E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
Carla McDonald, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading
Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 15797-h.htm or 15797-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/7/9/15797/15797-h/15797-h.htm)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/7/9/15797/15797-h.zip)
THE SEEKER
by
HARRY LEON WILSON
Author of _The Spenders_
_The Lions of the Lord,_ etc.
Illustrated by Rose Cecil O'Neill
New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1904
[Illustration: "My dear, Bernal is saying good-bye!"]
TO
MY FRIEND
WILLIAM CURTIS GIBSON
"Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one
vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?"--Holy Writ.
"John and Peter and Robert and Paul--
God, in His wisdom, created them all.
John was a statesman and Peter a slave,
Robert a preacher and Paul was a knave.
Evil or good, as the case might be,
White or colored, or bond or free,
John and Peter and Robert and Paul--
God, in His wisdom, created them all."
The Chemistry of Character.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE--The Age Of Fable
CHAPTER
I. How the Christmas Saint was Proved
II. An Old Man Faces Two Ways
III. The Cult of the Candy Cane
IV. The Big House of Portents
V. The Life of Crime Is Appraised and Chosen
VI. The Garden of Truth and the Perfect Father
VII. The Superlative Cousin Bill J.
VIII. Searching the Scriptures
IX. On Surviving the Idols We Build
X. The Passing of the Gratcher; and Another
XI. The Strong Person's Narrative
XII. A New Theory of a Certain Wicked Man
BOOK TWO--The Age of Reason
CHAPTER
I. The Regrettable Dementia of a Convalescent
II. Further Distressing Fantasies of a Clouded Mind
III. Reason Is Again Enthroned
IV. A Few Letters
V. "Is the Hand of the Lord Waxed Short?"
VI. In the Folly of His Youth
BOOK THREE--The Age of Faith
CHAPTER
I. The Perverse Behaviour of an Old Man and a Young Man
II. How a Brother Was Different
III. How Edom Was Favoured of God and Mammon
IV. The Winning of Browett
V. A Belated Martyrdom
VI. The Walls of St. Antipas Fall at the Third Blast
VII. There Entereth the Serpent of Inappreciation
VIII. The Apple of Doubt is Nibbled
IX. Sinful Perverseness of the Natural Woman
X. The Reason of a Woman Who Had No Reason
XI. The Remorse of Wondering Nancy
XII. The Flexible Mind of a Pleased Husband
XIII. The Wheels within Wheels of the Great Machine
XIV. The Ineffective Message
XV. The Woman at the End of the Path
XVI. In Which the Mirror Is Held Up to Human Nature
XVII. For the Sake of Nancy
XVIII. The Fell Finger of Calumny Seems to be Agreeably Diverted
XIX. A Mere Bit of Gossip
SCENES
BOOK ONE--The Village of Edom
BOOK TWO--The Same
BOOK THREE--New York
CHARACTERS
ALLAN DELCHER, a retired Presbyterian clergyman.
BERNAL LINFORD }
ALLAN LINFORD } his grandsons.
CLAYTON LINFORD, Their father, of the artistic temperament, and versatile.
CLYTEMNESTRA, Housekeeper for Delcher.
COUSIN BILL J., a man with a splendid past.
NANCY CREALOCK, A wondering child and woman.
AUNT BELL, Nancy's worldly guide, who, having lived in Boston, has
"broadened into the higher unbelief."
MISS ALVIRA ABNEY, Edom's leading milliner, captivated by Cousin Bill J.
MILO BARRUS, The village atheist.
THE STRONG PERSON, of the "Gus Levy All-star Shamrock Vaudeville."
CALEB WEBSTER, a travelled Edomite.
CYRUS BROWETT, a New York capitalist and patron of the Church.
MRS. DONALD WYETH, an appreciative parishioner of Allan Linford.
THE REV MR. WHITTAKER, a Unitarian.
FATHER RILEY, of the Church of Rome.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"'My dear, Bernal is saying good-bye!'" (Frontispiece)
"She could be made to believe that only he could protect her from the
Gratcher"
"They looked forward with equal eagerness to the day when he should
become a great and good man"
"He gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his"
* * * * *
BOOK ONE
The Age of Fable
[Illustration]
THE SEEKER
BOOK ONE--THE AGE OF FABLE
CHAPTER I
HOW THE CHRISTMAS SAINT WAS PROVED
The whispering died away as they heard heavy steps and saw a line of light
under the shut door. Then a last muffled caution from the larger boy on
the cot.
"Now, remember! There ain't any, but don't you let _on_ there ain't--else
he won't bring you a single thing!"
Before the despairing soul on the trundle-bed could pierce the vulnerable
heel of this, the door opened slowly to the broad shape of Clytemnestra.
One hand shaded her eyes from the candle she carried, and she peered into
the corner where the two beds were, a flurry of eagerness in her face,
checked by stoic self-mastery.
At once from the older boy came the sounds of one who breathes labouredly
in deep sleep after a hard day. But the littler boy sat rebelliously up,
digging combative fists into eyes that the light tickled. Clytemnestra
warmly rebuked him, first simulating the frown of the irritated.
"Now, Bernal! Wide awake! My days alive! You act like a wild Indian's
little boy. This'll _never_ do. Now you go right to sleep this minute,
while I watch you. Look how fine and good Allan is." She spoke low, not to
awaken the one virtuous sleeper, who seemed thereupon to breathe with a
more swelling and obtrusive rectitude.
"Clytie--now--_ain't_ there any Santa Claus?"
"Now what a sinful question _that_ is!"
"But _is_ there?"
"Don't he bring you things?"
"Oh, there _ain't_ any!" There was a sullen desperation in this, as of one
done with quibbles. But the woman still paltered wretchedly.
"Well, if you don't lie down and go to sleep quicker'n a wink I bet you
anything he won't bring you a single play-pretty."
There came an unmistakable blare of triumph into the busy snore on the
cot.
But the heart of the skeptic was sunk. This evasion was more
disillusioning than downright confession. A moment the little boy regarded
her, wholly in sorrow, with big eyes that blinked alarmingly. Then came
his last shot; the final bullet which the besieged warrior will sometimes
reserve for his own destruction. There could no longer be any pretense
between them. Bravely he faced her.
"Now--you just needn't try to keep it from me any longer! I _know_ there
ain't any--" One tensely tragic second he paused to gather himself--"_It's
all over town!_" There being nothing further to live for, he delivered
himself to grief--to be tortured and destroyed.
Clytie set the candle on the bureau and came to hover him. Within the
pressing arms and upon the proffered bosom he wept out one of those griefs
that may not be told--that only the heart can understand. Yet, when the
first passion of it was spent she began to reassure him, begging him not
to be misled by idle gossip; to take not even her own testimony, but to
wait and see what he would see. At last he listened and was a little
soothed. It appeared that Santa Claus was one you might believe in or
might not. Even Clytie seemed to be puzzled about him. He could see that
she overflowed with belief in him, yet he could not make her confess it in
plain straight words. The meat of it was that good children found things
on Christmas morning which must have been left by some one--if not by
Santa Claus, then by whom? Did the little boy believe, for example, that
Milo Barrus did it? He was the village atheist, and so bad a man that he
loved to spell God with a little g.
He mused upon this while his tears dried, finding it plausible. Of course
it couldn't be Milo Barrus, so it _must_ be Santa Claus. Was Clytie
certain some presents would be there in the morning? If he went directly
to sleep, she was.
Hereupon the larger boy on the cot, who had for some moments listened in
forgetful silence, became again virtuously asleep in a public manner.
But the littler boy must yet have talk. Could the bells of Santa Claus be
heard when he came?
Clytie had known some children, of exceptional merit, it was true, who
claimed to have heard his bells on certain nights when they had gone early
to sleep.
_Why_ would he never leave anything for a child that got up out of bed
and caught him at it? Suppose one had to get up for a drink.
Because it broke the charm.
But if a very, _very_ good child just _happened_ to wake up while he was
in the room, and didn't pay the least attention to him, or even look
sidewise or anything--
Even this were hazardous, it seemed; though if the child were indeed very
good all might not yet be lost.
"Well, won't you leave the light for me? The dark gets in my eyes."
But this was another adverse condition, making everything impossible. So
she chided and reassured him, tucked the covers once more about his neck,
and left him, with a final comment on the advantage of sleeping at once.
When the room was dark and Clytie's footsteps had sounded down the hall,
he called softly to his brother; but that wise child was now truly asleep.
So the littler boy lay musing, having resolved to stay awake and solve
the mystery once for all.
From wondering what he might receive he came to wondering if he were good.
His last meditation was upon the Sunday-school book his dear mother had
helped him read before they took her away with a new little baby that had
never amounted to much; before he and Allan came to Grandfather Delcher's
to live--where there was a great deal to eat. The name of the book was
"Ben Holt." He remembered this especially because a text often quoted in
the story said "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." He
had often wondered why Ben Holt should be considered an especially good
name; and why Ben Holt came to choose it instead of the goldpiece he found
and returned to the schoolmaster, before he fell sick and was sent away to
the country where the merry haymakers were. Of course, there were worse
names than Ben Holt. It was surely better than Eygji Watts, whose sanguine
parents were said to have named him with the first five letters they drew
from a hat containing the alphabet; Ben Holt was assuredly better than
Eygji, even had this not been rendered into "Hedge-hog" by careless
companions. His last confusion of ideas was a wondering if Bernal Linford
was as good a name as Ben Holt, and why he could not remember having
chosen it in preference to a goldpiece. Back of this, in his fading
consciousness was the high-coloured image of a candy cane, too splendid
for earth.
Then, far in the night, as it might have seemed to the little boy, came
the step of slippered feet. This time Clytie, satisfying herself that both
boys slept, set down her candle and went softly out, leaving the door
open. There came back with her one bearing gifts--a tall, dark old man,
with a face of many deep lines and severe set, who yet somehow shed
kindness, as if he held a spirit of light prisoned within his darkness, so
that, while only now and then could a visible ray of it escape through
the sombre eye or through a sudden winning quality in the harsh voice, it
nevertheless radiated from him sensibly at all times, to belie his
sternness and puzzle those who feared him.
Uneasy enough he looked now as Clytie unloaded him of the bundles and
bulky toys. In a silence broken only by their breathing they quickly
bestowed the gifts--some in the hanging stockings at the fire-place,
others beside each bed, in chairs or on the mantel.
Then they were in the hall again, the door closed so that they could
speak. The old man took up his own candle from a stand against the wall.
"The little one is like her," he said.
"He's awful cunning and bright, but Allan is the handsomest. Never in my
born days did I see so beautiful a boy."
"But he's like the father, line for line." There was a sudden savage
roughness in the voice, a sterner set to the shaven upper lip and
straight mouth, though he still spoke low. "Like the huckstering, godless
fiddle-player that took her away from me. What a mercy of God's he'll
never see her again--she with the saved and he--what a reckoning for him
when he goes!"
"But he was not bad to let you take them."
"He boasted to me that he'd not have done it, except that she begged him
with her last breath to promise it. He said the words with great maudlin
tears raining down his face, when my own eyes were dry!"
"How good if you can leave them both in the church, preaching the word
where you preached it so many years!"
"I misdoubt the father's blood in them--at least, in the older. But it's
late. Good night, Clytie--a good Christmas to you."
"More to you, Mr. Delcher! Good night!"
CHAPTER II
AN OLD MAN FACES TWO WAYS
His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red
carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study.
Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth.
Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp
cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers. A big, white-breasted
gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly
upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands
suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily
falling eye-lids.
He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing
backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real
presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call
of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the family
way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had been revolt in
him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own
daughter's revolt.
Again he dwelt in the days when he had preached with a hot passion such
truth as was his. For a long time, while the old clock ticked on the
mantel before him and the big cat purred or slept under his absent
pettings, his mind moved through an incident of that early ministry.
Clear in his memory were certain passages of fire from the sermon. In the
little log church at Edom he had felt the spirit burn in him and he had
movingly voiced its warnings of that dread place where the flames forever
blaze, yet never consume; where cries ever go up for one drop of water to
cool the parched tongues of those who sought not God while they lived. He
had told of one who died--one that the world called good, a moral man--but
not a Christian; one who had perversely neglected the way of life. How, on
his death-bed, this one had called in agony for a last glass of water,
seeming to know all at once that he would now be where no drop of water
could cool him through all eternity.
So effective had been his putting of this that a terrified throng came
forward at his call for converts.
The next morning he had ridden away from Edom toward Felton Falls to
preach there. A mile out of town he had been accosted by a big, bearded
man who had yet a singularly childish look--who urged that he come to his
cabin to minister to a sick friend. He knew the fellow for one that the
village of Edom called "daft" or "queer," yet held to be harmless--to be
rather amusing, indeed, since he could be provoked to deliver curious
harangues upon the subject of revealed religion. He remembered now that
the man's face had stared at him from far back in the church the night
before--a face full of the liveliest terror, though he had not been among
those that fled to the mercy-seat. Acceding to the man's request, he
followed him up a wooded path to his cabin. Dismounting and tying his
horse, he entered and, turning to ask where the sick man was, found
himself throttled in the grasp of a giant.
He was thrust into an inner room, windowless and with no door other than
the one now barred by his chuckling captor. And here the Reverend Allan
Delcher had lain three days and two nights captive of a madman, with no
food and without one drop of water.
From the other side of the log partition his captor had declared himself
to be the keeper of hell. Even now he could hear the words maundered
through the chinks: "Never got another drop of water for a million years
and _still_ more, and him a burning up and a roasting up, and his tongue
a lolling out, all of a _sizzle_. Now wasn't that fine--because folks said
he'd likely gone crazy about religion!"
Other times his captor would declare himself to be John the Baptist
making straight the paths in the wilderness. Again he would quote passages
of scripture, some of them hideous mockeries to the tortured prisoner,
some strangely soothing and suggestive.
But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident,
they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go with
his captor's. His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity had
been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted that
ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of divine
retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of
heterodoxy. Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of him;
only, as once averred a plain parishioner, "He seemed to bear down on hell
jest a _lee-tle_ less continuously."
As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable
aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was set
forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a
little time after the father's release from the maniac's cabin. She had
grown to womanhood submitting meekly to an iron rule; but none the less
betraying an acute repugnance for certain doctrines preached by her
father. It seemed to the old man a long way to look back; and then a
long way to come forward again, past the death of his girl-wife while
their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that
child's revolt, in her thirty-first year. Dumbly, dutifully, had she
submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her
girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness.
Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the
monstrous thing. He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had
gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing
good-for-nothing who had that winter given singing lessons in the
village.
Only once after that had he looked upon her face--the face of a withered
sprite, subdued by time. The hurt of that look was still fresh in him,
making his mind turn heavily, perhaps a little remorsefully, to the two
little boys asleep in the west bedroom. Had the seed of revolt been in
her, from his own revolt against his father? Would it presently bear some
ugly fruit in her sons?
From a drawer in the table he took a little sheaf of folded sheets, and
read again the last letter that had come from her; read it not without
grim mutterings and oblique little jerks of the narrow old head, yet with
quick tender glows melting the sternness.
"You must not think I have ever regretted my choice, though every day of
my life I have sorrowed at your decision not to see me so long as I stayed
by my husband. How many times I have prayed God to remind you that I took
him for better or worse, till death should us part."
This made him mutter.
"Clayton has never in his life failed of kindness and gentleness to
me"--so ran the letter--"and he has always provided for us as well as a
man of his _uncommon talents_ could."
Here the old man sniffed in fine contempt.
"All last winter he had quite a class to teach singing in the evening and
three day-scholars for the violin, one of whom paid him in hams. Another
offered to pay either in money or a beautiful portrait of me in pastel.
We needed money, but Clayton chose the portrait as a surprise to me. At
times he seems unpractical, but now he has started out in _business_
again--"
There were bitter shakings of the head here. Business! Standing in a buggy
at street-corners, jauntily urging a crowd to buy the magic
grease-eradicator, toothache remedy, meretricious jewelry, what not! first
playing a fiddle and rollicking out some ribald song to fetch them.
Business indeed! A pretty business!
"The boys are delighted with the Bibles you sent and learn a verse each
day. I have told them they may some day preach as you did if they will be
as good men as you are and study the Bible. They try to preach like our
preacher in the cunningest way. I wish you could see them. You would love
them in spite of your feeling against their father. I did what you
suggested to stimulate their minds about the Scriptures, but perhaps the
lesson they chose to write about was not very edifying. It does not seem
a pretty lesson to me, and I did not pick it out. They heard about it at
Sabbath-school and had their papers all written as a surprise for me. Of
course, Bernal's is _very_ childish, but I think Allan's paper, for a
child of his age, shows a _grasp_ of religious matters that is _truly
remarkable_. I shall keep them studying the Bible daily. I should tell you
that I am now looking forward with great joy to--"
With a long sigh he laid down the finely written sheet and took from the
sheaf the two papers she had spoken of. Then while the gale roared without
and shook his window, and while the bust of John Calvin looked down at him
from the book-case at his back, he followed his two grandsons on their
first incursion into the domain of speculative theology.
He took first the paper of the older boy, painfully elaborated with heavy,
intricate capitals and headed "Elisha and the Wicked Children--by Mr.
Allan Delcher Linford, Esquire, aged nine years and six months."
* * * * *
"This lesson," it began, "is to teach us to love God and the prophets or
else we will likely get into trouble. It says Elisha went up from Bethel
and some children came out of the city and said go up thou Baldhead.
They said it Twice one after the other and so Elisha got mad right away
and turned around and cursed them good in the name of the Lord and so 2
She Bears come along and et up 42 of them for Elisha was a holy prophet of
God and had not ought to of been yelled at. So of course the mothers would
Take on very much When they found their 42 Children et up but I think that
we had ought to learn from this that these 42 Little ones was not the
Elected. It says in our catchism God having out of his mere good pleasure
elected some to everlasting life. Now God being a Presbiterian would know
these 42 little ones had not been elected so they might as well be et up
by bears as anything else to show forth his honour and glory Forever Amen.
It should teach a Boy to be mighty carful about kidding old men unless he
is a Presbiterian. I spelled every word in this right.
"Mr. Allan Delcher Linford."
The second paper, which the old man now held long before him, was partly
printed and partly written with a lead-pencil, whose mark was now faint
and now heavy, as having gone at intervals to the writer's lips. As the
old man read, his face lost not a little of its grimness.
"BEARS
"It teaches the lord thy God is baldheaded. I ask my deer father what it
teeches he said it teeches who ever wrot that storry was baldheaded. He
says a man with thik long hair like my deer father would of said o let the
kids have their fun with old Elisha so I ask my deer mother who wrot this
lesson she said God wrot the holy word so that is how we know God is
baldheaded. It was a lot of children for only two 2 bears. I liked to of
ben there if the bears wold of known that I was a good child. mabe I cold
of ben on a high fense or up a tree. I climd the sor aple tree in our back
yard esy.
"By Bernal Linford, aged neerly 8 yrs."
Carefully he put back both papers with the mother's letter, his dark face
showing all its intricate net-work of lines in a tension that was both
pained and humorous.
Two fresh souls were given to his care to be made, please God, the means
of grace by which thousands of other souls might be washed clean of the
stain of original sin. Yet, if revolt was there--revolt like his
daughter's and like his own? Would he forgive as his own father had
forgiven, who had called him back after many years to live out a tranquil
old age on the fortune that father's father had founded? He mused long on
this. The age was lax--true, but God's law was never lax. If one would
revolt from the right, one must suffer. For the old man was one of the few
last of a race of giants who were to believe always in the Printed Word.
CHAPTER III
THE CULT OF THE CANDY CANE
When the littler boy looked fairly into the frosty gray of that Christmas
morning, the trailed banner of his faith was snatched once more aloft;
and in the breast of his complacent brother there swelled the conviction
that one does ill to flaunt one's skepticism, when the rewards of belief
are substantial and imminent. For before them was an array of gifts such
as neither had ever looked upon before, save as forbidden treasure of the
few persons whose immense wealth enables them to keep toy-shops.
The tale of the princely Saint was now authenticated delightfully. That
which had made him seem unreal in moments of spiritual laxity--the
impenetrable secrecy of his private life--was now seen to enhance manyfold
his wondrous givings. Here was a charm which could never have sat the
display before them had it been dryly bought in their presence from one of
the millionaire toy-shop keepers. For a wondering moment they looked from
their beds, sputtering, gibbering, gasping, with cautious calls one to
the other. Then having proved speech to be no disenchantment they shouted
and laughed crazily. There followed a scramble from the beds and a swift
return from the cold, each bearing such of the priceless bits as had
lain nearest. And while these were fondled or shot or blown upon or
tasted or wound up, each according to its wonderful nature, they looked
farther afield seeing other and ever new packages bulk mysteriously into
the growing light; bundles quickening before their eyes with every delight
to be imagined of a Saint with epicurean tastes and prodigal
habits--bundles that looked as if a mere twitch at the cord would expose
their hidden charms.
The littler boy now wore a unique fur cap that let down to cover the neck
and face, with openings wonderfully contrived for the eyes, nose and
mouth--an easy triumph, surely, over the deadliest cold known to man. In
one hand he flourished a brass-handled knife with both of its blades open;
with the other he clasped a striped trumpet, into the china mouthpiece of
which he had blown the shreds of a caramel, not meaning to; and here he
was made to forget these trifles by discovering at the farther side of the
room a veritable rocking-horse, a creature that looked not only
magnificently willing, but superbly untamable, with a white mane and tail
of celestial flow, with alert, pointed ears of maroon leather nailed
nicely to the right spot. At this marvel he stared in that silence which
is the highest power of joy: a presentiment had been his that such a
horse, curveting on blue rockers, would be found on this very morning. Two
days before had he in an absent moment beheld a vision of this horse
poised near the door of the attic; but when he ran to make report of it
below, thinking to astound people by his power of insight, Clytemnestra,
bidding him wait in the kitchen where she was baking, had hurried to the
spot and found only some rolls of blue cambric. She had rather shamed him
for giving her such a start. A few rolls of shiny blue cambric against a
white wall did not, she assured him, make a rocking-horse; and, what was
more, they never would. Now the vision came back with a significance that
set him all a-thrill. Next time Clytie would pay attention to him. He
laughed to think of her confusion now.
But here again, at the very zenith of a shout, was he frozen to silence by
a vision--this time one too obviously of no ponderable fabric. There in
the corner, almost at his hand, seemed to be a thing that he had dreamed
of possessing only after he entered Heaven--a candy cane: one of fearful
length, thick of girth, vast of crook, and wide in the spiral stripe that
seemed to run a living flame before his ravished eyes, beginning at the
bottom and winding around and around the whole dizzy height. Fearfully in
nerve-braced silence he leaned far out of his bed to bring against this
amazing apparition one cool, impartial forefinger of skeptic research. It
did not vanish; it resisted his touch. Then his heart fainted with
rapture, for he knew the unimagined had become history.
Standing before the windows of the great, he had gazed long at these
creations. They were suspended on a wire across the window in various
lengths, from little ones to sizes too awesome to compute. On one
occasion so long had he stood motionless, so deep the trance of his
contemplation, that the winter cold had cruelly bitten his ears and toes.
He had not supposed that these things were for mere vulgar ownership. He
had known of boys who had guns and building-blocks and rocking-horses as
well as candy in the lesser degrees; but never had he known, never had he
been able to hear of one who had owned a thing like this. Indeed, among
the boys he knew, it was believed that they were not even to be seen save
on their wire at Christmas time in the windows of the rich. One boy had
hinted that the "set" would not be broken even if a person should appear
with money enough to buy a single one. And here before him was the finest
of them all, receding neither from his gaze or his touch, one as long as
the longest of which Heaven had hitherto vouchsafed him a chilling vision
through glass; here was the same fascinating union of transcendent merit
with a playful suggestion of downright utility. And he had blurted out to
Clytie that the news of there being no Santa Claus was all over town! He
was ashamed, and the moment became for him one of chastening in which he
humbled his unbelieving spirit before this symbol of a more than earthly
goodness--a symbol in whose presence, while as yet no accident had
rendered it less than perfect, he would never cease to feel the spiritual
uplift of one who has weighed the fruits of faith and found them not
wanting.
He issued from some bottomless stupor of ecstacy to hear the door open to
Allan's shouts; then to see the opening nicely filled again by the figure
of Clytemnestra, who looked over at them with eager, shining eyes. He was
at first powerless to do more than say "Oh, Clytie!" with little impotent
pointings toward the candy cane. But the action now in order served to
restore him to a state of working sanity. There was washing and dressing
after Clytie had the fire crackling; the forgetting of some treasures to
remember others; and the conveyance of them all down stairs to the big
sitting-room where the sun came in over the geraniums in the bay-window,
and where the Franklin heater made the air tropic. The rocking-horse was
led and pushed by both boys; but to Clytie's responsible hand alone was
intrusted the more than earthly candy cane.
Downstairs there was the grandfather to greet--erect, fresh-shaven,
flashing kind eyes from under stern brows. He seemed to be awkwardly
pleased with their pleasure, yet scarce able to be one with them; as if
that inner white spirit of his fluttered more than its wont to be free,
yet found only tiny exits for its furtive flashes of light.
Breakfast was a chattering and explosive meal, a severe trial, indeed, to
the patience of the littler boy, who decided that he wished never to eat
breakfast again. During the ten days that he had been a member of the
household a certain formality observed at the beginning of each meal had
held him in abject fascination, so that he looked forward to it with
pleased terror. This was that, when they were all seated, there ensued a
pause of precisely two seconds--no more and no less--a pause that became
awful by reason of the fact that every one grew instantly solemn and
expectant--even apprehensive. His tingling nerves had defined his spine
for him before this pause ended, and then, when the roots of his hair
began to crinkle, his grandfather would suddenly bow low over his plate
and rumble in his head. It was very curious and weirdly pleasurable, and
it lasted one minute. When it ceased the tension relaxed instantly, and
every one was friendly and cordial and safe again.
This morning the little boy was actually impatient during the rumble, so
eager was he to talk. And not until he had been assured by both his
grandfather and Clytie that Santa Claus meant everything he left to be
truly kept; that he came back for nothing--not even for a cane--_of any
kind_--that he might have left at a certain house by mistake--not until
then would he heave the sigh of immediate security and consent to eat his
egg and muffins, of which latter Clytie had to bring hot ones from the
kitchen because both boys had let the first plate go cold. For Clytie,
like Grandfather Delcher, was also one of the last of a race of American
giants--in her case a race preceding servants, that called itself "hired
girls"--who not only ate with the family, but joyed and sorrowed with it
and for long terms of years was a part of it in devotion, responsibility
and self-respect. She had, it is true, dreaded the coming of these
children, but from the moment that the two cold, subdued little figures
had looked in doubting amazement at the four kinds of preserves and three
kinds of cake set out for their first collation in the new home, she had
rejoiced unceasingly in a vicarious motherhood.
Within an hour after breakfast the morning's find had been examined,
appraised, and accorded perpetual rank by merit. Grandfather Delcher made
but one timid effort to influence decisions.
"Now, Bernal, which do you like best of all your presents?" he asked. With
a heart too full for words the littler boy had pointed promptly but shyly
at his candy cane. Not once, indeed, had he been able to say the words
"candy cane." It was a creation which mere words were inadequate to name.
It was a presence to be pointed at. He pointed again firmly when the old
man asked, "Are you quite certain, now, you like it best of
all?"--suggestively--"better than this fine book with this beautiful
picture of Joseph being sold away by his wicked brothers?"
The questioner had turned then to the older boy, who tactfully divined
that a different answer would have pleased the old man better.
"And what do you like best, Allan?"
"Oh, I like this fine and splendid book best of all!"--and he read from
the title-page, in the clear, confident tones of the pupil who knows that
the teacher's favour rests upon him--"'From Eden to Calvary; or through
the Bible in a year with our boys and girls; a book of pleasure and profit
for young persons on Sabbath Afternoon. By Grandpa Silas Atterbury, the
well-known author and writer for young people."
His glance toward his brother at the close was meant to betray the
consciousness of his own superiority to one who dallied sensuously with
created objects.
But the unspiritual one was riding the new horse at a furious gallop, and
the glance of reproof was unnoted save by the old man--who wondered if it
might be by any absurd twist that the boy most like the godless father
were more godly than the one so like his mother that every note of his
little voice and every full glance of his big blue eyes made the old heart
flutter.
In the afternoon came callers from the next house; Dr. Crealock, rubicund
and portly, leaning on his cane, to pass the word of seasonable cheer with
his old friend and pastor; and with him his tiny niece to greet the
grandchildren of his friend. The Doctor went with his host to the study on
the second floor, where, as a Christmas custom, they would drink some
Madeira, ancient of days, from a cask prescribed and furnished long since
by the doctor.
The little boy was for the moment left alone with the tiny niece; to stare
curiously, now that she was close, at one of whom he had caught glimpses
in a window of the big house next door. She was clad in a black velvet
cloak and hood, with pink satin next her face inside the hood, and she
carried a large closely-wrapped doll which she affected to think might
have taken cold. With great self-possession she doffed her cloak and
overshoes; then slowly and tenderly unwound the wrappings of the doll,
talking meanwhile in low mothering tones, and going with it to the fire
when she had it uncloaked. Of the boy who stared at her she seemed
unconscious, and he could do no more than stand timidly at a little
distance. An eye-flash from the maid may have perceived his abjectness,
for she said haughtily at length, "I'm astonished no one in this house
knows where Clytie is!"
He drew nearer by as far as he could slowly spread his feet twice.
"_I_ know--now--she went to get two glasses from the dresser to take to my
grandfather and that gentleman." He felt voluble from the mere ease of
the answer. But she affected to have heard nothing, and he was obliged to
speak again.
"Now--why, _I_ know a doll that shuts up her eyes every time she lies
down."
The doll at hand was promptly extended on the little lap and with a click
went into sudden sleep while the mother rocked it. He could have ventured
nothing more after this pricking of his inflated little speech. A moment
he stood, suffering moderately, and then would have edged cautiously away
with the air of wishing to go, only at this point, without seeming to see
him, she chirped to him quite winningly in a soft, warm little voice, and
there was free talk at once. He manfully let her tell of all her silly
little presents before talking of his own. He even listened about the
doll, whose name Santa Claus had thoughtfully painted on the box in which
she came; it was a French name, "Fragile."
Then, being come to names, they told their own. Hers, she said, was
Lillian May.
"But your uncle, now--that gentleman--he called you _Nancy_ when you came
in." He waited for her solving of this.
"Oh, Uncle Doctor doesn't know it yet, what my _real_ name is. They call
me Nancy, but that's a very disagreeable name, so I took Lillian May for
my real name. But I tell _very_ few persons," she added, importantly. Here
he was at home; he knew about choosing a good name.
"Did you give up the gold-piece you found?" he asked. But this puzzled
her.
"'A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,'" he reminded her.
"Didn't you find a gold-piece like Ben Holt did?"
But it seemed she had never found anything. Indeed, once she had lost a
dime, even on the way to spending it for five candy bananas and five
jaw-breakers. Plainly she had chosen her good name without knowing of the
case of Ben Holt. Then he promised to show her something the most
wonderful in all the world, which she would never believe without seeing
it, and led her to where the candy cane towered to their shoulders in its
corner. He saw at once that it meant less to her than it did to him.
"Oh, it's a candy cane!" she said, _calling_ it a candy cane commonly,
with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold
watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her
coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never
be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and
incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating
the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in
her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the
term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent
by his side, would have known him to be of the brotherhood. Perhaps at the
end there would have been respectful wonder expressed as to how long it
would stay unbroken and so untasted. Still he was not unkind to her,
except in ways requisite to a mere decent showing forth of his now
ascertained superiority. He helped her to a canter on the new horse; and
even pretended a polite and superficial interest in the doll, Fragile,
which she took up often. Being a girl, she had to be humoured in that
manner. But any boy could see that the thing went to sleep by turning its
eyes inside out, _and its garters were painted on its fat legs_. These
things he was, of course, too much the gentleman to point out.
When the Doctor and his host came down stairs late in the afternoon, the
little boy and girl were fairly friendly. Only there was talk of kissing
at the door, started by the little girl's uncle, and this the little boy
of course could not consider, even though he suddenly wished it of all
things--for he had never kissed any one but his father and mother. He had
told Clytie it made him sick to be kissed. Now, when the little girl
called to him as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he could not
go. And then she stabbed him by falsely kissing the complacent Allan
standing by, who thereupon smirked in sickening deprecation and promptly
rubbed his cheek.
Not until the pair were out in the street did his man-strength come back
to him, and then he could only burn with indignation at her and at Allan.
He wondered that no one was shocked at him for feeling as he did. But, as
they seemed not to notice him, he rode his horse again. No mad gallop now,
but a slow, moody jog--a pace ripe for any pessimism.
"Clytie!" he called imperiously, after a little. "Do you think there's a
real bone in this horse--like a _regular_ horse?"
Clytie responded from the dining-room with a placid "I guess so."
"If I sawed into its neck, would the saw go right into a real _bone_?"
"My suz! what talk! Well?"
"I know there _ain't_ any bone in there, like a regular horse. It's just a
_wooden_ bone."
Nor was this his last negative thought of the day. It came to him then and
there with cruel, biting plainness, that no one else in the house felt as
he did toward his chief treasure. Allan didn't. He had spent hardly a
moment with it. Clytie didn't; he had seen her pick it up when she dusted
the sitting-room; there was sacrilege in her very grasp of it; and his
grandfather seemed hardly to know of its existence. The little girl who
had chosen the good name of Lillian May might have been excused; but not
these others. If his grandfather was without understanding in such a
matter, in what, then, could he be trusted?
He descended to a still lower plane before he fell asleep that night. Even
if he had _one_ of them, he would probably never have a whole row,
graduated from a pigmy to a mammoth, to hang on a wire across the front
window, after the manner of the rich, and dazzle the outer world into
envy. The mood was but slightly chastened when he remembered, as he now
did, that on last Christmas he had received only one pretentious candy
rooster, falsely hollow, and a very uninteresting linen handkerchief
embroidered with some initials not his own. He fell asleep on a brutal
reflection that the cane could be broken accidentally and eaten.
CHAPTER IV
THE BIG HOUSE OF PORTENTS
In this big white house the little boys had been born again to a life that
was all strange. Novel was the outer house with its high portico and
fluted pillars, its vast areas of white wall set with shutters of
relentless green; its stout, red chimneys; its surprises of gabled window;
its big front door with the polished brass knocker and the fan-light
above. Quite as novel was the inner house, and quite as novel was this new
life to its very center.
For one thing, while the joy of living had hitherto been all but flawless
for the little boys, the disadvantages of being dead were now brought
daily to their notice. In morning and evening prayer, in formal homily,
informal caution, spontaneous warning, in the sermon at church, and the
lesson of the Sabbath-school, was their excessive liability to divine
wrath impressed upon them "when the memory is wax to receive and marble
to retain."
Within the home Clytie proved to be an able coadjutor of the old man, who
was, indeed, constrained and awkward in the presence of the younger child,
and perhaps a thought too severe with the elder. But Clytie, who had said
"I'll make my own of them," was tireless and not without ingenuity in
opening the way of life to their little feet.
Allan, the elder, gifted with a distinct talent for memorising, she taught
many instructive bits chosen from the scrap-book in which her literary
treasures were preserved. His rendition of a passage from one of Mr.
Spurgeon's sermons became so impressive under her drilling that the aroma
of his lost youth stole back to the nostrils of the old man while he
listened.
"There is a place," the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting
gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, "where the
only music is the symphony of damned souls. Where howling, groaning,
moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert. There is a
place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire,
torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of
mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water--that water all denied. When
thou diest, O Sinner--"
But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have
to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. Always he became thirsty here.
And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire
his brother in the closing periods.
--"but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then
thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each
brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood,
thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the
fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a
string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell's
unutterable torment."
Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse
rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of
being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who
spelled God with a little g.
As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great
difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a
lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed
him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but
invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going
"down--_down_--DOWN--into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became
pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he
would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say,
at each of his failures, "if you only _could_ do it the way Mr. Murphy
did--and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,--just like he was
associating with a body in their own parlour--and so pathetic it made a
body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell
what a sot he'd been!"
However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more
tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical
conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy
couplets such as:
"Xerxes the Great did die
And so must you and I."
"As runs the glass
Man's life must pass."
"Thy life to mend
God's book attend."
From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of
her favourites being:
UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE
"I in the burying-place may see
Graves shorter there than I.
From Death's arrest no age is free,
Young children, too, may die.
"My God, may such an awful sight
Awakening be to me;
Oh, that by early grace, I might
For death prepared be!"
She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to
Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second stanza
somewhat timidly, because it sounded so much like swearing.
Nor did she neglect to teach both boys the lessons of Holy Writ.
Of a Sabbath afternoon she would read how God ordered the congregation to
stone the son of Shelomith for blasphemy; or, perhaps, how David fetched
the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the
Lord "made a breach" upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark
to save it when the oxen stumbled. The little boys were much impressed by
this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to
Uzza to have "a breach" made upon him. The unwisdom of touching an Ark of
the Covenant, under any circumstances, could not have been more clearly
brought home to them. They liked also to hear of the instruments played
upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps,
psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of
fir-wood.
Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession "girded
with a linen ephod," which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed,
it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David's
wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him
"leaping and dancing before the Lord," uncovered save for the presumably
inadequate ephod of linen. She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of
David's years and honour should "make himself ridiculous that way."
So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it
behooves those to walk who shall taste death. And to the littler boy,
prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the
big house itself would at times be more than itself to him. There was the
Front Room. Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in
which he was accustomed to regard it. Each Friday, when it was opened for
a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold
of its door. It seemed to be an abode of dead joys--a place where they had
gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival. And while he could not
see God there, actually, neither in the horse-hair sofa nor the bleak
melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table
with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep
chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately
set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat
frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from
the ceiling--yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding
spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb--an all-pervading
thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and
part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or
spirit he conceived to be God--the more as it came to him in a flash of
divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark
of the Covenant.
Thus the Front Room became what "Heaven" meant to him when he heard the
word--a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it
actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very
joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart;
a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously
pleasant hell, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games
and sweets and joyous idleness.
The word "God," then, became at this time a word of evil import to the
littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath
morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie's,
with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who,
clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in
front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely,
like very princes.
To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her
permission, "Oh, it must be awful, _awful_ wicked--because I want to do
it very, very much!--not like, going to church."
Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation--particularly when
Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the
care-free Sabbath loafers.
Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come
to the Feet before he died. "But I believe he _will_ come to the Feet,"
she added, "even if it's on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat
standing on his brow. It would make a lovely tract--him coming to the
Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything."
The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn't come to the
Feet. It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn't, and if you
could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come. During
church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet. Once, long ago,
it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of
the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and
made his own forever one image: the image of a mighty foot carved in
marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway. It had been
severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border
of lace. It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed
eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to
each perfect toe. Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo
Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark
stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it--and what did you
have to do when you got to the Feet? The possibility of not getting to
them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite
as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the
Front Room--particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good
because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.
During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity. She would
even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired
and of which he learned to repeat not a few. One of her pastoral poems
told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a
neighbouring State. It began thus:
"New Hampshire is a pretty place,
I did go there to see
The maple-sugar being boiled
By one that's dear to me."
Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza--
"I loved to hear the banjo hum,
It sounds so very calmly;
If a happy home you wish to find,
Visit the Thompson family."
After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy
and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of
them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her
voice--
"At lovers' promises fates grow merrilee;
Some are made on land,
Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave
Streams of tears."
He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that
sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked
like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black
hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her
beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.
Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose
bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that
Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even
sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own:
"For her dear sake whom he did pity,
He took her back to Jersey City."
But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him,
just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of
the awful joys of Heaven. And then his mind was like the desert of
shifting sands. There were so many things to be done and not done if one
were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of
terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and
shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.
There was being good--which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like
Milo Barrus and spell God with a little g; and there was Coming to the
Feet--not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there
was the matter of Blood. There were hymns, for example, that left him
confused. The "fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins"
sounded interesting. Vividly he saw the "sinners plunged beneath that
flood" losing all their guilty stains. It was entirely reasonable, and
with an assumption of carelessness he glanced cautiously over his own body
each morning to see if his guilty stains showed yet. But who was Immanuel?
And where was this excellent fountain?
Then there was being "washed in the blood of the lamb," which was
considerably simpler--except for the matter of its making one "whiter
than snow." He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only
poetry-writing which doesn't mean everything it says. He meant to try
this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as
a desirable experiment.
But plunging into the fountain filled with blood sounded far more
important and effectual--if it were only practicable. As the sinners came
out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet
flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running
with the Magnetic Ointment--even redder!
The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a
house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed. And if its
inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the
big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces;
where the lawn on one side was bordered with beds of petunias and
fuschias, tiger-lilies and dahlias; where were a great clump of white
lilacs and many bushes of yellow roses; a lawn that stretched unbrokenly
to the windows of the next big house where lived the gentle stranger with
the soft, warm little voice who had chosen the good name of Lillian May.
Life was severely earnest but by no means impracticable.
CHAPTER V
THE LIFE OF CRIME IS APPRAISED AND CHOSEN
It came to seem expedient to Bernal, however, in the first spring of his
new life, to make a final choice between early death and a life, of sin.
Matters came to press upon him, and since virtue was useful only to get
one into Heaven, it was not worth the effort unless one meant to die at
once. This was an alternative not without its lures, despite the warnings
preached all about him. It would surely be interesting to die, if one had
come properly to the Feet. Even coming to but one of the Feet, as he had,
might make it still more interesting. Perhaps he would not, for this
reason, be always shut up in Heaven. In his secret heart was a lively
desire to see just what they did to Milo Barrus, if he _should_ continue
to spell God with a little g on his very death-bed--that is, if he could
see it without disadvantage to himself: But then, you could save that up,
because you _must_ die sometime, like Xerxes the Great; and meantime,
there was the life of evil now opening wide to the vision with all
enticing refreshments.
First, it meant no school. He had ceased to picture relief in this matter
by the school-house burning some morning, preferably a Monday morning,
one second after school had taken in. For a month he had daily dramatised
to himself the building's swift destruction amid the kind and merry
flames. But Allan, to whom he had one day hinted the possibility of this
gracious occurrence, had reminded him brutally that they would probably
have school in the Methodist church until a new school-house could be
built. For Allan loved his school and his teacher.
But a life of evil promised other joys besides this negative one of no
school. In his latest Sunday-school book, Ralph Overton, the good boy, not
only attended school slavishly, so that at thirteen he "could write a
good business hand"; but he practised those little tricks of picking up
every pin, always untying the string instead of cutting it, keeping his
shoes neatly polished and his hands clean, which were, in a simpler day,
held to lay the foundations of commercial success in our republic. Besides
this, Ralph had to be bright and cheery to every one, to work for his
widowed mother after school; and every Saturday afternoon he went,
sickeningly of his own accord, to split wood for an aged and poor lady.
This lady seemed to Bernal to do nothing much but burn a tremendous lot of
stove-wood, but presently she turned out to be the long-lost cousin of Mr.
Granville Parkinson, the Great Banker from the City, who thereupon took
cheery Ralph there and gave him a position in the bank where he could be
honest and industrious and respectful to his superiors. Such was the
barren tale of Virtue's gain. But contrasted with Ralph Overton in this
book was one Budd Jackson, who led a life of voluptuous sloth, except at
times when the evil one moved him to activity. At these bad moments he
might go bobbing for catfish on a Sabbath, or purloin fruit from the
orchard of Farmer Haskins (who would gladly have given some to him if he
had but asked for it civilly, so the book said); or he might bully smaller
boys whom he met on their way to school, taking their sailor hats away
from them, or jeering coarsely at their neatly brushed garments. When
Budd broke a window in the Methodist parsonage with his slung-shot and
tried to lie it on to Ralph Overton, he seemed to have given way utterly
to his vicious nature. He was known soon thereafter to have drunk liquor
and played a game called pin-pool with a "flashy stranger" at the tavern;
hence no one was surprised when he presently ran off with a circus, became
an infidel, and perished miserably in the toils of vice.
This touch about the circus, well-intended, to be sure, was yet fatal to
all good the tale might have done the little boy. Clytie, who read most of
the story to him, declared Budd Jackson to be "a regular mean one." But in
his heart Bernal, thinking all at once of the circus, sickened unutterably
of Virtue. To drive eight spirited white horses, seated high on one of
those gay closed wagons--those that went through the street with that
delicious hollow rumble--hearing perchance the velvet tread, or the
clawing and snarling of some pent ferocity--a leopard, a lion, what not;
to hear each day that muffled, flattened beating of a bass drum and
cymbals far within the big tent, quick and still more quickly, denoting to
the experienced ear that pink and spangled Beauty danced on the big white
horse at a deathless gallop; to know that one might freely enter that
tented elysium--if it were possible he would run off with a circus though
it meant that he had the morals of a serpent!
Now, eastward from the big house lay the village and its churches: thither
was tame virtue. But westward lay a broad field stretching off to an
orchard, and beyond swelled a gentle hill, mellow in the distance. Still
more remotely far, at the hill's rim, was a blur of woods beyond which
the sun went down each night. This, in the little boy's mind, was the
highway to the glad free Life of Evil. Many days he looked to that western
wood when the sky was a gush of colour behind its furred edge, perceiving
all manner of allurements to beckon him, hearing them plead, feeling them
tug. Daily his spirit quickened within him to their solicitations, leaping
out and beyond him in some magic way to bring back veritable meanings and
values of the future.
Then a day came when the desire to be off was no longer resistible. There
was a month of school yet; an especially bitter thought, for had he not
lately been out of school a week with mumps; and during that very week had
not the teacher's father died, so that he was cheated out of the resulting
three-days' vacation, other children being free while he lay on a bed of
pain--if you tasted pickles or any sour thing? Not only was it useless to
try to learn to write "a good business hand," like Ralph Overton--he took
the phrase to mean one of those pictured hands that were always pointing
to things in the newspaper advertisements--but there was the circus and
other evil things--and he was getting on in years.
It was a Saturday afternoon. To-morrow would be too late. He knew he would
not be allowed to start on the Sabbath, even in a career that was to be
all wickedness. In the grape-arbour he massed certain articles necessary
for the expedition: a very small strip of carpet on which he meant to
sleep; a copy of "_Golden Days_," with an article giving elaborate
instructions for camping in the wilderness. He was compelled to disregard
all of them, but there was comfort and sustenance in the article itself.
Then there was the gun that came at Christmas. It shot a cork as far as
the string would let it go, with a fairly satisfying report (he would have
that string off, once he was in the woods!). Also there were three glass
alleys, two agate taws and thirty-eight commies. And to hold his outfit
there was a rather sizable box which he with his own hands had papered
inside and out from a remnant of gorgeously flowered wall-paper.
When all was ready he went in to break the news to Clytie. She, busy with
her baking, heard him declare:
"Now--I'm going to leave this place!" with the look of one who will not be
coaxed nor in any manner dissuaded. He thought she took it rather coolly,
though Allan ran, as promptly as he could have wished, to tell his
grandfather.
"I'm going to be a regular mean one--_worse'n_ Budd Jackson!" he continued
to Clytie. He was glad to see that this brought her to her senses.
"Will you stay if I give you--an orange?"
"No, _sir;_--you'll never set eyes on _me_ again!"
"Oh, now!--two oranges?"
"I can't--I _got_ to go!" in a voice tense with effort.
"All right! Then I'll give them to Allan."
She continued to take brown loaves from the oven and to put other loaves
in to bake, while he stood awkwardly by, loath to part from her. Allan
came back breathless.
"Grandpa says you can go as far as you like and you needn't come back till
you get ready!"
He shifted from one foot to the other and absently ate a warm cookie from
the jarful at his hand. He thought this seemed not quite the correct
attitude to take toward him, yet he did not waver. They would be sorry
enough in a few days, when it was too late.
"I guess I better take a few of these along with me," he said, stowing
cookies in the pockets of his jacket. He would have liked one of the big
preserved peaches all punctuated with cloves, but he saw no way to carry
it, and felt really unable to eat it on the spot.
"Well, good-bye!" he called to Clytie, turning back to her from the door.
"Good-bye! Won't you shake hands with me?"
Very solemnly he shook her big, floury hand.
"Now--could I take Penny along?" (Penny was an inconsequential dog that
had been given to Clytie by one whom she called Cousin Bill J.)
"Yes, you'll need a dog to keep the animals off. Now be sure you write to
us--at least twice a year--don't forget!" And, brutally before his very
eyes, she handed the sniffing and virtuous Allan two of the largest, most
goldenly beautiful oranges ever beheld by man.
Bitterly the self-exiled turned from this harrowing scene and strode
toward his box.
Here ensued a fresh complication. Nancy, who had chosen the good name of
Lillian May, wanted to go with him. She, too, it appeared, was fresh from
a Sunday-school book--one in which a girl of her own age was so proud of
her long raven curls that she was brought to an illness and all her hair
came out. There was a distressing picture of this little girl after a just
Providence had done its work as a depilatory. And after she recovered from
the fever, it seemed, she had cared to do nothing but read the Scriptures
to bed-ridden old ladies--even after a good deal of her hair came in
again--though it didn't curl this time. The only pleasure she ever
experienced thereafter was that, by virtue of her now singularly angelic
character, she was enabled to convert an elderly female Papist--an
achievement the joys of which were problematic, both to Nancy and the
little boy. Certainly, whatever converting a Papist might be, it was
nothing comparable to driving a red-and-green-and-gold wagon in which was
caged the Scourge of the Jungle.
But Nancy could not go with him. He told her so plainly. It was no place
for a girl beyond that hill where they commonly drove caged beasts, and no
one ever so much as thought of Coming to the Feet or washing in the blood
of the Lamb, or writing a good business hand with the first finger of it
pointing out, or anything.
The little girl pleaded, promising to take her new pink silk parasol, her
buff buttoned shoes, a Christmas card with real snow on it, shining like
diamonds, and Fragile, her best doll. The thing was impossible. Then she
wept.
He whistled to Penny, who came barking joyously--a pretender of a dog, if
there ever was one--and they moved off. Weeping after them went Nancy--as
far as the first fence, between two boards of which she put her head and
sobbed with a heavenly bitterness; for to the little boy, pushing sternly
on, her tears afforded that certain thrill of gratified brutality under
conscious rectitude, the capacity for which is among those matters by
which Heaven has set the male of our species apart from the female. The
sensation would have been flawless but for Allan's lack of dignity: from
the top board of the fence he held aloft in either hand a golden orange,
and he chanted in endless inanity:
Chink, Chink Chiraddam!
Don't you wisht you had 'em?
Chink, Chink Chiraddam!
Don't you wisht you had 'em?
Still he was actually and triumphantly off.
And here should be recalled the saying of a certain wise, simple man: "If
our failures are made tragic by courage they are not different from
successes." For it came about that the subsequent dignity of this revolt
was to be wholly in its courage.
The way led over a stretch of grassy prairie to a fence. This surmounted,
there came a ploughed field, of considerable extent to one carrying an
inconvenient box. At the farther end of this was another fence, and beyond
this an ancient orchard with a grassy floor, where lingered a few old
apple-trees, under which the recumbent cows, chewing and placid, dozed
like stout old ladies over their knitting.
Nearest the fence was an aged, gnarled and riven tree, foolishly decked
in blossoms, like some faded, wrinkled dame, fatuously reluctant to leave
off girlish finery. Under its frivolous branches on the grassy sward would
be the place for his first night's halt--for the magic wood just this side
of the sun was now seen to be farther off than he had once supposed. So he
spread his carpet, arranged the contents of his box neatly, and ate half
his food-supply, for one's strength must be kept up in these affairs. As
he ate he looked back toward the big house--now left forever--and toward
the village beyond. The spires of the three churches were all pointing
sternly upward, as if they would mutely direct him aright, but in their
shelter one must submit to the prosaic trammels of decency. It was not to
be thought of.
He longed for morning to come, so that he might be up and on. He lay down
on his mat to be ready for sleep, and watched a big bird far above,
cutting lazy graceful figures in the air, like a fancy skater. Then, on a
bough above him, a little dusty-looking bird tried to sing, but it sounded
only like a very small door creaking on tiny rusted hinges. A fat,
gluttonous robin that had been hopping about to peer at him, chirped far
more cheerfully as it flew away.
Just at this point he suffered a real adventure. Eight cows sauntered up
interestedly and chewed their cuds at him in unison, standing
contemplative, calculating, determined. It is a fact in natural history
not widely enough recognised that the domestic cow is the most ferocious
appearing of all known beasts--a thing to be proved by any who will
survey one amid strange surroundings, with a mind cleanly disabused of
preconceptions. A visitor from another planet, for example, knowing
nothing of our fauna, and confronted in the forest simultaneously by a
common red milch cow and the notoriously savage black leopard of the
Himalyas, would instinctively shun the cow as a dangerous beast and
confidingly seek to fondle the pretty leopard, thus terminating his
natural history researches before they were fairly begun.
It can be understood, then, that a moment ensued when the little boy
wavered under the steady questioning scrutiny of eight large and powerful
cows, all chewing at him in unison. Yet, even so, and knowing, moreover,
that strange cows are ever untrustworthy, only for a moment did he waver.
Then his new straw hat was off to be shaken at them and he heaved a fierce
"_H-a-y--y-u-p!_"
At this they started, rather indignantly, seeming to meditate his swift
destruction; but another shout turned and routed them, and he even chased
them a little way, helped now by the inconsiderable dog who came up from
pretending to hunt gophers.
After this there seemed nothing to do but eat the other half of the
provisions and retire again for the night. Long after the sun went down
behind the magic wood he lay uneasily on his lumpy bed, trying again and
again to shut his eyes and open them to find it morning--which was the way
it always happened in the west bedroom of the big house he had left
forever.
But it was different here. And presently, when it seemed nearly dark
except for the stars, a disgraceful thing happened. He had pictured the
dog as faithful always to him, refusing in the end even to be taken from
over his dead body. But the treacherous Penny grew first restive, then
plainly desirous of returning to his home. At last, after many efforts to
corrupt the adventurer, he started off briskly alone--cornerwise, as
little dogs seem always to run--fleeing shamelessly toward that east
where shone the tame lights of Virtue.
Left alone, the little boy began strangely to remember certain phrases
from a tract that Clytie had tried to teach him--"the moment that will
close thy life on earth and begin thy song in heaven or thy wail in
hell"--"impossible to go from the haunts of sin and vice to the presence
of the Lamb"--"the torments of an eternal hell are awaiting thee"--
"To-night may be thy latest breath,
Thy little moment here be done.
Eternal woe, the second death,
Awaits the Christ-rejecting one."
This was more than he had ever before been able to recall of such matters.
He wished that he might have forgotten them wholly. Yet so was he turned
again to better things. Gradually he began to have an inkling of a
possibility that made his blood icy--a possibility that not even the
spectacle of Milo Barrus having interesting things done to him could
mitigate--namely, a vision of himself in the same plight with that person.
Now it was that he began to hear Them all about him. They walked
stealthily near, passed him with sinister rustlings, and whispered over
him. If They had only talked out--but they whispered--even laughing,
crying and singing in whispers. This horror, of course, was not long to
be endured. Yet, even so, with increasing myriads of Them all about,
rustling and whispering their awful laughs and cries--it was no
ignominious rout. With considerable deliberation he folded the carpet,
placed it in the box with his other treasure, and started at a pace which
may, perhaps, have quickened a little, yet was never undignified--never
more than a moderately fast trudge.
He wondered sadly if Clytie would get up to unlock the door for him so
late at night. As for Penny, things could never be the same between them
again.
He was astounded to see lights burning and the house open--how weird for
them to have supper at such an hour! He concealed his box in the
grape-arbour and slunk through the kitchen into the dining-room. Probably
they had gotten up in the middle of the night, out of tardy alarm for him.
It served them right. Yet they seemed hardly to notice him when he slid
awkwardly into his chair. He looked calculatingly over the table and
asked, in tones that somehow seemed to tell of injury, of personal
affront:
"What you having supper for at this time of night?"
His grandfather regarded him now not unkindly, while Clytie seemed
confused.
"It's more'n long past midnight!" he insisted.
"Huh! it ain't only a quarter past seven," put in his superior brother.
He seemed about to say more, but a glance from the grandfather silenced
him.
So _that_ was as late as he had stayed--a quarter after seven? He was
ready now to rage at any taunt, and began to eat in haughty silence. He
was still eating when his grandfather and Allan left the table, and then
he began to feel a little grateful that they had not noticed or asked
annoying questions, or tried to be funny or anything. Over a final dish of
plum preserves and an imposing segment of marble cake he relented so far
as to tell Clytie something of his adventures--especially since she had
said that the big hall-clock was very likely slow--that it must surely be
a lot later than a quarter past seven. The circumstances had combined to
produce a narrative not entirely perspicuous--the two clear points being
that They do everything in a whisper, and that Clytie ought to get rid of
Penny at once, since he could not be depended upon at great moments.
As to ever sleeping under a tree, Clytie discouraged him. She knew of
some Boys that once sat under a tree which was struck by lightning, all
being Killed save one, who had the rare good luck to be the son of a
Presbyterian clergyman. The little boy resolved next time to go beyond
the trees to sleep; perhaps if he went far enough he would come to the
other one of the Feet, and so have a safeguard against lightning, foreign
cows, and Those that walk with rustlings and whisper in the lonely places
at night.
The little boy fell asleep, half-persuaded again to virtue, because of its
superior comforts. The air about his head seemed full of ghostly "good
business hands," each with its accusing forefinger pointed at him for that
he had not learned to write one as Ralph Overton did.
Down the hall in his study the old man was musing backward to the
delicate, quiet girl with the old-fashioned aureole of curls, who would
now and then toss them with a little gesture eloquent of possibilities
for unrestraint when she felt the close-drawn rein of his authority. Again
he felt her rebellious little tugs, and the wrench of her final defiance
when she did the awful thing. He had been told by a plain speaker that her
revolt was the fault of his severity. And here was the flesh of her
flesh--was it in the same spirit of revolt against authority, a
thousandfold magnified? Might he not by according the boy a wise liberty
save him in after years from some mad folly akin to his mother's?
CHAPTER VI
THE GARDEN OF TRUTH AND THE PERFECT FATHER
It was a different summer from those that had gone before it.
A little passionate Protestant had sallied out to make bed with the gods;
and the souls of such the just gods do truly take into certain shining
realms whither poor involatile bodies of flesh may not follow. The
requirement is that one feel his own potential godship enough to rebel.
For, having rebelled, he will assuredly venture beyond mortal domains into
that garden where stands the tree of Truth--this garden being that one to
the west just beyond the second fence (or whichever fence); that point
where the mortal of invertebrate soul is beset with the feeling that he
has already dared too far--that he had better make for home mighty quick
if he doesn't want Something to get him. The essence of this decision is
quite the same whether the mortal be eight years old or eighty. Now the
Tree of Truth stands just over this line at which all but the gods' own
turn to scamper back before supper. It is the first tree to the left--an
apple-tree, twisted, blackened, scathed, eaten with age, yet full of
blossoms as fresh and fertile as those first born of any young tree
whatsoever. Those able rightly to read this tree of Truth become at once
as the gods, keeping the faith of children while absorbing the wisdom of
the ages--lacking either of which, be it known, one may not become an
imperishable ornament of Time.
But to him who is bravely faithful to the passing of that last fence, who
reclines under that tree even for so long as one aspiration, comes a
substantial gain: ever after, when he goes into any solitude, he becomes
more than himself. Then he reads the first lesson of the tree of Truth,
which is that the spirit of Life ages yet is ageless; and suffers yet is
joyous. This is no inconsiderable reward for passing that frontier, even
if one must live longer to comprehend reasons. It is worth while even if
the mortal become a mere dilettante in paradoxes and never learn even
feebly to spell the third lesson, which is the ultimate wisdom of the
gods.
These matters being precisely so, the little boy knew quite as well as the
gods could know it, that a credit had been set down to his soul for what
he had ventured--even though what he had not done was, so far, more
stupendous than what he had, in the world of things and mere people. He
now became enamoured of life rather than death; and he studied the Shorter
Catechism with such effect that he could say it clear over to "_Every sin
deserveth God's wrath and curse both in this life and that which is to
come._" Each night he tried earnestly to learn two new answers; and glad
was he when his grandfather would sit by him, for the old man had now
become his image of God, and it seemed fitting to recite to him. Often as
they sat together the little boy would absently slip his hand into the
big, warm, bony hand of the old man, turning and twisting it there until
he felt an answering pressure. This embarrassed the old man. Though he
would really have liked to take the little boy up to his breast and hold
him there, he knew not how; and he would even be careful not to restrain
the little hand in his own--to hold it, yet to leave it free to withdraw
at its first uneasy wriggle.
Of this shackled spirit of kindness, always striving within the old man,
the little boy had come to be entirely conscious. So real was it to him,
so dependable, that he never suspected that a certain little blow with the
open hand one day was meant to punish him for conduct he had persisted in
after three emphatic admonitions.
"Oh! that _hurts_!" he had cried, looking up at the confused old man with
unimpaired faith in his having meant not more than a piece of friendly
roughness. This look of flawless confidence in the uprightness of his
purpose, the fine determination to save him chagrin by smiling even though
the hurt place tingled, left in the old man's mind a biting conviction
that he had been actually on the point of behaving as one gentleman may
not behave to another. Quick was he to make the encounter accord with the
child's happy view, even picking him up and forcing from himself the
gaiety to rally him upon his babyish tenderness to rough play. Not less
did he hold it true that "The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child
left to himself bringeth his mother to shame--" and with the older boy
he was not unconscientious in this matter. For Allan took punishment as
any boy would, and, indeed, was so careful that he seldom deserved it. But
the old man never ceased to be grateful that the littler boy had laughed
under that one blow, unable to suspect that it could have been meant in
earnest.
From the first day that the little boy felt the tender cool grass under
his bare toes that summer, life became like perfectly played music. This
was after the long vacation began, when there was no longer any need to
remember to let his voice fall after a period, or to dread his lessons so
that he must learn them more quickly than any other pupil in school. There
would be no more of that wretched fooling until fall, a point of time
inconceivably far away. Before it arrived any one of a number of strange
things might happen to avert the calamity of education. For instance, he
might be born again, a thing of which he had lately heard talk; a
contingency by no means flawless in prospect, since it probably meant
having the mumps again, and things like that. But if it came on the very
last day of vacation, or on the first morning of school, just as he was
called on to recite, snatching him from the very jaws of the Moloch, and
if it fixed him so he need not be afraid in the night of going where Milo
Barrus was going, then it might not be so bad.
Nancy, who had now discarded the good name of Lillian May for simple
Alice, disapproved heartily of being born again; unless, indeed, one could
be born a boy the second time. She was only too eager for the day when
she need not submit to having her hair brushed and combed so long every
morning of her life. Not for the world would she go through it again and
have to begin French all over, even at "_J'ai, tu as, il a_." Yet, if it
were certain she could be a boy--
He was too considerate to tell her that this was as good as
impossible--that she quite lacked the qualities necessary for that.
Instead, he reassured her with the chivalrous fiction that he, at least,
would like her as well as if she _were_ a boy. And, indeed, as a girl, she
was not wholly unsatisfactory. True, she played "school" (of all things!)
in preference to "wild animals," practised scales on the piano an hour
every day, wore a sun-hat frequently--spite of which she was
freckled--wore shoes and stockings on the hottest days, when one's feet
are so hungry for the cool, springy turf, and performed other acts
repugnant to a soul that has brought itself erect. But she was fresh and
dainty to look at, like an opened morning glory, with pretty frocks that
the French lady whose name was Madmasel made her wear every day, and her
eyes were much like certain flowers in the bed under the bay-window, with
very long, black lashes that got all stuck together when she cried; and
she made superb capital letters, far better than the little boy's, though
she was a year younger.
Also, which was perhaps her chief charm, she could be made to believe that
only he could protect her from the Gratcher, a monstrous thing, half
beast, half human, which was often seen back of the house; sometimes
flitting through the grape-arbour, sometimes coming out of the dark
cellar, sometimes peering around corners. It was a thing that went on
enormous crutches, yet could always catch you if it saw you by daylight
out of its right eye, its left being serviceable only at night, when, if
you were wise, you kept in the house. Once the Gratcher saw you with its
right eye the crutches swung toward you and you were caught: it picked you
up and began to look you all over, with the eyes in the ends of its
fingers. This tickled you so that you went crazy in a minute.
Nancy feared the Gratcher, and she became supremely lovely to the little
boy when she permitted him to guard her from it, instead of running home
across the lawn when it was surely coming;--a loveliness he felt more
poignantly at certain reflective times when he was not also afraid. For,
the Gratcher being his own invention, these moments of superiority to its
terrors would inevitably seize him.
[Illustration: "She could be made to believe that only he could protect
her from the Gratcher."]
Better than protecting Nancy did he love to report the Gratcher's
immediate presence to Allan, daring him to stay on that spot until it put
its dreadful head around the corner and shook one of its crutches at them.
In low throbbing tones he would report its fearful approach, stride by
stride, on the crutches. This he could do by means of the Gratcher-eye,
with which he claimed to be endowed. One having a Gratcher-eye can see
around any corner when a Gratcher happens to be coming--yet only then, not
at any other time, as Allan had proved by experiment on the first
disclosure of this phenomenon. He of the Gratcher-eye could positively not
see around a corner, if, for example, Allan himself was there; the
Gratcher-eye could not tell if his hat was on his head or off. But this by
no means proved that the Gratcher-eye did not exercise its magic function
when a Gratcher actually approached, and Allan knew it. He would stand
staunchly, with a fine incredulity, while the little boy called off the
strides, perhaps, until he announced "_Now_ he's just passed the
well-curb--_now_ he's--" but here, scoffing over an anxious shoulder,
Allan would go in where Clytie was baking, feigning a sudden great hunger.
Nancy would stay, because she believed the little boy's protestations that
he could save her, and the little boy himself often believed them.
"I love Allan best, because he is so comfortable, but I think you are the
most admirable," she would say to him at such times; and he thought well
of her if she had seemed very, very frightened.
So life had become a hardy sport with him. No longer was he moved to wish
for early dissolution when Clytie's song floated to him:
"'I should like to die,' said Willie,
If my papa could die, too;
But he says he isn't ready,
'Cause he has so much to do!"
This Willie had once seemed sweet and noble to him, but the words now made
him avid of new life by reminding him that his own dear father would soon
come to be with him one week, as he had promised when last they parted,
and as a letter written with magnificent flourishes now announced.
Late in August this perfect father came--a fine laughing, rollicking, big
gentleman, with a great, loud voice, and beautiful long curls that touched
his velvet coat-collar. His sweeping golden moustache, wide-brimmed white
hat, the choice rings on his fingers, his magnificently ponderous gold
watch-chain and a watch of the finest silver, all proclaimed him a being
of such flawless elegance both in person and attire that the little boy
never grew tired of showing him to the village people and to Clytie. He
did not stay at the big house, for some reason, but at the Eagle Hotel,
whence he came to see his boys each day, or met them hurrying to see him.
And for a further reason which the little boys did not understand, their
grandfather continued to be too busy to see this perfect father once
during the week he stayed in the village.
Deeming it a pity that two such choice spirits should not be brought
together, the little boy urged his father to bring his fiddle to the big
house and play and sing some of his fine songs, so that his grandfather
could have a chance to hear some good music. He knew well enough that if
the old man once heard this music he would have to give in and enjoy it,
even if he was too busy to come down. And if only his father would tune up
the fiddle and sing that very, very good song about,
"The more she said 'Whoa!'
They cried, 'Let her go!'
And the swing went a little bit higher,"
if only his grandfather could hear this, one of the funniest and noisiest
songs in the world, perhaps he would come right down stairs. But his
father laughed away the suggestion, saying that the old gentleman had no
ear for music; which, of course, was a joke, for he had two, like any
person.
Clytemnestra, too, was at first strangely cool to the incomparable father,
though at last she proved not wholly insensible to his charm, providing
for his refection her very choicest cake and the last tumbler of
crab-apple jelly. She began to suspect that a man of manners so engaging
must have good in him, and she gave him at parting the tracts of "The
Dying Drummer Boy" and "Sinner, what if You Die To-day?" for which he
professed warm gratitude.
The little boy afterward saw his perfect father hand these very tracts to
Milo Barrus, when they met him on the street, saying, "Here, Barrus, get
your soul saved while you wait!" Then they laughed together.
The little boy wondered if this meant that Milo Barrus had come to the
Feet, or been born again, or something. Or if it meant that his father
also spelled God with a little g. He did not think of it, however, until
it was too late to ask.
The flawless father went away at the end of the week, "over the County
Fair circuit, selling Chief White Cloud's Great Indian Remedy," the little
boy heard him tell Clytie. Also he heard his grandfather say to Clytie,
"Thank God, not for another year!"
The little boy liked Nancy better than ever after that, because she had
liked his father so much, saying he was exactly like a prince, giving
pennies and nickels to everybody and being so handsome and big and grand.
She wished her own Uncle Doctor could be as beautiful and great; and the
little boy was generous enough to wish that his own plain grandfather
might be _almost_ as fine.
CHAPTER VII
THE SUPERLATIVE COUSIN BILL J.
A splendid new interest had now come into the household in the person of
one whom Clytemnestra had so often named as Cousin Bill J. Grandfather
Delcher having been ordered south for the winter by Dr. Crealock, Cousin
Bill J., upon Clytie's recommendation, was imported from up Fredonia way
to look after the cow and be a man about the place. Clytie assured
Grandfather Delcher that Cousin Bill J. had "never uttered an oath, though
he's been around horses all his life!" This made him at once an object of
interest to the little boy, though doubtless he failed to appraise the
restraint at anything like its true value. It had sufficed Grandfather
Delcher, however, and Cousin Bill J., securing leave of absence from the
livery-stable in Fredonia, arrived the day the old man left, making a
double excitement for the household.
He proved to be a fascinating person; handsome, affable, a ready talker
upon all matters of interest--though sarcastic, withal--and fond of boys.
True, he had not long hair like the little boy's father. Indeed, he had
not much hair at all, except a sort of curtain of black curls extending
from ear to ear at the back of his bare, pink head. But the little boy had
to admit that Cousin Bill J.'s moustache was even grander than his
father's. It fell in two graceful festoons far below his chin, with a
little eyelet curled into each tip, and, like the ringlets, it showed the
blue-black lustre of the crow's wing. In the full sunlight, at times, it
became almost a royal purple.
Later observation taught the little boy that this splendid hue was applied
at intervals by Cousin Bill J. himself. He did it daintily with a small
brush, every time the moustache began to show a bit rusty at the roots;
Bernal never failed to be present at this ceremony; nor to resolve that
his own moustache, when it came, should be as scrupulously cared for--not
left, like Dr. Crealock's, for example, to become speckled and gray.
Cousin Bill J.'s garments were as splendid as his character. He had an
overcoat and cap made from a buffalo hide; his high-heeled boots had
maroon tops set with purple crescents; his watch-charm was a large gold
horse in full gallop; his cravat was an extensive area of scarlet satin in
the midst of which was caught a precious stone as large as a robin's egg;
and in smoking, which his physician had prescribed, he used a superb
meerschaum cigar-holder, all tinted a golden brown, upon which lightly
perched a carven angel dressed like those that ride the big white horse in
the circus.
But aside from these mere matters of form, Cousin Bill J. was a man with a
history. Some years before he had sprained his back, since which time he
had been unable to perform hard labour; but prior to that mishap he had
been a perfect specimen of physical manhood--one whose prowess had been
the marvel of an extensive territory. He had split and laid up his three
hundred and fifty rails many a day, when strong men beside him had
blushingly to stop with three hundred or thereabouts; he had also cradled
his four acres of grain in a day, and he could break the wildest horse
ever known. Even the great Budd Doble, whom he personally knew, had said
more than once, and in the presence of unimpeachable witnesses, that in
some ways he, Budd Doble, knew less about a horse than Cousin Bill J. did.
The little boy was wrought to enthusiasm by this tribute, resolving always
to remember to say "hoss" for horse; and, though he had not heard of Budd
Doble before, the name was magnetic for him. After you said it over
several times he thought it made you feel as if you had a cold in your
head.
Still further, Cousin Bill J. could throw his thumbs out of joint, sing
tenor in the choir, charm away warts, recite "Roger and I" and "The Death
of Little Nell," and he knew all the things that would make boys grow
fast, like bringing in wood, splitting kindling, putting down hay for the
cow, and other out-of-door exercises that had made him the demon of
strength he once was. The little boy was not only glad to perform these
acts for his own sake, but for the sake of lightening the labours of his
hero, who wrenched his back anew nearly every time he tried to do
anything, and was always having to take a medicine for it which he called
"peach-and-honey." The little boy thought the name attractive, though his
heart bled for the sufferer each time he was obliged to take it; for after
every swallow of the stuff he made a face that told eloquently how
nauseous it must be.
As for the satire and wit of Cousin Bill J., they were of the dry sort. He
would say to one he met on the street when the mud was deep, "Fine weather
overhead"--then adding dryly, after a significant pause--"_but few going
that way!"_ Or he would exclaim with feigned admiration, when the little
boy shot at a bird with his bow and arrow, "My! you made the feathers fly
_that_ time!"--then, after his terrible pause--_"only, the bird flew with
them_." Also he could call it "Fourth of Ju-New-Years" without ever
cracking a smile, though it cramped the little boy in helpless laughter.
Altogether, Cousin Bill J. was a winning and lovely character of merits
both spiritual and spectacular, and he brought to the big house an exotic
atmosphere that was spicy with delights. The little boy prayed that this
hero might be made again the man he once was; not because of any flaw that
he could see in him--but only because the sufferer appeared somewhat less
than perfect to himself. To Bernal's mind, indeed, nothing could have been
superior to the noble melancholy with which Cousin Bill J. looked back
upon his splendid past. There was a perfect dignity in it. Surely no mere
electric belt could bring to him an attraction surpassing this--though
Cousin Bill J. insisted that he never expected any real improvement until
he could save up enough money to buy one. He showed the little boy a
picture cut from a newspaper--the picture of a strong, proud-looking man
with plenteous black whiskers, girded about with a wide belt that was
projecting a great volume of electricity into the air in every direction.
It was interesting enough, but the little boy thought this person by no
means so beautiful as Cousin Bill J., and said so. He believed, too,
though this he did not say, from tactful motives, that it would detract
from the dignity of Cousin Bill J. to go about clad only in an electric
belt, like the proud-looking gentleman in the picture--even if the belt
did send out a lot of electric wiggles all the time. But, of course,
Cousin Bill J. knew best. He looked forward to having his father meet this
new hero--feeling that each was perfect in his own way.
CHAPTER VIII
SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES
Around the evening lamp that winter the little boys studied Holy Writ,
while Allan made summaries of it for the edification of the proud
grandfather in far-off Florida.
Tersely was the creation and the fall of man set forth, under promptings
and suggestions from Clytie and Cousin Bill J., who was no mean Bible
authority: how God, "walking in the garden in the cool of the day," found
his first pair ashamed of their nakedness, and with his own hands made
them coats of skins and clothed them. "What a treasure those garments
would be in this evil day," said Clytie--"what a silencing rebuke to all
heretics!" But the Lord drove out the wicked pair, lest they "take also of
the tree of life and live forever," saying, "Behold, the man is become as
one of _us!_" This provoked a lengthy discussion the very first evening as
to whether it meant that there was more than one God. And Clytie's
view--that God called himself "Us" in the same sense that kings and
editors of newspapers do--at length prevailed over the polytheistic
hypothesis of Cousin Bill J.
On they read to the Deluge, when man became so very bad indeed that God
was sorry for ever having made him, and said: "I will destroy man whom I
have created from the face of the earth; both man and the beast and the
creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have
made them."
Hereupon Bernal suggested that all the white rabbits at least should have
been saved--thinking of his own two in the warm nest in the barn. He was
unable to see how white rabbits with twitching pink noses and pink rims
around their eyes could be an offense, or, indeed, other than a pure joy
even to one so good as God. But he gave in, with new admiration for the
ready mind of Cousin Bill J., who pointed out that white rabbits could not
have been saved because they were not fish. He even relished the dry quip
that maybe he, the little boy, thought white rabbits _were_ fish; but
Cousin Bill J. didn't, for his part.
Past the Tower of Babel they went, when the Lord "came down to see the
city and the tower," and made them suddenly talk strange tongues to one
another so they could not build their tower actually into Heaven.
The little boy thought this a fine joke to play on them, to set them all
"jabbering" so.
After that there was a great deal of fighting, and, in the language of
Allan's summary, "God loved all the good people so he gave them lots of
wives and cattle and sheep and he let them go out and kill all the other
people they wanted to which was their enemies." But the little boy found
the butcheries rather monotonous.
Occasionally there was something graphic enough to excite, as where the
heads of Ahab's seventy children were put into a basket and exposed in two
heaps at the city's gate; but for the most part it made him sleepy.
True, when it came to getting the Children of Israel out of Egypt, as
Cousin Bill J. observed, "Things brisked up considerable."
The plan of first hardening Pharaoh's heart, then scaring him by a
pestilence, then again hardening his heart for another calamity, quite
won the little boy's admiration for its ingenuity, and even Cousin Bill J.
would at times betray that he was impressed. Feverishly they followed the
miracles done to Egypt; the plague of frogs, of lice, of flies, of boils
and blains on man and beast; the plague of hail and lightning, of locusts,
and the three days of darkness. Then came the Lord's final triumph, which
was to kill all the first-born in the land of Egypt, "from the first-born
of Pharaoh, that sitteth upon the throne, even unto the first-born of the
maid-servant that is behind the mill; and all the first-born of beasts."
Again the little boy's heart ached as he thought pityingly of the
first-born of all white rabbits, but there was too much of excitement to
dwell long upon that humble tragedy. There was the manner in which the
Israelites identified themselves, by marking their doors with a sprig of
hyssop dipped in the blood of a male lamb without blemish. Vividly did he
see the good God gliding cautiously from door to door, looking for the
mark of blood, and passing the lucky doors where it was seen to be truly
of a male lamb without blemish. He thought it must have taken a lot of
lambs to mark up all the doors!
Then came that master-stroke of enterprise, when God directed Moses to
"speak now in the ears of the people and let every man borrow of his
neighbour, and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver and jewels
of gold," so that they might "spoil" the Egyptians. Cousin Bill J.
chuckled when he read this, declaring it to be "a regular Jew trick"; but
Clytie rebuked him quickly, reminding him that they were God's own words,
spoken in His own holy voice.
"Well, it was mighty thoughtful in God," insisted Cousin Bill J., but
Clytie said, however that was, it served Pharaoh right for getting his
heart hardened so often.
The little boy, not perceiving the exact significance of "spoil" in this
connection, wondered if Cousin Bill J. would spoil if some one borrowed
his gold horse and ran off with it.
Then came that exciting day when the Lord said, "I will get me honour upon
Pharaoh and all his host," which He did by drowning them thoroughly in the
Red Sea. The little boy thought he would have liked to be there in a
boat--a good safe boat that would not tip over; also that he would much
like to have a rod such as Aaron had, that would turn into a serpent. It
would be a fine thing to take to school some morning. But Cousin Bill J.
thought it doubtful if one could be procured; though he had seen Heller
pour five colours of wine out of a bottle which, when broken, proved to
have a live guinea-pig in it. This seemed to the little boy more wonderful
than Aaron's rod, though he felt it would not reflect honour upon God to
say so.
Another evening they spent before Sinai, Cousin Bill J. reading the verses
in a severe and loud tone when the voice of the Lord was sounding. Duly
impressed was the little boy with the terrors of the divine presence, a
thing so awful that the people must not go up into the mount nor even
touch its border--lest "the Lord break forth upon them: There shall not a
hand touch it but he shall surely be stoned or shot through; whether it be
beast or man it shall not live." Clytie said the goodness of God was
shown herein. An evil God would not have warned them, and many worthy but
ignorant people would have been blasted.
Then He came down in thunder and smoke and lightning and
earthquakes--which Cousin Bill J. read in tones that enabled Bernal to
feel every possible joy of terror; came to tell them that He was a very
jealous God and that they must not worship any of the other gods. He
commanded that "thou shalt not revile the Gods," also that they should
"make no mention of the names of other Gods," which Cousin Bill J. said
was as fair as you could ask.
When they reached the directions for sacrificing, the little boy was
doubly alert--in the event that he should ever determine to be washed in
the blood of the lamb and have to do his own killing.
"Then," read Cousin Bill J., in a voice meant to convey the augustness of
Deity, "thou shalt kill the ram and take of his blood and put it upon the
tip of the right ear of Aaron and upon the tip of the right ear of his
sons, and upon the thumb of their right hand, and upon the great toe of
their right foot." So you didn't have to wash all over in the blood. He
agreed with Clytie, who remarked that no one could ever have found out how
to do it right unless God had told. The God-given directions that ensued
for making the water of separation from "the ashes of a red heifer" he did
not find edifying; but some verses after that seemed more practicable.
"And thou shalt take of the ram," continued the reader in majestic
cadence, "the fat and the rump and the fat that covereth the inwards, and
the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys and the fat that is upon
them--"
Here was detail with a satisfying minuteness; and all this was for
"a wave-offering" to be waved before the Lord--which was indeed an
interesting thought.
"If God was so careful of His children in these small matters," said
Clytie; "no wonder they believed He would care for them in graver matters,
and no wonder they looked forward so eagerly to the coming of His Son,
whom He promised should be sent to save them from His wrath."
Through God's succeeding minute directions for the building and upholstery
of His tabernacle, "with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and
purple and scarlet, with cherubims of cunning work shalt thou make them,"
the interest of the little boys rather languished; likewise through His
regulations about such dry matters as slavery, divorce, and polygamy. His
directions for killing witches and for stoning the ox that gores a man or
woman had more of colour in them. But there was no real interest until the
good God promised His children to bring them in unto the Amorites and the
Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the
Jebusites, to "cut them off." It was not uninteresting to know that God
put Moses in a cleft of the rock and covered it with His hand when He
passed by, thus permitting Moses a partial view of the divine person. But
the actual fighting of battles was thereafter the chief source of
interest. For God was a mighty God of battles, never weary of the glories
of slaughter. When it was plain that He could make a handful of two
thousand Israelites slay two hundred thousand Midianites, in a moment, as
one might say, the wisdom of coming to the Feet, being born again, and
washing in the blood ceased to be debatable. It would seem very silly,
indeed, to neglect any precaution that would insure the favour of this
God, who slew cities full of men and women and little children off-hand.
The little boy thought Milo Barrus would begin to spell a certain word
with the very biggest "G" he could make, if any one were to bring these
matters to his notice.
As to Allan, who made abstracts of the winter's study, Clytemnestra and
her transcendent relative agreed that he would one day be a power in the
land. Off to Florida each week they sent his writing to Grandfather
Delcher, who was proud of it, in spite of his heart going out chiefly to
the littler boy.
"So this is all I know now about God," ran the conclusion, "except that He
loved us so that He gave His only Son to be crucified so that He could
forgive our sins as soon as He saw His Son nailed up on the cross, and
those that believed it could be with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and
those that didn't believe it, like the Jews and heathens, would have to be
in hell for ever and ever Amen. This proves His great love for us and that
He is the true God. So this is all I have learned this winter about God,
who is a spirit infinite eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom and
power holiness justice goodness and truth, and the word of God is
contained in the scriptures of the old and new testament which is the only
rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him. In my next I will take
up the meek and lowly Jesus and show you how much I have learned about
him."
They had been unable to persuade the littler boy into this species of
composition, his mind dwelling too much on the first-born of white rabbits
and such, but to show that his winter was not wholly lost, he submitted a
secular composition, which ran:
"BIRDS
"The Animl kindom is devided into birds and reguler animls. Our teacher
says we had ougt to obsurv so I obsurv there is three kinds of birds
Jingle birds Squeek birds and Clatter birds. Jingle birds has fat rusty
stumacks. I have not the trouble to obsurv any more kinds."
CHAPTER IX
ON SURVIVING THE IDOLS WE BUILD
It is the way of life to be forever building new idols in place of the
old. Into the fabric of these the most of us put so much of ourselves that
a little of us dies each time a cherished image crumbles from age or is
shattered by some lightning-stroke of truth from a cloud electric with
doubt. This is why we fade and wither as the leaf. Could we but sweep
aside the wreck without dismay and raise a new idol from the overflowing
certainty of youth, then indeed should we have eaten from that other tree
in Eden, for the defence of which is set the angel with the flaming sword.
But this may not be. Fatuously we stake our souls on each new
creation--deeming that _here_, in sooth, is one that shall endure beyond
the end of time. To the last we are dull to the truth that our idols are
meant to be broken, to give way to other idols still to be broken.
And so we lose a little of ourselves each time an idol falls; and,
learning thus to doubt, wistfully, stoically we learn to die, leaving some
last idol triumphantly surviving us. For--and this is the third lesson
from that tree of Truth--we learn to doubt, not the perfection of our
idols, but the divinity of their creator. And it would seem that this is
quite as it should be. So long as the idol-maker will be a slave to his
creatures, so long should the idol survive and the maker go back to useful
dust. Whereas, did he doubt his idols and never himself--but this is
mostly a secret, for not many common idolmongers will cross that last
fence to the west, beyond the second field, where the cattle are strange
and the hour so late that one must turn back for bed and supper.
To one who accepts the simple truth thus put down precisely, it will be
apparent that the little boy was destined to see more than one idol
blasted before his eyes; yet, also, that he was not come to the foolish
caution of the wise, whom failure leads to doubt their own powers--as if
we were not meant to fail in our idols forever! Being, then, not come to
this spiritual decrepitude, fitted still to exercise a blessed contempt
for the Wisdom of the Ages, it is plain that he could as yet see an idol
go to bits without dismay, conscious only of the need for a new and a
better one.
Not all one's idols are shattered in a day. This were a catastrophe that
might wrench even youth's divine credulity.
Not until another year had gone, with its heavy-gaited school-months and
its galloping vacation-days, did the little boy come to understand that
Santa Claus was not a real presence. And instead of wailing over the ruins
of this idol, he brought a sturdy faith to bear, building in its place
something unseen and unheard of any save himself--an idol discernible only
by him, but none the less real for that.
The Imp with the hammer being no respecter of dignities, the idol of the
Front Room fell next, increasing the heap of ruins that was gathering
about his feet. Tragically came a day one spring, a cold, cloudy,
rational day, it seemed, when the Front Room went down; for the little
boy saw all its sanctities violated, its mysteries laid bare. And the
Front Room became a mere front room. Its shutters were opened and its
windows raised to let in light and common fresh air; its carpet was on the
line outside to be scourged of dust; the black, formidable furniture was
out on the wide porch to be re-varnished, like any common furniture,
plainly needing it; the vases of dyed grass might be handled without risk;
and the dark spirit that had seemed to be in and over all was vanished.
Even the majestic Ark of the Covenant, which the sinful Uzza once died for
so much as touching reverently, was now seen to be an ordinary stove for
the burning of anthracite coal, to be rattled profanely and polished for
an extra quarter by Sherman Tranquillity Tyler after he had finished
whitewashing the cellar. Fearlessly the little boy, grown somewhat bigger
now, walked among the débris of this idol, stamping the floor, sounding
the walls, detecting cracks in the ceiling, spots on the wall-paper and
cobwebs in the corners. Yet serene amid the ruins towered his valiant
spirit, conscious under the catastrophe of its power to build other and
yet stauncher idols.
Thus was it one day to stretch itself with new power amid the base ruins
of Cousin Bill J., though the time was mercifully deferred--that his soul
might gain strength in worship to put away even that which it worshipped
when the day of new truth dawned.
When Cousin Bill J., in the waning of that first winter, began actually
to refine his own superlative elegance by spraying his superior garments
with perfume, by munching tiny confections reputed to scent the breath
desirably, by a more diligent grooming of the always superb moustache, the
little boy suspected no motive. He saw these works only as the outward
signs of an inward grace that must be ever increasing. So it came that his
amazement was above that of all other persons when, at Spring's first
breath of honeyed fragrance, Cousin Bill J. went to be the husband of
Miss Alvira Abney. He had not failed to observe that Miss Alvira sang
alto, in the choir, out of the same book from which Cousin Bill J.
produced his exquisite tenor. But he had reasoned nothing from this,
beyond, perhaps, the thought that Miss Alvira made a poor figure beside
her magnificent companion, even if her bonnet was always the gayest bonnet
in church, trembling through every season with the blossoms of some
ageless springtime. For the rest, Miss Alvira's face and hair and eyes
seemed to be all one colour, very pale, and her hands were long and thin,
with far too many bones in them for human hands, the little boy thought.
Yet when he learned that the woman was not without merit in the sight of
his clear-eyed hero, he, too, gave her his favour. At the marriage he felt
in his heart a certain high, pure joy that must have been akin to that in
the bride's own heart, for their faces seemed to speak much alike.
Tensely the little boy listened to the words that united these two,
understanding perfectly from questions that his hero endowed the woman at
his side with all his worldly goods. Even a less practicable person than
Miss Alvira would have acquired distinction in this light--being endowed
with the gold horse, to say nothing of the carven cigar-holder or the
precious jewel in the scarlet cravat. Probably now she would be able to
throw her thumbs out of joint, too!
But to the little boy chiefly the thing meant that Cousin Bill J. would
stay close at hand, to be a joy forever in his sight and lend importance
to the town of Edom. For his hero was to go and live in the neat rooms of
Miss Alvira over her millinery and dressmaking shop, and never return to
the scenes of his early prowess.
After the wedding the little boy, on his way to school of a morning, would
watch for Cousin Bill J. to wheel out on the sidewalk the high glass case
in which Miss Alvira had arranged her pretty display of flowered bonnets.
And slowly it came to life in his understanding that between the not
irksome task of wheeling out this case in the morning and wheeling it back
at night, Cousin Bill J. now enjoyed the liberty that a man of his parts
deserved. He was free at last to sit about in the stores of the village,
or to enthrone himself publicly before them in clement weather, at which
time his opinion upon a horse, or any other matter whatsoever, could be
had for the asking. Nor would he be invincibly reticent upon the subject
of those early exploits which had once set all of Chautauqua County
marvelling at his strength.
At first the little boy was stung with jealousy at this. Later he came to
rejoice in the very circumstance that had brought him pain. If his hero
could not be all his, at least the world would have to blink even as he
had blinked, in the dazzling light of his excellences--yes, and smart
under the lash of his unequalled sarcasm.
It should, perhaps, be said that dissolution by slow poison is not
infrequently the fate of an idol.
Doubtless there was never a certain day of which the little boy could have
said "that was the first time Cousin Bill J. began to seem different." Yet
there came a moment when all was changed--a time of question, doubt,
conviction; a terrible hour, in short, when, face to face with his hero,
he suffered the deep hurt of knowing that mentally, morally, and even
esthetically, he himself was the superior of Cousin Bill J.
He could remember that first he had heard a caller say to Clytie of Miss
Alvira, "Why, they do say the poor thing has to go down those back stairs
and actually split her own kindlings--with that healthy loafer setting
around in the good clothes she buys him, in the back room of that
drug-store from morning till night. And what's worse, he's been seen with
that eldest--"
Here the caller's eyes had briefly shifted sidewise at the small listener,
whereupon Clytie had urged him to run along and play like a good boy. He
pondered at length that which he had overheard and then he went to Miss
Alvira's wood-pile at the foot of her back stairs, reached by turning up
the alley from Main Street. He split a large pile of kindling for her. He
would have been glad to do this each day, had not Miss Alvira proved to be
lacking in delicacy. Instead of ignoring him, when she saw him from her
back window, where she was second-fitting Samantha Rexford's pink waist,
she came out with her mouth full of pins and gave him five cents and tried
to kiss him. Of course, he never went back again. If _that_ was the kind
she was she could go on doing the work herself. He was no Ralph Overton or
Ben Holt, to be shamed that way and made to feel that he had been Doing
Good, and be spoken of all the time as "our Hero."
As for Cousin Bill J., of _course_ he was a loafer! Who wouldn't be if he
had the chance? But it was false and cruel to say that he was a healthy
loafer. When Cousin Bill J. was healthy he had been able to fell an ox
with one blow of his fist.
Nor was he disturbed seriously by rumours that his hero was a
"come-outer"; that instead of attending church with Miss Alvira he could
be heard at the barbershop of a Sabbath morning, agreeing with Milo Barrus
that God might have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh;
but he couldn't have made the whale swallow Jonah, because it was against
reason and nature; and, if you found one part of the Bible wasn't so, how
could you tell the rest of it wasn't a lot of grandmother's tales?
Nor did he feel anything but sympathy for a helpless man imposed upon when
he heard Mrs. Squire Cumpston say to Clytie, "Do you know that lazy brute
has her worked to a mere shadow; she just sits in that shop all day long
and lets tears fall every minute or so on her work. She spoiled
five-eighths of a yard of three-inch lavender satin ribbon that way, that
was going on to Mrs. Beasley's second-mourning bonnet. And she's had to
cut him down to twenty-five cents a day for spending-money, and order the
stores not to trust him one cent on her account."
He was sorry to have Miss Alvira crying so much. It must be a sloppy
business, making her hats and things. But what did the woman _expect_ of a
man like Cousin Bill J., anyway?
Yet somehow it came after a few years the new light upon his old idol. One
day he found that he neither resented nor questioned a thing he heard
Clytie herself say about Cousin Bill J.: "Why, he don't know as much as a
goat." Here she reconsidered, with an air of wanting to be entirely
fair:--"Well, not as much as a goat really _ought_ to know!" And when he
overheard old Squire Cumpston saying on the street, a few days later, "Of
all God's mean creatures, the meanest is a male human that can keep his
health on the money a woman earns!" it was no shock, though he knew that
Cousin Bill J. was meant.
Departed then was the glory of his hero, his splendid dimensions shrunk,
his effective lustre dulled, his perfect moustache rusted and scraggly,
his chin weakened, his pale blue eyes seen to be in force like those of a
china doll.
He heard with interest that Squire Cumpston had urged Miss Alvira to
divorce her husband, that she had refused, declaring God had joined her to
Cousin Bill J. and that no man might put them asunder; that marriage had
been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament and was now
indissoluble--an emblem, indeed, of Christ's union with His Church; and
that, as she had made her bed, so would she lie upon it.
Nor was the boy alone in regarding as a direct manifestation of Providence
the sudden removal of Cousin Bill J. from this life by means of pneumonia.
For Miss Alvira had ever been esteemed and respected even by those who
considered that she sang alto half a note off, while her husband had
gradually acquired the disesteem of almost the entire village of Edom.
Many, indeed, went so far as to consider him a reproach to his sex.
Yet there were a few who said that even a pretended observance of the
decencies would have been better. Miss Alvira disagreed with them,
however, and after all, as the village wag, Elias Cuthbert, said in the
post-office next day, "It was _her_ funeral." For Miss Alvira had made no
pretense to God; and, what is infinitely harder, she would make none to
the world. She rode to the last resting-place of her husband--Elias also
made a funny joke about his having merely changed _resting-places_--decked
in a bonnet on which were many blossoms. She had worn it through years
when her heart mourned and life was bitter, when it seemed that God from
His infinity had chosen her to suffer the cruellest hurts a woman may
know--and now that He had set her free she was not the one to pretend
grief with some lying pall of crêpe. And on the new bonnet she wore to
church, the first Sabbath after, there still flowered above her somewhat
drawn face the blossoms of an endless girlhood, as if they were rooted in
her very heart. Beneath these blossoms she sang her alto--such as it
was--with just a hint of tossing defiance. Yet there was no need for that.
Edom thought well of her.
No one was known to have mourned the departed save an inferior dog he had
made his own and been kind to; but this creature had little sympathy or
notice, though he was said to have waited three days and three nights on
the new earth that topped the grave of Cousin Bill J. For, quite aside
from his unfortunate connection, he had not been thought well of as a dog.
CHAPTER X
THE PASSING OF THE GRATCHER; AND ANOTHER
From year to year the perfect father came to Edom to be a week with his
children. And though from visit to visit there were external variations in
him, his genial and refreshing spirit was changeless. When his garments
were appreciably less regal, even to the kind eye of his younger son; when
his hat was not all one might wish; the boots less than excellent; the
priceless watch-chain absent, or moored to a mere bunch of aimless keys,
though the bounty from his pockets was an irregular and minute trickle of
copper exclusively, the little boy strutted as proudly by his side,
worshipping him as loyally, as when these outer affairs were quite the
reverse. Yet he could not avoid being sensible of the fluctuations.
One year the parent would come with the long hair of one who, having been
brother to the red Indian for years, has wormed from his medicine man the
choicest secret of his mysterious pharmacopæia, and who would out of love
for suffering humanity place this within the reach of all for a nominal
consideration.
Another year he would be shorn of the sweeping moustache and much of the
tawny hair, and the little boy would understand that he had travelled
extensively with a Mr. Haverly, singing his songs each evening in large
cities, and being spoken of as "the phenomenal California baritone." His
admiring son envied the fortunate people of those cities.
Again he would be touring the world of cities with some simple article of
household use which, from his luxurious barouche, he was merely
introducing for the manufacturers--perhaps a rare cleaning-fluid, a
silver-polish, or that ingenious tool which will sharpen knives and cut
glass, this being, indeed, one of his prized staples. It appeared--so the
little boy heard him tell Milo Barrus--that few men could resist buying a
tool with which he actually cut a pane of glass into strips before their
eyes; that one beholding the sea of hands waving frantically up to him
with quarters in them, after his demonstration, would have reason to
believe that all men had occasion to slice off a strip of glass every day
or so. Instead of this, as an observer of domestic and professional life,
he believed that out of the thousands to whom he had sold this tool, not
ten had ever needed to cut glass, nor ever would.
There was another who continued indifferent to the personal estate of this
father. This was Grandfather Delcher, who had never seen him since that
bleak day when he had tried to bury the memory of his daughter. When the
perfect father came to Edom the grandfather went to his room and kept
there so closely that neither ever beheld the other. The little boy was
much puzzled by this apparently intentional avoidance of each other by two
men of such rare distinction, and during the early visits of his father he
was fruitful of suggestion for bringing them together. But when he came to
understand that they remained apart by wish of the elder man, he was
troubled. He ceased then all efforts to arrange a meeting to which he had
looked forward with pride in his office of exhibiting each personage to
the other. But he was grieved toward his grandfather, becoming sharp and
even disdainful to the queer, silent old man, at those times when the
father was in the village. He could have no love and but little
friendliness for one who slighted his dear father. And so a breach
widened between them from year to year, as the child grew stouter fibre
into his sentiments of loyalty and justice.
Meantime, age crept upon the little boy, relentlessly depriving him of
this or that beloved idol, yet not unkindly leaving with him the pliant
vitality that could fashion others to be still more warmly cherished.
With Nancy, on afternoons when cool shadows lay across the lawn between
their houses, he often discussed these matters of life. Nancy herself had
not been spared the common fate. Being now a mere graceless rudiment of
humanity, all spindling arms and legs, save for a puckered, freckled face,
she was past the witless time of expecting to pick up a bird with a broken
wing and find it a fairy godmother who would give her three wishes. It was
more plausible now that a prince, "all dressed up in shiny Prince
Clothes," would come riding up on a creamy white horse, lift her to the
saddle in front of him and gallop off, calling her "My beautiful darling!"
while Madmasel, her uncle, and Betsy, the cook, danced up and down on the
front piazza impotently shouting "Help!" She suspected then, when it was
too late, that certain people would bitterly wish they had acted in a
different manner. If this did not happen soon, she meant to go into a
convent where she would not be forever told things for her own good by
those arrogantly pretending to know better, and where she could devote a
quiet life to the bringing up of her children.
The little boy sympathised with her. He knew what it was to be
disappointed in one's family. The family he would have chosen for his own
was that of which two excellent views were given on the circus bills. In
one picture they stood in line, maddeningly beautiful in their pink
tights, ranging from the tall father and mother down through four children
to a small boy that always looked much like himself. In the other picture
these meritorious persons were flying dizzily through the air at the very
top of the great tent, from trapeze to trapeze, with the littlest boy
happily in the greatest danger, midway in the air between the two proud
parents, who were hurling him back and forth.
It was absurd to think of anything like this in connection with a family
of which only one member had either courage or ambition. One had only to
study Clytie or Grandfather Delcher a few moments to see how hopeless it
all was.
The next best life to be aspired to was that of a house-painter, who could
climb about unchided on the frailest of high scaffolds, swing from the
dizziest cupola, or sway jauntily at the top of the longest ladder--always
without the least concern whether he spilled paint on his clothes or not.
Then, all in a half-hour, one afternoon, both he and Nancy seemed to cross
a chasm of growth so wide that one thrilled to look back to the farther
side where all objects showed little and all interests were juvenile. And
this phenomenon, signalised by the passing of the Gratcher, came in this
wise. As they rested from play--this being a time when the Gratcher was
most likely to be seen approaching by him of the Gratcher-eye, the usual
alarm was given, followed by the usual unbreathing silence. The little boy
fixedly bent his magic eye around the corner of the house, the little girl
scrambling to him over the grass to clutch one of his arms, to listen
fearfully for the setting of the monster's crutches at the end of each
stride, to feel if the earth trembled, as it often distinctly did, under
his awful tread.
Wider grew the eyes of both at each "Now he's nearer still!" of the little
boy, until at last the girl must hide her head lest she see that awful
face leering past the corner. For, once the Gratcher's eye met yours
fairly, he caught you in an instant and worked his will. This was to pick
you up and look at you on all sides at once with the eyes in his
finger-ends, which tickled you so that you lost your mind.
But now, at the shrillest and tensest report of progress from the gifted
watcher, all in a wondrous second of realisation, they turned to look into
each other's eyes--and their ecstasy of terror was gone in the quick
little self-conscious laughs they gave. It was all at once as if two
grown-ups had in a flash divined that they had been playing at a childish
game under some spell. The moment was not without embarrassment, because
of their having caught themselves in the very act and frenzy of showing
terror of this clumsy fiction. Foolishly they averted their glances, after
that first little laugh of sudden realisation; but again their eyes met,
and this time they laughed loud and long with a joy that took away not
only all fears of the Gratcher forever, but their first embarrassment of
themselves. Then, with no word of the matter whatsoever, each knowing that
the other understood, they began to talk of life again, feeling older and
wiser, which truly they were.
For, though many in time wax brave to beard their Gratcher even in his
lair, only the very wise learn this--that the best way to be rid of him is
to laugh him away--that no Gratcher ever fashioned by the ingenuity of
terror-loving humans can keep his evil power over one to whom he has
become funny.
The passing of the Gratcher had left no pedestal crying for another idol.
In its stead, for his own chastening and with all reverence, the little
boy erected the spirit of that God which the Bible tells of, who is
all-wise and loving, yet no sentimentalist, as witness his sudden
devastations among the first-born of all things, from white rabbits to
men.
But an idol next went down that not only left a wretched vacancy in the
boy's pantheon, but fell against his heart and made an ugly wound. It was
as if he had become suddenly clear-seeing on that day when the Gratcher
shrivelled in the blast of his laugh.
A little later came the father on his annual visit, and the dire thing was
done. The most ancient and honoured of all the idols fell with a crash. A
perfect father was lost in some common, swaggering, loud-voiced,
street-mannered creature, grotesquely self-satisfied, of a cheap, shabby
smartness, who came flaunting those things he should not have flaunted,
and proclaiming in every turn of his showy head his lack of those things
without which the little boy now saw no one could be a gentleman.
He cried in his bed that night, after futile efforts to believe that some
fearful change had been wrought in his father. But his memory of former
visits was scrupulously photographic--phonographic even. He recalled from
the past certain effects once keenly joyed in that now made his cheeks
burn. The things rioted brutally before him, until it seemed that
something inside of him strove to suppress them--as if a shamed hand
reached out from his heart to brush the whole offense into decent hiding
with one quick sweep.
This time he took care that Nancy should not meet his father. Yet he
walked the streets with him as before--walking defiantly and with shame
those streets through which he had once led the perfect father in festal
parade, to receive the applause of a respectful populace. Now he went
forth awkwardly, doggedly, keen for signs that others saw what he did, and
quick to burn with bitter, unreasoning resentment, when he detected that
they did so. Once his father rallied him upon his "grumpiness"; then he
grew sullen--though trying to smile--thinking with mortification of his
grandfather. He understood the old man now.
He was glad when the week came to an end. Bruised, bewildered, shamed, but
loyal still and resentful toward others who might see as he did, he was
glad when his father went--this time as Professor Alfiretti, doing a
twenty-minute turn of hypnotism and mind-reading with the Gus Levy
All-Star Shamrock Vaudeville, playing the "ten-twenty-thirties," whatever
they were!
CHAPTER XI
THE STRONG PERSON'S NARRATIVE
Near the close of the following winter came news of the father's death.
In some town of which the boy had never heard, in another State, a
ramshackle wooden theatre had burned one night and the father had perished
in the fire through his own foolhardiness. The news came by two channels:
first, a brief and unilluminating paragraph in the newspaper, giving
little more than the fact itself.
But three days later came a friend of the father, bringing his few poor
effects and a full relation of the matter. He was a person of kind heart,
evidently, to whom the father had spoken much of his boys in Edom--a
bulky, cushiony, youngish man who was billed on the advertising posters of
the Gus Levy All-Star Shamrock Vaudeville as "Samson the Second," with a
portrait of himself supporting on the mighty arch of his chest a grand
piano, upon which were superimposed three sizable and busy violinists.
He told his tale to the two boys and Clytie, Grandfather Delcher having
wished to hear no more of the occurrence.
"You understan', it was like this now," he began, after having with a
calculating eye rejected two proffered chairs of delicate structure and
selected a stout wooden rocker into which he settled tentatively, as one
whom experience had taught to distrust most of the chairs in common use.
"The people in front had got out all right, the fire havin' started on the
stage from the strip-light, and also our people had got out through the
little stage-entrance, though havin' to leave many of our props--a good
coat I had to lose meself, fur-lined around the collar, by way of helpin'
the Sisters Devere get out their box of accordions that they done a Dutch
Daly act with for an enn-core. Well, as I was sayin', we'd all hustled
down these back stairs--they was already red hot and smokin' up good, you
understan', and there we was shiverin' outside in the snow, kind of
rattled, and no wonder, at that, and the ladies of the troupe
histurrical--it had come like a quick-change, you understan', when all of
a sudden up in the air goes the Original Kelly. Say, he lets out a yell
for your life--'Oh, my God!' he says, 'my kids--up there,' pointin' to
where the little flames was spittin' out through the side like a
fire-eatin' act. Then down he flops onto his knees in the snow, prayin'
like the--prayin' like _mad_, you understan', and callin' on the blessed
Virgin to save little Patsy, who was just gittin' good with his drum-major
act and whirlin' a fake musket--and also little Joseph, who was learnin'
to do some card-tricks that wasn't so bad. Well, so everybody begins to
scream louder and run this way and that, you understan', callin' the kids
and thinkin' Kelly was nutty, because they must 'a got out. But Kelly
keeps right on prayin' to the holy Virgin, the tears runnin' down his
make-up--say, he looked awful, on the dead! And then we hears another
yell, and here was Prof. at the window with one of the kids, sure enough.
He'd got up them two flights of stairs, though they was all red smoky,
like when you see fire through smoke. Well, he motions to catch the kid,
so we snatches a cloak off one of the girls and holds it out between us,
you understan', while he leans out and drops the kid into it, all safe and
sound.
"Just then we seen the place all light up back of him, and we yelled to
him to jump, too--he could 'a saved himself, you understan', but he waves
his hand and shook his head--say, lookin' funny, too, with his _mus_-tache
half burned off, and we seen him go back out of sight for the other little
Kelly--Kelly still promisin' to give up all he had to the Virgin if she
saved his boys.
"Well, for a minute the crowd kep' still, kind 'a holdin' its breath, you
understan', till the Prof.'d come back with the other kid--and holdin' it
and holdin' it till the fire gits brighter and brighter through the
window--and--nothin' happens, you understan'--just the fire keeps on
gittin' busy. Honest, I begun to feel shaky, but then up comes one of
these day-after-to-morrow fire-departments, like they have in them towns,
with some fine painted ladders and a nice new hose-cart, and there was
great doings with these Silases screamin' to each other a foot away
through their fire-trumpets, only the stairs had been ablaze ever since
the Prof. got up 'em, and before any one does anything the whole inside
caves in and the blaze goes way up to the sky.
"Well, of course, that settles it, you understan'--about the little Kelly
and the Prof. We drags the original Kelly away to a drug-store on the
corner of the next block, where they was workin' over the kid Prof.
saved--it was Patsy--and Kelly was crazy; but the Doc. was bringin' the
kid around all right, when one of the Miss Deveres, she has to come nutty
all to once--say, she sounded like the parrot-house in Central Park,
laughin' till you'd think she'd bust, only it sounded like she was cryin'
at the same time, and screamin' out at the top of her voice, 'Oh, he
looked so damned funny with his _mus_-tache burned off! Oh, he looked so
damned funny with his _mus_-tache burned off!'--way up high like that,
over and over. Well, so she has to be held down till the Doc. jabs her arm
full of knockouts. Honest, I needed the dope myself for fair by that time,
what with the lady bein' that way I'm 'a tellin' you, and Kelly, the crazy
Irishman--I could hear him off in one corner givin' his reg'ler stunt
about his friend, O'Houlihan, lately landed and lookin' for work, comes to
a sausage factory and goes up to the boss and says, 'Begobs!'--_you_ know
the old gag--say, I run out in the snow and looked over to the crowd
around the fire and thought of Prof. pokin' around in that dressin'-room
for Kelly's other kid, when he might 'a jumped after he got the first one,
and, say, this is no kid--first thing I knew I begin to bawl like a baby.
"Well, as I was sayin', there I am and all I can see through the fog is
one 'a these here big lighted signs down the street with 'George's Place'
on it, and a pitcher of a big glass of beer. Me to George's, at once. When
Levy himself finds me there, about daylight, I'm tryin' to tell a gang of
Silases how it all happened and chokin' up every time so's I have to have
another.
"Well, of course, we break up next day. Kelly tells me, after he gits
right again, that little Patsy was saved by havin' one 'a these here
scapulars on--he shows it to me hanging around the kid's neck, inside his
clothes. He says little Joseph must 'a left his off, or he'd 'a' been
saved, too. He showed me a piece in one 'a these little religious books
that says there was nothing annoyed the devil like a scapular--that a man
can't be burned or done dirt to in no way if he wears one. I says it's a
pity the Prof. didn't have one on, but Kelly says they won't work for
Protestants. But I don't know--I never _purtended_ to be good on these
propositions of religious matters. And there wasn't any chance of findin'
the kid to prove if Kelly had it right or not.
"But the Prof. he was certainly a great boy for puttin' up three-sheets
about his own two kids; anybody that would listen--friend or
stranger--made no difference to _him_. He starred 'em to anybody, you
understan'--what corkers they was, and all like that. It seemed like
Kelly's havin' two kids also kind 'a touched on his feelin's. Honest, I
ain't ever got so worked up over anything before in me whole life."
When this person had gone the old man called the two boys to his room and
prayed with them; keeping the younger to sit with him a long time
afterward, as if feeling that his was the heavier heart.
CHAPTER XII
A NEW THEORY OF A CERTAIN WICKED MAN
The time of the first sorrow was difficult for the boy. There was that
first hard sleep after one we love has gone--in which we must always
dream that it is not true--a sleep from which we awaken to suffer all the
shock of it again. Then came black nights when the perfect love for the
perfect father came back in all its early tenderness to cry the little boy
to sleep. Yet it went rapidly enough at last, as times of sorrow go for
the young. There even came a day when he found in a secret place of his
heart a chastened, hopeful inquiry if all might not have been for the
best. He had loved his father--there had been between them an unbreakable
bond; yet this very love had made him suffer at every thought of him while
he was living, whereas now he could love him with all tender memories and
with no poisonous misgivings about future meetings with their
humiliations. Now his father was made perfect in Heaven, and even
Grandfather Delcher--whose aloofness here he had ceased to blame--would
not refuse to meet and know him there.
Naturally, then, he turned to his grandfather in his great need for a new
idol to fill the vacant niche. Aforetime the old man in his study upstairs
had been little more than a gray shadow, a spirit of gloom, stubbornly
imprisoning another spirit that would have been kind if it could have
escaped. But the little boy drew near to him, and found him curiously
companionable. Where once he had shunned him, he now went freely to the
study with his lessons or his storybook, or for talk of any little matter.
His grandfather, it seemed, could understand many things which so old a
man could scarcely have been expected to understand. In token of this
there would sometimes creep over his brown old face a soft light that made
it seem as if there must still be within him somewhere the child he had
once been; as if, perhaps, he looked into the little boy as into a mirror
that threw the sunlight of his own boyhood into his time-worn face. Side
by side, before the old man's fire, they would talk or muse, since they
were friendly enough to be silent if they liked. Only one confidence the
little boy could not bring himself to make: he could not tell the old man
that he no longer felt hard toward him, as once he had done, for his
coldness to his father; that he had divined--and felt a great shame
for--the true reason of that coldness. But he thought the old man must
understand without words. It was hardly a matter to be talked of.
About his other affairs, especially his early imaginings and difficulties,
he was free to talk; about coming to the Feet, and the Front Room, and
being washed in the blood, and born again--matters that made the old man
wish their intimacy had not been so long delayed.
But now they made up for lost time. Patiently and ably he taught the
little boy those truths he needed to know; to seek for eternal life
through the atoning blood of the Saviour, whose part it had been to
purchase our redemption from God's wrath by his death on Calvary. Of other
matters more technical: of how the love that God of necessity has for His
own infinitely perfect being is the reason and the measure of the hatred
he has for sin. Above all did he teach the little boy how to pray for the
grace of effectual calling, in order that, being persuaded of his sin and
misery, he might thereafter partake of justification, adoption,
sanctification, and those several benefits which, in this life, do either
accompany or flow from them. They looked forward with equal eagerness to
the day when he should become a great and good man, preaching the gospel
of the crucified Son to spellbound throngs.
[Illustration: "They looked forward with equal eagerness to the day when
he should become a great and good man."]
Together they began again the study of the Scriptures, the little boy now
entering seriously upon that work of writing commentaries which had once
engaged Allan. In one of these school-boyish papers the old man came upon
a passage that impressed him as notable. It seemed to him that there was
not only that vein of poetic imagination--without which one cannot be a
great preacher--but a certain individual boldness of approach, monstrous
in its naïve sentimentality, to be sure, but indicating a talent that
promised to mature splendidly.
"Now Jesus told his disciples," it ran, "that he must be crucified before
he could take his seat on the right hand of God and send to hell those who
had rejected him. He told them that one of them would have to betray him,
because it must be like the Father had said. It says at the last supper
Jesus said, 'The Son of Man goeth as it is written of him; but woe unto
that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed; it had been good for that man
if he had not been born.'
"Now it says that Satan entered into Judas, but it looks to me more like
the angel of the Lord might have entered into him, he being a good man to
start with, or our Lord would not have chosen him to be a disciple. Judas
knew for sure, after the Lord said this, that one of the disciples had got
to betray the Saviour and go to hell, where the worm dieth not and the
fire is not quenched. Well, Judas loved all the disciples very much, so he
thought he would be the one and save one of the others. So he went out and
agreed to betray him to the rulers for thirty pieces of silver. He knew if
he didn't do it, it might have to be Peter, James, or John, or some one
the Saviour loved very dearly, because it _had_ to be one of them. So
after it was done and he knew the others were saved from this foul deed,
he went back to the rulers and threw down their money, and went out and
hung himself. If he had been a bad man, it seems more like he would have
spent that money in wicked indulgences, food and drink and entertainments,
etc. Of course, Judas knew he would go to hell for it, so he was not as
lucky as Jesus, who knew he would go to heaven and sit at the right hand
of God when he died, which was a different matter from Judas's, who would
not have any reward at all but going to hell. It looks to me like poor
Judas had ought to be brought out of hell-fire, and I shall pray Jesus to
do it when he gets around to it."
However it might be with our Lord's betrayer, there was one soul now seen
to be deservedly in hell. Through the patient study of the Scriptures as
expounded by Grandfather Delcher, the little boy presently found himself
accepting without demur the old gentleman's unspoken but sufficiently
indicated opinion. His father was in everlasting torment--having been not
only unbaptised, but godless and a scoffer. With a quickening sense of the
majesty of that Spirit infinitely good, a new apprehension of His plan's
symmetry, he read the words meant to explain, to comfort him, silently
indicated one day by the old man:
"Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one
vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
"What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known,
endured with much long suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to
destruction?
"And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of
mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory."
It hurt at first, but the young mind hardened to it dutifully--the big,
laughing, swaggering, scoffing father--a device of God made for torment,
that the power of the All-loving might show forth! If the father had only
repented, he might have gone straight to heaven as did Cousin Bill J. For
the latter had obtained grace in his last days, and now sang acceptably
before the thrones of the Father and the Son. But the unbaptised scoffer
must burn forever--and the little boy knew at last what was meant by
"the majesty of God."
BOOK TWO
The Age of Reason
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
THE REGRETTABLE DEMENTIA OF A CONVALESCENT
"You know you _please_ me--_really_ you do!"
Allan, perfect youth of the hazel eyes and tawny locks, bent upon
inquiring Nancy a look of wholly pleasant reassurance, as one wishful to
persuade her from doubt.
"I'm not joking a bit. When I say you please me, I mean it."
His look became rather more expansive with a smile that seemed meant to
sympathise guardedly with her in her necessary rejoicing.
Meekly, for a long second, Nancy drew the black curtains of her eyes,
murmuring from out the friendly gloom:
"It's very good of you, Allan!"
Then, before he could tell reasons for his pleasing, which she divined he
was about to do, the curtains were up and the eyes wide open to him with a
question about Bernal.
He turned to the house and pointed up to the two open windows of the
study, in and out of which the warm breeze puffed the limp white curtains.
"He's there, poor chap! He was able to get that far for the first time
yesterday, leaning on me and Clytie."
"And to think I never knew he was sick until we came from town last night.
I'd surely have left the old school and come before if I'd heard. I
wouldn't have cared _what_ Aunt Bell said."
"Eight weeks down, and you know we found he'd been sick long before he
found it out himself--walking typhoid, they called it. He came home from
college with me Easter week, and Dr. Merritt put him to bed the moment he
clapped eyes on him. Said it was walking typhoid, and that he must have
been worrying greatly about something, because his nervous system was all
run down."
"And he was very ill?"
"Doctor Merritt says he went as far as a man can go and get back at all."
"How dreadful--poor Bernal! Oh, if he _had_ died!"
"Out of his head for three weeks at a time--raving fearfully. And you
know, he's quite like an infant now--says the simplest things. He laughs
at it himself. He says he's not sure if he knows how to read and write."
"Poor, dear Bernal!"
With some sudden arousing he studied her face swiftly as she spoke, then
continued:
"Yes, Bernal's really an awfully good chap at bottom." He turned again to
look up at the study windows. "You know, I intend to stand by that fellow
always--no matter _what_ he does! Of course, I shall not let his being my
brother blind me to his faults--doubtless we _all_ have faults; but I tell
you, Nancy, a good heart atones for many things in a man's make-up."
She seemed to be waiting, slightly puzzled, but he broke off--"Now I must
hurry to mail these letters It's good to be home for another summer. You
really _do_ please me, Nance!"
She thought, as he moved off, that Allan was handsome--more than handsome,
indeed. He left an immediate conviction of his superb vitality of body and
mind, the incarnation of a spirit created to prevail. Featured in almost
faultless outline, of a character unconsciously, unaffectedly proclaiming
its superior gravity among human masses, he was a planet destined to have
many satellites and be satellite to none; an _ego_ of genuine lordliness;
a presence at once masterly and decorative.
And yet she was conscious of a note--not positively of discord, but one
still exciting a counter-stream of reflection. She had observed that each
time Allan turned his head, ever so little, he had a way of turning his
shoulders with it: the perfect head and shoulders were swung with almost a
studied unison. And this little thing had pricked her admiration with a
certain needle-like suspicion--a suspicion that the young man might be not
wholly oblivious of his merits as a spectacle.
Yet this was no matter to permit in one's mind. For Nancy of the
lengthened skirts and the massed braids was now a person of reserves. Even
in that innocent insolence of first womanhood, with its tentatively
malicious, half-conscious flauntings, she was one of reticences toward the
world including herself, with petticoats of decorum draping the child's
anarchy of thought--her luxuriant young emotions "done up" sedately with
her hair. She was now one to be cautious indeed of imputations so blunt as
this concerning Allan. Besides, how nobly he had spoken of Bernal. Then
she wondered _why_ it should seem noble, for Nancy would be always a
creature to wonder where another would accept. She saw it had seemed noble
because Bernal must have been up to some deviltry.
This phrase would not be Nancy's--only she knew it to be the way her
uncle, for example, would translate Allan's praise of his brother. She
hoped Bernal had not been very bad--and wondered _how_ bad.
Then she went to him. Her first little knock brought no answer, nor could
she be sure that the second did. But she knew it was loud enough to be
heard if the room were occupied, so she gently opened the door a crack and
peeped in. He lay on the big couch across the room under the open window,
a scarlet wool dressing-gown on, and a steamer-rug thrown over the lower
part of his body. He seemed to be looking out and up to the tree that
appeared above the window. She thought he could not have heard her, but he
called:
"Clytie!"
She crossed the room and bent a little over to meet his eyes when he
weakly turned his head on the pillow.
"Nancy!"
He began to laugh, sliding a thin hand toward one of hers. The laugh did
not end until there were tears in his eyes. She laughed with him as a
strong-voiced singer would help a weaker, and he tried to put a friendly
force into his grip of the firm-fleshed little hand he had found.
"Don't be flattered, Nance--it's only typhoid emotion," he said at last,
in a voice that sounded strangely unused. "You don't really overcome me,
you know--the sight of you doesn't unman me as much as these fond tears
might make you suspect. I shall feel that way when Clytie brings my lunch,
too." He smiled and drew her hand into both his own as she sat beside him.
"How plump and warm your hand is--all full of little whispering pulses. My
hands are cold and drowsy and bony, and _so_ uninterested! Doesn't fever
bring forward a man's bones in the most shameless way?"
"Oh, Bernal--but you'll soon have them decently hidden again--indeed,
you're looking--quite--quite plump." She smiled encouragingly. A sudden
new look in his eyes made her own face serious again.
"Why, Nance, you're rather lovely when you smile!"
She smiled.
"Only then?"
He studied her, while she pretended to be grave.
He became as one apart, giving her a long look of unbiassed appraisal.
"Well--you know--now you have some little odds and ends of features--not
bad--no, not even half bad, for that matter. I can see thousands of miles
into your eyes--there's a fire smouldering away back in there--it's all
smoky and mysterious after you go the first few thousand miles--but, I
don't know--I believe the smile is _needed_, Nance. Poor child, I tell you
this as a friend, for your own good--it seems to make a fine big
perfection out of a lot of little imperfections that are only fairly
satisfactory."
She smiled again, brushing an escaped lock of hair to its home.
"Really, Nance, no one could guess that mouth till it melts."
"I see--now I shall be going about with an endless, sickening grin. It
will come to that--doubtless I shall be murdered for it--people that do
grin that way always make _me_ feel like murder."
"And they could never guess your eyes until the little smile runs up to
light their chandeliers."
"Dear me!--Like a janitor!"
"--or the chin, until the little smile does curly things all around
it--"
"There, now--calm yourself--the doctor will be here presently--and you
know, you're among friends--"
"--or the face itself until those little pink ripples get to chasing each
other up to hide in your hair, as they are now. You know you're blushing,
Nance, so stop it. Remember, it's when you smile; remember, also, that
smiles are born, not made. It's a long time since I've seen you, Nance."
"Two years--we didn't come here last summer, you know."
"But you've aged--you're twice the woman you were--so, on the whole, I'm
not in the least disappointed in you."
"Your sickness seems to have left you--well--in a remarkably unprejudiced
state of mind."
He laughed. "That's the funny part of it. Did they tell you this siege had
me foolish for weeks? Honest, now, Nance, here's a case--how many are two
times two?" He waited expectantly.
"Are you serious?"
"It seems silly to you, doesn't it--but answer as if I were a child."
"Well--twice two are four--unless my own mind is at fault."
"There!--now I begin to believe it. I suppose, now, it _couldn't_ be
anything else, could it? Yesterday morning the doctor said something was
as plain as twice two are four. You know, the thing rankled in me all day.
It seemed to me that twice two ought to be twenty-two. Then I asked Clytie
and she said it was four, but that didn't satisfy me. Of course,
Clytemnestra is a dear soul, and I truly, love her, but her advantages in
an educational way have been meagre. She could hardly be considered an
authority in mathematics, even if she is the ideal cook and friend. But I
have more faith in your learning, Nance. The doctor's solution seems
plausible, since you've sided with him. I suppose you could have no motive
for deceiving me?"
She was regarding him with just a little anxiety, and this he detected.
"It's nothing to worry about, Nance--it's only funny. I haven't lost my
mind or anything, you know--spite of my tempered enthusiasm for your
face--but this is it: first there came a fearful shock--something
terrible, that shattered me--then it seemed as if that sickness found my
brain like a school-boy's slate with all his little problems worked out on
it, and wickedly gave it a swipe each side with a big wet sponge. And now
I seem to have forgotten all I ever learned. Clytie was in to feed me the
inside of a baked potato before you came. After I'd fought with her to eat
the skin of it--such a beautiful brown potato-skin, with delicious little
white particles still sticking to the inside where it hadn't all been dug
out--and after she had used her strength as no lady should, and got it
away from me, it came to me all at once that she was my mother. Then she
assured me that she was not, and that seemed quite reasonable, too. I told
her I loved her enough for a mother, anyway--and the poor thing giggled."
"Still, you have your lucid moments."
"Ah, still thinking about the face? You mean I'm lucid when you smile, and
daffy when you don't. But that's a case of it--your face--"
"My face a case of _what?_ You're getting commercial--even shoppy. Really,
if this continues, Mr. Linford, I shall be obliged--"
"A case of it--of this blankness of mine. Instead of continuing my early
prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey
you coldly for the first time. You know I'm afraid to look at print for
fear I've forgotten how to read."
"Nonsense!"
"No--I tell you I feel exactly like one of those chaps from another
planet, who are always reaching here in the H.G. Wells's stories--a
gentleman of fine attainments in his own planet, mind you--bland,
agreeable, scholarly--with marked distinction of bearing, and a personal
beauty rare even on a planet where the flaunting of one's secretest bones
is held to betoken the only beauty--you understand _that?_--Well, I come
here, and everything is different--ideals of beauty, people absurdly
holding for flesh on their bones, for example--numbers, language,
institutions, everything. Of course, it puzzles me a little, but see the
value I ought to be to the world, having a mature mind, yet one as clean
of preconceptions and prejudice as a new-born babe's."
"Oh, so that is why you could see that I'm not--"
"Also, why I could see that you _are_--that's it, smile! Nance, you _are_
a dear, when you smile--you make a man feel so strong and protecting. But
if you knew all the queer things I've thought in the last week about time
and people and the world. This morning I woke up mad because I'd been
cheated out of the past. Where _is_ all the past, Nance? There's just as
much past somewhere as there is future--if one's soul has no end, it had
no beginning. Why not worry about the past as we do about the future?
First thing I'm going to do--start a Worry-About-the-Past Club, with dues
and a president, and by-laws and things!"
"Don't you think I'd better send Clytie, now?"
"No; please wait a minute." He clutched her hand with a new strength, and
raised on his elbow to face her, then, speaking lower:
"Nance, you know I've had a feeling it wasn't the right thing to ask the
old gentleman this--he might think I hadn't been studying at college--but
_you_ tell me--what is this about the atoning blood of Jesus Christ? It
was a phrase he used the other day, and it stuck in my mind."
"Bernal--you surely know!"
"Truly I don't--it seems a bad dream I've had some time--that's all--some
awful dream about my father."
"It was the part of the Saviour to purchase our redemption by his death on
Calvary."
"Our redemption from what?"
"From sin, to be sure."
"What sin?"
"Why, our sin, of course--the sin of Adam which comes down to us."
"You say this Jesus purchased our redemption from that sin by dying?"
"Yes."
"From whom did he purchase it?"
"Oh, dear--this is like a catechism--from God, of course."
"The God that made Adam?"
"Certainly."
"Oh, yes--now I seem to remember him--he was supposed to make people, and
then curse them, wasn't he? And so he had to have his son killed before he
could forgive Adam for our sins?"
"No; before he could forgive _us_ for Adam's sin, which descended to us."
"Came down like an entail, eh? ... Adam couldn't disinherit us? Well, how
did this God have his son die?"
"Why, Bernal--you _must_ remember, dear--you knew so well--don't you know
he was crucified?"
"To be sure I do--how stupid! And was God _very_ cheerful after that? No
more trouble about Adam or anything?"
"You must hush--I can't tell you about these things--wait till your
grandfather comes."
"No, I want to have it from you, Nance--grandad would think I'd been
slighting the classics."
"Well, God takes to heaven with him those who believe."
"Believe what?"
"Who believe that Jesus was his only begotten son."
"What does he do with those who don't believe it?"
"They--they--Oh, I don't know--really, Bernal, I must go now."
"Just a minute, Nance!" He clutched more tightly the hand he had been
holding. "I see now! I must be remembering something I knew--something
that brought me down sick. If a man doesn't believe God was capable of
becoming so enraged with Adam that only the bloody death of his own son
would appease his anger toward _us_, he sends that man where--where the
worm doeth something or other--what is it? Oh, well!--of course, it's of
no importance--only it came to me it was something I ought to remember if
grandad should ask me about it. What a quaint belief it must have been."
"Oh, I must go!--let me, now."
"Don't you find it interesting, Nance, rummaging among these musty old
religions of a dead past--though I admit that this one is less pleasant to
study than most of the others. This god seems to lack the majesty and
beauty of the Greek and the integrity of the Norse gods. In fact, he was
too crude to be funny--by the way, what is it I seem to recall, about
eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the son?--'unless ye eat the
flesh of the son--'"
She drew her hand from his now and arose in some dismay. He lay back upon
his pillow, smiling.
"Not very agreeable, is it, Nance? Well, come again, and I'll tell you
about some of the pleasanter old faiths next time--I remember now that
they interested me a lot before I was sick."
"You're sure I shouldn't send Clytie or some one?" She looked down at him
anxiously, putting her hand on his forehead. He put one of his own lightly
over hers.
"No, no, thank you! It's not near time yet for the next baked potato. If
Clytie doesn't give up the skin of this one I shall be tempted to forget
that she's a woman. There, I hear grandad coming, so you won't be leaving
me alone."
Grandfather Delcher came in cheerily as Nancy left the room.
"Resting, my boy? That's good. You look brighter already--Nancy must come
often."
He took Nancy's chair by the couch and began the reading of his morning's
mail. Bernal lay still with eyes closed during the reading of several
letters; but when the old man opened out a newspaper with little rustlings
and pats, he turned to him.
"Well, my boy?"
"I've been thinking of something funny. You know, my memory is still
freakish, and things come back in splotches. Just now I was recalling a
primitive Brazilian tribe in whose language the word 'we' means also
'good. 'Others,' which they express by saying 'not we,' means also
'evil.' Isn't that a funny trait of early man--we--good; not we--bad! I
suppose our own tongue is but an elaboration of that simple bit of human
nature--a training of polite vines and flowering shrubs over the crude
lines of it.
"And this tribe--the Bakaïri, it is called--is equally crude in its
religion. It is true, sir, is it not, that the most degraded of the
savages tribes resort to human sacrifice in their religious rites?"
"Generally true. Human sacrifice was practised even by some who were well
advanced, like the Aztecs and Peruvians."
"Well, sir, this Bakaïri tribe believed that its god demanded a sacrifice
yearly, and their priests taught them that a certain one of their number
had been sent by their god for this sacrifice each year; that only by
butchering this particular member of the tribe and--incredible as it
sounds--eating his body and drinking his blood, could they avert drouth
and pestilence and secure favours for the year to come. I remember the
historian intimated that it were well not to incur the displeasure of any
priest; that one doing this might find it followed by an unpleasant
circumstance when the time came for the priests to designate the next
yearly sacrifice."
"Curious, indeed, and most revolting," assented the old man, laying down
his paper. "You _are_ feeling more cheerful, aren't you--and you look so
much brighter. Ah, what a mercy of God's you were spared to me!--you know
you became my walking-stick when you were a very little boy--I could
hardly go far without you now, my son."
"Yes, sir--thank you--I've just been recalling some of the older
religions--Nancy and I had quite a talk about the old Christian faith."
"I'm glad indeed. I had sometimes been led to suspect that Nancy was the
least bit--well, frivolous--but I am an old man, and doubtless the things
that seem best to me are those I see afar off, their colour subdued
through the years."
"Nancy wasn't a bit frivolous this morning--on the contrary, she seemed
for some reason to consider me the frivolous one. She looked shocked at me
more than once. Now, about the old Christian faith, you know--their god
was content with one sacrifice, instead of one each year, though he
insisted on having the body eaten and the blood drunk perpetually. Yet I
suppose, sir, that the Christian god, in this limiting of the human
sacrifice to one person, may be said to show a distinct advance over the
god of the Bakaïri, though he seems to have been equally a tribal god,
whose chief function it was to make war upon neighbouring tribes."
"Yes, my boy--quite so," replied the old man most soothingly. He stepped
gently to the door. Halfway down the hall Allan was about to turn into his
room. He came, beckoned by the old man, who said, in tones too low for
Bernal to hear:
"Go quickly for Dr. Merritt. He's out of his head again."
CHAPTER II
FURTHER DISTRESSING FANTASIES OF A CLOUDED MIND
When young Dr. Merritt came, flushed and important-looking, greatly
concerned by the reported relapse, he found his patient with normal pulse
and temperature--rational and joyous at his discovery that the secret of
reading Roman letters was still his.
"I was almost afraid to test it, Doctor," he confessed, smilingly, when
the little thermometer had been taken from between his lips, "but it's all
right--I didn't find a single strange letter--every last one of them meant
something--and I know figures, too--and now I'm as hungry for print as I
am for baked potatoes. You know, never in my life again, after I'm my own
master, shall I neglect to eat the skin of my baked potato. When I think
of those I let go in my careless days of plenty, I grow heart-sick."
"A little at a time, young man. If they let you gorge as you'd like to
there would be no more use sending for me; you'd be a goner--that's what
you'd be! Head feel all right?"
"Fine!--I've settled down to a pleasant reading of Holy Writ. This Old
Testament is mighty interesting to me, though doubtless I've read it all
before."
"It's a very complicated case, but I think he's coming on all right," the
doctor assured the alarmed old man outside the door. "He may be a little
flighty now and then, but don't pay any attention to him; just soothe him
over. He's getting back to himself--stronger every hour. We often have
these things to contend with."
And the doctor, outwardly confident, went away to puzzle over the case.
Again the following morning, when Bernal had leaned his difficult way down
to the couch in the study, the old man was dismayed by his almost
unspeakable aberrations. With no sign of fever, with a cool brow and
placid pulse, in level tones, he spoke the words of the mad.
"You know, grandad," he began easily, looking up at the once more placid
old man who sat beside him, "I am just now recalling matters that were
puzzling me much before the sickness began to spin my head about so fast
on my shoulders. The harder I thought, the faster my head went around,
until it sent my mind all to little spatters in a circle about me. One
thing I happened to be puzzling over was how the impression first became
current that this god of the Jews was a being of goodness. Such an
impression seems to have been tacitly accepted for some centuries after
the iniquities so typical of him had been discountenanced by society--long
after human sacrifice was abhorred, and even after the sacrificing of
animals was held to be degrading. It's a point that escapes me, owing to
my addled brain; doubtless you can set me right. At present I can't
conceive how the notion could ever have occurred to any one. I now
remember this book well enough to know that not only is little good ever
recorded of him, but he is so continually barbarous, and so atrociously
cruel in his barbarities. And he was thought to be all-powerful when he is
so pitifully ineffectual, with all his crude power--the poor old fellow
was forever bungling--then bungling again in his efforts to patch up his
errors. Indeed, he would be rather a pathetic figure if he were not so
monstrous! Still, there is a kind of heathen grandeur about him at times.
He drowns his world full of people because his first two circumvented him;
then he saves another pair, but things go still worse, so he has to keep
smiting the world right and left, dumb beasts as well as men; and at last
he picks out one tribe, in whose behalf he works a series of miracles,
that devastated a wide area. How he did love to turn a city over to
destruction! And from the cloud's centre he was constantly boasting of his
awful power, and scaring people into butchering lambs and things in his
honour. Yet, doubtless, that heathen tribe found its god 'good,' and other
people formed the habit of calling him good, without thinking much about
it. They must have felt queer when they woke up to the fact that they were
calling infinitely good a god who was not good, even when judged by their
poor human standards."
Remembering the physician's instructions to soothe the patient, the
distressed old man timidly began--
"'For God so loved the world'"--but he was interrupted by the vivacious
one on the couch.
"That's it--I remember that tradition. He was even crude enough to beget a
son for human sacrifice, giving that son power to condemn thereafter those
who should not detect his godship through his human envelope! That was a
rather subtler bit of baseness than those he first perpetrated--to send
this saving son in such guise that the majority of his creatures would
inevitably reject him! Oh! he was bound to have his failures and his
tortures, wasn't he? You know, I dare say the ancient Christians called
him good because they were afraid to call him bad. Doubtless the one great
spiritual advance that we have made since the Christian faith prevailed
is, that we now worship without fearing what we worship."
Once more the distressed old man had risen to stand with assumed
carelessness by the door, having writhed miserably in his chair until he
could no longer endure the profane flood.
"But, truly, that god was, after all, a pathetic figure. Imagine him amid
the ruins of his plan, desolate, always foiled by his creatures--meeting
failure after failure from Eden to Calvary--for even the bloody expedient
of sending his son to be sacrificed did not avail to save his own chosen
people. They unanimously rejected the son, if I remember, and so he had to
be content with a handful of the despised Gentiles. A sorrowful old figure
of futility he is--a fine figure for a big epic, it seems to me. By the
way, what was the date that this religion was laughed away. I can remember
perfectly the downfall of the Homeric deities--how many years there were
when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while
the educated classes were more or less discreetly heretical, until at last
the whole Olympian outfit became poetic myths. But strangely enough I do
not recall just the date when _we_ began to demand a god of dignity and
morality."
The old man had been loath to leave the sufferer. He still stood by the
open door to call to the first passer-by. Now, shudderingly wishful to
stem the torrent of blasphemies, innocent though they were, he ventured
cautiously:
"There was Sinai--you forget the tables--the moral law--the ten
commandments."
"Sinai, to be sure. Christians used to regard that as an occasion of
considerable dignity, didn't they? The time when he gave directions about
slavery and divorce and polygamy--he was beautifully broad-minded in all
those matters, and to kill witches and to stone an ox that gored any one,
and how to disembowel the lambs used for sacrifice, and what colours to
use in the tabernacle."
But the horrified old man had fled. Half an hour later he returned with
Dr. Merritt, relieving Clytie, who had watched outside the door and who
reported that there had been no signs of violence within.
Again they found a normal pulse and temperature, and an appetite
clamouring for delicacies of strong meat. Young Dr. Merritt was greatly
puzzled.
"I understand the case perfectly," he said to the old man; "he needs rest
and plenty of good nursing--and quiet. We often have these cases. Your
head feels all right, doesn't it?" he asked Bernal.
"Fine, Doctor!"
"I thought so." He looked shrewdly at the old man. "Your grandfather had
an idea you might be--perhaps a bit excited."
"No--not a bit. We've had a fine morning chatting over some of the
primitive religions, haven't we, old man?" and he smiled affectionately up
to his grandfather. "Hello, Nance, come and sit by me."
The girl had paused in the doorway while he spoke, and came now to take
his hand, after a look of inquiry at the two men. The latter withdrew, the
eyes of the old man sadly beseeching the eyes of the physician for some
definite sign of hope.
Inside, the sufferer lay holding a hand of Nancy between his cheek and the
pillow--with intervals of silence and blithe speech. His disordered mind,
it appeared, was still pursuing its unfortunate tangent.
"The first ideas are all funny, aren't they, Nance? Genesis in that
Christian mythology we were discussing isn't the only funny one. There was
the old northern couple who danced on the bones of the earth nine times
and made nine pairs of men and women; and there were the Greek and his
wife who threw stones out of their ark that changed to men; and the Hindu
that saved the life of a fish, and whom the fish then saved by fastening
his ship to his horn; and the South Sea fisherman who caught his hook in
the water-god's hair and made him so angry that he drowned all the world
except the offending fisherman. Aren't they nearly as funny as the god who
made one of his pair out of clay and one from a rib, and then became so
angry with them that he must beget a son for them to sacrifice before he
would forgive them? Let's think of the pleasanter ones. Do you know that
hymn of the Veda?--'If I go along trembling like a cloud, have mercy,
Almighty, have mercy!'
"'Through want of strength, thou strong and bright God, have I gone
wrong. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy!'
"And Buddha was a pleasant soul, Nance--with stuff in him, too--born a
prince, yet leaving his palace to be poor and to study the ways of wisdom,
until enlightenment came to him sitting under his Bo tree. He said faith
was the best wealth here. And, 'Not to commit any sin, to do good and to
purify one's mind, that is the teaching of the awakened'; 'not hating
those who hate us,' 'free from greed among the greedy.' They must have
been glad of Buddhism in their day, teaching them to honour their parents,
to be kind to the sick and poor and sorrowing, to forgive their enemies
and return good for evil. And there was funny old Confucius with his
'Coarse rice for food, water to drink, the bended arm for a
pillow--happiness may be enjoyed even with these; but without virtue, both
riches and honour seem to me like the passing cloud.' Another one of his
is 'In the book of Poetry are three hundred pieces--but the designs of
them all mean, "Have no depraved thoughts."' Rather good for a Chinaman,
wasn't it?
"And there was old Zoroaster saying to his Ormuzd, 'I believe thee, O God!
to be the best thing of all!' and asking for guidance. Ormuzd tells him to
be pure in thought, word and deed; to be temperate, chaste and
truthful--and this Ormuzd would have no lambs sacrificed to him. Life,
being his gift, was dear to him. And don't forget Mohammed, Nance, that
fine old barbarian with the heart of a passionate child, counselling men
to live a good life and to strive after the mercy of God by fasting,
charity and prayer, calling this the 'Key of Paradise.' He went after a
poor blind man whom he had at first rebuffed, saying 'He is thrice welcome
on whose account my Lord hath reprimanded me.' He was a fine, stubborn old
believer, Nance. I wonder if it's not true that the Christians once
studied these old chaps to take the taste of their own cruder God out of
their minds. What a cruel people they must have been to make so cruel a
God!
"But let's talk of you, Nance--that's it--light the chandeliers in your
eyes."
He spoke drowsily now, and lay quiet, patting one of her hands. But
presently he was on one elbow to study her again.
"Nance, the Egyptians worshipped Nature, the Greeks worshipped Beauty, the
Northern chaps worshipped Courage, and the Christians feared--well, the
hereafter, you know--but I'm a Catholic when you smile."
CHAPTER III
REASON IS AGAIN ENTHRONED
Slowly the days brought new life to the convalescent, despite his
occasional attacks of theological astigmatism. And these attacks grew
less frequent and less marked as the poor bones once more involved
themselves in firm flesh--to the glad relief of a harried and scandalised
old gentleman whose black forebodings had daily moved him to visions of
the mad-house for his best-loved descendant.
Yet there were still dreadful times when the young man on the couch
blasphemed placidly by the hour, with an insane air of assuming that those
about him held the same opinions; as if the Christian religion were a
pricked bubble the adherents of which had long since vanished.
If left by himself he could often be heard chuckling and muttering
between chuckles: "I will get me honour upon Pharaoh and all his host. I
have hardened his heart and the heart of his host that I might show these
my signs before him."
Entering the room, the old gentleman might be met with:
"I certainly agree with you, sir, in every respect--Christianity was an
invertebrate materialism of separation--crude, mechanical separation--less
spiritual, less ethical, than almost any of the Oriental faiths. Affirming
the brotherhood of man, yet separating us into a heaven and a hell.
Christians cowering before a being of divided power, half-god and
half-devil. Indeed, I remember no religion so non-moral--none that is so
baldly a mere mechanical device for meeting the primitive mind's need to
set its own tribe apart from all others--or in the later growth to
separate the sheep from the goats, by reason of the opinion formed of
certain evidence. Even schoolboys nowadays know that no moral value
inheres in any opinion formed upon evidence. Yet, I dare say it was
doubtless for a long period an excellent religion for marauding nations."
Or, again, after a long period of apparently rational talk, the
unfortunate young man would break out with, "And how childish its
wonder-tales were, of iron made to swim, of a rod turned to a serpent, of
a coin found in a fish's mouth, of devils asking to go into swine, of a
fig-tree cursed to death because it did not bear fruit out of season--how
childish that tale of a virgin mother, who conceived 'without sin,' as it
is somewhere naïvely put--an ideal of absolutely flawless falsity. Even
the great old painters were helpless before it. They were driven to make
mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality. It's not easy to
idealise mere physical motherhood. You see, that was the wrong, perverted
idea of motherhood--'conceiving without sin.' It's an unclean dogma in its
implications. I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus--a sort of
cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say
seems now to have a certain crude truth in it. He said: 'There's my old
mother, seventy-eight this spring, bent, gray, and wasted with the work of
raising us seven children; she's slaved so hard for fifty years that she's
worn her wedding-ring to a fine thread, and her hands look as if they had
a thousand knuckles and joints in them. But she smiles like a girl of
sixteen, she was never cross or bitter to one of us hounds, and I believe
she never even _wanted_ to complain in all her days. And there's a look of
noble capacity in her face, of soul dignity, that you never saw in any
Madonna's. I tell you no "virgin mother" could be as beautiful as my
mother, who bore seven children for love of my father and for love of the
thought of us.' Isn't it queer, sir, that I remember that--for it seemed
only grotesque at the time I heard it."
It was after this extraordinary speech, uttered with every sign of
physical soundness, that young Dr. Merritt confided to the old man when
they had left the study:
"He's coming on fine, Mr. Delcher. He'll eat himself into shape now in no
time; but--I don't know--seems to me you stand a lot better show of making
a preacher out of his brother. Of course, I may be mistaken--we doctors
often are." Then the young physician became loftily humble: "But it
doesn't strike me he'll ever get his ideas exactly into Presbyterian shape
again!"
"But, man, he'll surely be rid of these devil's hallucinations?"
"Well, well--perhaps, but I'm almost afraid they're what we doctors call
'fixed delusions.'"
"But I set my heart so long ago on his preaching the Word. Oh, I've looked
forward to it so long--and so hard!"
"Well, all you can do now is to feed him and not excite him. We often have
these cases."
The very last of Bernal's utterances that could have been reprobated in a
well man was his telling Clytie in the old gentleman's presence that,
whereas in his boyhood he had pictured the hand of God as a big black hand
reaching down to "remove" people--"the way you weed an onion bed"--he now
conceived it to be like her own--"the most beautiful fat, red hand in the
world, always patting you or tucking you in, or reaching you something
good or pointing to a jar of cookies." It was so dangerously close to
irreverence that it made Clytemnestra look stiff and solemn as she
arranged matters on the luncheon tray; yet it was so inoffensive,
considering the past, that it made Grandfather Delcher quite hopeful.
Thereafter, instead of babbling blasphemies, the convalescent became
silent for the most part, yet cheerful and beautifully rational when he
did speak, so that fear came gradually to leave the old man's heart for
longer and longer intervals. Indeed, one day when Bernal had long lain
silent, he swept lingering doubts from the old man's mind by saying, with
a curious little air of embarrassment, yet with a return of that old-time
playful assumption of equality between them--"I'm afraid, old man, I may
have been a little queer in my talk--back there."
The old man's heart leaped with hope at this, though the acknowledgment
struck him as being inadequate to the circumstance it referred to.
"You _were_ flighty, boy, now and then," he replied, in quite the same
glossing strain of inadequacy.
"I can't tell you how queerly things came back to me--some bits of
consciousness and memory came early and some came late--and they're still
struggling along in that disorderly procession. Even yet I've not been
able to take stock. Old man, I must have been an awful bore."
"Oh, no--not _that_, boy!" Then, in glad relief, he fell upon his knees
beside the couch, praying, in discreetly veiled language, that the pure
heart of a babbler might not be held guilty for the utterances of an
irresponsible head.
Yet, after many days of sane quiet and ever-renewing strength--days of
long walks in the summer woods or long readings in the hammock when the
shadows lay east of the big house, there came to be observed in the young
man a certain moody reticence. And when the time for his return to college
was near, he came again to his disquieted grandfather one day, saying:
"I think there are some matters I should speak to you about, sir." Had he
used the term "old man," instead of "sir," there might still have been no
cause for alarm. As it was, the grandfather regarded him in a sudden,
heart-hurried fear.
"Are the matters, boy, those--those about which you may have spoken during
your sickness?"
"I believe so, sir."
The old man winced again under the "sir," when his heart longed for the
other term of playful familiarity. But he quickly assumed a lightness of
manner to hide the eagerness of his heart's appeal:
"_Don't_ talk now, boy--be advised by me. It's not well for you--you are
not strong. Please let me guide you now. Go back to your studies, put all
these matters from your mind--study your studies and play your play. Play
harder than you study--you need it more. Play out of doors--you must have
a horse to ride. You have thought too much before your time for thinking.
Put away the troublesome things, and live in the flesh as a healthy boy
should. Trust me. When you come to--to those matters again, they will not
trouble you."
In his eagerness, first one hand had gone to the boy's shoulder, then the
other, and his tones grew warm with pleading, while the keen old eyes
played as a searchlight over the troubled young face.
"I must tell you at least one thing, sir."
The old man forced a smile around his trembling mouth, and again assumed
his little jaunty lightness.
"Come, come, boy--not 'sir.' Call me 'old man' and you shall say
anything."
But the boy was constrained, plainly in discomfort. "I--I can't call you
that--just now--sir."
"Well, if you _must_, tell me one thing--but only one! only one, mind you,
boy!" In fear, but smiling, he waited.
"Well, sir, it's a shock I suffered just before I was sick. It came to me
one night when I sat down to dinner--fearfully hungry. I had a thick
English chop on the plate before me; and a green salad, oily in its bowl,
and crisp, browned potatoes, and a mug of creamy ale. I'd gone to the
place for a treat. I'd been whetting my appetite with nibbles of bread and
sips of ale until the other things came; and then, even when I put my
knife to the chop--like a blade pushed very slowly into my heart came the
thought: 'My father is burning in hell--screaming in agony for a drop of
this water which I shall not touch because I have ale. He has been in this
agony for years; he will be there forever.' That was enough, sir. I had to
leave the little feast. I was hungry no longer, though a moment before it
had seemed that I couldn't wait for it. I walked out into the cold, raw
night--walked till near daylight, with the sweat running off me. And the
thing I knew all the time was this: that if I were in hell and my father
in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to
hell to burn with me forever--come with a joke and a song, telling me
never to mind, that we'd have a fine time there in hell in spite of
everything! That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing
mountebank of a father. Just a moment more--this is what you must remember
of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never
ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered
it until my mind went out in that sickness. But, listen now: whatever has
happened--I'm not yet sure what it is--I no longer suffer. Two things only
I know: that our creed still has my godless, scoffing, unbaptised father
in hell, and that my love for him--my absolute _oneness_ with him--has not
lessened.
"I'll stop there, if you wish, leaving you to divine what other change has
taken place."
"There, there," soothed the old man, seizing the shoulders once more with
his strong grip--"no more now, boy. It was a hard thing, I know. The
consciousness of God's majesty comes often in that way, and often it
overwhelms the unprepared. It was hard, but it will leave you more a man;
your soul and your faith will both survive. Do what I have told you--as if
you were once more the puzzled little Bernal, who never could keep his
hair neatly brushed like Allan, and would always moon in corners. Go
finish your course. Another year, when your mind has new fortitude from
your recreated body, we will talk these matters as much as you like. Yet
I will tell you one thing to remember--just one, as you have told me one:
You are in a world of law, of unvarying cause and effect; and the
integrity of this law cannot be destroyed, nor even impaired, by any
conceivable rebellion of yours. Yet this material world of law is but the
shadow of the reality, and that reality is God--the moral law if you
please, as relentless, as inexorable, as immutable in its succession of
cause and effect as the physical laws more apparent to us; and as little
to be overthrown as physical law by any rebellion of disordered sentiment.
The word of this God and this Law is contained in the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments, wherein is the only rule to direct us how we may
glorify and enjoy Him.
"Now," continued the old man, more lightly, "each of us has something to
remember--and let each of us pray for the other. Go, be a good boy--but
careless and happy--for a year."
The old man had his way, and the two boys went presently back to their
studies.
The girl, Nancy, remembered them well for the things each had said to her.
Allan, who, though he constantly praised her, had always the effect of
leaving her small to herself. "Really, Nance," he said, "without any
joking, I believe you have a capacity for living life in its larger
aspects."
And on the last day, Bernal had said, "Nance, you remember when we were
both sorry you couldn't be born again--a boy? Well, from what the old
gentleman says, one learns in time to bow to the ways of an inscrutable
Providence. I dare say he's right. I can see reasons now, my girl, why it
was well that you were not allowed to meddle with Heaven's allotment of
your sex. I'm glad you had to remain a girl."
One compliment pleased her. The other made her tremble, though she laughed
at it.
CHAPTER IV
A FEW LETTERS
(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)
_Dear Grandfather:_ The college year soon ends; also my course. I think
you hoped I wouldn't want again to talk of those matters. But it isn't so.
I am primed and waiting, and even you, old man, must listen to reason. The
world of thought has made many revolutions since you shut yourself into
that study with your weekly church paper. So be ready to hear me.
Affectionately,
BERNAL LINFORD.
(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)
"Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright, but they have
sought out many inventions." I am sending you a little book.
GRANDFATHER.
(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)
_Dear Old Man:_ How am I going to thank you for the "little book"--for
Butler's Analogy? Or rather, how shall I forgive you for keeping it from
me all these years? I see that you acquired it in 1863--and I never knew!
I must tell you that I looked upon it with suspicion when I unwrapped
it--a suspicion that the title did not allay. For I recalled the last time
you gave me a book--the year before I came here. That book, my friend, was
"Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." I began it with deep respect for you. I
finished with a profound distrust of all Abyssinians and an overwhelming
grief for the untimely demise of Mrs. Johnson--for you had told me that
the good doctor wrote this book to get money to bury her. How the circle
of mourners for that estimable woman must have widened as Rasselas made
its way out into the world! Oh, Grandad, if only they had been able to
keep her going some way until he needn't have done it! If only she could
have been spared until her son got in a little money from the Dictionary
or something!
All of which is why I viewed with unfriendly distrust your latest gift,
the Analogy of Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop of Durham. But, honestly,
old man, did you know how funny it was when you sent it? It's funnier than
any of the books of Moses, without being bloody. What a dear, innocent old
soul the Bishop is! How sincerely he believes he is reasoning when he is
merely doing a roguish two-step down the grim corridor of the eternal
verities--with a little jig here and there, and a pause to flirt his frock
airily in the face of some graven image of Fact. Ah, he is so weirdly
innocent. Even when his logical toes go blithely into the air, his dear
old face is most resolutely solemn, and I believe he is never in the least
aware of his frivolous caperings over the floor of induction. Indeed, his
unconsciousness is what makes him an unfailing delight. He even makes his
good old short-worded Saxon go in lilting waltz-time.
You will never know, Grandad, what this book has done for me. I am
stimulated in the beginning by this: "From the vast extent of God's
dominion there must be some things beyond our comprehension, and the
Christian scheme may be one of them." And at the last I am soothed with
this heart-rending _pas seul:_ "Concluding remarks by which it is clearly
shown that those men who can evade the force of arguments so probable for
the truth of Christianity undoubtedly possess dispositions to evil which
would cause them to reject it, were it based on the most absolute
demonstration." Is not that a pearl without price in this world of lawful
conclusions?
By the way, Grandad--recalling the text you quote in your last--did you
know when you sent me to this university that the philosophy taught, in a
general way, is that of Kant; that most university scholars smile
pityingly at the Christian thesis? Did you know that belief in Genesis had
been laughed away in an institution like this? With no intention of
diverting you, but merely in order to acquaint you with the present state
of popular opinion on a certain matter, I will tell you of a picture
printed in a New York daily of yesterday. It's on the funny page. A
certain weird but funny-looking beast stands before an equally
funny-looking Adam, in a funny Eden, with a funny Eve and a funny Cain and
Abel in the background. The animal says, "Say, Ad., what did you say my
name was? I've forgotten it again." Our first male parent answers somewhat
testily, as one who has been vexed by like inquiries: "Icthyosaurus, you
darned fool! Can't you remember a little thing like that?"
In your youth this would doubtless have been punished as a crime. In mine
it is laughed at by all classes. I tell you this to show you that the
Church to-day is in the position of upholding a belief which has become
meaningless because its foundation has been laughed away. Believing no
longer in the god of Moses who cursed them, Christians yet assume to
believe in their need of a Saviour to intercede between them and this
exploded idol of terror. Unhappily, I am so made that I cannot occupy that
position. To me it is not honest.
Old man, do you remember a certain saying of Squire Cumpston? It was this:
"If you're going to cross the Rubicon, _cross_ it! Don't wade out to the
middle and stand there: you only get hell from both banks!"
And so I have crossed; I find the Squire was right about standing in the
middle. Happily, or unhappily, I am compelled to believe my beliefs with
all my head and all my heart. But I am confident my reasons will satisfy
you when you hear them. You will see these matters _in a new light._
Believe me, Grandad, with all love and respect,
Affectionately yours,
BERNAL LINFORD.
(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)
_My Boy:_ For one bitten with skepticism there is little
argument--especially if he be still in youth, which is a time of raw and
ready judgments and of great spiritual self-sufficiency. You wanted to go
to Harvard. I wanted you to go to Princeton, because of its
Presbyterianism and because, too, of Harvard's Unitarianism. We
compromised on Yale--my own alma mater, as it was my father's. To my
belief, this was still, especially as to its pulpit, the stronghold of
orthodox Congregationalism. Was I a weak old man, compromising with Satan?
Are you to break my heart in these my broken years? For love of me, as for
the love of your own soul, _pray_. Leave the God of Moses until your
soul's stomach can take the strong meat of him--for he _is_ strong
meat--and come simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle--the Redeemer, who
died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls. Centre your
aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe,
_or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve_. Do not
deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet
question the inerrance of Holy Writ--yea, with its everlasting burnings.
"He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth
not shall be damned."
I am sad. I have lived too long.
GRANDFATHER.
(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)
_Grandad:_ It's all so plain, you must see it. I told you I had crossed to
the farther bank. Here is what one finds there: Taking him as God, Jesus
is ineffectual. Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become
beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, worthy, great--or even
plausible.
The instinct of the Jews did not mislead them. Jesus was too fine, too
good, to have come from their tribal god; yet too humanly limited to have
come from God, save as we all come from Him.
Since you insist that he be considered as God, I shall point out those
things which make him small--as a God. I would rather consider him as a
man and point out those things which make him great to me--things which I
cannot read without wet eyes--but you will not consider him as man, so let
him be a God, and let us see what we see. It is customary to speak of his
"sacrifice." What was it? Our catechism says, "Christ's humiliation
consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the
law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed
death of the cross; in being buried and continuing under the power of
death for a time."
As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to
any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of
integrity. Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites,
humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead
of into the family of a King? This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.
Let us be done with gods playing at being human, or at being half god and
half human. The time has come when, to prolong its usefulness, the Church
must concede--nay, proclaim--the manhood of Jesus; must separate him from
that atrocious scheme of human sacrifice, the logical extension of a
primitive Hebrew mythology--and take him in the only way that he commands
attention: As a man, one of the world's great spiritual teachers.
Insisting upon his godship can only make him preposterous to the modern
mind. Jesus, born to a carpenter's wife of Nazareth, declares himself, one
day about his thirtieth year, to be the Christ, the second person in the
universe, who will come in a cloud of glory to judge the world. He will
save into everlasting life those who believe him to be of divine origin.
Yet he has been called meek! Surely never was a more arrogant character in
history--never one less meek than this carpenter's son who ranks himself
second only to God, with power to send into everlasting hell those who
disbelieve him! He went abroad in fine arrogance, railing at lawyers and
the rich, rebuking, reproving, hurling angry epithets, attacking what we
to-day call "the decent element." He called the people constantly "Fools,"
"Blind Leaders of the Blind," "faithless and perverse," "a generation of
vipers," "sinful," "evil and adulterous," "wicked," "hypocrites," "whited
sepulchres."
As the god he worshipped was a tribal god, so he at first believed himself
to be a tribal saviour. He directed his disciples thus: "Go not into the
way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But
go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel"--(who emphatically
rejected and slew him for his pretensions). To the woman of Canaan whose
daughter was vexed with a devil, he said: "It is not meet to take the
children's bread to cast it to dogs." Imagine a God calling a woman a dog
_because she was not of his own tribe!_
And the vital test of godhood he failed to meet: It is his own test,
whereby he disproves his godship out of his own mouth. Compare these
sayings of Jesus, each typical of him:
"Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also." Yet he said to his Twelve:
"And whosoever shall not receive you nor hear you, when you depart thence
shake off the dust of your feet for a testimony against them."
Is that the consistency of a God or a man?
Again: "Blessed are the merciful," _but_ "Verily I say unto you it shall
be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for
that city." Is this the mercy which he tells us is blessed?
Again: "And as ye would that men should do to you do ye also to them
likewise." Another: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida ...
and thou, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down
to hell." Is not this preaching the golden rule and practicing something
else, as a man might?
Again: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.
"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the
publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren, what do ye more than
others? Do not even the publicans so?" That, sir, is a sentiment that
proves the claim of Jesus to be a teacher of morals. Here is one which,
placed beside it, proves him to have been a man.
"_Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the son of man also
confess before the angels of God_;
"_but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my
father, which is in heaven._"
Is it God speaking--or man? "_Do not even the publicans so?_"
Beside this very human contradiction, it is hardly worth while to hear him
say "Resist not evil," yet make a scourge of cords to drive the
money-changers from the temple in a fit of rage, human--but how ungodlike!
Believe me, the man Jesus is better than the god Jesus; the man is worth
while, for all his inconsistencies, partly due to his creed and partly to
his emotional nature. Indeed, we have not yet risen to the splendour of
his ideal--even the preachers will not preach it.
And the miracles? We need say nothing of those, I think. If a man disprove
his godship out of his own mouth, we shall not be convinced by a coin in a
fish's mouth or by his raising Lazarus, four days dead. So long as he
says, "I will confess him that confesseth me and deny him that denieth
me," we should know him for one of us, though he rose from the dead before
our eyes.
Then at the last you will say, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Well,
sir, the fruits of Christianity are what one might expect. You will say it
stands for the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. That it has
always done the reverse is Christianity's fundamental defect, and its
chief absurdity in this day when the popular unchurchly conception of God
has come to be one of some dignity.
"That ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the
Egyptians and Israel." There is the rock of separation upon which the
Church builded; the rock upon which it will presently split. The god of
the Jews set a difference between Israel and Egypt. So much for the
fatherhood of God. The Son sets the same difference, dividing the sheep
from the goats, according to the opinions they form of his claim to
godship. So much for the brotherhood of man. Christianity merely
caricatures both propositions. Nor do I see how we can attain any worthy
ideal of human brotherhood while this Christianity prevails: We must be
sheep and goats among ourselves, some in heaven, some in hell, still
seeking out reasons "Why the Saints in Glory Should Rejoice at the
Sufferings of the Damned." We shall be saints and sinners, sated and
starving. A God who separates them in some future life will have children
that separate themselves here upon His own very excellent authority. That
is why one brother of us must work himself to death while another idles
himself to death--because God has set a difference, and his Son after him,
and the Church after that. The defect in social Christendom to-day, sir,
is precisely this defect of the Christian faith--its separation, its
failure to teach what it chiefly boasts of teaching. We have, in
consequence, a society of thinly veneered predatoriness. And this, I
believe, is why our society is quite as unstable today as the Church
itself. They are both awakening to a new truth--which is _not_ separation.
The man who is proud of our Christian civilisation has ideals susceptible
of immense elevation. Christianity has more souls in its hell and fewer in
its heaven than any other religion whatsoever. Naturally, Christian
society is one of extremes and of gross injustice--of oppression and
indifference to suffering. And so it will be until this materialism of
separation is repudiated: until we turn seriously to the belief that men
are truly brothers, not one of whom can be long happy while any other
suffers.
Come, Grandad, let us give up this God of Moses. Doubtless he was good
enough for the early Jews, but man has always had to make God in his own
image, and you and I need a better one, for we both surpass this one in
all spiritual values--in love, in truth, in justice, in common decency--as
much as Jesus surpassed the unrepentant thief at his side. Remember that
an honest, fearless search for truth has led to all the progress we can
measure over the brutes. Why must it lose the soul?
BERNAL.
(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)
My boy, I shall not believe you are sane until I have seen you face to
face. I cannot believe you have fallen a victim to Universalism, which is
like the vale of Siddim, full of slime-pits. I am an old man, and my mind
goes haltingly, yet that is what I seem to glean from your rambling
screed. Come when you are through, for I must see you once more.
"For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that
the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not
condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath
not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God."
Lastly--doubt in infinite things is often wise, but doubt of God must be
blasphemy, else he would not be God, the all-perfect.
I pray it may be your mind is still sick--and recall to you these words of
one I will not now name to you: "Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do."
ALLAN DELCHER.
CHAPTER V
"IS THE HAND OF THE LORD WAXED SHORT?"
A dismayed old man, eagerly trying to feel incredulous, awaited the
home-coming of his grandsons at the beginning of that vacation.
Was the hand of the Lord waxed short, that so utter a blasphemer--unless,
indeed, he were possessed of a devil--could walk in the eye of Jehovah,
and no breach be made upon him? Even was the world itself so lax in these
days that one speaking thus could go free? If so, then how could God
longer refrain from drowning the world again? The human baseness of the
blaspheming one and the divine toleration that permitted it were alike
incredible.
A score of times the old man nerved himself to laugh away his fears. It
could not be. The young mind was still disordered.
On the night of the home-coming he greeted the youth quite as if all were
serene within him, determined to be in no haste and to approach the thing
lightly on the morrow--in the fond hope that a mere breath of authority
might blow it away.
And when, the next morning, they both drifted to the study, the old man
called up the smile that made his wrinkles sunny, and said in light tones,
above the beating of an anxious heart:
"So it's your theory, boy, that we must all be taken down with typhoid
before we can be really wise in matters of faith?"
But the youth answered, quite earnestly:
"Yes, sir; I really believe nothing less than that would clear most
minds--especially old ones. You see, the brain is a muscle and thought is
its physical exercise. It learns certain thoughts--to go through certain
exercises. These become a habit, and in time the muscle becomes stiff and
incapable of learning any new movements--also incapable of leaving off
the old. The religion of an old person is merely so much reflex nervous
action. It is beyond the reach of reason. The individual's mind can
affect it as little as it can teach the other muscles of his body new
suppleness."
He spoke with a certain restrained nervousness that was not reassuring.
But the old man would not yet be rebuffed from his manner of lightness.
"Then, wanting an epidemic of typhoid, we of the older generation must die
in error."
"Yes, sir--I doubt even the efficacy of typhoid in most cases; it's as
difficult for an old person to change a habit of thought as to take the
wrinkles from his face. That is why what we very grandly call 'fighting
for the truth' or 'fighting for the Lord' is merely fighting for our own
little notions; they have become so vital to us and we call them 'truth.'"
The youth stopped, with a palpable air of defiance, before which the old
man's assumption of ease and lightness was at last beaten down. He had
been standing erect by the table, still with the smile toning his
haggardness. Now the smile died; the whole man sickened, lost life
visibly, as if a dozen years of normal aging were condensed into the dozen
seconds.
He let himself go into the big chair, almost as if falling, his head
bowed, his eyes dulled to a look of absence, his arms falling weakly over
the chair's sides. A sigh that was almost a groan seemed to tell of pain
both in body and mind.
Bernal stood awkwardly regarding him, then his face lighted with a sudden
pity.
"But I thought _you_ could understand, sir; I thought you were different;
you have been like a chum to me. When I spoke of old persons it never
occurred to me that you could fall into that class! I never knew you to be
unjust, or unkind, or--narrow--perhaps I should say, unsympathetic."
The other gave no sign of hearing.
"My body was breaking so fast--and you break my heart!"
"There you are, sir," began the youth, a little excitedly. "Your heart is
breaking _not_ because I'm not good, but because I form a different
opinion from yours of a man rising from the dead, after he has been
crucified to appease the anger of his father."
"God help me! I'm so human. I _can't_ feel toward you as I should. Boy, I
_won't_ believe you are sane." He looked up in a sudden passion of hope.
"I won't believe Christ died in vain for my girl's little boy. Bernal,
boy, you are still sick of that fever!"
The other smiled, his youthful scorn for the moment overcoming his deeper
feeling for his listener.
"Then I must talk more. Now, sir, for God's sake let us have the plain
truth of the crucifixion. Where was the sacrifice? Can you not picture the
mob that would fight for the honour of crucifixion to-morrow, if it were
known that the one chosen would sit at the right hand of God and judge all
the world? I say there was no sacrifice, even if Christian dogma be
literal truth. Why, sir, I could go into the street and find ten men in
ten minutes who would be crucified a hundred times to save the souls of us
from hell--_not_ if they were to be rewarded with a seat on the throne of
God where they could send into hell those who did not believe in them--but
for no reward whatever--out of a sheer love for humanity. Don't you see,
sir, that we have magnified that crucifixion out of all proportion to the
plainest truth of our lives? You know I would die on a cross to-day, not
to redeem the world, but to redeem one poor soul--your own. If you deny
that, at least you won't dare deny that you would go on the cross to
redeem _my_ soul from hell--the soul of one man--and do you think you
would demand a reward for doing it, beyond knowing that you had ransomed
me from torment? Would it be necessary to your happiness that you also
have the power to send into hell all those who were not able to believe
you had actually died for me?
"One moment more, sir--" The thin, brown, old hand had been raised in
trembling appeal, while the lips moved without sound.
"You see every day in the papers how men die for other men, for one man,
for two, a dozen! Why, sir, you know you would die to save the lives of
five little children--their bare carnal lives, mind you, to say nothing of
their immortal souls. I believe I'd die myself to save two thousand--I
_know_ I would to save three--if their faces were clean and they looked
funny enough and helpless. Here, in this morning's paper, a negro
labourer, going home from his work in New York yesterday, pushed into
safety one of those babies that are always crawling around on railroad
tracks. He had time to see that he could get the baby off but not himself,
and then he went ahead. Doubtless it was a very common baby, and certainly
he was a very common man. Why, I could go down to Sing Sing tomorrow, and
I'll stake my own soul that in the whole cageful of criminals there isn't
one who would not eagerly submit to crucifixion if he believed that he
would thereby ransom the race from hell. And he wouldn't want the power to
damn the unbelievers, either. He would insist upon saving them with the
others."
"Oh, God, forgive this insane passion in my boy!"
"It was passion, sir--" he spoke with a sudden relenting--"but try to
remember that I've sought the truth honestly."
"You degrade the Saviour."
"No; I only raise man out of the muck of Christian belief about him. If
common men all might live lives of greater sacrifice than Jesus did,
without any pretensions to the supernatural, it only means that we need a
new embodiment for our ideals. If we find it in man--in God's creature--so
much the better for man and so much the more glory to God, who has not
then bungled so wretchedly as Christianity teaches."
"God forgive you this tirade--I know it is the sickness."
"I shall try to speak calmly, sir--but how much longer can an educated
clergy keep a straight face to speak of this wretchedly impotent God?
Christians of a truth have had to bind their sense of humour as the
Chinese bound their women's feet. But the laugh is gathering even now.
Your religion is like a tree that has lain long dead in the forest--firm
wood to the eye but dust to the first blow. And this is how it will
go--from a laugh--not through the solemn absurdities of the so-called
higher criticism, the discussing of this or that miracle, the tracing of
this or that myth of fall or deluge or immaculate conception or trinity to
its pagan sources; not that way, when before the inquiring mind rises the
sheer materialism of the Christian dogma, bristling with absurdities--its
vain bungling God of one tribe who crowns his career of impotencies--in
all but the art of slaughter--by instituting the sacrifice of a Son
begotten of a human mother, to appease his wrath toward his own creatures;
a God who even by this pitiful device can save but a few of us. Was ever
god so powerless? Do you think we who grow up now do not detect it? Is it
not time to demand a God of virtue, of integrity, of ethical dignity--a
religion whose test shall be moral, and not the opinion one forms of
certain alleged material phenomena?"
When he had first spoken the old man cowered low and lower in his chair,
with little moans of protest at intervals, perhaps a quick, almost
gasping, "God forgive him!" or a "Lord have mercy!" But as the talk went
on he became slowly quieter, his face grew firmer, he sat up in his chair,
and at the last he came to bend upon the speaker a look that made him
falter confusedly and stop.
"I can say no more, sir; I should not have said so much. Oh, Grandad, I
wouldn't have hurt you for all the world, yet I had to let you know why I
could not do what you had planned--and I was fool enough to think I could
justify myself to you!"
The old eyes still blazed upon him with a look of sorrow and of horror
that was yet, first of all, a look of power; the look of one who had
mastered himself to speak calmly while enduring uttermost pain.
"I am glad you have spoken. You were honest to do so. It was my error not
to be convinced at first, and thus save myself a shock I could ill bear.
But you have been sick, and I felt that I should not believe without
seeing you. I had built so much--so many years--on your preaching the
gospel of--of my Saviour. This hope has been all my life these last
years--now it is gone. But I have no right to complain. You are free; I
have no claim upon you; and I shall be glad to provide for you--to educate
you further for any profession you may have chosen--to start you in any
business--away from here--from this house--"
The young man flushed--wincing under this, but answered:
"Thank you, sir. I could hardly take anything further. I don't know what I
want to do, what I can do--I'm at sea now. But I will go. I'm sure only
that I want to get out--away--I will take a small sum to go with--I know
you would be hurt more if I didn't; enough to get me away--far enough
away."
He went out, his head bowed under the old man's stern gaze. But when the
latter had stepped to the door and locked it, his fortitude was gone.
Helplessly he fell upon his knees before the big chair--praying out his
grief in hard, dry sobs that choked and shook his worn body.
When Clytie knocked at the door an hour later, he was dry-eyed and
apparently serene, but busy with papers at his table.
"Is it something bad about Bernal, Mr. Delcher," she asked, "that he's
going away so queer and sudden?"
"_You_ pray for him, too, Clytie--you love him--but it's nothing to talk
of."
But the alarm of Clytemnestra was not to be put down by this.
"Oh, Mr. Delcher--" a look of horror grew big in her eyes--"You don't mean
to say he's gone and joined the Universalists?"
The old man shook his head.
"And he ain't a _Unitarian_?"
"No, Clytie; but our boy has been to college and it has left him rather
un--unconforming in some little matters--some details--doubtless his
doctrine is sound at core."
"But I supposed he'd learn everything off at that college, only I know he
never got fed half enough. What with all its studies and football and
clubs and things I thought it was as good as a liberal education."
"Too liberal, sometimes! Pray for Bernal--and we won't talk about it
again, Clytie, if you please."
Presently came Allan, who had heard the news.
"Bernal tells me he will not enter the ministry, sir; that he is going
away."
"We have decided that is best."
"You know, sir, I have suspected for some time that Bernal was not as
sound doctrinally as you could wish. His mind, if I may say it, is a
peculiarly literal one. He seems to lack a certain spiritual
comprehensiveness--an enveloping intuition, so to say, of the spiritual
value in a material fact. During that unhappy agitation for the revision
of our creed, I have heard him, touching the future state of unbaptised
infants, utter sentiments of a heterodoxy that was positively effeminate
in its sentimentality--sentiments which I shall not pain you by repeating.
He has often referred, moreover, with the same disordered sentimentality,
to the sad fate of our father--about whose present estate no churchman can
have any doubt. And then about our belief that even good works are an
abomination before God if performed by the unregenerate, the things I have
heard him--"
"Yes--yes--let us not talk of it further. Did you wish to see me
especially, Allan?"
"Well, yes, sir, I _had_ wished to, and perhaps now is the best moment. I
wanted to ask you, sir, how you would regard my becoming an Episcopalian.
I am really persuaded that its form of worship, translating as it does so
_much_ of the spiritual verity of life into visible symbols, is a form
better calculated than the Presbyterian to appeal to the great throbbing
heart of humanity. I hope I may even say, without offense, sir, that it
affords a wider scope, a broader sweep, a more stimulating field of
endeavour, to one who may have a capacity for the life of larger aspects.
In short, sir, I believe there is a great future for me in that church."
"I shouldn't wonder if there was," answered the old man, who had studied
his face closely during the speech. Yet he spoke with an extreme dryness
of tone that made the other look quickly up.
"It shall be as you wish," he continued, after a meditative pause--"I
believe you are better calculated for that church than for mine. Obey your
call."
CHAPTER VI
IN THE FOLLY OF HIS YOUTH
At early twilight Bernal, sore at heart for the pain he had been obliged
to cause the old man, went to the study-door for a last word with him.
"I believe there is no one above whose forgiveness I need, sir--but I
shall always be grieved if I can't have yours. I _do_ need that."
The old man had stood by the open door as if meaning to cut short the
interview.
"You have it. I forgive you any hurt you have done me; it was due quite as
much to my limitations as to yours. For that other forgiveness, which you
will one day know is more than mine--I--I shall always pray for that."
He stopped, and the other waited awkwardly, his heart rushing out in
ineffectual flood against the old man's barrier of stern restraint. For a
moment he made folds in his soft hat with a fastidious precision. Finally
he nerved himself to say calmly:
"I thank you, sir, for all you have done--all you have ever done for me
and for Allan--and, good-bye!"
"Good-bye!"
Though there was no hint of unkindness in the old man's voice, something
formal in his manner had restrained the other from offering his hand.
Still loath to go without it, he said again more warmly:
"Good-bye, sir!"
"Good-bye!"
This time he turned and went slowly down the dim hall, still making the
careful folds in his hat, as if he might presently recall something that
would take him back. At the foot of the stairs he stopped quickly to
listen, believing he had heard a call from above; but nothing came and he
went out. Still in the door upstairs was the old man--stern of face, save
that far back in his eyes a kind spirit seemed to strive ineffectually.
Across the lawn from her hammock Nancy called to Bernal. He went slowly
toward her, still suffering from the old man's coldness--and for the hurts
he had unwittingly put upon him.
The girl, as he went forward, stood to greet him, her gown, sleeveless,
neckless, taking the bluish tinge that early twilight gives to snow, a
tinge that deepened to dusk about her eyes and in her hair. She gave him
her hand and at once he felt a balm poured into his tortured heart. After
all, men were born to hurt and be hurt.
He sat in the rustic chair opposite the hammock, looking into Nancy's
black-lashed eyes of the Irish gray, noting that from nineteen to twenty
her neck had broadened at the base the least one might discern, that her
face was less full yet richer in suggestion--her face of the odds and ends
when she did not smile. At this moment she was not only unsmiling, but
excited.
"Oh, Bernal, what is it? Tell me quick. Allan was so vague--though he said
he'd always stand by you, no matter what you did. What _have_ you done,
Bernal? Is it a college scrape?"
"Oh, that's only Allan's big-hearted way of talking! He's so generous and
loyal I think he's often been disappointed that I didn't do something, so
he _could_ stand by me. No--no scrapes, Nance, honour bright!"
"But you're leaving--"
"Well, in a way I have done something. I've found I couldn't be a minister
as Grandad had set his heart on my being--"
"But if you haven't done anything wicked, why not?"
"Oh, I'm not a believer."
"In what?"
"In anything, I think--except, well, in you and Grandad and--and Allan and
Clytie--yes, and in myself, Nance. That's a big point. I believe in
myself."
"And you're going because you don't believe in other things?"
"Yes, or because I believe too much--just as you like to put it. I
demanded a better God of Grandad, Nance--one that didn't create hell and
men like me to fill it just for the sake of scaring a few timid mortals
into heaven."
"You know Aunt Bell is an unbeliever. She says no one with an open
mind can live twenty years in Boston without being vastly
broadened--'broadening into the higher unbelief,' she calls it. She
says she has passed through nearly every stage of unbelief there is,
but that she feels the Lord is going to bring her back at last to rest
in the shadow of the Cross."
As Aunt Bell could be heard creaking heavily in a willow rocker on the
piazza near-by, the young man suppressed a comment that arose within him.
"Only, unbelievers are apt to be fatiguing" the girl continued, in a lower
tone. "You know Aunt Bell's husband, Uncle Chester--the meekest, dearest
little man in the world, he was--well, once he disappeared and wasn't
heard of again for over four years--except that they knew his bank account
was drawn on from time to time. Then, at last, his brother found him,
living quietly under an assumed name in a little town outside of
Boston--pretending that he hadn't a relative in the world. He told his
brother he was just beginning to feel rested. Aunt Bell said he was
demented. While he was away she'd been all through psychometry, the
planchette, clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology, and Unitarianism. What are
you, Bernal?"
"Nothing, Nance--that's the trouble."
"But where are you going, and what for?"
"I don't know either answer--but I can't stay here, because I'm
blasphemous--it seems--and I don't want to stay, even if I weren't sent.
I want to be out--away. I feel as if I must be looking for something I
haven't found. I suspect it's a fourth dimension to religion. They have
three--even breadth--but they haven't found faith yet--a faith that
doesn't demand arbitrary signs, parlour-magic, and bloody, weird tales in
a book that becomes their idol."
The girl looked at him long in silence, swaying a little in the hammock, a
bare elbow in one hand, her meditative chin in the other, the curtains of
her eyes half-drawn, as if to let him in a little at a time before her
wonder. Then, at last:
"Why, you're another Adam--being sent out of the garden for your sin. Now
tell me--honest--was the sin worth it? I've often wondered." She gave an
eager little laugh.
"Why, Nance, it's worth so much that you want to go of your own accord. Do
you suppose Adam could have stayed in that fat, lazy, silly garden after
he became alive--with no work, no knowledge, no adventure, no chance to do
wrong? As for earning his bread--the only plausible hell I've ever been
able to picture is one where there was nothing to do--no work, no
puzzling, no chances to take, no necessity of thinking. Now, isn't that an
ideal hell? And is it my fault if it happens to be a description of what
Christians look forward to as heaven? I tell you, Adam would have gone out
of that garden from sheer boredom after a few days. The setting of the
angel with the flaming sword to guard the gate shows that God still failed
to understand the wonderful creature he had made."
She smiled, meditative, wondering.
"I dare say, for my part, I'd have eaten that apple if the serpent had
been at all persuasive. Bernal, I wonder--and wonder--and wonder--I'm
never done. And Aunt Bell says I'll never be a sweet and wholesome and
stimulating companion to my husband, if I don't stop being so vague and
fantastic."
"What does she call being vague and fantastic?"
"Not wanting any husband."
"Oh!"
"Bernal, it's like the time that you ran off when you were a wee thing--to
be bad."
"And you cried because I wouldn't take you with me."
"I can feel the woe of it yet."
"You're dry-eyed now, Nance."
"Yes--and the pink parasol and the buff shoes I meant to take with me are
also things of the past. Mercy! The idea of going off with an unbeliever
to be bad and--everything! 'The happy couple are said to look forward to a
life of joyous wickedness, several interesting crimes having been planned
for the coming season. For their honeymoon infamy they will perpetrate a
series of bank-robberies along the Maine coast.' There--how would that
sound?"
"You're right, Nance--I wouldn't take you this time either, even if you
cried. And your little speech is funny and all that--but Nance, I believe,
these last years, we've both thought of things now and then--things, you
know--things to think of and not talk of--and see here--The man was driven
out of the garden--but not the woman. She isn't mentioned. She could stay
there--"
"Until she got tired of it herself?"
"Until the man came back for her."
He thought her face was glowing duskily in the twilight.
"I wonder--wonder about so many things," she said softly.
"I believe you're a sleeping rebel yourself, Nance. If ever you do eat
from that tree, there'll be no holding you. You won't wait to be driven
forth!"
"And you are, a wicked young man--that kind never comes back in the
stories."
"That may be no jest, Nance. I should surely be wicked, if I thought it
brings the happiness it's said to. Under this big sky I am free from any
moral law that doesn't come from right here inside me. Can you realize
that? Do I seem bad for saying it? What they call the laws of God are
nothing. I suspect them all, and I'll make every one of them find its
authority in me before I obey it."
"It sounds--well--unpromising, Bernal."
"I told you it was serious, Nance. I see but one law clearly--I am bound
to want happiness. Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance. No
man can possibly want anything else. That's the only thing under heaven
I'm sure of at this moment--the one universal law under which we all make
our mistakes--good people and bad alike?"
"But, Bernal, you wouldn't be bad--not really bad?"
"Well, Nance, I've a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn't really
compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth. I know the
Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious
thing the Church implies it to be."
"You make me afraid, Bernal--"
"But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?"
"--and you make me wonder."
"I think that's all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go. I have to
say good-bye to Clytie yet. The poor soul is convinced that I have become
a Unitarian and that there's a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from
her. She says grandad evaded her questions about it. She doesn't dream
there are depths below Unitarianism. I must try to convince her that I'm
not _that_ bad--that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not
that. Nance--girl!"
He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her. She turned her face
away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully,
tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it
felt itself--as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light
without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.
Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to
tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.
When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her
skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again
made the careful folds in his hat. Then they shook hands very stiffly, and
went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate
that beautiful, crude young lust for living--too fierce to be tamed save
by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour
and sound made one by heat--the song Nature sings unendingly--but heard
only by young ears.
The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the
grace of faith.
"That elder young Linford," began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, "has a
future. You know I talked to him about the Episcopal Church, strongly
advising him to enter it. For all my broad views"--Aunt Bell sighed
here--"I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian
is ever thoroughly at ease in this world."
Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of
smartness--of coquetry, indeed--as to her exquisitely small hands and
feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone
harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent
years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.
"Of course this young chap could see at once," she went on, "what
immensely better form it is than Calvinism. _Dear_ me! Imagine one being a
Presbyterian in this day!" It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell
poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in
a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.
"And he tells me that he has his grandfather's consent. Really, my dear,
with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a
future in the Episcopal Church. I dare say he'll be wearing the lawn
sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he's forty."
"Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is--well, just the least
trifle--I was going to say, vain of his appearance--but I'll make it
'self-conscious'?"
"Child, don't you know that a young man, really beautiful without being
effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it. But vain he is not. It
mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it."
"But why speak of it so often? He was telling me to-day of an elderly
Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking
resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth."
"Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store
ask the clerk who 'that handsome stranger' was. But, my dear, he tells
them as jokes on himself, and he's so sheepish about it. And he's such a
splendid orator. I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college
papers. I don't seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of
the most beautiful expressions. One, I remember, begins, 'Oh, of all the
flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human
heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of--' you know I've
forgotten what it was--Civilisation or Truth or something. Anyway,
whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation
out from the maze of antiquity, where she now waits to be freighted with
the precious fruits of living genius, and so on."
"That seems impressive and--mixed, perhaps?"
"Of course I can't remember things in their order, but it was about the
essential nature of man being gregarious, and truth is a potent factor in
civilisation, and something would be a tear on the world's cold cheek to
make it burn forever--isn't that striking? And Greece had her Athens and
her Corinth, but where now is Greece with her proud cities? And Rome,
Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and splendour. Of course I can't recall
his words. There was a beautiful reference to America, I remember, from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the
ever-tepid waters of the sunny South--and a perfectly splendid passage
about the world is and ever has been illiberal. Witness the lonely lamp of
Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of
Sidney--Sidney who, I wonder?"
"Has it taken you that way, Aunt Bell?"
"And France, the saddest example of a nation without a God, and succeeding
generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory,
bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet
acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with
vital interest to every thinking man--"
"Spare me, Aunt Bell--it's like Coney Island, with all those carrousels
going around and five bands playing at once!"
"But his peroration! I can't pretend to give you any idea of its
beauties--"
"Don't!"
"Get him to declaim it for you. It begins in the most impressive language
about his standing on top of the Rocky Mountains one day and placing his
feet upon a solid rock, he saw a tempest gathering in the valley far
below. So he watches the storm--in his own language, of course--while all
around him is sunshine. And such should be our aim in life, to plant our
feet on the solid rock of--how provoking! I can't remember what the rock
was--anyway, we are to bid those in the valley below to cease their
bickerings and come up to the rock--I think it was Intellectual
Greatness--No!--Unselfishness--that's it. And the title of the paper was a
sermon in itself--'The Temporal Advantage of the Individual No Norm of
Morality.' Isn't that a beautiful thought in itself? Nancy, that chap will
waste himself until he has a city parish."
There was silence for a little time before Aunt Bell asked, as one having
returned to baser matters:
"I wonder if the jacket of my gray suit came back from that clumsy tailor.
I forgot to ask Ellen if an express package came."
And Nancy, whose look was bent far into the dusk, answered:
"Oh, I wonder if he will come back!"
BOOK THREE
The Age of Faith
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
THE PERVERSE BEHAVIOUR OF AN OLD MAN AND A YOUNG MAN
When old Allan Delcher slept with his fathers--being so found in the big
chair, with the worn, leather-bound Bible open in his lap--the revived
but still tender faith of Aunt Bell Hardwick was bitten as by frost. And
this though the Bible had lain open at that psalm in which David is said
to describe the corruption of a natural man--a psalm beginning, "The
fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"
For it straightway appeared that the dead man had in life done a
perverse and inexplicable thing, to the bitter amazement of those who
had learned to trust him. On the day after he sent a blasphemous
grandson from his door he had called for Squire Cumpston, announcing to
the family his intention to make an entirely new will--a thing for which
there seemed to be a certain sad necessity.
When he could no longer be reproached it transpired that he had left "to
Allan Delcher Linford, son of one Clayton Linford," a beggarly pittance
of five thousand dollars; and "to my beloved grandson, Bernal Linford, I
give, devise and bequeath the residue of my estate, both real and
personal."
Though the husband of her niece wore publicly a look of faith
unimpaired, and was thereby an example to her, Aunt Bell declared
herself to be once more on the verge of believing that the proofs of an
overseeing Providence, all-wise and all-loving, were by no means
overwhelming; that they were, indeed, of so frail a validity that she
could not wonder at people falling away from the Church. It was a trying
time for Aunt Bell. She felt that her return to the shadow of the cross
was not being made enough of by the One above. After years of running
after strange gods, the Episcopal service as administered by Allan had
prevailed over her seasoned skepticism: through its fascinating leaven
of romance--with faint and, as it seemed to her, wholly reverent hints
of physical culture--the spirit may be said to have blandished her. And
now this turpitude in a man of God came to disturb the first tender
rootlings of her new faith.
The husband of her niece had loyally endeavoured to dissuade her from
this too human reaction.
"God has chosen to try me for a purpose, Aunt Bell," he said very
simply. "I ought to be proud of it--eager for any test--and I am. True,
in these last years I had looked upon grandfather's fortune as mine--not
only by implied promise, but by all standards of right--even of
integrity. For surely a man could not more nearly forfeit his own
rights, in every moral aspect, than poor Bernal has--though I meant
always to stand by him. So you see, I must conclude that God means to
distinguish me by a test. He may even subject me to others; but I shall
not wince. I shall welcome His trials. He turned upon her the face of
simple faith."
"Did you speak to that lawyer about the possibility of a contest--of
proving unsound mind?"
"I did, but he saw no chance whatever."
Aunt Bell hereupon surveyed her beautifully dimpled knuckles minutely,
with an affectionate pride--a pride not uncritical, yet wholly
convinced.
"Of course," added Allan after a moment's reflection, "there's no sense
in believing that every bit of one's hard luck is sent by God to test
one. One must in all reverence take every precaution to prove that the
disaster is not humanly remediable. And this, I may say, I have done
with thoroughness--with great thoroughness."
"Bernal may be dead," suggested Aunt Bell, brightening now from an
impartial admiring of the toes of her small, plump slippers.
"God forbid that he should be cut off in his unbelief--but then, God's
will be done. If that be true, of course, the matter is different.
Meantime we are advertising."
"I wish I had your superb faith, Allan. I wish Nancy had it...."
Her niece's husband turned his head and shoulders until she had the
three-quarters view of his face.
"I have faith, Aunt Bell. God knows my unworthiness, even as you know it
and I know it--but I have faith!"
The golden specks in his hazel eyes blazed with humility, and a flush of
the same virtue mantled his perfect brow.
Such news of Bernal Linford as had come back to Edom, though meagre and
fragmentary, was of a character to confirm the worst fears of those who
loved him. The first report came within a year after his going, and
caused a shaking of many heads.
An estimable farmer, one Caleb Webster, living on the outskirts of Edom,
had, in a blameless spirit of adventure, toured the Far West, at
excursion rates said to be astounding for cheapness. He had met the
unfortunate young man in one of the newer mining towns along his
exciting route.
"He was kind of nursin' a feller that had the consumption," ran the
gossip of Mr. Webster, "some one he'd fell in with out in them parts,
that had gone there to git cured. But, High Mighty! the way them two
carried on at all hours wasn't goin' to cure no one of nothin'!
Specially gamblin', which was done right in public, you might say,
though the sharpers never skinned me none, I'll say that! But these two
was at it every night, and finally they done just like I told the young
fools they'd do--they lost all they had. They come into the Commercial
House one night where I was settin' lookin' over a time-table, both
seemin' down in the mouth. And all to once this sick young man--Mr.
Hoover, his name was--bust out cryin'--him bein' weak or mebbe in liquor
or somethin'.
"'Every cent lost!' he says, the tears runnin' down those yellow, sunk
cheeks of his. But Bernal seems to git chipper again when he sees how
Mr. Hoover is takin' it, so he says, 'Haven't you got a cent left,
Hoover? Haven't you got anythin' at all left? Just think,' he says,
'what I stood to win on that last turn, if it'd come my way--at four to
one,' he says, or somethin' like that; them gamblin' terms is too much
for me. 'Hain't you got nothin' at all left?' he says.
"Then this Hoover--still cryin', mind you--he says, 'Not a cent in the
world except forty dollars in my trunk upstairs that I saved out to bury
me with--and they won't send me another cent,' he says, 'because I tried
'em.'
"It sounded awful to hear him talkin' like that about his own buryin',
but it didn't phase Bernal none.
"'Forty dollars!' he says, kind of sniffy like. 'Why, man, what could
you do for forty dollars? Don't you know such things are very outrageous
in price here? Forty _dollars_--why,' he says, 'the very best you could
do would be one of these plain pine things with black cloth tacked on to
it, and pewter trimmin's if _any_,' he says. 'Think of _pewter_
trimmin's!'
"'Say,' he says, when Hoover begun to look up at him, 'you run and dig
up your old forty and I'll go back right now and win you out a full
satin-lined, silver-trimmed one, polished mahogany and gold name-plate,
and there'll be enough for a clock of immortelles with the hands stopped
at just the hour it happens,' he says. 'And you want to hurry,' he says,
'it ought to be done right away--with that cough of yours.'
"Me? Gosh, I felt awful--I wanted to drop right through the floor, but
this Hoover, he says all at once, still snufflin', mind you: 'Say,
that's all right,' he says. 'If I'm goin' to do it at all, I ought to do
it right for the credit of my folks. I ought to give this town a flash
of the right thing,' he says.
"Then he goes upstairs, leaning on the balusters, and gets his four
ten-dollar bills that had been folded away all neat at the bottom of his
trunk, and before I could think of anythin' wholesome to say--I was that
scandalised--they was goin' off across the street to the Horseshoe
Gamin' Parlour, this feller Hoover seemin' very sanguine and asking
Bernal whether he was sure they was a party in town could do it up right
after they'd went and won the money for it.
"Well, sir, I jest set there thinkin' how this boy Bernal Linford was
brought up for a preacher, and 'Jest look at him now!' I says to
myself--and I guess it was mebbe an hour later I seen 'em comin' out of
the swingin' blinds in the door of this place, and a laffin' fit to kill
themselves. 'High Mighty! they done it!' I says, watchin' 'em laff and
slap each other on the back till Hoover had to stop in the middle of the
street to cough. Well, they come into the Commercial office where I am
and I says, 'Well, boys, how much did you fellers win?' and Hoover says,
'Not a cent! We lost our roll,' he says. 'It's the blamedest funniest
thing I ever heard of,' he says, just like that, laffin' again fit to
choke.
"'_I_ don't see anythin' to laff at,' I says. 'How you goin' to live?'
"'How's he goin' to die?' says Bernal, 'without a cent to do it on?'
"'That's the funny part of it,' says Hoover. 'Linford thought of it
first. How _can_ I die now? It wouldn't be square,' he says--'me without
a cent!'
"Then they both began to laugh--but me, I couldn't see nothin' funny
about it.
"Wal, I left early next mornin', not wantin' to have to refuse 'em a
loan."