Betrayed
So, you’re the chaplain! You needn’t say what you have comefor; I can guess.You’ve come to talk about Jesus’ love, and repentance and restand forgiveness!You’ve come to say that my sin is great, yet greater the mercyHeaven will mete,If I, like Magdalen, bend my head, and pour my tears at yourSaviour’s feet.Your promise is fair, but I’ve little faith: I relied on promisesonce before;They brought me to this—this prison cell, with its iron-barredwindow, its grated door!Yet he, too, was fair who promised me, with his tender mouthand his Christ-like eyes;And his voice was as sweet as the summer wind that sighsthrough the arbors of Paradise.And he seemed to me all that was good and pure, and noble andstrong, and true and brave!I had given the pulse of my heart for him, and deemed it aprecious boon to crave.
You say that Jesus so loved the world he died to redeem itfrom its sin:It isn’t redeemed, or no one could be so fair without, and soblack within.I trusted his promise, I gave my life;—the truth of my love isknown on high,If there is a God who knows all things;—his promise was false,his love was a lie!It was over soon, Oh! soon, the dream,—and me, he had called“his life,” “his light,”He drove me away with a sneering word, and you Christianssaid that “it served me right.”I was proud, Mr. Chaplain, even then; I set my face in theteeth of Fate,And resolved to live honestly, come what might, and sink beneathneither scorn nor hate.Yes, and I prayed that the Christ above would help to bear thebitter cross,And put something here, where my heart had been, to fill up theaching void of loss.
It’s easy for you to say what I should do, but none of you everdream how hardIs the way that you Christians make for us, with your “sin nomore,” “trust the Lord.”When for days and days you are turned from work with coldpoliteness, or open sneer,You get so you don’t trust a far-off God, whose creatures arecold, and they, so near.You hold your virtuous lives aloof, and refuse us your humanhelp and hand,And set us apart as accursèd things, marked with a burning,Cain-like brand.
But I didn’t bend, though many days I was weary and hungry,and worn and weak,And for many a starless night I watched, through tears thatgrooved down my pallid cheek.They are all dry now! They say I’m hard, because I never weepor moan!You can’t draw blood when the heart’s bled out! you can’t findtears or sound in a stone!And I don’t know why I should be mild and meek: no one hasbeen very mild to me.You say that Jesus would be—perhaps! but Heaven’s a long wayoff, you see.
That will do; I know what you’re going to say: “I can have itright here in this narrow cell.”The soul is slow to accept Christ’s heav’n when his followerschain the body in hell.Not but I’m just as well off here,—better, perhaps, than I wasoutside.The world was a prison-house to me, where I dwelt, defyingand defied.
I don’t know but I’d think more of what you say, if they’dgiven us both a common lot;If justice to me had been justice to him, and covered our nameswith an equal blot;But they took him into the social court, and pitied, and said he’dbeen “led astray”;In a month the stain on his name had passed, as a cloud thatcrosses the face of day!He joined the Church, and he’s preaching now, just as you are,the love of God,And the duty of sinners to kneel and pray, and humbly to kissthe chastening rod.If they’d dealt with me as they dealt by him, may be I’d credityour Christian love;If they’d dealt with him as they dealt by me, I’d have more faithin a just Above.
I don’t know, but sometimes I used to think that she, who wastold there was no roomIn the inn at Bethlehem, might look down with softened eyesthro’ the starless gloom.Christ wasn’t a woman—he couldn’t know the pain and enduranceof it; but she,The mother who bore him, she might know, and Mary inHeaven might pity me.Still that was useless: it didn’t bring a single mouthful for meto eat,Nor work to get it, nor sheltering from the dreary wind andthe howling street.Heavenly pity won’t pass as coin, and earthly shame brings ahigher pay.Sometimes I was tempted to give it up, and go, like others, theeasier way;But I didn’t; no, sir, I kept my oath, though my baby lay in myarms and cried,And at last, to spare it—I poisoned it; and kissed its murderedlips when it died.I’d never seen him since it was born (he’d said that it wasn’this, you know);But I took its body and laid it down at the steps of his door, inthe pallid glowOf the winter morning; and when he came, with a love-tunehummed on those lips of lies,It lay at his feet, with its pinched white face staring up at himfrom its dead, blue eyes;I hadn’t closed them; they were like his, and so was the mouthand the curled gold hair,And every feature so like his own,—for I am dark, sir, and heis fair.’Twas a moment of triumph, that showed me yet there was apassion I could feel,When I saw him bend o’er its meagre form, and, starting backwards,cry out and reel!If there is a time when all souls shall meet the reward of thedeeds that are done in the clay,When accused and accuser stand face to face, he will cry outso in the Judgment Day!
The rest? Oh, nothing. They hunted me, and with virtuouslawyers’ virtuous tearsTo a virtuous jury, convicted me; and I’m sentenced to stay herefor twenty years.Do I repent? Yes, I do; but wait till I tell you of what I repent,and why.I repent that I ever believed a man could be anything but aliving lie!I repent because every noble thought, or hope, or ambition, orearthly trust,Is as dead as dungeon-bleached bones in me,—as dead as mychild in its murdered dust!Do I repent that I killed the babe? Am I repentant for that,you ask?I’ll answer the truth as I feel it, sir; I leave to others the piousmask.Am I repentant because I saved its starving body from Famine’steeth?Because I hastened what time would do, to spare it pain andrelieve its death?Am I repentant because I held it were better a grave shouldhave no nameThan a living being, whose only care must come from a motherweighed with shame?Am I repentant because I thought it were better the tiny formlay hidFrom the heartless stings of a brutal world, unknown, unnamed,’neath a coffin lid?Am I repentant for the act, the last on earth in my power, to saveFrom the long-drawn misery of life, in the early death and thepainless grave?I’m glad that I did it! Start if you will! I’ll repeat it over; Isay I’m glad!No, I’m neither a fiend, nor a maniac—don’t look as if I weregoing mad!
Did I not love it? Yes, I loved with a strength that you, sir, cannever feel;It’s only a strong love can kill to save, tho’ itself be torn wheretime cannot heal.You see my hands—they are red with its blood! Yet I wouldhave cut them, bit by bit,And fed them, and smiled to see it eat, if that would havesaved and nourished it!“Beg!” I did beg,—and “pray!” I did pray! God was as stonyand hard as Earth,And Christ was as deaf as the stars that watched, or the nightthat darkened above his birth!And I—I feel stony now, too, like them; deaf to sorrow andmute to grief!Am I heartless?—yes:—it-is-all-=cut=-OUT! Torn! Gone! Allgone! Like my dead belief.
Do I not fear for the judgment hour? So unrepentant, so hardand cold?Wait! It is little I trust in that; but if ever the scrolled skyshall be uprolled,And the lives of men shall be read and known, and their acts bejudged by their very worth,And the Christ you speak of shall come again, and the thundersof Justice shake the earth,You will hear the cry, “Who murdered here? Come forth tothe judgment, false heart and eyes,That pulsed with accurséd strength of lust, and loaded faithwith envenomed lies!Come forth to the judgment, haughty dames, who scathed themother with your scorn,And answer here, to the poisoned child, who decreed its murderere it was born?Come forth to the judgment ye who heaped the gold of earthin your treasured hoard,And answer, ‘guilty,’ to those who stood all naked and starving,beneath your board.Depart, accurséd! I know you not! Ye heeded not the commandof Heaven,‘Unto the least of these ye give, it is even unto the Mastergiven.’”
Judgment! Ah, sir, to see that day, I’d willingly pass thro’ ahundred hells!I’d believe, then, the Justice that hears each voice buried alivein these prison cells!But, no—it’s not that; that will never be! I trusted too long,and He answered not.There is no avenging God on high!—we live, we struggle,and—we rot.
Yet does Justice come! and, O Future Years! sorely ye’ll reap,and in weary pain,When ye garner the sheaves that are sown to-day, when theclouds that are gathering fall in rain!The time will come, aye! the time will come, when the childye conceive in lust and shame,Quickened, will mow you like swaths of grass, with a sickleborn of Steel and Flame.Aye, tremble, shrink, in your drunken den, coward, traitor, andChild of Lie!The unerring avenger stands close to you, and the dread hourof parturition’s nigh!Aye! wring your hands, for the air is black! thickly thecloud-troops whirl and swarm!See! yonder, on the horizon’s verge, play the lightning-shafts ofthe coming storm!
=Adrian, Mich.,= July, 1889.