White Fire. John Oxenham
a deeper intensity of hopeful inquiry. "Say what you will, I believe in you!" it said.
"The whole truth of what happened on that dreadful day has never been told. I will confess that I had dared to hope that it might never need to be told—that it might lie between myself and God—that I might be permitted by Him to work out my redemption on the field of my failure, chastened, and perhaps strengthened, by what has passed. For, at a vital moment, when the flinching of an eyelid meant disaster, I … flinched.
"This is what happened. As we went up towards the savages that day, my dear old friend asked me if I was ready. I was ready. I said so. He said, 'Remember, one sign of flinching and it is finished,' and we went up and round the corner. We were going, as I believed, to certain death, and I was ready—at least, and truly, I believed so. When the savages rushed in upon us, the horror of it broke upon me like a deluge. I glanced round to see if there was no possible way of escape for us. But there was no way. My dear old chief's head was crimson already with blood, and he went down among them. I burst through—and I know no more. They tell me my body was found on top of his. It may be so. How it got there I do not know. What I do know is—that at that supreme moment, when I believed myself to be strong, I found myself weak. When I believed myself ready for a martyr's death, I tried to escape by shameful flight. I was weighed and found wanting, and the remembrance of it has seared my heart like molten iron, night and day, since ever I came to myself. Whether we should have won through if I had remained firm, God only knows. But—I flinched and fled. It seems to me now that I would sooner die a hundred such deaths as I fled from then than stand here before you all and confess my default. I can accept no honours. Honours!" with a despairing lift and fall of the hand. "I can accept no position based on so terrible a misconception. All I ask, and I ask it with the deepest humility, is that I may be allowed to go out there again. My life is forfeit to the past. It shall be spent—if it be God's will, it shall be laid down joyfully—in the service to which I believe He called me, and from which I do not believe He has expelled me."
"My life is forfeit to the past."
He sat down and covered his face with his hands. There was a momentary silence. The chairman did not quite know what to do. The face of the girl in the third row was ablaze with emotion; the dark eyes were swimming. She glanced restlessly about to see what was going to happen; she looked like springing up herself with flaming words. But another did it. A tall, white-haired man, with a flowing white beard and a face like brown leather, stood up on the platform, and said, in a voice that went straight to all their hearts—
"My friends, we have all heard. Some of us understand, because we have passed through that same dark valley as our young friend. Dare I, in all humility, remind you that a Greater than any shrank from the supreme moment, and prayed, with agonies no man may conceive of, that His bitter cup might pass from Him? I tell you, gentlemen," he cried, in a voice that rang like a trumpet, "that in doing what he has done here this evening our friend has proved himself a man among men. He has said that a hundred savage deaths appear to him less terrible than the confession he has just made. And it is a true saying. Ask your own hearts. I could prove to you that no man can answer absolutely for himself at such a moment; but I will not even argue the point. Our friend has been through the fire. He has been through God's mill. He has been hammered on God's anvil. I tell you that he is true metal. He has proved it here and now. I hold it an honour to grasp his hand and bid him God-speed."
He stretched a sinewy, leather-brown hand to Blair, and the young man gripped it with a new light in his face, and the two stood facing one another.
Still holding the young man's hand, the old one turned to the front again.
"If you agree with me that this is the man we want for the work out there, rise in your seats."
His voice had rung like a bugle-call through the outer darknesses of the earth; his name stood but little lower than God's to tens of thousands who dwelt there, and was held in reverence wherever the English language was spoken. That great audience rose to his call as if a mine had exploded beneath it. His eyes shone with the light the black men knew and loved.
"Let us pray," he said; and the young man fell to his knees beside his chair and dropped his head into his hands again.
CHAPTER IV
A SHAMELESS THING!
The night that followed that meeting at Queen's Hall was the most tempestuous time Jean Arnot ever passed through.
The dramatic events of the meeting had shaken her hidden soul out of its sanctuary. She was thankful to get home intact—so far, at all events, as outward appearances went.
She went at once to her own room. She locked herself in, and paced the floor till she could pace no more.
She could order her steps, but not her thoughts, and her thoughts took wings and climbed lofty heavens of white-piled clouds, and the white-piled clouds were all rosy-tipped, because the thoughts that scaled them came straight from her heart and were tinged with the rosy gold of her heart's desire.
Oh, wonderful! wonderful! The great big soul of him! Was there a nobler man on earth?
How easy to have let it pass! to have kept it between God and himself only! to have worked out his redemption in secret! But he could not, because he was a true man—the truest man ever born, and the bravest. Oh the great, big, noble soul of him!
To and fro she paced, and, no matter where she looked, his white, set face and blazing eyes looked out at her in that agonised strenuity of appeal which had stirred her so in the hall, stirred her to the depths till she had had difficulty in sitting still. It had seemed to her as though he lost sight of all those straining thousands and spoke only to her—as though they were all nothing, and she the whole world. Had he recognised her, she wondered, or had he perceived, in spite of the disguisement of her steady face, the intensity of her sympathy, and had clung to it as to a one and only hope?
And as she paced, and sank down into her chair, which had lost all its ordinary sense of comfort, and started up and paced again, there sprang up in her heart a great golden-glowing purpose—a purpose that trapped her breath and set her gasping when first it peeped out, but which grew like an escaped genie, and filled the world of her thoughts before she knew, and was never to be confined within bounds again.
An unheard-of thing! An incredible thing! A shameless thing!
Nay, not that—and yet—yes! yes! Shameless indeed, for shameless meant without sense of shame, and no sense of shame had she—glory rather.
An unmaidenly thing, then! That without doubt, but not without precedent, and circumstances make laws unto themselves.
But, whatever it was or was not, it grew and grew, stronger and stronger, and ever brighter in its glowing, golden rose.
As she paced to and fro it seemed to her that her path in life had suddenly flashed out before her on the darkness of the night. It was limned in lines and letters of fire, and they cried to her to follow, follow, follow.
And now, as she thought it all out, with tightened lips, and crumpled brow, and eyes that shone, it came home to her, like a revelation, that all her life had been working up to this starry point.
She thought long and deeply, and then turned up the light and sat down to her writing-table with a purposeful face. It was done in a moment—a couple of lines. But a single word has changed the destiny of a nation before this. Weighty things, words, at times! Live shells are playthings to them.
She folded and addressed her letter, and then pondered the best way over a difficulty. She wrote two more lines and enclosed them with her original letter in a larger envelope, and addressed it, and then she laid her white forehead on the packet for a moment as it lay on the table. And then, like one whose ships are burned, or whose golden bridge is built, she altered the indicator