The Reign of Law; a tale of the Kentucky hemp fields

by James Lane Allen

All high happiness has in it some element of love; all love contains a desire for peace. One immediate effect of new happiness, new love, is to make us turn toward the past with a wish to straighten out its difficulties, heal its breaches, forgive its wrongs. We think most hopefully of distressing things which may still be remedied, most regretfully of others that have passed beyond our reach and will.

It was between ten and eleven o'clock of the next day—Sunday. David's cold had become worse. He had turned over necessary work to the negro man and stayed quietly in his room since the silent breakfast Two or three books chosen carelessly out of the trunk lay on his table before the fire: interest had gone out of them this day. With his face red and swollen, he was sitting beside this table with one hand loosely covering the forgotten books, his eyes turned to the window, but looking upon distant inward scenes.

Sunday morning between ten and eleven o'clock! the church-going hour of his Bible-student life. In imagination he could hear across these wide leagues of winter land the faint, faint peals of the church bells which were now ringing. He was back in the town again—up at the college—in his room at the dormitory; and it was in the days before the times of his trouble. The students were getting ready for church, with freshly shaved faces, boots well blacked, best suits on, not always good ones. He could hear their talk in the rooms around his, hear fragments of hymns, the opening and shutting of doors along the hallways, and the running of feet down the stairs. By ones and twos and larger groups they passed down and out with their hymnals, Testaments, sometimes blank books for notes on the sermon. Several thrust bright, cordial faces in at the door, as they passed, to see whether he and his roommate had started.

The scene changed. He was in the church, which was crowded from pulpit to walls. He was sitting under the chandelier in the choir, the number of the first hymn had just been whispered along, and he began to sing, with hundreds of others, the music which then released the pinions of his love and faith as the air releases the wings of a bird. The hymn ceased; he could see the pastor rise from behind the pulpit, advance, and with a gesture gather that sea of heads to prayer. He could follow the sermon, most of all the exhortation; around him was such stillness in the church that his own heart-beats were audible. Then the Supper and then home to the dormitory again—with a pain of happiness filling him, the rest and the unrest of consecration.

Many other scenes he lived through in memory this morning—once lived in reality amid that brotherhood of souls. His tenderest thoughts perhaps dwelt on the young men's prayer-meetings of Sunday afternoons at the college. There they drew nearest to the Eternal Strength which was behind their weakness, and closest to each other as student after student lifted a faltering, stumbling petition for a common blessing on their work. The Immortal seemed to be in that bare room, filling their hearts with holy flame, drawing around them the isolation of a devoted band. They were one in One. Then had followed the change in him which produced the change in them: no fellowship, no friendship, with an unbeliever; and he was left without a comrade.

His heart was yearning and sick this day to be reconciled to them all. How did they think of him, speak of him, now? Who slept in his bed? Who sat a little while, after the studies of the night were over, talking to his room-mate? Who knelt down across the room at his prayers when the lights were put out? And his professors—what bulwarks of knowledge and rectitude and kindness they were!—all with him at first, all against him at last, as in duty bound.

To one man alone among those hundreds could David look back as having begun to take interest in him toward the close of his college days. During that vacation which he had spent in reading and study, he had often refreshed himself by taking his book out to the woodland park near the city, which in those days was the grounds of one of the colleges of the University. There he found the green wild country again, a forest like his pioneer ancestor's. Regularly here he observed at out-of-door work the professor of Physical Science, who also was pressing his investigations forward during the leisure of those summer months. An authority from the north, from a New England university, who had resigned his chair to come to Kentucky, attracted by the fair prospects of the new institution. A great gray-bearded, eagle-faced, square-shouldered, big-footed man: reserved, absorbed, asking to be let alone, one of the silent masters. But David, desperate with intellectual loneliness himself, and knowing this man to be a student of the new science, one day had introduced himself and made inquiry about entering certain classes in his course the following session.

The professor shook his head. He was going back to New England himself the next year; and he moved away under the big trees, resuming his work.

As troubles had thickened about David, his case became discussed in University circles; and he was stopped on the street one day by this frigid professor and greeted with a man's grasp and a look of fresh beautiful affection. His apostasy from dogmatism had made him a friend of that lone thinker whose worship of God was the worship of Him through the laws of His universe and not through the dogmas of men.

This professor—and Gabriella: they alone, though from different motives, had been drawn to him by what had repelled all others. It was his new relation to her beyond anything else that filled David this day with his deep desire for peace with his past. She had such peace in herself, such charity of feeling, such simple steadfast faith: she cast the music of these upon the chords of his own soul. To the influence of her religion she was now adding the influence of her love; it filled him, subdued, overwhelmed him. And this morning, also out of his own happiness he remembered with most poignant suffering the unhappiness of his father. His own life was unfolding into fulness of affection and knowledge and strength; his father's was closing amid the weakness and troubles that had gathered about him; and he, David, had contributed his share to these. To be reconciled to his father this day—that was his sole thought.