David Fleming's Forgiveness

by Margaret M. Robertson

It would be useless to follow him through all the troubled thoughts and anxious questionings of the night. Out of them all came first a doubt, and then a certainty, painful and not unmixed with shame, that the friendship he feared to lose was more to him than was the love that put it in jeopardy. Nay, that he had for many a month been mistaking love for friendship, and friendship for love.

There were more troubled thoughts and anxious questionings, and they ended in the conviction that he had made a great mistake for which there seemed no remedy. He must suffer, but he knew that with God’s help he would overcome. For a time he must submit to the loss of that society which had been so much to him since he came to Gershom. By and by, when he should be wiser and stronger, and when other changes should have come into his life, as they must come, his friendship with Miss Holt might be renewed and strengthened, and through all his thoughts and questionings it never came into his mind that the suffering might not be his alone.

About three months before this time, when Mr Maxwell had been a resident of Gershom for a year and a half, circumstances occurred which made it advisable for him to pay a visit to the place which had been his home during the last years of his mother’s life, and during the years which followed her death while his course of study continued. It was a visit which he anticipated with lively pleasure, and much enjoyed. His home while there was, of course, in the house of his friend and his mother’s friend, Miss Martha Langden; and visiting her aunt at the same time, as had frequently happened in former years when he had been this lady’s guest, was her niece, Miss Essie. She was a very pretty girl, and a good girl as well, eight or ten years younger than Mr Maxwell, but not too young to be his wife, his mother and her aunt had decided long ago when Miss Essie was a child. These loving and rather romantic friends had set their hearts on a union in every way to their view so suitable, and they had been at less pains than was quite prudent to keep their hopes and their plans to themselves. Indeed, as presented by a fond mother to a studious and utterly inexperienced lad, such as young Maxwell was at twenty, the prospect of a wife so pretty and winning and well dowered could not but be agreeable enough, and though no formal engagement was entered into between them, they had corresponded frequently, and to an engagement it was taken for granted by all parties this correspondence was to lead when the right time came.

The idea that the time of this visit might be the right time had not presented itself so clearly to Mr Maxwell as it had to his friend Miss Martha. Still it was natural enough and pleasant enough for him to fall into the old relations with the pretty and good Miss Essie. Not quite the old relations, however, for Miss Essie was a child no longer, but eighteen years of age, and a graduate of one of the most popular ladies’ seminaries of the State, and quite inclined to stand on her dignity and claim due consideration for her years and acquirements. She had been one of the model young ladies of the seminary, it seemed, and in various pretty ways, and with words sufficiently modest, she sought to make her admiring friends aware of the fact, and dwelt with untiring interest on the trials and triumphs of the time. But she by no means considered her education completed, she gravely assured Mr Maxwell. She had a plan of study drawn out by the distinguished principal of the seminary, which, after she should be quite rested from the work of the last years, she intended steadily to pursue, to the further development of her powers, and the acquisition of knowledge which should fit her for usefulness in any sphere which she might be called to occupy. She had much to say on these themes, her present self-improvement and her future work and influence in the world, and Mr Maxwell sometimes smiled in secret as he listened, but he liked to listen all the same. Her views were not very clear to herself, nor very practical, but she was very earnest in expressing them; and being perfectly sincere in her beliefs and honest in her intentions, she had also perfect confidence in the success of what she was pleased to call her “life’s work,” and never doubted that she should accomplish through her labours find see with her eyes, all the good which she planned.

It was her earnestness and evident sincerity that charmed Mr Maxwell, and though all this looked to him sometimes like a child’s mimic assumption of responsibilities and duties, with a child’s power of imagining what is desired, and ignoring all else, yet he was more impatient of his own doubts than of her illusions.

But dare he speak or think of them as illusions? He recalled his own early youth—the plans he had formed, the hopes he had cherished of all he was to dare and do for his Master’s sake, the battles he was to win, the souls he was to conquer, and he grew grave and self-reproachful at the remembrance. He was young yet as to his work and his office, and young in years, but in the presence of all his earnestness, this desire to do good and true work in the world, he could not but acknowledge that his own early zeal had cooled somewhat, that something had gone from him in life, and in his discontent with himself his admiration for the little enthusiast grew apace. And though he could not but smile now and then, still as she made her modest little allusions to her private diary and to certain “resolutions” written therein, and though he could not always respond with sufficient heartiness to satisfy himself when she showed him little letters on very thin paper that had come to her from “distant lands,” and confessed to anxious thoughts as to the claims which the “foreign field” and the “dark places of the earth” might have upon her, yet listening to her, and meeting Aunt Martha’s admiring glances, and hearing her more extended accounts of her self-devotion and self-denial, he could not but consider himself fortunate in his relations to them both, and desire almost as earnestly as Aunt Martha did that the young girl should consent to share his life’s work and make it hers. To this end all their intercourse tended, and the course of love, in their case, promised to be as smooth as could be desired for a time.

But an interruption occurred as the end of Mr Maxwell’s visit drew near, which, however, seemed hardly to be an interruption as they took it, or rather, it should be said, as the young lady whom it was specially designed to influence seemed to take it.

Up to this time Miss Martha had been permitted to do very much as she chose with her pretty niece. Miss Essie’s mother, a dear friend of Miss Martha’s, had died when her daughter was an infant, and the child’s home, even after the second marriage of her father, had been almost as often with her aunt as with him. Her aunt had chosen her teachers and her schools, and had introduced her to a social circle far more refined and intellectual than she could have found in the large manufacturing town where her father lived. She had formed the girl’s mind, and possessed her affections, and had come to look upon her as her own child rather than as the child of her hitherto somewhat indifferent father, who had another family growing up around him. It certainly never came into Miss Martha’s mind that the future she had been planning for her darling might be regarded by the father with unfavourable eyes. So that his decided refusal to permit his daughter to enter into an engagement of marriage with the young man was a surprise as well as a pain to her.

The father was not unreasonable in his objections. Mr Maxwell might be all that his partial old friend declared him to be, worthy in all respects of his daughter. But that a child—he called her a child—should ignorantly make a blind promise that must affect her whole future life, he would not allow. A girl just out of school, who had seen nothing of the world, who could not possibly know her own mind on any matter of importance, must not be suffered to do herself this wrong. He smiled a little when Aunt Martha, hoping to move him, dwelt earnestly on her dear Essie’s views of life, her plans of usefulness, and her desire above all things to do some good in the world. It was all right, he said, just what he should expect from a girl brought up by a good woman like Aunt Martha. But all the same she was only a child, and she could not know whether she cared enough for Mr Maxwell to be happy in doing her life’s work in his company.

Even when Miss Martha in her eagerness betrayed how long the thought of her niece’s engagement had been familiar to her, he only laughed, though he saw that he had a good right to be angry, and he stood firm to his first determination that for two years at least there should be no engagement. Essie must have more experience of life; she must visit her mother’s relations, and see more of the world. He intended she should spend the next winter with her aunt in New York, and he would not have her hampered by any engagement, out of which, if she should find that she had mistaken her own heart, trouble might spring. He was firm, and poor Miss Martha was heart-broken at the turn which affairs had taken.