Her voice had faltered again, and the pallor of weariness which spread grayly over her face frightened Lois. She shivered, and wrung her hands sharply together.
"Oh," she said, "I would do anything in the world for you--but--but"--
"But this is all I want," interrupted the other eagerly. "Promise this, and I am content to die. When he asks you--oh, my dear, my dear, promise me to say yes!"
Lois had hidden her face in the pillow. "It was all my fault," she was saying to herself; "it is the only atonement I can make."
"I will do anything you want me to," she said at last.
Mrs. Forsythe, laid her shaking hand on the girl"s bowed head. "Oh, look at me! You give me life when you say that. Will you promise to say yes, Lois?"
She lifted her head, but she would not look into Mrs. Forsythe"s eyes.
"Yes," she answered, twisting her fingers nervously together. "I promise if--if he wants me."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" Mrs. Forsythe said, and then, to Lois"s horror, she burst into tears. She tried to say it was joy, and Lois must not be frightened, but the young girl fled for Mrs. Dale, and then ran up to the garret, and locked the door.
She went over to the western window and threw herself upon the floor, her face hidden in her arms.
"He made me do it," she said between her sobs; "he said it was my fault.
Well, I have made up for it now. I have atoned. I have promised."
She was too miserable even to take the satisfaction which belongs to youth, of observing its own wretchedness. She sobbed and cried without consciousness of tears. At last, for very weariness and exhaustion, she fell asleep, and was wakened by hearing Mrs. Dale rap sharply at the door.
"Come, Lois, come!" she cried. "What"s the matter? d.i.c.k Forsythe is here.
Do have politeness enough to come down-stairs. I don"t know but that his mother is a shade better, but she has had a chance to die twice over, the time he"s been getting here!"
CHAPTER XXI.
The news of the anxiety in Ashurst hurried Helen"s visit. She might be of use, she thought, and she had better go now than a week later.
Perhaps, too, she felt the necessity of calm. She had been forced into a tumult of discussion and argument, which at last she had begun to meet with the silence of exhaustion. Elder Dean had come to see her, and she had received him at first with patience, and given him her reasons for not believing in h.e.l.l. There had even been a moment when Helen fancied that she might convince him of what was so clear and simple to her own mind. But to each argument of hers he had but one reply,--"The Bible, ma"am, the Word of G.o.d, instructs us" thus or thus,--and he returned again and again with unwearied obstinacy to his own position. After a while Helen"s annoyance at the man got the better of her judgment, and she wrote to him, saying she did not wish to argue with him again, and must beg him not to come to the parsonage to see her.
Mr. Grier, too, horrified at his wife"s reports of what Mrs. Ward had said, hastened to Lockhaven to reproach and admonish John for permitting such heresy in his household; for Mr. Grier held with St. Paul that the husband was head of the wife, even to the extent of regulating her conscience. John was not at home, so he turned his attack upon the real offender, a.s.suring her that it was for her soul"s sake that he thus dealt with her. Helen had brought the interview to a sudden close by refusing to hear further argument, and bowing Mr. Grier from the room, with a certain steady look from under her level brows and a compression of the lips which, greatly to his surprise when he thought it over, silenced him.
The talks with John could not, of course, be called painful, for they were with him, but they were futile.
When the last evening came before she was to leave home, Helen knew, with a dull pain of helpless remorse, that it was a relief to go; she was glad that she could not hear Elder Dean"s voice for a fortnight, or even know, she said with a pathetic little laugh to her husband, that she "was destroying anybody"s hope of h.e.l.l, in the parish."
"Yes," John answered, "it will be good for you to be away from it all for a time. It is hard to think clearly, hurried by my impatient anxiety to have you reach a certain conclusion. I realize that. But I know you will try to reach it, dearest."
Helen shook her head wearily. "No, I am afraid I cannot promise that. You must not hope that I shall ever come to believe in eternal d.a.m.nation. Of course I believe that the consequences of sin are eternal; the effect upon character must be eternal, and I should think that would be h.e.l.l enough, sometimes. But I shall never, never believe in it as you do."
"Oh, Helen," her husband said, "I cannot cease to hope while I have power to pray."
Helen sighed. "I wish you could understand how useless it is, dearest, or how it hurts me, this talk of h.e.l.l. For people to be good for fear of h.e.l.l is like saying "Honesty is the best policy;" it is degrading. And it seems selfish to me, somehow, to think so much about one"s own salvation,--it is small, John. The scheme of salvation that the elders talk so much about really resolves itself into a fear of h.e.l.l and hope of heaven, all for the individual soul, and isn"t that selfish? But after all, this question of eternal punishment is such a little thing, so on the outside of the great puzzle. One goes in, and in: Why is sin, which is its own punishment, in the world at all? What does it all mean, anyhow? Where is G.o.d, and why does He let us suffer here, with no certainty of a life hereafter? Why does He make love and death in the same world? Oh, that is so cruel,--love and death together! Is He, at all? Those are the things, it seems to me, one has to think about. But why do I go all over it? We can"t get away from it, can we?"
"Those questions are the outgrowth of unbelief in justice," he said eagerly; "if you only realized justice and mercy, the rest would be clear."
She came over to him, and, kneeling down, put her head on his knee. "Oh, John, how can I leave you to-morrow?"
It was true that they could not drop the subject. Hour after hour they had sat thus, John instructing, proving, reasoning, with always the tenderest love and patience in his voice. Helen listening with a sweet graciousness, which kept her firm negations from making her husband hopeless. He had showed her, that Sunday evening after the sermon on foreign missions, what he felt had been his awful sin: he had deprived his people of the bread of life for her sake, and, for fear of jarring the perfect peace of their lives and giving her a moment"s unhappiness, he had shrunk from his duty to her soul.
At first Helen had been incredulous. She could not realize that her mere unbelief in any doctrine, especially such a doctrine as this of eternal punishment, could be a matter of serious importance to her husband. It needed an effort to treat his argument with respect. "What does it matter?" she kept saying. "We love each other, so never mind what we believe. Believe anything you want, darling. I don"t care! Only love me, John. And if my ideas offend your people, let us leave Lockhaven; or I can keep silence, unless I should have to speak for what seems to me truth"s sake."
And then John tried to show her how he had wronged his people and been false to his own vows and that he dared not leave them until he had rooted out the evil his own neglect had allowed to grow up among them, and that her mere silence would not reach the root of the evil in her own soul. And the importance of it!
"Oh," he cried, once, when they had been talking until late into the night, "is not your soul"s life of importance, Helen? When I see you going down to eternal death because I have failed in my duty to you, can I satisfy myself by saying, We love one another? Because I love you, I cannot be silent. Oh, I have wronged you, I have not loved you enough!
I have been content with the present happiness of my love,--my happiness!
I had no thought of yours."
So they had gone over and over the subject, until to Helen it seemed threadbare, and they sat now in the dusky library, with long stretches of silence between their words.
Alfaretta brought in the lamps. In view of Mrs. Ward"s departure for a fortnight, her father, still with an eye to wages, deferred giving notice. "Besides," he thought, "Mrs. Ward may be convicted and converted after she"s been dealt with."
Helen had risen, and was writing some instructions for her maid: just what was to be cooked for the preacher, and what precautions taken for his comfort. As she put her pen down, she turned to look at her husband.
He was sitting, leaning forward, with his head bowed upon his hand, and his eyes covered.
"Helen," he said, in a low, repressed voice, "once more, just once more, let me entreat you; and then we will not speak of this before you go."
She sighed. "Yes, dearest, say anything you want."
There was a moment"s silence, and then John rose, and stood looking down at her. "I have such a horror of your going away. I do not understand it; it is more than the grief and loneliness of being without you for a few days. It is vague and indefinable, but it is terribly real. Perhaps it is the feeling that atonement for my sin towards you is being placed out of my reach. You will be where I cannot help you, or show you the truth. Yet you will try to find it! I know you will. But now, just this last night, I must once more implore you to open your heart to G.o.d"s Spirit. Ah, my Helen, I have sinned against Heaven and before you, but my punishment will be greater than I can bear if I enter heaven without you! Heaven? My G.o.d, it would be h.e.l.l! The knowledge that my sin had kept you out--yet even as I speak I sin."
He was walking up and down the room, his hands knotted in front of him, and his face filled with hopeless despair.
"Yes, I sin even in this, for my grief is not that I have sinned against G.o.d in my duty to his people and in forgetting Him, but that I may lose you heaven, I may make you suffer!"
Helen came to him, and tried to put her arms about him. "Oh, my dear,"
she said, "don"t you understand? I have heaven now, in your love. And for the rest,--oh, John, be content to leave it in Hands not limited by our poor ideas of justice. If there is a G.o.d, and He is good, He will not send me away from you in eternity; if He is wicked and cruel, as this theology makes Him, we do not want his heaven! We will go out into outer darkness together."
John shuddered. "Lay not this sin to her charge," she heard him say; "she knows not what she says. Yet I--Oh, Helen, that same thought has come to me. You seemed to make my heaven,--you; and I was tempted to choose you and darkness, rather than my G.o.d. Sin, sin, sin,--I cannot get away from it. Yet if I could only save you! But there again I distrust my motive: not for G.o.d"s glory, but for my own love"s sake, I would save you. My G.o.d, my G.o.d, be merciful to me a sinner!"
In his excitement, he had pushed her arm from his shoulder, and stood in tense and trembling silence, looking up, as though listening for an answer to his prayer.
Helen dared not speak. There is a great gulf fixed between the nearest and dearest souls when in any spiritual anguish; even love cannot pa.s.s it, and no human tenderness can fathom it. Helen could not enter into this holiest of holies, where her husband"s soul was prostrate before its Maker. In the solitude of grief and remorse he was alone.
It was this isolation from him which broke her calm. It seemed profane even to look upon his suffering. She shrank away from him, and hid her face in her hands. That roused him, and in a moment the old tenderness enveloped her.
He comforted her with silent love, until she ceased to tremble, and looked again into his tender eyes.
"What I wanted to say," he said, after a while, when she was leaning quietly against his breast, "was just to tell you once more the reasons for believing in this doctrine which so distresses you, dearest. To say, in a word, if I could, why I lay such stress upon it, instead of some of the other doctrines of the church. It is because I do believe that salvation, eternal life, Helen, depends upon holding the doctrine of reprobation in its truth and entirety. For see, beloved: deny the eternity of punishment, and the scheme of salvation is futile. Christ need not have died, a man need not repent, and the whole motive of the gospel is false; revelation is denied, and we are without G.o.d and without hope. Grant the eternity of punishment, and the beauty and order of the moral universe burst upon us: man is a sinner, and deserves death, and justice is satisfied; for, though mercy is offered, it is because Christ has died. And his atonement is not cheapened by being forced upon men who do not want it. They must accept it, or be punished."
Helen looked up into his face with a sad wonder. "Don"t you see, dear,"