"If all the records of that holy life, of its gracious words and mighty deeds, could be blotted out and lost, I think we might know Him as we know no heart on earth only from His words as He hung _there_. His words, and His silence. Seven last words in three hours of silence.
"Listen! the voice is low, the voice which is to rend the tombs. And yet, though you may fail to hear the gathering of the storm that is coming, no heart that listens shall fail to catch the murmurs of those dying lips.
"For the murderers not yet repenting, "_Father, forgive them_." To the Blessed Mother, "_Behold thy son_." To the beloved disciple, "_Behold thy mother_,"--binding His faithful ones to each other.
"To the poor tortured penitent thief, "_To-day thou shalt be with me in paradise_."
"Son of Mary, He cares tenderly for her in the languor of death, and in the agonies of redemption.
"Son of G.o.d, He gives paradise from the cross.
"To you who love, to you who repent, thus He speaks, "_Paradise_,"
"_Behold thy mother, and thy son_." But to you who have _not_ loved, who have _not_ repented, still "_Father, forgive_."
"Look, listen! it is this voice which will award our sentence. Can we doubt what pleases Him? Beloved, He is love; always; then, and now, and at that Day.
"Nothing pleases Him but holy love; nothing is like Him but love; nothing separates from Him but the death of love. What He will be hereafter, He is now.
"Is there no wrong you can forgive now before it is too late?
"No wrong you can repair now?
"No need you can supply now? No sorrow you can soften?
"It is not yet too late.
"I speak no more. Listen to Him.
"I say to you now, not, look forward to the Day, but _Ecce h.o.m.o--Behold the Man!_"
And that night blind Bruno knelt beside his wife Margarethe in the forest-hut, and said, "Beloved, let us say the Lord"s Prayer together. I can say it from my heart at last," and gentle tears flowed from his sightless eyes as he murmured, "Forgive, as we forgive."
And in the little turret-chamber of the castle the Baron came and stood beside his daughter"s bed, his hands clasped in agony.
"Child," he said, "I come to make thee homeless and a beggar, and to make thee hate me."
And he confessed the whole dark story to her, and told her how he meant to restore the lost inheritance and divest themselves of all.
Then she rose and fell on his breast, and said, "Father, you make me richer than ever I could have been, and you make me love you as I never could before. We will go through the world together, thou and I, until we find the injured kinsman, and restore him all."
And the next morning, before any in the castle were awake, the Baron went with his daughter down the turret-stairs, and through a postern gate, down the steep, and through the forest to the hermit"s hut.
And the Baron knelt and wept like a child at the hermit"s feet.
His was a long shrift. Crimes about which there could be no self-deception, a life of high-handed wrong. The first wrong which won him his kinsman"s heritage had placed him almost inevitably among the beasts of prey, and made his dwelling a den of rapine. Yet, happily for him, he had preserved unsoiled the belief in a just and avenging G.o.d.
Sullenly, hopelessly, he had pursued his track of violence; but he had never been able to falsify to himself this vision of the Just One, or to hope to appease Him by any payment or fine, save the one he thought it hopeless to attempt, the reversal of his wrong-doings and leading a just life.
And now on the Face he had believed irrevocably set against him, for the first time he had seen the yearning of forgiving pity, not only for the wronged, but for _him_, the criminal.
A ray of hope, a beam of holy Almighty love dawned on the long polar night of his soul, and the ice began to melt. And in the light of that hope he dared to stand face to face with his sins.
But the long array rising before him from his own lips, reflected in the compa.s.sionate sternness of the hermit"s eyes, seemed to crush him to the dust; and when he came out from that terrible hour, he seemed to his young daughter to have shrunk into a feeble old man.
She drew close to him and laid her hand in his; but as they moved away, it seemed to her as if it were no longer he who sustained her, but she who sustained him.
"The holy man has given thee counsel, father," she said tenderly.
"He bids me call all our people together, at once," he said, "and confess to them my sin, and bid them proclaim my intention of rest.i.tution. That," he said, "is at once the truest penance, and the surest way to find the means of rest.i.tution."
"I will be beside thee, father," she said. "All thy burdens are mine."
"Nay," he said, with a sob in his voice, "it is _thee_ I cannot bear to degrade."
"Nay," she said, "we _are_ one in the depths together, now, and that will be the first bitter step on our joyful upward way."
But as they returned, it chanced that they lost the path and found themselves before the threshold of blind Bruno"s hut.
And for the first time since his sorrow, the wronged man"s heart was so light with the joy of forgiving that he was singing as he wove his baskets, chanting half-unconsciously the hymn "_Apparebit repentina_."
And the tones of the voice seemed familiar to Baron Ivo, and he paused and looked, and saw the upturned sightless face with the new peace on it, and recognized his wronged kinsman.
He strode up to him and knelt at his side, and said in a low voice half-stifled with shame and grief, "Bruno, you are avenged at last; I can never forgive myself. Can _you_ forgive?" And after a brief pause from the quivering lips came the pardon,--
"_I forgave you last night_, thank G.o.d."
They said no more.
But on the morrow Baron Ivo gathered the whole of his retainers together, and as many of the townsmen as could come, and leading his kinsman, with his wife and child, to the chair of state in the great hall of the castle, he knelt before him and made confession of his wrong. And then, by his command (his last as their lord), his retainers took from him arms, and helmet, and sword, and coat of mail, and left him in rough woollen garments such as his serfs wore, girded with a rope; humbled and degraded, as he well knew, before no sympathetic eyes--for, large as the a.s.sembly was, there were few in it who had not against him some memory of rapine and wrong, and through the hall there was a murmur of execrations.
But the true Baron rose and said, "Let no man reproach him. ONE has atoned for him, and for me, and for all. Let no man reproach him, or pity me. For since I have seen that forgiving Face, I am content to be blind to all beside. _Ecce h.o.m.o._ Forgive, as He forgave."
And the hermit lifted the cross on high, and took one hand of the penitent, while his daughter held the other in both hers, and together they went forth through the hushed crowd, out of the castle-gates, into the forest-hut to dwell there alone.
And the miser went home from the hermit"s sermon once more a stricken man--stricken before by terror to the conscience, but now smitten by love to the heart.
Once more he turned to his coffers. And the gold, which terror for a night had turned into dead leaves, seemed trans.m.u.ted into coin of the Kingdom; for, once more, the thought of the goldsmith"s widowed daughter and her children came to his heart. And this time he made no excuses, and no delays, but hurrying out alone with eager haste, he searched out the three dest.i.tute ones in their poor chamber in the roof, and took them home to his house, and fed and clothed them, and made himself their servant. And so the spell of death pa.s.sed from his treasures, and they became living grain.
And even to Gammer Trudchen, the power of forgiving love, the might of the thorn-crowned Face, slowly penetrated. She could not banish from her heart the tenderness of that gracious countenance. The words, "For envy they delivered Him, for _envy_," stung her to the heart, and dimly and slowly she grew to feel herself among those who had accused Him. And His face seemed to haunt her, with a look in it that recalled the pale saddened countenance of the Burgomaster"s young wife: for lately she could not help seeing that the lady"s fair bright face had grown grave and white; the shadow of calumny lay heavy on the young life alone in the strange city.
So it went on, until one day Gammer Trudchen was seized with sudden illness, and nothing would content her, as she lay tossing on her bed, but to see again that saddened face whose memory so haunted her.
Willingly the lady came, and the old woman told her all, and the lady would not leave her until she had nursed her into health again.