“Canst thou indeed be the son of old Norman Adams, the industrious, the temperate, the mild, and the pious—who so often sat in this very room which thy presence has now polluted, and spake with me on the mysteries of life and of death? Foul ravisher, what stayed thy hand from the murder of that child, when there were none near to hear her shrieks in the dark solitude of the great pine-wood?”
Norman Adams smote his heart and fell down too on his knees beside the poor ruined orphan. He put his arm round her, and, raising her from the floor, said, “No, no, my sin is great, too great for Heaven’s forgiveness; but, oh sir! say not—say not that I would have murdered her; for, savage as my crime was, yet may God judge me less terribly than if I had taken her life.”
In a little while they were both seated with some composure, and silence was in the room. No one spoke, and the old grayhaired man sat with his eyes fixed, without reading, on the open Bible. At last he broke silence with these words out of Isaiah, that seemed to have forced themselves on his heedless eyes:—“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
Mary Simpson wept aloud at these words, and seemed to forget her own wrongs and grief in commiseration of the agonies of remorse and fear that were now plainly preying on the soul of the guilty man. “I forgive you, Norman, and will soon be out of the way, no longer to anger you with the sight of me.” Then, fixing her streaming eyes on the minister, she besought him not to be the means of bringing him to punishment and a shameful death, for that he might repent, and live to be a good man and respected in the parish; but that she was a poor orphan for whom few cared, and who, when dead, would have but a small funeral.
“I will deliver myself up into the hands of justice,” said the offender, “for I do not deserve to live. Mine was an inhuman crime, and let a violent and shameful death be my doom.”
The orphan girl now stood up as if her strength had been restored, and stretching out her hands passionately, with a flow of most affecting and beautiful language, inspired by a meek, single, and sinless heart that could not bear the thought of utter degradation and wretchedness befalling any one of the rational children of God, implored and beseeched the old man to comfort the sinner before them, and promise that the dark transaction of guilt should never leave the concealment of their own three hearts. “Did he not save the lives of two brothers once who were drowning in that black mossy loch, when their own kindred, at work among the hay, feared the deep sullen water, and all stood aloof shuddering and shaking, till Norman Adams leapt in to their rescue, and drew them by the dripping hair to the shore, and then lay down beside them on the heather as like to death as themselves? I myself saw it done; I myself heard their mother call down the blessing of God on Norman’s head, and then all the haymakers knelt down and prayed. When you, on the Sabbath, returned thanks to God for that they were saved, oh! kind sir, did you not name, in the full kirk, him who, under Providence, did deliver them from death, and who, you said, had thus showed himself to be a Christian indeed? May his sin against me be forgotten, for the sake of those two drowning boys, and their mother, who blesses his name unto this day.”
From a few questions solemnly asked, and solemnly answered, the minister found that Norman Adams had been won by the beauty and loveliness of this poor orphan shepherdess, as he had sometimes spoken to her when sitting on the hill-side with her flock, but that pride had prevented him from ever thinking of her in marriage. It appeared that he had also been falsely informed, by a youth whom Mary disliked for his brutal and gross manners, that she was not the innocent girl that her seeming simplicity denoted. On returning from a festive meeting, where this abject person had made many mean insinuations against her virtue, Norman Adams met her returning to her master’s house, in the dusk of the evening, on the footpath leading through a lonely wood; and, though his crime was of the deepest dye, it seemed to the minister of the religion of mercy, that by repentance, and belief in the atonement that had once been made for sinners, he, too, might perhaps hope for forgiveness at the throne of God.
“I warned you, miserable man, of the fatal nature of sin, when first it brought a trouble over your countenance, and broke in upon the peaceful integrity of your life. Was not the silence of the night often terrible to you, when you were alone in the moors, and the whisper of your own conscience told you, that every wicked thought was sacrilege to your father’s dust? Step by step, and almost imperceptibly, perhaps, did you advance upon the road that leadeth to destruction; but look back now, and what a long dark journey have you taken, standing, as you are, on the brink of everlasting death! Once you were kind, gentle, generous, manly, and free; but you trusted to the deceitfulness of your own heart; you estranged yourself from the house of the God of your fathers; and what has your nature done for you at last, but sunk you into a wretch—savage, selfish, cruel, cowardly, and in good truth a slave? A felon are you, and forfeited to the hangman’s hands. Look on that poor innocent child, and think what is man without God. What would you give now, if the last three years of your reckless life had been passed in a dungeon dug deep into the earth, with hunger and thirst gnawing at your heart, and bent down under a cartload of chains? Yet look not so ghastly, for I condemn you not utterly; nor, though I know your guilt, can I know what good may yet be left uncorrupted and unextinguished in your soul. Kneel not to me, Norman; fasten not so your eyes upon me; lift them upwards, and then turn them in upon your own heart, for the dreadful reckoning is between it and God.”
Mary Simpson had now recovered all her strength, and she knelt down by the side of the groaner. Deep was the pity she now felt for him, who to her had shown no pity; she did not refuse to lay her light arm tenderly upon his neck. Often had she prayed to God to save his soul, even among her rueful sobs of shame in the solitary glens; and now that she beheld his sin punished with a remorse more than he could bear, the orphan would have willingly died to avert from his prostrate head the wrath of the Almighty.
The old man wept at the sight of so much innocence, and so much guilt, kneeling together before God, in strange union and fellowship of a common being. With his own fatherly arms he lifted up the orphan from her knees, and said, “Mary Simpson, my sweet and innocent Mary Simpson, for innocent thou art, the elders will give thee a token, that will, on Sabbath-day, admit thee (not for the first time, though so young) to the communion-table. Fear not to approach it; look at me, and on my face, when I bless the elements, and be thou strong in the strength of the Lord. Norman Adams, return to your home. Go into the chamber where your father died. Let your knees wear out the part of the floor on which he kneeled. It is somewhat worn already; you have seen the mark of your father’s knees. Who knows, but that pardon and peace may descend from Heaven upon such a sinner as thou? On none such as thou have mine eyes ever looked, in knowledge, among all those who have lived and died under my care, for three generations. But great is the unknown guilt that may be hidden even in the churchyard of a small quiet parish like this. Dost thou feel as if God-forsaken? Or, oh! say it unto me, canst thou, my poor son, dare to hope for repentance?”