“I know, I am not in the way,” said Flora, still in the same fearfully quiet, matter-of-fact tone. “I never have been”—and she bent over her child, as if taking her leave for eternity.
His tongue almost clave to the roof of his mouth, as he heard the words—words elicited by one of those hours of true reality that, like death, rend aside every wilful cloak of self-deceit, and self-approbation. He had no power to speak at first; when he recovered it, his reply was not what his heart had, at first, prompted.
“Flora! How has this dear child been saved?” he said. “What has released her from the guilt she inherited through you, through me, through all? Is not the Fountain open?”
“She never wasted grace,” said Flora.
“My child! my Flora!” he exclaimed, losing the calmness he had gained by such an effort; “you must not talk thus—it is wrong! Only your own morbid feeling can treat this—this—as a charge against you, and if it were, indeed”—he sank his voice—“that such consequences destroyed hope, oh, Flora! where should I be?”
“No,” said Flora, “this is not what I meant. It is that I have never set my heart right. I am not like you nor my sisters. I have seemed to myself, and to you, to be trying to do right, but it was all hollow, for the sake of praise and credit. I know it, now it is too late; and He has let me destroy my child here, lest I should have destroyed her everlasting life, like my own.”
The most terrible part of this sentence was to Dr. May, that Flora spoke as if she knew it all as a certainty, and without apparent emotion, with all the calmness of despair. What she had never guessed before had come clearly and fully upon her now, and without apparent novelty, or, perhaps, there had been misgivings in the midst of her complacent self-satisfaction. She did not even seem to perceive how dreadfully she was shocking her father, whose sole comfort was in believing her language the effect of exaggerated self-reproach. His profession had rendered him not new to the sight of despondency, and, dismayed as he was, he was able at once to speak to the point.
“If it were indeed so, her removal would be the greatest blessing.”
“Yes,” said her mother, and her assent was in the same tone of resigned despair, owning it best for her child to be spared a worldly education, and loving her truly enough to acquiesce.
“I meant the greatest blessing to you,” continued Dr. May, “if it be sent to open your eyes, and raise your thoughts upwards. Oh, Flora, are not afflictions tokens of infinite love?”