CHAPTER VIII

She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,A smile of hers was like an act of grace;She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,Like daily beauties of the vulgar race;But, if she smiled, a light was on her face,A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beamOf peaceful radiance.—Hartley Coleridge.

She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,

A smile of hers was like an act of grace;

She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,

Like daily beauties of the vulgar race;

But, if she smiled, a light was on her face,

A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam

Of peaceful radiance.

—Hartley Coleridge.

To the surprise of both the friends, Anna, who had gone about her rigorous tasks unseen and unnoted hitherto, began about this time to come into a certain comparative prominence in the quiet little city.

A day or two after the evening described in the last chapter, Anna received a note from Mrs. Ingraham, the wife of a distinguished citizen of the town, a man of great wealth, and a well-known senator. The Ingrahams were, perhaps, the most highly placed family in the little town, by right of distinguished antecedents, of wealth, and of habit of life. They belonged to that singularly privileged class, which Anna Mallison had not hitherto encountered, who have both will and power to appropriate the most select of all things which minister to the individual development, whether things material, things intellectual, or things spiritual. Thus Mrs. Ingraham and her daughters were women of fashion, prominent figures at the state functions of their own state, and well known in the inner circles of Washington society. They dressed superlatively well in clothes that came from Paris. At the same timethey were as much at home among literary as among fashionable folk, and Mrs. Ingraham at least was understood to be devotedly religious, with an especial penchant for foreign missions. In fine, all things were theirs.

Thus it was an event for Anna Mallison, in her dull, low-ceiled upper room, to open and read the note of Mrs. Senator Ingraham to herself,—a note written in graceful, flowing hand, on sumptuous, ivorylike paper, squarely folded, with a crest on the seal, and the faintest suggestion of violets escaping almost before perceived. The note was delicately courteous, a marvel of gracious tact. Mrs. Ingraham had heard through a friend that Miss Mallison was under appointment as a missionary to India, and had sincerely wished to meet her. On Friday evening a dear Christian worker from Boston, now her guest, was to hold a little parlour meeting at the house for the help and encouragement of friends who were interested in a higher Christian life. Would not Miss Mallison give them all the pleasure of making one of that number? Mrs. Ingraham would esteem it a personal favour; and if Miss Mallison felt that she could tell the little company something of the experience she had had in being led into this beautiful life work, it would be most acceptable. However, this was by no means urged, but merely suggested and left entirely to Miss Mallison’s preference.

The man who had brought the note waited on the narrow walk below for Anna’s answer. He wore a sober but handsome livery.

This was the first invitation of the kind which Anna had received, but she had now somewhat accustomed herself, by the advice of the Board, to speaking inwomen’s missionary meetings, and it seemed to her right to say yes. Accordingly, on untinted note-paper of a very common grade, she said yes in a natural and simple way, and made haste to give the note to the man at the door below, whom she felt distressed to keep waiting.

This man removed his shining hat in respectful acknowledgment as he took the note, and told Anna that Mrs. Ingraham had asked him to say, having forgotten to mention it in her note, that in case Miss Mallison would be so kind as to come, Mrs. Ingraham would send the carriage for her at half-past seven on Friday evening.

Anna felt that she ought to deprecate so much attention, and timidly attempted to do so; but the man plainly was not further empowered to treat in the matter, and, bowing respectfully, departed with Anna’s pallid, long and narrow envelope in his well-gloved hand.

When Mally came in, Anna handed her Mrs. Ingraham’s note. Mally’s face flushed noticeably as she read it. It was not easy for her to have her quiet friend thus preferred.

“You’ll go, of course?” she commented rather coldly, as she handed it back.

“Yes.”

“I should think you would by all means. Who wouldn’t? I’ve heard lots about Mrs. Ingraham; she believes in a very high religious life, you know, and those rich higher-life people live high, I can tell you. There’ll be a supper, depend on that, and it will be a fine one.”

“Oh, I don’t think there will be anything of that kind,” interposed Anna, hastily.

“You see!” cried Mally, with an air of superiorwisdom and wide social experience. “Oh my! if I should tell you all I’ve heard about those Ingrahams, you’d be surprised. One night they have a prayer-meeting and the next night a dance. It’s all right, I suppose. Kind of new, that’s all.”

On the following evening, when the luxurious Ingraham carriage was driven up before Mrs. Wilson’s poor little house, many eyes peered narrowly from neighbours’ windows to catch the unwonted sight; and Anna, slipping hastily out of the Wilson door, felt an access of humility in this exaltation of herself, for such she knew it seemed to her neighbours, transient though it was. She had suffered a guilty and apologetic consciousness all day toward Mally, who had treated her with a slight coolness and indifference, which afflicted Anna keenly.

When Anna entered the hall of the Ingraham house, a small, stout woman, in a brown dress and smooth hair, came out to greet her, and took her hand between both her own, which were white and soft and heavily weighted with diamonds. Anna found the diamonds confusing, but she knew the hands were kind. Mrs. Ingraham’s manner, of sincere kindliness and dignity, put Anna wholly at her ease, and she looked about her, presently, at the subdued luxury and elegance of her surroundings with a frank, childlike pleasure. Her absolute unconsciousness of herself saved Anna from the awkwardness which her unusual height, her angular thinness, and her unaccustomedness to social contact might otherwise have produced. She wore her “other dress,” which was of plain black poplin, but quite new, and not ungraceful in its straight untortured lines; and as she entered the great drawing-room, with its splendours of costly art, and metthe eyes of many people who were watching her entrance, the quiet gravity and simplicity of her bearing were hardly less than grace.

Two women, dressed with elegance and apparently not deeply touched with religiousness, commented apart a little later, having met and spoken in turn with the lady from Boston and the young missionary elect.

“What do you think of Mrs. Ingraham’s new saints?” asked one, whose black dress was heavily studded with jet ornaments.

“I like the young missionary better than the Bostonian, myself,” was the reply. The speaker had red hair and an exquisite figure. “Isn’t she curious, though?” she continued. “Manners, you know, but absolutely no manner! I never encountered a woman before, even at her age, who positively hadnone.”

“That is what ails her, isn’t it?” returned her beaded friend. “You’ve just hit it. And you can see that tremendously developed missionary conscience of hers in every line of her face and figure, don’t you know you can?”

“Figure, my dear? She has none. I never saw such an utter absence of the superfluous!”

Here they both laughed clandestinely behind their laced handkerchiefs.

“Do you know how I should describe that girl?” challenged the Titian beauty, recovering.

“Cleverly, without doubt.”

“I should call her a scaffolding over a conscience.”

“That is really very good, Evelyn. You can see that she is not even consciously a woman yet. She knows nothing of life or of herself or of this goodly frame, the earth, save what that New England conscienceof hers has interpreted to her. Her horizon is as narrow as her chest.”

“Poor thing. How will she bear life, I wonder!” and the words died into a whisper, for at that moment the little talking, moving groups of men and women were called to take the chairs, which had been arranged in comfortable order, and give attention to what was to follow.

CHAPTER IX

When the soul, growing clearer,Sees God no nearer;When the soul, mounting higher,To God comes no nigher;But the arch-fiend PrideMounts at her side,And, when she fain would soar,Makes idols to adore,Changing the pure emotionOf her high devotionTo a skin-deep senseOf her own eloquence;Strong to deceive, strong to enslave—Save, oh! save.—Matthew Arnold.

When the soul, growing clearer,

Sees God no nearer;

When the soul, mounting higher,

To God comes no nigher;

But the arch-fiend Pride

Mounts at her side,

And, when she fain would soar,

Makes idols to adore,

Changing the pure emotion

Of her high devotion

To a skin-deep sense

Of her own eloquence;

Strong to deceive, strong to enslave—

Save, oh! save.

—Matthew Arnold.

Anna was the first to speak. When she rose and faced the little audience, made up of fashionable women, professional men, and a sprinkling of the more clearly defined religious “workers”, she did not feel the coldness underlying their courteous attention. The Titian beauty fixed upon her eyes full of unconsciously patronizing kindness, and Mrs. Ingraham smiled at her with sympathetic encouragement, but they might have spared themselves the effort. Anna did not perceive or consider these things. She was not thinking of them at all, nor of herself.

The peculiar twofold consecration which rested upon her spirit in regard to her missionary vocation, as a call to fulfil at once the Divine Will and the will of her father, was so profound and so solemn as to removeher from personal and passing cares. She would not herself have chosen to appear before these people and to speak to them of her supreme interest; but to do so had been laid upon her as duty, and Anna’s conception of duty, by reason of the “tremendously developed conscience” which the worldly-wise women had discerned in her, was of something to be done. She did this duty with the simple directness of a soldier under command. She stood erect and motionless, with no nervous working of hands or trembling of lips, and spoke in a clear, low voice, in which alone, by reason of a peculiar vibrant pathos, the profound, undeclared passion of her nature was suggested.

Her critics of the early evening had been right in finding her destitute of manner. There was no slightest evidence as she spoke of the orator’s instinct—the magnetism of kindling eye and changing expression, of the conciliation and subtle flattery of her hearers. Neither had she fervid personal raptures nor spiritual triumphs to communicate. Of the picturesque and pathetic elements of the situation she made no use whatever. She had simply an absolute, dominating conviction that the heathen were lost; that they could only be saved by the knowledge of Christ; that this knowledge must be conveyed to them by the disciples of Christ at his command; and that she, Anna Mallison, was humbly grateful that she was permitted to devote herself to a service so obviously necessary. Of these things she spoke; of the sacred sense of living out her father’s disappointed life she naturally could not speak.

It was not the speech which Mrs. Ingraham and her guests had expected. They had looked to have their sympathies aroused by a pathetic recital of sacrifice andexalted self-devotion. Anna, on the contrary, was unconscious of sacrifice, and felt herself simply grateful for the privilege of carrying out her innermost desires.

The people who heard her felt that to give up “the world” was a mighty thing. Anna did not yet know what “the world” was. To their anticipation, she had been a figure almost as romantic and moving as a young novitiate about to take conventual vows; to herself, she was an enlisted soldier who has received marching orders, and whose heart exults soberly, since there are ties which may be broken, and death, perhaps, awaiting, but even so exults with joyful response.

Thus, to most of those who heard her, Anna’s little speech was a distinct disappointment; the very loftiness of her conception of her calling made it featureless, and robbed it of adaptation to easy emotional effect. The ladies who had discussed her before her speech found, after it, that it was, after all, exactly what might have been expected—altogether of a piece with the austerity of her figure, and her sad, colourless face, no warmth, no emotion—just the hard Puritan conscience at its hardest.

There were two or three only who felt the spiritual elevation belonging to the girl and to what she said, and the underlying pathos of her high restraint, as too great to put into the conventional phrases of sympathy and praise, and so kept silence.

There was a brief pause after Anna returned to her seat, during which people stirred and spoke in low tones, and the beaded lady leaned over and thanked Anna for her “charming little talk”. Then Mrs. Westervelt, the guest from Boston came forward and began speaking with a winning smile, a gentle, soothing voice, and anaffectionate reference to “the dear, sweet young sister.” She had the ease and flexibility of the practised public speaker; the winning and dimpled smile with which she won the company at the start was in frequent use, and she made constant motions with a pair of very white hands. She was quietly dressed, and yet, after the straightness of Anna’s poor best gown, her attire had its own air of handsome comfort. The perfect command of her voice and of herself established instantaneously arapportwith her audience, of which Anna, in her inexperience, had never dreamed.

Her beloved Mrs. Ingraham, she said, had asked her to tell the dear friends of some wonderful answers to prayer which she had recently experienced, but before doing this she craved the privilege of reading a few verses of Scripture.

She then read certain passages from the prophecy of Zechariah, detached from one another, taken entirely from their historic setting, but fitted together with some care. The speaker explained that she had, in her earlier Christian life, found some difficulty in interpreting this rather obscure passage, but in the new life of complete sanctification, into which it had been her glorious privilege to enter, she had come to see all Scripture by a new and marvellous light. No longer did she trust to the dry and formal explanations of scholars, many of whom, it was but too well known, had never had the deep things of God revealed to them, and who had been led into many errors by their pride of learning. All that kind of study was past for her, for the dear Lord himself showed her, when she lifted her heart to him, just what he meant in his blessed word. This had been her experience in regard to the passage just read. Tothe natural mind there were difficulties in it, but just below the surface was the great precious truth which God would have all his children receive. It had been given her that when she came to the beautiful home of Mrs. Ingraham, and should be called upon to speak to these friends, she must bring them this particular passage. But it had looked dark to her, and she was in doubt how to interpret it. But as she had been in the cars, coming up from Boston, she had said: “Now, Lord, those dear friends in Burlington will want to know just what you meant by that sweet portion of your word, and I do not feel that I can tell them unless you enlighten me. What is it that is intended by the two staves in the hand of the prophet, one called Beauty and one called Bands?”

Then the dear Lord had sweetly spoken in the secret place of her heart, as distinctly as if with an audible voice: “My child, the old life of formalism, of coldness, and of worldly pleasure in which many Christians live is the staff called Bands. The higher life, the life of answered prayer, the life of perfect sanctification and fulness of blessing, is Beauty. Take this message to my dear children in Burlington.”

Oh, how simple! Oh, how sweet! Who would weary heart and brain over the interpretations of rationalistic German commentators, when we could thus have the direct interpretation of his own word by the Lord himself?

Thus Mrs. Westervelt proceeded at some length on this line, and then, with tearful eyes and an added intensity of the personal element, she rehearsed the answers to prayer which her friend, Mrs. Ingraham, had rightly called wonderful. Thus, in carrying on the work of preaching perfect sanctification in Boston, a room hadbeen needed for meetings. Two or three of the little band had prayed, and within a week they had had a most suitable room offered them by a precious sister, but it was unfurnished. The details of securing the equipment of this room were now described. Each piece of furniture, the speaker declared, had been directly given in answer to special prayer and by a marvellous interposition. If any natural means had been at work by which persons in sympathy with their efforts were led to supply their obvious needs, these were not mentioned. Plainly it was Mrs. Westervelt’s conception of a perfect relation to God that the one sustaining it should receive constant miraculous testimony of the divine favour. The privilege of attaining this condition was presented with fervid emphasis. It was the high and perfect life! Who would live on the old plane when this was what God had for them? Oh, how beautiful it was to trust! Why should we ever doubt, when we were so plainly told thatwhatsoeverwe ask we shall receive?

As Mrs. Westervelt went on, many of her hearers were moved to tears, and a continuous response of sympathetic looks and subdued exclamations followed her recital of her surprising experiences. The wealthy women present felt that this was certainly a fine thing for those who could not get what they wanted by ordinary business methods, but were, perhaps, secretly glad that they were not themselves called upon to test their relation to God quite so pointedly. The poorer and humbler guests wept profusely, thinking how long they had stumbled on in the dull and inferior practice of working painfully for many needed things, which might all have been miraculously given them, if they had only been favourites of God, like Mrs. Westervelt, or, as shewould have said, “had only just stepped out into the fulness.”

Anna Mallison sat and listened in unspeakable astonishment.

This was as absolutely new a gospel to her as the gospel of Christ to a disciple of Buddha. It was her first contact with sentimental religion.

The God of her father had been the immutable and eternal Creator, the high and holy One inhabiting eternity, the Judge of all the earth. Through the Incarnation the just anger of this Holy Being toward sinful men had been appeased. But although in Christ there had been found access to God and an Intercessor, never had it entered into the heart of Samuel Mallison or those whom he led to regard themselves as occupying a position other than of deepest humility, self-distrust, awe, and reverence.

Mrs. Westervelt’s phraseology was almost like a foreign tongue to Anna. The constant use of terms of familiar endearment in speaking of the Almighty; the application of affectionate and flattering adjectives on all sides; the sense of a peculiar and intimate relation established between herself and God; and the free-and-easy conversational, in fact, rather colloquial, style in which she held herself privileged to communicate with him,—were almost amazing to her. And beneath all these superficial marks of a new cult, lay the deeper sense of the inherent disparity. Religion to Anna had been, it has been said earlier, a system of prohibitions, of self-denials, of self-abasement, with only at rare intervals the illumination of a profound sense of the love of God. Here was a religion which held up a species of luxurious spiritual enjoyment, of unrestrained freedom in approachingGod, of an indubitable sense of being personally on the best of terms with him, as the privilege of all true believers.

The conception of prayer which Mrs. Westervelt had demonstrated was not less surprising to Anna. She knew that there were wide and sweeping scriptural promises with regard to prayer, but she had always felt a deep mystery attaching itself to them. For herself, she had never ventured to intrude her temporal gratifications and designs upon the attention of her God, but had rather felt a sober silence regarding these things to best befit a sinful creature coming before a holy Creator. Half revolting, but half smitten with compunction, the thought now flashed through her mind that, if she had only prayed after this new sort, her father might have received the oranges for which he had sorely longed in the months before his death. This luxury was not to be obtained in Haran, and had therefore been patiently foregone, heaven and Burlington having seemed equally inaccessible at the time.

Mrs. Westervelt sat down, and the meeting broke up, a swarm of enthusiastic, tearful women rushing to surround her and pour out their effusive appreciation of her wonderful address. Anna stood bewildered and alone, doubting within herself. Had it all been the highest consecration, as it undoubtedly desired to be? or had it been the highest presumption, the old temptation of spiritual pride, assuming a new guise?

Two clergymen of the city, who had been attentive listeners during the whole evening, not being moved to pour out their admiration upon either speaker, quietly strayed across the hall into Mr. Ingraham’s library. The senator himself was absent.

“Well, Nichols,” said Dr. Harvey, the older man, who had a shrewd, kindly, smooth-shaven face, “what do you think of that for Old Testament exegesis?”

“It was pretty stiff to have the responsibility for it given to the Lord,” returned his friend. “I almost felt like interrupting her to say that, with all due respect, the Lord never told her any such thing, her interpretation being monstrously untrue.”

“It was awful, simply awful,” said the other, with slow emphasis. “Such fantastic tricks before high heaven might make men, as well as angels, weep. And then her familiarity with the Lord, Nichols,—why, man, she positively patronized the Almighty!”

“It is true, and yet, do you know, Doctor, that woman has some extraordinary elements for success in such work?”

“If she hadn’t, she would be of no importance, my dear fellow. She has a fine homiletic instinct. That is just where the danger lies. But, after all, she represents only one danger—there are others. She is simply the modern mystic—a kind of latter-day, diluted Madame Guyon. Too much of the thing is a trifle nauseous, perhaps, but it represents the revolt of devout souls, in every age, from formalism, and is inevitably an excess, like all revolt. Doubtless there will be such revolt, world without end, and it will have its uses.”

“It was fairly pathetic to see how eagerly those women rushed forward to receive her; evidently that’s the message they are pining for. They don’t go for us that way, Doctor.”

“No; and they didn’t for that first speaker, Mallison’s daughter. I knew him. Poor man, what a mystic he might have made, if he had let himself go! This girl ismuch like him—the old New England type; religion with all colour and sentiment clean purged out of it. Cold as ice, chaste as snow, the antipodes of the Guyon-Westervelt danger. Talk of holiness,—poor Mallison,—he was the holiest man I ever knew, and in this life the least rewarded,” and the old clergyman shook his head with a mournful smile.

“I fancied, when I heard her speak, although I had no idea who she was, that this daughter of his had not exactly revelled in the luxury of religion.”

“No; but I tell you, Nichols, she is none the worse for that, at her age. There is a hardihood, an unconscious, sturdy fortitude in that earlier type, which we mightily need in the world to-day. To me, that girl was positively beautiful, because—notice what I say, Nichols—she is absolutely true.”

“Very likely.”

“Yes; but when you have thought it over, tell me, some day, how many men and women you know of whom you can say that. If you know one, you will do well.”

Dr. Harvey, as he said these words, rose to leave the library, but stopped and stood, as there appeared at that moment at the hall door the figure of a man who was apparently passing through the hall. So silent and so sudden was his coming, and so singular his aspect, that the younger of the two men, perceiving him, started violently in involuntary surprise, and was conscious of a disagreeable sensation along the course of his veins.

This man, who had approached the door with noiseless steps, might have been young, or might have been old. He was of unusual height, with narrow shoulders, short body, and disproportionate length of limb. Hisface, an elongated oval, was of as smooth surface as that of a woman, and of the shape and pale even colour of an egg. The enormous forehead, the eyes, small and narrow, set wide apart and obliquely, the flattened nose, the straight, wide, almost lipless mouth, combined with an expression of crafty complacence to give the man a singularly alien semblance. As he stood, he smiled slowly, a smile which emphasized both the craftiness and the complacency of his expression, and remarked in a high, thin voice:—

“Just going, Doctor? Make yourself at home here, that’s all right.”

He carried a rather large, morocco-bound note-book in one hand, and a silver pencil-case in the other. His hands were extremely delicate and white, with sinuous, flexible fingers, of such phenomenal length as to suggest an extra, simian joint. They conveyed to the young clergyman a sense of expressing the same craft as the face, and a yet more palpable cruelty. The unpleasant impression became more pronounced, for, seeing the hands, young Nichols involuntarily shivered.

Probably this fact was not noticed by the newcomer, but, having thus spoken and smiling one more chilling smile, he passed on to the other end of the hall.

Eyes rather than voice asked in astonishment, “Who is that?”

“Oliver Ingraham, the senator’s son,” was the elder clergyman’s reply, as they left the library together, “the son of his first wife.” Dr. Harvey was Mrs. Ingraham’s pastor.

“Incredible!” cried the other, under his breath. “I never saw him, never heard of his existence.”

The other shook his head with gravely troubled look.

“He is only here when it becomes impossible to keep him elsewhere.”

“Is he insane? imbecile? what is he?”

“Not the first, not the second. I cannot answer the third question.”

CHAPTER X

She sitteth in a silence of her own;Behind her, on the ground, a red rose lies;Her thinking brow is bent, nor doth ariseHer gaze from that shut book whose word unknownHer firm hands hide from her; there all aloneShe sitteth in thought trouble, maidenwise.—R. W. Gilder.

She sitteth in a silence of her own;

Behind her, on the ground, a red rose lies;

Her thinking brow is bent, nor doth arise

Her gaze from that shut book whose word unknown

Her firm hands hide from her; there all alone

She sitteth in thought trouble, maidenwise.

—R. W. Gilder.

An October morning, and breakfast-time in the Ingraham household. Great doors stood open into the dining room, where the vast round table could be seen with its glittering array of silver, and the grace and colour of exquisite flowers.

A slender girl, as graceful and charming in her simple morning dress as the flowers she had just placed on the table, stood in the doorway, waiting, a shade of impatience on her face. Behind her, at one of the dining-room windows, stood Oliver Ingraham, her half-brother. Mrs. Ingraham, with her other daughters, one older, one younger, were in the adjoining library. Outside, in the hall, a man paced up and down with impatience which he did not attempt to conceal. This was Mr. Ingraham himself, a man of good height, fine, erect figure, and youthful energy of motion and bearing. His hair was grey, as also his heavy mustache and imperial; his eyes grey also, keen, clear, but inclined to wander with disconcerting swiftness; he had a high, beaklike nose, and a fine, carefully kept skin, in which a network of dark red veins betrayed the high liver. He was atonce peremptory and gracious, military and courtly, a man of the world and of affairs on a large scale.

With watch in hand he entered the library and approached his wife.

“Cornelia,” he said, smiling with good-tempered sarcasm, “does it strike you that the show is a little late in opening? I dislike to mention it, but it is already ten minutes past eight. I am not familiar with the social customs of Abyssinia, nor even of Macedonia, but in the United States it is considered good form for guests, albeit lions, to come to breakfast on time. Even the Hyrcan tiger, I understand, is usually prompt in his attendance on that function—”

“Papa!” cried his youngest daughter, Louise, “you are perfectly dreadful.”

Mrs. Ingraham looked up into her husband’s face with her mild, conciliating smile.

“I am so sorry, Justin,” she said softly, “but I suppose the poor dear creatures are very tired after the meeting last night, and their journey, and all—”

There was a slight noise on the stairs as she spoke, and Mr. Ingraham faced about with military precision to receive in succession a number of ladies, who filed into the room, and were warmly greeted and promptly presented to him by his wife. Two were visitors from New York, substantial “Board women”; other two, returned missionaries from Japan; the last to enter was a shy, brown little person with soft dark eyes, a native Hindu, who could only communicate with her host by a gentle, pleading smile. All were in attendance on a great missionary conference held in Burlington that week, drawing its supporters from all New England and New York.

“Shall we go to breakfast, Cornelia?” Mr. Ingraham asked, having infused sudden courage into the trembling breast of the little native by his gallant attention. “Are we all here?”

“Why, no, papa,” interposed his youngest daughter; “we must wait for Mr. Burgess.”

“Mr. Burgess?” repeated her father, in a musing tone. “I do not recall that I have met him. Is the gentleman an invalid?”

“At least the gentleman is here, papa,” murmured Louise, directing his attention to a young man who at the moment entered the room, and approached Mrs. Ingraham with a few words of courteous apology.

Meeting him, Mr. Ingraham saw a slender, youthful figure, somewhat below the average of masculine height, a man of delicate physique, perhaps five and twenty years old, with a serious, sensitive face, and earnest blue eyes looking out through glasses; a young man who presented himself with quiet self-possession, and bore the unmistakable marks of good breeding.

As they took their places around the breakfast table, Keith Burgess, for this was the young man’s name, found himself seated opposite Oliver, with whom he was not drawn to converse, and between the second Miss Ingraham and the little Aroona-bia. Conversation with the latter being necessarily of an extremely limited nature, her gentle lisping of “yes” and “thank you” being somewhat indiscriminate, the guest found himself shortly occupied exclusively with his very pretty neighbour.

“You know, Mr. Burgess,” she was presently saying, “I almost feel that I know you already.”

“How so?” asked Keith, simply. It was plain that,although accustomed to the refinements of life, this was not a man accomplished in social subtleties. There was, in fact, a curiously unworldly expression in the young fellow’s eyes, and somewhat of thoughtful introspection.

“Why, you see mamma and some of her friends who heard you speak last spring have told us so much about you.”

Keith bowed slightly, without reply.

“And you can’t think, Mr. Burgess, how delighted we are to have you come to Burlington. We were so afraid you would leave for the East before we could hear you, and I assure you that would have been a great disappointment. I think you sail in the spring, do you not?”

“Yes, in May, as soon as I graduate.”

“And it is for India?”

“I suppose so. It is not fully determined, but that would be my choice, and I believe the Board incline that way.”

The pretty Miss Ingraham, whose name was Gertrude, sighed a very little.

“It is all so wonderful, so almost incredible, to me that any one young and like other people, don’t you know? can really go,” she said gently. “Therearepeople to whom it seems perfectly natural. Mamma has a new protégée who is to go out as a missionary teacher a year from this fall. She is very young, only twenty-one, and we all think she is lovely; but still, for her it seems really the only thing to be expected. She has the genuine missionary air already, and you would know she could not be anything else, somehow.”

Keith looked civilly, but not keenly, interested.

“I wonder if it is any one I have heard of,” he remarked. “It is our Board that sends her?”

“Yes. Her name is Mallison, Anna Mallison. Her father was a country minister up in the mountainous part of the state. Poor thing! She will find India quite a change after Vermont winters, I should think.”

“An improvement, perhaps,” said Keith, smiling. “But really, Miss Ingraham, going back to what you said a moment ago, why should it seem so incredible for a man who has devoted himself to the service of God, truly and unreservedly, to be willing to go where what little he can do is most needed? Many men go to foreign countries and remain the better part of their lives for business purposes: men in the navy; Englishmen, of course, of social and political ambitions, by hundreds. Do you ever feel that there is anything extraordinary or superhuman in what they do?”

Gertrude Ingraham was looking at the young man with almost devout attention.

“No,” she answered, shaking her head with pretty humility, seeing which way he led.

“Then why,” pursued Keith Burgess, leaning over to look steadily in her face with his earnest eyes, and lowering his voice to a deeper emphasis, “why do you wonder that now and then a man should be willing to do for the Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation of souls what a hundred men do as a matter of course for their own selfish ambition and the gaining of money?”

The girl looked down, the brightness of her face softened by serious feeling.

“The only wonder, Miss Ingraham, is that so few do it. For my own part I do not see how a fellow who goes into the ministry, as things are now, can doanything else,” and Keith turned back to his neglected breakfast. Thereafter he was drawn into conversation, across the mute languor of the little Hindu, with his host, who had questions to ask regarding Fulham, which had been his college.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Keith Burgess, sitting in a large congregation in Dr. Harvey’s stately church, listening with consciously declining interest to a long statistical report which was being read from the pulpit, felt himself touched on the shoulder. Looking up he saw the Rev. Frank Nichols, pastor of a mission church in the city. He had known him well in college, a clear-eyed, well set-up young cleric. Nichols invited him by a word and look to follow him, and together they quietly left the assembly.

When they had reached the street and the crisp autumn air, Keith shook himself with a motion of relief.

“Is there anything more tiresome than such a succession of meetings?” he exclaimed. “Shall we walk? I am in a hurry to climb one of these hills.”

“We must do it later,” returned Nichols; “but if you are not too tired I want to take you down this street and on a block or two to my church. The women are having a meeting there this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes, I remember; but will it be in order for us to intrude?”

“Yes, that will be all right. The brethren drop in quietly now and then, and are welcome. You needn’t stay long, for you are tired, I know by your face; but I tell you what it is, Burgess, I want you to hear Anna Mallison.”

Anna Mallison! again that name which he had heardin the morning. It began to have a strangely musical quality to Keith’s ears.

“I have heard her name. She is under appointment, I believe. A good speaker?”

“No, not a particularly good speaker, but, as Dr. Harvey once said to me, an absolutely true nature. She is a young woman of strong personality, but singularly destitute of the desire to impress herself, and with a certain touch of the unconsciously heroic about her which you feel but cannot describe. I have never met a girl of precisely her type before, myself, and I am curious to know what you will think of her.”

Entering the small, unpretentious church, Nichols and his friend sat down in the first row of seats, next to the central aisle. The room was nearly full; several women were upon the platform, from which the pulpit had been removed. One woman was speaking in a high-keyed, plaintive voice.

It was not a stable or quiet audience; some were leaving their seats, others coming in, many turning their heads to catch glimpses of expected friends. Behind the young men came in two girls who remained standing close beside them in the aisle for a little space. One of these girls had pretty, fair hair and peachy cheeks; she was dressed in deep blue with touches of gilt cord and buttons, giving a kind of coquettish military jauntiness to her appearance. She wore a small round hat, of dark blue, which set off her pretty hair charmingly. Her manner was full of quick, eager animation; she smiled much and whispered to her companion continually. This companion stood motionless and unresponsive to the frequent appeals made to her, a quiet face and figure, a dress and bonnet of plain and unadorned black, ill suited toher youth; but it was her face and figure rather than the other to which Keith Burgess found his attention riveted. He knew intuitively, before Nichols told him, that this was Anna Mallison; but without this knowledge he felt that he must still have kept his eyes upon her face. The repose of it, the purity and elevation of the look, the serene, serious sweetness, were what he had seen in the faces of angels men have dreamed of rather than of women they have loved. But that she was after all a woman, with a woman’s sensitiveness and impressibility, he fancied was manifest when, having perhaps felt his look resting thus intently on her face, Anna turned and their eyes met in an instant’s direct, uninterrupted gaze, whereupon a deep flush rose and spread over the clear brown pallor of her face, and she turned, and bent to speak to her friend, as if to cover a slight confusion.

The friend was Mally Loveland, and she was finding her position a particularly satisfactory one at the moment, being aware that Mr. Nichols was so placed as to take in the best points of her new fall costume in a side view. It was for him, not for Anna, that she had been using so much of nervous energy in the last few minutes.

A lady who had left the platform for the purpose now came down the aisle, and, taking Anna Mallison by the hand with a word of welcome, conducted her to the front of the church. Mally, thus left alone, fluttered into a place made for her, seeming to discover Mr. Nichols as she turned, and smiling surprise and pleasure upon him.

Just before Anna began to address the gathering, while a hymn was sung, Keith Burgess quietly made his way to a seat near the front of the church, at the side of the platform. He had excused himself to Nichols, who hadthen asked and obtained permission to sit beside Mally, an incident productive of a vast amount of conscious and fluttering delight on the part of that young lady.

The austerity of Anna Mallison’s religious life had, under the influence of Mrs. Westervelt and her disciple, Mrs. Ingraham, relaxed within a few months to a marked degree. New conceptions of a relation of joyful assurance, of conscious acceptance with God, had risen within her, with the perception that religion was not exclusively prohibition, and conscience its only energy. Something of warmth and brightness had been infused into her chill, colourless, outward life, furthermore, by the intercourse with the Ingrahams which had followed her first visit. She was still in a manner ice-bound in her interior life and in her capacity for expression, but the ice was beginning to yield and here and there to break up a little.

Thus, in the manner with which she spoke on this occasion, there was something of gentleness, and a less uncompromising self-restraint than when she had first spoken before an audience. She was still noticeably reserved, still innocent of the orator’s arts, or of conscious seeking to produce an effect; she still delivered herself of her simple message as if it were a duty to be discharged rather than an opportunity to be grasped. But through the coldness of all this neutrality there pierced now and then a ray of the radiant purity and loftiness of the girl’s inner nature, and this time those who heard her did not pity or patronize her in their thoughts.

Keith Burgess watched her from the place he had chosen. Her tall, meagre figure in its nunlike dress was sharply outlined against a palely tinted window opposite,through which the October sun shone. She stood without support of table or desk, her hands falling straight at her sides, and looked directly at the people she addressed, fearless, since burdened with the sense of immortal destinies, not with a consciousness of herself. Keith noted the hand which fell against the straight black folds of her dress; its fine shape and delicate texture alone expressed her ladyhood. She could not have been called pretty, but her face thus seen in profile was almost beautiful, the hollowness of the cheeks and the stringent thinness of all the contours being less obvious.

But Keith Burgess was not occupied with Anna’s face and figure to any serious degree. He knew instinctively that she was of good birth and breeding; he saw that, though severe and angular in person and manner, she was womanly, noble, refined. He divined, as no one could have failed to divine, the essential truth and purity of her nature. From her simple, unfeigned utterance he perceived the high earnestness and consecration with which she was entering upon missionary labour. Perceiving all those things, the young man looked and listened with a sudden, momentous question taking swift shape in his mind.

He remained until the close of the meeting and met Anna, introducing himself, as he preferred doing. She received his few expressions of satisfaction in hearing her with scant response, and apparently with neither surprise or gratification. He did not like her the less for that.

The Ingrahams found Keith sober and preoccupied at dinner that night, but, as he was to be chief speaker at the evening session of the convention, they thought this natural and in order. He was liked and was treated withespecial consideration by them all, and even Mr. Ingraham did him the honour of going to the church to hear him speak. He had no sympathy with his wife’s penchant for missions, but he thought Burgess was “a nice little fellow,” and he wanted to see what kind of a speech he could make.

The different members of the family and their guests came home one after another late in the evening, and, as they met, exchanged enthusiastic expressions concerning the eloquence of Keith Burgess. Mrs. Ingraham and the Board ladies thought the dear young man had a wonderful gift; Aroona-bia smiled tenderly in assent; the girls said he was simply perfect; and Mr. Ingraham admitted that, when he had worked off some of his “sophomoric effervescence,” he might make a good deal of an orator, and added, under his breath, it was nothing less than a crime to send a delicate, talented boy like that to make food for those barbarians, whose souls weren’t worth the sacrifice, even if he could save them, which he couldn’t.

“Very true, dear,” rejoined his wife; “no man can save another’s soul; he can only lead him to the dear Lord’s feet.”

The senator bit short a sharp reply, and just then Keith himself appeared, looking pale and exhausted, deprecating wearily the praise they were eager to bestow upon him, and begging to be excused if he withdrew at once to his room.

As the sound of his footsteps was lost in the hall above, Mrs. Ingraham said:—

“I am sorry Mr. Burgess was so tired. I invited Anna Mallison to come here for the night, and I wanted him to meet her. Mrs. Churchill has asked the opportunityfor a little talk with Anna in the morning, and it will be convenient for her to be here. It is so far to her rooms, you know.”

“I should think the house was full already, mamma,” remarked Gertrude Ingraham. “Where can we put her?”

“Oh, she will not mind going up to the south room in the third story, my dear. I told Jane to have it in order.”

Just then Miss Ingraham came into the house and Anna Mallison was with her.

Back to Index Next