Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the
meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was
staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their
controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him
through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and
the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in
them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine
of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those
who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had
wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.
The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at
the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the
earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again
and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for
assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers,
just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this
consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds
of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could
be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our
inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the
few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this
position, and urged it upon all his hearers; but in the moment of doing
so a point that old Hilbrook had made in their talk suddenly presented
itself. He experienced inwardly such a collapse that he could not be
sure he had spoken, and he repeated his declaration in a voice of such
harsh defiance that he could scarcely afterwards bring himself down to
the meek level of the closing prayer.
As they walked home together, his wife asked, "Why did you repeat
yourself in that passage, Clarence, and why did you lift your voice so?
It sounded like contradicting some one. I hope you were not thinking of
anything that wretched old man said?"
With the mystical sympathy by which the wife divines what is in her
husband's mind she had touched the truth, and he could not deny it.
"Yes, yes, I was," he owned in a sort of anguish, and she said:--
"Well, then, I wish he wouldn't come about any more. He has perfectly
obsessed you. I could see that the last two Sundays you were preaching
right at him." He had vainly hoped she had not noticed this, though he
had not concealed from her that his talk with Hilbrook had suggested his
theme. "What are you going to do about him?" she pursued relentlessly.
"I don't know,--I don't know, indeed," said Ewbert; and perhaps because
he did not know, he felt that he must do something, that he must at
least not leave him to himself. He hoped that Hilbrook would come to
him, and so put him under the necessity of doing something; but Hilbrook
did not come, and after waiting a fortnight Ewbert went to him, as was
his duty.