A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

The answer not being forthcoming, Professor Ward presently volunteered it.

“Because he has espoused Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. In Mrs. Keith these three are one.”

Fulham was a small city with a college of no great reputation, which called itself a university by reason of having a divinity school affiliated. Furthermore it was a seaboard town and had had a large shipping trade in former years, now slowly dying a natural death. The aristocratic circle of Fulham—there was but one—was as definitely marked and as strongly defended from invasion as it is possible for such a circle to be, even in an old New England town. In fact, it existed more obviously for its own defence and preservation from the ineligible than for any other reason; and only two classes of citizens were eligible,—namely, those who had some connection with “the university,” and those who inherited either poverty or riches from ancestors engaged in foreign commerce. These two agreed in one, and agreed to rule out all others. Thus the aristocratic circle was necessarily small and its social functions painfully mechanical and monotonous; its maidens were proverbially lacking in personal charms, and its young men, with rare exceptions, fled, escaping to more interesting and varied scenes; but it was supremely satisfied, rejoiced in the distinction of its unattainable exclusiveness, and looked with cold and unrelenting disfavour upon all strangers, newcomers, or fellow-citizens, however meritorious, who failed to possess the sole claims to its ranks.

Madam Burgess enjoyed a double title to membership in this exclusive circle. Her fathers before her, for several generations, had been shipowners residing in the house now her own, to which her husband, the Reverend Elon Burgess, had come, as an eminently suitable adjunct upon their marriage. Mr. Burgess had filled a minor chair in the divinity school for the ten years of their married life; he had not filled even this particularly well, being a man of small calibre, lacking in any trace of original power or talent, but his name was in the university catalogue, and hence his place in the ranks of Fulham’s high social circle safe forever. But, although of limited ability, Professor Burgess was fine of grain and fine of habit, and sincerely pious in a day when to be called pious did not awaken a smile. In the fear and faith of God and in true humility he had lived and died, leaving perhaps no very large and irreparable vacancy, and no overwhelming sense of loss or desolation even to his wife and son, and still having borne—

“without reproach

The fine old name of gentleman.”

As a girl Sarah Keith had given satisfactory evidence of a “change of heart,” and in a time of profound missionary awakening she had declared herself strongly in sympathy with foreign missions. To the position thus taken she had consistently adhered. All boards and auxiliaries to which she was available claimed her name on their lists. Missionary literature was always scattered abundantly in her library, her gifts were large, and her allegiance to religious interests was so completely taken for granted that it would no more have been questioned in Fulham than her place in its aristocracy. Certainly she never doubted herself that she was essentially a religious woman. Nevertheless, religion, whether personal or in its outreaching toward a world which she would have unhesitatingly called “lost,” consisted for her now in a series of mechanical observances, and in tenacious orthodoxy of opinion it had become a dry husk enclosing a dead seed. The brief blossoming of the religious impulse of her young years over, she had fixed her affections on the small adventitious trappings of “this transitory life,” and denied unconsciously the power of that other life, the form of which she so punctiliously maintained.

Her invalidism was becoming, not inconvenient on the whole, and not wholly imaginary. Such was the woman who was now by the ordering of Providence to rule and direct the unfoldings of Anna’s early womanhood, since Keith Burgess cherished a respect and submission to his mother which would have found something akin in Chinese ancestor-worship. He had reproduced in his own young life his mother’s early missionary fervour; that it was long dead in her case he did not suspect. With Keith this experience had received a strong accent from the temper of his college life, and from the possibility of an actual dedication of himself to the missionary vocation. It had thus become, as we have seen, for a time nobly and completely dominant with him, the strongest passion his life had known. He was himself surprised to find, on his reaction from the crisis of loss and disappointment connected with his illness and the abandonment of a missionary career, how natural and, on the whole, how satisfactory it was to settle back into his own place in his old home, to fall back into the small, comfortable interests of Fulham, and to find full soon an aspect of unreality and even of incongruity clothing his former ardent dream.

Not so Anna.

The ordered precision, the formal, stiff monotony, repeated day after day in her husband’s home, the cold, conventional courtesies, the absence of any purpose save to maintain things in existing form without progress or alteration, for a time exerted upon her an almost paralyzing effect. A torpid dulness, a physical oppression, came upon her when shut up alone to the companionship of Madam Burgess, against which she found it impossible to struggle successfully. Accustomed to serious mental work, to much strenuous bodily labour, to the wholesome severity of long walks in all weathers, and more than all to the stimulus of a great, immediate purpose ennobling every homeliest task and smallest service,—the present life of inaction, of sluggish ease, of absence of responsibility of motive or purpose, was like the life of a prison. A heavy, spiritless apathy overbore every motion to fresh endeavour or to new hopes and incitements. She “fluttered and failed for breath,” and at times her heart seemed bursting with its longing, the old wild, girlish longing, grown still and deep, for freedom and for power.