CHAPTER V

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word;For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word;

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

And yet Anna was the very apple of his eye. Of such fibre was the altruism of that rugged first growth.

CHAPTER V

Life! life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,Love, Love alone can poreOn thy dissolving scoreOf harsh half-phrasings,Blotted ere writ,And double erasingsOf chords most fit.—Sidney Lanier.

Life! life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,

Love, Love alone can pore

On thy dissolving score

Of harsh half-phrasings,

Blotted ere writ,

And double erasings

Of chords most fit.

—Sidney Lanier.

From the time of the missionary meeting and the announcement of his daughter’s determination to devote herself to the service of Christ in a heathen land, Samuel Mallison’s health declined rapidly. HisNunc Dimittiswas of literal import, and prophetic.

Whether the death which all who loved him saw that he was soon to accomplish could be called dying of heart-break or dying of fulfilled desire, would have been hard to determine. Heart and flesh cried out against the separation from his best-beloved child, while the triumphant spirit blessed God for answered prayer, and for the fruition in that cherished life of his child of hopes and aspirations which had been but scantily fulfilled in his own.

“I have not been a successful man, Anna,” he said to her one autumn day when they were alone in his study. He sat erect in his straight chair, but with an unmistakable languor in every line of face and frame, and with a feverish brightness in his prominent dark eyes.

Anna laid her hand upon his with endless gentleness.

“No man in Haran is so beloved, father. No man has done so much good.”

“Perhaps,” he answered sadly, “and I am satisfied. It is the will of God. Anna, I have seemed, perhaps, cold and silent, and without feeling as you have seen me; but the fire within has burned unceasingly, and I am consumed.”

The last words were spoken lower and with an unconscious pathos which moved Anna unspeakably.

“I do not understand, father dear, not fully. Can you tell me all? I love you so.”

They were the simplest words of the most natural affection, and yet it was the first time in her life that Anna had spoken after this sort to her father.

“My girl,” he said simply, taking her hand within his own. Then, after a pause, he continued speaking.

“It is after this manner that life has gone with me. I believe I ought to retrace my past with you—for perhaps there may be light upon your path, if you know all. When I entered the ministry it was with sincerely right purpose; all the influences of my life pointed me in that direction, but it was, perhaps, more as an intellectual and congenial profession than from deeper reasons. I began my ministry, in 1841, in Boston. I was considered to have certain gifts which were valued in that day, and all went well, on the surface. But it was the period of a literary awakening in our nation, of which Boston was the centre of influence. An American literature was just becoming a visible reality, and a new impulse was at work and stirring everywhere. Men of original force were suddenly multiplied before us, and the contagion of intellectual ambition was felt in an altogether new degree. To me it became all-controlling. Transcendental philosophy,Platonism, and classic learning acquired for me a supreme attraction, and I gave myself more and more to the study of them, and to the translation of Greek poetry. This had no unfavourable effect upon my preaching in the opinion of my congregation, rather the reverse, and I may say without vanity that I had reached comparatively early a certain eminence to which I was by no means indifferent.”

Samuel Mallison paused a moment, while Anna silently reflected that this narrative would in the end explain the buried books of her dear old garret delight.

“Learning was young among us in those days, Anna,” Samuel Mallison began again humbly, after a little space, “else this would not have happened; in the year 1848 I received a call to a professorship of the Greek language and literature in Harvard College.”

Anna felt her own young blood rush to her cheeks in pride and wonder and amazement. To her little-village simplicity and scanty experience this seemed a surpassing distinction, and one which placed her father among the great men of the earth.

“The day after the mind of the authorities had been made known to me, was the day of my life which I remember best,” Samuel Mallison continued.

“I went to my study that morning with a programme of what would take place somewhat definitely before my mind. I was about to seek, humbly and devoutly, an interview with God, in which I would lay before him this new and momentous opening in my life, and seek to have his will for me made clear. What this will would be, or what I should take it to be, was, just below the surface of my mind, a foregone conclusion. In fact, my letter of acceptance was substantially framedin my mind already. I had never been favoured with voices and visions and revelations clear and conclusive in my religious experience, and I foresaw a decision based upon general reasonableness and preference, touched with a pleasant sense of the divine favour, which might naturally be expected to rest upon so congenial a course, and one so worthily justified by precedent. I read, as a preparatory exercise, with perfect satisfaction, the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel, then closed my Bible and knelt in prayer. This was exactly as I had foreseen—an orderly series of exercises befitting my position. But, oh; how mechanical, how cold, how barren! With such perfunctory practices I could think to take leave of the sacred calling of the ministry, so dead had my spirit grown to the claims of the blessed gospel, and its mission of salvation to a lost and perishing world!

“I knelt and thought to pray, but, like the king in ‘Hamlet’, my words flew up, my thoughts remained below. Between me and Him whom I would have approached, interposed, like a palpable barrier, a solemn reiterated echo of words just read: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it.’

“I rose from my knees and walked up and down the room in great anxiety of spirit. This new work which I thought to undertake was educational, ennobling, necessary; in no way contrary to sound doctrine, in no way a betrayal of sacred responsibility; I was fitted for it by nature, by tastes, and attainments. Why was it opened to me? To mock me? to tempt? I couldnot believe it, I had welcomed it as coming in the providence of God.

“But my heart-searching grew swift and deep, and it was given me to see the absoluteness, the finality, of the vows which I had assumed, from which I straightway realized that no argument of those with which I was equipped sufficed to release me. Feebly and imperfectly, yet sensibly, I began to grasp the import of what the apostle calls the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, the being made conformable unto his death. Oh, the depth of the mystery hid in that saying! All these years I have sounded it—Anna, all these years I have died, in my own natural life—I have striven to give all I had to give, but the ‘much fruit’—where has it been?”

An expression of pain, hardly less than agony, was impressed upon Samuel Mallison’s face, and Anna hid her eyes, finding it too bitter to bear to see him suffer thus.

“I put it all away from me, then and there. Nothing was possible but for me to decline the invitation which had been given, you can see. Further, I saw that my studies had been my snare. My love of poetry and philosophy and learning, the prominence of my pulpit, the social and intellectual affinities I had formed, all had contributed to my spiritual deadness and decline. It was then that I put away in that box, now upstairs, the books which had particularly ministered to the tastes which had led me so far from the true conception of my life work. Never since that day have I allowed myself to follow the instinct for poetic expression. That longing had to be cut out, even if some life-blood flowed in the doing it. Henceforth, I wished to know nothingbut Christ, and him—Anna, do not fail to grasp this—him, not triumphant, butcrucified. The offence of the cross to the natural spirit, how hardly can it be overcome! No child’s play, no easy and harmonious growth in grace, has it been to me, but a conflict all the way. Your mother has a different type of religious life. Be thankful if her temperament shall prove to be yours.

“That is the story. I left my church not very long after and sought this rugged, remote section, because it offered hard work and a needy field, which some men shunned. Some years before I had met your mother, and we were married. Twenty years of my life and its best activity have been spent here in Haran. Those first few years and what made life to me in them I have looked upon as a false start. From that day, I sought only this one gift: an especial enduement of the Holy Spirit to give me power with men unto salvation. I desired this gift supremely, but I have not received it in any signal manner. My ministry has not been wholly unfruitful, but it has been lacking in the results for which I hoped; I have not had power with God and men, as have some of my more favoured brethren. The end is near now, very near, but I come with almost empty hands and a humbled, contrite heart to meet my Judge. But, my child, whatever the conflicts of the past years, the last thing which I could wish for to-day would be to have reversed that early decision. My life, from the merely human point of view, might, perhaps, on the line of intellectual effort have been counted successful, while as a minister of Christ it has not been so to any marked degree: but what is success, and what failure, when the things of time fade before our eyes?”

Samuel Mallison’s head drooped upon one supportinghand, and an expression of solemn musing rested on his face, while Anna’s tears flowed fast.

“Just to do our own little day’s work faithfully, not knowing what its part may be in the great whole, just to hold fast to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, and, having begun the race, to continue to the end—is not this enough?”

There was silence between them for some moments, and then the father said, making a sign to Anna to rise:—

“I want you to leave me now, dear child. I must rest. The one earthly hope to which I still cling is that to you may be given the reward of ‘much fruit,’ which I have failed to win. Remember this, if all the other teaching I have given you shall be forgotten in the years which are to try you, of what stuff you are made:with greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”

Anna Mallison listened to these words with reverent sympathy and loving response, but the deeper meaning of them did not reveal itself to her, her time for perception being not yet fully come.

CHAPTER VI

O Joy, hast thou a shape?Hast thou a breath?How fillest thou the soundless air?Tell me the pillars of thy house!What rest they on? Do they escapeThe victory of Death?—H. H.

O Joy, hast thou a shape?

Hast thou a breath?

How fillest thou the soundless air?

Tell me the pillars of thy house!

What rest they on? Do they escape

The victory of Death?

—H. H.

In the largest theatre of the New England city of Springfield on a night in December, an immense assembly of people was gathered. Every gallery was crowded to its utmost, and the house, from floor to roof, was a dense mass of human beings. On the stage were musical instruments, but the customary scenery was withdrawn, save that the background showed a Neapolitan villa situated on the slope of a Swiss mountain, at the base of which an ultramarine ocean heaved stormily. Against the incongruity of this unstable structure were massed several hundred men and women, and before them a musical leader, baton in hand. At an appointed signal the great chorus stood, and with them, at the gesture of a man, himself seated near the centre of the foreground of the stage, the whole audience, with a rushing sound like the sea or the wind, rose also.

Then there was sung by the chorus, with trained perfection, an old hymn, the words of which, as well as the melody, were of quaint and almost childish simplicity:—

“Alas, and did my Saviour bleed?And did my Sovereign die?Would he devote that sacred headFor such a worm as I?Was it for crimes that I had doneHe groaned upon the tree?Amazing pity, grace unknown,And love beyond degree.”

“Alas, and did my Saviour bleed?

And did my Sovereign die?

Would he devote that sacred head

For such a worm as I?

Was it for crimes that I had done

He groaned upon the tree?

Amazing pity, grace unknown,

And love beyond degree.”

With a swift motion of his baton the leader indicated that the whole assembly was to join in singing the refrain, in lowered voices. There followed in a deep murmur of a pathos quite indescribable:—

“Remember me, remember me,Oh, Lord, remember me!And when thou sittest on thy throneDear Lord, remember me.”

“Remember me, remember me,

Oh, Lord, remember me!

And when thou sittest on thy throne

Dear Lord, remember me.”

At the close of this hymn many people in all parts of the house were in tears, but the hush of motionless silence following was complete, and the eyes of all were riveted upon that central figure on the stage, the man who now rose and, advancing to the front, began to address them.

This man was of majestic personal presence and his speech was with marked power. Thinly veiled under a manner of unusual restraint and quietness lay a genius for emotional appeal and for persuasion. There was in his manner and speech an utter absence of excitability, and yet a quality which excited; a capacity for impassioned eloquence, apparently controlled and held back by the speaker’s will. The congregation listened with absorbed attention.

At the close of the address, which was designed to move all the impenitent or irresolute persons present to an immediate confession of their need of a Saviour, the speaker asked those of this class who were present andwere so inclined to advance and take certain seats, directly in front of the stage, which had been reserved for them.

A close observer would have been interested in watching the man as this part of the evening’s work was ushered in. The restrained intensity of his manner was noticeably augmented; his eyes moved slowly and searchingly from one part of the house to another with a gaze which no trifler and no awakened soul might escape. The expression of his face was sternly solemn, even tragical, as of one undergoing an actual travail of spirit. He stood absolutely motionless save for a single and significant gesture of his right hand, an upward gesture made with peculiar slowness and with dramatic effect. It was at once entreating, subduing, and commanding.

At the first moment no person stirred; but presently, as if drawn by an irresistible magnetism, a stream of men and women could be seen advancing down the various aisles, with fixed look, pallid faces, and sometimes with tears. Upon such the speaker bent a look of gentleness and encouragement, in which his features would be momentarily relaxed, only to resume the profound solemnity already spoken of, as he lifted his eyes again to the unmoved masses still confronting him.

The chorus, without rising, now chanted softly the words of vivid appeal:—

“Why not to-night? Why not to-night?Thou wouldst be saved, why not to-night?”

“Why not to-night? Why not to-night?

Thou wouldst be saved, why not to-night?”

Many moments passed. The company of seekers now numbered a hundred. Beneath the absolute outward restraint which held all, an inner excitement grew steadily in intensity, and the subtle contagion of “thecrowd” assumed an irresistible sway. It might have become alarming. It possessed elements of terror just below the surface. A climax was reached when a man of gigantic frame and brutalized features, in the upper gallery, stepped forward, and with a gesture rude and almost wild, flung out his arms toward the evangelist, and called through the silence of the place:—

“I give in—you knew I’d have to. Yes, I’m comin’.” And then, turning, clattered down the bare gallery stairs, only to reappear presently below, with his coarse head bent and big tears flowing down his purple cheeks.

Gradually the stream of seekers abated, and the aisles became empty. Thus far no word of appeal or warning had been added to the sermon; save for the restrained monotony of the music this extraordinary scene had taken place in complete silence.

Then the speaker’s voice was heard again, and in it was a strange emotional quality which had been previously unnoticed, and before which the pride and will of many melted within them.

“The people of this company are dismissed to their homes,” he said, in gentle, measured tones; “my work now is for those who have feared God rather than men. They will remain. Let all others go without unnecessary delay, or stopping for speech with one another. The Spirit is here.”

The benediction followed, but as they broke up, scores hitherto irresolute turned and joined the company of seekers in the front of the house.

When the speaker, the house being otherwise emptied, came down to the anxious and disquieted little company waiting for his guidance, he stood before themin silence for a little space, and then, turning to a group of clergymen who were associated with him, he said:—

“Pardon me, but I believe I will leave these friends in your hands, brethren. I wish to return immediately to my lodging,” and saying nothing further in explanation or apology, he departed, with evident haste.

When he reached the lobby of the theatre he found three men watching who hastened toward him, their spokesman, with outstretched hand, introducing himself and his companions and adding, with eager cordiality:—

“This is so much better than we expected. We were prepared to wait for you some time.”

The man received the greeting gravely, and, indeed, silently.

“Will you come with us now to our hotel? We wish to confer with you. We have come from New York for that purpose.”

“Will you not let me know what you wish here, at once?” was the rejoinder. “I am in some haste.”

“Certainly, certainly, if you prefer it,” said the other, cheerfully, hiding a shade of discomfiture. Then, with a change to serious emphasis, he proceeded: “We want you to undertake a work in New York this winter, as soon as possible, in fact. A large group of prominent churches is ready to unite in the movement, and unlimited resources will be placed at your disposal. Your own compensation, pardon me for alluding to it, will be anything you will name—that is a matter of indifference to the committee, save that it be large enough. We are ready to build you a tabernacle two hundred feet square,—larger if you like.”

The man addressed involuntarily laid his hand on his breast; a letter in the pocket under his hand, from Chicago,specified a tabernacle three hundred feet square. He smiled slightly; even religious zeal was a size larger in Chicago than elsewhere.

Further details were mentioned, but the evangelist seemed to give them a forced and mechanical attention. Then, rather suddenly, he broke in with a word of apology.

“I am fully sensible, gentlemen,” he went on, “of the confidence you have manifested in me, and I would, under other conditions, have accepted your proposition. But the very circumstance of your making it to-night hastens an action on my part which I have been approaching, but had not, until now, definitely determined upon. I am about to withdraw from this work, and can form no engagements, however promising. I shall close the meetings here as soon as I can honourably do so, and these meetings are, for the present certainly, my last.”

The blank faces of the three men before him seemed to demand a word or two more.

“My reasons?” he asked with curt and almost chilling brevity. “Pardon me. They are personal to myself. Good evening. No one can regret your disappointment more than I.” With these words the speaker turned abruptly from the little group and left the theatre. In great amazement and perplexity the committee of three presently followed his example.

Here was an accredited and earnest man, no irresponsible religious tramp, who possessed, apparently in a superlative degree, the gift of winning souls for which Samuel Mallison had given his all, if in vain, and for lack of which he might fairly be said to be dying, being one who could have lived on spiritual joy, if such had ever been his portion. And this man, possessing thiscoveted and crowning religious endowment, was deliberately putting it aside, and refusing to use it. What did it signify?

Anna Mallison had left Haran, in its ice-bound valley, early that morning, and, by travelling through snowdrifts in a sleigh all the forenoon, had been favoured to get as far as Springfield on her journey, at nine o’clock of that same evening. She was bound for Boston, where she was to go before the missionary board to be examined as to her fitness and promise for a worker on the “foreign field.”

At the Springfield station Anna had been met by the little missionary lady whom she had heard and met in Haran on her night of great decision. By her she had been conducted to a hotel, shown to a room, affectionately if reticently counselled, and then left to sleep and be ready for another early start on the following morning. It was the first time Anna had ever been in a city, and she was bewildered by the noise and lights in the streets through which she had been hurriedly driven.

Left alone, she looked about her at the stiff order of the narrow hotel chamber, the first she had ever inhabited, the showy, shabby carpet, the cheap carvings of the furniture, the long mirror in which she herself stood, still and dreary, and a rushing wave of heart-sickness swept over her. Her anxiety for her father became suddenly poignant; a sense of the sadness of his life tore her heart with fierce pain: she realized now, as she had failed to before, how fast his strength declined. She longed to know how that moment fared with him, and how the next would. A wild purpose seized herto return the next morning to Haran, and let all other purposes go until some later time.

However, in spite of all this anxiety and doubt, Anna’s physical weariness was sufficient to bring sleep apace, when once her head was on the pillow, and all the distant murmur of the city and the sudden, uncomprehended noises of the great house were soon lost to her. Thus she failed to hear a man who entered the room next to hers within the same hour, who closed the door with some emphasis and locked it fast; who, after that, walked up and down within the narrow limits of that room with uniform, slow step, and who continued to do this until the December dawn filtered through the dim windows. All was still in that next room when Anna awoke. The anxiety and homesickness of the night before were gone, and in their place was that mysterious joy which once before on a June night had strangely visited her. Again, in her dream, she had seen the face which ever since had dominated her; as before, it was majestic, free, and strong. As before, it had bent to her,—

“Bent down and smiled.”

She rose hastily, glad and awed and greatly wondering. At six o’clock she was ready and went down to the great dining-hall, dark save for the wan light of a single gas jet under which she sat down, silent and alone, and was served by a heavy-eyed, untidy man-servant, with an indifferent breakfast. She swallowed a few mouthfuls by force of will, then gathered up her humble belongings, and started out alone into the icy chill of the grey morning. It was too early for her friend from the Orient to brave the rigours of the unaccustomedwinter. It was all comfortless, dreary, and inauspicious; small cheer for a young girl starting on such an errand, but there was no sinking now of her spirit. She walked to the Springfield station in the light and warmth of that inexplicable radiance of her dream, and so pursued her journey to Boston.

FROM ANNA MALLISON’S NOTE-BOOK

Do you believe in the mutual penetration of mind? Do you believe that, independent of word and voice, independent of distance, from one end of the world to the other, minds can influence and penetrate one another?... Do you not know a soul can feel within it another soul which touches it?

—Père Gratry.

January 28, 1870.—A week to-day since my father was buried. It is late at night, and I have come up to my little roof room, but I cannot sleep. I have been with my mother, and we have cried together, until she sleeps at last, so tired, and her dear face changed so sadly that, as she slept, I was almost afraid. And yet she is greatly upheld, and as gentle and uncomplaining as it is possible to be.

But for me, knowing my father, and trying to find the meaning of his life, these days give me less grief than wonder and perplexity. For a time after my father told me the story of his past, after I knew what he might have been, knew his great renunciation, his utter humility, his leaving all to seek one only thing, and that a gift for others, and even that being denied him, so that to himself his life seemed a failure, and its supreme sacrifice unsanctioned and unblessed—afterthis I could hardly bear the heart-break of it all. So pure, so blameless, so devoted a life, and yet, to his own thought, so unfruitful. Just a narrow little village church, with its narrow little victories and defeats, and its monotony of spiritual ebb and flow—this was the sum of his achievement. Was it not hard of God? This he would not have said, but my undisciplined heart has cried out in bitterness and rebellion. I have been in deep doubt and darkness.

To-night it is given me to see it all in light, and I am reconciled. The word which changed my father’s life was that great word of the Master, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground anddie, it abideth alone.” That dying, the utterness of it, was what we did not comprehend. I think my father understood before he left us, although he could not express it. But all along he had felt that in dying in his own personal life to the world and to his ambition, he was meeting the condition, and that in his own personal life the fruits of that death were to be manifest, that he should be set for the salvation of many. But God sees not with our short vision. Days with him are years, and years days; and our whole life but a vapour, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

This has come to me: My father’s sacrifice has borne in the life of one of his children, if not in all, the fruit of an especial dedication of that life to the service of God. If he had not been the man he was, if he had not laid down his life daily and hourly in humble self-surrender to the Divine Will, never, never should I have dreamed of giving myself to the work to which I am now pledged. His life, in its deepest working, had been wrought into mine, so that unconsciously I willed to bewhat he would have willed to have me. So, then, it is no more I alone, but the spirit, the will, the nature of my father that worketh in me.

The God of my father—this phrase, so common, so almost commonplace before, has suddenly taken to itself an extraordinary significance. My father’s God, my God, who began in my father’s willing sacrifice of all the noblest powers of his manhood his purpose of grace, will now, in his good pleasure, carry on the one work, the same so begun, through me, all unworthy as I am, timid, trembling, but a child. A child, and yet called with this high calling; child of a saint, called solemnly, sacredly, in the very depths of my being, deeper than I feel, higher than I know, to be my father’s child, to be the continuance, the fulfilment of his dying life, to finish what he began, to bring to fruitage the seed he died to sow. How sublime, how sweet, how awful the vocation wherewith I am called!

Then look upon me, O my God, my father’s God! Behold my weakness; raise it into power; turn my dull mind to light, my hard and narrow heart to a flame of love; make me thy minister, thy messenger, fulfil in me all thy great will.

February 20.—To-night I am alone in the old home, notourhome any more. It is stripped already of all that made it home, but, bare and grim as it is, I love it, and leave it with a sorrow my heart is yet too tired to realize. They have consented to let me sleep this one last night in my own little room. This poor bed is to be left, being not worth removing, and all that clothes it goes with me. So, like a pilgrim, under a tent roof for a single night, I lie alone, and look up beyond the dear old gable and see the winter stars.

They shine upon his grave, and the snow already has drifted over it, and my heart bleeds. Why will they not let us pray for our dead as the Romish people do? Oh, kind little father, gone what dim, dazzling way I do not know, will they let you be happy at last? Will God let yousee why?

February 21.—It was a strange night, and yet most beautiful.

I hardly slept, but prayed until nearly dawn. Then I slept a short time, and woke to find my limbs racked with pain from the bitter chill of the room, and tears running down my face. Almost as if I were carrying out an order given me in my sleep, I hurried on my clothing, and, taking my candle, came down the stairs, both flights, through the empty, echoing house, to the rooms below. I was so cold that I shook from head to foot. Then I found in the kitchen wood left from our store, and I brought it into the east room, the parlour, where we laid my father after his death, and where I had sat beside his dear form each night. The great fireplace was bare and empty, like the room, but the andirons were left.

I laid the wood across and started the fire, and it blazed and gave light, and threw strange shadows about the room, and I kneeled beside it, on the hearth, as I used sometimes when I was a little child, and warmed my hands, and still I cried, and there was no one to comfort me.

Mally says she would have been afraid—in that room. I cannot understand. It is because her dearest have not died. What of him could have been anything but precious? To have felt his spirit near me! That would indeed have been holy consolation.

But what if that were true? I do not know. While I so crouched in the chimney corner, my heart bleeding, and the tears bathing my poor face, there was a soft touch, lighter than the flight of a thistledown, passing over my head, as if the gentlest hand God himself could make gentle had smoothed my hair, and sought to comfort me.

Then some one said: “I came here to be with you.” But I do not know whether it was I who so said in my own heart, or whether the words were spoken to my ear. I only know that I was comforted, and the fire warmed my aching limbs, and my head drooped against the wall, and I slept with long sobs, as I slept once when I was a child, and my dear father ministered to me.

It was broad daylight when I awoke, and I felt soothed and strong. I rose to go and make ready to lock and leave the house. But first I knelt and prayed, and I am praying still.

Live in me, O God, as my father lives in me, and as thou didst live in him. Let me live the life and die the death which he sought to live, to die, for thee. Give thou unto him through me abiding fruit in the salvation of souls; and grant us such grace as that we may humbly and worthily fulfil thy gracious will, I on earth, as he in heaven.

CHAPTER VII

She [Dorothea] could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp, and artificial protrusions of drapery.—Middlemarch,George Eliot.

A small house in a small street of a small provincial city. A faded brown house with its front door directly on the street, the steps jutting into the sidewalk. A narrow strip of yard overlaid with grimy snow separated this house from others on either side, equally unnotable and uninteresting, the dwellings of mechanics and small tradesmen.

It was the close of a rough March day, the wind had not died with sunsetting, and a thin, piercing rain, colder than snow, was driven before it into the very teeth of the few passers-by.

A tall woman, in a straight black dress with a dyed black shawl drawn tightly around her shoulders, was making her way down the street dead against the wind, which beat her hair out into wet strands and bound her skirts hard about the slender long limbs. She made no useless attempt to hold an umbrella; in fact, she carried none, but was heavily burdened with four or five large books. She was girlish in figure after a severe sort, her step steady, her movement without impatience or fluttering, in spite of the struggle with the wind. Seeing her face, the absorbedness of sorrow in it was profound enough to explain indifference to sharper buffetings than those of the wind. It was Anna Mallison.

When she reached the house she deposited her books on the icy step and drew from her pocket with stiffened, aching fingers a key with which she unlocked the door. The house was unlighted, and its close, airless precincts apparently empty.

Stooping, Anna gathered her books again and closed the door, then groped her way to a steep staircase, a weary sigh escaping her as if in spite of herself. The room which she entered, silent and dark at her coming, showed itself, when she had lighted a lamp, a low but spacious living room, stiffly and even meagrely furnished. Opening beyond it was a smaller bedroom.

Having laid aside shawl and bonnet, Anna made preparation for a simple evening meal for two persons. Not until these were made did she stop to realize that she was chilled and that her shoes were wet through. Characteristically it was of the shoes she took cognizance rather than of her feet—circumstances having thus far led her to regard health as an easier thing to acquire than food and raiment.

There was a sudden outburst now, from below, of merry voices, both a man’s voice and a girl’s, in loud and cheerful banter, then the house door shut with a bang, there was a quick step on the stairs, and a gay, fluttering, wind-blown figure of a pretty girl appeared in the upper sitting room. It was Mally Loveland, Anna’s early Haran friend and companion.

“Holloa, Anna!” she called lightly, “lucky for me you got in first! A fire is a good thing, I tell you, on a night like this.” Mally’s voice had acquired a new ring of self-confident vivacity.

“You’re a little late, Mally,” remarked Anna, quietly, as she returned to the room. “Shall I make tea?”

“Oh, yes, do; there’s a dear. Oh, such fun as we’ve been having at the Allens’! But I’m so chilly and damp, you know; and just look, Anna, at the ribbons on my hat.” Mally held up to view a pretentious structure of ribbon and velvet which had plainly suffered many things of the elements.

“Too bad. I hope you won’t go out again to-night, your cold was so bad yesterday. It is a wretched night.”

“Oh, I must go out, my dear—must indeed! Couldn’t disappoint the girls, you know.”

“Nor even the boys?” asked Anna smiling.

Mally laughed at this, evidently pleased. In a few moments she was ready and they took their places at the tea-table, Mally quieting herself with an effort, in order to ask a brief blessing upon the meal. It was her turn to-night. The two coöperated in their religious exercises of a general character, as well as in their housekeeping.

Destiny, so eagerly challenged by these two village girls in the eventless isolation of their life in Haran, seemed at last to have declared itself decisively: both were to catch men,—Anna in the apostolic sense, Mally in a different one.

Anna’s journey to Boston, three months earlier, had been successful. She had returned under appointment as a missionary to India; but being still too young to go out, the Board had advised her to spend the following two years in studies especially designed to develop her usefulness in work among the heathen. In January Samuel Mallison had died. The parsonage, where the children had been born and nurtured, could thus no longer be their home. It must be made ready now for a successor.

It had been a sorrowful breaking up, and when the melancholy work was done, and the home effaced forever, the mother, patient and uncomplaining, departed with Lucia to the lonely farmhouse among the hills, to take on again, in her later years of life, the many cares of tending little children. It was then that Anna, accompanied by her friend Mally, had come to Burlington with the purpose of studying at a collegiate institute, which offered opportunity for more advanced study than could be had in Haran. Anna was hard at work every morning on Paley’s “Evidences” and Butler’s “Analogy,” while her afternoons were spent in the small hospital of the town, in an informal nurses’ class, as it was even then considered a useful thing for missionaries to go out with some equipment for healing the bodies of men as well as their souls. Mally, by her own account, was “taking” music, painting, and French.

As they sat at their little table now, with its meagre and humble fare, but its indefinable expression of refinement, Anna and Mally were in striking contrast.

It has been said before that Anna matured slowly. There was still in her face, despite its sadness, the grave wonder, the artless simplicity, and the sweet unconsciousness of a child. Her figure was angular and undeveloped; her black dress, absolutely, harshly plain, and of coarse stuff; her face, far too thin and colourless for beauty. She was, plainly, underfed and overworked; but there was, nevertheless, a dignity and a distinction in her aspect which emphasized Mally’s provincialness, notwithstanding the little fashionable touches about dress and coiffure which the latter had swiftly and instinctively adapted to her own use.

Anna had the repose of a person who is not concernedat all as to the impression she makes, or desirous of making any personal impression whatever. Mally had the restlessness, the vivacity, the eagerness, of a woman who wishes everywhere and at every time to make herself felt, to be the central figure. She was born an egotist, and even “divine grace,” in the devotional phraseology of that time, had not been sufficient to overcome her natural bent. At the present time, in fact, egotism was having comparatively easy work with her, and an indefinite truce with the religious conflicts of earlier days had been tacitly declared. That spiritual experience had been sincere, and it had lasted several years. Fortunately, to Mally’s unspoken thought, she had been favoured during those years to work out her salvation, which was now, according to a prime doctrine of the church, secured to her against all accidents. This being so, no one need be concerned for her; and if she were herself satisfied with a low spiritual attainment, it was nobody’s business but her own.

She had, to her own naïve surprise, met with a marked degree of social success in a certain middle-class stratum of the small town. She was pretty, clever, adaptive; the young men and women of her set said she was “such good company.” This was high praise. In Haran the natural order for a marriageable girl was to be soberly and decorously and protractedly wooed by one young man, to whom, in process of time, she was married. Here Mally found a far more stimulating social condition. Not one man, but many, might be the portion of a popular girl, and Mally found the strength of numbers very great. The sex instinct, the ruling desire to attract men, sprang into vigorous action, and became, for a time at least, predominant. Women of whom this is trueare often very good women, with energy and common sense, but it is important for their friends, for various reasons, to hold the master key to their character.

Anna Mallison, at this period of her life as sexless in her conscious life as a star, looked on at this rapid and unlooked-for development of Mally’s nature in infinite perplexity. She had always liked certain men, even outside her own kindred, but it was because they were wise or good or sincere, not because they were men. A thirst for admiration being thus far undeclared in her own life, Mally became inexplicable to her; she did not hold the key to her character, and involuntarily she withdrew more and more into herself, her only friend becoming thus uncomprehended. If she felt this in any degree, Mally, being closely occupied with more tangible consideration, paid small heed to it.

While they were taking tea, Anna kept her eyes fixed on the mantel clock, and, having eaten hastily, rose from her place.

“What is the matter?” asked Mally, looking up. “Oh, of course; but, dear me, Anna, I never would bother to get things ready for old Marm Wilson, after the way she grumbles at you. Sit down, do. You’ll never get any thanks, I can tell you that; and what’s the use?”

Anna was at the door already. “I think it’s late enough now to be safe. She only grumbles, you know, if the oil and wood burn out awhile before she gets here. She was to work quite near on Hill Street, to-day, so she will surely be in early.”

“Oh, well, go on if you’ve a mind to. I suppose it is forlorn on a night like this for the poor old creature to find her house all dark and cold,” Mally spoke carelessly, half to herself. Anna was already half-way downstairs.

Mrs. Wilson was their houseowner, a seamstress of narrow means and narrower life whose upper rooms they rented.

An hour later the upper sitting room was suddenly enlivened and almost filled, as far as seating capacity was concerned, by a group of Mally’s friends, who had come to escort her to an evening gathering. These young men and maidens, whom Anna had scarcely seen before, seemed to explain the new Mally to her, and to place her at a different angle, as one of a class, not one by herself. The girls all wore a profusion of ribbons and curls, and were all in an effervescence of noisy excitement regarding the effect of the dampness on their hair and their finery; they whispered and giggled together, and pouted at the young men, or tossed their heads and assumed exaggerated airs of being shocked at the personal remarks which these attendants volunteered, and with which they were, in fact, palpably delighted.

Anna, who attempted some quiet civilities from time to time, was regarded with undisguised indifference, as not being “one of the set.”

After the young people had left the house, however, Mally’s companion on their expedition, a young man somewhat above the others in intelligence, said to her:—

“What an unusual girl that friend of yours, that Miss Mallison, is. I never met any one just like her. She strikes me as a girl who would keep a fellow at a mighty distance; but if she ever did care for him, he wouldn’t mind dying for her, you know, and all that sort of thing. But she isn’t one of the kind you like to play games with.”

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