Part 10

Now, lest some refined Methodist of the present day should be a little too severe on our good friend Mr. Donaldson, I must express my sympathy for the worthy old gentleman as he goes riding along toward the scene of conflict. Dear, genteel, and cultivated Methodist reader, you who rejoice in the patristic glory of Methodism, though you have so far departed from the standard of the fathers as to wear gold and costly apparel and sing songs and read some novels, be not too hard upon our good friend Donaldson. Had you, fastidious Methodist friend, who listen to organs and choirs, and refined preachers, as you sit in your cushioned pew--had you lived in Ohio sixty years ago, would you have belonged to the Methodists, think you? Not at all! your nerves would have been racked by their shouting, your musical and poetical taste outraged by their ditties, your grammatical knowledge shocked beyond recovery by their English; you could never have worshiped in an excitement that prostrated people in religious catalepsy, and threw weak saints and obstinate sinners alike into the contortions of the jerks. It is easy to build the tombs of the prophets while you reap the harvest they sowed, and after they have been already canonized. It is easy to build the tombs of the early prophets now while we stone the prophets of our own time, maybe. Permit me, Methodist brother, to believe that had you lived in the days of Parson Donaldson, you would have condemned these rude Tishbites as sharply as he did. But you would have been wrong, as he was. For without them there must have been barbarism, worse than that of Arkansas and Texas. Methodism was to the West all that Puritanism was to New England. Both of them are sublime when considered historically; neither of them were very agreeable to live with, maybe.

But, alas! I am growing as theological as Mr. Donaldson himself. Meantime Morton has forded the creek at a point more favorable than his crossing of the night before, and is riding rapidly homeward; and ever, as he recedes from the scene of his peril and approaches his home, do the embarrassments of his situation become more appalling. If he could only be sure of himself in the future, there would be hope. But to a nature so energetic as his, there is no action possible but in a right line and with the whole heart.

In returning, Morton had been directed to follow a "trace" that led him toward home by a much nearer way than he had come. After riding twenty miles, he emerged from the wilderness into a settlement just as the sun was sitting. It happened that the house where he found a hospitable supper and lodging was already set apart for Methodist preaching that evening. After supper the shuck-bottom chairs and rude benches were arranged about the walls, and the intermediate space was left to be filled by seats which should be brought in by friendly neighbors. Morton gathered from the conversation that the preacher was none other than the celebrated Valentine Cook, who was held in such esteem that it was even believed that he had a prophetic inspiration and a miraculous gift of healing. This "class" had been founded by his preaching, in the days of his vigor. He had long since given up "traveling," on account of his health. He was now a teacher in Kentucky, being, by all odds, the most scholarly of the Western itinerants. He had set out on a journey among the churches with whom he had labored, seeking to strengthen the hands of the brethren, who were like a few sheep in the wilderness. The old Levantine churches did not more heartily welcome the final visit of Paul the Aged than did the backwoods churches this farewell tour of Valentine Cook.

Finding himself thus fairly entrapped again by a Methodist meeting, Morton felt no little agitation. His mother had heard Cook in his younger days, in Pennsylvania, and he was thus familiar with his fame as a man and as a preacher. Morton was not only curious to hear him; he entertained a faint hope that the great preacher might lead him out of his embarrassment.

After supper Goodwin strolled out through the trees trying to collect his thoughts; determined at one moment to become a Methodist and end his struggles, seeking, the next, to build a breastwork of resistance against the sermon that he must hear. Having walked some distance from the house into the bushes, he came suddenly upon the preacher himself, kneeling in earnest audible prayer. So rapt was the old man in his devotion that he did not note the approach of Goodwin, until the latter, awed at sight of a man talking face to face with God, stopped, trembling, where he stood. Cook then saw him, and, arising, reached out his hand to the young man, saying in a voice tremulous with emotion: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." Morton endeavored, in a few stammering words, to explain his accidental intrusion, but the venerable man seemed almost at once to have forgotten his presence, for he had taken his seat upon a log and appeared absorbed in thought. Morton retreated just in time to secure a place in the cabin, now almost full. The members of the church, men and women, as they entered, knelt in silent prayer before taking their seats. Hardly silent either, for the old Methodist could do nothing without noise, and even while he knelt in what he considered silent prayer, he burst forth, continually in audible ejaculations of "Ah--ah!" "O my Lord, help!" "Hah!" and other groaning expressions of his inward wrestling--groanings easily uttered, but entirely without a possible orthography. With most, this was the simple habit of an uncultivated and unreserved nature; in later times the ostentatious and hypocritical did not fail to cultivate it as an evidence of superior piety.

But now the room is full. People are crowding the doorways. The good old-class leader has shut his eyes and turned his face heavenward. Presently he strikes up lustily, leading the congregation in singing:

"How tedious and tasteless the hours When Jesus no longer I see!"

When he reached the stanza that declares:

"While blest with a sense of his love A palace a toy would appear; And prisons would palaces prove, If Jesus would dwell with me there."

there were shouts of "Halleluiah!" "Praise the Lord!" and so forth. At the last quatrain, which runs,

"O! drive these dark clouds from my sky! Thy soul-cheering presence restore; Or take me to thee up on high, Where winter and clouds are no more!"

there were the heartiest "Amens," though they must have been spoken in a poetic sense. I cannot believe that any of the excellent brethren, even in that moment of exaltation, would really have desired translation to the world beyond the clouds.

The preacher, in his meditations, had forgotten his congregation--a very common bit of absent-mindedness with Valentine Cook; and so, when this hymn was finished, a sister, with a rich but uncultivated soprano, started, to the tune called "Indian Philosopher," that inspiring song which begins:

"Come on, my partners in distress, My comrades in this wilderness, Who still your bodies feel; Awhile forget your griefs and tears, Look forward through this vale of tears To that celestial hill."

The hymn was long, and by the time it was completed the preacher, having suddenly come to himself, entered hurriedly, and pushed forward to the place arranged for him. The festoons of dried pumpkin hanging from the joists reached nearly to his head; a tallow dip, sitting in the window, shed a feeble light upon his face as he stood there, tall, gaunt, awkward, weather-beaten, with deep-sunken, weird, hazel eyes, a low forehead, a prominent nose, coarse black hair resisting yet the approach of age, and a _tout ensemble_ unpromising, but peculiar. He began immediately to repeat his hymn:

"I saw one hanging on a tree In agony and blood; He fixed his languid eye on me, As near the cross I stood."

His tone was monotonous, his eyes seemed to have a fascination, and the pathos of his voice, quivering with suppressed emotion, was indescribable. Before his prayer was concluded the enthusiastic Morton felt that he could follow such a leader to the world's end.

He repeated his text: "_Behold, the day cometh_," and launched at once into a strongly impressive introduction about the all-pervading presence of God, until the whole house seemed full of God, and Morton found himself breathing fearfully, with a sense of God's presence and ineffable holiness. Then he took up that never-failing theme of the pioneer preacher--the sinfulness of sin--and there were suppressed cries of anguish over the whole house. Morton could hardly feel more contempt for himself than he had felt for two days past; but when the preacher advanced to his climax of the Atonement and the Forgiveness of Sins, Goodwin felt himself carried away as with a flood. In that hour, with God around, above, beneath, without and within--with a feeling that since his escape he held his life by a sort of reprieve--with the inspiring and persuasive accents of this weird prophet ringing in his ears, he cast behind him all human loves, all ambitious purposes, all recollections of theological puzzles, and set himself to a self-denying life. With one final battle he closed his conflict about Patty. He would do right at all hazards.

Morton never had other conversion than this. He could not tell of such a struggle as Kike's. All he knew was that there had been conflict. When once he decided, there was harmony and peace. When Valentine Cook had concluded his rapt peroration, setting the whole house ablaze with feeling, and then proceeded to "open the doors of the church" by singing,

"Am I a soldier of the Cross, A follower of the Lamb, And shall I fear to own his cause, Or blush to speak his name?"

it was with a sort of military exaltation--a defiance of the world, the flesh, and the devil--that Morton went forward and took the hand of the preacher, as a sign that he solemnly enrolled himself among those who meant to

"----conquer though they die."

He was accustomed to say in after years, using the Methodist phraseology, that "God spoke peace to his soul the moment he made up his mind to give up all." That God does speak to the heart of man in its great crises I cannot doubt; but God works with, and not against, the laws of mind. When Morton ceased to contend with his highest impulses there was no more discord, and he was of too healthful and objective a temperament to have subjective fights with fanciful Apollyons. When peace came he accepted it. One of the old brethren who crowded round him that night and questioned him about his experience was "afeard it warn't a rale deep conversion. They wuzn't wras'lin' and strugglin' enough." But the wise Valentine Cook said, when he took Morton's hand to say good-bye, and looked into his clear blue eye, "Hold fast the beginning of thy confidence, brother."

_CHAPTER XVIII._

THE PRODIGAL RETURNS.

At last the knight was in the saddle. Much as Morton grieved when he thought of Patty, he rejoiced now in the wholeness of his moral purpose. Vacillation was over. He was ready to fight, to sacrifice, to die, for a good cause. It had been the dream of his boyhood; it had been the longing of his youth, marred and disfigured by irregularities as his youth had been. In the early twilight of the winter morning he rode bravely toward his first battle field, and, as was his wont in moments of cheerfulness, he sang. But not now the "Highland Mary," or "Ca' the yowe's to the knowes," but a hymn of Charles Wesley's he had heard Cook sing the night before, some stanzas of which had strongly impressed him and accorded exactly with his new mood, and his anticipation of trouble and the loss of Patty, perhaps, from his religious life:

"In hope of that immortal crown I now the Cross sustain, And gladly wander up and down, And smile at toil and pain; I suffer on my threescore years, Till my Deliv'rer come And wipe away his servant's tears, And take his exile home.

* * * * * * * *

"O, what are all my sufferings here If, Lord, thou count me meet With that enraptured host to appear And worship at thy feet! Give joy or grief, give ease or pain, Take life or friends away, But let me find them all again In that eternal day."

Long before he had reached Hissawachee he had ceased to sing. He was painfully endeavoring to imagine how he would be received at home and at Captain Lumsden's.

At home, the wan mother sat in the dull winter twilight, trying to keep her heart from fainting entirely. The story of Morton's losses at cards had quickly reached the settlement--with the easy addition that he had fled to escape paying his debt of dishonor, and had carried off the horse and gun which another had won from him in gambling. This last, the mother steadily refused to believe. It could not be that Morton would quench all the manly impulses of his youth and follow in the steps of his prodigal brother, Lewis. For Morton was such a boy as Lewis had never been, and the thought of his deserting his home and falling finally into bad practices, had brought to Mrs. Goodwin an agony that was next door to heart-break. Job Goodwin had abandoned all work and taken to his congenial employment of sighing and croaking in the chimney-corner, building innumerable Castles of Doubt for the Giant Despair.

Mrs. Wheeler came in to comfort her friend. "I am sure, Mrs. Goodwin," she said, "Morton will yet be saved; I have been enabled to pray for him with faith."

In spite of her sorrow, Mrs. Goodwin could not help thinking that it was very inconsistent for an Arminian to believe that God would convert a man in answer to prayer, when Arminians professed to believe that a man could be a Christian or not as he pleased. Willing, however, to lay the blame of her misfortune on anybody but Morton, she said, half peevishly, that she wished the Methodists had never come to the settlement. Morton had been in a hopeful state of mind, and they had driven him to wickedness. Otherwise he would doubtless have been a Christian by this time.

And now Mrs. Wheeler, on her part, thought--but did not say--that it was most absurd for Mrs. Goodwin to complain of anything having driven Morton away from salvation, since, according to her Calvinistic doctrine, he must be saved anyhow if he were elected. It is so easy to be inconsistent when we try to reason about God's relation to his creatures; and so easy to see absurdity in any creed but our own!

The twilight deepened, and Mrs. Goodwin, unable now to endure the darkness, lit her candle. Then there was a knock at the door. Ever since Sunday the mother, waiting between hope and despair, had turned pale at every sound of footsteps without. Now she called out, "Come in!" in a broken voice, and Mr. Brady entered, having just dismissed his school.

"Troth, me dair madam, it's not meself that can give comfort. I'm sure to say something not intoirely proper to the occasion, whiniver I talk to anybody in throuble--something that jars loike a varb that disagrees with its nominative in number and parson, as I may say. But I thought I ought to come and say you, and till you as I don't belave Moirton would do anything very bad, an' I'm shoore he'll be home afore the wake's out. I've soiphered it out by the Rule of Thray. As Moirton Goodwin wuz to his other throubles--comin' out all roight--so is Moirton Goodwin to his present dif_fic_culties. If the first term and the third is the same, then the sicond and the fourth has got to be idintical. Perhaps I'm talkin' too larned; but you're an eddicated woman, Mrs. Goodwin, and you can say that me dimonsthration's entoirely corrict. Moirton'll fetch the answer set down in the book ivery toime, without any remainder or mistake. Thair's no vulgar fractions about him."

"Fractious, did you say?" spoke in Job Goodwin, who had held his hand up to his best ear, to hear what Brady was saying. "No, I don't 'low he was fractious, fer the mos' part. But he's gone now, and he'll git killed like Lew did, and we'll all hev the fever, and then they'll be a war weth the Bridish, and the Injuns'll be on us, and it 'pears like as if they wa'n't no eend of troubles a-comin'. Hey?"

At that very moment the latch was jerked up and Henry came bursting into the room, gasping from excitement.

"What is it? Injuns?" asked Mr. Goodwin, getting to his feet.

But Henry gasped again.

"Spake!" said Brady. "Out wid it!"

"Mort's--a-puttin'--Dolly--in the stable!" said the breathless boy.

"Dolly's in the stable, did you say?" queried Job Goodwin, sitting down again hopelessly. "Then somebody--Injuns, robbers, or somebody--'s killed Mort, and she's found her way back!"

While Mr. Goodwin was speaking, Mrs. Wheeler slipped out of the open door, that she might not intrude upon the meeting; but Brady--oral newspaper that he was--waited, with the true journalistic spirit, for an interview. Hardly had Job Goodwin finished his doleful speech, when Morton himself crossed the threshold and reached out his hand to his mother, while she reached out both hands and--did what mothers have done for returning prodigals since the world was made. Her husband stood by bewildered, trying to collect his wits enough to understand how Morton could have been murdered by robbers or Indians and yet stand there. Not until the mother released him, and Morton turned and shook hands with his father, did the father get rid of the illusion that his son was certainly dead.

"Well, Moirton," said Brady, coming out of the shadow, "I'm roight glad to see ye back. I tould 'em ye'd bay home to-noight, maybe. I soiphered it out by the Single Rule of Thray that ye'd git back about this toime. One day fer sinnin', one day fer throyin' to run away from yersilf, one day for repintance, and the nixt the prodigal son falls on his mother's neck and confisses his sins."

Morton was glad to find Brady present; he was a safeguard against too much of a scene. And to avoid speaking of subjects more unpleasant, he plunged at once into an account of his adventure at Brewer's Hole, and of his arrest for stealing his own horse. Then he told how he had escaped by the good offices of Mr. Donaldson. Mrs. Goodwin was secretly delighted at this. It was a new bond between the young man and the minister, and now at last she should see Morton converted. The religious experience Morton reserved. He wanted to break it to his mother alone, and he wanted to be the first to speak of it to Patty. And so it happened that Brady, having gotten, as he supposed, a full account of Morton's adventures, and being eager to tell so choice and fresh a story, found himself unable to stay longer. But just as he reached the door, it occurred to him that if he did not tell Morton at once what had happened in his absence, some one else would anticipate him. He had sole possession of Morton's adventure anyhow; so he straightened himself up against the door and said:

"An' did ye hear what happened to Koike, the whoile ye was gone, Moirton?"

"Nothing bad, I hope," said Morton.

"Ye may belave it was bad, or ye may take it to be good, as ye plase. Ye know how Koike was bilin' over to shoot his uncle, afore ye went away in the fall. Will, on'y yisterday the Captin he jist met Koike in the road, and gives him some hard words fer sayin' what he did to him last Sunthay. An' fwat does Koike do but bowldly begins another exhortation, tellin' the Captin he was a sinner as desarved to go to hill, an' that he'd git there if he didn't whale about and take the other thrack. An' fwat does the Captin do but up wid the flat of his hand and boxes Koike's jaw. An' I thought Koike would 'a' sarved him as Magruder did Jake Sniger. But not a bit of it! He fired up rid, and thin got pale immajiately. Thin he turned round t'other soide of his face, and, wid a thremblin' voice, axed the Captin if he didn't want to slap that chake too? An' the Captin swore at him fer a hypocrite, and thin put out for home wid the jerks; an' he's been a-lookin' loike a sintince that couldn' be parsed iver sence."

"I wonder Kike bore it. I don't think I could," said Morton, meditatively.

"Av coorse ye couldn't. Ye're not a convarted Mithodist, But I must be goin'. I'm a-boardin' at the Captin's now."

_CHAPTER XIX._

PATTY.

Patty's whole education tended to foster her pride, and in Patty's circumstances pride was conservative; it saved her from possible assimilation with the vulgarity about her. She was a lily among hollyhocks. Her mother had come of an "old family"--in truth, of two or three old families. All of them had considered that attachment to the Established Church was part and parcel of their gentility, and most of them had been staunch Tories in the Revolution. Patty had inherited from her mother refinement, pride, and a certain lofty inflexibility of disposition. In this congenial soil Mrs. Lumsden had planted traditional prejudices. Patty read her Prayer-book, and wished that she might once attend the stately Episcopal service; she disliked the lowness of all the sects: the sing-song of the Baptist preacher and the rant of the Methodist itinerant were equally distasteful. She had never seen a clergyman in robes, but she tried, from her mother's descriptions, to form a mental picture of the long-drawn dignity of the service in an Old Virginia country church. Patty was imaginative, like most girls of her age; but her ideals were ruled by the pride in which she had been cradled.

For the Methodists she entertained a peculiar aversion. Methodism was new, and, like everything new, lacked traditions, picturesqueness, mustiness, and all the other essentials of gentility in religious matters. The converts were rude, vulgar, and poor; the preachers were illiterate, and often rough in voice and speech; they made war on dancing and jewelry, and dancing and jewelry appertained to good-breeding. Ever since her father had been taken with that strange disorder called "the jerks," she had hated the Methodists worse than ever. They had made a direct attack on her pride.

The story of Morton's gambling had duly reached the ears of Patty. The thoughtful unkindness of her father could not leave her without so delectable a morsel of news. He felt sure that Patty's pride would be outraged by conduct so reckless, and he omitted nothing from the tale--the loss of horse and gun, the offer to stake his hat and coat, the proposal to commit suicide, the flight upon the forfeited horse--such were the items of Captain Lumsden's story. He told it at the table in order to mortify Patty as much as possible in the presence of her brothers and sisters and the hired men. But the effect was quite different from his expectations. With that inconsistency characteristic of the most sensible women when they are in love, Patty only pitied Morton's misfortunes. She saw him, in her imagination, a hapless and homeless wanderer. She would not abandon him in his misfortunes. He should have one friend at least. She was sorry he had gambled, but gambling was not inconsistent with gentlemanliness. She had often heard that her mother would have inherited a plantation if her grandfather had been able to let cards alone. Gambling was the vice of gentlemen, a generous and impulsive weakness. Then, too, she laid the blame on her favorite scape-goat. If it had not been for Kike's exciting exhortation and the inconsiderate violence of the Methodist revival, Morton's misfortune would not have befallen him. Patty forgave in advance. Love condones all sins except sins against love.