CHAPTER XIV.
HOPE.
At last there came a time, even in hell, when the burden of my sin lay so heavily upon me, that I felt I could bear it no longer, and that if succour there came none, the very soul of me must wither away and die. It was not that I wanted to evade the punishment of my crime, for I was willing and wished to undergo it to the uttermost. No, that which was so terrible to me was the thought that not all the sufferings of eternity could avail to wipe away the awful stain upon my spirit, or to undo the evil which I had brought upon the woman I had ruined. Of myself and of my future, save for the continual crying-out of my soul after its lost purity, I scarcely cared now to think. It was of Dorothy that my heart was full; it was for Dorothy that I never ceased to sorrow, to lament, and—sinner, though I was—to pray. I saw then the inevitable consequences of the wrong I had done her pictured forth in all their horror. I saw her, with the sense of her sin as yet but fresh upon her, shrinking from every glance, and fancying that she read the knowledge of her guilt in every eye. I saw her, "not knowing where to turn for refuge from swiftly-advancing shame, and understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther and farther in the nightfall," stealing stealthily forth at dusk to hide herself from her fellow-creatures.
I saw her, when the secret of her shame could no longer be concealed, recoiling in mute terror from the glance of coarse admiration on the faces of sensual men, or shrinking in quivering agony from the look of curious scorn in the eyes of maids and mothers, who drew aside their skirts as she passed them, as if fearful of being contaminated by her touch. And then—driven out from their midst by the very Christian women who should have been the first to have held out a hand to save her—I saw her turn away with a heart hardened into brazen indifference, and plunge headlong into a bottomless gulf of ignominy and sin.
Nor did the vision pass from me until, out of that seething vortex of lust and infamy, I saw arise the black phantom of an immortal soul which was lost for ever, crying out unto God and His Christ for judgment upon the seducer!
As these hideous spectres of the past arose again before me, I fell to the ground, and shrieked out under the burden of my sin, as only he can shriek who is torn by hell-torture and despair. But even as I shrieked, I felt that burden lifted and borne away from me, and then I saw, as in a vision, One kneeling in prayer. And I, who had cried out that I could bear the burden of my sin no longer, saw that upon Him was laid, not only my sin, but the sins of the whole world, and that He stooped of His own accord to receive them. And as I looked upon the Divine dignity of that agonized form—forsaken of His Father that we might never be forsaken, and bowed down under a burden, compared to which, all the horrors of hell were but as the passing phantom of a pain—I saw great beads of blood break out like sweat upon His brow, and I heard wrung from Him a cry of such unutterable anguish as never before rose from human lips. And at that cry the vision passed, and I awoke to find myself in hell once more, but in my heart there was a stirring as of the wings of hope—the hope which I had deemed dead to me for ever.
Could it be—O God of mercy! was it possible that even now it might not be too late?—that there was indeed One who could make my sin as though it had never been?—who of His great love for Dorothy and for me, would bear it and its consequences as His own burden? and who by the cleansing power of the blood which He had shed upon the cross, could wash her soul and mine whiter than the whiteness of snow?
But to this hope there succeeded a moment when the agonized thought: "How if there be no Christ?" leapt out at me, like the darkness which looms but the blacker for the lightning-flash; a moment when hell gat hold on me again, and a thousand gibbering devils arose to shriek in my ear: "And though there be a Christ, is it not now too late?"
I reeled at that cry, and the darkness seemed once more to close in around. A horde of hideous thoughts, the very spawn of hell, swarmed like vermin in my mind; there was the breath as of a host of contending fiends upon my face; a hundred hungry hands laid hold on me, and strove to drag me down and down as to a bottomless pit; but with a great cry to God, I flung the foul things from me; and battling, beating, like a drowning man for breath, I fell at the feet of a woman, white-veiled, and clad in robes like the morning, whose hand it was that had plucked me from the abyss in which I lay.
