At this moment there was a cry from those who stood nearer the bed; a sobbing of women, and the pitiful cry of a child. In the haste and confusion, and efforts at recovery, the little Louise had been laid at the foot of the bed on which her mother lay dead; and now, in the pause, she had crawled, unobserved, once more to that mother’s side, and, laying her lips to that cold bosom—ah! well may you weep, baby Louise! the mother-heart is still, the mother’s breast is cold and empty, the mother love has gone away from you to heaven.
“Is there a God?” cried the pastor, wildly tossing his thin arms upward, “that he lets the sun rise upon such scenes as this!”
“There is a God,” said Ernest Clare, “who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up to death, that we might live forevermore. Courage, friend, the day of freedom is at hand; you would not grudge your daughter the glory of helping Him to redeem the world; of filling up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ?”
“It is for Henry Randolph’s daughter that mine has died,” said the pastor, but with less violence; “upon the floors and walls of that palace, to which he has no right, which he has robbed from others, she spent her precious life.”
“Henry Randolph!” it was like the cry of a wild beast, as Paul Kellar sprang to his feet with clinched hands and red and glaring eyes.
“Henry Randolph! the bloated millionnaire who cuts down his workmen’s wages! the gambler with the daily bread of thousands, starving them by hundreds that he may add another cipher to his bank-account! Is he the murderer of my wife?”
“Not wittingly, oh, not wittingly!” Ernest Clare knew better than to urge any plea of “employment” and “wages” at such a moment as this. “Not wittingly, Paul, does he injure any man. Therefore, Father,” he added, looking upward, “forgive both him and those like unto him. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do!”
But Paul Kellar had rushed away into the early and peaceful morning; while the pastor, falling upon his knees beside his dead child, cried out,—
“She was my first-born! I called her Christina that she might be like unto Christ; and behold, like Him, she has died,—died for the sins of the world.”
Tina Kellar’s piteous death was, to the labor-world of Micklegard, the breath which, fanning the clouds of their discontent a hair’s-breadth nearer, completed the power of the gathering storm. A martyr! That was their name for her; but a martyr whose death they were bound to avenge? that, to students of Scripture, seemed less fit and natural.