Mr. Denner could not keep his thoughts from his puzzle. Supper-time came, and he was still struggling to reach a conclusion. He carved the cold mutton with more than usual precision, and ate it in anxious abstraction.
The room was chilly; draughts from the narrow windows made the lamp flare, and the wind from under the closed door raised the carpet in swells along the floor. He did not notice Willie, who kept his hands in his pockets for warmth, and also because he had nothing for them to do.
When Mr. Denner rang for Mary, the boy said with anxious politeness, "Was--was the mutton good, sir?"
Willie had been well brought up,--he was not to speak unless spoken to; but under the press of hunger nature rebelled, for his uncle, in his absorption, had forgotten to help him to anything.
Mr. Denner carved some meat for the child, and then sat and watched him with such gloomy eyes, that Willie was glad to finish and push his chair back for prayers.
The table was cleared, and then Mary put the Bible in front of Mr.
Denner, and Jay"s "Morning and Evening Exercises," open at the proper day. Two candles in ma.s.sive candlesticks on either side of his book gave an unsteady light, and when they flickered threw strange shadows on the ceiling. The frames which held the paintings of Mr. Denner"s grandparents loomed up dark and forbidding, and Mary, who always sat with her arms rolled in her ap.r.o.n and her head bowed upon her ample breast, made a grotesque shadow, which danced and bobbed about on the door of the pantry. Mary generally slept through prayers, while for Willie it was a time of nervous dread. The room was so dark, and his uncle"s voice so strange and rolling, the little fellow feared to kneel down and turn his back to the long table with its ghastly white cloth; his imagination pictured fearful things stealing upon him from the mysterious s.p.a.ce beneath it, and his heart beat so he could scarcely hear the words of the prayer. But Mr. Denner enjoyed it. Not, however, because prayer was the expression of his soul; family prayer was merely a dignified and proper observance. Mr. Denner would not; have omitted it any more than he would have neglected Sunday morning service; but he was scarcely more aware of the words than Willie or Mary were. It was the reading which gave Mr.
Denner so much pleasure.
Perhaps the cases he had never pleaded, the dramatic force which he secretly longed to exert, expended themselves in the sonorous chapters of Isaiah or in the wail of Jeremiah. Indeed, the thought had more than once occurred to Mr. Denner that the rector, who read the service with cheerful haste, might improve in his own delivery, could he listen to the eloquence under which Mary and little Willie sat every evening.
To-night it was the victory of Jephtha. The reading proceeded as usual: Mary slumbered tranquilly at her end of the room; Willie counted the number of panes of gla.s.s in the window opposite him, and wondered what he should do if suddenly a white face should peer in at him out of the darkness; Mr. Denner had reached the vow that whatsoever should first meet Jephtha,--when, with his hand extended, his eyebrows drawn together, and his whole att.i.tude expressing the anxiety and fear of the conqueror, he stopped abruptly. Here was an inspiration!
Mary woke with a start. "Is it a stroke?" she exclaimed. But Willie, with one frightened look at the window and the long table, slipped from his chair to kneel, thinking the reading was over. The sound of his little copper-toed boots upon the floor aroused Mr. Denner; he frowned portentously. "_So Jephtha pa.s.sed over unto the children of Ammon_,"
he read on, "_to fight against them, and the Lord delivered them into his hands_."
When prayers were ended, however, and he was sitting in his library alone, he said with a subdued glee, "That is the way to do it,--the one I see first!" And Mr. Denner went to bed with a quiet mind, and the peace which follows the decision of a momentous question.
CHAPTER XI.
The cold that winter was more persistent and severe in the mountains than down in Ashurst.
At Lockhaven the river had been frozen over for a month, even above the bridge and the mills, where the current was swiftest. Long lines of sawdust, which had been coiling and whirling in the eddies, or stretching across the black seething water, were caught in the ice, or blown about with the powdered snow over its surface.
Rafts could not come down the river, so the mills had no work to do, for the logs on hand at the beginning of the cold snap had been sawed into long rough planks, and piled in the lumber-yards, ready to be rafted as soon as the thaw came. The cold, still air was sweet with the fragrance of fresh pine boards, and the ground about the mills was covered with sawdust, so that footsteps fell as silently as though on velvet, instead of ringing sharp against the frozen ground.
John Ward, walking wearily home from a long visit to a sick woman, came, as he crossed the lumber-yards, upon a group of raftsmen; they had not heard his approach, and were talking loudly, with frequent bursts of drunken laughter.
It was towards evening; the sky had been threatening all day, and when the clouds lifted suddenly in the west, blown aside like tumultuous folds of a gray curtain, the red sun sent a flood of color across the wintry landscape; the bare branches of the trees were touched with light, and the pools of black, clear ice gleamed with frosty fire. John"s face had caught the radiance.
He had come up to the men so silently that he had been standing beside them a moment before they noticed him, and then Tom Davis, with a start of drunken fear, tried to hide the bottle which he held.
"d.a.m.n you, mate, you"re spillin" it!" cried one of the others, making an unsteady lunge forward to seize the bottle.
"Let up, let up," said Tom thickly. "Don"t ye see the preacher?" Though Davis was not one of his flock, he had the same reverence for the preacher which his congregation felt. All Lockhaven loved and feared John Ward.
John had not spoken, even though a little boy, building block houses on a heap of sawdust near the men, had come up and taken his hand with a look of confident affection.
The man who had saved the whiskey stumbled to his feet, and leaning against a pile of lumber stood open-mouthed, waiting for the preacher"s rebuke; but Davis hung his head, and began to fumble for a pipe in his sagging coat pocket; with clumsy fingers, scattering the tobacco from his little bag, he tried to fill it.
"Tom," the preacher said, at last, "I want you to come home with me, now.
And Jim, you will give me that bottle."
"I can"t go home, preacher. I"ve got to buy some things. She said I was to buy some things for the brats."
"Have you bought them?" John asked. Tom gave a silly laugh.
"Not yet, preacher, not yet."
"Listen, men," John said, with sudden sternness. "You have let this child see you on the road to h.e.l.l. If he can remember this sight, it will save his soul."
Tom Davis shrank as the preacher said "h.e.l.l." He gave a maudlin cry, and almost whimpered, "No, sir, no, preacher, I am a-goin" to reform." John had known what note to touch in this debased nature. Not love, nor hope, nor shame, would move Tom Davis, but fear stung him into a semblance of sobriety. "I"ll come along wi" you," he went on, swaying back and forth, and steadying himself with a hand on the lumber against which he had been leaning. "This is the last time, preacher. You won"t see me this way no more."
Here he hiccoughed, and then laughed, but remembering himself instantly, drew his forehead into a scowl.
The other men slunk away, for the minister had taken the bottle, and Tom Davis was following him through the narrow pa.s.sages between the great piles of boards, towards his house.
The boy had gone back to his block house; the pile of sawdust in the sheltered corner was more comfortable and not more cheerless than his own home.
John left Davis at his door. The man looked cowed, but there was no shame in his face, and no sense of sin. It was unpleasant to be caught by the preacher, and he was frightened by that awful word, which it was the constant effort of his numb, helpless brain to forget.
John went on alone. He walked slowly, with his eyes fixed absently on the ground, thinking. "Poor Davis," he said, "poor fellow!" The man"s future seemed quite hopeless to the preacher, and, thinking of it, he recalled Mrs. Davis"s regret that he had not spoken of h.e.l.l in his sermon.
John sighed. His grief at Helen"s unbelief was growing in his silence; yet he realized the inconsistency of his love in hiding his sorrow from her.
"It is robbing her, not to let her share it," he thought, "but I dare not speak to her yet."
More than once during the winter he had tried to show her the truth and the beauty of various doctrines, generally that of reprobation, but she had always evaded discussion; sometimes lightly, for it seemed such a small matter to her, but always firmly.
The preacher loitered, stopping to look at the river and the gaunt line of mills against the sky. He left the path, and went down to the edge of the white ice, so full of air bubbles, it seemed like solid snow, and listened to the gurgle of the hurrying water underneath.
A shed was built close to the stream, to shelter a hand fire-engine. It had not been used for so long that the row of buckets beside it, which were for dipping up water to fill it, were warped and cracked, their iron bands rusty, and out of one or two the bottom had fallen. The door of the shed creaked on its one hinge, and John looked up surprised to see how dark it had grown, then he turned towards home.
"Yes," he said to himself, "I must show her her danger. It will grieve her to force an argument upon her, and I don"t think she has had one unhappy hour since we were married; but even if it were not for her own soul"s sake, I must not let my people starve for the bread of life, to spare her. I must not be silent concerning the danger of the sinner. But it will trouble her,--it will trouble her."
John had dallied with temptation so long, that it had grown bold, and did not always hide under the plea of wisdom, but openly dared him to inflict the pain of grieving his wife upon himself. He still delayed, yet there were moments when he knew himself a coward, and had to summon every argument of the past to his defense. But before he reached the parsonage door he had lapsed into such tender thoughts of Helen that he said again, "Not quite yet; it seems to annoy her so to argue upon such things. I must leave it until I win her to truth by the force of its own constraining beauty. Little by little I will draw her attention to it.
And I must gradually make my sermons more emphatic."
Helen met him at the door, and drew him into the house. "You are so late," she said, pressing his chill fingers against her warm cheek, and chafing them between her hands.
He stopped to kiss her before he took his coat off, smiling at her happiness and his own.
"How raw and cold it is!" she said. "Come into the study; I have a beautiful fire for you. Is it going to snow, do you think? How is your sick woman?"
"Better," he answered, as he followed her into the room. "Oh, Helen, it is good to be at home. I have not seen you since noon."
She laughed, and then insisted that he should sit still, and let her bring his supper into the study, and eat it there by the fire. He watched her with a delicious luxury of rest and content; for he was very tired and very happy.
She put a little table beside him, covered with a large napkin; and then she brought a loaf of brown bread and some honey, with a mould of yellow b.u.t.ter, and last a little covered dish of chicken.
"I broiled that for you myself," she explained proudly; "and I did not mean to give you coffee, but what do you think?--the whole canister of tea has disappeared. When Alfaretta went to get it for my supper, it had gone."