Lancashire (England) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It was to this cupboard Mr. Morell turned, taking therefrom two
time-stained, leather-bound volumes--the one a record of the
interments of the past hundred years, the other containing the roll
of Rehoboth communicants since the establishment of the Church.
Laying the former aside, he took up the latter with a tenderness
and devoutness becoming one who was touching the sacred books of
some fetish of the East. It was, indeed, to him a book to be
reverenced; and as he slowly and sadly turned over its time-stained
pages, his eye rested on many names entered in his own small
handwriting--names which carried him back to companionship with
lives for ever past. Some he had known from birth to death,
blessing them in their advent, and committing them at the grave to
Him who is the sure and certain hope. There were those, too, whom
he piloted along the rocky coasts of youth--those with whom he once
wept in their shadowed homes, and from whom he never withheld his
joy in their hour of triumph. As name after name met his eye, it
was as though he travelled the streets of a ruined city--a city
with which in the days of its glory he had been familiar.
Memories--nothing but memories--greeted him. He heard voices, but
they were silent; he saw forms, but they were shadowy.
As he turned over page after page he read as never before the
record of his half-century's pastorate--his moorland ministry
among an ever-changing people, and there passed before him the
pageant of a life--not loud in blare, nor brilliant in colour--but
sombre, stately, and true.
Continuing to turn over the pages, he came to where a black line
was drawn across the name of Amanda Stott, and where against the
cancelled name a word was written as black as the ink with which
it was inscribed.
Again there came a pause. Long and tearfully the old pastor looked
at that name disfigured, as she, too, who bore it had been, by the
hand of man. Then, taking up the corroded pen and filling it, he
re-wrote the name in the space between the narrow blue-ruled
lines, and, looking up with smiling face, said:
'Yet there is room.'
And the shaft of sunlight that fell in through the cobwebbed
window of the Rehoboth vestry lay on the newly-inscribed name, as
though heaven sealed with her assent the act of the old man who
felt himself the servant of the One who said, 'I will in no wise
cast out.'
IV.
SAVED AS BY FIRE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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