Читать книгу In League with Israel: A Tale of the Chattanooga Conference - Johnston Annie Fellows - Страница 4

BY some misunderstanding, Bethany and her cousins had been assigned to different homes.

"It is too late to make any change to-night," said Mrs. Marion, as they left her. "We are only one block further up on this same street. We will try to make some arrangement to-morrow to have you with us."

Bethany followed her hostess into the wide reception-hall. One of the most elegant homes of the South had opened its hospitable doors to receive them. Ten delegates had preceded her, all as tired and travel-stained as herself.

During the introductions, Bethany mentally classified them as the most uninteresting lot of people she had seen in a long time.

"I believe you are the odd one of this party, Miss Hallam," said the hostess, glancing over the assignment cards she held; "so I shall have to ask you to take a very small room. It is one improvised for the occasion; but you will probably be more comfortable here alone than in a larger room with several others."

It had never occurred to Bethany that she might have been asked to share an apartment with some stranger, and she hastened to assure her hostess of her appreciation of the little room, which, though very small indeed compared with the great dimensions of the others, was quite comfortable and attractive.

"I have always been accustomed to being by myself," she said, "and it makes no difference at all if it is so far away from the other sleeping-rooms. I am not at all timid."

Yet, when she had wearily locked her door, she realized that she had never been so entirely alone before in all her life. Home seemed so very far away. Her surroundings were so strange. Her extreme weariness intensified her morbid feeling of loneliness. She remembered such a sensation coming to her one night in mid-ocean, but she had tapped on her state-room wall, and her father had come to her immediately. Now she might call a weary lifetime. No earthly voice could ever reach him.

With a throbbing ache in her throat, and hot tears springing to her eyes, she opened her valise and took out a little photograph case of Russia leather. Four pictured faces looked out at her. She was kneeling before them, with her arms resting on the low dressing-table. As she gazed at them intently, a tear splashed down on her black dress.

"O, it isn't right! It isn't right," she sobbed, passionately, "for God to take everything! It would have been so easy for him to let me keep them. How could he be so cruel? How could he take away all that made my life worth living, and then let little Jack suffer so?"

She laid her head on her arms in a paroxysm of sobbing. Presently she looked up again at her mother's picture. It was a beautiful face, very like her own. It brought back all her happy childhood, that seemed almost glorified now by the remembered halo of its devoted mother-love.

The years had softened that grief, but it all came back to-night with its old-time bitterness.

The next face was little Jack's – a sturdy, wide-awake boy, with mischievous dimples and laughing eyes. But the recollection of all he had suffered since his accident, made her feel that she had lost him also, in a way. The physician had assured her that he would be the same vigorous, romping child again; but she found that hard to believe when she thought of his present helpless condition.

She pressed the next picture to her lips with trembling fingers, and then looked lovingly into the eyes that seemed to answer her gaze with one of steadfast, manly devotion.

"O, it isn't right! It isn't right!" she sobbed again. How it all came back to her – the happy June-time of her engagement! – the summer days when she dreamed of him, the summer twilights when he came. Every detail was burned into her aching memory, from the first bunch of violets he brought her, to the judge's tender smile when she spread out all her bridal array for him to see. Such shimmering lengths of the white, trailing satin; such filmy clouds of the soft, white veil, destined never to touch her fair hair! For there was the telegram, and afterward the darkened room, and the darker hour, when she groped her way to a motionless form, and knelt beside it alone. O, how she had clung to the cold hands, and kissed the unresponsive lips, and turned away in an agony of despair! But as she turned, her father's strong arms were folded about her, and his broken voice whispered comfort.

The dear father! It had been doubly desolate since he had gone, too.

Kneeling there, with her head bowed on her arms, she seemed to face a future that was utterly hopeless. Except that Jack needed her, she felt that there was absolutely no reason why she should go on living.

The ticking of her watch reminded her that it was nearly midnight. In a mechanical way, she got up and began to arrange her hair for the night.

After she had extinguished the light, she pulled aside the curtain, and looked out on the unfamiliar streets.

The moon had come up. In the dim light the crest of old Lookout towered grimly above the horizon. A verse of one of the Psalms passed through her mind: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."

"No," she whispered, bitterly, "there is no help. God doesn't care. He is too far away."

As she went back to the bed, the words of the novice in Muloch's "Benedetta Minelli" came to her:

"I wish I could do that," she thought; "lock myself away with my memories, and not be obliged to keep up this empty pretense of living, just as if nothing were changed. It might not be so hard. How I dread to-morrow, with its crowds of strange faces! O, why did I ever come?"

Next morning, the guests gathered out on the vine-covered piazza to discuss their plans for the day.

There were two theological students from Boston, a young doctor from Texas, and the son of a wealthy Louisiana planter. A Kansas farmer's wife and her sister, a bright little schoolteacher from an Iowa village, and three pretty Georgia girls, completed the party.

Bethany sat a little apart from them, wondering how they could be so greatly interested in such things as the most direct car-line to Missionary Ridge, or the time it would take to "do" the old battle-grounds.

The youngest Georgia girl was about her own age. She had made several attempts to include Bethany in the conversation, but mistaking her reserve and indifference for haughtiness, turned to the Louisiana boy with a remark about unsociable Northerners.

Their frequent laughter reached Bethany, and she wondered, in a dull way, how anybody could be light-hearted enough even to smile in such a world full of heart-aches. Then she remembered that she had laughed herself, the day before, when Mr. Cragmore was with them. It rather puzzled her now to know how she could have done so. Her wakeful night had left her unusually depressed.

An open, two-seated carriage stopped at the gate. Mrs. Marion and George Cragmore were on the back seat. Mr. Marion and Dr. Bascom sat with the driver. Bethany had been waiting for them some time with her hat on, so she went quickly out to meet them. Mr. Cragmore leaped over the wheel to open the gate, and assist her to a seat between himself and Mrs. Marion.

They drove rapidly out towards Missionary Ridge. To Bethany's great relief, neither of her companions seemed in a talkative mood. Mr. Marion, who was an ardent Southerner, had been deep in a political discussion with Dr. Bascom. As they stopped on the winding road, half way up the ridge, to look down into the beautiful valley below, and across to the purple summit of Lookout, Mr. Marion drew a long breath. Then he took off his hat, saying, reverently, "The work of His fingers! What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?" Then, after a long silence: "How insignificant our little differences seem, Bascom, in the sight of these everlasting hills! Let's change the subject."

Mrs. Marion, absorbed in the beauty on every side, did not notice Bethany's continued silence or Cragmore's spasmodic remarks. The fresh air and brisk motion had somewhat aroused Bethany from her apathy. First, she began to be interested in the constantly-changing view, and then she noticed its effect on the erratic man beside her.

From the time they commenced to ascend the ridge he had not spoken to any one directly, but everything he saw seemed to suggest a quotation. He repeated them unconsciously, as if he were all alone; some of them dreamily, some of them with startling force, and all with the slight brogue he spoke so musically.

"Every common bush afire with God," he murmured in an undertone, looking at a dusty wayside weed, with his soul in his eyes.

Bethany thought to herself, afterwards, that if any other man of her acquaintance had kept up such a steady string of disjointed quotations, it would have been ridiculous. She never heard him do it again after that day. It seemed as if the old battle-fields suggested thoughts that could find no adequate expression save in words that immortal pens had made deathless.

The warm odor of ripe peaches floated out to them from grassy orchards, where the trees were bent over with their wealth of velvety, sun-reddened fruit. Seemingly, Cragmore had taken no notice of Bethany's depression when she joined them, or of the soothing effect nature was having on her sore heart. But she knew that he had seen it, when he turned to her abruptly with a quotation that fitted her as well as his first one had the wayside weed. He half sang it, with a tender, wistful smile, as he watched her face.

Bethany wondered if her cousin Frank had told him of all she had suffered, or if he had guessed it intuitively. Somehow she felt that he had not been told, but that he had divined it. Yet when they stopped on the Chickamauga battle-field, and she saw him go leaping across the rough fields like an overgrown boy, she thought of her cousin Ray's remark, "They used to call him the wild Irishman," and wondered at the contradictory phases his character presented. She saw him pause and lay his hand reverently on the largest cannon, and then come running back across the furrows with long, awkward jumps.

"What on earth did you do that for, Cragmore?" asked Mr. Marion, in his teasing way. "The idea of keeping us waiting while you were racing across a ten-acre lot to pat an old gun."

"Old gun, is it?" was the laughing answer, yet there was a flash in his eyes that belied the laugh. "Odds, man! it is one of the greatest orators that ever roused a continent. I just wanted to lay my hands on its dumb lips." He waved his arm with an exulting gesture. "Aye, but they spoke in thunder-tones once, the day they spoke freedom to a race."

He did not take his seat in the carriage for a while, but followed at a little distance, ranging the woods on both sides; sometimes plunging into a leafy hollow to examine the bark of an old tree where the shells had plowed deep scars; sometimes dropping on his knees to brush away the leaves from a tiny wild-flower, that any one but a true woodsman would have passed with unseeing eyes. Once he brought a rare specimen up to the carriage to ask its name. He had never seen one like it before. That was the only one he gathered.

"It's a pity to tear them up, when they would wither in just a few hours," he said; "the solitary places are so glad for them."

"He's a queer combination," said Dr. Bascom, as he watched him break a little sprig of cedar from the stump of a battle-broken tree to put in his card-case. "Sometimes he is the veriest clown; at others, a child could not be more artless; and I have seen him a few times when he seemed to be aroused into a spiritual giant. He fairly touched the stars."

Bethany was so tired by the morning's drive that she did not go to the opening services in the big tent that afternoon.

"Well, you missed it!" said Mr. Marion, when he came in after supper, "and so did David Herschel."

"Missed what?" inquired Bethany.

"The mayor's address of welcome, this afternoon. You know he is a Jew. Such a broad, fraternal speech must have been a revelation to a great many of his audience. I tell you, it was fine! You're going to-night, aren't you, Bethany?"

"No," she answered, "I want to save myself for the sunrise prayer-meeting on the mountain to-morrow. I saw the sun come up over the Rigi once. It is a sight worth staying up all night to see."

It was about two o'clock in the morning when they started up the mountain by rail. The cars were crowded. People hung on the straps, swaying back and forth in the aisles, as the train lurched around sudden curves. Notwithstanding the early hour, and the discomfort of their position, they sang all the way up the mountain.

"Cousin Ray," said Bethany, "do tell me how these people can sing so constantly. The last thing I heard last night before I went to sleep was the electric street-car going past the house, with a regular hallelujah chorus on board. Do you suppose they really feel all they sing? How can they keep worked up to such a pitch all the time?"

"You should have been at the tent last night, dear," answered Mrs. Marion. "Then you would have gotten into the secret of it. There is an inspiration in great numbers. The audiences we are having there are said to be the greatest ever gathered south of the Ohio. Our League at home has been doing very faithful work, but I couldn't help wishing last night that every member could have been present. To see ten thousand faces lit up with the same interest and the same hope, to hear the battle-cry, 'All for Christ,' and the Amen that rolled out in response like a volley of ten thousand musketry, would have made them feel like a little, straggling company of soldiers suddenly awakened to the fact that they were not fighting single-handed, but that all that great army were re-enforcing them. More than that, these were only the advance-guard, for over a million young people are enlisted in the same cause. Think of that, Bethany – a million leagued together just in Methodism! Then, when you count with them all the Christian Endeavor forces, and the Baptist Unions, and the King's Daughters and Sons, and the Young Men's Christian Associations, and the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, it looks like the combined power ought to revolutionize the universe in the next decade."

"Then you think it is an inspiration of the crowds that makes them sing all the time," said Bethany.

"By no means!" answered Mrs. Marion. "To be sure, it has something to do with it; but to most of this vast number of young people, their religion is not a sentiment to be fanned into spasmodic flame by some excitement. It is a vital force, that underlies every thought and every act. They will sing at home over their work, and all by themselves, just as heartily as they do here. I remember seeing in Westminster Abbey, one time, the profiles of John and Charles Wesley put side by side on the same medallion. I have thought, since then, it is only a half-hearted sort of Methodism that does not put the spirit of both brothers into its daily life – that does not wing its sermons with its songs."

Hundreds of people had already gathered on the brow of the mountain, waiting the appointed hour. Mr. Marion led the way to a place where nature had formed a great amphitheater of the rocks. They seated themselves on a long, narrow ledge, overlooking the valley. They were above the clouds. Such billows of mist rolled up and hid the sleeping earth below that they seemed to be looking out on a boundless ocean. The world and its petty turmoils were blotted out. There was only this one gray peak raising its solitary head in infinite space. It was still and solemn in the early light. They spoke together almost in whispers.

"I can not believe that any man ever went up into a mountain to pray without feeling himself drawn to a higher spiritual altitude," said Dr. Bascom.

Frank Marion looked around on the assembled crowds, and then said slowly:

"Once a little band of five hundred met the risen Lord on a mountain-side in Galilee, and were sent away with the promise, 'Lo, I am with you alway!' Think what they accomplished, and then think of the thousands here this morning that may go back to the work of the valley with the same promise and the same power! There ought to be a wonderful work accomplished for the Master this year."

Cragmore, who had walked away a little distance from the rest, and was watching the eastern sky, turned to them with his face alight.

"See!" he cried, with the eagerness of a child, and yet with the appreciation of a poet shining in his eyes; "the wings of the morning rising out of the uttermost parts of the sea."

He pointed to the long bars of light spreading like great flaming pinions above the horizon. The dawn had come, bringing a new heaven and a new earth. In the solemn hush of the sunrise, a voice began to sing, "Nearer, my God, to thee."

It was as in the days of the old temple. They had left the outer courts and passed up into an inner sanctuary, where a rolling curtain of cloud seemed to shut them in, till in that high Holy of Holies they stood face to face with the Shekinah of God's presence.

Bethany caught her breath. There had been times before this when, carried along by the impetuous eloquence of some sermon or prayer, every fiber of her being seemed to thrill in response. In her childlike reaching out towards spiritual things, she had had wonderful glimpses of the Fatherhood of God. She had gone to him with every experience of her young life, just as naturally and freely as she had to her earthly father. But when beside the judge's death-bed she pleaded for his life to be spared to her a little longer, and her frenzied appeals met no response, she turned away in rebellious silence. "She would pray no more to a dumb heaven," she said bitterly. Her hope had been vain.

Now, as she listened to songs and prayers and testimony, she began to feel the power that emanated from them, – the power of the Spirit, showing her the Father as she had never known him before: the Father revealed through the Son.

Below, the mists began to roll away until the hidden valley was revealed in all its morning loveliness. But how small it looked from such a height! Moccasin Bend was only a silver thread. The outlying forests dwindled to thickets.

Bethany looked up. The mists began to roll away from her spiritual vision, and she saw her life in relation to the eternities. Self dwindled out of sight. There was no bitterness now, no childish questioning of Divine purposes. The blind Bartimeus by the wayside, hearing the cry, "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by," and, groping his way towards "the Light of the world," was no surer of his dawning vision than Bethany, as she joined silently in the prayer of consecration. She saw not only the glory of the June sunrise; for her the "Sun of righteousness had arisen, with healing in his wings."

People seemed loath to go when the services were over. They gathered in little groups on the mountain-side, or walked leisurely from one point of view to another, drinking in the rare beauty of the morning.

Bethany walked on without speaking. She was a little in advance of the others, and did not notice when the rest of her party were stopped by some acquaintances. Absorbed in her own thoughts, she turned aside at Prospect Point, and walked out to the edge. As she looked down over the railing, the refrain of one of the songs that had been sung so constantly during the last few days, unconsciously rose to her lips. She hummed it softly to herself, over and over, "O, there's sunshine in my soul to-day."

So oblivious was she of all surroundings that she did not hear Frank Marion's quick step behind her. He had come to tell her they were going down the mountain by the incline.

"O, there's sunshine, blessed sunshine!" The words came softly, almost under her breath; but he heard them, and felt with a quick heart-throb that some thing unusual must have occurred to bring any song to her lips.

"O Bethany!" he exclaimed, "do you mean it, child? Has the light come?"

The face that she turned towards him was radiant. She could find no words wherewith to tell him her great happiness, but she laid her hands in his, and the tears sprang to her eyes.

"Thank God! Thank God!" he exclaimed, with a tremor in his strong voice. "It is what I have been praying for. Now you see why I urged you to come. I knew what a mountain-top of transfiguration this would be."

Standing on the outskirts of the crowd, David Herschel had looked around with great curiosity on the gathering thousands. It was only a little distance from the inn, and he had come down hoping to discover the real motive that had brought these people together from such vast distances. He wondered what power their creed contained that could draw them to this meeting at such an early hour.

He had felt as keenly as Cragmore the sublimity of the sunrise. He felt, too, the uplifting power of the old hymn, that song drawn from the experience of Jacob at Bethel, that seemed to lift every heart nearer to the Eternal.

He was deeply stirred as the leader began to speak of the mountain scenes of the Bible, of Abraham's struggles at Moriah, of Horeb's burning bush, of Sinai and Nebo, of Mount Zion with its thousand hallowed memories. So far the young Jew could follow him, but not to the greater heights of the Mountain of Beatitudes, of Calvary, or of Olivet.

He had never heard such prayers as the ones that followed. Although there can be found no sublimer utterances of worship, no humbler confessions of penitence or more lofty conceptions of Jehovah, than are bound in the rituals of Judaism, these simple outpourings of the heart were a revelation to him.

There came again the fulfillment of the deathless words, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me!" O, how the lowly Nazarene was lifted up that morning in that great gathering of his people! How his name was exalted! All up and down old Lookout Mountain, and even across the wide valley of the Tennessee, it was echoed in every song and prayer.

When the testimony service began, David turned from one speaker to another. What had they come so far to tell? From every State in the Union, from Canada, and from foreign shores, they brought only one story – "Behold the Lamb of God!" In spite of himself, the young Jew's heart was strangely drawn to this uplifted Christ. Suddenly he was startled by a ringing voice that cried: "I am a converted Jew. I was brought to Christ by a little girl – a member of the Junior League. I have given up wife, mother, father, sisters, brothers, and fortune, but I have gained so much that I can say from the depths of my soul, 'Take all the world, but give me Jesus.' I have consecrated my life to his service."

David changed his position in order to get a better view of the speaker. He scrutinized him closely. He studied his face, his dress, even his attitude, to determine, if possible, the character of this new witness. He saw a man of medium height, broad forehead, and firm mouth over which drooped a heavy, dark mustache. There was nothing fanatical in the calm face or dignified bearing. His eyes, which were large, dark, and magnetic, met David's with a steady gaze, and seemed to hold them for a moment.

With a lawyer-like instinct, David longed to probe this man with questions. As he went back to the inn, he resolved to hunt up his history, and find what had induced him to turn away from the faith.