"From that first night when I rode through the mountains over the white road and stopped at your gate--since I looked up and saw her standing on the balcony with the narcissus in her hair it has always been the same thing. It began that very moment--it was there when she leaned forward and spoke to me. I had never thought of a woman before--I was too poor and sad and lonely and young. And there she was--all white--and it seemed as if she was _mine_."

Tom nodded his head as if to a white rose-bush in the small garden.

"I am as poor as ever I was," said Rupert. "I am a beggar if we lose our claim; but I am not sad, and I am not lonely--I can't be--I can't be! I am happy--everything's happy--because she knows--and I have kissed her."

"What did you think I would say when you told me?" Tom asked.

"I don't know," impetuously; "but I knew I must come to you. It seems a million years ago since that hot morning in the old garden at Delisleville--when I had never seen her."

"One of the things I have thought about a good deal," said Tom, with quite a practical manner, "has been love. I had lots of time to think over things at the Cross-roads, and I used to work them out as far as my mind would carry me. Love's as much an element as the rest of them.

There's earth, air, fire, water--and love. It has to be calculated for.

What I've reasoned out is that it has not been calculated for enough.

It's going to _come_ to all of us--and it will either come and stay, and make the old earth bloom with flowers--or it will come and go, and leave it like a plain swept by fire. It's not a trivial thing that only boys and girls play with; it's better--and worse. It ought to be prepared for and treated well. It's not often treated well. People have got into the way of expecting trouble and tragedy to come out of it. We are always hearing of its unhappiness in books. Poets write about it that way."

"I suppose it is often unhappy," said Rupert; "but just now it seems as if it _could_ not be."

"What _I've_ been wanting to see," said Tom, "is young love come up like a flower and be given its dew and sun and rain--and bloom and bloom its best."

He drew a big sigh.

"That poor child who lies on the hillside under the pines," he went on, "Sheba's mother--hers was young love--and it brought tragedy and death.

Delia," his voice was unsteady, "your mother's was young love, and her heart was broken. No, it's not often well treated. And when you and Sheba came to me that night with your boy and girl eyes shining with gladness just because you had met each other, I said to myself, 'By the Lord, here is what it springs from. Perhaps it may come to them; I wonder if it will?'"

"You thought it might, even then," Rupert cried.

"Yes, I did," was Tom's answer. "You were young--you were drawn together--it seemed natural. I used to watch you, and think it over, making a kind of picture to myself of how it would be if two young things could meet each other and join hands and wander on among roses until they reached the gate of life--and it swung open for them and they passed through and found another paradise."

He stopped a second and turned to look at Rupert's dreamy face with a smile not all humorous. "I'm a sentimental chap for my size," he added.

"That's what I wanted for Sheba and you--that's what I want. That sort of thing was left out of my life; but I should like to see it before I'm done with. Good God! why can't people be _happy_? I want people to be _happy_."

The boy was trembling.

"Uncle Tom," he said, "Sheba and I are happy to-night."

"Then God have mercy on the soul of the man who would spoil it for you,"

said Big Tom, with actual solemnity. "I'm not that man. You two just go on being happy; try and make up for what your two mothers had to bear."

Rupert got up from his chair and caught the big hand in his. It was a boy's action, and he looked particularly like a boy as he did it. "It is just like you," he broke forth. "I did not know what you would say when I told you--but I ought to have known you would say something like this.

It's--it's as big as you are, Uncle Tom," ingenuously.

That was his good-night. When he went away Big Tom settled into his chair again and looked out for some time longer at the bright night. He was going back to two other nights which lay in the years behind. One was the night he turned his back on Delisleville and rode towards the mountain with a weight on his kindly heart which he had grimly told himself seemed to weigh a ton; the other was the night he had been wakened from his sleep by the knock on the door of the bedroom behind the Cross-roads Post-office and had ridden out under the whiteness of the moon to find in the bare cabin at Blair's Hollow the little fair girl who had sobbed and died as she clung to his warm hand.

CHAPTER XXIX

The world had heard and talked much of the Reverend John Baird in the years which followed his return to Willowfield. During the first few months after his reappearance among them, his flock had passed through a phase of restless uncertainty with regard to him. Certain elder members of his congregation had privately discussed questions of doctrine with anxiousness. Had not Nature already arraigned herself upon the man's side by bestowing upon him a powerful individuality, heads might have been shaken, and the matter discussed openly instead of in considerately confidential conclave. It was, however, less easy to enter into argument with such a man than with one slow and uncertain of tongue, and one whose fortunes rested in the hands of the questioners. Besides, it was not to be denied that even the elderly and argumentative found themselves listening to his discourses. The young and emotional often thrilled and quaked before them. In his hour he was the pioneer of what to-day we call the modern, and seemed to speak his message not to a heterogeneous mental mass, but to each individual man and woman who sat before him with upturned face. He was daringly human for the time in which he lived, it being the hour when humanity was overpowered by deity, and to be human was to be iconoclastic. His was not the doctrine of the future--of future repentance for the wrongs done to-day, of future reward for the good to-day achieves, all deeds being balanced on a mercantile account of profit and loss. His was a cry almost fierce, demanding, in the name of human woe, that to-day shall hold no cruelty, no evil done, even to the smallest and most unregarded thing.

By some chance--though he alone realised the truth of the fact--the subjects of his most realistic and intense appeals to his hearers had the habit of developing themselves in his close talks with Latimer. Among the friends of the man on whom all things seemed to smile, the man on whom the sun had never shone, and who faithfully worshipped him, was known as his Shadow. It was not an unfitting figure of speech. Dark, gloomy, and inarticulate, he was a strange contrast to the man he loved; but, from the hour he had stood by Latimer's side, leaning against the rail of the returning steamer, listening to the monotonously related story of the man's bereavement, John Baird had felt that Fate herself had knit their lives together. He had walked the deck alone long hours that night, and when the light of the moon had broken fitfully through the stormily drifting clouds, it had struck upon a pallid face.

"Poor fellow!" he had said between his teeth; "poor darkling, tragic fellow! I must try--try--oh, my God! I must try----"

Then their lives had joined currents at Willowfield, and the friendship Baird had asked for had built itself on a foundation of stone.

There was nothing requiring explanation in the fact that to the less fortunate man Baird's every gift of wit and ease was a pleasure and comfort. His mere physical attractions were a sort of joy. When Latimer caught sight of his own lank, ill-carried figure and his harshly rugged sallow face, he never failed to shrink from them and avert his eyes. To be the companion of a man whose every movement suggested strength and grace, whose skin was clear and healthful, his features well balanced and admirable in line--to be the friend of a human being built by nature as all human beings should be built if justice were done to them, was nourishment to his own starved needs.

When he assumed his charge at the squalid little town of Janway's Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; but his was the asceticism and stern self-denial of Savonarola without the uplifting power of passionate eloquence and fire which, through their tempest, awakened and shook human souls. He had no gifts of compelling fervor; he could not arouse or warm his hearers; he never touched them. He preached to them, he visited them at their homes, he prayed beside their dying and their dead, he gave such aid in their necessities as the narrowness of his means would allow, but none of them loved him or did more than stoically accept him and his services.

"Look at us as we stand together," he said to Baird on an evening when they stood side by side within range of an old-fashioned mirror. "Those things your reflection represents show me the things I was born without.

I might make my life a daily crucifixion of self-denial and duty done at all costs, but I could not wear your smile or speak with your voice. I am a man, too," with smothered passion; "I am a man, too! And yet--what woman looks smilingly at _me_--what child draws near unafraid?"

"You are of the severe monastic temperament," answered Baird. "It is all a matter of temperament. Mine is facile and a slave to its emotions.

Saints and martyrs are made of men like you--never of men such as I am."

"Are you sure of the value to the world of saints and martyrs?" said Latimer. "I am not. That is the worst of it."

"Ah! the world," Baird reflected. "If we dare to come back to the world--to count it as a factor----"

"It is only the world we know," Latimer said, his harsh voice unsteady; "the world's sorrow--the world's pain--the world's power to hurt and degrade itself. That is what seems to concern us--if we dare to say so--we, who were thrust into it against our wills, and forced to suffer and see others suffer. The man who was burned at the stake, or torn in the arena by wild beasts, believed he won a crown for himself--but it was for _himself_."

"What doth it profit a man," quoted Baird, vaguely, but as if following a thought of his own, "if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

Latimer flung back his shock of uneven black locks. His hollow eyes flashed daringly.

"What doth it profit a man," he cried, "if he save his own soul and lose the whole world, caring nothing for its agony, making no struggle to help it in its woe and grieving? A Man once gave His life for the world. Has any man ever given his soul?"

"You go far--you go far!" exclaimed Baird, drawing a short, sharp breath.

Latimer's deep eyes dwelt upon him woefully. "Have you known what it was to bear a heavy sin on your soul?" he asked.

"My dear fellow," said John Baird, a little bitterly, "it is such men as I, whose temperaments--the combination of forces you say you lack--lead them to the deeds the world calls 'heavy sins'--and into the torment of regret which follows. You can bear no such burden--you have no such regret."

Latimer, whose elbow rested on the mantel, leaned a haggard forehead on his hand.

"I have sinned," he said. "It was that others might be spared; but I have put my soul in peril. Perhaps it is lost--lost!"

Baird laid a hand on his shoulder and shook him. It was a singular movement with passion in it.

"No! No!" he cried. "Rouse, man, and let your reason speak. In peril?

Lost--for some poor rigid law broken to spare others? Great God! No!"

"Reason!" said Latimer. "What you and I must preach each week of our lives is that it is not reason a man must be ruled by, but blind, wilful faith."

"I do not preach it," Baird interposed. "There are things I dare to leave unsaid."

"I have spoken falsely," Latimer went on, heavily. "I have lived a lie--a lie--but it was to save pure hearts from breaking. They would have broken beneath the weight of what I have borne for them. If I must bear punishment for that, I--Let me bear it."