“You did not eat your supper to-night, little Anna,” he said gently, remembering her faint appetite for the frugal fare of the parsonage table.
Anna only sobbed more convulsively. She had expected severity and blame, feeling verily guilty in spirit.
Samuel Mallison said nothing more, but Anna, wondering, heard him go downstairs, heard doors open and shut, and then silence fell again. Ten minutes later her father stood again by the bedside in the icy chill of the winter midnight in the unwarmed chamber, and he had brought a bowl of broth, hot and smoking, bread, too, and, most unwonted pampering, a piece of the rare poundcake, kept for company and never given to children except on high holidays.
Neither of them spoke, but Samuel Mallison, for all the cold, sat on the bed’s edge while Anna ate and drank, drawing her frail little body to rest against his own.
The broth was salted for Anna by her tears, and the long-drawn sobs, coming at intervals, half choked her as she ate, but she was comforted at last and fortified against the woe of the world, and she pressed her cheek against her father’s arm with a sense of the infinite sweetness of fatherhood warm at her heart. As she finished the last crumb of cake, she thought:—
“If only God had been kind like my father! I was naughty, and that only makes him good to me and pitiful.” But she said nothing, only looked with a world of wondering gratefulness in her large innocent eyes up into her father’s face, finding some perplexity that cake and broth should reconcile her to the everlasting torment of the majority of mankind, but wisely concluding to make the best of it since such seemed to be the effect, and, as it was now undoubtedly high time, to go to sleep.
Finding her bright and well next morning, the Mallisons, father and mother, had thought little more of that Saturday night revolt, which they, indeed, had not known as such; but, as she looked back over her years to-night, in her gable window, Anna perceived that from that time there had always been in the secret place of her heart a sense of enmity against a God who was not kind like her father. To-night she knew herself, at last, reconciled; faith had triumphed and declared that even the darkest decree of God’s great will must be right, since he was the absolutely Good. But her heart yearned with mighty yearning for the subjects of his just wrath, and as she knelt in the darkness and silence she gave herself with simple, unreserved sincerity to the service of the lost among men.
Rising from her knees, Anna felt a strange glow and exaltation of spirit. In her own personal life sin had been met and vanquished. Tremendous apostolic assertions buoyed her soul upward like strong wings: “free from the law of sin and of death,” “passed from death unto life,” “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” Thus she felt her finite linked to the infinite. Her spirit was suffused with thrilling and unspeakable joy; God was closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.
But, as she stood rapt and absorbed, there came up through the hush of the night from the dim street below a strange sound, and she was caught back by it, and listened painfully. It was a little child crying piteously.
Peering down through the clustering branches, below her window, Anna could discern by the dim light of the stars the shape of a woman, forlorn and spiritless, passing silently along the shadowed way. Behind her followed the crying child, with weary little feet stumbling at every stone. The woman carried something in her arms, hidden by an apron; she turned and looked at the child, and shook her head, but did not speak.