Читать книгу The Seeker - Harry Leon Wilson - Страница 13

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His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study. Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth. Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers. A big, white-breasted gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily falling eye-lids.

He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the family way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had been revolt in him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own daughter's revolt.

Again he dwelt in the days when he had preached with a hot passion such truth as was his. For a long time, while the old clock ticked on the mantel before him and the big cat purred or slept under his absent pettings, his mind moved through an incident of that early ministry. Clear in his memory were certain passages of fire from the sermon. In the little log church at Edom he had felt the spirit burn in him and he had movingly voiced its warnings of that dread place where the flames forever blaze, yet never consume; where cries ever go up for one drop of water to cool the parched tongues of those who sought not God while they lived. He had told of one who died—one that the world called good, a moral man—but not a Christian; one who had perversely neglected the way of life. How, on his death-bed, this one had called in agony for a last glass of water, seeming to know all at once that he would now be where no drop of water could cool him through all eternity.

So effective had been his putting of this that a terrified throng came forward at his call for converts.

The next morning he had ridden away from Edom toward Felton Falls to preach there. A mile out of town he had been accosted by a big, bearded man who had yet a singularly childish look—who urged that he come to his cabin to minister to a sick friend. He knew the fellow for one that the village of Edom called "daft" or "queer," yet held to be harmless—to be rather amusing, indeed, since he could be provoked to deliver curious harangues upon the subject of revealed religion. He remembered now that the man's face had stared at him from far back in the church the night before—a face full of the liveliest terror, though he had not been among those that fled to the mercy-seat. Acceding to the man's request, he followed him up a wooded path to his cabin. Dismounting and tying his horse, he entered and, turning to ask where the sick man was, found himself throttled in the grasp of a giant.

He was thrust into an inner room, windowless and with no door other than the one now barred by his chuckling captor. And here the Reverend Allan Delcher had lain three days and two nights captive of a madman, with no food and without one drop of water.

From the other side of the log partition his captor had declared himself to be the keeper of hell. Even now he could hear the words maundered through the chinks: "Never got another drop of water for a million years and still more, and him a burning up and a roasting up, and his tongue a lolling out, all of a sizzle. Now wasn't that fine—because folks said he'd likely gone crazy about religion!"

Other times his captor would declare himself to be John the Baptist making straight the paths in the wilderness. Again he would quote passages of scripture, some of them hideous mockeries to the tortured prisoner, some strangely soothing and suggestive.

But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident, they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go with his captor's. His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity had been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted that ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of divine retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of heterodoxy. Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of him; only, as once averred a plain parishioner, "He seemed to bear down on hell jest a lee-tle less continuously."

As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was set forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a little time after the father's release from the maniac's cabin. She had grown to womanhood submitting meekly to an iron rule; but none the less betraying an acute repugnance for certain doctrines preached by her father. It seemed to the old man a long way to look back; and then a long way to come forward again, past the death of his girl-wife while their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that child's revolt, in her thirty-first year. Dumbly, dutifully, had she submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness. Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the monstrous thing. He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing good-for-nothing who had that winter given singing lessons in the village.

Only once after that had he looked upon her face—the face of a withered sprite, subdued by time. The hurt of that look was still fresh in him, making his mind turn heavily, perhaps a little remorsefully, to the two little boys asleep in the west bedroom. Had the seed of revolt been in her, from his own revolt against his father? Would it presently bear some ugly fruit in her sons?

From a drawer in the table he took a little sheaf of folded sheets, and read again the last letter that had come from her; read it not without grim mutterings and oblique little jerks of the narrow old head, yet with quick tender glows melting the sternness.

"You must not think I have ever regretted my choice, though every day of my life I have sorrowed at your decision not to see me so long as I stayed by my husband. How many times I have prayed God to remind you that I took him for better or worse, till death should us part."

This made him mutter.

"Clayton has never in his life failed of kindness and gentleness to me"—so ran the letter—"and he has always provided for us as well as a man of his uncommon talents could."

Here the old man sniffed in fine contempt.

"All last winter he had quite a class to teach singing in the evening and three day-scholars for the violin, one of whom paid him in hams. Another offered to pay either in money or a beautiful portrait of me in pastel. We needed money, but Clayton chose the portrait as a surprise to me. At times he seems unpractical, but now he has started out in business again—"

There were bitter shakings of the head here. Business! Standing in a buggy at street-corners, jauntily urging a crowd to buy the magic grease-eradicator, toothache remedy, meretricious jewelry, what not! first playing a fiddle and rollicking out some ribald song to fetch them. Business indeed! A pretty business!

"The boys are delighted with the Bibles you sent and learn a verse each day. I have told them they may some day preach as you did if they will be as good men as you are and study the Bible. They try to preach like our preacher in the cunningest way. I wish you could see them. You would love them in spite of your feeling against their father. I did what you suggested to stimulate their minds about the Scriptures, but perhaps the lesson they chose to write about was not very edifying. It does not seem a pretty lesson to me, and I did not pick it out. They heard about it at Sabbath-school and had their papers all written as a surprise for me. Of course, Bernal's is very childish, but I think Allan's paper, for a child of his age, shows a grasp of religious matters that is truly remarkable. I shall keep them studying the Bible daily. I should tell you that I am now looking forward with great joy to——"

With a long sigh he laid down the finely written sheet and took from the sheaf the two papers she had spoken of. Then while the gale roared without and shook his window, and while the bust of John Calvin looked down at him from the book-case at his back, he followed his two grandsons on their first incursion into the domain of speculative theology.

He took first the paper of the older boy, painfully elaborated with heavy, intricate capitals and headed "Elisha and the Wicked Children—by Mr. Allan Delcher Linford, Esquire, aged nine years and six months."

"This lesson," it began, "is to teach us to love God and the prophets or else we will likely get into trouble. It says Elisha went up from Bethel and some children came out of the city and said go up thou Baldhead. They said it Twice one after the other and so Elisha got mad right away and turned around and cursed them good in the name of the Lord and so 2 She Bears come along and et up 42 of them for Elisha was a holy prophet of God and had not ought to of been yelled at. So of course the mothers would Take on very much When they found their 42 Children et up but I think that we had ought to learn from this that these 42 Little ones was not the Elected. It says in our catchism God having out of his mere good pleasure elected some to everlasting life. Now God being a Presbiterian would know these 42 little ones had not been elected so they might as well be et up by bears as anything else to show forth his honour and glory Forever Amen. It should teach a Boy to be mighty carful about kidding old men unless he is a Presbiterian. I spelled every word in this right.

Mr. Allan Delcher Linford."

The second paper, which the old man now held long before him, was partly printed and partly written with a lead-pencil, whose mark was now faint and now heavy, as having gone at intervals to the writer's lips. As the old man read, his face lost not a little of its grimness.

"Bears

"It teaches the lord thy God is baldheaded. I ask my deer father what it teeches he said it teeches who ever wrot that storry was baldheaded. He says a man with thik long hair like my deer father would of said o let the kids have their fun with old Elisha so I ask my deer mother who wrot this lesson she said God wrot the holy word so that is how we know God is baldheaded. It was a lot of children for only two 2 bears. I liked to of ben there if the bears wold of known that I was a good child. mabe I cold of ben on a high fense or up a tree. I climd the sor aple tree in our back yard esy.

By Bernal Linford, aged neerly 8 yrs."

Carefully he put back both papers with the mother's letter, his dark face showing all its intricate net-work of lines in a tension that was both pained and humorous.

Two fresh souls were given to his care to be made, please God, the means of grace by which thousands of other souls might be washed clean of the stain of original sin. Yet, if revolt was there—revolt like his daughter's and like his own? Would he forgive as his own father had forgiven, who had called him back after many years to live out a tranquil old age on the fortune that father's father had founded? He mused long on this. The age was lax—true, but God's law was never lax. If one would revolt from the right, one must suffer. For the old man was one of the few last of a race of giants who were to believe always in the Printed Word.