XXI
The OLD PRECENTOR'S NEW SONG
As a stream emerges from its forest tunnel, eluding the embrace of tangled shadows, swiftly gliding from sombre swamps and hurrying towards the sunlit plain, its phantom weeds of widowhood exchanged for its bridal robe of light; so doth this tale of mine glide forth from the sable shadows which garrison the chapter it has left behind.
No man loves to linger by his scaffold, though it be cheated of its last adornment, and though no eye behold its grinning outline but its own. For there are shadowy scaffolds, and invisible executioners, sitting at our own boards and eating of our own bread, discernible only in a glass. Our own Sheriffs and Executioners are we all.
Swift in the wake of sorrow came the unromantic form of toil. Thank God! Work is sorrow's cure, its hands like the hands of an enemy, but its voice the voice of an Eternal friend. For duty is God's midwife, sent to deliver the soul that travails in its anguish.
It was but the day after Margaret had passed from out my door, girding it as she went with crape, invisible to other eyes, that I was called to Archie McCormack's house. The day was bright and clear, but I knew it not—for in this doth sorrow make us like to God, that then the darkness and the light are both alike.
For some months past, my old precentor had been failing fast. The doctor said it was his heart, but none of us believed it; for his heart had grown larger, stronger, happier with every passing year. Its outer life might perish if it would, but its inner life was renewed day by day. Indeed, his soul's second harvest seemed to take the form of cheerfulness, the scantiest crop of all in the stern seasons of his earlier life. Even merriment sought to bloom before the frost should come.
The very day before Margaret and I began our life's Lenten season, I had been to see him, little thinking that my next visit was to be the last. My own heart was full of that joy whose overflow Margaret had entrusted to its care—which is a great gift to a minister, this gift of gladness, seeking as he does to irrigate the thirsty plains of life about him.