The Seeker | Page 4

pettings, his mind moved through an incident of that early ministry. Clear in his memory were certain passages of fire from the sermon. In the little log church at Edom he had felt the spirit burn in him and he had movingly voiced its warnings of that dread place where the flames forever blaze, yet never consume; where cries ever go up for one drop of water to cool the parched tongues of those who sought not God while they lived. He had told of one who died--one that the world called good, a moral man--but not a Christian; one who had perversely neglected the way of life. How, on his death-bed, this one had called in agony for a last glass of water, seeming to know all at once that he would now be where no drop of water could cool him through all eternity.
So effective had been his putting of this that a terrified throng came forward at his call for converts.
The next morning he had ridden away from Edom toward Felton Falls to preach there. A mile out of town he had been accosted by a big, bearded man who had yet a singularly childish look--who urged that he come to his cabin to minister to a sick friend. He knew the fellow for one that the village of Edom called "daft" or "queer," yet held to be harmless--to be rather amusing, indeed, since he could be provoked to deliver curious harangues upon the subject of revealed religion. He remembered now that the man's face had stared at him from far back in the church the night before--a face full of the liveliest terror, though he had not been among those that fled to the mercy-seat. Acceding to the man's request, he followed him up a wooded path to his cabin. Dismounting and tying his horse, he entered and, turning to ask where the sick man was, found himself throttled in the grasp of a giant.
He was thrust into an inner room, windowless and with no door other than the one now barred by his chuckling captor. And here the Reverend Allan Delcher had lain three days and two nights captive of a madman, with no food and without one drop of water.
From the other side of the log partition his captor had declared himself to be the keeper of hell. Even now he could hear the words maundered through the chinks: "Never got another drop of water for a million years and still more, and him a burning up and a roasting up, and his tongue a lolling out, all of a sizzle. Now wasn't that fine--because folks said he'd likely gone crazy about religion!"
Other times his captor would declare himself to be John the Baptist making straight the paths in the wilderness. Again he would quote passages of scripture, some of them hideous mockeries to the tortured prisoner, some strangely soothing and suggestive.
But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident, they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go with his captor's. His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity had been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted that ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of divine retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of heterodoxy. Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of him; only, as once averred a plain parishioner, "He seemed to bear down on hell jest a _lee-tle_ less continuously."
As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was set forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a little time after the father's release from the maniac's cabin. She had grown to womanhood submitting meekly to an iron rule; but none the less betraying an acute repugnance for certain doctrines preached by her father. It seemed to the old man a long way to look back; and then a long way to come forward again, past the death of his girl-wife while their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that child's revolt, in her thirty-first year. Dumbly, dutifully, had she submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness. Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the monstrous thing. He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing good-for-nothing who had that winter given singing lessons in the village.
Only once after that had he looked upon her face--the face of