Читать книгу Marjorie's Canadian Winter -- A Story of the Northern Lights - Agnes Maule Machar - Страница 4

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That was the last talk that Marjorie and her father had for a good while. The chill that Mr. Fleming had taken that evening produced serious results. He felt so ill next morning that the doctor had to be summoned, and, in spite of all he could do, the attack developed into inflammation of the lungs, accompanied by a touch of bronchitis, to which he was constitutionally liable. For days he had to be kept perfectly quiet, while the doctor came every few hours and watched his patient’s progress with great anxiety. Marjorie was distressed and anxious, though she scarcely realized the danger, being accustomed to her father’s severe colds and attacks of bronchitis. By his express desire she went to school as usual and tried to study her lessons, though not by any means with her usual success. But when she hurried home from school, with an anxious heart, eager to know how her father felt now, and how Rebecca thought he was getting on, she was much more inclined to hover about the sick room, attempting the superfluous task of assisting the capable and experienced Rebecca in attending to the patient’s comfort, than to set to work at the lessons which had never seemed so dry and difficult before. But she knew it worried her father when she neglected her studies, and the doctor had said that much depended on keeping him perfectly quiet, so Marjorie toiled away over French verbs and German adjectives and still more tiresome sums, with a very half-hearted attention, glad when they were done and she was free to sit by her father, or carry him the nourishment that Rebecca prepared. The short November days had never seemed so dreary, and the solitary meals seemed so uninviting that, but for Rebecca’s energetic remonstrances, Marjorie would have half-starved herself.

“It’s just too ridicklous,” that sensible handmaid would declare, “for you to be frettin’ yourself sick, when you ought to be savin’ up yourself to cheer up the master; an’ then, when he’s gettin’ well, you’ll be taken down sick next, worryin’ him to death almost!”

This consideration never failed to have its effect on Marjorie, when nothing else would make her feel like swallowing the food that seemed as if it would choke her.

But at last the doctor announced that he thought his patient out of danger, and that, with care, he might soon be restored to his usual state of health. Marjorie’s relief and delight were so great, and the reaction to overflowing spirits so strong, that Rebecca had to be constantly warning her not to excite or fatigue her father by too frequent expressions of her satisfaction at his slowly returning strength.

One cold, bleak November afternoon, two or three days after the turning-point, she was walking home from school with her friend Nettie Lane. Marjorie was in her brightest mood, as she talked of her father’s recent improvement. During the time when she had been feeling oppressed by anxiety, she had shyly avoided speaking of his illness, as far as it was possible for her to do so; had answered inquiries as briefly as possible, and had even avoided Nettie herself, from an instinctive dread of Nettie’s too ready and often thoughtless tongue. But now, with a natural desire for sympathy, she talked freely and hopefully of her father’s daily increasing improvement.

But Nettie was not so sympathetic as might have been expected. At home she had heard it confidently predicted that Mr. Fleming “would not get over it,” and people are often unwilling to admit their judgments to be wrong, even in such matters. So Nettie looked rather important, and remarked that her mother had said that appearances were often deceitful, and, any way, Mr. Fleming was in a very “critical condition.”

“And I guess ‘critical’ means something pretty bad,” added Nettie, “for that was what the doctor said before our baby died.”

“But Dr. Stone says he thinks papa will soon be all right again,” said Marjorie, keenly hurt by Nettie’s blunt and unfeeling words.

“O, well! you never can tell what doctors mean by that,” she added sententiously. “Mother thinks, any way, you ought to realize the danger more; for she says it would be dreadful if he were taken away while he is so unprepared.”

“My father—unprepared!” exclaimed Marjorie, too much shocked to say more.

“Yes,” replied Nettie decidedly; “every one’s unprepared if they’re not converted, you know; and mother says she’s sure he’s never been converted.”

“I don’t think your mother knows anything about it, then,” said Marjorie, indignantly.

“Marjorie Fleming! aren’t you ashamed? My mother knows all about such things. She says she can always tell when a person’s converted,” exclaimed Nettie, aggrieved in her turn.

“Well, she doesn’t know much about my father; and I don’t think you ought to say such things to me,” said Marjorie, trying hard to repress the tears that she would not on any account have let Nettie see.

“Yes, I ought,” persisted Nettie, “because you ought to pray for him every day—that he mightn’t die till he was converted, for you know that would be dreadful!”

“Nettie Lane, I just wish you would mind your own business!” almost sobbed out Marjorie, who could bear no more; and without another word she turned the corner quickly, and almost ran till she was safe within her own door. And then, when she had got into her own little room, she gave way to the fit of grieved and indignant crying that she could no longer keep down.

It was intensely wounding both to her pride and to her affection, to hear Nettie talk in such a flippant, unfeeling fashion, of the father she so passionately loved and revered. And to be told that she ought to pray for her father’s recovery—when she had been praying so earnestly morning, noon and night that he might be restored to health! And under all the rest lay an uneasy misgiving lest there might be some truth in what Mrs. Lane had said. She knew how Mrs. Lane was looked up to as an “eminent Christian”—a leader in all good works; and if she said such a thing, she must think it; and how could Marjorie tell what this mysterious “being converted” meant? And she knew that her father was not a very regular attendant at church, and that in some other respects he was not just like some of the people that Nettie, on her mother’s authority, called “real Christians.” But then she remembered what he had said about many people being “half-heathens,” and how he had spoken to her about the “light that shineth in darkness.” She felt perplexed and bewildered; and it was a great comfort to her when Dr. Stone’s neat little equipage drove up to the door, and the brisk, cheery little doctor brightened her up by his hopeful, encouraging words about her dear father.

“I’ve told him he can leave his room and take tea with you to-night,” he said. “A little change will be good for him now; only take care to have a good fire; and keep the temperature of the room very even,” was his parting injunction.

How good it was to see her father once more in his own easy-chair by the fire, and to see that, though still weak and pale, he looked so much like himself, and smiled so cheerfully at all the little preparations for his comfort, while he also expressed his satisfaction in his own way.

“Why, Marjorie,” he said, “you and Rebecca will spoil me altogether, if you coddle me up like this,” and he bent over to kiss his excited child, thinking how much she looked like her mother just then. She had forgotten, for the time, all about the disquietude of the afternoon; but by and by it came back to her when tea was over and she sat down by her father, who seemed disinclined to try to read yet. It was Friday evening, so that she did not need to learn her lessons till next day.

“Well, Marjorie, what subject are you considering so deeply?” asked Mr. Fleming, watching her preoccupied and absent air as she gazed into the fire and stroked Robin’s shaggy locks. Marjorie had often wondered at her father’s power of divining her “moods and tenses,” as he used to call them, and she was not sorry to have an opportunity of unburdening her mind a little to the only person who, she felt, could give her any light on the subject. So she looked up, and asked shyly: “Papa—what does it mean, exactly—to ‘be converted’?”

“To be turned round from the wrong to the right,” he replied.

“Is that all?” she asked in surprise. “I thought it meant—to have a new heart. Were you ever converted, father?” she added, finding no way of getting at what she wanted, except the direct question.

“What has Nettie Lane been saying to you, dear?” Mr. Fleming asked, with one of his scrutinizing looks and a slight smile.

“Why, father, how could you know?” she asked in startled surprise.

“I can put things together,” he said quietly. “I know Mrs. Lane’s ideas pretty well, and I can guess her opinion of me. She is one of the Christians who forget that their Master has said, ‘Judge not,’ and who doesn’t understand any one’s being religious if it isn’t in their own way. She is a good woman, and honestly tries to do good, but, like many other good people, she is apt to make mistakes when she tries to judge others.”

“I knew you were religious, father; but I don’t understand about being converted.”

“Well, my dear child, I don’t want you to mistake me, and I think the best way to answer your question will be to tell you something of my own experience and my own mistakes. It may save you from some, and I should like to tell you more about myself than I have ever done yet. I have been very ill, you know, dear, and in all these quiet hours and days that I have been laid aside—not knowing whether I should ever come back to my old life again—I have been thinking a good deal about my own past, and of things I have been led to see, that once I did not see.”

Marjorie’s eyes had filled with tears as her father referred, in his still weak voice, to that terrible possibility, and then, with quick anxiety, she asked if it would not tire him too much. And Rebecca came in to enforce the necessity of Mr. Fleming saving his strength, and not wearing himself out with too much talking yet, a truth which the fatigue he already felt obliged him to admit. So what he wanted to tell Marjorie was postponed, and eager as she was to hear it, she cheerfully settled down to read to him the newly arrived papers, and some things that specially interested him in the last unopened number of the periodical with which he was connected.

The next evening an old friend from the city office came in to see him, and he and Dr. Stone had a little private talk with Mr. Fleming while Marjorie finished her lessons, for once, in her own room. Sunday was a lovely day for November—almost spring-like in its mildness—and Mr. Fleming was downstairs to give Marjorie a pleasant surprise when she came home from church. This unexpected pleasure made her forget what she had been going to tell him, until her return from Sunday-school, as the early dusk was closing in.

“O, father! we needn’t have the lights in yet?” she asked eagerly, for the warm glow of the firelight was so inviting, and Marjorie liked nothing better than a twilight talk with her father on Sunday evening.

“No, dear; I have read as much as I care to read, just now, and I would rather go on with the talk we began the other evening.”

Marjorie gladly settled herself down in her low chair by his side, and Robin stretched himself contentedly at their feet. Then, with a sudden recollection, she exclaimed:

“O, papa! what do you think was the text this morning? It was a stranger that preached, and I don’t know his name, but his text was: ‘The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.’ Wasn’t it odd?”

“Not very,” replied her father. “You would never have noticed the text specially if it hadn’t been for our talk about it. Well, can you tell me any of the sermon?”

“He said, for one thing, that Christ lighted every man that came into the world, and that meant, that he gave them light enough to walk by, if they would take it. And then he said just what you said that evening, about our hearts being so full of darkness that the light often shone in the midst of it without being able to drive it away; and that even good people often had a great deal more darkness in their hearts than they knew.”

Marjorie had been accustomed to have to bring home reports of the sermons she heard when her father was not with her, and partly in this way she had acquired the habit of listening with attention, and carrying away leading thoughts in her mind.

“Yes,” said Mr. Fleming, “that is only too true. ‘Lighten our darkness’ is perhaps the prayer we all need most. But then if we are only sincere in trying to walk in the light we have, we shall have more light. It has always seemed inexpressibly touching to me that those words, ‘more light,’ should have been the last on the great Goethe’s dying lips. With all the light his splendid intellect and vast knowledge could give him, ‘more light’ was, he felt, what he needed most. It seems sad, too, that he could not, while he lived, have seen the true ‘Light of the World.’ But pride and selfishness are terribly blinding powers.”

“Well, father,” said Marjorie, much less interested in Goethe than in himself, “you said you were going to tell me about yourself.”

“Yes, darling, and so I will. Well, I was a long time in getting to see that true Light, and that gives me more patience with others. You know that I was born and brought up in Scotland, though I left it as soon as I had finished my university course. My parents were good people, but very strict in their ideas—my father especially so—and very sure that what they had been taught to believe was the exact truth, and everything different must be wrong. From the people about me I got the idea that certain beliefs were a necessary part of Christianity, which I now believe people got out of the darkness of their own hearts, and not out of the Bible—beliefs which are certainly quite inconsistent with the blessed truth that ‘God is Love,’ and which, I think, taught them to be hard and unloving and unforgiving, as they fancied God was. I was too much of a boy—too lazy and careless about such things—to study the Bible for myself, and see what Christ and his apostles really taught. And so, first I grew to dread and dislike the very name of God, and everything that reminded me of One whom I never thought of loving but only of fearing. And then as I grew older, and met with other young men, and read more, I was very easily persuaded that religion was all a superstition—because some things I had been taught could not be true—and that it was impossible, even if there was a God, that we could ever understand him, or could even know whether he existed or not.”

“That’s what you call an Agnostic, isn’t it, papa? Mrs. Lane thinks they are dreadful people, but they can’t be, if you were ever one,” said Marjorie, impulsively.

“They are very much to be pitied, at any rate,” he said, “for wandering in darkness when there is light. And often it is not so much their fault as that of the Christians who pervert or misrepresent Christianity. I was unfortunate, too, in some friends of whom, at one time, I saw a good deal—people who were very earnest and devoted Christians, but seemed to care for nothing in life that was not distinctly religious. Art, science, even philanthropic reforms, they seemed to think unworthy of a Christian’s attention. There was for them only one interest—that which they call ‘salvation,’ and they seemed to care little even for other people, unless they thought as they did. Now I thought, and truly enough, that if there was a God, he was the God of nature as well as of religion, and that he must have created all man’s faculties and intended him to use them; and so the narrowness of these really good people only confirmed me in my idea that religion is only a superstition. And I took these stunted, dwarfed specimens—stunted and dwarfed by the perversity and narrowness of human nature—for the natural fruits of the tree of Christianity, and thought that I was thus judging the tree by its fruits.

“Well, as I said, I came to America just after my university course, when your Uncle Ramsay married my eldest sister, and came out to settle in Montreal. I had very exalted ideas on the subject of human freedom, and I thought that republican institutions and the growth of humanity would right every evil under the sun. But I soon found that even these were by no means perfect; that abuses and selfish oppression and many other evils seemed to spring up, like weeds from the soil. As a young writer, trying to make my way, I had a hard time of it, and many experiences that gradually led me into very pessimistic, that is hopeless, views of humanity, and I was feeling very, very miserable and dejected, when—I met your dear mother.”

Marjorie’s eyes followed the direction of her father’s—to the sweet face in the picture. Both were silent for a few moments.

Then Mr. Fleming continued: “To me, in my depressed state of mind, she seemed a very angel of consolation. And when I found that she loved me, and was willing to share my not very brilliant prospects, life seemed to blossom anew for me. It seemed as if now I had found the true light of life, and for a time it was all I wanted.

“But it was not all she wanted. I had purposely avoided saying anything to her about the faith in which I knew she implicitly believed. I went to church—though not very regularly—and she knew I was serious and earnest in my ideas and in my life; that I worked with all my heart for what seemed to me for the good of man, and I think that even while she had a misgiving that her faith was not mine, she still hoped that it was, and when she could no longer even hope this, she still hoped that it yet would be.”

Marjorie sat listening with intense interest. She had never heard much of her dead mother except from her Aunt Millie, and this opening of her father’s heart and life to her, was a more precious gift than any other he could have bestowed on her. Mr. Fleming spoke slowly and thoughtfully—almost as if thinking aloud—now and then pausing, as if the time he was speaking about was present still.

“As our happy married life went on,” he continued, “and your mother’s nature matured and deepened, her true, spiritual faith grew deeper and stronger also. She did what I had never done—studied the Bible daily and thoughtfully, with a loving and childlike heart, and remember, Marjorie darling, it is only love that ‘comprehendeth love.’ Without this, it is no wonder so many critics should miss the very heart and core of revelation. But as her love and faith grew stronger, she grew more sensitive to my lack of sympathy with either, and I well know it was a great and growing sorrow to her. I always put the subject aside as gently as I could when it came up, for by that time my will was set against believing; but I felt the wistful pain in her face in spite of myself. Then our first baby died, and I knew that in that sorrow her one consolation was that which I could not and would not share; and this seemed to make a separation between us, just when sorrow should have drawn us closest. She was never very strong, and I think this double sorrow undermined her health so much that, shortly after your birth I lost her, as I then thought, forever!”

Marjorie’s tears were flowing now. Her father took her hand in his, while he gently stroked her hair with the other; and, after a short pause, he went on.

“What I went through at that time, Marjorie, I could never tell in words. It was the blackness of darkness. I knew then what it was to be ‘without God and without hope in the world.’ I would have longed for death, but even that gave me no hope of reunion with her who was my life—and what did I know of a ‘beyond’? And healthy human nature shrinks from a vacuum! So I lived on, trying to forget my sorrow in my work. Your Aunt Millie came to live with me, and did all she could to cheer me. She was passionately fond of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam,’ and sometimes in the evenings, when I sat too tired and sad to talk or read, she would read to me bits of that beautiful poem, which I had never cared to do more than glance at before. The beauty and music of the poetry attracted me at first, and by degrees some of its teaching found its way into my heart. I began to feel that human knowledge is not all knowledge, and that there were other ways of getting at truth than by our senses and our short-sighted human reasoning. And so to make a long story short, I began to stretch out my hands through the darkness, to the Light that can shine even in darkness, and that, as I found, shone even for me. Your Uncle Ramsay too helped me by telling me that if I wanted to get more light, I must honestly seek to follow the light I had, and that Christ had said, ‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.’ I began to study Christ’s life and words, and was amazed to find there many things that I had never seen before—often as I had heard and read the words—things that transcended my own highest ideal of moral purity, and that, alas, far transcended my power of acting up to them. But I felt that in the very desire to follow Christ came the power of following. There were many things that I did not see for a long time—some that I cannot say I see clearly even yet; but this I have long been sure of: that no light has ever come to this world’s darkness to compare with the divine glory seen in Jesus Christ, and that in the loving following of him, is the life and light of men! I could say for myself, from the heart, what was said by one who was also a long and anxious seeker for truth, whose life I read some years ago. ‘Fully assured that when I am most a Christian, I am the best man, I am content to adhere to that as my guide in the absence of better light, and wait till God shall afford me more.’ And as time has gone on, God has given me more light, so that some of the very things that once were difficulties to me, are now additional proofs of the divine origin of a religion which proud human nature could never, never have originated.”

The room was very still. The fire had burned low as the absorbing talk had gone on; only the ticking of the clock and the distant sound of Rebecca’s preparations for tea broke the silence. Mr. Fleming’s voice had grown tired and weak, but presently he roused himself to say a few words more.

“I have told you all this, my child, because in this age of conflicting opinions few thoughtful minds can entirely escape the infection of prevailing doubt. And as changes are always liable to come, and some may soon come to our life together, I think it may be helpful to you hereafter to know what has been your father’s experience, and what is his deliberate verdict after so many years of thought and of trial of the illusions of life without the true Light. I might not be able to satisfy Mrs. Lane yet on a cross-examination, and as it does not come natural to me to express myself in her particular phraseology, I never try to do so. But

‘God fulfils himself in many ways;’

and I am more and more satisfied that Christ’s law of love is the law of light; and that in those two words, loving and following, lies the essence of that which is variously called ‘conversion,’ or a ‘new heart’ or practical Christianity. ‘Rise up and follow me,’ was Christ’s summons to those who would be his disciples, and then ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments,’ and ‘This is my commandment, that ye love one another!’ And now, darling, ring for lights and tea; for I have talked rather too much and I feel a little faint.”

Mr. Fleming talked no more that evening, but Marjorie never forgot that conversation, or rather her father’s earnest words, which lingered in her mind for months and years to come. It made that mysterious something called “conversion” so much clearer and simpler than it had ever seemed before. Just to “follow” Christ; to try to do his will in loving obedience; she could try to do that, and she would. And when she read in her Testament that evening about the man sick of palsy whom Christ told to “take up his bed and walk,” it flashed upon her that perhaps it was just in trying to obey Christ that he received the power to do it. And the light that had shone for her dear father and mother would, she was sure, shine for her also.

But what could be the “change” her father had hinted at, as if something unknown to her were impending? Her father, she was sure, was growing decidedly better. The doctor no longer came to see him daily, and when he did, he spoke so cheerfully, that Marjorie felt quite reassured. Nettie Lane and the other girls had often told her that she might have a step-mother some day—an idea which seemed to her as impossible as it was painful. But she felt sure that her father could not have spoken of her mother as he had done, if he had had the slightest thought of such a thing; and she dismissed it from her mind as out of the question. Whatever the impending change might be, it was not that. And, as often happens, what it really was, was something which would in all probability have never occurred, even to her dreaming imagination.