AN EASTER MORNING.
If life is to be measured by happiness, the days that followed should
have been reckoned by years for the poor young woman, so long defrauded
of the rightful love of her life. To Mr. Chillingworth, they were days
of strangely mingled happiness and pain. As, little by little, he
learned most of her story, in the long, quiet days when husband and wife
were left alone together, he felt, with deep humiliation, how great a
wrong his impatient harshness bad done to her, and to himself. When she,
poor thing, timidly spoke of "forgiveness," he passionately responded
that it was _he_, not she, who needed to be forgiven. But, as yet, he
could not, weak and prostrate as he still was, face the problem of the
future.
That problem, too, was solved for him in a way he had little dreamed of.
As he rapidly recovered, his devoted nurse could no longer conceal the
fact that the dangerous malady had attacked herself. This was not, of
course, surprising, since, she was as yet by no means strong, and had
been so constantly shut up in the infected atmosphere. It did not take
long for the disease to work its fatal way in her enfeebled
constitution. Indeed, it seemed as if she had not the vitality left for
any resistance. She had, evidently, but little desire for life, and she
had learned to think of death without fear, much as a tired child thinks
of its evening rest. As she lay, prostrated by weakness, scarcely
speaking, but watching her husband's face and movements, the expression
of the pale but satisfied and peaceful countenance seemed to say, "Now,
let me depart in peace."
Mr. Chillingworth tried to speak to her of the hope that it is the
minister's privilege to set before dying eyes, but his attempts seemed
to himself weak and impotent. He had lived so long in a world of ideals
and abstractions, that he had, in a great measure, lost the realizing
sense of the simple gospel truths, so familiar to him from infancy.
Reality seemed to have gone out of the things he had so long believed,
and he sometimes wondered whether he had believed at all--whether he
were not himself drifting into the position of an agnostic. He
remembered a sermon he had once preached, about the rich young man who
had come to the Master, but who, tried by too severe a test, had shrunk
back from the required sacrifice, and had "gone away sorrowful." So, he
thought, had he shrunk back from the cross laid on him, and, what right
had he to call himself a follower of the Master? But, what was
impossible to him, had been long ago done by others. Other guidance than
his had led the poor wanderer to the Divine and forgiving Helper, in
whom alone rests the hope of the true penitent; and she, who had "loved
much," felt herself forgiven.
The end came very soon. Her constitution made so little resistance that
the suffering seemed the less severe. As the fair spring morning of
Easter Sunday dawned, it was clear to the solitary watcher that all was
nearly over. He tenderly held his wife supported by his encircling arm,
watching her as she looked at him wistfully, with a faint smile of
recognition, scarcely able to speak.
"It--is--far--the best thing,--Cecil!" she said, in words disjointed and
scarcely audible; "you'll take care of Cecilia--she'll be a comfort to
you--by and by!"
Then the eyelids drooped, and her husband, bending low, could only catch
faintly the words, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we----"
He repeated the words with her, and finished the sentence. As he did so,
he found that he was alone with the dead.
Gently he laid back the lifeless form, kissed the cold brow, and sat for
a little while, reluctant to break the spell of the solemn stillness,
and absorbed in the thought of the remote past which had now swallowed
up the present, and of that unseen future which he vainly tried to
grasp, and which seemed to him so shadowy. But, as he knelt in prayer,
he registered a silent, passionate vow, that, henceforward, his life
should be lived, to the utmost of his power, in the spirit of that
unselfish love which he had preached so long and practised so little.
The sharpest conflicts are often those which take place in silence and
solitude, without any outward sign; and human lives are shaped and
moulded to higher uses as silently as were the Temple stones of old.
As he slowly turned at last, to leave the room, the golden light of the
new day broke in upon him from without, and he heard the silvery chimes
of the Easter bells ushering in the morning that commemorates the
Resurrection.