THE DELUGE.
The indescribable deluge! But, after all, the worst of anything of that
sort is the moment before it begins. A plunge-bath, a tooth-pulling, an
amputation, and a dress-party are all worse in anticipation than in the
moment of infliction. Julia, as she stood busily sticking a pin in the
window-sash, waiting for her mother to begin, wished that the storm
might burst, and be done with it. But Mrs. Anderson understood her
business too well for that. She knew the value of the awful moments of
silence before beginning. She had not practiced all her life without
learning the fine art of torture in its exquisite details. I doubt not
the black-robed fathers of the Holy Office were leisurely gentlemen,
giving their victims plenty of time for anticipatory meditation, laying
out their utensils quietly, inspecting the thumb-screw affectionately to
make sure that it would work smoothly, discussing the rack and wheel
with much tender forethought, as though torture were a sweet thing, to
be reserved like a little girl's candy lamb, and only resorted to when
the appetite has been duly whetted by contemplation. I never had the
pleasure of knowing an inquisitor, and I can not certify that they were
of this deliberate fashion. But it "stands to nature" that they were.
For the vixens who are vixens of the highest quality, are always
deliberate.
Mrs. Anderson felt that the piece of invective which she was about to
undertake, was not to be taken in hand unadvisedly, "but reverently,
discreetly, and in the fear of God." And so she paused, and Julia
fumbled the tassel of the window-curtain, and trembled with the chill of
expectation. And Mrs. Abigail continued to debate how she might make
this, which would doubtless be her last outburst before the day of
judgment, her masterpiece--worthy song of the dying swan. And then she
hoped, she sincerely hoped, to be able by this awful _coup de main_ to
awaken Julia to a sense of her sinfulness. For there was such a jumble
of mixed motives in her mind, that one could never distinguish her
sincerity from her hypocrisy.
Mrs. Anderson's conscience was quite an objective one. As Jonas often
remarked, "she had a feelin' sense of other folkses unworthiness." And
the sins which she appreciated were generally sins against herself.
Julia's disobedience to herself was darker in her mind than murder
committed on anybody else would have been. And now she sat deliberating,
not on the limit of the verbal punishment she meant to inflict--that
gave her no concern--but on her ability to do the matter justice. Even
as a tyrannical backwoods school-master straightens his long beech-rod
relishfully before applying it.
Not that Mrs. Anderson was silent all this time. She was sighing and
groaning in a spasmodic devotion. She was "seeking strength from above
to do her whole duty," she would have told you. She was "agonizing" in
prayer for her daughter, and she contrived that her stage-whisper
praying should now and then reach the ears of its devoted object.
Humphreys remained seated, pretending to read the copy of "Josephus,"
but watching the coming storm with the interest of a connoisseur. And
while he remained Jonas determined to stay, to keep Julia in
countenance, and he beckoned to Cynthy to stay also. And Samuel
Anderson, who loved his daughter and feared his wife, fled like a coward
from the coming scene. Everybody expected Mrs. Anderson to break out
like a fury.
But she knew a better plan than that. She felt a new device come like an
inspiration. And perhaps it was. It really seemed to Jonas that the
devil helped her. For instead of breaking out into commonplace scolding,
the resources of which she had long since exhausted, she dropped upon
her knees, and began to pray for Julia.
No swearer ever curses like the priest who veils his personal spites in
official and pious denunciations, and Mrs. Anderson had never dealt out
abuse so roundly and terribly and crushingly, as she did under the guise
of praying for the salvation of Julia's soul from well-deserved
perdition. But Abigail did not say perdition. She left that to weak
spirits. She thought it a virtue to say "hell" with unction and
emphasis, by way of alarming the consciences of sinners. Mrs. Anderson's
prayer is not reportable. That sort of profanity is too bad to write.
She capped her climax--even as I have heard a revivalist pray for a
scoffer that had vexed his righteous soul--by asking God to convert her
daughter, or if she could not be converted to take her away, that she
might not heap up wrath against the day of wrath. For that sort of
religious excitement which does not quiet the evil passions, seems to
inflame them, and Mrs. Anderson was not in any right sense sane. And the
prayer was addressed more to the frightened Julia than to God. She would
have been terribly afflicted had her petition been granted.
Julia would have run away from the admonition which followed the prayer,
had it not been that Mrs. Anderson adroitly put it under cover of a
religious exhortation. She besought Julia to repent, and then, affecting
to show her her sinfulness, she proceeded to abuse her.
Had Julia no temper? Yes, she had doubtless a spice of her mother's
anger without her meanness. She would have resisted, but that from
childhood she had felt paralyzed by the utter uselessness of all
resistance. The bravest of the villagers at the foot of Vesuvius never
dreamed of stopping the crater's mouth.
But, happily, at last Mrs. Anderson's insane wrath went a little too
far.
"You poor lost sinner," she said, "to think you should go to destruction
under my very eyes, disgracing us all, by running over the country at
night with bad men! But there's mercy even for such as you."
Julia would not have understood the full meaning of this aspersion of
her purity, had she not caught Humphreys's eye. His expression, half
sneer, half leer, seemed to give her mother's saying its full
interpretation. She put out her hand. She turned white, and said: "Say
one word more, and I will go away from you and never come back! Never!"
And then she sat down and cried, and then Mrs. Anderson's maternal love,
her "unloving love," revived. To have her daughter leave her, too, would
be a sort of defeat. She hushed, and sat down in her splint-bottomed
rocking-chair, which snapped when she rocked, and which seemed to speak
for her after she had shut her mouth. Her face settled into a
martyr-like appeal to Heaven in proof of the justice of her cause. And
then she fell back on her forlorn hope. She wept hysterically, in
sincere self-pity, to think that an affectionate mother should have such
a daughter!
Julia, finding that her mother had desisted, went to her room. She did
not exactly pray, but she talked to herself as she paced the floor. It
was a monologue, and yet there was a conscious appeal to an invisible
Presence, who could not misjudge her, and so she passed from talking to
herself to talking to God, and that without any of the formality of
prayer. Her mother had made God seem to be against her. Now she, like
David, protested her innocence to God. She recited half to herself, and
yet also to God--for is not every appeal to one's conscience in some
sense an appeal to God?--she recited all the struggles of that night
when she went to August at the castle. People talk of the consolation
there is in God's mercy. But Julia found comfort in God's justice. He
_could_ not judge her wrongly.
Then she opened the Testament at the old place, and read the words long
since fixed in her memory. And then she--weary and heavy laden--came
again to Him who invites, and found rest. And then she found, as many
another has found, that coming to God is not, as theorists will have it,
a coming once for a lifetime, but a coming oft and ever repeated.
Jonas and Cynthy Ann retired to the kitchen, and the former said hi his
irreverent way, "Blamed ef Abigail ha'nt got more devils into her'n Mary
Magdalene had the purtiest day she ever seed! I should think, arter a
life with her fer a mother, the bad place would be a healthy and
delightful clime. The devil a'n't a patchin' to her."
"Don't, Jonas; you talk so cur'us, like as ef you was kinder sorter
wicked."
"That's jest what I am, my dear, but Abigail Anderson's wicked without
the kinder sorter. She cusses when she's a-prayin'. She cusses that poar
gal right in the Lord's face. Good by, I must go. Smells so all-fired
like brimstone about here." This last was spoken in an undertone of
indignant soliloquy, as he crossed the threshold of Cynthy's
clean kitchen.