John Ward, Preacher Part 19

When John left her, beating his way home through the blinding snow, his face was as haggard as her own. He could not escape from the ultimate conclusion of his creed,--"He that believeth not shall be d.a.m.ned." Yet he loved and trusted completely. His confidence in G.o.d's justice could not be shaken; but it was with almost a groan that he said, "O my G.o.d, my G.o.d, justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne; mercy and truth shall go before thy face! But justice with mercy,--justice first!"

CHAPTER XII.

The snow fell all that night, but the day broke exquisitely clear upon a white and s.h.i.+ning world. The sky was blue and sparkling, and the keen north wind had carved the drifts into wonderful overhanging curves, like the curling crests of breakers.

John Ward went early to Mrs. Davis's. The sharp agony of the night before was over; there was even a momentary complacency at the importance of death, for the room was full of neighbors, whose noisy sympathy drove her despair of her husband's fate from her mind. But when she saw John, her terror came back, and she began to be silent, and not so ready to tell the story of the dead man's bravery to each one that entered. But with the people who were not immediately affected, the excitement of Tom's death could scarcely last.

By the afternoon his widow was for the most part alone. Helen had thought it would be so, and waited until then to go and see her. But first she went into her kitchen, and she and Alfaretta packed a little basket with cold meat, and sweet, snowy bread, and some jam, for the children.

"They do say," Alfaretta said, as she tucked the corners of the napkin under the wicker cover,--"they do say Tom Davis went straight to the bad place, last night. He wasn't never converted, you know; but somehow, seein' as he really thought he was going to save that Charley, seein' as he died for him, as you might say, it don't seem like as if it was just"--Alfaretta lowered her voice a little--"as if it was just--fair. Do you think he went there, Mrs. Ward?"

"I know he did not," Helen answered promptly. "I don't think about h.e.l.l quite as you do, Alfaretta. I cannot believe G.o.d punishes people eternally; for if He is good, He could not be so cruel. Why, no human being would be so cruel as that, and do you think we ought to believe that men are better and kinder than G.o.d?"

Alfaretta looked confused. "Well, but justice?"

"Justice!" Helen said. "Would it be just if I put a little child where it was certain to fall down, and then punish it for falling? The child did not ask to be put there. So G.o.d puts us here, where we must sin; would it be just to punish us eternally for his own work?"

Alfaretta shook her head, and sighed. "Well, I don't know but yer right, though the preacher don't say so."

Helen did not speak for a moment, and then said quietly, "Perhaps not,--not yet; but he will say so some day. He is so good himself, you know, Alfaretta, he cannot bear to think every one else does not love and serve G.o.d, too; and it seems to him as though they ought to be punished if they don't."

This was a very lame explanation, but it closed the discussion, and she hurried away from the honest, searching eyes of her servant, which she felt must see through the flimsy excuse. Her eyes burned with sudden tears that blurred the white landscape, it hurt her to excuse her husband's belief even to herself, and gave her a feeling of disloyalty to him: for a moment she weakly longed to creep into the shelter of the monstrous error in which she felt he lived, that they might be one there, as in everything else. "Yet it does not matter," she said to herself, smiling a little. "We love each other. We know we don't think alike on doctrinal points, but we love each other."

She stopped a moment at the lumber-yard. The ghastly blackness of the ruin glared against the snow-covered hills and the dazzling blue of the sky; here and there a puff of steam showed where the melting snow on the cooler beams dripped on the hot embers below. Some scattered groups of lumbermen and their forlorn wives braved the cold, and stood talking the fire over, for, after all, it was the immediate interest; death would not come to them for years, perhaps, but where were they going to get money for their families during the spring? There could be no rafting down the river until after the loggers had brought their rafts from up in the mountains, to be sawed into planks.

Alfaretta's father, who stood contemplating the ruins, and moralizing when any one would stop to listen to him, had pointed this out. Mr. Dean was a carpenter, and kept a grocery store as well, so he could pity the lumbermen from the shelter of comparative affluence. When he saw the preacher's wife, he came over to speak to her.

"Well, ma'am," he said, "the dispensations of Providence is indeed mysterious,--that the river should have been froze last night!"

Mr. Dean had a habit of holding his mouth open a moment before he spoke, and looking as though he felt that his listener was impatient for his words, which were always p.r.o.nounced with great deliberation. Helen had very little patience with him, and used to answer his slowly uttered remarks with a quickness which confused him.

"It would be more mysterious if it were not frozen, at this time of year," she replied, almost before he had finished speaking. She was in haste to reach Mrs. Davis, and she had no time to hear Elder Dean's plat.i.tudes.

He began to open his beak-like mouth in an astonished way, when a by-stander interrupted him: "I suppose this here sudden death in our midst" (it was easy to fall into pious phraseology in the presence of Elder Dean) "will be made the subject of the prayer-meeting to-night?"

"It will," said Mr. Dean solemnly,--"it will. It is an awful example to unbelievers. An' it is a lesson to the owners not to allow smoking in the yards." Then, with a sharp look at Helen out of his narrow eyes, he added, "I haven't seen you at prayer-meeting, lately, Mrs. Ward. It is a blessed place, a blessed place: the Lord touches sinners' hearts with a live coal from off his altar; souls have been taught to walk in the light, in the light of G.o.d." Mr. Dean prolonged the last word in an unctuous way, which he reserved for public prayer and admonition.

Helen did not answer.

But the elder was not rebuffed. "I hope we will see you soon," he said.

"A solemn season of revival is approaching. Why have you stayed away so long, Mrs. Ward?"

Annoyed at the impertinence of his questions, Helen's face flushed a little.

"I do not like the prayer-meeting," she answered quietly; but before the elder could recover from the shock of such a statement, Mrs. Nevins had come up to speak to him.

"Have you seen Mrs. Davis yet, Mr. Dean?" she said. "She took on awful, last night; the neighbors heard her. 'T was after twelve 'fore she was quiet."

"Yes, I saw her," responded the elder, shaking his head in a pompous way.

"I went to administer consolation. I'm just coming from there now. It is an awful judgment on that man: no chance for repentance, overtook by h.e.l.l, as I told Mrs. Davis, in a moment! But the Lord must be praised for his justice: that ought to comfort her."

"Good heavens!" cried Helen, "you did not tell that poor woman her husband was overtaken by h.e.l.l?"

"Ma'am," said Mr. Dean, fairly stuttering with astonishment at the condemnation of her tone--"I--I--did."

"Oh, shame!" Helen said, heedless of the listeners around them. "How dared you say such a thing? How dared you libel the goodness of G.o.d?

Tom Davis is not in h.e.l.l. A man who died to save another's life? Who would want the heaven of such a G.o.d? Oh, that poor wife! How could you have had the heart to make her think G.o.d was so cruel?"

There was a dead silence; Elder Dean was too dumfounded to speak, and the others, looking at Helen's eyes flas.h.i.+ng through her tears of pa.s.sionate pain, were almost persuaded that she was right. They waited to hear more, but she turned and hurried away, her breath quick, and a tightened feeling in her throat.

The elder was the first to break the spell of her words, but he opened his lips twice before a sound came. "May the Lord forgive her! Tom Davis not in h.e.l.l? Why, where's the good of a h.e.l.l at all, then?"

Helen's heart was burning with sympathy for the sorrow which had been so cruelly wounded. She had forgotten the reserve which respect for her husband's opinions always enforced. "It is wicked to have said such a thing!" she thought, as she walked rapidly along over the creaking snow.

"I will tell her it is not true,--it never could be true."

The path through the ragged, unkempt garden in front of the tenement house was so trodden that the snow was packed and hard. The gate swung back with a jar and clatter, and two limp frosted hens flew shrieking out from the shelter of the ash-heap behind it. The door was open, and Helen could see the square of the entry, papered, where the plaster had not been broken away, with pale green castles embowered in livid trees. On either side was the entrance to a tenement; a sagging nail in one of the door-posts held a coat and a singed and battered hat. Here Helen knocked.

Mrs. Davis was in the small inner room, but came out as her visitor entered, wiping the soapsuds from her bare arms on her dingy gingham ap.r.o.n. On the other side of the room, opposite the door, was that awful Presence, which silenced even the voices of the children.

"I'm was.h.i.+ng," the woman said, as she gave her hand to Helen. "It is Tom's best s.h.i.+rt,--fer to-morrow."

Helen took the hand, wrinkled and bleached with the work it had done, and stroked it gently; she did not know what to say. This was not the grief she had thought of,--a woman working calmly at her wash-tub, while her husband lay dead in the next room. Helen could see the tub, with the mist of steam about it, and the wash-board, and the bar of yellow soap.

She followed Mrs. Davis back to her work, and sat down on a bench, out of the way of a little stream of water which had dripped from the leaking tub, and trickled across the floor. She asked about the children, and said she had brought some food for them; she knew it was so hard to have to think of housekeeping at such a time.

But the widow scarcely listened; she stood lifting the s.h.i.+rt from the water, and rubbing it gently between her hard hands, then dipping it back into the suds again. Once she stopped, and drew the back of her wet hand across her eyes, and once Helen heard her sigh; yet she did not speak of her sorrow, nor of Elder Dean's cruel words. For a little while the two women were silent.

"Mrs. Davis," Helen said, at last, "I'm so sorry."

It was a very simple thing to say, but it caught the woman's ear; it was different from any of the sympathy to which, in a dull, hopeless way, she had listened all that morning. The neighbors had sighed and groaned, and told her it was "awful hard on her," and had pitied Tom for his terrible death; and then Mr. Dean had come, with fearful talk of justice, and of h.e.l.l.

A big tear rolled down her face, and dropped into the tub. "Thank you, ma'am," she said.

She made a pretense of turning towards the light of the one small window to see if the s.h.i.+rt was quite clean; then she began to wring it out, wrapping the twist of wet linen about her wrist. When she spoke again, her voice was steady.

"Elder Dean 'lows I oughtn't to be sorry; he says I'd ought to be resigned to G.o.d's justice. He says good folks ought to be glad when sinners go to the bad place, even if they're belonging to them. He 'lows I'd oughtn't to be sorry."

"I am sure you have a right to be sorry Tom is dead," Helen said,--the woman's composure made her calm, too,--"but I do not believe he is in any place now that need make you sorry. I do not believe what Elder Dean said about--h.e.l.l."

Mrs. Davis looked at her, a faint surprise dawning in her tired eyes, and shook her head. "Oh, I'm not sayin' that he ain't right. I'm not sayin'

Tom ain't in the bad place, ner that it ain't justice. I'm a Christian woman. I was convicted and converted when I wasn't but twelve years old, and I know my religion. Tom--he wasn't no Christian, he didn't ever experience a change of heart: it was always like as if he was just going to be converted, when he wasn't in drink; fer he was good in his heart, Tom was. But he wasn't no Christian, an' I'm not sayin' he isn't lost.

I'm only sayin',"--this with a sudden pa.s.sion, and knotting her tremulous hands hard together,--"I'm only sayin' I can't love G.o.d no more! Him havin' all the power--and then look at Tom an' me"--

Helen tried to speak, but Mrs. Davis would not listen. "No," she cried, "yer the preacher's wife, but I must say it. He never give Tom a chance, an' how am I goin' to love Him now? Tom,"--she pointed a shaking finger at the coffin in the next room,--"born, as you might say, drinkin'. His father died in a drunken fit, and his mother give it to her baby with her milk. Then, what schoolin' did he get? Nothin', 'less it was his mother lickin' him. Tom's often told me that. He hadn't no trade learned, neither,--just rafted with men as bad as him. Is it any wonder he wasn't converted?"