“Harry Spink is a worldly-minded man. But he is not a bad man. He did a manly thing when he left us, since he did not feel the call. But we have felt the call, Willard, you and I—and when a man like Spink puts us a question such as he put this evening we ought to be able to answer it. And we ought not to want to avoid answering it.”
“You mean when he said: ‘What is there in it for Jesus?’”
“The phrase was irreverent, but the meaning reached me. He meant, I take it: ‘What have your long years here profited to Christ?’ You understood it so—?”
“Yes. He said to me in the bazaar: ‘What’s your bag?’”
Mr. Blandhorn sighed heavily. For a few minutes Willard fancied he had fallen asleep; but he lifted his head and, stretching his hand out, laid it on his disciple’s arm.
“The Lord chooses His messengers as it pleaseth Him: I have been awaiting this for a long time.” The young man felt his arm strongly grasped. “Willard, you have been much to me all these years; but that is nothing. All that matters is what you are to Christ ... and the test of that, at this moment, is your willingness to tell me the exact truth, as you see it.”
Willard Bent felt as if he were a very tall building, and his heart a lift suddenly dropping down from the roof to the cellar. He stirred nervously, releasing his arm, and cleared his throat; but he made no answer. Mr. Blandhorn went on.
“Willard, this is the day of our accounting—of my accounting. What have I done with my twenty-five years in Africa? I might deceive myself as long as my wife lived—I cannot now.” He added, after a pause: “Thank heaven she never doubted....”
The younger man, with an inward shiver, remembered some of Mrs. Blandhorn’s confidences. “I suppose that’s what marriage is,” he mused—“just a fog, like everything else.”
Aloud he asked: “Then why should you doubt, sir?”