“But Sodom and Gomorrah,” reminded him my mother, “would have been spared for the sake of ten just men.”
“Much more sensible to have hurried the ten men out, leaving the remainder to be buried with all their abominations under their own ashes,” growled Hal.
“And we shall be purified,” continued my mother, “the evil in us washed away.”
“Why have made us ill merely to mend us? If the Almighty were so anxious for our company, why not have made us decent in the beginning?” He had just come away from a meeting of Poor Law Guardians, and was in a state of dissatisfaction with human nature generally.
“It is His way,” answered my mother. “The precious stone lies hid in clay. He has His purpose.”
“Is the stone so very precious?”
“Would He have taken so much pains to fashion it if it were not? You see it all around you, Hal, in your daily practice—heroism, self-sacrifice, love stronger than death. Can you think He will waste it, He who uses again even the dead leaf?”
“Shall the new leaf remember the new flower?”
“Yes, if it ever knew it. Shall memory be the only thing to die?”
Often of an evening I would accompany Hal upon his rounds. By the savage tribe he both served and ruled he had come to be regarded as medicine man and priest combined. He was both their tyrant and their slave, working for them early and late, yet bullying them unmercifully, enforcing his commands sometimes with vehement tongue, and where that would not suffice with quick fists; the counsellor, helper, ruler, literally of thousands. Of income he could have made barely enough to live upon; but few men could have enjoyed more sense of power; and that I think it was that held him to the neighbourhood.