The Redemption of David Corson Part 40

Bewildered by the scene through which he had just pa.s.sed, Corson returned to his rooms and spent the night in a sort of stupor. What happened the next day he never knew; but on the following morning he accompanied Mantel to the cemetery where, with simple but reverent ceremony, they committed the body of the doctor to the bosom of earth.

Just as they were about to turn away, after the conclusion of the burial service, a strange thing happened. The limb of a great elm tree, which had been tied back to keep it out of the way of the workmen, was released by the old s.e.xton and swept back over the grave.

It produced a similar impression upon the minds of both the subdued spectators. They glanced at each other, and Mantel said, "It was like the wing of an angel!"

"Yes," added David with a sigh, "and seemed to brush away and obliterate all traces of his sorrow and his sins."

They did not speak during their homeward journey, and when they reached their rooms David paced uneasily backward and forward until the shadows of evening had fallen. When he suddenly observed that it was dusk, he took his hat and went out into the streets. There was something so restless and unnatural about his movements as to excite the suspicion of his friend, who waited for a single moment and then hurried after him.

The night was calm and clear, the autumn stars were s.h.i.+ning in a cloudless sky, and the tide of life which had surged through the busy streets all day was ebbing like the waters from the bays and estuaries along the sh.o.r.e of the ocean.

The sounds the people made in tramping over the stone pavements or hurriedly driving over the hard streets, possessed a strangely different quality from the monotonous and grinding roar of the daylight. They were sharp, clear, resonant and emphatic. A single footfall attracted the attention of a listener more than the previous shuffle of a thousand feet. David's,--soft and subdued as it was,--resounded loudly, echoing from the buildings on either side of him as he slowly paced along.

It was evident to every one who met him that he was moving aimlessly.

Now and then some keen-eyed pedestrian stopped to take a second look and, turning to do so, felt an instinctive pity for this burdened, care-enc.u.mbered man, wending his way through the almost deserted streets.

This gaze was unreturned and this sympathy unperceived. He was in one of those fits of abstraction when the whole external universe with all its beauties and sublimities has ceased to exist. His cup of misery was full, he had lost all clue to the meaning of life and a single definite idea had taken complete possession of his mind. It was that he was doomed to pa.s.s his existence under a curse.

By the very nature of its being, the soul is keenly sensitive to blessings and curses, and it is not alone the benediction of the mitred priest that thrills the heart! That of the pauper upon whom we have bestowed alms sometimes awakens in our bosom a hope and gladness out of all proportion to the insignificant source from which it has proceeded.

Nor do we need to be cursed by the great and the powerful to feel a pang of terror in our souls! Let but some helpless wretch whom we have wronged commit his cause to heaven in a single syllable, and we shudder as if we already heard the approach of those avenging feet which the ancients said were shod with wool. The curse of the dead and impotent beggar rang in the ears of the fugitive like the strokes of an alarm bell. That deep sense of justice which had been formed in his early life had been revivified and endowed with a resistless power.

At such moments as these through which he was pa.s.sing man experiences no doubt as to the nature and origin of conscience. He is as sure that the terror aroused in his heart is the echo of the decision of some real and awful tribunal as that the wave upon the sh.o.r.e is produced by some real though invisible storm at sea, or the shadow on the mountain by some palpable object between it and the sun.

The conscience is not only "a secretion in the brain," it is not only the "acc.u.mulated observations of the universal man upon the phenomena of the moral life," it is not only his study of the laws of cause and effect distilled into maxims and forebodings; it is this, but it is more than this--as every total is more than any of its parts. For every man has something which is in him, but not of him. It resides within his intelligence, but it is not so much the offspring of his intelligence as an emissary that has taken up its residence there! This obscure something is stronger than he. He does not subordinate it to himself, but is subordinated by it. He can rebel against it, but he cannot overthrow it. He can fly from it, but he cannot escape it.

This sublime and mysterious power had at last obtained complete ascendency in the soul of David Corson. He no longer argued and he no longer resisted. He saw no way of escape from the spiritual anaconda which was tightening its folds around him.

This was all the more strange because the way to the satisfaction of the irrepressible hunger of his heart was now open. Pepeeta's husband was dead, and although he was not innocent of a great crime, he was at least not a murderer. Pepeeta still loved him, if she were still alive. Of this he had no more doubt than of his love for her. Why then did he thus give up to despair? Why did he not fly to her arms and claim from life that happiness which had hitherto escaped his grasp?

He did not try to solve these problems, nor to comprehend his own despair. He only knew that he had been baffled at every turn of his life by powers with which he was unable to cope, and that he was tired of the struggle. He would give himself up to the mighty stream of events and be borne along. If he was exercising any volition in the choice of the path he was following, he was doing it unconsciously. That path was leading him direct to the harbor. It was a pathway well-worn by tired feet like his own.

The miserable creatures who had preceded him seemed to have formed a sort of wake by which he was being drawn along to that "wandering grave"

in the deep sea. At last he reached the water's edge, and started as he heard the waves splas.h.i.+ng among the wooden piles. The soft, sibilant sounds seemed like kisses on the lips of the victims of their treacherous caresses.

The deed of which they whispered seemed but the logical conclusion of his entire career. He put his foot upon the edge of the wharf and looked down into the dark abyss.

It was at this critical instant that his faithful friend extended his hand to save him; but at the same instant another and mightier hand was also extended from the sky.

From a remote part of the Battery a sound cut the silent air. It was a human voice, masculine, powerful, tender and pleading, lifted in a sacred song. That sound was the first element of the objective world which had penetrated the consciousness of the tortured and desperate would-be suicide.

He turned and listened--and as he did so, Mantel sprang back among the shadows just in time to escape his observation. The full-throated music, floating on the motionless air, fell upon his ear like a benediction. He listened, and caught the words of a hymn with which he had been familiar in his childhood:

"Light of those whose dreary dwelling Borders on the shades of death!

Rise on us, thy love revealing, Dissipate the clouds beneath.

Thou of heaven and earth creator-- In our deepest darkness rise, Scattering all the night of nature, Pouring day upon our eyes."

By the spell of this mysterious music he was drawn back into the living world--drawn as if by some powerful magnet.

Pain and sorrow had become tired of vexing him at last, and now stretched forth their hands in a ministry of consolation. With his eyes fixed on the spot from which the music issued, he moved unconsciously toward it, Mantel following him.

A few moments' walking brought him to a weird spectacle. A torch had been erected above a low platform on which stood a man of most unique and striking personality. He looked like a giant in the wavering light of the torch. He was dressed in the simple garb of a Quaker; his head was bare; great locks of reddish hair curled round his temples and fell down upon his shoulders. His ma.s.sive countenance bespoke an extraordinary mind, and beamed with rest and peace.

As he sang the old familiar hymn, he looked around upon his audience with an expression such as glowed, no doubt, from the countenance of the Christ when He spoke to the mult.i.tudes on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Genessaret.

Close to the small platform was a circle of street Arabs, awed into silence and respect by the charm of this remarkable personality. Next to them came a ring of women--some of them old and gray, with haggard and wrinkled countenances upon which Time, with his antique pen, had traced many illegible hieroglyphs; some of them young and bedizened with tinsel jewelry and flashy clothing; not a few of them middle-aged, wan, dispirited and bearing upon their hips bundles wrapped in faded shawls, from which came occasionally that most distressing of sounds, the wail of an ill-fed and unloved infant, crying in the night.

Outside of this zone of female misery and degradation, there was a belt of masculine stupidity and crime; men with corpulent bodies, bull necks, double chins, pile-driving heads; men of shrunken frames, cadaverous cheeks, deep-set and beady eyes--vermin-covered, disease-devoured, hope-deserted. They clung around him, these concentric circles of humanity, like rings around a luminous planet, held by they knew not what resistless attraction.

The simple melody, borne upon the pinions of that resonant and cello-like voice, attained an almost supernatural influence over their perverted natures. When it ceased, an audible sigh arose, an involuntary tribute of adoration and of awe.

As soon as he had finished his hymn, this consecrated apostle to the lost sheep of the great city opened a well-worn volume.

The pa.s.sage which he read, or rather chanted, was the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the awe-inspiring sentences sending through the circles of humanity which were tightening about him visible vibrations.

When he finished his reading, he began an address full of homely wit and pathos, in which, with all the rich and striking imagery culled from a varied life in the wildernesses of the great forests and the great cities of our continent, he appealed to that consciousness of "the true, the beautiful and the good" which he believed to lie dormant, but capable of resurrection, in the soul of every man.

A few of his auditors were too far gone with fatigue or intoxication to follow him, and elbowing their way through the crowd shot off into the night upon their various tangents of stupidity or crime; but most of the spectators listened with a sort of rapt and involuntary attention.

The influence which he exerted over the mind of the young man whom he had unconsciously saved from suicide was as irresistible as it was inscrutable. His language had the charm of perfect familiarity. Every word and phrase had fallen from his own lips a hundred times in similar exhortations. In fact, they seemed to him strangely like the echo of his own voice coming back upon him from the dim and half-forgotten past.

His interest and excitement culminated in an incident for which the listener was totally unprepared. The speaker who had been exhorting his audience upon the testimony of prophet and apostle now appealed to his own personal experience.

"Look at me!" he said, laying his great hand on his broad chest. "I was once as hardened and desperate a man as any of you; but G.o.d saved me!

See this book!" he added, holding up the old volume. "I will tell you a story about it. I found it in a log cabin away out in the frontier state of Ohio. Listen, and I will tell you how. I had left a lumber camp with a company of frontiersmen one Sunday morning, to go to a new clearing which 'we were making in the wilderness, when I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten my axe. Swearing at my misfortune, I returned to get it.

As I approached the cabin which I had left a few minutes before, I heard a human voice. I paused in surprise, crept quietly to the door and listened. Some one was talking in almost the very language in which I have spoken to you. I was frightened and fled! Escaping into the depths of the forest, I lay down at the root of a great tree, and for the first time in my life I made a silence in my soul and listened to the voice of G.o.d. I know not how long I lay there; but at last when I recovered my consciousness I returned to the cabin. It was silent and empty; but on the floor I found this book."

"Good G.o.d!" exclaimed a voice.

So rapt had been the attention of the hearers that at this unexpected interruption the women screamed and the men made a wide path for the figure that burst through them and rushed toward the platform.

The speaker paused and fixed his eye upon the man who pressed eagerly toward him.

"Tell me whether a red line is drawn down the edge of that chapter, and a hand is pointing toward the fifth and sixth verses!" he cried.

"It is," replied the lumberman.

"Then let me take it!" exclaimed David, reaching out his trembling hands.

"What for?"

"Because it is mine! I am the man who proclaimed the holy faith, and, G.o.d forgive me, abandoned it even as you received it!"

The astonished lumberman handed him the Bible, and he covered it with kisses and tears. In the meantime, the crowd, excited by the spectacular elements of the drama, surged round the actors, and the preacher, reaching down, took David by the arm and raised him to the platform.

"Be quiet, my friends," he said with a gesture of command, "and when this prodigal has regained his composure we will ask him to tell us his story."

Of what was transpiring around him, David seemed to be entirely unconscious and at last the fickle crowd became impatient.

"What's de matter wid you?" said a sarcastic voice.