The Zeit-Geist

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The Zeit-Geist

L. DOUGALL

Author of Beggars All, What Necessity Knows, etc. 

LONDONHUTCHINSON & COPATERNOSTER ROW

 "I . . . Create evil. I am the Lord. " _Isa. Xlv. 6, 7. _

 "Where will God be absent? In His face Is light, but in His shadow there is healing too: Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!" _The Ring and the Book. _

 "If Nature is the garment of God, it is woven without seam throughout. " _The Ascent of Man. _

OXFORD, _January 1895_. 

_When travelling in Canada, in the region north of Lake Ontario, I cameupon traces of the somewhat remarkable life which is the subject of thefollowing sketch. 

Having applied to the school-master in the town where Bartholomew Toynerlived, I received an account the graphic detail and imaginative insightof which attest the writer's personal affection. This account, with onlysuch condensation as is necessary, I now give to the world. I do notbelieve that it belongs to the novel to teach theology; but I do believethat religious sentiments and opinions are a legitimate subject of itsart, and that perhaps its highest function is to promote understandingby bringing into contact minds that habitually misinterpret oneanother. _

THE ZEIT-GEIST. 

CHAPTER I. 

PROLOGUE. 

To-day I am at home in the little town of the fens, where the AhweweeRiver falls some thirty feet from one level of land to another. Bothbroad levels were covered with forest of ash and maple, spruce andtamarack; but long ago, some time in the thirties, impious hands builtdams on the impetuous Ahwewee, and wide marshes and drowned wood-landsare the result. Yet just immediately at Fentown there is neither marshnor dead tree; the river dashes over its ledge of rock in a foamingflood, runs shallow and rapid between green woods, and all about thetown there are breezy pastures where the stumps are still standing, andarable lands well cleared. The little town itself has a thriving look. Its public buildings and its villas have risen, as by the sweep of anenchanter's wand, in these backwoods to the south of the Ottawa valley. 

There was a day when I came a stranger to Fentown. The occasion of mycoming was a meeting concerning the opening of new schools for thetown--schools on a large and ambitious plan for so small a place. Whenthe meeting was over, I came out into the street on a mild Septemberafternoon. The other members of the School Council were with me. Therewere two clergymen of the party. One of them, a young man with thin, eager face, happened to be at my side. 

"This Mr. Toyner, whose opinion has been so much consulted, was nothere to-day?" I said this interrogatively. 

"No, ah--but you'll see him now. He has invited you all to a gardenparty, or something of that sort. He's in delicate health. Ah--ofcourse, you know, it is natural for me to wish his influence with theCouncil were much less than it is. "

"Indeed! He was spoken of as a philanthropist. "

"It's a very poor love to one's fellow-man that gives him all that hisvanity desires in the way of knowledge without leading him into theChurch, where he would be taught to set the value of everything in itsright proportion. "

I was rather struck with this view of the function of the Church. "Certainly, " I replied, "to see all things in right proportion iswisdom; but I heard this Toyner mentioned as a religious man. "

"He has some imaginations of his own, I believe, which he mistakes forreligion. I do not know him intimately; I do not wish to. I believe hehas some sort of desire to do what is right; but that, you know, is ahouse built upon the sand, unless it is founded upon the desire forinstruction as to what _is_ right. Every one cries up his generosity;for instance, one of my church-wardens tells him that we need a neworgan in the church and the people won't give a penny-piece towards it, so Toyner says, with his benevolent smile, 'They must be taught to give. Tell them I will give half if they will give the other half. ' But if theRoman Catholic priest or a Methodist goes to him the next day for asubscription, he gives just as willingly if, as is likely, he thinks theobject good. What can you do with a man like that, who has no principle?It's impossible to have much respect for him. "

Now I myself am a school-master, versed in the lore of certain booksancient and modern, but knowing very little about such a practicalmatter as applied theology; nor did I know very much then concerning theclassification of Christians among themselves: but I think that I am notwrong in saying that this young man belonged to that movement in theAnglican Church which fights strongly for a visible unity and for Churchtradition. I am so made that I always tend to agree with the man who isspeaking, so my companion was encouraged by my sympathy. 

He went on: "I can do with a man that is out-and-out anything. I canwork with a Papist; I can work with a Methodist, as far as I canconscientiously meet him on common ground, and I can respect him if heconscientiously holds that he is right and I am wrong: but thesefellows that are neither one thing nor the other--they are as dangerousas rocks and shoals that are just hidden under the water. You never knowwhen you have them. "

We were upon the broad wooden side-walk of an avenue leading from thecentral street of the town to a region of outstanding gardens andpleasure-grounds, in which the wooden villas of the citizens stood amongluxuriant trees. It is a characteristic of Fentown that the old treesabout the place have been left standing. 

A new companion came to my side, and he, as fate would have it, wasanother clergyman. He was an older man, with a genial, bearded face. Ithink he belonged to that party which takes its name from the Evangel ofwhose purity it professes itself the guardian. 

"You are going to this entertainment which Mr. And Mrs. Toyner aregiving?" The cordiality of his common-place remark had a certainrestraint in it. 

"You are going also?"

"No; it is not a house at which I visit. I have lived here fortwenty-five years, and of course I have known Mr. Toyner more or lessall that time. I do not know how I shall be able to work on the sameCouncil with him; but we shall see. We, who believe in the truth ofreligion, must hold our own if we can. "

I was to be the master of the new schools. I pleased him with my assent. 

"I am rather sorry, " he continued, "to tell the truth, that you shouldbegin your social life in Fentown by visiting Mr. Toyner; but of coursethis afternoon it is merely a public reception, and after a time youwill be able to judge for yourself. I do not hesitate to say that Iconsider his influence, especially with the young people, of a mostdangerous kind. For a long time, you know, he and his wife were quiteostracised--not so much because of their low origin as because of theirreligious opinions. But of late years even good Christians appeardisposed to be friendly with them. Money, you know--money carries allthings before it. "

"Yes, that is too often the case. "

"Well, I don't say that Toyner doesn't hold up a certain standard ofmorality among the young men of the place, but it's a pretty low one;and he has them all under his influence. There isn't a young fellow thatwalks these streets, whether the son of clergyman or beggar, who is notfree to go to that man's house every evening and have the run of hisrooms and his books. And Toyner and his wife will sit down and playcards with them; or they'll get in a lot of girls, and have a dance, ortheatricals, --the thin end of the wedge, you know, the thin end of thewedge! And all the young men go to his house, except a few that we'vegot in our Christian Association. "

The speaker was stricter in his views than I saw cause to be; but then, I knew something of his life; he was giving it day by day to save themen of whom he was talking. He had a better right than I to know whatwas best for them. 

"When you have a thorough-going man of the world, " he said, "every oneknows what that means, and there's not so much harm done. But this Mr. Toyner is always talking about God, and using his influence to makepeople pray to God. Such men are not ready to pray until they areprepared to give up the world! The God that he tells them of is afiction of his imagination; indeed, I might say a mere creature of hisfancy, who is going to save all men in the end, whatever they do!"

"A Universalist!"

"Oh, worse than that--at least, I have read the books of Universalistswho, though their error was great, did not appear to me so far astray. Icannot understand it! I cannot understand it!" he went on; "I cannotunderstand the influence that he has obtained over our more educatedclass; for twenty years ago he was himself a low, besotted drunkard, andhis wife is the daughter of a murderer! Still less do I understand howsuch people can claim to be religious at all, and yet not see to whatawful evil the small beginnings of vice must lead. I tell you, if a manis allowed by Providence to lead an easy life, and remains unfaithful, he may still have some good metal in him which adversity might refine;but when people have gone through all that Toyner and his wife have beenthrough--not a child that has been born to them but has died at thebreast--I say, when they have been through all that, and still lead aworldly, unsatisfactory life, you may be sure that there is nothing inthem that has the true ring of manhood or womanhood. "

I was left alone to enter Mr. Toyner's gates. I found myself in a largepleasure-ground, where Nature had been guided, not curtailed, in herwork. I was walking upon a winding drive, walled on either side by awild irregular line of shrubs, where the delicate forms of acacias andcrab-apples lifted themselves high in comparison to the lower lilac andelderberry-bushes. I watched the sunlit acacias as they fluttered, spreading their delicate leaves and golden pods against the blue aboveme. I made my way leisurely in the direction of music which I heard atsome distance. I had not advanced far before another person came into mypath. 

He was a slight, delicate man of middle size. His hair and moustachewere almost quite white. Something in the air of neatness and perfectionabout his dress, in the extreme gravity and clearness of his grey eyes, even in the fine texture of that long, thin, drooping moustache, made itevident to me that this new companion was not what we call an ordinaryperson. 

"Your friend did not come in with you. " The voice spoke disappointment;the speaker looked wistfully at the form of the retreating clergymanwhich he could just see through a gap in the shrubs. 

"You wished him to come?"

"I saw you coming. I came toward the gate in the hope that he mightcome in. " Then he added a word of cordial greeting. I perceived that Iwas walking with my host. 

There are some men to whom one instinctively pays the compliment ofdirect speech. "I have been walking with two clergymen. I understandthat you differ from both with regard to religious opinion. "

It appeared to me that after this speech of mine he took my measurequietly. He did not say in so many words he did not see that thisdifference of opinion was a sufficient reason for their absence, but bysome word or sign he gave me to understand that, adding:

"I feel myself deprived of a great benefit in being without theirsociety. They are the two best and noblest men I know. "

"It is rare for men to take pleasure in the society of theiropponents. "

"Yet you will admit that to be willing to learn from those from whom wediffer is the only path to wisdom. "

"It is difficult to tread that path without letting go what we alreadyhave, and that produces chaos. "

With intensity both of thought and feeling he took up the words that Ihad dropped half idly, and showed me what he thought to be the truth anduntruth of them. There was a grave earnestness in his speech which madehis opinion on this subject suddenly become of moment to me, and hisintensity did not produce any of that sensation of irritation oropposition which the intensity of most men produces as soon as it isfelt. 

"You think that the chief obstacle which is hindering the progress oftrue religion in the world at present is that while we will not learnfrom those who disagree with us we can obtain no new light, and thatwhen we are willing to reach after their light we become also willing tolet go what we have had, so that the world does not gain but loses bythe transaction. This is, I admit, an obstacle to thought; but it is notthe essential difficulty of our age. "

"Let us consider, " I said, in my pedantic way, "how my difficulty may beovercome, and then let us discuss that one you consider to beessential. "

Toyner's choice of words, like his appearance, betrayed a strong, yetfinely chiselled personality. 

"We are truly accustomed now to the idea that whatever has life cannotpossibly remain unchanged, but must always develop by leaving some partbehind and producing some part that is new. It is God's will that thereligious thought of the world, which is made up of the thought ofindividuals, shall proceed in this way, whether we will or not, but itmust always help progress when we can make our wills at one with God'sin this matter; we go faster and safer so. Now to say that to submitwillingly to God's law of growth is to produce chaos must certainly be afallacy. It must then be a fallacy to argue that to keep a mind open toall influences is antagonistic to the truest religious life; wecannot--whether we wish or not, we _cannot_--let go any truth that hasbeen assimilated into our lives; and what truth we have not assimilatedit is no advantage to hold without agitation. We know better where weare when we are forced to sift it. It is the very great apparentadvantage of recognised order that deceives us! When we lose that_apparent_ advantage, when we lose, too, the familiar names andsymbols, and think, like children, that we have lost the reality theyhave expressed to us, a very low state of things _appears_ to result. The strain and stress of life become much greater. Ah! but, my friend, it is that strain and stress that shape us into the image of God. "

"You hinted, I think, that to your mind there was a more real obstacle, one peculiar to our age. "

Ever since I first met him I have been puzzled to know how it was that Ioften knew so nearly what Toyner meant when he only partially expressedhis thought; he had this power over my understanding. He was my masterfrom the first. 

He laid his hand now slightly upon my arm, as though to emphasise whathe said. 

"It is a little hard to explain it reverently, " he said, "and stillharder to understand why the difficulty should have come about, but inour day it would seem that the nights of prayer and the fresh intuitioninto the laws of God's working, which we see united in the life of ourgreat Example, have become divorced. It is their union again that wemust have--that we shall have; but at present there is the difficultyfor every man of us--the men who lead us in either path are differentmen and lead different ways. Our law-givers are not the men who meet Godupon the mount. Our scientists are not the teachers who are pre-eminentfor fasting and prayer. We who to be true to ourselves must follow inboth paths find our souls perplexed. "

In front of us, as we turned a curve in the drive, a bed of scarletlilies stood stately in the sun, and a pair of bickering sparrows rosefrom the fountain near which they grew. Toyner made a slight gesture ofhis hand. With the eagerness of a child he asked:

"Is it not hard to believe that we may ask and expect forgiveness andgifts from the God who by slow inevitable laws of growth clothes thelilies, who ordains the fall of every one of these sparrows, foreseesthe fall and ordains it--the God whose character is expressed inphysical law? The texts of Jesus have become so trite that we forgetthat they contain the same vision of 'God's mind in all things' thatmakes it so hard to believe in a personality in God, that makes prayerseem to us so futile. "

We came out of the shrubbery upon a bank that dropped before us to alevel lawn. I found myself in the midst of a company of people amongwhom were the other members of the new School Council. Below, upon thelawn, there was a little spectacle going on for our entertainment--amorris-dance, simply and gracefully performed by young people dressedin quaintly fashioned frocks of calico; there was good music too--one ortwo instruments, to which they danced. Round the other side of the grassan avenue of stately Canadian maples shut in the view, except where theriver or the pale blue of the eastern horizon was seen in glimpsesthrough their branches. Behind us the sun's declining rays fell upon anold-fashioned garden of holly-hocks and asters, so that the effect, asone caught it turning sideways, was like light upon a stained-glasswindow, so rich were the dyes. I saw all this only as one sees thesurroundings of some object that interests supremely. 

The man who had been walking with me said simply, "This is my wife. "

Before me stood a woman who had the power that some few women have ofmaking all those whom they gather round them speak out clearly andfreshly the best that is in them. 

Ah! we live in a new country. Its streets are not paved with gold, noris prosperity to be attained without toil; but it gives this oneadvantage--room for growth; whatever virtue a soul contains may reachits full height and fragrance and colour, if it will. 

I did not know then that the beginning of this provincial _salon_, whichToyner's wife had kept about her for so many years, and to which shegave a genuine brilliance, however raw the material, had been a woodenshanty, in which a small income was made by the sale of home-brewedbeer. 

I always remember Ann Toyner as I saw her that first time. Her eyes wereblack and still bright; but when I looked at them I remembered thelittle children that had died in her arms, and I knew that her hopeshad not died with them, but by that suffering had been transformed. As Iheard her talk, my own hopes lifted themselves above their ordinarylevel. 

Husband and wife stood together, and I noticed that the white shawl thatwas crossed Quakerwise over her thin shoulders seemed like a counterpartof his careful dress, that the white tresses that were beginning to showamong her black ones were almost like a reflection of his white hair. Ifelt that in some curious way, although each had so distinct and stronga personality, they were only perfect as a part of the character whichin their union formed a perfect whole. They stood erect and looked at uswith frank, kindly eyes; we all found to our surprise that we weresaying what we thought and felt, and not what we supposed we ought tosay. 

As I talked and looked at them, the words that I had heard came back tomy mind. "His wife is the daughter of a murderer, and he has come upfrom the lowest, vilest life. " Some indistinct thought worked through mymind whose only expression was a disconnected phrase: "I saw a newheaven and a new earth. "

In the years since then I have learned to know the story of Toyner andhis wife. Now that they are gone away from us, I will tell what I know. His was a life which shows that a man cut off from all contact with hisbrother-thinkers may still be worked upon by the great over-soul ofthought: his is the story of a weak man who lived a strong life in astrength greater than his own. 

CHAPTER II. 

In the days when there were not many people in Fentown Falls, and whenmuch money was made by the lumber trade, Bartholomew Toyner's fathergrew rich. He was a Scotchman, not without some education, and wasambitious for his son; but he was a hard, ill-tempered man, andconsequently neither his example nor his precepts carried any weightwhatever with the son when he was grown. The mother, who had begun lifecheerfully and sensibly, showed the weakness of her character in thatshe became habitually peevish. She had enough to make her so. All herpleasure in life was centred in her son Bart. Bart came out of school tolounge upon the streets, to smoke immoderately, and to drink such largequantities of what went into the country by the name of "Jamaica, " thatin a few years it came to pass that he was nearly always drunk. 

Poor Bart! the rum habit worked its heavy chains upon him before he waswell aware that his life had begun in earnest; and when he realised thathe was in possession of his full manhood, and that the prime of life wasnot far off, he found himself chained hand and foot, toiling heavily inthe most degrading servitude. A few more years and he realised alsothat, do what he would, he could not set himself free. No one in theworld had any knowledge of the struggle he made. Some--his mother amongthem--gave him credit for trying now and then, and that was a charitableview of his case. How could any man know? He was not born with thenature that reveals itself in many words, or that gets rid of itsintolerable burdens of grief and shame by passing them off upon others. All that any one could see was the inevitable failure. 

The failure was the chief of what Bart himself saw. That unquenchableinstinct in a man's heart that if he had only tried a little harder hewould certainly have attained to righteousness gave the lie to his senseof agonising struggle, with its desperate, rallies of courage andsinkings of discouragement, gleams of self-confidence, and foulsuspicion of self, suspicion even as to the reality of his own effort. All this was in the region of unseen spirit, almost as much unseen tothose about him as are the spirits of the dead men and angels, often amere matter of faith to himself, so apart did it seem from the outwardrealities of life. 

Outwardly the years went easily enough. The father railed and stormed, then relapsed into a manner of silent contempt; but he did not drive hisson from the plain, comfortable home which he kept. Bart would not work, but he took some interest in reading. Paper-covered infidel books, andpopular books on modern science, were his choice rather than fiction. The choice might have been worse, for the fiction to which he had accesswas more enervating. Outside his father's house he neglected the betterclass of his neighbours, and fraternised with the men and women thatlived by the lowest bank of the river; but his life there was still oneinto which the fresh air and the sunshine of the Canadian climateentered largely. If he lounged all day, it was on the benches in theopen air; if he played cards all night, he was not given much money towaste; and there were few women to lend their companionship to the manydrunkards of whom he was only one. Then, also, Bart did not do even allthe evil that he might. What was the result of that long struggle of hiswhich always ended in failure? The failure was only apparent; thesuccess was this mighty one--that he did not go lower, he did not leaveFentown Falls for the next town upon the river, a place called TheMills, where his life could have been much worse. He fell in love withAnn Markham; and although she was the daughter of the wickedest man inFentown, she was--according to the phraseology of the place--"a lady. "She kept a small beer-shop that was neat and clean; she lived so that noman dared to say an uncivil word to her or to the sister whom sheprotected. She did for her father very much what Bart's father did forhim: she kept a decent house over his head and decent clothes upon hisback, and threw a mantle of thrifty respectability over him. 

Ann was no prude, and she certainly was no saint. Twice a week there wasthe sound of fiddling and dancing feet in a certain wooden hall thatstood near the river; and there, with the men and women of the worldlysort, Ann and her sister danced. It was their amusement; they had noother except the idle talking and laughing that went on over the tableat which Ann sold her home-brewed beer. Ann's end in life was just theordinary one--respectability, or a moderate righteousness, first, andafter that, pleasure. She was a strong, vigorous, sunbrowned maiden; sheworked hard to brew her beer and to sell it. She ruled her sister withan inflexible will. She had much to say to men whom she liked andadmired. She neither liked nor admired Bart Toyner, never threw him aword unless in scorn; yet he loved her. She was the star by which hesteered his ship in those intervals in which his eyes were clear enoughto steer at all; and the ship did not go so far out of the track as itwould otherwise have gone. When a man is in the right course, with agood hope of the port, rowing and steering, however toilsome, is acheerful thing; but when the track is so far lost that the sailorscarcely hopes to regain it--then perhaps (God only knows) it requiresmore virtue to row and steer at all, even though it be done fitfully. 

This belief that he could never come to any desired haven was the oneforce above all others that went to the ruining of Toyner's life. 

CHAPTER III. 

Bart Toyner was more than thirty years old when the period of hisreformation came. His father had grown old and foolish. It was thebreaking down of his father's clear mind that first started and shockedBart into some strong emotion of filial respect and love; then cameanother agonising struggle on his part to free himself from his evilhabits. In this fit of sobriety he went a journey to the nearest cityupon his father's business, and there, after a few days, he took todrinking harder than ever, ceased to write home, lost all thepossessions that he had taken with him, and sank deep down into the mireof the place. 

The first thing that he remembered in the awakening that followed wasthe face of another man. It stood out in the nebulous gathering of hisreturning self-consciousness like the face of an angel; there was theflame of enthusiasm in the eyes, a force of will had chiselled handsomefeatures into tense lines; but in spite of that, or rather perhapsbecause of it, it was a gentle, happy face. 

It is happiness that is the culmination of sainthood. You may lookthrough the pictures of the saints of all ages and find enthusiasm andrighteousness in many and the degree of faith that these imply; butwhere you find joy too, there has been the greatest faith, the greatestsaintliness. 

Bart found himself clothed and fed; he felt the warm clasp of a humanhand in his, and some self-respect came back to him by the contact. Theface and the hand belonged to a mission preacher, and Bart arose andfollowed his friend to a place where there was the sound of many feethurrying and a great concourse of people was gathered in a wood withoutthe town. 

It was only with curiosity that Bart looked about him at the high treesthat stretched their green canopy above, at the people who rangedthemselves in a hollow of the wood--one of nature's theatres. Curiositypassed into strong emotion of maudlin sentiment when the greatcongregation sang a hymn. He sat upon a bench at the back and wept tearsthat even to himself had neither sense nor truth. Yet there was in themthe stirring of something inarticulate, incomprehensible, like thestirring that comes at spring-time in the heart of the seed that liesbelow the ground. After that the voice of the preacher began to make itsway slowly through the dull, dark mind of the drunkard. 

The preacher spoke of the wonderful love of God manifested in a certaindefinite offer of salvation, a certain bargain, which, if closed with, would bring heaven to the soul of every man. 

The preacher belonged to that period of this century when the religiousworld first threw off its contempt for the present earthly life andbegan to preach, not a salvation from sin's punishment so much as asalvation from sin. 

It was the old cry: "Repent, believe; for the kingdom of heaven is athand. " The doctrine that was set forth had not only the vital growth ofages in it, but it had accreted the misunderstanding of the ages also;yet this doctrine did not hide, it only limited, the saving power ofGod. "Believe, " cried the preacher, "in a just God and a Saviour. " So hepreached Christ unto them, just as he supposed St. Paul to have done, wotting nothing of the fact that every word and every symbol stand fora different thought in the minds of men with every revolution of thatglass by which Time marks centuries. 

It mattered nothing to Bart just now all this about the centuries andthe doctrines; the heart of the preaching was the eternal truth that hasbeen growing brighter and brighter since the world began--God, a livingPower, the Power of Salvation. The salvation was conditioned, truly; butwhat did conditions matter to Bart! He would have cast himself into seaor fire to obtain the strength that he coveted. He eagerly cast asidethe unbelief he had imbibed from books. He accepted all that he was toldto accept, with the eager swallowing of a man who is dying for thestrength of a drug that is given to him in dilution. 

At the end of the sermon there was a great call made upon all whodesired to give up their sins and to walk in God's strength andrighteousness, to go forward and kneel in token of their penitence andpray for the grace which they would assuredly receive. 

This public penance was a very little thing, like the dipping in Jordan. It did not seem little to Toyner. He was thoroughly awake now, rousedfor the hour to the power of seeking God with all his mind, all histhought, all his soul. The high tide of life in him made the ordealterrible; he tottered forward and knelt where, in front of the rostrum, sweet hay had been strewn upon the ground. A hundred penitents werekneeling upon this carpet. 

There was now no more loud talking or singing. Silence was allowed tospread her wings within the woodland temple. Toyner, kneeling, felt theinfluence of other human spirits deeply vivified in the intensity ofprayer. He heard whispered cries and the sound of tears, the prayer ofthe publican, the tears of the Magdalene, and now and then there came aglad thanksgiving of overflowing joy. Toyner tried to repeat what heheard, hoping thereby to give some expression to the need within him;but all that he could think of was the craving for strong drink that heknew would return and that he knew he could not resist. 

He heard light footsteps, and felt a strong arm embracing his owntrembling frame. The preacher had come to kneel where he knelt, and topray, not for him, but with him. 

"I cannot, " said Bart Toyner, "I can't, I can't. "

"Why not?" whispered the preacher. 

"Because I know I shall take to drink again. "

"Which do you love best, God or the drink?" asked the preacher. "If youlove the drink best, you ought not to be here; if you love God best, you need have no fear. "

"God. " The word embodied the great new idea which had entered Toyner'ssoul, the idea of the love that had power to help him. 

"I want to get hold of God, " he said; "but it isn't any use, for I shalljust go and get drunk again. "

"Dear, dear fellow, " said the young preacher, his arm drawing closerround Bart, "He is able and willing to keep you; all you have to do isto take Him for your Master, and He will come to you and make a new manof you. He will take the drink crave away. He knows as well as you dothat you can't fight it. "

"I don't believe it, " said Toyner. 

Then the young preacher turned his beautiful face toward the blue abovethe trees and whispered a prayer: "Open the eyes of our souls that wemay see Thee, and then we shall know that Thou canst not lie. Thy honouris pledged to give Thy servants all they need, and this man needs tohave the craving for drink taken out of his body. He has come at Thycall, willing to be Thy slave; Thou canst not go back on Thy promises. We know Thou hast accepted him, because he has come to Thee. We knowthat Thou wilt give him what he needs, "--so the short sentences of thewhispered prayer went on in quick transition from entreaty tothanksgiving for a gift received. Suddenly, before the conclusion hadcome, Bart stood up upon his feet. 

"What is it, my brother?" asked the preacher. He too had risen and stoodwith his hand on Toyner's shoulder. 

They were alone together, these two. The great crowd of the congregationhad already gone away; those that remained were each one so intenselyoccupied with prayer or adoration that they paid no heed to others. 

"I feel--light, " said Toyner. 

"Dear fellow, " said the preacher, "the devil has gone out of you. Youare free now because you are the slave of Christ. Begin your service tohim by praising God!"

Toyner stayed a week longer in the place, lodging with the youngpreacher. Day and night they were close together. A change had come toToyner. It was a miracle. The young preacher believed in such miracles, and because he believed he saw them often. 

Toyner trembled and hoped, and at length he too believed. He believedthat as long as he willingly obeyed God his old habits would not triumphover him. The physical health which so often comes like a flood andreplaces disease at the shrines of idol temples, of Romish saints, or, at the many Protestant homes for faith-healing, had undoubtedly come toBart Toyner. The stomach that had been inflamed and almost useless, nowproduced in him a regular appetite for simple nourishing food. Thecraving for strong drink had passed away, and with his whole mind andheart he threw himself into such service as he believed to be acceptableto God and the condition upon which he held his health and his freedom. At the end of the week Toyner went home to face the old life again withno safe-guard but the new inward strength. No one there believed in hisreformation. He had lost money for his father in his last debauch; theman who was virtually a partner would not trust him again. He had anominal business of his own, an agency which he had heretoforeneglected, and now he worked hard, living frugally, and for the firsttime in his life earned his own living. The rules of conduct which thepreacher had laid down for him were simple and broad. He was to see Godin everything, accepting all events joyfully from His hand; he was so topreach Him in life and word that others would love Him; he was to do allhis work as unto a God who beheld and cared for the minutest things ofearth; he was to abstain, not only from all sin, but from all thingsthat might lead to evil. At first he saw no contradiction in this ruleof life; it seemed a plain path, and he walked, nay ran, upon it for along distance. 

Between Toyner and his old friends the change of his life and thoughtshad made the widest breach. That outward show of companionship remainedwas due only to patient persistence on his part and the endurance of thepain and shame of being in society where he was not wanted and where hefelt nothing congenial. There was a Scotch minister who, with the peopleof his congregation, had received and befriended the reformed man; butbecause of Toyner's desire to follow the most divine example, and alsobecause of his love to Ann Markham, he chose the other companionship. Itwas a high ideal; something warred against it which he could notunderstand, and his patience brought forth no mutual love. 

When six months had passed away, Toyner had gained with his neighbours acharacter for austerity in his personal habits and constantcompanionship with the rough and the poor. The post of constable fellvacant; Toyner's father had been constable in his youth; Toyner wasoffered the post now, and he took it. 

The constable in such villages as Fentown was merely a respectable manwho could be called upon on rare occasions to arrest a criminal. Crimewas seldom perpetrated in Fentown, except when it was of a nature thatcould be winked at. Toyner had no uniform; he was put in possession of apair of hand-cuffs, which no one expected him to use; he was given anominal income; and the name of "constable" was a public recognitionthat he was reformed. 

Toyner had had many scruples of mind before he took this office. Theconsiderations which induced him to accept it were various. The austeredemand of law and the service of God were very near together in hismind; nor are they in any strong mind ever separated except in parable. 

Bart Toyner, who had for years appeared so weak and witless, possessedin reality that fine quality of brain and heart which is so often aprey to the temptation of intoxicants. He was now working out all thetheory of the new life in a mind that would not flinch before, or shirkthe gleams of truth struck from, sharp contact of fact with fact as thedays and hours knocked them together. For this reason it could not bethat his path would remain that plain path in which a man could runseeing far before him. Soon he only saw his way step by step, aroundthere was darkness; but through that darkness, except in one black hour, he always saw the mount of transfiguration and the light of heaven. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Another six months passed, and an event occurred which gave a greatshock to the little community and gave Toyner a pain of heart such asalmost nothing else could have given. Ann's father, John Markham, had adeadly dispute with a man by the name of Walker. Walker was acomparatively new comer to the town, or he would have known better thanto gamble with Markham as he did and arouse his enmity. The feud lastedfor a week, and then Markham shot his enemy with a borrowed fire-arm. Walker was discovered wounded, and cared for, but with little hope ofhis recovery. From all around the men assembled to seize Markham, buthalf a night had elapsed, and it was found that he had made good hisescape. When the others had gone, Toyner stood alone before Ann Markham. 

I have often heard what Toyner looked like in those days. Slight as histheological knowledge might be, he was quite convinced that if religionwas anything it must be everything, personal appearance included. As hestood before Ann, he appeared to be a dapper, rather dandified man, forhe had dressed himself just as well as he could. Everything that he didwas done just as well as he could in those days; that was the reason hedid not shirk the inexpressibly painful duty which now devolved on him. 

You may picture him. His clothes were black, his linen good. He wore alarge white tie, which was the fashionable thing in that time and place. His long moustache, which was fine rather than heavy, hung down to hischin on either side of his mouth. He did not look like a man who wouldchance upon any strong situation in life, for the strength ofcircumstances is the strength of the soul that opposes them, and we arechildishly given to estimating the strength of souls by certain outwardtests, although they fail us daily. 

"I have always been your friend, Ann, " said Toyner sadly. 

Ann tossed her head. "Not with my leave. "

"No, " he assented; "but I want to tell you now that if we can't get onMarkham's track I shall have to spy on you. You'll help him if you can, of course. "

"I don't know where he is, " said Ann sullenly. 

"I do not believe you are telling the truth" (sadly); "but you maybelieve _me_, I have warned you. "

People in Fentown went to sleep early. At about eleven that night allwas still and lonely about the weather-stained, unpainted wooden housein which Ann lived. 

Ann closed her house for the night. The work was a simple one: she sether knee against the door to shut it more firmly, and worked an old nailinto the latch. Then she shook down the scant cotton curtains that weretwisted aside from the windows. There were three windows, two in theliving-room (which was also kitchen and beer-saloon) and one in thebedroom; that was the whole of the house. There was not an article offurniture in the place that was not absolutely necessary; what there waswas clean. The girl herself was clean, middle-sized, and dressed ingarments that were old and worn; there was about her appearance acertain brightness and quickness, which is the best part of beauty andgrace. The very hair itself, turning black and curly, from the temples, seemed to lie glossy and smooth by reason of character that willed thatit should lie so. 

One small coal-oil lamp was the light of the house. When Ann had closeddoors and windows she took it up and went into the bedroom. Neither roomwas small; there was a shadowy part round their edges which the lamp didnot brighten. In the dimmer part of this inner room was a bed, on whicha fair young girl was sleeping. 

A curious thing now occurred. Ann, placing herself between the lamp andthe window, deliberately went through a pantomime of putting herself tobed. She took care that the shadow of the brushing of her hair should beseen upon the window-curtain. She measured the distance, and threw hersilhouette clearly upon it while she took off one or two of her outergarments. Her face had resolution and nervous eagerness written in it, but there was nothing of inward disquiet there; she was wholly satisfiedin her own mind as to what she was doing. It was not a very profoundmind, perhaps, but it was like a weapon burnished by constant and properuse. 

She removed her shadow from the window-curtain when she removed her lampto the bedside. She employed herself there for a minute or two inputting on the clothes she had taken off, and in tightly fastening upthe hair that she had loosened; then she put out the lamp and got intobed. The wooden bedstead creaked, and rubbed against the side of thehouse as she turned herself upon it. The creaking and rubbing could beheard on the other side of the wall. 

There was a man walking like a sentry outside who did hear. It was BartToyner, the constable. 

After he heard the bed creak he still waited awhile, walking slowlyround the house in silence and darkness. Then, as he passed the sidewhere the bedroom was, there came the sound of a slight sleeping snore, repeated as regularly as the breath might come and go in a woman'sbreast. 

After a while Toyner retreated with noiseless steps, standing still whenhe had moved away about fifty paces, looking at the house again withcareful, suspicious eyes; then, as if satisfied, he slid back the ironshade that covered his lantern and, lighting his own steps, he walkedaway. 

He had moved so quietly that the girl who lay upon the bed did not hearhim. She did not, in fact, know for certain whether he had been there ornot, much less that he had gone, so that she toilsomely kept up thepretence of that gentle snore for half an hour or more. It was verytiresome. Her bright black eyes were wide open as she lay performingthis exercise. Her face never lost its look of strong resolution. Atlength, true to her acting, she moved her head sleepily, sighed heavily, and relapsed into silent breathing as a sleeper might. It was the actingof a true artist. 

Half an hour more of silence upon her bed, and she crept offnoiselessly; she lifted the corner of the window-curtain and looked out. There was not a light to be seen in any of the houses within sight, there was not a sound to be heard except the foam at the foot of thefalls, the lapping of the nearer river, and the voice of a myriadcrickets in the grass. She opened the window silently. 

"Bart, " she whispered. Then a little louder, "Bart--Bart Toyner. "

The one thing that she wanted just then was to be alone, and of allpeople in the world Toyner was the man whom she least wanted to meet. Yet she called him. She got out of the window and took a few paces onone side and on the other in the darkness, still calling his name in avoice of soft entreaty. In his old drunken days she had scorned him. Shescorned him now more than ever, but she still believed that her callwould never reach his ear in vain. In this hour of her extremity shemust make sure of his absence by running the risk of having to endurehis nearer presence. When she knew that he was not there, she took abundle from inside the room, shut down the window through which she hadescaped, and wrapping her head and hands in a thin black shawl such asIndian women drape themselves with, she sped off over the dark grass tothe river. 

Overhead, the stars sparkled in a sky that seemed almost black. Thehouses and trees, the thick scrubby bushes and long grass, were justvisible in all the shades of monochrome that night produces. 

In a few minutes she was beyond all the houses, gliding through a woodby the river. The trees were high and black, and there was a faintmusical sound of wind in them. She heard it as she heard everything. More than once she stopped, not fearful, but watching. She must havelooked like the spirit of primeval silence as she stood at such moments, lifting her shawl from her head to listen; then she went on. She knewwhere a boat had by chance been left that day; it was a small roughboat, lying close under the roots of a pine tree, and tied to its trunk. In this she bestowed her bundle, and untying the string, pushed from theshore. She could hardly see the opposite side of the little Ahwewee inthe darkness; she rowed at once into the midst of its rapid current;once there, she dipped her oars to steer rather than to propel. Shetravelled swiftly with the black stream. 

For half an hour or more she was only intent upon steering her boat. Then, when she had come about three miles from the falls, she was instill water, and began rowing with all her strength to make the boatshoot forward as rapidly as before. 

The water was as still now as if the river had widened and deepened intoan inland sea; yet in the darkness to all appearance the river was asnarrow, the outline of the trees on either side appearing black and highjust within sight. When the moon rose this mystery of nature wasrevealed, for the river was a lake, spreading far and wide on eitherside. The lake was caused by dams built farther down the stream, andthe forest that had covered the ground before still reared itself abovethe water, the bare dead trees standing thick, except in the narrow, winding passage of the original stream. 

The moon rose large, very large indeed, and very yellow. There was smokeof distant forest fires in the dry hot air, which turned the moon asgolden as a pane of amber glass. There was no fear of fire in the forestthrough which the boat was passing other than that cold pretence ofyellow flames, the broken reflections of the moon on the wet mirror inwhich the trees were growing. These trees would not burn; they had beendrowned long ago! They stood up now like corpses or ghosts, rising fromthe deathly flood, lifeless and smooth; ghastly, in that they retainedthe naked shape that they had had when alive. To the east the reflectionof the moon was seen for a mile or more under their grey outstretchedbranches, and on all sides its light penetrated, showing through what astrange dead wilderness the one small fragile boat was travelling. 

Very little of the feeling of the place entered the mind of the girl whowas working at her oars with such strong, swift strokes. Every daythrough the ten or fifteen miles of the dead forest a little snortingsteamboat passed, bearing market produce and passengers. The smoke ofits funnel had blasted all sense of the weird picturesqueness of theplace in the minds of the inhabitants, that is, they were accustomed toit, and sentiment in most hearts is slowly killed by use and wont, asthis forest had been killed by the encroaching water. Ann Markham's wasnot a mind which harboured very much sentiment at that period of herlife; it was a keen, quick-witted, practical mind. She was not afraidof the solitude of the night, or of the strange shapes and lights andshadows about her. Now that she knew for certain that she was alone andunpursued, she was for the time quite satisfied. 

A mile more down the windings of the lake, and Ann began counting thetrees between certain landmarks. Then into an opening between the treeswhich could not have been observed by a casual glance she steered herboat, and worked it on into a little open passage-way among theirtrunks. The way widened as she followed it, and then closed again. Wherethe passage ended, one great tree had fallen, and its trunk withupturned branches was lying, wedged between two standing trunks, in analmost horizontal position. On it a man was sitting, a wild, miserablefigure of a man, who looked as if he might have been some savage beingwho was at home there, but who spoke in a language too vicious andprofane for any savage. 

He leaned out from his branch as far as he dared, and welcomed the girlwith curses because she had not come sooner, because it was now thesmall hours of the night and he had expected her in the evening. 

"Be quiet, father, " said the girl; "what's the use of talking likethat!" Then she held the boat under the tree and helped him to slip downinto it, where, in spite of his rage, he stretched his legs with anevident animal satisfaction. He wallowed in the straitened liberty thatthe boat gave, lying down in the bottom and gently kicking out hiscramped limbs, while the girl held tight to the trees, steadying theboat with her feet. 

It was this power of taking an evident sensual satisfaction in suchsmall luxuries as he was able to obtain that had alone attached Markhamto his daughter. His character belonged to a type found both among menand women; it was a nature entirely selfish and endowed with aninstinctive art in working upon the unselfish sentiments of others--anart which even creates unselfishness in other selfish beings. 

"I came as soon as I could, " she said. "I suppose you did not want me toput Toyner on your track. "

"Yee owe, " said the wretched man, stretching himself luxuriously. "I'vebeen a-standin' up and a-sittin' down and a-standin' up since lastnight, an'----" Here he suddenly remembered something. He sat up andlooked round fearfully. 

"When it got dark before the moon came I saw the devil! One! I thinkthere was half a dozen of them! I saw them comin' at me in the air. I'dhave gone mad if they hadn't gone off when the moon rose. "

"Lie still, father, until I give you something to eat, " she said. 

While she was unfastening her bundle, she looked about her, and saw howthe spaces of shadow between the grey branches might easily seem to takesolid form and weird shape to a brain that was fevered with excitementof crime and of flight and enforced vigil. She had a painful thing totell this man--that she could not, as she had hoped, release him fromhis desperate prison that night; but she did not tell him until she hadfed him first and given him drink too. She insisted upon his taking thefood first. It was highly seasoned, beef with mustard upon it, andpickles. All the while he watched her hand with thirsty eye. When he hadgulped his food to please her, she produced a small bottle. He cursedher when he saw its size, but all the same he held out his hand for iteagerly and drank its contents, shutting his eyes with satisfaction andlicking his lips. 

All this time she was steadying the boat by holding on to a tree with astrong arm. 

"Now it's hard on you, father, but you'll have to stay here anothernight. Down at The Mills they're watching for you, and it would be suredeath for you to try and get through the swamp, even if I could take youin the boat to the edge anywhere. "

The man, who had been entirely absorbed with eating and drinking andstretching himself, now gave a low howl of anguish; then he struggled tohis knees and shook his fist in her face. "By ---- I'll throw you out ofthis 'ere boat, I will; what do yer come tellin' me such a thing as thatfor? Don't yer know I'd liefer die--don't yer know that?" He broughthis fist nearer and nearer to her eyes. "Don't yer know that?"

It appeared that he would have struck her, but by a dexterous twist ofher body and a pull upon the tree she jerked the boat so that he losthis balance, not entirely, but enough to make him right himself withcare and sit down again, realising for the time being that it was shewho was mistress of this question--who should be thrown out of the boatand drowned. 

"Of course I'll row you to The Mills, if it's to jail you want to go;but Walker is pretty bad, they say. I think it'll be murder they'llbring you up for; and it ain't no sort of use trying to prove that youdidn't do it!"

The miserable man put his dirty knotted hands before his face and howledagain. But even that involuntary sound was furtive lest any one shouldhear. He might have shrieked and roared with all the strength that wasin him--there was no human ear within reach--but the instinct ofcowardice kept him from making any more noise than was necessary to rendand break the heart of the woman beside him, --that, although he was onlyhalf conscious of it, was his purpose in crying. He had a fiendishdesire to make her suffer for bringing him such news. 

Ann was not given to feeling for others, yet now it was intensesuffering to her to see him shaking, writhing, moving like a beast inpain. She did not think of it as her suffering; she transferred it allto him, and supposed that it was the realisation of his misery that sheexperienced. 

At last she said: "There's one fellow up to the falls that knows a trackthrough the north of the marsh to sound ground; I heard him tell it oneday how he'd found it out. It's that David Brown that's been cominground to see Christa. Christa can get the chart he made from him byto-morrow night--I know she can. I'll try to be here earlier than I wasto-night. And I brought you strips of stuff, father, so that you couldtie yourself on to the tree and have a sort of a sleep; and I brought afew drops of morphia, just enough to make you feel sleepy and stupid, and make the time pass a bit quicker. "

For a long while he writhed and cried, telling her that it took all thewits that he had to keep awake enough to keep the devils off him withouttaking stuff to make him sleep, and that he was sure she'd never comeback, and that he would very likely be left on the tree to rot or tofall into the water. 

All that he said came so near to being true that it caused her theutmost pain to hear it. He was clever enough by instinct, not bythought, to know that mere idle cries could not torture her as did thetrue picture of the fears and dangers that encompassed him in his wildhiding-place. The endurance of this torture exhausted her as nothing hadever exhausted her before; yet all the time she never doubted but thatthe pain was his, and that she was merely a spectator. 

She soothed him at last, not by gentleness and caresses--no suchcommunication ever passed between them--but by plain, practical, hopefulsuggestions spoken out clearly in the intervals of his whining. Atlength she esteemed it time to use the spur instead of stroking him anylonger. "Get up on the tree, father, and I will give you the rest of thethings when you are fixed on the branch. If Toyner's stirring againbefore I get home, he'll find means to keep me from coming to-morrownight. Climb up now. I'll give you the things. There--there isn't enoughof the morphia drops to get you to sleep, only to make you feel easy;and here's the strips of blanket I've sewed together to tie yourself onwith. It's nice and soft--climb up now and fix yourself. It's Toynerthat will catch me, and you too, if I don't get back. Look at themoon--near the middle of the sky. "

She established him upon the branch again with the comforts that she hadpromised, and then she gave him one thing more, of which she had notspoken before. It was a bag of food that would last, if need be, forseveral days. 

He took it as evidence that she had lied to him in her assurance thatshe could return the next night. As she moved her boat out of the secretopenings among the dead trees, she heard him whining with fear andcalling a volley of curses after her. 

That her father's words were all profane did not trouble Ann in theleast. It was a meaningless trick of speech. Markham meant no more atthis time by his most shocking oaths than does any man by his habitualexpletive. Ann knew this perfectly. God knew it too. 

Yet if his profanity was mechanical, the man himself was without traceof good. There was much reason that Ann's heart should be wrung withpity. It is the divine quality of kinship that it produces pity even forwhat is purely evil. Ann rowed her boat homeward with a harddetermination in her heart to save her father at any cost. 

CHAPTER V. 

An hour later the small solitary boat crept up the current of themoonlit river. The weary girl plied her oars, looking carefully for thenook under the roots of the old pine whence she had taken the boat. 

She saw the place. She even glanced anxiously about the groundimmediately around it, thinking that in the glamour of light she couldsee everything; and yet in that rapid glance, deluded, no doubt, intosupposing the light greater than it was, she failed to see a man who wasstanding ready to help her to moor the boat. 

Bart Toyner watched her with a look of haggard anxiety as she camenearer. 

A uniform is a useful thing. It is almost natural to an actor to playhis part when he has assumed its dress. A man in any official capacityis often just an actor, and the best thing that he can do at times is toact without a thought as to how his inner self accords with the action, at least till we have attained to a higher level of civilisation. Toynerhad no uniform, nor had he mastered the philosophy that underlies thisinstinct for playing a part; he had an idea that the whole mind and soulof him should be in conscientious accord with all that he did. It wasthis ideal that made his fall certain. 

He had no notion that the girl had not seen him. Before she got out, when she put her hand to tether the boat, she felt his hand gentlytaking the rope from her and fell back with a cry of fear. 

In her wearied state she could have sobbed with disappointment. How muchhad he discovered? If he knew nothing more than merely that she hadreturned with the boat, how could it be possible to elude him and comeagain the next night? She thought of her father, and her heart was fullof pity; she thought that her own plans were baffled, and she wasenraged. Both sentiments fused into keener hatred of Toyner; but sheremembered--yes, even then she remembered quite clearly anddistinctly--that if the worst came to the worst and she could save herfather in no other way, she had one weapon in reserve, one in which shehad perfect faith. 

It was for this reason that she sat still for a minute in the boat, looking up at Toyner, trying to pry into his attitude toward her. At theend of the minute he put out his hand to lift her up, and she leanedupon it. 

Without hesitation she began to thread her way through the wood towardhome, and he walked by her side. He might have been escorting her from adance, so quietly they walked together, except that the question of aman's life or death which lay between them seemed to surround them witha strange atmosphere. 

At length Bart spoke. "I don't know where you have been, " he said. "Ihave been patrolling the shore all night. " He paused awhile. "I thoughtyou were safe at home. "

She stopped short and turned upon him. "Look here! what are you going todo now? It's a pretty mean sort of business this you've taken to, sneaking round your old friends to do them all the harm you can. "

"It's the first time I knew that you'd ever been a friend of mine, Ann. "He said this in a sort of sad aside, and then: "You've sense enough toknow that when a man shoots another man he's got to be found and shut upfor the good of the country and for his own good too. It's the kindestthing that can be done to a man sometimes, shutting him up in jail. " Hesaid this last quite as much by way of explanation to himself as to her. 

"Or hanging him, " she suggested sarcastically. 

He paused a moment. "I hope he won't come to that. "

"But you'll do all you can to catch him, knowing that it's like to cometo that. What's the good of hoping?"

He had only said it to soothe her. He had another self-justification. 

"I can only do what I have to do: it is not me that will decide whetherWalker dies or not. At any rate, it ain't no use to justify it to you. It's natural that you should look upon me as an enemy just now; but allthe police in the country are more your enemies than I am. You've gothim off now, I suppose; however you've done it I don't pretend to know. It'll be some one else that catches him if he's caught. "

She wondered if he was only saying this to try her, or if he reallybelieved that Markham had gone far; yet there was small chance even thenthat he would cease to watch her the next night and the next. He hadshown both resolution and diligence in this business--qualities, as faras she knew, so foreign to his character that she smiled bitterly. 

"A nice sort of thing religion is, to get out of the mire yourself andspend your time kicking your old friends further in!"

Now the fugitive had been never a friend to Toyner, except in the sensethat he had done more than any one else to lead him into low habits andkeep him there. He had, in fact, been his greatest enemy; but that, according to Toyner's new notions, was the more reason for counting hima friend, not the less. 

"Well, I grant 'tain't a very grand sort of business being constable, "he said; "to be a preacher 'ud be finer perhaps; but this came to handand seemed the thing for me to do. It ain't kicking men in the mire todo all you can to stop them making beasts of themselves. "

He stood idling in the moonlight as he justified himself to this woman. Surely it was only standing by his new colours to try to make hisposition seem right to her. He had no hope in it--no hope of persuadingher, least of all of bringing her nearer to him; if he had had that, hisdallying would have seemed sinful, because it would have chimed soperfectly with all his natural desires. 

Ann took up her theme again fiercely. "Look here, Bart Toyner; I want toknow one thing, honour bright--that is, " scornfully, "if you care abouthonour now that you've got religion. "

He gave a silent sarcastic smile, such as one would bestow upon anaughty, ignorant child. "Well, at least as much as I did before, " hesaid. 

"Well, then, I want to know if you're a-going to stop spying on me nowthat father has got well off? There ain't no cause nor reason for you tohang about me any longer. You know what my life has been, and you knowthat through it all I've kept myself like a lady. It ain't nice, knowingas people do that you came courting once, 'tain't nice to have youhanging round in this way. "

He knew quite well that the reason she gave for objecting to his spyingwas not the true one. He had enough insight into her character, enoughknowledge of her manner and the modulations in her voice, to have apretty true instinct as to when she was lying and when she was not; buthe did not know that the allusion to the time when he used to court herwas thrown out to produce just what it did in him, a tender recollectionof his old hopes. 

"Until Markham is arrested, you know, and every one else at Fentownknows, that it is my duty to see that you don't communicate with him. You've fooled me to-night, and I'll have to keep closer watch; but ifyou don't want me to do the watching, I can pay another man. "

She had hoped faintly that he would have shown himself less resolute;now there was only one thing to be done. After all, she had known fordays that she might be obliged to do it. 

"I wouldn't take it so hard, Bart, if it was any one but you, " she saidsoftly. She went on to say other things of this sort which would make itappear that there was in her heart an inward softness toward him whichshe had never yet revealed. With womanly instinct she played her littlepart well and did not exaggerate; but she was not speaking now to theman of drug-weakened mind and over-stimulated sense whom she had knownin former years. 

He spoke with pain and shame in his voice and attitude. "There isn'tanything that I could do for you, Ann, that I wouldn't do as it is, without you pretending that way. "

She did not quite take it in at first that she could not deceive him. 

"I thought you used to care about me, " she said; "I thought perhaps youdid yet; I thought perhaps"--she put well-feigned shyness into hertone--"that you weren't the sort that would turn away from us justbecause of what father has done. All the other folks will, of course. I'm pretty much alone. "

"I won't help you to break the laws, Ann. Law and righteousness is thesame for the most part. Your feeling as a daughter leads you the otherway, of course; but it ain't no good--it won't do any good to him in thelong run, and it would be wrong for me to do anything but just what Iought to do as constable. When that's done we can talk of being friendsif you like, but don't go acting a lie with the hope of getting thebetter of me. It hurts me to see you do it, Ann. "

For the first time there dawned in her mind a new respect for him, butthat did not alter her desperate resolve. She had been standing beforehim in the moonlight with downcast face; now she suddenly threw up herhead with a gesture that reminded him of the way a drowning man throwsup his hands. 

"You've been wanting to convert me, " she said. "You want me to sign thepledge, and to stop going to dances and playing cards, and to bring upChrista that way. "

All the thoughts that he had had since his reform of what he could dofor this girl and her sister if she would only let him came before hisheart now, lit through and through with the light of his love that atthat moment renewed its strength with a power which appalled him. 

She took a few steps nearer to him. 

"Father didn't mean to do any harm, " she whispered hastily; "he's got nomore sin on his soul than a child that gets angry and fights for what itwants. He's just like a child, father is; but it's been a lesson tohim, and he'll never do it again. Think of the shame to Christa and meif he was hanged. And I've striven so to keep us respectable--Bart, youknow I have. There's no shame in the world like your father being----"(there was a nervous gasp in her throat before she could go on)--"andhe'd be awfully frightened. Oh, you don't know how frightened he'd be!If I thought they were going to do that to him, it would just kill me. I'll do anything; I wouldn't mind so much if they'd take me and hang meinstead--it wouldn't scare me so much: but father would be just like achild, crying and crying and crying, if they kept him in jail and weregoing to do that in the end. And then no one would expect Christa and meto have any more fun, and we never would have any. There's a way thatyou can get father off, Bart, and give him at least one more chance torun for his life. If you'll do it, I'll do whatever you want, --I'll signthe pledge; I'll go to church; I'll teach Christa that way. She and Iwon't dance any more. You can count on me. You can trust me. You knowthat when I say a thing I'll do it. "

He realised now what had happened to him--a thing that of all things hehad learned to dread most, --a desperate temptation. He answered, and histone and manner gave her no glimpse of the shock of opposing forces thathad taken place within a heart that for many months had been dwelling inthe calm of victory. 

"I cannot do it, Ann. "

"Bart Toyner, " she said, "I'm all alone in this world; there's not asoul to help me. Every one's against me and against him. Don't turnagainst me; I need your help--oh, I need it! I never professed to careabout you; but if your father was in danger of dying an awful death andyou came to me for help, I wouldn't refuse you, you know I wouldn't. "

He only spoke now with the wish to conceal from her the panic within;for with the overwhelming desire to yield to her had come a ghastly fearthat he was going to yield, and faith and hope fled from him. He sawhimself standing there face to face with his idea of God, and thistemptation between him and God. The temptation grew in magnitude, andGod withdrew His face. 

"I know, Ann, it sounds hard about your father" (mechanically); "but youmust try and think how it would be if he was lying wounded like Walkerand some other man had done it. Wouldn't you think the law was in theright then?"

"No!" (quickly). "If father'd got a simple wound, and could be nursedand taken care of comfortably until he died, I wouldn't want any man tobe hanged for it. It's an awful, awful thing to be hanged. "

She waited a moment, and he did not speak. The lesser light of night isfraught with illusions. She thought that she saw him there quite plainlystanding quiet and indifferent. She was so accustomed to hisappearance--the carefulness of his dress, the grave eyes, and the thin, drooping moustache--that her mind by habit filled in these details whichshe did not in reality see; nor did she see the look of agonised prayerthat came and went across the habitual reserve of his face. 

"Can't you believe what I say, Bart? I say that I will give up dancingand selling beer, and sign the pledge, and dress plain, and go tochurch. I say I will do it and Christa will do it; and you can teach usall you've a mind to, day in and day out, and we'll learn if we can. Isn't it far better to save Christa and me--two souls, than to hunt onepoor man to death? Don't you believe that I'll do what I promise? I'llgo right home now and give it to you in writing, if you like. "

"I do believe you, Ann. " He stopped to regain the steadiness of hisvoice. He had had training in forcing his voice in the last few months, for he hated to bear verbal testimony to his religious beliefs, and yethe had taught himself to do it. He succeeded in speaking steadily now, in the same strong voice in which he had learnt to pray at meetings. Itwas not exactly his natural voice. It sounded sanctimonious andostentatious, but that was because he was forced to conceal that hisheart within him was quaking. "I do believe that you would do what yousay, Ann; but it isn't right to do evil that good may come. "

He did not appeal to her pity; he did not try to tell her what it costhim to refuse. If he could have made her understand that, she might havebeen turned from her purpose. He realised only the awful weakness andwickedness of his heart. He seemed to see those appetites which, up to afew months before, had possessed him like demons, hovering near him inthe air, and he seemed to see God holding them back from him, but onlyfor so long as he resisted this temptation. 

To her he said aloud: "I cannot do it, Ann. In God's strength I cannotand will not do it. "

Within his heart he seemed to be shouting aloud to Heaven: "My God, Iwill not do it, I will not do it. Oh, my God!" He turned his back uponher and went quickly to the village, only looking to see that at somedistance she followed him, trudging humbly as a squaw walks behind herIndian, as far as her own door. 

CHAPTER VI. 

When one drops one's plummet into life anywhere it falls the wholelength of the line we give it. The man who can give his plummet thelongest line is he who realises most surely that it has not touched thebottom. 

Bart Toyner betook himself to prayer. He had learned from his friend thepreacher that when a man is tempted he must pray until he is given thevictory, and then, calm and steadfast, go out to face the world again. If Toyner's had been a smaller soul, the need of his life would haveimperatively demanded then that just what he expected to happen to himshould happen, and in some mysterious way no doubt it would havehappened. 

When we quietly observe religious life exactly as it is, without thebias of any theory, there are two constantly recurring facts which, taken together, excite deep astonishment: the fact that small mindseasily attain to a certainty of faith to which larger minds attain moreslowly and with much greater distress; and also the fact that thehappenings of life do actually come in exact accordance to a man'sfaith--faith being not the mere expectation that a thing is going totake place, but the inner eye that sees into the heart of things, andknows that its desire must inevitably take place, and why. This sort offaith, be it in a tiny or great nature, comes triumphantly in actualfact to what it predicts; but the little heart comes to it easily andproduces trivial prayers, while the big heart, thinking to arrive withthe same ease at the same measure of triumph, is beaten back time andtime and again. 

Probably the explanation is that the smaller mind has not the samegerminating power; there is not enough in it to cause the long, slowgrowth of root and stem, and therefore it soon puts forth its littleblossom. These things all happen, of course, according to eternal law ofinward development; they are not altered by any force from without, because nothing is without: the sun that makes the daisy to blossom isjust that amount of sun that it absorbs into itself, and so with theacorn or the pine-cone. These latter, however, do not produce any brightimmediate blossom, though they ultimately change the face of all thatspot of earth by the spread of their roots and branches. 

After praying a long time Bart Toyner relapsed into meditation, endeavouring to contemplate those attributes of his God which mightbring him the strength which he had not yet attained, and just here cameto him the subtlest and strongest reinforcement to all those argumentswhich were chiming together upon what appeared to him the side of evil. The God in whom he had learned to trust was a God who, moved by pity, had come out of His natural path to give a chance of salvation to wickedmen by the sacrifice of Himself. To what did he owe his own rescue butto this special adjustment of law made by God? and how then was it rightfor him to adhere to the course the regular law imposed on him and tohunt down Markham? If he saved Markham, he would answer to the law forhis own breach of duty--this would be at least some sacrifice. Was notthis course a more God-like one?

There was one part of Toyner that spoke out clearly and said that hisduty was exactly what he had esteemed it to be before Ann Markhamappealed to him. He believed this part of him to be his conscience. 

All the rest of him slowly veered round to thoughts of mercy rather thanlegal duty; he thought of Ann and Christa with hard, godless hearts, surrounded by every form of folly and sin, and he believed that Annwould keep her promise to him, and that different surroundings wouldgive them different souls. Yet he felt convinced that God and conscienceforbade this act of mercy. 

One thing he was as certain of now as he had been at the beginning--thatif he disobeyed God, God would leave him to the power of all his evilappetites; he felt already that his heart gave out thoughts of affectionto his old evil life. 

As the hours passed he began to realise that he would need to disobeyGod. He found himself less and less able to face the thought of givingup this rare opportunity of winning Ann's favour and an influence overher--_moral_ influence at least; his mind was clear enough to see thatwhat was gained by disobeying God's law was from a religious point ofview nil. In his mind was the beginning of a contempt for God's way ofsaving him. If he was to win his own soul by consigning Ann and herfather to probable perdition, he did not want to win it. 

The August morning came radiant and fresh; the air, sharp with a touchof frost from neighbouring hills, bore strength and lightness for everycreature. The sunlight was gay on the little wooden town, on its breezygardens and wastes of flowering weeds, on the descent of the foamingfall, on the clear brown river. Even the sober wood of ash and mapleglistened in the morning light, and the birds sang songs that incountries where a longer summer reigns are only heard in spring-time. 

Bart Toyner went out of the house exhausted and almost hopeless. Thesource of his strength had failed within him. He looked forward todefeat. 

As it happened Toyner's official responsibility for Markham's arrest wasto be lightened. The Crown Attorney for the county had alreadycommunicated with the local government, and a detective had been sent, who arrived that morning by the little steamboat. Before Toyner realisedthe situation he found himself in consultation with the new-comer as tothe best means of seeking Markham. Did the perfect righteousness requirethat he should betray Ann's confidence and state that Markham was inhiding somewhere within reach? Bart looked the question for a moment inthe face, and trembled before it. Then he set it aside unanswered, resolved on reticence, whether it was right or wrong. 

The detective, finding that Toyner had no clue to report, soon went todrink Ann's beer, on business intent. Bart kept sedulously apart fromthis interview. When it was over the stranger took Toyner by the arm andtold him privately that he was convinced that the young woman knewnothing whatever about the prisoner, and as Markham had been gone nowforty-eight hours it was his opinion that it was not near Fentown thathe would be found. 

This communication was made to Toyner in the public-house, where theyhad both gone the better to discuss their affairs. Toyner had gone inlabouring under horrible emotion. He believed that he was going to getdrunk, and the result of his fear was that he broke his pledge, givingas an excuse to the by-standers that he felt ill. Yet he did not getdrunk. 

Toyner saw the detective depart by the afternoon boat, and as he walkedback upon the bit of hot dusty road in the sun he reeled, not with thespirits he had taken, but with the sickening sense that his battle waslost. 

Nothing seemed fair to him, nothing attractive, but to drink one moreglass of spirits, and to go and make promises to Ann that would be sweetto her ear. He knew that for him it was the gate of death. 

At this point the minister met him, and jumped at once to the conclusionthat he was drunk. The minister was one of those good men who foundtheir faith in God upon absolute want of faith in man. His heart wasbetter than his head, as is the case with all small-minded souls thathave come into conscious contact with God, but his opinions ruled hisofficial conduct. "I am afraid you have been drinking, Toyner, " he saidreproachfully. 

The first three words, "I am afraid, " were enough for Bart; he wasfilled himself with an all-pervading fear--a fear of himself, a fear ofGod, a fear of the devil who would possess him again. He was not drunk;the fact that drunkenness in him appeared so likely to this man, who wasthe best friend he had, completed in his heart the work of revoltagainst the minister and the minister's God. What right had God to takehim up and clothe him and keep him in his right mind for a little while, just to let him fall at the first opportunity? It was quite true that hehad deserved it, no doubt; he had done wrong, and he was going to dowrong; but God, who had gone out of His way to mercifully convert himand keep him straight for a while, could certainly have gone on keepinghim if He had chosen. His mind was a logical one. He had been taught topraise God for some extraordinary favour towards him; he had been taughtthat the grace which had changed his life for good was in no degree hisown; and why then was he to bear all the disgrace of his return to evil?

In the next hours he walked the streets of the town, and talked to othermen when need was, and did a little business on his own account in theagency in which he was engaged, and went home and took supper, watchingthe vagaries of his father's senile mania with more than common pity forthe old man. His own wretchedness gave him an aching heart of sympathyfor all the sorrow of others which came across his mind that day. 

The whole day was a new revelation to him of what tenderness for otherscould be and ought to be. 

He did not hope to attain to any working out of this higher sympathy andpity himself. The wonderful confidence which his new faith had so longgiven him, that he was able in God's strength to perform the higherrather than the lower law of his nature, had ebbed away. God's strengthwas no longer with him; he was going to the devil; he could do nothingfor himself, little for others; but he sympathised as never before withall poor lost souls. He was a little surprised, as the day wore to aclose, that he had been able to control his craving, that he had nottaken more rum. Still, he knew that he would soon be helpless. It washis doom, for he could awake in himself no further feeling of repentanceor desire to return to God. 

In the long day's struggle, half conscious and half unconscious, hislove for Ann--and it was not a bad sort of love either--had triumphedover what principle he had; it had survived the sudden shock that hadwrecked his faith. The hell which he was experiencing was intolerablenow, because of the heaven which he had seen, and he could not forgivethe God who had ordained it. The unreal notion that an omnipotent Godcan permit what He does not ordain could have no weight with him, for hewas grappling with reality. As he brooded bitterly upon his own fate, his heart became enlarged with tenderness for all other poor helplesscreatures like himself who were under the same misrule. 

His resolution was taken--he would use his sobriety to help Ann. Itwould not profit himself, but still he would win from her the promiseconcerning her future life and Christa's which she had offered him, andhe would go that night and do all that a man could do to help the poorwretch to whom his heart went out with ever-increasing pity. It wouldnot be much, but he would do what he could, and after that he would tellthe authorities what he had done and give up his office. He had a veryvague notion of the penalties he would incur; if they put him in prison, so much the better--it might save him a little longer from drinkinghimself to death. 

Like an honest man he had given up attempting to pull God round to hisown position. He did not now think for a moment that the act of love andmercy which possessed his soul was a pious one; his motive he believedto be solely his pity for Markham and his love for Ann, which, beingnatural, he supposed to be selfish, and, being selfish, he knew to beunholy. 

It had all come to this, then--his piety, his reformation, his prayers, his thanksgiving, his faith. His heart within him gave a sneering laugh. He was terribly to blame, of course--he was a reprobate; but surely Godwas to blame too!

CHAPTER VII. 

Ann Markham's thoughts of Bart that day were chiefly wondering thoughts. She tried to think scornfully of his refusal to help her; theoreticallyshe derided the religion that produced the refusal, but in the bottom ofher heart she looked at it with a wonder that was akin to admiration. Then there was a question whether he would remain fixed in hisresolution. If this man did not love her then Ann's confidence failedher in respect to her judgment of what was or was not; for though shehad regarded him always as a person of not much strength or importance, not independent enough to be anything more than the creature of thewoman whom he desired to marry, yet, curiously enough, she had believedthat his love for her had a strength that would die hard. She did notstop to ask herself how it could be that a weak man could love herstrongly. Love, in any constant and permanent sense of the word, was analmost unknown quality among her companions, and yet she had attributedit to Bart. Well! his refusal of last night proved that she had beenmistaken--that was all. But possibly the leaven of her proposal wouldwork, and he would repent and come back to her. The fact that he hadevidently not betrayed her to the detective gave her hope of this. Herthoughts about Toyner were only subordinate to the question, how she wasto rescue her father. With the light and strength of the morning, hopein other possibilities of eluding Bart, even if he remained firm, cameback to her. She would at least work on; if she was baffled in the end, it would be time enough to despair. Her sister was not her confidante, she was her tool. 

Ann waited until the shadow of the pear tree, which with ripening fruitoverhung the gable of their house, stretched itself far down the bit ofweedy grass that sloped to the river. The grass plot was whollyuntended, but nature had embroidered it with flowers and ferns. 

Ann sat sewing by the table on which she kept her supply of beer. Shecould not afford to lose her sales to-day, although she knew bitterlythat most of those who turned in for a drink did so out of pryingcuriosity. Even Christa, not very quick of feeling, had felt this, andhad retired to lounge on the bed in the inner room with a paper novel. Christa usually spent her afternoon in preparing some cheap finery towear in the cool of the evening, but she felt the family disgrace andAnn's severity, and was disheartened. As Ann bided her time andconsidered her own occupation and Christa's, she marvelled at theaudacity of the promise which she had offered to give Bart, yet so awfulwas the question at stake that her only wish was that he had acceptedit. 

At four o'clock in the afternoon she roused Christa and apportioned acertain bit of work to her. There was a young man in Fentown calledDavid Brown, a comely young fellow, belonging to one of the richerfamilies of the place. He was good-natured, and an athlete; he had oflate fallen into the habit of dropping in frequently to drink Ann'sbeer. She felt no doubt that Christa was his attraction. Some weeksbefore he had boasted that he had found the bed of a creek which madeits way through the drowned forest, and that by it he had paddled hiscanoe through the marsh that lay to the north of the lake. He had alsoboasted that he had a secret way of finding the creek again. Uponconsidering his character Ann believed that although the statement wasgiven boastfully it was true. Brown had a trace of Indian blood in him, and possessed the faculties of keen observation and good memory. It wasby the help of this secret that she had hoped to extricate her fatherherself. There was still a chance that she might be able to use it. 

"Some men think the world and all of a woman if they can only get intothe notion that she is ill-used. David may be more sweet on you thanever, " said Ann to Christa. "Put on your white frock: it's a littlemussed, so it won't look as if you were trying to be fine; don't put onany sash, but do your hair neatly. "

She will look taking enough, thought Ann to herself; she did notdespise herself for the stratagem. It was part of the hard, practicalgame that she had played all her life, for that matter; she was notconscious of loving Christa any more than she was conscious of lovingher father. It was merely her will that they should have the utmostadvantage in life that she could obtain for them. Nothing short of amoral revolution could have changed this determination in her. 

When Christa had performed her toilet, obeying Ann from mere habit, Anndrilled her in the thing she was to do. Brown would of course suspectwhat this information was to be used for. Christa was to coax him topromise secrecy. Ann went over the details of the plan again and again, until she was quite sure that the shallow forgetful child understood theimportance of her mission. 

Christa sat with her elbows on the table and cried a little. Her fairhair was curled low over her eyes, the coarse white dress hung limp butsoft, leaving her neck bare. With all her motions her head nodded on herslender graceful neck, like a flower which bows on its stalk. 

Before this disaster Christa had spent her life laughing; that had beenmore becoming to her than sullenness and tears. For all that, Ann wasnot sorry that Christa's eyelids should be red when David Brown was seenslowly lounging toward the window. 

He had not been to see them the day before; it was apparent from his airthat he thought it was not quite the respectable thing to do to-day. Hetried to approach the house with a _nonchalant_, happen-by-chance air, so that if any one saw him they would suppose his stopping merelyaccidental. 

Ann poured out his beer. Christa looked at him with eyes full ofreproach. Then she got up and went away to the doorstep, and stoodlooking out. To the surprise of both of them, David did not follow herthere. He stood still near Ann. 

"It's hard on Christa, " said Ann with a sigh; "she has been crying allday. Every one will desert us now, and we shall have to live alonewithout friends. "

"Oh no" (abruptly); "nobody blames you. "

"I don't mind for myself so much; I don't care so much about what peoplethink, or how they treat me. " She lifted her head proudly as she spoke. "But" (with pathos) "it's hard on Christa. "

"No; you never think of yourself, do you?" David giggled a little as hesaid it, betraying that he felt his words to be unusually personal. Annwondered for a minute what could be the cause of this giggle, and thenshe returned to the subject of Christa's suffering. 

"Look here, " he interrupted, "if there's any little thing I can do tohelp you, like lending you money if you're left hard up, or anything ofthat sort, you know" (he was blushing furiously now), "it's for you I'ddo it, " he blurted out. "I don't care about Christa. "

"The silly fellow!" thought Ann. She was six years older than he, andshe felt herself to be twenty years older. She entirely scorned hisadmiration in its young folly; but she did not hesitate a moment to makeuse of it. All her life had been a long training in that thrift whichutilised everything for family gain. She was a thorough woman ofsociety, this girl who sat in her backwoods cottage selling beer. 

She looked at the boy, and a sudden glow of sensibility appeared in herface. "Oh, David!" she said; "I thought it was Christa. "

"But it isn't Christa, " he stammered, grinning. He was hugely pleasedwith the idea that she had accepted his declaration of courtship. 

Half an hour later and Ann had the secret of the new track through thenorth of the drowned forest, and Brown had the wit not to ask her whatshe wanted to do with it. He had done more--he had offered to row herboat for her, but this Ann had refused. 

It was a curious thing, this refusal. It arose purely from principle onher part; she had come to the limit which the average mind sets to theevil it will commit. She deceived and cajoled the boy without scruple, but she did not allow him to break the law. She remembered that he hadparents who valued his good name more than he had as yet learned tovalue it. He was young; he was in her power; and she declined hisfurther help. 

Christa had wandered down the grass to the river-side and stood therepouting meanwhile. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

This incident with David Brown and the getting possession of his chartwas the one stimulant that helped Ann to endure this long day ofinactivity. It was like a small thimbleful of wine to one who longed fora generous draught; there was nothing else to do but to wait, alert forall chances that might help her. Evening closed in; the sisters wereleft alone. Christa returned indolently to lounging upon the bed andreading her novel. If Ann had had less strength, she would have pacedthe floor of the outer room in impatience; as it was she sat still bythe table which held the beer and stitched her seam diligently. Abouteight o'clock she heard Toyner's step. 

Was he going to haunt the house again in order to keep her from goingout of it?

He came up to the door and came in. 

She was preparing herself to act just as if she did not know who hadcome, and did not take much notice of him; but when he came up and shelooked at his face in the lamp-light, she saw written in it the strugglethat he had gone through. Its exact nature and detail she was incapableof conceiving, but one glance proved to her its reality. She was struckby the consciousness of meeting an element in life which was wholly newto her. When such a thing forces itself upon our attention, howeverindefinite and unexpressed may be our thought, it is an experience neverto be forgotten. Ann fought against her conviction. She began at once, as intelligent humanity always does, to explain away what she did notunderstand, supposing by that means that she could do away with itsexistence. 

"I think you are ill, Bart, " she said quickly. "It looks to me as if youwere in for a bout of chills; and enough to give it to you too, hangingabout in the woods all night. "

He drew a chair close to the table and sat down beside her. 

"There isn't any chills in the swamps about here, " he said; "they are aswholesome as dry land is. " She saw by this that he had no intention ofupbraiding her with his fall, or of proclaiming the object of his visit. She wanted to rouse him into telling her something. 

"I heard them saying something about you to-day that I didn't believe abit. I heard you were in the saloon drinking. "

He took hold of the end of her seam, passed his finger along it as ifexamining the fabric and the stitches. "I took one glass, " he said, with the curious quiet gravity which lay to-night like a spell upon allhis words and actions. 

"Well, " she said cheerily, "I don't believe in a man making a slave ofhimself, not to take a glass when he wants it just because he sometimesmakes a beast of himself by taking more than he ought. "

"If you choose to think black is white, Ann, it will not make it thatway. "

"That's true, " she replied compliantly; "and you've got more call toknow than I have, for I've never 'been there. '"

"God forbid!" he said with sudden intensity. All the habits of thoughtof the last year put strength into his words. "If I thought you evercould be 'there, ' Ann, it's nothing to say that I'd die to save you fromit. "

She let her thought dwell for a moment upon the picture of herself as adrunkard which had caused such intense feeling in him. "I am not worthhis caring what becomes of me in that way, " she thought to herself. Itwas the first time it ever occurred to her to think that she wasunworthy of the love he had for her; but at the same moment she felt ashadow extinguish the rays of hope she had begun to feel, for shebelieved, as Bart did, that his piety was in direct opposition to thehelp he might otherwise give her. She had begun to hope that piety hadloosened its grasp upon him for the time. 

"I don't know what's to become of us, Christa and me, " she saiddespairingly; "if we don't take to drink it will be a wonder, everybodyturning the cold shoulder on us. "

This was not her true thought at all. She knew herself to be quiteincapable of the future she suggested, but the theme was excellentlyadapted to work upon his feelings. 

"I'm going away to-night, Ann, " he said; "perhaps I won't see you againfor a long time; but you know all that you said you would promise lastnight----"

Her heart began to beat so sharply against her side with sudden hope, and perhaps another feeling to which she gave no name, that her answerwas breathless. "Yes, " she said eagerly, "if----"

He went on gravely: "I am going to start to-night in a row-boat for TheMills. You can tell me where your father is, and on my way I'll do all Ican to help him to get away. It won't be much use perhaps. It is mostlikely that he will only get away from this locality to be arrested inanother, but all that one man can do to help him I will do; but you'llhave to give me the promise first, and I'll trust you to keep it. "

Ann said nothing. The immediate weight of agonised care for her father'slife was lifted off her; but she had a strange feeling that the man whohad taken her responsibility had taken upon him its suffering too in adeeper sense than she could understand. It flashed across her, notclearly but indistinctly, that the chief element in her suffering hadbeen the shame of defying law and propriety rather than let her fatherundergo a just penalty. In some way or other this had been alltransferred to Bart, and in the glimmering understanding of hischaracter which was growing within her, she perceived that he had it inhim to suffer under it far more intensely than she had suffered. It wasvery strange that just when she obtained the promise she wanted from himshe would have been glad to set him free from it!

Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always been a good-naturedand generous person, and she experienced a strong impulse of this goodnature and generosity just now, but it was only for a moment, and shestifled it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father must berelieved, of course, from his horrid situation; and, after all, Bartcould help him quite easily, more easily than any other man in the worldcould, and then come back and go on with his life as before. Questionsof conscience had never, so far, clouded Ann's mental horizon. Amoment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear toher that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making thesacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in herheart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberallysketched the night before, and only the fact that there was somethingabout Bart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that thatsomething might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, madeher submissively adhere to it. 

"Christa and I will sign the pledge. We will give up dancing and wearingfinery. We will stop being friends with worldly people, and we will goto church and meetings, and try to like them. " Ann repeated her vow. 

Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled her sales of beerand wrote the vow twice on two pages of his note-book; at the bottom headded, "God helping me. " Ann signed them both, he keeping one and givingher the other. 

This contract on Ann's part had many of the elements of faith in it--awonderful audacity of faith in her own power to revolutionise her lifeand control her sister's, and all the unreasoning child-likeness offaith which could launch itself boldly into an unknown future withoutany knowledge of what life would be like there. 

On the part of Toyner the contract showed the power that certain habitsof thought, although exercised only for a few months, had over him. Goodpeople are fond of talk about the weakness of good habits compared withthe strength of bad ones. But, given the same time to the formation ofeach, the habits which a man counts good must be stronger than thosewhich he counts evil, because the inner belief of his mind is in unitywith them. Toyner believed to-night that he was in open revolt against arule of life which he had found himself unable to adhere to, and againstthe God who had ordained it; but, all the same, it was this rule, andfaith in the God which he had approached by means of it, that actuatedhim during this conference with Ann. As a man who had given up hope forhimself might desire salvation for his child, so he gravely and gentlyset her feet in what he was accustomed to regard as the path of lifebefore he himself left it. 

CHAPTER IX. 

Ann's plan of the way in which Toyner more than any other man could aidher father was simple enough. He who was known to be in pursuit ofMarkham was to take him as a friend through the town at The Mills andstart him on the road at the other side. Markham was little known at TheMills, and no one would be likely to take the companion of the constableto be the criminal for whose arrest he had been making so muchagitation; they were to travel at the early hour of dawn when few werestirring. This plan, with such modifications as his own good sensesuggested, Toyner was willing to adopt. 

He started earlier in the evening than she had done, having noparticular desire for secrecy. He told his friends that he was going torow to The Mills by night, and those who heard him supposed that he hadgained some information concerning Markham that he thought it best toreport. It was a calm night; the smoke of distant burning was still inthe air. 

He dropped down the river in the dark hours before the moonrise, andbegan to row with strength, as Ann had done, when he reached the placidwater. His boat was light and well built. He could see few yards of darkwater in advance; he could see the dark outline of the trees. The waterwas deep; there were no rocks, no hidden banks; he did not make all thehaste he could, but rowed on meditatively--he was always more or lessattracted by solitude. To-night the mechanical exercise, the darkness, the absolute loneliness, were greater rest to him than sleep would havebeen. In a despairing dull sort of way he was praying all the time; hismind had contracted a habit of prayer, at least if expressing histhoughts to the divine Being in the belief that they were heard may becalled prayer. 

Probably no one so old or so wise but that he will behave childishly ifhe can but feel himself exactly in the same relation to a superior beingthat a child feels to a grown man. Toyner expressed his grievance overand over again with childlike simplicity; he explained to God that hecould not feel it to be right or fair that, when he had prayed so verymuch, and prayers of the sort to which a blessing was promised, heshould be given over to the damning power of circumstance, launched in acareer of back-sliding, and made thereby, not only an object of greaterscorn to all men than if he had never reformed, but actually, as itappeared to him, more worthy of scorn. 

He did not expect his complaints to be approved by the Deity, and gainedtherefore no satisfying sense that the prayer had ascended to heaven. 

The moon arose, the night was very warm; into the aromatic haze a mistwas arising from the water on all sides. It was not so thick but that hecould see his path through it in the darkness; but when the light camehe found a thin film of vapour between him and everything at which helooked. The light upon it was so great that it seemed to be luminous initself, and it had a slightly magnifying power, so that distances lookedgreater, objects looked larger, and the wild desolate scene with whichhe was familiar had an aspect that was awful because so unfamiliar. 

When Toyner realised what the full effect of the moonlight was going tobe, he dropped his oars and sat still for a few minutes, wondering ifhe would be able to find the landmarks that were necessary, so strangedid the landscape look, so wonderful and gigantic were the shapes whichthe dead trees assumed. Then he continued his path, looking for a treethat was black and blasted by lightning. He was obliged to grope his wayclose to the trees; thus his boat bumped once or twice on hidden stumps. It occurred to him to think what a very lonely place it would be to diein, and a premonition that he was going to die came across him. 

Having found the blasted tree, he counted four fallen trees; they cameat intervals in the outer row of standing ones; then there was a breakin the forest, and he turned his boat into it and paused to listen. 

The sound that met his ear--almost the strangest sound that could havebeen heard in that place--was that of human speech; it was still somedistance away, but he heard a voice raised in angry excitement, supplicating, threatening, defying, and complaining. 

Toyner began to row down the untried water-way which was opened to hisboat. The idea that any one had found Markham in such a place and atsuch an hour was too extraordinary to be credited. Toyner looked eagerlyinto the mist. He could see nothing but queer-shaped gulfs of lightbetween trunks and branches. Again his boat rubbed unexpectedly againsta stump, and again the strange premonition of approaching death cameover him. For a moment he thought that his wisest course would be toreturn. Then he decided to go forward; but before obeying this command, his mind gave one of those sudden self-attentive flashes the capacityfor which marks off the mind of the reflective type from others. He sawhimself as he sat there, his whole appearance and dress; he took in hishistory, and the place to which that hour had brought him, he, BartToyner, a thin, somewhat drooping, middle-aged man, unsuccessful, because of his self-indulgence, in all that he had attempted, yet havingcarried about with him always high desires, which had never had theslightest realisation except in the one clear shining space of visionand victory which had been his for a few months and now was gone. Thelight had mocked him; now perhaps he was going to die!

He pushed his boat on, his sensations melting into an excited blank ofthought in which curiosity was alone apparent. He was growing strangelyexcited after his long calm despondency; no doubt the excitement of theother, who was shouting and jabbering not far away in the moonlitnight, affected him. 

He found his way through the trees of the opening; evidently the splashof his oar was caught by the owner of the noisy voice, for before hecould see any one a silence succeeded to the noise, a sudden absolutesilence, in itself shocking. 

"Are you there, Markham?" cried Toyner. 

No answer. 

Toyner peered into the silver mist on all sides of him; the sensation ofthe diffused moonlight was almost dazzling, the trees looked far away, large and unreal. At length among them he saw the great log that hadfallen almost horizontal with the water; upon it a solitary human figurestood erect in an attitude of frenzied defiance. 

"I have come from your daughter, Markham. " Then in a moment, by way ofself-explanation, he said, "Toyner. "

The man addressed only flung a clenched fist into the air. The silenceof his pantomime now that there was some one to speak to was madeghastly by the harangue which he had been pouring out upon the solitude. 

"Have you lost your head?" asked Toyner. "I have come from yourdaughter--I'm not going to arrest you, but set you down at TheMills--you can go where you will then. "

He knew now the answer to his first question. The man before him was insome stage of delirium. Toyner wondered if any one could secretly havebrought him drink. 

There was nothing to be done but to soothe as best he could the other'sfear and enmity, and to bring the boat close to the tree for him to getin it. Whether he was sane or mad, it was clearly necessary to take himfrom that place. Markham retained a sullen silence, but seemed tounderstand so far that he ceased all threatening gestures. His onlymovements were certain turnings and sudden crouchings as if he saw orfelt enemies about him in the air. 

"Now, get in, " said Toyner. He had secured the boat. He pulled the otherby the legs, and guided him as he slipped from his low bench. "Sit down;you can't stand, you know. "

But Markham showed himself able to keep his balance, and alert to helpin pushing off the boat. There was a heavy boat-pole ready for use inshallow water, and Markham for a minute handled it adroitly, pushing offfrom his tree. 

Toyner turned his head perforce to see that the boat was not proceedingtowards some other dangerous obstacle. Then Markham, with the suddenswift cunning of madness, lifted the butt end of his pole and struck himon the head. 

Toyner sank beneath the blow as an ox shivers and sinks under thewell-aimed blow of the butcher. 

Markham looked about him for a moment with an air of childish triumph, looked not alone at the form of the fallen man before him, but allaround in the air, as if he had triumphed not over one, but over many. 

No eye was there to see the look of fiendish revenge that flitted nextover the nervous working of his face. Then he fell quickly to workchanging garments with the limp helpless body lying in the bottom of theboat. With unnatural strength he lifted Toyner, dressed in his own coatand hat, to the horizontal log on which he had lived for so long. Hetook the long mesh of woollen sheeting that his daughter had brought tobe a rest and support to his own body, and with it he tied Toyner to theupright tree against which the log was lying; then, with an additionaltouch of fiendish satire, he took a bit of dry bread out of the amplebag of food which Ann had hung there for his own needs, and laid it onToyner's knees. Having done all this he pushed his boat away withreckless rapidity, and rowed it back into the open water, steering withthat unerring speed by which a somnambulist is often seen to perform adangerous feat. 

The moonlit mist and the silence of night closed around this lonely nookin the dead forest and Toyner's form sitting upon the fallen log. In theopen river, where no line determined the meeting of the placid moonlitwater and the still, moonlit mist, the boat dashed like a dark streakup the white winding Ahwewee toward the green forest around FentownFalls. The small dark figure of the man within it was working at hisoars with a strength and regularity of some powerful automaton. At everystroke the prow shot forward, and the sound of the splashing oars madesoft echoes far and wide. 

CHAPTER X. 

When men have visions the impression left upon their minds is that lightfrom the unseen world of light has in some way broken through into thesphere of their cognizance. The race in its ages of reflection has uponthe whole come to the conclusion that that which actually takes place isthe gradual growth and the sudden breaking forth of light within themysterious depths of the man himself. A new explanation of a fact doesnot do away with the fact. 

Toyner was not dead, he was stunned; his head was badly injured. Whenhis consciousness returned, and through what process of inflammation andfever his wounded head went in the struggle of nature toward recovery, was never clearly known. His body, bound with the soft torn cloths tothe upright tree, sagged more and more until it found a rest upon theinclined log. The fresh sweet air from pine woods, the cool vapours fromthe water beneath him, were nurses of wise and delicate touch. The sunarose and shone warmly, yet not hotly, through the air in which dry hazewas thickening. The dead trees stood in the calm water, keeping silenceas it were, a hundred stalwart guards with fingers at their lips, lestany sound should disturb the life that, with beneficent patience, waslittle by little restoring the wounded body from within. Even the littlevulgar puffing market-boat that twice a day passed the windings of theold river channel--the only disturber of solitude--was kept at so greata distance by this guard of silent trees that no perception of herpassing, and all the life and perplexity of which she must remind him, entered into Toyner's half-closed avenues of sense. 

For two days the sun rose on Bart through the mellow, smoke-dimmedatmosphere. Each night it lay in a red cloud for an hour in the west, tingeing and dyeing all the mirror below the trees with red. No one wasthere in the desolate lake to see the twice-told glory of that rosyflood and firmament, unless it was this wondrous light that firstpenetrated the eyes of the prisoner with soothing brightness. 

It was at some hour of light--sunset or sunrise, or it might have beenin the blending of the mornings and the evenings in that confusion ofmind which takes no heed of time--that Toyner first began to knowhimself. Then it was not of himself that he took knowledge; his heart inits waking felt after something else around and beneath and above him, everywhere, something that meant light and comfort and rest and love, something that was very strong, that was strength; he himself, BartToyner, was part of this strength, and rested in it with a rest andrefreshing which is impossible to weakness, however much it may crave. 

It came to him as he lay there, not knowing the where or when of hisknowledge--it came to him that he had made a great mistake, as a littlechild makes a mistake in laughable ignorance. Indeed, he laughed withinhimself as he thought what a strange, childish, grotesque notion he hadhad, --he had thought, he had actually thought, that God was only a partof things; that he, Bart Toyner, could turn away from God; that God'spower was only with him when he supposed himself to be obedient to Him!Yes, he had thought this; but now he knew that God was all and in all. 

There came to him, trooping with this new joy of knowledge, the sensuoussight and sound and smell of many things that he had known, but had notunderstood, before. All the spring-times through which he had walkedunconscious of their meaning, came to him. There was a sound in his earsof delicate flowers springing to light through dewy moss, of budsbursting, and he saw the glancing of myriad tiny leaves upon the greyold trees. With precisely the same sense of sweetness came the vision ofdays when autumn rain was falling, and the red and sear leaf, the nut, the pine-cone and the flower-seed were dropping into the cold wet earth. Was life in the spring, and death in the autumn? Was the power and loveof God not resting in the damp fallen things that lay rotting in theground?

There came before him a troop of the little children of Fentown, all therosy-cheeked faces and laughing eyes and lithe little dancing forms thathe had ever taken the trouble to notice; and Ann and Christa came andstood with them--Christa with her dancing finery, with her beautiful, thoughtless, unemotional face, her yellow hair, and soft white hands;and Ann, a thousand times more beautiful to him, with her sun-browntints and hazel eyes, so full of energy and forethought, her dark neathair and working-dress and hardened hands--this was beauty! Over againstit he saw Markham, blear-eyed, unkempt and dirty; and his own father, agaunt, idiotic wreck of respectable manhood; and his mother, faded, worn, and peevish; with them stood the hunch-backed baker of Fentownand all the coarse and ugly sons of toil that frequented its wharfs. There was not a child or a maiden among those he saw first who did notowe their life to one of these. With the children and the maidens therewere pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effortand failure, sin and despair. The life that was in all of them, was itpartly of God and partly of themselves? He laughed again at thequestion. The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse, every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted, if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by whichthey thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad, the energy which upheld them was all of God. That devil, too, that hesaw standing close by and whispering to them--his form was dim andfading; he was not sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but--ifhe had life, was it his own? Somewhere, he could not remember where orwhen, he had heard the voice of truth saying, "Thou couldst have nopower against me except it were given thee from above. "

The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings themnearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which hasnot manifold meanings. Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bartsaw Ann slowly walk over from the group in which she had risen to be aqueen, to that group whose members were worn with disappointment andage; as she went he saw her perfectly as he had never seen her before, the hard shallow thoughts that were woven in with her unremitting effortto do always the thing that she had set herself to do; and he saw, too, a nature that was beneath this outer range of activity, a smalltrembling fountain of feeling suppressed and shut from the light. Insome strange way as she stood, having grown older by transition from onegroup to the other, he saw that this inner fountain of strength wasincreasing and overflowing all that other part which had before made upalmost the entire personality of the woman. This change did not takeplace visibly in the other people among whom she stood. It was in Ann hesaw the change. He felt very glad he had seen this; he seemed to thinkof nothing else for a long time. 

He forgot then all the detail of that which he had seen and thought, andit seemed to him that he spent a long time just rejoicing in the divinelife by which all things were, and by which they changed, growing bytransformation into a glory which was still indistinct to him, too faroff to be seen in any way except that its light came as the light comesfrom stars which we say we see and have never really seen at all. 

Through this joy and light the details of life began to show again. Thetwo forces which he had always supposed had moulded his life acted hisearly scenes over again. His young mother, before the shadow of despairhad come over her, was seen waiting upon all his boyish footsteps withcheerful love and patience, trying to guide and to help, but trying muchmore to comfort and to please; and his father, with a strong body andthe strength of fixed opinion and formed habits, having no desire forhis son except to train and form him as he himself was trained andformed, was seen darkening all the boy's happiness with unreasonableseverity, which hardened and sharpened with the opposition of years intoselfish cruelty. Toyner had often seen these scenes before; all thatwas new to him now was that they stood in the vivid light of a newinterpretation. Ah! the father's cruelty, the irritable self-love, theincapacity to recognise any form of life but his own, it was ofGod, --not a high manifestation: the bat is lower than the bird, and yetit is of God. Bart saw now the one great opportunity of life! He sawthat the whole of the universe goes to develop character, and the onechief heavenly food set within reach of the growing character for itsnourishment is the opportunity to embrace malice with love, to gather itin the arms of patience, convert its shame into glory by willingendurance. 

Had he, Bart Toyner, then really been given the power in that beginningof life to put out his hand and take this fruit which would have givenhim such great strength and stature, or had he only had strength justfor what he had done and nothing more?

The answer seemed to come to him from all that he had read of the growthof things. He looked into the forests, into the life of the creaturesthat now lived in them; he saw the fish in the rivers and the birds inthe air, everywhere now roots were feeling under the dark ground forjust the food that was needed, and the birds flew open-mouthed, and thefishes darted here and there, and the squirrels hoarded their nuts. Everywhere in the past the growth of ages had been bringing togetherthese creatures and their food by slowly developing in them new powersto assimilate new foods. What then of those that pined and dwindled whenthe organism was not quite strong enough and the old food was takenaway? Ah, well! they fell--fell as the sparrows fall, not one of themwithout God. And what of man rising through ages from beast tosainthood, rising from the mere dominion of physical law which works outits own obedience into the moral region, where a perpetual choice isordained of God, and the consequences of each choice ordained? Was notthe lower choice often inevitable? Who could tell when or where exceptGod Himself? And the higher choice the only food by which character cangrow! So men must often fall. Fall to what end? To pass into thatboundless gulf of distant light into which everything is passing, passing straight by the assimilation of its proper food, circuitously byweakness and failure, but still coming, growing, reaching out intoinfinite light, for all is of God, and God is Love. 

All Toyner's thought and sense seemed to lose hold again of everythingbut that first realisation of the surrounding glory and joy andstrength, and the feeling that he himself had to rest for a littlewhile before any new thing was given him to do. 

His body lay back upon the grey lifeless branch, wrapped in the ragged, soiled garment that Markham had put upon him; the silence of night cameagain over the water and the grey dead trees, and nature went onsteadily and quietly with her work of healing. 

CHAPTER XI. 

When Toyner had left Fentown to go and rescue Markham, Ann had stood agood way off upon the dark shore just to satisfy herself that he had gotinto the boat and rowed down the river. This was not an indication thatshe doubted him. She followed him unseen because she felt that nightthat there were elements in his conduct which she did not in the leastunderstand. When he was gone, she went back to fulfil her part of thecontract, and she had a strength of purpose in fulfilling it which didnot belong mainly to the obligation of her promise. Something in hislook when he had come in this evening, in his glance as he bade herfarewell, made her eager to fulfil it. 

All night, asleep or awake, she was more or less haunted with this newfeeling for Toyner--a feeling which did not in her mind resemble love orliking, which would have been perhaps best translated by the word"reverence, " but that was not a word in Ann's vocabulary, not even anidea in her mental horizon. 

Our greatest gains begin to be a fact in the soul before we have anymental conception of them!

The next day Ann was up early. She took her beer (it was home-brewed andnot of great value) and deliberately poured it out, bottle after bottle, into a large puddle in the front road. The men who were passing earlysaw her action, and she told them that she had "turned temp'rance. " Shewashed the bottles, and set them upside down before the house to drywhere all the world might see them. The sign by which she hadadvertised her beer and its price had been nothing but a sheet of brownpaper with letters painted in irregular brush strokes. Ann had plenty ofpaper. This morning she laid a sheet upon her table, and rapidly paintedthereon with her brush such advertisements as these:

 _Tea and Coffee, 3 Cents a Cup. Ginger Bread, Baked Beans, Lemonade. 

Cooking done to order at any hour and in any style. _

By the time this placard was up, Christa had sauntered out to smell themorning air, and she looked at it with what was for Christa quite anexertion of surprise. 

She went in to where Ann was scrubbing the tables. Christa neverscrubbed except when it was necessary from Ann's point of view that sheshould, but she never interfered either. Now she only said:

"Ann!"

"I'm here; I suppose you can see me. "

"Yes; but, Ann----"

It was so unusual for Christa to feel even a strong emotion of surprisethat she did not know in the least how to express it. 

Ann stopped scrubbing. She had never supposed that Christa would yieldeasily to all the terms of the condition; she had not sufficientconfidence in her to explain the truth concerning the secret compact. 

"Look here, Christa, do you know that Walker died last night? Now I'lltell you what it is; you needn't think that the people who arerespectable but not religious will have anything more to do with us, even in the off-hand way that they've had to do with us before now. Father's settled all that for us. Now the only thing we've got to do isto turn religious. We're going to be temp'rance, and never touch a gameof cards. You're going to wear plain black clothes and not dance anymore. It wouldn't be respectable any way, seeing they may catch fatherany day, and the least we can do is sort of to go into mourning. "

Christa stood bright and beautiful as a child of the morning, and heardthe sentence of this long night passed upon her; but instead of lookingplaintive, a curiously hard look of necessary acquiescence came aboutthe lines of her cherry lips. Ann was startled by it; she had expectedChrista to bemoan herself, and in this look she recognised that theyounger sister had an element of character like her own, was perhapsgrowing to be what she had become. The quality that she honestlyadmired in herself appeared disgusting to her in pretty Christa, yet shewent on to persuade and explain; it was necessary. 

"We can't dance, Christa, for no one would dance with us; we can't wearflowers in our hats, for no one would admire them. I suppose you havethe sense to see that? The men that come here are a pretty easy-goingrough lot, but they draw a line somewhere. Now I've kept you like a ladyso far, and I'll go on doing that to the end" (This was Ann's paraphrasefor respectability); "so if you don't want to sit at home and mope, we've got to go in for being religious and go to church and meetings. The minister will come to see us, and all that sort will take tospeaking to us, and I'll get you into Sunday school. There are severalvery good-looking fellows that go there, and there's a class of realbig girls taught by a Young-Men's-Christian-Association chap. He'd cometo see you, you know, if you were in his class. "

Christa was perfectly consoled, perfectly satisfied; she even showed hersister some of the animation which had hitherto come to her only whenshe was flirting with men. 

"Ann, " she said earnestly, "you are very splendid. I got up thinkingthere weren't no good in living at all. "

Ann eyed her sharply. Was one set of actions the same to Christa asanother? and was she content to forget all their own shame and all herfather's wretched plight if she could only have a few pleasures forherself? It was exactly the passive state that she had desired to evokein Christa; but there are many spectres that come to our call and thenappal us with their presence!

Ann went on with her work. She was not in the habit of indulgingherself in moods or reveries; still, within her grew a silentdisapproval of Christa. She felt herself superior to her. After a whileanother thought came upon her with unexpected force. Christa's motivefor taking to the religious life was only self-interest; her own motivewas the same; and was not that the motive which she really supposedhitherto to actuate all religious people? Had she not, for instance, been fully convinced that self-interest was the sum and substance ofBart Toyner's religion? Now between Bart Toyner and Christa and herselfshe felt that a great gulf was fixed. 

Well, she did not know; she did not understand; she was not at all surethat she wanted to understand anything more about Bart Toyner and allthe complex considerations about life which the thought of him seemed toarouse in her. She felt that the best way of ridding herself ofuncomfortable thoughts about him was to be busy in performing all thathe could reasonably require at her hands. It is just in the same waythat many people rid themselves of thoughts about God. 

All that long day, while the sunlight fell pink through the haze, Annworked at renovating her own life and Christa's. She took Christa andwent to some girls of their acquaintance, and presented them with allthe feathers, furbelows, and artificials which she and Christapossessed. She cooked some of the viands which she had advertised forsale, and prepared all her small stock of kitchen utensils for the newavocation. It was a long hard day's work, and before it was over thevillage was ringing with the news of all this change. The minister hadalready called on Ann and Christa, saying suitable things concerningtheir father's terrible crime and their own sad position. When he wasgone Christa laughed. 

CHAPTER XII. 

The sweet-scented smoke of the distant forest fires had diffused itselfall day in the atmosphere more and more palpably. It was not a gloomyeffect, and familiar to eyes accustomed to the Canadian August. All thesunbeams were very pink, and they fell flickering among the shadows ofthe pear tree upon Markham's grey wooden house, upon the path and theragged green in front. Ann had pleasant associations with these pinkbeams because they told of fine weather. Smoke will not lie thus in anatmosphere that is molested with any currents of wind that might bringcloud or storm. On the whole Ann had spent the day happily, for fairweather has much to do with happiness; but when that unusual flood ofblood-red light came at sunset, giving an unearthly look to a land whichwas well enough accustomed to bright sunsets of a more ordinary sort, Ann's courage and good humour failed her; she yielded to the commoninfluence of marvels and felt afraid. 

What had she done, and what was she going to do? She was playing withreligion; and religion, if it was nothing more, was something which hadmade Bart Toyner look at her with such a strange smile of selfless hopeand desire--hope that she would be something different from what she hadbeen, desire that the best should come to her whatever was going tohappen to him. That was the explanation of what had seemed inexplicablein his look (she felt glad to have worked it out at last); and ifanything so strange as that were possible in Bart, what was the forcewith which she was playing? Would some judgment befall her?

The evening closed in. Christa went to bed to finish a yellow-backednovel. As it was the last she was to read for a long time, she thoughtshe might as well enjoy it. Ann sat alone in the outer room. The nightwas very still. Christa went to sleep, but Ann continued to sit, stitching at the very plain garb that Christa was to don on the morrow, not so much because she needed to work as because she felt no need ofsleep. The night being close and warm, her window, a small Frenchcasement, stood open. At a late hour, when passers upon the road werefew, arrested by some sound, she knew not what, she lifted her head andlooked through the open window intently, in the same way as we lift oureyes and look sometimes just because another, a stranger perhaps, hasriveted his gaze upon us. 

A moment more, and Ann saw some one come within the beams of her ownlamp outside of the window; the figure crossed like a dark, silentshadow, but Ann thought she recognised Toyner. The outline of theclothes that he had worn when she had seen him last just about this houron the previous night was unconsciously impressed upon her mind. Ashudder of fear came over her, and then she was astonished at the fear;he might easily have done all that she had given him to do and returnedby this time. Yet why did he pass the window in that ghostly fashion andshow no sign of coming to the door? A moment or two that she sat seemedbeaten out into the length and width of minutes by the throbbing of hernerves, usually so steady. She determined to steel herself againstdiscomfort. If Toyner had done his work and come home and did not thinkit wise to visit her openly, what was there to alarm in that? Yet sheremembered that Toyner had spoken of being away for some indefinitelength of time. She had not understood why last night, and now it seemedeven more hard to understand. 

As she sewed she found herself looking up moment by moment at thewindow. It was not long before she saw the same figure there again, close now, and in the full light. Her hands dropped nerveless upon herknee; she sat gazing with strained whitened face. The outline of theclothes she associated with the thought of Toyner, but from under thedark hat her father's face looked at her. Not the face of a man shethought, but the face of a spirit, as white as if it were lifeless, ashaggard as if it were dead, but with blazing life in the eyeballs and aline like red fire round their rims. In a moment it was gone again. 

Ann started up possessed with the desire to prove the ghostly visitantmaterial; passing through the door, she fled outside with her lamp. Whatever had been there had withdrawn itself more quickly than she hadcome to seek it. 

She felt convinced now that her father was dead; she fell to imaginingall the ways in which the tragic end might have come. No thought thatcame to her was satisfactory. What had Bart done? Why had his formseemed to her so inextricably confused with the form of her father atthe moment of the apparition? The recognition of a man or his garments, although the result of observation, does not usually carry with it anyconsciousness of the details that we have observed; and she did not knownow what it was that had made her think of Toyner so strongly. 

The next morning, as the day was beginning to wear on, one of theFentown men put his head into Ann's door. 

"Do you happen to know where Toyner is?" he asked. 

She gave a negative, only to be obliged to repeat it to severalquestions in quick succession. 

"Seen him this morning?"

"Seen him last night?"

"Happen to know where he would likely be?"

The growing feeling of distress in Ann's mind made the shake of her headmore and more emphatic. She was of course an object of more or less pityto every one at that time, and the intruder made an explanation that hadsome tone of apology. 

"Oh, well, I didn't know but as you might have happened to have seen himsince he came back. His boat's there at the landing all right, but hismother's not seen him up to the house. "

During the day Ann heard the same tale in several different forms. Toyner was one of those quiet men not often in request by hisneighbours; and as he was known at present to have reason possibly forhidden movements in search of his quarry, there was not that hue and cryraised concerning the presence of the boat and the absence of the ownerthat would have been aroused in the case of some other; still, theinterest in his whereabouts gradually grew, and Ann heard the talk aboutit. Within her own heart an unexpressed terror grew stronger andstronger. It was founded upon the sense of personal responsibility. Shealone knew the secret mission upon which Toyner had left; she alone knewof the glimpse of her father which she had caught the night before, andshe doubted now whether she had seen a spirit or visible man. What hadhappened in the dark hour in which Toyner and Markham had met, and whichof them had brought back the boat? The misery of these questions grew tobe greater than she could endure; but to confide her distress to any onewas impossible. To do so might not only be to put her father's enemiesupon his track, but it would be to confess Bart's unfaithfulness to hispublic duty; and in that curious revolution of feeling which sofrequently comes about in hearts where it is least expected, Ann feltthe latter would be the more intolerable woe of the two. 

Then came another of those strange unearthly sunsets. Ann's mind wasmade up. Inactivity she could endure no longer. There was oneexplanation that appeared to her more reasonable than any other; thatwas, that Bart had wavered in his resolution to relieve Markham, thatthe latter had died upon the tree where he was hiding, and that Bartwould not show himself for the present where Ann could see him. Ann didnot believe in this explanation; but because of the apparition which shethought she had seen, because of the horrible nature of the fear itentailed, she determined that, come what would, she would go to thatsecret place which she alone knew and find out if her father had beentaken from it or if any trace remained there to show what had reallyhappened. It was when the sisters were again alone for the night thatshe first broke the silence of her fears. 

"Christa, father came to the window last night, but went away againbefore I could catch him. "

"Sure he would never show his face in this place, Ann. You must havebeen dreaming!"

"Well, I must try to find him. I tell you what I'm going to do. I'vebeen along all the boats, and there's not one of them I could takewithout being heard except David Brown's canoe that is tied at the footof his father's field. I could get that, and I expect to be back herelong before it's light. If any one should come to the door asking forme, you say, like the other night, that I'm ill and can't see them. "

"Yes, " said Christa, without exhibiting much interest. Ann had been the_deus ex machina_ of the house since Christa's babyhood. It neveroccurred to her that any power needed to interfere on behalf of Ann. 

"But if I shouldn't get back by daylight, you'll have to manage to say aword to David Brown. Tell him that I borrowed his canoe for a veryspecial purpose. If you just say that, he'll have sense not to make afuss. "

"Yes, " said Christa sleepily. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

The canoe did not answer to Ann's one slim Indian paddle so lightly asthe boat she had taken before had answered to the oars. Kneeling uprightin the stern, she was obliged to keep her body in perfect balance. 

The moon did not rise now until late, but the smoke that had for twodays hung so still and dim had been lifted on a light breeze that camewith the darkness. The stars were clear above, and Ann's eyes were wellaccustomed to the wood and stream. 

Ah! how long it seemed before she came round the bend of the river anddown to the blasted tree. She felt a repulsion for the whole death-likeplace to-night that she had not felt before. She had been sure theother night of meeting some one at the end of her secret journey, andnow the best she could hope was that the place would be empty; and evenif it were empty, perhaps, for all she knew, one of the men for whom shewas seeking might be lying dead in the water beneath. Certainly theinexplicable appearance of her father the night before had shaken hernerves. Ann was doing a braver thing than she had ever done in her life, because she was a prey to terror. Lonely as the desolate Ahwewee was, toturn from it into the windings of the secret opening seemed like leavingthe world behind and going alone into a region of death. There was nosound but the splash of paddle, the ripple of the still water under thecanoe, the occasional voice of a frog from the swampy edges of the lake, and the shrill murmur of crickets from the dry fields beyond. 

When Ann came near she saw the bound figure reclining in the arms of thefallen tree. Then she believed that her worst fear had been true--thatBart had been unfaithful, and that her father had died in this wretchedplace. He must be dead because she had seen his spirit!

She came nearer. He had not died of starvation; the bag of food whichshe had hung upon the branch hung there yet. She set the canoe closeagainst the tree, and, holding by the tree, raised herself in it. Shehad to be very careful lest the canoe should tip under her even whileshe held by the tree. Then she put forth a brave hand, and laid it uponthe breast of the unconscious man. 

He was not dead. The heart was beating, though not strongly; the bodywas warm. 

"Father, father. " She shook him gently. 

The answer was a groan, very feeble. It told her at once that the manbefore her was stricken with some physical ill that made him incapableof responding to her. 

And now what was she to do? It was necessary by some means to get herfather into the canoe. To that she did not give a second thought, butwhile he still lived it seemed to her monstrous to take him either backto Fentown Falls or down to The Mills. Her horror of prison and ofjudgment for him had grown to be wholly morbid and unreasonable, justbecause his terror of it had been so extreme. Only one course remained. She had the chart that David Brown had given her. He had told her thatat that northern edge of the swamp, which could be reached by the way hehad marked out, a small farmhouse stood. Possibly the people in thishouse might not yet have heard of Markham the murderer; or possibly, ifthey had heard, they might be won for pity's sake to let him regainstrength there and go in peace. It was her only chance. The moon wasrising now, and she would find the way. She felt strength to do anythingwhen she had realised that the heart beneath her hand was still beating. 

Ann moved the canoe under the fallen log, and moving down it upon herknees, she took the rope from the prow, secured it round the log fromwhich the sick man must descend, and fastened it again to the other endof the boat. This at least was a guarantee that they could not all sinktogether. Even yet the danger of upsetting the canoe sideways was verygreat. It was only necessity that enabled her to accomplish her task. 

"Father, rouse yourself a little. " She took Markham's old felt hat, uponwhich the insensible head was lying, and set it warmly over his brow. She unfastened the bands that tied his body to the log. She had not comewithout a small phial of the rum that was always necessary for herfather, in the hope that she might find him alive. She soaked somemorsels of bread in this, and put it in the mouth of the man over whomshe was working. It was very dark; the only marvel was, not that she didnot recognise Toyner, but that she and he were not both engulfed in theblack flood beneath them in the struggle which she made to take him inthe canoe. 

Twice that day Toyner had stirred and become conscious; butconsciousness, except that of confused dreams, had again deserted him. The lack of food, if it had preserved him from fever, had caused theutmost weakness of all his bodily powers; yet when the small amount ofbread and rum which he could swallow gave him a little strength, he wasroused, not to the extent of knowing who he was or where, but enough tomove his muscles, although feebly, under direction. After a long timeshe had him safely in the bottom of the canoe, his head lying upon herjacket which she had folded for a pillow. At first, as she began topaddle the canoe forward, he groaned again and again, but by degrees thereaction of weakness after exertion made him lapse into his former statethat seemed like sleep. 

Ann had lost now all her fears of unknown and unseen dangers. All thatshe feared was the loss of her way, or the upsetting of her boat. Thestrength that she put into the strokes of her paddle was marvellous. Shehad just a mile to go before she came to another place where a stretchof still water opened through the trees. There were several of theseblind channels opening off the bed of the Ahwewee. They were the terrorof those who were travelling in boats, for they were easily mistaken forthe river itself, and they led to nothing but impenetrable marsh. Fromthis particular inlet David Brown had discovered a passage to the land, and Ann pursued the new untried way boldly. Somewhere farther on Davidhad told her a little creek flowed in where the eye could not discernany wider opening than was constantly the case between the drownedtrees. Its effect upon the current of the water was said to be so slightthat the only way to discover where it ran was by throwing some lightparticles upon the water and watching to see whether they driftedoutwards from the wood steadily. She turned the boat gently against abroken stump from which she could take a decaying fragment. An hourpassed. She wearily crossed the water to and fro, casting out her chipsof punk, straining her eyes to see their motion in the moonlight. Thebreeze that had moved the smoke had gone again. Above the moon rodethrough white fleecy clouds. The water and air lay still and warm, inter-penetrated with the white light. The trees, without leaf or twigs, cast no shadow with the moon in the zenith. 

The patient experimenting with the chips was a terrible ordeal to Ann. The man whom she supposed to be her father lay almost the whole lengthof the canoe so close to her, and yet she could not pass hisoutstretched feet to give him food or stimulant. At last, at last, toher great joy, she found the place where the chips floated outward withsteady motion. She then pushed her canoe in among the trees, thankful toknow that it, at least, had been there before, that there would be nopass too narrow for it. The canoe itself was almost like a livingcreature to her by this time. Like an intelligent companion in thesearch, it responded with gentle motion to her slightest touch. 

It seemed to Ann that the light of the moon was now growing very strongand clear. Surely no moon had ever before become so bright! Ann lookedabout her, almost for a moment dreading some supernatural thing, andthen she realised that the night was gone, that pale dawn was actuallysmiling upon her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Herheart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the easternsky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On eitherside of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes roseabove it. 

The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing. 

The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe. Pretty soon itscurrent flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss inwhich the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered totheir trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of youngspruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls. She smelt livingtrees, dry woods and pastures in front. Then a turn of the narrow creek, and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream. Aboveand around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there wassome sort of a clearing farther on. 

Ann felt exultant in her triumph. She had brought her boat to a place ofsafety. She seemed to gather life and strength from the sun; although itstill lay below the blue horizon of lake and forest which she had leftbehind her, the sky above was a gulf of sunshine. 

She stepped out of the boat and pushed away the hat to look in herfather's face. She saw now who it was that she had rescued. Toynerstirred a little when she touched him, and opened his eyes, the samegrave grey eyes with which he had looked at her when he bade hergood-bye. There was no fever in them, and, as it seemed to her, no lackof sense and thought. Yet he only looked at her gravely, and then seemedto sleep again. 

The girl sprang upright upon the bank and wrung her hands together. Itcame to her with sudden clearness what had been done. Had Toyner toldhis tale, she could hardly have known it more clearly. Her father, hadtried to murder Bart; her father had tied him in his own place; it washer father who had escaped alone with the boat. It was he himself, andno apparition, who had peered in upon her through the window. She waswrought up into a strong glow of indignation against the baseness thatwould turn upon a deliverer, against the cruelty of the revenge taken. No wonder that miserable father had not dared to enter her house againor to seek further succour from her! All her pity, all the strength ofher generosity, went out to the man who had ventured so much on hisbehalf and been betrayed. That unspoken reverence for Toyner, a sense ofthe contrast between him and her father and the other men whom she knew, which had been growing upon her, now culminated in an impulse ofdevotion. A new faculty opened within her nature, a new mine of wealth. 

The thin white-faced man that lay half dead in the bottom of the canoeperhaps experienced some reviving influence from this new energy of lovethat had transformed the woman who stood near him, for he opened hiseyes again and saw her, this time quite distinctly, standing lookingdown upon him. There was tenderness in her eyes, and her sunbrowned facewas all aglow with a flush that was brighter than the flush of physicalexercise. About her bending figure grew what seemed to Bart'shalf-dazzled sense the flowers of paradise, for wild sunflowers andsheafs of purple eupatorium brushed her arms, standing in high phalanxby the edge of the creek. Bart smiled as he looked, but he had nothoughts, and all that he felt was summed up in a word that he utteredgently:

"Ann!"

She knelt down at once. "What is it, Bart?" and again: "What were youtrying to say?"

It is probable that her words did not reach him at all. He was onlyhalf-way back from the region of his vision; but he opened his eyes andlooked at her again. 

The sun rose, and a level golden beam struck through between the trunksof the trees, touching the flowers and branches here and there withmoving lights, and giving all the air a brighter, mellower tint. Therewas something that Bart did feel a desire to say--a great thought thatat another time he might have tried in a multitude of words to haveexpressed and failed. He saw Ann, whom he loved, and the paradise abouther; he wanted to bring the new knowledge that had come to him in thelight of his vision to bear upon her who belonged now to the region ofoutward not of inward sight and yet was part of what must always be tohim everlasting reality. 

"What were you going to say, Bart?" she asked again tenderly. 

And again he summed up all that he thought and felt in one word:

"God. "

"Yes, Bart, " she said, with some sudden intuitive sense of agreement. 

Then, seeming to be satisfied, he closed his eyes and went back into thestate of drowsiness. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Ann went up to the house. It was a great relief to her to remember thatthe man for whom she was going to ask help was no criminal. She couldhold up her head and speak boldly. 

Another minute and she began to look curiously to see how long the grassand weeds had grown before the door. It was some months since DavidBrown had been here. The doubt which had entered Ann's mind grewswiftly. She knocked loudly upon the door and upon the wooden shuttersof the windows. The knocks echoed through empty rooms. 

She had no hesitation in house-breaking. In a shed at the back she founda broken spade which formed a sufficiently strong and sharp lever forher purpose. She pried open a shutter and climbed in. She found onlysuch furniture as was necessary for a temporary abode. A small ironstove, a few utensils of tin, a huge sack which had been used for astraw bed, and a few articles of wooden furniture, were all that was tobe seen. 

Upon the canvas sack she seized eagerly. Bart might be dying, or hemight be recovering from some injury; in either case she had only onedesire, and that was to procure for him the necessary comforts. Havingno access to hay or straw, she began rapidly to gather the bracken whichwas standing two and three feet high in great quantities wherever theground was dry under the trees. She worked with a nervous strength thatwas extraordinary, even to herself, after the toilsome night. When shehad filled the sack, she put it upon the floor of the lower room andwent back to the canoe. She saw that Bart had roused himself and wassitting up. He was even holding on to the rushes with his hand--an actwhich she thought showed the dreamy state of his mind, for she did notnotice that the rope had come undone. She helped Bart out of the canoe, putting her arm strongly round him so that he was able to walk. She sawthat he had not his mind yet; he said no word about the help she gavehim; he walked as a sleeping man might walk. When she laid him down uponthe bed of bracken and arranged his head upon the thicker part which shehad heaped for a pillow, he seemed to her to fall asleep almost at once;and yet, for fear that his strange condition was not sleep, she hastilyopened the bag of food and the flask of rum. 

She stripped the twigs from a tiny spruce tree, piling them inside theold stove. When they had cracked and blazed with a fierce, sudden heat, Ann could only break bread-crumbs into a cupful of boiling water and puta few drops of rum in it. She woke Bart and fed him as she might havefed a baby. When he lay down again exhausted, with that strange moanwhich he always gave when he first put back his head, she had thecomfort of believing that a better colour came to his cheek than before. She resolved that if he rested quietly for a few hours and appearedbetter after the next food she gave him, she would think it safe tocushion the canoe with bracken and take him home. This thought suggestedto her to moor the canoe. 

She went down to the creek again, but it was too late. The water runninggently and steadily had done its work, taken the canoe out from amongthe rushes, and floated it down between the mosses of the swamp. Makingher feet bare, she sprang from one clump of fern root to another, sometimes missing her footing and striking to her knees through thegreen moss that let her feet easily break into the black wet earth. In afew minutes she could see the canoe. It had drifted just beyond theswamp, where all the ground was lying under some feet of water; butthere a tree had turned its course out of the current of the creek, sothat it was now sidling against two ash trees, steady as if at anchor. So few feet as it was from her, Ann saw at a glance that to reach it wasquite impossible. Realising the helplessness of her position withoutthis canoe, she might have been ready to brave the dangers of a strugglein deep water to obtain it, but the danger was that of sinking inbottomless mud. The canoe was wholly beyond her reach. Retracing hersteps, she washed her feet in the running creek, and, as she put on hershoes, sitting upon the grassy bank in the morning sunlight, she feltdrowsily as if she must rest there for a few minutes. She let her headfall upon the arm she had outstretched on the warm sod. 

When she stirred again she had that curious feeling of inexplicablelapse of time that comes to us after unexpected and profound slumber. The sun had already passed the zenith; the tone in the voices of thecrickets, the whole colouring of earth and sky, told her, before she hadmade any exact observation of the shadows, that it was afternoon. 

She prepared more food for the sick man. When she had fed him and puthim to rest again, she went out to discover what means of egress byland was to be found from this lonely dwelling. She followed the fainttrace of wheel-ruts over the grass, which for a short distance ranthrough undergrowth of fir and weeds. She came out upon a cleared spaceof some acres, from which a fine crop of hay had clearly been taken, apparently about a month before. Whoever had mowed the hay had evidentlybeen engaged also in a further clearing of the land beyond, and therewas a small patch where tomatoes and pea vines lay neglected in the sun;the peas had been gathered weeks before, but the tomatoes, later inripening, hung there turning rich and red. Ann went on across thecleared space. Following the track, she came to a thick bit of bushbeyond, where a long cutting had been made, just wide enough for a cartto pass through. 

There was no other way out; Ann must walk through this long greenpassage. No knight in a fairy tale ever entered path that looked moreremote from the world's thoroughfares. When she had walked a mile shecame to an opening where the ground dipped all round to a bottom whichhad evidently at some time held water, for the flame-weed that grewthick upon it stood even, the tops of its magenta flowers as level as alake--it was, in fact, a lake of faded crimson lying between shores ofluxuriant green. The cart-ruts went right down into the flame-flowers, and she thought she could descry where they rose from them on the otherside. Evidently the blossoming had taken place since the last cart hadpassed over, and no doubt many miles intervened between this and thenext dwelling-house. Nothing but the thought of necessities that mightarise for help on Bart's account made her make the toilsome passage, knee-deep among the flowers, to see whether, beyond that, the road waspassable; but she only found that it was not fit for walkers except at atime of greater drought than the present. The swamp crept round in aring, so that she discovered herself to be upon what was actually anisland. Ann turned back, realising that she was a prisoner. 

On her way home again she gathered blood-red tomatoes; and finding awild apple tree, she added its green fruit to what she already heldgathered in the skirt of her gown; starvation at least was not a nearenemy. 

She had made her investigation calmly, and with a light heart; she feltsure that Bart had grown better and stronger during the day, and thatwas all that she cared about. She never paused to ask herself why hisrecovery was not merely a humane interest but such a satisfying joy. The knowledge of her present remoteness from all distresses of her lifeas a daughter and sister came to her with a wonderful sense of rest, andopened her mind to the sweet influences of the summer night and itsstars as that mind had never been opened before. 

She cooked the apples and tomatoes, making quite a good meal forherself. Then she roused Bart, and gave him part of the cooked fruit. 

CHAPTER XV. 

The darkness closed in about eight o'clock. Ann sat on the doorstepwatching the lights in the sky shine out one by one. Last night had beenthe only night which had ever possessed terrors for her, and now thatshe believed her father to be still alive she thought no longer with anyhorror of his apparition. She wondered where he was wandering, but herheart hardened towards him. She rested and dozed by turns upon thedoorstep until about midnight. Then in the darkness she heard a voicefrom the bracken couch that assured her that Bart's mind had come backto him again. 

"Who is there?" he asked. 

"I am going to give you something to eat, " she said, letting her voicespeak her name. 

"Is it very dark?" he asked, "or am I blind?"

"You can see right enough, Bart, " she said gently; "you can watch mekindle the fire. "

She left the door of the stove open while the spruce twigs werecrackling, and in the red, uncertain, dancing light he caught glimpsesof the room in which he was, and of her figure, but the fire died downvery quickly again. 

"I was thinking, Ann, " he said slowly, "that it was a pity for Christato be kept from dancing. She is young and light on her feet. God musthave made her to dance. "

"Christa's well enough without it, " said Ann, a little shortly. 

She thought more coldly of Christa since she had come up to a higherlevel herself. 

"Well, I only meant about Christa that I think I made a mistake, " saidBart slowly. 

"How a mistake?" she asked. 

It was a very hard question to answer. A moment before and he thought hehad seen what the mistake was and how to speak, but when he tried, allthat manifold difficulty of applying that which is eternal to that whichis temporal came between his thought and its expression. 

He could not know clearly wherein his difficulty lay; no one had taughthim about the Pantheism which obliterates moral distinctions, or toldhim of the subjective ideal which sweeps aside material delight. He onlyfelt after the realities expressed by these phrases, and dimly perceivedthat truth lies midway between them, and that truth is the mind of God, and can only be lived, not spoken. For a while he lay there in thedarkness, trying to think how he could tell Ann that to his eyes allthings had become new; after a little while he did try to tell her, andalthough the words were lame, and apparently contradictory to much thatthey both knew was also true, still some small measure of his meaningpassed into her mind. 

"God is different from what I ever thought, " he said; "He isn't in somethings and not in others; it's wicked to live so as to make people thinkthat, for they think they can get outside of Him, and then they don'tmind Him at all. "

"How do you know it?" she asked curiously. 

"I saw it. Perhaps God showed me because I was so hard up. It's God'struth, Ann, that I am saying. "

The room was quite dark again now; the chirping of the crickets outsidethrilled through and through it, as if there were no walls there butonly the darkness and the chirping. Ann sat upon a wooden chair by thestove. 

She considered for a minute, and then she said, with the first touch ofrepentance in her heart: "Well, I reckon God ain't in me, any way. Thereisn't much of God in me that I can see. "

"I'll tell you how it is if I can. " Toyner's voice had a strange restand calm in it. He spoke as a man who looked at some inward source ofpeace, trying to describe it. "Supposing you had a child, you wouldn'tcare anything about him at all if you could just work him by wires sothat he couldn't do anything but just what you liked; and yet the moreyou cared about him, the more it would hurt you dreadfully if he didn'tdo the things that you knew were good for him, and love you and talk toyou too. Well now, suppose one day, when he was a little fellow, say, he wanted to touch something hot, and you told him not to. Well, if hegave it up, you'd make it easier for him to be good next time; butsuppose he went on determined to have his own way, can't you think ofyourself taking hold of his hand and just helping him to reach up andtouch the hot thing? I tell you, if you did that it would mean that youcared a great sight more about him than if you just slapped him and putit out of his reach; and yet, you see, you'd be helping him to do thewrong thing just because you wanted to take the naughtiness out of hisheart, not because you were a devil that wanted him to be naughty. Well, you see, between us and our children" (Toyner was talking as men do whoget hold of truth, not as an individual, but as mankind) "it's not thesame as between God and us. They have our life in them, but they'reoutside us and we're outside them, and so we get into the way, when wewant them to be good, of giving them a punishment that's outside theharm they've done, and trying to put the harm they are going to dooutside of their reach; and when they do the right thing, half the timewe don't help them to do it again. But that isn't God's way. Nothing isever outside of Him; and what happens after we have done a thing is justwhat must happen, nothing more and nothing less, so that we can neverhope to escape the good or the evil of what we have done; for the waythings must happen is just God's character that never changes. You seethe reason we can choose between right and wrong when a tree can't, or abeast, is just because God's power of choice is in us and not in them. So we use His power, and when we use it right and think about pleasingHim--for, you see, we know He can be pleased, for our minds are justbits of His mind (as far as we know anything about Him; but of course weonly know a very little)--He puts a tremendous lot of strength into us, so that we can go on doing right next time. Of course it's a low sort ofright when we don't think about Him, for that's the most of what Hewants us to do; but I tell you" (a little personal fire and energy herebroke the calm of the recital), "I tell you, when I do look up to Godand say, '_Now I am going to do this for Your sake and because You arein me and will do it_, ' I tell you, there's _tremendous power_ given us. _That's the law that makes the value of religion_; I know it by the wayI gave up drinking. But now, look here; most of the time we don't useGod's will, that He lends us, to do what's right; well, then He doesn'tslap us and put the harm out of our reach. He does just what the motherdoes when she takes the child's hand and puts it against the hot thing, and the burn hurts her as much as it hurts the child; but He is not weaklike we are to do it only once in a way. I tell you, Ann, every time youdo a wrong thing God is with you; that is what I saw when I was hard upand God showed me how things really were. Now, look here, there isn'tany end to it that we can see here; it's an awful lot of help we get todo the wrong thing if that's the thing we choose to do. It gets easierand easier, and at first there's a lot of pleasure to it, but by-and-byit gets more and more dreadful, and then comes death, and that's the endhere. But God does not change because we die, and wherever we go He iswith us and gives us energy to do just what we choose to do. It's hellbefore we die when we live that way, and it's hell after, for ages andages and worlds and worlds perhaps, just until the hell-fire of sin hasburned the wrong way of choosing out of us. But remember, God neverleaves us whatever we do; there's nothing we feel that He doesn't feelwith us; we must all come in the end to being like Himself, and there'salways open the short simple way of choosing His help to do right, instead of the long, long way through hell. But I tell you, Ann, whetheryou're good or whether you're wicked, God is in you and you are in Him. If He left you, you would neither be good nor wicked, you would stopbeing; but He loves you in a bigger, closer way than you can think ofloving anybody; and if you choose to go round the longest way you can, through the hell-fire of sin on earth and all the other worlds, He willsuffer it all with you, and bring you in the end to be like Himself. "

The calm voice was sustained in physical strength by the strength of thenew faith. 

Ann's reply followed on the track of thoughts that had occurred to her. "Well now, there's that awful low girl, Nelly Bowes. She's drunk all thetime, and she's got an awful disease. She's as bad as bad can be, and sois the man she lives with; and that little child of hers was born ahard-minded, sickly little beast. " Her words had a touch of triumphantopposition as she brought them out slowly. "It's a mean, horrid shamefor the child to be born like that. It wasn't its fault. Do you mean tosay God is with them?"

"It's a long sight easier to believe that than that He just let them goto the devil! I tell you it's an awful wicked thing to teach peoplethat God can save them and doesn't. God is saving those two and thechild just by the hell they've brought on themselves and it; and He's inhell with them, and He'll bring them out to something grander than wecan think about. They could come to it without giving Him all that agonyand themselves too; but if they won't, He'll go through it with themrather than turn them into puppets that He could pull by wires. And asto the child, I can't see it quite clear; but I see this much that Iknow is true: it's God's character to have things so that a good man hasa child with a nice clean soul, and it's just by the same way of thingsthat the other happens too. It's the working out of the bad man'ssalvation to see his child worse than himself, and it's the working outof the child's salvation to have his bad soul in a bad body. Look you, can't you think that in the ages after death the saving of the soul ofthat child may be the one thing to make that man and woman divine?They'll never, never get rid of their child, and the child will comequicker to the light through the blackness he is born to than if, havingthe bad soul that he has, God was to set him in heaven. But, look you, Ann, there isn't a day or an hour that God is not asking them to choosethe better and the quicker way, and there isn't a day or an hour that Heisn't asking you and me and every one else in the world to do as He doesso as to help them to choose it, and live out the sufferings of theirlife with them till they do. "

Ann sat quite still; she had a feeling that if she moved to make anyother sound, however slight, than that of speech some spell would bebroken. In the darkness Bart had awakened out of the stupor of hisinjury; and although Ann could not have expressed it, she felt that hisvoice came like the speech of a soul that is not a part of the things wesee and touch. It was so strange to her that he did not ask her where hewas. For a few minutes more at least she did not want to bring the leastrustle of material surroundings into their talk. She was stillincredulous; it is only a very weak mind that does not take time to growinto a new point of view. 

"Bart, was God with father when he tried to kill you and tied you to thetree?"

"Yes. "

"How do you know?"

"You can't think of God being less than something else. If God was notin your father, then space is outside God's mind. You can't think thatGod wanted to save your father from doing it and didn't, unless youthink that the devil was stronger than God. You can't think that you aremore loving than God; and if He is so loving, He couldn't let any one dowhat wasn't just the best thing. I tell you, it's a love that's awful tothink of that will go on giving men strength to do wrong until throughthe ages of hell they get sick of it, rather than make them intomachines that would just go when they're wound up and that no one couldlove. "

"Do they know all this in church, Bart?" Ann asked. It had neveroccurred to her before to test her beliefs by this standard, but now itseemed necessary; she felt after tradition instinctively. The nakednessof Bart's statements seemed to want tradition for a garment. 

Bart's words were very simple. "When I was fastened on that log and sawall this, I saw that Jesus knew it all, and that that was what all Hislife and dying meant, and that the people that follow Him are learningto know that that was what it meant; it takes them a long, long time, and we can't understand it yet, but as the world goes on it will comeclearer. Everybody that knows anything about Him says all this inchurch, only they don't quite understand it. There's many churches, Ann, where the people all get up and say out loud, 'He descended into hell. 'I don't know much, for I've only read the Bible for one year; but if youthink of all that Jesus did and all that happened to Him, you will seewhat I mean. People have made little of it by saying it was a miracleand happened just once, but He knew better. He said that God had beendoing it always, and that He did nothing but what He saw God doing, andthat when men saw Him they would know that God was like that always. Haven't I just been telling you that God bears our sins and carries oursorrows with us until we become blessed because we are holy? We canalways choose to be that, but He will never _make_ us choose. Jesusnever _made_ anybody do anything; and, Ann, if there are things in theBible that we don't understand to mean that, it is because they are aparable, and a parable, Ann, is putting something people can'tunderstand in pictures that they can look at and look at, and alwayslearn something every time they look, till at last they understand whatis meant. People have always learned just as much from the Bible as theycan take in, and made mistakes about the rest; but it is God's characterto make us learn even by mistakes. "

Ann's interest began to waver. They were silent awhile, and then, "Bart, do you know where you are?" she asked. 

"I don't seem to care much where I am, as long as you are here. " Therewas a touch of shyness in the tone of the last words that made all thathe had said before human to her. 

"If it hadn't been that I thought it was father, I'd have taken youhome. " She told him how she had brought him. "If it had been a boat, "she said, "I'd have found out who it was before we got here, but thecanoe was too narrow. "

CHAPTER XVI. 

Ann dosed where she sat. Toyner slept again. At length they were bothaware that the level light of the sun was in the room. 

Ann sat up, looking at the door intently. Then her eyes moved as iffollowing some one across the room. 

"What is it?" asked Toyner. 

Ann started up with one swift look of agonised entreaty, and then itseemed that what she had seen vanished, for she turned to Barttrembling, unable to speak at first, sobs struggling with her breath. 

"It was father--I saw him come to the door and come in. He's dead now. "

"What did he look like?" Toyner's voice was very quiet. 

"He looked as if he was dead, but as if he was mad too--his body as ifit was dead, and himself wild and mad and burning inside of it. " She wascrouching on the floor, shaken with the sobs of a new and overwhelmingpity. "O Bart! I never cared--cared anything for him before--except tohave him comfortable and decent; but if I thought he was going tobe--like that--now I think I would die to save him if I could. "

"Would you die to save him? So would God; and you can't believe in Godat all unless you know that He does what He wants to do. And God doesit; dies in him, and is in him now; and He will save him. "

Bart's eyes were full of peace. 

"Can't you trust God, Ann? When He is suffering so much for love of eachof us? He could make us into good machines, but He won't. Can't youbegin to do what He is doing for yourself and other people? Ann, if Hesuffers in your father and in you, He is glad when you are glad. Try tobe glad always in His love and in the glory of it. "

Ann's mind had reverted again to the traditions of which she knew solittle. "I don't want to go to heaven, " she said, "if father is in someplace looking like he did just now. "

"Heaven" (Bart repeated the word curiously), "heaven is inside you whenyou grow to be like God; and through all ages and worlds heaven will beto do as He does, to suffer with those that are suffering, and to diewith those that are dying. But remember, Ann, too, it means to rejoicewith those who are rejoicing; and joy is greater than pain andheaviness. And heaven means always to be in peace and strength anddelight, because it is along the line of God's will where His joyflows. "

Ann rose and ran out of the house. To be in the sunshine and among thewild sunflowers was more to her just then than any wisdom. The wave ofpity that had gone over her soul had ebbed in a feeling of exhaustion. Her body wanted warmth and heat. She felt that she wanted _only_ that. After she had sat for an hour near the bank of the rippling stream, andall her veins were warmed through and through with the sunlight, theapparition of her father seemed like a dream. She had seen him thus oncein life, and supposed him a spirit. She was ready to suppose what shehad now seen to be a repetition of that last meeting, coming before shewas well roused from her sleep. She took comfort because her pulses ranfull and quiet once more. She thought of her love to Bart, and wascontent. As to all that Bart had said--ah well! something she hadgathered from it, which was a seed in her mind, lay quiet now. 

At length Toyner found strength to walk feebly, and sat down on thedoorstep, where he could see Ann. It was his first conscious look uponthis remote autumn bower, and he never forgot its joy. The eyes of menwho have just arisen from the dim region that lies near death are oftencuriously full of unreasoning pleasure. Within himself Toyner called theplace the Garden of Eden. 

"If only I had not brought you here!" said Ann. "If only I had not leftthe canoe untied!"

For answer Bart looked around upon the trees and flowers and upon herwith happy eyes that had no hint of past or future in them. Something ofthe secret of all peace--the _Eternal Now_--remained with him as longas the weakness of this injury remained. 

"Don't fret, Ann" (with a smile). 

"I'm afraid for you; you look awful ill, and ought to have a doctor. "

He had it in his mind to tell her that he was all right and desired onlywhat he had; but, in the dreamy reflective mood that still held him, what he said was:

"If all the trouble in earth and heaven and hell were put together, Ann, it would be just like clouds passing before the sun of joy. The cloudsare never at an end, but each one passes and melts away. Ann! sorrow andjoy are like the clouds and the sun. "

It is never destined that man should remain long in Eden. About noonthat day Ann heard a shout from the direction of the lake outside amongthe dead trees; the shout was repeated yet nearer, and in a minute ortwo she recognised the voice and heard the sound of oars splashing upthe narrow channel made by the running creek. The thought of thisdeliverance had not occurred to her; yet when she recognised the voiceit seemed to her natural enough that David Brown should have divinedwhere his canoe might have been brought. She stood waiting while hisboat came up the creek. The young athlete sprang from it, question andreproach in his handsome young face. She found no difficulty then intelling him just what she had done, and why. She felt herself suddenlyfreed from all that life of frequent deception which she had so longpractised. She had no desire to dupe any man now into doing any service. Something in the stress of the last days, in her new reverence for Bart, had wrought a change in the relative value she set on truth and thegain of untruth. She held up her head with a gesture of new dignity asshe told David that she had sought her father and found Bart. 

"Father has half killed him, and now it hurts me to see him ill. Bart isa good man. O David, I tell you there is no one in the world I mindabout so much as Bart. Could you take him in your boat now to thehospital at The Mills? He would have done as much for you, and more, ifyou had got hurt in that way. "

So David took the man Ann loved to the hospital at The Mills. He did itwillingly if he did it ruefully. Ann went home, as she had come, in thecanoe, except that she had gone out in the dead of night and she wenthome in broad daylight. 

No one blamed Ann when they knew she had gone out to help her father; noone smiled or sneered when they found that she had succeeded in savingToyner's life. 

A few days passed, and poor Markham was found drowned in a forest pool. They brought him home and buried him decently at Fentown for hisdaughter's sake. 

Toyner lay ill for weeks in the little wooden hospital at The Mills. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

When Toyner was well he came home again. His mind was still animatedwith the conception of God as suffering in the human struggle, but asabsolute Lord of that struggle, and the consequent belief that nothingbut obedience to the lower motive can be called evil. The new view oftruth his vision had given him had become too really a part of his mindto be overthrown. It was no doubt a growth from the long years ofdesultory browsing upon popular science and the one year that had beenso entirely devoted to the story of the gospel and to prayer. He couldnot doubt his new creed; but no sooner had he left the hospital wallsthan that burden came upon him of which the greatest stress is this, that in trying to fit new light to common use we are apt to lose theclearer vision of the light itself. 

In Toyner's former religious experience he had been much upheld by theknowledge that he was walking in step with a vast army of Christians. Now he no longer believed himself in the ways of exclusive thought andpractices in which the best men he knew were walking. The only religiousthinkers with whom he had come in contact gave up a large class of humanactivities and the majority of human souls to the almost exclusivedominion of the devil. As far as Toyner knew he was alone in the worldwith his new idea. He had none of that vanity and self-confidence whichwould have made it easy for him to hold to it. It did not appear to himreasonable that he could be right and these others wrong. He did notknow that no man can think alone, that by some strange necessity ofthought he could only think what other men were then thinking. He felthomesick, sick for the support of those faithful ones which he had beenwont to see in imagination with him: their conscious communion with Godwas the only good life, the life which he must seek to attain and fromwhich he feared above all things to fall short; and that being so, itwould have been easier, far easier, to call his new belief folly, heresy, nay, blasphemy if that were needful, and to repent of it, if hecould have done so. He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision tobe true. 

The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice fromheaven had spoken it. Is not this the history of all revelation?

When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of God and ofthe human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought holdthe contrary to be true. I do not mean to say that daily and hourly, when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem amere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring itinto any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act;and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outwardenvironment that makes any creed _appear_ to be incontrovertible. 

Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! Thesheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believeconcerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time andtime again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine. 

The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he hadbeen taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long ashe yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge ofright from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rulesclashed with that one large new rule which had come to him--that any wayof life was wicked which made it appear that God was in some provincesof life and not in others. "Whatever is not of faith is sin"; but whilean old and a new faith are warring in a man's soul the definition fails:many a righteous act is born of doubt, not faith. This was one reasonwhy Toyner no longer possessed all-conquering strength. Another reasonthere was which acted as powerfully to rob him--the soul-bewilderingdifficulty of believing that the God of physical law can also be the Godof promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be aboveus with power to lift us up. 

Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was aman with a diseased craving for intoxicants. He fled from them as a manflies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinenceand the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle. A fewweeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother'shouse one morning dead drunk. The mother, whose heart had revived withinher a little during the last year, now sank again into her previousdejection. Her friends said to her that they had always known how itwould be in the case of so sudden a reformation. When Toyner woke up hishumiliation was terrible; he bore it as he had borne all the rest of hispain and shame, silently enough. No one but Ann Markham even guessed theagony that he endured, and she had not the chance to give a kindlylook, for at this time Toyner, unable to trust himself with himself, wasafraid to look upon Ann lest he should smirch her life. 

Again Toyner set his feet sternly in the way of sobriety. Ah! how heprayed, beseeching that God, who had revealed Himself to be greater andnobler than had before been known, would not because of that showHimself to be less powerful towards those that fear Him. It is theprayer of faith, not the prayer of agonised entreaty, that takes hold ofstrength. Toyner failed again and again. There was a vast difference nowbetween this and his former life of failure, for now he never despaired, but took up the struggle each time just where he had laid it down, andmoreover the intervals of sobriety were long, and the fits ofdrunkenness short and few; but there were not many besides Ann whonoticed this difference. And as for Toyner, the shame and misery offailure so filled his horizon that he could not see the favourablecontrast--shame and misery, but never despair; that one word had goneout of his life. 

One day a visitor came hurrying down the street to Toyner's home. Thestranger had the face of a saint, and the hasty feet of those who areconscious that they bear tidings of great joy. It was Toyner's friend, the preacher. Bart had often written to him, and he to his convert. Oflate the letters had been fraught with pain to both, but this was thefirst time that the preacher had found himself able to come a longjourney since he had heard of Toyner's fall. He came, his heart big withthe prayer of faith that what he had done once he might be permitted todo again--lead this man once more into the humble path of atime-honoured creed and certain self-conquest. To the preacher the twowere one and indivisible. 

When this life is passed away, shall we see that our prayers for othershave been answered most lavishly by the very contradiction of what wehave desired?

The visit was well timed. Bart Toyner's father lay dying; and in spiteof that, or rather in consequence of nights of watching and thenecessary handling of stimulants, Bart sat in his own room, only justreturned to soberness after a drunken night. With face buried in hishands, and a heart that was breaking with sorrow, Bart was sittingalone; and then the preacher came in. 

The preacher sat beside him, and put his arm around him. The preacherwas a man whose embrace no man could shrink from, for the physical partof him was as nothing compared with the love and strength of itsanimating soul. 

"Our Lord sends a message to you: 'All things are possible to him thatbelieveth. '" The preacher spoke with quiet strength. "_You_ know, dearbrother, that this word of His is certainly true. "

"Yes, yes, I know it. By the hour in which I first saw you I know it;but I cannot take hold of it again in the same way. My faith wavers. "

"Your faith wavers?" The preacher spoke questioningly. "My brother, faith in itself is nothing; it is only the hand that takes; it is theSaviour in whom we believe who has the power. You have turned away fromHim. It is not that your faith wavers, but that you are walking straightforward on the road of infidelity, and on that path you will never finda God to help, but only a devil to devour. "

Toyner shivered even within the clasp of the encircling arm. "I hadtried to tell you in writing that the Saviour you follow is more tome--far more, not less. "

"In what way?" The preacher's voice was full of sympathy; but here, andfor the first time, Bart felt it was an unconscious trick. Sympathy wasassumed to help him to speak. The preacher could conceive of no divineobject of love that was not limited to the pattern he had learned todwell upon. 

"I am not good at words, " Toyner spoke humbly. "I took a long time towrite to you; I said it better than I could now, that God is far morebecause He is a faithful Creator, responsible for us always, whatever wedo, to bring us to good. Now I do not need to keep dividing things andpeople and thoughts into His and not-His. That was what it came tobefore. You may say it didn't, but it did. And all we know aboutJesus--don't you see. " (Bart raised his face with piteous, huntedlook)--"don't you see that what His life and death meant was--just whatI have told you? God doesn't hold back His robe, telling people whatthey ought to do, and then judge them. He does not shrink from takingsin on Himself to bring them through death to life. Doesn't your booksay so again and again and again?"

"God cannot sin!" cried the preacher, with the warmth of holyindignation. 

Toyner became calm with a momentary contempt of the other's lack ofunderstanding. "That goes without saying, or He would not be God. "

"But that is what you have said in your letters. "

There was silence in the room. The misery of his loneliness took hold ofToyner till it almost felt like despair. Who was he, unlearned, verysinful, even now shaken with the palsy of recent excess--who was he tobandy words with a holy man? All words that came from his own lips thathour seemed to him horribly profane. The new idea that possessed him waswhat he lived by, and yet alone with it he did not gather strength fromit to walk upright. 

"The father tempted the prodigal, " he said, "when he gave him thesubstance to waste with sinners. Did the father sin? The time had comewhen nothing but temptation--yes, and sin too--could save. Most things, sir, that you hold about God I can hold too. There are bad men, powerfuland seducing men, in the world; there may easily be unseen devils. Thereis hell on earth, and I don't doubt but that there's the awfulest, longest depth of the same kind of hell beyond. There's heaven on earth, and all the love and pain of love we have tell us there's heaven beyond, unspeakable and eternal; but, sir, when you come to limit God--to say, here the responsibility of the faithful God stops, here man'sself-destruction begins--I can't believe that. He must be responsible, not only for starting us with freedom, but responsible for the use wemake of it and for all the consequence. When you say of the infinite Godthat hell and the devils are something outside of Him--I can't thinkthat. The devils must live and move and have their being in Him. Whenyou say the holy God ever said to spirit He had created, 'Depart fromMe' (except in a parable meaning that as long as a spirit chose evil itwould not be conscious of God's nearness), I tell you, sir, by all Hehas taught me out of the Bible you gave me, I don't believe it. We'vestudied the Bible so much now that we know that holiness is justlove--the sort of love that holds holy hatred and every other goodfeeling within itself. We know that love can't fail and cast out thething it loves. When we know a law, we know the way it must work. If theBible seems to say the big law it teaches doesn't work out true, it mustbe like what is said of the six days of creation, something that came asnear as it could to what people would understand, but that needs a newexplanation. "

The young preacher had withdrawn his encircling arm. He sat looking verystern and sad. 

"When you begin to doubt God's word, you will soon doubt that He is, andthat He is the rewarder of them that seek Him. "

"Sir, it seems to me that it's doubting the incarnate Word to believewhat you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did iscontradicted by some few things men supposed Him to mean because theythought them. But it's not that I would set myself up to know aboutdoctrines, if it wasn't that this doctrine had driven me to stopbelieving and stop caring to do right. I can't just explain it clearly, but when I came to Him the way you told me, and thought the way you toldme, I just went on and did it and was blessed and happy in the love ofGod as I never could have dreamed of; but all the time there was asomething--I didn't know exactly what--that I couldn't bring my mind to;so I just left it. But when I got tempted, and prayed and prayed, thenit came on me all of a sudden that I didn't want a God who had to dowith such a little part of life as that. You see it had been simmeringin my mind all the days that I stopped doing the things you told me werewrong and yet went on keeping among the publicans and sinners becauseHe did. If I'd just stayed with the church-goers, maybe I wouldn't havefelt it; but to think that I couldn't take a hand in an innocent game o'cards, or dance with the girls that hadn't had another bit ofamusement--all that wasn't very important, but that sort of thing beganit. And then to think that God was in me and not in them! I began, as Iwent down the street, wondering who had God in his heart and who hadn't, that I might know who to trust and who to try to do good to. And then, most of all, there was all my books that I liked so much. I didn't readthem any more, for when I thought that God had set every word in theBible quite true and left all the other books to be true or not just asit happened, I couldn't think to look at any book but the Bible; forone's greedy of knowing how things really are--that's what one readsfor. So you see it was all in my mind God did things differently onetime and another, like making one book and not the others, and only sucha small part of things was His; and then when the temptation came, yousee, if I'd thought God was in Markham and the girls I could have donemy duty and let Him take care of them; but it was because I'd no causeto think that, and believed that He'd let them go, that I couldn't letthem go. I felt that I'd rather give up the sort of a God I thought onand look after them a bit. It wasn't that I thought it out clear at thetime; but that was how it came about, and I was ready to kick religionover. And, sir, if God hadn't taught me that when I went down to hell Hewas there, I don't think I'd want to be religious again; but now I dowant it with all my might and main, and I'll never let go of it, just asI know He won't let go of me--no, not if some of these days they haveto shovel me into a drunkard's grave; but I believe that God's got thesame strength for me just as He had when you converted me. " Toynerlooked round him despairingly as a man might look for something that isinexplicably lost. "I can't think how it is, but I can't get hold of Hisstrength. "

The preacher meditated. It had already been given to him to pray withgreat persistency and faith for this back-slider, and he had come sureof bringing with him adequate help; but now his hope was less. In amoment he threw himself upon his knees and prayed aloud: "HeavenlyFather, open the heart of Thine erring child to see that it was thecraft and subtlety of the devil that devised for him a temptation hecould not resist, --none other but the devil could have been so subtle;and show him that this same devil, clothed as an angel of light, hasfeigned Thy voice and whispered in his ear, and that until he returns tothe simple faith as it is in the gospel Thou _canst_ not help him as ofold. "

"Stop!" (huskily). "I have not let go of His faith. His faith was in theFather of sinners. "

Then the preacher strove in words to show him the greatness of hiserror, and why he could not hold to it and live in the victory whichfaith gives. It was no narrow or weak view that the preacher took of theuniverse and God's scheme for its salvation; for he too lived at a timewhen men were learning more of the love of God, and he too had spokenwith God. The hard outline of his creed had grown luminous, fringed withthe divine light from beyond, as the bars of prison windows growdazzling and fade when the prisoner looks at the sun. All that thepreacher said was wise and strong, and the only reason he failed toconvince was that Toyner felt that the thought in which his ownstorm-tossed soul had anchored was a little wiser and stronger--only alittle, for there was not a great difference between them, after all. 

"I take in all that you say, sir; but you see I can't help feeling surethat it's true that God is living with us as much and as true when we'rein the worst sort of sin, and the greater sin that it brings--for thepunishment of sin is more and more sin--and being sure, I know thateverything else that is true will come to fit in with it, though I maynot be able rightly to put it in now, and what won't come to fit in withit can't be true. "

The preacher perceived that the evil which he had set himself to slaywas giantlike in strength. He chose him smooth stones for his sling. His heart was growing heavy with fear of failure, his spirit within himstill raised its face heavenward in unceasing prayer. He began to tellthe history of God's ways with man from the first. He spoke of Abraham. He urged that the great strength had always come to men who had trustedGod's word against reason and against sight. And he saw then that forthe first time Toyner raised up his head and seemed stirred with areviving strength. 

The preacher paused, hoping to hear some encouraging word incorrespondence to the gesture, but none came. 

Then he spoke of Moses and of Joshua, for he was following the tale ofGod's rejection of sinful nations. 

Toyner answered now. His eye was clearer, his hand steadier. "I haveread there's many that say that God could not have told His people toslay whole nations, men, women, and children. I think it's theshallowest thing that was ever said. I don't know about His _tellingpeople_ to do it--that may be a poem; but that He gave it to them to do, that He gives it to winds and floods and fires and plagues to do, timeand time and again, is as certain as that if there's a God He must havethings His way or He isn't God. But I don't believe that in this world, or in the next, He ever left man, woman, or child, but lived with eachone all through the sin and the destruction. And, sir, I take it thatmen couldn't see that until at last there came One who looked into God'sheart and saw the truth, and He wanted to tell it, but there were nowords, so though He had power in Him to be King over the whole earth, Hechose instead to be the companion of sinners, and to go down into allthe depths of pain and shame and death and hell. And He said His Fatherhad been doing it always, and He did it to show forth the Father. Thatis what it means. I am sure that is what it means. "

The preacher was surprised to see the transformation that was going onin the man before him. That wonderful law which gives to some centre ofenergy in the brain the control of bodily strength, if but the rightrelationship between mind and body can be established, was againworking, although in a lesser degree than formerly, to restore this manbefore his eyes. Bart, who had appeared shrunken, trembling, andwatery-eyed, was pulling himself together with some strength that he hadgot from somewhere, and was standing up again ready to play a man'spart. The preacher did not understand why. There seemed to him to havebeen nothing but failure in the interview. He made one more effort; heput the last stone in his sling. Toyner had just spoken of thesacrifice of Calvary, and to the preacher it seemed that he set it atnaught, because he was claiming salvation for those who mocked as wellas for those who believe. 

"Think of it, " he said; "you make wrong but an inferior kind of right. You take away the reason for the one great Sacrifice, and in this youare slighting Him who suffered for you. "

Then he made, with all the force and eloquence he could, the personalappeal of the Christ whom he felt to be slighted. 

"You have spoken of the sufferings of lost and wretched men, " he wenton; "think of His sufferings! You have spoken of your loneliness; thinkof His loneliness!"

Then suddenly Bart Toyner made a gesture as a slave might who casts offthe chains of bondage. The appeal to which he was listening was not forhim, but for some man whom the preacher's imagination had drawn in hisplace, who did not appropriate the great Sacrifice and seek to live inits power. He did not now seek to explain again that the death of Christwas to him as an altar, the point in human thought where always the fireof the divine life descends upon the soul self-offered in likesacrifice. He had tried to explain this; now he tried no more, but heheld out his hands with a sign of joy and recovered strength. 

"You came to help me; you have prayed for me; you have helped me; youhave been given something to say. Listen: you have told me of Abraham;he was called to go out alone, quite alone. Now you have spoken to me ofAnother who was alone. " Toyner was incoherent. "That was why _He_ boreit, that we might know that it was possible to have faith all alonebecause He had it. It is easy to believe in God holding us up whenothers do, but awfully hard all alone. He knew that, He warned them tokeep together; but all the same He lived out His prayers alone. "

Toyner looked at the preacher, love and reverence in his eyes. "Yousaved me once, " he said; "you have saved me again. "

But the preacher went home very sorrowful, for he did not believe thatBart Toyner was saved. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

The spiritual strength that proceeds from every holy man had againflowed in life-giving stream from the preacher to Bart Toyner. The helpwas adequate. Toyner never became intoxicated again. 

His father died; and for two years or more the mother, who had livedfrugally all her life, still lived frugally, although land and money hadbeen left to her. The mother would not trust her son, and yet graduallyshe began to realise that it was he who was quietly heaping into her lapall those joys of which she had been so long deprived. At length shedied, the happy mother of a son who had won the respect of other men. 

It was after that that Toyner wedded Ann Markham. Then, when he had thepower to live a more individual life of enjoyment and effort, it beganto be known little by little that these two had committed that sinagainst society so hard to forgive, the sin of having their own creedand their own thoughts and their own ways. 

Toyner was not a preacher. It was not in him to try to change the ideasof those who were doing well with what ideas they had. All that hedesired was to live so that it might be known that his God was the Godof the whole wide round of human activity, a God who blessed the justand the unjust. Toyner desired to be constantly blessing both the badand the good with the blessing of love and home which had been given tohim. It was inevitable that to carry out such an idea a man must livethrough many mistakes and much failure. The ideal itself was an offenceto society. We have all heard of such offences and how they have beenpunished. 

One great factor in the refining of Ann's life was her lover's longneglect; for he, in the simple belief that she must know his heart andpurpose and that she would not be much benefited by his companionship, left her for those years that passed before he married her whollyignorant of his constancy. Ann was constant. Had he explained himselfshe would have been content and taken him more or less at his ownvaluation, as we all take those who talk about themselves. Having nosuch explanation to listen to, she watched and pondered all that he did. Before the day came in which he made his shy and hesitating offer ofmarriage, she had grown to be one with him in hope and desire. Togetherthey made their mistakes and lived down their failure. They had othertroubles too, for the babies lived and died one by one. 

There is seen to be a marvellous alchemy in true piety. Mind and sensesubject to its process become refined. Where refinement is not theresult, we may believe that there is a false note in the devotion, thatthere is self-seeking in the effort toward God. Toyner's wealth grewwith the spread of the town over the land he owned. He had the goodtaste to spend well the money he devoted to pleasure; yet it was notbooks or pictures or music, acquired late in life, that gave to him andto his wife the power to grow in harmony with their surroundings. It wasthe high life of prayer and effort that they lived that made it possiblefor God--the God of art as truly as the God of prayer--to teach them. 

It is not at the best a cultured place, this backwoods town. There wasmany a slip in grammar, many a broad uncouth accent, heard daily inAnn's drawing-room; but what mental life the town had came to centre inthat room. Gradually reflecting neighbours began to learn that there wasa beneficent force other than intellectual at work there. 

Young men who needed interest and pleasure, the poor who needed warmthand food, came together to that room, and met there the drunkard in hissober intervals, the gamester when he cared to play for mere pastime;yes, and others, the more evil, were made welcome there. It was notforgotten that Toyner had been a wicked man and that Ann's father hadbeen a murderer. 

It was a strange effort this, to increase virtue in the virtuous, not byseparation from, but by friendship with, the unrepentant. To Toyner sinwas an abhorred thing. It consisted always, yet only, in failure totread in the foot-prints of God, as far as it was given to each man tosee God's way--in obedience to the lower motive in any moment of theperpetual choice of life. For himself, his life was impassioned with thebelief that it was wicked to live as if God was not the God of the wholeof what we may know. 

I, who have seen it, tell you that the atmosphere of that house wasalways sweet. There were many young girls who came to it often, andlaughed and danced with men who were not righteous, and the girls livedmore holy lives than before. I would say this:--do not let any oneimitate the method of life which Toyner and his wife practised unless byprayer he can obtain the power of the unseen holiness to work upon theflux of circumstance; yet do not let those fear to imitate it who havelearned the secret of prayer. It was a strenuous life of prayer andself-denial that these two lived until their race in this phase ofthings was run. 

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_It is with this abrupt note of personal observation and reflection thatthe schoolmaster's manuscript ends. He had evidently become one ofToyner's disciples. It is well that we should know what our brothersthink, feel with their hearts for an hour, if it may not be for longer. _

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Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd. , London and Aylesbury