An idyl of the Wabash, and other stories

By Anna Nicholas

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Title: An idyl of the Wabash, and other stories

Author: Anna Nicholas


        
Release date: March 20, 2026 [eBook #78253]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Hurst & Company, 1898

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78253

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN IDYL OF THE WABASH, AND OTHER STORIES ***




AN IDYL OF THE WABASH




[Illustration]




  AN IDYL OF THE WABASH
  AND OTHER STORIES

  BY
  ANNA NICHOLAS

  _Made out o’ truck ’at’s jes’ a-goin’ to waste
   ’Cause smart folks thinks it’s altogether too
   Outrageous common._--RILEY.

  NEW YORK
  HURST & COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS




  Copyright 1898
  The Bowen Merrill Company

  Copyright 1912
  The Bobbs-Merrill Company

  An Idyl of the Wabash




TO MY MOTHER




CONTENTS

                                  PAGE.

  AN IDYL OF THE WABASH               1

  AT A WAY-STATION                   32

  MRS. BROOKS’S CHANGE OF HEART      60

  AN ABIDING LOVE                    77

  A FARMHOUSE DRAMA                 101

  THE SOLUTION OF A TEXT            131

  AN OCCULT EXPERIENCE              141

  AN ITINERANT PAIR                 177

  A MOVEMENT IN ART                 201

  THE QUICKENING OF A SOUL          221




  Herewith together you have flower and thorn,
  Both rose and brier, for thus together grow
  Bitter and sweet, but wherefore none may know.

                                         --ALDRICH.




AN IDYL OF THE WABASH




AN IDYL OF THE WABASH


When Miss Callista Rogers first came from her Vermont home to the
little Indiana town of Honeyport, on the Wabash, she had a sense of
almost perilous adventure--something like that felt by the pioneer
women who followed up the ever-advancing and now forever vanished
frontier.

“It is so very far away,” she said to her family before starting, “and
while, of course, there are no Indians and no danger of having one’s
scalp taken, or anything of that sort, still, things will be queer and
the people can’t be expected to be like those in Vermont, not having
had the same advantages.”

After she reached Honeyport she wrote to her sister that the people
were queer, but that they seemed friendly, and she thought she should
get along real well. At that time Miss Callista was not much past her
first youth, but she had lived long enough to have imbibed the very
firm conviction that New England opinions and New England ways were
the only opinions and only ways worth considering seriously. Holding
such belief, it might naturally have been expected that she would come
into conflict with her new associates, but a fair degree of discretion
prevented her from airing her views too aggressively, and her wholesome
humor and evident kindliness of spirit led her Hoosier friends to be
indulgent to such of her unflattering opinions as were inadvertently
betrayed and to regard her with considerable favor.

She had come to Indiana to teach school, and to Honeyport through the
intercession in her behalf of Deacon Knox, an old family friend at
home whose second cousin had married Rev. Calvin Evans, pastor of the
Presbyterian Church at Honeyport.

In those days--it was soon after the war--teaching, especially in the
rural districts and village communities, was not the complicated and
exacting science it has since become. Miss Callista was fairly well
grounded in the common English branches; in the way of accomplishments
she knew a little music, and as a crowning acquirement had an
acquaintance with the rudiments of the Latin language. This last she
was not called upon to teach, but the consciousness that she was on
familiar terms--hardly a speaking acquaintance, to be sure--with the
ancient tongue was a source of infinite satisfaction to her; it gave
her a sense of superiority and power.

There were some preliminaries to be undergone before she was officially
authorized to teach the young idea of Honeyport, an examination among
the rest, but this was not severe, and she stood it successfully. As
for the methods of teaching to be adopted, there were no fixed rules as
now under the elaborate and inflexible system in vogue. She was free
to follow her own judgment, which was for the most part good, being
based on New England common sense and a power of adaptation to the
pupils’ individual needs which every successful teacher must have. So
she taught in one of the two schools of Honeyport very acceptably to
the people, who were easy-going and not yet affected by the “higher
education” fad.

But Miss Callista did not so easily adapt herself to her new
environment in all respects. She did not like the appearance of the
town and the surrounding country, to begin with. The country was too
level. Her soul yearned for the hills as the souls of those born among
them must do till memory fails. She missed the blue distances, the
lights and shadows, the feeling of companionship the mountains gave.
The prairie was monotonous and the sky shut down too close. The village
itself was trying to her sense of thrift and order. She could not free
her mind concerning it in her letters home, for she was resolved to
give nothing but agreeable impressions to the mother and sister back in
the trim and prim but picturesque Vermont town.

To Mrs. Evans, the pastor’s wife, she unburdened her mind when her
sensibilities were too deeply outraged. In Mrs. Evans she had found
a congenial acquaintance. That lady had lived in Indiana for so many
years that she had acquired some of the habits and peculiarities of
what Miss Callista called the natives, but she had been born in New
England and cherished its traditions. Consequently, she sympathized in
a measure with the strictures made by the new teacher, but she was a
discreet woman, as became a minister’s wife, and the confidences poured
into her ears went no further. Understanding this, Miss Callista felt
free to express her true sentiments on all matters. She was especially
indignant over the slipshod ways of the village.

“It’s perfectly scandalous,” she said, “the way they let the grass grow
in the gutters and the way they let the pigs and cattle run loose in
the street. They ought to have more pride. Why, when I rode up Main
street in the Paw Paw hack that first day and saw the sidewalks almost
covered by high grass, and cows and pigs lying right on the walks, and
people stepping around them, I expected to find slovenly housekeeping,
too. Like town, like people, I thought. Didn’t turn out jest that way,
I’m free to confess. There are some very nice, neat housekeepers here.”

Another peculiarity of the natives excited Miss Callista’s scorn.

“I never see,” she told Mrs. Evans, “such a dowdy set as they be. Why,
they don’t care how they look. The women don’t dress up of afternoons,
and farmers’ wives don’t put on a fresh dud when they come to town;
jest wear their old limpsy calicoes and sunbunnets. The men ain’t a
mite better, though, to be sure, that’s the women’s fault. Husbands
are much what the wives make ’em, as you know. I don’t set no great
store by fashions and folderols myself,” she went on, “but it’s
certainly a dreadful shame they don’t slick up more when they go to
meeting--particularly the Campbellites. Go over to that church an’ you
won’t see a man with a starched shirt bosom. Not that I look at such
things, specially, but if you have eyes you must see. Clean enough,
all of ’em, mebbe, but no stiffenin’. I’d like to clear starch ’em all
once--men, women and children.

“And there is another thing. Folks around here surmise and wonder,
but can’t guess one of the main reasons why I set up my own little
housekeeping. Of course, in the first place, I wanted to economize,
but, Mrs. Evans, another great thing was that I jest wanted something
good to eat. I do’ know as I’m so very dainty about my eating, an’ I
do’ know _but_ I be. Anyhow, I don’t like the cooking I get at most
places. Of course, if you’d felt clear to take me it would a’ been all
right s’ far as the table’s concerned, but most places they don’t suit
me. They can’t make a good cup o’ tea; they don’t know how to make
yeast bread, and not one of ’em can make a decent pie. I will say for
’em, though, that they can fry chicken to beat all creation.”

Miss Callista conceived a peculiar animosity toward the religious
sect variously known as “Disciples,” “Christians” and “Campbellites.”
Just why was not clear. It may have been due to the fact that she
had never heard of the denomination back in Vermont, and being, as
she considered, a purely western product, it was, therefore, to be
distrusted as somehow unorthodox and subversive of pious principles.
The sect was numerously represented in that locality, and the
congregation which worshiped in one of the three churches of Honeyport
was larger than either the Methodists or Presbyterians could muster.

“I shan’t call ’em Disciples,” sniffed Miss Callista, “jest as if
they were as good as the Twelve, an’ I shan’t call ’em Christians.
The idear! Jest as if they had a patent on the name. They don’t like
to be called Campbellites, but I shall call ’em Campbellites the hull
time. How any reasonable human being can believe in the docterns of
that church does beat me. An’ there they’ll set an’ listen to jest the
scrappiest kind o’ sermons, when, by crossin’ the street, they could
hear your husband’s stirrin’ discourses.”

It will be seen from this that Miss Callista was not a woman of
broad mind, and that, though she made her opinions plain to the
comprehension, they were not expressed in that correct and elegant
language so desirable in the teachers of youth. It is but just,
however, to say that she was aware of some of these verbal lapses. As
she herself remarked:

“Nobody understands grammar, and what is proper language, better than I
do, and in school I always take great care to speak correctly. When I
come home, though, it’s too much trouble to be thinking of the parts of
speech, and I drop into an easier sort o’ talk, as I put on a kitchen
apron or an old pair o’ shoes.”

Her idioms and accents she was unconscious of, and therefore could not
drop. The born New Englander seldom does. She would say “Indianar,” and
“idear,” and “Mariar” to the end of her days. She was quick to detect
what she considered errors in others, however.

“‘Bucket!’ Don’t let me hear you say ‘bucket,’” she would tell her
pupils. “It’s a ridiculous word; say ‘pail.’ And don’t say you
‘reckon’ or ‘low’ you’ll do so and so; say ‘guess.’”

Miss Callista had come West to teach because, even if she could get a
school at her home, with all the eager candidates in competition for
every place, better salaries were paid in Indiana. For her own part
she would have preferred to stay in Vermont, even with the scant wages
of the district school, but she had a mother and sister who needed her
earnings, and it was for them she started out to seek a better fortune.
The mother was a widow with a tiny home to call her own and an income
hardly in proportion; the sister, a fragile girl with the New England
scourge, consumption, already making its signs visible. Miss Callista
must be the bread winner, and she went bravely about her task. She
loved her family and her home; she had none of the self-assertiveness
that is needed for those who would get on in the world; she dreaded
the separation from her dear ones, and yet it never occurred to her to
rebel against fate that made such a trial possible. She did not dream
that she was heroic, and yet it is in such actions that the heroism of
the latter days is found--a heroism not less than that which led the
knights of old on their crusades.

Many and many a day in her new abiding place homesickness pressed upon
her like a tangible weight; her heart ached for a sight of dear faces
and familiar scenes; the very sun shining in the heavens took on a
forbidding look, and the birds sang a melancholy tune. But if the poor,
lonely little woman wept it was when no one knew. She kept a brave
face and wrote cheery letters to the invalid at home. Every penny of
her salary but that which supplied her own barest needs went to make
the life of that invalid easier. She not only made no complaint over
her own deprivations and sacrifices; she made the sacrifices gladly
and did not know them to be such. Women are often like that. If the
beneficiaries accepted the gifts as a matter of course and without
appreciation of the life that was being given also, why, that was not
unusual either. The human creature is often so.

The years went on until five had passed since Miss Callista had seen
the faces of her kin and the blue Vermont hills. At the beginning
she had not dreamed that so long a time would elapse before she
could return, but one thing and another had delayed her visit. The
invalid sister had needed so many things. The malady made inroads and
delicacies were wanted to keep up her strength; medicines, too, and
the doctor must be paid. Once a famous specialist came up from Boston
to see her, and that cost money. This fifth winter just ended had been
spent by the ailing one in Florida, but she was now at home again, and
a turn of fortune in the shape of a railroad rate war made it suddenly
possible for Miss Callista to go to see her and the dear mother. The
cost of travel, the rival passenger agents declared, was less than that
of staying at home. So, the spring term having just ended, she joyfully
went her way.

She was in time for the end. Though it was early June and the sun shone
with torrid strength on the Honeyport prairie, and the roses were in
bloom, it was not so surely summer but that a wintry blast swept down
from the north through the Vermont valleys and undid all the healing
wrought by the Florida airs. The ailing sister was cut down as a lily
by the frost. She died in Miss Callista’s arms--faithful arms that had
scarce time to rest before they held the mother’s weary form while
her soul breathed itself away. The mother had lived for the stricken
daughter, and that beloved life ended, she, too, was done with earth.

The summer vacation was not over when Miss Callista came back to
Honeyport. The charm of her childhood’s home was gone. Later in life
the glamour of the mountains would come back to her and her heart
would yearn for a sight of them, but now they chilled her and she was
glad to return to the once despised village on the Wabash, with the
unbroken, shadowless landscape and the level horizon. Out of the old
home life were left only memories and a few household goods. When some
of these treasures were unloaded at the door of her Indiana home--a
heavy oaken secretary, a spindle-legged table, a straight-backed,
comfortless-looking chair--the men who lifted them into place wondered
that she went to the expense of shipping such old-fashioned furnishings
when she might have bought finer ones at home for less money. But the
women who saw them did not wonder--women who had found for themselves
how the heart clings to inanimate things when they alone are left to
speak of the dead.

So Miss Callista, permanently transplanted, settled down in a bit of
a cottage next to the Presbyterian parsonage, still occupied by her
friends, the Evanses, and resumed her occupation of teaching. There was
no one now to save for and deny herself for, but, being an unselfish
creature, this only brought her pain. Nevertheless, as time went on
life grew more comfortable for her. She indulged in an occasional bit
of finery; now and then she went on an excursion somewhere. Once she
went to Indianapolis to attend the state fair, and once she went to
Chicago and came back dizzy and bewildered, glad to be in the quiet
home away from the busy whirl.

The years went on until more than fifteen had passed since she set foot
on Hoosier soil. All this time she had not escaped the speculations
all normally constituted people are bound to indulge in concerning the
matrimonial prospects of their spinster friends. It was assumed that
she was not only ready, but anxious to marry when the opportunity and
the man offered, and kindly neighbors kept a lookout for both. Miss
Callista alone seemed indifferent. Apparently she took no thought of
such possibilities. She was polite in a sedate way to the occasional
marriageable men who showed a disposition to hover around her, but she
gave encouragement to none. Her Honeyport friends suspected that she
had wasted her heart on some unappreciative Vermont Yankee, but this
was not the case.

The truth was that the marriageable male beings who had come within her
range of possibilities had not been quite to her liking. The farmers
who constituted the most of these eligibles were too rough and careless
in dress, too much given to tobacco chewing and too loudly hilarious
in their conversation to please her somewhat fastidious taste. She
may not have cherished a definite ideal of the man who would meet her
requirements, but she had a clear conception of what would not do. So
the years had gone swiftly by, bringing few changes in the routine of
her life, or even in her appearance. She was a plump and comely body,
and in some respects more attractive than in her younger days, for
lines of care and anxiety and homesickness had given way to placid
contentment in her work and in every-day affairs. She looked forward
to no change in her mode of life or her experiences, but, as so often
happens when change comes into an uneventful existence, it comes
unexpectedly and creates a complete transformation in the little world.

Mrs. Evans, still her nearest neighbor and closest friend, fell ill and
came swiftly down to death’s door. Before she passed through she said
to Miss Callista, who was her faithful attendant:

“When I am gone Calvin will marry again after a proper time. He will;
oh, yes. It is a man’s way, and it will be Calvin’s way. He will need
somebody to look after him. I want you to be the one, and I have told
him so. You will know how and will do for him as I would.”

This was said gaspingly between paroxysms of pain, but with all the
firmness and decision for which Mrs. Evans was noted when at her best
estate. It was the supreme proof of a woman’s faith in another that
she could put her husband into her keeping, and, having given it, she
closed her eyes and opened them no more.

This last communication made a powerful impression on Miss Callista.
It was a startling surprise, but she accepted it unquestioningly as a
guide to her future.

What Mrs. Evans wanted Mr. Evans to do had always been done, and
she had not the faintest doubt that he would follow his wife’s
instructions in this, as he had been accustomed to do in all other
matters.

She grieved for her friend’s death, but almost insensibly she began
to adjust herself to coming conditions. The bereaved man assumed the
conventional appearance of gentle melancholy by which the newly-made
widower is so easily recognized, and his earliest sermons had a
tenderly pathetic tone that she, in common with the other women of
the congregation, considered very touching and appropriate. But even
in this sacred stage of his widowerhood she felt herself looking upon
him with a new interest and a secret sense of possession. She had
been brought up to revere ministers as a class, and had always had a
respectful regard for Mr. Evans because of his profession and because
he had been kind to her. He was not her ideal of manly beauty, being
gaunt of frame and bald of head; moreover, he was twenty years older
than she, being nearly sixty. However, she recognized the fact that
it was not for her to make age a barrier, since no widower of sixty
was likely to consider himself other than desirable even to a maid of
twenty.

She also confessed to herself that she had always considered the wife
of a minister blessed among women, and that, while she had never hoped
to marry one, the sudden and unexpected prospect of doing so was very
agreeable indeed. She felt herself fitted to the labor of smoothing
life’s pathway for a servant of the Lord. Not that she could assist in
sermon-writing, as she had suspected the first Mrs. Evans of doing,
but she could minister to his comfort in a more material way. She
could take household cares from his shoulders; she could make him
presentable to the public; she could keep him posted on many ins and
outs of the parish; above all, she could feed him well, and she held
that of all men ministers needed to be well fed. She considered it a
reasonable proposition that a man could administer a far higher degree
of spiritual consolation to his flock when his stomach was comfortably
filled than when it was empty or dyspeptic from poor food.

The very church building began to take on a new aspect. She saw that it
needed a new carpet and a coat of paint, and her mind leaped forward
to the time when, as minister’s wife, she could have an influence in
bringing such improvements about. But she kept all such thoughts
concealed in her own heart. Her manner toward her pastor was more
sedate and dignified than ever. The knowledge imparted by her deceased
friend had given her a self-consciousness which put an end to the
little neighborly attentions she had been accustomed to offer when
the wife was alive, such as sending over a favorite dish, or now and
then an embroidered handkerchief, or even taking his hose from the
mending basket and darning them in the highest style of the art. Now,
she thought, such things would “make talk”--dreadful bugbear of lone
women--and she left Mr. Evans entirely to the mercies of Nancy, his
inefficient and elderly serving woman, and to other female parishioners
who, with husbands to approve their actions, might safely venture where
she could not tread.

It was the more easy to give up her accustomed service in her
reverend neighbor’s house from the fact that her spare hours were now
largely devoted to the entertainment of the Littledale twins--the
three-year-old children of the Rev. Amos Littledale, the Campbellite
minister, who lived across the street.

Miss Callista’s animosity to the Campbellites had in no wise abated,
and was generally understood in the community, but the feeling was
directed to them as a sect and not as individuals. Certainly, it did
not include the babies, especially such sweet and attractive ones as
these. Long before their mother died, several months back, her heart
had gone out to those twins, and when they manifested a fondness for
her, based though she knew it was on her supply of buns and cookies,
she became their devoted friend. She had once confided to Mrs. Evans,
with a maidenly blush, that if she had been married and the Lord had
seen fit to bless her with children, she would have liked twins.

Mr. Littledale’s young sister was his housekeeper and guardian of
the babies, and Miss Callista, seeing that the burden of care was
heavy for the girl, cheerfully relieved and aided her in many ways.
It would do no harm to make the young things happy while it could
be done, she thought. “It wasn’t at all likely they would have much
chance to be happy if their father married that flirty young Mattie
Stone, over on the West pike, as seemed likely. Strange that a man
couldn’t show better judgment when he married, especially when he
took a second partner. There was Mr. Littledale, all of thirty-one, or
maybe thirty-two years old, and Mat Stone wasn’t over twenty, and a
giddy piece, too. There was Jane Embree, steady and settled, and of a
suitable age, and willing, and he never so much as looked her way. But
law sakes, what could you expect of a man and a preacher at that, in a
church that had the hull New Testament for its creed and no confession
of faith and no definite thing you could get at to tell what the
members did believe, or why they couldn’t be just plain Baptists, or
even Methodists or Presbyterians, who will immerse you if you insist on
it?”

But, with all her absorption in the infants Miss Callista did not
fail to keep a watchful eye on Widower Evans. She was a woman and not
unobservant, and had therefore not failed to note the peculiarities of
widowers. She knew at about what period deepest grief began to lift
its clouds and life present some attractions once more; it was a very
early period in a majority of cases. She could invariably detect the
first indications that the bereaved one was “able to take notice,” as
cynical old ladies have it; she knew well the signs that he was not
only contemplating further matrimonial possibilities in a general way,
but also when he had ceased to generalize and had fixed his eye upon a
concrete individual as a desirable consoler. She saw Mr. Evans emerge
into the first of these stages, her proximity as next-door neighbor
being a point of vantage. He shaved oftener than he had been accustomed
to doing; he buttoned his frock coat when he went out, instead of
allowing it to hang open in a saggy, slovenly way; he carried himself
more erectly, and with almost a jaunty air. Before his best coat was in
the least shiny he began to wear it every day, and bought a new one for
Sundays.

Miss Callista observed this piece of extravagance with a thrill; it
was significant of immediate activity in the matrimonial field. It
was barely six months since Mrs. Evans had died, but her expectant
successor considered it probable that he would wish to marry as soon as
the conventional year of mourning had expired, and it was a matter of
course that the necessary preliminaries should be arranged before that
date.

Almost unconsciously she began to preen herself like a little bird in
the spring. Her brown hair waved with an extra crinkle; she put a
fresh bow on her summer bonnet and wore a pink ribbon at her throat
where brown had been. People said how young Miss Callista looked and
how well she “held her age.” They also began to say what a suitable
wife she would make for Mr. Evans; some of them, in the free-spoken
rural way, said it to her, and made her blush and try to look angry.
But they began to say, too, that Mr. Evans seemed to be looking with a
favorable eye upon the Widow Jackson, out on West Main street. He had
been seen to walk home with her from prayer-meeting, and he dropped in
with what some considered needless frequency to administer spiritual
consolation to the widow’s son, who was in the last stages of what was
known as “decline.”

This information gave Miss Callista a shock. Could it be possible,
she asked herself, that he was about to disregard his wife’s dying
injunction? He showed no indications of any leaning in her direction,
save that he had come over once or twice in a neighborly way, and
when other neighbors were present, to sit on her little porch and
chat in the twilight. But he had never walked home with her from
prayer-meeting, though she attended regularly and it was right in
his way. She cogitated over the matter a good deal, and as a result
of her reflections decided upon what she considered a bold move and a
counter attraction to the widow’s blandishments. She resolved to invite
him to supper, no matter if folks did say she was setting her cap for
him. She wasn’t doing anything of the kind, and she wasn’t anyways
anxious, she said to herself, to marry him, but something was due to
her friend Mrs. Evans; and certainly that lady would not approve of
Mrs. Jackson. And what a poor figure she would cut at the head of the
missionary society and the sewing circle, sure enough! Perhaps, it was
her (Miss Callista’s) duty gently to remind him of his late partner’s
wishes. So she spent the most of one Saturday afternoon in concocting
the preacher’s favorite dishes, and when they were ready to serve,
stepped to the back fence, and, in a casual way, as if it were a sudden
thought, asked him to come over and have a bit of supper. She said, she
knew Nancy had gone to see her folks, and she thought he might enjoy a
cup of tea and something warm instead of a cold bite by himself.

He came with alacrity, and was presently installed at the table with
Miss Callista opposite and a Littledale twin at each side of her. It
had seemed to her that the presence of the twins would at once preserve
the proprieties and offer no barrier to confidential conversation. The
babies behaved like little angels, but there was no conversation that
all the world might not have heard. She plied her guest with fried
chicken, with the lightest of rolls, with strawberry shortcake and with
his favorite temperance tipple of diluted blackberry cordial, put up by
her own hands the year before. He ate heartily and joyously, and made a
variety of facetious remarks to the twins, but he went home without so
much as a look indicating a thought of his wife’s sacred injunction.

Miss Callista did not like it. She took the twins to their gate and
kissed them good-night with an abruptness and irritation of manner
hitherto unknown to them. She was beginning to have a little resentment
on her own account as well as on that of the departed Mrs. Evans, whose
request was being ignored. Her vanity was touched. Queer taste a man
had, she thought, who could see anything in that Widow Jackson better
than he saw in her; and everybody knew the widow couldn’t cook a decent
meal to save her life.

Miss Callista was modest, but no woman is so unduly self-depreciating
that she does not secretly recognize her own superiority to certain
other women.

But the supper did have its effect, after all, for during the weeks
following Mr. Evans fell into the way of walking home with Miss
Callista after Sunday evening service and of coming oftener to sit on
her porch in the dusk. But he did not discontinue his visits to the
widow. The situation was quite interesting to the parishioners and the
village gossips, and people began to take sides. The women discussed
the matter over the back fences, and the men who sat around the grocery
stores wagered small sums on the outcome.

One day in August Miss Callista was surprised by the receipt of a
letter. It was from Mr. Evans, who had been spending a week or so with
a sister in Lafayette. It read thus:

  “Miss Callista--Esteemed Friend: I take this means of addressing
  you in regard to an important matter. When my lamented Jane was in
  her last illness, she foresaw that I should find the burden of
  loneliness too great to bear, and she advised me to marry again after
  a proper time had passed, and strongly recommended you as a suitable
  partner. Indeed, she was so urgent that she exacted a promise that
  I would follow her advice. At that time I was much agitated and
  distressed, and scarcely knew what I was saying, but since I have
  recently come to reflect upon the matter it has seemed to me that
  her views were very judicious. The time is near when I can, without
  reproach, enter again into the marriage state, and for many reasons
  it seems expedient for me to do so. Inasmuch as you were on terms of
  close friendship with my dear Jane, and will doubtless desire, as I
  do, to carry out her wishes as far as possible in all respects, I ask
  your consideration of the matter in hand. As my wife you can greatly
  increase your field of usefulness, and I feel assured that the Lord
  will fit your strength to the new duties and responsibilities. I
  write this in order to prepare your mind. I shall return to-morrow
  and will call on you, when we can discuss the subject in all its
  bearings.
                                          “Yours in the Lord,
                                                      “CALVIN H. EVANS.”

Miss Callista read this epistle several times. At first she experienced
a sense of triumph and elation. There was no longer any doubt about
the matter. She, and not the Widow Jackson, had won the prize. On the
second reading she added the comment, “if he is a prize.” The third
time red spots began to grow on her cheeks, and she talked to herself
as people who live alone are apt to do.

“He talks as if he were asking me to marry him all on his first wife’s
account, and had no special interest in the matter himself. Mrs. Evans
was a good woman, but another woman wants some better reason for
marrying the widower than that. And then he doesn’t out and out ask me
to marry him; jest takes it for granted that I will jump at the chance
once my mind is prepared. Conceited old thing, if he is a preacher. He
seems to have some doubt, too, of my being equal to the new duties,
and--and he never even says he likes me or will try to make me happy,
or anything. A woman, even if she is going to be a second wife and
isn’t as young as she was, wants a little love-making on her own
account.”

Miss Callista did not reflect, or perhaps did not know, that men to
whom it is not given to be sentimental and affectionate on paper are
sometimes most eloquent of speech in the tender cause. She continued to
cherish resentment, but, nevertheless, went about preparing green corn
fritters in case the parson should happen in about supper time.

The twins happened in, as they were wont to do whenever they found the
gates unfastened, and after them presently came their father ostensibly
in search of the truants. He had come so often on the same errand that
he was quite at home, and detected at once Miss Callista’s appearance
of irritation, for there was a dangerous sparkle in her usually mild
eyes.

“Have the children worried you? I will take them home at once,” he said.

“Worry me--those dear babies? No, indeed; they couldn’t do that. Older
people than they are the ones who worry.”

Rev. Mr. Littledale might have made a reputation in the legal
profession, he had such a knack of getting the information he wanted by
skillful but apparently purposeless questioning. Miss Callista had no
intention of telling about Mr. Evans’s proposal, or, more accurately,
his proposition, but she was full of the subject, and presently sat
down on the sofa in the cool little parlor, the twins promptly climbing
up and sitting one on each side with their arms about her.

“What would you think, Mr. Littledale, of a man who would ask a woman
to be his second wife just because he thought it would please his
first wife? I know--I know a lady--I have heard of a case of the kind.”

Mr. Littledale was shrewd. He had had his eye on Mr. Evans, and needed
to know no more.

“Miss Callista,” said he promptly and with shameless disregard of the
other man’s possible claims, “Miss Callista, such a man isn’t worth
thinking about. He’s a selfish wretch, and no woman could be happy with
him. A second wife deserves as much consideration as the first, and on
her own account, too. And while we are talking about marrying, Miss
Callista, shall I tell you what I have been wanting to say for some
time? I want you for my wife. I love you, Miss Callista; the twins love
you; won’t you come to us?”

The twins, cherubic creatures, promptly echoed, “Love oo, Miss
C’lista,” and proceeded to embrace her, but were dispossessed by their
parent.

Miss Callista was taken completely by surprise, but this variety of
surprise never wholly disconcerts the most timid of women. She thought
rapidly for a moment.

“There! Mr. Littledale’s been dropping in all summer, staying to supper
and making himself at home generally, and I never thought anything of
it, because he’s younger than I be; and, besides, I s’posed he was
engaged to that Stone girl. Folks will say I tried to catch him.”

Like a flash, too, came the thought: “If I say yes, Mr. Evans will have
to look somewhere else, and I don’t care if he does. I never made any
promise to Jane. The Widow Jackson can have him.”

What Miss Callista said was: “Why, Mr. Littledale, I’m seven years
older than you be, and--and I’m a Presbyterian.”

“What do a few years matter? We won’t count them,” was the reply. “And
I’m sure I have nothing against Presbyterians. If you mean that I’m a
Campbellite, why, please try to forgive me.”

Evidently he received forgiveness, for when Mr. Evans arrived that
evening he found Mr. Littledale sitting with Miss Callista on the
vine-covered porch, and the corn fritters had all been eaten. The new
condition of affairs was gently disclosed to him by his successful
rival, and he was perceptibly discomfited. He had, perhaps, not valued
Miss Callista at her true worth while he considered her his for the
asking, but now that another man had taken her from him she suddenly
seemed highly desirable. Possibly the discovery of Rev. Evans’s designs
may have inspired Mr. Littledale to unpremeditated action, but this is
only a surmise. It is the way of man to be so influenced. Mr. Evans
made but a short call, and when he entered his own home the door was
heard to slam with what seemed unnecessary violence.

But the Presbyterian pastor was not inconsolable. The very next evening
he walked home with the Widow Jackson from prayer-meeting and stayed
till 10 o’clock. The morning after, the widow, under strict injunction
of secrecy, told Deacon Todd’s wife of her engagement, and by night the
whole town knew of it.

Miss Callista also confided in Mrs. Todd.

“I never would have supposed that I’d marry a Campbellite, that is, a
Disciple--never, or that I’d be one myself. Of course, a minister’s
wife ought, in all decency, to belong to his church, and, of course,
I will. I ought to be able to accept the doctern if it’s the hull New
Testament, as they say. And there! I’ll have to be immersed, too, I
s’pose. I hadn’t thought of that; but I guess I can stand it to go
through water, or fire either, for them blessed twins.”




AT A WAY-STATION


Thirty years ago a certain railroad in Indiana was new enough to be
still a source of deep interest and curiosity to the people of the
sparsely-settled region through which it passed. They had not yet
ceased to gather at the stations, morning and evening, to see the “down
train” and the “up train.” The projectors of this thoroughfare, having
in view, perhaps, legislative appropriations and private subscriptions
of stock, had artfully led the public to think that a farming country
of marvelous richness was suffering for an outlet; that passengers
and produce impatiently waited to crowd its cars. So impressed were
guileless citizens with this idea that only a brave man or a fool
would have dared to say: “Go to! We need no railroad.” Thus far in the
existence of the road the great rush of travel and traffic had not
begun; in the meantime, one train daily each way was found enough for
all needs.

Few among the rural population along the route ever went from home;
fewer still expected visitors. Yet they went regularly to see the
engine and the gayly painted cars; they indulged in wild speculations
as to the probable business and destination of the travelers of whom
they caught glimpses. The occasional stranger who stopped at any
village was confronted on the platform by groups of men in blue or
butternut jeans, all chewing tobacco and expectorating profusely. He
passed women in lank calico dresses and limp calico sunbonnets--some
old and wrinkled, some young enough to be pretty, but, with rare
exceptions, hopelessly plain. Even the dull-eyed babies, in their
mothers’ arms, lacked the charm of health and wholesomeness. If the
traveler chanced to wonder how one woman, with an expanse of toothless
gums, could endure to smile, he might marvel that the next one appeared
in public before having her unsightly teeth removed. And while he
considered the sad effect of quinine, soda and tobacco on human beauty,
he would have been amazed had he known the curiosity his own person
excited. “Who is he?” “Where does he live at?” “What brings him down
this away?” “How long will he stay?” were questions eagerly discussed.

The railroad had given them something to think about. Do you know what
that means, you who have never lived in the country, remote from a
business center? It means that the residents, having little outside
interest, few books, perhaps no newspapers (there are such places
yet), have narrowed their lives down until fresh subjects for thought
and conversation are rare. They have talked about each other, about
the crops, the calves, the pigs and the weather, until each man knows
what another is going to say while he is yet afar off. Any unusual
event, a death, an elopement, a fire, is seized upon, talked about
from every point of view, turned to every light, over and over, until
each thread and shred of the story is worn with age. Finally, it seems
to die away, but suddenly revives, and passes on its round until set
aside by something equally startling. Think, then, of the vast store of
entertainment afforded by a railroad!

On this October evening, thirty years ago, the echoing scream of the
locomotive, strange to say, did not draw out the usual number of
idlers to gape, open-mouthed, as the train halted, then passed on. More
strange still, many passengers alighted at each stopping place--the
natives, themselves, returning home with the air of adventurers,
breathing sighs of relief, too, as of having safely accomplished a
perilous journey. Capacious lunch-baskets, as well as certain additions
to their every-day attire--wide hoop-skirts on the women, shirt-collars
on the men, for example--suggested that some sort of festivities had
been indulged in.

As the excursionists lingered, reluctant to go while anything remained
to be seen, their last glances turned from the long line of crowded
passenger coaches to a baggage-car with the doors tightly closed, and a
curious hush fell on them as it rolled by. What did it mean? A “through
passenger,” in search of knowledge, found the path an easy one. The
long, lean man at his side, with sunburned, straggling beard and a
mouth like a cavern, was full of information. “Political meetin’! Lord,
no! ’Lections stirs a feller up some, but there ain’t ary stump-speaker
in Indiana ’at kin fetch sech an all-fired big crowd as was out to
Newburg to-day. Hangin’ yo’ know--Bill Murdock’s. Hain’t heard about
him? Reckon yo’ cain’t live ’round hyer, anywheres, or yo’d a knowed
the peticklers. Been a powerful sight o’ talk about it, fust an’ last.
Yo’ see ’t happened ’bout this hyer way: Bill, he tuck a notion one
night, nigh two months ago now, ’at he’d go down to the Corners to
Gimble’s an’ get some ten-penny nails.

“He was a-workin’ old Carter’s farm on the sheers an’ lived up there,
full two mile from the Corners. His wife was a finicky little critter,
with a mite of a baby, an’ ’peared like she had a warnin’ o’ some kind,
for she done her best to coax him to stay to home. But go he would,
though what he wanted with them nails jest at that time, more ’an a
pin with two heads, no one could ever make out. After he’d bought ’em
an’ talked with the fellers in the store a bit--mebbe had a drink or
two in the back room--in come Jake Jillson. Jake was a airy sort o’
chap--could afford to be, ’cause his father ’d left him one o’ the best
farms in the township, an’ he was beholden to nobody. Well, there’d
been some old grutch atween him an’ Bill--no one knows zackly what.
Some says Jake had courted Bill’s wife in times past, an’ that she
throwed him over; but I don’t reckon that was it. Jake was married two
years afore Bill was, an’ taint no ways likely ’at a female woman ’u’d
give a well-to-do feller like Jake the go-by an’ take up with a pore
man like Bill. They’re too long-headed, women be. ’T any rate, however
’twas, the two soon come to a quarrel. Nobody ’at heard ’em seems to
agree jest how it was. Jake he was aggravatin’ an’ kep’ a naggin’. Bill
allays was high-tempered, an’ fore anyone seen ’at they was really in
airnest, Bill he was chasin’ of Jake over the boxes an’ bar’ls. It was
on’y a minute afore he ketched him an’ hit him. The breath was knocked
out o’ Jake for good an’ all with that air very pound o’ ten-penny
nails.

“Jerusalem! What a racket it raised! After the folks come to their
senses like, they got the sheriff an’ a posse o’ constables an’ scoured
around the country right smart of a spell huntin’ Bill, afore they
thought o’ going to his house. At last they went there an’ found him
a-walkin’ the floor with his baby. He was teetotally wropped up in that
woman an’ young un o’ his, but sick baby or not he was drug off to
jail, an’ not a minute too soon. A lot o’ men in masks came a-gallopin’
down, an’ would a’ made short work o’ him if he’d been there. No, I
don’t know who they were, an’ ef I did, ’twould be safe fer to keep my
mouth shet. These hyer things hev to be looked after now an’ then--the
law bein’ so slow an’ oncertain. Wasn’t much time lost, though, on this
case. The jury wouldn’t a’ dared to a’ brought in ary other verdict
than guilty, considerin’ how many rich relations Jake had scattered
about this county. They’d made it mighty lively for ary juryman ’at
would vote to clear his murderer. An’ so Bill, bein’, as I said, a pore
man, with no friends to help him, had no show, an’ had to swing. ’Twas
all right, I reckon; somebody has to be made a example of.

“Me an’ Mandy--that’s her in the red caliker a settin’ over
yonder--’lowed we’d go up to Newburg to-day, where the hangin’ was at.
Hadn’t ary one of us ever saw a man hung, an’ she hadn’t never been
on the steam kyars. I hadn’t no notion o’ takin’ the boys, but Mandy,
she says, ‘Lawsy, let ’em go, it’ll be a warnin’ to ’em to behave
theirselves when they’ve growed up.’ So we all went. An’ jeminey! what
a crowd! Best part o’ two counties there, I reckon.”

After a pause, during which the long, lean man ejected tobacco juice
vigorously across the traveler into the aisle, he added reflectively:
“A circus, I’m free to say, would a’ been more to my taste, but it
wouldn’t a’ been so improvin’ to the community. Elder Borum says
circuses are corrupt an’ a snare o’ the devil.”

Another pause and more tobacco.

“The--the--deceased is on a kyar back o’ this hyer.”

Just then the train quivered, slackened, stopped where a lonely country
road crossed the track; not a human being, not a house in sight--only
a platform and a pile of walnut lumber to hide the long, straight,
western horizon beyond miles and miles of “rolling” country. In the
summer, perhaps, it might have a certain beauty; in the dusk of this
autumn day it was desolation. Toward the north a grove of girdled
trees waved white, ghostly arms; rain had fallen and the gray earth,
the heavy sky alike seemed sodden. The long gray and black curves of
the wagon-track wound in and out like a huge serpent crawling over the
earth.

Out upon the platform was helped from the baggage-car a young, slender
woman with a baby in her arms--a woman in whose eyes was no longer
hope, were no more tears.

After her was lifted a pine coffin roughly stained. The men who had
touched her gently were less tender of this other burden. They dropped
it with a jar that brought a little cry of pain from the woman’s lips.
She sank down and placed her hand upon the box as if to shield from
harm that which was within. The child upon her lap stared solemnly at
the sky. The engine shrieked fiercely as if in haste to go, then rushed
on, leaving her with her dead and her despair.

Curious passengers, looking back from a bend in the road, saw her
crouching motionless, while a last red gleam from the setting sun broke
through the clouds and touched her with a weird light.

Around a curve of serpentine highway they saw, too, a country wagon,
the driver an old man with bent head, the horses slow and spiritless.
Then the train swept on out of sight.

Not a pleasant story, do you say?

No, yet “’tis true, ’tis pity.” It is one of those dark threads so
common in the weft of life that, to our short-sighted eyes, mar the
pattern that else might be so fair. We even doubt the wisdom of the
Weaver who permits such defects, such shadows to hide the clearer
outlines of the web. As if we knew His designs!

Do you wish to hear the sequel--to follow to an end the twisted thread
that seems to have crossed and tangled uselessly in the loom of fate?

The mother, who was left with her child at the lonely station, would
have been glad to die, no doubt; but, for the sake of the babe, she
must live on. She was one of those timid, clinging creatures such as
all women are exhorted to become. Masculine wisdom says the manifest
destiny of such a one is to be a wife and mother; the same sagacity
neglects to go further and provide for her helplessness when destiny
fails her. But these two lived, and the child grew and thrived. How
they lived only a woman, poor and alone, who toils for her children,
day and night, can tell. This mother, like the rest, worked early and
late at anything her hands could find to do. She sewed, she washed, she
nursed the sick, she drudged for the farmers’ wives in busy seasons.
Hours when she should have slept were spent in making the scanty
garments of baby Nancy. Little sympathy was manifested for her, though
doubtless more was felt than found expression; the American farmer is
not demonstrative. She did not ask for pity, and no one saw her weep.
The neighbors said “Mrs. Murdock bore up right well under her man’s
takin’ off; lucky ’at she was one o’ them kind ’at didn’t have no deep
feelin’s.”

Not so with the other widow. Mrs. Jillson’s display of grief was loud
and violent. Never was woman so cruelly bereaved, she said. She knew
she could not live. If there were no Murdocks on the face of the earth
she should die easier; she could grind them to powder herself. “What
right had that sly, deceitful hussy to be alive? Not a bit of doubt she
worked Bill up to the murder. Jealous, you see, because Jake looked at
her once before he knew me.”

Before long, however, her excessive sorrow moderated. She allowed
herself to think favorably of life once more. Hysterics and “sinking
spells” grew less frequent. In less than a year she married
again--entirely on her son’s account, she told her friends. “A lone
widow woman couldn’t rightly bring up a boy.”

Mrs. Murdock’s feelings toward the family of her husband’s victim
were curious. For them she cared nothing, but for “Billy’s sake” she
cherished a strong desire, a feverish anxiety to do them some service.
Had she been of the Roman Catholic instead of the Methodist faith she
would have starved herself, if need be, to pay for masses for the
repose of his soul. As it was, ministers of the gospel--well-meaning
men--who had “labored and prayed” with Murdock before his execution,
told her that he had refused the means of grace. While admitting regret
for the crime committed, he had declared that he did not love God;
that he knew nothing about Him. “When yo’ talk, Elder, about lovin’,”
he would say, “I could sense yore meanin’ mighty well ef yo’ was a
p’intin’ at my woman an’ the little chickabiddy. Them’s all I’ve got
ary love fer in this hyer world. I never knowed the Lord here, an’
ef it depends upon my believin’ in an’ lovin’ of Him now, I reckon
I shan’t know Him in the next place.” With which grim statement the
preachers were finally forced to silence.

Being taken thus in the blackness of his sins, unconverted, of course
he must pay the penalty hereafter, they told the grieving wife. The
penalty, she had always been taught and had undoubtedly believed, was
unspeakable torture forever and evermore.

Now, in her extremity, she did as we all do when a creed is too narrow
for our own special needs--she passed it by. Turning from that monument
of human wisdom, she groped for a gate where hope was not shut out.

“Billy must be punished, for he done a wicked thing, but he was not
bad, he was not bad. I knowed him so well. He was always kind, on’y his
temper quick--God must know that too, an’ surely, surely He can’t be
hard on him always ’cause he lost control over his self jest once. Ef
I could on’y do something for Mrs. Jillson, seems as if ’twould count
for Billy some way. Ef she would let me work for her I might see some
chance, but ’pears like she won’t let me come a-nigh.”

Having no one else, she whispered her thoughts, her wishes to the
little Nancy. Instead of tender songs and baby talk, the child was
lulled to sleep with stories of her father, with broken sobs and
prayers. Who knows how early she became aware of a shadow upon her
life? How soon she was conscious of a difference between herself and
other children whom she saw? Her presence was only tolerated by the
busy farmers’ wives because the mother could not leave her; no noisy
play, no mischievous pranks were permitted or excused.

The children of the poor and unfortunate learn self-control and
self-repression at an early age. When Nancy was ten years old she
was done with childhood. She could make herself useful in many ways
to the women who wanted “help.” She could “earn her own living,” and
talk gravely of a half day’s or a full day’s time. Her mother, perhaps
feeling that she could do no more for her daughter, and having no other
interest in life, let this world slip from her feeble hold, and went
out over the border into the unknown.

As she grew up, people were not often unkind to Nancy. On the contrary,
they were usually friendly in a somewhat condescending way--when she
did her work well. Had she been a timid, confiding creature, less
self-reliant and reserved, no doubt they would have shown her many a
favor that would have made her heart glad. As it was, the occasional
rude taunts of other children (what is more barbarous than a cruel
child?) and now and then rough allusions to her father’s death by
older people, raised in her nature the armor of silence and assumed
indifference. Withdrawing into herself, asking no help, she was allowed
to go her way alone as best she could. So she toiled and served until
she came to eighteen years of age. That time found her in the home of a
farmer, twenty miles from her birthplace.

Had you asked the girl if she were happy, she might have said yes.
The farmer and his wife, who had no children, were kind to her. There
was plenty of hard work, to be sure, but she had known nothing else.
Metaphysical questions had not troubled her; she had never asked
herself if life were worth living, had accepted fate without rebellion.
She had read no novels. Mr. Rhorer, the farmer, sometimes asked her
to read to him from The Weekly Reaper--“types were so much littler’n
they used to be, readin’ kind o’ made his head dizzy.” Nancy certainly
might absorb facts, but not romance, from the able dissertations she
spelled out upon the treatment of lambs, the weevil in wheat, or the
advertisements of patent churns. Even the household department of the
paper did not develop artistic tastes. She had no colored tissue papers
wherewith to construct lamp-mats. Why should she make elaborate frames
of walnut shells or crooked sticks, when she had no pictures to put in
them?

An ignorant, uninteresting serving-maid, you see--very different from
the æsthetic, cultured heroine, so popular nowadays. Yet this one was
a woman, “with the heart and the hopes of a woman.” Hardly conscious,
perhaps, that she had a heart, so long had it been starved. As in her
childish days, she still held aloof from the young people, though,
had she been so disposed, more than one young granger would have been
glad to become her “beau,” for Nancy was fair to see. They were not so
fastidious as to birth and family that her bright eyes might not have
won them.

The one small interest and excitement in Nancy’s life this summer was
watching the evening passenger train. It stopped for a few moments at a
water station not far below the house, and there she waited, when her
work was done, to catch a glimpse of the wonderful outside world, that
she could see in no other way. Day after day found her there, leaning
against the old gate under a wide beech tree. She liked to look at
the strange faces, and took deep interest in the variety of hats and
bonnets, the only articles of apparel visible from her point of view.
It puzzled her to guess where so many people could always be going. If
she should ever go traveling she would not look so tired and cross as
many of them did; she was sure she would feel sorry, too, for girls who
could only stand outside and see the cars go by. Once she saw a man
carefully fasten a wrap around his wife’s throat, and heard words of
tender anxiety for her comfort. She wondered vaguely if any one would
ever care for her in that way; it was not likely, she thought. Somehow
she did not wish to stay that night until the train started. She was
tired, and the hissing of the steam made her head ache.

One day she became conscious that the young man who stood smoking a
cigar on the back platform was the same one who was there yesterday,
perhaps the day before that. With eyes turned away she became aware,
too, that he was looking at her with bold admiration--the subtle
magnetism, conveyed no scientists quite explain how, made her cheeks
scarlet.

What was there in a trifle like that to make her sleep that night less
dreamless than before, in spite of sound health and weary young body?

The next evening she went to the usual place. A little shyness about
her now, but why should she stay away? She could not know that the
young man would be there again; but he was there, and this time lifted
his hat and smiled at her. If Nancy lived to be an old woman, and never
saw him again, he would stay in her memory for that one act. She looked
at it, not as an impertinence, but as a mark of respect. No man had
ever lifted his hat to her before. The rustic beaux had not attained
that touch of polish, and would have sneered had they seen him, yet
have envied him his style and city manners.

The refined, accomplished lady of whom we like to read would not have
been pleased with this young man. She would have seen a “person” of
twenty-one or twenty-two years of age with sandy hair and a jet black
moustache. A penetrating odor of hair oil and cinnamon essence diffused
itself about him. Wherever jewelry is admissible in masculine outfit
he had given it room--not expensive ornaments, perhaps, but large and
showy. A hat worn upon one side of his head, a cigar carried in the
opposite corner of his mouth, as if to balance the organ of brains,
were peculiarities of his style.

The thrill which filled poor Nancy with delight would have been a
shudder of disgust to our fastidious maiden.

Poor Nancy? No. Something had entered into her days which made labor
light and hours short. Only smiles and glances, but these may mean so
much. Once he threw a kiss at her when no one else could see; she tried
not to think of that except when by herself, for fear some one might
guess her thoughts.

One day her heart was set to fluttering, and her cheeks to burning when
Mr. Rohrer brought the young man--yes, there could be no mistake--the
same young man home to dinner with him. His name was Valentine Gipe.

“My stepfather’s name, did you say, Mrs. Rhorer? Yes, I’ve always
went by name of Gipe instead of ----.” (A door slammed and Nancy did
not catch that.) “Live up at Newburg, with maw an’ paw. Maw, she’s
that wropped up in me she won’t hardly let me out of her sight. Am
in business with Uncle Joe, down to the junction, an’ havin’ a free
pass, it’s just as cheap to board at home, so I go up and down on the
road every day. We’re dealin’ in stock right smart at present. Heard
Mr. Rhorer had some fat cattle to sell, an’ have took a run up to see.
Betcher boots I can’t be beat in jedgin’ the pints of a nanimal. Uncle
Joe, he knows it, too; has dead loads o’ confidence in me.”

It took a long time to buy those cattle. Mr. Gipe came and went, and
came again. When one purchase was made another was talked of, and the
summer was ended before the stock was sold.

Long before that time Nancy’s heart was gone. All the love that other
girls divide among friends and relatives was concentrated and lavished
upon a creature who did not know what treasure was laid at his feet. He
had nothing but empty words to give in return, was having a little fun,
a little flirtation, he said to himself--but upon these words of love
Nancy lived and was happy. The world took on a beauty she had never
seen before. She wondered, as she sang at her work, that she had not
noticed what a pretty blue was the sky, how bright were the sunsets;
nothing in heaven, she thought, could be fairer than the moonlit summer
nights.

The light of her passion brightened everything. Even the gray, heavy
face of her mistress was touched with a reflected glow. Hitherto the
girl had felt an unconscious pity for that worthy matron’s plainness.
With feminine faith in beauty, she had wondered, idly, how Mr. Rhorer,
himself no Adonis, could ever have married so unprepossessing a
creature. Now she could see that the good woman might not have been so
plain, after all, when young.

Mrs. Rhorer saw nothing of the play that went on before her face. Not a
whisper of the old, old story reached her dull ears. She had forgotten
that she was young once; she did not remember that the blood of youth
is riotous, its pulses swift and eager--not sluggish, as her own. The
girl was “only Nancy.” Her mistress did not see that she was fair, did
not dream that she had a want that was not supplied by herself. It
never occurred to her that Valentine’s frequent visits were for any
one but her husband, because she knew----.

A part of what Mrs. Rhorer knew Nancy learned one day. Summer had gone
then; the first bleak weather of fall had come, and sitting by the
kitchen fire, the prudent farmer’s wife began planning for the winter.
“I wish to goodness Dan’el an’ Val Gipe would finish up their trade
about that last lot o’ cattle. We don’t want to winter them steers
over. The young feller’s keen at a bargain, but powerful cautious. It’s
jest as well, though, I s’pose, fer him to go slow an’ take care of his
money, fer he’ll have a heap of it some day. His Uncle Joe’s an old
bachelor, an’ most likely’ll leave him all he’s got, an’ then his pap
left him right smart of a lump.”

“His pap dead? Why, child, didn’t I ever tell ye ’at Val’s pap was
murdered when he was a baby? Gipe’s on’y his stepfather--Jillson’s
rightly his name. The man was hung who did the killin’. ’Member me
and Dan’el was at the hangin’.----Why! Bless my soul! What ails the
critter, a whiskin’ out thataway an’ slammin’ of the door? Is she--why
lawsy, come to think, the man who was hung was her pap, and I clean
forgot it. Mighty touchy she is, to be sure, but I wouldn’t a’ said
anything if I’d a’ thought. Was going to tell her about Val’s wedding
that’s to come off next month. Wonder if we’ll get an invite.”

Nancy’s mind was in a whirl. One thought only was clear. Val was coming
that night. He would have “something particular” to tell her, he had
said, and she, in her innocence, had blushed and thought of but one
thing he could say. Now she must tell him this awful thing; of course
he did not know it, and what would he say? Quite likely he could not
marry her now, for his mother would never consent. But how could they
live apart?

With the simplicity of a woman who loves and knows nothing of coquetry
or flirtation, she had accepted Val’s tender words without misgiving.
That he had said nothing of marriage had not troubled her; so far
the love had been all-absorbing, without thought for the morrow. She
had not doubted that he knew her history--“everybody did”--and mixed
with her affection was a strong feeling of gratitude that he had not
held aloof. She would care for him just the same, she knew, if all
his relatives were thieves and murderers, but this was different. Her
early years had left a vivid impression on her mind of the relentless
hatred of Mrs. Jillson to her mother and herself. It could hardly be
hoped that time had made much change. If Val should ask his mother,
perhaps--it might be--

Like one dazed she went about her tasks. Would the day never end? How
gray and cold it was! The morning, she remembered, had been bright and
clear. After supper she was sent to the cross-roads grocery, a mile and
a half away, on some household errand. It grew dark early now, but she
was not afraid. What was there to fear? She must hurry, though, to be
back when Val came. It was nearer to go up the railroad than around by
the turnpike, so she started home that way. It was a lonely walk even
in the daylight, through dense woods and through deep cuts, but she
thought only of the man she was hastening to meet.

Suddenly in the darkest part of the road, where it made a short curve,
she came upon an obstruction. Partly with eyes accustomed now to the
darkness, partly by touch, she found logs and stones piled high across
the track.

How they came there she did not stop to consider. Like a flash came the
thought, “the evening express is due; it will be wrecked and Val is
on it.” One moment, then followed the thought and the deed for which
she had lived her eighteen years. “If I can reach the water station I
can warn the engineer; there is no other way. I shall save Val yet.”
Softly she crept over the logs; with swift feet she sped up the gloomy
road, and thought not of the darkness. Like an illumination around her
was the feeling “My Val shall not die, I will save him.” Swifter yet
she ran--it was a mile or more. Once she fell; with her ear upon the
ground she heard the vibrations of the coming train. Could she not go
faster? On and on, past the woods, through the cornfields now--the
stalks still standing breast-high after the western fashion. How the
dry leaves rustled! Her footsteps seemed to echo. Plainly now she heard
the throbbing of the engine; its fiery eye shone far up the road--there
was yet time, she was nearly there. Louder sounded the thunder of the
train, but above that and the beating of her heart she heard again the
echoing steps. Some one followed her, called to her to halt, threatened
her, but still she ran faster, faster. A pistol shot, another, but she
went on, staggering now. The train came thundering on, seeming in the
gloom, like a destroying monster, stopped impatiently at the station,
and Nancy dragged herself to the engineer’s cab. Her work was done.
The creatures who, for malice or plunder, had planned the wreck were
defeated, but had wreaked vengeance on her.

On board that train were lives worth more than the one for which
she had given her own--men for whom other women would have died, no
doubt; wives and children for whom hearts would have broken had they
come to their homes no more. She had saved these passengers from
destruction, but her thoughts were only for one. “Val! my Val!” was
her cry--maidenly shyness gone now in the solemn presence of death. To
her it was as though they two were alone in all the world. When they
carried her to the house the young man followed reluctantly.

“I did it for you, Val. I know’d you’d be on the train. Seemed as if
the Lord must let me get there in time. I kep’ askin’ Him over an’
over, an’ He did. I reckon it’s all up with me, though. This mornin’
I’d a been sorry, but it’s just as well. You couldn’t a married me,
Val, a-knowin’ who I be, an’ it don’t ’pear as if I could a-lived away
from you. You’re all I’ve got. Mother’ll be glad ’at I did this. Mebbe
it’ll count for father, as she always was sayin’. Mebbe yer ma’ll
forgive us all now.”

Valentine Jillson was selfish. Some woman had ministered to his
comfort, his vanity, all his life. This one, he thought, had only done
what was proper, everything considered. He was base, but with those
dying eyes upon his face he did not remind Nancy that he had never
spoken of marrying her. He could not tell the girl what he had come
that night to say--that their acquaintance must come to an end, because
he was to marry Squire Jones’s daughter, Juniata, next month.

And she, even with the prescience of death, could not read his
treachery. With his hand clasped tightly in her own she did not know
him false.

Swiftly her life ebbed away. She grew weaker, weaker. “I am--so--tired.
Kiss me--once more--Val. Say you--love me. My Val. I--love--love--. It
is--dark.”

With his words, his kiss (heaven would pardon this last deceit),
Nancy’s eyes closed to open no more on this earth. On the other side,
it may be, she took up the thread of existence that had lain in the
shadow here and carried it on into the eternal brightness--the glory
that is neither of sun nor of moon.




MRS. BROOKS’S CHANGE OF HEART


Mrs. Hannah Brooks, “Aunt Hannah,” as she was commonly known, had been
a consistent member of the Methodist Episcopal Church from the time
she was eleven years old, and she was now sixty-two. For over fifty
years she had walked in the strait and narrow path and had never failed
to observe the ordinances of the church, or to rebuke sin wherever
she detected it. Many people, even church members, felt that Mrs.
Brooks’s standard of behavior was a little too exacting and severe for
nineteenth century use. She was quite as austere in her views as if she
had been a direct descendant of a Puritan father and had lived all her
life on stony New England soil instead of having been born in Indiana
of parents who had come from the “old country.” The Puritan influence
affects all American character more or less, and it is a mistake to
suppose that the stern and rigid code of conduct commonly ascribed
to that influence is confined to one locality or is accepted only by
Americans whose family trees were planted in this soil before the
Revolution.

Mrs. Brooks had early been taught to believe that dancing was a device
of the enemy of mankind to ensnare the souls of youth. Card playing was
an abomination that none could tamper with without danger of missing
heaven; while as for the theater, that was simply an open door to the
place of everlasting torment. All through her life she had frequently
found it necessary to warn and reprove young people of her acquaintance
who showed an inclination to indulge in the two first-named
frivolities, but the theater evil was one she had encountered only
in recent years. Aunt Hannah had never lived in the city, her home
having been first upon a farm, and, later, and for many years now, in
the little town of Cicero, which has no opera house and whose dramas
are not played upon the stage. With increasing frequency the rumor
came to her that some young man or maiden had visited the theater in
Indianapolis to see a performance by graceless play-actors--a “show”
they called it--and if these erring young persons were in the church
she invariably took pains to make a personal remonstrance and to urge
them to turn again to the strait and narrow path.

Among themselves these young people, feeling a little guilty and
conscience-stricken over their conduct, nevertheless, said sometimes
that Aunt Hannah was hard and unsympathetic, and that she would not
talk so if she were not so old-fashioned and understood how harmless
theaters really were. But Mrs. Brooks was not unsympathetic. She
believed firmly that all these things were wicked. She had been taught
so, and had seen no reason to change her opinion. Believing thus, and
being very direct, outspoken and fearless in her methods, she hesitated
not to free her mind when occasion seemed to require.

She was an uncommonly intelligent and well-informed woman for one of
her limited opportunities, being a close reader of such literature as
came in her way--the range extending from the Bible and the life of
John Wesley to Roe’s novels and the weekly newspaper. But reading must
be supplemented by experience and observation before it gives breadth
of view and liberality of judgment. She realized vaguely that a change
of sentiment had taken place in recent years concerning card playing,
dancing and kindred amusements, but she felt that this was merely a
symptom of the degeneracy of the times and was strongly to be combated.
Even the ministry was being tainted with moral weakness, for had not
Presiding Elder Daniels--and he one of the most influential men in the
conference, too!--said to her one day when she was discoursing on this
subject--had he not used these almost incendiary words:

“People must have amusements, Sister Brooks, and perhaps it is better
to let them enjoy their pleasures under the sanction of the church. In
old times they danced before the Lord, you know.”

This was heresy that horrified the good lady, but she resolved, let
come what might, that she would abate not a jot or tittle of her
efforts against sin. Whatever others might do she would obey the
spirit of the rules and regulations laid down in the Methodist Book
of Discipline, and one of these rules charged that no entertainment
be entered into on which the blessing of the Lord could not be asked,
or words to that effect. And to the best of her ability she did. She
neglected none of the accepted means of grace. She was a regular
attendant at prayer-meeting, where her voice was frequently raised
in exhortation and prayer, as is the custom with devout and elderly
sisters in that fold. She was faithful at class-meeting, and there
confessed her shortcomings with such reservations as seemed expedient
in view of the fact that the listening ears were those of a dozen or
so neighbors instead of a single father confessor vowed to silence.
For instance, she saw no necessity for relating in detail that she
lost her temper and thought a dreadful thought, which if put in print
would have contained a dash, when her clothesline broke on Monday
and let her week’s “wash” into the mud. All she considered essential
was to acknowledge, in a general way, that she was a weak and sinful
creature, and to ask the prayers of her brethren and sisters that she
might overcome the old Adam and lay hold more firmly on divine grace.
If any of her friends and neighbors had dared to arise in the same
meeting and to speak of her as weak and sinful it would have been a
very different affair. But none of them did. They only sighed heavily,
looked dismal and said “Amen!” or “Lord bless!” after the relation of
each “experience.”

Of late, as it happened, Mrs. Brooks’s attention had been especially
attracted to matters of a theatrical drift. A son living in Chicago
occasionally sent her a Sunday paper, and those papers, as everybody
knows, devote a considerable share of their space to the drama in its
various phases. She had serious doubts as to the propriety of reading
these newspapers because they were labeled “Sunday,” but, reflecting
that it was along in the middle of the week before they reached her,
she decided, through some obscure train of logic, that there was no
moral delinquency in finding out just what had been going on in the
world three or four days before.

It was something of a task to read a twenty, thirty or forty-page
Chicago paper through from beginning to end with the religious care
that she did her county weekly, but in the two or three weeks that
each copy lay around before another arrived she accomplished the task.
Consequently she read a good deal about the theaters, much of it not
to edification, because she had never seen a play nor read one, and
failed to comprehend many allusions. There was something about these
columns that attracted her, however, and she continued to peruse them
with interest. One day she found something within her comprehension. In
response to popular demand, Joseph Jefferson had reproduced his “Rip
Van Winkle” that season after its semi-retirement for some years, and
Chicago papers had a great deal to say about it and about him--all in
the way of praise. Now, Mrs. Brooks knew all about “Rip Van Winkle”
and all about Jefferson. The daughter of her next-door neighbor on the
east was a school-teacher in the city--said city meaning Indianapolis,
of course--and subscribed for the Century Magazine, sending each copy
home after she had read it. When the family was through with it,
it was passed around the neighborhood, beginning with Mrs. Brooks.
Among other things she found in it was Jefferson’s autobiography. She
began reading this under the vague impression that Joseph Jefferson
was a statesman of the Thomas Jefferson type; or, if not, perhaps a
great writer, though she did not remember to have heard of him. At
any rate, he must be a distinguished man, for only that kind wrote
biographies of themselves and got them printed. When she learned that
he was only an actor she felt something of a shock, but by that time
she was interested in his career and pleased with the good principles
he seemed to possess and the excellent moral sentiments he enunciated
incidentally. It did seem strange, though, that such a man should
engage in so reprehensible a calling.

When she came to the account of his appearance as Rip Van Winkle she
was again surprised and pleased, for had she not read Irving’s story
of that good-for-nothing but winsome idler? Her next-door neighbor
on the west had received a copy of the “Sketch Book” as a prize for
subscribing for the Weekly Bugle, and, like most other books in the
village, it had eventually gravitated into her hands.

Altogether, she was fairly well posted in regard to this particular
bit of drama, and was startled one day by the discovery that she was
actually wishing to see the play and to see Jefferson. The idea was
really shocking. She, a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in
good standing, to think of going to the theater of all places in the
world. Satan himself must have put the suggestion into her mind. Did
not the church Discipline enjoin members to engage in no pastimes
which could not be performed to the glory of God? Certainly no one
could praise God at the theater; and yet--and yet, there was nothing
especially objectionable about “Rip Van Winkle,” while Mr. Jefferson
seemed a good sort of man according to his light. However, perhaps the
theatrical columns of the Sunday papers were just as well left alone,
and she would have no more of them.

The truth was that Mrs. Brooks had, without suspecting it, a liking
for the dramatic and for the spectacular. She patronized all the
entertainments given under church auspices, and was pleased with
them in proportion as they were picturesque or exciting. She liked
elocutionary performances, and was partial to the more dramatic
recitations. She never missed charades or tableaux arranged by the
young people, and made no criticisms, though the representations were
scenes from profane history or heathen gods and goddesses arranged in
white cotton drapery, such as gods never wore before. She liked lively
music--dance music, if she only knew it--revival meetings of the
stirring, fervid sort, and temperance meetings where the emotions were
played upon by skillful speakers.

A week or so after this twinge of worldly temptation Mrs. Brooks went
to spend a few days with her married daughter in Indianapolis to help
that young matron with her winter sewing. The very evening of her
arrival her son-in-law remarked to his wife at the supper table:

“Maria, Joe Jefferson is to play ‘Rip Van Winkle’ to-morrow night. You
know we have been waiting to see him again, and I have bought tickets.”

Now, Mrs. Brooks knew that since her marriage her daughter had departed
from the strict ways of her youth, and now and then indulged in that
perilous frivolity, progressive euchre, and attended the theater. She
had made vigorous remonstrance, as in duty bound, but, finding her
protests of no use, had abandoned the fight, at least till an opportune
season. Out of respect to her mother’s feelings, Maria tacitly ignored
the subject, and now endeavored to signal her husband to silence, but
he went placidly on and invited his mother-in-law to go with them,
saying he would secure another seat. Much to his surprise, and more to
that of his wife, Mrs. Brooks did not manifest that animosity toward
theaters which a mention of them in her presence had been wont to
arouse, and which the artful son-in-law had hoped to excite on this
occasion for his own delectation. On the contrary, she took up the
subject with a show of interest more eager than she knew, and displayed
so much familiarity with Jefferson and his play that the two younger
people looked at each other in wonder. But when urged to say whether or
not she would go she suddenly stiffened and responded coldly:

“George Henry, you know my principles in regard to such places.
To-morrow night I shall go to hear Francis Murphy. I know the way to
the hall, and am not afraid to go and come alone.”

Next evening came, but Maria had a headache and could not go. George
proposed to escort his mother-in-law to the Murphy meeting and leave
her there while he went to the theater for an act or two--“for it was
really a pity to miss it when we had the tickets and the time. You
know, Mother Brooks,” he said solemnly, winking at his wife over his
mother-in-law’s head, “you know going to see Jefferson is not like
going to see other actors. He plays such nice, clean, moral plays and
is such a high-toned, moral man--church member, and all that--that it
is almost as good as going to a religious meeting to hear him.”

“Church member, is he?” was Mrs. Brooks’s only response, but the acute
George Henry detected an expression in her eye that led him to whisper
to his wife, as he kissed her good-night: “If we are not home till late
you may know that I have inveigled your esteemed parent into a wild
orgy at the theater.”

It was a fair night, and they walked down. The Grand Opera House was
on the way to Tomlinson Hall, and as they drew near its portals the
orchestra could be heard discoursing some very lively music preliminary
to the raising of the curtain. When they reached the entrance George
Henry turned toward it.

“Come, Mother Brooks, let’s hear Jefferson. You may never have another
chance. He beats Francis Murphy all hollow. It’s all right. You’ll find
lots of good people there who wouldn’t go to any other play nor to see
any other actor for the world.”

There was a faint remonstrance--where were Mrs. Brooks’s accustomed vim
and decision? There was a feeble holding back of her steps, but her
eyes were fixed on the distant drop curtain, visible through the open
doors--and in she went.

It was an event in her life. The stage with its setting, was as novel
to her as to a child. There it all was, just as she had read about it,
but so much more real--the village green, the old Dutch burghers, the
vixenish Gretchen, little Katrina and the happy-go-lucky, lazy, but
lovable Rip. As played, the story had some points she did not recall
in the book, but what mattered! There was Rip doing the best he could.
Suppose he was lazy and shiftless and did get tipsy sometimes, such
a wife was enough to drive a man to drink. Mrs. Brooks forgot time
and place in following his fortunes. She leaned forward, filled with
visible wrath when Gretchen scolded, and when, at last, the wife drove
him from home with his dog, and Rip turned and bade her and his child a
touching farewell, tears ran down her cheeks unheeded.

Then, how she thrilled at the thunder of the mysterious ninepins rolled
in the hollows of the Catskills by Hendrick Hudson’s men; how weird
those old Dutchmen were; how wonderful was the red fire that flashed
over them, making them look like creatures from the infernal regions!
How her heart and her throat ached for the poor, pitiful old man when
he woke from his twenty years’ sleep and wandered back to his home to
find the world changed! What a wonderful thing it was altogether that
one man--for the others in the play did not matter much--that one man
could make a mere story, an impossible legend, seem so true, such a
thing of actual life! And what a delightful creature he was, that Rip,
that Jefferson, with his airy wave of the hand and his confidential,
infectious smile.

She was glad she had seen him; glad, glad.

And this statement she adhered to. George Henry was discreet enough to
say very little about this escapade of his mother-in-law, but she knew
that she would meet no such consideration at home, for in coming out of
the opera house she had jostled against young Hiram Jones, of Cicero,
whom she had often rebuked for his theater-going, and whose father
was her class leader. But she was not cast down. She had no intention
of concealing her act. Next Sunday she went to church as usual,
serene in the consciousness of looking well in a brand new, though
properly plain, bonnet bought in the city. As usual, she appeared in
class-meeting when the hour came. Her keen eye detected a movement of
interest and curiosity on the part of others present, which convinced
her that young Hiram had told his story.

Brother Minshall, being called on after the opening prayer and hymn,
arose and repeated with nasal emphasis the formula of forty years,
beginning: “Brethren and sisters, I feel to rejoice that I am spared to
be with you another Sunday, that I may tell you of the wondrous work of
grace in my heart.”

Sister Angeline Martin told her hearers in droning phrase that she was
a weak and sinful worm of the dust, but that she had fixed her trust in
the Lord and knew that He would lift her up.

Uncle Ezra Hinshaw was glad to add his testimony and to say that he was
on the Lord’s side, and had been for nigh on to forty year. An hour
spent here, he said, was worth all the fleeting joys the world could
give.

And so it went on until Mrs. Brooks arose. She wasted no time in
preliminaries.

“I take it for granted, brethren and sisters,” she said, “that you know
I attended the theater when I was in the city last week, and that you
want to know how I reconcile it with my professions. I did go; I got
no harm, but very much enjoyment, and, I think, some good. I learned
that whatever some theater plays may be, some others are as good as the
best sermons. I have found out that it doesn’t do to abuse all theaters
because some are bad. I don’t feel that I did anything wrong. I don’t
advise anybody else to go, and I don’t advise them not. It is a matter
with their own conscience. Mine is clear. I expect never to go again,
but I am glad I went, and glad I learned what I learned, and glad I saw
Joe Jefferson. Praise the Lord!”

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” said the leader with solemn
intonation, but with a faint twinkle in his eye. He was a discreet man,
and had been to the theater in his time, too. So the class sang the
doxology and was dismissed.

Going out, Aunt Hannah met young Hiram Jones, looking a little
sheepish, and shook hands with him.

“Wasn’t it beautiful?” said she. “Ain’t you glad you went, and ain’t
Joseph Jefferson great? May he live long and prosper.”




AN ABIDING LOVE


The woman who was a critical reader of magazines met her friend, the
writer of stories, in the little railroad station at Mullins, in
southern Indiana. The writer had just arrived from Indianapolis; the
other was waiting the north-bound train.

“What have you come to this dull, lonely, forlorn place for? Not for
literary material, surely? My grandmother lives here, and I have known
the town all my life. Nothing romantic ever happened to anyone here;
there are no incidents, no tragedies, no characters worth studying; the
people simply vegetate.”

“I never hunt for ‘material’ anywhere,” replied the woman who wrote.
“It comes to me--crowds itself on me. I have been sent for by an
invalid cousin, and expect not to think of literary matters; but if I
were searching for themes I have no doubt I could find them, even here.”

“I am sure you could not. What, for instance (here the speaker’s
voice was lowered), what could you make out of that spiritless, meek,
faded-out creature there? She is a resident here; I have seen her
often, but she is so colorless I never had the curiosity to ask even
her name. I am sure she never had a vivid emotion, never really lived
in all her life.”

“Perhaps not,” laughed the writer, “but I believe she has a story. I
will find it out and tell it to you.”

       *       *       *       *       *

This is the story she told a month later:

Martin Davis did not look much like a man with æsthetic sentiment
in his soul as he left his plow in the furrow that afternoon in
early April and drove his tired horses up the lane. His face was
weatherbeaten, his hands rough and hard, his clothing cheap and coarse,
his high boots, into which his jeans trousers were tucked, caked with
mud. But he was young and vigorous; his eyes were bright and eager, and
he felt himself a man to be envied, for had he not a wife waiting for
him at the house--a bride of but a few weeks? In the band of his rusty
felt hat he had slipped a bunch of yellow violets.

“I knew ye liked posies, Lizzie,” he said as he handed them to her
at the kitchen door, “and these are the first I’ve seen this season,
’thout it’s the little white windflowers that wilt while ye’re pickin’
them. These yellow things are way ahead of time. I’ve never found them
before earlier than May; they’re not common hereabouts, anyhow, but I
know of a spot down in the holler where they always flourish.”

When she put them in a teacup and set them on the supper table he
wondered vaguely why he had never known before that flowers made a
room look so cheerful--almost as if the sun were shining, though that
luminary had sunk behind the western hill. He did not know that the
brightness was not of the flowers, but was the light of love reflected
from his heart and hers.

It was but a brief time that his happiness lasted. That was the spring
of ’61, and the country was even then calling upon her loyal sons.
Martin Davis turned his horses into the pasture, left his crops for
others to harvest and went unhesitatingly to answer the call. Oh, the
heroism of the myriads who thus went out from home, and peace, and
love, to the battlefield in those dreadful years! What if they did
not know that the ninety days would lengthen until no man could name
the end, and that the slain would be like the leaves of the forest
for numbers? What if they did go simply from a matter-of-fact sense
of duty, and with little feeling of risk and danger, or because the
riotous spirit of youth yearned for adventure? The fact remains--the
tremendous, immutable fact--that they went by hundreds, by thousands,
by tens and hundreds of thousands, and that they offered their lives.
Greater love than this hath no man, and yet we, in this frivolous later
day, dare sometimes speak lightly of those men and their sacrifices.

It was a monotonous and a hard life for the most part, that of a
private soldier in the war for the Union. Its story has been told in
fragments at home firesides and by campfires, but never in literature
as a whole for the world to know. Perhaps it never will be. The
veterans tell of battles and of victories and of stirring events,
but they do not, as a class, care to dwell upon their hardships and
sufferings. The experience cut deep, and the scars are even yet too
sensitive to touch upon.

Martin Davis’s life was not different from the rest. There was the
drill and the camp life, the picket duty, the marching, the digging of
trenches and building of breastworks, the skirmishing, the expectation
of encounters with the enemy--all this for slow and weary months, and
at last a great battle.

Lizzie, the young wife at home, waited from week to week and month
to month, as women did in those days, with what show of patience and
composure they could muster--a proof of courage and patriotism not less
than that of going to war. The soldiers’ story may sometimes be told,
but where is the historian who shall portray the agony of the women’s
waiting hearts, the suffering of uncertainty and suspense? Who shall
comprehend the anguish of their tears? Who understand that the strain
of constant dread of evil news from husband and brother and lover was
greater than that felt by the soldier before the enemy’s guns--that it
left unhealed scars that aged them before their time?

Lizzie Davis fared like the other women--hoping and praying, living
upon the letters that came at irregular intervals, going about her
tasks by day, with heavy heart, and enduring long nights with their
visions of war and woe. In the little town from which the flower of
the young men had already gone, existence was not gay at the best of
times, and was now more monotonous than ever to the women, whose part
was to wait. There were few things to distract their minds from their
own anxieties; they were not the “new” women, with many and diverse
activities, and so they sat at home and thought of what might be. Mrs.
Davis did not love her husband more than the other lonely women loved
theirs, perhaps; but without him she was quite alone in the world, and
it was natural that no event of the war was important in which he had
no place. That brawny private, that long-limbed, awkward farmer boy,
was all the world to her. No future opened to her vision which he did
not share. She was a commonplace little creature, narrow in thought and
limited in capacity, but other and greater women have found it all of
life to love one man.

Letters came to her from Tennessee now. Martin wrote that it looked as
if some fighting would be done very soon that would scatter the rebels
and end the war. Then came the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, and he
wrote with still greater certainty that the war was soon to close. Men
better informed than he thought so then. After that there was marching
across country, transportation by boat up the Tennessee, more marching,
with rain and mud and cold as features of the travel--all this
described in fragmentary scrawls. One of them, dated April 5th, and
written on a scrap of paper while he stood in the rain with his company
awaiting orders, said there would be fighting soon, and added: “Here’s
a yellow violet; just found it under a bank. Season’s early down here.
We’re going to beat the rebs out of their boots. Good-bye.”

This note, and then--silence. There had been a battle; it was
Shiloh--bloody Shiloh. On its gory field, when the 7th of April dawned,
the dead lay by thousands--the blue and the gray. Oh, Shiloh! the
waiting hearts that broke when your victory was won!

Private Davis, of Company D, was numbered among the dead. A comrade
wrote to Lizzie, telling her that Martin had died like a hero. A part
of his regiment had faced about and retreated, broken in a panic
before the Confederates’ furious onslaught; but he had remained, had
seized the flag from the hand of the fleeing color-bearer and gone on
triumphantly to meet the coming foe. In the thick of the fight he was
seen to fall, “and,” said the writer, with no art at softening cruel
truth, “he was buried in a trench.”

To the widow a realizing sense of the death did not come. It is
often so when those away from home are taken; to their families they
seem still temporarily absent and likely to return at any hour. She
accepted the situation dumbly, uncomplainingly. She had no longer a
keen interest in life, and was without the strength of character to
rise above her grief and force herself to accept new interests. She was
simply an every-day woman, who had loved her husband and continued to
love and to think of him day and night, though he was dead. She sold
her farm to a rich neighbor, who took advantage of her ignorance to pay
her but half its value, and she was deprived of a large share of the
proceeds by a sharper to whom she intrusted them for investment. Then
she settled down in the little town and became a neighborhood drudge.
She sewed, nursed the sick, took care of the new babies, and was at the
beck and call of any housewife who needed her in domestic emergencies.

The years went on with little variety. The war ended, and affairs
settled into new grooves. A flood of prosperity swept over the country
and affected even this quiet town, but made little difference in Mrs.
Davis’s plodding, uneventful existence. No one pitied her especially
for her lonely and hard-working life. She was spoken of as “the widow
Davis,” but she was only one among many widows the war had created,
and, as she made no ado over her woes, no one else thought to do it
for her. They had their own troubles to think of. They did say, along
at first, that she didn’t take Mart’s death very hard. She “didn’t
make no fuss,” they said, and they “’lowed” she was “ruther shaller.”
Afterwards they practically forgot him, and assumed that she had done
the same. But she never put off her simple mourning garb; her mouth
fixed itself in a pathetic little droop; her brown hair faded early.
And she would not marry again. Ten years after Shiloh, John Holt, a
thrifty widower, attracted by her quiet, industrious ways, sought her
as a step-mother for his children.

“No, Mr. Holt,” she said. “I can’t be your wife. Martin Davis is dead
and buried, but I can’t make him seem dead nohow; I never have, an’ I
don’t reckon I ever can. I feel as if he was gone jest on a trip; an’ I
dream of him o’ nights, an’ I’m always glad when night comes, because
them dreams come, too. I’ll go along by myself till the time comes for
me to go and meet Martin--but it’s long, long!”

And then, her self-repression overcome by the sudden compassion in the
man’s eyes, she bowed her head upon the table and sobbed and wept in
the utter abandonment of a grief which knows no pretense.

John Holt went away thoughtful, and was afterwards heard to say it was
a “sing’lar dispensation o’ Providence that took a man away from a wife
like that an’ let other men live whose wives wouldn’t a-mourned for ’em
over night if they’d drownded theirselves.”

More years went, until, one day, Mrs. Davis heard of an excursion
that filled her patient soul with longing. This was a trip by boat
to Shiloh battleground. She had never been further from home than to
Cincinnati, fifty miles away, where she had gone once when a girl, but
she determined to make this journey. It was a great undertaking, and
she got ready for it with an excitement such as had not stirred her for
years. She never thought of the South but as the rebels’ country, and,
though she knew there were no rebels now, there was down in her heart a
dull hatred of all Southerners, because but for them there would have
been no war--but for a certain one of them who had fired a fatal shot
she would not have been left in loneliness all these long years.

Men and women of the world who, through contact with people of many
localities, have gained the ability to judge their fellow-beings
dispassionately find it difficult to comprehend the limitations of one
who has but a single point of view. Lizzie Davis had had but one great
interest in life, and had never been able to consider the outside world
in any other than its relation to herself.

The trip down the Ohio river, though novel, aroused no emotion; once
on the Tennessee she began to brighten. Martin had made this journey
not long before his death. The war, now so far past, was brought close
to her. The battle seemed but a little while back. On the wooded
bluffs she could almost see rebel skirmishers in hiding. Her meek,
feminine soul, which had never before directed a cruel thought toward
any individual, suddenly throbbed with fierce resentment; the slow,
easy-going natives, who strolled down to the landings and leisurely
carried their freight up the bank in primitive fashion, seemed to
her to represent a bloodthirsty, murderous people. She eyed them
malevolently.

One day the captain of the boat sat down by her side on the deck. He
was a middle-aged man of slow, soft speech and gentle manner--as far
removed from the typical bluff, gruff, profane, aggressive river man
of literature as possible. He had already won Mrs. Davis’s confidence
by his deferential courtesy and attentions to which she was a stranger
at home. There no one was unkind, but certainly no one was noticeably
considerate of the comfort of women, especially those of no particular
importance. He narrated to her bits of history about the places along
the river, with every foot of which he was familiar, and told anecdotes
of the people, half of whom he seemed to know by their Christian names.

“How can you speak so kindly of them, an’ you a soldier, too?” she
broke out at last. “Rebels I reckon they were, most of ’em, an’ killed
our men, an’ would do it again if they had a chance.”

He turned to her slowly and without a sign of surprise; she was not a
new type to him.

“Madam, these people along heah were mostly Union sympathizers during
the wah. I was a soldier in the Confede’at ahmy.”

It was a shock. Ex-rebels had found their way to her little village
since the war, but a good many sons had gone out from there to fight
for the Union, and never to return, and those wanderers from the South
were not made welcome, but had mostly drifted on to regions elsewhere
in Indiana where were friends and sympathizers. She had never so much
as talked with one before.

Then he told her, in a quiet, reminiscent way, some stories of his
youth and his far Southern home; of how the South was then all the
country he knew, and the North a far-off, cold region, whose people, he
was taught, cared only to buy and sell, and to subjugate and rob the
South; of how the war broke out and one by one his neighbors joined the
army, then his brothers, and then himself, a boy of sixteen--all filled
with fierce patriotism and the blind belief that they were fighting
for the right; of how his brothers had been slain, and how he had gone
home, when at last the conflict was over, to find that home dismantled,
the mother who had been its center forever gone, and he, yet a boy in
years, lonely, disheartened and forlorn.

It was a revelation to the woman of few ideas that rebels--rebels!--were
creatures with loves and sorrows like her own.

And they went on up the shining river, and a little of the peace and
beauty of it entered into her soul. It was May, and the fields and
forests were in freshest array. The gray-green willows, the rank water
maples and the glossy oaks that crowded the river bank were fringed
with undergrowth, and their trunks lost in a tangle of honey-suckles,
grape-vines and ivy. It was primitive wilderness, such as the Indian
must have looked at in his day.

Then came Fort Henry. The boat, which stopped accommodatingly wherever
a would-be traveler waived a handkerchief, obligingly made fast while
passengers climbed the hill and wandered over the old earthworks that
made the walls of that famous fort. In the glamour of the moonlight and
the softness of the shadows could almost be seen the soldiers who had
once crowded the place--but trees had grown up within the walls since
that day, and the soldiers--where were they?

Then Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh, and the woman from the little
Indiana town had reached her Mecca.

They wandered over the battlefield, those tourists; they saw it almost
as it looked on the fatal Sunday so long ago, only to-day the sun
shone, and then the very heavens had wept at the sight below. They saw
the place where the fight was fiercest and most furious--the “Hornet’s
Nest,” where Union men and Confederates met hand to hand and the
slaughter was so great that the dead lay in heaps. They saw the pool
whose margin had been red with the blood of wounded men who had dragged
themselves there to quench their raging thirst. To-day cattle drank
from it undisturbed.

There were houses here and there--primitive structures, hardly more
than cabins. Mrs. Davis stopped at the door of one to ask for water. An
old woman came out, a woman with a scant calico gown and clumsy shoes,
and eyes blurred perhaps with age, possibly with tears, but kindly
still. She grew garrulous in response to a timid question.

“Yes, she had lived hereabouts evah since befo’ the wah. She an’ her
ole man was Union, but their six boys couldn’t no ways agree, an’ three
j’ined the Union ahmy an’ three the Confede’at. An’, yes--yes, it’s all
done ended long ago, but some days the time seems yistiddy, an’ it all
comes back. Her ole man couldn’t keep out no ways when the boys was
gone, an’ he jined, too, when General Sherman come along. An’--yes, the
boys was all killed; three at Donelson, two here at Shiloh Church, an’
one at Chattanooga. Their pap didn’t live long after; sort o’ broke
down like. An’ if it wasn’t that the boys who died here were buried
in a Confede’at trench (did the visitor see the ridge over thataway?)
she reckoned she’d disremembah which was Union an’ which wasn’t. Such
things didn’t seem to make no difference, nohow, when they alls was
gone to rest twel jedgment day.”

The woman who had lost one and the woman who had lost seven looked
in each other’s eyes and knew the kinship of grief, and somehow the
visitor from the North felt no longer a personal resentment for her
loss. Though it might have been a son of this woman who shot her
Martin, he had thought he was right and meant no evil.

Then she entered the gates of the National Cemetery, where the Union
dead are laid in long lines, with a granite block marking each resting
place. The captain of the boat joined her at the gate, and as he passed
in he plucked a sprig of cedar. The sun shining through the branches of
the great forest trees flecked the grass upon the graves; a soft May
breeze scattered the leaves of the early blooming roses. Down between
the rows of stones they walked, and the captain, pausing at one bearing
the number 1607, lifted his hat reverently and laid the bit of cedar
upon it.

“I put a little posy there every time I come,” he said gently; “I
reckoned that may be the wife or mother of the boy lying there might
like it.”

The man lying there might be her Martin, thought the little widow, and
from that moment her heart ceased to cherish animosity toward any man
who had fought on the other side.

She stood on the bluff and looked down on the sparkling, glinting
river. The panorama of water and sky and hill stretching for miles
before her was a vision fair to see. The flag of her country floated
from the great staff above; the only sound was the singing of the
birds, and the peace of God was over all.

       *       *       *       *       *

More years went by, and the Widow Davis plodded patiently through them,
getting a little more weary as they passed and finding the burden of
loneliness none the easier to bear as age crept on. That visit to
Shiloh had taught her some things, toleration among the rest, but it
had also taken away one thing that had been a secret source of comfort
to her. Until that time she had pictured to herself the return of her
husband. She was a woman with but scant imaginative power, but where
even the dullest mind dwells much upon one subject it weaves about it
a network of fancy far different from reality. She had not seen her
husband dead; a battle was a vague thing to her; he had simply gone
away and had not come back. Perhaps he had been wounded, had lost a
leg or an arm, and a prisoner in rebel hands was long in recovering.
Then, perhaps--here her fancy took a wild leap--perhaps he was told by
some one that she was dead, or that she, thinking him dead, had married
again, though she didn’t quite see how he could believe she could
marry another man. But such things had happened--she had read of them;
and supposing he had believed it, he would wander away and never care
to revisit his old home until, at last, he somehow learned the truth
and hastened to her with joy. Or it might be that he had escaped from
his rebel prison, had reached the sea-coast, had crept on board some
foreign vessel, and had been carried to far-off lands, whence he would
some day return.

Vain imaginings, but lonely women dream strange things while they
go half mechanically about their monotonous daily tasks. Even the
happiness of happy women is half in this unreal inner life. After this
visit to Shiloh these comforting pictures were conjured up no more in
Lizzie’s mind. It was all real now, the battle and the slaughter, and
she had seen the graves where the soldiers lay; her thoughts centered
about “1607,” where the captain’s tribute rested, and she felt more
and more convinced that Martin slept beneath that stone. It was nearly
thirty years, a lifetime, since he went, and he would come to her now
only after heaven’s gate had opened to let her in. She had mourned her
lost love for thirty years. She, a little, commonplace woman of whom
no one would have thought as a heroine of romance. She would not have
known what the term “grand passion” meant; she had been simply faithful
to a memory in a quiet, undemonstrative way; her life had been bound up
in a sentiment, that was all.

One day in April--it was the 30th Shiloh anniversary--she was at
her little cottage, no neighbor needing her services as nurse or
seamstress. It had been an early spring, and she went out in the garden
to look at the signs of life among her few cherished flowers. In a
sunny corner wild violets grew and had pushed green leaves above the
mold, but no buds were yet in sight.

“I remember,” she said, speaking to a neighbor who had paused in
passing, “I remember seeing violet flowers as early as this.”

She was thinking of those stuck in the band of Martin’s hat that day
so long ago when he came from the field, and as she spoke she looked
down the village street, wondering at the unusual boisterousness of
the school children. They followed after and jeered at a man who came
slowly and hesitatingly along, as if uncertain of his way. His clothing
was rough, his shoulders bent and his gait shambling. On his head was
a military cap, such as some old soldiers still insist upon wearing,
and on its side was something like a decoration on a woman’s bonnet. It
was this that made the children jeer. Mrs. Davis put her hand over her
eyes and looked at it intently. Hardly knowing what she did, she went
out upon the walk and down the street to meet him. When she came closer
she saw that the decoration was a bunch of yellow violets. She stopped
before the man and looked at him. She had never thought of her husband
as other than erect, and strong, and young; this man was feeble, and
dim-eyed, and old, but--she knew him.

“Martin!” she said; “Martin!” and reached out her hands, forgetful of
watching neighbors and wondering children.

Something like a miracle happened in that moment. The years fell away
from her as a garment; the flush in her cheek, the love light in her
eyes transfigured her.

“Lizzie!” said the man, the dull, dazed expression clearing from his
face. “Lizzie,” and he fumbled at his cap, “I--I thought ye’d like some
posies, and came round by the holler and got them.”

She took him by the hand and led him into the house, her face still
illumined.

       *       *       *       *       *

The woman who wrote stories and the other who read them met again on
the street of Mullins. Toward them came Lizzie Davis. She was the woman
who had been at the station weeks before, but she was like one born
again. Her hair was faded, it is true; her complexion gray, her dress
old-fashioned and rusty, but her eyes were bright, her bearing erect
and proud, her face smiling. She stopped a moment to speak to the woman
who wrote.

“Just think, Miss,” she said; “Martin lived over in Jonesboro, just
beyond the Ohio line, and not fifty miles from here, for twenty years.
I’ve just seen a man from there. Where he had been before that time the
Lord knows. The man says that they all knowed something was the matter
with his head. Seemed to do his work well on the farm, but every now
an’ then he’d get uneasy an’ talk an’ talk about some place he’d ought
to go if he could only just think of the name; an’ when he heard any
one call ‘Lizzie’ he always got worried and fidgety. Come spring, too,
every year, he’d pick flowers an’ wear ’em in his hat. Then at last
one day his recollection seemed to come to him sudden, and he up an’
started off, the man said, acting like a crazy lunatic. He found his
way here, an’ he’s getting to be more like himself every day, an’ it
almost seems as if he’d never been away.”

A glow was on her cheek like the blush of a bride; the thirty years of
loneliness were as naught; the children that might have been hers, the
happiness and peace she had missed were forgotten. The mother heart
in her went out to the broken-down man and was satisfied. He came
shuffling down the walk.

“See how well he looks,” she said, as she hastened toward him, with
a face through which love shone as it must shine on the faces of the
angels in heaven.

“You were wrong, you see,” softly said the woman who wrote, to her
friend; “you were wrong when you declared there was no romance here;
that the people merely vegetated. That woman has lived.”

“Yes,” said the other, “she has loved.”




A FARMHOUSE DRAMA


“It was an exceptional case, that of the Marshalls, Brother Johnson, or
I never should have advised them to the course they took.”

The speaker, familiarly known as Father Allen to all the region round
about, was a minister of the Methodist denomination, who, after an
itinerant life of forty years, had, as his professional brethren put
it, “assumed the superannuated relation.” This being interpreted, meant
that he had retired from regular duty and occupied himself, as age
and strength would permit, in rendering such service to neighboring
members of his old flock as occasion called for. An old minister comes
to be identified with a family as no newcomer can. He has comforted its
members in their sorrows and participated in their pleasures; he has
been with them at their funerals and their marriage feasts, and in the
emergencies of life they turn to him.

To-day, Father Allen had accompanied the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the
young preacher lately stationed at Amber Center, the little Indiana
town whose roofs were visible far across the prairie, on his first
round of pastoral calls. They had just taken their departure from
the white farm-house of the Marshalls, bearing with them the look of
ineffable content that comes to mankind only after the consumption of a
bountiful meal, and were discussing the affairs of their entertainers,
as is the ancient custom of guests of all degree, regardless of canons
of etiquette.

Acting on the principle that a pastor should be thoroughly acquainted
with the history of his flock in order to meet its spiritual needs, as
a physician is better fitted to prescribe for a patient’s ills when
he understands his physical constitution, the old minister gave, with
somewhat garrulous, not to say gossipy, detail, particulars of each
individual’s life to the new shepherd.

“Yes, it was an exceptional case. It is hardly necessary to say, I
hope, Brother Johnson, that I am opposed to divorce. The ease with
which legal separations are to be had is one of the greatest evils of
our time; I need not enlarge on that. Still--Brother Johnson, one must
use judgment, and it is difficult to make an iron-clad rule for all
cases. ‘A rule already made,’ do you say? Well, yes, yes--of course.
As a general thing it is best to abide by the literal scriptural
injunction, and I am the last person to countenance any other course.
Nevertheless, my son, you will find, as your experience with the
realities of the world broadens, that it is sometimes inexpedient to
insist upon too rigid an application of the letter of the law.

“Now, in the case of the Marshalls, John was very deeply attached to
his first wife, whom he married on the day of his enlistment in the
army, twenty years ago; very deeply attached, no doubt of it. His wife,
pretty Rose Lytle, was fond of him in her way, too, but she was of a
clinging, dependent nature, and would, perhaps, have been equally happy
had it chanced to be another than John, who had so devoted himself to
her. The woman who loved him most deeply on the day of his marriage was
Rose’s cousin and adopted sister, Mary; but that was her secret. Many a
woman has such. Rose was a pretty creature. It was twenty years ago,
but I remember her well. She reminded me--my wife’s name was Rose, too.”

The old man’s voice faltered. It was not upon the prospect near that
his dim eyes were wistfully fixed, but upon something far beyond.
Before them the western sky was gorgeous with crimson and purple and
gold--fit reminder of the gates of the New Jerusalem--but Mr. Johnson
removed his gaze from the glory of the sunset to glance curiously at
his aged companion, knowing as he did, that the name of the present
Mrs. Allen was Sarah, and that the neatly framed portrait of her
immediate predecessor was carefully labeled, “My beloved consort,
Matilda.”

“A week later,” resumed the elder gentleman, “John was on his way with
his regiment to the South, and the women were left to each other’s
company. The months following went by slowly enough, no doubt, to the
girl in the lonely prairie home and to the man toiling in Virginia
trenches, or marching over sodden hills; time moves slowly, you know,
when one is young and impatient.”

“When the ‘body is in Segovia’ and the ‘soul is in Madrid,’” softly
interpolated the listener, who was yet young enough to permit
sentiment to come to the surface now and then.

“But time goes for all,” continued the old minister, “and before the
year’s close it had ended to the consciousness of one of the pair. A
report that John had been killed in battle came suddenly to the ears of
the waiting wife--a false report, as later appeared, like so many that
came from ‘the front’ in those days. Next day their son was born, but
the mother had no smile at the sight of the baby face. The shock of the
news had deprived her of reason. Physical strength came back in time,
but with its return the insanity increased until she raved with madness
and became dangerously violent. The husband, who had been wounded only,
came home on furlough, but his presence excited her to fierce outbursts.

“It was a long time before John or the cousin Mary, patiently devoted
to mother and child, would consent to send the cherished and petted
girl away from their own care to an institution for the insane; but
finally the safety of all demanded it. She was taken to an asylum and
is there to-day.

“John rejoined his regiment, and when the war was over came back to
find his home and child well cared for by the faithful Mary. Matters
went on in this way for a while, with the addition of himself as head
of the household. Left to himself, he would perhaps have discovered no
reason why the agreeable conditions should not continue, but when Mary,
the center of this home life, suddenly resumed her old occupation of
teaching, and would give no explanation of her course to the bewildered
man save that she preferred the change, there were neighbors willing
to enlighten him. In the matter of social conventionalities and
proprieties people in country communities are very exacting, Brother
Johnson, and it was not considered proper that Mary should remain as
housekeeper for a man who was her brother-in-law only by courtesy.

“Naturally, this was the beginning of the end. They soon discovered
each other’s sentiments and came to me for advice, separately and
together. The physicians had assured them that Rose was hopelessly
insane; that while no one could say with absolute certainty that she
would not recover, the tendencies in her case gave no encouragement for
such hope. Insanity was not specified as legal cause for divorce, but
in those days, Indiana courts were allowed by the statutes far greater
liberty and discretion than now, and, under the circumstances, there
was no difficulty in the way of securing a decree of separation. The
only question with these two, Mary and John, was whether it was right
for John to be divorced even with conditions as they were. They were
conscientious and argued for and against themselves.”

“To me it seemed one of the exceptional cases. Marshall needed some one
at the head of his establishment; he had not so warm an affection for
this woman, perhaps, as for Rose, but he would make her a good husband.
Mary cared for him as she never could for another. It is best for women
to marry. It seemed to me expedient that these two should be united,
and so I advised the divorce. I am still of the opinion that the course
was wise.”

“Mrs. Marshall’s expression did not strike me as that of a particularly
happy woman,” said Mr. Johnson. “She looked sad, I thought, and
anxious.”

“Women, as a class, are foolish,” hastily exclaimed the old man. “The
best of them have imaginary troubles. Mrs. Marshall allows herself to
be tormented by the fear that Rose will yet be cured, and reproaches
herself at the same time for dreading what ought, under other
circumstances, to be a blessing. However, as I said, women will find
something to worry over, and if it were not for this fanciful notion,
Mrs. Marshall, good, sensible woman that she is, would have some other.
I believe she did well.”

As they drove up the village street in the haze of the late Indian
summer twilight the young minister breathed a sigh. He had been
impressed by what the poet calls the large, sweet calmness of the
prairie; but peace, after all, did not, it seemed, abide with the
people. He wondered what would be the end if, at last, the innocent,
but cast-off wife should be restored to the realities of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Back in the white house on the prairie the first chapter of the sequel
to the old minister’s story had even then begun.

After the visitors had driven away, John Marshall and his wife stood on
the steps, his eyes fixed absently on the purple line of the horizon
far across the level plain, she, with her face turned toward his. A
question was on her lips, but she did not speak, only touched his arm
softly while the look of vague apprehension in her eyes deepened into
what was almost terror. At last he moved until his glance met hers.

“What you have always dreaded has happened,” he said. “Rose has
recovered her mind.”

The woman at his side did not cry out nor moan--she was not of the
demonstrative sort; but a change come over her while she stood there as
if she had suddenly grown old and feeble. Her face looked pinched and
gray. She took her hand from his arm and moved back a pace--a movement
that told its own story. After a moment he went on steadily:

“The doctor writes that it is a very unexpected recovery; quite
remarkable in the history of such cases. She is well as ever, mentally,
but oddly enough her bodily strength has as suddenly failed, and,
according to what he says, she is not likely to be better. It is not
probable at the best that she will live many months--perhaps not even
weeks; but in order to prolong her life, as well as to retain her
mental balance, she must be carefully guarded from a shock of any sort.
This, above all things, must be the care of those about her, he says,
and explains that he has said nothing to her concerning our family
affairs. And,” after a pause in which he glanced uneasily at his wife,
“Rose wants to come home.”

She looked at him with calm, tearless eyes.

“Do you wish her to come?” she asked.

“Well,” he answered, hesitatingly, “it’s a queer fix. We’re all she’s
got, you know, you and I, and to send her among strangers now--it
doesn’t seem just right. She was our little Rose, you remember,
and----. If she were well it would be different, of course. Still,
if you think it won’t do--if you can’t have it so, let it be as you
please, Mary.”

“I only wanted to know what you wished. Do you think I would say to
you, I who took her place, that our doors must be shut against her? We
will go to-morrow and bring her home, and I will do what I can to make
her last days happy.”

John Marshall breathed a sigh of relief as if a weight were lifted
from his mind. He looked at his wife approvingly.

“You are a good woman, Mary,” he said.

Many a man addressing such words to his wife would have followed them
with a caress, but John Marshall turned away and went about his evening
tasks while Mary passed slowly and wearily into the house. A coat
belonging to her husband hung in the hall. She caught the sleeve in her
hand and kissed it. A girl or a gay young matron might have been thus
childishly demonstrative without suspicion of any deeper feeling than
an impulsive outburst of affection toward the owner of the garment.
Discerning eyes like those of Father Allen, grown keen with a half
century’s study of human weaknesses, would have seen in the act of this
middle-aged woman the betrayal of a heart’s hunger.

Mechanically she went about her household duties and preparations for
the guest, the dread of whose possible coming had hung over her like
a shadow for fifteen years. No detail was overlooked in arranging for
the comfort of “John’s wife,” as Mary caught herself calling in her
thoughts the woman who had dropped out of conscious existence so long
ago. She had come back to life as from the dead. If a wrong had been
done to her in her helpless state those who had committed it must, as
they hoped for mercy hereafter, do what they could to save her from its
consequences; there was no other way. They, the wrong-doers, she and
John, must suffer in the performance of their duty; but they had no
right to complain. It was Rose, little Rose, whom they had loved and
who had trusted them so completely, who was coming back, and she must
find the doors open.

Like a dream that day and the next seemed to her afterwards. The
journey to the city, the meeting with the one so miraculously restored
to them, the return home, were events that fixed themselves but dimly
on her memory. The central fact that the companion of her girlhood, the
wife of John’s youth, was with them again absorbed her faculties to
the exclusion of lesser matters. It was not until Rose was installed
in the sunny upper room and the domestic routine had adjusted itself
to the change in affairs that the second wife realized the nature of
the task she had set herself to do--that had been imposed upon her she
whispered in bitter protest sometimes.

Her married life had been haunted by the fear that Rose might regain
her reason, but the picture formed in her fancy had been of a wan
and haggard creature heaping reproaches on the husband who had been
unfaithful in her absence, and on the woman who had promised a dying
father to care for her and had then usurped her place. Never had she,
in her wildest dreams, contemplated anything like the reality which she
now faced.

It was no pallid, wild-eyed woman who sat in the upper chamber, but
a smiling guest whose every wish was honored. Strangely enough, the
change that had been wrought in Rose’s mental condition had its
counterpart in a physical transformation. The deathly paleness, the
hollow cheek, the look of age which had characterized the insane woman
had given way to a color rivaling the peachy bloom of twenty years
before; the blue eyes, dull for so long, shone with all their old
vivid brilliancy beneath the long lashes; the face was rounded out,
and its youthful outlines were emphasized by the babyish rings of fair
hair that lay about the white forehead. The weakness and languor
that accompanied this change and did not pass away only added to her
attractiveness. As she leaned back upon the cushions of the chair that
she seldom left it was difficult to believe that the face was that of
one who had lived past her girlhood. To the lookers-on it seemed that
nature had endeavored to compensate for the lost years by a veritable
renewal of youth and beauty.

It was not the difficult task that had been feared to guard her against
injurious shocks. She quietly assumed, without question, that the
relations of her loved ones were as they had been of old; indeed she
seemed not to realize the time that had passed since she left them.
John was her husband; Mary, the dear sister who had kept his house and
awaited her recovery and return. Rose asked for her son but showed
little emotion when told with hesitant caution--this was one of the
things that could not be concealed or denied--that he had been a feeble
child who, after five years of baby life, had left them and gone to
heaven. The infant had not formed a part of the life she remembered,
and knowledge of his death did not move her deeply. In telling the
story of the little one whom she had loved like her own, Mary thought,
with almost a guilty feeling, of the sturdy boy who called her mother
and whose existence must be so carefully hidden. The presence of a boy
in the house might be easily enough accounted for, but he must not come
where “Aunt Rose” was lest she ask fatal questions.

“It is enough that you and I must deceive her, but my boy shall not
be taught to lie or to deny his birthright,” said Mary, with fierce
decision, and John had agreed.

A negro and his wife who had followed John from “ole Kaintuck” to find
a home in the North, and who had been faithful servants ever since,
formed the rest of the household. Visitors were few. A prairie road
after November rains is not a thoroughfare sought by any except those
on journeys of necessity. The few old friends or curious neighbors
drawn thither by the news of Rose’s return were quietly cautioned not
to touch on personal matters in their conversation with the invalid.
This caution and the chance allusions Rose made to her “husband” led
the visitors, ignorant of the kindly deceit being practiced upon her,
and doubtful, as the most intelligent people often are, of the entire
recovery of those once insane, to believe that her mind was not yet
sound. So it came about that the little drama being enacted in that
prairie farm-house had few spectators.

Rose expressed little curiosity concerning events that had happened
during her absence, and showed no interest in affairs outside their own
little circle. She was content to live like a child, taking up life
where she had left it, and thinking nothing of the morrow. One thing
only she demanded as her right, and that the hardest of all for one
member of the household to grant. “Her John’s” society she claimed in
all of his leisure moments, and as a farmer in the position of this man
is an independent being who orders his own goings-in and comings-out,
the result was that John, “my dear John,” as Rose called him, was at
her side many hours in the day. Mary might be there, too; Rose wanted
Mary also at hand, or within call, but without John she fretted and was
restless.

At first Mary quieted her misgivings with a sense of shame at their
existence. John, she said, was, like herself, trying to do his duty.
She could serve the invalid in other ways; he could only bear her
company. But the days went on, and that upper room became a place of
torture for the lawful wife so steadfastly doing that which seemed best.

John was good; he was a good man, she said over and over. Not to
himself would the loyal soul willingly utter a complaint of the one she
loved, but at last she could no longer close her eyes to the truth. In
an agony which could find no expression, Mary acknowledged to herself
that her husband sought the presence of that transfigured woman who
had been the bride of his youth, because in that presence he found
pleasure and delight. All through the fifteen years of her life with
him she had been conscious of a lack of responsiveness to the cravings
of her affection; but she had stilled the aching of her heart with the
thought, not that he mourned the loss of Rose, but that a sentiment of
self-reproach for having set her aside in her misfortune had raised a
barrier in his nature between himself and the companion in the wrong
which he could not overcome. And now she knew that this coldness was
because he loved this other as he had not loved her.

During those long years she had never been quite happy because of the
invisible barrier; sometimes she had fancied herself wretched. Looking
back to that time now, she felt, in the sharpness of her suffering,
that she had lived in paradise. Then, it was a vague, unsubstantial
thing that held them apart; now, it was a beautiful woman who thought
herself his wife.

That room had a fascination for Mrs. Marshall; she suffered when there,
but after leaving it she hastened back. Neither occupant seemed to
mind her presence. Rose did not;--conscious of no wrong, why should
she? John did not, being apparently unaware, as he sat near, and often
with Rose’s pretty hand in his, that he was exceeding the part of a
courteous host.

One day, to Mary, going quietly about some task in an outer room,
floated a voice in soft reproach:

“John, do you love me?”

“Why Rose, my dear Rose, don’t you know we all love you?”

“‘We!’ I am not talking of ‘we,’ but of you. Do you know, John, that
you have never kissed me since the day I came home? Is that the way a
man behaves who loves his wife?”

And Mary, her heart faint with pain and shame and outraged love, saw
the man succumb to the pleading eyes and outstretched arms. A kiss
like that, she knew, had never been given her. Alive with the quick
instinct to possess her own she started forward, but in a moment turned
and crept away like a wounded creature, even then excusing the one who
had pierced her soul.

“Could any man do differently? Only a saint could resist that
loveliness for the sake of a woman such as I, worn with care and
on-coming years.”

She could not breathe under that roof. Out into the chill November day
she hastened, not caring whither. Heavy gusts of rain swept across the
sky, shrouding the prairie in a gray mist through which the scattered
trees loomed dimly, their bare boughs tossing like the spars of a
ship in a laboring sea. Conscious of little but her own thoughts, she
hurried on until her footsteps were checked by the surprised voice of
Father Allen hastening from the performance of some errand of mercy to
gain shelter from the wintry storm.

“Are you crazy, daughter?”

“It would be better if I were; it would save trouble. If John could
have left me at the asylum when he brought Rose away how much better
it would have been. But this life is killing me--I shall die, I shall
die and be out of their way. Rose will get well--do you hear me, Father
Allen? When I married John I prayed that Rose, my little cousin Rose,
might never recover her mind. I founded my happiness on her misfortune.
Now, I can see no happiness while we both live. I am like a murderer,
Father Allen! But my punishment has come. The Lord does not wait until
the hereafter.”

The burst of passion ended in tears and sobs, and the old man,
dismounting from his horse, led her unresistingly home and delivered
her into the hands of the faithful black ’Liza, whose ire had long
since been excited by what she described to her spouse, Tom, as the
“scan’lous goings on ob dat crazy woman with Mistah John.”

“I will remonstrate with Brother Marshall,” thought the ministerial
visitor. “It is a peculiar case, and he means no harm, I am sure; but,
really, it is a very trying position for Sister Marshall, and he should
be more considerate.”

Mr. Allen was old; the woes of women did not impress him as they might
have done a younger man, or as they would have impressed him even now,
perhaps, had not the many sorrowful tales poured into his ears during
the forty years of his ministry somewhat dulled his sensibilities. So
it happened that he was not stern and severe in his remonstrance with
Mr. Marshall when he drew him aside that night after supper, at which
Mary presided, pale but self-possessed once more.

“If Mary wishes to tell Rose the truth and kill her, she may do so, or
you may do it; I will not,” said John. “While she is here I shall treat
her kindly, whatever others may do. Come up and see her.”

The old minister followed his host. In that radiant presence he, too,
forgot the aching heart below and thought only of Rose and the wife of
his youth whose likeness he fancied he saw in the face before him.

That night Rose moaned in her sleep, and Mary, rising from her couch
near by, found the white hands clasped over the heart and wondered if
the pangs of actual disease could equal her own pain.

Next day the wild storm continued and the minister, who had remained
over night, prolonged his stay. Mary wandered restlessly over the
house, now in the kitchen with ’Liza, now talking lightly with Father
Allen in the pleasant parlor, but never long absent from the spot
upstairs where all interest centered.

“You look pale--are you not well?” said Rose once. “John, you must not
let Mary work too hard for me. Dear Mary! How should we do without her?”

Mary’s answer was short and brusque as she hurried away, thinking
bitterly that John had no thought to spare for any illness of hers.
Repenting, presently, of her ungracious response to a kind inquiry, and
returning, she saw repeated the loving scene of the day before. John
was on his knees by Rose’s side, her arms about his neck.

“I dreamed of our baby last night, John. When I am well--I think I
shall be well soon--I want you to take me down to see where you have
laid him. If I should die I want my--there, there--hush! I know you
love me; I know you do, and I won’t talk again of leaving you. Poor
John; he has had no one to pet and care for him, and he wants his
little Rose.”

Half an hour later ’Liza, intent on some household service, found
Mrs. Marshall lying prostrate on the floor of an unused room. She was
not unconscious--women out of books do not faint when their hearts
break--but nature had reached a limit, and after the storm of tears
and strong crying had come a dullness of feeling that was almost
insensibility.

’Liza stooped to raise her, but suddenly changed her plan. “This is
Mistah John’s business, an’ I’ll be boun’ he ’tends to it.”

No delicately conscientious scruples troubled her mind.

“Mistah John’s a mighty good man; nevah had nothin’ to say ’gainst him
befo’, but it do look mighty cur’ous to see him hangin’ roun’ a crazy
woman that he divorced hisself from, an’ thinkin’ no mo’ o’ this hyer
po’ lamb than if the ole elder hadn’t done married ’em fas’ an’ tight.
’Taint gwine on no mo’, nohow, if this chile kin stop it. Bettah be the
crazy woman than Mis’ Mary if somebody gwine die fo’ it.”

And ’Liza, muttering ominously, marched to the front room. There even
she paused.

“Ole ’Liza’s a mighty mean niggah when the blessed Lawd’s grace done
loose its hold on her, but the devil aint nevah gwine make her huht
Mis’ Rose, who looks like a angel o’ the ’pocalypse, crazy or no crazy.”

And so, very quietly, she called Mr. Marshall out of the charmed
presence. Father Allen, on his way upstairs, was summoned also. Once in
that distant room over the half conscious “Mis’ Mary,” ’Liza’s wrath
broke forth.

“Ole ’Liza’s done thought a heap o’ you, Mistah John. I nevah reckoned
I’us trailin’ out o’ ole Kaintuck aftah a man who was gwine have two
wives undah one roof. Is yo’ that stone bline an’ onfeelin’, Mistah
John, that yo’ aint see this blessed lamb dyin’ foh the love o’ yo’ on
’count o’ the way yo’ carryin’ on? What yo’ reckon the Lawd thinkin’ o’
class-leadah Mahshall ’bout now?”

She was on the floor holding Mary’s head on her ample bosom, loosening
her dress, chafing her hands.

“Yo’ an’ Eldah Allen, hyer, yo’ alls think its Mis’ Mary’s duty to
make it easy foh you uns, an’ aint a carin’ if she done make a bu’nt
offering o’ herself. Yo’ alls may be mighty good in yo’ minds, but yo’
ain’ got no kind o’ feelin’s. Ary man what wants his wife to stan’
back an’ be sweet an’ purty wiles he honeys up to a nurrer woman is
boun’ to get all broke up in he cackleations. No woman, black or white,
ain’ made thataway. Ole Mis’ Duncan, down in Kaintuck, used to ’low,
‘’Liza,’ she ’low, ‘ebery male man that was evah bohned would be a
Mohmon or a heathen Tuhk if he wasn’t ’shamed to have folks know it.’
Ole Mis’ hadn’t had good luck with her husban’s an’ was down on the
sect pow’ful ha’d, but the longah I live the mo’ I’s ’pressed with the
’pinion that a man what wants to get into the heabenly kingdom’s got to
live mighty close in this worl’, mighty close.”

John made no attempt to check this impetuous tirade, but during its
progress his eyes had become wide open to the situation. His cheeks
burned with shame. He took Mary from ’Liza’s arms and laid her upon
a bed. The sound of his voice brought her to herself. Half dazed she
struggled to her feet.

“Father Allen,” said the man, “We,--I have made a mistake. One wrong
can not be set right by another. Mary, here, is my wife. We will
have done with this deception, and will go and tell Rose, let the
consequences be what they may.”

Supporting his wife, he moved toward the room across the house,
followed by the old minister, with ’Liza, alarmed now at the result
of her temerity, bringing up the rear. Even at that moment, Mary,
beginning to recover herself, forgot her own grief and pleaded brokenly
for delay. Strong as had been John Marshall’s resolution of a moment
before, his steps faltered as they approached the door. A moment more
and all paused involuntarily--arrested by the words they heard and the
sight before them.

Standing by Rose’s side was Mary’s son, the lad of twelve. Coming into
the house he had heard the sharp alarm of Aunt Rose’s bell and, finding
no one to answer the call, had gone up and peeped bashfully in.

Rose, gasping for breath in sudden faintness, motioned for water and
air. She revived presently, the boy watching her, meanwhile, with
wondering eyes.

“I have heard you about the house,” she said faintly but with a smile;
“why have you never been to see me before?”

“I wanted to come, but they said you must not be worried,” stammered
the lad.

“‘They’? Who are ‘they’?”

“Why, father and mother,” he answered in surprise.

“Well, your father and mother, whoever they may be, should have known
that boys would not trouble me; I like them. And what is your name,
child?”

The group at the door heard this and the boy’s quick answer:

“My name is Richard--Dick, for short--Richard Marshall, you know.”

Mary staggered forward as if to stop the words on the boy’s lips.

“Save her, Lord!” she whispered.

Father Allen held her arm. “Hush! it is too late. It is the will of
God.”

John stood as one paralyzed.

“Richard Marshall,” she repeated wonderingly--“the same name. And are
you related to Mr. John Marshall? He did not tell me--”

“Why, Mr. John Marshall is my father, didn’t you know? You must have
forgotten, Aunt Rose. And, of course, Mrs. Mary Marshall is my mother.”

The revelation which they had so guarded against had been made; the
shock so dreaded had been given.

Rose seemed to realize the truth slowly. Her startled eyes fell upon
the terror-stricken group at the doorway. Gradually, as comprehension
of the situation dawned upon her, a change came over the sweet face. It
grew gray and sharp; the brightness vanished. She suddenly seemed no
longer young.

“Is it true, John?”

“It is true,” he whispered.

“Why, then, when you had taken another in my place did you deceive me?
Why was I allowed to think--”

“Rose, my darling, we did it for the best. We thought you would suffer;
we had done you a wrong and were afraid--Rose, Rose, it was for your
sake. Can you not forgive?”

John Marshall had drawn near to the woman on whom the shadow of death
now plainly lay. Mary crept to the bedside and crouched there with
head bowed low. For a long time, hours it seemed to the spell-bound
watchers, the dying woman lay silent with her hands clenched over her
heart. No sound was heard save the dash of rain upon the window and the
crackling of the fire upon the hearth. At last she spoke:

“It would be better for us all if I had died long ago, or if I had
never come to myself in the asylum. I have wanted to live, but it does
not matter now. I will go to my baby; the Lord will let me have him for
my own in heaven. I thought,”--the words came slowly and more faint--“I
thought you were all mine, all mine, and you belonged to Mary. I had no
one. But John,” triumphantly--it was the last flash of the woman nature
regardless of human law for love’s sake--“John, you loved me best once;
you love me now, don’t you, John?”

The man, with his head bent upon the pillow, sobbed aloud.

“Always, my darling.”

After a pause she spoke again:

“You did not mean to hurt. I have been happy--happy. Kiss me, John.”

The face brightened with a strange light.

“Mary, don’t cry. I--am--going--to--my--baby. Do--you--see? Mary,
forgive----.”

Then the blue eyes looked on death.

A pale gleam of sunshine, the first for days, broke through the clouds
and fell upon the still face. Father Allen, with uplifted hands,
whispered softly, “Let us pray.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Six months later, Father Allen and the young pastor, driving across the
prairie, stopped again at the Marshall home. Only the wife was within.
In answer to a whispered inquiry from the older man, as he departed,
she said gently, but with an unconscious touch of defiance in her
speech: “I am happy, of course. He is mine, now--all mine. One does not
fear the dead.”

It was not quite a look of peace that filled her eyes as they left her
gazing wistfully down the length of the level road.

A mile beyond, at the other side of the broad prairie farm, was the
little cottage where the dead Rose had spent the first brief months
of her married life. It had never been occupied since by strangers.
A marble shaft gleamed through the trees near by. Against the fence
surrounding this leaned John Marshall, absorbed in contemplation of
the two flower-grown mounds within. His horse, in the road at a little
distance, neighed impatiently, but the watcher gave no heed.

“It seemed to me expedient,” said Father Allen, half to himself, as
they drove, unnoticed, by; “but I may have been wrong. The Lord knows.”




THE SOLUTION OF A TEXT


  There is a conviction among certain educated people that with
  increased intellectual culture comes a keener susceptibility to
  pleasure and pain. Is it so? Turn anywhere among the “short and
  simple annals of the poor,” and we can find passion, and romance, and
  tragedy. They do not call these incidents of life by such names; they
  only live them. When love or suffering--and what else is life?--comes
  to us, we can analyze our emotions, and label them with high-sounding
  words; we can tell of them in verse, or in language compared to which
  theirs is but an inarticulate cry. Are our feelings, therefore,
  deeper?

“Slave! Yassum, an’ sot free by de prockelmation. Hab I lib in dis yer
house so long an’ yo’ nebah know I’se done been a slave?” And Aunty
Smith, the African dame, who represented that domestic institution
known as “our girl,” gave the fire a vigorous poke.

“Tell yo’ ’bout it? Dar ain’t nuffin’ to tell wuth the while for yo’ to
listen. An’ ole niggah ain’t got no hist’ry--dat’s for white folkses.
Didn’t I heah yo’ a readin’ ’bout de hist’ry ob Jawge Washin’ton--an’
den talkin’ to me? Sho!”

The black lips parted over broad white teeth in a quick laugh, but
no smile touched the solemn eyes given to her race by generations of
bondage.

“Time to be a-takin’ yo’ quinine, honey; bettah take it mighty reg’lah
ef yo’ specks to get dem chills bruck. ‘Trouble?’ Yas, indeedy, I’s
had heaps ob trouble, but I nebah did go roun’ talkin’ ’bout it. Makes
mattahs wuss to be forebber a-talkin’ an’ a-talkin’ ob yer trials. An’
I’s allus noticed dis yer fac’, dat mos’ people likes to tell deir
own ’sperience ’stiddy o’ hearin’ ’bout yours. Co’se I has to tell
somebody an’ I tells de Lawd, but ’pears like de Lawd’s a long way
off, sometimes. Ef I could be shore dat He allus heard a pore niggah I
couldn’t nebah grieve no mo’.”

“Has doubt seized the believers?” I thought. “If the rest of us were
sure of that one thing what burdens would be lifted!”

“I’s done been mahied fo’ times. Yassum! By de preachah ebry time; dey
couldn’t hab no foolishness wid dis chile. My first husband’s name
was Cæsah Mahshall. He b’longed to Kunnel Mahshall, who at dat time
was courtin’ my mastah’s daughtah, Miss Betty, an’ ob course Cæsah he
spen’ a heap ob time ’round dar. Cæsah he a likely boy, an’ all de gals
tort dey gwine git him. But laws! I knowed he didn’t keer for none
o’ dem niggahs. I did keep a mighty keen eye, dough, on Lize. She a
yaller gal allus a-rollin’ her eyes an’ tossin’ her head, an’ thinkin’
herself good as white folkses; one o’ dese yer sly kind, too, a sayin’
flatterin’ things dat make a man think she a-dyin’ for lub o’ him. I
gib her mighty little chance to try any of her sassy tricks on Cæsah.
Men’s dat pow’ful vain--you des know it’s so, honey--dey swallahs
ebry soft an’ sugary speech ob de female sect as ef ’twar de libin’
trufe. But Cæsah he wouldn’t hab no one but des’ me. He sayed I was
like Solomon’s wife dat de Bible tells ob, ‘black but comely.’ I ax
de preachah once ef Solomon was a cullud gemlan. He look scared, an’
sayed he couldn’t ’splain dat tex’ to an ig’nant pusson like me; sayed
it didn’t mean what it sayed, but was a yallerglory ’bout de chu’ch.
Preachahs don’t know ebry thing more’n we’uns, an’ what’s de use for
twis’ de words ob de good book diff’rent from what dey is?

“Well, Cæsah an’ me we done got mahied, an’ lived in a little cabin
neah my mastah’s house, cause I had to wo’k hahd waitin’ on ole mistis
an’ de young ladies. Dey wore heaps ob fine muslins an’ lawns in dem
days an’ no one could do de washin’ an’ i’nin’ to suit dem but me. But
I had a little time in my own house an’ Cæsah he come often. I was dat
happy I went roun’ singin’ from mawnin’ twel night; neber tort ’bout
the nex’ day an’ what it might bring fo’th. Ef I was too happy with de
things ob dis worl’, de Lawd knows my heart been heavy dis many yeahs
to pay foh it. ’Pears like all dat’s happen since has des’ teched de
outside ob my feelin’s an’ lef’ all de heavenly sweetness ob dat time
shet off to itself.

“De time went by twel one mawnin’ in de summah Cæsah he agwine to come
an’ tote de chile ober in de hills to a camp-meetin’. She was two munce
old, an’ I hadn’t neber had her ’way from home befo’. Dar’s no tellin’
how proud we bofe was ob dat baby.

“Dat mawnin’ I dress her an’ I waited. De people roun’ de place dey get
ready an’ go. None ob dem stopped to talk, but I ’membered aft’wards
dey look mighty queah at me. Lize, dat yaller gal I’se tellin’ yo’ ob,
she run back an’ hug de baby. Yo’ pore crittah, I thought, yo’d gib all
dat finery for sich a honey-drop!

“An’ I waited. Plenty things might ob happen for to keep Cæsah away,
so I sang Rosy to sleep. Den somehow I ’gan to ’member de looks an’
de whispers dat I hadn’t noticed at de time, an’ it seem to grow
dark, dough de sun was a-shinin’; an’ de chills crep ober me. Ole
mistis’s mockin’-bird up at de big house, how it did sing! I ’spise
a mockin’-bird eber sence. I waited--an’ aft’ while ole mistis come
walkin’ down the paf. She was bawn an’ raised in de Nawf, was ole
mistis, an’ neber ’peared to like de black people. She hab berry sharp
eyes--’bout de color ob de blade ob a new razah,--an’ when she come
close an’ look at me I felt as ef dey cut me clean froo. She hab a soft
voice, an’ dar was a little smile on her face when she tole me--she
tole me--she stretch up an’ pick some yaller roses from de bush dat
grow’d ober de do’, an’ she say dat if I ’spect to git to camp-meetin’
I better be agwine; dat I’d haf to pack de chile de whole way, for
Cæsah he fur ’nough off now. She tole me he been sold down Souf, whar
he’d be ’bliged to pick cotton an’ git ober some ob his fine notions.

“When she were gone ’way I tore de yaller rosebush down an’ tromp it
undah my feet. Aftah dat for a spell I don’t rightly ’member what
happened. Dey tole me dat Cæsah he try to ’scape frum de tradahs; dat
dey chase him wid de dogs, an’ when de men tort he gwine to cross de
ribah dey done shoot him dead. Heabenly Mastah! an’ I lubed him so!

“I lib through it all. Many a woman, black or white, could tell yo’ dat
she goes on a-libin’ an’ every night a-prayin’ de Lawd her soul to take.

“I foun’ out dat Kunnel Mahshall he felt so mighty pore dat he had to
sell some of his people. De Kunnel he one o’ de real Kentucky gemlen;
great man to be a-bettin’ an’ a-hoss racin’. He’d loss a heap of money
on his fas’ hoss, ’kase it wasn’t so fas’ as some o’ de rest, an’ he
an’ Miss Betty gwine to be mahied; so ob co’se he must hab money--an’
he sold Cæsah.

“Den Rosy died; an’ when I look at her in de little coffin I’s dat glad
I couldn’t cry. I’s glad, honey, ’kase she nebber hab no trouble.

“Well, de time go on, an’ diff’rent men dey ax me to marry, but I tole
dem to go off ’bout deir business. But laws! a man cain’t b’lieve a
woman don’t keer nuffin fer him! So dey kep hangin’ roun’ twel Mistis
she say I mus’ marry. Mistis she hab a thrifty turn an’ wanted all her
people to marry an’ raise chillen, kase chillen proputty in dem days.
Bless de Lawd! I didn’t hab no mo’ chillen fer her to count as I do de
pigs.

“At las’ I mahied Big Tom to git shet ob him, but I done miss it, fer
shore as yo’ lib, dat crittah tuck de kinsumption. He war de mos’
misable, no-’count niggah I ’member to hab knowed. I waited on dat man
night an’ day, an’ like to run my laigs off; tried to be as good to
him as ef he were de light ob my eyes; but nuffin pleased him no ways.
One day he shied a flat-i’n at me an’ cut a gash ober my lef’ year. De
scar’s dah yit. I’s pow’ful mad den, an’ says I, ‘Ole man, ye kin cough
yo’ livah an’ lights up foh all me, an’ de soonah de bettah.’

“’Bout dat time mastah done send him down de ribah on some business.
Tom he were mastah’s right han’, an’ mastah didn’t pay no ’tention to
de kinsumption dat he say ailded him. Well, de steamboat blowed up,
an’ I s’pose Tom done get blowed up too, for I’s neber seed him since.

“Aft’ dat, a spell, I mahied Joe, ’kase he was lively, an’ kept us all
a-laughin’ with his jokes. He played de fiddle like an angel, too, an’
when I sot an’ listened, seemed as ef I could see beyond the stahs
clar into de New Jerusalem. But Joe didn’t have good jedgment ’bout
some mattahs. De wah was gwine on by dis time, an’ nuffin’ would do
but Joe he mus’ go with Kunnel Mahshall down into Jawgy for to jine de
’federate ahmy. De Kunnel was his mastah, but he didn’t hab to go. He
was gwine to be a drummah, an’ was dat heedless he nevah ’flected dad
he was on de wrong side; reckon he nevah s’posed dar’d be anything else
but playin’ on de fife an’ drum. In de berry fust’ skrimmage dey had,
Joe was killed. Might a knowed he’d hab bad luck, an’ I tole him so
’fore he went. Joe had a good heart, dough, an’ I don’t ‘spect de Lawd
will be hahd on him for habin’ been bawn so giddy.

“Aftah while, when de prockelmation set de culled people free, de
family bruck up, an’ I went up to Louieville for to get washin’ an
i’nin’. Dah I met Mistah Smith at pra’r-meetin’. He were pow’ful in
pra’r, an’ he seem struck with my ’pearance (I had on my violent dress
for de fust time). At de second pra’r-meetin’ he tole me he’d had a
hebenly vision which sayed I was to be his second pahtnah. Co’se I
couldn’t stan’ out ’gainst de will ob de Lawd, an’ dat’s why I’s now
Mrs. Smith. His name was Obadiah, but he ’quested me for to call him
Mistah Smith; sayed it ’corded bettah wid de condition ob de woman to
be ’spectful to de husban’; man, he say, bein’ so s’perior.

“Mistah Smith an’ me we done git along comf’tably twel he died, which
was des befo’ I come heah. I nebah had no fault to fine, ’cept dat he
did talk too much ’bout de fust Mrs. Smith. I’s had a heap ob trouble
wid dat boy ob hers, but I’s tried to do my juty by him. I’s whipped
him once a week reg’lah, ’kase he’s pow’ful bad, but he’s mos’ too big
for me now, an’ I’se ’fraid de debbil’ll ketch him.

“What’ll I do in hebben wid so many husban’s? I won’t hab but one,
bless de Lawd, an’ dat’s Cæsah. Tom he won’t be dah; Joe he’ll be so
tuck up wid de harps an’ de banjos dat he won’t think ob nuffin’ else;
an’ Mistah Smith can ’joy hisself wid dat fust wife.

“I’ll hab Cæsah an’ I’ll hab Rosy, an’ we’ll hab a little mansion with
a passion vine an’ roses roun’ de do’; an’ we’ll be happy for ebber an’
ebber. Glory! Glory!”

       *       *       *       *       *

The light that shone on the black face as she turned away was a token
of faith and hope; an outward sign of an inward grace the whitest of us
seldom wear.

Floating back to the room, like an echo of a thought, came a triumphant
voice:

  “Dah ebahlasting spring abides,
   An’ nevah fading flowahs.”




AN OCCULT EXPERIENCE


Mrs. Abner Hale and Mrs. Silas Adams walked slowly out Main street
after the regular Thursday meeting of the Branchville Ladies’ Literary
Circle. When these ladies organized their society they decided to call
it a circle instead of a club, because the latter word sounded “so
mannish, somehow.”

“That was a beautiful paper of Alfaretta Miller’s on theosophy,” Mrs.
Hale remarked, in rather a questioning way.

“Oh, lovely!” said her companion, in the tone women use when they wish
to be agreeable, no matter what their real thoughts may be concerning
the matter under discussion. “Yes, Alfaretta can write on most any
subject. She’s got a good mind. She’s a credit to our Circle.”

“What idea did you get from the paper?” pursued Mrs. Hale,
hesitatingly, and then, with an impetuous outburst, “Martha Adams, what
_is_ theosophy, anyway?”

“Land! Mrs. Hale, don’t ask me. I haven’t the faintest idea, and never
expect to have, if I should hear a dozen papers. Alfaretta wanted me
to be prepared to discuss the subject and loaned me a book to read up
in, but it made me dizzy. I did copy a sentence or two out, though,
that I meant to recite off at the proper time, just to show that I
wasn’t ignorant, but I forgot it. To tell the truth, I kind of lost
track of what she was saying in studying out just how the trimming
was fixed on Jennie Wilson’s new silk waist. I’m making one for my
Sis, you know. Near as I can get at it, from all I’ve read and heard,
theosophy is a sort of spiritualism that the heathen believe in and
that our folks have taken up out of curiosity--sort of a moony, spooky
thing, with spheres and mahatmas--whatever they are--and astral bodies,
and ever-so-many-times-on-earth, and all that kind of foolishness.
I ain’t sure that it’s quite the thing to talk about in our Circle.
Some that’s not so well balanced as you and me might be influenced by
it. Not but what there’s deep things that it would be real satisfying
to know about. Sometimes I think there’s something genuine about
spiritualism--the rapping and slate-writing kind.”

Mrs. Hale looked at the speaker with an expression of severe
disapproval, but had no chance to utter a word of protest before that
voluble lady began again.

“Yes, I do, Mrs. Hale. Lemme tell you something.” Here Mrs. Adams’s
voice was lowered to a confidential whisper, although no one was within
sight or hearing. “The most of it’s foolishness, I’ll allow, and
there’s a lot of humbuggery about it, but there’s queer, unaccountable
things, too. Cousin Jim Lawson’s wife was telling me one of ’em the
last time I was in Indianapolis. She’d been to visit a slate-writing
medium and had had a communication from her mother, who’d died suddenly
not long before when she was away from home on a visit. Cousin Jim’s
wife couldn’t reconcile herself to having no last word, and so she went
to this medium, who, it seems, is no common person, but a real lady.
She’d always had the power, but only a few knew about it, and she never
thought of earning money by it until after she was left a widow and had
to do something to make a living for herself and little girl.”

“Well”--and here the whisper grew more impressive--“Cousin Jim’s wife,
she went and never told her name or anything, and right inside of that
double slate, with the medium’s hands laid flat on top in plain sight,
came a message signed by her mother, Eunice Bascom, telling her she
(Mrs. Bascom) was very happy, was glad to have the opportunity to talk
to her and urge her to be reconciled, and also to tell her to give her
(the mother’s) cashmere dress and her wrappers and aprons to Jane,
the other daughter, and to keep the new black silk and the fur collar
herself. Cousin Jim’s wife said you could a’ knocked her down with a
feather. The thought had come to her several times that that would be
a fair way to divide their mother’s things, seeing she had so much
more use for dressy clothes than Jane, who lived in the country and
never went anywhere, but she hadn’t had the clothes in mind that day
at all, and had no notion anything would be said about them. It was
a real comfort to her, though, to have what you might call official
authority for disposing of the garments, for she’d been a little afraid
Jane would be inclined to complain; so she bought the slate with the
writing on and took it home with her. Now, Mrs. Hale, wasn’t that
remarkable?”

“It seems to me,” protested that lady in reply, “that I shouldn’t
like to have my mother come back from the other world to talk about
clothes,” but as she was going on to express her fixed objection
to such doings, such unholy tampering with sacred things, as she
considered it, they reached Mrs. Adams’s gate, and that sprightly
person, after unavailingly urging her companion to enter, hurried in,
saying she would sew a little on Sis’s waist before dark.

Mrs. Hale, who was not really a townswoman at all, but a farmer’s wife,
and lived nearly a mile beyond the point where the highway ceased to
be a street and became the pike, went leisurely on her way over the
quiet country road, saying to herself, with a shake of the head, that
Martha Adams was a good soul, but too ready to believe everything she
heard. Then her mind drifted to other matters. She always remembered
her wandering thoughts of that afternoon, and sometimes spoke of them
long after, as showing how little foreknowledge has the human mind. She
thought complacently of her own paper on the French Revolution, which
she had read before the Circle the week previous. She was sixty years
old and had never done such a thing before, and it was a great event in
her life, but she told her husband, when it was over, that she didn’t
see but what her piece was “full as good as the average.” She owned
frankly that she got the most of it from the encyclopedia and the rest
from an old magazine belonging to Joe, “but, of course, they couldn’t
expect me to write a thing like that out of my own head,” she said,
“and if I used the same language, why, what’s the difference? I’m sure
I couldn’t have said it as well, and, anyway, it was all new to the
Circle.”

But the Circle soon passed into the background on this autumn
afternoon, and Joe, never far from the front in the mother’s mind,
occupied her thoughts exclusively--Joe, the son of her old age, she
called him. He was a young civil engineer, and through the influence of
an instructor in the school of which he was a graduate had had the good
fortune, as he considered it, to be made one of a government surveying
party to Alaska that summer, starting in April. He was on his way home
now. A letter had come from Seattle saying he had left the party,
which was coming east over the northern route, and was about to go
down the coast in a small sailing vessel, whose captain had happened
to take a liking to him. He did this because it was inexpensive and
he wanted a glimpse of California, not knowing when he should visit
the western coast again. He must have reached San Francisco by this
time, his mother reflected, and another letter was nearly due, though
possibly he would not think it worth while to write, he was coming so
soon himself. Mrs. Hale’s fond heart beat faster at the very thought
of seeing her boy once more, and as she looked about her over the
fields, golden with the September sunshine, the sight, dear from long
association, seemed to take on a new charm. It was a beautiful world,
she thought, not realizing that it was the contentment of her soul that
made the Indiana landscape doubly fair.

She entered the door of her home with a song in her heart and upon
her lips. She put her bonnet carefully away, and, with a look at the
clock to assure herself that she had yet a few minutes before it was
time to prepare supper for Abner and the hired man, she sat down to
rest and to glance at the paper she had brought from the post-office.
She opened the sheet and looked over it with mild interest. What fate
turned her eyes straight upon the obscure paragraph that in times of
much news would have found no space in the inland paper? Thus blindly
and unsuspectingly are we led into the tragedies of our lives. It was a
brief dispatch, dated at San Francisco, and mentioning the sinking of
the schooner Yakima through being run down by the steamship Montana.
The Yakima was bound for San Francisco with a cargo of coal, and filled
and sank so rapidly after the collision that only one person on board
escaped. The Montana put out her boats and picked up one sailor, who
reported that in addition to the crew the schooner had had on board one
passenger, a man from Indiana named Hale. The cause of the accident
would be investigated and the responsibility fixed, said the dispatch.

The mind comprehends slowly the full meaning of death when a loved
one has gone. It is only as weeks and months pass that the loss, the
desolation, the awful loneliness are realized. Sitting with her paper
in her hand that afternoon, Mrs. Hale saw her husband coming through
the orchard, and her first conscious thought was one of pity for him
that he had no son. Concerning her own bereavement she had, as yet,
no sensation; the sudden blow had made her numb. She watched him come
slowly and heavily through the gate and up the walk--a gray-haired man,
with bent shoulders, who had not kept his youthful elasticity as had
his wife.

“He has not many years of grief to bear,” she said, as she went out to
him, bearing the message of evil.

       *       *       *       *       *

The history of the next few days she could hardly have told later. She
went about her household tasks mechanically, for the living must eat
and drink, though the best loved lie dead, but her mind wandered far
and scarce knew what her hands did. There was a sending of telegraphic
messages, a writing of letters and the gathering of all the information
that could be secured, but this was little more than the first
newspaper dispatch had contained. The Yakima had sunk, only one person
on board had been picked up at the time--which was just after midnight
on the 20th of September--and the sea being rough that night there was
no probability, even had any one been overlooked in the careful search
made, that a survivor could have remained afloat till morning.

Hope, catching at the faintest chance, died hard, but when weeks went
by and brought no word Joseph Hale’s death was accepted as a certainty.
His mother put on a black gown; his father went to and fro about his
work with a look that made the neighbors say he was aging fast; they
tried to bear their affliction with the fortitude and resignation
becoming to their Christian professions, but they knew that for them
the zest of life had passed with their son’s going, and that the years
to come must be endured, not enjoyed. They read the grief in each
other’s eyes, but spoke little of it, Abner being taciturn at all
times, and his wife, like so many men and women of the Anglo-Saxon
race, never having learned to express her deepest emotions in words.

One day in October services in memory of the young man were held in
the Presbyterian church. Sympathy with the bereaved parents was deep,
and the curious, but not unkindly, desire of their friends to see how
they were affected by the remarks of the minister, and how they bore
their sorrow, caused the emotion of a young woman near the door to go
unnoticed. She was Nellie Hamilton, a teacher in one of the village
schools. She and Joe Hale had known each other all their lives, and
were on such friendly footing and so free from self-consciousness
that no one had thought of them as lovers. She had been aware for
a long time of the state of her own affections, but it was only a
few days before his departure that Joe had begun to learn where his
heart belonged. She had seen the awakening in his eyes; she had felt
it in the subtle change of manner; she had read his secret through
the prescience of her own love, and her heart leaped in her bosom
and was glad. He had not spoken before he went away, but she did not
feel the less secure, for she saw also that he had not discovered her
secret, and was in that state of doubt where he feared to test his
fate. Maiden-like, and with a touch of coquetry, she had refrained
from betraying a hint of the truth, coyly holding back, confident in
the knowledge that when she chose to offer a sign he would come. Not
long since had come a letter telling her that on his return he had a
question to ask--one which he had “always thought a man ought to be
brave enough to put to a woman face to face, and not by letter.” A
reply would not have reached him had she written it, and now he was
dead; he was dead and would never know; was dead and she had not the
right to weep for him, but must go about with calm face, for she had
not let him speak, and he was not hers in the sight of the world. She
envied his mother the liberty of tears, of outspoken grief and of
unsmiling face. Life was bitter.

The days went on drearily. Mrs. Hale neglected the Ladies’ Circle,
the Missionary Society and all the various interests that had made
her social world, and, shut in her rural home, brooded over her loss.
October passed and November came, with heavier rains and more lowering
clouds, it seemed, than ever November had had before. Thanksgiving day
approached, and Mrs. Hale grew restless. On that day it had been the
custom to invite to dinner all the kinfolk living thereabout, but this
time she and her husband could not make festivity for themselves or
others. When the morning came Mrs. Hale arose and went about her tasks
with an unusual look of determination.

“Father,” she said to her husband at breakfast, “I don’t feel as if I
could go to our church this morning, and I am going into the city. I
know you don’t want to go, so I sha’n’t ask you. I’ll come out on the
one-o’clock train, which will give me time to have dinner by three.
It’ll be a good dinner. I’ve fixed ready for it.”

Abner offered no objection to the plan, but hitched up the horse and
took his wife to the train, meeting her, also, upon her return. Her
face bore a different expression, he noticed, from that it had worn in
the morning--a brighter, more cheerful look. They chatted of various
things on their way home--of Rev. Mr. Willetts’s sermon, which Abner
had heard; of the music by the new choir, which Abner did not like,
because he didn’t know what was being sung--tunes or words.

“That Hamilton girl--Nellie is her name, isn’t it?--took sick in
meeting,” he said casually. “Screamed and had to be helped out to the
air. Hystericky, I guess.”

“Poor thing!” commented his wife. “I expect she’s overworked and run
down. I must ask her out to spend some Sunday. She and Joe used to be
good friends.”

They ate their Thanksgiving dinner rather silently and their thanks
were not fervent, but perhaps the Lord forgave them, knowing their sore
hearts. It was not till dinner was over and Abner’s chores done that
Mrs. Hale disclosed the purpose of her morning’s visit to Indianapolis
and its result. It had not occurred to her husband’s rather slow-moving
mind, until that moment, that she had as yet said nothing about it.
He had assumed that she had attended a city church and had received
consolation from the words of the pastor. If she was nervous over the
confession of a different course of action she did not betray the
feeling, but went boldly about it.

“Father, I’ve got something to tell you. I went in town to-day and
visited a spiritualist medium--a slate-writer. She didn’t know I was
coming. She didn’t know my name. She didn’t ask a question, but she
sat down at a little table, took this little folding slate that Johnny
Miller left here (I carried it with me), laid her hands on it, never
a minute out of my sight, and while I was looking the little pencil
inside began to scratch, and when it stopped here was this writing,”
and Mrs. Hale produced the slate and began to read from its pages.

“Dear Mother,” the writing ran. “Dear Mother: I am so glad you have
come at last. Have been looking for you anxiously. I knew you grieved
because I passed into the spirit world before you, and because you
knew so little of the going, but I knew you never believed that one
who had gone could ever return and talk to his friends, so was afraid
the truth would not be impressed on you and you would not come. But it
is true, mother. This is your own Joey boy. It was all true about the
shipwreck; we went down without warning and were drowned. I didn’t have
time to think about it, and you will be glad to know I didn’t suffer.
I shouldn’t have wanted to go if I had known beforehand what was to
happen, but it’s all right now. I am happy--perfectly happy. Everything
is beautiful here. I can’t tell you just how it is, because we are not
permitted, but you will know some day. Father isn’t looking well. Now
that that affair of Lester’s is off his mind he ought to cheer up. Tell
him not to fret about me. It’s all right. Come and talk to me again
some day soon. Your loving son, Joseph Albert Hale.”

Down in one corner was added: “What have you done with old Major? I
don’t see him about.”

Mrs. Hale read this communication, as she called it, slowly and
impressively, but with visible excitement and elation. Then she paused
a moment for her husband to speak, but he remained silent, and she
burst out:

“Isn’t it wonderful, Abner? I know you never believed in spiritualism,
and neither did I, but you can’t deny that there’s something in this.
Why, here’s Joe’s very own handwriting, and his signature, with the
quirl at the end that he always makes and his middle name written out
in full. That was a notion he picked up when he was at school, but I
never could get into the fashion of addressing his letters any other
way than ‘Joseph A.’ And in the letter he calls himself ‘Joey boy.’ I
used to call him ‘Joey,’ you know, for a pet name. And who but Joey
could have mentioned that trouble with his cousin Lester, when only we
four ever knew you got the young rascal out of a scrape, and you know
very well none of us ever mentioned it--Lester least of all. Then,
father, he says you are not looking well, which is true, and shows he
must have seen you. Think of that! And he missed old Major. I never
wrote to him that the dog had died; kind of hated to. I tell you,
father, it’s wonderful, wonderful! I never would have believed that I
could have an atom of faith in spiritualism, and I must say that I wish
Joe could communicate with us at first hand, and not through a total
stranger. But this way is better than nothing, and what I’ve got here’s
a great comfort to me. I’m going again, and if you--”

Abner’s face had slowly assumed an expression that caused his wife to
pause suddenly and observe him with some apprehension. He looked at her
fixedly and sternly, then spoke with a voice trembling with anger:

“Sarah Jane!” They addressed each other in the sweet, old-fashioned
way, as “father” and “mother,” except on those occasions when storms
loomed in the domestic sky. “Sarah Jane Hale, has it come to this,
that you, a professing Christian for forty years, a member of the
Presbyterian church in good standing; that you, the wife of a ruling
elder, have taken up with this abominable witchcraft, and have the
indecency to glory in it? Have you not read that the wrath of God
comes upon those who practice such vile arts? Have you forgotten your
religion? Do you care nothing for the safety of your immortal soul?
I am shocked, Sarah Jane! I am astonished and grieved, and I insist
that there shall be no more of this idolatrous business. It was
thoughtlessness that led you to the den of the witch this time, may be,
but the visit must not be repeated. I want you to promise not to go
again, and I should like to hear you say you are sorry for this visit.”

Mrs. Hale, after a gasp of surprise, got her breath and her bearings.

“She is not a witch, but a respectable lady, I’d have you know, Abner
Hale, and she doesn’t live in a den, but in a house that’s better than
this one, and she’s a member of the Baptist church. And I wouldn’t
be as narrow-minded and stiff-necked as you are for a farm. There’s
things in this world that you haven’t found out yet, if you are a
ruling elder; and, anyway, I won’t be dictated to just as if I were a
disobedient child and had no judgment or rights of my own. You don’t
seem to understand how I miss Joe. It was a real comfort to me, that
letter from him, and I’m not sorry I went, and I shall go again if I
want to. So there!”

After which feminine outburst she threw herself upon the lounge and
sobbed with as much abandon as if she were ten years old instead of
sixty. Abner was not moved to compassion by her tears.

“Sarah Jane,” he said, solemnly, “I am disappointed. I have always
considered you a sensible woman--one not likely to be led away from
true Christian principles, though at times you haven’t been as faithful
to the means of grace as would be becoming in an elder’s wife. I know
Joe’s death was hard on you. He was my son, too, but I haven’t found it
necessary to consort with Satan’s emissaries for comfort. This taking
up with evil things is a matter that calls for church discipline. It
ought to be laid before the session, but I ain’t ready to do that yet,
Sarah Jane. I want you to have time to consider the iniquity of your
course before it is made public, and until you can realize it I sha’n’t
speak a word to you, not a word from this hour.”

Mrs. Hale dried her tears suddenly and sat up, looking at her husband
with curiosity.

“Are you six years old or sixty-five, Abner Hale, getting mad and ‘not
speaking?’” she inquired, sharply.

Abner deigned no reply, but wound the clock, kicked the cat out and
slammed the door with more energy than was becoming to a ruling elder,
then stalked majestically off to bed in silence.

Mrs. Hale was not especially overcome by this exhibition of conjugal
authority. The neighbors were wont to speak of Mr. Hale as “terribly
set in his ways and domineering.” On account of these traits the
women were inclined to congratulate themselves on not being married
to him, but this feeling was not really a sound basis for an adverse
verdict on his character. The disposition of women to wonder how other
women can “put up” with their respective husbands arises, perhaps,
out of feminine inability to comprehend thoroughly the idiosyncrasies
of more than one man at a time. Not all wives are martyrs who seem
so to outside eyes. At all events, Mrs. Hale had never so regarded
herself, and did not now. She had lived with Abner for forty years and
understood him. He had “ways,” and she had adapted herself to them,
bringing him, in the long run, to her way of thinking; or, at least,
so modifying his asperities of thought and character as to make him
quite satisfactory to her. She had never run so directly counter to his
prejudices as in this case, but was not alarmed at his wrath and only
moderately resentful.

“I didn’t suppose he’d take it so hard,” she said long afterward, “but
I might have remembered that he hadn’t been thinking the matter over
for a month or so, as I had. I ought to have talked it up to him in
advance and got him into the notion by degrees. Poor soul! He tried
not to show it, but he grieved for Joe every day and all day while he
was alone at his work, and his nerves were all wrought up. Women ain’t
the only ones that get cross and crabbed from nervousness. However,
I wasn’t going to give in right at once. I didn’t want him to think
he could dictate to me that way. It doesn’t do to give a man such an
advantage, even once.”

Down in the village that Thanksgiving night, while this domestic
episode took place in the farm-house, pretty Nellie Hamilton lay upon
her bed with wide-open eyes, staring into the dark, her mind intent
upon the experience of the morning. The choir had performed its final
“voluntary,” the minister had just given out his text, “Let us come
before His presence with thanksgiving,” and the congregation was
settling itself into the pews, when choir, minister and people faded
out of sight and she looked upon a far different scene--not only looked
upon it, but seemed a part of it. There before her, almost at her
feet, was a lake, half shadowed by a mountain, whose bare and rocky
summit pierced the sky. A vivid green forest, whose appearance was
strange and tropical, circled the water and was thick about her. In a
little opening were two or three huts, and near them, swung between two
trees, was a hammock, in which lay her lover, Joe Hale. Pale and ill
he looked, but was unmistakably Joe. As she stood, or seemed to stand,
ready to step forward to his side, so softly as not to awaken him, she
became aware of a swarthy, half-clothed foreign-looking man slipping
toward the hammock from the further side. His face wore an evil look,
and he glanced furtively about. His hand crept toward the pocket in the
breast of the flannel shirt worn by the occupant of the hammock, but
the movement, soft as it was, roused the sleeper, and he started up.
Quicker than it could be told, a bright blade flashed in the air, blood
spurted over the sick man’s breast and he fell back as if dead. It was
at this moment that Nellie Hamilton startled the congregation with a
scream, and was assisted to her home under the belief that she was
suddenly taken ill.

Lying there, puzzling over it, she could not solve the mystery. It
could not be a dream. She had just seated herself when the vision came,
and had had no time in which to grow drowsy if she were so inclined.
She was thinking of Joe at the time; it was seldom in those days that
he was far from her mind, but she pictured him as battling with fierce
waves, and as sinking slowly, surely, and, at last, despairingly, into
their cruel depths--a hideous vision that haunted her, awake or asleep.
She had never associated him with far southern lands; she had never
been outside of her own state of Indiana, yet she knew that an actual
tropical landscape could never be more real to her than this phantasmal
scene of the morning. She could almost see it yet--the shining green
of trees, whose names she did not know, the vines that stretched from
branch to branch like great serpents, the rank undergrowth, the intense
blue of the sky, the mountain, with its upper height a bare, stony
peak. What did it mean? She remembered hearing her Scotch grandfather
talk mysteriously of second sight, but had never troubled herself to
know just what he meant, and she had never before had an experience
like this. Besides, if Joe had been drowned in the Pacific, and he must
have been drowned, or he would have been heard from long ago, this
vision must have been a delusion. Could she be losing her mind? she
wondered drearily, and fell at last into troubled sleep.

The days and weeks dragged slowly by, Abner Hale kept strictly to the
letter of his threat to speak no word to his wife until she showed
signs of repentance for what he considered her ill conduct. She
addressed him freely when occasion required, and sometimes when it did
not, but he made the hired man his medium of communication, directing
his remarks ostensibly to that personage, but really to Mrs. Hale; and
the hired man, being but a stupid creature, concerned more with eating
all that was set before him than with what went on in the house,
never discovered that he was used as a convenience. With neighbors who
dropped in Abner talked freely and even eagerly, which, in view of his
usual taciturnity, caused them some surprise. Once his wife detected
him furtively examining the slate containing Joe’s letter, which she
kept in a drawer of Joe’s old desk, but he showed no sign of interest
when she made another visit to the city, and he had reason to assume
that she again visited the woman he had denounced as an agent of the
evil one.

She did, in fact, visit that person, not once, but twice or more, as
the holidays drew near, and she felt the need of aid in resisting
the depressing influences of other people’s gayety. Each time was
repeated, with somewhat greater amplification, the story that had been
told on the slate the first day. Each time some allusions were made
or questions asked which convinced her anew that Joe’s spirit must
inspire the pencil’s movements, since none but he and herself had
knowledge of the matters involved. Each time came the assurance afresh
that the unseen writer was Joe, her son, come back to her in this way
from the other world. She could not doubt that this was true, but
somehow the slate writings did not continue to be the comfort to her
that she had first found them. There was a consciousness of something
lacking, something unsatisfactory; there was a barrier between her
and her son that she could not overcome. He told her so little, after
all. It dawned on her one day that he had really written nothing that
she had not herself known or believed before. She was thinking of
this as she left the station one afternoon on her way home from one
of these visits, and had wondered if it would not be just as well to
fall in with Abner’s notions and tell him she was willing to give up
the medium. “But I won’t do it just yet,” she decided. “He hasn’t been
behaving well, and I don’t want to encourage him in such doings by
giving in so easily. He ought to come half way, anyhow, and I think he
will before long. He’s getting very uneasy.”

Nevertheless, she sighed as she thought of her silent home, and when
she chanced to meet Nellie Hamilton, something wistful in the girl’s
face attracted her notice and she urged her to accompany her to the
farm. Visitors were always welcome now.

“Come out and spend the afternoon with me, and if, as you say, you must
be home to-night, Abner will bring you.”

It was the last day of the year, but the clear, crisp air and the
bright sunshine brought suggestions of spring, and both women felt
cheered in a vague way when they reached the country home. Mrs.
Hale talked to Nellie of her lost son that afternoon, and found a
sympathetic listener. She related anecdotes of his boyhood; she brought
out the tintypes and photographs he had had taken at various stages of
his career; she showed specimens of his handiwork about the house; she
told how thoughtful and considerate he was always and what a source
of comfort. But with all the confidences bestowed she did not mention
her visits to the medium or the story on the slate; all that was
too intimate an experience to relate to this girl, who, for all her
evident appreciation of Joe, might have an ignorant prejudice against
spiritualistic manifestations. She had had it herself not so long ago.
Nor did Nellie Hamilton venture to tell the elder woman of her vision
on Thanksgiving day, nor of the later one the day before Christmas.

It rained on the latter occasion, and as she stood on the school-house
step, looking up the dreary street, after the children had gone home,
suddenly street and houses vanished, the dark sky cleared, and before
her stretched a wide sweep of gray, sandy desert, patches of gray-green
vegetation only adding to the dreariness; not far distant were barren
hills, and beyond them arose mountains, gray, too, and craggy, with
lines of white near their summits, glittering in the pitiless sunshine.
Almost at her feet lay a horse, gasping as if for breath, his tongue,
cracked and bleeding, hanging from his mouth. Near him a man was
stretched face downward on the sand. As she looked he raised his head,
and, with dull eyes, gazed drearily about, but she had not needed the
movement to know that the man was Joe Hale. He was gaunt of frame,
but his face was brown, not white, as she had seen it the other time,
and there was a red scar on his forehead not there before. The gray
desert stretched away until it melted into the horizon line, and no
other creature was in sight in all its space. But while she looked,
and before she could take the one step forward that seemed to divide
her from the man she loved, the scene was changed, and she stood upon
the school-house steps, staring blankly into the muddy street of
Branchville.

She began to be afraid of herself, and would have liked to take Joe’s
mother into her confidence and ask what these visions could mean, but
had not the courage. So the two women talked together about one who
was so dear to both, and each kept from the other her closest thoughts
concerning him. After supper, when the guest would go, pleading duties
that demanded her attention in the early New Year’s morning, Abner
entreated delay, and as they sat about the fire he, too, conscious of
sympathy, fell to relating stories of the dear lost son. And while
they talked the gate opened, a step was heard on the walk, then on the
porch, and Mrs. Hale, her face suddenly radiant with hope and joy, rose
swiftly, and before he could touch the latch opened the door to her
son. The intuition of the mother rose superior at this moment to the
mysterious power that brought visions from far off to the younger woman.

There were laughter and tears, kisses and embraces, and if the visitor
shared these neither father nor mother stopped to wonder. There were
incoherent questions and answers when all talked at once and no one
listened; there was silence of deep emotion as the parents looked
upon their boy, who had been lost and was found, and put their hands
upon him again and again to be convinced anew that he was truly in
the flesh. And when the excitement quieted they all gathered close
while Joe told them the story of his adventures; how he had been
shipwrecked, as they had read in the papers; how the steamship had made
little effort instead of much to save its victims; how he had clung
to a floating plank till morning and had been picked up by a tramp
boat which had mysterious errands, whose nature he did not inquire, to
Central American ports, and was anxious to avoid California harbors for
reasons that he suspected to have connection with customs officers.

He told how, at his own solicitation, he was put ashore at the first
Guatemalan port, and how, instead of being able to work his way back
to San Francisco, as he had hoped, being without money after the
shipwreck, he fell ill with fever and would have fared badly but for a
party of American miners and prospectors, themselves scant of funds,
who ran across him, doctored him, and took him far into the interior
before he fairly realized their kind purpose. They were going north
overland in search of one of the famous lost mines of Mexico, to whose
location they thought they had a clew. It was a wild country they
traveled through, and their journeying was slow. They did not come near
the civilization of which railroad trains and telegraph wires were a
part, and so he wrote no letters, but looked forward to the day when he
should reach home in person, and fretted that progress was so slow.

“I had one or two close calls,” he said lightly, with the disregard for
dangers past common to the young. “While I was lying in a hammock one
day (it was the Thanksgiving day here, by the way, and I was dreaming
of home), a Mexican thief crept up and gave me this,” touching a scar
on his forehead, “and another on my shoulder. He aimed at my heart,
of course, and it’s a wonder he missed. And only last Monday, just a
week ago to-day, I thought I was gone. I had left my friends to their
rainbow chasing and started to make the rest of the way to Tucson
alone. I wandered off the trail, my skeleton of a horse broke down--we
were both famished for water--and I thought for a bit that the jig was
up. But while I was on the sand thinking the matter over, what did I
hear--or, rather, feel--but the faint jarring of a railroad train and
the echo of a far-off whistle! It was miles away, but I knew I was all
right. It was the sweetest music I ever heard. Actually, the old horse
pricked up his ears, scrambled to his feet and jogged on. We struck the
track after two or three hours and followed it to a station. From there
I got to Tucson, where Tom Bailey, my old room-mate, is, and he lent me
money to get home with. So here I am.”

The women shuddered at the tale, and looked upon this youth, who talked
so carelessly of his perils, as a hero of heroes.

The hour grew late, and Nellie, making a movement of withdrawal, found
Joe eager with his proposal to accompany her. She was unwilling to
disturb the family group, but read entreaty in the young man’s eyes,
and so declined her hostess’s invitation to remain. They scorned the
thought of driving, and went out gayly to walk the short mile on the
highway, that was to them that night a path to paradise. Under the
moonlit sky Joe asked her the question he had said ought never to be
written, and she whispered her answer so low that even the owl blinking
in the tree overhead could not hear. But Joe heard.

As they loitered down the road, unmindful that it was the season of
frost and not of roses, she told him of her visions, and a wonder fell
upon them that she had seen so true. Yet, after all, they reflected,
with the beautiful confidence of youth in the supreme power of love, it
was not so strange that two souls in such harmony as theirs should come
to each other across the world. As they looked up at the starry sky,
thinking of this, heaven seemed very near, and they caught a glimpse of
its mysteries. Then the bells rang that ushered in a new year, and they
felt that it was the beginning of life for them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Back in the farm-house another subject was under discussion. Mrs. Hale
had stood in the doorway looking after her son with a pang at her heart
in spite of her joy at his return. Sudden insight had come to her, and
she knew that though the lost was found he would never be all her own
again. She sighed as she shut the door and turned, with absent-minded
gaze, toward her husband. He sat by the fire, with a hand on each knee
and a puzzled expression on his face. Through all the confusion and
excitement of the evening he had remained faithful to his promise, and
had not addressed a word to his wife, but now, without preamble, and as
if no silence had intervened, he began:

“Mother, what do you reckon it was that made the writing on them slates
at Madame Victorine’s?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “It certainly wasn’t Joe, for he didn’t
get drowned and he wasn’t dead, and still some of the things written
were family matters no one could have knowledge of but one of us three.
But it wasn’t Madame Victorine; it was Mrs. Mary Ellen Johnson who was
the medium.” Then, with the swift intuition of a woman who reads her
husband like a book: “Abner Hale, I believe you went to visit Madame
Victorine yourself to get slate writings, or you wouldn’t know anything
about her! You did. I know by your sheepish look you did. Madame
Victorine, of all creatures, too! Why, she isn’t a decent woman, if
all they say’s true; five or six husbands, and nobody knows where one
of ’em is, or whether they’re alive or dead. You ought to be ashamed
of yourself--an elder in the church. And all the time holding off from
speaking to your own wife.”

Abner got in a word here.

“I wanted to investigate a little on your account, and I thought you
mentioned Madame Victorine,” he urged, feebly.

“My account--nothing!” was her scornful ejaculation. “You were just
filled with curiosity, for one thing, and a desire to hear from Joe,
for another--don’t deny it! And not speaking a word to me for a whole
month, and talking of church discipline! Huh!”

Abner had risen to his feet and affected a dignity it was obvious he
did not altogether feel.

“Well, mother,” he said, in a conciliatory tone, but with the masculine
reluctance to owning himself in the wrong clearly apparent; “well,
mother, I guess we haven’t either of us done anything we want to talk
about before folks. It looks as if the devil was in the thing, anyway,
as I told you at first. I guess we’d better say nothing about the
matter to any one--to any one, not even to Joe.”

She looked at him intently and reflected for a moment, then laughed a
little, not being without humor.

“I guess so, too,” she said.

And she never did mention the affair to any one but Joe, who, of
course, told his wife.




AN ITINERANT PAIR


Were you ever at Michigan City, in Indiana? Stop! Let me put the
question more carefully. Were you ever compelled to wait for a train at
Michigan City? The first inquiry sounds innocent enough, but a Hoosier
would detect a covert insult in it. Why? Because one of the three state
penitentiaries is situated there and is the town’s chief distinction to
the outside public. A native of the state living elsewhere can conceive
of no reason why a man should voluntarily take up his residence in the
place, or even why he should “stop off,” except to visit some erring
and unfortunate relative. Hence, to avoid trouble, those persons in
search of local information do well to be on their guard.

I had passed through, many times, on my way to and from Chicago, but
until this trip had never taken closer observations than through the
car windows. To-day the “lightning express” on the Michigan Central
road was three hours too early for the one train that in those
days--some years ago now--daily jogged along down the road leading
south. What should I do with the time? I looked into the waiting-room
of the station. No passenger had left the train but myself, and the
place was empty save for an old couple, who had evidently just come in
from the country.

I went out and explored the town. Up one street and down another
I strolled, until the circuit was made. In every direction was
sand--mountains of sand, valleys of sand. It was in drifts upon the
sidewalks, in hillocks in the streets. The houses were built upon
it. Many dwellings leaned from the perpendicular at various angles,
according to their age, the shifty foundations had so worn away and
blown away. Though it was a bright April day but few people were on the
street, and these seemed in haste to disappear as soon as seen. It may
have been a biased imagination that saw this, or the cause may have
been the chill lake wind.

Was it fancy, too, that made the women and children, visible here and
there at the windows, seem to draw back, as if to hide? The scattering
tufts of grass in the front yards seemed to have given over the
ambition to cover the earth with green, and were creeping under the
sand. Did I imagine a burden in the air, as of grief or guilt? The
shadow of the prison seemed to hover over the place. It grew oppressive.

In desperation, I resolved to climb the nearest sand-hill and view the
world from that eminence. Perhaps I might find an elevation of spirits
when I could survey the prospect from above. Were not poets always
telling us to commune with nature, and thereby escape from fret and
care; to seek the solitude of a height and see the earth grow fair
beneath our feet, the mists and clouds melt into sunlight? Laboriously
I crept and scrambled up the slippery side of that miserable hill. From
the foot it had not looked far to the summit--perhaps not over one
hundred feet--nor yet steep; but with each step forward and each slip
back it seemed to grow, until, when half way up I stopped to breathe,
it loomed above me like a mountain. Out to the north was Lake Michigan,
blue and cold. Far distant could be seen the smoke of steamers;
nearer, the white wings of sail-boats; but all were outward bound.

Along the shore the sand dunes stretched for miles. Once, long ago,
the lake is said to have covered this ground. Having been given up by
water, the earth had not had thrift to reclaim the waste. Even the idle
train of vagrant weeds had not wandered in to hide the barrenness.
Beyond the town rose the grim, bare walls of the prison. Hundreds of
men inside were wearing out the long hours of weary days in toil that
was heavy and bitter, because it was enforced. Deprived of freedom of
will, of liberty of body, without hope for the future, they waited--for
what? For release from bondage, to spend the remnant of their lives
as Ishmaelites, followed in the world by sneers and suspicion, or
received, if at all, with a virtuous condescension no easier to bear.
Probably they deserved their fate. Some of those men had stolen, some
had forged, some had murdered; and the way of the transgressor was
hard, we were told. It was right that they should suffer, then; but we
Pharisees, were we without sin, that we should cast a stone? Had we
not done those things that we should not, left undone that which we
should? Perhaps, my friend, you took advantage of a man’s need and made
an unrighteous profit. Did you not foreclose a mortgage and distress
a debtor, when you could have waited? Perhaps you did not love your
neighbor, or, may be, you loved his wife too well. Such things had been
known. Perhaps--but the catalogue was long. Because the law had not
touched us, were we to proscribe those on whom its finger was laid?
Life was bitter at best. What were we, good Lord, that we should take
all the sweet of existence from any man?

This little sermon I preached to myself, for lack of a better audience;
but the wind was too keen to encourage moralizing. What should I gain
by climbing to the top of this hill? Each step higher would only show
a wider sweep of desolation. Why should I emulate the young man of
Alpine fame? He was a foolish youth and came to an untimely end. I had
no ambition; besides I had brought no banner to plant at the top to
commemorate my deed. It was a gloomy world. Nothing was worth while. I
would go down.

The descent was rapid and undignified. Eyes, ears and clothing were
full of sand. To such irritation of mind had I come that I felt ready
for reckless deeds, but I swallowed wrath and sand together and walked
on.

Suddenly, in a sunny corner, between a pile of railroad ties and
another of fragrant pine lumber, I came upon the old couple whom I had
seen at the station. There they were--she with a napkin spread upon
her lap and nibbling daintily at a bit of cake; he helping himself
freely to sandwiches or chicken, now from the lap that served as
table, now from the basket at their feet. Involuntarily, I paused;
perhaps, to apologize for the intrusion, perhaps, attracted by the
people themselves, or drawn, maybe (who knows?) by the luncheon. Who
can tell afterward just how an acquaintance began? In ten minutes we
were chatting briskly, and I was cheerfully helping to empty that
lunch basket. I think the wife opened the conversation by saying that
they had seen me climb the hill, and only wished themselves a little
younger, that they might do the same.

No one is so charming to a traveler as a woman, young or old, who knows
when and how to dispense with formality, and talk kindly, yet with
dignity, to a stranger. It is a rare grace, however, I have come to
know.

If my old lady whom I met that day on the sand told too much of her
own story, it was not her fault, but mine. I asked questions now
and then to lead her on. As we talked about the weather, of the
trains, of the time--drifting along in the shallows of conversation
as strangers do--I became slowly conscious of a something out of the
common in the manner of these old people. Just what it was was hard
to define. There was nothing at all remarkable in their personal
appearance. He was tall, spare, with a mild, benevolent face, and it
needed only one glance to be assured that he was a minister of the
Gospel. A Presbyterian minister I would have said, judging from a
certain stiffness of carriage and gentle dignity, as well as from the
extreme neatness of his well-worn garments. With a little surprise, I
learned that he was, as he put it, “the Lord’s servant in the Methodist
vineyard”--Methodists of the old school whom I had heretofore met being
noticeable rather for a carelessness of dress and a soldierly bearing,
as of those who had conquered men. His wife was a slender, nervous
little body; one of the women who in these days are called “delicate”
and of whom little is expected; one of those who, when the tests of
life come, sometimes develop a power of endurance, mental and physical,
marvelous to see.

“No, we don’t live here,” she said. “We have been spending a day in the
country with some old friends, but we came up to see a young man who is
in prison for murder. He was a school-mate of our son Gabriel, and had
the making of a man; but he took a wild and reckless turn as he grew
up, and never got on the right track again till now.”

“You smile,” said the old minister; “but you know that building is a
place of bondage and of punishment for breaking our laws only, and
not God’s laws. If a man steal, we shut him up to teach him that he
shall not touch our property; but, unless he repent of his sin, I hold
that the Lord will punish him still, the same as if we had let him go
free. This boy drank to excess, he quarreled, and the jury found that
he had killed a man. For the sake of his dead mother and of our son,
who is dead and had loved him, we came to see if we could help him on
the way to be forgiven; and the good God has blessed us. We found him
wretched and without hope. We could give no comfort; we could only pray
for help, and the comfort came. Before we came away he began to feel
that there was mercy waiting for him. A little light shone out of the
darkness; just a glimpse of the glory beyond. It is not for me to say
that he was more guilty than another; but we all have need of grace.
Cynthy and I pray that the little grain of faith in that boy’s heart
may take deep root, until he can bear his punishment with patience;
until he can say with humility, ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in
Him.’”

“It made my heart ache to leave him,” said Mother Ellis (I knew her pet
name must be “Mother,” it fitted so well); “but God, who has been so
good to us, has pity for him.”

There was no want of reverence in this continual allusion to the
Almighty; no cant, no grating familiarity. This old couple talked of
Him as of a revered friend, with whom they had constant intercourse
and in whom they had utter faith. Their simplicity was unworldly and
beautiful.

“The folks down to Freedom, where we’ve been living lately, wanted
us to go to Chicago and see the sights, while we were so near; but
John and I we’re too anxious to get home.” Here she looked at John and
blushed, and he took her hand in his. They were like a pair of young
lovers. It was curious.

Presently she went on, with a contented sigh, as if the little by-play
needed some explanation:

“You see, John and I, we’re going home--to a home of our own--for the
first time in our lives, though we’ve been married forty years come
June. Forty years! It’s a long time, looking at it some ways; but
again it only seems a little while since we were young and lived ’way
back in York state. Those hills and woods were pretty to look at. I’ve
never seen their like since. Maybe it’s wicked, but I always think
o’ the hills ’round the New Jerusalem as being like those about the
head-waters o’ the Allegheny. Like as not, though, the New York hills
have been cleared and ‘improved’ till they’re bare enough and ugly; but
I’ve no fine words to tell ye how they used to look to me. I’ve learned
now to see beauty in a level country; but it took a long while. When
we first came to Indiana, John and I, seemed as if I couldn’t any way
get used to the low land. Do you remember Chestnut Hill, John, over
toward Cattaraugus? If I were one o’ the painter folks I could make a
picture of it now. There was a tall, dead tree at the very top, with
two branches reaching out like arms, making a cross that could be seen
for miles. When I was young and foolish, I used to wish I were a Roman
Catholic, that I might go and pray at the foot of that tree rather than
in church.”

“I don’t remember about the hills being so pretty--’bout the same as
others, I guess,” said unpoetical John; “but I reck’lect the road
through the pine woods. Do you, Cynthy?”

Again the faded eyes of both brightened with love that is ever young.
Again came the blush on the wife’s wrinkled cheek, and this time John’s
feeble arm went around her waist. There was silence for a little space;
but I doubt not the air was filled with the fragrance of the pine
forest, that their ears heard the murmur of the trees. Once more they
listened with their hearts to the words of long ago, which had made
that woodland path so fair a memory.

“When I first knew John he taught our district school, and used to come
to my Uncle Isaac’s pretty often. Teachers boarded around in those
days, and I did think he took his turn at Uncle’s pretty often. I knew
he was a pious young man, who’d had a call to be a preacher, and, like
a silly girl, was a little afraid of him and didn’t want to see him.
He stayed all summer when there was no school, helping my uncle and
the neighbors in haying and harvest, studying between times. In those
days the best of men worked in the harvest-field. Before early apples
were ripe I mistrusted what was keeping him, and somehow I had got all
over being afraid of him. I had found out that he was an orphan, like
myself, and had no home. I was only _staying_ with Uncle Isaac, and it
must have been that which made my mind turn toward him. But he never
said anything, John didn’t; only kept hanging ’round and looking as if
he wanted to speak. John was bashful; but, though I’ve heard o’ men
too bashful to ask a girl to marry ’em, I never knew one, and I guess
John ’u’d a plucked up courage after awhile, even if the revival hadn’t
come. ’Long in October Brother Duzan came along through that region,
and held meetings that were powerfully blessed. It was early in the
season for a revival; but everybody turned out to the meetings at our
school-house. I had never experienced religion then, though Uncle Isaac
often made me the subject of prayer. I was giddy and thoughtless, and,
like many another, I couldn’t or, rather, wouldn’t see how good the
Lord was to me.

“Well, I went with the rest to the meetings; but my heart was hard.
Seemed as if it grew harder the more the brethren and sisters prayed
and exhorted, though all the young folks I knew were going forward to
the mourners’ bench and were being converted. One night Brother Duzan
preached his dreadful sermon on future punishment of the godless,
that he always kept for the crowning effort. He told, in awful words,
how the unconverted sinner would finally suffer and burn in endless
torment, and everybody was crying and groaning but myself. That threat
couldn’t soften me then, and I’m free to confess has no effect now.
Then John, he led in prayer. His voice was so soft and gentle that it
hushed the excitement. He besought the tender Shepherd, who loved all
His sheep, to look with special care upon the playful lambs, whose
willful feet refused to follow whither they were led; to draw them
back with merciful hands before they should learn, too late, that only
the narrow, rocky path led to the green pastures that were beside still
waters.

“I knew he prayed for me, and my heart was melted then; and, for fear
the tears would come, I slipped out of the door, while the rest were
on their knees. But John saw me--though how he could, with his back
turned, I never knew--and I didn’t get far into the pine woods alone.
He began where the prayer had stopped. ‘The Lord was waiting,’ he said,
‘for me to stretch out my hands, and He would take me into the blessed
fold.’ And I? What should I do but cry, as a woman always does when
she should not. Then John, to comfort me, began to tell how God loved
me; and from that, some way, it was easy to say how--well, no, John,
I shan’t tell what you said then, and don’t you, either. I kind o’
forgot for a minute that we were not alone, and was thinking out loud,
I guess. I hope our friend will excuse me, for when she comes to be old
such places in her life will stand out clear in her memory, where many
another important thing has faded away.

“The next night I went to meeting, and made a profession of religion.
What could I do but praise the Lord for being so good to me, who was
so undeserving. Had he not given me John, and what was I that such a
blessing should be mine?”

Here, the mild eye of Reverend John looked at me over his wife’s head
with a mischievous twinkle. As she went on, however, his face resumed
its serenity.

“We have lived many years since then. Sometimes the way has been rough
and hard. We have had trials and losses; but mercy and goodness have
followed us, for we have borne the burdens together. I can confess now,
though I never said so to John, that one of the heaviest crosses of my
life has been the wish for a home. When we were married, I knew that I
was taking an itinerant Methodist preacher for better or worse (it has
always been the better, never the worse, John); but I could not know
till I had tried it what a wandering, unsettled life it was. Different
in the early days from now, too. When we came out here, it was looked
upon as more of an undertaking than going to Europe now. There were no
railroads then running here and there across the country; so we came
by water on a flat-boat to Pittsburgh and in a steamboat from there.
Stopped at Cincinnati to see the sights. It was a fine city then, but
they say it’s grown since.

“Daughter, a volume would not hold our experience of forty years. We
have been sojourners, never long in one place. It’s only of late years,
you know, that Methodist ministers are allowed to labor more than two
years in one church. Then there was the loneliness; for sometimes John
would be gone on the circuit, away from his family for weeks at a
time. I could not go, because of the children. We have been here and
there, here and there, and used to live in pretty wild places, with few
neighbors.”

John took up the thread here: “I never was what is called a popular
preacher,” he said, with a gentle smile. “I tried to do my duty--the
Lord knows that; but the people would sometimes grow anxious about
building up the church, and would want a man who could bring in large
accessions to the membership. I tried to win souls to the Master,
with His help; but, though I trust my sheaves will contain more than
weeds, the harvest in my field has been less abundant than in many.
The elders and bishops are judges of men, and they stationed me where
I could do best, no doubt. Latterly, some have told me that people
nowadays do not like to hear so much about Christ and Him crucified,
that they prefer the religion of humanity, and that I should adapt
my style to the times; but it is too late. I am too old to learn a
new religion or to sugar-coat or rarefy the old one. It was a lack
of faith, I fear, that caused a disappointment when they sent me to
an obscure corner, a by-way, as sometimes they did. It was all the
Master’s vineyard, and I should have worked without a murmur; but I
thought too much, perhaps, about the little earthly reward and that I
could make no provision for old age. We knew the Lord had always been
good to us, Cynthy. We should have trusted Him in this, for He had
never failed us and He never will. ‘Underneath us are the everlasting
arms.’”

“Yes,” said Cynthy, “the Lord has provided for us. We are to have a
home of our own in our old age; a home where our children can come to
visit us or to stay. As I said, I couldn’t complain. It was the will of
Heaven that we should live as sojourners. We could not set our hearts
upon this house or that tree, as people will. The room where the son
died or the daughter married could not be kept sacred, for we must
leave them; the roses and the vines which we might plant would grow
to gladden other eyes than ours. Such worldly affections do not seem
wrong; but they might have been a snare to us. For a year or two John
has been so afflicted with rheumatism that he could not go about, and
has been put on the superannuated list.

“If you know anything about Methodists, you know they do not contribute
to the fifth collection as liberally as to some others, and the fund
for worn out ministers is small. I suppose they do not realize the
needs of any one so near them. We have always lived on a little--no one
knows so well as a Methodist preacher’s family how to make much out of
nothing; but of late we have been sore pressed. Our children--only five
are living out of ten--are scattered far and wide. Two are missionaries
in India; two are teaching in the south, and our oldest son, a farmer
in Texas, is the only one who is at all forehanded. He has wanted us
to make our home with him; but we couldn’t quite make up our minds.
Seemed as if we couldn’t quite give up to go so far and get used to new
things and a new country. Old people get dreadful set in their ways,
you know.

“It had got to look, though, as if the Lord meant that we should go,
and we were beginning to make our plans and to talk of a few farewell
visits we must make.

“We have some old friends we should want to see once more, and we
must take another look at the graves where our children were laid at
rest. It had come to be about settled that we were to go. The Gosport
Howitzer had mentioned it in its personal column, saying we should be
greatly missed, when a letter came telling us the Widow Green up at
Arcady had died and left us her property. We’d been up to see Mrs.
Green not long before, and she talked then of leaving what she had
to the Foreign Missionary Society, and we never once thought of her
mentioning us in her will. But she did leave us the home. Not much,
maybe you’d say--its only a little cottage and an acre o’ ground; but
it’s a home, for all that, an’ I’ve wanted one for so many years.

“We regret the Widow Green, of course. She was a good Christian woman,
though a trifle irritable; but she’d been bedridden and so afflicted
for many a day that it was her desire to go whenever the call should
come. We shall have no care for ourselves the rest of our days, for
the future is provided for. We are such weak creatures that faith is
not always strong enough to take no thought for the morrow. We want a
sign--something we can see and touch.

“Is it wrong, I wonder, to think so much about worldly things? I have
planned how every room shall look. I have seeds of all the flowers
I can find like the ones that grew in the yard when I was a girl.
We shan’t have very much money; but, with our share of the Retired
Preachers’ Fund and with our garden, we shall have enough. I’m spry if
I be old, and always had a knack at making things grow. John’s a master
hand to work in the garden, too, when he’s well. I tell John (don’t
laugh at a foolish old woman)--I tell John that this is like a wedding
journey. We traveled a long way when we were married; but we didn’t
reach the home for forty years. John is as anxious to get there as I,
but is more sensible and not so impatient. We are going to stop at
Kokomo to-night with Brother and Sister Roberts, and in the morning we
shall go on home to Arcady. Home! How sweet the word sounds, John!”

There had been a movement of freight cars in our vicinity for some
minutes; distant whistles of locomotives echoed around, and John had
become restless. He rose stiffly, but eagerly. “Cynthy, I think it must
be near time for our train; it would never do for us to miss this one,
or we shouldn’t get home till to-morrow night. Let us go.”

I left them on the car, with hope and expectation in their faces,
and said farewell as to old friends. “Come and see us in our home,
my daughter,” was their last word. “May the Lord bless you as he has
blessed us, and good-bye!”

As I waited yet a little for my train the benediction seemed to linger.
The boats were coming gayly in to shore now; the western sun shone with
a warm glow upon the distant prison windows; school children laughed
and shouted as if care and crime were not. Truly, the world had not all
gone wrong. There was hope yet, and life was worth living after all.

       *       *       *       *       *

A year later, in the station at Indianapolis, I caught a glimpse of the
two kind old faces once more. The eagerness had gone out of them; there
was peace and resignation instead of hope. They looked out of a car
that was westward bound. A farmer, standing at my elbow, told the story.

“Father Ellis? Yes. Him and his wife is goin’ West, to jine their son
’at has a cattle ranch some’rs in Texas. One o’ these yer onlucky
Methodis’ preachers, the old man is. Preached around on circuits in
Indianny fer a matter o’ thirty or forty year. Married an’ had right
smart o’ children, of course, as his perfession allays does. How they
managed to scratch along an’ raise them young-uns on the skimped wages
Methodist preachers do get beats me. Seems ’sef people like them ort
to be fed by the ravens, as Elisha was, or some sech way; or their
meal-bar’ls filled up, like the widder Cruse’s. How’s’ever, I s’pose
some way’s allays pervided. In this case the old man had got past his
preachin’ days, an’ not a nickel saved fer old age, when old Mis Green,
at Arcady, north o’ hyer, up an’ died, an’ left him her little jag o’
proputty. Not worth much, to be sure; but a right snug little home.

“With this an’ what he’d get from the superannuated fund, they was
fixed to inch along comfortable to the end o’ their days. But law! what
does the old fellow do, when they hadn’t got more’n fairly settled, but
go security fer Jim Jeffries, out Cicero road! Anybody with a grain o’
business sense ’ud a knowed it was flyin’ in the face o’ Providence,
for Jeffries allays was slack an’ shif’less an’ ’twan’t noways likely’t
he’d be able to meet them notes; an’ he didn’t nuther, an’ Father Ellis
he hed to pay the debt, but it took all they was. So hyer they be, all
tore up by the roots, so to speak. Doggoned pity, I say.”

I went aboard the car to speak a word of greeting. The aisle was
blocked by a small woman, with a large basket, and by a young miss
who exchanged farewell giggles with a departing friend, interspersed
with messages to their respective beaux. While I waited just behind
them, the old wife’s voice reached me, soft and clear, amid all the
confusion. I listened, and I turned away, sure that they needed no
comfort I could offer.

“The Lord has been very good to us, John. I can see now that my heart
was set too much on worldly things, and it was best they should be
taken away. The Lord doeth that which is good, John. He has left us
each other.”

“Yes, Cynthy, He has said: ‘I am with thee and will keep thee in all
places whither thou shalt go.’ We are old, my dear, and night will soon
pass forever into the dawn of eternal day. May we enter together into
the land that is no longer very far off. Let us pray, love, that death
shall not part us; that, still together, when the morning is come, we
may open our eyes in the Heavenly Kingdom, where a place is prepared
for us.”




A MOVEMENT IN ART


It was Sunday forenoon, and Lodilla Jackson was engaged in “doing
up” the morning’s work. She had washed the breakfast dishes, put the
kitchen in order, made the beds, helped get her young brother and
sister off to Sunday-school and her mother started to church, and
had got the dinner well under way. Lodilla worked during the week in
the establishment of a manufacturing chemist, or, as the place was
otherwise known, a patent-medicine factory, where she pasted labels
on bottles and pill-boxes, afterwards putting these articles in
elaborately printed wrappers. Sunday was her “off” day, but she usually
spent the first half of it in the manner described in order to relieve
her mother, who was also a hard-working woman, as widows with children
and little money are apt to be. She was twenty years old, and a good
girl. Ever since she was fourteen she had been earning money, and,
with the help of her mother, her brother two years younger, and, now,
of a younger sister who answered to the call of “H-e-r-e, C-a-s-h,” in
a dry goods shop, had almost succeeded in clearing their little house
of the mortgage that encumbered it when her father died. Almost, but
not quite. There was still necessity for frugality and self-denial,
and little chance for indulgence in the vanities and luxuries in which
girls delight. Nevertheless, Lodilla was not downcast or unhappy; far
from it. She looked forward confidently to the time when debt would
cease to be a burden, and, meanwhile, planned a little for that happy
day.

This morning, while the corned beef and cabbage boiled merrily on the
stove and the molasses cake browned in the oven, she opened the parlor
door, and, dust-cloth in hand, gazed meditatively about that retreat.
The room had been a source of great comfort to her mother and herself.
Its possession seemed to them a visible token of their respectable
social standing. It was not every one of their neighbors on the quiet
little South-side Indianapolis street who could afford a parlor. A good
many of the people in their part of town lived in houses so small,
or had families so large, that not a corner of their establishments
could be spared for company uses exclusively. Or, sometimes, when the
extra room was there, the occupant of the house could not afford the
necessary outlay for suitable furniture.

The fittings for the Jackson parlor had been bought when the paternal
Jackson was alive and in the enjoyment of health and good wages. The
selection of this furniture had been the outcome of much thought,
consultation and financial calculation on the part of the two older
members of the family, Lodilla at that time being of an age when her
opinion on such matters was not influential. There, as the foundation
of the outfit, was the ingrain carpet, with a green and black vine of
most luxuriant growth meandering over its bright red ground. There,
against the widest wall space, was a haircloth sofa, now worn to a
gloss that rivaled the Russia-iron stove, and with a lumpiness of
surface and weakness of springs unknown to it when new. The stove, an
upright cylinder, decorated with much nickel-plating, was regarded when
purchased as a great ornament to the room, and, although now adapted to
the use of natural gas instead of the coal for which it was originally
meant, was still held in much esteem in the household. There were
several cane-seated chairs, a table which held a large glass lamp, and,
on a shelf underneath, the family Bible. The crowning glory of the room
was the small cabinet organ in one corner. Lodilla, at an early age,
had learned to play “by ear” a few simple tunes and accompaniments, and
when the family and their visitors gathered there on Sunday afternoons
and sang “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Hold the Fort,” “Whiter than
Snow,” “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” and other “gospel hymns,” Mrs.
Jackson, for one, felt that she enjoyed many blessings, while the
pleasure felt by all in the music would certainly have been far less
intense at a symphony concert.

But it was not on any of these pieces of furniture that Lodilla was
looking with some discontent visible in her face; it was upon the more
decorative features of the apartment. Over the high wooden mantel
hung a crayon portrait of her departed father, enlarged to a head of
life size from a tintype of thumb-nail proportions by one of those
mysterious processes practiced by peripatetic artisans. Her father
had been gone too long for her to feel any deep personal sentiment
in regard to him, but the picture was invested with the interest of a
sacred relic, and she had no thought of disturbing it. On the wall,
over the sofa, hung that pair of chromos, “Wide Awake” and “Fast
Asleep,” which, when, as newspaper prizes, they found places in a
multitude of homes years ago, were so universally characterized as
“perfectly lovely.” Lodilla was a trifle tired of these pictures, not
because she detected any lack of artistic merit, but because she did
not think the chubby little girl portrayed in them a pretty child.
Still, she did not at this time cherish any designs against them.

Her eyes moved slowly along the row of photographs of various sizes
resting on the mantel, from there passed to the framed marriage
certificate of her parents hanging above the cabinet organ in a line
with the framed certificates of baptism of herself and her brother and
sister, then wandered from these to a large “memorial piece,” framed
in black and hanging in the place of honor between the windows, and
rested there with especial dissatisfaction. This piece, which was
printed in very black inks, with very deep shadows and very white high
lights, represented a marble tombstone of dazzling whiteness, a willow
tree and a kneeling widow, who had evidently come to weep, but had
changed her mind and was looking up with ecstatic gaze at an angel with
powerful wings bearing the astral body of the occupant of the grave
up to a heaven beyond a flock of woolly clouds. Printed on scrolls in
the corners were sundry comforting texts, and below, the full name of
the deceased Jackson, engrossed in an ornamental, Spencerian hand.
This remarkable work of art was kindly furnished to the widow for
$2.75--$1.25 off for an immediate sale--by the agent of an enterprising
engraving firm soon after her husband’s death.

“I do wish, ma,” said Lodilla to her mother, who entered just then,
“I do wish I had a photograph album--one like Nell Abbott’s, a big
plush-covered one. It would be so stylish on the table, and, besides,
is so much better for keeping photographs than setting them around on
things. And, ma--”

Here Lodilla hesitated and blushed a little.

“Ma, Joe--Mr. Little--is getting his pictures taken--great big
cabinets--and if he gives me one it would be nice to have a place to
put it. He just admires Nell’s album; told her he thought every family
ought to have one.”

It will be observed that Lodilla, capable young woman that she was, was
not quite up to date in this matter, but in her behalf it must be said
that she had not had the advantage of association with young society
women, who claim to lead in fads and fashions of this sort, and who
abandoned the album as a drawing-room ornament some time since. Her
ideas as to the desirability of the article had been gathered from
visits to the homes of her friends, who were still in the plush album
and chromo stage of development. She had also gone with her mother
on one occasion to carry a basket of mended clothing to a bachelor
apartment, where, in the common sitting-room of the half dozen young
men, the center-table held six large family albums arranged about
the lamp, and presumably containing likenesses of the relatives,
sweethearts and favorite actresses of the respective owners. Lodilla,
who was much impressed with the luxury of other fittings of this room,
felt that the albums were the crowning touch of elegance, and had
longed for one ever since. She had particularly desired one since Joe
Little, brakeman on the Big Four railroad, had loomed on her social
horizon. She wanted his picture, and fancied that he would be the more
willing to bestow it if she had a suitable casket for the treasure.
She was an unsophisticated girl, you see, unaware that no man needs
encouragement to his vanity beyond the mere willingness on the part of
a young woman to accept a likeness of himself.

Mrs. Jackson, who, mother-like, would have been glad to gratify all her
daughter’s tastes, looked a little troubled.

“I don’t see, Dilly,” she said hesitatingly, “I don’t see how we can
afford one now.”

“Of course not, ma; of course not,” said Lodilla, with a sudden return
to cheerfulness. “I know we can’t afford it yet a while, and I’m not
grumbling. Don’t you think it. I was just wishing and talking, and that
don’t hurt, you know. But some day, ma, I’m going to have that album,
and some day I’m going to buy some pictures and get you to put the
memorial piece and the certificates in your bedroom. They’ve hung where
they are so long I’d like a change, and the parlor needs a little
freshening up and more style.”

Her mother sighed a little, without looking at all sad. Her grief for
the departed Jackson was so mitigated by time that the sighs brought
by allusions to him were more from habit than emotion, and no longer
indicated the least depression of spirits.

“I always liked that memorial,” she said. “It’s so sort of
satisfactory. That angel who’s carrying your pa is so big and strong
that you can easy enough see how he can do it. He looks so substantial.
The Widow Thomas, she has one where the angel’s just starting down
after Thomas--a little, thin, weakly angel you can see through, and
you know the old man must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds
if he did one. Of course, we don’t suppose his spirit was heavy, but,
somehow, there don’t seem to be a fitness in sending such a puny
messenger after him. It seems a pity to put that memorial out of sight
in the bedroom, but young folks must have their way, I reckon. You
don’t think of taking the chromos down, do you?” she asked, anxiously.
“Your pa gave them to me before we was married, and people come from
all around to see them, and everybody said they were just the finest
pictures that had ever been seen in Cherry Corners. Old Mr. Van Lew
offered ten dollars for them, because Little Wide Awake looked so much
like his grand-daughter, Lucy Ann Rodibaugh. But I wouldn’t a’ taken
twice that then.”

Dilly assured her mother that she had no intention of removing “Wide
Awake” and “Fast Asleep,” and hastened to look after her dinner.

The cabbage which had boiled so long and steadily, was tender, the
potatoes mealy, the corned beef just as it should be, the molasses cake
light and sweet and delicious--just the cake that children remember
all their lives as the kind mother used to make, a memory which causes
them, when they are old, to wonder why no one else can ever make as
good.

And if you think the family gathered around that board and partaking of
that frugal fare were not as happy as it is often given to people to
be in this rather pleasant world, then you know little of the rewards
of honest toil, of the delights of home provided, and its comforts
earned and paid for by the efforts of all; you have forgotten the eager
appetite of healthy youth, which gives the plainest food a zest that a
Lucullus feast could not offer now. And if you think Miss Lodilla, with
her narrow life, her daily labor and her simple hopes and ambitions,
was wasting time or energy in repinings at her lot, or fancied herself
in any respect ill-used by fate, then you little understand the serene
independence of the self-reliant, self-supporting American girl, who,
confident of her ability to provide for herself, envies no one.

Lodilla, in her neat black skirt and shirt waist, in summer--oh, the
ever-useful, universal shirt waist!--and her trim cloth jacket over the
waist in winter, wended her way back and forth each day between home
and factory, making one of the great army of working women, but having
her own little plans and cares apart from such associations, and her
maidenly dreams, just as other girls do with more time for dreams--just
as all girls do while life is young and love is sweet. Joe Little, the
big, fair-haired brakeman, figured a good deal in these meditations.
He came to see her now and then, when he had no “run” to make, but it
was always on a week-day evening. Sunday evenings he spent with Nellie
Abbott, Lodilla’s dearest friend. That is, she had been her nearest
and most confidential friend, the girl to whom she had confided all
her little secrets, but lately the intimacy had waned somewhat, and
perhaps Joe Little had, unconsciously to himself, something to do with
the coolness. These ardent friendships between girls are so apt to die
a sudden death when an attractive young man comes on the scene.

Joe Little had first met both the girls at a church strawberry
festival, but had seemed to give preference to Nellie. The chief sign
of his favor was the fact that his calls upon her were made on Sunday
nights, and in their social circle this meant more serious intentions
than an ordinary week-night visit. He was a musician of local repute,
being known as a “boss fiddler,” and this accomplishment gave him
welcome admission to the best society of the neighborhood. Nellie,
being something of a coquette, did not appear to care especially for
him, and, for that matter, neither did Lodilla--she was too fully a
woman for that--but she did care, and was learning to think about him
more and more.

“I really don’t think Nell’s prettier than I am,” she would say to
herself, looking anxiously in the glass. “Nell’s got a real good
complexion, lots better than mine, but her nose is pug and her eyes
are squinty. They are; she can’t deny it, and they do say cross-eyed
people get to have bad tempers, even if they don’t begin with them.
Nell’s awful peppery sometimes now when things don’t go her way. It
can’t be her looks; it must be other things. She’s got a piano and can
play the ‘Maiden’s Prayer,’ ‘The Brook,’ ‘The Gussie Waltz’ and a lot
of pieces, and he likes music so. And she’s got a photograph album,
and, oh dear!”

You people who accept the assurances of novelists and cheap critics
that women with the smallest claims to comeliness--and where is she
who has none?--are satisfied with themselves, and unable to recognize
the charms of their rivals--you merely show your ignorance. The normal
girl is distinctly aware of her own defects, and as keenly conscious
of the other girl’s especial attractions. She recognizes, with a pang
at her heart, the captivating effect of the little curl on her rival’s
white neck, the dimple in her chin, of the long lashes, under which she
glances so bewitchingly. She may honestly wonder why the man in the
case is so stupid and blind as not to detect that other girl’s faults
of character which are so clear to her, but she never undervalues the
outward allurements.

Strawberry time and its festivals were now long past, and early winter
was here, but Joe Little showed no signs of change in his fancy for
Nellie Abbott, except that his calls at the Widow Jackson’s were
rather less frequent than they had been. Lodilla began to have little
heartaches, and if she cried when her sister was asleep and she could
smother her sobs in the pillow, it would not be at all surprising. But
if anybody guessed her sadness and its cause it was only her mother,
and mothers never betray such secrets.

She worked as industriously as ever over her bottles and pill-boxes,
chattered as gayly with her companions as usual, and loitered before
the shop windows during the noon hour with the natural and wholesome
curiosity of a healthy young woman. Love, of the lurid, all-absorbing
kind we read about, that takes the appetite, banishes sleep and
destroys other interests of life, is less frequent than the variety
which permits other sentiments to exist simultaneously and allows the
sufferer intervals of comparative comfort and cheer.

One evening Mr. Little dropped in unexpectedly and brought his
fiddle--he did not call it a violin. He did not tell Lodilla that he
had intended to go to Nellie’s, but from across the street had chanced
to see William Marvin, freight conductor on his road, enter before him
and receive a warm greeting from the young lady. He “never could abide
Bill Marvin,” and wouldn’t spend an hour in the same room if he could
help it.

Lodilla made herself particularly agreeable that evening. She begged
him to play for her, and he did play the “Wrecker’s Daughter,”
“Fisher’s Hornpipe,” “Drunkard’s Heecups”--a tune in which the plunking
of the strings gives the realistic effect of hiccoughs--the “Arkansaw
Traveler” and a Strauss Waltz. At least these are what he told her
they were, and she thanked him and praised him and said she loved the
fiddle, and could never grow tired of it; and then she sang all her
songs to the cabinet organ accompaniment with its undertone of wheezy
groans, suggestive of misery in its inside, and never before had she
put such feeling and earnestness into tunes or words. And, after the
visitor had been served with doughnuts and a big glass of unfermented
grape juice that ma put up herself, he went home, well pleased with
himself and all the world, Lodilla included. She was happy, but not
confident. She had still an oppressive fear of her rival.

The very next day she was drawn by irresistible attraction into a crowd
in front of a big Washington street shoe-shop, and stood there with
fascinated eyes watching a man in the window who painted a beautiful
landscape while you waited. There he stood, painting clouds, trees,
rivers and river banks, grassy knolls, mossy dells and gray rocks with
lightning swiftness--laying on one color and then another, and bringing
out marvelous effects before you fairly knew what he had intended.

A yellow circular thrust into her hand by a boy informed her that she
could have one of these works of art free of cost if she would purchase
a pair of shoes in the shop--the frame only being charged for.

A sudden ambition filled her mind. She had the money in her pocket for
a pair of shoes and meant to buy them that very afternoon. Why not
purchase them here instead of at the little shop on the side street,
which she had always patronized? They might cost a little more here,
but then, just for once, and with this prize in view, she might surely
venture the additional outlay. The frame was extra, but she would take
a ninety-eight-cent one and save the amount after awhile out of the
price of her winter gown. Without giving herself time to reconsider,
she bought the shoes, selected the picture she had seen painted, or one
precisely like it, and went her way, feeling the fearful joy of a wish
gratified at the cost of wild extravagance.

The purchase created a sensation at home, and though the careful mother
shook her head doubtfully over the investment of so much money for
purely decorative purposes, she did not remonstrate, but joined with
the rest of the family in admiring the new possession.

“You see, ma,” said Lodilla, with intent to justify herself, “you
see, hand-painted pictures are the thing now-days; everybody says so,
and they cost like everything. Nell says her uncle’s sister-in-law
in Chicago paid twenty-five dollars for a painting not more than ten
inches across, and Joe Little, he told me about a five-hundred-dollar
picture he’d seen a man carrying home on the train one day, and there
wasn’t a thing to it but two or three sheep and a dog on a side-hill.
And just think! This didn’t cost a cent without the frame.”

The next day was Sunday, and frequent were Lodilla’s visits to the
parlor to look at her treasure hanging in state between the windows,
in place of the memorial piece, now retired to the privacy of ma’s
bedroom. That night who should come but Joe Little to ask her to go
to church. She accepted the invitation with sedate dignity, but with
secret joy. Sunday night! That meant so much.

Nellie Abbott was there with the freight conductor, whom Lodilla
mentally classified at once as “perfectly horrid,” and was instantly
convinced that her old friend was consumed with envy of her superior
good fortune in securing the handsome and altogether more desirable
escort. Filled with which thought, she smiled with great sweetness on
Miss Nellie.

After services were over Joe came in with intent to sit by the
sheet-iron cylinder and enjoy an hour of social converse. Lodilla
wished her new art acquisition to dawn upon him unannounced, and sat
in tremulous expectation of his verdict. Finally, after talk about
the weather, ma’s cold, the new choir and various neighborhood topics
had begun to languish, Mr. Little’s glance chanced to fall upon the
picture. He rose slowly and stood before it, inspecting it closely with
a critical eye; then he made a telescope of his hands and viewed it
from a more distant standpoint. Then he said impressively:

“Lodilla, that’s a mighty good thing; it’s got good points. You don’t
want to stand too close to one of them hand-painted oil pictures,
they’re apt to blur, but just get off a piece and they come right
out. That lightning artist’s a dandy. Shows what a painter man can do
who puts his mind to it and isn’t afraid to work. It must make those
fellows who potter over one picture for weeks just sick to see him dash
them things off at such a rate. I tell you, Lodilla,” he added with
animation, after a pause and further inspection, “it looks like a place
on the old farm down home. I’ve set on that rock, or one like it, and
fished for bass in just such a hole many of a time.”

Then, as if with inspiration of the instant; “And say, Lodilla”--here
he faltered and his voice grew soft--“say, don’t you want to marry me
some day and go down there and visit the home place and the old folks?”

It was sudden, but she was equal to the emergency. His arm was around
her, and her answer was whispered on his shoulder, but not so low that
he could not hear.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Christmas came, a few weeks later, he gave her a big red plush
album with gilt trimmings and a little mirror set in the corner, and
she felt that her cup of bliss was full.

The album was a treasure, but Lodilla will value that picture between
the windows till the end of her days. It brought her love and Joe. Art
education is not always a rapid process. Her children may learn to
appreciate picture posters and know what Beardsleyism means, but she
will be forever satisfied with her landscape painted in nine minutes as
her mother before her was with the chromos.




THE QUICKENING OF A SOUL


A religious revival had been in progress in the churches of Greenbrier,
Indiana, for six weeks--that is, in the Methodist, the Baptist and the
Presbyterian churches. The Roman Catholics went on calmly with only
their usual services, and were regarded with more than the ordinary
measure of pity by their Protestant neighbors as persons who had never
been properly converted, and were little better than benighted heathen.
Episcopalians, too, continued in the even tenor of their way, and had
their customary dancing and card parties, which were frowned on with
greater sternness than ever by the rigid Methodist, Presbyterian and
Baptist brethren who had not yet reached the tolerant stage in relation
to these amusements attained by members of their denominations in
larger cities. Even the young people of these churches who had been
wont to think longingly of the forbidden entertainments, and sometimes
to participate in them surreptitiously, now looked askance at the
frivolous givers of the parties and promised themselves that by the
help of the Lord they would never be led into such evil doings again,
for these young people were among the fruits of the revival, and had
bidden farewell to sin.

Such a wonderful ingathering of souls had not been known before in the
history of Greenbrier. The revival movement began simultaneously in
the three churches, and almost from the beginning a wave of religious
emotion manifested itself. Young and old were affected by it; innocent
children and case-hardened sinners succumbed, the first unresistingly,
the second reluctantly, to its power. Every night the churches were
crowded and every night penitents seeking salvation rose for prayers,
or went forward and knelt at the altar as the custom of the respective
sects required. Every night numbers of these penitents declared that
they had found what they sought, that they had shaken off the bonds
of iniquity and had entered upon a new life. Backsliders returned and
renewed their faith. The interest was intense. A subdued excitement
was in the air and affected the transaction of business and household
affairs throughout the town. People hurried through their evening meals
in order that they might miss no feature of the coming services. Now,
after six weeks, though there was no falling off in attendance, it
began to be said that the meetings would soon close. As one pious but
practical elder put it, the harvest was gathered, and why go raking
over the ground? A few sinners remained unconverted, it was true, but
they were seemingly hopeless and must be left to the Lord’s mercy.

On this Friday night of the sixth week as many people as ever hastened
along the streets to the places of meeting and the Methodist Church,
at least, quickly filled with a congregation as large as at any time
during the revival season. People had come to depend on the excitement
and dreaded a termination of it. In their narrow village life the
meetings took the place of drama and opera and social gayeties,
with the addition of a personal and emotional element that such
entertainments lack, and that held them through night after night of
prayer and exhortation without wearying. A thorough-going revival in a
town of this kind has uses not contemplated by its promoters.

Among the later arrivals was a group of young girls who entered a pew
not far from the door. There was a little crowding and confusion as
they passed in, and if Althea Hood, the youngest member of the party,
had been observant of her companions she would have seen that their
purpose was to give her a seat next the aisle. She saw nothing and
sat contentedly enough, her thoughts absorbed in the scene about her.
Althea was not yet sixteen; until these meetings opened she had never
attended a religious gathering more exciting than the Sunday morning
services in the Episcopal church where she went with her parents, and
the regular weekly Presbyterian prayer-meeting to which she had gone
with an elderly neighbor on several occasions. Her parents, easy-going
and indulgent, after the American fashion, had allowed their young
daughter to take her own way, and when she showed herself disinclined
to confirmation ceremonies had not insisted, saying to each other it
was better that she should choose the bonds she would wear when she
was old enough to know her duty to God and her fellow-creatures. So
far were they out of sympathy with revival methods that, perhaps, it
did not occur to them that their self-contained, unemotional child was
likely to be affected by them, and, indeed, she had shown no signs of
being so.

One by one her school associates had succumbed to the pleadings of
the pastors, evangelists or other workers in the vineyard, had passed
through a period of penitence and grief, and had finally declared,
in more or less childlike and incoherent phrase, that they felt the
burden of sin lifted from their souls and an assurance that they were
saved by divine grace. Henceforth they would turn their backs upon
the temptations of this world and would love God and praise Him for
the rest of their days. So many of these school-mates had professed
conversion that at last Althea was the only one of her circle who
remained unmoved by the appeals that had so affected the others. She
took a deep interest in all the proceedings, but seemed to make no
personal application of the exhortations. She watched her companions
curiously. That a change of some sort had passed over them was
plain. It manifested itself in an increased sedateness of behavior;
she was aware, too, in the presence of certain ones, of a pitying
condescension, as if she were no longer on an equality with them.
Others--two or three--went about with a rapt and radiant air as if,
indeed, they had entered upon a new life, and with glorified vision
looked out upon a more spiritual world than the unregenerate saw. These
she observed somewhat wistfully, but it was at no time borne in upon
her that she, too, could share their joy.

She was not self-conscious; had she been so she would have become aware
on this Friday night that unusual attention was directed her way. Long
after, she learned that she had been regarded by the elder brethren and
sisters as a “soul” whose conversion was, for various reasons, much to
be desired, and that a determined and concerted effort to break her
hitherto unmoved calm was prearranged for that evening.

All these meetings were informal. Some one began to sing, “Jesus, Lover
of My Soul,” and the congregation joined in with more than common
fervor. It was the old-time tune even more touching than the words.
Althea added her clear young voice to the rest as she had done before:

  “All my trust on Thee is stayed,
     All my help from Thee I bring;
   Cover my defenseless head
     With the shadow of Thy wing.”

As the verse came to an end an elderly sister, passing by, touched
Althea softly on the shoulder and whispered:

“You should come, dear, and give yourself to Jesus so you could sing
that with your heart.”

An aged brother lifted up his quavering voice in prayer. He was
illiterate, but it is piety and not erudition, we must believe, which
counts with the Maker of men.

“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “Oh, Lord, there ain’t but a few sinners left in
this yer congregation, an’ ef you’ll jest pour out the speret upon us
to-night, jest pour it out free, we’ll fetch ’em in. They cain’t stand
out agin that power; they’ll realize thet they’re pore an’ needy. Bless
us, Lord, bless us right now!”

Then came the pleading hymn:

  “Come ye sinners, poor and needy,
   Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
   Jesus ready stands to save you,
   Full of pity, love and power;
   He is able, He is able,
   He is willing, doubt no more.”

The exhortations of the old pastor, commonly so fatherly and gentle,
had an almost youthful fire that night. He preached the wrath of God
as he had not done in all the weeks. The guilt of the one withholding
complete submission was pictured in the darkest colors. Repentance for
sin, acceptance of atoning grace, love for the Son, were the only means
of averting this wrath. Neither gifts nor praise, neither good works
nor clean living, could avail if the doer of righteous things walked
not humbly by faith in God. Delay meant death. Let the young yield up
their hearts now, or else risk the loss of life eternal.

After him came a young evangelist who was becoming noted for his
success as an “awakener.” He was a thin-faced, long-necked young man,
spoken of by admiring women as ascetic and spiritual. Discriminating
observers would have been apt to class him as dyspeptic and his
eloquence as sounding brass; nevertheless, with his peculiarly musical
voice and pleading manner he won attention where others failed. Althea
Hood had dreamed dreams about this young man. If she had understood
the secrets of her own foolish little child-heart she would have
been aware that his presence was one of the attractions that had
made her attendance so constant at the meetings. She was not in love
with him--the sentiment had no such strength as that. She was simply
experiencing the first faint flutterings of femininity roused to life
by masculine influence.

The evangelist clasped his hands before him in the praying-Samuel
position, and tossing back his long mane began to plead with those
lambs which had wandered away from the Shepherd’s loving arms. He said
nothing of sin or of guilt, repentence or forgiveness. He only called
upon the wanderers to come where love, and shelter, and tender care
awaited them. He quoted beautiful poetic passages from the Bible and
comforting promises; he talked of green pastures and still waters,
of light, and life, and love, but love was chiefly his theme. It was
divine love, of course, but the speaker’s voice was soft and low; his
eyes were directed toward Althea, and she, poor child, thrilled at his
tones and only half comprehended his words. In conclusion he held out
his hands entreatingly and sang:

  “Love divine, all loves excelling,
     Joy of heaven to earth come down;
   Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
     All thy faithful mercies crown.”

These little tenor solos, interspersed through his talks, were
distinctive features of his methods and were considered especially
effective. The revival spirit was fully aroused now. Song and prayer
quickly succeeded each other. Ejaculations of praise and murmurs of
ecstatic feeling were heard from all parts of the room in antiphonal
likeness. Brethren and sisters, gifted as pleaders, or led by sense of
duty to exercise their influence, moved among the congregation, seeking
out the few who, as the accepted phrase was, had not yet “confessed
Christ.” One after another besought Althea to yield up her heart. Tears
fell from the eyes of the old pastor as he urged her to go forward
to the “mourners’ bench” and take what might be her last chance for
salvation.

They were singing fervently just then:

  “Alas, and did my Savior bleed,
   And did my Sovereign die?
   Would He devote that sacred head
   For such a worm as I?”

“But I am not a vile sinner,” she protested. “I am not a worm,” and
would not go.

Her school-mates who had so lately read their own titles clear added
their petitions; her teacher urged upon her the duty of subduing her
pride and indifference; women and men for whom she had the greatest
respect, came to her and pointed out the strait and narrow path. They
left her still unmoved so far as outward indications showed. The young
evangelist approached. Her lips set together firmly; her hands, already
moving nervously, clenched themselves; the strain was becoming great,
but, “I will not go,” she whispered to herself. He reached out his
hand. “Come, little sister,” he said. “Come; the Good Shepherd wants
this lamb that is outside the fold. Come.” And she arose and followed
him.

In front of the pulpit was a long bench at which already were two
penitents--an old man who was converted at every revival and as
regularly became a backslider when the excitement subsided, and a young
man who was commonly spoken of in the community as a “hard case.” She
knelt beside them mechanically.

The congregation was singing with great volume of sound, “There’s a
Land That Is Fairer Than Day.” The young evangelist turned and lifted
his hand. There was silence, and with hands clasped and eyes uplifted
he sang “The Ninety and Nine.” It was like a solo by a famous tenor in
an opera--a feature of the evening that women, at least, would not have
missed for the world. He sang it through, and when he reached the last
triumphant strain excitement was at hysterical height:

  “But all through the mountains thunder-riven,
      And up from the rocky steep,
   There rose a cry to the gate of heaven,
     ‘Rejoice! I have found my sheep!’
      And the angels echoed around the throne,
     ‘Rejoice! for the Lord brings back His own!’”

There was a chorus of amens. “Bless the Lord!” shouted one brother;
“Praise His name!” exclaimed another. There were groans and
inarticulate cries. A woman uttered a piercing shriek, and falling
prone upon the floor in the aisle, lay there like a log. No one heeded
her; she had the “power” and would come to herself in good time.
Breathing was short and quick; faces were flushed; women and girls wept
silently, or with hysterical sobs, as their temperaments constrained
them; there was a rhythmical swaying of bodies; some one prayed loudly
but no one heard; the amens, the groans, and the bless-God’s were still
louder. Althea, half terrified by the tempest of emotion about her,
her self-control broken at last, sobbed convulsively.

A mother in Israel knelt beside her and entreated her to open her heart
and let love and forgiveness come in. The old man at the mourners’
bench rose with a joyful shout and announced that he felt to rejoice
that he had once more been anointed with the oil of gladness and had
obtained forgiveness for his sins.

“Come let us anew our journey pursue” began a voice near by, and the
congregation took up the strain.

The young man, who was a hard case, rose and stammeringly declared
that he had given his heart to God and hoped, by His help, to live a
Christian life from that time on.

As suddenly as Althea’s tears had begun they ceased and her excitement
was over. She rose to her feet just as her favorite hymn was being
sung--favorite, because of the pathetic minor cadences, not the words
whose sentiment was beyond her experience yet. Unconscious as a bird,
she joined in:

  “Just as I am, without one plea,
   But that Thy blood was shed for me,
   And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
   O Lamb of God! I come.”

The brethren and sisters near the front pressed around her with
congratulations. The pastor took her hand and patted it, his face
beaming.

“My daughter, I knew there was a blessing for you if you would take it.
Add your word of testimony now.”

“But I did not mean,” she said with startled emphasis. “I am not--I
have not had a blessing.”

They saw her lips move, but no one listened to her words, and the song
drowned them:

  “Hallelujah ’tis done! I believe on the Son,
   I am saved by the blood of the crucified One!”

Following this triumphant outburst came the joyful hymn:

      “How happy are they
       Who their Savior obey,
  And have laid up their treasures above!
       Tongue can not express
       The sweet comfort and peace
  Of a soul in its earliest love!”

She was counted among the converts. The pastor thanked God for her in
his prayer, and was a shade less enthusiastic in thanks for the rescue
of the backslider and the hard case.

Althea did not join in the singing of the doxology. All at once a
meaning seemed to come into the words which hardly had a meaning to her
before.

  “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

Could she really praise God? Praise Him for what?

As she passed slowly down the crowded aisle hands were stretched
from every side to grasp hers in the kindly Methodist fashion; many
a blessing was invoked upon her by the older brethren and sisters;
younger friends said they were glad she had become one of them. She
only smiled faintly and was silent. Silence seemed cowardly, but how
could she tell them that it was not true, that she had experienced no
change of heart, that she was the same in every way that she had been
the day before? Or could it be, and she grasped at the thought, could
it be that a change had come and she did not know it? She had been
excited, had wept and then become calm like all her newly converted
friends. Then her eyes fell upon the hard case as he met his mother--an
old woman with care-worn, tear-stained face, transfigured, now, with
joy. His reckless, defiant expression had given way to a look of--what
was it?--determination, gladness, high endeavor? She felt that he had
attained something she had not and her hopeful thought for herself
vanished.

Pressed by the crowd into the angle of a doorway she heard the young
evangelist say in confidential tone to a leading member: “In this
business you have to make a study of people. Different methods must be
worked on old and young men, old women and young ones. Not many’ll hold
out if you go at ’em in the right way. I felt sure I’d fetch the Hood
girl. You know they say I have a taking way with the ladies,” and he
laughed foolishly.

“I’m powerful glad ye fetched her, it makes the even one hundred and
fifty--I don’t count the other two who went for’ard to-night, they
won’t stick--and one hundred and fifty is a mighty good showing in
a town like this; they’ll build up the church amazing. Besides, her
father, Colonel Hood, ’ll be madder’n a hornet. He don’t b’lieve in
religious revivals. He’s ’Piscopal.”

The old man chuckled in an ungodly way. Althea, hurrying by, felt, with
the changing impulse of youth, that she hated them both, and, with
mist of romance suddenly and cruelly cleared, she saw the evangelist
as a lean, lank, commonplace, self-conceited youth, and an innocent,
girlish ideal of manliness was forever gone.

It was not a happy frame of mind for a new convert.

       *       *       *       *       *

A few months after the revival, which remains famous in the annals of
Greenbrier, life began for Althea Hood. This first experience of life
grew out of acquaintance with death. The destroyer came suddenly to her
father, not yet an old man. Under the shock the mother drooped and soon
followed her husband.

Althea, with the bewilderment which comes to the young who encounter
the great mystery, mourned and suffered as only the young do--without
the philosophy, the resignation, sometimes the peace and hope that
bereavement brings to age. Pious friends talked to her of the duty
of submission--she was still rebellious; of God’s love--she did not
know their meaning. The experience of the revival had left her without
religious feeling; it was as if her heart, which might have unfolded as
naturally to spiritual truth as a rose opens under sun and dew, had
ceased to grow, like a bud when torn apart by rough hands.

Life was not easy. Poverty was her portion, and a home with uncongenial
relatives until school days were past and she became a teacher among
new scenes and new people in the capital of the state.

There are teachers who profess to love their calling for its own sake.
Being truthful in other matters they must be believed in this. Althea
Hood was not one of these. She found teaching irksome, and when David
Phillips asked her to marry him she promptly said yes, and gladly gave
up her work.

Althea loved her husband with as deep an affection as she was capable
of entertaining at her stage of development.

In occasional moments of introspection Althea realized that she did not
have that absorbing, overwhelming affection for him that novelists’
heroines entertain for their chosen lovers, but satisfied herself with
the theory that such ardent emotions did not belong to real life.

David Phillips was a prosperous, energetic business man several years
older than she--a quiet, self-contained person who smiled indulgently
over his young wife’s æsthetic tastes, her fondness for poetry
and romance, her little outbursts of sentiment, her feminine ways
in general. If he did not seem to sympathize he, at least, did not
antagonize, and she was fairly content in her little daily round.
There were the housekeeping and social duties, the music, the reading,
the various odds and ends that fill the time of the woman who has
no ambitions outside her home, no consciousness of work to be done
there--these made up her routine. There were no ecstacies, no deep
emotions; it was a narrow life, and yet a day came when she looked back
to this period of peace as one of enviable bliss. There are but few
heights of joy in any life, and, in most, many depths of grief, so it
may be that the dead level of calm content, the absence of emotion, is
the happiness to be chosen--if choice were in human power.

Althea attended church during this time. It was respectable to do so;
it had been her early habit, and, besides, the beauty of the Episcopal
ritual pleased her. She could join in the prayer, “Have mercy upon us
miserable sinners,” with an intellectual pleasure in the sonorousness
of the response, but with as little understanding of heart as when the
brethren at the revival besought her to seek forgiveness for sin. But
though she did not comprehend, sometimes she wondered if all those who
joined in the prayers were as unmoved as she, and, if not, what secret
they possessed that she did not.

Then, one happy day, a new interest entered into her life. Her baby
came and her soul began to grow. It is not always so, though it is the
fashion to talk of mothers as gifted with a world of new spiritual and
moral graces. To those who look on, it too often seems that motherhood
means a narrowing of vision and an intensity of selfishness. But
Althea’s horizon widened. With her own child in her arms she looked out
upon a new world. Her eyes were suddenly opened to the needs of other
little ones. A vast pity filled her heart for the waifs, the hapless
creatures who are born to poverty and know suffering almost with their
first breath. “The cry of the children” appealed to her as it had never
done before. Her eyes once open, it was strange what vistas of both
joy and sorrow spread before them; she questioned why she had not seen
these things before.

Her little son waxed fat and fair. He was the delight of her days;
waking and sleeping he was in her dreams. She rejoiced in his infantile
graces, but her thoughts ran on and on and pictured him as he should
be as time went by--the sturdy lad loved by his playmates, the youth
excelling his companions in all noble undertakings, the strong, proud
man honored by the world, but through all the changes her own dear son,
still loving and true.

Her husband looked on, pleased at the sight of the maternal joy, the
look a little wistful at times, perhaps, because the wife was so lost
in the mother that he seemed half forgotten and quite unessential to
her happiness.

Then one terrible day the baby died, the little child who had lacked no
care that love could give. Out of the mother’s arms they took the fair
dimpled body for the last time; they folded the rose-leaf hands that
would flutter upon her bosom no more; they took him away, the life of
her life, and laid him under the flowers.

Is there agony for any human creature greater than that of the mother
bereaved?

She mourned in bitterness and without hope. Between her and the
“land that is fairer than day,” the land of which she once sang
so unthinkingly, rose a wall through which came no answer to her
resentful cries. In her wretchedness she turned against her husband.
She fancied that he was not sympathetic, that he really missed
their child but little. She brooded over this imaginary trouble in
addition to the genuine woe and brought herself into such a state of
antagonism that nothing he could do pleased her, and she withdrew
her companionship from him to a degree that left him bewildered and
helpless. He ascribed her irritability and coldness to her recent
bereavement. It was really one of those critical situations that occur
in most married lives before the art of living together in harmony has
been mastered. The little rift may close itself or become a chasm never
to be bridged.

David recommended change of scene. Would she go south and get the
early spring breezes? Would she come with him on a trip to New York
which business compelled him to take? Would she go anywhere her fancy
preferred and win back health to mind and nerves? These were questions
he asked her, but to all she coldly answered “no.” She “wished to be
alone,” she said, and he left her reluctantly.

Scarcely had he started on his journey when a thing happened the like
of which has been known to occur among people we hear of; people of
whom our friends know and, whispering, tell the tale. A woman called
to see Althea--a woman who had possibly been comely at one time in her
life but was no longer, a creature unprepossessing enough now. With her
was a child two or three years old. It was not a pleasant story she
told, but she told it in a way convincing to her hearer. She was the
woman, she said, who should have been David Phillips’s wife; the child
was hers and his, but he had cast them both off. They were in want;
would Mrs. Phillips help them?

She gave the woman money and sent her away in haste, telling her never
to return, and that she did not believe her story; but she never
doubted its truth for a moment. Would a woman, even a lost creature,
advertise her shame needlessly? She had never dreamed that her husband,
David Phillips, had ever been other than upright and honorable, and
had heard and thought but little in her life about evil of this sort.
But she had seen that David was changed; he was growing more quiet and
reticent every day. Perhaps he was losing his love for her, and he had
not seemed to care when the baby died. Her little son! And he was the
father of her son.

A whirlwind of rage swept over her at the thought that he had covered
the memory of this lost darling with shame, that he had brought
humiliation upon her. How could she go on and live in the same world
with him and with--those others. A wild impulse to take herself out of
it came to her; a vision of the river, deep and dark, rose temptingly.

Her wrath turned against the man who had deceived her. At times
she longed for him to be there that she might face him with her
knowledge of his iniquity; then, with revulsion of feeling, rejoiced
at his absence. No one seeing her then could charge her with being
unemotional. Vindictive passion stirred her one hour, shame weighed
her down the next, then followed a wave of grief for the vanished
days of peace. Life was not the joyous thing it had seemed in the old
Greenbrier days; now, she knew that it meant tears, and heartache,
and sorrows worse than death. She wrote brief notes in reply to her
husband’s letters. Why she postponed writing him that their lives
could not go on together she hardly knew, since she had determined to
send such a letter. One day she began the task. Before she had finished
illumination came. She knew suddenly that she loved the man she was
preparing to put out of her life--loved him in spite of his sins, of
his wrong to herself, loved him with an intensity she had not dreamed
of when she married him. It was not the love she had read of and had
not thought to experience, it was a thousand times stronger. She did
not want it so; she resented the truth and would have denied it to
herself but could not.

For days she fought with her impulses, and then resisted them no
longer. She was too frank and transparent to dream of concealing her
knowledge of the wretched secret, and, besides, she had conceived a
plan whose carrying out involved mutual explanation and consultations.

With trembling haste, now that she had resolved upon a course, she
wrote the letter telling him her story of the woman and child, of her
grief and resentment, and, finally, of her love and willingness to
forgive and receive him back. Then she added--it was the crowning bit
of self-sacrifice--“I want to provide for the child; if you like, I
will find it and bring it home.”

She sent the letter and waited. With all her spirit of forgiveness and
her impatience for his return she was not unmindful of the fact that
she was doing an unusual thing, one he would have no right to expect, a
truly Christian act. Indeed, the spirit of condescension, of goodness
stooping to the sinner, was manifest in the letter.

She did not know where the woman and child might be found, but spent
those days of waiting in wandering about a quarter of the city she had
known but little of, thinking that by chance she might find them. Once
she caught a glimpse of the woman in a passing street car--a hard-faced
creature in tawdry garb she looked in the pitiless sunlight.

Hurrying home, a little belated, one evening, she was driven by a
sudden spring shower to the nearest shelter, which chanced to be a
dilapidated warehouse, hardly more than a shed, from whose open door
the sound of singing issued. By the dim and flickering light of a few
lanterns hung about she saw a motley company seated on improvised
benches, or standing next the wall. There were men who looked like
tramps and others, better clothed, who might be worse. There were women
who might be honest mothers of families, others who as surely were not.
Unwholesome looking children of various ages looked curiously on.

But one voice was heard; evidently the crowd was not familiar with the
words of the song. The man standing by an upturned box with a cheap
glass lamp upon it was the singer. “There Is a Fountain Filled With
Blood,” was the hymn; he sang one stanza through alone. As he began the
second a woman joined in in a thin, uncertain soprano:

  “The dying thief rejoiced to see
     That fountain in his day;
   And there may I, though vile as he,
     Wash all my sins away,
   Wash all my sins away.”

With the third verse the woman stopped and sat down, sobbing loudly,
but not before Althea had seen her face; it was that of the woman she
was seeking.

The man by the box began to speak in a low, conversational tone. As he
stepped out of the shadow into the light of the lamp she recognized,
with a start of surprise, the “hard case” of the Greenbrier revival.
He did not look like a hard case now. He was shabbily dressed, but
his thin, dark face wore an expression of earnestness, of absorbed
interest, of what even seemed like love for the people about him.

“I was vile, like that thief,” he said; “I defied God. I cared
nothing for Him; I believed He cared nothing for me. I broke His laws
recklessly and rejoiced in my wickedness, or I pretended to rejoice,
though I could never quite quiet the pricks of conscience, for I
knew better. I had a mother who loved me and prayed for me. One day
I suddenly saw all my guilt and was without hope, but light came and
forgiveness even to me--to me!--to me!--and since that day ‘redeeming
love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.’”

Then he pleaded with his hearers in impassioned but simple language to
leave their sins and live good lives for the sake of the One who died
upon the cross, for their own sakes, for the sake of those about them.
It was not a sermon; it was not even a connected discourse; it was
neither learned nor logical, but it was a cry from the heart, and the
listeners knew it and were moved accordingly.

Althea knew that she had encountered again the mysterious something
which had passed her by. The hard case whose conversion at Greenbrier
had been so lightly regarded that he was not counted in by the
revivalists when they “made up their jewels,” had found there the
spiritual gift that made him a new man. Sometimes she had suspected
that those who professed to have consciously won this blessing deceived
themselves, but there was something genuine here. But she could not
speculate on this now. She stepped to the side of the yellow-haired
girl and touched her arm.

“Where is your baby?” she whispered. The girl looked up with red eyes,
stupidly. “My baby?” she repeated wonderingly, and then comprehended.
Through the artificial color on her cheeks a genuine red showed. She
dropped her head and then lifted it and looked straight in Althea’s
eyes.

“I have no baby, lady; I never had. I was just fooling you. I wanted
money. I never knew your husband only by name, and he never saw or
heard of me, I reckon. I read in the paper that he’d gone to New York.
I wanted money, and I’d seen you, and I guessed you were, well--an easy
mark, and so I fixed up the story. I thought you looked, too, as if you
had no sympathy for such as me, and maybe that made me pick on you to
give you a little trouble instead of another. You didn’t know a body
could be so wicked, did you? The baby is Mrs. Caffrey’s, across the
street. His mother’s good to me and lets me take care of him when she
goes washing. I’ve been a bad girl, lady, but I’m going to be better.
I’ll pay you back that money some day.”

But Mrs. Phillips was gone. She flew across the street. The door of the
two-room shanty was open and she stepped in after a hasty knock. The
baby--she would have known it anywhere--lay asleep on a bed; a woman
stood at a table ironing.

“Are you Mrs. Caffrey, and whose baby is this?” asked the visitor.

“Oim Mrs. Caffrey, and thot boy is mine, born in howly wedlock, av ye
plaze, an’ wud have a father this blessed minute av ut hadn’t bin for
the haythenish shtame cars thot wudn’t shtop to rouse up a man who’d
set down on the thrack to rest as he was comin’ from a wake. An’ phwat
wud ye be likin’ to know for, ma’am?”

“It isn’t Maggie Miller’s baby?”

“Maggie Miller--the likes av her! My little Patsy asked av his mother
was an ondacent famale--him that had an honest father married to his
mother by the praste. Och, the impident question! Maggie, she’s got no
baby, betther’s her luck. Not thot Maggie’s so bad, poor body. She’s
good to little Patsy, an’ she’s over now helpin’ thot preacher man
sing the hymns she used to hear in the counthry when she was a betther
gurrl. She’d be betther askin’ the Howly Mother to shpake for her, an’
be confessin’ her sins to Father Ryan; but av this warehouse religion
kapes her from divilmint it’s not the likes av me to shpake ill av it.
But phwat is it, leddy?”

The lady, with a strange look on her face, apologized confusedly for
her visit and hurried up the street, Mrs. Caffrey peering after her and
talking volubly to herself. Her mind was in a tumult. She had condemned
her husband on the first charge against him, without question and
without giving him a chance for defense. She had emphasized the injury
by offering to extend pardon to him. Pardon! When she was the one to
need forgiveness! And he was away and she wanted to see him at once.

In the morning came a message. There had been a railroad accident at
a junction fifty miles away. David Phillips had been seriously hurt.
Would she come?

She was on the train in an hour. It seemed years since the calm,
uneventful period of her early married life when she had sometimes
fancied that she was born with a limited capacity for emotion. She knew
better now; depths had been sounded and were stirred. She had learned
what love and suffering meant, and more suffering was before her. The
thing that most bewildered her was being suddenly and unquestionably
in the wrong. She had been accustomed always to be right, or to think
herself so. She had never been a suppliant to God or man. She wondered
if she had been self-righteous, and was filled with sudden humility.
She was ready to humble herself before man, at least. The train did not
move fast enough. Would David forgive her? Would she reach him in time?

She found him at a farm-house with a broken leg and many bruises, but
he would live. She had long explanations to make, but as she knelt by
his side could only gasp:

“I was wrong; it was not true; I was mistaken.”

He drew her face to his, and she knew pardon was hers, and love.

“It hurt me, sweetheart, that you believed the story,” he whispered,
faintly, “but when you were ready to take me back in spite of what
you believed, when you could forgive such a wrong, I knew you loved
me--and--and I had been afraid.”

He closed his eyes with a look of utter peace and the doctors decreed
silence, but she sat by his side through the day, nor knew that the
hours were long.

The miracle of spring was being wrought upon the world. But yesterday
the trees had been bare; to-day in the sunshine their buds had burst
into green, the peach trees were pink with bloom, the dandelions shone
yellow in the grass. A sense of growth, of transformation, was in the
very air.

What comes so suddenly to buds and flowers may come to the human soul.

Under the sod and through the harsh reign of frosts and snows the way
had been prepared for the wonder of the trees. Motherhood, bereavement
and tears, injured love and humiliation, and the later happiness had
done their silent work upon the woman nature. The time had come for a
new birth.

In the dusk she left David and wandered down a grassy lane. In the
western sky beyond the broad prairie, the gorgeous tints of the sunset
faded into blue and pearl. The soft, damp air brought the smell of
the fresh earth from the newly plowed field; a spicy odor from a wild
apple tree, now a mass of pale pink, was wafted to her. A robin chirped
sleepily among the young maple leaves overhead. The tender, elusive
charm of the season of growth was all about her. But was it only this
that so moved her, she vaguely wondered. She had known the joy of
spring before, and it was not like this. Her soul seemed lifted up. She
felt dimly that a greater glory than she had known was just beyond.

Inside the open door of a little cottage down the lane a woman sat by a
lamp sewing and singing. Her voice rose sweet and clear:

  “Just as I am--though tossed about.
   With many a conflict, many a doubt,
   With fears within and foes without--
   O Lamb of God, I come!”

All her life she had been familiar with the hymns that expressed the
thoughts of the world seeking God--hymns of penitence, of agony, of
peace and praise, of ecstatic worship--and she had not known their
meaning. All at once light came. She lifted up her arms.

“O Lamb of God! O Lamb of God!” she whispered. The cloud that had
obscured her spiritual sight lifted. She saw herself an imperfect human
creature, but, with all her faults and frailties, an atom of the divine
essence; her little life a part of the divine plan; her sorrows and
trials the discipline inflicted by love. Before her suddenly appeared
her lost child, the child she had mourned without hope, a glorified
vision. Its baby hands beckoned her; its sweet lips smiled. Love for
child and husband, the old earthly love, filled her bosom with a power
she had not known, but there was a love greater than this. Could that
be hers, also?

She tried to pray, but could not form her thoughts. Was that a touch
upon her hair, a whisper in her ear? Surely she heard the words:

“Come unto Me all ye that are heavy laden.” She stood trembling as in a
holy presence. Her face turned toward the sky.

“O Lamb of God--O Lamb of God, I come.”

He heard in heaven. Joy enfolded her as a garment. Divine peace fell
upon her. Her soul was born.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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