A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
Daybreak of the second day of imprisonment brought no renewal of the
storm, though the sun was hidden and the clouds were dark and lowering.
But the morning was to have its tragedy.
The storekeeper who had got on at the station five miles back seemed
half demented. He had chafed and grumbled loudly from the first,
asserting that his business would be ruined without his immediate
presence and attention, and heaping imprecations upon the weather and
the railroad company alike. Patience or philosophy seemed entirely
lacking in his character. All through the first day of detention he had
paced restlessly back and forth throughout the train, a walking
expletive, and now he had become furious.
"I must get home," he shouted; "I live only five miles down the track
and I'm going to walk it. I know these blizzards, and I'm bigger than
any of 'em! I can make it!" and he would have leaped from the train at
once had not strong hands restrained him. He went forward mutteringly.
The stillness of all the world about had something to it sinister and
threatening. It was like the silence of a graveyard. "I'd rather have
that storm howling again, and howling worse than ever," said one of the
passengers, "than endure this ghastly quiet. It's altogether too quiet.
Something is going to happen!"
He was right. Something was going to happen. The dark clouds were
sinking nearer and nearer to the earth, and at last there came a sound,
the faintest of sighs, of the coming wind. It deepened steadily until it
became more than a sigh; it was a moan. It increased in volume. The moan
became a shriek, the shriek a mighty roar, and the blizzard, with its
snowfall, was raging about the pass again.
The passengers crowded together at the windows and a few of the more
hardy even ventured out upon the platforms to enjoy, or to become
apprehensive over, the mighty spectacle.
They were thus engaged when there came rushing excitedly into the car
the pert youth who had told the remarkable Indian story the night
before.
"The Storekeeper!" he exclaimed. "The Storekeeper is missing! He must
have left the train!"
[Illustration: "THE STOREKEEPER!" HE EXCLAIMED]
There was aroused a sudden and alarmed interest, followed by a hurrying
of men to the different platforms, but there was nothing to be seen. The
man must have slipped from the train, unobserved, before the recurrence
of the storm and made the desperate attempt to reach his home by the
exercise of sheer bulldog tenacity and brute force, in struggling
through the enormous drifts. Stafford, accompanied by two of the
trainmen, made a brief but arduous and difficult search for some
distance, but found slight trace of the missing passenger. Close beside
the train they discovered where he had leaped off and staggered
uncertainly forward, but beyond that there was no sign. The snow had
already hidden the reckless being's trail.
There was a sequel, long in coming. Late in the following spring, when
the looming drifts of the pass had melted, the mortal part of the
Storekeeper was found some distance from the track, where he had
stumbled blindly in his wanderings. But of his fate there could, of
course, at this time, be no certain knowledge. There was even a chance,
some thought, that he might accomplish the seemingly impossible. The
men muttered to each other, and that was all. Why the Storekeeper,
apparently one possessed of shrewdness at least, should have taken such
awful risk no one could say--but it made swift tragedy.
Communication had been maintained with Belden. A path to the telegraph
pole utilized by Stafford on the night of the stoppage had been
laboriously dug by the trainmen and Stafford had again made the
connection and learned the condition of affairs with the rescuing party
already started. The report was not altogether encouraging. The vast
fall of snow in the canyon, drifted, in some places, higher than the top
of the smokestack of the locomotive--for this was the greatest blockade
in the history of the road--had proved more than baffling, even with the
snow-plow. Scores of men were at work ahead of it with shovels, in the
work of bringing the clearance within the range of its capability. The
relief train was yet many miles from the one entirely helpless. Still
the snow would not be so deep at points ahead, where the canyon widened,
and the belief of the rescuers was that the half-entombed would be
reached at some hour of the fourth day of their detention. The news was
not received with any degree of exultation.
It was at this crisis that Moses appeared to lead those in the Cassowary
and their visitors out of the gloom oppressing them.
When men and women of intelligence and brightness and modern perception
are cast together in an emergency, there ever appears among them some
one who brings the group close together. He may not be the greatest of
the group, but he has some dominant instinct in him involving a regard
for the comfort of others. Such a man was Colonel Livingston.
The Colonel was a man of thought, and he wanted his own sort of people
around him. He had raised a regiment once, when fierce things were going
on in the "60's," and he knew how to gather men. He had ranged through
the train, like some good-naturedly overbearing Lord High Commissioner
selecting those whose appearance most appealed to him and, because of
his keen acumen and genial approachment, had captured easily and brought
into the Cassowary those whom he thought would swing best into being a
healthful and merry part of the fraction of humanity enduring temporary
distress. He had an idea.
The occupants of the Cassowary included a number of the more than
ordinarily intelligent and cultivated--as would naturally be the case in
such a car and on such an extended trip--and all had, by this time,
become more or less acquainted, though all had not, like the Colonel,
acquired the fancy of addressing others by the title of their
occupation. It was to such a group as this that the Colonel, standing at
one end of the car, addressed himself:
"I'm afraid that we are flunking a little. I know--I feel it in my
bones--that we are going to escape from this cold dilemma without any
serious consequence, but we shall not be a credit to ourselves if we
falter in the interval. Let us avoid depression. Let us enliven the
situation as much as possible. To such end I have a suggestion to make
in this connection which, I hope, may be well received. Last night I was
much interested in a story told by the buoyant and blithesome young
gentleman occupying the end seat on the left side there"--and he
indicated the "Gallus Youth"--"and it has come to my mind since that we
may greatly relieve the monotony of our case by doing what we do in the
smoking compartment, that is, by telling stories. If you consent, I
will modestly offer myself as a sort of master of ceremonies. Does the
idea meet with any degree of approval?"
There was no dissent, but, instead, a hearty agreement to the
proposition, the Colonel's cheery manner having its effect on everybody.
For a time, though, the story-telling did not begin.
There was need, certainly, for any and all suggestions as to means for
ameliorating in any degree a situation the grimness of which was
beginning to force itself upon even the most optimistic of the company.
The wind, even when it lowered its tone for a moment, growled ominously.
"It is awful," moaned the woman with the baby. "I wonder how God can let
such things happen. I wonder if praying would help?"
Then followed--it could hardly be otherwise with such a
company--reverent but earnest discussion of the question of whether or
not Providence ever really intervened in special cases, as a result of
special supplication. Varying opinions were expressed, the majority,
even the most seemingly devout, inclining to the belief that the answer
to the question was beyond the knowledge accorded to humanity. It was
the Colonel's opportunity. He appealed to the Minister, who had listened
to the discussion with a thoughtful smile upon his kindly face, but who
had not given an opinion.
"Do you believe in special providences, sir?" he asked. "Can you relate
a single instance in your experience, or one of which you have heard,
from a reliable source, where there has been the manifestation of what
we call 'a special providence,' in direct answer to prayer?"
"I cannot answer your question," was the Minister's reply. "I cannot
answer the first part of the query, because I am undecided, and I cannot
answer the second because the same reasoning would, in a way, apply,
since I am not entirely assured of certain earthly facts. But," and
there was a twinkle in the reverend gentleman's eyes, "I heard a curious
story once, for the exact truth of which I will by no means vouch, which
I will tell in the narrator's own words, and which, supposing it to be
true, might be looked upon as either for or against the doctrine of
A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
Just who are the "salt of the earth" is a disputable question. The title
belongs traditionally to a group of that splendid race--the Jews. But
it is claimed, also, and on seemingly excellent grounds, by other
groups, including a large number of the people of Iowa. Appearances are
in their favor, for Iowa was settled by a fine lot of men and women, and
their children have not deteriorated.
They were excellent pioneers who came to cross the great river and make
a new State, to cut away the forest where it was too dense, to plant
trees where the prairie-planted farm-houses and barns needed shelter
from wintry blasts, to import cattle, and horses, and sheep, and hogs
with blood in them, and to repeat the old exploit of the dominating race
in making, somewhere, the desert blossom as the rose. About what is
Maxonville alighted one of the groups of men and women, settling down
like wild geese upon an area of fertile and well-watered land.
Maxonville was not much in evidence when they came, these strong men and
women, for only "Old Man" Maxon was living at the forks where the big
creek found the little river; but they all settled about, and there were
built new homes close to Maxon's, and there came, as the years passed, a
church, and a schoolhouse, and a grocery and dry goods store, and, in
time, the prosperous town. The farmers round about prospered, for they
had thrift and intelligence and something of the old Covenanters'
spirit.
The church Maxonville built, offhand and ready for all its uses before
they had a preacher, was a pride to the sturdy men and believing women,
and when the preacher came to them from the East they were more
satisfied than ever.
There may be something in lonely farm work making one a grim adherent of
straight creed. Down behind horses and plow all day long, with only the
great blue sky of God above, and only a view of the same sky meeting a
green horizon far away and all around; inclosed in this great vault of
blue and green, and left alone with one's thoughts, it may be that the
eternal problem becomes more earnestly considered, more a part of all
the thought and life of a human being than it is to the man of the city,
who has his attention distracted every moment from the great,
overwhelming presence and pressure. Such effects crystallize. The people
of Maxonville and its vicinity were sternly devout--that is, most of
them--and their new minister was a fit exponent of their creed.
The minister was tall, dark-haired, clean-shaven, and with brown eyes
which were keen, chiefly, in looking into himself. He had a stern,
well-defined mission in religious teaching--as earnest as Ignatius
Loyola, stubborn as Oliver Cromwell. He had been through college, and
then through one of the strictest of theological schools. He was fit to
preach, he felt, as far as mere acquirement of having learned the ways
of other preachers; but he knew that the ideas of the world were
changing, and that if the world were changing God must be doing it, and
so he was at times perplexed. But he came to his little land of prairie
flowers, and steer-raising, and honest obstinacy, a fit man for the
place. And they said they had a preacher!
It is doubtful if any village of three hundred people in the United
States, from Montpelier to San Diego, from Portland to St. John, has not
one pretty girl or more. Maxonville had a number of pretty girls, and
one of them was more than pretty; she was beautiful.
Deacon Conant was the leading man of the church of the new town. He was
a man who had succeeded, because of brains and energy, in managing his
two or three farms, but he does not figure in this account save that he
was the father of Jane Conant. His blood had gone into her, and it was
pretty good blood, too. The preacher had fallen in love with her and she
with him. Preachers and girls would not be good for much if they did not
do that sort of thing occasionally.
Here was an ideal relation of things, or what should have been an ideal
one. What could have been finer than that there should have come into a
growing town in a growing region a stalwart, almost fanatical builder-up
of faith, who should find a fitting partner in the daughter of the chief
man of the locality, and that from the union so buttressed all around
should come great results? There was but one obstacle in the way of this
perfect combination, and the obstacle was in the woman. It is
astonishing how women will nibble at apples and learn things, from Eve
down! This particular young woman had graduated from one of the most
cleverly conducted of Eastern colleges for girls, and she had views. Not
only did she have views, but she had views in the face of her religious
teacher, of the man whom she respected for his earnestness and loved for
himself. They were intensely happy for a while after their
engagement--as becomes strong souls getting close together in such
relationship--but with nearer relationship came necessarily more
vehement and unguarded interchange of thought, and--sad the day!--they
differed seriously, upon a matter of belief.
A part of the belief of John Elwell, the preacher, was an implicit
confidence in the manifestation at times of what we call a "special
providence." One of the ideas of the young woman, deeply religious
though she was, was an utter disbelief in this same thing--that is, a
disbelief that God sometimes makes an exception, and, instead of working
through the laws of the Nature which He has instituted, produces a
direct result having the quality of what we are accustomed to call a
miracle.
The two discussed the matter together very often after they came close
together, as lovers may. The first time they debated there came a little
wedge between them as thin as tissue paper abraded to an end. Next time
the wedge grew larger, and where it ended there was a cleft reaching
down to anywhere. The third time there was a split broad and well
defined, and the engagement was broken.
"My dear, I do believe in special providences; I do believe that earnest
prayer will bring results in certain cases, justifiable in themselves."
"I do not."
"Why?"
"Because I believe that the whole thing--and I am only a girl talking, I
don't know what you call it--is just a belief and taken on trust. What
would you think of going down to the mill there and praying the miller
to make one bag of flour coarse in the midst of all his business? The
miller is giving us bread for our physical life, and he knows best how
to do it, at least as compared with the rest of us. I know that this is
all a poor simile, a poor comparison, but I can't help it."
Now, even an earnest preacher is human, and a great many girls--though
the healthy among us call them angels--are human. The engagement between
the two was at this juncture broken off so squarely that the ends
weren't even ragged, though there was left a possible sequence, not
altogether black as midnight--a vague hope in the heart of each that the
future might have something to it. This brought a few words more before
they parted.
Said the girl: "Show me a case of special providence and I will believe
with you. It must be--it cannot possibly be otherwise--than that there
should in some way, somehow, come an opportunity for showing that you
are right and I wrong."
The pale-faced man's eyes were burning as he looked at her.
"The day will come!" he said.
Time passed and the two worked together in social and church relations,
but there was no more talk of marriage. It was one day in mid-July, a
year after the conversation just described, when John Elwell was talking
earnestly from his pulpit, and Jane Conant was one of the congregation.
The preacher talked well that day--there is no denying it. He talked in
a simple, straightforward but wonderfully eloquent way of how the
quality of one's relation to others in this world must make easy or
uneasy the path toward what is the better habitation after death. He
told of the duties of the successful to the unsuccessful, of the strong
to the weak; and he told too, of how, even in this world, each man's
mind is accuser or justifier, and how, even in this world, come rewards
and punishments, and how to him with faith enough should come immediate
returns. With glowing face he even went aside a little to speak of those
who talk too much of Nature and the Universe, and who believe that a
general scheme is as true and strong and believable as one more
definite--"'He noteth the sparrow's fall,'" he said.
It was sultry within the church, and all seemed lifeless, though hearts
were beating rapidly under the preacher's eloquence. There seemed no
oxygen in the air; all was oppressive. There was no sound as the speaker
closed a long and telling sentence, save the slight "swish" as a locust
alighted on the sill of an open window. There was sound enough a moment
later.
Through the open doorway leaped a young man who shouted but one word:
"Cyclone!"
At the exclamation breaking in thus on the religious stillness perhaps
one-fourth of the congregation started to their feet and rushed into the
open air, but the three-fourths remained in their seats as if paralyzed.
The preacher paused, looked about, and then with almost shining face
spoke solemnly:
"My friends, we are threatened with one of the visitations which God
sometimes decrees, but which, it is my earnest belief, cannot harm those
who believe in Him rightly and appeal to Him most trustingly. Let us
pray that the cyclone will avoid this church."
They knelt together, preacher and congregation, and strong and trustful
and appealing was the pastor's prayer. His clear voice did not falter in
the eloquent appeal, and those who knelt felt confidence and a glorified
pride in the attitude taken in an awful hour. Men came rushing to the
doorway crying aloud upon all within to make the attempt at escape to a
safer place, but there was no response, no sound save that of the
preacher's uplifted voice. There was a roar and rumble in the far
southwest and a half darkness was approaching. As the sound outside
increased, the voice of the preacher became less audible, but the
spellbound and trusting congregation did not move. Among the women was
still Jane Conant.
The rumble became a roar, the roar an ear-splitting, paralyzing blast,
and then--chaos! In blackness, with its steeple, its roof, its whole
upper part torn away and leaving but an uncovered brick rectangle, ten
or fifteen feet in height, remained what was of the church in
Maxonville. With the blackness came a torrent; the interior of the
rectangle became a flooded space, within which area men and women waded,
and floundered and shouted, and shrieked, and felt for each other, and
feared, almost, that the world was ended. Then gradually, the flood
ceased, and daylight came again, and the drenched creatures within what
was left of the church--by what seemed a miracle there had been none
injured--emerged upon the greenery about. Among them was the preacher.
He spoke to no one. He had worn a straw hat when he came to the church,
and had found it somehow. It had been wetted and crushed, and now hung
down on each side of his head grotesquely. He was a sodden, queer
creature who looked neither to the right nor to the left. But there was
thought in him still. He lifted his face to Heaven, and thanked God that
all had been preserved, but said no other word. He walked drippingly
along the sidewalk and then turned down a lane which led into the
country.
Barely one-fourth of a mile--estimated conventionally as the crow
flies--from the town of Maxonville was the farm of John Dent. It was not
a large farm; it was, in fact, but a quarter of a quarter-section,
which means forty acres; but acres have nothing to do with ideas. John
Dent, though he had only a little farm, worked hard and lived reasonably
well, and had a standing, and knew the preacher well, and debated one
important question with him frequently. It was this same question of
special providence, and the attitude of John Dent was, though in a man's
way, identical with that of Jane Conant, the preacher's lost sweetheart.
The preacher wondered at this sometimes. He wondered how it was that
this gifted girl and this obstinate, deep-thinking farmer should so
chance to decide alike. Of course all this was before the cyclone.
Down at the bottom of his heart John Dent was a little sentimental. His
father and mother had come to the small farm before him. They were dead
now, as well as certain sisters and brothers, and they were buried in a
little private graveyard on the farm, around which the beeches grew
thickly and from which the ground sloped gently into a laughing creek.
There was not much surplus left at the end of each year of the product
of John Dent's farming, and the surplus had more channels for immediate
and demanding distribution than it could supply, still John Dent
thought that some day he would put up a neat little brick monument in
that graveyard--a somewhat unusual form of monument--but that was Dent's
idea. He was going to have a pyramidical thing about fifty feet high.
The spire of the church at Maxonville was of brick, hollow of course,
welded solidly in its weather-hardened cement, as if it were a monolith
of stone.
The cyclone had passed. A preacher had gone down a lane thinking the
thoughts which come to a clean Christian man in a surprising and
dispiriting emergency. A fair young woman had gone home crying over what
was where her heart was, and Mr. John Dent had seen a cyclone come and
miss his place by about forty rods, and had also seen an out-flinging
and eccentric wing of that same cyclone deposit, just in the proper
place in the burying-ground of his family, a perfect pyramid monument,
such as he had been dreaming of for the last quarter of a century. It
was all queer and out of the common, and was hard to explain; it is not
attempted here, for this is only the story of what happened within an
hour or two on a certain afternoon in Iowa.
This is going back to the preacher. He walked fast and he walked far,
and found himself deep in the country. He was at least honest in all he
thought; he was a good man, yet he was troubled to the depths of his
being. "I have prayed to God," he said to himself, "and He has refused
me. The cyclone didn't turn away from the church! Is the woman I love
right, and am I wrong? Is there a broader and greater scheme of being
wherein I should be a trusting and unquestioning instrument rather than
one who demands as a special suppliant? I will see Jane," he said in his
great strait. "I feel that she may aid me."
He met the woman that night; he went to her house and found her there,
and found, too, that as she was, being a dear woman, she had just then
but vague views either on special providences or anything else in
particular, all being absorbed in anxiety as to his own health and
welfare. She was but a loving, frightened creature, harried over what
might have happened to the man who through all the months of silence and
separation had been all there was in the world to her. He had come half
intending to admit himself all in error, but soon all had been lost in
the mere performance of a man and a woman blending. And the evening
passed. Then when the next day came, the two, now understanding, walked
out into the country.
It was in that wonderful hour of the summer sunset, when all the world
is filled with light and the heavens are tinted with opalescent colors
from an unseen source, and some vagrant vesper sparrow is still singing,
that John Elwell and Jane Conant stood in John Dent's little family
graveyard, looking soberly at the transplanted church steeple. It stood
there, its base ranged plumb east and west, north and south, as if
calculated with all the niceties of the Ancient Order; at its foot the
quiet grass-grown graves, while all around stretched clover meadows and
the cornfields.
"I feel like borrowing a phrase from the Mohammedans," said the
minister, "or just the beginning of one, then saying no more: 'God is
great!'"
The girl's summer bonnet hung back over her shoulders, its pink strings
loosely tied under her chin. She looked comprehendingly at the minister,
but she said nothing.
"I have been narrow," continued the minister, "but God is great."
Coming across the clover field they saw John Dent, and the two went to
the white picket fence around the graveyard, which he had built and
cared for, and stood at its little gate to meet him.
"Mr. Dent," said the minister, when he had shaken the farmer's hand, and
as they all turned to look at the steeple top, "I have had a lesson, and
I must acknowledge that it was needed. Our vision is limited, and we
often know not even how to pray! I am content to leave all to God, nor
to wrestle for His special interposition in my behalf. The doctrine of
special providences is presuming--of the earth, earthy. I see that now."
"Well, I don't know," said John Dent; "I didn't exactly pray for it, but
I've always wanted a monument to my folks here. Sometimes I thought it
was vain and worldly minded in me, but I couldn't give it up. I wanted
that monument just about as high as the end of the steeple stands, just
about that shape, too, more than anything in this world. I couldn't see
my way clear to getting it. I couldn't afford to build one--and here it
is! I don't know as I quite agree with you now parson, concerning
special providences!"
It was just before the conclusion of the Minister's story that a lady
entered quietly from the next sleeping car and was welcomed to the
coterie by two or three of the ladies, who had, evidently, met her.
Stafford looked in her direction and their eyes met. Then, all the world
changed!
They knew each other on the instant, but beyond the slightest of
inclinations of their heads, there was no sign of recognition. There was
no smile. There was but an almost startled look which changed into one
of comprehension and then of the ready trust which was of the past. What
message that lingering mutual glance conveyed neither could have told
entirely--it was doubtful, hopeful, appealing, understanding.
As the minister ceased talking, and comment began, Stafford rose and
made his way toward the new arrival. He had but neared her when Mrs.
Livingston took him by the arm:
"Have you met Mrs. Eversham yet, Mr. Stafford?"
They clasped hands, and his head swam, it seemed to him: "I did not know
that you were on the train," he said.
"I have been slightly ill," she answered gently, "and have been confined
to my stateroom most of the time since leaving San Francisco, but I am
well again. It is good to be out."
Then their attention was demanded by others and they were separated.
But, what a flavor to the world now!