'John,' she said, clearing her throat, 'John, yer shan't want while I'm livin. I promised Eliza I wouldn't forget yer, and I won't. I can work yet—there's plenty o' people want me to work for 'em—an maybe, when yer get over this, you'll work a bit too now and again. We'll hold together, John—anyways. While I live and keep my 'elth, yer shan't want. An yer'll forgive Bessie'—she broke into sudden sobbing. 'Oh! I'll never 'ear a crule word about Bessie in my 'ouse, never!'
John put his arms on the table and hid his face upon them. He could not speak of forgiveness, nor could he thank her for her promise. His chief feeling was an intense wish to sleep; but as Mary Anne dried her tears and began to go about her household work, the sound of her step, the sense of her loving presence near him, began for the first time to relax the aching grip upon his heart. He had always been weak and dependent, in spite of his thrift and his money. He would be far more weak and dependent now and henceforward. But again, he had found a woman's tenderness to lean upon, and as she ministered to him—this humble shrinking creature he had once so cordially despised—the first drop of balm fell upon his sore.
Meanwhile, in another cottage a few yards away, Mr. Drew was wrestling with Isaac. In his own opinion, he met with small success. The man who had refused his wife mercy, shrank with a kind of horror from talking of the Divine mercy. Isaac Costrell's was a strange and groping soul. But those misjudged him who called him a hypocrite.
Yet in truth, during the years that followed, whenever he was not under the influence of recurrent attacks of melancholia, Isaac did again derive much comfort from the aspirations and self-abasements of religion. No human life would be possible if there were not forces in and round man perpetually tending to repair the wounds and breaches that he himself makes.
Misery provokes pity; despair throws itself on a Divine tenderness. And for those who have the 'grace' of faith, in the broken and imperfect action of these healing powers upon this various world—in the love of the merciful for the unhappy, in the tremulous yet undying hope that pierces even sin and remorse with the vision of some ultimate salvation from the self that breeds them—in these powers there speaks the only voice which can make us patient under the tragedies of human fate, whether these tragedies be 'the falls of princes' or such meaner, narrower pains as brought poor Bessie Costrell to her end.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of Bessie Costrell., by Mrs. Humphry Ward