Chapter 38. A Good Man Speaks

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_ Chapter XXXVIII. A Good Man Speaks

As Ida approached the hotel, Van Berg and Stanton saw her, and the latter hastened down the steps to join her.

"Why, Ida!" he exclaimed, "where have you been? I've searched for you high and low."

"You had no right to do so, sir," she said coldly, as she passed on.

"Wait a moment, Ida, please. I wish to speak with you--to ask your pardon--to apologize in the strongest terms."

She would not break again her ominous silence, but continued on with bowed head, up the steps, and through the hall. Stanton, to save appearances before the guests who were near, walked at her side, but her manner chilled and embarrassed him so greatly, that only as she was about to enter her room did he again address her, and now entreatingly:

"Ida, won't you speak to me?"

"No!" was her stern, brief response; and she locked her door against him.

"Van," said Stanton gloomily, "I'd give a year's income if I had not spoken to my cousin as I did last night. She'll never forgive me. It seems as if my words had turned her into ice, she is so cold and calm; and yet her eyes were red with weeping. I have strange misgivings about the girl."

"Yes, Ik," said the artist, gloomily, "we have both made an unpardonable blunder. If Miss Burton cannot thaw her out, I shall not dare to try."

"With her usual perversity," replied Stanton, "she dislikes Miss Burton, and I doubt if she will listen to her."

"I have great faith in her tact and genuine goodwill. It was wonderful how quickly she brought Mr. Mayhew under her genial spells. She has promised to see your cousin this evening."

"I'm sorry," said Stanton, gloomily, "that it should have been at your request rather than mine. But I suppose your wishes are becoming omnipotent with her."

"No, Ik; I regret to say that they weigh with her only as those of a friend," was Van Berg's quiet response.

"Well, well, Van, bear with me, for I'm in a devil of a scrape."

Even Miss Burton's efforts could not brighten the clouded faces that gathered at the supper-table. In truth, her attempts were brief and fitful, for she seemed absorbed in thought herself. She heard Mrs. Mayhew whisper to Stanton,

"If I were a perfect stranger she could not keep me at a greater distance. I can do nothing with her or for her."

To their surprise, Ida quietly walked in and took her place. Her face was very grave and very pale; the traces of her grief were still apparent, and they caused in Van Berg the severest compunction. She was now dressed richly, but plainly and unobtrusively. Her manner was quiet and self-possessed, but there was an expression of desperate trouble in her eyes that soon filled Van Berg with a strong and increasing uneasiness. She returned his bow politely, but distantly. Poor Stanton scarcely dared to look towards her. At supper, on the previous evening, he had taken no pains to conceal his contempt and displeasure; now he was unable to hid his embarrassment and fear. As in the parlor on the previous evening so now again, there was an element in Ida Mayhew's appearance or in herself that caused deep disquietude.

"I'm very glad, Ida, you've changed your mind and come down," began Mrs. Mayhew, volubly.

"I have not changed my mind," she replied, with such sad, stern emphasis that they all involuntarily looked at her for a moment.

Poor Mrs. Mayhew was so quenched and depressed that she did not venture to speak again.

Only Miss Burton was able to maintain her self-possession and tact, and she was intently but unobtrusively studying Miss Mayhew. Her college-life had made her acquainted with so many strange feminine problems that she had the nerve and experience of a veteran, but she could not penetrate the dark mystery in which Ida had now shrouded herself. Resolving, however, that she would not succumb to the chill and restraint that paralyzed the others, she persisted in conversing with her in simple, natural tones.

Ida replied in perfect courtesy and not with unnecessary brevity, but if her words were polished, they were also as cold and hard as ice. Nothing that Miss Burton said could bring the glimmer of a smile athwart her features that were growing so thin and transparent that even an approach to a pleasant thought would have lighted them up with a momentary gleam. Miss Burton found her task a difficult one.

"She affected me as strangely," she afterwards said to Van Berg, "as if a dead maiden were sitting at my side, who had still, by some horrible mystery, the power of speech."

As for Van Berg, he had hitherto supposed that his quiet, well-bred ease would be equal to every social emergency, but he now found himself tongue-tied and embarrassed to the last degree. He could not speak to the woman whom he felt he had so deeply wronged in his thoughts and manner, and who was also well aware of the fact. He felt that he had no right to speak to her until he had first asked and secured her forgiveness. This could not be done in public, and he greatly doubted whether she ever would pardon him. As a chivalric man of honor, he was overwhelmed with a sense of the insult he had unwittingly offered to the maiden opposite him, who now appeared as if mortally wounded. Beyond a few forced remarks to Stanton and Miss Burton, he made a show of eating his supper in silence. But he longed to escape from his present ordeal, and resolved to leave the table as soon as appearances permitted.

One thing in Ida's manner perplexed him greatly. She now looked at him as if he were an object, scrupling not to meet his eye with her strange, unwavering gaze. There was nothing of the haughty indifference which she had manifested the evening before in her occasional glances. She rather looked as one who is trying to fix an object in his memory that he may carry an accurate picture of it away with him.

The thought crossed his mind more than once, "We have wakened our Undine's sleeping mind with a vengeance, but have jostled it so rudely that I fear the frail article is hopelessly shattered."

Miss Burton tried once more to make the conversation general, but her effort ended rather disastrously.

"Mr. Van Berg," she said, "I've been reading an essay this afternoon in which the writer tries to prove that science has done more for humanity than art and religion combined. Now I suppose you would be inclined to take the same ground in regard to art that I ought in respect to religion."

Van Berg was about to reply, when his attention was caught by a vivid gleam in the face of Ida, who looked up as if she wished to speak.

"I think Miss Mayhew has an opinion on this subject," he said, with a bow.

She looked steadily at him as she replied promptly, "I have a decided opinion, though I base it on such poor and narrow grounds as personal experience. I think art is by far the most potent. It has accomplished for me much more than science or religion ever did, or could."

"What has it done for you, Miss Mayhew?" he asked, dreading the answer.

"It has filled me with despair," she replied with a glance and tone which he never afterwards forgot. Then, with the same cold, quiet manner in which she had come, she left the table.

Van Berg turned very pale, for he at once understood her reference to the emblematic rose-bud he had thrown away, and his remark, "Art can tolerate no such imperfection."

Her words and manner hopelessly perplexed the others, but Van Berg believed he had found light on the problem that had hitherto baffled him, but so far from being reassured, he had never been at such bitter odds with himself before.

He also soon after left the table, hoping to find an opportunity to express his regret that he had been so harsh by prejudice; but Miss Mayhew was not to be found.

"Can it be," he thought, as he strode off into the shrubbery, "that I have been blind to the very effects that I hoped to cause? Can it be that she has been made to feel her imperfection so keenly, and in such a way as to create only utter discouragement? She evidently understands the worm-eaten rose-bud I tossed away to be the emblem of herself. Oh, the curse of Phariseeism--the 'holier than thou' business, whatever form it takes. It has made an egregious fool of me."

"But her relations with Sibley, confound it all! I can't understand them. Why did she associate with him so constantly, and then say, 'Congenial society, or none at all'? Seems to me she ought to have seen what he was before he showed his cloven feet so plainly. Well, perhaps the most rational as well as charitable explanation is that her eyes were opened to see him in his true colors, as well as herself. Had Titania's eyes been disenchanted when she was fondling the immortal Weaver, she might have perished with disgust; and it is scarcely strange that Miss Mayhew should be ill on finding that she was infatuated with a man who was both ass and villain. She evidently sees things now as they are, and since her vision has become so good, I am very sorry I do not appear to better advantage. People who stalk along through life with elevated noses, are not pleasing or edifying spectacles."

His disquietude soon caused him to return to the hotel, in hopes of seeing the object of his thoughts.

He had hardly reached the piazza before Ida appeared, dressed in a plain walking suit. She hesitated a moment in the door-way as if undecided in her course. A party of gay young people were just starting on a stroll to a neighboring village. With apparent hesitancy, she said to one of the young girls:

"I have an errand to the village; may I walk with you for company?"

"Oh, certainly," replied the girl, but evidently not welcoming this addition to their party, and Ida went away with them, but not as one of them, isolated more, however, by her own manner than by the bearing of her companions.

The explanation of her action was this: on opening her drawer after returning to her room, she found, with a sense of dismay--as if a misfortune had occurred instead of an incident that gave a chance for better thought--that in taking the opiate the night before, she had replaced the cork in the phial insecurely, and that nearly all its contents had oozed away. Some might have regarded this incident as an omen or a providential interference; but Ida was neither superstitious nor speculative in her nature; she was positive and willful, rather, and the current of her purposes always flowed strongly, though it might be in narrow channels.

"There is nothing left for me to do," she muttered, "but go to the village. I don't know whether Mr. Burleigh has laudanum, and my asking for it might excite suspicion."

It was terrible to see her fair young face grow hard like marble in her stern determination to carry out her awful design, and the impress of this remorseless purpose filled Van Berg with so great foreboding that he could not resist the impulse to follow the desperate girl. If harm should come to her through the harshness of others, and as he now feared, more especially his own, he would never forgive himself.

Mrs. Mayhew and Stanton did not see her departure--they were in anxious consultation in one of the small private parlors, and the artist, to disarm suspicion of his design, entered the hotel, and passed out again by a side door, from which he took a short-cut across the field intending to watch Ida, without being himself observed.

Having found some dense copse-wood by the road-side, and near to the village, he sat down and waited. The gay, chattering party soon passed, Ida walking by herself on the opposite side of the road, with head bowed as if wholly wrapped in her own thoughts. Her unhappy face appealed to his sympathy even more than her graceful carriage to his sense of beauty, and he longed to join her and make such amends as were possible.

He now followed at too great a distance for recognition in the deepening twilight, and saw the young people enter a confectionery shop, but observed, with increased uneasiness, that Miss Mayhew parted from them and went to an adjacent drug-store. She soon joined the party again, however, and they all apparently started homeward.

Van Berg at once determined to go to this drug-store and learn, if possible, if there were anything to confirm the horrible suspicion that crossed his mind. He remembered that despair and desperate deeds often went together, and the daily press had taught him how many people, with warped and ungoverned moral natures, place their troubles beyond remedy by the supreme folly of self-destruction.

By a considerable detour through a side street, he reached the store unperceived, and found the druggist rather disquieted himself.

"Are you staying at Burleigh's?" he asked.

"I am," Van Berg replied.

"Do you know a young lady boarding there with large dark eyes and auburn hair?"

"I do."

"Is there--is there anything wrong about her?"

"Why should there be? Why do you ask?"

"She has just been in here, and she looked sick and strangely, and all she wanted was a large phial of laudanum. Somehow her looks and purchase have made me uneasy. I never saw so white a face in my life, and she seemed weak and very tired. If she's sick, how comes it she's walking to the village? Besides, she seemed to have very little to do with the party she joined after leaving here."

Van Berg controlled himself only by a powerful effort, and was very glad that the brim of his soft hat concealed the pallor of his own face. He managed to say quietly:

"The young lady you describe has not been well, and has probably found the walk longer and more wearisome than she supposed. As for the laudanum, that's used in many ways. Some cigars, if you please--thank you. I'll join the lady and see that she reaches home safely," and he hastily left the store and walked swiftly away.

"He wouldn't go as fast as that if he wasn't a little uneasy, too," muttered the druggist, whose dearth of business gave him abundant leisure to see all that was going on, and to imagine much more.

Van Berg determined to overtake Ida before she reached the hotel, and his strides were as long and swift as mortal dread could make them.

In the meantime, while the artist was making the detour necessary to reach the drug-store without meeting Ida, she and her companions had started homeward. As they approached a church on the outskirts of the village, the bell in the steeple commenced tolling.

"What's that for?" asked a young man of the party of a plain, farmer-like appearing man, who was just about to enter.

"For prayer-meetin'," was the good-natured reply. "It wouldn't hurt you to come to it;" and the speaker passed into the lecture-room.

"I call this frivolous assemblage to order," cried the youth, turning around to his companions. "If any one of our number has ever attended a prayer-meeting, let him hold up his right hand. I use the masculine pronoun, because the man always embraces the woman--when he gets a chance."

No hands were held up.

"Heathen, every mother's son of us," cried the first speaker. "The daughters are angels, of course, and don't need to go to prayer-meetin', as he of the cowhide sandals just termed it. But for the novelty of the thing, and for the want of something better to do, I move that we all go to-night. If it should be borous, why, we can come out."

The proposition pleased the fancy of the party, and with gay words and laughter that scarcely ceased at the vestibule, they entered the place of prayer and lighted down among the sober-visaged, soberly-dressed worshippers like a flock of tropical birds.

Ida reluctantly followed them. At first she half decided to walk home alone, but feared to do so. She who had resolved on facing the "King of Terrors" shrank, with a woman's instinct, from a lonely walk in the starlight.

She sat in dreary preoccupation a little apart from the others and paid no more heed to the opening services than to their ill-concealed merriment.

the minister was away on his August vacation. Prayer-meetings were out of season, and very few were present. The plain farmer was trying to conduct the service as well as he could, but it was evident he would have been much more at ease holding the handle of a plow or the reins of his rattling team, than a hymn-book. Dr. Watts and John Wesley might have lost some of their heavenly serenity could they have heard him read their verses, and certainly only a long-suffering and merciful God could listen to his prayer. And yet rarely on the battle-field is there more moral courage displayed than plain Thomas Smith put forth that night in his conscientious effort to perform an unwonted task; and when at last he sat down and said, "Bruthren, the meetin' is now open," he was more exhausted than he than he would have been from a long day of toil.

"The Lord looketh at the heart" is a truth that chills many with dread, but it was a precious thought to Farmer Smith as he saw that his fellow church members did not look very appreciative, and that the gay young city-people often giggled outright at his uncouth words and manner.

Ida would have been as greatly amused as any of them a few weeks since, but now she scarcely heard the poor man's stumblings, or the wailing of the hymns that were mangled anew by the people. She sat with her eyes fixed on vacancy, thinking how dreary and empty the world had become; and it seemed to her that religion was the most dreary and empty thing in it.

"What good can this wretched little meeting do any one?" she thought, more than once.

She was answered.

Near her was a very old man who had been regarding the ill-behaved party with an expression of mingled displeasure and pity. Now that the meeting was open to all he rose slowly to his feet, steadying himself with his cane.

"He looks like the Ancient Mariner," giggled an exceedingly immature youth, who sat next to Ida.

She turned upon him sharply and said, in a low tone, "If you have the faintest instincts of a gentleman you will respect that venerable man."

The youth was so effectually quenched that he bore the aspect of a turnip-beet during the remainder of the service.

"My young friends," began the old main in tones of gentle dignity, "will you listen patiently and quietly to one that you see will not have the chance to speak many more words. My eyes are a little dim, but you all appear young and happy; and yet I am sorry for you, very sorry for you. You don't realize what you are and what is before you. You remind me of a number of pleasure boats just starting out to sea. I have been across this ocean, and have almost reached the other shore. I know what terrible storms and dangers you will meet. You can't escape these storms, my young friends. No one can, and you don't seem prepared to meet them.

"Your manner has pained me very much, and yet, as my Master said, so I have felt, you 'know not what you do.' There is a Kingly Presence in this place that you have not recognized. Do you not remember who it was that said, 'Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them'?

"I am very old, but my memory is good. It seems but a short time ago that I was as young thoughtless as any one of you, and yet it was seventy years ago. I have tested the friendship of Jesus Christ for over half a century. Have I not then a right to speak of it? Ought I not to know something about him?

"Do you ask me if my Master has kept me from trouble and suffering all these years? Far from it. Indeed, I think he has caused me a good deal of trouble and pain in addition to that which I brought on myself by my own folly and mistakes; but I now see that he caused it only as the good physician gives pain, in order to make the patient strong and well. But one thing is certainly true. He has stood by me as a faithful friend all these years, and has brought good to me out of all the evil. I have been in sore temptations and deep discouragement. My heart at times has seemed breaking with sorrow. Mine has been the common lot. But when the storm was loudest and most terrible, his hand was on the helm, and now I am entering the quiet harbor. There has been much that was dark and hard to understand; there is much still; but there is plenty to prove that my Heavenly Father is leading me home as a little child.

"It is a precious, blessed truth that I wish to bring you fact to face with to-night, and yet it may become a very sad and terrible truth, if you shut your eyes to it now and remember it only when it is too late. I wish to assure you, on the ground of simple, down-right experience, through all these years, that God's 'unspeakable gift,' his only Son, is just what our poor human nature needs. Jesus Christ 'is able to save them ot the uttermost that come to God by him.' He helps us overcome that awful disease--sin. He brings to our unhappy hearts immortal life and health. I know it as I know that I exist. He has helped me when and where there was no human help. I have often seen his redeeming work in the lives of other faulty, sinful people like myself.

"The question therefore which you must each decide is not whether you will believe this or that doctrine, or do what this or that man teaches. The question is this:--Here is a tender, merciful, Divine Friend. He offers to lead you safely through all the dangers and hard places in this world, as a shepherd leads his flock through the wilderness. Will you follow him, or will you remain in the wilderness and perish when the night comes, as it surely will? If you will follow him as well as you can, he'll bring you to a happy and eternal home. Thanks to his patient kindness which never falters, he has brough me almost there.

"And now, my young friends, beat with an old man, and let me say, in conclusion, that you all need the kind, patient, faithful Friend that I found so long ago. No evil, no misfortune can come into any human life that is beyond his power to remedy and finally banish forever. I you have not found this Friend, this Life-giver, I am younger and happier than you are to-day, although I am eighty-eight years old."

Once before a rash, despairing man lifted his hand against his life, but God's message to him, through his apostle, was, "Do thyself no harm." And now again a faithful servant, speaking for him whose coming was God's supreme expression of good-will towards men, had brought a like merciful message to another poor soul that had taken counsel of despair. Ida Mayhew might learn, as did the jailer of Philippi, that God has a better remedy than death for seemingly irretrievable disasters.

The old gentleman's words came home to her with such a force of personal application that she was deeply moved, and even awed. They seemed like a divine message--nay more, like a restraining hand. "How strange it was," she thought, that she had come to this place!--how strange that a serene old, man, with heaven's peace already on his brow, should have uttered the words best adapted to her desperate need. If he had spoken of duty, obligation, of truth in the abstract, his tones would have been like the sound of a wintry wind. But he had spoken of a Friend, as tender, patient, and helpful as he was powerful. What was far more, he spoke with the strong convincing confidence of personal knowledge. He had tried this Friend through all the vicissitudes of over half a century, and found him true. Could human assurance--could human testimony go farther? Deep in her heart she was conscious that hope was reviving again--that the end had not yet come.

The gay young party, touched and subdued, passed out quietly with the others. But Ida lingered.

"Who is that old gentleman?" she asked of a lady near her.

"That is Mr. Eltinge--Mr. James Eltinge," was the reply.

Ida passed slowly towards the door, looking wistfully back at the old man, who stopped to greet cheerily one and another.

"No one need be afraid to speak to him," she thought. "His every look and tone show him to be kind and sincere. I'll see him before--before"--she shuddered, and scarcely dared to put her dark purpose in thought in the presence of one who had lived patiently at God's will for nearly a century.

She stepped out into the night and watched for his coming. In a moment or two the old gentleman also passed out, and stood waiting for his carriage.

Timidly approaching him, she said, "Mr. Eltinge, may I speak with you?"

He stepped with her a little aside from the others.

"Mr. Eltinge," she continued, in a voice that trembled and was broken by her feeling, "I am one of the young people you spoke to this evening. I'm in trouble--deep trouble. I want such a Friend as you described to-night."

He took her hand and said, in a hearty voice, "God bless you, my child. He wants you more than you want him."

"May I come and see you to-morrow morning?" asked Ida, hurriedly, for his tones of kindness, for which her heart was famishing, were fast breaking down her self-control.

"I'll come and see you," was his prompt and cordial response.

"No," she faltered, "let it be as I wish. Please tell me where to find you."

As he finished directing her, she stooped down and kissed his hand, and then vanished in the darkness.

"Perhaps I'm not yet a cumberer of the ground," murmured the old man, wiping a sudden moisture from his eyes. _

Read next: Chapter 39. Van Berg's Escape

Read previous: Chapter 37. Voices Of Nature

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