“He is so steady, so genuine. I can never forget his kindness. Oh, that awful cloudburst!” Celeste shivered; then, half aloud to herself, she added,—“Can it be three years since Elisha left us?”
Instinctively both looked backward toward the paper-mill woods and there, smiling at them “over their right shoulders,” hung the new moon!
Now Hernando knew there was nothing “in” seeing the new moon over the right shoulder. He did not believe that it has any influence whatever on our lives; but as he looked at that silver crescent smiling on a troubled world, a peace, such as he had never known, stole over his senses, and with it came that clear vision which reveals truth, clears up the mysterious connection between cause and effect, and the long lines of our destiny. Forgotten was Hernando’s God of tradition and dogma; the beautiful system of ethics formulated at Shushan was indeed good—as far as it went; but that same beautiful system with God in it is religion, is wisdom, and at last Hernando had “found” it. Oh, the blessed truth! Nothing in this wide universe but God, Good, whose Being is manifested through us. One God, one “Great First Cause,” and His effect, man and the universe the effect of God!
“Just let the Kingdom of Heaven take you”: why struggle for our own when nothing, “no thing,” disputes our claim? All we need do to come into our full inheritance is prove our identity as legitimate heirs. Here again, nothing denies the truth. Simple, when we let God show us how, “so divinely easy that the only wonder is that we have not done it before!” Like the air and the sky, when we open our “upper eyes,” Heaven simply is; and it is all there is, for God is there.
Yes, this “straining” is the “point”; always sending messages, unmindful of the fact that no answer can be “received” by a “transmitter.” How plain it all was now to Hernando. His prayers of childhood, youth, manhood, when from the very bottom of his heart, had all been “received” at the great central office, and here were the answers “in heaps.”
Oh, how much easier his life might have been had he been “willing” to “receive”; but he had kicked “against the goads” and so must learn obedience through bitter experience. He had worked back to the “forks of the road” in “fear and trembling.” Unjust as it all had seemed at the time, he now saw that in no other way could his lesson have been learned. The stony road of necessity on which no traveller escapes just toll, was behind him. Before him once more, the road forked. One fork led to Hong Kong, to mistaken duty with exactions—not obligations.
On the other fork was the woman he loved, the “helpmeet” he needed, that other “half” of this man of flesh and blood. He thought over the last three years; how he had been temporarily filling his friend’s vacancy at the mine until the way to Hong Kong should open up, little dreaming that Elisha had only temporarily filled his, Hernando’s, vacancy in Celeste’s heart until he had “proved his claim.”
How sincerely he had tried to comfort her in her bereavement. What joy it had given him to watch her dimples returning and hear her merry laugh once more! He looked at her now, standing in the witching light of the new moon with her sweet, chaste profile outlined against the shadow, and then, because it was so “natural-like” and he knew it was right, he held out his arms to Celeste. The call from the very bottom of his heart was answered. The message read: “Not Hong Kong!”
By and by they looked toward The Laurels; the evening shadows had crept up beyond the house, but father and mother, they knew, were sitting on the piazza waiting for them. There was a light in Eletheer’s room and anon they caught glimpses of her as she flitted to and fro packing for her long journey. Margaret’s voice resounded in a familiar hymn from the kitchen and there, with his lantern, came dear old Reuben from the barn. How well they knew that no beast, bird nor living thing could ever look reproachfully into that black face! They saw him stop, turn, and with the deliberation that characterized everything he did, look at the new moon over his right shoulder.
“What did you wish?” Celeste asked, and her voice was as sweet as the robin’s good-night.