—Thirty-Seven —

Mr. Christopher

On the last Sunday evening before she was to leave for Yrndale, Hester had gone to see a poor woman in a house she had not been in before. Walking up the dismal stair, dark and dirty, she heard a moaning from a room the door of which was a little open. She peeped in, and saw on a low bed a poor woman, old, yellow, and wrinkled, apparently at the point of death. Her throat was bare, and she saw the muscles of it knotted in the struggle for life.—Is not death the victorious struggle for life?

She was not alone—a man knelt by her bedside, his arm under the pillow to hold her head higher, and his other hand clasping hers.

“The darkness! the darkness!” moaned the woman.

“Are you lonely?” said the voice of the man, low and broken with sympathy.

“All, all alone,” sighed the woman.

“I can do nothing for you. I can only love you.”

“Yes, yes,” said the woman hopelessly.

“You are slipping away from me, but my master is stronger than me and can help you yet. He is not far from you, though you can’t see him. He loves you too, and only wants you to ask him to help you. He can cure death as easy as any other disease.”

No reply came for a moment. Then came the cry,

“Oh, Christ, save me!”

Suddenly Hester was seized with a sudden impulse—she thought afterwards the feeling of it might be like what men and women of old had when the Spirit of God came upon them. It seemed she had not intended song when the sounds coming from her mouth entered her ears. The words she uttered were those and no more, over and over again, which the poor dying woman had just spoken: “O Christ, save me!” But the song-sounds in which they were lapt and with which they came winged from her lips, were as an outpouring of her whole soul. They seemed to rise from some eternal deep within her, yet not to be of her making. She was as in the immediate presence of Christ, pleading with him for the consolation and strength which his poor dying creature so sorely needed.

The holy possession lasted but a minute or so and left her without further words. She turned away and continued up the stairs.

“The angels! the angels! I’m going now!” said the woman feebly.

“The angel was praying to Christ for you,” said Christopher. “Oh, living brother, save our dying sister.”

“Oh, Christ, save me!” she murmured again, and they were her last words.

Christopher laid the body gently back on the pillow. A sigh of relief passed from his lips and he went from the room to give notice of the death. He must go on to help the living!

Such may seem nothing but empty religious sentiment to the man of this world. But when the inevitable Death has him by the throat, when he lies like that poor woman, lonely in the shadow, though his room be crowded with friends and possessions, whatever his theories about the afterlife, it may be an awful hour in which no one but Christ will be able to comfort him.