The Seeker

CHAPTER XIV

The Ineffective Message

The week had gone while he walked in the crowds, feeling his remoteness; but he knew at last that he was not of the brotherhood of the zealots; that the very sense of humour by which he saw the fallacies of one zealot prevented him from becoming another. He lacked the zealot's conviction of his unique importance, yet one must be such a zealot to give a message effectively. He began to see that the world could not be lost; that whatever might be vital in his own message would, soon or late, be delivered by another. The time mattered not. Could he not be as reposeful, as patient, as God?

In spite of which, the impulse to speak his little word would recur; and it came upon him stoutly one day on his way up town. As the elevated train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men bent their heads over busy sewing-machines. Nearest the window, full before it, was one that touched him—a young man with some hardy spirit of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to recognise the odds against him. And fixed to his machine, where his eyes might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac—his little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross. The pathos of it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried him by it.

The train creaked its way around the curve—but the face dreaming happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind, coercing him.

As he entered the house, Nancy met him.

"Do go and be host to those men. It's our day for the Ministers' Meeting," she continued, as he looked puzzled, "and just as they sat down Allan was called out to one of his people who is sick. Now run like a good boy and 'tend to them."

So it came that, while the impulse was still strong upon him, he went in among the dozen amiable, feeding gentlemen who were not indisposed to listen to whomsoever might talk—if he did not bore—which is how it befell that they had presently cause to remark him.

Not at first, for he mumbled hesitatingly, without authority of manner or point to his words, but the phrase, "the fundamental defect of the Christian religion" caused even the Unitarian to gasp over his glass of mineral water. His green eyes glittered pleasantly upon Bernal from his dark face with its scraggly beard.

"That's it, Mr. Linford—tell us that—we need to know that—do we not, gentlemen?"

"Speak for yourself, Whittaker," snapped the aggressive little Baptist, "but doubtless Mr. Linford has something to say."

Bernal remained unperturbed by this. Very earnestly he continued: "Christianity is defective, judged even by poor human standards; untrue by the plain facts of human consciousness."

"Ah! Now we shall learn!" Father Riley turned his most gracious smile upon the speaker.

"Your churches are losing their hold upon men because your religion is one of separation, here and hereafter—while the one great tendency of the age is toward brotherhood—oneness. Primitive man had individual pride—family pride, city pride, state pride, national pride followed—but we are coming now to the only permissible pride, a world pride—in which the race feels its oneness. We are nearly there; even now the spirit that denies this actual brotherhood is confined to the churches. The people outside more generally than you dream know that God does not discriminate among religions—that he has a scheme of a dignity so true that it can no more permit the loss of one black devil-worshipper than that of the most magnificent of archbishops."

He stopped, looking inquiringly—almost wistfully, at them.

Various polite exclamations assured him of their interest.

"Continue, by all means," urged Whittaker. "I feel that you will have even Father Riley edified in a moment."

"The most cynical chap—even for a Unitarian," purled that good man.

Bernal resumed.

"Your God is a tribal God who performed his wonders to show that he had set a difference between Israel and Egypt. Your Saviour continues to set the same difference: Israel being those who believed his claim to Godship; Egypt those who find his evidence insufficient. But we humans daily practise better than this preaching of retaliation. The Church is losing power because your creeds are fixed while man, never ceasing to grow, has inevitably gone beyond them— even beyond the teachings of your Saviour who threatened to separate father from son and mother from daughter—who would distinguish sheep from goats by the mere intellectual test of the opinion they formed of his miracles. The world to-day insists on moral tests—which Christianity has never done."

"Ah—now we are getting at it," remarked the Methodist, whose twinkling eyes curiously belied his grimly solemn face. "Who was it that wished to know the belief of the average unbeliever?"

"The average unbeliever," answered Bernal promptly, "no longer feels the need of a Saviour—he knows that he must save himself. He no longer believes in the God who failed always, from Eden to Calvary, failed even to save his chosen tribe by that last device of begetting a son of a human mother who should be sacrificed to him. He no longer believes that he must have a mediator between himself and that God."

"Really, most refreshing," chortled Father Riley. "More, more!" and he rapped for silence.

"The man of to-day must have a God who never fails. Disguise it as you will, your Christian God was never loved. No God can be loved who threatens destruction for not loving him. We cannot love one whom we are not free not to love."

"Where shall we find this God—outside of Holy Writ," demanded Floud, who had once or twice restrained himself with difficulty, in spite of his amusement.

"The true God comes to life in your own consciousness, if you will clear it of the blasphemous preconceptions imposed by Christianity," answered Bernal so seriously that no one had the heart to interrupt him. "Of course we can never personify God save as a higher power of self. Moses did no more; Jesus did no more. And if we could stop with this—be content with saying 'God is better than the best man'—we should have a formula permitting endless growth, even as He permits it to us. God has been more generous to us than the Church has been to Him. While it has limited Him to that god of bloody sacrifice conceived by a barbaric Jew, He has permitted us to grow so that now any man who did not surpass him morally, as the scriptures portray him, would be a man of inconceivable malignity.

"You see the world has demonstrated facts that disprove the Godship of your God and your Saviour. We have come, indeed, into a sense of such certain brotherhood that we know your hell is a falsity. We know —a knowledge of even the rudiments of psychology proves—that there will be a hell for all as long as one of us is there. Our human nature is such that one soul in hell would put every other soul there. Daily this becomes more apparent. We grow constantly more sensitive to the pain of others. This is the distinctive feature of modern growth—our increasing tendency to find the sufferings of others intolerable to ourselves. A disaster now is felt around the world—we burn or starve or freeze or drown with our remote brothers— and we do what we can to relieve them because we suffer with them. It seems to me the existence of the S.P.C.A. proves that hell is either for all of us or for none of us—because of our oneness. If the suffering of a stray cat becomes our suffering, do you imagine that the minority of the race which Christianity saves could be happy knowing that the great majority lay in torment?

"Suppose but two were left in hell—Judas Iscariot and Herbert Spencer—the first great sinner after Jesus and the last of any consequence. One betrayed his master and the other did likewise, only with far greater subtlety and wickedness—teaching thousands to disbelieve his claims to godhood—to regard Christianity as a crude compound of Greek mythology and Jewish tradition—a thing built of myth and fable. Even if these two were damned and all the rest were saved— can you not see that a knowledge of their suffering would embitter heaven itself to another hell? Father Riley was good enough to tell us last week of the state of unbaptised infants after death. Will you please consider coldly the infinite, good God setting a difference for all eternity between two babies, because over the hairless pate of one a priest had sprinkled water and spoken words? Can you not see that this is untrue because it is absurd to our God-given senses of humour and justice? Do you not see that such a God, in the act of separating those children, taking into heaven the one that had had its little head wetted by a good man, and sending the reprobate into what Father Riley terms, 'in a wide sense, a state of damnation'——"

Father Riley smiled upon him with winning sweetness.

"——do you not see that such a God would be shamed off his throne and out of heaven by the pitying laugh that would go up—even from sinners?

"You insist that the truth touching faith and morals is in your Bible, despite its historical inaccuracies. But do you not see that you are losing influence with the world because this is not so—because a higher standard of ethics than yours prevails out in the world—a demand for a veritable fatherhood of God and a veritable brotherhood of man—to replace the caricatures of those doctrines that Christianity submits."

"Our young friend seems to think exceeding well of human nature," chirped Father Riley.

"Yes," rejoined Bernal. "Isn't it droll that this poor, fallen human nature, despised and reviled, 'conceived in sin and born in iniquity,' should at last call the Christian God and Saviour to account, weigh them by its own standard, find them wanting, and replace them with a greater God born of itself? Is not that an eloquent proof of the living God that abides in us?"

"Has it ever occurred to you, young man, that human nature has its selfish moments?" asked the high-church rector—between sips of claret and water.

"Has it ever occurred to you that human nature has any but selfish moments?" replied Bernal. "If so, your impression was incorrect."

"Really, Mr. Linford, have you not just been telling us how glorious is this nature of man——"

"I know—I will explain to you," he went on, moving Father Riley to another indulgent smile by his willingness to instruct the gray-bearded Congregationalist who had interrupted.

"When I saw that there must be a hell for all so long as there is a hell for one—even for Spencer—I suddenly saw there was nothing in any man to merit the place— unless it were the ignorance of immaturity. For I saw that man by the very first law of his being can never have any but a selfish motive. Here again practical psychology sustains me. You cannot so much as raise your hand without an intention to promote your happiness— nor are you less selfish if you give your all to the needy —you are still equally doing that which promotes your happiness. That it is more blessed to give than to receive is a terse statement of a law scientifically demonstrable. You all know how far more exquisite is the pleasure that comes from giving than that which comes from receiving. Is not one who prefers to give then simply selfish with a greater wisdom, a finer skill for the result desired—his own pleasure? The man we call good is not less selfish than the man we call bad—only wiser in the ways that bring his happiness—riper in that divine sensitiveness to the feelings of his brother. Selfish happiness is equally a law with all, though it send one of us to thieving and another to the cross.

"Ignorance of this primary truth has kept the world in spiritual darkness—it has nurtured belief in sin—in a devil, in a God that permits evil. For when you tell me that my assertion is a mere quibble—that it matters not whether we call a man unselfish or wisely selfish— you fail to see that, when we understand this truth, there is no longer any sin. 'Sin' is then seen to be but a mistaken notion of what brings happiness. Last night's burglar and your bishop differ not morally but intellectually —one knowing surer ways of achieving his own happiness, being more sensitive to that oneness of the race which thrills us all in varying degrees. When you know this—that the difference is not moral but intellectual, self-righteousness disappears and with it a belief in moral difference—the last obstacle to the realisation of our oneness. It is in the church that this fiction of moral difference has taken its final stand.

"And not only shall we have no full realisation of the brotherhood of man until this inevitable, equal selfishness is understood, but we shall have no rational conception of virtue. There will be no sound morality until it is taught for its present advantage to the individual, and not for what it may bring him in a future world. Not until then will it be taught effectively that the well-being of one is inextricably bound up with the well-being of all; that while man is always selfish, his selfish happiness is still contingent on the happiness of his brother."

The moment of coffee had come. The Unitarian lighted a black cigar and avidly demanded more reasons why the Christian religion was immoral.

"Still for the reason that it separates," continued Bernal, "separates not only hereafter but here. We have kings and serfs, saints and sinners, soldiers to kill one another—God is still a God of Battle. There is no Christian army that may not consistently invoke your God's aid to destroy any other Christian army— none whose spiritual guides do not pray to God for help in the work of killing other Christians. So long as you have separation hereafter, you will have these absurd divisions here. So long as you preach a Saviour who condemns to everlasting punishment for disbelief, so long you will have men pointing to high authority for all their schemes of revenge and oppression here.

"Not until you preach a God big enough to save all can you arouse men to the truth that all must be saved. Not until you have a God big enough to love all can you have a church big enough to hold all.

"An Indian in a western town must have mastered this truth. He had watched a fight between drunken men in which one shot the other. He said to me, 'When I see how bad some of my brothers are, I know how good the Great Spirit must be to love them all!'"

"Was—was he a member of any church?" inquired the amiable Presbyterian, with a facetious gleam in his eyes.

"I didn't ask him—of course we know he wasn't a Presbyterian."

Hereupon Father Riley and the wicked Unitarian both laughed joyously. Then the Congregationalist, gazing dreamily through the smoke of his cigarette, remarked, "You have omitted any reference to the great fact of Christianity—the sacrifice of the Son of Man."

"Very well, I will tell you about it," answered the young man quite earnestly, whereat the Unitarian fairly glowed with wicked anticipations.

"Let us face that so-called sacrifice honestly. Jesus died to save those who could accept his claim to godship —believing that he would go to sit at the right hand of God to judge the world. But look—an engineer out here the other day died a horrible death to save the lives of a scant fifty people—their mere physical lives—died out of that simple sense of oneness which makes us selfishly fear for the suffering of others—died without any hope of superior exaltation hereafter. Death of this sort is common. I would not belittle him you call the Saviour—as a man he is most beautiful and moving to me—but that shall not blind me to the fact that the sacrificial element in his death is surpassed daily by common, dull humans."

A veiled uneasiness was evident on the part of his listeners, but the speaker gave no heed.

"This spectacle of sacrifice, of devotion to others, is needed as an uplift," he went on earnestly, "but why dwell upon one remote—obscured by claims of a God-jugglery which belittle it if they be true—when all about you are countless plain, unpretentious men and women dying deaths and—what is still greater,— living lives of cool, relentless devotion out of sheer human love.

"Preach this divineness of human nature and you will once more have a living church. Preach that our oneness is so real that the best man is forever shackled to the worst. Preach that sin is but ignorant selfishness, less admirable than virtue only as ignorance is less admirable than knowledge.

"In these two plain laws—the individual's entire and unvarying selfishness and his ever-increasing sensitiveness to the sufferings of others—there is the promise not of a heaven and a hell, but of a heaven for all—which is what the world is more and more emphatically demanding—which it will eventually produce even here—for we have as little sensed the possibilities of man's life here as we have divined the attributes of God himself.

"Once you drove away from your church the big men, the thinkers, the fearless—the souls God must love most truly were it possible to conceive him setting a difference among his creatures. Now you drive away even the merely intelligent rabble. The average man knows your defect—knows that one who believes Christ rose from the dead is not by that fact the moral superior of one who believes he did not; knows, indeed, of God, that he cannot be a fussy, vain, blustering creature who is forever failing and forever visiting the punishment for his failures upon his puppets.

"This is why you are no longer considered a factor in civilisation, save as a sort of police-guard upon the very ignorant. And you are losing this prestige. Even the credulous day-labourer has come to weigh you and find you wanting—is thrilling with his own God-assurance and stepping forth to save himself as best he can.

"But, if you would again draw man, heat him, weld him, hold him—preach Man to him, show him his own goodness instead of loading him with that vicious untruth of his conception in iniquity. Preach to him the limitless devotion of his common dull brothers to one another through their sense of oneness. Show him the common beautiful, wonderful, selfish self-giving of humanity, not for an hour or for a day, but for long hard life-times. Preach the exquisite adjustment of that human nature which must always seek its own happiness, yet is slowly finding that that happiness depends on the happiness of all. The lives of daily crucifixion without hope of reward are abundant all about you—you all know them. And if once you exploit these actual sublimities of human nature—of the man in the street—no tale of devotion in Holy Writ will ever again move you as these do. And when you have preached this long enough, then will take place in human society, naturally, spontaneously, that great thing which big men have dreamed of doing with their artificial devices of socialism and anarchism. For when you have demonstrated the race's eternal oneness man will be as little tempted to oppress, starve, enslave, murder or separate his brothers as he is now tempted to mutilate his own body. Then only will he love his neighbor as himself—still with a selfish love.

"Preach Man to man as a discovery in Godhood. You will not revive the ancient glories of your Church, but you will build a new church to a God for whom you will not need to quibble or evade or apologise. Then you will make religion the one force, and you will rally to it those great minds whose alienation has been both your reproach and your embarrassment. You will enlist not only the scientist but the poet—and all between. You will have a God to whom all confess instinctively."

CHAPTER XV

The Woman at the End of the Path

He stopped, noticing that the chairs were pushed back. There was an unmistakeable air of boredom, though one or two of the men still smoked thoughtfully. One of these, indeed—the high church rector— even came back with a question, to the undisguised apprehension of several brothers.

"You have formulated a certain fashion of belief, Mr. Linford, one I dare say appealing to minds that have not yet learned that even reason must submit to authority; but you must admit that this revelation of God in the human heart carries no authoritative assurance of immortality."

Bernal had been sitting in some embarrassment, dismayed at his own vehemence, but this challenge stirred him.

"True," he answered, "but let us thank God for uncertainty, if it take the place of Christian belief in a sparsely peopled heaven and a crowded hell."

"Really, you know——"

"I know nothing of a future life; but I prefer ignorance to a belief that the most heinous baby that ever died in sin is to languish in a state of damnation—even 'in a wide sense' as our good friend puts it."

"But, surely, that is the first great question of all people in all ages—'If a man die shall he live again?'

"Because there has never been any dignified conception of a Supreme Being. I have tried to tell you what my own faith is—faith in a God wiser and more loving than I am, who, being so, has devised no mean little scheme of revenge such as you preach. A God more loving than my own human father, a God whose plan is perfect whether it involve my living or dying. Whether I shall die to life or to death is not within my knowledge; but since I know of a truth that the God I believe in must have a scheme of worth and dignity, I am unconcerned. Whether his plan demand extinction or immortality, I worship him for it, not holding him to any trivial fancy of mine. God himself can be no surer of his plan's perfection than I am. I call this faith—faith the more perfect that it is without condition, asking neither sign nor miracle."

"And life is so good that I've no time to whine. If this ego of mine is presently to become unnecessary in the great Plan, my faith is still triumphant. It would be interesting to know the end, but it's not so important as to know that I am no better—only a little wiser in certain ways—than yesterday's murderer. Living under the perfect plan of a perfect Creator, I need not trouble about hidden details when so many not hidden are more vital. When, in some far-off future, we learn to live here as fully and beautifully as we have power to, I doubt not that in the natural ways of growth we shall learn more of this detail of life we call 'death'—but I can imagine nothing of less consequence to one who has faith.

"I saw a stanza the other day that tells it well:

While quoting the lines his eyes had been straight ahead, absently dwelling upon the space between the slightly parted doors that gave into the next room. But even as he spoke, the last line faltered and halted. His glance slowly stiffened out of widening eyes to the face it had caught there—a face new, strange, mesmeric, that all at once enchained him soul and body. With a splendid, reckless might it assailed him—left him dazed, deaf, speechless.

It was the face of Nancy, for the first time all its guards down. Full upon him flamed the illumined eyes that made the face a yielding radiance; lifted a little was the chin of gentle curves, the under lip caught as if in that quivering eagerness she no longer breathed—the face of Nancy, no longer wondering, Nancy at last compelled and compelling. A moment the warm light flashed from each to each.

He stopped in a sudden bewilderment, looking blankly, questioningly at the faces about him. Then out of the first chaos came the sense of having awakened from some long, quiet sleep—of having suddenly opened his eyes upon a world from which the morning mists had lifted, to see himself—and the woman who stood always at the end of that upward path—face to face for the first time. One by one his outer sensations returned. At first he heard a blurred murmuring, then he became aware that some of the men were looking at him curiously, that one of them had addressed him. He smiled apologetically.

"I beg your pardon. I—I couldn't have been listening."

"I merely asked," repeated Floud, "how you expect to satisfy humanity with the vague hope that you would substitute for the Christian promise of eternal life."

He stared stupidly at the questioner.

"I—I don't know." He passed a hand slowly upward over his forehead. "Really I can hardly trouble about those matters—there's so much life to live. I think I knew a moment ago, but I seem to have forgotten, though it's doubtless no great loss. I dare say it's more important to be unafraid of life than to be unafraid of death."

"You were full of reasons a moment ago," reminded Whittaker—"some of them not uninteresting."

"Was I? Oh, well, it's a small matter—I've somehow lost hold of it." He laughed awkwardly. "It seems to have come to me just now that those who study an apple until it falls from its stem and rots are even more foolish than those who pluck and eat."

Again he was silent, with a great hidden impatience for them to be gone. But Whittaker, the wicked Unitarian, detained them still a moment longer.

"How hardly we should believe in a God who saved every one!" he breathed softly to the remains of his cigar.

"Humph! Such a God would be a mere mush of concession!" retorted Floud, the Baptist.

"And how true," pursued the unruffled Unitarian, "that we cannot worship a 'mere mush of concession' —how true that our God must hate what we hate, and punish what we would punish. We might stomach a God who would save orthodox burglars along with orthodox bishops, but not one who saved unbaptised infants and adults of unsound doctrine. Dear, dear, yes! We must have a God with a little human spite in Him or He seems to be spineless."

"A hopeless cynic," declared the soft voice of the Catholic—"it's the Unitarianism working out of him, mind you!"

"So glad to have met you!" continued the same good man to Bernal. "Your words are conducive to thought—you're an earnest, decent lad at all events."

But Bernal scarcely heard them or identified the speakers. They were to him but so many noisy wheels of the vast machine, each revolving as it must. His whole body seemed to send electric sparks of repulsion out to them to drive them away as quickly as might be. All his energies were centred to one mighty impulse.

At last the door closed and he stood alone with the disordered table and the pushed back chairs, doggedly gathering himself. Then he went to the doors and with a hand to each, pushed them swiftly apart.

She stood at the farther side of the room. She seemed to have fled there, and yet she leaned toward him breathless, again with the under lip caught fast in its quivering—helpless, piteously helpless. It was this that stayed him. Had she utterly shrunk away, even had he found her denying, defiant—the aroused man had prevailed. But seeing her so, he caught at the back of a chair as if to hold himself. Then he gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his. For a moment it filled him to see and know, to be certain that she knew and did not deny. But the man in him was not yet a reasoning man—too lately had he come to life.

He stepped eagerly toward her, to halt only when one weak white hand faltered up with absurd pretension of a power to ward him off. Nor was it her hand that made him stop then. That barrier confessed its frailness in every drooping line. Again it was the involuntary submission of her whole poise—she had actually leaned a little further toward him when he started, even as her hand went up. But the helpless misery in her eyes was still a defense, passive but sufficient.

Then she spoke and his tension relaxed a little, the note of helpless suffering in her voice making him wince and fall back a step.

"Bernal, Bernal, Bernal! It hurts me so, hurts me so! It's the Gratcher—isn't it hurting you, too? Oh, it must be!"

He retreated a little, again grasping the back of the chair with one hand, but there was no restraint in his voice.

"Laugh, Nance, laugh! You know what laughing does to them!"

"Not to this one, Bernal—oh, not to this one!"

"But it's only a Gratcher, Nance! I've been asleep all these years. Now I'm awake. I'm in the world again—here, do you understand, before you. And it's a glad, good world. I'm full of its life—and I've money —think of that! Yesterday I didn't know what money was. I was going to throw it away—throw it away as lightly as I threw away all those good, precious years. How much it seems now, and what fine, powerful stuff it is! And I, like a sleeping fool, was about to let it go at a mere suggestion from Allan."

He stopped, as if under the thrust of a cold, keen blade.

"Allan—Allan!" he repeated dazedly while the look of pain deepened in the woman's eyes. He stared back at her dumbly. Then another awakening became visible in him and he laughed awkwardly.

"It's funny, Nance—funny—and awful! Do you know that not until I spoke his name then had a thought of Allan come to me? Can you comprehend it? I can't now. But it's the truth. I woke up too suddenly. Allan—Allan—." It sounded as if he were trying to recall some forgotten personality. "Oh, Allan!"

The last was more like a cry. He fell into the chair by which he had stood. And now the woman erected herself, coming forward to stand before him, her head bowed, her hands convulsively interlocked.

"Do you see it all, Bernal? Is it plain now? Oh, how it tortured me—that last Gratcher—the one we make in our own image and yet make to be perfect. It never hurt me before, but now I know why. It couldn't hurt me so long as I looked it straight in the eye—but just now my eyes had to fall before it, and all in a second it was tearing me to pieces. That's the only defense against this last Gratcher, Bernal, to look it in the eyes unafraid. And oh, it hurts so—and it's all my own miserable fault!"

"No, it's your goodness, Nance." He spoke very quietly now. "Only the good have a Gratcher that can't be laughed away. My own was late in coming. Your Gratcher has saved us."

He stood up and took her unresisting hands in both his own. They rested there in peace, yielding themselves like tired children to caring arms.

"Now I shall be healed," she said.

"It will take me longer, Nance. My hurt is more stubborn, more complicated. I can't help it. Something in me resists. I see now that I know too much— too much of you, too much of——"

She saw that he must have suffered some illumination upon Allan. There was a look of bitter comprehension in his face as he broke off. She turned away from it.

When, an hour later, Allan came in, he found them chatting easily of the few people of St. Antipas that Bernal had met. At the moment, they were discussing Mrs. Wyeth, whose face, Bernal declared, was of a rare perfection. Nance turned to her husband.

"You must thank Bernal," she said, "for entertaining your guests this afternoon."

"He wouldn't if he knew what I said—or how it must have bored them. One thing, Nance, they won't meet here again until you swear I've gone!"

"Bernal's heart is right, even if his theology doesn't always please me," said his brother graciously, examining some cards that lay on the table. "I see Mrs. Wyeth has called," he continued to Nancy, looking up from these.

"Yes. She wanted me to see her sister, poor Mrs. Eversley, who is ill at her house. I promised to look in to-morrow."

"I've just been telling Nance how beautiful I think Mrs. Wyeth is," said Bernal. "She's rare, with that face of the low-browed Greek. It's one of the memories I shall take back to my Eve-less Eden."

"She is beautiful," said Nancy. "Of course her nose is the least bit thin and long, but it rather adds zest to her face. Now I must dress for dinner."

When Nancy had gone, Bernal, who had been speaking with a marked lightness of tone, turned to Allan with an equally marked seriousness.

"Old chap, you know about that money of mine— of Grandfather's?"

Allan instantly became attentive.

"Of course, there's no hurry about that—you must take time to think it over," he answered.

"But there is hurry! I shouldn't have waited so long to make up my mind.

"Then you have made up your mind?" questioned his brother, with guarded eagerness.

"Definitely. It's all yours, Allan. It will help you in what you want to do. And not having it will help me to do what I want to do—make it simpler, easier. Take it—and for God's sake be good to Nancy."

"I can't tell you how you please me, Bernal. Not that I'm avid for money, but it truly seems more in accord with what must have been grandfather's real wish. And Nancy—of course I shall be good to her— though at times she seems unable to please me."

There was a sanctified displeasure in his tone, as he spoke of Nancy. It caused Bernal to turn upon him a keen, speculative eye, but only for a moment. And his next words had to do with matters tangible. "To-morrow I'll do some of the business that can be done here. Then I'll go up to Edom and finish the transfers that have to be made there." After a brief hesitation, he added: "Try to please her a bit, Allan. That's all."

CHAPTER XVI

In Which the Mirror is Held up to Human Nature

When, the next day, Nancy went to pay her promised visit to Mrs. Eversley, the rectory was steeped in the deep household peace of mid-afternoon. Both Allan and Bernal had gone out soon after luncheon, while Aunt Bell had withdrawn into the silence, there to meditate the first letters of the alphabet of the inexpressible, to hover about the pleasant line that divides the normal from the subliminal.

Though bruised and torn, Nancy was still grimly upright in the eye of duty, still a worthy follower of orthodox ways. Buried in her own eventful thoughts in that mind-world where love is born and dies, where beliefs rise and perish but no sound ever disturbs the stillness, she made her way along the shaded side of the street toward the Wyeth residence. Not until she had passed several doors beyond the house did she recall her errand, remember that her walk led to a goal, that she herself had matters in hand other than thinking, thinking, thinking.

Retracing her steps, she rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Eversley. Before the servant could reply, Mrs. Wyeth rustled prettily down the hall from the library at the back. She wore a gown of primrose yellow. An unwonted animation lighted the cold perfection of her face, like fire seen through ice.

"So glad to see you!" she said with graceful effusion— "And the Doctor? And that queer, fascinating, puzzling brother of yours, how are they? So glad! Yes, poor sister keeps to her room and you really mustn't linger with me an instant. I'm not even going to ask you to sit down. Go right up. Her door's at the end of the hall, you know. You'll comfort the poor thing beautifully, you dear!"

She paused for breath, a vivid smile taking the place of words. Mrs. Linford, rendered oddly, almost obstinately reserved by this excessive cordiality, was conscious of something unnatural in that smile—a too great intensity, like the greenness of artificial palms.

"Thank you so much for coming, you angel," she went on playfully, "for doubtless I shall not be visible when you go. You see Donald's off in the back of the house re-arranging whole shelves of wretched, dusty books and he fancies that he must have my suggestions."

"The door at the end of the hall!" she trilled in sweet but unmistakable dismissal, one arm pointing gracefully aloft from its enveloping foam of draperies, that same too-intense smile upon the Greek face that even Nancy, in moments of humane expansion, had admitted to be all but faultless. And the latter, wondering not a little at the stiff disposition to have her quickly away, which she had somehow divined through all the gushing cordiality of Mrs. Wyeth's manner, went on upstairs. As she rapped at Mrs. Eversley's door, the bell of the street door sounded in her ears.

Somewhat less than an hour after, she came softly out again, opening and closing the door noiselessly. So effectually had she soothed the invalid, that the latter had fallen into a much-needed sleep, and Nancy, eager to escape to that mind-world where the happenings are so momentous and the silence is so tense, had crept like a mouse from the room.

At the top of the stairs she paused to gather up her skirts. Then her ears seemed to catch the sound of voices on the floor below and she remained motionless for a second, listening. She had no desire to encounter for the second time the torrent of Mrs. Wyeth's manner, no wish to meet unnecessarily one so disagreeably gifted in the art of arousing in her an aversion of which she was half ashamed.

No further sound greeted her straining ears, and, deciding that the way was clear, she descended the thickly carpeted stairs. Near the bottom, opposite the open doors of the front drawing-room, she paused to look into the big mirror on the opposite wall. As she turned her head for a final touch to the back of her veil, her eyes became alive to something in that corner of the room now revealed to her by the mirror —something that held her frozen with embarrassment.

Though the room lay in the dusk of drawn curtains, the gown of Mrs. Wyeth showed unmistakably —Mrs. Wyeth abandoned to the close, still embrace of an unrecognized man.

Distressed at the awkwardness of her position, Nancy hesitated, not knowing whether to retreat or go forward. She had decided to go on, observing nothing—and of course she had observed nothing save an agreeable incident in the oft impugned domesticity of Mr. and Mrs. Wyeth—when a further revelation arrested her.

Even as she put her foot to the next step, the face of Mrs. Wyeth was lifted and Mrs. Wyeth's big eyes fastened upon hers through the impartial mirror. But their expression was not that of the placid matron observed in a passage of conjugal tenderness. Rather, it was one of acute dismay—almost fear. Poor Mrs. Weyth, who had just said, "Doubtless I shall not be visible when you go!"

Even as she caught this look, Nancy started down the remaining steps, her cheeks hot from her own wretched awkwardness. She wanted to hurry—to run; she might still escape without having reason to suspect that the obscured person was other than he should be in the opinion of an exacting world. Then, as her hand was at the door, while the silken rustling of that hurried disentanglement was in her ears, the voice of Wyeth sounded remotely from the rear of the house. It seemed to come from far back in the library, removed from them by the length of the double drawing-rooms —a comfortable, smooth, high-pitched voice— lazy, drawling——

"Oh, Linford!"

Linford! The name seemed to sink into the stillness of the great house, leaving no ripple behind. Before an answer to the call could come, she had opened the great door and pulled it sharply to behind her.

Outside, she lingered a moment as if in serenely absent contemplation of the street, with the air of one who sought to recall her next engagement. Then, gathering up her skirts, she went leisurely down the steps and passed unhurriedly from the view of those dismayed eyes that she felt upon her from the Wyeth window.

On the avenue she turned north and was presently alone in a shaded aisle of the park—that park whose very trees and shrubs seem to have taken on a hard, knowing look from having been so long made the recipients of cynical confidences. They seemed to understand perfectly what had happened, to echo Wyeth's high-pitched, friendly drawl, with an added touch of mockery that was all their own—"Oh—Linford!"

CHAPTER XVII

For the Sake of Nancy

It was toward six o'clock when she ascended the steps of the rectory. Bernal, coming from the opposite direction, met her at the door. Back of his glance, as they came together, was an intimation of hidden things, and at sight of him she was smitten by an electric flash of wonder. The voice of Wyeth, that friendly, untroubled voice, she now remembered had called to no specific Linford. In the paralysis of embarrassment that had seized her in that darkened hallway, she had failed to recall that there were at least two Linfords in existence. In an instant her inner world, wrought into something like order in the past two hours, was again chaos.

"Why, Nance—you look like night, when there are no stars—what is it?" He scanned her with an assumption of jesting earnestness, palpably meant to conceal some deeper emotion. She put a detaining hand on his arm as he was about to turn the key in the lock.

"Bernal, I haven't time to be indirect, or beat about, or anything—so forgive the abruptness—were you at Mrs. Wyeth's this afternoon?"

His ear caught the unusual note in her voice, and he was at once concerned with this rather than with her question.

"Why, what is it, Nance—what if I was? Are you seeing another Gratcher?"

"Bernal, quick, now—please! Don't worry me needlessly! Were you at Mrs. Wyeth's to-day?"

Her eyes searched his face. She saw that he was still either puzzled or confused, but this time he answered plainly,

"No—I haven't seen that most sightly cold lady to-day—more's the pity!"

She breathed one quick little sigh—it seemed to him strangely like a sigh of relief.

"I knew you couldn't have been." She laughed a little laugh of secrets. "I was only wondering foolish wonders—you know how Gratchers must be humoured right up to the very moment you puff them away with the deadly laugh."

Together they went in. Bernal stopped to talk with Aunt Bell, who was passing through the hall as they entered; while Nancy, with the manner of one not to be deflected from some set purpose, made straight for Allan's study.

In answer to her ominously crisp little knock, she heard his "Come!" and opened the door.

He sat facing her at his desk, swinging idly from side to side in the revolving chair, through the small space the desk permitted. Upon the blotter before him she saw that he had been drawing interminable squares, oblongs, triangles and circles, joining them to one another in aimless, wandering sequence—his sign of a perturbed mind.

He glanced up with a look of waiting defiance which she knew but masked all his familiar artillery.

Instantly she determined to give him no opportunity to use this. She would end matters with a rush. He was awaiting her attack. She would make none.

"I think there is nothing to say," she began quickly. "I could utter certain words, but they would mean one thing to me and other things to you—there is no real communication possible between us. Only remember that this—to-day—matters little—I had already resolved that sooner or later I must go. This only makes it necessary to go at once."

She turned to the door which she had held ajar. At her words he sat forward in his chair, the yellow stars blazing in his eyes. But the opening was not the one he had counted upon, and before he could alter his speech to fit it, or could do more than raise a hand to detain her, she had gone.

He sat back in his chair, calculating how to meet this mood. Then the door resounded under a double knock and Bernal came in.

"Well, old boy, I'll be off to-night. The lawyer is done with me here and now I'll go to Edom and finish what's to be done there. Then in a few days I'll be out of this machine and back to the ranche. You know I've decided that my message to the world would best take the substantial form of beef—a message which no one will esteem unpractical."

He paused, noting the other's general droop of gloom.

"But what's the trouble, old chap? You look done up!"

"Bernal—it's all because I am too good-hearted, too unsuspecting. Being slow to think evil of others, I foolishly assume that others will be equally charitable. And you don't know what women are—you don't know how the sentimental ones impose upon a man in my office. I give you my word of honour as a man—my word of honour, mind you!—there never has been a thing between us but the purest, the most elevated— the loftiest, most ideal——"

"Hold on, old chap—I shall have to take the car ahead, you know, if you won't let me on this one...."

"—as pure a woman as God ever made, while as for myself, I think my integrity of purpose and honesty of character, my sense of loyalty should be sufficiently known——"

"Say, old boy—" Bernal's face had lighted with a sudden flash of insight—"is it—I don't wish to be indiscreet— but is it anything about Mrs. Wyeth?"

"Then you do know?"

"Nothing, except that Nance met me at the door just now and puzzled me a bit by her very curious manner of asking if I had been at the Wyeth's this afternoon."

"What?" The other turned upon him, his eyes again blazing with the yellow points, his whole figure alert. "She asked you that—Really?"

"To be sure!"

"And you said—"

"'No'—of course—and she mumbled something about having been foolish to think I could have been. You know, old man, Nance was troubled. I could see that."

His brother was now pacing the floor, his head bent from the beautifully squared shoulders, his face the face of a mind working busily.

"An idiot I was—she didn't know me—I had only to——"

Bernal interrupted.

"Are you talking to yourself, or to me?"

The rector of St. Antipas turned at one end of his walk.

"To both of us, brother. I tell you there has been nothing between us—never anything except the most flawless idealism. I admit that at the moment Nancy observed us the circumstances were unluckily such that an excitable, morbidly suspicious woman might have misconstrued them. I will even admit that a woman of judicial mind and of unhurried judgments might not unreasonably have been puzzled, but I would tear my heart open to the world this minute—'Oh, be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny!'"

"If I follow you, old chap, Nancy observed some scene this afternoon in which it occurred to her that I might have been an actor." There was quick pain, a sinking in his heart.

"She had reason to know it was one of us—and if I had denied it was I——"

"I see—why didn't you?"

"I thought she must surely have seen me—and besides"—his voice softened with affection—"do you think, old chap, I would have shifted a misunderstanding like that on to your shoulders. Thank God, I am not yet reduced to shirking the penalties of my own blameless acts, even when they will be cruelly misconstrued."

"But you should have done so—It would mean nothing to me, and everything to you—to that poor girl—poor Nance—always so helpless and wondering and so pathetically ready to believe! She didn't deserve that you take it upon yourself, Allan!"

"No—no, don't urge! I may have made mistakes, though I will say that few men of my—well, my attractions! Why not say it bluntly?—few men of my attractions, placed as I have been, would have made so few— but I shall never be found shirking their consequences —it is not in my nature, thank God, to let another bear the burden—I can always be a man!——"

"But, old boy—you must think of poor Nancy— not of me!" Again he felt the hurt of her suspicion.

"True—compassion requires that I think of her rather than of my own pride—and I have—but, you see, it's too late. I committed myself before I knew she didn't know!"

"Let her believe it is still a mistake——"

"No, no—it would be trickery—and it's impracticable —I as good as confessed to her, you see—unless "—he brightened here and stopped in his walk—"unless she could be made to believe that I meant to shield you!"

"That's it! Really, you are an executor, Allan! Now we'll put the poor girl easy in her mind again. I'll tell her you did it to shield me. You know it's important—what Nancy thinks of you, old chap— she's your wife—and—it doesn't matter a bit how meanly—she thinks of me—of course not. I dare say it will be better for me if she does think meanly of me— I'll tell her at once—what was it I did?"

"No—no—she wouldn't believe you now. I dislike to say this, Bernal, but Nancy is not always so trusting as a good woman should be—she has a habit of wondering—but—mind you, I could only consent to this for the sake of her peace of mind——"

"I understand perfectly, old chap—it will help the peace of mind of all of us, I begin to see—hers and mine—and yours."

"Well, then, if she can be made to suspect this other aspect of the affair without being told directly—ah!— here's a way. Turn that messenger-call. Now listen— I will have a note sent here addressed to you by a certain woman. It will be handed to Nancy to give to you. She will observe the writing—and she will recognise it,—she knows it. You will have been anxious about this note—expecting it—inquiring for it, you know. Get your dinner now, then stay in your room so the maid won't see you when the note comes—she will have to ask Nance where you are——"

At dinner, which Bernal had presently with Aunt Bell and two empty seats, his companion regaled him with comments upon the development of the religious instinct in mankind, reminding him that should he ever aspire to a cult of his own he would find Boston a more fertile field than New York.

"They're so much broader there, you know," she began. "Really, they'll believe anything if you manage your effects artistically. And that is the trouble with you, Bernal. You appeal too little to the imagination. You must not only have a novelty to preach nowadays, but you must preach it in a spectacular manner. Now, that assertion of yours that we are all equally selfish is novel and rather interesting—I've tried to think of some one's doing some act to make himself unhappy and I find I can't. And your suggestion of Judas Iscariot and Mr. Spencer as the sole inmates of hell is not without a certain piquancy. But, my dear boy, you need a stage-manager. Let your hair grow, wear a red robe, do healing——"

He laughed protestingly. "Oh, I'm not a prophet, Aunt Bell—I've learned that."

"But you could be, with proper managing. There's that perfectly stunning beginning with that wild healing-chap in the far West. As it is now, you make nothing of it—it might have happened to anybody and it never came to anything, except that you went off into the wilderness and stayed alone. You should tell how you fasted with him in a desert, and how he told you secrets and imparted his healing power to you. Then get the reporters about you and talk queerly so that they can make a good story of it. Also live on rice and speak with an accent—any kind of accent would make you more interesting, Bernal. Then preach your message, and I'd guarantee you a following of thousands in New York in a month. Of course they'd leave you for the next fellow that came along with a key to the book of Revelations, or a new diet or something, but you'd keep them a while."

Aunt Bell paused, enthusiastic, but somewhat out of breath.

"I'll quit, Aunt Bell—that's enough——"

"Mr. Spencer is an example for you. Contrast his hold on the masses with Mrs. Eddy's, who appeals to the imagination. I'm told by those who have read his works that he had quite the knack of logic, and yet the President of Princeton Theological Seminary preaches a sermon in which he calls him 'the greatest failure of the age.' I read it in this morning's paper. His text was, 'Ye believe in God, believe also in me.' You see, there was an appeal to the imagination—the most audacious appeal that the world has ever known —and the crowd will be with this clergyman who uses it to refute the arguments of a man who worked hard through forty years of ill-health to get at the mere dry common-sense of things. If Jesus had descended to logic, he'd never have made a convert. But he appealed magnificently to the imagination, and see the result!"

His mind had been dwelling on Allan's trouble, but now he came back to his gracious adviser.

"You do me good, Aunt Bell—you've taken all that message nonsense out of me. I suppose I could be one of them, you know—one of those fellows that get into trouble—if I saw it was needed; but it isn't. Let the men who can't help it do it—they have no choice. Hereafter I shall worry as little about the world's salvation as I do about my own."

When they had finished dinner he let it be known that he was not a little anxious concerning a message that was late in arriving, and he made it a point, indeed, that the maid should advise Mrs. Linford to this effect, with an inquiry whether she might not have seen the delayed missive.

Then, after a word with Allan, he went to his room and from his south window smoked into the night— smoked into something approaching quietude a mind that had been rebelliously running back to the bare-armed girl in dusky white—the wondering, waiting girl whose hand had trembled into his so long ago—so many years during which he had been a dreaming fool, forgetting the world to worship certain impalpable gods of idealism—forgetting a world in which it was the divinely sensible custom to eat one's candy cane instead of preserving it superstitiously through barren years!

He knew that he had awakened too late for more than a fleeting vision of what would have made his life full. Now he must be off, up the path again, this time knowing certainly that the woman would never more stand waiting and wondering at the end, to embitter his renunciations. The woman was definitely gone. That was something, even though she went with that absurd, unreasoning, womanish suspicion. And he had one free, dear look from her to keep through the empty days.