"I am going mad." Susannah whispered the words audibly. It was a
comfort to her even to hear her own voice. But when her whisper was past
she again listened involuntarily.
The words within her rose again. "Even so. Pray. If you are going mad,
you have the more need."
Susannah had come to class all search for definite and material answer
to prayer as one of the superstitions of false religion. In this
category stood also the hearing of voices and obedience to monitions
from the unseen. Now she reproached herself because she could not
immediately silence this fancy of disturbed nerves.
Long sad thoughts of all her reasons against prayer, strongest among
them the futility of her husband's prayers, passed through her mind with
their train of haunting memories, but in the cessation from argument
which these pictures of the past produced, the words arose again dearly
within her soul, like airdrops rising from the depths of a well and
expanding into momentary iridescence on the surface, "Pray for help. If
you have no faith in God's arm, you have the more need to seek it."
Stung by the fear that she was losing her mind, she rose as she would
have faced a human antagonist.
"God's arm!" she said aloud, "my husband prayed such prayers, but I will
ask nothing till I see his request fulfilled."
She spoke the quick words with an almost reckless sense of experiment.
Her thought was that before she could honestly think of such prayer she
must see some fruit of Angel's petitions for this man Smith and for her
own safety.
"Save Smith from further degradation," she said, her breath coming
sharply. "Save me now, if that sort of prayer is right. Do this in
answer to my husband's prayers. Remember his prayers."
She had begun recklessly, supposing that she was contending only with
her own sick fancy; she was astonished that a few swift moments had
involved her in an increasing sense of personal contact, and she became
awed by the strength of the encounter.
"My husband prayed for my safety," she repeated with softened attitude;
then, as if seeking for the protection which had died with him, she
repeated again and again, "Remember his prayers."
She left the challenge at last apparently to die where she had breathed
it in the dark cold air of her lonely room. The tension of her mind
relaxed.
She sat down again, not knowing whether anything had occurred, but a
crisis in the morbid working of her strained nerves had in some way
relieved her.
She was curiously unable to go back to her former agonised anxieties.
Natural fatigue, even sleepiness, came over her, but not her fears,
even though she wooed them.
"Ah, well," she said within herself, "it is quite true that it is
useless to consider when I can give myself no help."
The habits of the Saints were early. When she heard silence fall upon
the great house she went into her sleeping-room and lay down upon the
bed. Sleep came quickly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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