The Redemption of David Corson

by Charles Frederic Goss

The night was calm and clear, the autumn stars were shining in a cloudless sky, and the tide of life which had surged through the busy streets all day was ebbing like the waters from the bays and estuaries along the shore of the ocean.

The sounds the people made in tramping over the stone pavements or hurriedly driving over the hard streets, possessed a strangely different quality from the monotonous and grinding roar of the daylight. They were sharp, clear, resonant and emphatic. A single footfall attracted the attention of a listener more than the previous shuffle of a thousand feet. David's,—soft and subdued as it was,—resounded loudly, echoing from the buildings on either side of him as he slowly paced along.

It was evident to every one who met him that he was moving aimlessly. Now and then some keen-eyed pedestrian stopped to take a second look and, turning to do so, felt an instinctive pity for this burdened, care-encumbered man, wending his way through the almost deserted streets.

This gaze was unreturned and this sympathy unperceived. He was in one of those fits of abstraction when the whole external universe with all its beauties and sublimities has ceased to exist. His cup of misery was full, he had lost all clue to the meaning of life and a single definite idea had taken complete possession of his mind. It was that he was doomed to pass his existence under a curse.

By the very nature of its being, the soul is keenly sensitive to blessings and curses, and it is not alone the benediction of the mitred priest that thrills the heart! That of the pauper upon whom we have bestowed alms sometimes awakens in our bosom a hope and gladness out of all proportion to the insignificant source from which it has proceeded. Nor do we need to be cursed by the great and the powerful to feel a pang of terror in our souls! Let but some helpless wretch whom we have wronged commit his cause to heaven in a single syllable, and we shudder as if we already heard the approach of those avenging feet which the ancients said were shod with wool. The curse of the dead and impotent beggar rang in the ears of the fugitive like the strokes of an alarm bell. That deep sense of justice which had been formed in his early life had been revivified and endowed with a resistless power.

At such moments as these through which he was passing man experiences no doubt as to the nature and origin of conscience. He is as sure that the terror aroused in his heart is the echo of the decision of some real and awful tribunal as that the wave upon the shore is produced by some real though invisible storm at sea, or the shadow on the mountain by some palpable object between it and the sun.

The conscience is not only "a secretion in the brain," it is not only the "accumulated observations of the universal man upon the phenomena of the moral life," it is not only his study of the laws of cause and effect distilled into maxims and forebodings; it is this, but it is more than this—as every total is more than any of its parts. For every man has something which is in him, but not of him. It resides within his intelligence, but it is not so much the offspring of his intelligence as an emissary that has taken up its residence there! This obscure something is stronger than he. He does not subordinate it to himself, but is subordinated by it. He can rebel against it, but he cannot overthrow it. He can fly from it, but he cannot escape it.

This sublime and mysterious power had at last obtained complete ascendency in the soul of David Corson. He no longer argued and he no longer resisted. He saw no way of escape from the spiritual anaconda which was tightening its folds around him.

This was all the more strange because the way to the satisfaction of the irrepressible hunger of his heart was now open. Pepeeta's husband was dead, and although he was not innocent of a great crime, he was at least not a murderer. Pepeeta still loved him, if she were still alive. Of this he had no more doubt than of his love for her. Why then did he thus give up to despair? Why did he not fly to her arms and claim from life that happiness which had hitherto escaped his grasp?

He did not try to solve these problems, nor to comprehend his own despair. He only knew that he had been baffled at every turn of his life by powers with which he was unable to cope, and that he was tired of the struggle. He would give himself up to the mighty stream of events and be borne along. If he was exercising any volition in the choice of the path he was following, he was doing it unconsciously. That path was leading him direct to the harbor. It was a pathway well-worn by tired feet like his own.