Prospective gratitude, as I have often before remarked, is one thing—retrospective another. Prospectively, Mrs. Basil Stondon had promised wonderful things to Phemie, if she did her bidding; retrospectively she rather underrated her services, and felt in the present jealous of her influence and power over Basil.
In those days if Phemie said “Go” to Basil he went. The more he thought of the woman whose life he had made so poor in happiness, the more he loved her—not with the unholy love of old—not with the passion which had scorched and blighted the green verdure, and the fair flowers of their once sweet Paradise—but soberly and purely, as a worshipper might love a saint.
He was not afraid of being with her now. He did not feel her presence torture—the sight of her a snare. No great human passion, unless indeed it may be revenge, can live within sight of death—and the way in which Phemie told him of his calamity had cured Basil, and changed him for life.
In his vigil beside his boy the past came and kept him company, and he repented him of the evil, and wished unavailingly he could go back through the years, and live them over again.
He had made her a lonely, desolate woman—a woman who in her widowhood could not even take to her soul the poor consolation of having done her duty faithfully by a husband she never loved. He had broken Captain Stondon’s heart—he had wakened him from a pleasant dream. He had shown him the gold of the crown he wore was to him but as valueless tinsel—the gem he had prized so highly but glass in his possession. From the old man he had snatched away the last precious thing life held for him—faith in his wife’s love—belief in her perfect truth and purity. He was taken home and warmed beside his hearth, and when he had eaten his bread, and shared his affection, he turned and stung his benefactor; and then he left England, and the years had come and the years had gone, and he was rich and respected—yet—should he escape?
If he had forgotten, had God? If his sin had passed from his memory, like breath from the surface of a mirror, did it follow that the sin was forgiven? Though he had buried his fault—though he had hidden it away from sight—though the turf was green, and the roses blooming—there was still the body of his fault lying waiting for that resurrection which comes, even in this world, at an hour men least expect it, for the sins, and the follies, and the shortcomings, and the commission and the omission of their youth.
Trouble makes a man reflect: like adversity, it is a great teacher—and in the weary, weary hours that elapsed between his son’s death and the funeral, Basil Stondon learned more than he had ever done before, all his life long.
Hitherto the tale which experience traces on the memories of each of us had been to him as a narrative in a strange tongue; but now he got by degrees the clue to the mystery—the key to the cypher, and read the story day by day painfully and carefully. It had not been all a confused jumble of events, sorrows, temptations, joys, trials. Neither did it prove a disjointed puzzle that would not piece together and make a finished and perfect whole; but rather it was the fulfilment of a great truth which, once forced upon his attention, he had still elected to make light of—“The wages of sin is death.”
Painfully he patched the map of his life together, and found those words traced across it.
Death—not such death as had come to his boy, not such peace and quiet, not such repose and freedom from trouble, but death like what had fallen upon Phemie—living death—death to happiness, to hope, to the future. For wages are paid that they may be spent; and there can be no spending, no buying; no eating and drinking, of the bread of bitterness, of the waters of affliction, in the grave.