CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10
Gray stayed up long into Sunday morning, praying and talking with a little group of converts who in the great experiences of their new life clung to the evangelist with a personal helplessness that made it impossible for him to leave them.
Virginia and her uncle left about eleven o’clock, and Rachel and Jasper Chase went with them as far as the avenue where Virginia lived. Dr. West had walked on a little way with them to his own home, and Rachel and Jasper had then gone on together to her mother’s.
Never had her beauty and her strength influenced Jasper Chase as tonight. While she was singing he saw and heard no one else. It was no secret between them that the heroine of Jasper’s first novel had been his own ideal of Rachel and the hero in the story was himself. The names and characters were drawn with a subtle skill that revealed to Rachel the fact of his love for her, and she had not been offended. That was nearly a year ago.
Tonight he recalled the scene between them with every inflection and movement vivid in his memory.
“Rachel, you know I love you as my life. I can no longer hide it from you if I would.”
Rachel’s arm trembled in his. She allowed him to speak and had turned her face neither toward him nor away from him. She looked straight on, and her voice was sad but firm and quiet when she spoke.
“Why do you speak to me now? I cannot bear it—after what we have seen tonight.”
“Why—what—”
Rachel withdrew her arm from his but still walked near him. “Rachel! Do you not love me? Is not my love for you as sacred as anything in all of life itself?”
She walked silently for a few steps after that. They passed a streetlamp. Her face was pale and beautiful. He made a movement to clutch her arm, and she moved a little farther from him.
“No,” she had replied. “There was a time—You should not have spoken to me—now.”
He had seen in these words his answer. He could not think of pleading with her.
“Sometime—when I am more worthy?” he had asked in a low voice, but she did not seem to hear, and they had parted at her home. No good night had been said.
Now he lashed himself for his foolish precipitance. He had not reckoned on Rachel’s tense, passionate absorption of all her feeling in the scenes at the tent that were so new in her mind. When the clock in the First Church struck one, he still sat at his desk staring at the last page of manuscript of his unfinished novel.
Rachel went up to her room and faced her evening’s experience with conflicting emotions. Had she ever loved Jasper Chase? Yes. No. But overmastering her emotions Jasper’s declaration brought was the response of the wretched creatures in the tent to her singing. The swift, powerful, awesome presence of the Holy Spirit had affected her as never in all her life before.
The moment Jasper spoke her name and she realized that he was telling her of his love, she had felt a sudden revulsion for him. It was not the time to be absorbed in anything less than the divine glory of those conversions. All the time she was singing with the one passion of her soul to touch the conscience of that tent full of sin, Jasper Chase had been unmoved by it except to love her for herself. It gave her a shock as of irreverence on her part as well as on his.
Her mind was busy with the sights she had witnessed in the tent. Those faces, men and women, touched for the first time with the Spirit’s glory—what a wonderful thing life was after all! The complete regeneration revealed in the sight of drunken, vile, debauched humanity kneeling down to give itself to a life of purity and Christlikeness was surely a witness to the superhuman in the world! And Rollin Page’s face by the side of that miserable wreck out of the gutter!
She recalled Virginia crying with her arms about her brother just before she left the tent, and Mr. Gray kneeling close by, and the girl Virginia had taken into her heart while she whispered something to her before she went out. All these pictures stood out in Rachel’s memory now.
“No! No!” she said aloud. “He had no right to speak after all that! I am sure I do not love him—not enough to give him my life!”
The people of Raymond awoke Sunday morning to a growing knowledge of events that were beginning to revolutionize many of the regular, customary habits of the town. Nearly one hundred persons in Henry Maxwell’s church had made the pledge to do everything after asking, “What would Jesus do?” The result had been, in many cases, unheard-of actions. As a climax to the week’s events had come the spiritual manifestation at the Rectangle, and the announcement of the actual conversion at the tent of nearly fifty of the worst characters in that neighborhood, together with the conversion of Rollin Page, the well-known society and club man.
The First Church of Raymond came to the morning service in a condition that made it quickly sensitive to any large truth. Perhaps nothing had astonished the people more than the great change that had come over the minister since he had proposed to them the imitation of Jesus in conduct. The sermon had become a message. It was brought to them with a love, an earnestness, a passion, a desire, a humility that poured out its enthusiasm about the truth and made the speaker no more prominent than he had to be as the living voice of God. His prayers were unlike any the people had heard before. His great longing to voice the needs and wants of his people made him unmindful of an occasional mistake. It is certain that he had never prayed so effectively as he did now.
The effect of Henry Maxwell’s message this morning owed its power to the unusual fact of his preaching about the saloon at all, together with the events that had stirred the people. He spoke now with a freedom that seemed to measure his complete sense of conviction that Jesus would speak so. At the close he pleaded with the people to remember the new life that had begun at the Rectangle. The regular election of city officers was near at hand. The question of license would be an issue in the election. Was not the most Christian thing they could do to act as citizens in the matter, fight the saloon at the polls, elect good people to the city offices, and clean the municipality? His appeal was stronger at this point than he knew. It is not too much to say that the spiritual tension of the people reached its highest point right there. The imitation of Jesus that had begun with the volunteers in the church was working like leaven in the organization, and Henry Maxwell would have been amazed if he could have measured the extent of desire on the part of his people to take up the cross.
The service was over, the great audience had gone, and Maxwell again faced the company gathered in the lecture room as on the two previous Sundays. The after-service seemed now to be a necessity. As he went in and faced the people, his heart trembled. There were at least one hundred present. The Holy Spirit was never before so manifest. He missed Jasper Chase. But all the others were present.