What Necessity Knows by Lily Dougall (web ebook reader TXT) 📕

the expectation of exciting culmination, but long before the different seekers had found the meeting place, which was only known to the loyal-hearted, the storm, having spent itself elsewhere, had passed away.

There was an open space upon a high slope of the hill. Trees stood above it, below, around--high, black masses of trees. It was here old Cameron's company had gathered together. No woodland spot, in dark, damp night, ever looked more wholly natural and of earth than this. Sophia Rexford and Alec Trenholme, after long wandering, came to the edge of this opening, and stopped the sound of their own movements that they might look and listen. They saw the small crowd assembled some way off, but could not recognise the figures or count them. Listening intently, they heard the swaying of a myriad leaves, the drip of their moisture, the trickle of rivulets that the rain had started again in troughs of summer drought, and, amidst all these, the old man's voice in accents of prayer.

Even in her feverish eagerness to seek Winifred, which had sustained her so long, Sophia chose now to skirt the edge of the wood rather than cross the open. As they went through long grass and bracken, here and there a fallen log impeded their steps. A frog, disturbed, leaped before them in the grass; they knew what it was by the sound of its falls. Soon, in spite of the rustle of their walking, they began to hear the old man's words.

It seemed that he was repeating such passages of Scripture as ascribe the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Whether these were strung together in a prayer, or whether he merely gave them forth to the night air as the poetry on which he fed his soul, they could not tell. The night was much lighter now than when the storm hung over. They saw Cameron standing on a knoll apart from his company, his face upturned to the cloudy sky. Beyond him, over the lower ranks of trees, the thunder cloud they had feared was still visible, showing its dark volume in the southern sky by the frequent fiery shudderings which flashed through its length and depth; but it had swept away so far that no sound of its thunder touched their air; and the old man looked, not at it but at the calm, cloud-wrapped sky above.

"The Son of Man is coming in the clouds of heaven with power, and great glory."

The words fell upon the silence that was made up of the subdued sounds of nature; it seemed to breathe again with them; while their minds had time to be taken captive by the imagery. Then he cried,

"He shall send His angels with a trumpet, and a great voice, and they shall gather the elect upon the four winds. Two shall be in the fields; one shall be taken and the other left." He suddenly broke off the recitation with a heartpiercing cry. "My Lord and my God! Let none of Thy children here be left. Let none of those loved ones, for whom they have come here to entreat Thee, be among those who are left. Let it suffice Thee, Lord, that these have come to meet Thee on Thy way, to ask Thee that not one of their beloved may be passed over now, when Thou comest--_Now!_"

The last word was insistent. And then he passed once more into the prayer that had been the burden of his heart and voice on the night that Alec had first met him. That seemed to be the one thought of his poor crazed brain--"Come, Lord Jesus!"

The little band were standing nearer the trees on the upper side of the open. They seemed to be praying. Sophia came to the end of the straggling line they formed, and there halted, doubtful. She did not advance to claim her sister; she was content to single out her childish figure as one of a nearer group. She tarried, as a worshipper who, entering church at prayer-time, waits before walking forward. Alec stood beside his unknown lady, whose servitor he felt himself to be, and looked about him with no common interest. About thirty people were clad in white; there were a few others in ordinary clothes; but it was impossible to tell just how many of these latter were there or with what intent they had come. A young man in dark clothes, who stood near the last comers peered at them very curiously: Alec saw another man sitting under a tree, and gained the impression, from his attitude, that he was suffering or perplexed. It was all paltry and pitiful outwardly, and yet, as he looked about, observing this, what he saw had no hold on his mind, which was occupied with Cameron's words; and under their influence, the scene, and the meaning of the scene, changed as his mood changed in sympathy.

A hymn began to rise. One woman's voice first breathed it; other voices mingled with hers till they were all singing. It was a simple, swaying melody in glad cadence. The tree boughs rocked with it on the lessening wind of the summer night, till, with the cumulative force of rising feeling, it seemed to expand and soar, like incense from a swinging censer, and, high and sweet, to pass, at length through the cloudy walls of the world. The music, the words, of this song had no more of art in them than the rhythmic cry of waves that ring on some long beach, or the regular pulsations of the blood that throbs audibly, telling our sudden joys. Yet, natural as it was, it was far more than any other voice of nature; for in it was the human soul, that can join itself to other souls in the search for God; and so complete was the lack of form in the yearning, that this soul came forth, as it were, unclothed, the more touching because in naked beauty.


"Soon you will see your Saviour coming,
In the air."


So they sang. This, and every line, was repeated many times. It was only by repetition that the words, with their continuity of meaning, grew in ignorant ears.


"All the thoughts of your inmost spirit
Will be laid bare,
If you love Him, He will make you
White and fair."


Then the idea of the first line was taken up again, and then again, with renewed hope and exultation in the strain.


"Hark! you may hear your Saviour coming."


It was a well-known Adventist hymn which had often roused the hearts of thousands when rung out to the air in the camp meetings of the northern States; but to those who heard it first to-night it came as the revelation of a new reality. As the unveiling of some solid marble figure would transform the thought of one who had taken it, when swathed, for a ghost or phantom, so did the heart's desire of these singers stand out now with such intensity as to give it objective existence to those who heard their song.

Into the cloud-walled heaven they all looked. It is in such moments that a man knows himself.

Old Cameron, lifting up his strong, voice again, was bewailing the sin of the world. "We sinners have not loved Thee, O Christ. We have not trusted Thy love. We have not been zealous for Thy glory. This--this is our sin. All else Thou would'st have mended in us; but this--this is our sin. Have mercy! Have mercy! Have mercy!" Long confession came from him slowly, bit by bit, as if sent forth, in involuntary cries, from a heart rent by the disappointment of waiting. In strong voice, clear and true, he made himself one with the vilest in this pleading, and all the vices with which the soul of man has degraded itself were again summed up by him in this--"We have not loved Thee. We have not trusted Thy love. We are proud and vain; we have loved ourselves, not Thee."

How common the night was--just like any other night! The clouds, as one looked at them, were seen to swing low, showing lighter and darker spaces. How very short a time can we endure the tensest mood! It is like a branding iron, which though it leaves its mark forever, cannot be borne long. The soul relaxes; the senses reclaim their share of us.

Some men came rather rudely out from under the trees, and loitered near. Perhaps all present, except Cameron, noticed them. Alec did; and felt concerning them, he knew not why, uneasy suspicion. He noticed other things now, although a few minutes before he had been insensible to all about him. He saw that the lady he waited upon had dropped her face into her hands; he saw that her disdainful and independent mood was melted. Strangely enough, his mind wandered back again to her first companion, and he wondered that she had not sent back for him or mourned his absence. He was amazed now at his own assumption that design, not accident, had caused such desertion. He could almost have started in his solicitude, to seek the missing man, such was the rebound of his mind. Yet to all this he only gave vagrant thoughts, such as we give to our fellows in church. The temple of the night had become a holy place, and his heart was heavy--perhaps for his old friend, standing there with uplifted face, perhaps on account of the words he was uttering, perhaps in contrition. In a few minutes he would go forward, and take the old preacher by the arm, and try, as he had once tried before, to lead him to rest and shelter from so vain an intensity of prayer. But just now he would wait to hear the words he said. He could not but wait, for so dull, so silent, did all things remain, that the earnestness of the expectant band made itself felt as an agony of hope waning to despair.

Absorbed in this, Alec heard what came to him as harsh profane speech; and yet it was not this; it was the really modest address of a young man who felt constrained to speak to him.

"I don't know," he said nervously (his accent was American), "who _you_ may be, but I just wish to state that I've a sort of notion one of those fellows right down there means mischief to one of these poor ladies in white, who is his wife. I ain't very powerful myself, but, I take it, you're pretty strong, aren't you?"

Alec gave impatient assent; but the men whom he was asked to watch approached no nearer to the women but remained behind the preacher.

All this time old Cameron prayed on, and while it might be that hope in his followers was failing, in his voice there was increasing gladness and fervour.

The clouds above shifted a little. To those wrapped in true anticipation their shifting was as the first sign of a descending heaven. Somewhere behind the thick clouds there was a crescent moon, and when in the upper region of the sky a rift was made in the deep cloud cover, though she did not shine through, the sky beyond was lit by her light, and the upper edges of cloud were white as snow.

As the well of clear far light was opened to the old man's gaze, his prayer stopped suddenly, and he stood only looking upwards. They did not see so much as know from the manner in which