"Can I help you, Reuben?"
"No, thank you, Adèle. I understand you; I'm in a boggle,—that's all."
The father, too, at a hint from Adèle, (whose perceptions are so much quicker,) sees at last how the matter stands.
"Reuben," he says, "these struggles of yours are struggles with the Great Adversary of Souls. I trust, my son, you will not allow him to have the mastery."
It was kindly said and earnestly said, but touched the core of the son's moral disquietude no more than if it were the hooting of an owl. Yet, for all this, Reuben makes a brave struggle to wear with an outward calm the burden of the professions he has made,—a terrible burden, when he finds what awful chasms in his faith have been overleaped by his vaulting Quixotic fervor. Wearily he labors to bridge them across, with over-much reading, there in the quiet study of the parsonage, of Newton and Tillotson and Butler; and he takes a grim pleasure (that does not help him) in following the amiable argumentation of Paley. It pains him grievously to think what humiliation would possess the old Doctor, if he but knew into what crazy currents his boy's thoughts were drifting over the pages of his beloved teachers. But a man cannot live a deceit, even for charity's sake, without its making outburst some day, and wrecking all the fine preventive barriers which kept it in.
The outburst came at last in the quiet of the Ashfield study, Reuben had been poring for hours—how wearily! how vainly!—over the turgid dogmas of one of the elder divines, when he suddenly dashed the book upon the floor.
"Confound the theologies! I'll have no more of them!"
The Doctor dropped his pen, and stared as if a serpent had stung him.
"My son! Reuben! Reuben!"
It was not so much the expression that had shocked him, as it was the action and the defiance in his eye.