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.