The snow fell all that night, but the day broke exquisitely clear upon a
white and shining world. The sky was blue and sparkling, and the keen
north wind had carved the drifts into wonderful overhanging curves, like
the curling crests of breakers.
John Ward went early to Mrs. Davis's. The sharp agony of the night before
was over; there was even a momentary complacency at the importance of
death, for the room was full of neighbors, whose noisy sympathy drove her
despair of her husband's fate from her mind. But when she saw John, her
terror came back, and she began to be silent, and not so ready to tell
the story of the dead man's bravery to each one that entered. But with
the people who were not immediately affected, the excitement of Tom's
death could scarcely last.
By the afternoon his widow was for the most part alone. Helen had thought
it would be so, and waited until then to go and see her. But first she
went into her kitchen, and she and Alfaretta packed a little basket with
cold meat, and sweet, snowy bread, and some jam, for the children.
"They do say," Alfaretta said, as she tucked the corners of the napkin
under the wicker cover,--"they do say Tom Davis went straight to the bad
place, last night. He wasn't never converted, you know; but somehow,
seein' as he really thought he was going to save that Charley, seein' as
he died for him, as you might say, it don't seem like as if it was
just"--Alfaretta lowered her voice a little--"as if it was just--fair. Do
you think he went there, Mrs. Ward?"
"I know he did not," Helen answered promptly. "I don't think about hell
quite as you do, Alfaretta. I cannot believe God punishes people
eternally; for if He is good, He could not be so cruel. Why, no human
being would be so cruel as that, and do you think we ought to believe
that men are better and kinder than God?"
Alfaretta looked confused. "Well, but justice?"
"Justice!" Helen said. "Would it be just if I put a little child where it
was certain to fall down, and then punish it for falling? The child did
not ask to be put there. So God puts us here, where we must sin; would it
be just to punish us eternally for his own work?"
Alfaretta shook her head, and sighed. "Well, I don't know but yer right,
though the preacher don't say so."
Helen did not speak for a moment, and then said quietly, "Perhaps
not,--not yet; but he will say so some day. He is so good himself, you
know, Alfaretta, he cannot bear to think every one else does not love and
serve God, too; and it seems to him as though they ought to be punished
if they don't."
This was a very lame explanation, but it closed the discussion, and she
hurried away from the honest, searching eyes of her servant, which she
felt must see through the flimsy excuse. Her eyes burned with sudden
tears that blurred the white landscape, it hurt her to excuse her
husband's belief even to herself, and gave her a feeling of disloyalty to
him: for a moment she weakly longed to creep into the shelter of the
monstrous error in which she felt he lived, that they might be one there,
as in everything else. "Yet it does not matter," she said to herself,
smiling a little. "We love each other. We know we don't think alike on
doctrinal points, but we love each other."
She stopped a moment at the lumber-yard. The ghastly blackness of the
ruin glared against the snow-covered hills and the dazzling blue of the
sky; here and there a puff of steam showed where the melting snow on the
cooler beams dripped on the hot embers below. Some scattered groups of
lumbermen and their forlorn wives braved the cold, and stood talking the
fire over, for, after all, it was the immediate interest; death would not
come to them for years, perhaps, but where were they going to get money
for their families during the spring? There could be no rafting down the
river until after the loggers had brought their rafts from up in the
mountains, to be sawed into planks.
Alfaretta's father, who stood contemplating the ruins, and moralizing
when any one would stop to listen to him, had pointed this out. Mr. Dean
was a carpenter, and kept a grocery store as well, so he could pity the
lumbermen from the shelter of comparative affluence. When he saw the
preacher's wife, he came over to speak to her.
"Well, ma'am," he said, "the dispensations of Providence is indeed
mysterious,--that the river should have been froze last night!"
Mr. Dean had a habit of holding his mouth open a moment before he spoke,
and looking as though he felt that his listener was impatient for his
words, which were always pronounced with great deliberation. Helen had
very little patience with him, and used to answer his slowly uttered
remarks with a quickness which confused him.
"It would be more mysterious if it were not frozen, at this time of
year," she replied, almost before he had finished speaking. She was in
haste to reach Mrs. Davis, and she had no time to hear Elder Dean's
platitudes.
He began to open his beak-like mouth in an astonished way, when a
by-stander interrupted him: "I suppose this here sudden death in our
midst" (it was easy to fall into pious phraseology in the presence of
Elder Dean) "will be made the subject of the prayer-meeting to-night?"
"It will," said Mr. Dean solemnly,--"it will. It is an awful example to
unbelievers. An' it is a lesson to the owners not to allow smoking in the
yards." Then, with a sharp look at Helen out of his narrow eyes, he
added, "I haven't seen you at prayer-meeting, lately, Mrs. Ward. It is a
blessed place, a blessed place: the Lord touches sinners' hearts with a
live coal from off his altar; souls have been taught to walk in the
light, in the light of God." Mr. Dean prolonged the last word in an
unctuous way, which he reserved for public prayer and admonition.
Helen did not answer.
But the elder was not rebuffed. "I hope we will see you soon," he said.
"A solemn season of revival is approaching. Why have you stayed away so
long, Mrs. Ward?"
Annoyed at the impertinence of his questions, Helen's face flushed a
little.
"I do not like the prayer-meeting," she answered quietly; but before the
elder could recover from the shock of such a statement, Mrs. Nevins had
come up to speak to him.
"Have you seen Mrs. Davis yet, Mr. Dean?" she said. "She took on awful,
last night; the neighbors heard her. 'T was after twelve 'fore she was
quiet."
"Yes, I saw her," responded the elder, shaking his head in a pompous way.
"I went to administer consolation. I'm just coming from there now. It is
an awful judgment on that man: no chance for repentance, overtook by
hell, as I told Mrs. Davis, in a moment! But the Lord must be praised for
his justice: that ought to comfort her."
"Good heavens!" cried Helen, "you did not tell that poor woman her
husband was overtaken by hell?"
"Ma'am," said Mr. Dean, fairly stuttering with astonishment at the
condemnation of her tone--"I--I--did."
"Oh, shame!" Helen said, heedless of the listeners around them. "How
dared you say such a thing? How dared you libel the goodness of God?
Tom Davis is not in hell. A man who died to save another's life? Who
would want the heaven of such a God? Oh, that poor wife! How could you
have had the heart to make her think God was so cruel?"
There was a dead silence; Elder Dean was too dumfounded to speak, and the
others, looking at Helen's eyes flashing through her tears of passionate
pain, were almost persuaded that she was right. They waited to hear more,
but she turned and hurried away, her breath quick, and a tightened
feeling in her throat.
The elder was the first to break the spell of her words, but he opened
his lips twice before a sound came. "May the Lord forgive her! Tom Davis
not in hell? Why, where's the good of a hell at all, then?"
Helen's heart was burning with sympathy for the sorrow which had been so
cruelly wounded. She had forgotten the reserve which respect for her
husband's opinions always enforced. "It is wicked to have said such a
thing!" she thought, as she walked rapidly along over the creaking snow.
"I will tell her it is not true,--it never could be true."
The path through the ragged, unkempt garden in front of the tenement
house was so trodden that the snow was packed and hard. The gate swung
back with a jar and clatter, and two limp frosted hens flew shrieking out
from the shelter of the ash-heap behind it. The door was open, and Helen
could see the square of the entry, papered, where the plaster had not
been broken away, with pale green castles embowered in livid trees. On
either side was the entrance to a tenement; a sagging nail in one of the
door-posts held a coat and a singed and battered hat. Here Helen knocked.
Mrs. Davis was in the small inner room, but came out as her visitor
entered, wiping the soapsuds from her bare arms on her dingy gingham
apron. On the other side of the room, opposite the door, was that awful
Presence, which silenced even the voices of the children.
"I'm washing," the woman said, as she gave her hand to Helen. "It is
Tom's best shirt,--fer to-morrow."
Helen took the hand, wrinkled and bleached with the work it had done, and
stroked it gently; she did not know what to say. This was not the grief
she had thought of,--a woman working calmly at her wash-tub, while her
husband lay dead in the next room. Helen could see the tub, with the mist
of steam about it, and the wash-board, and the bar of yellow soap.
She followed Mrs. Davis back to her work, and sat down on a bench, out of
the way of a little stream of water which had dripped from the leaking
tub, and trickled across the floor. She asked about the children, and
said she had brought some food for them; she knew it was so hard to have
to think of housekeeping at such a time.
But the widow scarcely listened; she stood lifting the shirt from the
water, and rubbing it gently between her hard hands, then dipping it back
into the suds again. Once she stopped, and drew the back of her wet hand
across her eyes, and once Helen heard her sigh; yet she did not speak of
her sorrow, nor of Elder Dean's cruel words. For a little while the two
women were silent.
"Mrs. Davis," Helen said, at last, "I'm so sorry."
It was a very simple thing to say, but it caught the woman's ear; it was
different from any of the sympathy to which, in a dull, hopeless way, she
had listened all that morning. The neighbors had sighed and groaned, and
told her it was "awful hard on her," and had pitied Tom for his terrible
death; and then Mr. Dean had come, with fearful talk of justice, and of
hell.
A big tear rolled down her face, and dropped into the tub. "Thank you,
ma'am," she said.
She made a pretense of turning towards the light of the one small window
to see if the shirt was quite clean; then she began to wring it out,
wrapping the twist of wet linen about her wrist. When she spoke again,
her voice was steady.
"Elder Dean 'lows I oughtn't to be sorry; he says I'd ought to be
resigned to God's justice. He says good folks ought to be glad when
sinners go to the bad place, even if they're belonging to them. He 'lows
I'd oughtn't to be sorry."
"I am sure you have a right to be sorry Tom is dead," Helen said,--the
woman's composure made her calm, too,--"but I do not believe he is in any
place now that need make you sorry. I do not believe what Elder Dean said
about--hell."
Mrs. Davis looked at her, a faint surprise dawning in her tired eyes, and
shook her head. "Oh, I'm not sayin' that he ain't right. I'm not sayin'
Tom ain't in the bad place, ner that it ain't justice. I'm a Christian
woman. I was convicted and converted when I wasn't but twelve years old,
and I know my religion. Tom--he wasn't no Christian, he didn't ever
experience a change of heart: it was always like as if he was just going
to be converted, when he wasn't in drink; fer he was good in his heart,
Tom was. But he wasn't no Christian, an' I'm not sayin' he isn't lost.
I'm only sayin',"--this with a sudden passion, and knotting her tremulous
hands hard together,--"I'm only sayin' I can't love God no more! Him
havin' all the power--and then look at Tom an' me"--
Helen tried to speak, but Mrs. Davis would not listen. "No," she cried,
"yer the preacher's wife, but I must say it. He never give Tom a chance,
an' how am I goin' to love Him now? Tom,"--she pointed a shaking finger
at the coffin in the next room,--"born, as you might say, drinkin'. His
father died in a drunken fit, and his mother give it to her baby with her
milk. Then, what schoolin' did he get? Nothin', 'less it was his mother
lickin' him. Tom's often told me that. He hadn't no trade learned,
neither,--just rafted with men as bad as him. Is it any wonder he wasn't
converted?"
"I know all that," Helen began to say gently, but Mrs. Davis could not
check the torrent of her despairing grief.
"He didn't have no chance; an' he didn't ask to be born, neither. God put
him here, an' look at the way He made him live; look at this house; see
the floor, how the water runs down into that corner: it is all sagged an'
leanin'--the whole thing is rotten look at that one window, up against
the wall; not a ray of sunshine ever struck it. An' here's where God's
made us live. Six of us, now the baby's come. Children was the only thing
we was rich in, and we didn't have food enough to put in their mouths, or
decent clothes to cover 'em. Look at the people 'round us here--livin' in
this here row of tenements--drinkin', lying' swearin'. What chance had
Tom? God never give him any, but He could of, if He'd had a mind to. So
I can't love Him, Mrs. Ward,--I can't love Him; Him havin' all the power,
and yet lettin' Tom's soul go down to hell; fer Tom couldn't help it, and
him livin' so. I ain't denyin' religion, ner anything like that--I'm a
Christian woman, an' a member--but I can't love Him, so there's no use
talkin'--I can't love Him."
She turned away and shook the shirt out, hanging it over the back of a
chair in front of the stove, to dry. Helen had followed her, and put her
arm across the thin, bent shoulders, her eyes full of tears, though the
widow's were hard and bright.
"Oh, Mrs. Davis," she cried, "of course you could not love a God who
would never give Tom a chance and then punish him; of course you could
not love Him! But he is not punished by being sent to hell; indeed,
indeed, he is not. If God is good, He could not be so cruel as to give
a soul no chance, and then send it to hell. Don't ever think that Tom,
brave fellow, is there! Oh, believe what I say to you!"
Mrs. Davis seemed stupefied; she looked up into those beautiful
distressed brown eyes, and her dry lips moved.
"You don't think," she said, in a hoarse, hurried whisper--"you're not
saying--_Tom isn't in hell_?"
"I know he is not, I know it! Justice? it would be the most frightful
injustice, because, don't you see," she went on eagerly, "it is just as
you said,--Tom had no chance; so God could not punish him eternally for
being what he had to be, born as he was, and living as he did. I don't
know anything about people's souls when they die,--I mean about going to
heaven,--but I do know this: as long as a soul lives it has a chance for
goodness, a chance to turn to God. There is no such place as hell!"
"But--but"--the widow faltered, "he was cut off in his sins. The preacher
wouldn't say but he was lost!" Her words were a wail of despair.
Helen groaned; she was confronted by her loyalty to John, yet the
suffering of this hopeless soul! "Listen," she said, taking Mrs. Davis's
hands in hers, and speaking slowly and tenderly, while she held the weak,
shifting eyes by her own steady look, "listen. I do not know what the
preacher would say, but it is not true that Tom is lost; it is not true
that God is cruel and wicked; it is not true that, while Tom's soul
lives, he cannot grow good."
The rigid look in the woman's face began to disappear; her hopeless
belief was shaken, not through any argument, but by the mere force of the
intense conviction shining in Helen's eyes.
"Oh," she said appealingly, and beginning to tremble, "are you true with
me, ma'am?"
"I am true, indeed I am!" Helen answered, unconscious that her own tears
fell upon Mrs. Davis's hands; the woman looked at her, and suddenly her
face began to flush that painful red which comes before violent weeping.
"If you're true, if you're right, then I can be sorry. I wouldn't let
myself be sorry while I couldn't have no hope. Oh, I can be that sorry it
turns me glad!"
The hardness was all gone now; she broke into a storm of tears, saying
between her sobs, "Oh, I'm so glad--I'm so glad!"
A long time the two women sat together, the widow still shaken by gusts
of weeping, yet listening hungrily to Helen's words, and sometimes even
smiling through her tears. The hardship of loss to herself and her
children was not even thought of; there was only intense relief from
horrible fear; she did not even stop to pity Tom for the pain of death;
coming out of that nightmare of hell, she could only rejoice.
The early sunset flashed a sudden ruddy light through the window in the
front room, making a gleaming bar on the bare whitewashed wall, and
startling Helen with the lateness of the hour.
"I must go now," she said, rising. "I will come again to-morrow."
Mrs. Davis rose, too, lifting her tear-stained face, with its trembling
smile, towards her deliverer. "Won't you come in the other room a
minute?" she said. "I want to show you the coffin. I got the best I
could, but I didn't have no pride in it. It seems different now."
They went in together, Mrs. Davis crying quietly. Tom's face was hidden,
and a fine instinct of possession, which came with the strange uplifting
of the moment, made his wife shrink from uncovering it.
She stroked the varnished lid of the coffin, with her rough hands, as
tenderly as though the poor bruised body within could feel her touch.
"How do you like it?" she asked anxiously. "I wanted to do what I could
fer Tom. I got the best I could. Mr. Ward give me some money, and I
spent it this way. I thought I wouldn't mind going hungry, afterwards.
You don't suppose,"--this with a sudden fear, as one who dreads to fall
asleep lest a terrible dream may return,--"you don't suppose I'll forget
these things you've been tellin' me, and think _that_ of Tom?"
"No," Helen answered, "not if you just say to yourself that I told you
what Mr. Dean said was not true. Never mind if you cannot remember the
reasons I have given you,--I'll tell them all to you again; just try and
forget what the elder said."
"I will try," she said; and then wavering a little, "but the preacher,
Mrs. Ward?"
"The preacher," Helen answered bravely, "will think this way, too, some
day, I know." And then she made the same excuse for him which she had
given Alfaretta, with the same pang of regret.
"Yes, ma'am," the woman said, "I see. I feel now as though I could love
God real hard 'cause He's good to Tom. But Mrs. Ward, the preacher must
be wonderful good, fer he can think God would send my Tom to hell, and
yet he can love Him! I couldn't do it."
"Oh, he is good!" Helen cried, with a great leap of her heart.
The wind blew the powdered snow about, as she walked home in the cold
white dusk, piling it in great drifts, or leaving a ridge of earth swept
bare and clean. The blackened lumber-yards were quite deserted in the
deepening chill which was felt as soon as the sun set; the melting snow
on the hot, charred planks had frozen into long icicles, and as she
stopped to look at the ruin one snapped, and fell with a splintering
crash.
One of those strangely unsuggested remembrances flashed into her mind:
the gleam of a dove's white wing against the burning blue of a July sky,
the blaze of flowers in the rectory garden, and the subtle, penetrating
fragrance of mignonette. Perhaps the contrast of the intense cold and the
gathering night brought the scene before her; she sighed; if she and John
could go away from this grief and misery and sin, which they seemed
powerless to relieve, and from this hideous shadow of Calvinism!
"After all," she thought, hurrying along towards home and John, "Mrs.
Davis is right,--it is hard to love Him. He does not give a chance to
every one; none of us can escape the inevitable past. And that is as hard
as to be punished unjustly. And there is no help for it all. Oh, where is
God?"
Just as she left the lumber-yard district, she heard her name called, and
saw Gifford Woodhouse striding towards her. "You have been to those poor
Davises I suppose," he said, as he reached her side, and took her empty
basket from her hand.
"Yes," she answered, sighing. "Oh, Gifford, how dreadful it all is,--the
things these people say, and really believe!" Then she told him of Elder
Dean, and a little of her talk with Mrs. Davis. Gifford listened, his
face growing very grave.
"And that is their idea of God?" he said, as she finished. "Well, it is
mine of the devil. But I can't help feeling sorry you spoke as you did to
the elder."
"Why?" she asked.
"Well," he said, "to assert your opinion of the doctrine of eternal
damnation as you did, considering your position, Helen, was scarcely
wise."
"Do you mean because I am the preacher's wife?" she remonstrated,
smiling. "I must have my convictions, if I am; and I could not listen to
such a thing in silence. You don't know John, if you think he would
object to the expression of opinion." Gifford dared not say that John
would object to the opinion itself. "But perhaps I spoke too forcibly;
I should be sorry to be unkind, even to Elder Dean."
"Well," Gifford said doubtfully, "I only hope he may not feel called upon
to 'deal with you.'"
They laughed, but the young man added, "After all, when you come to
think of it, Helen, there is no bigotry or narrowness which does not
spring from a truth, and nothing is truer than that sin is punished
eternally. It is only their way of making God responsible for it,--not
ourselves,--and arranging the details of fire and brimstone, which is so
monstrous. Somebody says that when the Calvinists decided on sulphur they
did not know the properties of caustic potash. But there are stages of
truth; there's no use knocking a man down because he is only on the first
step of the ladder, which you have climbed into light. I think belief in
eternal damnation is a phase in spiritual development."
"But you don't really object to my protest?" she said. "Come, Giff, the
truth must be strong enough to be expressed."
"I don't object to the protest," he answered slowly, "but I hope the
manner of it will not make things difficult for Mr. Ward."
Helen laughed, in spite of her depression. "Why, Gifford," she said, "it
is not like you to be so apprehensive, and over so small a matter, too.
Mr. Dean has probably forgotten everything I said, and, except that I
mean to tell him, John would never hear a word about it."