CHAPTER VI.

THE MEN OF SPENERSBERG.

This Spenersberg, about which Leonhard was not a little eager to know more when he shut the door of the apartment into which his host had ushered him—­for he must remain all night—­what was it?

A colony, or a brotherhood, or a community, six years old.  Such a fact does not lie ready for observation every day—­such a place does not lie in the hand of a man at his bidding.  What, then, was its history?  We need not wait to find out until morning, when Leonhard will proceed to discover.  He is satisfied when he lies down upon the bed, which awaited him, it seems, as he came hither on the way-train—­quite satisfied that Spener of Spenersberg must be a man worth seeing.  Breathing beings possessed of ideas and homes here must have been handled with power by a master mind to have brought about this community, if so it is to be called, in six short years, thinks Leonhard.  He recalls his own past six years, and turns uneasily on his bed, and finds no rest until he reminds himself of the criticism he has been enabled to pass on Miss Elise’s rendering of “He is a righteous Saviour,” and the suggestion he made concerning the pitch of “Ye shall find rest for your souls.”  The recollection acts upon him somewhat as the advancing wave acts on the sand-line made by the wave preceding.  When he made the first suggestion, Sister Benigna stood for a moment looking at him, surprised by his remark; but, less than a second taken up with a thought of him, she had passed instantly on to say, “Try it so, Elise:  ‘He is a righteous Saviour.’  We will make it a slower movement.  Ah! how impressive! how beautiful!  It is the composer’s very thought!  Again—­slow:  it is perfect!”

Was this kind of praise worth the taking? a source of praise worth the seeking?  Leonhard had said ungrateful things about his prize-credentials to Miss Marion Ayres, and I do believe that these very prizes, awarded for his various drawings, were never so valued by him as the look with which priestly Benigna seemed to admit him at least so far as into the fellowship of the Gentiles’ Court.

He would have fallen asleep just here with a pleasant thought but for the recollection of Wilberforce’s letter, which startled him hardly less than the apparition of his friend in the moonlight streaming through his half-curtained window would have done.  Is it always so pleasant a thought that for ever and ever a man shall bear his own company?

But this Spenersberg?  Seven years ago, on the day when he came of age, Albert Spener, then a young clerk in a fancy-goods store, went to look at the estate which his grandfather had bequeathed to him the year preceding.  Not ten years ago the old man made his will and gave the property, on which he had not quite starved, to his only grandson, and here was this worthless gorge which stretched between the fields more productive than many a famous gold-mine.