“After to-day what comes to these, peace?”
“Nay, a year all dark and colorless; then another spasm called a feast—a brief lightning-flash revealing the darkness.”
“And so the years come and go; one generation of madmen, then another; death the only variety?”
“Nay! I’d have you look upon pleasure of sense deified, taking its pleasures under the shadows of Chemosh, for a purpose. You remember we read together, under the palms at Babylon, how the holy Daniel saw in vision the four winds of heaven striving on the sea?”
“I remember the prophet’s reverie or revel.”
“The four winds and the sea! the meaning, opened, is conflict on every hand on earth! Out of the follies and turmoils David’s White Kingdom will emerge at last. Listen to the words of the inspired seer:
“‘Behold one like the Son of Man! There was given Him a dominion and a glory that all people should serve Him; an everlasting dominion!’
“It is coming; my poor faith, amid the conflicts and revels of man, hears the voice of God crying through the night, as in Eden’s dark hour: ‘Where art thou?’ My last lesson to my son awaits us at Bethany; let’s be going.”
Ere long Cornelius Woelfkin and his son Winfred stood silently, and with uncovered heads, before, but a little apart from, a stately marble shaft that rose up amid the olive trees of Gethsemane. It was night, and they were alone. The father motioned the son back, and alone glided under the shadowing trees, toward the pillar. There the elder one threw himself down on the earth, close beside the monument; the youth, deeply moved, but unwilling to intrude upon the scene of sacred, silent grief, stood aloof. In a small way, there was a repetition of the grief of the Man of Sorrows, who there, ages before, yearned in His humanity over a lost world, over those from whom His heart was soon to part for life. To be sure, the cross of Cornelius Woelfkin was infinitely less galling, less heavy than that borne by his Master; and yet it was as heavy as he could bear, and hence the pitifulness of his grief.
Who can lift the curtain from his thoughts? The years roll back and memory’s pictures pass through his brain, at first in joyful train. The lovers in London; the betrothal at sea; the wedding at Jerusalem; the ecstatic consummation in years of marriage. Then the painful, almost awful separation by death, that never to be forgotten Christmas time. And then, twenty years with leaden feet carrying the lone-hearted man so painfully slow toward death’s portals, for which he longed with unutterable yearning. “Oh, Miriamne, Miriamne, let me come,” he cried. The youth, hearing the agonized utterings, was instantly by his father’s side. But the old man, still oblivious to all but his sorrow and his memories, moaned on with deepening fervor.