CHAPTER XIV
AMOS VENTURES INTO THE WORLD
In the autumn evenings Grandfather sat beside his stove in meditation. It was against his principles to permit himself too high a degree of physical comfort, but as the current of his blood ran less swiftly he drew unconsciously closer to the stove. As he had often sat here and ordered his life, so he was ordering now his departure from life. He dreamed sometimes of a burial such as the fathers had had, at midnight under the light of torches, with antiphonal singing and solemn tolling of bells, and with a procession of the Brotherhood of Zion and the Sisterhood of Spiritual Virgins.
Amos was at the pine table, now correcting the papers of the children in his school, now bent over his Latin manuscript. It seemed to him that his mind became less active and that the devil tempted him to dream when he ought to be at work.
To Grandfather there had been in the universe two stable realities, the existence of a wise and all-powerful Creator and the correctness of the Seventh-Day Baptist interpretation of the Creator's mind and works. Now in his old age he dwelt with increasing satisfaction upon a third reality, the divine appointment and fitness of Amos, on account of his faith and piety, to interpret both Creator and theology. He thought, as the weeks passed, less anxiously about Ellen, ascribing her placability to his own advice and to her better mind, rather than to the stern necessities of her case. She would, he believed, now that the dangerous influence of her father was removed, "come round."
One day he summoned a carpenter and went with him over the old buildings, measuring and inspecting. Here a wall needed strengthening, here a chimney rebuilding, here fresh plaster should replace the broken mortar of clay and grass. The sum required to put all in order was not large.
Sitting drowsily by the stove Grandfather peopled the quiet night with figures. He saw Saron filled; he saw men going after prayer to work in the fields and women in white filing in solemn procession to worship at midnight. They went joyfully, as he and Amos went sometimes to pray in the Saal. He heard above his little cottage heavenly songs issuing from the high matin room of Saron.
But the figures in his dreams were not those of departed saints. The face of the speaker in the pulpit who held an audience enthralled, not alone by his eloquence, but by the power of truth, was not that of Father Friedsam, but of Amos; the cowled and robed figure which was followed by adoring converts was that of Amos; the religious who knelt alone in the Saal at midnight praying for his people was Amos. It was mediæval and strange, but it was real to the dreamer. It had all happened once, less than two hundred years ago—it might, if it pleased God, happen again.
But Amos, alas! had come to doubt his own strength, had come indeed to fear his own thoughts. As he bent over "The Mystic Dove" on this winter evening his face was drawn, the fingers with which he held his pen were icy. He was trying to translate a sentence which he believed praised the holy mystery of the sacraments, but his mind was not upon his work, and, spoken to suddenly, he started as guiltily as though Grandfather had looked into his heart and detected his disquiet.