The Zeit-Geist Part 5

Nothing seemed fair to him, nothing attractive, but to drink one more gla.s.s of spirits, and to go and make promises to Ann that would be sweet to her ear. He knew that for him it was the gate of death.

At this point the minister met him, and jumped at once to the conclusion that he was drunk. The minister was one of those good men who found their faith in G.o.d upon absolute want of faith in man. His heart was better than his head, as is the case with all small-minded souls that have come into conscious contact with G.o.d, but his opinions ruled his official conduct. "I am afraid you have been drinking, Toyner," he said reproachfully.

The first three words, "I am afraid," were enough for Bart; he was filled himself with an all-pervading fear--a fear of himself, a fear of G.o.d, a fear of the devil who would possess him again. He was not drunk; the fact that drunkenness in him appeared so likely to this man, who was the best friend he had, completed in his heart the work of revolt against the minister and the minister's G.o.d. What right had G.o.d to take him up and clothe him and keep him in his right mind for a little while, just to let him fall at the first opportunity? It was quite true that he had deserved it, no doubt; he had done wrong, and he was going to do wrong; but G.o.d, who had gone out of His way to mercifully convert him and keep him straight for a while, could certainly have gone on keeping him if He had chosen. His mind was a logical one. He had been taught to praise G.o.d for some extraordinary favour towards him; he had been taught that the grace which had changed his life for good was in no degree his own; and why then was he to bear all the disgrace of his return to evil?

In the next hours he walked the streets of the town, and talked to other men when need was, and did a little business on his own account in the agency in which he was engaged, and went home and took supper, watching the vagaries of his father's senile mania with more than common pity for the old man. His own wretchedness gave him an aching heart of sympathy for all the sorrow of others which came across his mind that day.

The whole day was a new revelation to him of what tenderness for others could be and ought to be.

He did not hope to attain to any working out of this higher sympathy and pity himself. The wonderful confidence which his new faith had so long given him, that he was able in G.o.d's strength to perform the higher rather than the lower law of his nature, had ebbed away. G.o.d's strength was no longer with him; he was going to the devil; he could do nothing for himself, little for others; but he sympathised as never before with all poor lost souls. He was a little surprised, as the day wore to a close, that he had been able to control his craving, that he had not taken more rum. Still, he knew that he would soon be helpless. It was his doom, for he could awake in himself no further feeling of repentance or desire to return to G.o.d.

In the long day's struggle, half conscious and half unconscious, his love for Ann--and it was not a bad sort of love either--had triumphed over what principle he had; it had survived the sudden shock that had wrecked his faith. The h.e.l.l which he was experiencing was intolerable now, because of the heaven which he had seen, and he could not forgive the G.o.d who had ordained it. The unreal notion that an omnipotent G.o.d can permit what He does not ordain could have no weight with him, for he was grappling with reality. As he brooded bitterly upon his own fate, his heart became enlarged with tenderness for all other poor helpless creatures like himself who were under the same misrule.

His resolution was taken--he would use his sobriety to help Ann. It would not profit himself, but still he would win from her the promise concerning her future life and Christa's which she had offered him, and he would go that night and do all that a man could do to help the poor wretch to whom his heart went out with ever-increasing pity. It would not be much, but he would do what he could, and after that he would tell the authorities what he had done and give up his office. He had a very vague notion of the penalties he would incur; if they put him in prison, so much the better--it might save him a little longer from drinking himself to death.

Like an honest man he had given up attempting to pull G.o.d round to his own position. He did not now think for a moment that the act of love and mercy which possessed his soul was a pious one; his motive he believed to be solely his pity for Markham and his love for Ann, which, being natural, he supposed to be selfish, and, being selfish, he knew to be unholy.

It had all come to this, then--his piety, his reformation, his prayers, his thanksgiving, his faith. His heart within him gave a sneering laugh.

He was terribly to blame, of course--he was a reprobate; but surely G.o.d was to blame too!

CHAPTER VII.

Ann Markham's thoughts of Bart that day were chiefly wondering thoughts.

She tried to think scornfully of his refusal to help her; theoretically she derided the religion that produced the refusal, but in the bottom of her heart she looked at it with a wonder that was akin to admiration.

Then there was a question whether he would remain fixed in his resolution. If this man did not love her then Ann's confidence failed her in respect to her judgment of what was or was not; for though she had regarded him always as a person of not much strength or importance, not independent enough to be anything more than the creature of the woman whom he desired to marry, yet, curiously enough, she had believed that his love for her had a strength that would die hard. She did not stop to ask herself how it could be that a weak man could love her strongly. Love, in any constant and permanent sense of the word, was an almost unknown quality among her companions, and yet she had attributed it to Bart. Well! his refusal of last night proved that she had been mistaken--that was all. But possibly the leaven of her proposal would work, and he would repent and come back to her. The fact that he had evidently not betrayed her to the detective gave her hope of this. Her thoughts about Toyner were only subordinate to the question, how she was to rescue her father. With the light and strength of the morning, hope in other possibilities of eluding Bart, even if he remained firm, came back to her. She would at least work on; if she was baffled in the end, it would be time enough to despair. Her sister was not her confidante, she was her tool.

Ann waited until the shadow of the pear tree, which with ripening fruit overhung the gable of their house, stretched itself far down the bit of weedy gra.s.s that sloped to the river. The gra.s.s plot was wholly untended, but nature had embroidered it with flowers and ferns.

Ann sat sewing by the table on which she kept her supply of beer. She could not afford to lose her sales to-day, although she knew bitterly that most of those who turned in for a drink did so out of prying curiosity. Even Christa, not very quick of feeling, had felt this, and had retired to lounge on the bed in the inner room with a paper novel.

Christa usually spent her afternoon in preparing some cheap finery to wear in the cool of the evening, but she felt the family disgrace and Ann's severity, and was disheartened. As Ann bided her time and considered her own occupation and Christa's, she marvelled at the audacity of the promise which she had offered to give Bart, yet so awful was the question at stake that her only wish was that he had accepted it.

At four o'clock in the afternoon she roused Christa and apportioned a certain bit of work to her. There was a young man in Fentown called David Brown, a comely young fellow, belonging to one of the richer families of the place. He was good-natured, and an athlete; he had of late fallen into the habit of dropping in frequently to drink Ann's beer. She felt no doubt that Christa was his attraction. Some weeks before he had boasted that he had found the bed of a creek which made its way through the drowned forest, and that by it he had paddled his canoe through the marsh that lay to the north of the lake. He had also boasted that he had a secret way of finding the creek again. Upon considering his character Ann believed that although the statement was given boastfully it was true. Brown had a trace of Indian blood in him, and possessed the faculties of keen observation and good memory. It was by the help of this secret that she had hoped to extricate her father herself. There was still a chance that she might be able to use it.

"Some men think the world and all of a woman if they can only get into the notion that she is ill-used. David may be more sweet on you than ever," said Ann to Christa. "Put on your white frock: it's a little mussed, so it won't look as if you were trying to be fine; don't put on any sash, but do your hair neatly."

She will look taking enough, thought Ann to herself; she did not despise herself for the stratagem. It was part of the hard, practical game that she had played all her life, for that matter; she was not conscious of loving Christa any more than she was conscious of loving her father. It was merely her will that they should have the utmost advantage in life that she could obtain for them. Nothing short of a moral revolution could have changed this determination in her.

When Christa had performed her toilet, obeying Ann from mere habit, Ann drilled her in the thing she was to do. Brown would of course suspect what this information was to be used for. Christa was to coax him to promise secrecy. Ann went over the details of the plan again and again, until she was quite sure that the shallow forgetful child understood the importance of her mission.

Christa sat with her elbows on the table and cried a little. Her fair hair was curled low over her eyes, the coa.r.s.e white dress hung limp but soft, leaving her neck bare. With all her motions her head nodded on her slender graceful neck, like a flower which bows on its stalk.

Before this disaster Christa had spent her life laughing; that had been more becoming to her than sullenness and tears. For all that, Ann was not sorry that Christa's eyelids should be red when David Brown was seen slowly lounging toward the window.

He had not been to see them the day before; it was apparent from his air that he thought it was not quite the respectable thing to do to-day. He tried to approach the house with a _nonchalant_, happen-by-chance air, so that if any one saw him they would suppose his stopping merely accidental.

Ann poured out his beer. Christa looked at him with eyes full of reproach. Then she got up and went away to the doorstep, and stood looking out. To the surprise of both of them, David did not follow her there. He stood still near Ann.

"It's hard on Christa," said Ann with a sigh; "she has been crying all day. Every one will desert us now, and we shall have to live alone without friends."

"Oh no" (abruptly); "n.o.body blames you."

"I don't mind for myself so much; I don't care so much about what people think, or how they treat me." She lifted her head proudly as she spoke.

"But" (with pathos) "it's hard on Christa."

"No; you never think of yourself, do you?" David giggled a little as he said it, betraying that he felt his words to be unusually personal. Ann wondered for a minute what could be the cause of this giggle, and then she returned to the subject of Christa's suffering.

"Look here," he interrupted, "if there's any little thing I can do to help you, like lending you money if you're left hard up, or anything of that sort, you know" (he was blushing furiously now), "it's for you I'd do it," he blurted out. "I don't care about Christa."

"The silly fellow!" thought Ann. She was six years older than he, and she felt herself to be twenty years older. She entirely scorned his admiration in its young folly; but she did not hesitate a moment to make use of it. All her life had been a long training in that thrift which utilised everything for family gain. She was a thorough woman of society, this girl who sat in her backwoods cottage selling beer.

She looked at the boy, and a sudden glow of sensibility appeared in her face. "Oh, David!" she said; "I thought it was Christa."

"But it isn't Christa," he stammered, grinning. He was hugely pleased with the idea that she had accepted his declaration of courtship.

Half an hour later and Ann had the secret of the new track through the north of the drowned forest, and Brown had the wit not to ask her what she wanted to do with it. He had done more--he had offered to row her boat for her, but this Ann had refused.

It was a curious thing, this refusal. It arose purely from principle on her part; she had come to the limit which the average mind sets to the evil it will commit. She deceived and cajoled the boy without scruple, but she did not allow him to break the law. She remembered that he had parents who valued his good name more than he had as yet learned to value it. He was young; he was in her power; and she declined his further help.

Christa had wandered down the gra.s.s to the river-side and stood there pouting meanwhile.

CHAPTER VIII.

This incident with David Brown and the getting possession of his chart was the one stimulant that helped Ann to endure this long day of inactivity. It was like a small thimbleful of wine to one who longed for a generous draught; there was nothing else to do but to wait, alert for all chances that might help her. Evening closed in; the sisters were left alone. Christa returned indolently to lounging upon the bed and reading her novel. If Ann had had less strength, she would have paced the floor of the outer room in impatience; as it was she sat still by the table which held the beer and st.i.tched her seam diligently. About eight o'clock she heard Toyner's step.

Was he going to haunt the house again in order to keep her from going out of it?

He came up to the door and came in.

She was preparing herself to act just as if she did not know who had come, and did not take much notice of him; but when he came up and she looked at his face in the lamp-light, she saw written in it the struggle that he had gone through. Its exact nature and detail she was incapable of conceiving, but one glance proved to her its reality. She was struck by the consciousness of meeting an element in life which was wholly new to her. When such a thing forces itself upon our attention, however indefinite and unexpressed may be our thought, it is an experience never to be forgotten. Ann fought against her conviction. She began at once, as intelligent humanity always does, to explain away what she did not understand, supposing by that means that she could do away with its existence.

"I think you are ill, Bart," she said quickly. "It looks to me as if you were in for a bout of chills; and enough to give it to you too, hanging about in the woods all night."

He drew a chair close to the table and sat down beside her.

"There isn't any chills in the swamps about here," he said; "they are as wholesome as dry land is." She saw by this that he had no intention of upbraiding her with his fall, or of proclaiming the object of his visit.

She wanted to rouse him into telling her something.

"I heard them saying something about you to-day that I didn't believe a bit. I heard you were in the saloon drinking."

He took hold of the end of her seam, pa.s.sed his finger along it as if examining the fabric and the st.i.tches. "I took one gla.s.s," he said, with the curious quiet gravity which lay to-night like a spell upon all his words and actions.