BOOK III

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Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY

by

CAROLINE A. MASON

Author of “A Minister of the World,” “The Minister of Carthage,” “A Wind

Flower,” etc.

“_There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none

of them is without signification._”

New York

Doubleday, Page & Co.

1900

Copyright, 1900, by

Doubleday, Page & Company

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith

Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

Our share of night to bear,

Our share of morning,

Our blank in bliss to fill,

Our blank in scorning.

Here a star, and there a star,

Some lose their way.

Here a mist, and there a mist,

Afterwards—day!

EMILY DICKINSON.

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Contents

Page

BOOK I. MORNING 1

BOOK II. AFTERNOON 131

BOOK III. NIGHT 219

BOOK I

MORNING

CHAPTER I

I rise and raise my claspèd hands to Thee!

Henceforth, the darkness hath no part in me,

Thy sacrifice this day,—

Abiding firm, and with a freeman’s might

Stemming the waves of passion in the fight.

—JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.

Where the Monk River makes its way through the mountain wall in one of

the northern counties of Vermont, lies the small, white village of

Haran. Although isolated and remote from the world, unknown and

unconsidered beyond certain narrow limits, this village possessed, forty

years ago, a local importance as being the county town, the seat also of

a Young Ladies’ Seminary of some reputation, and an Orthodox church

which boasted a line of ministers of exalted piety and scholarly

attainment.

The incumbent in the year 1869 was the Rev. Samuel Mallison. His

pastorate had now extended over twenty years, and he was reverenced far

beyond the bounds of his parish for learning and godliness.

It was a June Saturday night in that year, and the hour was late. In the

low-roofed garret of the parsonage of Haran the figure of a tall, thin

girl with a candle in her hand moved swiftly and softly to the head of a

steep flight of stairs, which gave access to the garret from the floor

below. Some one had called her name.

“Yes, father,” she returned, and a certain vibration of restrained

feeling was perceptible in her voice, “it was I. I am sorry I disturbed

you. Were you asleep?”

All was dark below, and no person could be seen, but again came the

man’s voice.

“What were you doing, Anna?” was the question.

“Only putting away—” here the girl faltered and stopped speaking. The

candle in her hand shook, and threw a strange, wavering shadow of her

shape upon the long, rough timbers of the wall. The roof was so low

where she stood that of necessity her head was bent sharply forward. The

outline of her shoulders was meagre and angular; her arms and body had

neither the grace of a girl nor the curves of a woman; they were simply

lean and long. There was something of loftiness, and even of beauty, in

the face, but the cheeks were hollow, the lines all lacking in softness.

The _ensemble_ was grave and strenuous for a girl of eighteen.

She began again.

“I was nailing up that box of books, you remember. I thought now, you

know, I ought to do it.”

Something like a groan seemed to float up from the darkness below. There

was no other reply for a moment, and then the father’s voice said

slowly:—

“To take back later such an action is a greater violation of the moral

nature than to avoid performing it. If it has been given you as duty, it

is well done, but be very sure.”

A smile, brooding, and even sad, altered the girl’s face as she

reflected for a little.

“I am very sure,” she said softly, but without hesitation.

“Then, good night. Sleep, now. Let to-morrow take thought for the things

of itself, Anna.”

“Good night, father.” The little lingering of her voice on the last word

gave to it the force of a term of endearment, which it would not have

occurred to Anna Mallison at that time to add.

A door closed below, presently, and the house was still.

The garret extended over the entire house, and its unlighted spaces

seemed to stretch indefinitely on all sides from the little circle of

light shed by the one candle. The place was wholly open, save that at

the front gable, below the highest point in the peak of the roof, a

partition of planed but unpainted boards enclosed a small chamber. The

narrow door of it stood open.

As Anna approached this door she cast her glance to a far, dim corner,

where in stiff order a wooden box of moderate size stood upon a chest.

She crossed to the place, passed her hand over the lid of this box,

satisfied herself that it was firmly and evenly fastened, and then

gathered up some nails and a hammer, which she put away on the ledge

formed by a square, projecting rafter. This accomplished, she came back

and entered the chamber, which was sparely enough furnished, undressed,

put out her candle, and sat down in the open gable window.

Even if to-morrow were left to take thought for the things of itself,

there were many yesterdays which she wished to meet to-night. And for

that to-morrow,—she was hardly ready to leave all thought of it yet, for

she regarded it as the most solemn and important crisis in her eighteen

years of life. On the Sabbath, which a few hours would bring, she was to

be received into the village church of which her father was pastor, and

this event would signify that all her previous existence, the time past

of her life, was a closed and finished chapter, and that henceforth all

things were to become new. Life was to be furnished now with new

pleasures, new pains, new motives, new mental occupations. A somewhat

sterner and sadder life she fancied it, full of self-examination,

sacrifice, and high endeavour, for she felt it must suffice her to have

wrought her own will in the past, “the will of the flesh,” as her father

and the Apostle Paul termed it; a phrase which had but a vague import to

her own understanding, and yet exerted a powerful influence upon her

conscience.

To her mind there was an intimate connection between that now sealed box

and “the will of the flesh.”

It was when she was fifteen years old that Anna had discovered one day

among the ranks of chests and trunks which lined the outer stretches of

the garret, this small box of books, thickly covered with dust. At first

she had been greatly surprised, since books were the things her father

most earnestly desired and needed, his scanty collection being quite

insufficient for his use, and being helped out by no village library.

Every book in the house had borne to Anna’s imagination a potent dignity

and value, for each one embodied a persistent need, and represented an

almost severe economy before its possession had been achieved.

And here were nearly thirty respectably bound volumes packed away for

moth and dust alone to live upon—what could it mean? Had they been

forgotten? Anna had devoured their titles with consuming wonder and

curiosity, and with the ardour of the instinctive book-lover. Like

Aurora Leigh, she had “found the secret of a garret room.”

There was a volume of Ossian,—heroic, sounding words caught her eye as

she turned the rough, yellow leaves; Landor’s “Hellenics and Idylls”; a

copy bound in marred, brown leather of Pope’s translation of the

“Iliad,” published, she noted, in 1806, almost fifty years before she

was born; the poems of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and of the

earlier American poets; and a thin gilded volume of Blake’s “Songs of

Innocence.”

Besides these were worn volumes of Plato, of Greek and Latin poets, and

German editions of Faust and Nathan der Weise. At the bottom of the box

Anna found a faded commonplace book with her father’s name inscribed on

the first page, and the date 1840. It contained translations of Greek

poetry which she supposed to have been made by her father, although of

this she was not sure. She did not read them, for she felt that she had

no right to explore anything so personal without his permission. This

scruple, however, did not extend to the books which filled the box,

although Anna felt rather than understood that they had not been packed

away together thus by accident, or left by forgetfulness. She perceived

that they denoted some decisive experience in her father’s inner life,

that spiritual personality of the man, which possessed to the young

girl’s thought an august and even mysterious sacredness.

Whatever these books had meant to him, and for whatever reason they had

been exiled from his meagre library, they became to his daughter the

most brilliant and alluring feature of a somewhat colourless girlhood,

the charm of them enhanced by secrecy; for, with the reticence

characteristic of the family life, Anna never alluded to her discovery.

Neither did she ever remove these literary remains from their seclusion

in the garret; this would have seemed an act of violence, but around the

box which held them she formed a kind of enclosing barricade of chests

and old furniture. The little nook thus formed she regarded as her place

of refuge, of private and unguessed delight. A candle at night, and rays

of light piercing the wide cracks under the eaves by day, made reading

easy to her clear young eyes, even in the dust and dusk of the dim

place. And so for two years, through biting cold and searing heat, Anna

fed her mind and heart on the poetry which had ruled her father’s

generation, unknown and unsanctioned by any one. Then one day came a

strange event; she never recalled it without a sense of unshed tears.

It was late one August afternoon, and, her day’s work faithfully

performed, Anna had gone up to her garret room to make her simple toilet

for the evening meal. There were a few moments to spare, and, as usual,

she hastened to her nook, and was soon deep in Prometheus, for Shelley

just then controlled her imagination. Her father came into the garret

behind her, a very unwonted thing, and Anna heard the sharp, scraping

sound as he drew out from the recesses where it had stood for years, a

small, brown, hair-covered trunk, studded with brass nails, forming the

initials S. D. M. It had been his own during his college days, and had

seen but little service since. One of Anna’s brothers was to start for

college in a day or two, and the old trunk was to serve a second

generation in its quest for learning.

Startled by the unusual noise, Anna rose in her place, and, seeing her

father, spoke to him, whereupon he crossed the garret to where she

stood; a small, thin man, bent a little, with a pale brown skin,

prominent eyes, and a dome-shaped head, the hair thin on the crown even

to baldness, but soft and silken and long enough behind the ears to show

its tendency to curl.

“What have you there, Anna?” Samuel Mallison had asked, peering with

short-sighted, searching eyes between the bars of a battered crib which

Anna had used as a part of her wall of partition.

“Poetry, father,” she had replied, handing him the book with eager,

innocent enthusiasm; “oh, it is very beautiful! I love it so.”

Her father, looking at the book, flushed strangely, and a sudden,

indescribable change passed over his face. Pushing aside the rubbish

which separated him from Anna, he was immediately at her side, and in

silence had bent over the box. He had drawn it nearer the light, and

seemed looking on the side for some sign or inscription. There was a

piercing eagerness in his eyes. Then Anna had noticed what had escaped

her hitherto, the initials, S. D. M., followed by the reference, Matthew

v. 29, and the date, 1848, written in ink on the lower corner, dim with

dust stains and faded with the processes of time.

Still her father had not spoken, but, sitting down on a chest, he had

bent over the box, and had drawn from it one after the other the buried

books, with a hand as gentle as if he were touching the tokens of a dead

love. Anna had stood aside, silent and abashed, a strange tightening

sensation in her throat. Her father seemed to have forgotten her. At

last he had reached the old commonplace book underneath all. The flush

on his face had deepened, and Anna had thought there were tears in his

eyes as he glanced rapidly over its yellowed pages, with the verses in

fine, stiff writing and faded ink. Then he had closed the book with a

long sigh, had laid it carefully back in its place, and rising, had

walked up and down in the low garret for many minutes in some evident

agitation.

A sense of guilt and apprehension had fallen upon Anna in her

perplexity, but when, in the end, he had come and stood beside her,

there was a great gentleness on his face.

“And so you love those books, my child?” he had asked her briefly.

“Yes, father.”

“I understand. I loved them, but I gave them up—twenty years ago,

almost. They became a snare.” He had been, then, silent a moment, while

a peculiar conflict of thought was reflected in his face. “Yes,” he

continued, as if convinced of something called in doubt, “they became a

snare—to me—but for you I cannot decide. It may not be for you to drink

of my cup. Who knows?” and with that he had turned and left her, and

left the garret, the trunk forgotten; and Anna had laid the books back,

soberly and with a great heartache, almost as if she were laying dust

dear and sacred in its coffin.

The matter had never been alluded to again between the father and

daughter, but Anna knew that she was free to read, and so read on. And

still her unalloyed happiness in her hidden treasure was gone. A

question, a suspicion, a disturbing doubt, was now attached to it. It

was not wrong to read this poetry, but plainly there was a more

excellent way, a higher ground which her father had reached, and which,

with her inborn passion for perfection, she, too, must some day attain.

Slowly and silently this conviction matured within her.

And so to-night, on the eve of her day of supreme consecration, Anna, in

her turn, had buried out of her sight, as her father had before her, the

poetry into which she had been pouring her young awakening life,

silently and secretly, but with a fervour which the reader of many books

can never know. They had spoken to her in mighty voices, these great

spirits, so free, joyous, and mysterious in their power; but they were

not the voice _of God_, and therefore she must listen to them no more.

This had been a tree of life to her, but its fruit was forbidden. The

axe must thenceforth be laid unflinchingly at the root of the tree. Such

was the initial impulse, single, stern, and absolute, of Anna’s

awakening religious nature.

Theologians in the sixties did not talk of the immanence of God.

CHAPTER II

Children of men! the unseen Power whose eye

Forever doth accompany mankind,

Hath looked on no religion scornfully

That man did ever find.

Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?

Which has not fall’n on the dry heart like rain?

Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man:

_Thou must be born again!_

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Anna Mallison’s working theory of the human family in its moral and

religious relations (and she recognized no other as of importance) was

as destitute of shading as a carpenter’s house plan. Indeed, her

hypothesis unconsciously bore a certain pictorial resemblance to the

ground plan of a colonial house—a hall running through the middle with

two rooms on each side! There was, straight through the centre of her

moral universe, a wide, divisive, neutral passage in which dwelt

uneasily all people who had not been regenerated, but who had not

rejected salvation formally and forever. Here were such heathen and

young children, and such thoughtless and unhardened impenitent as might

yet listen to the divine call. At the right of this central hall,

following Anna’s scheme of the race, were two wide rooms: the first

bright with a subdued and varied light; the second, opening beyond the

first, overflowing with undimmed and celestial radiance. The first was

the Church, the place of saints on earth, the second was heaven, easily

reached from the first. But the entrance to the first room from the

central space was obscure, difficult, and mysterious, and few were they

who found it.

At the left of the great hall were likewise two vast connecting

chambers. A wide door stood ever open into the first, through which a

throng continually passed. Here were dimness and dread, lighted only by

false and baleful gleams; and in the room beyond, the blackness of

darkness, and that forever.

This first room was the abode of those who deliberately chose the world

and turned away from God, whose fitting end was in the awful gloom of

that place of torment and wailing beyond.

Above the right-hand division, high and lifted up, dwelt in unthinkable

glory the God of her fathers, holy, but to her subconscious sense,

ineffective, else why were earthquakes, murders, prisons, insanities?

and why, indeed, those populous chambers on the left?

Over them presided a rapid, hurtling Spirit, always engaged in her

imagination in falling like lightning from heaven. He was Miltonic

necessarily, but also much like one of Ossian’s heroes, and, on the

whole, a more imposing force than the Creator whose power he seemed so

successfully to have usurped.

In fine, Anna believed in two gods, an infinite spirit of good, and an

infinite spirit of evil, although she would have called herself strictly

monotheistic.

The neutral space between the realms of the Good and Evil was the

battleground of these two mighty spirits. Here prophets, apostles, and

preachers were calling loudly and untiringly upon all men to repent, and

to find the entrance to the company of the redeemed. From time to time

some swift and valorous spirit of man or angel would even make excursion

into the dim outer room on the left, and bring thence a scorched and

spotted soul, saved, but so as by fire. But such events were rare and

not to be presumed upon or expected.

It was all perfectly clear to Anna, the classification and grouping

precise, exact, and satisfactory. Black was very black; and white, very

white. She had herself until very recently belonged in the neutral hall,

but she now believed herself to be “experiencing religion,” a fine old

phrase, which was in effect to be pressing successfully through that

obscure opening which led into the outer court of heaven.

But just here there was a weakness in the system. Theologians and

preachers like her father boldly declared the contrary, and asserted

that the processes of entering the kingdom of heaven were as marked and

unmistakable as the great general divisions of saints and sinners. The

conversion of Saul of Tarsus was always depicted as norm and type. To be

sure, all the processes were not in each case marked by equal

distinctness, but the logical order was the same. In the first stage of

the progress the sinner was said to be “under conviction” or

“experiencing a sense of sin”; and the more bitter and overwhelming was

this first phase, the better was the diagnosis from the professional

point of view. At this point the penitent was to realize that, whatever

his former life had been, even if a life of prayer and unselfish

devotion, it had been wholly displeasing to God, and that, as tending to

self-righteousness, such a life was peculiarly dangerous. By nature,

there could not be in the human character any real moral excellence, or

what was more technically known as “evangelical virtue.”

All this Samuel Mallison had recently set forth in a series of sermons

on “Human Depravity; its Degree, its Extent, its Derivation, and its

Punishment,” which had been considered of extraordinary value and merit.

But it was just here that his daughter, for all the logic and learning

to which she was privileged to listen, stumbled and stood still. For

weeks her spiritual development appeared to be arrested. She was silent,

uncommunicative, and disappointing to all the older members and

office-bearers in her father’s church.

“What is the matter with Anna?” was the frequent question put to Mrs.

Mallison in the parish. “Why don’t she _come out_?”

“Oh, she is under conviction all the time,” would be the reply, with a

somewhat decided shake of the head. “We let her alone pretty much, Mr.

Mallison and I. It isn’t best to say too much, you know, when anybody

has reached that point. We can see that conscience is working with her.”

The questioner would depart with the belief that Anna’s conviction was

of an unusually profound and interesting nature, like a disease with a

complication; but if they had asked Anna herself, she might have told

them that it was from the absence of this conviction, rather than from

its intensity, that she was suffering. She was too honest to assume a

virtue, or even a vice, if she had it not, and seek it as she would, a

poignant sense of sin did not visit her. She had cast about her, and

searched her own heart and life in a distinct embarrassment at finding

so few clearly defined and indubitable sins of which to plead guilty;

she had even secretly reproached her parents in her heart for having

insisted upon an almost faultless standard of daily living, since

conformity to their will seemed to be in itself a snare, and to place

her at a distinct disadvantage now as compared with the flagrant sinner.

Why had they taught her to pray, since she was now told that the prayers

of the unregenerate were displeasing to God?

She used to sit during the Sunday morning service and look at the

neighbours in their pews around her, at their children and

grandchildren, and at the members of her own family, seeking to find a

person whom she was conscious of having wronged, or toward whom she

cherished a feeling of enmity or envy. The only result of this species

of self-examination had been to bring to her remembrance a childish,

half-forgotten grudge against a girl with fair curls, Malvina Loveland

by name, who had once ridiculed her at school, for wearing one of

Lucia’s dresses made over. Anna drew this dim and fading fault

remorselessly up to the light, and formally and forever forgave the

unconscious “Mally.” But the longing for a deep experience of the

“exceeding sinfulness of sin” remained unsatisfied. Like many another

sincere and seeking soul of that day, she yearned in vain to fill out in

its rigid precision of sequence that spiritual programme which the

theologians prescribed.

Her father gave her free access to the precious, if narrow, resources of

his library, and she read the Edwards, both elder and younger, the elder

Dwight, Bunyan, Baxter, and the rest, in place of her dear pagans whose

end she now clearly foresaw. She read of the “depraved moral conduct of

every infant who lives so long as to be capable of moral action”; she

read that “the heart of Man, after all abatements are made for certain

innocent and amiable characteristics, is set to do evil in a most

affecting and dreadful manner”; and that “the darling and customary

pleasures of men furnish an advantageous proof of the extreme depravity

of our nature.”

“Was I a very wicked little child?” she asked her mother one day.

“Wicked!” cried her mother, artlessly, resenting the thought. “You were

like a little angel, Benigna, even from the very first. So was it that I

gave you my sainted mother’s name. Even your looks were all love; all

saw it, and strangers too. You a bad child, indeed who never gave your

mother a harsh word or a heartache since you were born!”

Anna Benigna, for so her mother called her, bent and kissed her mother,

a rare caress in that family.

“I am glad I pleased you,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes,

and as she walked without further word from the room, her mother

perceived the significance of question and reply, and pondered long.

Then suddenly, as ice breaks up in the spring, and the freshet bears

down everything before it, a moment of crisis and perception came, one

of those moments which, albeit varying with each human experience,

remains in each supreme.

Under all her outward conformity to law and love, Anna realized now that

there had lain for years a deep, half-conscious resentment toward the

Creator, a cold dislike of God. How could he look upon her with approval

while such a disposition remained in her heart? She had loved the human;

she had not loved the divine.

A sense of the absolute and eternal Good from which she was alienated,

to which she was antagonistic, smote her with force. She now seemed to

herself in the presence of God as a speck of dust against a dazzling

mountain of snow—incalculably small, hatefully impure. A passion of

contrition and surrender mastered her; vague regenerating fires tried

her soul; and then came an exhaustion of spirit, as of a child whom its

Father has chastened, and who is reconciled and at peace. This

succession of emotions she was able to recall distinctly as long as she

lived.

This had been a month ago. Anna had recounted these spiritual exercises

to her father, and he had told her that they denoted conversion, and

advised her presenting herself to the church for admission. This she had

done, but when he asked her, further, to what cause, if any, she

ascribed this past sense of enmity against God, she had been silent.

However, her father was fully satisfied. Like a physician with a

well-declared fever of a certain type, he felt it to be a clear case.

Considering his child’s blameless innocence of life, it was an

unexpectedly satisfactory one from the theologian’s point of view.

As she sat now in the warm gloom of the June night, with the dark trees

murmuring softly under the wind, and the sky with many stars bending

near, only the gable jutting above her head to keep its splendours off,

Anna travelled back in thought to her childish days and found there the

answer to her father’s question.

CHAPTER III

Nay, but I think the whisper crept

Like growth through childhood. Work and play,

Things common to the course of day,

Awed thee with meanings unfulfill’d;

And all through girlhood, something still’d

Thy senses like the birth of light,

When thou hast trimmed thy lamp at night

Or washed thy garments in the stream.

—DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

Until her twelfth year Anna had not encountered the severities of

Calvinistic theology, Samuel Mallison having intrusted the spiritual

guidance of his children, during their earlier years, to their mother.

Anna was the youngest child. Mrs. Mallison was of a German Moravian

family who, coming from Pennsylvania, had settled on the eastern

boundary of New York early in the century. She possessed the serene and

trustful temperament of her people. The subtleties of her husband’s

religious system were beyond her simple ken; she loved to sing the hymns

of Zinzendorf, as she sewed and spun and ordered her household in true

German _Hausfräulichkeit_, a sincere, devout, affectionate soul who had

found the tone of the frigid little north New England community more

chilling than she dared to own.

From her Anna inherited her warm impulses, her abounding delight in

nature, her susceptibility to the simplest impressions of sweet and

common things. Gulielma Mallison understood the child when she came

running to her one early spring morning from the parsonage garden, where

the dark brown earth was freshly upturned and young green things were

springing, and had tears in her eyes, veiling wonder, and a shy thrill

of joy in all her small birdlike frame, and had asked, her hands clasped

upon her breast:—

“Why am I so happy, mother, that I can’t bear it? Why does something

ache so here?”

“It is because thou art in God’s beautiful world, little Benigna,” the

mother had said, “and thou art God’s child. He is near thee, and thy

heart yearns to him. Be glad in God.”

In his study, through the open door, Samuel Mallison heard these words,

and, whatever his perplexity as to their doctrinal inconsistency, he did

not gainsay them. From his point of view at this time little Anna was

entirely out of relation to God and out of harmony with his being, and

it would have been impossible for her to please him. But just then an

old question, which would not always down, had forced its way to his

mind—What if there were a wrong link somewhere in the logic? What if the

love of God were something greater than the schoolmen guessed?

But on a certain winter night Anna’s childhood died, and the battle of

her life began.

Well she remembered every physical sensation even, accompanying that

experience.

It had been a snowy Saturday night, and she had come in from the warm

kitchen where, in a round washing-day tub, drawn close to the hot stove,

she had taken a merry, splashing bath, after the regular order of

exercises for Saturday night at the parsonage. Her older sister, Lucia,

had presided over the function, and when it was accomplished she had

been closely wrapped in a pale straw-hued, homespun flannel sheet, over

her nightclothes, preparatory to facing the rigours of the bitterly cold

hall and stairs, and the little bedroom above.

So she had trailed into the living-room, where the boys and her parents

were gathered around a large table. The room was not very brightly

lighted by the single oil lamp, but a great fire crackled loudly in the

stove, and the rattle of the hard snowflakes on the window panes and the

whistling of the wind outside gave keen emphasis to the sense of

cheerful safety and comfort.

Warm and languid from the heat of her bath, Anna had sat down on a low

seat and dropped her head on her mother’s knees, feeling an

indescribable sensation of happy lassitude and physical well-being. She

recalled how interested she had been in the shrivelled whiteness of her

own long, little fingers, and how soft and woolly that dear old blanket

had felt; it was on her bed now, with her mother’s maiden name worked in

cross-stitch in one corner, in pale pink crewel.

They had been waiting for her, to proceed with the evening devotions,

and her father had at once begun to read a part of a sermon from one of

the standard divines who, though somewhat out of fashion in the centres

of progressive thought, were still held infallible in these remoter

regions.

The subject was “The Benevolence of God in Inflicting Punishment,” from

a work entitled “The Effects of the Fall.”

Anna did not listen very closely for a time, but presently her attention

was caught and held. The writer was seeking to prove that “the damnation

of a large part of the human race directly subserved the general

happiness of mankind and the glory of God.” That even if he had saved

none of the sons of men, but “had left them to the endless torment they

had so justly deserved,” and “had glorified himself in their eternal

ruin, they would have had no cause to complain.” That the best of what

were illusively known as “good works,” were “no more than splendid

sins.” That no doubt, if any heathen could be found who was truly

virtuous and holy, who loved God in the strictly evangelical sense, as

infinitely great, wise, and holy, and who kept all his perfect law

without infraction, such heathen might be saved. But as there was no

evidence that any such heathen ever had existed, or ever could exist,

there was no reason to believe that any had been saved. As the heathen

still formed a vast proportion of the population of the globe, and as

only a small fraction of those nations commonly known as Christian had

actually and experimentally come under the law of grace, the only

conclusion possible was, that a vast proportion of the human family

throughout all ages and down to the present time “were serving the

purposes of God’s infinite wisdom and benevolence in their creation in

endless misery or torment.”

The triumphant logic of the old divine, which Mrs. Mallison secretly

found discomfiting but accepted calmly enough considering its terrific

import, and which her husband read with the sad and solemn pathos of one

to whom it was a mournful verity, had a curious effect upon little Anna.

For the first time the real meaning of familiar words like these smote

full and sharp upon her mind, and in the physical lassitude of the

moment acted like a bodily injury upon her. She grew whiter and whiter,

and she touched and grasped the soft blanket about her with powerless

fingers, to convince herself that she could feel and find what was

familiar, faintness being an absolutely unknown sensation.

Suddenly, with an imperious impulse, and a singular effect of childish

courage which dared to do an unheard-of thing, she rose and said with

perfect apparent composure, breaking in upon the reading:—

“I am too tired to stay here any longer, I am going upstairs now,” and

so left the room. Her mother had watched the slight figure in its close

drapery with anxious eyes until the door closed upon her, but had not

thought of following. This reading was a solemn function not to be

lightly interrupted.

Upstairs, Anna had betaken herself hastily to bed, and lay there,

motionless, somewhat alarmed at her own revolutionary action, and with

little to say when questioned by her mother presently.

But when the house was still, and the night advancing to its mid depth

of darkness, the child, still lying with wide, wakeful eyes, cried

silently with a piteous consciousness of desolation and sorrow. A sense

of the bitterness of a world where millions of helpless human spirits

were shut up to endless agony had overwhelmed her, and a spirit of

rebellion against God who willed it so for his own glory had taken

intense possession of her thought.

In the passion of her childish resentment and grief and worn by the

unwonted wakefulness, her breath came in long, quivering sobs which were

heard in the next room, and brought her father to her side.

She could answer nothing to his questions, but he found her hands cold,

and her pulse weak and rapid.

“You did not eat your supper to-night, little Anna,” he said gently,

remembering her faint appetite for the frugal fare of the parsonage

table.

Anna only sobbed more convulsively. She had expected severity and blame,

feeling verily guilty in spirit.

Samuel Mallison said nothing more, but Anna, wondering, heard him go

downstairs, heard doors open and shut, and then silence fell again. Ten

minutes later her father stood again by the bedside in the icy chill of

the winter midnight in the unwarmed chamber, and he had brought a bowl

of broth, hot and smoking, bread, too, and, most unwonted pampering, a

piece of the rare poundcake, kept for company and never given to

children except on high holidays.

Neither of them spoke, but Samuel Mallison, for all the cold, sat on the

bed’s edge while Anna ate and drank, drawing her frail little body to

rest against his own.

The broth was salted for Anna by her tears, and the long-drawn sobs,

coming at intervals, half choked her as she ate, but she was comforted

at last and fortified against the woe of the world, and she pressed her

cheek against her father’s arm with a sense of the infinite sweetness of

fatherhood warm at her heart. As she finished the last crumb of cake,

she thought:—

“If only God had been kind like my father! I was naughty, and that only

makes him good to me and pitiful.” But she said nothing, only looked

with a world of wondering gratefulness in her large innocent eyes up

into her father’s face, finding some perplexity that cake and broth

should reconcile her to the everlasting torment of the majority of

mankind, but wisely concluding to make the best of it since such seemed

to be the effect, and, as it was now undoubtedly high time, to go to

sleep.

Finding her bright and well next morning, the Mallisons, father and

mother, had thought little more of that Saturday night revolt, which

they, indeed, had not known as such; but, as she looked back over her

years to-night, in her gable window, Anna perceived that from that time

there had always been in the secret place of her heart a sense of enmity

against a God who was not kind like her father. To-night she knew

herself, at last, reconciled; faith had triumphed and declared that even

the darkest decree of God’s great will must be right, since he was the

absolutely Good. But her heart yearned with mighty yearning for the

subjects of his just wrath, and as she knelt in the darkness and silence

she gave herself with simple, unreserved sincerity to the service of the

lost among men.

Rising from her knees, Anna felt a strange glow and exaltation of

spirit. In her own personal life sin had been met and vanquished.

Tremendous apostolic assertions buoyed her soul upward like strong

wings: “free from the law of sin and of death,” “passed from death unto

life,” “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”

Thus she felt her finite linked to the infinite. Her spirit was suffused

with thrilling and unspeakable joy; God was closer than breathing and

nearer than hands and feet.

But, as she stood rapt and absorbed, there came up through the hush of

the night from the dim street below a strange sound, and she was caught

back by it, and listened painfully. It was a little child crying

piteously.

Peering down through the clustering branches, below her window, Anna

could discern by the dim light of the stars the shape of a woman,

forlorn and spiritless, passing silently along the shadowed way. Behind

her followed the crying child, with weary little feet stumbling at every

stone. The woman carried something in her arms, hidden by an apron; she

turned and looked at the child, and shook her head, but did not speak.

This woman, who moved abroad only at night, was the village outcast, and

the child was her child, born in sin.

Vague and uncomprehended to Anna’s mind was the abyss into which this

woman had fallen, but she felt it to be black and bottomless, and to

place an everlasting separation between her and the good. She drew back

from the window, a sharp pain, made of pity and horror, at her heart,

sin embodied thus confronting her. She felt as Sir Launfal felt when he

saw the leper.

Lying down to rest at last, Anna slept, in spite of spiritual ecstasies

and sufferings, the sound sleep of a healthy girl who is fortunate

enough to forget the ultimate destinies of human souls, her own with the

rest, for certain favoured hours.

It was long before her sleep was disturbed by dreams, but an hour before

sunrise she awoke with a pervading sense of exquisite happiness brought

over with her from a dream just dreamed. It was a still dream of seeing,

not of doing. She had seen the form of a man of heroic aspect, old

rather than young, with a grey head, leonine and majestic, strong stern

features, a glance mild and yet searching and subduing; a man imperial

and lofty, and above his fellows, but whether as king or saint or

soldier she could not guess. But here was made visible a power, a

freedom, and a greatness for which her own nature, she felt in a swift

flash of self-revelation, passionately cried out, which it had nowhere

found, and to which it bowed in a curious delight hitherto unknown. This

only happened: this mysterious personality, more than human, she

thought, if less than divine, had looked kindly upon her, in her weak,

childish abasement, and had shed into her eyes, and so into her heart,

the impossible, inexplicable happiness with which she awoke. She did not

sleep again. This waking consciousness enamoured her.

What did it mean? Anna asked herself all day. Was it a dream sent from

God at this solemn hour of dedication? If so, what did it prefigure?

Even at the sacramental feast, her first communion, that majestic head,

with the controlling sweetness of the eyes upon her, came before her

vision, and made her heart beat fast.

CHAPTER IV

The fiend that man harries

Is love of the Best.

—_The Sphynx_, R. W. EMERSON.

Malvina Loveland, the girl whom Anna had found solace in forgiving for

her childish offence, had “come out,” as Haran people said, at the same

time with Anna.

This fact, and the compunction in Anna’s heart toward her early foe, had

drawn the two girls together, and they became friends. They talked of

the interests of the cause of religion, and read biographies together,

or rather, Anna read aloud while her friend diligently produced lace

work with a small shuttle, or hemstitched linen ruffles; but both cared

less for these several occupations than for the sense of mingling their

young, unfolding perceptions.

Anna had need of a friend; Lucia, her sister, was many years older, and

had long ago married a farmer, and departed deeper into the hills, where

she worked with the immoderate industry of New England women, bore many

children, and lived a life into which Anna did not enter deeply. The

Mallison boys were away from home, studying and working, and the

parsonage was a silent place. Anna adored her father with the restrained

ardour of her kind, and loved her mother with a great tenderness, but

she was actively intimate with neither, and thus greatly alone.

Mally was noticeably pretty, and Anna thought her beauty angelic. She

was capable, clever, quick, and impulsive, one of the women who can do

anything they see done, strongly imitative and impressionable. She

developed rapidly, while Anna matured slowly. Anna had nobleness, Mally

had facility. Anna, beside Mally, looked uncomfortably tall, with her

angular thinness and her dark, grave face. She had masses of lustreless

brown hair, a clear _brune_ skin like her father, and, like him,

singularly fine hands. Her eyes were her mother’s, and her only

beauty,—golden brown, and of limpid clearness.

To both these girls their religion was a system of prohibition and of an

abnormal development of conscience. The negative, not the positive, side

was uppermost to them. “Thou shalt not” was written over every device

and desire which did not minister directly to the furtherance of the

local conception of religion. Both were eager to grasp the positive

side, to convert the world, to see Satan chained, and themselves to

contribute to this desirable consummation; but they were doubtful how to

begin. Both were ardent controversialists after the manner of their day,

and Anna read systematic theology with her father with extraordinary

relish.

They waited and wondered, each longing for her destiny to disclose

itself decisively. But with Anna a hidden life budded beneath the

surface, unknown even to Mally. The romantic and poetic impulses of her

nature, no longer directly nourished by the poets whom she had put away

from her by force, stirred in her heart, and fed themselves, in silence,

on the life of nature, and on the delicate, evanescent imaginings of her

awakening womanhood.

Below the surface of her conscious thoughts a strange inarticulate

passion for power and freedom beat and throbbed, and would not be

stilled, despite her quiet, conscientious conformity to the narrow

conditions of the world about her. She did not know what freedom was,

but she felt that she was not free; neither did she clearly know what

the power meant for which she longed, but she felt the absence of it in

every one she had ever met. It was mysterious, indefinable—once only had

she encountered it, and that was in a dream.

Thus a nature simple and single, with all its forces apparently bent one

way, and with few avenues, or none, by which to import conflicting

influences, was, in fact, already incipiently subject to the

complexities of instinct, of motive, and desire, which weave the

bewildering network of human experience.

When Anna was twenty, an event occurred of much importance in its

bearing on her life. Under the direction of an old friend of Samuel

Mallison, the Rev. Dr. Durham of Boston, a general secretary for Foreign

Missions, a series of meetings was held in Haran for the promotion of an

interest in this cause. Dr. Durham was entertained, during the time of

the convention, at the parsonage; he was a genial and kindly man, and

became in his way an especial friend of Anna, in whom he manifested a

marked interest.

From the country round about, during the week, men and women thronged to

Haran; and at an evening meeting to be addressed by a woman who had been

a missionary in India, the white meeting-house was filled. Many in the

congregation had never seen a missionary; many more had never heard a

woman speak in public. Curiosity ran high.

The speaker was a little sallow woman, in a plain and unbecoming grey

gown, who stepped timidly to the edge of the platform, laying a small

hand which trembled visibly on the cold mahogany pulpit, as if to

conciliate it for her intrusion and to crave its support.

She spoke in a shrill crescendo, without the graces or arts of a skilled

speaker, and she made no appeal to the emotions of the hearers. It was

rather a dry and unimaginative account of the work done at an obscure

mountain station, with statistics of no great impressiveness, and

careful attention to accuracy of detail. But she had the advantage of

sowing her seed on virgin soil. It was not important at that day and to

those isolated and simple-minded people that the missionary should speak

with enticing words, or attempt dramatic effect. She was herself there

before them in flesh and blood, and no great time before she had been on

heathen ground, had come into actual combat, face to face, with wild,

savage men and strange, outlandish women, who knew not God, and who

veritably and visibly bowed down to wood and stone.

For the hour, that little woman of weak bodily presence and commonplace

intellect became the incarnation of Christianity seeking a lost world,

and she herself was far greater to their thought than anything she could

have said.

At the end of her report, for it was that rather than appeal or address,

she told the story of a high-caste Hindu woman to whom she had sought to

give the gospel message. This woman had turned upon her with grave

wonder and had asked, “How long have you known this? about this Jesus?”

“Oh, for many years, all my life in fact.”

“Then,” said the woman, solemnly, “why did you not come to tell us

before?”

Without comment or enlargement, having told of this occurrence, the

speaker turned and walked shyly from the platform, leaving an unusual

hush in the assembly, as if an event, a result of some sort, were waited

for.

Toward the end of the church, where she was seated with her mother, Anna

Mallison rose in her place, made her way out into the middle aisle, and

then, with her head a little bent, but her face neither pale nor

agitated, walked quietly to the foot of the platform. Samuel Mallison,

who was seated with Dr. Durham behind the pulpit, rose and stood, just

above, as if to receive her, looking down with solemn eyes. Some one who

saw Anna’s face said that, as she looked up into that of her father thus

bent above her, the smile which suddenly illuminated it was beyond

earthly beauty. It was a look in which two human spirits, and those

father and child, purged as far as might be of earthliness, met in

angelic interchange, pure and high.

Turning about, thus facing the great congregation, Anna, who had never

before spoken in a public gathering of any sort, however small, said in

a voice which was clear and distinct, though not loud:—

“I wish to offer myself to this society to go, if they will send me, to

some heathen people, to tell them that Christ has died to save them. I

am ready to go at once, if it is thought best.”

The gravity and simplicity, and absence of self-consciousness, of the

girl’s words and bearing, and the profound sympathy of the people who

saw and heard her, combined to produce an overpowering impression. As

the meeting broke up, women were weeping all over the house, and sturdy

unemotional men were deeply moved.

Anna, seeing that many would surround her and speak their sympathy or

give their praise, which she dreaded and feared to hear, turned with

swift steps to the door nearest her, and so escaped into the outer

darkness of the night, no one following.

But, as she hurried with light steps across the village green and

reached the parsonage gate, she found Mally waiting to waylay her.

“Oh, Anna,” she cried, and her tears flowed fast, “you will go away from

me, from all of us! How can you put this great distance between us?”

“How can I do anything else, Mally?” Anna answered softly. “It is what I

have been waiting for; I think I was never truly happy until to-night.

All my life before I have been unsatisfied, and something has ached and

hurt whenever I stopped to feel it.”

“And to-night you are really happy?” cried her friend, half enviously,

and yet by no means drawn to devote herself to the medley of crocodiles,

dark-skinned babies, and cars of Juggernaut, which signified India to

her mind.

“Oh, at last!” Anna exclaimed, and with a long breath of relief. “Will

it not bring peace, Mally, to know that I am surely doing His will? It

will be like pure sunshine after living in a fog these past years.”

“Then weren’t you really happy when you were converted and joined the

church?” asked Mally, naïvely.

“Partly. But just to be happy because you are saved yourself—why, it

does not last. And you know, dear, we could never find anybody’s soul to

work for here in Haran; at least, we didn’t know how,” and Anna became

silent, the vision of one solitary outcast coming before her, with whom

she had been forbidden even to speak. But Mally refused to be comforted

thus, and went her way with many tears.

There were more tears for Anna to encounter that night, for her mother

came home broken-hearted. The Lord had answered her husband’s daily

prayer, and had graciously chosen one of their own family to preach the

gospel to the heathen, and the answered prayer was more than the loving

soul could sustain. Like Jacob, she could get no farther than the wail,

“If I am bereaved, I am bereaved.”

Not so Samuel Mallison. Too long had he schooled himself to the

sacrifice of his dearest human and earthly desires. The long discipline

of his life stood him now in good stead. Coming into the room where Anna

was vainly seeking to comfort her mother, he laid his hands in blessing

on her head, and with a look upward which stilled the weeping woman, he

pronounced the ancient words:—

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy

word;

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

And yet Anna was the very apple of his eye. Of such fibre was the

altruism of that rugged first growth.

CHAPTER V

Life! life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,

Love, Love alone can pore

On thy dissolving score

Of harsh half-phrasings,

Blotted ere writ,

And double erasings

Of chords most fit.

—SIDNEY LANIER.

From the time of the missionary meeting and the announcement of his

daughter’s determination to devote herself to the service of Christ in a

heathen land, Samuel Mallison’s health declined rapidly. His _Nunc

Dimittis_ was of literal import, and prophetic.

Whether the death which all who loved him saw that he was soon to

accomplish could be called dying of heart-break or dying of fulfilled

desire, would have been hard to determine. Heart and flesh cried out

against the separation from his best-beloved child, while the triumphant

spirit blessed God for answered prayer, and for the fruition in that

cherished life of his child of hopes and aspirations which had been but

scantily fulfilled in his own.

“I have not been a successful man, Anna,” he said to her one autumn day

when they were alone in his study. He sat erect in his straight chair,

but with an unmistakable languor in every line of face and frame, and

with a feverish brightness in his prominent dark eyes.

Anna laid her hand upon his with endless gentleness.

“No man in Haran is so beloved, father. No man has done so much good.”

“Perhaps,” he answered sadly, “and I am satisfied. It is the will of

God. Anna, I have seemed, perhaps, cold and silent, and without feeling

as you have seen me; but the fire within has burned unceasingly, and I

am consumed.”

The last words were spoken lower and with an unconscious pathos which

moved Anna unspeakably.

“I do not understand, father dear, not fully. Can you tell me all? I

love you so.”

They were the simplest words of the most natural affection, and yet it

was the first time in her life that Anna had spoken after this sort to

her father.

“My girl,” he said simply, taking her hand within his own. Then, after a

pause, he continued speaking.

“It is after this manner that life has gone with me. I believe I ought

to retrace my past with you—for perhaps there may be light upon your

path, if you know all. When I entered the ministry it was with sincerely

right purpose; all the influences of my life pointed me in that

direction, but it was, perhaps, more as an intellectual and congenial

profession than from deeper reasons. I began my ministry, in 1841, in

Boston. I was considered to have certain gifts which were valued in that

day, and all went well, on the surface. But it was the period of a

literary awakening in our nation, of which Boston was the centre of

influence. An American literature was just becoming a visible reality,

and a new impulse was at work and stirring everywhere. Men of original

force were suddenly multiplied before us, and the contagion of

intellectual ambition was felt in an altogether new degree. To me it

became all-controlling. Transcendental philosophy, Platonism, and

classic learning acquired for me a supreme attraction, and I gave myself

more and more to the study of them, and to the translation of Greek

poetry. This had no unfavourable effect upon my preaching in the opinion

of my congregation, rather the reverse, and I may say without vanity

that I had reached comparatively early a certain eminence to which I was

by no means indifferent.”

Samuel Mallison paused a moment, while Anna silently reflected that this

narrative would in the end explain the buried books of her dear old

garret delight.

“Learning was young among us in those days, Anna,” Samuel Mallison began

again humbly, after a little space, “else this would not have happened;

in the year 1848 I received a call to a professorship of the Greek

language and literature in Harvard College.”

Anna felt her own young blood rush to her cheeks in pride and wonder and

amazement. To her little-village simplicity and scanty experience this

seemed a surpassing distinction, and one which placed her father among

the great men of the earth.

“The day after the mind of the authorities had been made known to me,

was the day of my life which I remember best,” Samuel Mallison

continued.

“I went to my study that morning with a programme of what would take

place somewhat definitely before my mind. I was about to seek, humbly

and devoutly, an interview with God, in which I would lay before him

this new and momentous opening in my life, and seek to have his will for

me made clear. What this will would be, or what I should take it to be,

was, just below the surface of my mind, a foregone conclusion. In fact,

my letter of acceptance was substantially framed in my mind already. I

had never been favoured with voices and visions and revelations clear

and conclusive in my religious experience, and I foresaw a decision

based upon general reasonableness and preference, touched with a

pleasant sense of the divine favour, which might naturally be expected

to rest upon so congenial a course, and one so worthily justified by

precedent. I read, as a preparatory exercise, with perfect satisfaction,

the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel, then closed my Bible and knelt in

prayer. This was exactly as I had foreseen—an orderly series of

exercises befitting my position. But, oh; how mechanical, how cold, how

barren! With such perfunctory practices I could think to take leave of

the sacred calling of the ministry, so dead had my spirit grown to the

claims of the blessed gospel, and its mission of salvation to a lost and

perishing world!

“I knelt and thought to pray, but, like the king in ‘Hamlet’, my words

flew up, my thoughts remained below. Between me and Him whom I would

have approached, interposed, like a palpable barrier, a solemn

reiterated echo of words just read: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you,

except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone;

but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life

shall lose it.’

“I rose from my knees and walked up and down the room in great anxiety

of spirit. This new work which I thought to undertake was educational,

ennobling, necessary; in no way contrary to sound doctrine, in no way a

betrayal of sacred responsibility; I was fitted for it by nature, by

tastes, and attainments. Why was it opened to me? To mock me? to tempt?

I could not believe it, I had welcomed it as coming in the providence of

God.

“But my heart-searching grew swift and deep, and it was given me to see

the absoluteness, the finality, of the vows which I had assumed, from

which I straightway realized that no argument of those with which I was

equipped sufficed to release me. Feebly and imperfectly, yet sensibly, I

began to grasp the import of what the apostle calls the fellowship of

Christ’s sufferings, the being made conformable unto his death. Oh, the

depth of the mystery hid in that saying! All these years I have sounded

it—Anna, all these years I have died, in my own natural life—I have

striven to give all I had to give, but the ‘much fruit’—where has it

been?”

An expression of pain, hardly less than agony, was impressed upon Samuel

Mallison’s face, and Anna hid her eyes, finding it too bitter to bear to

see him suffer thus.

“I put it all away from me, then and there. Nothing was possible but for

me to decline the invitation which had been given, you can see. Further,

I saw that my studies had been my snare. My love of poetry and

philosophy and learning, the prominence of my pulpit, the social and

intellectual affinities I had formed, all had contributed to my

spiritual deadness and decline. It was then that I put away in that box,

now upstairs, the books which had particularly ministered to the tastes

which had led me so far from the true conception of my life work. Never

since that day have I allowed myself to follow the instinct for poetic

expression. That longing had to be cut out, even if some life-blood

flowed in the doing it. Henceforth, I wished to know nothing but Christ,

and him—Anna, do not fail to grasp this—him, not triumphant, but

_crucified_. The offence of the cross to the natural spirit, how hardly

can it be overcome! No child’s play, no easy and harmonious growth in

grace, has it been to me, but a conflict all the way. Your mother has a

different type of religious life. Be thankful if her temperament shall

prove to be yours.

“That is the story. I left my church not very long after and sought this

rugged, remote section, because it offered hard work and a needy field,

which some men shunned. Some years before I had met your mother, and we

were married. Twenty years of my life and its best activity have been

spent here in Haran. Those first few years and what made life to me in

them I have looked upon as a false start. From that day, I sought only

this one gift: an especial enduement of the Holy Spirit to give me power

with men unto salvation. I desired this gift supremely, but I have not

received it in any signal manner. My ministry has not been wholly

unfruitful, but it has been lacking in the results for which I hoped; I

have not had power with God and men, as have some of my more favoured

brethren. The end is near now, very near, but I come with almost empty

hands and a humbled, contrite heart to meet my Judge. But, my child,

whatever the conflicts of the past years, the last thing which I could

wish for to-day would be to have reversed that early decision. My life,

from the merely human point of view, might, perhaps, on the line of

intellectual effort have been counted successful, while as a minister of

Christ it has not been so to any marked degree: but what is success, and

what failure, when the things of time fade before our eyes?”

Samuel Mallison’s head drooped upon one supporting hand, and an

expression of solemn musing rested on his face, while Anna’s tears

flowed fast.

“Just to do our own little day’s work faithfully, not knowing what its

part may be in the great whole, just to hold fast to the word of God and

the testimony of Jesus, and, having begun the race, to continue to the

end—is not this enough?”

There was silence between them for some moments, and then the father

said, making a sign to Anna to rise:—

“I want you to leave me now, dear child. I must rest. The one earthly

hope to which I still cling is that to you may be given the reward of

‘much fruit,’ which I have failed to win. Remember this, if all the

other teaching I have given you shall be forgotten in the years which

are to try you, of what stuff you are made: _with greatness we have

nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part_.”

Anna Mallison listened to these words with reverent sympathy and loving

response, but the deeper meaning of them did not reveal itself to her,

her time for perception being not yet fully come.

CHAPTER VI

O Joy, hast thou a shape?

Hast thou a breath?

How fillest thou the soundless air?

Tell me the pillars of thy house!

What rest they on? Do they escape

The victory of Death?

—H. H.

In the largest theatre of the New England city of Springfield on a night

in December, an immense assembly of people was gathered. Every gallery

was crowded to its utmost, and the house, from floor to roof, was a

dense mass of human beings. On the stage were musical instruments, but

the customary scenery was withdrawn, save that the background showed a

Neapolitan villa situated on the slope of a Swiss mountain, at the base

of which an ultramarine ocean heaved stormily. Against the incongruity

of this unstable structure were massed several hundred men and women,

and before them a musical leader, baton in hand. At an appointed signal

the great chorus stood, and with them, at the gesture of a man, himself

seated near the centre of the foreground of the stage, the whole

audience, with a rushing sound like the sea or the wind, rose also.

Then there was sung by the chorus, with trained perfection, an old hymn,

the words of which, as well as the melody, were of quaint and almost

childish simplicity:—

“Alas, and did my Saviour bleed?

And did my Sovereign die?

Would he devote that sacred head

For such a worm as I?

Was it for crimes that I had done

He groaned upon the tree?

Amazing pity, grace unknown,

And love beyond degree.”

With a swift motion of his baton the leader indicated that the whole

assembly was to join in singing the refrain, in lowered voices. There

followed in a deep murmur of a pathos quite indescribable:—

“Remember me, remember me,

Oh, Lord, remember me!

And when thou sittest on thy throne

Dear Lord, remember me.”

At the close of this hymn many people in all parts of the house were in

tears, but the hush of motionless silence following was complete, and

the eyes of all were riveted upon that central figure on the stage, the

man who now rose and, advancing to the front, began to address them.

This man was of majestic personal presence and his speech was with

marked power. Thinly veiled under a manner of unusual restraint and

quietness lay a genius for emotional appeal and for persuasion. There

was in his manner and speech an utter absence of excitability, and yet a

quality which excited; a capacity for impassioned eloquence, apparently

controlled and held back by the speaker’s will. The congregation

listened with absorbed attention.

At the close of the address, which was designed to move all the

impenitent or irresolute persons present to an immediate confession of

their need of a Saviour, the speaker asked those of this class who were

present and were so inclined to advance and take certain seats, directly

in front of the stage, which had been reserved for them.

A close observer would have been interested in watching the man as this

part of the evening’s work was ushered in. The restrained intensity of

his manner was noticeably augmented; his eyes moved slowly and

searchingly from one part of the house to another with a gaze which no

trifler and no awakened soul might escape. The expression of his face

was sternly solemn, even tragical, as of one undergoing an actual

travail of spirit. He stood absolutely motionless save for a single and

significant gesture of his right hand, an upward gesture made with

peculiar slowness and with dramatic effect. It was at once entreating,

subduing, and commanding.

At the first moment no person stirred; but presently, as if drawn by an

irresistible magnetism, a stream of men and women could be seen

advancing down the various aisles, with fixed look, pallid faces, and

sometimes with tears. Upon such the speaker bent a look of gentleness

and encouragement, in which his features would be momentarily relaxed,

only to resume the profound solemnity already spoken of, as he lifted

his eyes again to the unmoved masses still confronting him.

The chorus, without rising, now chanted softly the words of vivid

appeal:—

“Why not to-night? Why not to-night?

Thou wouldst be saved, why not to-night?”

Many moments passed. The company of seekers now numbered a hundred.

Beneath the absolute outward restraint which held all, an inner

excitement grew steadily in intensity, and the subtle contagion of “the

crowd” assumed an irresistible sway. It might have become alarming. It

possessed elements of terror just below the surface. A climax was

reached when a man of gigantic frame and brutalized features, in the

upper gallery, stepped forward, and with a gesture rude and almost wild,

flung out his arms toward the evangelist, and called through the silence

of the place:—

“I give in—you knew I’d have to. Yes, I’m comin’.” And then, turning,

clattered down the bare gallery stairs, only to reappear presently

below, with his coarse head bent and big tears flowing down his purple

cheeks.

Gradually the stream of seekers abated, and the aisles became empty.

Thus far no word of appeal or warning had been added to the sermon; save

for the restrained monotony of the music this extraordinary scene had

taken place in complete silence.

Then the speaker’s voice was heard again, and in it was a strange

emotional quality which had been previously unnoticed, and before which

the pride and will of many melted within them.

“The people of this company are dismissed to their homes,” he said, in

gentle, measured tones; “my work now is for those who have feared God

rather than men. They will remain. Let all others go without unnecessary

delay, or stopping for speech with one another. The Spirit is here.”

The benediction followed, but as they broke up, scores hitherto

irresolute turned and joined the company of seekers in the front of the

house.

When the speaker, the house being otherwise emptied, came down to the

anxious and disquieted little company waiting for his guidance, he stood

before them in silence for a little space, and then, turning to a group

of clergymen who were associated with him, he said:—

“Pardon me, but I believe I will leave these friends in your hands,

brethren. I wish to return immediately to my lodging,” and saying

nothing further in explanation or apology, he departed, with evident

haste.

When he reached the lobby of the theatre he found three men watching who

hastened toward him, their spokesman, with outstretched hand,

introducing himself and his companions and adding, with eager

cordiality:—

“This is so much better than we expected. We were prepared to wait for

you some time.”

The man received the greeting gravely, and, indeed, silently.

“Will you come with us now to our hotel? We wish to confer with you. We

have come from New York for that purpose.”

“Will you not let me know what you wish here, at once?” was the

rejoinder. “I am in some haste.”

“Certainly, certainly, if you prefer it,” said the other, cheerfully,

hiding a shade of discomfiture. Then, with a change to serious emphasis,

he proceeded: “We want you to undertake a work in New York this winter,

as soon as possible, in fact. A large group of prominent churches is

ready to unite in the movement, and unlimited resources will be placed

at your disposal. Your own compensation, pardon me for alluding to it,

will be anything you will name—that is a matter of indifference to the

committee, save that it be large enough. We are ready to build you a

tabernacle two hundred feet square,—larger if you like.”

The man addressed involuntarily laid his hand on his breast; a letter in

the pocket under his hand, from Chicago, specified a tabernacle three

hundred feet square. He smiled slightly; even religious zeal was a size

larger in Chicago than elsewhere.

Further details were mentioned, but the evangelist seemed to give them a

forced and mechanical attention. Then, rather suddenly, he broke in with

a word of apology.

“I am fully sensible, gentlemen,” he went on, “of the confidence you

have manifested in me, and I would, under other conditions, have

accepted your proposition. But the very circumstance of your making it

to-night hastens an action on my part which I have been approaching, but

had not, until now, definitely determined upon. I am about to withdraw

from this work, and can form no engagements, however promising. I shall

close the meetings here as soon as I can honourably do so, and these

meetings are, for the present certainly, my last.”

The blank faces of the three men before him seemed to demand a word or

two more.

“My reasons?” he asked with curt and almost chilling brevity. “Pardon

me. They are personal to myself. Good evening. No one can regret your

disappointment more than I.” With these words the speaker turned

abruptly from the little group and left the theatre. In great amazement

and perplexity the committee of three presently followed his example.

Here was an accredited and earnest man, no irresponsible religious

tramp, who possessed, apparently in a superlative degree, the gift of

winning souls for which Samuel Mallison had given his all, if in vain,

and for lack of which he might fairly be said to be dying, being one who

could have lived on spiritual joy, if such had ever been his portion.

And this man, possessing this coveted and crowning religious endowment,

was deliberately putting it aside, and refusing to use it. What did it

signify?

* * * * *

Anna Mallison had left Haran, in its ice-bound valley, early that

morning, and, by travelling through snowdrifts in a sleigh all the

forenoon, had been favoured to get as far as Springfield on her journey,

at nine o’clock of that same evening. She was bound for Boston, where

she was to go before the missionary board to be examined as to her

fitness and promise for a worker on the “foreign field.”

At the Springfield station Anna had been met by the little missionary

lady whom she had heard and met in Haran on her night of great decision.

By her she had been conducted to a hotel, shown to a room,

affectionately if reticently counselled, and then left to sleep and be

ready for another early start on the following morning. It was the first

time Anna had ever been in a city, and she was bewildered by the noise

and lights in the streets through which she had been hurriedly driven.

Left alone, she looked about her at the stiff order of the narrow hotel

chamber, the first she had ever inhabited, the showy, shabby carpet, the

cheap carvings of the furniture, the long mirror in which she herself

stood, still and dreary, and a rushing wave of heart-sickness swept over

her. Her anxiety for her father became suddenly poignant; a sense of the

sadness of his life tore her heart with fierce pain: she realized now,

as she had failed to before, how fast his strength declined. She longed

to know how that moment fared with him, and how the next would. A wild

purpose seized her to return the next morning to Haran, and let all

other purposes go until some later time.

However, in spite of all this anxiety and doubt, Anna’s physical

weariness was sufficient to bring sleep apace, when once her head was on

the pillow, and all the distant murmur of the city and the sudden,

uncomprehended noises of the great house were soon lost to her. Thus she

failed to hear a man who entered the room next to hers within the same

hour, who closed the door with some emphasis and locked it fast; who,

after that, walked up and down within the narrow limits of that room

with uniform, slow step, and who continued to do this until the December

dawn filtered through the dim windows. All was still in that next room

when Anna awoke. The anxiety and homesickness of the night before were

gone, and in their place was that mysterious joy which once before on a

June night had strangely visited her. Again, in her dream, she had seen

the face which ever since had dominated her; as before, it was majestic,

free, and strong. As before, it had bent to her,—

“Bent down and smiled.”

She rose hastily, glad and awed and greatly wondering. At six o’clock

she was ready and went down to the great dining-hall, dark save for the

wan light of a single gas jet under which she sat down, silent and

alone, and was served by a heavy-eyed, untidy man-servant, with an

indifferent breakfast. She swallowed a few mouthfuls by force of will,

then gathered up her humble belongings, and started out alone into the

icy chill of the grey morning. It was too early for her friend from the

Orient to brave the rigours of the unaccustomed winter. It was all

comfortless, dreary, and inauspicious; small cheer for a young girl

starting on such an errand, but there was no sinking now of her spirit.

She walked to the Springfield station in the light and warmth of that

inexplicable radiance of her dream, and so pursued her journey to

Boston.

FROM ANNA MALLISON’S NOTE-BOOK

Do you believe in the mutual penetration of mind? Do you believe

that, independent of word and voice, independent of distance, from

one end of the world to the other, minds can influence and penetrate

one another?... Do you not know a soul can feel within it another

soul which touches it?

—PÈRE GRATRY.

_January 28, 1870._—A week to-day since my father was buried. It is late

at night, and I have come up to my little roof room, but I cannot sleep.

I have been with my mother, and we have cried together, until she sleeps

at last, so tired, and her dear face changed so sadly that, as she

slept, I was almost afraid. And yet she is greatly upheld, and as gentle

and uncomplaining as it is possible to be.

But for me, knowing my father, and trying to find the meaning of his

life, these days give me less grief than wonder and perplexity. For a

time after my father told me the story of his past, after I knew what he

might have been, knew his great renunciation, his utter humility, his

leaving all to seek one only thing, and that a gift for others, and even

that being denied him, so that to himself his life seemed a failure, and

its supreme sacrifice unsanctioned and unblessed—after this I could

hardly bear the heart-break of it all. So pure, so blameless, so devoted

a life, and yet, to his own thought, so unfruitful. Just a narrow little

village church, with its narrow little victories and defeats, and its

monotony of spiritual ebb and flow—this was the sum of his achievement.

Was it not hard of God? This he would not have said, but my

undisciplined heart has cried out in bitterness and rebellion. I have

been in deep doubt and darkness.

To-night it is given me to see it all in light, and I am reconciled. The

word which changed my father’s life was that great word of the Master,

“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and _die_, it abideth

alone.” That dying, the utterness of it, was what we did not comprehend.

I think my father understood before he left us, although he could not

express it. But all along he had felt that in dying in his own personal

life to the world and to his ambition, he was meeting the condition, and

that in his own personal life the fruits of that death were to be

manifest, that he should be set for the salvation of many. But God sees

not with our short vision. Days with him are years, and years days; and

our whole life but a vapour, which appeareth for a little time, and then

vanisheth away.

This has come to me: My father’s sacrifice has borne in the life of one

of his children, if not in all, the fruit of an especial dedication of

that life to the service of God. If he had not been the man he was, if

he had not laid down his life daily and hourly in humble self-surrender

to the Divine Will, never, never should I have dreamed of giving myself

to the work to which I am now pledged. His life, in its deepest working,

had been wrought into mine, so that unconsciously I willed to be what he

would have willed to have me. So, then, it is no more I alone, but the

spirit, the will, the nature of my father that worketh in me.

The God of my father—this phrase, so common, so almost commonplace

before, has suddenly taken to itself an extraordinary significance. My

father’s God, my God, who began in my father’s willing sacrifice of all

the noblest powers of his manhood his purpose of grace, will now, in his

good pleasure, carry on the one work, the same so begun, through me, all

unworthy as I am, timid, trembling, but a child. A child, and yet called

with this high calling; child of a saint, called solemnly, sacredly, in

the very depths of my being, deeper than I feel, higher than I know, to

be my father’s child, to be the continuance, the fulfilment of his dying

life, to finish what he began, to bring to fruitage the seed he died to

sow. How sublime, how sweet, how awful the vocation wherewith I am

called!

Then look upon me, O my God, my father’s God! Behold my weakness; raise

it into power; turn my dull mind to light, my hard and narrow heart to a

flame of love; make me thy minister, thy messenger, fulfil in me all thy

great will.

_February 20._—To-night I am alone in the old home, not _our_ home any

more. It is stripped already of all that made it home, but, bare and

grim as it is, I love it, and leave it with a sorrow my heart is yet too

tired to realize. They have consented to let me sleep this one last

night in my own little room. This poor bed is to be left, being not

worth removing, and all that clothes it goes with me. So, like a

pilgrim, under a tent roof for a single night, I lie alone, and look up

beyond the dear old gable and see the winter stars.

They shine upon his grave, and the snow already has drifted over it, and

my heart bleeds. Why will they not let us pray for our dead as the

Romish people do? Oh, kind little father, gone what dim, dazzling way I

do not know, will they let you be happy at last? Will God let you _see

why_?

_February 21._—It was a strange night, and yet most beautiful.

I hardly slept, but prayed until nearly dawn. Then I slept a short time,

and woke to find my limbs racked with pain from the bitter chill of the

room, and tears running down my face. Almost as if I were carrying out

an order given me in my sleep, I hurried on my clothing, and, taking my

candle, came down the stairs, both flights, through the empty, echoing

house, to the rooms below. I was so cold that I shook from head to foot.

Then I found in the kitchen wood left from our store, and I brought it

into the east room, the parlour, where we laid my father after his

death, and where I had sat beside his dear form each night. The great

fireplace was bare and empty, like the room, but the andirons were left.

I laid the wood across and started the fire, and it blazed and gave

light, and threw strange shadows about the room, and I kneeled beside

it, on the hearth, as I used sometimes when I was a little child, and

warmed my hands, and still I cried, and there was no one to comfort me.

Mally says she would have been afraid—in that room. I cannot understand.

It is because her dearest have not died. What of him could have been

anything but precious? To have felt his spirit near me! That would

indeed have been holy consolation.

But what if that were true? I do not know. While I so crouched in the

chimney corner, my heart bleeding, and the tears bathing my poor face,

there was a soft touch, lighter than the flight of a thistledown,

passing over my head, as if the gentlest hand God himself could make

gentle had smoothed my hair, and sought to comfort me.

Then some one said: “I came here to be with you.” But I do not know

whether it was I who so said in my own heart, or whether the words were

spoken to my ear. I only know that I was comforted, and the fire warmed

my aching limbs, and my head drooped against the wall, and I slept with

long sobs, as I slept once when I was a child, and my dear father

ministered to me.

It was broad daylight when I awoke, and I felt soothed and strong. I

rose to go and make ready to lock and leave the house. But first I knelt

and prayed, and I am praying still.

Live in me, O God, as my father lives in me, and as thou didst live in

him. Let me live the life and die the death which he sought to live, to

die, for thee. Give thou unto him through me abiding fruit in the

salvation of souls; and grant us such grace as that we may humbly and

worthily fulfil thy gracious will, I on earth, as he in heaven.

CHAPTER VII

She [Dorothea] could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life

involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp, and

artificial protrusions of drapery.—_Middlemarch_, GEORGE ELIOT.

A small house in a small street of a small provincial city. A faded

brown house with its front door directly on the street, the steps

jutting into the sidewalk. A narrow strip of yard overlaid with grimy

snow separated this house from others on either side, equally unnotable

and uninteresting, the dwellings of mechanics and small tradesmen.

It was the close of a rough March day, the wind had not died with

sunsetting, and a thin, piercing rain, colder than snow, was driven

before it into the very teeth of the few passers-by.

A tall woman, in a straight black dress with a dyed black shawl drawn

tightly around her shoulders, was making her way down the street dead

against the wind, which beat her hair out into wet strands and bound her

skirts hard about the slender long limbs. She made no useless attempt to

hold an umbrella; in fact, she carried none, but was heavily burdened

with four or five large books. She was girlish in figure after a severe

sort, her step steady, her movement without impatience or fluttering, in

spite of the struggle with the wind. Seeing her face, the absorbedness

of sorrow in it was profound enough to explain indifference to sharper

buffetings than those of the wind. It was Anna Mallison.

When she reached the house she deposited her books on the icy step and

drew from her pocket with stiffened, aching fingers a key with which she

unlocked the door. The house was unlighted, and its close, airless

precincts apparently empty.

Stooping, Anna gathered her books again and closed the door, then groped

her way to a steep staircase, a weary sigh escaping her as if in spite

of herself. The room which she entered, silent and dark at her coming,

showed itself, when she had lighted a lamp, a low but spacious living

room, stiffly and even meagrely furnished. Opening beyond it was a

smaller bedroom.

Having laid aside shawl and bonnet, Anna made preparation for a simple

evening meal for two persons. Not until these were made did she stop to

realize that she was chilled and that her shoes were wet through.

Characteristically it was of the shoes she took cognizance rather than

of her feet—circumstances having thus far led her to regard health as an

easier thing to acquire than food and raiment.

There was a sudden outburst now, from below, of merry voices, both a

man’s voice and a girl’s, in loud and cheerful banter, then the house

door shut with a bang, there was a quick step on the stairs, and a gay,

fluttering, wind-blown figure of a pretty girl appeared in the upper

sitting room. It was Mally Loveland, Anna’s early Haran friend and

companion.

“Holloa, Anna!” she called lightly, “lucky for me you got in first! A

fire is a good thing, I tell you, on a night like this.” Mally’s voice

had acquired a new ring of self-confident vivacity.

“You’re a little late, Mally,” remarked Anna, quietly, as she returned

to the room. “Shall I make tea?”

“Oh, yes, do; there’s a dear. Oh, such fun as we’ve been having at the

Allens’! But I’m so chilly and damp, you know; and just look, Anna, at

the ribbons on my hat.” Mally held up to view a pretentious structure of

ribbon and velvet which had plainly suffered many things of the

elements.

“Too bad. I hope you won’t go out again to-night, your cold was so bad

yesterday. It is a wretched night.”

“Oh, I must go out, my dear—must indeed! Couldn’t disappoint the girls,

you know.”

“Nor even the boys?” asked Anna smiling.

Mally laughed at this, evidently pleased. In a few moments she was ready

and they took their places at the tea-table, Mally quieting herself with

an effort, in order to ask a brief blessing upon the meal. It was her

turn to-night. The two coöperated in their religious exercises of a

general character, as well as in their housekeeping.

Destiny, so eagerly challenged by these two village girls in the

eventless isolation of their life in Haran, seemed at last to have

declared itself decisively: both were to catch men,—Anna in the

apostolic sense, Mally in a different one.

Anna’s journey to Boston, three months earlier, had been successful. She

had returned under appointment as a missionary to India; but being still

too young to go out, the Board had advised her to spend the following

two years in studies especially designed to develop her usefulness in

work among the heathen. In January Samuel Mallison had died. The

parsonage, where the children had been born and nurtured, could thus no

longer be their home. It must be made ready now for a successor.

It had been a sorrowful breaking up, and when the melancholy work was

done, and the home effaced forever, the mother, patient and

uncomplaining, departed with Lucia to the lonely farmhouse among the

hills, to take on again, in her later years of life, the many cares of

tending little children. It was then that Anna, accompanied by her

friend Mally, had come to Burlington with the purpose of studying at a

collegiate institute, which offered opportunity for more advanced study

than could be had in Haran. Anna was hard at work every morning on

Paley’s “Evidences” and Butler’s “Analogy,” while her afternoons were

spent in the small hospital of the town, in an informal nurses’ class,

as it was even then considered a useful thing for missionaries to go out

with some equipment for healing the bodies of men as well as their

souls. Mally, by her own account, was “taking” music, painting, and

French.

As they sat at their little table now, with its meagre and humble fare,

but its indefinable expression of refinement, Anna and Mally were in

striking contrast.

It has been said before that Anna matured slowly. There was still in her

face, despite its sadness, the grave wonder, the artless simplicity, and

the sweet unconsciousness of a child. Her figure was angular and

undeveloped; her black dress, absolutely, harshly plain, and of coarse

stuff; her face, far too thin and colourless for beauty. She was,

plainly, underfed and overworked; but there was, nevertheless, a dignity

and a distinction in her aspect which emphasized Mally’s provincialness,

notwithstanding the little fashionable touches about dress and coiffure

which the latter had swiftly and instinctively adapted to her own use.

Anna had the repose of a person who is not concerned at all as to the

impression she makes, or desirous of making any personal impression

whatever. Mally had the restlessness, the vivacity, the eagerness, of a

woman who wishes everywhere and at every time to make herself felt, to

be the central figure. She was born an egotist, and even “divine grace,”

in the devotional phraseology of that time, had not been sufficient to

overcome her natural bent. At the present time, in fact, egotism was

having comparatively easy work with her, and an indefinite truce with

the religious conflicts of earlier days had been tacitly declared. That

spiritual experience had been sincere, and it had lasted several years.

Fortunately, to Mally’s unspoken thought, she had been favoured during

those years to work out her salvation, which was now, according to a

prime doctrine of the church, secured to her against all accidents. This

being so, no one need be concerned for her; and if she were herself

satisfied with a low spiritual attainment, it was nobody’s business but

her own.

She had, to her own naïve surprise, met with a marked degree of social

success in a certain middle-class stratum of the small town. She was

pretty, clever, adaptive; the young men and women of her set said she

was “such good company.” This was high praise. In Haran the natural

order for a marriageable girl was to be soberly and decorously and

protractedly wooed by one young man, to whom, in process of time, she

was married. Here Mally found a far more stimulating social condition.

Not one man, but many, might be the portion of a popular girl, and Mally

found the strength of numbers very great. The sex instinct, the ruling

desire to attract men, sprang into vigorous action, and became, for a

time at least, predominant. Women of whom this is true are often very

good women, with energy and common sense, but it is important for their

friends, for various reasons, to hold the master key to their character.

Anna Mallison, at this period of her life as sexless in her conscious

life as a star, looked on at this rapid and unlooked-for development of

Mally’s nature in infinite perplexity. She had always liked certain men,

even outside her own kindred, but it was because they were wise or good

or sincere, not because they were men. A thirst for admiration being

thus far undeclared in her own life, Mally became inexplicable to her;

she did not hold the key to her character, and involuntarily she

withdrew more and more into herself, her only friend becoming thus

uncomprehended. If she felt this in any degree, Mally, being closely

occupied with more tangible consideration, paid small heed to it.

While they were taking tea, Anna kept her eyes fixed on the mantel

clock, and, having eaten hastily, rose from her place.

“What is the matter?” asked Mally, looking up. “Oh, of course; but, dear

me, Anna, I never would bother to get things ready for old Marm Wilson,

after the way she grumbles at you. Sit down, do. You’ll never get any

thanks, I can tell you that; and what’s the use?”

Anna was at the door already. “I think it’s late enough now to be safe.

She only grumbles, you know, if the oil and wood burn out awhile before

she gets here. She was to work quite near on Hill Street, to-day, so she

will surely be in early.”

“Oh, well, go on if you’ve a mind to. I suppose it is forlorn on a night

like this for the poor old creature to find her house all dark and

cold,” Mally spoke carelessly, half to herself. Anna was already

half-way downstairs.

Mrs. Wilson was their houseowner, a seamstress of narrow means and

narrower life whose upper rooms they rented.

An hour later the upper sitting room was suddenly enlivened and almost

filled, as far as seating capacity was concerned, by a group of Mally’s

friends, who had come to escort her to an evening gathering. These young

men and maidens, whom Anna had scarcely seen before, seemed to explain

the new Mally to her, and to place her at a different angle, as one of a

class, not one by herself. The girls all wore a profusion of ribbons and

curls, and were all in an effervescence of noisy excitement regarding

the effect of the dampness on their hair and their finery; they

whispered and giggled together, and pouted at the young men, or tossed

their heads and assumed exaggerated airs of being shocked at the

personal remarks which these attendants volunteered, and with which they

were, in fact, palpably delighted.

Anna, who attempted some quiet civilities from time to time, was

regarded with undisguised indifference, as not being “one of the set.”

After the young people had left the house, however, Mally’s companion on

their expedition, a young man somewhat above the others in intelligence,

said to her:—

“What an unusual girl that friend of yours, that Miss Mallison, is. I

never met any one just like her. She strikes me as a girl who would keep

a fellow at a mighty distance; but if she ever did care for him, he

wouldn’t mind dying for her, you know, and all that sort of thing. But

she isn’t one of the kind you like to play games with.”

CHAPTER VIII

She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,

A smile of hers was like an act of grace;

She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,

Like daily beauties of the vulgar race;

But, if she smiled, a light was on her face,

A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam

Of peaceful radiance.

—HARTLEY COLERIDGE.

To the surprise of both the friends, Anna, who had gone about her

rigorous tasks unseen and unnoted hitherto, began about this time to

come into a certain comparative prominence in the quiet little city.

A day or two after the evening described in the last chapter, Anna

received a note from Mrs. Ingraham, the wife of a distinguished citizen

of the town, a man of great wealth, and a well-known senator. The

Ingrahams were, perhaps, the most highly placed family in the little

town, by right of distinguished antecedents, of wealth, and of habit of

life. They belonged to that singularly privileged class, which Anna

Mallison had not hitherto encountered, who have both will and power to

appropriate the most select of all things which minister to the

individual development, whether things material, things intellectual, or

things spiritual. Thus Mrs. Ingraham and her daughters were women of

fashion, prominent figures at the state functions of their own state,

and well known in the inner circles of Washington society. They dressed

superlatively well in clothes that came from Paris. At the same time

they were as much at home among literary as among fashionable folk, and

Mrs. Ingraham at least was understood to be devotedly religious, with an

especial penchant for foreign missions. In fine, all things were theirs.

Thus it was an event for Anna Mallison, in her dull, low-ceiled upper

room, to open and read the note of Mrs. Senator Ingraham to herself,—a

note written in graceful, flowing hand, on sumptuous, ivorylike paper,

squarely folded, with a crest on the seal, and the faintest suggestion

of violets escaping almost before perceived. The note was delicately

courteous, a marvel of gracious tact. Mrs. Ingraham had heard through a

friend that Miss Mallison was under appointment as a missionary to

India, and had sincerely wished to meet her. On Friday evening a dear

Christian worker from Boston, now her guest, was to hold a little

parlour meeting at the house for the help and encouragement of friends

who were interested in a higher Christian life. Would not Miss Mallison

give them all the pleasure of making one of that number? Mrs. Ingraham

would esteem it a personal favour; and if Miss Mallison felt that she

could tell the little company something of the experience she had had in

being led into this beautiful life work, it would be most acceptable.

However, this was by no means urged, but merely suggested and left

entirely to Miss Mallison’s preference.

The man who had brought the note waited on the narrow walk below for

Anna’s answer. He wore a sober but handsome livery.

This was the first invitation of the kind which Anna had received, but

she had now somewhat accustomed herself, by the advice of the Board, to

speaking in women’s missionary meetings, and it seemed to her right to

say yes. Accordingly, on untinted note-paper of a very common grade, she

said yes in a natural and simple way, and made haste to give the note to

the man at the door below, whom she felt distressed to keep waiting.

This man removed his shining hat in respectful acknowledgment as he took

the note, and told Anna that Mrs. Ingraham had asked him to say, having

forgotten to mention it in her note, that in case Miss Mallison would be

so kind as to come, Mrs. Ingraham would send the carriage for her at

half-past seven on Friday evening.

Anna felt that she ought to deprecate so much attention, and timidly

attempted to do so; but the man plainly was not further empowered to

treat in the matter, and, bowing respectfully, departed with Anna’s

pallid, long and narrow envelope in his well-gloved hand.

When Mally came in, Anna handed her Mrs. Ingraham’s note. Mally’s face

flushed noticeably as she read it. It was not easy for her to have her

quiet friend thus preferred.

“You’ll go, of course?” she commented rather coldly, as she handed it

back.

“Yes.”

“I should think you would by all means. Who wouldn’t? I’ve heard lots

about Mrs. Ingraham; she believes in a very high religious life, you

know, and those rich higher-life people live high, I can tell you.

There’ll be a supper, depend on that, and it will be a fine one.”

“Oh, I don’t think there will be anything of that kind,” interposed

Anna, hastily.

“You see!” cried Mally, with an air of superior wisdom and wide social

experience. “Oh my! if I should tell you all I’ve heard about those

Ingrahams, you’d be surprised. One night they have a prayer-meeting and

the next night a dance. It’s all right, I suppose. Kind of new, that’s

all.”

On the following evening, when the luxurious Ingraham carriage was

driven up before Mrs. Wilson’s poor little house, many eyes peered

narrowly from neighbours’ windows to catch the unwonted sight; and Anna,

slipping hastily out of the Wilson door, felt an access of humility in

this exaltation of herself, for such she knew it seemed to her

neighbours, transient though it was. She had suffered a guilty and

apologetic consciousness all day toward Mally, who had treated her with

a slight coolness and indifference, which afflicted Anna keenly.

When Anna entered the hall of the Ingraham house, a small, stout woman,

in a brown dress and smooth hair, came out to greet her, and took her

hand between both her own, which were white and soft and heavily

weighted with diamonds. Anna found the diamonds confusing, but she knew

the hands were kind. Mrs. Ingraham’s manner, of sincere kindliness and

dignity, put Anna wholly at her ease, and she looked about her,

presently, at the subdued luxury and elegance of her surroundings with a

frank, childlike pleasure. Her absolute unconsciousness of herself saved

Anna from the awkwardness which her unusual height, her angular

thinness, and her unaccustomedness to social contact might otherwise

have produced. She wore her “other dress,” which was of plain black

poplin, but quite new, and not ungraceful in its straight untortured

lines; and as she entered the great drawing-room, with its splendours of

costly art, and met the eyes of many people who were watching her

entrance, the quiet gravity and simplicity of her bearing were hardly

less than grace.

Two women, dressed with elegance and apparently not deeply touched with

religiousness, commented apart a little later, having met and spoken in

turn with the lady from Boston and the young missionary elect.

“What do you think of Mrs. Ingraham’s new saints?” asked one, whose

black dress was heavily studded with jet ornaments.

“I like the young missionary better than the Bostonian, myself,” was the

reply. The speaker had red hair and an exquisite figure. “Isn’t she

curious, though?” she continued. “Manners, you know, but absolutely no

manner! I never encountered a woman before, even at her age, who

positively had _none_.”

“That is what ails her, isn’t it?” returned her beaded friend. “You’ve

just hit it. And you can see that tremendously developed missionary

conscience of hers in every line of her face and figure, don’t you know

you can?”

“Figure, my dear? She has none. I never saw such an utter absence of the

superfluous!”

Here they both laughed clandestinely behind their laced handkerchiefs.

“Do you know how I should describe that girl?” challenged the Titian

beauty, recovering.

“Cleverly, without doubt.”

“I should call her a scaffolding over a conscience.”

“That is really very good, Evelyn. You can see that she is not even

consciously a woman yet. She knows nothing of life or of herself or of

this goodly frame, the earth, save what that New England conscience of

hers has interpreted to her. Her horizon is as narrow as her chest.”

“Poor thing. How will she bear life, I wonder!” and the words died into

a whisper, for at that moment the little talking, moving groups of men

and women were called to take the chairs, which had been arranged in

comfortable order, and give attention to what was to follow.

CHAPTER IX

When the soul, growing clearer,

Sees God no nearer;

When the soul, mounting higher,

To God comes no nigher;

But the arch-fiend Pride

Mounts at her side,

And, when she fain would soar,

Makes idols to adore,

Changing the pure emotion

Of her high devotion

To a skin-deep sense

Of her own eloquence;

Strong to deceive, strong to enslave—

Save, oh! save.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Anna was the first to speak. When she rose and faced the little

audience, made up of fashionable women, professional men, and a

sprinkling of the more clearly defined religious “workers”, she did not

feel the coldness underlying their courteous attention. The Titian

beauty fixed upon her eyes full of unconsciously patronizing kindness,

and Mrs. Ingraham smiled at her with sympathetic encouragement, but they

might have spared themselves the effort. Anna did not perceive or

consider these things. She was not thinking of them at all, nor of

herself.

The peculiar twofold consecration which rested upon her spirit in regard

to her missionary vocation, as a call to fulfil at once the Divine Will

and the will of her father, was so profound and so solemn as to remove

her from personal and passing cares. She would not herself have chosen

to appear before these people and to speak to them of her supreme

interest; but to do so had been laid upon her as duty, and Anna’s

conception of duty, by reason of the “tremendously developed conscience”

which the worldly-wise women had discerned in her, was of something to

be done. She did this duty with the simple directness of a soldier under

command. She stood erect and motionless, with no nervous working of

hands or trembling of lips, and spoke in a clear, low voice, in which

alone, by reason of a peculiar vibrant pathos, the profound, undeclared

passion of her nature was suggested.

Her critics of the early evening had been right in finding her destitute

of manner. There was no slightest evidence as she spoke of the orator’s

instinct—the magnetism of kindling eye and changing expression, of the

conciliation and subtle flattery of her hearers. Neither had she fervid

personal raptures nor spiritual triumphs to communicate. Of the

picturesque and pathetic elements of the situation she made no use

whatever. She had simply an absolute, dominating conviction that the

heathen were lost; that they could only be saved by the knowledge of

Christ; that this knowledge must be conveyed to them by the disciples of

Christ at his command; and that she, Anna Mallison, was humbly grateful

that she was permitted to devote herself to a service so obviously

necessary. Of these things she spoke; of the sacred sense of living out

her father’s disappointed life she naturally could not speak.

It was not the speech which Mrs. Ingraham and her guests had expected.

They had looked to have their sympathies aroused by a pathetic recital

of sacrifice and exalted self-devotion. Anna, on the contrary, was

unconscious of sacrifice, and felt herself simply grateful for the

privilege of carrying out her innermost desires.

The people who heard her felt that to give up “the world” was a mighty

thing. Anna did not yet know what “the world” was. To their

anticipation, she had been a figure almost as romantic and moving as a

young novitiate about to take conventual vows; to herself, she was an

enlisted soldier who has received marching orders, and whose heart

exults soberly, since there are ties which may be broken, and death,

perhaps, awaiting, but even so exults with joyful response.

Thus, to most of those who heard her, Anna’s little speech was a

distinct disappointment; the very loftiness of her conception of her

calling made it featureless, and robbed it of adaptation to easy

emotional effect. The ladies who had discussed her before her speech

found, after it, that it was, after all, exactly what might have been

expected—altogether of a piece with the austerity of her figure, and her

sad, colourless face, no warmth, no emotion—just the hard Puritan

conscience at its hardest.

There were two or three only who felt the spiritual elevation belonging

to the girl and to what she said, and the underlying pathos of her high

restraint, as too great to put into the conventional phrases of sympathy

and praise, and so kept silence.

There was a brief pause after Anna returned to her seat, during which

people stirred and spoke in low tones, and the beaded lady leaned over

and thanked Anna for her “charming little talk”. Then Mrs. Westervelt,

the guest from Boston came forward and began speaking with a winning

smile, a gentle, soothing voice, and an affectionate reference to “the

dear, sweet young sister.” She had the ease and flexibility of the

practised public speaker; the winning and dimpled smile with which she

won the company at the start was in frequent use, and she made constant

motions with a pair of very white hands. She was quietly dressed, and

yet, after the straightness of Anna’s poor best gown, her attire had its

own air of handsome comfort. The perfect command of her voice and of

herself established instantaneously a _rapport_ with her audience, of

which Anna, in her inexperience, had never dreamed.

Her beloved Mrs. Ingraham, she said, had asked her to tell the dear

friends of some wonderful answers to prayer which she had recently

experienced, but before doing this she craved the privilege of reading a

few verses of Scripture.

She then read certain passages from the prophecy of Zechariah, detached

from one another, taken entirely from their historic setting, but fitted

together with some care. The speaker explained that she had, in her

earlier Christian life, found some difficulty in interpreting this

rather obscure passage, but in the new life of complete sanctification,

into which it had been her glorious privilege to enter, she had come to

see all Scripture by a new and marvellous light. No longer did she trust

to the dry and formal explanations of scholars, many of whom, it was but

too well known, had never had the deep things of God revealed to them,

and who had been led into many errors by their pride of learning. All

that kind of study was past for her, for the dear Lord himself showed

her, when she lifted her heart to him, just what he meant in his blessed

word. This had been her experience in regard to the passage just read.

To the natural mind there were difficulties in it, but just below the

surface was the great precious truth which God would have all his

children receive. It had been given her that when she came to the

beautiful home of Mrs. Ingraham, and should be called upon to speak to

these friends, she must bring them this particular passage. But it had

looked dark to her, and she was in doubt how to interpret it. But as she

had been in the cars, coming up from Boston, she had said: “Now, Lord,

those dear friends in Burlington will want to know just what you meant

by that sweet portion of your word, and I do not feel that I can tell

them unless you enlighten me. What is it that is intended by the two

staves in the hand of the prophet, one called Beauty and one called

Bands?”

Then the dear Lord had sweetly spoken in the secret place of her heart,

as distinctly as if with an audible voice: “My child, the old life of

formalism, of coldness, and of worldly pleasure in which many Christians

live is the staff called Bands. The higher life, the life of answered

prayer, the life of perfect sanctification and fulness of blessing, is

Beauty. Take this message to my dear children in Burlington.”

Oh, how simple! Oh, how sweet! Who would weary heart and brain over the

interpretations of rationalistic German commentators, when we could thus

have the direct interpretation of his own word by the Lord himself?

Thus Mrs. Westervelt proceeded at some length on this line, and then,

with tearful eyes and an added intensity of the personal element, she

rehearsed the answers to prayer which her friend, Mrs. Ingraham, had

rightly called wonderful. Thus, in carrying on the work of preaching

perfect sanctification in Boston, a room had been needed for meetings.

Two or three of the little band had prayed, and within a week they had

had a most suitable room offered them by a precious sister, but it was

unfurnished. The details of securing the equipment of this room were now

described. Each piece of furniture, the speaker declared, had been

directly given in answer to special prayer and by a marvellous

interposition. If any natural means had been at work by which persons in

sympathy with their efforts were led to supply their obvious needs,

these were not mentioned. Plainly it was Mrs. Westervelt’s conception of

a perfect relation to God that the one sustaining it should receive

constant miraculous testimony of the divine favour. The privilege of

attaining this condition was presented with fervid emphasis. It was the

high and perfect life! Who would live on the old plane when this was

what God had for them? Oh, how beautiful it was to trust! Why should we

ever doubt, when we were so plainly told that _whatsoever_ we ask we

shall receive?

As Mrs. Westervelt went on, many of her hearers were moved to tears, and

a continuous response of sympathetic looks and subdued exclamations

followed her recital of her surprising experiences. The wealthy women

present felt that this was certainly a fine thing for those who could

not get what they wanted by ordinary business methods, but were,

perhaps, secretly glad that they were not themselves called upon to test

their relation to God quite so pointedly. The poorer and humbler guests

wept profusely, thinking how long they had stumbled on in the dull and

inferior practice of working painfully for many needed things, which

might all have been miraculously given them, if they had only been

favourites of God, like Mrs. Westervelt, or, as she would have said,

“had only just stepped out into the fulness.”

Anna Mallison sat and listened in unspeakable astonishment.

This was as absolutely new a gospel to her as the gospel of Christ to a

disciple of Buddha. It was her first contact with sentimental religion.

The God of her father had been the immutable and eternal Creator, the

high and holy One inhabiting eternity, the Judge of all the earth.

Through the Incarnation the just anger of this Holy Being toward sinful

men had been appeased. But although in Christ there had been found

access to God and an Intercessor, never had it entered into the heart of

Samuel Mallison or those whom he led to regard themselves as occupying a

position other than of deepest humility, self-distrust, awe, and

reverence.

Mrs. Westervelt’s phraseology was almost like a foreign tongue to Anna.

The constant use of terms of familiar endearment in speaking of the

Almighty; the application of affectionate and flattering adjectives on

all sides; the sense of a peculiar and intimate relation established

between herself and God; and the free-and-easy conversational, in fact,

rather colloquial, style in which she held herself privileged to

communicate with him,—were almost amazing to her. And beneath all these

superficial marks of a new cult, lay the deeper sense of the inherent

disparity. Religion to Anna had been, it has been said earlier, a system

of prohibitions, of self-denials, of self-abasement, with only at rare

intervals the illumination of a profound sense of the love of God. Here

was a religion which held up a species of luxurious spiritual enjoyment,

of unrestrained freedom in approaching God, of an indubitable sense of

being personally on the best of terms with him, as the privilege of all

true believers.

The conception of prayer which Mrs. Westervelt had demonstrated was not

less surprising to Anna. She knew that there were wide and sweeping

scriptural promises with regard to prayer, but she had always felt a

deep mystery attaching itself to them. For herself, she had never

ventured to intrude her temporal gratifications and designs upon the

attention of her God, but had rather felt a sober silence regarding

these things to best befit a sinful creature coming before a holy

Creator. Half revolting, but half smitten with compunction, the thought

now flashed through her mind that, if she had only prayed after this new

sort, her father might have received the oranges for which he had sorely

longed in the months before his death. This luxury was not to be

obtained in Haran, and had therefore been patiently foregone, heaven and

Burlington having seemed equally inaccessible at the time.

Mrs. Westervelt sat down, and the meeting broke up, a swarm of

enthusiastic, tearful women rushing to surround her and pour out their

effusive appreciation of her wonderful address. Anna stood bewildered

and alone, doubting within herself. Had it all been the highest

consecration, as it undoubtedly desired to be? or had it been the

highest presumption, the old temptation of spiritual pride, assuming a

new guise?

Two clergymen of the city, who had been attentive listeners during the

whole evening, not being moved to pour out their admiration upon either

speaker, quietly strayed across the hall into Mr. Ingraham’s library.

The senator himself was absent.

“Well, Nichols,” said Dr. Harvey, the older man, who had a shrewd,

kindly, smooth-shaven face, “what do you think of that for Old Testament

exegesis?”

“It was pretty stiff to have the responsibility for it given to the

Lord,” returned his friend. “I almost felt like interrupting her to say

that, with all due respect, the Lord never told her any such thing, her

interpretation being monstrously untrue.”

“It was awful, simply awful,” said the other, with slow emphasis. “Such

fantastic tricks before high heaven might make men, as well as angels,

weep. And then her familiarity with the Lord, Nichols,—why, man, she

positively patronized the Almighty!”

“It is true, and yet, do you know, Doctor, that woman has some

extraordinary elements for success in such work?”

“If she hadn’t, she would be of no importance, my dear fellow. She has a

fine homiletic instinct. That is just where the danger lies. But, after

all, she represents only one danger—there are others. She is simply the

modern mystic—a kind of latter-day, diluted Madame Guyon. Too much of

the thing is a trifle nauseous, perhaps, but it represents the revolt of

devout souls, in every age, from formalism, and is inevitably an excess,

like all revolt. Doubtless there will be such revolt, world without end,

and it will have its uses.”

“It was fairly pathetic to see how eagerly those women rushed forward to

receive her; evidently that’s the message they are pining for. They

don’t go for us that way, Doctor.”

“No; and they didn’t for that first speaker, Mallison’s daughter. I knew

him. Poor man, what a mystic he might have made, if he had let himself

go! This girl is much like him—the old New England type; religion with

all colour and sentiment clean purged out of it. Cold as ice, chaste as

snow, the antipodes of the Guyon-Westervelt danger. Talk of

holiness,—poor Mallison,—he was the holiest man I ever knew, and in this

life the least rewarded,” and the old clergyman shook his head with a

mournful smile.

“I fancied, when I heard her speak, although I had no idea who she was,

that this daughter of his had not exactly revelled in the luxury of

religion.”

“No; but I tell you, Nichols, she is none the worse for that, at her

age. There is a hardihood, an unconscious, sturdy fortitude in that

earlier type, which we mightily need in the world to-day. To me, that

girl was positively beautiful, because—notice what I say, Nichols—she is

absolutely true.”

“Very likely.”

“Yes; but when you have thought it over, tell me, some day, how many men

and women you know of whom you can say that. If you know one, you will

do well.”

Dr. Harvey, as he said these words, rose to leave the library, but

stopped and stood, as there appeared at that moment at the hall door the

figure of a man who was apparently passing through the hall. So silent

and so sudden was his coming, and so singular his aspect, that the

younger of the two men, perceiving him, started violently in involuntary

surprise, and was conscious of a disagreeable sensation along the course

of his veins.

This man, who had approached the door with noiseless steps, might have

been young, or might have been old. He was of unusual height, with

narrow shoulders, short body, and disproportionate length of limb. His

face, an elongated oval, was of as smooth surface as that of a woman,

and of the shape and pale even colour of an egg. The enormous forehead,

the eyes, small and narrow, set wide apart and obliquely, the flattened

nose, the straight, wide, almost lipless mouth, combined with an

expression of crafty complacence to give the man a singularly alien

semblance. As he stood, he smiled slowly, a smile which emphasized both

the craftiness and the complacency of his expression, and remarked in a

high, thin voice:—

“Just going, Doctor? Make yourself at home here, that’s all right.”

He carried a rather large, morocco-bound note-book in one hand, and a

silver pencil-case in the other. His hands were extremely delicate and

white, with sinuous, flexible fingers, of such phenomenal length as to

suggest an extra, simian joint. They conveyed to the young clergyman a

sense of expressing the same craft as the face, and a yet more palpable

cruelty. The unpleasant impression became more pronounced, for, seeing

the hands, young Nichols involuntarily shivered.

Probably this fact was not noticed by the newcomer, but, having thus

spoken and smiling one more chilling smile, he passed on to the other

end of the hall.

Eyes rather than voice asked in astonishment, “Who is that?”

“Oliver Ingraham, the senator’s son,” was the elder clergyman’s reply,

as they left the library together, “the son of his first wife.” Dr.

Harvey was Mrs. Ingraham’s pastor.

“Incredible!” cried the other, under his breath. “I never saw him, never

heard of his existence.”

The other shook his head with gravely troubled look.

“He is only here when it becomes impossible to keep him elsewhere.”

“Is he insane? imbecile? what is he?”

“Not the first, not the second. I cannot answer the third question.”

CHAPTER X

She sitteth in a silence of her own;

Behind her, on the ground, a red rose lies;

Her thinking brow is bent, nor doth arise

Her gaze from that shut book whose word unknown

Her firm hands hide from her; there all alone

She sitteth in thought trouble, maidenwise.

—R. W. GILDER.

An October morning, and breakfast-time in the Ingraham household. Great

doors stood open into the dining room, where the vast round table could

be seen with its glittering array of silver, and the grace and colour of

exquisite flowers.

A slender girl, as graceful and charming in her simple morning dress as

the flowers she had just placed on the table, stood in the doorway,

waiting, a shade of impatience on her face. Behind her, at one of the

dining-room windows, stood Oliver Ingraham, her half-brother. Mrs.

Ingraham, with her other daughters, one older, one younger, were in the

adjoining library. Outside, in the hall, a man paced up and down with

impatience which he did not attempt to conceal. This was Mr. Ingraham

himself, a man of good height, fine, erect figure, and youthful energy

of motion and bearing. His hair was grey, as also his heavy mustache and

imperial; his eyes grey also, keen, clear, but inclined to wander with

disconcerting swiftness; he had a high, beaklike nose, and a fine,

carefully kept skin, in which a network of dark red veins betrayed the

high liver. He was at once peremptory and gracious, military and

courtly, a man of the world and of affairs on a large scale.

With watch in hand he entered the library and approached his wife.

“Cornelia,” he said, smiling with good-tempered sarcasm, “does it strike

you that the show is a little late in opening? I dislike to mention it,

but it is already ten minutes past eight. I am not familiar with the

social customs of Abyssinia, nor even of Macedonia, but in the United

States it is considered good form for guests, albeit lions, to come to

breakfast on time. Even the Hyrcan tiger, I understand, is usually

prompt in his attendance on that function—”

“Papa!” cried his youngest daughter, Louise, “you are perfectly

dreadful.”

Mrs. Ingraham looked up into her husband’s face with her mild,

conciliating smile.

“I am so sorry, Justin,” she said softly, “but I suppose the poor dear

creatures are very tired after the meeting last night, and their

journey, and all—”

There was a slight noise on the stairs as she spoke, and Mr. Ingraham

faced about with military precision to receive in succession a number of

ladies, who filed into the room, and were warmly greeted and promptly

presented to him by his wife. Two were visitors from New York,

substantial “Board women”; other two, returned missionaries from Japan;

the last to enter was a shy, brown little person with soft dark eyes, a

native Hindu, who could only communicate with her host by a gentle,

pleading smile. All were in attendance on a great missionary conference

held in Burlington that week, drawing its supporters from all New

England and New York.

“Shall we go to breakfast, Cornelia?” Mr. Ingraham asked, having infused

sudden courage into the trembling breast of the little native by his

gallant attention. “Are we all here?”

“Why, no, papa,” interposed his youngest daughter; “we must wait for Mr.

Burgess.”

“Mr. Burgess?” repeated her father, in a musing tone. “I do not recall

that I have met him. Is the gentleman an invalid?”

“At least the gentleman is here, papa,” murmured Louise, directing his

attention to a young man who at the moment entered the room, and

approached Mrs. Ingraham with a few words of courteous apology.

Meeting him, Mr. Ingraham saw a slender, youthful figure, somewhat below

the average of masculine height, a man of delicate physique, perhaps

five and twenty years old, with a serious, sensitive face, and earnest

blue eyes looking out through glasses; a young man who presented himself

with quiet self-possession, and bore the unmistakable marks of good

breeding.

As they took their places around the breakfast table, Keith Burgess, for

this was the young man’s name, found himself seated opposite Oliver,

with whom he was not drawn to converse, and between the second Miss

Ingraham and the little Aroona-bia. Conversation with the latter being

necessarily of an extremely limited nature, her gentle lisping of “yes”

and “thank you” being somewhat indiscriminate, the guest found himself

shortly occupied exclusively with his very pretty neighbour.

“You know, Mr. Burgess,” she was presently saying, “I almost feel that I

know you already.”

“How so?” asked Keith, simply. It was plain that, although accustomed to

the refinements of life, this was not a man accomplished in social

subtleties. There was, in fact, a curiously unworldly expression in the

young fellow’s eyes, and somewhat of thoughtful introspection.

“Why, you see mamma and some of her friends who heard you speak last

spring have told us so much about you.”

Keith bowed slightly, without reply.

“And you can’t think, Mr. Burgess, how delighted we are to have you come

to Burlington. We were so afraid you would leave for the East before we

could hear you, and I assure you that would have been a great

disappointment. I think you sail in the spring, do you not?”

“Yes, in May, as soon as I graduate.”

“And it is for India?”

“I suppose so. It is not fully determined, but that would be my choice,

and I believe the Board incline that way.”

The pretty Miss Ingraham, whose name was Gertrude, sighed a very little.

“It is all so wonderful, so almost incredible, to me that any one young

and like other people, don’t you know? can really go,” she said gently.

“There _are_ people to whom it seems perfectly natural. Mamma has a new

protégée who is to go out as a missionary teacher a year from this fall.

She is very young, only twenty-one, and we all think she is lovely; but

still, for her it seems really the only thing to be expected. She has

the genuine missionary air already, and you would know she could not be

anything else, somehow.”

Keith looked civilly, but not keenly, interested.

“I wonder if it is any one I have heard of,” he remarked. “It is our

Board that sends her?”

“Yes. Her name is Mallison, Anna Mallison. Her father was a country

minister up in the mountainous part of the state. Poor thing! She will

find India quite a change after Vermont winters, I should think.”

“An improvement, perhaps,” said Keith, smiling. “But really, Miss

Ingraham, going back to what you said a moment ago, why should it seem

so incredible for a man who has devoted himself to the service of God,

truly and unreservedly, to be willing to go where what little he can do

is most needed? Many men go to foreign countries and remain the better

part of their lives for business purposes: men in the navy; Englishmen,

of course, of social and political ambitions, by hundreds. Do you ever

feel that there is anything extraordinary or superhuman in what they

do?”

Gertrude Ingraham was looking at the young man with almost devout

attention.

“No,” she answered, shaking her head with pretty humility, seeing which

way he led.

“Then why,” pursued Keith Burgess, leaning over to look steadily in her

face with his earnest eyes, and lowering his voice to a deeper emphasis,

“why do you wonder that now and then a man should be willing to do for

the Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation of souls what a hundred men do

as a matter of course for their own selfish ambition and the gaining of

money?”

The girl looked down, the brightness of her face softened by serious

feeling.

“The only wonder, Miss Ingraham, is that so few do it. For my own part I

do not see how a fellow who goes into the ministry, as things are now,

can do anything else,” and Keith turned back to his neglected breakfast.

Thereafter he was drawn into conversation, across the mute languor of

the little Hindu, with his host, who had questions to ask regarding

Fulham, which had been his college.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Keith Burgess, sitting in a large

congregation in Dr. Harvey’s stately church, listening with consciously

declining interest to a long statistical report which was being read

from the pulpit, felt himself touched on the shoulder. Looking up he saw

the Rev. Frank Nichols, pastor of a mission church in the city. He had

known him well in college, a clear-eyed, well set-up young cleric.

Nichols invited him by a word and look to follow him, and together they

quietly left the assembly.

When they had reached the street and the crisp autumn air, Keith shook

himself with a motion of relief.

“Is there anything more tiresome than such a succession of meetings?” he

exclaimed. “Shall we walk? I am in a hurry to climb one of these hills.”

“We must do it later,” returned Nichols; “but if you are not too tired I

want to take you down this street and on a block or two to my church.

The women are having a meeting there this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes, I remember; but will it be in order for us to intrude?”

“Yes, that will be all right. The brethren drop in quietly now and then,

and are welcome. You needn’t stay long, for you are tired, I know by

your face; but I tell you what it is, Burgess, I want you to hear Anna

Mallison.”

Anna Mallison! again that name which he had heard in the morning. It

began to have a strangely musical quality to Keith’s ears.

“I have heard her name. She is under appointment, I believe. A good

speaker?”

“No, not a particularly good speaker, but, as Dr. Harvey once said to

me, an absolutely true nature. She is a young woman of strong

personality, but singularly destitute of the desire to impress herself,

and with a certain touch of the unconsciously heroic about her which you

feel but cannot describe. I have never met a girl of precisely her type

before, myself, and I am curious to know what you will think of her.”

Entering the small, unpretentious church, Nichols and his friend sat

down in the first row of seats, next to the central aisle. The room was

nearly full; several women were upon the platform, from which the pulpit

had been removed. One woman was speaking in a high-keyed, plaintive

voice.

It was not a stable or quiet audience; some were leaving their seats,

others coming in, many turning their heads to catch glimpses of expected

friends. Behind the young men came in two girls who remained standing

close beside them in the aisle for a little space. One of these girls

had pretty, fair hair and peachy cheeks; she was dressed in deep blue

with touches of gilt cord and buttons, giving a kind of coquettish

military jauntiness to her appearance. She wore a small round hat, of

dark blue, which set off her pretty hair charmingly. Her manner was full

of quick, eager animation; she smiled much and whispered to her

companion continually. This companion stood motionless and unresponsive

to the frequent appeals made to her, a quiet face and figure, a dress

and bonnet of plain and unadorned black, ill suited to her youth; but it

was her face and figure rather than the other to which Keith Burgess

found his attention riveted. He knew intuitively, before Nichols told

him, that this was Anna Mallison; but without this knowledge he felt

that he must still have kept his eyes upon her face. The repose of it,

the purity and elevation of the look, the serene, serious sweetness,

were what he had seen in the faces of angels men have dreamed of rather

than of women they have loved. But that she was after all a woman, with

a woman’s sensitiveness and impressibility, he fancied was manifest

when, having perhaps felt his look resting thus intently on her face,

Anna turned and their eyes met in an instant’s direct, uninterrupted

gaze, whereupon a deep flush rose and spread over the clear brown pallor

of her face, and she turned, and bent to speak to her friend, as if to

cover a slight confusion.

The friend was Mally Loveland, and she was finding her position a

particularly satisfactory one at the moment, being aware that Mr.

Nichols was so placed as to take in the best points of her new fall

costume in a side view. It was for him, not for Anna, that she had been

using so much of nervous energy in the last few minutes.

A lady who had left the platform for the purpose now came down the

aisle, and, taking Anna Mallison by the hand with a word of welcome,

conducted her to the front of the church. Mally, thus left alone,

fluttered into a place made for her, seeming to discover Mr. Nichols as

she turned, and smiling surprise and pleasure upon him.

Just before Anna began to address the gathering, while a hymn was sung,

Keith Burgess quietly made his way to a seat near the front of the

church, at the side of the platform. He had excused himself to Nichols,

who had then asked and obtained permission to sit beside Mally, an

incident productive of a vast amount of conscious and fluttering delight

on the part of that young lady.

The austerity of Anna Mallison’s religious life had, under the influence

of Mrs. Westervelt and her disciple, Mrs. Ingraham, relaxed within a few

months to a marked degree. New conceptions of a relation of joyful

assurance, of conscious acceptance with God, had risen within her, with

the perception that religion was not exclusively prohibition, and

conscience its only energy. Something of warmth and brightness had been

infused into her chill, colourless, outward life, furthermore, by the

intercourse with the Ingrahams which had followed her first visit. She

was still in a manner ice-bound in her interior life and in her capacity

for expression, but the ice was beginning to yield and here and there to

break up a little.

Thus, in the manner with which she spoke on this occasion, there was

something of gentleness, and a less uncompromising self-restraint than

when she had first spoken before an audience. She was still noticeably

reserved, still innocent of the orator’s arts, or of conscious seeking

to produce an effect; she still delivered herself of her simple message

as if it were a duty to be discharged rather than an opportunity to be

grasped. But through the coldness of all this neutrality there pierced

now and then a ray of the radiant purity and loftiness of the girl’s

inner nature, and this time those who heard her did not pity or

patronize her in their thoughts.

Keith Burgess watched her from the place he had chosen. Her tall, meagre

figure in its nunlike dress was sharply outlined against a palely tinted

window opposite, through which the October sun shone. She stood without

support of table or desk, her hands falling straight at her sides, and

looked directly at the people she addressed, fearless, since burdened

with the sense of immortal destinies, not with a consciousness of

herself. Keith noted the hand which fell against the straight black

folds of her dress; its fine shape and delicate texture alone expressed

her ladyhood. She could not have been called pretty, but her face thus

seen in profile was almost beautiful, the hollowness of the cheeks and

the stringent thinness of all the contours being less obvious.

But Keith Burgess was not occupied with Anna’s face and figure to any

serious degree. He knew instinctively that she was of good birth and

breeding; he saw that, though severe and angular in person and manner,

she was womanly, noble, refined. He divined, as no one could have failed

to divine, the essential truth and purity of her nature. From her

simple, unfeigned utterance he perceived the high earnestness and

consecration with which she was entering upon missionary labour.

Perceiving all those things, the young man looked and listened with a

sudden, momentous question taking swift shape in his mind.

He remained until the close of the meeting and met Anna, introducing

himself, as he preferred doing. She received his few expressions of

satisfaction in hearing her with scant response, and apparently with

neither surprise or gratification. He did not like her the less for

that.

The Ingrahams found Keith sober and preoccupied at dinner that night,

but, as he was to be chief speaker at the evening session of the

convention, they thought this natural and in order. He was liked and was

treated with especial consideration by them all, and even Mr. Ingraham

did him the honour of going to the church to hear him speak. He had no

sympathy with his wife’s penchant for missions, but he thought Burgess

was “a nice little fellow,” and he wanted to see what kind of a speech

he could make.

The different members of the family and their guests came home one after

another late in the evening, and, as they met, exchanged enthusiastic

expressions concerning the eloquence of Keith Burgess. Mrs. Ingraham and

the Board ladies thought the dear young man had a wonderful gift;

Aroona-bia smiled tenderly in assent; the girls said he was simply

perfect; and Mr. Ingraham admitted that, when he had worked off some of

his “sophomoric effervescence,” he might make a good deal of an orator,

and added, under his breath, it was nothing less than a crime to send a

delicate, talented boy like that to make food for those barbarians,

whose souls weren’t worth the sacrifice, even if he could save them,

which he couldn’t.

“Very true, dear,” rejoined his wife; “no man can save another’s soul;

he can only lead him to the dear Lord’s feet.”

The senator bit short a sharp reply, and just then Keith himself

appeared, looking pale and exhausted, deprecating wearily the praise

they were eager to bestow upon him, and begging to be excused if he

withdrew at once to his room.

As the sound of his footsteps was lost in the hall above, Mrs. Ingraham

said:—

“I am sorry Mr. Burgess was so tired. I invited Anna Mallison to come

here for the night, and I wanted him to meet her. Mrs. Churchill has

asked the opportunity for a little talk with Anna in the morning, and it

will be convenient for her to be here. It is so far to her rooms, you

know.”

“I should think the house was full already, mamma,” remarked Gertrude

Ingraham. “Where can we put her?”

“Oh, she will not mind going up to the south room in the third story, my

dear. I told Jane to have it in order.”

Just then Miss Ingraham came into the house and Anna Mallison was with

her.

CHAPTER XI

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

—THE RUBAIYAT.

In a few moments after he had reached his room Keith Burgess heard a

knock at his door. Opening it, he found a neat, white-capped maid who

bore a tray; entering demurely, she placed it upon a small table,

remarking that Mrs. Ingraham thought he would need refreshment. The tray

held an exquisite china service for one person, a pot of chocolate, and

delicate rolls and cakes.

“Miss Gertrude said I was to light your fire,” the maid said, proceeding

to remove the fender and strike a match for the purpose.

“Very well,” replied Keith, walking to the other side of the room. The

night air was sharp, and he liked the notion.

A moment later the maid withdrew, with the noiseless, unobtrusive step

and movement of the well-trained servant, and Keith, when he turned,

found the room already enlivened by the firelight. The table was drawn

to a cosey corner on the hearth-rug, a deep cushioned easy-chair beside

it. The fragrant steam of the hot chocolate rose invitingly, and as

Keith threw himself with a long sigh of comfort into the chair, he

detected another fragrance, and perceived, lying upon the plate, a

single rose, and around the stem a slip of white paper. On the paper,

Keith found a few words written: “You must let me thank you for the

great uplift you have given me to-night. GERTRUDE INGRAHAM.”

The young man, rising, put the flower in a clean glass vase on his

mantle, and the note in the inner compartment of his writing-case,

touching both with careful gentleness. Then, returning to the fireside,

he fell to drinking and eating with cordial satisfaction in all this

creature comfort; but as he ate and drank and grew warm, he was thinking

steadily.

He was not minded to flatter himself unduly, but what was he justified

in inferring from Gertrude’s action and from other small signs which he

had seen? Simply, that she liked him; honoured him above his due;

probably idealized him; possibly, if he sought her deeper regard, might

respond.

He liked her thoroughly. What man would not? She was very pretty, and

her beauty was enhanced by faultless dress,—no small thing in itself.

Her manners were charming, with the charm of a sweet nature, aided by

the polish of high social intercourse; she had the thousand little

nameless, flattering graces of the woman, who, old or young,

instinctively knows how to put a man at his best. Furthermore, Keith was

not insensible to the background against which this girl was set. The

aristocratic, powerful family connection, the magnificent home, the

wealth and grace and ease of life, the fine manners and habits of

thought and conduct belonging to the Ingrahams, were not matters of

naught to him. He liked all these things. What was more, he knew

perfectly that there was no element of temptation in them to lead him

from his chosen path of altruism; Mrs. Ingraham’s well-known missionary

ardour and Gertrude’s delicate sympathy were guarantee for that. They

understood perfectly that within six months he would depart for an exile

of perhaps a lifetime, in an alien and uncongenial land, where he would

work under conditions of life repulsive and depressing to the last

degree. Nevertheless, he believed without vanity that Gertrude Ingraham,

knowing all, foreseeing all, could care for him.

Keith Burgess had come, suddenly perhaps, but definitely, to the

conclusion that he wanted a wife; and, furthermore, that he wanted a

wife who would go out with him to India six months hence. Consequently,

as he sat by the fire which Gertrude Ingraham had lighted for him, he

pursued this line of thought with significant persistence.

A curious condition, however, attended his reflections. While he sat by

Gertrude’s fire, tasted her dainty food, inhaled the fragrance of the

rose she had sent him, and thought of her in all her beauty and grace,

he did not _see_ her. Instead of her figure, there stood constantly

before the eye of his mind the tall, austere form of Anna Mallison, in

the unsoftened simplicity of her manner and apparel, and in her

passionless, unresponding repose. He thought of Gertrude Ingraham, but

he saw Anna Mallison.

She had travelled the way that he had come. Outwardly there might be

coldness between them, but inwardly there must be the profoundest basis

of sympathy. The same master conviction had won and held their two

souls. He could not have known her better, it seemed to him, had he

known her all his life. The things which would have repelled another man

were what drew him all the more to her. It was not the passion of love

which had so suddenly awakened within him, but a mighty longing for what

Keith Burgess had thus far gone through life without,—a true and

satisfying sympathy with his religious life and its aspirations. A girl

like Gertrude Ingraham might accept his religion and the shape it took,

but it would be because she cared for him; a girl like Anna Mallison

might, perhaps, accept him, but it would be because of his religion and

the shape it had taken. At this crisis of his life the enthusiasm for

his calling ruled him as no human love could, and by it all the issues

of life must stand or fall.

Hours passed. The fire died out to a core of dull red embers, the single

rose drooped on its stem, the tray of food stood despoiled and

indifferent; the words of the small white paper were forgotten, and

Keith Burgess, throwing himself upon his knees, prayed thus to God:—

“Oh, my Lord, if thou wilt grant me so great a good as to win her for my

wife, if thou wilt bless me in seeking her, if it is according to thy

will that our lives should be united, and that together we should carry

the cross of Christ to the lost, grant me, O Lord, a sign. But if it be

not thy will, make this, too, known to me. Thy will I seek, O my God, in

this, in all things.”

Then, being wearied in brain and body, he slept heavily until morning.

When, just before the breakfast hour, Keith stepped into the hall, he

paused a moment, hearing a step on the stairs above him leading from the

third story rooms. He advanced slowly to the head of the next staircase,

and not until he reached it did he see who it was descending from above.

Then, lifting his eyes, he saw Anna Mallison.

Her presence in this house, at this hour, so surprising, so

unlooked-for, so almost unnatural, since her home was elsewhere in the

city—what did it mean? It was the sign he had craved. How else could he

interpret it?

The blood rushed in sudden flow to his heart, leaving his face

colourless.

Anna, not being surprised to meet him thus, was simply saying “Good

morning,” and passing down the stairs. Keith put out his hand and

stopped her going.

So marvellous did her presence seem to him that he forthwith spoke out

with unconventional directness the thought in his mind.

“I think you do not know just what it means that you are here, in this

house, this morning.”

Mally Loveland would have flashed some pert rejoinder to a comment like

this; Gertrude Ingraham, in a similar situation, would have looked at

Keith Burgess with pretty wonder and smiling question.

Anna Mallison, seeing the pallor and emotion of his face, and having

become wonted to the supernatural interpretation of the small events of

human life, only said gravely and without obvious surprise:—

“I do not, perhaps, know all that it means. I trust it means no trouble

to any one—to you.”

“No,” he answered, a slight tremor in his voice; “I cannot believe that

it does. You came under the divine leading, no matter how or why you

seemed to yourself to come. You came as a sign. I had asked a sign of

God. I did not dream of your presence in this house. Seeing you now, so

unexpectedly, how can I doubt any further? It is the will of God.”

Anna looked straight into Keith’s face, a deep shadow of perplexity on

her own, but she did not speak.

He smiled slightly.

“You cannot understand, and no wonder, I am speaking to you as I have no

right to—in the dark. It is for you to say whether, by and by, before I

go to-morrow morning, I may explain my meaning and try to make clear to

you what is so clear to me.”

It was Anna now who grew perturbed, for the significance of his words,

although veiled, was manifest. She turned and descended the stairs

without speaking, Keith Burgess following her in silence. She did not

herself understand her own sharp recoil and dismay, but all the maiden

instinct of defence was in alarm within her.

At the foot of the stairs they both paused for an instant, and Keith

asked in a low voice:—

“Will you walk with me on these hills somewhere, alone, this afternoon

at four o’clock?”

A sudden great sense of revolt arose in the girl’s heart, and broke in a

faint sob upon her lips. She did not want to walk on the hills with

him—with any man. She did not want to hear what he had to say. But he

had said it was the will of God, their thus meeting. He had sought that

awful, irrefragable will, and she had acted, it seemed, in obedience to

it in coming to this house. What was she, to be found fighting against

God?

She felt herself constrained to say yes.

CHAPTER XII

... I made answer to my friend: “Of a surety I have now set my feet

on that point of life beyond the which he must not pass who would

return.”

—_The New Life_, DANTE.

“I ask you, Anna Mallison, to go out with me to my work in India in May,

as my wife.”

Thus Keith Burgess, having recounted the story of the lights and

leadings of the past twenty-four hours.

They were standing, and faced one another in a yellow beech wood where

the sky above their heads was shut out by the sun-lightened paving of

the clustering leaves.

As she came down the woodland path Anna had broken off a long stem of

goldenrod, and she held it hung like an inverted torch at her side, like

a sad vestal virgin at some ancient funeral rites.

“Forgive me for bringing this to you so swiftly. I know it seems hasty,

perhaps unreasonably so. But to me no time or acquaintance, however

extended, could change my wish. And, you see, my time is so very short,

now!”

Keith Burgess looked with his whole soul’s sincerity into Anna’s face,

and the integrity of his purpose, of his whole nature, could not be

mistaken.

“It is not the suddenness, I think,” she replied slowly, with

unconscious coldness; “like you, I feel that the great facts of God’s

will and providence may be made clear to us instantly.”

Then she hesitated and paused.

“Please go on,” the young man said gently.

“It is only,” she answered, with a pathos which a woman would have

understood, “that I did not want to be married at all. I had never

thought of it as being a thing I needed to be troubled about.”

Keith Burgess smiled faintly at her frankness, which was not cruel of

intention, he knew, but his smile touched Anna’s heart.

“I did not wish to trouble you,” he said quietly.

“Please do not misunderstand me. It was not the way to express it—my

words sounded unkind, I am afraid. I should learn better ways of gentler

speaking. Other women seem to have them naturally.”

“I like it that you are honest, even if it hurts,” said Keith, steadily.

“I did not mean that you trouble me—not exactly. Only that my life

looked so plain and clear to me, and this is so surprising—it seems to

change things so.”

“Only by a little outward difference. I should not dare to ask you to go

as my wife if I did not believe that you could work more effectively so,

perhaps,” he added timidly, “even more happily, if I had strength and

protection to give you, and a home of some sort, however poor, in that

strange land.”

Something in the quality of his voice brought swift tears to Anna’s

eyes. It was so new to have some one thinking and caring for her ease

and happiness. It had so long been her part to do this for others, to

forget herself, and take it quite for granted that others should forget

her.

He saw his advantage, and sought to follow it.

“The thought of marriage is unwelcome to you,” he said earnestly,

“because it is foreign and unfamiliar. I think you are very different

from most girls of your age, and have lived a different inward life,

higher and purer, and free from personal aims in a wonderful way. But

even so, regarding marriage I believe you are wrong. You think of it as

an interruption, almost as a decline from the life you had meant to

live. On the contrary, God has made it to be the very best life, the

normal and fulfilled life, in which each is at the strongest and best.

Where my work for God and men might fall utterly to the ground, you, by

your purer insight, might help me to make it availing; and perhaps the

poor service I could give might help a little to carry forward your

work.”

Anna lifted her hand in a slight, expressive gesture.

“Look at the whole thing a moment,” cried Keith, with sudden boldness,

“as if you were not you and I not I. Here are two persons, man and

woman, of the same age within two or three years, led of the same Spirit

to the same purpose and consecration and calling; both ready to go out

to the same unknown land, lonely and apart, and there to work as best

they may far from any human being they have ever seen or known. Such

were we. And now God, looking upon us, sees that each needs the other,

and in his good providence he leads us here to this place. I see you,

and instantly my heart goes out to you as the companion, the other self,

I need. My soul recognizes in you its counterpart. God, in answer to my

prayer that he will make known his will, suddenly, most unexpectedly, as

I start on the new day, brings you before me before I have spoken or met

with man or woman, as the first, best light of morning. What does God

mean? Ask yourself, Anna Mallison, ask him. For my own part, I cannot

doubt his will. I have no right to thrust my conviction upon you

forcibly, but to me this is as clearly the call of God as my call to the

foreign field or to the divine service.”

They were still standing face to face, and while Keith spoke Anna looked

into his eyes with the serious directness of one listening to an

argument of weighty but impersonal import. With all his conviction and

earnestness, he was as passionless as she, save for his religious

passion. A strange wooing!

Anna turned now and walked on along the mossy path in silence.

“Take time to consider,—all the time you need. Do not try to decide

now,” said Keith, walking at her side. She made no reply; in fact, she

did not realize that he spoke. Her mind was working in intense

concentration.

Keith Burgess alone she would have turned away without a moment’s doubt,

but he had, or seemed to have, a mighty Ally. She did not fear him in

rejecting nor desire him in accepting, but to reject God!—that she

feared; to accept God in every manifestation of his will was her deepest

desire.

But what if Keith were wrong in his conviction? Her pale face flushed

with a flame of indignation as she thought of it, that a man, whom she

had never met or known, sought or desired, could suddenly invade the

very citadel of her will, and summon her to surrender her very life into

his keeping, in the great Name, when, perhaps, he was self-deceived, was

coming in his own name, to do his own will. She looked aside at Keith’s

face as he walked by her, in sudden distrust. It wore no flush of

passion, and in the blue eyes was the light less of earthly love than of

heavenly. It was a look pure and high, such as a man might fitly wear as

he approached the sacrament. A sudden awe fell upon Anna, as if she were

looking upon one who had talked with God, and her eyes fell, the lashes

weighted with heavy, unshed tears.

“He is better than I,” she thought; “a man like this could not lead me

wrong.”

White and cold, and with a strange sinking at her heart, she turned to

him soon, and stopped where she stood.

He looked into her face, his own suffused with emotion. She held out

both her hands, the goldenrod, which she had held until now, falling to

the ground. Keith Burgess took them in both his, and Anna felt that his

hands trembled far more than did her own.

“I believe you were right,” she said simply. “It is the will of God.”

He kissed her then on her brow and on her lips, the salutation

disturbing her no more than if he had been her brother.

“Please, will you let me go home now, alone, Mr. Burgess?” she asked

humbly, like a child.

Keith was disappointed, but consented at once.

“Only,” he said, “you should not call me Mr. Burgess. My name for you is

Keith.”

“Not yet,” she answered. “In outward things and ways remember, please,

that we are perfect strangers. It is only in the spirit that we have

met.”

Then she left him, and Keith Burgess stood watching the tall, dark

figure swiftly receding down the wood walk in the yellow light. His look

was wistful. He longed to go after her, but he forebore.

Anna hastened down into the city streets and to the hospital where she

was on duty every afternoon. There was plenty of work awaiting her, and

not for a moment was she free or left alone to think her own thoughts.

Six o’clock found her back in her own rooms at Mrs. Wilson’s. They were

low and dull after the fine spaciousness of the Ingraham house, but that

was a matter of little note to Anna.

Mally was there with a friend whom she had brought home with her to tea.

Anna washed the dishes while these two diligently revised the trimming

of their hats which in some particular, wholly imperceptible to Anna’s

untrained eye, fell below the standard of latest fashion.

It was not until the girls left the house, at seven o’clock, and all her

duties, trivial and homely and wearying, were done, that Anna, alone at

last, could yield to the overpowering weariness which was upon her.

She carried the lamp, whose flame seemed to pierce her aching eyes, into

the next room, and then, lying on the hard haircloth sofa with her head

propped on one hand, she closed her eyes, thankful at last to be where

she could let a few tears fall with no one to wonder or question. The

quiet patience inbred in the constitution of the girl’s nature

controlled her mood; there was no struggle of revolt from the vow she

had taken and the future to which she had pledged herself, but an

unspeakable homesickness had taken possession of her. She liked and

reverenced Keith Burgess, no doubt she would love him very truly by and

by, but just now he seemed to have turned her out of her own life and to

have taken control where she had hitherto, with God, been supreme. It

all gave her the same feeling she had suffered when, after her father’s

death, they had been obliged to give up their home for the coming in of

a new leader for the little flock her father had led so long. She knew

there was no real analogy between the two experiences, she could reason

clearly against herself, but she could not control the piteous

heart-sickness which settled down upon her in the dim room, in the

silent, empty house.

Many women have suffered a reaction like this in the hour of committing

themselves, from the fear that this is not the supreme love, the love of

the lifetime; the misgiving lest this man is not, after all, the man for

whom they can forsake all others and unto whom they can cleave with a

perfect heart to the end. These were not, however, the considerations

which weighed upon Anna Mallison. It was, as she had herself expressed

it, very simply, that she had not thought about marriage at all. She had

no ideal of manhood in her mind from this point of view. It was not that

she craved the love of a stronger man or a man abler or better in any

way than Keith Burgess; she merely preferred no man. She had not

awakened to love; the deeper forces of her woman’s nature were sleeping

still.

But there was not for an instant, in Anna’s mind, the thought of

withdrawing from her plighted word to Keith. She believed that he had

come to her, as he believed, under the divine light and leading. She

turned to walk in the new path marked out for her, faithfully and

obediently, but pausing a moment to look with aching eyes and heart down

the dear, familiar path which she was leaving. But Anna was too tired to

think long, or even to feel, and so fell asleep shortly, in the stiff,

angular position in which she lay, the tears undried upon her cheeks.

The sound of the knocker on the house door, hard, metallic, but without

resonance, suddenly roused her, and she sprang up hastily, remembering

that Mrs. Wilson had gone to the great missionary meeting, and that she

was alone in the house.

She took her lamp and went down the narrow stairs into the bit of entry.

When she opened the door, Keith Burgess himself was standing there.

He looked at her, smiling half mischievously, and she felt a sudden

warmth at her heart as she met the sweet, true look of his eyes.

“Didn’t you ever expect to see me again?” he said, and laughed as he

stepped into the house and closed the door.

She smiled, too, and held out her hand. He took it and kissed it in a

gallant way, which she found wholly wonderful, being quite unused to

such feats, and unread in romances.

“It will be a bore, won’t it,” he went on quaintly, “this having a man

around to bother you? Perhaps I ought not to have come, but, you see, I

go in the morning, and I thought you might have something to say to me

before I left.”

“Yes,” Anna said; adding naïvely, “but where shall I take you? It is so

new. I have not had a call like this before.” She felt shy about

inviting him up to her own sitting room.

“In there?” he queried, pointing to the door of Mrs. Wilson’s drear

little closed parlour.

“Oh, no,” replied Anna, “Mrs. Wilson never lets us go in there. It is

too fine for anything but funerals and—” she was about to say weddings,

but broke off confused, and they both laughed, looking at each other

like two children with their innocent eyes.

“I can sit here,” said Keith, pointing, as he spoke, to the steep,

narrow stairs. There was a red and green striped carpet on them, and a

strip of grey linen over for protection. The little entry was bare of

furniture, save for the small uncovered table on which Anna had placed

her lamp.

“Very well,” she said, “I will borrow a chair from Mrs. Wilson’s

kitchen;” and she forthwith brought out a clean wooden chair painted a

light yellow, and placed it at the side of the stairway for herself,

there being no room at the foot.

“I was going to say,” remarked Keith, musingly, as Anna sat down, “that

these stairs are rather wide, and if Mrs. Wilson is particular about

lending her chairs, I could make room for you here,” and he looked at

her soberly between the stair-rails. Anna shook her head, but suddenly

there came over them both a sense of the ludicrousness of the little

scene they would have presented, had any one been able to look in upon

them, and they laughed again, as Anna had not laughed since she was a

child, something of exhaustion aiding to break down her wonted

restraint.

“It is so funny, oh, it is so funny!” she cried, “to see you looking out

between those bars as if you were a lion in a cage. Just think of the

people at the meeting! What if they were to see us two. Wouldn’t they

think it was dreadful?”

“Would you mind putting your hand into the cage?” asked Keith. “I assure

you it is perfectly safe. This is not the man-eating variety.”

“You are sure?” Anna asked, with a woman’s instinctive coquetry swiftly

developed, but giving her hand.

“It is such a beautiful hand,” he said, laying it very gently on his own

right hand, which he had placed on the stair beside him, and at this,

the first word of flattery which any man had ever spoken to her face,

Anna blushed and grew positively pretty, as he looked at her.

All this laughing and light nonsense between them, did for her what a

season of prayer and serious discussion of their situation could not

have accomplished. Anna felt, with a sudden sense of comfort and

release, that this new relation was not exclusively a solemn religious

ordinance, but a dear human companionship, the joyousness of simple,

upright hearts, and the sympathy of kindred minds.

CHAPTER XIII

Now die the dream, or come the wife,

The past is not in vain,

For wholly as it was your life

Can never be again,

My dear,

Can never be again.

—W. E. HENLEY.

At Anna’s earnest request, Keith Burgess consented that their engagement

should be announced to no one save his mother until spring. Mally

observed the regularity of Keith’s weekly letters, and attempted to

tease Anna into acknowledging that there was “something in it”; but

Anna’s dignity, which on occasion had its effect even upon Mally’s

vivacious self-confidence, ended this line of attack in short order. A

few weeks after Keith left Burlington Anna received the following note:—

MY DEAR MISS MALLISON: My son, Keith Burgess, has confided in me the

fact that you have consented to enter into an understanding with him

which, if Providence should favour, will doubtless eventually

terminate in marriage. Your name has been mentioned to me by members

of our Woman’s Foreign Missionary Board, and I am led to believe

that my dear son has been graciously led of the Lord in his choice

of a companion in the path of duty upon which he has entered. That

my son is a godly young man and of an amiable disposition, I need

hardly take this occasion to tell you. Similarity of views and of

religious experience would seem to furnish a satisfactory basis for

a union productive of mutual good and the glory of God.

Trusting for further acquaintance before you depart for foreign

shores,

I am yours very truly,

SARAH KEITH BURGESS.

If this letter were stiff or cold, Anna, not looking for warmth and

freedom, did not miss them. She knew that Keith was the only son of his

mother, and she a widow. She took it for granted that they were poor

like herself; she had not known many people who were other than poor,

none who were in the ranks of missionary candidates. Such a thing would

have seemed singularly incongruous because unfamiliar. She had a

distinct picture of Mrs. Burgess, whom she knew to be in delicate

health, as a woman of sweet, saintly face and subdued manner, living in

a small white cottage in an obscure street of Fulham, perhaps not unlike

the Burlington street in which Mrs. Wilson’s house stood. She fancied

her living alone—indeed, Keith had told her that this was so—in a plain

and humble fashion, a quiet, devoted, Christian life, a type with which

her experience both in Haran and Burlington church circles had made her

familiar. There were some geraniums in the little sitting room window,

she thought, and it was a sunny room with braided mats over the carpet,

and a comfortable cat asleep on a patchwork cushion near the stove.

There would be a small stand beside Mrs. Burgess’s rocking-chair with a

large Bible and a volume or two of Barnes’s “Notes,” a spectacle case

and a box of cough medicine; perhaps it was a bottle, Anna was not sure,

but she inclined to the hoarhound drops, and almost smelt them when she

thought of the room. She imagined the dear old lady carefully and

prayerfully inditing the epistle to herself, and thought it most kind of

her, and wrote thus to Keith.

The winter passed for Anna in hard and unintermitting work. Mally

allowed herself lighter labours, and, having raised her eyes with

admiration to the Rev. Frank Nichols, now shook herself free as far as

she could conveniently from her more frivolous Burlington friends, and

renewed her earlier interest in religion with extraordinary zeal. She

felt that Dr. Harvey’s church was too worldly for her ideals, and that

Mr. Nichols’s beautiful work among the humbler classes offered far more

opportunity for religious devotion. Her regular attendance at all the

meetings of the church was a great satisfaction to Anna, who looked on

with characteristic blindness, glad to see her friend returning to a

more consistent walk and conversation.

The letters which passed between Anna and Keith would hardly have been

called love-letters. They dealt with religious experience and views of

“divine truth,” for the most part. Not even at start or finish of any

letter was place found for the endearing trifling common to lovers. This

correspondence might all have been published, omitting nothing—without

dashes or asterisks, even in that day when it was thought unseemly to

reveal the innermost secrets of hearts, and to speak upon the housetops

that which had been whispered in the ear. There were few personal

allusions on the part of either, beyond Keith’s occasional mention of

his health being below the mark. At Christmas Keith sent Anna a volume

of “Sacred Poetry”; on the fly-leaf he had written:—

ANNA MALLISON,

From her sincere friend and well-wisher,

KEITH BURGESS.

He had abstained from warmer terms on account of Anna’s wish to withhold

the knowledge of their engagement for the present.

Poor Anna, having nothing wherewith to provide a gift for her lover, the

small savings for her education being now nearly exhausted, made shift

to sew together sheets of note-paper, on which she copied her favourite

passages from Paley and Butler and various theologians. This humble

offering was sent to Keith, who was highly gratified, and treasured the

little gift affectionately.

For two weeks following Christmas Anna received no letter, but she was

not greatly surprised, as she knew Keith was to start early in January

for a tour of various New England towns, where he was expected to

present the cause of Foreign Missions. He was now completing his last

year in the theological seminary near Boston, and his unusual gifts in

public speech induced the faculty to send him out frequently on such

missions.

At half-past eight of a zero morning in the second week of January,

Anna, with her threadbare black jacket buttoned tight to her throat, her

arm full of books, was leaving Mrs. Wilson’s door on her way to school,

when she saw a boy stop in front of the house with a telegram in his

hand. Taking it, she found, greatly amazed, that it was for herself—the

first telegram she had ever received.

The boy, accustomed to see people receive his messages with changing

colour and nervous hands, glanced at her coolly, then turned and went

his way back, plunging his hands into his pockets against the biting

cold. In the little entry Anna opened the despatch. It was dated

Portland, Maine, and signed by Keith Burgess. It told her that he was

very ill; that he was alone, it being impossible for his mother to go to

him. It asked her to come to him at once.

Anna’s mind, in the half-hour which followed, worked with intense

rapidity. She found from a newspaper that by a ten o’clock train she

could reach Boston that evening, and she decided to take that train, and

go on to Portland by night. She wrote a note to Mally, in which she told

her of her engagement to Keith and of what had occurred. She packed a

satchel with what was necessary, and last of all drew out of her little

square writing-desk, where she kept it carefully locked away, an

envelope containing all the ready money she possessed. She found that

there remained exactly twelve dollars. This, to Anna, was a large amount

of money, and, although her heart sank a little at the thought of

spending so much at once, the prospect for the weeks to come before she

could draw upon her mother again being blank enough, she knew that this

was justified by the emergency.

Soon after nine Anna again departed from the house, the books replaced

by the satchel, the worn and faded black gown and jacket unchanged,

starting alone and unsped upon her long and anxious journey.

She went first to the Ingrahams, walking the long mile in the sharp

cold, carrying her heavy bag with a benumbed hand, since the reckless

extravagance of a carriage might not for a moment be considered.

Mrs. Ingraham was ill and could not see Anna, but her daughter Gertrude

came into the parlour and greeted her cordially. The issues of the hour

were too strong upon Anna to permit any trace of embarrassment or

personal feeling in her manner, although she felt that it would have

been easier to say what she felt must be said, to Mrs. Ingraham.

“Will you be so good as to tell your mother,” she began, “that I could

not go away on this journey, which I must take, without explaining it to

her? She has been so very kind. We did not mean to announce it quite so

soon, but Mr. Burgess, whom I met here in the fall, and I are engaged to

be married.” Anna was too preoccupied to perceive the flush which slowly

and steadily rose in Gertrude Ingraham’s face.

“We expect to go out together in May,” Anna proceeded. “Mr. Burgess has

not been strong for several months, perhaps he is never very strong; but

this morning I have a telegram from him asking me to come to Portland,

as he is very ill, and his mother cannot be with him.”

“Shall you go, Miss Mallison?” asked Gertrude, with visible constraint.

Anna looked at her then, surprised, and instantly felt the indefinable

coldness of her reception of her little story.

“I am on my way to take the ten o’clock train east,” she said simply,

her voice faltering slightly. For all her courage and steadiness, her

heart was crying out for a little touch of another woman’s gentleness;

the way before her was not easy, and there was a sense of loneliness

upon her which began to make itself acutely felt.

Gertrude Ingraham rose and said:—

“I am so very sorry for Mr. Burgess. We liked him very much. You must

let me go and speak to mamma a moment, for I know she would wish to give

you some message. I will not keep you long.” And she hurried from the

room.

Anna sat alone and watched the minute-hand of a French clock on the

mantel moving slowly along the gilded dial, a heavy oppression on her

spirit. She had not consciously expected sympathy, but Gertrude’s

aloofness hurt her strangely.

Some one came softly into the room behind her just then, so softly that

she turned rather because she felt a presence than because she heard a

step. It was Oliver Ingraham.

The peculiar personality of this mysterious man inspired Anna always

with an aversion hardly less than terror, and although she had become

familiar with his presence in her frequent visits, it had never become

less painful to her. Indeed, latterly, a new element of discomfort had

been added to her feeling toward him, since he had shown a marked

disposition to follow her about, and intrude a manner of unpleasant

gallantry upon her.

He greeted her now almost effusively, and, perceiving that she was

prepared as if for a journey, asked at once:—

“Not going away? The painful hour of parting is not here yet, surely?”

Anna made a vague and hurried reply.

“Because, you know,” pursued Oliver, lowering his voice to an offensive

tone of familiarity, and maliciously mimicking the phraseology of his

stepmother’s friends, “we could hardly spare our dear young sister yet;

she is becoming really indispensable to us,” and he held out one long

hand as if to clasp that of Anna, leering at her repulsively.

Anna rose hurriedly and moved away from him, her heart beating hard with

fear and antipathy. To her great relief she heard Gertrude Ingraham’s

step in the hall, and Anna, with her face paler than it had been, met

her at the door, while Oliver slunk away to a little distance, and

appeared to be looking out of a window unconcernedly.

Gertrude Ingraham carried a pocket-book open in her hand, and as she

spoke she looked at it, and not at Anna.

“Mamma is so very sorry, and sends her best wishes and hopes for Mr.

Burgess’s quick recovery. She hopes you will let her know; and, Miss

Mallison,” Gertrude was evidently embarrassed, “mamma says it is such a

long and expensive journey, and she wishes you would just take this with

you to make everything as comfortable as may be.” And she drew out a

crisp twenty-dollar note, which she essayed to put in Anna’s hand.

Anna had not known before that she was proud. She did not know it now,

but Gertrude Ingraham did, and was touched with keen compunction. She

understood that her mother would have been more successful.

It was only the swift, unconscious protest of Anna’s hand, the pose of

her head as she turned to go, and the quiet finality with which she

said:—

“Will you thank Mrs. Ingraham for me, and say I did not need it? She is

always kind. Good-by.”

A moment later Gertrude watched from the window the slender figure in

its faded, scanty black, with the heavy, old-fashioned satchel, passing

down the windswept lawn, under the grey and bitter sky.

Within was warmth and luxury and protection, and yet Gertrude’s heart

leaped with a strong passion of desire to forego all this and take Anna

Mallison’s place, that so she might start on that long journey which

should bring her, at its end, to the side of Keith Burgess.

Small, unseen tragedies in women’s lives such as this, never once,

perhaps, expressed, and never forgotten, work out the heroic hypocrisies

which women learn, since such is their allotted part.

“You might have known better than to offer money to that girl,” Oliver’s

high, shrill voice behind Gertrude said. “She’s as confoundedly proud as

all the other saints. But she’ll have to come down yet. We shall see

some day.”

Thus unpleasantly interrupted in her reverie, Gertrude rose impatiently,

and left the room.

It was eight o’clock that evening when Anna reached Boston. Dismayed by

the small remainder of money left her after her railway ticket was

bought, she had not dared to spend anything for food through all the

day, and had tried to think the cold, dry bread, a few slices of which

she had put into her satchel, was sufficient for her needs.

In Boston a change of stations made a cab a necessity if she would not

lose the Portland train, and this she must not do, since she had

telegraphed Keith from Burlington that she would be with him in the

morning. Anna alighted at the station of the Maine Railroad and heard

the cabman say that his fee was two dollars with a sensation hardly less

than terror. She paid him without a word, then entering the station, sat

down in the glare of light amid the confusion of the moving crowd, and

looked into her poor little purse, a sharp contraction at her throat as

she counted, and found less than three dollars left.

The train would leave in fifteen minutes. Anna went with as brave a face

as she could manage, to the office, and asked what was the fare to

Portland. The curt reply of the agent proved the glaring insufficiency

of her small remaining store. Trembling with weakness and dismay, Anna

turned back to her place and sat down, closing her eyes while she

prayed. She had friends in missionary circles in Boston, who would

gladly have lent her money, but time failed to seek them out. She

thought, as she prayed, of the money which Gertrude Ingraham had

proffered in the morning, and, humbled, asked forgiveness for the

ignorance and pride which had led her to reject it. The thought of Keith

watching, perhaps in vain, for her coming in his loneliness and great

need, perhaps in his extremity, overwhelmed her with pity and penitence.

Having prayed for forgiveness and for guidance, and for a way out, and a

way to Keith that night, she opened her eyes, astonished for the moment

at the harsh light and the motley scene about her, her actual

surroundings having been for the time forgotten in the complete

abstraction of her mind. She gazed for a few moments languidly before

her, her face so colourless and sorrowful that many persons who passed

her looked back at her in curiosity and concern. Presently the space

before her became clear; there was a pause in the fluctuating course of

passers-by, and nothing interposed, for the instant, between her and the

window of the ticket office.

An elderly gentleman in a long travelling cloak and silk hat, carrying a

snug and shiny travelling bag, came up to the window with the confident

and assured bearing of the experienced traveller. Anna heard him ask for

a ticket to Portland. She recognized him at once, for it was Dr. Durham,

the missionary secretary who had once been her father’s guest.

When he turned from the window, the doctor found the pale, quiet girl in

black standing just behind him; she spoke to him with a radiant light in

her face, such as he had never met before. To herself, Anna was saying

with a sense of exquisite joy in her heart, “God is near,” feeling

herself close touched by the Almightiness. To her father’s friend she

told her story and her need in few words, without hesitation or doubt,

declaring, necessarily, her engagement to Keith Burgess, and the fact

that she was hastening to reach him on account of his serious illness.

“Amazing, my dear,” exclaimed Dr. Durham, taking off his hat and wiping

the large shining baldness of his head, “amazing indeed! I am myself on

my way to Burgess, and we can make the journey together. Poor fellow! It

is a sad case. I had a telegram yesterday, but it was impossible to

start until to-night. It seems he has had a hemorrhage. But we will talk

all this over on the way,” and the good old gentleman made haste to buy

Anna’s ticket, which he said it was only the part of the Society to do,

and she must never mention it again. This done, they hastened on

together to the train.

CHAPTER XIV

How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings, and that

a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an

acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the tree on which

perhaps we and others shall be crucified....

Poor, sorely tried Faith! She has but one way out of the

difficulty—the word Mystery. It is in the origins of things that the

great secret of destiny lies hidden, although the breathless

sequence of after events has often many surprises for us too.—AMIEL.

The incredible luxury of her breakfast the next morning in the hotel in

Portland made an impression upon Anna which she could never forget,

since she was, in fact, very nearly starved. The rich coffee, the

delicate and sumptuous food, the noiseless assiduity of the sleek black

waiters, the great glittering room, all partook of the marvellous to her

exhausted senses.

Then she was conducted through endless passages where her feet trod in

baffling silence upon the lanes of thick crimson carpet, for a few

moments she was alone in a room to bathe and prepare herself, and then a

low-voiced woman, stout and motherly, met her at the door, and she was

led to Keith.

He was lying, fully dressed, on a broad velvet sofa, in a richly

furnished room, which was full of flowers, and bright with the light of

the snowy winter morning and a blazing wood fire. His eyes were

luminous, his colour better than she had known it, and he did not look

ill. The nurse left them alone, and they met with unfeigned but quiet

happiness.

“Was I selfish to ask you to come this long journey, just for me?” Keith

asked anxiously, holding her hands. Anna found his hot and tremulous,

and soothed them with a slow, strong motion of her own.

“No, not selfish,” she said.

“You see, I am not very ill; in fact, I am sure the worst is over now,

and I shall be just as well as ever in a few weeks; but I had a terrible

cold and coughing so there was a little hemorrhage,—simply from the

throat, we understand it now,—but at the time the doctor himself was

alarmed, and so was I. If I had known how slight an affair it really

was, I should not have asked so much of you, but I cannot be sorry,

Anna. I shall have to stay right here for several weeks, they say, and

it will be everything to have you near me, don’t you see?”

“I am most grateful to be with you, Keith.”

“And will you talk to me about India, and about our home there? I have

thought of it so continually since I have been sick. It almost seems as

if I had seen it, and you in it. I love it already, Anna. Please say

that you do too, just a little.”

“Tell me about it. Of course I shall love it.”

“It is all made of bamboo, you know, the house, and perched up in the

air, and there are great, wide rooms, with cool shade, and a sound of

water flowing; there are broad bamboo lattices at the windows, and it is

still and peaceful, and the servants go about softly, and you are there

in a white dress, Anna,—oh, how I want to see you in that white dress!

It has tiny borders of gilt and coloured embroidery, and it suits you so

much better than this hard black gown. Will you have a dress made soon

like that?”

Anna smiled and pressed her hand over Keith’s eyes, which were full of

childish imploring. She was beginning to see his weakness with a new

pain at her heart.

She sat with him an hour, and then, the doctor coming in, she was sent

to her room to sleep until noon, while Keith should rest, and have an

interview with Dr. Durham, their fatherly friend.

When Anna reached her room, she found on a table a large jar of roses,

rich in colour and fragrance, and a basket of hothouse grapes. The day

was bitterly cold, and it was snowing hard, the thick snowflakes melting

against the broad, thick glass of her window.

The extravagant luxury of such fruit and flowers in this depth of

midwinter astonished and disturbed her. There was no one of whom she

could ask questions, but how could it be right for Keith to spend so

much money? To remain for weeks in such a hotel as this seemed to Anna

to involve an impossible expenditure, and she lay down on the great

luxurious bed with a bewildering confusion of questions to which no

answers were forthcoming. From the pinching cold and hunger of yesterday

to the luxurious ease of to-day was like the transformation of a fairy

tale; and Keith, with his weak hands, and his bright eyes, and his

wistful eagerness was formidable in his appeal to her. She did not know

what might be coming, but she felt anew that she had surrendered herself

and was pledged now to do another’s will.

At noon Anna had a moment’s conference with Keith’s physician. He

assured her that there was a remarkable change for the better in his

patient,—in fact, that he looked now for a speedy convalescence, adding

that her coming had produced a most favourable effect.

The whole afternoon of that January day, Keith and Anna were left alone

together. The nurse, glad of a brief release, took her “afternoon out”;

the various doctors of medicine and divinity betook themselves to other

places; and word was given the page that Mr. Burgess could not receive

visitors, so that flowers and cards accumulated, and interruptions were

postponed. There was justice in what Keith said, that they had never yet

had a chance to get acquainted, and now the afternoon was turned to good

account.

Experience and instinct made Anna a nurse. Keith was sure he had never

been so wholly comfortable as she made him, and the effect of her

personal presence was like health and healing to him.

“How dear you are, Anna, and how absolutely necessary to me,” he said

fondly, as he watched her quiet way of preparing his food and medicine.

“I foresee plainly that I can never let you leave me.”

When twilight gathered and the room grew dusky, they had no lights, but

sat by the fire, Anna on a low seat beside the sofa, and silence fell.

When Keith spoke again, his voice betrayed a rising emotion, and an

appeal before which she trembled within herself.

“Anna,” he said, “why should you leave me again? Why need we be

separated any more? I need you. I can get strong far faster with you

beside me, for you inspire me with a new life. Everything seems sure and

strong when you are with me. But I want you wholly mine without fear or

favour. Marry me, dear, to-night, to-morrow! What have we to wait for?

It is only three months before our marriage was to be, you know.”

Concealing her agitation, and speaking quite steadily and soothingly,

Anna answered:—

“But you know, Keith, I must go back in a few weeks, and finish my work

in the school and hospital. I have still so much to learn before I can

make a really useful missionary, and so little time before May to learn

it in. You know I have cut my preparation short a year, now, so that we

may go out together. I am sure we ought to wait until May.”

“Oh, Anna!”

The words, so spoken, had all the force of an inarticulate cry from the

man’s heart. They told what hours of argument and pleading could not

have conveyed,—the yearning need for her presence and her upholding.

Anna lifted her eyes to Keith’s, and saw that they were dim with tears.

She did not feel them to be unmanly tears, knowing his physical

exhaustion, and they moved her profoundly. She rose and walked to the

window, looking out into the snowy street. Again that sense that her

life was taken out of her own hands came upon her; she felt like those

of old who feared as they entered into the cloud. She feared, but,

nevertheless, she went back to Keith, and said, very gently, but without

hesitation:—

“If we should be married to-morrow night, would that please you, Keith?”

He caught her hand and pressed it to his cheek with pathetic eagerness.

“Oh, my girl, am I wrong to move you to do this for my sake? Forgive me,

leave me, if I am leading you faster, farther, than you wish to go.”

“I will not leave you, Keith,” Anna replied, taking her low seat again

at his side, “never, any more. It is the will of God.”

The next day Keith was much stronger. He was able to walk about the

room, to sit up for an hour at a time, and to talk and plan to his

heart’s desire. His spirits were high, and he was full of irrepressible

happiness, and yet a wistful, grateful question always rose in his eyes

when they rested upon Anna. The marriage was arranged to take place in

Keith’s room at six o’clock. Dr. Durham had consented to remain and

perform the ceremony, returning to Boston that night. Keith’s physician

had interposed no objection to the plan, and even regarded the

inevitable excitement as likely to be a benefit rather than an injury to

his patient.

“He needs you, Miss Mallison,” he remarked with an emphasis which Anna

felt to be peculiarly significant, finding him a man of few words.

It was five o’clock, and Anna had gone to her room to make ready for the

ceremony. At Keith’s urgent desire, and by the aid of one of the many

efficient friends whom the circumstances of his illness had gathered

around him, a white dress had been ordered for her. She found it now,

lying in delicate tissue wrappings upon her bed, and beside it a box of

orange flowers whose fragrance filled the room.

She was becoming a little inured to luxury; colour, warmth, perfume,

delight to sense, seemed here to be the natural order. A vague

perplexity lay below it all, but she had ceased now to ask questions.

As she bent to take her wedding-gown from its wrappings, some one

knocked at her door. It was Dr. Durham. There was a shade of anxiety

upon his kind old face, and he asked her to come with him into an alcove

at the end of the hall. With an uneasy stirring at her heart, Anna

followed him. Keith’s physician was standing by a table in the alcove,

evidently awaiting them.

Anna looked into his face, waiting without speaking for what he might

have to say. Surely it was impossible that Keith could be worse; it was

not ten minutes since she left him.

“Miss Mallison,” said the doctor, gravely, “I have been having a little

conference with your friend, Dr. Durham, and we find that there is a

chance that you may be under some misapprehension of the actual

conditions under which—under which you are about to take an important

step.”

“I did not understand it myself, my dear girl, until within the last

hour,” interposed Dr. Durham; “and I really don’t know now what we ought

to do. Still, perfect frankness, perfect understanding, you know, may be

better for all parties.”

The good old man was visibly oppressed with the burden of the part he

had to bear in the interview. Motionless Anna stood, only turning her

eyes from one man to the other in troubled wonder.

“The facts are simply these,” the physician took up the word again, “and

I am greatly surprised, and I may add greatly pained, that they have not

apparently been understood before. Mr. Burgess will recover from this

attack, and may have years yet of moderate health, but as for carrying

out his purpose to go out as a foreign missionary, it is absolutely

impossible. Such a course would simply be suicidal, and must not be

considered for a moment.”

“Not now, perhaps,” Anna spoke very low, in a strange, muffled tone;

“but it may be—later—?” and she turned her imploring eyes from the face

of one man to the other.

“To be perfectly frank, my dear,” said Dr. Durham, pressing his hands

nervously together, “after what the doctor has told me of the condition

of our dear friend, the organic difficulty, and all that, you see—I fear

that I can only, in justice to all concerned, state plainly that our

Board would not be justified in sending him. I assure you the blow is a

severe one to me in my capacity as secretary; for we regard Keith

Burgess as, perhaps, the most promising candidate who has ever come

before us. It is a dark Providence, and you will believe me that only a

sense of our duty in the matter has led us to put the case so plainly

before you.”

Anna did not speak.

“I was not aware, Miss Mallison,” said the physician, “until an hour

ago, that you were yourself under appointment as a missionary. When I

learned this fact, it seemed to me that you should not enter upon the

proposed line of action without knowing clearly that it involves giving

up your chosen career,” and with these words the doctor bowed and turned

to withdraw.

Anna turned to Dr. Durham.

“Mr. Burgess does not know that he must give up—?” she asked.

“No, oh, no,” was the reply; “the doctor says that he must on no account

be allowed to learn it until he is stronger. His heart is so entirely

bound up in this noble purpose, that the blow will be a terrible one

when it comes.”

“We must wait, Miss Mallison, until he is as far as may be recovered,

before we allow him to even suspect the actual state of the case;” the

doctor added this, looking at Anna’s face with surprise and concern. “If

I can serve you in any way, do not fail to call upon me. For the present

I must say good evening,” and he hastened away.

Dr. Durham followed, walking along the hall by his side. The look in

Anna’s face awed him. He felt that it was not his right to share in an

hour of such conflict as this bade fair to be to her, for he perceived

already something of what her missionary vocation meant to her. Anna,

however, did not notice that he had gone; the crisis was too great to

permit her paying heed to the accidental circumstances around her. A

voice in her heart seemed crying with constant iteration, “Father!

Father! What does God mean?”

For ten minutes Anna stood alone in the alcove, looking steadily before

her, but in her bewildered pain seeing no outward thing, while in the

far dim reaches of the hall the good old clergyman paced noiselessly to

and fro.

On one side Anna saw her father’s life, with all its deep renunciation,

its pure aims, its defeat, and its one final hope of fulfilment in

herself; she saw the look in his eyes as he bent above her in the little

church that night, when she declared her purpose to become a missionary;

she remembered his _Nunc Dimittis_ as he blessed her with dying eyes;

she lived again through the solemn hour of dedication, just after her

father’s death, when the sense came upon her that she was called of God

to carry on what her father began, to be in herself the continuance, and

through divine grace the fruition, of his life. Since that hour life had

meant only one thing to Anna; no other purpose or desire had ever

entered to divide or diminish its control over her: she was set apart to

carry the gospel of Christ to the heathen; this one thing only would she

do.

This on the one side, strong as life itself, inwoven into the very

texture of her soul and her consciousness.

On the other side Keith Burgess, even now scarcely better than a

stranger, and yet, by the will of God as she believed, bound to her by

sacred and indissoluble vows. To be faithful to those vows, to save him

from despair, perhaps from death, she must cut off all her past, must

read her life all backward, must annul and declare vain and void the

most solemn purposes of her soul.

From his retreat, watching, Dr. Durham at length saw Anna advancing down

the hall toward the door of her room. He met her there, a question he

did not dare to speak in his tired, kind old eyes. Her face was as the

face of one who has even in the moment received a spiritual death-blow.

He held his watch in his hand. Without speaking, Anna motioned to him,

and he replied:—

“It is nearly half-past five, my dear.”

“Very well,” she said, her voice dull and toneless; “I will be ready at

six o’clock.”

As if in a dream she prepared herself for her marriage. She moved as if

in response to another will than her own; her own will seemed to lie

dead before her, a visible, tangible thing, done to death by her own

hand. The white gown, Keith’s gift, seemed less a wedding-garment than a

burial robe, and a strange smile crossed her face when she caught her

reflection in the glass, and saw that, save for her eyes, her face was

wholly colourless, the pale flowers on her breast hardly paler, hardly

colder.

At the clock-striking of the appointed hour, Anna entered the room, and,

taking her place beside Keith, whose face was full of tender gladness,

she lifted her eyes steadily to the old clergyman’s face, listening as

for life and death to his words.

“In sickness and in health, ... for richer for poorer, ... and forsaking

all others, keep thee only unto him.” Yes, all others. God only knew the

significance of those words, for they seemed to mean God himself just

then; but God would pity. He would help. Her response came low but

unfaltering, and then, with bowed heads, standing side by side in their

youth, their innocence, their patience of hope, they two listened

solemnly to the last irrevocable words.

So steadfastly Anna held herself until the end, but hardly had the final

word of blessing been pronounced, when, with a low cry for help, she

wavered as she stood, and fell fainting.

BOOK II

AFTERNOON

Hear now our cry for strength to bear the weight of prayers unanswered.

—MAARTEN MAARTENS.

CHAPTER XV

The evil base of our society eats right through; that our wealthy homes

are founded on the spoliation of the poor vitiates all the life that

goes on within them. Somehow or other, it searches through and degrades

the art, manners, dress, good taste of the inmates.—EDWARD CARPENTER.

It was a month later, when a train from the east, entering the Fulham

station at five o’clock of the February afternoon, brought Keith Burgess

and his wife home.

Keith was apparently in fairly good physical condition, and looked and

carried himself much as he had when Anna first knew him, although she

could now detect the underlying weakness which he strove hard to

conceal. He had been told in due time of what was involved in his

illness. The shock had been severe both to mind and body, and for a

while a serious relapse had seemed imminent. Those days had brought the

young wife and husband into a new union of sympathy and suffering, as

each strove to bear the burden of their thwarted lives bravely for the

other’s sake. Not at that time nor at any later period was it possible

for Anna to let Keith know to the full the meaning of this renunciation

to her. He knew that to her, as to him, the abandonment of the

missionary purpose was a profound and poignant sorrow; he did not know

that it was the overthrow of all that had made her life hitherto, and

that, whatever new forces and motives might produce out of the elements

of her character, the old life, the first Anna Mallison, was slain.

Keith had told her little of what lay before them in his mother’s home,

which was now to be theirs; they had been too deeply absorbed in the

present emergency to take much thought for the future. This much,

however, had been accomplished in a week’s sojourn in Boston: Keith

would shortly be appointed to fill a missionary secretaryship, which

involved much travel and speaking in the interests of the cause, but

permitted him to make his residence in Fulham. The strong hope which

Anna clung to silently for herself, as the last pitiful substitute for

the calling now denied her, was that she, too, might still accomplish

something for the work so urgent in its claims upon her, by presenting

it, as occasion offered, among Christian women in her own land. But she

knew that her life was no longer in her own hands to shape and direct as

she might will; not only was Keith now to be her care, her chief concern

and interest, but she looked forward to daughterly duties toward his

invalid mother, to whom it was in her mind to minister with loving and

faithful devotion.

As the train now drew into the Fulham station, Keith remarked,

casually:—

“There’s Foster, all right. I knew he would be on hand.” And, looking

from the car platform, Anna saw a grey-haired man-servant in plain

livery, who saluted Keith respectfully as he hastened to the spot, and

wore an expression of solicitude and responsibility which stamped him at

once as an old family servant. As they gave over their hand luggage to

this man, and followed him out to the street where a plain closed

carriage stood in waiting, an unostentatious “B” on the door showing it

to be private, a deep perplexity and confusion began to rise in Anna’s

mind. She had gradually become accustomed to the luxuries of the life in

the Portland hotel, and had regarded them as incident to the passage of

a grave crisis, and justified, perhaps, by the necessities of the case;

but she had not been interested in thinking farther along the line of

the Burgesses’ worldly status, least of all minded to make it a matter

of inquiry, consequently the sight of the man-servant and the family

carriage smote her with a sharp sense of entering a new and undreamed-of

outward life. In them was the first obvious token which had ever been

given her of her husband’s home surroundings and worldly position. A

vague anxiety and dread were awakened in Anna by these small signs of a

life and habit so widely at variance with her own past of austere

privation. She saw the low white cottage figured heretofore in her

thought, in the narrow street, fading before her; the geraniums in the

window, the cat on the cushion, the braided mats, the wooden

rocking-chair, the little table with the Bible and cough-drops, wavered

in all their outlines, and fell like a house of cards. How would it be

with the figure of the sweet, saintly, patient invalid to whom she was

to minister? Must that go too? Anna ceased to speculate, but she sat

silent beside her husband, and her heart beat hard.

When the carriage stopped, it was in a fine old quiet street lined with

substantial dwellings, and before a large brick house painted a dull

drab. The house stood with its broad, low front close to the street;

there were many small-paned, shining windows, and a brass knocker on the

panelled black front door. Nothing could have been plainer or less

pretentious, and yet the house bore, to Anna’s first intuitive

perception, its own unmistakable expression of decorous and inflexible

dignity and quietly cherished family pride.

As they entered the wide, low-ceiled, oak-wainscoted hall, a neatly

dressed middle-aged woman advanced and, speaking in a low voice to Anna,

asked if she would follow her up to her rooms, Keith introducing her

pleasantly as his mother’s indispensable Jane. No one else was in sight;

but Mrs. Burgess’s invalid condition seemed to account sufficiently for

this, although Anna had supposed her able to move about the house, and

even to go out under favouring conditions.

Keith joined Anna on the stairs, taking her hand in his. He smiled

tenderly as he looked into her face, but there was a nervous eagerness

upon him which he could not conceal. Was he thinking that he had chosen

his wife for far other scenes and a widely different life? She could not

tell.

“This was my old room, Anna,” Keith was saying now, as they stood in the

doorway of a spacious bedroom with old-fashioned mahogany furniture and

handsome but faded chintz hangings. There was a marble chimney-piece,

over which hung a large picture of Keith, with a boyish, eager face.

Jane now threw open a door from this room into another of equal size.

“If you please, I was to tell you this is to be Mrs. Burgess’s own

sitting room,” she said respectfully, “and the dressing room and bath

beyond the bedroom will be for your own use entirely after this,” and

she crossed to open another door.

Keith drew Anna on into the sitting room.

“Well, now, this is certainly very kind of my mother,” he said, a flush

of grateful pleasure rising in his sensitive face. “See, Anna, this has

always been the state apartment, the guest-chamber of the house, and she

has had it refitted for our use.”

“How very kind,” said Anna, warmly.

The room was, indeed, in its own manner, grave and subdued, a luxurious

parlour, with good pictures, handsome hangings, and soft, pale-tinted

carpet.

“I must go down at once and tell the dear mother how we thank her,” said

Keith, and Anna, left alone, returned to the bedroom and began to remove

her travelling hat.

Jane was beside her at once, giving unneeded assistance.

“Shall I unpack for you directly?” she asked, looking at Keith’s small

trunk, which was quite adequate to Anna’s few belongings, added to her

husband’s. Anna felt her colour deepen as she declined the offered help,

and sat down with a little sigh in a great easy-chair. But she submitted

perforce when the maid knelt at her feet, and, quite as a matter of

course, removed her shoes. It was the first time since babyhood that

this office had been performed for Anna by other hands than her own, and

she felt all her veins tingle with a shy reluctance, but sat motionless.

Rising, Jane looked about, Anna thought with a shade of dissatisfaction

that there was thus far so little to be done, so scanty a display of the

small belongings of luxury.

“When you are ready to dress for dinner,” she said, with a touch of

coldness, “I will come if you will just ring the bell. The bell is

here,” and she indicated the green twisted cord and heavy silk tassel at

the head of the bed. “Mrs. Burgess said she could spare me to wait on

you for what you needed to-night,” she added.

“Thank you,” said Anna, gently, but with the quiet unconscious loftiness

of her own reserve. “Mrs. Burgess is very good to think of it, but I am

accustomed to caring for myself, and so I shall not need to trouble

you.”

“Very well, that will be just as suits you, ma’am. I should be pleased

to wait on you any time Mrs. Burgess doesn’t need me. Dinner will be at

six o’clock, then, if you please.” Thus saying the maid withdrew.

“Keith,” said Anna, with a perplexed countenance, when a few moments

later he joined her, “I find I ought to dress for dinner, but I have

nothing better to wear than this black gown. You ought to have told me,

dear.”

Keith looked down at the straight fashionlessness of Anna’s black figure

with unconcealed concern.

“I ought to have thought,” he said, “but it never occurred to me about

your clothes. We must get you a whole lot of new things straight away,

dear. We will do it together, and have a great time over it, won’t we?

And you will put off the black now for my sake? I want to see you in

wine-red silk and good lace.”

“Oh, Keith!” cried Anna, “I cannot imagine myself masquerading like

that. It would never do. But for to-night—that is the trouble now.”

“Why, wear your wedding-gown, sweetheart; that is just the thing. What

luck that we did get that!” and Keith was down on his knees before the

trunk on the instant, and soon produced the dress which, being of fine

white cashmere, with a little lace about the neck, was, in fact,

altogether appropriate.

Anna looked puzzled. It seemed to her almost sacrilegious to put on that

dress for everyday use, and the association with it made her shiver,

even now, but she did not dispute the matter.

Just before six o’clock Keith ushered his wife into the library

downstairs, where his mother sat waiting to receive them. It was the

sort of a library which Anna had read of but had not seen—lined with

books, furnished with massive leather-covered chairs and darkly gleaming

mahogany, a dim old India carpet on the floor.

Anna saw by the shaded drop-light the form of a small woman of fragile

figure, dressed in silver-grey silk, with a white shawl of cobweb

fineness of texture about her shoulders. There were several good

diamonds at her throat and on her hands, her grey hair was beautifully

dressed in soft waves and fastened with a quaint silver comb of fine

workmanship. Her face was pale and the features delicately cut; her

movement as she advanced to meet Anna was slow, and, in spite of her

diminutive size, stately, and there was a crisp, frosty rustle of her

grey gown.

She took both Anna’s hands in hers with a cold, kind smile, and kissed

her twice on her forehead, Anna bending low for the purpose. She seemed

to be at an incalculable height above the fine little lady, and

singularly young and immature. At twenty-two she had felt herself a

woman for long years, with her sober cares and grave purposes; but

to-night, before Keith’s mother, she suddenly seemed to become a shy,

undeveloped girl again.

While they spoke a little of the journey and the night, Keith Burgess

turned on his heel and affected to be examining, with critical interest,

an engraving above the fireplace, which he had seen in the same spot all

his life; but he was watching them both aside narrowly as he stood. He

was perfectly satisfied.

If Anna had been never so much prettier, and possessed of all of Mally

Loveland’s confident social facility; if she had met his mother as the

country girl of this type would have done, with eager and affectionate

appeal that she should at once stand and deliver motherly sympathy and

affection in copious measure,—there would have been only disappointment

and chagrin. But Mrs. Burgess’s bearing was not more reserved than that

of her daughter-in-law. At twenty-two Anna’s grave repose of manner was

in itself a distinction, and one which had its full weight with the

elder woman. Plainly, she had not a gushing provincial beauty on her

hands to curb and fashion into form. As for good looks, there was a

certain angular grace already in figure, an unconscious dignity of

attitude and bearing which suited Keith’s mother, while for her face,

the eyes were good, the brow very noble, and the expression peculiarly

lofty. The succession of strong and sudden emotional experiences through

which Anna had recently passed had wrought a subtle change already in

her face; there was less severity, less of hard, conscientious rigour in

its lines; a certain transparent, spiritual illumination softened the

profound sadness which was her habitual expression.

At dinner, a delicately sumptuous meal, served with some state, Anna

acquitted herself perfectly, having the instincts of good breeding, the

habit of delicate refinement, and having learned at Mrs. Ingraham’s

table many of the small niceties which she could hardly have acquired in

Haran.

Already, within the first hour, while seeing that her mother-in-law had

been physically entirely able to meet her children at her door at their

home-coming, Anna perceived the inevitable consistency of her waiting to

receive them in due form and order. Formality and form were essentials

of life in this house. This did not oppress Anna particularly, and she

liked to look at the cameo-cut delicacy of Mrs. Burgess’s face. Still,

perhaps never in her life, never in the cheerless chambers of Mrs.

Wilson’s poor house, had Anna known the homesickness with which she ate

and drank—that night at her husband’s table.

Poverty and obscurity were old and tried friends to Anna; among them she

would have been at home. From wealth and social prominence she shrank

with instinctive dread and ingrained disfavour. The familiar austerities

of poverty were, to her, denotements of mental elevation, while the

indulgences of wealth bore to her thought an almost vulgar pampering of

appetite and ministering to sense. The trained perfection of the silent

attentive service in itself was an offence to her. Why should those

people be turned into speechless automatons to watch every wish and wait

upon every need of three other people no more deserving than themselves?

Could it ever seem right to her?

She excused herself early. Left alone with him, Mrs. Burgess laid her

small hand on Keith’s, saying without warmth but with significant

emphasis:—

“You have done very well, Keith, in marrying Miss Mallison. I confess I

was not without some apprehension lest the wife who would have been a

perfect helpmeet and companion for you in the foreign field might appear

at some disadvantage in the life now before you in the ordering of

Providence.”

“Anna is so absolutely true, mother, that she cannot be a misfit

anywhere, except among false conditions.”

Mrs. Burgess bowed her head.

“I can see that she is a thoroughly exemplary young woman, and while she

may have much to learn of social conditions in a place like Fulham, the

foundation is all right.” She paused a little, and added reflectively:

“Her eyes and hands are extremely good. Her figure will improve. I

understand that her father belonged to the Andover Mallisons.”

There was a little flicker of Keith’s eyelids, but he made no reply,

taking up casually from the table a book at which he looked with

mechanical indifference. It was a volume of Barnes’s “Notes.” This much

only of Anna’s vision had had foundation.

CHAPTER XVI

For the most part people do not think at all. They have little

phrases and formulas which stand in their minds for thoughts and

opinions, and they repeat them parrotlike. Most of their notions and

ideas and prejudices are mere extraneous accretions, barnacled on to

them by men and books in their passage through life, as shells are

on a vessel, but not growing out of them or really belonging to

them.—ANON.

Life in her creaking shoes

Goes, and more formal grows,

A round of calls and cues.

—W. E. HENLEY.

At the end of the week, on Saturday morning, Anna Burgess was sitting on

a low stool in the middle of her bedroom, surrounded by a curious

confusion and medley of miscellaneous things. Before her was an open

cedar chest of large proportions; its pungent odour was mingled with the

spicy smell of winter apples, dried fruits, and maple sugar. From the

half unpacked chest, quilts of calico patchwork and soft home-woven

blankets were overflowing; piles of snowy linen sheets and pillowcases,

finely hemstitched and bordered with delicate thread-work, lay about the

floor, together with body linen of equal daintiness, and books in dull

and faded binding, while the red apples, rolled everywhere, studded the

confused array as commas do a printer’s page.

In the chest still lay some old-fashioned furs and other clothing. Anna,

as she sat, had her lap heaped with a quantity of yellowed lace, and a

number of small, thin silver spoons. She was reading a letter, and, as

she read, unconsciously tears were running down her cheeks.

“You must have known,” wrote Gulielma Mallison, “that I could not let my

dear daughter go empty-handed to her new home. The box has been long,

however, in being made ready, but I know your husband and his mother

will make excuses, the marriage having been so sudden. Lucia and I have

taken comfort in sorting out and preparing the things. The linen is,

much of it, what was left of my own bridal outfit, but we have bleached

it on the snow, and it is still strong. The silver I have tried to

divide equally among you all. This is your portion. The little

porringer, you know, came over from Germany with my mother, then the

Jungfrau Benigna von Brosius.

“I regret that I am unable to provide you with more dresses, etc., but

there is little to do with and little to choose from in Haran. Indeed, I

hardly ever get to Haran any more, my rheumatism is so bad, and the

going has been terrible this winter. We got Lucia’s husband’s sister to

buy the white cotton cloth, and sent it back by Joseph when he went down

with a load of wood. The brown cloak I shall not be likely to need any

more, going out so seldom, and Lucia says she doesn’t begrudge it to you

at all, being much too long for her, and it would be a shame to cut off

any of that material to waste. You know it is the best of camlet cloth,

and there is no wear out to it. I have given Lucia the melodeon, and she

says it is only fair that you should have the cloak and the brown silk

dress. We got Amanda Turner to make that over for you by an old waist we

had of yours. She was here three days, right through the worst snowstorm

we have had all winter, and there was nothing to interrupt us. We turned

the silk and made it all over. I think we succeeded pretty well. I

thought you really ought to have one silk dress, now you are going to

live in this country. Of course you’ll be invited out to tea some, there

in Fulham. The grey merino will do for afternoons. I made you four

aprons, two white, and two check to wear about your work, and you’ll

need them afternoons for taking care of your husband’s mother. Please

give her my best respects. I send the dried fruit to her,—maybe it will

tempt her appetite a little,—and part of the maple sugar, that in the

little cakes. Lucia ran it for her especially. We thought maybe they

wouldn’t have it down there in Fulham, that was pure.

“I am sorry we haven’t anything better to send Mr. Burgess, but I put in

your dear father’s quilted dressing-gown as my particular present; his

health being so poor, Lucia and I thought it might be acceptable. The

books are for him, from your father’s library....”

The letter dropped in Anna’s lap, and covering her face with both hands,

she burst into passionate tears. Her old life, in all its homely, simple

sweetness called her mightily, and the sharp sense of her own separation

from it now and forever tore her heart. Her mother’s inability to

comprehend the new conditions, the eager self-sacrifice which had gladly

shorn her own poor life bare of every lingering superfluity of

possession that she might equip her child with such small dower as was

attainable, had to Anna a pathos which seemed almost too poignant to

endure. How well, oh, how well she understood the planning and

contriving, the simple joy in each small new object gained; the delight

which her mother and Lucia had shared in picturing to themselves her own

grateful surprise in the manifold treasures stored in the dear old

chest, itself an heirloom of impressive value in the Mallison family.

And she was grateful beyond words to tell, and pleased and proud to come

thus set out to her husband; and yet, these possessions, so unspeakably

precious to her, would, she knew only too well, wear a rustic and

incongruous aspect in the Burgess household. She knew that Keith and his

mother would be gentle and respectful in thought as in word, but she

knew the faint embarrassment which they would try to conceal in

receiving gifts for which they would have no use; she knew the delicate,

half-pitying, well-meaning sympathy, which could never understand, try

as it would.

On Sunday morning, Anna attended church with her husband and his mother

for the first time, the latter making a great effort, since church-going

was far beyond her usual invalid routine. When Anna presented herself in

the hall ready to start, Mrs. Burgess, or Madam Burgess as she was

generally styled after this time, had bit her lip and almost gasped,

such was her amazement and dismay. However, she had said nothing, the

situation being plainly hopeless, and she sat in the carriage in

speechless anxiety, while Keith’s face reflected the same emotion. He

had felt it impossible to interfere with Anna’s arraying herself as she

had for church, seeing with his sensitive perception that the garments

fashioned and sent her from her home by the hands of her mother and

sister, for such a time as this, were in her eyes sacredly beyond

criticism or cavil.

Anna now preceded him, following his mother, down the broad aisle of the

stately and well-filled church, drawing to herself unconsciously the

attention of many eyes. She wore over the soft overshot silk gown the

brown camlet cloak which had formed in her mother’s eyes the chief glory

of her simple trousseau. It was a long, circular cape, falling to the

hem of her dress, drawn up about the throat and shoulders with quaint

smocking after a forgotten art, and tied with a long, loose bow of

changeable brown ribbon. The outlines of this garment were so simple and

so natural that it could never, at any period or by any shift of

fashion, become awkward, but it had at that time an effect of

Puritan-like quaintness. She wore a dark, broad-brimmed hat with falling

plumes, according well in simplicity as in colour with her cloak.

As she passed down to the Burgess pew, her height and bearing, the

flowing outline of her costume, the purity and unconscious, childlike

seriousness of her face with its clear brune pallor, the steady light of

her hazel eyes, the lustreless masses of her dark hair, all combined to

make a singular impression of mediæval loveliness, of something rare and

fine and wholly distinct from the prevalent type of women in the

ambitious little city. There were some who, seeing her, smiled and

whispered at the quaintness of her dress; there were others who found

their eyes irresistibly drawn again and again by the picturesque harmony

of her figure; there were one or two persons who, watching the proud,

pure severity of her face as she sat with her soul lifted to God and

heedless of outward things, saw in her a woman fit for reverence and

wonder, one whose spirit had been most evidently nourished on the

greatness and simplicity of spiritual realities, and who was yet

untouched by “the world’s slow stain.”

And so it came about that Keith Burgess and his mother, who had been

dismayed at the lack of conformity to fashion in Anna’s dress at this

first appearance in their world, found themselves met, the service over,

by men and women who had admiration and interest, sober and sincere, to

express, and much to say aside of the singular distinction, the

aristocratic dignity and charm, of the bride. Madam Burgess was not slow

to produce the good points of Anna’s ancestry of which she had quickly

possessed herself, thus enhancing the favourable impression, and she was

ready to accept Anna, cloak and all, herself, when the son of one of

Fulham’s leading men, Pierce Everett, an artist newly returned from

Paris, came to her with a respectful but eager wish that Mrs. Keith

Burgess would at some future day grant him the notable favour of sitting

to him for some saint’s face and figure.

There was a little crowd about them as they passed out to their

carriage, and much kind and deferential courtesy pressing upon Anna’s

notice. A group of young girls on the church steps watched her with shy,

awed glances, and murmured to each other that they adored her, she was

so different from any bride they had ever seen; she was grave and quiet,

and something of pathos and mystery seemed to remove her far from the

conscious, fluttering pink-and-white brides of their experience.

The young artist, Pierce Everett, joined a friend, a professor of

literature in the local university, Nathan Ward, as he walked away from

the church.

“What a study for a saint!” he exclaimed, with enthusiasm. “I did not

suppose there was such a woman left in the world. Where can she have

been saved up to keep that super-earthly look?”

Professor Ward smiled. After a silence he said,—

“Here’s a conundrum, if it is Sunday: Why is Keith Burgess like St.

Francis of Assisi?”

The answer not being forthcoming, Professor Ward presently volunteered

it.

“Because he has espoused Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. In Mrs. Keith

these three are one.”

Fulham was a small city with a college of no great reputation, which

called itself a university by reason of having a divinity school

affiliated. Furthermore it was a seaboard town and had had a large

shipping trade in former years, now slowly dying a natural death. The

aristocratic circle of Fulham—there was but one—was as definitely marked

and as strongly defended from invasion as it is possible for such a

circle to be, even in an old New England town. In fact, it existed more

obviously for its own defence and preservation from the ineligible than

for any other reason; and only two classes of citizens were

eligible,—namely, those who had some connection with “the university,”

and those who inherited either poverty or riches from ancestors engaged

in foreign commerce. These two agreed in one, and agreed to rule out all

others. Thus the aristocratic circle was necessarily small and its

social functions painfully mechanical and monotonous; its maidens were

proverbially lacking in personal charms, and its young men, with rare

exceptions, fled, escaping to more interesting and varied scenes; but it

was supremely satisfied, rejoiced in the distinction of its unattainable

exclusiveness, and looked with cold and unrelenting disfavour upon all

strangers, newcomers, or fellow-citizens, however meritorious, who

failed to possess the sole claims to its ranks.

Madam Burgess enjoyed a double title to membership in this exclusive

circle. Her fathers before her, for several generations, had been

shipowners residing in the house now her own, to which her husband, the

Reverend Elon Burgess, had come, as an eminently suitable adjunct upon

their marriage. Mr. Burgess had filled a minor chair in the divinity

school for the ten years of their married life; he had not filled even

this particularly well, being a man of small calibre, lacking in any

trace of original power or talent, but his name was in the university

catalogue, and hence his place in the ranks of Fulham’s high social

circle safe forever. But, although of limited ability, Professor Burgess

was fine of grain and fine of habit, and sincerely pious in a day when

to be called pious did not awaken a smile. In the fear and faith of God

and in true humility he had lived and died, leaving perhaps no very

large and irreparable vacancy, and no overwhelming sense of loss or

desolation even to his wife and son, and still having borne—

“without reproach

The fine old name of gentleman.”

As a girl Sarah Keith had given satisfactory evidence of a “change of

heart,” and in a time of profound missionary awakening she had declared

herself strongly in sympathy with foreign missions. To the position thus

taken she had consistently adhered. All boards and auxiliaries to which

she was available claimed her name on their lists. Missionary literature

was always scattered abundantly in her library, her gifts were large,

and her allegiance to religious interests was so completely taken for

granted that it would no more have been questioned in Fulham than her

place in its aristocracy. Certainly she never doubted herself that she

was essentially a religious woman. Nevertheless, religion, whether

personal or in its outreaching toward a world which she would have

unhesitatingly called “lost,” consisted for her now in a series of

mechanical observances, and in tenacious orthodoxy of opinion it had

become a dry husk enclosing a dead seed. The brief blossoming of the

religious impulse of her young years over, she had fixed her affections

on the small adventitious trappings of “this transitory life,” and

denied unconsciously the power of that other life, the form of which she

so punctiliously maintained.

Her invalidism was becoming, not inconvenient on the whole, and not

wholly imaginary. Such was the woman who was now by the ordering of

Providence to rule and direct the unfoldings of Anna’s early womanhood,

since Keith Burgess cherished a respect and submission to his mother

which would have found something akin in Chinese ancestor-worship. He

had reproduced in his own young life his mother’s early missionary

fervour; that it was long dead in her case he did not suspect. With

Keith this experience had received a strong accent from the temper of

his college life, and from the possibility of an actual dedication of

himself to the missionary vocation. It had thus become, as we have seen,

for a time nobly and completely dominant with him, the strongest passion

his life had known. He was himself surprised to find, on his reaction

from the crisis of loss and disappointment connected with his illness

and the abandonment of a missionary career, how natural and, on the

whole, how satisfactory it was to settle back into his own place in his

old home, to fall back into the small, comfortable interests of Fulham,

and to find full soon an aspect of unreality and even of incongruity

clothing his former ardent dream.

Not so Anna.

The ordered precision, the formal, stiff monotony, repeated day after

day in her husband’s home, the cold, conventional courtesies, the

absence of any purpose save to maintain things in existing form without

progress or alteration, for a time exerted upon her an almost paralyzing

effect. A torpid dulness, a physical oppression, came upon her when shut

up alone to the companionship of Madam Burgess, against which she found

it impossible to struggle successfully. Accustomed to serious mental

work, to much strenuous bodily labour, to the wholesome severity of long

walks in all weathers, and more than all to the stimulus of a great,

immediate purpose ennobling every homeliest task and smallest

service,—the present life of inaction, of sluggish ease, of absence of

responsibility of motive or purpose, was like the life of a prison. A

heavy, spiritless apathy overbore every motion to fresh endeavour or to

new hopes and incitements. She “fluttered and failed for breath,” and at

times her heart seemed bursting with its longing, the old wild, girlish

longing, grown still and deep, for freedom and for power.

With mechanical indifference she accompanied Madam Burgess on her daily

drives, paid and received visits, shopped, and attended the various

prescribed social functions, read aloud to Keith, and made a feint of

embroidering the great ottoman cover which her mother-in-law had

contrived for her leisure. It was a stag’s head with impossible square

eyes, the head partially surrounded by a half-wreath of oak leaves and

acorns, staring out of an illimitable field of small red stitches,

numberless as the sands of the seashore, and significant, Anna thought

wearily, of her endless, monotonous hours.

All the while, just below the surface, repeated through the long days,

was the bitter conflict of her spirit, her perpetual, unanswered

questioning, Why had God thus dealt with her? Why, with all power to

save or heal, had he permitted the illness to come upon Keith which had

thus brought to naught what she had supposed was the very and sacred

purpose of her creation.

Upon the intensity of youth and a nature of profound and passionate

earnestness this thwarting of her dedicated purpose, this apparent

rejection of herself from the service of God, worked piteous havoc. Anna

did not grow sullen or rebellious, but she felt her whole interior life

to be in hopeless confusion. Her sense of an immediate and personal

relation to a fatherly God had suffered something like an earthquake

shock. All the high faith, the sacred and filial purpose, the profound

self-dedication of her girlhood, seemed to have been flung aside by the

God whom she had sought to know and serve, with cold, blank

indifference, without sign or suggestion of pity, of love, or of amends.

The God of whom Mrs. Westervelt had taught her, a conception which she

had gradually absorbed and assimilated as her own, a God closer than

breathing, nearer than hands and feet, to whom the heart was never

lifted in vain, whose presence could be indubitably felt and known, who

answered every holy and devout prayer of his children, and who led them

immediately in every thought and action—where was he? Either he existed

only in imagination, or she was herself rejected by him as unworthy;

and, in a depth below the depth of burning grief, she saw her father

likewise despised and rejected.

A great protest, honest and indignant, rose up in Anna’s heart. She knew

that, as far as mortal man could be holy and harmless in the eyes of his

God, her father had been; and she knew that her own purposes had been

blameless and sincere. She refused to quibble with herself in regard to

these facts; something staunch and sturdy in her mental constitution—not

obstinacy, not pride, but sheer inward honesty—refused to seek

accommodation in any forced paroxysm of humility or blind submission.

With a sorrow which a lighter nature could not have comprehended, but

with characteristic conclusiveness, she said to herself, the stress of

her inward conflict spent, “I do not know God,” and composed her spirit

in silence to wait.

At the end of a month Keith returned to his class in the Massachusetts

Divinity School, with which he was to graduate in June. Immediately

thereafter he expected to enter upon the duties of his missionary

secretaryship, and make his home in Fulham with his wife and mother.

Thrown thus upon the sole companionship of Madam Burgess, and forced

either to make the best of the situation or to appear the crude,

undisciplined provincial who sullenly refuses to adapt herself to new

conditions, Anna’s native good sense came to her rescue. With strong

will she crowded down her mental conflict, while with conscientious

earnestness she addressed herself to the duty of making herself a

cheerful and sympathetic companion to her husband’s mother, and of

filling the social position in which she was undeniably placed, however

inscrutable the reasons therefor. New influences came out to meet and

win her on every side, and she responded with a social grace, and even

facility, which amazed all who had seen her first as the cold, pale,

silent girl whose marriage altar had seemed rather an altar of

sacrifice.

An effect of singular charm was produced by this new mental attitude,

the opening out of a nature until now so closely sealed. The native

seriousness, the fine, direct simplicity, of Anna’s girlhood remained;

but they seemed flooded with a new and warmer light, welcome as daily

sunshine while the hardness, the rigour, and the severity melted away.

She submitted without further protest to the comparative luxury of her

surroundings, found it surprisingly agreeable, and discovered a fresh,

forgotten joy in simple physical existence, which carried her bravely

through the long, dull days of the Burgess order of life.

Notwithstanding all these things, below the surface of her life, often

below the surface of her thought, lay an unplumbed depth of spiritual

loneliness, a sense of double orphanhood, a voice which cried and would

not be stilled; for while men and women had come near, of God she had

become shy, feeling toward him as toward a dearest friend grown cold.

But one night, as she lay alone and wakeful, tears painful, not easily

flowing, wetting her pillow, a sudden thought stung her by its throbbing

wonder and delight, seeming great enough to reconcile all things, even

God, who had filled her with bitterness, and hedged her about in all her

ways.

She said to herself, “It may be I shall have a child,” and the deep

places of her nature called to each other in joy and exultation; and she

knew that, if this grace should be given her, all would yet be clear,

and she could still believe in God’s love, and in his purpose in her

life.

So, blindly groping through the rough and thorny way by which humanity

has sought God through many ages, this human soul, sincere and humble,

perpetuated the heart-breaking fallacy of conditioning the Divine Love,

the Eternal Power and Godhead, on the small mutations of her own life,

seen at short range.

CHAPTER XVII

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,

Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control—

So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,

Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.

Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,

Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne

Where man’s one nature, queen-like, sits alone,

Centred in a majestic unity.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

To some minds there is nothing more pathetic in human experience than

the patient resignation with which average men and women accommodate

themselves to the most disastrous and distorting of griefs and

disappointments, nothing more amazing than their power to endure. If

something of the brute nature is in us all, it is not always and

altogether the animalhood of greed or of ferocity, but far more commonly

the mute, uncomprehending submission of sheep and oxen. Though the

futility of revolt is so apparent, the infrequency of it in human lives

does not cease to surprise. The modern Rachel mourns for her children,

and will not be comforted, but she goes about the streets in

conventional mourning, orders her house with decent regularity, and

probably, in the end, goes abroad for a time, and returning, enters with

apparent cheerfulness into the social round. The modern Guelph or

Ghibelline, banished from the political or intellectual activities which

made life to him, finds readily that raving against time and fate is no

longer good form, reads his daily paper with unabated interest, and

enjoys a good dinner with appetite unimpaired. Very probably the man’s

and the woman’s heart is broken in each instance, but what then? Life

goes on, and the resiliency of the mainspring in a well-adjusted piece

of human mechanism may be usually guaranteed, with safety, to last a

lifetime.

In a year after her marriage Anna Burgess was diligently at work along

the conventional lines of activity of her day for religious young women

at home,—writing missionary reports, distributing literature, collecting

dues. She saw nothing better to do. Her own private and innermost

relation to God, it was true, had been dislocated, but the heathen

remained to be saved.

One morning, Keith being away from home, Anna came into Madam Burgess’s

sitting room, her cheeks slightly flushed, her eyes shining, a letter in

hand.

“May I read you this?” she asked eagerly; “I have been invited to give

an address at the foreign missionary conference next month in H——. What

if I could! I should be so glad.” Her eyes told the new and eager hope

which this summons had stirred within her.

An added degree of frost settled upon her mother-in-law’s face.

“You can hardly mean, Anna,” she said, “that you would be willing to

speak in public?”

“But our missionaries do, and sometimes others,” Anna replied anxiously.

“The case of missionaries is, of course, entirely exceptional; and they

should never be heard, in my opinion, before mixed audiences. As for

other women making spectacles of themselves, it would seem to be enough

to remind you, Anna, of the words of the Apostle Paul on that subject.

You would hardly attempt, I think, to explain them away.”

Anna was silent.

“A woman who has a noble Christian husband, my dear,” continued Madam

Burgess, more gently, feeling her case now won, “as you have, who is

already at work in this very field of labour, has no occasion to leave

the sacred shelter of her own home, and lift up her voice and exhibit

her person in public gatherings.”

“Keith always said that I might still have a chance to do a little work

in this way; I am sure he approved,” and Anna’s low voice faltered, her

heart full just then of the memory of those first days of their common

sorrow.

“You have a very indulgent husband, and it is not strange if, in the

first fond days of your married life, he may have unwisely yielded to

some mistaken sense of duty on your part, and apparently committed

himself to a purpose which he would later realize to be impracticable.

Understand me clearly, my dear,” and the term of endearment sounded,

from Madam Burgess’s lips, as sharp as the point of an icicle, “my son’s

wife can never, without flying in the face of all her holiest

obligations, both to God and man, present herself before an audience of

people as a public speaker. A woman who does this violates the very law

of her being, she ceases to be womanly, ceases to be modest, and loses

all that feminine delicacy which is woman’s chief ornament.”

The finality of these remarks clearly perceived, Anna rose from her

chair, and left the room in silence. She never returned to the subject,

but simply buried in her heart one more high hope of service.

This was the first time that Anna’s inexperience and young ardour had

joined direct issue with Madam Burgess’s social creed. For a while

everything had gone so smoothly that Anna’s first sense of disparity had

been soothed to rest; all things being new, she had failed to see the

full significance of certain limitations which hedged her in. Little by

little she learned this, and learned the inevitable submission. She

never appealed to Keith from his mother, controlled by a sense of the

essential ugliness and vulgarity of a domestic situation in which the

different elements are working and interworking at variance with each

other. Furthermore, she learned very soon that, however sympathetic and

gentle Keith might show himself toward her, he would, in the end, range

himself on his mother’s side of every question.

Stratagem and indirection were alike alien to Anna’s nature and habit,

but she inevitably learned, in process of time and experience, to avoid

leading Madam Burgess to a declaration of definite positions, while she

sought to enlist her husband’s sympathies in her own undertakings before

his mother was made acquainted with them. Any plan which was brought

before her by her son was comparatively acceptable to the elder woman.

Thus wisely ordering her goings as women learn to do, Anna succeeded in

reaching a fair degree of independence and at the same time a harmonious

outward order. Her sacrifices and disappointments, the gradual paring

down of her larger hopes and the dimming of her finer aspirations, she

kept to herself.

Pierce Everett, the young artist who had spoken of Anna’s fitness for a

model of a saint, had carried out his purpose, and had formally

requested her to pose for him. With the cordial approval of both Madam

Burgess and Keith, Anna had consented, and late in the winter the

sittings began in Everett’s studio, which was in his father’s house.

Madam Burgess brought Anna to the house for the first sitting. They were

received by the mother of the artist, an intimate friend of Madam

Burgess, and the older ladies then laughingly gave Anna over into

Everett’s hands while they enjoyed a discussion of certain benevolent

committee matters.

In the studio a little talk ensued regarding the projected sittings, and

various considerations involved in them. These matters understood, Anna

said composedly:—

“I am ready, Mr. Everett, if you will tell me just what you wish. I do

not even know for what I am to be painted.”

“And you will not object, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quickly, “if I do

not tell you now? It is in a character which could not, I am sure,

displease you, but I think it would be decidedly better that we should

not discuss it, and that you should have no definite thought of it. Is

this satisfactory to you?”

“Entirely so.”

“Very well.”

Immediately upon this Everett took his place at the easel and began a

first rapid sketch of Anna’s head. He was a slight fellow, below the

medium height, with a delicate, almost transparent face, a red Vandyke

beard, and large and brilliant brown eyes. Quick and nervous in speech

and gesture, he had the clear-cut precision of a man who knows both his

means and his end.

Anna thought him very interesting.

At the second sitting their talk chanced to turn upon the relation of

the ideals of men and women to their practical lives, and Everett told

Anna the old story of Carcassonne, which was new to her. The train of

thought thus suggested soon absorbed her, so that she forgot him and

what he was doing. The sacred hope of her own life, yet unfulfilled,

still centring in the hope of her father, the ever receding purpose of

which she never spoke, cast its powerful influence upon her.

For half an hour neither spoke. Then Everett’s friend, Professor Ward,

came into the room in familiar fashion, and the two men talked of many

things.

When Anna left Nathan Ward said, looking over his friend’s shoulder:—

“If you can keep that look, you will make a great picture.” Then he

added, “But don’t fail to get her hands. They have the same expression.”

After that it became an habitual thing for Ward to drop into the studio

at these sittings. It never occurred to Anna that her presence had

anything to do with his coming. She supposed he had always come. He

talked very little with her, but she liked to listen to his talk with

Everett. It was distinctly novel to her—light, rambling, touch-and-go,

and yet full of underlying thought and suggestion. Anna had known few

men at best, none of the order to which these two belonged, men

conversant with art and literature, music and poetry, and modern life on

all its sides. Much that they said puzzled and perplexed her, but she

found an eager enjoyment in it.

Then one day Professor Ward said to her, apropos of Shelley, of whom

they had been speaking:—

“You do not join in this discussion, Mrs. Burgess. I am quite sure you

could give us opinions much wiser than ours.”

Anna’s colour deepened as she answered:—

“I have not read Shelley in a great many years. Indeed, I know nothing

of literature.”

There was a little silence; Anna hesitated, half inclined to say a word

in explanation of a fact which she plainly saw the two men found very

surprising, but finally, finding the explanation too personal and too

serious, remained silent.

As she started to walk home from the Everett’s, Professor Ward joined

her, asking to walk with her. He was a man of forty, with a wife and a

flock of little children. Anna knew the family slightly, but pleasantly.

“Mrs. Burgess,” the professor began, as they walked down the quiet

street, “I do not want to intrude or to be found inquisitive, but I am

so puzzled by what you said a little while ago that I really wish you

felt inclined to enlighten me. I know you never speak with the

exaggeration and inaccuracy which is so much the habit of young ladies,

and so I accept what you said as to your ignorance of literature as

sober truth. But you are a well-educated woman. How can it be?”

Anna was almost glad of a chance to explain. She was facing many new

questions in these days, and she felt the need of light. She answered

therefore at once, with frankness:—

“I deliberately gave up study on all these lines when I became a

Christian. I supposed them to be contrary to the absolute consecration

of my life to God.”

Professor Ward looked perplexed.

“You cannot understand,” Anna said timidly. “I have felt since I have

been in Fulham as if the language of my religious life in those days

would be an unknown tongue here. I see that I am right. To you,

Professor Ward, I am sure such a sense of duty as I speak of is

unintelligible, but I can still say it was sincere. And it was not an

easy sacrifice to make, for I had already grown fond of poetry, and

longed to know more in a way I could never express.”

“I see,” said her companion, gravely; “you felt that the study of the

work of men like most of our poets, whose religious positions were vague

and not formulated according to our creeds, was likely to act

unfavourably upon your spiritual life and experience.”

“Yes. To divide my heart, to dim my sense of a one, single aim in life.”

“And that aim?”

“To serve God directly in every thought and word. That, and to try to

save the souls of the lost.”

Professor Ward had no key to the profound sadness with which Anna spoke,

but he watched her face with earnest interest. She spoke with the

unconsciousness of absolute sincerity. He was reflecting, however, on

how much easier life might be if one could sustain, undisturbed, such

bare simplicity of conception of human relations.

“And so,” he said slowly, “you were going to prune away every instinct,

every faculty of your nature which did not serve the immediate purpose

of furthering what men call sometimes ‘the cause of religion,’ and know

and feel and be one thing only?”

Anna bent her head in assent.

“That is precisely what men and women do who seek monastic life.”

Anna looked up at Professor Ward in quick surprise and instinctive

protest.

“Yes,” he said, with emphasis, “it was just as noble and just as

cowardly, just as weak and just as strong, as the impulses which make

monks and nuns. It is what people do who are afraid of life, who do not

dare to encounter the whole of it, who have not reached the highest

faith in either God or man.”

“Then you think such a resolution, such a scheme of life, produces weak

natures, not strong ones?” asked Anna, looking up with her honest,

steadfast gaze into his eyes.

“I should say narrow natures, and yet I fear I ought to say weak ones

too. Mrs. Burgess, do you not see yourself the weakness, the narrowness,

of the position? It is what might be called the department system of

human life,” and Professor Ward, with rapid gestures, indicated the

drawing of sharp lines. “It is as if you said to your ego, your

soul—yourself—whatever,—Go to now, this department of your life is

religious; it sings hymns, reads a collection of sacred writings at

regular hours, prays, gives away money to build churches, and performs

various other exercises definitely stamped as godly. This other

department loves nature, exults in beauty, pours itself into poetic

thought, rejoices in music, expresses itself in art: but all this is

secular, pagan—all men may have this in common who have not accepted my

particular conception of the divine nature and its dealings with men;

consequently all this is to be cut off—effaced, fought with to the

death. Am I right?”

Anna nodded, her face very grave, her breath quickened.

“Does that seem to you a reasonable or even a noble conception? There

was nobleness, I grant you, in the struggle, just as there was in the

fortitude of the Spartans; but who feels now a desire to imitate that

sheer, barbaric effacing of human feeling? No, no. That day has passed.

We can begin to see life whole to-day; we can see God in nature, in

poetry, in beauty, in ugliness even. He is all and in all. All things

are ours and we are God’s! I wish I could make this clear to you.”

“You have, in part,” said Anna, simply.

“No way, however tortuous, by which men have groped after God can be

indifferent to us, if we have the right sense of humanity. Trust

yourself, Mrs. Burgess; trust the human heart throughout the ages.

Believe me, with all the drawbacks, all the falls, and all the blunders,

it has been an honest heart and is worthy of reverence and devout study.

‘Trust God: see all, nor be afraid.’”

“I have seen only one side of life, one conception of human nature.”

“That, at least, was a high and lofty one. For stern heroism of thought,

commend me to that old New England Calvinism in which I see you were

nurtured. It was fine; I glory in it, just as I glory in heroism

everywhere, builded up on however mistaken a foundation. The worst of

it, however, is that it completely deceives the human heart as to

itself. It is terrible in its power to mislead. The elect are not as

elect by half as they suppose. Calvin himself helped to burn Servetus,

which was not really fine of him, you know. But I have said enough. I

hope I have not wounded you?”

“I do not think so,” said Anna, smiling faintly, “but I am amazed beyond

everything. All that you say is so new.”

They had reached Professor Ward’s house, which was very near that of

Madam Burgess.

“I wish you would come in a moment,” said Ward, very gently; “you know

my wife always likes to see you, and I want to show you some books in

which I think you would be interested.”

Without reply, Anna passed through the gate which he held open for her,

and they entered the house together. Mrs. Ward met them, and they all

went into the professor’s study.

In a few moments Anna was lost in the realm of books so long self-closed

to her experience. She sat at his desk, and Ward handed her and heaped

about her rare and beautiful volumes until she became bewildered with

the sense of intellectual richness and complexity. She looked up at

last, as he bent over her, turning the leaves of a beautiful old Italian

edition of Dante’s “Commedia,” and, with a smile beneath which her lips

trembled, she asked, like a child:—

“Tell me truly, is all this for me, righteously, safely?”

“Did I not tell you?” he asked gently. “‘All things are yours, and you

are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.’”

With that day Anna returned to the long-sealed books of her father’s

love and her own. She read and studied under Professor Ward’s guidance

and direction, steadily and with eager delight. She did this with no

further misgiving or doubt. He had succeeded in satisfying her

conscience, and she moved joyfully along the clear lines of her

inherited intellectual choice.

As for her father and the example of renunciation he had given her, her

heart was at rest. That which was perfect being come for him, was not

that which had been in part done away?

CHAPTER XVIII

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you

suppose;

Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

· · · · ·

Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction?

· · · · ·

Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner

of me?

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic

man?

Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

—WALT WHITMAN.

In her sittings in the studio of Pierce Everett, Anna had found from

time to time numbers of an English magazine devoted to social reform.

Some of these, at Everett’s suggestion, she had taken home with her and

read with care. Coming to the studio one May afternoon, for the work had

been laid aside for a time for various reasons, and only resumed with

the spring, Anna laid down on a table three or four of these magazines

with the remark:—

“I wish I knew who John Gregory is.”

Everett glanced up quickly.

“I mean the man who wrote those articles on the ‘Social Ideals of

Jesus,’” added Anna.

“Do you like them?” asked Everett.

“I do not know how to answer that question,” said Anna, musingly;

“perhaps you hardly can say you like what makes you thoroughly

uncomfortable. What he says of the immorality of a life of selfish ease

appeals to me powerfully.”

“It is a great arraignment,” said Everett, working on in apparent

absorbedness.

“What stirs me so deeply,” continued Anna, “is that this writer not only

says what I believe to be true, but that he makes you feel a sense of

power, authority, finality almost, in the way he says it. And by that,

you know, I do not mean that he is authoritative or autocratic; it is

simply that he writes as one who sees, who knows, who has gone beyond

the mists of doubt and has a clear vision.”

“You are quite right, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quietly, looking up

from his work, his eyes kindling with unwonted light. “John Gregory is a

man of his generation—a seer; as you say, one who sees. He is my master.

You did not know, perhaps, that I am a socialist?”

“No,” Anna said simply; “I do not even rightly know what a socialist

is.”

“It is, as far as my personal definition is concerned,—there are a dozen

others,—a man who believes that the aim of individual and private gain

and advantage, to the ignoring of the interests of his fellow-men, is

immoral; this, whether it is the struggle for the man’s salvation in a

future life, or his social or material advancement in this.”

Anna looked very sober. In a moment of silence, she was asking herself,

“I wonder what becomes of people who are forced into lives of selfish

inaction; who have to live luxuriously when they don’t want to; who are

obliged to go in carriages when they far prefer walking; and who find

their hands tied whenever they seek any line of effort not absolutely

conventional?”

Looking up then with a sudden smile, she exclaimed, “I should like to

ask this Mr. Gregory a few questions!”

“Perhaps you may be able to some time. He is in this country now, and he

is so good as to honour me with his personal friendship. However, he

passes like night from land to land; one can never count upon his

coming, or plan for his staying an hour. But if I can bring it about,

Mrs. Burgess, you shall meet some time.”

“Thank you. What is he? A clergyman, a teacher, or what?”

“You found something a little sermonic in his articles?” and Everett

smiled. “I believe he can never throw it off entirely. He is an Oxford

man, a scholar, and a writer on sociology. He is first and last and

always, however, a Christian in the purest and most practical sense.”

“That seemed to me unmistakable.”

“He used to be a preacher; in fact, he was for a number of years a

famous evangelist in England, and also in this country. He was led into

that work by a sense of obligation. I should almost think you must have

heard of his wonderful success. John Gregory—his name was in everybody’s

mouth a few years ago.”

Anna tried to recall some vague sense of association with the name,

which failed to declare itself plainly.

“He was holding great revival meetings somewhere in New England, simply

sweeping everything before him; all the great cities were seeking him,

you know his income could have been almost anything he would have made

it. All this I know, but I never heard a word of it from Gregory

himself.”

“He is not doing this still?”

“I will tell you. Really to understand, you must try to imagine

something of the man’s personality. He has in the highest degree that

indefinable quality which we usually call magnetism. He has an almost

irresistible personal influence with many people. Well, on a certain

night, four or five years ago, I should think, during the course of a

most successful meeting, it suddenly became clear to him that he was

bringing the people in that audience to a religious crisis, and to a

committal of themselves to a profession of a knowledge of God, by

doubtful means. I cannot tell you the details, I have forgotten them;

but I know that he went through something like agony in that meeting,

and that in saying the words ‘The Spirit is here,’ he had an

overwhelming sense of presumption and even of blasphemy. He did not know

that the Spirit was present. He was not sure but the influence at work

was the product of music, of oratory, of his own will and personality,

of the contagion of an excited crowd—in short, was purely human. If this

were so, what could the results be but confusion and dismay when the

hour of reaction should come? He was borne down by a sense of pity and

remorse even for the coming spiritual doubts and struggles of the people

who were at that hour placed almost helplessly in his hands, and

abruptly he left the place—hall, whatever it was. That night in his

hotel he made no attempt to sleep, but studied the situation, its

dangers, its losses, its benefits, with the result that he never again

held that order of revival meetings. Whatever good other men might do

with the forces at work and put into their hands to wield at such

crises, for himself he was convinced that the human had usurped the

divine, and made of him, not only an unauthorized experimenter with

souls, but a violator of their sacred rights, albeit hitherto

unconsciously to himself.”

“What has he been doing since?”

“Studying. He has gone deeply into social and religious problems, has

travelled largely, has seen and talked with many of the most famous

leaders of modern thought, and I think he has now some large plans which

are maturing slowly. Meanwhile he writes such things as you have read.”

The following week Anna was again in Everett’s studio. This sitting, he

promised her as it drew to a close, should be the last, as he could

finish the picture without her.

“Am I to see it now?” asked Anna, timidly.

“Not quite yet, if you can be patient still after such long

forbearance,” was the answer, given with a bright but half-pleading

smile. “I want you to like the thing if you can, Mrs. Burgess, and I

know my chances are better if you see it when the final touches are on.”

“Very well. I am not in a hurry.”

When Anna left the studio the sun was low and the room fast growing

shadowy. Seeing how hard and intensely Everett was working to use the

last light of the day, she insisted that he should not come down the

three long flights of stairs with her. The studio was at the top of the

house. They parted, therefore, with a brief, cordial good-by, and

earnest thanks from the young artist, whose admiration and reverence for

his model had grown with every hour spent in her presence.

On the second flight of stairs Anna encountered the housemaid coming up,

a tray with a card in her hand. Otherwise the house seemed strangely

still and deserted that evening. As she descended slowly from the broad

landing of the main staircase, where a window of stained glass threw a

deep radiance from the western sky like a shaft of colour down into the

dim hall below, Anna perceived that some one stood there, waiting.

As she looked, amazement and a strange, deep joy took hold on her. The

man who stood with arms crossed upon his breast where the shaft of light

fell full upon him in the gathering shadow was of heroic height and

stature, with a large leonine head, grey hair thrown carelessly from his

forehead, strong features, and eyes stern and grave in their fixed look

straight before him as he stood.

It was not the first time that Anna Mallison had confronted this face.

Twice in her girlhood she had seen it as she saw it now. It was the face

of her dream, the dream which for years secretly dominated her inner

life as a vision of human power and greatness touched with supernatural

light. Even in later time, in this year of her Fulham life, she had at

intervals recalled that presence and influence distinctly, and never

without quickened pulses and mysterious longing. And now she saw bodily

before her the very shape and substance of her dream.

With her heart beating violently and her breath painfully quickened, she

proceeded down the stairs, through the hall, and so past the place where

the stranger stood. When she reached him he became aware of her presence

for the first time. Throwing back his head slightly with the action of

one surprised, he met Anna’s eyes lifted with timid joy and dreamlike

appeal to his face, and smiled, bending slightly as if in spiritual

bestowment, and shedding into her heart the inexplicable delight which

she had known before only as the effluence of a dream.

Neither spoke. The house door opened and closed, and Anna hastened down

the street alone under the pale, clear sky, with a sense that the

greatest event of her life had befallen her, but she knew not what it

was. As she went on her homeward way she seemed to herself to be

palpably taken up and borne onward by a power beyond herself, as of some

rushing, mighty “wind of destiny.”

She found her husband at home, alone in the dusky library by an

oppressive fire. She wanted to tell him what had happened; but when she

sought to do this she found that nothing had happened; there was nothing

to tell unless she should seek to put into words that mysterious dream

of her past, and this she found impossible. The dream was her own. No

one else could understand.

Keith had returned from a long and tiresome journey in her absence, and

Anna was filled with penitence that she had not been in the house to

receive him and make him comfortable. He looked worn and dispirited, and

complained of the weather, which she had thought celestial, but which

prostrated his strength.

In her quiet, skilful way she ministered to him, hiding in her heart the

deep happiness in which no one could share, and as she bathed his head

he caught her hand and kissed it.

“Oh, my wife,” he said, so low that she could hardly hear, “you are too

beautiful, too wonderful for a miserable weakling of a man like me; but

how I love you, Anna! Tell me that I do not spoil your life.”

CHAPTER XIX

I am holy while I stand

Circumcrossed by thy pure hand;

But when that is gone again,

I, as others, am profane.

—ROBERT HERRICK.

John Gregory stood in the studio with his friend, the first greetings

over.

“May I look at your work?” he asked, approaching Everett’s easel. The

younger man stood behind him with sensitive, changing colour, and

something almost like trepidation in the expression of his face.

There was a certain quality of command in John Gregory, of which he was

himself, perhaps, usually unconscious, which produced in many minds a

disproportionate anxiety to win his approval. As he stood now before

Everett’s easel, however, he was not the awe-inspiring figure of Anna’s

dream, or even of its sudden fulfilment, but simply an English gentleman

in his rough travelling tweeds, a man of fifty or thereabout, noticeable

for his height and splendid proportion, for a kind of rugged harmony of

feature, and for the peculiarly piercing quality of his glance. His

manner was characterized by repose which might have appeared stolidity

had not the fire in his eyes denied the suggestion; his voice was deep

and full, and he spoke with the roll and rhythm of accent common to

educated Englishmen. The aspect of the man produced, altogether, an

effect of almost careless freedom from form, the sense that here was one

who had to do with what was actual and imperative, not with the

adventitious and artificial; in fine, an essentially masculine and

virile individuality,—a man born to lead, not to follow.

Beside him, Pierce Everett, with his delicate mobility of face and the

slender grace of his frame, looked boyish and even effeminate, but there

was nothing of superiority or patronage in Gregory’s bearing toward the

young artist, but rather a kind of affectionate comradery peculiarly

winning, and he entered into the study of the young man’s work with

cordial and sympathetic interest.

The canvas before them was not a large one; the composition extremely

simple; the single figure it presented was set in against a background

of cold, low tones of yellow. A crumbling tomb of hewn stone, with tufts

of dry grass growing in the crevices, hoary with age, stained with

decay, was set against a steep hillside of sterile limestone. Leaning

upon a broken pillar of this tomb stood the figure of a young girl, her

hands dropped carelessly upon the rough stone before her, her head

lifted and encircled by a faint nimbus, the eyes fixed in absorbed

contemplation, and yet with a child’s passionless calm. The outlines of

the figure, in white Oriental dress, were those of extreme youth,

undeveloped and severe, the attitude had an unconscious childlike grace,

the expression of the face was that of awe and wonder, with a curious

mingling of joy and dread. The subject, easily guessed, was the Virgin

in Contemplation in early girlhood.

The picture was nearly finished, only the detail of the foreground

remained incomplete.

John Gregory stood for some time in silence. The face and figure before

him possessed the expression of high, spiritual quality common to the

early Florentines; there was little of fleshly or earthly beauty, but an

aura of celestial purity, of virginal innocence and devout aspiration,

was the more perceived.

“You have painted, like Fra Angelico, Everett, with heaven in your

heart.”

Gregory spoke at last. The artist drew a long breath and turned away,

satisfied. They both found chairs then, and settled down for an hour of

talk.

“Where could you find a model for such a conception? It would be most

difficult, I should think, in our self-conscious, sophisticated, modern

life.”

“It was my model who created my picture,” replied Everett. “Mrs. Keith

Burgess is the lady’s name. Seeing her at church, when she came here a

bride, gave me my first thought of the thing.”

Gregory looked at him meditatively.

“It is most remarkable that a woman who was married could have suggested

your little Mary there, with that child’s unconsciousness in her eyes,

that obviously virginal soul. When a woman has loved a man, she has

another look.”

Everett was surprised at this comment from Gregory, who had never

married, and who was peculiarly silent and indifferent commonly when the

subject of love or marriage was touched in conversation. He answered

presently:

“When Mrs. Burgess was married and came here, she was in a sense a

child. She was thoughtful and serious beyond her years in religious

concerns, but quite undeveloped on all other lines, and as inexperienced

in the motives and energies of the modern world as a child—I think one

might have described her then as a very religious child.”

“Has she changed greatly?”

“Not so much, and yet somewhat. She has begun to read, you see, which

she never had done except on certain scholastic and religious lines; she

has begun to think for herself somewhat, and in a sense, one could say,

she has begun to live.”

John Gregory did not reply, but he said to himself that if she had begun

to love she could not have furnished his friend with the inspiration and

the model for just that picture.

He had come to Fulham only for the evening, being on his way to take a

steamer from Montreal back to England. The two men had dinner together,

and then, returning to the studio, conversed long and earnestly. Gregory

spoke freely but not fully of plans which absorbed him, but which were

not yet matured. Some theory of social coöperation was in full

possession of his mind, and he had small consideration for things

outside. Everett listened with serious attention to all that he said,

and when he rose to make ready for departure he remarked:—

“Mr. Gregory, when the time comes that you are ready to carry into

execution any plan embodying this principle of brotherhood, count on me,

if you think me worthy. I am ready to follow you—anywhere.”

Gregory looked down upon the young man with his grave and winning smile.

“Thank you, Everett; I shall remember. But do you know, my dear fellow,

I want to ask a tremendous favour of you now, this very night?”

“Say on,” returned the other.

Gregory had crossed the room to the easel, and now stood with a look

intent on the picture of the young Virgin.

“It is a bold request, but I want to buy this picture of you now—before

you have a chance to touch it again. Who knows but you may spoil it? It

interests me unusually, and I want to take it with me to England,—to do

that it must go with me to-night. I will pay you any price you have in

mind. I want it for a purpose, Everett.”

“What! you mean that I should let it go to-night, before I have finished

it, or shown it to Mrs. Burgess herself even?” and Everett looked almost

aghast. “She has never seen it, even once, you know.”

“Yes,” said the other, looking fully into the artist’s excited face with

undisturbed quietness; “that is exactly what I ask of you. I will

promise to return the painting to you at some future date if that should

be your wish. I shall be over here again in a year.”

Everett stood for a moment, reflecting.

“I am very fond of the picture,” he said slowly.

“So am I,” said the other, smiling.

Everett glanced up, and caught the smile, and felt a strange control in

it.

“You will have to take it,” he said, with a nervous laugh. “There is no

other way.”

“Then, put a good price on it, my boy,” said Gregory, with

matter-of-fact brevity.

“You will agree not to exhibit it anywhere, publicly?”

“Certainly. I could not do that without Mrs. Burgess’s consent.”

“How I shall make my peace with her, I am sure I cannot imagine,”

murmured Everett, as he took the painting from its place, and laid it on

the table preparatory to packing it.

“Will you tell her, please,” said Gregory, quite unmoved, “that I wanted

the picture, and will agree to make good use of it?”

A sudden clearing passed over Everett’s clouded face.

“Oh, to be sure, to be sure!” he cried; “Mrs. Burgess has read your

recent articles in the _Economist_, and she is quite enthusiastic over

them. It will be all right.”

“I am sure it will,” said John Gregory. He was thinking of Anna’s face

as she had passed him in the hall below, but he did not mention the fact

that they had met to Everett.

CHAPTER XX

That which has caused the miserable failure of all the efforts of

natural religion is that its founders have not had the courage to

lay hold upon the hearts of men, consenting to no partition. They

have not understood the imperious desire for immolation which lies

in the depths of every soul, and souls have taken their revenge in

not heeding those too lukewarm lovers.

—_Life of St. Francis._ SABATIER.

To be content to have while others have not, to be content to be

right while others are bound and crushed with wrong, to be content

to be saved apart from the common life, to seek heaven while our

brothers are in hell, is deepest perdition and not salvation; it is

the mark of Cain in a new form.—G. D. HERRON.

In the few years which followed her early married life, the cords of

convention, slender, and strong as threads of silk, were wound closer

and closer about Anna Burgess outwardly. As she grew older, Keith’s

mother grew more immovable in her social creed, and ruled her family

more rigidly. Anna might read and study, but if she would please her

mother-in-law, it must be in the mildest of manners, and on strictly

suitable and ladylike lines; religious biography was recommended, while

all literature which conveyed a touch of freedom in thought, or a

suggestion of a change in social conditions, was viewed with horror.

Anna might also be charitable, but this too must be on strictly

conventional lines. There were numerous benevolent organizations upheld

by Fulham’s fashionable women; the name of Mrs. Keith Burgess might

figure frequently on these,—to this there would be no opposition, but

individual and sporadic work among the poor was uniformly discouraged.

The family carriage was often sent into the slums of the city on errands

of bestowal as from the wealthy to those “less favoured,” but when Anna

would have liked the carriage to take her on social calls on equal

terms, in respectable but unfashionable regions, she met with a cold

disfavour and unyielding lack of compliance.

Malvina Loveland, who had been married to the Rev. Frank Nichols, not

long after Anna’s marriage, had come again within Anna’s horizon.

Through Keith’s personal influence, exerted at Mr. Nichols’s request, a

call had been extended to him to the pastorate of a church in Fulham.

This church was not very large and not particularly prominent;

furthermore, it was not in the “right” part of Fulham geographically,

which was as distinctly limited as the social circle.

The Nicholses, delighted to come to Fulham as a university town of some

importance, and to a church far more promising of obvious success than

the mission enterprise in which they had worked in Burlington,

innocently rented a cosey modern house on a pleasant street which, had

they but known it, distinctly stamped them as socially ineligible from

the day of their arrival.

Mally, dreaming of nothing of the kind, entered upon what she expected

to be a somewhat brilliant life socially, into which she saw her husband

and herself conducted easily and naturally by the Keith Burgesses.

Anna had received her old friend with most affectionate cordiality, and

had spent days of hard work in helping her to order her house, which, as

there was a baby and but one servant, was not a small undertaking. Madam

Burgess had submitted with patience to the long absences and the

preoccupation of her daughter-in-law thus involved, and had even

responded without demur to Anna’s timid request that they might have her

old friends to dinner.

This dinner closed the Nichols episode from the social point of view.

The guests were full of cheerful and unfeigned admiration, eager to

please, easy to be pleased, but their good will availed them nothing.

Even Anna could not fail now to perceive poor Mally’s inherent

provincialness, but had she been apparently to the manner born, it would

have made no difference with Madam Burgess. The essential qualifications

to entrance into her world being lacking, her punctilious and attentive

courtesy for the occasion simply covered the inevitable and absolute

finality of it.

The Nicholses themselves, while by no means perceiving that the social

career to which they had looked forward in Fulham was ended with this

visit instead of begun, departed from the Burgess mansion with a vague

sense of chill which all Anna’s efforts could not counteract. They were

never invited there again. Madam Burgess had done her duty by her son’s

wife’s early friends, and the incident, as far as she was concerned, was

closed.

Anna, burning with a desire to make up to Mally for the inevitable

disappointment which she foresaw, and hotly, although silently,

resenting the social narrowness which excluded all men and women whose

lives had not been run in the one fixed mould, devoted herself

personally to her old friend with double ardour. More than this she

could not do. Mally wondered, as the months passed and they settled down

to the undivided intercourse of their own obscure church and

neighbourhood, that Anna made no attempt to introduce her into her own

aristocratic circle. Over and over she bit back the question which would

reach her lips, “Why?” Her heart fermented with bitterness and

resentment, and her husband was taxed to the utmost to subdue and

sweeten the tumult of her wounded feeling.

Another year brought Mally another baby, greatly to her own

dissatisfaction. Poor Anna, the great passion of motherhood within her

still baffled and unfulfilled, poured out her soul upon mother and child

in vicarious ecstasy, and went home to lie awake for many nights with

her ceaseless, thwarted yearning for a child; and thus these two women

each longed passionately for what the other, possessing, found a burden

rather than a joy.

As time went on, Anna, bound to a certain outward course of life alien

to her natural bent, lived her own life just below the surface, a life

like a flame burning beneath ice. All the master motives of her nature

unapplied; all the initial motives with which life had begun,

neutralized and made ineffective, she reached, five years of married

life over, the point which in any human development is one of

danger,—the point when great personal forces are dammed up by barriers

of external circumstance, when the prime powers and passions are without

adequate expression.

Meanwhile Keith Burgess, his young enthusiasms having lost their first

freshness, the limitations of physical weakness and suffering making

themselves more and more felt, settled into a narrow routine of life and

thought. As his physique gradually seemed to shrivel and his delicacy of

form and feature to increase, a resemblance to his mother, scarcely

observable in his younger manhood, became at times striking. His

missionary activity passed from its original fresh ardour into a system

of petty details, increasingly formal and perfunctory, even to Anna’s

reluctant perception.

Perhaps it was due to Keith’s protracted absences from home, perhaps

partly to his physical exhaustion, which made him dull and unresponsive

when with her, but Anna felt, against her own will, a growing divergence

in thought and interest between them. He was delicately sympathetic,

chivalrously attentive, to her in all outward ways; but when she longed

with eager craving for his participation in the life of thought and

purpose which was stirring the depths of her nature in secret, she found

scant response.

Driven inward thus at every point, Anna’s essential life centred itself

more and more upon the new message of social brotherhood which she had

found in the writings of John Gregory; and, unconsciously to herself,

the ruling figure in her mind, as the symbol of the human power and

freedom for which she longed, was his. The “counterfeit presentment” of

this man in her dream had ruled her girlish imagination; and now his

actual presence, though but once encountered, exercised an influence

over her maturer life no less mysterious and no less profound. To this

influence fresh strength was given by the relation, never-so-slight,

which existed between them by reason of Gregory’s possession of the

picture painted by Everett. How she was represented was still all

unknown to her, still unasked; but must it not be that, owning this

mysterious image of her face, his thoughts would sometimes turn to her?

This thought stirred Anna with a thrill, half of joy, half of fear.

An interruption in the routine of their Fulham life occurred after Keith

had served the missionary society for a period of five years. An illness

which manifested, as well as increased, his physical inability to

continue in his difficult duties brought Keith and Anna to a sudden

course of action. Keith resigned his official position, and, as soon as

he was able to travel, they sailed for Europe for a year’s absence.

This was a year of rapid development and of abounding happiness to Anna.

Alone and unguarded in their life together for the first time since

their marriage, the husband and wife grew together in new sympathy, and

fed their spirits on the beauty and wonder of art and the majesty of

nature in fond accord. The fulness and richness and complexity of the

working of the human spirit throughout the ages were revealed to Anna;

the grandeur and purity of dedicated lives of creeds unlike and even

hostile to her own opened her eyes to a new and broader view of human

and divine relations. Reverence, love, and sympathy began to usurp the

place of dogma, division, and exclusion in her mental energies. She

began to perceive that the righteous were not wholly righteous, nor the

wicked wholly wicked. The old ground plan of the moral universe with

which she had started in life looked now a mean and narrow thing. Larger

hopes and a bolder faith awoke in her.

And so in mind, and also in body, Anna grew joyously and freely; even

her attitudes and motions expressed a new harmony, while suavity and

grace of outline succeeded to the meagre and angular proportions of her

youth.

The return to Fulham came, when it could no longer be postponed, as an

unwelcome period to their best year of life. Madam Burgess received her

children with affectionate, albeit restrained, cordiality, and watched

Anna with keen eyes on which no change, however slight, was lost.

When mother and son were left alone on the night of the return, as on

the night when Keith brought his wife home a bride, Madam Burgess spoke

plainly and directly of Anna. She had never discussed her

characteristics from that night until the present, but she felt that

another epoch was reached, and a few remarks would be appropriate.

“My son,” she said, “do you remember the night when you brought Anna

home to this house as a bride?”

“Perfectly, mother.”

“So do I. I have been going back continually in thought to-night to that

time. Without undue partiality, Keith, I think we are justified in a

little self-congratulation. Anna has developed slowly, but she has now

reached the first and best bloom of her maturity. You brought her here a

shy, angular, country-bred, undeveloped girl, although I will not deny

that she had distinction, even then; to-night you bring her again not

only a _distingué_ but a beautiful woman,—yes, Keith, I really mean

it,—a beautiful woman, and with a certain charm about her which makes

her capable of being a social leader, if she chooses to exert her power.

I understand she has purchased some good gowns in Paris. I have about

concluded to give a reception next month in honour of your return, if my

health permits.”

The reception, which Madam Burgess’s health was favoured to permit,

proved to be as brilliant an event as social conditions in Fulham

rendered possible. The fine old house was radiant with flowers and

wax-lights, and the company which was gathered was the most

distinguished which the little city could muster. In the midst of all

the gay array stood Keith and Anna,—he with his small, slight figure,

his scrupulously gentlemanly air, his thin, worn face and nervous

manner; she tall and stately, with her characteristic repose illuminated

by new springs of thought, perception, and feeling, full of swift and

radiant response to each newcomer’s word, overflowing with the first

fresh joy of her awakened social instinct.

Professor Ward stood with Pierce Everett aside, and, watching Anna, said

in a lowered voice:—

“Mrs. Burgess is a woman now, through and through. Would you know her

for the girl whom Keith brought here half a dozen years ago?”

“I could not find my little maiden Mary in that queenly creature!”

exclaimed Everett.

“No; you were just in time with that mysterious disappearance of yours,

bad luck to you that you made way with it, however you did!”

“It has taken her a good while to accept the world’s standards and fit

herself to the world’s groove, but Madam Burgess has been patient and

diligent, and I think she has succeeded at last,” said Everett gravely;

“she will run along all right after this.”

“You think Mrs. Keith will live to sustain the family traditions

hereafter, do you? And Keith, what is to become of him? He seems to have

dropped off his missionary enthusiasm with singular facility.”

“Precisely. You will have to create a nice little chair for him in the

university now, to keep him in the correct line of his descent. By and

by, you know, he will have the estate to administer. That will be

something of an occupation.”

“Then he probably will take to collecting things,” Ward added, “coins or

autographs—”

“Oh, come, Ward, you’re too bad,” laughed Everett. “You don’t know Keith

Burgess as well as I do.”

Later in the evening Anna was summoned from her guests to speak with

some one who had called on an urgent matter which could not be put by

until another time.

The fine hall, as she passed along it, was alive with lights, fragrance,

music, and airy gayety; her own elastic step, her exquisite dress, her

joyous excitement in the first taste of social triumph which the evening

was bringing to her, accorded well with the environment. For the first

time in her life, Anna had seen that she was beautiful; had felt the

potent charm of her own personality; had found that she could draw to

herself the homage and admiration of her social world. These perceptions

had not excited her unduly, but they had given her a new sense of

herself, a strong exhilaration which expressed itself in the lustre of

her eyes, the brightness of every tone and tint of her face, in the way

she held her head, in the clear, thrilling cadence of her voice.

Once again, after long dimness and confusion, life seemed about to

declare itself to her, and the energies of her nature to find a free

channel. At last she might move in the line of least resistance, and

fill the place she was expected to fill, without further conflict or

question.

It looked a pleasant path that night, and submission a sweet and

gracious thing.

With a half smile still on her lips, and the spirit of the hour full

upon her, Anna came to the house door and opened it upon the outer

vestibule, where she had been told the messenger would await her.

The man who stood there was John Gregory.

Anna softly closed the door behind her, and looked up into his face. It

wore a different aspect from that which she remembered, for it was stern

and unsmiling, and more deeply grave and worn than she had seen it. But

even more than before the person of the man seemed to overawe her with a

sense of power and command.

“Do you remember me, Mrs. Burgess?” he asked simply.

“Yes.”

“And I know you through my friend, through the picture he painted once

of you. You must pardon my intruding upon you to-night. I could not do

otherwise. I have a message for you, and I am here only for to-night.”

Anna did not speak, but her eyes were fixed upon his in earnest

question, as if in some mysterious way he held destiny in his hands.

“No man could paint that picture from you now,” he proceeded slowly,

gently, and yet with a kind of unflinching severity; “you had the vision

then. You have lost it now. You saw God once. To-night you see the

world. Once your heart ached for the sorrows of others; now it thrills

with your own joys. You have given up great purposes, and are accepting

small ones. I have been sent to say to you: keep the word of the kingdom

and patience of Christ steadfast to the end, and hold that fast which

was given that no man take your crown.”

These words, spoken with the solemnity of a prophetic admonition,

pierced Anna’s consciousness.

A faint cry, as if in remonstrance, broke from her lips, but already

Gregory had turned, and before she could speak she found herself alone.

With strong control Anna returned, and mingled with her guests without

perceptible change of manner. When, however, the last carriage had

rolled down the street, and the house itself was dark and still, she

escaped alone to her own room to live over and over again that strange

summons and challenge of John Gregory.

Now the sense of what he had said roused her to burning indignation and

protest, and again to contrition. She knew that she was blameless and

approved if tried by the standards of the people now about her, and they

were the irreproachable, church-going people of Fulham. She was simply

conforming to the demands of an orderly and balanced social life, and

pleasing those most interested in her. But she also knew that, as tried

by the standards of her father, and her own early convictions, in the

social and intellectual ambitions which now animated her, she was

learning to love “the world and the things of the world,” to know “the

lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” The

voice of her past spoke clearly through the voice of John Gregory and

must be heard. The things which she had thought to put away forever in

the solemn dedication of her girlhood had gradually returned, and

silently established themselves in her life in the guise of duties,

necessities, conformities to the wishes of others.

But of late she had come to regard those early scruples almost as

superstitious. Where lay the absolute right—the truth? the will of God

concerning her? Why was life so hard? Why was it impossible to even know

the good? What right had John Gregory to spoil, as he had spoiled, this

latest development of life for her, and give her nothing in its place?

She resented his interference, and yet felt that she should inevitably

yield herself to its influence.

CHAPTER XXI

My thwarted woman-thoughts have inward turned,

And that vain milk like acid in me eats.

Have I not in my thought trained little feet

To venture, and taught little lips to move

Until they shaped the wonder of a word?

I am long practised. O those children, mine!

Mine, doubly mine: and yet I cannot touch them,

I cannot see them, hear them—Does great God

Expect I shall clasp air and kiss the wind

For ever? And the budding cometh on,

The burgeoning, the cruel flowering:

At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawn

That muffled call of birds how like to babes;

And I amid these sights and sounds must starve—

I, with so much to give, perish of thrift!

Omitted by his casual dew!

—STEPHEN PHILLIPS.

The next morning Anna was sent for to go to Mrs. Nichols, whom she had

hardly seen since her return from Europe.

She found her sitting in her nursery with her two little children

playing about her feet. She was near her third confinement, and in the

shadow of her imminent peril and the heavy repose laid upon body and

spirit by her condition there was an indescribable dignity about her

which Anna had never felt until now.

Before she left, Mally, with wistful eyes, looked up to her, and said,

timidly:—

“Anna, you love little children. No one that I ever saw takes mine in

her arms as you do—not even I who am their mother.”

“Oh, Mally!” Anna cried, sharp tears piercing their way. “If that is

true, it must be because my heart never stops aching for a child of my

own. I know now that we shall never have children, and I try to be

reconciled; but you can never know, dear, how I envy you.”

“Do not envy me,” Mally answered, her lips trembling. “You do not know

what it means to sit here to-day and see the shining of the sun on the

children’s hair, and touch their little heads with my hand, and smell

those roses you brought, and yet think that to-morrow at this time I may

be gone beyond breath, sight, the sun, the children—”

“Dear, don’t, don’t,” Anna pleaded; “you must not think so. You have

been helped through safely before; you will be again. People always have

these times of dread.”

Mally shook her head, but answered quietly:—

“I have never felt before like this, but only God knows. But this is why

I sent for you: If my little baby lives, and is a perfect child, and I

am taken away, would you, Anna, do you think you could—take my baby for

your own, for always?”

“Oh, if I could!” and all Anna’s heart went out in the cry, and Mally

saw the love which shone in her eyes and wondered at her strange beauty.

“I am sure you will come through safely as you have before,” she said,

“but this I promise you, Mally,” taking her friend’s hand and holding it

fast, “if you should be taken from your children, and they will let

me,—I mean if my husband and his mother should consent, for I am not

quite free, you see,—I will take your little baby and it shall be my

very own, and I will be its mother while we both live, God helping me.”

A look of deep joy and relief in Mally’s poor pale face was full

response, and the two parted with a sense of a deeper union of spirit

than they had ever known before.

Early on the following morning, after a wakeful and anxious night, Anna

hastened to the Nicholses’ home.

Mally’s husband met her with a stricken face, for a swift and sudden

blow had fallen; her trial had come and his wife had died, hardly an

hour before. There had been no time to send for Anna, although Mally had

spoken her name almost at the last.

They stood together in the poor, gay little parlour which Mally had

adorned with high hopes of the abundant life into which she fancied

herself entering,—the young husband with his grief-wrung, ashy face,

Anna with her heart melted in sorrow and compassion. While neither could

speak for their tears, the faint wail of a little child smote upon the

silence from a room within.

“The baby?” Anna asked under her breath.

A deeper darkness seemed to settle upon Nichols’s face.

“Yes, a boy. A fine little fellow, they say; but I feel as if I could

not look at him. I have not seen him.”

Anna turned and left the room, and in another moment, in the dark inner

room where she had sat with Mally in the sunshine the day before, she

took Mally’s baby into her arms, and bent her head above it with a great

sense of motherhood breaking over her spirit like a wave from an

infinite sea.

She stood and held the tiny creature for many moments, alone and in

silence, while joy and sorrow, life and death, passed by her and

revealed themselves. Then she laid the baby down and went up to the room

where Mally lay, white and still, with something of the beauty of her

girlhood in her face, and the great added majesty of motherhood and

death. On her knees Anna bent over the unanswering hand which yesterday

she had seen laid warmly on the fair curls of her little children, and,

in the hush and awe of the place, spoke again her solemn promise of

yesterday.

After that she came down to the children and their father, and took

quietly into her own hands the many cares which the day had brought.

It was late in the evening when Anna, exhausted and unnerved, returned

home. She found Keith and his mother waiting for her in the

library,—Keith hastening to welcome her with tender sympathy, Madam

Burgess a shade colder than usual beneath a surface of suitable phrases

of solicitude and condolence. She had been absolutely indifferent to

Mrs. Nichols in life, and did not find her deeply interesting even in

death. Furthermore, she always resented Anna’s spending herself upon

that family, and in the present affliction she felt that flowers and a

ten-minute call would have answered every demand.

If Anna had been steadier and less under the influence of the piteous

desolation of the home she had left, less absorbed in her own ardent

purpose, she would have realized that this was not the time or place in

which to make that purpose known. If she had waited, if she had talked

with her husband alone, the future of all their lives might have taken a

different shape. But with the one controlling thought in her mind,

forgetting how impossible it was for these two, not highly gifted with

imaginative sympathy, to enter into her own deep emotion, she spoke at

once of Mally’s request that in the event of her death she should take

her baby; of her own conditional promise, and of her deep desire to

fulfil it.

There was a little silence, chill and bleak, and then Keith said, in a

half-soothing tone as if she had been an excited child, hurrying in with

a manifestly impossible petition:—

“It was a very sweet and generous wish on your part, Anna; so like you,

dear.”

Anna looked at him in silence, her lips parted.

Madam Burgess gave a dry cough, and partook of a troche from a small

silver box which she carried in a lace-trimmed bag.

“Yes, as Keith says, my dear, it was a kind impulse on your part, but it

certainly was a very singular action on that of your friend. She was

probably too ill, poor thing, at the time to realize just what she was

asking. I have no doubt you were quite excusable for giving her some

sort of a conditional promise, considering all the circumstances. But

you need have no sense of responsibility in the matter; infants left

like that never live. It will only be a question of a few weeks’ care

for any one.”

Anna turned her eyes from her mother-in-law back to her husband in mute

amazement and appeal. They could not mean to deny her this sacred right!

It was impossible. And yet a sudden sense of the incongruity of poor

Mally’s baby in that house smote sharply upon her for the first time.

“If it had been God’s will that we should have had children of our own,

Anna,” said Keith, in answer to her look, “we should have learned to fit

ourselves to the many cares and responsibilities involved, I do not

doubt, as others do; but it is very different to go out of our way to

assume such cares, not ours in any legitimate sense. I think the

question is more serious than you realize in the very natural and proper

emotion which you are passing through in the death of your friend. We

certainly could not ask mother to take this strange child, and all that

would be involved in such a relation, into her house; and we are, I am

sure, as little prepared to leave mother and break up our natural order

of life,” and Keith smiled with kind conviction into Anna’s face. She

rose slowly and stood with eyes fixed before her, and a strange light

was in them, which her husband had never seen before.

“That is all perfectly true, Keith,” said Madam Burgess, as if to finish

up the case against poor Anna; “and even if all this were not so, there

would remain one insuperable obstacle to adopting this infant—an

absolutely insuperable obstacle.”

“What is it?” asked Anna, very low.

“Blood, my dear. I believe in blood, and never, with his mother’s

consent or approval, could my son give his name, and all that that

means, to a child of alien stock. Never.” And Madam Burgess closed her

lips firmly and folded her hands peacefully upon her grey silk gown with

the consciousness of occupying a perfectly unassailable position.

Anna moved toward the door, a curious effect in her step and bearing as

of one physically wounded, her head drooped slightly as if in

submission, her eyes downcast.

When she reached the door, however, a swift change passed over her; a

sudden energy and power awoke in her, and she turned, and, looking back

at mother and son, her eyes flashing light, and a smile they had never

seen before upon her lips, said quietly, but with slow emphasis:—

“You have decided this matter. You have each other; you are satisfied. I

shall submit, as you know. Once more you have taken my life—its most

sacred promise and its highest purpose—out of my hands. This time

another life, too, is involved. One thing only you must let me say, _I

wonder how you dare_!”

Facing them for an instant in silence, she turned, and went alone to her

room.

CHAPTER XXII

One by one thou dost gather the scattered families out of the

earthly light into the heavenly glory, from the distractions and

strife and weariness of time to the peace of eternity. We thank thee

for the labours and the joys of these mortal years. We thank thee

for our deep sense of the mysteries that lie beyond our dust.—RUFUS

ELLIS.

By Thy Rod and Thy Staff comfort us.

—CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

Two days later, in response to a note from Pierce Everett, Anna went to

the studio. He wrote that John Gregory had passed through Fulham and had

left the picture, in which she might still feel some lingering interest.

Anna left Keith and his mother diligently occupied in their daily task

of arranging and copying Keith’s European letters and journals,

interspersing them with careful and copious notes from Baedeker. From

this laborious undertaking, which absorbed mother and son in mutual and

sympathetic devotion, Anna was self-excluded, simply because she found

the letters of merely passing interest, but not of marked or lasting

value and concern. Madam Burgess confessed that she could think of no

occupation more graceful or becoming a young wife than this of putting

in permanent form the beautiful and instructive correspondence of her

beloved husband, and she found a new cause for disapproval in Anna’s

indifference to the work. In her own heart Anna hid a great protest

against the substitution of puerile and unproductive work like this, for

the serious altruistic endeavour to which she still felt that she and

Keith were both inwardly pledged. But this was an old issue, and one,

indeed, to-day almost forgotten before her passionate grief concerning

Mally, buried yesterday, and the promise to her which might not be

fulfilled. The pitiful cry of Mally’s baby seemed to sound continually

in her ears.

But another, even deeper, consciousness was that of the condemnation,

brief, sharp, conclusive, of herself by John Gregory. She believed now

that his judgment of her and of the line along which she was developing

was in a measure just—but what then? It had suddenly become definitely

declared in Anna’s thought, with no further shading or disguise, that a

life of worldly ease, of self and sense-pleasing, of fashionable charity

and conventional religion and of intellectual stagnation, was the only

life which could be lived in harmony with the spirit of her home. Her

soul lay that day in the calm which often falls upon strong natures when

profound passions and powers are gathering in upheaval just below the

surface. To conform, or to revolt, or to lead the wretched life of

spiritual discord which seeks to avoid alike conformity and freedom,

were the hard alternatives before Anna, as she thought, that day.

Pierce Everett, meeting her at the door of his studio, was startled by

the pallor and sadness of her face, like that of her earlier years, but

forebore to question her. He had expected to see her in the joyous bloom

of his last view of her; he had looked for her to fulfil his prophecy.

The light tone of badinage and compliment with which he had

involuntarily started to receive her fell from him now as impossible,

seeing her face, and in almost utter silence he led her across the room

and pointed to the picture of the Girlhood of Mary.

After a few moments Anna said simply, without turning to Everett, her

eyes still on the picture:—

“Did _I_ once look like that?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Gregory said no one could paint this from me now,” Anna said

slowly, as if to herself, not knowing that tears were falling down her

cheeks.

“You are older, that is all,” said Everett, gently.

“No, that is not all. I have lost something which I had then.”

“We all lose something with our child-soul, Mrs. Burgess,” cried

Everett, earnestly; “but you have gained more than you have lost. John

Gregory was not fair to you to leave you with a word like that. You were

a child then; now you are a woman. That face in my picture is not the

face of a Madonna, yet. It did not seek to be, but we do not blame it

for that. Should we blame the Mater Dolorosa that she has no longer the

face of a child?”

“Thank you,” Anna said humbly, and held out her hand, which the young

man caught in his and held with reverence.

She left the studio hastily, not daring to say more, a childless mother

of sorrows. The very emptiness of her grief, since no sweet substitution

of motherhood could be granted her, made it the more intolerable.

Instinctively she went from the Everett’s straight across the city to

the unfashionable new quarter and to the Nicholses’ home. She found

Mally’s baby properly cared for, but coldly, by hired and unloving

hands, and took it into her own arms with yearning motherliness and

cried over it, easing her heart and murmuring the tender nonsense, the

artless art which mothers always know, but seldom women who have not

known motherhood.

Mr. Nichols came in and she told him,—leaving the baby that she might

surely control herself,—that on account of Madam Burgess’s feeble health

it had been found impossible for her to carry out Mally’s wish and her

own. The disappointment of the poor fellow, with his almost impossible

burden and scanty income, was evident; but he rallied well, and showed a

simple dignity in the matter which made Anna like him even better than

she had before.

“I shall watch over the baby, you may depend, and come as often as I

can,” she said in leaving.

He thanked her, and she made him promise to send for her without delay

or hesitation if there were illness among the children or other

emergency, and so came away.

The frail little life, unwarmed and unwelcomed by the love which had

been bestowed on the other children, seemed to feel itself in an alien

air, and failed from week to week. Anna spent every moment she could

with the child, and sought to cherish and shield the tiny, flickering

flame of life, but in vain. The baby lingered for a month, and then, on

a bleak March evening, Anna was sent for, to speed its spirit back into

the unknown from which it had scarcely emerged. She sat all night with

the child upon her knees, the young father asleep in the leaden sleep of

unutterable weariness on a sofa in the room adjoining. It is not given

to a man to know the absolute annihilation of the body by love which

makes the endurance of long night watches and the supreme skill in

nursing the prerogative of women.

The nurse came and went at decent intervals with offers of help and of

food, but Anna quietly declined both. She knew that she was about to

partake of the sacrament of death, and she wished to receive it fasting,

and, if it might be, alone. She knew that she only on earth loved the

little child and longed to keep it, and she meant that it should die in

loving arms, if they had been denied it for living.

In the slow hours which were yet too swift, as she bent over the small

pinched face, brooding tenderly over the strange perfection of this

miniature of humanity, the delicately pencilled eyebrows, the fine

moulding of the forehead, the exquisite ear with soft fair hair curling

about it, the little, flower-like hands, Anna wondered, as she never had

thought to wonder before, at the wastefulness of nature. All this

exquisite organism made perfect by months of silent upbuilding, a life

of full strength paid for its faint breath, and then, this too cut off

before the dawn of consciousness!

Harder to bear was the thought, which would not leave her, that if she

could have taken the child for her own its life could have been saved. A

photograph of Mally on the bedroom wall in her wedding-gown looked down

upon her through the yellow gloom of the night lamp, and the eyes seemed

to Anna full of sad upbraiding.

In bitterness of soul she groaned aloud:—

“Oh, Mally, Mally, I wanted to keep your baby, but they would not let

me! He is going back to you, dear. Oh, if I knew that you were glad,

that you forgive me!”

At the sound of her voice the child on her knees, which had been asleep

or in a stupor, opened its eyes, and lifted them to hers. They were

large blue eyes like Mally’s, and for a moment their look was fixed upon

her own,—a clear, direct look, and, with a thrill of awe, Anna felt a

_conscious_ look. The instant of that mutual glance with all of mystery,

of joy, and of wonder which it held, passed; the waxen whiteness of the

lids fell again, but, as it passed, a sense of great peace fell upon

Anna’s spirit. The last look of that newborn soul, pure and undefiled,

had searched her heart, had found her love, had shed the glory of its

passing into her bruised and cabined spirit.

“Now go, little child, go to God and be at rest; we have known each

other, and you are mine after all,” she whispered fondly, her tears

falling like spring rains upon white blossoms.

The dawn-light came into the room, dimming the lamp-light with which it

could not blend; a tremor passed through the tiny frame, the breath

fluttered once or twice upon the lips, and the baby died. Anna had

called the father, and he stood by, watching in heavy oppression.

Quietly, with the great submission of spirit which death brings, Anna

washed and dressed the little body, putting on the garments of fairylike

texture and proportion which she had seen Mally making with warm,

dexterous fingers, a few weeks before. Then, having prayed, she left the

place and walked home alone through the silent streets, with the

consecration of the hour full upon her.

CHAPTER XXIII

He who professeth to believe in one Almighty Creator, and in his Son

Jesus Christ, and is yet more intent on the honours, profits, and

friendships of the world than he is, in singleness of heart, to

stand faithful to the Christian religion, is in the channel of

idolatry; while the Gentile, who, notwithstanding some mistaken

opinions, is established in the true principle of virtue, and humbly

adores an Almighty Power, may be of the number that fear God and

work righteousness.—JOHN WOOLMAN.

A physician’s carriage stood before the house when Anna reached it, and

within there was a stir unusual for that early hour. Jane met her on the

landing, and answered her questions.

“Yes, ma’am; Mrs. Burgess, she was all right as far as I could see when

I helped her get to bed, but I hadn’t got her light out when I heard her

give a queer kind of groan, and when I got to her, her face was that

twisted all to one side, that it would make your heart ache to see her.

But that isn’t so bad now; you’d hardly notice it. And she don’t seem

paralyzed; she moves ’most any way.”

“Then she is better?”

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know as you could say so much better. The worst of

it is, her mind ain’t right. She looks sort of blank, and when she talks

it ain’t natural, but all confused like, and it’s hard, poor lady, for

her to get anything out; she talks thick and slow, so different from

herself.”

A moment later Anna saw Keith, and heard the verdict of the physician.

Madam Burgess had suffered a paralytic seizure of a somewhat unusual

character. He should watch the case with great interest. There was

evidently a small clot on the left side of the brain which affected the

mental equilibrium, and produced something like delirium. The ultimate

result could only be fatal, and it was doubtful whether full

consciousness would return before death.

That afternoon Anna was permitted to go to her mother-in-law’s bedside.

Keith followed her, full of eager hope that for her there might be the

clear and unquestionable recognition which had thus far been denied him.

It was a strangely painful thing to Anna to see the familiar figure of a

woman so graceful, so precise, so secure in her high-bred

self-possession, so decided in her conscious self-direction, prostrate,

dull, lethargic; to hear in place of the cold, clear modulations of her

voice a meaningless, half-articulate muttering. She stood for a moment

beside the bed, her heart sinking with the piteousness of the sight,

herself apparently unnoticed by the stricken woman.

At the foot of the bed Keith, standing, cried out as if in

uncontrollable pain:—

“Mother, do you see Anna? She wants to speak with you.”

Slowly his mother turned her eyes, which had been fixed straight before

her, until they rested full upon Anna in a curious, disconcerting stare.

This continued in silence for some throbbing seconds, and then, with

thick utterance and unaccented monotony of modulation, she said, very

slowly:—

“If you had married differently you might have had children of your

own.”

This laboured sentence, in its violent discordance with the filial

tenderness and sympathy which alone filled the hearts of Keith and Anna

at the moment, smote them both as if with a harsh and incredible buffet.

Anna turned away from the bed white and appalled, and left the room at

the motion of the nurse while Keith, bowing his head upon the bed-rail,

groaned aloud. Even in the moment their mother had fallen back into

unintelligible confusion of speech. To them both this sinister and

unlooked-for expression revealed something of the weary ways in which

the clouded mind was straying. Some haunting sense of remorse and

accountability, vaguely felt and deviously followed, was torturing the

dimness of mental twilight. Again and again during the days following,

Anna, sitting just outside the bedroom door, heard the question

reiterated in the harsh, toneless voice:—

“Did that baby die?” And always, when answered, there came the same

response, “I said it would, I said it would that night.”

Filled with pity and compunction as she recalled the severity of her own

utterance in that interview, the memory of which with the sick woman had

plainly outlived all other, Anna went once more on the third night into

the sick-room, knelt by the bed, and took the hand of the sufferer in

both her own.

“Mother,” she said, in a strong, comforting voice, “mother dear, this is

Anna. Will you forgive me for my unkindness that night?”

There was no reply.

“Dear mother,” Anna went on, with gentlest kindness, “I wanted to tell

you that the little baby has gone to its own mother. It is all right,

and I am satisfied.”

There was a faint response as of relief and acquiescence.

Then, as Anna still held the limp, unresisting, unresponding hand and

looked tenderly in the grey, changed face, Sarah Burgess spoke once

more. Broken and falteringly came the words:—

“I am ... sorry ... you have ... no child,” and, as she spoke, large,

slow tears rolled down her face.

It was the first time in all their intercourse that she had opened her

heart to Anna in motherly pity. Perhaps she could not before, the

defences of pride and reserve were sunk too deep. But the few words, the

tears, the glimpse of a heart which, whatever its hardness, itself knew

the passion of motherhood and could understand her pain, broke down for

the younger woman the last remaining barriers which had stood between

these two who had lived together so coldly. Anna laid her head on the

pillow and kissed the face of the dying woman again and again, their

tears mingling, while pity and tenderness overflowed the coldness and

all the silent resentments of the past.

Two days later Madam Burgess died, not having spoken again, although she

had plainly recognized Keith and watched him with wistful eyes.

The burial and the various incidents connected with the close of a long

life, and one of social eminence, over, Keith and Anna turned back to

the home, now wholly their own, and looked about them wondering what was

in the future. Like all men and women of gentle will, they blotted out,

at once and forever, every impression of unworthiness or selfishness

which their dead had ever made upon them. They idealized her narrow

character, and loved her better than they ever had, perhaps, in life;

but underneath all this dutiful loyalty Anna found in her own heart a

recognition of great release, and at times, in spite of her will, her

pulses would bound and leap with the sense of new possibilities in life

for them both.

Just what these possibilities might be was by no means clear to Anna,

nor how far Keith would sympathize with her own vague but dominant

desires for a return in some sort to the working motives which had

swayed their earlier lives. She was greatly encouraged by the response

which she received to her timid approach to the subject of some slight

changes in their outward method of life in favour of simpler and more

democratic habits. The horses and carriage and liveried servants had

long been a source of distress to Anna’s conscience, as marks of a

privileged and separate class. She had always avoided employing them as

far as was possible. She had never, since she had begun reading the

social essays of Gregory, driven in the family carriage without longing

to apologize to every working man and woman whose glance rested upon

her, for a luxury which she felt to be in their eyes divisive, while all

the time her heart was crying out for brotherhood and burden-sharing

with the lowliest and most oppressed among them.

Somewhat to her surprise she found that Keith was not without a similar

consciousness, any expression of which, even to Anna, he had

scrupulously avoided in his mother’s lifetime. Finding herself met here,

and thus emboldened, Anna came to her husband one evening with a

question which involved serious doubt and difficulty for her. It was two

months since the death of Madam Burgess, and Anna was to start the

following morning for Vermont for a visit of several weeks to her mother

and Lucia. Keith was too busy with the details of settling his mother’s

estate to accompany her, but it had been planned that he should meet her

in Burlington on her return, late in May, and together with her make a

visit, long-promised and long-postponed, at the Ingrahams’, whose

friendship for them both had remained unchanged by the years.

And now the postman had brought Anna a note from Mrs. Ingraham which

took her back strangely to her girlhood, and to one March night when she

had first received a like request from the same source. This note asked

her to come, when she came for the promised visit, prepared to give a

missionary address at a meeting which would take place at that time in

Burlington.

Anna handed the note to her husband, and, as he finished the perusal of

it, she said hesitatingly:—

“Keith, I don’t know what to do.”

“Why, dear? Why not simply do as Mrs. Ingraham asks? You would like to,

would you not?”

“Once I would have, only too gladly,” and Anna paused a moment,

recalling the opposition to which she had yielded so unwillingly in the

time past. That outward and forcible opposition was now wholly removed,

but another restraint, subtle and subjective, had gradually taken its

place, although Anna had until now scarcely recognized the existence of

it.

“I am afraid, if I tell you,” she resumed, “you will be shocked and

pained. Perhaps I cannot even put it into words, and not overstate what

is in my mind; but the trouble is, Keith, I am afraid I don’t believe

everything just as I used to.”

Keith Burgess looked at her with his gentle smile.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“Dear, it is very strange,” and Anna spoke with sudden impetuousness;

“but I suppose I have not really a right to speak for missions, for I

cannot, any more, believe that God will condemn to everlasting torment

all the heathen who do not believe in a means of salvation of which they

have never heard.”

“Neither can I.”

“Keith!” Anna felt her breath almost taken away by this sudden admission

of what, in the seventies, was rank heresy in strictly orthodox circles.

“Why have you never let me suspect such a change in your views? Has this

had something to do with your giving up the secretaryship? Was it not

then quite all your health? Oh, Keith, if you knew how I have been

troubled!”

The tumult of Anna’s surprise broke out in this swift volley of

questions, for which she could not wait for answers.

“How have you been troubled? Tell me that first, Anna.”

Anna’s colour came and went. It was not easy to speak, but honesty and

frankness were the law of speech with her. Very seriously she said:—

“It seemed so strange to me that you grew, after the first few years,

into what often appeared a kind of official and perfunctory way of

working—letting the details cover the great purposes. It seemed little,

and different from what I had expected. Tables and figures and endless

reports—it was all business, and almost like other business.”

Keith Burgess nodded gravely. “Go on,” he said, as before.

“And then, you see, all at once you dropped it. Of course you had that

illness, and I could see how tiresome and troubling the work had come to

be; but I used to think—forgive me, Keith; I hated myself that I

did—that you dropped the whole missionary endeavour and purpose and

point of view as easily as you might have dropped a coat that you had

worn out—”

“In short, that it was all officialism.”

“Yes, even that—that it had come to be. And you know how different it

was at first, when it was your only life.”

“Yes, Anna,” and the delicate, sensitive face of the man showed

something of the profound pain which he could not speak; “it has been a

hard experience. I have kept it to myself because I did not think it was

fair to lay upon you the same burden of doubt and conflict. I see how

naturally you came to look upon the change in me as you have described.

Perhaps your view is in a measure just, too, but I think not

altogether.”

“Tell me, Keith.” Anna was waiting for him to go on with sympathetic

eagerness.

“It was simply that, some way, I hardly know how,—perhaps it was in part

worldliness and selfishness, but I think not altogether,—my views

gradually have changed. Perhaps it was in the air, perhaps I took it in

unconsciously from what I read, and from my deeper thought of God and

his grace. What I learned of the various forms of heathen religions

influenced me somewhat, and also observation of the workings of our own

system in our own country even under most favouring conditions. I cannot

tell, only I came definitely at last to the point where I could no

longer go before the churches and plead with them to send their money to

foreign missions to save the heathen from immediate eternal perdition

and torment, because they did not believe in the plan of salvation by a

Saviour of whom, as you say, they had never heard.”

“What did you do?”

“You see,” Keith went on, not noticing her question, “according to our

confession there is no salvation even in any ordinary knowledge of

Christ, but only for the elect few who experience personal regeneration

by conscious acceptance according to the line laid by such men as Calvin

and Edwards. Now we know that judged by this test a very large

percentage of any so-called Christian community is doomed to eternal

punishment, and when you come to the heathen, it grows unthinkable—do

you see?”

“Yes, I _feel_.”

“I went very soon to Dr. Durham, and poured out a full confession of my

‘unsoundness.’”

“What did he say?”

“Anna, that was what settled me. I almost think that if he had said,

‘Stop where you are, and wait until you can see it differently,’ I might

have come back to my early convictions in some sort, at least

sufficiently to give me a motive for working on. What he did say, in his

large, hearty way, was: ‘Oh, my dear fellow, there is nothing more

common than such doubts and questions! They naturally arise from time to

time with us all. Probably not half the men who are at work in this

cause actually believe literally in the common conception that the

heathen who do not know of Christ are all condemned. Oh, no, I ceased to

hold any such opinion long ago.’ ‘Then why don’t you say so openly?’ I

asked; to which he replied impressively: ‘Don’t you see, Burgess, that

if we told our change of views to the churches at large we should _cut

the very nerve_ of the missionary motive? We may hold these slightly

modified views on eschatology ourselves without detriment, perhaps, or

danger, although of course they must be held well in hand; but if we

should speak them out to the rank and file, the result would be an

instant falling off in the receipts of our treasury, and the Lord knows

they are small enough and inadequate enough as it is. The average man

would reason, if the heathen can be saved after all in some other way,

it is not necessary for me to deny myself in order to send them the

gospel. So keep still, my dear Burgess, just keep your views to yourself

as some of the rest of us do. Go right along as you have been doing, and

there will be no harm done.’”

“Keith, dear Dr. Durham did not know it, but that is Jesuitism!”

exclaimed Anna, with flashing eyes.

“I thought it was,” he replied quietly, “and the result was I gave up my

office, partly on account of my health, partly because I could not

continue what would actually have been, for me, getting money under

false pretences.”

“Still, Keith, it is not only to save the heathen from everlasting

punishment that we want to send the gospel, but to give them the present

salvation from sin.”

“Certainly. There are other motives left. I think they may be sufficient

to energize our work far beyond what the Gospel of Fear could do, but

they are not at present the popular motives to which I am expected to

appeal. The future of the cause is not clear to me. If Durham is right,

and the nerve of missions will be cut when people cease to believe that

the heathen are necessarily damned because they have not accepted

Christ, why then I have little hope, because it seems to me impossible

for thinking people to hold this view much longer. But I must admit that

it is hard enough to get them to give money when they believe implicitly

in the immediate and hopeless doom of every heathen soul departing to

judgment.”

“Keith, they _don’t_ believe it! Nobody _believes_ it! It is monstrous.

If we really believed such things as practically taking place, we should

all lose our reason. Our only escape from insanity, I believe, is that,

while with our mouths and with our opinions we have declared such

things, in our hearts and in our deeper conviction we have denied them,

knowing that they would be treason to God. What misleads us all, Keith,

I am beginning to believe, is that we have felt bound to accept a system

which theologians have worked out, and which has involved a paring down

of both God and man to make them fit into the narrow grooves they have

assigned them in the hard logic of their formulas.”

“Well, let us make this question concrete; illustrate it from life,”

said Keith, leaning back languidly in his arm-chair. “How is it with

yourself? You have been taught, and have believed until very recently,

this doctrine of universal condemnation of all heathen ‘out of Christ,’

and now, it seems, you have begun to question it. What is the effect on

the missionary motive in your case? Would you feel as eager as ever to

go as a missionary? Does the subject appeal to your conscience as

powerfully as before?”

Anna looked at Keith for a moment in thoughtful silence, and then shook

her head.

“No.”

“You see Dr. Durham was right,” said Keith, sadly. “If this is true of

you, who have all your life been pledged to this work,—and I admit that

it is true of myself,—what can be expected of the careless crowd,

indifferent at best?”

Anna had been walking restlessly up and down the library. Now she came

back to the heavy black oak table at which her husband was sitting, sat

down, and, resting her elbows on the table, propped her chin in both

hands, and so sat silently for many moments. Then she began to speak,

but very slowly, rather as if thinking aloud:—

“I have been accustomed, and so have you, all our lives, to the

stimulus, the spur, of a piercingly powerful motive, the most powerful

possible, I should think.—To save somebody from immediate death when the

means of rescue is in your hands is a motive to which every human being

must respond, instinctively. Suppose this motive is shown to be, in some

degree at least, based upon a misunderstanding, and we find that we are

asked to alleviate suffering instead of to save life, why would it not

be perfectly natural, almost inevitable, that at first there should be a

reaction? Accustomed to the stronger stimulus, just at first our motives

and purposes would languish, I think. Mine _do_. I can’t help owning it,

Keith. But I can imagine that deeper knowledge of God, higher

conceptions of human brotherhood, of what they call the solidarity of

the race—things like that—which I only dimly realize yet, might

reënforce our poor wills, and knit again the nerve if it has been cut.

Don’t you think so?”

Keith watched his wife as she sat thus speaking, and a great tenderness

was in his eyes.

“You are a very wonderful woman, Anna,” he said; “your thought always

goes beyond mine.”

She did not seem to hear what he said, for she went on in the same

musing tone:—

“In a way, it seems to me, sometimes, as if every hope, every purpose,

every controlling motive with which I started out in life, had slipped

away from me, this of missionary work with the rest. All that I thought

I could do or become has been rendered impossible in one way or another,

and whatever capacity or force there is in me is unapplied. I can’t even

be a comfortable society woman; other people won’t let me, even if I can

let myself, and you know how I find it impossible to fit into

conventional charities. Everywhere I seem to be superfluous, out of

harmony with my environment. I thought once, I was vain enough to think,

that God wanted me for some special service,—that he would give me a

work for him and for his children; but I am thirty years old now, Keith,

and what have I done?”

“You have been a dear wife and a faithful child,—a true Christian

woman,—is that not enough?”

Anna smiled wistfully.

“It is not good for any one to simply _be_, and bring nothing to pass.

But to-night I feel that whatever new wine life is to bring me will have

to be put into new bottles. The old motives and forces have spent

themselves, and the old hopes; and the forms which held them, have gone

with them, for me.”

BOOK III

NIGHT

O Holiest Truth! how have I lied to thee!

I vow’d this day thy sacrifice to be;

But I am dim ere night.

Surely I made my prayer, and I did deem

That I could keep in me thy morning beam,

Immaculate and bright.

But my foot slipp’d; and, as I lay, he came,

My gloomy foe, and robb’d me of heaven’s flame.

Help thou my darkness, Lord, till I am light.

—JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.