A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

CHAPTER XXIII

He who professeth to believe in one Almighty Creator, and in his Son Jesus Christ, and is yet more intent on the honours, profits, and friendships of the world than he is, in singleness of heart, to stand faithful to the Christian religion, is in the channel of idolatry; while the Gentile, who, notwithstanding some mistaken opinions, is established in the true principle of virtue, and humbly adores an Almighty Power, may be of the number that fear God and work righteousness.—John Woolman.

A physician’s carriage stood before the house when Anna reached it, and within there was a stir unusual for that early hour. Jane met her on the landing, and answered her questions.

“Yes, ma’am; Mrs. Burgess, she was all right as far as I could see when I helped her get to bed, but I hadn’t got her light out when I heard her give a queer kind of groan, and when I got to her, her face was that twisted all to one side, that it would make your heart ache to see her. But that isn’t so bad now; you’d hardly notice it. And she don’t seem paralyzed; she moves ’most any way.”

“Then she is better?”

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know as you could say so much better. The worst of it is, her mind ain’t right. She looks sort of blank, and when she talks it ain’t natural, but all confused like, and it’s hard, poor lady, for her to get anything out; she talks thick and slow, so different from herself.”

A moment later Anna saw Keith, and heard the verdict of the physician. Madam Burgess had suffered a paralytic seizure of a somewhat unusual character. He should watch the case with great interest. There was evidently a small clot on the left side of the brain which affected the mental equilibrium, and produced something like delirium. The ultimate result could only be fatal, and it was doubtful whether full consciousness would return before death.

That afternoon Anna was permitted to go to her mother-in-law’s bedside. Keith followed her, full of eager hope that for her there might be the clear and unquestionable recognition which had thus far been denied him. It was a strangely painful thing to Anna to see the familiar figure of a woman so graceful, so precise, so secure in her high-bred self-possession, so decided in her conscious self-direction, prostrate, dull, lethargic; to hear in place of the cold, clear modulations of her voice a meaningless, half-articulate muttering. She stood for a moment beside the bed, her heart sinking with the piteousness of the sight, herself apparently unnoticed by the stricken woman.

At the foot of the bed Keith, standing, cried out as if in uncontrollable pain:—

“Mother, do you see Anna? She wants to speak with you.”

Slowly his mother turned her eyes, which had been fixed straight before her, until they rested full upon Anna in a curious, disconcerting stare. This continued in silence for some throbbing seconds, and then, with thick utterance and unaccented monotony of modulation, she said, very slowly:—

“If you had married differently you might have had children of your own.”

This laboured sentence, in its violent discordance with the filial tenderness and sympathy which alone filled the hearts of Keith and Anna at the moment, smote them both as if with a harsh and incredible buffet. Anna turned away from the bed white and appalled, and left the room at the motion of the nurse while Keith, bowing his head upon the bed-rail, groaned aloud. Even in the moment their mother had fallen back into unintelligible confusion of speech. To them both this sinister and unlooked-for expression revealed something of the weary ways in which the clouded mind was straying. Some haunting sense of remorse and accountability, vaguely felt and deviously followed, was torturing the dimness of mental twilight. Again and again during the days following, Anna, sitting just outside the bedroom door, heard the question reiterated in the harsh, toneless voice:—

“Did that baby die?” And always, when answered, there came the same response, “I said it would, I said it would that night.”

Filled with pity and compunction as she recalled the severity of her own utterance in that interview, the memory of which with the sick woman had plainly outlived all other, Anna went once more on the third night into the sick-room, knelt by the bed, and took the hand of the sufferer in both her own.

“Mother,” she said, in a strong, comforting voice, “mother dear, this is Anna. Will you forgive me for my unkindness that night?”

There was no reply.

“Dear mother,” Anna went on, with gentlest kindness, “I wanted to tell you that the little baby has gone to its own mother. It is all right, and I am satisfied.”

There was a faint response as of relief and acquiescence.

Then, as Anna still held the limp, unresisting, unresponding hand and looked tenderly in the grey, changed face, Sarah Burgess spoke once more. Broken and falteringly came the words:—

“I am ... sorry ... you have ... no child,” and, as she spoke, large, slow tears rolled down her face.

It was the first time in all their intercourse that she had opened her heart to Anna in motherly pity. Perhaps she could not before, the defences of pride and reserve were sunk too deep. But the few words, the tears, the glimpse of a heart which, whatever its hardness, itself knew the passion of motherhood and could understand her pain, broke down for the younger woman the last remaining barriers which had stood between these two who had lived together so coldly. Anna laid her head on the pillow and kissed the face of the dying woman again and again, their tears mingling, while pity and tenderness overflowed the coldness and all the silent resentments of the past.

Two days later Madam Burgess died, not having spoken again, although she had plainly recognized Keith and watched him with wistful eyes.

The burial and the various incidents connected with the close of a long life, and one of social eminence, over, Keith and Anna turned back to the home, now wholly their own, and looked about them wondering what was in the future. Like all men and women of gentle will, they blotted out, at once and forever, every impression of unworthiness or selfishness which their dead had ever made upon them. They idealized her narrow character, and loved her better than they ever had, perhaps, in life; but underneath all this dutiful loyalty Anna found in her own heart a recognition of great release, and at times, in spite of her will, her pulses would bound and leap with the sense of new possibilities in life for them both.

Just what these possibilities might be was by no means clear to Anna, nor how far Keith would sympathize with her own vague but dominant desires for a return in some sort to the working motives which had swayed their earlier lives. She was greatly encouraged by the response which she received to her timid approach to the subject of some slight changes in their outward method of life in favour of simpler and more democratic habits. The horses and carriage and liveried servants had long been a source of distress to Anna’s conscience, as marks of a privileged and separate class. She had always avoided employing them as far as was possible. She had never, since she had begun reading the social essays of Gregory, driven in the family carriage without longing to apologize to every working man and woman whose glance rested upon her, for a luxury which she felt to be in their eyes divisive, while all the time her heart was crying out for brotherhood and burden-sharing with the lowliest and most oppressed among them.

Somewhat to her surprise she found that Keith was not without a similar consciousness, any expression of which, even to Anna, he had scrupulously avoided in his mother’s lifetime. Finding herself met here, and thus emboldened, Anna came to her husband one evening with a question which involved serious doubt and difficulty for her. It was two months since the death of Madam Burgess, and Anna was to start the following morning for Vermont for a visit of several weeks to her mother and Lucia. Keith was too busy with the details of settling his mother’s estate to accompany her, but it had been planned that he should meet her in Burlington on her return, late in May, and together with her make a visit, long-promised and long-postponed, at the Ingrahams’, whose friendship for them both had remained unchanged by the years.

And now the postman had brought Anna a note from Mrs. Ingraham which took her back strangely to her girlhood, and to one March night when she had first received a like request from the same source. This note asked her to come, when she came for the promised visit, prepared to give a missionary address at a meeting which would take place at that time in Burlington.

Anna handed the note to her husband, and, as he finished the perusal of it, she said hesitatingly:—

“Keith, I don’t know what to do.”

“Why, dear? Why not simply do as Mrs. Ingraham asks? You would like to, would you not?”

“Once I would have, only too gladly,” and Anna paused a moment, recalling the opposition to which she had yielded so unwillingly in the time past. That outward and forcible opposition was now wholly removed, but another restraint, subtle and subjective, had gradually taken its place, although Anna had until now scarcely recognized the existence of it.

“I am afraid, if I tell you,” she resumed, “you will be shocked and pained. Perhaps I cannot even put it into words, and not overstate what is in my mind; but the trouble is, Keith, I am afraid I don’t believe everything just as I used to.”

Keith Burgess looked at her with his gentle smile.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“Dear, it is very strange,” and Anna spoke with sudden impetuousness; “but I suppose I have not really a right to speak for missions, for I cannot, any more, believe that God will condemn to everlasting torment all the heathen who do not believe in a means of salvation of which they have never heard.”

“Neither can I.”

“Keith!” Anna felt her breath almost taken away by this sudden admission of what, in the seventies, was rank heresy in strictly orthodox circles. “Why have you never let me suspect such a change in your views? Has this had something to do with your giving up the secretaryship? Was it not then quite all your health? Oh, Keith, if you knew how I have been troubled!”

The tumult of Anna’s surprise broke out in this swift volley of questions, for which she could not wait for answers.

“How have you been troubled? Tell me that first, Anna.”

Anna’s colour came and went. It was not easy to speak, but honesty and frankness were the law of speech with her. Very seriously she said:—

“It seemed so strange to me that you grew, after the first few years, into what often appeared a kind of official and perfunctory way of working—letting the details cover the great purposes. It seemed little, and different from what I had expected. Tables and figures and endless reports—it was all business, and almost like other business.”

Keith Burgess nodded gravely. “Go on,” he said, as before.

“And then, you see, all at once you dropped it. Of course you had that illness, and I could see how tiresome and troubling the work had come to be; but I used to think—forgive me, Keith; I hated myself that I did—that you dropped the whole missionary endeavour and purpose and point of view as easily as you might have dropped a coat that you had worn out—”

“In short, that it was all officialism.”

“Yes, even that—that it had come to be. And you know how different it was at first, when it was your only life.”

“Yes, Anna,” and the delicate, sensitive face of the man showed something of the profound pain which he could not speak; “it has been a hard experience. I have kept it to myself because I did not think it was fair to lay upon you the same burden of doubt and conflict. I see how naturally you came to look upon the change in me as you have described. Perhaps your view is in a measure just, too, but I think not altogether.”

“Tell me, Keith.” Anna was waiting for him to go on with sympathetic eagerness.

“It was simply that, some way, I hardly know how,—perhaps it was in part worldliness and selfishness, but I think not altogether,—my views gradually have changed. Perhaps it was in the air, perhaps I took it in unconsciously from what I read, and from my deeper thought of God and his grace. What I learned of the various forms of heathen religions influenced me somewhat, and also observation of the workings of our own system in our own country even under most favouring conditions. I cannot tell, only I came definitely at last to the point where I could no longer go before the churches and plead with them to send their money to foreign missions to save the heathen from immediate eternal perdition and torment, because they did not believe in the plan of salvation by a Saviour of whom, as you say, they had never heard.”

“What did you do?”

“You see,” Keith went on, not noticing her question, “according to our confession there is no salvation even in any ordinary knowledge of Christ, but only for the elect few who experience personal regeneration by conscious acceptance according to the line laid by such men as Calvin and Edwards. Now we know that judged by this test a very large percentage of any so-called Christian community is doomed to eternal punishment, and when you come to the heathen, it grows unthinkable—do you see?”

“Yes, I feel.”

“I went very soon to Dr. Durham, and poured out a full confession of my ‘unsoundness.’”

“What did he say?”

“Anna, that was what settled me. I almost think that if he had said, ‘Stop where you are, and wait until you can see it differently,’ I might have come back to my early convictions in some sort, at least sufficiently to give me a motive for working on. What he did say, in his large, hearty way, was: ‘Oh, my dear fellow, there is nothing more common than such doubts and questions! They naturally arise from time to time with us all. Probably not half the men who are at work in this cause actually believe literally in the common conception that the heathen who do not know of Christ are all condemned. Oh, no, I ceased to hold any such opinion long ago.’ ‘Then why don’t you say so openly?’ I asked; to which he replied impressively: ‘Don’t you see, Burgess, that if we told our change of views to the churches at large we should cut the very nerve of the missionary motive? We may hold these slightly modified views on eschatology ourselves without detriment, perhaps, or danger, although of course they must be held well in hand; but if we should speak them out to the rank and file, the result would be an instant falling off in the receipts of our treasury, and the Lord knows they are small enough and inadequate enough as it is. The average man would reason, if the heathen can be saved after all in some other way, it is not necessary for me to deny myself in order to send them the gospel. So keep still, my dear Burgess, just keep your views to yourself as some of the rest of us do. Go right along as you have been doing, and there will be no harm done.’”

“Keith, dear Dr. Durham did not know it, but that is Jesuitism!” exclaimed Anna, with flashing eyes.

“I thought it was,” he replied quietly, “and the result was I gave up my office, partly on account of my health, partly because I could not continue what would actually have been, for me, getting money under false pretences.”

“Still, Keith, it is not only to save the heathen from everlasting punishment that we want to send the gospel, but to give them the present salvation from sin.”

“Certainly. There are other motives left. I think they may be sufficient to energize our work far beyond what the Gospel of Fear could do, but they are not at present the popular motives to which I am expected to appeal. The future of the cause is not clear to me. If Durham is right, and the nerve of missions will be cut when people cease to believe that the heathen are necessarily damned because they have not accepted Christ, why then I have little hope, because it seems to me impossible for thinking people to hold this view much longer. But I must admit that it is hard enough to get them to give money when they believe implicitly in the immediate and hopeless doom of every heathen soul departing to judgment.”

“Keith, they don’t believe it! Nobody believes it! It is monstrous. If we really believed such things as practically taking place, we should all lose our reason. Our only escape from insanity, I believe, is that, while with our mouths and with our opinions we have declared such things, in our hearts and in our deeper conviction we have denied them, knowing that they would be treason to God. What misleads us all, Keith, I am beginning to believe, is that we have felt bound to accept a system which theologians have worked out, and which has involved a paring down of both God and man to make them fit into the narrow grooves they have assigned them in the hard logic of their formulas.”

“Well, let us make this question concrete; illustrate it from life,” said Keith, leaning back languidly in his arm-chair. “How is it with yourself? You have been taught, and have believed until very recently, this doctrine of universal condemnation of all heathen ‘out of Christ,’ and now, it seems, you have begun to question it. What is the effect on the missionary motive in your case? Would you feel as eager as ever to go as a missionary? Does the subject appeal to your conscience as powerfully as before?”

Anna looked at Keith for a moment in thoughtful silence, and then shook her head.

“No.”

“You see Dr. Durham was right,” said Keith, sadly. “If this is true of you, who have all your life been pledged to this work,—and I admit that it is true of myself,—what can be expected of the careless crowd, indifferent at best?”

Anna had been walking restlessly up and down the library. Now she came back to the heavy black oak table at which her husband was sitting, sat down, and, resting her elbows on the table, propped her chin in both hands, and so sat silently for many moments. Then she began to speak, but very slowly, rather as if thinking aloud:—

“I have been accustomed, and so have you, all our lives, to the stimulus, the spur, of a piercingly powerful motive, the most powerful possible, I should think.—To save somebody from immediate death when the means of rescue is in your hands is a motive to which every human being must respond, instinctively. Suppose this motive is shown to be, in some degree at least, based upon a misunderstanding, and we find that we are asked to alleviate suffering instead of to save life, why would it not be perfectly natural, almost inevitable, that at first there should be a reaction? Accustomed to the stronger stimulus, just at first our motives and purposes would languish, I think. Mine do. I can’t help owning it, Keith. But I can imagine that deeper knowledge of God, higher conceptions of human brotherhood, of what they call the solidarity of the race—things like that—which I only dimly realize yet, might reënforce our poor wills, and knit again the nerve if it has been cut. Don’t you think so?”

Keith watched his wife as she sat thus speaking, and a great tenderness was in his eyes.

“You are a very wonderful woman, Anna,” he said; “your thought always goes beyond mine.”

She did not seem to hear what he said, for she went on in the same musing tone:—

“In a way, it seems to me, sometimes, as if every hope, every purpose, every controlling motive with which I started out in life, had slipped away from me, this of missionary work with the rest. All that I thought I could do or become has been rendered impossible in one way or another, and whatever capacity or force there is in me is unapplied. I can’t even be a comfortable society woman; other people won’t let me, even if I can let myself, and you know how I find it impossible to fit into conventional charities. Everywhere I seem to be superfluous, out of harmony with my environment. I thought once, I was vain enough to think, that God wanted me for some special service,—that he would give me a work for him and for his children; but I am thirty years old now, Keith, and what have I done?”

“You have been a dear wife and a faithful child,—a true Christian woman,—is that not enough?”

Anna smiled wistfully.

“It is not good for any one to simply be, and bring nothing to pass. But to-night I feel that whatever new wine life is to bring me will have to be put into new bottles. The old motives and forces have spent themselves, and the old hopes; and the forms which held them, have gone with them, for me.”

BOOK III
NIGHT

O Holiest Truth! how have I lied to thee!

I vow’d this day thy sacrifice to be;

But I am dim ere night.

Surely I made my prayer, and I did deem

That I could keep in me thy morning beam,

Immaculate and bright.

But my foot slipp’d; and, as I lay, he came,

My gloomy foe, and robb’d me of heaven’s flame.

Help thou my darkness, Lord, till I am light.

—John Henry Newman.