THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE (6 page)

It hadn’t reached to his wilderness home. It was
always
depression there. It was something he had expected, and it didn’t bother him. It was only astonishing that it had been lifted so suddenly and so fully in his case. Instead of just taking his money as something that would make him independent for life, something that he was to absorb in his own selfish plans and pursuits, why oughtn’t he to make that money work for others, in part at least? Perhaps that was why he had such an indifference toward trying to seek amusement for himself. Perhaps he was meant to enter into a scheme that would help others, and only through others could he really get the whole pleasure that his money was meant to give. Perhaps there was a business somewhere that he would buy or set up that would employ a lot of despairing ones. Almost every column of the paper had some story of a suicide or death or desperation of someone who was depressed because of business conditions. That was a terrible state of things. Why, there must be other people besides himself who had a little money. Why didn’t they think out a way to make that money work for others as well as themselves? Not just give it away, for then soon it would be gone, but keep it going in a continual circuit to make profit both for its owner and for those who were employed through it? Well, there must be a way. He would have to think it out.

He wished he had a few good, wise friends to talk this matter over with. He had come back into a world that seemed to be sick and sad and confused. He couldn’t remember that things had been this way when he went away. But he had been only a kid and perhaps didn’t understand. Still the papers spoke as if this was something comparatively new, this depression. Of course there had been more or less talk about it for the last year or two in the very few papers that had come his way, but he had not taken in the real purport of it. Living off that way alone gave one a selfish point of view.

There was just one man, as he thought it over, who might have some sane solution of this problem. It was a man he had met on his journey eastward. He had known him only for a day, but his whole attitude of life had made a deep impression upon him. His name was Rhoderick Steele, and he had come to know him in a somewhat dramatic fashion.

It was the second evening of Greg’s trip, and he was returning from the diner. As he reached his own section, he saw coming toward him an elderly man whom he recognized as the occupant of the drawing room section whose door was just beyond his own seat. The man’s face was ghastly, a blue look about his lips, and suddenly he put one hand to his heart as if he were in distress, reeled, and fell headlong in the aisle.

Greg was on his knees beside him instantly, lifting him in his arms, fanning him with his newspaper.

The porter came rushing from the other end of the car; people rose from their seats and offered help. Someone brought ice water. A flask of brandy was produced. A doctor appeared from another car. The porter brought a pillow and slipped it under the sick man’s head, and Greg lowered him gently upon it.

Greg stood beside the man while the doctor worked over him, watching the gray shadows gather over the haggard face, purple and gray under the eyes. He noticed the deathly pallor, the whiteness of the old lips. He knew this man was very near the end. He had the same look that old Luke had when he died. Strange, in spite of this man’s distinguished garments, he looked like old Luke. It came to Greg then that Death was no discriminator. He leveled all alike. This man was not immune because of his money and fine garments. The ashen look sat as desperately upon his well-groomed features as upon Luke’s stubbly old face.

Then the sick man had opened his eyes, as a quiver of pain shot across his face, and his look went around the group, frightened eyes searching for something, for hope, for someone to help. He read his doom in the doctor’s grave face. There was a convulsive twitch of his lips, and his eyes started on their quest again, coming to rest on Greg’s face.

“Get me a clergyman! Quick!” implored the dying man.

Greg gave a swift glance around at the faces of the men in the car. None of them looked like clergymen.

“I will!” he said and started away.

“Preacher right back in the private cah, sah! Second cah back!” murmured the porter as he hurried past with the glass of water and spoon the doctor had demanded.

Greg followed the motion of the porter’s head toward the end of the train, going with long strides. He burst into the luxurious quiet of the private car, shocking its well-trained attendants.

“Is there a preacher here? A dying man wants him quick!”

The attendants barred his way and eyed this strangely garbed young westerner coldly, but a young man rose from a chair by the window in the room just beyond and appeared at once.

“Coming!” he said instantly.

Greg gave him a quick appraising look and turned, satisfied. He wasn’t much older than himself, and he did not wear clerical garb, but there was a light in his blue eyes and a purpose in his kind, firm lips and chin that were entirely satisfactory. They did not stop for words.

The young minister knelt in the aisle with sympathetic eyes on the dying man.

“What can I do for you, brother?” he asked, and the man turned his anguished eyes toward him.

“I’m dying…and I’m a sinner—a very…
great
…
sinner
!” The last word came with another horrible grimace of pain.

“But you have a very great Savior!” said the minister in a confident voice.

“But…my
sins
!” cried the man.

“He took your sins on Himself. He’s paid the penalty for them. Do you believe, brother? Will you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior?”

“I do! I will,” said the hoarse, waning voice solemnly, his eyes fixed eagerly on the face of the young clergyman.

“Then He accepts you for His own. His Word says so: ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Just rest down on that like a pillow, brother, and you’ll find it mighty sweet. Shall we pray?”

The sick man nodded, and the younger man bent his head and prayed, bringing the dying soul close to the throne of God and committing him to the care of his Savior. It was such a prayer as any soul might be glad to have uttered beside his dying bed. The other passengers in the car listened reverently, more than one wiping a furtive tear.

Gregory Sterling had stood at one side with his head bowed. He had taken in every word of the message, and his heart was more stirred than it had ever been before. His mother had been a Christian and had read him many Bible stories and taught him to pray, but since her death, he had scarcely thought of God except bitterly, that He should have taken away his mother and home and left him to battle alone in the world. Now, however, God was suddenly put in a new light. It had never seemed before that God cared anything about human beings unless it might be to torment them. He studied the earnest face of the young preacher, watched the light of faith playing over his expressive features, took note of the strength in his face, the sweetness of expression that yet was not weakness, and drank in every word. At the prayer, he bowed his own head and thought to himself wistfully, “I would like to know God as well as that. If God is a God like that, He would be worth knowing and trusting.”

When the prayer was finished, the sick man drew a deep sigh, and with a voice that was suddenly quite clear and strong so that all who were near him could hear even above the sound of the moving train, said, “Thank you, sir! Now I can die trusting in your Savior!”

“And yours,” added the young minister.

A light broke over the dying face.

“And mine!”

Then the voice died down to a whisper.

“I’d like…to do something…for you. But I guess…there…isn’t time. I’ll ask Him”—the voice flickered lower—”when I get”—the voice refused to finish, and the man lifted a weak hand with an upward motion—”up…there!” The lips formed the words, and the dying eyes looked up. Then suddenly another attack came, and in a breath the man was gone.

Kind hands carried the dead man into the little drawing room where but a short hour before he had sat in apparent health. They laid him on the bed that the porter had quickly prepared. The doctor had asked the patient his name and address while Greg was gone for the minister. Telegrams were sent to his relatives and the undertaker at the next station. Presently the car settled back into its normal life again, demanding berths to be made up, while some sought to change their reservations to another car, and the world whirled on without the pompous gentleman who had been one of their number a little while ago. Yet it could not be that they would ever forget that death scene and the words that had been spoken there. It somehow put a new dignity into life, a new hope into death.

But the minister had touched Greg on the shoulder.

“Friend,” he said with a warm smile in his eyes, “suppose you and I sit in there with him till somebody comes to take charge. Wouldn’t it be rather decent, don’t you think? If he were our father, we’d be pleased to have someone do that, wouldn’t we?”

Greg assented, and they went in and sat down on the long couch opposite the sheeted figure, but somehow Greg had a feeling that it was not Death but God who was presiding over that little room.

They talked together, and Greg began to see that here was a rare man that had come to him. Whether he ever saw this man again after they reached their destination or not, he would always feel that here was someone to whose soul his soul was knit. When their vigil was ended a couple of hours later at a stop along the way and an undertaker took charge for the family of the dead man, the handclasp of both promised a real friendship between the two.

“Come back to my car in the morning and have breakfast with me,” the minister said, smiling.

Greg had looked down at himself and then at his new friend and became suddenly conscious of his attire.

“I’m not fit to go in a private car,” he said decidedly. “I’ve been in the wilderness for ten years, and I’m out of date.”

“What difference doest that make, friend? I’m the only passenger aboard that car, and it isn’t my car either. It’s just loaned to me. An old classmate of mine in college owns it. He’s out in California, about to sail for the Orient, and his car was being sent home. When he found I was coming this way, he offered it to me. That’s the story. Come and share my temporary luxury. He said I might bring as many of my friends as I chose.”

So Greg promised to come and went back to his section to bed. But tired as he was, he had to lie awake and think over the happenings of the evening, living over the deathbed scene, seeing again the flash of assurance in the eyes of his new friend as he pointed out those clear directions for salvation.

In the morning, Greg discovered a barber on the train and came forth from his hands much improved. He was beginning to get wise to the ways of the civilized world once more and very self-conscious about his own discrepancies.

However, he wore his faded khaki with an ease acquired from long habit of not having to think about public opinion, and when he came forth from the hands of a high-class barber, more than one passenger looked after him with an approving eye. He certainly was a good-looking young giant, and he did not seem to be in the least aware of it, which made him all the more attractive.

He spent the most of the next two days in the private car or sitting on its observation platform in pleasant converse with his new friend. They talked of many things. Of the West and the South and the East. Of world affairs in Europe and over here, of the significance of situations political, commercial, and spiritual, and through it all a book figured impressively. Not the tiny testament that Rhoderick Steele had used when he pointed the dying man to Jesus Christ, but one slightly larger, worn and limp and full of finely written notes on the margins. The Bible! Gregory Sterling was amazed to find how interesting the Bible became under the magic reading of this newfound friend.

Greg had not been without literature in his exile. His school days and his early home life had filled him with a love of reading. Little by little, he had acquired a small library. A volume or two that he loved when he was a child,
Robinson Crusoe, Lorna Doone
, and
John Halifax, Gentleman
He had bought them through a mail-order catalogue. Then he had added a little history and biography and some essays and poetry. Longfellow and Tennyson and a volume of Browning, because the advertisement had quoted two lines of a poem he liked about a star, one of his own stars. A few scattering volumes of Scott and Dickens, Macaulay’s
Essays
, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
It wasn’t a bad collection, but of course not up to date. Modern literature had not yet arrived when Greg, fresh from high school, had taken his far journey. So he had gathered what attracted him from advertisements and from his memory of familiar titles. Not much, but they gave him a background and a bond of intellectual sympathy with Rhoderick Steele who had read every one of his books and loved them. They made him feel at home at once.

For Greg had read his small collection over and over many times in his long, lonely life, rainy days and winter evenings, and knew his books almost by heart. He had left them in the cabin on their rough board shelf. “For some poor devil who doesn’t know what to do with himself sometimes!” he had told himself, reflecting that he was now able to replace them all and add new treasures to his store.

But now as they grew more intimate, Rhoderick Steele began to open up the treasures of the Bible to him, and Greg listened with amazement as prophecy was brought forth and its fulfillment pointed out both in the past and in present-day happenings.

Greg wasn’t up on current events. He took a newspaper once a week, but the news was stale when it reached him and seemed unreal to him out there on the hillside. But now he began to hear what was happening out in the world to which he was speeding, and he felt like a child listening to a fairy tale.