"My friends, we are threatened with one of the visitations which God sometimes decrees, but which, it is my earnest belief, cannot harm those who believe in Him rightly and appeal to Him most trustingly. Let us pray that the cyclone will avoid this church."
They knelt together, preacher and congregation, and strong and trustful and appealing was the pastor's prayer. His clear voice did not falter in the eloquent appeal, and those who knelt felt confidence and a glorified pride in the attitude taken in an awful hour. Men came rushing to the doorway crying aloud upon all within to make the attempt at escape to a safer place, but there was no response, no sound save that of the preacher's uplifted voice. There was a roar and rumble in the far southwest and a half darkness was approaching. As the sound outside increased, the voice of the preacher became less audible, but the spellbound and trusting congregation did not move. Among the women was still Jane Conant.
The rumble became a roar, the roar an ear-splitting, paralyzing blast, and then—chaos! In blackness, with its steeple, its roof, its whole upper part torn away and leaving but an uncovered brick rectangle, ten or fifteen feet in height, remained what was of the church in Maxonville. With the blackness came a torrent; the interior of the rectangle became a flooded space, within which area men and women waded, and floundered and shouted, and shrieked, and felt for each other, and feared, almost, that the world was ended. Then gradually, the flood ceased, and daylight came again, and the drenched creatures within what was left of the church—by what seemed a miracle there had been none injured—emerged upon the greenery about. Among them was the preacher. He spoke to no one. He had worn a straw hat when he came to the church, and had found it somehow. It had been wetted and crushed, and now hung down on each side of his head grotesquely. He was a sodden, queer creature who looked neither to the right nor to the left. But there was thought in him still. He lifted his face to Heaven, and thanked God that all had been preserved, but said no other word. He walked drippingly along the sidewalk and then turned down a lane which led into the country.
Barely one-fourth of a mile—estimated conventionally as the crow flies—from the town of Maxonville was the farm of John Dent. It was not a large farm; it was, in fact, but a quarter of a quarter-section, which means forty acres; but acres have nothing to do with ideas. John Dent, though he had only a little farm, worked hard and lived reasonably well, and had a standing, and knew the preacher well, and debated one important question with him frequently. It was this same question of special providence, and the attitude of John Dent was, though in a man's way, identical with that of Jane Conant, the preacher's lost sweetheart. The preacher wondered at this sometimes. He wondered how it was that this gifted girl and this obstinate, deep-thinking farmer should so chance to decide alike. Of course all this was before the cyclone.
Down at the bottom of his heart John Dent was a little sentimental. His father and mother had come to the small farm before him. They were dead now, as well as certain sisters and brothers, and they were buried in a little private graveyard on the farm, around which the beeches grew thickly and from which the ground sloped gently into a laughing creek. There was not much surplus left at the end of each year of the product of John Dent's farming, and the surplus had more channels for immediate and demanding distribution than it could supply, still John Dent thought that some day he would put up a neat little brick monument in that graveyard—a somewhat unusual form of monument—but that was Dent's idea. He was going to have a pyramidical thing about fifty feet high. The spire of the church at Maxonville was of brick, hollow of course, welded solidly in its weather-hardened cement, as if it were a monolith of stone.
The cyclone had passed. A preacher had gone down a lane thinking the thoughts which come to a clean Christian man in a surprising and dispiriting emergency. A fair young woman had gone home crying over what was where her heart was, and Mr. John Dent had seen a cyclone come and miss his place by about forty rods, and had also seen an out-flinging and eccentric wing of that same cyclone deposit, just in the proper place in the burying-ground of his family, a perfect pyramid monument, such as he had been dreaming of for the last quarter of a century. It was all queer and out of the common, and was hard to explain; it is not attempted here, for this is only the story of what happened within an hour or two on a certain afternoon in Iowa.
This is going back to the preacher. He walked fast and he walked far, and found himself deep in the country. He was at least honest in all he thought; he was a good man, yet he was troubled to the depths of his being. "I have prayed to God," he said to himself, "and He has refused me. The cyclone didn't turn away from the church! Is the woman I love right, and am I wrong? Is there a broader and greater scheme of being wherein I should be a trusting and unquestioning instrument rather than one who demands as a special suppliant? I will see Jane," he said in his great strait. "I feel that she may aid me."
He met the woman that night; he went to her house and found her there, and found, too, that as she was, being a dear woman, she had just then but vague views either on special providences or anything else in particular, all being absorbed in anxiety as to his own health and welfare. She was but a loving, frightened creature, harried over what might have happened to the man who through all the months of silence and separation had been all there was in the world to her. He had come half intending to admit himself all in error, but soon all had been lost in the mere performance of a man and a woman blending. And the evening passed. Then when the next day came, the two, now understanding, walked out into the country.
It was in that wonderful hour of the summer sunset, when all the world is filled with light and the heavens are tinted with opalescent colors from an unseen source, and some vagrant vesper sparrow is still singing, that John Elwell and Jane Conant stood in John Dent's little family graveyard, looking soberly at the transplanted church steeple. It stood there, its base ranged plumb east and west, north and south, as if calculated with all the niceties of the Ancient Order; at its foot the quiet grass-grown graves, while all around stretched clover meadows and the cornfields.
"I feel like borrowing a phrase from the Mohammedans," said the minister, "or just the beginning of one, then saying no more: 'God is great!'"