arms. "Don't cry, darling Mardie! I won't talk any more, not for days
and days! Let me wipe your poor eyes. Don't let Elder Gray see you
crying, or he'll think I've been naughty. He's just going in downstairs
to see Eldress Abby. Was it wrong what I said about backsliding, or
what, Mardie? We'll help each udder climb, an' then we'll go home an'
help poor lonesome Fardie; shall we?"
* * * * *
"Abby!" called Elder Gray, stepping into the entry of the Office
Building.
"Yee, I'm coming," Eldress Abby answered from the stairway. "Go right
out and sit down on the bench by the door, where I can catch a few
minutes more light for my darning; the days seem to be growing short all
to once. Did Lemuel have a good sale of basket-work at the mountains?
Rosetta hasn't done so well for years at Old Orchard. We seem to be
prospering in every material direction, Daniel, but my heart is heavy
somehow, and I have to be instant in prayer to keep from
discouragement."
"It hasn't been an altogether good year with us spiritually," confessed
Daniel; "perhaps we needed chastening."
"If we needed it, we've received it," Abby ejaculated, as she pushed her
darning-ball into the foot of a stocking. "Nothing has happened since I
came here thirty years ago that has troubled me like the running away of
Nathan and Hetty. If they had been new converts, we should have thought
the good seed hadn't got fairly rooted, but those children were brought
to us when Nathan was eleven and Hetty nine."
"I well remember, for the boy's father and the girl's mother came on the
same train; a most unusual occurrence to receive two children in one
day."
"I have cause to remember Hetty in her first month, for she was as wild
as a young hawk. She laughed in meeting the first Sunday, and when she
came back, I told her to sit behind me in silence for half an hour while
I was reading my Bible. 'Be still now, Hetty, and labor to repent,' I
said. When the time was up, she said in a meek little mite of a voice,
'I think I'm least in the Kingdom now. Eldress Abby!' 'Then run
outdoors,' I said. She kicked up her heels like a colt and was through
the door in a second. Not long afterwards I put my hands behind me to
tie my apron tighter, and if that child hadn't taken my small scissors
lying on the table and cut buttonholes all up and down my strings,
hundreds of them, while she was 'laboring to repent.'"
Elder Gray smiled reminiscently, though he had often heard the story
before. "Neither of the children came from godly families," he said,
"but at least the parents never interfered with us nor came here putting
false ideas into their children's heads."
"That's what I say," continued Abby; "and now, after ten years' training
and discipline in the angelic life, Hetty being especially promising, to
think of their going away together, and worse yet, being married in
Albion village right at our very doors; I don't hardly dare to go to bed
nights for fear of hearing in the morning that some of the other young
folks have been led astray by this foolish performance of Hetty's; I
know it was Hetty's fault; Nathan never had ingenuity enough to think
and plan it all out."
"Nay, nay, Abby, don't be too hard on the girl; I've watched Nathan
closely, and he has been in a dangerous and unstable state, even as long
ago as his last confession; but this piece of backsliding, grievous as
it is, doesn't cause me as much sorrow as the fall of Brother Ephraim.
To all appearance he had conquered his appetite, and for five years he
has led a sober life. I had even great hopes of him for the ministry,
and suddenly, like a great cloud in the blue sky, has come this terrible
visitation, this reappearance of the old Adam. 'Ephraim has returned to
his idols.'"
"How have you decided to deal with him, Daniel?"
"It is his first offense since he cast in his lot with us; we must
rebuke, chastise, and forgive."
"Yee, yee, I agree to that; but how if he makes us the laughing-stock of
the community and drags our sacred banner in the dust? We can't afford
to have one of our order picked up in the streets by the world's
people."
"Have the world's people found an infallible way to keep those of
_their_ order out of the gutters?" asked Elder Gray. "Ephraim seems
repentant; if he is willing to try again, we must be willing to do as
much."
"Yee, Daniel, you are right. Another matter that causes me anxiety is
Susanna. I never yearned for a soul as I yearn for hers! She has had the
advantage of more education and more reading than most of us have ever
enjoyed; she's gifted in teaching and she wins the children. She's
discreet and spiritually minded; her life in the world, even with the
influence of her dissipated husband, hasn't really stained, only humbled
her; she would make such a Shaker, if she was once 'convinced,' as we
haven't gathered in for years and years; but I fear she's slipping,
slipping away, Daniel!"
"What makes you feel so now, particularly?"
"She's diff'rent as time goes on. She's had more letters from that place
where her boy is; she cries nights, and though she doesn't relax a mite
with her work, she drags about sometimes like a bird with one wing."
Elder Daniel took off his broad-brimmed hat to cool his forehead and
hair, lifting his eyes to the first pale stars that were trembling in
the sky, hesitating in silver and then quietly deepening into gold.
Brother Ansel was a Believer because he had no particular love for the
world and no great susceptibility to its temptations; but what had drawn
Daniel Gray from the open sea into this quiet little backwater of a
Shaker Settlement?
After an adventurous early life, in which, as if youth-intoxicated, he
had plunged from danger to danger, experience to experience, he suddenly
found himself in a society of which he had never so much as heard, a
company of celibate brothers and sisters holding all goods and
possessions in common, and trying to live the "angelic life" on earth.
Illness detained him for a month against his will, but at the end of
that time he had joined the Community; and although it had been
twenty-five years since his gathering in, he was still steadfast in the
faith.
His character was of puritanical sternness; he was a strict
disciplinarian, and insisted upon obedience to the rules of Shaker life,
"the sacred laws of Zion," as he was wont to term them. He magnified his
office, yet he was of a kindly disposition easily approached by
children, and not without a quaint old-time humor.
There was a long pause while the two faithful leaders of the little
flock were absorbed in thought; then the Elder said: "Susanna's all you
say, and the child,--well, if she could be purged of her dross, I never
saw a creature better fitted to live the celestial life; but we must
not harbor any divided hearts here. When the time comes, we must dismiss
her with our blessing."
"Yee, I suppose so," said Eldress Abby, loyally, but it was with a sigh.
Had she and Tabitha been left to their own instincts, they would have
gone out into the highways and hedges, proselyting with the fervor of
Mother Ann's day and generation.
"After all, Abby," said the Elder, rising to take his leave, still in a
sort of mild trance,--"after all, Abby, I suppose the Shakers don't own
the whole of heaven. I'd like to think so, but I can't. It's a big
place, and it belongs to God."
IX
LOVE MANIFOLD
[Illustration]
The woods on the shores of Massabesic Pond were stretches of tapestry,
where every shade of green and gold, olive and brown, orange and
scarlet, melted the one into the other. The sombre pines made a
deep-toned background; patches of sumach gave their flaming crimson; the
goldenrod grew rank and tall in glorious profusion, and the maples
outside the Office Building were balls of brilliant carmine. The air was
like crystal, and the landscape might have been bathed in liquid amber,
it was so saturated with October yellow.
Susanna caught her breath as she threw her chamber window wider open in
the early morning; for the greater part of the picture had been painted
during the frosty night.
"Throw your little cape round your shoulders and come quickly, Sue!" she
exclaimed.
The child ran to her side. "Oh, what a goldy, goldy morning!" she cried.
One crimson leaf with a long heavy stem that acted as a sort of rudder,
came down to the window-sill with a sidelong scooping flight, while two
or three gayly painted ones, parted from the tree by the same breeze,
floated airily along as if borne on unseen wings, finally alighting on
Sue's head and shoulders like tropical birds.
"You cried in the night, Mardie!" said Sue. "I heard you snifferling and
getting up for your hank'chief; but I didn't speak 'cause it's so
dreadful to be _catched_ crying."
"Kneel down beside me and give me part of your cape," her mother
answered. "I'm going to let my sad heart fly right out of the window
into those beautiful trees."
"And maybe a glad heart will fly right in!" the child suggested.
"Maybe.--Oh! we must cuddle close and be still; Elder Gray's going to
sit down under the great maple; and do you see, all the Brothers seem to
be up early this morning, just as we are?"
"More love, Elder Gray!" called Issachar, on his way to the tool-house.
"More love, Brother Issachar!"
"More love, Brother Ansel!"
"More love, Brother Calvin!"
"More love!" "More love!" "More love!" So the quaint but not uncommon
Shaker greeting passed from Brother to Brother; and as Tabitha and
Martha and Rosetta met on their way to dairy and laundry and seed-house,
they, too, hearing the salutation, took up the refrain, and Susanna and
Sue heard again from the women's voices that beautiful morning wish,
"More love!" "More love!" speeding from heart to heart and lip to lip.
Mother and child were very quiet.
"More love, Sue!" said Susanna, clasping her closely.
"More love, Mardie!" whispered the child, smiling and entering into the
spirit of the salutation. "Let's turn our heads Farnham way! I'll take
Jack and you take Fardie, and we'll say togedder, 'More love'; shall
we?"
"More love, John."
"More love, Jack."
The words floated out over the trees in the woman's trembling voice and
the child's treble.
"Elder Gray looks tired though he's just got up," Sue continued.
"He is not strong," replied her mother, remembering Brother Ansel's
statement that the Elder "wa'n't diseased anywheres, but didn't have no
durability."
"The Elder would have a lovely lap," Sue remarked presently.
"_What?_"
"A nice lap to sit in. Fardie has a nice lap, too, and Uncle Joel
Atterbury, but not Aunt Louisa; she lets you slide right off; it's a
bony, hard lap. I love Elder Gray, and I climbed on his lap one day. He
put me right down, but I'm sure he likes children. I wish I could take
right hold of his hand and walk all over the farm, but he wouldn't let
me, I s'pose.--_More love, Elder Gray!_" she cried suddenly, bobbing up
above the window-sill and shaking her fairy hand at him.
The Elder looked up at the sound of the glad voice. No human creature
could have failed to smile back into the roguish face or have treated
churlishly the sweet, confident little greeting. The heart of a real man
must have an occasional throb of the father, and when Daniel Gray rose
from his seat under the maple and called, "More love, child!" there was
something strange and touching in his tone. He moved away from the tree
to his morning labors with the consciousness of something new to
conquer. Long, long ago he had risen victorious above many of the
temptations that flesh is heir to. Women were his good friends, his
comrades, his sisters; they no longer troubled the waters of his soul;
but here was a child who stirred the depths; who awakened the potential
father in him so suddenly and so strongly that he longed for the
sweetness of a human tie that could bind him to her. But the current of
the Elder's being was set towards sacrifice and holiness, and the common
joys of human life he felt could never and must never be his; so he went
to the daily round, the common task, only a little paler, a little
soberer than was his wont.
"More love, Martha!" said Susanna when she met Martha a little later in
the day.
"More love, Susanna!" Martha replied cheerily. "You heard our Shaker
greeting, I see! It was the beautiful weather, the fine air and glorious
colors, that brought the inspiration this morning, I guess! It took us
all out of doors, and then it seemed to get into the blood. Besides,
to-morrow's the Day of Sacrifice, and that takes us all on to the
mountain-tops of feeling. There have been times when I had to own up to
a lack of love."
"You, Martha, who have such wonderful influence over the children, such
patience, such affection!"
"It wasn't always so. When I was first put in charge of the children, I
didn't like the work. They didn't respond to me somehow, and when they
were out of my sight they were ugly and disobedient. My natural mother,
Maria Holmes, took care of the girls' clothing. One day she said to me,
'Martha, do you love the girls?'
"'Some of them are very unlovely,' I replied.
"'I know that,' she said, 'but you can never help them unless you love
them.'
"I thought mother very critical, for I strove scrupulously to do my
duty. A few days after this the Elder said to me: Martha, do you love
the girls?' I responded, 'Not very much.'
"'You cannot save them unless you love them,' he said.
"Then I answered, 'I will labor for a gift of love.'
"When the work of the day was over, and the girls were in bed, I would
take off my shoes and spend several hours of the night walking the
floor, kneeling in prayer that I might obtain the coveted gift. For five
weeks I did this without avail, when suddenly one night when the moon
was full and I was kneeling by the window, a glory seemed to overshadow
the crest of a high mountain in the distance. I thought I heard a voice
say: '_Martha, I baptize you into the spirit of love!_' I sat there
trembling for more than an hour, and when I rose, I felt that I could
love the meanest human being that ever walked the earth. I have never
had any trouble with children since that night of the vision. They seem
different to me, and I dare say I am different to them."
"I wish I could see visions!" exclaimed Susanna. "Oh, for a glory that
would speak to me and teach me truth and duty! Life is all mist,
whichever way I turn. I'd like to be lifted on to a high place where I
could see clearly."
She leaned against the frame of the open kitchen door, her delicate face
quivering with emotion and longing, her attitude simplicity and
unconsciousness itself. The baldest of Shaker prose turned to purest
poetry when Susanna dipped it in the alembic of her own imagination.
"Labor for the gift of sight!" said Martha, who believed implicitly in
spirits and visions. "Labor this very night."
It must be said for Susanna that she had never ceased laboring in her
own way for many days. The truth was that she felt herself turning from
marriage. She had lived now so long in the society of men and women who
regarded it as an institution not compatible with the highest spiritual
development that unconsciously her point of view had changed; changed
all the more because she had been so unhappy with the man she had
chosen. Curiously enough, and unfortunately enough for Susanna
Hathaway's peace of mind, the greater aversion she felt towards the
burden of the old life, towards the irksomeness of guiding a weaker
soul, towards the claims of husband on wife, the stronger those claims
appeared. If they had never been assumed!--Ah, but they had; there was
the rub! One sight of little Sue sleeping tranquilly beside her; one
memory of rebellious, faulty Jack; one vision of John, either as needing
or missing her, the rightful woman, or falling deeper in the wiles of
the wrong one for very helplessness;--any of these changed Susanna the
would-be saint, in an instant into Susanna the wife and mother.
"_Speak to me for Thy Compassion's sake_," she prayed from the little
book of Confessions that her mother had given her. "_I will follow after
Thy Voice!_"
"Would you betray your trust?" asked conscience.
"No, not intentionally."
"Would you desert your post?"
"Never, willingly."
"You have divided the family; taken a little quail bird out of the
home-nest and left sorrow behind you. Would God justify you in that?"
For the first time Susanna's "No" rang clearly enough for her to hear it
plainly; for the first time it was followed by no vague misgivings, no
bewilderment, no unrest or indecision. "_I turn hither and thither; Thy
purposes are hid from me, but I commend my soul to Thee!_"
Then a sentence from the dear old book came into her memory: "_And thy
dead things shall revive, and thy weak things shall be made whole._"
She listened, laying hold of every word, till the nervous clenching of
her hands subsided, her face relaxed into peace. Then she lay down
beside Sue, creeping close to her for the warmth and comfort and healing
of her innocent touch, and, closing her eyes serenely, knew no more till
the morning broke, the Sabbath morning of Confession Day.
X
BROTHER AND SISTER
[Illustration]
If Susanna's path had grown more difficult, more filled with anxieties,
so had John Hathaway's. The protracted absence of his wife made the
gossips conclude that the break was a final one. Jack was only half
contented with his aunt, and would be fairly mutinous in the winter,
while Louisa's general attitude was such as to show clearly that she
only kept the boy for Susanna's sake.
Now and then there was a terrifying hint of winter in the air, and the
days of Susanna's absence seemed eternal to John Hathaway. Yet he was a
man about whom there would have been but one opinion: that when deprived
of a rather superior and high-minded wife and the steadying influence
of home and children, he would go completely "to the dogs," whither he
seemed to be hurrying when Susanna's wifely courage failed. That he had
done precisely the opposite and the unexpected thing, shows us perhaps
that men are not on the whole as capable of estimating the forces of
their fellow men as is God the maker of men, who probably expects
something of the worst of them up to the very last.
It was at the end of a hopeless Sunday when John took his boy back to
his aunt's towards night. He wondered drearily how a woman dealt with a
ten-year-old boy who from sunrise to sunset had done every mortal thing
he ought not to have done, and had left undone everything that he had
been told to do; and, as if to carry out the very words of the church
service, neither was there any health in him; for he had an inflamed
throat and a whining, irritable, discontented temper that could be
borne only by a mother, a father being wholly inadequate and apparently
never destined for the purpose.
It was a mild evening late in October, and Louisa sat on the porch with
her pepper-and-salt shawl on and a black wool "rigolette" tied over her
head. Jack, very sulky and unresigned, was dispatched to bed under the
care of the one servant, who was provided with a cupful of vinegar,
salt, and water, for a gargle. John had more than an hour to wait for a
returning train to Farnham, and although ordinarily he would have
preferred to spend the time in the silent and unreproachful cemetery
rather than in the society of his sister Louisa, he was too tired and
hopeless to do anything but sit on the steps and smoke fitfully in the
semi-darkness.
Louisa was much as usual. She well knew--who better?--her brother's
changed course of life, but neither encouragement nor compliment were in
her line. Why should a man be praised for living a respectable life?
That John had really turned a sort of moral somersault and come up a
different creature, she did not realize in the least, nor the
difficulties surmounted in such a feat; but she did give him credit
secretly for turning about face and behaving far more decently than she
could ever have believed possible. She had no conception of his mental
torture at the time, but if he kept on doing well, she privately
intended to inform Susanna and at least give her a chance of trying him
again, if absence had diminished her sense of injury. One thing that she
did not know was that John was on the eve of losing his partnership.
When Jack had said that his father was not going back to the store the
next week, she thought it meant simply a vacation. Divided hearts,
broken vows, ruined lives--she could bear the sight of these with
considerable philosophy, but a lost income was a very different, a very
tangible thing. She almost lost her breath when her brother knocked the
ashes from his meerschaum and curtly told her of the proposed change in
his business relations.
"I don't know what I shall do yet," he said, "whether I shall set up for
myself in a small way or take a position in another concern--that is, if
I can get one--my stock of popularity seems to be pretty low just now in
Farnham. I'd move away to-morrow and cut the whole gossipy, deceitful,
hypocritical lot of 'em if I wasn't afraid of closing the house and so
losing Susanna, if she should ever feel like coming back to us."
These words and the thought back of them were too much for John's
self-control. The darkness helped him and his need of comfort was
abject. Suddenly he burst out, "Oh, Louisa, for heaven's sake, give me a
little crumb of comfort, if you have any! How can you stand like a stone
all these months and see a man suffering as I have suffered, without
giving him a word?"
"You brought it on yourself," said Louisa, in self-exculpation.
"Does that make it any easier to bear?" cried John. "Don't you suppose I
remember it every hour, and curse myself the more? You know perfectly
well that I'm a different man to-day. I don't know what made me change;
it was as if something had been injected into my blood that turned me
against everything I had liked best before. I hate the sight of the men
and the women I used to go with, not because they are any worse, but
because they remind me of what I have lost. I have reached the point now
where I have got to have news of Susanna or go and shoot myself."
"That would be about the only piece of foolishness you haven't committed
already!" replied Louisa, with a biting satire that would have made any
man let go of the trigger in case he had gone so far as to begin pulling
it.
"Where is she?" John went on, without anger at her sarcasm. "Where is
she, how is she, what is she living on, is she well, is she just as
bitter as she was at first, does she ever speak of coming back?--Tell me
something, tell me anything. I will know something. I say I _will_!"
Louisa's calm demeanor began to show a little agitation, for she was not
used to the sight of emotion.
"I can't tell you where Susanna is, for I made her a solemn promise I
wouldn't unless you or Jack were in danger of some kind; but I don't
mind telling you this much, that she's well and in the safest kind of a
shelter, for she's been living from the first in a Shaker Settlement."
"Shaker Settlement!" cried John, starting up from his seat on the steps.
"What's that? I know Shaker egg-beaters and garden-seeds and
rocking-chairs and--oh, yes, I remember their religion's against
marriage. That's the worst thing you could have told me; that ends all
hope; if they once get hold of a woman like Susanna, they'll never let
go of her; if they don't believe in a woman's marrying a good man,
they'd never let her go back to a bad one. Oh, if I had only known this
before; if only you'd told me, Louisa, perhaps I could have done
something. Maybe they take vows or sign contracts, and so I have lost
her altogether."
"I don't know much about their beliefs, and Susanna never explained
them," returned Louisa, nervously, "but now that you've got something to
offer her, why don't you write and ask her to come back to you? I'll
send your letter to her."
"I don't dare, Louisa, I don't dare," groaned John, leaning his head
against one of the pillars of the porch. "I can't tell you the fear I
have of Susanna after the way I've neglected her this last year. If she
should come in at the gate this minute, I couldn't meet her eyes; if
you'd read the letter she left me, you'd feel the same way. I deserved
it, to the last word, but oh, it was like so many separate strokes of
lightning, and every one of them burned. It was nothing but the truth,
but it was cut in with a sharp sword. Unless she should come back to me
of her own accord, and she never will, I haven't got the courage to ask
her; just haven't got the courage, that's all there is to say about it."
And here John buried his head in his hands.