In League with Israel: A Tale of the Chattanooga Conference. Johnston Annie Fellows
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David. "While he was very entertaining, I think he has shown us one of the least attractive phases of his character."
David had felt very much out of place all morning. It was one thing to travel among ordinary Gentiles, as he had always done, and another to be surrounded by those who were constantly bubbling over with religious enthusiasm. He did not object to sitting beside a hot-water tank, he said to himself, but he did object to its boiling over on him.
His neighbors would have been very much surprised could they have known he was studying them with keen insight, and finding much to criticise. Even some of their songs were objectionable to him, their catchy refrains reminding him of some he had heard at colored minstrel shows.
With such an exalted idea of worship as the old rabbi had inculcated in him, it did not seem fitting to approach Deity in song unless through such sonorous utterances as the psalms. Some of these little tinkling, catch-penny tunes seemed profanation.
He ventured to say as much to George Cragmore. He had very unexpectedly found a congenial friend in the young minister. It was not often he met a man so keenly alert to nature, so versed in his favorite literature, or of his same sensitive temperament. He felt himself opening his inner doors as he did to no one else but the rabbi.
A drizzling rain was falling when they began to wind in and out among the mountains of Tennessee, and for miles in their journey a rainbow confronted them at every turn in the road. It crowned every hilltop ahead of them. It reached its shining ladder of light into every valley. It seemed such a prophecy of what awaited them on the mountain beyond, that some one began to sing, "Standing on the Promises."
As the full glory of the rainbow flashed on Cragmore's sight, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. The expression of his face seemed to transfigure it. When he turned to David, there were tears in his eyes.
"O, the covenants of the Old Testament!" he said, in a low tone, that thrilled David with its intensity of feeling. "The Bethels! The Mizpahs! The Ebenezers! See, it is like a pillar of fire leading us to a veritable land of promise."
Then, with his hand resting on David's knee, he began to talk of the promises of the Bible, till David exclaimed, impulsively: "You make me forget that you are a Christian. You enter into Israel's past even more fully than many of her own sons."
Cragmore thrust out his hand, in his quick, nervous way, with an impetuous gesture.
"Why, man!" he cried, relapsing unconsciously into the broad brogue of his childhood, "we hold sacred with you the heritage of your past. We look up with you to the same God, the Father; we confess a common faith till we stand at the foot of the cross. There is no great barrier between us – only a step – one step farther for you to take, and we stand side by side!"
He laid his hand on David's, and looked into his eyes with an expression of tender pleading as he added:
"O, my friend, if you could only see my Savior as he has revealed himself to me! I pray you may! I do pray you may!"
It was the first time in David's life any one had ever said such a thing to him. He sat back in his corner of the seat, at loss for an answer. It put an end to their conversation for a while. Cragmore felt that his sympathy had carried him to the point of giving offense. He was relieved when Dr. Bascom beckoned him to share his seat.
After a while, as the train sped on into the darkness, the passengers subsided in to sleepy indifference. It seemed hours afterward when Mr. Marion clapped him on the shoulder, saying briskly, "Wake up, old fellow, we are getting into Chattanooga."
"Let us go in with banners flying," said Dr. Bascom. "I understand that every car-full that has come in, from Maine to Mexico, has come singing."
The lights of the city, twinkling through the car-windows, aroused the sleepy passengers with a sense of pleasant anticipations, and when they steamed slowly into the crowded depot, it was as "pilgrims singing in the night."
In the general confusion of the arrival, Mr. Marion lost sight of David.
"It's too bad!" he exclaimed, in a disappointed tone. "I intended to ask him to drive to Missionary Ridge with us to-morrow, and I wanted to introduce him to you, Bethany."
"I'm very glad you didn't have the opportunity, Cousin Frank," she said, as she followed him through the depot gates. "He may be very agreeable, and all that, but he's a Jew, and I don't care to make his acquaintance."
The handle of the umbrella she was carrying came in collision with some one behind her.
"I beg your pardon," she said, turning in her gracious, high-bred way.
The gentleman raised his hat. It was David Herschel. A stylish-looking little school-girl was clinging to his arm, and a gray-bearded man, whom she recognized as Major Herrick, was walking just behind him. They had come down from the mountain to meet him, and take him to Lookout Inn. As their eyes met, Bethany was positive that he had overheard her remark.
CHAPTER III.
THE SUNRISE SERVICE ON "LOOKOUT."
BY some misunderstanding, Bethany and her cousins had been assigned to different homes.
"It is too late to make any change to-night," said Mrs. Marion, as they left her. "We are only one block further up on this same street. We will try to make some arrangement to-morrow to have you with us."
Bethany followed her hostess into the wide reception-hall. One of the most elegant homes of the South had opened its hospitable doors to receive them. Ten delegates had preceded her, all as tired and travel-stained as herself.
During the introductions, Bethany mentally classified them as the most uninteresting lot of people she had seen in a long time.
"I believe you are the odd one of this party, Miss Hallam," said the hostess, glancing over the assignment cards she held; "so I shall have to ask you to take a very small room. It is one improvised for the occasion; but you will probably be more comfortable here alone than in a larger room with several others."
It had never occurred to Bethany that she might have been asked to share an apartment with some stranger, and she hastened to assure her hostess of her appreciation of the little room, which, though very small indeed compared with the great dimensions of the others, was quite comfortable and attractive.
"I have always been accustomed to being by myself," she said, "and it makes no difference at all if it is so far away from the other sleeping-rooms. I am not at all timid."
Yet, when she had wearily locked her door, she realized that she had never been so entirely alone before in all her life. Home seemed so very far away. Her surroundings were so strange. Her extreme weariness intensified her morbid feeling of loneliness. She remembered such a sensation coming to her one night in mid-ocean, but she had tapped on her state-room wall, and her father had come to her immediately. Now she might call a weary lifetime. No earthly voice could ever reach him.
With a throbbing ache in her throat, and hot tears springing to her eyes, she opened her valise and took out a little photograph case of Russia leather. Four pictured faces looked out at her. She was kneeling before them, with her arms resting on the low dressing-table. As she gazed at them intently, a tear splashed down on her black dress.
"O, it isn't right! It isn't right," she sobbed, passionately, "for God to take everything! It would have been so easy for him to let me keep them. How could he be so cruel? How could he take away all that made my life worth living, and then let little Jack suffer so?"
She laid her head on her arms in a paroxysm of sobbing. Presently she looked up again at her mother's picture. It was a beautiful face, very like her own. It brought back all her happy childhood, that seemed almost glorified now by the remembered halo of its devoted mother-love.
The years had softened that grief, but it all came back to-night with its old-time bitterness.
The next face was little Jack's – a sturdy, wide-awake boy, with mischievous dimples and laughing eyes. But the recollection of all he had suffered since his accident, made her feel that she had lost him also, in a way. The physician had assured her that he would be the same vigorous, romping child again; but she found that hard to believe when she thought of