MY FRIEND THE MISSIONARY.
By Marian Harland
My opposite neighbor at table upon the voyage from New York to Southampton in the autumn of 1893 was a young woman about twenty-five years of age, whom I silently decided by the closing of the second day out to be the most interesting of my fellow passengers. In features she was pleasing, even pretty, but her charm lay in a certain refinement of speech and manner, combined with quick intelligence and sensibility of expression. She was a lady ingrain, and in education and conversation so far above the average of her sex that when the crucial twenty-four hours of “slight unpleasantness” to both of us were happily over, I made opportunity to cultivate her acquaintance. We were already good friends when, on the fourth night of our voyage—which chanced to be Sunday night—we were pacing the moonlit deck together, and the talk took a personal turn. The initiative step was my statement that I was bound for Palestine, the promised land of my life-long dreams, never before visited by me in body and in truth. My companion listened, and when I proposed jestingly that she should join me in Jerusalem, smiled brightly. “In other circumstances, nothing would give me more pleasure, but I, too, am going to a promised land. My destination is Rangoon.” “Alone so far as human companionship is concerned. The friends with whom I was to have sailed left America a week ago. I was detained by a short but severe illness.” This was the preface to the story I drew from her. From childhood she had known that she was “appointed,” as she had phrased it, to the Master’s service in foreign lands. With the natural shrinking of youth from privation and toil, she had tried to get away from the conviction in various ways. At twenty-three she was impelled to reveal to her mother the struggle going on between conscience and expediency, and how she could not escape from the persuasion that the divine will urged her to consecrate herself to the life of a foreign missionary. The mother’s reply set the seal upon her purpose:— “Were I fifteen years younger, I would go with you. As it is, let me fulfil my part of the mission by giving you up cheerfully.” From the moment, the deep peace that entered the daughter’s soul had never known a cloud; a clear-headed, resolute woman, she knew what she had undertaken. In putting her hand to the plow, she had grasped it not hastily, but with staying power in the hold. In our long and earnest talks upon the subject, I appreciated for the first time what constitutes “a call to the mission field.” Since then I have thought and spoken of it with reverence, as something with which a stranger to such depth of spiritual conflict and such heights of spiritual enlightenment as hers may not intermeddle. My last glimpse of her was at Waterloo Station, London. We had said “good-by.” She caught sight of me, and stepped to the open door of my carriage; the electric light showed the ineffable white peace of the smile with which she kissed her hand to me silently, and made a slight but eloquent upward motion. Then the crowd and the London night swallowed her up, and I saw her face no more.—Marian Harland.