CHAPTER IX. THE CRIPPLE. Oft in life's stillest shade reclining, Meek souls there are who little dream Shall prove in heaven a martyr's palm. Christian Year. ONE by one we had all returned to our places after partaking, on Palm Sunday, of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ: yet the clergyman paused as if he waited for something; and presently we saw that it was for a poor looking woman who slowly came up, or rather dragged herself along towards the altar rails; for she was so very lame, that besides resting on her crutch, she was obliged frequently to stop, and to cling for support to the pew doors. One of our churchwardens, perceiving her condition, kindly came forward, and gave her his arm to lean upon. It was indeed greatly needed, for the perspiration stood in great drops on her face, and her whole frame "trembled very exceedingly," as she knelt to receive the gift of "The Body of our soothing and of strength. Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life." I noticed that as she turned away, a tear which her hand, too well occupied with her crutch, could not wipe off, fell upon the pavement; but mere bodily weakness might easily account for that, without surmising the presence of other more special emotions. Next Sunday I looked for her in vain; she did not come; and many more Sundays passed, I should think at least two months, and still she did not appear at Church. About Whitsuntide my friend, she whom I have called pre-eminently a "ministering angel," herself at that time in the very depths of affliction, asked me to drive with her to the Infirmary, to see a poor person in the surgical ward; "For," as with meek pathos she expressed it, "a blessing and refreshment seems to come back again, even upon our bodies, if in the sorrows of others, we ourselves try to lay aside 'the grief that only grieves.'" Now, I happened to have a great dread of the Infirmary; it was associated in my mind with dismal sights and bad smells; and the surgical ward above all! full of scars, and wounds, and "objects:" I was sure I should be frightened, most likely made sick. But yet to refuse to go would, under the circumstances, require more courage still; so, like all cowards, I had recourse to a half measure, that of putting on a crape veil, so thick, that I hoped I should be able to see nothing through it. But, lo and behold, when the horses halted before the Infirmary gate, and I felt nervously for my veil, I had, after all, forgotten to put it on the last thing. It served me right, and was besides so deliciously absurd, that I could not help laughing, in spite of a strong opposite impulse to cry. So there was no help for it, but to follow Lady down the ward in front of the long melancholy file of white beds; they looked to me like whited sepulchres, for each of them contained a marred, disfigured form. And it is a terrible thing to see the human face divine degraded thus, and made so abject. But my friend would linger beside each bed to meet with a cheerful greeting the wistful eye and hands that trembled as they were held out to her. At last, "Here is my patient," she exclaimed, stopping beside a bed in one corner; and the words were responded to by such a beaming look of gratitude from the poor creature who lay stretched upon it. It was actually the same face I had noticed at our Communion two months ago! "God bless your ladyship! How kind of you to come again so soon to see a helpless cripple like me!" And the poor thing began to weep bitterly, for she was just in that state of almost infantine weakness, in which joy and sorrow are alike too much to bear. "Don't cry, dear Mrs. Lewis, it will hurt you; indeed, you mustn't," said Lady taking up and gently kissing the poor thin hands of the sufferer; then, as she sat down on the bed beside her, she turned to me, saying, "You will say something to brighten her; see, Mrs. Lewis, I have brought you a new friend." Thus necessitated, I made but a clumsy beginning. "I believe I saw you once before, Mrs. Lewis, at the Sacrament last Palm Sunday?" This allusion made her tears flow afresh. "Very likely, Miss," she sobbed; it was the last time I got to Church." "You hardly appeared fit to be out," I said. She looked at me very sweetly. "Why, Miss," she replied, "I know'd as how I was a coming here, and sure enough I wanted to find strength to come with." Lady saw I was puzzled, and by way of explaining, as well as to give a new direction to the conversation, she whispered, "She came here on purpose to have her left leg taken off; it had been hanging over her a long while; and a most dreadful operation it proved; only He was with her who never fails His own." Those last words were said, oh how evidently from the heart and its experience; in no vague notional manner, or because it was pious to say so. For on common ground the high and the lowly were met, and in the furnace of seven-fold fire One had walked near them both, whose Form was like the Son of God, and whose Presence there had been to them as "a moist whistling wind." Yet I did not wonder now at the visible emotion betrayed by poor Mrs. Lewis when she partook of her last Communion. She "feared as she entered into the cloud." Well might she; the disciples did so too, though they knew that their Lord had entered it before them; there is nothing so terrible as to stand vaguely on the brink of unknown agonies; nothing wrong in the first natural starting back from it; we know this by the bloody sweat of our Lord, wrung out of Him with the cry, "Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from me!" For many weeks (I think thirteen in all,) Mrs. Lewis lay on, in that Infirmary ward, suffering much the while, in mind, body, and estate. Her past history was a painful one. She was the only child of a farmer in Warwickshire, at whose death she had inherited a portion of a few hundred pounds. Unfortunately, she had bestowed herself in marriage on a man, not exactly a wicked man, but what is worse, because it is more hopeless, a decidedly weak man; a wicked man may be turned, and then he will manifest the same energy for good that he has hitherto employed in evil; but no end of the man "without any fixed |