CHAPTER XXXVII
From the unhappy desire of becoming great;
Preserve us, gracious Lord and God.
—Old Moravian Liturgy.
There is a time when religion is only felt as a bridle that checks us, and then comes another time when it is a sweet and penetrating life-blood, which sets in motion every fibre of the soul, expands the understanding, gives us the Infinite for our horizon, and makes all things clear to us.—Lacordaire.
On the quiet street of the hill town of Bethlehem stands the quaint and ancient building set apart in the Moravian economy as the Widows’ House.
In the interior of the old stone house, with its massive walls and rows of dormer windows, are wide, low-ceiled halls, and sunny, sweet-smelling chambers, clean and orderly, chaste and simple, as those of a convent. Here in mild monotony and peace the women of the “Widows’ Choir” live their quiet life, and here in September we find Anna Burgess, who had fled to this haven of her mother’s abiding-place, as to a sanctuary.
The evening was warm, and the windows of Gulielma Mallison’s room were open to the sunshine and the sweet air. Flowers blossomed in the deep window-sills; the bare floor was as white as scrubbing could make it; the appointments of the room were cheerful and refined, albeit homely, and the atmosphere was that of still repose. By the window Gulielma Mallison sat knitting, her face beneath its widow’s cap calm and strong in its submissive sadness. Opposite her on the sofa lay Anna, each line of her face and figure expressing the suffering of a stricken heart. There had been months of slow, wearisome illness and of grievous mental suffering, in which her days had been a Purgatorio and her nights an Inferno; and now weeks of convalescence, which were bringing life back into her wasted frame, still failed to bring healing to her mind.
The mother’s fond eyes, glancing unperceived across her knitting, noted the listless droop of the long white hands upon the white dress, the marblelike pallor of the forehead from which the hair was so closely drawn, the hollow cheeks, the piteous sadness of the mouth, the glassy brightness of the eyes, fixed in the long, still gaze of habitual introspection.
“Surely,” sighed Gulielma Mallison to herself, as she had before a hundred times, “there is more than the bitterness of death in her face; widowhood alone to the Christian brings not such havoc as this. It is in some place of danger that her thoughts are dwelling. I should fear less for her if she could only speak!”
But Anna’s grief could not find its way to words. How could her mother, in her sober, ordered existence, her decorous and righteous experiences of life and love and death, comprehend what it was to live with shadows of faithlessness, even of blood-guiltiness, for perpetual company? For to Anna’s thought Keith had been driven to his lonely death by the hardness of Gregory, by words which had issued from the white heat of his passion for her, a passion unrebuked by her,—nay, rather, shared to the full. Was she then guiltless of her husband’s death?
Not for a moment could Anna divide herself from Gregory in responsibility for the action which Oliver had characterized as “moral murder.” Unsparingly just to herself, she bore to the very limit of reason all the fellowship which was imposed upon her by the mastery of a love so long lived in its unconsciousness and silence, so soon cut off, once perceived and acknowledged. It has been said that “all great loves that have ever died, dropped dead.” Anna’s mighty passion had been stillborn, slain by the words which had sent Keith on his dim way to death. For she had never doubted that Oliver’s rehearsal of the scene in the woods between Gregory and Keith had been substantially true. She knew there had been spiritual violence done, and her soul recoiled from the very strength and power which had once enchained her. Something of diabolical pride seemed to her now to invest even the austere morality of Gregory. He would have spurned a yielding to the weakness of the flesh, his moral fastidiousness would have made it impossible; but he fought the fire of love fiercely with the fire of pride, not humbly with the weapons of prayer. No shield of faith nor sword of the spirit had been his in the hour of temptation, for all his high ideals, but the sheer, elemental force of human will. He had conquered, or rather had grappled with, the one passion; but the very force by which he had conquered turned again and conquered him, and his very power became his undoing.
Beside this conception of Gregory which had now taken possession of Anna’s mind, Keith’s gentleness, his faithful, patient life, above all, the greatness of the silent sacrifice which he had made for her sake when he embarked on the Fraternia adventure, became sacred and heroic. She saw at last what his leaving his normal life had been; she believed, as she had said to Everett, that he had literally given his life for her, and the sense of his devotion, so little understood, so scantily recognized, wore ceaselessly at her heart. Her one drop of balm was the memory of Keith’s last smile of triumphant love and faith; the bitterest drop in her Cup of Trembling that not one last word had been given her to show her by what paths his soul had fared, and whether thoughts of peace had lightened his sufferings. Having loved her, he had loved her to the end,—this only she knew. His faithfulness had not failed.
Words which her father had spoken to her shortly before his death, vaguely comprehended at the time, haunted her now, “With greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”
If only she had earlier discerned their meaning!
Such shape did these two men take to Anna now; the one who had moulded all her outward life and touched her inner life hitherto so faintly, the other who had mastered her in her innate longing for power and freedom, and controlled her inner life for many years: Keith seemed to her now like some spirit of gentle ministration, humble, faithful, undefiled; Gregory, like some proud spirit, even as Lucifer, son of the morning, who had said, ‘I will ascend into heaven,’ but who had been brought down to hell, dragging with him all that was highest and holiest. And she had thought him so different! Like another, her heart would cry out:—
“I thought that he was gentle, being great;
O God, that I had loved a smaller man!
I should have found in him a greater heart.”
Once, some weeks earlier, there had come to her a brief note from Gregory, written soon after his return to Fraternia. It said only:—
“I have sinned deeply, against God; against him; most of all against you. I cannot even venture to ask you to forgive. I can only say to you, the penalty is wholly mine to bear. You are blameless.”
Having read the note, Anna threw it into the fire, and wrote no word in return.
And for herself—?
There was no softness of self-pity in Anna’s remorse. Dry and tearless and despairing, she saw herself, after long years of spiritual assurance, of established and unquestioned righteousness, overwhelmed at last by sin; not by the delicate and dainty and inconclusive discords which religious experts love to examine and analyze, but by a gross ground-swell of primitive passion, linking her with men of violence and women of shame.
Looking back upon her girlhood, Anna thought with sad self-scorning of her young desire for “a deeper sense of sin.” It had come now, not as the initial stage in a knowledge of God, and of her relation to him, but as a tardy revelation of the possibility of her nature, undreamed of in her long security. The cherished formulas of the old system, its measure of rule and line applied to the incalculable forces of the human spirit; its hard, inflexible mould into which the great tides of personal experience must be poured, seemed to lie in fragments about her now, like wreckage after a storm. She remembered that Professor Ward had once spoken to her of her inherited religious conceptions as terrible in their power to mislead, to deceive the heart as to itself; she saw the danger of a belief founded not on infinite verities, but on a narrow mediæval logic. She knew sin at last, and knew that it was not slain in the hour of spiritual awakening.
She thought of the night preceding her union with her father’s church, and the recoil of nameless dread with which she had seen passing under her window the village outcast whom she supposed to be incredibly guilty and cut off from fellowship with all who, like herself, were seeking God. And it was that very night that she had first dreamed of the mighty personality, the embodiment of power and greatness, which she had thought to find in Gregory. Though late, she now clearly perceived that in no human being could that ideal of her dream find full manifestation.
Such thoughts as these were passing behind the pale mask of Anna’s pain-worn face, which her mother’s eyes were watching. The impress of suffering which they gave was hard to see, and a long involuntary sigh escaped Gulielma Mallison’s lips.
Anna looked up with eyes as sad as those of Michel Angelo’s Fates.
“Mother dear,” she said, her voice strangely dulled from its former clear cadence, “why do you sigh? Do I make you unhappy?”
“I cannot comfort you, Anna Benigna,” said the mother, sorrowfully. “It is for that I sigh.”
“No,” Anna said slowly, her eyes falling again from her mother’s face; “you cannot do that, no one can. No one lives who can comfort your child, mother.”
“I have often thought, Anna, that you may have suffered,” the mother ventured almost timidly, “as many others have, from the sad mistakes so common to people who regard the Christian life and the married life as ends, instead of beginnings.”
Gulielma noticed a slight quickening of interest in Anna’s eyes, and went on thoughtfully, with her simple philosophy of life:—
“To read the books that are written, and to hear the things that are said, young people can hardly help supposing that when they become Christians they will know no more of sin, and when they are married they will have only joy and perfect union. To my way of thinking, these wrong ideas are responsible for a great deal of needless unhappiness. The Christian life is really a school, with hard discipline and harder lessons. As for marriage—”
“Well,” said Anna, as her mother paused, “as to marriage?”
“It may be a crown,” said Gulielma, slowly, “but it is sure to be in some measure a cross. It is a testing, a trial, a discipline, like the rest of life. Only, whether it happens to be happy, or happens to be hard, it is equally to be borne faithfully and in the fear of God.”
There was silence for a little space, and then a laughing voice in the street outside, called:—
“Mrs. Mallison!”
Gulielma rose and stepped to the window, looking out over the crimson and purple asters into the street. A young girl who stood there handed her up a letter.
“I don’t know whether it belongs to Mrs. Burgess or not. The address has been changed so many times, but the postmaster said I was to ask you.”
“Very well,” was the answer, and as Gulielma turned back, a letter in her hand, she found Anna sitting up, leaning upon her elbow, her eyes strangely eager. She held out her hand, not speaking, and received the letter. The upper line, which struck her eyes instantly, was her own name, and it had been written by Keith. She could not be mistaken. The mother’s anxious eyes saw every trace of colour ebb away from Anna’s face and lips, and then stream back until the faint flush rose to her forehead. She had not stopped to decipher the many addresses written below, crossed and recrossed by many pens, but, seeing her own name written by the dear dead hand, she pressed the letter hard against her heart and so lay a moment, silent.
Soon she looked up and met her mother’s eyes. A wistful, heart-breaking request was in her own, which she hardly dared to speak.
“May I be all alone, mother?” she asked faintly; “my letter is from him. It has gone wrong, but it has come to me, you see, at last. In the morning I will see you. I will tell you then—all.”
In another minute, the door quietly closing, Anna found herself alone. Breaking the seal, she saw that the letter had been written three days before Keith’s death. An error in the original address, doubtless due to his exhaustion, had sent it far astray. The letter said:—
My own Anna,—I am here in Raleigh in a comfortable house, and with kind people, but I fear that I am very ill, and that the end is now not far away, and I want you as soon as you can come to me. I hope there will be no need of alarming you with a telegram, for I know that you will start as soon as this reaches you, and that will be in good time.
Do not think that this crisis is sudden and unforeseen. The physician in Baltimore told me plainly that I could have but a short time to live, and when I knew that I hastened to reach you as quickly as I might. It was for you only, Anna, in all the world that I longed. I believed that a few weeks of quietness were for us, not harder than we could bear, being together.
I think you will know that something turned me back almost at my journey’s end. John Gregory is honest, and he will tell you, if indeed he knows himself.
I do not know now what he said to me, I do not care to remember. Whatever it was it should have had no weight, being spoken, I know, under some strong excitement, but with it there went that strange, irresistible influence which Gregory exerts over me, and before which I was, or seemed to myself, powerless. I felt his will was for me to go back, not onward to you, and I yielded as if unable to do otherwise. I do not know, I cannot understand. I wish it had not been so, but rather for him than for myself, for I know that in his higher mood the thought of that night must be hateful to him.
I want to say now while I can that neither you nor he must look upon these events in a way to exaggerate or overemphasize their importance. I can see that you with your sensitive conscience and he with his great moral severity may judge over hardly. The difference to me has not been great. The end was very near, and is not hastened, and I shall see you yet before it comes. If I had not been weak I should have kept on my way. It was my weakness that sent me back rather than the outward compulsion.
I shall not want to talk of this when I see you, Anna, and so I will write to-day some things which have come to my mind this winter, for I have come to see many things in a new light.
John Gregory loves you. I do not blame him for that, nor wonder. “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” He is a man of great power and of the highest spiritual ambition. He is far nearer to you in ability than I; he could enter more deeply into your purposes and sympathize in fuller measure with your intellectual life. I believe you could have loved him, if you had been free, and that the union of two such natures would have been nobly effective for good. But I found you first, and with my fond dream that a sign was given me, won you for my wife. What then?
It fell to my part, although not of my own will, to give your life the shape it has taken. Sometimes I see plainly that I, a poor, pale, colourless fellow, wholly beneath both you and John Gregory, have maimed both your lives, so much stronger and more potential than mine could ever be.
And yet, Anna, for all this I cannot wish the past undone. I claim you wholly, heartily, for my own, and whatever the future may hold for you, and however the past has tried you, I believe in your love for me, and in the union of our spirits. My heart is at rest. My trust in you is absolute and beyond hurt or harm, and all the joy my life has known has come through you, my true and faithful wife. Never doubt this if you love me and would honour my name.
I wish to lay no hint of limitation or direction upon your future. Wherever you go, the dear Lord will go with you, and you will bring peace and consolation. You cannot go astray, nor your work be brought to naught, for God is with you. All that I have is yours without reserve or condition, beyond the few legacies I have named in a letter to my lawyer in Fulham. Use what was ours together freely wherever you will, whether to establish Fraternia, or in any line of effort which appeals to you. My keenest regret is that heretofore I have withheld from you what you desired. Forgive me. Those scruples look small and mean to me to-day.
Good night, my Anna—my Benigna, my highest grace and blessing.
Do not think of me as left comfortless. I am not alone. The King is at the door, and I hear his voice. He has even come in and will sup with me and I with him.
Let his peace be upon us both.
Keith.
It was morning.
Entering her room, Gulielma Mallison found Anna fully dressed, standing in a stream of sunshine, with a brighter light than that of the sun upon her face.
“Oh, mother!” she cried, stretching out both her hands, “I can live. I can sleep. I can even cry now. Oh, these tears! how they have fallen like rain on a thirsty ground. See, mother; after all I am young still and strong. Feel my pulse, how full it is this morning, how strong and steady! I am at peace. The peace of God has come to me at last. Keith has comforted me.”