The First Soprano Part 22

If Hubert and I are really His children, called into His fellows.h.i.+p, then we must be sympathetic with His wish and do what we can to forward it. What would that be?"

Soon they reached the door of their home. Home! What a pleasant word it is. How easily the accustomed key turned in the latch, and how familiarly the house belongings greeted them as they entered. Ay, "there's no place like home," and its cords wind themselves about us silently, certainly, until it seems almost a sacrilege to think of leaving it.

Hubert went at once to his room, to the spot where questions were wont to be settled, and when dinner was announced he begged to be excused.

Winifred and her father sat alone at the table. He inquired concerning the missionary meeting, and she rehea.r.s.ed to him much of what Mr. Carew had said.

"Ah, very good--very good," Mr. Gray said. "Very conclusive, I should think."

But it did not occur to him how a conclusive argument and a life action might stand related. Theories cost nothing when only the mind a.s.sents to them. But wrought in the heart, they mold lives after them.

In Hubert's room a painful heart process was going on. Sunk in a deep, capacious chair, with head resting upon his hand, he set in order before himself the axiomatic truths he had heard.

"G.o.d's supreme work is salvation," he meditated. "The field for this work is the world--the whole world. Salvation is wrought--as to man's part--through faith in a message preached. The message requires a messenger. In vast proportions of the field the messengers are wanting. What should be done about it? Clearly, the messengers should rally at the command of G.o.d. But it must be at His command. Men cannot go self-sent."

This thought gave a brief respite to the haunting sense of a responsibility.

"_Whom shall I send and who will go for us_?" The double questions heard by Isaiah in the temple repeated itself now in Hubert's mind.

"There are two questions there," he said. "'Whom shall _I send_, and who will go for us?' A man can only answer, finally, the second. G.o.d must answer His own first query,--although Isaiah did suggest, 'send me.' Must not any loyal child _if he hear_ his Father's appeal say, 'Here am I'?"

Hubert's head sank lower upon his hand.

"Have I heard the voice of His need?" he asked, but hesitated to answer his own question. "Yes," he said finally, aloud, in a strained voice, "I have heard. I can never un-hear His words. I may disregard them, make myself forget them, but I can never go back to the place of twelve hours ago and be as though I had never known His mind. I have been in His temple--I, a wors.h.i.+per purged by His infinite grace, I have seen a vision of His will, and have heard the voice of His need. I can never undo the fact."

Lines that somebody had written repeated themselves in his mind:

"Light obeyed increaseth light; Light rejected bringeth night.

Who shall give me power to choose, If the love of light I lose?"

Why did he still hesitate? Why did his "here am I" linger for hours unsaid? A sense of the reality of present things and of home surroundings swept over him. These were the possible things. But those--? He shuddered. Dim, misty, in a veil of unreality lay China, a distant land. What relation had he with it? There were missionaries, a strange, separated, unusual folk, specially created for the purpose, no doubt; but _he_, a practical, everyday, intensely real sort of being--what had he to do with things so far away? Oh, no! It was not for him. Let him put aside the overwrought fancies of the day, and return to practical life again.

He almost rose from his seat as though to emphasize his sober thought, but an impression restrained him.

"And so I lose My witnesses!" he imagined his Lord saying with grief.

"They are walking by sight and not by faith, and the seen, tangible things hold them. Who will stretch out his hands to lay hold upon the things of eternal life?"

Hubert sank in rebuked silence under the spell of the afternoon's disclosure. It was reality, if he were a Christian. It must be faced.

But how the seen things wrestled with the heavenly vision! Habit, long a.s.sociation, and tender love mingled a cup of sacrifice that he must drink. Could he leave all these for the sake of the joyful message of his Lord?

Now imagination pictured the leavetaking. How the familiar scenes of his home and native city remonstrated with his choice! In fancy he wrung for the last time his father's hand, he bade one last farewell to the flower-dressed grave of his gentle mother, and--and _Winifred_!

A dry, tearless sob shook him. O sweet sister, loved most of all since the days when, her jealous-eyed protector, he walked beside her to the school, shared st.u.r.dily but keenly her childish woes and fought all battles for her! Loved now with a closer, spiritual tie in their mutual devotion to their blessed Lord! How could he give her up? How could he leave her undefended now by his watchful love?

The scene of three years ago when he handed the sword of his self-served and self-defended life to Jesus Christ, and purposed in His heart to follow Him at any cost, was vividly rehea.r.s.ed in his memory.

Possessions, home, kindred, all things, were nominated in the bond of the whole-hearted surrender to his Lord. The time had come to hold to those honest terms.

Hubert rose from his seat with a pale face, and a death-like sinking at his heart. "Yes, Lord Jesus," he uttered with dry lips, "I am at Thy command. Forgive my coward halting. If Thou wilt send me, I will go."

On the other side of the hall, in her pretty room, Winifred had prayed: "We have seen the glance of Thine eye, O Lord, and know Thy longing.

Open our eyes to see how we may serve Thee, and strengthen our hearts to bear--nay, to love!--Thy will. If we must give each other up"--a long pause, broken by storms of weeping, intervened--"then let us see--oh, _let us see Thy face_!"

When Winifred and Hubert first met in the hall next morning some gleams of comfort had already stolen into both their hearts. He put his arm about her as they descended the stairs together, and at the foot they paused.

"Dear little sister!" he said caressingly.

Her eyes filled at his unusual tenderness; for Hubert's love, however fervent and well believed-in, was not demonstrative. She looked up in his face with a long, serious question. He answered it by asking:

"Shall I go?--for Him, Winnie?"

"Yes, Hubert," she said earnestly, "oh, yes!" But the color flickered in her cheeks and her lips grew white.

They stood for a moment together but neither spoke. Together they presented afresh their offering to G.o.d, and He knew that it was costly.

At breakfast neither spoke of the matter that was uppermost in their hearts. But later Hubert sought his father in the library and made known to him the step he had taken.

Grief, dismay, and almost anger, struggled in the older man's heart.

He looked at his son with sorrowful sternness.

"Then--then, Hubert," he said very slowly, "you have concluded to leave me."

A pang shot through Hubert's heart, keener than any thought of his own pain, but he answered steadily:

"I have concluded, father, to follow Christ."

Mr. Gray frowned. He was not conscious of frowning at the name of Christ, or at so pure a sentiment as that uttered, but grief made him insensible to what he did.

"And is that," he asked with some irony, "the only way you can find of following Him? Can no one follow Him at home?"

"I do not see that he can if he is called abroad, father."

"And are you called?" he asked sharply, still the pain at his heart dulling any sense of shame that he could speak unsympathetically of such a thing.

Hubert answered gently.

"I believe I am, father," he said.

Mr. Gray stared at his son silently. His face grew ashen and the hand upon the table before him trembled visibly. Hubert stood in an agony of mute sympathy. At last the father rose without a word and prepared to leave the room. His face looked older by a decade than an hour before. Hubert made a movement to detain him and opened his lips to speak; but the other waved him aside with a quick gesture of the trembling hand. And so they parted.

Hubert looked after his father with a breaking heart. He had thought the crisis of his grief was pa.s.sed when alone in his room he wrestled out the problem for his own heart. But now a heavier weight rested upon his soul. Must he break his father's heart? Must the hope of happy comrades.h.i.+p in future years be put aside, and with the disappointment his father age and weaken irrecoverably? He saw him walk down the path slowly and heavily, and a feeling of awful guilt swept over him. Was he his father's murderer? Was he following a delusion that would make himself an exile and lay his father prematurely in his grave? The thought overpowered him. He sank helplessly in a chair and groaned out his burden to the Lord.

"O Lord," he prayed, "am I walking in Thy footsteps, or am I a deluded wretch, bringing sorrow, and it may be death, to those I love most?"

He paused, and his head sank deeply. "Lord, this is grief," he groaned. "This is grief. I have not known it before."

And so it seemed. Thoughts of his own loneliness and possible hards.h.i.+ps seemed light compared with this.

"Grief!" he repeated, as though he found relief in the pitiful uttering of the word whose depths he was sounding. Then memory framed a pa.s.sage which held the same word. "A man of sorrows," it repeated, "and _acquainted with grief_!"