HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY
Love's Labour's Lost, i. 1.
As Philip Ashe, his eyes cast down in earnest thought, approached Mrs.
Frostwinch's gate that afternoon, he looked up suddenly to find himself
face to face with Mrs. Fenton. She was dressed in dark, heavy cloth,
set down the waist with small antique buckles of dark silver; and
seemed to him the perfection of elegance and beauty.
"Good morning, Mr. Ashe," she greeted him, smiling. "I did not expect
to find you coming to hear Mrs. Crapps."
"To hear Mrs. Crapps?" he echoed. "Who is Mrs. Crapps?"
Mrs. Fenton turned back as she was entering the iron gate which between
stately stone posts shut off the domain of the Frostwinches from the
world, and marked with dignity the line between the dwellers on Mt.
Vernon Street and the rest of the world.
"Do you mean," asked she, "that you didn't know that Mrs. Crapps, the
mind-cure woman, is to lecture here this afternoon?"
Ashe drew back.
"I certainly did not know it," he answered. "I was coming to speak to
Mrs. Frostwinch about the election."
"It's the last of three lectures," Mrs. Fenton explained. "Mrs. Crapps,
you know, is the woman that has been curing Mrs. Frostwinch."
Ashe stood hesitatingly silent in the gateway a moment.
"I should like to see her," he said thoughtfully. "Not from mere
curiosity, but because I cannot understand what gives these persons a
hold over intelligent men and women."
"The thing that gives her a hold over Mrs. Frostwinch is that she has
raised her up from a bed of sickness. Come in with me, and see her. I
should like to see how she strikes you. You can speak to Mrs.
Frostwinch after the lecture."
He hesitated a moment, and then followed her, saying to himself with
suspicious emphasis that the fact that the invitation came from her had
nothing to do with his acceptance. He soon found himself seated in the
great dusky drawing-room of the Frostwinch house, an apartment whose
very walls were incrusted with conservative traditions. It was
furnished with richness, but both with much greater simplicity and
greater stiffness than he had seen in any of the houses he had thus far
been in. The chief decoration, one felt, was the air of the place's
having been inhabited by generations of socially immaculate Boston
ancestors. There was a savor of lineage amounting almost to godliness
in the dark, self-contained parlors; and if pedigree were not in this
dwelling imputed for righteousness, it was evidently held in becoming
reverence as the first of virtues. There are certain houses where the
atmosphere is so completely impregnated with the idea of the departed
as to give a certain effect as a spiritual morgue; and in the
drawing-room of Mrs. Frostwinch there was a good deal of this flavor of
defunct, but by no means departed, merit. Grim portraits stared coldly
from the walls, Copleys that would have looked upon a Stuart as
parvenu; the Frostwinch and Canton arms hung over the ends of the
mantel; while the very furniture seemed to condescend to visitors. Ashe
could not have told why the place affected him as overpowering, but he
none the less was conscious of the feeling. The company was apparently
nearly all assembled when he came in, and he sank down into a chair in
a corner, glad to escape observation.
The speaker of the afternoon was already in her place when he entered,
and he examined her with curiosity. She was a woman who might have been
forty years of age, with a hard, eager, alert face; her forehead was
narrow, her lips thin and straight, her nostrils cut too high. Her eyes
were bold and sharp, dominating her face, and fixing upon the hearers
the look of a bird of prey. Mrs. Crapps's hair was tinged with gray,
and in her whole appearance there was a sharpness which seemed to speak
of one who had battled with the world. Ashe was struck by the
personality of the woman, yet strongly repelled. She was evidently a
creature of abundant vitality, and exultantly dominant of will. The
bold, black eyes sparkled with determination, and he could at once
understand that Mrs. Crapps was one to establish easily an influence
over any nature naturally weak or debilitated by disease.
Ashe listened with curiosity to the opening of the address. The voice
of the speaker had much of the vivacity of her glance. She spoke with
an air of candor and frankness, and yet Philip found himself
distrusting her from the outset. He said to himself that it was because
he was prejudiced, that he doubted; but he yet felt that her manner
would in any case have begotten repulsion. She had that air of
insistence, of determination to be believed, which belongs to the
speaker who is absorbed rather in the desire to prevail than in the
wish to be true. He felt that her air of conviction was no proof of her
conception of the truth of what she was saying; she protested too much.
He was at first so absorbed in watching the woman that he paid little
heed to her theories; but he soon began to flush with indignation. This
woman, with her bold air and masculine dominance, sat there talking of
herself as a present incarnation of Christ; of Christ as the
incarnation of the human will; of disease as a sin; and of death as a
mere figment of the imagination. The paganism of the Persian as he had
heard it at Mrs. Gore's seemed to him less offensive than this. He
moved uneasily in his seat, his cheeks flushing, and his lips pressed
together. Presently he felt the glance of Mrs. Fenton, who sat near
him, and looking up he encountered her eyes. She seemed to him to show
sympathy with his feeling, but to remind him that this was not the time
or place for protest. He regained instantly his self-control, and
perhaps from that time on thought less of Mrs. Crapps than of his
neighbor.
The talk of Mrs. Crapps was commonplace enough, and hackneyed enough,
could Ashe but have known it. There was the usual patter about
spiritual and physical freedom, about faith and perfection, "the Deific
principle as a rule of health," a jumble of things medical and things
physical, things profane and things holy mingled in a strange and
unintelligible jargon. By the time that the eager-eyed speaker had
talked for an hour Ashe felt his mind to be in confusion, and he could
not but feel that not a few of the hearers must be in a state of utter
mental bewilderment if the address had impressed at all.
"The end of the whole matter is," Mrs. Crapps said in closing, "that
mankind has for ages submitted to this cruel superstition of death. We
have bowed ourselves beneath the wheels of this Juggernaut; we have
sent to the dark tomb our best loved friends; we crouch and cower in
awful fear of the time when we shall follow. We hear ever thrilling in
our ears the quivering minor chord of human woe, voice of the burning
heart-pain of the race, launched rudderless upon a troubled sea of woe,
and undrowned even by the throbbing march-beats of the progression of
man down the vista of the ages. And yet there is no death. This fear is
only the terror of children frightened by ghosts of their own
invention. What we dread has no existence save in the fevered and
fancy-fed fear of blinded men. O my hearers, why can we not seize upon
the hem of this truth which the Messiah came to teach! Death is but
sin; and sin has been removed by atonement; the holiness of the soul is
immortal. There is, there can be no death! Receive the glad tidings,
and cry it aloud! There is no death! Let all the earth hear, until
there is none so base, so low, so poor, so ignorant, so sinful that he
shall not be immortal. It is his birthright, for we are all born to
eternal life."
The voice of Mrs. Crapps took on a more persuasive inflection as she
delivered this peroration; and it was easy to see that she had affected
the nerves if not the minds of her audience. There was a deep hush as
she concluded. She lifted for a moment her sharp black eyes toward
heaven, and then dropped her glance to earth, as if overcome by
feeling, or as if with awe she had caught sight of sacred mysteries
which it was not lawful to look upon. In a moment more she raised her
eyes, and invited any of her hearers to question her about anything
connected with the subject which troubled them. For a breathing time
there was silence, and then a lady asked with a puzzled air:--
"But do you Christian Scientists deny"--
"I beg your pardon," Mrs. Crapps interrupted, leaning forward with a
deprecatory smile, "but I am not a Christian Scientist."
"I mean do you Faith Healers"--
"That is not our title," Mrs. Crapps said with gentle insistence.
"Are you called Mind Curers, then?"
"No," the priestess responded, with an air lofty yet condescending;
"with those forms of error we have no dealing or sympathy. It is true
that those who teach faith-healing, mind-cure, or any sort of religious
rejuvenance, have in part taken our high tenets; but they have in each
case obscured them by errors and follies of their own. We are the
Christian Faith Healed,--not healers, you will observe, because we
believe that all mankind are really healed, and that all that is needed
is that they recognize and acknowledge this precious truth."
The ladies present looked at one another in some confusion, and Ashe
caught in the eyes of Mrs. Staggchase, who sat half facing him, a gleam
of amusement. This emboldened him to repeat the question which had been
abandoned by its first asker, who had evidently been overwhelmed by the
delicacy of the distinction of sects made by Mrs. Crapps.
"Do you then," he asked, "deny the existence of death?"
"Utterly," the seeress returned, bending upon him a bold look as if to
challenge him to differ from what she asserted. "It is as amazing as it
is melancholy that mankind should have submitted to the indignity of
death so long."
"How can they submit to that which does not exist?"
"It exists in seeming, but not in reality."
A murmur ran through the company, and Philip met the eyes of Mrs.
Fenton, who shook her head slightly, as who would say that discussion
was futile.
"But--but how"--one hearer began falteringly, and then stopped,
evidently too overwhelmed by the astounding nature of the proposition
laid down to be able even to frame a question.
"Indeed," Mrs. Crapps said, taking up the word, "we may well ask how.
It transcends the incredible that the monstrous delusion of death
should ever have been entertained for an instant. The explanation lies
in sin. Death is but the projection of a sin-burdened conscience upon
the mists of the unknown. Thank God that it has been given to our
generation to tear away the veil from this falsehood, and to recognize
the absolute unreality of the phantom which the ignorance and
superstition of guilty humanity have conjured up." The smooth,
deliberate voice of Mrs. Staggchase broke the silence which this
declaration produced.
"It is then your idea that death comes entirely from the belief of
mankind?"
"What we call death undoubtedly has that origin," Mrs. Crapps answered.
"How then could so extraordinary a delusion have had a beginning?"
A faint shade crossed the face of the seeress, but it merged instantly
into a smile of patient superiority.
"That is the question unbelief always asks," she said. "It seems so
difficult to answer, and yet it is really so simple. The idea of death
of course arose from a distorted projection of the condition of sleep
upon the diseased imagination. With sin came the bewilderment of human
reason, and the delusion followed as an inevitable morbid growth."
"Then the earlier generations of mankind were immortal?"
"Undoubtedly. We have traces of the fact in all the old mythologies."
"But what became of them?"
"Once the idea of death had entered the world," Mrs. Crapps said
impressively, "it spread like the plague until it had infected all
mankind. Even those who had lived for ages to prove it false were not
able to resist the prevalence of the thing they knew to be untrue,--any
more," she added, dropping her eyes, and speaking in a tone sad and
patient, "than we who to-day understand that there is no such thing as
death can resist the overwhelming power of the belief of the masses of
the race. The might of the will of the majority, directed by an
appalling delusion, compels us to submit to that which we yet know to
be an unreality."
Again there was a hush. The woman was appealing to the most fundamental
facts of human experience and the most poignant emotions of human life,
and boldly denying or confounding both. It seemed to Ashe that the only
possible answer to such talk was an accusation either of madness or
blasphemy. The silence was once more broken by Mrs. Staggchase.
"But if there is no such thing as death," she observed, with the
faintest touch of irony perceptible in her well-bred voice, "of course
you do not really die; and since you do not share the general delusion
in thinking yourselves to be dead, it would seem to follow that
although you may be dead for the world in general, you are still
immortal for yourselves and each other."
The black eyes of Mrs. Crapps sparkled, but she controlled herself, and
shook her head with an air of gentle remonstrance.
"It proves how strong is the hold upon mankind of this delusion," she
said, "that what I tell you appears incredible. The truth is always
incredible, because the blind eyes of humanity can see only half-truths
except by great effort. I have tried to enlighten you, and I can do no
more. It is for you and not for myself that I speak."
She rose from her chair, which seemed to be the signal for the breaking
up of the assembly, and that her cleverness in securing the last word
was not without its effect was apparent by the murmurs of the company.
In another moment, however, Ashe heard as at Mrs. Gore's the exchange
of greetings and bits of news, the making of appointments for shopping
or theatre-going, and all the trivial chat of daily life. He stood
aside until the crowd should thin, and in the mean time had the
felicity of being near Mrs. Fenton. He began to feel himself almost
overcome by the delight of being so near her, of meeting her clear
glance, frank and sympathetic, of hearing her voice, of noting the
ripples of her hair, the curve of nostril and neck. He was like a boy
in the first budding of passion before reason has softened the
extravagance of his feeling. The talk of the afternoon, his indignation
at the words of Mrs. Crapps, his feeling that he had been assisting at
a sacrament of impiety, were all forgotten as he stood talking to his
neighbor.
"Come," she said at length, "I must speak to Mrs. Frostwinch before I
go."
He bent forward to remove a chair which was in her way, and her gloved
hand brushed against his. He covered the spot with his other hand as if
he would preserve the precious touch.
"I found Mr. Ashe at the door," Mrs. Fenton said to the hostess, "and I
would not let him turn back. I was too much interested in his errand."
"I am sorry if he needed urging to come in," Mrs. Frostwinch responded
with graceful courtesy; "but what was the errand?"
"Mrs. Wilson asked me to see you in relation to the election," Ashe
answered.
"Elsie is having a beautiful time managing this election," commented
Mrs. Frostwinch. "She hasn't been so amused for a long time. She thinks
Father Frontford is a puppet in her hands, while he knows that she is
one in his."
"I hope," Mrs. Fenton put in, "that you may be able to help Mr. Ashe. I
can answer for it that he is not making the matter one of amusement."
Ashe could not help flushing. He thanked her with a glance, and turned
again to Mrs. Frostwinch.
"I do not know or like the electioneering of such affairs," he said
gravely; "but since there is a strong effort being made on the other
side it certainly seems necessary to do whatever can be done fairly."
A few last visitors who had been chatting among themselves now came
forward to say good-by. Mrs. Fenton also took leave, and Ashe found
himself alone with his hostess and Mrs. Crapps.
"Mrs. Crapps, Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Frostwinch said.
It seemed to him that there was in the manner of Mrs. Frostwinch
something of condescension, as if the Faith Healed was a sort of upper
servant. He had himself not outlived the ingenuous period wherein a
youth feels that the preservation of truth in the world depends upon
his not covering his impressions, and he was accordingly extremely cold
in his manner.
"Ah, a new disciple to our faith, I trust," Mrs. Crapps said, fixing
upon him her keen, bold eyes.
"I have never even heard of your doctrine until to-day," he answered.
"But surely it must strike you at once," she responded, with a manner
evidently meant to be insinuating.
He hesitated. He remembered that he had been expressly warned not to
say anything against the vagaries with which Mrs. Frostwinch was
concerned; but his conscience would not allow him to evade this direct
challenge.
"It struck me as being blasphemous," he responded with unnecessary
fervor.
Mrs. Crapps raised her eyes to the ceiling, and uttered a theatrical
sigh.
"Oh, sacred truth!" she exclaimed.
"Come, Mrs. Crapps," Mrs. Frostwinch interposed almost sharply, "you
know that Mr. Ashe is right. It is blasphemous, and I feel as if I'd
allowed my house to be used for a sacrifice to false gods. If you will
excuse us, I wish to speak with Mr. Ashe on business. Will you kindly
come to the library, Mr. Ashe."
As he followed, Philip caught sight in a mirror of the face of Mrs.
Crapps. It wore a singular smile, but whether of anger or contempt he
could not tell.
"I dare say, Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Frostwinch remarked, as soon as they were
seated in the library, "that it seems strange to you that I have that
woman speak in my parlors. Of course I don't mean to apologize, but I
am sorry that you should hear things that shocked you."
"Dear madam," he answered, leaning forward in his eagerness, "what I
heard does not matter; but it does seem to me a pity that such things
should be said, and said under your protection."
He was too much in earnest to be self-conscious, even when she regarded
him in silence a moment before replying.
"You are perhaps right," she said at length, "although you exaggerate
the influence of such things."
"I do not pretend to know whether they are influential or not," he
returned simply. "It is only that they do not seem to me to be right.
If they are wrong, they are wrong."
She smiled and sighed.
"Life is not so simple as that," was her reply. "The woman has saved my
life. I should have been in my grave months ago but for her. My
physician insists now that I haven't any real right to be out of it. I
cannot refuse to allow her to say the thing that she believes, since
that thing has a certain proof in my very life."
Philip shook his head.
"It is not for me to judge," said he, "but the way in which all sorts
of heresies and strange doctrines are taught and played with in Boston
seems to me monstrous. The persons of influence who lend their names
and aid"--
He broke off suddenly, recalled by the half-smile in her eyes to the
fact that he was condemning her.
"There is much in what you say," Mrs. Frostwinch assented. "I suppose
that the difficulty is that we have ceased to recognize any authority
in matters of belief."
"But the church!"
"Yes, there is the church," she said doubtfully, "but to many it has
ceased to be an authority, and modern thought allows so much individual
freedom. Our church has never claimed to be infallible like the
Catholic; and individual freedom of conscience has come pretty
generally to mean freedom from conscience."
"Then it is a pity that the authority which is exercised in the Roman
church is not exercised in ours."
"Ah, Mr. Ashe, you reckon without the spirit of the age in which we
live. But tell me what I can do for you in the matter of the election."
Mrs. Frostwinch was a devout churchwoman in her way, although she was
now in appearance following after strange gods. She readily promised
her aid in favor of Father Frontford.
"I agree with you, Mr. Ashe," she said, "that everything possible
should be done to stem the tide of laxness which seems advancing
everywhere. The mental reservations of Mr. Strathmore are certainly so
broad that they may cover anything. I know women who go to his church
and simply say the beginning of the creed: 'I believe in God;' and who
do not hesitate in private to explain that by the name God they mean
whatever force it is that moves the universe, whether it is intelligent
or not."
"How dreadful!" Philip exclaimed. "How can the church endure if this
goes on?"
They talked for some time longer, and Mrs. Frostwinch assured him that
she would do her best to secure the votes of the clergymen who were her
pensioners. Ashe left her with a pleasant feeling in his heart that he
had accomplished his mission without sacrificing his convictions. Yet
perhaps more potent still in warming his heart was the remembrance of
the pleasant words which Mrs. Fenton had spoken in his behalf. The
memory colored all his thoughts of elections, of bishops, and of
creeds, as a gleam of rosy light tinges all upon which it falls.