Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

He was almost mad with thinking on his course, with trying to reason out some Northwest Passage for his conscience. Every eventuality had been considered, every resulting good or injury taken into account. When he did sleep, dreams had come to him—horrible, portending dreams that lingered into wakefulness and filled the hours with vague, tissue-weakening dread. He knew the meaning of this. His brain was so wearied with thinking of the perplexities which bristled round him that the very processes of thought had begun to operate less surely. Conclusions that should have stood out sharp and clear became blurred. Doubts and indecisions clamored round him. Things settled and settled right came trooping back to demand realignment. This alarmed him more than anything else,—the fear that the course he had chosen and which he knew to be right, might seem, in some moment when his mind passed into a fog, the wrong course; and he would falter not for lack of will but because of the maiming of his judgment.

He longed for counsel, to talk intimately with some one, but was afraid, afraid he might get the wrong advice and follow it. The loyalty of Rose, the judgment of the Angel of the Chair, he trusted; but himself he began to mistrust. Mistrusting himself, he dared not talk at all, lest he either exhibit signs of weakness that would frighten Rose, or lest, in that weakness, he confess too much to Mrs. Burbeck.

One fear like this and one alarm acted to produce another until something like panic grew up in his soul. A small onyx clock was on the mantel. The hands pointed to one—and then to two—and to three. At eight he must go to the church and see himself accused by those whom he loved, and for whom he had labored.

But at half-past three he saw clearly that his intended course was wrong, that he should defend himself and speak the truth: that his silence was working greater ill than good.

The clock tinkled four with this decision still clear in his mind. But the tinkling sound appeared to ring another bell deep inside him—a bell that boomed from far, far away and made him think of some one's definition of religion, "as a power within us not ourselves that makes for godliness." That power had spoken out. It revived the decision of half-past three. His former course was right. He must not swerve. With a gesture of pain and terror he flung up his hands to his brow. The calamity had fallen. His mind was passing under a fog. Defiantly he tried auto-suggestion to school his will against a possible reversal in the hour of trial, saying to himself over and over again: "I will stand! I will stand! I will stand!" He quoted frequently the words of Paul: "And having done all, to stand!"

At length he fell back limply in his chair. A vast irksomeness had taken possession of him. He was tired—tired of thinking of It—tired of waiting for It to come. Why didn't the clock hurry? The coming of Tayna to the study alone brought a welcome to his eye. Tayna! So full of buoyant, blooming youth; so quickly moved to tears of sympathy; so lightly kindled to smiling, happy laughter! Tayna, her melting eyes, her red cheeks, her one intermittent dimple, who flung her long arms about her uncle and held him close and silently as if he had been a lover!

But it was only a moment until Tayna too irked the tortured man. The touch of her cheek upon his cheek and the aggressive mingling of her thick braids with his own disheveled locks, once brushed so neat and high, now so apt to loop disconsolate upon his temples, reminded him of something quite unbearable but quite unbanishable,—a vision, and a vision which must be entertained alone.

"Stay here and keep shop," her uncle said with sudden brusqueness, forcing her down into his own chair at the desk. "I can see no one; talk to no one; hear from no one. I am going up-stairs!"

"Up-stairs" meant the long, half-attic room in which Hampstead slept. It ran the length of the cottage. There were windows in the gables, and dormers were chopped in upon the side toward the Bay. At one end, pushed back toward the eaves, was a bed, fenced from the eye by a folding screen. Far at the other end was a table, a student-lamp and a few books. Between lay a long, rug-strewn space which Hampstead called his "tramping ground."

Here, when he wished to retire most completely from the public reach, he made his lair. Upon that rug-strewn space he had tramped out many of the problems of his ministry. In the past week he had walked miles between one gable window and the other, and stopped as many times to gaze out through the dormer windows over the crested tops of palms to the dancing waters on the Bay.