“None of us can say that. You ought not—you shall not. I will not allow it.”
His words struck me. There was truth in them—the truth, the faith of my first youth though both had faded in after years—till I knew him. And this was why I clung to this friend of mine, because amidst all the shams and falsenesses around me, and even in myself—in him I ever found, clearly acknowledged, and bravely outspoken—the truth. Why should he not help me now?
Humbly I asked him, “if he were angry with me?”
“Not angry, but grieved; you little know how deeply.”
Was it for my dying, or my wickedly wishing to die? I knew not; but that he was strongly affected, more even than he liked me to see, I did see, and it lifted the stone from my heart.
“I know I have been very wicked. If any one would thoroughly scold me—if I could only tell anybody—”
“Why cannot you tell me?”
So I told him, as far as I could, all the dark thoughts that had been troubling me this day; I laid upon him all my burthens; I confessed to him all my sins; and when I ended, not without agitation, for I had never spoken so plainly of myself to any creature before, Doctor Urquhart talked to me long and gently upon the things wherein he considered me wrong in myself and in my home; and of other things where he thought I was only “foolish,” or “mistaken.” Then he spoke of the manifold duties I had in life; of the glory and beauty of living; of the peace attainable, even in this world, by a life which, if ever so sad and difficult, has done the best it could with the materials granted to it—has walked, so far as it could see, in its appointed course, and left the rewarding and the brightening of it solely in the hands of Him who gave it, who never gives anything in vain.
This was his “sermon”—as, smiling, I afterwards called it, though all was said very simply, and as tenderly as if he had been talking with a child. At the end of it, I looked at him by a sudden blaze of the fire; and it seemed as if, mortal man as he was, with faults enough doubtless—and some of them I already knew, though there is no necessity to publish them here—I “saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.” And I thanked God, who sent him to me—who sent us each to one another.
For what should Doctor Urquhart reply when I asked him how he came to learn all these good things? but—also smiling:—