“Your are not in earnest—you cannot be!” cried the old man, opening his eyes in wonder. “You surely will not desert me in my hour of need? I cannot believe you are ungrateful, and your very experience in the same affliction should help you to console us. I do not care so much for myself, but my poor wife has set her whole heart upon that child. Come with me and speak to her—tell her of your own child—of all you endured, and how God blessed the calamity to your soul—come, for I fear she will go mad!”
Who could hold out against such an appeal? Johnston rose, and allowed the old man to lead him slowly to the sick chamber. He was in a dream—the present and much of the past had fallen away from him as by magic, and he was looking on a familiar little room, with a sick child and a tending mother, both of whom hung on his words with reverence and love. He saw the whole as vividly as if he had looked upon the real faces there and then, and a great cry struggled for utterance in his heart—
“My God! my God! have mercy upon me, a sinner!”
He felt some one place a book in his hand, and he opened it mechanically, and began to read part of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount; but all the words which fell, in such rich tones and eloquent accents from his lips, seemed to him to come from the mouth of his own visionary sick child. The gentle eyes seemed to flash out fire into his very soul as the words were uttered—“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.”
Johnston was a splendid reader. To listen to him reading was to be thrilled, but the one most thrilled in that little group was himself. He seemed for the moment to have been wrenched suddenly out of his degraded life into a holier, nobler one, long since buried in the past. They told him afterwards that his conversation with the sick child seemed inspired—that the very gates of heaven seemed to open before their eyes under his eloquence, but the man himself remembered nothing of it.
He saw those other faces all the time; and if his tender words seemed such as could only come from the lips of a father, it was simply because he seemed to be addressing his own child. But when his benefactor led him from the sick-room back to the little parlour the spell was broken, the vision vanished, and the stricken wretch fell on his knees and groaned out—
“I am a wretch! I am a scoundrel! Why has not God struck me dead before your eyes?”
Tears, groans, and imprecations against himself followed; and then, to the astonishment of his benefactor, Johnston poured forth an abject confession of the truth—how he had deceived him with the letters, and actually meditated a midnight robbery with violence against the very hand that was now pressing his own in such gratitude and affection.
Mr Cooper, though shocked and horrified, heard the narration as only a Christian man could. He could not believe that Johnston was half as depraved and wicked as he imagined himself, and gently and feelingly reminded the cowering wretch that he had already confessed to many faults and shortcomings. In the end Johnston was shown out, and grasped as warmly by the hand in parting as if what he had just confessed had raised him tenfold in his benefactor’s estimation. As they were thus bidding each other good night, in the expectation of meeting again in the morning to arrange for the passage to the Cape, I stepped out of the shade close by the doorway, and laying my hand on Johnston’s arm, said sharply to Mr Cooper—
“Do you know that this man is a released convict, and a thief and housebreaker?”