West Lawn, and The rector of St. Mark's

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these,—it might have been.”

He could not pray at first, his brain was so confused; but when the white, quivering lips could move and the poor aching heart could pray, he only whispered: “God help me to do right,” and by that prayer he knew that for a single instant there had crept across his mind the possibility of sacrificing Lucy, the girl who loved and trusted him so much; but only for an instant. He would not cast her from him, though to take her now, knowing what he did, was almost death itself. “But God can help me, and he will,” he cried,—then falling upon his knees, with his face bowed to the floor, the rector of St. Mark’s prayed as he had never prayed before, first for himself, whose need was greatest, then for Lucy, that she might never know what making her happy had cost him, and then for Anna, whose name he could not speak. “That other one,” he called her, and his heart kept swelling in his throat and preventing his utterance so that the words he would say never reached his lips. But God heard them just the same, and knew his child was asking that Anna might forget him, if to remember him was pain,—that she might learn to love another far worthier than he had ever been. He did not think of Mrs. Meredith; he had no feeling of resentment then; he was too wholly crushed to care how his ruin had been brought about, and long after the wood-fire on the hearth had turned to cold, gray ashes, he knelt upon the floor and battled with his grief; and when the morning broke it found him still in the cheerless room, where he had passed the entire night and from which he went forth strengthened as he hoped to do what he fully believed to be his duty.

This was on Saturday, and the Sunday following there was no service at St. Mark’s. The rector was sick, the sexton said, hard sick, too, he had heard, and the Hetherton carriage with Lucy in it drove swiftly to the parsonage, where the quiet and solitude awed and frightened her as she entered the house and asked the housekeeper how Mr. Leighton was.

“It is very sudden,” she said. “He was perfectly well when he left me on Friday night. Please tell him I am here.”

The housekeeper shook her head. Her master’s orders were that no one but the doctor should be admitted, she said, repeating what Arthur had told her in anticipation of just such an infliction as this. But Lucy was not to be denied; Arthur was hers; his sickness was hers; his suffering was hers, and see him she would.

“He surely did not mean me, when he asked that no one should be admitted. Tell him it is I; it is Lucy,” she said, with an air of authority, which in one so small, so pretty, and so childish only amused Mrs. Brown, who departed with the message, while Lucy sat down with her feet upon the stove and looked around the sitting-room, thinking that it was smaller and poorer than the one at Prospect Hill, and how she would remodel it when she was mistress there.

“He says you can come,” was the word Mrs. Brown brought back, and with a gleam of triumph in her eye and a toss of the head which said, “I told you so,” Lucy went softly into the darkened room and shut the door behind her.

Arthur had half expected this and had nerved himself to meet it, but the cold sweat stood on his face and his heart throbbed painfully as Lucy bent over him and said, “Poor, dear Arthur, I am so sorry for you, and if I could I’d bear the pain so willingly.”

He knew she would; she was just as loving and unselfish as that, and he wound his arms around her and drew her closer to him, while he whispered, “My poor little Lucy, my poor little Lucy. I don’t deserve this from you.”