Fred Macdonald retired quietly, taking with him the keys of both doors, and feeling more exhausted than he had been on any Saturday night since the building of the mill.
CHAPTER XV.
A FIRST INWARD PEEP.
Among the Barton people who had actually made any effort for the sake of temperance, no one found greater comfort in contemplative retrospects of his own work than Deacon Jones. True, his contributions to the various funds which Crupp, Tomple, Wedgewell, and Brown devised had not been as great as had been expected of him; nor had such moneys as he finally gave been obtained from him without an amount of effort which Crupp declared sufficient to effect the extraction, from the soil, of the stump of a centenarian oak; but when the money had left his pocket, and was absolutely beyond recall, the deacon made the most he could out of it by the only method which remained. His contributions gave him an excuse for talk and exhortation, and, next to money-making, there was no operation which the deacon enjoyed as much as that of exhorting others to good deeds. Until there broke out in Barton the temperance excitement alluded to in our first chapter, Deacon Jones’s hortatory efforts had been principally of a religious nature; he believed in religion, and he occasionally extracted enjoyment from it; besides, his thrifty soul had always been profoundly moved by the business-like nature of the Scripture passage, “Whoso shall convert a sinner from the error of his ways, shall save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.” Many had been the unregenerate in Barton with whom the deacon had labored, generally with considerable tact, as to occasion and language, and sometimes with success. His orthodoxy was acceptable to every pastor in the village, for he was an extreme believer in every religious tenet which either pastor declared necessary to salvation; and his frequent inability to reconcile such of these ideas as conflicted with each other only led the ministers to accord new admiration to a faith which was appalled by nothing. Up to the time when he took active part in the temperance movement, one of his favorite injunctions had been, “Lay up your treasure in heaven;” when, however, he found himself suddenly and frequently called upon for contributions, he dropped this injunction in favor of that one which reads, “Give to him that asketh of thee.” It had been a matter of considerable sorrow to the deacon that his first knowledge of this passage had been derived from St. Luke instead of St. Matthew, and that he had many times been compelled to say “Give to every man,” etc., which quotation had reacted upon him in a manner which caused him to quote to himself, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous,” and to suffer some terrible flounderings in the twin pits of logic and casuistry; but when he corrected himself according to Matthew, his heart was gladdened, and his restraint removed. The old man talked a great deal out of honest delight in righteousness and humanity; but he was never moved to reticence by the thought that if his scattered seed produced a fair share of grain, the demands upon his own precious store would be lessened.
Besides, the deacon could, with propriety, urge a more conspicuous form of well-doing than mere contributions of currency ever attained to. Had not he himself taken upon his shoulders Tom Adams, driver of the brick-yard team? If any one doubted it, or had never been made acquainted with the fact, the deacon gave him no excuse for farther ignorance. One after another of the well-to-do merchants, professional men, and farmers, were urged by the deacon to take entire charge of some unfortunate soul, after the manner of the deacon himself with Tom, and to all of these he insisted that what he had done for Tom he had been richly paid for by the approving smiles of his own conscience. Shrewd judges of human nature were convinced that if such payment was made to the deacon, he was doubly paid, for Tom Adams had been a treasure of a workman ever since he had stopped drinking; but, with the marvelous blindness of the man who objects to seeing, the deacon clearly comprehended both aspects of the situation, without ever once allowing them to interfere with each other.
He was pursuing his favorite line of argument in his store one afternoon, before Parson Brown, Lawyer Bottom, the postmaster, Dr. White, and two or three others who were not active customers at that immediate moment, and, as all his hearers but the parson were in good circumstances, the deacon felt called upon to make an unusual effort.
“Tell you what it is, gentlemen,” said he, “there’s nothin’ like puttin’ your hand in your pocket to show you what doin’ good is. Here I’ve been thinkin’ all my life that I was doin’ good by subscribin’ to Bible Societies, Missionary Societies, an’ all such things, and yet there was the chance right in my own hands, and I was too blind to see it. I done it at last on a risk, as if God didn’t know best when he inspires men to righteous deeds; an’ I was fearful, time an’ again, that it mightn’t turn out well; but I’ve been more abundantly blessed at it than I ever expected to be. It makes a man feel kind of like Christ must have felt, to be able to help a fellow-creature out of his troubles and sins. Look at Tom Adams now! he’s always sober, his children go to Sunday-school, and he’s never around looking as if you’d rather not meet him, and I, thank the Lord! feel even better over it than he does.”
The postmaster slyly tipped a grave wink at Lawyer Bottom, and the lawyer sagely laid a wise forefinger athwart his own nose. Dr. White dropped a short bark, intended for a cough, which somehow provoked a smile all around. Suddenly a small boy rushed into the store, exclaiming,
“O Deacon Jones! Tom Adams fell out of the wagon and broke his leg!”