Winter Is Past

by Ruth Axtell Morren

  They often talked politics or theology, and she was forever quoting to him from that Bible that should be in tatters by now from the amount of time she spent poring over it. Many were the times he’d deliberately put a hypothetical situation before her, which mirrored what he was in fact facing, and ask her mockingly what her God would say about it. Many were the evenings he would lose patience with her replies, realizing afterward that he was more angry at himself for caring what she thought. He realized, too, that she never gave him the answers he wanted to hear. Everyone else would understand and advise him in a logical, sensible way. Even his father would offer good common sense. Althea would quote some verse that made no sense in his world. Other times she would just promise to pray for him without giving him her opinion, and yet he had a sneaking suspicion he knew what she was thinking.

  There was also something restful about her presence, no matter how much she might anger him at times. The more he paced and gestured with his hands, the more quietly she sat with that Bible on her lap.

  One time she tried to explain the similarity between his family’s religious rituals and those of the Church of England. According to her, both had become empty of real significance and become merely efforts to justify their adherents before God through their good works. She tried earnestly to make him see that no good work would ever be good enough to wipe away man’s inherently sinful nature.

  Her eyes lit up. “You gave us Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, all the great prophets. You gave the world Jesus!”

  Simon stared at her, caught for a moment, not by her argument but by her genuine love for his people. He studied her. “You are the first Christian I’ve ever met who has had anything admiring to say about my race. Normally you come across as a little mouse, quiet and demure, always in your gray, but when you speak of your Jesus, you reveal a passion within you that nobody would suspect. Your eyes light up first, then your whole face. You become beautiful.”

  She made no reply, and the two continued to regard each other until he became aware of the danger. As if sensing the same, she cast her eyes downward.

  “If you see any beauty in me, it is but Jesus in me. It is His beauty coming through.”

  “My wife, Hannah, was beautiful,” he said absently, receiving for an instant an image of her fresh young beauty and childish ways. It had been a long time since he had been able to picture her.

  “Was she?” Althea asked softly.

  “Yes,” he answered shortly, remembering for an instant how little he had had the privilege of enjoying a wife. He brought his attention back to the woman sitting before him. Suddenly he contrasted her with his young wife. Hannah had been a child-bride, still a little girl living more with her mother than with her new husband. Althea, on the other hand, was a fully mature woman, used to being on her own for many years. “You are nothing like her, you know.”

  She said nothing. He knew he should stop talking before the conversation became impossibly awkward. He sighed, raking a hand through his hair. Before giving them either a chance to say anything more, Simon wheeled about and went to stare out the window. He heard Althea leave the room, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  Simon continued to spend his nights at Rebecca’s bedside. He’d finally doze fitfully until dawn, when the maid Dot came up to relieve him. He then would retire to his own bed to sleep until noon. He would spend the early afternoon with Rebecca, making her laugh and doing everything to hide his fear at her growing weakness. She hadn’t recovered her natural buoyancy since the fever.

  Rebecca was visited regularly by the new surgeon, a serious, intense young fellow whom Simon formed an immediate antipathy toward. He told himself it was because he wasn’t a doctor, not even an apothecary, but a crude surgeon, probably the son of a butcher. Simon eyed him sourly when he spoke to Althea, with whom he exhibited a friendship and respect. His conversations with Althea as she escorted him down the hall and stairs reminded Simon that Althea had had a life of her own before she’d come under his roof.

  The surgeon told him frankly that the illness was following its natural progression; if anything it had delayed its inevitable end. The cases he had witnessed or read about succumbed in a matter of months, not to the illness so much as to other infections, which attacked the weakened body. He told him the only thing Simon could do to prolong Rebecca’s life was keep her as isolated as possible so she wouldn’t be exposed to any other illnesses. Her body was now too weak to resist any further battles.

  Russell gave him a final sharp look and said only an act of God would change his daughter’s fate.

  Simon cursed and shut himself in his library. God must be laughing at him. Well, He wouldn’t have the last laugh, he vowed.

  So often of late he felt as if his life were caught in a piece of the factory machinery he spoke so eloquently about, but he was powerless to extricate himself from its never-ending, frenetic motion. If anything, he stepped up the rhythm, almost as an act of defiance.

  Whenever he rose stiffly from his chair by Rebecca’s bedside at dawn, he knew by then Althea was on her knees praying. He had gone to the door of her sitting room one morning and had heard the muffled sound of her voice.

  He had lifted his hand to knock, but then dropped it again, realizing that she was praying to her God.

  Althea almost dreaded seeing Simon. It seemed as if they could never enter into a meaningful conversation without Simon’s lashing out at her faith. He couldn’t understand how much it hurt her—not because of herself, but because she knew how much he was hurting himself by rejecting the only One who could save him.

  When it was time for Simon to come up to Rebecca’s room for his afternoon visit, Althea always found an excuse to go into the connecting sitting room or downstairs to the pianoforte. One afternoon as she sat reading in the sitting room, she heard him come in and speak to his daughter. A moment later, he knocked on her door and poked his head in.

  “What are you doing there all by yourself? I promised Rebecca a treat. Please come in and partake with us.”

  Althea closed her book, flustered at his sudden cheerful tone.

  He had brought them each a strawberry tart. He was helping Rebecca to sit up against her pillows. “I went out especially to get you this, so you had better eat it all up.”

  “It looks delicious, Abba. Thank you ever so much.”

  He spoke to his daughter about some of the parties he had attended. Althea could see the effort he made to keep her mind amused. He gently urged her every so often to take a bite. When she had at last eaten three-quarters of it, she pushed it away, saying she could absolutely eat no more.

  Simon took her plate away from her to set it on the table. He stood for a moment by Althea’s chair.

  “They are trying the men involved in the Blanketeers march,” he told her quietly, referring to those that had been arrested in the march from Manchester earlier in the spring.

  “It doesn’t look good for most of them,” he said, answering the question in her eyes. “I think there will be at least half a dozen executions.”

  She put her hand to her mouth in a silent exclamation.

  “Can nothing be done—from Parliament?”

  “No one will listen to reason. They’re all afraid of revolution and think by snuffing it out, it will disappear.”

  He looked at her ironically. “Can nothing be done by the religious community? I don’t see the churches protesting. And those like your mission are too poor to have any voice.”

  “We don’t need the world’s wealth.”

  “Oh, come, Miss Breton, isn’t that somewhat hypocritical? At least we Jews are not ashamed of our wealth. If offers us one of the few protections against the world.”

  “At least I have lived among the people I aim to help,” she countered. “How can you champion the factory worker from Parliament, when you know so little about him, when your world is so removed from his?”

  “I don’t have to live among them to sympathize with their s
uffering,” he answered dryly. “Unlike you, it doesn’t mean I want to share it. I have enough of my own suffering,” he added under his breath.

  She bit her lip, ashamed of her accusations.

  Over the next few days she puzzled over Simon’s behavior. Everything she told him seemed only to exasperate him, and yet he continued seeking her out and bringing up controversy. He seemed to delight in provoking her, making it a point of telling her of his latest exploits in society, when he came in the evenings and found her reading or knitting by Rebecca’s bed or in her sitting room. While he rarely mentioned Lady Stanton-Lewis directly, she could sense her presence in every sentence.

  These late-night conversations reminded Althea of Nicodemus, and she told Simon so one evening.

  “Who was he?”

  “I thought you knew all there was to know in the Bible.”

  “Nicodemus must have slipped my recollection,” he said, stretching his legs out lazily before him as if in preparation for a good story.

  “Well, Nicodemus was a very respected man in Judea, intelligent, well-versed in Scripture, a leader, wealthy….”

  Simon smiled. “He sounds better and better. Go on with your tale.”

  “It is no tale. Anyway, despite everything he had, Nicodemus was drawn to the rabbi Jesus.”

  “Jesus styled himself as teacher of the Jews?”

  “Oh, yes, that was one of his principal ministries, among prophet, preacher, miracle worker and redeemer of Israel.”

  “Yes, yes.” He waved a hand impatiently. “So what did this Nicodemus see in Jesus?”

  “He knew for one thing that Jesus must be a prophet. He knew only one sent by God could perform the miracles Jesus performed.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, it was a tricky thing for an upstanding man, a leader in the Jewish community to go openly to this Jesus. So he visited him by night.”

  “Ah.” He looked up at the ceiling, his fingers forming a pyramid. “So you see me as secretly seeking out this Jesus? I’m afraid I shall have to disappoint you, Miss Breton. I doubt I’ll prove so apt a pupil as your friend Nicodemus.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t so able a teacher.”

  “Oh, I find you able enough. Your pupil just isn’t interested in the material.”

  Then, why do you keep coming back to hear? she silently asked in vexation.

  One evening before Simon had come in, Althea sat knitting by Rebecca’s bed.

  “Miss Althea, I’m afraid to die.” Rebecca’s large brown eyes stared at her through the dim light.

  Althea looked up, startled. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “What if I’m still alive when they bury me? Do they ever make a mistake?”

  Althea immediately knelt by the girl. She clasped Rebecca’s hand in hers and held it up to her cheek.

  “Don’t be frightened. We each have to face that moment when we depart this earth. God knew we would be afraid because we weren’t certain what we would be going to. So, do you know what He did?”

  Rebecca shook her head against the pillow, her dark eyes never leaving Althea’s face.

  Althea smoothed the girl’s forehead with her other hand. “God sent His most special emissary to show us the way. Do you know what an emissary is?”

  Again she shook her head.

  “It’s a messenger. God sent us His most trusted messenger, His most beloved one, so there could be no mistakes. He sent us His very own Son, a part of His very Self, to show us the way.

  “And do you know what that messenger was supposed to tell us?” Rebecca shook her head. “He was supposed to tell us about eternal life. You see these bodies of ours?” She moved her hand clasped with Rebecca’s closer to the girl’s face. “They’ll get old and worn. Yours feels a little weak right now, doesn’t it? Sometimes it hurts?” Rebecca nodded. “Well, these bodies are like suits of clothes. Someday we are going to shed them for better ones.

  “God’s Son came down upon this earth and put on one of these suits of clothing so He could feel our pain and our weakness and our fear. He came among us so that He could tell us about our Heavenly Father’s love for us. He knew we could never enter His Father’s world on our own, because of our sin.”

  The girl was listening raptly.

  “You see, every time we do something bad, we draw apart from God. He is holy, and I’m afraid these old, sinful garments of ours cannot stand to be in His presence. His presence is glorious.

  “But, you know, God had a plan to overcome this situation. He sent His special emissary, His Son, Jesus, to make a way for us to Heaven. He asked His Son if He would come and take all our sin on Himself. He paid the price, so that we could come into the Father’s presence, clean and whole. Jesus said if we would receive Him, He would make us a part of Himself, so that He could take us with Him into Heaven when our turn came to leave this earth.”

  “Am I a part of Jesus?”

  “You can be if you receive Him as your Lord and Savior. Do you know what His name, Jesus, means?”

  “No.”

  “It means ‘God will save’ in the language of your ancestors. They were awaiting this Savior for many, many generations before He appeared on earth. When Jesus came, He told the Jewish people, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ “The world—that means you and me, Rebecca. He loved us so much that He sent His Son to die in our place so we might have everlasting life with Him. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  Althea waited for a few moments before speaking again. “Do you want to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

  She nodded. “Yes, please.”

  “All right. Just pray after me. Dear Lord, I know I’ve sinned….”

  Rebecca repeated the words of the short prayer after Althea. Afterwards she fell into a peaceful sleep. Althea stayed kneeling, praying and thanking God.

  In the days following this prayer, Rebecca was eager to hear more about Jesus. Althea began reading to her directly from the gospels concerning the life and ministry of Jesus. Rebecca listened attentively, and would protest when Althea put the Bible down.

  The next night, as if to steal her joy at Rebecca’s conversion, Simon entered the room in a particularly belligerent mood. He reminded Althea of a little boy determined to get his way by sheer argument.

  He began with the latest report of his social exploits. When she made no reply, but continued knitting a muffler, he said, “You of all people should applaud me if I am at last breaking free of the shackles of tradition and the hypocritical standards imposed by society. You’re always preaching the ‘freedom’ to be had in true religion. Well, now I begin to go where I please, see whom I please, say what I please.”

  She said nothing but gave him that gentle look that seemed to irk him further.

  “If Lady Stanton-Lewis amuses me, and I her, why shouldn’t I spend time in her company?” he finally blurted out in irritation. “That’s what all this is about, isn’t it?”

  When she still said nothing, he said, “Miss Breton has that disapproving look on her face. Go ahead, tell me what you are thinking.”

  “I’m thinking,” she said over the clicking of her needles, “King Solomon wrote in one of the Proverbs that ‘there is a way that seemeth right to a man, but the end thereof is death.’”

  “So, I’m playing with fire, is that it? My father echoes those sentiments.”

  “Your father is perhaps wise in this area.”

  After a few moments, Althea continued. “Jesus talks about corruptible and incorruptible seed, the one leading to death, the other to eternal life.”

  “That sounds like something the good curate tried to drill into me in catechism classes. ‘The wages of sin are death,’ or some such nonsense to prepare me for water baptism.” Simon paced the room. “You Christians are happiest when you’re harping on sin.” He stopped right in front of h
er chair and pointed a finger at her. “My theory is that it’s all just an excuse for not living life—and for being bigoted and narrow-minded about others who might be taking advantage of the life God gave us!”

  “That’s what the world generally accuses us of,” she countered quietly, “when they can’t even begin to understand what living is really about. Jesus promised us life ‘more abundantly’ and believe me, He knew what that meant! He also warned us the world would not be able to understand.”

  “Life more abundantly!” he answered scornfully. He gestured impatiently toward Rebecca. “Is that what you call what my daughter is doing? Living!” He glared at her. “Oh, I know what you’re going to say, I know I’m supposed to be some kind of prodigal. I deserve what I’m getting, but what about her? Does she deserve this?”

  She didn’t say anything, but there was anguish in her eyes as she longed to tell him that his daughter now had eternal life.

  “Why doesn’t your Jesus heal her for your sake? Don’t think I don’t know how much you pray for her! I’ve seen you kneeling nights in your little sitting room. I’ve heard your weeping. Why doesn’t your precious Savior hear you? What more does He want of you? A pound of flesh?”

  Althea’s eyes were brimming with tears. He needed answers she couldn’t give. Her silent tears angered him all the more.

  “Go on, go to bed.” When she didn’t move, he said it more roughly. “Go! I need to be alone.”

  Hurriedly she gathered her things and left.

  A few nights later Simon came home feeling inordinately weary of fighting. As he entered Rebecca’s room, he felt an immediate peace. Althea was sitting in her usual place by the bed, knitting again.

  “Good evening. How is she?” he asked, looking toward his daughter’s ghostly form.

  “Fine.” Althea smiled. “She was quite lively this evening. We played a few games before she fell asleep.”

  He removed his spectacles, rubbing his eyes, too tired for the moment to move away from the door. Finally he walked toward his daughter, stepping in front of Althea. He stooped over Rebecca, touching her soft cheek. One dark braid lay across it. He pushed it gently out of the way.