The Seeker by Harry Leon Wilson

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THE SEEKER

by

HARRY LEON WILSON

Author of _The Spenders_
_The Lions of the Lord,_ etc.

Illustrated by Rose Cecil O'Neill

New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1904

[Illustration: "My dear, Bernal is saying good-bye!"]

TO

MY FRIEND

WILLIAM CURTIS GIBSON

"Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one
vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?"--Holy Writ.

"John and Peter and Robert and Paul--
God, in His wisdom, created them all.
John was a statesman and Peter a slave,
Robert a preacher and Paul was a knave.
Evil or good, as the case might be,
White or colored, or bond or free,
John and Peter and Robert and Paul--
God, in His wisdom, created them all."

The Chemistry of Character.

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE--The Age Of Fable

CHAPTER

I. How the Christmas Saint was Proved

II. An Old Man Faces Two Ways

III. The Cult of the Candy Cane

IV. The Big House of Portents

V. The Life of Crime Is Appraised and Chosen

VI. The Garden of Truth and the Perfect Father

VII. The Superlative Cousin Bill J.

VIII. Searching the Scriptures

IX. On Surviving the Idols We Build

X. The Passing of the Gratcher; and Another

XI. The Strong Person's Narrative

XII. A New Theory of a Certain Wicked Man

BOOK TWO--The Age of Reason

CHAPTER

I. The Regrettable Dementia of a Convalescent

II. Further Distressing Fantasies of a Clouded Mind

III. Reason Is Again Enthroned

IV. A Few Letters

V. "Is the Hand of the Lord Waxed Short?"

VI. In the Folly of His Youth

BOOK THREE--The Age of Faith

CHAPTER

I. The Perverse Behaviour of an Old Man and a Young Man

II. How a Brother Was Different

III. How Edom Was Favoured of God and Mammon

IV. The Winning of Browett

V. A Belated Martyrdom

VI. The Walls of St. Antipas Fall at the Third Blast

VII. There Entereth the Serpent of Inappreciation

VIII. The Apple of Doubt is Nibbled

IX. Sinful Perverseness of the Natural Woman

X. The Reason of a Woman Who Had No Reason

XI. The Remorse of Wondering Nancy

XII. The Flexible Mind of a Pleased Husband

XIII. The Wheels within Wheels of the Great Machine

XIV. The Ineffective Message

XV. The Woman at the End of the Path

XVI. In Which the Mirror Is Held Up to Human Nature

XVII. For the Sake of Nancy

XVIII. The Fell Finger of Calumny Seems to be Agreeably Diverted

XIX. A Mere Bit of Gossip

SCENES

BOOK ONE--The Village of Edom

BOOK TWO--The Same

BOOK THREE--New York

CHARACTERS

ALLAN DELCHER, a retired Presbyterian clergyman.

BERNAL LINFORD }
ALLAN LINFORD } his grandsons.

CLAYTON LINFORD, Their father, of the artistic temperament, and versatile.

CLYTEMNESTRA, Housekeeper for Delcher.

COUSIN BILL J., a man with a splendid past.

NANCY CREALOCK, A wondering child and woman.

AUNT BELL, Nancy's worldly guide, who, having lived in Boston, has
"broadened into the higher unbelief."

MISS ALVIRA ABNEY, Edom's leading milliner, captivated by Cousin Bill J.

MILO BARRUS, The village atheist.

THE STRONG PERSON, of the "Gus Levy All-star Shamrock Vaudeville."

CALEB WEBSTER, a travelled Edomite.

CYRUS BROWETT, a New York capitalist and patron of the Church.

MRS. DONALD WYETH, an appreciative parishioner of Allan Linford.

THE REV MR. WHITTAKER, a Unitarian.

FATHER RILEY, of the Church of Rome.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"'My dear, Bernal is saying good-bye!'" (Frontispiece)

"She could be made to believe that only he could protect her from the
Gratcher"

"They looked forward with equal eagerness to the day when he should
become a great and good man"

"He gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his"

* * * * *

BOOK ONE

The Age of Fable

[Illustration]

THE SEEKER

BOOK ONE--THE AGE OF FABLE

CHAPTER I

HOW THE CHRISTMAS SAINT WAS PROVED

The whispering died away as they heard heavy steps and saw a line of light
under the shut door. Then a last muffled caution from the larger boy on
the cot.

"Now, remember! There ain't any, but don't you let _on_ there ain't--else
he won't bring you a single thing!"

Before the despairing soul on the trundle-bed could pierce the vulnerable
heel of this, the door opened slowly to the broad shape of Clytemnestra.
One hand shaded her eyes from the candle she carried, and she peered into
the corner where the two beds were, a flurry of eagerness in her face,
checked by stoic self-mastery.

At once from the older boy came the sounds of one who breathes labouredly
in deep sleep after a hard day. But the littler boy sat rebelliously up,
digging combative fists into eyes that the light tickled. Clytemnestra
warmly rebuked him, first simulating the frown of the irritated.

"Now, Bernal! Wide awake! My days alive! You act like a wild Indian's
little boy. This'll _never_ do. Now you go right to sleep this minute,
while I watch you. Look how fine and good Allan is." She spoke low, not to
awaken the one virtuous sleeper, who seemed thereupon to breathe with a
more swelling and obtrusive rectitude.

"Clytie--now--_ain't_ there any Santa Claus?"

"Now what a sinful question _that_ is!"

"But _is_ there?"

"Don't he bring you things?"

"Oh, there _ain't_ any!" There was a sullen desperation in this, as of one
done with quibbles. But the woman still paltered wretchedly.

"Well, if you don't lie down and go to sleep quicker'n a wink I bet you
anything he won't bring you a single play-pretty."

There came an unmistakable blare of triumph into the busy snore on the
cot.

But the heart of the skeptic was sunk. This evasion was more
disillusioning than downright confession. A moment the little boy regarded
her, wholly in sorrow, with big eyes that blinked alarmingly. Then came
his last shot; the final bullet which the besieged warrior will sometimes
reserve for his own destruction. There could no longer be any pretense
between them. Bravely he faced her.

"Now--you just needn't try to keep it from me any longer! I _know_ there
ain't any--" One tensely tragic second he paused to gather himself--"_It's
all over town!_" There being nothing further to live for, he delivered
himself to grief--to be tortured and destroyed.

Clytie set the candle on the bureau and came to hover him. Within the
pressing arms and upon the proffered bosom he wept out one of those griefs
that may not be told--that only the heart can understand. Yet, when the
first passion of it was spent she began to reassure him, begging him not
to be misled by idle gossip; to take not even her own testimony, but to
wait and see what he would see. At last he listened and was a little
soothed. It appeared that Santa Claus was one you might believe in or
might not. Even Clytie seemed to be puzzled about him. He could see that
she overflowed with belief in him, yet he could not make her confess it in
plain straight words. The meat of it was that good children found things
on Christmas morning which must have been left by some one--if not by
Santa Claus, then by whom? Did the little boy believe, for example, that
Milo Barrus did it? He was the village atheist, and so bad a man that he
loved to spell God with a little g.

He mused upon this while his tears dried, finding it plausible. Of course
it couldn't be Milo Barrus, so it _must_ be Santa Claus. Was Clytie
certain some presents would be there in the morning? If he went directly
to sleep, she was.

Hereupon the larger boy on the cot, who had for some moments listened in
forgetful silence, became again virtuously asleep in a public manner.

But the littler boy must yet have talk. Could the bells of Santa Claus be
heard when he came?

Clytie had known some children, of exceptional merit, it was true, who
claimed to have heard his bells on certain nights when they had gone early
to sleep.

_Why_ would he never leave anything for a child that got up out of bed
and caught him at it? Suppose one had to get up for a drink.

Because it broke the charm.

But if a very, _very_ good child just _happened_ to wake up while he was
in the room, and didn't pay the least attention to him, or even look
sidewise or anything--

Even this were hazardous, it seemed; though if the child were indeed very
good all might not yet be lost.

"Well, won't you leave the light for me? The dark gets in my eyes."

But this was another adverse condition, making everything impossible. So
she chided and reassured him, tucked the covers once more about his neck,
and left him, with a final comment on the advantage of sleeping at once.

When the room was dark and Clytie's footsteps had sounded down the hall,
he called softly to his brother; but that wise child was now truly asleep.
So the littler boy lay musing, having resolved to stay awake and solve
the mystery once for all.

From wondering what he might receive he came to wondering if he were good.
His last meditation was upon the Sunday-school book his dear mother had
helped him read before they took her away with a new little baby that had
never amounted to much; before he and Allan came to Grandfather Delcher's
to live--where there was a great deal to eat. The name of the book was
"Ben Holt." He remembered this especially because a text often quoted in
the story said "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." He
had often wondered why Ben Holt should be considered an especially good
name; and why Ben Holt came to choose it instead of the goldpiece he found
and returned to the schoolmaster, before he fell sick and was sent away to
the country where the merry haymakers were. Of course, there were worse
names than Ben Holt. It was surely better than Eygji Watts, whose sanguine
parents were said to have named him with the first five letters they drew
from a hat containing the alphabet; Ben Holt was assuredly better than
Eygji, even had this not been rendered into "Hedge-hog" by careless
companions. His last confusion of ideas was a wondering if Bernal Linford
was as good a name as Ben Holt, and why he could not remember having
chosen it in preference to a goldpiece. Back of this, in his fading
consciousness was the high-coloured image of a candy cane, too splendid
for earth.

Then, far in the night, as it might have seemed to the little boy, came
the step of slippered feet. This time Clytie, satisfying herself that both
boys slept, set down her candle and went softly out, leaving the door
open. There came back with her one bearing gifts--a tall, dark old man,
with a face of many deep lines and severe set, who yet somehow shed
kindness, as if he held a spirit of light prisoned within his darkness, so
that, while only now and then could a visible ray of it escape through
the sombre eye or through a sudden winning quality in the harsh voice, it
nevertheless radiated from him sensibly at all times, to belie his
sternness and puzzle those who feared him.

Uneasy enough he looked now as Clytie unloaded him of the bundles and
bulky toys. In a silence broken only by their breathing they quickly
bestowed the gifts--some in the hanging stockings at the fire-place,
others beside each bed, in chairs or on the mantel.

Then they were in the hall again, the door closed so that they could
speak. The old man took up his own candle from a stand against the wall.

"The little one is like her," he said.

"He's awful cunning and bright, but Allan is the handsomest. Never in my
born days did I see so beautiful a boy."

"But he's like the father, line for line." There was a sudden savage
roughness in the voice, a sterner set to the shaven upper lip and
straight mouth, though he still spoke low. "Like the huckstering, godless
fiddle-player that took her away from me. What a mercy of God's he'll
never see her again--she with the saved and he--what a reckoning for him
when he goes!"

"But he was not bad to let you take them."

"He boasted to me that he'd not have done it, except that she begged him
with her last breath to promise it. He said the words with great maudlin
tears raining down his face, when my own eyes were dry!"

"How good if you can leave them both in the church, preaching the word
where you preached it so many years!"

"I misdoubt the father's blood in them--at least, in the older. But it's
late. Good night, Clytie--a good Christmas to you."

"More to you, Mr. Delcher! Good night!"

CHAPTER II

AN OLD MAN FACES TWO WAYS

His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red
carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study.
Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth.
Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp
cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers. A big, white-breasted
gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly
upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands
suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily
falling eye-lids.

He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing
backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real
presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call
of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the family
way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had been revolt in
him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own
daughter's revolt.

Again he dwelt in the days when he had preached with a hot passion such
truth as was his. For a long time, while the old clock ticked on the
mantel before him and the big cat purred or slept under his absent
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 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 said go up thou Baldhead.
They said it Twice one after the other and so Elisha got mad right away
and turned around and cursed them good in the name of the Lord and so 2
She Bears come along and et up 42 of them for Elisha was a holy prophet of
God and had not ought to of been yelled at. So of course the mothers would
Take on very much When they found their 42 Children et up but I think that
we had ought to learn from this that these 42 Little ones was not the
Elected. It says in our catchism God having out of his mere good pleasure
elected some to everlasting life. Now God being a Presbiterian would know
these 42 little ones had not been elected so they might as well be et up
by bears as anything else to show forth his honour and glory Forever Amen.
It should teach a Boy to be mighty carful about kidding old men unless he
is a Presbiterian. I spelled every word in this right.

"Mr. Allan Delcher Linford."

The second paper, which the old man now held long before him, was partly
printed and partly written with a lead-pencil, whose mark was now faint
and now heavy, as having gone at intervals to the writer's lips. As the
old man read, his face lost not a little of its grimness.

"BEARS

"It teaches the lord thy God is baldheaded. I ask my deer father what it
teeches he said it teeches who ever wrot that storry was baldheaded. He
says a man with thik long hair like my deer father would of said o let the
kids have their fun with old Elisha so I ask my deer mother who wrot this
lesson she said God wrot the holy word so that is how we know God is
baldheaded. It was a lot of children for only two 2 bears. I liked to of
ben there if the bears wold of known that I was a good child. mabe I cold
of ben on a high fense or up a tree. I climd the sor aple tree in our back
yard esy.

"By Bernal Linford, aged neerly 8 yrs."

Carefully he put back both papers with the mother's letter, his dark face
showing all its intricate net-work of lines in a tension that was both
pained and humorous.

Two fresh souls were given to his care to be made, please God, the means
of grace by which thousands of other souls might be washed clean of the
stain of original sin. Yet, if revolt was there--revolt like his
daughter's and like his own? Would he forgive as his own father had
forgiven, who had called him back after many years to live out a tranquil
old age on the fortune that father's father had founded? He mused long on
this. The age was lax--true, but God's law was never lax. If one would
revolt from the right, one must suffer. For the old man was one of the few
last of a race of giants who were to believe always in the Printed Word.

CHAPTER III

THE CULT OF THE CANDY CANE

When the littler boy looked fairly into the frosty gray of that Christmas
morning, the trailed banner of his faith was snatched once more aloft;
and in the breast of his complacent brother there swelled the conviction
that one does ill to flaunt one's skepticism, when the rewards of belief
are substantial and imminent. For before them was an array of gifts such
as neither had ever looked upon before, save as forbidden treasure of the
few persons whose immense wealth enables them to keep toy-shops.

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