"
The glimmering shadows changed and faded for an hour. The man
sat quiet. There was not much in the years gone to soften his
thought, as it grew desperate and cruel: there was oppression and
vice heaped on him, and flung back out of his bitter heart. Nor
much in the future: a blank stretch of punishment to the end. He
was an old man: was it easy to bear? What if he were black?
what if he were born a thief? what if all the sullen revenge of
his nature had made him an outcast from the poorest poor? Was
there no latent good in this soul for which Christ died, that a
kind hand might not have brought to life?
None? Something, I think, struggled up in the touch of his hand,
catching the skirt of his child's dress, when it came near him,
with the timid tenderness of a mother touching her dead baby's
hair,--as something holy, far off, yet very near: something in
his old crime- marked face,--a look like this dog's, putting his
head on my knee,--a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the
slow memory of a wrong done to his soul in a day long past. A
wrong to both, you say, perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and
never to be recompensed. Never?
"Yoh must go, my little girl," he said at last.
Whatever he did must be done quickly. She came up, combing the
thin gray hairs through her fingers.
"Father, I dunnot understan' what it is, rightly. But stay with
me,--stay, father!"
"Yoh've a many frien's, Lo," he said, with a keen flash of
jealousy.
Pages:
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151