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Page 60
For where was ever grief like this one? Beside this sorrow, death was
but a joy. If she might have closed her child's baby-eyes, and seen the
lips which had not uttered their first "Mother!" stilled, and laid her
away under the daisies, she would have sat there alone that night, and
thanked Him who had given and taken away.
But _this_,--a wanderer upon the face of the earth,--a mark, deeper
seared than the mark of Cain, upon the face which she had fondled and
kissed within her arms; the soul to which she had given life, accursed
of God and man,--to measure this, there is no speech nor language.
Martha Ryck rose at last, took off the covers of the stove, and made a
fresh blaze which brightened all the room, and shot its glow far into
the street. She went to the window to push the curtain carefully aside,
stood a moment looking out into the night, stole softly to the door,
unlocked it, then went upstairs to bed.
The wind, rising suddenly that night, struck sharply through the city.
It had been cold enough before, but the threatened storm foreboded that
it would be worse yet before morning. The people crowded in a warm and
brilliant church cast wandering glances from the preacher to the painted
windows, beyond which the night lay darkly, thought of the ride home in
close, cushioned carriages, and shivered.
So did a woman outside, stopping just by the door, and looking in at the
hushed and sacred shelter. Such a temperature was not the best medicine
for that cough of hers. She had just crawled out of the garret, where
she had lain sick, very sick, for weeks.
Passing the door of the Temple which reared its massive front and
glittering windows out of the darkness of the street, her ear was caught
by the faint, muffled sound of some anthem the choir were singing. She
drew the hood of her cloak over her face, turned into the shadow of the
steps, and, standing so, listened. Why, she hardly knew. Perhaps it was
the mere entreaty of the music, for her dulled ear had never grown deaf
to it; or perhaps a memory, flitting as a shadow, of other places and
other times, in which the hymns of God's church had not been strange to
her. She caught the words at last, brokenly. They were of some one who
was wounded. Wounded! she held her breath, listening curiously. The wind
shrieking past drowned the rest; only the swelling of the organ murmured
above it. She stole up the granite steps just within the entrance. No
one was there to see her, and she went on tiptoe to the muffled door,
putting her ear to it, her hair falling over her face. It was some
plaintive minor air they were hymning, as sad as a dying wail, and as
sweet as a mother's lullaby.
"But He was wounded; He was wounded for our transgression; He was
bruised for our iniquities."
Then, growing slower and more faint, a single voice took up the strain,
mournfully but clearly, with a hush in it as if one sang on Calvary.
"Yet we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised, and we
esteemed him not."
Well; He only knows what it spoke to the woman, who listened with her
guilty face hidden in her hair; how it drew her like a call to join the
throng that worshipped him.
"I'd like to hear the rest," she muttered to herself. "I wonder what it
is about."
A child came down from the gallery just then, a ragged boy, who, like
herself, had wandered in from the street.
"Hilloa, Meg!" he said, laughing, "_you_ going to meeting? That's a good
joke!" If she had heard him, she would have turned away. But her hand
was on the latch; the door had swung upon its noiseless hinges; the
pealing organ drowned his voice. She went in and sat down in an empty
slip close by the door, looking about her for the moment in a sort of
childish wonder. The church was a blaze of light and color. One
perceived a mist of gayly dressed people, a soft flutter of fans, and
faint, sweet perfumes below; the velvet-cushioned pulpit, and pale,
scholarly outlines of the preacher's face above; the warmth of
rainbow-tinted glass; the wreathed and massive carving of oaken cornice;
the glitter of gas-light from a thousand prisms, and the silence of the
dome beyond.
The brightness struck sharply against the woman sitting there alone. Her
face seemed to grow grayer and harder in it. The very hush of that
princely sanctuary seemed broken by her polluted presence. True, she
kept afar off; she did not so much as lift up her eyes to heaven; she
had but stolen in to hear the chanted words that were meant for the
acceptance and the comfort of the pure, bright worshippers,--sinners, to
be sure, in their way; but then, Christ died for _them_. This
tabernacle, to which they had brought their purple and gold and scarlet,
for his praise, was not meant for such as Meg, you know.
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