CHAPTER XIV.
There are certain flowers which, when placed with other blossoms, choke and stifle and wither them by some evil emanation so subtle that it cannot be analyzed. The heliotrope is one of the flowers which murder other blooms. As with flowers so with spirits. Which of us that is at all sensitive to psychic influences but has felt at one time or another the devitalizing influence of certain personalities, and one can readily imagine how continuous, how fatal such an influence would be, when the eyes were so blinded by love that they could neither perceive the evil plainly nor guess its genesis at all. And sometimes thinking of these things, one wonders if the old, weird tales of vampires and wehr-wolves are not cunning allegories instead of meaningless myths, invented by men who, searching the subtleties of soul and spirit, had discerned this thing, but living in times when it was not wise to prate too familiarly of the invisible, had been fain to cloak their discovery in a garb less mystic.
But if the strife be wrapped in mystery the effect upon the subjective spirit is very visible.
Many of the Dole people eyed their pastor anxiously as he arose to address them the next Sunday, for he was very dear to them. Dole was not prone to let its affections go out to strangers. Life was very pinched and stinted in Dole, and it would seem almost as if their loves were meagre as their lives; at their repasts there was rarely much more than would go round, and perhaps they remembered better the injunction against giving the children’s meat to the dogs, than they did the command to love thy neighbour as thyself. The great luxury of the poor—loving—they did not half enjoy, but bounded their affections as they did their fields.
Between Dole and strangers there was usually an insurmountable barrier of mutual incomprehension. It was, indeed, difficult to find the combination which opened the Dole heart, but Sidney had done it.
He was a very tender pastor to his people; whatever doubts, whatever questionings, whatever fears troubled and tormented his own soul, he permitted none of them to disturb the peace of the doctrine he preached. These people striving with irresponsive barren acres, and bending wearily above hopeless furrows, were told how they might lighten the labours both of themselves and others, and promised places of green pastures and running brooks. The gates of their visionary celestial city were flung wide to them, and in the windows of the heavenly mansion cheering lamps were lit.
Was this false doctrine? Perhaps. Protestants are fond of saying with a sneer that Catholicism is a very “comfortable religion.” The implication would seem to be that a religion is not to be chosen because of its consolations. Therefore, it is perhaps regrettable that Sidney’s preachment to Dole was so pronouncedly a message of “sweetness and light.”
His hearers loved him, and looked upon his unministerial ways with a tolerance which surprised themselves; often, as he passed upon these long, seemingly aimless, walks which Dole could not comprehend, a hard-wrought man would pause in his work, straighten himself and look after him wistfully even as the eyes of the fishermen followed the Galilean, or a weary woman would stand in her doorway until such time as he drew near, and then, with some little excuse upon her lips, arrest his steps for a moment, to turn away comforted by the benediction of his mere presence.
Nor was Sidney insensible of, or irresponsive to this output of affection. He felt the full force of it, and returned to them their full measure heaped up and running over. And for a time the comfort of the mutual feeling helped to sustain his spirit, fainting beneath the burden of morbid introspection, and sapped by the ignorantly exercised power of his wife, for, not understanding the influence she wielded, Vashti used it rashly. Suggestion was superimposed upon suggestion until the centre ofhis mental gravity was all but lost, and in his walks he often paused bewildered at the upspringing of certain things within his mind, grasping at the elusive traces of his vanishing individuality.
The hour is past when these things might be scoffed at; the old legends have given place to scientific data more marvellous than the myths they discredit. The law has recognized the verity of these things, and justice has vindicated its decision with the extreme fiat of death. Alas, the justice of men is for those who kill the body; it cannot reach those who murder the mind.
The church was unusually crowded when Sidney arose. It had been hinted abroad that Ann Serrup was to be there, and Dole stirred with pleasurable anticipation, for Ann Serrup was an unregenerate individual so far as religion was concerned.
It was related of her that once at a revival meeting in Brixton, when the fiery revivalist of that place, Mr. Hackles, approached her, asking in sepulchral tones where she expected to go when she died, Ann replied, unmoved, that she would go to where they put her, a response calculated, in the mind of Mrs. Ranger, to bring a “judgment onto her.”
The Rev. Hackles denounced her as a vessel of wrath and designated her as chaff ready to be cast into the fire, but Ann sat dreamily through it all, and, as Lanty related afterwards, “never turned a hair.” And this was when she bore no other shamethan the stigma of being a Serrup, and therefore predestined to evil, and now she was coming to Dole church. What would their gentle pastor say?
It was a sweet summer day. Mabella and little Dorothy sat by a window, and the yellow sunshine lingered about the two yellow heads, and reached out presently to Lanty’s curls when he entered a little later.
Vashti, white and stately, entered with Sally and took her place in the conspicuous pew set aside for the preacher’s family. Sally behaved herself demurely enough in church now, but such is the force of habit that the eyes of all the juveniles in Dole were bent steadily upon the preacher’s pew, for in Sally their childish instinct and experience told them there were possibilities, and indeed, to be strictly truthful, it must be confessed that now and then, at decent intervals, Sally treated them to a surreptitious grimace worth watching for.
Mrs. Ranger sat in the body of the church, with the expression of one who perceives an evil odour. This expression was assumed with her Sunday bonnet and laid aside with it. Indeed, Mrs. Ranger thought too much both of her Sunday bonnet and her religious principles to use either of them on week days.
Temperance and Nathan sat alone in a pew well back. It was reported in Dole that they had been seen to look at each other in church, but that was doubtless one of Mrs. Ranger’s slanders. Temperancewould have been the last to do anything scandalous.
The whole congregation waited.
Sidney was finding his places in the books. This was always an irritating spectacle in Dole, but was forgiven like Sidney’s other delinquencies. Dole liked to see the preacher open his Bible with the abrupt air of one seeking a sign from whence to draw his inspiration for the forthcoming sermon. The Dole children had been used to have animated arguments as to whether old Mr. Didymus knew where he was about to open the book or whether his text came to him in the nature of a surprise. If so, then they marvelled that he should so readily find “the bit.” Young Tom Shinar had once declared that Mr. Didymus found the place beforehand and substantiated his evidence by saying he had seen little ends of white paper sticking out of the big Bible on the pulpit. But this was coming it too strong for even the most hardened of his adherents, and until Tom rehabilitated himself by thrashing a Brixton boy who said the Brixton church was bigger than the Dole tabernacle, he ran a great risk of finding himself isolated, as sacrilegious people have often been before his time.
To see their preacher searching for his places before their eyes was a most trying spectacle, and no preacher save one of extraordinary confidence in himself and his vocation would have risked bringinghimself thus near the level of mortal man. Sidney surmounted this danger nobly, but Dole gave a sigh of relief, as much perhaps for its preacher as itself, when Sidney, after a final flutter of the pages, laid down his books, and rising looked down lovingly upon them; and just as this crisis was reached the door moved a little, wavered on its double hinges, closed, opened again, and finally admitted Ann Serrup, holding her baby in her arms and cowering behind his little form as though it were protection instead of a disgrace. Poor Ann! herbravadovanished at the critical moment and left her dazed, frightened, shamed, given into the hands of her enemies, or so it seemed to her. Now the curiosity of Dole over Ann’s appearance had been such that there was not one single seat, so far, at least, as she could see, but what held someone. And to advance under the fire of those curious eyes into any of these seats uninvited was more than Ann dare do. Sidney, with the lack of affectation which characterized him, looked about to see the cause of the concentrated gaze of his congregation, and saw a slim, frightened-looking woman standing just within the church door, holding a baby to her breast so tightly that the bewildered child was beginning to rebel against the restraint of the embrace.
Sidney’s swift intuitions grasped at once that this was a new comer, a stranger within their gates. He looked towards Vashti—Vashti was looking atthe congregation as if expecting one or other of them to do something. Sidney reflected swiftly that it might not be Dole etiquette for the minister’s wife to move in such a matter, then he turned to his congregation and said in a voice suggestive of disappointment, “Will not one of you offer a seat to our new sister?”
The effect was electrical.
The Rangers, Smilies, Simpsons, and all their ilk rose at the summons. Ann followed Mr. Simpson up the aisle, but just as she nearly reached the Simpson pew she gave an imploring look at Mabella. Mabella returned an encouraging smile, and Ann darted to Mabella’s pew like a rabbit flying to cover. Mr. Simpson felt the defection and resumed his seat feeling he had been “done,” and inclined to think Lanty and Mabella had usurped the privileges of the deaconship.
Nathan and Temperance gave a sigh of relief. The moment Ann entered the church each had longed to bring the forlorn girl to their seat, but a kind of shyness had fallen upon these two elderly lovers since their marriage; retracing the steps of their love dream, they were overtaken now and then by the awkward hesitancies of youth.
Ann put the neatly dressed child down on the seat by Dorothy, and the two babies eyed each other in the frankly questioning manner of innocence.
The congregation recovered, at least outwardly,its equanimity, and Sidney’s clear, sweet voice said, “Let us pray,” and after an instant’s pause uttered a brief invocation to the spirit of Truth and Holiness to descend upon their waiting hearts.
The hymn was sung, and then having read the chapter Sidney closed the Bible and began to speak.
Afterwards when all Sidney’s sermons were passed in review, it was remembered that during this discourse he kept his eyes fixed upon the face of his wife, and never once bent his gaze upon his congregation, the congregation which, gathered there full of trust that their spiritual wounds would be bound up, suddenly awakened to the fact that their beloved preacher was smiting them with the cold steel of spiritual condemnation.
This man who had been so ready to empty the vials of healing love upon their bruises, this man in whose hand the spiritual olive branch had blossomed like Aaron’s rod that budded, this man whose gentle human sympathy had wiled forth the secrets of the most obdurate, this man had turned and was rending them.
He took for his text, “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children,” and ere long the faces before him were piteous.
Never had Sidney spoken as he spoke that day; spurred on, it would seem, by an irresistible inspiration he cried to them “Woe—woe.” His fiery words seared their hearts as flame scorches flesh,beneath the burden of his bitter eloquence their spirits fainted. Nor was he content with generalizations, for with striking parallel and unmistakable comparison he illustrated his meaning with incidents from their own lives. Dole had never known how completely their preacher had been in their confidence till he turned traitor and dragged forth the skeletons of their griefs to point the moral of his denunciations.
Beneath it all they sat silent as those mute before a terrible judge, only the swift and piteous changes of expression showed when his barbed shafts struck home. These old men and women were suddenly smitten with the thought that their children who had “gone wrong” were only scapegoats for their parents’ sins, sent by them into the wilderness, with a mocking garland of religious training, to take awaytheirreproach before the eyes of the world. But though the scapegoat might delude the attention of the world, it did not divert the gaze of the Almighty from their sin-stained souls. Impeached by their preacher’s almost personal denunciations, these poor worn old men and women found themselves convicted of, and responsible for, their own and their children’s sins. The ghosts of all the bye-gone scandals in Dole rose from the shades, and for once, parading boldly before the face of all men, fastened upon their victims.
Sudden deaths were pronounced to be judgments upon hidden sin, and Mary Shinar’s blanched facewas wrung when she recalled her saintly father, who was found dead in his field with the whetstone in his hand to sharpen his scythe, that other reaper, whose sickle is always keen, had cut him down without warning. Mary tried to remember what old Mr. Didymus had said about the Lord coming quickly to those whom He loveth, but she could not, she could only writhe under the shadow of a dreadful uncertainty. Death-bed repentances were mocked at as unworthy and unacceptable cowardice, and old Henry Smilie’s jaw set, for his son, dead these fifteen years now, had acknowledged between the spasms of the death agony that he had erred and gone astray, and when a merciful interlude of peace was granted him before the end, he spent his last breaths whispering forth prayers to the Saviour whom his life had denied, and when he slept with a kind of unearthly peace and light upon his worn young face, old Mr. Didymus had spoken of those who through many deep waters at last win safe haven, and his father, ground to the earth by heart-breaking toil, wearied by the reproachful tongue of a scolding wife, looked beyond the horizon of this life to that moment when, transfigured from out the semblance of his sins, he should see his only son again. And now—— But Sidney having planted the empoisoned spear in his weary old heart, had turned to other things, and was speaking with strange white-faced fervour of the future.
The congregation had up to this instant rested in spellbound silence, but, as leaving the dead past he entered the hopeful realms of the future and proceeded to lay them waste with the most merciless forebodings, a long suspiration, half moan, half sigh swept about the church, spending itself like a hiss of shame in the corners, and coming vaguely to Sidney’s ears, unnoticed at the moment, but to be remembered afterwards in agony of spirit. He made no pause, but continuing in the tense tone of a man who only veils his meaning because it must be veiled, andwillsthat his words be understood, he pictured forth all the terrors which awaited the child of the shamed mother and the child of the drunkard; with pitiless imagery he suggested the inevitability of the fate which awaited them. He denounced in bitter terms the sin of giving children such a heritage, and following out his argument with rigid Calvinistic logic he left little hope of good for the victims of this inheritance. Of all the portions of this bitter sermon, this was the most scathing, and a silence like the silence of the grave fell upon his hearers.
The faces of Temperance and Nathan were wrung with generous, impersonal pain, and they held each other’s hands fast clasped, fearing for Mabella, who, her face working with keen, mother anguish, looked at the stony face of her torturer as a lamb might regard the knife which slays it; Ann Serrup, dazed, half stupefied by the storm which beat upon her,had only sufficient intelligence left to shrink from the wounds which followed thick and fast, as a person freezing to death may yet feel the icy rain dashing in his face.
Lanty sat at the end of the pew, a terrible expression of self-reproach in his eyes, his head held erect, his shoulders squared as one who receives the righteous recompense of his sins. But quickening all this endurance into agony was the thought of Mabella, he knew so well what she was suffering.
And, lifted up trustingly, in the midst of these pain-drawn faces, like flowers looking up from amid stones, were the faces of the two children, Dorothy and little Reub.
Having finished their scrutiny of each other they had joined hands and sat silent, looking up wonderingly at the preacher.
Upon their faces there was still the courage and hardihood seen upon the faces of all infants; alas! it is not long before it fades away, abashed by the unconscious recognition of life’s terrors. To those who see it, this bravery, the bravery of supreme ignorance, is poignantly touching. And of all that congregation only these two children dared look the preacher confidently in the face.
And yet there was one other. Vashti Lansing, sitting in the extreme corner of the pew, and facing her husband, had never taken her eyes from his face, nor withdrawn her gaze from his.
Her face was white like his, drawn as if by the intensity of concentrated thought.
Seemingly unconscious of the troubled faces about her, yet seeing every variation in their agony, she listened to her own thoughts voiced by Sidney’s tongue, she heard her own bitterness translated into words of fatal eloquence.
By the force of her suggestion these ideas, these images, had been impressed upon the mind of her husband, and he read the symbols aloud to his terrified congregation mechanically, only swayed by the more or less emphatic manner in which the thoughts had been suggested to him. And sitting thus, Vashti Lansing saw her own soul face to face.
Surely there must have been something in its dark reflection to terrify this daring woman, surely her heart must have trembled before the magnitude of her triumph, before the spectacle of the misery she had wrought, but if she indeed felt these things she gave no sign. Indeed it would seem as if this woman had suffered so much in secret, over her baulked desire, that she had gone mad of misery, and as some serpents when wounded strike savagely at stones and trees and even at their own coils, so Vashti, in her hour of power, did not care whom she wounded, if so that she could vent her venom and see upon the faces of others some reflex of the agony which had so long lain at her heart.
We cannot explain these things, nor dare we judgeof them, for to take judgment upon us is to be ourselves condemned.
Sidney’s voice was growing weaker, and finally, with a last scathing rebuke, which was perhaps more of a sneer than a reproof, he sat down, his stern, white face sinking out of sight behind the high pulpit desk.
After a few moments, which seemed a century to the racked congregation, he rose, but the face which they saw was no longer the stern face of the relentless man who had so tortured them. The gentle grey eyes had regained their kindliness, the sensitive mouth its sweetness, the lofty brow was no longer black with condemnation, but bright with beneficence; no longer stern with portents of wrath, but grave with reverent responsibility. He gave out the hymn in his usual way and it was sung haltingly, and then with outstretched hands he blessed his people.
But they wanted none of his blessings. They had trusted him and he had betrayed them into the clutch of their own fears.
It was the custom in Dole for the congregation and preacher to rest a moment or two in silence after the final Amen of the benediction, and after that there were greetings at the church door; but to-day, whilst Sidney’s bowed head rested upon his hands he heard hurrying feet crowding to the door, and when he raised his head and descended the short pulpitstairs, he found the church empty, he looked about in amazement.
“Why, Vashti,” he said in surprise, “where have they all gone?”
“I don’t know whatever has possessed them,” she said, although she knew only too well. “But they all hurried out pell mell.”
“How strange,” said Sidney wonderingly. Vashti looked at him curiously; by this time they were on the porch. It was empty. Those who walked to church had taken their departure, fleeing as from a place accursed. Those who had to wait for the men to bring round the democrat waggons in which they had come from a distance, accompanied the men round to the sheds, and mounting into the vehicles there, drove off rapidly.
Ann Serrup had waited barely till she got to the church door, and then turning with blazing eyes to Mabella, she demanded how she had dared bring her there to be mocked at; the poor tow of Ann’s passion was fairly ablaze, but something in Mabella’s face quieted her, and with an evil word for the preacher, flung out recklessly from the reservoir of sinful knowledge—Ann departed.
Amid the brief babel of condemnation which had preceded the general departure, the voice of Temperance was the only one raised to stem the flood of popular indignation.
“Perhaps ’twas laid onto him to speak so,”said Temperance. “I have heard tell of these things.”
“Well,” said Mr. Simpson indignantly, “them things is more enjoyable by hearsay. ’Twas disgraceful! that’s what it was——” and then he made off, but Temperance, staunch old Temperance, stood her ground, and spoke to Vashti and Sidney as they emerged. But Sidney was wearied out and bewildered by the sudden defection of his people, and so had little to say, and when they reached the little gate the two couples separated and took different roads; the windows and doors were closed in all the houses which Vashti and Sidney passed as they went to the parsonage. Vashti realized that never had she been so identified with her husband as she was that day by the eyes which peeped out of the re-opened doors behind them.
Dole had withdrawn itself from its preacher. It had been hard to win out, but it retired to its shell with a promptitude which suggested that it had never been quite comfortable out of it.
“I can’t understand it,” said Sidney. “It seems extraordinary. I did not preach too long, did I?”
“No, indeed,” said Vashti; “you spoke splendidly.”
His face glowed like that of a child which has been praised; he passed his hand vaguely across his brow.
“I am so glad you are pleased,” he said. “It was your sermon, you know. It seemed to me I was saying just what you would wish.”
“Yes, of course you did,” said Vashti as they entered the parsonage gate, then, hesitatingly, she said:
“Have you got it written down?”
“No, oh no—I—the fact is I don’t seem to remember what I preached about. How strange! But no matter if you were pleased at the time. I would not care to submit my theology to your tests, my dear.”
They were by this time standing together in the little study.
Moved by a sudden tenderness Vashti laid her face against his sleeve.
“I think,” she said, “you are better than anyone.”
A great joy illumined his face, he put his arms about her, for a moment his old self reasserted itself.
“My dear,” he said, “are you well? Why, Vashti, how thin you have grown.”
She looked up at him with great hollow grey eyes.
“Thin!” she said, and laughed discordantly; “what should the preacher’s wife have to make her thin?”
“You are well and happy?” he asked.
“Both, am I not first lady in Dole?”
“You are First and Only Queen of my heart,” he said tenderly. “That’s your name and title.”
And just then Sally came to say the table was ready, and slipping away from his encircling arms Vashti led the way to the table.
As the afternoon waned, Sidney’s nervousness increased.He strove to remember his sermon, and wandered restlessly about the house. At length he came to Vashti where she sat, book in hand, but busy with her own thoughts.
“I’m really worried over the people leaving so to-day,” he said. “Can it be that they are disappointed in me?”
“Why, no,” said Vashti, then asking a question which had been on the tip of her tongue all day: “Can’t you rememberanythingof your sermon?”
“Not a word,” said Sidney, “isn’t it strange?”
“Oh, it’s just a freak of memory,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t mind that,” said Sidney, “but the worrying part is that I seem to remember that I was harsh, that I said cruel things and used the facts you have told me about their own lives to drive in the nails of a cruel argument. Did I do that? Oh, Vashti, tell me. I spoke, it seemed to me, filled with your spirit, so surely I could not have been brutal to them. It is an evil dream.”
His pale face was strained with the pain of his thoughts. Vashti was alarmed by the distress upon his countenance. She rose and took him by the hand.
“Lie down, Sidney,” she said, “and have a little rest. You are troubling yourself needlessly. Dole is full of freakish people. Temperance has quarrelled with all the women about something and they may have rushed off to avoid some dispute. Your flockthink you are perfect. Sleep, Sidney, and forget these troubles. You are too sensitive.” He suffered himself to be led to the green leather couch and stretched himself upon it wearily. She bent above him, passing her strong magnetic hands across his brow, looking at him with almost pitiful eyes. Her pity was that of a vivisector who dares sympathize with the dumb creature he tortures.
Sidney looked up at her between the passes of her waving hands. For an instant his face was glorified, and he saw her again as he had seen her that first day on the old porch of the Lansing house, with her fingers shining like ivory in the sun, and her noble head set like a cameo upon the green background of wild cucumber vine which draped the porch.
He saw her thus, his first, last love, and then closed his eyes and floated forth upon the cloud of golden memory into the dreamless realm of a hypnotic sleep with her voice whispering, it seemed within his very soul, saying “Sleep and forget, sleep and forget.”
And he slept.
It was dusk. Vashti Lansing let herself out of the parsonage, for a wild hour was coming upon her, the proud, impatient despairing spirit was clamouring at her lips for utterance, and she felt as perhaps every married woman feels sometimes that her home afforded her no sanctuary safe from her husband’s intrusion.
And so softly closing the door she fled out intothe night, and as her agitation increased, the moonless night deepened, and lighted only by a few wan stars she fled along the country road, her turmoil of spirit translated into physical energy. And presently she found herself opposite the gaunt boulders of Mullein meadow. Its hopelessness suited her mood. She entered it, and wandering amid its dreary boulders she crucified herself with memories.
As a stoic who longs to know the extent of his endurance she forced herself to pass where she had trodden through the furnace, but she did not linger, for deny the fact as she might, Vashti Lansing was no longer the superbly strong woman she had been.
As the “elm tree dies in secret from the core,” so Vashti Lansing’s strength had been sapped unseen.
She turned dizzily away from the circle of boulders and wandered on, away to the other end of Mullein meadow, and there sank down upon a little knoll known far and near as Witches’ Hill, for it was here, so tradition said, that the unholy fires had been lit to torture the life out of cross-grained old women, with perhaps no worse tempers than their judges, but a poorer art in concealing them. It was because of these executions that Mullein meadow was cursed with barrenness, so said the old story, but Dole, concerned with the practical things of food and raiment, did not trouble its head about old tales, only the school children kept the story alive, daring each other to cross Mullein meadow at twilight, or to bring backa stone from Witches’ Hill, for there was a strange outcropping of stone here different from any in the district.
Vashti sat beneath the wan sky solitary upon one of these stones. She knew well the reputation of the place, but felt a perverse delight in carrying her tortured heart to the spot where the old Vashti had suffered.
Surely her imperious will, her lawless pride, her revengeful spirit, were as stern judges as those who haled her ancestress to her death.
She sighed aloud, and a wind sprang up and caught the breath and wandered with it up and down the dreary field, till all its barrenness seemed to be complaining to the pitiless heavens of the blight laid upon it.
Vashti rose to depart. As she turned away the wind wailed after her and Mullein meadow seemed to cry aloud for its child to be given back to its stony bosom.
Taking no thought that she might be seen, Vashti crossed to the road, and just as she mounted the fence she heard a cry of terror and saw two figures dash away. The shock to her tense nerves was terrible. She sank to the ground and it was some time ere she regained strength to go on, and when she did, skulking cautiously this time in the shadow of the rough stone fence, she encountered no one.
She reached home, stole into the house, and wentto Sidney’s room, where he was reading calmly and cheerfully.
So the day ended in outward calm at the parsonage. Two days later Vashti smiled palely when Mabella, who was a timorous and superstitious little soul, told her how all Dole was terrified because old Mr. Simpson and young Ab Ranger, going past Mullein meadow, had seen the ghost of a witch descend from Witches’ Hill and come straight towards them. They stood their ground till it began to cross the fence, and then they owned frankly they fled, whereupon it vanished into the earth.
It was described as a very tall, black-robed spectre.
Mabella shuddered as she related this story, and her attitude was typical of the attitude of the whole village. This apparition, seen upon the same day that Sidney had preached his terrible sermon, reduced Dole to a state of consternation. What was coming upon them? Mrs. Ranger, whose belief in and reference to “judgments” was very strong, felt an awesome premonition that a general judgment was in close proximity, and prepared herself for it according to her lights by making up with Temperance and giving Ann Serrup a petticoat.
Having thus hedged as best she could, Mrs. Ranger gave herself up to lugubrious anticipation.