Chapter VI: Part 6

“Lodilla, that’s a mighty good thing; it’s got good points. You don’t want to stand too close to one of them hand-painted oil pictures, they’re apt to blur, but just get off a piece and they come right out. That lightning artist’s a dandy. Shows what a painter man can do who puts his mind to it and isn’t afraid to work. It must make those fellows who potter over one picture for weeks just sick to see him dash them things off at such a rate. I tell you, Lodilla,” he added with animation, after a pause and further inspection, “it looks like a place on the old farm down home. I’ve set on that rock, or one like it, and fished for bass in just such a hole many of a time.”

Then, as if with inspiration of the instant; “And say, Lodilla”--here he faltered and his voice grew soft--“say, don’t you want to marry me some day and go down there and visit the home place and the old folks?”

It was sudden, but she was equal to the emergency. His arm was around her, and her answer was whispered on his shoulder, but not so low that he could not hear.

* * * * *

When Christmas came, a few weeks later, he gave her a big red plush album with gilt trimmings and a little mirror set in the corner, and she felt that her cup of bliss was full.

The album was a treasure, but Lodilla will value that picture between the windows till the end of her days. It brought her love and Joe. Art education is not always a rapid process. Her children may learn to appreciate picture posters and know what Beardsleyism means, but she will be forever satisfied with her landscape painted in nine minutes as her mother before her was with the chromos.

THE QUICKENING OF A SOUL

A religious revival had been in progress in the churches of Greenbrier, Indiana, for six weeks--that is, in the Methodist, the Baptist and the Presbyterian churches. The Roman Catholics went on calmly with only their usual services, and were regarded with more than the ordinary measure of pity by their Protestant neighbors as persons who had never been properly converted, and were little better than benighted heathen. Episcopalians, too, continued in the even tenor of their way, and had their customary dancing and card parties, which were frowned on with greater sternness than ever by the rigid Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist brethren who had not yet reached the tolerant stage in relation to these amusements attained by members of their denominations in larger cities. Even the young people of these churches who had been wont to think longingly of the forbidden entertainments, and sometimes to participate in them surreptitiously, now looked askance at the frivolous givers of the parties and promised themselves that by the help of the Lord they would never be led into such evil doings again, for these young people were among the fruits of the revival, and had bidden farewell to sin.

Such a wonderful ingathering of souls had not been known before in the history of Greenbrier. The revival movement began simultaneously in the three churches, and almost from the beginning a wave of religious emotion manifested itself. Young and old were affected by it; innocent children and case-hardened sinners succumbed, the first unresistingly, the second reluctantly, to its power. Every night the churches were crowded and every night penitents seeking salvation rose for prayers, or went forward and knelt at the altar as the custom of the respective sects required. Every night numbers of these penitents declared that they had found what they sought, that they had shaken off the bonds of iniquity and had entered upon a new life. Backsliders returned and renewed their faith. The interest was intense. A subdued excitement was in the air and affected the transaction of business and household affairs throughout the town. People hurried through their evening meals in order that they might miss no feature of the coming services. Now, after six weeks, though there was no falling off in attendance, it began to be said that the meetings would soon close. As one pious but practical elder put it, the harvest was gathered, and why go raking over the ground? A few sinners remained unconverted, it was true, but they were seemingly hopeless and must be left to the Lord’s mercy.

On this Friday night of the sixth week as many people as ever hastened along the streets to the places of meeting and the Methodist Church, at least, quickly filled with a congregation as large as at any time during the revival season. People had come to depend on the excitement and dreaded a termination of it. In their narrow village life the meetings took the place of drama and opera and social gayeties, with the addition of a personal and emotional element that such entertainments lack, and that held them through night after night of prayer and exhortation without wearying. A thorough-going revival in a town of this kind has uses not contemplated by its promoters.

Among the later arrivals was a group of young girls who entered a pew not far from the door. There was a little crowding and confusion as they passed in, and if Althea Hood, the youngest member of the party, had been observant of her companions she would have seen that their purpose was to give her a seat next the aisle. She saw nothing and sat contentedly enough, her thoughts absorbed in the scene about her. Althea was not yet sixteen; until these meetings opened she had never attended a religious gathering more exciting than the Sunday morning services in the Episcopal church where she went with her parents, and the regular weekly Presbyterian prayer-meeting to which she had gone with an elderly neighbor on several occasions. Her parents, easy-going and indulgent, after the American fashion, had allowed their young daughter to take her own way, and when she showed herself disinclined to confirmation ceremonies had not insisted, saying to each other it was better that she should choose the bonds she would wear when she was old enough to know her duty to God and her fellow-creatures. So far were they out of sympathy with revival methods that, perhaps, it did not occur to them that their self-contained, unemotional child was likely to be affected by them, and, indeed, she had shown no signs of being so.

One by one her school associates had succumbed to the pleadings of the pastors, evangelists or other workers in the vineyard, had passed through a period of penitence and grief, and had finally declared, in more or less childlike and incoherent phrase, that they felt the burden of sin lifted from their souls and an assurance that they were saved by divine grace. Henceforth they would turn their backs upon the temptations of this world and would love God and praise Him for the rest of their days. So many of these school-mates had professed conversion that at last Althea was the only one of her circle who remained unmoved by the appeals that had so affected the others. She took a deep interest in all the proceedings, but seemed to make no personal application of the exhortations. She watched her companions curiously. That a change of some sort had passed over them was plain. It manifested itself in an increased sedateness of behavior; she was aware, too, in the presence of certain ones, of a pitying condescension, as if she were no longer on an equality with them. Others--two or three--went about with a rapt and radiant air as if, indeed, they had entered upon a new life, and with glorified vision looked out upon a more spiritual world than the unregenerate saw. These she observed somewhat wistfully, but it was at no time borne in upon her that she, too, could share their joy.

She was not self-conscious; had she been so she would have become aware on this Friday night that unusual attention was directed her way. Long after, she learned that she had been regarded by the elder brethren and sisters as a “soul” whose conversion was, for various reasons, much to be desired, and that a determined and concerted effort to break her hitherto unmoved calm was prearranged for that evening.

All these meetings were informal. Some one began to sing, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and the congregation joined in with more than common fervor. It was the old-time tune even more touching than the words. Althea added her clear young voice to the rest as she had done before:

“All my trust on Thee is stayed,
All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.”

As the verse came to an end an elderly sister, passing by, touched Althea softly on the shoulder and whispered:

“You should come, dear, and give yourself to Jesus so you could sing that with your heart.”

An aged brother lifted up his quavering voice in prayer. He was illiterate, but it is piety and not erudition, we must believe, which counts with the Maker of men.

“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “Oh, Lord, there ain’t but a few sinners left in this yer congregation, an’ ef you’ll jest pour out the speret upon us to-night, jest pour it out free, we’ll fetch ’em in. They cain’t stand out agin that power; they’ll realize thet they’re pore an’ needy. Bless us, Lord, bless us right now!”

Then came the pleading hymn:

“Come ye sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love and power;
He is able, He is able,
He is willing, doubt no more.”

The exhortations of the old pastor, commonly so fatherly and gentle, had an almost youthful fire that night. He preached the wrath of God as he had not done in all the weeks. The guilt of the one withholding complete submission was pictured in the darkest colors. Repentance for sin, acceptance of atoning grace, love for the Son, were the only means of averting this wrath. Neither gifts nor praise, neither good works nor clean living, could avail if the doer of righteous things walked not humbly by faith in God. Delay meant death. Let the young yield up their hearts now, or else risk the loss of life eternal.

After him came a young evangelist who was becoming noted for his success as an “awakener.” He was a thin-faced, long-necked young man, spoken of by admiring women as ascetic and spiritual. Discriminating observers would have been apt to class him as dyspeptic and his eloquence as sounding brass; nevertheless, with his peculiarly musical voice and pleading manner he won attention where others failed. Althea Hood had dreamed dreams about this young man. If she had understood the secrets of her own foolish little child-heart she would have been aware that his presence was one of the attractions that had made her attendance so constant at the meetings. She was not in love with him--the sentiment had no such strength as that. She was simply experiencing the first faint flutterings of femininity roused to life by masculine influence.

The evangelist clasped his hands before him in the praying-Samuel position, and tossing back his long mane began to plead with those lambs which had wandered away from the Shepherd’s loving arms. He said nothing of sin or of guilt, repentence or forgiveness. He only called upon the wanderers to come where love, and shelter, and tender care awaited them. He quoted beautiful poetic passages from the Bible and comforting promises; he talked of green pastures and still waters, of light, and life, and love, but love was chiefly his theme. It was divine love, of course, but the speaker’s voice was soft and low; his eyes were directed toward Althea, and she, poor child, thrilled at his tones and only half comprehended his words. In conclusion he held out his hands entreatingly and sang:

“Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven to earth come down;
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy faithful mercies crown.”

These little tenor solos, interspersed through his talks, were distinctive features of his methods and were considered especially effective. The revival spirit was fully aroused now. Song and prayer quickly succeeded each other. Ejaculations of praise and murmurs of ecstatic feeling were heard from all parts of the room in antiphonal likeness. Brethren and sisters, gifted as pleaders, or led by sense of duty to exercise their influence, moved among the congregation, seeking out the few who, as the accepted phrase was, had not yet “confessed Christ.” One after another besought Althea to yield up her heart. Tears fell from the eyes of the old pastor as he urged her to go forward to the “mourners’ bench” and take what might be her last chance for salvation.

They were singing fervently just then:

“Alas, and did my Savior bleed,
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?”

“But I am not a vile sinner,” she protested. “I am not a worm,” and would not go.

Her school-mates who had so lately read their own titles clear added their petitions; her teacher urged upon her the duty of subduing her pride and indifference; women and men for whom she had the greatest respect, came to her and pointed out the strait and narrow path. They left her still unmoved so far as outward indications showed. The young evangelist approached. Her lips set together firmly; her hands, already moving nervously, clenched themselves; the strain was becoming great, but, “I will not go,” she whispered to herself. He reached out his hand. “Come, little sister,” he said. “Come; the Good Shepherd wants this lamb that is outside the fold. Come.” And she arose and followed him.

In front of the pulpit was a long bench at which already were two penitents--an old man who was converted at every revival and as regularly became a backslider when the excitement subsided, and a young man who was commonly spoken of in the community as a “hard case.” She knelt beside them mechanically.

The congregation was singing with great volume of sound, “There’s a Land That Is Fairer Than Day.” The young evangelist turned and lifted his hand. There was silence, and with hands clasped and eyes uplifted he sang “The Ninety and Nine.” It was like a solo by a famous tenor in an opera--a feature of the evening that women, at least, would not have missed for the world. He sang it through, and when he reached the last triumphant strain excitement was at hysterical height:

“But all through the mountains thunder-riven,
And up from the rocky steep,
There rose a cry to the gate of heaven,
‘Rejoice! I have found my sheep!’
And the angels echoed around the throne,
‘Rejoice! for the Lord brings back His own!’”

There was a chorus of amens. “Bless the Lord!” shouted one brother; “Praise His name!” exclaimed another. There were groans and inarticulate cries. A woman uttered a piercing shriek, and falling prone upon the floor in the aisle, lay there like a log. No one heeded her; she had the “power” and would come to herself in good time. Breathing was short and quick; faces were flushed; women and girls wept silently, or with hysterical sobs, as their temperaments constrained them; there was a rhythmical swaying of bodies; some one prayed loudly but no one heard; the amens, the groans, and the bless-God’s were still louder. Althea, half terrified by the tempest of emotion about her, her self-control broken at last, sobbed convulsively.

A mother in Israel knelt beside her and entreated her to open her heart and let love and forgiveness come in. The old man at the mourners’ bench rose with a joyful shout and announced that he felt to rejoice that he had once more been anointed with the oil of gladness and had obtained forgiveness for his sins.

“Come let us anew our journey pursue” began a voice near by, and the congregation took up the strain.

The young man, who was a hard case, rose and stammeringly declared that he had given his heart to God and hoped, by His help, to live a Christian life from that time on.

As suddenly as Althea’s tears had begun they ceased and her excitement was over. She rose to her feet just as her favorite hymn was being sung--favorite, because of the pathetic minor cadences, not the words whose sentiment was beyond her experience yet. Unconscious as a bird, she joined in:

“Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God! I come.”

The brethren and sisters near the front pressed around her with congratulations. The pastor took her hand and patted it, his face beaming.

“My daughter, I knew there was a blessing for you if you would take it. Add your word of testimony now.”

“But I did not mean,” she said with startled emphasis. “I am not--I have not had a blessing.”

They saw her lips move, but no one listened to her words, and the song drowned them:

“Hallelujah ’tis done! I believe on the Son,
I am saved by the blood of the crucified One!”

Following this triumphant outburst came the joyful hymn:

“How happy are they
Who their Savior obey,
And have laid up their treasures above!
Tongue can not express
The sweet comfort and peace
Of a soul in its earliest love!”

She was counted among the converts. The pastor thanked God for her in his prayer, and was a shade less enthusiastic in thanks for the rescue of the backslider and the hard case.

Althea did not join in the singing of the doxology. All at once a meaning seemed to come into the words which hardly had a meaning to her before.

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

Could she really praise God? Praise Him for what?

As she passed slowly down the crowded aisle hands were stretched from every side to grasp hers in the kindly Methodist fashion; many a blessing was invoked upon her by the older brethren and sisters; younger friends said they were glad she had become one of them. She only smiled faintly and was silent. Silence seemed cowardly, but how could she tell them that it was not true, that she had experienced no change of heart, that she was the same in every way that she had been the day before? Or could it be, and she grasped at the thought, could it be that a change had come and she did not know it? She had been excited, had wept and then become calm like all her newly converted friends. Then her eyes fell upon the hard case as he met his mother--an old woman with care-worn, tear-stained face, transfigured, now, with joy. His reckless, defiant expression had given way to a look of--what was it?--determination, gladness, high endeavor? She felt that he had attained something she had not and her hopeful thought for herself vanished.

Pressed by the crowd into the angle of a doorway she heard the young evangelist say in confidential tone to a leading member: “In this business you have to make a study of people. Different methods must be worked on old and young men, old women and young ones. Not many’ll hold out if you go at ’em in the right way. I felt sure I’d fetch the Hood girl. You know they say I have a taking way with the ladies,” and he laughed foolishly.

“I’m powerful glad ye fetched her, it makes the even one hundred and fifty--I don’t count the other two who went for’ard to-night, they won’t stick--and one hundred and fifty is a mighty good showing in a town like this; they’ll build up the church amazing. Besides, her father, Colonel Hood, ’ll be madder’n a hornet. He don’t b’lieve in religious revivals. He’s ’Piscopal.”

The old man chuckled in an ungodly way. Althea, hurrying by, felt, with the changing impulse of youth, that she hated them both, and, with mist of romance suddenly and cruelly cleared, she saw the evangelist as a lean, lank, commonplace, self-conceited youth, and an innocent, girlish ideal of manliness was forever gone.

It was not a happy frame of mind for a new convert.

* * * * *

A few months after the revival, which remains famous in the annals of Greenbrier, life began for Althea Hood. This first experience of life grew out of acquaintance with death. The destroyer came suddenly to her father, not yet an old man. Under the shock the mother drooped and soon followed her husband.

Althea, with the bewilderment which comes to the young who encounter the great mystery, mourned and suffered as only the young do--without the philosophy, the resignation, sometimes the peace and hope that bereavement brings to age. Pious friends talked to her of the duty of submission--she was still rebellious; of God’s love--she did not know their meaning. The experience of the revival had left her without religious feeling; it was as if her heart, which might have unfolded as naturally to spiritual truth as a rose opens under sun and dew, had ceased to grow, like a bud when torn apart by rough hands.

Life was not easy. Poverty was her portion, and a home with uncongenial relatives until school days were past and she became a teacher among new scenes and new people in the capital of the state.

There are teachers who profess to love their calling for its own sake. Being truthful in other matters they must be believed in this. Althea Hood was not one of these. She found teaching irksome, and when David Phillips asked her to marry him she promptly said yes, and gladly gave up her work.

Althea loved her husband with as deep an affection as she was capable of entertaining at her stage of development.

In occasional moments of introspection Althea realized that she did not have that absorbing, overwhelming affection for him that novelists’ heroines entertain for their chosen lovers, but satisfied herself with the theory that such ardent emotions did not belong to real life.

David Phillips was a prosperous, energetic business man several years older than she--a quiet, self-contained person who smiled indulgently over his young wife’s æsthetic tastes, her fondness for poetry and romance, her little outbursts of sentiment, her feminine ways in general. If he did not seem to sympathize he, at least, did not antagonize, and she was fairly content in her little daily round. There were the housekeeping and social duties, the music, the reading, the various odds and ends that fill the time of the woman who has no ambitions outside her home, no consciousness of work to be done there--these made up her routine. There were no ecstacies, no deep emotions; it was a narrow life, and yet a day came when she looked back to this period of peace as one of enviable bliss. There are but few heights of joy in any life, and, in most, many depths of grief, so it may be that the dead level of calm content, the absence of emotion, is the happiness to be chosen--if choice were in human power.

Althea attended church during this time. It was respectable to do so; it had been her early habit, and, besides, the beauty of the Episcopal ritual pleased her. She could join in the prayer, “Have mercy upon us miserable sinners,” with an intellectual pleasure in the sonorousness of the response, but with as little understanding of heart as when the brethren at the revival besought her to seek forgiveness for sin. But though she did not comprehend, sometimes she wondered if all those who joined in the prayers were as unmoved as she, and, if not, what secret they possessed that she did not.

Then, one happy day, a new interest entered into her life. Her baby came and her soul began to grow. It is not always so, though it is the fashion to talk of mothers as gifted with a world of new spiritual and moral graces. To those who look on, it too often seems that motherhood means a narrowing of vision and an intensity of selfishness. But Althea’s horizon widened. With her own child in her arms she looked out upon a new world. Her eyes were suddenly opened to the needs of other little ones. A vast pity filled her heart for the waifs, the hapless creatures who are born to poverty and know suffering almost with their first breath. “The cry of the children” appealed to her as it had never done before. Her eyes once open, it was strange what vistas of both joy and sorrow spread before them; she questioned why she had not seen these things before.

Her little son waxed fat and fair. He was the delight of her days; waking and sleeping he was in her dreams. She rejoiced in his infantile graces, but her thoughts ran on and on and pictured him as he should be as time went by--the sturdy lad loved by his playmates, the youth excelling his companions in all noble undertakings, the strong, proud man honored by the world, but through all the changes her own dear son, still loving and true.

Her husband looked on, pleased at the sight of the maternal joy, the look a little wistful at times, perhaps, because the wife was so lost in the mother that he seemed half forgotten and quite unessential to her happiness.

Then one terrible day the baby died, the little child who had lacked no care that love could give. Out of the mother’s arms they took the fair dimpled body for the last time; they folded the rose-leaf hands that would flutter upon her bosom no more; they took him away, the life of her life, and laid him under the flowers.

Is there agony for any human creature greater than that of the mother bereaved?

She mourned in bitterness and without hope. Between her and the “land that is fairer than day,” the land of which she once sang so unthinkingly, rose a wall through which came no answer to her resentful cries. In her wretchedness she turned against her husband. She fancied that he was not sympathetic, that he really missed their child but little. She brooded over this imaginary trouble in addition to the genuine woe and brought herself into such a state of antagonism that nothing he could do pleased her, and she withdrew her companionship from him to a degree that left him bewildered and helpless. He ascribed her irritability and coldness to her recent bereavement. It was really one of those critical situations that occur in most married lives before the art of living together in harmony has been mastered. The little rift may close itself or become a chasm never to be bridged.

David recommended change of scene. Would she go south and get the early spring breezes? Would she come with him on a trip to New York which business compelled him to take? Would she go anywhere her fancy preferred and win back health to mind and nerves? These were questions he asked her, but to all she coldly answered “no.” She “wished to be alone,” she said, and he left her reluctantly.

Scarcely had he started on his journey when a thing happened the like of which has been known to occur among people we hear of; people of whom our friends know and, whispering, tell the tale. A woman called to see Althea--a woman who had possibly been comely at one time in her life but was no longer, a creature unprepossessing enough now. With her was a child two or three years old. It was not a pleasant story she told, but she told it in a way convincing to her hearer. She was the woman, she said, who should have been David Phillips’s wife; the child was hers and his, but he had cast them both off. They were in want; would Mrs. Phillips help them?

She gave the woman money and sent her away in haste, telling her never to return, and that she did not believe her story; but she never doubted its truth for a moment. Would a woman, even a lost creature, advertise her shame needlessly? She had never dreamed that her husband, David Phillips, had ever been other than upright and honorable, and had heard and thought but little in her life about evil of this sort. But she had seen that David was changed; he was growing more quiet and reticent every day. Perhaps he was losing his love for her, and he had not seemed to care when the baby died. Her little son! And he was the father of her son.

A whirlwind of rage swept over her at the thought that he had covered the memory of this lost darling with shame, that he had brought humiliation upon her. How could she go on and live in the same world with him and with--those others. A wild impulse to take herself out of it came to her; a vision of the river, deep and dark, rose temptingly.

Her wrath turned against the man who had deceived her. At times she longed for him to be there that she might face him with her knowledge of his iniquity; then, with revulsion of feeling, rejoiced at his absence. No one seeing her then could charge her with being unemotional. Vindictive passion stirred her one hour, shame weighed her down the next, then followed a wave of grief for the vanished days of peace. Life was not the joyous thing it had seemed in the old Greenbrier days; now, she knew that it meant tears, and heartache, and sorrows worse than death. She wrote brief notes in reply to her husband’s letters. Why she postponed writing him that their lives could not go on together she hardly knew, since she had determined to send such a letter. One day she began the task. Before she had finished illumination came. She knew suddenly that she loved the man she was preparing to put out of her life--loved him in spite of his sins, of his wrong to herself, loved him with an intensity she had not dreamed of when she married him. It was not the love she had read of and had not thought to experience, it was a thousand times stronger. She did not want it so; she resented the truth and would have denied it to herself but could not.

For days she fought with her impulses, and then resisted them no longer. She was too frank and transparent to dream of concealing her knowledge of the wretched secret, and, besides, she had conceived a plan whose carrying out involved mutual explanation and consultations.

With trembling haste, now that she had resolved upon a course, she wrote the letter telling him her story of the woman and child, of her grief and resentment, and, finally, of her love and willingness to forgive and receive him back. Then she added--it was the crowning bit of self-sacrifice--“I want to provide for the child; if you like, I will find it and bring it home.”

She sent the letter and waited. With all her spirit of forgiveness and her impatience for his return she was not unmindful of the fact that she was doing an unusual thing, one he would have no right to expect, a truly Christian act. Indeed, the spirit of condescension, of goodness stooping to the sinner, was manifest in the letter.

She did not know where the woman and child might be found, but spent those days of waiting in wandering about a quarter of the city she had known but little of, thinking that by chance she might find them. Once she caught a glimpse of the woman in a passing street car--a hard-faced creature in tawdry garb she looked in the pitiless sunlight.

Hurrying home, a little belated, one evening, she was driven by a sudden spring shower to the nearest shelter, which chanced to be a dilapidated warehouse, hardly more than a shed, from whose open door the sound of singing issued. By the dim and flickering light of a few lanterns hung about she saw a motley company seated on improvised benches, or standing next the wall. There were men who looked like tramps and others, better clothed, who might be worse. There were women who might be honest mothers of families, others who as surely were not. Unwholesome looking children of various ages looked curiously on.

But one voice was heard; evidently the crowd was not familiar with the words of the song. The man standing by an upturned box with a cheap glass lamp upon it was the singer. “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood,” was the hymn; he sang one stanza through alone. As he began the second a woman joined in in a thin, uncertain soprano:

“The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
And there may I, though vile as he,
Wash all my sins away,
Wash all my sins away.”

With the third verse the woman stopped and sat down, sobbing loudly, but not before Althea had seen her face; it was that of the woman she was seeking.

The man by the box began to speak in a low, conversational tone. As he stepped out of the shadow into the light of the lamp she recognized, with a start of surprise, the “hard case” of the Greenbrier revival. He did not look like a hard case now. He was shabbily dressed, but his thin, dark face wore an expression of earnestness, of absorbed interest, of what even seemed like love for the people about him.

“I was vile, like that thief,” he said; “I defied God. I cared nothing for Him; I believed He cared nothing for me. I broke His laws recklessly and rejoiced in my wickedness, or I pretended to rejoice, though I could never quite quiet the pricks of conscience, for I knew better. I had a mother who loved me and prayed for me. One day I suddenly saw all my guilt and was without hope, but light came and forgiveness even to me--to me!--to me!--and since that day ‘redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.’”

Then he pleaded with his hearers in impassioned but simple language to leave their sins and live good lives for the sake of the One who died upon the cross, for their own sakes, for the sake of those about them. It was not a sermon; it was not even a connected discourse; it was neither learned nor logical, but it was a cry from the heart, and the listeners knew it and were moved accordingly.

Althea knew that she had encountered again the mysterious something which had passed her by. The hard case whose conversion at Greenbrier had been so lightly regarded that he was not counted in by the revivalists when they “made up their jewels,” had found there the spiritual gift that made him a new man. Sometimes she had suspected that those who professed to have consciously won this blessing deceived themselves, but there was something genuine here. But she could not speculate on this now. She stepped to the side of the yellow-haired girl and touched her arm.

“Where is your baby?” she whispered. The girl looked up with red eyes, stupidly. “My baby?” she repeated wonderingly, and then comprehended. Through the artificial color on her cheeks a genuine red showed. She dropped her head and then lifted it and looked straight in Althea’s eyes.

“I have no baby, lady; I never had. I was just fooling you. I wanted money. I never knew your husband only by name, and he never saw or heard of me, I reckon. I read in the paper that he’d gone to New York. I wanted money, and I’d seen you, and I guessed you were, well--an easy mark, and so I fixed up the story. I thought you looked, too, as if you had no sympathy for such as me, and maybe that made me pick on you to give you a little trouble instead of another. You didn’t know a body could be so wicked, did you? The baby is Mrs. Caffrey’s, across the street. His mother’s good to me and lets me take care of him when she goes washing. I’ve been a bad girl, lady, but I’m going to be better. I’ll pay you back that money some day.”

But Mrs. Phillips was gone. She flew across the street. The door of the two-room shanty was open and she stepped in after a hasty knock. The baby--she would have known it anywhere--lay asleep on a bed; a woman stood at a table ironing.

“Are you Mrs. Caffrey, and whose baby is this?” asked the visitor.

“Oim Mrs. Caffrey, and thot boy is mine, born in howly wedlock, av ye plaze, an’ wud have a father this blessed minute av ut hadn’t bin for the haythenish shtame cars thot wudn’t shtop to rouse up a man who’d set down on the thrack to rest as he was comin’ from a wake. An’ phwat wud ye be likin’ to know for, ma’am?”

“It isn’t Maggie Miller’s baby?”

“Maggie Miller--the likes av her! My little Patsy asked av his mother was an ondacent famale--him that had an honest father married to his mother by the praste. Och, the impident question! Maggie, she’s got no baby, betther’s her luck. Not thot Maggie’s so bad, poor body. She’s good to little Patsy, an’ she’s over now helpin’ thot preacher man sing the hymns she used to hear in the counthry when she was a betther gurrl. She’d be betther askin’ the Howly Mother to shpake for her, an’ be confessin’ her sins to Father Ryan; but av this warehouse religion kapes her from divilmint it’s not the likes av me to shpake ill av it. But phwat is it, leddy?”

The lady, with a strange look on her face, apologized confusedly for her visit and hurried up the street, Mrs. Caffrey peering after her and talking volubly to herself. Her mind was in a tumult. She had condemned her husband on the first charge against him, without question and without giving him a chance for defense. She had emphasized the injury by offering to extend pardon to him. Pardon! When she was the one to need forgiveness! And he was away and she wanted to see him at once.

In the morning came a message. There had been a railroad accident at a junction fifty miles away. David Phillips had been seriously hurt. Would she come?

She was on the train in an hour. It seemed years since the calm, uneventful period of her early married life when she had sometimes fancied that she was born with a limited capacity for emotion. She knew better now; depths had been sounded and were stirred. She had learned what love and suffering meant, and more suffering was before her. The thing that most bewildered her was being suddenly and unquestionably in the wrong. She had been accustomed always to be right, or to think herself so. She had never been a suppliant to God or man. She wondered if she had been self-righteous, and was filled with sudden humility. She was ready to humble herself before man, at least. The train did not move fast enough. Would David forgive her? Would she reach him in time?

She found him at a farm-house with a broken leg and many bruises, but he would live. She had long explanations to make, but as she knelt by his side could only gasp:

“I was wrong; it was not true; I was mistaken.”

He drew her face to his, and she knew pardon was hers, and love.

“It hurt me, sweetheart, that you believed the story,” he whispered, faintly, “but when you were ready to take me back in spite of what you believed, when you could forgive such a wrong, I knew you loved me--and--and I had been afraid.”

He closed his eyes with a look of utter peace and the doctors decreed silence, but she sat by his side through the day, nor knew that the hours were long.

The miracle of spring was being wrought upon the world. But yesterday the trees had been bare; to-day in the sunshine their buds had burst into green, the peach trees were pink with bloom, the dandelions shone yellow in the grass. A sense of growth, of transformation, was in the very air.

What comes so suddenly to buds and flowers may come to the human soul.

Under the sod and through the harsh reign of frosts and snows the way had been prepared for the wonder of the trees. Motherhood, bereavement and tears, injured love and humiliation, and the later happiness had done their silent work upon the woman nature. The time had come for a new birth.

In the dusk she left David and wandered down a grassy lane. In the western sky beyond the broad prairie, the gorgeous tints of the sunset faded into blue and pearl. The soft, damp air brought the smell of the fresh earth from the newly plowed field; a spicy odor from a wild apple tree, now a mass of pale pink, was wafted to her. A robin chirped sleepily among the young maple leaves overhead. The tender, elusive charm of the season of growth was all about her. But was it only this that so moved her, she vaguely wondered. She had known the joy of spring before, and it was not like this. Her soul seemed lifted up. She felt dimly that a greater glory than she had known was just beyond.

Inside the open door of a little cottage down the lane a woman sat by a lamp sewing and singing. Her voice rose sweet and clear:

“Just as I am--though tossed about.
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
With fears within and foes without--
O Lamb of God, I come!”

All her life she had been familiar with the hymns that expressed the thoughts of the world seeking God--hymns of penitence, of agony, of peace and praise, of ecstatic worship--and she had not known their meaning. All at once light came. She lifted up her arms.

“O Lamb of God! O Lamb of God!” she whispered. The cloud that had obscured her spiritual sight lifted. She saw herself an imperfect human creature, but, with all her faults and frailties, an atom of the divine essence; her little life a part of the divine plan; her sorrows and trials the discipline inflicted by love. Before her suddenly appeared her lost child, the child she had mourned without hope, a glorified vision. Its baby hands beckoned her; its sweet lips smiled. Love for child and husband, the old earthly love, filled her bosom with a power she had not known, but there was a love greater than this. Could that be hers, also?

She tried to pray, but could not form her thoughts. Was that a touch upon her hair, a whisper in her ear? Surely she heard the words:

“Come unto Me all ye that are heavy laden.” She stood trembling as in a holy presence. Her face turned toward the sky.

“O Lamb of God--O Lamb of God, I come.”

He heard in heaven. Joy enfolded her as a garment. Divine peace fell upon her. Her soul was born.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.