Christian fiction; Families -- Fiction; Love stories
On through the time-worn words she sang, while the sin-hardened man
stood silently and listened. His eyes had gradually lost their leer
and grown soft and tender, as if some childhood memories of home and
mother and a time when he was innocent and good were looking out his
eyes, reminding him of what he once intended to be before he ate the
apple of wisdom and became as the gods and devils. Shirley gradually
became aware that she was holding her strange audience; and a power
beyond herself steadied her voice, and kept her fingers from trembling
on the old pearl keys, as she wandered on from song to song; perhaps
happening on the very ones,--who knows?--that this man, standing in the
dying twilight of the old gloomy house, had sung beside his mother's
hearth or in church during his childhood? Certain it is that he stood
there silent and listened for at least half an hour without an
interruption, while the light in the big room grew dimmer and dimmer
and all about the house seemed still as death in the intervals between
her voice. She was just beginning:
Abide with me,
Fast falls the eventide,
The darkness deepens,
Lord, with me abide!
When the man put his hand in his pocket and brought out a candle.
Scratching a match on his trousers, he lit the candle and set it
carefully on the piano, where its light fell flickering, wavering over
her worn young face; and who shall say that she was not a messenger
from another world to this man who had long trodden the downward path?
They were interrupted, however, before this song was finished by a
newcomer who entered like a shadow and stood at the end of the piano
looking wonderingly from Shirley to the man, when she glanced up. She
stopped, startled, for although he wore no brass buttons nor blue
clothes she was quite sure those were the same gray eyes that had
looked at her from the recess of the window in the Government office
that afternoon, perhaps the same boy who had come after her car and
sent her off on this long way into the wilderness.
The man Sam straightened up suddenly and looked about him half-ashamed
with an apologetic grin:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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