"And I've come to git breakfast," she added, spreading peace over her dreadful face with an ineffable smile. An hour later she was in possession of William and me and the parsonage. She was clearing up the breakfast things when she said:

"You looked f.a.gged; go and git some rest. I'll take care of him,"

nodding her head toward the door of William's room.

When I awakened in the middle of the afternoon he was sitting up against four hot-water bottles, letting her call him "Brother Billy."

That sounds scandalous, but listening from where I lay on the sofa in the front room I could tell that they were having a duel of spirits, and that she was taking liberties with William's theology that must have made his guardian angel pale. He wore his red flannel nightshirt, had a quilt folded around his legs and one of Benson's Commentaries open upon his knees. His hair was bristling in fine style, and his long beard lay like a stole upon his breast. His hands were resting on the arms of his chair, and he was regarding Sal, who sat in the opposite corner openly dipping snuff, with a kind of fascinated disapproval.

"The kind of faith you have in G.o.d don't do Him jestice," she was saying. "It's sorter infernal--it's so mean and partial. Your G.o.d ain't nothing but a Paradise capitalist and aristocrat--the sort of one that fixes up a flower garden for Him and jest His saints to set in the middle of and sing and harp on their harps, while a right smart chance of the best folks sneak and shuffle around in the outer darkness forever because, like me, they had no chance to be good, and so went wrong before they knowed where they were going. Sometimes these last years since I had my vision of Him, I've wanted to tell you preachers that the little ornamental divinity that you shout about ain't nothing but a figger of speech took from the heathens and made over by heathen Christians."

"Stop!" said William, lifting one of his thin, white hands and waving it imperatively at her. "You must not speak irreverently. I know you don't mean it, but----"

"Jest answer me, this, sir--is your leg hurtin' any worse?"

"No," replied William, mollified.

"Not a mite?" she insisted.

"No, I am much easier of the pain."

"Well, then, I'm goin' to say this much more even if it strangles you: the word G.o.d stands for something in the hearts of men and women bigger'n a Paradise gardener with a taste for music!"

"You don't put it fair, Sister Prout," said William, aggrieved.

"I can't put it in as fine language as Saint John, if that's what you mean."

"What is the nature of G.o.d as you see Him?"

We are made very queer by the soul, not nearly so much alike as we are in other respects. I saw now the same light pa.s.s over Sal's face that I had often seen in William's, yet they could not agree about their one Heavenly Father.

"The G.o.d I trust is the One that makes flowers like them bloom for sech as me," she began, pointing through the window at a rose; "that lets His rain fall in my garden same as He does in your'n; that never takes His spite out on me for bein' what I was, but jest made it hard for me and waited patient for me. He's the kind of G.o.d, sir, that can change a heart like mine from all the evil there is, and make it so I can think good thoughts and be kind, and enjoy His hills and hear the birds sing again, same as I used to pay attention to 'em when I was a little gal."

She lowered her voice as if speaking of a mortal sorrow. "There were years and years, sir, when them little creatures were singin' all around me every day, but I couldn't hear 'em--my deeds were so evil. I don't reckon you know it--livin' the little you have--but sin affects you that way--takes away your hearin' for sweet sounds, your sight for what is lovely. But G.o.d, He jest kept on lettin' His birds sing for me, and the sun riz jest as fine above the hills behind my house. He didn't pick at me, nor put a sign on me same as folks did of my shame, as He could have done with a cloud or something over my house. You see, He'd fixed things from the foundations of the world so as they'd work out good and not evil for us every one, beca'se He knowed we'd all git tired and come home some time, the same as I've come. I don't know whether you ever found it out or not, sir, but sinners git awful tired of sinnin'. G.o.d knows that. He knows they just can't keep it up forever!"

The next winter Sal Prout died of smallpox, after nursing a community of sawmill hands farther up in the mountains who had been stricken with the disease, and many of whom must have died but for her care.

William never recovered from that attack of rheumatism. His legs got well, but he did not. He was different afterward, as if he had fallen into a trance. He seemed always to look and speak across a s.p.a.ce of which he was not conscious. He filled his appointments after a fashion during the remainder of the year at the Bowtown district, but he grew increasingly forgetful of people and all earthly considerations.

Sometimes he fell to dreaming in the middle of his sermon, looking over the heads of his congregation as if he was expecting Noah's dove to bring him a token or Michael to blow his trumpet. Then again he would make his prayer longer than his sermon. The people did not like it, and the Presiding Elder called for his superannuation at the conference that fall, on the grounds that Brother Thompson showed signs of "failing powers."

Maybe he did, but it was only his mortal faculties that were failing.

To the last he retained a clear and definite knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven that many a man in possession of all his powers never attains. The great change was that he took on a melancholy att.i.tude to reality.

CHAPTER XVI

IN THE LITTLE GRAVEYARD BEHIND REDWINE CHURCH

William was too dazed by the misfortune of his superannuation to think or plan for the future. For him there was no future. He sat in the chimney corner, following me about the house with his vacant eyes, but really grieving for one of the choice, hard circuits, with its dried-fruit salary, such as he had received for years, or remembering the good pastoral times he had upon one in this or that year.

I have sometimes wondered what would be the moral effect upon a church community if an old and helpless preacher like William should be sent to it with the understanding that the church should minister to him instead of his ministering to the church; that every saint and sinner should be invited to contribute to his peace and comfort, even as for years he had labored for them. There would be less preaching, of course, but more development in real Christian service. An old preacher treated in this manner would become very dictatorial, a perfect autocrat about ordering charities for the poor and prayers for the penitents, but would it be so bad for the church?

However, that was not my consideration now. The Redwine Circuit was only twenty miles distant; the little house between the two green hills that had been the Methodist parsonage thirty years before was long since abandoned for a shiny, green and yellow spindle-legged new parsonage at Royden. And while William, who had always had his home dictated to him by the Conference, showed a pathetic apathy about choosing one for himself, I hankered for the ragged-roof cottage with its ugly old chimneys that had first sheltered our life together. So within a month the horse and buggy were sold, the cottage at Redwine rented, and we settled in it like two crippled birds in a half-feathered nest.

Now, for the first time since I left Edenton, a happy, thoughtless bride, I had leisure to think just of ourselves, of our sum total, as it were. And I found that we were two human numerals added together for a lifetime which made a deficit. Yet we had not been idle or indifferent workers. For thirty years William had been in the itinerancy, filling nearly every third and fourth cla.s.s appointment in his Conference. He had preached over three thousand sermons, baptized more than four hundred infants, received nearly four thousand souls into membership. He had been untiring in his efforts to raise his a.s.sessments, and had paid more pastoral calls than half a dozen doctors need to make in order to become famous and wealthy.

Time changed us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses head the appearance of coming up out of a holy mist.

So, I say, we aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had feelings that prayers did not put down the desires that they did not satisfy. There were times when I almost hated prayers, when I had a mortal aversion to Heaven and wished only that G.o.d would give me a long earth-rest of the spirit.

We found the same kind of sinners everywhere and the same defects in all the saints. Sometimes I even wished some one would develop a new sort of wickedness, a kind that would vary the dreadful monotony of repentance and cause William to scratch his theological head for a different kind of sermon. But no one ever did; whether we were in the mountains or in the towns, among the rich or the poor, the people transgressed by the same mortal "rule of three" and fell short of the glory of G.o.d exactly alike.

At last I came to understand that there is just one kind of sin in the world--the sin against love--and no saints at all. I can't say that I was disappointed, but I was just tired of the awful upward strain of trying to develop faculties and feelings suitable to another world in this one. And to make things worse, William took on a weary look after his superannuation, like that of a man who has made a long journey in vain. This is always the last definition the itinerancy writes upon the faces of its superannuates. They are unhappy, mortified, like honorable men who have failed in a business. They no longer pretend to have better health than they really have, which is the pathetic hypocrisy they all practice toward the last when they are in annual fear of superannuation.

So, I looked at our deficit and knew that something was wrong. Still, I went about the little old house and garden, trying to reconstruct the memory of happiness and planning to spend our last days unhara.s.sed by salvation anxieties. I have never doubted the goodness of G.o.d, but, things being as they are, and we being what we are, it takes a long time for Him to work it out for us, especially in any kind of a church.

Meanwhile, I tried to find some of our old friends, only to discover that most of them were dead. I planted a few annuals, set some hens and prepared to cultivate my own peace. But William was changed. He had lost his courage. Whenever the rheumatism struck him he gave in to it with a groan. Then he took up with Job in the Scriptures, and before we had been back long enough for the flowers to bloom he just turned over on his spiritual ashheap and died.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Then He Took Up with Job in the Scriptures.]

He is buried in the little graveyard behind Redwine Church, along with most of the men and women to whom he preached in it thirty years ago.

I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the lat.i.tude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.

I used to wonder why Paul, pa.s.sing through all the grandest cities and civilizations of his times, never left behind him a single description of any of their glories, only a reference to the altar to An Unknown G.o.d that he found in Athens; but now I know. Paul lost the memory of sight. He had absent-minded eyes to the things of the world. So it is with the itinerant. The earth becomes one of the stars. I cannot remember roads and realities. I recall most clearly only spiritual facts, like this: Timothy Brown was a bad man, soundly converted under William's ministry; but how he looked, on which circuit he lived, I have forgotten long ago.

In spite of a really well-settled, worldly mind William prayed away its foundations during those thirty years, until now the very scene of his pa.s.sing floats a mist in memory. I know he lay in the same house where he had brought me on our wedding day. Through the window in the pearl light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills, the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to the earth, with children playing in the dooryards. It was all there the morning he died, as it had been that blue and glad morning thirty years before; but I could not see it or feel it with him lying stretched and still upon the bed, with the sheet drawn over his face, and the people crowding in, whispering, shuffling, bearing the long, black coffin among them. I say, it is dim and blurred and I cannot think it or write it properly. There seemed a rime upon the window-panes; the hills were bare, and the cup of the valley lay drained and empty before me, with the shadow of death darkening all the light of the day.

A very old woman, bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face when she had a "body" to prepare for burial.

"Come, Sister Thompson, you must git up and go out. We air ready to lay him out now."

"Oh, not him!" I cried; "you have laid out so many. Let some one else do it!" For I could not forget the frightful pleasure she had taken years ago in her ghoulish office.

"And why not him? I've helped to put away every man, woman and child that has died in this settlement since I was grown, and I ain't goin'

to shirk my duty to Brother Thompson--not that I ever expected to do it for him." She babbled on, gently urging me from the room, where her presence was the last blinding touch of horror for me.

So far, my autobiography has been mixed with William's biography, just as my life seems to mingle with the dust in his grave. But I came to an experience now of my own; unglorified by William, so strange that I cannot explain it unless there is what may be called a reversion to type in spirit, like this: that a person may be absolutely dominated for years by certain influences and not only feel no antagonism to them, but actually yield with devotion and inconceivable sacrifices, yet, when the influence is removed and there is no longer the love-cause for faithfulness the illusion not only pa.s.ses, but the person finds himself of his original mind and spirit, emanc.i.p.ated, gone back to himself, what he really was in the beginning before the domination began. Such at least is as near what happened in my own case as I can tell it.

I remained in the little house between the hills, walking about, attending to my few wants, receiving an occasional visitor in a sort of trance of sorrow. William had always meant more to me than Heaven. I had endured poverty, prayers, persecutions and revivals for his sake.

And now I had lost him. The very thought was immeasurable. I wore it for mourning. I missed him when I looked down the bridle path into the valley, and I missed him when I looked at the stars. Nothing meant anything to me without him. Then suddenly the veil lifted. I seemed at last to have conceded him to what is beyond the grave. At once my own mind came back to me, not the humble, church-censored mind I had during his life, but my very own, and it was like another conversion.

I remembered scenes and thoughts and faces that I had not recalled since girlhood. The innocent gayety of my youth came back to me, and I recalled distinctly with what nave, happy worldliness I faced the world then, and not the Kingdom of Heaven that I have been staring at since through William's eyes for thirty years.

The next Sunday I went to church as usual, but I did not go up near the front, which had always been my custom. It occurred to me that now I did not have to sit in the saint neighborhood, but might sit back with the honester human beings. The preacher was a young man of the progressive new order, who sustained the same relation as pastor to the church that an ambitious foreman sustains to a business that must be renovated and improved. He was taking up his foreign missionary collection very much after the manner of an auctioneer:

"Five dollars, five dollars, five dollars: who gives five dollars that the Gospel may be spread in China and Siam? Who gives five dollars that there may be light in India and to save women from casting their innocent babes into the Ganges? Thank you, Sister Tuttle. The women are leading off, getting ahead of you, brethren. Put down five dollars from Sister Tuttle. Now, who will give four dollars?" and so on down till even the sinners on the back benches subscribed a rattle of dimes.

I listened with comfortable indifference. I thought of how William died without enough oil in him to grease his joints. And how many more like him had died too weak and depleted to have even "a.s.surance" of their own salvation. I remembered how I wished toward the last that I could afford a few delicacies, for William liked cordials and real cream which might have strengthened and cheered him. Then and there I resolved never to give another cent to foreign missions. I am not opposed to foreign missions, you understand. William and I did without much that the heathen might have missionaries, and the gospel preached to them. But that is just it. We did without too much. I am not saying that anyone else ought to lessen their contribution to this cause. Let them give even more. But I am certain they ought to treble their contribution to old preachers. There is something fearful in the Bible like this: