John Ward, Preacher

The suspense was very hard for Lois Howe to bear.

When Mrs. Dale drove her from the sick-room for air and exercise, she wandered restlessly about the rectory, or went to Mr. Denner's door to beg a word of encouragement from Mary, or take a momentary comfort from the messages he sent her that he was better, and he begged she would not allow herself the slightest discomfort; it was really of no consequence,—no consequence at all.

Gifford was almost always with the little gentleman, and scarcely left him, even to walk through the garden to the grassy street with Lois. On Sunday, however, late in the afternoon, he went home with her; for Mr. Dale, with whom she had come, was going to sit awhile with Mr. Denner, and Gifford felt he could be spared.

The hour was full of that peculiar Sunday afternoon quiet which seems to subdue even the crickets and the birds. There was a breath of fragrance from some fresh-cut grass, still wet from a noon thunder shower, which had left the air crystal-clear and fresh. Their shadows stretched far ahead along the road, where the dust was still damp, though the setting sun poured a flood of yellow light behind them. Lois walked as though very tired; she scarcely noticed her companion, and did not speak except to answer his questions.

"Isn't there any change in Mrs. Forsythe?" he asked, with anxious sympathy.

Lois shook her head. "No," she said.

"Hasn't the rector gotten word to her son yet?"

"No," Lois said again. "We telegraphed twice, but he seems to be out of town, and nobody knows his address."

Gifford made no comment.

"I wish he would come!" the girl cried passionately. "It would be a relief to have him reproach me."

"I hope there will be no need of reproaches. I do hope his mother will get well."

"Oh, no, no," Lois said, "she won't! I know it."

"Try to be more hopeful," he urged. "The doctor said there was absolutely no injury except the shock. I believe she will get well, Lois."

"Oh, you don't know her," Lois answered. "You don't know how frail she is. And then there's Mr. Denner! It is the responsibility of it that kills me, Giff! I cannot get away from it for one single minute."

They had walked along the road where the accident had taken place, and Lois shivered as she saw the trampled grass, though it had been her wish that they should come this way.

"Oh," she said, putting her hands over her eyes, "life can never look the same to me, even if they get well!"

"No," Gifford said, "I understand that. But it may have a new sweetness of gratitude, Lois."

When they came to the gap in the hedge which was the outlet for the rectory path, Gifford held aside the twigs for her to enter.

"Let us sit down on the stone bench a little while," he said. "This is where poor little Mr. Denner sat that afternoon. Oh," he added in a lower tone, "just think from what a grief he may have saved us! I feel as though I could never be able to show him my gratitude." Then he looked at the transplanted bunch of violets, which was fresh and flourishing, and was silent.

Lois sat down a little reluctantly. The memory of that June night, nearly a year ago, flashed into her mind; she felt the color creep up to her forehead. "Oh," she thought, "how contemptible I am to have any thought but grief,—how shallow I am, how cruel!"

And to punish herself for this, she rushed into speaking of her responsibility again.

Gifford noticed her nervousness. "She is afraid of me," he said to himself. "She wouldn't be, if she cared."

"You see, Gifford," she began, "I keep saying to myself every moment, 'I did it—it was my carelessness—all, all my fault.' Father tried to comfort me, and so did Mrs. Forsythe as soon as she could speak, and Mr. Denner has sent word that I must not give him a thought (dear Mr. Denner!), but oh, I know!"

Gifford looked at her pale face, with the sweet trembling lip. "It is awfully hard for you," he said.

"Every one said I was not to blame," she went on unsteadily, "that it was not my fault; but, Gifford, if they die, I shall have been their murderer!"

She pressed her hands tight together to keep her self-control.

"No, Lois," he answered gently, "it is not right to feel that; your will would be to die now for either of them" ("Oh, yes, yes!" she said), "so don't blame yourself any more than you must."

"Than I must?" she repeated slowly, looking at him with questioning eyes. "How do you mean? They say there is no blame, Gifford."

He did not answer; his face was full of a grieved reluctance.

"Why," she said, with a quick breath, "do you blame me?"

Gifford put his strong, steady hand impulsively over hers. "I only know how you must blame yourself," he said pitifully. "I wish I could bear the pain of it for you."

"Then you say it is my fault?" she asked slowly.

"Yes, Lois," he answered, looking down at her with anxious tenderness. "I wish I didn't have to say it, but if it is true, if you were careless, it's best to meet it. I—I wish you would let me help you bear it."

Lois sat up very straight, as though bracing herself against a blow. "You are right. I knew it was all my fault; I said so. But there's no help. Let us go home now, please."

Gifford rose silently, and they went together between the sweet-smelling borders, up to the rectory. "I wish I could help you," he said wistfully, as she turned to say good-night at the foot of the steps.

"You cannot," she answered briefly. "No one can; and there's nothing I can do to make up for it. I cannot even die as an atonement. Oh, if I could only die!"

Gifford walked back, distressed and shocked; he was not old enough yet to know that the desire of death is part of youth, and it seemed as though he too had incurred a great responsibility. "What a brute I was to say it!" he said to himself. "I feel as though I had struck a woman. And it made her wish she was dead,—good heavens! How cruel I was! Yet if it was true, it must have been right to tell her; I suppose it was my brutal way!"

Lois went at once to Mrs. Forsythe's bedside, eager to hear of some improvement, but the invalid only shook her head wearily.

"No, no better," she said; "still breathing, that's all. But you must not grieve; it only distresses me."

Lois knelt down, and softly kissed her hand.

"My only trouble," Mrs. Forsythe continued, "is about my boy. Who will take care of him when I am gone?"

She said much more than this, and perhaps even Gifford's persistent justice could not have sustained the conviction that he had done right to tell Lois that the blame of the accident rested upon her, if he had known the thoughts of a possible atonement which passed through her mind when Mrs. Forsythe spoke thus of her son. It was not the first time since her injury that she had told Lois of her anxiety for Dick's future, and now the girl left her with a dazed and aching heart.

Mrs. Dale, full of importance and authority, met her in the hall.

"I've got some beef-tea for Arabella Forsythe," she said, balancing the tray she carried on one hand, and lifting the white napkin with the other to see that it was all right, "if I can only persuade her to take it. I never saw anybody who needed so much coaxing. But there! I must not be hard on her; she is pretty sick, I must say,—and how she does enjoy it! I said she would. But really, Lois, if we don't have some word from that young man soon, I don't know what we shall do, for she is certainly worse to-night. Your father has just had a letter from somebody, saying that he went away with some friends on a pleasure trip, and didn't leave his address. I thought he was so anxious to get to Ashurst,—well, that is Arabella's story. I shouldn't wonder if he didn't see his mother alive,—that's all I've got to say!"

She nodded her sleek head, and disappeared into the sick-room. Lois had a sudden contraction of the heart that made her lips white. "If aunt Deely says Mrs. Forsythe is worse, it is surely very bad."

She stumbled blindly up-stairs; she wanted to get away from everybody, and look this horrible fact in the face. She found her way to the garret, whose low, wide window, full of little panes of heavy greenish glass, looked over the tree-tops towards the western sky, still faintly yellow with sunset light, and barred by long films of gray cloud. She knelt down and laid her cheek against the sill, which was notched and whittled by childish hands; for this had been a play-room once, and many a rainy afternoon she and Helen and Gifford had spent here, masquerading in the queer dresses and bonnets packed away in the green chests ranged against the wall, or swinging madly in the little swing which hung from the bare rafters, until the bunches of southernwood and sweet-marjoram and the festoons of dried apples shook on their nails. She looked at the stars and hearts carved on the sill, and a big "Gifford" hacked into the wood, and she followed the letters absently with her finger.

"He blames me," she said to herself; "he sees the truth of it. How shall I make up for it? What can I do?"

She stayed by the window until the clouds turned black in the west; down in the heavy darkness of the garden the crickets began their monotonous z-z-ing, and in the locust-trees the katydids answered each other with a sharp, shrill cry. Then she crept down-stairs and sat outside of Mrs. Forsythe's room, that she might hear the slightest sound, or note the flicker of the night-lamp burning dimly on the stand at the bedside.

Gifford, sitting in another sick-room, was suffering with her, and blaming himself, in spite of principle.

Mr. Denner lay in his big bed in the middle of the library. The blinds were drawn up to the tops of the long, narrow windows, that the last gleam of light might enter, but the room was full of shadows, save where a taper flickered on a small table which held the medicines.

"I think," said Mr. Denner, folding his little hands upon his breast,—"I think, Gifford, that the doctor was not quite frank with me, to-day. I thought it proper to ask him if my injury was at all of a serious nature, if it might have—ah—I ought to apologize for speaking of unpleasant things—if it might have an untoward ending. He merely remarked that all injuries had possibilities of seriousness in them; he appeared in haste, and anxious to get away, so I did not detain him, thinking he might have an important case elsewhere. But it seemed as though he was not quite frank, Gifford; as though, in fact, he evaded. I did not press it, fearing to embarrass him, but I think he evaded."

Gifford also evaded. "He did not say anything which seemed evasive to me, Mr. Denner. He was busy charging me to remember your medicines, and he stopped to say a word about your bravery, too."

Mr. Denner shook his head deprecatingly at this, but he seemed pleased. "Oh, not at all, it was nothing,—it was of no consequence." One of the shutters blew softly to, and darkened the room; Gifford rose, and, leaning from the window, fastened it back against the ivy which had twisted about the hinge from the stained bricks of the wall. "I cannot claim any bravery," the sick man went on. "No. It was, as it were, accidental, Gifford."

"Accidental?" said the young man. "How could that be? I heard the horse, and ran down the road after the phaeton just in time to see you make that jump, and save her."

Mr. Denner sighed. "No," he replied, "no, it was quite by chance. I—I was mistaken. I am glad I did not know, however, for I might have hesitated. As it was, laboring under a misapprehension, I had no time to be afraid."

"I don't think I quite understand," said Gifford.

Mr. Denner was silent. The room was so dark now, he could scarcely see the young man's face as he stood leaning against one of the huge bed-posts. Behind him, Mr. Denner just distinguished his big secretary, with its pigeon-holes neatly labeled, and with papers filed in an orderly way. No one had closed it since the afternoon that he had been carried in and laid on the horse-hair sofa. He had given Mary the key then, and had asked her to fetch the bottle of brandy from one of the long divisions where it stood beside a big ledger. The little gentleman had hesitated to give trouble in asking to have it locked again, though that it should be open offended his ideas of privacy. Now he looked at it, and then let his eyes rest upon the nephew of the Misses Woodhouse.

"Gifford," he said, "would you be so obliging as to take the small brass key from my ring,"—here he thrust his lean hand under his pillow, and produced his bunch of keys, which jingled as he held them unsteadily out,—"and unlock the little lower drawer in the left-hand side of my writing-desk?"

Gifford took the ring over to the candle, which made the shadow of his head loom up on the opposite wall, as he bent to find the little brass key among a dozen others of all shapes and sizes.

"I have unlocked it, sir," he said, a moment later.

"Take the candle, if you please," responded Mr. Denner, "and you will see, I think, in the right-hand corner, back, under a small roll, a flat, square parcel."

"Yes, sir," Gifford answered, holding the candle in his left hand, and carefully lifting the parcel.

"Under that," proceeded Mr. Denner, "is an oval package. If you will be good enough to hand me that, Gifford. Stay,—will you lock the drawer first, if you please, and the desk?"

Gifford did so, and then put the package into Mr. Denner's hands. He held it a moment before he gently removed the soft, worn tissue paper in which it was wrapped; his very touch was a caress.

"I was desirous," he said, "of having this by me. It is a miniature of my little sister, sir. She—perhaps you scarcely remember her? She died when I was twenty. That is forty-one years ago. A long time, Gifford, a long time to have missed her. She is the only thing of—of that nature that I have loved—since I was twenty."

He stopped, and held the miniature up to look at it; but the light had faded, and the ivory only gleamed faintly.

"I look at this every day when I am in health, and I like it by me now. No, not the candle, I thank you, Gifford. I called for it now (how tarnished these pearls are in the frame! If—if I should not recover, it must be reset. Perhaps you will see to that for me, Gifford?),—I called for it now, because I wished to say, in the event of my—demise, I should wish this given to one of your aunts, sir."

Gifford came out from the shadow at the foot of the bed, and took Mr. Denner's hand. He did not speak; he had only the man's way of showing sympathy, and one weaker than Gifford could not have resisted the piteous longing for life in Mr. Denner's tone, and would have hastened to reassure him. But Gifford only held his hand in a firm, gentle grasp, and was silent.

"I should wish one of them to have it," he continued. "I have not provided for its welfare in my will; I had thought there was no one for whom I had enough—enough regard, to intrust them with it. I even thought to destroy it when I became old. Some people might wish to carry it with them to the grave, but I could not—oh, no, not my little sister! See, Gifford—take it to the light—not that little merry face. I should like to think it was with your aunts. And—and there is, as it were, a certain propriety in sending it to—her."

Gifford took the miniature from the lawyer's hand, and, kneeling by the candle, looked at it. The faded velvet case held only the rosy, happy face of a little child; not very pretty, perhaps, but with eyes which had smiled into Mr. Denner's for forty years, and Gifford held it in reverent hands.

"Yes," said the old man, "I would like one of them to have it."

"I shall remember it, sir," Gifford answered, putting the case down on the lawyer's pillow.

The room was quite still for a few moments, and then Mr. Denner said, "Gifford, it was quite accidental, quite by mistake, as it were, that I stopped the horse for Mrs. Forsythe and little Lois. I—I thought, sir, it was one of your aunts. One of your aunts, do you understand Gifford? You know what I said to you, at the stone bench, that afternoon? I—I alluded to myself, sir."

Gifford was silent, almost breathless; it all came back to him,—the warm, still afternoon, the sunshine, the faintly rustling leaves of the big silver poplar, and Mr. Denner's friend's love story. But only the pathos and the tenderness of it showed themselves to him now. He put his hand up to his eyes, a moment; somehow, he felt as though this was something too sacred for him to see.

"I know, sir," he said; "I—I see."

"I trust," Mr. Denner continued, in a relieved voice, "there is no impropriety in mentioning this to you, though you are still a youth. You have seemed older these last few days, more—ah—sedate, if I may so express it. They—they frequently speak as though you were quite a youth, whereas it appears to me you should be considered the head of the family,—yes, the head of the family. And therefore it seemed to me fitting that I should mention this to you, because I wished to request you to dispose of the miniature. It would have been scarcely proper to do otherwise, scarcely honorable, sir."

"I am grateful to you for doing so," Gifford replied gently. "I beg you will believe how entirely I appreciate the honor of your confidence."

"Oh, not at all," said Mr. Denner, waving his hand, "not at all,—pray do not mention it. And you will give it to one of them," he added, peering through the dusk at the young man, "if—if it should be necessary?"

"Yes, sir," he answered, "I will; but you did not mention which one, Mr. Denner."

Mr. Denner was silent; he turned his head wearily toward the faint glimmer which showed where the window was, and Gifford heard him sigh. "I did not mention which,—no. I had not quite decided. Perhaps you can tell me which you think would like it best?"

"I am sure your choice would seem of most value to them."

Mr. Denner did not speak; he was thinking how he had hoped that leap at the runaway horse would have decided it all. And then his mind traveled back to the stone bench, and his talk with Gifford, and the proverb. "Gifford," he said firmly, "give it, if you please, to Miss Deborah."

They did not speak of it further. Gifford was already reproaching himself for having let his patient talk too much, and Mr. Denner, his mind at last at rest, was ready to fall asleep, the miniature clasped in his feverish hand.

The next day, Gifford had no good news to carry to the rectory. The lawyer had had a bad night, and was certainly weaker, and sometimes he seemed a little confused when he spoke. Gifford shrank from telling Lois this, and yet he longed to see her, but she did not appear.

She was with Mrs. Forsythe, her aunt said; and when he asked for the invalid, Mrs. Dale shook her head. "I asked her how she felt this morning, and she said, 'Still breathing!' But she certainly is pretty sick, though she's one to make herself out at the point of death if she scratches her finger. Still—I don't know. I call her a sick woman."

Mrs. Dale could not easily resign the sense of importance which attends the care of a very sick person, even though Arabella Forsythe's appetite had unquestionably improved.

"We've telegraphed again for her son," she went on, "though I must say she does not seem to take his absence much to heart. They are the sort of people, I think, that love each other better at a distance. Now, if I were in her place, I'd be perfectly miserable without my children. I don't know what to think of his not writing to her. It appears that he's on a pleasure party of some kind, and he's not written her a line since he started; so of course she does not know where he is."

But to Lois Mrs. Forsythe's illness was something beside interest and occupation. The horror of her possible death hung over the young girl, and seemed to sap her youth and vigor. Her face was drawn and haggard, and her pleasant gray eyes had lost their smile. Somehow Mr. Denner's danger, which to some extent she realized, did not impress her so deeply; perhaps because that was, in a manner, the result of his own will, and perhaps, too, because no one quite knew how much the little gentleman suffered and how near death he was.

Lois had heard Gifford's voice as she went into the sick-room, and his words of blame rung again in her ears. They emphasized Mrs. Forsythe's despair about her son's future. She spoke to Lois as though she knew there was no possible chance of her recovery.

"You see, my dear," she said, in her soft, complaining voice, which sometimes dropped to a whisper, "he has no aunts or uncles to look after him when I am gone; no one to be good to him and help him to be good. Not that he is wild or foolish, Lois, like some young men, but he's full of spirit, and he needs a good home. Oh, what will he do without me. He has no one to take care of him!"

Lois was too crushed by misery to feel even a gleam of humor, when the thought flashed through her mind that she might offer to take his mother's place; but she knew enough not to express it.

"Oh," Mrs. Forsythe continued, "if he were only married to some sweet girl that I knew and loved how happy I should be, how content!"

"I—I wish he were," Lois said.

"My death will be so hard for him, and who will comfort him! I am sorry I distress you by speaking so, but, my dear child, on your death-bed you look facts in the face. I cannot help knowing his sorrow, and it makes me so wretched. My boy,—my poor boy! If I could only feel easy about him! If I thought, oh, if I could just think, you cared for him! I know I ought not to speak of it, but—it is all I want to make me happy. I might have had a little more of life, a few months, perhaps, if it had not been for the accident. There, there, you mustn't be distressed; but if I could know you cared for him, it would be worth dying for, Lois."

"I do care for him!" Lois sobbed. "We all do!"

Mrs. Forsythe shook her head. "You are the only one I want; if you told me you would love him, I should be happy, so happy! Perhaps you don't like to say it. But listen: I know all about last fall, and how you sent the poor fellow away broken-hearted; but I couldn't stop loving you, for all that, and I was so glad when he told me he was going to try again; and that is what he is coming down to Ashurst for. Yes, he is coming to ask you. You see, I know all his secrets; he tells me everything,—such a good boy, he is. But I've told you, because I cannot die, oh, I cannot die, unless I know how it will be for him. If you could say yes, Lois, if you could!"

Her voice had faltered again, and the pallor of weariness which spread grayly over her face frightened Lois. She shivered, and wrung her hands sharply together.

"Oh," she said, "I would do anything in the world for you—but—but"—

"But this is all I want," interrupted the other eagerly. "Promise this, and I am content to die. When he asks you—oh, my dear, my dear, promise me to say yes!"

Lois had hidden her face in the pillow. "It was all my fault," she was saying to herself; "it is the only atonement I can make."

"I will do anything you want me to," she said at last.

Mrs. Forsythe, laid her shaking hand on the girl's bowed head. "Oh, look at me! You give me life when you say that. Will you promise to say yes, Lois?"

She lifted her head, but she would not look into Mrs. Forsythe's eyes.

"Yes," she answered, twisting her fingers nervously together. "I promise if—if he wants me."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" Mrs. Forsythe said, and then, to Lois's horror, she burst into tears. She tried to say it was joy, and Lois must not be frightened, but the young girl fled for Mrs. Dale, and then ran up to the garret, and locked the door.

She went over to the western window and threw herself upon the floor, her face hidden in her arms.

"He made me do it," she said between her sobs; "he said it was my fault. Well, I have made up for it now. I have atoned. I have promised."

She was too miserable even to take the satisfaction which belongs to youth, of observing its own wretchedness. She sobbed and cried without consciousness of tears. At last, for very weariness and exhaustion, she fell asleep, and was wakened by hearing Mrs. Dale rap sharply at the door.

"Come, Lois, come!" she cried. "What's the matter? Dick Forsythe is here. Do have politeness enough to come down-stairs. I don't know but that his mother is a shade better, but she has had a chance to die twice over, the time he's been getting here!"

The news of the anxiety in Ashurst hurried Helen's visit. She might be of use, she thought, and she had better go now than a week later.

Perhaps, too, she felt the necessity of calm. She had been forced into a tumult of discussion and argument, which at last she had begun to meet with the silence of exhaustion. Elder Dean had come to see her, and she had received him at first with patience, and given him her reasons for not believing in hell. There had even been a moment when Helen fancied that she might convince him of what was so clear and simple to her own mind. But to each argument of hers he had but one reply,—"The Bible, ma'am, the Word of God, instructs us" thus or thus,—and he returned again and again with unwearied obstinacy to his own position. After a while Helen's annoyance at the man got the better of her judgment, and she wrote to him, saying she did not wish to argue with him again, and must beg him not to come to the parsonage to see her.

Mr. Grier, too, horrified at his wife's reports of what Mrs. Ward had said, hastened to Lockhaven to reproach and admonish John for permitting such heresy in his household; for Mr. Grier held with St. Paul that the husband was head of the wife, even to the extent of regulating her conscience. John was not at home, so he turned his attack upon the real offender, assuring her that it was for her soul's sake that he thus dealt with her. Helen had brought the interview to a sudden close by refusing to hear further argument, and bowing Mr. Grier from the room, with a certain steady look from under her level brows and a compression of the lips which, greatly to his surprise when he thought it over, silenced him.

The talks with John could not, of course, be called painful, for they were with him, but they were futile.

When the last evening came before she was to leave home, Helen knew, with a dull pain of helpless remorse, that it was a relief to go; she was glad that she could not hear Elder Dean's voice for a fortnight, or even know, she said with a pathetic little laugh to her husband, that she "was destroying anybody's hope of hell, in the parish."

"Yes," John answered, "it will be good for you to be away from it all for a time. It is hard to think clearly, hurried by my impatient anxiety to have you reach a certain conclusion. I realize that. But I know you will try to reach it, dearest."

Helen shook her head wearily. "No, I am afraid I cannot promise that. You must not hope that I shall ever come to believe in eternal damnation. Of course I believe that the consequences of sin are eternal; the effect upon character must be eternal, and I should think that would be hell enough, sometimes. But I shall never, never believe in it as you do."

"Oh, Helen," her husband said, "I cannot cease to hope while I have power to pray."

Helen sighed. "I wish you could understand how useless it is, dearest, or how it hurts me, this talk of hell. For people to be good for fear of hell is like saying 'Honesty is the best policy;' it is degrading. And it seems selfish to me, somehow, to think so much about one's own salvation,—it is small, John. The scheme of salvation that the elders talk so much about really resolves itself into a fear of hell and hope of heaven, all for the individual soul, and isn't that selfish? But after all, this question of eternal punishment is such a little thing, so on the outside of the great puzzle. One goes in, and in: Why is sin, which is its own punishment, in the world at all? What does it all mean, anyhow? Where is God, and why does He let us suffer here, with no certainty of a life hereafter? Why does He make love and death in the same world? Oh, that is so cruel,—love and death together! Is He, at all? Those are the things, it seems to me, one has to think about. But why do I go all over it? We can't get away from it, can we?"

"Those questions are the outgrowth of unbelief in justice," he said eagerly; "if you only realized justice and mercy, the rest would be clear."

She came over to him, and, kneeling down, put her head on his knee. "Oh, John, how can I leave you to-morrow?"

It was true that they could not drop the subject. Hour after hour they had sat thus, John instructing, proving, reasoning, with always the tenderest love and patience in his voice. Helen listening with a sweet graciousness, which kept her firm negations from making her husband hopeless. He had showed her, that Sunday evening after the sermon on foreign missions, what he felt had been his awful sin: he had deprived his people of the bread of life for her sake, and, for fear of jarring the perfect peace of their lives and giving her a moment's unhappiness, he had shrunk from his duty to her soul.

At first Helen had been incredulous. She could not realize that her mere unbelief in any doctrine, especially such a doctrine as this of eternal punishment, could be a matter of serious importance to her husband. It needed an effort to treat his argument with respect. "What does it matter?" she kept saying. "We love each other, so never mind what we believe. Believe anything you want, darling. I don't care! Only love me, John. And if my ideas offend your people, let us leave Lockhaven; or I can keep silence, unless I should have to speak for what seems to me truth's sake."

And then John tried to show her how he had wronged his people and been false to his own vows and that he dared not leave them until he had rooted out the evil his own neglect had allowed to grow up among them, and that her mere silence would not reach the root of the evil in her own soul. And the importance of it!

"Oh," he cried, once, when they had been talking until late into the night, "is not your soul's life of importance, Helen? When I see you going down to eternal death because I have failed in my duty to you, can I satisfy myself by saying, We love one another? Because I love you, I cannot be silent. Oh, I have wronged you, I have not loved you enough! I have been content with the present happiness of my love,—my happiness! I had no thought of yours."

So they had gone over and over the subject, until to Helen it seemed threadbare, and they sat now in the dusky library, with long stretches of silence between their words.

Alfaretta brought in the lamps. In view of Mrs. Ward's departure for a fortnight, her father, still with an eye to wages, deferred giving notice. "Besides," he thought, "Mrs. Ward may be convicted and converted after she's been dealt with."

Helen had risen, and was writing some instructions for her maid: just what was to be cooked for the preacher, and what precautions taken for his comfort. As she put her pen down, she turned to look at her husband. He was sitting, leaning forward, with his head bowed upon his hand, and his eyes covered.

"Helen," he said, in a low, repressed voice, "once more, just once more, let me entreat you; and then we will not speak of this before you go."

She sighed. "Yes, dearest, say anything you want."

There was a moment's silence, and then John rose, and stood looking down at her. "I have such a horror of your going away. I do not understand it; it is more than the grief and loneliness of being without you for a few days. It is vague and indefinable, but it is terribly real. Perhaps it is the feeling that atonement for my sin towards you is being placed out of my reach. You will be where I cannot help you, or show you the truth. Yet you will try to find it! I know you will. But now, just this last night, I must once more implore you to open your heart to God's Spirit. Ah, my Helen, I have sinned against Heaven and before you, but my punishment will be greater than I can bear if I enter heaven without you! Heaven? My God, it would be hell! The knowledge that my sin had kept you out—yet even as I speak I sin."

He was walking up and down the room, his hands knotted in front of him, and his face filled with hopeless despair.

"Yes, I sin even in this, for my grief is not that I have sinned against God in my duty to his people and in forgetting Him, but that I may lose you heaven, I may make you suffer!"

Helen came to him, and tried to put her arms about him. "Oh, my dear," she said, "don't you understand? I have heaven now, in your love. And for the rest,—oh, John, be content to leave it in Hands not limited by our poor ideas of justice. If there is a God, and He is good, He will not send me away from you in eternity; if He is wicked and cruel, as this theology makes Him, we do not want his heaven! We will go out into outer darkness together."

John shuddered. "Lay not this sin to her charge," she heard him say; "she knows not what she says. Yet I—Oh, Helen, that same thought has come to me. You seemed to make my heaven,—you; and I was tempted to choose you and darkness, rather than my God. Sin, sin, sin,—I cannot get away from it. Yet if I could only save you! But there again I distrust my motive: not for God's glory, but for my own love's sake, I would save you. My God, my God, be merciful to me a sinner!"

In his excitement, he had pushed her arm from his shoulder, and stood in tense and trembling silence, looking up, as though listening for an answer to his prayer.

Helen dared not speak. There is a great gulf fixed between the nearest and dearest souls when in any spiritual anguish; even love cannot pass it, and no human tenderness can fathom it. Helen could not enter into this holiest of holies, where her husband's soul was prostrate before its Maker. In the solitude of grief and remorse he was alone.

It was this isolation from him which broke her calm. It seemed profane even to look upon his suffering. She shrank away from him, and hid her face in her hands. That roused him, and in a moment the old tenderness enveloped her.

He comforted her with silent love, until she ceased to tremble, and looked again into his tender eyes.

"What I wanted to say," he said, after a while, when she was leaning quietly against his breast, "was just to tell you once more the reasons for believing in this doctrine which so distresses you, dearest. To say, in a word, if I could, why I lay such stress upon it, instead of some of the other doctrines of the church. It is because I do believe that salvation, eternal life, Helen, depends upon holding the doctrine of reprobation in its truth and entirety. For see, beloved: deny the eternity of punishment, and the scheme of salvation is futile. Christ need not have died, a man need not repent, and the whole motive of the gospel is false; revelation is denied, and we are without God and without hope. Grant the eternity of punishment, and the beauty and order of the moral universe burst upon us: man is a sinner, and deserves death, and justice is satisfied; for, though mercy is offered, it is because Christ has died. And his atonement is not cheapened by being forced upon men who do not want it. They must accept it, or be punished."

Helen looked up into his face with a sad wonder. "Don't you see, dear," she said, "we cannot reason about it? You take all this from the Bible, because you believe it is inspired. I do not believe it is. So how can we argue? If I granted your premises, all that you say would be perfectly logical. But I do not, John. I cannot. I am so grieved for you, dearest, because I know how this distresses you; but I must say it. Silence can never take the place of truth, between us."

"Oh, it did, too long, too long!" John groaned. "Is there no hope?" and then he began his restless walk again, Helen watching him with yearning eyes.

"I cannot give it up," he said at last. "There must be some way by which the truth can be made clear to you. Perhaps the Lord will show it to me. There is no pain too great for me to bear, to find it out; no, even the anguish of remorse, if it brings you to God! Oh, you shall be saved! Do the promises of the Eternal fail?"

He came over to her, and took her hands in his. Their eyes met. This sacrament of souls was too solemn for words or kisses. When they spoke again it was of commonplace things.

It was hard for her to leave the little low-browed house, the next morning. John stopped to gather a bunch of prairie roses from the bush which they had trained beneath the study window, and Helen fastened them in her dress; then, just as they were ready to start, the preacher's wife ran back to the study, and hurriedly put one of the roses from her bosom into a vase on the writing-table, and stooped and gave a quick, furtive kiss to the chair in which John always sat when at work on a sermon.

They neither of them spoke as they walked to the station, and no one spoke to them. Helen knew there were shy looks from curtained windows and peeping from behind doors, for she was a moral curiosity in Lockhaven; but no one interrupted them. Just before she started, John took her hand, and held it in a nervous grasp. "Helen," he said hoarsely, "for the sake of my eternal happiness seek for truth, seek for truth!"

She only looked at him, with speechless love struggling through the pain in her eyes.

The long, slow journey to Ashurst passed like a troubled dream. It was an effort to adjust her mind to the different life to which she was going. Late in the afternoon, the train drew up to the depot in Mercer, and Helen tried to push aside her absorbing thought of John's suffering, that she might greet her uncle naturally and gladly. The rector stood on the platform, his stick in one hand and his glasses in the other, and his ruddy face beaming with pleasure. When he saw her, he opened his arms and hugged her; it would have seemed to Dr. Howe that he was wanting in affection had he reserved his demonstrations until they were alone.

"Bless my soul," he cried, "it is good to see you again, my darling child. We're all in such distress in Ashurst, you'll do us good. Your husband couldn't come with you? Sorry for that; we want to see him oftener. I suppose he was too busy with parish work,—that fire has kept his hands full. What? There is the carriage,—Graham, here's Miss Helen back again. Get in, my dear, get in. Now give your old uncle a kiss, and then we can talk as much as we want."

Helen kissed him with all her heart; a tremulous sort of happiness stole over the background of her troubled thoughts, as a gleam of light from a stormy sunset may flutter upon the darkness of the clouds.

"Tell me—everything! How is Lois? How are the sick people? How is Ashurst?"

Dr. Howe took up a great deal of room, sitting well forward upon the seat, with his hands clasped on his big stick, which was planted between his knees, and he had to turn his head to see Helen when he answered her.

"Mrs. Forsythe is better," he said; "she is certainly going to pull through, though for the first week all that we heard was that she was 'still breathing.' But Denner is in a bad way; Denner is a very sick man. Gifford has been with him almost all the time. I don't know what we should have done without the boy. Lois is all right,—dreadfully distressed, of course, about the accident; saying it is her fault, and all that sort of thing. But she wasn't to blame; some fool left a newspaper to blow along the road and frighten the horse. She needs you to cheer her up."

"Poor little Mr. Denner!" Helen exclaimed. "I'm glad Giff is with him. Has Mr. Forsythe come?"

"Yes," said the rector; "but they are queer people, those Forsythes. The young man seems quite annoyed at having been summoned: he remarked to your aunt that there was nothing the matter with his mother, and she must be moved to her own house; there was nothing so bad for her as to have a lot of old women fussing over her. I wish you could have seen Adele's face! I don't think she admires him as much as she did. But his mother was moved day before yesterday, and he has a trained nurse for her. Your aunt Adele feels her occupation gone, and thinks Mrs. Forsythe will die without her," the rector chuckled. "But she won't,—she'll get well." Here he gave a heavy sigh, and said, "Poor Denner!"

"You don't mean Mr. Denner won't get well?" Helen asked anxiously.

"I'm afraid not," Dr. Howe answered sadly.

They were silent for a little while, and then Helen said in a hushed voice, "Does he know it, uncle Archie?"

"No," said the rector explosively, "he—he doesn't!"

Dr. Howe was evidently disturbed; he pulled up one of the carriage windows with some violence, and a few minutes afterwards lowered it with equal force. "No, he doesn't," he repeated. "The doctor only told me this morning that there was no hope. Says it is a question of days. He's very quiet; does not seem to suffer; just lies there, and is polite to people. He was dreadfully troubled at breaking up the whist party last Saturday; sent apologies to the other three by Gifford." Dr. Howe tugged at his gray mustache, and looked absently out of the window. "No, I don't believe he has an idea that he—he won't get well." The rector had a strange shrinking from the word "death."

"I suppose he ought to know," Helen said thoughtfully.

"That is what the doctor said," answered the rector; "told me he might want to settle his affairs. But bless my soul, what affairs can Denner have? He made his will fifteen years ago, and left all he had to Sarah Denner's boy. I don't see what he has to do."

"But, uncle," Helen said, "mightn't he have some friends or relatives to whom he would want to send a message,—or perhaps see? People you never heard of?"

"Oh, no, no," responded Dr. Howe. "I've known William Denner, man and boy, these sixty years. He hasn't any friends I don't know about; he could not conceal anything, you know; he is as simple and straightforward as a child. No; Willie Denner'll have his money,—there's not too much of it,—and that's all there is to consider."

"But it is not only money," Helen went on slowly: "hasn't he a right to know of eternity? Not just go out into it blindly?"

"Perhaps so,—perhaps so," the rector admitted, hiding his evident emotion with a flourish of his big white silk handkerchief. "You see," he continued, steadying his cane between his knees, while he took off his glasses and began to polish them, "the doctor wants me to tell him, Helen."

"I suppose so," she said sympathetically.

"And I suppose I must," the rector went on, "but it is the hardest task he could set me. I—I don't know how to approach it."

"It must be very hard."

"Of course it seems natural to the doctor that I should be the one to tell him. I'm his pastor, and he's a member of my church—Stay! is he?" Dr. Howe thrust out his lower lip and wrinkled his forehead, as he thought. "Yes, oh yes, I remember. We were confirmed at the same time, when we were boys,—old Bishop White's last confirmation. But he hasn't been at communion since my day."

"Why do you think that is, uncle Archie?" Helen asked.

"Why, my dear child, how do I know?" cried the rector. "Had his own reasons, I suppose. I never asked him. And you see, Helen, that's what makes it so hard to go and tell Denner that—that he's got to die. Somehow, we never touched on the serious side of life. I think that's apt to be the case with friends in our position. We have gone fishing together since we were out of pinafores, and we have played whist,—at least I've watched him,—and talked politics or church business over our pipes; but never anything like this. We were simply the best of friends. Ah, well, Denner will leave a great vacancy in my life."

They rode in silence for some time, and then Helen said gently, "Yes, but uncle, dear, that is the only way you are going to help him now,—with the old friendship. It is too late for anything else,—any religious aid, I mean,—when a man comes to look death in the face. The getting ready for death has gone, and it is death itself, then. And I should think it would be only the friend's hand and the friend's eyes, just the human sympathy, which would make it easier. I suppose all one can do is to say, 'Let my friendship go with you through it all,—all this unknown to us both.'"

Dr. Howe turned and looked at her sharply; the twilight had fallen, and the carriage was very dark. "That's a heathenish thing to say, Helen, and it is not so. The consolations of religion belong to a man in death as much as in life; they ought not to belong more to death than to life, but they do, sometimes. It isn't that there is not much to say to Denner. It is the—the unusualness of it, if I can so express it. We have never touched on such things, I tell you, old friends as we are; and it is awkward, you understand."

They were very quiet for the rest of the long drive. They stopped a moment at Mr. Denner's gate; the house was dark, except for a dim light in the library and another in the kitchen, where Mary sat poring over her usual volume. Gifford came out to say there was no change, and opened the carriage door to shake hands with Helen.

"He would have prayers to-night," he said to the rector, still talking in a hushed voice, as though the spell of the sick-room were on him out under the stars, in the shadows of the poplar-trees. "He made Willie read them aloud to Mary, he told me; he said it was proper to observe such forms in a family, no matter what the conditions might be. Imagine Willie stumbling through Chronicles, and Mary fast asleep at her end of that big dark dining-room!"

Gifford smiled, but the rector was too much distressed to be amused; he shivered as they drove away.

"Ah," he said sharply, "how I hate that slam of a carriage door! Makes me think of but one thing. Yes, I must see him to-morrow. I must tell him to-morrow."

The rector settled back in his corner, his face darkening with a grieved and troubled frown, and they did not speak until they reached the rectory gate. As it swung heavily back against the group of white lilacs behind it, shaking out their soft, penetrating fragrance into the night air, some one sprang towards the carriage, and almost before it stopped stood on the steps, and rapped with impatient joy at the window.

It was Lois. She had thrown a filmy white scarf about her head, and had come out to walk up and down the driveway, and listen for the sound of wheels. She had not wanted to stay in the house, lest Mr. Forsythe might appear.

Lois had scarcely seen him since he arrived, though this was not because of his devotion to his mother. He spent most of his time lounging about the post-office, and swearing that Ashurst was the dullest, deadest place on the face of the earth. He had not listened to Lois's self-reproaches, and insisted that blame must not even be mentioned. He was quite in earnest, but strangely awkward. Lois, weighed down by the consciousness of her promise, felt it was her fault, yet dared not try to put him at his ease, and fled, at the sound of his step, to her refuge in the garret. She did not feel that her promise to Mrs. Forsythe meant that she must give opportunity as well as consent. But Dick did not force his presence upon her, and he was very uncomfortable and distrait when at the rectory.

She need not have feared his coming again that evening. He was in the library of his mother's house, covering many pages of heavy crested note-paper with his big, boyish writing. Strangely enough, however, for a young gentleman in love with Miss Lois Howe, he was addressing in terms of ardent admiration some one called "Lizzie."

But in the gladness of meeting Helen, Lois almost forgot him. Her arms around her cousin's neck, and Helen's lips pressed against her wet cheek, there was nothing left to wish for, except the recovery of the two sick people.

"Oh, Helen! Helen! Helen!" she cried hysterically, while Dr. Howe, flourishing his silk handkerchief, patted them both without discrimination, and said, "There, my dear, there, there."