“AND do you mean I may come to your house, miss; me, a stranger, whom you have never seen before? May I come along tonight, if mother says I may? Yes, it is hard times most days now. Not that the work is so hard, but that mother sets on so, — what with the children ill, and my brother Frank still out of work. And then there’s father, what with the coaxing and the watching, mother says it’s more than she can ‘bide sometimes.”
I looked at the girl’s flushed face. Such large, blue, eager eyes met mine, they seemed to look me through; and, after the first startled gaze, I thought their decision was to trust in me. She stood leaning against a lamp-post. The tall slim outlines of her graceful figure, and tiny gloveless hands, contrasted oddly with the severe gingham gown she wore and the simple well-worn mushroom hat; so different from the many mill-girls hurrying by us then, not one without her bit of finery, feather, or beads. I passed on my way, feeling sure that one at least of the many I had spoken to that morning would keep her word, and pay me a visit in my “Evening Home.”
It is the evening hour that brings the temptations in this crowded suburb of our big city, when the glaring jet-lights from the dancing-saloons and music halls seem to give such a welcome to the giddy, thoughtless, pleasure-loving youth; “pass-times,” to fill up the hurrying hours of life, wherein to drown pain, care, and thoughts of coming toil. Yet that is not all; the sting of sin is there, and the slow fever that works so secretly at first.
Evening by evening I awaited my guests, as they trooped in by twos and threes; and among the merry, laughing throng came Alice, quiet and demure. For days no one seemed to notice her, she slipped in so quietly; but in time they found her out, and someone said―
“Who’s her?” pointing a finger over her shoulder.
“That ‘un? Oh, her’s a stranger here; her’s not our sort. Why, my dear Liz, her couldn’t say ‘Bo’ to a goose.”
How I longed sometimes to get a word with the girl, but with all her almost childish trustfulness there was a quiet dignified reserve that seemed to check inquiry. But she was always in her place when we gathered round the fire for a “good-bye talk,” when we caught the girls in their quieter moods, and then they almost hung upon our words.
It seemed like news to them hearing of the love of God as a love for them to trust in, — a love that spared not an only Son, but that gave Him up to die and suffer on the cross for their sins. It seemed as though it could scarcely be that the “Just” should suffer “for the unjust.” And then, too, that God should care so much about them as to meet them in all the daily needs of their narrowed, weary lives. Surely light was dawning in some of these sad hearts, which had for so long accustomed themselves to think of God only as the Almighty One, far away, quite outside their lives.
“Miss,” said Martha, as she left one night, “I believe God cares, because you care, though we are only factory girls.”
“And who be you? We dunnot want ony, thankee. I be busy, and we here don’t have toime to read such loiks.”
“Don’t want what?” I said, surprised, as the woman drew herself up a moment from her scrubbing, and fixed a pair of defiant eyes on me.
“No tracts,” she answered, moving as if to push the door.
“But I haven’t any,” I replied, laughing.
“Who be you, then?” came the answer, not quite so fierce this time.
“I am a friend of your daughter Alice, and came to ask for her.”
The woman’s face darkened again.
“You may well ask,” she almost shouted. “Where be she? Why, along down the road with all the rest.”
Perhaps a shadow crossed my face, for she looked at me more closely, saying—
“Don’t mistake me, the gal ain’t bad; she’s steady enough, poor lass. Not like I was when a lass, with a silly head full of this and that nonsense. Sure I was happy enough in my farm home, till the young Squire’s son came along, and what with his talks and his promises, and I thinking to be made a great leddy, gave in, and so we ran off and got married. And then came the trouble, and my mon he lists. But there now, need I tell you the rest?” spreading out her hands. “See,” she continued, “that is what it’s brought us to. This! do you call this home? And nine children, not one of them strong enough to face the world — weak, refined, delicate — all took after their father.”
Much more she said, telling me how she had followed her husband from place to place with his regiment. Being a quick workwoman, she was useful to the officers’ wives, and was seldom without employment. When he was ready to despair, she became the more watchful and earnest to keep him straight; and now they had settled down where he had found work on the railway.
“And what of Alice?” I asked again, as she finished her story.
“Why, the gal’s going along with the rest, I tell you. I must have her home; I must!” she said, almost desperately.
This is how it were, miss. The old couple are hard — hard as this stone hearth here. No! there’s no forgiveness for the mother; but they’ll have the children, and glad enough too.
So I let the eldest go; and she, poor child, is that quoit-loike, and never says a word, but just works hard every day, and not so much as a murmur. Whether it was the cold of Norfolk, or what, I don’t know, but it took her in the lungs; it’s the way they all go. It wasn’t long with her, miss; she took ill in the autumn, and in six months all was over.
Then it was Alice they must needs have; Alice, to nurse her. I says yes; but only on a visit, mind you, only on a visit. Soon after my eldest died; and, says I, Alice must come home. But no such thing.
“Had I the heart to treat an old couple so? I had other children; did I grudge them this one in their loneliness? And that’s how it was, miss, I gave in; God knows, not willingly. But there, they were my ain parents. What could I do?
“She was sent out in the orchard in the early morning to gather windfalls, when the dew was on the ground. And that’s the whole story. And now she’s down, and she’ll die too; my Alice, the bonniest of them all. She will die, I tell you; and who’s there to care? Trouble? Yes; no end to it! Don’t speak to me of comfort, or of God; I cannot bear it. No; if I believed once a little, it’s all gone now. One child dead, another dying, and seven more to go the same way. They’ve all it in them, yes, all; it’s consumption, miss, consumption.”
And so Alice’s mother was hardening her heart against that God who had so loved her as to give His only-begotten Son to die for her, She could not spare two out of her nine children; He had freely given up His only-begotten and well-beloved Son! Oh, what love was this! And what love of Jesus, to come and willingly suffer for sinners such as she was! and yet she cared not for Him, did not even believe! Reader, do you?
“He knew how wicked man had been,
And knew that God must punish sin;
So, out of pity, Jesus said
He’d bear the punishment instead.”
A week or so after I called again. The house was shut up. No satisfaction could be got from the neighbors. “No, they did not know where the family had gone to; they were strange folks with strange ways.”
Mrs. Smith replied that she for one “preferred to keep herself to herself, and not to be prying into her neighbors’ movements.”
The landlord said, “All he minded was hiss rent; and though the woman had a sharp tongue, and had hard work enough to keep the old man from the public, she was honest, and had paid her rent, and that was all he knew.”
So it was that I lost sight of Alice.
Just one year had passed away, and winter had come round again. A cold dreary December day, darkness within and without, though only two o’clock, as I looked out at the fog and back again to my snug chair by the fire. I decided I was best off at home, so settled down again to my work and my thoughts, till someone came and said, “Did I know a young girl named. Alice H —? She was dying in East London, and was asking for me.”
A low-roofed upper room, clean but poor, very poor. By the bed stood the mother, the same, yet changed; if possible the lines of care were deeper. Her lips, close set as if defying pain, relaxed a little when she saw me. She said, “I’m glad you’ve come, for the child will rest content.”
A thin white hand was stretched out across the coverlet; I laid mine upon it. My eyes were dim as they rested on that changed, white, tired, and wasted face. The silence of that room was only broken by the sharp, hard cough. And was this Alice? The blue eyes were fixed on mine once more; such joy and light were there! I bent down to catch the whispered words, “You’ve come; I only want to thank you.” And then, with quick, short breaths, “I’m — happy — happy.”
Day was declining, life was passing away; she was leaving the world that for her had brought little else but sorrow, change, and pain; dying, and our minds were for that moment occupied with the sadness’s of earth’s passing day. But why these tears? For Alice was eagerly looking onward and upward to that land of everlasting day, where “the inhabitants shall no more say, I am sick,” for her heart was surely fixed there, where true joys are to be found through Jesus Christ our Lord. “Thank you,” the words kept ringing in my ear. Thank me for what? Was it for that message given long ago, “found after many days”?
How little we know what we may have done when we have opened our lips, perhaps tremblingly, to speak of Christ, not as a far-off distant name, or a beautiful character that we admired and vainly tried to copy. No! but as of a Saviour and Friend whom we know personally; so weak the words, so feeble, so far short of what He is; and yet we speak of One we know. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” “Life eternal!” God’s own gift to man. A gift! though many heed it not. A certainty! to all that believe. Oh! how sad these words to those who heard them long ago; how grave their meaning still to those who do not heed today. “Ye will not come to me that ye might have life” (John v. 4o). Surely this is on time to trifle, in these days of sickness and of death. “It is a matter of life or death.” How often we have heard the words of late from the lips of the busy doctors, “This, or that,” is their only chance of life. Reader, it is a matter of life or death with you today!
Listen once more to the words of Christ, ― “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die. Believest thou this?”
K. H. M.