Гарриет Бичер-Стоу
He's Coming To-Morrow
Yet, though I felt awe, I felt a sort of confiding love as I said: "Tell me, is it really true? Is Christ coming?"
"He is," said the angel. "To-morrow He will be here!"
"What joy!" I cried.
"Is it joy?" said the angel. "Alas, to many in this city it is only terror! Come with me."
In a moment I seemed to be standing with him in a parlor of one of the chief palaces of the city. A stout, florid, bald-headed man was seated at a table covered with papers, which he was sorting over with nervous anxiety, muttering to himself as he did so. On a sofa lay a sad-looking, delicate woman, her emaciated hands clasped over a little book. The room was, in all its appointments, a witness of boundless wealth. Gold and silver, and gems, and foreign furniture, and costly pictures, and articles of virtu– everything that money could buy – were heaped together; and yet the man himself seemed to me to have been neither elevated nor refined by the confluence of all these treasures. He seemed nervous and uneasy. He wiped the sweat from his brow, and spoke:
"I don't know, wife, how you feel; but I don't like this news. I don't understand it. It puts a stop to everything I know anything about."
"Oh, John!" said the woman, turning towards him a face pale and fervent, and clasping her hands, "how can you say so?"
And as she spoke, I could see breaking out above her head a tremulous light, like that above the brow of an angel.
"Well, Mary, it's the truth. I don't care if I say it. I don't want to meet – well I wish He would put it off! What does He want of me? I'd be willing to make over – well, three millions to found an hospital, if He'd be satisfied and let me go on. Yes, I'd give three millions – to buy off from to-morrow."
"Is He not our best friend?"
"Best friend!" said the man, with a look half fright, half anger. "Mary, you don't know what you are talking about! You know I always hated those things. There's no use in it; I can't see into them. In fact, I hate them."
She cast on him a look full of pity. "Cannot I make you see?" she said.
