Post Haste by Robert Michael Ballantyne (free reads .txt) 📕

the wisest manner to your friend would be utterly ineffective unless the Holy Spirit gave him a receptive heart. This is one of the most difficult lessons that you and I and all men have to learn, Phil--that God must be all in all, and man nothing whatever but a willing instrument. Even that mysterious willingness is not of ourselves, for `it is God who maketh us both to will and to do of His good pleasure.' `Without me,' says Jesus, `ye can do nothing.' A rejecter of Jesus, therefore, is helpless for good, yet responsible."

"That is hard to understand," said Phil, with a perplexed look.

"The reverse of it is harder to understand, as you will find if you choose to take the trouble to think it out," replied the missionary.

Phil Maylands did take the trouble to think it out. One prominent trait in his character was an intense reverence for truth--any truth, every truth--a strong tendency to distinguish between truth and error in all things that chanced to come under his observation, but especially in those things which his mother had taught him, from earliest infancy, to regard as the most important of all.

Many a passer-by did Phil jostle on his way to the Post-Office that day, after his visit to the missionary, for it was the first time that his mind had been turned, earnestly at least, to the subject of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.

"Too deep by far for boys," we hear some reader mutter. And yet that same reader, perchance, teaches her little ones to consider the great fact that God is One in Three!

No truth is too deep for boys and girls to consider, if they only approach it in a teachable, reverent spirit, and are brought to it by their teacher in a prayerful spirit. But fear not, reader. We do not mean to inflict on you a dissertation on the mysterious subject referred to. We merely state the fact that Phil Maylands met it at this period of his career, and, instead of shelving it--as perhaps too many do--as a too difficult subject, which might lie over to a more convenient season, tackled it with all the energy of his nature. He went first to his closet and his knees, and then to his Bible.

"To the law and to the testimony" used to be Mrs Maylands' watchword in all her battles with Doubt. "To whom shall we go," she was wont to say, "if we go not to the Word of God?"

Phil therefore searched the Scripture. Not being a Greek scholar, he sought help of those who were learned--both personally and through books. Thus he got at correct renderings, and by means of dictionaries ascertained the exact meanings of words. By study he got at what some have styled the general spirit of Scripture, and by reading _both_ sides of controverted points he ascertained the thoughts of various minds. In this way he at length became "fully persuaded in his own mind" that God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are facts taught in Scripture, and affirmed by human experience, and that they form a great unsolvable mystery--unsolvable at least by man in his present condition of existence.

This not only relieved his mind greatly, by convincing him that, the subject being bottomless, it was useless to try to get to the bottom of it, and wise to accept it "as a little child," but it led him also to consider that in the Bible there are two kinds of mysteries, or deep things--the one kind being solvable, the other unsolvable. He set himself, therefore, diligently to discover and separate the one kind from the other, with keen interest.

But this is by the way. Phil's greatest anxiety and care at that time was the salvation of his old friend and former idol, George Aspel.


CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.


PLANS AND COUNTER PLANS.

One evening Phil sat in the sorting-room of the General Post-Office with his hand to his head--for the eight o'clock mail was starting; his head, eyes, and hands had been unusually active during the past two hours, and when the last bundle of letters dropped from his fingers into the mail-bags, head, eyes, and hands were aching.

A row of scarlet vans was standing under a platform, into which mail-bags, apparently innumerable, were being shot. As each of these vans received its quota it rattled off to its particular railway station, at the rate which used, in the olden time, to be deemed the extreme limit of "haste, haste, post haste." The yard began to empty when eight o'clock struck. A few seconds later the last of the scarlet vans drove off; and about forty tons of letters, etcetera, were flying from the great centre to the circumference of the kingdom.

Phil still sat pressing the aching fingers to the aching head and eyes, when he was roused by a touch on the shoulder. It was Peter Pax, who had also, by that time, worked his way upwards in the service.

"Tired, Phil?" asked Pax.

"A little, but it soon passes off," said Phil lightly, as he rose. "There's no breathing-time, you see, towards the close, and it's the pace that kills in everything."

"Are you going to Pegaway Hall to-night?" asked Pax, "because, if so, I'll go with you, bein', so to speak, in a stoodious humour myself."

"No, I'm not going to study to-night,--don't feel up to it. Besides, I want to visit Mr Blurt. The book he lent me on Astronomy ought to be returned, and I want to borrow another.--Come, you'll go with me."

After exchanging some books at the library in the basement, which the man in grey had styled a "magnificent institootion," the two friends left the Post-Office together.

"Old Mr Blurt is fond of you, Pax."

"That shows him to be a man of good taste," said Pax, "and his lending you and me as many books as we want proves him a man of good sense. Do you know, Phil, it has sometimes struck me that, what between our Post-Office library and the liberality of Mr Blurt and a few other friends, you and I are rather lucky dogs in the way of literature."

"We are," assented Phil.

"And ought, somehow, to rise to somethin', some time or other," said Pax.

"We ought--and will," replied the other, with a laugh.

"But do you know," continued Pax, with a sigh, "I've at last given up all intention of aiming at the Postmaster-Generalship."

"Indeed, Pax!"

"Yes. It wouldn't suit me at all. You see I was born and bred in the country, and can't stand a city life. No; my soul--small though it be-- is too large for London. The metropolis can't hold me, Phil. If I were condemned to live in London all my life, my spirit would infallibly bu'st its shell an' blow the bricks and mortar around me to atoms."

"That's strange now; it seems to me, Pax, that London is country and town in one. Just look at the Parks."

"Pooh! flat as a pancake. No ups and downs, no streams, no thickets, no wild-flowers worth mentioning--nothin' wild whatever 'cept the child'n," returned Pax, contemptuously.

"But look at the Serpentine, and the Thames, and--"

"Bah!" interrupted Pax, "would you compare the Thames with the clear, flowing, limpid--"

"Come now, Pax, don't become poetical, it isn't your forte; but listen while I talk of matters more important. You've sometimes heard me mention my mother, haven't you?"

"I have--with feelings of poetical reverence," answered Pax.

"Well, my mother has been writing of late in rather low spirits about her lonely condition in that wild place on the west coast of Ireland. Now, Mr Blurt has been groaning much lately as to his having no female relative to whom he could trust his brother Fred. You know he is obliged to look after the shop, and to go out a good deal on business, during which times Mr Fred is either left alone, or under the care of Mrs Murridge, who, though faithful, is old and deaf and stupid. Miss Lillycrop would have been available once, but ever since the fire she has been appropriated--along with Tottie Bones--by that female Trojan Miss Stivergill, and dare not hint at leaving her. It's a good thing for her, no doubt, but it's unfortunate for Mr Fred. Now, do you see anything in the mists of that statement?"

"Ah--yes--just so," said Pax; "Mr Blurt wants help; mother wants cheerful society. A sick-room ain't the perfection of gaiety, no doubt, but it's better than the west coast of Ireland--at least as depicted by you. Yes, somethin' might come o' that."

"More may come of it than you think, Pax. You see I want to provide some sort of home for George Aspel to come to when we save him--for we're sure to save him at last. I feel certain of that," said Phil, with something in his tone that did not quite correspond to his words--"quite certain of that," he repeated, "God helping us. I mean to talk it over with May."

They turned, as he spoke, into the passage which led to Mr Flint's abode.

May was at home, and she talked the matter over with Phil in the boudoir with the small window, and the near prospect of brick wall, and the photographs of the Maylands, and the embroidered text that was its occupant's sheet-anchor.

She at once fell in with his idea about getting their mother over to London, but when he mentioned his views about her furnishing a house so as to offer a home to his friend Aspel, she was apparently distressed, and yet seemed unable to explain her meaning, or to state her objections clearly.

"Oh! Phil, dear," she said at last, "don't plan and arrange too much. Let us try to walk so that we may be led by God, and not run in advance of him."

Phil was perplexed and disappointed, for May not only appeared to throw cold water on his efforts, but seemed unwilling to give her personal aid in the rescue of her old playmate. He was wrong in this. In the circumstances, poor May could not with propriety bring personal influence to bear on Aspel, but she could and did pray for him with all the ardour of a young and believing heart.

"It's a very strange thing," continued Phil, "that George won't take assistance from any one. I know that he is in want--that he has not money enough to buy respectable clothes so as to be able to appear among his old friends, yet he will not take a sixpence from me--not even as a loan."

May did not answer. With her face hid in her hands she sat on the edge of her bed, weeping at the thought of her lover's fallen condition. Poor May! People said that telegraphic work was too hard for her, because her cheeks were losing the fresh bloom that she had brought from the west of Ireland, and the fingers with which she manipulated the keys so deftly were growing very thin. But sorrow had more to do with the change than the telegraph had.

"It must be pride," said her brother.

"Oh! Phil," she said, looking up, "don't you think that shame has