A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

CHAPTER XIII

Now die the dream, or come the wife,

The past is not in vain,

For wholly as it was your life

Can never be again,

My dear,

Can never be again.

—W. E. Henley.

At Anna’s earnest request, Keith Burgess consented that their engagement should be announced to no one save his mother until spring. Mally observed the regularity of Keith’s weekly letters, and attempted to tease Anna into acknowledging that there was “something in it”; but Anna’s dignity, which on occasion had its effect even upon Mally’s vivacious self-confidence, ended this line of attack in short order. A few weeks after Keith left Burlington Anna received the following note:—

My Dear Miss Mallison: My son, Keith Burgess, has confided in me the fact that you have consented to enter into an understanding with him which, if Providence should favour, will doubtless eventually terminate in marriage. Your name has been mentioned to me by members of our Woman’s Foreign Missionary Board, and I am led to believe that my dear son has been graciously led of the Lord in his choice of a companion in the path of duty upon which he has entered. That my son is a godly young man and of an amiable disposition, I need hardly take this occasion to tell you. Similarity of views and of religious experience would seem to furnish a satisfactory basis for a union productive of mutual good and the glory of God.

Trusting for further acquaintance before you depart for foreign shores,

I am yours very truly,

Sarah Keith Burgess.

If this letter were stiff or cold, Anna, not looking for warmth and freedom, did not miss them. She knew that Keith was the only son of his mother, and she a widow. She took it for granted that they were poor like herself; she had not known many people who were other than poor, none who were in the ranks of missionary candidates. Such a thing would have seemed singularly incongruous because unfamiliar. She had a distinct picture of Mrs. Burgess, whom she knew to be in delicate health, as a woman of sweet, saintly face and subdued manner, living in a small white cottage in an obscure street of Fulham, perhaps not unlike the Burlington street in which Mrs. Wilson’s house stood. She fancied her living alone—indeed, Keith had told her that this was so—in a plain and humble fashion, a quiet, devoted, Christian life, a type with which her experience both in Haran and Burlington church circles had made her familiar. There were some geraniums in the little sitting room window, she thought, and it was a sunny room with braided mats over the carpet, and a comfortable cat asleep on a patchwork cushion near the stove. There would be a small stand beside Mrs. Burgess’s rocking-chair with a large Bible and a volume or two of Barnes’s “Notes,” a spectacle case and a box of cough medicine; perhaps it was a bottle, Anna was not sure, but she inclined to the hoarhound drops, and almost smelt them when she thought of the room. She imagined the dear old lady carefully and prayerfully inditing the epistle to herself, and thought it most kind of her, and wrote thus to Keith.

The winter passed for Anna in hard and unintermitting work. Mally allowed herself lighter labours, and, having raised her eyes with admiration to the Rev. Frank Nichols, now shook herself free as far as she could conveniently from her more frivolous Burlington friends, and renewed her earlier interest in religion with extraordinary zeal. She felt that Dr. Harvey’s church was too worldly for her ideals, and that Mr. Nichols’s beautiful work among the humbler classes offered far more opportunity for religious devotion. Her regular attendance at all the meetings of the church was a great satisfaction to Anna, who looked on with characteristic blindness, glad to see her friend returning to a more consistent walk and conversation.

The letters which passed between Anna and Keith would hardly have been called love-letters. They dealt with religious experience and views of “divine truth,” for the most part. Not even at start or finish of any letter was place found for the endearing trifling common to lovers. This correspondence might all have been published, omitting nothing—without dashes or asterisks, even in that day when it was thought unseemly to reveal the innermost secrets of hearts, and to speak upon the housetops that which had been whispered in the ear. There were few personal allusions on the part of either, beyond Keith’s occasional mention of his health being below the mark. At Christmas Keith sent Anna a volume of “Sacred Poetry”; on the fly-leaf he had written:—

Anna Mallison,

From her sincere friend and well-wisher,

Keith Burgess.

He had abstained from warmer terms on account of Anna’s wish to withhold the knowledge of their engagement for the present.

Poor Anna, having nothing wherewith to provide a gift for her lover, the small savings for her education being now nearly exhausted, made shift to sew together sheets of note-paper, on which she copied her favourite passages from Paley and Butler and various theologians. This humble offering was sent to Keith, who was highly gratified, and treasured the little gift affectionately.

For two weeks following Christmas Anna received no letter, but she was not greatly surprised, as she knew Keith was to start early in January for a tour of various New England towns, where he was expected to present the cause of Foreign Missions. He was now completing his last year in the theological seminary near Boston, and his unusual gifts in public speech induced the faculty to send him out frequently on such missions.

At half-past eight of a zero morning in the second week of January, Anna, with her threadbare black jacket buttoned tight to her throat, her arm full of books, was leaving Mrs. Wilson’s door on her way to school, when she saw a boy stop in front of the house with a telegram in his hand. Taking it, she found, greatly amazed, that it was for herself—the first telegram she had ever received.

The boy, accustomed to see people receive his messages with changing colour and nervous hands, glanced at her coolly, then turned and went his way back, plunging his hands into his pockets against the biting cold. In the little entry Anna opened the despatch. It was dated Portland, Maine, and signed by Keith Burgess. It told her that he was very ill; that he was alone, it being impossible for his mother to go to him. It asked her to come to him at once.

Anna’s mind, in the half-hour which followed, worked with intense rapidity. She found from a newspaper that by a ten o’clock train she could reach Boston that evening, and she decided to take that train, and go on to Portland by night. She wrote a note to Mally, in which she told her of her engagement to Keith and of what had occurred. She packed a satchel with what was necessary, and last of all drew out of her little square writing-desk, where she kept it carefully locked away, an envelope containing all the ready money she possessed. She found that there remained exactly twelve dollars. This, to Anna, was a large amount of money, and, although her heart sank a little at the thought of spending so much at once, the prospect for the weeks to come before she could draw upon her mother again being blank enough, she knew that this was justified by the emergency.

Soon after nine Anna again departed from the house, the books replaced by the satchel, the worn and faded black gown and jacket unchanged, starting alone and unsped upon her long and anxious journey.

She went first to the Ingrahams, walking the long mile in the sharp cold, carrying her heavy bag with a benumbed hand, since the reckless extravagance of a carriage might not for a moment be considered.

Mrs. Ingraham was ill and could not see Anna, but her daughter Gertrude came into the parlour and greeted her cordially. The issues of the hour were too strong upon Anna to permit any trace of embarrassment or personal feeling in her manner, although she felt that it would have been easier to say what she felt must be said, to Mrs. Ingraham.

“Will you be so good as to tell your mother,” she began, “that I could not go away on this journey, which I must take, without explaining it to her? She has been so very kind. We did not mean to announce it quite so soon, but Mr. Burgess, whom I met here in the fall, and I are engaged to be married.” Anna was too preoccupied to perceive the flush which slowly and steadily rose in Gertrude Ingraham’s face.

“We expect to go out together in May,” Anna proceeded. “Mr. Burgess has not been strong for several months, perhaps he is never very strong; but this morning I have a telegram from him asking me to come to Portland, as he is very ill, and his mother cannot be with him.”

“Shall you go, Miss Mallison?” asked Gertrude, with visible constraint.

Anna looked at her then, surprised, and instantly felt the indefinable coldness of her reception of her little story.

“I am on my way to take the ten o’clock train east,” she said simply, her voice faltering slightly. For all her courage and steadiness, her heart was crying out for a little touch of another woman’s gentleness; the way before her was not easy, and there was a sense of loneliness upon her which began to make itself acutely felt.

Gertrude Ingraham rose and said:—

“I am so very sorry for Mr. Burgess. We liked him very much. You must let me go and speak to mamma a moment, for I know she would wish to give you some message. I will not keep you long.” And she hurried from the room.

Anna sat alone and watched the minute-hand of a French clock on the mantel moving slowly along the gilded dial, a heavy oppression on her spirit. She had not consciously expected sympathy, but Gertrude’s aloofness hurt her strangely.

Some one came softly into the room behind her just then, so softly that she turned rather because she felt a presence than because she heard a step. It was Oliver Ingraham.

The peculiar personality of this mysterious man inspired Anna always with an aversion hardly less than terror, and although she had become familiar with his presence in her frequent visits, it had never become less painful to her. Indeed, latterly, a new element of discomfort had been added to her feeling toward him, since he had shown a marked disposition to follow her about, and intrude a manner of unpleasant gallantry upon her.

He greeted her now almost effusively, and, perceiving that she was prepared as if for a journey, asked at once:—

“Not going away? The painful hour of parting is not here yet, surely?”

Anna made a vague and hurried reply.

“Because, you know,” pursued Oliver, lowering his voice to an offensive tone of familiarity, and maliciously mimicking the phraseology of his stepmother’s friends, “we could hardly spare our dear young sister yet; she is becoming really indispensable to us,” and he held out one long hand as if to clasp that of Anna, leering at her repulsively.

Anna rose hurriedly and moved away from him, her heart beating hard with fear and antipathy. To her great relief she heard Gertrude Ingraham’s step in the hall, and Anna, with her face paler than it had been, met her at the door, while Oliver slunk away to a little distance, and appeared to be looking out of a window unconcernedly.

Gertrude Ingraham carried a pocket-book open in her hand, and as she spoke she looked at it, and not at Anna.

“Mamma is so very sorry, and sends her best wishes and hopes for Mr. Burgess’s quick recovery. She hopes you will let her know; and, Miss Mallison,” Gertrude was evidently embarrassed, “mamma says it is such a long and expensive journey, and she wishes you would just take this with you to make everything as comfortable as may be.” And she drew out a crisp twenty-dollar note, which she essayed to put in Anna’s hand.

Anna had not known before that she was proud. She did not know it now, but Gertrude Ingraham did, and was touched with keen compunction. She understood that her mother would have been more successful.

It was only the swift, unconscious protest of Anna’s hand, the pose of her head as she turned to go, and the quiet finality with which she said:—

“Will you thank Mrs. Ingraham for me, and say I did not need it? She is always kind. Good-by.”

A moment later Gertrude watched from the window the slender figure in its faded, scanty black, with the heavy, old-fashioned satchel, passing down the windswept lawn, under the grey and bitter sky.

Within was warmth and luxury and protection, and yet Gertrude’s heart leaped with a strong passion of desire to forego all this and take Anna Mallison’s place, that so she might start on that long journey which should bring her, at its end, to the side of Keith Burgess.

Small, unseen tragedies in women’s lives such as this, never once, perhaps, expressed, and never forgotten, work out the heroic hypocrisies which women learn, since such is their allotted part.

“You might have known better than to offer money to that girl,” Oliver’s high, shrill voice behind Gertrude said. “She’s as confoundedly proud as all the other saints. But she’ll have to come down yet. We shall see some day.”

Thus unpleasantly interrupted in her reverie, Gertrude rose impatiently, and left the room.

It was eight o’clock that evening when Anna reached Boston. Dismayed by the small remainder of money left her after her railway ticket was bought, she had not dared to spend anything for food through all the day, and had tried to think the cold, dry bread, a few slices of which she had put into her satchel, was sufficient for her needs.

In Boston a change of stations made a cab a necessity if she would not lose the Portland train, and this she must not do, since she had telegraphed Keith from Burlington that she would be with him in the morning. Anna alighted at the station of the Maine Railroad and heard the cabman say that his fee was two dollars with a sensation hardly less than terror. She paid him without a word, then entering the station, sat down in the glare of light amid the confusion of the moving crowd, and looked into her poor little purse, a sharp contraction at her throat as she counted, and found less than three dollars left.

The train would leave in fifteen minutes. Anna went with as brave a face as she could manage, to the office, and asked what was the fare to Portland. The curt reply of the agent proved the glaring insufficiency of her small remaining store. Trembling with weakness and dismay, Anna turned back to her place and sat down, closing her eyes while she prayed. She had friends in missionary circles in Boston, who would gladly have lent her money, but time failed to seek them out. She thought, as she prayed, of the money which Gertrude Ingraham had proffered in the morning, and, humbled, asked forgiveness for the ignorance and pride which had led her to reject it. The thought of Keith watching, perhaps in vain, for her coming in his loneliness and great need, perhaps in his extremity, overwhelmed her with pity and penitence. Having prayed for forgiveness and for guidance, and for a way out, and a way to Keith that night, she opened her eyes, astonished for the moment at the harsh light and the motley scene about her, her actual surroundings having been for the time forgotten in the complete abstraction of her mind. She gazed for a few moments languidly before her, her face so colourless and sorrowful that many persons who passed her looked back at her in curiosity and concern. Presently the space before her became clear; there was a pause in the fluctuating course of passers-by, and nothing interposed, for the instant, between her and the window of the ticket office.

An elderly gentleman in a long travelling cloak and silk hat, carrying a snug and shiny travelling bag, came up to the window with the confident and assured bearing of the experienced traveller. Anna heard him ask for a ticket to Portland. She recognized him at once, for it was Dr. Durham, the missionary secretary who had once been her father’s guest.

When he turned from the window, the doctor found the pale, quiet girl in black standing just behind him; she spoke to him with a radiant light in her face, such as he had never met before. To herself, Anna was saying with a sense of exquisite joy in her heart, “God is near,” feeling herself close touched by the Almightiness. To her father’s friend she told her story and her need in few words, without hesitation or doubt, declaring, necessarily, her engagement to Keith Burgess, and the fact that she was hastening to reach him on account of his serious illness.

“Amazing, my dear,” exclaimed Dr. Durham, taking off his hat and wiping the large shining baldness of his head, “amazing indeed! I am myself on my way to Burgess, and we can make the journey together. Poor fellow! It is a sad case. I had a telegram yesterday, but it was impossible to start until to-night. It seems he has had a hemorrhage. But we will talk all this over on the way,” and the good old gentleman made haste to buy Anna’s ticket, which he said it was only the part of the Society to do, and she must never mention it again. This done, they hastened on together to the train.