to need to speak the name: “Gain thyself that soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Heart, thy Mother, gain thyself that soul.”
They heard only one petition for herself, but that so anguished, so desperate, that the strong man broke into sobs to hear it: one hungry cry for God’s holy sacraments, for God’s anointed priest, to come to her before her death, yet never uttered without a more intense prayer still—“My God, my God, thy will be done, thy will be done”; and even that was entirely merged at last in her prayers for those who had made her life one long agony at its close.
Suddenly she sat straight up in her bed, her eyes blazing as if with an unearthly, reflected light, her cheeks brilliant with more than the fever flush.
“Hark, hark, hark!” she said, with a ring of ecstatic joy through every word. “Do you not hear the sacring-bell? Kneel, all of you. The priest comes—comes with my Lord at last.”
Her eyes were fixed upon the door that no hand opened, yet she seemed to watch some one enter, and to see some one draw nearer, nearer to her, and she folded her hands reverently, and bent her head as if in adoration. They understood: she believed a priest was there; and they, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, of what she evidently was sure she saw and heard—they who watched her fell down upon their knees and hid their faces as in some divine presence. The next words that broke the stillness were the words of a dying penitent alone with a priest of God: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my father.”
Steadily, as if for weeks she had prepared her soul for this in faith
and penance, Esther Armstrong made her dying confession, with a contrition sore as if she were the lowest sinner in Gomorrah’s depths of sin, and then craved absolution humbly and in tears. When there was silence, and they dared to look at her, she was lying back among her pillows, whispering, “Forgiven, forgiven!”
They moved to give her nourishment, and the movement roused her, though not to recognition. She started up once more, lifting her hand.
“Hark, hark!” she said again. “Do you not hear him? He is saying Mass, and they sing sweetly as angels.”
All round the world, that Christmas day, one song of praise was rising, one pure offering was offered up to Him who was born and given for us on that day. Grand cathedrals were ablaze with lights and rich with bloom; far down the choir the altar tapers shone like stars through clouds of incense waving upward to the fretted roof, and the full tide of chant swelled high to join the chant of angels; in lowly chapel as in great cathedral the priest of God and the people of God adored the Holy Babe upon his Mother’s breast. In Gomorrah, in a decaying chapel, while oath and brawl sounded without, one soul heard seraphic music which no other ear could hear; one soul beheld a Priest whom no other eye could see—joined in his offering of the tremendous Sacrifice. For an hour, upheld by superhuman strength, she knelt upright, rapt in an ecstasy of spiritual communion that grew too deep for prayer. When the clock struck twelve, she said slowly, “Ite missa est; Deo gratias”; then, with a long-drawn, rapturous sigh, lay down again, but not as if