“But…my sins!” cried the man.
“He took your sins on Himself. He’s paid the penalty for them. Do you believe, brother? Will you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior?”
“I do! I will,” said the hoarse, waning voice solemnly, his eyes fixed eagerly on the face of the young clergyman.
“Then He accepts you for His own. His Word says so: ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Just rest down on that like a pillow, brother, and you’ll find it mighty sweet. Shall we pray?”
The sick man nodded, and the younger man bent his head and prayed, bringing the dying soul close to the throne of God and committing him to the care of his Savior. It was such a prayer as any soul might be glad to have uttered beside his dying bed. The other passengers in the car listened reverently, more than one wiping a furtive tear.
Gregory Sterling had stood at one side with his head bowed. He had taken in every word of the message, and his heart was more stirred than it had ever been before. His mother had been a Christian and had read him many Bible stories and taught him to pray, but since her death, he had scarcely thought of God except bitterly, that He should have taken away his mother and home and left him to battle alone in the world. Now, however, God was suddenly put in a new light. It had never seemed before that God cared anything about human beings unless it might be to torment them. He studied the earnest face of the young preacher, watched the light of faith playing over his expressive features, took note of the strength in his face, the sweetness of expression that yet was not weakness, and drank in every word. At the prayer, he bowed his own head and thought to himself wistfully, “I would like to know God as well as that. If God is a God like that, He would be worth knowing and trusting.”
When the prayer was finished, the sick man drew a deep sigh, and with a voice that was suddenly quite clear and strong so that all who were near him could hear even above the sound of the moving train, said, “Thank you, sir! Now I can die trusting in your Savior!”
“And yours,” added the young minister.
A light broke over the dying face.
“And mine!”
Then the voice died down to a whisper.
“I’d like…to do something…for you. But I guess…there…isn’t time. I’ll ask Him”—the voice flickered lower—”when I get”—the voice refused to finish, and the man lifted a weak hand with an upward motion—”up…there!” The lips formed the words, and the dying eyes looked up. Then suddenly another attack came, and in a breath the man was gone.
Kind hands carried the dead man into the little drawing room where but a short hour before he had sat in apparent health. They laid him on the bed that the porter had quickly prepared. The doctor had asked the patient his name and address while Greg was gone for the minister. Telegrams were sent to his relatives and the undertaker at the next station. Presently the car settled back into its normal life again, demanding berths to be made up, while some sought to change their reservations to another car, and the world whirled on without the pompous gentleman who had been one of their number a little while ago. Yet it could not be that they would ever forget that death scene and the words that had been spoken there. It somehow put a new dignity into life, a new hope into death.
But the minister had touched Greg on the shoulder.
“Friend,” he said with a warm smile in his eyes, “suppose you and I sit in there with him till somebody comes to take charge. Wouldn’t it be rather decent, don’t you think? If he were our father, we’d be pleased to have someone do that, wouldn’t we?”
Greg assented, and they went in and sat down on the long couch opposite the sheeted figure, but somehow Greg had a feeling that it was not Death but God who was presiding over that little room.
They talked together, and Greg began to see that here was a rare man that had come to him. Whether he ever saw this man again after they reached their destination or not, he would always feel that here was someone to whose soul his soul was knit. When their vigil was ended a couple of hours later at a stop along the way and an undertaker took charge for the family of the dead man, the handclasp of both promised a real friendship between the two.
“Come back to my car in the morning and have breakfast with me,” the minister said, smiling.
Greg had looked down at himself and then at his new friend and became suddenly conscious of his attire.
“I’m not fit to go in a private car,” he said decidedly. “I’ve been in the wilderness for ten years, and I’m out of date.”
“What difference doest that make, friend? I’m the only passenger aboard that car, and it isn’t my car either. It’s just loaned to me. An old classmate of mine in college owns it. He’s out in California, about to sail for the Orient, and his car was being sent home. When he found I was coming this way, he offered it to me. That’s the story. Come and share my temporary luxury. He said I might bring as many of my friends as I chose.”
So Greg promised to come and went back to his section to bed. But tired as he was, he had to lie awake and think over the happenings of the evening, living over the deathbed scene, seeing again the flash of assurance in the eyes of his new friend as he pointed out those clear directions for salvation.
In the morning, Greg discovered a barber on the train and came forth from his hands much improved. He was beginning to get wise to the ways of the civilized world once more and very self-conscious about his own discrepancies.
However, he wore his faded khaki with an ease acquired from long habit of not having to think about public opinion, and when he came forth from the hands of a high-class barber, more than one passenger looked after him with an approving eye. He certainly was a good-looking young giant, and he did not seem to be in the least aware of it, which made him all the more attractive.
He spent the most of the next two days in the private car or sitting on its observation platform in pleasant converse with his new friend. They talked of many things. Of the West and the South and the East. Of world affairs in Europe and over here, of the significance of situations political, commercial, and spiritual, and through it all a book figured impressively. Not the tiny testament that Rhoderick Steele had used when he pointed the dying man to Jesus Christ, but one slightly larger, worn and limp and full of finely written notes on the margins. The Bible! Gregory Sterling was amazed to find how interesting the Bible became under the magic reading of this newfound friend.
Greg had not been without literature in his exile. His school days and his early home life had filled him with a love of reading. Little by little, he had acquired a small library. A volume or two that he loved when he was a child, Robinson Crusoe, Lorna Doone, and John Halifax, Gentleman He had bought them through a mail-order catalogue. Then he had added a little history and biography and some essays and poetry. Longfellow and Tennyson and a volume of Browning, because the advertisement had quoted two lines of a poem he liked about a star, one of his own stars. A few scattering volumes of Scott and Dickens, Macaulay’s Essays, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast Table It wasn’t a bad collection, but of course not up to date. Modern literature had not yet arrived when Greg, fresh from high school, had taken his far journey. So he had gathered what attracted him from advertisements and from his memory of familiar titles. Not much, but they gave him a background and a bond of intellectual sympathy with Rhoderick Steele who had read every one of his books and loved them. They made him feel at home at once.
For Greg had read his small collection over and over many times in his long, lonely life, rainy days and winter evenings, and knew his books almost by heart. He had left them in the cabin on their rough board shelf. “For some poor devil who doesn’t know what to do with himself sometimes!” he had told himself, reflecting that he was now able to replace them all and add new treasures to his store.
But now as they grew more intimate, Rhoderick Steele began to open up the
treasures of the Bible to him, and Greg listened with amazement as prophecy was brought forth and its fulfillment pointed out both in the past and in present-day happenings.
Greg wasn’t up on current events. He took a newspaper once a week, but the news was stale when it reached him and seemed unreal to him out there on the hillside. But now he began to hear what was happening out in the world to which he was speeding, and he felt like a child listening to a fairy tale.
Once when they sat on the observation platform together speeding away from a gorgeous sunset with deepening shadows on either side of the way, and majestic scenery melting into the obscurity of twilight, Rhoderick Steele began to talk of his childhood home in an old Virginia farmhouse amid cotton plantations and lovely hazy blue mountains. He told of his father, a man of God, and the firm foundation of the Gospel that had been laid in his young life; of the family worship where he and his brothers and sisters knelt and heard themselves prayed for daily. He spoke of his own early turning to God, of his struggle to earn enough for the education he must have if he went into the ministry, and of the wonderful way he had been led through his youthful years.
Then shyly, hesitatingly, Greg was led to tell of himself. Of his own lonely thoughts and feelings. Of the fierce fight to get a foothold, and how he had just sold his holdings for a price far beyond his wildest dreams.
They held sweet counsel that last evening of their journey together and lingered talking far into the night. The private car was to be switched to a southern train in the morning, and they were both to part.
When at last they said good night, Steele gave him a Bible like his own.
“When I bought it, I thought I might find someone who would enjoy it. Now I’m so glad to have something I love to give you. I’ve written a bit of a note on the flyleaf. Read it when we’re gone on our way. And don’t forget you’re to let me know when you get located. I want to keep in touch with you, and when I get a home of my own, as I’m hoping to soon, I want you to come and visit me. It won’t be grand like this car”—he looked around on his borrowed splendor with his pleasant smile—”but it’ll be home, and you’ll be greatly welcome.”
Greg left him finally, his heart warmed and comforted. Here was one who would be a friend always. It was great to know there was such a man in the world. He went to sleep planning that when he got a place of his own he would have this man often to see him. Maybe he could give some money to help along whatever he was interested in. He remembered the light in his eyes. He laid his hands on the yielding roughness of the beautiful little Bible that lay by his side. He resolved to look into it, to study it, and if possible to find the mysterious secret it seemed to have imparted to this prince of a man who was his friend.
That had been only a few short days ago that he had parted from this man whom he had come so to admire and love, yet he seemed almost like a dream now. He had kept his word and sent him his address that first night he had located at Whittall House after he came back from the hospital, but of course he had heard nothing from him yet.
Greg got up and paced back and forth through his hotel room and began to go over the whole experience in his mind again. How he wished that Rhoderick Steele would drop in for a few minutes this very evening. He would like to put his problems before him. A man like that would have insight and could help.
He thought of the Bible. He hadn’t read in it much yet. Perhaps it, too, would help to solve problems, only he felt so very inexperienced and helpless when he read, even with the help of the enlightening footnotes in the margin to which his new friend had introduced him. When things settled down he must study that Bible and get to know it better. His friend had told him it would be a lamp unto his feet and a light unto his path.
By and by when he got this little girl started in some position where she was safe perhaps he would run down to Virginia and see his friend, or get him up here for a few days. He would talk over what a man should do in these days to help get the world straightened out again. This man would know, he was sure he would know.
He went to bed eventually but he did not sleep much. He was trying to see just how he was going to keep his promise to Margaret McLaren. Some kind of a position must be forthcoming by Monday morning and he had to thrash it out before he went to see her on the morrow.
Chapter 5
Meanwhile, in an altogether up-to-date apartment not many blocks away from the Whittall House where Greg tossed the night through and worked out his problems, a girl whose name had once been Alice Blair wakened late that Sunday morning and lay luxuriously reading the society column in the morning paper while she toyed with grapefruit and ate delicate bits of Melba toast and drank strong coffee.
Idly she ran her eye down the columns—the debutantes of the coming season, the luncheons and teas, the theater dinners, the dances of the younger set—eagerly lapping up all the news of the cream of that ultra higher social set to which she had never as yet obtained an entrance.
There was news of the great hospital drive to which the smart set of the city was lending its gilded influence. Alice cared nothing of that except that there were occasional openings in such activities where an outsider might slip in and render a service that would be recognized and give entrée later to more sacred circles. Then suddenly, as her practiced eye ran down the column, a name stood out that made her catch her breath and read more carefully.
It was just the last paragraph of the column about the drive and the opening luncheon at which all the great were to appear. It said:
The committee is announcing a gift just received, the endowment of a perpetual free room for strangers who need special quiet and rest and should not be placed in the ward. The endowment is in memory of Mrs. Mary Montgomery Sterling and given by her son, Mr. Gregory Sterling, who has recently returned to his native city and expects to make his home in this vicinity
Alice Blair read the paragraph over several times with narrowing vision, considering just what this might mean. If Greg had returned and was doing things in this high-handed way in memory of his mother, he must have prospered. He must have made some money!
Alice half closed her eyes and looked off into space through their yellow fringes, at least as much space as there was between her rose taffeta–shrouded couch with its billows of pillows, mounted on its silver dais, and the odd construction she called a dressing table flanked by great pointed slabs of mirrors set in the wall.
Alice considered her former friend. He had been big and fairly nice looking, only far too much devoted to his prudish mother. But that mother was gone now. She wouldn’t be a drawback any longer.
So Greg had returned!
But he hadn’t come to hunt her up, though almost any of his old friends could have given him her history. Alice smiled shrewdly. Well, he might be worth looking up. She had no doubt but she could call him to her side again if she found it worthwhile. And one couldn’t have too many admirers.
So Alice arose, put on her war paint, got out her feathers, and took to the warpath.
She drove a high-powered cream-colored roadster and wore a stunning crimson dress. She drove about the city in various haunts new and old; she made descent upon various hotels and inquired sweetly if there was a Mrs. Hemingway-Smith staying there. Not that she knew a Mrs. Hemingway-Smith, but that made no difference to Alice. She had made up the name on her way in.
The clerk, of course, would shake his head and hand over the registry book, saying, “Those are our arrivals today.” And Alice would run through the list for several days back, and finding no name that interested her, she would sigh and say that she must have been mistaken about the date and hurry out to her cream-colored car and pass on to another. At the next hotel, she would have a different friend to inquire for, and always manage to run through several days’ records in the registry.
Alice was not easily balked. She had a gift of continuance. But it was not until midafternoon of Monday that she found the name Gregory Sterling, in the same old familiar scrawl sh
e knew so well, registered at the Whittall House. She had a bunch of letters tied with blue ribbon in her desk, done in that same scrawl, a little more unformed perhaps, but still the same characteristic turn to the letters.
It gave her quite a thrill to see his name once more.
A whimsical smile played around her thin red lips. He might be very well worth looking up. She had been told that he had taken it hard when she ran away to marry Murky Powers.
Well, she would go cautiously. She didn’t want to get entangled with him again if he was an undesirable, but—well, there would be ways of finding out.
Greg slept late on Sunday morning, and then, without waiting for breakfast, because it was almost eleven o’clock, he went down the broad avenue and presently found the street where was located the old brick church that his mother used to attend. It somehow seemed to him that the old church, and the old back pew under the balcony, where they used to sit so long ago, was the hometown. He wanted to do the thing that would have pleased his mother, and this he knew was what she would have wanted.
But he scarcely saw a familiar face as he sat there under his balcony and cast a keen glance around. He found himself looking among the boys and girls for his friends, and then remembered that ten years had passed since he was a boy. They would be older. But he could not identify any of his former companions.
There were one or two elders, grown more feeble. There up near the front was the old grouch who wouldn’t lend him the twenty dollars to start his newsstand. There he was with the same old projecting underjaw, the same old beetling brows, grown a trifle whiter perhaps, the same old look as if he never smiled. A rich old miser in a seedy coat. Greg wondered what he would say if he could know what his present bank account amounted to.
There was a little woman who always used to smile and speak to his mother after church. She was wearing spectacles now and looked frail and thin. The church somehow made him sad, but he sat there dutifully for his mother’s sake and bowed his head when they prayed.
THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE Page 5