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Chautauqua Girls at Home, The

<h2>CHAPTER XXIII.</h2> <h3>THE STRANGE STORY.</h3> JUDGE ERSKINE was in his library, pacing slowly back and forth, his forehead lined with heavy wrinkles, and his face wearing the expression of one involved in deep and troubled thought. He had just come home from the evening meeting, the last meeting of the series that had held the attention of so many hearts during four weeks of harvest time. Judge Erskine had been a silent and attentive listener. All through the solemnities of the sermon, that seemed written for his sake, and to point right at him, he had never moved his keen, steady eyes away from the preacher's face. The text of that sermon he was not likely to forget. He had looked it up, and read it, with its connections, the moment he reached the privacy of his library. "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." That was the text. Judge Erskine said it over and over to his own soul. It was true; it fitted his condition as precisely as though it had been written for him. The harvest that would tell for eternity had been reaped all around him. He had looked, and listened, and resolved; and still he stood outside, ungarnered. Moreover, one portion of the solemn sermon fitted him, also. When Dr. Dennis spoke of those who had let this season pass, unhelped, because they had an inner life that would not bear the gaze of the public, because they were not willing to drag out their past and cast it away from them, Judge Erskine had started and fixed a stern glance on the preacher. Did he know his secret, that had been hidden away with such persistent care? What scoundrel could have enlightened him? This, only for a moment; then he settled back and realized his folly. Dr. Dennis knew nothing of himself or his past. Then came that other awfully solemn thought—there was One who did? Could it be that his voice had instructed the pastor what special point to make in that sermon, with such emphasis and power? Was the keen eye of the Eternal God pointing his finger, now, at him, and saying; "Thou art the man?" He knew all this was true; he knew that the work of the past month had greatly moved him; he knew on the evening when the text had been, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian," that he had felt himself almost persuaded; he knew then, as he did now, that but one thing stood in the way of his entire persuasion. As he walked up and down his library on this evening, he felt fully persuaded in his own mind that the time had arrived when he was being called on persistently for a decision. More than that, he felt that the decision was to be not only for time, but for eternity; that he must settle the question of his future then and there. He had locked the door after him, as he came into the library, with a sort of grim determination to settle the question before he stepped into the outside world again. How would it be settled? He did not know himself. He did not dare to think how it would end; he simply felt that the conflict must end. Meantime, Ruth was up-stairs on her knees, praying for her father. Her heart felt very heavy. She had prayed for this father with all her soul; prayed, with what she felt was a degree of faith, that this evening, at the meeting, he might settle the question at issue, and settle it forever. She had felt a bitter, and almost an overwhelming, disappointment that the meeting closed and left him just where he had stood for a month. There seemed nothing left to do. She had not spared her words, her entreaties. She had gotten bravely over her fears of approaching her father. But now it seemed to her that there was nothing left to say. She could still pray, and it was with a half-despairing cry that she fell on her knees, realizing in her very soul that only the power of God could convert her father. Into the midst of this longing, clinging cry for help there came a knock. "Judge Erskine would like to have you come to the library for a few minutes, if you have not retired." This was Katie Flinn's message. And Ruth, as she swiftly set about obeying the summons, said: "Oh, Katie, pray for father!" for among those who, during the last few weeks, had learned to pray was Katie Flinn. Poor Katie, with the simple child-like faith and loving heart which she brought to the service, was destined to be a shining light in a dark world; and the glory thereof would sparkle forever in Flossy Shipley's crown. Judge Erskine turned as his daughter opened the door, and motioned her to a seat. Then he continued his walk. Something in his face hushed into silence the words that were on her lips; but presently he stopped before her, and his voice startled her with its strangeness. "My daughter, I have something to tell you, and something to ask you. I shall have to cause you great grief and shame, and I want to begin first by asking you to forgive your father." Ruth felt her face growing pale. What could he mean? Had she not always looked up to him as above most men, even Christian men?—faultless in his business transactions, blameless in his life? She attempted to speak, and yet felt that she did not know what to say. Apparently he expected no word from her; for he went on hurriedly: "You have, during these few weeks past, shown a sort of interest in me, that I never saw manifested before. I have reason to think that you have concluded, lately, that the most earnest desire you can have concerning your father, is to see him a Christian man? I can conscientiously tell you that I have felt the necessity for this experience as I never did before; that I realize its importance, and that I want it; yet there is something in the way, something that I must do, and confess, and abide by for the future, that I shrink from more on your account than my own. My child, do you want this thing enough to endure disgrace and humiliation, and a cross, heavy and hopeless, all your life?" "Father," she said, half rising, and looking at him with a bewildered air, a vague doubt of his sanity, and a half fear of his presence, creeping into her heart, "what can you possibly mean? How can disgrace, or cross-bearing, or trouble of any sort, be connected with you? I cannot understand you." "I know you can not. You think I am talking wildly, and you are half afraid of me; but I am perfectly sane. I wish, with all my soul, that a certain portion of my life could be called a wild dream of a disordered brain; but it is <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'solmnly'">solemnly</ins> true. Ruth, if I come out before the world and avow myself a Christian man, with the determination to abide by the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ, it involves my bringing to this house a woman who will have to be recognized as my wife, and a girl who will have to share with you as my daughter; a woman whom you will have to call mother, and a girl who is your sister. Are you equal to that?" Every trace of blood left Ruth Erskine's face. Her father watched her narrowly, with his hand touching the bell-rope; it seemed as if she must faint; but she motioned his hand away. "Don't ring," were the first words she said; "I am not going to faint. Father, tell me what you mean." The actual avowal made, and the fact established that his daughter was able to bear it, and to still keep the story between themselves, seemed to quiet Judge Erskine. His intense and almost uncontrollable excitement subsided; the wild look in his eyes calmed, and, drawing a chair beside his daughter, he began in a low steady voice to tell her the strange story: "Acts that involve a lifetime of trouble can be told in a few words, Ruth. When your mother died I was almost insane with grief; I can't tell you about that time; I was young and I was gay, and full of plans, and aims, and intentions, in all of which she had been involved. Then came the sudden blank, and it almost unsettled my reason. There was a young woman boarding at the same house where I went, who was kind to me, who befriended me in various ways, and tried to help me to endure my sorrow. She grew to be almost necessary to my endurance of myself. After a little I married her. I did not take this step till I found that my friendship with her, or, rather hers with me, was compromising her in the eyes of others. Let me hurry over it, Ruth. We lived together but a few weeks; then I was obliged to go abroad. Away from old scenes and associations, and plunged into business cares, I gradually recovered my usual tone of mind. But it was not till I came home again that I discovered what a fatal blunder I had made. That young woman had not a single idea in common with my plans and aims in life; she was ignorant, uncultured, and, it seemed to me, unendurable. How I ever allowed myself to be such a fool I do not know. But up to this time, I had at least, not been a villain. I didn't desert her, Ruth; I made a deliberate compromise with her; she was to take her child and go away, hundreds of miles away, where I would not be likely ever to come in contact with her again, and I was to take your mother's child and go where I pleased. Of course I was to support her, and I have done so ever since; that was eighteen years ago; she is still living, and the daughter is living. I have always been careful to keep them supplied with money; I have tried to have done for the girl what money could do; but I have never seen their faces since that time. Now, Ruth, you know the miserable story. There are a hundred details that I could give you, that perhaps would lead you to have more pity for your father, if it did not lead you to despise him more for his weakness. It is hard to be despised by one's child. I tell you truly, Ruth, that the bitterest of this bitterness is the thought of you." The proud man's lip quivered and his voice trembled, just here. Poor Ruth Erskine! "I am willing to do anything," she had said to Marion, not two hours before; and here was a thing, the possibility of which she had never dreamed, staring her in the face, waiting to be done, and she felt that she could not do it. Oh, why was it necessary? "Why not let everything be as it has been?" said that wily villain Satan, whispering in her ears. "They were false vows; they are better broken than kept. He does not love her, though he said he did. And how can we ever endure it, the shame, the disgrace, the horrid explanations, our name, the Erskine name, on everybody's lips, common loafers sneering at us? And then to have the family changed; myself to be only a back figure; a mother who is not, and never was my mother, taking my place; and the other one— Oh, it can not be possible that we must endure this! There must be some other way. They are doubtless contented, why could it not remain as it is?" As if to answer her unspoken thoughts, Judge Erskine suddenly said: "I have canvassed the entire subject in all its bearings, you may be sure of that. I am living a lie. I am saying my wife is dead, when a woman to whom before God I gave that name is living; I am saying that I have but one child, when there is another to whom I am as certainly father as I am to you. I am leaving them, nay, obliging them, to live a daily lie. I have assured myself to a certainty that one sin can never be atoned for by another sin; there is but one atonement; and the Source of all help says, 'If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins; and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.' I know there is only one way of cleansing, daughter." "Get thee behind me, Satan." The only perfect life gave that sentence once, not alone for Himself; thank God he has many a time since enabled his weak children of the flesh to repeat it in triumph. The grace came then and there to Ruth Erskine. She rose up from her chair, and going over to her father did what she had never remembered doing in her life before. She bent down and wound both arms around his neck and kissed him. Her voice was low and steady: "Father, don't let this, or anything earthly, stand between you and Christ. You are not a sinner above all others. It is only the interposing hand of God that has kept me from taking sinful vows upon my lips. Let us do just what is right. Send for them to come home, and I will try to be a daughter and a sister; and I will stand by you, and help you in every possible way. There are harder trials than ours will be, after all." It was his daughter who finally and utterly broke the proud, haughty heart. Judge Erskine bowed himself before her and sobbed like a child in the bitterness and the humiliation of his soul. "God bless you," he said, at last, in broken utterance. "There is an Almighty Saviour; I need nothing more than your words to convince me of the truth of that. If love to him can lead your heart to such forgiveness as this, what must his forgiveness be? Ruth, you have saved my soul; I will give up the struggle; I have tried to fight it out; I have tried to say that I could not; for my own sake, and for my own name, it seemed impossible. Then when I got beyond that, and felt that for myself, if I could have rest in the love of Christ, and could feel that he forgave me, I cared for nothing else. Then I said, 'I can not do this, for my child's sake; I can never plunge her into this depth of sin and shame.' Then, my daughter, there came to me a message from God, and of all those that could come to a miserable man like me, it was this: 'He that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.' Then I saw that I must be willing even to lose your love, to make you despise me; and that was the bitterest cup of all. But, thank God, he has spared me this. God bless you, my daughter." There was something almost terrible to Ruth, in seeing her cold, calm father so moved. She had never realized what awfully solemn things tears were till she saw them on her father's cheeks, and felt them falling hot on her head, from eyes so unused to weeping. The kisses she gave him were very soft and clinging—full of tender, soothing touches. Then father and daughter knelt together, and the long, long struggle with sin and pride and silence was concluded. Do you think this was a lasting victory for Ruth Erskine? You do not understand the power of "that old serpent, the Devil," if you can not think how he came to her again and again in the silence of her own room, even into the midst of her rejoicings over the newly-washed soul, even while the joy in heaven among the angels was still ringing out over her father, came whispering to her heart to say: "Oh, I can't, I can't. Think of it! The Erskines! How can we endure it? Is it possible that we must? Perhaps the woman would rather live as she is." As if that had anything to do with the question of right and wrong! The very next instant Ruth curled her lip sneeringly over her own folly. She never forgot that night, nor how the conflict waged. She tried to imagine herself saying "mother" to one who really had a nominal right to the title. Not that it was an unfamiliar word to her. The old aunt who had occupied the mother's place in the household since Ruth was a wee creature of two years, she had learned almost from the instincts of childhood to call "mamma." And as she grew older and was unused to any other name for Mrs. Wheeler, the widowed aunt, she toned it into the familiar and comfortable word "mother," and had always spoken to and of her in that name. Yet she knew very well how little the title meant to her. She had loved this old lady with a sort of pitying, patronizing love, realizing even very early in her life that she, herself, had more self-reliance, more executive ability, in her little finger, than was spread all over the placid lady who early learned that "Ruthie" was to do precisely as she pleased. Such a cipher was this same old lady in the household, that when a long lost son appeared on the surface, during Ruth's absence at Chautauqua, proving, sturdy old Californian as he was, to have a home and place for his mother, and a heart to take her with him, her departure caused scarcely a ripple in the well-ordered household of the Erskines. She had been its nominal head for eighteen years, but the real head who was absent at Chautauqua, had three or four perfectly trained servants, who knew their young mistress' will so well, that they could execute it in her absence as well as when she was present. So when Ruth took, in the eyes of everybody, the position that had really been hers so long, it made no sort of change in her plans or ways. And beyond a certain lingering tenderness when she spoke of her by that familiar title, "mother," there was no indication that the woman who had had so constant and intimate connection with her life was remembered. But this name applied to another, and that other, one whom she had never seen in her life, and who yet was actually to occupy the position of head of the household—her father's wife, in the eyes of society her mother, spoken of as such, herself asked, "How is your mother?" or "What does your mother think of this?" Would anyone dare to use that name to her? No one had so spoken of her aunt. They all knew she was only her aunt, though she chose to pet her by the use of that tender name. Could she bear all these things and a hundred others that would come up? "Marion," she said the next day as she chanced to meet that young lady on the street, "I have something to tell you. I want to call on you to witness that I shall never again be guilty of that vainglorious absurdity of saying that I am ready for anything. One can never know whether this is true or not; at least I am sure I never can. What I am to say in the future is simply, 'Lord, make me willing to do what there is for me to do this day.' Remember that in a few days you will understand what I mean." Then she went on. Marion pondered over it. She did not understand it at all. What trial could have come to Ruth that had brought her the knowledge of the weakness of her own heart? She wondered if it had also brought her peace. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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