The money,--there it lay on his knee,a little blotted slip of paper,nothing in itself;used to raise him out of the pit,something straight from God's hand.A thief!Well,what was it to be a thief?He met the question at last,face to face,wiping the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead.God made this money--the fresh air,too--for his children's use.He never made the difference between poor and rich.The Something who looked down on him that moment through the cool gray sky had a kindly face,he knew,--loved his children alike.Oh,he knew that!
There were times when the soft floods of color in the crimson and purple flames,or the clear depth of amber in the water below the bridge,had somehow given him a glimpse of another world than this,--of an infinite depth of beauty and of quiet somewhere,--somewhere,a depth of quiet and rest and love.
Looking up now,it became strangely real.The sun had sunk quite below the hills,but his last rays struck upward,touching the zenith.The fog had risen,and the town and river were steeped in its thick,gray damp;but overhead,the sun-touched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean,--shifting,rolling seas of crimson mist,waves of billowy silver veined with blood-scarlet,inner depths unfathomable of glancing light.Wolfe's artist-eye grew drunk with color.The gates of that other world!Fading,flashing before him now!What,in that world of Beauty,Content,and Right,were the petty laws,the mine and thine,of mill-owners and mill hands?
A consciousness of power stirred within him.He stood up.Aman,--he thought,stretching out his hands,--free to work,to live,to love!Free!His right!He folded the scrap of paper in his hand.As his nervous fingers took it in,limp and blotted,so his soul took in the mean temptation,lapped it in fancied rights,in dreams of improved existences,drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color.Clutching it,as if the tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession,he went aimlessly down the street.It was his watch at the mill.He need not go,need never go again,thank God!--shaking off the thought with unspeakable loathing.
Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night?how the man wandered from one to another of his old haunts,with a half-consciousness of bidding them farewell,--lanes and alleys and back-yards where the mill-hands lodged,--noting,with a new eagerness,the filth and drunkenness,the pig-pens,the ash-heaps covered with potato-skins,the bloated,pimpled women at the doors,with a new disgust,a new sense of sudden triumph,and,under all,a new,vague dread,unknown before,smothered down,kept under,but still there?It left him but once during the night,when,for the second time in his life,he entered a church.It was a sombre Gothic pile,where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches;built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's.
Yet it touched,moved him uncontrollably.The distances,the shadows,the still,marble figures,the mass of silent kneeling worshippers,the mysterious music,thrilled,lifted his soul with a wonderful pain.Wolfe forgot himself,forgot the new life he was going to live,the mean terror gnawing underneath.
The voice of the speaker strengthened the charm;it was clear,feeling,full,strong.An old man,who had lived much,suffered much;whose brain was keenly alive,dominant;whose heart was summer-warm with charity.He taught it to-night.He held up Humanity in its grand total;showed the great world-cancer to his people.Who could show it better?He was a Christian reformer;he had studied the age thoroughly;his outlook at man had been free,world-wide,over all time.His faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages;his fiery zeal guided vast schemes by which the Gospel was to be preached to all nations.
How did he preach it to-night?In burning,light-laden words he painted Jesus,the incarnate Life,Love,the universal Man:words that became reality in the lives of these people,--that lived again in beautiful words and actions,trifling,but heroic.Sin,as he defined it,was a real foe to them;their trials,temptations,were his.His words passed far over the furnace-tender's grasp,toned to suit another class of culture;they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue.He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that had never glared with hunger,and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake.In this morbid,distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he had failed.
Eighteen centuries ago,the Master of this man tried reform in the streets of a city as crowded and vile as this,and did not fail.His disciple,showing Him to-night to cultured hearers,showing the clearness of the God-power acting through Him,shrank back from one coarse fact;that in birth and habit the man Christ was thrown up from the lowest of the people:his flesh,their flesh;their blood,his blood;tempted like them,to brutalize day by day;to lie,to steal:the actual slime and want of their hourly life,and the wine-press he trod alone.
Yet,is there no meaning in this perpetually covered truth?If the son of the carpenter had stood in the church that night,as he stood with the fishermen and harlots by the sea of Galilee,before His Father and their Father,despised and rejected of men,without a place to lay His head,wounded for their iniquities,bruised for their transgressions,would not that hungry mill-boy at least,in the back seat,have "known the man"?That Jesus did not stand there.
Wolfe rose at last,and turned from the church down the street.
He looked up;the night had come on foggy,damp;the golden mists had vanished,and the sky lay dull and ash-colored.He wandered again aimlessly down the street,idly wondering what had become of the cloud-sea of crimson and scarlet.The trial-day of this man's life was over,and he had lost the victory.
