"Oh, you're young yet," Dr. Lavendar said encouragingly, "My boy, let me tell you that there are some good folks who don't begin to know their Heavenly Father, as the sinner does who climbed up to Him out of the gutter."
"A dangerous doctrine," William ruminated.
"Oh, I don't preach it," Dr. Lavendar said placidly "but I don't preach everything I know."
William was not following him. He said abruptly, "What are you going to do with David?"
"David is going to stay with me."
And William said again, "It will break her heart!"
"I hope so," said Dr. Lavendar solemnly, How he watched that poor heart, in the next few days! Every afternoon his shabby old buggy went tugging up the hill. Sometimes he found her walking restlessly about in the frosted garden; sometimes standing mutely at the long window in the parlor, looking for him; sometimes prostrate on her bed. When he took her hand—listless one day, fiercely despairing the next,—he would glance at her with a swift scrutiny that questioned, and then waited. The pity in his old eyes never dimmed their relentless keenness; they seemed to raid her face, sounding all the shallows in search of depths. For with his exultant faith in human nature, he believed that somewhere in the depths he should find God, It is only the pure in heart who can find Him in impurity, who can see, behind the murky veil of stained flesh, the very face of Christ declaring the possibilities of the flesh!—but this old man sought and knew that he should find Him. He waited and watched for many days, looking for that recognition of wrong-doing which breaks the heart by its revelation of goodness that might have been; for there is no true knowledge of sin, without a divine and redeeming knowledge of righteousness! So, as this old saint looked into the breaking heart, pity for the sinner who was base deepened into reverence for the child of God who might be noble. It is an easy matter to believe in the confident soul; but Dr. Lavendar believed in a soul that did not believe in itself!
It seemed to Helena that she had nothing to live for; that there was nothing to do except shiver back out of sight, and wait to die. For the time was not yet when she should know that her consciousness of sin might be the chased and fretted Cup from which she might drink the sacrament of life; when she should come to understand, with thanksgiving, that unless she had sinned, the holy wine might never have touched her lips!
In these almost daily talks with Dr. Lavendar, the question of the future was beaten out: it was a bleak enough prospect; it didn't matter, she said, where she went, or what became of her, she had spoiled her life, she said. "Yes," Dr. Lavendar agreed, "you've spoiled what you've had of it. But your Heavenly Father has the rest, in His hands, and He'll give it to you clean and sound. All you've got to do, is to keep it so, and forget the spoiled part." That was the only thing he insisted upon: no dwelling on the past!
"I wish I was one of the people who want to do things," she told him with a sort of wistful cynicism. "But I don't. I have no story-book desires. I don't want to go and nurse lepers!—but I will, if you want me to," she added with quick and touching simplicity.