The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Woman of Yesterday, by Caroline Atwater Mason

A Woman of Yesterday

BY

CAROLINE A. MASON

AUTHOR OF “A MINISTER OF THE WORLD,” “THE MINISTER OF CARTHAGE,” “A WIND FLOWER,” ETC.

“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.”

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

1900

Copyright, 1900, by

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith

Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

Our share of night to bear,

Our share of morning,

Our blank in bliss to fill,

Our blank in scorning.

Here a star, and there a star,

Some lose their way.

Here a mist, and there a mist,

Afterwards—day!

Emily Dickinson.

Contents

BOOK I
MORNING

CHAPTER I

I rise and raise my claspèd hands to Thee!

Henceforth, the darkness hath no part in me,

Thy sacrifice this day,—

Abiding firm, and with a freeman’s might

Stemming the waves of passion in the fight.

—John Henry Newman.

Where the Monk River makes its way through the mountain wall in one of the northern counties of Vermont, lies the small, white village of Haran. Although isolated and remote from the world, unknown and unconsidered beyond certain narrow limits, this village possessed, forty years ago, a local importance as being the county town, the seat also of a Young Ladies’ Seminary of some reputation, and an Orthodox church which boasted a line of ministers of exalted piety and scholarly attainment.

The incumbent in the year 1869 was the Rev. Samuel Mallison. His pastorate had now extended over twenty years, and he was reverenced far beyond the bounds of his parish for learning and godliness.

It was a June Saturday night in that year, and the hour was late. In the low-roofed garret of the parsonage of Haran the figure of a tall, thin girl with a candle in her hand moved swiftly and softly to the head of a steep flight of stairs, which gave access to the garret from the floor below. Some one had called her name.

“Yes, father,” she returned, and a certain vibration of restrained feeling was perceptible in her voice, “it was I. I am sorry I disturbed you. Were you asleep?”

All was dark below, and no person could be seen, but again came the man’s voice.

“What were you doing, Anna?” was the question.

“Only putting away—” here the girl faltered and stopped speaking. The candle in her hand shook, and threw a strange, wavering shadow of her shape upon the long, rough timbers of the wall. The roof was so low where she stood that of necessity her head was bent sharply forward. The outline of her shoulders was meagre and angular; her arms and body had neither the grace of a girl nor the curves of a woman; they were simply lean and long. There was something of loftiness, and even of beauty, in the face, but the cheeks were hollow, the lines all lacking in softness. The ensemble was grave and strenuous for a girl of eighteen.

She began again.

“I was nailing up that box of books, you remember. I thought now, you know, I ought to do it.”

Something like a groan seemed to float up from the darkness below. There was no other reply for a moment, and then the father’s voice said slowly:—

“To take back later such an action is a greater violation of the moral nature than to avoid performing it. If it has been given you as duty, it is well done, but be very sure.”

A smile, brooding, and even sad, altered the girl’s face as she reflected for a little.

“I am very sure,” she said softly, but without hesitation.

“Then, good night. Sleep, now. Let to-morrow take thought for the things of itself, Anna.”

“Good night, father.” The little lingering of her voice on the last word gave to it the force of a term of endearment, which it would not have occurred to Anna Mallison at that time to add.

A door closed below, presently, and the house was still.

The garret extended over the entire house, and its unlighted spaces seemed to stretch indefinitely on all sides from the little circle of light shed by the one candle. The place was wholly open, save that at the front gable, below the highest point in the peak of the roof, a partition of planed but unpainted boards enclosed a small chamber. The narrow door of it stood open.

As Anna approached this door she cast her glance to a far, dim corner, where in stiff order a wooden box of moderate size stood upon a chest. She crossed to the place, passed her hand over the lid of this box, satisfied herself that it was firmly and evenly fastened, and then gathered up some nails and a hammer, which she put away on the ledge formed by a square, projecting rafter. This accomplished, she came back and entered the chamber, which was sparely enough furnished, undressed, put out her candle, and sat down in the open gable window.

Even if to-morrow were left to take thought for the things of itself, there were many yesterdays which she wished to meet to-night. And for that to-morrow,—she was hardly ready to leave all thought of it yet, for she regarded it as the most solemn and important crisis in her eighteen years of life. On the Sabbath, which a few hours would bring, she was to be received into the village church of which her father was pastor, and this event would signify that all her previous existence, the time past of her life, was a closed and finished chapter, and that henceforth all things were to become new. Life was to be furnished now with new pleasures, new pains, new motives, new mental occupations. A somewhat sterner and sadder life she fancied it, full of self-examination, sacrifice, and high endeavour, for she felt it must suffice her to have wrought her own will in the past, “the will of the flesh,” as her father and the Apostle Paul termed it; a phrase which had but a vague import to her own understanding, and yet exerted a powerful influence upon her conscience.

To her mind there was an intimate connection between that now sealed box and “the will of the flesh.”

It was when she was fifteen years old that Anna had discovered one day among the ranks of chests and trunks which lined the outer stretches of the garret, this small box of books, thickly covered with dust. At first she had been greatly surprised, since books were the things her father most earnestly desired and needed, his scanty collection being quite insufficient for his use, and being helped out by no village library. Every book in the house had borne to Anna’s imagination a potent dignity and value, for each one embodied a persistent need, and represented an almost severe economy before its possession had been achieved.

And here were nearly thirty respectably bound volumes packed away for moth and dust alone to live upon—what could it mean? Had they been forgotten? Anna had devoured their titles with consuming wonder and curiosity, and with the ardour of the instinctive book-lover. Like Aurora Leigh, she had “found the secret of a garret room.”

There was a volume of Ossian,—heroic, sounding words caught her eye as she turned the rough, yellow leaves; Landor’s “Hellenics and Idylls”; a copy bound in marred, brown leather of Pope’s translation of the “Iliad,” published, she noted, in 1806, almost fifty years before she was born; the poems of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and of the earlier American poets; and a thin gilded volume of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence.”

Besides these were worn volumes of Plato, of Greek and Latin poets, and German editions of Faust and Nathan der Weise. At the bottom of the box Anna found a faded commonplace book with her father’s name inscribed on the first page, and the date 1840. It contained translations of Greek poetry which she supposed to have been made by her father, although of this she was not sure. She did not read them, for she felt that she had no right to explore anything so personal without his permission. This scruple, however, did not extend to the books which filled the box, although Anna felt rather than understood that they had not been packed away together thus by accident, or left by forgetfulness. She perceived that they denoted some decisive experience in her father’s inner life, that spiritual personality of the man, which possessed to the young girl’s thought an august and even mysterious sacredness.

Whatever these books had meant to him, and for whatever reason they had been exiled from his meagre library, they became to his daughter the most brilliant and alluring feature of a somewhat colourless girlhood, the charm of them enhanced by secrecy; for, with the reticence characteristic of the family life, Anna never alluded to her discovery. Neither did she ever remove these literary remains from their seclusion in the garret; this would have seemed an act of violence, but around the box which held them she formed a kind of enclosing barricade of chests and old furniture. The little nook thus formed she regarded as her place of refuge, of private and unguessed delight. A candle at night, and rays of light piercing the wide cracks under the eaves by day, made reading easy to her clear young eyes, even in the dust and dusk of the dim place. And so for two years, through biting cold and searing heat, Anna fed her mind and heart on the poetry which had ruled her father’s generation, unknown and unsanctioned by any one. Then one day came a strange event; she never recalled it without a sense of unshed tears.

It was late one August afternoon, and, her day’s work faithfully performed, Anna had gone up to her garret room to make her simple toilet for the evening meal. There were a few moments to spare, and, as usual, she hastened to her nook, and was soon deep in Prometheus, for Shelley just then controlled her imagination. Her father came into the garret behind her, a very unwonted thing, and Anna heard the sharp, scraping sound as he drew out from the recesses where it had stood for years, a small, brown, hair-covered trunk, studded with brass nails, forming the initials S. D. M. It had been his own during his college days, and had seen but little service since. One of Anna’s brothers was to start for college in a day or two, and the old trunk was to serve a second generation in its quest for learning.

Startled by the unusual noise, Anna rose in her place, and, seeing her father, spoke to him, whereupon he crossed the garret to where she stood; a small, thin man, bent a little, with a pale brown skin, prominent eyes, and a dome-shaped head, the hair thin on the crown even to baldness, but soft and silken and long enough behind the ears to show its tendency to curl.

“What have you there, Anna?” Samuel Mallison had asked, peering with short-sighted, searching eyes between the bars of a battered crib which Anna had used as a part of her wall of partition.

“Poetry, father,” she had replied, handing him the book with eager, innocent enthusiasm; “oh, it is very beautiful! I love it so.”

Her father, looking at the book, flushed strangely, and a sudden, indescribable change passed over his face. Pushing aside the rubbish which separated him from Anna, he was immediately at her side, and in silence had bent over the box. He had drawn it nearer the light, and seemed looking on the side for some sign or inscription. There was a piercing eagerness in his eyes. Then Anna had noticed what had escaped her hitherto, the initials, S. D. M., followed by the reference, Matthew v. 29, and the date, 1848, written in ink on the lower corner, dim with dust stains and faded with the processes of time.

Still her father had not spoken, but, sitting down on a chest, he had bent over the box, and had drawn from it one after the other the buried books, with a hand as gentle as if he were touching the tokens of a dead love. Anna had stood aside, silent and abashed, a strange tightening sensation in her throat. Her father seemed to have forgotten her. At last he had reached the old commonplace book underneath all. The flush on his face had deepened, and Anna had thought there were tears in his eyes as he glanced rapidly over its yellowed pages, with the verses in fine, stiff writing and faded ink. Then he had closed the book with a long sigh, had laid it carefully back in its place, and rising, had walked up and down in the low garret for many minutes in some evident agitation.

A sense of guilt and apprehension had fallen upon Anna in her perplexity, but when, in the end, he had come and stood beside her, there was a great gentleness on his face.

“And so you love those books, my child?” he had asked her briefly.

“Yes, father.”

“I understand. I loved them, but I gave them up—twenty years ago, almost. They became a snare.” He had been, then, silent a moment, while a peculiar conflict of thought was reflected in his face. “Yes,” he continued, as if convinced of something called in doubt, “they became a snare—to me—but for you I cannot decide. It may not be for you to drink of my cup. Who knows?” and with that he had turned and left her, and left the garret, the trunk forgotten; and Anna had laid the books back, soberly and with a great heartache, almost as if she were laying dust dear and sacred in its coffin.

The matter had never been alluded to again between the father and daughter, but Anna knew that she was free to read, and so read on. And still her unalloyed happiness in her hidden treasure was gone. A question, a suspicion, a disturbing doubt, was now attached to it. It was not wrong to read this poetry, but plainly there was a more excellent way, a higher ground which her father had reached, and which, with her inborn passion for perfection, she, too, must some day attain. Slowly and silently this conviction matured within her.

And so to-night, on the eve of her day of supreme consecration, Anna, in her turn, had buried out of her sight, as her father had before her, the poetry into which she had been pouring her young awakening life, silently and secretly, but with a fervour which the reader of many books can never know. They had spoken to her in mighty voices, these great spirits, so free, joyous, and mysterious in their power; but they were not the voice of God, and therefore she must listen to them no more. This had been a tree of life to her, but its fruit was forbidden. The axe must thenceforth be laid unflinchingly at the root of the tree. Such was the initial impulse, single, stern, and absolute, of Anna’s awakening religious nature.

Theologians in the sixties did not talk of the immanence of God.

CHAPTER II

Children of men! the unseen Power whose eye

Forever doth accompany mankind,

Hath looked on no religion scornfully

That man did ever find.

Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?

Which has not fall’n on the dry heart like rain?

Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man:

Thou must be born again!

—Matthew Arnold.

Anna Mallison’s working theory of the human family in its moral and religious relations (and she recognized no other as of importance) was as destitute of shading as a carpenter’s house plan. Indeed, her hypothesis unconsciously bore a certain pictorial resemblance to the ground plan of a colonial house—a hall running through the middle with two rooms on each side! There was, straight through the centre of her moral universe, a wide, divisive, neutral passage in which dwelt uneasily all people who had not been regenerated, but who had not rejected salvation formally and forever. Here were such heathen and young children, and such thoughtless and unhardened impenitent as might yet listen to the divine call. At the right of this central hall, following Anna’s scheme of the race, were two wide rooms: the first bright with a subdued and varied light; the second, opening beyond the first, overflowing with undimmed and celestial radiance. The first was the Church, the place of saints on earth, the second was heaven, easily reached from the first. But the entrance to the first room from the central space was obscure, difficult, and mysterious, and few were they who found it.

At the left of the great hall were likewise two vast connecting chambers. A wide door stood ever open into the first, through which a throng continually passed. Here were dimness and dread, lighted only by false and baleful gleams; and in the room beyond, the blackness of darkness, and that forever.

This first room was the abode of those who deliberately chose the world and turned away from God, whose fitting end was in the awful gloom of that place of torment and wailing beyond.

Above the right-hand division, high and lifted up, dwelt in unthinkable glory the God of her fathers, holy, but to her subconscious sense, ineffective, else why were earthquakes, murders, prisons, insanities? and why, indeed, those populous chambers on the left?

Over them presided a rapid, hurtling Spirit, always engaged in her imagination in falling like lightning from heaven. He was Miltonic necessarily, but also much like one of Ossian’s heroes, and, on the whole, a more imposing force than the Creator whose power he seemed so successfully to have usurped.

In fine, Anna believed in two gods, an infinite spirit of good, and an infinite spirit of evil, although she would have called herself strictly monotheistic.

The neutral space between the realms of the Good and Evil was the battleground of these two mighty spirits. Here prophets, apostles, and preachers were calling loudly and untiringly upon all men to repent, and to find the entrance to the company of the redeemed. From time to time some swift and valorous spirit of man or angel would even make excursion into the dim outer room on the left, and bring thence a scorched and spotted soul, saved, but so as by fire. But such events were rare and not to be presumed upon or expected.

It was all perfectly clear to Anna, the classification and grouping precise, exact, and satisfactory. Black was very black; and white, very white. She had herself until very recently belonged in the neutral hall, but she now believed herself to be “experiencing religion,” a fine old phrase, which was in effect to be pressing successfully through that obscure opening which led into the outer court of heaven.

But just here there was a weakness in the system. Theologians and preachers like her father boldly declared the contrary, and asserted that the processes of entering the kingdom of heaven were as marked and unmistakable as the great general divisions of saints and sinners. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus was always depicted as norm and type. To be sure, all the processes were not in each case marked by equal distinctness, but the logical order was the same. In the first stage of the progress the sinner was said to be “under conviction” or “experiencing a sense of sin”; and the more bitter and overwhelming was this first phase, the better was the diagnosis from the professional point of view. At this point the penitent was to realize that, whatever his former life had been, even if a life of prayer and unselfish devotion, it had been wholly displeasing to God, and that, as tending to self-righteousness, such a life was peculiarly dangerous. By nature, there could not be in the human character any real moral excellence, or what was more technically known as “evangelical virtue.”

All this Samuel Mallison had recently set forth in a series of sermons on “Human Depravity; its Degree, its Extent, its Derivation, and its Punishment,” which had been considered of extraordinary value and merit.

But it was just here that his daughter, for all the logic and learning to which she was privileged to listen, stumbled and stood still. For weeks her spiritual development appeared to be arrested. She was silent, uncommunicative, and disappointing to all the older members and office-bearers in her father’s church.

“What is the matter with Anna?” was the frequent question put to Mrs. Mallison in the parish. “Why don’t she come out?”

“Oh, she is under conviction all the time,” would be the reply, with a somewhat decided shake of the head. “We let her alone pretty much, Mr. Mallison and I. It isn’t best to say too much, you know, when anybody has reached that point. We can see that conscience is working with her.”

The questioner would depart with the belief that Anna’s conviction was of an unusually profound and interesting nature, like a disease with a complication; but if they had asked Anna herself, she might have told them that it was from the absence of this conviction, rather than from its intensity, that she was suffering. She was too honest to assume a virtue, or even a vice, if she had it not, and seek it as she would, a poignant sense of sin did not visit her. She had cast about her, and searched her own heart and life in a distinct embarrassment at finding so few clearly defined and indubitable sins of which to plead guilty; she had even secretly reproached her parents in her heart for having insisted upon an almost faultless standard of daily living, since conformity to their will seemed to be in itself a snare, and to place her at a distinct disadvantage now as compared with the flagrant sinner. Why had they taught her to pray, since she was now told that the prayers of the unregenerate were displeasing to God?

She used to sit during the Sunday morning service and look at the neighbours in their pews around her, at their children and grandchildren, and at the members of her own family, seeking to find a person whom she was conscious of having wronged, or toward whom she cherished a feeling of enmity or envy. The only result of this species of self-examination had been to bring to her remembrance a childish, half-forgotten grudge against a girl with fair curls, Malvina Loveland by name, who had once ridiculed her at school, for wearing one of Lucia’s dresses made over. Anna drew this dim and fading fault remorselessly up to the light, and formally and forever forgave the unconscious “Mally.” But the longing for a deep experience of the “exceeding sinfulness of sin” remained unsatisfied. Like many another sincere and seeking soul of that day, she yearned in vain to fill out in its rigid precision of sequence that spiritual programme which the theologians prescribed.

Her father gave her free access to the precious, if narrow, resources of his library, and she read the Edwards, both elder and younger, the elder Dwight, Bunyan, Baxter, and the rest, in place of her dear pagans whose end she now clearly foresaw. She read of the “depraved moral conduct of every infant who lives so long as to be capable of moral action”; she read that “the heart of Man, after all abatements are made for certain innocent and amiable characteristics, is set to do evil in a most affecting and dreadful manner”; and that “the darling and customary pleasures of men furnish an advantageous proof of the extreme depravity of our nature.”

“Was I a very wicked little child?” she asked her mother one day.

“Wicked!” cried her mother, artlessly, resenting the thought. “You were like a little angel, Benigna, even from the very first. So was it that I gave you my sainted mother’s name. Even your looks were all love; all saw it, and strangers too. You a bad child, indeed who never gave your mother a harsh word or a heartache since you were born!”

Anna Benigna, for so her mother called her, bent and kissed her mother, a rare caress in that family.

“I am glad I pleased you,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes, and as she walked without further word from the room, her mother perceived the significance of question and reply, and pondered long.

Then suddenly, as ice breaks up in the spring, and the freshet bears down everything before it, a moment of crisis and perception came, one of those moments which, albeit varying with each human experience, remains in each supreme.

Under all her outward conformity to law and love, Anna realized now that there had lain for years a deep, half-conscious resentment toward the Creator, a cold dislike of God. How could he look upon her with approval while such a disposition remained in her heart? She had loved the human; she had not loved the divine.

A sense of the absolute and eternal Good from which she was alienated, to which she was antagonistic, smote her with force. She now seemed to herself in the presence of God as a speck of dust against a dazzling mountain of snow—incalculably small, hatefully impure. A passion of contrition and surrender mastered her; vague regenerating fires tried her soul; and then came an exhaustion of spirit, as of a child whom its Father has chastened, and who is reconciled and at peace. This succession of emotions she was able to recall distinctly as long as she lived.

This had been a month ago. Anna had recounted these spiritual exercises to her father, and he had told her that they denoted conversion, and advised her presenting herself to the church for admission. This she had done, but when he asked her, further, to what cause, if any, she ascribed this past sense of enmity against God, she had been silent.

However, her father was fully satisfied. Like a physician with a well-declared fever of a certain type, he felt it to be a clear case. Considering his child’s blameless innocence of life, it was an unexpectedly satisfactory one from the theologian’s point of view.

As she sat now in the warm gloom of the June night, with the dark trees murmuring softly under the wind, and the sky with many stars bending near, only the gable jutting above her head to keep its splendours off, Anna travelled back in thought to her childish days and found there the answer to her father’s question.

CHAPTER III

Nay, but I think the whisper crept

Like growth through childhood. Work and play,

Things common to the course of day,

Awed thee with meanings unfulfill’d;

And all through girlhood, something still’d

Thy senses like the birth of light,

When thou hast trimmed thy lamp at night

Or washed thy garments in the stream.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Until her twelfth year Anna had not encountered the severities of Calvinistic theology, Samuel Mallison having intrusted the spiritual guidance of his children, during their earlier years, to their mother. Anna was the youngest child. Mrs. Mallison was of a German Moravian family who, coming from Pennsylvania, had settled on the eastern boundary of New York early in the century. She possessed the serene and trustful temperament of her people. The subtleties of her husband’s religious system were beyond her simple ken; she loved to sing the hymns of Zinzendorf, as she sewed and spun and ordered her household in true German Hausfräulichkeit, a sincere, devout, affectionate soul who had found the tone of the frigid little north New England community more chilling than she dared to own.

From her Anna inherited her warm impulses, her abounding delight in nature, her susceptibility to the simplest impressions of sweet and common things. Gulielma Mallison understood the child when she came running to her one early spring morning from the parsonage garden, where the dark brown earth was freshly upturned and young green things were springing, and had tears in her eyes, veiling wonder, and a shy thrill of joy in all her small birdlike frame, and had asked, her hands clasped upon her breast:—

“Why am I so happy, mother, that I can’t bear it? Why does something ache so here?”

“It is because thou art in God’s beautiful world, little Benigna,” the mother had said, “and thou art God’s child. He is near thee, and thy heart yearns to him. Be glad in God.”

In his study, through the open door, Samuel Mallison heard these words, and, whatever his perplexity as to their doctrinal inconsistency, he did not gainsay them. From his point of view at this time little Anna was entirely out of relation to God and out of harmony with his being, and it would have been impossible for her to please him. But just then an old question, which would not always down, had forced its way to his mind—What if there were a wrong link somewhere in the logic? What if the love of God were something greater than the schoolmen guessed?

But on a certain winter night Anna’s childhood died, and the battle of her life began.

Well she remembered every physical sensation even, accompanying that experience.

It had been a snowy Saturday night, and she had come in from the warm kitchen where, in a round washing-day tub, drawn close to the hot stove, she had taken a merry, splashing bath, after the regular order of exercises for Saturday night at the parsonage. Her older sister, Lucia, had presided over the function, and when it was accomplished she had been closely wrapped in a pale straw-hued, homespun flannel sheet, over her nightclothes, preparatory to facing the rigours of the bitterly cold hall and stairs, and the little bedroom above.

So she had trailed into the living-room, where the boys and her parents were gathered around a large table. The room was not very brightly lighted by the single oil lamp, but a great fire crackled loudly in the stove, and the rattle of the hard snowflakes on the window panes and the whistling of the wind outside gave keen emphasis to the sense of cheerful safety and comfort.

Warm and languid from the heat of her bath, Anna had sat down on a low seat and dropped her head on her mother’s knees, feeling an indescribable sensation of happy lassitude and physical well-being. She recalled how interested she had been in the shrivelled whiteness of her own long, little fingers, and how soft and woolly that dear old blanket had felt; it was on her bed now, with her mother’s maiden name worked in cross-stitch in one corner, in pale pink crewel.

They had been waiting for her, to proceed with the evening devotions, and her father had at once begun to read a part of a sermon from one of the standard divines who, though somewhat out of fashion in the centres of progressive thought, were still held infallible in these remoter regions.

The subject was “The Benevolence of God in Inflicting Punishment,” from a work entitled “The Effects of the Fall.”

Anna did not listen very closely for a time, but presently her attention was caught and held. The writer was seeking to prove that “the damnation of a large part of the human race directly subserved the general happiness of mankind and the glory of God.” That even if he had saved none of the sons of men, but “had left them to the endless torment they had so justly deserved,” and “had glorified himself in their eternal ruin, they would have had no cause to complain.” That the best of what were illusively known as “good works,” were “no more than splendid sins.” That no doubt, if any heathen could be found who was truly virtuous and holy, who loved God in the strictly evangelical sense, as infinitely great, wise, and holy, and who kept all his perfect law without infraction, such heathen might be saved. But as there was no evidence that any such heathen ever had existed, or ever could exist, there was no reason to believe that any had been saved. As the heathen still formed a vast proportion of the population of the globe, and as only a small fraction of those nations commonly known as Christian had actually and experimentally come under the law of grace, the only conclusion possible was, that a vast proportion of the human family throughout all ages and down to the present time “were serving the purposes of God’s infinite wisdom and benevolence in their creation in endless misery or torment.”

The triumphant logic of the old divine, which Mrs. Mallison secretly found discomfiting but accepted calmly enough considering its terrific import, and which her husband read with the sad and solemn pathos of one to whom it was a mournful verity, had a curious effect upon little Anna. For the first time the real meaning of familiar words like these smote full and sharp upon her mind, and in the physical lassitude of the moment acted like a bodily injury upon her. She grew whiter and whiter, and she touched and grasped the soft blanket about her with powerless fingers, to convince herself that she could feel and find what was familiar, faintness being an absolutely unknown sensation.

Suddenly, with an imperious impulse, and a singular effect of childish courage which dared to do an unheard-of thing, she rose and said with perfect apparent composure, breaking in upon the reading:—

“I am too tired to stay here any longer, I am going upstairs now,” and so left the room. Her mother had watched the slight figure in its close drapery with anxious eyes until the door closed upon her, but had not thought of following. This reading was a solemn function not to be lightly interrupted.

Upstairs, Anna had betaken herself hastily to bed, and lay there, motionless, somewhat alarmed at her own revolutionary action, and with little to say when questioned by her mother presently.

But when the house was still, and the night advancing to its mid depth of darkness, the child, still lying with wide, wakeful eyes, cried silently with a piteous consciousness of desolation and sorrow. A sense of the bitterness of a world where millions of helpless human spirits were shut up to endless agony had overwhelmed her, and a spirit of rebellion against God who willed it so for his own glory had taken intense possession of her thought.

In the passion of her childish resentment and grief and worn by the unwonted wakefulness, her breath came in long, quivering sobs which were heard in the next room, and brought her father to her side.

She could answer nothing to his questions, but he found her hands cold, and her pulse weak and rapid.

“You did not eat your supper to-night, little Anna,” he said gently, remembering her faint appetite for the frugal fare of the parsonage table.

Anna only sobbed more convulsively. She had expected severity and blame, feeling verily guilty in spirit.

Samuel Mallison said nothing more, but Anna, wondering, heard him go downstairs, heard doors open and shut, and then silence fell again. Ten minutes later her father stood again by the bedside in the icy chill of the winter midnight in the unwarmed chamber, and he had brought a bowl of broth, hot and smoking, bread, too, and, most unwonted pampering, a piece of the rare poundcake, kept for company and never given to children except on high holidays.

Neither of them spoke, but Samuel Mallison, for all the cold, sat on the bed’s edge while Anna ate and drank, drawing her frail little body to rest against his own.

The broth was salted for Anna by her tears, and the long-drawn sobs, coming at intervals, half choked her as she ate, but she was comforted at last and fortified against the woe of the world, and she pressed her cheek against her father’s arm with a sense of the infinite sweetness of fatherhood warm at her heart. As she finished the last crumb of cake, she thought:—

“If only God had been kind like my father! I was naughty, and that only makes him good to me and pitiful.” But she said nothing, only looked with a world of wondering gratefulness in her large innocent eyes up into her father’s face, finding some perplexity that cake and broth should reconcile her to the everlasting torment of the majority of mankind, but wisely concluding to make the best of it since such seemed to be the effect, and, as it was now undoubtedly high time, to go to sleep.

Finding her bright and well next morning, the Mallisons, father and mother, had thought little more of that Saturday night revolt, which they, indeed, had not known as such; but, as she looked back over her years to-night, in her gable window, Anna perceived that from that time there had always been in the secret place of her heart a sense of enmity against a God who was not kind like her father. To-night she knew herself, at last, reconciled; faith had triumphed and declared that even the darkest decree of God’s great will must be right, since he was the absolutely Good. But her heart yearned with mighty yearning for the subjects of his just wrath, and as she knelt in the darkness and silence she gave herself with simple, unreserved sincerity to the service of the lost among men.

Rising from her knees, Anna felt a strange glow and exaltation of spirit. In her own personal life sin had been met and vanquished. Tremendous apostolic assertions buoyed her soul upward like strong wings: “free from the law of sin and of death,” “passed from death unto life,” “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” Thus she felt her finite linked to the infinite. Her spirit was suffused with thrilling and unspeakable joy; God was closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.

But, as she stood rapt and absorbed, there came up through the hush of the night from the dim street below a strange sound, and she was caught back by it, and listened painfully. It was a little child crying piteously.

Peering down through the clustering branches, below her window, Anna could discern by the dim light of the stars the shape of a woman, forlorn and spiritless, passing silently along the shadowed way. Behind her followed the crying child, with weary little feet stumbling at every stone. The woman carried something in her arms, hidden by an apron; she turned and looked at the child, and shook her head, but did not speak.

This woman, who moved abroad only at night, was the village outcast, and the child was her child, born in sin.

Vague and uncomprehended to Anna’s mind was the abyss into which this woman had fallen, but she felt it to be black and bottomless, and to place an everlasting separation between her and the good. She drew back from the window, a sharp pain, made of pity and horror, at her heart, sin embodied thus confronting her. She felt as Sir Launfal felt when he saw the leper.

Lying down to rest at last, Anna slept, in spite of spiritual ecstasies and sufferings, the sound sleep of a healthy girl who is fortunate enough to forget the ultimate destinies of human souls, her own with the rest, for certain favoured hours.

It was long before her sleep was disturbed by dreams, but an hour before sunrise she awoke with a pervading sense of exquisite happiness brought over with her from a dream just dreamed. It was a still dream of seeing, not of doing. She had seen the form of a man of heroic aspect, old rather than young, with a grey head, leonine and majestic, strong stern features, a glance mild and yet searching and subduing; a man imperial and lofty, and above his fellows, but whether as king or saint or soldier she could not guess. But here was made visible a power, a freedom, and a greatness for which her own nature, she felt in a swift flash of self-revelation, passionately cried out, which it had nowhere found, and to which it bowed in a curious delight hitherto unknown. This only happened: this mysterious personality, more than human, she thought, if less than divine, had looked kindly upon her, in her weak, childish abasement, and had shed into her eyes, and so into her heart, the impossible, inexplicable happiness with which she awoke. She did not sleep again. This waking consciousness enamoured her.

What did it mean? Anna asked herself all day. Was it a dream sent from God at this solemn hour of dedication? If so, what did it prefigure? Even at the sacramental feast, her first communion, that majestic head, with the controlling sweetness of the eyes upon her, came before her vision, and made her heart beat fast.

CHAPTER IV

The fiend that man harries

Is love of the Best.

—The Sphynx, R. W. Emerson.

Malvina Loveland, the girl whom Anna had found solace in forgiving for her childish offence, had “come out,” as Haran people said, at the same time with Anna.

This fact, and the compunction in Anna’s heart toward her early foe, had drawn the two girls together, and they became friends. They talked of the interests of the cause of religion, and read biographies together, or rather, Anna read aloud while her friend diligently produced lace work with a small shuttle, or hemstitched linen ruffles; but both cared less for these several occupations than for the sense of mingling their young, unfolding perceptions.

Anna had need of a friend; Lucia, her sister, was many years older, and had long ago married a farmer, and departed deeper into the hills, where she worked with the immoderate industry of New England women, bore many children, and lived a life into which Anna did not enter deeply. The Mallison boys were away from home, studying and working, and the parsonage was a silent place. Anna adored her father with the restrained ardour of her kind, and loved her mother with a great tenderness, but she was actively intimate with neither, and thus greatly alone.

Mally was noticeably pretty, and Anna thought her beauty angelic. She was capable, clever, quick, and impulsive, one of the women who can do anything they see done, strongly imitative and impressionable. She developed rapidly, while Anna matured slowly. Anna had nobleness, Mally had facility. Anna, beside Mally, looked uncomfortably tall, with her angular thinness and her dark, grave face. She had masses of lustreless brown hair, a clear brune skin like her father, and, like him, singularly fine hands. Her eyes were her mother’s, and her only beauty,—golden brown, and of limpid clearness.

To both these girls their religion was a system of prohibition and of an abnormal development of conscience. The negative, not the positive, side was uppermost to them. “Thou shalt not” was written over every device and desire which did not minister directly to the furtherance of the local conception of religion. Both were eager to grasp the positive side, to convert the world, to see Satan chained, and themselves to contribute to this desirable consummation; but they were doubtful how to begin. Both were ardent controversialists after the manner of their day, and Anna read systematic theology with her father with extraordinary relish.

They waited and wondered, each longing for her destiny to disclose itself decisively. But with Anna a hidden life budded beneath the surface, unknown even to Mally. The romantic and poetic impulses of her nature, no longer directly nourished by the poets whom she had put away from her by force, stirred in her heart, and fed themselves, in silence, on the life of nature, and on the delicate, evanescent imaginings of her awakening womanhood.

Below the surface of her conscious thoughts a strange inarticulate passion for power and freedom beat and throbbed, and would not be stilled, despite her quiet, conscientious conformity to the narrow conditions of the world about her. She did not know what freedom was, but she felt that she was not free; neither did she clearly know what the power meant for which she longed, but she felt the absence of it in every one she had ever met. It was mysterious, indefinable—once only had she encountered it, and that was in a dream.

Thus a nature simple and single, with all its forces apparently bent one way, and with few avenues, or none, by which to import conflicting influences, was, in fact, already incipiently subject to the complexities of instinct, of motive, and desire, which weave the bewildering network of human experience.

When Anna was twenty, an event occurred of much importance in its bearing on her life. Under the direction of an old friend of Samuel Mallison, the Rev. Dr. Durham of Boston, a general secretary for Foreign Missions, a series of meetings was held in Haran for the promotion of an interest in this cause. Dr. Durham was entertained, during the time of the convention, at the parsonage; he was a genial and kindly man, and became in his way an especial friend of Anna, in whom he manifested a marked interest.

From the country round about, during the week, men and women thronged to Haran; and at an evening meeting to be addressed by a woman who had been a missionary in India, the white meeting-house was filled. Many in the congregation had never seen a missionary; many more had never heard a woman speak in public. Curiosity ran high.

The speaker was a little sallow woman, in a plain and unbecoming grey gown, who stepped timidly to the edge of the platform, laying a small hand which trembled visibly on the cold mahogany pulpit, as if to conciliate it for her intrusion and to crave its support.

She spoke in a shrill crescendo, without the graces or arts of a skilled speaker, and she made no appeal to the emotions of the hearers. It was rather a dry and unimaginative account of the work done at an obscure mountain station, with statistics of no great impressiveness, and careful attention to accuracy of detail. But she had the advantage of sowing her seed on virgin soil. It was not important at that day and to those isolated and simple-minded people that the missionary should speak with enticing words, or attempt dramatic effect. She was herself there before them in flesh and blood, and no great time before she had been on heathen ground, had come into actual combat, face to face, with wild, savage men and strange, outlandish women, who knew not God, and who veritably and visibly bowed down to wood and stone.

For the hour, that little woman of weak bodily presence and commonplace intellect became the incarnation of Christianity seeking a lost world, and she herself was far greater to their thought than anything she could have said.

At the end of her report, for it was that rather than appeal or address, she told the story of a high-caste Hindu woman to whom she had sought to give the gospel message. This woman had turned upon her with grave wonder and had asked, “How long have you known this? about this Jesus?”

“Oh, for many years, all my life in fact.”

“Then,” said the woman, solemnly, “why did you not come to tell us before?”

Without comment or enlargement, having told of this occurrence, the speaker turned and walked shyly from the platform, leaving an unusual hush in the assembly, as if an event, a result of some sort, were waited for.

Toward the end of the church, where she was seated with her mother, Anna Mallison rose in her place, made her way out into the middle aisle, and then, with her head a little bent, but her face neither pale nor agitated, walked quietly to the foot of the platform. Samuel Mallison, who was seated with Dr. Durham behind the pulpit, rose and stood, just above, as if to receive her, looking down with solemn eyes. Some one who saw Anna’s face said that, as she looked up into that of her father thus bent above her, the smile which suddenly illuminated it was beyond earthly beauty. It was a look in which two human spirits, and those father and child, purged as far as might be of earthliness, met in angelic interchange, pure and high.

Turning about, thus facing the great congregation, Anna, who had never before spoken in a public gathering of any sort, however small, said in a voice which was clear and distinct, though not loud:—

“I wish to offer myself to this society to go, if they will send me, to some heathen people, to tell them that Christ has died to save them. I am ready to go at once, if it is thought best.”

The gravity and simplicity, and absence of self-consciousness, of the girl’s words and bearing, and the profound sympathy of the people who saw and heard her, combined to produce an overpowering impression. As the meeting broke up, women were weeping all over the house, and sturdy unemotional men were deeply moved.

Anna, seeing that many would surround her and speak their sympathy or give their praise, which she dreaded and feared to hear, turned with swift steps to the door nearest her, and so escaped into the outer darkness of the night, no one following.

But, as she hurried with light steps across the village green and reached the parsonage gate, she found Mally waiting to waylay her.

“Oh, Anna,” she cried, and her tears flowed fast, “you will go away from me, from all of us! How can you put this great distance between us?”

“How can I do anything else, Mally?” Anna answered softly. “It is what I have been waiting for; I think I was never truly happy until to-night. All my life before I have been unsatisfied, and something has ached and hurt whenever I stopped to feel it.”

“And to-night you are really happy?” cried her friend, half enviously, and yet by no means drawn to devote herself to the medley of crocodiles, dark-skinned babies, and cars of Juggernaut, which signified India to her mind.

“Oh, at last!” Anna exclaimed, and with a long breath of relief. “Will it not bring peace, Mally, to know that I am surely doing His will? It will be like pure sunshine after living in a fog these past years.”

“Then weren’t you really happy when you were converted and joined the church?” asked Mally, naïvely.

“Partly. But just to be happy because you are saved yourself—why, it does not last. And you know, dear, we could never find anybody’s soul to work for here in Haran; at least, we didn’t know how,” and Anna became silent, the vision of one solitary outcast coming before her, with whom she had been forbidden even to speak. But Mally refused to be comforted thus, and went her way with many tears.

There were more tears for Anna to encounter that night, for her mother came home broken-hearted. The Lord had answered her husband’s daily prayer, and had graciously chosen one of their own family to preach the gospel to the heathen, and the answered prayer was more than the loving soul could sustain. Like Jacob, she could get no farther than the wail, “If I am bereaved, I am bereaved.”

Not so Samuel Mallison. Too long had he schooled himself to the sacrifice of his dearest human and earthly desires. The long discipline of his life stood him now in good stead. Coming into the room where Anna was vainly seeking to comfort her mother, he laid his hands in blessing on her head, and with a look upward which stilled the weeping woman, he pronounced the ancient words:—

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word;

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

And yet Anna was the very apple of his eye. Of such fibre was the altruism of that rugged first growth.

CHAPTER V

Life! life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,

Love, Love alone can pore

On thy dissolving score

Of harsh half-phrasings,

Blotted ere writ,

And double erasings

Of chords most fit.

—Sidney Lanier.

From the time of the missionary meeting and the announcement of his daughter’s determination to devote herself to the service of Christ in a heathen land, Samuel Mallison’s health declined rapidly. His Nunc Dimittis was of literal import, and prophetic.

Whether the death which all who loved him saw that he was soon to accomplish could be called dying of heart-break or dying of fulfilled desire, would have been hard to determine. Heart and flesh cried out against the separation from his best-beloved child, while the triumphant spirit blessed God for answered prayer, and for the fruition in that cherished life of his child of hopes and aspirations which had been but scantily fulfilled in his own.

“I have not been a successful man, Anna,” he said to her one autumn day when they were alone in his study. He sat erect in his straight chair, but with an unmistakable languor in every line of face and frame, and with a feverish brightness in his prominent dark eyes.

Anna laid her hand upon his with endless gentleness.

“No man in Haran is so beloved, father. No man has done so much good.”

“Perhaps,” he answered sadly, “and I am satisfied. It is the will of God. Anna, I have seemed, perhaps, cold and silent, and without feeling as you have seen me; but the fire within has burned unceasingly, and I am consumed.”

The last words were spoken lower and with an unconscious pathos which moved Anna unspeakably.

“I do not understand, father dear, not fully. Can you tell me all? I love you so.”

They were the simplest words of the most natural affection, and yet it was the first time in her life that Anna had spoken after this sort to her father.

“My girl,” he said simply, taking her hand within his own. Then, after a pause, he continued speaking.

“It is after this manner that life has gone with me. I believe I ought to retrace my past with you—for perhaps there may be light upon your path, if you know all. When I entered the ministry it was with sincerely right purpose; all the influences of my life pointed me in that direction, but it was, perhaps, more as an intellectual and congenial profession than from deeper reasons. I began my ministry, in 1841, in Boston. I was considered to have certain gifts which were valued in that day, and all went well, on the surface. But it was the period of a literary awakening in our nation, of which Boston was the centre of influence. An American literature was just becoming a visible reality, and a new impulse was at work and stirring everywhere. Men of original force were suddenly multiplied before us, and the contagion of intellectual ambition was felt in an altogether new degree. To me it became all-controlling. Transcendental philosophy, Platonism, and classic learning acquired for me a supreme attraction, and I gave myself more and more to the study of them, and to the translation of Greek poetry. This had no unfavourable effect upon my preaching in the opinion of my congregation, rather the reverse, and I may say without vanity that I had reached comparatively early a certain eminence to which I was by no means indifferent.”

Samuel Mallison paused a moment, while Anna silently reflected that this narrative would in the end explain the buried books of her dear old garret delight.

“Learning was young among us in those days, Anna,” Samuel Mallison began again humbly, after a little space, “else this would not have happened; in the year 1848 I received a call to a professorship of the Greek language and literature in Harvard College.”

Anna felt her own young blood rush to her cheeks in pride and wonder and amazement. To her little-village simplicity and scanty experience this seemed a surpassing distinction, and one which placed her father among the great men of the earth.

“The day after the mind of the authorities had been made known to me, was the day of my life which I remember best,” Samuel Mallison continued.

“I went to my study that morning with a programme of what would take place somewhat definitely before my mind. I was about to seek, humbly and devoutly, an interview with God, in which I would lay before him this new and momentous opening in my life, and seek to have his will for me made clear. What this will would be, or what I should take it to be, was, just below the surface of my mind, a foregone conclusion. In fact, my letter of acceptance was substantially framed in my mind already. I had never been favoured with voices and visions and revelations clear and conclusive in my religious experience, and I foresaw a decision based upon general reasonableness and preference, touched with a pleasant sense of the divine favour, which might naturally be expected to rest upon so congenial a course, and one so worthily justified by precedent. I read, as a preparatory exercise, with perfect satisfaction, the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel, then closed my Bible and knelt in prayer. This was exactly as I had foreseen—an orderly series of exercises befitting my position. But, oh; how mechanical, how cold, how barren! With such perfunctory practices I could think to take leave of the sacred calling of the ministry, so dead had my spirit grown to the claims of the blessed gospel, and its mission of salvation to a lost and perishing world!

“I knelt and thought to pray, but, like the king in ‘Hamlet’, my words flew up, my thoughts remained below. Between me and Him whom I would have approached, interposed, like a palpable barrier, a solemn reiterated echo of words just read: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it.’

“I rose from my knees and walked up and down the room in great anxiety of spirit. This new work which I thought to undertake was educational, ennobling, necessary; in no way contrary to sound doctrine, in no way a betrayal of sacred responsibility; I was fitted for it by nature, by tastes, and attainments. Why was it opened to me? To mock me? to tempt? I could not believe it, I had welcomed it as coming in the providence of God.

“But my heart-searching grew swift and deep, and it was given me to see the absoluteness, the finality, of the vows which I had assumed, from which I straightway realized that no argument of those with which I was equipped sufficed to release me. Feebly and imperfectly, yet sensibly, I began to grasp the import of what the apostle calls the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, the being made conformable unto his death. Oh, the depth of the mystery hid in that saying! All these years I have sounded it—Anna, all these years I have died, in my own natural life—I have striven to give all I had to give, but the ‘much fruit’—where has it been?”

An expression of pain, hardly less than agony, was impressed upon Samuel Mallison’s face, and Anna hid her eyes, finding it too bitter to bear to see him suffer thus.

“I put it all away from me, then and there. Nothing was possible but for me to decline the invitation which had been given, you can see. Further, I saw that my studies had been my snare. My love of poetry and philosophy and learning, the prominence of my pulpit, the social and intellectual affinities I had formed, all had contributed to my spiritual deadness and decline. It was then that I put away in that box, now upstairs, the books which had particularly ministered to the tastes which had led me so far from the true conception of my life work. Never since that day have I allowed myself to follow the instinct for poetic expression. That longing had to be cut out, even if some life-blood flowed in the doing it. Henceforth, I wished to know nothing but Christ, and him—Anna, do not fail to grasp this—him, not triumphant, but crucified. The offence of the cross to the natural spirit, how hardly can it be overcome! No child’s play, no easy and harmonious growth in grace, has it been to me, but a conflict all the way. Your mother has a different type of religious life. Be thankful if her temperament shall prove to be yours.

“That is the story. I left my church not very long after and sought this rugged, remote section, because it offered hard work and a needy field, which some men shunned. Some years before I had met your mother, and we were married. Twenty years of my life and its best activity have been spent here in Haran. Those first few years and what made life to me in them I have looked upon as a false start. From that day, I sought only this one gift: an especial enduement of the Holy Spirit to give me power with men unto salvation. I desired this gift supremely, but I have not received it in any signal manner. My ministry has not been wholly unfruitful, but it has been lacking in the results for which I hoped; I have not had power with God and men, as have some of my more favoured brethren. The end is near now, very near, but I come with almost empty hands and a humbled, contrite heart to meet my Judge. But, my child, whatever the conflicts of the past years, the last thing which I could wish for to-day would be to have reversed that early decision. My life, from the merely human point of view, might, perhaps, on the line of intellectual effort have been counted successful, while as a minister of Christ it has not been so to any marked degree: but what is success, and what failure, when the things of time fade before our eyes?”

Samuel Mallison’s head drooped upon one supporting hand, and an expression of solemn musing rested on his face, while Anna’s tears flowed fast.

“Just to do our own little day’s work faithfully, not knowing what its part may be in the great whole, just to hold fast to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, and, having begun the race, to continue to the end—is not this enough?”

There was silence between them for some moments, and then the father said, making a sign to Anna to rise:—

“I want you to leave me now, dear child. I must rest. The one earthly hope to which I still cling is that to you may be given the reward of ‘much fruit,’ which I have failed to win. Remember this, if all the other teaching I have given you shall be forgotten in the years which are to try you, of what stuff you are made: with greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”

Anna Mallison listened to these words with reverent sympathy and loving response, but the deeper meaning of them did not reveal itself to her, her time for perception being not yet fully come.

CHAPTER VI

O Joy, hast thou a shape?

Hast thou a breath?

How fillest thou the soundless air?

Tell me the pillars of thy house!

What rest they on? Do they escape

The victory of Death?

—H. H.

In the largest theatre of the New England city of Springfield on a night in December, an immense assembly of people was gathered. Every gallery was crowded to its utmost, and the house, from floor to roof, was a dense mass of human beings. On the stage were musical instruments, but the customary scenery was withdrawn, save that the background showed a Neapolitan villa situated on the slope of a Swiss mountain, at the base of which an ultramarine ocean heaved stormily. Against the incongruity of this unstable structure were massed several hundred men and women, and before them a musical leader, baton in hand. At an appointed signal the great chorus stood, and with them, at the gesture of a man, himself seated near the centre of the foreground of the stage, the whole audience, with a rushing sound like the sea or the wind, rose also.

Then there was sung by the chorus, with trained perfection, an old hymn, the words of which, as well as the melody, were of quaint and almost childish simplicity:—

“Alas, and did my Saviour bleed?

And did my Sovereign die?

Would he devote that sacred head

For such a worm as I?

Was it for crimes that I had done

He groaned upon the tree?

Amazing pity, grace unknown,

And love beyond degree.”

With a swift motion of his baton the leader indicated that the whole assembly was to join in singing the refrain, in lowered voices. There followed in a deep murmur of a pathos quite indescribable:—

“Remember me, remember me,

Oh, Lord, remember me!

And when thou sittest on thy throne

Dear Lord, remember me.”

At the close of this hymn many people in all parts of the house were in tears, but the hush of motionless silence following was complete, and the eyes of all were riveted upon that central figure on the stage, the man who now rose and, advancing to the front, began to address them.

This man was of majestic personal presence and his speech was with marked power. Thinly veiled under a manner of unusual restraint and quietness lay a genius for emotional appeal and for persuasion. There was in his manner and speech an utter absence of excitability, and yet a quality which excited; a capacity for impassioned eloquence, apparently controlled and held back by the speaker’s will. The congregation listened with absorbed attention.

At the close of the address, which was designed to move all the impenitent or irresolute persons present to an immediate confession of their need of a Saviour, the speaker asked those of this class who were present and were so inclined to advance and take certain seats, directly in front of the stage, which had been reserved for them.

A close observer would have been interested in watching the man as this part of the evening’s work was ushered in. The restrained intensity of his manner was noticeably augmented; his eyes moved slowly and searchingly from one part of the house to another with a gaze which no trifler and no awakened soul might escape. The expression of his face was sternly solemn, even tragical, as of one undergoing an actual travail of spirit. He stood absolutely motionless save for a single and significant gesture of his right hand, an upward gesture made with peculiar slowness and with dramatic effect. It was at once entreating, subduing, and commanding.

At the first moment no person stirred; but presently, as if drawn by an irresistible magnetism, a stream of men and women could be seen advancing down the various aisles, with fixed look, pallid faces, and sometimes with tears. Upon such the speaker bent a look of gentleness and encouragement, in which his features would be momentarily relaxed, only to resume the profound solemnity already spoken of, as he lifted his eyes again to the unmoved masses still confronting him.

The chorus, without rising, now chanted softly the words of vivid appeal:—

“Why not to-night? Why not to-night?

Thou wouldst be saved, why not to-night?”

Many moments passed. The company of seekers now numbered a hundred. Beneath the absolute outward restraint which held all, an inner excitement grew steadily in intensity, and the subtle contagion of “the crowd” assumed an irresistible sway. It might have become alarming. It possessed elements of terror just below the surface. A climax was reached when a man of gigantic frame and brutalized features, in the upper gallery, stepped forward, and with a gesture rude and almost wild, flung out his arms toward the evangelist, and called through the silence of the place:—

“I give in—you knew I’d have to. Yes, I’m comin’.” And then, turning, clattered down the bare gallery stairs, only to reappear presently below, with his coarse head bent and big tears flowing down his purple cheeks.

Gradually the stream of seekers abated, and the aisles became empty. Thus far no word of appeal or warning had been added to the sermon; save for the restrained monotony of the music this extraordinary scene had taken place in complete silence.

Then the speaker’s voice was heard again, and in it was a strange emotional quality which had been previously unnoticed, and before which the pride and will of many melted within them.

“The people of this company are dismissed to their homes,” he said, in gentle, measured tones; “my work now is for those who have feared God rather than men. They will remain. Let all others go without unnecessary delay, or stopping for speech with one another. The Spirit is here.”

The benediction followed, but as they broke up, scores hitherto irresolute turned and joined the company of seekers in the front of the house.

When the speaker, the house being otherwise emptied, came down to the anxious and disquieted little company waiting for his guidance, he stood before them in silence for a little space, and then, turning to a group of clergymen who were associated with him, he said:—

“Pardon me, but I believe I will leave these friends in your hands, brethren. I wish to return immediately to my lodging,” and saying nothing further in explanation or apology, he departed, with evident haste.

When he reached the lobby of the theatre he found three men watching who hastened toward him, their spokesman, with outstretched hand, introducing himself and his companions and adding, with eager cordiality:—

“This is so much better than we expected. We were prepared to wait for you some time.”

The man received the greeting gravely, and, indeed, silently.

“Will you come with us now to our hotel? We wish to confer with you. We have come from New York for that purpose.”

“Will you not let me know what you wish here, at once?” was the rejoinder. “I am in some haste.”

“Certainly, certainly, if you prefer it,” said the other, cheerfully, hiding a shade of discomfiture. Then, with a change to serious emphasis, he proceeded: “We want you to undertake a work in New York this winter, as soon as possible, in fact. A large group of prominent churches is ready to unite in the movement, and unlimited resources will be placed at your disposal. Your own compensation, pardon me for alluding to it, will be anything you will name—that is a matter of indifference to the committee, save that it be large enough. We are ready to build you a tabernacle two hundred feet square,—larger if you like.”

The man addressed involuntarily laid his hand on his breast; a letter in the pocket under his hand, from Chicago, specified a tabernacle three hundred feet square. He smiled slightly; even religious zeal was a size larger in Chicago than elsewhere.

Further details were mentioned, but the evangelist seemed to give them a forced and mechanical attention. Then, rather suddenly, he broke in with a word of apology.

“I am fully sensible, gentlemen,” he went on, “of the confidence you have manifested in me, and I would, under other conditions, have accepted your proposition. But the very circumstance of your making it to-night hastens an action on my part which I have been approaching, but had not, until now, definitely determined upon. I am about to withdraw from this work, and can form no engagements, however promising. I shall close the meetings here as soon as I can honourably do so, and these meetings are, for the present certainly, my last.”

The blank faces of the three men before him seemed to demand a word or two more.

“My reasons?” he asked with curt and almost chilling brevity. “Pardon me. They are personal to myself. Good evening. No one can regret your disappointment more than I.” With these words the speaker turned abruptly from the little group and left the theatre. In great amazement and perplexity the committee of three presently followed his example.

Here was an accredited and earnest man, no irresponsible religious tramp, who possessed, apparently in a superlative degree, the gift of winning souls for which Samuel Mallison had given his all, if in vain, and for lack of which he might fairly be said to be dying, being one who could have lived on spiritual joy, if such had ever been his portion. And this man, possessing this coveted and crowning religious endowment, was deliberately putting it aside, and refusing to use it. What did it signify?

Anna Mallison had left Haran, in its ice-bound valley, early that morning, and, by travelling through snowdrifts in a sleigh all the forenoon, had been favoured to get as far as Springfield on her journey, at nine o’clock of that same evening. She was bound for Boston, where she was to go before the missionary board to be examined as to her fitness and promise for a worker on the “foreign field.”

At the Springfield station Anna had been met by the little missionary lady whom she had heard and met in Haran on her night of great decision. By her she had been conducted to a hotel, shown to a room, affectionately if reticently counselled, and then left to sleep and be ready for another early start on the following morning. It was the first time Anna had ever been in a city, and she was bewildered by the noise and lights in the streets through which she had been hurriedly driven.

Left alone, she looked about her at the stiff order of the narrow hotel chamber, the first she had ever inhabited, the showy, shabby carpet, the cheap carvings of the furniture, the long mirror in which she herself stood, still and dreary, and a rushing wave of heart-sickness swept over her. Her anxiety for her father became suddenly poignant; a sense of the sadness of his life tore her heart with fierce pain: she realized now, as she had failed to before, how fast his strength declined. She longed to know how that moment fared with him, and how the next would. A wild purpose seized her to return the next morning to Haran, and let all other purposes go until some later time.

However, in spite of all this anxiety and doubt, Anna’s physical weariness was sufficient to bring sleep apace, when once her head was on the pillow, and all the distant murmur of the city and the sudden, uncomprehended noises of the great house were soon lost to her. Thus she failed to hear a man who entered the room next to hers within the same hour, who closed the door with some emphasis and locked it fast; who, after that, walked up and down within the narrow limits of that room with uniform, slow step, and who continued to do this until the December dawn filtered through the dim windows. All was still in that next room when Anna awoke. The anxiety and homesickness of the night before were gone, and in their place was that mysterious joy which once before on a June night had strangely visited her. Again, in her dream, she had seen the face which ever since had dominated her; as before, it was majestic, free, and strong. As before, it had bent to her,—

“Bent down and smiled.”

She rose hastily, glad and awed and greatly wondering. At six o’clock she was ready and went down to the great dining-hall, dark save for the wan light of a single gas jet under which she sat down, silent and alone, and was served by a heavy-eyed, untidy man-servant, with an indifferent breakfast. She swallowed a few mouthfuls by force of will, then gathered up her humble belongings, and started out alone into the icy chill of the grey morning. It was too early for her friend from the Orient to brave the rigours of the unaccustomed winter. It was all comfortless, dreary, and inauspicious; small cheer for a young girl starting on such an errand, but there was no sinking now of her spirit. She walked to the Springfield station in the light and warmth of that inexplicable radiance of her dream, and so pursued her journey to Boston.

FROM ANNA MALLISON’S NOTE-BOOK

Do you believe in the mutual penetration of mind? Do you believe that, independent of word and voice, independent of distance, from one end of the world to the other, minds can influence and penetrate one another?... Do you not know a soul can feel within it another soul which touches it?

—Père Gratry.

January 28, 1870.—A week to-day since my father was buried. It is late at night, and I have come up to my little roof room, but I cannot sleep. I have been with my mother, and we have cried together, until she sleeps at last, so tired, and her dear face changed so sadly that, as she slept, I was almost afraid. And yet she is greatly upheld, and as gentle and uncomplaining as it is possible to be.

But for me, knowing my father, and trying to find the meaning of his life, these days give me less grief than wonder and perplexity. For a time after my father told me the story of his past, after I knew what he might have been, knew his great renunciation, his utter humility, his leaving all to seek one only thing, and that a gift for others, and even that being denied him, so that to himself his life seemed a failure, and its supreme sacrifice unsanctioned and unblessed—after this I could hardly bear the heart-break of it all. So pure, so blameless, so devoted a life, and yet, to his own thought, so unfruitful. Just a narrow little village church, with its narrow little victories and defeats, and its monotony of spiritual ebb and flow—this was the sum of his achievement. Was it not hard of God? This he would not have said, but my undisciplined heart has cried out in bitterness and rebellion. I have been in deep doubt and darkness.

To-night it is given me to see it all in light, and I am reconciled. The word which changed my father’s life was that great word of the Master, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” That dying, the utterness of it, was what we did not comprehend. I think my father understood before he left us, although he could not express it. But all along he had felt that in dying in his own personal life to the world and to his ambition, he was meeting the condition, and that in his own personal life the fruits of that death were to be manifest, that he should be set for the salvation of many. But God sees not with our short vision. Days with him are years, and years days; and our whole life but a vapour, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

This has come to me: My father’s sacrifice has borne in the life of one of his children, if not in all, the fruit of an especial dedication of that life to the service of God. If he had not been the man he was, if he had not laid down his life daily and hourly in humble self-surrender to the Divine Will, never, never should I have dreamed of giving myself to the work to which I am now pledged. His life, in its deepest working, had been wrought into mine, so that unconsciously I willed to be what he would have willed to have me. So, then, it is no more I alone, but the spirit, the will, the nature of my father that worketh in me.

The God of my father—this phrase, so common, so almost commonplace before, has suddenly taken to itself an extraordinary significance. My father’s God, my God, who began in my father’s willing sacrifice of all the noblest powers of his manhood his purpose of grace, will now, in his good pleasure, carry on the one work, the same so begun, through me, all unworthy as I am, timid, trembling, but a child. A child, and yet called with this high calling; child of a saint, called solemnly, sacredly, in the very depths of my being, deeper than I feel, higher than I know, to be my father’s child, to be the continuance, the fulfilment of his dying life, to finish what he began, to bring to fruitage the seed he died to sow. How sublime, how sweet, how awful the vocation wherewith I am called!

Then look upon me, O my God, my father’s God! Behold my weakness; raise it into power; turn my dull mind to light, my hard and narrow heart to a flame of love; make me thy minister, thy messenger, fulfil in me all thy great will.

February 20.—To-night I am alone in the old home, not our home any more. It is stripped already of all that made it home, but, bare and grim as it is, I love it, and leave it with a sorrow my heart is yet too tired to realize. They have consented to let me sleep this one last night in my own little room. This poor bed is to be left, being not worth removing, and all that clothes it goes with me. So, like a pilgrim, under a tent roof for a single night, I lie alone, and look up beyond the dear old gable and see the winter stars.

They shine upon his grave, and the snow already has drifted over it, and my heart bleeds. Why will they not let us pray for our dead as the Romish people do? Oh, kind little father, gone what dim, dazzling way I do not know, will they let you be happy at last? Will God let you see why?

February 21.—It was a strange night, and yet most beautiful.

I hardly slept, but prayed until nearly dawn. Then I slept a short time, and woke to find my limbs racked with pain from the bitter chill of the room, and tears running down my face. Almost as if I were carrying out an order given me in my sleep, I hurried on my clothing, and, taking my candle, came down the stairs, both flights, through the empty, echoing house, to the rooms below. I was so cold that I shook from head to foot. Then I found in the kitchen wood left from our store, and I brought it into the east room, the parlour, where we laid my father after his death, and where I had sat beside his dear form each night. The great fireplace was bare and empty, like the room, but the andirons were left.