A Daughter of Witches: A Romance

by Joanna E. Wood

The congregation recovered, at least outwardly, its equanimity, and Sidney’s clear, sweet voice said, “Let us pray,” and after an instant’s pause uttered a brief invocation to the spirit of Truth and Holiness to descend upon their waiting hearts.

The hymn was sung, and then having read the chapter Sidney closed the Bible and began to speak.

Afterwards when all Sidney’s sermons were passed in review, it was remembered that during this discourse he kept his eyes fixed upon the face of his wife, and never once bent his gaze upon his congregation, the congregation which, gathered there full of trust that their spiritual wounds would be bound up, suddenly awakened to the fact that their beloved preacher was smiting them with the cold steel of spiritual condemnation.

This man who had been so ready to empty the vials of healing love upon their bruises, this man in whose hand the spiritual olive branch had blossomed like Aaron’s rod that budded, this man whose gentle human sympathy had wiled forth the secrets of the most obdurate, this man had turned and was rending them.

He took for his text, “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children,” and ere long the faces before him were piteous.

Never had Sidney spoken as he spoke that day; spurred on, it would seem, by an irresistible inspiration he cried to them “Woe—woe.” His fiery words seared their hearts as flame scorches flesh, beneath the burden of his bitter eloquence their spirits fainted. Nor was he content with generalizations, for with striking parallel and unmistakable comparison he illustrated his meaning with incidents from their own lives. Dole had never known how completely their preacher had been in their confidence till he turned traitor and dragged forth the skeletons of their griefs to point the moral of his denunciations.

Beneath it all they sat silent as those mute before a terrible judge, only the swift and piteous changes of expression showed when his barbed shafts struck home. These old men and women were suddenly smitten with the thought that their children who had “gone wrong” were only scapegoats for their parents’ sins, sent by them into the wilderness, with a mocking garland of religious training, to take away their reproach before the eyes of the world. But though the scapegoat might delude the attention of the world, it did not divert the gaze of the Almighty from their sin-stained souls. Impeached by their preacher’s almost personal denunciations, these poor worn old men and women found themselves convicted of, and responsible for, their own and their children’s sins. The ghosts of all the bye-gone scandals in Dole rose from the shades, and for once, parading boldly before the face of all men, fastened upon their victims.

Sudden deaths were pronounced to be judgments upon hidden sin, and Mary Shinar’s blanched face was wrung when she recalled her saintly father, who was found dead in his field with the whetstone in his hand to sharpen his scythe, that other reaper, whose sickle is always keen, had cut him down without warning. Mary tried to remember what old Mr. Didymus had said about the Lord coming quickly to those whom He loveth, but she could not, she could only writhe under the shadow of a dreadful uncertainty. Death-bed repentances were mocked at as unworthy and unacceptable cowardice, and old Henry Smilie’s jaw set, for his son, dead these fifteen years now, had acknowledged between the spasms of the death agony that he had erred and gone astray, and when a merciful interlude of peace was granted him before the end, he spent his last breaths whispering forth prayers to the Saviour whom his life had denied, and when he slept with a kind of unearthly peace and light upon his worn young face, old Mr. Didymus had spoken of those who through many deep waters at last win safe haven, and his father, ground to the earth by heart-breaking toil, wearied by the reproachful tongue of a scolding wife, looked beyond the horizon of this life to that moment when, transfigured from out the semblance of his sins, he should see his only son again. And now—— But Sidney having planted the empoisoned spear in his weary old heart, had turned to other things, and was speaking with strange white-faced fervour of the future.

The congregation had up to this instant rested in spellbound silence, but, as leaving the dead past he entered the hopeful realms of the future and proceeded to lay them waste with the most merciless forebodings, a long suspiration, half moan, half sigh swept about the church, spending itself like a hiss of shame in the corners, and coming vaguely to Sidney’s ears, unnoticed at the moment, but to be remembered afterwards in agony of spirit. He made no pause, but continuing in the tense tone of a man who only veils his meaning because it must be veiled, and wills that his words be understood, he pictured forth all the terrors which awaited the child of the shamed mother and the child of the drunkard; with pitiless imagery he suggested the inevitability of the fate which awaited them. He denounced in bitter terms the sin of giving children such a heritage, and following out his argument with rigid Calvinistic logic he left little hope of good for the victims of this inheritance. Of all the portions of this bitter sermon, this was the most scathing, and a silence like the silence of the grave fell upon his hearers.