The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 79

"All of us," he murmured uncertainly, "are weak. The best among us sins in a day enough to blacken eternity. And unless we believe, and have faith in the Divine Mercy of the Father, and confess--confession--" His voice grew stronger and into it crept the rapt note of one whose auditor is within. "Confession! A sin confessed is no longer a sin. The word spoken out of the broken and contrite heart makes all things right. If one but had faith in that! If--if one had Faith!"

The life went out of his voice, the fire died in his eyes, his fingers drooped on the tea-bowl. The Chinaman's clock was striking the half after seven. He stared at the floor, haggard with guilt.

"Dear me, I'm late for prayer-meeting again. Snow will be looking for me."

I slipped out behind him, glad enough of Urkey's raw air after that close chamber of mysteries. I avoided the wharf-lane, however, more than a little scared by this sudden new aspect of the Minister, and got myself out to the sh.o.r.e street by Miah White's yard and the grocery porch, and there I found myself face to face with Mate Snow. That frightened me still more, for the light from Henny's Notions' window was s.h.i.+ning oddly in his eyes.

"You're lookin' for the minister," I stammered, ducking my head.

He stopped and stared down at me, tapping a sole on the cobbles.

"What's this? What's this?"

"He--he says you'd be lookin' for 'im, an' I seen 'im to the Chinaman's an' he's comin' right there, honest he is, Mr. Snow."

"Oh! So? I'd be looking for him, would I?"

"Y--y--yessir."

I sank down on the grocery steps and studied my toes.

"He was _there_, though!" I protested in desperation, when we had been waiting in vain for a long quarter-hour. The dark monitor lifted his chin from his collar and looked at his watch.

"It's hard," I heard him sigh, as he turned away down Lovett's Court, where Center Church blossomed with its prayer-meeting lamps. Shadows of the uneasy flock moved across the windows; Emsy Nickerson, in his trustee's black, peered out of the door into the dubious night, and beyond him in the bright vestry Aunt Nickerson made a little spot of color, agitated, nursing formless despairs, an artist in vague dreads.

I was near enough, at the church steps, to hear what Mate told them.

"I'll lead to-night. He's gone out in the back-country to pray alone."

Aunt Nickerson wept quietly, peeping from the corners of her eyes.

Reverent awe struggled with an old rebellion in Emsy's face, and in others as they came crowding. The trustee broke out bitterly:

"Miah White's took to the bottle again, along o' him. If only he'd do his prayin' at Miah's house a spell, 'stead o' the back-country--"

"There was a back-country in Judea," Mate cried him down. "And some one prayed there, not one night, but forty nights and days!"

What a far cry it was from the thwarted lover behind the prescription screen, fanning the flames of h.e.l.l-fire through the night, to the Seer thundering in the vestry--had there been any there with heads enough to wonder at it.

It happened from time to time, this mysterious retreat into the moors, more frequently as the Infield Conference drew on and the hollows deepened in the minister's cheeks and his eyes shone brighter with foreboding. Nor was this the first time the back-country had been mentioned in the same breath with the Wilderness of Judea. I can remember our Miss Beedie, in Sunday School, lifting her eyes and sighing at the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Luke.

And to-night, while I crept off tingling through the dark of Lovett's Court, he was in the Wilderness again, and I had seen him last.

I brought up by one of the tubbed box-trees and peered in at the Pillar House with a new wonder. I was so used to it there, dead on the outside and living on the inside, that I had never learned to think of it as a strange thing. Perhaps a dozen times I had seen little Hope Gibbs (they still said "Gibbs") playing quietly among the lilacs in the back yard.

It was always at dusk when the shadows were long there, and she a shadow among them, so un.o.btrusive and far away. As for her mother, no one ever saw Sympathy Gibbs.

Crouching by the box-tree, I found myself wondering what they were doing in there, Sympathy Gibbs and the little girl; whether they were sleeping, or whether they were sitting in the dark, thinking, or whispering about the husband and father who was neither husband nor father, or whether, in some remote chamber, there might not be a lamp or a candle burning.

The dead hush of the place oppressed me. I turned my head to look back at the comfortable, b.u.mbling devotion of Center Church, and this is what I saw there.

The door was still open, a blank, bright rectangle giving into the deserted vestry, and it was against this mat of light that I spied Minister Malden's head and shoulders thrust furtively, as he peeped in and seemed to harken to the m.u.f.fled unison of the prayer.

You may imagine me startled enough at that, but what of my emotion when, having peeped and listened and rea.s.sured himself for a dozen seconds, Minister Malden turned and came softly down the Court toward the gate and the box-trees and me, a furtive silhouette against the door-light, his face turned back over one shoulder.

I couldn't bolt; he was too close for that. The wonder was that he failed to see me, for he stopped within two yards of where I cowered in the shadow and stood for a long time gazing in between the trees at the pillared porch, and I could hear his breathing, uneven and laborious, as though he had been running or fighting. Once I thought he struck out at something with a vicious fist. Then his trouble was gone, between two winks, and he was gone too, up the walk and up the steps, without any to-do about it. I don't know whether he tapped on the door or not. It was open directly. I caught a pa.s.sing glimpse of Sympathy Gibbs in the black aperture; the door closed on them both, and the Pillar House was dead again.

Now this was an odd way for Minister Malden to fast and pray in the Wilderness--odd enough, one would say, to keep me waiting there a while to see what would come of it all. But it didn't. I had had enough of mysteries for one Summer's night, or at any rate I had enough by the time I got my short legs, full tilt, into the sh.o.r.e street. For I had caught a fleeting glimpse, on the way, of a watcher in the shadow behind the _other_ box-tree--Yen Sin, the heathen, with a surprised eyeball slanting at me over one shoulder.

Among the most impressive of the phenomena of life, as noted in my thirteenth year, is the amazing way in which a community can change while one is away from it a month. Urkey village at the beginning of my 'teens seemed to me much the same Urkey village upon which I had first opened my eyes. And then I went to make a visit with my uncle Orville Means in Gillyport, just across the Sound, and when I came back on the packet I could a.s.sure myself with all the somber satisfaction of the returning exile that I would scarcely have known the old place.

Gramma Pilot's cow had been poisoned. There had been a fire in the Selectmen's room at Town Hall. Amber Matheson had left Mrs. Wharf's Millinery and set up for herself, opposite the Eastern School. And Mate Snow, all of a sudden, had bought the old Pons house, on the hill hanging high over the town, and gone to live there. With a leap, and as it were behind my back, he sat there dominating the village and the harbor and the island--our Great Man.

He took Minister Malden with him, naturally, out of the two rooms over the store, into one room in the third story of the house on the hill--where Sympathy Gibbs could see him if she chose to look that way, as frankly and ignominiously a dependent as any baron's chaplain in the Golden Days.

"She'd have done better with Mate, after all," folks began to say.

But of all the changes in the village, the most momentous to me was the change in Yen Sin. I don't know why it should have been I, out of all the Urkey youth, who went to the Chinaman's; perhaps it was the spiritual itch left from that first adventure on the scow. At any rate, I had fallen into a habit of dropping in at the cabin, and not always with a collar to do.

I had succeeded in worming out of him the meaning of that first set of bird-scratches on my collar-band--"The boy who throws clam-sh.e.l.ls"--and of a second and more elaborate writing--"The boy who is courageous in the face of all the water of the ocean, yet trembles before so much of it as may be poured in a wash-basin." There came a third inscription in time, but of that he would not tell me, nor of Mate Snow's, nor the minister's. It was a queer library he had, those fine-written collars of Urkey village.

He had been growing feebler so long and so gradually that I had made nothing of it. Once, I remember, it struck me queer that he wasn't working so hard as he had used to. Still earliest of all and latest of all, he would sometimes leave his iron cooling on the board now and stand for minutes of the precious day, dreaming out of the harbor window. When the sun was sinking, the shaft through the window bathed his head and his lean neck with a quality almost barbaric, and for a moment in the gloom made by the bright pencil, the new, raw things of Urkey faded out, leaving him alone in his ancient and ordered civilization, a little wistful, I think, and perhaps a little frightened, as a child waking from a long, dreaming sleep, to find his mother gone.

He had begun to talk about China, too, and the river where he was born.

And I made nothing of it, it came on so gradually, day by day. Then I went away, as I have said, and came back again. I dropped in at the scow the second day after the packet brought me home.

"h.e.l.lo, there!" I cried, peeping over the counter, "I got a collar for you to--to--" I began to stumble. "Mr. Yen Sin, dear me, what's the matter of you?"

"Mista Yen Sin fine," he said in a strengthless voice, smiling and nodding from the couch where he lay, half propped up by a gorgeous, faded cus.h.i.+on. "Mista Yen Sin go back China way pletty quick now, yes."

"Honest?"

He made no further answer, but took up the collar I had brought.

"You been gone Gillypo't, yes? You take colla China boy, yes?"

"Yessir!"

"He pletty nice man, Sam Low, yes?"

"Oh, you know him, then? Oh, he's all right, Yen Sin."

It was growing dark outside, and colder, with a rising wind from landward to seaward against the tide. A sense of something odd and wrong came over me; it was a moment before I could make it out. The fire was dead in the stove for the first time in memory and the Vestal irons were cold. Yen Sin asked me to light the lamp. In the waxing yellow glow he turned his eyes to mine, and mine were big.

"You know Mista G.o.d?" he questioned.

"Oh, yes," I answered soberly. "Yes, indeed."