“Child, child, what are you doing? you do not know what I am, or you would not kiss me!”
“Yes, Lady Bellamy,” she said, quietly, “I do, that is, I know what you have been; but I want to forget that. Perhaps you will one day be able to forget it too. I do not wish to preach, but perhaps, after all, this terrible misfortune may lead you to something better. Thank God, there is forgiveness for us all.”
Her words touched some forgotten chord in the stricken woman’s heart, and two big tears rolled down the frozen cheeks. They were the first Anne Bellamy had wept for many a day.
“Your voice,” she said, “has a music that awakes the echoes from a time when I was good and pure like you, but that time has gone for ever.”
“Surely, Lady Bellamy, the heart that can remember it can also strive to reach another like it. If you have descended the cliff whence those echoes spring, into a valley however deep, there is still another cliff before you that you may climb.”
“It is easy to descend, but we need wings to climb. Look at me, Angela; my body is not more crippled and shorn of power than my dark spirit is of wings. How can I climb?”
Angela bent low beside her and whispered a few words in her ear, then rose with a shy blush upon her face. Lady Bellamy shut her eyes. Presently she opened them again.
“Do not speak any more of this to me now,” she said. “I must have time. The instinct of years cannot be brushed away in a day. If you knew all the sins I have committed, perhaps you would think too that for such as I am there is no forgiveness and no hope.”
“Whilst there is life there is hope, and, as I once heard Mr. Fraser say, the real key to forgiveness is the desire to be forgiven.”
Again Lady Bellamy shut her eyes and thought, and, when she drew up their heavy lids, Angela saw that there was something of a peaceful look about them.