University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.
A SOUL IN DISTRESS.

The events told in the last two chapters had
taken place toward the close of the week. On
Saturday evening the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather
received a note which was left at his
door by an unknown person who departed without
saying a word. Its words were these: —

“One who is in distress of mind requests the
prayers of this congregation that God would be
pleased to look in mercy upon the soul that he
has afflicted.”

There was nothing to show from whom the
note came, or the sex or age or special source of
spiritual discomfort or anxiety of the writer. The
handwriting was delicate and might well be a
woman's. The clergyman was not aware of any
particular affliction among his parishioners which
was likely to be made the subject of a request of
this kind. Surely neither of the Venners would
advertise the attempted crime of their relative in
this way. But who else was there? The more
he thought about it, the more it puzzled him;
and as he did not like to pray in the dark, without

knowing for whom he was praying, he could
think of nothing better than to step into old
Doctor Kittredge's and see what he had to say
about it.

The old Doctor was sitting alone in his study
when the Reverend Mr. Fairweather was ushered
in. He received his visitor very pleasantly, expecting,
as a matter of course, that he would begin
with some new grievance, dyspeptic, neuralgic,
bronchitic, or other. The minister, however,
began with questioning the old Doctor about the
sequel of the other night's adventure; for he was
already getting a little Jesuitical, and kept back
the object of his visit until it should come up as
if accidentally in the course of conversation.

“It was a pretty bold thing to go off alone
with that reprobate, as you did,” said the minister.

“I don't know what there was bold about it,”
the Doctor answered. “All he wanted was to
get away. He was not quite a reprobate, you
see; he didn't like the thought of disgracing his
family or facing his uncle. I think he was
ashamed to see his cousin, too, after what he
had done.”

“Did he talk with you on the way?”

“Not much. For half an hour or so he didn't
speak a word. Then he asked where I was driving
him. I told him, and he seemed to be surprised
into a sort of grateful feeling. Bad enough,
no doubt, — but might be worse. Has some humanity

left in him yet. Let him go. God can
judge him, — I can't.”

“You are too charitable, Doctor,” the minister
said. “I condemn him just as if he had carried
out his project, which, they say, was to make it
appear as if the school-master had committed
suicide. That's what people think the rope
found by him was for. He has saved his neck,
— but his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond
question.”

“I can't judge men's souls,” the Doctor said.
“I can judge their acts, and hold them responsible
for those, — but I don't know much about
their souls. If you or I had found our soul in a
half-breed body, and been turned loose to run
among the Indians, we might have been playing
just such tricks as this fellow has been trying.
What if you or I had inherited all the tendencies
that were born with his cousin Elsie?”

“Oh, that reminds me,” — the minister said, in
a sudden way, — “I have received a note, which
I am requested to read from the pulpit to-morrow.
I wish you would just have the kindness to look
at it and see where you think it came from.”

The Doctor examined it carefully. It was a
woman's or girl's note, he thought. Might come
from one of the school-girls who was anxious
about her spiritual condition. Handwriting was
disguised; looked a little like Elsie Venner's, but
not characteristic enough to make it certain. It
would be a new thing, if she had asked public

prayers for herself, and a very favorable indication
of a change in her singular moral nature. It was
just possible Elsie might have sent that note.
Nobody could foretell her actions. It would be
well to see the girl and find out whether any unusual
impression had been produced on her mind
by the recent occurrence or by any other cause.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather folded the note
and put it into his pocket.

“I have been a good deal exercised in mind
lately, myself,” he said.

The old Doctor looked at him through his spectacles,
and said, in his usual professional tone, —

“Put out your tongue.”

The minister obeyed him in that feeble way
common with persons of weak character, — for
people differ as much in their mode of performing
this trifling act as Gideon's soldiers in their way
of drinking at the brook. The Doctor took his
hand and placed a finger mechanically on his
wrist.

“It is more spiritual, I think, than bodily,” said
the Reverend Mr. Fairweather.

“Is your appetite as good as usual?” the Doctor
asked.

“Pretty good,” the minister answered; “but my
sleep, my sleep, Doctor, — I am greatly troubled
at night with lying awake and thinking of my
future, — I am not at ease in mind.'

He looked round at all the doors, to be sure they
were shut, and moved his chair up close to the
Doctor's.

“You do not know the mental trials I have
been going through for the last few months.”

“I think I do,” the old Doctor said. “You
want to get out of the new church into the old
one, don't you?”

The minister blushed deeply; he thought he
had been going on in a very quiet way, and that
nobody suspected his secret. As the old Doctor
was his counsellor in sickness, and almost everybody's
confidant in trouble, he had intended to
impart cautiously to him some hints of the change
of sentiments through which he had been passing.
He was too late with his information, it appeared,
and there was nothing to be done but to throw
himself on the Doctor's good sense and kindness,
which everybody knew, and get what hints he
could from him as to the practical course he
should pursue. He began, after an awkward
pause, —

“You would not have me stay in a communion
which I feel to be alien to the true church,
would you?”

“Have you stay, my friend?” said the Doctor,
with a pleasant, friendly look, — “have you stay?
Not a month, nor a week, nor a day, if I could
help it. You have got into the wrong pulpit, and
I have known it from the first. The sooner you
go where you belong, the better. And I'm very
glad you don't mean to stop half-way. Don't
you know you've always come to me when you've
been dyspeptic or sick anyhow, and wanted to

put yourself wholly into my hands, so that I
might order you like a child just what to do and
what to take? That's exactly what you want in
religion. I don't blame you for it. You never
liked to take the responsibility of your own body;
I don't see why you should want to have the
charge of your own soul. But I'm glad you're
going to the Old Mother of all. You wouldn't
have been contented short of that.”

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather breathed with
more freedom. The Doctor saw into his soul
through those awful spectacles of his, — into it
and beyond it, as one sees through a thin fog.
But it was with a real human kindness, after all.
He felt like a child before a strong man; but the
strong man looked on him with a father's indulgence.
Many and many a time, when he had
come desponding and bemoaning himself on account
of some contemptible bodily infirmity, the
old Doctor had looked at him through his spectacles,
listened patiently while he told his ailments,
and then, in his large parental way, given him a
few words of wholesome advice, and cheered him
up so that he went off with a light heart, thinking
that the heaven he was so much afraid of was
not so very near, after all. It was the same thing
now. He felt, as feeble natures always do in the
presence of strong ones, overmastered, circumscribed,
shut in, humbled; but yet it seemed as if
the old Doctor did not despise him any more for
what he considered weakness of mind than he

used to despise him when he complained of his
nerves or his digestion.

Men who see into their neighbors are very apt
to be contemptuous; but men who see through
them find something lying behind every human
soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment
on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of
God's manifold universe.

Little as the Doctor had said out of which comfort
could be extracted, his genial manner had
something grateful in it. A film of gratitude
came over the poor man's cloudy, uncertain eye,
and a look of tremulous relief and satisfaction
played about his weak mouth. He was gravitating
to the majority, where he hoped to find
“rest”; but he was dreadfully sensitive to the
opinions of the minority he was on the point of
leaving.

The old Doctor saw plainly enough what was
going on in his mind.

“I sha'n't quarrel with you,” he said, — “you
know that very well; but you mustn't quarrel
with me, if I talk honestly with you; it isn't
everybody that will take the trouble. You flatter
yourself that you will make a good many enemies
by leaving your old communion. Not so
many as you think. This is the way the common
sort of people will talk: — `You have got your
ticket to the feast of life, as much as any other
man that ever lived. Protestantism says, — “Help
yourself; here's a clean plate, and a knife and

fork of your own, and plenty of fresh dishes to
choose from.” The Old Mother says, — “Give
me your ticket, my dear, and I'll feed you with
my gold spoon off these beautiful old wooden
trenchers. Such nice bits as those good old
gentlemen have left for you!” There is no
quarrelling with a man who prefers broken victuals.'
That's what the rougher sort will say;
and then, where one scolds, ten will laugh. But,
mind you, I don't either scold or laugh. I don't
feel sure that you could very well have helped
doing what you will soon do. You know you
were never easy without some medicine to take
when you felt ill in body. I'm afraid I've given
you trashy stuff sometimes, just to keep you quiet.
Now, let me tell you, there is just the same difference
in spiritual patients that there is in bodily
ones. One set believes in wholesome ways of
living, and another must have a great list of specifics
for all the soul's complaints. You belong
with the last, and got accidentally shuffled in with
the others.”

The minister smiled faintly, but did not reply.
Of course, he considered that way of talking as
the result of the Doctor's professional training.
It would not have been worth while to take
offence at his plain speech, if he had been so disposed;
for he might wish to consult him the next
day as to “what he should take” for his dyspepsia
or his neuralgia.

He left the Doctor with a hollow feeling at the

bottom of his soul, as if a good piece of his manhood
had been scooped out of him. His hollow
aching did not explain itself in words, but it
grumbled and worried down among the unshaped
thoughts which lie beneath them. He
knew that he had been trying to reason himself
out of his birthright of reason. He knew that
the inspiration which gave him understanding
was losing its throne in his intelligence, and the
almighty Majority-Vote was proclaiming itself in
its stead. He knew that the great primal truths,
which each successive revelation only confirmed,
were fast becoming hidden beneath the mechanical
forms of thought, which, as with all new converts,
engrossed so large a share of his attention.
The “peace,” the “rest,” which he had purchased,
were dearly bought to one who had been trained
to the arms of thought, and whose noble privilege
it might have been to live in perpetual warfare for
the advancing truth which the next generation
will claim as the legacy of the present.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was getting
careless about his sermons. He must wait the
fitting moment to declare himself; and in the
mean time he was preaching to heretics. It did
not matter much what he preached, under such
circumstances. He pulled out two old yellow
sermons from a heap of such, and began looking
over that for the forenoon. Naturally enough,
he fell asleep over it, and, sleeping, he began to
dream.

He dreamed that he was under the high arches
of an old cathedral, amidst a throng of worshippers.
The light streamed in through vast windows,
dark with the purple robes of royal saints, or
blazing with yellow glories around the heads of
earthly martyrs and heavenly messengers. The
billows of the great organ roared among the
clustered columns, as the sea breaks amidst the
basaltic pillars which crowd the stormy cavern of
the Hebrides. The voice of the alternate choirs
of singing boys swung back and forward, as the
silver censer swung in the hands of the white-robed
children. The sweet cloud of incense rose
in soft, fleecy mists, full of penetrating suggestions
of the East and its perfumed altars. The
knees of twenty generations had worn the pavement;
their feet had hollowed the steps; their
shoulders had smoothed the columns. Dead bishops
and abbots lay under the marble of the floor
in their crumbled vestments; dead warriors, in
rusted armor, were stretched beneath their sculptured
effigies. And all at once all the buried
multitudes who had ever worshipped there came
thronging in through the aisles. They choked
every space, they swarmed into all the chapels,
they hung in clusters over the parapets of the galleries,
they clung to the images in every niche,
and still the vast throng kept flowing and flowing
in, until the living were lost in the rush of
the returning dead who had reclaimed their
own. Then, as his dream became more fantastic,

the huge cathedral itself seemed to change
into the wreck of some mighty antediluvian
vertebrate; its flying-buttresses arched round
like ribs, its piers shaped themselves into limbs,
and the sound of the organ-blast changed to
the wind whistling through its thousand-jointed
skeleton.

And presently the sound lulled, and softened
and softened, until it was as the murmur of a
distant swarm of bees. A procession of monks
wound along through an old street, chanting, as
they walked. In his dream he glided in among
them and bore his part in the burden of their
song. He entered with the long train under a
low arch, and presently he was kneeling in a narrow
cell before an image of the Blessed Maiden
holding the Divine Child in her arms, and his lips
seemed to whisper, —

Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!

He turned to the crucifix, and, prostrating himself
before the spare, agonizing shape of the Holy
Sufferer, fell into a long passion of tears and
broken prayers. He rose and flung himself, worn-out,
upon his hard pallet, and, seeming to slumber,
dreamed again within his dream. Once more
in the vast cathedral, with throngs of the living
choking its aisles, amidst jubilant peals from the
cavernous depths of the great organ, and choral
melodies ringing from the fluty throats of the
singing boys. A day of great rejoicings, — for

a prelate was to be consecrated, and the bones of
the mighty skeleton-minister were shaking with
anthems, as if there were life of its own within
its buttressed ribs. He looked down at his feet;
the folds of the sacred robe were flowing about
them: he put his hand to his head; it was
crowned with the holy mitre. A long sigh, as
of perfect content in the consummation of all his
earthly hopes, breathed through the dreamer's
lips, and shaped itself, as it escaped, into the
blissful murmur, —

Ego sum Episcopus!

One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath
the roof through an opening in a stained window.
It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the
old builders loved to place under the eaves to
spout the rain through their open mouths. It
looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair,
with its hideous grin growing broader and
broader, until it laughed out aloud, — such a
hard, stony, mocking laugh, that he awoke out
of his second dream through his first into his
common consciousness, and shivered, as he
turned to the two yellow sermons which he was
to pick over and weed of the little thought they
might contain, for the next day's service.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather was too
much taken up with his own bodily and spiritual
condition to be deeply mindful of others.
He carried the note requesting the prayers of the

congregation in his pocket all day; and the soul
in distress, which a single tender petition might
have soothed, and perhaps have saved from despair
or fatal error, found no voice in the temple
to plead for it before the Throne of Mercy!