But if the dimmer light softened the lines in her face, it gave the pictured face another charm—the soft illusion of mystery and youth. The woman gazed at the dual reflection long until her breath blurred the mirror, so that all was blotted out save the brightness of the gold frame and a pair of wild, questioning eyes. A sharp sob parted her lips, and the mirror was empty.
Not long after, this woman was found dead. By her side was an empty bottle, such as they sell poison in, and in her hand was a painting of a beautiful woman framed in gold. Those who found her said the picture resembled her a little.
But this was far away from Jamestown, where Myron lived and suffered. That winter was a very busy one for her. Tender of touch, strong of arm, brave of heart, she was an ideal nurse. It is said a great grief has before now made a poet out of what was only a man. Myron's sorrows had changed her from a commonplace woman to a creature of most subtle sympathies. The pleading of pained eyes was eloquent to her, and the curves of dumb lips told her the tale of their sufferings. The touch of her hand brought rest, the pressure of her palms, peace; whilst the infinite sympathy from a heart that had itself been smitten eased those pangs which, keener than any physical anguish, rend those that are near death.
But Myron herself reaped no blessing of peace from these duties. What a strange fantasy it is to dream, as many do, that the occupation of nursing is one which heals a hurt heart and reconciles yearning hands to their emptiness! What dreary days did Myron not know! What solemn, silent nights, when alone, she sat at Misery's banquet and supped with Sorrow—with shame, regret, and betrayed trust to hand the dish.
"We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;In feelings, not in figures on a dial.We should count time by heart-throbs."
So some one says; and, reckoning by this higher notation, how many centuries of weariness had not Myron lived? The spring months came, scarce changed in sky from those of winter, only the gathering heat of the sun sent up "sorrow from the ground." Malaria, influenza, and typhoid overspread the country. The whole neighborhood was gloomy. The rain fell day after day. The plough horses splashed through mud, and the furrows filled with water behind the plough.
Myron had been working at a cousin's of Mrs. Warner's, whose baby was sick unto death. The child died, and its mother, in the first rebellion of grief, had said to Myron:
"'Tain't just—I can't think it is—nor right, neither—for my baby to be taken when there's so many left alive that ain't any use. There's old Humphries, and paralytic Henry Deans, and drunken Ann Lemon—what's the good of them to anybody—it's a shame!"
Myron soothed her as well as she could, but she burst forth again:
"Fancy my child dead! If it had been that young one of yours, now, there would have been some sense in it—a young one without even a name—that would have been a good riddance—but mine—mine!"
For once Myron's very soul was shaken with rage. She turned where she stood, and looked the other woman in the face.
"Oh!" she cried, "you wicked, wicked woman!"
The words carried all the accusation of outraged motherhood in their tones. The woman shrank back, and Myron, taking her boy, set off to the village.
It began to rain before they were half way. Myron's thoughts turned to Homer. She never forgot him for long at a time. It falls to the lot of few to be so sincerely sorrowed for.
She and My were both wet through when they reached the cottage, and Myron was very weary with the boy's weight. She lit the fire, and My played about in the kitchen. He was of a peculiarly sunny and equable disposition—
"One of those happy soulsWhich are the salt of the earth, and without whomThe world would smell like what it is—a tomb."
Myron was glad when the time came for bed, for she was utterly weary.
The old clock on the wall was pointing to one o'clock, when Myron suddenly started up, wide awake. The mother instinct, keener than her other faculties, had awakened her, not the boy. For the strange, low, gurgling sound he made would scarce have aroused the lightest sleeper, and Myron had been sunk in the deep sleep of exhaustion.
In a moment she had the lamp alight. The boy lay, his blue eyes wide open, his round cheeks scarlet with the fatal flush of fever, his lips swollen and parted in gasping respirations, his body almost rigid with the efforts he made for breath. One glance showed her this. The next instant she was undoing the little nightdress and shirt. With tremulous haste she placed some goose-grease in a little tin and strove to melt it by holding it over the lamp. The light was weak and wavering. She removed the chimney, and thrust the cup into the flame. Her fingers scorched till the skin cracked; she did not know it. She applied the melted oil and flew to wet his parched lips. The horrible, croupy cough cut her to the heart as it issued from My's swollen throat. She used every remedy her homely skill suggested, some of them efficacious enough often—but little My was dying. His blue eyes were filming; his baby lips twitching; the little hands, that had of late grasped her fingers so firmly as to suggest protection, made wavering, feeble movements toward her face and bosom, or clutched with waning strength at his own tortured throat.
She knelt beside the bed. She hardly dared touch the little form before her lest the mother in her, which had grown fierce in her dread, should cause her to clasp it too close. She lifted her voice in prayer, and cried aloud in frightful accents of despair, entreaty, expostulation, nay, even of threatening. No prayer more eloquent of human agony ever beat against deaf skies, yet it was but the repetition of one word—"My—My!"
An hour crept by. The flush had deepened on My's cheeks; his eyes were glazed. Once again, in surpassing pain, Myron Holder called aloud her child's name. There came no heavenly answer; but the true little heart, beating so faintly, responded once more to the beloved voice. Little My's eyes cleared a space and his fingers closed round his mother's.
"My's mama!" He uttered the alliterative little babble in strange, shackled tones. The woman—his mother—felt a stricture at her throat; she strove in vain to force it down as she answered:
"Mama's My."
A strange change passed over the little gray face, like a gleam of sunlight on a wintry day—hardly that—like the watery nimbus of the sun through a cloud. It was little My's last smile.
"Mama's My," the woman whispered; and, true to his love-taught lesson, My strove to give the answer, "My's mama." The first word was articulate, the last but half-shaped ere the stiffening lips were drawn in the convulsion which ended time for little My.
Over him "the eclipsing curse of birth" had lost its power.
At daybreak nest morning a messenger knocked long at the door of the Holder cottage. He had been sent in haste to summon Myron back to the house she had left in such anger the day before. Finding he could get no response, he lifted the latch and entered the kitchen. It was empty. There was a strong odor of kerosene oil, and absolute silence reigned. The man crossed the kitchen to an open door, and looking in saw the bedroom. Upon a little table stood a lamp which had evidently burned itself out. The chimney was off, and a great sooty blotch against the wall showed how the wick had smoked. In a chair by the bed sat Myron Holder, her eyes fixed straight before her—her pose rigid—her face pale as that of the dead child she held upon her knees.
"What is it, Myron?" he gasped.
"He's dead," said Myron, in the hoarse tones of one whose throat muscles are constrained and swollen.
The man turned and made for Mrs. Warner's. The cottage soon filled. Myron neither stirred nor spoke. They took the child and prepared it for burial. They told her to eat, and she swallowed the bread and tea they placed before her. All her faculties were benumbed, absorbed in an effort to realize her loss.
* * * * * *
The little plain coffin was in the kitchen, surrounded by a group of people that filled the room—those who considered it part of a Christian's bounden duty to attend funerals. Mr. Prew, sent for by Mrs. Deans, had just finished his address. Myron, with bare head, and hands clasped on her knees, was seated by the coffin, gazing down at the face there, when there was a sudden stir at the door, and Mrs. Wilson pushed herself through the throng.
"Wait!" she said, authoritatively, to Mr. Muir, who was advancing to screw down the coffin-lid. "Wait!" Then she turned to Myron Holder. "Listen to me, Myron Holder," she said. "Is that child my grandson?"
"No," said Myron, rising to her feet, and giving a helpless look around at the curious faces about her.
"What!" said Mrs. Wilson. "What, you'll lie in the very face of your dead child! Lay your hand on that coffin, Myron Holder, and then tell me if that ain't Homer's son!"
Myron sank by the coffin and flung her arms athwart it.
"He is not!" she cried. Then her long calm gave way, and she began to sob and cry. "He belongs to none of you; he is mine—my own baby—my own child—My—My!"
Mrs. Wilson left the house. Mr. Muir put aside the clinging arms and prepared the coffin for burial. Some one led Myron to a wagon and she got in.
Mr. Muir was not free from fears when they stopped at the paupers' corner of the graveyard. Myron looked around, half-dazed, when she alighted, and, touched Mr. Muir's arm.
"Why here?" she asked, pointing to the open grave. "Why not by father?"
"Your grandmother sold the other half of the lot," said Mr. Muir hastily.
Mrs. Deans watched the little scene with much inward satisfaction. Myron made no further sign, uttered no other word. The coffin was lowered into the grave.
Mr. Prew put up a prayer, in which petitions for the "child of sin" and the "sinful mother" were about equally balanced. The throng departed each to his own place. Old Humphries filled up the grave, and Myron was left alone.
The next day she went to Mr. Muir's and inquired how much she owed him. He told her, and to his surprise she paid him at once. Then she set out for town, along dreary country roads, betwixt desolate fields, until she came to the outskirts of the straggling town; through these, until she was absorbed in the hurrying throng that crowded the narrow streets.
It was very late when she returned to Jamestown, and as she passed the Deans place she encountered Gamaliel, just returning from some expedition with his bosom friend.
"Hullo, Myron; where've you been?" he asked.
"I've been to town," said Myron, still in those strange, hard tones, and passed on.
There was much speculation as to her errand, which was set at rest when a few days later a wagon entered the little graveyard and the men who came with it proceeded to put up a tiny white tablet at the head of a new-made grave. On it there was carved only one word, and that a short one—MY—a word which in its brevity and meaning was not unsuitable as an inscription over that grave. Myron had spent the last penny of her painful savings in marking the spot where her child lay.
"Let grief be her own mistress still.She loveth her own anguish deepMore than much pleasure. Let her willBe done—to weep or not to weep."
So says the humanest of our poets; but such luxurious grieving is for those who fare delicately and live in kings' courts. Myron Holder had her bread to earn—her feet were tied to the treadmill of toil.
So she fared forth on her journey as best she might; and then, and for long after, Jamestown women told how Myron Holder perjured herself with her hand on her dead child's coffin.
"When some beloved voice, that was to youBoth sound and sweetness, faileth suddenly,And silence, against which you dare not cry,Aches round you like a strong disease and new—What hope? What help? What music will undoThat silence to your sense?"
"I'll tell you, hopeless grief is passionless."
It was the season of the half-yearly revival meetings in Jamestown. The little Methodist Church filled rapidly. There was asoupçonof pleasurable excitement about a revival which was very enticing to the youth of Jamestown. Besides, all the "stiddy" young men were expected to go, and they always did what was expected of them.
Mrs. Deans came in with the minister, her face, with its self-important expression, irradiated with the glow of spiritual as well as worldly well-being. She had proffered her bid for the company of the officiating ministers in good season, and the first of them had been knocked down to her in consequence, much to the chagrin of the Mesdames White, Wilson, Disney, and the rest, for they knew that the second minister on the list was an old personal friend of Mrs. Deans and would doubtless elect to stay at her house; thus they would have no opportunity to display their pious zeal and forehanded housekeeping.
Mrs. Deans' self-complacency was veiled, but not obscured, by an anxious air, as who should say, "I am not free of responsibility if all does not go off well."
It is a weakness of such women to consider themselves divinely appointed judges of the souls of their neighbors and friends.
The minister with her was pretty well hidden among the cluster of men and women to whom Mrs. Deans was introducing him. She introduced him with discrimination, however. She did not propose giving any one the chance of prefixing a remark with "The other night when I was speaking to Mr. Hardman," or "Mr. Hardman said to me the other day," unless she felt quite sure the recipient of the honor was worthy of it.
But to her consternation, Mr. Hardman broke bounds, passed the confines of the little group of important church members, and went out from one to another of the men and women, picking out, with the unerring divination of a man whose heart is in sympathy with the sorrows rather than the joys of mankind, the oldest, most forlorn, most miserable-looking of his prospective hearers.
To see the minister thus throwing away the apostolic benediction of his smile upon old Ann Lemon and Clem Humphries whilst Mrs. White stood with uplifted nose in the doorway, unnoticed, was an unholy thing, more particularly as Mrs. White, willing to have her discomfiture shared by some one else, turned to Mrs. Deans with a surprised air, and said:
"Why, I thought the minister was with you?"
"So he is," Mrs. Deans was fain to avow. "We came a few minutes ago. He is great on missions, I think, and young." The latter half of her sentence was given in the tone of a hostess who excuses a guest. For the rest, it is probable that both ladies regarded his present occupation as distinctly a missionary effort.
Presently the minister straightened himself and proceeded up the aisle to the platform. Mrs. Deans' expression changed from an anxious, proprietary one to one of spiritualized commiseration. Was the misguided man actually going to begin service without asking one word about the ordinary routine of services in Jamestown Methodist Church? If so, he would make a fine hash of it.
Besides she had not informed him that a collection was to be taken up to defray the cost of extra lighting, etc., and she had promised Mr. White at class-meeting to do so. She had thought of telling Mr. Hardman, but preferred waiting until the minister sought for information before imparting it. His opportunity for that was now past, unless, indeed, he descended from the platform to do so. A pleasing thrill, inspired by this idea, turned to a chill as she saw Mr. Hardman take from his pocket a well-thumbed and shabby little Testament, and, opening it, seem to find a place. Then he laid it down, open, upon the big church Bible, and rose to pray.
Mrs. Deans' expression of anxiety was now unalleviated by any spiritual exaltation; it was unvariegated gloom. Any man who could disregard the gilt edges, thick covers, and ornate binding of that book, and leave it closed whilst he read from what her experienced eye told her was a Bible Society Testament that probably cost ten cents, was certainly in need of anxious watching. Nor was it to be supposed that a discourse begun upon lines like these would be productive of much good. How many sermons she had heard rounded off by the banging of those covers together! How many final injunctions had been given a dramatic and artistic interest by the holding of that book, half-open, ready to put a period to the peroration by a sanctified thud!
Well—Mrs. Deans sighed audibly.
Mr. Hardman began to read in a deep and sympathetic voice. He was a tall man, of twenty-eight, muscularly built, but not brawny; his studies had been too close to admit of that. He had square shoulders, rather higher than they should be, and rounded with the stoop that the scholar and the ploughman share. His hands, as he raised them in infrequent gestures, were seen to be rather broad and short—hands, it would seem, of a mechanic, but not toil-stained. Indeed, their whiteness so ill agreed with their shape that a sense of something incongruous forced itself upon one when looking at them. His hair was almost black, and was tossed and disarranged by his habit of running his fingers through it. His face was pale.
His brow was square and overhanging—of the penthouse order, rather forbidding; the brow inherited from a generation of toilers, men who, from their own bleak corner of the world, looked forth at the panorama of life with sombre eyes, intrenching themselves behind a barrier of silent endurance, concealing their weakness, their wants, their hopes and fears, their few joys and pitiful ambitions behind an impenetrable mask, until it would seem that their lineaments adjusted themselves to their mental attitudes; and this, their son, presented to the world this square brow, strong, secret, sad. But its sternness, and alas! a great deal of its strength, was negatived by the eyes which looked out from beneath it. Very dark-gray these eyes were, and made eloquent by the expression of infinite love and sympathy for his kind; but their dilating pupils evidenced an emotional nature, and they were somewhat too soft for a man. Yet, looking in steady kindness at the world, they often seemed fit eyes for a strong, calm soul.
But Philip Hardman felt himself neither calm nor strong. As he looked upon the expectant faces of those before him, the doubt which was gnawing at the heart-strings of belief suddenly seemed to grip his own heart and brain and threaten each.
He had no message to give these people! What were they there for? Was it not all a myth and a delusion? Was it?
Then he broke the spell which held him, and his words rushed forth. His congregation stirred and swayed and yielded—not to persuasion, for of that there was none; not to the minister's personality, for they had forgotten him; not in the hope of reward, for he spoke but of wrath and pitiless requital of sin, and merciless judgment, and endless woe—they yielded to their own fears.
For this man was lashing his own soul with the copy-righted invective of his sect, pronouncing against himself and (as in the midst of his mental agony he realized) against all mankind a doom of woe and wrath if they did not believe. He strove to terrify his own soul into the submission it denied, and strove to awaken in the people before him a reflex of the emotion he fain would feel. They responded to his words, but not to his feeling. They wept and abased themselves because of the fear, not because they feared unbelief.
Cold drops trickled down Mrs. Deans' face and be-dabbled her second-best bonnet-strings. Mrs. Wilson, grew almost hysterical. Ann Lemon wondered vaguely if she had "the horrors," and held on to the pew with both hands, whilst she looked about her with bewildered, lack-lustre eyes. Clem Humphries sat outwardly unmoved, but inwardly vowing if he "once got out of this he'd never be wheedled into a revival meeting again."
The younger men thought revival meetings "no slouch," as Gamaliel Deans expressed it; and, comparing the excitement with that of a cock-fight he had attendedsub rosain the old brewery, he decided in favor of the revival.
The minister's voice failed and faltered. Like all magnetic natures, his exhausted itself. He paused, looked at the men and women before him, and, realizing the shallowness of their facile emotions, felt the pall of self-disgust envelop his soul. A horrible contempt for himself and them, even for the religion that had inspired this mental debauch, overwhelmed him. He shuddered as he realized the impiousness of his own thought, left the platform, went swiftly down the aisle and out into the darkness.
Mr. White closed the meeting, and prayed enthusiastically for the "young brother who had so awakened them," and ended amid a chorus of ejaculations.
Mrs. Deans, finding herself so agreeably disappointed, went home content. She wished to-morrow night were come. What crises of emotion might not be expected then! She found Mr. Hardman pacing the veranda slowly, his brow bare to the stars; his frame was relaxed and weary, his eyes tired. He refused any refreshment, and long into the night Mrs. Deans heard him pacing back and forth.
* * * * * *
Another night had come, and Philip Hardman was again to stand before an assembly of his fellows and voice the truths they held eternal. Mrs. Deans had no doubts now as to his competency. She anticipated an exciting struggle with spiritual foes, and the better to gird herself for the fray, went early, leaving Mr. Hardman to follow. She felt this implied a delicate compliment to the preacher, recognizing in it a simulacrum of John the Baptist's mission in the wilderness.
So Philip Hardman was left to walk the mile from the Deans farm-house to the village alone. It was evening—late evening in summer. The air was filled with that indefinite, receptive murmur the earth gives forth as it opens its pores to the dew. Without wind, there was yet a sense of motion in the atmosphere, at once calming and exhilarating. It brought a keen sense of the fact that the world is rushing through space, with its puny burden of men and their works. The sun had set, but the western sky was radiant with an amber afterglow, against which the tree-tops in Mr. Deans' woodland showed a mass of dark, billowy green, the light behind them intensifying the depth of their color, so that they showed sombrely against the sky.
Before him stretched the dusty road, the grass at either side parched by the heat; now and then a maple overshadowed him; now and then he startled nested birds from out the low-growing trees of the wild plum. He walked swiftly, the grasshoppers and little whirring insects and dragon-flies flitting about his path.
At a turn in the road, where Mr. Deans' land joined Mr. White's, was wedged in the little cemetery of Jamestown. It was fenced with sharp-pointed palings, over which the native virgin bower clematis clung in feathery festoons, just blossoming out in fragile greenish-white flowers. Within, he saw the untidy graves and inebriated gravestones of a country churchyard. Those slanting stones and graves, almost obliterated by masses of periwinkle and white-leaved balm and ribbon grass, appealed to him strongly.
He looked at his watch. He had started in fair time, but, lost in thought, had walked very quickly. He had time to linger a few minutes here. Perhaps amid the graves of Jamestown's dead he might learn the open sesame to the hearts of the living.
He entered through a gap in the palings, pushing his way through a little thicket of thorny locust bushes that had sprung up in a scattered cluster. The graves were nearly all marked by gravestones. In Jamestown it was considered a mark of respectability to erect a memorial to one's dead, but this done, all care for their graves ceased. Philip Hardman wandered about, noting the weather-beaten grayness of the older stones and reading their inscriptions almost mechanically. One broad, thin slab, with a weeping-willow sculptured upon it, bore a legend in memory of "Amelia Warner, beloved wife of Josiah Warner, aged sixteen years." Poor little wife! In the fifty years of her rest her grave had sunken almost level with the path; the lichen on the stone was striving to obliterate her name there, even as it had been long ago forgotten upon earth. A wild hawthorn bush was springing from under one corner of her tombstone and tilting it over perilously.
Some of the more recent graves had odd little jingles of original rhyme carven upon their stones. One, of but a year before, bore the brief prayer, too human for its glistening coldness, "Meet me in Heaven." Hardman read the name on this grave with a little start—"Jennie Best, wife of William Best." Yesterday Mrs. Deans had pointed out William Best and his new-made bride. How futile and absurd the little legend seemed! But Jennie Best slept as securely and as sweetly as though her husband still cherished in his inmost heart these last words of hers and walked as though he hoped to realize them, instead of writing them upon her tombstone and marrying within a year of her death.
There were graves of old and young in this little churchyard—men and women, boys and girls, infants of days, and men of many years. Beneath one stone slept seven friends, who "perished in the yachtFoamoff the coast"—a narrow space, truly, for seven to occupy, set in this out-of-the-way village; seven such as these who had hoped to fill great places in the world before their lives were laughed out by the little ripples of the lake.
The shadows lengthened. Gleaming through the dusk, Hardman noticed a white stone with gilt lettering. "Homer Wilson" was the name it bore, but it meant nothing to the preacher; only he sighed as he noted the age of the man sleeping there, and a half-envious thought crossed him, as he looked around, that "these had completed their journey."
Philip Hardman turned his steps to the road again, but he paused yet once more. Close under the shadow of the high stone wall which bounded the graveyard on the village side, he almost stumbled over a woman's figure, which, in the deepening gloom, he had not observed. She was almost prone beside a little mound whereon the sods had not yet taken root. The woman's arms were outstretched toward the grave—almost embraced it. Her whole attitude spoke eloquently of a hopeless and passive despair.
Hardman stopped a moment irresolutely; she had not observed him.
"You are in great trouble," he said, bending down and touching her shoulder.
"Yes," she answered, raising her head without a start. "Yes."
Her voice was painfully constrained. The words seemed to issue with difficulty, and the tones were harsh. Speech seemed strangely dissonant with the hour and place. Her mute despair seemed the only fitting emotion for the scene. Her eyes, from out a pallid face, looked up at him, filmed by misery. Her cheeks were hollowed in delicate shadows. Her pale lips drooped. She seemed the Mourning Spirit of the place.
"Come and pray," he said, looking at her with infinite pity in his kind eyes. "Come," he urged.
He waited for her reply, but none came. She was sitting by the grave now, her hands locked round her knees, her eyes looking hungrily into vacancy and seeing neither hope nor recompense for her pain.
A bat held its angled flight past them. He roused himself to a sense of time. He looked down upon the woman at his feet, an expression of ineffable compassion lit his face; then he turned to go.
As his eyes left that pallid face the scene seemed to darken suddenly. He realized the lateness of the hour, and, finding his way out of the graveyard, strode rapidly to the church.
After all, he was in time—indeed, had a few minutes to spare. He did not, however, again shock Mrs. Deans by a promiscuous friendliness. He went straight to the platform and sat down behind the reading-desk. His thoughts reverted to the woman whom he had just seen, and he felt he ought to have made a more eloquent appeal to her to come to church. Mental habit led him to decide at once that prayer was the only efficacious cure for grief such as hers. It was thus with this man always. In calm moments, when all went well with him, he strove to elucidate those problems of reason and right which presented themselves to him in season and out of season—strove to live a life of austere truth without factitious aid of self-delusion, without hope of ultimate reward.
But in times of distress or pain, whether his own or others', he turned again to his old beliefs, and prayer appealed to him as the only panacea. Orthodox folk plead this as a triumphant and sure vindication of the truth of their creeds. It may be in some cases, but in Philip Hardman's it was only the result of inherent weakness of will and vacillating decision, and, alas! a cowardly shrinking from mental torture. Face to face with grief such as this woman's, he could not bear to look the inevitability of such bereavements in the face; could not endure to think of the irreparable loss of a vanished life; could not calmly recognize one single instance of what he was ever mourning over—the sadness and futility of life.
He must hallow each blow as a "merciful dispensation;" muffle it from prying eyes with the tabooed veil of "sacred predestination"; set it beyond close scrutiny by asserting to himself the impiety of questioning "divine will"; and at such times the beauty of his solacing faith lit in his soul fresh fervor for the cause.
For a few moments Philip Hardman sat motionless. The hands of the clock reached the hour for service to begin. His audience settled themselves in the pews and stilled themselves to attention.
Mrs. Deans ostentatiously ceased her whispered remarks to Mrs. Wilson, straightened herself in her seat, looked about with a critical and judicial eye, and then, convinced that all was well, hemmed several times expectantly.
Philip Hardman rose, and, in brief words, asked for Divine guidance through the service. He ceased. The bowed heads were raised. He was about to begin the reading of the Scriptures, when, silently, slowly, Myron Holder entered the open door and, advancing only to the nearest seat, which happened to be in the farthest back pew, sat down. So quiet were her movements that, save by a few of the young men who had taken the rear seats the better to observe the antics of the elect, she was unobserved.
Philip Hardman, however, had seen her. He changed his intention of reading, and announced a hymn instead. He wanted a few minutes to familiarize himself with that tragic face before attempting to utter any message of love or hope to the woman who had thus obeyed his suggestion. While the singing went on he looked at his audience, and, in a flash, their narrow, sordid, often miserable lives seemed revealed to him. These were the people he had lashed with spiritual fears the night before. As he recalled it, his heart smote him with terrible reproach. His eyes grew dim as he looked at the people before him and saw, shining through their midst, the pallid face of Myron Holder.
By what strange chance had this woman come to Jamestown? For he decided at once she was no native of the village. The purely cut, martyr face; the broad brow, sensitive lips, and cameo-like nostrils were too utterly unlike the other faces in the church to be for one moment associated with them.
There came to him a fantastic thought, that this woman was sent to bear the griefs of this village, even as One long since—the Carpenter's Son—had borne the griefs of the world and become a "Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief." But alas! this woman had no divine message to give; instead, she was wandering in the wilderness of hopeless despair. But—and Hardman's hand tightened on his Testament—a message she should have.
"Other refuge have I none,Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.Leave, oh, leave me not alone!Oh, protect and comfort me!"
So they sang. Philip Hardman found his place—
"All my hopes on Thee are stayed,All my wants to Thee I bring;Cover my defenceless headWith the shadow of Thy wing."
Rapt in an infinite sorrow for his kind—inspired by the need of this woman of help—exalted by the dependence and confidence expressed in the hymned words—seeing in all his audience but one pallid face—Philip Hardman rose to speak.
This choosing of a subject upon the spur of the moment, to meet the needs of one woman, was no disadvantage to him, for he was a fluent and ready speaker, and his whole training had been that spontaneity was absolutely essential. He had none of the measured method that develops a subject into "three heads and an application." The evangelistic sect to which he belonged abjures notes, and hops along to the halting cadence of a quasi-inspiration.
Happily, however, it has now and then a man like Philip Hardman, whose words flow freely forth, and never so eloquently as when heart and sympathies are touched. Hardman was never at a loss for words of his own to translate his feelings into language; but this night his sermon was but the enunciation of a sweet and comforting doctrine uttered in the language of the Book which has preserved it.
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," he said, and held out as a free gift the inestimable boon of peace. "I will not leave you comfortless," uttered in his vibrant tones, bore the assurance of divinest aid. "Let not your heart be troubled," he voiced as a sacred command to cease from grief, and then the general invitation, "Let whosoever will drink of the water of life freely."
With these words as a thesis, a human heart to be comforted, a soul alight with belief and confidence, a rare natural eloquence to frame his plea—was there any wonder that the sermon was effective, any wonder that to the weary heart of the listening woman it appealed almost irresistibly?
Perhaps Philip Hardman dwelt too exclusively upon the blessings of his religion, ignored too utterly the thorn in the crown—offered it too freely, avowed it too confidently. But what will you? Even the greatest purists in religions faith find it hard to disabuse their minds of the idea that martyrdom means and merits the Kingdom, and Philip Hardman's theology was not of the sternest sort.
He felt, somehow, that this woman had suffered enough to win Heaven, whether she merited it in other respects or not. So he set himself to present his faith to her in the most glowing aspect, always seconding his message with his eyes.
Just as Philip Hardman saw but one face in his audience, so Myron Holder was, after the first few moments, unconscious of any other presence save his. Her eyes had won a straight path to his face between the heads and shoulders, and her gaze never faltered. There was a tall, white-shaded lamp on each side of the desk. As she looked, his figure, in strong relief against the light-blue background of the walls, seemed to absorb and radiate the light. It was simply an ordinary optical effect, and Myron Holder herself recognized vaguely that it was "only the light," and yet that pale irradiation around his head seemed to add a dignity and sanctity to the man and lend his utterance a deeper, higher import.
Her eyes never left his face—that kind, weak face, so full of contradictions, whose beetling brow seemed ready to do battle for his Faith, whose lips quivered with the feeling in his own voice.
Her eyes were hot and dilated from the long strain when, with hands upraised above the standing people, he uttered the benediction, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Amen."
Philip Hardman descended from the platform and strove to make his way toward Myron, but he was hemmed in by outstretched hands, and had to make his way slowly through a throng, all eager to say "Good-bye," for he left on the morrow. Myron was just stepping out of the shelter of the porch when he overtook her. He held out his hand, which she took, her own toil-hardened one trembling in the clasp of his softer fingers. He looked down at her and spoke with great gentleness:
"Did you take the message I gave you to-night?"
"Is it for me?" she asked.
"Surely," he answered.
"You do not know me; you cannot tell. If you knew"——
"Whosoever will," he replied, with steady emphasis. And in his heart he marvelled at the humbleness of this woman, whose candid brow and clear eyes bespoke her life.
Then, the man mingling with the priest in him, he continued, still more gently:
"The message is even to the greatest sinner. To see you is to know you have the right of one of the least."
She put up two hands, clasped in miserable deprecation; her cheeks flamed red an instant, then paled to a ghastly white; she turned silently, and swiftly went down two steps of the broad entrance stair; then pausing and looking back at him with a gaze such as one might fix upon the flames before he steps into them, she said clearly:
"Ask Mrs. Deans who Myron Holder is!" She slipped away, the gloom of the unlighted street absorbing her figure, as though it gathered to itself its righteous belonging.
"We are the voices of the wandering wind,Which seek for quiet, and quiet can never find.Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life—A moan, a sob, a sigh, a storm, a strife."
Next morning Philip Hardman left Mrs. Deans' early. He was leaving by the first train from the little flag station which was at the far end of the village; besides, he was determined to see Myron Holder.
Mrs. Deans had endeavored to dissuade him from this, but he was firm, and, recognizing this, Mrs. Deans suggested that she accompany him upon his mission; but he stated gently, but firmly, that he could achieve better results alone. Mrs. Deans felt bitterly aggrieved at being treated thus, for behind his gentle words she read a settled determination "to keep her out of it," as she phrased it to herself.
She bade him good-bye, however, with well-affected geniality, as he stood upon her doorstep; but the shallow smile died very soon, and a malevolent expression replaced it upon her fat features.
"I'll speak to Brother Fletcher about this," she said. "That Hardman is sorely puffed up in his own conceit and vainglorious! Well, by himself he can do nothing," she concluded, piously.
But whether it was the absence of the Lord or herself from Hardman's side that was going to militate against his success she left undetermined. There might also have been some doubt in the mind of the impartial hearer as to whether she was glad or sorry that his mission was likely to be a failure. Certainly her tone was not indicative of any great grief.
She betook herself indoors, and set about preparing a fresh supply of country dainties for the Reverend Fletcher.
Philip Hardman's face changed also after he turned it from Mrs. Deans' self-contented countenance, and the new expression was not far removed from one of disgusted contempt; and, it must be confessed, a somewhat sneering bitterness made his keen eyes sombre. He had asked Mrs. Deans the night before who Myron Holder was, and had been told—told! but in such a fashion! Mrs. Deans' evil words still stung his heart with shame for his kind. He felt as though one had smitten his lips with nettles.
And the pious speeches with which Mrs. Deans had besprent her tale—bah! It was like sprinkling a weak disinfectant over a heap of filth. It was indeed the "poison of asps" to hear Scripture—nay, the very words of his Master—so defiled.
Well, Hardman compressed his lips and hurried on.
The morning was sweet and calm, the "shoreless air" very clear and still, and, little by little, his spirit attuned itself to the hour; shred by shred, the mantle of bitterness, fell from him. The memories of the evening mingled with the hopes of the morning, into a draught that was very sweet to him. When he reached the cottage door his eyes were exalted, his lips calm, his heart confident.
The door was open, and through it he saw a bare room, the walls stained a deep yellow with ochre; a carpetless floor, comfortless but clean; a square table, with a coarse white cloth covering it, stood in the middle of the room; upon it was some food. Myron sat there alone, but there was another plate laid, beside which stood a battered tin mug. All this he took in at a glance, and then his eyes fastened upon the woman's face. She was as yet unconscious of his presence. She sat at the table in such position that the profile of her face was outlined sharply against the bright yellow of the walls.
Her face, as he beheld it thus for the first time in clear daylight, struck him with swift remembrance of an exquisite picture he had once seen, a meek-mouthed Madonna painted on a bright brass plaque. There was the same pose of head, the same heavy knot of nut-brown hair, the same outward sweep of the lashes from the same drooped lids, the same exquisite line where the cheek softened to the throat. But, alas! there was no heavenly nimbus round this living head, no holy glow of happy maternity, no pure halo of womanhood.
A MEEK-MOUTHED MADONNA.A MEEK-MOUTHED MADONNA.
At that moment Myron turned towards the doorway, and, as her eyes met his, his imagination suddenly supplied the aureole that before she seemed to lack, and, in completion of the picture, a stray line or two of poetry came back to him with all the happy force of applicability:
"Eh, sweet,You have the eyes men choose to paint, you know;And just that soft turn in the little throat,And bluish color in the lower lid,They make saints with."
He started as he realized that he was comparing the Madonna to this unblest mother—an ideal of saintly beauty to this sinning one. But all in an instant there came to him a swift certainty that this was not the face of an evil woman. This woman bore in her countenance the indelible lines of pain and suffering, the ineffaceable traces of bodily and mental anguish. She had been bowed beneath the burden of woman's inalienable heritage of agony, had lived through the Gethsemane of childbirth and won to the heights of motherhood's Golgotha—a child's grave. But in all this, remember, there is nothing vile; it is only infinitely pitiful.
Whilst he gazed and thought these things swiftly, she had risen from her place and stood with clasped hands and down-bent head—so like a prisoner awaiting sentence that he felt a great throb of pity. He took a step forward and held out his hand.
"I am going to the train," he said; "but I came away early, that I might see you."
"You are very good," she faltered; "but"—she hesitated.
"But what?" he urged gently, holding both her hands and looking down at her.
"Do you know who I am?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered, "I know everything."
"You asked Mrs. Deans!" she said in an incredulous voice.
He flushed at the tone. It told so clearly that she fully understood what Mrs. Deans would say; and somehow it seemed to link him with Mrs. Deans, as if he and that worthy woman stood on one side of a river and Myron Holder alone on the other. He could not bear that.
"Yes, but I always judge for myself," he said quickly.
"Oh!" she said. "You are——" She stopped, but gave the note of those swift glances of ineffable gratitude that had so often stirred Homer's heart.
And, looking at her thus, Hardman forgave her everything, "for Love pardons the unpardonable past;" and this man from that moment loved her, although he did not yet know it.
"Your child was very dear to you," he said, glancing at the table, where the two plates stood, although there was but one to sit at the board.
"Ah, so dear!" she answered.
Then, after a moment's pause, she went on swiftly:
"Oh, you can understand what it was—surely you can see—you are so good! He was everything to me, absolutely everything! The thought of him kept me from greater sin! I was nearly blind with weariness, and the way was getting dimmer and dimmer to my eyes; but his laugh showed me where the right road lay, and, when I found it again, his steps kept me company! Oh, can you think what it is to see the only creature—the only living thing in all the world—that loves you—die?" She looked at him, an interrogation so poignant as to be imperative in her eyes.
"Yes," he said, "we are two lonely souls, Myron. In all the wide earth there is none who cares whether I live or die."
"I am so sorry," she said. "Only, you are so good you can have friends for the seeking. As for me, I am not fit to be any one's friend. I had one friend here, but he is dead too"—she added the last sentence with a strange, swift sense of justice. Even though Homer was dead, she could not bear that he be classed with those others who had been so cruel.
"Yes," answered Hardman, "I heard of him."
"Did she tell you that he died to save My's life?" she asked.
"Yes, she told me," he answered.
There was a pause, then Myron said:
"It was so good of you to come!" He noticed the harsh tones of her voice.
"Have you a sore throat?" he asked.
"No," she said; "but my child died of suffocation. His throat was swollen with inflammation and croup, and when he tried to speak to me his voice was hard, like mine is now. It made my own throat ache; and ever since, the pain has been there and I have spoken in this way."
Thus, simply, Myron told of that marvel, that extraordinary instance of the power of Love. For this was indeed so. In Myron's case had been made manifest one of those marvellous mysteries of the human mechanism that now and again thrills the scientist with a burning zeal to discover the real relation between mind and matter, to enter the penetralia of humanity and learn its secret. That desolate night in the cottage the mother-heart apprehended each pang of the choking child, and the mother endured in her own organism a like agony. How sad to think she had no Divine license to do so! How strange that such a love should spring from shame!
Hardman's mind grasped the significance of her words upon the instant. For a moment the realization of this woman's strength held him silent. Then he remembered her loneliness and bent towards her.
"Myron," he said, "will you be my friend?"
"Oh, do you mean it?" she asked, breathlessly.
"Assuredly," he said.
Then once more Myron gave her hands as a seal of friendship.
There was only a short time left after that—a few moments of earnest prayer from Philip Hardman—a few words asking her to go to the rest of the meetings—a brief promise from her and briefer acknowledgments of his goodness faltering between her sobs—then Hardman had said good-bye, and his form was already vanishing from sight before Myron realized that she was once more alone.
Philip Hardman hurried to the station and caught his train. The first stage of his journey was short, only some fifty miles to the city, where he was to meet the Reverend Mr. Fletcher. He found him at the depot, ready to go to Jamestown. In a few hurried words Hardman told him of Myron Holder—of her sin—her punishment—her sorrow. He commended her to Mr. Fletcher's prayers, and asked him to preach so that her diffident heart might find some message in his words.
Mr. Fletcher promised, and expressed with some little emphasis a hope that Hardman's own labors might be blest.
Then he departed. His train was just pulling out when Hardman ran up to the open window, by which Mr. Fletcher had settled himself.
"You'll be gentle with her, Brother Fletcher? She is indeed a bruised reed."
There was no time for answer. Mr. Hardman did not witness the scorn with which this advice—no entreaty—was received. He stood looking after the swiftly vanishing train somewhat sadly; then, rousing himself, went to find out about the train that was to take him to his new charge.
Philip Hardman's father had been a mechanic, a life-long worker in one of those sooty, befouling foundries where the great furnaces gleam like so many mouths of the Pit—where all day long there is the roar of flames, the blast of hot air, the clang of metal, the heat of Hades, the hiss of molten iron, the angry flight of sparks struck from huge anvils; all the haste and fury and dumb-brutish endurance of men working at the top notch of physical exertion, rushing hither and thither like demons before the fires, or clad in grotesque masks and armor, turning great masses of glowing, cooling metal so that the steam-hammers may forge them into shape.
In this atmosphere Philip Hardman's father had spent all his life since he was a little lad, carrying water to the workers—water in which flying sparks quenched themselves, hissing. It would be no wonder if from a race of fathers, such as these blackened workers, gnome-like children were to be born, all action and no thought; swift, tireless, inhuman. But these men, darting about in the glare of the dusky fires, like devil-ridden spectres, had, some of them, time for thought. Indeed, the man who moves unmoved amid these masses of incarnate heat, steps over and around streams of liquid fire, watches those infernal lakes, plumbago-shored, which one single drop of water converts into death-dealing volcanoes, and stands beside a torrent of molten iron as it flows from the crucible, ready to dam its resistless tide on the instant, may well be credited with capacity, if not time, for thought.
To Philip Hardman's father during those long, hot hours of breathless haste there came ideas—distorted, meagre, and ill-developed, perhaps—which, when he left the works at night, pallid-faced beneath the grime, still bore him company: nebulous visions of great labor-saving devices by which men forever would be exempt from the dreadful toil that scorched both soul and body.
There was many a rich germ dormant in these ideas of his, but lacking the cohesion of long, uninterrupted thought, and wanting the quickening of accurate knowledge. For there lay Philip Hardman's great stumbling-block. To perfect his inventions, he required a knowledge of chemicals and of different forces and their application, and an insight into the cause of the effects he wished to produce.
How blindly, painfully and heart-brokenly he toiled after this knowledge no one ever fully appreciated. His son, long years after his death, realized it in some fashion. He did not ask assistance of any one, for he feared, with the traditional dread of the inventor, lest the one from whom he sought advice should steal his idea. He saved, to buy books that were useless to him, and pored over their misleading pages with eyes from which all moisture seemed scorched away, until the very eyeballs themselves felt hot and hard; but he kept them painfully fastened upon those pages from which he strove to wrest a secret they did not hold, to learn those things which would enable him to set free forever his fellows from the necessity of enduring that soul-baking heat.
Perhaps his invention, even if perfected, would not have compassed all he dreamed it would, for he was prone to endow it almost with thinking as well as executive powers, and to think of it as animated by a great zeal for mankind as, with its nerveless phalanges, it performed those awful tasks. Perhaps there may be greater ideals than the thought of setting men free from one of the most terrible and exhaustive forms of labor; but none knew better than this man the terrors of heat, none understood more clearly how the mind narrowed as the body shrank before the stifling blasts. And, after all, if we all set ourselves to alleviate the special misery we understand, there would be fewer misshapen lives in the world.
Well—
"How many a vulgar Cato has compelledHis energies, no longer tameless then,To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail!"
Philip Hardman's mother was a woman of a hysteric nature, who scarcely thought enough of this world to make her husband and children comfortable in it. The children were narrow-chested, weak little creatures. They heard from her lips terrible tales of the wrath to come, couched in symbolism they well understood, for their father worked daily amid just such scenes as their mother depicted the abode of the damned to be. The parallel between the Hades her words pictured forth and her husband's life never struck Mrs. Hardman.
Even when her husband died—going to his grave a broken-hearted man, barren of achievement, leaving not one labor-saving device, not one little bolt or wheel called by his name—she did not regret or realize the hard life he had had, nor think she might have made it easier. She only tortured herself daily by wondering if she had sufficiently represented to him his lost condition.
It is to be feared that she was more interested in convincing herself that she was free of responsibility than that he was saved.
In time, however, she began to feel that she had done her best, and, feeling it would be too much like "them Catholics" to pray for the soul of a dead man, she turned all her attention to her own. Doubtless she was right; and yet, is it not a beautiful myth to think that prayer from a loving heart may benefit those we love, even if they have passed "beyond these voices"?
If we must needs pick and choose delusions, why not take those unselfish ones, so beautiful, if inutile? Is it not an idea really worthy of a Divinity to think that by our self-flagellations our loved ones may be freed from stripes? Are there not some of us who would gladly thus requite debts of incalculable benefits received—some of us who would dare accept even a Hell to know our loved one had a Heaven?
Philip Hardman's father had belonged to various insurance societies, such as workmen form for mutual benefit. It would have sufficed to keep life in all the children until such time as they became self-supporting; but one by one they died, until only Philip was left. He worked in the "pattern-shop" in the works until he was twenty, when his mother died. Then he took the residue of his father's insurance money and his own savings and went to school.
It is not strange that he should choose the ministry. He had inherited all his father's love for his kind and much of his mother's fervor of purpose, added to which he had his own birthright of lofty idealism; but he had also something of the weaknesses of both parents. His mother's instability clung to him and made him vacillating, and the secrecy of his father in regard to his inventions survived in him under the guise of habitual reticence. He was deeply impressed with the sadness of life, and thought he saw in religion the one panacea for pain. Besides, he too wished to flee from the wrath to come.
He had been preaching some seven years when he visited Jamestown, and during that time he had bitten through to the ashes more than once. The fruit he held against his lips was losing even its fair seeming.
His charges were always amid the poor, and he was beginning to rebel against a doctrine that accused a Divine Being of all the cruelties life holds. "The poor have the Gospel preached to them" he had once looked upon as the expression of Divine benefaction; now it struck him as being redolent of a peculiar and brutal sarcasm.
Philip Hardman had all his life thought of his religion as only true when environed in an atmosphere of severity. One day, just after a tumult of doubt and a corresponding influx of faith and confidence, he went into a Roman Catholic cathedral. The exact reason for this is hard to divine. Perhaps it may have been some mad thought of attacking Rome in her own citadel. At any rate, he went in and sat down, looking about him with righteous contempt at the "idolatrous images" in their carven niches. His religious dreams had ever been barren of that ecstasy which springs from the grandeur and dignity of gorgeous ceremonials, sonorous chanting, vibrating music. He had never experienced the breathless hush of suspense between the intoned invocation of priests and the thrilling choral response. He had never, at the clear-tongued ringing of a bell, let fall his head and abased his spirit. But now he experienced an emotion such as possessed the monks of the Rosy Cross, when to their fervid vision the stony walls of their cells parted and disclosed vistas of heavenly beauty. He adored with the fervor of the true fanatic The Church—saw her for the first time in the light of a beautiful mistress, to be worshipped alone—for herself—her beauty—her charm—her power.
Philip Hardman left the cathedral, his eyes kindled, his step light. He had had doubts of his love, but they were all gone now. He had been dwelling apart from her; he had but heard echoes of her voice; he had never seen her as he should have seen her, at home—mystical, with dim, subdued and vaporous light, clad in gorgeous vestments; incensed with heavenly odors, irradiate with a hundred colors as the sunlight fell through the painted windows and the altar lights smote answering flames from the gold of the altar; served by humble servitors made holy by their service.
He had regarded her as a poor bride, without a wedding garment, chilled by the cold breath of the world, abashed by the insulting sneers of the ungodly. He now beheld her as she was, a Queen upon a throne, in all the regal magnificence of her regal state.
He was no longer the cherisher of a feeble flame, striving to make it shine in darkness; he was an humble slave of a great lamp, blessed if the farthest-reaching rays from the sacred centre of light shone upon his unworthy head or gilded his outstretched hands. He had thought of his creed pitifully as a "torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt." There was none of that here—no apology—no plea; there was only a triumphant pæan of a glorious creed, a sad mourning over those that were without it.
This spiritual exaltation working upon his eager nature imparted to him a physical stimulus exhilarating and strange. He strode along vigorously. He felt that he was "strong and fleet" in spirit, mind, and body. He walked on; the day waned; distinct thought had long since departed. His mood, which in an Oriental would have induced the coma of the hasheesh eater, prompted him hazily to form great plans for the good of his kind. The good of his kind? No, the glory of The Church. He followed few of these plans to any conclusion. They ended as they had begun, in nebulous imaginings of glory. And, as glory is easily transferable from the worshipped to the worshipper, the ending of his dreams included a cloud of incense to himself—the incense of approval, admiration, and the sweet savor of self-inflicted martyrdom.
He walked on, pitiably unaware of the St. Simeon Stylites attitude he had assumed. Night dimmed down; the wind rose, dead elm leaves were blown across his path, rustling under foot. The night wind, chill with first frosts, aroused him with a shiver to remember where he was. He found himself in the country; long vistas of barren fields stretched out before him a dreary panorama.
The gray sky was darkened by crows flying silently towards their nightly roosts. He passed pools of lifeless water, choked with sodden leaves. A laborer slouched by—a laborer from the railway going home, content because he had earned double pay for a Sunday's work. The odor of decaying vegetables somewhere near struck painfully upon Hardman's senses. This, he thought, with disgust, was the odor of nature—of the world.
The night suddenly dropped down from the clouds, and the darkness urged him to seek shelter. He approached a cottage he observed dimly, finding his way to it up an uneven lane bordered by a fantastic fence of uprooted stumps, whose ragged branch-like roots, twisted and distorted, stood out in solid black masses against the insubstantial mist of the night. He shuddered.
It seemed to his supersensitive fancy that these grotesque shapes were huge simulacra of the animalculæ that the microscope discovers in water. His muscles shrank as he imagined these huge shapes, unseen but not unseeing, writhing through the air, flourishing their weird forms over and around his head, embracing him with their elastic antennas and moving with him encircled in their horrible, impalpable embrace. With what devilish skill they swept nearer and nearer to him, avoiding him by a hair's breadth, and perceiving how his spirit shrank from their approach! He gazed up into the night, striving to see there the dreadful shapes his fancy had woven into a Dante-like vision. The side glimpses his eyes held of the fantastic forms of the roots projected themselves upon the curtains of the night before him. His breath quickened; he felt stifled; he withdrew his gaze from the clouds and fastened it upon his path, which, to his distorted fancy, seemed to contract until it narrowed down to an impassable barrier of threatening, twining arms.
He stumbled on.
As he staggered across the threshold of the cottage he brushed through a mass of dried, sweet grass, cut down and left to wither in the pathway. Its snuff-like odor brought back the incense of the afternoon. With a strong revulsion of feeling, he threw off alike the sensuous charm of the odor and the horrid phantasmagoria that his imagination had conjured up.
He knocked at the door, feeling a self-disgust that amounted almost to physical nausea.
Philip Hardman after this was especially bitter in his sermons against Rome—her priests—her altars—her incense—her teachings. He regarded himself as having escaped, hardly by the skin of his teeth, from the clutches of the Scarlet Woman that sitteth upon the Seven Hills, and besought his hearers oft, with all his own peculiar eloquence, to keep themselves withdrawn from the temptations of Rome, of which, he avowed almost with tears, he had felt the power.
This experience has no bearing upon the story of Myron Holder, save inasmuch as it indicates the emotional instability of Philip Hardman. Poor Myron!
"Behold, we know not anything!I can but trust that good shall fallAt last—far off—at last, to all;And every winter change to spring."
"O Wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
Mr. Fletcher arrived in Jamestown in due time and was met at the station by Mrs. Deans. Hardly had they started upon their drive to Mrs. Deans' before Mr. Fletcher inquired about Myron Holder. Mrs. Deans launched forth eloquently, and Mr. Fletcher was soon in possession of the same facts and fancies concerning Myron Holder as Philip Hardman had been deluged with; but the Reverend Fletcher viewed the recital differently. He regarded Mrs. Deans' indignation as being the natural feeling of a good woman toward a bad one, and saw in this drawing away of the skirts nothing derogatory to Mrs. Deans' womanhood.
The church was filled that evening, and many eyes watched the door eagerly, for the probable appearance of Myron Holder had been a much discussed theme that day. Many of them had missed seeing her the night before, but there certainly was no danger that the like would occur again.
The Reverend Mr. Fletcher entered with his hostess, and, like the clever church diplomat that he was, spoke to the class-leaders and the elect, and smiled benignly but condescendingly upon the lesser lights, and then proceeded, without further parley, to the platform. He was a hard-faced man, with hawk-like features, coarsened by wind and weather; keen, hard eyes, wherein passion had left its light but not its warmth; strong, square jaws, that indicated at once the tenacity and stubbornness of the man. The Reverend Fletcher was indeed a good specimen of the evangelist who goes forth with the Sword of the Smiter rather than the Balm of the Healer. There was no fear of his beguiling any one by false promises of perilous peace.
When he had taken his position behind the reading-desk, he too began to watch the door. From Mrs. Deans' description of Myron Holder he had formed an idea of her appearance. He looked to see some flaunting, rustic beauty, bold of eye, brazen of deportment, gayly dressed perhaps, and defiant of bearing.
It lacked but a moment or two of the time for service when Myron Holder entered the church. She paused a moment in the doorway, looking about her for an inconspicuous seat. There was one but a step from the doorway; she sank into it.
The Reverend Fletcher observed her pale face shine, star-like, for a moment against the darkness of the unlighted porch ere she stepped within the church. He decided instantly that this was indeed one of the elect, and gave no further thought to her. His whole attention was absorbed in looking for the sinner for whose soul he was to do battle. He thirsted for the fray, but the minutes passed and no one else entered, so he took up his discourse, and soon had his congregation in a spiritual tumult. Ejaculations came thick and fast from his hearers, and there were as many weeping women as any preacher could desire; but the heart of the Reverend Fletcher was hot within him against She, the godless one, who sat at home whilst the warnings and threatenings prepared for her were poured into the ears of every one else in the village.
Meantime Myron sat half-dazed. Truly this was another doctrine than the one she had listened to the night before. Where, amid all these words, was the promise of the pitying Christ? She was out and away the moment Mr. Fletcher uttered his last Amen. As he stood mopping the perspiration from his brow she was speeding through the silent street, and by the time the church was empty she had flung herself, sobbing, on her bed.
When the Reverend Mr. Fletcher discovered that, after all, Myron Holder had been in the church, he was decidedly disgusted. He always liked aiming his remarks at some particular person, and always felt as though he were firing blank cartridges when he could not see the target. Therefore he was more than annoyed to find that he had so scattered his fire when he might have taken accurate aim at Myron. He remarked to Mrs. Deans, with some irascibility, that her description of Myron Holder had been somewhat misleading.
"Oh, she's deep," said Mrs. Deans; "and that sly there's no being up to her. Always goin' about as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth; but as for wickedness and genuine, inborn badness! Why, Brother Fletcher, it's my belief and solemn opinion that she was jest makin' a set at Brother Hardman with them eyes of her'n. I'm glad, Brother Fletcher, that Brother Hardman was called away. He was very young, Brother Hardman was—very."
The Reverend Mr. Fletcher, recalling Hardman's words at the depot, decided that Myron was a dangerous creature—a sly serpent, evidently, in a dove's disguise. The Reverend Fletcher girded his loins to the fray, and was fain to look well to his breastplate of righteousness and to give thanks that it had fallen to his fate to emulate Saint Anthony.
Mrs. White and Mrs. Wilson were invited to take tea "along with the minister" next day, and Mrs. Wilson played her role of sorrowing mother to perfection. The two other ladies paid her the delicate compliment of looking fixedly at her for a moment, then shaking their heads lugubriously and exchanging a meaning glance with each other. When the cockles of their hearts were warmed by the Japan tea, they began making allusions to "dispensations," and "afflictions," and "merciful Providences" (terms which in the vocabulary of the sanctified seem to mean the same thing); and Mrs. Wilson began making remarks about "troubles" which were not very intelligible, owing to her beginning them with a sniff and ending in a snivel.
All this fired the zeal of the preacher to no small degree. He resolved they should see the strength of the spiritual sword when wielded by his hands. He assured them that the stubborn neck of the offender should be bowed beneath the Scriptural yoke; that the flinty heart of the sinner should be broken, and that the cause of all this trouble and scandal should be made to do penance.
These cheerful predictions filled the hearts of his hearers with much joy, and they parted in a little flutter of excitement to meet again at the church, where they anticipated, as Mrs. White expressed it, that "Brother Fletcher would show that Myron Holder up in her true colors."
That night Myron sat again in that far-back seat, and again the spiritual thunders of the Reverend Fletcher spent themselves over her head. In all his harangue there was no word to touch her soul.
Death—death—death—was the burden of it all. Now death is a bogy to fright happy children with, not weary women. Life had been so bitter to this woman that its antithesis could not be aught but alluring.
* * * * * *
It was the last night of the Reverend Fletcher's ministration in Jamestown. For three nights he had fired volleys of fire and brimstone at Myron Holder; for three nights she had sat patient, pale, unmoved—her eyes growing wearier and wearier, her face sadder and sadder, as her hope of finding peace grew less and less. It was such a vague hope, not concerned with repentance of sin at all, but wholly comprehended in an ineffable longing for the fabled rest of Philip Hardman's preaching. She had heard no further word of it, and she was beginning to doubt if she had heard aright that night when the sweetness of the words had left a tiny germ of hope behind.