The Sword of Damocles

as he lay upon his pillow, his mouth grew severe and he essayed to shake his head. I at once pointed to the portrait.

“ ‘What will you say to her when she meets you on the borders of heaven?’ I demanded with the courage of despair.’ She will ask, ‘Where is my child?’ And what will you reply?’

“The fingers that lay upon the coverlid moved spasmodically; he eyed me with a steady deepening stare, awful to meet, fearful to remember. I went on steadily; ‘She has gone out of this house with your curse; tell me that if she comes back, she may be greeted with your forgiveness.’ Still that awful stare which changed not. ‘I have watched and waited for her every day since her departure,’ I whispered, ‘and shall watch and wait for her, every day until I die. Shall a stranger’s love be greater than a father’s?’ This time his lips twitched and the grey shadow shifted, but it did not rise. ‘I had sworn to do it,’ I went on. ‘When you lay there at the top of the stairs, smitten down by your first shock, I told her, come sickness, come health, I should keep a daily vigil at that door of the house which your severity had not closed upon her; and I have kept my word till now and shall keep it to the end. What will you do for this miserable child of whose being you are the author?’

“With indescribable anxiety I paused and watched him, for his lips were moving. ‘Do for her?’ he repeated.

“How awful is the voice of the dying! I shivered as I listened, but drew near and nearer, that I might lose no word that came from his stony lips.

“ ‘She will not come,’ gasped he, with an effort that raised him up in bed, and deepened that horrible stare, ‘but⁠—’

“Who shall say what he might have uttered if Death’s hand had delayed a single instant, but the inexorable shadow fell, and he never finished the sentence.

“My child, these are frightful things for you to hear. God knows I would not assail your pure ears with a tale like this, if it were not for the help and sympathy I hope to gain from you. Sin is a hideous thing; the gulf it opens is wide and deep; well may it be said to swallow those who trust themselves above its flower-hung brink. But we who are human, owe something to humanity. Love stops not because of the gulf; love follows the sinner with wilder and more heartbreaking longing, the deeper and deeper he sinks into the illimitable darkness. Ten years have passed since we laid the Colonel away in the burying-place of all the Japhas, and dutiful to his last request, nailed up the front door of his speedily to be forsaken mansion. In all that time my watch has remained unbroken in this house, which by will he had left to me, but which I secretly hold in trust for her. The hour of six has found me at my post, sometimes elate with hope, sometimes depressed with repeated disappointments, but whether hopeful or sad, always trustful that the great God who Himself so loved all sinners, that He gave the life of His Son to rescue them, would ultimately grant me the desire of my heart. But the decrepitude of age is coming upon me, and each morning I leave my bed, with growing fear lest my infirmities will increase until they finally overcome my resolution. Child, if this should happen, if lying in my bed I should some day hear that she had come back, and failing to find the lamp burning and the welcome ready, had gone away again⁠—But the thought is madness. I cannot bear it. A sinner, lost, degraded, suffering, starving, perhaps, is wandering this way. She is hardened and old in guilt; she has drunk the cup of life’s passions and found them corrupting poison; all that was lovely and pure and good has withdrawn from her; she stands alone, shut off by her sin, like a wild thing in a circle of flame. What shall touch this soul? The preacher’s voice has no charm for her; good men’s advice is but empty air. God’s love must be mirrored in human love, to strike an eye so unused to looking up. Where shall she find such love? It is all that can rescue her; love as great as her sin, as boundless as her degradation, as persistent as her suffering. Child⁠—”

“I know what you are going to say,” suddenly exclaimed Paula, rising up and confronting Mrs. Hamlin with a steady high look of determination. “In the day of your weakness or illness you want someone to unlock the door and light the lamp. You have found her!”

XXVIII

Sunshine on the Hills

“If I speak to thee in Friendship’s name,
Thou think’st I speak too coldly;
If I mention Love’s devoted flame,
Thou say’st I speak too boldly.”

Moore

The story told by Mrs. Hamlin had a great effect upon Paula, not only on account of its own interest and the promise it had elicited from her, but because of the remembrances it revived of Mr. Sylvester and her life in New York. Any vision of evil or suffering, any experience that roused the affections or awakened the sensibilities, could not fail to recall to her mind the forcible figure of Mr. Sylvester as he stood that day by his own hearthstone, talking of the temptations that assail humanity; and any reminiscence of him must necessarily bring with it much that charmed and aroused. For a week, then, she felt the effect of a great unsettlement. Her village home appeared a prison; she longed to run, soar⁠—anything to escape; the horizon was full of beckoning hands. A brooding melancholy settled upon her reveries; the prospect of a life spent in the narrow circle to which she had endeavored to re-accustom