Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

But now he had retreated there, not to be alone, but because he felt a sudden longing for companionship; and for a certain and particular companionship. That touch of Tayna's soft cheek upon his own had brought with stinging poignancy the recollection of what the presence of Bessie would be now,—Bessie as she once had been, dear, loyal, sympathetic, wise; as she had begun to be again before that last trip east; as she would have been when she returned and found him still strong and faithful.

Yet now she would never come. She was in Chicago to-day—no, upon the Atlantic. Last week was her final week. She had been getting her degree there while his unfrocking was beginning here. She was attaining her high hope as he was losing his. He had meant to telegraph her his congratulations, but he had forgotten it. That was just as well now. All this hissing of the poisoned tongues must have poured into her ears. The old doubts would be revived. She would feel herself shamed, humiliated, all but compromised by these disclosures, and she would never see—never communicate with him again. No letter had come in that last week, no telegram from the ship's side. That proved it clearly. She was lost to him.

Yet now his church—his liberty—his reputation—nothing else that he had lost or might lose seemed worth while. He wanted only her, cared only about her. His duty had melted into mist. He could not see its outlines. But there was a face in the mist, her face; and a form, her form. And he would never see her in any other way but this way—a vision to haunt and mock and torture him.

Thinking these thoughts over and over again, the man walked steadily from gable's end to gable's end and back again, until his legs lost all sense of feeling; but still he walked, and occasionally his fists were clenched and beat upon his chest, while an expression of agony looked out of his eyes.

The Reverend John Hampstead, pastor of All People's, a man of some victories and of some defeats, a man of some strength and of some weaknesses, was fighting his most important and his hardest battle, and he knew it. And he was no longer fit. The preliminary days of battling in the lower spurs and ranges had exhausted him. The summit was still above. The higher he toiled, the weaker he grew; the greater need for strength, the less he had to offer. He felt his purpose sag, his courage breaking. He had faced too much, and faced it too long and too solitarily. Others had sympathetically tried to get into his heart, and he had shut them out. It was a place which only one could enter, and she was not there. Now he knew that she would never be there.

That was the final mockery of his fate. At the time when he loved her most, when he needed her most, when before God, he deserved her most, she was most irretrievably lost. The pang of this, the awful inevitableness of it, broke him like a reed. From time to time he had sighed heavily, but now a dry sob shivered in his broad breast. His shoulders shook, and then his legs crumpled under him; he was on his knees and sinking lower and lower, like a man beaten down, blow upon blow, until at length he lies prostrate before his foes.

"Not that, O God," he sobbed; "not that! I cannot—I cannot lose her. Leave me, oh, leave me this one thing! I ask nothing more! Nothing more."

There was silence for an interval and then the pleadings began more earnestly, more piteously. "O God, give me her! Give me love! Give me completeness! Give me that without which no man is strong, the undoubting love of an unwavering woman! Give me that and I can face anything—endure anything!"

For a moment his hands, virile and outstretched, grasped convulsively the far edges of the Indian rug on which he had fallen, and thrust themselves through the stoutly woven fabric as if it had been wet paper. Scalding drops had begun to flow from his eyes like rivers. He seized the fabric of the rug in his teeth and bit it. He forced the thick folds against his eyes as if to dam the flooding tears.

"It is too much! It is too much!" he moaned. "O God," he reproached, "you have left me; you have left me alone and far. I have stood, but I am tottering." He dropped into a sort of vernacular in his blind pleadings. "I can go, I can go the route, but I cannot go it alone. Give me her, O God, give me her!"