CHAPTER XXIV.
GOD'S WAY.
Be it understood that Dr. Douglass was very much astonished, and not a little disgusted with himself. As he marched defiantly up and down the long piazza he tried to analyze his state of mind. He had always supposed himself to be a man possessed of keen powers of discernment, and yet withal exercising considerable charity toward his erring fellow-men, willing to overlook faults and mistakes, priding himself not a little on the kind and gentlemanly way in which he could meet ruffled human nature of any sort. In fact, he dwelt on a sort of pedestal, from the hight of which he looked calmly and excusingly down on weaker mortals. This, until to-night: now he realized, in a confused, blundering sort of way, that his pedestal had crumbled, or that he had tumbled from its hight, or at least that something new and strange had happened. For instance, what had become of his powers of discernment? Here was this miserable doctor, who had been one of the thorns of his life, whom he had looked down upon as a canting hypocrite. Was he, after all, mistaken? The explanation of to-night looked like it; he had been deceived in that matter which had years ago come between them; he could see it very plainly now. In spite of himself, the doctor's earnest, manly apology would come back and repeat itself to his brain, and demand admiration.
Now Dr. Douglass was honestly amazed at himself, because he was not pleased with this state of things. Why was he not glad to discover that Dr. Van Anden was more of a man than he had ever supposed? This would certainly be in keeping with the character of the courteous, unprejudiced gentleman that he had hitherto considered himself to be; but there was no avoiding the fact that the very thought of Dr. Van Anden was exasperating, more so this evening than ever before. And the more his judgment became convinced that he had blundered, the more vexed did he become.
"Confound everybody!" he exclaimed at length, in utter disgust. "What on earth do I care for the contemptible puppy, that I should waste thought on him. What possessed the fellow to come whining around me to-night, and set me in a whirl of disagreeable thought? I ought to have knocked him down for his insufferable impudence in dragging me out publicly in that meeting." This he said aloud; but something made answer down in his heart: "Oh, it's very silly of you to talk in this way. You know perfectly well that Dr. Van Anden is not a contemptible puppy at all. He is a thoroughly educated, talented physician, a formidable rival, and you know it; and he didn't whine in the least this evening; he made a very manly apology for what was not so very bad after all, and you more than half suspect yourself of admiring him."
"Fiddlesticks!" said Dr. Douglass aloud to all this information, and went off to his room in high dudgeon.
The next two days seemed to be very busy ones to one member of the Ried family. Dr. Douglass sometimes appeared at meal time and sometimes not, but the parlor and the piazza were quite deserted, and even his own room saw little of him. Sadie, when she chanced by accident to meet him on the stairs, stopped to inquire if the village was given over to small-pox, or any other dire disease which required his constant attention; and he answered her in tones short and sharp enough to have been Dr. Van Anden himself:
"It is given over to madness," and moved rapidly on.
This encounter served to send him on a long tramp into the woods that very afternoon. In truth, Dr. Douglass was overwhelmed with astonishment at himself. Two such days and nights as the last had been he hoped never to see again. It was as if all his pet theories had deserted him at a moment's warning, and the very spirit of darkness taken up his abode in their place. Go whither he would, do what he would, he was haunted by these new, strange thoughts. Sometimes he actually feared that he, at least, was losing his mind, whether the rest of the world were or not. Being an utter unbeliever in the power of prayer, knowing indeed nothing at all about it, he would have scoffed at the idea that Dr. Van Anden's impassioned, oft-repeated petitions had aught to do with him at this time. Had he known that at the very time in which he was marching through the dreary woods, kicking the red and yellow leaves from his path in sullen gloom, Ester in her little clothes-press, on her knees, was pleading with God for his soul, and that through him Sadie might be reached, I presume he would have laughed. The result of this long communion with himself was as follows: That he had overworked and underslept, that his nervous system was disordered, that in the meantime he had been fool enough to attend that abominable sensation meeting, and the man actually had wonderful power over the common mind, and used his eloquence in a way that was quite calculated to confuse a not perfectly balanced brain. It was no wonder, then, in his state of bodily disorder, that the sympathetic mind should take the alarm. So much for the disease, now for the remedy. He would study less, at least he would stop reading half the night away; he would begin to practice some of his own preaching, and learn to be more systematic, more careful of this wonderful body, which could cause so much suffering; he would ride fast and long; above all, he would keep away from that church and that man, with his fanciful pictures and skillfully woven words.
Having determined his plan of action he felt better. There was no sense, he told himself, in yielding to the sickly sentimentalism which had bewitched him for the past few days; he was ashamed of it, and would have no more of it. He was master of his own mind, he guessed, always had been, and always would be. And he started on his homeward walk with a good deal of alacrity, and much of his usual composure settling on his face.
Oh, would the gracious Spirit which had been struggling with him leave him indeed to himself? "O God," pleaded Ester, "give me this one soul in answer to my prayer. For the sake of Sadie, bring this strong pillar obstructing her way to thyself. For the sake of Jesus, who died for them both, bring them both to yield to him."
Dr. Douglass paused at the place where two roads forked and mused, and the subject of his musing was no more important than this: Should he go home by the river path or through the village? The river path was the longer, and it was growing late, nearly tea time; but if he took the main road he would pass his office, where he was supposed to be, as well as several houses where he ought to have been, besides meeting probably several people whom he would rather not see just at present. On the whole, he decided to take the river road, and walked briskly along, quite in harmony with himself once more, and enjoying the autumn beauty spread around him. A little white speck attracted his attention; he almost stopped to examine into it, then smiled at his curiosity, and moved on. "A bit of waste paper probably," he said to himself. "Yet what a curious shape it was as if it had been carefully folded and hidden under that stone. Suppose I see what it is? Who knows but I shall find a fortune hidden in it?" He turned back a step or two, and stooped for the little white speck. One corner of it was nestled under a stone. It was a ragged, rumpled, muddy fragment of a letter, or an essay, which rain and wind and water had done their best to annihilate, and finally, seeming to become weary of their plaything, had tossed it contemptuously on the shore, and a pitying stone had rolled down and covered and preserved a tiny corner. Dr. Douglass eyed it curiously, trying to decipher the mud-stained lines, and being in a dreamy mood wondered meanwhile what young, fair hand had penned the words, and what of joy or sadness filled them. Scarcely a word was readable, at least nothing that would gratify his curiosity, until he turned the bit of leaf, and the first line, which the stone had hidden, shone out distinctly: "Sometimes I can not help asking myself why I was made—." Here the corner was torn off, and whether that was the end of the original sentence or not, it was the end to him. God sometimes uses very simple means with which to confound the wisdom of this world. Such a sudden and extraordinary revulsion of feeling as swept over Dr. Douglass he had never dreamed of before. He did not stop to question the strangeness of his state of mind, nor why that bit of soiled, torn paper should possess so fearful a power over him. He did not even realize at the moment that it was connected with this bewilderment, he only knew that the foundation upon which he had been building for years seemed suddenly to have been torn from under him by invisible hands, and left his feet sinking slowly down on nothing; and his inmost soul took suddenly up that solemn question with which he had never before troubled his logical brain: "I can not help asking myself why I was made?" There was only one other readable word on that paper, turn it whichever way he would, and that word was "God;" and he started and shivered when his eye met this, as if some awful voice had spoken it to his ear.
"What unaccountable witchcraft has taken possession of me?" he muttered, at length. And turning suddenly he sat himself down on an old decaying log by the river side, and gave himself up to real, honest, solemn thought.
"Where is Dr. Douglass?" queried Julia, appearing at the dining-room door just at tea time. "There is a boy at the door says they want him at Judge Beldon's this very instant."
"He's nowhere" answered Sadie solemnly, pausing in the work of arranging cups and saucers. "It's my private opinion that he has been and gone and hung himself. He passed the window about one o'clock, looking precisely as I should suppose a man would who was about to commit that interesting act, since which time I've answered the bell seventeen times to give the same melancholy story of his whereabouts."
"My!" exclaimed the literal Julia, hurrying back to the boy at the door. She comprehended her sister sufficiently to have no faith in the hanging statement, but honestly believed in the seventeen sick people who were waiting for the doctor.
The church was very full again that evening. Sadie had at first declared herself utterly unequal to another meeting that week, but had finally allowed herself to be persuaded into going; and had nearly been the cause of poor Julia's disgrace because of the astonished look which she assumed as Dr. Douglass came down the aisle, with his usual quiet composure of manner, and took the seat directly in front of them. The sermon was concluded. The text: "See I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil," had been dwelt upon in such a manner that it seemed to some as if the aged servant of God had verily been shown a glimpse of the two unseen worlds waiting for every soul, and was painting from actual memory the picture for them to look upon. That most solemn of all solemn hymns had just been sung:
"There is a time, we know not when
A point, we know not where,
That marks the destiny of men
'Twixt glory and despair.
"There is a line, by us unseen,
That crosses every path,
The hidden boundary between
God's mercy and his wrath."
Silence had but fairly settled on the waiting congregation when a strong, firm voice broke in upon it, and the speaker said:
"I believe in my soul that I have met that point and crossed that line this day. I surely met God's mercy and his wrath, face to face, and struggled in their power. Your hymn says, 'To cross that boundary is to die;' but I thank God that there are two sides to it. I feel that I have been standing on the very line, that my feet had well-nigh slipped. To-night I step over on to mercy's side. Reckon me henceforth among those who have chosen life."
"Amen," said the veteran minister, with radiant face.
"Thank God," said the earnest pastor, with quivering lip.
Two heads were suddenly bowed in the silent ecstasy of prayer—they were Ester's and Dr. Van Anden's. As for Sadie, she sat straight and still as if petrified with amazement, as she well-nigh felt herself to be, for the strong, firm voice belonged to Dr. Douglass!
An hour later Dr. Van Anden was pacing up and down the long parlor, with quick, excited steps, waiting for he hardly knew what, when a shadow fell between him and the gaslight. He glanced up suddenly, and his eyes met Dr. Douglass, who had placed himself in precisely the same position in which he had stood when they had met there before. Dr. Van Anden started forward, and the two gentlemen clasped hands as they had never in their lives done before. Dr. Douglass broke the beautiful silence first with earnestly spoken words:
"Doctor, will you forgive all the past?"
And Dr. Van Anden answered: "Oh, my brother in Christ!"
As for Ester, she prayed, in her clothes-press, thankfully for Dr. Douglass, more hopefully for Sadie, and knew not that a corner of the poor little letter which had slipped from Julia's hand and floated down the stream one summer morning, thereby causing her such a miserable, miserable day, was lying at that moment in Dr. Douglass' note-book, counted as the most precious of all his precious bits of paper. Verily "His ways are not as our ways."