CHAPTER XXVII
Oneevening late in March Joyce was coming out from the Bible School on the way to her train. She had omitted the second class that evening because she had papers to correct when she got home and it would keep her up very late if she waited until the late train.
As she came into the street a gust of wind caught her hat and flung it along the pavement. She darted out after it, and after quite a race captured it, but not till several large drops of rain had fallen in her face. She turned to hurry toward the station. It was not a long walk, and she usually preferred to do it on foot rather than to wait for trolleys, which were few and far between on that side street. But it was all too evident that a storm was upon her. Dust and papers and litter were being blown along in the gutter, and the wind lifted in wild swoops and banged signs and shutters and any loose object in sight. People hurried to cover, umbrellas were raised and lowered quickly, or the wind seized them and turned them inside out. People in automobiles hurriedly fastened on side curtains, and the street was almost deserted in a trice.
Joyce turned to see if a car was coming, but none was in sight. She held her hat, and ducking her head, hurried on as fast as she could fly, but at the second corner the wind took her and almost tore her from the sidewalk. It was with difficulty she regained her footing and huddled by some steps with her hand on a building to steady her. Then the rain fell in torrents, and she turned and scurried blindly into an open doorway a few feet away.
Other people had taken refuge there also, they were crowding in and Joyce was pushed with the throng inside the door, not knowing what kind of a place she was entering. But there were other women in the company, caught in the storm as was she, so she was not frightened. Before she had opportunity to look around and know where she was a burst of song broke about her:
“Free from the law! O happy condition!Jesus hath bled and there is remission!Cursed by the law, and bruised by the fall,Christ hath redeemed us once for all.“Once for all, O sinner, receive it!Once for all, O brother, believe it!Cling to the cross, the burden will fall,Christ hath redeemed us once for all.”
“Free from the law! O happy condition!Jesus hath bled and there is remission!Cursed by the law, and bruised by the fall,Christ hath redeemed us once for all.“Once for all, O sinner, receive it!Once for all, O brother, believe it!Cling to the cross, the burden will fall,Christ hath redeemed us once for all.”
“Free from the law! O happy condition!Jesus hath bled and there is remission!Cursed by the law, and bruised by the fall,Christ hath redeemed us once for all.
“Free from the law! O happy condition!
Jesus hath bled and there is remission!
Cursed by the law, and bruised by the fall,
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.
“Once for all, O sinner, receive it!Once for all, O brother, believe it!Cling to the cross, the burden will fall,Christ hath redeemed us once for all.”
“Once for all, O sinner, receive it!
Once for all, O brother, believe it!
Cling to the cross, the burden will fall,
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.”
It was a religious meeting of some sort, right there in the heart of the city!
She pressed in at last where she could stand behind the last row of chairs next to the aisle and see the platform. A piano was there and a girl playing the hymn. A young man was playing on a cornet, and there were singers and some men seated in chairs behind a low desk table.
She forgot that she was missing her train in her deep interest in the meeting, and her own voice joined eagerly in the old hymn she had known ever since she could remember:
“Now we are free—there’s no condemnation,Jesus provides a perfect salvation:‘Come unto me,’ oh, hear His sweet call,Come, and He saves us, once for all.”
“Now we are free—there’s no condemnation,Jesus provides a perfect salvation:‘Come unto me,’ oh, hear His sweet call,Come, and He saves us, once for all.”
“Now we are free—there’s no condemnation,
Jesus provides a perfect salvation:
‘Come unto me,’ oh, hear His sweet call,
Come, and He saves us, once for all.”
Her eyes swept over the congregation. Men and women and children were there, people of plain dress, mostly, some young giddy children of the street, some old men in worn garments, a few tired-looking women, not many mighty. Back by the door, caught as herself in thestorm were a few better-dressed people, in luxurious furs and velvets, people obviously amused at their surroundings, as they would have been equally amused if they had dropped into an opium joint for the moment, or a travelling circus, or a Hindoo temple, or any other alien environment.
But Joyce felt that she had dropped in on home and her heart went out in the song:
“‘Children of God,’ oh, glorious calling,Surely His grace will keep us from falling:Passing from death to life at His call,Blessed salvation once for all.”
“‘Children of God,’ oh, glorious calling,Surely His grace will keep us from falling:Passing from death to life at His call,Blessed salvation once for all.”
“‘Children of God,’ oh, glorious calling,
Surely His grace will keep us from falling:
Passing from death to life at His call,
Blessed salvation once for all.”
The congregation rustled into their seats with the closing chorus and gave Joyce a full view of the people on the platform. A man with a good voice that could be heard out in the street was speaking now. He said:
“Before you go home I want you to listen to somebody else a moment. A dear brother came to me tonight wanting to tell me what Christ had done for him, and I have asked him if he will tell you what he told me. He says he is not a public speaker, but when I put it to him that he might help somebody else he consented.”
Some one stepped to the front of the platform and began to speak. A man just in front of Joyce rose up at that instant and put on his overcoat, and she could not see the platform for a moment, but the voice rang into her soul like a song of long ago.
“I don’t like to talk about myself,” said the speaker, “never did, but when your leader showed me a verse in my new Bible that said: ‘If thou confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!’ I had to do what he asked, because Ibelieve, and I want toconfess.”
Joyce’s heart stood still with wonder and then wentflying on in great glad leaps and bounds. There could not be two voices like that one. She stretched her neck to see, and when the man ahead of her sat down, there was Darcy Sherwood standing on the platform, with a new grave look upon his face, and he was saying the most wonderful thing:
“I’ve been a sinner all my life, but I never knew it until one day God sent a woman to look into my eyes and ask me what I was doing. I was in the bootlegging business then and doing pretty well. It had never occurred to me that there was anything like what you’d call sin about it. But it began to seem as if somehow God had got into that woman’s eyes and was looking at me. I saw that the breaking of the law of the land that had been made for the good of the land was a sin. I was a law-breaker and I was a sinner. And somehow that sin grew until it was the heaviest thing I had to carry around.
“I gave up bootlegging right away that night, but somehow that didn’t seem to make any difference. The sin was there just the same and it grew heavier and heavier on my soul. I never knew I had a soul before that.
“I heard a Bible story read long ago about a blind man, and there was one verse I always remembered. It said: ‘If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, we see; therefore your sin remaineth.’
“I began to see that was just like me. I had always prided myself on seeing what was right and doing it. I had been a law to myself. But now I saw that was all wrong. I had no right to make my own laws. There had to be somebody wiser than I who could make the laws for everybody.
“I bought a Bible and began to read, and presentlyI began to see that there was something else back of it all that I hadn’t got at all yet. There was something bigger than federal laws. I had broken the law of the land and I could go and pay the penalty of that and wipe it out, but there was a higher law, a law of the universe, that my spirit had been breaking, and I didn’t see any way to wipe out that debt, pay that penalty. In fact, I didn’t know that higher law, and how was I to keep from breaking it?
“Then one day I came on a verse that said: ‘And this is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his son Jesus Christ.’
“There it was! I hadn’t been doing that, and I was a sinner. I could see how God would be very angry with me about that. God, to be a God, holy and good and all that a real God would be, and I a little creature setting up myself to not believe on Him! It really seemed a reasonable offense. As I thought about it, it seemed greater than killing anybody, or robbing a bank, or forging, or any of the things we count sins in the world. It seemed—well—so contemptible in me. And the more I felt it, the more I didn’t like the feeling, and I kept on reading my Bible.
“My Bible is a pretty nice kind of a Bible. I suppose you all know about it. It is called a Scofield Bible and it has little explanations and notes here and there that lead you on and that let you in on the meaning of a word in the original Hebrew or Greek, and make it a lot plainer to a beginner like me. By and by, after I had worried about my sin a lot, I found that I didn’t need to worry at all—that my sin had all been prepared for, and the penalty paid; that Jesus Christ had set me free from thelaw of sin and death, and all I had to do was accept my pardon and go out unburdened.
“Well, there isn’t much more to tell. I took it. You better believe I did! If you had been as unhappy as I was you wouldn’t have wasted a minute in taking a pardon like that. Why don’t you, by the way, if you never have? It pays. I’m here to tell you it paysabove everything else I’ve ever tried. If you don’t see it, just try it anyway, and you’ll find out.”
The audience rose to join in the closing hymn, and during that and the benediction Joyce’s heart was in a tumult of joy. She could not see the platform because the two men who stood in front of her were unusually tall, and some people had come in and were standing in the aisle beside her, crowding her from her position, but the instant the benediction was over she set herself to get up that aisle somehow. However, she might as well have attempted to throw herself out to sea when the tide was coming in. It was impossible to make any progress, and finally she slipped into the back seat and decided to wait. She must see Darcy at any risk, no matter if she lost the next train. She must tell him how glad she was!
There was a crowd around the platform. Likely people had come up to speak to him. His words rang over again in her heart as she waited, her eyes lighted with a great joy. At last the crowd thinned and she managed to work her way through and get to the front, but as she did so she saw several men going out a door back of the platform, and when she arrived there was but one man left up there, seemingly a janitor, picking up the books. Her heart sank.
“Oh, can you tell me where the speakers have gone?I must see one of them a minute, that last man, Mr. Sherwood!” she cried eagerly.
“Him? Oh, he went while they was singin’, lady, hed to ketch a train. I showed him the way to the station. Good, wa’n’t he? Beats all what the Lord does when He gets a chance at a soul—”
But Joyce had gone, down the aisle with swift steps, out into the street where it was still raining briskly, and the water pouring along the gutter in deep angry tides. She paid no heed. She fled along on winged feet, across the water, down another block; wet and breathless, she arrived at last at the station.
She did not glance at the clock to see if she had missed her train; she hurried out to the gates, and scanned every entrance to a train, but the man was just closing the gate and slipping down the sign for the New York express, which was moving away in the distance, and there was no other train sign up except her own, the last one out to Silverton that night. She glanced at the clock. There were three minutes before it left. She cast a despairing glance around. He was probably gone on that train to New York and she had missed her chance of telling him how glad she was. She must go home of course. She would be in a terrible predicament if she missed that train, and had to stay in the station all night, for she had no money for lodging and would not have known where to go if she had. And there were her examination papers.
The guard had his hand on the gate and his eye on the clock. She hurried through the gates and onto the train, sinking into a seat just as the train began to move, and feeling a rush of bitter disappointment so deep she could hardly restrain the tears.
Yet beneath it all, as she put her head down on her hand and tried to control her feelings, there was a deep gladness. Her prayers had been answered. Darcy had found the way home. The horror of that night in the cemetery was all cleared away. She had her friend once more, whether he ever knew it or not.
Afterwards, while the wheels were turning in a drowsy tune, and the sleepy passengers, with closed eyes, were trying to snatch a bit of rest on the way, her heart woke up and began to tell over to her every word that he had spoken, every precious look that showed his heart was changed, every intonation of the voice she had known so long. And to think the Lord had used her to make him listen to God’s voice! Oh, it was too dear, too wonderful!
The look of glory stayed on her face the next morning as she came blithely through the hall at school and met the young professor.
“You look as though you had fallen heir to a fortune,” he said sourly, as though he begrudged her her happy heart.
“Why, I have,” she said brightly and smiled.
“Can’t you share it?” he said wistfully.
“I’m afraid not,” she said gently. “It wouldn’t share. You wouldn’t understand.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t?” he said crossly.
“Oh,” she tried to explain. “It’s just—that I’ve heard from home.” Her eyes were all alight.
“Oh!” he said rudely, and turned away.
“There’s another man in Meadow Brook,” he told himself gloomily. “I must do something about this right away. I’m a fool, but I can’t help it.”
At recess time he entered Joyce’s classroom with a smile and handed her a newspaper still in its wrapper.
“Here’s a paper from Meadow Brook that just came in the mail. I thought perhaps it might interest you. There’s a boy in High School there who persists in thinking that I’m interested in their baseball team, and every time they win a game I get a sheaf of papers. Of course they don’t interest me. I hardly remember the names of people there any more. I was there so short a time.”
Joyce thanked him and put the paper in her desk for a leisure moment, going on with the blackboard exercise she was writing. Harrington was disappointed. He had hoped she would open the paper in his presence, and he might perhaps get some clue to her interest in Meadow Brook, but she was as cool and disinterested as a lily. Well, he must find a way to keep her in his company, there was no other way. It was against all his principles to be too attentive until he felt she was worthy of his position, but there seemed to be no other way, with her. It was perhaps, after all, a proof that she was really worth while that she held herself aloof. Or could it possibly be subtlety? No, he decided not. Her religion was genuine, and that would preclude subtlety. Well, at least her method had shown him his own heart, and now he must find a way to win out, for it was getting toward spring and he must have this matter settled before he went away on his vacation. He had an eye to another larger school with better pay. It would be an advantage to him to have it known that he was engaged to a personable young woman. It was a wealthy community, where he was hoping to be called, and Joyce would shine in such society with a little tutoring from him, always providing of course that he could rid her of her ridiculous fanaticism.