Part 13

At this moment Nettie herself came into the room on some errand. Kike had heard her wheel stop--had looked toward the door--had caught her glance as she came in, and had, in that moment, become aware that he was not the only person in love. Was it, then, that the doctor wished to prevent the attachment going further that he had delicately reminded his guest of the approach of the time when he must leave? These thoughts aroused Kike from the lassitude of his slow convalescence. Nettie went back to her wheel, and set it humming louder than ever, but Kike heard now in its tones some note of anxiety that disturbed him. The doctor came and sat down by him and felt his pulse, ostensibly to see if he had fever, really to add yet another link to the chain of evidence that his surmise was correct.

"Mr. Lumsden," said he, "a constitution so much impaired as yours cannot recuperate in a few days."

"I know that, sir," said Kike, "and I am anxious to get to my mother's for a rest there, that I may not burden you any longer, and----"

"You misunderstand me, my dear fellow, if you think I want to be rid of you. I wish you would stay with me always; I do indeed."

For a moment Kike looked out of the window. To stay with the doctor always would, it seemed to him, be a heaven upon earth. But had he not renounced all thought of a heaven on earth? Had he not said plainly that here he had no abiding place? Having put his hand to the plow, should he look back?

"But I ought not to give up my work."

It was not in this tone that Kike would have spurned such a temptation awhile before.

"Mr. Lumsden," said the doctor, "you see that I am useful here. I cannot preach a great deal, but I think that I have never done so much good as since I began to practice medicine. I need somebody to help me. I cannot take care of the farm and my practice too. You could look after the farm, and preach every Sunday in the country twenty miles round. You might even study medicine after awhile, and take the practice as I grow older. You will die, if you go on with your circuit-riding. Come and live with me, and be my----assistant." The doctor had almost said "my son." It was in his mind, and Kike divined it.

"Think about it," said Dr. Morgan, as he rose to go, "and remember that nobody is obliged to kill himself."

And all day long Kike thought and prayed, and tried to see the right; and all day long Nettie found occasion to come in on little errands, and as often as she came in did it seem clear to Kike that he would be justified in accepting Dr. Morgan's offer; and as often as she went out did he tremble lest he were about to betray the trust committed to him.

_CHAPTER XXII._

THE DECISION.

The austerity of Kike's conscience had slumbered during his convalescence. It was wide awake now. He sat that evening in his room trying to see the right way. According to old Methodist custom he looked for some inward movement of the spirit--some "impression"--that should guide him.

During the great religious excitement of the early part of this century, Western pietists referred everything to God in prayer, and the belief in immmediate divine direction was often carried to a ludicrous extent. It is related that one man retired to the hills and prayed a week that he might know how he should be baptized, and that at last he came rushing out of the woods, shouting "Hallelujah! Immersion!" Various devices were invented for obtaining divine direction--devices not unworthy the ancient augurs. Lorenzo Dow used to suffer his horse to take his own course at each divergence of the road. It seems to have been a favorite delusion of pietism, in all ages, that God could direct an inanimate object, guide a dumb brute, or impress a blind impulse upon the human mind, but could not enlighten or guide the judgment itself. The opening of a Bible at random for a directing text became so common during the Wesleyan movement in England, that Dr. Adam Clarke thought it necessary to utter a stout Irish philippic against what he called "Bible sortilege."

These devout divinings, these vanes set to catch the direction of heavenly breezes, could not but impress so earnest a nature as Kike's. Now in his distress he prayed with eagerness and opened his Bible at random to find his eye lighting, not on any intelligible or remotely applicable passage, but upon a bead-roll of unpronounceable names in one of the early chapters of the Book of Chronicles. This disappointment he accepted as a trial of his faith. Faith like Kike's is not to be dashed by disappointment. He prayed again for direction, and opened at last at the text: "Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?" The marked trait in Kike's piety was an enthusiastic personal loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ. This question seemed directed to him, as it had been to Peter, in reproach. He would hesitate no longer. Love, and life itself, should be sacrificed for the Christ who died for him. Then he prayed once more, and there came to his mind the memory of that saying about leaving houses and homes and lands and wives, for Christ's sake. It came to him, doubtless, by a perfectly natural law of mental association. But what did Kike know of the association of ideas, or of any other law of mental action? Wesley's sermons and Benson's Life of Fletcher constituted his library. To him it seemed certain that this text of scripture was "suggested." It was a call from Christ to give up all for him. And in the spirit of the sublimest self-sacrifice, he said: "Lord, I will keep back nothing!"

But emotions and resolutions that are at high tide in the evening often ebb before morning. Kike thought himself strong enough to begin again to rise at four o'clock, as Wesley had ordained in those "rules for a preacher's conduct" which every Methodist preacher even yet _promises_ to keep. Following the same rules, he proceeded to set apart the first hour for prayer and meditation. The night before all had seemed clear; but now that morning had come and he must soon proceed to execute his stern resolve, he found himself full of doubt and irresolution. Such vacillation was not characteristic of Kike, but it marked the depth of his feeling for Nettie. Doubtless, too, the enervation of convalescence had to do with it. Certainly in that raw and foggy dawn the forsaking of the paradise of rest and love in which he had lingered seemed to require more courage than he could muster. After all, why should he leave? Might he not be mistaken in regard to his duty? Was he obliged to sacrifice his life?

He conducted his devotions in a state of great mental distraction. Seeing a copy of Baxter's Reformed Pastor which belonged to Dr. Morgan lying on the window-seat, he took it up, hoping to get some light from its stimulating pages. He remembered that Wesley spoke well of Baxter; but he could not fix his mind upon the book. He kept listlessly turning the leaves until his eye lighted upon a sentence in Latin. Kike knew not a single word of Latin, and for that very reason his attention was the more readily attracted by the sentence in an unknown tongue. He read it, "_Nec propter vitam, vivendi perdere causas_." He found written in the margin a free rendering: "Let us not, for the sake of life, sacrifice the only things worth living for." He knelt down now and gave thanks for what seemed to him Divine direction. He had been delivered from a temptation to sacrifice the great end of living for the sake of saving his life.

It cost him a pang to bid adieu to Dr. Morgan and his motherly wife and the excellent Jane. It cost him a great pang to say good-bye to Nettie Morgan. Her mobile face could ill conceal her feeling. She did not venture to come to the door. Kike found her alone in the little porch at the back of the house, trying to look unconcerned. Afraid to trust himself he bade her farewell dryly, taking her hand coldly for a moment. But the sight of her pain-stricken face touched him to the quick: he seized her hand again, and, with eyes full of tears, said huskily: "Good-bye, Nettie! God bless you, and keep you forever!" and then turned suddenly away, bidding the rest a hasty adieu and riding off eagerly, almost afraid to look back. He was more severe than ever in the watch he kept over himself after this. He could never again trust his treacherous heart.

Kike rode to his old home in the Hissawachee Settlement, "The Forks" had now come to be quite a village; the valley was filling with people borne on that great wave of migration that swept over the Alleghanies in the first dozen years of the century. The cabin in which his mother lived was very little different from what it was when he left it. The old stick chimney showed signs of decrepitude; the barrel which served for chimney-pot was canted a little on one side, giving to the cabin, as Kike thought, an unpleasant air, as of a man a little exhilarated with whiskey, who has tipped his hat upon the side of his head to leer at you saucily. The mother received him joyously, and wiped her eyes with her apron when she saw how sick he had been. Brady was at the widow's cabin, and though he stood by the fire-place when Kike entered, the two splint-bottomed chairs sat suspiciously close together. Brady had long thought of changing his state, but both Brady and the widow were in mortal fear of Kike, whose severity of judgment and sternness of reproof appalled them. "If it wasn't for Koike," said Brady to himself, "I'd propose to the widdy. But what would the lad say to sich follies at my toime of loife? And the widdy's more afeard of him than I am. Did iver anybody say the loikes of a b'y that skeers his schoolmasther out of courtin' his mother, and his mother out of resavin' the attintions of a larnt grammairian loike mesilf? The misfortin' is that Koike don't have no wakenisses himsilf. I wish he had jist one, and thin I wouldn't keer. If I could only foind that he'd iver looked jist a little swate loike at iny young girl, I wouldn't moind his cinsure. But, somehow, I kape a-thinkin' what would Koike say, loike a ould coward that I am."

Kike had come home to have his tattered wardrobe improved, and the thoughtful mother had already made him a warm, though not very shapely, suit of jeans. It cost Kike a struggle to leave her again. She did not think him fit to go. But she did not dare to say so. How should she venture to advise one who seemed to her wondering heart to live in the very secrets of the Almighty? God had laid hands on him--the child was hers no longer. But still she looked her heart-breaking apprehensions as he set out from home, leaving her standing disconsolate in the doorway wiping her eyes with her apron.

And Brady, seeing Kike as he rode by the school-house, ventured to give him advice--partly by way of finding out whether Kike had any "wakeniss" or not.

"Now, Koike, me son, as your ould taycher, I thrust you'll bear with me if I give you some advoice, though ye have got to be sich a praycher. Ye'll not take offinse, me lad?"

"O no; certainly not, Mr. Brady," said Kike, smiling sadly.

"Will, thin, ye're of a delicate constitooshun as shure as ye're born, and it's me own opinion as ye ought to git a good wife to nurse ye, and thin you could git a home and maybe do more good than ye do now."

Kike's face settled into more than its wonted severity. The remembrance of his recent vacillation and the sense of his present weakness were fresh in his mind. He would not again give place to the devil.

"Mr. Brady, there's something more important than our own ease or happiness. We were not made to seek comfort, but to give ourselves to the work of Christ. And see! your head is already blossoming for eternity, and yet you talk as if this world were all."

Saying this, Kike shook hands with the master solemnly and rode away, and Mr. Brady was more appalled than ever.

"The lad haint got a wakeniss," he said, disconsolately. "Not a wakeniss," he repeated, as he walked gloomily into the school-house, took down a switch and proceeded to punish Pete Sniger, who, as the worst boy in the school, and a sort of evil genius, often suffered on general principles when the master was out of humor.

Was Kike unhappy when he made his way to the distant Pottawottomie Creek circuit?

Do you think the Jesuit missionaries, who traversed the wilds of America at the call of duty as they heard it, were unhappy men? The highest happiness comes not from the satisfaction of our desires, but from the denial of them for the sake of a high purpose. I doubt not the happiest man that ever sailed through Levantine seas, or climbed Cappadocian mountains, was Paul of Tarsus. Do you think that he envied the voluptuaries of Cyprus, or the rich merchants of Corinth? Can you believe that one of the idlers in the Epicurean gardens, or one of the Stoic loafers in the covered sidewalks of Athens, could imagine the joy that tided the soul of Paul over all tribulations? For there is a sort of awful delight in self-sacrifice, and Kike defied the storms of a northern winter, and all the difficulties and dangers of the wilderness, and all the hardships of his lonely lot, with one saying often on his lips: "O Lord, I have kept back nothing!"

I have heard that about this time young Lumsden was accustomed to electrify his audiences by his fervent preaching upon the Christian duty of Glorying in Tribulation, and that shrewd old country women would nod their heads one to another as they went home afterward, and say: "He's seed a mighty sight o' trouble in his time, I 'low, fer a young man." "Yes; but he's got the victory; and how powerful sweet he talks about it! I never heerd the beat in all my born days."

_CHAPTER XXIII._

RUSSELL BIGELOW'S SERMON.

Two years have ripened Patty from the girl to the woman. If Kike is happy in his self-abnegation, Patty is not happy in hers. Pride has no balm in it. However powerful it may be as a stimulant, it is poor food. And Patty has little but pride to feed upon. The invalid mother has now been dead a year, and Patty is almost without companionship, though not without suitors. Land brings lovers--land-lovers, if nothing more--and the estate of Patty's father is not her only attraction. She is a young woman of a certain nobility of figure and carriage; she is not large, but her bearing makes her seem quite commanding. Even her father respects her, and all the more does he wish to torment her whenever he finds opportunity. Patty is thrifty, and in the early West no attraction outweighed this wifely ordering of a household. But Patty will not marry any of the suitors who calculate the infirm health of her father and the probable division of his estate, and who mentally transfer to their future homes the thrift and orderliness they see in Captain Lumsden's. By refusing them all she has won the name of a proud girl. There are times when out of sight of everybody she weeps, hardly knowing why. And since her mother's death she reads the prayer-book more than ever, finding in the severe confessions therein framed for us miserable sinners, and the plaintive cries of the litany, a voice for her innermost soul.

Captain Lumsden fears she will marry and leave him, and yet it angers him that she refuses to marry. His hatred of Methodists has assumed the intensity of a monomania since he was defeated for the legislature partly by Methodist opposition. All his love of power has turned to bitterest resentment, and every thought that there may be yet the remotest possibility of Patty's marrying Morton afflicts him beyond measure. He cannot fathom the reason for her obstinate rejection of all lovers; he dislikes her growing seriousness and her fondness for the prayer-book. Even the prayer-book's earnestness has something Methodistic about it. But Patty has never yet been in a Methodist meeting, and with this fact he comforts himself. He has taken pains to buy her jewelry and "artificials" in abundance, that he may, by dressing her finely, remove her as far as possible from temptations to become a Methodist. For in that time, when fine dressing was not common and country neighborhoods were polarized by the advent of Methodism in its most aggressive form, every artificial flower and every earring was a banner of antagonism to the new sect; a well-dressed woman in a congregation was almost a defiance to the preacher. It seemed to Lumsden, therefore, that Patty had prophylactic ornaments enough to save her from Methodism. And to all of these he added covert threats that if any child of his should ever join these crazy Methodist loons, he would turn him out of doors and never see him again. This threat was always indirect--a remark dropped incidentally; the pronoun which represented the unknown quantity of a Methodist Lumsden was always masculine, but Patty did not fail to comprehend.

[Illustration: THE CONNECTICUT PEDDLER.]

One day there came to Captain Lumsden's door that out-cast of New England--a tin-peddler. Western people had never heard of Yale College or any other glory of Connecticut or New England. To them it was but a land that bred pestilent peripatetic peddlers of tin-ware and wooden clocks. Western rogues would cheat you out of your horse or your farm if a good chance offered, but this vile vender of Yankee tins, who called a bucket a "pail," and said "noo" for new, and talked nasally, would work an hour to cheat you out of a "fipenny bit." The tin-peddler, one Munson, thrust his sharpened visage in at Lumsden's door and "made bold" to _in_quire if he could git a night's lodging, which the Captain, like other settlers, granted without charge. Having unloaded his stock of "tins" and "put up" his horse, the Connecticut peddler "made bold" to ask many leading questions about the family and personal history of the Lumsdens, collectively and individually. Having thus taken the first steps toward acquaintance by this display of an aggravating interest in the welfare of his new friends, he proceeded to give elaborate and truthful accounts--with variations--of his own recent adventures, to the boundless amusement of the younger Lumsdens, who laughed more heartily at the Connecticut man's words and pronunciation than at his stories. He said, among other things, that he had ben to Jinkinsville t'other day to what the Methodis' called a "basket meetin'." But when he had proceeded so far with his narrative, he prudently stopped and made bold to _in_quire what the Captain thought of these Methodists. The Captain was not slow to express his opinion, and the man of tins, having thus reassured himself by taking soundings, proceeded to tell that they was a dreffle craoud of folks to that meetin'. And he, hevin' a sharp eye to business, hed went forrard to the mourner's bench to be prayed fer. Didn't do no pertik'ler harm to hev folks pray fer ye, ye know. Well, ye see, the Methodis' they wanted to _in_courage a seeker, and so they all bought some tins. Purty nigh tuck the hull load offen his hands! (And here the peddler winked one eye at the Captain and then the other at Patty.) Fer they was seen a dreffle lot of folks there. Come to hear a young preacher as is 'mazin' elo'kent--Parson Goodwin by name, and he was a _good one_ to preach, sartain.

This startled Patty and the Captain.

"Goodwin?" said the Captain; "Morton Goodwin?"

"The identikle," said the peddler.

"Raised only half a mile from here," said Lumsden, "and we don't think much of him."

"Neither did I," said the peddler, trimming his sails to Lumsden's breezes. "I calkilate I could preach e'en a'most as well as he does, myself, and I wa'n't brought up to preachin', nother. But he's got a good v'ice fer singin'--sich a ring to't, ye see, and he's got a smart way thet comes the sympathies over the women folks and weak-eyed men, and sets 'em cryin' at a desp'ate rate. Was brought up here, was he? Du tell! He's powerful pop'lar." Then, catching the Captain's eye, he added: "Among the women, I mean."

"He'll marry some shouting girl, I suppose," said the Captain, with a chuckle.

"That's jist what he's going to do," said the peddler, pleased to have some information to give. Seeing that the Captain and his daughter were interested in his communication, the peddler paused a moment. A bit of gossip is too good a possession for one to part with too quickly.

"You guessed good, that time," said the tinware man. "I heerd say as he was a goin' to splice with a gal that could pray like a angel afire. An' I heerd her pray. She nearly peeled the shingles off the skewl-haouse. Sich another _ex_citement as she perjuced, I never did see. An' I went up to her after meetin' and axed a interest in her prayers. Don't do no harm, ye know, to git sich lightnin' on yer own side! An' I took keer to git a good look at her face, for preachers ginerally marry purty faces. Preachers is a good deal like other folks, ef they do purtend to be better, hey? Well, naow, that Ann Elizer Meacham _is_ purty, sartain. An' everybody says he's goin' to marry her; an' somebody said the presidin' elder mout tie 'em up next Sunday at Quartily Meetin', maybe. Then they'll divide the work in the middle and go halves. She'll pray and he'll preach." At this the peddler broke into a sinister laugh, sure that he had conciliated both the Captain and Patty by his news. He now proposed to sell some tinware, thinking he had worked his audience up to the right state of mind.

Patty did not know why she should feel vexed at hearing this bit of intelligence from Jenkinsville. What was Morton Goodwin to her? She went around the house as usual this evening, trying to hide all appearance of feeling. She even persuaded her father to buy half-a-dozen tin cups and some milk-buckets--she smiled at the peddler for calling them _pails_. She was not willing to gratify the Captain by showing him how much she disliked the scoffing "Yankee." But when she was alone that evening, even the prayer-book had lost its power to soothe. She was mortified, vexed, humiliated on every hand. She felt hard and bitter, above all, toward the sect that had first made a division between Morton and herself, and cordially blamed the Methodists for all her misfortunes.