VI
HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY
Love's Labour's Lost, i. 1.
As Philip Ashe, his eyes cast down in earnest thought, approached Mrs. Frostwinch's gate that afternoon, he looked up suddenly to find himself face to face with Mrs. Fenton. She was dressed in dark, heavy cloth, set down the waist with small antique buckles of dark silver; and seemed to him the perfection of elegance and beauty.
"Good morning, Mr. Ashe," she greeted him, smiling. "I did not expect to find you coming to hear Mrs. Crapps."
"To hear Mrs. Crapps?" he echoed. "Who is Mrs. Crapps?"
Mrs. Fenton turned back as she was entering the iron gate which between stately stone posts shut off the domain of the Frostwinches from the world, and marked with dignity the line between the dwellers on Mt. Vernon Street and the rest of the world.
"Do you mean," asked she, "that you didn't know that Mrs. Crapps, the mind-cure woman, is to lecture here this afternoon?"
Ashe drew back.
"I certainly did not know it," he answered. "I was coming to speak to
Mrs. Frostwinch about the election."
"It's the last of three lectures," Mrs. Fenton explained. "Mrs. Crapps, you know, is the woman that has been curing Mrs. Frostwinch."
Ashe stood hesitatingly silent in the gateway a moment.
"I should like to see her," he said thoughtfully. "Not from mere curiosity, but because I cannot understand what gives these persons a hold over intelligent men and women."
"The thing that gives her a hold over Mrs. Frostwinch is that she has raised her up from a bed of sickness. Come in with me, and see her. I should like to see how she strikes you. You can speak to Mrs. Frostwinch after the lecture."
He hesitated a moment, and then followed her, saying to himself with suspicious emphasis that the fact that the invitation came from her had nothing to do with his acceptance. He soon found himself seated in the great dusky drawing-room of the Frostwinch house, an apartment whose very walls were incrusted with conservative traditions. It was furnished with richness, but both with much greater simplicity and greater stiffness than he had seen in any of the houses he had thus far been in. The chief decoration, one felt, was the air of the place's having been inhabited by generations of socially immaculate Boston ancestors. There was a savor of lineage amounting almost to godliness in the dark, self-contained parlors; and if pedigree were not in this dwelling imputed for righteousness, it was evidently held in becoming reverence as the first of virtues. There are certain houses where the atmosphere is so completely impregnated with the idea of the departed as to give a certain effect as a spiritual morgue; and in the drawing-room of Mrs. Frostwinch there was a good deal of this flavor of defunct, but by no means departed, merit. Grim portraits stared coldly from the walls, Copleys that would have looked upon a Stuart as parvenu; the Frostwinch and Canton arms hung over the ends of the mantel; while the very furniture seemed to condescend to visitors. Ashe could not have told why the place affected him as overpowering, but he none the less was conscious of the feeling. The company was apparently nearly all assembled when he came in, and he sank down into a chair in a corner, glad to escape observation.
The speaker of the afternoon was already in her place when he entered, and he examined her with curiosity. She was a woman who might have been forty years of age, with a hard, eager, alert face; her forehead was narrow, her lips thin and straight, her nostrils cut too high. Her eyes were bold and sharp, dominating her face, and fixing upon the hearers the look of a bird of prey. Mrs. Crapps's hair was tinged with gray, and in her whole appearance there was a sharpness which seemed to speak of one who had battled with the world. Ashe was struck by the personality of the woman, yet strongly repelled. She was evidently a creature of abundant vitality, and exultantly dominant of will. The bold, black eyes sparkled with determination, and he could at once understand that Mrs. Crapps was one to establish easily an influence over any nature naturally weak or debilitated by disease.
Ashe listened with curiosity to the opening of the address. The voice of the speaker had much of the vivacity of her glance. She spoke with an air of candor and frankness, and yet Philip found himself distrusting her from the outset. He said to himself that it was because he was prejudiced, that he doubted; but he yet felt that her manner would in any case have begotten repulsion. She had that air of insistence, of determination to be believed, which belongs to the speaker who is absorbed rather in the desire to prevail than in the wish to be true. He felt that her air of conviction was no proof of her conception of the truth of what she was saying; she protested too much. He was at first so absorbed in watching the woman that he paid little heed to her theories; but he soon began to flush with indignation. This woman, with her bold air and masculine dominance, sat there talking of herself as a present incarnation of Christ; of Christ as the incarnation of the human will; of disease as a sin; and of death as a mere figment of the imagination. The paganism of the Persian as he had heard it at Mrs. Gore's seemed to him less offensive than this. He moved uneasily in his seat, his cheeks flushing, and his lips pressed together. Presently he felt the glance of Mrs. Fenton, who sat near him, and looking up he encountered her eyes. She seemed to him to show sympathy with his feeling, but to remind him that this was not the time or place for protest. He regained instantly his self-control, and perhaps from that time on thought less of Mrs. Crapps than of his neighbor.
The talk of Mrs. Crapps was commonplace enough, and hackneyed enough, could Ashe but have known it. There was the usual patter about spiritual and physical freedom, about faith and perfection, "the Deific principle as a rule of health," a jumble of things medical and things physical, things profane and things holy mingled in a strange and unintelligible jargon. By the time that the eager-eyed speaker had talked for an hour Ashe felt his mind to be in confusion, and he could not but feel that not a few of the hearers must be in a state of utter mental bewilderment if the address had impressed at all.
"The end of the whole matter is," Mrs. Crapps said in closing, "that mankind has for ages submitted to this cruel superstition of death. We have bowed ourselves beneath the wheels of this Juggernaut; we have sent to the dark tomb our best loved friends; we crouch and cower in awful fear of the time when we shall follow. We hear ever thrilling in our ears the quivering minor chord of human woe, voice of the burning heart-pain of the race, launched rudderless upon a troubled sea of woe, and undrowned even by the throbbing march-beats of the progression of man down the vista of the ages. And yet there is no death. This fear is only the terror of children frightened by ghosts of their own invention. What we dread has no existence save in the fevered and fancy-fed fear of blinded men. O my hearers, why can we not seize upon the hem of this truth which the Messiah came to teach! Death is but sin; and sin has been removed by atonement; the holiness of the soul is immortal. There is, there can be no death! Receive the glad tidings, and cry it aloud! There is no death! Let all the earth hear, until there is none so base, so low, so poor, so ignorant, so sinful that he shall not be immortal. It is his birthright, for we are all born to eternal life."
The voice of Mrs. Crapps took on a more persuasive inflection as she delivered this peroration; and it was easy to see that she had affected the nerves if not the minds of her audience. There was a deep hush as she concluded. She lifted for a moment her sharp black eyes toward heaven, and then dropped her glance to earth, as if overcome by feeling, or as if with awe she had caught sight of sacred mysteries which it was not lawful to look upon. In a moment more she raised her eyes, and invited any of her hearers to question her about anything connected with the subject which troubled them. For a breathing time there was silence, and then a lady asked with a puzzled air:—
"But do you Christian Scientists deny"—
"I beg your pardon," Mrs. Crapps interrupted, leaning forward with a deprecatory smile, "but I am not a Christian Scientist."
"I mean do you Faith Healers"—
"That is not our title," Mrs. Crapps said with gentle insistence.
"Are you called Mind Curers, then?"
"No," the priestess responded, with an air lofty yet condescending; "with those forms of error we have no dealing or sympathy. It is true that those who teach faith-healing, mind-cure, or any sort of religious rejuvenance, have in part taken our high tenets; but they have in each case obscured them by errors and follies of their own. We are the Christian Faith Healed,—not healers, you will observe, because we believe that all mankind are really healed, and that all that is needed is that they recognize and acknowledge this precious truth."
The ladies present looked at one another in some confusion, and Ashe caught in the eyes of Mrs. Staggchase, who sat half facing him, a gleam of amusement. This emboldened him to repeat the question which had been abandoned by its first asker, who had evidently been overwhelmed by the delicacy of the distinction of sects made by Mrs. Crapps.
"Do you then," he asked, "deny the existence of death?"
"Utterly," the seeress returned, bending upon him a bold look as if to challenge him to differ from what she asserted. "It is as amazing as it is melancholy that mankind should have submitted to the indignity of death so long."
"How can they submit to that which does not exist?"
"It exists in seeming, but not in reality."
A murmur ran through the company, and Philip met the eyes of Mrs. Fenton, who shook her head slightly, as who would say that discussion was futile.
"But—but how"—one hearer began falteringly, and then stopped, evidently too overwhelmed by the astounding nature of the proposition laid down to be able even to frame a question.
"Indeed," Mrs. Crapps said, taking up the word, "we may well ask how. It transcends the incredible that the monstrous delusion of death should ever have been entertained for an instant. The explanation lies in sin. Death is but the projection of a sin-burdened conscience upon the mists of the unknown. Thank God that it has been given to our generation to tear away the veil from this falsehood, and to recognize the absolute unreality of the phantom which the ignorance and superstition of guilty humanity have conjured up." The smooth, deliberate voice of Mrs. Staggchase broke the silence which this declaration produced.
"It is then your idea that death comes entirely from the belief of mankind?"
"What we call death undoubtedly has that origin," Mrs. Crapps answered.
"How then could so extraordinary a delusion have had a beginning?"
A faint shade crossed the face of the seeress, but it merged instantly into a smile of patient superiority.
"That is the question unbelief always asks," she said. "It seems so difficult to answer, and yet it is really so simple. The idea of death of course arose from a distorted projection of the condition of sleep upon the diseased imagination. With sin came the bewilderment of human reason, and the delusion followed as an inevitable morbid growth."
"Then the earlier generations of mankind were immortal?"
"Undoubtedly. We have traces of the fact in all the old mythologies."
"But what became of them?"
"Once the idea of death had entered the world," Mrs. Crapps said impressively, "it spread like the plague until it had infected all mankind. Even those who had lived for ages to prove it false were not able to resist the prevalence of the thing they knew to be untrue,—any more," she added, dropping her eyes, and speaking in a tone sad and patient, "than we who to-day understand that there is no such thing as death can resist the overwhelming power of the belief of the masses of the race. The might of the will of the majority, directed by an appalling delusion, compels us to submit to that which we yet know to be an unreality."
Again there was a hush. The woman was appealing to the most fundamental facts of human experience and the most poignant emotions of human life, and boldly denying or confounding both. It seemed to Ashe that the only possible answer to such talk was an accusation either of madness or blasphemy. The silence was once more broken by Mrs. Staggchase.
"But if there is no such thing as death," she observed, with the faintest touch of irony perceptible in her well-bred voice, "of course you do not really die; and since you do not share the general delusion in thinking yourselves to be dead, it would seem to follow that although you may be dead for the world in general, you are still immortal for yourselves and each other."
The black eyes of Mrs. Crapps sparkled, but she controlled herself, and shook her head with an air of gentle remonstrance.
"It proves how strong is the hold upon mankind of this delusion," she said, "that what I tell you appears incredible. The truth is always incredible, because the blind eyes of humanity can see only half-truths except by great effort. I have tried to enlighten you, and I can do no more. It is for you and not for myself that I speak."
She rose from her chair, which seemed to be the signal for the breaking up of the assembly, and that her cleverness in securing the last word was not without its effect was apparent by the murmurs of the company. In another moment, however, Ashe heard as at Mrs. Gore's the exchange of greetings and bits of news, the making of appointments for shopping or theatre-going, and all the trivial chat of daily life. He stood aside until the crowd should thin, and in the mean time had the felicity of being near Mrs. Fenton. He began to feel himself almost overcome by the delight of being so near her, of meeting her clear glance, frank and sympathetic, of hearing her voice, of noting the ripples of her hair, the curve of nostril and neck. He was like a boy in the first budding of passion before reason has softened the extravagance of his feeling. The talk of the afternoon, his indignation at the words of Mrs. Crapps, his feeling that he had been assisting at a sacrament of impiety, were all forgotten as he stood talking to his neighbor.
"Come," she said at length, "I must speak to Mrs. Frostwinch before I go."
He bent forward to remove a chair which was in her way, and her gloved hand brushed against his. He covered the spot with his other hand as if he would preserve the precious touch.
"I found Mr. Ashe at the door," Mrs. Fenton said to the hostess, "and I would not let him turn back. I was too much interested in his errand."
"I am sorry if he needed urging to come in," Mrs. Frostwinch responded with graceful courtesy; "but what was the errand?"
"Mrs. Wilson asked me to see you in relation to the election," Ashe answered.
"Elsie is having a beautiful time managing this election," commented
Mrs. Frostwinch. "She hasn't been so amused for a long time. She thinks
Father Frontford is a puppet in her hands, while he knows that she is
one in his."
"I hope," Mrs. Fenton put in, "that you may be able to help Mr. Ashe. I can answer for it that he is not making the matter one of amusement."
Ashe could not help flushing. He thanked her with a glance, and turned again to Mrs. Frostwinch.
"I do not know or like the electioneering of such affairs," he said gravely; "but since there is a strong effort being made on the other side it certainly seems necessary to do whatever can be done fairly."
A few last visitors who had been chatting among themselves now came forward to say good-by. Mrs. Fenton also took leave, and Ashe found himself alone with his hostess and Mrs. Crapps.
"Mrs. Crapps, Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Frostwinch said.
It seemed to him that there was in the manner of Mrs. Frostwinch something of condescension, as if the Faith Healed was a sort of upper servant. He had himself not outlived the ingenuous period wherein a youth feels that the preservation of truth in the world depends upon his not covering his impressions, and he was accordingly extremely cold in his manner.
"Ah, a new disciple to our faith, I trust," Mrs. Crapps said, fixing upon him her keen, bold eyes.
"I have never even heard of your doctrine until to-day," he answered.
"But surely it must strike you at once," she responded, with a manner evidently meant to be insinuating.
He hesitated. He remembered that he had been expressly warned not to say anything against the vagaries with which Mrs. Frostwinch was concerned; but his conscience would not allow him to evade this direct challenge.
"It struck me as being blasphemous," he responded with unnecessary fervor.
Mrs. Crapps raised her eyes to the ceiling, and uttered a theatrical sigh.
"Oh, sacred truth!" she exclaimed.
"Come, Mrs. Crapps," Mrs. Frostwinch interposed almost sharply, "you know that Mr. Ashe is right. It is blasphemous, and I feel as if I'd allowed my house to be used for a sacrifice to false gods. If you will excuse us, I wish to speak with Mr. Ashe on business. Will you kindly come to the library, Mr. Ashe."
As he followed, Philip caught sight in a mirror of the face of Mrs. Crapps. It wore a singular smile, but whether of anger or contempt he could not tell.
"I dare say, Mr. Ashe," Mrs. Frostwinch remarked, as soon as they were seated in the library, "that it seems strange to you that I have that woman speak in my parlors. Of course I don't mean to apologize, but I am sorry that you should hear things that shocked you."
"Dear madam," he answered, leaning forward in his eagerness, "what I heard does not matter; but it does seem to me a pity that such things should be said, and said under your protection."
He was too much in earnest to be self-conscious, even when she regarded him in silence a moment before replying.
"You are perhaps right," she said at length, "although you exaggerate the influence of such things."
"I do not pretend to know whether they are influential or not," he returned simply. "It is only that they do not seem to me to be right. If they are wrong, they are wrong."
She smiled and sighed.
"Life is not so simple as that," was her reply. "The woman has saved my life. I should have been in my grave months ago but for her. My physician insists now that I haven't any real right to be out of it. I cannot refuse to allow her to say the thing that she believes, since that thing has a certain proof in my very life."
Philip shook his head.
"It is not for me to judge," said he, "but the way in which all sorts of heresies and strange doctrines are taught and played with in Boston seems to me monstrous. The persons of influence who lend their names and aid"—
He broke off suddenly, recalled by the half-smile in her eyes to the fact that he was condemning her.
"There is much in what you say," Mrs. Frostwinch assented. "I suppose that the difficulty is that we have ceased to recognize any authority in matters of belief."
"But the church!"
"Yes, there is the church," she said doubtfully, "but to many it has ceased to be an authority, and modern thought allows so much individual freedom. Our church has never claimed to be infallible like the Catholic; and individual freedom of conscience has come pretty generally to mean freedom from conscience."
"Then it is a pity that the authority which is exercised in the Roman church is not exercised in ours."
"Ah, Mr. Ashe, you reckon without the spirit of the age in which we live. But tell me what I can do for you in the matter of the election."
Mrs. Frostwinch was a devout churchwoman in her way, although she was now in appearance following after strange gods. She readily promised her aid in favor of Father Frontford.
"I agree with you, Mr. Ashe," she said, "that everything possible should be done to stem the tide of laxness which seems advancing everywhere. The mental reservations of Mr. Strathmore are certainly so broad that they may cover anything. I know women who go to his church and simply say the beginning of the creed: 'I believe in God;' and who do not hesitate in private to explain that by the name God they mean whatever force it is that moves the universe, whether it is intelligent or not."
"How dreadful!" Philip exclaimed. "How can the church endure if this goes on?"
They talked for some time longer, and Mrs. Frostwinch assured him that she would do her best to secure the votes of the clergymen who were her pensioners. Ashe left her with a pleasant feeling in his heart that he had accomplished his mission without sacrificing his convictions. Yet perhaps more potent still in warming his heart was the remembrance of the pleasant words which Mrs. Fenton had spoken in his behalf. The memory colored all his thoughts of elections, of bishops, and of creeds, as a gleam of rosy light tinges all upon which it falls.