"Come, come, boy—not 'sir.' Call me 'old man' and you shall say anything."
But the boy was constrained, plainly in discomfort. "I—I can't call you that—just now—sir."
"Well, if you must, tell me one thing—but only one! only one, mind you, boy!" In fear, but smiling, he waited.
"Well, sir, it's a shock I suffered just before I was sick. It came to me one night when I sat down to dinner —fearfully hungry. I had a thick English chop on the plate before me; and a green salad, oily in its bowl, and crisp, browned potatoes, and a mug of creamy ale. I'd gone to the place for a treat. I'd been whetting my appetite with nibbles of bread and sips of ale until the other things came; and then, even when I put my knife to the chop—like a blade pushed very slowly into my heart came the thought: 'My father is burning in hell— screaming in agony for a drop of this water which I shall not touch because I have ale. He has been in this agony for years; he will be there forever.' That was enough, sir. I had to leave the little feast. I was hungry no longer, though a moment before it had seemed that I couldn't wait for it. I walked out into the cold, raw night—walked till near daylight, with the sweat running off me. And the thing I knew all the time was this: that if I were in hell and my father in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to hell to burn with me forever—come with a joke and a song, telling me never to mind, that we'd have a fine time there in hell in spite of everything! That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing mountebank of a father. Just a moment more—this is what you must remember of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered it until my mind went out in that sickness. But, listen now: whatever has happened—I'm not yet sure what it is—I no longer suffer. Two things only I know: that our creed still has my godless, scoffing, unbaptised father in hell, and that my love for him—my absolute oneness with him—has not lessened.
"I'll stop there, if you wish, leaving you to divine what other change has taken place."
"There, there," soothed the old man, seizing the shoulders once more with his strong grip—"no more now, boy. It was a hard thing, I know. The consciousness of God's majesty comes often in that way, and often it overwhelms the unprepared. It was hard, but it will leave you more a man; your soul and your faith will both survive. Do what I have told you—as if you were once more the puzzled little Bernal, who never could keep his hair neatly brushed like Allan, and would always moon in corners. Go finish your course. Another year, when your mind has new fortitude from your recreated body, we will talk these matters as much as you like. Yet I will tell you one thing to remember—just one, as you have told me one: You are in a world of law, of unvarying cause and effect; and the integrity of this law cannot be destroyed, nor even impaired, by any conceivable rebellion of yours. Yet this material world of law is but the shadow of the reality, and that reality is God— the moral law if you please, as relentless, as inexorable, as immutable in its succession of cause and effect as the physical laws more apparent to us; and as little to be overthrown as physical law by any rebellion of disordered sentiment. The word of this God and this Law is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, wherein is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him.
"Now," continued the old man, more lightly, "each of us has something to remember—and let each of us pray for the other. Go, be a good boy—but careless and happy—for a year."
The old man had his way, and the two boys went presently back to their studies.
The girl, Nancy, remembered them well for the things each had said to her.
Allan, who, though he constantly praised her, had always the effect of leaving her small to herself. "Really, Nance," he said, "without any joking, I believe you have a capacity for living life in its larger aspects."