The Noble Revenge

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 2, 1877

The Noble Revenge.

The coffin was a plain one,—a poor, miserable, pine coffin. No flowers on its top, no lining of rose-white satin for the pale brow; no smooth ribbons about the coarse shroud. The brown hair was laid decently back, but there was no crimped cap, with its neat tie beneath the chin. The sufferer from cruel poverty, smiled in her sleep.

“I want to see my mother,” sobbed a poor child, as the city undertaker screwed down the top.

“You can’t—get out of the way, boy! why don’t somebody take the brat?”

“Only let me see her one minute,” cried the hapless, homeless orphan, clutching the side of the charity box, and as he gazed into that rough face, anguish tears streamed rapidly down the cheek on which no childish bloom ever lingered. Oh, it was pitiful to hear him cry, “Only once, let me see my mother only once!”

Quickly and brutally the hard-hearted monster struck the boy away, so that he reeled with the blow. For a moment the boy stood panting with grief and rage; his blue eye distended, his lips sprang apart, a fire glittering through his tears, as he raised his puny arm, and with a most unchildish accent screamed, “When I’m a man, I’ll kill you for that!”

There was a coffin and a heap of earth between the mother and the poor, forsaken child, and a monument stronger than granite, built in the boy’s heart to the memory of a heartless deed.

The court-house was crowded to suffocation.

“Does any one appear as this man’s counsel?” asked the judge.

There was a silence when he finished, until with lips tightly pressed together, a look of strange intelligence, blended with haughty reserve upon his handsome features, a young man stepped forward with a firm tread and kindling eye, to plead for the erring and the friendless. He was a stranger, but from his first sentence there was silence.

The splendor of his genius entranced and convinced. The man who could not find a friend was acquitted.

“May God bless you, sir, I cannot.”

“I want no thanks,” replied the stranger, with icy coldness.

“I—I believe you are unknown to me.”

“Man! I will refresh your memory. Twenty years ago you struck a broken-hearted boy away from his mother’s poor coffin. I was that poor, miserable boy.”

The man turned livid.

“Have you rescued me, then, to take my life?”

“No, I have a sweeter revenge; I have saved the life of a man whose brutal deed has rankled in my breast for twenty years. Go! and remember the tears of a friendless child.”

The man bowed his head in shame, and went out from the presence of a magnanimity as grand to him as incomprehensible, and the noble young lawyer felt God’s smile in his soul.