Masterman and Son

by W. J. Dawson

"Why do you say that?" he cried. "A letter like that puts its writer beyond pity."

"Ah, Arthur! I see you've not yet got out of the bad habit of judging people harshly. My laddie, don't let your heart grow hard against your sister, even though she is to blame. I'm not saying that that isn't a bad letter, and it comes from a hard, cruel heart. But I mind Helen as a little girl, as sweet and bright a child as you might meet in a day's march. It wasn't her fault that she was shallow; that's the way she was made. Yes, she was shallow, and only meant to sail in shallow waters, and when the deep waters overtook her, she was frightened to death. That's the letter of a poor, terrified girl who doesn't know what she's saying."

"I didn't think of it like that."

"No; it wasn't to be supposed you could. It isn't a boy that understands the heart of a poor, terrified girl."

"But it's the meanness of it—no word about my father but cruel accusation."

"Yes, it's mean; fear makes weak people mean."

"That's right," interjected Bundy. "I've seen a man, when thoroughly frightened, pour out all the black things in his heart, without the least idea of what a cad he looked to other people."

"Ah! and that's not all," went on Mrs. Bundy. "You think she's beyond pity. Why, she never had a better right to pity than now. She's sold her youth to that old Frenchman—I never did believe in Frenchmen—and she's got to pay for her folly, and it'll be a hard, long price before she's through with it, be sure of that. December and May—I never did know any good come of that kind of marriage yet. No, no. Your father's to be pitied, but he's got his pride; and you are to be pitied, but you've got your youth and freedom; but, if you ask me who is to be pitied most, it's that poor motherless girl. She may have a hard heart, but it can bleed; yes, and life will make it bleed before long, I doubt."

And so from Mrs. Bundy Arthur once more learned that lesson in life which he had found so difficult to master, the lesson always difficult to youth, and perhaps the most difficult of all to those whose ideals are highest—the lesson of charity, of tolerance, of lenient judgment toward the faulty. Mrs. Bundy had once before shown him the better road, when she had made him acquainted with virtues in his father which he had ignored; he had learned something of what charity meant from Vyse upon the Saurian, and Horner in New York, each with his catholic axiom that Englishmen ought to stand by one another; he had remarked Vickars's altered attitude to life, his sense of life's complexity, and his allowance for faults in men, for which their own will was but partially responsible: four times the Angel of Charity had stood beside him, and each time he had turned his face away. He had not allowed Mrs. Bundy's plea; he had accepted Horner's kindness, but without any accurate conception of the rarity and real beauty of his character; he had heard Vickars's confession, and in his utmost heart had thought him an apostate prophet. And now the same test met him again in the case of his sister. He saw her hardness and shallowness with more than sufficient accuracy; what he had not seen was her weakness, her terror under sudden disaster, and the tragic folly to which she had been driven by her terror. It was left to Mrs. Bundy to show him that. Suddenly he saw it; and he saw much besides. He saw that there is a vision of the mind and a vision of the heart; that the one is judging vision, the other sympathetic vision; that the one sees the surface only, the other the depth; and that therefore the vision of the heart is the only true vision. Of the four persons who had instructed him, three were quite simple persons, without the least claim to intellectual superiority; the other a man of genius, who had become humble by contact with human sorrows. And there was a fifth—there was Bundy himself, an adventurer whom he had secretly despised and ridiculed, but from whose hand had come salvation in his own hour of direst need. And the bond between these persons was quite simple; they had warm, human hearts, and in the difficult hours of life they were governed by warm impulses. Ah! that had been his error; he had looked at life with the mind, rarely with the heart. He had set himself up to judge others, and now he was judged. He had not pitied his sister; it was left for a stranger to do that; and in that moment he saw, as clearly as though expressed in tongues of heavenly flame, the divine grace resting on the head of Mrs. Bundy, and himself standing in the dark shadows cast by his own proud egoism.

"O Mrs. Bundy!" he cried, "I have been wrong—quite wrong; you have made me see it!"