Why had he said that? Gil wondered. Hadn’t he agreed with her that unless she shared his faith, they could not court? Yet he couldn’t seem to keep himself from feeling attracted to her, and from saying things such as he had just said. Her cheeks were pink again and she seemed to be struggling to hide a smile.
Surprisingly, he didn’t feel any sense that his flirting with this woman wasn’t pleasing the Lord. Could that mean she would regain her faith at some future time?
Perhaps Faith was fighting similar feelings, for her face grew serious. Her eyes met his and she said, “A fib is a little lie, isn’t it? I thought Christians weren’t supposed to lie.”
She wasn’t teasing him back. Was she trying to put distance between them? Yet she hadn’t said it as a taunt, either.
Could this be the very opening he’d been looking for to ease into a discussion of spiritual things?
“No, Christians aren’t supposed to lie,” he said. “But this side of Heaven, we remain fallible beings who merely try our best to do the right thing with God’s help. No one is perfect but God.”
Her eyes were troubled, and he wondered if Faith was thinking God wasn’t so perfect, either, because He’d let her brother die.
By mutual, unspoken consent they drifted over to the bench that sat beneath the big live oak tree at the back of the churchyard, and sat down.
“Christians are called on to show the world God’s love,” he said. “Yet sometimes, speaking the truth could hurt someone’s feelings to no good purpose. So if it isn’t a truth that must be said, I don’t think the Lord wants us to say some things.”
She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“Here’s an example. Just between you and me, I don’t find a certain female appealing, and it’s completely unlikely that I would ever want to court that particular female. But I wouldn’t be showing Christian behavior to tell her that if it could be avoided, would I? To hurt her feelings, just so I could claim I was honest. Do you see?”
He thought from a certain look of knowing in those green eyes that she had guessed he was speaking to her of Polly. A glint of amusement sparkled in her eyes.
“That’s the ‘Golden Rule,’ isn’t it? ‘Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.’ But I do that, too. It’s basically just being kind.”
He nodded.
They were both silent for a few moments, and then, staring straight ahead, she asked, “I understand why God—if there is such a being—didn’t answer my prayers, or my parents’, when we prayed for my brother. We’re just ordinary folks. But why didn’t he answer your father’s? He’s a preacher, and there’s no more righteous man than your father. But even his prayers couldn’t save Eddie.”
“Faith, God says in the Bible, ‘My ways aren’t your ways,’ so I don’t understand what His reason is for taking your brother any more than why my mother died years ago, leaving my father alone. But a preacher’s prayers have no magic in them. A preacher’s just as much in need of a Savior as anyone else.”
Once again, she looked doubtful, and for a moment, he was tempted to tell her just what a big sinner he truly had been, when he’d been away at seminary, lonely and unused to worldly women, he had fallen in love with a woman so unsuitable to being the wife of a preacher that she made Faith look like a saint by comparison. When she died, their unborn baby had perished with her.
Yet he dared not tell her. If he did, she would question what right he had to get up before the congregation every Sunday and tell anyone how to live. She would never understand how a preacher could sin so much and still call himself a preacher. And if his father heard of it, he might be so devastated by his son’s failings that he could have another stroke.
But maybe he could tell her a part of the truth, Gil thought, enough so she could understand the point he was trying to make.
“I’m sure you never doubted that God exists,” Faith said now, a note of challenge in her tone.
He took a deep breath. “Faith, once, while I was away at seminary, I prayed desperately for the life of an unborn baby...and his mother who’d been shot,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I prayed so hard I understood what the Bible meant when it said Jesus prayed so hard He sweated blood.” He closed his eyes, remembering those hours on his knees, his frantic pleading.
When he looked up, she was watching him. And waiting.
“They died anyway,” he said dully. “And for a long time, Faith, I doubted that God existed. How could He, when He could let a sinless baby die? I came so close to packing my valise and heading home. Of course I had no idea what I’d be if I wasn’t going to follow in Papa’s footsteps...”
“But you got your faith back,” she said. “How? The next time you prayed, you got what you asked for?”
He steepled his fingers and looked at her. “No, Faith, because talking to God isn’t like a magic spell we utter. Getting my faith back wasn’t that simple, and it took time. One of my seminary professors urged me to consider my presence at the seminary one day at a time—even one hour at a time. For a while, it seemed like the time I spent in prayer was just like talking to a wall, like there was no one there. But I kept trying—and He kept trying, too, I guess, and one day I felt His presence in my heart again.” And the promise of a better life ahead of me, he thought, but he couldn’t tell her that without revealing who the woman had been to him.
She was silent, staring unseeingly ahead of her at the tombstones that now cast long shadows across the lawn. Had his words made any dent in the hard shell that imprisoned her soul?
Chapter Twelve
Drowsiness ebbed as Faith entered the newspaper office the next morning. It was Monday, press day, and by now her father would have a stack of newspapers to be delivered to the local businesses that advertised in the paper. She’d deliver them, and by the time she returned, he’d have another armful to be taken to those residents who subscribed. Those subscribers who lived on outlying ranches had their papers delivered to the post office, to be claimed when they ventured to town.
She’d lain awake a long time last night thinking about what Gil had said. If there was a God, had He really stayed with Gil during his crisis of faith after the tragedy, or was that just wishful thinking on Gil’s part? And who was the woman he had mentioned, the woman who’d been fatally shot, and her unborn child with her? Had she been important to Gil somehow, or just an acquaintance from the local church? Why had she been shot? How awful that when she died, two lives were lost instead of just one.
The sound of the printing press clacking away dissolved the remaining cobwebs in Faith’s mind, helped by the strong cup of coffee she’d downed before she’d left home. She always felt such a sense of purpose when she could help her father; she wasn’t just a grown woman still living at home assisting her mother as needed while she waited to meet a suitable man and make a home of her own—she was Faith Bennett, assistant to the newspaper editor.
“There you are at last,” said her father, taking a sheet of newspaper off the cords stretched from one wall to the other and folding it. “I sure didn’t want to have another Monday like the last one, printing and delivering the papers myself,” he groused.
Had he forgotten what she’d been doing that day? “But Papa, Reverend Chadwick—”
“Yes, I know, you were nursing the preacher,” he said quickly. “I just can’t do it all myself, that’s all. Now that you’re here, let’s get busy.”
Her father was always grumpy and impatient on press day. But maybe he had begun to see how essential she was. Perhaps after her deliveries were done, she should go home and try writing a piece on some bit of news she encountered around town. She would show it to Louisa secretly after her cousin was done with her school day, and make sure it was polished and grammar-perfect, then present it to her father. If she did well enough he might come to see th
at he didn’t really need to hire that fellow from Georgia...
Minutes later, she left the office with her printed cargo and headed for her first stop, the hotel. Its proprietor had bought a particularly large advertisement this week and her father had instructed her to be sure and show him its prominent placement on page two, right next to her father’s editorial about the need for vigilance on everyone’s part now that Reverend Gil had been attacked by Comanches and only escaped by the “grace of God,” as he had written it.
What did “grace” mean in this instance? She’d have to ask Gil, but be careful to do so casually, and when he could only give her a brief, to-the-point answer. He’d given her far too much to think about yesterday afternoon.
Now she was thinking about Gil yet again, and the earnest light in his hazel eyes when he’d tried to answer her question about Eddie’s death. There could be no real answer, of course. Before the conversation had turned serious, though, his talk had been too much like the bantering between a suitor and the object of his interest. She had to find a way to spend less time with him.
That would soon come naturally, now that his father was doing so much better. Before Faith had gone home yesterday, she and Gil had even talked about the fact that eventually, his father would probably be able to see to his own needs well enough that the presence of a spinster nurse wouldn’t be necessary unless Gil had to spend any extended time away from the parsonage.
Faith had one more shift with old Reverend Chadwick this week, and perhaps it would be a good idea to get one of the other ladies to take it, so she could avoid situations where she and Gil spent too much time together. They dare not continue to nurture the inappropriate affection that had been growing between them.
Which of the other spinsters could she ask to take her place? Anyone but Polly, she thought wryly, for the other girl was probably still irked by what Faith had said to her yesterday at the party. And in any case Gil would want to avoid that young lady’s company as much as possible.
What might be best for her, Faith realized, would be meeting another gentleman who was more of a freethinker like herself. Then it would be very clear to Gil that he needed to look elsewhere for a wife. She would be doing the right thing for Gil as well as herself.
Yet it was unlikely such a thing would happen before the box social supper, if it even happened then. If Gil found out what boxed meal was hers, and won the bid for it—and who would try to top the well-liked young preacher’s bid after all?—there was no way she could convince anyone that Gil and she weren’t courting.
Just as she was leaving the hotel, her first paper delivered, she saw the stagecoach pulling up on its regular run from Austin. She halted, always interested to see the variety of men and women emerging from the interior of the coach. Sometimes they were all strangers; other times, she recognized townspeople returning from a journey. She wasn’t aware of anyone from Simpson Creek who’d been away, but if there were any of the latter group, she knew her father would be interested in hearing of it so he could include the tidbit in his regular column “Doings about Town.”
None of the half-dozen people who emerged were familiar to her, however. There was a weary-looking middle-age couple who lost no time in disappearing into the hotel, then a pair of fellows who jumped out and gazed with interest, not at her, but at the saloon across the street. Next came an elderly female clutching the hand of a small wiggly boy, who was assisted in her descent by the driver. Last of all emerged a young man, perhaps only a year or two older than the other two, but as different from them as night and day.
Even standing in profile to her, the man had a certain grandeur to him, she thought, remembering a time her father had used the term when writing about a long-ago time when he’d met a prominent thespian on tour from New York.
The man standing by the stagecoach stretched his arms now as if his muscles had been cramped by the long journey, raising a black bowler he’d been clutching in one hand to the sky, as if announcing his arrival. He was of middle height, but carried himself as if he were the tallest man in Texas.
He wore a sack coat of pearl-gray with matching trousers and a vest of black and silver brocade. As Faith watched, he clapped the bowler on his head, covering a head full of thick wheat-colored hair, then smoothed both sides of a luxuriant moustache absently with a thumb and forefinger.
“You boys remember we’re takin’ off in an hour,” the stagecoach driver called to the pair of gents who were making their way across the dusty street to the saloon. “We gotta make tracks if we’re gonna keep to th’ schedule, and I ain’t comin’ along to pull yore heads out of a whiskey bottle iffen ya don’t show up once the team is watered an’ the other folks’ve et their grub.” The pair ignored him, so he turned to the man Faith had been studying and said, “I’ll fetch yore trunk down now, sir, because you’re the only one not goin’ on to th’ next stop.”
“Obliged to you, sir,” the man said in a voice as thick with a Deep South drawl as molasses trickling from an overturned pitcher. He turned so his back was to Faith, peering down the street with eyes shaded by his gloved hand. Then, apparently not spotting what he was looking for, he turned back to the stagecoach driver, who had climbed up to reach under the leather flap covering the passengers’ luggage. “By any chance, would you know where the newspaper office is, Driver?”
The combination of the thick southern drawl and his question told Faith who he was. When the driver called him by name in his next breath, it only confirmed her sickening realization.
“On th’ other side of the hotel, Mr. Merriwell,” Turner said, pointing a thumb behind him in Faith’s direction. “I’ll leave your trunk here on the boardwalk. No one’ll bother it.”
As Yancey Merriwell stepped around the coach to see where the driver was pointing, his eyes lit on Faith. And widened appreciatively.
“Good day, Miss,” he said, sweeping his bowler off and bowing.
“I can take you there, Mr. Merriwell. As it happens, I’m the daughter of the editor. We...we weren’t expecting your arrival so soon,” she stammered, hoping her face didn’t reflect her dismay. “My father just got your letter the other day.”
“You must be Miss Bennett, then,” he said, straightening. “I’m honored to meet you. I’m afraid I’ve acted a little impulsively,” he confessed, with a smile that was both sheepish and sure of its effect. “As soon as I sent off the letter, I set off by train for Texas, and when I could come no nearer to Simpson Creek by that mode of transportation, I boarded the stagecoach, so eager was I to assume my new position. I hope I didn’t act rashly. He hasn’t given the position to someone else, has he?”
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “Because you’re here, allow me to introduce you to my father.” She gestured for him to cross the narrow alley between the hotel and the newspaper office, and saw that he moved with an elegant grace. “I’m sure he’ll be pleased you’ve seized the initiative and come on ahead.” As pleased as I am disappointed that I won’t have a chance to prove myself before your arrival. She tried to tell herself the man had exhibited an amazing amount of gall by not waiting for her father’s letter of invitation, but it was impossible to do so under the force of the man’s golden charm. Her father would be pleased, she thought. I was only fooling myself to think I ever really had a chance, anyway.
Just as she had suspected, her father was pleased. Exuberant was more the word Faith would use to describe the excitement lighting her father’s face after she’d identified Merriwell. He was so transported by Yancey Merriwell’s arrival that he didn’t even hear Faith announcing she was leaving to resume her newspaper delivering. She thought her departure would go unnoticed, but just as she reached the door, Merriwell looked up.
“I’m certain I’ll see you later, Miss Bennett,” he said in his courtly drawl. “Thank you so much for escorting me here and making the introduction. It was most kind of you.”
I’m sure you would have found your way to the right building, because you were in spitting distance of it, she thought waspishly, but aloud she only said, “It was my pleasure to assist you, Mr. Merriwell.”
She’d better stop at the house and alert her mother they would have another place to set at the supper table tonight. As soon as she finished her rounds, she’d need to help her prepare Eddie’s—no, she should probably call it the guest room now, she supposed. She wondered if this would be her last time to deliver the newspapers. Would Merriwell take even that little pleasure from her?
* * *
The next morning Gil had just finished paying a call on Mrs. Henderson to check on the widow’s well-being when he spotted a man and woman making their way down the boardwalk toward him. It was Faith, but who was the man walking alongside her? He wasn’t touching her in any way, but she seemed to know him, for she was talking to him and pointing to the establishments as they passed them. The stranger was quite the dandy, Gil thought, studying the other man’s stylish garments. Not a Texan, he thought, but someone from the east and he possessed attractive features to go with his clothes.
What was it about the way the man smiled down at her that raised Gil’s hackles?
Faith caught sight of him and smiled, urging the other man forward.
“Good morning, Reverend Gil,” she called. “I’d like to introduce you to someone.”
“Good morning, Miss Faith. You’re looking very pretty today.” She was, in fact—was there a color that did not look well on Faith Bennett? By complimenting her in front of this man, had he been unconsciously trying to stake a claim of sorts on her?
“Thank you, Reverend,” she said formally, and Gil found himself wishing she would call him by his Christian name as she did at other times. “May I present Mr. Yancey Merriwell? Mr. Merriwell, this is Reverend Gil Chadwick, the younger of our church’s two preachers.”
“My very great pleasure, sir,” the other man said, bowing and shaking Gil’s hand with restrained enthusiasm. “My” came out “mah” and Merriwell’s r’s were all slurred, but without a Texan’s twang.
The Preacher's Bride (Brides of Simpson Creek) Page 12