BOOK IIAFTERNOON

Hear now our cry for strength to bear the weight of prayers unanswered.—Maarten Maartens.

Hear now our cry for strength to bear the weight of prayers unanswered.

—Maarten Maartens.

CHAPTER XV

The evil base of our society eats right through; that our wealthy homes are founded on the spoliation of the poor vitiates all the life that goes on within them. Somehow or other, it searches through and degrades the art, manners, dress, good taste of the inmates.—Edward Carpenter.

It was a month later, when a train from the east, entering the Fulham station at five o’clock of the February afternoon, brought Keith Burgess and his wife home.

Keith was apparently in fairly good physical condition, and looked and carried himself much as he had when Anna first knew him, although she could now detect the underlying weakness which he strove hard to conceal. He had been told in due time of what was involved in his illness. The shock had been severe both to mind and body, and for a while a serious relapse had seemed imminent. Those days had brought the young wife and husband into a new union of sympathy and suffering, as each strove to bear the burden of their thwarted lives bravely for the other’s sake. Not at that time nor at any later period was it possible for Anna to let Keith know to the full the meaning of this renunciation to her. He knew that to her, as to him, the abandonment of the missionary purpose was a profound and poignant sorrow; he did not know that it was the overthrow of all that had made her life hitherto, and that, whatever new forces and motives might produce out of the elements of her character, the old life, the first Anna Mallison, was slain.

Keith had told her little of what lay before them in his mother’s home, which was now to be theirs; they had been too deeply absorbed in the present emergency to take much thought for the future. This much, however, had been accomplished in a week’s sojourn in Boston: Keith would shortly be appointed to fill a missionary secretaryship, which involved much travel and speaking in the interests of the cause, but permitted him to make his residence in Fulham. The strong hope which Anna clung to silently for herself, as the last pitiful substitute for the calling now denied her, was that she, too, might still accomplish something for the work so urgent in its claims upon her, by presenting it, as occasion offered, among Christian women in her own land. But she knew that her life was no longer in her own hands to shape and direct as she might will; not only was Keith now to be her care, her chief concern and interest, but she looked forward to daughterly duties toward his invalid mother, to whom it was in her mind to minister with loving and faithful devotion.

As the train now drew into the Fulham station, Keith remarked, casually:—

“There’s Foster, all right. I knew he would be on hand.” And, looking from the car platform, Anna saw a grey-haired man-servant in plain livery, who saluted Keith respectfully as he hastened to the spot, and wore an expression of solicitude and responsibility which stamped him at once as an old family servant. As they gave over their hand luggage to this man, and followed him out to the street where a plain closed carriage stood in waiting, an unostentatious “B” on the door showing it to be private, a deep perplexity and confusion began to rise in Anna’s mind. She had gradually become accustomedto the luxuries of the life in the Portland hotel, and had regarded them as incident to the passage of a grave crisis, and justified, perhaps, by the necessities of the case; but she had not been interested in thinking farther along the line of the Burgesses’ worldly status, least of all minded to make it a matter of inquiry, consequently the sight of the man-servant and the family carriage smote her with a sharp sense of entering a new and undreamed-of outward life. In them was the first obvious token which had ever been given her of her husband’s home surroundings and worldly position. A vague anxiety and dread were awakened in Anna by these small signs of a life and habit so widely at variance with her own past of austere privation. She saw the low white cottage figured heretofore in her thought, in the narrow street, fading before her; the geraniums in the window, the cat on the cushion, the braided mats, the wooden rocking-chair, the little table with the Bible and cough-drops, wavered in all their outlines, and fell like a house of cards. How would it be with the figure of the sweet, saintly, patient invalid to whom she was to minister? Must that go too? Anna ceased to speculate, but she sat silent beside her husband, and her heart beat hard.

When the carriage stopped, it was in a fine old quiet street lined with substantial dwellings, and before a large brick house painted a dull drab. The house stood with its broad, low front close to the street; there were many small-paned, shining windows, and a brass knocker on the panelled black front door. Nothing could have been plainer or less pretentious, and yet the house bore, to Anna’s first intuitive perception, its own unmistakable expression of decorous and inflexible dignity and quietly cherished family pride.

As they entered the wide, low-ceiled, oak-wainscoted hall, a neatly dressed middle-aged woman advanced and, speaking in a low voice to Anna, asked if she would follow her up to her rooms, Keith introducing her pleasantly as his mother’s indispensable Jane. No one else was in sight; but Mrs. Burgess’s invalid condition seemed to account sufficiently for this, although Anna had supposed her able to move about the house, and even to go out under favouring conditions.

Keith joined Anna on the stairs, taking her hand in his. He smiled tenderly as he looked into her face, but there was a nervous eagerness upon him which he could not conceal. Was he thinking that he had chosen his wife for far other scenes and a widely different life? She could not tell.

“This was my old room, Anna,” Keith was saying now, as they stood in the doorway of a spacious bedroom with old-fashioned mahogany furniture and handsome but faded chintz hangings. There was a marble chimney-piece, over which hung a large picture of Keith, with a boyish, eager face.

Jane now threw open a door from this room into another of equal size.

“If you please, I was to tell you this is to be Mrs. Burgess’s own sitting room,” she said respectfully, “and the dressing room and bath beyond the bedroom will be for your own use entirely after this,” and she crossed to open another door.

Keith drew Anna on into the sitting room.

“Well, now, this is certainly very kind of my mother,” he said, a flush of grateful pleasure rising in his sensitive face. “See, Anna, this has always been the state apartment,the guest-chamber of the house, and she has had it refitted for our use.”

“How very kind,” said Anna, warmly.

The room was, indeed, in its own manner, grave and subdued, a luxurious parlour, with good pictures, handsome hangings, and soft, pale-tinted carpet.

“I must go down at once and tell the dear mother how we thank her,” said Keith, and Anna, left alone, returned to the bedroom and began to remove her travelling hat.

Jane was beside her at once, giving unneeded assistance.

“Shall I unpack for you directly?” she asked, looking at Keith’s small trunk, which was quite adequate to Anna’s few belongings, added to her husband’s. Anna felt her colour deepen as she declined the offered help, and sat down with a little sigh in a great easy-chair. But she submitted perforce when the maid knelt at her feet, and, quite as a matter of course, removed her shoes. It was the first time since babyhood that this office had been performed for Anna by other hands than her own, and she felt all her veins tingle with a shy reluctance, but sat motionless.

Rising, Jane looked about, Anna thought with a shade of dissatisfaction that there was thus far so little to be done, so scanty a display of the small belongings of luxury.

“When you are ready to dress for dinner,” she said, with a touch of coldness, “I will come if you will just ring the bell. The bell is here,” and she indicated the green twisted cord and heavy silk tassel at the head of the bed. “Mrs. Burgess said she could spare me to wait on you for what you needed to-night,” she added.

“Thank you,” said Anna, gently, but with the quiet unconscious loftiness of her own reserve. “Mrs. Burgess is very good to think of it, but I am accustomed to caring for myself, and so I shall not need to trouble you.”

“Very well, that will be just as suits you, ma’am. I should be pleased to wait on you any time Mrs. Burgess doesn’t need me. Dinner will be at six o’clock, then, if you please.” Thus saying the maid withdrew.

“Keith,” said Anna, with a perplexed countenance, when a few moments later he joined her, “I find I ought to dress for dinner, but I have nothing better to wear than this black gown. You ought to have told me, dear.”

Keith looked down at the straight fashionlessness of Anna’s black figure with unconcealed concern.

“I ought to have thought,” he said, “but it never occurred to me about your clothes. We must get you a whole lot of new things straight away, dear. We will do it together, and have a great time over it, won’t we? And you will put off the black now for my sake? I want to see you in wine-red silk and good lace.”

“Oh, Keith!” cried Anna, “I cannot imagine myself masquerading like that. It would never do. But for to-night—that is the trouble now.”

“Why, wear your wedding-gown, sweetheart; that is just the thing. What luck that we did get that!” and Keith was down on his knees before the trunk on the instant, and soon produced the dress which, being of fine white cashmere, with a little lace about the neck, was, in fact, altogether appropriate.

Anna looked puzzled. It seemed to her almost sacrilegious to put on that dress for everyday use, andthe association with it made her shiver, even now, but she did not dispute the matter.

Just before six o’clock Keith ushered his wife into the library downstairs, where his mother sat waiting to receive them. It was the sort of a library which Anna had read of but had not seen—lined with books, furnished with massive leather-covered chairs and darkly gleaming mahogany, a dim old India carpet on the floor.

Anna saw by the shaded drop-light the form of a small woman of fragile figure, dressed in silver-grey silk, with a white shawl of cobweb fineness of texture about her shoulders. There were several good diamonds at her throat and on her hands, her grey hair was beautifully dressed in soft waves and fastened with a quaint silver comb of fine workmanship. Her face was pale and the features delicately cut; her movement as she advanced to meet Anna was slow, and, in spite of her diminutive size, stately, and there was a crisp, frosty rustle of her grey gown.

She took both Anna’s hands in hers with a cold, kind smile, and kissed her twice on her forehead, Anna bending low for the purpose. She seemed to be at an incalculable height above the fine little lady, and singularly young and immature. At twenty-two she had felt herself a woman for long years, with her sober cares and grave purposes; but to-night, before Keith’s mother, she suddenly seemed to become a shy, undeveloped girl again.

While they spoke a little of the journey and the night, Keith Burgess turned on his heel and affected to be examining, with critical interest, an engraving above the fireplace, which he had seen in the same spot all his life; but he was watching them both aside narrowly as he stood. He was perfectly satisfied.

If Anna had been never so much prettier, and possessed of all of Mally Loveland’s confident social facility; if she had met his mother as the country girl of this type would have done, with eager and affectionate appeal that she should at once stand and deliver motherly sympathy and affection in copious measure,—there would have been only disappointment and chagrin. But Mrs. Burgess’s bearing was not more reserved than that of her daughter-in-law. At twenty-two Anna’s grave repose of manner was in itself a distinction, and one which had its full weight with the elder woman. Plainly, she had not a gushing provincial beauty on her hands to curb and fashion into form. As for good looks, there was a certain angular grace already in figure, an unconscious dignity of attitude and bearing which suited Keith’s mother, while for her face, the eyes were good, the brow very noble, and the expression peculiarly lofty. The succession of strong and sudden emotional experiences through which Anna had recently passed had wrought a subtle change already in her face; there was less severity, less of hard, conscientious rigour in its lines; a certain transparent, spiritual illumination softened the profound sadness which was her habitual expression.

At dinner, a delicately sumptuous meal, served with some state, Anna acquitted herself perfectly, having the instincts of good breeding, the habit of delicate refinement, and having learned at Mrs. Ingraham’s table many of the small niceties which she could hardly have acquired in Haran.

Already, within the first hour, while seeing that her mother-in-law had been physically entirely able to meet her children at her door at their home-coming, Anna perceived the inevitable consistency of her waiting toreceive them in due form and order. Formality and form were essentials of life in this house. This did not oppress Anna particularly, and she liked to look at the cameo-cut delicacy of Mrs. Burgess’s face. Still, perhaps never in her life, never in the cheerless chambers of Mrs. Wilson’s poor house, had Anna known the homesickness with which she ate and drank—that night at her husband’s table.

Poverty and obscurity were old and tried friends to Anna; among them she would have been at home. From wealth and social prominence she shrank with instinctive dread and ingrained disfavour. The familiar austerities of poverty were, to her, denotements of mental elevation, while the indulgences of wealth bore to her thought an almost vulgar pampering of appetite and ministering to sense. The trained perfection of the silent attentive service in itself was an offence to her. Why should those people be turned into speechless automatons to watch every wish and wait upon every need of three other people no more deserving than themselves? Could it ever seem right to her?

She excused herself early. Left alone with him, Mrs. Burgess laid her small hand on Keith’s, saying without warmth but with significant emphasis:—

“You have done very well, Keith, in marrying Miss Mallison. I confess I was not without some apprehension lest the wife who would have been a perfect helpmeet and companion for you in the foreign field might appear at some disadvantage in the life now before you in the ordering of Providence.”

“Anna is so absolutely true, mother, that she cannot be a misfit anywhere, except among false conditions.”

Mrs. Burgess bowed her head.

“I can see that she is a thoroughly exemplary young woman, and while she may have much to learn of social conditions in a place like Fulham, the foundation is all right.” She paused a little, and added reflectively: “Her eyes and hands are extremely good. Her figure will improve. I understand that her father belonged to the Andover Mallisons.”

There was a little flicker of Keith’s eyelids, but he made no reply, taking up casually from the table a book at which he looked with mechanical indifference. It was a volume of Barnes’s “Notes.” This much only of Anna’s vision had had foundation.

CHAPTER XVI

For the most part people do not think at all. They have little phrases and formulas which stand in their minds for thoughts and opinions, and they repeat them parrotlike. Most of their notions and ideas and prejudices are mere extraneous accretions, barnacled on to them by men and books in their passage through life, as shells are on a vessel, but not growing out of them or really belonging to them.—Anon.

Life in her creaking shoesGoes, and more formal grows,A round of calls and cues.—W. E. Henley.

Life in her creaking shoes

Goes, and more formal grows,

A round of calls and cues.

—W. E. Henley.

At the end of the week, on Saturday morning, Anna Burgess was sitting on a low stool in the middle of her bedroom, surrounded by a curious confusion and medley of miscellaneous things. Before her was an open cedar chest of large proportions; its pungent odour was mingled with the spicy smell of winter apples, dried fruits, and maple sugar. From the half unpacked chest, quilts of calico patchwork and soft home-woven blankets were overflowing; piles of snowy linen sheets and pillowcases, finely hemstitched and bordered with delicate thread-work, lay about the floor, together with body linen of equal daintiness, and books in dull and faded binding, while the red apples, rolled everywhere, studded the confused array as commas do a printer’s page.

In the chest still lay some old-fashioned furs and other clothing. Anna, as she sat, had her lap heaped with a quantity of yellowed lace, and a number of small, thin silver spoons. She was reading a letter, and, as she read, unconsciously tears were running down her cheeks.

“You must have known,” wrote Gulielma Mallison, “that I could not let my dear daughter go empty-handed to her new home. The box has been long, however, in being made ready, but I know your husband and his mother will make excuses, the marriage having been so sudden. Lucia and I have taken comfort in sorting out and preparing the things. The linen is, much of it, what was left of my own bridal outfit, but we have bleached it on the snow, and it is still strong. The silver I have tried to divide equally among you all. This is your portion. The little porringer, you know, came over from Germany with my mother, then the Jungfrau Benigna von Brosius.

“I regret that I am unable to provide you with more dresses, etc., but there is little to do with and little to choose from in Haran. Indeed, I hardly ever get to Haran any more, my rheumatism is so bad, and the going has been terrible this winter. We got Lucia’s husband’s sister to buy the white cotton cloth, and sent it back by Joseph when he went down with a load of wood. The brown cloak I shall not be likely to need any more, going out so seldom, and Lucia says she doesn’t begrudge it to you at all, being much too long for her, and it would be a shame to cut off any of that material to waste. You know it is the best of camlet cloth, and there is no wear out to it. I have given Lucia the melodeon, and she says it is only fair that you should have the cloak and the brown silk dress. We got Amanda Turner to make that over for you by an old waist we had of yours. She was here three days, right through the worst snowstorm we have had all winter, and there was nothing to interrupt us. We turned the silk and made it all over. I think we succeeded pretty well.I thought you really ought to have one silk dress, now you are going to live in this country. Of course you’ll be invited out to tea some, there in Fulham. The grey merino will do for afternoons. I made you four aprons, two white, and two check to wear about your work, and you’ll need them afternoons for taking care of your husband’s mother. Please give her my best respects. I send the dried fruit to her,—maybe it will tempt her appetite a little,—and part of the maple sugar, that in the little cakes. Lucia ran it for her especially. We thought maybe they wouldn’t have it down there in Fulham, that was pure.

“I am sorry we haven’t anything better to send Mr. Burgess, but I put in your dear father’s quilted dressing-gown as my particular present; his health being so poor, Lucia and I thought it might be acceptable. The books are for him, from your father’s library....”

The letter dropped in Anna’s lap, and covering her face with both hands, she burst into passionate tears. Her old life, in all its homely, simple sweetness called her mightily, and the sharp sense of her own separation from it now and forever tore her heart. Her mother’s inability to comprehend the new conditions, the eager self-sacrifice which had gladly shorn her own poor life bare of every lingering superfluity of possession that she might equip her child with such small dower as was attainable, had to Anna a pathos which seemed almost too poignant to endure. How well, oh, how well she understood the planning and contriving, the simple joy in each small new object gained; the delight which her mother and Lucia had shared in picturing to themselves her own grateful surprise in the manifold treasures stored in the dear old chest, itself an heirloom of impressivevalue in the Mallison family. And she was grateful beyond words to tell, and pleased and proud to come thus set out to her husband; and yet, these possessions, so unspeakably precious to her, would, she knew only too well, wear a rustic and incongruous aspect in the Burgess household. She knew that Keith and his mother would be gentle and respectful in thought as in word, but she knew the faint embarrassment which they would try to conceal in receiving gifts for which they would have no use; she knew the delicate, half-pitying, well-meaning sympathy, which could never understand, try as it would.

On Sunday morning, Anna attended church with her husband and his mother for the first time, the latter making a great effort, since church-going was far beyond her usual invalid routine. When Anna presented herself in the hall ready to start, Mrs. Burgess, or Madam Burgess as she was generally styled after this time, had bit her lip and almost gasped, such was her amazement and dismay. However, she had said nothing, the situation being plainly hopeless, and she sat in the carriage in speechless anxiety, while Keith’s face reflected the same emotion. He had felt it impossible to interfere with Anna’s arraying herself as she had for church, seeing with his sensitive perception that the garments fashioned and sent her from her home by the hands of her mother and sister, for such a time as this, were in her eyes sacredly beyond criticism or cavil.

Anna now preceded him, following his mother, down the broad aisle of the stately and well-filled church, drawing to herself unconsciously the attention of many eyes. She wore over the soft overshot silk gown the brown camlet cloak which had formed in her mother’seyes the chief glory of her simple trousseau. It was a long, circular cape, falling to the hem of her dress, drawn up about the throat and shoulders with quaint smocking after a forgotten art, and tied with a long, loose bow of changeable brown ribbon. The outlines of this garment were so simple and so natural that it could never, at any period or by any shift of fashion, become awkward, but it had at that time an effect of Puritan-like quaintness. She wore a dark, broad-brimmed hat with falling plumes, according well in simplicity as in colour with her cloak.

As she passed down to the Burgess pew, her height and bearing, the flowing outline of her costume, the purity and unconscious, childlike seriousness of her face with its clear brune pallor, the steady light of her hazel eyes, the lustreless masses of her dark hair, all combined to make a singular impression of mediæval loveliness, of something rare and fine and wholly distinct from the prevalent type of women in the ambitious little city. There were some who, seeing her, smiled and whispered at the quaintness of her dress; there were others who found their eyes irresistibly drawn again and again by the picturesque harmony of her figure; there were one or two persons who, watching the proud, pure severity of her face as she sat with her soul lifted to God and heedless of outward things, saw in her a woman fit for reverence and wonder, one whose spirit had been most evidently nourished on the greatness and simplicity of spiritual realities, and who was yet untouched by “the world’s slow stain.”

And so it came about that Keith Burgess and his mother, who had been dismayed at the lack of conformity to fashion in Anna’s dress at this first appearance intheir world, found themselves met, the service over, by men and women who had admiration and interest, sober and sincere, to express, and much to say aside of the singular distinction, the aristocratic dignity and charm, of the bride. Madam Burgess was not slow to produce the good points of Anna’s ancestry of which she had quickly possessed herself, thus enhancing the favourable impression, and she was ready to accept Anna, cloak and all, herself, when the son of one of Fulham’s leading men, Pierce Everett, an artist newly returned from Paris, came to her with a respectful but eager wish that Mrs. Keith Burgess would at some future day grant him the notable favour of sitting to him for some saint’s face and figure.

There was a little crowd about them as they passed out to their carriage, and much kind and deferential courtesy pressing upon Anna’s notice. A group of young girls on the church steps watched her with shy, awed glances, and murmured to each other that they adored her, she was so different from any bride they had ever seen; she was grave and quiet, and something of pathos and mystery seemed to remove her far from the conscious, fluttering pink-and-white brides of their experience.

The young artist, Pierce Everett, joined a friend, a professor of literature in the local university, Nathan Ward, as he walked away from the church.

“What a study for a saint!” he exclaimed, with enthusiasm. “I did not suppose there was such a woman left in the world. Where can she have been saved up to keep that super-earthly look?”

Professor Ward smiled. After a silence he said,—

“Here’s a conundrum, if it is Sunday: Why is Keith Burgess like St. Francis of Assisi?”

The answer not being forthcoming, Professor Ward presently volunteered it.

“Because he has espoused Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. In Mrs. Keith these three are one.”

Fulham was a small city with a college of no great reputation, which called itself a university by reason of having a divinity school affiliated. Furthermore it was a seaboard town and had had a large shipping trade in former years, now slowly dying a natural death. The aristocratic circle of Fulham—there was but one—was as definitely marked and as strongly defended from invasion as it is possible for such a circle to be, even in an old New England town. In fact, it existed more obviously for its own defence and preservation from the ineligible than for any other reason; and only two classes of citizens were eligible,—namely, those who had some connection with “the university,” and those who inherited either poverty or riches from ancestors engaged in foreign commerce. These two agreed in one, and agreed to rule out all others. Thus the aristocratic circle was necessarily small and its social functions painfully mechanical and monotonous; its maidens were proverbially lacking in personal charms, and its young men, with rare exceptions, fled, escaping to more interesting and varied scenes; but it was supremely satisfied, rejoiced in the distinction of its unattainable exclusiveness, and looked with cold and unrelenting disfavour upon all strangers, newcomers, or fellow-citizens, however meritorious, who failed to possess the sole claims to its ranks.

Madam Burgess enjoyed a double title to membership in this exclusive circle. Her fathers before her, for severalgenerations, had been shipowners residing in the house now her own, to which her husband, the Reverend Elon Burgess, had come, as an eminently suitable adjunct upon their marriage. Mr. Burgess had filled a minor chair in the divinity school for the ten years of their married life; he had not filled even this particularly well, being a man of small calibre, lacking in any trace of original power or talent, but his name was in the university catalogue, and hence his place in the ranks of Fulham’s high social circle safe forever. But, although of limited ability, Professor Burgess was fine of grain and fine of habit, and sincerely pious in a day when to be called pious did not awaken a smile. In the fear and faith of God and in true humility he had lived and died, leaving perhaps no very large and irreparable vacancy, and no overwhelming sense of loss or desolation even to his wife and son, and still having borne—

“without reproachThe fine old name of gentleman.”

“without reproach

The fine old name of gentleman.”

As a girl Sarah Keith had given satisfactory evidence of a “change of heart,” and in a time of profound missionary awakening she had declared herself strongly in sympathy with foreign missions. To the position thus taken she had consistently adhered. All boards and auxiliaries to which she was available claimed her name on their lists. Missionary literature was always scattered abundantly in her library, her gifts were large, and her allegiance to religious interests was so completely taken for granted that it would no more have been questioned in Fulham than her place in its aristocracy. Certainly she never doubted herself that she was essentially a religious woman. Nevertheless, religion, whether personalor in its outreaching toward a world which she would have unhesitatingly called “lost,” consisted for her now in a series of mechanical observances, and in tenacious orthodoxy of opinion it had become a dry husk enclosing a dead seed. The brief blossoming of the religious impulse of her young years over, she had fixed her affections on the small adventitious trappings of “this transitory life,” and denied unconsciously the power of that other life, the form of which she so punctiliously maintained.

Her invalidism was becoming, not inconvenient on the whole, and not wholly imaginary. Such was the woman who was now by the ordering of Providence to rule and direct the unfoldings of Anna’s early womanhood, since Keith Burgess cherished a respect and submission to his mother which would have found something akin in Chinese ancestor-worship. He had reproduced in his own young life his mother’s early missionary fervour; that it was long dead in her case he did not suspect. With Keith this experience had received a strong accent from the temper of his college life, and from the possibility of an actual dedication of himself to the missionary vocation. It had thus become, as we have seen, for a time nobly and completely dominant with him, the strongest passion his life had known. He was himself surprised to find, on his reaction from the crisis of loss and disappointment connected with his illness and the abandonment of a missionary career, how natural and, on the whole, how satisfactory it was to settle back into his own place in his old home, to fall back into the small, comfortable interests of Fulham, and to find full soon an aspect of unreality and even of incongruity clothing his former ardent dream.

Not so Anna.

The ordered precision, the formal, stiff monotony, repeated day after day in her husband’s home, the cold, conventional courtesies, the absence of any purpose save to maintain things in existing form without progress or alteration, for a time exerted upon her an almost paralyzing effect. A torpid dulness, a physical oppression, came upon her when shut up alone to the companionship of Madam Burgess, against which she found it impossible to struggle successfully. Accustomed to serious mental work, to much strenuous bodily labour, to the wholesome severity of long walks in all weathers, and more than all to the stimulus of a great, immediate purpose ennobling every homeliest task and smallest service,—the present life of inaction, of sluggish ease, of absence of responsibility of motive or purpose, was like the life of a prison. A heavy, spiritless apathy overbore every motion to fresh endeavour or to new hopes and incitements. She “fluttered and failed for breath,” and at times her heart seemed bursting with its longing, the old wild, girlish longing, grown still and deep, for freedom and for power.

With mechanical indifference she accompanied Madam Burgess on her daily drives, paid and received visits, shopped, and attended the various prescribed social functions, read aloud to Keith, and made a feint of embroidering the great ottoman cover which her mother-in-law had contrived for her leisure. It was a stag’s head with impossible square eyes, the head partially surrounded by a half-wreath of oak leaves and acorns, staring out of an illimitable field of small red stitches, numberless as the sands of the seashore, and significant, Anna thought wearily, of her endless, monotonous hours.

All the while, just below the surface, repeated through the long days, was the bitter conflict of her spirit, her perpetual, unanswered questioning, Why had God thus dealt with her? Why, with all power to save or heal, had he permitted the illness to come upon Keith which had thus brought to naught what she had supposed was the very and sacred purpose of her creation.

Upon the intensity of youth and a nature of profound and passionate earnestness this thwarting of her dedicated purpose, this apparent rejection of herself from the service of God, worked piteous havoc. Anna did not grow sullen or rebellious, but she felt her whole interior life to be in hopeless confusion. Her sense of an immediate and personal relation to a fatherly God had suffered something like an earthquake shock. All the high faith, the sacred and filial purpose, the profound self-dedication of her girlhood, seemed to have been flung aside by the God whom she had sought to know and serve, with cold, blank indifference, without sign or suggestion of pity, of love, or of amends. The God of whom Mrs. Westervelt had taught her, a conception which she had gradually absorbed and assimilated as her own, a God closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, to whom the heart was never lifted in vain, whose presence could be indubitably felt and known, who answered every holy and devout prayer of his children, and who led them immediately in every thought and action—where was he? Either he existed only in imagination, or she was herself rejected by him as unworthy; and, in a depth below the depth of burning grief, she saw her father likewise despised and rejected.

A great protest, honest and indignant, rose up inAnna’s heart. She knew that, as far as mortal man could be holy and harmless in the eyes of his God, her father had been; and she knew that her own purposes had been blameless and sincere. She refused to quibble with herself in regard to these facts; something staunch and sturdy in her mental constitution—not obstinacy, not pride, but sheer inward honesty—refused to seek accommodation in any forced paroxysm of humility or blind submission. With a sorrow which a lighter nature could not have comprehended, but with characteristic conclusiveness, she said to herself, the stress of her inward conflict spent, “I do not know God,” and composed her spirit in silence to wait.

At the end of a month Keith returned to his class in the Massachusetts Divinity School, with which he was to graduate in June. Immediately thereafter he expected to enter upon the duties of his missionary secretaryship, and make his home in Fulham with his wife and mother.

Thrown thus upon the sole companionship of Madam Burgess, and forced either to make the best of the situation or to appear the crude, undisciplined provincial who sullenly refuses to adapt herself to new conditions, Anna’s native good sense came to her rescue. With strong will she crowded down her mental conflict, while with conscientious earnestness she addressed herself to the duty of making herself a cheerful and sympathetic companion to her husband’s mother, and of filling the social position in which she was undeniably placed, however inscrutable the reasons therefor. New influences came out to meet and win her on every side, and she responded with a social grace, and even facility, which amazed all who had seen her first as the cold, pale, silentgirl whose marriage altar had seemed rather an altar of sacrifice.

An effect of singular charm was produced by this new mental attitude, the opening out of a nature until now so closely sealed. The native seriousness, the fine, direct simplicity, of Anna’s girlhood remained; but they seemed flooded with a new and warmer light, welcome as daily sunshine while the hardness, the rigour, and the severity melted away. She submitted without further protest to the comparative luxury of her surroundings, found it surprisingly agreeable, and discovered a fresh, forgotten joy in simple physical existence, which carried her bravely through the long, dull days of the Burgess order of life.

Notwithstanding all these things, below the surface of her life, often below the surface of her thought, lay an unplumbed depth of spiritual loneliness, a sense of double orphanhood, a voice which cried and would not be stilled; for while men and women had come near, of God she had become shy, feeling toward him as toward a dearest friend grown cold.

But one night, as she lay alone and wakeful, tears painful, not easily flowing, wetting her pillow, a sudden thought stung her by its throbbing wonder and delight, seeming great enough to reconcile all things, even God, who had filled her with bitterness, and hedged her about in all her ways.

She said to herself, “It may be I shall have a child,” and the deep places of her nature called to each other in joy and exultation; and she knew that, if this grace should be given her, all would yet be clear, and she could still believe in God’s love, and in his purpose in her life.

So, blindly groping through the rough and thorny way by which humanity has sought God through many ages, this human soul, sincere and humble, perpetuated the heart-breaking fallacy of conditioning the Divine Love, the Eternal Power and Godhead, on the small mutations of her own life, seen at short range.

CHAPTER XVII

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control—So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,Spring the foundations of that shadowy throneWhere man’s one nature, queen-like, sits alone,Centred in a majestic unity.—Matthew Arnold.

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,

Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control—

So men, unravelling God’s harmonious whole,

Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours.

Vain labour! Deep and broad, where none may see,

Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne

Where man’s one nature, queen-like, sits alone,

Centred in a majestic unity.

—Matthew Arnold.

To some minds there is nothing more pathetic in human experience than the patient resignation with which average men and women accommodate themselves to the most disastrous and distorting of griefs and disappointments, nothing more amazing than their power to endure. If something of the brute nature is in us all, it is not always and altogether the animalhood of greed or of ferocity, but far more commonly the mute, uncomprehending submission of sheep and oxen. Though the futility of revolt is so apparent, the infrequency of it in human lives does not cease to surprise. The modern Rachel mourns for her children, and will not be comforted, but she goes about the streets in conventional mourning, orders her house with decent regularity, and probably, in the end, goes abroad for a time, and returning, enters with apparent cheerfulness into the social round. The modern Guelph or Ghibelline, banished from the political or intellectual activities which made life to him, finds readily that raving against time and fate is no longer good form, reads his daily paperwith unabated interest, and enjoys a good dinner with appetite unimpaired. Very probably the man’s and the woman’s heart is broken in each instance, but what then? Life goes on, and the resiliency of the mainspring in a well-adjusted piece of human mechanism may be usually guaranteed, with safety, to last a lifetime.

In a year after her marriage Anna Burgess was diligently at work along the conventional lines of activity of her day for religious young women at home,—writing missionary reports, distributing literature, collecting dues. She saw nothing better to do. Her own private and innermost relation to God, it was true, had been dislocated, but the heathen remained to be saved.

One morning, Keith being away from home, Anna came into Madam Burgess’s sitting room, her cheeks slightly flushed, her eyes shining, a letter in hand.

“May I read you this?” she asked eagerly; “I have been invited to give an address at the foreign missionary conference next month in H——. What if I could! I should be so glad.” Her eyes told the new and eager hope which this summons had stirred within her.

An added degree of frost settled upon her mother-in-law’s face.

“You can hardly mean, Anna,” she said, “that you would be willing to speak in public?”

“But our missionaries do, and sometimes others,” Anna replied anxiously.

“The case of missionaries is, of course, entirely exceptional; and they should never be heard, in my opinion, before mixed audiences. As for other women making spectacles of themselves, it would seem to be enough to remind you, Anna, of the words of the Apostle Paul onthat subject. You would hardly attempt, I think, to explain them away.”

Anna was silent.

“A woman who has a noble Christian husband, my dear,” continued Madam Burgess, more gently, feeling her case now won, “as you have, who is already at work in this very field of labour, has no occasion to leave the sacred shelter of her own home, and lift up her voice and exhibit her person in public gatherings.”

“Keith always said that I might still have a chance to do a little work in this way; I am sure he approved,” and Anna’s low voice faltered, her heart full just then of the memory of those first days of their common sorrow.

“You have a very indulgent husband, and it is not strange if, in the first fond days of your married life, he may have unwisely yielded to some mistaken sense of duty on your part, and apparently committed himself to a purpose which he would later realize to be impracticable. Understand me clearly, my dear,” and the term of endearment sounded, from Madam Burgess’s lips, as sharp as the point of an icicle, “my son’s wife can never, without flying in the face of all her holiest obligations, both to God and man, present herself before an audience of people as a public speaker. A woman who does this violates the very law of her being, she ceases to be womanly, ceases to be modest, and loses all that feminine delicacy which is woman’s chief ornament.”

The finality of these remarks clearly perceived, Anna rose from her chair, and left the room in silence. She never returned to the subject, but simply buried in her heart one more high hope of service.

This was the first time that Anna’s inexperience and young ardour had joined direct issue with Madam Burgess’ssocial creed. For a while everything had gone so smoothly that Anna’s first sense of disparity had been soothed to rest; all things being new, she had failed to see the full significance of certain limitations which hedged her in. Little by little she learned this, and learned the inevitable submission. She never appealed to Keith from his mother, controlled by a sense of the essential ugliness and vulgarity of a domestic situation in which the different elements are working and interworking at variance with each other. Furthermore, she learned very soon that, however sympathetic and gentle Keith might show himself toward her, he would, in the end, range himself on his mother’s side of every question.

Stratagem and indirection were alike alien to Anna’s nature and habit, but she inevitably learned, in process of time and experience, to avoid leading Madam Burgess to a declaration of definite positions, while she sought to enlist her husband’s sympathies in her own undertakings before his mother was made acquainted with them. Any plan which was brought before her by her son was comparatively acceptable to the elder woman. Thus wisely ordering her goings as women learn to do, Anna succeeded in reaching a fair degree of independence and at the same time a harmonious outward order. Her sacrifices and disappointments, the gradual paring down of her larger hopes and the dimming of her finer aspirations, she kept to herself.

Pierce Everett, the young artist who had spoken of Anna’s fitness for a model of a saint, had carried out his purpose, and had formally requested her to pose for him. With the cordial approval of both Madam Burgess and Keith, Anna had consented, and late in the winterthe sittings began in Everett’s studio, which was in his father’s house. Madam Burgess brought Anna to the house for the first sitting. They were received by the mother of the artist, an intimate friend of Madam Burgess, and the older ladies then laughingly gave Anna over into Everett’s hands while they enjoyed a discussion of certain benevolent committee matters.

In the studio a little talk ensued regarding the projected sittings, and various considerations involved in them. These matters understood, Anna said composedly:—

“I am ready, Mr. Everett, if you will tell me just what you wish. I do not even know for what I am to be painted.”

“And you will not object, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quickly, “if I do not tell you now? It is in a character which could not, I am sure, displease you, but I think it would be decidedly better that we should not discuss it, and that you should have no definite thought of it. Is this satisfactory to you?”

“Entirely so.”

“Very well.”

Immediately upon this Everett took his place at the easel and began a first rapid sketch of Anna’s head. He was a slight fellow, below the medium height, with a delicate, almost transparent face, a red Vandyke beard, and large and brilliant brown eyes. Quick and nervous in speech and gesture, he had the clear-cut precision of a man who knows both his means and his end.

Anna thought him very interesting.

At the second sitting their talk chanced to turn upon the relation of the ideals of men and women to their practical lives, and Everett told Anna the old story ofCarcassonne, which was new to her. The train of thought thus suggested soon absorbed her, so that she forgot him and what he was doing. The sacred hope of her own life, yet unfulfilled, still centring in the hope of her father, the ever receding purpose of which she never spoke, cast its powerful influence upon her.

For half an hour neither spoke. Then Everett’s friend, Professor Ward, came into the room in familiar fashion, and the two men talked of many things.

When Anna left Nathan Ward said, looking over his friend’s shoulder:—

“If you can keep that look, you will make a great picture.” Then he added, “But don’t fail to get her hands. They have the same expression.”

After that it became an habitual thing for Ward to drop into the studio at these sittings. It never occurred to Anna that her presence had anything to do with his coming. She supposed he had always come. He talked very little with her, but she liked to listen to his talk with Everett. It was distinctly novel to her—light, rambling, touch-and-go, and yet full of underlying thought and suggestion. Anna had known few men at best, none of the order to which these two belonged, men conversant with art and literature, music and poetry, and modern life on all its sides. Much that they said puzzled and perplexed her, but she found an eager enjoyment in it.

Then one day Professor Ward said to her, apropos of Shelley, of whom they had been speaking:—

“You do not join in this discussion, Mrs. Burgess. I am quite sure you could give us opinions much wiser than ours.”

Anna’s colour deepened as she answered:—

“I have not read Shelley in a great many years. Indeed, I know nothing of literature.”

There was a little silence; Anna hesitated, half inclined to say a word in explanation of a fact which she plainly saw the two men found very surprising, but finally, finding the explanation too personal and too serious, remained silent.

As she started to walk home from the Everett’s, Professor Ward joined her, asking to walk with her. He was a man of forty, with a wife and a flock of little children. Anna knew the family slightly, but pleasantly.

“Mrs. Burgess,” the professor began, as they walked down the quiet street, “I do not want to intrude or to be found inquisitive, but I am so puzzled by what you said a little while ago that I really wish you felt inclined to enlighten me. I know you never speak with the exaggeration and inaccuracy which is so much the habit of young ladies, and so I accept what you said as to your ignorance of literature as sober truth. But you are a well-educated woman. How can it be?”

Anna was almost glad of a chance to explain. She was facing many new questions in these days, and she felt the need of light. She answered therefore at once, with frankness:—

“I deliberately gave up study on all these lines when I became a Christian. I supposed them to be contrary to the absolute consecration of my life to God.”

Professor Ward looked perplexed.

“You cannot understand,” Anna said timidly. “I have felt since I have been in Fulham as if the language of my religious life in those days would be an unknown tongue here. I see that I am right. To you, Professor Ward, I am sure such a sense of duty as I speak of isunintelligible, but I can still say it was sincere. And it was not an easy sacrifice to make, for I had already grown fond of poetry, and longed to know more in a way I could never express.”

“I see,” said her companion, gravely; “you felt that the study of the work of men like most of our poets, whose religious positions were vague and not formulated according to our creeds, was likely to act unfavourably upon your spiritual life and experience.”

“Yes. To divide my heart, to dim my sense of a one, single aim in life.”

“And that aim?”

“To serve God directly in every thought and word. That, and to try to save the souls of the lost.”

Professor Ward had no key to the profound sadness with which Anna spoke, but he watched her face with earnest interest. She spoke with the unconsciousness of absolute sincerity. He was reflecting, however, on how much easier life might be if one could sustain, undisturbed, such bare simplicity of conception of human relations.

“And so,” he said slowly, “you were going to prune away every instinct, every faculty of your nature which did not serve the immediate purpose of furthering what men call sometimes ‘the cause of religion,’ and know and feel and be one thing only?”

Anna bent her head in assent.

“That is precisely what men and women do who seek monastic life.”

Anna looked up at Professor Ward in quick surprise and instinctive protest.

“Yes,” he said, with emphasis, “it was just as noble and just as cowardly, just as weak and just as strong, asthe impulses which make monks and nuns. It is what people do who are afraid of life, who do not dare to encounter the whole of it, who have not reached the highest faith in either God or man.”

“Then you think such a resolution, such a scheme of life, produces weak natures, not strong ones?” asked Anna, looking up with her honest, steadfast gaze into his eyes.

“I should say narrow natures, and yet I fear I ought to say weak ones too. Mrs. Burgess, do you not see yourself the weakness, the narrowness, of the position? It is what might be called the department system of human life,” and Professor Ward, with rapid gestures, indicated the drawing of sharp lines. “It is as if you said to your ego, your soul—yourself—whatever,—Go to now, this department of your life is religious; it sings hymns, reads a collection of sacred writings at regular hours, prays, gives away money to build churches, and performs various other exercises definitely stamped as godly. This other department loves nature, exults in beauty, pours itself into poetic thought, rejoices in music, expresses itself in art: but all this is secular, pagan—all men may have this in common who have not accepted my particular conception of the divine nature and its dealings with men; consequently all this is to be cut off—effaced, fought with to the death. Am I right?”

Anna nodded, her face very grave, her breath quickened.

“Does that seem to you a reasonable or even a noble conception? There was nobleness, I grant you, in the struggle, just as there was in the fortitude of the Spartans; but who feels now a desire to imitate that sheer, barbaric effacing of human feeling? No, no. Thatday has passed. We can begin to see life whole to-day; we can see God in nature, in poetry, in beauty, in ugliness even. He is all and in all. All things are ours and we are God’s! I wish I could make this clear to you.”

“You have, in part,” said Anna, simply.

“No way, however tortuous, by which men have groped after God can be indifferent to us, if we have the right sense of humanity. Trust yourself, Mrs. Burgess; trust the human heart throughout the ages. Believe me, with all the drawbacks, all the falls, and all the blunders, it has been an honest heart and is worthy of reverence and devout study. ‘Trust God: see all, nor be afraid.’”

“I have seen only one side of life, one conception of human nature.”

“That, at least, was a high and lofty one. For stern heroism of thought, commend me to that old New England Calvinism in which I see you were nurtured. It was fine; I glory in it, just as I glory in heroism everywhere, builded up on however mistaken a foundation. The worst of it, however, is that it completely deceives the human heart as to itself. It is terrible in its power to mislead. The elect are not as elect by half as they suppose. Calvin himself helped to burn Servetus, which was not really fine of him, you know. But I have said enough. I hope I have not wounded you?”

“I do not think so,” said Anna, smiling faintly, “but I am amazed beyond everything. All that you say is so new.”

They had reached Professor Ward’s house, which was very near that of Madam Burgess.

“I wish you would come in a moment,” said Ward,very gently; “you know my wife always likes to see you, and I want to show you some books in which I think you would be interested.”

Without reply, Anna passed through the gate which he held open for her, and they entered the house together. Mrs. Ward met them, and they all went into the professor’s study.

In a few moments Anna was lost in the realm of books so long self-closed to her experience. She sat at his desk, and Ward handed her and heaped about her rare and beautiful volumes until she became bewildered with the sense of intellectual richness and complexity. She looked up at last, as he bent over her, turning the leaves of a beautiful old Italian edition of Dante’s “Commedia,” and, with a smile beneath which her lips trembled, she asked, like a child:—

“Tell me truly, is all this for me, righteously, safely?”

“Did I not tell you?” he asked gently. “‘All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.’”

With that day Anna returned to the long-sealed books of her father’s love and her own. She read and studied under Professor Ward’s guidance and direction, steadily and with eager delight. She did this with no further misgiving or doubt. He had succeeded in satisfying her conscience, and she moved joyfully along the clear lines of her inherited intellectual choice.

As for her father and the example of renunciation he had given her, her heart was at rest. That which was perfect being come for him, was not that which had been in part done away?

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