Sam Haymond, D.D., gathering together his belongings, as the train
whistled for the village, fancied that he could visualize with a fair
accuracy the gentleman who had written, "You will be met at the
station." Eben Tollman used, in his correspondence, a stilted formality
which conjured up the portrait of one somewhat staid and humorless.
Conscience and her husband had, on the other hand, formed no mental
portrait of the visiting minister, save that his reputation and
accomplishment would indicate mature years.
When the train stopped, and only one stranger emerged upon the
crushed-stone platform, Conscience thought that their guest had missed
his train. Sam Haymond, D.D., in turn, seeing no elderly gentleman of
sober visage, inferred that his host had failed to meet him. There was
only a young woman standing alone by a baggage truck and for an instant
the thoughts of the minister were fully occupied with the consideration
of her arrestingly vivid beauty: a beauty of youth and slender litheness
and exquisite color.
Then their glances met and the girl moved forward. It flashed
simultaneously upon both of them that faulty preconceptions had caused a
failure of recognition.
The tall, young man, whose breadth of shoulder and elasticity of step
might have been a boy's, spoke first with an amused riffle in his eyes.
"My name is Sam Haymond. Are you, by any chance, Mr. Tollman's
daughter?"
Under the challenge of his humorous twinkle, a sudden mischief flashed
into Conscience's face. She was tempted to announce herself as William
Williams' daughter and let it go at that, but with a swift
reconsideration she laughed and told the whole truth.
"I am Mr. Tollman's wife."
The minister raised his brows in surprise. "Now I don't know why I
pictured Mrs. Tollman as a delightful but maternal lady with a gift for
mince pies--yet I did."
"I'm afraid I'm below par on my mince pies," she confessed with a
mockery of humiliation. He could not, of course, know that the youth in
her was leaping up to his bait of spontaneity as a trout leaps to the
fly when flies are few. Conscience went on: "But you're below par,
too--on ecclesiastical solemnity. I expected a grave-faced parson--"
Sam Haymond's laughter pealed out with a heartiness which seemed gauged
to outdoor spaces rather than to confining walls.
"I haven't always been a minister," he acknowledged as he put down his
suit-case. There was in his whole appearance an impression of physical
confidence and fitness, which made Conscience's thoughts revert to
Stuart Farquaharson.
"Once I preached a very bad sermon in a log meeting-house in the
Cumberland mountains," he went on. "It is a country chiefly notable for
feuds and moon-shining. I was introduced by a gentleman whose avocations
were varied. He explained them to me in these words, 'I farms some; I
jails some an' I gospels some.' Perhaps I'm cut to a similar pattern."
For both of them the drive proved short. Like a brook which has been
running in the darkness of an underground channel, and which livens with
sparkle and song as it breaks again into the sun--Conscience found
herself in holiday mood and her companion was responsive and frankly
delightful.
Haymond was, she understood, a preacher who could move men, but just
now he was only a splendidly alive companion. If she thought of him as a
preacher at all it was a preacher whose conception was rather that of a
knight serving a divinely royal master than a prosecutor thinking in
terms of dogma.
As an experiment in psychology, the luncheon was interesting because of
the riffles and undercurrents that passed below the conversation's even
tenor. The white-haired minister and his bronze-faced junior joined no
issues of conflicting opinion and each saw only the admirable in the
other--although two men so unlike in every quality except a common zeal
might more easily have found points of disagreement than concord.
Tollman was rather the listener than the talker, but when his eyes met
those of the visitor, Conscience fancied she detected an instinct of
vague hostility in those of the host and a dubiousness in those of the
guest. It was as if the waving antennae of their minds had touched and
established a sense of antagonism.
Sam Haymond knew types as a good buyer knows his line of wares. Here, he
told himself, was a nature cramped and bigoted. Such men had smirched
the history of religion with inquisitions and tortures--and had retarded
the progress of human thought.
Tollman's impression was less distinct. He fancied that in the
penetrating quality of the other's gaze was an impertinence of prying.
Had the visiting clergyman carried his analysis far enough to discover
that both men were bigots, he would still have drawn this distinction:
the lion and the jackal have the same general motive in life, yet the
jackal is hardly a lion.
Possibly it was a feeling of disquiet under silent observation which
caused Tollman, after luncheon, to turn his guest over to his wife for
entertainment, and Haymond acquiesced with enthusiasm to Conscience's
suggestion that they go for a sail to the greater bay.
To Conscience this was all retrieving from monotony a little scrap of
the life for which she had so eagerly yearned: the life of progress,
stimulus and breadth.
And then they were in the tilting boat, racing before a wind which
bellied the taut mains'l and drummed upon its canvas. She and Eben had,
once or twice, taken this same sail, but he had endured in patience
rather than enjoyed it.
On those occasions Ira had revealed a surly personality, which now
expanded and mellowed into conversation as Haymond asked questions about
the setting of eel traps and lobster pots and the management of fish
weirs.
The wind toyed so persistently with Conscience's dark hair that she took
it down from its coils and let it hang in heavy braids. The color rose
in her cheeks and the gleam to her eyes making them starry, and a lilt
sang in her voice.
There was a wealth of sapphire and purple in the water; there were thin
shore lines of vivid green and dazzling sand. Sails bronzed and reddened
in the sun and the distance. Gulls quarreled and screamed as they
fished--and everything was young.
"Them's mackerel gulls," volunteered Ira as he pointed to two birds
perched on a precariously buffeted buoy. "There's a sayin' that 'When
the whippoorwills begin to call, the mackerel begins to run'--then the
gulls come, too."
But as the sailboat drew near its landing stage again and the sunset was
fading into twilight, the fires died slowly, too, in the eyes of
Conscience Tollman and she felt that a vacation had ended.
There seemed to be in the sunlight of the following morning a tempered
and Sabbath stillness.
Perhaps the sun itself remained pagan, but if so it only lent contrast
to the slumberous restfulness where the shadows fell.
Over the countryside brooded the calm peacefulness of the day and when
the church bell gave its first call, its notes floated out across
silences disturbed by no noisier interruptions than bird notes and the
distant voice of the surf.
When her father had expressed his determination of going, for the first
time since he had been stricken, to the church where he had so long
preached, Conscience had demurred without avail. She had been, at first,
alarmed, lest the associations dwelling between those walls might excite
him beyond his strength. He must feel that he was going back, broken, to
a place where, in strength, he had been a mentor and potter whose clay
was human thought. But he would listen to no objections and when the
congregation gathered, his invalid's chair stood at the head of the
center aisle and he looked directly up at the pulpit from which, since
his youth, he had thundered the damnation of sinners.
When the tall young man took his place in the pulpit, the aged minister
swung his finely shaped head around with something of pride as though he
would say, "Here is my successor, in whom I am well pleased."
It was the revered elder who first engaged the interest of the
congregation, but when Sam Haymond had announced his text: "Let him who
is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," there came a shifting
of attention. Here was a man gifted with that quality of voice without
which there can be no oratory; endowed with that magic of force under
which human emotion is a keyboard responsive to the touch; commanding
that power which can sway its hearers at will between smile and tear.
His reputation was already known to them, but within five minutes after
his voice sounded reputation had become a pallid label for something
flamingly real: something under which their feeling stirred; something
that made their pulses leap like a bugle call; something that soothed
them like sleep after weariness--and above all something so convincing
that questioning was stilled as by the voice of a prophet who comes
direct from the presence of God.
The Reverend William Williams had held their loyalty by virtue of
vehemence and fire, and in that the visitor matched and surpassed him.
The intensity was there, but much besides--and yet in all else this was
a man as opposite to the aged veteran of the pulpit as east is far
across from west. In all the fire of his words was no mention of the
fires of hell. He seemed to know nothing of the avenging God, whose name
had rung terribly from that rostrum for half a century: a God swift of
anger and mighty to punish: an omnipotently jealous God. The Deity he
served was one of infinite charity to whose forgiveness nothing was
unforgivable--except unforgiveness.
He was expounding a doctrine of joy and aspiration: a splendid and
uplifting message from a God of the onward and upward march. No
suspicion came to him that, in effect, he was assailing the life work of
the old man below him, whom he deeply revered, yet he breathed a
conception of religion not only unlike, but contradictory to the set and
riveted dogma of his listening predecessor.
Minds that had unquestioningly accepted the old and hard gospel of
righteousness by duress of brimstone awoke to a new insurgency and eyes
little given to the light of thought kindled to this new postulate of
brotherhood and the service of brotherhood.
Conscience sat with her eyes hypnotically fixed on the face of the
speaker. Yesterday afternoon he had gone sailing with her; to-day he was
voicing her own beliefs from the pulpit whose former incumbent had
strangled and throttled them with his tyranny of weakness.
Of her father and the influence this sermon might have on him she did
not just then think at all. She like the others was being swept on a
tide of rapt attention--and she had forgotten that William Williams was
not at home in his study. But as that discourse progressed one might
have followed the ebb and flow of a man's life-battle, had he watched
only the face of the old man, in the wheel chair, crowned with a white
mane.
First there was the expression of exaltation which mutely proclaimed: "A
prophet is risen among us," but after it came swift doubt and
foreboding. The eagle eyes, deep-set in the thin face, were clouded and
hurt. Tho talon-like fingers clutched at their chair arms. Must he sit
here constrained to silence, while another confounded his teachings?
After doubt came certainty under which the sunken eyes of the paralyzed
man smouldered fiercely and his face blanched to the deadness of
parchment. This was all a passionate and revolutionary appeal for
liberality--or--by his interpretation--for license. It mounted into an
indictment against the cramping evils of intolerance, it scathingly
denounced the goodness of the strait-jacket until the old minister saw
every effort of his life assailed and vilified. His mind, distorted by
suffering and brooding, beheld a prophet indeed, but a prophet who
carried Satan's commission and who dared to serve it in the house of
God.
Would God himself remain silent and unavenging under such insult? He at
least, the lifelong servant, would not sit voiceless while his Master
was libeled. He who had spoken here many hundreds of times before would
speak once more and his last message would be one of scourging from the
temple desecrators more evil than money-changers.
But he shook with so palsied a fury that for a time he could only
surrender to his physical weakness. With a mighty effort he braced his
withered body and pulled himself forward. He knew he was killing
himself, but he would fall at his sentry post, challenging the enemy.
Sam Haymond, himself oblivious until now to all but his own
earnestness, brought his gaze back to the chair just below him--and
suddenly the resonance of his swelling voice fell silent--snapped by
astonishment with a word half spoken.
Of the tragedy which was acting itself before him he realized little. He
saw only a venerable colleague stricken by some sudden and terrible
ailment.
Then William Williams raised his thin arms above his head. Out of his
eyes rained challenge, denunciation, anathema! Mutely he was hurling the
curse of God's church. With the last ounce of his attenuated strength he
was struggling for the voice which at this moment of supreme need had
failed him. Over the body of the congregation, as the preacher halted,
fell a deadly stillness.
From the throat of the old man came a strangled groan, which had sought
to be a command for silence, and he crumpled forward. Life had gone out
of him, and Sam Haymond, lifting both hands, spoke in a voice of hushed
awe, "My brethren, the hand of God has fallen here."