CHAPTER XX.
"When some beloved voice, that was to you
Both sound and sweetness, faileth suddenly,
And silence, against which you dare not cry,
Aches round you like a strong disease and new—
What hope? What help? What music will undo
That silence to your sense?"
"I'll tell you, hopeless grief is passionless."
It was the season of the half-yearly revival meetings in Jamestown. The little Methodist Church filled rapidly. There was a soupçon of pleasurable excitement about a revival which was very enticing to the youth of Jamestown. Besides, all the "stiddy" young men were expected to go, and they always did what was expected of them.
Mrs. Deans came in with the minister, her face, with its self-important expression, irradiated with the glow of spiritual as well as worldly well-being. She had proffered her bid for the company of the officiating ministers in good season, and the first of them had been knocked down to her in consequence, much to the chagrin of the Mesdames White, Wilson, Disney, and the rest, for they knew that the second minister on the list was an old personal friend of Mrs. Deans and would doubtless elect to stay at her house; thus they would have no opportunity to display their pious zeal and forehanded housekeeping.
Mrs. Deans' self-complacency was veiled, but not obscured, by an anxious air, as who should say, "I am not free of responsibility if all does not go off well."
It is a weakness of such women to consider themselves divinely appointed judges of the souls of their neighbors and friends.
The minister with her was pretty well hidden among the cluster of men and women to whom Mrs. Deans was introducing him. She introduced him with discrimination, however. She did not propose giving any one the chance of prefixing a remark with "The other night when I was speaking to Mr. Hardman," or "Mr. Hardman said to me the other day," unless she felt quite sure the recipient of the honor was worthy of it.
But to her consternation, Mr. Hardman broke bounds, passed the confines of the little group of important church members, and went out from one to another of the men and women, picking out, with the unerring divination of a man whose heart is in sympathy with the sorrows rather than the joys of mankind, the oldest, most forlorn, most miserable-looking of his prospective hearers.
To see the minister thus throwing away the apostolic benediction of his smile upon old Ann Lemon and Clem Humphries whilst Mrs. White stood with uplifted nose in the doorway, unnoticed, was an unholy thing, more particularly as Mrs. White, willing to have her discomfiture shared by some one else, turned to Mrs. Deans with a surprised air, and said:
"Why, I thought the minister was with you?"
"So he is," Mrs. Deans was fain to avow. "We came a few minutes ago. He is great on missions, I think, and young." The latter half of her sentence was given in the tone of a hostess who excuses a guest. For the rest, it is probable that both ladies regarded his present occupation as distinctly a missionary effort.
Presently the minister straightened himself and proceeded up the aisle to the platform. Mrs. Deans' expression changed from an anxious, proprietary one to one of spiritualized commiseration. Was the misguided man actually going to begin service without asking one word about the ordinary routine of services in Jamestown Methodist Church? If so, he would make a fine hash of it.
Besides she had not informed him that a collection was to be taken up to defray the cost of extra lighting, etc., and she had promised Mr. White at class-meeting to do so. She had thought of telling Mr. Hardman, but preferred waiting until the minister sought for information before imparting it. His opportunity for that was now past, unless, indeed, he descended from the platform to do so. A pleasing thrill, inspired by this idea, turned to a chill as she saw Mr. Hardman take from his pocket a well-thumbed and shabby little Testament, and, opening it, seem to find a place. Then he laid it down, open, upon the big church Bible, and rose to pray.
Mrs. Deans' expression of anxiety was now unalleviated by any spiritual exaltation; it was unvariegated gloom. Any man who could disregard the gilt edges, thick covers, and ornate binding of that book, and leave it closed whilst he read from what her experienced eye told her was a Bible Society Testament that probably cost ten cents, was certainly in need of anxious watching. Nor was it to be supposed that a discourse begun upon lines like these would be productive of much good. How many sermons she had heard rounded off by the banging of those covers together! How many final injunctions had been given a dramatic and artistic interest by the holding of that book, half-open, ready to put a period to the peroration by a sanctified thud!
Well—Mrs. Deans sighed audibly.
Mr. Hardman began to read in a deep and sympathetic voice. He was a tall man, of twenty-eight, muscularly built, but not brawny; his studies had been too close to admit of that. He had square shoulders, rather higher than they should be, and rounded with the stoop that the scholar and the ploughman share. His hands, as he raised them in infrequent gestures, were seen to be rather broad and short—hands, it would seem, of a mechanic, but not toil-stained. Indeed, their whiteness so ill agreed with their shape that a sense of something incongruous forced itself upon one when looking at them. His hair was almost black, and was tossed and disarranged by his habit of running his fingers through it. His face was pale.
His brow was square and overhanging—of the penthouse order, rather forbidding; the brow inherited from a generation of toilers, men who, from their own bleak corner of the world, looked forth at the panorama of life with sombre eyes, intrenching themselves behind a barrier of silent endurance, concealing their weakness, their wants, their hopes and fears, their few joys and pitiful ambitions behind an impenetrable mask, until it would seem that their lineaments adjusted themselves to their mental attitudes; and this, their son, presented to the world this square brow, strong, secret, sad. But its sternness, and alas! a great deal of its strength, was negatived by the eyes which looked out from beneath it. Very dark-gray these eyes were, and made eloquent by the expression of infinite love and sympathy for his kind; but their dilating pupils evidenced an emotional nature, and they were somewhat too soft for a man. Yet, looking in steady kindness at the world, they often seemed fit eyes for a strong, calm soul.
But Philip Hardman felt himself neither calm nor strong. As he looked upon the expectant faces of those before him, the doubt which was gnawing at the heart-strings of belief suddenly seemed to grip his own heart and brain and threaten each.
He had no message to give these people! What were they there for? Was it not all a myth and a delusion? Was it?
Then he broke the spell which held him, and his words rushed forth. His congregation stirred and swayed and yielded—not to persuasion, for of that there was none; not to the minister's personality, for they had forgotten him; not in the hope of reward, for he spoke but of wrath and pitiless requital of sin, and merciless judgment, and endless woe—they yielded to their own fears.
For this man was lashing his own soul with the copy-righted invective of his sect, pronouncing against himself and (as in the midst of his mental agony he realized) against all mankind a doom of woe and wrath if they did not believe. He strove to terrify his own soul into the submission it denied, and strove to awaken in the people before him a reflex of the emotion he fain would feel. They responded to his words, but not to his feeling. They wept and abased themselves because of the fear, not because they feared unbelief.
Cold drops trickled down Mrs. Deans' face and be-dabbled her second-best bonnet-strings. Mrs. Wilson, grew almost hysterical. Ann Lemon wondered vaguely if she had "the horrors," and held on to the pew with both hands, whilst she looked about her with bewildered, lack-lustre eyes. Clem Humphries sat outwardly unmoved, but inwardly vowing if he "once got out of this he'd never be wheedled into a revival meeting again."
The younger men thought revival meetings "no slouch," as Gamaliel Deans expressed it; and, comparing the excitement with that of a cock-fight he had attended sub rosa in the old brewery, he decided in favor of the revival.
The minister's voice failed and faltered. Like all magnetic natures, his exhausted itself. He paused, looked at the men and women before him, and, realizing the shallowness of their facile emotions, felt the pall of self-disgust envelop his soul. A horrible contempt for himself and them, even for the religion that had inspired this mental debauch, overwhelmed him. He shuddered as he realized the impiousness of his own thought, left the platform, went swiftly down the aisle and out into the darkness.
Mr. White closed the meeting, and prayed enthusiastically for the "young brother who had so awakened them," and ended amid a chorus of ejaculations.
Mrs. Deans, finding herself so agreeably disappointed, went home content. She wished to-morrow night were come. What crises of emotion might not be expected then! She found Mr. Hardman pacing the veranda slowly, his brow bare to the stars; his frame was relaxed and weary, his eyes tired. He refused any refreshment, and long into the night Mrs. Deans heard him pacing back and forth.
* * * * * *
Another night had come, and Philip Hardman was again to stand before an assembly of his fellows and voice the truths they held eternal. Mrs. Deans had no doubts now as to his competency. She anticipated an exciting struggle with spiritual foes, and the better to gird herself for the fray, went early, leaving Mr. Hardman to follow. She felt this implied a delicate compliment to the preacher, recognizing in it a simulacrum of John the Baptist's mission in the wilderness.
So Philip Hardman was left to walk the mile from the Deans farm-house to the village alone. It was evening—late evening in summer. The air was filled with that indefinite, receptive murmur the earth gives forth as it opens its pores to the dew. Without wind, there was yet a sense of motion in the atmosphere, at once calming and exhilarating. It brought a keen sense of the fact that the world is rushing through space, with its puny burden of men and their works. The sun had set, but the western sky was radiant with an amber afterglow, against which the tree-tops in Mr. Deans' woodland showed a mass of dark, billowy green, the light behind them intensifying the depth of their color, so that they showed sombrely against the sky.
Before him stretched the dusty road, the grass at either side parched by the heat; now and then a maple overshadowed him; now and then he startled nested birds from out the low-growing trees of the wild plum. He walked swiftly, the grasshoppers and little whirring insects and dragon-flies flitting about his path.
At a turn in the road, where Mr. Deans' land joined Mr. White's, was wedged in the little cemetery of Jamestown. It was fenced with sharp-pointed palings, over which the native virgin bower clematis clung in feathery festoons, just blossoming out in fragile greenish-white flowers. Within, he saw the untidy graves and inebriated gravestones of a country churchyard. Those slanting stones and graves, almost obliterated by masses of periwinkle and white-leaved balm and ribbon grass, appealed to him strongly.
He looked at his watch. He had started in fair time, but, lost in thought, had walked very quickly. He had time to linger a few minutes here. Perhaps amid the graves of Jamestown's dead he might learn the open sesame to the hearts of the living.
He entered through a gap in the palings, pushing his way through a little thicket of thorny locust bushes that had sprung up in a scattered cluster. The graves were nearly all marked by gravestones. In Jamestown it was considered a mark of respectability to erect a memorial to one's dead, but this done, all care for their graves ceased. Philip Hardman wandered about, noting the weather-beaten grayness of the older stones and reading their inscriptions almost mechanically. One broad, thin slab, with a weeping-willow sculptured upon it, bore a legend in memory of "Amelia Warner, beloved wife of Josiah Warner, aged sixteen years." Poor little wife! In the fifty years of her rest her grave had sunken almost level with the path; the lichen on the stone was striving to obliterate her name there, even as it had been long ago forgotten upon earth. A wild hawthorn bush was springing from under one corner of her tombstone and tilting it over perilously.
Some of the more recent graves had odd little jingles of original rhyme carven upon their stones. One, of but a year before, bore the brief prayer, too human for its glistening coldness, "Meet me in Heaven." Hardman read the name on this grave with a little start—"Jennie Best, wife of William Best." Yesterday Mrs. Deans had pointed out William Best and his new-made bride. How futile and absurd the little legend seemed! But Jennie Best slept as securely and as sweetly as though her husband still cherished in his inmost heart these last words of hers and walked as though he hoped to realize them, instead of writing them upon her tombstone and marrying within a year of her death.
There were graves of old and young in this little churchyard—men and women, boys and girls, infants of days, and men of many years. Beneath one stone slept seven friends, who "perished in the yacht Foam off the coast"—a narrow space, truly, for seven to occupy, set in this out-of-the-way village; seven such as these who had hoped to fill great places in the world before their lives were laughed out by the little ripples of the lake.
The shadows lengthened. Gleaming through the dusk, Hardman noticed a white stone with gilt lettering. "Homer Wilson" was the name it bore, but it meant nothing to the preacher; only he sighed as he noted the age of the man sleeping there, and a half-envious thought crossed him, as he looked around, that "these had completed their journey."
Philip Hardman turned his steps to the road again, but he paused yet once more. Close under the shadow of the high stone wall which bounded the graveyard on the village side, he almost stumbled over a woman's figure, which, in the deepening gloom, he had not observed. She was almost prone beside a little mound whereon the sods had not yet taken root. The woman's arms were outstretched toward the grave—almost embraced it. Her whole attitude spoke eloquently of a hopeless and passive despair.
Hardman stopped a moment irresolutely; she had not observed him.
"You are in great trouble," he said, bending down and touching her shoulder.
"Yes," she answered, raising her head without a start. "Yes."
Her voice was painfully constrained. The words seemed to issue with difficulty, and the tones were harsh. Speech seemed strangely dissonant with the hour and place. Her mute despair seemed the only fitting emotion for the scene. Her eyes, from out a pallid face, looked up at him, filmed by misery. Her cheeks were hollowed in delicate shadows. Her pale lips drooped. She seemed the Mourning Spirit of the place.
"Come and pray," he said, looking at her with infinite pity in his kind eyes. "Come," he urged.
He waited for her reply, but none came. She was sitting by the grave now, her hands locked round her knees, her eyes looking hungrily into vacancy and seeing neither hope nor recompense for her pain.
A bat held its angled flight past them. He roused himself to a sense of time. He looked down upon the woman at his feet, an expression of ineffable compassion lit his face; then he turned to go.
As his eyes left that pallid face the scene seemed to darken suddenly. He realized the lateness of the hour, and, finding his way out of the graveyard, strode rapidly to the church.
After all, he was in time—indeed, had a few minutes to spare. He did not, however, again shock Mrs. Deans by a promiscuous friendliness. He went straight to the platform and sat down behind the reading-desk. His thoughts reverted to the woman whom he had just seen, and he felt he ought to have made a more eloquent appeal to her to come to church. Mental habit led him to decide at once that prayer was the only efficacious cure for grief such as hers. It was thus with this man always. In calm moments, when all went well with him, he strove to elucidate those problems of reason and right which presented themselves to him in season and out of season—strove to live a life of austere truth without factitious aid of self-delusion, without hope of ultimate reward.
But in times of distress or pain, whether his own or others', he turned again to his old beliefs, and prayer appealed to him as the only panacea. Orthodox folk plead this as a triumphant and sure vindication of the truth of their creeds. It may be in some cases, but in Philip Hardman's it was only the result of inherent weakness of will and vacillating decision, and, alas! a cowardly shrinking from mental torture. Face to face with grief such as this woman's, he could not bear to look the inevitability of such bereavements in the face; could not endure to think of the irreparable loss of a vanished life; could not calmly recognize one single instance of what he was ever mourning over—the sadness and futility of life.
He must hallow each blow as a "merciful dispensation;" muffle it from prying eyes with the tabooed veil of "sacred predestination"; set it beyond close scrutiny by asserting to himself the impiety of questioning "divine will"; and at such times the beauty of his solacing faith lit in his soul fresh fervor for the cause.
For a few moments Philip Hardman sat motionless. The hands of the clock reached the hour for service to begin. His audience settled themselves in the pews and stilled themselves to attention.
Mrs. Deans ostentatiously ceased her whispered remarks to Mrs. Wilson, straightened herself in her seat, looked about with a critical and judicial eye, and then, convinced that all was well, hemmed several times expectantly.
Philip Hardman rose, and, in brief words, asked for Divine guidance through the service. He ceased. The bowed heads were raised. He was about to begin the reading of the Scriptures, when, silently, slowly, Myron Holder entered the open door and, advancing only to the nearest seat, which happened to be in the farthest back pew, sat down. So quiet were her movements that, save by a few of the young men who had taken the rear seats the better to observe the antics of the elect, she was unobserved.
Philip Hardman, however, had seen her. He changed his intention of reading, and announced a hymn instead. He wanted a few minutes to familiarize himself with that tragic face before attempting to utter any message of love or hope to the woman who had thus obeyed his suggestion. While the singing went on he looked at his audience, and, in a flash, their narrow, sordid, often miserable lives seemed revealed to him. These were the people he had lashed with spiritual fears the night before. As he recalled it, his heart smote him with terrible reproach. His eyes grew dim as he looked at the people before him and saw, shining through their midst, the pallid face of Myron Holder.
By what strange chance had this woman come to Jamestown? For he decided at once she was no native of the village. The purely cut, martyr face; the broad brow, sensitive lips, and cameo-like nostrils were too utterly unlike the other faces in the church to be for one moment associated with them.
There came to him a fantastic thought, that this woman was sent to bear the griefs of this village, even as One long since—the Carpenter's Son—had borne the griefs of the world and become a "Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief." But alas! this woman had no divine message to give; instead, she was wandering in the wilderness of hopeless despair. But—and Hardman's hand tightened on his Testament—a message she should have.
"Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.
Leave, oh, leave me not alone!
Oh, protect and comfort me!"
So they sang. Philip Hardman found his place—
"All my hopes on Thee are stayed,
All my wants to Thee I bring;
Cover my defenceless head
With the shadow of Thy wing."
Rapt in an infinite sorrow for his kind—inspired by the need of this woman of help—exalted by the dependence and confidence expressed in the hymned words—seeing in all his audience but one pallid face—Philip Hardman rose to speak.
This choosing of a subject upon the spur of the moment, to meet the needs of one woman, was no disadvantage to him, for he was a fluent and ready speaker, and his whole training had been that spontaneity was absolutely essential. He had none of the measured method that develops a subject into "three heads and an application." The evangelistic sect to which he belonged abjures notes, and hops along to the halting cadence of a quasi-inspiration.
Happily, however, it has now and then a man like Philip Hardman, whose words flow freely forth, and never so eloquently as when heart and sympathies are touched. Hardman was never at a loss for words of his own to translate his feelings into language; but this night his sermon was but the enunciation of a sweet and comforting doctrine uttered in the language of the Book which has preserved it.
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," he said, and held out as a free gift the inestimable boon of peace. "I will not leave you comfortless," uttered in his vibrant tones, bore the assurance of divinest aid. "Let not your heart be troubled," he voiced as a sacred command to cease from grief, and then the general invitation, "Let whosoever will drink of the water of life freely."
With these words as a thesis, a human heart to be comforted, a soul alight with belief and confidence, a rare natural eloquence to frame his plea—was there any wonder that the sermon was effective, any wonder that to the weary heart of the listening woman it appealed almost irresistibly?
Perhaps Philip Hardman dwelt too exclusively upon the blessings of his religion, ignored too utterly the thorn in the crown—offered it too freely, avowed it too confidently. But what will you? Even the greatest purists in religions faith find it hard to disabuse their minds of the idea that martyrdom means and merits the Kingdom, and Philip Hardman's theology was not of the sternest sort.
He felt, somehow, that this woman had suffered enough to win Heaven, whether she merited it in other respects or not. So he set himself to present his faith to her in the most glowing aspect, always seconding his message with his eyes.
Just as Philip Hardman saw but one face in his audience, so Myron Holder was, after the first few moments, unconscious of any other presence save his. Her eyes had won a straight path to his face between the heads and shoulders, and her gaze never faltered. There was a tall, white-shaded lamp on each side of the desk. As she looked, his figure, in strong relief against the light-blue background of the walls, seemed to absorb and radiate the light. It was simply an ordinary optical effect, and Myron Holder herself recognized vaguely that it was "only the light," and yet that pale irradiation around his head seemed to add a dignity and sanctity to the man and lend his utterance a deeper, higher import.
Her eyes never left his face—that kind, weak face, so full of contradictions, whose beetling brow seemed ready to do battle for his Faith, whose lips quivered with the feeling in his own voice.
Her eyes were hot and dilated from the long strain when, with hands upraised above the standing people, he uttered the benediction, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Amen."
Philip Hardman descended from the platform and strove to make his way toward Myron, but he was hemmed in by outstretched hands, and had to make his way slowly through a throng, all eager to say "Good-bye," for he left on the morrow. Myron was just stepping out of the shelter of the porch when he overtook her. He held out his hand, which she took, her own toil-hardened one trembling in the clasp of his softer fingers. He looked down at her and spoke with great gentleness:
"Did you take the message I gave you to-night?"
"Is it for me?" she asked.
"Surely," he answered.
"You do not know me; you cannot tell. If you knew"——
"Whosoever will," he replied, with steady emphasis. And in his heart he marvelled at the humbleness of this woman, whose candid brow and clear eyes bespoke her life.
Then, the man mingling with the priest in him, he continued, still more gently:
"The message is even to the greatest sinner. To see you is to know you have the right of one of the least."
She put up two hands, clasped in miserable deprecation; her cheeks flamed red an instant, then paled to a ghastly white; she turned silently, and swiftly went down two steps of the broad entrance stair; then pausing and looking back at him with a gaze such as one might fix upon the flames before he steps into them, she said clearly:
"Ask Mrs. Deans who Myron Holder is!" She slipped away, the gloom of the unlighted street absorbing her figure, as though it gathered to itself its righteous belonging.