style="font-size:15px;"> Conscience-stricken and speechless, the parson opened it and entered.
The small white bed stood against the wall beneath an open window, and one bright-headed sunflower, growing against the house outside, leaned in and fixed its kind face anxiously upon the sufferer's.
The figure of the boy was stretched along the edge of the bed, his cheek on one hand and his eyes turned steadfastly towards the middle of the room, where, on a table, the violin lay exposed to view.
He looked quickly towards the door as the parson entered, and an expression of relief passed over his face.
"Why, David," said the parson, chidingly, and crossing to the bed with a bright smile. "Sick? This will never do;" and he sat down, imprisoning one of the burning palms in his own.
The boy said nothing, but looked at him searchingly, as though needing to lay aside masks and disguises and penetrate at once to the bottom truth. Then he asked, "Are you mad at me?"
"My poor boy!" said the parson, his lips trembling a little as he tightened his pressure – "my poor boy! why should I be mad at you?"
"You never could do anything with me."
"Never mind that now," said the parson, soothingly, but adding, with bitterness, "it was all my fault – all my fault."
"It wasn't your fault," said the boy. "It was mine."
A change had come over him in his treatment of the parson. Shyness had disappeared, as is apt to be the case with the sick.
"I want to ask you something," he added, confidentially.
"Anything – anything! Ask me anything!"
"Do you remember the wax figures?"
"Oh yes, I remember them very well," said the parson, quickly, uneasily.
"I wanted to see 'em, and I didn't have any money, and I stole a quarter from Mr. Leuba."
Despite himself a cry escaped the parson's lips, and dropping the boy's hand, he started from his chair and walked rapidly to and fro across the room, with the fangs of remorse fixed deep in his conscience.
"Why didn't you come to me?" he asked at length, in a tone of helpless entreaty. "Why didn't you come to me? Oh, if you had only come to me!"
"I did come to you," replied the boy.
"When?" asked the parson, coming back to the bedside.
"About three o'clock yesterday."
About three o'clock yesterday! And what was he doing at that time? He bent his head over to his very knees, hiding his face in his hands.
"But why didn't you let me know it? Why didn't you come in?"
"Mrs. Spurlock told me you were at work on a sermon."
"God forgive me!" murmured the parson, with a groan.
"I thought you'd lend me a quarter," said the boy, simply. "You took the other boys, and you told me I must be certain to go. I thought you'd lend me a quarter till I could pay you back."
"Oh, David!" cried the parson, getting down on his knees by the bedside, and putting his arms around the boy's neck, "I would have lent you – I would have given you – anything I have in this poor world!"
The boy threw his arms around the parson's neck and clasped him close. "Forgive me!"
"Oh, boy! boy! can you forgive me?" Sobs stifled the parson's utterance, and he went to a window on the opposite side of the room.
When he turned his face inward again, he saw the boy's gaze fixed once more intently upon the violin.
"There's something I want you to do for me," he said. "Mr. Leuba gave me a violin last night, and mamma says I ought to sell it and pay him back. Mamma says it will be a good lesson for me." The words seemed wrung from his heart's core. "I thought I'd ask you to sell it for me. The doctor says I may be sick a long time, and it worries me." He began to grow excited, and tossed from side to side.
"Don't worry," said the parson, "I'll sell it for you."
The boy looked at the violin again. To him it was priceless, and his eyes grew heavy with love for it. Then he said, cautiously: "I thought you'd get a good price for it. I don't think I could take less than a hundred dollars. It's worth more than that, but if I have to sell it, I don't think I could take less than a hundred dollars," and he fixed his burning eyes on the parson's.
"Don't worry! I'll sell it for you. Oh yes, you can easily get a hundred dollars for it. I'll bring you a hundred dollars for it by to-morrow morning."
As the parson was on the point of leaving the room, with the violin under his arm, he paused with his hand on the latch, an anxious look gathering in his face. Then he came back, laid the violin on the table, and going to the bedside, took the boy's hands in both of his own.
"David," said the moral philosopher, wrestling in his consciousness with the problem of evil – "David, was it the face of the Saviour that you wished to see? Was it this that tempted you to – " and he bent over the boy breathless.
"I wanted to see the Sleeping Beauty."
The parson turned away with a sigh of acute disappointment.
It was on this night that he was seen to enter his room with a boy's violin under his arm, and later to hang it, and hang his beloved flute, tied with a blue ribbon, above the meagre top shelf of books – Fuller's Gospel, Petrarch, Volney's Ruins, Zollicoffer's Sermons, and the Horrors of San Domingo. After that he remained motionless at his table, with his head bowed on his folded arms, until the candle went out, leaving him in inner and outer darkness. Moralist, logician, philosopher, he studied the transgression, laying it at last solely to his own charge.
At daybreak he stood outside the house with the physician who had been with the boy during the night. "Will he die?" he asked.
The physician tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "The chances are against him. The case has peculiar complications. All night it has been nothing but the wax figures and the stolen quarter and the violin. His mother has tried to persuade him not to sell it. But he won't bear the sight of it now, although he is wild at the thought of selling it."
"David," said the parson, kneeling by the bedside, and speaking in a tone pitiful enough to have recalled a soul from the other world – "David, here's the money for the violin; here's the hundred dollars," and he pressed it into one of the boy's palms. The hand closed upon it, but there was no recognition. It was half a year's salary.
The first sermon that the parson preached in the new church was on the Sunday after the boy's death. It was expected that he would rise to the occasion and surpass himself, which, indeed, he did, drawing tears even from the eyes of those who knew not that they could shed them, and all through making the greatest effort to keep back his own. The subject of the sermon was "The Temptations of the Poor." The sermon of the following fortnight was on the "Besetting Sin," the drift of it going to show that the besetting sin may be the one pure and exquisite pleasure of life, involving only the exercise of the loftiest faculty. And this was followed by a third sermon on "The Kiss that Betrayeth," in which the parson ransacked history for illustrations to show that every species of man – ancient, mediæval, and modern
