Six and Half-a-Dozen - Page 2

pity which made him so much nearer the
angels than his master to pull her toward her home. But she shook her
head and moaned pitifully; then throwing her arms round the poor brute
she kissed him with those passionate kisses of repentance and love which
should have fallen on her father's neck. The dog (dumb to all but God)
pleaded with sorrowful eyes and half-frantic gestures; but she turned
wearily away toward a great circle of immense rocks--relics of a
religion scarcely more cruel than that which had neither pity nor
forgiveness at the mouth of the grave. Within their shadow she could die
unseen; and there next morning a wagoner, attracted by the plaintive
howling of a dog, found her on the ground, dead.

There are set awful hours between every soul and heaven. Who knows what
passed between Lettice Todd and her God in that dim forsaken temple of a
buried faith? Death closes tenderly even the eyes full of tears, and
her face was beautiful with a strange peace, though its loveliness was
marred and its youth "seared with the autumn of strange suffering."

At the inquest which followed, her stern old father neither blamed nor
excused himself. He accepted without apology the verdict of society
against him; only remarking that its reproof was "a guid example o'
Satan correcting sin."

Scant pity and less ceremony was given to her burial. Death, which draws
under the mantle of Charity the pride, cruelty and ambition of men,
covering them with those two narrow words _Hic jacet_! gives also to the
woman who has been a sinner all she asks--oblivion. In no other way can
she obtain from man toleration. The example of the whitest, purest soul
that ever breathed on earth, in this respect, is ignored in the church
He founded. The tenderest of human hearts, "when lovely woman stooped to
folly," found no way of escape for her but to "die;" and those closet
moralists, with filthy fancies and soiled souls, who abound in every
community, regard her with that sort of scorn which a Turk expresses
when he says "Dog of a Christian." Poor Lettice! She had procured this
doom--first by sacrificing herself to a blind and cruel love, and then
to the importunate demands of hunger, "oldest and strongest of
passions." Ah! if there was no pity in Heaven, no justice beyond the
grave, what a cruel irony this life would be! For, while the sexton
shoveled hastily over the rude coffin the obliterating earth, there
passed the graveyard another woman equally fallen from all the apostle
calls "lovely and of good report." One whose youth and hopes and
marvelous beauty had been sold for houses and lands and a few thousand
pounds a year. But, though her life was a living lie, the