The palpitation of his heart was almost choking him, and it would have taken little to make him turn about and fly. How long he stood there--whether five minutes or ten--he never rightly knew. A hundred thoughts, more wild than the whirling snow, were tossing within his brain. But thinking at length that Almighty God who had brought him through the perils of that fearful day--defeating the designs of the devil and of the elements, and driving him before His mighty will as before a greater hurricane--could not have led him there at last to any end save a good one, he urged his horse to the foot of the steps and raised his whip to the window.
X
Magnus Stephenson had indeed lost his religion. For fifteen years he had believed with all the strength of his soul that everybody in this life was treated according to his deserts; that if you did right you were rewarded sooner or later, and if you did wrong you were punished. But experience of the world had little by little, and year by year, inflicted upon his profound faith in the rule of conscience the most inexplicable contradictions. The man who lived a good life was not being rewarded, and the man who lived an evil one was not being punished. What, then, was there left to believe? That there was no God in the universe at all, or that if there were a God He did nothing!
Magnus Stephenson had tried to do what was right. He had taken up the burdens which others laid down and he had struggled on with a strong heart. For fifteen years he had labored like a slave, and though his arrears of debt constantly accumulated, he had never allowed himself to believe that the end was coming on. The mortgage was monstrous, the interest was exorbitant, and the Bank would come to see that more than he got out of the land and stock it was impossible for man to make!
But the deed of execution had been served on him at length, the advertisements of the sale had been published, and the two preliminary auctions had been held. Then, as if in a moment, the man's religion had disappeared and his soul had sent up that sublime if blasphemous cry, which since the beginning of the world has borne to heaven the lamentation and protest of humanity against the misery of man: "I have obeyed Your laws; I have lived a good life; I have assisted the poor and helped the oppressed; I have shared my bread with the orphan and protected the widow--what have You done for me?"
In the grim silence which follows that ghastly question, it is more than a man's religion that disappears, and Magnus Stephenson's belief in right and wrong, his faith in justice, in conscience, and in virtue had gone down together, leaving nothing but the fierce convulsions of his animal nature.
From the moment the Sheriff arrived to make the inventory he had done little but sit in the hall and drink. He sat there all day long, with his coarse snow-stockings over his boots, his sullen face to the stove, his hands deep in his trouser pockets, his broad forehead heavily wrinkled under the rough stubble of his iron-grey hair, his massive jaw resting on his breast, and his mighty loins making the chair creak as he moved and turned.
At intervals during the day his mother tried to comfort him.
"Don't be too downhearted, Magnus," said Anna. "The stars shine when it is dark, you know."
"Isn't it dark enough yet?" said Magnus, and he laughed bitterly and drank again.