"All's Well"; or, Alice's Victory

by Emily Sarah Holt

Eureka!

In the court where the prebendaries’ chambers were situated, within the Cathedral Close at Canterbury, was an underground vault, known as Monday’s Hole. Here the stocks were kept, but the place was very rarely used as a prison. A paling, four feet and a half in height, and three feet from the window, cut off all glimpses of the outer world from any person within. A little short straw was strewn on the floor, between the stocks and the wall, which formed the only bed of any one there imprisoned. It was a place where a man of any humanity would scarcely have left his dog; cold, damp, dreary, depressing beyond measure.

That litter of straw, on the damp stones, had been for five weary weeks the bed of Alice Benden. She was allowed no change of clothes, and all the pittance given her for food was a halfpenny worth of bread, and a farthing’s worth of drink. At her own request she had been permitted to receive her whole allowance in bread; and water, not over clean nor fresh, was supplied for drinking. No living creature came near her save her keeper, who was the bell-ringer at the cathedral—if we except the vermin which held high carnival in the vault, and were there in extensive numbers. It was a dreadful place for any human being to live in; how dreadful for an educated and delicate gentlewoman, accustomed to the comforts of civilisation, it is not easy to imagine.

But to the coarser tortures of physical deprivation and suffering had been added the more refined torments of heart and soul. During four of those five weeks all God’s waves and billows had gone over Alice Benden. She felt herself forsaken of God and man alike—out of mind, like the slain that lie in the grave—forgotten even by the Lord her Shepherd.

One visitor she had during that time, who had by no means forgotten her. Satan has an excellent memory, and never lacks leisure to tempt God’s children. He paid poor Alice a great deal of attention. How, he asked her, was it possible that a just God, not to say a merciful Saviour, could have allowed her to come into such misery? Had the Lord’s hand waxed short? Here were the persecutors, many of them ungodly men, robed in soft silken raiment, and faring sumptuously every day; their beds were made of the finest down, they had all that heart could wish; while she lay upon dirty straw in this damp hole, not a creature knowing what had become of her. Was this all she had received as the reward of serving God? Had she not tried to do His will, and to walk before Him with a perfect heart? and this was what she got for it, from Him who could have swept away her persecutors by a word, and lifted her by another to the height of luxury and happiness.

Poor Alice was overwhelmed. Her bodily weakness—of which Satan may always be trusted to take advantage—made her less fit to cope with him, and for a time she did not guess who it was that suggested all these wrong and miserable thoughts. She “grievously bewailed” herself, and, as people often do, nursed her distress as if it were something very dear and precious.

But God had not forgotten Alice Benden. She was not going to be lost—she, for whom Christ died. She was only to be purified, and made white, and tried. He led her to find comfort in His own Word, the richest of earthly comforters. One night Alice began to repeat to herself the forty-second Psalm. It seemed just made for her. It was the cry of a sore heart, shut in by enemies, and shut out from hope and pleasure. Was not that just her case?

“Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul? and why art thou so disquieted within me? Put thy trust in God!”

A little relieved, she turned next to the seventy-seventh Psalm. She had no Bible; nothing but what her well-stored memory gave her. Ah! what would have become of Alice Benden in those dark hours, had her memory been filled with all kinds of folly, and not with the pure, unerring Word of God? This Psalm exactly suited her.

“Will the Lord absent Himself for ever?—and will He be no more entreated? Is His mercy clean gone for ever?—and is His promise come utterly to an end for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious?—and will He shut up His loving-kindness in displeasure? And I said, It is mine infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest.”