At this point Wanhope hesitated with a kind of diffidence that was rather
charming in him. “I don’t see,” he said, “just how I can keep the facts
from this on out of the line of facts which we are not in the habit of
respecting very much, or that we relegate to the company of things that
are not facts at all. I suppose that in stating them I shall somehow make
myself responsible for them, but that is just what I don’t want to do. I
don’t want to do anything more than give them as they were given to me.”
“You won’t be able to give them half as fully,” said Minver, “if Mrs.
Ormond gave them to you.”
“No,” Wanhope said gravely, “and that’s the pity of it; for they ought to
be given as fully as possible.”
“Go ahead,” Rulledge commanded, “and do the best you can.”
“I’m not sure,” the psychologist thoughtfully said, “that I am quite
satisfied to call Ormond’s experiences hallucinations. There ought to be
some other word that doesn’t accuse his sanity in that degree. For he
apparently didn’t show any other signs of an unsound mind.”
“None that Mrs. Ormond would call so,” Minver suggested.
“Well, in his case, I don’t think she was such a bad judge,” Wanhope
returned. “She was a tolerably unbalanced person herself, but she wasn’t
altogether disqualified for observing him, as I’ve said before. They had
a pretty hot summer, as the summer is apt to be in the Housatonic valley,
but when it got along into September the weather was divine, and they
spent nearly the whole time out of doors, driving over the hills. They
got an old horse from a native, and they hunted out a rickety buggy from
the carriage-house, and they went wherever the road led. They went mostly
at a walk, and that suited the horse exactly, as well as Mrs. Ormond, who
had no faith in Ormond’s driving, and wanted to go at a pace that would
give her a chance to jump out safely if anything happened. They put their
hats in the front of the buggy, and went about in their bare heads. The
country people got used to them, and were not scandalized by their
appearance, though they were both getting a little gray, and must have
looked as if they were old enough to know better.
“They were not really old, as age goes nowadays: he was not more
than forty-two or -three, and she was still in the late thirties. In
fact, they were
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita--
“in that hour when life, and the conceit of life, is strongest, and when
it feels as if it might go on forever. Women are not very articulate
about such things, and it was probably Ormond who put their feeling into
words, though she recognized at once that it was her feeling, and shrank
from it as if it were something wicked, that they would be punished for;
so that one day, when he said suddenly, ‘Jenny, I don’t feel as if I
could ever die,’ she scolded him for it. Poor women!” said Wanhope,
musingly, “they are not always cross when they scold. It is often the
expression of their anxieties, their forebodings, their sex-timidities.
They are always in double the danger that men are, and their nerves
double that danger again. Who was that famous _salonnière_--Mme.
Geoffrin, was it?--that Marmontel says always scolded her friends when
they were in trouble, and came and scolded him when he was put into the
Bastille? I suppose Mrs. Ormond was never so tender of Ormond as she was
when she took it out of him for suggesting what she wildly felt herself,
and felt she should pay for feeling.”
Wanhope had the effect of appealing to Minver, but the painter would
not relent. “I don’t know. I’ve seen her--or heard her--in very
devoted moments.”
“At any rate,” Wanhope resumed, “she says she scolded him, and it did not
do the least good. She could not scold him out of that feeling, which was
all mixed up in her retrospect with the sense of the weather and the
season, the leaves just beginning to show the autumn, the wild asters
coming to crowd the goldenrod, the crickets shrill in the grass, and the
birds silent in the trees, the smell of the rowan in the meadows, and the
odor of the old logs and fresh chips in the woods. She was not a woman to
notice such things much, but he talked of them all and made her notice
them. His nature took hold upon what we call nature, and clung fondly to
the lowly and familiar aspects of it. Once she said to him, trembling for
him, ‘I should think you would be afraid to take such a pleasure in those
things,’ and when he asked her why, she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him;
but he understood, and he said: ‘I’ve never realized before that I was so
much a part of them. Either I am going to have them forever, or they are
going to have me. We shall not part, for we are all members of the same
body. If it is the body of death, we are members of that. If it is the
body of life, we are members of that. Either I have never lived, or else
I am never going to die.’ She said: ‘Of course you are never going to
die; a spirit can’t die.’ But he told her he didn’t mean that. He was
just as radiantly happy when they would get home from one of their
drives, and sit down to their supper, which they had country-fashion
instead of dinner, and then when they would turn into their big, lamplit
parlor, and sit down for a long evening with his books. Sometimes he read
to her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and he said he hadn’t
had such a bath of poetry since he was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid
nights, which were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of the
gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and walk up and down the long
veranda. Once, when he coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm
and walked her up and down, and he said: ‘Isn’t it like a ship? The earth
is like a ship, and we’re sailing, sailing! Oh, I wonder where!’ Then he
stopped with a sob, and she was startled, and asked him what the matter
was, but he couldn’t tell her. She was more frightened than ever at what
seemed a break in his happiness. She was troubled about his reading the
Bible so much, especially the Old Testament; but he told her he had never
known before what majestic literature it was. There were some turns or
phrases in it that peculiarly took his fancy and seemed to feed it with
inexhaustible suggestion. ‘The Angel of the Lord’ was one of these. The
idea of a divine messenger, embodied and commissioned to intimate the
creative will to the creature: it was sublime, it was ineffable. He
wondered that men had ever come to think in any other terms of the living
law that we were under, and that could much less conceivably operate like
an insensate mechanism than it could reveal itself as a constant purpose.
He said he believed that in every great moral crisis, in every ordeal of
conscience, a man was aware of standing in the presence of something sent
to try him and test him, and that this something was the Angel of the
Lord.
“He went off that night, saying to himself, ‘The Angel of the Lord, the
Angel of the Lord!’ and when she lay a long time awake, waiting for him
to go to sleep, she heard him saying it again in his room. She thought he
might be dreaming, but when she went to him, he had his lamp lighted, and
was lying with that rapt smile on his face which she was so afraid of.
She told him she was afraid and she wished he would not say such things;
and that made him laugh, and he put his arms round her, and laughed and
laughed, and said it was only a kind of swearing, and she must cheer up.
He let her give him some trional to make him sleep, and then she went off
to her bed again. But when they both woke late, she heard him, as he
dressed, repeating fragments of verse, quoting quite without order, as
the poem drifted through his memory. He told her at breakfast that it was
a poem which Longfellow had written to Lowell upon the occasion of his
wife’s death, and he wanted to get it and read it to her. She said she
did not see how he could let his mind run on such gloomy things. But he
protested he was not the least gloomy, and that he supposed his
recollection of the poem was a continuation of his thinking about the
Angel of the Lord.
“While they were at table a tramp came up the drive under the window, and
looked in at them hungrily. He was a very offensive tramp, and quite took
Mrs. Ormond’s appetite away: but Ormond would not send him round to the
kitchen, as she wanted; he insisted upon taking him a plate and a cup of
coffee out on the veranda himself. When she expostulated with him, he
answered fantastically that the fellow might be an angel of the Lord, and
he asked her if she remembered Parnell’s poem of ‘The Hermit.’ Of course
she didn’t, but he needn’t get it, for she didn’t want to hear it, and if
he kept making her so nervous, she should be sick herself. He insisted
upon telling her what the poem was, and how the angel in it had made
himself abhorrent to the hermit by throttling the babe of the good man
who had housed and fed them, and committing other atrocities, till the
hermit couldn’t stand it any longer, and the angel explained that he had
done it all to prevent the greater harm that would have come if he had
not killed and stolen in season. Ormond laughed at her disgust, and said
he was curious to see what a tramp would do that was treated with real
hospitality. He thought they had made a mistake in not asking this tramp
in to breakfast with them; then they might have stood a chance of being
murdered in their beds to save them from mischief.”