CHAPTER IV.
The doctor motioned them all to come with him to an adjoining room. And then Mrs. Mancredo told all she knew about the rosebud which had become associated in Reginald’s mind with his early life, and of the conversation which had taken place between them the night of his attack, adding:
“I was in the family when he was a little fellow, before auntie died. We parted after that, and only met a few times when I was a tall, thin, sallow girl; and—and he did not know me when we met again here at this hotel this summer, in my robust maturity. He isn’t quick, Reginald isn’t, and I’ve puzzled him my share, one way and another. He has been getting in a bad way, poor Regie, and here’s the end of it.”
And to this the doctors agreed. This was the end of poor Reginald Grove; and as his fate seemed settled, the older Mr. Grove, when he arrived, accepted the statement that Reginald was a wrecked man, body and mind. And when Mrs. Mancredo had made herself known to Mr. Grove on his arrival, in a softened state of feeling toward both the father and son she found herself promising more in the way of help and responsibility than she at first realized, or afterwards wanted to perform. And the elder Grove (deeply interested in speculations in Mexico, and interested in his own approaching third marriage) was well content to turn this responsibility over to Mrs. Mancredo, with (it was popularly said) the promise of all the money necessary for Reginald’s needs or fancies. It was not until Mr. Grove had steamed away to Mexico that Mrs. Mancredo really began to look about her; and then she did it with some disgust at her own stupidity, as she was pleased to name the sympathy that had overwhelmed her and swept her on to undertake, in an indefinite way, all that the care of Reginald involved.
One warm day in the late fall she brought Reginald in her carriage down to the Dakshas. He was urgent to go there every day, and was often brought down and placed in a long-chair out on their piazza, where, with his volume of Petrarch (from which he was inseparable) he passed many pleasant hours. His facial disfigurement was not as marked as at first. But he was paralyzed through one arm and leg, and the sense of taste, touch and smell seemed deadened. His hearing and his sight were not perceptibly injured, and the childlike alertness of his questions seemed to show that the gray matter of the brain, like a galvanic battery, still generated the electric current sufficiently to produce and accumulate nervous force for the few demands which the partially deadened coarser part of the brain now made upon it. There was evinced by Reginald an utter deadness to the passions of fear, desire, etc. The central ganglia, which serves to do the drudgery of the brain, leaving the gray matter free for higher, more difficult kinds of work, was injured; thus overthrowing the balance of power between the highest meditative, spiritual faculties, and the seat of those practical faculties which insure energetic daily activities.
It was as if the partial paralysis which had befallen Reginald Grove had sent a partial sleep to the abused and overtaxed faculties of his animal being; while the higher hemisphere of his brain, so long crippled by inaction, now arousing from that lethargy of disuse, put forth dormant strength. Whether true or not, this was Ethelbert’s theory of the case, and her study of developments confirmed her in it. He was, in a sense, helpless and forceless; yet the childlike, placid clearness of his ideals, and the exhalation of sentiment in view of nature’s beauties, were so inherently clear-cut and rare, that, broken and disorganized though he was, Reginald Grove was now a less disagreeable person to Ethelbert than he had been on his first tumultuous visit. He was seldom pettish or unmanageable when with Ethelbert; but to Mrs. Mancredo his talk was unendurable. She called him a miserable fellow, blaming him passionately to Ethelbert.
“But I don’t think he is miserable,” said Ethelbert, in her quiet way. “He was miserable, when in other moments he loathed himself for his self-mismanagement. He acted like a soul in torment the first time he was here; and I fancy he was not then at his worst.”
“I am sure I can’t understand your notions. Do you mean, you think he is less miserable than before?” said Mrs. Mancredo, looking toward Reginald, who sat reading the book from which he was inseparable, as a very little child reads. The sight of that book made her wild with nervousness. There seemed something uncanny in the way he had identified himself with the personages and ideas there. And his numerous polyglot questions asked in regard to things she could not explain, and his weird, childlike shrewdness of imagination as to some unseen world of mind and spirit, were getting to be the horrible thing to Mrs. Mancredo.
From what in the apparently stolid, noncommittal old Reginald, this spirit of occult divination of the purposes, powers and results of Petrarch’s struggles, had evolved itself, she could not fancy. And she was getting so nervous at the steady illumination of his eyes that she would have given half she was worth to have removed from her memory all knowledge of his existence. Whether he had become absolutely foolish, or uncannily wise and weird, she did not know. But her refuge was Ethelbert; and Reginald’s unaltered fancy for calling Ethelbert “mother,” seemed to favor Mrs. Mancredo’s dawning hope of a way to get rid of him helpfully. And as she so thinking stood there, down in the garden, looking back at him up on the piazza, he called out: “Mother! mother!” and they both walked quickly to him.
“Let’s have a nice read about ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ and about the poor boy out of whom the devils were cast. I want to know about those mighty works, and how power did them.”
Mrs. Mancredo, with an ignorant person’s horror of what may result from irregularity of mental action, felt it was awful that a man who had lost the gustatory appetites which render nice food a pleasure to thepalate, should yet, as Ethelbert said, feast on the high thoughts and things of the unseen realms. For Ethelbert believed he did notthinkin the sense of concentrating attention; but, instead, she believed his mind simply reflected back to his attention what passed in the realms of life above and anear him, as a lake reflects all that shadows itself upon its surface; and this she explained to Mrs. Mancredo, adding:
“It is for this reason that I wish he could be always cared for by some discerning person, who, dwelling unmoved in that beautiful realm which now has hold on his mind, and who, reading his very thought, would thus sustain him at peace there, as a student under these angelic teachers, and so educate him for a real manhood which he would thus yet attain. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand,” was the blunt response. “All I know is, he has played out his little play on the stage of life, and has made a tragedy or farce of it, common enough in this age. He makes me wild with nervousness sometimes. What do you want me todowith him, for heaven’s sake?”
“You are right. It is for heaven’s sake that I want you to do it; for there is a heaven, and it belongs on earth,” said Ethel, slowly. “I believe it is only the organs at the base of his brain which are exhausted; and as they are nearly deadened, he seems like a fool to people who can only use their lower brain, which is the seat of the senses and passions—but—”
“Do you mean that as I am not alert on those spiritual planes which arouse themselves in this ghostly way with him, and as he cannot use his common-sense faculties, which are alert enough in me, I probably seem to him to be as much of an idiot as he to me seems to be?”
“I mean you have no common ground to meet upon just now. Not, however, that you are unspiritual, but because your nature is so closely knitted up, that you act and think as a well-constructed entity, dealing with entities, not with fragments.”
“Well, we never did have any common ground,” said Mrs. Mancredo,just as Judge Elkhorn came on the scene. And then her mind took hold of the fact that if she could not get along with Reginald as a whole, she certainly did not want to deal with the ghastly fragments of him which seemed left. And this she told Ethel.
“He never has been mentally whole,” said Ethel. “He is gathering up his fragments;” said Ethel. “Don’t you want to help him?”
Then Mrs. Mancredo gave Judge Elkhorn a crude version of the story, appealing from Ethel to him, concerning the whole business, in a way which some women have; not because they are going to act on the advice they may receive, but because they understand themselves better after hearing themselves “talk out the whole problem.”
Judge Elkhorn was a bright man in many regards, and had had an ambition to electrify the world with a theory which would give a new basis for action in reforms; but in dealing with such a case as this, he had certain serious limitations. For he prided himself on never going beyond the common-sense recognition of objects which he could taste, touch, feel, smell and see. But here was Reginald with the common-sense plane of mind (that is, the plane of mind on which practical people live externally and meet each other) terribly damaged, and with three out of five sense-avenues to knowledge, shut up. And yet Miss Ethelbert claimed he was living in a rather select sort of world of his own, after a tranquil fashion; not devoid of certain startling gleams of intelligence, nay, wisdom. But as for an unseen world, and “an education beyond the grave,” Judge Elkhorn was pleased to say, “he hoped he had left all faith in that sort of thing along with fear of spooks and the dark.” He was willing to call Reginald’s state “a curious phenomenon.” For the rest, he would have liked to have relegated this man to the obscurity of some asylum. For if he disliked Reginald when he was well (?) and obtrusively at home on Ethelbert’s balcony the day they first met, he disliked him vastly more now that he, as a child, was ensconced on Ethelbert’s attention.
Judge Elkhorn thought the whole thing preposterous; and notwithstandinghis fine humanitarian theories for helping misery in the mass, he would have liked to take prompt steps to hinder its being served up in individual cases, in polite society. He quite laid down the law on this subject to Miss Daksha, and interposed his particular likes and dislikes as if they were the code of the Medes and Persians. Ethel let him proceed. But she held to her faith in the final rehabilitation of Reginald, and expressed it.
So, in language of his own, Judge Elkhorn at last reassured her that her concern for this case was really unfitting.
“Who being judge?” said she.
“I shall have to be judge of your conduct, if you desire to retain my friendship and respect.”
“But that isnotmy desire. My desire is to get Reginald Grove well,” she said quietly, holding Judge Elkhorn steady in the light of her self-directing intelligence, until, without more words, he himself saw that he had supposed her general friendliness for him was identified with an enfeebling dependence on his approbation.
Then—
“Mrs. Mancredo, what willyoudo for this man?” Ethel cheerily asked.
“What can I do?”
“You could take Reginald away from the hotel-life which you dislike, and which you find so injurious to both of you; and you could get a nice, rightly adjusted home. And then, from the pure potencies of your splendid being, you could second nature’s recuperative forces inhim; and they, unthwarted and assisted thus by you, will build him up again into health of body, by giving him a new affluence of mind. Thenmindwill recreate the body. To accomplish this would perhaps take years of real mothering-wit and wisdom. But—”
“Years, Ethelbert? I should be an old woman by that time, near my fifties. What is a woman worth then? And what would this rejuvenated young scholar care for me? I mean—this is nonsense; and yes,what would I be by that time?”
“You would be a woman who at least would have achieved one defined object in life. You are now sick of existence. Money spending, dressing, dining, and days spent in wishing that things and men were different, have given your active imagination and non-concentrated powers no comfort for years past. Neither could you get much good by running up and down the world, trying to get an audience to listen to your theories. Absolute, concentrated personal work, done well, on the spot you stand on, will not fatigue you any more than does the toil of mere self-exhibit and self-protection from the inroads of others on your property and yourself. You say twelve years hence you will be a woman in the fifties, if you give these years to work. How old will you be twelve years hence if you don’t?”
“There are always asylums and skilled people,” she suggested, trembling with alarm, not so much at the work, as at undertaking to settle herself to a twelve-years’ job for him. She was very pale, and looked toward the man with a shrinking, like that in the eyes of a dumb creature being led at last to the altar of final sacrifice.
“Yes,” said Ethelbert, “there are always asylums; and they are getting fuller and fuller of people who know so ill how to deal with time, that fearing, faltering and fightings have landed them there to die, while their friends outside, fearing, faltering and fighting against their fears, soon need asylums, too. This man’s trembling intellect would be ruined by a few months in the average insane asylum. You say you would be an old woman at fifty if you tried to save that man; tell me, then, what will you be if you don’t?”
“Mother! mother! please call little Alitza; she can read me the story of the little leaden soldier; he didn’t fight well; he fell in the gutter.”
Of course that was Reginald’s voice speaking out in good English this time, which was enfibred by the childish ring of a perfectly carefree mind, when it is filled with blithe imaginings.
Judge Elkhorn looked at him with startled attention, and Mrs. Mancredoshuddered, half whispering: “We used to read ‘Comte d’Andersen’ in the French, with his mother. He was such a pretty little fellow, and took up French so easily. I learned it, too, though Italian was my baby tongue. My father was French. O dear, my life has amounted to nothing after all my efforts!”
“How would it do, then, to cease efforts, and in a home be easily useful?”
“It would make a scandal.”
Ethelbert unconsciously drew herself up, till it seemed as if the universe did not contain air enough to fill her expanding lungs as she said:
“‘Don’t talk of scandal. Needs break through stone walls. Take counsel of your own soul, though all the world should be scandalized thereby.’” And then, turning at the repeated call for “mother,” she went to Reginald, who could not be satisfied without a caressing touch of her health-giving hand. But then, contented, he went on with his reading, caring for the attention only as a petted child cares for an accustomed endearment which is hourly, perhaps, received.
Yet Judge Elkhorn looked not incapable of striking the paralyzed creature. But the Italian, with an instant’s sharp scrutiny, saw only in the act that Diana-like integrity of purpose, which like a light reflected, beautified her own face, too, with the mother-tenderness that filled Ethelbert’s being, as she said:
“Will you go to Alitza’s house, or stay with mother?”
“Of course I shall stay with my mother. Alitza may come when she chooses,” said the invalid again in English. And Elkhorn, with arms high folded, looked on, forgetful of all else but the simple intelligent purpose which made radiant these workers. Was it that passion by them had been triturated into the high potency of a god-like vigor, which was sent now through the earth to bring redemption to universal man, and (at their hands) to this individual, by the way?
“Yes, yes, take him, keep him here,” said Mrs. Mancredo. “Do ashe says, Miss Daksha. He is coming to seem such a dreadful responsibility—guarded by angels, that—”
“Oh, if this is the style of doing things which women are going to put on the world!” the judge exclaimed, “asylums and criminal courts will get to seem more devoted to miracle-working than the churches now are; and every idiot will become a center for spiritually scientific endeavor.”
“They never should have been anything less. In fact, idiots don’t belong. They are transgressions of law, as much as criminals. They, with hundreds of other things, are but the results of women’s unnatural relation to the university-education, which must be byherbestowed on man,” said Ethelbert, leading them away from proximity to Reginald. Because even though he seemed unobservant of what was going on about him, she thought that when he was not directlyaddressedhe (as if in echo) heard what was said to or about him. This manner of dealing with him rendered his visible presence in this world of effects a means by which those who were about him in this world were partially introduced to the other.
The judge and Mrs. Mancredo stood drawn together, looking back at this alienated mentality. Then she half whispered:
“They say at the hotel that he ought to—well—not be at the hotel, no matter what big bills I am willing to pay, and all that. So many people are in a rickety mental condition themselves, that—instead ofstudyinga case like this, Miss Ethel, asyoudo, it alarms them, and—and—well, I don’t know myself what it does to them—yes, and to me, too. I will confess I dislike sick men. And it sometimes seems to be not Reginald at all, but a ghost which has arisen out of his childhood—sort of waiting to have another try at what he can make of life.”
“Yet there are hundreds of such men everywhere, and we can’t afford to use our brains over them. Why should women spend their lives doing such jobs? Men choose to go the pace that kills, one wayand another, and will not hear one word from women till they drop down dead weights on the shoulders of—”
Mrs. Mancredo broke forth into convulsive weeping. This was too much for Judge Elkhorn. He took sudden leave, assured of one thing: that was, that Mrs. Mancredo saw the cleansing work which would have to be done in society’s augean stables if women took up the business of turning these stables into ‘the home of the brave and the free.’ And he saw that the idea that sheoughtto save this man, now had a hold on Mrs. Mancredo, and he knew that when a strong woman thinks sheoughtto do a thing, the ship of state may as well clear its decks for an encounter from all the guns hitherto known or unknown in moral combat. For he had learned that women are constitutionally brave as well as educationally timid, and that they set no limits to their daring when once they enter the lists to do the thing that must be done.
After he was gone, Mrs. Mancredo stood watching Reginald’s happy, superintelligent look. Then—
“What have you done to him and to us all?” she said. “It is as if—as if we were watching by the hallowed dead.”
“I think it is wonderful myself,” said Ethelbert. “I have concluded that the core of Reginald’s nature is the love of truth; and that this core of his being has not yet been ruined by social abuses; and that this love of truth is a radical root, from which a resurrected life will arise. There is hope of a tree, though it be cut down, that it shall live again if the roots are healthy. The roots of his life are better than the visible growths that have appeared,” said Ethelbert.
“Oh, let me come here, too! Let us both come!” cried Mrs. Mancredo, after the strange, tremblant silence; “I can’t keep away from here. I am so much happier here than I have ever been in my life; I feel so broken up and stripped of everything, somehow. Let me fetch down a few things. You can crowd together a little and give me two rooms; or better still, throw out an addition across the house. You can make new parlors—so—with a veranda round them, and give Regie thesunny half, and—and take me in and educate me, too. You’ve tossed me all up, somehow. At the rate I am going on I shall be a selfish old woman at fifty, and have done neither Regie nor myself nor anyone any good. But really, you know, he don’t deserve a bit of this at my hands. Do you know the night he had the shock, I felt as though—as though—”
She stopped and looked at Ethelbert’s impassive face. “You have never asked me what there was between Regie and me,” she said. “Sharp as you are, you must have known I hated him. Well, yes,” hesitated Mrs. Mancredo, “in a sort, I hated him. Have you never wondered what there is between us? You don’t look as if you cared now.”
“I should be sorry to have anything between him and his best development, or you and yours. All the rest does not amount to much either way at this terrible social crisis,” said Ethelbert, as she gazed down the long ages which had been leading on to this stage of general social, chaotic development, which is but an outward sign of the particular state of the aggregated individual. “And instead of feeling frightened at wickedness, and planning a punitive reform, the simple thing to do is to recognize these conditions asstagesat which the fomentation takes place, which always precedes clarification. A thorough clarification of society is at hand, the outcome of which will be, ‘the new order of the new age.’”
“I begin to think so myself,” said Mrs. Mancredo, after a long pause, in which she had watched the thought-gleams in Ethel’s eyes. Then, vexed at her own perplexity, she said uneasily:
“I wonder if anything would interest you that was not purely metaphysical or psychological? I mean—in fact—I want—that is—I wonder—
“Oh come, tell me. How farwouldyour ideas of old-fashioned duty carry you? Would they make you interfere with another person’s business? Would they make you make a body tell you all she knew aboutherself, and make you bring a body right down to the grindstone of confession, and bind her to your dictatorial law of ways and means of repentance?”
Ethel laughed amiably, saying: “If you want to know my character, you would better glance at my life.”
But still, with an alarmed, distrustful, quizzical look, the outgrowth of her experiences, Mrs. Mancredo said at last:
“Do you think you can take better care of Reginald than I can?”
“I can do my duty better than you can do my duty, but I cannot do yours; but on my way to do mine, if you are with me you ought to get some view of what your duty is, as I shall get new views from you regardingmywork. That seems to be the whole of the affair,” said Ethel, taking Mrs. Mancredo’s hand cordially.
“Is that so? Would you not dictate to me, nor talk to others about me, nor flinch from your duty if I neglected mine?”
“I only know,” said Ethelbert after a pause, “whatever comes to me to be done, I shall do, but I shall accommodate my actions to new circumstances which may arise, for I should be sorry to have anything come between Reginald and his best development, or between you and yours. The development of the individual is the point; all else is inconsiderable.”
“Now look at me,” said Mrs. Mancredo, taking her hand tightly, and looking her straight in the eyes. “Remember what you have said, for I shall not forget it. Listen: I am Reginald Grove’s wife.”
Ethel caught her breath, for this she had not foreseen.
“Now, then, how far will you practice your personal liberty principles? How much will you leave me in perfect freedom to choose my own duty? Remember, you have said you would be sorry to have anything come between Reginald and his best development, and me and mine, and that all the rest amounts to little either way.
“Now, then,” she continued, starting off again after a little pause, “if you don’t want anything to come between me and my best development,you will let me give up my life there at the hotel, and you will make the changes in your house that I suggest, and let me pay you the hotel prices, and bring along my carriage and servant John, and take me into the family on the ‘personal liberty principle’ with which you four heavenly mortals control or don’t control each other’s lives. And you will angelically mind your heaven-appointed business of evoking Regie’s lost angel, and leave me to evolve my own as best I can.”
By this time Ethelbert’s beryl eyes were looking into Mrs. Mancredo’s black ones, as if this arrangement were a simple plan for a lawn party.
“Why don’t you look disgusted at a woman who passes as rich Mr. Mancredo’s widow, and who is really Reginald Grove’s wife, and has never been any other man’s wife, nor anything like it, in any way to anybody!”
“Disgust must be too unpleasant a feeling to take on one’s self prematurely,” said Ethelbert, with her rare sweet smile, as she took Mrs. Mancredo’s hands in hers and sat looking way down through the turbulent surface of her eyes, into the sorrowful depths beneath; then: “When I learn all, I am sure I shall have reason to congratulate you, that with all your temptations and perplexities you have done so well.”
“How well?”
“I only know that you want nothing between you and your upward path; and that is well, absolutely well.”
“That is true; and I have never wanted any evil thing, and I really doubt if anyone really wants evil things. Shall I tell you my history now?” she continued.
“I don’t see why you should.”
“Have you no curiosity?”
“Not of that kind. I am curious to know just how Reginald’s brain looks, and if his tranquil, happy life is accumulating force in the superior brain faster than he is using it. I would like to see if recuperative energy can be stored up like money in a bank, ready for a heavy draft, and—”
“If you weren’t so interested in all that, you would be more interested in my affairs.”
“Yes, if I were not so much interested in lifeas a religiously-scientific-problem, I would be more interested in gossip, and would now bid you good-by, and immediately would set the town alive with a little romance; which, instead, you will tell me much later, and will tell the rest of the world when you choose.” And with a long grasp of the hand, Ethelbert moved away as she spoke.
“Don’t you care to know?” said Mrs. Mancredo, following her up.
“I don’t care to know anything except the resurrection-truth that you can still make your life as beautiful as you choose. You are thirty-five years old; you have forty-five years to live in this world,” said Ethelbert. “Think of that, and fashion circumstances accordantly with the result you would like to see.”
“Well, I declare, I never thought of that way of doing,” said Mrs. Mancredo, after a pause. Then: “Do you really mean to say that you take me on trust?”
“I do,” said Ethelbert; “and ‘equal exchange is no robbery.’ You take me so, too, do you not?” And a hand-grasp, peculiar and vitalizing, sealed the compact. And this was the last reference made to that matter till years afterward.
The house had not only been promptly enlarged, and Mrs. Mancredo very promptly domiciled there as she desired, but also within two years other developments had taken place. Mrs. Mancredo was now “one of them,” and participated in their many other lines of work, an account of which in the limits of this little booklet will not appear. This is but an episode in the doings of the dualized, and it must suffice to say that, under the best health conditions, physical and psychical, Reginald so improved that strangers recognized him but as a lame man, who had been paralyzed, but who was a person of winsome, gentle manners.His speech was inconsequent, and often polyglot and startling in its sudden outbreaks into good English concerning unknown themes related to realms unknown, and intangible to those who could not comprehend his mental movement.
The home of the Dakshas was more than ever like themselves; or it would be truer to say, was as much as ever like themselves, since the changes which had developed were but outward signs of the average spiritual state of the occupants of that home.
The house eventually was greatly enlarged. For Mrs. Mancredo and her servant having come to stay, the sustained condition of spiritual attraction necessitated a steady extension of the outward buildings.
As, for instance, when Bertha Gemacht (whose life was a romance) had first heard of Reginald’s attack, and of Miss Daksha’s intention of restoring his faculties, she had presented herself to Ethelbert, internally necessitated to explain her relation to the problem in hand. For the memorable scene and conversation on the balcony had left with her a fixed belief that the vital force of vein and brain is the vigor of Jehovah in us; and that those who reverence it according to the law of right use, having englobed that vital force, are thereby enriched, and fitted for a great order of service. For that this wealth of vein and brain is wealth, indeed, of an absolutely empowering sort; and is, in itself,power. And she had fully learned that by its inherentempowermentit naturally introduces its possessor to services which can only be carried forward on the plane of superordinary intelligence.
Bertha had taken to this philosophy as naturally as she had to breathing. But her heart had lately become very sore with the fear that, as the workers were to be “the pure in heart” who see good and God, she, for cause known to herself, might not be considered “pure in heart,” and so might be rejected as not fitted to help even in the humblest way, in the splendid work here opening up. The bitterness of this dread had filled her mind for weeks,—yes, from the first. And the bitterness was none the less bitter from the fact that the verycircumstancein her lifewhich she felt would be taken as ground for her rejection from this work for the new age, was in her good judgment the circumstance which had educated her to well do one line of work, that ought to be a collateral to the rest of it, as carried on here.
So one day she came suddenly to see Miss Daksha, appearing at the sunlighted stretch of rooms, the abutting tower-end of which was connected with Reginald’s suite. She glanced furtively at him, halting as she knocked, and Ethel, understanding all, said at once:
“Bertha, I call him—not bad, but bewildered; not sick, but being healed; not lost,but in process of finding himself. His helplessness now exists because Mother Wisdom Divine hasarrestedhim, by putting to sleep certain of his faculties, in order to the better releasement of his higher nature. As we understand this matter, he is mentally in communion now with saintly spirits. And if your angel and mine can but wisely conspire with angels higher yet, he will be safely carried through this crisis; and in a few years he will have forgotten all of the evil things of the past, and will be ready for a new life. And then all will go well, if but only people will then not remember against him his follies and transgressions.
“For Bertha,” Ethel said, curiously looking into the steadfast German eyes, as if showing her a sight of “those invisible things of God, which are clearly seen, being understood by things which are made.” “Bertha, Reginald ought not to die yet physically. Dying as he now is would but necessitate that at his next incarnation some other woman would be tortured to give birth to perhaps an unchangeddistractedbeing, with the same self-destructive tendencies as those evinced the day when, years ago, he was beating the rosebush to pieces.
“All that unfortunate waste of mother-pain can be prevented; for we here will now take up for him, and others, the work of being spiritual mothers, who will very simply, in this home, supplement the work of the other poor mothers who have had to give birth to ill-conditioned children, without being properly accoutred, with the time, money, andeducation requisite to enable them to teach these children the ways of life.
“That day on the balcony when he was destroying the rosebud, his mother’s spirit touched mine (as mine now touches yours), and she urged me (as I am now urging you) to bring this child out of his state of arrested development into harmony with righteousness. She informed me that in the bonds of matrimony, as well as out, Bertha, mothers often endure abuse which no creature but man thrusts on his mate; abuse which devitalizes and poisons the fountain at which, born and unborn, the babe is fed; and which weakens the nerve substance of the child, by draining the vital forces of the mother, in a way more ruinous than would be a sword-thrust.
“This mother with spiritual insistence urged me to keep her son in the body, and to carry him through this valley of the shadow of death, so as to enable him to attain a resurrection to newness of life in this body.”
Bertha’s eyes were raised in soul-flaming sympathy with the sufferings hinted at. Such violence had been done her. For years she had been hurled into wraths and torments, and into the dangers of that moral defeat from which she had been delivered by Ethel’s comprehension of her inward righteousness, as opposed to the outward conditions that had been thrust upon her, and as opposed to the reputation which she had unjustly been made to bear.
And of all this she thought. But Ethel’s stated recognition of thecommonnessof the outrages put on woman as maid and mother, now aroused her intelligence as to thegeneralneed for a general enlightenment. But her wrath was inexpressible, and she cried out suddenly: “O, but he is a fool, that Reginald! If he had treated me well I could have done him great good. I hate him! I wish he would cease to live in any world,—could be blasted, blotted out of all worlds, and made into nothing at all, with a lasting ache of shame to it! For he is a fool. Miss Ethelbert, it’s—it’s him! That’s who it was!” And she coveredher face, stretched and distorted with loathing, and whispered dreadfully:
“Let him die as the fool dies; withhold your breath of life from him. Dead he would be but for the vitality you exhale upon the upper realms of his being. Let him die! Let him be damned, as he has damned my poor Waldemar into being! I do hate, hate fools!”
Just so had Mrs. Mancredo said: “I do—dislike sick men.”
And Ethelbert, well knowing that woman’s dislike of folly and sickness would turn men away from both, if woman were free to rise to her own heights, said calmly: “It is precisely because you hate fools that you will conspire with me, his mother, and other angels of God, to annihilate the fool and evoke the man. Two children, Waldemar and Reginald,—is it not so? Your Waldemar is your son, and better born than Reginald. For after that assault you were deserted by your assailant, and lived in virginal conditions through all the time of the coming of your son to this present incarnation. You have lived since, loathing evil, seeking the good and pursuing it, and—in an humble sense—pondering these things in your heart, as did the mother of our Lord; and—”
“Aye, I hate him! I would gladly have been like the Virgin Mother, reverently treated, by the spirit-of-life in some good man,—if not by the Angel of the Annunciation. Mystery and unfathomable mystery as it all is, I claim I should have had the highest and best. I am a good girl; I am from a good family. I love that story; I love the mystery as the good Father in our mountain village in Germany taught it. I meant always to be like Mary, blessed among women. Reginald betrothed me; and betrothal is almost marriage in my land.”
She turned, and gazing again back toward Reginald’s chair, said again: “Aye, I hate him! Beast, brute! I think—I think I must kill him! I do hate him! What will my Waldemar think of me! I hate thatman!”
“Who?” said Ethelbert.
“That man,” said Bertha, with a point of her finger, like a sword-thrust. And Reginald, as if shocked by an electric charge, sent forth a cry, springing forward as if galvanized; and Bertha, frightened, heard Ethelbert say, steadily:
“There is no man there,—a crippled child, an absent spirit, a wraith, a wreck, a ghost, a ‘remains’ of the criminal who was arrested in the act of killing a citizen of this nation, called Reginald Grove; that ‘remains’ is there; nothing more. A child waiting to come forth to the business of making one more try at self-management, is there.”
“You were right,” Ethelbert continued, not unobservant meanwhile of Bertha’s alarm at the effect of the electric-battery which her finger had fired at Reginald, and at the flush which had mounted Reginald’s face. “You are right in saying there are too many born and buried. Let us not bury him (this ‘remains’), but let us electrify him into newness of spirit, and then he will not need rebirth of the body. Give him another chance. You and Waldemar shall have yours.”
“No; for if he gets well you will be making him marry me. All the good ladies try to make those kind of men do that. And the men hate us, and we hate them; and even when they are of our own class, they always think we are worse for what was as bad for one as for the other. And they think they have done us great honor; and we keep on, never able to do anything that will make the wrong right; and all that comes of it is hate, hate, hate; and more babies are born, all of them full of hate; and the mothers can’t take care of so many; and it’s all nothing but hate, hate, hate. And the mother dies hating, and the children live hating; and it’s all foolishness and misery. You are my enemy if you make him marry me; and you can’t be my friend if you are his.”
“Now, then, is he going to stay here?”
“He will stay here,” said Ethel.
“Then I must go.”
“Must you?”
“Yes madame, you would not have two such people under your roof!”
“The clear dome above us is the roof I live under,” said Ethelbert, “and it covers all sorts of acting people. A few boards nailed together neither roofs life in nor shuts life out. People who are separated are separated by partitions thin as glass and strong as adamant, and repellant or death-dealing as a live electrical wire. Go or stay, as you choose. But, dear child, you need never fear that I should make Captain Grove marry you, or make anybody do anything. Liberty is the law of life. But I see your perception that you are to Reginald a part of a dreadful dream, the same as he is to you, may be true. A hundred marriage services would not in themselves unite you. All you say of the disaster which comes from these unintelligent methods of compelling legal-unions between persons who are abhorrent to each other, is true. You need have no fear of any compulsion.
“We are living in a revolutionary epoch. My family believes marriage is the great sacrament of life. But we do not perceive, however, that all legal marriages are so formed and sustained as to render them sacramental to the parties concerned. Yet we do think that the highest type of marriage is symbolic of the kingdom of heaven. But I will tell you this: If your case were mine, I should not try to right up the wrong I had done by going on to do more wrongs under the shelter of legality. If you consider that Waldemar was damned into being (that was your term, not mine, I should not use it; I do not think he is), your next care should be to bless him out of that condemnatory state, by giving him such instruction and such simple joys in life as will secure him against perpetuating any form of wrong-doing. Put away sadness, Bertha, and remember not wrongs against your brother Reginald. Correct the past by dealing sensibly with the present. Truth and right living will bring good results to the future.
“A large proportion of morals and manners today are unintelligent. Yours have been. But all that ceases today. Excessive emotional wrath at those who have blundered with us, does not help either them or us to better intelligence, nor to the best adjustment of results.”
“Unintelligent? What a niddering word for, for—”
“Yes, unintelligent. A fuller intelligence will render all the mysteries and miseries of life intelligible. For whatever is in the past, you are, with others, responsible. Now waste no more brain-substance in grief, shame or wrath, but conserve all your nervous force for your work.Assume the motherhoodwhich youpresumed upon. Your mind is crowded with artificial distinctions. A few simple principles, held to amiably, will make all your life sweet and intelligent, even now.
“You love purity. That characteristic is rooted deep in your nature. You are ethically valuable to the kind of work that must be done in this age, because of that characteristic. I will tell you five points of faith that abide with me. Then you will see why I say that any methodsof abusing the brain-substance is unintelligent, and why I say that fuller intelligence concerning woman-nature and possibilities will renderintelligiblethe past miseries and mysteries of life, and will displace them with the spontaneous joyfulness of wisdom’s way of living.
“Do you understand?”
“Certainly I understand. Tell me your five points of faith,” said Bertha, clear-headedly.
“One is, that purity is natural and inherent in humanity. Next, it consists in an invulnerable ability to garner up the vital force within the seven nerve-centers ready for use, just as the electric current is captured and held by the electric dynamo, ready to be put to use in a scientific and purposeful way; in order that great things may be achieved for the race, by means of its light-giving, heat-supplying, weight-lifting and propelling power. Next, I believe purity is a profitable, satisfactory personal possession. For it fills the nerves and brain with a reserve force which is a tremendous reconstructive energy. The possession of purity is always back of that steady brain-building which goes on, with its incessant increase of mental grasp and power of intuitive perception. So that those who have large reserves of thewealthwhichpuritybrings, can lay hold on the history of past ages, takingpossession of such history in great blocks of time and events; and they can apprehend things which are to come, in time to prepare for crises, one after another, in such a way as to turn what would have been disaster into success. Purity gives one self-possession, and creates a simple, unsullied self, well worth possessing.
“It enables people to dare to state themselves in unqualified correct terms. For their unmixed simple purposes bear each other out in the long run. And I say, Bertha, if all women were legally upheld in being what men delight to be called (that is, Right Honorable,) the sons of such women would be by nature ‘Right Honorables.’ I will uphold you in being right honorable, Bertha, and Waldemar shall be Right Honorable.”
“Gott be danken.”
“There cannot be a more profitable and satisfactory possession than purity. It fills one with courage and truth, and makes honor easy. Its joys fade not away. Its hopes are fulfilled, and I believe if we were all possessors of this type of purity, and understood how to live according to its law, the social result would be, that humanity would become like the angels of God: right, bright, agile and light; with probably less marrying and no divorcing; because of the well-poised, well-contented lives to which such men and women will have attained. If all possessed this type of purity, there would be an end to these inordinate desires which now make some people to be self-tormented monsters, and others to be their victims. When this type of purity exists, then family life, worthy the name, will be established on a plane of health-giving-comfort to all concerned. While those who, St. Paul says, ‘do better than to marry, though to marry may be to do well,’ will be able, Bertha, to coöperate together in simple, unsullied service to the world, which always needs such service.
“When people come once to know the buoyant delight way down to old, old age, which is ushered in by a scientific life of purity, they will never thereafter rack themselves with the disorders and maniacal nervelessnesswhich comes, Bertha, one way and another, from the abuse of vitality.
“It is doubtful if people, as a whole, will ever learn life’s true and refined joys until women are legally upheld in their own work of carrying out that law of liberty to all as opposed to license in any; which law enables the evolution of such a joyous love of decency, and such reverence for the God-power in the blood and brain of each, as shall secure health, wealth and vivacity to individuals and the nations throughout the earth.”
“It is all true, true,” said Bertha. “But that comes from beliefs which are all one. But yet you said five points of faith, and I shall learn them all. So you would better name the fifth, by telling me what is purity. You say it is natural and inherent to humanity. And you tell me it is profitable; and what the social result would be if we all possessed it and lived according to its law. But what is it, what does it consist in?”
“To be pure, the dictionary tells us, is to be unsullied, unmixed, genuine, unqualified. Purity is free from a burdensome sense of shame, and is full of an invigorating courage which is wide away from all necessity of making and loving those things which the Bible calls ‘lies.’ Because a robust healthfulness fills with courage those who habitually practice the scientific law of purity. So that, in the character of a Right Honorable, purity, courage and truth knit each other up into a triuned power against which nothing can prevail. Purity knows how to deal in an offhand way with its own nature and needs, being full of the courage of its own convictions as to what it wants to do and be.
“The courage of purity is full of simplicity and high achievement; quite the opposite of that bravado which, attached to inordinate desires, is full of duplicity and failure. Purity is not timid, for it is its own protector. It is genuine, unmixed God-power, and makes its possessor a partaker in omnipotent omniscience. This fact all can prove for themselves who enable themselves to do so.
“It consists in an intelligent use of the vital element of blood and brain; and this intelligent use is religion itself. For, Bertha, the vitality within us is the divine creative power of Jehovah, and should be reverenced with awe. I repeat it, I distinctly believe this elusive, thrilling gladness-element of mind and nerve, is the joy-power, the intellectual vigor of that Vital One, the being whom we call God; who is the breath of our lives, and of whom we are competent to know more and more eternally.
“Now the only realclassdistinction between people is—not that some are rich and some are poor, not that some are university graduates and some are not, but—that some have cultivated andknowtheir possibilities of garnering up this vital force within their own nerve centers, ready for use, just as the electric dynamo captures and garners up the electric current, that it may be in readiness to achieve great results for this great age.
“Those who have this order of self-sovereignty have what the world cannot give and cannot take away. Those whose self-sovereignty is founded on this unimpregnable purity of brain and nerve have entered into a permanent delight in life. And no matter to what retreat their humble duty calls them, they are among the rulers of the age.
“Ach, Himmel! It is the secret of the sanctuary!” said Bertha. “We of the high mountain regions are taught it, in the old fatherland. Nothing can be wanted, if Waldemar and I have and hold this, and give it to the world.”
So thus came Bertha into the home of the Dakshas.