She bade him good-day, and went on up the slope. When she was walking
along the brink of the bluff in the open beyond the nut-trees she heard
him call. He came after her with hastened gait, Bible still in hand. She
was surprised to find that what he had to say was very simple, but not
the less dignified for that.
"I sometimes think, Sister Halsey, that you look down on us all as if we
weren't good enough for you, although you're too kindly to let it be
seen. According to the ways of the world, of course, it's so. If I'm as
rough and uneducated as most of our folks, at least I can think in my
mind what it would be not to be rough, and I can think sometimes how it
all seems to you."
His words appealed directly to strong private feeling which had no
outlet. While she stood seeking a reply the natural power that he had of
working upon the feelings of others, vulgarly called magnetism, so far
worked in connection with his words that tears came to her eyes.
"I don't often think about my old life," she said with brief pathos.
Smith was looking at the ground, as a huge, shy boy might stand when
anxious to express sympathy of which he was somewhat ashamed. "I know it
must be a sort of abiding trial to you." After a moment he added, "I
wouldn't like to make it worse by having you think that I was goin' to
preach any strange doctrine. I'd sometimes give a good deal if the Lord
would raise me up a friend that I could speak to concerning the lights
that come to me that I know that it wouldn't do to speak of in the
public congregations, because of their upsetting nature, and likewise
because I doubt concerning their meaning. And of this matter there was
no thought in my mind to speak in public, for it is for the future to
declare whether it be of the darkness or of the light; but to you I
spoke, almost unwittingly, and perhaps in disobedience to the dictates
of wisdom."
He looked at her wistfully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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