“In sickness and in health, ... for richer for poorer, ... and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him.” Yes, all others. God only knew the significance of those words, for they seemed to mean God himself just then; but God would pity. He would help. Her response came low but unfaltering, and then, with bowed heads, standing side by side in their youth, their innocence, their patience of hope, they two listened solemnly to the last irrevocable words.
So steadfastly Anna held herself until the end, but hardly had the final word of blessing been pronounced, when, with a low cry for help, she wavered as she stood, and fell fainting.
BOOK II
AFTERNOON
Hear now our cry for strength to bear the weight of prayers unanswered.
—Maarten Maartens.
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.