Читать книгу In League with Israel: A Tale of the Chattanooga Conference - Johnston Annie Fellows - Страница 3

IT was within three minutes of time for the south-bound train to start when David Herschel swung himself on the platform of the Chattanooga special. As he settled himself comfortably in the first vacant seat, Mr. Marion hurried past him down the aisle with a valise in each hand. He was followed by two ladies. The first one seemed to know every one in the car, judging by the smiles and friendly voices that greeted her appearance.

"O, we were so afraid you were not coming, Mrs. Marion," cried an impulsive young girl, just in front of David. "It would have been such a disappointment. Isn't she just the dearest thing in the world?" she rattled on to her companion, as Mrs. Marion passed out of hearing.

"Well, if she hasn't got Bethany Hallam with her! Of all people to go on an excursion, it seems to me she would be the very last."

"Why?" asked the other girl. As that was the question uppermost in David's mind, he listened with interest for the answer.

"O, she seems so different from other people. Her father always used to treat her as if she were made of a little finer clay than ordinary mortals. When she traveled, it was always in a private car. When she went to lectures or concerts, they always had the best seats in the house. All her teachers taught her at home except one. She went to the conservatory for her drawing lessons, but a maid came with her in the morning, and her father drove by for her at noon."

As he listened, David's eyes had followed the tall, graceful girl who was now seating herself by Mrs. Marion.

Every movement, as well as every detail of her traveling dress, impressed him with a sense of her refinement and culture. He noticed that she was all in black. A thin veil drawn over her face partially concealed its delicate pallor; but her soft, light hair, drawn up under the little black hat she wore, seemed sunnier than ever by contrast.

"Isn't she beautiful?" sighed David's talkative neighbor. "I used to wish I could change places with her, especially the year when she went abroad to study art; but I wouldn't now for anything in the world."

"Why?" asked her companion again, and David mentally echoed her interrogation.

"O, because her father is dead now, and everything is so different. Something happened to their property, so there's nothing left but the old home. Then her little brother had such a dreadful fall just after the Judge's death. They thought he would die, too, or be a cripple all his life; but I believe he's better now. He is sort of paralyzed, so he has to stay in a wheel-chair; but the doctor says he is gradually getting over that, and will be all right after awhile. It's a very peculiar case, I've heard. There have only been a few like it. She is studying stenography now, so that she can keep on living in the old home and take care of little Jack."

"Do you know her?" interrupted the interested listener.

"No, not very well. I've always seen her in Church; you know Judge Hallam was one of our best paying members, and rarely missed a Sabbath morning service. But they were very exclusive socially. My easel stood next to hers in the art conservatory one term, and we talked about our work sometimes. She used to remind me of Sir Christopher in 'Tales of a Wayside Inn.' Don't you remember? She had that

Both girls laughed, and then the lively chatter was drowned by the jarring rumble of the train as it puffed slowly out of the depot.

"Any one would know this is a Methodist crowd," said Mrs. Marion laughingly, as a dozen happy young voices began to sing an old revival hymn, and it was caught up all over the car.

"That reminds me," said her husband, reaching into his coat pocket, "I have something here that will prevent any mistake if doubt should arise."

He drew out a little box of ribbon badges and a paper of pins. "Here," he said, "put one on, Ray; we must all show our colors this week. You, too, Bethany."

"O no, Cousin Frank," she protested. "I am not a member of the League."

"That makes no difference," he answered, in his hearty, persistent way. "You ought to be one, and you will be by the time you get back from this conference."

"But, Cousin Frank, I never wore a badge in my life," she insisted. "I have always had the greatest antipathy to such things. It makes one so conspicuous to be branded in that way."

He held out the little white ribbon, threaded with scarlet, and bearing the imprint of the Maltese cross. The light, jesting tone was gone. He was so deeply in earnest that it made her feel uncomfortable.

"Do you know what the colors mean, Bethany?" Then he paused reverently. "The purity and the blood! Surely, you can not refuse to wear those."

He laid the little badge in her lap, and passed down the aisle, distributing the others right and left.

She looked at it in silence a moment, and then pinned it on the lapel of her traveling coat.

"Cousin Ray, did you ever know another such persistent man?" she asked. "How is it that he can always make people go in exactly the opposite way from the one they had intended? When he first planned for me to come on this excursion, I thought it was the most preposterous idea I ever heard of. But he put aside every objection, and overruled every argument I could make. I did not want to come at all, but he planned his campaign like a general, and I had to surrender."

"Tell me how he managed," said Mrs. Marion. "You know I did not get home from Chicago until yesterday morning, and I have been too busy getting ready to come on this excursion to ask him anything."

"When he had urged all the reasons he could think of for my going, but without success, he attacked me in my only vulnerable spot, little Jack. The child has considered Cousin Frank's word law and gospel ever since he joined the Junior League. So, when he was told that my health would be benefited by the trip, and it would arouse me from the despondent, low-spirited state I had fallen into, he gave me no rest until I promised to go. Jack showed generalship, too. He waited until the night of his birthday. I had promised him a little party, but he was so much worse that day, it had to be postponed. I was so sorry for him that I could have promised him almost anything. The little rascal knew it, too. While I was helping him undress, he put his arms around my neck, and began to beg me to go. He told me that he had been praying that I might change my mind. Ever since he has been in the League he has seemed to get so much comfort out of the belief that his prayers are always answered that I couldn't bear to shake his faith. So I promised him."

"The dear little John Wesley," said Mrs. Marion; "you ought to give him the full benefit of his name, Bethany."

"Mamma did intend to, but papa said it was as much too big for him as the huge old-fashioned silver watch that Grandfather Bradford left him. He suggested that both be laid away until he grew up to fit them."

"Who is taking care of him in your absence?" was the next question.

"O, he and Cousin Frank arranged that, too. They sent for his old nurse. She came last night with her little nine-year-old grandson. Just Jack's age, you see; so he will have somebody to make the time pass very quickly."

Mrs. Marion stopped her with an exclamation of surprise. "Well, I wish you'd look at Frank! What will he do next? He is actually pinning an Epworth League badge on that young Jew!"

Bethany turned her head a little to look. "What a fine face he has!" she remarked. "It is almost handsome. He must feel very much out of place among such an aggressive set of Christians. I wonder what he thinks of all these songs?"

Mr. Marion came back smiling. As superintendent of both Sunday-school and Junior League, he had won the love of every one connected with them. His passage through the car, as he distributed the badges, was attended by many laughing remarks and warm handclasps.

There was a happy twinkle in his eyes when he stopped beside his wife's seat. She smiled up at him as he towered above her, and motioned him to take the seat in front of them.

"I'm not going to stay," he said. "I want to bring a young man up here, and introduce him to you. He's having a pretty lonesome time, I'm afraid."

"It must be that Jew," remarked Mrs. Marion. "I know every one else on the car. I don't see that we are called on to entertain him, Frank. He came with us, simply to take advantage of the excursion rates. I should think he would prefer to be let alone. He must have thought it presumptuous in you to pin that badge on him. What did he say when you did it?"

Mr. Marion bent down to make himself heard above the noise of the train.

"I showed him our motto, 'Look up, lift up,' and told him if there was any people in the world who ought to be able to wear such a motto worthily, it was the nation whose Moses had climbed Sinai, and whose tables of stone lifted up the highest standard of morality known to the race of Adam."

Mrs. Marion laughed. "You would make a fine politician," she exclaimed. "You always know just the right chord to touch."

"Cousin Frank," asked Bethany, "how does it happen you have taken such an intense interest in him?"

He dropped into the seat facing theirs, and leaned forward.

"Well, to begin with, he's a fine fellow. I have had several talks with him, and have been wonderfully impressed with his high ideals and views of life. But I am free to confess, had I met him ten years ago, I could not have seen any good traits in him at all. I was blinded by a prejudice that I am unable to account for. It must have been hereditary, for it has existed since my earliest recollection, and entirely without reason, as far as I can see. I somehow felt that I was justified in hating the Jews. I had unconsciously acquired the opinion that they were wholly devoid of the finer sensibilities, that they were gross in their manner of living, and petty and mean in business transactions. I took Fagin and Shylock as fair specimens of the whole race. It was, really, a most unaccountable hatred I had for them. My teeth would actually clinch if I had to sit next to one on a street-car. You may think it strange, but I was not alone in the feeling. I know it to be a fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of Church members to-day that have the same inexplicable antipathy."

Bethany looked up quickly.

"My father's reading and training," she said, "has caused me to have a great admiration and respect for Jews in the abstract. I mean such as the Old Testament heroes and the Maccabees of a later date. But in the concrete, I must say I like to have as little intercourse with them as possible. And as to modern Israelites, all I know of them personally is the almost cringing obsequiousness of a few wealthy merchants with whom I have dealt, and the dirty swarm of repulsive creatures that infest the tenement districts. We used to take a short cut through those streets sometimes in driving to the market. Ugh! It was dreadful!" She gave a little shiver of repugnance at the recollection.

"Yes, I know," he answered. "I had that same feeling the greater part of my life. But ten years ago I spent a summer at Chautauqua, studying the four Gospels. It opened my eyes, Bethany. I got a clearer view of the Christ than I ever had before. I saw how I had been misrepresenting him to the world. The inconsistencies of my life seemed like the lanterns the pirates used to hang on the dangerous cliffs along the coast, that vessels might be wrecked by their misleading light. Do you suppose a Jew could have accepted such a Christ as I represented then? No wonder they fail to recognize their Messiah in the distorted image that is reflected in the lives of his followers."

"But they rejected Christ himself when he was among them," ventured Bethany.

"Yes," answered Mr. Marion, "it was like the old story of the man with a muck rake. Do you remember that picture that was shown to Christian at the interpreter's house in 'Pilgrim's Progress?' As a nation, Israel had stooped so much to the gathering of dry traditions, had bent so long over the minute letter of the law, that it could not straighten itself to take the crown held out to it. It could not even lift its eyes to discern that there was a crown just over its head."

"It always made me think of the blind Samson," said Mrs. Marion. "In trying to overthrow something it could not see, spiritually I mean, it pulled down the pillars of prophecy on its own head."

Mr. Marion turned to Bethany again.

"Yes, Israel, as a nation, rejected Christ; but who was it that wrote those wonderful chronicles of the Nazarene? Who was it that went out ablaze with the power of Pentecost to spread the deathless story of the resurrection? Who were the apostles that founded our Church? To whom do we owe our knowledge of God and our hope of redemption, if not to the Jews? We forget, sometimes, that the Savior himself belonged to that race we so reproach."

He was talking so earnestly, he had forgotten his surroundings, until a light touch on his shoulder interrupted him.

"What's the occasion of all this eloquence, Brother Marion?" asked the minister's genial voice.

He turned quickly to smile into the frank, smooth-shaven face bending over him.

"Come, sit down, Dr. Bascom. We're discussing my young friend back there, David Herschel. Have you met him?"

"Yes, I was talking with him a little while ago," answered the minister. "He seems very reserved. Queer, what an intangible barrier seems to arise when we talk to one of that race. I just came in to tell you that Cragmore is in the next car. He got on at the last station."

"What, George Cragmore!" exclaimed Mr. Marion, rising quickly. "I haven't seen him for two years. I'll bring him in here, Ray, after awhile."

"That's the last we'll see of him till lunch-time," said Mrs. Marion, as the door banged behind the two men.

"Frank will never think of us again when he gets to spinning yarns with Mr. Cragmore. I want you to meet him, Bethany. He is one of the most original men I ever heard talk. He's a young minister from the 'auld sod.' They called him the 'wild Irishman' when he first came over, he was so fiery and impetuous. There is enough of the brogue left yet in his speech to spice everything he says. He and Frank are a great deal alike in some things. They are both tall and light-haired. They both have a deep vein of humor and an inordinate love of joking. They are both so terribly in earnest with their Christianity that everybody around them feels the force of it; and when they once settle on a point, they are so tenacious nothing can move them. I often tell Frank he is worse than a snapping-turtle. Tradition says they do let go when it thunders, but nothing will make him let go when his mind is once clinched."

There was a stop of twenty minutes at noon. At the sound of a noisy gong in front of the station restaurant, Mr. Marion came in with his friend. Capacious lunch-baskets were opened out on every side, with the generous abundance of an old-time camp-meeting.

"Where is Herschel?" inquired Mr. Marion. "I intended to ask him to lunch with us."

"I saw him going into the restaurant," replied his wife.

"You must have a talk with him this afternoon, George," said Mr. Marion. "I've been all up and down this train trying to get people to be neighborly. I believe Dr. Bascom is the only one who has spoken to him. They were all having such a good time when I interrupted them, or they didn't know what to say to a Jew, and a dozen different excuses."

"O, Frank, don't get started on that subject again!" exclaimed Mrs. Marion. "Take a sandwich, and forget about it."

Bethany Hallam laughed more than once during the merry luncheon that followed. She could not remember that she had laughed before since her father's death. The young Irishman's ready wit, his droll stories, and odd expressions were irresistible. He seemed a magnet, too, drawing constantly from Frank Marion's inexhaustible supply of fun.

"You have seen only one side of him," remarked Mrs. Marion, when her husband had taken him away to introduce David. "While he was very entertaining, I think he has shown us one of the least attractive phases of his character."

David had felt very much out of place all morning. It was one thing to travel among ordinary Gentiles, as he had always done, and another to be surrounded by those who were constantly bubbling over with religious enthusiasm. He did not object to sitting beside a hot-water tank, he said to himself, but he did object to its boiling over on him.

His neighbors would have been very much surprised could they have known he was studying them with keen insight, and finding much to criticise. Even some of their songs were objectionable to him, their catchy refrains reminding him of some he had heard at colored minstrel shows.

With such an exalted idea of worship as the old rabbi had inculcated in him, it did not seem fitting to approach Deity in song unless through such sonorous utterances as the psalms. Some of these little tinkling, catch-penny tunes seemed profanation.

He ventured to say as much to George Cragmore. He had very unexpectedly found a congenial friend in the young minister. It was not often he met a man so keenly alert to nature, so versed in his favorite literature, or of his same sensitive temperament. He felt himself opening his inner doors as he did to no one else but the rabbi.

A drizzling rain was falling when they began to wind in and out among the mountains of Tennessee, and for miles in their journey a rainbow confronted them at every turn in the road. It crowned every hilltop ahead of them. It reached its shining ladder of light into every valley. It seemed such a prophecy of what awaited them on the mountain beyond, that some one began to sing, "Standing on the Promises."

As the full glory of the rainbow flashed on Cragmore's sight, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. The expression of his face seemed to transfigure it. When he turned to David, there were tears in his eyes.

"O, the covenants of the Old Testament!" he said, in a low tone, that thrilled David with its intensity of feeling. "The Bethels! The Mizpahs! The Ebenezers! See, it is like a pillar of fire leading us to a veritable land of promise."

Then, with his hand resting on David's knee, he began to talk of the promises of the Bible, till David exclaimed, impulsively: "You make me forget that you are a Christian. You enter into Israel's past even more fully than many of her own sons."

Cragmore thrust out his hand, in his quick, nervous way, with an impetuous gesture.

"Why, man!" he cried, relapsing unconsciously into the broad brogue of his childhood, "we hold sacred with you the heritage of your past. We look up with you to the same God, the Father; we confess a common faith till we stand at the foot of the cross. There is no great barrier between us – only a step – one step farther for you to take, and we stand side by side!"

He laid his hand on David's, and looked into his eyes with an expression of tender pleading as he added:

"O, my friend, if you could only see my Savior as he has revealed himself to me! I pray you may! I do pray you may!"

It was the first time in David's life any one had ever said such a thing to him. He sat back in his corner of the seat, at loss for an answer. It put an end to their conversation for a while. Cragmore felt that his sympathy had carried him to the point of giving offense. He was relieved when Dr. Bascom beckoned him to share his seat.

After a while, as the train sped on into the darkness, the passengers subsided in to sleepy indifference. It seemed hours afterward when Mr. Marion clapped him on the shoulder, saying briskly, "Wake up, old fellow, we are getting into Chattanooga."

"Let us go in with banners flying," said Dr. Bascom. "I understand that every car-full that has come in, from Maine to Mexico, has come singing."

The lights of the city, twinkling through the car-windows, aroused the sleepy passengers with a sense of pleasant anticipations, and when they steamed slowly into the crowded depot, it was as "pilgrims singing in the night."

In the general confusion of the arrival, Mr. Marion lost sight of David.

"It's too bad!" he exclaimed, in a disappointed tone. "I intended to ask him to drive to Missionary Ridge with us to-morrow, and I wanted to introduce him to you, Bethany."

"I'm very glad you didn't have the opportunity, Cousin Frank," she said, as she followed him through the depot gates. "He may be very agreeable, and all that, but he's a Jew, and I don't care to make his acquaintance."

The handle of the umbrella she was carrying came in collision with some one behind her.

"I beg your pardon," she said, turning in her gracious, high-bred way.

The gentleman raised his hat. It was David Herschel. A stylish-looking little school-girl was clinging to his arm, and a gray-bearded man, whom she recognized as Major Herrick, was walking just behind him. They had come down from the mountain to meet him, and take him to Lookout Inn. As their eyes met, Bethany was positive that he had overheard her remark.