A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

With mechanical indifference she accompanied Madam Burgess on her daily drives, paid and received visits, shopped, and attended the various prescribed social functions, read aloud to Keith, and made a feint of embroidering the great ottoman cover which her mother-in-law had contrived for her leisure. It was a stag’s head with impossible square eyes, the head partially surrounded by a half-wreath of oak leaves and acorns, staring out of an illimitable field of small red stitches, numberless as the sands of the seashore, and significant, Anna thought wearily, of her endless, monotonous hours.

All the while, just below the surface, repeated through the long days, was the bitter conflict of her spirit, her perpetual, unanswered questioning, Why had God thus dealt with her? Why, with all power to save or heal, had he permitted the illness to come upon Keith which had thus brought to naught what she had supposed was the very and sacred purpose of her creation.

Upon the intensity of youth and a nature of profound and passionate earnestness this thwarting of her dedicated purpose, this apparent rejection of herself from the service of God, worked piteous havoc. Anna did not grow sullen or rebellious, but she felt her whole interior life to be in hopeless confusion. Her sense of an immediate and personal relation to a fatherly God had suffered something like an earthquake shock. All the high faith, the sacred and filial purpose, the profound self-dedication of her girlhood, seemed to have been flung aside by the God whom she had sought to know and serve, with cold, blank indifference, without sign or suggestion of pity, of love, or of amends. The God of whom Mrs. Westervelt had taught her, a conception which she had gradually absorbed and assimilated as her own, a God closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, to whom the heart was never lifted in vain, whose presence could be indubitably felt and known, who answered every holy and devout prayer of his children, and who led them immediately in every thought and action—where was he? Either he existed only in imagination, or she was herself rejected by him as unworthy; and, in a depth below the depth of burning grief, she saw her father likewise despised and rejected.

A great protest, honest and indignant, rose up in Anna’s heart. She knew that, as far as mortal man could be holy and harmless in the eyes of his God, her father had been; and she knew that her own purposes had been blameless and sincere. She refused to quibble with herself in regard to these facts; something staunch and sturdy in her mental constitution—not obstinacy, not pride, but sheer inward honesty—refused to seek accommodation in any forced paroxysm of humility or blind submission. With a sorrow which a lighter nature could not have comprehended, but with characteristic conclusiveness, she said to herself, the stress of her inward conflict spent, “I do not know God,” and composed her spirit in silence to wait.

At the end of a month Keith returned to his class in the Massachusetts Divinity School, with which he was to graduate in June. Immediately thereafter he expected to enter upon the duties of his missionary secretaryship, and make his home in Fulham with his wife and mother.

Thrown thus upon the sole companionship of Madam Burgess, and forced either to make the best of the situation or to appear the crude, undisciplined provincial who sullenly refuses to adapt herself to new conditions, Anna’s native good sense came to her rescue. With strong will she crowded down her mental conflict, while with conscientious earnestness she addressed herself to the duty of making herself a cheerful and sympathetic companion to her husband’s mother, and of filling the social position in which she was undeniably placed, however inscrutable the reasons therefor. New influences came out to meet and win her on every side, and she responded with a social grace, and even facility, which amazed all who had seen her first as the cold, pale, silent girl whose marriage altar had seemed rather an altar of sacrifice.

An effect of singular charm was produced by this new mental attitude, the opening out of a nature until now so closely sealed. The native seriousness, the fine, direct simplicity, of Anna’s girlhood remained; but they seemed flooded with a new and warmer light, welcome as daily sunshine while the hardness, the rigour, and the severity melted away. She submitted without further protest to the comparative luxury of her surroundings, found it surprisingly agreeable, and discovered a fresh, forgotten joy in simple physical existence, which carried her bravely through the long, dull days of the Burgess order of life.

Notwithstanding all these things, below the surface of her life, often below the surface of her thought, lay an unplumbed depth of spiritual loneliness, a sense of double orphanhood, a voice which cried and would not be stilled; for while men and women had come near, of God she had become shy, feeling toward him as toward a dearest friend grown cold.

But one night, as she lay alone and wakeful, tears painful, not easily flowing, wetting her pillow, a sudden thought stung her by its throbbing wonder and delight, seeming great enough to reconcile all things, even God, who had filled her with bitterness, and hedged her about in all her ways.

She said to herself, “It may be I shall have a child,” and the deep places of her nature called to each other in joy and exultation; and she knew that, if this grace should be given her, all would yet be clear, and she could still believe in God’s love, and in his purpose in her life.