The Making Of A Gentleman. Ruth Axtell Morren

“How did you, uh, lose the leg?”

      Hathaway touched the leather strap holding the wooden peg in place. “A wagon ran over me as a child.”

      Jonah widened his eyes at the calm tone.

      “I was eight. I was in charge of herding a flock of ducks back to our pond and I ran after one, heedless of the traffic on the road.”

      “I’m sorry, sir.”

      “I was fortunate not to be killed altogether. But the Lord was merciful. He spared my life for my parents’ sake. They only had Florence and myself,” he explained.

      Jonah shook his head at the young man’s lack of self-pity. He himself couldn’t get over the fact the curate wasn’t even the son of a gentleman. He’d never have guessed it. He made a very fine-looking gent from his golden brown hair to his aristocratic features. “Pity about the leg, though,” he said.

      A flush was the only indication that the words might have caused him any discomfort. “Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.”

      Jonah cocked an eyebrow. “How do you figure that?”

      “I think my, er, impediment has made me more readily submit to God with my whole heart.” His lips curved upward. “I can identify with Jacob in the Old Testament when he wrestled with the Angel of the Lord one night. Are you familiar with the story?”

      Here it came. Was Hathaway going to evangelize him the way his sister did those at Newgate? “No…I never heard much o’ the Bible.”

      “Pity. Well, Jacob wrestled an entire night with a stranger.”

      Jonah leaned forward. A wrestling story, that sounded interesting.

      “Jacob was going to meet his brother, whom he had wronged many years before.”

      “Hmm. And he got into a fight?”

      He grinned. “God met with him one night.”

      Jonah raised an eyebrow.

      “Jacob was all alone. God appeared in the form of a man and wrestled silently with him. It wasn’t until Jacob found it impossible to best him that he realized this was more than a mere mortal.”

      “It was God?”

      “The Bible says it was ‘the Angel of the Lord.’ Jacob was a shrewd fellow. When he perceived it was a divine being, he wouldn’t let go until he received a blessing.”

      Jonah rubbed his bare head, still expecting to find thick hair there. “Can a man fight with God and come out alive?”

      “If God has a purpose with that individual and must first wrestle with him to put to death the ‘old man.’”

      “The old man?”

      “The man in the flesh,” Hathaway explained. “He will always contend with the man of the spirit.”

      “So, how do you figure all this in your own case?”

      Hathaway smiled. “Well, to break the stalemate, the Angel eventually touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh and it immediately became dislocated. Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his life.”

      “Ah.” He was beginning to see the connection. “So, would you say God fought with you and you lived through it but lost your leg?”

      Hathaway’s eyes twinkled. “I would say, rather, I came out of that accident with a realization, earlier in life than most people, of how much I must depend on God.”

      Jonah rubbed an earlobe. “You weren’t railing at God for such a misfortune?”

      The curate shook his head, a far-off look in his blue eyes, as if he were seeing himself again. “I was only a lad of eight. My parents had raised me to know a God of love, not one of vengeance. After the terrible physical pain of the accident was over, I was faced with a different situation.”

      Jonah waited.

      “Being viewed with pity by my elders or with ridicule by my peers.”

      “Aye.”

      “I had to get used to people staring at the absence of a leg first thing, before they even looked at my face. I needed desperately to be able to hold my head up in public.” Hathaway continued more slowly, his long, lean fingers rubbing the cloth of his pant leg above the wooden peg. “I think this need made it easier for me, in a way, to submit to God. It made me understand more quickly God’s love for me.”

      He gazed keenly at Jonah. “No matter how human beings were to treat me, I could be sure God did not look at the exterior man, this man of flesh with its glaring imperfection, but He looked deep into the interior of me, and saw the real man I was, whole and sound.”

      Jonah shifted uncomfortably as he remembered the scorn he’d endured when he’d been shackled like a murderer and heard the clank of the iron-barred door closing behind him. He wasn’t one of those criminals, he’d wanted to rail at the turnkey, but all he’d seen was ridicule and derision on the grimy face.

      “When I lost my leg, I learned the truth of the Scripture verse which says ‘my strength is made perfect in weakness.’ It might have taken me many more years to understand and submit to that teaching if it hadn’t been for the accident. I probably wouldn’t have achieved all that I did for a mere clockmaker’s son—gone to Oxford, been ordained as a clergyman, and now at the age of six-and-twenty gotten a curacy in the greatest city in the world.” He sat up and smiled. “I would probably be a simple watchmaker, working alongside my father in his small shop and content with that.”

      Jonah cleared his throat. “Would that have been so bad? You had a roof over your head, a fair income, I’ll wager, and your family around you.” So many had far less.

      Hathaway looked at him with understanding. “No, I’m sure I would have been content…but would the Lord have been?”