It was more like a hideous nightmare than a piece of actual life, those fierce tiger faces swarming around, that roar of vindictive anger, that frightful crushing, that hail storm of savage blows! But, whether life or nightmare, it must be gone through with. In the thick of the fight a line of Goethe came to his mind, one of his favorite mottoes; "Make good thy standing place and move the world."
And even then he half smiled to himself at the forlornness of the hope that he should ever need a standing place again.
With renewed vigor he fought his way on, and with a sort of glow of triumph and new-born hope had almost seen his way to a place of comparative safety, when a fearful blow hopelessly maimed him. With a vain struggle to save himself he fell to the earth a vision of fierce faces, green leaves, and blue sky flashed before his eyes, an inward vision of Erica, a moment"s agony, and then the surging crowd closed over him, and he knew no more.
CHAPTER XVII. At Death"s Door
Sorrow and wrong are pangs of a new birth; All we who suffer bleed for one another; No life may live alone, but all in all; We lie within the tomb of our dead selves, Waiting till One command us to arise. Hon. Boden Noel.
Knowing that Erica would have a very anxious afternoon, Charles Osmond gave up his brief midday rest, s.n.a.t.c.hed a hasty lunch at a third-rate restaurant, finished his parish visits sooner than usual, and reached the little house in Guilford Terrace in time to share the worst part of her waiting. He found her hard at work as usual, her table strewn with papers and books of reference. Raeburn had purposely left her some work to do for him which he knew would fully occupy her; but the mere fact that she knew he had done it on purpose to engross her mind with other matters entirely prevented her from giving it her full attention. She had never felt more thankful to see Charles Osmond than at that moment.
"When your whole heart and mind are in Hyde Park, how are you to drag them back to what some vindictive old early Father said about the eternity of punishment?" she exclaimed, with a smile, which very thinly disguised her consuming anxiety.
They sat down near the open window, Erica taking possession of that side which commanded the view of the entrance of the cul-de-sac. Charles Osmond did not speak for a minute or two, but sat watching her, trying to realize to himself what such anxiety as hers must be. She was evidently determined to keep outwardly calm, not to let her fears gain undue power over her; but she could not conceal the nervous trembling which beset her at every sound of wheels in the quiet square, nor did she know that in her brave eyes there lurked the most visible manifestation possible of haggard, anxious waiting. She sat with her watch in her hand, the little watch that Eric Haeberlein had given her when she was almost a child, and which, even in the days of their greatest poverty, her father had never allowed her to part with. What strange hours it had often measured for her. Age-long hours of grief, weary days of illness and pain, times of eager expectation, times of sickening anxiety, times of mental conflict, of baffling questions and perplexities. How the hands seemed to creep on this afternoon, at times almost to stand still.
"Now, I suppose if you were in my case you would pray," said Erica, raising her eyes to Charles Osmond. "It must be a relief, but yet, when you come to a.n.a.lyze it, it is most illogical a fearful waste of time. If there is a G.o.d who works by fixed laws, and who sees the whole maze of every one"s life before hand, then the particular time and manner of my father"s death must be already appointed, and no prayer of mine that he may come safely through this afternoon"s danger can be of the least avail. Besides, if a G.o.d could be turned round from His original purpose by human wills and much speaking, I hardly think He would be worth believing in."
"You are taking the lowest view of prayer mere pet.i.tion; but even that, I think, is set on its right footing as soon as we grasp the true conception of the ideal father. Do you mean to say that, because your father"s rules were unwavering and his day"s work marked out beforehand, he did not like you to come to him when you were a little child, with all your wishes and longings and requests, even though they were sometimes childish and often impossible to gratify? Would he have been better pleased if you had shut up everything in your own heart, and never of your own accord told him anything about your babyish plans and wants?"
"Still, prayer seems to me a waste of time," said Erica.
"What! If it brings you a talk with your Father? If it is a relief to you and a pleasure because a sign of trust and love to Him? But in one way I entirely agree with you, unless it is spontaneous it is not only useless but harmful. Imagine a child forced to talk to its father. And this seems to me the truest defense of prayer; to the "natural man"
it always will seem foolishness, to the "spiritual man" to one who has recognized the All-Father it is the absolute necessity of life. And I think by degrees one pa.s.ses from eager pet.i.tion for personal and physical good things into the truer and more Christlike spirit of prayer. "These are my fears, these are my wishes, but not my will but Thine be done." Shakespeare had got hold of a grand truth, it seems to me, when he said:
""So find we profit by losing of our prayers.""
"And yet your ideal man distinctly said: "Ask and ye shall receive""
said Erica. "There are no limitations. For aught we know, some pig-headed fanatic may be at this moment praying that G.o.d in His mercy would rid the earth of that most dangerous man, Luke Raeburn; while I might be of course I am not, but it is conceivable that I might be praying for his safety. Both of us might claim the same promise, "Ask and ye shall receive.""
"You forget one thing," said Charles Osmond. "You would both pray to the Father, and His answer which you, by the way, might consider no answer would be the answer of a father. Do you not think the fanatic would certainly find profit in having his most unbrotherly request disregarded? And the true loss or gain of prayer would surely be in this: The fanatic would, by his un-Christlike request, put himself further from G.o.d; you, by your spontaneous and natural avowal of need and recognition of a Supreme loving will, would draw nearer to G.o.d.
Nor do we yet at all understand the extraordinary influence exerted on others by any steady, earnest concentration of thought; science is but just awakening to the fact that there is an unknown power which we have hitherto never dreamed of. I have great hope that in this direction, as in all others, science may show us the hidden workings of our Father."
Erica forgot her anxiety for a moment; she was watching Charles Osmond"s face with mingled curiosity and perplexity. To speak to one whose belief in the Unseen seemed stronger and more influential than most people"s belief in the seen, was always very strange to her, and with her prophet she was almost always conscious of this double life (SHE considered it double a real outer and an imaginary inner.) His strong conviction; the every-day language which he used in speaking of those truths which most people from a mistaken notion of reverence, wrap up in a sort of ecclesiastical phraseology; above all, the carrying out in his life of the idea of universal brotherhood, with so many a mere form of words all served to impress Erica very deeply. She knew him too well and loved him too truly to pause often, as it were, to a.n.a.lyze his character. Every now and then, however, some new phase was borne in upon her, and some chance word, emphasizing the difference between them, forced her from sheer honesty to own how much that was n.o.ble seemed in him to be the outcome of faith in Christ.
They went a little more deeply into the prayer question. Then, with the wonder growing on her more and more, Erica suddenly exclaimed: "It is so wonderful to me that you can believe without logical proof believe a thing which affects your whole life so immensely, and yet be unable to demonstrate the very existence of a G.o.d."
"Do you believe your father loves you?" asked Charles Osmond.
"My father! Why, of course."
"You can"t logically prove that his love has any true existence."
"Why, yes!" exclaimed Erica. "Not a day pa.s.ses without some word, look, thought, which would prove it to any one. If there is one thing that I am certain of in the whole world, it is that my father loves me. Why, you who know him so well, you must know that! You must have seen that."
"All his care of you may be mere self-interest," said Charles Osmond.
"Perhaps he puts on a sort of appearance of affection for you just for the sake of what people would say not a very likely thing for Mr.
Raeburn to consider, I own. Still, you can"t demonstrate to me that his love is a reality."
"But I KNOW it is!" cried Erica, vehemently.
"Of course you know, my child; you know in your heart, and our hearts can teach us what no power of intellect, no skill in logic can every teach us. You can"t logically prove the existence of your father"s love, and I can"t logically prove the existence of the all-Father; but in our hearts we both of us know. The deepest, most sacred realities are generally those of heart-knowledge, and quite out of the pale of logic."
Erica did not speak, but sat musing. After all, what COULD be proved with absolute certainty? Why, nothing, except such bare facts as that two and two make four. Was even mathematical proof so absolutely certain? Were they not already beginning to talk of a possible fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce when even that might no longer be capable of demonstration.
"Well, setting aside actual proof," she resumed, after a silence, "how do you bring it down even to a probability that G.o.d is?"
"We must all of us start with a supposition," said Charles Osmond.
"There must on the one hand either be everlasting matter or everlasting force, whether these be two real existences, or whether matter be only force conditioned, or, on the other hand, you have the alternative of the everlasting "He." You at present base your belief on the first alternative. I base mine on the last, which, I grant you, is at the outset the most difficult of the two. I find, however, that nine times out of ten the most difficult theory is the truest. Granting the everlasting "He," you must allow self-consciousness, without which there could be no all powerful, all knowledge-full, and all love-full. We will not quarrel about names; call the Everlasting what you please. "Father"
seems to me at once the highest and simplest name."
"But evil!" broke in Erica, triumphantly. "If He originates all, he must originate evil as well as good."
"Certainly," said Charles Osmond, "He has expressly told us so. "I form the light and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things.""
"I recollect now, we spoke of this two or three years ago," said Erica. "You said that the highest good was attained by pa.s.sing through struggles and temptations."
"Think of it in this way," said Charles Osmond. "The Father is educating His children; what education was ever brought about without pain? The wise human father does not so much shield his child from small pains, but encourages him to get wisdom from them for the future, tries to teach him endurance and courage. Pain is necessary as an element in education, possibly there is no evolution possible without it. The father may regret it, but, if he is wise, knows that it must be. He suffers twice as much as the child from the infliction of the pain. The All-Father, being at once all-knowing and all-loving, can see the end of the education while we only see it in process, and perhaps exclaim: "What a frightful state of things," or like your favorite "Stephen Blackpool," "It"s all a muddle.""
"And the end you consider to be perfection, and eternal union with G.o.d.
How can you think immortality probable?"
"It is the necessary outcome of belief in such a G.o.d, such a Father as we have spoken of. What! Could G.o.d have willed that His children whom He really loves should, after a time, fade utterly away? If so, He would be less loving than an average earthly father. If He did indeed love them, and would fain have had them ever with Him, but could not, then He would not be all-powerful."
"I see you a universalist, a great contrast to my Early Father here, who gloats over the delightful prospect of watching from his comfortable heaven the tortures of all unbelievers. But, tell me, what do you think would be our position in your unseen world? I suppose the mere realization of having given one"s life in a mistaken cause would be about the most terrible pain conceivable?"
"I think," said Charles Osmond, with one of his grave, quiet smiles, "that death will indeed be your "gate of life," that seeing the light you will come to your true self, and exclaim, "Who"d have thought it?""
The every day language sounded quaint, it made Erica smile; but Charles Osmond continued, with a brightness in his eyes which she was far from understanding: "And you know there are to be those who shall say: "Lord when saw we Thee in distress and helped Thee?" They had not recognized Him here, but He recognized them there? They shared in the "Come ye blessed of my Father.""
"Well," said Erica, thoughtfully, "if any Christianity be true, it must be your loving belief, not the blood-thirsty scheme of the Calvinists.
If THAT could by any possibility be true, I should greatly prefer, like Kingsley"s dear old "Wulf," to share h.e.l.l with my own people."
The words had scarcely left her lips when, with a startled cry, she sprung to her feet and hurried to the door. The next moment Charles Osmond saw Tom pa.s.s the window; he was unmistakably the bearer of bad news.
His first panting words were rea.s.suring "Brian says you are not to be frightened;" but they were evidently the mere repet.i.tion of a message.
Tom himself was almost hopeless; his wrath and grief become more apparent every minute as he gave an incoherent account of the afternoon"s work.
The brutes, the fiends, had half killed the chieftain, had set on him like so many tigers. Brian and Hazeldine were bringing him home had sent him on to prepare.
Erica had listened so far with a colorless face, and hands tightly clasped, but the word "prepare" seemed to bring new life to her. In an instant she was her strongest self.
"They will never try to take him up that steep narrow staircase. Quick, Tom! Help me to move this couch into the study."
The little Irish servant was pressed into the service, too, and sent upstairs to fetch and carry, and in a very few minutes the preparations were complete, and Erica had at hand all the appliances most likely to be needed. Just as all was done, and she was beginning to feel that a minute"s pause would be the "last straw," Tom heard the sound of wheels in the square, and hurried out. Erica stood in the doorway watching, and presently saw a small crowd of helpers bearing a deathly looking burden.
Whiteness of death redness of blood. The ground seemed rocking beneath her feet, when a strong hand took hers and drew her into the house.