CHAPTER VI

In the Folly of His Youth

At early twilight Bernal, sore at heart for the pain he had been obliged to cause the old man, went to the study-door for a last word with him.

"I believe there is no one above whose forgiveness I need, sir—but I shall always be grieved if I can't have yours. I do need that."

The old man had stood by the open door as if meaning to cut short the interview.

"You have it. I forgive you any hurt you have done me; it was due quite as much to my limitations as to yours. For that other forgiveness, which you will one day know is more than mine—I—I shall always pray for that."

He stopped, and the other waited awkwardly, his heart rushing out in ineffectual flood against the old man's barrier of stern restraint. For a moment he made folds in his soft hat with a fastidious precision. Finally he nerved himself to say calmly:

"I thank you, sir, for all you have done—all you have ever done for me and for Allan—and, good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"

Though there was no hint of unkindness in the old man's voice, something formal in his manner had restrained the other from offering his hand. Still loath to go without it, he said again more warmly:

"Good-bye, sir!"

"Good-bye!"

This time he turned and went slowly down the dim hall, still making the careful folds in his hat, as if he might presently recall something that would take him back. At the foot of the stairs he stopped quickly to listen, believing he had heard a call from above; but nothing came and he went out. Still in the door upstairs was the old man—stern of face, save that far back in his eyes a kind spirit seemed to strive ineffectually.

Across the lawn from her hammock Nancy called to Bernal. He went slowly toward her, still suffering from the old man's coldness—and for the hurts he had unwittingly put upon him.

The girl, as he went forward, stood to greet him, her gown, sleeveless, neckless, taking the bluish tinge that early twilight gives to snow, a tinge that deepened to dusk about her eyes and in her hair. She gave him her hand and at once he felt a balm poured into his tortured heart. After all, men were born to hurt and be hurt.

He sat in the rustic chair opposite the hammock, looking into Nancy's black-lashed eyes of the Irish gray, noting that from nineteen to twenty her neck had broadened at the base the least one might discern, that her face was less full yet richer in suggestion—her face of the odds and ends when she did not smile. At this moment she was not only unsmiling, but excited.

"Oh, Bernal, what is it? Tell me quick. Allan was so vague—though he said he'd always stand by you, no matter what you did. What have you done, Bernal? Is it a college scrape?"

"Oh, that's only Allan's big-hearted way of talking! He's so generous and loyal I think he's often been disappointed that I didn't do something, so he could stand by me. No—no scrapes, Nance, honour bright!"

"But you're leaving——"

"Well, in a way I have done something. I've found I couldn't be a minister as Grandad had set his heart on my being——"

"But if you haven't done anything wicked, why not?"

"Oh, I'm not a believer."

"In what?"

"In anything, I think—except, well, in you and Grandad and—and Allan and Clytie—yes, and in myself, Nance. That's a big point. I believe in myself."

"And you're going because you don't believe in other things?"

"Yes, or because I believe too much—just as you like to put it. I demanded a better God of Grandad, Nance—one that didn't create hell and men like me to fill it just for the sake of scaring a few timid mortals into heaven."

"You know Aunt Bell is an unbeliever. She says no one with an open mind can live twenty years in Boston without being vastly broadened—'broadening into the higher unbelief,' she calls it. She says she has passed through nearly every stage of unbelief there is, but that she feels the Lord is going to bring her back at last to rest in the shadow of the Cross."

As Aunt Bell could be heard creaking heavily in a willow rocker on the piazza near-by, the young man suppressed a comment that arose within him.

"Only, unbelievers are apt to be fatiguing" the girl continued, in a lower tone. "You know Aunt Bell's husband, Uncle Chester—the meekest, dearest little man in the world, he was—well, once he disappeared and wasn't heard of again for over four years—except that they knew his bank account was drawn on from time to time. Then, at last, his brother found him, living quietly under an assumed name in a little town outside of Boston—pretending that he hadn't a relative in the world. He told his brother he was just beginning to feel rested. Aunt Bell said he was demented. While he was away she'd been all through psychometry, the planchette, clairvoyance, palmistry, astrology, and Unitarianism. What are you, Bernal?"

"Nothing, Nance—that's the trouble."

"But where are you going, and what for?"

"I don't know either answer—but I can't stay here, because I'm blasphemous—it seems—and I don't want to stay, even if I weren't sent. I want to be out— away. I feel as if I must be looking for something I haven't found. I suspect it's a fourth dimension to religion. They have three—even breadth—but they haven't found faith yet—a faith that doesn't demand arbitrary signs, parlour-magic, and bloody, weird tales in a book that becomes their idol."

The girl looked at him long in silence, swaying a little in the hammock, a bare elbow in one hand, her meditative chin in the other, the curtains of her eyes half-drawn, as if to let him in a little at a time before her wonder. Then, at last:

"Why, you're another Adam—being sent out of the garden for your sin. Now tell me—honest—was the sin worth it? I've often wondered." She gave an eager little laugh.

"Why, Nance, it's worth so much that you want to go of your own accord. Do you suppose Adam could have stayed in that fat, lazy, silly garden after he became alive—with no work, no knowledge, no adventure, no chance to do wrong? As for earning his bread—the only plausible hell I've ever been able to picture is one where there was nothing to do—no work, no puzzling, no chances to take, no necessity of thinking. Now, isn't that an ideal hell? And is it my fault if it happens to be a description of what Christians look forward to as heaven? I tell you, Adam would have gone out of that garden from sheer boredom after a few days. The setting of the angel with the flaming sword to guard the gate shows that God still failed to understand the wonderful creature he had made."

She smiled, meditative, wondering.

"I dare say, for my part, I'd have eaten that apple if the serpent had been at all persuasive. Bernal, I wonder—and wonder—and wonder—I'm never done. And Aunt Bell says I'll never be a sweet and wholesome and stimulating companion to my husband, if I don't stop being so vague and fantastic."

"What does she call being vague and fantastic?"

"Not wanting any husband."

"Oh!"

"Bernal, it's like the time that you ran off when you were a wee thing—to be bad."

"And you cried because I wouldn't take you with me."

"I can feel the woe of it yet."

"You're dry-eyed now, Nance."

"Yes—and the pink parasol and the buff shoes I meant to take with me are also things of the past. Mercy! The idea of going off with an unbeliever to be bad and—everything! 'The happy couple are said to look forward to a life of joyous wickedness, several interesting crimes having been planned for the coming season. For their honeymoon infamy they will perpetrate a series of bank-robberies along the Maine coast.' There—how would that sound?"

"You're right, Nance—I wouldn't take you this time either, even if you cried. And your little speech is funny and all that—but Nance, I believe, these last years, we've both thought of things now and then— things, you know—things to think of and not talk of— and see here—The man was driven out of the garden—but not the woman. She isn't mentioned. She could stay there——"

"Until she got tired of it herself?"

"Until the man came back for her."

He thought her face was glowing duskily in the twilight.

"I wonder—wonder about so many things," she said softly.

"I believe you're a sleeping rebel yourself, Nance. If ever you do eat from that tree, there'll be no holding you. You won't wait to be driven forth!"

"And you are, a wicked young man—that kind never comes back in the stories."

"That may be no jest, Nance. I should surely be wicked, if I thought it brings the happiness it's said to. Under this big sky I am free from any moral law that doesn't come from right here inside me. Can you realize that? Do I seem bad for saying it? What they call the laws of God are nothing. I suspect them all, and I'll make every one of them find its authority in me before I obey it."

"It sounds—well—unpromising, Bernal."

"I told you it was serious, Nance. I see but one law clearly—I am bound to want happiness. Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance. No man can possibly want anything else. That's the only thing under heaven I'm sure of at this moment—the one universal law under which we all make our mistakes—good people and bad alike?"

"But, Bernal, you wouldn't be bad—not really bad?"

"Well, Nance, I've a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn't really compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth. I know the Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious thing the Church implies it to be."

"You make me afraid, Bernal——"

"But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?"

"——and you make me wonder."

"I think that's all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go. I have to say good-bye to Clytie yet. The poor soul is convinced that I have become a Unitarian and that there's a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from her. She says grandad evaded her questions about it. She doesn't dream there are depths below Unitarianism. I must try to convince her that I'm not that bad—that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not that. Nance—girl!"

He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her. She turned her face away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully, tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it felt itself—as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.

Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.

When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat. Then they shook hands very stiffly, and went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate that beautiful, crude young lust for living—too fierce to be tamed save by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour and sound made one by heat—the song Nature sings unendingly—but heard only by young ears.

The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the grace of faith.

"That elder young Linford," began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, "has a future. You know I talked to him about the Episcopal Church, strongly advising him to enter it. For all my broad views"—Aunt Bell sighed here—"I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian is ever thoroughly at ease in this world."

Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of smartness—of coquetry, indeed—as to her exquisitely small hands and feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.

"Of course this young chap could see at once," she went on, "what immensely better form it is than Calvinism. Dear me! Imagine one being a Presbyterian in this day!" It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.

"And he tells me that he has his grandfather's consent. Really, my dear, with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a future in the Episcopal Church. I dare say he'll be wearing the lawn sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he's forty."

"Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is—well, just the least trifle—I was going to say, vain of his appearance—but I'll make it 'self-conscious'?"

"Child, don't you know that a young man, really beautiful without being effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it. But vain he is not. It mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it."

"But why speak of it so often? He was telling me to-day of an elderly Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth."

"Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store ask the clerk who 'that handsome stranger' was. But, my dear, he tells them as jokes on himself, and he's so sheepish about it. And he's such a splendid orator. I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college papers. I don't seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of the most beautiful expressions. One, I remember, begins, 'Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of—' you know I've forgotten what it was—Civilisation or Truth or something. Anyway, whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation out from the maze of antiquity, where she now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, and so on."

"That seems impressive and—mixed, perhaps?"

"Of course I can't remember things in their order, but it was about the essential nature of man being gregarious, and truth is a potent factor in civilisation, and something would be a tear on the world's cold cheek to make it burn forever—isn't that striking? And Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where now is Greece with her proud cities? And Rome, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and splendour. Of course I can't recall his words. There was a beautiful reference to America, I remember, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South—and a perfectly splendid passage about the world is and ever has been illiberal. Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney—Sidney who, I wonder?"

"Has it taken you that way, Aunt Bell?"

"And France, the saddest example of a nation without a God, and succeeding generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man——"

"Spare me, Aunt Bell—it's like Coney Island, with all those carrousels going around and five bands playing at once!"

"But his peroration! I can't pretend to give you any idea of its beauties——"

"Don't!"

"Get him to declaim it for you. It begins in the most impressive language about his standing on top of the Rocky Mountains one day and placing his feet upon a solid rock, he saw a tempest gathering in the valley far below. So he watches the storm—in his own language, of course—while all around him is sunshine. And such should be our aim in life, to plant our feet on the solid rock of—how provoking! I can't remember what the rock was—anyway, we are to bid those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up to the rock—I think it was Intellectual Greatness— No!—Unselfishness—that's it. And the title of the paper was a sermon in itself—'The Temporal Advantage of the Individual No Norm of Morality.' Isn't that a beautiful thought in itself? Nancy, that chap will waste himself until he has a city parish."

There was silence for a little time before Aunt Bell asked, as one having returned to baser matters:

"I wonder if the jacket of my gray suit came back from that clumsy tailor. I forgot to ask Ellen if an express package came."

And Nancy, whose look was bent far into the dusk, answered:

"Oh, I wonder if he will come back!"

BOOK THREE—The Age of Faith

CHAPTER I

The Perverse Behaviour of an Old Man and a Young Man

When old Allan Delcher slept with his fathers— being so found in the big chair, with the worn, leather-bound Bible open in his lap—the revived but still tender faith of Aunt Bell Hardwick was bitten as by frost. And this though the Bible had lain open at that psalm in which David is said to describe the corruption of a natural man—a psalm beginning, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"

For it straightway appeared that the dead man had in life done abperverse and inexplicable thing, to the bitter amazement of those who had learned to trust him. On the day after he sent a blasphemous grandson from his door he had called for Squire Cumpston, announcing to the family his intention to make an entirely new will—a thing for which there seemed to be a certain sad necessity.

When he could no longer be reproached it transpired that he had left "to Allan Delcher Linford, son of one Clayton Linford," a beggarly pittance of five thousand dollars; and "to my beloved grandson, Bernal Linford, I give, devise and bequeath the residue of my estate, both real and personal."

Though the husband of her niece wore publicly a look of faith unimpaired, and was thereby an example to her, Aunt Bell declared herself to be once more on the verge of believing that the proofs of an overseeing Providence, all-wise and all-loving, were by no means overwhelming; that they were, indeed, of so frail a validity that she could not wonder at people falling away from the Church. It was a trying time for Aunt Bell. She felt that her return to the shadow of the cross was not being made enough of by the One above. After years of running after strange gods, the Episcopal service as administered by Allan had prevailed over her seasoned skepticism: through its fascinating leaven of romance—with faint and, as it seemed to her, wholly reverent hints of physical culture—the spirit may be said to have blandished her. And now this turpitude in a man of God came to disturb the first tender rootlings of her new faith.

The husband of her niece had loyally endeavoured to dissuade her from this too human reaction.

"God has chosen to try me for a purpose, Aunt Bell," he said very simply. "I ought to be proud of it— eager for any test—and I am. True, in these last years I had looked upon grandfather's fortune as mine— not only by implied promise, but by all standards of right—even of integrity. For surely a man could not more nearly forfeit his own rights, in every moral aspect, than poor Bernal has—though I meant always to stand by him. So you see, I must conclude that God means to distinguish me by a test. He may even subject me to others; but I shall not wince. I shall welcome His trials. He turned upon her the face of simple faith."

"Did you speak to that lawyer about the possibility of a contest—of proving unsound mind?"

"I did, but he saw no chance whatever."

Aunt Bell hereupon surveyed her beautifully dimpled knuckles minutely, with an affectionate pride—a pride not uncritical, yet wholly convinced.

"Of course," added Allan after a moment's reflection, "there's no sense in believing that every bit of one's hard luck is sent by God to test one. One must in all reverence take every precaution to prove that the disaster is not humanly remediable. And this, I may say, I have done with thoroughness—with great thoroughness."

"Bernal may be dead," suggested Aunt Bell, brightening now from an impartial admiring of the toes of her small, plump slippers.

"God forbid that he should be cut off in his unbelief —but then, God's will be done. If that be true, of course, the matter is different. Meantime we are advertising."

"I wish I had your superb faith, Allan. I wish Nancy had it...."

Her niece's husband turned his head and shoulders until she had the three-quarters view of his face.

"I have faith, Aunt Bell. God knows my unworthiness, even as you know it and I know it—but I have faith!"

The golden specks in his hazel eyes blazed with humility, and a flush of the same virtue mantled his perfect brow.

Such news of Bernal Linford as had come back to Edom, though meagre and fragmentary, was of a character to confirm the worst fears of those who loved him. The first report came within a year after his going, and caused a shaking of many heads.

An estimable farmer, one Caleb Webster, living on the outskirts of Edom, had, in a blameless spirit of adventure, toured the Far West, at excursion rates said to be astounding for cheapness. He had met the unfortunate young man in one of the newer mining towns along his exciting route.

"He was kind of nursin' a feller that had the consumption, " ran the gossip of Mr. Webster, "some one he'd fell in with out in them parts, that had gone there to git cured. But, High Mighty! the way them two carried on at all hours wasn't goin' to cure no one of nothin'! Specially gamblin', which was done right in public, you might say, though the sharpers never skinned me none, I'll say that! But these two was at it every night, and finally they done just like I told the young fools they'd do—they lost all they had. They come into the Commercial House one night where I was settin' lookin' over a time-table, both seemin' down in the mouth. And all to once this sick young man—Mr. Hoover, his name was—bust out cryin'—him bein' weak or mebbe in liquor or somethin'.

"'Every cent lost!' he says, the tears runnin' down those yellow, sunk cheeks of his. But Bernal seems to git chipper again when he sees how Mr. Hoover is takin' it, so he says, 'Haven't you got a cent left, Hoover? Haven't you got anythin' at all left? Just think,' he says, 'what I stood to win on that last turn, if it'd come my way—at four to one,' he says, or somethin' like that; them gamblin' terms is too much for me. 'Hain't you got nothin' at all left?' he says.

"Then this Hoover—still cryin', mind you—he says, 'Not a cent in the world except forty dollars in my trunk upstairs that I saved out to bury me with—and they won't send me another cent,' he says, 'because I tried 'em.'

"It sounded awful to hear him talkin' like that about his own buryin', but it didn't phase Bernal none.

"'Forty dollars!' he says, kind of sniffy like. 'Why, man, what could you do for forty dollars? Don't you know such things are very outrageous in price here? Forty dollars—why,' he says, 'the very best you could do would be one of these plain pine things with black cloth tacked on to it, and pewter trimmin's if any,' he says. 'Think of pewter trimmin's!'

"'Say,' he says, when Hoover begun to look up at him, 'you run and dig up your old forty and I'll go back right now and win you out a full satin-lined, silver-trimmed one, polished mahogany and gold name-plate, and there'll be enough for a clock of immortelles with the hands stopped at just the hour it happens,' he says. 'And you want to hurry,' he says, 'it ought to be done right away—with that cough of yours.'

"Me? Gosh, I felt awful—I wanted to drop right through the floor, but this Hoover, he says all at once, still snufflin', mind you: 'Say, that's all right,' he says. 'If I'm goin' to do it at all, I ought to do it right for the credit of my folks. I ought to give this town a flash of the right thing,' he says.

"Then he goes upstairs, leaning on the balusters, and gets his four ten-dollar bills that had been folded away all neat at the bottom of his trunk, and before I could think of anythin' wholesome to say—I was that scandalised —they was goin' off across the street to the Horseshoe Gamin' Parlour, this feller Hoover seemin' very sanguine and asking Bernal whether he was sure they was a party in town could do it up right after they'd went and won the money for it.

"Well, sir, I jest set there thinkin' how this boy Bernal Linford was brought up for a preacher, and 'Jest look at him now!' I says to myself—and I guess it was mebbe an hour later I seen 'em comin' out of the swingin' blinds in the door of this place, and a laffin' fit to kill themselves. 'High Mighty! they done it!' I says, watchin' 'em laff and slap each other on the back till Hoover had to stop in the middle of the street to cough. Well, they come into the Commercial office where I am and I says, 'Well, boys, how much did you fellers win?' and Hoover says, 'Not a cent! We lost our roll,' he says. 'It's the blamedest funniest thing I ever heard of,' he says, just like that, laffin' again fit to choke.

"'I don't see anythin' to laff at,' I says. 'How you goin' to live?'

"'How's he goin' to die?' says Bernal, 'without a cent to do it on?'

"'That's the funny part of it,' says Hoover. 'Linford thought of it first. How can I die now? It wouldn't be square,' he says—'me without a cent!'

"Then they both began to laugh—but me, I couldn't see nothin' funny about it.

"Wal, I left early next mornin', not wantin' to have to refuse 'em a loan."

CHAPTER II

How a Brother was Different

In contrast with this regrettable performance of Bernal's, which, alas! bore internal evidence of being a type of many, was the flawless career of Allan, the dutiful and earnest. Not only did he complete his course at the General Theological Seminary with great honour, but he was ordained into the Episcopal ministry under circumstances entirely auspicious. Aunt Bell confided to Nancy that his superior presence quite dwarfed the bishop who ordained him.

His ordination sermon, moreover, which his grandfather had been persuaded into journeying to hear, was held by many to be a triumph of pulpit oratory no less than an able yet not unpoetic handling of his text, which was from John—"The Truth shall make you free."

Truth, he declared, was the crowning glory in the diadem of man's attributes, and a subject fraught with vital interest to every thinking man. The essential nature of man being gregarious, how important that the leader of men should hold Truth to be like a diamond, made only the brighter by friction. The world is and ever has been illiberal. Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney—all fighters for truth against the masses who cannot think for themselves.

Truth was, indeed, a potent factor in civilisation. If only all truth-lovers could feel bound together by the sacred ties of fraternal good-will, independent yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, succeeding ages could but add a new lustre to their present resplendent glory.

Truth, triumphant out of oppression, is a tear falling on the world's cold cheek to make it burn forever. Why fear the revelation of truth? Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where is Greece to-day? Rome, too, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and polish! They were, but they are not—for want of Truth. But might not we hope for a land where Truth would reign —from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South?

Truth is the grand motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of civilisation out from the maze of antiquity where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius.

The young man's final flight was observed by Aunt Bell to impress visibly even the bishop—a personage whom she had begun to suspect was the least bit cynical, perhaps from having listened to many first sermons.

"Standing one day," it began, "near the summit of one of the grand old Rocky Mountains that in primeval ages was elevated from ocean's depths and now towers its snow-capped peak heavenward touching the azure blue, I witnessed a scene which, for beauty of illustration of the thought in hand, the world cannot surpass. Placing my feet upon a solid rock, I saw, far down in the valley below, the tempest gathering. Soon the low-muttered thunder and vivid flashes of lightning gave token of increasing turbulence with Nature's elements. Thus the storm raged far below while all around me and above glittered the pure sunlight of heaven, where I mingled in the blue serene; until at last the thought came electric-like, as half-divine, here is exemplified in Nature's own impressive language the simple grandeurs of Truth. While we are in the valley below, we have ebullitions of discontent and murmurings of strife; but as we near the summit of Truth our thought becomes elevated. Then placing our feet on the solid Rock of Ages, we call to those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up higher.

"Truth! Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare, as this one flower of Truth. Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed in order that their fragrance become perceptible. But the soul of this flower courses its way down the garden walk, out through the deep, dark dell, over the burning plain, up the mountain-side, up and ever UP it rises into the beautiful blue; all along the cloudy corridors of the day, up along the misty pathway to the skies, till it touches the beautiful shore and mingles with the breath of angels!"

Yet a perverse old man had sat stonily under this sermon —had, even after so effective a baptism, neglected to undo that which he should never have done. Moreover, even on the day of this notable sermon, he was known to have referred to the young man, within the hearing of a discreet housekeeper, as "the son of his father"—which was an invidious circumlocution, amounting almost to an epithet. And he had most weakly continued to grieve for the wayward lost son of his daughter—the godless boy whom he had driven from his door.

Not even the other bit of news that came a little later had sufficed to make him repair his injustice; and this, though the report came by the Reverend Arthur Pelham Gridley, incumbent of the Presbyterian pulpit at Edom, who could preach sermons the old man liked.

Mr. Gridley, returning from a certain gathering of the brethren at Denver, had brought this news: That Bernal Linford had been last seen walking south from Denver, like a common tramp, in the company of a poor half-witted creature who had aroused some local excitement by declaring himself to be the son of God, speaking familiarly of the Deity as "Father."

As this impious person had been of a very simple mind and behaved inoffensively, rather shrinking from publicity than courting it, he had at first attracted little attention. It appeared, however, that he had presently begun an absurd pretence of healing the sick and the lame; and, like all charlatans, he so cunningly worked upon the imaginations of his dupes that a remarkable number of them believed that they actually had been healed by him. In fact, the nuisance of his operations had grown to an extent so alarming that thousands of people stood in line from early morning until dusk awaiting their turn to be blessed and "healed" by the impostor. Just as several of the clergy, said Mr. Gridley, were on the point of denouncing this creature as anti-Christ and thus exploding his pretensions; and when the city authorities, indeed, appealed to by the local physicians, were on the point of suppressing him for disorderly conduct, and a menace to the public health, since he was encouraging the people to forsake their family physicians; and just as the news came that a long train-load of the variously suffering was on its way from Omaha, the wretched impostor had himself solved the difficulty by quietly disappearing. As he had refused to take money from the thousands of his dupes who had pressed it upon him in their fancied relief from pain, it was known that he could not be far off, and some curiosity was at first felt as to his whereabouts— particularly by those superstitious ones who continued to believe he had healed them of their infirmities, not a few of whom, it appeared, were disposed to credit his blasphemous claim to have been sent by God.

According to the lookout thus kept for this person, it was reported that he had been seen to pass on foot through towns lying south of Denver, meanly dressed and accompanied by a young man named Linford. To all inquiries he answered that he was on his way to fast in the desert as his "Father" had commanded. His companion was even less communicative, saying somewhat irritably that his goings and comings were nobody's business but his own.

Some six months later the remains of the unfortunate person were found in a wild place far to the south, with his Bible and his blanket. It was supposed that he had starved. Of Linford no further trace had been discovered.

The most absurd tales were now told, said Mr. Gridley, of the miracles of healing wrought by this person—told, moreover, by persons of intelligence whom in ordinary matters one would not hesitate to trust. There had even been a story started, which was widely believed, that he had raised the dead; moreover, many of those who had been deluded into believing themselves healed, looked forward confidently to his own resurrection.

Mr. Gridley ventured the opinion that we should be thankful to the daily press which now disseminates the news of such things promptly, instead of allowing it to travel slowly by word of mouth, as it did in less advanced times—a process in which a little truth becomes very shortly a mighty untruth. Even between Denver and Omaha he had observed that the wonder-tales of this person grew apace, thus proving the inaccuracy of the human mind as a reporter of fact. Without the check of an unemotional daily press Mr. Gridley suspected that the poor creature's performances would have been magnified by credulous gossip until he became the founder of a new religion—a thing especially to be dreaded in a day when the people were crazed for any new thing—as Paul found them in Athens.

Mr. Gridley mentioned further that the person had suffered from what the alienists called "morbid delusions of grandeur"—believing, indeed, that but One other in the universe was greater than himself; that he would sit at the right hand of Power to judge all the world. His most puerile pretension, however, was that he meant to live, even if the work required a thousand years, until such time as he could save all persons into heaven, so that hell need have no occupants.

But this distressing tale did not move old Allan Delcher to reconsider his perverse decision, though there had been ample time for reparation. Placidly he dropped off one day, a little while after he had cautioned Clytie to keep the house ready for Bernal's coming; and to have always on hand one of those fig layer-cakes of which he was so fond, since as likely as not he would ask for this the first thing, just as he used to do. It must seem homelike to him when he did come.

Having betrayed the trust reposed in him by an unsuspecting grandson, it seemed fitting that he should fall asleep over that very psalm wherein David describeth the corruption of the natural man.

CHAPTER III

How Edom was Favoured of God and Mammon

In the years gone, the village of Edom had matured, even as little boys wax to manhood. Time was when all but two trains daily sped by it so fast that from their windows its name over the station door was naught but a blur. Now all was changed. Many trains stopped, and people of the city mien descended from or entered smart traps, yellow depot-wagons or immaculate victorias, drawn by short-tailed, sophisticated steeds managed by liveried persons whose scraped faces were at once impassive and alert.

In its outlying parts, moreover, stately villas now stood in the midst of grounds hedged, levelled, sprayed, shaven, trimmed and garnished—grounds cherished sacredly with a reverence like unto that once accorded the Front Room in this same village. Edom, indeed, had outgrown its villagehood as a country boy in the city will often outgrow his home ways. That is, it was still a village in its inmost heart; but outwardly, at its edges, the distinctions and graces of urban worldliness had come upon it.

All this from the happy circumstance that Edom lay in a dale of beauty not too far from the blessed centre of things requisite. First, one by one, then by families, then by groups of families, then by cliques, the invaders had come to promote Edom's importance; one being brought by the gracious falling of its little hills; one by its narrow valleys where the quick little waters come down; one by the clearness of its air; and one by the cheapness with which simple old farms might be bought and converted into the most city-like of country homes.

The old stock of Edom had early learned not to part with any massive claw-footed sideboard with glass knobs, or any mahogany four-poster, or tall clock, or high-boy, except after feigning a distressed reluctance. It had learned also to hide its consternation at the prices which this behaviour would eventually induce the newcomers to pay for such junk. Indeed, it learned very soon to be a shrewd valuer of old mahogany, pewter, and china; even to suspect that the buyers might perceive beauties in it that justified the prices they paid.

Old Edom, too, has its own opinion of the relative joys of master and servant, the latter being always debonair, their employers stiff, formal and concerned. It conceives that the employers, indeed, have but one pleasure: to stand beholding with anxious solemnity— quite as if it were the performance of a religious rite— the serious-visaged men who daily barber the lawns and hedges. It is suspected by old Edomites that the menials, finding themselves watched at this delicate task, strive to copy in face and demeanour the solemnity of the observing employer—clipping the box hedge one more fraction of an inch with the wariest caution— maintaining outwardly, in short, a most reverent seriousness which in their secret hearts they do not feel.

Let this be so or not. The point is that Edom had gone beyond its three churches of Calvin, Wesley and Luther—to say nothing of one poor little frame structure with a cross at the peak, where a handful of benighted Romanists had long been known to perform their idolatrous rites. Now, indeed, as became a smartened village, there was a perfect little Episcopal church of redstone, stained glass and painted shingles, with a macadam driveway leading under its dainty porte-cochère, and at the base of whose stern little tower an eager ivy already aspired; a toy-like, yet suggestively imposing edifice, quite in the manner of smart suburban churches—a manner that for want of accurate knowledge one might call confectioner's gothic.

It was here, in his old home, that the Reverend Allan Delcher Linford found his first pastorate. Here from the very beginning he rendered apparent those gifts that were to make him a power among men. It was with a lofty but trembling hope that the young novice began his first service that June morning, before a congregation known to be hypercritical, composed as it was of seasoned city communicants, hardened listeners and watchers, who would appraise his vestments, voice, manner, appearance, and sermon, in the light of a ripe experience.

Yet his success was instant. He knew it long before the service ended—felt it infallibly all at once in the midst of his sermon on Faith. From the reading of his text, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed therein might not perish, but have everlasting life," the worldly people before him were held as by invisible wires running from him to each of them. He felt them sway in obedience to his tones; they warmed with him and cooled with him; aspired with him, questioned, agreed, and glowed with him. They were his—one with him. Their eyes saw a young man in the splendour of his early prime, of a faultless, but truly masculine beauty, delicate yet manfully rugged, square-chinned, straight-mouthed, with tawny hair and hazel eyes full of glittering golden points when his eloquence mounted; clear-skinned, brilliant, warm-voiced, yet always simple, direct, earnest; a storehouse of power, yet ornate; a source of refreshment both physical and spiritual to all within the field of his magnetism.

So agreed those who listened to that first sermon on Faith, in which that virtue was said be like the diamond, made only the brighter by friction. Motionless his listeners sat while he likened Faith to the giant engine that has rolled the car of Religion out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the present day, where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when truth shall come forth as a new and blazing star to light the splendid pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood, independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence.

Rapt were they when, with rare verbal felicity and unstudied eloquence, the young man pictured himself standing upon a lofty sunlit mountain, while a storm raged in the valley below, calling passionately to those far down in the ebullition to come up to him and mingle in the blue serene of Faith. Faith was, indeed, a tear dropped on the world's cold cheek of Doubt to make it burn forever.

Even those long since blasé to pulpit oratory thrilled at the simple beauty of his peroration, which ran: "Faith! Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare, as this one flower of Faith. Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed in order that their fragrance become perceptible. But this flower——"

In spite of this triumph, it had taken him still another year to prevail over one of his hearers. True, she had met him after that first triumphant ordination sermon with her black lashes but half-veiling the admiration that shone warm in the gray of her eyes; and his low assurance, "Nance, you please me! Really you do!" as his yellow eyes lingered down her rounded slenderness from summer bonnet to hem of summer gown, rippled her face with a colour she had to laugh away.

Yet she had been obstinate and wondering. There had to be a year in which she knew that one she dreamed of would come back; another in which she believed he might; another in which she hoped he would—and yet another in which she realised that dreams and hopes alike were vain—vain, though there were times in which she seemed to feel again the tingling life of that last hand-clasp; times when he called to her; times when she had the absurd consciousness that his mind pressed upon hers. There had been so many years and so much wonder—and no one came. It had been foolish indeed. And then came a year of wondering at the other. The old wonder concerning this one, excited by a certain fashion of rendering his head in unison with his shoulders—as might the statue of Perfect Beauty turn upon its pedestal—with its baser residue of suspicion, had been happily allayed by a closer acquaintance with Allan. One must learn, it seemed, to distrust those lightning-strokes of prejudice that flash but once at the first contact between human clouds.

Yet in the last year there had come another wonder that excited a suspicion whose troubling-power was absurdly out of all true proportion.

It was in the matter of seeing things—that is, funny things.

Doubtless she had told him a few things more or less funny that had seemed to move him to doubt or perplexity, or to mere seriousness; but, indeed, they had seemed less funny to her after that. For example, she had told Aunt Bell the anecdote of the British lady of title who says to her curate, concerning a worthy relative by marriage lately passed away, toward whom she has felt kindly despite his inferior station: "Of course I couldn't know him here—but we shall meet in heaven." Aunt Bell had been edified by this, remarking earnestly that such differences would indeed be wiped out in heaven. Yet when Nancy went to Allan in a certain bubbling condition over the anecdote itself and Aunt Bell's comment thereon, he made her repeat it slowly, after the first hurried telling, and had laughed but awkwardly with her, rather as if it were expected of him—with an eye vacant of all but wonder—like a traveller not sure he had done right to take the left-hand turn at the last cross-roads.

Again, the bishop who ordained him had, in a relaxed and social moment after the ceremony, related that little classic of Bishop Meade, who, during the fight over a certain disestablishment measure, was asked by a lobbyist how he would vote. The dignified prelate had replied that he would vote for the bill, for he held that every man should have the right to choose his own way to heaven. None the less, he would continue to be certain that a gentleman would always take the Episcopal way. To Nancy Allan retold this, adding,

"You know, I'm going to use it in a sermon some time."

"Yes—it's very funny," she answered, a little uncertainly.

"Funny?"

"Yes."

"Do you think so?"

"Of course—I've heard the bishop tell it myself— and I know he thinks it funny."

"Well—then I'll use it as a funny story. Of course, it is funny—I only thought"—what it was he only thought Nancy never knew.

Small bits of things to wonder at, these were, and the wonder brought no illumination. She only knew there were times when they two seemed of different worlds, bereft of power to communicate; and at these times his superbly assured wooing left her slightly dazed.

But there were other times, and different—and slowly she became used to the idea of him—persuaded both by his own court and by the spirited encomiums that he evoked from Aunt Bell.

Aunt Bell was at that time only half persuaded by Allan to re-enter the church of her blameless infancy. She was still minded to seek a little longer outside the fold that rapport with the Universal Mind which she had never ceased to crave. In this process she had lately discarded Esoteric Buddhism for Subliminal Monitions induced by Psychic Breathing and correct breakfast-food. For all that, she felt competent to declare that Allan was the only possible husband for her niece, and her niece came to suspect that this might be so.

When at last she had wondered herself into a state of inward readiness—a state still governed by her outward habit of resistance, this last was beaten down by a letter from Mrs. Tednick, who had been a school friend as Clara Tremaine, and was now married, apparently with results not too desirable.

"Never, my dear," ran the letter to Nancy, "permit yourself to think of marrying a man who has not a sense of humour. Do I seem flippant? Don't think it. I am conveying to you the inestimable benefits of a trained observation. Humour saves a man from being impossible in any number of ways—from boring you to beating you. (You may live to realise that the tragedy of the first is not less poignant than that of the second.) Whisper, dear!—All men are equally vain—at least in their ways with a woman—but humour assuredly preserves many unto death from betraying it egregiously. Beware of him if he lack it. He has power to crucify you daily, and yet be in honest ignorance of your tortures. Don't think I am cynical—and indeed, my own husband is one of the best and dearest of souls in the world, the biggest heart—but be sure you marry no man without humour. Don't think a man has it merely because he tells funny stories; the humour I mean is a kind of sense of the fitness of things that keeps a man from forgetting himself. And if he hasn't humour, don't think he can make you happy, even if his vanity doesn't show. He can't—after the expiration of that brief period in which the vanity of each is a holy joy to the other. Remember now!"

Curiously enough this well-intended homily had the effect of arousing in Nancy an instant sense of loyalty to Allan. She suffered little flashes of resentment at the thought that Clara Tremaine should seem to depreciate one toward whom she felt herself turning with a sudden defensive tenderness. And this, though it was clear to the level eye of reason that Clara must have been generalising on observations made far from Edom. But her loyal spirit was not less eager to resent an affront because it might seem to have been aimless.

And thereafter, though never ceasing to wonder, Nancy was won. Her consent, at length, went to him in her own volume of Browning, a pink rose shut in upon "A Woman's Last Word"—its petals bruised against the verses: