CHAPTER XVIII
Are you the new person drawn toward me?To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?· · · · ·Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction?· · · · ·Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?—Walt Whitman.
Are you the new person drawn toward me?To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?· · · · ·Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction?· · · · ·Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?—Walt Whitman.
Are you the new person drawn toward me?To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
· · · · ·
· · · · ·
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloyed satisfaction?
· · · · ·
· · · · ·
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?—Walt Whitman.
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?
—Walt Whitman.
In her sittings in the studio of Pierce Everett, Anna had found from time to time numbers of an English magazine devoted to social reform. Some of these, at Everett’s suggestion, she had taken home with her and read with care. Coming to the studio one May afternoon, for the work had been laid aside for a time for various reasons, and only resumed with the spring, Anna laid down on a table three or four of these magazines with the remark:—
“I wish I knew who John Gregory is.”
Everett glanced up quickly.
“I mean the man who wrote those articles on the ‘Social Ideals of Jesus,’” added Anna.
“Do you like them?” asked Everett.
“I do not know how to answer that question,” said Anna, musingly; “perhaps you hardly can say you like what makes you thoroughly uncomfortable. What he says of the immorality of a life of selfish ease appeals to me powerfully.”
“It is a great arraignment,” said Everett, working on in apparent absorbedness.
“What stirs me so deeply,” continued Anna, “is that this writer not only says what I believe to be true, but that he makes you feel a sense of power, authority, finality almost, in the way he says it. And by that, you know, I do not mean that he is authoritative or autocratic; it is simply that he writes as one who sees, who knows, who has gone beyond the mists of doubt and has a clear vision.”
“You are quite right, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quietly, looking up from his work, his eyes kindling with unwonted light. “John Gregory is a man of his generation—a seer; as you say, one who sees. He is my master. You did not know, perhaps, that I am a socialist?”
“No,” Anna said simply; “I do not even rightly know what a socialist is.”
“It is, as far as my personal definition is concerned,—there are a dozen others,—a man who believes that the aim of individual and private gain and advantage, to the ignoring of the interests of his fellow-men, is immoral; this, whether it is the struggle for the man’s salvation in a future life, or his social or material advancement in this.”
Anna looked very sober. In a moment of silence, she was asking herself, “I wonder what becomes of people who are forced into lives of selfish inaction; who have to live luxuriously when they don’t want to; who are obliged to go in carriages when they far prefer walking; and who find their hands tied whenever they seek any line of effort not absolutely conventional?”
Looking up then with a sudden smile, she exclaimed,“I should like to ask this Mr. Gregory a few questions!”
“Perhaps you may be able to some time. He is in this country now, and he is so good as to honour me with his personal friendship. However, he passes like night from land to land; one can never count upon his coming, or plan for his staying an hour. But if I can bring it about, Mrs. Burgess, you shall meet some time.”
“Thank you. What is he? A clergyman, a teacher, or what?”
“You found something a little sermonic in his articles?” and Everett smiled. “I believe he can never throw it off entirely. He is an Oxford man, a scholar, and a writer on sociology. He is first and last and always, however, a Christian in the purest and most practical sense.”
“That seemed to me unmistakable.”
“He used to be a preacher; in fact, he was for a number of years a famous evangelist in England, and also in this country. He was led into that work by a sense of obligation. I should almost think you must have heard of his wonderful success. John Gregory—his name was in everybody’s mouth a few years ago.”
Anna tried to recall some vague sense of association with the name, which failed to declare itself plainly.
“He was holding great revival meetings somewhere in New England, simply sweeping everything before him; all the great cities were seeking him, you know his income could have been almost anything he would have made it. All this I know, but I never heard a word of it from Gregory himself.”
“He is not doing this still?”
“I will tell you. Really to understand, you must try to imagine something of the man’s personality. He has in the highest degree that indefinable quality which we usually call magnetism. He has an almost irresistible personal influence with many people. Well, on a certain night, four or five years ago, I should think, during the course of a most successful meeting, it suddenly became clear to him that he was bringing the people in that audience to a religious crisis, and to a committal of themselves to a profession of a knowledge of God, by doubtful means. I cannot tell you the details, I have forgotten them; but I know that he went through something like agony in that meeting, and that in saying the words ‘The Spirit is here,’ he had an overwhelming sense of presumption and even of blasphemy. He did not know that the Spirit was present. He was not sure but the influence at work was the product of music, of oratory, of his own will and personality, of the contagion of an excited crowd—in short, was purely human. If this were so, what could the results be but confusion and dismay when the hour of reaction should come? He was borne down by a sense of pity and remorse even for the coming spiritual doubts and struggles of the people who were at that hour placed almost helplessly in his hands, and abruptly he left the place—hall, whatever it was. That night in his hotel he made no attempt to sleep, but studied the situation, its dangers, its losses, its benefits, with the result that he never again held that order of revival meetings. Whatever good other men might do with the forces at work and put into their hands to wield at such crises, for himself he was convinced that the human had usurped the divine, and made of him, not only an unauthorized experimenter withsouls, but a violator of their sacred rights, albeit hitherto unconsciously to himself.”
“What has he been doing since?”
“Studying. He has gone deeply into social and religious problems, has travelled largely, has seen and talked with many of the most famous leaders of modern thought, and I think he has now some large plans which are maturing slowly. Meanwhile he writes such things as you have read.”
The following week Anna was again in Everett’s studio. This sitting, he promised her as it drew to a close, should be the last, as he could finish the picture without her.
“Am I to see it now?” asked Anna, timidly.
“Not quite yet, if you can be patient still after such long forbearance,” was the answer, given with a bright but half-pleading smile. “I want you to like the thing if you can, Mrs. Burgess, and I know my chances are better if you see it when the final touches are on.”
“Very well. I am not in a hurry.”
When Anna left the studio the sun was low and the room fast growing shadowy. Seeing how hard and intensely Everett was working to use the last light of the day, she insisted that he should not come down the three long flights of stairs with her. The studio was at the top of the house. They parted, therefore, with a brief, cordial good-by, and earnest thanks from the young artist, whose admiration and reverence for his model had grown with every hour spent in her presence.
On the second flight of stairs Anna encountered the housemaid coming up, a tray with a card in her hand. Otherwise the house seemed strangely still and deserted that evening. As she descended slowly from the broadlanding of the main staircase, where a window of stained glass threw a deep radiance from the western sky like a shaft of colour down into the dim hall below, Anna perceived that some one stood there, waiting.
As she looked, amazement and a strange, deep joy took hold on her. The man who stood with arms crossed upon his breast where the shaft of light fell full upon him in the gathering shadow was of heroic height and stature, with a large leonine head, grey hair thrown carelessly from his forehead, strong features, and eyes stern and grave in their fixed look straight before him as he stood.
It was not the first time that Anna Mallison had confronted this face. Twice in her girlhood she had seen it as she saw it now. It was the face of her dream, the dream which for years secretly dominated her inner life as a vision of human power and greatness touched with supernatural light. Even in later time, in this year of her Fulham life, she had at intervals recalled that presence and influence distinctly, and never without quickened pulses and mysterious longing. And now she saw bodily before her the very shape and substance of her dream.
With her heart beating violently and her breath painfully quickened, she proceeded down the stairs, through the hall, and so past the place where the stranger stood. When she reached him he became aware of her presence for the first time. Throwing back his head slightly with the action of one surprised, he met Anna’s eyes lifted with timid joy and dreamlike appeal to his face, and smiled, bending slightly as if in spiritual bestowment, and shedding into her heart the inexplicable delight which she had known before only as the effluence of a dream.
Neither spoke. The house door opened and closed, and Anna hastened down the street alone under the pale, clear sky, with a sense that the greatest event of her life had befallen her, but she knew not what it was. As she went on her homeward way she seemed to herself to be palpably taken up and borne onward by a power beyond herself, as of some rushing, mighty “wind of destiny.”
She found her husband at home, alone in the dusky library by an oppressive fire. She wanted to tell him what had happened; but when she sought to do this she found that nothing had happened; there was nothing to tell unless she should seek to put into words that mysterious dream of her past, and this she found impossible. The dream was her own. No one else could understand.
Keith had returned from a long and tiresome journey in her absence, and Anna was filled with penitence that she had not been in the house to receive him and make him comfortable. He looked worn and dispirited, and complained of the weather, which she had thought celestial, but which prostrated his strength.
In her quiet, skilful way she ministered to him, hiding in her heart the deep happiness in which no one could share, and as she bathed his head he caught her hand and kissed it.
“Oh, my wife,” he said, so low that she could hardly hear, “you are too beautiful, too wonderful for a miserable weakling of a man like me; but how I love you, Anna! Tell me that I do not spoil your life.”
CHAPTER XIX
I am holy while I standCircumcrossed by thy pure hand;But when that is gone again,I, as others, am profane.—Robert Herrick.
I am holy while I standCircumcrossed by thy pure hand;But when that is gone again,I, as others, am profane.—Robert Herrick.
I am holy while I standCircumcrossed by thy pure hand;But when that is gone again,I, as others, am profane.—Robert Herrick.
I am holy while I stand
Circumcrossed by thy pure hand;
But when that is gone again,
I, as others, am profane.
—Robert Herrick.
John Gregory stood in the studio with his friend, the first greetings over.
“May I look at your work?” he asked, approaching Everett’s easel. The younger man stood behind him with sensitive, changing colour, and something almost like trepidation in the expression of his face.
There was a certain quality of command in John Gregory, of which he was himself, perhaps, usually unconscious, which produced in many minds a disproportionate anxiety to win his approval. As he stood now before Everett’s easel, however, he was not the awe-inspiring figure of Anna’s dream, or even of its sudden fulfilment, but simply an English gentleman in his rough travelling tweeds, a man of fifty or thereabout, noticeable for his height and splendid proportion, for a kind of rugged harmony of feature, and for the peculiarly piercing quality of his glance. His manner was characterized by repose which might have appeared stolidity had not the fire in his eyes denied the suggestion; his voice was deep and full, and he spoke with the roll and rhythm of accent common to educated Englishmen. The aspect of the man produced, altogether, an effect of almost careless freedom from form, the sensethat here was one who had to do with what was actual and imperative, not with the adventitious and artificial; in fine, an essentially masculine and virile individuality,—a man born to lead, not to follow.
Beside him, Pierce Everett, with his delicate mobility of face and the slender grace of his frame, looked boyish and even effeminate, but there was nothing of superiority or patronage in Gregory’s bearing toward the young artist, but rather a kind of affectionate comradery peculiarly winning, and he entered into the study of the young man’s work with cordial and sympathetic interest.
The canvas before them was not a large one; the composition extremely simple; the single figure it presented was set in against a background of cold, low tones of yellow. A crumbling tomb of hewn stone, with tufts of dry grass growing in the crevices, hoary with age, stained with decay, was set against a steep hillside of sterile limestone. Leaning upon a broken pillar of this tomb stood the figure of a young girl, her hands dropped carelessly upon the rough stone before her, her head lifted and encircled by a faint nimbus, the eyes fixed in absorbed contemplation, and yet with a child’s passionless calm. The outlines of the figure, in white Oriental dress, were those of extreme youth, undeveloped and severe, the attitude had an unconscious childlike grace, the expression of the face was that of awe and wonder, with a curious mingling of joy and dread. The subject, easily guessed, was the Virgin in Contemplation in early girlhood.
The picture was nearly finished, only the detail of the foreground remained incomplete.
John Gregory stood for some time in silence. The face and figure before him possessed the expression ofhigh, spiritual quality common to the early Florentines; there was little of fleshly or earthly beauty, but an aura of celestial purity, of virginal innocence and devout aspiration, was the more perceived.
“You have painted, like Fra Angelico, Everett, with heaven in your heart.”
Gregory spoke at last. The artist drew a long breath and turned away, satisfied. They both found chairs then, and settled down for an hour of talk.
“Where could you find a model for such a conception? It would be most difficult, I should think, in our self-conscious, sophisticated, modern life.”
“It was my model who created my picture,” replied Everett. “Mrs. Keith Burgess is the lady’s name. Seeing her at church, when she came here a bride, gave me my first thought of the thing.”
Gregory looked at him meditatively.
“It is most remarkable that a woman who was married could have suggested your little Mary there, with that child’s unconsciousness in her eyes, that obviously virginal soul. When a woman has loved a man, she has another look.”
Everett was surprised at this comment from Gregory, who had never married, and who was peculiarly silent and indifferent commonly when the subject of love or marriage was touched in conversation. He answered presently:
“When Mrs. Burgess was married and came here, she was in a sense a child. She was thoughtful and serious beyond her years in religious concerns, but quite undeveloped on all other lines, and as inexperienced in the motives and energies of the modern world as a child—I think one might have described her then as a very religious child.”
“Has she changed greatly?”
“Not so much, and yet somewhat. She has begun to read, you see, which she never had done except on certain scholastic and religious lines; she has begun to think for herself somewhat, and in a sense, one could say, she has begun to live.”
John Gregory did not reply, but he said to himself that if she had begun to love she could not have furnished his friend with the inspiration and the model for just that picture.
He had come to Fulham only for the evening, being on his way to take a steamer from Montreal back to England. The two men had dinner together, and then, returning to the studio, conversed long and earnestly. Gregory spoke freely but not fully of plans which absorbed him, but which were not yet matured. Some theory of social coöperation was in full possession of his mind, and he had small consideration for things outside. Everett listened with serious attention to all that he said, and when he rose to make ready for departure he remarked:—
“Mr. Gregory, when the time comes that you are ready to carry into execution any plan embodying this principle of brotherhood, count on me, if you think me worthy. I am ready to follow you—anywhere.”
Gregory looked down upon the young man with his grave and winning smile.
“Thank you, Everett; I shall remember. But do you know, my dear fellow, I want to ask a tremendous favour of you now, this very night?”
“Say on,” returned the other.
Gregory had crossed the room to the easel, and now stood with a look intent on the picture of the young Virgin.
“It is a bold request, but I want to buy this picture of you now—before you have a chance to touch it again. Who knows but you may spoil it? It interests me unusually, and I want to take it with me to England,—to do that it must go with me to-night. I will pay you any price you have in mind. I want it for a purpose, Everett.”
“What! you mean that I should let it go to-night, before I have finished it, or shown it to Mrs. Burgess herself even?” and Everett looked almost aghast. “She has never seen it, even once, you know.”
“Yes,” said the other, looking fully into the artist’s excited face with undisturbed quietness; “that is exactly what I ask of you. I will promise to return the painting to you at some future date if that should be your wish. I shall be over here again in a year.”
Everett stood for a moment, reflecting.
“I am very fond of the picture,” he said slowly.
“So am I,” said the other, smiling.
Everett glanced up, and caught the smile, and felt a strange control in it.
“You will have to take it,” he said, with a nervous laugh. “There is no other way.”
“Then, put a good price on it, my boy,” said Gregory, with matter-of-fact brevity.
“You will agree not to exhibit it anywhere, publicly?”
“Certainly. I could not do that without Mrs. Burgess’s consent.”
“How I shall make my peace with her, I am sure I cannot imagine,” murmured Everett, as he took the painting from its place, and laid it on the table preparatory to packing it.
“Will you tell her, please,” said Gregory, quiteunmoved, “that I wanted the picture, and will agree to make good use of it?”
A sudden clearing passed over Everett’s clouded face.
“Oh, to be sure, to be sure!” he cried; “Mrs. Burgess has read your recent articles in theEconomist, and she is quite enthusiastic over them. It will be all right.”
“I am sure it will,” said John Gregory. He was thinking of Anna’s face as she had passed him in the hall below, but he did not mention the fact that they had met to Everett.
CHAPTER XX
That which has caused the miserable failure of all the efforts of natural religion is that its founders have not had the courage to lay hold upon the hearts of men, consenting to no partition. They have not understood the imperious desire for immolation which lies in the depths of every soul, and souls have taken their revenge in not heeding those too lukewarm lovers.
—Life of St. Francis.Sabatier.
To be content to have while others have not, to be content to be right while others are bound and crushed with wrong, to be content to be saved apart from the common life, to seek heaven while our brothers are in hell, is deepest perdition and not salvation; it is the mark of Cain in a new form.—G. D. Herron.
In the few years which followed her early married life, the cords of convention, slender, and strong as threads of silk, were wound closer and closer about Anna Burgess outwardly. As she grew older, Keith’s mother grew more immovable in her social creed, and ruled her family more rigidly. Anna might read and study, but if she would please her mother-in-law, it must be in the mildest of manners, and on strictly suitable and ladylike lines; religious biography was recommended, while all literature which conveyed a touch of freedom in thought, or a suggestion of a change in social conditions, was viewed with horror.
Anna might also be charitable, but this too must be on strictly conventional lines. There were numerous benevolent organizations upheld by Fulham’s fashionable women; the name of Mrs. Keith Burgess might figure frequently on these,—to this there would be no opposition, but individual and sporadic work among the poor was uniformly discouraged. The family carriagewas often sent into the slums of the city on errands of bestowal as from the wealthy to those “less favoured,” but when Anna would have liked the carriage to take her on social calls on equal terms, in respectable but unfashionable regions, she met with a cold disfavour and unyielding lack of compliance.
Malvina Loveland, who had been married to the Rev. Frank Nichols, not long after Anna’s marriage, had come again within Anna’s horizon. Through Keith’s personal influence, exerted at Mr. Nichols’s request, a call had been extended to him to the pastorate of a church in Fulham. This church was not very large and not particularly prominent; furthermore, it was not in the “right” part of Fulham geographically, which was as distinctly limited as the social circle.
The Nicholses, delighted to come to Fulham as a university town of some importance, and to a church far more promising of obvious success than the mission enterprise in which they had worked in Burlington, innocently rented a cosey modern house on a pleasant street which, had they but known it, distinctly stamped them as socially ineligible from the day of their arrival.
Mally, dreaming of nothing of the kind, entered upon what she expected to be a somewhat brilliant life socially, into which she saw her husband and herself conducted easily and naturally by the Keith Burgesses.
Anna had received her old friend with most affectionate cordiality, and had spent days of hard work in helping her to order her house, which, as there was a baby and but one servant, was not a small undertaking. Madam Burgess had submitted with patience to the long absences and the preoccupation of her daughter-in-lawthus involved, and had even responded without demur to Anna’s timid request that they might have her old friends to dinner.
This dinner closed the Nichols episode from the social point of view. The guests were full of cheerful and unfeigned admiration, eager to please, easy to be pleased, but their good will availed them nothing. Even Anna could not fail now to perceive poor Mally’s inherent provincialness, but had she been apparently to the manner born, it would have made no difference with Madam Burgess. The essential qualifications to entrance into her world being lacking, her punctilious and attentive courtesy for the occasion simply covered the inevitable and absolute finality of it.
The Nicholses themselves, while by no means perceiving that the social career to which they had looked forward in Fulham was ended with this visit instead of begun, departed from the Burgess mansion with a vague sense of chill which all Anna’s efforts could not counteract. They were never invited there again. Madam Burgess had done her duty by her son’s wife’s early friends, and the incident, as far as she was concerned, was closed.
Anna, burning with a desire to make up to Mally for the inevitable disappointment which she foresaw, and hotly, although silently, resenting the social narrowness which excluded all men and women whose lives had not been run in the one fixed mould, devoted herself personally to her old friend with double ardour. More than this she could not do. Mally wondered, as the months passed and they settled down to the undivided intercourse of their own obscure church and neighbourhood, that Anna made no attempt to introduce her into her own aristocraticcircle. Over and over she bit back the question which would reach her lips, “Why?” Her heart fermented with bitterness and resentment, and her husband was taxed to the utmost to subdue and sweeten the tumult of her wounded feeling.
Another year brought Mally another baby, greatly to her own dissatisfaction. Poor Anna, the great passion of motherhood within her still baffled and unfulfilled, poured out her soul upon mother and child in vicarious ecstasy, and went home to lie awake for many nights with her ceaseless, thwarted yearning for a child; and thus these two women each longed passionately for what the other, possessing, found a burden rather than a joy.
As time went on, Anna, bound to a certain outward course of life alien to her natural bent, lived her own life just below the surface, a life like a flame burning beneath ice. All the master motives of her nature unapplied; all the initial motives with which life had begun, neutralized and made ineffective, she reached, five years of married life over, the point which in any human development is one of danger,—the point when great personal forces are dammed up by barriers of external circumstance, when the prime powers and passions are without adequate expression.
Meanwhile Keith Burgess, his young enthusiasms having lost their first freshness, the limitations of physical weakness and suffering making themselves more and more felt, settled into a narrow routine of life and thought. As his physique gradually seemed to shrivel and his delicacy of form and feature to increase, a resemblance to his mother, scarcely observable in his younger manhood, became at times striking. His missionary activity passed from its original fresh ardour into asystem of petty details, increasingly formal and perfunctory, even to Anna’s reluctant perception.
Perhaps it was due to Keith’s protracted absences from home, perhaps partly to his physical exhaustion, which made him dull and unresponsive when with her, but Anna felt, against her own will, a growing divergence in thought and interest between them. He was delicately sympathetic, chivalrously attentive, to her in all outward ways; but when she longed with eager craving for his participation in the life of thought and purpose which was stirring the depths of her nature in secret, she found scant response.
Driven inward thus at every point, Anna’s essential life centred itself more and more upon the new message of social brotherhood which she had found in the writings of John Gregory; and, unconsciously to herself, the ruling figure in her mind, as the symbol of the human power and freedom for which she longed, was his. The “counterfeit presentment” of this man in her dream had ruled her girlish imagination; and now his actual presence, though but once encountered, exercised an influence over her maturer life no less mysterious and no less profound. To this influence fresh strength was given by the relation, never-so-slight, which existed between them by reason of Gregory’s possession of the picture painted by Everett. How she was represented was still all unknown to her, still unasked; but must it not be that, owning this mysterious image of her face, his thoughts would sometimes turn to her? This thought stirred Anna with a thrill, half of joy, half of fear.
An interruption in the routine of their Fulham life occurred after Keith had served the missionary society for a period of five years. An illness which manifested,as well as increased, his physical inability to continue in his difficult duties brought Keith and Anna to a sudden course of action. Keith resigned his official position, and, as soon as he was able to travel, they sailed for Europe for a year’s absence.
This was a year of rapid development and of abounding happiness to Anna. Alone and unguarded in their life together for the first time since their marriage, the husband and wife grew together in new sympathy, and fed their spirits on the beauty and wonder of art and the majesty of nature in fond accord. The fulness and richness and complexity of the working of the human spirit throughout the ages were revealed to Anna; the grandeur and purity of dedicated lives of creeds unlike and even hostile to her own opened her eyes to a new and broader view of human and divine relations. Reverence, love, and sympathy began to usurp the place of dogma, division, and exclusion in her mental energies. She began to perceive that the righteous were not wholly righteous, nor the wicked wholly wicked. The old ground plan of the moral universe with which she had started in life looked now a mean and narrow thing. Larger hopes and a bolder faith awoke in her.
And so in mind, and also in body, Anna grew joyously and freely; even her attitudes and motions expressed a new harmony, while suavity and grace of outline succeeded to the meagre and angular proportions of her youth.
The return to Fulham came, when it could no longer be postponed, as an unwelcome period to their best year of life. Madam Burgess received her children with affectionate, albeit restrained, cordiality, and watched Anna with keen eyes on which no change, however slight, was lost.
When mother and son were left alone on the night of the return, as on the night when Keith brought his wife home a bride, Madam Burgess spoke plainly and directly of Anna. She had never discussed her characteristics from that night until the present, but she felt that another epoch was reached, and a few remarks would be appropriate.
“My son,” she said, “do you remember the night when you brought Anna home to this house as a bride?”
“Perfectly, mother.”
“So do I. I have been going back continually in thought to-night to that time. Without undue partiality, Keith, I think we are justified in a little self-congratulation. Anna has developed slowly, but she has now reached the first and best bloom of her maturity. You brought her here a shy, angular, country-bred, undeveloped girl, although I will not deny that she had distinction, even then; to-night you bring her again not only adistinguébut a beautiful woman,—yes, Keith, I really mean it,—a beautiful woman, and with a certain charm about her which makes her capable of being a social leader, if she chooses to exert her power. I understand she has purchased some good gowns in Paris. I have about concluded to give a reception next month in honour of your return, if my health permits.”
The reception, which Madam Burgess’s health was favoured to permit, proved to be as brilliant an event as social conditions in Fulham rendered possible. The fine old house was radiant with flowers and wax-lights, and the company which was gathered was the most distinguished which the little city could muster. In the midst of all the gay array stood Keith and Anna,—hewith his small, slight figure, his scrupulously gentlemanly air, his thin, worn face and nervous manner; she tall and stately, with her characteristic repose illuminated by new springs of thought, perception, and feeling, full of swift and radiant response to each newcomer’s word, overflowing with the first fresh joy of her awakened social instinct.
Professor Ward stood with Pierce Everett aside, and, watching Anna, said in a lowered voice:—
“Mrs. Burgess is a woman now, through and through. Would you know her for the girl whom Keith brought here half a dozen years ago?”
“I could not find my little maiden Mary in that queenly creature!” exclaimed Everett.
“No; you were just in time with that mysterious disappearance of yours, bad luck to you that you made way with it, however you did!”
“It has taken her a good while to accept the world’s standards and fit herself to the world’s groove, but Madam Burgess has been patient and diligent, and I think she has succeeded at last,” said Everett gravely; “she will run along all right after this.”
“You think Mrs. Keith will live to sustain the family traditions hereafter, do you? And Keith, what is to become of him? He seems to have dropped off his missionary enthusiasm with singular facility.”
“Precisely. You will have to create a nice little chair for him in the university now, to keep him in the correct line of his descent. By and by, you know, he will have the estate to administer. That will be something of an occupation.”
“Then he probably will take to collecting things,” Ward added, “coins or autographs—”
“Oh, come, Ward, you’re too bad,” laughed Everett. “You don’t know Keith Burgess as well as I do.”
Later in the evening Anna was summoned from her guests to speak with some one who had called on an urgent matter which could not be put by until another time.
The fine hall, as she passed along it, was alive with lights, fragrance, music, and airy gayety; her own elastic step, her exquisite dress, her joyous excitement in the first taste of social triumph which the evening was bringing to her, accorded well with the environment. For the first time in her life, Anna had seen that she was beautiful; had felt the potent charm of her own personality; had found that she could draw to herself the homage and admiration of her social world. These perceptions had not excited her unduly, but they had given her a new sense of herself, a strong exhilaration which expressed itself in the lustre of her eyes, the brightness of every tone and tint of her face, in the way she held her head, in the clear, thrilling cadence of her voice.
Once again, after long dimness and confusion, life seemed about to declare itself to her, and the energies of her nature to find a free channel. At last she might move in the line of least resistance, and fill the place she was expected to fill, without further conflict or question.
It looked a pleasant path that night, and submission a sweet and gracious thing.
With a half smile still on her lips, and the spirit of the hour full upon her, Anna came to the house door and opened it upon the outer vestibule, where she had been told the messenger would await her.
The man who stood there was John Gregory.
Anna softly closed the door behind her, and looked up into his face. It wore a different aspect from that which she remembered, for it was stern and unsmiling, and more deeply grave and worn than she had seen it. But even more than before the person of the man seemed to overawe her with a sense of power and command.
“Do you remember me, Mrs. Burgess?” he asked simply.
“Yes.”
“And I know you through my friend, through the picture he painted once of you. You must pardon my intruding upon you to-night. I could not do otherwise. I have a message for you, and I am here only for to-night.”
Anna did not speak, but her eyes were fixed upon his in earnest question, as if in some mysterious way he held destiny in his hands.
“No man could paint that picture from you now,” he proceeded slowly, gently, and yet with a kind of unflinching severity; “you had the vision then. You have lost it now. You saw God once. To-night you see the world. Once your heart ached for the sorrows of others; now it thrills with your own joys. You have given up great purposes, and are accepting small ones. I have been sent to say to you: keep the word of the kingdom and patience of Christ steadfast to the end, and hold that fast which was given that no man take your crown.”
These words, spoken with the solemnity of a prophetic admonition, pierced Anna’s consciousness.
A faint cry, as if in remonstrance, broke from her lips, but already Gregory had turned, and before she could speak she found herself alone.
With strong control Anna returned, and mingled withher guests without perceptible change of manner. When, however, the last carriage had rolled down the street, and the house itself was dark and still, she escaped alone to her own room to live over and over again that strange summons and challenge of John Gregory.
Now the sense of what he had said roused her to burning indignation and protest, and again to contrition. She knew that she was blameless and approved if tried by the standards of the people now about her, and they were the irreproachable, church-going people of Fulham. She was simply conforming to the demands of an orderly and balanced social life, and pleasing those most interested in her. But she also knew that, as tried by the standards of her father, and her own early convictions, in the social and intellectual ambitions which now animated her, she was learning to love “the world and the things of the world,” to know “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” The voice of her past spoke clearly through the voice of John Gregory and must be heard. The things which she had thought to put away forever in the solemn dedication of her girlhood had gradually returned, and silently established themselves in her life in the guise of duties, necessities, conformities to the wishes of others.
But of late she had come to regard those early scruples almost as superstitious. Where lay the absolute right—the truth? the will of God concerning her? Why was life so hard? Why was it impossible to even know the good? What right had John Gregory to spoil, as he had spoiled, this latest development of life for her, and give her nothing in its place? She resented his interference, and yet felt that she should inevitably yield herself to its influence.
CHAPTER XXI
My thwarted woman-thoughts have inward turned,And that vain milk like acid in me eats.Have I not in my thought trained little feetTo venture, and taught little lips to moveUntil they shaped the wonder of a word?I am long practised. O those children, mine!Mine, doubly mine: and yet I cannot touch them,I cannot see them, hear them—Does great GodExpect I shall clasp air and kiss the windFor ever? And the budding cometh on,The burgeoning, the cruel flowering:At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawnThat muffled call of birds how like to babes;And I amid these sights and sounds must starve—I, with so much to give, perish of thrift!Omitted by his casual dew!—Stephen Phillips.
My thwarted woman-thoughts have inward turned,And that vain milk like acid in me eats.Have I not in my thought trained little feetTo venture, and taught little lips to moveUntil they shaped the wonder of a word?I am long practised. O those children, mine!Mine, doubly mine: and yet I cannot touch them,I cannot see them, hear them—Does great GodExpect I shall clasp air and kiss the windFor ever? And the budding cometh on,The burgeoning, the cruel flowering:At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawnThat muffled call of birds how like to babes;And I amid these sights and sounds must starve—I, with so much to give, perish of thrift!Omitted by his casual dew!—Stephen Phillips.
My thwarted woman-thoughts have inward turned,And that vain milk like acid in me eats.Have I not in my thought trained little feetTo venture, and taught little lips to moveUntil they shaped the wonder of a word?I am long practised. O those children, mine!Mine, doubly mine: and yet I cannot touch them,I cannot see them, hear them—Does great GodExpect I shall clasp air and kiss the windFor ever? And the budding cometh on,The burgeoning, the cruel flowering:At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawnThat muffled call of birds how like to babes;And I amid these sights and sounds must starve—I, with so much to give, perish of thrift!Omitted by his casual dew!—Stephen Phillips.
My thwarted woman-thoughts have inward turned,
And that vain milk like acid in me eats.
Have I not in my thought trained little feet
To venture, and taught little lips to move
Until they shaped the wonder of a word?
I am long practised. O those children, mine!
Mine, doubly mine: and yet I cannot touch them,
I cannot see them, hear them—Does great God
Expect I shall clasp air and kiss the wind
For ever? And the budding cometh on,
The burgeoning, the cruel flowering:
At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawn
That muffled call of birds how like to babes;
And I amid these sights and sounds must starve—
I, with so much to give, perish of thrift!
Omitted by his casual dew!
—Stephen Phillips.
The next morning Anna was sent for to go to Mrs. Nichols, whom she had hardly seen since her return from Europe.
She found her sitting in her nursery with her two little children playing about her feet. She was near her third confinement, and in the shadow of her imminent peril and the heavy repose laid upon body and spirit by her condition there was an indescribable dignity about her which Anna had never felt until now.
Before she left, Mally, with wistful eyes, looked up to her, and said, timidly:—
“Anna, you love little children. No one that I ever saw takes mine in her arms as you do—not even I who am their mother.”
“Oh, Mally!” Anna cried, sharp tears piercing their way. “If that is true, it must be because my heart never stops aching for a child of my own. I know now that we shall never have children, and I try to be reconciled; but you can never know, dear, how I envy you.”
“Do not envy me,” Mally answered, her lips trembling. “You do not know what it means to sit here to-day and see the shining of the sun on the children’s hair, and touch their little heads with my hand, and smell those roses you brought, and yet think that to-morrow at this time I may be gone beyond breath, sight, the sun, the children—”
“Dear, don’t, don’t,” Anna pleaded; “you must not think so. You have been helped through safely before; you will be again. People always have these times of dread.”
Mally shook her head, but answered quietly:—
“I have never felt before like this, but only God knows. But this is why I sent for you: If my little baby lives, and is a perfect child, and I am taken away, would you, Anna, do you think you could—take my baby for your own, for always?”
“Oh, if I could!” and all Anna’s heart went out in the cry, and Mally saw the love which shone in her eyes and wondered at her strange beauty.
“I am sure you will come through safely as you have before,” she said, “but this I promise you, Mally,” taking her friend’s hand and holding it fast, “if you should be taken from your children, and they will let me,—I mean if my husband and his mother should consent, for I am not quite free, you see,—I will take your little baby and it shall be my very own, and I will be its mother while we both live, God helping me.”
A look of deep joy and relief in Mally’s poor pale face was full response, and the two parted with a sense of a deeper union of spirit than they had ever known before.
Early on the following morning, after a wakeful and anxious night, Anna hastened to the Nicholses’ home.
Mally’s husband met her with a stricken face, for a swift and sudden blow had fallen; her trial had come and his wife had died, hardly an hour before. There had been no time to send for Anna, although Mally had spoken her name almost at the last.
They stood together in the poor, gay little parlour which Mally had adorned with high hopes of the abundant life into which she fancied herself entering,—the young husband with his grief-wrung, ashy face, Anna with her heart melted in sorrow and compassion. While neither could speak for their tears, the faint wail of a little child smote upon the silence from a room within.
“The baby?” Anna asked under her breath.
A deeper darkness seemed to settle upon Nichols’s face.
“Yes, a boy. A fine little fellow, they say; but I feel as if I could not look at him. I have not seen him.”
Anna turned and left the room, and in another moment, in the dark inner room where she had sat with Mally in the sunshine the day before, she took Mally’s baby into her arms, and bent her head above it with a great sense of motherhood breaking over her spirit like a wave from an infinite sea.
She stood and held the tiny creature for many moments, alone and in silence, while joy and sorrow, life and death, passed by her and revealed themselves. Then she laidthe baby down and went up to the room where Mally lay, white and still, with something of the beauty of her girlhood in her face, and the great added majesty of motherhood and death. On her knees Anna bent over the unanswering hand which yesterday she had seen laid warmly on the fair curls of her little children, and, in the hush and awe of the place, spoke again her solemn promise of yesterday.
After that she came down to the children and their father, and took quietly into her own hands the many cares which the day had brought.
It was late in the evening when Anna, exhausted and unnerved, returned home. She found Keith and his mother waiting for her in the library,—Keith hastening to welcome her with tender sympathy, Madam Burgess a shade colder than usual beneath a surface of suitable phrases of solicitude and condolence. She had been absolutely indifferent to Mrs. Nichols in life, and did not find her deeply interesting even in death. Furthermore, she always resented Anna’s spending herself upon that family, and in the present affliction she felt that flowers and a ten-minute call would have answered every demand.
If Anna had been steadier and less under the influence of the piteous desolation of the home she had left, less absorbed in her own ardent purpose, she would have realized that this was not the time or place in which to make that purpose known. If she had waited, if she had talked with her husband alone, the future of all their lives might have taken a different shape. But with the one controlling thought in her mind, forgetting how impossible it was for these two, not highly gifted with imaginative sympathy, to enter into her own deepemotion, she spoke at once of Mally’s request that in the event of her death she should take her baby; of her own conditional promise, and of her deep desire to fulfil it.
There was a little silence, chill and bleak, and then Keith said, in a half-soothing tone as if she had been an excited child, hurrying in with a manifestly impossible petition:—
“It was a very sweet and generous wish on your part, Anna; so like you, dear.”
Anna looked at him in silence, her lips parted.
Madam Burgess gave a dry cough, and partook of a troche from a small silver box which she carried in a lace-trimmed bag.
“Yes, as Keith says, my dear, it was a kind impulse on your part, but it certainly was a very singular action on that of your friend. She was probably too ill, poor thing, at the time to realize just what she was asking. I have no doubt you were quite excusable for giving her some sort of a conditional promise, considering all the circumstances. But you need have no sense of responsibility in the matter; infants left like that never live. It will only be a question of a few weeks’ care for any one.”
Anna turned her eyes from her mother-in-law back to her husband in mute amazement and appeal. They could not mean to deny her this sacred right! It was impossible. And yet a sudden sense of the incongruity of poor Mally’s baby in that house smote sharply upon her for the first time.
“If it had been God’s will that we should have had children of our own, Anna,” said Keith, in answer to her look, “we should have learned to fit ourselves to the many cares and responsibilities involved, I do notdoubt, as others do; but it is very different to go out of our way to assume such cares, not ours in any legitimate sense. I think the question is more serious than you realize in the very natural and proper emotion which you are passing through in the death of your friend. We certainly could not ask mother to take this strange child, and all that would be involved in such a relation, into her house; and we are, I am sure, as little prepared to leave mother and break up our natural order of life,” and Keith smiled with kind conviction into Anna’s face. She rose slowly and stood with eyes fixed before her, and a strange light was in them, which her husband had never seen before.
“That is all perfectly true, Keith,” said Madam Burgess, as if to finish up the case against poor Anna; “and even if all this were not so, there would remain one insuperable obstacle to adopting this infant—an absolutely insuperable obstacle.”
“What is it?” asked Anna, very low.
“Blood, my dear. I believe in blood, and never, with his mother’s consent or approval, could my son give his name, and all that that means, to a child of alien stock. Never.” And Madam Burgess closed her lips firmly and folded her hands peacefully upon her grey silk gown with the consciousness of occupying a perfectly unassailable position.
Anna moved toward the door, a curious effect in her step and bearing as of one physically wounded, her head drooped slightly as if in submission, her eyes downcast.
When she reached the door, however, a swift change passed over her; a sudden energy and power awoke in her, and she turned, and, looking back at mother and son, her eyes flashing light, and a smile they had neverseen before upon her lips, said quietly, but with slow emphasis:—
“You have decided this matter. You have each other; you are satisfied. I shall submit, as you know. Once more you have taken my life—its most sacred promise and its highest purpose—out of my hands. This time another life, too, is involved. One thing only you must let me say,I wonder how you dare!”
Facing them for an instant in silence, she turned, and went alone to her room.