CHAPTER XXI.
"We are the voices of the wandering wind,
Which seek for quiet, and quiet can never find.
Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life—
A moan, a sob, a sigh, a storm, a strife."
Next morning Philip Hardman left Mrs. Deans' early. He was leaving by the first train from the little flag station which was at the far end of the village; besides, he was determined to see Myron Holder.
Mrs. Deans had endeavored to dissuade him from this, but he was firm, and, recognizing this, Mrs. Deans suggested that she accompany him upon his mission; but he stated gently, but firmly, that he could achieve better results alone. Mrs. Deans felt bitterly aggrieved at being treated thus, for behind his gentle words she read a settled determination "to keep her out of it," as she phrased it to herself.
She bade him good-bye, however, with well-affected geniality, as he stood upon her doorstep; but the shallow smile died very soon, and a malevolent expression replaced it upon her fat features.
"I'll speak to Brother Fletcher about this," she said. "That Hardman is sorely puffed up in his own conceit and vainglorious! Well, by himself he can do nothing," she concluded, piously.
But whether it was the absence of the Lord or herself from Hardman's side that was going to militate against his success she left undetermined. There might also have been some doubt in the mind of the impartial hearer as to whether she was glad or sorry that his mission was likely to be a failure. Certainly her tone was not indicative of any great grief.
She betook herself indoors, and set about preparing a fresh supply of country dainties for the Reverend Fletcher.
Philip Hardman's face changed also after he turned it from Mrs. Deans' self-contented countenance, and the new expression was not far removed from one of disgusted contempt; and, it must be confessed, a somewhat sneering bitterness made his keen eyes sombre. He had asked Mrs. Deans the night before who Myron Holder was, and had been told—told! but in such a fashion! Mrs. Deans' evil words still stung his heart with shame for his kind. He felt as though one had smitten his lips with nettles.
And the pious speeches with which Mrs. Deans had besprent her tale—bah! It was like sprinkling a weak disinfectant over a heap of filth. It was indeed the "poison of asps" to hear Scripture—nay, the very words of his Master—so defiled.
Well, Hardman compressed his lips and hurried on.
The morning was sweet and calm, the "shoreless air" very clear and still, and, little by little, his spirit attuned itself to the hour; shred by shred, the mantle of bitterness, fell from him. The memories of the evening mingled with the hopes of the morning, into a draught that was very sweet to him. When he reached the cottage door his eyes were exalted, his lips calm, his heart confident.
The door was open, and through it he saw a bare room, the walls stained a deep yellow with ochre; a carpetless floor, comfortless but clean; a square table, with a coarse white cloth covering it, stood in the middle of the room; upon it was some food. Myron sat there alone, but there was another plate laid, beside which stood a battered tin mug. All this he took in at a glance, and then his eyes fastened upon the woman's face. She was as yet unconscious of his presence. She sat at the table in such position that the profile of her face was outlined sharply against the bright yellow of the walls.
Her face, as he beheld it thus for the first time in clear daylight, struck him with swift remembrance of an exquisite picture he had once seen, a meek-mouthed Madonna painted on a bright brass plaque. There was the same pose of head, the same heavy knot of nut-brown hair, the same outward sweep of the lashes from the same drooped lids, the same exquisite line where the cheek softened to the throat. But, alas! there was no heavenly nimbus round this living head, no holy glow of happy maternity, no pure halo of womanhood.
A MEEK-MOUTHED MADONNA.
At that moment Myron turned towards the doorway, and, as her eyes met his, his imagination suddenly supplied the aureole that before she seemed to lack, and, in completion of the picture, a stray line or two of poetry came back to him with all the happy force of applicability:
"Eh, sweet,
You have the eyes men choose to paint, you know;
And just that soft turn in the little throat,
And bluish color in the lower lid,
They make saints with."
He started as he realized that he was comparing the Madonna to this unblest mother—an ideal of saintly beauty to this sinning one. But all in an instant there came to him a swift certainty that this was not the face of an evil woman. This woman bore in her countenance the indelible lines of pain and suffering, the ineffaceable traces of bodily and mental anguish. She had been bowed beneath the burden of woman's inalienable heritage of agony, had lived through the Gethsemane of childbirth and won to the heights of motherhood's Golgotha—a child's grave. But in all this, remember, there is nothing vile; it is only infinitely pitiful.
Whilst he gazed and thought these things swiftly, she had risen from her place and stood with clasped hands and down-bent head—so like a prisoner awaiting sentence that he felt a great throb of pity. He took a step forward and held out his hand.
"I am going to the train," he said; "but I came away early, that I might see you."
"You are very good," she faltered; "but"—she hesitated.
"But what?" he urged gently, holding both her hands and looking down at her.
"Do you know who I am?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered, "I know everything."
"You asked Mrs. Deans!" she said in an incredulous voice.
He flushed at the tone. It told so clearly that she fully understood what Mrs. Deans would say; and somehow it seemed to link him with Mrs. Deans, as if he and that worthy woman stood on one side of a river and Myron Holder alone on the other. He could not bear that.
"Yes, but I always judge for myself," he said quickly.
"Oh!" she said. "You are——" She stopped, but gave the note of those swift glances of ineffable gratitude that had so often stirred Homer's heart.
And, looking at her thus, Hardman forgave her everything, "for Love pardons the unpardonable past;" and this man from that moment loved her, although he did not yet know it.
"Your child was very dear to you," he said, glancing at the table, where the two plates stood, although there was but one to sit at the board.
"Ah, so dear!" she answered.
Then, after a moment's pause, she went on swiftly:
"Oh, you can understand what it was—surely you can see—you are so good! He was everything to me, absolutely everything! The thought of him kept me from greater sin! I was nearly blind with weariness, and the way was getting dimmer and dimmer to my eyes; but his laugh showed me where the right road lay, and, when I found it again, his steps kept me company! Oh, can you think what it is to see the only creature—the only living thing in all the world—that loves you—die?" She looked at him, an interrogation so poignant as to be imperative in her eyes.
"Yes," he said, "we are two lonely souls, Myron. In all the wide earth there is none who cares whether I live or die."
"I am so sorry," she said. "Only, you are so good you can have friends for the seeking. As for me, I am not fit to be any one's friend. I had one friend here, but he is dead too"—she added the last sentence with a strange, swift sense of justice. Even though Homer was dead, she could not bear that he be classed with those others who had been so cruel.
"Yes," answered Hardman, "I heard of him."
"Did she tell you that he died to save My's life?" she asked.
"Yes, she told me," he answered.
There was a pause, then Myron said:
"It was so good of you to come!" He noticed the harsh tones of her voice.
"Have you a sore throat?" he asked.
"No," she said; "but my child died of suffocation. His throat was swollen with inflammation and croup, and when he tried to speak to me his voice was hard, like mine is now. It made my own throat ache; and ever since, the pain has been there and I have spoken in this way."
Thus, simply, Myron told of that marvel, that extraordinary instance of the power of Love. For this was indeed so. In Myron's case had been made manifest one of those marvellous mysteries of the human mechanism that now and again thrills the scientist with a burning zeal to discover the real relation between mind and matter, to enter the penetralia of humanity and learn its secret. That desolate night in the cottage the mother-heart apprehended each pang of the choking child, and the mother endured in her own organism a like agony. How sad to think she had no Divine license to do so! How strange that such a love should spring from shame!
Hardman's mind grasped the significance of her words upon the instant. For a moment the realization of this woman's strength held him silent. Then he remembered her loneliness and bent towards her.
"Myron," he said, "will you be my friend?"
"Oh, do you mean it?" she asked, breathlessly.
"Assuredly," he said.
Then once more Myron gave her hands as a seal of friendship.
There was only a short time left after that—a few moments of earnest prayer from Philip Hardman—a few words asking her to go to the rest of the meetings—a brief promise from her and briefer acknowledgments of his goodness faltering between her sobs—then Hardman had said good-bye, and his form was already vanishing from sight before Myron realized that she was once more alone.
Philip Hardman hurried to the station and caught his train. The first stage of his journey was short, only some fifty miles to the city, where he was to meet the Reverend Mr. Fletcher. He found him at the depot, ready to go to Jamestown. In a few hurried words Hardman told him of Myron Holder—of her sin—her punishment—her sorrow. He commended her to Mr. Fletcher's prayers, and asked him to preach so that her diffident heart might find some message in his words.
Mr. Fletcher promised, and expressed with some little emphasis a hope that Hardman's own labors might be blest.
Then he departed. His train was just pulling out when Hardman ran up to the open window, by which Mr. Fletcher had settled himself.
"You'll be gentle with her, Brother Fletcher? She is indeed a bruised reed."
There was no time for answer. Mr. Hardman did not witness the scorn with which this advice—no entreaty—was received. He stood looking after the swiftly vanishing train somewhat sadly; then, rousing himself, went to find out about the train that was to take him to his new charge.
Philip Hardman's father had been a mechanic, a life-long worker in one of those sooty, befouling foundries where the great furnaces gleam like so many mouths of the Pit—where all day long there is the roar of flames, the blast of hot air, the clang of metal, the heat of Hades, the hiss of molten iron, the angry flight of sparks struck from huge anvils; all the haste and fury and dumb-brutish endurance of men working at the top notch of physical exertion, rushing hither and thither like demons before the fires, or clad in grotesque masks and armor, turning great masses of glowing, cooling metal so that the steam-hammers may forge them into shape.
In this atmosphere Philip Hardman's father had spent all his life since he was a little lad, carrying water to the workers—water in which flying sparks quenched themselves, hissing. It would be no wonder if from a race of fathers, such as these blackened workers, gnome-like children were to be born, all action and no thought; swift, tireless, inhuman. But these men, darting about in the glare of the dusky fires, like devil-ridden spectres, had, some of them, time for thought. Indeed, the man who moves unmoved amid these masses of incarnate heat, steps over and around streams of liquid fire, watches those infernal lakes, plumbago-shored, which one single drop of water converts into death-dealing volcanoes, and stands beside a torrent of molten iron as it flows from the crucible, ready to dam its resistless tide on the instant, may well be credited with capacity, if not time, for thought.
To Philip Hardman's father during those long, hot hours of breathless haste there came ideas—distorted, meagre, and ill-developed, perhaps—which, when he left the works at night, pallid-faced beneath the grime, still bore him company: nebulous visions of great labor-saving devices by which men forever would be exempt from the dreadful toil that scorched both soul and body.
There was many a rich germ dormant in these ideas of his, but lacking the cohesion of long, uninterrupted thought, and wanting the quickening of accurate knowledge. For there lay Philip Hardman's great stumbling-block. To perfect his inventions, he required a knowledge of chemicals and of different forces and their application, and an insight into the cause of the effects he wished to produce.
How blindly, painfully and heart-brokenly he toiled after this knowledge no one ever fully appreciated. His son, long years after his death, realized it in some fashion. He did not ask assistance of any one, for he feared, with the traditional dread of the inventor, lest the one from whom he sought advice should steal his idea. He saved, to buy books that were useless to him, and pored over their misleading pages with eyes from which all moisture seemed scorched away, until the very eyeballs themselves felt hot and hard; but he kept them painfully fastened upon those pages from which he strove to wrest a secret they did not hold, to learn those things which would enable him to set free forever his fellows from the necessity of enduring that soul-baking heat.
Perhaps his invention, even if perfected, would not have compassed all he dreamed it would, for he was prone to endow it almost with thinking as well as executive powers, and to think of it as animated by a great zeal for mankind as, with its nerveless phalanges, it performed those awful tasks. Perhaps there may be greater ideals than the thought of setting men free from one of the most terrible and exhaustive forms of labor; but none knew better than this man the terrors of heat, none understood more clearly how the mind narrowed as the body shrank before the stifling blasts. And, after all, if we all set ourselves to alleviate the special misery we understand, there would be fewer misshapen lives in the world.
Well—
"How many a vulgar Cato has compelled
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail!"
Philip Hardman's mother was a woman of a hysteric nature, who scarcely thought enough of this world to make her husband and children comfortable in it. The children were narrow-chested, weak little creatures. They heard from her lips terrible tales of the wrath to come, couched in symbolism they well understood, for their father worked daily amid just such scenes as their mother depicted the abode of the damned to be. The parallel between the Hades her words pictured forth and her husband's life never struck Mrs. Hardman.
Even when her husband died—going to his grave a broken-hearted man, barren of achievement, leaving not one labor-saving device, not one little bolt or wheel called by his name—she did not regret or realize the hard life he had had, nor think she might have made it easier. She only tortured herself daily by wondering if she had sufficiently represented to him his lost condition.
It is to be feared that she was more interested in convincing herself that she was free of responsibility than that he was saved.
In time, however, she began to feel that she had done her best, and, feeling it would be too much like "them Catholics" to pray for the soul of a dead man, she turned all her attention to her own. Doubtless she was right; and yet, is it not a beautiful myth to think that prayer from a loving heart may benefit those we love, even if they have passed "beyond these voices"?
If we must needs pick and choose delusions, why not take those unselfish ones, so beautiful, if inutile? Is it not an idea really worthy of a Divinity to think that by our self-flagellations our loved ones may be freed from stripes? Are there not some of us who would gladly thus requite debts of incalculable benefits received—some of us who would dare accept even a Hell to know our loved one had a Heaven?
Philip Hardman's father had belonged to various insurance societies, such as workmen form for mutual benefit. It would have sufficed to keep life in all the children until such time as they became self-supporting; but one by one they died, until only Philip was left. He worked in the "pattern-shop" in the works until he was twenty, when his mother died. Then he took the residue of his father's insurance money and his own savings and went to school.
It is not strange that he should choose the ministry. He had inherited all his father's love for his kind and much of his mother's fervor of purpose, added to which he had his own birthright of lofty idealism; but he had also something of the weaknesses of both parents. His mother's instability clung to him and made him vacillating, and the secrecy of his father in regard to his inventions survived in him under the guise of habitual reticence. He was deeply impressed with the sadness of life, and thought he saw in religion the one panacea for pain. Besides, he too wished to flee from the wrath to come.
He had been preaching some seven years when he visited Jamestown, and during that time he had bitten through to the ashes more than once. The fruit he held against his lips was losing even its fair seeming.
His charges were always amid the poor, and he was beginning to rebel against a doctrine that accused a Divine Being of all the cruelties life holds. "The poor have the Gospel preached to them" he had once looked upon as the expression of Divine benefaction; now it struck him as being redolent of a peculiar and brutal sarcasm.
Philip Hardman had all his life thought of his religion as only true when environed in an atmosphere of severity. One day, just after a tumult of doubt and a corresponding influx of faith and confidence, he went into a Roman Catholic cathedral. The exact reason for this is hard to divine. Perhaps it may have been some mad thought of attacking Rome in her own citadel. At any rate, he went in and sat down, looking about him with righteous contempt at the "idolatrous images" in their carven niches. His religious dreams had ever been barren of that ecstasy which springs from the grandeur and dignity of gorgeous ceremonials, sonorous chanting, vibrating music. He had never experienced the breathless hush of suspense between the intoned invocation of priests and the thrilling choral response. He had never, at the clear-tongued ringing of a bell, let fall his head and abased his spirit. But now he experienced an emotion such as possessed the monks of the Rosy Cross, when to their fervid vision the stony walls of their cells parted and disclosed vistas of heavenly beauty. He adored with the fervor of the true fanatic The Church—saw her for the first time in the light of a beautiful mistress, to be worshipped alone—for herself—her beauty—her charm—her power.
Philip Hardman left the cathedral, his eyes kindled, his step light. He had had doubts of his love, but they were all gone now. He had been dwelling apart from her; he had but heard echoes of her voice; he had never seen her as he should have seen her, at home—mystical, with dim, subdued and vaporous light, clad in gorgeous vestments; incensed with heavenly odors, irradiate with a hundred colors as the sunlight fell through the painted windows and the altar lights smote answering flames from the gold of the altar; served by humble servitors made holy by their service.
He had regarded her as a poor bride, without a wedding garment, chilled by the cold breath of the world, abashed by the insulting sneers of the ungodly. He now beheld her as she was, a Queen upon a throne, in all the regal magnificence of her regal state.
He was no longer the cherisher of a feeble flame, striving to make it shine in darkness; he was an humble slave of a great lamp, blessed if the farthest-reaching rays from the sacred centre of light shone upon his unworthy head or gilded his outstretched hands. He had thought of his creed pitifully as a "torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt." There was none of that here—no apology—no plea; there was only a triumphant pæan of a glorious creed, a sad mourning over those that were without it.
This spiritual exaltation working upon his eager nature imparted to him a physical stimulus exhilarating and strange. He strode along vigorously. He felt that he was "strong and fleet" in spirit, mind, and body. He walked on; the day waned; distinct thought had long since departed. His mood, which in an Oriental would have induced the coma of the hasheesh eater, prompted him hazily to form great plans for the good of his kind. The good of his kind? No, the glory of The Church. He followed few of these plans to any conclusion. They ended as they had begun, in nebulous imaginings of glory. And, as glory is easily transferable from the worshipped to the worshipper, the ending of his dreams included a cloud of incense to himself—the incense of approval, admiration, and the sweet savor of self-inflicted martyrdom.
He walked on, pitiably unaware of the St. Simeon Stylites attitude he had assumed. Night dimmed down; the wind rose, dead elm leaves were blown across his path, rustling under foot. The night wind, chill with first frosts, aroused him with a shiver to remember where he was. He found himself in the country; long vistas of barren fields stretched out before him a dreary panorama.
The gray sky was darkened by crows flying silently towards their nightly roosts. He passed pools of lifeless water, choked with sodden leaves. A laborer slouched by—a laborer from the railway going home, content because he had earned double pay for a Sunday's work. The odor of decaying vegetables somewhere near struck painfully upon Hardman's senses. This, he thought, with disgust, was the odor of nature—of the world.
The night suddenly dropped down from the clouds, and the darkness urged him to seek shelter. He approached a cottage he observed dimly, finding his way to it up an uneven lane bordered by a fantastic fence of uprooted stumps, whose ragged branch-like roots, twisted and distorted, stood out in solid black masses against the insubstantial mist of the night. He shuddered.
It seemed to his supersensitive fancy that these grotesque shapes were huge simulacra of the animalculæ that the microscope discovers in water. His muscles shrank as he imagined these huge shapes, unseen but not unseeing, writhing through the air, flourishing their weird forms over and around his head, embracing him with their elastic antennas and moving with him encircled in their horrible, impalpable embrace. With what devilish skill they swept nearer and nearer to him, avoiding him by a hair's breadth, and perceiving how his spirit shrank from their approach! He gazed up into the night, striving to see there the dreadful shapes his fancy had woven into a Dante-like vision. The side glimpses his eyes held of the fantastic forms of the roots projected themselves upon the curtains of the night before him. His breath quickened; he felt stifled; he withdrew his gaze from the clouds and fastened it upon his path, which, to his distorted fancy, seemed to contract until it narrowed down to an impassable barrier of threatening, twining arms.
He stumbled on.
As he staggered across the threshold of the cottage he brushed through a mass of dried, sweet grass, cut down and left to wither in the pathway. Its snuff-like odor brought back the incense of the afternoon. With a strong revulsion of feeling, he threw off alike the sensuous charm of the odor and the horrid phantasmagoria that his imagination had conjured up.
He knocked at the door, feeling a self-disgust that amounted almost to physical nausea.
Philip Hardman after this was especially bitter in his sermons against Rome—her priests—her altars—her incense—her teachings. He regarded himself as having escaped, hardly by the skin of his teeth, from the clutches of the Scarlet Woman that sitteth upon the Seven Hills, and besought his hearers oft, with all his own peculiar eloquence, to keep themselves withdrawn from the temptations of Rome, of which, he avowed almost with tears, he had felt the power.
This experience has no bearing upon the story of Myron Holder, save inasmuch as it indicates the emotional instability of Philip Hardman. Poor Myron!