“I HAVE nothing to expect, sir, but condemnation; nothing to expect but condemnation.” The speaker articulated with difficulty. He was a large man, massive of feature and muscular of limb. The awful pallor of his face was increased by the masses of thick black hair that lay in confusion about the pillow, brushed off from the dead whiteness of his forehead. Struck down suddenly from full hearty life to the bed of death, he made then and there an agonizing confession, such as too often racks the ear of the listener at unhappy death-beds.
A meek woman sat near the nurse, who was striving quietly to alleviate the suffering he endured.
“Oh, don’t talk to me of pain!” he cried bitterly. “It is the mind, woman, the mind”; and agony overclouded his face.
He continued, slowly and deliberately, “There is a demon whispering in my ear forever, ‘You knew it at the time, and at every time; you knew it.’ Knew what? why, that a penalty must follow a broken law. Mark me, I have not opened a Bible for thirty odd years, I have not entered a church for twenty; yet the very recollection that my mother taught me to pray (and she died when I was only six) has passed judgment upon all my sins. I have done wrong knowing that it was wrong; first with a few qualms, then brushing aside conscience, and at last with the coolness of a fiend. Sir, in one minute of all my life I have not lived for heaven; no, not one minute.
“Oh, yes! Christ died for sinners, but my intellect is clear, sir—clearer than ever before. I tell you”— his voice sharpened, almost whistled, it was so shrill and concentrated— “I can see almost into eternity. I can feel that unless Christ is desired, sought after, longed for, that unless guilt is repented of, His death can do me no good.
“Do I not repent? No! I am only savage at myself to think—to think, sir,”—he lifted his right hand impressively— “that I have so cursed myself! Is that repentance? Do not try to console me; save your sympathy for those who will bear it, I cannot.”
“Thank you, nurse” (this as she wiped his brow, and moistened his parched lips), “I am not dead to kindness, if I am to hope. I thank you, sir, for your Christian offices, though they do me no good. If we sow thorns, you know, we cannot reap flowers—and corn don’t grow from thistle-seed. I have been following up the natural laws, and I see an affinity between them and the great laws of God’s moral universe. Heaven was made for the holy; without right.”
After that, till eleven o’clock, his mind wandered, then he slept a few moments. Presently, aroused by the striking of the clock, are dogs, and adulterers. There’s a distinction—it’s all right, all he looked round dreamily, caught the eye of the nurse, then of the Christian friend who watched.
“It’s awfully dark here,” he whispered. “My feet stand on the slippery edge of a great gulf. Oh, for some foundation!” He stretched his hand out as if feeling for a way.
“Christ is the only help— ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life,’” whispered the man of God.
“Not for me!” and pen cannot describe the immeasurable woe in that answer.
“I shall fall! I am falling!” he half shrieked an instant after—he shuddered, and all was over. The willfully blind, deaf, and maimed, had gone before his Judge. The poor despairing soul had taken that last plunge into eternity.
“I’m falling!” It seems as if the very chamber where he died has kept the echo of that terrible cry.