Bride went away with a great awe upon her—a deep respect and sympathy for the faith of this patient man, and a sense of the intense reality of the power of prayer such as she had scarcely experienced in her life before. She knew that Abner had been praying for the conversion of Saul, even as she had been praying that Eustace might turn in faith towards the God of Salvation. Once it had seemed as though nothing could conquer the invincible wildness of the one or the intellectual scepticism of the other. But God had put forth His hand in power, and had caused that even the powers of evil should aid in bringing about the answer. She wanted to think it out. She wanted to be alone in her awe and her thankfulness. She went swiftly up to her own room, and sank upon her knees, burying her face in her hands.
CHAPTER XXII
SAUL TRESITHNY
HIS eyes opened slowly upon the unfamiliar room. The shaft of sunlight slanting in from the west shone upon a comfortable apartment, far larger and loftier than anything to which he had been accustomed. The window was larger, the fireplace was wider, and there was a clear fire of coal burning in the grate, very different from the peat and driftwood fires to which he had been long accustomed. The only familiar object in the room was the figure of his grandfather, bending over the big Bible on the table, as he had been so used to see it from childhood, when he awakened from sleep in the early hours of the night, and looked about him to know where he was.
For a moment a dreamy wonderment came over him. He asked himself whether he had not been dreaming a long, long troubled dream of manhood and strife, and whether, after all, he were not a little child again, living in his grandfather’s cottage, happy in his games upon the shore, and looking eagerly forward to the time when he should be a man and could follow the fortunes of fishermen and smugglers, or have a big garden to care for like Abner.
But this dreamy condition did not last long. There was a bowed look about Abner, and his hair was altogether too white for him to be identified with the Abner of twenty years back. Saul raised his own hand and looked at it curiously. It was shrunken to skin and bone, but a great hand still, with indications of vanished power and strength. The dark sombre eyes roved round and round the room. Memory was awakening, the mists of fever and delirium were passing away. Suddenly Saul seemed to see as in a panorama the whole map of his past life rolled out before him. It was written in characters of fire upon the bare walls of the room. Everywhere he looked he saw his wild and evil deeds depicted. Why was it that they looked black and hideous to him now, when hitherto he had gloried in them—gloated over them? He saw, last of all, the doomed vessel bearing straight down upon the cruel rocks. And now he seemed to see a face on board that vessel—the face of one he loved—the face of the man who had held out his hand in friendship, when (as he believed) all the world beside had turned its back upon him. He saw the face of this friend looking at him with a deep reproach in the eyes, and a sudden groan of anguish broke from Saul’s lips as he stretched out his hands to stay the course of the doomed vessel.
At the sound of that groan Abner rose quickly and came forward to the bedside. The ray of dying daylight was fading already, and the shadow of the winter’s evening closing in; and yet in the dimness about the bed, Abner thought he saw something new in Saul’s face.
“Saul, my lad,” he said gently, “do you know me?”