The cold that winter was more persistent and severe in the mountains than
down in Ashurst.
At Lockhaven the river had been frozen over for a month, even above the
bridge and the mills, where the current was swiftest. Long lines of
sawdust, which had been coiling and whirling in the eddies, or stretching
across the black seething water, were caught in the ice, or blown about
with the powdered snow over its surface.
Rafts could not come down the river, so the mills had no work to do, for
the logs on hand at the beginning of the cold snap had been sawed into
long rough planks, and piled in the lumber-yards, ready to be rafted as
soon as the thaw came. The cold, still air was sweet with the fragrance
of fresh pine boards, and the ground about the mills was covered with
sawdust, so that footsteps fell as silently as though on velvet, instead
of ringing sharp against the frozen ground.
John Ward, walking wearily home from a long visit to a sick woman, came,
as he crossed the lumber-yards, upon a group of raftsmen; they had not
heard his approach, and were talking loudly, with frequent bursts of
drunken laughter.
It was towards evening; the sky had been threatening all day, and when
the clouds lifted suddenly in the west, blown aside like tumultuous folds
of a gray curtain, the red sun sent a flood of color across the wintry
landscape; the bare branches of the trees were touched with light, and
the pools of black, clear ice gleamed with frosty fire. John's face had
caught the radiance.
He had come up to the men so silently that he had been standing beside
them a moment before they noticed him, and then Tom Davis, with a start
of drunken fear, tried to hide the bottle which he held.
"Damn you, mate, you're spillin' it!" cried one of the others, making an
unsteady lunge forward to seize the bottle.
"Let up, let up," said Tom thickly. "Don't ye see the preacher?" Though
Davis was not one of his flock, he had the same reverence for the
preacher which his congregation felt. All Lockhaven loved and feared John
Ward.
John had not spoken, even though a little boy, building block houses on a
heap of sawdust near the men, had come up and taken his hand with a look
of confident affection.
The man who had saved the whiskey stumbled to his feet, and leaning
against a pile of lumber stood open-mouthed, waiting for the preacher's
rebuke; but Davis hung his head, and began to fumble for a pipe in his
sagging coat pocket; with clumsy fingers, scattering the tobacco from his
little bag, he tried to fill it.
"Tom," the preacher said, at last, "I want you to come home with me, now.
And Jim, you will give me that bottle."
"I can't go home, preacher. I've got to buy some things. She said I was
to buy some things for the brats."
"Have you bought them?" John asked. Tom gave a silly laugh.
"Not yet, preacher, not yet."
"Listen, men," John said, with sudden sternness. "You have let this child
see you on the road to hell. If he can remember this sight, it will save
his soul."
Tom Davis shrank as the preacher said "hell." He gave a maudlin cry, and
almost whimpered, "No, sir, no, preacher, I am a-goin' to reform." John
had known what note to touch in this debased nature. Not love, nor hope,
nor shame, would move Tom Davis, but fear stung him into a semblance of
sobriety. "I'll come along wi' you," he went on, swaying back and forth,
and steadying himself with a hand on the lumber against which he had been
leaning. "This is the last time, preacher. You won't see me this way no
more."
Here he hiccoughed, and then laughed, but remembering himself instantly,
drew his forehead into a scowl.
The other men slunk away, for the minister had taken the bottle, and Tom
Davis was following him through the narrow passages between the great
piles of boards, towards his house.
The boy had gone back to his block house; the pile of sawdust in the
sheltered corner was more comfortable and not more cheerless than his own
home.
John left Davis at his door. The man looked cowed, but there was no shame
in his face, and no sense of sin. It was unpleasant to be caught by the
preacher, and he was frightened by that awful word, which it was the
constant effort of his numb, helpless brain to forget.
John went on alone. He walked slowly, with his eyes fixed absently on the
ground, thinking. "Poor Davis," he said, "poor fellow!" The man's future
seemed quite hopeless to the preacher, and, thinking of it, he recalled
Mrs. Davis's regret that he had not spoken of hell in his sermon.
John sighed. His grief at Helen's unbelief was growing in his silence;
yet he realized the inconsistency of his love in hiding his sorrow from
her.
"It is robbing her, not to let her share it," he thought, "but I dare not
speak to her yet."
More than once during the winter he had tried to show her the truth and
the beauty of various doctrines, generally that of reprobation, but she
had always evaded discussion; sometimes lightly, for it seemed such a
small matter to her, but always firmly.
The preacher loitered, stopping to look at the river and the gaunt line
of mills against the sky. He left the path, and went down to the edge of
the white ice, so full of air bubbles, it seemed like solid snow, and
listened to the gurgle of the hurrying water underneath.
A shed was built close to the stream, to shelter a hand fire-engine. It
had not been used for so long that the row of buckets beside it, which
were for dipping up water to fill it, were warped and cracked, their iron
bands rusty, and out of one or two the bottom had fallen. The door of the
shed creaked on its one hinge, and John looked up surprised to see how
dark it had grown, then he turned towards home.
"Yes," he said to himself, "I must show her her danger. It will grieve
her to force an argument upon her, and I don't think she has had one
unhappy hour since we were married; but even if it were not for her own
soul's sake, I must not let my people starve for the bread of life, to
spare her. I must not be silent concerning the danger of the sinner. But
it will trouble her,--it will trouble her."
John had dallied with temptation so long, that it had grown bold, and did
not always hide under the plea of wisdom, but openly dared him to inflict
the pain of grieving his wife upon himself. He still delayed, yet there
were moments when he knew himself a coward, and had to summon every
argument of the past to his defense. But before he reached the parsonage
door he had lapsed into such tender thoughts of Helen that he said again,
"Not quite yet; it seems to annoy her so to argue upon such things. I
must leave it until I win her to truth by the force of its own
constraining beauty. Little by little I will draw her attention to it.
And I must gradually make my sermons more emphatic."
Helen met him at the door, and drew him into the house. "You are so
late," she said, pressing his chill fingers against her warm cheek, and
chafing them between her hands.
He stopped to kiss her before he took his coat off, smiling at her
happiness and his own.
"How raw and cold it is!" she said. "Come into the study; I have a
beautiful fire for you. Is it going to snow, do you think? How is your
sick woman?"
"Better," he answered, as he followed her into the room. "Oh, Helen, it
is good to be at home. I have not seen you since noon."
She laughed, and then insisted that he should sit still, and let her
bring his supper into the study, and eat it there by the fire. He watched
her with a delicious luxury of rest and content; for he was very tired
and very happy.
She put a little table beside him, covered with a large napkin; and then
she brought a loaf of brown bread and some honey, with a mould of yellow
butter, and last a little covered dish of chicken.
"I broiled that for you myself," she explained proudly; "and I did not
mean to give you coffee, but what do you think?--the whole canister of
tea has disappeared. When Alfaretta went to get it for my supper, it had
gone."
"Oh," John said, smiling, while Helen began to pour some cream into his
coffee from a flat little silver jug, "I forgot to mention it: the fact
is, I took that tea with me this afternoon,--I thought probably they had
none in the house; and I wish you could have seen the woman's joy at the
sight of it. I cooked some for her,--she told me how," he said
deprecatingly, for Helen laughed; "and she said it was very good, too,"
he added.
But Helen refused to believe that possible. "It was politeness, John,"
she cried gayly, "and because, I suppose, you presented her with my
lacquered canister."
"I did leave it," John admitted; "I never thought of it." But he forgot
even to ask forgiveness, as she bent towards him, resting her hand on
his shoulder while she put his cup beside him.
"The fire has flushed your cheek," he said, touching it softly, the
lover's awe shining in his eyes; with John it had never been lost in the
assured possession of the husband. Helen looked at him, smiling a little,
but she did not speak. Silence with her told sometimes more than words.
"It has been such a long afternoon," he said. "I was glad to hurry home;
perhaps that is the reason I forgot the canister."
"Shall I send you back for it?" She put her lips for a moment against his
hand, and then, glancing out at the night for sheer joy at the warmth and
light within, she added, "Why, what is that glow, John? It looks like
fire."
He turned, and then pushed back his chair and went to the window.
"It does look like fire," he said anxiously.
Helen had followed him, and they watched together a strange light, rising
and falling, and then brightening again all along the sky. Even as they
looked the upper heavens began to pulsate and throb with faint crimson.
"It is fire!" John exclaimed. "Let me get my coat. I must go."
"Oh, not now," Helen said. "You must finish your supper; and you are so
tired, John!"
But he was already at the door and reaching for his hat.
"It must be the lumber-yards, and the river is frozen!"
"Wait!" Helen cried. "Let me get my cloak. I will go if you do," and a
moment later the parsonage door banged behind them, and they hurried out
into the darkness.
The street which led to the lumber-yards had been silent and deserted
when John passed through it half an hour before, but now all Lockhaven
seemed to throng it.
The preacher and his wife could hear the snapping and crackling of flames
even before they turned the last corner and saw the blaze, which,
sweeping up into the cold air, began to mutter before it broke with a
savage roar. They caught sight of Gifford's broad shoulders in the crowd,
which stood, fascinated and appalled, watching the destruction of what to
most of them meant work and wages.
"Oh, Giff!" Helen said when they reached his side, "why don't they do
something? Have they tried to put it out?"
"It's no use to try now," Gifford answered. "They didn't discover it in
time. It has made such headway, that the only thing to do is to see that
it burns out, without setting fire to any of the houses. Fortunately the
wind is towards the river."
John shook his head; he was too breathless to speak for a moment; then he
said, "Something must be done."
"There is no use, Mr. Ward," Gifford explained. But John scarcely heard
him; his people's comfort, their morality almost,--for poverty meant
deeper sin to most of them,--was burning up in those great square piles
of planks.
"Men," he shouted, "men, the engine! To the river! Run! run!"
"Nothing can be done," Gifford said, as the crowd broke, following the
preacher, who was far ahead of all; but he too started, as though to join
them, and then checked himself, and went back into the deserted street,
walking up and down, a self-constituted patrol.
Almost every man had gone to the river. Tom Davis, however, with Molly
beside him, stood lolling against a tree, sobered, indeed, by the shock
of the fire, but scarcely steady enough on his legs to run. Another, who
was a cripple, swaying to and fro on his crutches with excitement, broke
into a storm of oaths because his companion did not do the work for which
he was himself too helpless. But Tom only gazed with bleared eyes at the
fire, and tried to stand up straight.
The little crowd of women about Helen had been silenced at first by the
tumult and glare, but now broke into wild lamentations, and entreaties
that Heaven would send the engine soon, wringing their hands, and
sobbing, and frightening the children that clung about their skirts even
more than the fire itself.
"How did it start?" Helen said, turning to the woman next to her, who,
shivering with excitement, held a baby in her arms, who gazed at the fire
with wide, tranquil eyes, as though it had been gotten up for his
entertainment.
"They say," answered the woman, tossing her head in the direction of Tom
Davis,--"they say him and some other fellows was in 'mong the lumber this
afternoon, drinkin', you know, and smokin'. Most likely a match dropped,
or ashes from their pipes. Drunken men ain't reasonable about them
things," she added, with the simplicity of experience. "They don't stop
to think they're burnin' up money, an' whiskey too; for Dobbs don't trust
'em, now the mill is shut down."
"Yes," said another woman who stood by, "them men! what do they care?
You," she shouted, shaking her fist at Tom,--"you'll starve us all, will
ye? an' your poor wife, just up from her sick bed! I do' know as she'll
be much worse off, though, when he is out of work," she added, turning to
Helen--"fer every blessed copper he has goes to the saloon."
"Yer man's as bad as me," Tom protested, stung by her taunts and the
jeers of the cripple.
"An' who is it as leads him on?" screamed the woman. "An' if he does take
a drop sometimes, it wasn't him as was in the lumber-yard this afternoon,
a-settin' fire to the boards, an' burnin' up the food and comfort o' the
whole town!"
Tom hurled a torrent of profanity at the woman and the cripple
collectively, and then stumbled towards the road with the crowd, for the
fire was approaching the side of the yard where they stood, and beating
them back into the village street.
The air was filled with the appalling roar and scream of the flames;
showers of sparks were flung up against the black sky, as with a
tremendous crash the inside of one of the piles would collapse; and
still the engine did not come.
"Hurry! hurry!" the women shouted with hoarse, terrified voices, and some
ran to the edge of the bluff and looked down at the river.
The men were hurrying; but as they drew the long-unused engine from its
shed, an axle broke, and with stiff fingers they tried to mend it. Some
had had to run for axes to break the ice, and then they pushed and
jostled each other about the square hole they had cut, to dip up the
dark, swift water underneath; and all the while the sky behind them grew
a fiercer red, and the very ice glared with the leaping flames. At last,
pulling and pushing, they brought the little engine up the slope, and
then with a great shout dragged it into the outskirts of the yard. They
pumped furiously, and a small jet of water was played upon the nearest
pile of boards. A hissing cloud of steam almost hid the volunteer
firemen, but the flames leaped and tossed against the sky, and the sparks
were sucked up into the cold air, and whirled in sheets across the river.
John Ward came breathlessly towards his wife. "Are you all right, Helen?
You seemed too near; come back a little further." Then, suddenly seeing
the woman beside her with the baby in her arms, he stopped, and looked
about. "Where's your boy, Mrs. Nevins?" he said. The woman glanced around
her.
"I--I'm not just sure, preacher."
"Have you seen him since six o'clock?"
"No--I--I ain't," the woman answered. There was something in John's face
which terrified her, though the mere absence of her son gave her no
uneasiness.
"Go back, Helen," he said, quickly,--"go as far as that second house,
or I shall not feel sure you are safe. Mrs. Nevins, we must look for
Charley. I am afraid--he was in the lumber-yard this afternoon"--
John did not wait to hear the woman's shriek; he turned and ran from
group to group, looking for the boy whom he had seen building block
houses on the pile of sawdust; but the mother, pushing her baby into
a neighbor's arms, ran up and down like a mad woman.
"My boy!" she cried; "Charley! Charley! He's in the fire,--my boy's in
the fire!"
Tom Davis had heard the hurried words of the preacher, and the mother's
cries roused all the manhood drink had left. He hesitated a moment, and
then pushing Molly towards the cripple whose taunts still rung in his
ears, "Take care of the brat!" he said, and pulling off his coat, which
he wrapped about his head to guard himself from the falling boards, he
stooped almost double, and with his left arm bent before his face, and
his right extended to feel his way, he ran towards the fire, and
disappeared in the blinding smoke.
Even Mrs. Nevins was silenced for a moment of shuddering suspense; and
when she tossed her arms into the air again, and shrieked, it was because
John Ward came towards her with Charley trotting at his side.
"You should have looked after the child," the preacher said sternly. "I
found him on the other side of the yard, near the fire-engine."
Mrs. Nevins caught the boy in her arms in a paroxysm of rage and joy; and
then she thought of Tom.
"Oh, preacher," she cried, "preacher! he's run in after him, Tom Davis
has!"
"_There?_" John said, pointing to the fire. "God help him!"
There was no human help possible. Tom had run down between two long piles
of boards, not yet in flames, but already a sheet of fire swept madly
across the open space. They could only look at each other, dumb with
their own helplessness, and wait. How long this horror of expectation
lasted no one knew, but at last, as if from the very mouth of hell, Tom
Davis came, staggering and swaying,--his singed coat still rolled about
his head, and his hands stretched blindly out.
John Ward ran towards him, and even the cripple pressed forward to take
his hand. But with unseeing eyes he stood a moment, and then fell forward
on his face. They lifted him, and carried him back into the street, away
from the glare of light; there were plenty of kindly hands and pitying
words, for most of the crowd had gathered about him; even the men who had
brought the engine followed, for their efforts to subdue the fire were
perfectly futile.
They laid him down on the stiff frozen grass by the roadside; but Molly
clung so tightly about his neck, that the preacher could scarcely move
her to put his hand upon Tom's heart; Helen lifted the little girl, and
laid her own wet cheek against the child's.
The group of men and women stood awed and silent about the prostrate
form, waiting for John to raise his head from the broad, still breast;
when he lifted it, they knew all was over.
Whether the shock of the heat and tumult, coming upon the stupor of
intoxication, and paralyzing the action of the heart, or whether a blow
from a burning plank, had killed him, no one could know. The poor sodden,
bloated body was suddenly invested with the dignity of death; and how
death had come was for a little while a secondary thought.
"He is dead," John said. "He has died like a brave man!"
He stood looking down at the body for some moments, and no one spoke.
Then, as there was a stir among those who stood near, and some one
whispered that Mrs. Davis must be told, the preacher looked away from
the dead man's face.
"Poor soul," he said, "poor soul!"
A few light flakes of snow were beginning to fall in that still,
uncertain way which heralds a storm; some touched the dead face with pure
white fingers, as though they would hide the degraded body from any eyes
less kind than God's.
Helen, who had gone further back into the street that Molly might not
look again at her father, came to John's side.
"I will take Molly home with me," she said; "tell Mrs. Davis where she
is."
"Gifford is here to go with you?" John asked, with that quick tenderness
which never left him. Then he turned away to help in carrying the dead
man to his home.
The silent procession, with its awful burden, went back through the
streets, lighted yet by the pulsing glare of the fire. John walked beside
the still figure with his head bent upon his breast. That first impulse
of human exultation in a brave deed was gone; there was a horror of pity
instead. Just before they reached Tom's home, he stopped, by a gesture,
the men who bore the body.
"Oh, my people," he said, his hands stretched out to them, the snow
falling softly on his bared head, "God speaks to you from the lips of
this dead man. Listen to his words: the day or the hour knoweth no man;
and are you ready to face the judgment-seat of Christ? Oh, be not
deceived, be not deceived! Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap."
It was long past midnight when the knot of men about Tom Davis's door
dispersed; the excitement of the fire faded before that frank interest in
death, which such people have no hesitation in expressing. Society veils
it with decent reserve, and calls it morbid and vulgar, yet it is
ineradicably human, and circumstances alone decide whether it shall be
confessed.
But when the preacher came out of the house, all was quiet and deserted.
The snow, driving in white sheets down the mountains, was tinged with a
faint glow, where, in a blinding mist it whirled across the yards; it had
come too late to save the lumber, but it had checked and deadened the
flames, so that the few unburned planks only smouldered slowly into
ashes.
John had told Mrs. Davis of her loss with that wonderful gentleness which
characterized all his dealings with sorrow. He found her trying to quiet
her baby, when he went in, leaving outside in the softly falling snow
that ghastly burden which the men bore. She looked up with startled,
questioning eyes as he entered. He took the child out of her arms, and
hushed it upon his breast, and then, with one of her shaking hands held
firm in his, he told her.
Afterwards, it seemed to her that the sorrow in his face had told her,
and that she knew his message before he spoke.
Mrs. Davis had not broken into loud weeping when she heard her husband's
fate, and she was very calm, when John saw her again, after all had been
done which was needful for the dead; only moving nervously about, trying
to put the room into an unusual order. John could not bear to leave her;
knowing what love is, his sympathy for her grief was almost grief itself;
yet he had said all that he could say to comfort her, all that he could
of Tom's bravery in rushing into the fire, and it seemed useless to stay.
But as he rose to go, putting the child, who had fallen asleep in his
arms, down on the bed, Mrs. Davis stopped him.
She stood straightening the sheet which covered Tom's face, creasing its
folds between her fingers, and pulling it a little on this side or that.
"Mr. Ward," she said, "he was drunk, Tom was."
"I know it," he answered gently.
"He went out with some money this forenoon," she went on; "he was to buy
some things for the young ones. He didn't mean to drink; he didn't mean
to go near the saloon. I _know_ it. Mrs. Shea, she came in a bit after he
went, and she said she seen him comin' out of the saloon, drunk. But he
didn't mean it. Then you brought him home. But, bein' started, preacher,
he could not help it, an' he'd been round to Dobbs's again, 'fore he seen
the fire."
"Yes," John said.
Still smoothing the straight whiteness of the sheet, she said, with a
tremor in her voice:--
"If he didn't want to, preacher--if he didn't mean to--perhaps it wasn't
a sin? and him dying in it!"
Her voice broke, and she knelt down and hid her face in the dead man's
breast. She did not think of him now as the man that beat her when he was
drunk, and starved the children; he was the young lover again. The dull,
brutal man and the fretful, faded woman had been boy and girl once, and
had had their little romance, like happier husbands and wives.
John did not answer her, but a mist of tears gathered in his eyes.
Mrs. Davis raised her head and looked at him. "Tell me, you don't think
it will be counted a sin to him, do you? You don't think he died in sin?"
she asked almost fiercely.
"I wish I could say I did not," he answered.
She threw her hands up over her head with a shrill cry.
"You don't think he's lost? Say you don't, preacher,--say you don't!"
John took her hands in his. "Try and think," he said gently, "how brave
Tom was, how nobly he faced death to save Charley. Leave the judgments
of God to God; they are not for us to think of."
But she would not be put off in that way. Too weak to kneel, she had sunk
upon the floor, leaning still against the bed, with one thin, gaunt arm
thrown across her husband's body.
"You think," she demanded, "that my Tom's lost because he was drunk
to-night?"
"No," he said, "I do not think that, Mrs. Davis."
"Is he saved?" she cried, her voice shrill with eagerness.
John was silent. She clutched his arm with her thin fingers, and shook it
in her excitement; her pinched, terrified face was close to his.
"He wasn't never converted,--I know that,--but would the Lord have cut
him off, sudden-like, in his sin, if He wasn't goin' to save him?"
"We can only trust his wisdom and his goodness."
"But you think he was cut off in his sins--you think--my Tom's lost!"
The preacher did not speak, but the passionate pity in his eyes told her.
She put her hands up to her throat as though she were suffocating, and
her face grew ghastly.
"Remember, God knows what is best for his children," John said. "He
sends this grief of Tom's death to you in his infinite wisdom. He loves
you,--He knows best."
"Do you mean," asked the woman slowly, "that it was best fer Tom he
should die?"
"I mean this sorrow may be best for you," he answered tenderly. "God
knows what you need. He sends sorrow to draw our souls nearer to Him."
"Oh," she exclaimed, her voice broken and hoarse, "I don't want no good
fer me, if Tom has to die fer it. An' why should He love me instead o'
Tom? Oh, I don't want his love, as wouldn't give Tom another chance! He
might 'a' been converted this next revival, fer you would 'a' preached
hell,--I know you would, then. No, I don't want no good as comes that
way. Oh, preacher, you ain't going to say you think my Tom's burning in
hell this night, and me living to be made better by it? Oh, no, no, no!"
She crawled to his feet, and clasped his knees with her shaking arms.
"Say he isn't,--say he isn't!"
But the presence of that dead man asserted the hopelessness of John's
creed; no human pity could dim his faith, and he had no words of comfort
for the distracted woman who clung to him. He could only lift her and try
to soothe her, but she did not seem to hear him until he put her baby in
her arms; at the touch of its little soft face against her drawn cheek,
she trembled violently, and then came the merciful relief of tears. She
did not ask the preacher again to say that her husband was not lost; she
had no hope that he would tell her anything but what she already knew.
"The soul that sinneth, it shall die." She tried, poor thing, to find
some comfort in the words he spoke of God's love for her; listening with
a pathetic silence which wrung his heart.
When John left her, beating his way home through the blinding snow, his
face was as haggard as her own. He could not escape from the ultimate
conclusion of his creed,--"He that believeth not shall be damned." Yet he
loved and trusted completely. His confidence in God's justice could not
be shaken; but it was with almost a groan that he said, "O my God, my
God, justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne; mercy and
truth shall go before thy face! But justice with mercy,--justice first!"