He prayed that this bitter trial might not come upon him, that this great peril might not approach his children. He prayed that the visitation which he dreaded might be averted by almighty power. He prayed that God would prevent his brother from coming, and keep the home in unbroken purity and peace, holy and undefiled.
From this strange wrestling in spirit he rose benumbed, yet calmed, as one who feels that he has made his last effort and can do no more. He opened the door of his study and listened. There was no sound. The children had all gone to bed. He turned back to the old table to work until midnight on his sermon for the morrow. The text was: "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."
II
But that sermon was not to be delivered. Mr. North woke very early, before it was light, and could not find sleep again. In the gray of the morning, when the little day was creeping among the houses of Glendour, he heard steps in the street and then a whisper of voices at his gate. He threw his wrapper around him and went down quietly to open the door.
A group of men were there, with trouble in their faces. They told him of an accident on the river. A sleigh crossing the ice during the night had lost the track. The horses had broken into an air-hole and dragged the sleigh with them. The man went under the ice with the current, and came out a little while ago in the big spring-hole by the point. They had pulled the body ashore. They did not know for sure who it was—a stranger—but they thought—perhaps——
The minister listened silently, shivering once or twice, and passing his hand over his brow as if to brush away something. When their voices paused and ceased, he said slowly, "Thank you for coming to me. I must go with you, and then I can tell." As he went upstairs softly and put on his clothes, he repeated these words to himself two or three times mechanically—"yes, then I can tell." But as he went with the men he said nothing, walking like one in a dream.
On the bank of the river, amid the broken ice and trampled yellow snow, the men had put a couple of planks together and laid the body of the stranger upon them turning up the broad collar of his fur coat to hide his face. One of the men now turned the collar down, and Nathaniel North looked into the wide-open eyes of the dead.
A horrible tremor shook him from head to foot. He lifted his hands, as if he must cry aloud in anguish. Then suddenly his face and figure seemed to congeal and stiffen with some awful inward coldness—the frost of the last circle of the Inferno—it spread upon him till he stood like a soul imprisoned in ice.
"Yes," he said, "this is my brother Abel. Will you carry him to my house? We must bury him."
During the confusion and distress of the following days that frozen rigidity never broke nor melted. Mr. North gave no directions for the funeral, took no part in it, but stood beside the grave in dreadful immobility. He did not mourn. He did not lament. He listened to his friends' consolation as if it were spoken in an unknown tongue. Nothing helped him, nothing hurt, because nothing touched him. He did no work, opened no book, spoke no word if he could avoid it. He moved about his house like a stranger, a captive, shrinking from his children so that they grew afraid to come close to him. They were bewildered and harrowed with pity. They did not know what to do. It seemed as if it were their father and not their uncle who had died.