Was It Right to Forgive? A Domestic Romance

“No! no! Mrs. Filmer asked me to tell you. May I?”

Harry sat down, but not very graciously; and the young woman stood by the table, with her hand grasping the back of the chair from which Yanna had just risen. She was a very pretty young woman, and her peculiar dress was by no means unbecoming. If it had been, Harry perhaps might have been less willing to listen; though, as it was, he had a wandering idea that Cora was playing a trick – that she might have taken a wager she would enter his house and drink tea with his wife – that she might have wondered at him for not seeking her out, and contrived this plan to engage his attention. In fact, he did not at all believe in any confession Cora had made to his wife; and he was resentful of her presence under any guise on his hearthstone. So, though he sat down to listen, he did it ungraciously, and his voice was irritable as he said:

“I do not understand your little game, Cora; and I wish you would explain it as quickly as possible.”

“Do you remember Mary Brady, one of the ballet girls?”

“Yes.”

“She is dead. She sent for me one night in July. She was dying without a friend, and without a cent. I did what I could. I did what there was no one else to do, I tried to pray with her, and to tell her about a pitiful God and Christ.”

“You!”

“Me. For I am the child of parents who loved God, and I have two little sisters whom I have sinned for, lest they should become sinners. I know I ought to have trusted God, but I thought He was never coming to help me – and so I took the devil’s help. No one knows what the devil’s wages are until they have earned them. Mary has taken his last coin, which is – death.”

“Poor little girl! She was a merry sprite.”

“Mirth was part of her bargain. She was dying while she was laughing” – and the face of the speaker was so instinct with grief that Harry suddenly found that all his suspicions were vanishing, and an irrepressible interest was taking their place.

“Well, Cora?”

“My name is Hannah – Hannah Young. My father and mother gave me that name, in the old meeting-house at Newburyport. It was the name registered in God’s Book, and I would not see it on a play-bill; so I called myself – the other one. As I was telling you, I tried to talk to poor Mary, as I knew my mother would have talked to me. Alas! alas! it was too late!”

Harry looked up startled and uneasy.

“She had suffered so long and so cruelly, without anything to help or to relieve her pain. I brought her cold water and fruits and a doctor, and I told her that Christ saw all her trouble and pitied her, but she only said, ‘It is not true! If He loved me He would have 257 sent me help, when help might have saved me.’ Then I got the Gospel, and I read it to her, and she cried wearily, ‘I have heard it all before! I know He was loving and good, but that is all so long ago!’ I said, ‘Mary, if you could only pray!’ and she asked angrily, ‘To whom? To the fine ladies on Broadway, or to the men who preach now and then in the mostly closed churches?’ I told her, ‘Christ waits in this very room,’ and she began to wail and cry out, ‘It is not true! It is not true! Christ would have touched and healed me long ago!’ Yes, in her very last moments she whispered, ‘He does not know.’ I shall never forget her eyes; no, not as long as I live. She went quite hopeless down the hard road to the grave; but I do believe now that the moment she touched the other side Jesus met and comforted her.”

Harry did not answer. His eyes were cast down, and he was holding his right hand in his left, with a nervous, restless motion.

“After Mary’s death I could not be the same. I felt that I would rather hire myself out to wash dishes than earn another sinful penny. The day of her burial I went back to her room to pay the pittance due for its wretched shelter; and I sat and talked with the woman who owned the house a long time, so it was growing dark when I turned out of the court into the main street. It was a poor, quiet street, and the people were sitting on their doorsteps, or leaning out of their windows; and I saw a little crowd coming toward me, and they were singing. And as I met them, they ceased; and a woman a little in front, with an open Bible in her hand, cried out:

“‘Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ And her clear, sweet 258 call went down into my heart, and I began to weep and to pray as I walked through the streets; and after I got to my room, I locked the door and threw myself on my knees, on my face, and pleaded with Christ to forgive me and save me from my sins and myself. Oh! how I longed and wept for the purity I had lost and the faith I had cast aside! I was weary, fainting, but I would not rise. In a little while, I could not rise. I felt that the Savior was in the room. It seemed to me at first as if He would not be entreated, as if He would go away. But I had hands that clasped his feet, and caught his robe, and I would not let Him go until He forgave me.”

“You knew that you were forgiven? How?”

“I knew it by the joy that filled my heart. I did not feel my body at all. I walked up and down, clasping my hands and saying, ‘Christ, I thank Thee! Christ, I thank Thee!’ And when the dawn began to break, a great, a wonderful peace came all over me; and I lay down and slept such a happy sleep; and when I awakened, I knew that the old life had passed away, and that I was a different woman. Do you believe me, Mr. Filmer?”

“Yes,” answered Harry, very softly, “I believe you.”

“Then I went to the Salvation Army. Such gifts as God had given me, I gave back to Him. And I have been very happy ever since.”

“What made you come here to my wife?”

“I had wronged her. Against her my sin was great and particular. I came to her, and I told her what I have told you. She wept with me. She forgave me freely. She made me tea with her own hands; she did more than that – she ate and drank with me. It 259 was as if Christ again put His hand upon the leper, or went to be guest in the house of a man that was a sinner. I shall never forget her goodness. I wanted you to know – ”

“What?”

“That there is mercy for sin – that there is joy and gladness in repenting – that God is ‘the lover of souls.’”

“It is a strange thing to hear you talk in this way to me.”

“I talk to you now because I shall not accuse you at the Day of Judgment. I have been forgiven, and I have forgiven you. But, oh! if you remain unforgiven, will you accuse me then?”

“No; I only am to blame.”

“Now I will go. It is not likely we shall meet again until the Day of Judgment. At that Day, I shall be glad that I have spoken; and I hope that you will be glad that you have listened.”

Harry tried to answer, but he knew not what to say. His soul was in a chaos of emotion. There seemed to be no words to interpret it; and before he could find words, the woman was gone, and the door was shut, and he was quite alone.

He did not wish to see Yanna just then; and she, being a wise wife, probably divined this feeling, for she did not intrude herself or her opinions on the event at that time. She knew what Hannah Young would say to him, and she understood that such words need neither commentary nor explanation. She was rather satisfied than otherwise, when she heard Harry go out; and as she had promised to dine with Miss Alida, she went there alone – there being already an understanding that Harry should come for her at eleven o’clock.

So their next meeting was in a company who were discussing Browning with an extraordinary animation. Miss Alida stopped in the middle of her declaration “that she would rather have her teeth drawn than be compelled to read Sordello,” to smile a welcome; and Yanna’s look of pleasure drew him to her side; where he stood leaning on her chair and watching Professor Snowdon, who was holding a book open at the likeness of the poet.

“What a brave countenance!” he cried. “How honest, and thoughtful, and kindly! And what a pleasant shrewdness in the eyes! It is a perfect English face.”

“Oh, indeed!” said a scholarly man who stood by Miss Alida; “if Browning had an English body, his soul was that of some thirteenth-century Italian painter. Does he not say of himself:

‘Open my heart and you will see

Graved inside of it – “Italy.”’

Now it is a prejudice with me, that if an Englishman is to open his heart to us, we ought to find England written there. Shakespeare, who is at home with all people, is never so mighty and so lovable as when depicting the sweet-natured English ladies who became his ‘Imogenes,’ ‘Perditas,’ and ‘Helenas,’ or dallying with his own country wild-flowers, or in any way exalting England’s life and loveliness, majesty and power.”

“And pray, sir,” asked the Professor, “who but a man with an English heart could have written that home-yearning song:

‘Oh to be in England
Now that April’s there;
And whoever wakes in England,
Sees, some morning unaware,
That the lowest boughs, and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm tree bole, are in tiny leaf;
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough,
In England – now!’”

“There is somewhere a still finer home-thought,” said Harry. “I remember learning it when I was at college;” and as Adriana looked backward and smiled, and the Professor nodded approval, and Miss Alida said, “Let us have the lines, Harry,” he repeated them without much self-consciousness, and with a great deal of spirit:

“‘Nobly, nobly Cape St. Vincent to the westward died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and grey;
“Here and there did England help me, – how can I help England?” – say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.’”

There was a hearty response to Harry’s effort, and then Miss Alida’s favorite minister – who had been silent during the whole discussion, much to her disappointment – spoke.

“A poet’s nature,” he said, “needs that high reverence which is to the spirit what iron is to the blood; it needs, most of all, the revelation of Christianity, because of its peculiar temptations, doubts, fears, yearnings, and obstinate questionings. Mr. Browning has this reverence, and accepts this revelation. He is 262 not half-ashamed, as are some poets, to mention God and Christ; and he never takes the name of either in vain. He does not set up a kind of pantheistic worship. No one has ever told us, as Browning has in his poem of ‘Christmas Eve and Easter Day,’ how hard it is to be a Christian. Do you remember its tremendous dream of the Judgment Day: