John Henry Warden was a carpenter by trade; he was a well-to-do workman,
employed constantly in a profitable and moneymaking business. God had
also endowed him with excellent mental and physical powers. Sickness
was unknown to this man, and as to the many heart-aches which come into
the daily measure of most other lives, they were strangers to his
nature. He did not understand moping; he had no sympathy with gloom.
He considered himself a successful man, he was also ambitious; he meant,
if he lived, to leave this world in a much higher position than when he
had entered it. He was very much respected by his neighbours, for he
was a strictly honourable, upright, and honest man. But though
respected he was not loved. It was his misfortune that never yet in all
his life had he either awakened or given love. And yet he was not
without those closest ties which knit hearts to hearts. He had been a
husband; he was now a widower and a father. He had married a young and
beautiful girl, a sensitive creature who needed love as the plants need
sunshine. She lived with him for a little over ten years, all the time,
year after year, fading slowly but surely. Then she died; no one said
she died of a broken heart--Warden least of all suspected it. He
regretted her loss, for he considered a mother the right person to bring
up her children, and he felt it a pity that she should have left all the
good things of this life, which by-and-by he might have provided for
her. He had even expressed this regret to her as she lay on her
death-bed, and her answer had surprised him.
"But there'll be love up in heaven. I'm so _hungry_ for love."
The wife and mother died, and Warden did not fret. It would have been
very sinful to fret, for although he scarcely considered himself
religious, yet he had a respect for God's dispensations. Yes, he was
outwardly a model character: he worked early and late; he saved money;
he was never in debt; he defrauded no man; his evenings were spent
either in attending lectures of working men like himself or studying the
subjects he loved at home; he never drank; he never swore; he was looked
up to, and brought forward as an example to follow for many a poor
drunken wretch. But yet in God's sight that poor drunkard, struggling,
though struggling feebly, to repent, was far nearer, far dearer than
this Pharisee, who had never yet known love, human or divine.
Warden's wife died, leaving to his care two children. Faith, the elder,
nine years of age at the time, was a pale, silent child. She knew
enough of her father's character to suppress all her real self before
him. Roy, the younger, aged three months when his mother left him,
showed from his earliest moments a disposition differing widely from
either father or mother. By-and-by that sweet soul would develop the
love of the one parent without her weakness, the strength of the other
without his hardness. Warden, in reality loving no one, having never in
all his existence experienced either the joy or the pain of true love,
yet believed that he had this feeling for his boy. He was undoubtedly
very proud of the little child; he was his son, he was beautiful.
Warden, when he looked at him, dreamed dreams, in which he saw himself
the founder of a house and a name. He would make his boy a gentleman;
he worked ever harder and harder as this thought grew and gathered
strength within him. As to Faith, she was useful in helping and
training Roy. For her own individual existence he had no special
thought. She was but a girl; she would grow up another weak, good,
loving creature like her mother. She might or might not marry. It did
not greatly matter. Of course he would do his duty by her--for whenever
had John Warden, in his own opinion, neglected that? She should be
educated; she should have her chance in life. But he had no high
opinion of women, and, though he thought he loved his son, he did not
even pretend to his own heart that he cared for little Faith.
It was to this man--this hard, hard man--who lived so uprightly in the
eyes of his fellow men, but so far from his God, that the same God of
love and pity and infinite compassion would yet reveal Himself. He must
hear the voice of God; but, alas! for his hardness of heart, it must be
in the whirlwind and the storm; not in the still small accents.