“What is the matter, Ailie?” Christian asks. “Tell me, what is the matter?”
“Oh, Miss Christian!” and poor Ailie’s wail of sobbing mixed with broken laughter sounded almost unearthly in Christian’s ear. “Oh, Miss Christian! said I not, that the bairn of sae monie prayers suld not be lost at last?”
“Ailie! Ailie! what do you mean? Have you heard anything of Halbert?” and Christian trembled like a leaf, and could scarce speak her question for emotion. “Ailie! I entreat you to speak to—to answer me.”
And Christian wrung her hands in an agony of hope and fear, unwitting what to think or make of all this almost hysterical emotion of the old faithful servant, or of her enigmatical words. “Look up, dear Christian; look up!” Ailie needs not answer. Who is this that stands on the threshold of this well-remembered room, with a flush of joy on his cheek, and a shade of shame and fearfulness just tempering the glow of happiness in his eyes?
“Halbert!”
“Christian!”
The brother and sister so fearfully and so long separated, and during these years unwitting of each other’s existence even, are thus restored to each other once more.
A long story has Halbert to tell, when Christian has recovered from her first dream of confused joy, a three year long story, beginning with that fearful night, the source of all his sorrows and his sufferings. Christian’s heart is bent down in silent shuddering horror as he tells her of how he fell; how he was seduced, as by the craftiness of an Ahithophel, into doubt, into scoffing, into avowed unbelief, and finally led by his seducer—who all the previous time had seemed pure and spotless as an angel of light—into the haunts of his profligate associates, so vicious, so degrading, that the blush mantles on Halbert’s cheek at the bare remembrance of that one night. He tells her how among them he was led to acknowledge the change which Forsyth had wrought upon his opinions, and how he had been welcomed as one delivered from the bondage of priestly dreams and delusions; how he was taken with them when they left Forsyth’s house—the host himself the prime leader and chief of all—and saw scenes of evil which he shuddered still to think of; and how in the terrible revulsion of his feelings which followed his first knowledge of the habits of these men, whose no-creed he had adopted, and whose principles he had openly confessed the night before, sudden and awful conviction laid hold upon him—conviction of the nature of sin; of his sin in chief—and an apprehension of the hopelessness of pardon being extended to him; and how, turning reckless in his despair, he had resolved to flee to some place where he was unknown, uncaring what became of himself. He told her then of his long agony, of his fearful struggle with despair, which engrossed his soul, and how at last he was prompted by an inward influence to the use of the means of grace once more; and how, when at length he dared to open his Bible again, a text of comfort and of hopefulness looked him in the face; that he had said to himself, over and over again, “It is impossible!” till hope had died in his heart: but here this true word contradicted at once the terrible utterance of his self-abandonment. “All things,” it was written, “are possible with God;” and Halbert told her, how the first tears that had moistened his eyes since his great fall sprang up in them that very day. He told her of the scene so fair, where this mighty utterance of the Almighty went to his soul, and where he found peace; in the words of the gifted American—
“Oh, I could not choose but go
Into the woodlands hoar.
“Into the blithe and breathing air,
Into the solemn wood,
Solemn and silent everywhere!
Nature with folded arms seem’d there,
Kneeling at her evening prayer!
Like one in prayer I stood.