A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

CHAPTER XII

... I made answer to my friend: “Of a surety I have now set my feet on that point of life beyond the which he must not pass who would return.”

—The New Life, Dante.

“I ask you, Anna Mallison, to go out with me to my work in India in May, as my wife.”

Thus Keith Burgess, having recounted the story of the lights and leadings of the past twenty-four hours.

They were standing, and faced one another in a yellow beech wood where the sky above their heads was shut out by the sun-lightened paving of the clustering leaves.

As she came down the woodland path Anna had broken off a long stem of goldenrod, and she held it hung like an inverted torch at her side, like a sad vestal virgin at some ancient funeral rites.

“Forgive me for bringing this to you so swiftly. I know it seems hasty, perhaps unreasonably so. But to me no time or acquaintance, however extended, could change my wish. And, you see, my time is so very short, now!”

Keith Burgess looked with his whole soul’s sincerity into Anna’s face, and the integrity of his purpose, of his whole nature, could not be mistaken.

“It is not the suddenness, I think,” she replied slowly, with unconscious coldness; “like you, I feel that the great facts of God’s will and providence may be made clear to us instantly.”

Then she hesitated and paused.

“Please go on,” the young man said gently.

“It is only,” she answered, with a pathos which a woman would have understood, “that I did not want to be married at all. I had never thought of it as being a thing I needed to be troubled about.”

Keith Burgess smiled faintly at her frankness, which was not cruel of intention, he knew, but his smile touched Anna’s heart.

“I did not wish to trouble you,” he said quietly.

“Please do not misunderstand me. It was not the way to express it—my words sounded unkind, I am afraid. I should learn better ways of gentler speaking. Other women seem to have them naturally.”

“I like it that you are honest, even if it hurts,” said Keith, steadily.

“I did not mean that you trouble me—not exactly. Only that my life looked so plain and clear to me, and this is so surprising—it seems to change things so.”

“Only by a little outward difference. I should not dare to ask you to go as my wife if I did not believe that you could work more effectively so, perhaps,” he added timidly, “even more happily, if I had strength and protection to give you, and a home of some sort, however poor, in that strange land.”

Something in the quality of his voice brought swift tears to Anna’s eyes. It was so new to have some one thinking and caring for her ease and happiness. It had so long been her part to do this for others, to forget herself, and take it quite for granted that others should forget her.

He saw his advantage, and sought to follow it.

“The thought of marriage is unwelcome to you,” he said earnestly, “because it is foreign and unfamiliar. I think you are very different from most girls of your age, and have lived a different inward life, higher and purer, and free from personal aims in a wonderful way. But even so, regarding marriage I believe you are wrong. You think of it as an interruption, almost as a decline from the life you had meant to live. On the contrary, God has made it to be the very best life, the normal and fulfilled life, in which each is at the strongest and best. Where my work for God and men might fall utterly to the ground, you, by your purer insight, might help me to make it availing; and perhaps the poor service I could give might help a little to carry forward your work.”

Anna lifted her hand in a slight, expressive gesture.

“Look at the whole thing a moment,” cried Keith, with sudden boldness, “as if you were not you and I not I. Here are two persons, man and woman, of the same age within two or three years, led of the same Spirit to the same purpose and consecration and calling; both ready to go out to the same unknown land, lonely and apart, and there to work as best they may far from any human being they have ever seen or known. Such were we. And now God, looking upon us, sees that each needs the other, and in his good providence he leads us here to this place. I see you, and instantly my heart goes out to you as the companion, the other self, I need. My soul recognizes in you its counterpart. God, in answer to my prayer that he will make known his will, suddenly, most unexpectedly, as I start on the new day, brings you before me before I have spoken or met with man or woman, as the first, best light of morning. What does God mean? Ask yourself, Anna Mallison, ask him. For my own part, I cannot doubt his will. I have no right to thrust my conviction upon you forcibly, but to me this is as clearly the call of God as my call to the foreign field or to the divine service.”

They were still standing face to face, and while Keith spoke Anna looked into his eyes with the serious directness of one listening to an argument of weighty but impersonal import. With all his conviction and earnestness, he was as passionless as she, save for his religious passion. A strange wooing!

Anna turned now and walked on along the mossy path in silence.

“Take time to consider,—all the time you need. Do not try to decide now,” said Keith, walking at her side. She made no reply; in fact, she did not realize that he spoke. Her mind was working in intense concentration.

Keith Burgess alone she would have turned away without a moment’s doubt, but he had, or seemed to have, a mighty Ally. She did not fear him in rejecting nor desire him in accepting, but to reject God!—that she feared; to accept God in every manifestation of his will was her deepest desire.

But what if Keith were wrong in his conviction? Her pale face flushed with a flame of indignation as she thought of it, that a man, whom she had never met or known, sought or desired, could suddenly invade the very citadel of her will, and summon her to surrender her very life into his keeping, in the great Name, when, perhaps, he was self-deceived, was coming in his own name, to do his own will. She looked aside at Keith’s face as he walked by her, in sudden distrust. It wore no flush of passion, and in the blue eyes was the light less of earthly love than of heavenly. It was a look pure and high, such as a man might fitly wear as he approached the sacrament. A sudden awe fell upon Anna, as if she were looking upon one who had talked with God, and her eyes fell, the lashes weighted with heavy, unshed tears.

“He is better than I,” she thought; “a man like this could not lead me wrong.”

White and cold, and with a strange sinking at her heart, she turned to him soon, and stopped where she stood.

He looked into her face, his own suffused with emotion. She held out both her hands, the goldenrod, which she had held until now, falling to the ground. Keith Burgess took them in both his, and Anna felt that his hands trembled far more than did her own.

“I believe you were right,” she said simply. “It is the will of God.”

He kissed her then on her brow and on her lips, the salutation disturbing her no more than if he had been her brother.

“Please, will you let me go home now, alone, Mr. Burgess?” she asked humbly, like a child.

Keith was disappointed, but consented at once.

“Only,” he said, “you should not call me Mr. Burgess. My name for you is Keith.”

“Not yet,” she answered. “In outward things and ways remember, please, that we are perfect strangers. It is only in the spirit that we have met.”

Then she left him, and Keith Burgess stood watching the tall, dark figure swiftly receding down the wood walk in the yellow light. His look was wistful. He longed to go after her, but he forebore.

Anna hastened down into the city streets and to the hospital where she was on duty every afternoon. There was plenty of work awaiting her, and not for a moment was she free or left alone to think her own thoughts. Six o’clock found her back in her own rooms at Mrs. Wilson’s. They were low and dull after the fine spaciousness of the Ingraham house, but that was a matter of little note to Anna.

Mally was there with a friend whom she had brought home with her to tea. Anna washed the dishes while these two diligently revised the trimming of their hats which in some particular, wholly imperceptible to Anna’s untrained eye, fell below the standard of latest fashion.

It was not until the girls left the house, at seven o’clock, and all her duties, trivial and homely and wearying, were done, that Anna, alone at last, could yield to the overpowering weariness which was upon her.

She carried the lamp, whose flame seemed to pierce her aching eyes, into the next room, and then, lying on the hard haircloth sofa with her head propped on one hand, she closed her eyes, thankful at last to be where she could let a few tears fall with no one to wonder or question. The quiet patience inbred in the constitution of the girl’s nature controlled her mood; there was no struggle of revolt from the vow she had taken and the future to which she had pledged herself, but an unspeakable homesickness had taken possession of her. She liked and reverenced Keith Burgess, no doubt she would love him very truly by and by, but just now he seemed to have turned her out of her own life and to have taken control where she had hitherto, with God, been supreme. It all gave her the same feeling she had suffered when, after her father’s death, they had been obliged to give up their home for the coming in of a new leader for the little flock her father had led so long. She knew there was no real analogy between the two experiences, she could reason clearly against herself, but she could not control the piteous heart-sickness which settled down upon her in the dim room, in the silent, empty house.

Many women have suffered a reaction like this in the hour of committing themselves, from the fear that this is not the supreme love, the love of the lifetime; the misgiving lest this man is not, after all, the man for whom they can forsake all others and unto whom they can cleave with a perfect heart to the end. These were not, however, the considerations which weighed upon Anna Mallison. It was, as she had herself expressed it, very simply, that she had not thought about marriage at all. She had no ideal of manhood in her mind from this point of view. It was not that she craved the love of a stronger man or a man abler or better in any way than Keith Burgess; she merely preferred no man. She had not awakened to love; the deeper forces of her woman’s nature were sleeping still.

But there was not for an instant, in Anna’s mind, the thought of withdrawing from her plighted word to Keith. She believed that he had come to her, as he believed, under the divine light and leading. She turned to walk in the new path marked out for her, faithfully and obediently, but pausing a moment to look with aching eyes and heart down the dear, familiar path which she was leaving. But Anna was too tired to think long, or even to feel, and so fell asleep shortly, in the stiff, angular position in which she lay, the tears undried upon her cheeks. The sound of the knocker on the house door, hard, metallic, but without resonance, suddenly roused her, and she sprang up hastily, remembering that Mrs. Wilson had gone to the great missionary meeting, and that she was alone in the house.

She took her lamp and went down the narrow stairs into the bit of entry. When she opened the door, Keith Burgess himself was standing there.

He looked at her, smiling half mischievously, and she felt a sudden warmth at her heart as she met the sweet, true look of his eyes.

“Didn’t you ever expect to see me again?” he said, and laughed as he stepped into the house and closed the door.

She smiled, too, and held out her hand. He took it and kissed it in a gallant way, which she found wholly wonderful, being quite unused to such feats, and unread in romances.

“It will be a bore, won’t it,” he went on quaintly, “this having a man around to bother you? Perhaps I ought not to have come, but, you see, I go in the morning, and I thought you might have something to say to me before I left.”

“Yes,” Anna said; adding naïvely, “but where shall I take you? It is so new. I have not had a call like this before.” She felt shy about inviting him up to her own sitting room.

“In there?” he queried, pointing to the door of Mrs. Wilson’s drear little closed parlour.

“Oh, no,” replied Anna, “Mrs. Wilson never lets us go in there. It is too fine for anything but funerals and—” she was about to say weddings, but broke off confused, and they both laughed, looking at each other like two children with their innocent eyes.

“I can sit here,” said Keith, pointing, as he spoke, to the steep, narrow stairs. There was a red and green striped carpet on them, and a strip of grey linen over for protection. The little entry was bare of furniture, save for the small uncovered table on which Anna had placed her lamp.

“Very well,” she said, “I will borrow a chair from Mrs. Wilson’s kitchen;” and she forthwith brought out a clean wooden chair painted a light yellow, and placed it at the side of the stairway for herself, there being no room at the foot.

“I was going to say,” remarked Keith, musingly, as Anna sat down, “that these stairs are rather wide, and if Mrs. Wilson is particular about lending her chairs, I could make room for you here,” and he looked at her soberly between the stair-rails. Anna shook her head, but suddenly there came over them both a sense of the ludicrousness of the little scene they would have presented, had any one been able to look in upon them, and they laughed again, as Anna had not laughed since she was a child, something of exhaustion aiding to break down her wonted restraint.

“It is so funny, oh, it is so funny!” she cried, “to see you looking out between those bars as if you were a lion in a cage. Just think of the people at the meeting! What if they were to see us two. Wouldn’t they think it was dreadful?”

“Would you mind putting your hand into the cage?” asked Keith. “I assure you it is perfectly safe. This is not the man-eating variety.”

“You are sure?” Anna asked, with a woman’s instinctive coquetry swiftly developed, but giving her hand.

“It is such a beautiful hand,” he said, laying it very gently on his own right hand, which he had placed on the stair beside him, and at this, the first word of flattery which any man had ever spoken to her face, Anna blushed and grew positively pretty, as he looked at her.

All this laughing and light nonsense between them, did for her what a season of prayer and serious discussion of their situation could not have accomplished. Anna felt, with a sudden sense of comfort and release, that this new relation was not exclusively a solemn religious ordinance, but a dear human companionship, the joyousness of simple, upright hearts, and the sympathy of kindred minds.