University of Virginia Library

41. CHAPTER XLI.
NIGHT TALKS.

WE walked home that night by starlight, over the long
bridge between Boston and Cambridge, and watched the
image of the great round yellow moon just above the horizon,
breaking and shimmering in the water into a thousand crystal
fragments, like an orb of golden glass. We stopped midway in
the calm obscurity, with our arms around each other, and had
one of those long talks that friends, even the most confidential,
can have only in the darkness. Cheek to cheek under the soft
dim mantle of the starlight, the night flowers of the innermost
soul open.

We talked of our loves, our hopes, of the past, the present,
and the great hereafter, in which we hoped forever to mingle.
And then Harry spoke to me of his mother, and told in burning
words of that life of bitterness and humiliation and sorrow
through which he had passed with her.

“O Harry,” said I, “did it not try your faith, that God should
have left her to suffer all that?”

“No, Horace, no, because in all that suffering she conquered, —
she was more than conqueror. O, I have seen such divine peace
in her eyes, at the very time when everything earthly was failing
her! Can I ever doubt? I who saw into heaven when
she entered? No, I have seen her crowned, glorified, in my
soul as plainly as if it had been a vision.”

At that moment I felt in myself that magnetic vibration of
the great central nerves which always prefaced my spiritual
visions, and looking up I saw that the beautiful woman I had
seen once before was standing by Harry, but now more glowing
and phosphorescent than I saw her last; there was a divine,
sweet, awful radiance in her eyes, as she raised her hands above
his head, he, meanwhile, stooping down and looking intently
into the water.

“Harry,” said I, after a few moments of silence, “do you
believe your mother sees and knows what you do in this world,
and watches over you?”

“That has always been one of those things that I have believed
without reasoning,” said Harry, musingly. “I never
could help believing it; and there have been times in my life
when I felt so certain that she must be near me, that it seemed
as though, if I spoke, she must answer, — if I reached out my
hand, it would touch hers. It is one of my instinctive certainties.
It is curious,” he added, “that the difference between Esther and
myself is just the reverse kind of that which generally subsists
between man and woman. She has been all her life so drilled in
what logicians call reasoning, that, although she has a glorious
semi-spiritual nature, and splendid moral instincts, she never
trusts them. She is like an eagle that should insist upon climbing
a mountain by beak and claw instead of using wings. She
must always see the syllogism before she will believe.”

“For my part,” said I, “I have always felt the tyranny of the
hard New England logic, and it has kept me from really knowing
what to believe about many phenomena of my own mind
that are vividly real to me.” Here I faltered and hesitated, and
the image that seemed to stand by us slowly faded. I could not
and did not say to Harry how often I had seen it.

“After all I have heard and thought on this subject,” said
Harry, “my religious faith is what it always was, — a deep, instinctive
certainty, an embrace by the soul of something which it
could not exist without. My early recollections are stronger than
anything else of perfect and utter helplessness, of troubles entirely
beyond all human aid. My father —” He stopped and shuddered.
“Horace, he was one of those whom intemperance makes
mad. For a great part of his time he was a madman, with all
the cunning, all the ingenuity, the devilishness of insanity, and I
have had to stand between him and my mother, and to hide
Tina out of his way.” He seemed to shudder as one convulsed.
“One does not get over such a childhood,” he said. “It has
made all my religious views, my religious faith, rest on two
ideas, — man's helplessness, and God's helpfulness. We are

sent into this world in the midst of a blind, confused jangle of
natural laws, which we cannot by any possibility understand, and
which cut their way through and over and around us. They
tell us nothing; they have no sympathy; they hear no prayer;
they spare neither vice nor virtue. And if we have no friend
above to guide us through the labyrinth, if there is no Father's
heart, no helping hand, of what use is life? I would throw myself
into this river, and have it over with at once.”

“I always noticed your faith in prayer,” said I. “But how
can it consist with this known inflexibility of natural laws?”

“And what if natural laws were meant as servants of man's
moral life? What if Jesus Christ and his redeeming, consoling
work were the first thing, and all things made by him for this
end? Inflexible physical laws are necessary; their very inflexibility
is divine order; but `what law cannot do, in that it is
weak through the flesh, God did by sending his Son in the likeness
of sinful flesh.' Christ delivers us from slavery to natural
law; he comes to embody and make visible the paternal idea;
and if you and I, with our small knowledge of physical laws, can
so turn and arrange them that their inflexible course shall help,
and not hinder, much more can their Maker.”

“You always speak of Christ as God.”

“I have never thought of God in any other way,” he answered.
“Christ is the God of sufferers; and those who learn
religion by sorrow always turn to him. No other than a suffering
God could have helped my mother in her anguish.”

“And do you think,” said I, “that prayer is a clew strong
enough to hold amid the rugged realities of life?”

“I do,” said Harry. “At any rate, there is my great venture;
that is my life-experiment. My mother left me that as her only
legacy.”

“It certainly seems to have worked well for you so far,
Harry,” said I, “and for me too, for God has guided us to what
we scarcely could have hoped for, two poor boys as we were,
and so utterly helpless. But then, Harry, there must be a great
many prayers that are never answered.”

“Of course,” said Harry, “I do not suppose that God has put

the key of all the universe into the hand of every child; but it is
a comfort to have a Father to ask of, even though he refuse five
times out of six, and it makes all the difference between having a
father and being an orphan. Yes,” he added, after a few moments
of thought, “my poor mother's prayers seemed often to be
denied, for she prayed that my father might reform. She often
prayed from day to day that we might be spared miseries that he
still brought upon us. But I feel sure that she has seen by this
time that her Father heard the prayers that he seemed to deny,
and her faith in him never failed. What is that music?” he said.

At this moment there came softly over the gleaming water,
from the direction of the sea, the faintest possible vibration of a
sound, like the dying of an organ tone. It might be from some
ship, hidden away far off in the mist, but the effect was soft and
dreamy as if it came from some spirit-land.

“I often think,” said Harry, listening for a moment, “that no
one can pronounce on what this life has been to him until he has
passed entirely through it, and turns around and surveys it from
the other world. I think then we shall see everything in its true
proportions; but till then we must walk by faith and not by
sight, — faith that God loves us, faith that our Saviour is always
near us, and that all things are working together for good.”

“Harry,” said I, “do you ever think of your father now?”

“Horace, there is where I wish I could be a more perfect
Christian than I am. I have a bitter feeling toward him, that
I fear is not healthful, and that I pray God to take away. Tonight,
since we have been standing here, I have had a strange,
remorseful feeling about him, as if some good spirit were interceding
for him with me, and trying to draw me to love and
forgive him. I shall never see him, probably, until I meet him
in the great Hereafter, and then, perhaps, I shall find that her
prayers have prevailed for him.”

It was past twelve o'clock when we got to our room that night,
and Harry found lying on his table a great sealed package from
England. He opened it and found in it, first, a letter from his
father, Sir Harry Percival. The letter was as follows: —

Accompanying this letter was a letter from the family lawyer,
stating that on the 18th day of the month past Sir Harry Percival
had died of an attack of gout. The letter went on to give
various particulars about the state of the property, and the steps
which had been taken in relation to it, and expressing the hope
that the arrangements made would meet with his approbation.

It may well be imagined that it was almost morning before we
closed our eyes, after so very startling a turn in our affairs. We
lay long discussing it in every possible light, and now first I
found courage to tell Harry of my own peculiar experiences, and
of what I had seen that very evening. “It seems to me,” said

Harry, when I had told him all, “as if I felt what you saw.
I had a consciousness of a sympathetic presence, something
breathing over me like wind upon harp-strings, something particularly
predisposing me to think kindly of my father. My feeling
towards him has been the weak spot of my inner life always, and
I had a morbid horror of him. Now I feel at peace with him.
Perhaps her prayers have prevailed to save him from utter
ruin.”