Her voice was painfully constrained. The words seemed to issue with difficulty, and the tones were harsh. Speech seemed strangely dissonant with the hour and place. Her mute despair seemed the only fitting emotion for the scene. Her eyes, from out a pallid face, looked up at him, filmed by misery. Her cheeks were hollowed in delicate shadows. Her pale lips drooped. She seemed the Mourning Spirit of the place.
"Come and pray," he said, looking at her with infinite pity in his kind eyes. "Come," he urged.
He waited for her reply, but none came. She was sitting by the grave now, her hands locked round her knees, her eyes looking hungrily into vacancy and seeing neither hope nor recompense for her pain.
A bat held its angled flight past them. He roused himself to a sense of time. He looked down upon the woman at his feet, an expression of ineffable compassion lit his face; then he turned to go.
As his eyes left that pallid face the scene seemed to darken suddenly. He realized the lateness of the hour, and, finding his way out of the graveyard, strode rapidly to the church.
After all, he was in time—indeed, had a few minutes to spare. He did not, however, again shock Mrs. Deans by a promiscuous friendliness. He went straight to the platform and sat down behind the reading-desk. His thoughts reverted to the woman whom he had just seen, and he felt he ought to have made a more eloquent appeal to her to come to church. Mental habit led him to decide at once that prayer was the only efficacious cure for grief such as hers. It was thus with this man always. In calm moments, when all went well with him, he strove to elucidate those problems of reason and right which presented themselves to him in season and out of season—strove to live a life of austere truth without factitious aid of self-delusion, without hope of ultimate reward.
But in times of distress or pain, whether his own or others', he turned again to his old beliefs, and prayer appealed to him as the only panacea. Orthodox folk plead this as a triumphant and sure vindication of the truth of their creeds. It may be in some cases, but in Philip Hardman's it was only the result of inherent weakness of will and vacillating decision, and, alas! a cowardly shrinking from mental torture. Face to face with grief such as this woman's, he could not bear to look the inevitability of such bereavements in the face; could not endure to think of the irreparable loss of a vanished life; could not calmly recognize one single instance of what he was ever mourning over—the sadness and futility of life.
He must hallow each blow as a "merciful dispensation;" muffle it from prying eyes with the tabooed veil of "sacred predestination"; set it beyond close scrutiny by asserting to himself the impiety of questioning "divine will"; and at such times the beauty of his solacing faith lit in his soul fresh fervor for the cause.
For a few moments Philip Hardman sat motionless. The hands of the clock reached the hour for service to begin. His audience settled themselves in the pews and stilled themselves to attention.
Mrs. Deans ostentatiously ceased her whispered remarks to Mrs. Wilson, straightened herself in her seat, looked about with a critical and judicial eye, and then, convinced that all was well, hemmed several times expectantly.