A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

CHAPTER XV

The evil base of our society eats right through; that our wealthy homes are founded on the spoliation of the poor vitiates all the life that goes on within them. Somehow or other, it searches through and degrades the art, manners, dress, good taste of the inmates.—Edward Carpenter.

It was a month later, when a train from the east, entering the Fulham station at five o’clock of the February afternoon, brought Keith Burgess and his wife home.

Keith was apparently in fairly good physical condition, and looked and carried himself much as he had when Anna first knew him, although she could now detect the underlying weakness which he strove hard to conceal. He had been told in due time of what was involved in his illness. The shock had been severe both to mind and body, and for a while a serious relapse had seemed imminent. Those days had brought the young wife and husband into a new union of sympathy and suffering, as each strove to bear the burden of their thwarted lives bravely for the other’s sake. Not at that time nor at any later period was it possible for Anna to let Keith know to the full the meaning of this renunciation to her. He knew that to her, as to him, the abandonment of the missionary purpose was a profound and poignant sorrow; he did not know that it was the overthrow of all that had made her life hitherto, and that, whatever new forces and motives might produce out of the elements of her character, the old life, the first Anna Mallison, was slain.

Keith had told her little of what lay before them in his mother’s home, which was now to be theirs; they had been too deeply absorbed in the present emergency to take much thought for the future. This much, however, had been accomplished in a week’s sojourn in Boston: Keith would shortly be appointed to fill a missionary secretaryship, which involved much travel and speaking in the interests of the cause, but permitted him to make his residence in Fulham. The strong hope which Anna clung to silently for herself, as the last pitiful substitute for the calling now denied her, was that she, too, might still accomplish something for the work so urgent in its claims upon her, by presenting it, as occasion offered, among Christian women in her own land. But she knew that her life was no longer in her own hands to shape and direct as she might will; not only was Keith now to be her care, her chief concern and interest, but she looked forward to daughterly duties toward his invalid mother, to whom it was in her mind to minister with loving and faithful devotion.

As the train now drew into the Fulham station, Keith remarked, casually:—

“There’s Foster, all right. I knew he would be on hand.” And, looking from the car platform, Anna saw a grey-haired man-servant in plain livery, who saluted Keith respectfully as he hastened to the spot, and wore an expression of solicitude and responsibility which stamped him at once as an old family servant. As they gave over their hand luggage to this man, and followed him out to the street where a plain closed carriage stood in waiting, an unostentatious “B” on the door showing it to be private, a deep perplexity and confusion began to rise in Anna’s mind. She had gradually become accustomed to the luxuries of the life in the Portland hotel, and had regarded them as incident to the passage of a grave crisis, and justified, perhaps, by the necessities of the case; but she had not been interested in thinking farther along the line of the Burgesses’ worldly status, least of all minded to make it a matter of inquiry, consequently the sight of the man-servant and the family carriage smote her with a sharp sense of entering a new and undreamed-of outward life. In them was the first obvious token which had ever been given her of her husband’s home surroundings and worldly position. A vague anxiety and dread were awakened in Anna by these small signs of a life and habit so widely at variance with her own past of austere privation. She saw the low white cottage figured heretofore in her thought, in the narrow street, fading before her; the geraniums in the window, the cat on the cushion, the braided mats, the wooden rocking-chair, the little table with the Bible and cough-drops, wavered in all their outlines, and fell like a house of cards. How would it be with the figure of the sweet, saintly, patient invalid to whom she was to minister? Must that go too? Anna ceased to speculate, but she sat silent beside her husband, and her heart beat hard.

When the carriage stopped, it was in a fine old quiet street lined with substantial dwellings, and before a large brick house painted a dull drab. The house stood with its broad, low front close to the street; there were many small-paned, shining windows, and a brass knocker on the panelled black front door. Nothing could have been plainer or less pretentious, and yet the house bore, to Anna’s first intuitive perception, its own unmistakable expression of decorous and inflexible dignity and quietly cherished family pride.

As they entered the wide, low-ceiled, oak-wainscoted hall, a neatly dressed middle-aged woman advanced and, speaking in a low voice to Anna, asked if she would follow her up to her rooms, Keith introducing her pleasantly as his mother’s indispensable Jane. No one else was in sight; but Mrs. Burgess’s invalid condition seemed to account sufficiently for this, although Anna had supposed her able to move about the house, and even to go out under favouring conditions.

Keith joined Anna on the stairs, taking her hand in his. He smiled tenderly as he looked into her face, but there was a nervous eagerness upon him which he could not conceal. Was he thinking that he had chosen his wife for far other scenes and a widely different life? She could not tell.

“This was my old room, Anna,” Keith was saying now, as they stood in the doorway of a spacious bedroom with old-fashioned mahogany furniture and handsome but faded chintz hangings. There was a marble chimney-piece, over which hung a large picture of Keith, with a boyish, eager face.

Jane now threw open a door from this room into another of equal size.

“If you please, I was to tell you this is to be Mrs. Burgess’s own sitting room,” she said respectfully, “and the dressing room and bath beyond the bedroom will be for your own use entirely after this,” and she crossed to open another door.

Keith drew Anna on into the sitting room.

“Well, now, this is certainly very kind of my mother,” he said, a flush of grateful pleasure rising in his sensitive face. “See, Anna, this has always been the state apartment, the guest-chamber of the house, and she has had it refitted for our use.”

“How very kind,” said Anna, warmly.

The room was, indeed, in its own manner, grave and subdued, a luxurious parlour, with good pictures, handsome hangings, and soft, pale-tinted carpet.

“I must go down at once and tell the dear mother how we thank her,” said Keith, and Anna, left alone, returned to the bedroom and began to remove her travelling hat.

Jane was beside her at once, giving unneeded assistance.

“Shall I unpack for you directly?” she asked, looking at Keith’s small trunk, which was quite adequate to Anna’s few belongings, added to her husband’s. Anna felt her colour deepen as she declined the offered help, and sat down with a little sigh in a great easy-chair. But she submitted perforce when the maid knelt at her feet, and, quite as a matter of course, removed her shoes. It was the first time since babyhood that this office had been performed for Anna by other hands than her own, and she felt all her veins tingle with a shy reluctance, but sat motionless.

Rising, Jane looked about, Anna thought with a shade of dissatisfaction that there was thus far so little to be done, so scanty a display of the small belongings of luxury.

“When you are ready to dress for dinner,” she said, with a touch of coldness, “I will come if you will just ring the bell. The bell is here,” and she indicated the green twisted cord and heavy silk tassel at the head of the bed. “Mrs. Burgess said she could spare me to wait on you for what you needed to-night,” she added.

“Thank you,” said Anna, gently, but with the quiet unconscious loftiness of her own reserve. “Mrs. Burgess is very good to think of it, but I am accustomed to caring for myself, and so I shall not need to trouble you.”

“Very well, that will be just as suits you, ma’am. I should be pleased to wait on you any time Mrs. Burgess doesn’t need me. Dinner will be at six o’clock, then, if you please.” Thus saying the maid withdrew.

“Keith,” said Anna, with a perplexed countenance, when a few moments later he joined her, “I find I ought to dress for dinner, but I have nothing better to wear than this black gown. You ought to have told me, dear.”

Keith looked down at the straight fashionlessness of Anna’s black figure with unconcealed concern.

“I ought to have thought,” he said, “but it never occurred to me about your clothes. We must get you a whole lot of new things straight away, dear. We will do it together, and have a great time over it, won’t we? And you will put off the black now for my sake? I want to see you in wine-red silk and good lace.”

“Oh, Keith!” cried Anna, “I cannot imagine myself masquerading like that. It would never do. But for to-night—that is the trouble now.”

“Why, wear your wedding-gown, sweetheart; that is just the thing. What luck that we did get that!” and Keith was down on his knees before the trunk on the instant, and soon produced the dress which, being of fine white cashmere, with a little lace about the neck, was, in fact, altogether appropriate.

Anna looked puzzled. It seemed to her almost sacrilegious to put on that dress for everyday use, and the association with it made her shiver, even now, but she did not dispute the matter.

Just before six o’clock Keith ushered his wife into the library downstairs, where his mother sat waiting to receive them. It was the sort of a library which Anna had read of but had not seen—lined with books, furnished with massive leather-covered chairs and darkly gleaming mahogany, a dim old India carpet on the floor.

Anna saw by the shaded drop-light the form of a small woman of fragile figure, dressed in silver-grey silk, with a white shawl of cobweb fineness of texture about her shoulders. There were several good diamonds at her throat and on her hands, her grey hair was beautifully dressed in soft waves and fastened with a quaint silver comb of fine workmanship. Her face was pale and the features delicately cut; her movement as she advanced to meet Anna was slow, and, in spite of her diminutive size, stately, and there was a crisp, frosty rustle of her grey gown.

She took both Anna’s hands in hers with a cold, kind smile, and kissed her twice on her forehead, Anna bending low for the purpose. She seemed to be at an incalculable height above the fine little lady, and singularly young and immature. At twenty-two she had felt herself a woman for long years, with her sober cares and grave purposes; but to-night, before Keith’s mother, she suddenly seemed to become a shy, undeveloped girl again.

While they spoke a little of the journey and the night, Keith Burgess turned on his heel and affected to be examining, with critical interest, an engraving above the fireplace, which he had seen in the same spot all his life; but he was watching them both aside narrowly as he stood. He was perfectly satisfied.

If Anna had been never so much prettier, and possessed of all of Mally Loveland’s confident social facility; if she had met his mother as the country girl of this type would have done, with eager and affectionate appeal that she should at once stand and deliver motherly sympathy and affection in copious measure,—there would have been only disappointment and chagrin. But Mrs. Burgess’s bearing was not more reserved than that of her daughter-in-law. At twenty-two Anna’s grave repose of manner was in itself a distinction, and one which had its full weight with the elder woman. Plainly, she had not a gushing provincial beauty on her hands to curb and fashion into form. As for good looks, there was a certain angular grace already in figure, an unconscious dignity of attitude and bearing which suited Keith’s mother, while for her face, the eyes were good, the brow very noble, and the expression peculiarly lofty. The succession of strong and sudden emotional experiences through which Anna had recently passed had wrought a subtle change already in her face; there was less severity, less of hard, conscientious rigour in its lines; a certain transparent, spiritual illumination softened the profound sadness which was her habitual expression.

At dinner, a delicately sumptuous meal, served with some state, Anna acquitted herself perfectly, having the instincts of good breeding, the habit of delicate refinement, and having learned at Mrs. Ingraham’s table many of the small niceties which she could hardly have acquired in Haran.

Already, within the first hour, while seeing that her mother-in-law had been physically entirely able to meet her children at her door at their home-coming, Anna perceived the inevitable consistency of her waiting to receive them in due form and order. Formality and form were essentials of life in this house. This did not oppress Anna particularly, and she liked to look at the cameo-cut delicacy of Mrs. Burgess’s face. Still, perhaps never in her life, never in the cheerless chambers of Mrs. Wilson’s poor house, had Anna known the homesickness with which she ate and drank—that night at her husband’s table.

Poverty and obscurity were old and tried friends to Anna; among them she would have been at home. From wealth and social prominence she shrank with instinctive dread and ingrained disfavour. The familiar austerities of poverty were, to her, denotements of mental elevation, while the indulgences of wealth bore to her thought an almost vulgar pampering of appetite and ministering to sense. The trained perfection of the silent attentive service in itself was an offence to her. Why should those people be turned into speechless automatons to watch every wish and wait upon every need of three other people no more deserving than themselves? Could it ever seem right to her?

She excused herself early. Left alone with him, Mrs. Burgess laid her small hand on Keith’s, saying without warmth but with significant emphasis:—

“You have done very well, Keith, in marrying Miss Mallison. I confess I was not without some apprehension lest the wife who would have been a perfect helpmeet and companion for you in the foreign field might appear at some disadvantage in the life now before you in the ordering of Providence.”

“Anna is so absolutely true, mother, that she cannot be a misfit anywhere, except among false conditions.”

Mrs. Burgess bowed her head.

“I can see that she is a thoroughly exemplary young woman, and while she may have much to learn of social conditions in a place like Fulham, the foundation is all right.” She paused a little, and added reflectively: “Her eyes and hands are extremely good. Her figure will improve. I understand that her father belonged to the Andover Mallisons.”

There was a little flicker of Keith’s eyelids, but he made no reply, taking up casually from the table a book at which he looked with mechanical indifference. It was a volume of Barnes’s “Notes.” This much only of Anna’s vision had had foundation.