CHAPTER XIII.
"And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold, the Bridegroom cometh;
go ye out to meet him. . . . And they that were ready went in with him
to the marriage; and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other
virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
"But he answered and said, Verily, I say unto you, I know you not.
"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the
Son of man cometh."
After reading these verses in a loud voice, my father closed the
Bible; in the room where we were assembled there was a sound of chairs
being moved and we all went down upon our knees to pray. Following the
usage in old Huguenot families, it was our custom to have prayers just
before retiring to our rooms for the night.
"And the door was shut. . . ." Although I still knelt I no longer
heard the prayer, for the foolish virgins appeared to me. They were
enveloped in white veils that billowed about them as they stood before
the door holding in their hands the little lamps whose flickering
flames were so soon to be extinguished, leaving them in the gloom
without before that closed door, closed against them irrevocably and
forever. . . . And a time could come then when it would be too late;
when the Saviour weary of our trespassing would no longer listen to
our supplications! I had never thought that that was possible. And a
fear more terrifying and awful than any I had ever known before
completely overwhelmed me at the thought of eternal damnation. . . .
* * * * *
For a long time, for many weeks and months, the parable of the foolish
virgins haunted me. And every evening, when darkness came, I would
repeat to myself the words that sounded so beautiful and yet so
dismaying: "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour
wherein the Son of man cometh." If he should come to-night, was ever
my thought, I would be awakened by a noise as of the sound of rushing
waters, by the blare of the trumpet of the angel of the Lord
announcing the terrifying approach of the end of the world. And I
could never go to sleep until I had said a long prayer in which I
commended myself to the mercy of my Saviour.
I do not believe there was ever a little child who had a more
sensitive conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly
scrupulous that I was often misunderstood by those who loved me best,
a thing that caused me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having
been tormented for days merely because in relating something I had not
reported it precisely as it had happened. And to such a point did I
carry my squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my
recital or statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one
who tells over his beads, these words: "After all, perhaps I do not
remember just exactly how it was." When I think of the thousand
remorses and fears which my trifling wrong doings caused me, and which
from my sixth to my eighth year cast a gloom over my childhood, I feel
a sort of retrospective depression.
At that period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future,
when a man, without hesitation I would answer: "I expect to be a
minister,"--and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest
one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought,
inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.
In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that
hereafter which to pronounce the name of filled me with terror:
eternity. And my departure from this earth,--this earth which I had
scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most
colorless corner--seemed to me a thing very near at hand. With a
blending of impatience and mortal fear I thought of myself as soon to
be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a
great splendor of light among the multitude of angels and chosen ones
around the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a
great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and
continuously in the infinite void of heaven.
