New Name (19 page)

That was a sermon of no uncertain sound. It pointed the way of salvation clearly and plainly, with many more quotations from scripture, so that the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err in that, and Murray Van Rensselaer was both of those. He learned the meaning of the word
Calvary
, too, and heard the story of the cross for the first time clearly told. Before that it had been more or less a vague fairy tale to him. Of course one could not live in the world of civilization without having heard about Christ and the cross, but it had meant nothing to him. He was as much of a heathen as anyone could be and live in the United States of America.

He heard how all men were sinners. That was made most plain in terms that reminded him of the morning sermon about the judgment. He did not dispute that fact in his mind. He knew that he was a sinner. Since he had run away from the hospital, his sin had loomed large, but he named it by the name of murder and counted it done against a human law. Now he began to see that there was sin behind that. There were worse things in his life than even killing Bessie had been, if one was to believe all that the preacher said. It was an unpleasant sensation, this listening to these keen, convincing sentences, and trying them by his own experiences and finding they were true. He heard for the first time of the love of God in sending a Savior to the world. This thought was pressed home till He became a personal Savior, just for himself, as if he had been the only one who needed Him, or the only one who would have accepted Him. The minister tolda story of two sisters, one of whom was stung by a bee, and the other fled away, crying, “Oh, I’m afraid it will sting me, too!” but the first sister called, “You needn’t be afraid, Mary; it has left its sting in my cheek! It can’t sting you anymore!” And Murray Van Rensselaer learned that his sin had left its sting in Jesus Christ and could hurt him no more. Strange thing! The sin from whose consequences he was fleeing away had left its sting in the body of the Lord Christ when He was nailed to the cross hundreds of years ago, and could harm him no more! Could not have the power to shut him out from eternal life, as it was now shutting him out from earthly life and all that he loved. Strange! Could this thing be true? There was one condition, however. One had to
believe
! How could one believe a thing like that? It was too good to be true. Besides, if it were true, why had no one ever told it to him before?

Murray went home in a dazed state of mind, home to the deep chair by the firelight, to Mrs. Summers’ gentle benediction of a prayer before he went up to his room. And then he lay down in his bed to toss and think, and half decided to get up and creep away in the night from this place where such strange things were told and such peculiar living expected of one. What would they ask of him next?

Chapter 18

T
he next thing they asked him to do was to let them elect him state president of the Christian Endeavor Society.

It meant nothing whatever to him when they told him, because he did not know what Christian Endeavor even stood for at that time, but he smiled and turned it down flat with the excuse that he could not give any more time to outside things. He owed his whole energy to the bank. Mr. Harper would not like it if he accepted other duties here and there.

Then it developed that Mr. Harper
would
like it very much. It was just what Mr. Harper wanted of his bank teller, to be prominent in social and religious matters. A committee had waited upon Mr. Harper, and he came himself to plead with the young man, stressing that he would like him to accept as a personal favor to himself. He felt it would give their bank a good standing to have their employees identified with such organizations.

The young committee pleaded eagerly and promised to do all the work for him. They would prepare all the programs and suggest competent helpers on each committee who understood their work thoroughly. There really would be little left for him to do but preside at the state conventions and attend a county convention now and then. Wouldn’t he stretch a point and take the office? They needed him terribly just now, having lost a wonderful president through serious illness.

It sounded easy. He did not imagine it meant much but calling a meeting to order now and then, and as there was a vice president, he could always get out of it on the score of pressing business when he did not want to go. So Murray “stretched a point” and said yes. He was beginning to enjoy the prestige given by these various activities which they had pressed upon him. He had almost forgotten that he was an outlaw. For the time being he seemed to himself to have become Allan Murray. He was quite pleased with himself that he was fitting down into the groove so well. Even the religious part was not so irksome as he had felt at first. He might in time come to enjoy it a little. He had not slipped away that next Saturday night. He had lived very tolerably through three more Sundays. He was even becoming somewhat fond of those seven little devils in his Sunday school class. His popularity as a Sunday school teacher was evidenced by the fact that seven other little devils, seven times worse than the first seven, had joined themselves to the knot that closed around him for a brief half hour every Sunday afternoon. There was even talk of giving him a room by himself next to the Primary room.

Fearing that he never would be able to teach a lesson, he had conceived the idea of offering a prize of a story to the class after they had told him the lesson for the day. This relieved him of any responsibility in the matter of the teaching, and kept excellent order in the class. All he had to do was to have a hairbreadth experience ready to relate during the last ten minutes of the session.

But Mrs. Summers, wise in her day and generation, perhaps wiser than Murray ever suspected, brought to bear her gentle heaven-guided influence upon the young teacher. If she suspected his need, she never told anybody but her heavenly Father, but she quietly hunted out little bits here and there about the lesson—illustrations, an unusual page from the
Sunday School Times
, a magazine article with a tale that covered a point in the lesson, now and then an open Bible dictionary with a marked paragraph—and laid them on his reading table under the lighted lamp.

“I found such a wonderful story today when I was studying for my Sunday school class,” she would say while she passed him the puffy little biscuits and honey at the supper table. “I thought you might like to use it for your boys. I took the liberty of laying it up on your table, with the verses marked in the Bible where it fits. You have so little time; it is only right the rest of us should help you in the wonderful work you are doing in that Sunday school class.”

He thanked her, and then because he did not like to seem ungrateful, and he was afraid he might be asked what he thought ofit, he read what she had left there and was surprised to find himself getting interested. Strange how a dull thing grew fascinating if you just once gave your mind to it. He wondered if that were true of all dull things. He actually grew interested in getting ready for his Sunday school class. There were times when he even preferred it to going out socially, although that was where he naturally shone, it being more his native element.

Yet he often felt a constraint when he went out to dinner or to a social gathering. There were very few invitations to the kind of thing to which he had been accustomed. The whole community seemed to be pretty well affected by the sentiments of that Presbyterian church. They did not seem to know how to play cards, not the ones who were active, and they did not seem to think of dancing when they got together. Not that he missed those things. He was rather more interested in the novelty of their talk and their games, and their music, which was some of it really good. It appeared that the girl Anita was quite a fine musician. She had been away for a number of years studying. Yet he was always a little bit afraid of Anita. Was it because she reminded him of Bessie, or because she seemed to not quite trust him? He could not tell. When he was in the same company with her, he found himself always trying to put his best foot forward. It annoyed him. She seemed to be always looking through him and saying: “You are not what you are trying to seem at all. You are an impostor! You have stolen a dead man’s name and character, and you killed a girl once! Someday you will kill the good man’s good name, too, and everybody will find outthat you are a murderer!” When these thoughts came through his mind, he would turn away from her clear eyes, and a sharp thought of Bessie like an intense pain would go through his soul. At such times he was ready to give it all up and run away. Yet he stayed on.

He was flooded with invitations to dinners and teas and evening gatherings, little musicals and concerts, and always at these gatherings there was the tang of excitement lest he should be found out. He was growing more and more skillful in evading direct questions and bantering gaiety intended to draw him out. He came to be known as a young man of great reserve. He never talked about himself. They began to notice that. All they knew about him they had heard from others before he came. They liked him all the better for this, and perhaps the mystery that this method gradually put about him made him even more fascinating to the girls. All except Anita.

Anita kept her own counsel. She was polite and pleasant, consulting with him when it was necessary, that is, when she could not get someone else to do it for her, but never taking him into the gracious circle of her close acquaintances. Jane often asked her why she had to be so stiff. Jane was more effusive than ever about the young hero of the town. But Anita closed her lips and went about her business, as charming as ever and just as distant. It intrigued Murray. He never had had a girl act like that to him. If it had not been for the fact that she reminded him unpleasantly of Bessie and made him uncomfortable every time he came in her vicinity, he would have set to work in earnest to do somethingabout it, but he really was very busy and almost happy at the bank and was quite content to let her go her way. His work at the bank was growing more and more fascinating to him. He was like a child who is permitted to work over machinery and feel that he is doing real work with it. He fairly beamed when his accounts came out just right, and he loved being a wheel that worked the machinery of this big clean bank. While he was there he forgot all that was past in his life, forgot that any minute a stranger might walk in and announce himself as the real Allan Murray, and he would have to flee. In the sweet wholesomeness of the monotony of work, it seemed impossible that such things as courts of justice could reach a long arm after him and place him in jail and try him for his life.

He liked most of the men with whom he was associated; also he liked Mrs. Summers. The little talks they had at night before he went up to his room gave him something like comfort. It was a new thing, and he enjoyed it. He even let her talk about religious questions and sometimes asked her a shy question now and then, though most of all he was afraid to venture questions lest he reveal his utter ignorance and lay himself open to suspicion. More and more as the days went by he began to cling to the new life he was carving out for himself and to dread to lose it. The respect of men, which he had never cared about in his other days, was sweet to him now. To have lost his first inheritance gave him a great regard for the one into which he had dropped unawares. It was not his, but he had none now, and he must not let them take this one awayfrom him. He flattered himself now and then that he had been born again, as the sign in that trolley car had advised. He was like a little child learning a new world, but he was learning it, and he liked it.

Into the midst of this growing happiness and assurance entered the State Christian Endeavor Convention.

It was to be held in a nearby city. He had not understood that he would have to go away to a strange place when he took the office, but it was too late to refuse now. He must risk it. Still, it worried him some. Here in Marlborough he was known, now, and would not easily be taken for someone else. Practically everybody in town knew him or knew who he was. He would not likely be mistaken or arrested for anyone else, even if his picture were put up in the bank right opposite his own window. He had by this time ventured to look the picture of the advertised man on the wall fully in the face and discovered it did not look in the least like himself, so he had grown more relaxed about such things. If all this time had passed and nothing had come out about him, surely his father had found a way to hush things up. Poor Dad! He wished he dared send him word that he was all right and on the way to being a man. But he must not. It might only precipitate a catastrophe. He was dead and had been born again. He must be dead to all his old life if he hoped to escape its punishment.

He journeyed to the convention in company with a large party from the Marlborough churches, who hovered around him and made him feel almost like a peacock with all their adulation. Theypinned badges on him, chattered to him about their committee work, asked his advice about things he had never heard of before, and it amused him wonderfully to see what answers he could give them that would satisfy them, and at the same time would in no way give himself away.

But when they arrived at the strange city and went together to the convention hall, and Murray saw for the first time the great auditorium, with its bunting and streamers and banners and mottoes, his heart began to fail him. A kind of sick feeling came over him. It appalled him that he was to be made conspicuous in a great public assembly like this. He never imagined that it was to be a thing of this sort. He began to realize what a fool he had been to get into a fix like this—what an unutterable fool that he did not clear out entirely. He did not belong among people like this. He could never learn their ways, and inevitably sometime, probably soon, he would be found out. Every day, every hour he remained would only make the outcome more unspeakable. This business of being born again was an impossible proposition from the start. One could not work it. He ought to go. He would go at once! This was as good a time as any. Much better than in Marlborough, for no one around would recognize him, and he could get far away before his absence was discovered.