Winter Evening Tales

Slain in the battle of life.  Wounded and fallen, trampled in the mire and mud of the conflict, then the ranks closed again and left no place for her.  So she crawled aside to die.  With a past whose black despair was as the shadow of a starless night, a future which her early religious training lit up with the lurid light of hell, and the strong bands of a pitiless death dragging her to the grave—­still she craved, as the awful hour drew near, to see once more the home of her innocent childhood.  Not that she thought to die in its shelter—­any one who knew David Todd knew also that was a hopeless dream; but if, IF her father should say one pardoning word, then she thought it would help her to understand the love of God, and give her some strength to trust in it.

Early in the evening, just as the sun was setting and the cows were coming lowing up the little lane, scented with the bursting lilac bushes, she stood humbly at the gate her father must pass in order to go to the hillside fold to shelter the ewes and lambs.  Very soon she saw him coming, his Scotch bonnet pulled over his brows, his steps steadied by his shepherd’s staff.  His lips were firmly closed, and his eyes looked far over the hills; for David was a mystic in his own way, and they were to him temples not made with hands in which he had seen and heard wonderful things.  Here the storehouses of hail and lightning had been opened in his sight, and he had watched in the sunshine the tempest bursting beneath his feet.  He had trod upon rainbows and been waited upon by spectral mists.  The voices of winds and waters were in his heart, and he passionately believed in God.  But it was the God of his own creed—­jealous, just and awful in that inconceivable holiness which charges his angels with folly and detects impurity in the sinless heavens.  So, when he approached the gate he saw, but would not see, the dying girl who leaned against it.  Whatever he felt he made no sign.  He closed it without hurry, and then passed on the other side.

“Father!  O, father! speak one word to me.”

Then he turned and looked at her, sternly and awfully.

“Thou art nane o’ my bairn.  I ken naught o’ thee.”

Without another glance at the white, despairing face, he walked rapidly on; for the spring nights were chilly, and he must gather his lambs into the fold, though this poor sheep of his own household was left to perish.

But, if her father knew her no more, the large sheep-dog at his side was not so cruel.  No theological dogmas measured Rover’s love; the stain on the spotless name of his master’s house, which hurt the old man like a wound, had not shadowed his memory.  He licked her hands and face, and tried with a hospitality and pity which made him so much nearer the angels than his master to pull her toward her home.  But she shook her head and moaned pitifully; then throwing her arms round the poor brute she kissed him with those passionate kisses of repentance and love which should have fallen on her father’s neck.  The dog (dumb to all but God) pleaded with sorrowful eyes and half-frantic gestures; but she turned wearily away toward a great circle of immense rocks—­relics of a religion scarcely more cruel than that which had neither pity nor forgiveness at the mouth of the grave.  Within their shadow she could die unseen; and there next morning a wagoner, attracted by the plaintive howling of a dog, found her on the ground, dead.

There are set awful hours between every soul and heaven.  Who knows what passed between Lettice Todd and her God in that dim forsaken temple of a buried faith?  Death closes tenderly even the eyes full of tears, and her face was beautiful with a strange peace, though its loveliness was marred and its youth “seared with the autumn of strange suffering.”

At the inquest which followed, her stern old father neither blamed nor excused himself.  He accepted without apology the verdict of society against him; only remarking that its reproof was “a guid example o’ Satan correcting sin.”

Scant pity and less ceremony was given to her burial.  Death, which draws under the mantle of Charity the pride, cruelty and ambition of men, covering them with those two narrow words Hic jacet! gives also to the woman who has been a sinner all she asks—­oblivion.  In no other way can she obtain from man toleration.  The example of the whitest, purest soul that ever breathed on earth, in this respect, is ignored in the church He founded.  The tenderest of human hearts, “when lovely woman stooped to folly,” found no way of escape for her but to “die;” and those closet moralists, with filthy fancies and soiled souls, who abound in every community, regard her with that sort of scorn which a Turk expresses when he says “Dog of a Christian.”  Poor Lettice!  She had procured this doom—­first by sacrificing herself to a blind and cruel love, and then to the importunate demands of hunger, “oldest and strongest of passions.”  Ah! if there was no pity in Heaven, no justice beyond the grave, what a cruel irony this life would be!  For, while the sexton shoveled hastily over the rude coffin the obliterating earth, there passed the graveyard another woman equally fallen from all the apostle calls “lovely and of good report.”  One whose youth and hopes and marvelous beauty had been sold for houses and lands and a few thousand pounds a year.  But, though her life was a living lie, the world praised her, because she “had done well unto herself.”  Yet, at the last end, the same seed brought forth the same fruit, and the Lady of Hawksworth Hall learned, with bitter rapidity, that riches are too poor to buy love.  Scarcely had she taken possession of her splendid home before she longed for the placid happiness of her mother’s cottage, and those evening walks under the beech-trees, whose very memory was now a sin.  Over her beautiful face there crept a pathetic shadow, which irritated the rude and noisy squire like a reproach.  He had always had what he wanted.  Not even the beauty of all the border counties had been beyond his means to buy but somehow he felt as if in this bargain he had been overreached.  Her better part eluded his possession, and he felt dissatisfied and angry.  Expostulations grew into cruel words; cruel words came to cruder blows. Yes, blows.  English gentlemen thirty years ago knew their privileges; and that was one of them.  She was as much and as lawfully his as the horses in his stables or the hounds in his kennels.  He beat them, too, when they did not obey him.  Her beauty had betrayed her into the hands of misery.  She had wedded it, and there was no escape for her.  One day, when her despair and suffering was very great, some tempting devil brought her a glass of brandy, and she drank it.  It gave her back for a few hours her departed sceptre; but at what a price!  Her slave soon became her master.  Stimulus and stupefaction, physical exhaustion and mental horrors, the abandonment of friends and the brutality of a coarse and cruel husband, brought her at last to the day of reckoning.  She died, seven years after her marriage, in the delirium of opium.  There were physicians and servants around her, and an unloving husband waiting for the news of his release.  I think I would rather have died where Lettice did—­under the sky, with the solemn mountains lifting their heads in a perpetual prayer around me, and that faithful dog licking my hands, and mourning my wasted life.

Now, wherein did these two women differ?  One sinned through an intense and self-sacrificing love, and in obedience to the strongest calls of want.  Her sin, though it was beyond the pale of the world’s toleration, was yet one according to Nature.  The other, in a cold spirit of barter, voluntarily and deliberately exchanged her youth and beauty, the hopes of her own and another’s life, for carriages, jewels, fine clothing and a luxurious table.  She loathed the price she had to pay, and her sin was an unnatural one.  For this kind of prostitution, which religion blesses and society praises, there seems to be no redress; but for that which results as the almost inevitable sequence of one lapse of chastity we, the pious, the virtuous, the irreproachable, are all to blame.  Who or what make it impossible for them to retrace their steps?  Do they ever have reason to hope that the family hearth will be open to them if they go back?  Prodigal sons may return, and are welcomed with tears of joy and clasped by helping hands; but alas! how few parents would go to meet a sinning daughter.  Forgetting our Master’s precepts, forgetting our human frailty, forgetting our own weakness, we turn scornfully from the weeping Magdalen, and leave her “alone with the irreparable.”  Marriage is a holy and a necessary rite.  We would deprecate any loosening of this great house-band of society; but we do say that where it is the only distinction between two women, one of whom is an honored matron, and the other a Pariah and an outcast, there is “something in the world amiss”—­something beyond the cure of law or legislation, and that they can only be reached by the authority of a Christian press and the influence of Christian example.