Softly the bell tolled and the last stragglers came hurrying leisurely, every soul carrying the lovely fragrant plumes so that the church would be sweet with the breath of spring. Later, these armfuls of beauty would be packed into huge boxes and shipped to the city hospitals to gladden pain-racked bodies and weary hearts.
Nanny Ainslee was still outside waiting for Grandma Wentworth. Lilac Sunday Nanny always waited for Grandma and always sat with her, because of a certain story that Grandma had told her once when the lamps were not yet lit and the soft summer moonlight lay in windowed squares on Grandma's sitting room floor. Nanny began to inquire of the last comers. But Tommy and Alice Winston, still bridey and shy, said they had seen nothing of her, and even Roger Allan supposed of course that she must be in her favorite pew, known to the oldtimers as Inspiration Corner. For it had been observed that all ministers sooner or later delivered their discourses to Grandma Wentworth. They were always sure of her undivided attention. Other people's eyes and minds might wander, some might be even openly bored, but Grandma's uplifted face was always kindly and encouraging, even though the sermon was hopelessly jumbled. She was the surest, severest critic and yet each man preached to her feeling that with the criticism would come kindliness and the sort of mother comfort that Grandma somehow knew how to give to the meanest and most blundering of creatures. Indeed, it was the least successful of Green Valley's ministers who had designated Grandma's seat as Inspiration Corner. And then had in a final burst of wrath told Green Valley that like Sodom and Gomorrah it was doomed, that no mere man preacher could save it, that its only hope lay in Grandma Wentworth, who alone understood its miserable, petty orneriness.
He meant to leave town a sputtering, raging man, that minister,—full of what he called righteous wrath. But he went to say good-by to Grandma and experienced a change of heart.
He began his farewell by unburdening his heart and soul of all the ponderous doctrines that sunny, joyful Green Valley had refused to listen to. He spoke earnestly of the world's terrible need of salvation, the fearful necessity for haste and wholesale repentance and the awful menace of God's wrath. And the fact that he was a man entering his forties instead of his thirties made matters worse.
But Grandma listened patiently and when he was emptied of all his sorrows and worriments she took him out into her herb-garden, seated him where he could see the sunset hills and then she preached a marvellous sermon to just this one man alone. No one but he knows what she told him but he went forth a humble, tired, quiet man, filled to the brim with a sudden belief in just life as it is lived by a few hundred million humans. Five years later word came to Green Valley that this same man was a much loved pastor somewhere in the mountains. And Green Valley, perennially young, unthinking, joyous Green Valley, laughed incredulously as a sweet-hearted but wrongly educated child always laughs at a true fairy tale or a simple miracle.
"If I had the making and raising of ministers," Grandma was heard to say, apropos of this clergyman, "about the first thing I'd set them to learning would be to laugh, first at themselves and then at other people. And as for this repentance and exhortation business I believe it is worn out. Humans have gotten tired of that 'last call for the paradise express.' They like this world and its life and they know they could be pretty decent if somebody would only explain a few little things to them. It isn't that they hate religion but they want to be allowed to grow into it naturally and sanely. Religion getting ought to be the quietest, happiest process, just pleasant neighboring like and comparing of ideas, with every now and then a holy hush when men and women have suddenly sensed some big beauty in life. All this noise is unnecessary, for every living soul of us, barring idiots, repents several times a day even though we don't admit it in so many words. And as for righteous wrath—it's a good thing and I believe in it, but like cayenne pepper it wants to be used sparingly and only at the right place and on the right person. Any one would think to hear some ministers talk that the Almighty was a combination of Theodore Roosevelt, the Kaiser and a New York Police Commissioner working the third degree.
"I wonder what the colleges can be thinking of, turning loose such stale foolishness and old canned stuff on a mellow, sunny little home town like Green Valley that's full of plain, blundering but well-meaning, God-fearing people who work joyfully at their business of living and turn up more religion when they plow a furrow or make over the wedding dress for the baby than these ministers can dig up out of all their musty books. I've prayed for all kinds of qualities in ministers but I've come to the point where I ask nothing more of a preacher than a laugh now and then, some horse sense and health.
"I used to think that only mature men ought to be sent out but now I shall be glad to see a boy in the pulpit to show us the way to salvation,—a boy it may be with a head full of foolish notions that old folks say are not practical and some of which won't of course stand wear; but a boy, with a glad young face, eyes full of faith and dreams and the sort of insane courage and daring that only the young know. Such a boy needs considerable education in certain earthly matters, of course, but he's lovable and teachable and will in time grow into a real, God-knowing, truth-interpreting man."
Oh, Grandma Wentworth was an authority on ministers—ministers and babies. And it was a baby that had kept her away from church this Lilac Sunday; a little, merry, red-headed boy baby that had come in the early morning to make glad the heart of unbusinesslike Billy Evans and his neat businesslike wife. For several hours Doc Philipps and Grandma had despaired of both baby and mother, but when the pink dawn came smiling over the world's rim Billy's little son was born alive and unblemished and Billy's wife crept back from the Valley of the Shadow and smiled a bit into Billy's white, stricken face. And Billy looked deep down into the brown eyes of the girl and the terrible numbness went out of his muscles and the icy hardness from around his heart and he slipped out into the morning world to thank the Great Spirit that moved it for His mercy and wonderful gift. He just stood on his front doorstep and, looking about his pretty home and remembering the miracle within the house, poured a great prayer into the heart of the glad morning.
Billy's house was one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him buy it. Then, under her supervision Billy enlarged and remodeled it and Billy's wife waved some sort of a fairy wand over it, for it became over night a lovely, story-book home. When everything was ready she had the unsightly willows cut, revealing a gently rising stretch of mossy sward ending in a cluster of old trees from which the cozy house peeped roguishly, tantalizingly. Two old walnuts guarded the little footpath to the door and two huge lilac bushes screened the porch from the too curious gaze of travelers on the road below. Indeed, so altogether taking and fascinating a bit of property did it become after its transformation that it was said that two of Green Valley's real estate men never went down that road without doing sums in their heads and calling themselves names for overlooking such a bargain. It takes constructive imagination to be successful in real estate.