And so from Mrs. Bundy Arthur once more learned that lesson in life
which he had found so difficult to master, the lesson always difficult
to youth, and perhaps the most difficult of all to those whose ideals
are highest--the lesson of charity, of tolerance, of lenient judgment
toward the faulty. Mrs. Bundy had once before shown him the better
road, when she had made him acquainted with virtues in his father which
he had ignored; he had learned something of what charity meant from
Vyse upon the _Saurian_, and Horner in New York, each with his catholic
axiom that Englishmen ought to stand by one another; he had remarked
Vickars's altered attitude to life, his sense of life's complexity, and
his allowance for faults in men, for which their own will was but
partially responsible: four times the Angel of Charity had stood beside
him, and each time he had turned his face away. He had not allowed
Mrs. Bundy's plea; he had accepted Horner's kindness, but without any
accurate conception of the rarity and real beauty of his character; he
had heard Vickars's confession, and in his utmost heart had thought him
an apostate prophet. And now the same test met him again in the case
of his sister. He saw her hardness and shallowness with more than
sufficient accuracy; what he had not seen was her weakness, her terror
under sudden disaster, and the tragic folly to which she had been
driven by her terror. It was left to Mrs. Bundy to show him that.
Suddenly he saw it; and he saw much besides. He saw that there is a
vision of the mind and a vision of the heart; that the one is judging
vision, the other sympathetic vision; that the one sees the surface
only, the other the depth; and that therefore the vision of the heart
is the only true vision. Of the four persons who had instructed him,
three were quite simple persons, without the least claim to
intellectual superiority; the other a man of genius, who had become
humble by contact with human sorrows. And there was a fifth--there was
Bundy himself, an adventurer whom he had secretly despised and
ridiculed, but from whose hand had come salvation in his own hour of
direst need. And the bond between these persons was quite simple; they
had warm, human hearts, and in the difficult hours of life they were
governed by warm impulses. Ah! that had been his error; he had looked
at life with the mind, rarely with the heart. He had set himself up to
judge others, and now he was judged. He had not pitied his sister; it
was left for a stranger to do that; and in that moment he saw, as
clearly as though expressed in tongues of heavenly flame, the divine
grace resting on the head of Mrs. Bundy, and himself standing in the
dark shadows cast by his own proud egoism.
"O Mrs. Bundy!" he cried, "I have been wrong--quite wrong; you have
made me see it!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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