Blue Ruin

by Grace Livingston Hill

  The sea had been smooth and the weather perfect. Scarcely anybody on board had been seasick. It seemed an ideal day for Sunday, at least down here alone with her Bible and the sea breeze blowing her hair from her forehead gently. Somehow she was more reconciled to what she was doing this morning. She did not feel so intently the wrench of parting nor dread so much the prospect of a long time away, perhaps without any definite word from Dana. A kind of peace was in her soul after the anxiety of the past few days. Perhaps it was because of the great thoughts which she had been reading in the book the stranger loaned her. She was reading it avidly and was growing more and more interested in that “miracle in stone,” the pyramid, and filled with the wonder of the God who had planned the universe and seemed to have written His plans in the secret places of this phenomenal building.

  Suddenly Dorothy burst into the room in great excitement.

  “Lynette! Who, who do you think is going to conduct religious service this morning? Guess! You never can in all the world.”

  Lynette smiled.

  “How could I, Dorrie? I know hardly a soul on board. There might be the greatest preacher in the world on board and I not know him. Who is it? Some great bishop?”

  “I don’t know how great he is, nor what name they call him, but I know I’m simply crazy about him. Lynn, it’s Plush Eyes, my beautiful Plush Eyes! Isn’t that wonderful? My! I shall die of excitement. Which dress would you wear, my red sport frock or the black satin? I want to look my very sweetest.”

  “Oh, not your sports dress on Sunday, Dorrie!” protested Lynette smiling. “Wear the black. It’s less conspicuous.”

  “But I want to be conspicuous! I want him to see me from the minute he steps into the room. I’ve set my heart on captivating him and I’m taking no chances. Don’t you simply adore his eyes, Lynnie? They go straight to my heart. Oh, I’ve always been sure I’d meet a man like that someday, and now he’s here!”

  “But Dorothy! You oughtn’t to talk like that even in fun! Suppose he should hear of it? Suppose he should be married?”

  “Then I’ll have him get a divorce!” said Dorothy tragically. “I shall give him up to nobody! Hurry, Lynnie, and get ready. I want to get a front seat. I wonder where my prayer book is. I’m sure Mamma stuck it in. She always does, and now the first time I’ve ever wanted it it’s just my luck not to find it.”

  “Oh, Dorothy!” sighed her cousin. “I wish you wouldn’t talk so crazily. It doesn’t sound like you. You try to make yourself seem horrid, and you aren’t really!”

  “But that’s the thing to do, darling! Everybody’s doing it. Come, aren’t you going to doll up any? Of course I know you don’t need to powder your nose because you have such a perfectly stunning complexion, but don’t you want to borrow one of my vanity cases just to have something to do between the hymns?”

  “Dorothy!”

  “Well, what’s the harm? I always do at the symphony concerts. I think it’s such a graceful little act; just get out your mirror and dab away at your face to see that it is all neat and nice. It shows you are well groomed and never let down on your job. I think it’s attractive myself!”

  “I don’t think men like it, dear,” said Lynette, going slowly toward the door. “Come on, I think I hear the bell striking.”

  “Don’t you really?” Dorothy paused as if she were actually considering the question. “Don’t you think Plush Eyes would enjoy seeing me powder my nose? Well, then I’ll leave my vanity case behind!”

  And reluctantly she flung it on the bed and followed Lynette out into the corridor.

  Lynette wondered. Who could tell how much earnestness hid beneath the frivolous act of this sweet young butterfly of the world?

  The room was filling up rapidly. Word had gone about that the great Alexander Douglas, the noted London preacher who was making such a stir in religious circles with his original message, was going to preach. Someone had requested that he be asked. The story was that he was traveling quietly, almost incognito, trying to finish a book and that he had hesitated long before he consented to speak this morning. But the plea had been so urgent that he had finally yielded.

  This was being whispered from one to another all around them, and Dorothy grew more and more excited over the idea.

  “Well, they can’t say I didn’t pick a real one,” she giggled to Lynette.

  But Lynette was busy watching the still figure up behind the desk as he sat quietly, his head resting on his lifted hand, his eyes closed as if the moment were a hallowed one, as if the duty he was about to perform was one of deep responsibility. Was this her friend of the moonlight and the stars? She had scarcely seen him since then, except the minute or two when he brought her the book.

  So he was a great man, a noted preacher! She might have recognized the scholar in those wonderful words that fell from his lips as he taught her about the stars!

  And then her heart sprang back to home, and Dana. Perhaps if he was very great Dana would count his word of some weight. Perhaps even Dana would think him great enough to listen to! Oh, if Dana could be here this morning!

  Well, but he hadn’t preached yet. He might not be so good a preacher as he was a teacher.

  Yet when she remembered the reverent voice, the almost hallowed look on his face as he repeated those Bible verses, she knew that he would have a wonderful message. She felt that he was praying now, praying for the words to speak. The message, then, would be from God. Would all those frivolous, card-playing, cigarette-smoking, wine-drinking people who were crowding the seats and chattering about his greatness be open-hearted enough to take the message? Would they receive it gladly? Would Dorothy? Dear, sweet, naughty Dorothy!

  She found herself praying now, for Dana, for Dorothy, for the dear home folks, and for the preacher that he might have a message for her tired, perplexed soul.

  And then the service opened.

  It seemed that even the music was fraught with deeper meaning than is usual on shipboard. People were very still during the prayer and more than respectful in the responses. And now the preacher rose to speak, and Dorothy murmured, “Oh, you darling Plush Eyes!” close to Lynette’s ear. How Lynette wished she wouldn’t!

  Then the reverent voice with the soft burr on the edge of the words began solemnly, and thrilled her anew as it had thrilled her when he stood beside her in the moonlight and said that wonderful sentence “Clothed in Light!” and gave her a vision of glory such as she had never had before.

  “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

  “Oh, what a horrid text!” whispered Dorothy. “If he’s going to talk about dying I’m going out. It always makes me furious to hear about dying!”

  The opening sentences of the sermon were lost in trying to get Dorothy to keep quiet, and when Lynette came in on it again he was saying, “The greatest truth about Christ is that ‘He was dead but is alive again.’”

  “That life through death has controlled the world ever since and has made the world realize that, in spite of most determined efforts to destroy it, here is something which is indestructible. Great world systems, cults, and even empires have exhausted all their resources to blot out the name and the continued vitality of Christ. But it is they which have perished. He still lives on victoriously.”

  Dorothy was watching the great preacher eagerly, studying the flash of those eyes that she admired, watching the well-chiseled lips as they brought out the clearly enunciated sentences, admiring the sweep of arm, the fine, broad shoulders, amused at the Scotch accent. The words he spoke meant little or nothing to her. But Lynette was drinking it all in.

  “We never receive the real life of Christ until we, too, have been to the cross,” was the next astonishing statement. Lynette sat up straighter and listened with all her might. Was that a message for her soul?

  “The real divine life—the life of Jesus Christ—” went on the steady, quiet voice that yet penetrated
to every corner of the room and rang distinct above the beat of waves and throbbing of the ship, and compelled the breathless attention of even those who were not near to listen. “This life is only known by what it does in men and women in making them live on a plane which infinitely transcends the human level. ‘I have been crucified with Christ, and yet I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.’ And again, ‘For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection!’ and again: ‘Like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.’”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing!” whispered Dorothy. “I like him best when he just smiles.”

  But the steady voice was going on, and Dorothy was compelled like all the rest to listen.

  “If we are going to manifest that life of Christ, and if that vital, indestructible something is going to bear its powerful testimony in the world, if that divine life—that very life of God himself—indestructible, victorious, is going to bear its mighty witness and make itself felt in the world in the member of His body, the church invisible, it is only through their oneness with Him in death and resurrection. Until we know this oneness our Christian life will count for little. We must take our place in one initial, all-inclusive reckoning with Him in death to the old self, and the old world with all its ambitions, desires, programs, ideas, and standards, and then allow that death to be wrought out in us daily in order that the resurrection life may be increasingly manifest in us. The life of God cannot come into the old creation; it is the new creation life.”

  “He is looking straight over here,” whispered Dorothy. “Do you think he recognizes who we are? He must have seen us together at the table.”

  “Hush, Dorothy, please!” pleaded Lynette, but she had lost the connection again. Oh, if she could but have come alone to hear this wonderful message. She had never heard anything like it before.

  When she was able to give attention he was talking about how this law of life through death affects every relationship in life. How in learning new spiritual truths, even the great oft-heard doctrine of Christ’s victory on the cross over sin, we have to get to the point where we give up utterly, in despair of ourselves, before the Holy Spirit can really teach and make a part of us the truth which before we had learned only with our minds. For then, in that hour of death, when we find ourselves at the end of our own power and we throw up our hands and say, “Lord, I can do nothing,” then we find that truth which we thought was learned long ago is the only thing which can grip us and bring us out into victory.

  He spoke of service, how it, too, comes under this law of life through death. How we must die even to our service for Christ sometimes before it can be effectually used by Him. How there comes a time in our service when from sheer force of circumstances, adversity, and fruitlessness we feel that we are at an end. That is our testing time. When that time comes, no self-life is left, but only Himself in us, free now to work. Then is the time when we discover just how much of our work was a matter of popularity. Whether we were out to make a name for ourselves; whether it mattered to us when people said nice things about our work, or when they said mean things and criticized.

  “From all this self-life, we have to be emancipated before God can use us,” went on the preacher earnestly. “We have to get to the place where it does not matter in the least what people say or do, so long as God is satisfied and we are in the way of His will. This is the way of peace and the way of victory. But we have to go down to the realm of death, the ‘I’ has been crucified that Christ in the power of His resurrection can be revealed.”

  Dorothy was yawning prettily now, and one arm was slung across the back of Lynette’s chair. Softly her hand stole up and captured a loose lock of Lynette’s hair that hung in a little curl, escaped from the pins, and turning its ends in her fingers, began using it like a tiny paintbrush, tickling Lynette’s ear, her nose, her cheek, even her eyes were playfully attacked. It was most annoying and she did so want to hear this. It was something that Dana ought to know. Sometime she would have to tell him. She was convinced of that. And she must gather every word and remember it. Afterward she would write it out to fix it in her mind. Dared she write it to Dana now? Oh, if Dana were only here now listening, beside her! Her heart went up in a hungry cry, “Lord, save Dana from himself!”

  “Please don’t!” she whispered to Dorothy. “I want to hear the sermon!” and at last Dorothy let her alone and turned her attention to another part of the room.

  The preacher was talking now about the liberty that is ours through surrender.

  “When the cross has done its work,” he said, “there is liberation from all human limitations, and Christ breaks forth from the grave in a way that gives Him mastery of the whole situation. Those who have been identified with Him in His death are raised by Him to a life on a supernatural level, and through them He achieves such things as were before utterly impossible.”

  At this point Dorothy whispered again.

  “I’m going out, Lynn. I’m dying for a smoke! I can’t stand it another minute! Let me get by you!” and Dorothy arose in her slim black satin, with a smile, and made her pretty way out of the audience, causing not a little stir and breaking through that silence that had come with the climax of the preacher’s words.

  When Lynette recovered from her vexation at Dorothy’s thoughtlessness and got back to the sermon once more the preacher had reached his last point: enlargement through loss. He referred to the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. “Here,” he said earnestly, “we see the redeeming servant of God going into desolation. The whole picture is one of desolation. He is alone, despised, rejected—terrible aloneness—His cross has cost Him everything. His own brethren do not believe in Him, His nearest disciples do not understand Him, and yet, how did that wonderful chapter close? ‘He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.’ From that point of the cross and its promise of ‘seed,’ we move on to the ultimate vindication: ‘Behold a Lamb as it had been slain, in the midst of the Throne’ and around Him great multitudes which no man could number out of every nation, and tribes and peoples and tongues. There is the gain! The countless multitude, the result of His travail.”

  There was a breathless moment when the audience seemed to see the multitude around the great white throne and to suddenly realize that the words they had often heard read from the Bible meant something tangible. It was almost as if an audible expression of this thought went through the room.

  Lynette’s heart almost stood still. Was this God’s message especially for her? It was in some ways just what her mother had said, and yet—it went further. It was one thing to have something wrenched from you and to bow to God’s will; it was a step further to hand that precious thing over and let Him do His will. Was she ready to do that with Dana? Just give him up to the Lord? Maybe he would find the way to God and know all this deeper message someday, but was she willing that, in order to work this for him, and perhaps for herself, too, she should hand over the thing she prized most in life?

  The preacher’s voice broke in upon her agonized thoughts, quiet, searching, as if he bore the message from the understanding God and had a right to search their hearts.

  “Very often it does seem as if God requires a lot of us: that this cross makes tremendous invasion, tremendous demands, and sometimes forces the demand to the point of pain when we have to hand over to Him something very dear. We seem all the time to be giving, giving. It seems that the law of sacrifice is tremendously at work. But this is the road and the law by which, and by which alone, the infinite and transcendent gain can come.

  “Are you prepared to let go in order to obtain? Let go the temporal for the eternal, the transient for the abiding, the earthly for the heavenly, the present glamour for the ultimate glory? This is the way to posses all things. Christ now has received of His Father’s hands eternal fullness, and by our union with Him throu
gh the cross even these lives may become transcendently rich and unspeakably full. Some of us have proved that the things that we were most loathe to let go—but which at length we gladly yielded up—have come back to us with a greater fullness or have been the way of enrichment transcending anything we knew before. The compensation is overwhelming as at the cross we lay our treasure in the dust, ‘the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brook,’ that the Almighty should be our treasure.

  “Let us pray.” The prayer that followed seemed to bring them before the very throne and lay bare their lives to the eyes of God, and many eyes were bright with tears as the little congregation rose for the closing hymn. For the service was not following the regular order of the ship. The London preacher was bending it to suit his will, and more than one heart was deeply touched, as in silence they went out to the deck and strove to assume an ordinary manner, glad that the sun was shining and the salt air tasting natural again and they were back to the things that did not condemn. For there in that room where all was usually gaiety, and where there would soon move a free and easy group of worldly people intent on pleasure pure and simple, they had been made to think of eternal things, and it almost seemed as if God had come and stood just behind their chairs, waiting, waiting for something. What was it? Surrender. That was what the preacher said. Oh, not surrender! Not now, anyway! By and by, perhaps, when life was gone and hope was low—but now—Oh, no! On with the dance!

  They spoke in lower tones at first as if they were not quite sure the presence was gone out and past them into the infinite again. But then they grew more cheerful and laughter began to creep refreshingly in, and women adjusted their beads, smoothed their Paris frocks, and life went on again in happy waves.

  The preacher walked silently away, his head down, as if in prayer. Few ventured to speak to him till he came out into the sunshine of the deck on this way to quietness. Then one young matron bolder than the rest advanced.