more than once when he was first "gathered in," and secretly lamented
the lack of spirituality in the new convert. The Elder was an instrument
more finely attuned; sober, humble, pure-minded, zealous, consecrated to
the truth as he saw it, he labored in and out of season for the faith he
held so dear; yet as the years went on, he noted that Ansel,
notwithstanding his eccentric views, lived an honest, temperate,
God-fearing life, talking no scandal, dwelling in unity with his
brethren and sisters, and upholding the banner of Shakerism in his own
peculiar way.
As Susanna approached him, Ansel called out, "The yairbs are all ready
for ye, Susanna; the weeds have been on the rampage sence yesterday's
rain. Seems like the more uselesser a thing is, the more it flourishes.
The yairbs grow; oh, yes, they make out to _grow_; but you don't see 'em
come leapin' an' tearin' out o' the airth like weeds. Then there's the
birds! I've jest been stoppin' my grindin' to look at 'em carry on. Take
'em all in all, there ain't nothin' so lazy an' aimless an'
busy'boutnothin' as birds. They go kitin' 'roun' from tree to tree,
hoppin' an' chirpin', flyin' here an' there 'thout no airthly objeck
'ceptin' to fly back ag'in. There's a heap o' useless critters in the
univarse, but I guess birds are 'bout the uselyest, 'less it's
grasshoppers, mebbe."
"I don't care what you say about the grasshoppers, Ansel, but you shan't
abuse the birds," said Susanna, stooping over the beds of tansy and
sage, thyme and summer savory. "Weeds or no weeds, we're going to have
a great crop of herbs this year, Ansel!"
"Yee, so we be! We sowed more'n usual so's to keep the two 'jiners' at
work long's we could.--Take that scythe over to the barn, Jacob, an'
fetch me another, an' step spry."
"What's a jiner, Ansel?"
"Winter Shakers, I call 'em. They're reg'lar constitooshanal
dyed-in-the-wool jiners, jinin' most anything an' hookin' on most
anywheres. They jine when it comes on too cold to sleep outdoors, an'
they onjine when it comes on spring. Elder Gray's always hopin' to
gather in new souls, so he gives the best of 'em a few months' trial.
How are ye, Hannah?" he called to a Sister passing through the orchard
to search for any possible green apples under the trees. "Make us a good
old-fashioned deep-dish pandowdy an' we'll all do our best to eat it!"
"I suppose the 'jiners' get discouraged and fear they can't keep up to
the standard. Not everybody is good enough to lead a self-denying
Shaker life," said Susanna, pushing back the close sunbonnet from her
warm face, which had grown younger, smoother, and sweeter in the last
few weeks.
"Nay, I s'pose likely; 'less they're same as me, a born Shaker," Ansel
replied. "I don't hanker after strong drink; don't like tobaccer (always
could keep my temper 'thout smokin'), ain't partic'lar 'bout
meat-eatin', don't keer 'bout heapin' up riches, can't 'stand the ways
o' worldly women-folks, jest as lives confess my sins to the Elder as
not, 'cause I hain't sinned any to amount to anything sence I made my
first confession; there I be, a natural follerer o' Mother Ann Lee."
Susanna drew her Shaker bonnet forward over her eyes and turned her back
to Brother Ansel under the pretense of reaching over to the rows of
sweet marjoram. She had never supposed it possible that she could laugh
again, and indeed she seldom felt like it, but Ansel's interpretations
of Shaker doctrine were almost too much for her latent sense of humor.
"What _are_ you smiling at, and me so sad, Mardie?" quavered Sue,
piteously, from the little plot of easy weeding her mother had given her
to do. "I keep remembering my game! It was such a _Christian_ game, too.
Lots nicer than Mother Ann in prison; for Jane said her mother and
father was both Believers, and nobody was good enough to pour milk
through the key-hole but her. I wanted to give the clothes-pins story
names, like Hilda and Percy, but I called them Adam and Eve and Cain and
Abel just because I thought the Shakers would 'specially like a Bible
play. I love Elderess Abby, but she does stop my happiness, Mardie.
That's the second time to-day, for she took Moses away from me when I
was kissing him because he pinched his thumb in the window."
"Why did you do that, Sue?" remonstrated her mother softly, remembering
Ansel's proximity. "You never used to kiss strange little boys at home
in Farnham."
"Moses isn't a boy; he's only six, and that's a baby; besides, I like
him better than any little boys at home, and that's the reason I kissed
him; there's no harm in boy-kissing, is there, Mardie?"
"You don't know anybody here very well yet; not well enough to kiss
them," Susanna answered, rather hopeless as to the best way of
inculcating the undesirability of the Adamic plane of thought at this
early age. "While we stay here, Sue, we ought both to be very careful to
do exactly as the Shakers do."
By this time mother and child had reached the orchard end of a row, and
Brother Ansel was thirstily waiting to deliver a little more of the
information with which his mind was always teeming.
"Them Boston people that come over to our public meetin' last Sunday,"
he began, "they was dretful scairt 'bout what would become o' the human
race if it should all turn Shakers. 'I guess you needn't worry,' I says;
'it'll take consid'able of a spell to convert all you city folks,' I
says, 'an' after all, what if the world should come to an end?' I says.
'If half we hear is true 'bout the way folks carry on in New York and
Chicago, it's 'bout time it stopped,' I says, 'an' I guess the Lord
could do a consid'able better job on a second one,' I says, 'after
findin' out the weak places in this.' They can't stand givin' up their
possessions, the world's folks; that's the principal trouble with 'em!
If you don't have nothin' to give up,--like some o' the tramps that
happen along here and convince the Elder they're jest bustin' with the
fear o' God,--why, o' course 't ain't no trick at all to be a Believer."
"Did you have much to give up, Brother Ansel?" Susanna asked.
"'Bout's much as any sinner ever had that jined this Community," replied
Ansel, complacently. "The list o' what I consecrated to this Society
when I was gathered in was: One horse, one wagon, one two-year-old
heifer, one axe, one saddle, one padlock, one bed and bedding, four
turkeys, eleven hens, one pair o' plough-irons, two chains, and eleven
dollars in cash.--Can you beat that?"
"Oh, yes, _things_!" said Susanna, absent-mindedly. "I was thinking of
family and friends, pleasures and memories and ambitions and hopes."
"I guess it don't pinch you any worse to give up a hope than it would a
good two-year-old heifer," retorted Ansel; "but there, you can't never
tell what folks'll hang on to the hardest! The man that drove them
Boston folks over here last Sunday,--did you notice him? the one that
had the sister with a bright red dress an' hat on?--Land! I could think
just how hell must look whenever my eye lighted on that girl's
git-up!--Well, I done my best to exhort that driver, bein' as how we had
a good chance to talk while we was hitchin' an' unhitchin' the team;
an' Elder Gray always says I ain't earnest enough in preachin' the
faith;--but he didn't learn anything from the meetin'. Kep' his eye on
the Shaker bunnits, an' took notice o' the marchin' an' dancin', but he
didn't care nothin' 'bout doctrine.
"'I draw the line at bein' a cerebrate,' he says. 'I'm willin' to sell
all my goods an' divide with the poor,' he says, 'but I ain't goin' to
be no cerebrate. If I don't have no other luxuries, I will have a wife,'
he says. 'I've hed three, an' if this one don't last me out, I'll get
another, if it's only to start the kitchen fire in the mornin' an' put
the cat in the shed nights!'"
IV
LOUISA'S MIND
[Illustration]
Louisa, otherwise Mrs. Adlai Banks, the elder sister of Susanna's
husband, was a rock-ribbed widow of forty-five summers,--forty-five
winters would seem a better phrase in which to assert her age,--who
resided on a small farm twenty miles from the manufacturing town of
Farnham.
When the Fates were bestowing qualities of mind and heart upon the
Hathaway babies, they gave the more graceful, genial, likable ones to
John,--not realizing, perhaps, what bad use he would make of them,--and
endowed Louisa with great deposits of honesty, sincerity, energy, piety,
and frugality, all so mysteriously compounded that they turned to
granite in her hands. If she had been consulted, it would have been all
the same. She would never have accepted John's charm of personality at
the expense of being saddled with his weaknesses, and he would not have
taken her cast-iron virtues at any price whatsoever.
She was sweeping her porch on that day in May when Susanna and Sue had
wakened in the bare upper chamber at the Shaker Settlement--Sue
clear-eyed, jubilant, expectant, unafraid; Susanna pale from her fitful
sleep, weary with the burden of her heart.
Looking down the road, Mrs. Banks espied the form of her brother John
walking in her direction and leading Jack by the hand.
This was a most unusual sight, for John's calls had been uncommonly few
of late years, since a man rarely visits a lady relative for the mere
purpose of hearing "a piece of her mind." This piece, large, solid,
highly flavored with pepper, and as acid as mental vinegar could make
it, was Louisa Banks's only contribution to conversation when she met
her brother. She could not stop for any airy persiflage about weather,
crops, or politics when her one desire was to tell him what she thought
of him.
"Good-morning, Louisa. Shake hands with your aunt, Jack."
"He can't till I'm through sweeping. Good-morning, John; what brings you
here?"
John sat down on the steps, and Jack flew to the barn, where there was
generally an amiable hired man and a cheerful cow, both infinitely
better company than his highly respected and wealthy aunt.
"I came because I had to bring the boy to the only relation I've got in
the world," John answered tersely. "My wife's left me."
"Well, she's been a great while doing it," remarked Louisa, digging her
broom into the cracks of the piazza floor and making no pause for
reflection. "If she hadn't had the patience of Job and the meekness of
Moses, she'd have gone long before. Where'd she go?"
"I don't know; she didn't say."
"Did you take the trouble to look through the house for her? I ain't
certain you fairly know her by sight nowadays, do you?"
John flushed crimson, but bit his lip in an attempt to keep his temper.
"She left a letter," he said, "and she took Sue with her."
"That was all right; Sue's a nervous little thing and needs at least one
parent; she hasn't been used to more, so she won't miss anything. Jack's
like most of the Hathaways; he'll grow up his own way, without anybody's
help or hindrance. What are you going to do with him?"
"Leave him with you, of course. What else could I do?"
"Very well, I'll take him, and while I'm about it I'd like to give you a
piece of my mind."
John was fighting for self-control, but he was too wretched and
remorseful for rage to have any real sway over him.
"Is it the same old piece, or a different one?" he asked, setting his
teeth grimly. "I shouldn't think you'd have any mind left, you've given
so many pieces of it to me already."
"I have some left, and plenty, too," answered Louisa, dashing into the
house, banging the broom into a corner, coming out again like a breeze,
and slamming the door behind her. "You can leave the boy here and
welcome; I'll take good care of him, and if you don't send me twenty
dollars a month for his food and clothes, I'll turn him outdoors. The
more responsibility other folks rid you of, the more you'll let 'em, and
I won't take a feather's weight off you for fear you'll sink into
everlasting perdition."
"I didn't expect any sympathy from you," said John, drearily, pulling
himself up from the steps and leaning against the honeysuckle trellis.
"Susanna's just the same. Women are all as hard as the nether
millstone. They're hard if they're angels, and hard if they're devils;
it doesn't make much difference."
"I guess you've found a few soft ones, if report says true," returned
Louisa, bluntly. "You'd better go and get some of their sympathy, the
kind you can buy and pay for. The way you've ruined your life turns me
fairly sick. You had a good father and mother, good education and
advantages, enough money to start you in business, the best of wives,
and two children any man could be proud of, one of 'em especially.
You've thrown 'em all away, and what for? Horses and cards and gay
company, late suppers, with wine, and for aught I know, whiskey,--you
the son of a man who didn't know the taste of ginger beer! You've spent
your days and nights with a pack of carousing men and women that would
take your last cent and not leave you enough for honest burial."
"It's a pity we didn't make a traveling preacher of you!" exclaimed
John, bitterly. "Lord Almighty, I wonder how such women as you can live
in the world, you know so little about it, and so little about men."
"I know all I want to about 'em," retorted Louisa, "and precious little
that's good. They're a gluttonous, self-indulgent, extravagant,
reckless, pleasure-loving lot! My husband was one of the best of 'em,
and he wouldn't have amounted to a hill of beans if I hadn't devoted
fifteen years to disciplining, uplifting, and strengthening him!"
"You managed to strengthen him so that he died before he was fifty!"
"It don't matter when a man dies," said the remorseless Mrs. Banks, "if
he's succeeded in living a decent, God-fearing life. As for you, John
Hathaway, I'll tell you the truth if you are my brother, for Susanna's
too much of a saint to speak out."
"Don't be afraid; Susanna's spoken out at last, plainly enough to please
even you!"
"I'm glad of it, for I didn't suppose she had spunk enough to resent
anything. I shall be sorry to-morrow, 's likely as not, for freeing my
mind as much as I have, but my temper's up and I'm going to be the
humble instrument of Providence and try to turn you from the error of
your ways. You've defaced and degraded the temple the Lord built for
you, and if He should come this minute and try to turn out the crowd of
evil-doers you've kept in it, I doubt if He could!"
"I hope He'll approve of the way you've used your 'temple,'" said John,
with stinging emphasis. "I shouldn't want to live in such a noisy one
myself; I'd rather be a bat in a belfry. Good-by; I've had a pleasant
call, as usual, and you've been a real sister to me in my trouble. You
shall have the twenty dollars a month. Jack's clothes are in that
valise, and there'll be a trunk to-morrow. Susanna said she'd write and
let you know her whereabouts."
So saying, John Hathaway strode down the path, closed the gate behind
him, and walked rapidly along the road that led to the station. It was a
quiet road and he met few persons. He had neither dressed nor shaved
since the day before; his face was haggard, his heart was like a lump of
lead in his breast. Of what use to go to the empty house in Farnham when
he could stifle his misery by a night with his friends?
No, he could not do that, either! The very thought of them brought a
sense of satiety and disgust; the craving for what they would give him
would come again in time, no doubt, but for the moment he was sick to
the very soul of all they stood for. The feeling of complete
helplessness, of desertion, of being alone in mid-ocean without a sail
or a star in sight, mounted and swept over him. Susanna had been his
sail, his star, although he had never fully realized it, and he had cut
himself adrift from her pure, steadfast love, blinding himself with
cheap and vulgar charms.
The next train to Farnham was not due for an hour. His steps faltered;
he turned into a clump of trees by the wayside and flung himself on the
ground to cry like a child, he who had not shed a tear since he was a
boy of ten.
If Susanna could have seen that often longed-for burst of despair and
remorse, that sudden recognition of his sins against himself and her,
that gush of penitent tears, her heart might have softened once again; a
flicker of flame might have lighted the ashes of her dying love; she
might have taken his head on her shoulder, and said, "Never mind, John!
Let's forget, and begin all over again!"
* * * * *
Matters did not look any brighter for John the next week, for his senior
partner, Joel Atterbury, requested him to withdraw from the firm as soon
as matters could be legally arranged. He was told that he had not been
doing, nor earning, his share; that his way of living during the year
just past had not been any credit to "the concern," and that he,
Atterbury, sympathized too heartily with Mrs. John Hathaway to take any
pleasure in doing business with Mr. John.
John's remnant of pride, completely humbled by this last withdrawal of
confidence, would not suffer him to tell Atterbury that he had come to
his senses and bidden farewell to the old life, or so he hoped and
believed.
To lose a wife and child in a way infinitely worse than death; to hear
the unwelcome truth that as a husband you have grown so offensive as to
be beyond endurance; to have your own sister tell you that you richly
deserve such treatment; to be virtually dismissed from a valuable
business connection;--all this is enough to sober any man above the
grade of a moral idiot, and John was not that; he was simply a
self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, thoughtless, willful fellow, without
any great amount of principle. He took his medicine, however, said
nothing, and did his share of the business from day to day doggedly,
keeping away from his partner as much as possible.
Ellen, the faithful maid of all work, stayed on with him at the old
home; Jack wrote to him every week, and often came to spend Sunday with
him.
"Aunt Louisa's real good to me," he told his father, "but she's not like
mother. Seems to me mother's kind of selfish staying away from us so
long. When do you expect her back?"
"I don't know; not before winter, I'm afraid; and don't call her
selfish, I won't have it! Your mother never knew she had a self."
"If she'd only left Sue behind, we could have had more good times, we
three together!"
"No, our family is four, Jack, and we can never have any good times,
one, two, or three of us, because we're four! When one's away, whichever
it is, it's wrong, but it's the worst when it's mother. Does your Aunt
Louisa write to her?"
"Yes, sometimes, but she never lets me post the letters."
"Do you write to your mother? You ought to, you know, even if you don't
have time for me. You could ask your aunt to enclose your letters in
hers."
"Do you write to her, father?"
"Yes, I write twice a week," John answered, thinking drearily of the
semi-weekly notes posted in Susanna's empty work-table upstairs. Would
she ever read them? He doubted it, unless he died, and she came back to
settle his affairs; but of course he shouldn't die,--no such good luck.
Would a man die who breakfasted at eight, dined at one, supped at six,
and went to bed at ten? Would a man die who worked in the garden an hour
every afternoon, with half a day Saturday; that being the task most
disagreeable to him and most appropriate therefore for penance?
Susanna loved flowers and had always wanted a garden, but John had been
too much occupied with his own concerns to give her the needed help or
money so that she could carry out her plans. The last year she had lost
heart in many ways, so that little or nothing had been accomplished of
all she had dreamed. It would have been laughable, had it not been
pathetic, to see John Hathaway dig, delve, grub, sow, water, weed,
transplant, generally at the wrong moment, in that dream-garden of
Susanna's. He asked no advice and read no books. With feverish
intensity, with complete ignorance of Nature's laws and small sympathy
with their intricacies, he dug, hoed, raked, fertilized, and planted
during that lonely summer. His absent-mindedness caused some expensive
failures, as when the wide expanse of Susanna's drying ground, which was
to be velvety lawn, "came up" curly lettuce; but he rooted out his
frequent mistakes and patiently planted seeds or roots or bulbs over and
over and over and over, until something sprouted in his beds, whether it
was what he intended or not. While he weeded the brilliant orange
nasturtiums, growing beside the magenta portulacca in a friendly
proximity that certainly would never have existed had the mistress of
the house been the head-gardener, he thought of nothing but his wife. He
knew her pride, her reserve, her sensitive spirit; he knew her love of
truth and honor and purity, the standards of life and conduct she had
tried to hold him to so valiantly, and which he had so dragged in the
dust during the blindness and the insanity of the last two years.
He, John Hathaway, was a deserted husband; Susanna had crept away all
wounded and resentful. Where was she living and how supporting herself
and Sue, when she could not have had a hundred dollars in the world?
Probably Louisa was the source of income; conscientious, infernally
disagreeable Louisa!
Would not the rumor of his changed habit of life reach her by some means
in her place of hiding, sooner or later? Would she not yearn for a
sight of Jack? Would she not finally give him a chance to ask
forgiveness, or had she lost every trace of affection for him, as her
letter seemed to imply? He walked the garden paths, with these and other
unanswerable questions, and when he went to his lonely room at night, he
held the lamp up to a bit of poetry that he had cut from a magazine and
pinned to the looking-glass. If John Hathaway could be brought to the
reading of poetry, he might even glance at the Bible in course of time,
Louisa would have said. It was in May that Susanna had gone, and the
first line of verse held his attention.
"May comes, day comes,
One who was away comes;
All the earth is glad again,
Kind and fair to me.
"May comes, day comes,
One who was away comes;
Set her place at hearth and board
As it used to be.
"May comes, day comes,
One who was away comes;
Higher are the hills of home,
Bluer is the sea."
The Hathaway house was in the suburbs, on a rise of ground, and as John
turned to the window he saw the full moon hanging yellow in the sky. It
shone on the verdant slopes and low wooded hills that surrounded the
town, and cast a glittering pathway on the ocean that bathed the beaches
of the near-by shore.
"How long shall I have to wait," he wondered, "before my hills of home
look higher, and my sea bluer, because Susanna has come back to 'hearth
and board'!"
V
THE LITTLE QUAIL BIRD
[Illustration]
Susanna had helped at various household tasks ever since her arrival at
the Settlement, for there was no room for drones in the Shaker hive; but
after a few weeks in the kitchen with Martha, the herb-garden had been
assigned to her as her particular province, the Sisters thinking her
better fitted for it than for the preserving and pickling of fruit, or
the basket-weaving that needed special apprenticeship.
The Shakers were the first people to raise, put up, and sell garden
seeds in our present-day fashion, and it was they, too, who began the
preparation of botanical medicines, raising, gathering, drying, and
preparing herbs and roots for market; and this industry, driven from the
field by modern machinery, was still a valuable source of income in
Susanna's day. Plants had always grown for Susanna, and she loved them
like friends, humoring their weakness, nourishing their strength,
stimulating, coaxing, disciplining them, until they could do no less
than flourish under her kind and hopeful hand.
Oh, that sweet, honest, comforting little garden of herbs, with its
wholesome fragrances! Healing lay in every root and stem, in every leaf
and bud, and the strong aromatic odors stimulated her flagging spirit or
her aching head, after the sleepless nights in which she tried to decide
her future life and Sue's.
The plants were set out in neat rows and clumps, and she soon learned to
know the strange ones--chamomile, lobelia, bloodroot, wormwood, lovage,
boneset, lemon and sweet balm, lavender and rue, as well as she knew
the old acquaintances familiar to every country-bred child--pennyroyal,
peppermint or spearmint, yellow dock, and thoroughwort.