XXVII

“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she has drunk the cup of life’s passions and found them corrupting poison; all that was lovely and pure and good has withdrawn from her; she stands alone, shut off by her sin, like a wild thing in a circle of flame.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—”