One good trait of Mrs. Ewbert was that she never meant half she
said--she could not; but in this case there was more meaning than usual
in her saying. It really vexed her that the university families, who had
all received them so nicely, and who appreciated her husband's spiritual
and intellectual quality as fully as even she could wish, came some of
them so seldom, and some of them never, to hear him at the Rixonite
church. They ought, she said, to have been just suited by his preaching,
which inculcated with the peculiar grace of his gentle, poetic nature a
refinement of the mystical theology of the founder. The Rev. Adoniram
Rixon, who had seventy years before formulated his conception of the
religious life as a patient waiting upon the divine will, with a
constant reference of this world's mysteries and problems to the world
to come, had doubtless meant a more strenuous abeyance than Clarence
Ewbert was now preaching to a third generation of his followers. He had
doubtless meant them to be eager and alert in this patience, but the
version of his gospel which his latest apostle gave taught a species of
acquiescence which was foreign to the thoughts of the founder. He put as
great stress as could be asked upon the importance of a realizing faith
in the life to come, and an implicit trust in it for the solution of the
problems and perplexities of this life; but so far from wishing his
hearers to be constantly taking stock, as it were, of their spiritual
condition, and interrogating Providence as to its will concerning them,
he besought them to rest in confidence of the divine mindfulness, secure
that while they fulfilled all their plain, simple duties toward one
another, God would inspire them to act according to his purposes in the
more psychological crises and emergencies, if these should ever be part
of their experience.
In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much
more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean,
and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the
hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs.
Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his
grievance with the university people.
"Well," he said, "you know I can't _make_ them come, my dear."
"Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I
know that you feel about it just as I do."
"Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you _think_ you feel. Of course, I'm
very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don't undervalue the
good I may do to my poor sheep--they're _not_ an intellectual flock--in
trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and
unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching
than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually
unconscious enough already, if not modest."
"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her
sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never
tell me that they wouldn't appreciate you more."
"More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked.
"Oh, I hope _he_ isn't coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with
a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he's coming here every
Sunday night"--
As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having
come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a
habit of it.
"But he _stayed_ so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real
belief that he was not coming.
"He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which
her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.
"I shall tell him you're not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you
are lying down. You ought to be, now. You're perfectly worn out with
that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a
menacing eye upon him.
"Oh, I'm very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his
easy-chair. "Hilbrook won't come to-night. It's past the time."
She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I'm
determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him,
Clarence. You've brought it upon yourself."
Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to
blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He
owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would
probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much
to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long;
and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to
have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.