young and slight, who spoke was half
sitting, half lying in a low rush-bottomed chair, in the poor kitchen of
a small Irish farmhouse. Her small, pretty face was marked with
premature lines of pain and care, and now it was paler than usual, for
across eyebrow and cheek extended a livid, dark bruise, as if from a
blow of a heavy fist, and over the pathetic, drooping mouth there was a
cruel, jagged cut, this evidently caused by a fall against something
with a sharp, projecting point. By her side, in a wattled cradle, lay a
puny, small baby, about a year old, with its small blue fingers,
claw-like in their leanness, clutched closely, and with such a gray
shade over its pinched features that one might have thought it dying.
The young husband and father was cast down in an attitude bespeaking
utter abasement at his wife's knees, and his face was hidden in her lap;
but over the nut-brown hair her thin hands went softly, with caressing
tender strokings, and as the great heart-breaking sobs burst from him
the tears rolled one after another down her wan little face, while her
low, soft voice went on tenderly, "Whisht, alanna machree, whisht! sure
it's breakin' my heart ye are! Sure, how can I bear at all, at all, to
listen to ye sobbin' like that?"
All the weary months of unkindness and neglect were forgotten, and she
only remembered that her Jim was in sore trouble--Jim Daly that courted
her, her husband, and her baby's father; not Jim Daly the good fellow at
the public-house, always ready to take a treat or stand one; always the
first in every scheme of conviviality, drowning heart and mind and
conscience in cheap and bad whisky; while at home, on the little
hillside farm, crops were rotting, haggard lying empty, land untilled,
and poverty and hunger threatening the little home, and day after day
the meek, uncomplaining young wife was growing thinner and paler, and
the lines deepening in her face where no lines should be. Three years
had gone by since the wedding-day that seemed but the gate of a happy
future for those two young things who loved each other truly, and almost
since that wedding-day Jim Daly had been going steadily downhill. Not
that he was vicious at all; he was only young and gay and good-natured,
and so sought after for those things, and he had a fine baritone voice
that could roll out "Colleen dhas cruitheen na mo" with rare power and
tenderness, and when the rare spirits who held their merry-makings in
the Widow Doolan's public-house nightly would come seeking to draw him
thither with many flattering words, he was not strong enough to resist
the temptation; and the young wife--they were the merest boy and
girl--was too gentle in her clinging love to stay him. So things had
gone steadily from bad to worse, and instead of only the nights, much of
the days as well were spent in the gin-shop, and at last the time came
when people began to shake their heads over bonny Jim Daly as a
confirmed drunkard, and the handsome boyish face was getting a sodden
look, and the once frank, clear eyes refused to look at one either
frankly or clearly, but shuffled from under a friend's gaze uneasily and
painfully. Last night, however, the climax had come when, reeling home
after midnight, the tender little wife, with her baby on her breast, had
opened the door for him, and had stood in the door-way with some word of
pain on her lips, and he feeling his progress barred, but with no sense
of what stood there, had struck out fiercely with his great fist, and
stricken wife and child to the ground. And Winnie's mouth had come with
cruel force against a projecting corner of the dresser, and his hand had
marked darkly her soft face, and she and the little son were both
bruised and injured by the fall. We have seen how bitter poor Jim's
repentance was when he came to himself out of his drunken sleep, and in
presence of it his wife, womanlike, forgot everything but that he needed
her utmost love and tenderness. But if she was forbearing to him out of
her great love, his little brown old mother, who had been sent for
hastily to her farm two miles away, spared not at all to give him what
she called the rough side of her tongue; and when the doctor came from
his home across the blue mountains, and shook his head ominously over
the baby, and dressing Winnie's wan face, said that the blow on the
forehead by just missing the temple had escaped being a deathblow, the
old woman's horror and indignation against her son were great. But the
doctor had gone now, with a kindly word of cheer at parting to the poor
sinner, and with an expressed hope of pulling the baby through by
careful attention and nursing. These it was sure to have, because Jim
Daly's mother was the best nurse in all fair Tipperary, and, despite the
very rough side to her tongue on occasion, the gentlest and most
kind-hearted.
These two were alone now, and the room was quite silent except for the
man's occasional great sobs, and the low, sweet, comforting voice of the
woman.
Presently the door opened again, this time to admit a priest, a hale,
ruddy-faced man of fifty or so, spurred and gaitered as if for riding,
who, coming to them quickly, with a keen look of concern and pain in his
clear eyes, and drawing a chair closer, laid one large hand on Jim's
bent head, while the other went out warmly to take Winnie's little, cold
fingers. "My poor, poor children!" he said, and under that true, loving
pity Winnie's tears began to flow anew. He was sorely troubled for
these; he had baptized them, had admitted both to the Sacraments, had
joined their hands in marriage, and he had tried vainly to stop this
poor boy's easy descent to evil; and now it had ended so. In the new
silence he was praying rapidly and softly, asking his Lord to make this
a means of bringing back the strayed lamb to His fold. Then he spoke
again:--
"Look up, Jim, my child; you needn't tell me anything about it, I know
all. Look up, and tell me you are going to begin a new life; that you
are going with me now to the altar of God, to kneel there and ask His
forgiveness, and to promise Him that you will never again touch the
poison that has so nearly made you the murderer of your wife and child.
It is His great mercy that both are spared to you to-day, and the doctor
tells me that he hopes to bring the baby through safely, so you must
cheer up. And it will be a new life, will it not, my poor boy, from this
day, with God's good help."