Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk
about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept
well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon
promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but
Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his
apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world
of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he
might confirm himself from Ewbert's faith and reason in the conjectures
with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a
future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and
Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual
forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case
was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse
himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook's claim to all that he could
give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he
supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert's censoriously anxious eye
the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that
Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he
would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not
some trick of his own imagination.
He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a
certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth,
so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the
repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a
hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly
against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of
question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in
belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter was not
something which he was _sharing_ with Hilbrook; he was _giving_ it
absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his
own soul of its most precious possession.
So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook's visits
left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been
making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put
this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a
cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the
old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that
the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and
stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered
that he never felt better in his life. "But you," he said, casting an
eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his
easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, "_you_, look
rather peaked. I don't know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I
seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit
yesterday."
"It was a very close day," said Ewbert. "I don't know why I shouldn't be
about as well as usual."
"Well, that's right," said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle
which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.
Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions
they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found
himself beset by a strange temptation,--by the wish to take up these
notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their
common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition,
but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to
break them one by one and cast them in the old man's face. Like all
imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions,
whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous
the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it
became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely
parishioner about the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him
with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to
make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the
wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the
impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old
Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin
undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the
doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic
representations he figured the old man's helpless amaze at the
demoniacal gayety with which he should mock his own seriousness in the
past, the cynical ease with which he should show the vanity of the hopes
he had been so fervent in awakening. He had throughout recognized the
claim that all the counter-doubts had upon the reason, and he saw how
effective he could make these if he were now to become their advocate.
He pictured the despair in which he could send his proselyte tottering
home to his lonely house through the dark.
He rent himself from the spell, but the last picture remained so real
with him that he went to the window and looked out, saying, "Is there a
moon?"
"It ain't up yet, I guess," said old Hilbrook, and from something in his
manner, rather than from anything he recollected of their talk, Ewbert
fancied him to have asked a question, and to be now waiting for some
answer. He had not the least notion what the question could have been,
and he began to walk up and down, trying to think of something to say,
but feeling his legs weak under him and the sweat cold on his forehead.
All the time he was aware of Hilbrook following him with an air of
cheerful interest, and patiently waiting till he should take up the
thread of their discourse again.
He controlled himself at last, and sank into his chair. "Where were we?"
he asked. "I had gone off on a train of associations, and I don't just
recall our last point."
Hilbrook stated it, and Ewbert said, "Oh, yes," as if he recognized it,
and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was
aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective
undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse
with himself to an effect wholly different from that produced in
Hilbrook.
"Well, sir," said the old man when he rose to go at last, "I guess
you've settled it for me. You've made me see that there can be an
immortal life that's worth living; and I was afraid there wa'n't! I
shouldn't care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I
guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions
every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin'
that he was in any danger of bein' wasted. You've made me want to meet
my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn't think I was fit for it. I
don't know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don't; but
I"--he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that
he put trembling into Ewbert's--"I _bless_ you!"