The Redemption of David Corson Part 8

Just at that critical moment there occurred one of those trifling incidents which so often produce results ridiculously disproportionate to their apparent importance. Through the open door to which his back was turned, a little snake had made its way into the room, and having writhed silently across the floor, coiled itself upon the hearth-stone, faced the speaker, looked solemnly at him with its beady eyes, and occasionally thrust out its forked tongue as if in relish of his words.

That fixed and inscrutable gaze completed the confusion of the orator.

He suddenly ceased to speak, and stood staring at the serpent. His face became impa.s.sive and expressionless; the pupils of his eyes dilated; his lips remained apart; the last word seemed frozen on his tongue. Not a shade of thought could be traced on his countenance and yet he must have been thinking, for he suddenly collapsed, sank down on a rude bench and rested his head on his hands as if he had come to some disagreeable, and perhaps terrible conclusion. And so indeed he had. The uneasy suspicions which had been floating in his mind in a state of solution were suddenly crystallized by this untoward event. The absurdity of a man's having tramped twenty miles through an almost unbroken wilderness to preach the gospel to a garter snake, burst upon him with a crus.h.i.+ng force. This grotesque denouement of an undertaking planned and executed in the loftiest frame of religious enthusiasm, shook the very foundation of his faith.

"It is absurd, it is impossible, that an infinite Spirit of love and wisdom could have planned this repulsive adventure! I have been misled!

I am the victim of a delusion!" he said to himself, in shame and bitterness.

To him, Christianity had been not so much a system of doctrines based upon historical proofs, as emotions springing from his own heart. He believed in another world not because its existence had been testified to by others, but because he daily and hourly entered its sacred precincts. He had faith in G.o.d, not because He had spoken to apostles and prophets, but because He had spoken to David Corson. Having received direct communication from the Divine Spirit, how could he doubt? What other proof could he need?

Suddenly, without warning and without preparation, the foundation upon which he had erected the superstructure of his faith crumbled and fell.

He had been deceived! The communications were false! They had originated in his own soul, and were not really the voice of G.o.d.

Through this suspicion, as through a suddenly-opened door, the powers of h.e.l.l rushed into his soul and it became the theater of a desperate battle between the good and evil elements of life. Doubt grappled with faith; self-gratification with self-restraint; despair with hope; l.u.s.t with purity; body with soul.

He heard again the mocking laughter of the quack, and the stinging words of his cynical philosophy once more rang in his ears. What this coa.r.s.e wretch had said was true, then! Religion was a delusion, and he had been spending the best portion of his life in hugging it to his bosom. Much of his youth had already pa.s.sed and he had not as yet tasted the only substantial joys of existence,--money, pleasure, ambition, love! He felt that he had been deceived and defrauded.

A contempt for his old life and its surroundings crept upon him. He began to despise the simple country people among whom he had grown up, and those provincial ideas which they cherished in the little, unknown nook of the world where they stagnated.

During a long time he permitted himself to be borne upon the current of these thoughts without trying to stem it, till it seemed as if he would be swept completely from his moorings. But his trust had been firmly anch.o.r.ed, and did not easily let go its hold. The convictions of a lifetime began to rea.s.sert themselves. They rose and struggled heroically for the possession of his spirit.

Had the battle been with the simple abstraction of philosophic doubt, the good might have prevailed, but there obtruded itself into the field the concrete form of the gypsy. The glance of her l.u.s.trous eye, the gleam of her milk-white teeth, the heaving of her agitated bosom, the inscrutable but suggestive expression of her flushed and eager face, these were foes against which he struggled in vain. A feverish desire, whose true significance he did not altogether understand, tugged at his heart, and he felt himself drawn by unseen hands toward this mysterious and beautiful being. She seemed to him at that awful moment, when his whole world of thought and feeling was slipping from under his feet, the one only abiding reality. She at least was not an impalpable vision, but solid, substantial, palpitating flesh and blood. Like continuously advancing waves which sooner or later must undermine a d.y.k.e, the pa.s.sions and suspicions of his newly awakened nature were sapping the foundations of his belief.

At intervals he gained a little courage to withstand them, and at such moments tried to pray; but the effort was futile, for neither would the accustomed syllables of pet.i.tion spring to his lips, nor the feelings of faith and devotion arise within his heart. He strove to convince himself that this experience was a trial of his faith, and that if he stood out a little longer, his doubt would pa.s.s away. He lifted his head and glanced at the serpent still coiled upon the hearth. Its eyes were fixed upon him in a gorgon-like stare, and his doubts became positive certainties, as disgust became loathing. The battle had ended. The mystic had been defeated. This sudden collapse had come because the foundations of his faith had been honeycombed. The innocent serpent had been, not the cause, but the occasion.

Influences had been at work, of which the Quaker had remained unconscious. He had been observing, without reflecting upon, many facts in the lives of other men, experiences in his own heart, and apparent inconsistencies in the Bible. There was also a virus whose existence he did not suspect running in his very blood! And now on top of the rest came the bold skepticism of the quack, and the bewildering beauty of the gypsy.

Yes, the preliminary work had been done! We never know how rotten the tree is until it falls, nor how unstable the wall until it crumbles. And so in the moral natures of men, subtle forces eat their way silently and imperceptibly to the very center.

A summer breeze overthrows the tree, the foot of a child sets the wall tottering; a whisper, a smile, even the sight of a serpent, is the jar that upsets the equilibrium of a soul.

The Quaker rose from his seat in a fever of excitement. He seized the Bible lying open on the table, hurled it frantically at the snake and flung himself out of the open door into the suns.h.i.+ne. A wild consciousness of liberty surged over him.

"I am free," he exclaimed aloud. "I have emanc.i.p.ated myself from superst.i.tion. I am going forth into the world to a.s.sert myself, to gratify my natural appet.i.tes, to satisfy my normal desires. It was for this that life was given. I have too long believed that duty consisted in conquering nature. I now see that it lies in a.s.serting it. I have too long denied myself. I will hereafter be myself. That man was right--there is no law above the human will."

CHAPTER VII.

THE CHANCE WORD

"A man reforms his habits altogether or not at all."

--Bacon.

David was not mistaken in his vague impression that he had heard a sob and footsteps outside the cabin door.

The little band of lumbermen abandoning their camp in the early light of the morning for another clearing still farther in the wilderness, had already covered several miles of their journey when their leader suddenly discovered that he had forgotten his axe, and with a wild volley of oaths turned back to get it.

Even in that region, where new types of men sprang up like new varieties of plants after a fire has swept over a clearing, there was not to be found a more unique and striking personality than Andy McFarlane. In physique he was of gigantic proportions, his hair and beard as red as fire, his voice loud and deep, his eyes blue and piercing. Clad in the gay-colored woolen s.h.i.+rt, the rough fur cap, and the high-topped boots of a lumberman, his appearance was bold and picturesque to the last degree.

Nor were his mental powers inferior to his physical. Although unable to read or write, he could both reason and command. His keen perceptions, his ready wit, his forcible logic and his invincible will had made him a leader among men and the idol of the rude people among whom he pa.s.sed his days.

Repelled and disgusted with those manifestations of the religious life with which alone he was familiar, he was still an unconscious wors.h.i.+per.

The woods, the hills, the rivers and the stars awoke within him a response to the beautiful, the sublime and awe-inspiring in the natural universe.

But because of ignorance, the mysteries of existence which ought to have made him devout had only rendered him superst.i.tious, though, all unknown to himself, his bosom was full of inflammable materials of a deeply religious life. A spark fell upon them that Sunday morning and kindled them into a conflagration. Nothing else can so enrage a nature like his as having to retrace its steps. He could have walked a hundred miles straight forward without a feeling of fatigue or a sense of hards.h.i.+p; but every backward step of his journey had put him more out of temper.

He reached the clearing in a towering pa.s.sion and was bewildered at hearing in what he supposed to be a deserted room, the sound of a human voice in whose tones there was a peculiar quality which aroused his interest and perhaps excited his superst.i.tion. He crept toward the rude cabin on his tiptoes, paused and listened. What he heard was the voice of the young mystic, pouring out his heart in prayer.

For the first time in his life McFarlane gave serious attention to a pet.i.tion addressed to the Supreme Being. Other prayers had disgusted him because of their vulgar familiarity with the Deity, or repelled him by their hypocrisy; but there was something so sincere and simple in the childlike words which issued from the cabin as to quicken his soul and turn his thoughts upon the mysteries of existence. He had received the gift of life as do the eagles and the lions--without surprise. Had any one asked him: "Andy McFarlane, what is life?" he would have answered: "Life? Why it is just life."

But suddenly a voice, heard in the quiet of a wilderness, a voice full of tenderness and pathos, issuing from unknown and invisible lips and ascending into the vast and illimitable s.p.a.ces of air, threw wide open the gates of mystery. His heart was instantly emptied of its pa.s.sions; his soul grew calm and his whole nature became as impressionable as wax.

When at length the prayer had ended and the sermon began, every power of his mind was strained to its utmost capacity, and he listened as if for life. The buried germs of desires and aspirations of which he had never dreamed were quickened into life with the rapidity of the outburst of vegetation in a polar summer. Words and phrases which had hitherto seemed to him the utterances of fools or madmen, became instinct with a marvelous beauty and a wondrous meaning. They flashed like b.a.l.l.s of fire. They pierced like swords. They aroused like trumpets. Such was the susceptibility of this great soul, and such was the power of that simple eloquence.

Andy McFarlane, the child of poverty, the rude lumberman, the hardy frontiersman, was by nature a poet and a seer, and this was his new birth into his true inheritance. Those eyes which had never wept, swam in tears. Those knees which had never trembled before the visible, shook in the presence of the unseen.

The emotions have their limitations as well as the thoughts, and McFarlane had endured all that he was capable of sustaining. With a profound sob, in which he uttered the feelings he could not speak, he turned and fled. It was this sob and these footsteps which David heard.

Plunging into the depths of the forest as a wounded animal would have done, he cast himself upon the bosom of the earth at the foot of a great tree, to find solitude and consolation.

There are wounds in the soul too deep to be healed by the balm which exudes from the visible elements of Nature. There are longings and aspirations which the palpable and audible cannot satisfy. Not what he sees and touches, but what he hopes and trusts, can save man in these dark moments from the final despair and terror of existence.

Upon such an hour as this the lumberman had fallen. G.o.d had thrust Himself upon his attention. Instead of being compelled to seek a religious experience, he found it impossible to escape it.

The religious experiences of men in any such epoch possess a certain general similarity. Sometimes thought, sometimes action and sometimes emotion furnish the all-pervasive element. Whatever this peculiar characteristic may be, its manifestations are always most vivid and violent in ignorant periods, and along the uncultivated frontiers of advancing civilization. In those rude days and regions, the victims (if one might say so) of religion experienced nervous excitations and emotional transports which not infrequently terminated in convulsions.

Days and nights, weeks and even months, were often spent by them in struggles which were always painful and often terrible.

Andy McFarlane had often enough witnessed and despised these experiences; but through those almost inexorable laws of a.s.sociation and imitation, they were more than likely to reproduce themselves in him.

And so indeed they did. Under the influence of these new thoughts that had seized him with such power, he writhed in agony on the ground. A profound "conviction of sin" took possession of his soul and he felt himself to be hopelessly and forever lost. That h.e.l.l at which he had so often scoffed suddenly opened its jaws beneath his feet, and although he shuddered at the thought of being engulfed in its horrors, he felt that such a doom would be the just desert of a life like his.

Hours pa.s.sed in which his calmest thoughts were those of complete bewilderment and helplessness, and in which he seemed to himself to be floating upon a wide and sh.o.r.eless sea, or wandering in a pathless wilderness or winging his way like a lost bird through the trackless heavens. However large an element of unreality and absurdity there may have been in such experiences, it is certain that changes of the most startling and permanent character were often wrought in the natures of those who pa.s.sed through them, and when McFarlane at last emerged from this spiritual excitement he was a strangely altered man. He seemed to find himself in another and more beautiful world. Looking around him with a childlike wonder, he rose and made his way back to the cabin. He listened at the door, but heard no sound. He entered, found the room empty, and gave himself up to rude and unscientific speculation as to the nature of this mysterious adventure. Nothing helped to solve the problem, until at last he discovered the Bible, which the Quaker had hurled at the snake, lying upon the hearthstone. It did not explain everything, but it served to connect the inexplicable with the real and human, and he carried the book with him when he returned to his companions with his recovered axe.

That Bible became a "lamp to his feet and a light to his path." By patient labor he learned to read it, and soon grew to be so familiar with its contents, that he was able not only to communicate its matter to others, in the new and beautiful life which he began to live, but to give it new power for those men in the plain and homely language of which he had always been a master.

The lion had become a lamb, the eagle a dove. He moved among his men, the incarnation of gentleness and truth. Under his powerful influence the camp pa.s.sed through a marvelous transformation. From this limited sphere of influence, his fame began to extend into a larger region. He was sent for from far and near to tell the story of his strange conversion, and in time abandoned all other labor and gave himself entirely to the preaching of the Gospel.

It was as if the spirit of love and faith which had departed from the Quaker had entered into the lumberman.

CHAPTER VIII.

A BROKEN REED

"Superst.i.tion is a senseless fear of G.o.d."

--Cicero.