CHAPTER XXXVIII
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
To spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.
—Sidney Lanier.
While we are not to forget that we have fallen, we are not always to carry the mud with us; the slough is behind, but the clean, clearly defined road stretches ahead of us; skies are clear, and God is beyond. We were made for purity, truth, and fidelity, and the very abhorrence of the opposite of these qualities bears testimony that our aspirations are becoming our attainments. The really noble thing about any man or woman is not freedom from all the stains of the lower life, but the deathless aspirations which forever drive us forward.... Better a thousand times the eager and passionate fleeing to God from a past of faults and weaknesses, with an irresistible longing to rest in the everlasting verities, than the most respectable career which misses this profound impulse.
—Anon.
It was Easter morning in Bethlehem. The stars still shone in the sky, and the little town lay in the hush and stillness which precede the earliest dawn, when suddenly, far off, like a whisper from the sky, the tones of the trumpets could be heard announcing the risen Christ.
Down through the quiet streets passed the solemn choir, the trombones blowing their deep-breathing melody in full and thrilling power. They stopped for a little space upon the bridge, and as their herald choral swelled and grew and filled the air, lights came out in visible response here and there throughout the sleeping town; and as they passed on down the streets, under the starlit sky, groups of men and women joined them in quiet fashion until the procession grew to a great though silent throng.
From the Widows’ House Gulielma Mallison and Anna came out and stood together for a moment in the dusk, watching the approaching stream of people as it moved forward in the gloom, and listening to the strains of music which called to their ears:—
“Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen!”
Soon the procession had reached their door, and, joining it with humble gladness, mother and daughter followed with the rest, greeting their friends and neighbours in simple, heartfelt kindliness.
The church was reached, and within it a solemn service was begun, and continued until the brightening of the eastern sky gave token of the sunrise. Then, as with one accord, and with the quietness of dear and familiar custom, the great congregation streamed out into the twilight of the early dawn, and, again forming in procession, moved forward up the winding hill to the cemetery, the choir with the pastor leading the way.
It was an early spring, and on the air was the thrill of awakening life. As she stood in the midst of the reverent throng now waiting, as if expectant, in the still churchyard, Anna felt the deep significance of the time as it had never been given her to feel it before.
Again the trombones poured forth their deep, yearning music in the ancient Easter hymn, the people singing in full chorus:—
“Amen! Come, Lord Jesus! Come, we implore thee;
With longing hearts we now are waiting for thee;
Come soon, O come!”
Then followed, in slow, rhythmic chant, the noble words of the old Moravian liturgy:—
“This is my Lord, who redeemed me, a lost and undone human creature, purchased and gained me from all sin, from death and from the power of the devil;
“Not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood, and with his innocent suffering and dying;
“To the end that I should be his own, and in his kingdom live under him and serve him in eternal righteousness, innocence, and happiness;
“So as he, being risen from the dead, liveth and reigneth world without end.”
With awe and joy came back the great volume of the response:—
“This I most certainly believe.”
“Keep us, oh Lord,” came then the prayer, “in everlasting fellowship with those of our brethren who since Easter Day have entered into the joy of their Lord and with the whole Church triumphant, and let us rest together in thy presence from our labours.”
The sun rose. The quiet God’s Acre was gilded with its misty beams, and the pale opal tints of the morning clouds reflected its glory. From the whole assembly burst forth the mighty hallelujahs of the hymn of praise, borne up by the deep diapason of the trumpets:—
“The Lord is risen. He is indeed risen.”
As Anna came out of the churchyard in the sunrise light, the peace of God was in her look, and the victory of the Resurrection morning shone in her eyes.
Hardly had she reached the street, when some one who had stood, awaiting her coming, put out his hand and greeted her. It was Pierce Everett.
“I saw you in the churchyard,” he said. “I wish to speak to you now, if I may.”
Anna welcomed him with quiet gladness, and they walked on together through the street, until they were beyond the crowd. Then Anna asked:—
“Do you come from Fulham?”
“Oh, no,” was the answer, “from Fraternia, or from what was Fraternia. My home is there now, and will be.”
“I did not know,” Anna said simply, not finding it easy to say more.
“There is little left there now of the old village or of the old life. Even the name is gone. They call it Gregory’s now.”
“I heard that the land had gone into the hands of the man who held the mortgage.”
“Yes, it is all gone now; all except the bit of ground that Mr. Gregory’s house stands on. The house and land we have kept for our own.”
“And there you live alone? Are all the others gone?”
“Nearly all. Some stay and work in the cotton mill, which has been enlarged, but the cabins are mostly used now by the coloured people who work the land, and are employed also in the mill.”
They were silent for a moment, and then Everett said:—
“We have heard that you are going soon to India. Is it true?”
“Yes, I go next month.”
“As a teacher?”
“Yes, partly, but I am also to be connected with a hospital. You know that is work which I have always liked, and this is to be a new hospital, bearing my husband’s name.”
Everett was silent, and Anna noted as she had not before the profound sadness of his face. Presently he looked at her with undisguised anxiety and asked a question which she had already begun to dread.
“Would you be willing to see Mr. Gregory before you go?”
A painful change passed over Anna’s face.
“I cannot,” she replied quickly; “it is not necessary. Is he here, Mr. Everett? Did he come with you?” and he noticed that she trembled and lost colour.
“No,” he answered very gently; “do not be troubled. He is not here. He will not seek to find or follow you. He will never leave Fraternia again.”
Her eyes questioned his face, for it was impossible not to detect some melancholy significance in his words.
“Mr. Gregory has received a severe injury,” Everett went on, as if in answer to her look. “It was a month ago. He was at work with the lumbermen up in the ravine. He was working midway of the river, which was unusually high, and he slipped and fell. Before he could get to his feet, a heavy log which was carried forward very swiftly by the current struck him with tremendous force and stunned him. We were near enough to reach him almost immediately, but the blow was on the spine, and it produced instantaneous paralysis. He will never walk again.”
Swift changes had passed over Anna’s face. In a softened voice she said:—
“How strange, how very terrible. Is he himself in other ways?”
“Perfectly. His mind was never clearer nor more active. I think he was never stronger in spirit. His body is a magnificent wreck, that is all.”
“And he does not wish to leave Fraternia?”
“No, I think nothing could suit him so well as our little stronghold in the solitude there. He does not mind the changes even, as one would expect. There is no bitterness. He is too large-minded for that. He acknowledges himself defeated, but his faith is still strong in his cause.”
“And how about yourself?”
“I am with him, heart and soul,” Everett answered, with strong emphasis; “nothing could take me from him now,—unless my presence ceased to be acceptable to him. He is, in spite of all that has passed of failure and defeat, my leader, and will be to the end. He is imperfect, being human; perhaps there are men least in the kingdom of heaven who are greater than he. Nevertheless, he is the bravest man I have ever known and the most sincere,—I would almost add, the humblest. So we live on together. He writes, I paint. Barnabas takes care of the house for us, and little Judith gives us the touch of womanhood we need to humanize us. An oddly assorted family perhaps, but we are satisfied.”
Anna listened with intense eagerness to every word, and found sincere satisfaction in the simple picture which Everett had thus drawn for her.
“And you have come to Bethlehem—” Anna hesitated, and Everett took up the word quickly.
“I have come all the way from Fraternia to ask you to go back with me and see John Gregory once more. He may live for a number of years, but it is hardly probable that you ever will see him again. He asks this as the greatest kindness you can do him, but he told me to say that, if you do not feel that you can go, he will still be perfectly sure that you are doing right.”
Something in the new note of humility, of submission, in the implied finality of the request, most of all the vision of the strong man in his present helplessness and acknowledged defeat, wrought powerfully upon Anna’s resolution.
They walked on silently for some moments, and then, turning abruptly to retrace her steps into the town, Anna said:—
“Yes, I will go with you. We will start to-morrow morning.”
It was late on Tuesday afternoon when they reached the valley. As they drove past the mill Anna gave a sudden exclamation of dismay as she caught a passing glimpse of a well-remembered figure which she least expected to see again in Fraternia.
“That could not be Oliver Ingraham,” she cried, “and yet no other man could look like him.”
“It was Oliver himself,” said Everett, smiling a little.
“How can it be? What has happened?”
“To begin with, I should tell you that Mr. Gregory succeeded in paying back, even to the last dollar, Mr. Ingraham’s contribution.”
Anna’s face grew brighter.
“I am glad,” she said.
“Yes, it was better, I am sure. But when this was accomplished a sense of compunction seized him toward Oliver for some fancied harshness in the past. Six months ago he sent for him to come if he would, and he appeared promptly. Mr. Gregory had conceived the idea that something better could be made of the man under right influences, and he determined to make the attempt.”
“Can you see any change?” asked Anna, still incredulous.
“It was rather hopeless for a time, only that he so evidently, for all his former spleen and spite, came to have a regard for Mr. Gregory, himself, approaching worship. But when the accident happened up in the woods and he saw Mr. Gregory helpless as he is now, it seemed to produce an extraordinary change in the fellow. He is softened and humanized in a marvellous degree. He can never be wholesome exactly to ordinary mortals. I sometimes think he is a snake still, but a snake with its poisonous fangs drawn. Yes, Mr. Gregory has made it possible to hope for good even from Oliver.”
“Only a great nature could have made that possible,” said Anna, musingly.
“Yes,” responded Everett, “and only then a great nature which had learned obedience by the things which it suffered.”
Anna was silent. This action of Gregory’s seemed very great to her, so wholly was it in opposition to his deep, instinctive antipathy toward Oliver. This man had seemed to embody in himself the evil forces which had entered Fraternia to destroy all of highest hope and purpose with which it had been established. And now Gregory had stooped to lift up, even to draw to himself, the man in all his hideous moral ugliness. Idealist as Anna had ever been, she saw in the nature thus revealed to her, in spite of failures and falls, a more robust virtue, a higher spiritual efficacy, than any of which she had known or dreamed. Again she found herself convicted of a too narrow and partial view of the working of the human spirit in her passionate withdrawal from Gregory in his time of temptation.
They had crossed the bridge now, and up the wooded slope Anna saw Barnabas and little Judith standing before the door of Gregory’s cabin. With simple and unaffected delight they welcomed her, and then suffered her to enter the house alone.
When the door had closed behind her, Barnabas came up quietly and took his place upon the rude steps which his hands had laid, and so sat, throughout the interview, as one self-stationed, to keep guard.
The interior of the cabin was as it had always been, with its rude furniture and its one picture, save that a broad and capacious couch covered with leather stood with its head just below the south window. On this couch, with a rug of grey foxskin thrown over his limbs, lay John Gregory, his head and shoulders propped high, his powerful hands lying by his sides with their own expression of enforced idleness.
He lifted his head as Anna entered, and leaned forward, raising his right hand in a pathetic salutation of reverence and gratitude.
Overcome by the new and more august repose of his face and by the pathos of his look and gesture, Anna crossed to where Gregory lay, and fell upon her knees by his side, her tears bathing his hand, although this she did not know.
For a space neither spoke nor moved. Then, as she rose from her knees, Anna said under her breath:—
“Life is greater than I thought.”
“Life is great,” returned Gregory, “because we live in God.” Then he asked humbly, all the fire of his earlier habit of speech quenched,—
“Do you then forgive me?”
“Yes, I have forgiven you,” she said softly. “I could not until, months after my husband’s death, a letter came to me from him, which had been lost long in reaching me. It was so noble, so great, so reconciling, that it sufficed for all—even that,” she added, with unsparing truthfulness. Then, even more gently:—
“It is altogether from him that I am here to-day. I could never have seen you again if it had not been for that letter.”
“Then I owe to him the greatest mercy of my life,” said John Gregory, solemnly, “and it is fitting that I should. He was a gentler man than I, a better man. I did not rightly appreciate him when he was among us.”
“He had no noisy virtues,” Anna said. “I think none of us perceived fully what he was until he was gone.”
Then with great delicacy she told Gregory all that the letter had brought of reconcilement, and especially the word to him. He heard it in brooding silence, and his face grew very calm.
“I wanted you to know,” Gregory began after a long pause, “that my feeling toward you has not been evil or base or wholly selfish. From the time I first saw that picture,” and he pointed to that above the fireplace, “you became to me a kind of religion. You stood to me for the absolute purity of my ideal, untainted by self and sin and even sorrow. That picture gave you to me as a virgin soul in the first dawning of a great and noble expectation. It was a picture which a Galahad might have worshipped. But alas! I was no Galahad.
“I was bringing the picture back to this country, and it happened, although you never knew it, that I crossed on the same ship with you.”
“How could it have been,” cried Anna, “that I never saw you?”
“I was with my East London people in the other part of the ship. But I used often to see you with your husband and with the many friends who always made a circle about you, and I fancied I saw a change in your look,—a change which betokened a gradual dimming of your higher vision, a fading of your ideal. I thought the people about you were changing you to their own likeness in some degree, and the thought haunted and disturbed me more than I had a right to let it.
“I came to Fulham with the picture, which I had promised to return to Everett. When I reached his house late in the evening, his mother received me and told me that he and ‘all the world’ were at a great reception at your house. She further told me that your husband’s mother had confided in her her hopes and her confidence that a new era of social leadership was now before you, and added that you were indeed already quite ‘the fashion’ in Fulham’s aristocratic circle.
“I had hardly an hour in Fulham—hardly a moment to reflect. I acted on my impulse and sought you and called you out from your brilliant company. You know what I said. My motive was pure, I think, whether the action were well judged or ill. When I saw you before me in that brief interview, in your loveliness, and in the docility which underlay your frank and candid joy, a strange impulse arose in me to gain some spiritual control over you, to have an essential influence over your thinking and to direct your development and your activity as I believed would be noblest and best.
“Naturally I had no opportunity to carry out such an impulse for a long period, but I think it never left me. When I saw you that night in the audience at Burlington, I knew that you would go to Fraternia. I determined in my own heart that if it could be right, you should. There was no thought then or for many months that anything could arise between us which could impair our faith and duty. Indeed, I never knew myself that it was you who had wholly mastered me rather than I you, until that day on Eagle Rock. When I left Fraternia that night, I knew all—to the very depth. I understood the blindness and tyranny of my passion, and I left, meaning never to see you again. Benigna, I did not have it in my heart to do you wrong, least of all to do wrong to your husband. It was the suddenness of his coming before me, and the struggle I was myself undergoing, which threw me at the moment into a kind of still frenzy of evil impulse. Gladly would I have died to atone for it.
“Now, looking back, I almost think I can see that I was permitted, so far as my individual life was concerned, to reach some climax of pride and passion, that I might be brought low in my humiliation. Perhaps in no other way could I have learned the way of the Cross than through seeing the failure of my own strength, in which God knew, I see now, I had taken an unconscious pride.
“There is nothing left of it. No drop of the wormwood and gall has gone untasted. But I believe solemnly to-day in the forgiveness of sins, and rest in a good hope of salvation through our Master, Christ.”
Again silence came between them, a silence which was full of peace, and then, with something of his old abruptness, Gregory said:—
“And now you will tell me about your going to India. You are glad to go; so much I understand.”
“Yes,” Anna replied, “it is a great fulfilment. I have lived a whole round of life since I first felt the call to this service, and now I come back to it with a purpose and conviction even deeper than those which first inspired me.”
“Then the larger hopes of final destiny do not, in the end, weaken the missionary motive, you think?”
“Oh, no. That fear belonged only to the time of transition. The message I have now is a far mightier and a more imperative one than I had at first. I know something now of the reality of sin and its terrible fellowship, and at least far more than in those old days, both of law and of love. I have learned also a greater reverence for man as well as for God.”
“Yes,” he said quietly; “it is true. You have been in training for your work.”
“I am gladder than I can tell you,” continued Anna, “that I was withheld from going out on such a mission with the hard and narrow message which was all I had then to give. It was you, Mr. Gregory, who opened to me the great truth of the unity of the race, you who taught me to see that ‘redemption is the movement of the whole to save the part.’ I share the burden of sin and suffering with all my fellow-men, and I simply seek to lift that burden so far as I may where it presses most sorely. Can there be any doubt that this is where Christ is not known,—among pagan nations?”
John Gregory thought for a moment before he replied. “I believe you are right,” he said finally. “The needs there are grosser than here, and they are actual and intolerable; inherent in the system, not artificial. You have the gift of high ministry. You used it without stint for our people here in Fraternia, but the issues were inadequate to your powers; for the conditions were, after all, abnormal, being produced voluntarily rather than by necessity.”
“Then do you feel, Mr. Gregory, that the message of brotherhood, of equality, cannot be spread by such means as we tried in Fraternia?” Anna asked timidly, and yet without fear.
“I believe that such isolated, social experiments, for many years at least, will be as ours has been, premature and ineffective. They are symptoms rather than formative agencies. They have significance as such, but are otherwise unproductive.
“I have not learned this lesson easily,” he added with a faint return of his rare smile, and the swift, strong gesture with which he had always been wont to dash the hair from his forehead. Anna knew without words that in the fall of Fraternia his dearest hopes, his most cherished plans, and highest pledges had fallen too. It was not necessary to open the old wound that she should know his pain.
“There are more steps between the clear perception of a condition and the application of remedial measures than I supposed before I started our colony here. I was in a hurry, but God seems to have plenty of time. There must be years, generations, perhaps—I sometimes fear it—centuries still of education and training before men understand that they are not created oppressors by the grace of God, nor oppressed by the will of God. I read this the other day,” he continued, taking a book from the table beside him; “it will show you what I mean: ‘When a man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral fact, he sees plainly enough that that fact cannot come into the actual world all at once—not without first a destruction of the existing order of society—such a destruction as makes him feel satanic; then an intellectual revolution; and lastly only a new order embodying the new impulse.’
“That is good,” he commented, laying the book down, “but what is said there in a few sentences may, in actual fulfilment, require several centuries.”
“It is hard to wait,” said Anna.
“Yes, it is hard,” Gregory repeated, his eyes resting on her face with that sympathetic response to her thought which, she was startled to find, could still stir the old warm tremor in her heart; “but I can wait, can’t you? You can if you believe, as we are bound to believe, in a ‘divine event toward which the whole creation moves.’ I believe, I thank God, also, that, unworthy and powerless as I am in this marred soul and destroyed body of me, I can still hope, still work, still greet the unseen and expect the impossible.”
They talked long, and Anna rose at last to go.
“Oh, you will be leaving now!” John Gregory cried, as if he had forgotten that she did not belong to Fraternia.
“Yes,” Anna said gently, “I am to return to Spalding in an hour for the night, and I start home from there in the morning.”
“Yes,” he said, “that is right. You must go;” but with the thought all colour left his face, and his breath came hard and fast. She saw the physical change in him then. She had hardly seen it before.
“Can I help you? Can I bring you anything you need?” she asked quickly.
He pointed to a glass on the mantel, and said, smiling faintly:—
“It is so new to make others wait on me. It is not quite easy to lie here and submit to be served,—even by you, Benigna.”
As she brought him the glass, the simple act of service bore with it a peculiar power of suggestion and produced upon Anna herself an effect far beyond its apparent importance; for, as she thus served Gregory in his helplessness, a wave of yearning compassion and pure womanly tenderness broke over her heart. He would lie here for years, perhaps, prostrate, defeated, suffering, and she who had so loved him would go her way and leave him alone and uncomforted! Could it be right?
Before the imperious power of this question all other motives lost their significance.
Gregory had recovered from the sharpest effect of his agitation, and raised his eyes again, full of patient and quiet sorrow.
“Tell me,” she cried low and breathlessly, “shall I stay? I said I wished only to go where was most need of me. Is it here? Oh, I trust you wholly now, John Gregory! If you need my service, I will serve you while we both live.”
Then, as they faced each other with looks of solemn question, Anna saw into the depth of the man’s strong spirit, and she was prepared for what would follow.
“That might have been,” he said very slowly, and as if he were pronouncing his own doom, “even that unspeakable joy; but I myself, my child, made it impossible. Do you no longer see the great gulf fixed between you and me?”
He was holding both her hands now, and his own were firm and steady, but his face reflected the stern agony of the moment, while that of Anna was white as death. A throbbing silence filled the room, and all the air seemed to vibrate with the fierce pulsations of their hearts, for in both the cry arose that their punishment, self-inflicted, was greater than they could bear.
Then calmness fell, for as with one consent their eyes met again, and each perceived the light of a final spiritual conquest, and the shadow of an ultimate renunciation.
Again, as once before, John Gregory said, “It is the end,” and thus, most quietly, they parted.
It was evening when Anna left Fraternia. As the road entered the woods where the valley widened to the plain, she turned and caught a last glimpse of the solitary light which shone from the lowly house on the river’s farther side.
Through all the years and changes which remained to her, never did Anna lose the vision of that light, shining apart in the high valley. But John Gregory she never saw again.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
- Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.