They lifted her upon the mattress, and made her more comfortable than perhaps she had ever been in her life.But it was only her illness that made her capable of prizing such comfort.In health, the heather on a hill-side was far more to her taste than bed and blankets.She had a wild, roving, savage nature, and the wind was dearer to her than house-walls.She had come of ancestors--and it was a poor little atom of truth that a soul bred like this woman could have been born capable of entertaining.But she too was eternal--and surely not to be fixed for ever in a bewilderment of sin and ignorance--a wild-eyed soul staring about in hell-fire for want of something it could not understand and had never beheld--by the changeless mandate of the God of love! She was in less pain than during the night, and lay quietly gazing at the fire.Things awful to another would no doubt cross her memory without any accompanying sense of dismay; tender things would return without moving her heart; but Falconer had a hold of her now.Nothing could be done for her body except to render its death as easy as might be;but something might be done for herself.He made no attempt to produce this or that condition of mind in the poor creature.He never made such attempts.'How can I tell the next lesson a soul is capable of learning?' he would say.'The Spirit of God is the teacher.My part is to tell the good news.Let that work as it ought, as it can, as it will.' He knew that pain is with some the only harbinger that can prepare the way for the entrance of kindness: it is not understood till then.In the lulls of her pain he told her about the man Christ Jesus--what he did for the poor creatures who came to him--how kindly he spoke to them--how he cured them.He told her how gentle he was with the sinning women, how he forgave them and told them to do so no more.He left the story without comment to work that faith which alone can redeem from selfishness and bring into contact with all that is living and productive of life, for to believe in him is to lay hold of eternal life: he is the Life--therefore the life of men.She gave him but little encouragement: he did not need it, for he believed in the Life.But her outcries were no longer accompanied with that fierce and dreadful language in which she sought relief at first.He said to himself, 'What matter if I see no sign? I am doing my part.Who can tell, when the soul is free from the distress of the body, when sights and sounds have vanished from her, and she is silent in the eternal, with the terrible past behind her, and clear to her consciousness, how the words I have spoken to her may yet live and grow in her; how the kindness God has given me to show her may help her to believe in the root of all kindness, in the everlasting love of her Father in heaven? That she can feel at all is as sure a sign of life as the adoration of an ecstatic saint.'
He had no difficulty now in getting from her what information she could give him about his father.It seemed to him of the greatest import, though it amounted only to this, that when he was in London, he used to lodge at the house of an old Scotchwoman of the name of Macallister, who lived in Paradise Gardens, somewhere between Bethnal Green and Spitalfields.Whether he had been in London lately, she did not know; but if anybody could tell him where he was, it would be Mrs.Macallister.
His heart filled with gratitude and hope and the surging desire for the renewal of his London labours.But he could not leave the dying woman till she was beyond the reach of his comfort: he was her keeper now.And 'he that believeth shall not make haste.' Labour without perturbation, readiness without hurry, no haste, and no hesitation, was the divine law of his activity.
Shargar's mother breathed her last holding his hand.They were alone.He kneeled by the bed, and prayed to God, saying,'Father, this woman is in thy hands.Take thou care of her, as thou hast taken care of her hitherto.Let the light go up in her soul, that she may love and trust thee, O light, O gladness.I thank thee that thou hast blessed me with this ministration.Now lead me to my father.Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.Amen.'
He rose and went to his grandmother and told her all.She put her arms round his neck, and kissed him, and said,'God bless ye, my bonny lad.And he will bless ye.He will; he will.Noo gang yer wa's, and do the wark he gies ye to do.Only min', it's no you; it's him.'
The next morning, the sweet winds of his childhood wooing him to remain yet a day among their fields, he sat on the top of the Aberdeen coach, on his way back to the horrors of court and alley in the terrible London.
