The Seeker | Page 5

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 a
withered sprite, subdued by time. The hurt of that look was still fresh in
him, making his mind turn heavily, perhaps a little remorsefully, to the
two little boys asleep in the west bedroom. Had the seed of revolt been

in her, from his own revolt against his father? Would it presently bear
some ugly fruit in her sons?
From a drawer in the table he took a little sheaf of folded sheets, and
read again the last letter that had come from her; read it not without
grim mutterings and oblique little jerks of the narrow old head, yet with
quick tender glows melting the sternness.
"You must not think I have ever regretted my choice, though every day
of my life I have sorrowed at your decision not to see me so long as I
stayed by my husband. How many times I have prayed God to remind
you that I took him for better or worse, till death should us part."
This made him mutter.
"Clayton has never in his life failed of kindness and gentleness to
me"--so ran the letter--"and he has always provided for us as well as a
man of his uncommon talents could."
Here the old man sniffed in fine contempt.
"All last winter he had quite a class to teach singing in the evening and
three day-scholars for the violin, one of whom paid him in hams.
Another offered to pay either in money or a beautiful portrait of me in
pastel. We needed money, but Clayton chose the portrait as a surprise
to me. At times he seems unpractical, but now he has started out in
business again--"
There were bitter shakings of the head here. Business! Standing in a
buggy at street-corners, jauntily urging a crowd to buy the magic
grease-eradicator, toothache remedy, meretricious jewelry, what not!
first playing a fiddle and rollicking out some ribald song to fetch them.
Business indeed! A pretty business!
"The boys are delighted with the Bibles you sent and learn a verse each
day. I have told them they may some day preach as you did if they will
be as good men as you are and study the Bible. They try to preach like
our preacher in the cunningest way. I wish you could see them. You

would love them in spite of your feeling against their father. I did what
you suggested to stimulate their minds about the Scriptures, but
perhaps the lesson they chose to write about was not very edifying. It
does not seem a pretty lesson to me, and I did not pick it out. They
heard about it at Sabbath-school and had their papers all written as a
surprise for me. Of course, Bernal's is very childish, but I think Allan's
paper, for a child of his age, shows a grasp of religious matters that is
truly remarkable. I shall keep them studying the Bible daily. I should
tell you that I am now looking forward with great joy to--"
With a long sigh he laid down the finely written sheet and took from
the sheaf the two papers she had spoken of. Then while the gale roared
without and shook his window, and while the bust of John Calvin
looked down at him from the book-case at his back, he followed his
two grandsons on their first incursion into the domain of speculative
theology.
He took first the paper of the older boy, painfully elaborated with heavy,
intricate capitals and headed "Elisha and the Wicked Children--by Mr.
Allan Delcher Linford, Esquire, aged nine years and six months."
* * * * *
"This lesson," it began, "is to teach us to love God and the prophets or
else we will likely get into trouble. It says Elisha went up from Bethel
and some children came out of the city and